{"id":1066319,"date":"2022-04-25T11:59:11","date_gmt":"2022-04-25T11:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/04\/25\/can-sporting-sanctions-floor-russias-invasion\/"},"modified":"2022-04-25T11:59:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-25T11:59:11","slug":"can-sporting-sanctions-floor-russias-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/04\/25\/can-sporting-sanctions-floor-russias-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Can sporting sanctions floor Russia’s invasion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Russia
Russia President Vladimir Putin enjoys ice hockey and judo, but his country has been frozen out of international sport since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February
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Can sporting sanctions have any influence on ending Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine? BBC World Service reporter and cricket historian Mo Allie has been looking into what role sporting sanctions can play in politics, particularly how they helped to end apartheid in his homeland South Africa.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in late February, many of the world\u2019s biggest sporting organisations\u00a0moved swiftly in an attempt to isolate Russia.<\/p>\n

Both European and world football\u2019s governing bodies, Uefa and Fifa, banned Russia and its clubs from taking part in any of their competitions, with many others following suit.<\/p>\n

Those in charge of motorsport \u2013 including Formula One \u2013 athletics, tennis, rugby and many others have excluded Russian athletes, officials and teams.<\/p>\n

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Last week, the Wimbledon Championships banned the country\u2019s players in a bid to \u201climit Russia\u2019s global influence through the strongest means possible\u201d.<\/p>\n

South Africans know all about the impact such sanctions can have after different sports in the country suffered varying lengths of isolation from the 1960s through to 1991, when the end of apartheid started.<\/p>\n

\u201cGeneral sanctions, including sport, worked to bring down the apartheid regime so it makes sense to do it with Russia too,\u201d former South Africa cricket chief Dr Ali Bacher told BBC Sport Africa.<\/p>\n

In 1948, laws in South Africa segregated people based on their race and governed all aspects of life to benefit the minority-white rulers in a policy that came to be known as apartheid (Afrikaans for \u2018apartness\u2019).<\/p>\n

Sanctions \u2013 especially in the fields of sport, economics, education, arts and culture \u2013 played a decisive role in the eventual demise of apartheid and the installation of a democratic order in South Africa in 1994.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t take on the world \u2013 that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing,\u201d said Dr Bacher.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, the Russian athletes have to suffer because of their leader, but the same happened to us as South Africans. Many, including myself, didn\u2019t support apartheid but we had to suffer the effects of isolation as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dr
Dr Ali Bacher, pictured in 2003, organised rebel tours to South Africa during apartheid but led the country\u2019s unified cricket board upon its creation<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bacher, 79, played a controversial rule in South African sport, organising rebel tours of the country in the 1980s \u2013 by the likes of England, West Indies and Australia \u2013 in a bid to maintain a certain level of cricket in his homeland.<\/p>\n

Such tours of a pariah nation so isolated by its apartheid policies attracted furious headlines, but Bacher was also taking action to develop cricket in black townships at the same time.<\/p>\n

His role in creating a unified cricket board in 1991 \u2013 after contacting and building a great friendship with the head of the African National Congress\u2019 sports desk \u2013 resulted in South Africa being re-admitted to international cricket over two years before apartheid officially ended.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t only sports sanctions that played a role in bringing down apartheid,\u201d Dr Bacher added.<\/p>\n

\u201cEconomic and other sanctions also helped but the impact of sports sanctions was very important considering how popular sport is with South Africans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had the best (cricket) team in the world in 1970 and we only returned to world cricket in 1991 so for 21 years world sanctions impacted on South African cricket, no question about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, they did not stop apartheid swiftly.<\/p>\n

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  • Three decades of sporting isolation<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Introduced after the National Party\u2019s election win in 1948, apartheid laws were applied for over a decade before the affiliation of South Africa\u2019s whites-only national sports organisations to international bodies was gradually stopped.<\/p>\n

    During that period, their unfettered access to international sport \u2013 while their black compatriots were denied such opportunities \u2013 started grinding to a halt.<\/p>\n

    \"A
    A demonstration outside Lord\u2019s Cricket Ground in London as South Africa toured England in 1965<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Things began to change in the late 1950s when South Africa\u2019s exclusively-white football association was barred from the first Africa Cup of Nations, prior to being suspended from Fifa in 1961 (and expelled altogether in 1976).<\/p>\n

    When the white minority government refused to allow an England team that included Basil D\u2019Oliveira \u2013 a \u2018Cape coloured\u2019 South African who had fled apartheid \u2013 to undertake a scheduled tour in 1968, the\u00a0huge scandal\u00a0ignited South Africa\u2019s international sporting isolation.<\/p>\n

    Banned from the 1964 and 1968 Games, the whites-only National Olympic Committee was expelled from the Olympic movement in 1970, by when South Africa had been barred from a host of sports, from athletics to wrestling.<\/p>\n

    Meanwhile, the visit by Australia in 1969-70 \u2013 where the all-whites side captained by Bacher registered a famous 4-0 whitewash \u2013 was the last official tour hosted by the South African Cricket Association, which was indefinitely suspended shortly after.<\/p>\n

    In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was huge pressure around the world for South Africa to release Nelson Mandela, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 after being found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the government.<\/p>\n

    Anti-apartheid rallies took place across the globe, with a packed concert at London\u2019s Wembley Stadium in honour of the freedom fighter\u2019s 70th birthday\u00a0amplifying the issue\u00a0when broadcast to 60 countries around the world.<\/p>\n

    Given the vested interests of many countries in South Africa at the time, sport became an incredibly useful way of harming many of those either running the country or living as a supposedly-superior race or both.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe growing international calls for the release of Mandela was a universal movement that helped tremendously to isolate the apartheid regime \u2013 sport played a very important role in that,\u201d Professor Andre Odendaal, one of South Africa\u2019s leading sports historians, told BBC Sport Africa.<\/p>\n

    \"Russian
    Pictured celebrating a Russian gold medal in judo at the London 2012 Olympics, Putin champions sporting success<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    \u201cWestern interests were tied up with the economy of South Africa and countries like Britain and USA were supporting the regime against liberation movements in the 1970s and early 80s.<\/p>\n

    \u201cTo call for soft sanctions like sport were more acceptable than the big call for economic sanctions and oil supplies being cut off.<\/p>\n

    \u201cA key part of the success of the sports boycott was that it was a soft dimension of society that had a massive impact on white South Africans. They\u2019d always felt part of the colonial world \u2013 \u2018the supremacy of western civilisation in darkest Africa\u2019 as they called it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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    • Sanctions\u2019 suitability?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      During his long presidency of Russia, Vladimir Putin has pushed sport, with the country having staged the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the last football World Cup in 2018, both at vast expense, among a host of events.<\/p>\n

      The country\u2019s attempts to achieve athletics success through a\u00a0state-sponsored doping regime\u00a0also clearly indicated the importance attributed to giving Russians a sense of proud nationalism in their sporting success.<\/p>\n

      Although the Russian state bans talk of \u201cwar\u201d in Ukraine, calling it instead a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d. it cannot stop questions asked by its citizens as to why sportsmen and women, and\u00a0events,\u00a0have effectively been struck off.<\/p>\n

      \"President
      Putin\u2019s Olympic Order presented by the International Olympic Committee \u2013 the movement\u2019s highest award \u2013 has been withdrawn<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

      Professor Odendaal, whose work has helped rewrite South African sport\u2019s history to include the role played by the country\u2019s black majority, cautions that sports bodies have to be consistent in their use of sanctions.<\/p>\n

      \u201cI have sympathy with those trying to use sanctions to help save the situation of the Ukrainian people. Can you imagine the children lying in bomb shelters and basements and living in that terror of the destruction?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

      \u201cBut if you\u2019re going to use the outbreak of war as a reason to institute sanctions then you must be consistent about it.<\/p>\n

      \u201cApartheid was a clear-cut situation of moral responsibility for people in a world where human rights and the right to human dignity for everyone was realised.<\/p>\n

      \u201cBut if you start supporting this or that country depending on which war is happening, then we run the risk of no longer having the Olympic Games.<\/p>\n

      \u201cThere are many conflicts like, for example, Saudi Arabia, an ally of certain people, being in Yemen and conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria but there\u2019s no talk of introducing sanctions to help normalise those situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

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