The tour must go ahead says Snedden

Martin Snedden

Martin Snedden is not seeking your approval, just understanding. New Zealand Cricket's chief executive knows if the issue of touring Zimbabwe was played out on the pitch of public opinion, he would be facing an innings defeat.

While he accuses politicians of "opportunism" and "selectivism", he is working within more, pardon the pun, black and white parameters.

Snedden needs you to know not why New Zealand should tour Zimbabwe, but why New Zealand must tour the troubled African state.

From his Christchurch home, Snedden points to a copy of the ICC Members' Agreement. It is a document New Zealand administrators fought long and hard to shape. It is cricket's Magna Carta.

Without it, he says, New Zealand would remain a cricketing backwater, forced to pay teams such as Australia and England financially crippling guarantees to tour. Now they are compelled to come on a rotational basis. With that comes quid pro quo and one of those pay-offs is touring countries such as Zimbabwe. Except the Government, other political parties and, by and large, the public, feel it is too heavy a cross to bear.

Snedden admits to being worried about a backlash against the sport similar to the post-1981 effect on rugby, but he reasons that there will be hardly a sport to defend if New Zealand doesn't tour.

Is the fact NZC is virtually forced to tour a pointer to the Members' Agreement being too unwieldy a document? "No. It's a really good, tight document. When people just talk about the issues of penalties, it's wrong. We've created a coherent international cricketing community and I don't believe we can just pick and choose."

When Snedden is asked if he would tour Zimbabwe now, if New Zealand wasn't contractually obliged to, he says he doesn't have the luxury of looking at it like that. He says his own view on Mugabe's regime is irrelevant. His job is to act only in the best interests of the game and New Zealand Cricket. "Parties have enjoyed making this into a political issue. It doesn't mean they don't have genuine beliefs, but there are a lot of opportunists out there, who have jumped on the bandwagon.

"Most of them have enjoyed this to gain some profile. All of them, in my view, have been highly selective on this issue in isolation, without looking at the wider issue of what actually happens in sporting contact at international level."

Snedden is adept at dealing with crises - the players' strike, the tsunami-destroyed Sri Lankan tour, not going to Kenya during the 2003 World Cup - but he clearly feels this is an issue that is being played out in the wrong forum.

"[The] issue which I find absolutely astounding is that people can isolate this and take a completely different attitude to China. How can we possibly argue we should have no sporting contact with Zimbabwe on the basis of human rights and at the same time go out of our way to become a close friend of a country that, for a much longer period than Zimbabwe, has had a terrible human rights record? A country that's actually funding Zimbabwe.

"That's an issue every political party has to face: if they're going to take a view on Zimbabwe, they have to be utterly consistent and take the same view on China and that has to become a known policy for their electioneering, so people know where they stand."

He is not finished yet. "You can actually extend that argument. What we know is that Britain and the US last year illegally invaded Iraq. No matter what they say and what spin they put on it, it's now an accepted fact that their invasion was illegal.

"They've now created a situation in Iraq that is causing massive destruction of human life and has totally torn apart their society. If you want to extend this argument, then say we'll have no sporting contact with Britain and America. That's how dangerous this argument is."

But Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff rejects that notion. "I don't put the situation in Zimbabwe with any of those things," Goff said. "Are there human rights abuses in China? Yes, of course there are. Do we regularly raise those with China? Yes, we do, through regular dialogue. Would we have supported a tour of a sporting team to China immediately after Tiananmen Square? We wouldn't.

"The situation has gone from routine abuse of human rights that we have opposed consistently in Zimbabwe, to abuse on a scale that is affecting upwards of a third of a million people, who are having their homes destroyed, some of them crushed to death in their homes.

"This is an act of hypocrisy. It is a statement by New Zealand that in the appalling circumstances that exist at the moment, at this time, we can't possibly contemplate having our sports team there as if nothing were happening. You have to draw a line in the sand."

The doyen of British sports writers, Hugh McIlvanney, wrote, before England toured Zimababwe last year, that "the leadership of the ECB [England and Wales Cricket Board] seems to be inhabiting a separate, hermetically-sealed universe". Are Snedden and the ICC, for all their rhetoric, burying their heads in the sand over Zimbabwe?

"Well, let's see who makes up the cricket world who decided on the future tours programme. You have representatives from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. South Africa, Zimbabwe, the West Indies. Then, on the other hand, you have Australia, New Zealand and England. Now anyone that lives in those countries first mentioned doesn't live in any sealed version of life. That's what New Zealanders struggle to understand: we live in a very democratic, low-key society. These people are living in the middle of unrest all the time.

"The other countries, and I'm not just talking cricket administrators, I'm talking about the countries, the attitude of the people, they've got their own issues to deal with, Zimbabwe is just one of them. They realise it's a difficult issue, but it's one that's just an issue of life so let's get on with it."

Snedden won't have a bar of "cooking" up a force majeure excuse not to travel, like tenuous security advice or a hastily stitched-together embargo.

"The advice I've consistently received from the Government is that they have no legal power to ban anyone travelling overseas to any country.

"I'm not going to be a party to anything that's shonky and stitched together just because it might be deemed to be convenient."

He is unsure what direction his dialogue with Goff and the Government will proceed in and does not think he can force them to change their minds about issuing visas for the Zimbabweans in December, despite the decision sounding the death-knell over New Zealand's hopes of hosting the 2011 World Cup.

He thinks Goff now realises he might have cooked a potential golden goose.

"I put this before him, I put it before the Government, before he made this decision. They knew what they were walking into. Now it's out there publicly what the consequences are.

"I'll abide by the decision but I don't think it is the right decision."

If New Zealand thinks its opposition is shaping the minds of the entrenched, this editorial comment from Zimbabwe's oxymoronically titled Independent should cast it in sharp relief: "Anyone who believes President Robert Mugabe will lose sleep over New Zealand not coming to Zimbabwe might as well believe he is not his son's mother or her mother's daughter."

- HERALD ON SUNDAY