This past month I have been reminded, more than once, of a cartoon I saw in the early 1970s in Punch magazine, I think. There’s a middle-aged couple in a travel agency, trying to choose a holiday destination. The woman, exasperated by her husband’s rejection of her suggestions, declares: ‘So you won’t go to Spain because of Franco; you won’t go to Greece because of the military junta; and you won’t go to Portugal because of their fascist regime. Well, do you have anything against the Mayor of Eastbourne?’
Boycotting events in certain destinations on political grounds seems to be Ã? -la-mode this summer. It all started in May, with calls from human rights organisations for countries to pull out of the Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan, to demonstrate their concerns about the country’s human rights violations and its clampdown on dissidents. Criticism of Azerbaijan’s ruling elite intensified following a BBC Panorama documentary, Eurovision’s Dirty Secret, which claimed that the contest had been used as a tool of intimidation within the country. In the event, Armenia withdrew from participating in Eurovision 2012, over ongoing strife between themselves and the host nation.
The opening matches of the Euro 2012 football tournament in June became the next international boycott target, as British ministers stayed away due to concerns over the civil rights record of co-host Ukraine. The German and French governments also boycotted the games in Ukraine as a protest against that country’s imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Again, the BBC contributed to the debate by airing a Panorama documentary, Euro 2012: Stadiums of Hate, that showed East-European football supporters chanting racist slogans and giving Nazi salutes.
It was only a matter of time before calls to boycott international conferences, on political grounds, caught on. Controversy is currently raging over the decision of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation to hold its 2013 General Assembly in Victoria Falls, co-hosted by Zimbabwe and Zambia. Zimbabwean propagandists have re-processed this decision as an accolade for Robert Mugabe, portraying him as being officially honoured as the UNWTO’s latest international tourism ambassador, when in reality he is better known as the man who has single-handedly destroyed Zimbabwe’s international reputation with repeated human rights abuses, and devastated Zimbabwe’s tourism industry along with it. The UNWTO’s latest choice of conference destination has been the last straw for some of its members, and Canada has become the first country to withdrawal from the UN tourism body.
There appear to be two schools of thought on the issue of holding events in such countries. One: it opens them up to public scrutiny and draws the international public’s attention, via the media’s spotlight, to the political conditions prevailing there. Two: the act of holding events in these countries offers them a kind of legitimacy and can be too easily portrayed as an endorsement of their obnoxious regimes and practices.
Proponents of this second school of thought argue that high-profile events give the ruling elites too much of an opportunity to ‘big’ themselves up under the international media spotlight. However, it seems to me that a third approach may be to allow events be hosted by these countries, but to encourage some high-profile boycotts from key international players: the well-known ‘power of the empty chair’.
We might not agree with everything that our political leaders do in the UK, but it’s hard to imagine that conferences held in this country could be the object of any boycott on political grounds, unless the Mayor of Eastbourne has an appalling record on human rights, that is.
– Rob Davidson is a Senior Lecturer in Events Management at the University of Greenwich.
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