Gary Player in the rough
Sean Jacobs, a South African blogger living in the US, added an interesting comment to the post about Burma under his equally interesting pen name, Leo Africanus.
In it, he calls for a boycott of Gary Player for doing business in Burma. This call, while it has merit, leaves me uncomfortable for several reasons, however. Let’s first establish the facts of the matter.
The pro-democracy leader in Burma, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has since 1988 consistently supported a boycott of all foreign companies doing business in Burma, as well as a tourism boycott. Not everyone supports that call, however, fearing it may harm ordinary Burmese people more than it would help them.
It is true that among the golf courses Gary Player designed is Pun Hlaing Golf Club in Yangon, Burma. Its website, predictably, is unavailable, since the regime has unplugged the Burmese internet in its most recent free speech crackdown, but the course was opened in 2002, and is listed on Player’s website.
Anglican archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu has backed calls for a boycott, in particular citing the activist George Monbiot’s call to boycott Gary Player. Now Monbiot’s opinions don’t carry much weight with me. He is rather selective in whose moral excesses he condemns, and I believe that his position on this issue is probably more influenced by his knee-jerk anti-capitalist stance than by any objective support for freedom and democracy.
Tutu carries a lot more moral authority. He is reportedly a patron of the Free Myanmar Campaign in South Africa1. However, he undermines it when he says that he doesn’t want to “put [Nelson Mandela] on the spot”, but then proceeds to do exactly that by publicly repeating Monbiot’s call for Mandela to remove his name from Player’s Nelson Mandela Invitational golf tournament, sponsored by Coca-Cola, to be played at Arabella near Hermanus next month.
The problem is this. Though it has discussed the option of sanctions, the UN has not instituted them against the Burmese junta, and as noted before, South Africa voted against a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned the actions of the regime.
Given the fact that neither our government nor the UN can get themselves to institute coordinated action, it strikes me as hypocritical and unfair to castigate a South African for doing business in Burma. Business is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral. Money is apolitical. It simply goes where demand is, and in doing so is neither good, nor bad, but neutral. In the absence of coordinated action such as a UN sanctions campaign, it seems to me unreasonable to expect some companies to give up business opportunities, when their competitors will simply step in and profit from the business in their stead. Besides, what can Gary Player do now about a course designed five years ago? Okay, the military junta uses it. Can Player stop them? Can he undo the deal?
Jacobs (Leo Africanus) adds some background about Player’s historic support for Apartheid, which casts him in a very unflattering light indeed. However, Player was hardly alone in those views 40 years ago. Hindsight justifiably condemns these views, but in those days, a white businessman either held those views, or said they did. Judging — and punishing — a man for what he said in 1968 in a country where reconciliation has long since trumped vengeance, seems harsh. It’s not like he’s seeking political office.
I applaud those who stand up and speak out against the Burmese junta, and support the Burmese democracy movement — as I support the promotion of democracy, free markets and individual liberty everywhere. However, in the absence of a coordinated response in the form of, for example, UN sanctions, under which everyone can play by the same rules, I think it’s unjust to single out and go after individuals like Gary Player. Especially when his own government can’t even be bothered to speak out. When it does, we can talk again.
- I’ve been unable to find a website for the Free Myanmar Campaign in South Africa, so haven’t been able to confirm this. [↩]
