Aggressive policing may have caused tragedy at Indonesia game

Tear gas still hung in the air at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia, as police used a manual that is grimly familiar across the world.

Police officers had no choice but to fire the chemical into the crowd, East Java Province Police Chief Nico Afinta said, “because there was anarchy.” The terrible scale of the nightmare was still unclear. However, the police had to act, the chief said. “They were about to attack the police and they had damaged the cars,” he said.

The accusation that fans were to blame for yet another football disaster was immediately identified with the tragedy at the Olembé stadium in Cameroon – where eight people died in January during the African Cup of Nations – and the near miss in May in the final of the Champions League, decisive game of European football, in Paris.

These two incidents took place this year, but the subject is old: for example, in Port Said, Egypt, where 74 fans were killed in 2012; in Sheffield, England, where 97 Liverpool fans attended a football game at Hillsborough Stadium and did not return home in 1989.

These are rare incidents, given the global scale of the sport, but they are linked by a common thread: when tragedies occur in football, they tend not to be the result of fan violence, but an overzealous and sometimes aggressive style of policing that treats a large crowd as a threat and turns a game into a danger.

“It speaks to a mindset that is often more public order oriented than public safety oriented,” said Owen West, a senior professor of policing at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, UK. “You can see officers with full riot gear, crowd control ammunition. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

He explained that law enforcement agencies took on the need to “control” the crowd and therefore tended to be “over-zealous and over-resourced”. “Often, it’s actually police action that triggers the backlash from the crowds,” he said.

Saturday’s tragedy in Malang echoed that in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, in January, when eight people were crushed to death before an African Cup of Nations match between Cameroon and Comoros.

Then, the police received thousands of fans who wanted to enter the Olembé stadium, directing them to a gate that was “closed for inexplicable reasons”, as Patrice Motsepe, president of the organization that organizes African football, said. “If that gate were open, as it should be, we wouldn’t have this loss of life,” he said.

In Port Said, too, the public had nowhere to run. That day, when supporters of the Egyptian team Al Masry attacked supporters of rival Al Ahly after a game in the country’s Premier League, thousands tried to escape the violence. The stadium doors, however, were locked and not opened to relieve pressure. Seventy-four people died.

The use of tear gas, however, was more reminiscent of the chaotic scenes in Paris during this year’s Champions League final, played by Real Madrid and Liverpool.

UEFA, the governing body of European football, has had two of its previous decisive games marred by a failure to control a fully anticipated crowd. First, at the postponed Euro 2020 final, which took place at London’s Wembley Stadium in July 2021, thousands of fans broke through security barriers to enter.

So, following this year’s Europa League final between Eintracht Frankfurt and Scottish side Rangers in Seville, Spain, the two clubs took the unusual step of issuing a joint letter of complaint to UEFA about the way their fans were treated.

Paris, however, was the most worrying situation of all. French authorities channeled tens of thousands of Liverpool fans through narrow passages, causing bottlenecks at the entrance to the stadium. Many in the crowd waited for hours at gates that either opened just minutes before the game started or were not opened at all.

As they waited, French security officers fired tear gas into a tight crowd.

Uefa initially warned supporters already in the stadium, as well as spectators who were watching from home, that the game would be postponed due to the “late arrival” of so many fans, despite knowing at the time that many of those on outside had arrived hours before the scheduled start.

This theme was seized upon by French authorities, who in the following days tried to blame tens of thousands of fans with counterfeit tickets for the problems. The number of fake tickets, however, was grossly exaggerated, and a French Senate inquiry in July blamed officials for what it called a “fiasco” in the final, determining that poor coordination, poor planning and multiple mistakes, including the use of gas tear gas against fans, had wreaked havoc.

Five months later, their Indonesian counterparts similarly shied away from responsibility in their opening remarks. They blamed the deaths of at least 125 people on the fans who stormed the Kanjuruhan stadium field after an Indonesian Premier League game between Arema and Persebaya Surabaya, not the police officers who tried to deal with this infraction by firing tear gas in an area where it was not. easy to escape from it.

“It’s incredibly dangerous to use a dispersal tactic like tear gas in this case,” said West, the law enforcement expert. “Especially in the minds of officers, thinking about this tactic should be where the public can disperse. Some of the reports speak of panic, which suggests an irrationality on the part of the crowd. But running away from something that is doing so much damage to your breathing , vision and general health is a completely rational decision.”

According to stadium safety and security regulations published by FIFA, the governing body of world football, “crowd control gas” must not be “carried or used” by stewards or police officers stationed on the sidelines inside a stadium. However, FIFA admitted on Sunday that these principles can only serve in domestic competitions subject to national safety and security regulations.

In a statement on Sunday, the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation condemned “the excessive use of force through the use of tear gas” and blamed it for the large number of deaths in Malang, a claim supported by eyewitnesses. “The tear gas was exaggerated,” said photographer Suci Rahayu, who was at the stadium. “A lot of people fainted. If it weren’t for the tear gas, there wouldn’t be that riot.”