Football Reflects Frozen Conflicts, but Seldom Transcends Them: A Three Part Case Study.
du Nord, September 22, 2009
By Justin PaulAzerbaijan, Moldova, and CyprusThis is an examination of three intractable political conflicts on the European continent and how football has been a mere entrenchment of tension as opposed to a release valve to find space for moderate ground within divided communities. Football and Politics cannot be separated easily, and syrupy rhetoric about football uniting (as it did in the Ivory Coast briefly in 2006 before the World Cup) runs against numerous other examples, three of which are discussed here.Part I: Fratricide in the South Caucasus, how a disputed territory of a Soviet Socialist Republic brought Armenia and Azerbaijan to war.The first example is the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. This is one of the grubby post Soviet conflicts mostly ignored in the west because of a difficulty to find good guys and bad guys, although the Armenian-American Diaspora played a huge role in assisting their brethren. The Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan was an autonomous region within the country