October 24 – Piara Powar (pictured), executive director or Football Against Racism in Europe and a member of FIFA’s anti-discrimination task force, has added his voice to growing calls that Russia needs to stop paying lip-service to racism in the country and to tackle the problem head-on rather than from the current position of denial.
Powar’s comments come in a week when CSKA Moscow served the first part of a sanction for racism by their fans and played out a Champions League home fixture against Manchester City behind closed doors.
This week the head of Russia’s 2018 World Cup organising committee Alexey Sorokin said that Russia was doing all it could to “root out” racism and that “while there are individual outbreaks of undesired tendencies, it cannot be regarded as a trend in our country.”
Speaking to Reuters, Powar painted a different but very possible scenario where an African team, playing in a World Cup match being televised live to hundreds of millions around the world, walk off in the face of racist taunts from Russian fans.
“It is an absolute possibility that we will have a strong, confident African team that will say, ‘we are not taking this, we are leaving regardless of what is at stake – this issue is bigger than this match’,” he said.
Russia has taken steps to address the problem and UEFA has been unafraid to issue sanctions to clubs. But Powar says that the message is not getting through.
“What is needed now is a very clear message from government leaders, from Putin and Medvedev to send out the message that racism in football is not something that Russian society will tolerate any longer,” said Powar.
“Right now to me, it looks like a mess. The laws are in place to deal with racism and violence in football in Russian stadiums but those laws are being applied sometimes too stringently, sometimes not at all.
“It needs a reaction from the leadership, especially in Russia where political leadership, in a very hierarchical society, determines so much.”
Powar said that education needed to start now if the problem is going to be solved. “Denial is always the first obstacle, and we face that everywhere, and until they get over the denial then there can be no progress and the sort of measures they need to take. I see this in the organising committee.”
He also said that “what is happening inside stadiums, the far-right involvement, the levels of racism and attacks that are taking place on minorities in and around football stadiums are at levels completely unacceptable in a country that is going to hosting the next World Cup.”
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