Dear Editor,
This August will go down in history as a crime against international sports and humanity. After the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) ruled to suspend Russian Paralympic Committee membership and bar the Russian sportsmen from the Paralympic Games in Rio it applied the ban for the 2018 Paralympic Games in South Korea.
No substantial proof of the accusations against the Russian team from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report has been provided. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Paralympians have never been suspected of foul play, the ban extends to the entire Russian team of 267 athletes who qualified to compete in 20 sports.
As President Putin emphasized, the decision on the disqualification of our Paralympians is lawless, immoral and inhumane. The world has witnessed how the humanistic foundations of sport and the Olympic spirit have been trampled underfoot by politicians, and how selfish interest and cowardice have triumphed over Olympic principles.
The inhumane ruling by the IPC is viewed by a majority of the world’s human rights defenders as the application of the collective responsibility principle, betraying those legal standards the modern world is resting on, and is a grave human rights abuse of disabled persons. It is a serious violation of the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, reaffirming their full and effective access to justice, inclusion in public life, and encouraging their participation to the fullest extent possible in mainstream sporting activities at all levels. The fact that the Paralympians unlike Olympic Athletes were refused the right to be rehabilitated, shows that they were discriminated against for being disabled persons.
The cynical decision was triggered by jealousy over the success of the Russian Paralympic athletes who had brilliant results during the 2012 London Olympics, and Russian Olympians during the 2016 Rio Olympics who earned 4th place despite the disqualification of one third of the team. We can only state that the principles of tolerance, pluralism, respect for human rights proclaimed by Western societies are loose or are separated by the West between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ nations.
Such words as rights abuse are too weak to describe the personal human tragedy of every Paralympic athlete. Some athletes who could not walk in childhood have become the strongest sportsmen of the world. The only disease they could not overcome was a dirty policy arranged by British and Canadian functionaries.
The Anti-Russia hysteria caused by unproven WADA report continues. The restrictions are to be applied, although it hardly could be imagined, not only to the disabled persons but also to the diseased. The International Olympic Committee initiated an additional doping test for Russian wrestler and a London Olympic Silver Medallist, Mr Besik Kudukhov, who died in 2013.
Meanwhile it is clear that the impact on Russian sport which was meant to unravel the public mood in Russia, has achieved the opposite result. Russian society has offered the strongest support to those who were disqualified in the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games. The inhabitants of a central-Russia region are raising funds for a gold medal for famous Russian Olympic medallist, pole jumper Mrs Elena Isinbayeva, who was refused participation in this year’s Olympic Games. The Russian Government has promised to arrange alternative Paralympic Games for athletes with disabilities who have been denied participation in the Rio Paralympics.
The decision to indiscriminately bar Russian athletes from competing in the Paralympic Games in Rio led to the creation of a petition which has garnered the support of more than 300,000 signatories so far (on www.change.org website), urging sports bureaucrats to review the IPC’s decision to impose collective punishment and allow clean athletes to compete. Join it if you believe that Olympic values should prevail over filthy political campaigns.
Yours faithfully,
Aleksei Illuviev
Press Attaché
Russian Embassy in Guyana