Sports: A battlefield for freedom of expression and political change
By James M.
Dorsey
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Athletes,
executives and fans are turning sports in an era of defiance and dissent into a battleground for freedom of
expression and political change, putting national and international sports
associations that nominally adhere to human rights on the spot.
Denunciations
of repression in China’s troubled north-western province of Xinjiang and
support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by soccer celebrity Mesut Ozil, Houston
Rockets basketball general manager Darryl Morey, and rugby superstar Sonny Bill Williams alongside soccer fans in regions
like Morocco and Hong Kong, highlight the willingness of sports associations to
sacrifice the values attributed to sports for commercial gain in their dealings
with autocratic nations.
They also by
implication puncture the fiction of a separation of sports and politics that
sports associations have long employed to justify their often-close ties to
government and dealings with countries irrespective of their records in
upholding basic rights.
By
distancing themselves from statements of Messrs. Morey and Ozil, despite the
latter’s ties to Turkish president Recep
Tayyip Erdogan,
English Premier League club Arsenal and the US National Basketball
Association (NBA) have served to highlight the discrepancy between sports
associations’ declared principles and their policies.
The gap
between professed principles and practice is even more yawning with the
awarding of the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup to China despite Chinese president Xi
Jinping’s crackdown in Xinjiang and his moves to turn the People’s Republic
into a 21st century Orwellian surveillance state.
In a letter
to Human Rights Watch, FIFA justified its decision by
insisting that the Chinese football association as well as China had committed
“to respect human rights in their activities associated with the tournament in accordance with internationally
recognised human rights standards and FIFA’s own Human Rights Policy.”
It was not
clear how human rights associated with the Club World Cup could be separated
from the overall crackdown in China. Nnor was it clear why FIFA would help Mr.
Xi take a step towards fulfilling his dream of China first qualifying
for the World Cup, then winning the World Cup and ultimately hosting the
tournament.
The awarding
casts doubt on FIFA’s campaign against racism in stadiums given that the crackdown
in Xinjiang aims to force Turkic Muslims to violate principles of their faith
and adopt Xi Jinping though as superseding Islam.
The
re-emergence of sports as a battleground is not limited to the plight of
Xinjiang.
Hong Kong
fans recently took their struggle for greater democracy to a match in South
Korea.
Chinese and Hong Kong broadcasters
refrained from showing the playing of the national anthems when China and Hong Kong played each
other earlier this month in an East Asia Football Federation (EAFF)
Championship match.
Hong Kong
fans booed China’s anthem, chanted “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our
times,” and displayed Hong Kong’s British-era flag.
Support for
national teams in autocracies like Egypt and Syria has dropped with fans
demanding reforms of regime-controlled football federations that are widely
viewed as corrupt,
"Egypt's national team is also
its national embarrassment ... Plenty of Egyptians are basking in the team's loss today,"
tweeted journalist Karim Zidan in July after host Egypt crashed out of the
African Cup of Nations.
Privately,
many fans assert that the team represents the repressive regime of
general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi rather than its historically huge
fan base.
Sentiments
in war-torn Syria are no different.
“Anyone who
knows Syria well knows that in Syria there are no independent institutions, and
that includes sporting institutions… Considering this (national) team as
one that is above politics and a national team that unites people is a big lie
and part of a certain propaganda,” said Syrian journalist Hala Droubi.
In Morocco,
fans, dressed in black, last year booed the national anthem during a match in the northern city
of Tetouan that was being broadcast live on television in protest against the
killing by the Moroccan navy of a 20-year old student as she tried to illegally
cross into Spain.
“These days,
the national anthem feels like a way to
force patriotism onto us, so our reaction has been to boo,” said Zakaria Kamal, a PhD student
in sociology and supporter of Raja Athletic Club of Casablanca (RCA).
Fbladi
Dalmouni, a song chanted by RCA fans, that refers to suffering one’s own home, has
gone viral and become the anthem of disaffected Moroccan youth. It has garnered
millions of hits on YouTube.
“Oh Oh Oh Oh
My country has wronged me…
We live in a
cloud in this country
They have
rendered us orphans to be judged on Judgement Day…
You stole
the wealth of our country and shared it with strangers…
Oh Oh Oh Oh
Somebody understand me…
This is my
last word,
I write it
from my heart.
Tears fall from
my eyes,” the song’s lyrics read.
In a tweet
to journalist Aida Alami, Gruppo Aquile, the composers of the song, said it expressed a feeling among Moroccan
youth that they were insignificant and that it did not matter whether they were
dead or alive.
“Behind the
title ‘Fbladi Dalmouni’ hides the difficulty of living, the feeling of being a
foreigner in your own country… We are Moroccan citizens. We live in a dying society,
and the youth is asphyxiated,” the group said.
It is a
sentiment shared by anti-government protesters across the globe from Latin
America to Asia.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior
fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National
University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the
University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture
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