hankyoreh

left

The hosts of the Beijing Olympic torch when it comes to Seoul on April 27 are scurrying to find torchbearers in the wake of announcements by Koreans previously designated to run with the torch that they are now refusing participate. The torch run is being organized by the Korean Olympic Committee and the Seoul city government.

Police officials are busy preparing for the torch’s arrival as well, having seen how it has been met with protests as it has circled the globe.

Park Won-sun, a well-known civic activist lawyer and leading member of the Hope Institute, announced April 22 that he has decided against running with the torch. “I have been asked to carry the Olympic torch,” he said. “But the situation in Tibet has led me to decide not to.”

Later the same day, Choi Seung-guk, the general secretary of the environmental group Green Korea United, called a press conference to announce he has decided not to carry the torch.

“I was contacted about running with the torch because one of the major goals of the Beijing Olympics is for it to be an ‘environmental Olympics,’” said Choi. “But as the secretary general of an organization that has a platform calling for nonviolence and the pursuit of peace, I cannot carry the torch, having seen what has happened in Tibet.”

A 44-year-old man chosen last month to be an “ordinary citizen” torchbearer has also said he won’t participate, saying that he “doesn’t want to support a party being put on by a country that engages in immoral violence.”

Civic groups, meanwhile, are planning events to protest the situation in Tibet on the occasion of the torch’s arrival. The “Tibet Peace Alliance” (Tibet Pyeonghwa Yeondae), an umbrella organization of close to fifty civic groups, plans a street protest styled as a “torch praying for Tibetan peace” that will be carried from Pagoda Park to city hall in downtown Seoul. Some one hundred conservative organizations, including North Korean human rights groups, say they intend to block the Olympic torch’s path as it departs from Olympic Park in Seoul’s Songpa-gu.

The torch’s twenty-kilometer route will extend from Olympic Park, where the torch event will begin at 2 p.m., to Seoul City Hall, where it is scheduled to arrive by 7 p.m. after being passed between 80 torchbearers.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]