How three Canadians upstaged Beijing 2

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From Washington, Ms. Putt has steered a disorderly circle of thousands of volunteers on six continents into a carefully designed campaign that will combine Greenpeace-style attention-getting techniques with the Buddhist country's traditionally non-violent values, all directed at the thousands of media outlets that are converging on Beijing.

She also leads the efforts to communicate with the International Olympic Committee, whose president, the Belgian Jacques Rogge, has refused to consider requests to prevent China from sending the torch relay over Mount Everest and through Tibet, which Tibetans consider a gesture of subjection. The committee may be forced to bend after European leaders suggested this week that they will stay away from the opening ceremonies unless China changes its approach to Tibet.

And she works closely with groups that are using the Olympics to bring attention to China's other controversies, including its support for the government of Sudan during the Darfur crisis and its mistreatment of the media.

"I make sure we're co-ordinating all these groups around the world, making sure we're speaking with a common message and focusing our efforts so they'll have the greatest impact," Ms. Putt said. "I make sure that we have a common target, that all of these groups' energies are going in the same direction, which is to put pressure on the Chinese leaders in Beijing to make Tibet the critical issue that really needs to be resolved immediately."

While Ms. Woznow had become involved in the politics of Tibet after a yearlong tour of China in 1999, Ms. Putt got involved through her family: Her mother had been a volunteer in India with the aid agency CUSO in the 1960s, working with Tibetan refugees who were flooding across the border. So when Ms. Putt encountered Tibet activists at the University of Victoria, she was quickly drawn into their circle.

She soon met another young B.C. woman, Lhadon Tethong, a family acquaintance. Her mother had also worked with CUSO near Tibet, and had married a Tibetan activist who had been in the Dalai Lama's inner circle; the two had moved to Canada, where Ms. Tethong was born.

Today Ms. Tethong, 34, is the charismatic executive director of Washington-based Students for a Free Tibet, with 650 chapters around the world, and is perhaps the leading figure in the international Olympic-protest campaign.

The three women work closely together, drawing on their long experience in Canada. "We've all kind of grown up together," Ms. Woznow says. "It's been a kind of maturing of the movement as we've gotten older, and I think now is its most exciting time."

But Ms. Tethong, unlike her non-Tibetan friends, has never visited Tibet. Given her family's history, that would be too dangerous. But she did sneak into China last year and help organize the unfurling of a large banner on the Great Wall and a protest on Mount Everest, all the while posting video clips on the Web. She was taken into custody by Chinese police and questioned.

In an interview yesterday from Dharamsala, India, where she has been working with Tibetans all month, Ms. Tethong explained that the Olympics have come to be seen as a decisive historical moment and that the bloody events of recent weeks have not dimmed a hope that this year's international attention will force China to change its stand toward Tibet.

"We want to lessen the damage that can be done to Tibetans by shining as bright a light as possible on them, especially during the Games and this torch relay," she said.

"The Chinese government wants something from this; they want world acceptance. That's why they're taking the risk of inviting the world in for these Games. They want to be part of the club and to be liked. And our job as young activists is to deny them this, to tell them that their approach to Tibet is going to cost them something, it'll cost them face. And loss of face is the most serious thing we can deliver."

The three women have been campaigning around the Olympics since 2000, when Beijing was bidding to be host of the 2008 Games. At the time, they were simply trying to prevent China from getting the Games. When that campaign failed, there was a mood of dismay, and the issue was dropped for a couple years.

Then, about 2005 or 2006, there was an epiphany, a realization that China's Games could be the ultimate opportunity to make a change, if angry, mistreated and dying Tibetans became their emblematic image.

The campaign falls into a long tradition of political campaigning around Olympic Games. It probably began in 1936, when Adolf Hitler hosted the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for the new fascist Germany, and there was a major international discussion of a boycott. It was Hitler who introduced the torch relay, intended to show off his regime's power and purity, and gave the opening ceremonies much of their nation-promoting pomp.

Because the opening events of the Olympics became tools of national promotion after 1936, they soon became targets of activism, including the civil-rights protests by athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Games, the boycott by several democratic countries of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the reciprocal Communist boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

"Even when we were opposing Beijing's bid," Ms. Putt said from Washington, "people knew that if China was awarded the Olympics, it would mean that all the attention of the media and a huge number of people around the world would be on China in a way that it isn't normally. And for Tibetans, they've been struggling to get their voices heard for 50 or 60 years. It's not a fresh issue, it's not a violent conflict, and because of that it's hard to get a sense of attention and urgency on the issue. So we knew right away that it was an opportunity not to be missed."

As the torch makes its slow journey around the world, passing through Beijing this weekend before crossing Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas before returning to China for its controversial trip through Tibet in May, the three Canadian women are working their BlackBerrys and laptops late into the night, ensuring that something dramatic will happen at each stop.

Their biggest plans, however, are for August, when Beijing will be on every TV station and the front page of every publication. "We are determined to have non-violent direct action in the heart of Beijing, inside the Games, every day," Ms. Tethong says.

"We know that Tibet won't be free in September, but we want the next generation of Chinese leaders to know that this occupation is very costly for them, that its cost to their reputation outweighs any benefits. That's what we want to accomplish this summer."