By Phyllis Bennis\OtherWords.org
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Of all the memorable moments from this year’s Olympics, there’s one in particular that will stay with me.
As the spectacular parade of lighted boats sailed up the Seine to open the games, among them was a small craft filled with 37 competitors in white uniforms. Their flag carrier was boxer Cindy Ngamba, who won the first Olympic medal for her team a few days later.
Ngamba didn’t win that bronze for her home country, Cameroon. And the flag that Ngamba and her co-flag-bearer, Yahya al Ghotany from Syria, waved proudly was not the flag of either of their countries. It was the Olympic flag.
That’s because Ngamba and al Ghotany were members of the Refugee Olympic Team, made up entirely of athletes displaced from their home countries.
The idea of an Olympic refugee team first emerged in 2016, a year of sky high global displacement — a trend that unfortunately continues today. Back then, 67 million people in the world were forcibly displaced — a population comparable to that of France and bigger than Italy or South Africa.
By the time the torch was lit in Paris for 2024, that figure had soared to 107 million. If “Refugee Nation” were a country, it would be the 15th most populous in the world — just behind Egypt.
Like the rest of this population, the athletes on the Refugee Olympic Team have been forced from their homes by some combination of war, climate change, human rights violations, and economic crisis.
And this year the 37 members had something else in common: all of their home countries are facing U.S. economic sanctions.
These sanctions exacerbate the factors that are driving people from their homes. Two years before the 2016 Rio Olympics, the UN Human Rights Council expressed alarm at “the disproportionate and indiscriminate human costs of unilateral sanctions and their negative effects on the civilian population.”
In Iran, for example, the U.S. imposed extreme sanctions in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, despite the UN nuclear watchdog agency’s recognition that Tehran was in compliance.
The impact on Iranian civilians was dire. According to Human Rights Watch, the sanctions posed “a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines,” something especially dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic that hit shortly after.
While the Biden administration lifted some of those Trump-era sanctions, many remain in place — and were significantly tightened in April 2024. Fourteen members of this year’s Olympic Refugee Team were from Iran.
In Afghanistan, sanctions are causing famine. In 2022, head of the International Rescue Committee and former UK foreign minister David Miliband told senators that sanctions were “the proximate cause of this starvation crisis.” Five of the Refugee Team came from Afghanistan.
These 37 athletes brought cheering audiences to their feet, on the banks of the Seine and on screens around the world.
But for all the triumph and beauty of the Refugee Team — and all that these young people have accomplished despite extraordinary hardship — the stark reality is that global mass displacement has become the new normal. And whatever the specific conditions that forced each of them to leave their homes, U.S. policy is one of the factors that made things worse in their countries.
Giving these world-class athletes a chance to compete in the Olympic games was a gift — to them and to us. But at the end of the day, the need for such a team speaks to our failure to reverse the conditions that displace people in the first place — including by ending U.S. economic sanctions.
Medals are great. But wouldn’t it be better if these amazing athletes could win the right to return safely home?
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.
