Snapshot:China's Verbal Acrobatics On Sports And Politics

By Sam Nuvala Fonkem

Never before has there been such a heated and widespread controversy surrounding a sporting event as has been the case with the upcoming Beijing Olympics, which has been dogged by disruptions of the itinerary of the Olympic Torch and strident calls by human rights activists worldwide for a boycott of the games.

It would seem that the Olympic Games hardly come and go without some controversy or scandal to mark the event, but very few have mobilised world attention such as that of 1934 in Berlin during which the founder of Nazi Germany, arch anti-Semitist, Adolf Hitler, who had turned racism into a national religion, refused to shake hands with African-American sprint gold medallist, Jesse Owen.

Prior to the current Beijing controversy, the 1980 Moscow Olympics was mired by an unprecedented highly vocal campaign for boycott that was championed by the US and some of its allies. The Soviet Union, before Glasnost and Perestroika, was the evil empire which had instituted hundreds of subhuman concentration camps for political prisoners, the gulags, and was intolerant of divergent opinion.

Because of its despicable human rights record, the US even dispatched a rather reluctant messenger to Africa, the one and only Mohammed Ali, to campaign for a boycott of the Olympic Games. Coincidentally, and in the heat of the boycott campaign, the Supreme Council for Sports in Africa, SCSA, under the chairmanship of its President, Abraham Odia of Nigeria, was holding its summit meeting in Yaounde with the Moscow Olympic boycott featuring at the top of its agenda.

The international news media had virtually invaded Yaounde for the event, and as a young ambitious reporter for Radio Yaounde at the time, I was determined to be ahead of the pack of wolves to get the scoop and the exclusive interview; after all this was my territory and I knew the ropes. After tailing Old Man Odia, from one function to the other, we finally settled in his hotel suite at Mont Febe at midnight for the exclusive.

I went straight to the point. Should politics be mixed with sports? The old man asked me how I could imagine the organisation of sports and sporting events without government's involvement. Governments provide infrastructure, the enabling environment, finances and what have you, to promote sporting activities, how then can government be involved without politics coming into play?

Next question: Was Africa going to boycott the Moscow games or not? Of course not! cried the Old Man. Africa, he explained, was not going to get caught in super power politics. The SISA was going to steer its own course and not be influenced by Western whims and caprices.

He cautioned me to beware of Western media propaganda which had disingenuously misled international public opinion to believe there was going to be a collective African boycott of the Moscow Games. Old Man Odia reminded me that we were dealing with the era of the Cold War; the super power rivalry between Washington and Moscow, adding that Africa must deal with the situation with circumspection.

At the end of the 90-minute interview, I had got my scoop and learned a lot about sports and politics; I had learned enough to know that any attempt to separate sports from politics is not only facetious but dishonest.

Ever since the end of the Mao Tse Tung era of isolationism, China has been gradually worming its way into the global arena of capitalism, not by mere political pronouncements, but by staging international spectaculars as an international public relations ploy to gain world visibility.

One of the landmarks of China's visibility exploits was the staging of the UN-sponsored International Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995 that produced resolutions and a code of conduct on matters related to the rights of women. We cannot forget the highly mediatised Sino-African Summit in Beijing last year, too.

China's lobby to host the 2008 Olympic Games has been motivated by political considerations, not the mere love of sports. Its ambition to host the Games is both politically and economically motivated and its outcome is intended to confer on China the status of a big world player in the field of international politics.

The whole purpose of the Games is to consolidate its position in the committee of civilised nations and it would be deceiving itself by seeking high visibility on the world arena; China ought to have been prepared to come under inevitable scrutiny over its international and bilateral relations and its adherence to the international norms, values and best practices.

Everyone would agree that sports, in general, are meant to promote human interaction, competition, tolerance, camaraderie and physical well-being. However, any sporting event that is staged against a background of unwholesome morality and disregard for universal values on the part of the host is bound to raise questions, criticism and controversy.

China has repeatedly declared to whoever cares to listen that its diplomatic and trade relations with the outside world are predicated on non-interference in the international affairs of other nations. China is overly sensitive and highly irritable whenever the issue of human rights is raised.

It becomes quarrelsome and intransigent whenever the issue of its subjugation of the autonomous province of Tibet and other provinces is raised. It is highly defensive whenever its relations with brutal, genocidal regimes in Africa are put to question. China's cosy relations with the Sudanese regime to which it supplies arms that are being used for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the Darfur region of Western Sudan considered to be second class citizens, is abominable.

Yet, China, knowing fully well the end purpose of those military supplies, has insisted in claiming that it is only respecting the terms of its bilateral relations and does not interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan.

Just the other day, Mozambique and South Africa refused a Chinese shipload of arms destined for Zimbabwe to disembark and offload the shipload at their sea ports. We hear the shipload later headed for Angola with which it has bilateral relations since the 1970s and in which it has significant investments.

I recently watched the Director of China's Institute of International Relations on TV expounding on his country's foreign policy. He castigated Western nations for dictating policy in Africa because of their historical relationship of colonialism and neo-colonialism. He gloated that while China is free from such colonial stigma, it was pursuing quite a different diplomatic course in Africa; a pragmatic course based on trade and devoid of interference.

China may not have been involved in the slave trade or the 19th century Scramble for Africa by European powers, but by definition, its relations with Africa are obviously not different from a colonial relationship wherein Africa is regarded as a source of raw materials, especially petroleum and a dumping ground for Chinese manufactured goods.

China's wobbling attempts to dissociate politics from sports, or trade for that matter, may appear to be pragmatic but pragmatism without morality, without ethics, without concern for the human being, boils down to unscrupulous pragmatism and must be condemned by the civilised committee of nations. By probing dictatorial regimes whose modus operandi is brutality and crimes against humanity on the capricious excuse of pragmatism and non-interference, China's diplomatic acrobatics is not only outdated; it is unacceptable.

China, in hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, has been given a sporting chance to gather its act together, shape up and amend its deplorable human rights record. China should be reminded that it is the oldest cradle of civilisation after Africa, irrespective of its down-trodden position today.

China should do well to borrow a leaf from the African Union which, under the distinguished leadership of Alpha Konare, adapted the humanitarian philosophy of non-indifference, which goes far beyond the mercantile notion of non-interference.

Non-indifference signifies the primacy of humanity over mercantilist pursuits and upholds the truism that man lives by man; that you are your brother's keeper. Long live Ubuntu, the principle that good men shall not remain silent in the face of man's inhumanity to man.