Football
Succeeds Where Politics Fails
By Ali al-Fadhily
30 July, 2007
Inter Press Service
(This story is posted a couple of days late. The Iraqi football
team defeated Saudi Arabia on Sunday, 1-0, to win the Asian Cup. This
sparked similar celebrations and reaction across the country as described
in this story-minus the follow-up car bombings)
BAGHDAD, Jul 27 (IPS) - An Iraqi football victory seems
to have united Iraqis across the country where politicians only divide
it.
The Iraqi football team defeated
South Korea 4-3 in Malaysia Wednesday to gain entrance into the finals
of the Asian Cup. That set off a wave of celebrations across the capital
and most of the country.
Tens of thousands of overjoyed
Iraqis swarmed the streets of Baghdad, waving Iraqi flags and firing
into the air to celebrate. Not even two car bombs that killed more than
50 people dampened all of the enthusiasm.
The football team is one
of the last remaining symbols of national unity, because it includes
mixed sects and ethnicities -- a rarity under an occupation that has
fractured the country along ethnic lines and along sects within Islam.
For a brief time it appeared
that the people of Iraq suddenly had suddenly forgotten those differences.
"This is a punch that
came right in the nose of anyone who says we are divided," Mahmood
Farhan of the Iraqi Journalists League in Baghdad told IPS. "Look
how we swept off the dirt of occupation politics and, hand in hand,
won each other's love."
Iraqi security forces were
taken off guard by the spontaneous burst of celebrations, and for a
brief time the capital appeared the old, crowded, noisy Baghdad.
"Our hearts beat together,
and let the occupiers go to hell," shouted a young man on a bicycle
on the streets of the Sadr City area of the capital. Many people gathered
around the IPS correspondent when they figured their celebrations were
being reported to the outside world.
A man who referred to himself
as Hussein who was visiting Baghdad from Basra, told IPS amidst the
celebrating crowd in Sadr City: "Iraq only, no Shias, no Sunnis
and no Kurds. Down with divisions. Down with sectarian attitudes."
Iraqis also crowded the streets
of Basra and other southern Iraqi cities. Around the country people
sang the song "Victory for Baghdad", composed by a group of
non-Iraqi Arab singers ten years before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
in March 2003.
In the semi-autonomous northern
region Kurdistan people who now came across as Iraqis and not just Kurds
waved Iraqi flags in a rare display of national unity. Kurds normally
view the Iraqi flag as an Arab symbol, and instead fly the Kurdish flag.
Iraqis outside the country
also celebrated the victory.
"Dozens of Iraqis have
telephoned me to express their happiness and unity," Maki al-Nazzal,
an Iraqi businessman in Amman told IPS on telephone. "Arabs from
Jordan and the Gulf countries who are in Amman celebrated the winning
as if it were their own.
"It seems that sports
achieved the unity of Iraqis and Arabs that politics has managed to
ruin," added Nazzal. "Two hours of football was far more fruitful
than four years of politics. Do not ask me whether this unity will last
long."
The same day the two car
bombs went off amidst the throngs of cheering Iraqis. The blasts came
half an hour apart in different areas of Baghdad. The killings did not
end the celebrations elsewhere.
"This is a game that
Iraq won, and I hope Bush won't now say, look, I made them win that
match," a member of the Iraqi Olympics Federation in Baghdad, speaking
on condition of anonymity, told IPS.
"He did it once and
we hated him even more for that because it was our boys who won despite
the miserable support we are getting from the Americans and our government,"
he said. He was referring to the claim by U.S. President George W. Bush
in August 2004 that the Iraqi football success in the Olympics was proof
that the U.S.-led occupation was benefiting Iraq.
At that time, Iraqi football
star Salih Sadir told reporters, "Iraq as a team doesn't want Mr.
Bush to use us (in an ad) for the presidential campaign...we don't wish
for the presence of the Americans in our country. We want them to go
away."
Iraq's football coach Adnan
Hamad Majeed had then said: "(My problems) are with what America
has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American Army has killed so
many people in Iraq."
On Sunday Iraq plays Saudi
Arabia in the finals.
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