TUESDAY night’s incident at a Nicosia stadium where APOEL hooligans attacked Turkish team Pinar Karasiyaka during a FIBA Eurochallenge basketball game could not have come at a worse time, or become so blown out of proportion politically.
The Cyprus talks are already flagging badly and the amount of negative publicity surrounding the incident is another nail in the coffin, whether it was random mindless thuggery or a politically motivated organised attack.
Although the Cypriot team had won the game, as soon as the final whistle blew 500 APOEL fans from the 2,000 attendees started throwing things at the Turkish team’s bench. Police escorted the Pinar Karasiyaka members to their locker room for safety. The mob tried to storm the room but were prevented.
Subsequently Turkish EU Affairs Minister Egemen Bagis called Athens and Brussels in an effort to get the team out through the north, even though by then police had them safely under heavy security at the GSP.
Bagis spoke to Greek Foreign Minister Demetris Droutsas and EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule. He even called former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat who reportedly tried unsuccessfully to convince President Demetris Christofias to let the team pass north.
Christofias could not allow this as it would send the mistaken message that the government was incapable of protecting Turks on the Republic’s soil.
Pumping up the rhetoric, Bagis said the incident “showed that the spirit of 1974 still lives on the island” and that Cyprus’ behaviour “should be monitored by the worldwide community and punished.” That was his view. Another view came from the Turkish team’s technical leader coach Selim Cinar who essentially said it was not a political issue. “This is sports life, it sometimes happens,” he said.
The truth probably sits somewhere in between. If the incident had happened anywhere but at a sports event it might be a cause for serious political concern but everyone knows what a particular faction of the APOEL fans is like. They are hooligans, albeit with a nationalist bent, who would attack their own grandmothers if there was no one else around.
The fact that the targets were Turkish and not a rival Greek Cypriot team was just an added bonus for them. Even though the violence cannot be condoned, the Turkish side’s use of the incident to score political points is a clear case of ‘pot, kettle, black’, and its attempts to smear the entire Greek Cypriot population as violent nationalists are more than a little disingenuous.
Various Turkish teams have played in Cyprus before without incident or harm while at least one Greek Cypriot team was attacked in Turkey a few years back during a game there. There have also been other high-profile sports’ violence incidents emanating from Turkey.
There is an upside however. As the government scrambled furiously yesterday to limit the political damage, it just might finally decide to tackle the scourge of hooliganism once and for all. If it does, then it’s a shame that we had to wait for the national issue to be affected before anything was done.
