Columnist Dean Juipe: Saddam wasn’t a good sport

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, April 23, 2003 | 9:57 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

For all the attention directed toward Saddam Hussein, Iraq and its people in the past decade, it appears as if more than one international organization turned a blind eye toward the country's athletic hierarchy and a number of its revolting practices.

Sports Illustrated addressed the treatment and decline of Iraqi athletes in its March 24 edition and a report this week by Fox News on a tangent issue only adds to the disgrace.

Hussein and his eldest son, Uday, can take the blame for terrorizing their athletes and people, yet the International Olympic Committee and, to a lesser extent, the United Nations, can share in the ignominy. The latter two weren't shielded from reality; they chose to look the other way in the face of striking evidence of human suffering and degradation.

Fox News is reporting that a U.N.-sponsored program known as Food for Oil was used by Saddam not to consistently direct goods to Iraq's impoverished people, as was stipulated in a trade agreement, but to add money to a fund that would eventually cover the costs of building an Olympic stadium in Baghdad. At the present time, some $20 million is sitting in that stadium fund and another $2 million-$5 million rests in an ancillary account that would provide a few trinkets for the facility should it ever get off the drawing board.

Of course the stadium is not going to be built, not after what has happened in Iraq this year, but that's beside the point. People were starving while Saddam funneled money from a valid relief program into a needless stadium, and it's hard to believe that someone affiliated with the U.N. failed to catch on.

But that's nothing compared to the blemish on the already tarnished reputation of the International Olympic Committee, which has, to date, ignored pleas calling for reform as well as disregarded firsthand evidence of civil wrongdoing in the treatment of Iraqi athletes.

While the IOC -- the same IOC that has inconsistent penalties for drug violations and has been known to assign irreputable judges to boxing and figure skating events -- has received sufficient notice of heinous crimes related to Iraqi athletes, the best it has been able to do is table the item with its Ethics Committee as it did in February.

Preposterous and sickening as it is, at least one former Iraqi athlete says he can provide a list of 52 Iraqi athletes who are missing (and presumed dead) as a direct result of their failures on the playing field. Apparently in Iraq, with Uday Hussein as its top Olympic officer, if an athlete didn't win it was in his best interest not to come back to his home country.

Among the specific cases cited in the SI story was one of an Iraqi boxer who competed in a Gulf States tournament and failed to earn a gold medal. Upon his return to Iraq, Uday slugged the defenseless fighter, prodded him with an electrified stick, sliced him with a razor and then turned him over to henchmen who, presumably, finished the job and killed the poor guy.

"The Butcher Boy," is how Iraq's Olympic representative is known among his constituents. That he tortured Iraqi athletes who lost otherwise meaningless events and that he kept a 30-cell prison in the basement of the country's Olympic building should have prompted a complete IOC-led investigation, yet no such inquiry was ever launched.

He also facilitated his country's Olympic decline, which, based on numbers alone, should have turned heads in the IOC offices.

Iraq sent 46 athletes to the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, yet only four Iraqis made the trip to Sydney for the 2000 Games and it's easy to see why: The risk factor from the athletes' perspective was otherworldly. If you didn't win, there was a good chance you wouldn't breathe.

The IOC's lack of initiative has been pathetic and its failure to respond to the athletic crisis that enveloped Iraq for almost two decades is a shameful commentary on its elitist, head-in-the-sand leadership.

Yes, the IOC is merely a sports agency, yet here was a chance to excel on a humanitarian level and it did anything but.