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In Praise of Refugee Athletes Competing at the Olympic Games
Providing world-class athletes dispossessed from their homes a chance to compete in the Olympic games is a gift—to them and their communities, and to the rest of us watching and cheering them on. But at the end of the day, the need for such a team speaks to our failure.
Aug 06, 2024
It was a spectacular parade of lighted boats filled with some of the best athletes in the world that sailed up the Seine to open the 2024 Olympics. Among them, second in line following the Greek team, traditionally the first to enter the Olympic stadium, was a small craft filled with 37 competitors in white uniforms, grinning and waving to the thousands of spectators. Their flag carrier was boxer Cindy Ngamba. A few days later she would win the first Olympic medal for her team.
But Ngamba, from Cameroon, did not win that bronze medal for her home country. And the flag that Ngamba, from Cameroon, and her co-flag-bearer Yahya al Ghotany, from Syria, waved proudly above their heads was not that of either their countries. Ngamba and al Ghotany are members of the Refugee Olympic Team, carrying the Olympic flag and wearing the five interlocked circles on their jackets. Their flag is raised to the notes of the Olympic hymn, not their national anthems.
The idea of a refugee team first emerged in 2016—and unfortunately not much has changed. Like before, all of the athletes on the team have been forced from their homes by some combination of war, exploding climate change, massive human rights violations, and economic crisis. This year the 37 members of the Refugee Olympic Team have something else in common: all of their home countries are facing often crippling U.S. economic sanctions.
This year the 37 members of the Refugee Olympic Team have something else in common: all of their home countries are facing often crippling U.S. economic sanctions.
The Rio Olympics in 2016 took place in the midst of the mass displacement crisis resulting from the civil war in Syria. At that time, there were 67 million people in the world forcibly displaced, a population comparable to that of France and bigger than those of Italy or South Africa. If it were a country, Refugee Nation would have been the 23rd largest population in the world.
By the time of the Tokyo games in 2021, Refugee Nation had grown to 82 million and was then the 20th largest in the world, situated just between Thailand and Germany.
And this year, as the 2024 Olympic torch was lit in Paris, the number of forcibly displaced people has soared to 107 million, and Refugee Nation has risen through the ranks to become the 15th largest population in the world—just behind Egypt.
Forced displacement has been on the rise for a very long time. And the conditions driving people from their homes—war, repression, economic and climate crises—are on the rise as well. In 2016 war was the biggest reason people were forced to leave their homes. By 2021 wars were still raging, but climate crises and especially the Covid-19 pandemic were creating refugees by the millions.
And all those crises—and the resulting escalation in forced migration—were and continue to be made significantly worse by U.S. economic sanctions. Two years before the Rio Olympics, the UN Human Rights Council expressed alarm at “the disproportionate and indiscriminate human costs of unilateral sanctions and their negative effects on the civilian population.”
In Iran, for example, the U.S. imposed extreme sanctions in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal despite recognition by the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency that Tehran was in compliance with the deal’s requirements. The sanctions’ impact on civilians was dire. According to Human Rights Watch, the sanctions “pose a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines,” something especially dangerous during the Covid-19 pandemic that was about to hit. While the Biden administration lifted some of those Trump-era sanctions, many remain in place and were significantly tightened in April 2024. Fourteen members of the Olympic Refugee Team are from Iran.
Whatever the specific conditions that forced each of them to leave their homes, U.S. policy is one of the factors that made things worse in their countries.
In Afghanistan, sanctions cause famine. In 2022, head of the International Rescue Committee and former UK foreign minister David Miliband told the U.S. Senate that the policy of cutting Afghanistan off from financial flows—aka sanctions—was “the proximate cause of this starvation crisis.” Five of the Refugee Team come from Afghanistan.
The 37 athletes brought audiences to their feet, on the banks of the Seine and on screens around the world. But the triumph and beauty of the Refugee Team, and all that these young people have accomplished despite having been forced to leave their homes, cannot hide the stark reality that mass displacement on a global scale has become the new normal. And whatever the specific conditions that forced each of them to leave their homes, U.S. policy is one of the factors that made things worse in their countries.
Providing world-class athletes dispossessed from their homes a chance to compete in the Olympic games is a gift—to them and their communities, and to the rest of us watching and cheering them on. But at the end of the day, the need for such a team speaks to our failure—to stop the normalization of forced displacement, and to reverse the conditions that create it in the first place. Including ending U.S. economic sanctions. The chance to win a medal in Paris is great—but wouldn’t it be better if these amazing athletes could instead win the right to return safely home instead?
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Stop Green Genocide in Cameroon
Fortress conservation has pushed the Baka people from the rainforests of the Congo Basin into villages bordering the national parks of southern Cameroon, while the logging that truly threatens the forest continues.
Jul 16, 2024
Clouds of red dust rise into the sky and hang in the air as the truck roars past. It's impossible to breathe as the dust gathers in the folds of villagers' clothes, settles on rooftops, and coats the forest's green leaves. The next truck goes by, and another cloud rises up in its wake. They carry massive tree trunks felled in the rainforests of the Congo Basin. The Baka people struggle to breathe every day, as logging companies from China, France, Italy, and Lebanon descend on the tropical forests and cut everything in their path.
The Baka have been pushed into villages bordering the national parks of southern Cameroon. Amid the din of passing trucks, they tell me they have been barred from their forest—they can no longer hunt for food, access their sacred sites, fish, or gather medicinal plants. Government authorities and "nature conservation" organizations say it's not the clear-cutting loggers destroying the forests. They blame the Baka—Indigenous hunter-gatherers who rely on the forests to live.
You're probably wondering how such a paradox can be tolerated. This is the heart of what's known as fortress conservation, driven by the erroneous belief that Indigenous people cannot look after their own land.
The Baka are fighting for their own survival, for their way of life, and for the forest they love. We in the West must ensure that our governments, and organizations such as WWF, finally stop supporting these atrocities.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) supports national parks, including Lobéké, Nki, and Boumba Bek parks. The organization funds heavily armed rangers who prevent the Baka from entering their forest by arresting, beating, and torturing them. The Baka are forced to live in small roadside villages—without access to their own lands. Logging companies' concessions surround the parks. And it's not hard to see that it's their activities—not the Baka—threatening the Congo Basin forest, especially as most of the timber is destined for export to industrialized countries.
The companies sometimes operate within the parks. But WWF and other major conservation NGOs look the other way. Instead, they create partnerships with the companies for "sustainable forest management." But let's be honest: For WWF, it has more to do with the money they receive from the companies than actual conservation. WWF and the companies set up "anti-poaching units," with yet more guards attacking the Baka—all while the trucks keep roaring by. The certification labels on the timber say "sustainable"—so does the companies' advertising. But, watching the trunks trundle past before me, and seeing the destruction of the forest, that is laughable. There's no such thing as sustainable destruction.
National parks are not—as the conservation industry would have us believe—rare islands of unspoiled nature that mitigate the surrounding destruction. Instead, they are an integral part of a strategy designed to maximize profit from the environment and its resources while pointing the finger of blame at local communities—the people who are least responsible for the destruction.
Michel is chief of a Baka village on the edge of Lobéké National Park. He explains: "Our grandparents used the forest at Lobéké, before WWF arrived. Since they came, we don't go there anymore. If you go there, in the park, you won't be able to go home without problems. They're not protecting anything—they just want to kick us out."
For the Baka, the loss of their forest takes all of that away. It's not just losing a place to live or access to food; it's losing their identity. So, it's not just a matter of material hardship, it's also the destruction of a people.
Baka children no longer learn about the forest plants: It's too dangerous to take them into the forest to teach them. The Baka say that for them the forest is absolutely everything. It sustains them and it provides everything that gives meaning to their lives. Without access to their forest, the Baka's future is in jeopardy.
Tragic as it may seem, the situation was much worse just a few years ago. WWF-funded guards waged a veritable war against the Baka. They harassed people, invading their homes, beating and torturing anyone they found—including the elderly who weren't quick enough to flee. Many Baka had to abandon their villages to escape. Some fled to neighboring Congo.
Thanks in large part to the work of Survival International, which catalyzed international support and investigations, the once-extreme level of violence has radically diminished. But the guards still beat Baka people if they try to enter the forest, and the severe trauma of the extreme physical violence of previous years remains. Célestin, a young Baka man in his mid-20s says: "We always think about violence. We go to sleep without having eaten, and we think about it. All the time."
The big conservation organizations are responsible for this chaos and pain. Once they've forced the Baka out of the forest, they offer "alternative livelihood projects" to draw them further away from their ancestral territory and way of life. Though they claim the projects compensate for the loss of the forest, it's just a less obvious way to go about destroying the Baka's lives and their bonds with their forest.
"They want to turn us into villagers," say the Baka. "We stay in the village all day, but we were born to be in the forest." WWF set up a mushroom-growing project in a Baka village. It provided equipment and training and built a warehouse. The Baka followed the instructions to grow and dry the mushrooms. But a year later, no one came to buy them, and WWF never returned. That's just one example among many. NGOs promise people chickens, sheep, ponds for fish farming, saying they'll have a "better" life. But for the Baka, the best life is one at peace in the forest, and the promises never materialize. "So far, we've had nothing. The people to whom these promises were made are dead now," testify the Baka.
The loss of their forest, as described by village chief Michel, leads to a disintegration of the social fabric, and loss of the foundations of the Baka identity and way of life. It is simply the destruction of them as a people: it's a green genocide. Nothing could compensate the Baka for the loss of their forest. The Baka survive by working in neighboring communities' fields, in conditions akin to slavery, paid tiny sums of money or just given alcohol. But it's dependent on the goodwill of those who "employ" them. (There is a big problem now with alcohol dependency among the Baka, not unlike the historical problems of other peoples who were dispossessed of their land, such as those in North America and Australia.)
"We are suffering. Those who make us work in the fields don't consider us human, they want to kill us. They give us so much to do, and if you refuse to work in the fields, they hit you," says Michel.
Michel, Célestin, and the rest of the Baka are fighting for their own survival, for their way of life, and for the forest they love. We in the West must ensure that our governments, and organizations such as WWF, finally stop supporting these atrocities. It's not too late to prevent the conservation industry suffocating an entire people, just as the red dust suffocates everyone in its path. Let's stop this green genocide.
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