Zimbabwe and Kenya do not deserve being boycotted for the ICC World Cup

The ICC Cricket World Cup started last Saturday in South Africa with Zimbabwe and Kenya being the co-hosts. Over the past few weeks there has been much dilemma of security fears in Kenya and Zimbabwe by some of the participating countries to an extent that one would think that both these countries are war-torn countries. 

The issue of snapping sporting ties with countries whose policies are bitterly opposed to certainly attracts confusion and to some extent there is also hypocrisy. The liberal line is that politics and sport should be kept separate. Sport is a means of unifying the world, of bringing people closer together. Politics, on the other hand, is about governments and politicians. According to liberals, politicians and regimes may have their differences but sport should never be mixed up with these differences. Let the politicians fight while the people of the world unite to play cricket, football or any other sport.

The conservative line is that it is foolish to play sport with a country with which you are in a state of near war or whose policies you oppose. Sport may be fun but it can also become a weapon. A boycott is a good way of isolating repressive regimes and shaming them into changing their ways. Thus sporting events are held to hostage due to political differences and the opportunity that sporting links could provide to re-stabilise relationships between the countries is disregarded.

The English Cricket Board earlier chose a very careful and limited defence to refuse to play Zimbabwe in Harare on February 13 in the cricket World Cup. The Board pointed out that it may well be wrong to play in Zimbabwe but says in that case, the government should have asked it to launch a boycott much earlier. To back out would entail a huge financial loss. In other words, it steered clear of the politics-and-sport issue and stuck to pragmatic considerations. Subsequently the Board emphatically gave a go-ahead arguing that if British Companies can trade in Zimbabwe why can’t its sportsmen play there? If Zimbabwe is such a terrible country, they say, and Robert Mugabe is such a terrible despot, then why does Britain continue to trade with Zimbabwe? (Last year, trade between the two countries was over $ 300 million.) Why is it okay to sell goods to Harare but wrong to play cricket there?

It is wrong to say that sport and politics should never mix. It is also wrong to say that they must always mix. There may be times when two countries that oppose each other see no difficulty in meeting on the sporting field (as America and Russia did during the Cold War). And there may be times when a boycott can influence policy for the better. For instance, most people are now agreed that the global boycott of South Africa (coupled with economic sanctions) contributed much to the fall of the apartheid regime.

The problem, perhaps, is that all too often counties take pragmatic decisions and then dress them up in the rhetoric of morality. Or, people with suspect moralities (the racists who supported white South Africa) then used bogus arguments (“politics and sport don’t mix”) to hide their true intentions.

I do not fully subscribe to the proposition that sport improves relations between countries. There is simply no evidence for this view. Throughout the post-World War II period, the US and Russia competed against each other in a variety of international sporting competitions. Regardless of which side won more medals, it made no difference to the Cold War which continued to rage regardless. Nor did the emergence of such Soviet sportspersons as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci do anything to change the way in which the average American perceived the communists of the Warsaw Pact countries.

The truth is that most people or countries have no consistent policy on when to and when not to blend politics and sport. When security reasons are outlined for a boycott, one can point out isolated terrorist events in almost any part of the world and that does not mean that countries are selected randomly for boycott. It would be understandable to boycott countries having wars or civil disputes but using broad discretions would make a mockery of sporting events. One country would be safe for some and unsafe for others; countries that have been boycotted would in turn not play in countries that refused to play on their land and the chain reaction that would follow would be at the cost of  sports advancement and spectator satisfaction.

Under the circumstances one would seriously question the fear raised by some participants in the ICC World Cup about Kenya and Zimbabwe because both these countries are not countries where terrorists operate normally. These are countries that are not at war and these countries would be seriously disappointed to be boycotted by countries that trade with them and in the case of Kenya, where many visitors from all participating countries visit.