Media Statement, 8th April 2008

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's 'see no evil, hear no evil' welcoming of the Olympic Torch to Downing St makes the UK seem little more than a weak-kneed Chinese trading outpost.

The PM has shamefully ignored Beijing's brutal repression in Tibet – of which the recent killings and beatings are just the latest manifestation, as well as Chinese bankrolling of death and displacement in Darfur.

John O'Shea is CEO of GOAL - an international humanitarian organisation working in Sudan since 1984. He said;

“Last September, Gordon Brown said that he would do everything possible to end the carnage in Darfur, which is bought and paid for by Beijing. The world knows that China arms the Khartoum tyrants and janjaweed thugs who have driven 3 million of their own people from their homes in Darfur.”

To unquestioningly treat with a dictatorship that sponsors murderers overseas represents a remarkable historical reversal for Great Britain. It is now little more than a historical footnote to recall how the world's first parliamentary democracy stood alone against a rampant Nazi Germany in 1940.

O Shea said: “This welcome for the torch relay in London is a real 'Made in Britain' PR coup for the Communist regime in Beijing, and a nail in the coffins of the 400,000 murdered men, women and children in Darfur.”

O'Shea continued “The truth is, the British government is so eager to deepen trade links with China that it will debase itself on human rights issues to avoid offending Beijing. It seems human lives are little more than bargaining chips to be deployed in a game where the real prize is access to China's vast market and growing middle class.”

GOAL is calling on Gordon Brown to show some moral fibre, and rally western leaders to threaten a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, unless China ceases its oppression in Tibet and sponsorship of tyrants and kleptocrats in Burma, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe and North Korea.