FOOTBALL AND THE DRUMSS OF WAR?

1. FOOTBALL AND THE DRUMSS OF WAR?

2. The return match of the series took place in San Salvador, the beautifully named Flor Blanca stadium, a week later. This time it was the Honduran team that spent a sleepless night. • The players were taken to the match in armoured cars of the First Salvadoran Mechanized Division - which saved them from revenge and bloodshed at the hands of the mob that lined the route, holding up portraits of the national heroine Amelia Bolanios. • During the playing of the Honduran national anthem the crowd roared and whistled. Next, instead of the Honduran flag—which had been burnt before the eyes of the spectators, driving them mad with joy—the hosts ran a dirty, tattered dishrag up the flag-pole. Under such conditions the players from Tegucigalpa did not, understandably, have their minds on the game. They had their minds on getting out alive. ‘We’re awfully lucky that we lost,’ said the visiting coach, Mario Griffin, with relief.

3. E. Batuman, Life among Istanbul football fanatics • Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. In 1981, a match between two Izmir teams, Karșiyakaand Göztepe, drew eighty thousand spectators. • At a practice game between the same rivals in 2003, a fan was stabbed to death. • Even by the high European standard of soccer fanaticism, it’s rare to find such large-scale, life-and-death investment surrounding a match Read more • every Turkish city has its own team, the majority of Turks support one of the nation’s “big three” teams Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, and Beșiktaș

4. Soccer was brought to the Ottoman Empire in the eighteen-seventies, by British merchants. The first Muslim Turkish soccer team was founded in 1901. • Besiktas fan club: ÇarŞi, developed after the coup in 1980. “We’re not hooligans. We’re one level above hooliganism.” It developed many of the external characteristics of a political party. The group’s stands on national issues are reported in newspapers, and its representatives are invited to parliament and political rallies.

5. Ian Buruma, Tracing football's tribal roots The late Rinus Michels, also known as "the General," coach of the Dutch team that narrowly lost to Germany in the 1974 final, famously said: "Football is war”. On one occasion, in 1969, a football match between Honduras and El Salvador actually led to military conflict, known as the Soccer War.

6. Soccer War (R.Kapuscinski) • The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one set of firecrackers after another. • Result of the match Honduras 1- El Salvador 0 • Eighteen-year-old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Honduran striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute. She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. ‘The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,’ wrote the Salvadoran newspaper El Nacional the next day.

7. Result: El Salvador 3- Honduras 0. • The same armoured cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors’ cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later. • Few days later on the Honduras National radio one could have heard an announcer reading a communiqué from the Honduran government about the commencement of hostilities with El Salvador. • Then came the news that the Salvadoran army was attacking Honduras all along the front line.

8. The soccer war lasted one hundred hours. Its victims: 6,000 dead, more than 12,000 wounded. Fifty thousand people lost their homes and fields. Many villages were destroyed.

9. These are the real reasons for the war: El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, has the greatest population density in the western hemisphere (over 160 people per square kilometre). Things are crowded, and all the more so because most of the land is in the hands of fourteen great landowning clans. A thousand latjfundistas own exactly ten times as much land as their hundred thousand peasants. Two-thirds of the village population owns no land. • For years a part of the landless poor has been emigrating to Honduras, where there are large tracts of unimproved land. Honduras (12,000 square kilometres) is almost six times as large as El Salvador, but has about half as many people (2,500,000). This was illegal emigration but was kept hushed-up, tolerated by the Honduran government for years. Salvadoran peasants settled in Honduras, established villages, and grew accustomed to a better life than the one they had left behind. They numbered about 300,000.

10. In Latin America, he said, the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team. Players on the losing team are denounced in the press as traitors. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico 1970, an exiled Brazilian colleague of mine was heartbroken: ‘The military right wing,’ he said, ‘can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule.’ • On the way to the title, Brazil beat England. In an article with the headline ‘Jesus Defends Brazil’, the Rio de Janeiro paper Jornal dos Sportes explained the victory thus:
'Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out of the clouds and cleared the ball.’ Drawings accompanied the article, illustrating the supernatural intervention. • Anyone at the stadium can lose his life. Take the match Mexico lost to Peru, two-one. An embittered Mexican in an ironic tone, ‘Viva Mexico!’ A moment later be was dead, massacred by the crowd. But sometimes the heightened emotions find an outlet in other ways. After Mexico beat Belgium one-nil, Augusto Mariaga, the warden of a maximum-security prison in Chilpancingo (Guerrero State, Mexico), became delirious with joy and ran around firing a pistol into the air and shouting, ‘Viva Mexico!’ He opened all the cells, releasing 142 dangerous hardened criminals. A court acquitted him later, as, according to the verdict, he had ‘acted in patriotic exaltation.’

11. In the l960s, unrest began among the Honduran peasantry, which was demanding land, and the Honduras government passed a decree on agricultural reform. But since this was an oligarchical government, dependent on the United States, the decree did not break up the land of either the oligarchy or the large banana plantations belonging to the United Fruit Company. • The government wanted to re-distribute the land occupied by the Salvadoran squatters, meaning that the 300,000 Salvadorans would have to return to their own country, where they had nothing, and where, in any event, they would be refused by the Salvadoran government, fearing a peasant revolution. • Relations between the two countries were tense. Shops were burned. • In these circumstances the match between Honduras and El Salvador had taken place.

12. Of course, soccer wars are rare (indeed, there were no other examples), but the notion that international sporting competitions inevitably inspire warm fraternity – an idea advanced by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic games – is a romantic fiction. • The violence of British football hooligans, for example, reflects a peculiar nostalgia for war. • Even when football doesn't lead to actual bloodshed, it inspires strong emotions – primitive and tribal – evoking the days when warriors donned facial paint and jumped up and down in war dances, hollering like apes. • The nature of the game encourages this: the speed, the collective aggression.

13. Arthur Koestler • “There is nationalism, and there is football nationalism – and that the latter is the more deeply felt”. • It helps to have traditional enemies, old hurts, and humiliations that need to be redressed – if only symbolically.

14. The tribe can be a club, a clan, or a nation. Before the second world war, football clubs often had an ethnic or religious component: Tottenham Hotspur in London were Jewish, while Arsenal were Irish. Vestiges of these markings remain: Ajax of Amsterdam is still taunted by provincial opponents as the "Jew club". And the Glasgow clubs, Celtic and Rangers, are still divided by religious affiliation, Celtic being Catholic and Rangers Protestant. • But a common race or religion is not essential. The French football heroes who won the World Cup in 1998 included men of African and Arab origin, and they were proud of it. • Most successful modern football clubs are mixed (Apoel Nicosia; F.C. Internazionale) but this seems to have done nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of local supporters; in some countries, football is the only thing that knits together disparate people: Shia and Sunnis in Iraq, or Muslims and Christians in Sudan.

15. The football stadium became a kind of reservation where taboos on tribal frenzy and even racial antagonism could be relaxed, but only up to a point: when the taunting of Ajax supporters as rotten Jews degenerated into actual violence, sometimes accompanied by a collective hiss, mimicking escaping gas, the city authorities decided to step in. Some games have had to be played without the presence of rival supporters.

16. But the fact that sport can unleash primitive emotions is not a reason to condemn it. Since such feelings cannot simply be wished away, it is better to allow for their ritual expression, just as fears of death, violence and decay find expression in religion or bull fighting. Even though some football games have provoked violence, and in one case even a war, they might have served the positive purpose of containing our more savage impulses by deflecting them onto a mere sport.