Turkey, Egypt: football fans against autocrats

By James Dorsey

other public spaces in Turkey and Egypt have pitched militant soccer fans against authoritarian leaders determined to limit the supporters’ ability to challenge their authority.

As a result, a struggle that comes on the back of years of confrontation in the stadiums and mass, watershed anti-government protests that in 2011 toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and in 2013 rocked Turkey and reinforced President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s autocratic instincts, has moved beyond stadiums.

In Egypt, general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi inaugurated a new office of the Interior Ministry at the Police Academy in New Cairo, east of the Egyptian capital, as part of the relocation of the ministry away from Cairo’s downtown area where it

has long been a target of protests. The police academy joined the prosecutor-

general, state security, and judicial bodies in an effort to deprive protesters

of symbols at a time of mounting discontent.

“The security situation is connected to the targeting of these institutions by a number of protesters centered in downtown Cairo. They seek to spread chaos throughout the country, especially after the demonstrations became unfortunately chaotic themselves.

And they’re attempting to break the aura of authority around state institutions by putting them under siege, covering their walls with graffiti of vulgar images and language degrading to those who work there...

The security challenges the country is going through have forced the ministry to accelerate its construction plans,” General Ahmad al-Badry, the former head of the Police Academy, told Al Monitor during the inauguration.

General Badry’s acknowledgement of the street power of the fans followed an unprecedented bid in February by Sisi, who heads one of the most repressive governments in recent Egyptian history, to reach out to his opponents.

In his government’s initial recognition of the power of the fans, Sisi phoned in to a television program on the fourth anniversary of a politically loaded brawl at a stadium in the Suez Canal city of Port Said in which 72 militant supporters of storied Cairo club Al Ahli SC were killed, to invite them to appoint ten of their members

to independently investigate the incident.

It was the first time Sisi reached out to his opponents, many of whom have been killed by the interior ministry’s security forces, forced underground or into exile, or are lingering in prisons where they risk abuse and torture.

Ultras Ahlawy, the militant fan group that played a key role in the 2011 toppling of Mubarak and many of the anti-government protests since, declined the invitation saying it could not be accuser and judge at the same time but kept the door to a dialogue open.

Despite stadiums in Egypt being closed to the public for much of the last five years and Sisi’s initial gesture having failed to co-opt the fans, his effort contrasted starkly with Erdogan’s haughty refusal to even go through the motions of engagement

with a social force that has significant street power and has demonstrated its ability to wield it.

The contrasting approaches of Messrs Sisi and Erdogan, who are at odds over the Egyptian’s military 2013 coup that removed from office Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first and only democratically elected president, and the brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, follow failed attempts in both countries to use the courts to ban militant fan groups as terrorist organizations.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S.

Rajaratnam School of International Studies.