China rebuked by Olympic Committee

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China denied injecting politics into the Beijing Olympics on Thursday, despite a rare rebuke from the International Olympic Committee over remarks by a Chinese official about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

The IOC said it sent a letter to Beijing organizers this week, expressing regret over a speech Saturday by Tibet's Communist Party boss Zhang Qinglin at a ceremony marking the Olympic torch's passage through Lhasa.

"The IOC regrets that political statements were made during the closing ceremony of the Torch Relay in Tibet," the two-sentence IOC statement said.

"We have written to BOCOG to remind them of the need to separate sport and politics and to ask for their support in making sure that such situations do not arise again," it said.

BOCOG refers to the Beijing organizing committee; a spokesman for the group said he had no immediate information or comment on the letter.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also said he had no knowledge of the IOC letter but insisted that Zhang's remarks had been intended only to foster a "stable and harmonious environment for the Olympics" and did not constitute politicization. Watch China's efforts to clean up Beijing's air »

"China's solid position is against the politicizing of the Olympics," Liu said at a regularly scheduled news conference.

The IOC's comment was surprising given the organization's general aversion to criticizing Olympic hosts and previous reproaches to activists seeking to use the Beijing Games to spotlight China's human rights record, policies toward Tibet and support for Sudan's authoritarian regime.

Chaotic scenes including confrontations between protesters and Chinese supporters surrounded the torch during its earlier international legs, focusing attention on the connection between politics and the games.

Although the domestic legs have been incident-free, Saturday's Tibet stage was shortened from three days to one and conducted under extremely tight security, measures that followed widespread violent anti-government rioting across the region this spring.

Zhang's remarks came at the torch relay's closing ceremony, where it was reunited with a separate flame that had been carried to the top of Mount Everest.

Zhang praised the communist leadership's policies on Tibet and reasserted Beijing's hardline toward supporters of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, who fled into exile in India after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

"The sky above Tibet will never change. The red five-star flag will always fly above this land," Zhang said, referring to the Chinese national flag that was adopted by the communist regime that occupied Tibet in 1951.

"We can definitely smash the separatist plot of the Dalai Lama clique completely," Zhang said.

Chinese authorities villify the Dalai Lama, blaming him for recent unrest over Chinese rule in Tibet. Beijing says he is a part of a campaign to split the Himalayan region from the rest of China.

The Dalai Lama has denied these charges, saying that despite China's harsh crackdown on the demonstrations that erupted in March, he still supports a solution of meaningful autonomy for the Tibetan people under China's rule, not independence.

Although the Chinese government says it opposes politicizing the Olympics, the strong political and nationalistic overtones of its preparation have been hard to ignore.

Beijing's Communist Party chief was put in charge of the arrangements, overseen at the highest level by the nation's vice president.

The torch relay has been accompanied throughout by enthusiastic, sometimes bordering on hysterical, shows of nationalist fervor. Flag-waving young Chinese mobbed international stages of the relay, often confronting pro-Tibet or human rights protesters, sometimes violently. The domestic stages have been surrounded by a sea of red and yellow national flags.

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