In the Netherlands, discussions on this matter always refer to the fruitless appeal to boycott the World Cup in dictatorial Argentina (1978), which did not prevent a single country from taking part. Actions against the persecution of dissidents during the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics were also strictly speaking a failure, even though the USA had declared their own geopolitical boycott on the Soviet Union because of the invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, the Soviet Union retaliated with a boycott of their own. Still, these two international protest campaigns did succeed in putting human rights issues in sports on the agenda.
Fraternisation
Traditionally, sports organisations like the FIFA and IOC have claimed that sport has nothing to do with politics. In fact, they’ve argued that sports facilitate transnational fraternisation precisely because it keeps well away from politics. However, this argument is much harder to sustain once protest is no longer centred on competition between superpowers (as during the Cold War), but instead puts the finger on the sore spot of human rights violations and other negative consequences of large-scale sports events. In such cases, international indignation certainly has an impact, as history shows.
Until the 1960s, critics argued that protest via sports against the Apartheid regime in South Africa for example was pointless, but when such a boycott took place nevertheless, it turned out to play a crucial symbolic role because sports – as opposed to economic measures – generated a lot more visibility through worldwide media attention.
Protest is most effective when a country is still a candidate host for a sports event. For example, Human Rights Watch successfully campaigned against the Chinese candidacy for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They argued that a country which so violently persecuted its own citizens as the Chinese had done at the Tiananmen Square protests did not deserve the reward of hosting a grand sports event. Since then, human rights organisations have used sports events to denounce all kinds of violations, such as the forced eviction of 70,000 people for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Anti-gay propaganda law
Since the end of the Cold War, nation states have refrained from using sports boycotts as a blunt diplomatic weapon. But sports remain a political instrument. Unlike the Netherlands, some countries were willing to stage a symbolic protest against the Russian anti-gay propaganda law around the Sochi Olympics (2014). Furthermore, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International no longer advocate complete boycotts either, but instead work together with the IOC and FIFA in the hope that this might help them to more effectively promote human rights. And it’s working.
In 2017, the FIFA launched an independent human rights advisory group. The IOC has included a human rights clause in the contracts of future host cities. This may be little more than a symbolic action so far, but it’s nevertheless directly linked with the persistent calls to boycott. On a smaller scale, the International Ice Hockey Federation was forced to bow to transnational protest against the Ice Hockey World Championship in Belarus and Latvia in January after sponsors also turned their backs on Belarus as co-organiser.
Concessions
From a different angle, citizen protests against the financial costs, social impact, and ecological consequences of the Olympic Games are also forcing the IOC to make policy changes and concessions. Such protests have always been around, like Saar Boerlage’s successful protest against Amsterdam’s bid for the 1992 Olympics for example, but their incidence has increased dramatically in recent years. After activists successfully blocked the candidacies of Boston, Budapest, and Hamburg for the 2024 Summer Olympics, the IOC was forced to simultaneously assign locations for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics, an unprecedented turn of events.
History shows that international sports organisations tend to only act under pressure and out of fear of negative publicity and a lack of willing host countries. Even before The Guardian announced the death of at least 6750 South Asian migrant workers last week, the Qatar World Cup was surrounded by scandals and protests. So far, however, this has not prevented football federations, governments, and sponsors from following the FIFA and their financial interests. If this doesn’t change, it is by no means unthinkable that a new World Cup will be held in Qatar or Saudi-Arabia. This doesn’t just mean that athletes are facing a moral dilemma; it is a matter that concerns us all. Human rights violations in far-away Qatar are only possible because of our money, our TV ratings, and most of all, our lack of criticism.
Paul Reef is a PhD student in Sport History at Radboud University. This article previously appeared in de Volkskrant and on Voxweb. Photography: The Al Janoub stadium in Qatar under construction. Source: Matt Kieffer (via Flickr).