From Mrs J. Falzon

The chairman of the International Olympics Committee – flanked by enough officials to mount a football match – has been shown on television saying that if the protests currently being organised all over the world against the running of the Olympic torch continue: “The spirit of the Games will be broken.” Well, I, for one, think that “the spirit of the Games” was broken when the decision was taken to award the 2008 Games to China.

On 4 June 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I had been living in Hong Kong – now, of course, part of China but then a British Colony – for 13 years. In fact, I moved to Malta – as planned – four weeks later. Perhaps because it was happening “on our doorstep”, I – and probably the vast majority of the Hong Kong population – sat glued to my television and radio on that and the following day, hardly able to take in what was happening in Beijing. On the following Sunday, listening to my car radio on the way back from the New Territories, I took a detour so that I and my 11-year-old son could see, from the Happy Valley Flyover, over one million Hong Kong residents walking along Hennessy Road in silent protest at the deaths of what was probably thousands of young protesters.

These days, sport cannot be kept apart from politics, and it would be idealistic in the extreme to think that it can be. I love sport – I love the Olympic Games – and there is no way I would want to see this year’s Games cancelled, or subjected to a partial boycott, because of China’s recent actions in Tibet. The mistaken decision to allow China to host the Games this year was taken as part of the worldwide pandering to China because of the huge market its massive population represents. I have never forgotten what happened in Beijing in June 1989 – and, in fact, although seldom reported, in many other Chinese cities – and my attitude is “so what’s new?” China has never had any concept of human rights – and I doubt that it ever will. But, just maybe, the protests that are being made against the progress of the Olympic flame will show the Chinese authorities how the rest of the world feels about their regime which, in this day and age, is so repugnant to all those who value free speech and respect for the individual.

Judith Falzon

MELLIEHA