Zimbabwe's cricket team faces ban

Tue, 07/08/2008 - 1:43pm
AFP PHOTO/Aamir QURESHI

While the G8 leaders met today and agreed on targeted sanctions against the illegitimate government of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, some folks in the United Kingdom have finally started to take action in a supremely British way.

Two weeks ago, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) severed ties with Zimbabwe's cricket team in late June following a request from Gordon Brown that Zimbabwean cricketers be banned because of the country's human rights violations. Replacing Zimbabwe as England's first opponents next summer will be Sri Lanka, which isn't exactly a beacon of stability or nonviolence either. Unfortunately, Zimbabwe will not be banned from the International Cricket Council (ICC), which is currently holding its annual meeting in Dubai, despite Zimbabwe Cricket's close ties with Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.

On a related note, Steve James, a former cricketer and coach who is now a columnist for The Telegraph in London, (so he may may know more about cricket than I do) writes that Zimbabwe should not be competing with cricket powerhouses like India, England or the West Indies, not for political reasons, but because the team is plain awful.

As a big sports fan, it's great to see athletes and athletic organizations doing the right thing, even when world leaders and politicians turn a blind eye to tragedy. Particularly given that the Olympic games this summer are an example of the exact opposite effect: an athletic organization ignoring obvious human rights violations for its own personal gain. (Read John Hoberman's provocative piece on athletics, politics and the International Olympic Committee in the current issue of FP).

Then again, there's also times when politics and athletics are mirror images of one another (think Alex Rodriguez and Eliot Spitzer).

Alex Ely | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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The Careful Mugabe Dance

by RonMwangaguhunga on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 1:55pm
There is a real danger that overheated rhetoric against Mugabe from the West will play into Mugabe's neocolonialist narrative. That is a real danger. The British press -- BBC, The Spectator, The Times of london -- are particularly shrill in their (correct) condemnation of the Mugabe regime. But Bush and Brown should make sure not to strengthen Mugabe's hand by martyrizing him by overplaying their hand. Samantha Power navigates the sensitive Mugabe issue well in Time magazine this week: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820138,00.html : "So what can be done? To start, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should appoint his predecessor, Kofi Annan, fresh from brokering a power-sharing deal for Kenya, as the U.N.'s envoy to Zimbabwe. One by one, those African and Western leaders who claim to be disgusted with Mugabe should announce that they bilaterally recognize the validity of the March 29 first-round election results, which showed the opposition winning 48% to 43%, though the margin was almost surely larger. The countries which do would make up the new "March 29 bloc" within the U.N. and would declare Morgan Tsvangirai the new President of Zimbabwe. They would then announce that Mugabe and the 130 leading cronies who have already been sanctioned by the West will not be permitted entry to their airports. "Tsvangirai and his senior aides should do as South Africa's African National Congress did throughout the 1960s and '70s: set up a government-in-exile and appoint ambassadors abroad--including to the U.N. That ambassador should be given forums for rebutting the ludicrous claims of the Zimbabwean and South African regimes. "If 'the U.N.' is disaggregated into its component parts, Mugabe's friends will be exposed. 'June 27' countries will be those who favor electoral theft, while 'March 29' countries will be those who believe that the Zimbabweans aren't the only ones who should stand up and be counted. This can be a recipe for gridlock in international institutions--but the gridlock won't get broken by lamenting its existence. It will get broken when the heads of state who back Mugabe are forced out into the open and when constructive engagement of the new President of Zimbabwe begins."