Most viewers of the Olympics are aware that Sochi is only a few hundred miles from Chechnya—that’s part of what’s given these Winter Games their tension. It’s less widely known that Sochi is only a thousand miles from Homs, Syria. The two cities are separated by the Republic of Georgia, Turkey, and the ruins of Syria. I thought about their proximity after watching the men’s downhill on Sunday—the most exciting event of the Winter Olympics, as far as I’m concerned, won (as usual) by an Austrian, Matthias Mayer, on a nearly lethal course that had skiers flying down the mountain at close to ninety miles an hour, with one jump taking them almost the length of a football field—and then waking up to a picture from Homs.
It was taken by a Reuters photographer, and there was something immediately familiar about it: the straggling line of people, lugging their belongings in duffels and plastic bags along bullet-pocked walls, picking their way over the rubble of concrete blocks, fleeing for their lives but already without hope. You can see it in their haggard expressions, in the angle of their heads. We saw these faces in Sarajevo, Leningrad, Madrid—besieged cities that were bombed and starved for so long that the survivors appeared to be among the dead themselves.
Homs has had the misfortune of being at the center of Syria’s civil war from the beginning, almost three years ago. About seven hundred and fifty thousand people have fled; at least two and a half thousand remain in the pulverized city core. One refugee told the Times that he had been living on a spoonful of bulgur a day for the past week; his wife died of hunger. Residents are eating roots and weeds, and boiling grass for tea.
At recent peace talks in Geneva, a three-day ceasefire was negotiated, just in time for the Sochi opening ceremonies, to let trapped women, children, and elderly people (and only them, as required by the Syrian government) out of Homs, and to allow food aid in. But over the weekend humanitarian convoys came under fire, and snipers tried to pick off some of the six or seven hundred residents who got out. News accounts strongly suggest that the firing came from the government side. One old man was shot in the stomach. This was a violation of the laws of war, but the horrors of the Syrian civil war have long since lost their surprise. Equally obviously, no one will be held accountable by any United Nations resolution for the shooting of that old man, or for the barrel bombs that have been slaughtering civilians in Aleppo recently, or for last August’s chemical-weapons attacks in Damascus, or for the beheadings of rebel-held captives, or for any of the other atrocities committed on all sides of the war, because—as the Times reminds us—“Syria’s strongest international backer, Russia, would most likely veto it.”
While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad’s strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event. These are, as David Remnick has written, Vladimir Putin’s Olympics. Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focussed on the threat of terrorism, Putin’s domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda. These make me uneasy, too, but for sheer moral horror nothing can compare with Putin’s role in perpetuating a war that has killed well over a hundred thousand people and displaced more than nine million, with no end in sight.
No one pretends anymore that the Olympics are just about sports. It’s routine to talk about what effect holding the Games in this or that capital will have on the host country’s international reputation, how a nation’s prestige can be raised by its medal count. We often hear about the host country’s desire for respect and legitimacy on the world stage. The last time was in 2008, during the Beijing Summer Games, and, sure enough, those Olympics burnished China’s reputation for construction and spectacle (who can forget the Bird’s Nest?), while the limits the Communist Party placed on foreign coverage or the way it gagged Chinese dissidents cost it little or nothing. And if the Sochi Games come and go with no terror attacks, no viewing stands collapsing, then Putin’s Olympics will be judged a success as well, and the Russian leader will be able to claim that he has returned his country to the ranks of the great powers.
I’ll be watching the Games anyway, because they’re still about sports—though not only sports—and life is made of compromises and we have to take some of our pleasures where we find them. I’m not even sure that the Games shouldn’t take place in repressive countries like Russia, or China, though it’s useful to remind ourselves to stop short of Berlin in 1936. But I would like the standard for the success of the Sochi Olympics to be something other than hidden surveillance cameras in the showers of foreign correspondents’ crappy hotel rooms. I would like to be able to say that the downhill skiing was breathtaking—but these Games were a failure anyway, because of Homs.
Photograph of Vladimir Putin by Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of Homs by Thaer Al Khalidiya/Reuters.