Moscow Olympics

Press, 24 April 1980, Page 16

Moscow Olympics

Sir. — Your editorial call (April 21) for New Zealand to join the Olympic boycott only confirms the futility of such a gesture. The demise of the modern Olympics will certainly not rate a mention in any future historical analysis of communist aggression. If the political leaders of the Western world had exerted as much pressure within the United Nations where it properly belongs, as they have on their various national Olympic committees, some meaningful protest may have resulted. Instead, the General Assembly returns a massive majority vote denouncing the Soviet presence in Afghanistan then does nothing. Western nations’ attendance at the Olympics should be conditional on a like number of multi-national United

Nations peace observers being accepted into Afghanistan and not in the naive belief that a threatened boycott could achieve a complete Soviet withdrawal. For New Zealand to join the present ill-conceived boycott, as your editorial recommends, achieves nothing. — Yours, etc.,

ALLEN MORRIS. April 21, 1980.