Opinion
- Editorial- Commentary
The
Trinidad Guardian:
Zimbabwe
problems just aren’t cricket
Editorial
On
Monday, Australian Prime Minister John Howard
announced that the Government was
banning the country’s
World Cup-winning cricket team from touring
Zimbabwe in October.
In explaining his decision, Mr
Howard said Australia did not wish to give comfort
to Zimbabwe Prime
Minister Robert Mugabe who was described as a “grubby
dictator.”
The ICC World Cup winners still
want to play Zimbabwe as part of what was described
as a “commitment
to help Zimbabwe cricket develop” and hoped
to do so at a neutral ground.
The cricket champions have a responsibility to
uphold the principles of international cricket
which require all ICC full-member nations to play
other full-member nations regularly. Zimbabwe has
refused to consider a match on neutral grounds.
Australia’s decision to ban
its cricketers from Zimbabwe is, of course, a
slippery slope which
leaves the country exposed to allegations of international
relations hypocrisy.
If Australia disapproves of the
Mugabe administration, will Australian athletes
be banned from next year’s
Olympics which will be held in China, which many
have criticised for its distance from western democratic
practices?
And what about Pakistan, a cricket-loving
nation ruled by a military President now engaged
in a
battle with the country’s Chief Justice?
Will Australian cricketers be banned from Pakistan
as well?
Australia’s disapproval of
the Mugabe administration went further than the
pitches of the Harare Sports
Club, and the liberal John Howard administration
has pledged Aus$18 million to Zimbabwean civil
rights groups acting as critics or in opposition
to their government.
Mr Howard has been forced to respond
to a charge from a Zimbabwe minister that the
ban on the tour
was racist but, as Web sites have pointed out,
as a junior backbencher in 1975, Mr Howard argued
that sporting boycotts would be ineffective in
breaking down South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Zimbabwe’s problems are not
insignificant, and cricket offers a useful template
for evaluating
just how bad they are.
Zimbabwe’s Cricket Board is well funded,
but the money doesn’t filter down into the
game itself. Players aren’t always given
the salaries they are contracted to receive, community-level
pitches across the country are going to ruin, and
the team is widely regarded as the guardians of
cellar position in international cricket matches.
In a country where the economy falters with 80
per cent unemployment and 2,200 per cent inflation,
there is little loose change available to fix nets
and maintain cricket fields.
The free press is almost completely
gone, replaced by government-funded media outlets.
The Daily News,
an independent paper critical of the Mugabe government,
was bombed in 2001 and finally closed its doors
in 2004, when the country’s Supreme Court
denied the paper a licence to publish.
What’s more, the police and
military routinely beat opponents of the ruling
party.
Prime Minister Patrick Manning
has generously offered this country’s earned knowledge of
oil and gas to various African nations and T&T
has established a high commission in Pretoria,
South Africa, headed by Donna Carter.
But that high commission has not been accredited
to Zimbabwe, though it has established diplomatic
relations with the four countries surrounding that
landlocked nation, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia
and Mozambique.
Given this country’s sterling
reputation for democracy, it may be a little
awkward to establish
diplomatic relations with Zimbabwe and its 83-year-old
leader as a means of encouraging the return to
democratic norms there.
However, such a gesture would have a far different
resonance from the note struck by Australia and
might spark the kind of change that Zimbabwe so
desperately needs.
In the absence of diplomatic relations,
it is necessary for T&T to have a well-articulated
policy on what is going on in Zimbabwe.
The
Trinidad Guardian is
one of the most important news daily in Trinidad.
Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note: This
article was first publish in Trinidad Guardian,
Wednesday 16th May, 2007. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest
of our readers.
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