By Prarthana Mitra
For the last week and a half, London has been home to a football world cup for the forgotten and the unrecognised. For countries not recognised by football’s world governing body FIFA, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA) World Cup provides a legitimate platform to play the beautiful game.
CONIFA represents 16 forgotten nations, oppressed minorities and ethnic groups that are shut out by FIFA. Coming from regions not recognized as sovereign nations by most of the world, the teams are banned from participating in the FIFA World Cup, which starts next week in Russia. For these teams, CONIFA is the worlds greatest football tournament and there is a marked disdain for FIFA among the spectators as well.
The political history of a unique World Cup
The CONIFA World Cup seeks to represent nations which arent recognised as autonomous states and communities who want to establish their identities and culture. Sixteen fringe teams from places largely excluded from the international sport and diplomacy played tooth and nail across several stadiums in and around the British capital, after clinching a chance to play for the alternative World Cup.
The first CONIFA World Cup was held in the northern Swedish city of Ostersund, in 2014. The third iteration of CONIFA this year, hosted by Barawa FC (a team made up of the British-Somali diaspora) and sponsored by local bookmaker Paddy Power, has about 47 members around the world. Ranging from areas with fully functioning governments, like Iraqi Kurdistan, to those seeking to raise awareness of their political struggles, like the Roma and the Koreans of Japan. Members also include Delvidek (Hungarians in Serbia), Greenland, Northern Cyprus, Western Armenia, Szekelyland, and the Donetsk Peoples Republic in eastern Ukraine.
Other participants include Cascadia which is a proposed country that includes the Pacific Northwest in the United States and parts of Canada, Tamil Eelam-the Tamil-majority areas of Sri Lanka as well as Matabeleland in Zimbabwe all regions where the game has a passionate following and practice.
Past fixtures and the bright future
At this years CONIFA opening ceremony, held in the home stadium of Bromley FC, local soccer fans and reporters from all over the world cheered for the diasporic teams. In the final on Saturday evening, Karpatalya, a Hungarian-speaking minority in Western Ukraine, defeated Northern Cyprus, a state recognized only by Turkey in the penalty shootout.
This recalls the tense penalty shootout final in 2016, when the Abkhazia team became the CONIFA world soccer champions, after defeating the Punjab team (constituting the Punjabi diaspora in Britain).
Harpit Sinkh, the chairman of the Punjab Football Association, had then said, “My vision is to [enrich the] Punjabi people. They have kind of forgotten their identity of who they are – today they are either British, Indian, Pakistani or American. I want to bring about cultural awareness and reawaken lost identity.”
The minorities in these unrecognised states continue to be persecuted. A government-sponsored pogrom was organised against the Romani people in Ukraine when the tournament was underway, apparently the fourth in the last six weeks. After the final this week, CONIFA was compelled to release a statement condemning Ukraine’s demand to de-register Karpatalya as “draconian”.
At this point, being able to raise and wave their flags in cheerful solidarity is also a huge political statement. By taking part, we can achieve visibility internationally for our people and our cause, said Ferhat Mehenni, the president of the provisional government of Kabylia, a region in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria.
His team of Kabyls and their families were subject to threats and intimidation from the Algerian authorities ahead of the tournament, Mehenni told the New York Times via a telephonic conversation from France, where he lives and works in exile.
Giving voice to voiceless communities
CONIFA president and co-founder Per-Anders Blind himself hails from an indigenous minority group in Scandinavia and has brought together stateless nations, unrecognised countries, self-declared republics, ethnic groups and indigenous communities.
“For me, it’s a peace project,” he said. “We have a mission to create a global arena for the forgotten people, we have so many members that are not recognised around the world. We want to educate the world about all the different ethnicities and indigenous people that we have on this planet.”
Blind said although he wants the focus to be the games, not politics, it is a challenge when the players and fans want their regions to be internationally recognized amid a severe, and often violent, backlash from the countries that control them.
It’s about more than just football, its a matter of national pride and identity.
Prarthana Mitra is a staff writer at Qrius