A basketball player at the front against the Chinese regime

Boston Celtics basketball player Enes Kanter has been attacking China head-on for several days on Twitter, notably lambasting the country’s policies in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Marc Thibodeau
Press

The biting interventions of the Turkish-born athlete risk causing serious headaches for the NBA, which suffered the ire of Beijing a few years ago after a league team’s general manager, Daryl Morey, posted online his support for the protests in Hong Kong.

Kanter, who is not his first online political intervention, began his campaign last Wednesday by calling on “brutal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping” and his government to “return Tibet to the Tibetans”.

He listed in a video the list of human rights abuses perpetrated against the local population before noting, in a second post, that more than 150 people had set themselves on fire over the years in an attempt to draw attention to the situation.

On Friday, the professional player attacked Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang by demanding that the country “stop the genocide” against the Uyghur population in the region.

Several states, echoing human rights organizations, accuse the Chinese regime of persecuting this Muslim minority by resorting to large-scale arbitrary detention as well as forced labor.

On Monday, Mr. Kanter returned to the issue by specifying to Xi Jinping that he “would not silence him”.

At the same time, he attacked the Nike company by accusing it of taking advantage of the forced labor of Uyghurs to ensure part of its production in China while boasting in the United States of being a model of defense of the minorities. The firm, which has already been criticized on this subject by American media, denies any use of forced labor.

Check out Enes Kanter’s Twitter account

The NBA player also displayed his anger on the basketball courts by wearing shoes with messages critical of the Chinese regime.

Mr. Kanter’s outings have not gone unnoticed in Beijing. The Foreign Ministry accused him of “wanting to attract attention” while Chinese giant Tencent stopped local transmission by streaming Boston team games. Internet users in the country, where the NBA is very popular, have multiplied the messages demanding that the athlete apologize or be excluded from the league.

Senior Celtics executive Brad Stevens said on Friday that the team intends to “support its players and their right to free speech.” He said he was convinced that would also be the case with the league, which has not commented on the series of posts targeting China.

“Complicated” reports

The NBA was rather ambivalent in 2019 when the exit of Daryl Morey – then general manager of the Houston Rockets – in favor of the Hong Kong protesters prompted the government channel CCTV to stop all broadcasting of league games in the country. .

In April, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver testified that the organization’s relationship with China remained “complicated.” He defended existing commercial ties with the Asian country, noting that sport “was a way of bringing people together” across borders.

Louisa Greve, who is an activist with an Uyghur rights organization, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, believes the NBA and other professional sports organizations “should have already recognized” that they cannot “sort through.” selective ”in human rights and congratulate themselves on supporting the Black Lives Matter movement while neglecting the situation in Xinjiang.

The activist, however, is delighted to see a well-known figure in the NBA sound the alarm.

Chip Pitts, an independent corporate responsibility advisor, believes companies like the NBA and Nike should seek to “act proactively” to make things happen in China rather than end up in “reactive” mode when their presence in China. the country is making waves.

“Otherwise, it might come back to haunt them.” If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, ”notes Mr. Pitts, who would take a very negative view that the NBA seeks to silence the player.

“Enes Kanter is on the right side of the story. What he says must be heard, ”he concludes.