Murdering football fans is no longer an own goal?

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

In Summary

• If you can play football with someone, then you can live with or make peace with them if you are in conflict. Killing them for watching football is to say you can never live together, that one can only live when the other is dead.

This World Cup season is changing East African, and indeed, African politics. You could say it all started in the Uganda capital Kampala in July 2010.

 

Bombs went off at a sports pub where Kampalans were watching the World Cup final match between the Netherlands and Spain. Nearly 80 people were killed and hundreds wounded.

Football is the only mass sport in East Africa that overcomes tribal, religious, and all sorts of political rivalries, so many were truly puzzled that the Somali militant group Al Shabaab, which claimed responsibility for the attack, would kill fans watching a football game. It was the sports equivalent of desecrating a holy temple.

That was then. The age of innocence is long over. Last weekend, terrorists (Kenyans are still arguing about their identity) went on the rampage in the coastal town of Mpeketoni. In a spree of killing and burning, they left 60 people dead. Many of the dead were at various entertainment spots watching World Cup 2014.

On Tuesday, an explosion ripped through a football-viewing centre in Damaturu, northern Nigeria, where fans had gathered to watch Brazil face off with Mexico. About 30 people were killed, and dozens wounded.

Public screening of the World Cup at “viewing centres” in northeast Nigeria had already been banned in the face of heightened terror threats by Boko Haram.

In May, three people were killed in a blast in the city of Jos in central Nigeria as they watched the Champions League final between Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid.
That was only one of several deadly attacks on sports venues and football fans.

I am always prepared for Africa to surprise, but I never thought it would deliver us football martyrs. Watching football in a public viewing place is now stuff for the brave.

Because fans are being killed for watching football, the game has also become a cause to die for.

The extremists see terrible things in football: It is sinful idolatry; it distracts the faithful from the godly path and worship; it is a Jewish conspiracy, name it. All baloney.
The really striking thing, though, is how much terrorist attacks on football are challenging fundamental values.

At the start of the 2000s, Uganda and Rwanda’s allied forces fell out in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and fought a series of deadly short battles.

Though hostilities had been building up and the generals in Kampala and Kigali had been involved in a war of words for weeks, the soldiers on the ground still played cards and football together in the city of Kisangani.

In the first major clash between the two sides, soldiers who had been playing together were called to arms, abandoned their games, and minutes later were killing each other.

In Liberia and Sierra Leone, rebels and government troops would pause from killing other for a bit of football.

Here is the thing. If you can play football with someone, then you can live with or make peace with them if you are in conflict. Killing them for watching football is to say you can never live together, that one can only live when the other is dead.