The catalyst for good or ill, opposites are united in the complex human activities we call sport
By Simon Barnes
TWO old boys met at the cricket. There was much to divide them, but they had the cricket in common.
Shot, sir. Fine throw. Oh, I say, well bowled indeed. Do you think it’s the moment for a little light refreshment? What an awfully good idea. And at the end of the day, world peace was established.
The two gentlemen in question were General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan, and Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India. They made the greatest step towards a permanent peace between their nations since the two countries were first established by Partition in 1947.
In a joint statement, the two leaders said that “the peace process was now irreversible”. There will now be a crossborder bus service from Kashmir to Pakistan, divided families will be reunited, border crossings will be open to civilian traffic and consulates will be introduced in Bombay and Karachi.
The countries have fought three wars in the past halfcentury. Three years ago they stepped back from the brink, a good decision on the whole, since they are now both nuclear powers. The Indo-Pak border is regarded as the most dangerous flashpoint in the world.
And now, after a one-day cricket match in which India were utterly defeated, the danger has gone. Perhaps I should point out here that when I say India were defeated, I don’t mean that Pakistan laid waste to the land, raped women, shot children, levelled cities and played football with severed heads.
No. Pakistan won by 159 runs. Not a single person died. It was, you see, a sporting event. India and Pakistan had fought out — though not actually fighting, of course — a wonderfully fraught Test series, and followed it with a series of one-dayers. At the climax of these hostilities came the outbreak of peace.
Sport is often spoken of as the bringer of world peace. That’s what they say at the Olympic Games. It is the kind of talk technically known as “bullshit”. Sport is not the invariable bringer of peace. Sport is aggressive, confrontational, loud, passionate, irrational. Naturally, sport can bring a lot of other things besides peace. In 1969, a football match between El Salvador and Honduras brought a war that lasted six days.
The situation was pretty hot long before the first of a three-match series was played. It was all about living space: Honduras had one citizen for every ten acres, El Salvador eight citizens for each acre. So El Salvadorians waded the river to reach the unused acres. Then, equally inevitably, they were turfed out and their coffee fincas confiscated. Honduras blamed El Salvador for all its troubles; El Salvador naturally resented this and everything else about its neighbour.
The countries met in the qualifiers for the 1970 World Cup.
Honduras won the first of these at home, 1-0. The El Salvador team bus got punctured after running over roofing nails. They took this personally, but the nails had been broadcast across the city as a creative piece of industrial action by schoolteachers. Riots followed the match. In the return, the Honduras team hotel was torched and when they moved to another, people sang outside their windows all night.
Knackered, the Hondurans lost 3-0. Rioting duly followed. So they needed a decider, which was played in Mexico City. The score was 2-2 after 90 minutes, but El Salvador squeaked home with a goal in extra time.
Rioting followed in Mexico City, women were raped and people were killed. The Hondurans alleged crooked officiating and cheating. Within a few hours, the first armed skirmishes broke out along the frontier.
It was a war that both sides lost. About 2,000 people were killed, a thousand on each side. The Organisation of American States organised a ceasefire after six days of fighting. In both states, the result for those that survived was an enhanced power to the military, so even the survivors lost.
The idea of sport as the bringer of world peace doesn’t actually stand up. George Orwell’s famous essay of 1945, The Sporting Spirit takes the exact opposite view. Writing about the visit of Moscow Dynamo to Britain, he said: “If such a visit has any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.”
timesonline.co.uk
On similar lines-
Peace through sports
Humane response to bigotry, intolerance and prejudice
April 4, 2005
iranian.com
PARIS -- The positive influence of sport on all aspects of human life - its benefits of instituting mutual understanding across divisions of race, culture and gender - means that its importance ought to be recognized in peace-building and global reconciliation initiatives. 'Peace through Sports' is a new frontier opened for humanity. The belated recognition of the true value of sport in promoting coexistence, however, means that peace through sports is a relatively new occurrence. Sports in modern world are helping gel nations together. Suwan and Badir two Arab players of the 22 member national Israeli football team with their two recent goals against Ireland and France achieved more goodwill gelling minds of 'people to people' than any other soothing political event in the recent past.
iranian.com |
