Putin dismisses a call of a US boycott.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is going to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and thinks that a possible United States boycott of the event is “nonsense.” There has been a chorus of Republican voices telling President Joe Biden and his administration to not send athletes to China because of human rights violations or have the Biden administration put pressure on the International Olympic Committee to pull the 2022 event out of China. Here is a tip for the former South Carolina Governor and former American Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. The International Olympic Committee doesn’t care about you saying that China is more obviously dangerous today than Nazi Germany was in 1936. The IOC poohbahs probably had a good laugh when they read or heard about your words last March. Other politicians have expressed similar views but Utah Senator Mitt Romney thinks the Games must go on.
The human rights issue involves China and the Uighurs. In July 2020, the United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accused China of “gross and egregious” human rights abuses against the Uighurs. The Trump administration said the treatment of the Uighurs was genocide. No country plans an Olympics boycott at this time. The International Olympic Committee ignored charges of human rights violations in awarding the country the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. The 2022 IOC Beijing event is scheduled to start in less than four months. That date though remains in question because of the COVID-19 pandemic although almost everyone connected to the Games has to have a COVID-19 vaccination or two or three. Olympic boycotts never work. American President Jimmy Carter ordered a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games because the Soviet Union refused to leave Afghanistan. A good number of western countries followed Carter’s lead. The Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989.
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