Soccer weaves a thread through Syrian rebels and Assad forces

Fawwaz al Assad's soccer club website: Bashar without the thugs

By James M. Dorsey

Soccer, never distant from Middle Eastern politics, weaves its own thread through the brutal battle for the future of Syria, wracked by the Arab world’s most protracted and most bloody revolt against autocratic rule to date.

If Syrian nation youth team goalkeeper Abdelbasset Saroot symbolized for much of the past 17 months the resilience of peaceful protest in the besieged and battered city of Homs, soccer similarly goes to the heart of the shabiha, the irregular, civilian-clad, armed groups blamed for many of the atrocities believed to have been committed by forces loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a fascinating account of the history of the shabiha, whose designation derives from the Arabic word for ghost, Syrian Comment, traces the origins of these criminals to members of the Assad family as well as young, desolate Alawites in northern Syria who saw their escape from poverty and humiliation in becoming wealthy and prestigious on the back of smuggling of banned luxury goods from Lebanon and involvement in soccer.

Witnesses as well as opposition and human rights groups hold the shabiha responsible for a host of atrocities over the past 17 months, including the killing of 21 peaceful protesters in Latakia in March 2011, another 21, a month later in Homs and scores of demonstrators in May 2011 in Banias, Jableh, and Latakia. Shabiha are further accused of conducting a scorched earth campaign in northwestern Syria, burning crops, ransacking houses, shooting protesters and according to The Washington Post raping women. Shabiha are also believed to have committed the massacre in May of this year in Houla, a region north of Homs in which 108 people, including 49 children, were killed and in June in Al Qubair in which 78 people, many of them women and children died.

While the term shabiha has come to mean thugs rather than ghosts in Syria, the associated verb, shabaha, describes a goalkeeper, a shabih, jumping into the air or going airborne to stop an opponent’s attack, according to Syrian Comment. The shabih jumps and saves whether he was the soccer goalkeeper or the smuggler who enabled his clients to jump in status with the goods he provided.

Fawwaz al-Assad, a cousin of Bashar’s, who is widely viewed as the original shabih who rose to control the lucrative port of Latakia and its adjacent smuggling route, started as a fervent supporter of the city’s Tishreen soccer team before becoming its president. Syrian Comment recalls Fawwaz driving in “his big Mercedes” a demonstrative loop around the Al-Assad stadium before sitting on a chair in a fenced off area track reserved for players and coaches to watch a match.

“Always Fawwaz would have few words with the referee before the game also. In one very famous incident Fawwaz took his gun out and let out some shots. The game was between Hutteen and Tishreen and a forward scored on an offside goal for Fawwaz’ team Tishreen. The referee in that famous incident changed his mind after the gun shot to claim the goal in favor of Fawwaz’ team. That made Fawwaz happier and he let out more shots. Fawwaz was a real bully and acted like one,” Syrian Comment reported.

Fawwaz is largely credited in given the word shabih in Syria the meaning of thug rather than ghost. The European Union put Fawwaz and his brother Munzir, who ranks with Fawwaz among the original shabiha but remained on the background, on its sanctions list in May for alleged involvement in "the repression against the civilian population as members of the shabiha".

If Fawwaz inspires fear and disgust, Abdelbassat represents inspiration and resilience. A celebrated national soccer team goalkeeper, singer of revolutionary folk songs and cheerleader of the uprising in Homs, Abdelbassat has set a model that has been followed by other soccer players and athletes. Soccer national team goalkeeper Mosab Balhous is believed to be dead after his arrest a year ago on charges of harboring a ‘terrorist gang’ and ‘taking money to instigate unrest’.  Silver medal winner in the 2004 Athens Olympics Nasser al-Shami is reportedly recovering from wounds he suffered when a sniper fired at him in Hama.

Lulu Shanku, a Syrian national team player returned to his Swedish premier league team Syrianska disgusted with the corruption in Syrian soccer and the intimidation of players by the Assad regime. In some ways, he may have jumped from the fire into the frying pan. Power within the Swedish team is believed to rest with Ghayath Moro, an Assyrian who left Syria in the 1970s and a former Syrianska board member, who now serves as its unelected head of security. Former club board members and officials say that Mr. Moro, a mechanic and failed gas station owner, had close ties to members of Soderatalje’s criminal underground including Bülent Özcan Melke Aslanoglu, the fugitive brother of the club’s coach Özcan Melkemichel.

Aslanoglu disappeared after the killing in a struggle for underground power of Lebanese-Assyrian Syrianska rival Assyriska goalkeeper Eddie Moussa, widely seen as an act of revenge for the criminal dealings of his brother, Danny. “How much of Syrianska’s rise was funded by crime money is the million dollar question. That was probably more the case until the team became more successful,” said Eric Niva, one of Sweden’s top investigative sports reporters.

Replying to a question posed to Mr. Shanku in an interview in May about the fate of Mosab Balhous, Mr. Moro charged that “Mossab disappeared because of one of the gangsters against the regime.” Using terminology employed by the regime, the Syrianska official denounced Syrian protesters and rebels as “gangsters” and accused the United States, Israel and Al Qaeda of waging war against Mr. Assad. “It has been a year and three months now. It is clear that the people want Assad,” Mr. Moro said. He asserted that Syrian forces had captured 12 French and some 25 Turkish generals who had been supporting the rebellion, but could produce no evidence or reporting to back up his claim.

Pakistani The News reporter Naveed Ahmad quoted in late July acclaimed Syrian athlete Yasser Nasrullah as saying in the besieged city of Aleppo where he joined the rebel Free Syrian Army and shouldered a rocket-propelled grenade: “Over the last one year, the only popular sport for the youth has been raising slogans against Bashar Al-Assad and his allies while the regime played game of bloodshed. “I always dreamed of gold, silver and bronze medals but now I score Russian-made tanks and artillery,” he said, claiming to have already knocked out more than 20 Syrian tanks.

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

The Arab Spring Revisited: From Mass Protests to Local Revolts

RSIS presents the following commentary The Arab Spring Revisited: From Mass Protests to Local Revolts by James M. Dorsey. It is also available online at this link. (To print it, click on this link.). Kindly forward any comments or feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, at  RSISPublication@ntu.edu.sg

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No. 156/2012 dated 16 August 2012

The Arab Spring Revisited:
From Mass Protests to Local Revolts

 By James M. Dorsey

      

Synopsis

The push for change in the Middle East and North Africa, dominated by the bloody civil war in Syria, has morphed from mass anti-government protests in the capitals into a wave of smaller, political and socio-economic protests often in the outlying towns, that could lead to a second round of anti-regime demonstrations in countries that have so far managed to control widespread discontent.

Commentary

Televised pictures of mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as well as in Tunis, Tripoli and Sana’a have been replaced by scenes of bitter military battles in Syria’s main cities and towns. However, the impression that the wave of peaceful protests that toppled the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen has lost momentum is deceptive.

A wave of smaller, more local protests in outlying towns suggest a radical shift in the Middle East and North Africa: a once relatively docile, cowed population is applying a new assertiveness, a sense of empowerment acquired from the initial success of the Arab revolts to push demands for reform. They focus their objective on holding their governments accountable for creating the political conditions that will bring jobs and achieve economic growth and demonstrate that popular discontent continues to boil across the region in both pre-and post-revolt countries.

Revolts in waiting

Bahrain remains a second popular revolt-in-waiting. Last year’s Saudi-backed brutal crackdown drove protesters from Pearl Square in the capital Manama into the villages where smaller groups of demonstrators clash with security forces almost daily. Security forces used teargas and birdshot earlier this month to disperse protestors in three different locations outside the capital. Some 45 people were injured and 40 arrested. The protests are fuelled by the government’s failure to enact reforms that would put an end to the discrimination of the majority Shiite population and engage seriously in talks with the opposition.
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Confrontation in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia has intensified as the government cracks down on protesters demanding an end to discrimination of the predominantly Shiite population by a Wahhabi regime whose puritan interpretation of Islam views them as heretics. Earlier this month, masked gunmen shot and wounded a border guard while a policeman and an armed protester were killed when a security patrol came under heavy gunfire. Activists are preparing for another mass protest in the region a month after a prominent opposition cleric was shot while being arrested.

While protests in the Gulf are fuelled by sectarian resentment and demands for the rights of the stateless, demonstrations in much of the rest of the region focus on labour, economic and social issues as well as corruption. They range from post-revolt Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen to Jordan, Algeria and Morocco that have so far fended off popular revolts. The wave of protests often predates the mass demonstrations of the past 18 months, but has gathered pace as a result of the popular uprisings  as well as the global economic crisis.

Activists and trade unionists in Morocco, where the king initially took the wind out of the sails of the protest movement by initiating constitutional change and holding elections that produced an Islamist-led government, demonstrated this month in the capital Rabat and other cities against rising fuel prices, continued corruption by the ruling elite and the government’s perceived failure to address social grievances.  Earlier, similar protests in outlying towns like Taza in the northeast of the country, were brutally repressed by security forces. Achieving economic growth is likely to prove difficult given that Morocco’s agriculture-based economy imports its wheat and energy and markets them at subsidized prices while facing reduced exports to and remittances from Europe as well as an expected drought. As a result, addressing this year’s economic demands could prove more difficult than meeting political demands last year.

Caught by surprise
  
Similarly, a tacit understanding between Algerian soccer fans and security forces that allowed the fans to raise their grievances as long as they were contained in the stadiums is becoming increasingly fragile, arousing fears that the protests could at any time spill back into the streets of Algiers and other cities. Discontent over lack of water, housing, electricity and salaries pervades the country, sparking almost daily protests inside and outside the stadiums and clashes with security forces. A quarter of the Algerian population lives under the poverty line and unemployment is rampant. Protests earlier this year in Laghouat and other oil and gas cities, symbolic of simmering discontent, have gone viral in social media.

A general strike has paralyzed the hometown of Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation in December 2010 sparked the wave of Arab protests, to back  demands that the government resign for failing to alleviate poverty, which they claim has worsened since the ouster last year of President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali. In Jordan, protests by tribal groups, long viewed as the bedrock of the royal family, sweep the countryside on a weekly basis, targeting King Abdullah and demanding political and economic reform and an end to corruption. In Egypt, despite a law to suppress labour strikes decreed last year by the military council, the number of protests and strikes has increased since the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak. Workers across Yemen have stormed government and commercial offices to demand reform and the dismissal of allegedly corrupt managers.

The world was caught by surprise when Bouazizi changed the course of history. Governments, intelligence agencies and the media failed to see the tell-tale signs of mass protest in the making. The writing on the wall is still there. A University of Amsterdam report just published warns: “Although the Arab Spring is still in its early stages and optimism is prevalent (at least among some pundits), there are nevertheless certain developments ongoing that could be described as alarming. Prolonged political instability and the lack of economic progress could have adverse consequences for both the Arab world and the West, not only in terms of economic interests but also in terms of security.”

While the civil war in Syria dominates the news the wave of protests and strikes in the smaller cities of Arab states along the Mediterranean to the Gulf foretells a groundswell of mass demonstrations and revolts that seriously threaten the security of the regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.

James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He has been a journalist covering the Middle East for over 30 years.

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Can football unite Muslims and Christians in Egypt?

By Mustafa Abdulhalim

During the 2012 London Summer Olympics each country cheered for the success of their athletes, but in Egypt this hope went beyond simply winning. For a country with many societal divides, sports – particularly football – can strengthen social cohesion and national identity. 

Egypt’s participation in the Olympics could not be more symbolic of the role sports plays as a means to regain national pride and social unity. Egypt’s Olympic football team was coached by Hani Ramzy, the Coptic Christian player who led Egypt to victory in the 1998 Africa Cup of Nations championship. Despite divisions between Egyptians that have been evident in recent sectarian clashes in many parts of the country, there was unanimous support for the country’s Olympic team. Although Ramzy is the only Coptic Christian on the team, Egyptians praised his work and his team, especially after Egypt qualified for the Olympic quarter-finals with a 3-1 win over Belarus. 

Football clubs are spread across Egypt and the sport has the potential to help bridge the gap between Muslims and Copts. However, before this unity can be achieved Egyptians must first acknowledge the social divisions evident in the country’s sporting leagues. Only then can they realize the sports potential to bring diverging groups together.

Hassan Shehata, a Muslim and the former coach of the Egyptian national football team, once said he selected his players for Egypt’s team on the basis of their “religiosity and piety.” The statement caused a massive furor and was taken as a pretext for not including a single Coptic player on the national football team. The Coptic Church, however, has its own football league, open only to members of the Coptic community. The example of religious diversity provided by the recent Olympic team should be replicated nationally.

Egyptians should create sporting leagues across the country in which participation is based purely on skill and not an athlete’s religious or sectarian affiliations. By playing, watching and supporting sports together, the two religious communities could share a mutual and healthier national spirit rather than continue to be divided by group affiliations. 

We should think of sports as a common language to bring people together. Everyone in the country can use them to communicate, building a relationship based on shared experience.
This is not a revolutionary idea. 

In June 2012 London’s Wembley Stadium was the site of a “faith and football” day that united students from Muslim, Christian and Jewish schools. This event was planned by the Three Faiths Forum (3FF), a UK-based organization dedicated to building relationships between people of all faiths, and the UK Football Association, which officially oversees the sport in the country. 

Egyptians could replicate this example by creating nationwide leagues to promote intergroup and interfaith cooperation. These teams could include anyone who wants to participate in the sport and make Egyptians’ shared interest in sports a tool for a more inclusive society.

Sports lessons that promote intergroup unity in schools should be given priority. Everyone should be given a chance to compete for a spot on the national teams, regardless of whether their name is Mohammad or George. Sadly, there are presently few examples of interfaith football teams in the country. 

Though these possibilities may seem ambitious and idealistic in the current context there are many such examples in Egypt’s history. 

In 1998, Ramzy, an Egyptian Copt and the current coach of Egypt’s Olympic team, scored a goal for Egypt in the championship game of the Africa Cup of Nations. After scoring the goal he traced a cross on his chest in a common Christian gesture of prayer to thank God. When Hazem Imam, Ramzy’s Muslim teammate, scored a second goal he knelt down in prostration, expressing gratitude through prayer. As they celebrated their victory, with Ramzy carrying Imam on his shoulders, not a single member of the team or the audience cared who was a Muslim or a Copt at that moment.


Although the Olympics have ended the spirit of the games should continue. Egyptians need to believe in a future that is inclusive and encompasses all citizens. That’s where sports come in. 

Mustafa Abdelhalim is an award-winning journalist who works for Al-Ahram and the BBC. This article originally appeared on Common Ground News Service.

Turkish soccer club pioneers new funding strategy

By James M. Dorsey

A top football club from the Turkish hinterland is cementing the Turkey’s economic shift away from the commercial capital of Istanbul to the Anatolian inland with plans to increase revenue by building a hydroelectric power station in a country with growing energy demand and no oil or gas reserves of its own.

Trabzonspor, which is competing in this year’s UEFA Europa League, has added power to funding strategy that traditionally depended on ticket sales and the merchandising of club shirts and scarves The innovative strategy was developed in advance of the European soccer body’s imposition in 2014 of financial fair play rules that will bar clubs from being funded by wealthy owners, according to the Financial Times.

The project could well spark other major European clubs to think out of the box about how they will fund themselves once the new UEFA rules kick in and merchandising and sponsorship prove insufficient, particularly for the purchase of high-priced players.

The legendary club received this month government approval for a 28 megawatt plant in the hills above Trabzon, the Black Sea city it helped make famous and that is known for its fanatical football fans and hot-blooded residents who pick a fight first and think later, according to the Financial Times. The plant is expected to cost up to $50 million and gross annual revenues of $10 million. Trabzon is considering building a smaller, second plant.

Trabzonspor chairman Sadri Sener, a local construction magnate, expects the hydro plant to benefit from the mountains surrounding the city and its usually high annual rainfall. “The club needs a guaranteed source of income, and we have the ideal conditions for hydro power,” the Financial Times quoted a Trabzon club official as saying.

Energy is a booming market in Turkey that grows by eight per cent a year. The government projects that it needs to increase installed capacity by 45 per cent from 55,000MW to  80,000MW in the next eight years to be able to meet demand.

Trabzonspor’s move into energy prepares it not only for the introduction of UEFA’s financial fair play rules but also for concerns that Turkish soccer runs the same risk of economic difficulty that the country faces. Turkey got a taste of the risks when external funding tightened last year because of the global financial crisis and the country’s currency devalued more than had been predicted.

“Turkey’s declining success in football can be mapped to economics,” a Renaissance Capital research note said early this year.

Like the economy, Turkish soccer “imports almost all their best players from abroad, and exports (only) one or two good players every year” incurring high levels of debt to attract stars, the note said. It said Istanbul clubs like Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Galatasaray operated as commercial companies that eschew competitiveness for profit.

Renaissance Capital cautioned that buying expensive but old has-beens such as former Real Madrid stars Roberto Carlos and Gut boosts merchandising, but does not add real quality to a team. The focus on sales rather than soccer performance produces the ills many Turkish companies face:  complacency and reduced competitiveness.

The proof is in the pudding. Turkey’s top Istanbul clubs have dominated the country’s soccer for decades, but failed twice in a row recently to win the Turkish league or qualify for the Champions League. The poor performance mirrors a trend in Turkish economic development as growth shifts from the country’s economic capital to Anatolia.

Trabzonspor alongside Bursaspor, among Turkey’s recently most successful teams, hail from the inland. Renaissance Capital pointed to a further trend in line with the economy: Bursa and Trabzon boast trade surpluses while Istanbul accounts for 60 per cent of Turkey’s trade deficit.

To be sure, the similarities between the economy and soccer are not absolute. In some way, Turkish soccer is more in line with its European counterparts than the economy is. Turkish soccer economics mirror those of European clubs that operate on the basis of high debt levels to import rather than export talented players.

The model in contrast to the Turkish clubs has often translated into performance for their European counterparts. One reason is that Turkish clubs have not seen the kind of influx of foreign investment, particularly from the Gulf, from which teams like Manchester City and Paris St. Germain have benefitted. Nonetheless, in contrast to the Turkish economy and most European clubs, Turkish soccer thanks to domestic demand has so far not faced problems accessing funds.

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.

Desert Growth: Football in the UAE

Desert Growth: Football in the UAE

By John Ray

A camera pans over a half empty and fully solemn Old Trafford. Mother’s are talking to their kids, lone men are checking their blackberries, and half time is drawing to a close. The Emiratis and Uruguayans jog out in their respective red and black and blue and white kits. The South American side is replenish with top European talents; Edinson Cavani, Luis Saurez, and Gaston Ramirez all hail from the small landlocked country on the River Plate. Cavani in particular has been tagged by Aurelio de Laurentis, the president of his club, Napoli, as the 100 million Euro man. That exorbitant number would far exceed the market price of the Emiratis, whose team is largely composed of unknown variables, hidden by the limited extent of scouting networks in the desert. In the middle of Old Trafford, their captain, number 10 Ismail Matar, receives the ball with elegance, places the ball on his right foot, looks at the oncoming keeper, slides the ball to the right, and places the ball in the lower left corner, crowning the wonderful ball from Abdulrahman. The unacquainted commentators seem surprised at the quality of his technique, which surely a product of the growing football training facilities of a country that has gone football crazy. 4,655 miles away an oil field cooks in the sun, new buildings are erected, and a round ball is kicked. Football has quickly become a headline in the United Arab Emirates.

Academies and schools have started to pop-up across the country. In the past 3 years alone new schools from Inter-Milan, Manchester United, and Manchester City have all taken in crops of local tutelages. The infrastructural development might seem to be rapid, but for Matar the growth has been a long time coming. He appeared on the football world’s radar as a 20 year old when he won the Golden Ball at the 2003 Fifa Youth Championships in the UAE. It was the first major tournament the country had hosted. Receiving that honor meant that his performance was ranked above well-known names like Andres Iniesta, Fernando Cavenaghi, and Nilmar, European clubs, namely Chelsea, came shopping, but his club Al-Ain would never release him. In an eye-opening interview with Ashley Hammond of the Gulf News, Matar said “I don’t look to the past because you can’t return back there, I focus on the future and I’m thankful for what I’ve achieved. I don’t know if I had a chance to play abroad, but I always believe in myself and that’s the most important thing.”

He’s takes a less conciliatory approach towards the new crop of talent coming up in the country, suggesting that they also “have that quality to play in Europe”, but that they need to work on their drive to succeed as footballers abroad because “nobody will help you over there, you have to depend upon yourself. It’s not like how they deal with us here, whereby if you don’t work nobody will question you”

“Call me Ishmael.” That first line from the narrator of Moby Dick is one of the most famous sentences in literature and proves to be an aptly symbolic name Matar. The name reflects the Islamic tradition of the oil state; Muhammad is, after all, a descendent of the lineage of Ismail (eldest son of Abraham), but also reflects the enrapturing effect of oil on the country, as seen in Herman Melville’s iconic work, Moby Dick. The interview with Matar seems to portray him as a narrator of change in the UAE, he came too early to be “the one”, but he was still the first and that experience matters.

The dream of the United Arab Emirates as a football power has been similar to Melville’s whale, the beacon to which the countries sporting billionaires are flocking. The recent, swift, and rude debacle of Malaga’s sheikh, Al-Thani, pledging to run from the club he poured a quick €100 million into must have been a PR nightmare for the other owners at Paris St. Germain and Manchester City, who have, to this point, been the definition of stable. The Manchester City group, led by Khaldoon Mubarak and Sheikh Mansour, have not only elevated their football team to the upper echelons of Europe, but they have also become invested in the surrounding area, implementing “The Eastlands Community Plan”, and, in doing this, have tried to make the UAE a visible actor towards positive change and better business in Manchester. They are certainly at least raising suburban property values, now they just need to bring in some restaurants for Tevez.

The shift towards a visible asset like football is inline with the broader movement (exhibited by the massive growth of Abu Dhabi and Dubai) of the country’s elite to diversify their assets and investments in order to ensure that their family’s power extends well beyond their ever-depleting oil reserves. The UAE is the 116^th largest country and has the same population as New York, it is also one of the top-20 countries in terms of trade. Some consider the country’s capricious and extravagant spending to be…well…capricious and extravagant, but it is much more calculated than one would initially think. Dutch disease, over-dependence on one resource, has been the death of many a country, but it will not fell the United Arab Emirates. Over the past 10 years, attempts at diversification have reduced the value of oil and gas to only 38% of the economy and analysts predict that aluminum, steel, iron, and textile production will surpass their energy income in the next 50 years. They have appropriated their material wealth to the hope of growth, and no other industry makes this more obvious than football.

It is now two weeks after the Uruguay and UAE match and one of the team’s biggest stars, Omar Abdulrahman, is at Manchester City’s Carrington training ground, trialing for Roberto Mancini’s side. The player affectionately referred to by teammates as “Noodles” represents the new wave of extremely talented Emiratis and the country’s football chiefs have a decision to make: Will they let their domestic players leave to experience greater pastures and increase exposure for the quality coming out of the country? Or will they keep them in the United Arab Emirates and try to grow the domestic league? There seems to be no easy answer to this question, but the arrival of stars like Raul and Asamoah Gyan seems to suggest that football will not be disappearing anytime soon.

Perhaps Paul Shepard was speaking to the future of football when he proclaimed, “the desert is the environment of revelation”?

John Ray is a football writer and a student at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, who authors the blog, unseengame.tumblr.com. 

Conflict in Syria: The Regional Fall-out

RSIS presents the following commentary Conflict in Syria: The Regional Fall-out by James M. Dorsey. It is also available online at this link. (To print it, click on this link.). Kindly forward any comments or feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, at  RSISPublication@ntu.edu.sg

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No. 150/2012 dated 13 August 2012

Conflict in Syria:
The Regional Fall-out

 By James M. Dorsey

      

Synopsis

The international community’s inability to end the bloodshed in Syria contributes not only to a hardening of ethnic and sectarian battle lines in that war-torn country, but also to the exacerbation of fault lines in Turkey.

Commentary

The civil conflict in Syria has become a proxy war fought by global and regional powers. The potential fallout ranges from the exodus of many of its 2.1 million Christians from what they fear will be a Sunni-dominated post-Assad Syria, to the emergence of Kurdish areas in Syria as a new flashpoint in Turkey’s intermittent war against Kurdish insurgents. It also risks a greater assertiveness of Turkey’s Alevis, a Shiite sect akin to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawites that account for 20 per cent of its population.

All outside actors are being blamed for the crisis. Russia, determined to thwart perceived American regional designs and worried that its restless Muslim population may be inspired by the Syrian opposition’s resilience, is seen as the bogeyman for paralyzing the United Nations with its vetoes, with China, of Security Council resolutions that would sanction the Assad regime. Iran, Assad’s biggest Muslim ally, is seen being complicit in this.

While the United States, the EU, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar claim the moral high ground by backing Syrian rebels against Assad’s brutal crackdown, they may well be ultimately seen as also having sharpened fault lines across a region trying to cope with his downfall.

While there are elements of correctness in the positions of the various foreign powers pushing their own agenda in Syria, for Iran the fall of Assad is a zero-sum game. Regime change in Syria would deprive it of its foremost Arab ally and complicate its support for Shiite Muslim Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Albeit late in the game, Iran last week sought to modify perceptions of its unconditional support for the Assad regime by convening a conference attended by 30 countries that in a statement called for a three-month ceasefire and “political solutions based on a national dialogue.”

Like Iran, the other players have to varying degrees set themselves up for blame by supporting one of the protagonists with no credible vision of building a united Syria that is more inclusive, democratic and less corrupt. In doing so, they risk contributing to a post-Assad Syria that could be wracked by ethnic and sectarian animosities with deadly revenge and retaliation campaigns.

Russia and China have effectively undermined their credibility by failing to match their support for Assad with credible efforts to mediate a solution as they had tried in vain to do in Libya. Both Russia and China nevertheless attended the conference in Tehran and endorsed its final statement.

Saudi Arabia employs its support of the rebels to further its Wahhabi rejection of Shiites, Alawites and Alevis as heretics and supporters of its Muslim nemesis, Iran, by allegedly backing attacks on Shiite shrines in Syria. Qatar represents a less harsh interpretation of Wahhabism but is no less supportive of opposition forces that, if in power, are likely to be no less bent on creating a Sunni Muslim rather than a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious Syria.

Pushing a Sunni Muslim agenda

Turkey, backed by the US, has positioned itself as the partisan champion of the Syrian National Council (SNC) that is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and consists primarily of exiles with diminishing popularity among a population that is bearing the brunt of battles raging in populated cities, towns and villages. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - flush with Gulf-funded arms, strengthened by US intelligence and communications support, and enabled with access to bases in southeastern Turkey – operates primarily as a Sunni Muslim militia.

In short, the lines for battles are being drawn not only in post-Assad Syria but also in the war-ravaged country’s neighbours. Increasingly Syrian Christians, some of whom supported the opposition in the early days of the anti-government protests, feel that they are being targeted for their perceived support of Assad as the conflict becomes increasingly sectarian, and they worry whether there would be a place for them in a post-Assad Syria.

The memory of the fate of the Assyrians in southeastern Turkey who were forced to migrate to Europe in the late 1970s as a result of the government’s economic negligence and Kurdish attacks, is reinforced by attacks on Christians in rebel-held areas of northern Syria. Christian refugees from those areas, many with family ties across the Turkish border, have all but given up hope of returning to their homes.     

Between a rock and a hard place
  
Perceptions of the Turkish government favouring the Sunnis is fuelling a sense of deprivation and discrimination among Turkish Alevis who account for 50 percent of the border province of Hatay which was Syrian until 1938, when the French transferred it to Turkish sovereignty. Like the Christians they have cross border family ties and for the longest period of time saw the Assads as guarantors of their community’s rights.

The escalating fighting in Syria puts Christians, Alevis and Alawites on both sides of the border between a rock and a hard place: they can choose between a discredited, corrupt pariah regime that has lost its ability to protect their rights and guarantee a semblance of pluralism, and a post-Assad regime that threatens to make Syria, with Turkish backing, a place in which they no longer are welcome.

Their concern is heightened by the impact of Saudi financial and clerical support for the rebels, whose anti-Assad campaign is increasingly being cloaked in religious terms. Salafis as well as homegrown jihadists and a relatively small number of foreigners, have joined the ranks of the rebels, albeit constituting a minority. Nonetheless, rebel fighters are reported to have attempted on several occasions to destroy the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet who is revered by Shiites.

Russia may top the list of nations Syrians will revile for either backing a regime that turned on its people but that will not allow the puppet masters in other world capitals to go scot-free. Many Sunnis and secular Syrians in a country where minorities account for almost half of the population, as well as minorities in Turkey, heap equal blame on the United States and its allies – Europe, Turkey and the Gulf states – for either failing to intervene to stop the slaughter or fuelling ethnic and religious conflict. The outcome is one that is likely to power not only anti-Russian-Chinese and anti-Iranian sentiment but also anti-Americanism, and plant the seeds for conflicts that are equally detrimental to American interests.


James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He has been a journalist covering the Middle East for over 30 years.

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Egyptian president asserts power in Sinai and on the pitch

Taking on the military: Sports minister El-Amry Farouk

By James M. Dorsey

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is negotiating his working relationship with the country’s powerful military in the battle against armed militants in the Sinai and on the soccer pitch.

Taken together, the Egyptian military’s effort to restore control in the Sinai, a region that had become a no-man’s land in the wake of last year’s toppling of president Hosni Mubarak, and efforts by Mr. Morsi’s sports minister, El-Amry Farouk, to resume suspended professional soccer in the presence of fans despite opposition from the interior ministry constitute indications of how the new president will manage his complex relationship with the military as well as the security forces.

If the Sinai is any indication, the military after having given itself broad legislative and executive authority on the eve of last month’s election of Mr. Morsi and securing the defence ministry in Prime Minister Hesham Qandil’s cabinet, appears primarily concerned with shoring up its image tarnished by 18 months of at times brutal transition rule.

The military, long Egypt’s most trusted institution, suffered loss of credibility because of its post-Mubarak efforts to retain its political role as well as its perks and privileges and violent clashes between security forces and youth and soccer fan groups, the military’s most militant opponents.

Mr. Morsi’s response to this week’s killing of 16 Egyptian soldiers by militants has allowed him to position himself as the country’s co-commander-in-chief by firing intelligence chief General Murad Muwafi and ordering troops to restore control in the Sinai. Mr. Morsi is the first Egyptian president since the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy not to be Egypt’s official commander in chief, a title that is reserved for his defence minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, who is also head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

General Muwafi’s firing suggests that Mr. Morsi and the military both considered him to be a convenient scapegoat despite the fact that he was respected by US, Israeli and European intelligence officials and had long advocated a crackdown on militants in Sinai. The general’s popularity with foreign intelligence services may have been the real reason for his downfall. Many saw him as a potential Omar Suleiman, the late general who was Mr. Mubarak’s charismatic intelligence chief and his closest adviser and enforcer.

If the troubles in Sinai suggest that Mr. Morsi and the military have found common ground, the soccer pitch will put to the test the new president’s relationship not only with the military but also with the police and the security forces. Sports minister Farouk by pushing for a resumption of professional soccer is taking on the hard-line interior minister, General Ahmed Gamal el-Din, who is widely believed to be responsible for last year’s vicious street battles with youth and soccer groups in which scores of people were killed and thousands injured. General El-Din justified the casualties as “self-defense.”

General El-Din, who was deputy interior minister prior to Mr. Morsi’s election, has opposed lifting the ban on professional soccer imposed in February after 74 militant soccer fans were killed in a politically loaded soccer brawl in Port Said on security grounds. He sees the ban as a way of controlling expressions of dissent by militant, highly-politicized and street battle-hardened soccer fans who played a key role in the demonstrations that toppled Mr. Mubarak and agitated against the continued political role of the military and the security forces. General El-Din insists that the ban can only be lifted once stadiums have been equipped with enhanced security, including electronic gates, airport-style scanners and security cameras.

Although the demand for enhanced security is not unreasonable, maintaining the ban on soccer constitutes a risky strategy. For one it seeks to avoid the fact that addressing stadium security involves far larger issues including a reform of 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.

Mr. Farouk, a former board member of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC whose fans died in the Port Said incident, is also betting on the fact that the ban risks the government being held responsible for the mounting financial crisis experienced by soccer clubs because of the suspension of matches and the poor performance of Egypt’s national team and top clubs in African championships because they are forced to play in the absence of their fans. The national squad and Cairo’s two clubs, Al Ahly SC and Al Zamalek SC, are among Africa’s most crowned teams.

“Football resumption will be my priority in the coming period. I’m considering allowing fans back to the stands, given the financial losses clubs have incurred during the past period -- due to the absence of fans. I’m trying to coordinate with all the relevant authorities to settle on the best possible way to resume football and allow fan attendance. The fans usually breathe life into football matches. We saw how Ahly, (Cairo club) Zamalek and the Egyptian national team were affected because they had to play behind closed doors,” Mr. Farouk said in an interview with state-owned Al Ahram newspaper.

Mr. Farouk’s efforts are backed by the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) which has seen its efforts to resume professional soccer in later August rebuffed by General El-Din. He said earlier that his efforts were also backed by Messrs. Morsi and Qandil.

Mr. Farouk in his first move as sports minister earlier this month fired the EFA board appointed by the military in February after the Port Said incident and appointed former Al Ahly goalkeeper Essam Abdel-Moneim as caretaker chairman with the task of organizing elections within 60 days. The sports minister rejected a FIFA protest against what it said was political interference on the grounds that the dismissed board had not been elected.

“FIFA has received wrong information about the issue. They thought that we sacked an elected board of directors, but this is not the case,” Mr. Farouk 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.

Afghanistan’s Future: Civil War or Soccer Rivalry?

Thousands of young men are hoping to play in next month's Premier League

By James M. Dorsey

Soccer symbolizes Afghanistan’s choices coming full circle as US forces prepare to withdraw from the Central Asian nation more than a decade after they invaded it.

Back in late 2001 and early 2002, US troops fresh from overthrowing the Taliban viewed soccer balls and shoes as just as basic to mending Afghanistan’s social fabric as beams and girders were to mending war-damaged buildings. Soccer paraphernalia served as a tool to win hearts and minds and counter Iranian efforts to exploit the beautiful game for the same purpose.

A decade later, a major Afghan telecommunications company, Roshan Telecom Development Co., and media tycoon Saad Mohsen’s Moby Group are launching Afghan Premier League soccer in what  David Ignatius of The Washington Post juxtaposes as Afghanistan’s post-withdrawal options: televised soccer rivalry or armed civil war.

Afghanistan Football Federation (AFF) president Keramuddin Karim backed by sociological analysis argues that "to establish peace and stabilize a country, one must not only focus on training soldiers. Sport is also a strong base for peace, as it embodies values such as unity, integration, pride and prevents racism, drugs and other elements that bring insecurity to the country."

Mr. Karim is taking a leaf out of the experience of other countries where sports in general and soccer in particular have had a cathartic effect by channeling human aggression away from violence and into more healthy channels. Nelson Mandela used a racially integrated national rugby team to unite South Africa in the wake of apartheid -- a story now made famous by the movie Invictus. South Africa went on to become the first African nation to successfully host the World Cup.

In a letter announcing the premier league that will include eight teams, the AFF said that it would cut “across all ages, socio-economic groups, regions and tribes.” In fact, it will cut across regions and ethnic, tribal and religious groups that have in the past been at loggerheads with one another.

Abdul Sabor Walizada, a trainer for the project and former national team players, said the AFF hoped that the league would also help stimulate business and build bridges. "After years of civil conflict and war, people will focus on football and the businessmen from each zone will try to have the best players. It will create national unity because if the central zone, for example, has a really good player, the southern zone team will want to buy him. They will not care about his ethnicity. They will not care about his tribe. They will care that he is one of the best players,”Mr. Walizada said.

The launch of the premier league comes among fears that the Afghan army will split along ethnic and sectarian lines following an American withdrawal, plunging the country into chaos with the Taliban stepping up its insurgency and various groups that fought each other in the past picking up arms again.

US military and civilian officials believed a decade ago that reopening soccer stadiums and encouraging people to play free of fear or persecution would win hearts and minds among those scarred by regimes for which soccer was either the enemy or a weapon of terror. The premier league is one way of putting that to the test.

US-led international forces played shortly after their overthrow of the Taliban an Afghan team in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium to highlight the change they were bringing to the war-ravaged country. Last December, Afghan leaders together with US ambassador Ryan Crocker and the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, attended the festive opening of Kabul’s completely refurbished 25,000 seat Ghazi stadium to highlight progress from the days that the Taliban used it for public executions amputations of limbs.

The hope now is that the new league’s eight teams who represent different parts of the country with a history of being at loggerheads with one another will compete on the pitch instead of the battlefield once US forces have left despite the fact that some of them bear the names of fiery birds: the Eagles of the Hindu Kush in central Afghanistan, the Goshawks from southeastern Afghanistan and the Falcons of Kabul.

The recruitment of players also serves the effort to bridge the country’s fault lines. Selection takes place on a reality television show, Maidan e Sabz or Green Field, for which thousands of Afghans have applied.  The audience of each show selects 18 out of 30 candidates whose performance is judged by a group of former Afghan national team players and coaches who pick 15 players while the studio audience votes for the final three.

The reality show broadcast from six cities, including Kabul, Jalalabad and Mazar-e Sharif, is intended to involve from day one a once soccer-crazy public that failed to embrace recent amateur leagues. Soccer enjoyed enormous popularity until 1979 when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan spawned fierce resistance followed by a civil war once the Soviets withdrew.

"We are doing (player selection) on TV so that people can know the players. They will be famous thanks to the reality show. This will help us to promote football," said AFF board member Sayed Ali Reza Aghazada.

League matches broadcast on Afghanistan’s two main television channels will be played in September and October. Sponsor Roshan predicted that the league would be a "unifying institution" a Afghanistan.

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.

Turkey and Syria: The Kurdish dilemma

RSIS presents the following commentary Turkey and Syria: The Kurdish dilemma by James M. Dorsey. It is also available online at this link. (To print it, click on this link.). Kindly forward any comments or feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, at  RSISPublication@ntu.edu.sg

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No. 143/2012 dated 6 August 2012

Turkey and Syria:
The Kurdish dilemma

 By James M. Dorsey

      

Synopsis

The insurgency against the Syrian regime has sparked moves to create an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria, raised fears of the PKK using that region as a springboard for attacks against Turkey, and revived debate about long-standing Turkish rejection of Kurdish nationalism.

Commentary

As the civil war in Syria continues to spread Turkey is faced with a new dimension to its long-standing Kurdish problem. For decades, modern Turkey has been battling a bloody insurgency in southeastern Turkey, led by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that has left some 40,000 people dead on both sides.

After having virtually squashed the insurgency in a 16-year long war, however, Turkey found the reality on the ground change fundamentally with the emergence of a Kurdish state-in-waiting in northern Iraq, following the imposition of a US-led no fly zone there in 1991 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Turkey embraced that new fact by forging close ties with the Iraqi Kurdish leadership and investing heavily in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region in a bid to prevent it from fostering Turkish Kurdish demands for greater autonomy or moving towards full independence. The takeover of Syrian Kurdish towns along the border with Turkey by armed Kurds of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian wing of the PKK, confronts Turkey with a similar dilemma for which, unlike in Iraq, it has no ready answers.

Syrian Kurdish assertiveness raises the question whether Turkey can sustain its opposition to the aspirations of the Kurds on its borders, or whether it would be better served by embracing a pro-active Kurdish policy that would turn Kurdish nationalism across West Asia to its advantage, as it did in Northern Iraq? Turkish opposition to Kurdish aspirations, moreover, despite its support for the Sunni Muslim opposition in Syria,risks putting Turkey alongside China and Russia in the camp of those opposed to the emergence of a post-Assad Syria that is more democratic and pluralistic.

Risking military intervention

Turkish leaders have so far given no indication that they are reading the writing on the wall despite debate in the media about the need to bite the Kurdish bullet. That would involve granting Turkish Kurds full democratic rights of political and cultural expression that would bring the PKK into the fold and extending its approach in Iraqi Kurdistan to Kurdish communities in Syria and eventually in Iran. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan however has warned: ”We will not allow a terrorist group to establish camps in northern Syria and threaten Turkey. If there is a step which needs to be taken against the terrorist group, we will definitely take this step.”

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davitoglu has urged the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) to ensure that a post-Assad Syria remains united. In a rare joint declaration Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan warned that they would confront any threat from a violent group or organization that exploits the power vacuum in Syria. The warning addressed to the PKK without identifying it by name came as Turkey launched a military exercise just across the border from Kurdish-controlled Syrian towns.

These moves may persuade the PKK to refrain for now from attacking Turkey from Syrian territory but are unlikely to resolve the increasing challenge Kurds pose to Turkish policy at home and in the region. For the PKK, attacks against Turkey from Syria would be a double-edged sword. Turkish military retaliation against Syrian Kurdish targets in Syria would constitute foreign intervention in the country’s civil war; it could accelerate Assad’s downfall but would strengthen the hand of PKK’s nemesis, Turkey.

Turkish fears of Syrian Kurdish areas developing into a springboard for attacks on Turkey have also revived discussion of creating a buffer zone on the Turkish-Syrian border to counter Syrian Kurdish moves. For now Syrian Kurds are hedging their bets. Their takeover of Syrian Kurdish towns while remaining on the side lines of the effort to topple Assad, gives them leverage irrespective of who emerges victorious from the battle for the future of Syria.

So far Turkish warnings have only a limited impact. The PDY is one of two alliances of Syrian Kurdish groups, the People's Council for Western Kurdistan (PCWK), that are backed by Iraqi Kurdish leaders and have refused to become part of the SNC because of its rejection of Kurdish aspirations, its alignment with Turkey and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the council. Syrian Kurdish fighters have so far successfully rebuffed attempts by the rebel Free Syrian Army to enter Syrian Kurdish areas.
 
The Turkish military and Iraqi Kurdish leaders moreover have been unable to dislodge PKK bases established in the remote Kandil mountains in northern Iraq. The leaders have long counseled their Syrian Kurdish brethren, who account for some 12 per cent of the Syrian population, to remain on the side lines of the conflict in Syria until either the opposition recognizes Kurdish rights or facts on the ground that warrant a Kurdish move.

The Kurds’ time has come

That time appears to have come. In a post-Assad Syria that will probably remain volatile and unstable with ethnic and religious groups fighting one another, Syrian Kurds are likely to learn from the success of Iraqi Kurds in carving out a relatively stable enclave of their own while the rest of Iraq tore itself apart. In preparation, Iraqi Kurdish forces have already started training Syrian Kurdish fighters. With Syrian Kurds pushing for greater rights and self-rule rather than independence, Turkey is likely to sit on the side lines as long as it is not attacked from Syrian territory.

The emergence of a second autonomous Kurdish region along its border not only calls into question Turkey’s fundamental policy towards the Kurds, it makes more necessary than ever a revision of policy that would put Turkey at the forefront of developments in the region and cement its role as a leader at a time of geopolitical change.


James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He has been a journalist covering the Middle East for over 30 years.

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