Sydney Morning Herald
17 June 2010
By Daniel Brettig
AAP
Zimbabwe’s Minister for Sport, David Coltart, hopes common sense will prevail in the case of his country’s vote for the John Howard ICC candidacy.
But like everything else in the slow, precarious regeneration of his stricken nation, nothing is guaranteed.
Coltart has been in Melbourne and Canberra this week to meet with Cricket Australia and the federal government, discussing plans to resume an exchange of cricket tours with Australia while also outlining his nation’s wider progress to Foreign Affairs minister Stephen Smith.
Howard’s ascendancy to the ICC vice presidency and ultimately presidency had been openly questioned by several member nations, but Coltart said he was hopeful his nation’s cricket board would support the process by which the former prime minister had been selected.
However Coltart will not, by choice as well as by law, be active when the ICC decides on Howard at its annual conference in Singapore at the end of the month.
Instead, Zimbabwe will be represented by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF aligned Peter Chingoka and Ozias Bvute, and Coltart cannot guarantee the direction of their vote.
“I won’t be attending because I’m Minister of Sport, and it’s a cricket matter,” Coltart told AAP.
“In terms of Zimbabwe’s laws I do not have the power to give direction to Zimbabwe cricket.
“Aside from the legal situation, as someone who believes in democracy and the important role that civil society plays, I wouldn’t want to be giving directives – I think that’s part of the problem with world cricket and sport in general.
“So I’m simply playing a role of mediator and facilitator, because Chingoka and Bvute can’t at the present time travel to Australia.
“I will not be in Singapore but I will meet the Zimbabwe cricket board when I get back next week and convey to them what’s been discussed, and I hope that sense will prevail.”
Coltart travelled to New Zealand prior to Australia and will next meet with English officials as he fights for support to strengthen the tentative progress made under the joint government of Zanu-PF and the MDC (Movement For Democratic Change).
“The problem is there is still a lot of general scepticism regarding this provisional arrangement,” he said.
“There still is concern about the slow pace of reform, ongoing human rights violations and related to that the concern that if for example there is re-engagement at this stage, that may buttress Zanu-PF.
“Against that I’ve had to argue that we have to see this process in much the same way as happened in South Africa in the early 1990s. It’s a time of transition, and no-one can guarantee that it’s going to end happily.
“The entire provisional government is highly problematic, I sit on cabinet with Robert Mugabe, who I have been at loggerheads with for 30 years.
“But what takes us through is this belief that we can’t dwell in the past and that in the interests of saving lives and saving the country, we simply have to make this work.
“That involves sometimes taking a deep breath and working for the future.”