More than just a game

THERE are football fanatics who can effortlessly recall how many times a South American team other than Brazil has reached the World Cup finals. 

Few, however, could tell you the last time a team of Caucasian separatists defeated the descendants of Chagossian exiles, or how the record stands between Scandinavian indigenous peoples and unrecognised Somali statelets. 

Such were the match-ups in 2016 in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, where a collection of aspiring states, micro-nations and other minority communities staged a “World Football Cup”. The participants are unaffiliated to FIFA.

The tournament, organised by the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA), brought together a dozen teams ranging from Northern Cyprus to the United Koreans of Japan.

Founded in 2013, CONIFA provides a platform for the forgotten football associations of the world. It claims to skirt the politics that often plague sports and divide peoples. The first world championship was staged in 2014; this year’s was the second. 

Some competitors, such as Iraqi Kurdistan, were well-organised and expertly trained. Others were endearingly incompetent, but crowds were merciful: the hapless Chagossians were cheered off the field after every loss. The teams included amateurs and a few professionals from their respective homelands (as with Székely Land, an ethnic Hungarian area in Romania) or their diasporas abroad (as with Western Armenia, whose Armenian inhabitants were deported by the Ottomans during the first world war).

Shunned by most of the international community, Abkhazia , which broke off from Georgia in the early 1990s and has been openly backed by Russia since 2008, is hungry for recognition of any kind. Some here hope FIFA’s acceptance of Kosovo (which broke off from Serbia) as a member last month will become a precedent for the Abkhaz national team. 

Other stateless peoples and regions, too, are accepted by FIFA: Palestine has been a member since 1998. The Abkhazian team’s nail-biting win in the tournament championship on Sunday, against Panjab (a team representing the global Punjabi diaspora, whose homeland is split between India and Pakistan), may reinforce its claims to sporting legitimacy.

Whether CONIFA intended it or not, choosing Abkhazia as the host was something of a political decision. Georgia remains furious at any attempt to legitimise the breakaway region. Per-Anders Blind, CONIFA’s head, said Georgian officials had contacted European governments to ask them to discourage their citizens from entering Abkhazia through Russia, which it considers illegal entry onto occupied territory. (A government spokesman said only that his country works with its allies to prevent violations of Georgian law.) The teams traveled through Russia anyway, fearing that if they tried to enter Abkhazia from Georgia, they would be stopped by authorities.

12 teams reached the 2016 Finals although there were withdrawals, suspensions and reinstatements in the weeks running up to the opening fixture. 

The Stateless Nations as well as Abkhazia, the hosts included;

Aymara; an indigenous nation straddling modern Bolivia, Peru and Chile with an ancestry pre-dating the Inca's who enslaved and suppressed them.

Ellan Vannin; representing the Isle of Man

Padania; covering eight regions in the north of Italy

County of Nice; located in  Southern France around the resort of Nice

Raetia; a Province in Roman Times now across parts of the Tirol, Bavaria and Lombardy.

Somaliland in southern Africa

Chagos Islands; actually as uninhabited archipelago in the Indian Ocean apart from the US Base at Diego Garcia

Iraqi Kurdistan

Panjab

United Koreans of Japan

Northern Cyprus

The Romani People

Sapmi; northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia

Western Armenia

Szekely Land; around Transylvania

There are 35 current members of CONIFA. amongst them Heligoland, Tibet and Darfhur.

The tournament also served the political purposes of the teams. 

The Chagossians used it as a platform to voice their anger at the British government for forcing their relatives from the Diego Garcia atoll in the late 1960s. For Abdillahi Mur, who played for Somaliland, a secessionist region of Somalia, it was a chance to prove his ancestral homeland is not as violence-ridden as the stereotypes would have it. “We don’t want to be seen as people who just have wars.” 

It was, by all accounts, a great tournament but somehow bearing in mind the bigger picture the results were not really that important.

(Reproduced with edited sections from The Economist and BBC News sources)