Beijing tells IOC team: 'We're ready'

Paul Eckert

With Tiananmen Square sealed off to thwart possible protests, Beijing declared itself ready on Tuesday for an Olympic inspection of its bid to stage the Games in 2008.

"We are ready," Mayor Liu Qi told International Olympic Committee delegates on their dawn arrival.

IOC delegation chief Hein Verbruggen said his group was "absolutely overwhelmed" by the reception. "Next time, I promise you, we won't come at six in the morning," he joked.

Beijing has worked round-the-clock to prepare for the 17-member IOC delegation, which will inspect the city from Wednesday to Saturday in a survey that will help the IOC choose among five candidates in a vote in Moscow on July 13.

China, making its second bid after just losing out to Sydney for the 2000 Games, believes its status as the world's most populous nation and the intensity of state and popular backing give it an edge over Osaka, Toronto, Paris and Istanbul.

Hosting the Olympics is "not only the aspiration of Beijingers, but also that of China's 1.3 billion people", the official China Daily declared in an editorial.

SPORTS NOT POLITICS

State media have highlighted an opinion poll showing 94.9 per cent of the Beijing population want the Games.

Even people whose homes will vanish to make way for plush Olympic facilities cheerfully tell foreign reporters they want their city to be host at last.

Vice Mayor Liu Jingmin told a news conference on Tuesday that opponents of the Olympic bid argued the money should be spent on welfare or doubted the city's infrastructure was good enough.

He said there was no question that the IOC inspection team would be kept away from such dissidents in the capital of the last major Communist country.

"We will try our utmost to create opportunities for contact with people with divergent views and not work to obstruct such communication," Liu Jingmin said.

IOC delegates spent Tuesday huddled in meetings in the basement of their hotel in an area off-limits to outsiders.

SHADOW OF FALUN GONG

China has struggled to keep the focus on what it sees as its natural turn to stage the Games and off its human rights record, one of the reasons Beijing lost the 2000 Games.

Mayor Liu, president of Beijing's bid committee, issued a strong plea on Sunday for the IOC and the media to judge Beijing only on its sporting credentials and organisational skills.

China was "firmly opposed to any attempts to foil Beijing's bid on the excuse of human rights", he said.

But Beijing's bid, always shadowed by the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, is contending with a steady flow of images of police kicking and punching protesting members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement on Tiananmen Square.

Fallout from China's 19-month-long crackdown against the spiritual movement is mounting, with most weeks bringing new reports by overseas human rights groups alleging deaths from beatings, torture and abuse of psychiatric medicine.

Beijing saw a grim example of the kind of incident that could mar the IOC tour last week, when a man the government said was a Falun Gong adherent burned himself to death.

Last month, five purported Falun Gong adherents set themselves afire in Tiananmen Square. One was a 12-year-old girl. One woman, the girl's mother, died.

TAKING NO CHANCES

Police flanking the plaza on Tuesday refused to say why the popular tourist site -- a five-minute walk from the hotel where the IOC delegation was staying -- was closed off.

But it was clear Beijing was taking no chances.

Human rights activists and aggrieved groups in China have urged the IOC to use its influence with Beijing to win freedom for political prisoners and a halt to harsh Chinese policies.

To counter China's assertion that politics and sports must not be mixed, activists cite the IOC code of ethics which enshrines the dignity of the individual.

The London-based Free Tibet Campaign issued a statement saying the Games were an "inappropriate reward" for China's 50-year occupation of the Himalayan region. It suggested Tibetan monks had been pressed to sign petitions backing Beijing's bid.

And Human Rights in China issued a public letter warning the IOC to watch for use China's decades-old "Custody and Repatriation" system to clear streets of beggars, street children and homeless and detain them without due legal process.

"It is a virtual certainty that if Beijing hosts the Games and this system remains unchanged, large numbers of innocent people will be detained prior to the opening ceremonies," the New York-based watchdog group said.

Some IOC members and groups of lawmakers in Britain and the United States oppose Beijing's bid on human rights grounds.