A dangerous games? A muted start to the Olympics

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. During the period known as the Troubles, thousands of people were killed in a sectarian struggle for the soul of Northern Ireland. For many, justice was never served. We ask why Britain's government is now putting a lid on any future prosecutions. And as surreal as it sounds, as trains arrived full of human cargo bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp, an orchestra played on the platform. Our obituary's editor recounts the haunted life of an accordionist who cried as she played. But first, Eight years ago, thousands of Japanese people celebrated as Tokyo won the right to host the Olympic Games. But today, as Tokyo 2020 kicks off after a year's delay, the mood is decidedly different. The city is under a state of emergency because of a surge in coronavirus cases which hit a six month high yesterday. Just 23% of the population has been fully vaccinated to try to prevent the spread of COVID 19. Nearly all the events will be held without fans, foreign or domestic. But even that might not be enough. Nakamura Hidemasa, a senior Tokyo 2020 Games official, said yesterday that there is no one place that has no virus cases and that some cases will emerge. They already have more than 90 athletes and officials have Tested positive so far. And the overall costs of the Games won't just be measured in cases. Plenty of cash and even the country's credibility are on the line.

The mood in the run up to these Olympic Games has been pretty somber. There's very little celebration, there's very little fanfare. Most people in Tokyo would like to see this end as soon as possible and hopefully without it becoming a big COVID 19 super spreader event.

Noah Snyder is the Economist's Tokyo bureau chief.

There have been scattered protests.

No Olympics Tokyo. No Olympics Soccer, no Olympics anywhere. No Olympics anywhere.

People chanting for the Olympics to be cancelled. Of course they will not. And the planes flying overhead today, drawing Olympic rings in the sky are an indication of course, that these Games will go on.

But there's been controversy, not just about the holding of the Games itself, exactly.

I mean, every Olympics has its share of controversies, but these Olympics seem to have more than most. There are the eternal concerns about doping by athletes, as underlined by the fact that the Russian team will not be participating because of its doping in the Sochi Olympics in 2014. There have been controversies and debates over whether trans athletes should in fact be allowed to participate. There's been worries about the weather here in Tokyo. It's an especially hot summer and one athlete, an archer, actually fainted in a competition earlier today. And finally, there have been a string of resignations of pretty senior folks associated with the Games for saying some pretty terrible things. The latest is the creative director of the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony was forced to resign after an old video resurfaced of him making holocaust jokes.

And how about the provisions for trying to stop it becoming this super spreader event you mentioned? What's it like for the athletes?

For the athletes it's going to be a very different Olympics from ones in the past. Obviously their lives in the Olympic Village will be pretty circumscribed. There's a 70 page playbook that the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, has issue. They have to present negative test results, in fact two negative test results before leaving for Japan and take another COVID 19 test upon arrival. They're going to be tested daily in the village and positive tests will lead to disqualification. As we've already seen in several cases. Masks are going to be mandatory around the Olympic Village except for when they're sleeping or eating or competing. They'll have to wear them. Even if they make it to the podium to receive medals. Athletes are going to be pretty constrained as well to basically their accommodations and the venues where they're competing and you.

Say there's been a protest mood about it. What's the general reaction of the Japanese public to the fact that this is going ahead?

In polls leading up to the Games, we've seen as much as 80% of the Japanese population expressing opposition to going forward with the Games this year. Many fume that the interests of the sponsors and the TV networks and the IOC seem to be more important than those of the Japanese people. And I met one software engineer who was at a protest the other week when the Olympic torch showed up in Tokyo. As he put it, the fact that the Games have moved forward despite this public opinion shows that they're not for the people, but for the people to whom the money flows.

But what about that argument? Is there an element here that some people are making money out of what other people find to be a danger?

Well, the Olympics are obviously a lucrative enterprise, and for the international organizers, for the ioc, most of their returns come through broadcasting rights. Japanese organizers had hoped the Games would be worth it for the country as well, but that may have been wishful thinking. Economists have long argued that the Games leave wasteful infrastructure, onerous debt maintenance obligations in place of the sort of consumption and tourism and prestige that host cities hope to get. Hosting the Olympics is massively expensive. There was a paper by a group of researchers at Oxford University published last year that estimate that every Olympics since 1960 has overspent by an average of 172% in real terms. Now, the IOC has disputed their findings, but the Tokyo Games, though, seem to support their argument. The price tag initially was around $7.5 billion back in 2013. That's risen now to around at least $15 billion, including a few billion extra in measures to Covid proof the Olympics. And Japan's audit board reckons that the true cost may in fact be as much as around $28 billion.

But the argument on this has always been that the host city experiences benefits long after the Olympics that kind of offset those costs.

Yes, that's always the hope, and Japan is no exception. The Japanese government really saw these Games as a chance to kind of lend credence to the notion that Japan is kind of back on the world stage. They hope that the Games would help the country kind of snap out of the sense of gloom that had really taken hold after decades of economic stagnation and demographic decline and devastating natural disasters. They were looking for these Games to inject some hope and to bring Japan back to the forefront of the world's attention in a positive way. And they hoped that would in turn lead to hordes of tourists showing up in Tokyo and discovering the wonders of the rest of Japan. Now, however, there's a real fear that the controversy around holding the Games during this pandemic will have kind of the opposite effect. And it might instead reinforce the sense of decline amongst the Japanese public and make them more wary of the outside world. And for the Olympics as a movement, for the Olympics as an event, there's a real risk as well. The number of cities bidding to host the Games has dwindled in recent years, and Tokyo's experience will probably only set off more alarm bells. This week, the IOC awarded the 2032 Games to the Australian city of Brisbane. Without much competition for the honor, the Olympics risk becoming a race no city wants to run.

Thanks very much for your time, Noah.

Thank you for having me.

This week on the Economist asks our sister interview show, four time Olympic champion sprinter Michael Johnson talks about why he handed back his gold medal, why he thinks doping will never be eradicated, and why the home turf competitors at this games will be at a disadvantage.

The athletes that will be most effective will be the Japanese athletes who were looking forward to a home Olympics. And a lot of that benefit that you get from a home Olympics starts, you know, while you're training. Every day you're reminded of the Games because it's going to, it's coming to your country, it's coming to your city. And there's this buzz. They've already been somewhat robbed of that. And then of course, yeah, for me, you know, walking into a stadium in Atlanta with predominantly US crowd supporting me, that was a huge buzz that those athletes will not.

The three decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, resulted in more than three and a half thousand killings, many of which were never punished. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought that dark period to an end.

Today is about the promise of a bright future.

A day when we hope a line.

Can be drawn under the bloody past.

We must all seize the opportunity.

Since then, fugitives from justice have had little reason to fear that their crimes would catch up with them.

I miss Mary every day. I think about her every day. I would say I think about her thousands of times during the day for Split seconds.

In 1984, Ann Travers lost her sister Mary, who was shot by Irish Republican army gunmen as she left Mass.

As I ran out of the house, I could see my parents and Mary and a small kind of group of people gathering. And when I reached them, I could see Mary lying on top of my mum and my mum sort of crying. What about my husband?

The IRA targeted her family because her father was a Catholic magistrate who upheld British law. Unlike Mary, he survived the attack. Anne has over the years accepted that she may never see justice done. Now, though, her hopes are fading altogether. On July 14, the British government announced what amounts to an amnesty, a bar on new prosecutions even if new evidence should emerge.

The British government has announced that it's going to introduce what it calls a statute of limitations to apply equally to all Troubles related incidents.

Sam McBride writes about northern Ireland for the Economist and is based in Belfast.

This is really a de facto amnesty. It would also block, for instance, very belated inquests into killings which were not adequately investigated at the time during Northern Ireland's conflict, and civil court actions against either perpetrators, perpetrators of some of those crimes, or against the state looking for information.

And how is it that the crimes of the Troubles have been dealt with till now under the Good Friday Agreement?

Under the agreement, some terrorist prisoners were released early from jail at the time of the agreement, just after 1998, and jail terms for any future convictions after that point were limited to two years. The peace deal was then followed by further concessions to the people who really had once kept the conflict going in Northern Ireland. There were royal pardons in some instances, and also a more limited form of immunity for anyone who provided information about the location of hidden remains of those who had been killed many decades ago and secretly buried by the ira.

And given all of those provisions, then what's the stated rationale for what you're calling a de facto amnesty?

There really are two elements to the British government's argument. Firstly, it says that far from healing old wounds, really, investigations and prosecutions at this point just reopen them. And they also tie up the criminal justice system in a way which stops it from investigating some of today's crimes. And so in that vee and really the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson told Parliament last week that the proposal is about really allowing Northern Ireland to move on. And we are Finally, Mr. Speaker, bringing forward a solution to this problem to enable the province of Northern Ireland to draw a line under the Troubles, to enable the people. But the real impetus for this decision at this point in time is seen to be about the politics of Boris Johnson's Conservative Party. Many of his backbenchers and Conservative newspapers have vociferously opposed what have been a growing number of prosecutions of now elderly former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. And for many of the people who feel that they are being unfairly treated. Giving an amnesty to former paramilitaries is not something that they relish, but it's a price that they're prepared to pay to get these people free from this threat of being prosecuted in old age.

And how is this amnesty being viewed by the people of Northern Ireland?

There has been really near unanimous outrage among politicians, victims groups in Northern Ireland and among many of the members of the public who have spoken about this. Anne Travers, whose sister Mary was killed by the ira, told us at the Economist how she sees it.

I think it's quite immoral to kind of extinguish that bit of hope that any one of us are living with. I think that most victims and survivors are very realistic that the likelihood of getting the prosecution now is probably very slim unless new evidence comes in to light. However, I think to take that away from them and to take that away from the dead is quite immoral, and it is causing untold harm and distress to victims and survivors.

For her, the idea that changing the law will draw a line under the past is just insulting.

And that's the general sense of the feeling among victims groups as well.

Yes. Take for example, Jude White. He has publicly forgiven the loyalists who murdered his mother in 1984. And for many years, he has advocated for an across the board amnesty for trouble's crimes, but only as a precondition to a Truth and Reconciliation commission.

What I campaigned for essentially was the carrot and stick. There would be an amnesty if the person agreed to come to a truth commission and tell their story. That's the perpetrators of violence.

But he says that the problem with the amnesty that has been announced now is that it includes killers who remain silent. That means they will have no incentive to come forward.

The sins of our fathers will go not only unpunished, which I can live with, okay, but they will go undocumented. And many people over here will be left in a limbo where they know no context and they have received no apology. So this is the worst scenario, really, that could have happened. Our quest for the truth is now destroyed.

And we've spoken recently about the tensions that have arisen in Northern Ireland. How do you think this amnesty will play into that?

It's been a very tense year in Northern Ireland, largely because of Unionist anger at the Irish Sea border, which was put in place as part of the Brexit settlement. I think that this adds to a wider sense of grievance from all sides of Northern Ireland's very divided community, that they are disregarded by London unionists see in this a willingness to placate Sinn Fein by letting old IRA men off the hook. At this point, nationalists see this as an attempt by Britain to alter the law at the point where really the law might catch up with some of its armed forces for what they did during the troubles. But what unites them is a sense that even when, for different reasons, as in this case, they agree in something that counts for little with Boris Johnson.

Sam, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

It seems extraordinary that there should have been an orchestra at Auschwitz, but there were several, and Esteveggiorano was one of the players in the girls orchestra and one of the last survivors.

Ann Ro is the Economist's obituaries editor.

She heard about the orchestra fairly soon after she was taken to Auschwitz. She was engaged then in hauling rocks and doing extremely heavy work. She was only 18, and she realized that this labor would soon kill her and she had to find a different sort of post in the camp. When she heard about the orchestra, she immediately went to audition and was told that she should play a song called Bel Ami on the accordion. She knew Bel Ami very well. It was a song from the 1930s. It'd been made into a film. Everyone knew it. A very jaunty tune. What luck you have with the women. Bel Ami. It was about a dandy. So she was pleased that it was something she knew, but not so pleased that she had to play it on the accordion because she had never played one before. In the end, however, she just chanced on CHORD of C major and managed to play well enough that she got through the audition and she was in the orchestra. They had to play as the prisoners went off to work in the morning, German marching songs in the evenings. She was called on to do concerts for the staff and for the troops. And the most painful part of it was when they had to go down to the railway station where the cattle cars came in carrying Jews from all over Europe. And as these poor people staggered off the car, they would play to them as if to reassure them that they were coming to a place of comfort and culture, when, of course, they were coming to nothing of the sort. And half of them would be going immediately to the gas chamber. And she said that sometimes the people coming out of the cars would smile and wave and even applaud the orchestra, and then she would cry as she played. She and six other girls managed to escape, and eventually they encountered some Americans and were rescued. She remembered vividly that night, her first night of real Freedom. When they made a great bonfire and put on the bonfire a portrait of Hitler and then they all danced around it while she played the accordion. She went down through France rather slowly and eventually got on a boat for Palestine, as it then was, and decided that she would become one of the builders of the new state of Israel. And she was excited about going there and things were going fairly well. But she was always worried by the treatment of the Arabs and the people who had been been displaced. She became more and more angry about this and remained so all her life and found out in the end that Israel really wasn't a comfortable place for her to stay. So she had to leave. She decided to go back to Germany, although it held the most terrible memories of the deportations and murders of her family, the way she'd been kicked out of school, the way herself sister had been beaten up on Kristallnacht in 1938. All those memories apart. She thought she would try and make a life there again, because surely Nazism was dead. But she found after living there only a short time, that it wasn't dead at all. That it was underground perhaps, but like Bad Seeds, it was still there. And she decided at the same time that she would fight racism and anti Semitism with music. She formed a group called Coincidence, with her two children, Joram, her son and Edna. They went round Germany playing the music of the Yiddish resistance, the ghettos of old Europe. A song called Mirlebenbig We'll Live Forever really became her theme tune. She was determined to go on and on singing, not letting anyone forget what had happened to her and what had happened to her people. She didn't, however, play the accordion anymore. She decided that that was not her instrument. She'd played it at Auschwitz and that was enough. Every so often, when she sang Bel Ami, which she still continued to sing, somebody would come and play the accordion for her. She seemed to find the song rather more difficult to sing, as if it just brought back too many memories of those terrible years.

Ann Ro on Esther Bejerano, who's died aged 96. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Kim Gittleson and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans, with help this week from Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Hannah Mourinho, Duncan Barber and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren, and assistant producers Jason Hoskin and Abasoye Oshundairo, with extra production help this week from Dan Ashby, Kevin Kainers, Emily Elias Rory Galloway, Juliet Shapkiro and Lucy Taylor. We'll all see you back here on Monday.