Kim Jong-un, IOC deserve each other

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2018 (2981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GANGNEUNG — I thought terrorism had struck again here at the Olympics the other day.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out the North Koreans had just decided to go to the beach.

No joke: what looked to me from a distance to be a major incident — with a dozen cop cars with flashing lights stopping traffic and at least a hundred cops forming a massive perimeter — turned out just to be a few dozen North Koreans on a field trip to check out the sand at Gangneung’s famous Gyeongpo Beach.

So why do a couple dozen North Koreans get the kind of royal treatment that would make even the most self-important world leader blush? Damn good question.

Long before Sarah Murray, the Canadian head coach of the South Korea women’s hockey team, expressed “mixed feelings” about the presence of North Korean athletes at these Games (more on that in a second), the United Nations expressed some mixed feelings of their own about North Korea.

Back in 2014, the UN released the findings of a year-long investigation into what passes for human rights in North Korea. The report ran to 400 pages, documenting systematic state-sponsored murder, rape, torture, public executions and, oh yeah, the starvation of at least half a million North Koreans during the 1990s due to an insidious combination of gross incompetence and malice.

In one instance, the report cited numerous witnesses to an incident in which a North Korean official forced a woman to drown her own baby in a bucket of water because he was angered by the child’s crying.

Let that sink in for a moment. And then think about the fawning coverage you’ve seen the past few weeks about how heart-warming it is that the North Koreans have deigned to grace us with their presence here. And, also, how Kim Jong Un’s sister seems so nice.

In releasing their findings, UN panel chairman Michael Kirby — the noted Australian jurist, not the noted Canadian senator — likened the atrocities the UN had documented in North Korea to what allied troops had discovered when they kicked in the doors in places such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz.

“At the end of the Second World War so many people said ‘if only we had known, if only we had known the wrongs that were done in the countries of the hostile forces,’” Kirby said in the report.

“Well, now the international community does know… There will be no excusing failure of action because we didn’t know.”

So what have we done about it? We’ve given them a police escort. We’ve given them front-row seats to events for their officials and a weird, cult-like “cheerleading team.’ And we’ve given special exemptions for their athletes to participate at the 2018 Winter Olympics, all of it under the guise of some peace offering.

This is the stuff of Neville Chamberlain. Except that in this instance, we’re not talking about just one gullible politician with problematic views on Jews. The appeasement here goes from the highest level of the IOC to the president’s office in South Korea to all the media pushing the narrative that this is all a manifestation of some higher Olympic ideal.

And, also, higher TV ratings.

You want to know what a higher Olympic ideal looks like? It looks like the 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, that the IOC banned South Africa from participating at the Olympics over that regime’s racist apartheid policies.

That’s what higher ideals look like — treating a pariah state as a pariah.

All of which brings us back to Murray, the 29-year-old with deep hockey roots in Manitoba who spent the last four years over here building a hockey program in preparation for these Games, only to have it all ripped apart in the final weeks by a bunch of craven politicians who forced her to add a dozen North Koreans to her roster as a symbol of unity.

Murray is the daughter of former longtime NHL head coach — and the pride of Gladstone — Andy Murray. She has hockey in her DNA and was an outstanding defenceman in her own right, playing on the 2005 Manitoba under-18 team with Ste. Anne’s Jocelyn Larocque, who is over here playing for Team Canada.

The woman knows hockey, in other words, not diplomacy. And she proved it, building a competitive program out of nothing that last spring won the Division II women’s world hockey championship.

Long story, but I happened to be in Gangneung for the title game of that tournament last April. Murray’s team looked outstanding that day against an overmatched Netherlands squad and I remember at the time thinking she had built a legitimate bronze-medal contender.

(No one — not Murray, South Korea or anyone else — is going to touch the Americans or Canadians in this tournament or any other. Women’s hockey is played by Canada, the U.S. and then everyone else.)

To her everlasting credit, Murray expressed her opposition to ripping up her team in the weeks before these Olympics, using the strongest terms she could use while still keeping her job with a South Korean government that had decided — against the wishes of many of its own people — that they would take whatever measures necessary to include North Korea in these Games.

“I have mixed feelings about this combination,” Murray told The Canadian Press when the announcement was made, adding she didn’t believe it when she was first told “because it was so close to the start of the Olympics.”

So what does symbolic hockey look like? The South Koreans lost 8-0 to Switzerland in their first game. They lost 8-0 to Sweden in their second game. And they lost 4-1 to Japan in their final game Wednesday night.

In total, they were outscored 20-1 and outshot 146-28.

It’s a monument to Murray’s coaching talents that by their third game against Japan, this slapped together Korean unification team had actually become pretty competitive, trailing Japan just 2-1 deep into the third period and looking very much like a team that didn’t not belong here.

What was Murray up against here thanks to the politicians? With a hodge-podge roster forced upon her, she sent out a lineup against Japan that included just five defenceman but 15 forwards. That’s not how hockey works.

Watching that Japan-Korea game, I swear you could see the anguish in Murray’s eyes in the third period of a one-goal game as she realized how special this team could have been if only the damn politicians had gotten out of her way.

Korea’s tournament is over now, before it barely began. That’s too bad — and Murray said as much after the loss to Japan.

“It’s been an adventure, everything that has happened to our team in the last three weeks,” said Murray. “It’s been tough. We knew coming into the tournament it was going to be tough.”

Tougher than it had to be.

A total of 22 North Korea athletes will participate in these Games. Just two — pairs figure skaters Ryom Tae Ok, 19, and Kim Ju Sik, 25 — actually qualified to be here.

Everyone else, including the hockey players, got special exemptions from the IOC so everyone could feel warm and fuzzy for a couple weeks.

The biggest winner? Make no mistake, Kim Jong-un won gold here the moment the world decided to normalize his rogue state with their participation here.

It was a match made in heaven — the IOC and the North Korea regime.

They’re both corrupt. They’ll both stop at nothing to preserve their power. And they’ve both gotten rich off the hard work of unpaid labour.

Kim Jong-un and the IOC deserve each other.

It’s the rest of us — and especially the terrorized people of North Korea — who deserve better.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek