Egyptian military uses soccer ban to undermine ultras

Port Said continues to haunt the military and soccer

By James M. Dorsey

Egypt’s military rulers are employing a security-inspired sustained ban on professional soccer as a tool to undermine radical, highly-politicized and street battle-hardened soccer fans who have emerged as the North African country’s most militant opponents of the armed force’s grip on politics.

The military’s effort to sideline soccer as a national past time is in stark contrast to ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s use of the game to enhance his image and distract public attention from politics. If soccer overshadowed politics under Mr. Mubarak, politics dwarfs soccer under his successors.

So far the military supported by the interior ministry appears to be succeeding in its goal of isolating militant soccer fan groups. It is however a strategy that could backfire. For one, public focus on politics means closer scrutiny of public officials and enhanced pressure on both the military and Egypt’s newly elected president, Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi, to perform in terms of rebuilding Egypt’s economy and moving the country further down the road towards democracy.

The military, the interior ministry, soccer officials and militant soccer fans have in recent days been locked into a complex dance focused on the authorities’ refusal to lift a five month ban on professional soccer and the aftermath of the death of 74 fans in February in a politically loaded brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said. It is a dance that in coming days could erupt into renewed street violence in what the security forces would hope is the final showdown and militants would seek to turn into a second revolution that forces the soldiers to return to their barracks.

The hardening of positions on both sides of the divide comes as Mr. Morsi despite having won Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election with 52 per cent of the vote finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Egypt's military, which succeeded Mr. Mubarak with a mandate to guide the country towards free and fair elections effectively pre-empted the Brotherhood victory by giving itself broad legislative and executive authority on the eve of the election. The move has left Mr. Mors primarily dependent on public support in his tug of war with the military.

The interior ministry’s refusal to lift the ban on soccer imposed in the wake of the Port Said incident as long as enhanced security, including electronic gates, airport-style scanners and security cameras have not been installed in Egyptian stadiums is not unreasonable.

Yet, it ignores the fact that security forces stood aside during the brawl in Port Said in what was widely believed to be an effort that got out of hand to teach a lesson to the militant soccer fans for their continued opposition to the military. It also fails to take account of the fact that the military has refrained from reforming the interior ministry and its security forces who are Egypt’s most distrusted institutions because of their role as enforcers of the repressive Mubarak regime.

The military’s exploitation of increased post-Mubarak public focus on politics at the expense of soccer is aided by the poor performance of Egypt’s national team in recent African tournaments. Egypt last month failed to qualify for the Africa Cup finals in a crucial match against the Central African Republic just as Mr. Morsi was being sworn in as his country’s first democratically elected leader.

Media focus on Mr. Morsi rather than the soccer match was in stark contrast to an incident in 2006 when the Mubarak regime successfully focused the media on Egyptian soccer rather than on the sinking of a ferry in which 1,100 people died. Public sentiment at the time blamed government corruption for their deaths.

“The balance is being reset,” Egypt Independent quoted American University of Cairo political scientist Emad Shahin as saying.

In fact, the role of militant soccer fans in the overthrow of Mr. Mubarak and the vicious street battles with security forces in which hundreds were killed and thousands wounded since his downfall that culminated in the Port Said incident have transformed soccer from a debate about sports to one about politics.

That was reinforced by the government’s firing of the Mubarak era board of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) in the wake of Port Said. Three competing lists – members of the Mubarak-era board, Islamist players and independent reformers – are campaigning for the EFA’s elections scheduled for late August.

“This was the first time in the history of Egyptian football that victims have fallen after a football match. This match has fanned the flames of conflict between revolutionaries and the SCAF,” the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, said Ayman Abou Ayed, head of state-owned Al Ahram newspaper’s sports department.

Public empathy for the militant soccer fans was already diminishing by the time Port Said happened. Many Egyptians have become protest weary and yearn for stability that would allow their country to return to a path of economic growth.  Mr. Ayed argues that the violence coupled with the suspension of the premier league and the banning of spectators from international matches reduced public interest in what had been a national passion.

The hardening of positions and the potential for renewed violence became evident earlier this week when a group of militant supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC whose members died in the Port Said incident were attacked by unidentified men armed with shotguns, glass shards and rocks as they marched from their club’s headquarters to the Journalists’ Syndicate.

Militant supporters of Al Ahly arch rival Al Zamalek said days before the attack that they had suggested ways to reduce violence in the stadiums but had received no response from the authorities. In a statement, the militants warned that their approach towards upcoming matches would be determined by how the interior ministry justified its continued ban on spectators attending games. Zamalek and Al Ahly, whose derbies prior to Mr. Mubarak’s downfall were ranked among the world’s most violent, are scheduled to clash on Sunday in Cairo in an African club championship match.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Egyptian soccer riots set to spread from Port Said to Cairo

Al Masri soccer fans pray behind the coffin of a youth who was shot dead during clashes with security forces (Source: Reuters)

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.

Iranian interference in soccer federation election puts FIFA on the spot

Ali Kafashian: From government supporter to Ahmadinejad challenger

By James M. Dorsey

An effort by the Iranian government to force the resignation of recently re-elected Iranian Football Federation (IFF) president Ali Kafashian constitutes the second time in as many months that a Middle Eastern government defies world soccer body FIFA’s ban on political interference in the beautiful game.

It also spotlights FIFA’s systematic failure to impose governance on its members in the Middle East and North Africa, a part of the world where soccer has over the years become a political battlefield. As a result, governments openly flaunt FIFA’s authority.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a soccer fan who micro manages affairs of the Iranian federation in a failed bid to bolster his popularity, is using the judiciary in a blatant effort to nullify Mr. Kafashian’s re-election.

In a law suit, the attorney general asserted that Mr. Kafashian’s re-election is illegal because he is banned from holding public office as a retired public employee. The attorney general has further threatened to prosecute members of the IFF executive committee who voted in favour of Mr. Kafashian.

The state-owned Fars news agency reported that iran’s recently created sports ministry is pressuring Mr. Kafashian to resign so that it can get a government approved candidate elected.

In a separate report, Fars highlighted the importance of sports to the government in a report about support by prominent sportsmen including former national soccer team players Alireza Mansourian and Hassan Roshan, Teheran’s Esteghlal FC soccer academy chairman Faramarz Khodnegah and national body building federation deputy head Seyed Hassan Afzali for a global march to Jerusalem to demand an end to Israeli occupation.

Ironically, Mr. Kafashian’s retirement was not a legal issue when he was first elected four years ago with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s backing. Nor did FIFA complain about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political meddling to secure Mr. Kafashian’s 2008 election two years after it had briefly suspended Iran for interference in IFF polling.

Mr. Ahmadinejad turned this year on Mr. Kafashian because the IFF president had failed to ensure that soccer would boost the Iranian leader’s tarnished image. On the contrary, Iranian soccer has gone from bad to worse under Mr. Kafashian’s leadership.

Mr. Kafashian defeat of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s manipulation in early March came in the same week that the Iranian president’s conservative opponents triumphed in parliamentary elections. The legal proceedings highlight the importance Mr. Ahmadinejad attributes to control of the soccer federation, particularly against the backdrop of his parliamentary setback. Mr. Ahmadinejad became this week the first Iranian president since the Islamic revolution 33 years ago to be forced to justify his performance to parliament.

A diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Tehran leaked by Wikileaks asserts that Mr. Amadinejad’s interest in soccer as a political tool has had limited success. The cable reported that he pressured the IFF 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, and ensured that Mr Daei’s successor Mohamed Mayeli-Kohan lasted all of two weeks in the job so that his preferred candidate could 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.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s blatant meddling in this month’s IFF election constitutes the second time in as many months that a Middle Eastern government openly flaunts FIFA rules to benefit politically from the beautiful game. It highlights FIFA’s increasing lack of credibility in the region.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter last month unsuccessfully demanded that the board of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA), appointees of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, be reinstated after it was summarily dismissed by the government in the wake of the death of 74 militant soccer fans in the Suez Canal town of Port Said in the worst sporting violence in Egyptian history.

The government ignored Mr. Blatter’s demand and outmanoeuvred the FIFA president by ensuing that the board after its official dismissal announced its resignation without acknowledging that it was at the behest of the government. 

Mr. Blatter’s failed effort put the world soccer body at odds with Egyptian fans and clubs who had been campaigning for the last year for the resignation of the EFA board. It also contrasted starkly with FIFA’s failure for years to protest against the Mubarak regime’s political interference.

FIFA has been similarly lax in imposing adherence to FIFA criteria in the Egyptian premier league, a majority of whose members would be disqualified if the soccer body’s rules were applied. The same is true for the top Iranian league.

The comparison between Egypt and Iran doesn’t stop there nor does the risk of FIFA finding itself on the wrong side of history.

One reason Mr. Ahamdinejad turned against Mr. Kafashian is the fact that 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 the Iranian president’s government. The soccer pitch was an important incubator of the revolt that toppled Mr. Mubarak.

The IFF president is also the fall guy for the failure of successive national coaches to deliver performance even though Mr. Ahmadinejad took 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.

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.