IOC’s Rogge needs to speak up

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge of Belgium told the Associated Press on Monday that he has been engaging in “silent diplomacy” with China on human rights issues.

The silence is the problem.

Had the IOC used its moral platform to speak out about the issues within the first couple of years after awarding the 2008 Olympics to Beijing, when the possibility of removing the Games still was meaningful, perhaps the Chinese would have been chastened enough to listen.

After all, there probably was no way China would risk the loss of face that losing the Games would bring.

But a public statement by the IOC that China must clean up its act, as it promised, would have carried the appropriate sting.

Even if the IOC did not threaten, publicly or privately, to use its ultimate leverage against the Chinese, it could have made a statement about China’s repression of dissidents in Tibet and elsewhere being unacceptable.

Others now are making the statement for the IOC leadership, most recently the protesters at Monday’s lighting of the Olympic flame in Olympia, Greece, who carried a flag urging a boycott of the Games because of China’s brutal reaction to recent protests.

That protest was blacked out from telecasts of the ceremony in China and, astonishingly, purposely neglected by Greek television, which panned away from the scene.

China may know no shame, but the Greeks should be ashamed to exercise such censorship in the cradle of democracy. Even Greeks offended by the idea of a protest on the sacred ground of Olympia were disgusted that Greek television would be more concerned about not offending the Chinese than about honest journalism.

After leaving Greece, the torch is scheduled to go to London, Paris, San Francisco and Canberra, Australia, among other cities, before settling in China on May 4.

Exercising their rights in free countries, protesters undoubtedly will show up in England, France, the United States and Australia. And why not? Everyone with a grievance against China is seizing the opportunity provided by the upcoming Olympics to make those grievances public.

The Chinese are not so naive they could not see that coming. But Rogge sounded very naive when he told the press Monday, as reported on aroundtherings.com, “I would hope that common sense would prevail and I would hope that the potential protesters would understand that public opinion would not like such a symbol to be tainted by political protests. And I think that any action that anyone might want to undertake against the torch will be counterproductive.”

Political protests do not taint the Olympic torch or the relay, which, ironically, was an idea conceived by a German for the 1936 Nazi Olympics. They show the torch as a powerful symbol of moral authority that is tarnished by being linked to China.

All this must be beginning to make folks squirm at global Olympic sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Visa, Kodak, McDonald’s and General Electric, even if such corporations always adopt moral relativism where profit is concerned.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, publicly suggested Tuesday that he might boycott the Beijing opening ceremony. That is the kind of statement democratic leaders need to make, especially when the IOC leadership stands mute.

Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.