Last Saturday, two things happened at the same time. The brutally misogynist Taliban regime staged a military parade in Kabul to celebrate its five years back in power. And Ireland played Afghanistan in a cricket international in Belfast. Are these events by any chance related?
Ireland also played Afghanistan on Wednesday and Monday of last week. And on the Wednesday and Friday of the previous week. If you didn’t notice, it’s because, apart from a few brave souls, no one made a fuss of the fact that Ireland was hosting five men’s one-day internationals against a country that has driven its own women’s cricket team into exile.
The series of games Ireland concluded on Saturday was entirely voluntary. Unlike the international soccer team’s bad luck in being drawn against Israel in the Nations League, these were not competitive fixtures that Ireland would be punished for not fulfilling. Cricket Ireland decided to do this – excuse the pun – entirely off its own bat.
If anything, it’s the opposite: choosing to play Afghanistan puts Ireland at odds with more powerful nations within the sport. England, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa refuse to play Afghanistan in bilateral games. Cricket Ireland, on the other hand, not only invited its men’s team to play Ireland but it has arranged no fewer than seven matches against Afghanistan in the UAE next March.
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Nothing here is about keeping politics out of sport. Vicious gender politics is right at the centre of all sport in Afghanistan. As part of its wider system of gender apartheid, the Taliban regime that came back into power in 2021 after the disastrous US occupation banned all women from participation in all sports.
The nation’s women’s cricket team fled to Australia. The message its members say they have received from the regime is: “We will find you and if we find you, we will not let you live.” Women athletes who are still trapped in Afghanistan have buried their sports kits and destroyed their medals for fear of similar retribution.
This attack on women’s right to play sports is inextricable from the systematic erasure of women and girls from public life. Female education must go no further than primary school. Women are excluded from most jobs. They literally may be neither seen nor heard. They must be completely covered from head to toe in any public space. They must not speak in public and “must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses”.
This biologically-based discrimination is more severe even than that faced by black and “coloured” people under South Africa’s vile apartheid regime. When the South African Barbarians rugby team was due to tour Ireland in 1979, the Irish government refused to issue visas to the squad. In so doing, it was registering disapproval towards a “degrading” apartheid system that excluded non-white players.
Likewise, in 1981, when the IRFU took the extraordinary decision to send a team to South Africa, then taoiseach Charles Haughey summoned its officials and “put it directly and without qualification . . . that the tour should be cancelled”. When the IRFU pigheadedly decided to go anyway, Aer Lingus’s workers refused to carry the team or officials on any of its planes. Three star players – Tony Ward, Moss Keane and Donal Spring – refused to travel.
Yet, half a century on, there was no peep out of the Government about the decision of Cricket Ireland to host the representatives of an apartheid regime. Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee issued a statement on Saturday to say that “women and girls in Afghanistan have been subjected to an appalling campaign of discriminatory violence, abuse and exclusion”. She declined to mention that Ireland was, on that very day, helping to normalise that abuse.
There was, I think, just one letter to The Irish Times (from Orla Phillips in Dalkey, Dublin) about the cricket series. Fewer than a dozen people showed up at Stormont cricket grounds in Belfast to protest about the match, most of them clad from head to toe in burkas. Their spokeswoman, Marianne Buchanan Stewart, told the Belfast News Letter: “We cannot stand by and watch a sporting event that treats the total erasure of women from public life as business as usual.”
But there were nothing like the crowds of thousands who turned out to protest against the IRFU’s South African tour in 1981. Neither in government nor in civic society is there any serious sense of outrage that Cricket Ireland was treating gender apartheid as unfortunate but ultimately inconsequential.
One of the side effects of this apathy is that it plays into the hands of the Israeli regime. Binyamin Netanyahu’s government sells the line that Israel is “singled out” for criticism because of anti-Semitism. This is not true – if Israel is “singled out” from other murderous regimes, it is because it claims to be a European-style democracy and an adherent to international law. But the contrast between the deep public upset at Ireland having to play Israel and the general unconcern at Ireland choosing to play Afghanistan is a gift to Netanyahu. There is, however, a wider reality: systematic repression of women is much more acceptable than forms of subjugation based on race or ethnicity. And this, in turn, expresses another truth: most of the countries that practice institutionalised gender-based apartheid are too rich to be offended.
Denouncing the Taliban is easy enough, but what it has put into practice is just a more thorough version of the systems long in place in, for example, Saudi Arabia. And the Saudi regime pumps money into international sport – from effective ownership of Newcastle United to golf’s LIV tour to Aramco’s sponsorship of Formula One to the planned hosting of the 2034 Fifa World Cup. If Afghanistan were isolated because of gender apartheid, what might happen to all those Saudi billions?
What we get, then, is a toxic combination of money and misogyny. The lovely flow of oil money into sport runs along deep channels of indifference to the plight of women and girls.
