Politics Overrides ’96 Games Host Selection : IOC meetings: Situations in Middle East, South Africa come first in discussions at executive board session in Tokyo.

Throughout the boycotts of the 1976, ’80 and ’84 Summer Olympics, the International Olympic Committee maintained that governments should allow sports to remain independent from politics. But that idea has remained elusive even for the IOC.

As 87 IOC members gather here for their annual meeting, their most urgent business is to vote Tuesday on a city to organize the 1996 Summer Games.

The first meeting of the 11-member executive board Thursday, however, was dominated by political situations in the Middle East and South Africa.

“We like to say that sports and politics are separate,” IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said before the meeting. “But realistically, that is not possible.”

The IOC paid particularly close attention to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait because one of its members, Sheik Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, was killed while defending the royal palace in Kuwait City. He was a brother of Kuwait’s emir.

In paying tribute to Fahad Thursday, the executive board also announced that the IOC will continue to recognize an independent Kuwait Olympic Committee, even though it is in exile in Saudi Arabia.

Among the audience at the news conference when the statement was read was Fahad’s son, Sheik Ahmad Al-Sabah, who succeeded his father as the president of Kuwait’s Olympic Committee.

“The IOC says that we are still Kuwait, and for that we are very grateful,” Ahmad said.

He said he was not disturbed when the executive board took no position on his efforts to have Iraq banned from the Asian Games, a multisport competition that is scheduled to begin Sept. 22 in Beijing. Kuwait plans to send 51 athletes, most of whom are training in Saudi Arabia.

The Olympic Council of Asia’s executive committee last week recommended the exclusion of Iraq, but a final determination will not be made until a vote by the entire 38-member council next Thursday in Beijing. Fahad was the OCA’s president.

In its statement Thursday, the IOC’s executive board said it had “confidence in the Olympic Council of Asia, in the exercise of its responsibility, to take the most appropriate measures for the benefit of the Olympic movement and for the success of the Asian Games in Beijing.”

Despite recent comments by Samaranch that South Africa could earn readmission to the IOC in time for the 1992 Olympics, the executive board maintained its stance that the ban will continue until the South African government ends its official policy of racial segregation.

IOC spokeswoman Michelle Verdier said, however, that discussions will continue between the IOC’s anti-apartheid commission and South Africa’s Olympic Committee at a November meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Other politically charged issues that the executive board might discuss here include the applications of the Soviet Union’s Baltic republics--Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia--to enter independent teams in future Olympics.

The executive board will meet through Sunday, followed by sessions Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday involving the full IOC membership. Intense campaigning for the 1996 Summer Olympics already has begun by the six candidates: Atlanta; Athens; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Manchester, England; Melbourne, Australia; and Toronto.

While Athens is the sentimental favorite to stage the Games 100 years after the birth of the modern Olympics in that city, its supporters are attempting to persuade IOC members that it also is a practical choice. Their strongest opposition is expected to come from Atlanta, Melbourne and Toronto.