11 Nov 22 | Magazine, News and features, Volume 51.03 Autumn 2022, Volume 51.03 Autumn 2022 Extras
Football is a colossal business in Turkey. The billion-dollar industry constitutes Europe’s sixth largest football economy. No wonder the so-called “beautiful game” wields such enormous cultural and political influence on Turks, many of whom define themselves by their loyalty to football clubs Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş.
All based in Istanbul, they’re known as “the big three”, but since the nationalist-Islamist AK Party came to power in 2002, a flurry of other teams, from Trabzonspor to Başakşehir, have risen to prominence, winning national cups and increasingly defining what modern Turkish football is. Unsurprisingly, these teams are government-supported – a prerequisite for any successful business in autocrat President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “New Turkey”.
Just a decade ago, though, anti-government sentiment defined Turkish football. During the opening ceremony of Galatasaray’s fancy new stadium in 2011, Erdoğan greeted fans, expecting gratitude for his role in building the new venue. Instead, boos rose from the terraces.
“It’s a key moment in modern AK Party-era Turkish football,” said Patrick Keddie, who chronicled the tale of Turkish football in his 2018 book The Passion: Football and the Story of Modern Turkey.
“He expected to be welcomed and thought he would bask in fame, but ended up getting booed… It was around this time that things began to turn. There was this shift from the liberal early-era AK Party to something much more authoritarian and repressive.” Turkish football in those years, Keddie noticed, was “utterly politicised on every level”, from activists using the game’s national prominence to voice their political anger, to Erdoğan talking up his semi-professional football background for political gain. “There was this mythology of him as a former player.”
That 2011 incident, so crushing for an ex-footballer, marked the culmination point of several changes that began in 2002. Acting
out of financial self-interest, the government started knocking down stadiums in city centres and replacing them with enormous new ones, subsequently building a dozen more, in the suburbs, in association with Toki, Turkey’s public housing body.
Despite such tactics, cronies of the AK Party noticed how impenetrable the “big three” culture remained. Defending the republic’s ideals, fans of those teams largely hated the party’s oppressive project of Islamist nationalism. So the government began criminalising, imprisoning and demonising dissident fans and managers through a flurry of court cases.
First came the “match-fixing scandal”. In the summer of 2011, Erdoğan’s prosecutors began investigating football matches they
accused of being fixed. On 10 July 2012, a state court ordered the arrest of 61 people. Among the managers and national team players held was Aziz Yıldırım, the strictly secularist president of Fenerbahçe – the club Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk supported and which symbolises his modernising legacy. (A retrial process that began in 2015 cleared Fenerbahçe from all the charges; Yıldırım’s case was dropped in 2020.) Week after week, Fenerbahçe fans rushed to courts and, after sentencing, to prisons to show solidarity.
But it was the Beşiktaş fans – particularly the Çarşı group, named after the marketplace where Beşiktaş fans used to gather before matches for a drink – who played a crucial role in 2013’s Gezi uprising.
These Istanbul protests started as a movement against the development of the area, but quickly became a focal point of wider anti-government sentiment. Alongside environmentalists, leftists, liberals and other progressive millennials, Beşiktaş fans filled public squares and fought with the police.
Haldun Açıksözlü, an actor and author, wrote two books on Çarşı. “While growing up as a leftist in my youth, my passion for Beşiktaş grew, too,” he told Index. “I was part of Çarşı right from its inception.”
Rooted in the Ottoman Empire, Turkish football’s story begins with English residents of Salonica introducing the sport to Turks. The first matches were played in 1875. A football league was established in Istanbul in 1904, which soon extended into regional leagues in Anatolian cities and eventually the formation of the nationwide professional league. While Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray were known as teams of the bourgeoise and aristocracy, Beşiktaş was the team of cab drivers and the working classes.
Çarşı fans, Açıksözlü says, are famed for their cosmopolitanism and because they have a vital element of dissent. He said: “The group’s founders, from the early 1980s, were all leftists. Çarşı was a fan group that tilted football spectators toward leftist politics in the aftermath of the coup trauma of 12 September 1980. This leftist, communitarian perspective influenced me.”
But things turned when Beşiktaş’s 70-year-old stadium, İnönü (named after Atatürk’s closest ally in founding the republic), was demolished in 2013. “They made a mess of İnönü Stadium in the name of rebuilding it,” said Açıksözlü.
Erdoğan, who hates İnönü’s secularist politics, ended up excising the name of Turkey’s second president from Istanbul with this gesture.
Around this time, “the police and security forces began terrorising Beşiktaş fans”, said Açıksözlü. “Perhaps that was why Çarşı played such a prominent role in Gezi. The reaction creates reaction: the unnecessary use of tear gas by the police, their assault on Çarşı fans while they walked on streets with their families – these inevitably pushed Çarşı to the side of the sensitive people of Gezi.”
Açıksözlü describes Çarşı’s involvement in Gezi as an “incredible tale worthy of movies”. It began simply: 50 people walked from Beşiktaş to the nearby Akaretler neighbourhood. Their number grew to 100 at first and then grew to 1,000. When they walked up the hill and reached Gezi Park, the group numbered 2,500. “People heard their chants on the streets and joined in. Anyone who said they wouldn’t accept [living] under a one-man regime, wouldn’t accept state-intervention in their lives, sided with Çarşı,” he said.
Before Gezi, what Keddie – the British journalist – knew about Turkish football was clichéd: that it had crazy fans, that the big three Istanbul clubs hated each other. “I was surprised to see how prominent those fans were in the protests,” Keddie said. “They were on the forefront, fighting the police, manning the barricades.”
Still, the “big three” culture proved hard to penetrate for Keddie, who struggled with mingling with fans. “I think they’re insular and clannish and suspicious of outsiders – especially journalists.”
By the time Beşiktaş opened its new stadium on 10 April 2016, Keddie had noticed that Turkey’s political equation had changed dramatically. On the opening day, when Erdoğan sprinted and kicked a ball on the pitch, the stands were free of spectators. Even if they wanted to, nobody could boo him now.
When he visited the new stadium, Açıksözlü saw “airplane seats with special monitors attached to them”, and decided the old spirit of Çarşı was gone.
“There was this period, from 2011 to 2014, when the protest movement was quite intense,” Keddie said, “but by April 2016, most of the protests had died down or got more subtle for various reasons. Turkey didn’t have these major events, these major triggers, anymore. The biggest recent scandal of European football, the match-fixing case, 2013’s massive Gezi Park protests, and its aftermath – all of that had faded. With some exceptions, all forms of protest were essentially banned in Turkey.”
A significant factor behind the demise of Turkey’s protest culture was Passolig, an electronic ticket system the government introduced in 2014. “The electronic fan card Passolig was introduced as part of the country’s efforts to tackle hooliganism and violence in football,” announced the AK Party-run Anadolu Agency. “The new practice aims at a better identification of fans involved in violence in stadiums.”
In reality, Passolig was a cunningly conceived mechanism to detain dissident football fans. “Bringing in the Passolig card cowed many fans, and it made them think twice about protesting and even chanting because that system came with a whole load of security protocol and surveillance systems,” said Keddie.
It was much easier to identify anti-government protesters, ban them from stadiums and even charge and imprison them. “It was a response, the authorities said, to hooliganism and disorder, but most fans considered it a way to control them politically. It also gentrified the sport, making it more manageable, more middle class.”
Açıksözlü pointed to the formation of the 1453 group, a nationalist fans’ group, as another form of secret state intervention. “Specially assigned people were sent to Galatasaray’s Aslan Pençesi fan group and the Tek Yumruk group of Fenerbahçe. Their job was to stop fans looking at events from a leftist perspective.”
Anger soon melted into silence. Concern for security triumphed. Today, most fans wonder why they should risk their safety under an oppressive regime: Erdoğan sued more than 38,000 Turks for defamation between 2015 and 2021. Besides, for many devoted fans, it’s costly to go to matches at big clubs now. After Beşiktaş relocated, Çarşı had a much less prominent place in the new stadium. And outside the glossy new venues, Keddie observed, “the police are deployed in heavy numbers and they are happy to use violence whenever they need to”.
Açıksözlü said “industrial football” had destroyed the pleasures of the game. “Did you hear anything about Çarşı in the past five years? Did you read anything about other fan groups? Because of Passolig, the fan groups no longer influence Turkish football.” Still, the protest culture lives on, despite going underground. Fans can still be heard chanting about Atatürk, and when they sing the famed Izmir March, with lyrics including “Long live Atatürk! Your name will be written on a precious stone”, it’s a message directed at the Islamists.
Opposition politicians are playing ball, too. After a match between Galatasaray and the government-funded Başakşehir ended 2-0, the leader of the İYı Party, Meral Akşener, tweeted: “Galatasaray 2 -Erdoğan 0.” Many in Turkey call Başakşehir “Erdoğanspor”.
When another member of the opposition, Ekrem İmamoğlu, won Istanbul’s mayoral elections in 2019 but was refused the mandate after Erdoğan accused him of being a “terrorist”, a “liar” and a “thief”, the young politician, an ex-goalkeeper, visited football stadiums for support.
“Football is a big part of İmamoğlu’s brand,” Keddie said. “He was a goalie in his youth. So after the election was cancelled, he went to stadiums of the big three, pointedly avoiding smaller clubs, especially Başakşehir. Fans at those stadiums were chanting, ‘Give him the mandate’.” Once he was re-elected as mayor, İmamoğlu pledged to defend the interests of the big three.
Meanwhile, the “artificial success” of Başakşehir, Keddie said, may prove temporary. “I don’t see Başakşehir as really having power because they’re not an authentic, grassroots project. They don’t have many fans… It’s like a top-down project team; after all those years of investment and success in winning the league, they still get terrible attendances. It’s a cultural thing. Every other team sneers at them. Even people who support the government and support Beşiktaş or Galatasaray sneer at them.”
The AK Party may play dirty again, reject the results of next year’s presidential elections and invite their hardline supporters to
the streets to terrorise people. But then Turkey’s oppressed football fans can make a return, too, and protect Atatürk’s legacy.
“I spoke to a lot of people from Çarşı,” Keddie recalled, “and they said: ‘Yes, we’re against the government, and if something like Gezi happened again, we’d be there in a heartbeat.’”
Kaya Genç is Index’s contributing editor for Turkey. He is based in Istanbul.
This article appears in the autumn 2022 issue of Index on Censorship. To subscribe click here
12 Oct 22 | News and features
“If there is ever an opportunity to try and pretend a country is a nice country, it’s when everyone is diverted by someone kicking a football,” said Ruth Smeeth, CEO of Index on Censorship. Smeeth was introducing a panel discussion entitled “Qatar 2022: When Football and Free Speech Collide”. Hosted in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University, the event marked the launch of the Autumn 2022 edition of the Index on Censorship magazine, which looks at the role of football in extending or crushing rights ahead of the Qatar World Cup.
Index on Censorship Editor-in-Chief Jemimah Steinfeld was joined by David Randles, the BA Sports Journalism programme leader at Liverpool John Moores University, who has spent much of his career on sports desks and in press boxes. She was also joined by Connor Dunn, a public relations account manager who deals with big names from the football world, including Liverpool footballer Trent Alexander-Arnold, and was formerly a journalist at Reach PLC.
The issue of whether the FIFA World Cup 2022 being held in Qatar will be a force of change for good was prominent. Dunn was unsure whether there would be any long-term change in the country but felt there will in the short term, saying that “Qatar will want to show the world they are the best country on earth. They’ll be lax with those sort of rules people in the West will be used to [the human rights violations], as there will be potential for stories to be blown up”.
Therein lies a danger, as Steinfeld pointed out. Reeling off a series of examples, she said: “All of the editorials said that while France won the 2018 World Cup Putin was the real winner. The world forgot about the invasion about Crimea.” The fear therefore is that Qatar will relax their attacks on human rights during the tournament, court international leaders, put on a great show and as a result people will walk away with a much better impression of the country than they really should.
Despite attempts to appear more moderate, Randles said that he thinks most minorities would not visit the country due to safety issues. He said: “Would you go to support your team in a regime which doesn’t support you? I don’t think so. If you don’t feel safe, why would you go?” He also pointed out the fact that in Qatar’s neighbouring country Saudi Arabia (whose Sovereign Fund bought Newcastle FC last year), women still cannot attend football games.
Naturally discussion came round to the issue of migrant workers, who have died in huge numbers during the building of infrastructure for Qatar. Sadly the exact numbers are hard to come by, a nature of how tightly information is controlled in the country.
Dunn though highlighted one potential positive that has emerged from the heightened awareness of awful working conditions in Qatar. With claims of potential slave labour being used due to Qatar’s punitive ‘Kafala’ system (which has since been reformed on the back of World Cup coverage), there are hopes for reparations in the future. Dunn said: “There are calls to give the same amount of money the World Cup winner will win, which is about 440 million dollars, to make reparations and give that to underpaid migrant workers and families of those who have died. It’s not a big chunk of the predicted profits from the tournament but goes some way to changing things.”
On other positives that could come out of Qatar, all the panel agreed that football still has a unique way to be transformative. Steinfeld cited Permi Jhooti’s story from the new magazine which inspired the film Bend it Like Beckham, an interview with the head of the Afghan Women’s football team and the England Lionesses winning the recent European Championships for the nation’s first major trophy in 56 years.
And of course footballers, with their millions of fans, are often more listened to than politicians and could use their platform when in the country to raise rights issues. While they accepted that footballers shouldn’t be compelled to speak up, the event was full of examples of those who have – like Marcus Rushford and his campaign for free school meals – and in so doing have brought about important and far-reaching societal change.
21 Jun 21 | Austria, Macedonia, Media Freedom, Netherlands, Ukraine
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North Macedonia fans at Euro 2020. Razvan Pasarica/SPORT PICTURES/PA Images
In celebration of one of football’s biggest international tournaments, here is Index’s guide to the free speech Euros. Who comes out on top as the nation with the worst record on free speech?
It’s simple, the worst is ranked first.
We continue today with Group C, which plays the deciding matches of the group stages today.
1st Ukraine
Ever heard of the “Information War”? It is probably the biggest threat to freedom of speech in Ukraine and consumes most of the attention directed towards the state where there is often a distinct lack of freedom of expression. The information war between Russia and Ukraine is supposedly solely pro-Russian propaganda, but recent trends show that Ukraine is just as guilty of press freedom violations in this area.
The former Index employee currently detained in his native Belarus Andrei Aliaksandrau explained the tensions and Information War between the two countries back in 2014.
He wrote: “The more you lie, the less you need to shoot. And if you are very good at propaganda, you don’t need to shoot at all to win a war. The principles of an information war remain unchanged: you need to de-humanise the enemy. You inspire yourself, your troops and your supporters with a general appeal which says: “We are fighting for the right cause – that is why we have the right to kill someone who is evil.””
Essentially, propaganda between the two has forced true, fact-checked information to become secondary to a slanging match that has accompanied a territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.
Ukrainian law stripped three Russian state TV channels of their licences in February earlier this year and they can no longer be shown in Ukraine.
At the time Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk said: “Even if the desire to combat propaganda is legitimate, it does not justify the use of censorship, and banning these TV channels is liable to stir up violence against journalists. This violation of freedom of expression violates Ukraine’s international obligations.”
The situation has also created an atmosphere in which journalists can be targeted and physically attacked. Eight journalists have been killed in Ukraine since 2014, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, four of them seemingly in a crossfire between Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatist forces.
The most recent killing was in 2019 with the death of Vadym Komarov, killed after a Facebook post revealed that he planned to publish allegations of corruption within local authorities.
Komarov was found in the city of Cherkasy, central Ukraine, with blunt trauma injuries to the head on 4 May 2019, he died in hospital on 20 June.
2nd North Macedonia
In North Macedonia, journalists are no stranger to threats and harassment. This, added to the actions of corrupt officials leads to what Reporters Without Borders (RSF) describes as a “culture of impunity”.
Violent threats towards reporters are common. Journalist Miroslava Byrns was subjected to threatening messages online after reporting on a wedding with 200 guests in the town of Tetovo, during the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020. Byrns received one message that read “you will see what will happen to you” and was given 24-hour police protection in response.
Similarly, journalist Tanja Milevska received equally disgusting abuse after questioning the use of “Macedonia” by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The country’s name was changed in 2019, ending a long running dispute with Greece.
As a result, Milevska received a variety of awful online threats and abusive messages, including those of rape and graphically detailed violence.
Threats, sadly, are indicative of a culture of targeting bred by some North Macedonian officials.
In February 2020, then assistant head of department at North Macedonia’s Central Registry Emil Jakimovski, sent threats that included sexual comments to Meri Jordanovska and Iskra Korovesovska, the deputy editor of news website A1on and editor-in-chief of local broadcaster Alfa TV respectively. Jakimovski was later sacked.
The incident was not unusual. In 2019, local government staffers in the town of Aračinovo attempted to force a journalist and cameraman from TV21 to delete camera footage of interviews with local residents after requesting an interview with Mayor Milikije Halimi.
The two were locked in a room before being forcibly driven to the TV21 headquarters.
There is general distrust between the media and government. In 2015, the Macedonian government were found to have been wiretapping citizens, as well as over 100 journalists. The scandal led to the downfall of the then government.
It was found that the government was using the spying software FinFisher. FinFisher, according to Computer Weekly, is “a sophisticated and easy-to-use set of spying tools that is sold only to governments”.
Use of this technology is a clear violation of the rights of North Macedonian journalists to report without fear or intimidation.
3rd Austria
Most of the concerns around free speech in Austria arise due to defamation suits.
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (Slapps) are common in Austria. Slapps are a type vexatious defamation lawsuit usually aimed at journalists by large corporations or governments. The aim is to stop the journalist from publishing certain information, or pressure them with court cases that are time consuming and extremely costly.
According to Georg Eckelsberger of the investigative media outlet Dossier, letters threatening legal action are often received by journalists in Austria.
In 2017, for example, vice president of the autonomous province Bolzano in Italy and its minister for agriculture Arnold Schuler filed a Slapp against the Jurek Vengels and the Munich Environmental Insititue (MEI) and author Alexander Schiebel. The MEI and Schiebel had helped uncover the use of dangerous pesticides by farmers in Germany.
Commissioner for human rights of the Council of Europe Dunja Mijatović cited the case in expressing her concerns over Slapps. She said: “While this practice primarily affects the right to freedom of expression, it also has a dramatic impact on public interest activities more broadly: it discourages the exercise of other fundamental freedoms such as the right to freedom of assembly and association and undermines the work of human rights defenders.”
The non-profit organisation Freedom House pointed towards libel laws protecting politicians from proper questioning, particularly members of the right-wing populist party, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). The FPÖ have been responsible for the targeted bullying of Austrian journalists.
A growing trend in the country is also tensions between press and anti-lockdown protesters, something that has been echoed across Europe (BBC Newsnight political editor Nick Watt was hounded outside Downing Street only last week).
On 6 March 2021, several photojournalists covered anti-lockdown demonstrations in the Austrian capital of Vienna. Once again, the FPÖ were heavily involved and signs and placards were seen that read “the lying press”.
4th Netherlands
The Netherlands’ record on free speech is generally good.
Perhaps one of the clearest developments regarding free speech in the Netherlands in recent years is the court case involving the online abuse of journalist Clarice Gargard.
The case, which took two years to reach a judgement, saw 24 people convicted of incitement, insult and discrimination after Gargard was abused during a live stream of a protest she took part in against Zwarte Pieta, a blackface caricature part of traditional Christmas celebrations in the Netherlands.
The case, which journalist Fréderike Geerdink wrote about for Index in the recent winter edition of the magazine, was a landmark moment in retributory action taken against those threatening journalists in the country.
The case exists now as a precedent that may deter people from sending the kind of racist and sexist abuse Gargard was subjected to.
Freedom of speech is protected by the Dutch constitution but is not absolute and it is the incitement law that is contentious. Dutch people can be charged with incitement even if the comment is in relation to an inanimate object.
Generally, however, there is little to stop someone one the Netherlands, legislatively speaking, from speaking out. Also, on the case of incitement, 70 to 90 per cent of cases don’t go to trial, according to an article by The New Republic.
That said, the International Press Institute (IPI) has expressed concern over an increase in threats to reporters after government-imposed coronavirus curfew restrictions. A number of senior reporters in news organisations have noticed increasingly threatening attitudes towards journalists during the pandemic. Partly, some believe, due to conspiracy theorists equating government restrictions such as lockdowns a face masks being supposedly due to a media narrative.
They said: “In 2020, monitoring groups in the Netherlands charted a significant increase in threats and acts of aggression against journalists, with figures nearly trebling on the previous year from 52 to 141. While this may in part be down to the success of the new PressVeilig (Press Safety) hotline – a joint initiative of the NVJ, the Association of Editors-in-Chief, the Police and the Public Prosecution Service – editors have still noted a clear increase in hostility.”
Other Groups
Group A
Group B
Group D
Group E
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