Richard Whittall:

The Globalist's Top Ten Books in 2016: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Middle East Eye: "

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer is one of the weightiest, most revelatory, original and important books written about sport"

“The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer has helped me immensely with great information and perspective.”

Bob Bradley, former US and Egyptian national coach: "James Dorsey’s The Turbulent World of Middle Eastern Soccer (has) become a reference point for those seeking the latest information as well as looking at the broader picture."

Alon Raab in The International Journal of the History of Sport: “Dorsey’s blog is a goldmine of information.”

Play the Game: "Your expertise is clearly superior when it comes to Middle Eastern soccer."

Andrew Das, The New York Times soccer blog Goal: "No one is better at this kind of work than James Dorsey"

David Zirin, Sports Illustrated: "Essential Reading"

Change FIFA: "A fantastic new blog'

Richard Whitall of A More Splendid Life:

"James combines his intimate knowledge of the region with a great passion for soccer"

Christopher Ahl, Play the Game: "An excellent Middle East Football blog"

James Corbett, Inside World Football

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Government and fans battle in court and on the pitch in Egypt and Turkey

Egyptian and Turkish soccer pitches are set to re-emerge as
battlegrounds between militant, street battle-hardened fans and authoritarian
leaders in a life and death struggle that involves legal proceedings to brand
the supporters as terrorists and efforts to undermine their widespread popular
base.

Egyptian fans, barely a week after storming a Cairo stadium
in advance of an African championship final, have vowed to break open Egyptian
premier league games that have been closed to the public for much of the past
four years. Fans played a key role in mass anti-government protests that in
2011 toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Similarly a nationwide boycott of a government electronic
ticketing system in Turkey viewed by fans who were prominent in last year’s
Gezi Park protests against the country’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a way
of identifying them and barring them from stadia has so far all but defeated
the effort.

The struggles in Egypt and Turkey are heating up as criminal
legal proceedings against militant fans or ultras are set to open in Cairo and
Istanbul. In Istanbul, a trial begins on December 16 against 35 members of
Carsi, the nationally popular support group of storied club Besiktas JK,
accused of belonging to an armed terrorist organization and seeking to
overthrow the government.

In Cairo, courts are preparing to hear a series of cases
initiated by the head of the Egyptian capital’s Al Zamalek SC, Mortada Mansour,
a controversial fixture of the Mubarak era and close associate of
general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, charging that the club’s
militant support group, Ultras White Knights (UWK), are terrorists who sought
to assassinate him. Denying the allegations that led to the arrest of scores of
UWK members, the group has dubbed Mr. Mansour ‘the regime’s dog.’ UWK leaders
have gone into hiding to evade security forces.

In a statement, the Istanbul Bar Association denounced the
charges against Carsi as belonging to the “fantasy world” of prosecutors. “What
they are trying to do here is to dilute the concept of a coup in order to spark
fear in people, justify police violence that may occur in the future, and
intimidate a nation. The law cannot be manipulated for such purposes.
Prosecutors’ right to open a case must be restricted by logic and rules of law,”
the statement said.

The charging of the fans follows several ongoing court
proceedings against other protesters in which prosecutors were also seeking
harsh sentences. The cases were being prosecuted by a judiciary that like the
police force in the past year has largely been cleansed of alleged supporters
of Fethullalh Gulen, a frail, self-exiled 73-year old preacher, head of one of
the world’s largest Islamist movements and one time Erdogan ally, whom the
president accuses of seeking to create a parallel state in Turkey.

The legal proceedings in Istanbul and Cairo are part of an
effort by the Egyptian and Turkish governments who despite differences over the
Muslim Brotherhood both see cracking down on militant soccer fans as a pillar
of their campaigns to severely restrict if not outlaw peaceful protest and
dissent.

A vow by Ultras Ahlawy, the militant support group of
Zamalek Cairo rival Al Ahli SC, to force their way into stadia where Egyptian
premier league games are played came a week after they stormed Cairo’s
International Stadium to make their point. It also came as Ultras Nahdawy
(Renaissance Ultras), play a key role in months-long student protests on
university campuses and in local neighbourhoods in the Egyptian capital against
Mr. Al Sisi’s repressive regime and in favour of academic and other freedoms.

Nahdawy, whose name refers to the term used by the
Brotherhood to describe its political and economic program, is the only
militant soccer group that openly identifies itself as political and is not
aligned with a club. The group, formed by Ahlawy and UWK members who
sympathized with the Brotherhood that has been brutally suppressed by the Al
Sisi regime and outlawed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has
since distanced itself from the group. Its leadership consists largely of
university students while its rank and file are often still in high school.

"We took the culture of the ultras in the stadiums and
tried to copy and paste it into the street," a Nahdawy member and Ahli
supporter told The Los Angeles Review of Books.

For a regime that has shown little mercy for its opponents,
the Sisi government has balanced its tacit backing for the legal proceedings
against UWK with a more deft approach to Ahlawy that holds the military and
security forces responsible for the death of more than 70 of its members in a
politically loaded brawl in 2012 in Port Said. The Egyptian Football
Association (EFA) recently postponed a match between Al Ahli and the Port Said’s
Al Masri SC, which haven’t faced off since the worst incident in Egyptian sport
history.

Rather than confronting the ultras when they stormed the
stadium last week, security forces negotiated their departure as well as their
attendance under a temporary lifting of the spectator ban for Ahli’s match
against Ivory Coast’s Sewe Sport The game earned Ahli the African club
championship title. Ahlawy unfolded a huge banner during the match that referring
to the ban asserted “Football is for Fans.”

In a statement on the Facebook page with its 1.1 million
followers Ahlawy said that “the fans have every right to be present in stadiums
and cheer on their teams. Therefore, Ultras Ahlawy group has decided to be
present in the upcoming league games… We will be at Cairo Stadium to support
our team even if we remained separated by a fence. We will no longer watch our
team on television.”

The security forces’ response to Ahlawy’s insistence on
attending matches will serve as a litmus test of whether their decision to
negotiate rather than confront the fans before the African match constituted an
exception in a successful bid to ensure that the game would take place or
whether it signal’s the first softening of Mr. Al Sisi’s policies that have led
to sentencing to death of hundreds of Muslim Brothers, the deaths of more than
1,000 protesters, and the incarceration of tens of thousands of critics of his
regime.

Brutal police action radicalised the ultras in the waning
years of the Mubarak regime and turned stadia into the only battlegrounds on
which his opponents persistently confronted his repressive forces physically.
The rise of the ultras and other militant fan groups not only in Egypt but also
elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa has repeatedly prompted
governments since the popular revolts of 2011 to close stadia to the public. In
an exception to the rule, Algerian authorities have tacitly agreed to allow
fans to vent their pent-up anger and frustration in stadia provided they don’t take
it from there into the streets.

In Turkey, the government has sought to drive a wedge
between militant fans and other supporters by arguing that e-ticketing was a
way to combat illegal ticket scalping, increase tax revenues and ensure that
stadia are safe for families.

To be fair, Turkish stadia have a long history of violence.
A third of Carsi’s original founders have died since the group’s founding in
the early 1980s a violent death. A truce arranged at a gathering of heavily
armed rival supporters after a Besiktas fan was trampled to death in 1991 by
his Galatasaray SK adversaries reduced but did not put an end to the violence.
Two Leeds United fans in Istanbul for their team’s match against Galatasaray
were stabbed to death in 2000 during a soccer riot on Taksim. Stray bullets
fired into the air to celebrate the Turkish team’s victory killed a third
person and wounded four others.

The high stakes battle over e-ticketing goes to the heart of
a struggle for Turkey’s soul that erupted with the mass anti-government Gezi
Park protests in Istanbul in 2013 sparked by Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly
illiberal policies that seek to impose greater control on people’s lives and
restrictions on personal and political freedom and unfettered access to
information. Fans moreover are irked by the president’s manipulation of due process
in what was the most serious match fixing scandal in the history of Turkish
soccer, a run-up to his squashing of an investigation into the most serious
corruption scandal in his career.

Plummeting stadium attendance as a result of the e-ticket
boycott has severely affected ticket sales. A match in October in Istanbul’s
82,000-seat Ataturk Olympic Stadium between Besiktas and Eskeshehirspor Kulubu
that would normally have been attended by some 20- 30,000 spectators drew only
3,000 fans. Ticket sales for Galatasaray matches are down by two thirds with
fans gathering in cafes and homes to watch matches they would have attended in
the past.

The boycott prompted the government to suspend the
e-ticketing system for a friendly in November between Turkey and Brazil. As a
result, sales spiked with more than 40,000 tickets sold for the match shortly
after the suspension.

The boycott, the court cases and the battle for stadium access
all are elements of a struggle by militant soccer fans in Turkey and Egypt for
their existence in an environment in which some, particularly in Egypt, feel
that their options are being cut off with violence one of the few alternatives
left. “If anyone dies it’s a victory, if
anyone goes to jail it’s a victory. And if we go back to the football stadium it’s
the biggest victory for us,” a UWK member told the Los Angeles Review of Books.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the
author of The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer blog
and a forthcoming book with the same title.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Sporticos

Ads

Soccer Results

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer does not promote, link to or provide videos from any online sources who distribute illegal streaming content over the Internet with domains registered in the United States of America

Top 100 Soccer Sites

Subscribe To

Subscribe by Email

About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile