Olympics go for change!!

Vladimir Zworykin after inventing television had said, “I didn’t even dream it would be so good. But I would never let my children come close to the thing”. Though these words were intended to mean something else, however, they do speak the emotions of refugees who will be participating in upcoming Olympics.

While the world organisations are lending helping hands to refugees, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will be providing some refugees a chance to participate in the upcoming 2016 Games. “I think we are all touched and moved by the magnitude of the current worldwide refugee crisis. The Olympic Games are the time when the values of tolerance, solidarity and peace are brought to life. This is the time when the international community comes together for peaceful competition,” IOC President Thomas Bachsaid.This plan was first announced last year the IOC in United Nations General Assembly.

This time the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro has drifted from its age old tradition of torch relay of athletes marching in under the flags of the nations they're representing. For the first time there will be a new team that will have no flag to call its own and no country to call their own – Refugee Olympic Athletes (ROA).

The torch relay for the Olympic Games, that will be held in August, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro will also have a stop at a refugee camp in the Greek capital, Athens, where a refugee will carry the torch, the IOC announced.

The IOC has earlier this yearpublicilyidentified three refugee athletes. They are: RahelehAsemani (Iran) – Taekwondo (proposed by the Belgian NOC (National Olympic committee)); MisengaPopole (Democratic Republic of the Congo) – Judo (proposed by the Brazilian NOC); Yusra Mardini (Syria) – Swimming (proposed by the German NOC). Recently a press conference in Berlin was held wherein one of the atheletes – Yusra Mardini recounted her treacherous journey and how she got selected by\ the Olympics committee.

Like many others Syrians, Yusra Mardini and several members of her family travelled across Lebanon and Turkey, and then endured a potentially life-threatening passage to the Greek Island of Lesbos before beginning their travels across numerous European borders before arriving at the German capital.

Soon after arriving in Germany, Yusra was introduced to Wasserfreunde Spandau 04, a swimming club based near her refugee centre. She also mentioned her days of training as a swimmer. “The war was hard; sometimes we couldn’t train because of the war. Or sometimes you had training but there was a bomb in the swimming pool,” she said.

Bach says, "Having no national team to belong to, having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played, these refugee athletes will be welcomed to the Olympic Games with the Olympic flag and with the Olympic Anthem. They will have a home together with all the other 11,000 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees in the Olympic village."

This new team, ROA, as the committee say “will be treated at the Olympic Games like all other teams”. “By welcoming the team of Refugee Olympic Athletes to the Olympic Games Rio 2016, we want to send a message of hope for all refugees in our world,” Bach said. 

“In the Olympic Village we see tolerance and solidarity in their purest form. Athletes from all 206 National Olympic Committees live together in harmony and without any kind of discrimination,” he said while adding “We want to give the refugees the opportunity to mix with each other. Here you saw refugees from Syria, from Mali, from Sierra Leone, from Iran, from Iraq, all playing together with us and really showing a small Olympic community here in this camp”.

The team will get an entourage, including Chef de Mission, coaches and technical officials, by the IOC to meet all the required technical needs. The uniforms will also be provided by the IOC.

To what drove them to this step, Bach recollected his visit to the refugee camp in Athenswhere he played soccer with a group of young men, and met potential candidates who could compete for the first time as refugee athletes at the Rio Games.

“At present none of these athletes would have the chance to participate in the Olympic Games even if qualified from the sports point of view because, with their refugee status, they are left without a home country and National Olympic Committee to represent.

The ROA team is expected to number between 5-10 athletes. The full list of the participating athletes will be announced by the IOC Executive Board in June.

Bach had also announced that the Hellenic Olympic Committee  would receive an additional sum for the regeneration of the Moria Football Stadium on Lesbos (it is a prime landing spot for those fleeing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan) island for use by the thousands of refugees there.

At a time when the lakhs of people from Syria are struggling to enter their new phase of life while their hearts are weeping for their old homes, this news definitely needs a thumbs up and salute to the Olympic Committee.Jacques Rogge, IOC's honorary president, who is also the UN's Special Envoy for Youth Refugees and Sport, rightly says "Sport can heal many wounds. Sport can bring them hope; can help to forge their ideas and to integrate in society.”

Are the refugees truly at fault??

The morning of March 22 began like any other morning when sudden explosions tore through the Brussels subwaysystem and the departures hall of the city’s airport in an attack claimed by ISIS. With these blasts the hope and future of thousands of stranded Muslim refugees also become bleak.

While the world was rocked to the core, a

21-year-old refugee from Damascus had a different reaction. Sitting in his tent in the centre of the camp his face became all tensed when he saw the newson the screen of his Sony Ericsson mobile phone. He started sending messages about it to his friends. “God knows what will happen tomorrow,” he typed in one text, even as another took shape in his head: “For us it will get worse.”

Some months back when the same kind of attack was seen by the France citizens, while the world mourned the attacks,the consequences were faced by the innocent refugees.After a group of terrorists struck in Paris on November 13, leaving 130 people dead, it only took a few days for the backlash to reach the asylum seekers on Greece’s northern border. Before the Paris attacks, about 5,000 a day were crossing that frontier into Macedonia on their way to Western Europe. These numbers began to shrink after the attack as that pathway began to close.

From the eyes of these refugees, who with reason see themselves as victims of terror too, this reaction was perverse as many of them had to leave the comfort of their homes because of the same terrorist group now targeting European capitals. Yet those refugees have found themselves punished for the atrocities that ISIS committed in Europe.

The punishment often takes the form of new fences and increased border guards, out of concerns over security and fears that a terrorist might slip in among the migrants. For example, after the Brussels attack the immediate response of the Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo was - Poland cannot take part in the EU’s migrant relocation scheme. “Twenty eight EU countries agreed to solve the issue through relocation. But I will say it very clearly: I do not see it possible to allow migrants in Poland at the moment,” Szydlo told the Superstacja TV broadcaster.

She even went on criticising German chancellor Angela Merkel for having “invited migrants to Europe.” “This carefree attitude led to the problems that we have today,” she said by adding “We cannot agree that thousands of migrants, who come to improve their lives, flow into Europe. There are also terrorists among them.”

All these statements go against the prescribed International laws on refugees. Under Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention the countries have an obligation that they cannot return a refugee to a country of territory where h/she would be at risk of persecution. It clearly states, “No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

Besides the law the fact that several political observers and both Paris and Brussel’s citizens have pointed out is that there was clear lax in security in both the cases. In the case of Paris attack, The Washington Postreported “Poor information sharing among intelligence agencies, a threadbare system for tracking suspects across open borders and an unmanageable long list of home-grown extremists to monitor all gave the Paris plotters an opening to carry out the deadliest attack on French soil in more than half a century.” Similarly in Brussel’s attack, Time had said “Even as Belgians absorb From Tuesday’s bloodbath, there is a clear and unsettling sense that intelligence and security services have been caught badly short in confronting the lethal dangers closing in their small country.”

However, as the psychologists sayduring grave situations all senses of what is right and factual and what is wrong and impractical go obscure. Hence, one can say that these responses are very much natural. After the attacks in Brussels, as after those in Paris, the Europeans were bound to face the temptation to put reasoning aside and conflate the foreign victims of terror with its homegrown perpetrators. Now even in Greece, who figured in the list of countries welcoming migrants from the Muslim world, some are expecting a turn toward religious and racial profiling after the bombings in Brussels. “Given the religion of the overwhelming majority of those coming or attempting to come to Europe, many will hasten to connect Islamist terrorism with the immigration issue,” the liberal Greek newspaper Kathimerini said in an editorial.

“It created a domino effect,” says Emilias Dounias, the chief of logistics at the Idomeni camp for the international charity Doctors Without Borders. After the Paris attacks, they closed the border for all nationalities except Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who were trying to travel north from Greece to claim asylum in Western Europe. “They blocked Moroccans, Libyans, African people,” he says. “It was a wave.” And in the months that followed, this wave of border closures created the squalid camp at Idomeni, as thousands of migrants were bottlenecked in northern Greece.

Hence, for these refugees each attack is going to cost their future. As every time an attack happens the future is again and again going to be thrown into question.