Warped tribalism insults forgotten victims

Warped tribalism insults forgotten victims

Oliver Kay - The Times - September 15, 2012

Now that the lies and cruel myths about the Hillsborough disaster have been exposed once and for all, those who clung to them out of warped tribalism have but one straw left to clutch. “What about justice for Heysel?”, they plead. “What about the truth of what happened there?”

Actually, they have a point, even if they raise it out of malice rather than consideration for the bereaved. Questions remain unanswered about the Heysel Stadium disaster, in which 39 spectators — 32 from Italy, four from Belgium, two from France, one from Northern Ireland — were killed in a stampede before the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus. While those bereaved and outraged by Hillsborough have fought to keep their campaign for justice alive and been entirely vindicated for doing so, Heysel remains the tragedy that dares not speak its name.

So let us talk about it. Let us state a few of the facts about whether justice was done.
We all know that English football, collectively, was punished, with clubs excluded from Uefa competition. Liverpool immediately withdrew, in disgrace, from the next season’s Uefa Cup. Within hours the FA, under pressure from the Government, announced that no English club would play in the next season’s European competition. Two days later Uefa, European football’s governing body, announced an indefinite ban on English clubs. It ended up at five years, with Liverpool serving a sixth as punishment for their supporters’ behaviour at Heysel.

This was not a kneejerk reaction to a one-off night of mayhem. This — both the sanction and, it could be argued, the widespread loss of life — had been coming. Heysel was the disgraceful culmination of more than a decade of ugly incidents involving English supporters on their European travels: Tottenham Hotspur in Rotterdam in 1974 and 1983, Leeds United in Paris in 1975, Manchester United in Saint-Étienne in 1977, the national team in Basle in 1981 and so on until the spiral of depravity reached its tragic conclusion — logical in one sense, crazy in all others — in Brussels.

As to whether individuals were brought to account, 27 arrests were made on suspicion of manslaughter and 26 men were charged. (These, incidentally, do not tend to be described as Liverpool supporters — in part because of claims at the time from John Smith, the club’s chairman, and two Merseyside councillors that National Front members from London had been responsible. There are many sensitive issues here, but let us not pussyfoot over this one. As Tony Evans, Times football editor and author of Far Foreign Land, a brilliant book about his experiences following Liverpool at Heysel and all over Europe, put it: “It was a red herring. Hooligans from the far right would not have been welcome.”) The prosecutions stemmed from television camera footage of the charge — the third such charge in a matter of minutes — that led directly to the deaths of those 39 innocent spectators. There are dozens of points that are usually offered to explain the context, but the context does not begin to excuse anything. No amount of context could. That stampede might have been considered standard terrace fare, a token act of territorialism and intimidation, but it led innocent fans to flee in terror. Some tried to climb a wall to escape. The wall crumbled. Thirty-nine people were crushed to death. The world was appalled. Turin went into mourning. Liverpool and their supporters were left with the stigma and the stain.

As for “justice”, an initial inquiry by Marina Coppieters, a leading Belgian judge, found after 18 months that the police and the authorities, in addition to Liverpool supporters, should face charges. Quite apart from the hooliganism, ticketing arrangements and police strategy and responses were criticised. By this stage, English supporters were regarded across Europe as such animals that shock was expressed at how the authorities had played into the hands of the troublemakers.

There was bewilderment, too, at the choice of stadium. And where have you heard that before? Uefa chose a ground that had been built in the 1920s and condemned in the early 1980s for failing to meet modern safety standards.

Evans recalls that the outer wall, made of cinder block, was decaying, that he was not required to show his ticket and that, long before the stampede, he saw a crash barrier in front of him crumble.

Jacques Georges, the Uefa president at the time, and Hans Bangerter, his general secretary, were threatened with imprisonment but eventually given conditional discharges. Albert Roosens, the former secretary-general of the Belgian Football Union (BFU), was given a six-month suspended prison sentence for “regrettable negligence” with regard to ticketing arrangements. So was Johan Mahieu, who was in charge of policing the stands at Heysel. “He made fundamental errors,” Pierre Verlynde, the judge, said. “He was far too passive. I find his negligence extraordinary.”

In 1989, after a five-month trial in Brussels, 14 of the 26 Liverpool supporters who stood trial were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and given a three-year prison sentence, 18 months of which was suspended, and each ended up serving about a year behind bars. The remaining ten defendants were acquitted of manslaughter, but some had their £2,000 bail money confiscated, having been absent for part of the trial. And civil damages estimated at more than £5 million were provisionally awarded to families of the Heysel victims against the convicted fans and the BFU.

You never hear of this because the tragedy is taboo. It was only brought into the open when the clubs were drawn together in the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2005. Liverpool, after consultation with their Italian counterparts, announced it would be a game of “friendship”. Before the first leg at Anfield, Liverpool supporters held up a mosaic to form the word “amicizia”. Some of the visiting Juventus fans applauded. Most, it seemed, turned their backs in disgust.

Heysel is an unspeakably awkward subject for Liverpool — perhaps more, perhaps less, for the anguish the club and the city endured four years later at Hillsborough. But they do at least now have a memorial plaque at Anfield, they do have extensive coverage of the tragedy on their official website and they do pay tribute on May 30 every year, even if it took far too long for the club to recognise the tragedy and the stain it had left — not unlike Sheffield Wednesday with Hillsborough. None of this diminishes Liverpool’s or their supporters’ right to grieve or complain at what happened four years later.

The real mystery is that Heysel is even more of a taboo in Turin. Go on to the Italian club’s official website in search of a tribute and you will find merely 106 words within a 645-word article called “Juventus wins everything”. “The long-awaited success in Europe’s highest accolade was tainted with sadness” . . .
“Something unexplainable happened … and 39 innocent victims lost their lives. Football, from that moment, would never be the same again.” … “It’s a joyless success, but the victory enabled the Bianconeri to fly to Tokyo in winter to play the Intercontinental Cup final. Argentinos Junior were beaten on penalties and Juve were the world champions.”

Is that it? No wonder the Association for the Victims of Heysel has felt hurt by Juventus’s reluctance to acknowledge what happened on the night they won the European Cup for the first time. Justice for Heysel? There can never be justice for 39 lives lost at a football match, but it is in Turin, not on Merseyside, that the cries of the bereaved are met with silence. The families do not want their lost ones to become a cause célèbre in England, where the purpose is purely to score points on the terraces. A little recognition closer to home is what they want.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/columnists/kay/article3539157.ece