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I am a soft touch when it comes to underdogs: I wear a badge that says: ‘I heart migrants‘; I buy the Big Issue; and I work for the World Development Movement to combat the injustice that is rife through out the world. And now I am faced with a choice between Ghana – the top dog of the underdogs according to Who Should I Cheer For?; and Serbia – the country that shot to fame in the 1990s as an international pariah. So for most people, the choice of which team to cheer for based on ‘underdog’ criteria would be simple. For me, not so simple.

But life, politics and war is never simple. Let me announce my bias: my father’s family is from Serbia, from a city called Kragujevac, which is known for a massacre of up to 5000 people in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis. My grandfather fled the country and walked across Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back.

Massacres and deeply held resentments have been prominent in the former Yugoslavia’s turbulent history for centuries and the war crimes that took place at the hands of the Serbs in the 1990s are clear to everyone. And now to the Serbs themselves, who because of the propaganda pedalled by Milosevic and the closure of independent media, did not know of the true extent of the genocidal war that was being waged in their name.

But what they did know is that they were under attack from sanctions, from NATO bombing and economic collapse. By the year 2000, Serbia was the poorest country in Europe. It was the year that I went to visit my family in Kragujevac and saw the embarrassment and anger in my cousin’s face when admitted that she had been ‘paid’ in eggs that week.

This was also the year that Milosevic was finally forced from power.  The Milosevic regime’s tactics to stay in power were violent and omnipotent, including hundreds of thousands of fake ballot papers, the arrest, detention and ‘diasppearances’ of journalists, opposition activists and judges who sympathised with the opposition. One judge was murdered when he refused to issue an arrest warrant for two opposition leaders. And the disappearance and death of Ivan Stambolic, the former Prime Minister, who turned against Milosevic and gave support to the leader of the opposition party, Vojislav Kostunica.

Kostunica was leading a shakey coalition of 18 opposition parties, and despite Milosevic’s repression, they organised election monitors, mobililsed people, and collaborated with the powerful student movement, Otpor.  After the contested election of September 2000, a month of mass strikes and one million people descended on Belgrade from across the country, including elderly  farmers on tractors and bulldozers. They broke through police lines and faced tear gas and stormed parliament forcing Milosevic’s resgination on October 5th.

The last decade has not been easy for Serbs. The chasm between the rich and the poor has widened. Although, there’s no data available in government numbers for the clever people behind whoshouldicheerfor.com to crunch, inequality has increased after the IMF imposed its usual draconian economic conditions, like privatisation of electricty, education and health care, in return for loans.

The poorest people in Serbia (and Eastern Europe) who have suffered greatly are the Roma population. Roma people are widely discriminated against, are the target of racist attacks and fail to access public services. Currently, in Serbia the situation of Roma people is particularly worrying with 30 per cent of the population living on less than $2 a day; entire communities unable to access health care, education and live in shanty towns. It’s my bet that data for the Roma population is not included in official government stats, because Roma people tend not to have birth certificates, ID or permanent addresses. If the stats for Roma people were available to us the maternal mortality, hunger and life expectancy results would be a lot worse.

So I will be cheering for Serbia: for the Roma people – the underdogs of Europe; for the Serbs who bravely and peacefully overthrew a genocidal dictator; and for my family, and all families, who are still struggling to get by.

p.s. Amnesty International is running a campaign to stop forced evictions of Roma communities in Serbia, please do get involved.

The symbol of Otpor's resistance against the Milosevic regime, it appeared in badges, stickers, posters, banners, graffiti, t-shirts and as a tattoo on my colleague, James' arm!

Posted in: Ghana, Global injustice, Serbia, Serbia-Ghana, Teams, Who am I cheering for?

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

After using the ‘Who should I cheer for’ website to compare Argentina and Nigeria, I was struck by the many compelling reasons to cheer for Nigeria in this match. For example, the average Nigerian is thirteen times poorer than the average Argentine and as such Nigeria is definitely the underdog in the match. While Nigerian’s emit nearly 75 per cent less CO2 per person, and the country spends less on its military and has more women in government.

However, the whole concept behind ‘Who should I cheer for’ is to get people thinking differently and not just conforming to their normal national ties and prejudices. Being English, not supporting Argentina would seem a little too much like conformity. After all the English enjoy hating Argentina (along with Germany) almost as much as they love supporting England. This national dislike of Argentine football teams is a mixture of geo politics and footballing grievances. First, came the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, when both Thatcher and the Argentine Junta used the blood and bodies of their countries’ youth to whip up support for their deeply unpopular domestic policies; the ensuing state violence left 258 British and 649 Argentines dead. And then if war wasn’t enough, to top it off, this was followed just four years later by the infamous Maradona ‘hand of God’ incident during Argentina’s 2-1 victory over England in the World Cup quarter final. To say nothing of David Beckham’s red card in the second round of the 1998 World Cup.

So to avoid bowing to conformity, I will be cheering for Argentina in solidarity with the workers of occupied cooperatives.

In the wake of the 2001 IMF sponsored economic meltdown, millions were left jobless and had their savings wiped out. Meanwhile, the rich who had benefited from the IMF economic policies upped and left the country taking their savings with them and leaving the country to fend for itself. But the people who had been locked out of their bankrupted workplaces chose not to stand idly by. They refused to allow their livelihoods be sold off to the highest bidder to satisfy the profits of foreign banks. Instead they broke in to their old workplaces; armed only with sleeping bags and simply refused to leave, defying the banks, their former bosses, the police and judges. Around 200 factories, bankrupt and abandoned by their owners, were taken over by their workers and turned into co-ops. And the workers began to produce goods for the community – providing both much needed work and goods. From tractor plants to supermarkets, printing houses to aluminium factories and pizza parlours, decisions about company policy were made in open assemblies and the profits split equally among the workers, they turned former exploitive sweatshops into a real alternative to private corporations.

In the wake of our own economic collapse and under threat of devastating public sector cuts and mass unemployment, it’s time for the English to look past their differences with Argentina and learn from Argentine workers. The millionaires that make up Argentina’s national team must also learn from the occupied factories and start playing as a collective like the workers of the cooperatives do; if they are to progress in the World Cup.

Posted in: Argentina, Argentina-Nigeria, Matches, Nigeria, Teams

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Help! My home is already taken over by World Cup frenzy. My 7 year old, football obsessed son has posters all over the house, tracking the teams and their prospective games; he’s been collecting special world cup stickers of all the players with his best friend for the past month, comparing statistics. Meanwhile, the husband has marked key matches he’ll be in the pub for in the family diary. (our television screen is apparently WAY too small).

I must admit, I quite like the World Cup – having grown up in Canada, where American-dominated sport pretends to represent the world, it’s refreshing to be living in a country where a genuinely global sport is the norm. But at the same time, I have a negative reaction to pure nationalism – sport is one thing, but I don’t want to live in a world where we seek to look after ourselves, before thinking of others.

Unfortunately, that’s the way we’re going. Just looking at the comparative stats on this site, you find that most of the rich countries fall down on their long-standing commitments to providing more aid to developing countries; and have per capita carbon emissions that go far beyond their fair share of the world’s resources.

The Con-Dem nation coalition seems set to withdraw Britain internationally, too. While I’m no big fan of Gordon Brown, he did serve to put some social justice issues on the global political agenda – like aid and debt relief, and convinced other world leaders to follow. Unfortunately, we just found out that the new Prime Minister, David Cameron seems to bear no such global gravitas, given that the UK has lost its seat on the critical UN climate finance panel. Meanwhile, there are rumours that the UK’s Department for International Development will be merged with the Foreign Office – a retro-grade step that means we’ll only do something for the world if it’s in Britain’s immediate political interests – rather than what’s right for equity and justice. Will this mean a return to the bad old days of tied aid?

The World Cup isn’t about politics – it’s about friendly sport, putting players on a level-playing field. Unfortunately, for the world’s poorest, beyond the football extravaganza, the world simply isn’t a level playing field. Perhaps we should model all international institutions – from the UN to the World Bank, on World Cup processes? You would have to pass a qualifier to get to the end game, but in this case, countries would have to pass a social and environmental justice qualifier to join. It could end the domination of rich countries over poorer countries (would the US and Britain be out of the ‘tournament’?), and give a stronger voice to poorer countries, like Ghana, who are working hard to eradicate poverty.

So while my family dons England paraphernalia during the home team matches; I’ll be watching the World Cup this year with a different lens, with an eye on how to ensure Britain keeps its social conscience. It’s cheering for nationalism, with a global justice twist.

Posted in: Global injustice

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.