D-A-S-H

Tatort Stadion

Show racism the red card! The Association of Active Football Fans BAFF(1) are raising public awareness of racism and discrimination with a travelling exhibition and an online news service.

Perhaps the most persistent forms of racism are those that establish themselves in the routines of everyday life. Football, or one of the world’s best ways to waste time as the Germans say, is not an exception. The fan stands, where people are less inhibited and the atmosphere is rougher, have repeatedly become stages for scenes of homophobic and racist verbal abuse. Anyone who has seen hundreds of fans screaming like apes whenever a black player has the ball knows what is meant. Because of this, stadiums have long been popular recruiting grounds for the extreme right political party NPD and Nazi groups. Over time, however, fans have started to fight back and now, many fan clubs are actively fighting to prevent Neonazis and the shouting of rightist slogans from becoming acceptable in the stadiums. And they’ve been successful: fans, players and clubs are working together on activities and campaigns against the Right and have been able to prevent at least the worst excesses.

But the fight’s not over yet, says the Association of Active Football Fans (BAFF). Founded in 1993 when a number of fan initiatives and clubs joined together, the association wants to raise public awareness of the issue with a travelling exhibition called »Tatort Stadion« (Crime scene: stadium). With over 20 boards featuring text and pictures, the exhibition documents racist and discriminatory incidents and developments in the past 20 years. Quite a few visitors came to the Mediengalerie of the ver.di-Haus in Berlin, where the two patrons of the exhibition – the president of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, and the football player, Michael Preetz, of Hertha BSC Berlin – opened it to the public on November 7th. In addition, fan activists from Italy and England, who together with BAFF are members of the organization, »Football Against Racism in Europe« (FARE), talked about their current activities. »Show racism the red card!« is one of the slogans with which British fans try to promote an international and fair kind of football. In Italy, Progetto Ultra is organizing an antiracist world football championship with 96 teams.

Christos Figas, who is one of the organizers of »Crime scene: stadium«, acknowledges the success of the fan initiatives, but he remains skeptical: "The Nazis are still out there, working primarily on recruitment. But again and again, we see them sinking to new lows, for example when Hertha fans attacked a squat in Babelsberg or when choruses of fans from Essen screamed »Out with the foreigners!«. Although it’s obviously a good thing that many clubs have adopted antiracist paragraphs into their stadium regulations, the big clubs (with rare exceptions) only did this after a great deal of pressure was put on them. Christos Figas is worried that the debate on German football’s current crisis could lead to »measures restricting foreigners.« The Bavaria coach, Ottmar Hitzfeld, is among the supporters of such initiatives: »this takes all pronouncements against violence and xenophobia ad absurdum.«

An ambitious program of readings and discussions will accompany the exhibition in Berlin until the end of the year. Next year it can be seen in Hamburg, Bochum, Leipzig and other German cities. In the meantime, fan activists have already started work on another project that will take over where this current exhibition (which primarily documents the situation in the 1990s) leaves off. A new website (http://www.tatort-stadion.de/) is being created which will not only take visitors on a virtual tour through the exhibition, but just as importantly, it will include a news service documenting racist attacks. The BAFF activists’ work on the website was in part inspired by and based on their experience with a mailing list which greatly improved communication and information exchange among its 120 members, who live in different cities and who until then had only met twice a year. Their goal is to create an information network which connects and links events and developments with up-to-date coverage. Using contacts to a variety of fanzines and fan groups, a team of editors will investigate and publish the information: »We want a website which will be updated daily and have a reputation as a serious research project in the football scene,« says Christos Figas.

http://www.tatort-stadion.de/