Munich Olympics Massacre

Baroness Jowell Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I am delighted to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing it and on being so actively engaged for 10 years in the procuring for and planning of the Olympics.

Obviously, the Munich massacre has been a recurrent preoccupation and concern. This occasion is remarkable and noteworthy. When I was in government, I had the privileged responsibility of supporting the bereaved families of those who suffered as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and of the 52 innocent Londoners who died on 7 July 2005, as well as a similarly privileged association with families bereaved in the Bali bombings and the tsunami, albeit that was not related to terrorism. I therefore have personal experience of the importance of anniversaries and of a sense of place that enables people to gather together. Next Tuesday, we shall mark the 11th anniversary of the loss of 67 lives in New York. We should never forget that. In a way, such atrocities are too easily absorbed into the everyday narrative of our shared history.

The reason why the timing of the debate is so important is that there will probably not be in our lifetimes another Olympic moment like this summer in London in which we can restate our horror at what happened, and its complete contradiction of the founding values of the Olympic movement. I believe—I think that hon. Members on both sides of the House share my view—that that movement has been a force for peace, and it is the antithesis of the behaviour of the Black September group that led to the death of 11 innocent Israelis.

The hon. Member for Harrow East remembered the names of the victims, and I, too, want to remember: Mark Slavin, who was only 18 years old when he died; Eliezer Halfin, his wrestling team mate; David Berger, Yossef Romano and Ze’ev Friedman, who were Israeli Olympic weightlifters; Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr and Yakov Springer, who were athletics, fencing and weightlifting coaches; and Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Gutfreund and Andre Spitzer, who were referees. The group was representative of the people one would expect to be at the Olympics. I have been privileged to be a mayor of the Olympic village this summer and thus to live alongside athletes of every competing nation.

The event we are commemorating is an affront to the Talmud, which states that taking a single life is like destroying an entire world. Something of the innocence of the Olympic movement was lost on that day. Children lost their fathers, mothers lost their sons, and wives lost their husbands. As the ages of those who were killed suggest, lives with enormous potential were simply extinguished. We have only our sense of national outrage, and our private speculations about the potential that would never be realised. As with all such moments—9/11, 7/7 and September 1972—we can all remember where we were on that day 40 years ago, because the sense of incomprehensible tragedy and the violation of the very essence of the Olympics lives on in our collective memory. This was an attack on not just Israeli athletes, but on the values and spirit of the entire Olympic movement. The memory of the tragedy remains not just with the victims’ families, but with the whole Olympic family and the world beyond—and here, for a brief time, in our House of Commons, which is something of which we can all be proud.

One reason why London won its bid for the games is that we are proud of our diversity and tolerance, as has been demonstrated at every turn in the extraordinary few weeks of our Olympic summer. The city is home to people from every part of the world who practise every religion and follow every faith. In the Olympic athletes’ village—now the Paralympic village—such an intense representation of the whole world was there for everyone to see, from the flags outside the flats to the diversity of the diet in the dining hall, which was big enough to accommodate six football pitches. One touching observation came from the amazing polyclinic, which treated athletes from around the world. Every athlete was treated according to their need—this was no way of stealing a little competitive advantage for the home team. I vividly remember one of my last visits there when the Cameroon football team were having mouth guards made so that they would be properly equipped for the matches ahead.

We celebrate the fact that in our city 200 nationalities speak more than 300 languages, and that 200,000 Jews live alongside 600,000 Muslims. In some ways, our city is the embodiment of the Olympic ideal, where people of different faiths and cultures live in the same neighbourhoods, and where their children go to the same schools. As with the Olympic ideal, we seek to build our city around the values of equality, respect, friendship and courage. Whether Jew, Muslim, Christian or Hindu, we hope that those shared values allow us to recognise our communities’ potential and ambition, as well as to celebrate our differences. It is that character that has brought London and Londoners to embrace the Olympics and everything that they stand for, and to reject those who want to divide one community against another. It is a characteristic that has seen us through not just 7/7, but other moments in our history, when that precious part of our identity has been under threat.

We must also remember that for each surviving family of the 11 victims, this year’s Olympics will be another especially poignant reminder of what they suffered 40 years ago. The ambition of the Olympic and Paralympic games has always been more than to provide a festival of world-class sport; it has been, as the Olympic charter says,

“to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of”

man to promote “a peaceful society”. The Munich attacks were a gross betrayal of that ideal and of everything that the Olympics stand for. The degree of sustained outrage is a measure of how the Olympic movement, and the millions of people who have been inspired by it, have marked the anniversary in different ways.

In the Olympic village is the Olympic truce wall which, at the end of the games, bore the signatures of thousands of visitors, officials and Olympic athletes. I conducted some 16 welcome ceremonies for about 64 teams, and the ambition of peace, the Olympic games as a period of truce, and the invitation to sign the truce wall were fundamental messages in those ceremonies, which extended a welcome to teams from around the world.

We can all join in sharing this moment today, and I am delighted that you, Ms Dorries, and the Minister have agreed that we should mark it with a minute’s silence. I conclude by saying that every time our world is scarred by this kind of atrocity, it redoubles our shared effort and determination to achieve peace and tolerance.