AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRICKET COUNCIL (January 7, 2003)

The President, Mr. M. Gray

Ref: The Controversial Cricket Tour of Zimbabwe

Dear Sir:

…I regret to advise that many of us, Zimbabwean cricket fans, are having to survive on wild roots and fruits from the forests, due to the famine aggravated by the policies and programs of the illegitimate Mugabe regime.

We would like to believe that cricket has nothing to do with the politics of any country, but we know only too well that for the International Cricket Council to insure the security of the players going into any country, including Zimbabwe, security arrangements have to be negotiated with the political masters of the host country who, in this instance, happen to be an illegitimate brutal regime which has been suspended from all the councils of the Commonwealth of Nations.

But for such notorious hosts to satisfy the Cricket Tour’s security arrangements, they will obviously have to rely on their henchmen in the police and in the army whose history of torture, murder and mayhem would do Pol Pot proud…How then, in good conscience, can you try to legitimize such illegitimate brutal regime by suggesting that such security arrangements, by Pol Pot-like characters, sits well with the International Cricket Board?
Cricket is supposed to be a sport for gentlemen. And gentlemen are supposed to know that doing business with nefarious characters has no place in sport.

This isn’t Cricket, is it?

We respectfully request you to search your conscience, and the conscience of cricket, and then and there you should find some good and true centuries of an absence of hypocrisy…

For we understand cricket to be incompatible with the apparent hypocrisy and the monumental insensitivity to the genocide and war crimes victims of the Pol Pot-like regime which such controversial tour would help legitimize.

If memory serves you right, you may remember that when there were illegitimate regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa –– under white rulers - you did not support cricket tours to such places; but now that the new illegitimate regime, in the same part of Africa, is led by a black rogue, you seem ready to support tours to such a place.

If you call this Cricket, we call it Racism. i.e.: you were ready to punish illegitimate regimes when the villains where white people, and yet you do not seem ready to act against an illegitimate regime when the villains are black people…

With due respect to cricket as a sport, are you cricketers so desperate and so heartless that you are now ready to sell the soul of cricket to the highest bidder?

We find the lame excuses about the loss of MONEY, if your sport does not embrace Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, to be absolutely outrageous and obnoxious. This morally bankrupt tour-for-money adventure is not unlike the oldest profession, prostitution, and your controversial decision to support such house-of-ill-repute type adventure makes for strange bedfellows indeed.

Please kindly respond to these concerns; and educate us, as a gentlemen would do, as to whether or not this is Cricket.

By: Thabo Siziba.

N.B: this open letter was published by the Zimbabwean independent newspaper, The Zimbabwe Independent, on January 17, 2003.Title of the article was “ICC excuses about loss of money lame”.