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Greece revives Olympic truce
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GREECE, host of the 2004 Olympic Games, formally revived on Tuesday the idea of an “Olympic Truce” -- a call to combatants around the world to lay down their arms during the games.
Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou and International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch last year set up an International Olympic Truce Centre Foundation to promote the concept that has been part of the Olympic ideal since ancient times.
Holding a board meeting at the United Nations on Tuesday, the foundation unveiled a sculpture of a bronze dove and a torch at a ceremony with Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
“The initiative is to revive the old tradition of the Olympic Games, which is a tradition of stopping wars during the Olympic Games,” Papandreou told a press conference. “This was in fact the purpose of the Olympic Games.”
Greece, the birthplace of the ancient Olympics, he said, was now surrounded by violence in Kosovo and Macedonia, the Middle East and its own conflict with Turkey over Cyprus.
Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the former Greek parliamentarian who led Athens' successful bid for the 2004 games, said the Olympic flame would travel from runner to runner through 60 countries, some of them in conflict, and touch down on all five continents over the world.
Samaranch, who is retiring this year after leading the IOC for 21 years, also announced that the IOC would donate US$100,000 to the United Nations for its new war chest to fight AIDS in the developing world, particularly in Africa.
The idea of an Olympic truce is not new but the foundation is. During the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, there was a brief halt to fighting in Bosnia which allowed UNICEF to conduct a vaccination campaign.
And Papandreou noted the 2000 Sydney Olympics brought North and South Korea together under one flag.
Annan, in receiving the Olympic Truce sculpture, recalled that the 189-member UN General Assembly unanimously endorsed resolutions calling “for warring parties to lay down their arms while athletes from the entire community of nations meet under the noble flame of the Olympic torch”. (SD-Agencies)
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