This is not the first time this year that the sport has had to confront the reality that tragedies often result from failures of policing, security and crowd management.
The tear gas still hung thick in the air at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia, as law enforcement reached into a playbook that is grimly familiar across the world.
Officers had been given no choice but to fire the chemical into the crowd, the police chief for the province of East Java, Nico Afinta, said, “because there was anarchy.” The nightmarish scale of the disaster was not yet clear. Yet the police, the chief said, had to act. “They were about to attack the officers and had damaged the cars,” he said.
The accusation that fans were to blame for another soccer tragedy was immediately recognizable from the tragedy at the Olembé Stadium in Cameroon — where eight people died in January during the Africa Cup of Nations — and the near miss in May at the Champions League final, European soccer’s showpiece game, in Paris.
Those two incidents happened this year, but the trope dates back further: for example, to Port Said, Egypt, where 74 fans were killed in 2012; to Sheffield, England, where 97 Liverpool supporters went to a soccer game at Hillsborough Stadium and never came home in 1989.
These are rare incidents, given the global scale of the sport, but they are bound by a common thread: When tragedies occur in soccer, they tend not to be the result of fan violence, but of an overzealous and, at times, aggressive style of policing that treats a large crowd as a threat and turns a game into a hazard.
“It speaks to a mind-set that is too often too oriented toward public order, rather than public safety,” said Owen West, a senior lecturer in policing at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, England. “You can see officers in full riot gear, crowd control munitions. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
He said law enforcement agencies assumed a need to “control” the crowd, and therefore tended to be “overzealous and over-resourced.” “Too often, it is actually the police action that triggers the adverse reaction in the crowds,” he said.
The disaster Saturday in Malang carried an echo of the tragedy in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, in January, when eight people were killed in a crush before an Africa Cup of Nations game between Cameroon and the Comoros.
Then, the police had greeted the sight of thousands of fans trying to get into the Olembé Stadium by directing them to enter through a gate that was “closed for inexplicable reasons,” as Patrice Motsepe, the president of African soccer’s governing body, said. “If that gate was open, as it was supposed to be, we would not have had this loss of life,” he said.
At Port Said, too, fans had found themselves with nowhere to run. That day, when supporters of the Egyptian team Al Masry attacked fans of rival Al Ahly after a game in the country’s Premier League, thousands more in the crowd tried to escape the violence. The doors to the stadium, though, had been locked, and were not opened to relieve the pressure. Seventy-four fans were killed.
The use of tear gas, though, was most redolent of the chaotic scenes in Paris outside this year’s Champions League final, contested by Real Madrid and Liverpool.
UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, had two of its previous showpiece games marred by a failure to manage an entirely anticipated crowd. First, at the final of the delayed 2020 European Championship, held at Wembley Stadium in London in July 2021, thousands of fans broke through security barriers to gain entry.
Then, after this year’s Europa League final between Eintracht Frankfurt and the Scottish team Rangers in Seville, Spain, both clubs took the unusual step of issuing a joint letter of complaint to UEFA about the way their fans were treated.
Paris, though, was the most worrisome of all. French authorities funneled tens of thousands of Liverpool fans through narrow passageways, causing bottlenecks at the entrance to the stadium. Many in the crowd waited for hours at gates that either opened only a few minutes before the game was scheduled to start or did not open at all.
As they waited, French security officers fired tear gas into tightly packed crowds.
UEFA initially advised those fans already in the stadium, as well as viewers watching at home, that the game would be delayed because of the “late arrival” of so many supporters, despite knowing at the time that many of the fans trapped outside had arrived hours before the scheduled start time.
That trope was seized upon by the French authorities, who in the days afterward tried to blame tens of thousands of fans bearing forged tickets for the problems. The number of fake tickets, however, was grossly overstated and a French Senate inquiry in July faulted the authorities for what it called a “fiasco” at the final, determining that poor coordination, bad planning and multiple errors, including the use of tear gas on fans, had caused the chaos.
Five months later, their counterparts in Indonesia directed responsibility away from themselves in the same way in their initial statements. They centered blame for the deaths of at least 125 fans on those supporters who had encroached the field of play at Kanjuruhan Stadium after an Indonesian league game between Arema and Persebaya Surabaya, rather than on the officers who had sought to deal with that offense by firing tear gas into an area where there was no easy escape from it.
“It is incredibly dangerous to use a dispersal tactic such as tear gas in this case,” said West, the policing expert. “Chiefly in the minds of officers thinking about that tactic should be where people are expected to disperse to. Some of the reporting talks about panic, which suggests an irrationality on the part of the crowd. But running away from something that is doing so much damage to your breathing, eyesight and general health is an entirely rational decision.”
According to the stadium safety and security regulations published by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, “crowd control gas” should not be “carried or used” by stewards or police officers positioned on the side of the field inside a stadium. FIFA, though, admitted Sunday that those principles can only be guidelines at domestic competitions subject to national safety and security regulations.
In a statement Sunday, Indonesia’s Legal Aid Foundation condemned “the excessive use of force through the use of tear gas,” and blamed it for the large number of fatalities in Malang, an assertion supported by eyewitnesses. “The tear gas was overdone,” said Suci Rahayu, a photographer who was in the stadium. “Many people fainted. If there wasn’t tear gas, there wouldn’t be such a riot.”
Austin Ramzy, Andrew Das and Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
