“The future of Iraq should not be buried by the conflicts of the past”

This is a full transcript, in the original English, of my interview with ambassador Hussain Sinjari, former representative of Iraq in Portugal and founder and president of Tolerancy International. The published interview, in Portuguese, can be read here. 

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How important is this visit for Iraq and for the Iraqi state?

As everyone else, I do believe that this is a highly important visit. The Pope comes to Iraq after the first papal visit was cancelled for many and difficult reasons [in 2000] and now the Iraqis from different religious backgrounds are all waiting with great hope for this visit.

We do need not only the blessings from the Pope, but also to strengthen the moderate voices in Iraq. In fact, not only in Iraq but in the Middle East at large. We hope also that the visit will encourage the young Christians to stay home rather than to immigrate to Europe and to other places. 

This is a visit of hope and we do appreciate the Pope, at his old age, making this effort to come all the way to Iraq in these difficult times. 

Many people advised against the Pope's visit, for safety reasons and also because of the pandemic...

Probably for other reasons as well. Many people believe that the past will decide about our future and this visit shows that our future shouldn't be buried by the past and the conflicts of the past. This is the most important thing. We shouldn't allow our past to decide our future and to bury it in the sands of the Middle East. 

 The coexistence among faiths and the different religious and ethnic backgrounds in Iraq and beyond, in the Middle East, is very important for building a future for everyone to have a place in it. Myself, as founder and president of Tolerancy International (tolerancy.org), I have great hope that this will bear fruit, good fruit, and to plant seeds, this Spring, in the soil of the Middle East for brotherhood, fraternity and equality and human rights for individuals and communities.

 Do you have any doubts about the Government's ability to keep the Pope safe during this trip?

No! Everybody is concerned about this, including the two governments, in Baghdad, and the regional government in Erbil, in Kurdistan. I have seen myself that there are guards along the streets and everybody is making sure that the Pope returns to the Vatican safely, and in good shape. 

 One of the highlights of this visit will be the Pope's visit with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. How important is this religious leader in Iraq? 

For the Shiites he is very important, he is the supreme religious leader and grand ayatollah among the Shiites, not only in Iraq but beyond as well, but also Ayatollah Sistani is important for other Iraqis because until now he has shown himself as a guardian of peaceful coexistence among different minorities and people from different backgrounds in Iraq and for peaceful solutions whenever there is a conflict or a problem, as well as being a moderate voice. 

The meeting with between these two great religious men is important to establish peace among people and understanding, and tolerance and building tolerance, the thing we most need in the Middle East.

There was a serious conflict between Baghdad and Erbil a few years ago. Have things been resolved?

The problem between Baghdad and Erbil is not resolved completely. We still have serious problems between the KRG and the Government in Baghdad. The issues of oil and gas, budgets and state employees are all very important issues for the living standards of the people, and are still not solved completely. There are still serious problems. 

But somehow, if this is what you mean, there is a better military and security coordination between the Kurdish forces and the federal forces of Baghdad. Any understanding will help, and we hope this Papal visit will also help to find common ground between Baghdad and the regional government.

 

"I ran a sport club, make me leader of your country"

This is a full transcript, in the original English, of my interview with Simon Kuper, author of several books on football and politics and economy, amongst others. The edited and published version can be found here, in Portuguese.

Esta é uma transcrição completa, no Inglês original, da minha entrevista a Simon Kuper, autor de vários livros sobre futebol e política e economia, entre outros. A reportagem publicada pode ser lida aqui. 

It’s been 26 years since you wrote Football against the Enemy, a book which argues that football is far more than just a game. All these years later, have things changed?

I think in some ways football has become more important in politics in the last few years, because what you see around the world is that voters are becoming distrustful of parties, so if you are a party politician it is harder to have trust. You see that with Hillary Clinton, for example, and more and more you see the Berlusconi phenomenon, where somebody comes from sport, or from football, and says: "I am a respected figure in sport, I ran a sport club – like Berlusconi, or Mauricio Macri –, or I played great football – like George Weah – make me leader of your country". 

As parties become weaker, this sports route becomes more important. Donald Trump has a background in professional wrestling, that helped him build a name among working class Americans, George W. Bush in Baseball, and so on. So I think that in some ways it has become a more common part of politics. 

We tend to think that sports should be free of outside influence. Is this possible? Does politics ruin football?

I think it is very hard to imagine football without a political and social meaning. What are the institutions in Portugal that get most people motivated and build more loyalty? In all our countries we have seen churches become more important and trade unions become less important, people know fewer people... The institutions that have survived are often football clubs. 

Clubs like Benfica and Porto are some of the most powerful, most popular and most beloved institutions in Portugal today, and of course those institutions are not just sport. Benfica also represent Lisbon and the Benfica-Porto relationship is also about the relationship about the two cities, which in Portugal has been a very political relationship, which has caused a lot of anger and mistrust.

So, football is never just football, it always speaks to much wider tribes and divides in society. 

You mentioned the decline in Church attendance and religious affiliation, for example. Some people compare football to religion, do you put much stock in that?

There are obviously huge differences. Football doesn't promise you an afterlife. I don't think football is a religion in that it can't give full meaning to answer the question of why we are on earth, at least for most people. 

I think the similarity is community. If you think of a parish church in Portugal 50 years ago, it was your community, those were the people you knew, you knew them from birth to death, that was where you belonged, unquestionably, it was a place of social support,  place where you celebrated your big life events, births, deaths, weddings, and of course, for most people in Portugal and in Western Europe that has disappeared. So, for a lot of people the community is now the football fandom, and that is true, even among people who don't go to the stadium... I don't know what the average attendance at Benfica is, but let’s say 50,000, but the number of Benfica fans is much higher, so a lot of those people get a sense of identity, who I am, who is my tribe, in this new and rather lonely world, from football. 

You see it in social media as well. If you look at how people describe themselves on Facebook and on Twitter, often they say: "I am João, 21 years old, Porto fan", and that is the identification that he gives. And you see it also in third countries. "I am Mohammad, I live in Kuala Lumpur, 100% Manchester United". 

So, the identity that they are presenting to the world, first, is football, and that becomes more common as these other identities become weaker. 

How familiar are you with Portuguese football? What news reaches you?

I am more aware of your national team, José Mourinho, Ronaldo, than of your club football.

Surely you have heard of Football Leaks. How familiar are you with this case?

Somewhat...

Rui Pinto, a criminal or a whistleblower?

I'd say that it is possible to be both.

I just don't want to step into a field where I don't know the facts.

The past years have given us many suspicions of corruption in Portuguese football. Sporting is involved in the “cashball” case; opponents say Benfica’s leaked emails point to corruption and Porto was at the center of the famous “Golden Whistle investigations” several years ago, although the evidence was considered inadmissible because of illegal phone taps. Fans always whine about corruption when their own teams are in the dumps. In your experience, is corruption really that widespread in football in general? 

I think historically Portugal has more of a problem than Northern European leagues, and in the past, due maybe more to political interference. I think you see that in the figure of Mourinho. Mourinho is a product of Portuguese football and he knows all about all these fixes, or purported fixes, many of which, I'm sure, are absolutely real. 

So when Mourinho comes to England he presumes it is the same system. So, Chelsea are being nobbled by the BBC, and by Arsenal, and by the FA, and they are all trying to arrange a bad fixture list for Chelsea with the wrong referees, and Mourinho says these things partly to draw attention to himself – he is a kind of verbal performer – but I think he also believes a lot of it. And in the English context it is very bizarre, because almost nobody in English football believes that sort of thing is happening in England.

So people will get very angry at the referee, but they don't have this belief that everything is fixed, everything is corrupt, and I think they are right, I think that in most Northern European countries football is not fixed, not corrupt. With a figure like Mourinho you see this Portuguese mindset of everything is corrupt, transposed into a country where it just seems a bit bizarre. 

Britain has enormous flaws, enormous problems, but I don't think the whole football system is secretly rigged, which he does seem to think. 

Up to what point should the state be involved in seeing its domestic football?

You need a rule of law environment, so if people are fixing football matches, that should be a crime. It is not a crime in all European countries. So you need a robust law that says that if you fix a football match that is a criminal offense, and then that needs enforcement, and that needs to have police involvement.

But in terms of running day-to-day football I'd be happier if it was done by a football association that is separate from the state but overseen by the state. Often, around the world, we see football federations that are completely corrupt. Argentina, under Julio Gondona was an example where the money was just stolen and none goes back into football, in those cases you need a state that steps in. 

So the football federation should be regulated, but not state-run, ideally. 

How about football violence? In Portugal the current law, still being fully implemented, calls for segregated seating for organized football firms (ultras), issuing of fan IDs, and calling for all football supporter groups to be legalized and form associations if they intend to benefit from club support. Do you know of any other country that has taken these measures to try and fight football violence? What do you think of them?

The thing is we know a lot about football violence because Britain had the unfortunate distinction of being the first country where this was a big problem. 

So from the 80s the British government has had 35 years, really, of trying to work out what to do, and it has mostly been successful in that football violence in Britain is much lower than it was.

I think the football ID scheme is very damaging, because it makes it very difficult for casual people to go to a football match. They did this in Italy at one point. You have to have an ID, so if you and your friends decide one day that you want to go to a football match it is impossible because you haven't ordered your IDs weeks before and it is exactly the kind of casual fans you want to encourage, as well as women, to keep the stadium atmosphere a bit less insane and fanatical, which is the situation you'd have if you only had ultras. So I think fan ID is just an obstacle to a majority of fans.

You really only need to think about a small group of people. And the best way to deal with these people is through the police. Because what you have in a country like Portugal, Italy or Argentina, is that the ultras and the club are very intertwined. So the ultras know where the club's president lives, the president needs their support, he needs them not to be chanting against them, money is often exchanged, favours are done, if they are violent then the president doesn't dare to step in... These kinds of cosy relationships between ultras and the club are very dangerous.

I spoke to one Italian club president and he said: “What can we do? We are afraid of these people”. The club doesn't have the resources to deal with criminals, and when you are talking about hooligans doing violence that is criminal. You need the police. 

And it is not very complicated, because you are not talking about very many people. You don't want the police to worry about 50,000 people, because we are only talking about 500. You want the police to know who those 500 are, if somebody shouts something racist, or hits somebody, or throws a firework in the crowd, that is all on CCTV now, we know exactly who those people are. One good thing that has happened now in Britain is that the police come along on Monday Morning and say they saw you shouting racist abuse, essentially the club then bans you from the stadium and you have to report at the police station during a match, so you can't go. 

I think we need a much more micro approach to those specific people, run by the police, not by the club.

Here in Portugal we are often told about the English example, and how Britain managed to eliminate hooliganism. Is that true?

Very largely, yes. People always say, well yes, but they fight outside the stadium, but there is very little evidence of that. British society, like all Western societies, has become much less violent in the last 25 years. You have far fewer groups of young men getting completely drunk and hitting each other in city centres, which was a normal thing around 1990, even leaving aside football. So society is much more peaceful.

I would happily take my children to any football match anywhere in Britain without fear. And you get these stories about how the Cardiff fans are going to meet the Swansea fans in a pub a mile from the stadium and they are going to have a prearranged fight... Football hooligans like to talk this up, because it makes them look macho, the police like to talk it up, because it retains funding for anti-hooligan policing, and the media like to talk it up because it is an exciting media story. But there is very little evidence of anything like that... I mean, when was the last person killed in a hooligan battle in the UK? I am sure there have been one or two in the last couple of decades, the only media coverage I can remember is when Leeds fans went to Turkey and that happened in Istanbul.

Many English fans bemoan the fact that with its effort to modernize and stomp out violence the FA and the Government also, effectively, destroyed football as a popular sport, making it too refined and too expensive for ordinary families or working-class people to attend. Your thoughts?

You must also remember that society has become less working-class since 1985, which was the peak of football hooliganism, which was obviously not necessarily a working-class activity, but this is a much richer country, just as Portugal is a much richer country than in 1985. So people say oh, in the 1950s when my grandfather went, and you look at those photos and it was men in cloth caps, from a different era, men who worked in factories which no longer exist, there were no women, no ethnic minorities, in the 80s it was still terrifying for ethnic minorities, so we have a different country, also a different football audience, which is more feminine, ethnic minorities are now safe in the stadiums. So I don't think that safety and gentrification are the same thing. In Germany and Spain tickets are still quite cheap, but it is also not dangerous, you can also go to a game in Germany and pay 10 euros, often, for a big game, but you are safe. So I don't think it necessarily goes together. 

What is true is that in Britain the stadiums are modernised and that attracted more families and what had been a game for 17-year-old boys who were willing to put up with terrible toilets and pushing in the stands and discomfort, has become much more a kind of game for all age groups. 

At the top-level British football is very expensive, that's true, so going to Arsenal or Chelsea will cost you an enormous amount of money, and they've priced out the poor, but at the lower levels that's not really true. 

Could you say that is where the pure football remains, in the lower levels, the people's sport?

What is the people's sport? I was never an Arsenal fan, but because I live near there and my cousins are big fans, I've been to Arsenal quite a lot and you'd see the crowds change over the decades. I first started watching Arsenal in the 80s and I see them occasionally now when I'm in London. 

In the 80s it was white men with working-class or lower middle-class accents, who were not necessarily poor, many of them drove in from the suburbs. And now it is a much more urban audience of modern londoners. 

But those older white men, living in the Northern suburbs of London, are still largely there. And tickets for Arsenal are about the most expensive you can buy in Europe, it is something like 1000 pounds a year for a season ticket, which is around 1,100 or 1,200 euros. So it is a lot of money. But the average salary in London is about 30,000 pounds. So if you are really an Arsenal fan, this is not such a big deal. If you are big Arsenal fan you spend a big part of your social life thinking about and talking about Arsenal, to pay 1,000 pounds a year is not a big dissuasion for those people. 

Remember that the London region is still about the wealthiest in the EU. So when people compare the old stadiums of the 80s or 70s with now, remember it is also a different country, it is a much richer Europe that we inhabit, and football, to some degree, reflects that. 

Are football fans one of the last social groups that you are allowed to discriminate against?

No, I think that being a general football fan is a very popular and highly admired thing to be. So you see football fans appearing in television adverts for cars, you see politicians pretending to be football fans, or some of them really are football fans. A football fan is a highly regarded figure in society, if you think of the general person. 

So when the European championship starts this summer, on Portuguese TV you will see endless advertisements for cars, for television screens which show people wearing Portugal shirts and cheering goals, because that is now our image of happiness and togetherness in society. 

Around ultras there is some demonization. Of course, not all ultras are violent at all, but I think much less than before. I think social fear of hooliganism is greatly reduced.

Before every big tournament you used to have the fear that hooligans were going to wreck everything. I lived in France during 2016 and during the Euro the great French anxiety had nothing to do with hooligans, it was about terrorists. So the obsession with hooligans has largely gone away. I think football fans have a much better reputation, including ultras, than they have had for decades. 

You were in France when Portugal won the European Cup, did it surprise you? 

I have been around football long enough to know that there is a lot of chance in football, so let me say, first of all, that I hugely admire Portuguese football, but you have had much better national teams than in 2016.

When I think back to the team of 2004, with players like Figo and Ronaldo, but also Maniche and Miguel, Ricardo. I thought that was just a magnificent team. I am a Holland fan, I grew up in Holland and I remember you beating us in the semis, and it was 2-1, but really it was 5-1, Holland never had a chance. The way Portugal keeps the ball, controls the game, Deco was a beautiful example of that, to me that was some of the most beautiful football I'd ever seen. 

In 2016 you didn't have that kind of team, it was a very beatable team. But strange things happen in football. I think Portuguese football, like Dutch football, is highly intelligent, which means that teams can win without having very good players, because of good positioning. Portugal is very good at controlling the tempo of the ball. Holland usually loses to Portugal because Holland is used to controlling the tempo of the game. And then you play Portugal and they do that, so it is very confusing.

So I think that Portugal 2016, like Holland reaching the World Cup Final in 2010, is a tribute to a football culture of high intelligence, that two not very good teams went all the way, and of course you had Ronaldo, although he missed most of the final, but went all the way based on a bit of luck and a lot of football intelligence.

Portugal deserve to win a trophy because you have an incredible football history, for such a small country, so you didn't necessarily deserve to win in 2016, but you had it coming. 

Have you ever been to see any games in Portugal?

Yes, I took my kids to see Benfica-Marítimo a few years ago, it was a very pleasant experience, I have to say. I like the stadium, it was relaxed.

I went around Portugal during Euro 2004 and went to all sorts of towns that I'll never go to again. I was in Braga, Coimbra, Porto, as well as Lisbon of course. So just the joy of travelling around this beautiful country... That's one of the things I love about these tournaments.

Fotos de Simon Kuper: Gustavo Lopes Pereira/Clube de Lisboa

On "Farewell to Mars"

When I interviewed Brian Zahnd earlier this year, he very kindly gave me an advance copy of “Farewell to Mars”, his book against violence and, especially, the militarization of the Christian message.

I read it with great interest. By nature I am not a tremendously peaceful person. Like so many others, I am attracted to violence be it in film or in real life and have had to curb my own violent impulses, with difficulty, over the years.

The radical call to peace is something that, as a Christian, I struggle with, but which I have hardly any intellectual doubts about.

Let me put this into a context that might be more understandable. As I read “Farewell to Mars”, hundreds of thousands of Christian Assyrians were being expelled from their ancestral homelands in Iraq, by a terrorist organization which I truly believe represents pure evil, in its ideology as well as its motivations and above all, its methods. Women were raped and sold as sex slaves, men were summarily executed, entire families expelled from their homes and forced to trek through the desert to relative safety.

The Yezidis had it even worse and as a reporter I covered, from the safety of my city, the horrendous suffering of the men and women starving and dying of thirst on mount Sinjar, to the point of throwing their children off cliffs so as not to watch them die in agony before their eyes.

Faced with this, my first and very powerful impulse was only one. Go and fight these evil men. If I did not have a wife and four young children to care for, I might have done just that. The second impulse was to celebrate the airstrikes that were finally ordered against the Islamic State. That they should all be killed.

It has been a constant struggle of the mind to look at the terrorists who are killing the innocent, beheading aid workers and raping teenage girls, and come to terms with the fact that these men too, are my brothers. That they too, are created in the image and the likeness of God. It has not been easy, and I confess that when I heard, just yesterday, that the first of about 12 Portuguese members of IS had been killed, my first thought was “great, only 11 more to go”.

So reading Zahnd’s book was a welcome challenge, one I knew would do me good. In “Farewell to Mars” he does the important work of deconstructing the militaristic version of Christianity which so easily glorifies war and violence, condemns the “enemy” and heaps praise and glory on those who are supposedly killing in our name.

Monument commemorating the Portuguese discoveries
Note the cross shaped sword

It is true that he is responding to a reality which is more familiar to American Evangelicals than to this Portuguese Catholic, but there is enough of that sort of thing in our history for me to relate. Just a few hundred meters from my house is an enormous monument commemorating the discoveries, part of which is a huge cross shaped sword, just like the one which makes him feel so uncomfortable in the Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel.

Too easily, indeed, we forget that Christ calls on us to love our enemies, not to rejoice in their deaths. The fact that Zahnd reminds us of this by confessing to us that he too, at one point, led prayer services of war, makes the tone less preachy and more of a wake-up call.

So before I get on to things I am unsure of, or with which I disagree, let me say clearly that this book is a service to true Christianity, whether reformed or unreformed, and that its message is sorely needed today, as it always has been, even though it is likely to shock us and make us uncomfortable, as it did 2000 years ago. Thank you, Brian, for your effort and for the courage it takes to do what you did in “Farewell to Mars”.

But here is where I become the skeptic who you have no doubt met so often. I know you’ve met him, because you say so yourself here: “They begin to say what Jesus did not mean by ‘resist not an evildoer’ and when this teaching does not apply. (By the way, Hitler always shows up in these discussions).”

But, Brian, there is a reason Hitler always shows up in these discussions, as I am sure you know. He represents that type of absolute evil which many people believe can only be stopped with violence. And by many people I do not mean “hawks”, I mean many good, godly men and women. Men like Boehnhoffer. How can you mention Boenhoeffer in a book such as this without mentioning the fact that he was killed precisely because he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler?

But it doesn’t have to be Hitler. It doesn’t even have to be the Islamic State. We could boil it down to the typical example: There is a man with a knife in a playground, starting to stab children at random. You have the opportunity to kill him, what do you do?

Because I understand and relate to the idea that we should turn the other cheek, when it is our cheek to turn. But what do we do in the face of other’s unnecessary and pointless suffering at the hands of an evil we can stop, even if only at the cost of violence? I don’t think that case is quite so clear.

In “Amish Grace”, a book I know you are familiar with, as you quote from it in your previous book about forgiveness, there is the story, told to generations of Amish families, of a man who’s house was attacked by native Americans and who forbade his sons from fetching their hunting rifles to defend the family, even though that meant that he and his children would be killed. So I am not saying the answer is simple. There are good Christian men and women who would hesitate even in these situations to use force against evil. But I am not convinced this is the right thing to do.

Dietrich Bohnhoeffer

I believe Boehnhoffer was right to try and have Hitler killed. I believe it is right to bomb Islamic State positions in defense of the innocent and I think I would take the shot in the playground scenario. I hope I would not feel any satisfaction in the death even of the evil, but that does not mean it isn’t the right thing to do.

There are other examples in the book which I have trouble with. The criticism of the Vietnam war is a case in point. Let’s leave aside the possible other motivations for that or any other war. Let’s take it on face value, even if we are being naïve, that the war was indeed fought to try and spare the South Vietnamese the horrors of life under communism. You say the following:

“The argument was that we had to combat atheistic communism by stopping its spread in Southeast Asia … But how did that work out? Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam. The war was lost. Vietnam became communist. Yet somehow the dominos did not fall. Soviet bloc communism ran out of steam and collapsed under its weight a couple of decades later. The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia. War is, among other things, impatience”.

True. But Vietnam was not the whole story. Thousands died in Korea as well, and effectively managed to stop the advance of the communists across the whole peninsula. The result was not useless, there are millions of South Koreans now who live in freedom who would otherwise have had to live under the insane regime of Pyongyang. If it had taken an international intervention to stop communism from sweeping across Cambodia, would it not have been worth the price, rather than having had to bear the genocidal Khmer Rouge?

Which brings me back to the Islamic State. As we “speak”, a few hundred brave men and women are defending the city of Kobane from a group of fighters who will massacre them all if they fail. Is it not only right, but an obligation, to come the aid of these men and women, militarily? It certainly seems that way to me.

Please, I urge you, don’t get me wrong! I am not picking a fight over a book about peace! I repeat that I fully agree with almost all you have written and I too deplore the fact that Christianity is so often co-opted by those looking to justify their personal vendettas or economic interests. I too agree that there is no “other”, there is only “us”. What I regret, though, is the way you simply brush aside the “Hitler” argument without taking it on, I would, genuinely, like to know your answer.

Thank you for your book, for your thoughts and insight, and for being an apostle of peace which the World so badly needs. God bless you!