New Zealand and Australia want Zimbabwe banned as an international cricket destination. They are fed up with Mugabe’s human rights abuses in the African country. New Zealand has been most vocal on this score.
The foreign ministers of the two trans-Tasman nations want to stop sport teams going to Zimbabwe as well as Zimbabwean teams coming to their countries or any other nations.
They decided to start off with the NZ cricket team which has been scheduled to tour the African nation next month - an unsuccessful attempt. But their ultimate objective is a total ban across all sports involving Zimbabwe teams.
This stand contrasted sharply with New Zealand’s previous stand regarding sporting contacts with apartheid white South Africa, where New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon declared that the New Zealand rugby team was free to play with the team from, or even tour the racist white supremacist country. He stated that New Zealand was a democratic country, and therefore its people could do what it liked, and that included having sporting contacts with an international pariah nation like the Afrikaner racist regime.
What occurred was that in 1976, Muldoon allowed NZ national rugby team, the All Blacks to tour South Africa and play with its all whites team. Maoris weren't selected for the tour because of South Africa's apartheid policy - the white Afrikaners considered Maoris as non-whites.
Muldoon's disgraceful action was in direct contravention to the Gleneagles Agreement, which Commonwealth members signed to form a united stand against racism, particularly the white South African variety, by not having sporting contacts with such evil regimes.
Muldoon's refusal to honour the Agreement led to its first but unfortunate victim of the consequential African boycott, Canada, who hosted the Olympic Games in Montreal that same year. Any Games without the formidable black African athletes would lose the high standards of competition and associated lustre.
For a number of years New Zealand diced with the good will of the black African nations by persisting in its sporting contacts with the Apartheid regime. It showed recalcitrancy and stubornness, and a complete lack of solidarity with Commonwealth nations of Africa and Asia, in its persistence in having close sporting links with an Apartheid regime. Each time the NZ government was criticised by Commonwealth African nations for doing so, it would declare that it had no control over its sporting bodies which, under a “democracy” could go anywhere to play with whoever they wished, including and especially racists.
Admittedly, all that double standards, double talk and indeed subtle racism were under the Muldoon National Party government, whose political support came from the conservative right, where invariably some members sympathised or had no difficulties mingling with the white racists in South Africa.
Today’s New Zealand government is held by the Labour Party, under Helen Clarke, who stands on the opposite end of the human rights “cricket pitch”. She's a bloody good person and indeed has shown her "superior" compassion towards "unwanted" refugees ("superior" to, & "unwanted" by Australia).
Nevertheless, most African nations and many Asian ones would view, rightly or wrongly, New Zealand’s current strident cry to boycott sporting events with Zimbabwe, a policy now supported by Britain, as the double standards of white Anglo-Saxon nations. Undoubtedly they would ask where then were these countries, whose sporting teams played regularly with the white Supremacists?
They would undoubtedly ask that if Zimbabwe's current black racism were to be damned with a sporting boycott, then what about Zimbabwe's (or Rhodesia's) white racist past, that under the Ian Smith regime? Did New Zealand sporting teams tour the country then? Surely what's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander!
Should sports be influenced by politics, as was the Moscow Olympics, which inevitably attracted retaliation in the Los Angeles Olympic Games? Or should sporting bodies of draconian regimes like the erstwhile white Afrikaner nation and Rhodesia-Zimbabwe be allowed to have sporting contacts with the civilised world?
The answer lies in the attitude of the Commonwealth cricketing nations. You may ask "which nation", and that in fact is the unfortunate answer!
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