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.
Housing the Foreign. A European's Exotic Home in Late 19th-Century Beirut
in: Thomas Philipp, Jens Hanssen, Stefan Weber (eds.): The Empire in the City. Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, (Beiruter Texte und Studien; 88), Beirut: OIB & Würzburg: Ergon 2002, S. 105-127.
Turkey and Tehran: Caught between a rock and a hard place
Turkish Review
BY JAMES DORSEY, S. RAJARATNAM SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL... more
Turkish Review
BY JAMES DORSEY, S. RAJARATNAM SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY, SINGAPORE
Turkey’s besting Iran in the contest for the hearts and minds of advocates of change in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa is proving to be both a blessing and a curse. With tension mounting over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the
perceived window of opportunity for a military strike closing, Turkey faces increased challenges and the threat of a proxy war with Syria and the Islamic republic. This is compounded by the fact that the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia need Turkey in their
effort to further corner the regime in Syria and to isolate Iran, but want to prevent a shift in regional power away from the kingdom and the Israeli state to Ankara -- increasingly held up as the model of an economically successful, Islamist-led democracy.
A concerted effort by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia to further isolate Iran has laid bare the challenges facing Turkey against the backdrop of an ever more severe sanctions regime, increased debate regarding a military strike to prevent the Islamic
republic from developing a nuclear weapon and popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
The challenges are evident in the anti-Iranian campaign’s little noticed subtext, with the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel seeking to prevent a shift of power in the region from Israel and the Gulf to Turkey and Iran. All three see benefit in Turkey’s rising star as a result of its emotional support for Palestine, its deteriorating relations with its erstwhile ally Israel, its perceived support for the Arab revolt, an impressive economic performance and the fact that it is ruled by an elected Islamist government. (The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), despite its Islamist origins nd appeal as well as a continued widespread perception of the party as Islamist, rejects this label, arguing that it has put its Islamist past behind it.) However, the trio does not want Turkey’s ascendance to be at the expense of either the kingdom or the Jewish state.
Turkey has so far largely been shielded from criticism that it, like the US, is seeking to maintain the status quo in the Gulf and has failed to match words with deeds in its condemnation of the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters,
one which has already cost more than 5,000 lives. The veil shrouding contradictions in Turkish -- as well as US, Israeli and Saudi -- policy could well soon be lifted, with Syria emerging as a crucial flashpoint in the mushrooming power struggle in the Middle \ East \ and North Africa (MENA). Increasingly it is looking like a matter of when rather than if the wave of protests truly spreads to the energy-rich Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia first and foremost among them.
The gradual morphing of the 11-month old Syrian protests into a civil war, much as was the case in Libya, leaves Turkey stuck between a rock and a hard place. With little appetite for military intervention despite its support of the revolt and warnings
that there would be consequences if Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad failed to engage with his detractors and initiate political and economic reform, Turkey risks being perceived as a paper tiger. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu insisted
Turkey was “ready for all possible scenarios” but had as yet not considered military intervention and didn’t want to. Similarly, he suggested that Turkey could create a military buffer zone within Syria, should tens of thousands of Syrians seek refuge in
Turkey, all the while insisting that such a zone was “not on the agenda.” This reluctance to put its money where its mouth is from Turkey is not a stance it is likely to be able to maintain for much longer, with the failure of Arab League monitors in
Syria, tightening economic sanctions and an Arab League-backed move to get UN Security Council endorsement of its call for al-Assad to step down.
Turkey could end up in the same boat as the US, which has seen its influence and credibility in MENA wane because of its inability to match its words with deeds. Despite its denunciations of al-Assad, Turkey has -- like the US -- remained silent on the need
for change in the Gulf.Like the US it has a vested interest in ensuring that the revolt does not hit the region, Saudi Arabia in particular, with full force.
Consequently, the struggle of US President Barack Obama is one Turkey may well face.The US administration is finding it difficult to wield its influence in a region with a more
assertive Arab public opinion, one demanding that Washington make good on its promises in terms of both the revolution and declared support for an independent Palestinian state.
Obama’s inability to do so, particularly in an election year, means that the US is finding it increasingly hard to perform its past balancing of diametrically opposed demands and
expectations from its allies in the Middle East and North Africa. US support for the toppling of leaders like Egypt’s Gen. Hosni Mubarak has damaged its ties to key autocratic
allies like Saudi Arabia, while the need to be seen to be make real steps in furthering Palestinian independence threatens to put it on a collision course with Israel.
Turkey’s potential policy dilemma is complicated by continued fallout from the 2010 killing by Israeli Special Forces of nine Turkish nationals aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish aid ship seeking to run Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Israel imposed its naval blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007, with Tel Aviv saying it was necessary to prevent weapons being supplied to
militants in the strip. Critics of the sea and land blockade describe it as collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
Turkey has painted itself into a corner with its refusal to reverse the downgrading of diplomatic relations with Israel to the level of second secretary and the suspension of all military cooperation. Ankara is adamant that these measures will continue as long
as Israel fails to apologize or offer compensation for the death of the Turkish activists,and maintains its blockade of Gaza. Short term, Turkey’s attitude has garnered it popular support across the Arab and Muslim world, but longer term it has complicated
Turkey’s efforts to shield itself from being drawn into the region’s multiple conflicts.
Turkey’s stance on Israel means it has little (if any) ability to bring Israel and Iran back from the brink of a military confrontation at a time that escalating tension between the two countries threatens to impair Turkey’s efforts to project itself as a regional Islamic,democratic, economic and military power.
While Turkish defense and military officials have little doubt that Israel would prevail in a military confrontation with Iran, even if it is unlikely to fully destroy Iran’s decentralized and heavily fortified nuclear facilities, they worry that likely Iranian retaliatory attacks against Israel, as well as against US targets in the Gulf and
Afghanistan, would escalate confrontation with Iran. As a result, members of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AK Party have criticized him for responding emotionally to Israeli policies. While they remain critical of Tel Aviv, they have urged
Erdoğan to repair relations with Israel in a bid to ensure that Turkey can truly act as a bridge across the West-East divide as well as MENA’s fault lines. The key to Turkey’s role may indeed lie partially in Israel, but Turkey has only a limited window of opportunity to keep the door open as Western nations and Israel increasingly rattle their sabers.
In the event of a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, any effort by Ankara to remain on the sidelines risks Turkey’s being portrayed in Tel Aviv and Washington as having not only turned on Israel -- often a yardstick in the West for assessing Turkish foreign policy -- but also sided with the enemy. Already
Tehran eyes Ankara’s condemnation of al-Assad, as well as its mounting popularity in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf, with suspicion. Tehran views these developments as a US-Saudi conspiracy designed to prevent the
Islamic Revolution of over 30 years ago getting the credit it deserves as an inspiration for the Arab revolt and to stymie the appeal of the Islamic republic for states in the turbulent region.
In a series of messages, Iranian leaders warned Turkey that Turkish support for an international campaign against Syria, the Islamic republic’s foremost Arab ally, and Syrian opposition groups would constitute a red line -- warnings Turkey has so far
ignored. Without Syria, Iran would be left only with Iraq as its foremost interlocutor in the Arab world. Iraq lacks Syria’s relationship with groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Hamas in Palestine and is unlikely to be as compliant and strategic a friend as Syria is. Turkey compounded Iran’s narrowing options by not only setting its warnings
aside but going a step further with its agreement to install on Turkish soil a NATO radar system believed to constitute a shield against Iranian ballistic missiles. In recent weeks, it has also started looking at reducing its dependence on imports of Iranian oil as Western powers crack down on Iran’s oil sales and the Islamic republic threatens to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Turkey sought to soften the blow by suggesting that majority state-owned Halkbank would continue to handle Iranian oil payments as long as that does not run afoul of the sanctions regime.
Turkish officials and analysts fear that mounting tension with Iran could produce a covert proxy war, with Iran and Syria supporting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has stepped up attacks on Turkish military targets in the southeast of the country.Syria and Iran have already halted their security cooperation with Turkey with regard to the Kurds. Conservative Iranian columnists have denounced Erdoğan’s government in
recent months as a Sunni Muslim dictatorship that does not represent half the country’s population -- a reference to Turkey’ large Kurdish and Alevi communities. They warned that Turkey’s minorities constituted its Achilles’ heel and a potentially destabilizing factor.
In a strange twist, Iranian soccer, pockmarked by nationalist and environmental protests in Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province, offers a perspective of how Turkey could respond in a proxy war with Syria and Iran -- one using ethnic minorities as pawns. The soccer protests in the Bagh Shomal and Yadegar-e-Emam stadiums in Tabriz, the capital of the province, signal a rise in Azeri nationalism. This trend would enable Turkey to exploit
secessionist sentiments among its Turkic brethren in the predominantly Azeri East Azerbaijan Province, which borders the Turkic former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, a close Turkish ally.
In the latest soccer incident in Tabriz, fans of Tabriz soccer club Tractor Sazi Tabriz F.C. -- a focus of Iranian Azerbaijan’s identity politics owned by the state-run Iran Tractor Manufacturing Co. (ITMCO) -- wore shirts bearing Turkey and Azerbaijan’s flags and
raised the latter emblem during a match against Fajr-e Sepasi F.C. of Shiraz. “[The] Iranian regime will […] charge them with separatism and even arrest them. The main [Iranian concern] is that the idea of Turkism is strengthening in South Azerbaijan,”
Azeri news website news.az quoted Saftar Rahimli, a member of the board of the World Azerbaijanis Congress, as saying. Rahimli was referring to the East Azerbaijan Province by its nationalist Azeri name.
A conservative, pro-Iranian website, Raja News, confirmed the incident in November, charging that the soccer fans had employed “separatist symbols” and shouted separatist
slogans during the match. Raja News accused the fans of promoting “pan-Turkish” and “deviant” objectives. It urged authorities to ban nationalist fans from entering soccer
stadiums.
The protests during the match against the Shiraz-based club followed similar protests in September and October sparked by the Iranian parliament’s refusal to fund efforts to save
the threatened Lake Orumiyeh and by anti-government protests in Tehran’s Azadi Stadium.The latter occurred both during last month’s 2014 World Cup qualifier against Bahrain and
at a ceremony in May following the death of Nasser Hejazi, an internationally acclaimed Iranian defender and outspoken critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A decision by security forces in early October to bar fans’ entry into the stadium during a match against Tehran’s Esteghlal sent thousands into the streets of Tabriz shouting “Azerbaijan is united!” and “Long live united Azerbaijan with its capital in Tabriz!” Scores were injured as security forces tried to break up the protest. Cars honking their horns choked traffic.
“Wherever Tractor goes, fans of the opposing club chant insulting slogans. They imitate the sound of donkeys, because Azerbaijanis are historically derided as stupid and stubborn.
I remember incidents going back to the time that I was a teenager,” said a long-standingobserver of Iranian soccer.
Mounting Iran-focused tension serves, at least in the case of Israel and Saudi Arabia, multiple purposes that go beyond the nuclear threat. It puts Turkey on the spot and shifts
attention away from the wave of revolts sweeping MENA.
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. This story first appeared in Turkish Review
Sayyida Zaynab in the State of Exception: Shiʿi Sainthood as “Qualified Life" in Contemporary Syria
by Edith Szanto
International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 no. 2 (2012): 285-299.
According to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law,... more According to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee camp cum shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure of homo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (or zoē) in states of exception.
UAE cancels soccer match amid mounting tension with Iran
By James M. Dorsey
Increasingly strained relations between Iran and oil-rich Arab Gulf states spilled on to... more
By James M. Dorsey
Increasingly strained relations between Iran and oil-rich Arab Gulf states spilled on to the soccer pitch this weekend with the United Arab Emirates cancelling a friendly match against the Islamic republic and recalling its ambassador in Tehran.
The move against the backdrop of a war of words between Iran and Qatar and a regional battle for influence with Saudi Arabia was in protest against a controversial visit by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to two disputed islands in the Gulf 60 kilometres off the UAE coast, Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Iran occupied the two potentially oil-rich islands as well as a third one, Abu Musa, located near key shipping routes at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz in 1971 on the eve of the formation of the UAE as an independent state. The visit was part of tour by Mr. Ahmadinejad of the Iranian Gulf coast. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if Iran or the United States were to attack its nuclear facilities.
The UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahayan denounced the visit as a "flagrant violation of the UAE's sovereignty'". His ministry said the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman would meet on Tuesday, the day the match was scheduled to be played, to discuss the Iranian president's visit. The UAE immediately after cancelling the soccer match withdrew its ambassador from Teheran.
Iranian soccer officials said they would file a protest against the cancellation of the match that with world governing soccer body FIIFA. They noted that Nigeria was ordered to pay $300,000 to the Iranian football federation after cancelling in 2010 a friendly against the Islamic republic on political grounds.
It is not immediately clear why Mr. Ahmadinejad chose to provoke the UAE at a moment that Iran is engaged in six-party talks about its nuclear program in a bid to weaken international sanctions and reduce the risk of an Israeli and/or US military strike. A second round of the talks which resumed in Istanbul this weekend for the first time in more than a year is scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad.
The UAE last year emerged in remarks made by its ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, as the first Gulf state to publicly endorse military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, should peaceful efforts to resolve the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program fail. The UAE at the time also restricted Iran’s use of Dubai to imports goods sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States. The ambassador's remarks reflected the Emirates' mounting frustration with Iran’s refusal to resolve the dispute over the islands.
Mr. Otaiba described a nuclear-armed Iran as the foremost threat to the UAE, and one that needed to be neutralized at whatever cost. His remarks suggested that in case of military action, the UAE would prefer a US to an Israeli strike because that was less likely to fuel popular anger, particularly among Shiites, at a time of widespread civil unrest in the Middle East and North AFRICA
Mr. Otaiba described the UAE as the country most threatened by Iran. Contrasting the threat against the UAE with the danger a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the US, Mr. Otaiba said that a nuclear Iran would “threaten the peace process, it will threaten balance of power, it will threaten everything else, but it will not threaten you. . . . Our military . . . wakes up, dreams, breathes, eats, sleeps the Iranian threat. It's the only conventional military threat our military plans for, trains for, equips for. . . . There's no country in the region that is a threat to the UAE [besides] Iran."
Satellite imagery last year revealed Iranian installations on Abu Musa that included three missile launch pads, an elaborate underground market, and a sports field with the words “Persian Gulf” emblazoned on it -- a provocative reminder of Iran’s hegemonic view of a region the Gulf states describe as the Arab Gulf. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Zayed last year stopped short of comparing Iran’s occupation of the islands to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. “Iran refuses to allow us to send teachers, doctors and nurses. I am not comparing Iran to Israel, but Iran should be more careful than others,” Sheikh Zayed said.
The UAE has worked to ensure that its security is closely linked to U.S. and European security interests. French President Nicolas Sarkozy last year inaugurated in Abu Dhabi France’s first military base in the region. The base, which comprises three sites on the banks of the Strait of Hormuz, houses a naval and air base as well as a training camp, and is home to 500 French troops. Alongside other smaller Gulf states, the UAE has further agreed to the deployment of U.S. anti-missile batteries on its territory. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to spend up to $100 billion on arms procurement in the next five years.
With his remarks, Mr. Otaiba signalled further that the UAE was willing to pay a price for stopping Iranian nuclear proliferation, and could afford to do so now that Abu Dhabi had cemented its predominance among the UAE emirates following the financial crisis in Dubai.
“There will be backlash, and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and [being] very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country,” Mr. Otaiba said. “That is going to happen no matter what.”
But he added, “If you are asking me, 'Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran,' my answer is still the same: We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.”
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.
call for papers-Metamorphosis of the Arab World-Political Geography and Alternative Maps
by barış çoban
Metamorphosis of The Arab World:
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Editors: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
The so-called "Arab Spring", recent social movements in the Arab world, which can also be described as the "return of the oppressed", have attracted international attention on the Middle East and Arab world. The Middle East, North Africa and Turkey have been profoundly affected by this political and social metamorphosis. The objective of this project is to discuss “metamorphosis of the Arab world” in the context of international relations, politics, sociology, economics and communications and so on by the contribution of several academicians, researchers, politicians and journalists.
The geography of the Arab world is in a process of metamorphosis and consequently traditional structure of the Arab world, its power structure, power relations, politics and social relations have been fluctuated by the hand of the global super power(s). In fact, “All that is solid melts into air", this expression summarizes clearly what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa. The possible outcomes and/or result of this ongoing process are vague, and it needs to be discussed with its all aspects.
As a result, our focus is on “metamorphosis” of the Middle East and the Arab world, since it simultaneously means “metamorphosis” of the world. This book project aims to address and discuss transformation and subsequent reformation of societies and changes in the political geographies and mental maps of the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey from past to present with a multi-voice and multi-layer approach.
(Papers can be submitted in English, French and Turkish)
Deadline for Abstracts: June 10, 2012
Deadline for Full Paper: December 25, 2012
(Please use APA style)
E-mail:
barishc@gmail.com
baris.erdogan1974@hotmail.com,
Editors:
Barış Çoban (Assoc. Prof. Dr., Department of Communication Studies, Dogus University, Turkey)
Barış Erdoğan (Assist Prof. Dr., Department of Political Sciences, Yeni Yuzyil University, Turkey)
Métamorphose du monde arabe:
Géographie politique et des cartes alternatives
Editeurs: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
Les mouvenents sociaux recents apparus dans une large partie du monde arabe, appellés communement «printemps arabe», peuvent également être décrit comme le «retour de l'opprimé», ont attiré l'attention internationale sur le Moyen-Orient et le monde arabe. Le Moyen-Orient, l'Afrique du Nord et la Turquie ont été profondément touchés par cette métamorphose politique et sociale. L'objectif de ce projet est de discuter «la métamorphose du monde arabe » dans le contexte des relations internationales, politique, sociologie, économie et communication et ainsi de suite par les biais de la contribution de plusieurs universitaires, chercheurs, politiciens et journalistes.
La géographie du monde arabe est dans un processus de métamorphose et par conséquent la structure traditionnelle du monde arabe, sa structure de pouvoir, les relations de pouvoir, la politique et les relations sociales se sont gravement écroulés par la main de la(des) puissance(s) mondiale(s). En fait, «Tout ce qui est solide se dissout dans l'air", cette expression résume bien ce qui se passe au Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord. Les résultats possible et / ou résultat de ce processus en cours sont vagues, et ils doivent être discuté dans tous ses aspects.
Par conséquent, nous nous concentrons sur la métamorphose du Moyen-Orient et du monde arabe, puisqu'elle constitue à la fois la métamorphose du monde. Ce projet a pour objectif d'aborder et discuter de la transformation et la réforme de ces sociétés ainsi que les modifications de la géographie politique et cartes mentales du Moyen-Orient , de l'Afrique du Nord et de la Turquie du passé au présent, avec un multi-voix et une approche multicouche.
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Articles
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Editeurs :
Dr. Barış Çoban, maitre de conférence, le département de communication, l’Universite de Doğuş, Turquie.
Dr. Barış ERDOGAN, maitre de conférence adjoint, le département des relations internationales l’Université de Yeni Yüzyıl, Turquie.
Arap Dünyasının Dönüşümü:
Siyasetin Coğrafyası ve Alternatif Haritalar
Editörler: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
Arap ülkelerinde yaşanan ve “Arap Baharı” olarak adlandırılan, “bastırılmış olanın geri döndüğü” kitle hareketleri sonrasında tüm dünyanın gözü yeniden Ortadoğu ve diğer Arap ülkelerine odaklandı. Ortadoğu, Kuzey Afrika ve Türkiye yaşanan siyasal ve toplumsal bu dönüşümden derin bir biçimde etkilenmekte. Bu sürecin uluslararası ilişkiler, siyaset, sosyoloji, ekonomi ve iletişim vb. alanları bağlamında tartışılmasını amaçlayan bu kitap projesi, farklı disiplinlerden akademisyen, araştırmacı, siyasetçi ve gazetecilerin katkılarından oluşacaktır.
Söz konusu coğrafyada bir yılı aşkın bir süredir küresel iktidar(lar)ın da farklı biçimlerde müdahil olduğu toplumsal hareketler geleneksel iktidar yapılarını, siyaset biçimlerini ve toplumsal ilişkileri parçalamakta. Ortadoğu ve Kuzey Afrika’da “katı olan her şey buharlaşmakta”. Bu coğrafyada kurulma aşamasında olan yeni düzende siyasi ve sosyal aktörlerin bu buharlaşmanın ardından nasıl bir katılaşma süreci izleyeceği ise şimdilik belirsiz ve üzerinde çok boyutlu olarak düşünülmesi gereken bir konu.
Sonuç olarak, odak noktamız Ortadoğu’nun ve Arap Dünyasının dönüşümüdür, çünkü bu dönüşüm eşzamanlı olarak dünyanın dönüşümüdür. Bu kitap projesi Ortadoğu, Kuzey Afrika ve Türkiye coğrafyası bağlamında tarihten günümüze siyasal ve zihinsel haritaların değişimi ve toplumların dönüşümünü çoksesli, çok katmanlı bir yaklaşımla ele almayı ve tartışmayı amaçlamaktadır.
(Makaleler Türkçe, İngilizce, Fransızca dillerinde yazılabilir)
Makale Başlığı ve Özeti Gönderimi Son Tarih: 10 Haziran 2012
Tamamlanmış Makale Gönderimi Son Tarih: 25 Aralık 2012
(Makaleler APA formatına göre yazılacaktır.)
İletişim:
barishc@gmail.com
baris.erdogan1974@hotmail.com
(Barış Çoban, Doç. Dr. Doğuş Üniversitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, İletişim Bilimleri Bölümü)
(Barış Erdoğan, Yrd. Doç. Dr., Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi, İktisadi İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü)
call for papers-
Metamorphosis of the Arab World-
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Metamorphosis of the Arab World-
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Métamorphose du monde arabe:
Géographie politique et des cartes alternatives
Arap Dünyasının Dönüşümü:
Siyasetin Coğrafyası ve Alternatif Haritalar
Download (.doc) Egyptian feminists challenge militant soccer fan chauvinism
By James M. Dorsey
An Egyptian feminist group has challenged militant soccer fans that played a key role in... more
By James M. Dorsey
An Egyptian feminist group has challenged militant soccer fans that played a key role in toppling president Hosni Mubarak to recognise women's rights to unrestricted protest.
The challenge exposes conservatism that is deeply rooted in Egyptian society and cuts across ideological, cultural and religious fault lines. It lays bare differing interpretations of concepts such as diversity, freedom and faith and highlights a battle by women who were prominent in the campaign to overthrow Mr. Mubarak to have their rights recognised in post-revolt Egypt.
The women confront a conservatism that pervades the Middle East and North Africa as illustrated by the recent creation of a soccer league in the United Arab Emirates that allows women to play behind closed doors in the absence of men as well as Saudi Arabia's struggle with the International Olympic Committee's demand that it include women among its athletes at this year's London Olympics.
UAE and Kuwaiti royals joined prominent foreign representatives this week at a two day conference to encourage women’s participants in sports and the launch of the Fatima Bint Mubarak Women's Sports Awards, named after the third wife of the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who heads the Family Development Foundation.
Egyptian women are battling to have their rights acknowledged on two fronts: recognition by their often socially conservative revolutionary male counterparts as well as Egypt's post-Mubarak military rulers who have systematically humiliated detained women protesters by subjecting them to virginity tests. A court this week acquitted a military doctor who conducted the tests.
More secular Egyptian women fear that the rise of Islamists further threatens achievement of their rights. Islamists have dissolved the Women's Council, charging that it was a creation of Suzanne Mubarak, the ousted president's widely despised wife. Islamist members of parliament have also proposed the establishment of a family ministry that would operate in accordance with Islamic law and roll back legal advances introduced by the Mubarak regime.
The feminists issued their challenge in response to a decision by the ultras -- militant, highly politicised, soccer fans -- to allow women to participate in their 16-day old sit-in in front of parliament only during daytime and to ban them at night starting from 22:00.
The ultras are demanding justice for 74 of their comrades who died in a soccer brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said that they believe was instigated by the government in retaliation for their role in the ousting of Mr. Mubarak and their militant opposition to his military successors.
In a statement quoted on the Egyptian news website Bikya Masr, the Independent Egyptian Women's Union said that those "who carry the flame of liberty against the oppressive powers should respect it first." They said that their understanding of diversity and faith ruled out restricting women's right to protest.
The battle for women's rights is one that is being waged by different women's groups -- secular and religious -- whose definition of women’s rights varies both among Middle Eastern and North African groups as well as Western ones.
Western groups objected last month to a decision by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) to allow observant Muslim women to wear a headdress that meets their religious and cultural requirements as well as safety and security standards.
The decision by the IFAB, which governs the rules of professional soccer, was intended to open opportunity to a large number of observant Muslim women who had been excluded from a professional career because of what they saw as a conflict between the rules of their faith and the rules of the game.
The conservatism is most deep-seated in Saudi Arabia, home to Wahhabism, one of the world's most puritan and restrictive interpretations of Islam that allows women to travel abroad only with the permission of a male guardian and bans them from driving. The kingdom, under threat of exclusion from the London Olympics if it fails to field women athletes and pressured by human rights groups has responded publicly with a series of test balloons on how to respond.
Saudi officials first leaked a story earlier this year about a plan to build the kingdom’s first stadium especially designed to accommodate women who are currently barred from attending soccer matches because of the kingdom’s strict public gender segregation. The planned stadium was supposed to open in 2014. Saudi media subsequently reported that the plan had been shelved.
Deputy education minister for female student affairs Noura al-Fayez said in two letters addressed to Human Rights Watch that the government was working to set up a “comprehensive physical education programme”, including sports facilities and a health and nutrition awareness scheme “as part of its national strategy for physical education for boys and girls”, according to the daily al-Watan newspaper. Ms. Al-Fayez said physical education for girls was under consideration “as one of the priorities of the ministry's leadership”.
The letters didn’t stop Human Rights Watch from accusing Saudi Arabia in a report of kowtowing to assertions by the country's powerful conservative Muslim clerics that female sports constitute "steps of the devil" that will encourage immorality and reduce women's chances of meeting the requirements for marriage.
The kingdom’s toothless Shura or Advisory Council moreover issued regulations for women's sports clubs, but conservative religious forces often have the final say in whether they are implemented or not. Saudi Arabia’s official sports body, the General Presidency of Youth Welfare, presided by a member of the royal family, Prince Nawaf Bin Faisal, only caters to men. As a result, the kingdom last year hired a consultant to develop its first national sports plan - for men only.
Al Hayat newspaper, owned by a Saudi royal, reported last month that Saudi Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud had approved plans to send female athletes to the London Olympics. That report was quickly squashed with the media quoting Prince Nayef as reversing his statement.
Prince Nawaf subsequently went a step further by telling a news conference: “Female sports activity has not existed (in the kingdom) and there is no move thereto in this regard. At present, we are not embracing any female Saudi participation in the Olympics or other international championships.”
Despite Saudi women in the kingdom pushing the envelope by forming private clubs of their own, Prince Nawaf asserted that the demand for women’s participation came from Saudi women living abroad. He said the kingdom would work to ensure that expatriate Saudi women seeking to compete in the Olympics on their own account rather than as official delegates would do so “in the appropriate framework and comported with Islamic law.” He said he was working with the Saudi mufti and religious scholars to guarantee that nothing “infringed upon the Muslim woman.”
Saudi Arabia adopted a similar approach at the Youth Olympics in 2010 where Saudi equestrian participated without official endorsement and won a bronze medal in show jumping. It was not immediately clear whether the approach would this time be sufficient to remove the IOC’s threat of excluding the kingdom from the Olympics.
The evident debate about women’s rights to sports is part of a far broader discussion about the position of women in Saudi society. In an unusually frank interview with the BBC, Princess Basma Bint Saud Bin Abdulaziz lambasted the kingdom’s discriminatory policies and called for the drafting of a constitution that would treat men and women equally as well as sweeping reforms, including “abusive” divorce laws, an education system that teaches “that a woman's position in society is inferior” and "that the angels will curse her if she is not submissive to her husband's needs," and a social affairs ministry that “is tolerating cruelty towards women rather than protecting them.”
To be sure the conservatism that inhibits women’s rights has support among conservative segments of the Middle East and North Africa’s female population. Three Emirate women, have launched, according to a report in The National, a behind closed doors soccer league in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the far more liberal UAE alongside the country’s national women’s team because they had no opportunity to play in an environment that banned men.
"There are some girls that don't mind playing in front of men. But there is a huge percentage of Emirati women who can't play in front of men because of cultural reasons. Those in the community who want to play the sport after university don't have a place to go. It's all open and there isn't really a place for the sport to be developed," said government employee Mariam Al Omaira, a founding partner of Irada (Determination) Sports Development Company.
The league has 84 players spread over six teams.
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.
Arabs boycott Adidas as public displeasure shifts from the West to China
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel... more
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel manufacturer Adidas because of its sponsorship of last month’s Jerusalem marathon. The boycott comes at a time that Arab public displeasure is expanding from the West to China and Russia because of their support for the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The announcement of the boycott by Saudi Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, chairman of the Arab council of youth and sports ministers, contrasted starkly with an analysis presented the same day by a prominent UAE intellectual that if a year ago Arabs were denouncing the United States for its support of Israel and Arab autocrats, today their anger was focused on China.
"All companies that have sponsored the marathon of Jerusalem, including Adidas, will be boycotted," Saudi Prince Nawaf said at the end of meeting of the council in Jeddah.
Adidas, the only non-Israeli sponsor, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Jerusalem municipality to re-route the marathon to avoid occupied East Jerusalem after three city council members had complained to the German multi-national. That did little however to dissuade Arab ministers.
In fact, going beyond the boycott, Prince Nawaf said the council had also decided to organise a separate marathon next year in Arab cities entitled ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ to coincide with the annual Jerusalem event. "Israel is trying to misguide public opinion into believing that Jerusalem is its capital and that is a violation of all UN resolutions," Prince Nawaf said.
Prince Nawaf’s statement appeared to have an element of the pot talking to the kettle with the marathon’s slogan seemingly matching Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem rather than to Arab countries’ long-standing endorsement of a peace plan that envisages Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine with the east of the city serving as the administrative seat of the Palestinian state.
The council’s decisions reflect as much a deep-seated Arab stake in Jerusalem, Islam’s third most holy city, as it does an effort to by largely troubled regimes to garner public support at a time that a demand for far-reaching change is sweeping the Middle East and Africa for the past 16 months. The wave has already toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and has pushed Syrian President Bashar al Assad to the brink.
Speaking at a symposium organized by the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute (MEI), Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent US-educated UAE University political scientist, cautioned that despite continued public Arab condemnation of US and Western support for Israel and contradictory policies towards the protest wave sweeping the Middle East and North Africa,
China was for the first time seeing its flags burnt at demonstrations and calls for boycotts of Chinese goods echoing on social media.
At the root of public anger with China, a country that for years was respected for its support of the Palestinians and other liberation movements, is its dithering in Libya during last year’s NATO-backed rebellion that toppled Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, and even more so China’s refusal to back away from Mr. Assad, whose year-long bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters and rebels has already cost an estimated 9,000 lives.
Speaking at the same symposium Peking University Arabist Wu Bingbing identified the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa as a threat to Chinese interests alongside what he charged was a US concerted effort to secure its hegemony in the region. Mr. Bingbing avoided mentioning the crackdown in Syria but described Chinese-Russian cooperation, an apparent reference to the two countries’ vetoing of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council, as strategic.
China has insisted its veto did not amount to supporting Mr. Assad and was intended to prevent the situation in Syria from worsening. While insisting that the battle in Syria was a domestic affair, China has since said it backs Arab League efforts to find a political solution despite military support for the anti-Assad rebels by key Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the People’s Republic’s key energy suppliers.
Mr Abdulla suggested that at this point the growing anti-Chinese sentiment was unlikely to damage China’s economic interests despite Arab leaders publicly criticizing China as well as Russia for their vetoes of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. While that appears largely to be the case for the Gulf’s autocratic oil producers, China’s most important counterparts in the Middle East, that may not be the same for those nations such as oil producing Libya that have toppled their autocrats.
Saudi King Abdullah in widely reported blunt remarks in early February directed at China and Russia without mentioning them by name described their UN vetoes as “absolutely regrettable.” The king went on to say that “no matter how powerful, countries cannot rule the whole world. The world is ruled by brains by justice, by morals and by fairness.” An Arab League representative confronted senior Russian officials days later in in even blunter, undiplomatic terms during a heated debate behind-closed-doors.
China last year supported a Security Council resolution that imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on the regime of Mr. Qaddafi, and endorsed referral of the regime’s crackdown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague but abstained from voting on a resolution that authorized international military intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds.
At the same time, China attempted to straddle the fence by cultivating relations with both Mr. Qaddafi’s embattled regime and the rebels. That even-handed approach however didn’t prevent the rebels from threatening a commercial boycott, particularly after they found documents purporting to show that Chinese defence companies had discussed the supply of arms with Qaddafi operatives.
A Chinese Ministry of Commerce delegation visiting Libya in February failed to secure agreement on recovering at least some of the losses that China, Libya’s biggest foreign contractor, suffered with the evacuation last year of 35,000 Chinese workers who were servicing $18.8 billion worth of contracts.
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.
The struggle for Syria: Iran-Qatar Ties Come under Stress
By James M. Dorsey
Synopsis
The struggle by Syrian opposition... more
By James M. Dorsey
Synopsis
The struggle by Syrian opposition forces to topple the Assad regime is sharpening tensions between Iran and Qatar and threatens sectarian fault lines elsewhere in North Africa and Middle East. Qatar increasingly becomes a potential target for retaliation should the US and/or Israel attack Iranian nuclear
facilities.
Commentary
RELATIONS BETWEEN Iran and Qatar, once the closest across the Persian Gulf next to Oman, have deteriorated in recent months to the point that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cancelled a planned trip to Doha in November 2011. Iran has also embarked on a campaign of anti-Qatari rhetoric usually reserved for its most bitter rivals, the United States and Saudi Arabia.
For much of the past decade, Qatar’s foreign policy aimed to maintain good relations with all parties by positioning itself as a mediator in multiple disputes including Iran’s troubled relations with the US and a majority of Gulf states as well as between rival Palestinian factions and warring factions in Sudan.
Fraying close ties
Qatar’s lead however in isolating internationally the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s closest Arab ally, and arming his opponents has broken the back of traditionally close Qatari-Iranian relations. It has ended years of Iran bending over backwards to avoid animosity with Qatar despite the Gulf state’s increasingly open backing of US and European efforts to force the Islamic republic to halt its nuclear enrichment programme and Saudi-led efforts to stymie Iranian influence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Among the smallest of the Gulf states, Qatar is particularly exposed because of its joint ownership with Iran of the South Pars/North Field gas field in the Gulf. Tehran has recently accused Qatar of pilfering the field and poaching Iranian skilled personnel to exploit the fact that it is far more advanced than the Islamic republic in developing its part of the field because of the debilitating impact of the UN sanctions. The accusation echoes Saddam Hussein’s justification for Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and recalls disputed occupation of three islands belonging to the United Arab Emirates.
A potential target for retaliation
Iran is unlikely to repeat Saddam’s disastrous adventure that sparked a US-led allied attack on Iraq. Nonetheless, the assertions raise Qatar’s ranking on the list of potential targets for retaliation should Israel and/or the US decide to use military force to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme. They also significantly undermine Qatar’s role as a back channel to reduce tension between Iran and its US and Saudi detractors.
Iranian media and political leaders have denounced Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his ruling family as illegitimate. They have accused the emir of being in league with the West and Saudi Arabia to ensure that pro-Western regimes emerge from the popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. They have condemned him for allowing the sale of alcohol and pork to expatriates in violation of Islamic law. The allegations echo criticism of the emir’s policies by conservative segments of Qatari society but are unlikely to curry favour with regime opponents in a country that adheres to Saudi Arabia’s austere Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, even if it’s in a more liberal fashion.
Iran’s stepped up attacks on Qatar underline the importance it attributes to the survival of the Assad regime. The Islamic republic had consistently looked the other way in the past five years as Qatar realigned its policy toward Iran in line with US and Saudi pressure on Teheran.
Close Qatari-Iranian relations, only rivalled in the Gulf by those between the Islamic republic and Oman, date back to Qatar’s refusal to back Iraq in its war against Iran in the 1980s; its rejection as a member of the UN Security Council of a resolution in 2006 that imposed initial sanctions on Iran against its nuclear enrichment programme; and its 2007 invitation to Ahmadinejad to attend an Arab summit in Doha, to the consternation of some of its closest Arab allies.
Bending over backwards
As a result, Iran was willing to ignore Qatar’s subsequent support for ever harsher UN sanctions against Iran as well as its participation last year in the Gulf Cooperation Council’s intervention in Bahrain to suppress a predominantly Shiite Muslim uprising against the island’s minority Sunni Muslim rulers. In fact, the two countries went significantly further in cementing their relations with the conclusion of a defence agreement two years ago and a subsequent Iranian naval visit.
The reversal in Iranian willingness to indulge Qatar also underscores the rise of the country’s hardliners who last month won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. The voices in Tehran that continue to see virtue in Qatar’s ability to be a back channel are being drowned out by the anti-Qatari rhetoric.
Iran, squeezed by the damaging of Assad as an effective ally and increasing US pressure as manifested in President Obama’s decision to sanction buyers of Iranian crude, appears to be signalling that it sees offence rather than negotiation and compromise as its best chance to beat ever harsher efforts to force it to reverse course.
Mounting anti-Qatari rhetoric narrows Iran’s ability to keep communication lines open to its detractors and sharpens sectarian fault lines in the Middle East and North Africa at a time that Syria is increasingly becoming a proxy war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the region.
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.
Soccer fan attack on Palestinians sparks Israeli debate
By James M. Dorsey
An initially under-reported attack by militant supporters of controversial Beitar... more
By James M. Dorsey
An initially under-reported attack by militant supporters of controversial Beitar Jerusalem Football Club known for their anti-Palestinian, anti-Ashkenazi Jewish attitudes on Palestinian shoppers and workers in a Jerusalem shopping mall and the Israeli police’s failure to intervene and arrest any the attackers has outraged many Israelis and is raising questions about the moral fiber of a society that tolerates such incidents as well as a soccer club that is unashamedly racist.
Police launched an investigation into the incident that was caught on security camera video only after the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the assault and asked how Israel would have reacted if France had responded similarly to last week’s attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in which four people, including three children, were killed. The alleged killer died in a shootout with police after an intense manhunt and a more than 30-hour siege.
“Those who fail to raise their voice now over Malha will get Toulouse in Jerusalem. Sticks today, guns tomorrow,” warned Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy.
“It's not hard to imagine what would have happened had hundreds of people burst into a mall in Toulouse and beat up Jews who worked there. Israel and the Jewish community would have set up a hue and cry. The president of the republic would have rushed to Toulouse, met with representatives of the Jewish community and expressed his shock and regret. Our prime minister and foreign minister would have competed with each other in expressing shock, and columnists would be fulminating about anti-Semitism raising its ugly head in Europe. Everyone would agree: Jews were beat up (again) simply for being Jewish.
It's also not hard to imagine what would have happened had hundreds of Arabs stormed the Jerusalem mall, beating up Jewish workers. Dozens of rioters would have been arrested and tried. But when it comes to Beitar fans, all is forgiven, all is overlooked. No one was arrested, almost no one said anything, and even after it was made public the mall's manager was the only one to apologize to the workers, who were beaten up simply for being Arab,” Mr. Levy said.
Journalist Uzi Dann noted in a separate commentary that when Paris Saint-Germain fans attacked Jews in 2006 after their team lost to Hapoel Tel Aviv French police intervened immediately and shot one of the attackers.
“In properly run countries like England and Germany there is surveillance of hooligans, who are quite often extreme right-wingers, and harsh penalties are meted out for violence, including imprisonment. And of course, there is massive police presence during games,” Mr. Dann wrote.
He said the mounting Beitar violence stemmed from the growing influence among the clubs fans of a group known as La Familia that is dominated by supporters of Kach, the outlawed violent and racist party that was headed by assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane. Beitar’s management has so far failed to stymie the group’s influence.
Messrs Levy and Dann’s comments followed Haaretz’s breaking of the story that some 300 Beitar Jerusalem fans had attacked Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Malha shopping mall as part of a celebration of their team’s defeat of rival Bnei Yehuda.
The attack, one of the worst Israeli-Palestinian clashes in Jerusalem in recent years, came two years after the Israel Football Association replaced police in Israeli stadium with ushers in a bid to reduce potential provocations of soccer violence. The shifting of responsibility for law and order away from the stadiums did not relieve the police of its responsibilities in other public places, Haaretz noted.
The incident occurred in what City University of New York scholar Dov Waxman described in an article in The Middle East Journal as an atmosphere of escalating tension between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. “Attitudes on both sides have hardened, mutual distrust has intensified, fear has increased, and political opinion has become more militant and uncompromising….Jews and Palestinians are currently on a collision course, with potentially severe consequences for their continued peaceful co-existence, as well as for stability and democracy in Israel,” Mr. Waxman wrote.
The incident further highlights the failure of the Israeli Football Association (IFA), the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched a campaign against racism and discrimination, to rein in the Beitar fans and curb the club’s submission to its supporter’s racist attitudes. 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’ racist behavior.
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 such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 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. Maccabi striker Mohammed Ghadir recently put Beitar on the spot when he challenged the club to hire him despite its discriminatory hiring policies.
Beitar fans shocked Israelis several years ago when they refused to observe a moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Referring to the latest incident, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the law enforcement agency had not launched an earlier investigation into the shopping mall attack because no one involved in the incident had sought medical assistance or filed a complaint about the incident in which mostly young Beitar fans unfurled a Kach flag. Beitar fans often fly the flag during soccer matches.
"How can we arrest someone when there have been no complaints made? There have been no reports of injuries or that anyone was spoken to in [a racist] way. Normally, members of the public would have come forward within hours to make an official complaint. Until now, none has been made", Mr. Rosenfeld said.
Witnesses said the soccer fans flooded into the shopping center, hurled racial abuse at Palestinians workers and shoppers and chanted anti-Palestinian slogans.
Haaretz quoted Mohammed Yusuf, a cleaner in the mall, as describing the attack as “a mass lynching attempt."
An unidentified shop owner told the paper that the soccer fans “stood on chairs and tables (in the mall’s food court) and what have you. They made a terrible noise, screamed 'death to the Arabs,' waved their scarves and sang songs at the top of their voices."
A brawl erupted fans started verbally abusing and spitting at three Palestinian women, who were sitting in the food hall with their children, according to CCTV footage. Palestinian cleaners intervened in a bid to help the women, chasing fans with their broomsticks. After initially succeeding in chasing them away, the fans return to attack the cleaners.
"They caught some of them and beat the hell out of them. They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows. I don't understand how none shattered into pieces. One cleaner was attacked by some 20 people, poor guy, and then they had a go at his brother who works in a nearby pizza shop and came to his rescue," bakery owner Yair told Haaretz.
Jewish shop owners refused demands by the fans that they give them knives and sticks with which they could attack the Palestinians. By the same token, no one in the mall intervened to stop the attack. The mall’s security chief, whose men were outnumbered by the fans, called police who arrived only 40 minutes after the attack started. Police evacuated the mall but did not intervene further or arrest any of the culprits. Malha executive director Gideon Avrahami was the only senior official or executive to apologize to the workers.
In a statement, Beitar Jerusalem said that the club "firmly condemns violence and leaves it to the treatment of the authorities." Beitar went however on to say that “the incident at the mall has nothing to do with Beitar Jerusalem... Apparently the fistfight started because of an argument between a fan and a worker. This is not about racist violence."
Commentator Levy warned that the problem was one of Beitar’s attitude and mentality. “This was not a rare, one-off event, of course. The Beitar entourage strikes again. It starts with their racist and ultranationalist chants and songs, continues to hitting and will end in murders. One of the young rioters boasted the following day (to my informant's daughter) about what he and his friends had done the previous evening. Apparently anti-Arab violence is a source of cheer: Beitar finally won a game, you have to celebrate somehow. It's easy to imagine what would have happened had they lost,” he said.
An Israeli member of parliament called on the eve of the latest Beitar incident Israeli soccer fan for putting violent soccer fans under administrative detention, the legal holdover from British rule largely employed to detain Palestinians for reasons of security for indefinite periods of time without being charged.
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.
Egyptian soccer riots set to spread from Port Said to Cairo
By James M. Dorsey
The battle for Egypt’s future was set to spill once again into the streets of Cairo... more
By James M. Dorsey
The battle for Egypt’s future was set to spill once again into the streets of Cairo following two days of battles between militant supporters of the embattled Al Masri SC soccer club of Port Said that sparked the closure of the city’s harbour and left one teenager dead and more than 100 people wounded.
The riots in Port Said coupled with plans for protests on Sunday by militant fans of crowned Cairo club AL Ahly SC in front of the headquarters of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) and an Al Ahly board meeting scheduled for Monday were prompted by the EFA’s controversial meting out of penalties for last month’s lethal clash between supporters of the two teams that left 74 people dead.
Al Ahly spokesman Gamal Gabr denounced the EFA ruling as “an invitation for more violence. We are back to square one…Ahli fans will never accept such a weak verdict from a powerless association,” he said in an interview on soccer channel Modern Korba TV.
The EFA on Friday banned Al Masri for two seasons from playing in Egypt’s premier league and closed the city’s stadium for three years. The soccer body also ordered Al Ahly to play four matches behind closed doors and suspended the club’s Portuguese coach Manuel Jose as well as midfielder Hossam Ghaly for an equal number of games in a decision that in close coordination with Egypt’s military rulers failed to address the underlying causes of the soccer violence and satisfied no one.
The ruling conformed to an earlier comment by Egyptian prime minister Kamal El-Ganzouri who after a meeting with senior soccer and security officials called in violation of world soccer body FIFA’s ban on political interference in soccer on the EFA to ensure that its punitive measures would “neither be lenient nor excessive.” The government’s concern about the political fallout of the Port Said incident was already evident when it last month against the will of FIFA fired the board of the EFA that had been appointed under ousted president Hosni Mubarak. FIFA is expected to discuss the issue at an executive committee meeting in Zurich later this week.
Adding insult to injury, Mr. Ganzouri acknowledged that the EFA had awarded Al Masri “the minimum penalty,” adding that the club had the right to appeal the verdict.
The government’s approach as well as the EFA ruling reflect a refusal to address the deep-seated animosity between security forces and militant soccer fans stemming from years of almost weekly clashes in Egyptian stadiums as well as the growing frustration among youth groups and soccer fans who were at the core of last year’s popular revolt that they are being marginalized while the aims of their uprising are being shunted aside in favour of vested interests.
“The old (Mubarak) regime was very sceptic of everything organized. They tried to control the unions, they tried to control the student unions in the universities and they tried to control the political life. Suddenly they found in front of them a bunch of young people organizing themselves in football. That’s why we had so many problems.
They just weren’t happy with the fact that you have 20, 25 guys who have gathered 500 people in two hours. For them, now they are speaking about football, tomorrow they will be speaking about politics and funny enough, for us, we had no political intention at any moment. They made of us what they were afraid, repressing us when they started like fighting us, people started to hate them because we were fighting for our freedom, for what we believe we had the right to achieve and the right to establish,” Assad, one of the founders of the Ultras Ahlawy, the militant Al Ahly support group, told the BBC.
Supporters of Al Masri and Al Ahly alongside a growing number of soccer officials and ordinary Egyptians are convinced that last month’s lethal clash between the two rivals after a match in Port Said was provoked by the military and security forces in a bid to punish the ultras – well-organized, highly-politicized, violence-prone, street battle-hardened soccer fans groups modelled on similar organizations in Italy and Serbia – for their militant opposition to military rule since last year’s ousting of Mr. Mubarak. The belief is fuelled by circumstantial evidence.
The ultras, who last year played a key role in the mass anti-government protests that forced Mr. Mubarak to resign after 30 years in office, have since emerged in repeated vicious street battles with security forces as the fiercest opponents of the military who succeeded the toppled leader with a pledge to lead the country to democracy.
The preliminary results of a parliamentary investigation into the Port Said incident appeared to bear out some of the evidence that the violence had been planned by registering the involvement of unidentified thugs and lax security while also blaming the fans. Egypt’s attorney general recently charged 75 people, including nine security officials, in connection with the incident. Al Ahly fans noted that the security personnel appeared to be getting off lightly with charges of negligence while Al Masri supporters were largely accused of murder.
“When you come here…you get a real sense of how football is part of all of this… You realize how football and politics are totally connected… It’s clear that this was not a case of typical fan violence. There are camera reports that the gates are welded shut and one of the first things that you see with what’s going on on the field, police are doing nothing. When I ask opinions of different people, I do get opinions from people who say that the military in their own way in some moments are almost trying to say: fine, you want us out, well then this is what it’s going to be like without us…. When you start piecing all this together, as everybody knows now, this not just violence. This was much more complicated,” said Egypt’s American national coach Bob Bradley in a BBC interview.
Speaking in a separate BBC interview, a fan of Al Ahly which traces its history as an opposition force to its founding more than a century ago as a meeting point for opponents of British colonial rule, vividly described scenes during the clash in Port Said stadium that fuel the belief that the lethal violence was not spontaneous.
“After the final whistle the fans started to storm the grounds…We were so surprised that the gates were locked, so we find ourselves like say 800 people all stuck inside this tunnel, 60 square meters. We started to fall down on each other, there were like five levels of people all on each other…All you could see was half of a human. You could see just the upper part, you could see the head and the body is buried under other bodies. You could see the hand, just one hand of our friends, just trying to say help or something.
The cops didn’t do anything, they were just watching. The army were guarding this gate and they were just watching. They were just killing us… It wasn’t just about killing, it was about humiliating. When you see someone with two broken legs and stabbed in the face just like that and stabbed in his stomach, you’re not just killing, your humiliating before killing,” the fan identified as Bima said.
Supporters of Al Masri and Port Said residents feel that their team and city was set up and is being subjected to collective punishment for a battle that is not theirs. “We need to know who is provoking the rift between Port Said and Cairo,” demanded a protester in the Suez Canal city after its port was closed and ships were diverted further east.
In a statement on their Facebook page, Al Masri ultras known as the Green Eagles denied that they had participated in the slaughter of mostly Al Ahly fans. “Congratulations to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, they succeeded in driving a wedge between the two cities. They are now watching the play they wrote…Something suspicious is happening in the Suez Canal… We withdrew once we saw suspicious things happening (in the stadium),” the statement said.
Representatives of Port Said in parliament echoed the ultras’ sentiment in a joint statement with some blaming Al Ahly for provoking the incident. “We call on Egypt’s intellectuals and faithful media personnel to stand up against the tendentious campaign to drive a wedge between the residents of Port Said and Cairo and completely isolate Port Said. We fully respect Ahly’s board of directors and fans ... there will never be any hard feelings between Port Said and Ahly. The Port Said residents are leading calls for the punishment of the culprits. However, they fully reject any attempts to wipe out the name of Masry from Egyptian football. Accordingly, we will not accept any excessive sanctions that will be considered as a collective punishment for the city and the club,” the deputies said in their statement.
In separate remarks Port Said deputy Akram El-Shaer said Ahly fans had incited the violence with a banner that mocked Port Said, his colleague El-Badry Farghaly warned that he expose “the corruption of Ahly’s board of directors and their chairman, Hassan Hamdy”.
Mr. Hamdy attracted attention last year for an alleged conflict of interest in heading Al Ahly while at the same time occupying the posts of director of advertisement at Al Alhram, the most important state-owned print publication under Mr. Mubarak, and chair of the EFA’s sponsorship committee. Military police were last year to have seized documents that Mr. Hamdy and then Al Ahram editor-in-chief Osama Saraya had allegedly attempted to smuggle out of the editor's office. Prosecutors were investigating the documents to verify employees' suspicion that they contained evidence of corruption.
In a further blow to the city, Port Said’s port was shut down Saturday after stone-throwing protesters clashed with police near the Suez Canal Authority building and demonstrators forced the closure of factories by blocking roads leading into the city. A 13-year old was killed and at least 100 people wounded in the clashes.
While Al Masri supporters have taken to the streets to protest what they see as their club and city being scapegoated, Al Ahly is preparing to take the EFA, the security forces and the military to task for what it sees as a far too lenient treatment of the Suez Canal city’s club and the security forces.
Ultras Ahlawy warned in a statement that their patience with the government and the EFA meting out justice was running out and said they would start a sit-in in front of the EFA headquarters on Sunday. “If our silence led some people to think that we are weak … then the following words are directed to them. From now on, we will be out of our mind. 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 group said.
It demanded a swift trial for the Port Said culprits, the relegation and suspension of sports activities of Al Masri for a period of three years, and resumption of the premier league once the rights of the victims of the clash had been secured.
Al Ahly’s board said it would meet on Monday in emergency session “to discuss the EFA’s decisions and take the appropriate measures which would preserve the rights of the club and their fans”. Club chairman Mahmoud Allam warned that “there will be some surprises on Monday. We will take a stance against those sanctions which satisfy nobody. We expected far tougher punishments after the suffering of our fans. The decisions which will be taken by the board of directors will show how much we care about our supporters.”
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.
Egypt’s powder keg: Meting out punishment for Port Said
By James M. Dorsey
The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) is struggling with how to penalize the Suez... more
By James M. Dorsey
The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) is struggling with how to penalize the Suez Canal town of Port Said’s soccer team Al Masri SC for a clash six weeks ago with supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC in which 74 fans were killed in the worst incident in Egyptian sporting history.
The EFA’s dilemma is not simply one of satisfying demands for justice by Ultras Ahlawy, the militant Ahly support group, which suffered the greatest loss of life without provoking die hard Al Masri supporters but also goes to the heart of what really happened in Port Said.
Egyptian prime minister Kamel El-Ganzouri cautioned that Al Masri's punishment “should neither be lenient nor excessive," according to Egyptian media.
The EFA's dilemma is compounded by the fact that it is being managed by caretakers after the board appointed by ousted President Hosni Mubarak was summarily dismissed by the government immediately after the Port Said clash. FIFA's executive committee is expected to discuss the Port Said situation at the end of this month.
The EFA’s options include ordering Al Masri to play many of its home games behind closed doors or in a different city to demoting them to a lower division. The club could also be banned from playing for one year.
The government's willingness to risk condemnation by world soccer body FIFA for politically interfering in soccer affairs with its dismissal of the EFA's board and Mr. El-Ganzouri's advice underlines the political sensitivity of the decision facing the Egyptian association.
The government fears that if not properly balanced, the EFA's decision could spark new confrontations with the street-battled hardened soccer fans that played a key role last year in ousting Mr. Mubarak and have since emerged as the ruling military's most militant opponents.
Both the government and parliament are investigating the incident for which 75 people, including nine security officials, were last week charged with murder or negligence. The EFA cancelled this season’s premier league shortly after the Port Said incident.
The ultras of Al Ahly and its Cairo arch rival Al Zamalek SC accuse the government and security forces of having at the very least enabled if not encouraged the clash in the Port Said stadium after a match between Al Masri SC and Al Ahly to punish the Cairo ultras for emerging as the most militant opponents to military rule.
Preliminary results of a parliamentary investigation of the Port Said incident blamed fans and lax security for the incident and suggested that unidentified thugs had been involved in the violence, fuelling reports that the violence had been planned rather than spontaneous. The circumstantial evidence that Al Masri fans may not have instigated the incident, including messages on twitter in advance of the game, the failure of the security forces to intervene when the clash got out of hand and unconfirmed reports that military vehicles escorted the thugs to the stadium complicates the penalizing of Al Masri.
Some ultras believe that the clash and the suspension of the league in soccer-crazy Egypt was designed to further isolate the ultras and youth groups that have lost popularity in recent months in a country that has become protest weary and yearns for a return to normalcy and economic growth. Anti-government protests and violent clashes with security forces stand in the way of focusing on the economy.
Potential relegation of Masri could prove to be a financial disaster for the club and impact the economy of a town that increasingly feels that is being singled out for collective punishment. Representatives of Port Said in Egypt's newly elected parliament have warned that they would not tolerate the city being made a scapegoat,
“We call on Egypt’s intellectuals and faithful media personnel to stand up against the tendentious campaign to drive a wedge between the residents of Port Said and Cairo and completely isolate Port Said...The Port Said residents are leading calls for the punishment of the culprits. However, they fully reject any attempts to wipe out the name of Masry from Egyptian football. Accordingly, we will not accept any excessive sanctions that will be considered as a collective punishment for the city and the club,” Port Said 's six parliamentary representatives said in a joint statement.
The hostility between Masri and Ahly remained however just below the surface. One of the deputies, Akram El-Shaer, suggested that the Cairo team had provoked the incident by raising a banner that mocked their Port Said opponent. Another signatory of the statement, El-Badry Farghaly, threatened to focus on “the corruption of Ahly’s board of directors and their chairman, Hassan Hamdy”.
Mr. Hamdy is believed to have been last year under investigation of corruption because of his apparent conflict of interest in being head of the lucrative advertisement department of state-owned Al Ahram newspaper, the Mubarak regime's most important print media outlet as well as chairman of Egypt’s most prominent soccer club and until recently chair of the EFA’s sponsorship committee at the same time.
Military police last year was reported to have seized three boxes of documents that Mr. Hamdy and then Al Ahram editor-in-chief Osama Saraya had allegedly attempted to smuggle out of the editor’s office when they were confronted by publishing house employees who suspected that the boxes contained documents that would prove the two men’s involvement in corruption.
The lethal clash between the Al Masri and Al Ahli fans has deepened animosity between the two clubs. Masri fans fuelled the flames by waving flags during demonstrations since the incident on which was inscribed: "They imprisoned my family and brothers for the sake of Ahly," according to Al Ahram.
Leila Zaki Chakravart, a London School of Economics scholar who spent 18 months in Port Said for research recalled in an article in Open Democracy “how the coastal Mediterranean city’s self-styled laissez faire lifestyle of almost sleepy monotony abruptly changed gear on the day each year on which the al-Masri/al-Ahly fixture was scheduled. Tension rose rapidly before the event, and a self-imposed curfew descended ensuring that only the city’s male population patronised its streets and public spaces.
All cities and towns in Egypt are, to some extent, football-mad: but Port Said is a city which takes its football fervour to the extreme. Boys learn to dribble from the time they can walk, and street football games are played out as passionately as the city’s sole professional football club is supported. Even the club’s choice of name provides telling evidence of how the city’s distinctive regional brand of martial patriotism, forged during the (!956) Suez invasion and later wars with Israel, is concretely rooted in and expressed through the tribal loyalties which football brings out. Most sporting clubs name themselves after the city (or district) in which they are based: but rather than follow convention and call itself simply ‘the Port Said Sporting Club’, the chosen title is instead Nadi al-Masri (‘the Egyptian Sporting Club’ – a deliberate mirroring of al-Ahly’s similarly unconventional choice of name, which translates as ‘the National Sporting Club’),” Ms. Chakravart wrote.
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.
Syrian TV accuses FC Barcelona of aiding anti-government rebels
By James M. Dorsey
State-run Syrian Al Dunya television, in one of its more bizarre parroting of... more
By James M. Dorsey
State-run Syrian Al Dunya television, in one of its more bizarre parroting of allegations of foreign intervention by embattled President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has accused crowned traditionally left-wing leaning Spanish soccer club FC Barcelona of employing its tactical formations to deliver coded messages to armed Syrian rebels.
The television broadcast the allegation as fighters of the rebel Free Syrian Army retreated from the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor following a fierce two day Syrian military assault in what activists said was an effort to spare residents further bloodshed.
The retreat followed earlier rebel withdrawals from Homs and Idlib.
The withdrawals appear to signal a shift in rebel tactics from trying to hold on to territory in favour of a campaign of bombings and assassinations, particularly in the sensitive Syrian capital of Damascus.
Al Dunya charged that Barcelona’s tactical formations represented a map of routes from Lebanon to Syria used to smuggle weapons to the Syrian rebels. It said projecting the map on a Barcelona Copa del Rey quarter final match against Real Madrid that players in the club’s formation on the soccer pitch were the equivalent of smugglers while the ball represented weapons as they were moved along the smuggling route.
Al Dunya asserted that midfielder Andres Iniesta operated at the beginning of a smuggling route while a late game pass by player of the year Lionel Messi constituted the successful handover of an arms shipment in Deir al-Zor at the end of the route. In Al Dunya’s apparently doctored version of the match a mysterious, unidentified player appears as Messi passes the ball. The shadowy player somehow ends up in the Real Madrid goal. Midfielder Sergio Busquets Burgos was also part of Barcelona’s international intrigue, Al Dunya said.
The report serves as further evidence of the callousness of the Assad regime and the degree to which Mr. Assad and his immediate family and aides appear to be cut off from reality – a portrait that also emerges from Assad family emails disclosed earlier this month by The Guardian which detail the president’s purchases on ITunes and his wife’s acquisition of luxury goods at the same time that his forces push on with their brutal year-old crackdown on anti-government protesters.
Al Dunya’s assertions are likely to be an attempt at scoring public relations points against Qatar, the Arab nation that together with Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in denouncing the Assad regime, seeking to isolate it in the Middle East as well as internationally and calling for support for the country’s armed resistance. Barcelona signed its first ever commercial shirt sponsorship agreement worth $200 million in December 2010 with the Qatar Foundation, a state-owned charity.
The Al Dunya report was posted on YouTube and has been viewed by almost half a million people.
Al Dunya charged that the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera television network was repeatedly broadcasting clips from the Barcelona match in a bid to weaken the Assad regime. Al Dunya earlier this month charged that Al Jazeera sports newscaster had incited listeners against the Assad regime during his coverage of a match between Syria and Bahrain in London.
Syria has repeatedly over the past year accused Al Jazeera and other foreign media from being in bed with anti-government forces. Syria has barred all foreign media from reporting from the country and has tightly controlled the movements of the few journalists granted entry.
Syria’s invocation of soccer as part of the international conspiracy it alleges that it is battling underscores the important role of soccer in Middle Eastern and North African politics.
Syria’s national soccer teams flagrantly set rules aside in recent months in their line-ups to ensure success on the pitch in a bid to demonstrate that Mr. Assad’s regime is in control and can perform despite the violence and turmoil and the hope that success on the soccer pitch would rub off on the regime.
World soccer body FIFA last September barred Syria from competing for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil after the country’s national team fielded an ineligible player in in a qualifying match against Tajikistan. Lebanon has accused Syria in November of fielding six players in an Under-19 Asian Football Championship qualifier whose ages had been falsified to qualify them for the team.
By the same token, Syria refused to send athletes to last November’s Arab Games because it feared embarrassment if some of its sportsmen defected.
That fear may not have been unfounded. Abdelbasset Saroot, who was targeted by pro-Assad forces and is believed to be in hiding since the Syrian military recently entered the rebel stronghold of Homs, symbolizes the regime’s problems with its youth soccer team.
A 20-year old goalkeeper for Syria's national Under-23 team, Mr. Saroot is a leader of the revolt in Homs. “They are really targeting me. They really want to get me. They want to kill me. But God is giving me life. The more death and destruction we face, the higher our optimism and spirit. We are not sad that our martyrs are dead but we miss them as revolutionaries” Mr. Saroot says in an Al Jazeera documentary.
The documentary pictures Mr. Saroot standing on a podium leading protesters with a chant:
“My homeland is Syria
Those who want to challenge this revolution are not up to the task
We want to hang Bashar and crush this tyranny,” he sings.
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.
Egyptian and international soccer figures grasp for ways to reduce Egyptian soccer violence
By James M. Dorsey
Egyptian and international soccer officials and experts are grasping for straws as they... more
By James M. Dorsey
Egyptian and international soccer officials and experts are grasping for straws as they seek to address the reasons for the deaths six weeks ago of 74 soccer fans in the worst incident in Egyptian sporting history.
At an international security conference in Qatar, the officials and experts, including Egyptian Footballers' Association president Magdy Abdel Ghani, former English Football Association vice chairman David Dein and International Conference on Sport Security executive director and head of security for the 2006 World Cup in Germany Helmut Spahn blamed the fans, the media, rivalry between clubs and lack of education for last month's lethal clash between rival militant soccer fans in the Suez Canal city of Port Said.
Absent from the discussion was the political situation in Egypt that created the environment for the violence, the years of abuse and violence in stadiums that fans endured at the hands of security forces, the quest for dignity expressed in confrontations with security forces by fans emboldened by their success last year in toppling President Hosni Mubarak and their frustration with the fact that the goals of their revolt have been sidelined.
The debate at the International Sport Security Conference in Doha about reducing violence in Egyptian soccer took place as Egypt's chief prosecutor charged 75 people, including nine police officers, with murder or negligence over the Port Said riot in which at least 74 people were killed when rival fans clashed after a game between premier league clubs Al-Masry SC and Al-Ahly SC on 1 February.
Thousands of militant fans of Al Ahly and Cairo rival Al Zamalek SC marched Thursday to the High Court in downtown Cairo to demand justice for the victims of the Port Said disaster. They chanted slogans against Egypt’s military rulers and the interior ministry and carried banners calling for revenge against the killers of their dead comrades.
“We demand specific charges, not just a general accusation for all of them like what happened this morning. We also demand a fair and speedy trial,” said Mohammed Tarek, a spokesman of Ultras Ahlawy, one of several militant, highly politicized, violence-prone, street-battled hardened soccer fan groups or ultras that played a key role in the overthrow of Mr. Mubarak. The ultras have since emerged as the most militant opponents of the military that succeeded Mr. Mubarak.
Mr. Tarek expressed concern that general charges could mean that only a few of the 75 charged would be sentenced and that senior officials may be granted leniency by accusing them of “failing to fulfill their duties, not murder."
In a show of unity, ultras of Al Ahly and its arch rival Al Zamalek SC, respected for their fearlessness and their years of standing up to the security forces, warned Egypt’s military rulers that they were “ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of our country" and to ensure that the instigators of Port Said were swiftly brought to justice. They also warned that they would resist a crackdown on militant soccer groups.
The ultras’ militancy has forced the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) to put on hold plans for a friendly tournament behind closed doors to commemorate the Port Said victims. The tournament was intended to compensate the clubs for the cancellation of this season’s league in the wake of Port Said. The ultras had threatened to storm the pitches of the friendlies if they were played before the perpetrators of Port Said had been brought to justice.
The cancellation of the league came as registration started for candidates for Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election in May.
Some ultras believe that the suspension of the league in soccer-crazy Egypt was designed to further isolate the ultras and youth groups that have lost popularity in recent months in a country that has become protest weary and yearns for a return to normalcy and economic growth. Anti-government protests and violent clashes with security forces stand in the way of focusing on the economy.
The ultras’ protest and the warnings suggest that the indictments like the debate in Doha are unlikely to contribute to pre-empting future violence.
The death of the 74 Al Ahli fans put a tragic crown on years of politically motivated violence in Egyptian stadiums and a year of militant soccer fan opposition to military rule in the wake of the toppling of Mr. Mubarak.
Egyptian Footballers' Association chief Mr. Ghani, speaking on a panel about hooliganism and violence in football at the Doha conference, blamed the Port Said violence on the militants’ use of social media.
“One of the very important facts that caused this anger and rage between fans is the inference of social media. Fans are very young which makes it easier to drive the anger and make them do acts without knowing,” Mr. Ghani said.
He charged that the ultras had planned the Port Said incident. “Before the game some of the ultras talked to each other on Facebook chat. They used the lack of policing and they prepared themselves to do something before the game because the fans of Port Said had no reason to attack the other fans - they won the game,” Mr. Ghani said.
Mr. Ghani’s remarks highlighted the gap between fans and players that has opened since the fall of Mr. Mubarak. The fans have expressed frustration with the fact that the majority of players remained on the side lines during the protests against Mr. Mubarak. To the ultras, players are hired guns willing to switch allegiances for money while management consists largely of corrupt appointees of autocratic regimes.
Al Ahly ultras unfolded a year ago a huge banner addressed to players during their team’s friendly against Harras El-Hodoud that read: "We followed you everywhere but in the hard times we didn't find you." Many reject Egypt’s national team as ‘Mubarak’s team’ rather than that of the nation. Players have since the overthrow of Mr. Mubarak pressured the ultras unsuccessfully to moderate their support tactics that include the use of fireworks, flares, smoke guns and abusive chanting because the clubs were being penalized.
Egyptian soccer star Mohamed Zidan in recent controversial remarks put a further spotlight on the gap with the fans as well as the problem Egypt and other post-revolt Arab countries face in the transition from an autocratic to a more open society and the battles being fought on the soccer pitch.
In an interview with satellite channel CBC Egypt, Mr. Zidan, a striker in the Egyptian national team and for Germany’s FSV Mainz 05, focused attention on the neo-patriarchal role of Arab autocrats as their nation’s father figure and the refusal of a majority of soccer players and managers to join the region’s anti-autocratic revolts despite the fact that militant soccer fans of rival clubs stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the mass protests last year against Mr. Mubarak.
“I kissed Mubarak’s hand when he honored Egypt after the 2010 African Cup of Nations as I saw him as a father of all Egyptians,” Mr. Zidan said reflecting the attitude of most soccer players and managers in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Nonetheless, Port Said created an opening for reconciliation between players and fans. In a sign of the changing times, the Al Ahly ultras recently apologized on an especially created Facebook page named “We are sorry Shika” to Zamalek winger Mahmoud Abdel-Razek aka Shikabala, widely viewed as Egypt’s top player, for routinely abusing him verbally during their clubs’ derbies. The abuse frequently led to Shikabala and Al Ahly fans trading insults in heated exchanges.
Responding in an interview on the Zamalek club’s website, Shikabala welcomed the apology. “Despite the cruelty of what happened in Port Said, this disaster played a role in uniting the fans of all clubs. It might be a turning point in ending intolerance and hatred in Egyptian football. I will go to the Ahly club along with my teammates to offer our condolences to the families of Port Said martyrs. The fans of Ahly are my brothers,“ he said.
Some of Mr. Abdul Ghani's co-panelists in Doha seemed even more clueless about the roots of Egyptian soccer violence, comparing it to hooliganism in Europe and calling for stricter law enforcement and better education in a country in which law enforcement agencies are at the root of the problem and ultras rather than hooligans are the product of an autocratic system that closed down all release valves for pent-up anger and frustration but the mosque and the soccer pitch.
Port Said as well as last year's repeated vicious street battles between ultras and security forces are the product of years of abuse and violence against soccer fans by the police and the Central Security Force (CSF).
Port Said was also the result of a refusal by the police in the absence of badly needed reforms and re-education to fulfill its duties. Egypt's deteriorating security situation stems in part from the police being largely absent since Mr. Mubarak's downfall.
Widely viewed as the autocratic former president's enforcers and henchmen, the police have avoided confrontation with the public in a bid to improve their tarnished image. In fact, the police's raison d'etre in the last year was public relations not ensuring law and order. Incidents would only highlight the threat of Egypt descending into anarchy and chaos if the police were not accorded the respect needed to uphold law and order.
Egyptian soccer violence “needs to be looked at because there’s a deep-rooted cause there. You have to look at the policing, the infrastructure, the culture - The English FA and Premier League are there to help. We’ve had it, we have had to deal with it and we’ve come out the other side so we are here to help," said former English Football Association chief Mr. Dein.
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.
EFA cancels Egyptian league for security and political reasons
By James M. Dorsey
The Egyptian Football Association (EFA), acting on instructions of the interior... more
By James M. Dorsey
The Egyptian Football Association (EFA), acting on instructions of the interior ministry, has cancelled the rest of this season's league matches in the wake of rioting at a match last month that killed 74 people and injured hundreds of others in a move that is apparently designed to further isolate militant soccer fans and fails to hold the police and security forces to their responsibility to maintain law and order.
The league has been suspended since February 1, the day that 74 people, mostly militant soccer fans of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC, were killed in Port Said immediately after a clash with supporters of the Suez Canal town’s Al Masri SC in the worst incident in Egypt’s sporting history, the most lethal since last year’s overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak, and the deadliest soccer incident worldwide since 1996.
Many believe that the incident in which security forces failed to intervene was an attempt to punish the Ahly fans and send a message to other groups of ultras – well-organized, highly politicized, street battle-hardened soccer fan groups modeled on similar organizations in Serbia and Italy – for their key role in last year’s toppling of Mr. Mubarak and opposition since to Egypt’s military rulers. It came as registration started for candidates for Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election in May.
EFA spokesman Azmy Megahed said the season would not resume because there was not enough time to play the league games before the national team begins training for the 2013 African Cup qualifiers and this year's London Olympics.
Mr. Megahed said that 18 teams, divided into two groups, would compete in a friendly Martyrs Cup tournament in empty stadiums later this month intended to raise money for families of those killed in the Port Said violence and to appease sponsors. He said Al Masri would not be participating in the cup.
“This tournament is aimed at lessening the effects of the league’s cancellation on the clubs and sponsors. Some clubs initially objected to the proposal to cancel the league but they eventually accepted it after the interior ministry said it would not secure the matches,” Mr. Megahed told Al Ahram newspaper.
The EFA, whose board was dismissed after the Port Said incident, is expected to announce within days how it will penalize Al Masri for the violence. Prominent soccer figures have called for the relegation of the team to a lower division.
The decision ends weeks of debate on whether the league should be resumed. Various clubs as well as media organizations campaigned for resumption of the league because they feared the financial consequences of a suspension. Egyptian soccer clubs have suffered significant financial losses as a result of last year’s suspension for three months in the walk-up and aftermath of Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow and repeated orders to play matches behind closed doors as a result of clashes between the ultras and security forces.
Al Ahly, one of Africa’s most crowned clubs which traces its roots to opposition to the government to when it was founded more than a century ago as a meeting place of opponents of the British colonial administration and the monarchy, favored cancellation of the league. A number of Al-Ahly players, including Mohamed Abou Treika, Mohamed Barakat, Ahmed Fathi and Emad Mete'b, said they would not play matches because of low morale and because no one had yet been brought to justice for the bloodshed in Port Said.
Egypt's lawmakers are investigating who was behind the deadly violence. Preliminary results blamed fans and lax security for the incident and suggested that unidentified thugs had been involved in the violence, fueling reports that the violence had been planned rather than spontaneous.
Senior interior ministry officials said last week that those suspected of responsibility for the Port Said violence, including security officials, would be formally charged within days. Authorities have so far detained 54 people on suspicion of complicity.
The EFA decision may have been the soccer body’s only option but raises significant questions. It highlights the deteriorating security in the Arab world's most populous country as instability continues nearly a year after Mr. Mubarak was swept out of power in a popular uprising.
The lack of security is fueled by the reluctance of the police and security forces to enforce law and order in a bid to change the image of law enforcement agencies, which are widely perceived as henchmen of the Mubarak regime. As a result, the police over the past year have been more interested in avoiding clashes with groups that played key roles in the overthrow of the president, including the incident in Port Said, than in carrying out their duties in the belief that this would help them reposition themselves and that insecurity would emphasize the need for a police force to prevent the country from drifting into chaos and anarchy.
The league suspension spotlights the military rulers’ failure to reform the police and security forces and ensure that they carry out their responsibility to ensure law and order. Some in Egypt believe that the suspension in a soccer-crazy country is also designed to further isolate the ultras and youth groups that were at the core of the popular uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak. The groups have lost popularity in recent months in a country that has become protest weary and yearns for a return to normalcy and economic growth. Anti-government protests and violent clashes with security forces stand in the way of focusing on the economy.
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer
Ahmadinejad loses not one but two elections with re-election of Iranian soccer boss
By James M. Dorsey
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s waning political fortunes suffered a double blow... more
By James M. Dorsey
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s waning political fortunes suffered a double blow this week: the conservative victory in parliamentary elections and the re-election of Iranian Football Federation (IFF) president Ali Kafashian in defiance of the Iranian leader’s efforts to ensure his defeat.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s candidate in IFF elections when he first ran for president four years ago, Mr. Kafashian’s performance has done little to ensure that Iranian soccer helped the hands-on, soccer playing Iranian leader polish his tarnished image. On the contrary. Iranian soccer has been going from bad to worse under Mr. Kafashian’s leadership.
The soccer pitch on Mr. Kafashian’s watch has repeatedly in Tehran and Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan, turned into a venue for protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad’s government. The IFF president is also the fall guy for the failure of successive national coaches to deliver performance even though Mr. Ahmadinejad
takes a direct interest in their appointment.
The coaches failed to take Iran to World Cup finals or triumph in Asian Cups, dashing Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hopes that the national team’s resulting prestige would rub off on him. Iran still stands a chance for qualifying for the 2014 Brazil World Cup.
Nonetheless, Iran’s Olympic women’s team was disqualified last year for wearing a hijab, a headdress favoured by observant Muslim women players, in violation of world soccer body FIFA rules. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Kafashian last year withdrew his candidacy for a seat on the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) executive committee..
As a result, Mr. Kafashian’s re-election campaign faced opposition from two candidates: one backed by the government, the other by the Revolutionary Guards, which has been taking in recent years an ever greater interest in Iranian soccer.
Ironically, the fact that Mr. Kafashian decided to stand as a candidate despite the loss of support of his former sponsors and his willingness to challenge the government publicly may have worked in his favour. In statements to the media, Mr. Kafashian made no bones of the fact that the government was interfering in the IFF election to engineer his defeat. Iran was briefly suspended by FIFA in 2006 for interfering in the federation’s elections.
Mr. Kafashian drove his newly found assertiveness home by vowing in his campaign to improve the financial and commercial position of clubs and ensure that the federation would enjoy greater independence in his second term. That is a tall order in a country in which the majority of clubs are owned by government-related entities, people close to the Revolutionary Guards have been joining boards and in which the president sees the federation as one of his soft power tools.
It would also mean ensuring that clubs meet FIFA criteria for membership in a premier league, which include financial independence, ownership of a stadium and the fact that its owners have only one club in the league – all conditions that would significantly reduce the government’s influence on soccer.
Last weekend’s decision by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which determines the rules of the game, to test a new headdress for women that complies with player’s cultural demand as well as safety and security standards poses a challenge for Mr. Kafashian. While it ensures that Iran will no longer be disbarred as long as it adheres to the new headdress rather than the hijab, Mr. Kafashian will still have to manage the issue that wearing the headdress is mandatory rather than voluntary not only for Iranian players but also for visiting foreign women’s teams.
All of this is hardly good news for Mr. Ahmadinejad, who according to a 2009 US diplomatic cable disclosed by WikiLeaks concluded that the president’s efforts to make soccer work to his political advantage had achieved only limited success.
The Iranian president went as far as in 2006 lifting the ban on women watching soccer matches in Iranian stadia, but in a rare public disagreement was overruled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Documenting Mr. Ahmadinejad’s active interest in soccer, the US cable reported that he pressured the Iranian football federation to lift its 2008 suspension of star Ali Karimi so that he could play in 2010 World Cup qualifiers, engineered the 2009 firing of Ali Daei as coach, ensured that Mr Daei’s successor Mohamed Mayeli-Kohan lasted all of two weeks in the job so that his candidate would be appointed.
Mr. Ahmedinejad has justified his interference telling Iranian journalists that “unfortunately, this sport has been afflicted with some very bad issues. I must intervene personally to push aside these destructive issues.”
Like in other Middle Eastern nations, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s efforts to politically manipulate the beautiful game turned the soccer pitch into a platform for dissent for which the president wanted him to take the blame in this year’s IFF election.
The Iranian federation postponed league matches in Tehran in February of last year in a bid to prevent celebrations of the 32nd anniversary of the Islamic revolution from turning into anti-government protests inspired by the toppling of the Egyptian and Tunisian presidents by mass anti-government protests.
The funeral in May of last year of famous Iranian soccer player Nasser Hejazi, an internationally acclaimed defender and outspoken critic of the president in Tehran’s Azadi stadium turned into a mass protest against the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Mourners chanted “Hejazi, you spoke in the name of the people” in a reference to Mr. Hejazi’s criticism of the Iranian president’s economic policies. Mr. Hejazi took Mr. Ahmadinejad in April publicly to task for Iran’s gaping income difference and budgetary measure, which hit the poorest the hardest.
Mourners in the Behsht Zahra cemetery where Mr. Hejazi was buried shouted “Mubarak, Bin Ali, now it’s your turn Khamenei!” in reference to ousted Egyptian and Tunisian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine Abedine Ben Ali and Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Mr. Hejazi tried to run for president as an independent candidate in Iran’s 2005 elections, but was forced by authorities to withdraw.
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.
Lebanon employs soccer in bid to reduce threat of spill over of Syrian violence
By James M. Dorsey
Soccer is rallying divided Lebanon scarred by years of bitter civil war at a time that... more
By James M. Dorsey
Soccer is rallying divided Lebanon scarred by years of bitter civil war at a time that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s sectarian-tainted brutal crackdown threatens to spill into the streets of Lebanese cities.
In a bid to build on Lebanese rallying around their flag in December after the Lebanese national soccer team defeated South Korea 2:1 in a 2014 World Cup qualifier, Education Minister Hassan Diab called this week on private and public schools to allow students to go home early on Wednesday so that they can cheer their squad as it plays the UAE in Abu Dhabi. A win against favourite UAE could guarantee Lebanon a spot in the fourth and final round of qualifiers for the Brazil World Cup.
In a country where almost every facet of life is defined by sectarian fault lines, Lebanon’s defeat of South Korea in December brought tens of thousands of fans into the streets of the Lebanese capital Beirut waving the country's red and white flag with a green cedar in the middle. Traffic came to a halt and for a moment sectarian differences that have deeply divided the country for decades were superseded by a sense of national pride.
"Sports can do what religion and politics can't, gather the Lebanese people around a common thing. The national team changed the point of view to many football fans, and it united them for one goal, to participate in World Cup 2014. This was a very good step to help people to leave their political and religious views behind and watch their team without reverting to riots or gang wars,” The Associated Press (AP) quoted Lebanese supporter Serge Mghames as saying at the time.
Just how fragile that sense of unity is was highlighted when earlier this month fighting erupted between supporters of Mr. Assad, and those who oppose his regime in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli where a single street divides Jabal Muhsin, populated by members of the Syrian leader’s Alawite sect, from Sunni Muslims in Bab al-Tabbana who have close ties to their Sunni brethren across the border in Syria.
Three people were killed and many more were injured in 24 hours of fighting. Walls riddled with bullets and damaged buildings betray the intensity of the fighting.
The government hopes that a surprise defeat of the UAE could revive the soccer-inspired sense of national unity and prove stronger than sectarian animosity that is never far from the surface.
That however is a tall order in a country of four million that is divided among 18 Muslim and Christian sects and scarred by 15 years of civil war that ended with a fragile peace in 1991.
If the experience of Iraq whose national team became Asian champion in 2007 at a time that the country was wracked by sectarian bloodshed or Abbas Suan, a devout Palestinian Israeli Muslim who refused to sing the Hatikva, Israel’s national anthem, when it was played before a game but in 2006 united Israeli Jews and Arabs by securing with a last minute equalizer against Ireland Israel’s first chance in 35 years to qualify for a world cup is anything to go by soccer’s unifying effect is lost as soon as the team no longer performs.
The government’s effort is further complicated by the fact that sectarianism is so deeply rooted in the country’s game that the government banned fans from attending domestic league matches in the wake of the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harriri and violent clashes between fans
following the 2006 war between the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah and Israel.
The government lifted the ban on fans in October of last year, but by then the damage had been done. The ban devastated the game: its domestic league whose clubs are closely tied to sectarian and political interests all but collapsed and the national team was drained of potential talent. Clubs became financially even more dependent on their sectarian and political sponsors, allowing them to manipulate the game to their own ends.
The grip of sectarian and political sponsors is strengthened by the fact that corporate sponsors like Coca Cola are forced to simultaneously support Christian, Sunni and Shiite teams to avoid being accused of favouring one community above the other. As a result, Lebanon fell in world soccer body FIFA’s rankings from 125 to 178 but has rebounded to 111 with its defeat of South Korea.
"Politics came into football and destroyed it," said Rahif Alameh, secretary-general of the Lebanese Football Association, who dates the "death of football" to 2001, the year when the government intervened in a murky match-fixing scandal rather than the 2005 ban on fans. That was when Lebanon's political-religious leaders began treating the association as a pie to be carved up in line with Lebanon’s sectarian system of power sharing.
The Hariri family’s Future or March 14 Movement, for example, sponsors several clubs. Rafik Hariri’s purchase in 2003 of Nejmeh, Lebanon’s most popular team made it the last to succumb to sectarianism. The first non-Christian club to be founded in Lebanon, Nejmeh lost its Shiite Muslim fan base with the acquisition by Mr. Hariri. The former billionaire prime minister initially ventured into sports as a moneymaking venture, but later turned his teams into vehicles for consolidating his Sunni Muslim support.
"Football had just (become an extension) of politics. Everything in Lebanon is politicized, the air we breathe is politicized.,” Mr. Alameh said.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that the various teams within a political block – the Hariri’s pro-Western and pro-Saudi March 14 Movement or Iran-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah’s pro-Syrian March 8 Movement – support each other by not fielding their best players when one of their associated clubs needs a win to progress in a championship or avoid being relegated.
American University of Beirut political scientist Danyel Reiche describes professional sports and particularly soccer in Lebanon in an essay in Third World Quarterly as the sector with the most “direct confrontation among the different sectarian and political groups“ because “whereas the political system prevents sects from competing with each other there are no separate sectarian (sports) leagues.” Quoting George Orwell, Mr. Reiche says Lebanese soccer amount to “war minus the shooting.”
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.
Egyptian striker Zidan highlights post-revolt transition problems by calling Mubarak father
By James M. Dorsey
Egyptian soccer star Mohamed Zidan in controversial remarks in
a television... more
By James M. Dorsey
Egyptian soccer star Mohamed Zidan in controversial remarks in
a television interview put his finger on the problem Egypt and other post-revolt Arab countries face in transition from an autocratic to a more open society and the battles to be fought on the soccer pitch.
In an interview with satellite channel CBC Egypt, Mr. Zidan, a striker in the Egyptian national team and for Germany’s FSV Mainz 05, focused attention on the neo-patriarchal role of Arab autocrats as their nation’s father figure, the refusal of a majority of soccer players and managers to join the region’s anti-autocratic revolts and the deep-seated rivalry between crowned Cairo clubs Al Ahly SC and Al Zamalek SC despite the fact that militant soccer fans of both clubs stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the mass protests last year that forced president Hosni Mubarak out of office.
“I kissed Mubarak’s hand when he honoured Egypt after the 2010 African Cup of Nations as I saw him as a father of all Egyptians,” said Mr. Zidan said reflecting the attitude of most soccer players and managers in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Egyptian soccer players stood aside during the mass protests while some prominent managers, including then starred national coach Hassan Shehata and twin brother Ibrahim and Hossam Hassan, who were at the time a Zamalek board member and the team’s coach openly supported Mr. Mubarak, only to be later blacklisted by the protesters.
Mr. Zidan’s description of Mr. Mubarak as a father echoed repeated statements last year by the Hassan brothers and others who said they supported the objectives of the anti-government protesters, but were concerned about the impact on soccer and believed that Mubarak had served his country and should be treated with respect.
Elsewhere, Libyan soccer players only joined the rebels four months into the NATO-backed armed revolt against Moammar Qaddafi when family and friends of theirs were killed in the fighting. In Bahrain where majority Shiite Muslim national soccer team players and other sportsmen organized their own protest against the minority Sunni Muslim government, the royal family failure to ensure equal rights for the religious minority meant that the king was not perceived as the country’s father figure.
Abdelbasset Saroot, a 20-year old player for Syria's national Under-23 team who is one of the leaders of the protest in the embattled city of Homs, is perhaps the foremost exception to the rule.
At the heart of the failure of soccer players and managers to join the popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa is what Palestinian-American historian Hisham Sharabi call neo-patriarchy in a controversial book published in 1992 that is still banned in many Arab countries. Mr. Sharabi argued that Arab society was built around the "dominance of the Father (patriarch), the centre around which the national as well as the natural family are organized. Between ruler and ruled, between father and child, there exist only vertical relations: in both settings the paternal will is absolute will, mediated in both the society and the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion."
In other words, Arab regimes franchised repression so that in a cultural patrimonial society, the oppressed participated in their repression and denial of rights. The regime is in effect the father of all fathers at the top of the pyramid. In the words of Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab quoted by journalist Brian Whitacker in a book exploring the nature of Arab soicety, Egypt's problem was not simply an aging president with little to show for himself after almost thirty years in power, but the fact that "Egypt has a million (president Hosni) Mubaraks.”
As a result, the patriarchal values that dominate soccer in addition to its popularity made it the perfect game for neo-patriarchs. Their values were soccer's values: assertion of male superiority in most aspects of life, control or harnessing of female lust and a belief in a masculine God. The identification of the presidents of Egypt, Iran and Yemen - Mubarak, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Abdullah Ali Saleh - as well as Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Qaddafi’s son, Al Saadi al Qaddafi, with their country’s national teams turned their successes and failures into barometers of how their regimes were faring.
It also meant that managers were either appointed or approved by the Middle East’s and North Africa’s autocratic regimes while players were feted by autocrats and showered with gifts including expensive real estate and cars as well as significant amounts of cash for their successes on the soccer pitch.
With the region’s militant soccer fans or ultras – highly politicized, well organized street battle-hardened groups modelled on similar groups in Serbia and Italy – likely to refocus their attention on the beautiful game after having played a key role in revolts that toppled various Arab autocrats and a year of vicious street battles with security forces in downtown Cairo, Mr. Zidan’s remark highlights the strained relations between fans who view themselves as their club’s only truly supporters, players and managers in the region’s post-revolt soccer.
To the ultras, players are hired guns willing to switch allegiances for money while management consists largely of corrupt appointees of autocratic regimes. Al Ahly ultras unfolded a year ago a huge banner addressed to players during their team’s friendly against Harras El-Hodoud that read: "We followed you everywhere but in the hard times we didn't find you." Many reject Egypt’s national team as ‘Mubarak’s team’ rather than that of the nation. Players have since the overthrow of Mubarak pressured the ultras unsuccessfully to moderate their support tactics that include the use of fireworks, flares, smoke guns and abusive chanting because the clubs were being penalized.
In the interview, Mr. Zidan attempted to explain his failure to acknowledge the 74 soccer fans who died in a lethal clash in Port Said earlier this month immediately after a match between Al Ahly and the Sue Canal city’s Al Masry SC. His failure to do so highlighted the intense rivalry between Ahly, established in the early 20as an Egyptians-only meeting place for opponents of Britain's colonial rule as well as the monarchy that was toppled in 1952 and Zamalek, the pro-monarchy club of the British imperial administrators and military brass as well as the Cairo upper class. Their rivalry was so deep-seated that matches between them became the world’s most violent derby.
Ironically it was Mr. Mubarak that brought the arch rivals together.
For the first time in the two clubs’ history, Mr. Mubarak emerged as the figure that fans of both clubs hated more than they hated each other. As a result, ultras of the two clubs joined forces last year on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to throw the country’s father figure off his pedestal.
“I really didn’t mean to provoke the emotions of the Egyptians,” Mr. Zidan said apologizing for his lack of empathy with the killed Ahli fans. “I was really close to a move to Ahly in the past and I respect the club and its fans,” Mr. Zidan insisted.
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.
Revealing picture of Tunisian-German midfielder fuels debate about political Islam
By James M. Dorsey
This week’s arrest of three Tunisian journalists for publishing a revealing picture of a... more
By James M. Dorsey
This week’s arrest of three Tunisian journalists for publishing a revealing picture of a Tunisian soccer player with his girlfriend has deepened secular distrust of Tunisia’s Islamist-led post-revolt government and fueled debate in the Middle East and North Africa and beyond about the true intentions of Sunni Muslim Islamist parties that are emerging as victors from the Arab revolt.
The three journalists, the first to be detained since mass demonstrations toppled President Zine el Abedine Ben Ali a year ago, were arrested on orders of the public prosecutor for publishing a picture of Tunisian-German Real Madrid midfielder Sami Khedira dressed in a tuxedo with his hands covering the breasts of his otherwise naked German model girlfriend, Lena Gercke.
The three journalists – Attounisia newspaper publisher Nasreddine Ben Said, editor-in-chief Habib Guizani, and foreign editor Hedi Hidhri – are being held on charges of offending public morality.
Their arrest has focused the immediate debate on Islamist intentions on the threat of a media crackdown to ensure that publishing adheres to religious morals as defined by the country's new Islamist rulers. It follows the pressing of charges against a local television channel for showing Persepolis, a film whose animated depiction of God outraged conservative Salafi Islamists who propagate a .return to the 7th century way of life in the time of the Prophet Mohammed.
Last month, hundreds of journalists demonstrated outside the office of the prime minister to demand an end to restrictions on media freedoms after the appointment of government officials and editors to state television positions.
Fears of a crackdown come a year after Tunisia’s popular revolt was liberated from Mr. Ben Ali’s tight censorship.
“The Islamists don’t like the media and are trying to control it,” says Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, the leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. Mr. Chebbi, a proponent of replacing the Islamist Ennahada party led government with a national unity government. “There is still place for other political forces, they just need to consolidate themselves.”
Mustafa Tlili, the founder of the New York-based Center for Dialogues and an advisor to United Nations General Assembly chairman Nassir Abdelaziz Al–Nasser of Qatar, charges that Islamists are hijacking the revolts staged by protesters whose “slogans were secular for freedom, liberty and dignity… Those that staged the revolution see it being stolen and hijacked…Tunisia’s environment is the Mediterranean and Europe. The Islamists discourse is to withdraw Tunisia from its natural environment and make it adopt Islamist values that are not those of the majority of Tunisians. They reject these values because they are not part of their daily life or vision of Islam,” Mr. Tlili says.
Messrs Tlili and Chebbi, speaking in Sochi, Russia at a Valdei Discussion Club meeting on the revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, made their remarks days after five secular Tunisian political parties announced that they would merge into a single coalition in an effort to counter the moderate Islamist Ennahada party that last October won Tunisia’s post Mubarak election.
In a statement, Tunisia's journalists' union called for the "immediate release of all journalists and the rejection of intimidation against reporters." Thousands of Tunisians endorsed a campaign on Facebook in support of the journalists and to defend freedom of expression.
The government has repeatedly denied accusations it is seeking to stifle the media.
Ennahada officials acknowledge that they are fighting a battle to channel expectations of their rank and file and demonstrate their commitment to a pluralist, democratic society. In perhaps his last article before his sudden death of an asthma attack, revered New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid quoted Ennahada official Said Ferjani said history would judge his generation not on their ability to take power but rather on what it did with power.
“I can tell you one thing, we now have a golden opportunity. And in this golden opportunity, I’m not interested in control. I’m interested in delivering the best charismatic system, a charismatic, democratic system. This is my dream,” Mr. Ferjani said.
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.
Sherry Sayed Gadelrab on Victorian Scientific Theories and their Influence on Muslim Understandings of Gender
This blog examines how victorian Scientific theories still influence contemporary Muslim fatwas on gender roles. This blog examines how victorian Scientific theories still influence contemporary Muslim fatwas on gender roles.