Why my sport is now in the line of fire
The Times, 4th March 2009
The Lahore terrorists targeted cricket because they see it as a symbol of Western modernity
by Ed Smith
There is nothing new in the realisation that sport can be hit by stray bullets from the terrorist scattergun. Kabir Ali, the England fast bowler, was staying at the Taj hotel in Mumbai when it suffered the terrible terrorist siege last autumn – only chance led him out of harm’s way on the evening of the attacks.
At first glance, the Islamic extremist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team yesterday, in which their bus driver was killed and several Test players injured, might look like a reprise of Mumbai.
But the target in Mumbai was the Taj hotel – that international cricket uses it as its Indian home was incidental. Lahore was an attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team because it is a cricket team. The terrorists have their guns pointing specifically at us, the sporting community.
This is a watershed, then, of the worst possible kind. It is often said that sport is a metaphor for life, a mirror held up to the world. After Lahore, the reflection has rarely looked darker or more uncertain.
For more than two decades cricket has been a source of deep national pride for people all over South Asia. Asian cricket has been in the ascendancy, the world’s new epicentre of power and popularity. Pakistan and Sri Lanka have won the World Cup, and both teams, as emblems of unity and achievement, have given their troubled countries deep joy and pride. How quickly a team can turn from a symbol of unity, proof of the ties that bind, to a helpless target in a terrorist war.
Attacking a national sports team makes the atrocity all the more gruesomely eye-catching. Being gruesomely eye-catching is terrorism’s mission statement. But why cricket, and why the Sri Lankans? Cricket fulfils two important criteria for the Islamic extremists – it is high profile and, in their eyes, dangerously decadent.
In the terrorist mindset, the effete and Western activity of cricket distracts good Muslims from what they should be doing: praying and executing jihad. In the terrorist imagination, cricket, loved by millions of ordinary Pakistanis, is an emblem of evil Western modernity. An innocent pastime becomes a symbol of hatred.
Poor Sri Lanka. They were only touring Pakistan as a replacement for India – the wrong cricket team in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why would Islamists target Sri Lanka? Admittedly, as a coalition of Buddhists, Hindus and Christians, they are a non-Muslim team. But they are hardly as obvious as a target as the mostly Hindu Indians or the colonial English.
You have to turn back to the Munich in 1972, when 11 Israeli Olympians were murdered, to find the last time that sport found itself as the focal point of terrorism. But that atrocity was specifically levelled against Israel – the athletes were pawns in a political game, not targets because they were sportsmen. In Lahore, it is cricket itself – and other Western games like it – that are under attack.
After Mumbai, I hoped, like many others who believe that sport can elevate human character, that England would resume their tour of India. They did, and deserve great credit for it. Now, what right-minded person would recommend playing cricket in Pakistan anytime soon?
I wouldn’t. Is this a double standard, a prejudice against the “basket case” state of Pakistan? This uncomfortable position is made all the worse because the cricket-loving strands of Pakistan society are exactly those the West needs if Pakistan is not to regress further towards becoming a terrorist state.
But cricketers have been shot at and their bus attacked, as if by a special forces unit. It is all too understandable to conclude: “We’re never coming back to Pakistan, not ever,” the line articulated by the former England player Dominic Cork, in Lahore yesterday as a commentator. But surely it is better to leave open the hope that Pakistan one day will come to its senses.
Cricket brings Pakistan a huge amount of national self-esteem. That is another element of the tragedy in Lahore. Without the hope of being able to host international matches, Pakistan will only become more, not less, sympathetic to terrorism.
So cricket now has several awkward distinctions to make – between being in danger and being a target, between India and Pakistan, between bravery and recklessness. If international cricket is to survive in South Asia, the ICC will have to balance competing voices more skilfully than it has in the past.
For sportsmen, meanwhile, an uncomfortable truth has been brought home in the most grotesque manner. When the target of terrorism is not just a government or a state, but a way of life and a set of values, then no one is safe, no matter how innocent their activity might seem.
There was a time when the British hoped to “civilise” their Empire with the character-building game of cricket, with its code of ethics and ennobling spirit. Now, with Islamic extremists aiming for their own kind of Reformation, where better to start than with murderous attacks on icons of westernisation?
Cricket, once again, has become much more than just a game, and in the worst possible way.