At Plaid Cymru’s Spring Conference in Newport back in March, Dafydd Iwan and I called for a boycott of the Olympic Games opening ceremony in protest at the Chinese Government’s activities in Tibet and its attacks on press freedom. You can see the photograph taken at the time, when we posed with the Tibetan flag.
The Tibetan flag is of course banned in China, and as the Olympic Games get under way, there have been arrests of protesters who have brandished the flag. But this week we learned that our own flag has been banned from official venues at the Beijing Olympics.
This applies to both supporters and competitors, which means that no one will be able to wave the Ddraig Goch to encourage Welsh athletes, and successful Welsh athletes would be unable to do a lap of honour with our flag.
Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones has said that Welsh athletes should be able to do a lap of honour with the Welsh flag.
Of course, the ruling is aimed at pro-Tibetan demonstrations, rather than celebrations by Welsh, Scottish or any other competitors, but this catch-all ruling shows how quickly all sorts of freedoms can be limited.
As we said in March, the eyes of the world are on China, and how its human rights record has never been in sharper focus. There is a long way to go before Tibet gains the freedom its people desire.
August 8, 2008 at 5:53 pm |
Looks like Jill and Dafydd were really prescient on this. Their early action now has a further edge with the banning of the Welsh flag too.
And with the Georgians suppressing the Ossetians, it’s about time these sovereign so-called ‘nation-states’ were put in their place
August 11, 2008 at 7:57 am |
Congratulations to Nicole Cooke on that fantastic win for Wales, and let’s give credit to the strong supporting role in th race by her English colleagues. Pity that it all has to be in the red, white and blue, and not a Welsh flag to be seen – by order!
The BBC seemed to have a few problems with this yesterday. Not that they failed to mention Wales: they’re pretty good at that now, but they couldn’t quite pin down where Nicole was from, most of the time. First of all she was from ‘Glamorgan’, later and correctly the Vale of Glamorgan, but in between times Swansea. And putting in an appearance was that mythical territory South Wales – with a capital ’s’ no doubt.
January 17, 2009 at 2:01 am |
I would think that the freedom of 95% of the “Tibetan” population would be of value to you. It was China, not the Dalai Lama, and not the CIA, that freed the slaves and serfs in Lasha and “Tibet” almost 50 years ago. That is right, even the Dalai Lama’s slaves were finally set free.