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Beijing Olympics: "China Has Exaggerated Terror Threat"

by Christina 123 | July 29, 2008 at 01:30 pm

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With world athletes already making their way to the Olympic villages in Beijing and an impressive security operation in place, a researcher at the Human Rights Watch has today accused China of fudging on the issue of whether there is a genuine terrorist threat and has demanded "concrete evidence".

After a series of explosions and other potential security threats, Beijing is mounting one of the biggest-ever security operations for the games. The measures include surface-to-air missiles at the main stadiums and the deployment of 100,000 troops to deal with potential terrorist attacks. “Safety is our top concern,” said Xi Jinping, the vice-president, last week.

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Security experts from both China and overseas say the country does face a genuine terrorism threat. The most prominent risk is believed to be the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which was listed as a terrorist group by the United Nations in 2002.

Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert based in Singapore, said that one branch of ETIM had been based for a number of years in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it had received “ideology, training and financing from al-Qaeda”. Its numbers had been reduced from several thousand to a few hundred as the result of Pakistani military operations, he said.

Li Wei, a terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that ETIM was the biggest problem but that China faced four other terrorist threats, listed as: “Extremists and activists among the Tibetan independence groups; Falun Gong evil cult organisations; common citizens who are discontented; and international terrorist forces.”

In spite of the flurry of recent incidents, Beijing has been accused of exaggerating risks, in part by lumping together ETIM with other groups, some of which have no history of violence.

Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, says that any security threat to the Olympics should be taken seriously. However, he said, China should provide concrete evidence to back up the many allegations of terrorist plots and should stop conflating terrorism with other types of crime or political activity. “China is not acting as a responsible Olympics host when it blurs so much of the actual terrorism risk,” he said. FT