Hooliganism, signs of changing times

By Aboeprijadi Santoso

CHARLEROI, Belgium (JP): A weekend of violence in Brussels and Charleroi recently has intensified growing concerns about riots at international football matches.

The Euro-2000 championship, co-hosted by Belgium and the Netherlands, has transformed hooliganism into a political headache. The events suggest that while sport has been linked to state politics and violence for a long time, the relationship between these elements remains problematic.

Anyone arriving in Charleroi and Brussels over the past few weeks must have been struck by an atmosphere of confrontation. Belgium's policy of "zero tolerance" has put 3,000 of its police officers armed with sticks on horses, gendarmes troops with dogs, armed spies, and the permanent noise of flying helicopters over the city. The city has been transformed into a beleaguered venue -- an ideal setting for would-be hooligans ready for a showdown.

Meanwhile English hooligans were as spirited, fanatic and at times violent as always. They were young men, numbered in the hundreds, aged 20 to 30, usually with short hair, often with tattoos and a strong mob mentality as they chanted patriotic and explicitly racist slogans. Fun and jingoism were more important to these soccer "fans" than the match itself. "Revenge is sweet!" one hooligan shouted.

What happened in Charleroi on June 17, therefore, was quite predictable. The security cordon set up to separate the English and German fans, was destroyed as both groups were packed into the small square of Charles-II Place.

Once a few incidents take place, spirits are bound to flare up like gin in a furnace. Chairs were flying and water canons were let off to disperse the masses. In Brussels, the riots and repression were even worse. The result was destruction and mass arrests. Peace only came in the second week after some 850 English fans were ousted.

Yet the Euro-2000 championship -- the third biggest sport event on earth after the Olympic Games and the football World Cup -- had been carefully prepared for years and included discussions with Great Britain in recent months about how to prevent soccer violence.

British officials could not ban potential hooligans from traveling since they had to respect the civil liberty of their citizens. When Brussels demanded hundred of names to be banned, London blacklisted only 15.

Hooliganism remains a real threat, but neither the states nor the football clubs seem able to meet the growing concerns from within the societies affected.

So while Europe was enthusiastically in the grip of Euro-2000, it was also governed by an unprecedented and widespread fear of football violence. People suddenly rediscovered nationalism, asserting their national identities and passionately championing their teams.

"It has been called 'banal nationalism' (because) it's not nationalism which knows its history, it's very much a carnivalesque type of thing, which a lot of people indulge in. It's relatively harmless," one academic researcher, N. van Sas, concluded.

Football becomes a folk festival, indeed, as the Dutch celebrated the victory of their national team over the Yugoslavs on June 25.

But in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, football events have become the single most important source of public concern as nationalism of this sort combined with violence and applied to international competitions threatens civil harmony.

Football is no longer just a means and a symbol of friendship among and within nations. To tame public hype is like fighting against a massive, spirited excitement, the social biologist Dennis Morris wrote in The Soccer Tribe.

"Football is war," the former trainer of Amsterdam's Ajax football club, Rinus Michels, told his team in 1974. "Football is Sodom," a Protestant minister said in a Rotterdam church recently as he prayed for public safety -- a unique occasion at a time when churchgoing has become rare in the country.

The public mood is perhaps aptly, if partly, captured by the anger and frustration expressed by a former Dutch prime minister, who himself is a sport lover. "Two thousands years ago, in the Roman times, people threw men to lions in the stadium," said Dries van Agt. "But now, they throw each other into the streets to fight!"

The metaphor is significant. Indeed, as the Roman Emperors entertained the people with the ritual of gladiator sports, fighting sports might have developed as a preparation for war. Likewise, war became a training ground for a sort of championship. Over time sport became institutionalized as the state replaced archaic fighting with more modern battles.

State politics helped create the game and also joined the game. As if imitating the Romans, modern authoritarian rulers are most eager to manipulate sport events. Hitler used the Berlin Olympic Games to show off his Third Reich to the world. Sukarno created Ganefo (the Games of the New Emerging Forces) to mobilize the Third World against the established West.

The Argentine dictator Gen. Videla used the 1978 World Cup for his political purposes. Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in turn, called for national unity by demonstratively imprisoning hundreds of his opponents in a football stadium soon after his coup d'etat.

Only Gen. Soeharto was perhaps too dull or unimaginative to manipulate sport to strengthen his rule.

As football becomes the single most popular sport event in the world, any ruler of whatever ideology or morality should be aware of its overall impacts.

Football events, therefore, have become effective messengers to the entire population. In 1991, it was the interruption of an important match in Lisbon to commemorate victims of the Santa Cruz massacre that awakened Portugal from her sleep on the fate of its former colony of East Timor.

It's no coincidence that both Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands and King Albert of Belgium attended football matches. And while the old taboo of criticizing monarchy has been broken only recently in both countries, football will no doubt strengthen the bond between the royal house and society.

Sport is not only a useful vehicle for political aggrandizement to cement nation-states or as a state messenger to society. As it creates hype, markets soon follow suit. Club sponsors have turned the World Cup into a commercial war between Adidas and Nike.

With hooligans, however, it's now the sport's turn to taste revenge, as it were: it has created battles on the streets and raised the specter of violence against the state in a post-modern age.

Hooliganism dominated the late 1980s and shocked state and society when it culminated in a tragedy with 39 deaths in one single occasion, when Juventus (Italy) met Liverpool (England) in Brussels Heizel Stadium in 1985.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old left wing movements are largely gone, but right wing extremists are on the rise. Some are connected with groups of hooligans and use similar methods and symbols.

Arkan, a notorious Serb leader who was recently murdered, was the prototype of a political broker linking the state, political party, militia terror, football clubs and hooligans together.

The rise of new states in Eastern Europe has stimulated football nationalism and hooliganism even further, whilst the expanded European Union -- despite cooperation at the supra-state level -- has not responded adequately to the new challenges. Five years after the Heizel drama, Euro-2000 has transformed hooliganism into a serious international issue.

Local authorities, international negotiators, football clubs and educators should rethink their discourse. For if football is to survive, one needs to reflect on the virtues of human civilization a little bit further.

As the British actor, Peter Ustinov, recalling his childhood, said, it was in England that the term "to lose is to be elegant" was a standard of civilized culture.

One may also think of the tribal civilization of Papua New Guinea, where the French anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss discovered years ago that to play football evenly is to build peace. As a result, the Papuans will play football for hours, even days, in order to end up with a draw so as to maintain peace.

The problem with these alternatives is that they would mean the end of football.

The writer is a journalist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.