ARTS & WEEKEND Euro 2008 is already unique: it’s the first big football tournament in 20 years that will start free of media hysteria over hooligans. Traditionally, before every tournament TV programmes reveal how “hooligan generals” armed with dastardly modern devices such as mobile phones and even the internet are planning “pitched battles” between rival “fan armies”.
Not this time. Big-time hooliganism now appears dead and England, its biggest exporter, didn’t qualify for Euro 2008. Martin Kallen, the tournament’s chief operating officer, told me: “We haven’t had many incidents since 1992. There was a small one in Belgium in 2000, with England fans in Charleroi, but it was less than was mentioned.” But this year both Kallen’s tournament and Beijing’s Olympics are preceded by a more serious worry: terrorism.
Terrorism has become the unfashionable media topic it was before 9/11. The authorities usually say little about plots against football tournaments, for fear of scaring away fans or inspiring terrorists. Yet terrorists have targeted almost every modern tournament. For example:
● A fortnight before the French World Cup in 1998, European police rolled up a plot against it, arresting 100 people in seven countries. Terrorism was considered a yawn, and the episode was forgotten. But based on letters from members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) detailing their plot, they meant to strike at the England-Tunisia game.
Adam Robinson, the pseudonym of a journalist based in the Middle East, has reported extensively on the plot. The Algerians, backed by Osama bin Laden, aimed to infiltrate the Marseilles stadium, shoot and blow up England players, and throw grenades into the crowd. Their colleagues would then burst into the US team’s hotel and murder players.
Others would crash a plane into France’s nuclear power station near Poitiers. A bin Laden biographer, Yossef Bodansky, says one reason al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in east Africa in August 1998, killing 224 people, was “the failure of the primary operation, an attack on the World Cup”.
● Algeria’s GIA tried again for Euro 2000. France’s secret services discovered that the Algerian Adel Mechat – in jail for his role in plotting against the World Cup – was phoning the Netherlands from his cell, planning an attack on the European Championship in the Low Countries.
● Just before Euro 2004 kicked off in Portugal, three Dutch Islamist extremists were arrested there. They were suspected of planning to attack the Portuguese prime minister José Manuel Barroso and other dignitaries. Portugal deported them. Hardly anybody noticed.
Five years later, after the Dutch extremist Mohammed Bouyeri assassinated the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, it was noted that the trio had travelled to Portugal in Bouyeri’s car. They belonged to his “Hofstadgroep” of terrorists.
● An Iraqi, believed to be from the radical Ansar al Islam movement, was seen acting suspiciously outside the Munich stadium before the opening match of World Cup 2006. While the police investigated him, he fled Germany. Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s interior minister, revealed these facts only this March.
A US air force officer protecting his country’s team during that World Cup told me that a month before the tournament, he received “signals” that Islamist terrorists were planning to attack the team.
Some of these plots might sound pathetic. But if any had come off, it would have been horrible. Now Switzerland and Austria, hosts of Euro 2008, are worrying about terrorism. At Euro 2004, Nato planes policed a no-fly zone over Portugal. At the World Cup of 2002, there were ground-to-air missiles in Korean stadiums.
Yet it would still be relatively easy for a terrorist to, say, blow himself up at a train station on match day. That would guarantee him global publicity, whereas a suicide bomb in Iraq barely even gets on TV anymore. A report on Euro 2004 by the Dutch COT Institute for Safety, Security and Crisis Management lists the potential terrorist threats against such tournaments:
“A. Islamic-inspired. B. Traditional terrorist groups: including those from participating nations. C. ... organised crime. D. ... sociopaths. E .... lunatics.”
Seymour Hersh, an American writer on intelligence services, says of the risks to sports tournaments: “You’ve got to worry about it all the time.”
China does. Ronald Noble, head of Interpol, warned last week that al-Qaeda might attack the Beijing Olympics. He said the security “situation has clearly changed” since last September, when Interpol had no specific information on direct terrorist threats to the Games. Chinese media often report failed domestic plots against the Olympics.
Rana Mitter, historian of modern China at Oxford University, says: “... bombs don’t go off often. But there are the odd movements that do occasionally set off bombs on Beijing buses.”
Given the dumbing-down of the world’s media, the most effective time to do that is probably during a sports tournament.
