Smoke signals to the authorities: The ultra group “Rheinfire” is celebrating its 20th anniversary (Karlsruhe, November 12, 2022)
On Tuesday (October 29th), the Karlsruhe District Court in the first instance sentenced three employees of a local fan project to four-figure fines each on charges of obstruction of justice. After two days of proceedings, the court largely followed the public prosecutor’s office, which had demanded slightly higher fines in its closing argument. The defense has already announced that it will appeal. The social workers had refused to testify against members of an ultra group in order not to endanger the relationship of trust with the fans. Once destroyed, it is difficult to rebuild.
It is the next round of state persecution after a use of pyrotechnics on a Saturday afternoon in November 2022. Almost two years ago, Karlsruher SC secured a 4-4 draw against FC St. Pauli in a crazy game. The ultra group “Rheinfire” (KSC), founded in 2002, used the game as an opportunity to celebrate their 20th anniversary. The block was uniformly marked with blue pieces of paper, a banner with the slogan “Raufen, saufen, sucht Handel” with the year it was founded was presented on the fence and a block flag in the shape of the group logo was displayed. At the end of the intro, the fateful smoke pots in blue and white were ignited, and there were fireworks from the curve. Some people complained of injuries due to the heavy smoke in the stadium.
The social workers from the Karlsruhe fan project then created a protected space to process the events and were thus able to help clarify the conflict in accordance with their mission without involving the police and the judiciary. State action is in contrast to this: two KSC ultras have now been (provisionally) sentenced to prison sentences without parole, incidentally without proof of direct involvement in the crime. The fan project also came into the investigators’ crosshairs. The Karlsruhe public prosecutor’s office tried to obtain confidential information by issuing summonses and later by accusing him of obstruction of justice.
Social workers cannot invoke the right to refuse to testify, not even in the context of organized football fans. The Alliance for the Right to Refuse to Testify (BfZ) has been calling for this for years. BfZ spokesman Georg Grohmann was correspondingly shocked after the verdict was announced: “We have to speak of a blatant threat to social work as a whole.”
The federal government sees things differently, as a small query from the ranks of the Die Linke faction showed at the beginning of the year. In its response, the state’s highest executive body positioned itself against the expansion of the right to refuse and justified this line with the argument that the activities of employees in fan projects “do not correspond to the understanding of those subject to professional secrecy underlying the Code of Criminal Procedure.”
Political support for social work in the context of organized football fans is difficult to find. Dealing with the topic is similar to that of migration. Football fans like to serve as scapegoats for politicians – the bourgeois parties from the AfD to the SPD don’t do much, as the recent security summit (October 18th) showed again.
If you want to eliminate the causes of this dynamic, you should not limit yourself to simple appeals to those in power. It is pointless to accuse the federal government in general or Justice Minister Buschmann in particular of not understanding the practical consequences of their decisions. They know exactly what they are doing. The decision not to better protect social workers in the football context continues a line of anti-social work that was already made clear in the question of financing fan projects. It is fair to assume that political intimidation and discrediting are the goal.
Mathias Stein, also spokesman for the Alliance for the Right to Refuse to Testify, emphasizes that the fan project employees cannot allow themselves to be left alone. But it doesn’t just affect her. The convictions are part of a large number of state repressions against organized football fans and their helpers as a whole. The state-organized shift to the right, the predicted “end of political liberalization” (A. Fisahn) – we also see it in football.
