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Cricket Zimbabwe Style 23rd May 2004 I came to write about cricket. Instead, I had a bayonet pointed at my chest and was told I looked like a terrorist Shane Warne has enjoyed the golf courses in Zimbabwe, Matthew Hayden was taken by the fishing, and Simon Katich has raved about his game park visit. It's a shame about the cricket. The Australia Test players have just spent a week in limbo, attempting to amuse themselves as an Orwellian maelstrom of doublespeak swirled around them. When yet another deal between the duplicitous and hopelessly compromised Zimbabwe Cricket Union (ZCU) and the 15 striking white players collapsed, an increasingly exasperated Cricket Australia chief executive, James Sutherland, said from Melbourne: "We have had repeated assurances and been repeatedly disappointed. It's got to the stage where we won't believe anything until we see it." The tentacles of president Robert Mugabe's regime have now reached into the ZCU, where some board members, who are considered government stooges, regard getting rid of the white players as a victory. The sacking of captain Heath Streak for complaining to the ZCU about racism in selection and the walkout of 14 other white players in support merely sped up the aim of installing a black captain and a largely black team. It was against this backdrop that the fatalistic world champions attempted to carry on as normal in the most abnormal of circumstances, preparing to play Test cricket with no idea who their opponents would be, or whether, as it turned out, there would be any at all. South Africans laugh when asked about safety in Zimbabwe. Harare, they claim, is nowhere near as dangerous as Johannesburg, but caution is still needed, and the Australian players may not be too unhappy about the fact that they will soon be heading for home. I went for a leisurely stroll around Harare last week, and ended up looking down the barrel of a rifle. Mugabe's heavily guarded state residence is across the road from the Harare Sports Club, Zimbabwe's main Test ground. The stone-walled compound, topped with razor wire and security cameras, takes up an entire city block and has several soldiers with semi-automatic weapons pacing the public footpath outside. The soldiers took no notice as I walked past to get to the sports club, but the compound guards in dark-green uniforms on either side of large steel gates were far more interested. Realising there was no easy way around the compound, I doubled back, only to find a bayonet pointing at my chest. "What are you up to? What are you doing? You can't go there," the guard spat through clenched teeth. "Sorry," I replied. "I'm trying to get to the cricket ground." "You are up to something, you are a terrorist," the guard hissed. Wearing a T-shirt that read "Cricket - a passion not a game", a pair of blue running shorts and trainers, I didn't feel like a terrorist, and was surprised to hear that I looked like one. Two army officers emerged and began an increasingly uncomfortable 15-minute interrogation. All the while, the guard, his rifle levelled at me, hissed invective: "Don't let him go, he 's a terrorist. Lock him up . . ." With everything in my hotel-room safe, bar a room keycard and a frequent flyer card used to swipe the safe shut, the failure to produce adequate identification made them even less impressed. But little identification was better than the officers finding the compulsory press card from the Media and Information Commission, with which every foreign journalist must register, paying £335 on arrival. The foreign journalist is public enemy No 1 in Zimbabwe for having exposed the oppression and brutality of the Mugabe regime. Eventually I was forced to write my name, hotel address and Australian address on a tatty scrap of office paper and was thoroughly body-searched in some uncomfortable places. When I was finally told to go and turned to leave, the guard with the gun shouted: "Don't come back, or I will shoot you." The thought of a bullet in my back did not leave my mind as I walked back past the soldiers, who still took no notice. It is clear that Mugabe has turned Zimbabwe into a police state, even at the cricket. During the recent second Test between Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka at the Queens ground in Bulawayo, two Australian supporters were arrested and fined for displaying a harmless non-political banner that poked fun at New Zealand. As part of an ever greater attempt to prevent public anger against the government's human rights abuses, posters have been banned from cricket grounds after isolated protests during last year's World Cup. The fact that the banner displayed at the Bulawayo Test was irrelevant to Zimbabwe was of no consequence. And neither, it appears, is cricket. Malcolm Conn is chief cricket
writer of The Australian newspaper Malcolm Conn in Harare
- From The Times (UK) |