THE COLUMN: “When Samaranch left the IOC presidency it was also the end for me”, says Fekrou Kidane, the facilitator of the Olympic truce

The announcement of the diplomatic boycott by the United States and other countries of the Beijing Winter Olympics, on the grounds of human rights violations in China, coincided with a new chapter in the Olympic truce.

The resolution entitled “Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal” was adopted by consensus and co-sponsored by 173 Member States at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The call calls for the observance of the Olympic Truce from seven days before the start of the Olympic Games on February 4, 2022, until seven days after the end of the Paralympics.

While the coronavirus pandemic has dominated global concern over the past two years, there are an estimated 60 active wars and conflicts around the world at the 2021 farewell.

Although limited in duration, the Olympic truce can act as a starting point for dialogue.

On December 7, 1994, the 49th Session of the UN General Assembly unanimously approved the initiative. A year later, on November 6, 1995, the then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch appeared before that world plenary. It was the first time that the president of an organization that did not enjoy any special status at the UN had that privilege.

As IOC Director of International Relations, the Ethiopian journalist and diplomat Fekrou Kidane is credited with playing a key role in making the Olympic truce a reality, as well as facilitating Samaranch’s appearance at the United Nations, a role that was continued by his successors, Jacques Rogge and Thomas Bach.

As a result of the armed conflicts in Yugoslavia and the subsequent UN Security Council sanctions, in 1992 the IOC considered restoring the age-old tradition of the Olympic truce. On July 21 of that year, at its 99th Session, the IOC adopted the “Barcelona Declaration,” a call to all states of the world to observe a truce for the Summer Olympic Games in that city.

The support of the United Nations was needed. Kidane, an expert in “quiet diplomacy,” did his part when the Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali, successor to the Peruvian Javier Perez de Cuellar, with whom a dialogue had already begun, took over.

“His know-how opened the doors of the United Nations to us, establishing a cooperation that has crystallized in common projects of humanitarian spirit,” Samaranch wrote about Kidane in his Olympic Memoirs.

Earlier, Samaranch had given him the task of closely monitoring developments surrounding apartheid. On June 21, 1988, a small summit was organized in Lausanne with all African sports organizations in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Seoul.

Later, a new IOC Commission “Apartheid and Olympism” was created, chaired by the Senegalese judge Keba M’Baye. Exactly 30 years ago, Kidane went to South Africa together with several personalities, among them the American Olympic champion Edwin Moses, to pave the way for the readmission of that country to the Olympic Games.

There were contacts with Nelson Mandela and President Frederik de Klerk, and with sports groups that led, shortly thereafter, to the founding of a non-racist National Olympic Committee. In May 1992, Mandela traveled to Lausanne and on July 25 the African hero was one of the special guests at the opening of the Barcelona Olympic Games, where for the first time a multiracial South African team paraded.

It was in 1975, in Lausanne, where Kidane arrived to report on an IOC Session, that he had his first conversation with Samaranch, in his capacity as President of the IOC Press Commission.

The Ethiopian was trying to get help in organizing seminars for African sports journalists on Olympism. He never imagined that he would become Chief of Staff to the IOC President.

In 1978 in Algiers, Algeria, during the African Games, Kidane met Samaranch again. By then he knew that the Catalan executive was campaigning to succeed Lord Killanin. The meetings were repeated at the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980, with Samaranch as president, and in Lausanne.

Kidane was a journalist in Paris and at the same time chairman of the international anti-apartheid campaign.

It was in the early 1990s that Kidane began working for the IOC after serving as a consultant. He later became the director of the Office of the President and the Department of International Cooperation. As a former international civil servant of the United Nations he developed several projects in favor of the Olympic movement. The IOC was able to sign Memoranda of Understanding with several UN agencies.

“I am very proud and thank President Samaranch who gave me carte blanche,” Kidane tells Around The Rings after learning of the approval of the Olympic truce for the Beijing 2022 Games.

At 85 years old and in his apartment in Paris, he does not cease in his intellectual activity. We met him in that same city during the Centennial Olympic Congress in June 1994, just as he was taking up his IOC duties for the first time.

Kidane thus alluded to the support that Samaranch always gave him in his initiatives in the fight against apartheid in sport, first, and in implementing the project at the UN with commissions in favor of women and sport, sport and the environment. He also launched the first project in favor of refugees around the world.

In New York, Kidane addressed the UN General Assembly to obtain the approval of the two resolutions of the member states, one declaring 1994 as the IOC Centennial Year and the second in favor of the Olympic Truce.

“In fact it is the resolution that with some modifications is being implemented today. All this was possible because President Samaranch had confidence in me,” Kidane says.

In February 1994, in the middle of the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, he was part of Samaranch’s small entourage on a surprise and dangerous trip to Sarajevo, which had hosted an Olympic Games 10 years earlier. They brought the encouragement of the Olympians and more than 1,500 kilograms of food in donations and a commitment to restore the destroyed 1984 sports facilities. They came to the front line with bulletproof vests and blue helmets.

In his historical reflection starting from when Pierre de Coubertin convened the 1894 Congress in Paris, the two world wars that interrupted the Olympic Games, the “hot and cold” wars with their saga of armed conflicts and politically motivated boycotts, Kidane recalled Samaranch’s meeting with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, at a time when the Security Council decided to include sport in the framework of the sanctions against Yugoslavia.

It was then that the IOC convinced the UN about the participation of athletes in the Olympic Games under the flag of the five rings.

“I had to campaign in New York contacting every member of the Security Council delegations to get approval,” Kidane reveals.

“The famous title of the resolution, “Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal,” is a symbol in favor of peace and is non-binding.

“The IOC was delighted when the UN Millennium Summit of Heads of State and Government in September 2000 included a paragraph on sport and the Olympic ideal in the Final Declaration.

“It was the last time I walked the corridors of the United Nations in New York on behalf of the IOC.”

“When Samaranch left the IOC Presidency it was also the end for me. Freedom of action without Samaranch, the friend of Africa, was impossible,” Kidane concludes.

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