Posts by James M. Dorsey.:
Middle East soccer associations campaign for women’s right to play
January 15th, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
Middle Eastern soccer associations have launched a campaign to put women’s soccer on par with men’s football in a region in which a woman’s right to play and pursue an athletic career remains controversial and at a time at which political Islam is on the rise.
The associations announced the campaign at the end of a two-day seminar in the Jordanian capital Amman organized by the West Asian Football Federation (WAFF) and the Asian Football Development Project (AFDP). Glaringly absent among the representatives of the 13 Middle Eastern WAFF members was Saudi Arabia where women’s soccer exists at best in a political and legal nether land as well as Yemen.
The campaign comes as women are demanding greater rights in a part of the world that has entered a period of dramatic political and social change. Popular revolts in the past two years have toppled the autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, sparked a bloody civil war in Syria and prompted numerous other states to adopt policies designed to shield themselves against a wave of protest that is unlikely to leave any Middle Eastern nation untouched.
A statement at the end of the seminar chaired by FIFA Vice President and AFDP Chairman Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein defined “an athletic woman” as “an empowered woman who further empowers her community.” In a rebuttal of opposition to women’s soccer among some Islamists across the region and more conservative segments of Middle Eastern society the seminar stressed that women’s soccer did not demean cultural and traditional values.
In doing so, the associations backed by representatives of the United Nations, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), and the English Football Association, put themselves at the forefront of efforts to secure equality and women’s rights. The seminar’s statement emphasized the right of women to play soccer irrespective of culture, religion and race; a women’s right to opt for soccer as a career rather than only as a sport; and soccer’s ability to promote gender equality and level the playing field on and off the pitch.
The statement called further for the appointment of women to the boards of WAFF member associations, establishment of a WAFF women’s committee, creation of Under-16 and Under-19 women competitions in the Middle East (West Asia) as well as the compulsory rotation of hosting of subsidized WAFF women competitions.
With Saudi Arabia unlikely to comply with the initiative, It was not immediately clear whether member associations who refused to participate would be sanctioned, and if so, how. The statement, however, singled out Saudi Arabia by explicitly stating that the kingdom would be included in women’s tournaments. The statement said it would kick start its campaign with a WAFF Girls Football Festival on International Women’s Day on March 8.
In campaigning for women’s rights, WAFF has its work cut out for it not only with regard to Saudi Arabia but also in relation to many of its members who did sign on to the focus on women. “Female athletes in the Middle East face pressures that include family, religion, politics, and culture,” said a recent study entitled ‘Muslim Female Athletes and the Hijab’ by Geoff Harkness, a sociologist at Northwestern University’s campus in Qatar, and one of his basketball playing students, Samira Islam.
Resistance to women’s sports is moreover not restricted to Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. Palestine’s women soccer team includes 14 Christians and only four Muslims but a majority of the team has similar tales to tell about the obstacles they needed to overcome and the initial resistance they met from their families.
Human Rights Watch last year accused Saudi Arabia of kowtowing to assertions by the country’s powerful conservative Muslim clerics that female sports constitute “steps of the devil” that will encourage immorality and reduce women’s chances of meeting the requirements for marriage. The group’s charges contained in a report entitled “’Steps of the Devil’ came on the heels of the kingdom backtracking on a plan to build its first stadium especially designed to allow women who are currently barred from attending soccer matches because of the kingdom’s strict public gender segregation to watch games. The planned stadium was supposed to open in 2014.
Saudi Arabia, which does not have physical education for girls in schools and has hired consultants to draft its first ever five-year national sports plan but for men only, bowed to pressure last year to field for the first time ever women athletes at an international tournament, the London Olympics. It did so by fielding two expatriate Saudi females.
Women nonetheless play an important role in sporadic anti-government protests in Saudi Arabia, a country where discontent is simmering at the surface. Authorities earlier this month arrested 18 women in Buraida, a bulwark of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s puritan interpretation of Islam, who were protesting the long-term detention of relatives without charges on suspicion of terrorism.
Women in Iran have the right to play provided their uniforms are compliant with Islamic precepts but like in Saudi Arabia are also barred from attending matches in all-men stadiums as spectators. Two women highlighted the issue during a World Cup qualifier last year when they smuggled themselves into the stadium dressed as men only to reveal themselves publicly after the match.
For their part, Kuwaiti Islamists denounced the Gulf University for Science and Technology’s organization of a soccer tournament for Gulf women teams. “Women playing football is unacceptable and contrary to human nature and good customs. The government has to step in and drop the tournament,” Kuwait’s Al Wasat newspaper quoted member of parliament Waleed al-Tabtabai as saying at the time.
Mr. Tabtabai was one of a number of deputies who earlier criticized the government and sports executives for allowing the Kuwaiti women’s national soccer team to take part in the Third West Asian Women Soccer Tournament in Abu Dhabi. The members of parliament charged that the women’s participation had been illegal and a waste of money. “Football is not meant for women, anyway,” Mr. Tabtabai said.
Prince Ali has however put conservatives on the defensive with his successful campaign last year to get FIFA to agree to observant Muslim soccer players wearing a headdress that complies with Islamic precepts as well as the world soccer body’s safety and security standards. The move set the stage for the WAFF campaign by taking away one major obstacle to women’s sports having the same status of the athletic endeavors of men.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog
Agreement with UEFA bolsters reformists in troubled Asian soccer body
December 12th, 2012By James M. Dorsey.
The gold standard in soccer governance
By James M. Dorsey
This week’s signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and its European counterpart, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), potentially boosts an uphill battle by reformers to strengthen governance in the AFC, a deeply divided and troubled organization.
The agreement also bolsters efforts to weaken the influence within the Asian soccer body of its president, Mohammed Bin Hammam, a 63–year old Qatari national who has been suspended for more than a year pending investigation of alleged bribery and corruption in the worst scandal in the history of world soccer. Mr. Bin Hammam has repeatedly denied the charges.
World soccer governing body FIFA, which also suspended Mr. Bin Hammam as a member of its executive committee, announced last week that its independent investigator, former New York prosecutor Michael J. Garcia, had completed his enquiry into the charges.
Mr. Garcia was investigating allegations that Mr. Bin Hammam had bribed Caribbean soccer officials to enlist their support for his failed bid to challenge FIFA president Sepp Blatter in last year’ presidential election as well as the Qatari’s financial management of the AFC.
FIFA said that Mr. Garcia’s “final report, together with the investigation files, would be submitted to the adjudicatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee for examination. On the same day, all of the documents were sent by Garcia to the chairman of the adjudicatory chamber, Hans-Joachim Eckert,” FIFA said. The soccer body said Mr. Eckert had “deemed that the final report was complete and decided to proceed with adjudicatory proceedings in this case.”
The AFC’s memorandum of understanding with UEFA is part of a reformist effort to put an end to what at best can be described as mismanagement within the Asian group that has been progressing on the Leninist principle of two steps forward, one step backwards.
In a statement, the AFC noted that UEFA, the regional association widely viewed as the gold standard in good governance in world soccer, would assist the Asian body in “marketing, legal and social responsibility matters apart from promotion of good governance principles in the game,” the issues it is struggling most with.
Opponents of Mr. Bin Hammam say the suspended soccer boss’s influence is greatest in those parts of the AFC that deal with marketing, finance and legal issues. The AFC last month effectively fired its marketing director Satoshi Saito, who was seconded for two years to the group by the Japanese Football Association (JFA), one of Mr. Bin Hammam’s staunchest critics. Mr. Saito, the sources said, had long been barred from meetings with the Asian group’s influential marketing contractor, the Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG) on the grounds that “the company holds all plenipotentiary rights to AFC’s marketing rights.”
The AFC statement quoted Acting President Zhang Jilong as saying the agreement with UEFA constituted a milestone in the history of Asian football. “It is a historical day for Asian football as we enter into the partnership with UEFA. They have set the standards in world football and we are happy to share their knowledge to develop the Asian game,”
Sources said Mr. Garcia’s investigation report was believed to include a damning internal audit of Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the AFC that asserted that he had used an AFC sundry account as his personal account. The report also raised serious questions about the propriety of WSG’s $1 billion master rights agreement (MRA) negotiated by Mr. Bin Hammam.
WSG has taken legal steps against this reporter in a bid to force him to disclose sources for his reporting, squash media reporting and intimidate sources.
The company has so far refrained from public comment on the audit that also raised questions about $14 million in payments to Mr. Bin Hammam by one of its shareholders in the run-up to the signing of the agreement.
However, in an August 28 letter to this reporter that first threatened legal action, WSG legal counsel Stephanie McManus said that “PWC are incorrect and misconceived in suggesting that the MRA was undervalued. They have neither considered the terms of the contract correctly, the market, nor the circumstances in which it was negotiated.” Ms. McManus did not comment on questions raised by the audit about the payments as well as the negotiating procedure and terms of the contract.
The sources said a deal forged in late November during an AFC executive committee meeting in Kuala Lumpur between Mr. Bin Hammam’s supporters and several AFC member association led by Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) president Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat and opposed by reformists involved the holding of new presidential and executive committee[jmd1] elections in exchange for burying the report at least temporarily.
The sources said the deal effectively had little substance given that the AFC had surrendered control of the investigation of Mr. Bin Hammam s well as his relationship to WSG to Mr. Garcia prior to the executive committee meeting. They said cooperation with UEFA strengthened efforts to clean-up and reform the AFC and would ultimately have to include an enquiry into WSG’s contractual relationship with the Asian body.
The audit conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) on behalf of the AFC urged the soccer body to seek legal advice related to Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the group as well as to the possibility of renegotiating or cancelling the WSG contract.
The sources said an enquiry into the contract was unlikely before the AFC’s April elections but that the question was not if but when it would occur.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Qatar faces double-barreled attack as Singapore company moves into the firing line
November 21st, 2012
By James M. Dorsey.
Qatar faces double-barreled attack as Singapore company moves into the firing line Mohammed Bin Hammam and By James M. Dorsey Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup faces a double-barreled attack with a decision by world soccer body FIFA to investigate the Gulf state’s bid, fresh allegations of alleged attempted bribery, and imminent trade union actions in protest of Qatar’s treatment of foreign workers involved in the construction of World Cup-related infrastructure.
FIFA’s investigation comes on the back of a decision to expand its enquiry into bribery charges against its suspended vice-president, Mohammed Bin Hammam, a Qatari national who has also been suspended as president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), into Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the Asian soccer body.
The enquiry is likely to focus on what an internal audit conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) described as his management of an AFC sundry account as his personal account as well as the negotiation and terms of a $1 billion master rights agreement with Singapore-based World Sports Group concluded by the soccer body on Mr. Bin Hammam’s authority.
A Singapore court this week instructed veteran journalist and soccer scholar James M. Dorsey to reveal his sources for his reporting on the audit and Mr. Bin Hammam’s relationship with WSG. Mr. Dorsey has not commented on the ruling. FIFA made its decision to investigate Qatar public after The Sunday Times handed over evidence that constituted the basis for its reporting that the Gulf state had discussed sponsoring to the tune of $1 million a gala dinner organized by Samson Adamu, the son of Nigerian FIFA executive committee member Amos Adamu.
Mr. Adamu Sr was banned for three years from involvement in professional soccer in 2010 in the run-up to the FIFA vote following a Sunday Times undercover investigation that secretly filmed him offering to sell his vote on the 2018 World Cup for a payment of $1.3 million into his personal bank account, which he said he would use to build football pitches in his native Nigeria. The newspaper quoted Hassan al-Thawadi, the deputy head and main spokesman of the Qatari World Cup organizing committee, as confirming initial negotiations about the sponsorship of the dinner but insisting that those talks were ultimately broken off after taking FIFA bid rules into consideration.
Qatar has so far successfully fended off repeated allegations of wrong doing in its effort to win the World Cup hosting rights that was far better funded than the bids by its competitors, the United States, Australia and South Korea. Qatar faces in addition to the FIFA investigation escalating action by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) that has 175 million members in 153 countries because of what it describes as inhuman conditions for foreign workers that violate international labor standards.
The ITUC is expected to make its rejection of Qatari efforts to improve the material conditions of foreign workers, who account for a majority of the Gulf state’s population, as insufficient because they do not include recognition of the right to free association and collective bargaining at a climate change conference that opens in Doha later this month.
“The Qataris are offering short term conditions that make a difference but for the international union movement this is not about fixing bedrooms, It is about freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining – fundamental rights. When you have trade unions and collective bargaining all other things get fixed. Work and living conditions are part of collective bargaining,” said a source familiar with trade union thinking.
The ITUC has launched an online campaign calling for a boycott of Qatar if it fails to adhere to international labor standards. Construction industry sources said that Qatar was trying to fend off the ITUC’s rights demands by ensuring that companies enforce safety and security standards, pay workers on time and ensuring that they are properly housed.
The sources said Qatar had reduced the number of workers allowed to live in one room from eight to four and that it was building a compound for the laborers with modern residential units as well as shops and cinemas. The FIFA investigation of Qatar intersects with that of Mr. Bin Hammam given widespread skepticism about Qatari assertions that he was not involved in the World Cup bid despite the fact that he was the most important figure in Asian soccer and one of the most important people in world soccer.
Mr. Bin Hammam has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has charged that he is the victim of a vendetta by FIFA president Sepp Blatter, whom he last year challenged in FIFA presidential elections. Mr. Bin Hammam withdrew his candidacy after he was accused of seeking to buy the votes of Caribbean soccer officials.
Sources close to FIFA ethics investigator Michael J. Garcia described the former US district attorney as a stickler for detail who played everything by the book. The sources said Mr. Garcia was unlikely to leave a stone unturned and would therefore look closely at all allegations raised in the PwC report. The report, beyond discussing Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the AFC and negotiation of the WSG contract, raised questions about two payments totaling $14 million by a WSG shareholder to Mr. Bin Hammam’s AFC sundry account prior to the signing of the agreement.
The report said that “it is highly unusual for funds (especially in the amounts detailed here) that appear to be for the benefit of Mr Hammam personally, to be deposited to an organization’s bank account. In view of the recent allegations that have surrounded Mr Hammam, it is our view that there is significant risk that…the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder funds and that the funds have been credited to the former President for an improper purpose (Money Laundering risk)” or that “the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder the receipt and payment of bribes.”
Mr. Bin Hammam reportedly furnished FIFA investigators in September with his own independent expert’s report from London accountants Smith and Williamson into the AFC account that was said to include a line-by-line explanation of all expenditure. Rather than opting for transparency, WSG has sought to squash all reporting on its relationship to Mr. Bin Hammam and the AFC with its legal proceedings against Mr. Dorsey.
Its refusal to comment on the PwC report has been reinforced by the Singapore court decision. In its only comment publicly available, WSG said in an August 28 letter in which it initially threatened this reporter with legal action that “PWC are incorrect and misconceived in suggesting that the MRA (master rights agreement) was undervalued. They have neither considered the terms of the contract correctly, the market, nor the circumstances in which it was negotiated.”
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Sanctions dash Ahmadinejad’s hope to boost his image through soccer
November 16th, 2012
By James M. Dorsey.
Sanctions dash Ahmadinejad’s hope to boost his image through soccer President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad By James M. Dorsey Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hopes to spruce up his image through soccer boosted by last month’s defeat of South Korea in a 2014 World Cup qualifier are threatened by gruelling international sanctions that have sparked an exodus of foreign players from the Islamic republic. Iranian clubs strapped for cash by the international sanctions imposed to force Iran to compromise on its controversial nuclear program are finding it difficult if not impossible to pay foreign players’ salaries.
The clubs’ financial difficulties have been aggravated by the collapse of the Iranian rial, which last month alone lost a quarter of its value. The collapse was sparked by the sanctions as well as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s economic policies. Parliament has summoned Mr. Ahmadinejad to explain later this month what legislators called his mismanagement of Iran’s response to the sanctions that has reduced oil exports to a dwindle and his mistaken allocation of limited government-subsidized dollars, including for the import of thousands of foreign cars.
Adding to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s problems is the fact that several players who have left Iran, including premier league club Esteghlal FC top midfielder Fabio Januario of Brazil and compatriot and team mate Rodrigo Tosi have said they would file a complaint with world soccer body FIFA. German-born Iranian German player Under-21 international Ferydoon Zandi has also left his ancestral homeland for greener pastures in Qatar. An Iranian sports reporter said that former premier league club Persepolis FC coach Ali Daei was also considering complaining to FIFA about the club’s failure to pay his backlogged salary.
Iranian referees have also encountered recent problems in getting paid by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) for work performed at international matches. The AFC found in September that it could not transfer $1 million to the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic. “There is no basis whatsoever for the American Government to black our money. We are a NGO and have nothing to do with politics. We have approached the AFC and several other organizations to persuade the Americans to release our money, which we are desperate to have, to no avail,” FFIR president Ali Kafashian was quoted as saying.
It was not immediately clear whether former Ghana captain Stephen Appiah was having second thoughts. Mr. Appiah started training with Persepolis earlier this month but has yet to sign his contract. Teheran daily newspaper 7Sobh warned that the players “are not only not coming back but there will also be further consequences.” The Iranian Student’s News Agency (ISNA) hinted that foreign coaches, including premier league club Persepolis’ FC’s Portuguese trainer Manuel Jose and Portuguese national team coach Carlos Queiroz could follow suit.
Mr. Queiroz’s departure could dash Iran’s hopes for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil and with them Mr. Ahmadinejad’s efforts to employ soccer to brush up his tarnished image. Iranian soccer officials have tried to stymie the exodus by warning that a lesser quality of soccer in the Gulf to which most of the foreign players are re-locating means that their chances of playing international tournaments will be reduced. “The players are moving to these countries for economic reasons but because proper training regimes are not in place there, the quality of their play is deteriorating,” Malaysia’s Sun Daily quoted Esteghlal coach Hamid Ghalenoei as saying.
Mr. Ghalenoei’s warning is countered by the fact that Iranian midfielder Andranik Teymourian who plays in Qatar remains part of Iran’s national team. A passionate soccer player and fan, Mr. Ahmadinejad has had mixed success in recent years in seeking to increase his popularity by identifying himself with Iran’s most popular sport. Mr. Ahmadinejad last month paid a surprise visit to the Iranian national soccer team’s training camp in advance of the World Cup qualifier against South Korea. He went as far during the visit as shaking the hand of Ali Karimi, one of several players who wore green wrist bands during a 2009 international match in protest of alleged rigging of that year’s presidential election which returned Mr. Ahmadinejad to a second term in office.
The visit, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s third in recent years, echoed attempts by deposed presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Abdullah Saleh of Yemen to exploit soccer’s prestige in a bid to shore up their popularity in the years before their overthrow in 2011. In a region in which the passion soccer evokes is only rivalled by that sparked by religion, Iran stands out. “I am not aware of anywhere else with the same passion,” said Carlos Queiroz in a recent interview with ESPN.
A US embassy cable disclosed by Wikileaks noted in 2009 that “President Ahmadinejad has worked hard to associate himself with Iran’s beloved national team – ‘Team Melli’ – a tactic that backfired in March when he was accused of ‘jinxing’ the team, which suffered a last-minute defeat to Saudi Arabia just after Ahmadinejad entered the stadium. That event, coupled with an unexpected loss by the national wrestling team with Ahmadinejad in attendance earlier in the year, set off a firestorm of SMS messages and internet jokes holding the President personally responsible for the teams’ defeats,” the cable said.
Soccer represents for autocrats like Mr. Ahmadinejad a double-edged sword that both offers opportunity and constitutes a threat. The funeral last year of a famous Iranian soccer player in Tehran’s Azadi stadium turned into a mass protest against the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Tens of thousands reportedly attended the ceremony for Nasser Hejazi, an internationally acclaimed defender Mr. Ahmadinejad who was perceived as a critic of the president. In a rare occurrence, some 1,000 women were allowed to be present during the ceremony.
Mourners chanted “Hejazi, you spoke in the name of the people” in a reference to Mr. Hejazi’s criticism of the Iranian president’s economic policies. Mr. Hejazi took Mr. Ahmadinejad in April to task for Iran’s gaping income differences and budgetary measures which hit the poorest the hardest. The mourners also shouted “Goodbye Hejazi, today the brave are mourning” and “Mr Nasser, rise up, your people can’t stand it anymore”.
Following in the footsteps of Arab autocrats confronted with mass protests, Iran last year suspended professional soccer matches temporarily to prevent celebrations of the 32nd anniversary of the Islamic revolution from turning into anti-government protests. 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.
FIFA investigates Bin Hammam’s financial management of AFC
November 7th, 2012
Mohammed Bin Hammam
By James M. Dorsey.
World soccer body FIFA has expanded investigation of its suspended vice president, Mohammed Bin Hammam, to include his financial management of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in a move that involves questions raised by alleged payments to the Qatari national by a shareholder of a Singapore-based company in advance of the signing of a $1 billion marketing rights agreement, according to sources close to FIFA and press reports.
The sources said that independent FIFA ethics investigator Michael J. Garcia was now in possession of the AFC’s file regarding potential irregularities in the financial management of the Asian soccer body. Mr. Bin Hammam, who is the subject of three inquiries, has also been suspended as president of the Asian group pending investigation by FIFA, the AFC and Malaysian police. The controversy over Mr. Bin Hammam has deeply divided the AFC with supporters of the Qatari working to dampen the impact of the moves against him.
The AFC file significantly expands Mr. Garcia’s inquiry into last year’s alleged attempt by Mr. Bin Hammam to buy the support of Caribbean soccer officials for his failed effort to defeat Sepp Blatter in FIFA’s presidential elections, the sources and press reports said. Mr. Bin Hammam, once one of the most powerful men in Asian soccer who is at the center of the worst scandal in the history of world football, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. He charges that the allegations against him were construed to penalize him for challenging Mr. Blatter’s presidency.
Mr. Garcia declined to comment referring to FIFA’s code of ethics.
The expansion of the FIFA investigation is believed to be one reason why the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last week rejected Mr. Bin Hammam’s request that his suspension as FIFA vice president be overturned. The CAS ruling was first reported by FIFA.
FIFA last month extended its 90-day banning of Mr. Bin Hammam by another 45 days. FIFA had earlier unsuccessfully attempted to introduce an internal AFC audit of Mr. Bin Hammam’s financial management of the Asian body conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) into another CAS appeal by the Qatari national against FIFA’s actions against him.
The PwC report, the sources said, was believed to be part of the file in Mr. Garcia’s possession. The report charged that Mr. Bin Hammam had used an AFC sundry account as his personal account and questioned the terms and negotiation procedure of a $1 billion master rights agreement (MRA) with Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG). The PwC report also raised questions about two payments totalling $14 million by a WSG shareholder to Mr. Bin Hammam’s AFC sundry account prior to the signing of the agreement.
The report said that “it is highly unusual for funds (especially in the amounts detailed here) that appear to be for the benefit of Mr Hammam personally, to be deposited to an organization’s bank account. In view of the recent allegations that have surrounded Mr Hammam, it is our view that there is significant risk that…the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder funds and that the funds have been credited to the former President for an improper purpose (Money Laundering risk)” or that “the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder the receipt and payment of bribes.”
Mr. Bin Hammam reportedly furnished FIFA investigators in September with his own independent expert’s report from London accountants Smith and Williamson into the AFC account that was said to include a line-by-line explanation of all expenditure.
Malaysian police arrested in September the husband of a former AFC head of finance and an associate of Mr. Bin Hammam on suspicion of helping steal documents related to one of the payments by the WSG shareholder to Mr. Bin Hammam from AFC’s head office in Kuala Lumpur.
WSG has so far not commented publicly on the PwC report or its relationship or that of its shareholder with Mr. Bin Hammam. However in an August 28, 2012 letter to this reporter that threatened legal action, WSG Group Legal Advisor Stephanie McManus asserted that “PWC are incorrect and misconceived in suggesting that the MRA (master rights agreement) was undervalued. They have neither considered the terms of the contract correctly, the market, nor the circumstances in which it was negotiated,” Ms. McManus wrote.
WSG has since asked the Singapore court to instruct this reporter to reveal his sources for all his WSG-related reporting. The Singapore High Court is scheduled to decide on November 19 on an appeal by this reporter against a decision by a lower court that instructed him to reveal his sources for his reporting on the PwC report as well as Mr. Bin Hammam’s relationship to the company.
In an affidavit to the lower court, Mr. Dorsey asserted that he believed that WSG’s legal action was an attempt at “indirectly discovering who within the AFC may have breached their confidentiality and also suppress any well meaning or good intended person from coming forward in the future and is seeking to punitively punish those who may have spoken against them.”
Acting AFC president Zhang Jilong last month accused the Qatari national and his lawyer, Eugene Gulland, of similar methods, charging that they had adopted “intimidatory tactics” against members of the Asian body’s executive committee and staff. Messrs. Bin Hammam and Gulland have denied the charge.
WSG’s legal action and its refusal to comment publicly on the PwC report, including the allegation of eyebrow raising payments by one of its shareholders, appear to stem from concern that the terms of or circumstances under which its $1 billion agreement with the AFC was negotiated may become known beyond a very small circle of people. Not all members of the executive committee, the AFC’s highest management body, have seen the agreement and those that have were only allowed to view it on the premises of the Asian soccer body, according to sources close to the AFC.
The sources said the restrictive handling of the WSG contract contrasted with the way marketing agreements concluded by European soccer body UEFA and other international sports associations are dealt with. A spokesperson for UEFA said both its managerial staff and executives had access to the group’s contracts irrespective of where they physically may be at any given moment.
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 Issue of Arab Jews: Manipulating a Justified Cause
November 1st, 2012By James Dorsey.
Synopsis
A recent United Nations conference on the rights of Jews forced to flee Arab countries in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel focuses attention on a long overlooked consequence of the Middle East conflict. It also complicates the revival of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.
Commentary
THE PLIGHT of Palestinians uprooted and driven out of large chunks of historic Palestine to make way for a Jewish state lies at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That epochal dispute dominated policies towards and perceptions of the Middle East for much of post-World War Two history.
Efforts to achieve a definite resolution have foundered, but have produced a de facto status quo that serves the interests of two key parties to the conflict: Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Neither truly wants the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, preferring instead a long-term ceasefire that would allow for economic growth in the hope that time will gain them a strengthened negotiating position.
Battle of narratives
This month’s brief flare up of Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel and Israeli counterstrikes hardly detracted from this understanding. On the contrary the attacks enabled Hamas to burnish its credentials as a resistance movement and fend off criticism from more militant Palestinian factions that accuse it of having gone soft and allowed Israel to project it as a continued terrorist threat, maintain its refusal to formally do business with Hamas and ensure that the peace process remains in a deep coma.
To further undermine the centrality of the Palestinian issue that has been significantly diminished by the wave of popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa as well as the split between Hamas and the Al Fatah-led Palestine Authority on the West Bank, Israel supported by Jewish leaders is equating Palestinian rights with those of Arab Jews who once lived in the Arab world but were forced to leave their homelands. It is a move perceived by Palestinians and even a minority of Jews as a cynical manipulation of a justified cause.
The Israeli move adds one more dimension to the Palestinian-Israeli battle of narratives that has served to camouflage the real intentions of Israel and Palestinian leaders since the inception of an Palestinian-Israeli peace process. It is part of a larger campaign that aims to reduce, if not delegitimise Palestinian rights by opposing Palestinian efforts to upgrade their status at the United Nations and calling for the dismantling of UNWRA, the UN agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees. The move further seeks to mend chinks in the armour of US public support for Israel.
At the core of the battle of narratives lies a definition of rights that has allowed both parties to ensure that peace negotiations do not produce the kind of painful compromises on both sides needed to achieve a definitive resolution of their deep-seated conflict.
Like everything else that is on the negotiation table, the solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees as well as that of Arab Jews is evident to all. Palestinians would get an independent state of their own alongside Israel and be compensated for losses suffered in territories that are part of the Jewish state. Similarly, Arab Jews would be compensated for their losses. Few, if any, Palestinians are likely to want to physically return to Israeli rule and even fewer Arab Jews would opt for a return to their ancestral homelands.
Devil in the details
Nevertheless, the devil is in the details. Palestinians would settle for compensation and a state of their own but insist on doing so on the basis of an Israeli recognition of their right to return to their ancestral homes. Such recognition would amount to Israeli acknowledgement of Palestinians being the original owners of historic Palestine. In effect, it would deny Israel’s narrative that it represents the resurrection of the Jewish state in lands that always belonged to the Jews.
To reinforce that narrative and reject the Palestinian right of return, before raising the rights of Arab Jews Israel has insisted in recent years that Palestinians upgrade their recognition of Israel’s right to exist by acknowledging its right to exist as a Jewish state – a demand that transcends accepted diplomatic protocols. In doing so, it prepared the ground to use Arab Jewish rights as a tool to further undermine Palestinian demands for recognition of their right to return, by rejecting Palestinian suggestions that Arab Jews too should have the right to return to their Arab countries of origin rather than Israel.
The Israeli effort to portray the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as one of competing refugee claims also serves to counter Palestinian efforts to upgrade their United Nations observer status to that of a non-member state as well as a rupture in crucial American Christian support for Israel. Palestine Authority officials are confident that the UN General Assembly will next month vote in favour of the upgrade. Israel is likely to argue that Palestinian rights cannot be viewed independently of those of Arab Jews.
As Palestine pushes for recognition, leaders of the Presbyterian Church this month urged US Congressional leaders to reconsider aid to Israel because of its alleged violations of human rights. In seeking to shift the conflict’s paradigm, the Israeli focus on Arab Jewish rights calls into question the emphasis on the Palestinians of one important faction of the bedrock of US support for Israel.
Palestinian issue at stake
The campaign for recognition of the rights of Arab Jewry could not come at a more politically opportune moment for Israel. It reinforces pro-Israeli support in Congress to limit the definition of a Palestinian refugee to those who were physically displaced when the Jewish state was created in 1948. The definition would deprive a majority of Palestinians born after the founding of Israel of any possibility to put forward a claim. It coalesces with proposals in Congress to equate Arab Jewish rights to those of Palestinians.
At the bottom line, the absence of a credible peace process has created a vacuum in which the very definition and importance of the Palestinian issue is at stake. It is a process in which Israel is benefitting from an Arab world that increasingly is preoccupied with either regime survival or post-revolt transition, a deeply divided Palestinian polity, and an international community that mistakenly believes that Palestine has taken a permanent backseat to more pressing issues such as Iran and the calls for political change.
Palestine may well for now be on the backburner; it is however unlikely to remain there.
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Egyptian Soccer Fans’ Anti-corruption Campaign Gathers Steam
October 10th, 2012In the firing line: Al Ahly chairman Hassan Hamdy
By James M. Dorsey
A campaign by militant Egyptian soccer fans to root out corruption gathered steam this week with the slapping of a travel ban on and the freezing of assets of the chairman of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC by the country’s Illicit Gains Authority (IGA).
Hassan Hamdy, who until recently doubled as head of the lucrative advertising department of the state-owned Al Ahram newspaper, for decades one of Egypt’s most influential media organizations, is the third official this month suspected of corruption and targeted by the militants to be called to account.
The fans, Egypt’s second largest civic group, last week scored a political with a decision by associates of ousted president Hosni Mubarak to withdraw from elections for the board of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA). The decision by world soccer body FIFA executive committee member Hani Abou-Reida and former Al Ahly goalkeeper Ahmed Shobeir to withdraw came in response to a campaign by Ultras Ahlawy, the club’s militant fan group, demanding they be disqualified.
In the last month, Ultras Ahlawy – one of several highly politicised, well-organized, street battle-hardened fan groups – attacked the club’s training ground, the EFA’s headquarters and media organizations to push for a clean-up of Egyptian soccer and media, whom they accuse of corruption and fanning the flames of confrontation.
They also demanded reform of the powerful security forces; depriving the interior ministry’s police and security’s forces — the country’s most despised institution widely viewed as the brutal enforcers of repression under Mr. Mubarak – of responsibility for security in the stadiums; and the resignation of the EFA and Al Ahly boards.
The militant’s success is likely to boost their resolve to thwart this month’s resumption of professional soccer matches that have been suspended since February when 74 Al Ahly supporters were killed in a politically loaded brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said. The ultras, who played a key role in last year’s overthrow of Mr. Mubarak and in subsequent street battles to ensure achievement of the revolt’s goals, reject a resumption of soccer as long as justice has not been served to those responsible for the Port Said incident.
The ultras succeeded last month in getting the resumption of soccer postponed a month until October 17. Authorities had initially planned to lift the eight-month old suspension on September 17.
With many in Egypt convinced that the Port Said brawl was instigated in a bid to teach the militants a lesson and cut them down to size, the militants have demanded that those in high positions responsible for the worst incident in Egyptian sporting history be called to account. Nine mid-level security officers are among 74 people standing trial for their role in the brawl in a slow-moving legal process.
Ultras were on Tuesday among thousands of Egyptians who demonstrated to commemorate the anniversary of the Maspero killing last year of 27 Coptic Christians in clashes with the military. Ultras carried banners with pictures of former Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and his deputy Lieutenant General Sami Anan with ropes around their necks. “The people want the execution of the Field Marshall,” the protesters chanted.
Mr. Tantawi ruled Egypt from the fall of Mr. Mubarak in February of last year until the election in July of Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi as the country’s first free and fairly elected president. Mr. Morsi was swift after taking office to remove Mr. Tantawi from power.
The ultras emerged after the toppling of Mr. Mubarak as the country’s most militant opponents to military rule. They believe that the military was at least tacitly complicit in the Port Said incident.
Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that Mr. Hamdy was released on Tuesday on a bail of two million Egyptian pounds (USD 330,000) after being questioned by the IGA about the accumulation of his wealth estimated at 500 million pounds (USD 82 million). MENA said Mr. Hamdy had been unable to provide an explanation and had been banned from travel abroad. He also had his assets frozen.
Mr. Hamdy has for the past decade been the chairman of Al Ahly which is Egypt and Africa’s most crowned club with a fan base estimated at 50 million. The club has won Egypt’s championship 34 and the African cup six times. The Ultras Ahlawy Facebook page has more than 570,000 followers.
The ultras have denounced Mr. Hamdy as a “part of the dismantled regime” of Mr. Mubarak, accused him of fraud and charge that he failed to exert sufficient pressure on authorities to hold to account those responsible for the Port Said incident.
“We said before that Hamdy should leave because he conspired with the Egyptian Football Association over the Port Said case. And now that things have become clear for many people, we will not allow Hamdy to tarnish the image of our club. You have run out of credit, you have no option but to depart,” Ultras Ahlawy said in a statement on their Facebook page.
Mr. Hamdy is believed to have been under investigation of corruption since last year as a result of his apparent conflict of interest in being head of the advertisement department of Al Ahram as well as chairman of Egypt’s most prominent soccer club and until last year chair of the EFA’s sponsorship committee at the same time.
Military police last year were reported to have seized three boxes of documents that Mr. Hamdy and then Al Ahram editor-in-chief Osama Saraya had allegedly attempted to smuggle out of the editor’s office when they were confronted by publishing house employees who suspected that the boxes contained documents that would prove the two men’s involvement in corruption.
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.
Qatar engages workplace safety NGO to counter trade union boycott
October 4th, 2012By James M. Dorsey
Qatar in a bid to counter mounting criticism of workers’ conditions in the Gulf state and a threatened global campaign by international trade unions calling for a boycott of the 2022 World Cup trumpeted this week the announcement of the opening of a chapter of Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).
The UK-based charity, which works with employers and practitioners to improve standards of work-related health and safety, said it had developed a five-year plan to improve “road traffic, fire and construction safety” in Qatar.
Olumide Adeolu, head of the newly established IOSH Qatar branch, told the Gulf Times that he aimed to raise standards of occupational safety and health in line with Qatar’s plan to develop a legal framework to ensure a safe workplace.
“Our duty is to ensure that workers are adequately protected from accidents at their workplace and also to provide support to safety practitioners, who are charged with the responsibility of ensuring a safe workplace,” Mr. Adelou was quoted as saying.
“We will also look to contribute to a safe and healthy 2022 World Cup in Qatar, by offering guidance on construction safety and sports events planning,” added IOSH president Subash Ludhra.
The opening of the IOSH chapter comes days after the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Building and Woodworkers’ International (BWI), which claim to represent 175 million workers in 153 countries, complained to the International Labour Organization (ILO) that Qatar was refusing to allow migrant workers to freely unionize in violation of international standards.
The unions asserted that poor working conditions and the inability of migrant workers, who constitute a majority of Qatar’s population, to stand up for their rights was responsible for the Gulf state’s high rate of workplace deaths. Noting that Qatar refuses to release statistics of workplace deaths, the unions asserted that an average 200 Nepalese workers die every year in the Gulf state as a result of work-related incidents.
Qatar is expected to import up to 1 million migrant workers to work on infrastructure projects linked to the hosting of the World Cup. The Qatar 2022 World Cup organizing committee has said that it will ensure contractors adhere to international labor laws.
The opening of the IOSH chapter is likely to fall short of the demands of the unions who last week launched a campaign entitled ‘Qatar: Do the Right Thing’ to pressure the Gulf state. The unions called on their members not to “let your World Cup team play in a shamed stadium. Help us fill the stadium now, and send a message to Qatar that there will be no World Cup in 2022 without workers’ rights.”
The ITUC asserts that “1.2 million workers in Qatar are prohibited from joining a trade union, in violation of international rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining … We want people to know about the problems facing workers in Qatar, where more people will die building the World Cup infrastructure than will play in the World Cup … Local laws in Qatar stop migrant workers from forming a trade union, collectively bargaining for better wages, and healthy and safe work.”
In a statement last week, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said that “an event like the World Cup should be an opportunity for a wealthy nation like Qatar to modernize its social framework – and we will be putting all pressure we can to ensure that workers’ rights are improved as a result of the event.”
Qatar has repeatedly denied that it exploits foreign labour. “The Ministry has received no complaint of forced labour and it is inconceivable that such a thing exists in Qatar as the worker may break his contract and return to his country whenever he wishes and the employer cannot force him to remain in the country against his will,” the ministry said in a letter in June to Human Rights Watch in response to a damning report by the group.
Nonetheless, Qatar has rejected ITUC demands that workers be allowed to organize and move freely and abolish its sponsorship system. Instead, the Gulf state has said it would establish government-controlled workers’ councils and replace sponsorship with a system of contracts between employers and employees that does not give workers full freedom to seek alternative employment.
The trade union demands go to the heart of the largest threat to several of the wealthy Gulf states: the demographic time bomb. Qataris like Bahrainis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis constitute a minority of their country’s population and fear that any concessions that would give expatriates and migrant workers a stake in society could jeopardize their national identity, privileges and culture.
In responding to the trade unions, the Qatari government is walking a fine line between projecting the Gulf state as a cutting edge 21st century nation and local concerns that the country’s Islamic norms could be jeopardized by complying with what are perceived to be Western standards.
Fear of social change in the world’s only country alongside Saudi Arabia that adheres to the puritan interpretation of Islam of the 18th century warrior priest Mohammed Abdul Wahhab, albeit in a less strict application, has already prompted protests by conservative elements.
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.
Singapore court orders journalist to reveal sources
September 29th, 2012By James M. Dorsey
A Singapore court has ordered veteran journalist and scholar JMD to reveal his sources for his reporting on an audit of suspended world soccer body FIFA vice president and Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Mohammed Bin Hammam’s management of AFC’s finances and agreement with a Singapore-based company on the group’s marketing rights.
The court accepted a demand by World Sports Group (WSG) to instruct the journalist and scholar to reveal his sources on the grounds that the audit was confidential and that the sources had defamed the company.
The court in a four-hour hearing however stayed its decision pending an appeal that Mr. Dorsey’s lawyers, N. Sreenivasan and Sujatha Selvakumar of Straits Law Practice LLC, will submit in the coming days.
Mr. Dorsey’s lawyers argued that he was not a party to any confidentiality agreement and that if WSG had an issue it should take it up with the AFC to whom the original report was addressed. The lawyers noted further that the code of ethics of journalists in Singapore as well as in numerous Asian countries, including Malaysia and Hong Kong shield journalists from revealing sources.
In an affidavit to the court, Mr. Dorsey asserted that he believed that WSG’s legal action was an attempt at “indirectly discovering who within the AFC may have breached their confidentiality and also suppress any well meaning or good intended person from coming forward in the future and is seeking to punitively punish those who may have spoken against them.”
WSG has said it applied to the High Court to force Mr. Dorsey to reveal his sources with the intention of launching possible defamation or breach of confidence proceedings. “We want information so we can determine what charges to make and against whom,” WSG lawyer Deborah Barker told Agence France Presse.
The internal AFC audit conducted by PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PwC) charged that Mr. Bin Hammam had used an AFC sundry account as his personal account, questioned the terms and negotiation procedure of a $1 billion marketing rights agreement between WSG and the AFC and raised questions of $14 million in payments by a WSG shareholder to Mr. Bin Hammam prior to the signing of the agreement.
In its report, PwC said that “it is highly unusual for funds (especially in the amounts detailed here) that appear to be for the benefit of Mr Hammam personally, to be deposited to an organization’s bank account. In view of the recent allegations that have surrounded Mr Hammam, it is our view that there is significant risk that…the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder funds and that the funds have been credited to the former President for an improper purpose (Money Laundering risk)” or that “the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder the receipt and payment of bribes.”
Malaysian police earlier this month arrested the husband of an associate of Mr. Bin Hammam on suspicion of helping steal documents related to one of the payments to Mr. Bin Hammam from AFC’s head office in Kuala Lumpur.
WSG has refused to comment on the PwC report and has threatened reporters, including the author of this report, with defamation proceedings. However in an August 28, 2012 letter to this reporter WSG Group Legal Advisor Stephanie McManus asserted that “PWC are incorrect and misconceived in suggesting that the MRA was undervalued. They have neither considered the terms of the contract correctly, the market, nor the circumstances in which it was negotiated,” Ms. McManus wrote.
The master rights agreement is controversial both because of the unexplained payments as well as assertions by sources close to the AFC that the soccer group, in line with common practice among international sport associations, should have concluded a service provider rather than a master rights agreement with WSG. The sources said such an agreement would have given the AFC greater control of its rights and how they are exploited and enabled it to better supervise the quality of services provided by WSG.
In a July 13 letter to lawyers Shearn Delamore & Co, PWC explicitly leaves open the possibility that the AFC might share the report with third parties. For that reason, the terms of the report contain a clause that shields PwC from any liability should the AFC choose to share the report with non-AFC institutions or persons.
The letter stipulates that the report is intended “solely for the internal use and benefit of Shearn Delamore & Co. and the Asian Football Confederation,” and that third parties are not authorised to have access to the report. The letter however goes on to say that should third parties gain access they agree that the report was compiled in accordance with instructions by the law firm and the AFC and that PwC is not liable for any consequences stemming from the fact that third parties had been granted access.
Lawyers for FIFA earlier this year sought unsuccessfully to introduce the report in Mr. Bin Hammam’s appeal proceedings in the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration of Sport against the world soccer body’s banning for life of the Qatari national from involvement on soccer on charges of bribery.
Both FIFA and the AFC have suspended M. Bin Hammam on the basis of the report pending further investigation of the allegations in the PwC report and separate charges that he last year sought to bribe Caribbean soccer officials. Mr. Bin Hammam has denied all allegations and charges.
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.
FIFA decision on Kosovo likely to spur Kurdish national aspirations
September 23rd, 2012By James M. Dorsey
The Kosovo Football Federation (KFF) and soccer-crazy Kosovars are not the only ones in anxious anticipation of this coming Friday’s executive committee meeting of world soccer body FIFA that is expected to decide the terms on which Kosovo will be allowed to play international friendlies. So will the Kurdistan Football Association and equally soccer-mad Kurds.
Kosovo and Catalonia, which already has been granted permission by FIFA to play international friendlies, are models for Kurdistan to whom soccer is also an important tool in achieving recognition as a nation and statehood.
For Kurdistan, it is an uphill battle. Kosovo and Catalonia have a leg up on Kosovo. Unlike Kurdistan, an autonomous region in Iraq that enjoys no recognition from an international community afraid that its independence would further destabilize the Middle East, Kosovo has been recognized by the United States, 36 European nations including 22 European Union members, and 54 other countries.
Kosovo moreover is a member of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, Kosovo achieved full sovereignty this month with the ending of international supervision imposed after it unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008. For its part, Catalonia’s bid was backed by the Spanish Football Federation.
Kurdistan has none of those assets. The KFF’s relations with the Iraqi soccer body are strained with Iraqis weary of Kurdish efforts to strike out on their own. Unable to breakthrough internationally, Kurdistan organized last June the 5th VIVA world cup for nations that FIFA refuses to recognize. Competing teams included Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus the Tamils, Western Sahara and Darfur.
In a September 14 letter to FIFA, the KFF welcomed FIFA’s decision in May to grant Kosovo the right to play international friendlies and requested that that right be applicable to “football as a whole, national clubs and teams, men’s and women’s, age categories and senior teams.”
The KFF noted that “Kosovo is not a place where football is embryonic and has to be sustained from a low level. The Football Federation of Kosovo became a member of the FA of Yugoslavia in 1946 with equal rights and the pyramid is complete with leagues and competitions from the top down to the bottom totally in line with FIFA and (European soccer body) UEFA requirements.”
That is in many ways true for Kurdistan too, which like Kosovo has Kurds playing in major European clubs. Nonetheless, the hardnosed, realpolitik objections to Kurdistan, for all practical matters a state-in-waiting, following in the shoes of Kosovo and Catalonia outweigh the moral arguments in its favor.
FIFA’s embrace of Kosovo will nevertheless make Kurdistan and others all the more determined to achieve equal soccer status. A statement by Iraqi Kurdish president Massoud Barzani equating sports to politics as a way of achieving recognition adorns Iraqi Kurdistan’s three major stadiums and virtually all of its sports centers and institutions. “We want to serve our nation and use sports to get everything for our nation. We all believe in what the president said,” says KFF president Safin Kanabi, scion of a legendary supporter of Kurdish soccer who led anti-regime protests in Kurdish stadiums during Saddam Hussein’s rule.
“Like any nation, we want to open the door through football. Take Brazil. People know Brazil first and foremost through football. We want to do the same. We want to have a strong team by the time we have a country. We do our job, politicians do theirs. Inshallah (if God wills), we will have a country and a flag” adds Kurdistan national coach Abdullah Mahmoud Muhieddin.
With other words, soccer may not achieve immediate political and diplomatic recognition but it certainly puts nations in the public eye. “Our external objective is primarily to project our identity through sports. Many people don’t know our problem or would not be able to find us on a map. Soccer can change that. We had a French woman visit our refugee camps. When she told children that she was from France, they all replied saying Zidan” – a reference to retired star soccer player Zinedine Zidan, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, argues , said Sheikh Sidi Tigani, president of the Western Sahara Football Federation. “We’ve replaced the gun with a soccer ball,” adds West Saharan national sports director Mohammed Bougleida.
In using soccer as a tool to further nation and statehood, Kosovars, Kurds and West Saharan exploit a tradition established at the time that soccer was introduced in the Middle East and North Africa by the British when soccer was a tool to resist European colonialism and assert Arab interests internationally.
“Our success with VIVA demonstrates our ability to govern ourselves. Our goal for now is to be part of FIFA. All languages are represented in FIFA, only Kurdish isn’t while (FIFA president Sepp) Blatter claims that football is for everyone. We are human. We want the world to understand Kurdistan’s contribution,” says Mr. Kanabi.
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
Malaysian police make first arrest in Bin Hammam case
September 19th, 2012Malaysian authorities have arrested an associate of suspended Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and world soccer body FIFA vice president Mohammed bin Hammam on suspicion of theft of documents from AFC’s offices in Kuala Lumpur.
An AFC lawyer, Mohamad Bustaman Abdullah, identified the associate as Tony Kang, the husband of AFC’s finance director under Mr. Bin Hammam, who was let go after allegations of financial misconduct surfaced against the Qatari national, according to Agence France Press (AFP).
Mr. Abdullah said Mr. Kang had surrendered himself to Malaysian police and is expected to be charged in court in Kuala Lumpur after police reports identified him as having participated in the theft.
Mr. Kang’s arrest came as FIFA launched a new probe into allegations that Mr. Bin Hammam had last year sought to buy the votes of Caribbean soccer officials in his failed bid to challenge FIFA president Sepp Blatter in elections for the group’s presidency. Investigators have demanded documents from those involved at an extraordinary meeting of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU), where the bribes were allegedly paid on Mr. Bin Hammam’s behalf, according to The Telegraph.
A Fifa-headed letter dated Sept 7 gave recipients a week’s notice for the delivery of “all correspondence including emails, texts, SMS messages, letters or notes related to Fifa, CFU, Concacaf (the Caribbean, North and Central American confederation) or any other football-related entity with which you’ve been affiliated. A list of all email addresses and accounts — including personal, CFU, Concacaf accounts, as relevant — you have used … All financial records related to Fifa, CFU, Concacaf or any other football-related entity with which you’ve been affiliated,” the newspaper said.
The FIFA investigation is in response to a ruling in July of the Court of the Arbitration of Sport (CAS) that overturned FIFA’s banning for life in July of last year of Mr. Bin Hammam from all involvement in professional soccer because of the bribery allegations. The court said FIFA had produced insufficient evidence for the ban, but made clear that its verdict was not a declaration that Mr. Bin Hammam was innocent and urged FIFA to do a more thorough investigation.
Malaysian police are investigating the theft of documents from the AFC’s premises after the Asian soccer body reported that documents related to a payment by International Sports Events (ISE), a shareholder of Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG), to Mr. Bin Hammam, had gone missing and were allegedly handed over to an associate of Mr. Bin Hammam, according to Malaysian police reports and sources close to the AFC.
The AFC report was filed on July 31 by AFC finance director Kuan Wee Hong. Mr. Hong told the police in subsequent statements that the documents had been handed over to a Chinese male by the name of Tony Kang.
Mr. Kang’s wife has since her departure from the AFC been employed in Mr. Bin Hammam’s home country as a club licensing officer by Qatar Stars League, which is headed by a member of the Qatari royal family, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Bin Ahmad Al Thani.
The missing documents relate to a $2 million payment in 2008 by Saudi Arabia-based ISE, one of three shareholders of Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG), according to the company’s website. A recent internal AFC audit conducted by PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PwC) said that the money had been paid to Mr. Bin Hammam for his personal use. The PwC report said the payment by ISE, which is believed to have a ten per cent stake in WSG, as well as a second payment of $12 million by a related company, Al Baraka Investment and Development Co., were “of interest. Transactions of significant value between these parties (of both a business and purportedly personal nature) occurred around the time of the MRA contract (a controversial $1 billion master rights agreement) negotiations with WSG,” PwC said in its report.
PwC said that Al Baraka “may (through the Arab Radio & Television Co., which it owns) have been a 20% beneficial owner of the group at that time (of the payment). Further, our enquiries indicate that Mr Mohyedin Saleh Kamel, the Assistant Chief Executive Officer (Investments) of the Dallah Al-Baraka Group may have been (from 2005 2009) the Managing Director of ISE.” Al Baraka is a finance arm of Dallah Al Baraka that is owned by Saudi billionaire Saleh Kamel. PwC said that Mohyedin Saleh Kamel is believed to be Mr. Kamel’s son. It said that ART and ISE appear to share a post office box in Saudi Arabia. Neither Messrs. Kamel or their companies could be reached for comment.
In its report, PwC said that “it is highly unusual for funds (especially in the amounts detailed here) that appear to be for the benefit of Mr Hammam personally, to be deposited to an organization’s bank account. In view of the recent allegations that have surrounded Mr Hammam, it is our view that there is significant risk that … the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder funds and that the funds have been credited to the former President for an improper purpose (Money Laundering risk)” or that “the AFC may have been used as a vehicle to launder the receipt and payment of bribes.”
WSG has refused to comment on the PwC report and has threatened reporters, including the author of this report, with defamation proceedings. WSG has filed legal action against this writer, who has reported extensively on the Bin Hammam affair, in a bid to force him to disclose his sources and intimidate potential sources. Qatar Holding LLC, an investment arm of Qatar, holds a ten per cent stake in France’s Lagardere Unlimited, WSG’s largest shareholder, according to Lagardere’s 2011 annual report.
However in an August 28, 2012 letter to this reporter WSG Group Legal Advisor Stephanie McManus asserted that “PWC are incorrect and misconceived in suggesting that the MRA was undervalued. They have neither considered the terms of the contract correctly, the market, nor the circumstances in which it was negotiated,” Ms. McManus wrote.
The agreement is controversial both because of the unexplained payments as well as assertions by sources close to the AFC that the soccer group, in line with common practice among international sport associations, should have concluded a service provider rather than a master rights agreement with WSG. The sources said such an agreement would have given the AFC greater control of its rights and how they are exploited and enabled it to better supervise the quality of services provided by WSG.
A July 31 Malaysian police report of AFC finance director Hong’s complaint says that he noticed that an “important document, which contained a bank report/statements belonging to former AFC president (Mohammad b Hammam), was missing from my office.” Mr. Hong told the police that he and a colleague, James Johnson, had last reviewed the document on July 13 and that “after that I kept the document back in a storage drawer” until he discovered that it was missing.
Sources close to the AFC said that the soccer body within hours of reporting the missing document received a letter from Mr. Bin Hammam’s Malaysian lawyers accusing it of being responsible for the disappearance. The sources said the AFC had asked the Malaysian police to give it several days to conduct its own internal investigation before looking into the matter.
A second Malaysian police report dated August 11 corroborated by sources close to the AFC quoted Mr. Hong as reporting to the police that AFC staffer Selina Lee Siew Choo, “had admitted taking the file (containing the documents) and said she had handed them to a male Chinese known as Tony, the husband of Ms Amelia Gan, who was the former (AFC) Finance Director. Selina had also admitted making a copy of a bank document advice for a transaction worth USD $2 million, which was a payment from ISE.”
An August 15 Malaysian police report, also corroborated by sources close to the AFC, quoted Mr. Hong as saying that Ms. Choo on August 2 had “admitted stealing the file from the drawer in my office as instructed by Ms Amelia Gan (former finance director at AFC). Her instructions were to steal the file which showed the document/ bank advice containing the US$2 million transaction from ISE and surrender them to her husband, Tony Kang.”
The report quoted Mr. Hong as further saying that “I have my suspicions/reasons to believe that the theft of the file was to dispose evidence involving a case of wrongful management of AFC accounts by Mohammad Bin Hammam in the wake of a financial audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers.”
The PwC report constituted the basis on which Mr. Bin Hammam’s suspension from the AFC and FIFA was extended. The report allowed the two groups to postpone any reinstatement of Mr. Bin Hammam after his banning was overturned by CAS.
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
Middle East protests: Ultras settle scores, Islamists seek to score points
September 15th, 2012By James M. Dorsey
The anti-American protests spreading across the Middle East and North Africa may be fuelled by an obscure anti-Muslim American film but are really about domestic score settling and political maneuvering.
At the bottom line, the message from this week’s riots that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stephens and 13 others in Benghazi, wrecked the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second city and sparked attacks on U.S. missions in Cairo and elsewhere is that the transition from autocracy to more open societies in post-revolt Middle Eastern and North African nations remains an unfinished, convoluted process. It is a message that is being expressed by protesters whose backgrounds vary from country to country and in Egypt include militant, highly politicized, well organized and street-battle, hardened soccer fans or ultras.
Transition is likely to remain volatile until post-autocratic governments deliver on the demands of protesters, including social justice and reform of the former regime’s repressive machinery that in the last 21 months have toppled four Arab leaders and plunged Syria into civil war. It also will stay convolutes until populations who have only known totalitarianism become more tolerant and thick skinned as they adapt to emerging, more open, pluralistic societies that embrace the principle of live and let live and freedom of expression.
Journalist Issandr El Amrani noted in The National this week that historically Islamists and autocratic governments have used perceived insults against Islam as a mobilization tool. The difference between this week’s crisis or the 2005 Danish cartoon crisis that was fomented by the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the 1988 death fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued by Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign in 2000 against Syrian novelist Hayder Hayder is the Internet that puts obscure or local expressions of bigotry on the global map.
Few doubt that the devastating attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was pre-planned and that the manipulation of emotions over a film that would have best been ignored allowed militant Islamists bent on revenging the death of an Al Qaeda leader, Sheikh al-Libi, to execute their plan in a country that is struggling to build institutions, disarm a multitude of armed groups and build unified military and law enforcement forces. In Egypt, the initial driver of the protests appears to be Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri’s brother Mohammed who heads a small group of Salafists that saw an opportunity to commemorate in its own way the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and score points against the Muslim Brotherhood which has largely out maneuvered the country’s more radical Islamists.
Nonetheless, the Islamists have put post-revolt governments on the spot forcing them to walk a tightrope between condemning the violence as well as the insult of the Prophet Mohammed. In Egypt the emotions evoked and the central role of the ultras, one of the country’s largest and best organized civic groups, forced President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood to call for a demonstration of its own against the U.S. film that it may not be able to control.
This month amid mounting tension between ultras, security forces and the government over the failure to mete out justice for the 74 soccer fans killed in a politically loaded brawl in February in Port Said, the banning of fans from soccer matches and corruption in Egyptian soccer, this week’s anti-American protests offered the ultras the perfect opportunity to make good on their promise of renewed street agitation. Tension started building when ultras last week first stormed the training ground of crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC and a day later the offices of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA). The protests won the ultras the support of the Brotherhood which now hopes to keep a lid on the brewing conflict by attempting to take control of the anti-American protests.
As far back as February, the ultras asserted that their issues were “bigger than football. We want to settle the score with remnants of the former regime.” In a statement last week they warned that “we remained silent for seven months, during which we were committed to peaceful ways to ask for the rights of 74 martyrs who died in the world’s worst football tragedy. Now, after seven months, we call on everybody to revolt against the football system before action is resumed. We also call on fellow Ultras groups to reunite and support us in our demands.”
That support is being manifested on the streets around the U.S. embassy in Cairo where the anger sparked by the U.S. film offered the ultras a renewed opportunity to settle scores with the police and the security forces – Egypt’s most despised institutions that are widely seen as the brutal enforcers of ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime. Those scores are deep seated dating back to four years of regular clashes with police and security forces in the stadiums as well as the memory of police brutality in the poorer neighborhoods of Egyptian cities, the clashes during the 18 days of protest last year that toppled Mr. Mubarak and the vicious street battles since then that killed scores and wounded thousands.
To the ultras, defeating the police is reaffirmation of their dignity. It amounts to defeating the remnants of the Mubarak regime and what sociologist Salwa Ismail describes as ensuring that the “fear and the culture of fear that continuous monitoring, surveillance, humiliation and abuse have created” defeated with the toppling of Mr. Mubarak is maintained.
To ordinary Egyptians the state, in the words of London School of Economics and Political Science historian John Calcraft, was in autocratic Middle Eastern and North African regimes “in the detention cells, in the corrupt police stations, in the beatings, in the blood of the people, in the popular quarters.” What the ultras in front of the U.S. embassy and before that on Tahrir Square and in the stadiums were performing is continued “rejection of fear and the culture of fear” in a bid to ensure that the demands that led to the toppling of autocratic leaders are achieved says Mr. Calcraft .
It was also learning the lessons – both in the run-up to Mr. Mubarak’s downfall and in the post-Mubarak transition period – of the failures of revolutionaries like prominent Syria poet Adonis and Yasin Al-Hafiz in the heyday of Arab nationalism whose Marxist thinking was at the core of the Syrian Baath Party’s ideology but was rendered impotent by autocracies that stymied critical, independent thinking.
“We aspire as revolutionary Arabs, to lay the foundations for a new era for the Arabs. We know that institutionalizing a new era requires from the very beginning a total break with the past. We also know that the starting point of this founding break is criticism, the criticism of all that is inherited, prevalent and common. The role of criticism is not limited to exposing and laying bare whatever prevents the creation of a new era but involves its destruction,” Adonis wrote.
Al-Hafiz argued that “a critique of all aspects of existing Arab society and its traditions as well as a strict scientific, secular critique and deep, penetrating analysis is a fundamental obligation of the Arab revolutionary socialist vanguard … Exploring the traditional frames of Arab society, will accelerate the creation of a completely modern Arab society. Without such an explosion, the chances for a systematic, speedy and revolutionary development of the traditional intellectual and social structures of the Arab people will be questionable if not impossible.”
The challenge for post-revolt governments in the Middle East and North Africa is harnessing the revolutionary energy released by people’s realization that there is power in numbers and in channeling it from street into pluralistic politics of political organizations and interest groups. Building confidence in post-revolt institutions and delivering on protesters’ original demands is the key. A first step in Egypt would be long overdue reform of the police and security forces.
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.
World Sports Group sues journalist in bid to squash reporting on Bin Hammam
September 11th, 2012By James M. Dorsey.
Singapore-based World Sports Group (WSG) has started legal proceedings against veteran journalist and soccer scholar James M. Dorsey in a bid to silence sources and squash reporting about its relationship with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and disgraced FIFA vice president and AFC president Mohammed Bin Hammam, who is at the center of the worst corruption scandal in soccer history.
WSG has asked the Singapore High Court to instruct Mr. Dorsey to reveal how he may have come into possession of internal AFC documents, including an audit that puts on record unexplained payments of $14 million to Mr. Bin Hammam by one of the company’s shareholders in the walk-up to the signing of its controversial $1 billion marketing rights contract with the AFC. The report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) also raises questions about how WSG was chosen, the terms of the contract and how it was negotiated.
A syndicated columnist, blogger and senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Mr. Dorsey reported extensively on the PwC report as well as the web of scandals that have wracked world soccer body FIFA and the AFC of which Mr. Bin Hammam, a Qatari national, is at the core. His reports have been posted on social media including Twitter, which has been cited in WSG’s petition to the court.
WSG initiated the legal proceedings after Mr. Dorsey first disclosed details of the PwC report, including the payments to Mr. Bin Hammam by one of its shareholders, International Sports Events (ISE), which is believed to be owned by Saudi billionaire Saleh Kamel as well as another entity associated with the businessman. Sources close to the AFC were quoted as questioning whether the terms of the WSG contract were in the AFC’s interest and revealed that Malaysian police had opened an investigation into the alleged theft of documents related to one of the payments by an AFC official on behalf of Mr. Bin Hammam. France’s Lagedere United, the country’s largest media and sports marketing company in which Qatar Holding has a ten per cent stake, and Dentsu, a Japanese advertising and marketing agency, are also shareholders of WSG.
WSG Chairman and CEO Seamus O’Brien who doubles as head of the New York Cosmos took control of the U.S. club last year in a partnership with Sela Sport, a Saudi company represented by Hussein Mohsin Al Harthy, according to media reports as well as well-placed sources who believe that Mr. Al-Harthy is Mr. Kamel’s brother-in-law. The 2012 Directory of Islamic Financial Institutions published by Routledge lists Mr. Al Harthy, who sits on the board of a number of companies of Mr. Kamel’s Dallah Al Baraka group, as a founder, together with the Saudi billionaire, of the Al Baraka Islamic Investment Bank BSC in Bahrain.
The legal proceedings initiated by WSG under Singapore law constitute a pre-trial action that would allow the company to serve Mr. Dorsey with interrogatory questions that he would be obliged to answer. A hearing in the High Court has been set for September 12. WSG, which has threatened other journalists with defamation proceedings, is asking the court to order Mr. Dorsey to answer six questions that would force him to reveal whether and what internal AFC documents he may have in his possession and who his sources are. Responses to the questions would allow WSG to initiate legal action against Mr. Dorsey and his sources on charges of breach of confidentiality and defamation.
In an August 28 letter to Mr. Dorsey, WSG Group Legal Counsel Stephanie McManus implicitly admitted the accuracy of Mr. Dorsey’s reporting by acknowledging that his sources “must have a very deep knowledge of the matters referred to in your Article.” Ms. McManus went on to first respond to the allegations against WSG in the PwC report and then demand that Mr. Dorsey take WSG-related articles off his blog and reveal his sources. In an August 30 letter by WSG’s lawyers, Deborah Barker and Ushan Premaratne of KhattarWong repeated Ms. Mc Manus’ demands in addition to demanding an apology by Mr. Dorsey. The letter asserted that Mr. Dorsey had been an accessory to breach of confidentiality. It alleged that “your distorted and unsubstantiated statements present your viewers with a biased view and indicate malice on your part.”
Mr. Dorsey has rejected WSG’s demands and will vigorously defend himself against the claim. He is represented by N. Sreenivasan of Straits Law.
Mr. Bin Hammam has been suspended for more than a year as FIFA vice president and AFC president initially on charges of having sought to bribe Caribbean soccer officials to support his failed effort last year to challenge Sepp Blatter in elections for the FIFA presidency. The PwC report constituted the basis on which Mr. Bin Hammam’s suspension was extended in July after the Court of Arbitration of Sport overturned a FIFA ruling that banned Mr. Bin Hammam for life from involvement in professional soccer but suggested that its decision was not a declaration of the Qatari’s innocence. The PwC report suggested that Mr. Bin Hammam’s management of AFC affairs may have involved cases of money laundering, tax invasion, bribery and busting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea.
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.
Striker Abou Treika – a symbol of Egypt’s convoluted political transition
September 8th, 2012By James M. Dorsey.
Starred striker Mohamed Abou-Treika symbolizes the struggles in virtually every Egyptian institution between post-Mubarak reformers and supporters of the Mubarak-era status quo ante.
Breaking with the tradition of soccer players standing on the sidelines of popular revolts in the Middle East and North Africa, if not supporting autocratic leaders, Mr. Abou Treika announced late this week that he would not be joining his fellow Al Ahly SC players in Sunday’s Super Cup final against ENPPI, Egypt’s first domestic match since this month’s lifting of a seven-month ban on professional soccer.
In doing so Mr. Abou Treika, one of Egypt’s most popular players, sided with Ultras Ahlawy, the cub’s militant, highly politicized, well organized, street-battle hardened support group. The group opposes the resumption of soccer as long as justice has not been done for the 74 Ahly supporters who were killed in February during Egypt’s worst sporting incident in a politically loaded brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said. Fans are not allowed to attend matches.
The brawl, which widely is believed to have been provoked by security forces in a bid to punish the ultras for their key role in the ousting of president Hosni Mubarak and violent opposition to the military that ruled Egypt until the election in July of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in the country’s first democratic poll, sparked the banning of soccer for most of this year.
Mr. Morsi’s sports minister, El-Amry Farouq, this month overcame interior ministry opposition to lifting the ban on soccer by agreeing to ban fans from matches that would have to be played in military stadiums to prevent politically motivated violence.
Ultras groups across Egypt constitute the country’s second largest, most organized civic group after Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s foremost political grouping. The ultras this week further demanded that the interior ministry’s police and security’s forces — the country’s most despised institution widely viewed as the brutal enforcers of repression under Mr. Mubarak – be deprived of responsibility for security in the stadiums. They also called for the resignation of the boards of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) and Al Ahly as well as the withdrawal of the candidacy of Mubarak era officials, among whom world soccer body FIFA executive committee member Hani Abou-Reida, as candidates in upcoming EFA elections.
Frustrated with the slow moving legal proceedings against 74 people, including nine security officials, accused of responsibility for the Port Said incident and the lack of reform of soccer, Al Ahly ultras this week stormed the grounds where the club’s players were training for Sunday’s match. They attacked the headquarters of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) a day later demanding a cleanup of Egyptian soccer and media, whom they accuse of corruption and fanning the flames of confrontation, and reform of the security forces. Hundreds of ultras demonstrated Friday in front of the security forces’ headquarters in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria where Sunday’s match will be played.
“We appreciate the historic stance of Abou-Treika … and we have a message for other players: choose to stand by your fans, they will always be there for you,” Ultras Ahlawy said in a statement on their Facebook page.
Mr. Abou-Treika’s move reflects Egypt’s convoluted transition from autocracy to an as yet undefined form of a more open society that is waging in virtually all of the country’s institutions. “After (the fall of Mr. Mubarak in) February 2011, internal battles took place in all state institutions — with some people advocating greater autonomy, others gravitating toward the SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that ruled Egypt until Mr. Morsi’s election in July), and old leaders hanging on …. Many critical Egyptian institutions are still undergoing slow but portentous internal struggles, generally away from the headlines,” said Egypt expert Nathan J. Brown in a just published Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analysis.
Mr. Abou-Treika’s move further breaks with the neo-patriarchy that underlies attitudes of most players. Neo-patriarchy is what makes Arab authoritarianism different from dictatorships in other parts of the world. Dictatorial regimes are not simply superimposed on societies gasping for freedom. Arab autocracies may lack popular support and credibility but their repressive reflexes that create barriers of fear are internalized and reproduced at virtually every layer of society. As a result societal resistance to and fear of change contributed to their sustainability.
In a controversial book published in 1992 that is still banned in many Arab countries, Palestinian-American historian Hisham Sharabi argued that Arab society was built around the “dominance of the father (patriarch), the centre around which the national as well as the natural family are organized. Thus between ruler and ruled, between father and child, there exist only vertical relations: in both settings the paternal will is absolute will, mediated in both the society and the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.” With other words, Arab regimes franchised repression so that society, the oppressed, participated in their repression and denial of rights. The regime is in effect the father of all fathers at the top of the pyramid.
If any group in the Middle East and North Africa confirmed Mr. Shirabi’s concept of neo-patriarchy, it is professional soccer players and officials. In Egypt and Tunisia soccer players remained on the side lines of the momentous events in their countries while some prominent soccer officials, particularly in Egypt, declared their support for the embattled autocratic leader. It took four months of mass protests that morphed into civil war for a group of Libyan players, who had lost friends and relatives, to join the rebel forces aligned against Moammar Qaddafi. At the same time, a former captain of the national soccer team called the anti-Qaddafi rebels rats and dogs.
Egyptian soccer fans responded to the aloofness of their players by unfurling a banner at one of the first matches following Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow that read, “We followed you everywhere but in the hard times we didn’t find you.”
Another banner put the fans further at odds with their clubs and star players who were resisting calls for a capping of transfer prices and salaries for coaches and players. It said: “You’re asking for millions and you don’t care about the poverty of Egyptians.”
Fuelling the growing gap between fans and players was what sociologist Ian R. Taylor described as resistance to and rejection of the upwardly mobile move of players from their working class origins to a middle class with a Peter Stuyvesant-like, jet-set lifestyle. “Increasingly, soccer is a means of moving out of the working class, not for temporary relief but rather to permanent affluence. The player has been incorporated into the bourgeois world, his self-image and behavior have become increasingly managerial or entrepreneurial, and soccer has become for the player, a means to personal (rather than sub-cultural) success,” Taylor concluded in a 1970s analysis of British soccer violence.
As a result, relations between fans and players have much like Egyptian politics been on a rollercoaster since the fall of Mr. Mubarak. Tensions in the first post-Mubarak year made way for a period of reconciliation in the wake of Port Said. Mr. Abou-Treika was one of three al Ahly and national squad players who initially announced their resignation from soccer immediately after the incident but later returned to the game.
Within days Al Ahly militants, responding to an outpour of sympathy from across Egypt including militants of their arch Cairo rival Al Zamalek SC, apologized on an especially created Facebook page named “We are sorry Shika” to Zamalek winger Mahmoud Abdel-Razek aka Shikabala, one of Egypt’s top players, for routinely abusing him verbally during their clubs’ derbies. The abuse frequently lead to heated exchanges and a trading of insults between Shikabala and Al Ahly fans.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Soccer match to test Egypt’s shift from street to parliamentary politics
August 30th, 2012Egyptian military patrols soccer match (Source: Reuters)
By James M. Dorsey.
Egypt is testing with a partial lifting of a ban on fans attending soccer matches whether the country after 18 months of political volatility, including violent protests before and after last year’s ousting of president Hosni Mubarak that led to the republic’s first free elections, has finally returned to a more peaceful resolution of political and moral issues.
An interior ministry decision to allow a limited number of fans, who played a key role in the protests before and after the toppling of Mr. Mubarak constitutes a political victory for newly elected Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. The ministry has in recent week resisted calls for a resumption of professional soccer matches in the presence of fans by members of the Morsi government, including sports minister El-Amry Farouq, and the government appointed acting head of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA).
The ministry suspended professional soccer and banned fans from matches in February in the wake of a politically loaded soccer brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said that left 74 militant soccer fans dead. It has since insisted that the suspension and the ban could only be lifted once cash-strapped soccer clubs had introduced proper security infrastructure and stringent security measures in Egyptian stadiums.
In an apparent softening of its position, the ministry this week said it would allow some supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Zamalek SC, who are among the country’s most politicized, militant, well-organized and street battle-hardened fans, to attend an African Champions League game in Cairo against Ghana’s Berekum Chelsea.
In doing so the ministry appears to agree with scholars Eduardo P. Archetti and Amilcar G. Romero who almost two decades ago asserted that “football does not only reflect society or culture but is part of the way that a society models some of its central existential, political and moral issues.”
Fan behaviour on Saturday will serve as an indication of whether Egyptian society is shifting from street to parliamentary politics and the backroom horse trading associated with it. Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow at the end of 18 days of mass protests was followed by more than a year of street agitation and repeated vicious street battles between security forces and militant youth and soccer fan groups in which scores were killed and thousands injured.
The EFA has called on supporters of Zamalek to be on their best behaviour to ensure that they do not endanger next month’s planned resumption of premier league games. The matches are expected to be largely played in military stadiums.
Authorities are apprehensive following the storming of a pitch earlier this month in neighbouring Tunisia in which 22 police officers were injured. The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has expelled Etoile Sportieve du Tunis from the African club championship as punishment for the incident. Zamalek fans invaded the pitch last year in the first post revolt Egyptian-Tunisian encounter.
EFA spokesman Azmy Megahed said that the soccer body was relying “on Zamalek fans to display sportsmanship and send a message to the world that Egypt is safe. That match will also pave the way for the resumption of domestic football ahead of the league’s launch on 17 September.”
Scholars who have studied violence in stadiums caution that violence is as much dependent on fan behaviour as it is on attitudes and perceptions of security forces. Much of the violence in recent years in Egyptian stadiums and the clashes in the last 18 months were the result of deep-seated fan animosity towards security forces who are widely viewed as having brutally enforced the Mubarak regime’s repression. Calls for a reform of the Egyptian police and security forces have so far remained unheeded.
To the protesters and the militant soccer fans, defeating the police amounted to defeating what School of Oriental and African Studies professor Salwa Ismaildescribed as “fear and the culture of fear that continuous monitoring, surveillance, humiliation and abuse have created.” To ordinary Egyptians the state represented by the security forces in the words of London School of Economics and Political Science historian John Calcraft is “in the detention cells, in the corrupt police stations, in the beatings, in the blood of the people, in the popular quarters.”
Messrs. Archetti and Romero, describing Argentinian soccer violence noted that “the police in the stadia … are perceived not as neutral and shallow actors but as central and active participants. To resist and to attack the police force is thus seen as morally justified.” For their part, “the police came to define the fans as a political enemy. Stadiums were then converted into political arenas,” the two scholars said, warning that fan groups had evolved into well-trained fighting organizations.
Egypt’s militant soccer fans demonstrated their skill in the years of stadium battles in the run-up to Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow and the street battles since. By limiting the number of fans that will be allowed to attend Saturday’s African championship match, chances are the game will proceed peacefully. The threat of soccer violence is however likely to remain acute as long as the Morsi government does not move to reform the security forces and hold them accountable for their actions.
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 Arab Revolts: Impact on Central Asia
August 27th, 2012By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis:
The rise of Islamist forces in the complicated post-revolt transition in the Middle East and North Africa may have an impact on post-Soviet states in Central Asia, that are still struggling with transition to democracy or have yet to experience popular revolts.
Commentary:
Two years ago, the scenes in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek resembled those in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the last 18 months. Mass anti-government protests demanding an end to autocratic rule toppled the country’s ruler despite attempts by security forces to squash them. The protests paved the way for presidential elections contested by a former prime minister under the ancient regime and a host of Islamist and non-Islamist candidates.
The Kyrgyz voters chose their former prime minister, Almazbek Atambayev as Central Asia’s first democratically elected president. Two years later Mohammed Morsi, a leader of the long outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, was elected president of a post-revolt Egypt. Though the results may be different the elections represent two sides of a fundamental issue that both Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa are grappling with: the rise of religious parties in their politics and public life.
Decades of neglected discontent in the Middle East and North Africa erupted in December 2010 in Tunisia, sparking a wave of popular revolts that has toppled the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, fomented a civil war in Syria and has other Arab leaders scrambling to avoid being next.
Discontent is similarly simmering in the Central Asia region where half of the population is below the age of 30, and the constituent countries are largely ruled by former Soviet Communist Party bosses who became the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan upon the demise and breakup of the Soviet Union. With countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan ranked among the world’s worst violators of basic freedoms, the region is feeling the impact of the revolts in the Arab world.
However, Central Asia’s sustained suppression of regime critics, including Islamists, and its efforts to severely curtail expressions of religion is bucking the trend towards a greater public role for religion seen in West Asia, such as the success of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and the rise of Islamists in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the growing influence of Christian evangelists in the United States.
A combustible mix
At a recent inter-faith meeting in Kazakhstan, a Christian participant was quoted by The National newspaper of the United Arab Republic as saying: “The removal of religion from the society also removes the values of the society. The atheist societies of the 20th century failed and were swept away. Faith is a natural desire of a human being. Societies that do not recognise this are not realistic. They will fail as well.”
The suppression of Islamist forces in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union serves not only to maintain autocratic rule in most of the newly independent states but also as a mechanism for as long as it lasts to preserve stability in a region that shares a long border with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran where the confluence of religion and politics has produced a combustible mix.
Several of the Central Asian republics have experienced cross border attacks by Islamic militants, Uzbekistan is home to the jihadist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Tajikistan is still coping with the aftermath of a five-year civil war. A leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), Tajikistan foremost opposition group, was recently killed and another has disappeared in the rebellious province of Gorno-Badakhstan.
Polishing tarnished images
Nonetheless, the fate of autocratic leaders in the Middle East and North Africa holds a cautionary lesson for Central Asian leaders whose raison d’etre is maintaining repressive autocratic powers despite economic mismanagement and widespread corruption. Some, like Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov see soccer as a way to polish their tarnished image, a tactic that bought deposed Arab leaders time but ultimately failed.
Karimov last year ordered authorities to build new stadiums, open new football schools, and expand training opportunities for players and referees. The Uzbek leader hoped to capitalize on the fact that a Uzbek club won the Asian Football Cup last year as well as an earlier success of the country’s Under-17 youth team. To cement his attempt to steal the show, Karimov persuaded Spanish giant Real Madrid to open a soccer school in Tashkent.
The moves did little to counter discontent, particularly among soccer fans frustrated with corruption in the sport. Clashes among fans have taken the regime by surprise. In Guzar, it took security forces a day to restore order after soccer riots that spilled into the town itself. Similar incidents have erupted in the Tajik capital Dushanbe. Celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Uzbek soccer have repeatedly been postponed because of delays in the completion of Tashkent’s showcase 35,000-seat Bunyodkor stadium amid fears that fans were unlikely to show the necessary enthusiasm.
Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s only middle-income country, last year experienced its first suicide bombing and several lethal attacks on police officers as a result of a crackdown on religion and a deteriorating economy. Discontent in the volatile Fergana Valley recently spilled into the streets of the Uzbek city of Andijan, where hundreds were killed during mass protests in 2005.
In breaking with its Central Asian neighbours, post-revolt Kyrgyzstan, like post-revolt Arab states,has allowed Islamist parties and groups to operate openly in a bid to take the sting out of their bite. The experience of Turkey shows that giving Islamists space has produced what many see as a model for the Middle East and North Africa and perhaps for Central Asia too.
The rise to power through the ballot box of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia is forcing them to focus on their country’s economic problems and to demonstrate their ability to reach out to secular and non-Muslim groups. While the jury is still out in Egypt and Tunisia, nonetheless, it strengthens the basis for international pressure on Central Asian autocrats to loosen the reins and move towards greater transparency and accountability. If that comes about it might well be the most lasting impact of the Arab revolts on the post-Soviet states of Central Asia.
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.
Reinstituting Egypt’s Premier League: A Political Tug of War
August 25th, 2012Port Said riot: 74 dead (Source: Reuters)
By James M. Dorsey.
Egyptian security authorities, reluctant to lift a seven-month old ban on professional soccer, are considering testing the waters by allowing a limited number of fans to attend a closed door African championship match scheduled to be played in Cairo next month.
The move would constitute a small victory for Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in his tug of war with the country’s security establishment. Mr. Morsi recently scored an important win by changing the top guard of the armed forces and successfully grabbing executive and legislative power from the military.
The battle for the lifting of the ban on professional soccer that has financially hurt the football industry severely and allowing fans back into the stadium is a litmus test of Mr. Morsi’s ability to impose his will on the unreformed interior ministry and its police and security forces, the country’s most distrusted institution because of its role as enforcers of ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime.
Officials of Mr. Morsi’s government have so far unsuccessfully pushed for a resumption of professional soccer with the attendance of fans who played a key role in the toppling of Mr. Mubarak. The officials as well as the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) are calling for the Premier League to kick off on September 16, but have yet to get interior ministry approval. The ministry this week agreed however to allow the Super Cup final between crowned Cairo club Al Ahly SC and ENPPI to be played on September 8 behind closed doors and to admit some fans to an African Championship League match between Al Ahly arch rival Al Zamalek SC and Ghana’s Chelsea Berekum.
The military, the interior ministry, government officials, soccer executives and militant soccer fans have in recent weeks been locked in a complex dance focused on the security authorities’ refusal to lift the ban imposed in the aftermath of the death of 74 fans in February in a politically loaded brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said.
Egypt’s military rulers are employing the security-inspired sustained ban on soccer as a tool to undermine radical, highly-politicized and street battle-hardened soccer fans who emerged as the North African country’s most militant opponents of the armed force’s grip on politics and proponents of security service reform in the walk-up to Mr. Morsi’s presidency.
Their concern has been reinforced by last week’s clash in Tunisia between security forces and soccer fans in which 22 policemen were injured that followed the throwing of smoke bombs and the storming of the pitch by fans of Etoile Sportive du Sahel unhappy with their team’s poor performance against Esperance Sportive du Tunis. The incident has sparked calls for the banning of Tunisian fans from soccer matches.
The Egyptian effort to side line 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. It also counters Mr. Morsi, who has vowed to free soccer and sports in general from corruption and political interference and sees the resumption of professional soccer as a sign of Egypt’s return to normalcy after 18 months of volatility.
The government recently installed a new EFA board tasked with organizing within 60 days elections in the soccer body. Three competing lists – members of the Mubarak-era board, Islamist players and independent reformers – are campaigning for the election.
The interior ministry has so far refused 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.
While not unreasonable, the demand ignores the fact that security forces stood aside during the brawl in Port Said in what was widely believed to be an effort to teach a lesson to the militant soccer fans that got out of hand. It also fails to take account of the fact that the military and the government have refrained from reforming the interior ministry and its security forces.
That is not going unnoticed in a post-revolt environment in which the public is no longer distracted from politics. Media focus on Mr. Morsi rather than soccer contrasts starkly with the Mubarak era when, for example, the media at the regime’s behest focused on the beautiful game rather than 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 recently quoted American University of Cairo political scientist Emad Shahin as saying.
As a result, the debate about soccer is as much about politics as it is about sports. It is a debate that is likely to be fought out politically rather than on the pitch. However, failure to resolve the issue politically risks fans demanding reinstitution of soccer and their right to attend matches on the street rather than at the negotiating table.
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
Soccer weaves a thread through Syrian rebels and Assad forces
August 18th, 2012Fawwaz al-Assad’s soccer club: 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 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
August 17th, 2012By 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
Conflict in Syria: The Regional Fall-out
August 13th, 2012Synopsis
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.