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Foreign reporters will not have complete access to the Internet
during the Beijing Olympics, Games organizers said on Wednesday,
reversing a pledge to bring down the Chinese firewall of censorship.
Sites linked to the banned Falun Gong spiritual
movement and other unspecified ones would remain blocked for the
thousands of foreign reporters covering the Games, organizing
committee spokesman Sun Weide said.
“During the Olympic Games, we will provide
sufficient access to the Internet for reporters,” Sun told Agence
France-Presse.
“Sufficient” access, however, falls short of
the complete Internet freedoms for foreign reporters that China’s
communist authorities had promised in the run-up to the Games, which
begin on August 8.
The head of the press commission of the
International Olympic Committee (IOC), Kevan Gosper, said he would
take the matter up with Chinese authorities.
“I have heard that there are some limitations
on access,” Gosper added.
“I will speak with the Chinese authorities to
advise them of the restraints and to see what their reaction is,”
he said.
The chief of the Australian Olympic team, John
Coates, also a member of the IOC, expressed frustration with the
decision to continue to censor the Internet, pointing out that China
had gone back on one of its “key” Olympic promises.
“It certainly is disappointing . . . I think
it’s a matter that the IOC will take seriously,” Coates told
reporters at the main press center for the Games in Beijing where
sensitive Internet sites remained blocked.
He said Gosper and IOC President Jacques Rogge
would have “very serious discussions with the Chinese
authorities” about the issue.
He said, though, that he was not sure whether
the IOC had the power or influence to convince the authorities to
give foreign reporters free access to the Internet.
“What [IOC leaders] can do about it, I don’t
know,” Coates said.
During an exclusive interview with Agence
France-Presse two weeks ago, Rogge insisted that there would be no
censorship of the Internet.
“For the first time, foreign media will be
able to report freely and publish their work freely in China,” he
said.
“There will be no censorship on the
Internet,” Rogge added.
But Sun said China’s pledge was only to allow
foreign reporters enough information to carry out their duties, not
to have unfettered Internet access.
“Our promise was that journalists would be
able to use the Internet for their work during the Olympic Games,”
he added.
“So we have given them sufficient access to do
that,” Sun said.
Falun Gong is a particularly sensitive issue for
China’s communist authorities, who outlawed the group in 1999,
describing it as an evil cult.
Thousands of their practitioners staged a
protest in central Beijing after the group was outlawed, and Falun
Gong members in China report they continue to face severe
repression.
Sun would not say which other sites would remain
censored for foreign reporters.
But journalists working at the main press center
for the Olympics reported they could not access sites belonging to
rights group Amnesty International and a range of media outlets such
as the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle.
Chinese authorities operate strict Internet
censorship with a so-called Great Firewall of China that blocks
information that the ruling Communist Party views as improper,
unhealthy or a threat to their rule.
Amnesty International describes China as one of
the world’s “enemies of the Internet.”
Last year, Beijing introduced new regulations
relaxing general media curbs for foreign journalists in the run-up
to the Games.
Domestic journalists, who work under strict
censorship, however, were not included in the measures to relax
reporting restrictions, nor were they promised any greater Internet
freedoms during the Games.
-- AFP
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