(Washington) On Friday, former US diplomat Mike Pompeo joined elected officials and figures from the Republican Party calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing to punish the Chinese authority in the name of human rights.
“They shouldn’t be standing there,” former Donald Trump Secretary of State said in an interview with conservative radio broadcaster Hugh Hewitt.
“We cannot allow our athletes to go to Beijing and reward the Chinese Communist Party for doing all the bad things it does around the world,” he added.
“The Olympic Games are an expression of freedom and athletic talent. Mike Pompeo insisted that their organization in Beijing is totally inappropriate.
The former secretary led the cold war-like confrontation that erupted in the final months of the Trump administration with China. However, this hawk did not take a stand to boycott the 2022 Olympics while taking over the State Department premiership, until January 20.
On Friday, he stressed that he had “worked on this issue in recent months” in order to “find the best approach” to “punish the Chinese Communist Party as much as possible.”
Calls for the new president, Joe Biden, are multiplying among the Republicans, especially in Congress, to decide on the boycott, in the name of human rights, especially the fate that Beijing reserves for the Uyghur Muslims, which Washington described as “genocide by Washington.”
The Winter Olympics are set to open on February 4, 2022, nearly six months after the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Human rights organizations accuse China of detaining up to a million Uighurs in camps in Xinjiang.
China denies this number and claims that these people have been transferred to vocational training centers with the aim of helping them find jobs to keep them away from the temptation of religious extremism.
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