ICC slip academy squad in Mugabe’s back door
Operation Murambatsvina (restore order), the Zimbabwean campaign to bulldoze and obliterate houses, has been estimated by the UN to have left up to 700,000 people homeless. Let’s just ponder that number a second. Seven Hundred Thousand people having their homes destroyed.
The ICC is next week sending an Australian academy squad to Zimbabwe to play cricket against the national side. That would be the side that represents Zimbabwe. That’s the country where 700,000 have been made homeless by their own government. That’s the government that controls cricket.
People are marching the streets of Tshwane, pleading with the UN to intervene. Protest groups with names like the “Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition” and the “South African Women’s Institute of Migration” are screaming for the world to listen to their plight. These are desperate people in dire circumstances.
I am sick to my teeth of the arguments that sport and politics should not overlap. Whether they should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. They do overlap and they intertwine and in many countries they are inextricably linked by money and politics. And that’s that. Zimbabwe, even more so than other countries, has an umbilical cord between its sport and its despotic government.
The ICC is sucker-punching us with this academy tour, and is also tipping their hand with their intention to ease Zimbabwe cricket back into the comfy leather chairs of the ICC Gentleman’s Club. Test status will follow soon after. By picking an academy squad full of young emerging talent, they are less likely to find a concienscous objector among the teams ranks.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis and scandalous human suffering is attracting less and less media coverage as other world events dominate headlines. There is no room for Murambatsvina in between the pages of Lebanon and Paris Hilton.
And with little media pressure comes little political pressure on Mugabe to rebuild houses and restore lives and livelihoods. The ineffective UN will continue to issue damning reports that will continue to be read by nobody and Mugabe will proceed unhindered.
Which leaves organisations like the ICC with an increasingly important role to play in highlighting the plight of the Zimbabwean people. The ICC won’t ever bring Mugabe to his knees, but they could bring his picture a little closer to the front page.
And that at least, would be something.
