Dhe Iranian Football Association fears that FIFA, the international football association, will be excluded from the football World Cup in Qatar. The background is the violent action by Iranian security forces against women on the sidelines of the Iranian team’s World Cup qualifier against Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon in Mashhad. There, women who had bought tickets for the game online the night before but were not admitted had demonstrated against their lockout.
Videos circulated by local media on social media showed a sizeable crowd outside Imam Resa Stadium, with women loudly shouting “We have objections!” as the match was played inside the stadium. Pictures posted later show some women kneeling on the ground with tears in their eyes, who, according to them, were attacked by emergency services with pepper spray. Recordings are now circulatingshowing that the pepper spray was sprayed into the crowd from inside via the sealed access.
“FIFA must act now”
Mehrdad Seraji, board member of the Iranian Football Association IRIFF, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “There is worrying news about decisions by FIFA and the AFC (Asian Football Association; ed.)” Should there be a World Cup exclusion , are responsible for those who paved the way for the “bitter events of #Mashhad” – Seraji called the Ministry of Sports.
He called on the Iranian parliamentarians to deal with the issue. More than 29 hours later, the world association answered the FAZ.NET question to FIFA about how they reacted to the renewed exclusion of spectators in the Islamic Republic of Iran. One sees the reports with concern, has asked the IRIFF for information and demands that women are allowed further into the stadium. Minky Worden, Human Rights Watch director of global initiatives, tweeted that violating FIFA’s statutes could result in a ban from the World Cup. “FIFA must act now to enforce its own rules!” Worden wrote.
Stronghold of religious hardliners
On social media, the incident was compared to the Islamist Taliban’s ban on girls going to school in Afghanistan. Observers suspect that influential Islamist hardliners in Mashad acted on their own initiative and without consulting the FFI, reports the German Press Agency from Iran.
Mashhad is a stronghold of religious hardliners, where Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s current president, chaired the Imam Resa Shrine Foundation between 2016 and 2019, the country’s largest foundation and the largest landowner in the Islamic Republic. Both the foundation and the stadium are named after Imam Resa, the eighth Shiite Imam buried in Mashhad, whose shrine is the country’s most important pilgrimage site.
The fact that the last game of the World Cup qualifying round was played in the city of over a million inhabitants in the north-east of the country had already aroused suspicion among women’s rights activists. After at least a few thousand women were allowed to watch the qualifying match against Cambodia in October 2019 in Tehran’s Asadi Stadium under pressure from FIFA before the outbreak of the corona pandemic, spectators were no longer allowed to watch international matches at all, citing the pandemic. In October 2021, before the top game against South Korea, it was initially announced that a limited number of women would be allowed to watch again before spectators were completely excluded.
Rollback by the security apparatus
Before the game against Lebanon in Mashhad, it was again unclear for a long time whether women would be allowed in. On Monday evening, women could then book tickets online, which they took to the stadium the next day. However, no preparations had been made there to prepare a separate area of the grandstand for women as a so-called “family block”, as was done in Tehran in 2019. After being turned away at the stadium gates, the women protested in front of the stadium.
Even if FIFA now writes that “there must be no U-turn”, another qualifying round for a World Cup has come to an end in which FIFA was unable to enforce its statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in Iran, while the team qualified for the World Cup. It was the same in 1998, 2006, 2014 and 2018; In view of the manageable progress made three years ago – women were still not allowed to play league games in Iranian men’s soccer, just as men were not allowed to play games of women’s teams – the violent exclusion in Mashhad means a rollback by the Iranian security apparatus. At the World Cup in Qatar, FIFA is supporting another human rights issue that has been pressing for years and for which it has not yet found a solution.
