'Covering the “Arab Spring”: Oriental Revolutionaries in the mainstream Western Μedia',
Mirage in the Desert, Ed. by Keeble, R. and Mair, J., London, Abramis, 2011, pp.44-51
This paper argues that Edward Said’s critique of the “Orientalist” bias of dominant Western representations of Arab... more This paper argues that Edward Said’s critique of the “Orientalist” bias of dominant Western representations of Arab cultures is still highly relevant when examining the reporting of the recent uprisings
'The "Anger Revolutions" in the Middle East: an answer to decades of failed reform'
Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 13:2, June 2011, pp.143-156
This article analyses the events of the 'Arab Spring' in their earlier stages. It argues that the popular revolts in... more This article analyses the events of the 'Arab Spring' in their earlier stages. It argues that the popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya possess the hallmarks of what historians would normally describe as 'revolutions', but uses primary evidence to dispute the widespread assertion that these should be explained as 'Facebook revolutions'. The article's core thesis is that the recent uprisings in the Middle East mark the beginning of the end of the postcolonial Arab state.
Download (.jpg) Beyond “Liberal” Female Piety or “Women Read the Qur’an Too” by Amy Levin
Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project
I’m a teacher’s assistant for an undergraduate course at New York University called, “What is Islam?” The other day in... more I’m a teacher’s assistant for an undergraduate course at New York University called, “What is Islam?” The other day in class, my professor asked the students whether or not the Qur’an is considered a “book”. Fraught with anxiety over inheriting such a problematic scholarly tradition of defining and delineating what “religion” is, I kept quiet. While my professor was aiming more for something sounding like, “a book is read, while the Qur’an is recited,” I kept thinking about the physicality and sacrality of the Qur’an (among other authoritative religious texts) and the way it is handled, revered, preserved, loved, an constantly under interpretation. It was about a week later when news broke out that U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan were guilty of burning several copies of the Qur’an on their military base, followed by an unfortunate slew of casualties including at least 30 Afghan deaths and five US soldiers.
[review] Problemen met de civiele maatschappij
Van den Bos, M. 1996. "Problemen met de civiele maatschappij [Civil society problematics]." Review of Norton, Augustus Richard, ed. 1995/1996. Civil Society in the Middle East (Vols. 1 and 2). Soera. Tijdschrift over het Midden-Oosten 4 (2): 38-40.
Manchester City victory threatens to strengthen Middle Eastern autocrats
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four... more
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four decades, has defied warnings that money cannot buy soccer success and set an example for Middle Eastern and North African autocrats and wealthy businessmen who employ the beautiful game to strengthen unpopular regimes in what an Egyptian democracy activist describes as the new opium of the people.
The Premier League title crowns the investment of an estimated $1.5 billion that the Abu Dhabi United Group headed by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan pumped into the club since it acquired the struggling team in 2008. The investment was used to acquire high profile players, including Argentinian Carlos Tevez, Robinho, Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor, Kolo Touré and Joleon Lescott for a total of approximately $330 million.
Funds were poured into upgrading Manchester City’s facilities: a new office block was built with bars and an entertainment arena for supporters; the Carrington training ground was revamped. The club’s stadium was renamed Etihad Stadium after Abu Dhabi’s premier airline signed a ten-year, $475 million sponsorship agreement with Manchester City.
The Guardian sports writer David Conn notes in a book to be published early next month, ‘Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football And Growing Up,’ that the deprived neighbourhoods surrounding the club ‘s stadium have benefitted little if anything from Sheikh Mansour’s largesse.
Nonetheless, Manchester City fans enthusiastically greeted the Middle East’s first acquisition of a major European club, by wearing Arab headdress and waving British pound notes with the picture of the queen replaced by a Gulf sheikh at the team’s first post-acquisition match. A picture in The Guardian this weekend shows Sheikh Mansour’s portrait featuring on a fake GBP 500 billion note that Manchester City supporters waved at fans of rival club Chelsea.
Fans have at times also been willing to accept cultural changes that have accompanied Arab acquisitions in Europe. FC Malaga’s new owner, law by its new owner, Qatari royal Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani, last year replaced bookmaker William Hill Plc the club’s jersey sponsor because gambling is banned under Islamic. United Nations culture agency UNESCO took the place of the bookmaker.
On the other hand, Real Madrid’s recent decision to remove a Christian cross from its official logo in what it described as the cost of doing business in a globalized world has sparked ire, particularly among anti-Muslim right-wingers. The removal came as Real Madrid embarked on the construction of a $1 billion sport tourist resort in the United Arab Emirates scheduled to open in 2015.
Elsewhere, fans have expressed fears that commercial investment such as new funds that invest in players - Dubai’s United Investment Bank last year launched the Middle East’s first alternative investment soccer fund modelled on similar controversial European funds -- undermines a club’s ability to generate funds of its own and often favours vested interests. Opposition last year by fans of Istanbul’s Besiktas to third party acquisition of three Portuguese players -- Hugo Almeida, Simao Sabrosa and Manuel Fernandez -- was fuelled by unsubstantiated suspicions that the fund involved was a front for club president Yildirim Demiroren, a wealthy businessman who had lent the club just under $100 million.
For Middle Eastern and North African autocrats who have long seen support and control of soccer as a tool to improve their tarnished images, divert attention from widespread grievances and manipulate national emotions the message from Manchester City is that investment in soccer pays political dividends, particularly at a time that the region is wracked by popular unrest. The message is likely to reinforce a tendency to hire and fire managers and coaches depending on how a team performs in its last game rather than in a long-term bid to build a squad’s culture and cohesion. Performance on the pitch is reduced to the prestige of a regime or nation in what to autocratic rulers is a zero sum game.
The message threatens to distort a trend towards professionalization, commercialization and the creation of a proper football industry as a key to unlocking economic opportunity in a world where the soccer pitch is often a battlefield for political, ethnic, religious and gender rights that was sparked by Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup.
For many in the region, last year’s Asia Cup final in Doha, in which half of the competing teams hailed from the Middle East with not one reaching the semi-finals, constituted a wake-up call. It is an experience, Middle Eastern and North African leaders and soccer officials do not want repeated at the Qatar World Cup for political reasons as well as a sense of pride and realization of what soccer can do for their prestige as well as that of their nations.
Manchester City’s victory threatens to send out the message that money rather than political reform, divorcing soccer from the political control of often unpopular regimes and building a strong, cohesive team over time can do the trick.
Similarly, for European clubs there is risk inherent in dependency on wealthy benefactors and in association with Middle Eastern autocrats.
Michel Platini, the head of Europe’s soccer body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) warned his week in the wake of the Manchester City title win that that clubs dependant on the largesse of wealthy benefactors could face oblivion if they failed to maintain a realistic level of spending.
Mr. Platini defended UEFA’s new Financial Fair Play rules developed in response to an influx of wealthy club owners that require clubs to balance their soccer-related expenditure over a three-year period by telling Fox Soccer America: “We have to protect the clubs, because until they pay Manchester City will be happy but if they (the owners) leave Manchester City what is going to happen with this club?”
Under the new rules, clubs will initially be allowed to make a loss of $60 million over the first three years, falling to $36 million from 2015–16. Mr. Platini reiterated that despite the Manchester City success, money was not a guarantee. Clubs that violate the Financial Fair Play rules could be excluded from European competitions.
The experience of some European clubs illustrates the risk Mr. Platini was highlighting. Emirati Sheikh Sulaiman Al Fahim , barely three months after acquiring Portsmouth FC several years ago, sold the bulk of his stake to Saudi property tycoon Ali Al-Faraj amid reports that his flagship Hydra Village project in Abu Dhabi was floundering. Mr. Al-Faraj too had no intention of staying involved for long. Soon after the takeover, he announced that he was selling the club. But with no buyer on the horizon, Portsmouth FC went into receivership.
Geneva’s Swiss Super League club Servette FC and Austria’s Admira Wacker haven’t fared much better. Servette is on the brink of collapse after Iranian businessman Majid Pishyar who acquired it in 2008, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Mr. Pishyar, who managed the club on a shoe string, tried unsuccessfully to attract government funding by last year appointing Robert Hensler, a former top civil servant for the canton of Geneva, as vice-president. His earlier efforts to salvage Admira, his first European acquisition, failed too. Servette’s problems come on the heels of the bankruptcy in January of Neuchatel’s Super League team Xamax whose Chechen owner was arrested on charges of fraud and financial mismanagement.
Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak in an interview in
Mr. Conn’s book, an excerpt of which was published in The Guardian this weekend, illustrated the benefits as well as the risks of wealthy ownership. Mr. Al Mubarak expressed surprise at the lack of professional administration that Manchester City’s new owners encountered when they took over the club and described how he had introduced a more professional approach. "One of the big surprises was how amateurish it was. I found it shocking in the famous Premier League, to be without such basic
functions" as a personnel department, he said.
Mr. Al Mubarak appointed former Arsenal winger Brian Marwood as head of administration. Mr. Marwood showed Mr. Conn a 30-page, colour-coded analysis produced by Manchester City's new inter-departmental analytic system for a 15-year-old that was being eyed by the club. For major signings, Mr. Marwood said, the dossiers could run up to 50 pages. Before, he said, "it was in people's heads" Now, it is a spreadsheet that. “that detailed, not left to chance," Mr. Marwood said.
Manchester City is unlikely to be able to comply with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules without Sheikh Mansour. The club’s losses for 2010–11, the year before their finances were assessed under the new regulation, were $294 million, the highest ever by an English football club and five times the total the club is allowed in the coming two years.
In Mr. Conn’s book, Mr. Platini’s concern about an evolving unhealthy relationship between money and soccer seemed lost on Mr. Al Mubarak. “Whichever way I asked Al-Mubarak about the instinctive repulsion many people in football have for this kind of "project" – for a rich man to just buy a club, then pour in as much money as it took to buy success – he did not so much defend what they were doing as fail to understand the question,” Mr. Conn wrote.
“If you said football was not supposed to be about which ‘owner’ had the most money, so who could pay the most to players, thereby seducing them to their club, he (Mr. Al Mubarak) wondered aloud how United had won the Premier League so many times, and how anybody could compete with them without money. If you tried to argue that a club should be a club, belonging to the people who support it, that a sporting competition does not seem sporting if it is owned by one rich man spending whatever it takes to stockpile the necessary mercenary talent, you would be describing an abstract idea with which he was unfamiliar, and which did not match reality as it was, and as it was viewed from Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Conn said.
To Sheikh Masour and Mr. Al Mubarak buying a soccer club may be more fun than the oil and gas industry, the mainstay of Abu Dhabi’s economy, but at the bottom line it remains a business. To them clubs are business. "There is an opportunity we have identified and taken hold of. A mid-tier club will move to become a big club because of the financial resources we are able to make available. Because we see value in making that transition. And that is the bottom line," Mr. Conn quoted Mr. Al Mubarak as saying.
Beyond the financial dependency risk, European acquisition targets also run the risk of being associated with regimes potentially capable of using brute force to suppress popular demands for greater freedom. The UAE has nervously reacted to the mass protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa by cracking down on dissent and freedom of expression at home and investing more than $500 million in the creation of a mercenary force headed by former Blackwater security company head Eric Page for the eventuality of an outbreak of protests at home.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a consultant to geopolitical consulting firm Wikistrat.
The Impact of Semi-Presidentialism on Governance in the Palestinian Authority
Co-authored with Robert Elgie. Published in: Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2010, pp. 22-40.
Divided they stand, divided they fail': opposition politics in Morocco
Published in: Democratization, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2009, pp. 137-156.
A Minority Rule over a Hostile Majority: The Case of Syria
by Oded Haklai
published in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Vol 6: 3 (2000), 19-50.
Holding Back The Flood: Regimes of Censorship in the Middle East & North Africa in Comparative Perspective
by Ed Webb
Global Media Journal (German Edition) Volume 2, No. 1
Spring / Summer 2012
Special issue: Covering the Arab Spring:
Middle East in the Media – the Media in the Middle East
In order to investigate the relationship between censorship and popular uprisings, I survey trends in repression of... more In order to investigate the relationship between censorship and popular uprisings, I survey trends in repression of information across Iran and the Arab states of the Middle East & North Africa over several decades to see if the recent wave of popular mobilization appears to respond to changes in the degree of repression in particular countries. I argue that while the available data is inconclusive, there is little support for the idea that partial liberalization provokes revolutionary outbreaks and conversely some support for high or increasing repression of expression as a contributor to regime-challenging popular mobilization.
Escalation of Social Conflict during Popular Upheavals: Evidence from Bahrain
Central European Journal of Political Science
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Displacement and statecraft in Iraq: Recent trends, older roots.
by Ali Ali
Published in the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Issue 2 (2011).
This article discusses the relationship between state formation and refugees, linking statecraft - the 'art' of state... more This article discusses the relationship between state formation and refugees, linking statecraft - the 'art' of state building - and displacement in post-2003 Iraq. It uses the testimonies of displaced Iraqis now living in Syria to show how parties and militias in Iraq targeted specific groups, including religious minorities such as the Mandaeans. They created new forms of exclusion, forcing some communities to flee. In some cases, they compelled people to leave abruptly; in others, hostile forces gradually encroached upon the target groups. Some organizations had their origins in pre-2003 dynamics and were not the first in Iraq to use displacement as a means to implement a political design.
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Yemen’s Arab Spring: From Youth Revolution to Fragile Political Transition
by Tobias Thiel
LSE Ideas Special Report: After the Arab Spring: Power Shift in the Middle East?
In February 2012, Yemen’s revolutionary movement achieved its first victory: the removal of President Ali Abdullah... more In February 2012, Yemen’s revolutionary movement achieved its first victory: the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. However, the co-option of the movement by Yemen’s key powerbrokers, regional insurgencies and daunting economic challenges threaten to squander the opportunity to repair Yemen’s failing social contract. Stabilisation efforts, though indispensible, must not come at the expense of a democratic and civic state.
Egyptian military’s loss of popularity brings ultras in from the cold
By James M. Dorsey
It took Egypt’s military brass less than six months to first isolate street-battle... more
By James M. Dorsey
It took Egypt’s military brass less than six months to first isolate street-battle hardened soccer fans, the country’s most militant opponents of military rule, and then restore their waning popularity amid mushrooming protests demanding an immediate return of the armed forces to their barracks and a transition to civilian government.
The ultras– militant, highly politicized, violence-prone soccer fans modeled on similar groups in Italy and Serbia – chanting "Where are the Baltagiya (thugs)? The Revolutionaries are here" and “Tantawi is Mubarak,” joined this weekend thousands of protesters in a confrontation with security forces in Cairo near the defense ministry.
The timing of the protest could not have been more symbolic – the 84th birthday of ousted President Hosni Mubarak with whom the protesters have come to equate Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
The health ministry said a soldier was killed and more than 400 people injured in clashes between the protesters and security forces barely three weeks before the first scheduled presidential elections since the toppling of Mubarak more than a year ago. A group of doctors aiding wounded protesters said two demonstrators had died of shotgun wounds.
The government declared a night curfew in the area around the defense ministry in Cairo’s Al Abbasiya neighborhood. Similar protests occurred in other Egyptian cities, including Alexandria and Suez. An effort by protesters to defy the curfew was repelled in part by residents of Abbasiya, a stronghold of support for Mubarak and the military.
The joining of forces of Salafists – proponents of return to life as it was at the time of the Prophet Mohammed --, Islamists, youth and left wing groups and ultras in their demand for an end to military rule in defiance of a warning by SCAF that it would not tolerate protests near the defense ministry or military facilities symbolizes the military’s misreading of the public mood.
The coming together of protesters of all walks of life was a far cry from the scene in late November and early December when protesters on Tahrir Square first called on the ultras to protect them against attacks by security forces but then abandoned them as they fought vicious street battles with the police in a street just off the square. Some 50 people were killed at the time in the fighting and more than a thousand wounded.
The then isolation of the youth groups and ultras – respected for their years of resistance in the stadiums to Mubarak’s brutal security forces and celebrated for their key role in toppling the hated leader -- reflected growing protest weariness at a time that the public retained confidence in the military despite its brutality, was frustrated by the lack of economic fruits of their popular revolt and longed for a return to normalcy that would put Egypt back on the path of economic growth.
The ultras’ increasing marginalization was evident in their lonely battle in recent months to demand justice for the 74 soccer fans killed in early February in a soccer brawl in Port Suez, the worst incident in Egyptian sporting history that was widely seen as an effort by the security forces to teach the militants a lesson.
Security forces failed to intervene in the brawl in which pro-government thugs armed with sticks and knives were believed to have been involved. The government has charged 61 people, including nine security officials, with responsibility for the incident. The incident led to the cancellation of this season’s top two soccer competitions. A majority of the dead were supporters of Al Ahly SC, Egypt and Africa’s foremost soccer club.
A series of unpopular measures widely seen as an effort by the military to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election to ensure that a civilian-led Egypt is governed by a president and government sympathetic to safeguarding the role of the armed forces in politics and its stake in the economy and shield them from external oversight has over the past week brought protesters back in to the streets in ever growing numbers.
The measures included the banning of popular Islamist politicians and others from standing for president and culminated in an attack by thugs on anti-military protesters last Wednesday that left 11 people dead, some of them shot, others reportedly with their throats slit. Like in the case of Port Said, few doubt that the military at the very least had turned a blind eye to aggression by unidentified pro-regime thugs.
The mounting tension has strengthened the resolve of the ultras to force justice for their fallen comrades in Port Said and press for an end to military rule. In a show of unity in March, ultras of crowned Cairo arch rivals Ahly and Al Zamalek SC warned that they would sacrifice their lives to achieve their goals.
The statement at the end of a historic meeting between the two groups who have bitterly fought each other since their inception in 2007 suggested a sea change in Egypt’s soccer politics and a cementing of relationships among rival groups that have the organization and street battle experience to turn the military’s effort to mold Egypt in its image into a bitter and bloody struggle.
State-owned Al Ahram newspaper warned earlier this year that the ultras were “a time bomb ticking due to lack of justice for fallen comrades following the Port Said disaster.”
In a statement almost two months after the Port Said incident, Ultras Ahlawy said: “You can call us thugs, you can call us crazy, but we will be crazy to regain our rights, either through legal avenues or with our bare hands. We are ready to die for our rights; we are ready to add to the toll of 74 deaths.”
The ultras bring to the demonstrations against the military in Al Abbasiya the same degree of fearlessness, recklessness and abandon that they brought to last year’s mass protests on Tahrir Square that forced Mubarak to resign after 30 years in office.
"The government has turned the ultras into their enemy. That was a mistake. The ultras are passionate; they don’t have a specific agenda and don’t want to be labeled politically. They go into battle with abandon impervious to what it may produce,” said Mohammed Gamal Bashir aka Gemyhood, a founder of the UWK and author of a recent Arabic-language book about the ultras who is widely seen as the movement’s Egyptian godfather.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Siria y la posibilidad de la intervención
Reflexión acerca de las prácticas intervencionistas en torno al conflicto en Siria Reflexión acerca de las prácticas intervencionistas en torno al conflicto en Siria
Toplumsal Hareketler ve Yeni Alternatif - Radikal Medyalar
by barış çoban
Yeditepe Üniversitesi İletişim Çalışmaları Dergisi 2011, no:14
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Conflicting visions of society spark Israeli and Egyptian soccer violence
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli... more
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.
The stakes for Egyptian and Israeli soccer fans are high – the nature of the society they want to live in and in some cases the very existence of some of their financially troubled clubs – even if the two groups are likely to agree on little more than their passion for the game.
For militant Egyptian soccer fans the battle is about securing the goals of last year’s popular uprising that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ending military rule and saving clubs from financial ruin as a result of initial suspension and ultimate cancellation of Egypt’s top two tournaments. A majority of Egyptian fans, who favor a more pro-Palestinian Egyptian foreign policy, have little empathy for their Israeli counterparts whom they see as thugs, many of whom are racists with their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants attitudes.
The Egyptian view is not unfounded even if leaders of the Egyptian ultras – militant, highly politicized, street battle-hardened fan groups modeled on similar organizations in Italy and Serbia – are struggling to keep their rank and file whose cry for dignity is often expressed in clashes with security forces under control.
Israeli soccer brawls over the past month ranged from pure hooliganism and violent clashes between players to attacks on Palestinians and more moderate Jews outside the confines of the stadium. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday called for a crackdown on violence on the soccer field, after fighting broke out on Friday between players of Hapoel Ramat Gan and Bnei Lod. "If there's violence, there will not be soccer. We must uproot this violence in order to return to games that spectators can enjoy, myself among them,” Mr. Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting according to The Jerusalem Post.
The incident in Ramat Gan followed thousands of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans rioting on the pitch after their team lost to Maccabi Tel Aviv.
A few days later, two fans of Maccabi Petach Tikvah attempted to attack a referee. In late March a Hapoel Haifa player was hospitalized after being headbutted by a Maccabi Petach Tikvah coach and then kicked in the head by a team associate. The two most onerous incidents involved militant anti-Arab fans of financially troubled Beitar Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s notorious club, in which supporters first attacked Palestinian workers and shoppers in a Jerusalem mall and later a Jewish woman who protested against their racist attitude. Police were severely criticized for failing to intervene in the mall attack.
The situation in nationalist Israel and post-Egypt could not be more different the laxity of the Israeli police notwithstanding. Yet, they are similar when it comes to the lack of political will on both sides of the Egyptian-Israeli divide to tackle soccer violence as well as governments’ failure to create an environment in which politically motivated violence is viewed as unacceptable. To be sure, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has responded firmly to player violence but despite being the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched an anti-racist campaign has been lenient in meting out punishments for politically motivated violence.
The IFA last month significantly reduced Beitar's punishment for soccer violence from three home games out of town and one behind partly closed doors to on the grounds that the measure would not change fan behavior. With the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League, Beitar has faced since 2005 more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including point deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racism.
Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians. Supported by Israeli right wing leaders, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Beitar is Israel’s only leading club never to have signed an Israeli Palestinian player because of fan pressure despite the fact that Palestinians are among the country’s top players.
By contrast, Egyptian teams already reeling from the cancellation of the Premier League in February following the death of 74 fans in a brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said fear financial disaster as a result of Sunday’s looming annulment of the Egypt Cup. The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) has appealed to the country’s military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to step in after a refusal by the interior ministry, which controls the police and the security forces. The refusal was prompted by the security forces’ reluctance to engage with deeply hostile, militant soccer fans because clashes would further damage their already tarnished image as the executioners of the former Mubarak regime and the military.
The military and the police have done little in the 14 months since Mubarak’s departure to polish the image of the security forces by projecting a willingness to reform the police, holding officers accountable for their actions and being seen to investigate the Port Said incident that allows the chips to fall where they fall. The trial against 61, people including fans and nine security officials, accused of responsibility for Port Said was suspended at its opening last week after disruptions by family and friends of the dead.
Police reform is a tough pill to swallow for the Egyptian military. The military “find themselves in a classic Catch-22 situation with regards to police reform. If they listen to the aspirations of the people and fully reform the police, they lose a valuable tool of state control. Should reform take place, where would the buck stop? Real reform in state institutions might later have personal ramifications for SCAF itself, as Egyptians are already calling for civilian control over the military, which may lead to investigations of the military junta down the line. On the other hand, should SCAF choose not to fully reform the police, they risk continued clashes with the people, who no longer fear the police - and consider it one of the last remaining bastions of the old regime,” said Adel Abdel Ghafar, a PhD scholar at the Australian National University and scion of a prominent Egyptian soccer figure, writing on Al Jazeera.com.
Granted, the Israeli police does not have the problems of their Egyptian counterpart. But if the stakes in Egypt are a more transparent, more accountable society, in Israel they are the very democracy that the Jewish state prides itself on, which increasingly is less based on tolerance and respect for diverging opinions and ethnic and religious minorities and ever more so on intolerance and the brutalizing effects of 45 years of occupation of Palestinian lands.
Violence in Israel is not limited to the soccer pitch. A senior Israeli military officer was celebrated by Israel’s right wing after attacking on camera a bicycle protester on the West Bank on camera in the same week as the Ramat Gan incident. Youths on a Tel Aviv beach taunted and abused a mentally disturbed woman inviting her to have sex with them.
The battles in Egypt and Israel are fought on multiple battlefields of which soccer is an important one. That puts the onus not only on governments but also on soccer associations, club management and last but not least world soccer body FIFA, which so far for all practical matters has looked the other way by at best issuing lame protests that Israelis and Egyptians can ignore because there is no price to pay.
With an inept military more concerned about its perks than the country’s future in charge in Egypt and an Israeli government that includes many Beitar Jerusalem supporters, little can be expected beyond at best demands for law enforcement from the highest authority in the country.
That means that the national soccer federations, FIFA and the regional associations, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the Confederation of African Football (CAF), more than ever need to step up to the plate.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
America: An Empire In Decline (Part 3)
by Devon DB
Current foreign policy under the Obama administration is examined (from the Cheonan incident to the Arab Spring) and... more Current foreign policy under the Obama administration is examined (from the Cheonan incident to the Arab Spring) and there is a brief examination of what may lay in store for America's future.
The post-14/02 Bahrain: a state in the remaking?
Presented at the 13th Mediterranean Research Meeting 2012, European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 21-24 March 2012