Egypt Pressures CAF to be Lenient on Zamalek After Soccer Pitch Invasion


Egyptian soccer officials are pressing the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to limit the damage their country will suffer as a result of this weekend’s invasion of the pitch by militant fans of crowned Cairo club Zamalek SC’s African championship against Tunisia’s Club Africain.

CAF spokesman Amr Shaheen said Zamalek faces up to a three-year ban from playing in African competitions. CAF’s disciplinary committee has yet to announce what sanctions will be imposed on Zamalek.

Egyptian officials are urging CAF to take into account that security was almost absent during the match in the Cairo International Stadium and that the country has been experiencing political turmoil that in February toppled President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in office. The officials want CAF to ban Zamalek from hosting matches or order it to play such games behind closed doors for a period of time instead of preventing the club from competing for a number of years.

Members of the Ultra White Knights (UWK), the militant, violence-prone ultra Zamalek fan group, stormed the pitch on Saturday in the 90th minute of the match destroying goalposts and everything else in their path and attacking the referee and players. The fans accused the referee, Algerian national Mohamed Maknouz, of depriving Zamalek of the two point lead it needed to advance in the African club championship. Zamalek was leading 2:1 when the invasion took place, which automatically disqualified the Egyptian team.

UWK members believe the police, widely viewed as henchmen of the hated Mubarak regime, deliberately were barely present for the first time in years in which a heavy security presence at soccer matches was a permanent fixture at soccer matches to prove that Egypt will descend into chaos without them. The UWK members admits that they fell for the bait. The police has a long-standing score to settle with the UWK with whom they have battled for years and who confronted them in clashes during the demonstrations that led to Mubarak’s downfall.

The Egyptian proposals could prove for Zamalek arch rival Al Ahly SC, which is competing in the Champions League and military-owned Alexandria club Harras El-Hodoud, which plays in the Confederation Cup, to be a double edged sword.
CAF could conclude under its regulations that Egypt qualifies as a country “in which the internal situation does not allow the organisation of CAF matches” and deprive them from hosting matches.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intellectual honesty in Israel & Palestine produces radically different outcomes

Image
  Just published! By James M. Dorsey To watch a video version of this story or listen to an audio podcast click here . Thank you for your support and loyalty. Intellectual honesty is a rare commodity in the divide between Israelis and Palestinians. It is even rarer with the rise of Jewish ultra-nationalism and a generation of Israelis and Palestinians nurtured on prejudiced, biased, and often supremacist perceptions of the other. The irony is that historically, it was far-right militants, and currently, it is fringe left-wing intellectuals who displayed intellectual honesty, even if their conclusions differ radically. With few exceptions, intellectual honesty has long been lost on the Israeli right and left. What intellectual honesty survives is posited in fringe pockets of the left that propagate a paradigm cultural change on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide that goes against the grain of mainstream Israeli and Palestinian thinking and, in today’s fog of war,...
Read more

Pakistan caught in the middle as China’s OBOR becomes Saudi-Iranian-Indian battleground

Image
By James M. Dorsey Pakistani General Raheel Sharif walked into a hornet’s nest when he stepped off a private jet in Riyadh two weeks ago to take command of a Saudi-led, 41-nation military alliance. Things have gone from bad to worse since. General Shareef had barely landed when Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman dashed the Pakistani’s hopes to include Iran in the alliance that nominally was created to fight terrorism rather than confront Iran. The general’s hopes were designed to balance Pakistan’s close alliance with Saudia Arabia with the fact that it shares a volatile border with Iran and is home to the world’s second largest Shiite Muslim community. General Sharif’s ambition had already been rendered Mission Impossible before he landed with Saudi Arabia charging that Iran constitutes the world’s foremost terrorist threat . In a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting television network, Prince Mohammed, who also serves a...
Read more

Israeli & Palestinian war crimes? Yes. Genocide? Maybe. A talk with Omer Bartov

Image
  To watch a video version of this story on YouTube please click  here. An audio podcast is available on Soundcloud. Hi, and welcome to the Turbulent World with me James M. Dorsey, as your host. Words matter. No more so than in legal settings. Genocide is the word most associated with Israel's more than one-month-long assault on Gaza. In response to the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, in which at least 1,200, mostly civilian, Israelis were killed. Genocide and Holocaust scholars, including those who believe that Israel has and is committing war crimes in its assault are divided about whether Israeli actions amount to genocide. Even so, they warn that Israeli actions could lead to genocide, if it not already has. What is certain is that optics streaming out of Gaza of the destruction and the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians, including large numbers of children and babies, explain the popular use of the term genocide when discussing the Israeli assa...
Read more