It is disappointing, but not surprising, that certain elements in the Asian media have been trying to inject into the public discourse some outrage about South Africa’s decision on Wednesday evening to leave Sri Lanka.
Despite their shabby-genteel pretensions, cricket writers are still media people; and media people do not like to see their deity — money — spurned in favour of simpering humanist sentimentality, for instance the fear that you might be blown up in a Sri Lankan shopping centre.
Nonetheless, it was remarkable how quickly and with what silky aggression Osman Samiuddin, Cricinfo Pakistan’s editor, weighed in with the hackneyed accusation of double standards. Throwing stones while sitting on the fence, he started his gentle chastisement of the Proteas by reminding his readers of the apparent hypocrisy of Australia refusing to tour Pakistan in 2002 (because of terrorism fears) before happily playing in England in 2005, months after the July 7 bombings.
Naturally it was a fatuous argument: to even try to suggest that Pakistan’s threadbare security apparatus is on a par with Britain’s is to insist that a flotilla of leaking rowing boats constitutes a navy. But even more extraordinary was his patronising suggestion that teams from outside the subcontinent might be less keen to hang about than their Asian counterparts because they are less accustomed to regular terrorist attacks.
”They are not used to such incidents on as regular a scale and thus likely to react differently,” wrote Samiuddin, indulging in the sort of fatalistic macho posturing that Rhodesians and other citizens of failing states have used in the past to make themselves feel better about staying on in places where people no longer have any reasonable control over how they live or die. It is a tone that implies that any fault lies with those who are frightened or upset; and that the sooner they get ”used to” indiscriminate terror, the happier everyone will be.
Of course, South Africa’s crime statistics suggest that the Proteas would have been considerably safer in Colombo than they are back home; and Samiuddin doesn’t fail to point out that this country’s anarchic criminal element hasn’t yet caused a tour to be cancelled (oh, those brave, brave foreigners!).
But that’s not really the point. The point is much more simple, once one removes all the niggle and resentment of the widening schism between Anglophone and Asian cricket: if any team — black, white, Christian or Muslim — has consulted not one but two security consultants, both of which have confirmed a risk, and wants to go home, then its wishes should be respected.
Gerald Majola and his administrators have done the sensible thing, and the right thing, putting the concerns of its players (however unjustified in the eyes of Pakistani correspondents) above financial reward or some juvenile notion of national pride. They have also made the right noises in terms of their diplomatic responsibilities, urging a rescheduling of the series. This is admirable and fitting: relations between South African and Sri Lankan cricket have been excellent since South Africa’s readmission, and it was largely the island nation that greased the wheels of that seamless return to international cricket. But unfortunately this doesn’t look like going away.
No team in the past decade has been explicitly threatened by the Tamil Tigers. Indeed, the skittish Australians and West Indians were welcomed by the rebels before the 1996 World Cup, with assurances that they would be unmolested; unlike the scores of civilians incinerated in the huge blast days earlier, who apparently played for the wrong team.
But this week’s revelation of a polite but clear request by the Tamil Tiger Youth that South Africa leave the country suggests a hardening of attitudes, a new steel to the old campaign of attritional terror that has rumbled like distant thunder over the island for the past generation. If the e-mailed threat was genuine, and came from a Tamil cell with any legitimacy (not a certainty when youth wings start mouthing off), then one must accept that it would be a very bad idea to return to Sri Lanka any time in the next few months.