World Cup 2010 = Beijing 2008?

With World Cup 2010 getting closer every day, South Africa could do with a bit of good PR. So the global peace conference scheduled to be in Johannesburg this week – to promote soccer and World Cup 2010 as instruments of harmony – probably seemed like a good idea.

Until it all went wrong that is.

Without getting too much into the politics of it, seems China put pressure on South Africa to deny a visa to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, because (according to spokesman Thabo Masebe) it “would not be in South Africa’s best interests.”

In response, three of the scheduled guests – Nobel Peace prize laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and F.W. de Klerk, plus executive director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad – decided it wouldn’t be in their best interests to attend a sham conference.

And so the whole thing was cancelled and South Africa has a world of negative headlines to deal with. Good work fellas.

The South African – and Chinese – argument is that wherever the Dalai Lama goes, the issue of Tibetan freedom gets attention. And they didn’t want the peace conference being overshadowed by that.

But the cancellation has already gotten way more attention than the actual conference would have. So that didn’t work out too well for them. No good can ever come of denying a visa to a Nobel Peace Prize winner (the Dalai Lama won in 1989).

And I’ll tell you this: I wanted to use an image of the Dalai Lama looking angry to go with this post. But apparently no such photo exists. The one you see above is the closest I could get. Despite all the sh*t he has to put up with, the guy is always always smiling. Which is pretty impressive.

I’m still optimistic about World Cup 2010, and I’m still predicting some outstanding football next summer (we’ll have a better idea in about three months time, when South Africa hosts the 2009 Confederations Cup). But I’m not so confident about South Africa’s political maneuvering.

The one thing I remember from the Beijing Olympics 2008 was that it didn’t make China – or the Olympics – look too good. More than a couple of shady things happened, epitomized by the Milli Vanilli trick they pulled with that little singing girl. Let’s hope South Africa learns fast and doesn’t tarnish the reputation of the World Cup with any similar shenanigans.

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