Games peace plan faces new hurdle

Press, 10 May 1982, Page 1

Games peace plan faces new hurdle

NZPA London The Commonwealth Games at Brisbane still have one more hurdle to overcome before they are guaranteed to be boycott-free.

African leaders who will meet in Mozambique later this month are expected to decide whether to accept the Games peace moves made in London last week. The resolution reached in London at the special meeting of the Commonwealth Games Federation has force for the Commonwealth only, a point underlined at the week-end by the head of the Organisation for African Unity’s sanctions department, Mr Solomon Gomez. African countries were still under an O.A.U. obligation to boycott sports events involving New Zealanders because of last year’s Springbok tour, he said. The O.A.U. comprises all African nations except South Africa and not just the 15 African Commonwealth countries. Dr Gomez said that resolutions passed by the London meeting “have no bearing on

the African stand whatsoever.”

He said in Addis Ababa that all African countries should abide by a resolution adopted in Nairobi last June calling for a boycott of all sports links with New Zealand. The Games federation, at its London meeting, agreed to amend the federation’s constitution to allow the banning from future Games of countries which acted against the Gleneagles agreement. A committee was set up to draft the necessary constitutional changes. The ' president of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, Dr Abraham Ordia, said in London that the resolution to which Dr Gomez had referred was “absolutely correct.”

He would be reporting the outcome of the federation's meeting to the O.A.U. meeting at Maputo later this month. However, he would not speculate on what the O.A.U. was likely to decide. Dr Ordia said that O.A.U.

members had gone to the federation’s meeting with the aim of excluding New Zealand from the Games.

“But we were told by the federation’s chairman, Sir Alexander Ross, that the consitution was defective in that it did not have any provision whatsoever for sanctions against any offending member country” he said. “It is precisely for this reason that, the committee was set up. We have redesigned the constitution.. .There are no more loopholes.” In Wellington, the deputy chairman of the New Zealand Olympic and Commonwealth Games Association, Mr Brian Bremner, said yesterday that a continuation of the boycott talk by the O.A.U. would undo all the good that had been done in London.

Mr Bremner, one of three New Zealand delegates in London, said that if there was an African boycott, the Australian organisers might have to think about reducing their multi-million dollar Games budget.