Spectre of 1936 and 1980 haunts Beijing 2022 as fear and repression breed silence

Zumretay Arkin is remembering the day she thought she might change the International Olympic Committee’s mind. It was October 2020, and human rights groups, representing Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, and the democracy movement in Hong Kong, were granted a meeting with senior IOC figures to discuss their concerns about the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“I explained how millions of Uyghurs are being arbitrarily detained in concentration camps,” she says. “The IOC was told survivors’ stories of rapes and torture, forced sterilisation and repression. And about families who have not heard from relatives for years.

“All of us shared personal experiences of loss and sacrifice,” adds Arkin, who fled Xinjiang when she was 10 years old. “And do you know what the first thing that [the then] IOC vice-president, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, said?”

She pauses. Shakes her head. “‘The world is a complicated place’.”

“That was the tone in which the IOC addressed us throughout the meeting,” she says. “It was extremely condescending. They were just like: ‘Yes, OK, but we’re not here to change the world’.”

Mandie McKeown, of the International Tibetan Network, was there too. “I remember an Uyghur colleague of mine telling them about her situation, and how she had many family members missing. And the IOC simply turned around and said: ‘Many countries have had bad human rights – look at Guantánamo.’ It was unbelievable whataboutery.”

The IOC did offer their sympathies, according to those present. But it also stressed that it was not the United Nations, and its primary role was to bring people together through sport. McKeown felt at the time that the IOC was burying its head in the sand. She still does. “The IOC is in a massive hole,” she says. “And it