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Beijing Olympics and Worldwide Governance: Eyes Wide Shut?
By Kaufmann | August 11, 2008
The majority of the world’s population watched the magnificent opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. Many are sports fans, yet many wanted to witness China’s ‘coming out Party’, showcasing to all (in case some did not know) that China is a world power, and its people are capable of great things. One of the main themes in the ceremony, central to Chinese culture, was harmony (the Chinese symbol appears in the adjacent image). Generally, the Olympics can be a venue for sportsmanship and festive get together among the community of nations, though, as we know from Berlin and Munich, there can be a rather dark side as well.
The very tight control exerted by Chinese authorities on every organizational and daily life detail of life in Beijing means that nobody is dubbing these as the ‘fun Olympics’. Yet the opening ceremony did receive universal media accolades over the weekend, and pointed to the seven years of painstaking organization that went into it by the authorities.
The weekend is over, though. Back to work, and to the rest of world reality. Talk of the dazzling ceremony, which is now transitioning into the customary obsession with counting medals, ought not to hide the very serious governance challenges currently in our midst. For starters, within sports, as a telling illustration: a dozen Russian athletes have now been suspended for doping. While doping violations have afflicted athletes from so many nations, the ‘governance’ flag goes up when the problem is systemic and institutionalized: the New York Times points out that such wholesale doping indictment raises questions about corruption in Russian drug testing procedures as well as a systemic attempt by coaches or officials to violate the rules.
This brings up the tainting in recent years of professional baseball and cycling as sports due to the widespread use of performance-enhancement drugs. There are many other ongoing corruption-related challenges in sports, of course. For instance, an article in the UK’s Telegraph suggests that corruption through illegal betting can be a threat at the Olympics, in the aftermath of betting-related corruption in soccer and cricket elsewhere. We could go on about misgovernance and corruption in sports, but others have written about it, and in a blog entry not that long ago I touched on these.
So let us turn to something more important right now: the danger of ‘misgovernance flare-ups’ around the world, while the media and world leaders are enjoying the Olympics. Witness the escalating war situation between Russia and Georgia in the disputed Caucasus region of South Ossetia, and spreading to other parts of Georgia, with hundreds of innocent civilian lives claimed in a short few days through aerial and ground bombings. Obviously, more urgent and resolute international action is needed to resolve this crisis.
And just in case some leaders attending the Beijing Olympics did not notice, in Africa a coup d’Etat just took place the other day. This was in Mauritania, and while it appeared to have been bloodless (in contrast to what is happening in the Caucuses), the first-ever democratically elected President of that country has been deposed after only a year in power, and his whereabouts, safety and condition are still uncertain. A troubling reversal has taken place.
Speaking of Africa, in the international community (and media industry) we may also want to pay concerted attention right now to help towards some resolution of the acute leadership crisis in Zimbabwe, the country in the world which over the past decade has exhibited the most dramatic decline in their quality of governance. Such dramatic decline in governance, threatening the lives and 
livelihoods of millions of citizens in Zimbabwe provides poignant evidence of the extent to which governance matters for development. There also are major violations of human rights and misgovernance elsewhere, obviously: it is also critical to keep a concerted focus on the dire straits of the citizenry and refugees in Darfur, rather than turning a blind eye due to expedient political and commercial reasons.
Topics: Corruption, Voice and Human Rights | |