Soccer star lauded for condemning racism in sports

LONDON — Highlighting ongoing efforts to combat racist and anti-Semitic abuse by sports fans across the globe, the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation on Monday awarded Cameroonian soccer sensation Samuel Eto’o with the third annual European Medal of Tolerance.

“Football is a very important vehicle to fight racism, Islamic radicalism, neo-nazism and anti-semitism,” ECTR President Moshe Kantor said at a ceremony in London’s Kensington Palace. Kantor noted that Eto’o, a former Barcelona striker and Spanish league top scorer who has been named African player of the year four times, had strived throughout his career to spread a message of tolerance in soccer stadiums, and had taken a firm stance against manifestations of racism both on and off the playing field.

The 34-year-old Eto’o had found “the courage and will to stand against the racists, building awareness and inspiring fellow footballers and millions of football fans,” Kantor said.

In his acceptance speech, the Cameroonian player recalled his first encounter with racist abuse during a soccer match in 2005, when supporters of the Spanish club Zaragoza continuously taunted him with monkey chants from the stands. Eto’o, now a member of the Italian Sampdoria team, said that the traumatic experience had driven him to take action against intolerance in sports.

“You are born with love and you have to learn hatred, and that is something I discovered that day,” Eto’o said. “My teammates supported me, the management supported me. Then I discovered the only path is to stand up and shout.”

Reacting to recent video footage showing several Chelsea fans preventing a black man from boarding a metro train in Paris, Eto’o, who played for the British club in the past, urged authorities to heavily penalize the perpetrators of such acts. He stressed, however, that the fans in question were not representative of the club’s supporters at large.

”I was shocked when I saw those images, but fortunately Chelsea has millions of fans worldwide,” Eto’o said. “We are here to fight against these issues and try to have harsher laws that are applied in a very tough way to fight against this abuse.”

Sharing the honor with Eto’o is the FARE Network, an anti-discrimination and social inclusion network focusing on combating soccer-related xenophobia.

Tensions between ethnic groups in Europe, where many countries are seeing a rising far right and radical Islam, in recent years have led to increased efforts by European organizations and governments to combat manifestations of racism and other forms of exclusion in soccer stadiums, where derogatory chants about Jews and blacks are commonplace.

That effort featured prominently on the agenda of the March 3 conference in Brussels of Facing Facts, a project set up in 2011 by CEJI: A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe and other groups to help anti-racism watchdogs become more effective.

At the event, Joanna Perry, the hate crime officer at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, referred to recent incidents last month in which fans of Britain’s Chelsea soccer team prevented a black man from getting on a Metro in Paris, and another in which fans were seen singing anti-Semitic songs in the London Underground.

“Hate crimes persist, but what is changing is the response,” Perry said in reference to strong and immediate condemnation of the fans by Chelsea’s management. ”They know now they need to respond quickly, and this is another sign that the response has become much stronger to these things.”

JTA contributed to this report.