Hiroshima and Nagasaki dream of Olympics 2020
Tokyo (AsiaNews) - Tadayoshi Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima and Tomihisa Taue, mayor of Nagasaki are hoping to host the 2020 Olympics in their respective cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only cities in the world to have been destroyed by atomic bombs in the final days of World War II (6 and 9 August 1945). With this initiative, made public at a press conference on 11 October in Hiroshima, the mayors seek to spread a message of world peace.
The news first reported by the Japanese media, was greeted with surprise, because just a week before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had rejected the offer of Tokyo for the 2016 Olympics in favour of Rio de Janeiro.
Most commentators, doubts whether the request can be accepted by the IOC, but agree in recognizing the symbolic value: the year 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the tragic event and the 50th of the Non-Proliferation Treaty ( NPT), signed, first, by the USA, UK and the then Soviet Union on 1 July 1968. It went into force on 5 March 1970. It is also the year of the so-called Hiroshima Nagasaki Protocol for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
The initiative was presented by Akiba only last month in Mexico City during an international conference on peace. But it has a long gestation period.
June 24, 1982, during a special session of the United Nations in New York on disarmament, the then Mayor of Hiroshima, Takeshi Araki, proposed a program to promote the solidarity of cities in the world with a view to total elimination of nuclear weapons. Following the initiative of the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the NGO "Mayors for Peace" (MFP) was created, an organization composed of cities around the world that support the program announced by Mayor Araki. Its main objective is precisely to internationally engage to raise awareness about the duty and urgency of the abolition of nuclear weapons. There are already over three thousand mayors who have joined.
April 29, 2008, during a meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP) in Geneva, the "Mayors for Peace" initiative of Akiba, launched a "protocol" directed to all members participating the Treaty of NTP to commit themselves to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2020. "If you do not act effectively to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons by 2020 - has said - you are partially responsible for the nuclear disaster that no doubt will fall on upon us before that date. I urge you not to underestimate the seriousness and urgency of this decision".
The bold proposal to host the Olympics this year is aimed at making world opinion aware of a commitment that can not be rescheduled. An indirect but highly effective support, for the decision of the two mayors, was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barak Obama three days earlier. The American president was chosen, in part, for his initiative on the reduction of nuclear weapons.
Ideally the proposal of the two mayors is well grounded. The editor of the renowned Japanese newspaper Asahi writes: "Because the Olympics are a celebration of peace, few people would disagree in thinking that they are an event suited to serve as a symbol of total nuclear disarmament."
With great surprise, Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, while expressing his displeasure over the exclusion of the capital to host the Games in 2016, said that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are good candidates for those of 2020. "Holding the Games in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only city victims of nuclear attacks, has great significance for the world peace." Even the IOC vice president Thomas Bach said that "an 'offer (to Host the Olympics) that includes Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has a high symbolic significance, but, he added, for the application to be accepted much more is required".
In fact, there are three levels of difficulty. The first concerns the constitutional charter of the Olympics: the event, in principle, can not occur simultaneously in two cities. The second is the cost: they are astronomical. As commercialism and national prestige are now aspects of the event, only big cities can afford to host it. Hiroshima’s tax intake is one tenth that of Tokyo, and Nagasaki is half that of Hiroshima. The third is political. The Games are an international event allegedly politically neutral. If you think that the reasons given by the two mayors is the abolition of nuclear weapons and which nation used them for the first and only time, it is not difficult to imagine how powerful the third difficulty is.
Yet even the most critical state that peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons in the short term are such important values that we must find a way to overcome the obstacles. The two mayors have already begun to this task by setting up a joint committee to study the conditions that could make their wish come true.
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28/01/2019 14:36
