Olympian injustice to keep enclave out of Games
BEIJING'S WINNING bid for the 2008 Olympics has generated a storm of enthusiasm in Macau, but it has also evoked bitter emotions over the enclave's continued exclusion from the Games. Many residents regard the exclusion as an injustice of Olympic proportions.
'There is new hope now,' Manuel Silverio, the president of the Macau Sports Development Board and the vice-president of the Macau Olympic Committee, said this week after Jacques Rogge was elected president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Mr Silverio attended the IOC meeting in Moscow as an adviser to Beijing's Olympic Games Bid Committee.
'It is unfair, and it makes no sense at all,' Joaquim Morais Alves, a former president of the Macau Olympic Committee, said about the IOC's 14-year-long rejection of Macau's bid for membership.
Macau applied for IOC membership in 1987, shortly after the Macau Olympic Committee was set up. The application process has been bogged down for obscure reasons, some of which appear intrinsically political.
Most in Macau blame former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch for the predicament. Mr Samaranch, a Spanish national, is believed to have put Macau's application on hold because he was worried that two trouble spots in his home country, the autonomous region of Catalonia and the British dependency of Gibraltar, could follow Macau's lead and insist on IOC membership too.
Although the IOC had traditionally accepted 'geographical areas' other than independent nations as members - such as Hong Kong, which joined in 1951 - it suddenly changed tack in 1996, when it decided only sovereign countries could be recognised as new members.
Macau's Olympic Committee countered by citing the universally recognised principle that a new law or rule should never be applied retroactively if this would have adverse consequences for a concerned person or entity.
Mr Samaranch seemed to accept that argument, because he pledged during a visit to Macau in 1997 that the SAR's application was about to be approved.
He broke his promise.
Macau enjoys the same autonomous status as Hong Kong, and it has more inhabitants than several members of the Association of National Olympic Committees. Palau, for instance, a Pacific archipelago with a population of just 20,000, was recognised by the IOC in 1999. Macau's population is about 430,000.
Besides, Macau is one of the 'most sporty' regions in the world. There are about 1,000 sports clubs, and there are international sporting events throughout the year - including women's volleyball, marathon, triathlon, wushu, squash, golf and motor sports.
Whereas Hong Kong lost its bid for the 2006 Asian Games, Macau will be hosting the 2005 East Asian Games. Thanks to that event, Macau will get a state-of-the-art aquatic centre. Macau also hopes to host some of the games of Beijing's 2008 Olympics - such as field hockey, which has become a speciality in the SAR.
The Olympic creed proclaims, quite rightly, that the most important thing is not to win but to take part. It is high time the IOC applied this maxim to Macau so the SAR's sportsmen and women will finally be able to participate in the Olympic Games - in Athens in 2004 or, at least, in Beijing in 2008.
Harald Bruning is the Post's Macau correspondent
