A large crowd of football hooligans in Turkey’s northwestern province of Bursa organised a racist protest against visiting Amedspor, a football club from the Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Diyarbakır (Amed).
The Bursaspor supporters gathered outside a hotel where visiting Amedspor players were staying, and chanted “How happy is he who says ‘I am a Turk’”, a phrase attributed to Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. The police did not intervene in the Bursaspor supporters, who carried flaming torches, and let off firecrackers and fireworks, reports said.
Videos of the incident were shared on Amedspor’s official Twitter account.
The club said that this kind of protest was not the way to treat a team visiting from an earthquake-stricken region to play a 90-minute match.
Diyarbakır was among the 10 provinces in Turkey rocked by the twin earthquakes on 6 February.
In recent years, Amedspor has found itself the target of racist attacks several times, especially at times when political tensions peak in the country. Such attacks have escalated since the team changed its name to Amedspor, Amed being the Kurdish word for Diyarbakır.
