Well, can France be trusted? And it is not just the Olympics. Are we not entitled to ask the same question about this year's Rugby World Cup?
The answer, of course, should be an indignant “why not?”.
France is a beautiful, civilised, cultured country. Its glorious capital, where the 2024 Olympics will be held (rugby will be spread around the country), is renowned the world over as the City of Light or City of Romance. Pomp and ceremony is there to be admired in countless major spectacles. Organising an important sporting event should come naturally.
Then you remember that its success can depend to some extent on how crowds are managed - and you recall with a shudder what a dreadful mess Paris made of the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in May last year. I am not alone in suggesting the scandal of the Stade de France raised questions about French trustworthiness in running important sporting occasions; I have seen them canvassed in French media too.
As an independent report commissioned by Uefa has just found, it is in no way to the credit of French authorities - or indeed Uefa itself, as the competition organisers - that the match at the Stade de France did produce a disaster of Hillsborough-level proportions. It was a sinister debacle, the primary responsibility for which was found in the report to be the incompetence of Uefa.
But it is to the everlasting shame of France that two government members, Gérald Darmanin (interior minister, a role colloquially known as that of France's No 1 Cop, and therefore one of the most senior politicians in the country), and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra (sports minister and a former tennis pro), falsely and disgustingly blamed supporters of Liverpool for the dangerously chaotic scenes that occurred outside the stadium that evening.
«Menteurs», une banderole des supporters de Liverpool fustige Darmanin et Oudéa-Castéra https://t.co/hEcBfa3Xmp pic.twitter.com/O4adlOFDhg
— RFI – Sports (@RFIsports) February 22, 2023
It gets worse. If both ministers had been misinformed by police chiefs and/or others and based their lamentable pronouncements on the self-serving, self-preserving assertions, of those they consulted, but quickly realised their errors and then retracted their accusations, offering abject public apologies to Liverpool supporters, the city of Liverpool and maybe football supporters generally, we could have moved on by now. Ministerial resignations might still have been eminently justified, and would probably have been volunteered in a nobler age of politics, but that is a separate issue.
There has been no such apology. Oudéa-Castéra has babbled meaninglessly about France having learned "absolutely" all the lessons on "management of flows, on the deployment of security forces, the mobilisation of private security agencies, crime prevention plans".
But the word sorry was significantly missing from her lips. No wonder Liverpool fans raised a banner denouncing Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra as menteurs - liars - when their team again met Real Madrid at Anfied this week. Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra had somehow found it possible, maybe expedient, to trash the image of Liverpool fans.
Someone straying into these pages and not knowing me from Adam could be excused for dismissing this as just another frogbashing rant from one of those grimly flagwaving Brexiters encouraged by a boneheaded populist government to pick endless fights with the French.
Those who do know me from Adam are aware that I err, if anything, on the other side. I am a confirmed Francophile with a French wife, half-French daughters and dual nationality. But I know injustice when, whatever the origin, it smacks me in the face. Penning fans for hours in frighteningly crowded conditions, pepper-spraying them as if for fun and failing to protect them from local hoodlums bent on violence and robbery before shrugging shoulders with "qu'attendez-vous des hooligans anglais avex leurs faux billets?" smacks me in the face as rank injustice.
Last year, I wrote to Alexandre Holroyd, the deputé (MP) who represents French voters resident in the UK, reminding him we had met briefly at a debate in London ahead of the French parliamentary elections.
This is what I said:
'I obtained French nationality in 2021 [and] was able for the first time to vote in the presidential and legislative elections. Without the least difficulty, I voted for Emmanuel Macron and then for you.
But I feel total disgust at the way Gerald Darmanin and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra tried to blame Liverpool supporters for events at the Stade de France. Their comments made it abundantly clear they were predisposed to shift the responsibility for anything that went wrong.
The result is that good, decent people - including women, even pregnant, children, the disabled er - were demonised. The overwhelming majority of Liverpool supporters - and, I am sure, Real Madrid fans - behaved impeccably.
I’m a passionate football fan - not Liverpool -and am under no illusions about the problem of hooliganism. As a journalist, I have written about it often. But this was emphatically not a case of yobs on the rampage but, as the Senate report finds, of the authorities and police getting it wrong and then insulting the victims by blaming them instead of owning up to their own failings and disgraceful excesses.
My own daughter supports Liverpool and considered taking her 13 year old daughter to Paris for the game. Thank heavens she couldn’t get tickets give them abject failure of the authorities to ensure they would have been safe.
My own view, having covered The Hillsborough tragedy, is that police actions on the night could easily have led to loss of life, far worse of course than the false allegations of Darmanin and AOC.
I am reassured that the Senate has produced such an open and critical report, appalled at the ministers’ failure even now to own up and issue unqualified apologies.'
Eventually, M Holroyd replied:
'... Indeed, the report produced by the Senat as well as the police enquiry which is still underway have helped to bring light to the causes of the events that took place outside the Stade de France on the 28th of May. In front of the Sénat, M. Darmanin apologised to the supporters who suffered from the poor management of the crowd at different stages throughout the evening.
The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 shone light on the risks and tragic consequences of overcrowding at sporting events and this is a subject matter which is not taken lightly by neither the French authorities nor the French parliamentarians who hold them accountable.'
And my response?
'Thank you, M Holroyd. You know, however that this is simply not good enough. M Darmanin and the sports minister owed deep and sincere apologies not just for the failures of the authorities but for their own insults and false accusations about the Liverpool supporters.'
They are still waiting, just as they had to wait nearly 34 years for formal recognition that the cause of the terrible loss of life Hillsborough was not drunken yobbishness from Scousers but the total failure of safe, effective policing that day in Sheffield.
Then, as now, police added unforgivable insult to death and injury by covering up - yes, that means lying - about their own negligence and instead trying to deflect blame on to innocent fans.
There is a culture of cover-up and dishonesty that, together with conduct generally unbecoming, has brought public life into disrepute in recent times. We have seen it in the UK with shameless recourse to news management, sleaze, exaggeration, evasiveness and downright lies. The Hillsborough cover-up, and the continuing failure of the Government even now to make a meaningful response to the same report that exposed it, represent stains on Britain and demeans notions of essential British fair play.
Le fair play britannique is a familiar piece of franglais. There is not always le fair play français when it comes to dealing with crowds. Underpaid, overworked police officers sometimes find gratuitous violence comes easily. When writing about the gilets jaunes protests, I came across ample evidence of dreadful, wholly unjustified brutality (the case of Genevieve Legay was one glaring example).
That culture, or the twin culture of officialdom resorting routinely to duplicity or routinely to violence, must be broken. And the pages of Salut!, needless to say, stand open to m Darmanin, Mme Oudéa-Castéra and M Holroyd should they feel unfairly challenged above.
But let me close with the powerful recollections of the events of May 28 2022 of Ted Morris, who chairs the Liverpool Disabled Supporters' Association. This was his submission to the inquiring Uefa panel (as quoted byThe Guardian):
“I started receiving messages saying our disabled supporters were being gassed and crushed outside the turnstiles … they were terrified and panicking. It was harrowing to receive these messages with me unable to help them. They said the situation outside the stadium was becoming critical, and they feared for their lives. I thought many of our disabled supporters were now in danger of being crushed. This group included children with disabilities, blind fans and wheelchair users.
“In my opinion, it was only thanks to the restraint and actions shown by the supporters of Liverpool that a major disaster and probably a death were averted. No one in authority helped our disabled supporters. The saddest thing about this is that our disabled fans have arrived in Paris to attend a football festival, but at that very moment, they are in the middle of a carnival of horrors, which will leave them with long-term mental scars”.
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