Recently the Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu drew attention to a soccer team by saying the team was getting directions and funds from the Worker’s Party of Kurdistan, the PKK.

PKK is considered a terrorist organization in Turkey with its assumed headquarters in the mountain of Kandil. Kandil is situated at the border between Iran and Iraq about 100 km. from the Turkish border. Yet Turkish military has attacked Kandil, outside its borders, and bombed it allegedly to wipe out the Kurdish PKK camps there.

It came as a shock to soccer fans when a soccer team from Diyarbakır, a southeastern city in Turkey, was charged publicly by the interior minister himself that the team was performing under the orders coming directly from the Kurdish camps of Kandil Mountains.

The region around Diyarbakır is predominantly Kurdish and has been under heavy attacks by the Turkish government since the inception of the country in 1923. Turkey has considered all demands of national and ethnic recognition of the Kurds as an attempt against its unity and has brutally suppressed any Kurdish movement be it peaceful and unarmed or violent.

The soccer club Amedspor was born in 1990 and is a successful soccer team playing in the 2^nd league in Turkey. It was established as a team with the help of the Diyarbakır provincial government as Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyespor.

However, the official name of the city, Diyarbakır and its traditional Kurdish name Amed has been a contested area.

Turkey is very sensitive to the original names of the cities in its land because most cities, towns and villages had foreign names, given long times before Turks even settled in Anatolia. This doesn’t go well with a dominant culture that claims every name in the country must be Turkish with no reference to the original titles. This becomes really hard when one considers that nearly all settlements had started long time before Turkish arrival from the Central Asia steppes.

After the establishment of modern Turkey, a Turkification program forcefully changed the names of residential areas, making mostly Kurdish, Armenian and Greek names nearly banned.

Today, calling Istanbul with its Greek-Roman name Constantinople would probably get one in trouble.

When the soccer team changed its name from the current name of the city Turkish Diyarbakır to Kurdish Amedspor, all hell broke loose. Nationalists immediately targeted the team for carrying a Kurdish name, and hence being a terrorist. Due to Turkish paranoia, it is a short distance between being a Kurdish and charged with being a separatist terrorist.

And that seems to have just happened when out of the blue the interior minister charged the soccer team with taking orders from a camp on top of a mountain 100km outside of Turkey.

Yet, it really wasn’t “out of the blue.” The attacks on this sports team had been piling up. Many places it went, the host stadium would be glaring with Turkish nationalist, racist and military videos on huge screens. Nationalistic marches would be revving the spectators against the Kurds who have by now become the “internal enemy number one” by the racist, nationalistic policies of the state. The players would be attacked both on the grass or in their locker room. At one time, even the security guard assigned to protect the team from racist attacks joined in the beating of the players in the locker room.

One of the most bizarre cases happened when in 2016 the team was playing in the nation’s capital Ankara. The Ankara police officials decided that only those who were born in Diyarbakır would be allowed to watch the game on the Amedspor fan’s side. This decision came only few hours before the match was to begin. The problem was that both teams were progressive with dynamic and left leaning fans. If the fans would meet in the match, it could get explosive for the establishment that needs a divided and fighting nationalities.

In another 2016 match, not only the players but also the trainers and administrators faced lynching while the police only watched and did nothing to stop the attacks. This match was also played in Ankara but against Ankaragücü where the entire match was played under racist chants and swearing at the Amedspor players. However, when the team scored against the host team, the Ankaragücü fans ran onto the field and beat up the players. The team administrators sitting in the secure booths were also attacked and 5 of them were hospitalized. The events continued after the match when the bus carrying the Diyarbakır team was attacked and damaged with thrown rocks and sticks.

Later in 2018 the Amedspor fans on their way to support their team were not allowed to even enter the town of Sivas, the hosting city.  After this ban, the players decided they would not play the game and returned back home.  This wasn’t an isolated incident.  According to Amedspor spokesperson, in the 60 matches they played as visitors, they faced the government ban of not allowing their fans to travel to the hosting city 41 times.

So, it comes as no surprise when the same team, after being targeted by the interior minister himself is now the target of the same ministry. The government has appointed attorneys and auditors to investigate any financial wrongdoing and if the team is linked to any terrorist organization.

As if to resist these racist attacks, Amedspor enjoys tremendous support from its fans in Diyarbakır and the region as representing the Kurdish people. Instead of giving in, they have actually grown to even have a women’s team under their name as well. In a heavily patriarchal and religious region, anyone can appreciate the effort it took and the message it puts out to have a women team competing in the fields.

As reported in the YeniYaşam daily, the women players expressed that their games had to confront both sexism and the racism hurled against their ethnic origin and their team.

The women’s team captain Güzide Alçu has been playing soccer for the last 10 years. She smiles as she remembers when her family did everything they could to prevent her from playing. She remembers especially her father swearing that his daughter was never going to play soccer.

Yet, it was surprising for them to find out that it was their mothers who were their first supporters. She said, “Our mothers were our biggest fans.  We loved this game so much we never could quit. We worked and practiced a lot.  We went a long way and we succeeded.  We had pretty hard, bad times as the women team of Amedspor. We were cast out not only from our families but by others as well. We were also subject to racist assaults. They really tried hard to make us quit. But they never knew that what made us successful were their very attacks. When we were playing in the third league, nobody supported us and nobody had any expectations from us. However, when we started winning in match after match, people took notice and started having hopes.”

Güzide says they were able to change the minds and approaches of the society and adds, “When we started playing we didn’t have even a single fan or spectator.” She ties not having any fans to the loss of hope one sees in the women. She invites other women as, “The best support for women comes from women. Even in our home field we don’t have many women coming for support. This is sad. We need to show solidarity, so we invite all women to come to our matches.” The team now enjoys around 70 women from all ages and creeds who work in the team.

Dilan Kaya, another player, complains that the matches they play turn into a war instead of a simple soccer game. She remembers, “When we went to Hakkari, another Kurdish dominated city in south eastern Turkey, the spectators were mostly from the armed forces and the police.  They had come to watch. We are going there to play soccer not to wage a war. We feel more pressure under their eyes. We feel very uncomfortable. And our fans who come to the match also feel uncomfortable. So, under this pressure our fans start not showing up. We are not doing anything but soccer. We are doing sports and we want to be accepted as such. If we can host anybody in our city proudly we want to be hosted in other cities the same way.”

Answering the interior minister Süleyman Soylu’s baseless claim that the team is under the influence of Kandil or the PKK guerillas, she says, “They all talk without knowing what we are doing here or how much we are working. They should not try to spin what we have done here.  They all are making assumptions. They should not speak without any proof. Of course, we want to help the people in our region, but they should not make anything else of that. The Federation of Soccer in Turkey provides some help as a team. But they say, “Kandil provides funds to them.” If this was true, why are we always in a financial need and crisis. We have always had financial problems since our formation. They are channeling people to discrimination and racism against us.”

The team owners said they will wait for the auditor’s report before addressing the audit or investigation against the team.

Sendika.Org News (Mehmet Bayram)