Conference “Unite against racism”, organized by UEFA and FARE took place in Warsaw last week. For participants from Ukraine such events are always cognitive because not so long time ago we got an opportunity to learn from the European Community principles of building civil society of equal rights. That was the main issue of the Conference and football is the tool for achieving results.
Our country was represented by four separate participants: Crimean Tatar Youth Centre, East European Development Institute, FFU and NGO Karpaty.
Unfortunately, being participants of such large-scale event you understand the distance between Ukraine and civilized European Community. First of all, out of four Ukrainian organizations only FFU and NGO Karpaty really represented football community of the state with population of over 48 million people.
Secondly, on behalf of the Football Federation of Ukraine Mr Voskresenskiy (FFU vice president) thanked to the organizers for invitation and confessed that having been working in different football institutions for over 20 years he still could understand meanings of most of banners, figures and abbreviations used by supporters in football stadiums. One could see amazed faces of participants of the Conference because by saying that Mr Voskresenskiy placed a question mark over not only personal professional qualities but also those of the organization he represented.
NGO Karpaty’s president Oleh Soldatenko in his speech at one of workshops indicated that experience of participation in similar events was very important and compared problems existing within Ukrainian football and among supporters to problems discussed by delegates from the UK, Poland, Germany, Austria and other countries of EU.
The chairman Mr Howard Holmes asked Oleh to elaborate on the situation in Ukraine because for him and his colleagues our state remains “Terra Incognita” in many aspects.
Giving examples of well-known incidents in Okhtyrka, Lviv and Kyiv (final match of the Cup of Ukraine) Oleh again emphasized that unfortunately in our country words and actions do not correspond. Also foreign colleagues could not understand methods of work with supporters, which is carried out by security officers (according to some people between workshops Mr Voskresenskiy shared with UEFA and FARE representatives own experience and told that all security officers were former police officers, which would control supporters of their clubs, and in case they fail to do that – there is a special police forces called “Berkut”).
Policy of stick and…stick. This method is forgotten in Europe but still exists in Ukraine. And that’s what the FFU representative boasts of in front of all Europe where human rights are the highest value and where work with supporters is conducted at large scale (for instance, in Germany there are more than 40 different fan projects, and every year the State Budget assigns over 6 million Euro for financing them. Feel the difference). Bright colors, in which Ukrainian authorities “paint” preparations for “EURO-2012” for foreign delegations suddenly turn black-and-white. Also it is really sad that football officials believe that their work is perfect.
Prior to the upcoming qualifying match England v Ukraine we managed to talk to representatives of the Football Association of England regarding obtaining tickets for the mentioned match. The British were quite surprised to find out that the Ukrainian Federation offers its supporters only tickets worth 65 Euro (nominal value is 54 Euro). But for this match there are also tickets at a much cheaper price. We were promised that possibility of providing Ukrainians supporters with tickets at acceptable price would be considered.
It is nice that we had an opportunity to get commentaries and advices from representatives of British and European Parliaments regarding visa regime of the UK. The matter is that 30% out of all football fans wishing to support our team in London were refused visas. Explanations of visa officers turned out to be mere formal runarounds.
Although at such events first of all informal communication and exchanging thoughts are appreciated – we can say that we picked up much experience both out of “coffee-break” contacts and speeches of European representatives having many years’ experience of work with football supporters.
|
