Torch sparks troubles for host nations

The Olympic torch is not exactly an unwelcome guest, but it is a problematic one.

As the flame continues its troubled odyssey around the world, many host governments face tough decisions. Do they allow their citizens to express their opposition in the style to which they are accustomed and risk offending China, host of the 2008 Games?

Beijing was so angered by raucous protests in Paris, where a demonstrator tried to wrestle the torch from a Chinese athlete in a wheelchair, that trade and diplomatic relations between the countries have been strained.

Alternatively, do torch relay hosts deploy so much security as to crimp the Olympic spirit and their own principles of free speech?

Many Indians were furious that nobody got to see the torch during its jaunt through New Delhi last week besides a handful of VIPs and the 15,000 riot police officers lining the route.

“Why do we always kowtow to the Chinese?” complained columnist Poonam I. Kaushish. “India is a democracy with strong fundamentals of free speech and expression, unlike Communist China.”

The torch relay Tuesday in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta was reduced to a couple of laps before an invitation-only crowd inside the national stadium. The Nepalese government announced that its soldiers will be permitted to shoot anybody who interferes with the torch’s ascent next month of Mt. Everest, on the Nepalese-Tibetan border.

Australia opted for a middle ground for the relay Thursday in its capital, Canberra. The 10-mile route was lined with police, who arrested seven protesters. But they allowed demonstrations a respectable distance from the torch and did nothing to stop a skywriting plane that sketched “Free Tibet” above the relay.

“We are a democratic country, but we are also an Olympic-minded country,” Kevan Gosper, an Australian official on the International Olympic Committee, said in describing the dilemma in a telephone interview earlier in the week.

About 2,000 pro-Tibetan demonstrators showed up for the event, scuffling with more than 10,000 China supporters.

Japan comes next, and the political storm has been building for days. The 1,400-year-old Zenkoji temple in Nagano last week withdrew its permission to allow the relay to start from its grounds; officials announced instead that they would hold a prayer vigil in support of fellow Buddhists in Tibet. For lack of another location, the relay will begin in a municipal parking lot.

Nagano Mayor Shoichi Washizawa bluntly told the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun that staging the torch relay is “a great nuisance.”

What makes the Olympic torch such a hot potato is that China is a huge economic power but also exceedingly thin-skinned. Beijing has made no secret of the fact that it regards the reception accorded what officials here often call “the holy flame” as a loyalty test to determine which countries are true friends.

Despite profuse apologies from French officials about the Paris protests, France has been punished by a boycott of one of its largest retailers, Carrefour. Chinese travel agencies have canceled trips to France.

Protests in Asia haven’t reached anywhere near the level of fury that they did in Paris, London or San Francisco.

“Asian governments tend to be very deferential to China. They don’t want any embarrassment,” said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong.

But the torch relay has brought about all sorts of complications. At each stop, torchbearers have dropped out, each time creating bad publicity for China and forcing a scramble for replacements. United Nations agencies who were supposed to provide torchbearers for a relay in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, next week withdrew because of concerns that the regime there “would co-opt the whole event for propaganda purposes,” as one aid official put it.

Host countries also have to decide whether to admit Chinese paramilitary police trained as a “flame protection squad.” The militarist bearing of the men in blue track suits has offended many relay participants. Japan has refused to allow them to participate.

The International Olympic Committee appears to have given China great leeway in the planning of the relay. It was China that insisted on the 85,000-mile, 20-nation route, the longest in Olympic history, overriding the committee’s misgivings.

But the Chinese didn’t appreciate that the relay would be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime chance for activists to publicize their grievances. Demonstrating in China is difficult and will probably be impossible in Beijing during the Olympics.

China’s crackdown on demonstrations in Tibet and neighboring regions last month has pushed the Tibet cause to the front of the stage, but there are many other issues clamoring for attention: China’s support of Sudan’s government during a time of massive abuses in the Darfur region. Writers and human rights activists imprisoned in China. The banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is expected to protest in Hong Kong.

In South Korea, the next stop after Japan, thousands of Christians have announced plans to demonstrate against China’s policy of forcibly repatriating North Korean defectors in violation of U.N. laws on refugees.

“How can China be proud of hosting the Olympics when they don’t abide by basic international laws?” demanded Lee Min-bok of the North Korean Christians Assn.

Perhaps the only place where the Olympic torch will be able travel unmolested on the open streets is in North Korea, which has a well-deserved reputation as the world’s most repressive country. The torch is scheduled Monday for a 10-mile run through downtown Pyongyang to Kim Il Sung Stadium.

“This event will take place in the most secure and smooth manner as planned in the DPRK” -- the initials for North Korea’s formal name -- “where all the people have formed a big harmonious family, single-mindedly united,” predicted an unnamed North Korean Olympic spokesman in an article carried by the country’s official news service.

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barbara.demick@latimes.com

Times staff writer Bruce Wallace in Tokyo and special correspondent Jinna Park in Seoul contributed to this report.