The zimbabwean cricketing authorities may be a force for good (I don’t know enough to attempt to comment).
However; the world cup is a compettition between Nations, not clubs. This means that there is a diffrence between, say Yorkshire, going there to help out in Cricket development and England giving their approval to the regime by playing there.
Evil racist bastards are just plain wrong and shouldn’t be counternanced.
Well, no, of course not, I wouldn’t expect the opposition even to bother to try to set up official interviews with foreign journalists.
But you remember how it was during the Taliban War, with all kinds of sidebar news stories coming out of Kabul, and the refugee camps, and even Pakistan. The cumulative effect was to raise America’s consciousness about other Afghanistan issues besides Al Qaeda and the Taliban–the most obvious one was the whole women’s rights issue. Before Fall 2001, you never heard much about women’s rights in the Mideast, but once you had all those Western journalists over there doing standups in front of crowds of women wearing burqas, it was Nellie-bar-the-door, it was “RAWA this” and “RAWA that”.
So the same thing would happen in Zimbabwe. Let enough stringers for AP and Reuters and “special correspondents” loose in the country, and by the end of the Cup, you’d have a lot more awareness on the part of Americans of what was going on over there. Mugabe can’t possibly police where they all go, not with a normal-sized foreign press corps descending on Harare, all those people just in town for the duration, all of them with laptops and minicams and Internet uplinks, all of them hungry enough to go anywhere, talk to anybody, film anything, eager to grab that career-making sound bite or video clip.
And I’d predict that there’d be at least one tape of a police beating or confiscation or something like that, to make world headlines and suddenly teach Americans how to spell “Zimbabwe”.
Well, I hope I can control the jerking of my knee and speak a bit more sensibly now. Of course, despite my concern for specific people I know there, and resentment over the appalling, government-sanctioned hijacking of their assets, far more important issues are the risk of mass starvation and ZANU-PF’s continuing, violent suppression of political rivals.
As I alluded to earlier, most of my ex’s extended family are pulling up stakes en masse and decamping to New Zealand. While there will be many difficulties associated with this move, it’s probably for the best; ZANU-PF’s anti-white rhetoric is becoming more and more shrill and with the white population now below 30,000, I would not entirely rule out a Ugandan-style spasm of forced deportation, or worse, within the next year or two.
So, looking at the bigger picture, I’ll go with DDG and those who better know the political situation within cricket, and say let 'em play; if nothing else it may buy some more time before the final eviction of the remaining whites in the country, and may result in some additional attention to the increasingly dire food situation.
I am not, however, optimistic that letting additional journalists into the country to cover the matches will necessarily result in significantly greater world attention to the country’s problems; it’s a small, poor place of little economic or political interest to the US or European states; if “the people” (outside the UK, where these issues are of continuing interest) really cared what happened there, they probably would have spoken up by now.
You’re placing too much stock in John Doe’s interest in ferreting out News Of The World from the inside pages of the newspaper.
John Doe doesn’t pay much attention to news that doesn’t come with juicy sound bites or arresting video footage, EK. That’s how the vast majority of American people get their news–from CNN and the other TV networks. And as soon as the networks feature a story, the print media pick up the ball and run with it.
One picture is worth a thousand words, but up till now, nothing visually exciting has come out of Zimbabwe. Give it time.
Look at women’s soccer–all it took was Brandy Chastain ripping her shirt off, and suddenly women’s soccer is Big News, it’s all over the place, Time, Newsweek, everywhere.
Look at China–nobody really cared about human rights violations in China until they started suppressing the Falun Gong, which caught the media’s attention, who publicized it, and the next thing you know there are Questions Being Asked as to whether China is really suitable for the 2008 Olympics.
Nobody really cared about the child slave labor on African cacao plantations until AP and Reuters stringers started getting in there to cover the Ivory Coast civil war.
DDG: Are you seriously suggesting that the American Media is going to cover a story featuring CRICKET and small african country’s politics?
Of the countries competing in the World Cup only S Africa and England (which is the UK in cricket terms) have any kind of influence with Mugabe et al, and the UKs influence is very minor.
Most people in those countries aready know that Mugabe is a syphlitic slug. Let’s not give him a chance to strut on the World stage.
As pretty much the only American-born cricketer within sight (I was told that, in the Los Angeles league I played in, there were only one or two others out of about 750) I’m not expecting cricket to be on SportsCenter anytime soon. But throw in an MDC protest/rally at the Bulawayo or Harare grounds with the cameras rolling and you could have a potential headline news story even in the US.
Again, I’m not saying Mugabe isn’t a thug. I just think it’s a bad idea to turn our backs on MDC, the ZCU, and the others who are trying to do something. If the cameras stop rolling, that gives Mugabe carte blanche to finish what he’s started. That, I think, is more important than “denying Mugabe a platform.”
(BTW, I checked Wisden.com this morning and it looks like the MDC is divided on whether to support the boycott. I should also say that some sources are calling Mugabe the “president” of the ZCU, but Mugabe is titular president of darn near everything in Zimbabwe. He hasn’t shown his face at any meetings and doesn’t even have his name on the ZCU website. )
It’s possible.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/12/19/zimbabwe.cricket/index.html
AP has picked it up, although it hasn’t hit the American GoogleNews outlets yet.
http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoSports/ts.ts-12-20-0096.html
Also, CNN.com has been covering Zimbabwe right along.