When Greece and Turkey faced off in a recent Euro 2008 qualifier, politics hung heavy in the air. But it had nothing to do with Turkish-Greek relations. Instead, the game, played in Istanbul, offered the local fans a venue to air their more recent grievances against the Kurdish PKK group, which recently killed 12 Turkish soldiers.

Turkish fans wave flags before kick-off (photo: Asher Kohn)

I was tipped off to this by Asher Kohn, a student at the University of Maryland, who is spending the semester abroad in Turkey. Asher went to the game (which Greece won 1-0, their first ever victory over Turkey) and sent me this account of what he saw.

Last week I somewhat miraculously scored tickets to the Greece-Turkey game for Euro 08 qualification. It was funny, I really had no clue what to expect. I figured that there would be a lot of good-natured screaming and mocking of Greeks; maybe a “1453!” chant (when the Turks took Constantinople) or something like that. Instead it was an ultra-nationalist atmosphere just this side of a Fascist Rally.

Things are getting fairly nasty in Eastern Turkey/North Iraq right now. A lot of Kurdish separatists are hiding out in Iraq and go across the border, kill a few soldiers, then return to Iraq. Any day now, the Turkish Army is going to go into Iraq. The US is trying to convince them not to, but there’s pretty much no way that’ll happen after 12 soldiers were killed yesterday. I think there was a big battle and 8 or so were killed the day before the Turkey-Greece game.

The stadium holds about 50,000 people, and this game was on TV or radio just about everywhere in Turkey. Everybody has a Turkish flag, I think. And the chants were not friendly, not light-hearted … and not directed at the Greeks. The standard chants were “Fuck the PKK!” and “Martyrs never die, our nation won’t be divided!” The game was actually a protest more than it was a game. No one cared about Greece, they just wanted the Turkish Government to do something about the PKK.

Greece won, 1-0, by the way. It was a fairly boring game. The most interesting part, by far, was the fact that the game was a political weapon, something that really doesn’t have a parallel in the states. I’ve never seen such a huge number of people so devoted to a single political cause. It was a pretty enlightening experience, the sort of thing that really turns on a light bulb in my head: “Oh, so that’s why there are so many problems with the Kurds here.”

Turkish soccer fans display a banner reads that: “Not only 15 we are 70 million Mehmetcik’”referring the 15 Turkish soldiers who were killed by separatist Kurdish rebels (photo: AP/Murad Sezer)

Banners hung by Turkish fans to express their feelings (photo: Asher Kohn)

The political demonstrations at this game seem to have inspired other Turkish soccer fans to let their feelings be known in the stadium. There were similar scenes when Liverpool took on Besiktas last week in the Champions League, as Andy Hunter wrote in the Guardian’s match report.

The setting for Liverpool’s latest ordeal was more akin to a political rally than a Champions League tie between two teams desperate for their first group win. Outside the arena were banners calling for an invasion of northern Iraq and war against the Kurdish rebel organisation, the PKK, and inside a lone bugler sounded a tribute to the Turkish soldiers killed by the group in recent weeks. “This is an important victory for the nation, given the men we have lost in the east,” said the Besiktas coach, Ertugrul Saglam. Amid a sea of Turkish flags one supporter broke forth to plant the national banner in the centre of the pitch, only for the pole to break as it struck the grass. The symbolic failure had no lingering effect on the team or an exuberant crowd, however.

Besiktas fans display a giant Turkish flag with the words “Martyrs never die. This land cannot be divided” written on it (photo: Reuters/Fatih Saribas)

Asher Kohn tells me that Besiktas are the traditional working-class team of Turkey and their stadium, which is across from a park that is the site of nationalist rallies, is covered with political slogans at the moment. Turkish Daily News reporter Çetin Cem Yilmaz also attended the match about Liverpool and wrote about his feelings while inside the stadium.

We entered the stadium and I was simply stunned by the decibel of the fan shouts, though I am familiar with Besiktas. But I was even more impressed by the quiet during the one-minute silence in honor of the 12 slain soldiers’ who were killed last Sunday by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants. The constant playing of nationalist songs in the stadium via the speakers proved that Besiktas fans, too, saw the game as a chance to prove that terrorist attacks cannot bring Turks down.

With the nation’s consciousness overwhelmed by the question of the PKK, it is perhaps not surprising that Turkish soccer fans have expressed their feelings in the country’s stadiums. Politics and soccer often mix in the minds of fans throughout the world (see the 1998 World Cup game between the US and Iran or every game since the Falklands War involving England and Argentina). But it is rare that soccer fans express their feelings as viscerally as have Turkish fans in the past couple of weeks. To paraphrase and misquote Rodney Dangerfield, it’s as if they went to a political rally and a soccer game broke out.

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Photo credit: AP / Rebecca Blackwell

“The battle for young hearts and minds plays out in Herat, where children play soccer in front of an American-built school; behind it, a school built by the Iranians.”

From AP: BBC correspondent Damian Kahya, right, fights for the ball against president Evo Morales during a friendly in La Paz, Bolivia on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006. One day after his government published a list of Bolivia’s ‘most hostile’ media outlets, president Evo Morales challenged the South American nation’s international press corps to a friendly soccer match. (AP Photo/Dado Galdieri)

No word on who won.

Two Afghans walk in a dust storm near a football goal post in the capital, Kabul.