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Wrestling a Route to Peace
On February 20, 1998, the United States flag was raised in the capital of Iran. There were no jeers. No boos. No shouts about The Great Satan. Instead, the atmosphere was friendly.
The occasion was the opening of the Takhti Cup international wrestling tournament. Wrestling teams had flown into Iran from sixteen other countries, including the US, which had waged ideological war with this Islamic nation for nearly twenty years. Five American wrestlers comprised the first group of US citizens to set foot in the country since 1979.
‘We had been told by Iranian friends that wrestling would be a good way to launch non-official exchanges between Iran and the US,’ says John Marks, President of Search for Common Ground, an organisation that helped to arrange US participation in the Takhti Cup.
Those friends turned out to be right. The American team was met at Teheran airport by two hundred reporters. There were 13,000 cheering fans in the Azadi arena at the finals.
Ironically, the Takhti Cup, a free-style and Graeco-Roman competition, is held each February to commemorate Iran’s 1979 revolution. It was that revolution which propelled the Middle Eastern country into a state of hostility with the US. Soon after, in a dramatic gesture of defiance against western power, 52 captive US diplomats were paraded through the streets of Teheran in a hostage crisis that lasted 444 days. The world held its breath as Islamic-Western tension was explosively launched.
It has taken almost twenty years for this hammer-hold of hostility to be broken - through ritual struggle. Wrestling, in other words.
The moment was auspicious. Overtures were also being made at the highest government levels. Iran’s President Khatemi and US President Clinton had both, via the media, urged non-official, people-to-people exchanges. That helped smooth the arrangements and raised the profile of the visit. Wrestling came to be viewed as a metaphor for a possible new relationship, with fierce competition, but conducted within mutually accepted rules, in which differences would be accommodated within a framework of adherence to common humanity.
‘Our Iranian friends felt that, because of the huge popularity of the sport in Iran, even hard-liners would not oppose the presence of American wrestlers,’ says John Marks.
From its headquarters in Washington and Brussels, Search for Common Ground got in touch with Bruce Laingen, the most senior American official held hostage in 1979, who introduced them to the US Olympic Committee and USA Wrestling. Contacts were made between the governments of the USA, Iran and Switzerland. The latter government’s officials now protect US interests in Teheran.
A European ambassador later commented that, by starting with wrestling, Common Ground had showed ‘exquisite empathy’ with Iranians. Traditional Persian samurai were wrestlers, not swordsmen.
Hostility broken by ritual struggle.
Photo Search for Common Ground
‘Our hope was, with Iran, that sports could once again provide an opening wedge in improving relations,’ Marks explained.
Of the five wrestlers on the American team, one was a former Olympic Champion and two former World Champions. They ‘wiped the mats with their hosts,’ reported the Washington Post.
‘The five Americans won nine of 12 head-to-head tussles with Iranians on the 500-member team that their country sent into the freestyle competition,’ the newspaper cheered. But the Iranians got even in the end. They won two close matches, including the feature event of the tournament, and the final clash between 215-pound World Champion rivals, Melvin Douglas and Abbas Jadidi. This latter event had been a long-anticipated one. At the 1993 world championship in Toronto, Jadidi had defeated Douglas but was later disqualified for failing a drug test. At the Takhti Cup, he reasserted his supremacy.
But the true victor of the tournament was world peace.
At the end of their match, Jadidi and Douglas embraced while still on their knees, and walked off the mat with arms around each other. Former Olympic champion, Kevin Jackson, hugged his Iranian opponent after winning his match, and patted him on the back of the head. US wrestler, Zeke Jones, raised a small Iranian flag over his head from his corner of the arena at the end of his event, ‘to show friendship between American wrestlers and the people of Iran... ‘
The Iranians were equally joyous.
‘Their interest in Americans,’ says Marks, ‘mirrored what we experienced elsewhere in Tehran: namely, that Iranians seemed overwhelmingly pro-American. Obviously, hard-line radicals, who are jockeying for power with more moderate elements, do not share such sentiments. In fact, we heard that hard-liners, who represent a thin, but still very powerful slice of Iranian society, fear that pro-US sentiments might get out of hand.’
To avoid stirring up sentiments, no national flags were raised and no national anthem played at the closing ceremony of the tournament. Jadidi, however, received his award carrying a framed portrait of revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, while his opponent, Douglas, carried one of Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The American said an Iranian official had asked him to hold the portrait of Iran’s spiritual leader.
‘By their actions and their words,’ says Marks, ‘the Iranian and American wrestlers demonstrated an alternative model for how their two countries could interact.’
And later, at the October 1998 presentation of the first Common Ground Awards to honour outstanding accomplishment in conflict resolution, Douglas and Jadidi won another award - for use of sports in conflict resolution and peace-making.
‘As the stars of wrestling diplomacy between the US and Iran,’ said the citation, ‘they modelled behaviour for a new relationship between their two countries: competing fiercely, but within mutually accepted rules, they recognised their differences and allowed their common humanity to triumph.’
In taking a wrestling team to Iran, Search for Common Ground hoped to use sports as a means to break through a long-standing conflict - just as ping pong had been between the US and China in 1971, when the visit of an American team to China opened the door to more substantial links on the governmental level.
Common Ground believes rapid growth in non-official exchanges can make a major contribution to draining poison from US-Iranian relations, though, in the end, only governments can make peace. The organisation notes that it is also important to recognise the uniqueness of each country. Activities that are successful in one country do not necessarily work in another. Careful attention must be paid to cross-cultural design and adapting of programmes.
While in Tehran, Common Ground’s Marks spoke to an ambassador for a European country, who explained the situation with regard to US-Iran relations in terms of differences in negotiating styles. Washington’s approach is akin to the attacking strategy of a team playing American football, he said, while the Iranians behave like chess players. Thus one side wants to ‘forget past results, march down the field, and make immediate scores’, while the other shows a tendency to ‘develop complex strategies, take nothing on face value, and play ahead a dozen moves.’
Not long after American wrestlers visited Iran in February 1998,
five Iranian journalists spent two weeks in Boston and New York
as guests of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors.
‘It’s About Feelings, About Human Emotions’
A few months later, in response to President Mohammad Khatami’s
pleas for people-to-people exchanges to break down ‘the wall of
mistrust’, Search for Common Ground invited six Iranian actresses
and female film directors to the US. This was a direct follow-up
to the wrestling exchange, which had underlined the value of exchanges
in areas in which the two countries excel.
Iran has emerged as one of the most important areas of artistic
film-making in the world. More than 50 feature films are made
in the country each year, including several which have won international
awards. The Iranian women were able to screen their films at the
Lincoln Centre and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York,
and the film centre of the Arts Institute in Chicago. They also
held a series of discussions with the US counterparts.
Iranian film producer, Fereshteh Taerpour, told the Lincoln Centre
Film Society: ‘We know there are some groups that are against
any contact. What we’re trying to show is that it’s not dangerous
to talk, and that the United States is not going to control our
minds.’
During the visit, the six Iranian actresses, directors and producers,
sought to portray another side of what is viewed by outsiders
as severe restrictions on portrayal of Iranians women in film,
since they have to wear head scarves even when depicted in home
scenes, and cannot touch men unless related by blood or marriage.
They told the Directors’ Guild of America in New York that such
curbs were actually conducive to creative expression.
Actresses used facial expressions, hand gestures and other devices
to make up for the limitations, they explained, conveying through
looks and words the emotions they felt, rather than by touching.
Iranian movies have no violence or sex. They explore the complexities
of human relationships.
‘It’s about feelings, about human understanding,’ said Malak Djahan
Khazai, an Iranian director.
While the organisation believes that these differences in approaches can be overcome, to some extent, by confidence-building mechanisms, it also recognizes that there are profound differences between the US and Iran that call for top-level political attention. However, the organisation is convinced that non-governmental organisations like Common Ground can play a very important role in building bridges. To this end, Common Ground plans to work with other NGOs to carry out a series of exchanges between Iran and the US, including cross-cultural ties in areas such as the environment, women’s issues, medicine, and refugees.
Wrestling diplomacy provided an excellent example of how governmental and non-governmental processes can overleap and interact. When the US team returned home, President Clinton invited them -along with USA Wrestling and Search for Common Ground- to the Oval Office. This was seen as a positive signal to Teheran. White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, told reporters, ‘it would be accurate to say that (the President is) drawing attention to an exchange that is maybe off the beaten path of diplomacy, but has something to say about the prospect and hope for more beneficial relations between peoples.’
Feedback please to
j.verhoeven@euconflict.org