Soccer: Focus on Ataturk stadium security ahead of Turkey-Armenia fixture

Incidents at a soccer game played over the weekend in a northwestern Turkish city have raised questions over the security of an upcoming international game planned in the same venue where the visitors will be Armenians.

On October 14, the Ataturk Stadium in Bursa, some 90 kilometers to the south of Istanbul, will host the FIFA World Cup 2010 Group 5 qualifier between the national soccer teams of Turkey and Armenia.

Incidents at a soccer game played over the weekend in a northwestern Turkish city have raised questions over the security of an upcoming international game planned in the same venue where the visitors will be Armenians.

On October 14, the Ataturk Stadium in Bursa, some 90 kilometers to the south of Istanbul, will host the FIFA World Cup 2010 Group 5 qualifier between the national soccer teams of Turkey and Armenia.

According to Turkish media reports, serious brawls at the stadium during the Saturday domestic league game between the local club, Bursaspor, and visitors from a mostly Kurdish-populated region, raised questions about whether the city has been the right choice for hosting the match against Armenia.

The Turkish daily Hurriyet (hurriyetdailynews.com) wrote on Monday that Bursaspor fans known for their passion in the stands and their nationalist stance, greeted Diyarbakirspor, considered by many ultra-nationalists in Turkey to represent the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with huge Turkish flags and banners that read: “We are Turks, we are all soldiers”, and “How happy is he who calls himself a Turk.”

According to the report, in the middle of the first half of the game, Bursaspor supporters started to break the plastic seats in the stands and throw them at the visiting-team supporters and some even tried to jump over the fences.

The brawl that stopped only after police interference left ten Diyarbakirspor fans, including one woman, injured.

The Turkish newspaper writes that some in Turkey fear that the ultra-nationalists may try to undermine the fence-mending with Armenia that is expected to peak at the soccer game attended by the two countries’ leaders.

Stepped up security measures had been put in place by Armenian security officials during the first-leg match between Armenia and Turkey in Yerevan last September. The match then was attended by Turkish President Abdullah Gul who accepted his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan’s invitation to visit the Armenian capital. That meeting between the two leaders marked the start of a yearlong fence-mending process expected to result in a deal on opening the border and establishing diplomatic relations between the two historical foes.

In another development reported by some Turkish media outlets over the weekend, an organization from Igdir, a mostly Azeri-populated town near the Turkish-Armenian border, has reportedly requested the hosts at the Ataturk stadium, the Bursaspor club, to decorate the arena and the stands with Azerbaijani and Turkish flags during the Turkey-Armenia match “to show to the world that people of these two countries are one nation.”

No reaction from stadium officials or soccer officials is yet known.

This request from an Azeri nationalist group in Turkey is in stark contrast with the initiative of the management of Kadir Has Stadium in Kayseri, the city in central Anatolia that had originally been named as the venue for the match, to decorate the stadium with 70,000 carnations for the October 14 match to show a floral greeting to Armenians.