The European Union's critical engagement with the Syrian Arab Republic
Co-authored with Arantza Gomez Arana. Published in: European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 15, No. 5, 2010, pp. 629-644.
Download (.pdf) Yes, He Can': A Reappraisal of Syrian Foreign Policy under Bashar al-Asad
Co-authored with Erik Mohns. Published in: Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2010, pp. 289-298.
[Policy analysis]: Der Anfang vom Ende? Das Assad-Regime in Syrien steht mit dem Rücken zur Wand
by Erik Mohns
[Syria: The beginning of the end? – The Assad regime is cornered]. Published in: Resource Center, Centre for Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. Shorter version published In: iz3w – Informationszentrum 3. Welt 325 (July-August): 10-11.
Trotz brutaler Repressionen halten im syrischen “Königreich der Angst“ die Proteste an. Je länger das Regime seine... more Trotz brutaler Repressionen halten im syrischen “Königreich der Angst“ die Proteste an. Je länger das Regime seine Unfähigkeit zur politischen Öffnung beweist, desto mehr dürfte seine Legitimation schwinden.
İÇ SAVAŞIN EŞİĞİNDE BİR ÜLKE: SURİYE (A COUNTRY ON THE THRESHOLD OF A CIVIL WAR: SYRIA)- 13.02.2012
ÖZET
Tunus, Mısır, Yemen, Libya, Bahreyn ve Suriye gibi çok sayıda Arap ülkesi, 2011 yılında Orta... more
ÖZET
Tunus, Mısır, Yemen, Libya, Bahreyn ve Suriye gibi çok sayıda Arap ülkesi, 2011 yılında Orta Doğu’nun otoriter yönetimlerine karşı ortaya çıkan halk ayaklanmalarından derinden etkilendi. Suriye’deki ayaklanma 15 Mart 2011’de başladı ve hızlı bir biçimde ülke çapına yayıldı. Bununla birlikte Suriye’deki ayaklanma, bu ülkenin kendine özgü iç siyasi şartları ve jeopolitik konumundan dolayı diğer Arap ülkelerinden farklı bir seyir izledi. Yaklaşık bir yıllık sürede ne Suriye yönetimi ülkedeki ayaklanmayı tam anlamıyla bastırabildi, ne de muhalifler Suriye yönetimini yıkacak yeterli toplumsal tabana sahip olabildi. Suriye’deki kriz gün geçtikçe derinleşmekte ve daha karmaşık bir hale gelmektedir. Suriye’de mezhep temelli bir iç savaş olasılığı, Orta Doğu alt sisteminde güvenlik ve yüksek yoğunlukta çatışma risklerini hızlı bir biçimde yükseltmektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Suriye, Beşşar Esad, 2011-2012 Suriye Ayaklanması
ABSTRACT
A great number of Arab countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Syria were deeply affected by uprisings occurring against authoritarian regimes of the Middle East in 2011. Syrian uprising broke out on 15 March 2011 and quickly developed into a full-scale nationwide uprising. However Syrian uprising has proceeded in different way than others owing to its sui generis internal political conditions and geopolitical position. Nearly for a year neither Syrian government could suppress the uprising, nor opponents had enough social base to overturn the regime. As the day goes on crisis in Syria has deepened and got more complicated. The probability of civil war in Syria sharply increases risks of security and high density conflict in the Middle East sub-system
Keywords: Syria, Bashar al-Assad, 2011–2012 Syrian Uprising
Ba’thist Syria and War: Understanding the Role of War Mobilisation in the Making of its Contemporary Institutions
To understand the current Syrian regime answer to internal pressure it is necessary to consider its historical... more To understand the current Syrian regime answer to internal pressure it is necessary to consider its historical relation to war preparation and its role for the construction of the Syrian nation. The following analysis of Ba’thist Syria under al-Asad (elder) traces the relation of institutional evolution and war experience considering both the political economy of the state and its legitimacy. This period corresponds with the growth of the state’s economic role from the access of the Ba’th party to power up to the end of the 70s. It will concludes by presenting the challenge posed to the regime by the fiscal crisis of the 1980s.
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.
The Turkish Approach of the Syrian crisis
Some corrections needed.
The Turks did not demand for a regime change since the beginning of the crisis in Syria. In fact, even when Ramy... more The Turks did not demand for a regime change since the beginning of the crisis in Syria. In fact, even when Ramy Makhlouf said that the regime “will fight until the end” in May 2011, Ankara still had a solid relationship with Damascus. In consequence, it is quite hard to describe the Turkish policy as a Sunni one. The Sunni factor which might exist at the personal or domestic levels, but in addition there are numerous other factors that shape the Turkish policy toward Syria. The thesis that is argued in this paper is that the policy of Turkey is mainly dictated by its need of stability in its Southern border. The problem can be assessed by referring to two levels of preoccupations for the Turkish government: the domestic level and the regional level.
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.
The Struggle Over Syria
Published on 31/03/2012, on TheGWPost www.thegwpost.com
It is unquestionable that the crisis in Syria is getting worse by the minute. Thousands of people have been killed,... more It is unquestionable that the crisis in Syria is getting worse by the minute. Thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have fled their homes, and Turkey hosts almost 20,000 refugees. While the account is tragic and discouraging already, the Assad regime does not stop shelling his own country’s cities and killing his own people. In this climate, the international community – if there is such a coherent thing – is trying to manage the crisis. It is true that for most of the international actors involved, what is going on in Syria is unfortunate and they would frankly rather not to be dealing with it.
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.
Lebanese victory boosts national unity and spotlights Gulf problems
By James M. Dorsey
Lebanon advanced for the first time in its soccer history to the fourth and final Asian... more
By James M. Dorsey
Lebanon advanced for the first time in its soccer history to the fourth and final Asian qualifying round for the 2014 World Cup despite losing this week to the United Arab Emirates. In doing so, the Lebanese squad cemented soccer’s role as a rallying point for a country divided and scarred by years of bitter civil war afraid that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s sectarian-tainted brutal crackdown could spill into the streets of Lebanese cities.
In a country where almost every facet of life is defined by sectarian fault lines, Lebanon’s advance had people from all walks of life glued to television sets and computer screens in offices, university lecture halls, sports bars and living rooms. Schools closed early for students to be able to watch the match.
The Lebanese success even if it was by default strengthened soccer’s unifying role two months after the national team’s defeat of South Korea in December brought tens of thousands into the streets of the Lebanese capital Beirut waving the country's red and white flag with a green cedar in the middle. As Lebanon scored against South Korea sectarian chants in Beirut’s Cite Sportive stadium were replaced with roars of "Minshan Allah, Libnan yallah'' - "For God's Sake, Lebanon Come On'' as fans belonging to the country’s multiple sects and political groups united behind their national squad.
Nonetheless, fighting last month between supporters of Mr. Assad, and those who oppose his regime in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli signaled just how fragile that sense of national unity is. Three people were killed and many more were injured in 24 hours of fighting.
Meanwhile, in a weird twist of events, Lebanese fans attending Wednesday’s match in Abu Dhabi against the UAE spotlighted a key weakness of soccer in the Gulf that has fuelled some of the criticism of Qatar’s winning in late 2010 of the right to host the 2022 World Cup: the lack of a fan base eager to come to the stadium to cheer their team.
The estimated 6,000 Lebanese fans outnumbered the Emiratis on Wednesday in Abu Dhabi’s Al Nahyan Stadium. To be sure with an estimated 100,000 Lebanese expats resident in the UAE many of the Lebanese did not have to travel far for the match.
Nonetheless, news reports said that Lebanese supporters had come from as far as Brazil and Britain to support their team.
The Gulf News reported that Emiratis boycotted the match because their team did not stand a chance irrespective of whether it defeated Lebanon or not of reaching the World Cup finals as it had done once before in 1990.
While that may be true it evades the structural problem with filling stadiums in a part of the world where the local population often constitutes a minority of the total population. In the UAE, locals account for at best 15% of the population whose vast majority are expatriates.
A recent survey by Abu Dhabi daily The National concluded that the Mohamed bin Zayed Stadium of the emirate’s Al Jazira Sports & Culture club was among the UAE’s most popular sport venues. The stadium owes it popularity only in part to its futuristic design that lacks a runway track and allows fans to be seated closer to the field.
Equally important is the fact that Al Jazira has some of the highest attendance figures in the Gulf because its former chief executive officer, Englishman Phil Anderton, a former marketeer for Scottish Rugby, Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble, was willing to go places others in the Gulf shied away from because they were afraid of upsetting the fragile demographic apple cart.
In a bid to raise match attendance and integrate his club with the community, Mr. Anderton reached out to the expatriate population – a move Gulf clubs controlled by the region’s ruling families have avoided out of fear that this would give foreigners a stake that could encourage them over time to demand greater rights.
Mr. Anderton’s strategy worked. Within a year attendance figures at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium had quadrupled drawing a record crowd of 28,164 for a match against Al Wasl. Redevelopment of the stadium has increased its capacity from 15,000 to 42,000. Ironically, the increased number of expats has sparked greater enthusiasm among Emiratis.
"The number of Al Jazira's home fans is really impressive as they really get a good crowd. You enjoy the game thrice as much than the stadium being more than half empty. Also, we see a lot of expats at their games so it's great that they are showing an interest in the Pro League,” The National quoted rival Al Nasr fan Faisal Hamadi as saying.
“We looked at who was coming and who wasn't and why. There was a lack of awareness and a range of misconceptions - they thought it was amateur or for Emiratis only. From this we developed a brand position to encourage people interested in football to come to the club. With the transitory nature few felt a connection so we are trying to unite the city through the club with the tag line ‘Pride of Abu Dhabi'. We developed a full marketing plan with advertising and PR as well as going into local schools and communities to try and change perceptions and raise awareness,” Mr. Anderson said in an interview last year.
“We showcased our star players and organized tournaments for the community in our facilities. Once we encouraged people to come to the games and feel part of the club we had to deliver a product. We needed to make sure that we treated people well when they came, with food in a clean well sign-posted stadium and then we needed to put on a good show where football is at the core of other entertainment options - it's more an American model,” he added.
Mr. Anderton’s approach broke with Gulf practice in more than one way. Arguing that teams can only exploit their home advantage if they have the crowd cheering them on during matches, he also argued in favor of turning clubs dependent on the politically motivated largesse of their royal and tribal owners into commercially viable entities. “Historically clubs here didn't have the requirement to go into the commercial side of things but we want to develop sponsorship, merchandise, ticketing and hospitality from using our facilities 365 days a year via leasing in order to set down a sustainable business model, which inevitably leads to success on the field,” Mr. Anderton 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.
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.
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