NEXT Jan. 1, millions worldwide will be watching the televised 94th Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, and the 199th Rose Parade with its celebratory floats. One of those floats, saluting the 2008 Chinese Olympics, has already stirred worldwide protests because of China's many human rights violations against its own people as well as China's large-scale financial partnership with Sudan, perpetrator of the continuing genocide in Darfur.

In the story "Roses Are Red" (July 19) in the Pasadena Weekly, Joe
Piasecki reported that both local and international human rights organizations
are urging the Tournament of Roses Association and the Pasadena City Council
to speak out about how the Olympics in China will be a chilling caricature
of what Tournament President C.L. Keedy - justifying the inclusion of the
float in the parade - said:

"The Olympics, which brings nations together, is the epitome of a global celebration - providing a worldwide spirit of cooperation, supporting athletes in peaceful competition." But there are no celebrations among the many victims of China's chronic cruelty.

The acutely controversial float is sponsored by the Pasadena-based Avery Dennison Corp., which, the Pasadena Weekly reports, "employs more than 10,000 people in factories it owns in China," making office and consumer
products.

Among the gathering critics of the Avery float are international human rights organizations Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch.

Sophie Richardson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asian Division, points out, accurately: "The people who are organizing the parade should be fully aware that the Chinese government uses this kind of opportunity not for just promoting the Olympics, but for real political propaganda purposes. The float will certainly be construed as not just support of the Olympics, but for the Chinese government's staging of it."

The supporters of this particular float are very likely to claim that protests about China's complicity in human rights violations - including the ongoing genocide in Darfur - have become irrelevant by citing China's support of the unanimous July 31 Resolution by the U.N. Security Council. The resolution will purportedly send 26,000 U.N. and African troops and police into Darfur to begin to end the genocide.

But before that Security Council vote, China greatly undermined the resolution by stripping from the original language a clause pledging sanctions against the government of Sudan if it prevented the implementation of the resolution. Sudan's president, Gen. Omar al-Bashir, has broken every agreement he has signed to end the horrors that have cost the lives of more than 450,000 black Africans in Darfur.

On that record, the genocide will continue.

This acclaimed but deeply flawed July 31 U.N. resolution also prevents
the disarming of the al-Bashir's militia, the Janjaweed, responsible for
most of the mass murders of the people in Darfur, and the huge numbers of gang
rapes of Darfur's black women.

Because of lethal holes in this U.N. resolution, the growing
international campaign to shame China, Sudan's largest investor and supplier of arms,
into pressuring its genocidal partner to really end the atrocities there is continuing. On Jan. 1, the world will see the shaming on television and in international newspapers if the Avery Dennison Corp. floral float
remains as a focus of the Rose Bowl Parade, billed as "The Passport to the World's Celebrations."

However, it is not too late for the Tournament of Roses Association and Pasadena city officials to clearly disassociate themselves from the float's propaganda value for China's dictatorship. In a letter to Tournament of Roses President C.L. Keedy, Robert Menard, secretary-general of the invaluable champion of international press freedoms, Reporters Without Borders, showed how the Tournament of Roses can greatly add to the campaign to disgrace China into pressuring Sudan to end the mass murder.

Menard urged Keedy and Pasadena officials to "say clearly to the Chinese authorities that you will not allow the Rose Parade to be associated with the Chinese Olympics by hosting the Avery float until the Chinese
(Olympic Committee) organizers, who are for the most part also senior (Chinese government) officials, release prisoners of conscience, reform repressive laws and end censorship."

A similar letter, reports the Pasadena Weekly, has been sent to Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard. This public focusing on China as one of the pariahs among civilized nations will also put increased pressure on China - even
if its Olympics float is not removed from the Rose Parade - to compel Sudan to stop the Darfur genocide so that China will no longer be identified with these atrocities, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told The New

York Times is "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today."

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment
and the Bill of Rights.

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Article Launched:08/13/2007 07:08:26 PM PDT