To be honest, it’s hard on me. We have entered an era of nasty countries and I don’t like it. I have already written enough about the World Cup in Qatar. It should never have happened, I don’t feel like it, except the tit guy, nobody has it yet and I’m not going to watch it. Incidentally, sport has long been the domain of nasty men and unsociable countries. I remember being in China for shooting (about crayfish) when the Olympics were taking place there. While we were on the job, we were constantly monitored by Government officials and informal sniffs. When I surfed the internet at the hotel, search terms like ‘human rights’ returned zero results.
My boss, the editor-in-chief of this newspaper, recently wrote that things often went wrong at other major sporting events: ‘At the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, the Russian city on the Black Sea, the temperatures were far from winter (…). The following summer flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile. That didn’t stop the football community from heading to Russia in 2018 to compete for the world championship.”
He also recalls how at the World Cup in Brazil, Haitian guest workers worked under harsh conditions and sometimes died. Ah, the sports. So addictive, so tasty, but maybe we should ignore that whole puny lick-ass sector from now on. Hard, very hard, but one day it’s enough.
Unfortunately, the rotten country advance is not limited to sport. Now climate summits have to believe it too. The climate summit that starts this week will be held in Egypt. Tens of thousands of people are flying there. They also have to take a domestic flight from Cairo, because otherwise it is impossible to reach Sharm-el-Sheikh.
Of course it is important that people can actually meet each other in order to make decisions, but you can ask yourself whether there really should be that many people at this CO2-devouring party. And then Egypt is also a rotten country that ignores human rights, arrests people just like that, tortures them and makes them disappear.
Nature and the environment do not seem to find the repressive regime very important either. Yesterday I saw the documentary The plastic Nile about the pollution of the world’s largest river. To cry how much plastic disappears into the Nile and then into the sea. Anyone who complains about the pollution of the river can get into trouble with the authorities. In any case, a critical attitude about environmental issues (or any government issue for that matter) is not appreciated. Human Rights Watch published a report showing that environmental organizations are made virtually impossible to function. The chance that Egyptian NGOs will have the chance to demonstrate in Sharm el-Sheik is extremely small.
Just as the World Cup is not held in Qatar because the country has a thriving football culture, Egypt did not become the organizer of the climate summit because of its beautiful green beating heart. This event is also especially important for the organization to boost its own reputation. We are happy to work with you. Where will the next climate summit be held? The United Arab Emirates. We live in a time of rotten lands.