When Turkish F-4 fighter planes violated Greek airspace over the Aegean Sea this month, the government complained that its centuries-old enemy also had violated the Olympic truce.
The agreement, signed last year by every member of the United Nations, is aimed at ceasing wars for at least as long as the Olympic flame burns.
It’s an effort to emulate the famed pauses in fighting between the city-states of ancient Greece during the Games at Olympia.
Known in Greece as ekecheiria, or “holding hands,” the practice lasted for 1,200 years and allowed athletes to cross hostile territory to reach the sites of athletic competitions and go home once the events were over, win or lose.
“We send our kids to sports to compete in peace,” said Stavros Lambrinidis, director of the Athens-based International Olympic Truce Center. “We should not send some of our other kids to die in war at the same time.”
Founded three years ago, the truce center is based in the neoclassical Zappeion building near the parliament of the present-day Hellenic Republic. Greece’s government and the International Olympic Committee provided the $1 million budget for the center, including the salaries of eight employees.
The center has distributed T-shirts that read: “If we can have peace for 16 days, then maybe, just maybe, we can make it last forever.”
In a more concrete accomplishment, truce center officials participated in negotiations that led to North and South Korean athletes marching together into the Olympic Stadium behind a common flag at Friday’s Opening Ceremony.
The truce has not stopped global warring, of course. The military forces of several Olympic truce signatories remain deeply engaged in conflicts even as their athletes compete.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that an Olympic truce is a good idea but added, “The world does not stop entirely for the Olympics.”
The camera-equipped blimps hovering over Athens and other heavy security measures to protect Olympic athletes and spectators belie the very idea of a truce. And an Iranian Olympic judoka refused to fight his Israeli rival because Iran does not recognize the Jewish state.
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Allen Guttmann, a sports historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said the modern revival of the concept is based on false premises.
“The ancient truce was valid only for those going back and forth from the Games,” he said. “It did not stop all wars, and even then it was violated.”
Its newest incarnation, Guttmann said, is no more likely to succeed. He believes a good first step would be to bar nations that are at war from hosting the Games.
“The idea is so obviously impractical that it makes people cynical,” Guttmann said. “I’m afraid we’re a long, long way from having a truce, even in a limited form.”
Lambrinidis conceded that an Olympic truce is a romantic notion. But he insisted it is not utopian, even if much 21st-Century fighting involves terror groups or civil conflict rather than armed confrontations between states.
“Terrorists also have to take public opinion into account,” Lambrinidis said.
When admirers of ancient ideals revived the Games in 1896, the truce was not among the traditions organizers tried to bring back.
War interrupted the Games from being held at all during World War II. President Jimmy Carter tried unsuccessfully to lead a widespread boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow in 1980 to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All that engendered was a retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games by Soviet bloc countries.
The first attempt at a truce came in 1992, when the IOC invoked the concept to bring Bosnian athletes to the Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain, despite the international embargo then in effect against war-torn Yugoslavia.
Two years later, during the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, the fighting in Yugoslavia stopped for one day. That allowed UNICEF workers to inoculate 10,000 children from all of Yugoslavia’s feuding ethnic groups.
After Athens was awarded the 2004 Games seven years ago, Greece began efforts to get nations to sign on to the truce. In its efforts to welcome the Games to their birthplace, Greek authorities have tried to play up links between the ancient practices and the modern Olympics.
Lambrinidis said the truce center’s next step would be to organize sports competitions between what he called “mixed teams” in conflict zones. Just talking about the Olympic truce, he said, could raise public pressure to avoid fighting and create “windows of opportunity” for peace negotiations.
“In a few years, we have [created] a credible though not yet successful movement,” he said. “As the truce becomes more ingrained in the diplomatic jargon, it will take on a life of its own and lead to real truces.”