Fox News reports:
The International Olympic Committee confirmed its decision to ban Iraq from taking part in the Beijing Olympics because of the government’s interference with sports by disbanding the country’s National Olympic Committee, Reuters reported.
“This morning we were informed of the final decision of the International Olympic Committee to suspend the membership of the Iraqi Olympic Committee,” Hussein al-Amidi, the general secretary of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, said.
The decision is a major blow to seven Iraqi athletes who hoped to travel to Beijing this summer, AFP reported.
During Saddam Hussein’s regime, the IOC didn’t act on Uday Hussein’s interference with sports:
In the history of the world, an expanse that covers Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler and other despots both past and present, there is no shortage of absolute rulers whose human rights records compare with that of today’s designated pariah, Saddam Hussein.
There may never have been a sports official, though, as brutal as his son, Uday.
As president of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee, Uday allegedly tortures athletes for losing games. He sticks them in prison for days or months at a time. Has them beaten with iron bars. Caned on the soles of their feet. Chained to walls and left to stay in contorted positions for days. Dragged on pavement until their backs are bloody, then dunked in sewage to ensure the wounds become infected. If Uday stops by a player’s jail cell, he might urinate on his bowed, shaven head. Just to humiliate him.
This is the picture that emerges of Uday Saddam Hussein from ESPN.com interviews in the United States and England with former Iraqi national team athletes in several sports. Some of them claim they were personally tortured. All of them say they lived in fear that they would be punished at Uday’s whim. . .
The allegations in the ESPN.com report come on the heels of a formal complaint filed with the International Olympic Committee earlier this month. Indict, a London-based human rights group created in 1997 that seeks to bring criminal charges against the top leaders of the Iraqi regime, asked the IOC Ethics Commission earlier this month to suspend or expel the country from the Olympics based on violations of the IOC code of ethics. The IOC, which has no sway over a nation’s choice for its Olympic committee chief, is reviewing the request.
Didn’t act, that is, until a month after Saddam’s regime fell. Then, in May 2003, the IOC’s “ethics commission” called for the dissolution of Iraq’s national Olympic committee, the same action for which Iraq now finds itself banned from the 2008 Olympics.
Another reason to boycott them.
UPDATE (7/29): The IOC has relented.
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