Pitched Battles: The Role of Ultra Soccer Fans in the Arab Spring

 

 

 

PITCHED BATTLES: THE ROLE OF ULTRA SOCCER FANS IN THE ARAB SPRING*

 

 

 

James M. Dorsey†

 

 

 

For decades soccer has constituted an alternative public space in the Middle East. Largely unnoticed by international experts, soccer provided a venue for the expression of pent-up anger and frustration against authoritarianism. By the time the Arab revolt erupted in December 2010, soccer had emerged as a key nonreligious, nongovernmental institution capable of confronting repressive regimes. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Egypt, where militant, politicized, often violent ultras—organized clubs of soccer fans—played a key role in the protests that forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign in February 2011. Since his resignation, Egyptian ultras have continued to play a prominent role in Egyptian street politics.

 

 

The ultras of the Middle East—organized clubs of soccer fans—are renowned for their fanatical support of their teams. With elaborate displays of fireworks, flares, smoke guns, loud chanting, and jumping up and down during matches, they hope to create an atmosphere in the stadium that encourages their team and intimidates opposing players and supporters. Like many of their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, the ultras are fiercely independent, with bans on outside funding, and abide by strict rules that oblige them to attend their team’s every match. As in many countries, Middle Eastern ultras are composed largely of young working- class men who embrace a culture of confrontation—against opposing teams, against the state, and against expressions of weakness in society at large. Sometimes this culture manifests itself in acts of political rebellion (Kuhn 2011).

For years, ultras in the Middle East have staged frequent stadium battles with the police and rival fans, a zero-sum game for control of a venue they saw as their own. States in the region viewed these autonomous, militant groups as a challenge to the regime’s monopoly on the means of coercion, and a potentially serious threat to their authority. In the name of public safety they turned football pitches into virtual fortresses, ringed by black steel and armed security personnel. The ultras, for their part, radicalized in response to the militarization of the stadium, though they did not always frame their militancy as political. “We steer clear of politics. Competition in Egypt is on the soccer pitch. We break the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong. You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We're not political, the government knows that and that is why it has to deal with us,” said one Egyptian ultra in 2010, after his group overran a police barricade erected to prevent it from bringing

 

 

 

 

*  There are too many people I am indebted to for sharing their knowledge, wisdom, help, and support—many of whom prefer not to be named. First and foremost however, I will never be able to repay Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario for her insights, guidance and unwavering support in more ways than I can describe. I am also grateful for the con- fidence, backing and encouragement I received from my RSIS colleagues Barry Desker, Joseph Liow Ching Yong and Mushahid Ali as well as from Bilahari Kausikan. Without Steven Solomon’s comments, I would have never turned an incidental article into a systematic approach toward the Middle East and North Africa..

† James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajmaratan School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and author of the blog, “The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.” Please direct all cor- respondence to jmdorsey@questfze.com.

 

 

© 2012 Mobilization: An International Journal 17(4): 411-418

 

flares, fireworks and banners into a stadium (Dorsey 2011). In recent years, violent clashes erupted almost weekly.

States in the Middle East have long sought to control the stadium symbolically as well as physically. Soccer has been a national passion for many Arabs since it was introduced by British colonial forces in Egypt in the late 19th century (El-Sayed 2004), and it had become a

symbol of national fortunes as early as the 1920s (Lopez 2009: 282-305). State elites sought

to associate themselves with the sport through patronage and micromanagement, rewarding players and coaches when they emerged victorious and firing them when they failed. In late

2009, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saw an opportunity to fan the flames of nationalism after Egypt’s national squad lost to Algeria and failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in

South Africa. Algerian fans attacked Egyptian fans outside the match—at a neutral site in

Sudan—and   a   mob   in   Cairo   stormed   Algeria’s   embassy  (Fraser  2009).   Mubarak’s government recalled its ambassador from Algiers. In retaliation, Algeria slapped Egyptian- owned Orascom Telecom’s Algerian operation with a tax bill of more than half a billion dollars.  The  feud  might  have  escalated  further  if  not  for  mediation  by  Libyan  leader Mu’ammar Qaddafi (Personal interview with Egyptian soccer analyst Hani Mokhtar, (January 5, 2011, Lima).

Qaddafi was not above associating himself with soccer as well. He adorned the country’s stadiums with quotes from his Green Book that explained his idiosyncratic theories of democracy, including the notion that both weapons and sports belong to the people. He appointed his son Al-Saadi—commander of a Libyan military unit that later played a crucial role in his father’s failed fight for survival in 2011—head of the Libyan Football Federation. Al-Saadi placed himself in the starting lineup of the Ahly club of Tripoli and pursued a stormy rivalry with the Ahly club of Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city, which later led the revolt against Qaddafi. In 2000, he had the Benghazi team relegated to the league’s second division, its headquarters burnt to the ground, and several of its officials imprisoned for protesting blatantly rigged matches (Dorsey 2011b).

In Iran, as well, soccer pitches are political battlefields. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former soccer player, sought to associate himself with Iran’s national team in a bid to curry popular favor, though with limited success. He invited media coverage when he practiced occasionally with the team, and he got the team suspended from international play for his political interference in team management. This involvement backfired further in 2009, just before presidential elections that sparked nation-wide protest, when Ahmadinejad “was accused of ‘jinxing’ the team, which suffered a last-minute defeat to Saudi Arabia just after Ahmadinejad entered the stadium,” according to a U.S. State Department memo disclosed by Wikileaks (US State Department 2009).

In these countries and elsewhere, ultras and other soccer fans came to view soccer officials as tools of the regime, and even disparaged some of the athletes as mercenaries, playing only for money. The ultras considered themselves the only defenders of the true values

of their squad.

 

 

THE ARAB REVOLTS

 

The  first  uprising  in  the  region  erupted  in  Tunisia  in  December  2010,  after  the  self- immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid. Observers have noted that this was not the first time that Tunisians had protested against the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Recent years had witnessed strikes, demonstrations, even other instances of self-immolation. In November 2010, weeks before the uprising, Tunisian soccer fans clashed with security forces after a tense championship match between Esperance Sportive du Tunis and TP Mazembe from the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

For more than a decade, Tunisian ultras had forged links with Takriz, a secretive self- described “cyber think tank and street resistance network,” founded in 1998, whose name is a street-slang profanity that expresses a feeling of frustrated anger. In 1999, several Takriz activists attended a Tunisian soccer cup match that erupted in violence with scores injured, several fatally. The ultras’ militant spirit impressed the activists, who reached out to fan groups and developed a web forum for ultras from different teams. At the end of 2009, Takriz and the ultras decided the time was right to mobilize. “So we turned up the heat in the stadiums and started boiling the Internet. We decided to fuck everybody,” said Foetus, one of Takriz’s founders, who identifies himself only by his alias (Pollock 2011). They used Facebook to put opposition forces on the spot for being too timid and intimidated. “We had to

‘electroshock’ them to get people to do that last step. Then we built momentum, momentum, momentum,” said Waterman, the alias for another Takriz founder. (Pollock 2011). In the street  battles  that  ensued  with  security  forces  in  early  2011  in  the  run-up  to  Ben  Ali’s

departure into exile on January 14, in which some 300 people were killed, ultras and members

of Takriz formed the protestors’ fighting core (Pollock 2011).

 

A Way of Life

 

In Egypt, as well, some fervent fans of the top clubs had become politicized as well. “I made my first steps into politics in 2000,” said Mohamed Gamal Besheer, author of Kitab al- Ultras (The Ultras Book), who is widely seen as the godfather of the Egyptian ultras move- ment (personal interview with Mohamed Gamal Basheer, April 1, 2011, Cairo). “I was against corruption and the regime and for human rights. Radical anarchism was my creed. Ultras ignore the system. You do your own system because you already own the game. We see ourselves as organizers of anarchy. Our power was focused on organizing our system.” Some ultras made contact with like-minded militant fan groups in Serbia, Italy, Russia, and Argentina, developing friendships and in a few instances even long-distance relationships. Ahmed Fondu, a co-founder of one of the Egyptian ultras, was drawn into the movement in this way. “Soccer is a way of life for me. I made my transition to the ultras on the Internet. I encountered the fans movement. They were about bringing the game back to the fans. I talked to them every day for three or four years, and I’d check the newspapers every day,” said Fondu, who met his Serbian girlfriend through his connections with Belgrade ultras (Personal interview with Ahmed Fondu, April 2, 2011, Cairo). At the same time, the Egyptian ultras refrained from adopting the right-wing ideology of some of their counterparts overseas, or the nihilistic violence common to European soccer hooligans. “We are normal people. We love our country, our club and our group. We are fighting for freedom. That was the common thing between the revolutionaries and the ultras. We were fighting for freedom in the stadiums. The Egyptian people were fighting for freedom. We invested our ideas and feelings in revolution,” Fondu said.

Less than two weeks after Tunisian ultras and other protestors forced Ben Ali to leave the country, Egyptian ultras followed suit. The first major protest in Egypt was planned for Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011. The day before the protest, the two leading ultra

groups in Cairo issued statements on their Facebook pages stressing that they were non-

political organizations, but that their members were free as individuals to participate in the protests. “The group emphasizes that its members are free in their political choices,” said the statement by the Ultras Ahlawy, supporters of the Ahly club. Privately, both groups told their followers that the demonstration was what they had been working towards in four years of almost weekly clashes with security forces in the stadiums of Cairo. The ultras, unlike most other groups in Tahrir Square, were braced for violent confrontations. “We fought for our rights in the stadium for four years. That prepared us for this day. We told our people that this was our litmus test. Failure was not an option,” said Fondu.

       On January 25, Mohammed Hassan, a soft-spoken, 20-year old computer science student, aspiring photographer, and a leader of the Ultras White Knights, led a march from the Cairo neighborhood of Shubra that grew to 10,000 people. They marched through seven security barricades to Tahrir Square. A group of White Knights, including Mohamed, sought at one point to break through a police barrier to reach the nearby parliament building. “When I see the security forces, I go crazy. I will kill you or I will be killed. The ultras killed my fear. I learnt the meaning of brotherhood and got the courage of the stadium,” he said. He pointed to a scar on the left side of his forehead from a stone thrown by police, who stymied the fans’ first attempt to break through to parliament. As blood streamed down his face, he regained his courage from the crowd behind him: “They are our brothers. We can do this” (personal interview with Mohamed Hassan, April 1, 2011, Cairo).

The ultras’ street-battle experience helped other protesters break down barriers of fear that had kept them from confronting the regime in the past. "We were in the front line. When the police attacked we encouraged people. We told them not to run or be afraid. We started firing flares. People took courage and joined us, they know that we understand injustice and liked the fact that we fight the devil,” said Hassan.

During the 18-day occupation of Tahrir Square, the battle experience of the ultras was evident in the organization and social services that they helped to establish. Protestors were assigned tasks and wore masking tape on which they were identified by their role, such as

medic or media contact. The ultras patrolled the perimeters of the square and controlled entry.

They manned the front lines in clashes with security forces and pro-government supporters. Their faces were frequently covered so that the police, who had warned them by phone to stay away from Tahrir Square, would not recognize them. Years of confrontation with security forces prepared them for the struggle for control of the square when the president’s loyalists employed brute force in a bid to dislodge them. The ultras’ battle order included designated rock hurlers, specialists in turning over and torching vehicles for defensive purposes, and a quartermaster crew delivering projectiles like clockwork on cardboard platters.

Pro-democracy activists welcomed the ultras. “In fact, the ultras, the football fans’ asso- ciations, have played a more significant role than any political movement on the ground at this moment. Maybe we should let the ultras rule the country,” said Alaa Abd El Fatah, an Egyptian blogger and activist (El Fatah 2011). Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement—one of the central organizations on January 25 and later—noted that “The youth of the Muslim Brotherhood played a really big role. But actually so did the soccer fans,” who “are always used to having confrontations with police at the stadiums (Kirkpatrick and Sanger 2011).”

 

Beyond Rivalry

 

The Egyptian uprising managed to bring together two ultra groups, the Ahlawy and the White Knights, whose clashes had made Cairo home to one of the most violent soccer rivalries in the world (Gleeson 2008; Montague 2008). Their teams—Al-Ahly, which has won Egypt’s championship 34 times and the African championship six times, and Zamalek, with

14 Egyptian championships and five African championships—had to play on neutral ground; foreign referees were flown in because no Egyptian was believed to be neutral. On match day, the stadium resembled a fortress as riot police, soldiers, and plainclothes security personnel

sought to keep the fan groups apart. Their rivalry dated back a century: Al-Ahly was founded

by Egyptian nationalists in 1907; Al-Zamalek was founded in 1911 by Europeans, and was associated with the Egyptian monarchy. Today, the clubs’ fan bases are indistinguishable, and both see themselves as representing the common people against an oppressive elite. “Ahly was the first ever [football club] to be 100% Egyptian so it is very nationalistic, but Zamalek has changed their name so many times we sing: ‘You used to be half British, you guys are the rejects.’ In Arabic it’s the plural of ‘small dirty houses,’” said an Ahlawy ultra leader (Montague 2008). A former Zamalek board member countered, “Zamalek is the biggest political party in Egypt. We see the injustice of the football federation and the government against whatever once belonged to the king. The federation and the government see Zamalek as the enemy. Zamalek represents the people who express their anger against the system. We view Ahly as the representative of corruption in Egypt (Goldblatt 2010).”

“Soccer is a massive thing in Egypt. It is like religion. In most countries you are born Jewish, Muslim or Christian. In Egypt you were born Ahly and Zamalek. People would not ask your religion, they would ask whether you were Ahly or Zamalek,” said Adel Abdel

Ghafar, a doctoral student at Australian National University whose great-grandfather, Abdel

Khaliq Sarwat Pasha, co-founded Al-Ahly before becoming prime minister in 1922 (Personal interview with Adel Abdel Ghafar, April 23, 2012, Canberra). The shared experience of protest since early 2011, battling shoulder to shoulder against security forces, has altered relations between Cairo’s two groups of ultras, even if it has not erased their deep-seated rivalry. In January 2012, the White Knights called for a truce with the Ahlawy, in advance of a  match between their two teams. “We are asking for an end to the bloodshed, and to reconcile and unite for the sake of Egypt,” the statement said. The Ultras Ahlawy replied with a smiley-face icon (Dorsey 2012b).

In the months after Mubarak’s resignation, Egyptian security forces were reluctant to confront the ultras, in the streets or in stadiums, out of concern that clashes would undermine the military’s efforts to repair its tarnished image. That truce ended in September 2011, when Ahlawy ultras shouted obscene slogans against Mubarak and his former interior minister during an Egypt Cup match between Al-Ahly and Kima Aswan. Both men are on trial for their alleged role in hundreds of deaths during the anti-government protests that led to Mubarak’s ouster. In the ensuing clash, 130 people were wounded, including 45 policemen, and 20 ultras were arrested. Several days later, Ahlawy and Zamalek ultras joined together in large demonstrations demanding an end to military rule. Again in November 2011, ultras joined protestors who retook Tahrir Square from security forces, in clashes that left 50 dead and thousands injured. In February 2012, security forces stood by during a brawl after a soccer match in Port Said, Egypt, that left 74 Ahlawy ultras dead.

 

In and Out of Stadiums

 

Egypt’s two top soccer competitions, the Premier League and the Egypt Cup, were canceled this year because of concerns over violence. Elsewhere in the region, soccer has been suspended for months at a time, from the moment that anti-government protesters took to the streets. In Syria, the indefinite suspension of professional soccer since early 2011 has pushed anti-government protesters, including soccer fans, back into the mosque. With soccer stadiums inaccessible, serving as detention centers and staging points for security forces, protests have been more likely to start at mosques, the only remaining place where people can gather in numbers. In Algeria, where revolt petered out, at least for now, the regime and soccer fans have reached an informal understanding under which the militants returned to the stadium, where they are allowed to chant their slogans against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the military, corruption, and the cost of living. These arrangements constitute a fragile stand-off between protesters and the regime, which worries that anti-government agitation could spill out of the stadiums into the streets (Dorsey 2011c).

In Egypt, the ultras returned to the streets to demand justice for the victims of violence in Port Said. Ahlawys and White Knights marched through Cairo, chanting “the Ministry of Interior are thugs,” “I hear the martyr’s mother calling . . . ‘Who will get me my son’s rights,’”

and “Down, down with military rule,” as well as soccer songs (Egypt News 2012). More than

60 people, including nine security officials, have since been prosecuted for the deaths in Port Said. During the trial, the ultras staged a sit-in outside of the Egyptian parliament building, meeting formally with one another for the first time in their history and warning Egypt’s ae swiftly brought to justice. They also warned that they would resist a crackdown on militant soccer groups. In their first-ever joint statement, the two groups demanded “full transparency in revealing the outcome of the investigations. We will neither accept dis- regarding the disaster and turning it into football riots nor making a scapegoat to protect those who orchestrated the attacks.” They threatened joint action that would “not allow any football activities to resume unless complete justice is done” (Dorsey 2012b).

In a sign of the shifting balance of power in the region, the ultras faced not only a challenge from the security forces. They also faced a challenge from women activists. Women had been active in all aspects of the Egyptian uprising, and they expected to join the latest protests as well. However, the ultras did not consider it appropriate for women to stay at the sit-in with men overnight, and women were forced to leave at 10:00 P.M. The Independent Egyptian Women's Union objected, “From our belief . . . that anyone who carries the flame of liberty against the oppressive powers, should respect it first, we announce our objection to the rules of the sit-in to ban women from being there after 10 p.m. and prohibit them from their right to protest (Ammar 2012).” The ultras were not affiliated with Islamist parties, or any other  parties,  but  many  of  them  shared  the  conservative  social  mores  of  the  Islamists (Personal interviews with 20 ultras, March 30-April 2, 2011 Cairo). The masculine values that allowed the ultras to confront the security forces, such as courage and honor, coincided with patriarchal visions of male protectiveness of women, frequent separation of men’s and women’s spaces, and women’s duty not to provoke male lust.

The ultras’ attitude towards women’s rights constituted the flip side of the exploitation of soccer’s patriarchal values by the Middle East and North Africa’s neo-patriarchal regimes. Dictatorial regimes were not simply superimposed on societies gasping for freedom. Arab autocracies may have lacked popular support and credibility but the repressive reflexes that created barriers of fear were internalized and reproduced at every layer of society. As a result, societal resistance to, and fear of, change contributed to their sustainability. The patriarchal values that dominate soccer, in addition to its popularity, made it the perfect game for neo- patriarchs. Their values reinforced society’s cultural patriarchy as well as soccer’s values: assertion of male superiority in most aspects of life, control or harnessing of female lust and a belief in a masculine God. The protesters, despite their revolutionary spirit, were often unable or unwilling to completely shake off the patriarchal values they internalized. That failure complicated their struggle to not only topple the autocratic father figure, but to also destroy the regime he established. This regime was manifested, for example, in the street clashes near Cairo’s Tahrir Square in November 2011 during protests demanding an end to the Egyptian military’s rule. “The worst and the most damaging form of the persistence of the ancien regime is when it persists in the very lives, behaviour, habits and decisions of the revolutionaries themselves,” says prominent Syrian intellectual Sadik Al Azm (Al Azm 2011).

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

All in all, soccer remains a battlefield as well as a prism from which to view social and political dynamics not only in those Middle Eastern and North African nations still governed by autocratic leaders, but also those that have toppled their presidents in the course of the Arab revolts. Militant soccer fans continue to be at the forefront of efforts to ensure that the goals of popular revolts are achieved, or to maintain pressure on governments in countries like Algeria where discontent is boiling just under the surface. The soccer pitch is also, more than ever, a key venue in the Palestinian and Kurdish struggle for nationhood, the assertion of Berber and Iranian Azeri identity, and the fight for women’s rights.

Sports and athletes have often been agents of social change, challenging power as well as asserting identity and challenging norms and assumptions concerning justice, fairness, gender,

 

race, and sexuality. As a result, sports in general and soccer in particular have a history of resistance (Gates 2007). In doing so, sports have frequently forced those that have a grip on the levers of power to adapt their modes of control. African-American athletes formed their own teams and leagues in response to their exclusion from participation in mainstream sports for almost a century after the abolition of slavery as a lever to achieve inclusion. As recently as the 1990s, American athletes and coaches, irrespective of color, boycotted sport events in protest against the perceived racism of sponsors. These efforts to get antiracism standards accepted were ultimately successful. Similarly, observant Muslim women, backed by an Arab vice president of the world soccer body FIFA and Western sports figures, in 2012 persuaded the International Football Association Board (IFAB) to lift the ban on women wearing culturally acceptable headdress. Following the example of African-Americans, women in Saudi Arabia, where women’s sports linger in a cultural and legal no-man’s land, have formed their own clubs and teams that operate in a grey zone. Kurds and Palestinians see international soccer matches as a way to project their nationhood and achieve statehood. In doing so, athletes, managers and officials employ soccer as a driver for social transformation. For most of the past decade soccer in the Middle East and North Africa has been about more than just the game. This will likely be the case in coming decades.

 

 

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