Blabbers don’t matter to Blatter

The effort to oust Sepp Blatter failed and he bounced back like a football

So okay. Some might think this is rather farfetched. But consider this for a while. Are not the goings on in Fifa (forget the French and stick to a simple English translation – international football federation) so like our own politics?

Which is worse is hard to tell. But the similarities are so uncanny that it should send a chill down the spine. At least it will prove one is not spineless now that somebody or other is forever accusing somebody else of not ha

ving a backbone. These accusations are thrown with some abandon when politicians and their cohorts confront each other especially on TV talk shows in the heat of the night.

It is true of course that our domestic politics does not have the international spread that make Fifa’s activities raise hackles in some continents and cheers in others. But our politics does have its own international ramifications. 

International conspiracies

Not so long ago one read remarks in the local media that Mahinda Rajapaksa’s defeat at the presidential election was the result of an international conspiracy hatched in the West with some help from India’s spy agency RAW, as they desired regime change. 

Only a few weeks back the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a quick visit to Colombo. This was many years after one of his predecessors dropped in on our capital city. Kerry seemed to be in a hurry to visit this wonder of Asia as though climate change (for which the US has contributed so generously) would soon wipe us off the face of the planet. He probably wanted to see the results of Washington’s handiwork, if one is to believe the conspiracy theorists.

Now just five months after Rajapaksa’s defeat Sepp Blatter, the long-surviving President of Fifa, is said to have been the victim of another such conspiracy. His daughter would rather avoid mentioning the US and UK and say there were “dark forces” behind the plot. I doubt when she said dark forces she meant the colour of the skin of the conspirators.

Others, it seemed, were more pointed. Their fingers were turned towards those transatlantic cousins, the US and UK. Except this time round their joint effort failed to oust Blatter who bounced back like a football.

Blatter boxes on

If we are to believe all this – and certainly regime change was wished for by several foreign states and groups bristling with anger at an uppity Sri Lanka – it seemed to have succeeded on our own soil but failed miserably to throw out Blatter who has taken a long lease on the Fifa presidency.

Interestingly Blatter did not need to amend the organisation’s constitution to continue his extended life as head of one of the world’s greatest sporting bodies. No constitutional change, not even an 18th Amendment, was required to keep him ensconced in the post. Blatter simply boxes on, to change the sporting metaphor, as though nothing has happened.

Again, like in Sri Lanka, law enforcement authorities have pounced on some of the top officials of Fifa. Seven of them were arrested and 17 others have had indictments of corruption against them.

Now have we not read of such things happening closer home, not just in the political arena but even in some of our sports bodies and State institutions, though some officials seem to have got away more easily than the politicians.

But in faraway Switzerland, things were falling apart around the head honcho. Still Blatter batted on (to slip into another sporting metaphor) regardless. Maybe a modern-day Cassius or a Brutus is on the prowl with daggers drawn trying to do a Caesarean operation on Blatter before long.

Attempts to resurrect the fallen

Shades of Sri Lanka, critics of Yahapalanaya would loudly yell, angry at the way some of the leaders have been treated since their political fall from the citadels of power.

Attempts to resurrect the fallen are going on. Hark back to those mass rallies that began at Nugegoda and spread elsewhere. The demand that the fallen leader be returned to a position of importance goes on even as we write.

But Blatter did not need rallies. He wanted votes. So while annoyed opponents were blabbing and still others blathering on Blatter’s sheer impertinence in seeking re-election for the fifth time, the old veteran appears to have done his homework better than his mainly Western critics.

There were threats to boycott the upcoming election if Blatter did not call it off. Some football associations and federations were talking of pulling out of Fifa. Still others were threatening to set up a rival organisation.

Funny, though. One thought that Blatter’s critics had found a common candidate in the shape of Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan to oppose the man. But if Sri Lanka’s common candidate did oust his rival, Blatter’s opponent, a Royal though he may be, failed miserably. This was indeed a Royal failure though in Sri Lanka Royalists appear to be bagging all ministries and posts, thanks to the old school tie.

Despite the bluster and threats, mainly from the Western membership, the election was held last week. On the first ballot Blatter mustered 133 votes of the 209-strong membership, falling just short of a 2/3rd majority that would have seen him through in the first round. The Prince got 73 votes.

The writing was surely on the wall and Prince Ali read it correctly. He threw in the towel and anything else there was to throw, in a public display of surrender retreating to Jordan one supposes just as much as Mahinda Rajapaksa did returning home to Medamulana.

Royal families also stick together

But just as birds do, Royal families also stick together. So the day after Prince Ali withdrew from the race and presumably went home, here in London Prince William stuck his royal oar into the already-muddied waters surrounding Fifa.

The Prince who is the President of the Football Association, speaking before the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium last Saturday, called for a cleanup of world football.

As though in a riposte to England’s critics of Blatter and Fifa ‘The Spectator’ wrote: “Of course Fifa is a fetid pit of corruption, but we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground, not with our own history of bungs and match-fixing scandals. The attack on Fifa from these islands is inspired not by moral superiority but by our failure to secure the right to hold the 2018 World Cup.”

Sri Lanka’s political behaviour

Anyway the British Vice-President on the Fifa committee has already resigned. What will really happen when the committee meets this week is anybody’s guess right now.

But if Blatter’s critics mainly from the West want to really make their point they should study Sri Lanka’s political behaviour. I don’t mean that those attending the committee meeting should resort to the kind of language that my old friend Vasudeva Nanayakkara let slip – inadvertently of course, because he does not use coarse language in public.

However, one could recommend another course of action. If the ground outside the meeting place is not to rough or the floor inside is not too hard, they could always take a leaf out of the Weerawansa School of Public Dissent. After all it is turning into summer so a “farce unto death” outside is surely warranted.