Boycott by Africans?

Press, 14 June 1984, Page 40

Boycott by Africans?

NZPA-AP United Nations New York

African sports leaders met in a special session of the United Nations yesterday, to discuss the role of South Africa in international sports. amid speculation that African nations were contemplating an Olympic boycott.

The officials, from Senegal, Nigeria, Togo, Ethiopia and various African sports bodies, took up the subject in private meetings and a public session sponsored by the U.N. Special Committee Against Apartheid, which has waged a long campaign against athletic competition with segregationist South Africa. South Africa has been barred from the Olympics for years because of apartheid. But the South African runner, Zola Budd, is being allowed to participate in the Los Angeles Olympics because she recently was granted British citizenship, sparking controversy and talk of a possible African boycott.

The admission of Budd to the Games is "a cause for concern." said Major General Joseph N. Garba of Nigeria, chairman of the committee during the public session. "The struggle must continue."

He said he would discuss strategy on how to deal with such developments with the African sports leaders, and said: "The idea of a boycott exists." But ’ Sam Ramsamy. chairman of the South African Non-Racial Olympicc Committee, said that in private consultations between the sports officials, "they did not say they would boycott and they did not say ’ they would not boycott. The idea did not come up." Mr Ramsamy termed Budd an “agent of apartheid" when he asserted that South African manouevred to infiltrate the Olympic games under “flags of convenience.” Chief Abraham Ordia. the former president of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, said the Budd

case was a pointer to things to come. He said it was difficult to reconcile the activities of the British Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher, who received the South African premier in London last week, with U N and Commonwealth declarations. Amadou Lamine Ba of Senegal, the secretary-gen-eral of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, said the high points in the campaign against apartheid in sport were the suspension of South Africa on the eve of the 1964 Olympics and its subsequent expulsion from the International Olympic Committee in 1970.

Ba, also secretary-general of the Association of National Olympic Committees and the Association of African Sports Confederations called for a strategy of isolating South Africa, rather than Africa, from the international sports scene. But he warned against overusing the boycott as a political tactic, saying it risked being taken as an act of provocation.