I’m sorry to keep going on about it but football hooliganism is actually my area of professional expertise. Therefore it’s a topic about which I can talk your ears off so I think there may well be a part three even if my British based computer really doesn’t like me talking about it.
The reason why I’m so knowledgeable about the subject is because I basically did it for a living for about six years. I have to say that if we’d faced a situation like the one that occurred at Port Said on Wednesday (1/2/12) where I worked the plan we were all trained to follow was to open the exit gates and then abandon our posts. We would then re-group at a pre-arranged point and then think up a plan of how best to re-take the stadium. A large part of that plan would have been to allow the riot to burn itself out. That is because if you lack the strength in numbers to completely dominate the situation but then attempt to use force and fail you only end up making the situation worse and increase the number of casualties. So apart from the unforgivable mistake of the locked gates which is sadly still an all to common practice in Egypt and much of Africa the only fault I can find in the way the Egyptian police handled yesterday’s riot was that they tried doing too much to control it without a coherent plan of action.
Of course there is still the issue of why the police didn’t do more in the run up to the match to avoid a riot breaking out in the first place. In a rich country such as Britain which has a highly trained and professional police force that is very experienced in dealing with football violence you would expect the policing operation for this type of match to be planned weeks if not months in advance. They would have begun with a way to transport both home and away fans to and from the match without coming in contact with each other. They would then have arrested known troublemakers weeks in advance in order to prevent them travelling to the match and had plainclothes police officers mixing with the crowd to act as spotters to identify potential trouble spots before those situations got out of control. However the policing environment in Egypt is very different. For a start it is a much poorer country so their police don’t have the same level of resources available to them. Then there are the Ultras who make Britain’s infamous football hooligans look like disorganised pacifists by comparison and can quite easily arrange for gates to be opened to let guys with weapons in. The way the Ultra’s are organised also makes it much more difficult for the police to identify and arrest their ringleaders without starting a war. Thirdly Egypt doesn’t really have a functioning police force as they go through the process of transforming Mubarak’s CSF into a civilian police force that is capable of serving the new Egypt. On top of all that the Egyptian authorites are currently pre-occupied holding the elections for the upper house of Parliament so their focus was understandably elsewhere.
So I have no doubt that the Egyptian military were in no way involved in orchestrating yesterday’s riots. The only reason why the Muslim Brotherhood are saying they were is because they’ve calculated that fighting between the secular Ultras and the secular military will translate as more support for them. If you want a conspiracy theory though the way the violence seems to have spread to Tahrir Square threatening those elections means that I’d take a long hard look at the Ultras. After all they played a key role in November 2011’s riots that threatened the elections for the lower house and they certainly move in the same online circles as Britain’s English Defence League.
Interestingly tomorrow (4/2/12) will see London hosting the infamous match between West Ham Utd and Millwall. Undoubtedly this match will be trouble free and will showcase London's police at their best. It's almost as if Britain is trying to get Egypt's interim military leadership to ask them for advice.
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