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Playing for peace - The Football Schools in the Balkans
Anders Levinsen (1991) Life in the Refugee Camp A moving sight encountered by anyone who visits a refugee camp is the old women sitting on their grey emergency relief blankets with their vacant stares. Their whole life consisted in the family, the cow and the small lot where they grew vegetables, and now they have lost it all. Women who look like the witch in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Tinder-Box, a bent-over shape with a gnarly stick and a scarf tied under her chin, as if keeping her last tooth in place. How could anyone ever have wanted to harm these women? How will they ever recover their lives and their futures? I think the old women are somehow more vulnerable than the children. Children are more resilient, more buoyant. They may have lost their fathers, their everyday lives may be precarious, their homes may be reduced to a couple of blankets spread out on the floor of a run-down classroom occupied by thirty other refugee families. There may be individuals in the room who have lost their marbles during the escape and now spend their days and nights rocking back and forth nervously on their blankets, uttering incomprehensible sounds. But the children have an astonishing way of making life seem normal. Obviously, I only see the children from the outside––the language barrier and the nature of my work do not permit me to peer into their little souls, which must be packed with traumatic experiences. But the children play, after all. It is as if ”the good game” has a magical power that helps the children stay afloat like corks that bob up again and again and again. Some children have made up a game in the ruins outside. The worst thing I have seen was refugee children in Northern Iraq playing hide-and-seek in Shianadary, an old military encampment crammed with mines where we found an old stockpile of leaking chemical munitions, protective clothing and atropine ampoules. Other children play war. Some have made the fanciest cars out of wire and used canisters. In the parking lot there is always a small group of boys playing football with an empty can, a punctured plastic ball or a tied-up ball of rags. There is magic in the ball playing. The National War Psychosis, Demonisation, or the Logic of War
If you have once lived in a war zone, you will know that war and violent conflicts have their own dynamics. When in 1992-93 I was heading the UN emergency relief operation in central and north-eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, I witnessed first-hand how the violence escalated from nothing to utter madness, tearing country and people apart. In the beginning of the war the soldiers were content to punish their prisoners of war by cutting off their fingers. Later, the ears were put under the knife, and when one party removed one ear from their prisoners, the other sliced off both ears. Then tongues and heads became valued trophies, producing the certain result that the other side chased the same trophies, and maybe they even put out their victims’ eyes before they cut their tongues out or slit their throats. When the violence was at its peak I saw the grisly remains of six women and eight children that soldiers had set fire to, without bothering to kill them first. The women’s charred arms lay stretched out from their bodies, as if trying to protect their children from the lethal flames, and the crumbled extremities resembled burnt-out matches that would collapse if touched ever so lightly. The conflicts and the violence in Bosnia snowballed. Territorial dominance was the end, and the means were violence, massacres, fear, hatred and nationalism. These means have produced the most destructive emotions in us all, they have polarised conflicting parties and have escalated conflicts and produced still more revenge, violence, barbarism and destruction. War and violence have their own dynamics, based on emotions like fear, hatred and the desire for revenge, emotions that live in us all and are nourished by chauvinist nationalism. When the war is on, its progression is determined more by the specific acts, the violence and the ”national war psychosis” and much less by the ethnic, historical or religious factors so often identified as the causes of war. In this situation, conflict resolution and emergency aid must help the parties find a viable political solution to their conflict. That is, the external conflict resolution practitioner or aid worker must help decrease the violence and turn around the negative spiral, the demonisation, the logic of war, and stimulate peace-building and constructive processes in the self, between people and in the structures and systems of society at large. Regardless of the image of neutrality and impartiality that emergency aid organisations try to affect, emergency aid is a specific political tool that can be used by the world community to save human lives, to stop and prevent violence and conflict and to stimulate sustainable, democratic developments that respect the right to life of every human being––as expressed in the UN human rights declaration. Conflict resolution and emergency aid are much more than donor and aid organisations distributing food and other relief aid, building or rebuilding destroyed houses or financing large, heavy and expensive bureaucracies. Conflict resolution and emergency aid are also about establishing distribution systems and supporting local structures that promote peace, stability, democracy and human rights. Thus, it is the aid worker’s task to use the relief aid as a practical political tool to counter the violence and the demonisation and make life harder for the warring parties. Table 1: Tasks for the conflict resolution practitioner and the emergency aid worker:
Trading with emergency aid and development aid
The Balkan football schools are based on the idea that the international community and the aid organisations ”trade” emergency and development aid for peace, stability, human rights and democracy. The simple logic of supply and demand applies. If an aid program is very attractive to the local population, more people want to join and the organisers may be very selective. The Open Fun Football Schools is one such attractive development project, and we are in a position to implement it with the specific objective of stimulating the peace, stability and democratisation processes in the Balkans. In other words, the more enthusiasm we are able to generate about our football schools, the more attractive they become, and the easier it is for us to require that the participants further our political goals. Thus, we work hard to create incentives that make children, parents, volunteer leaders, trainers, football clubs and the local authorities feel they miss out on something important if they do not join the project. At the same time, these incentives enable us to be very explicit about what we expect in return. For example, we negotiate individual agreement with a number of local organisations -- such as the mayors of the towns involved, the participating football clubs and the school leaders. In each case, we specify the numbers of children, leaders and trainers that must be involved, the specific project activities we will fund and conduct, the amount of sports equipment and number of balls we leave behind in the clubs after the schools are over, etc. The agreement also specifies the recruitment of the children, the leaders and the trainers and their geographical, social and ethnic balance. We require that all leaders and trainers are unpaid volunteers (the only compensation is a trainer’s uniform). Additionally, we require that a minimum of 12 out of 15 leaders and trainers per school attend one of our regional leader or trainer courses. The agreement also details the facilities and services that we require the local organisers to pay for, such as renting a stadium, bussing the children to the schools, meals for the children, etc. The need for agreements as specific as this is evidenced by the fact that every year we exclude several towns and football clubs from our program because they do not meet our exacting standards. Play as a tool for conflict resolution
I believe that our football schools are a means for conflict management on a par with other conflict resolution techniques, such as mediation, in which a neutral third party engages the conflicting parties in a structured dialogue that helps them reach a practical agreement. Viewed in this light, our starting point is different, though: Children, trainers and leaders gather because of the passion they share and the fun they expect from the game––not because they have specific problems to solve or a conflict to discuss. Right from the start, our football schools are charged with positive energy, and the whole organisational and pedagogical set-up is geared towards nurturing the community spirit and the social relations fuelled by this energy. Compare with more traditional conflict resolution techniques that start with the problem to be solved, that is, a projection of the deadlocked conflict situation. For the football schools to work as a means for conflict resolution, the clubs, leaders, trainers, and players involved must be neighbours that do not share everyday activities due to ethnic, political or social divisions. They are brought together at the football schools across these divisions. This is our reason for the detailed requirements made for the geographical, ethnic and social mix of the participants. Trainers and children from the various ethnic groups form mixed teams. Good and bad players on the same team, boys and girls, black and white. This is not a conflict management tool that has the parties sit around a table discussing why they cannot live together peacefully. We create a program where people act and play together in a constructive atmosphere, in real time, so to speak. As soon as the organisational set-up is in order and the participants have checked in, we start focussing on the fun and learning involved in ball playing. Put differently, we use our football schools to create a ”window” or a meeting place where children and adults from all ethnic and social groups, beginners and experienced players, boys and girls, trainers, leaders and football clubs can meet and enjoy the camaraderie of the game, despite any initial distrust and the invisible, mental front lines that still live inside most of them. We meet in ”the good game”, which, in my opinion, is an excellent conflict resolution tool because the nature of the good game is that it
It is fascinating to see that, again and again, trainers and leaders who have literally shot at each other across a front line just a few years earlier now organise football schools together for their children. The magical power of the game is capable of moving people across physical and mental barriers, if only you focus single-mindedly on the inner qualities of the game and the sense of community that the good game fosters. The football schools have shown that many adults (in fact, far more than we imagined possible) are prepared to put aside the terrors of the war, the hatred and the fear and seek out a new future along with their children.
It has been tremendously gratifying to hear from some of the people involved in our projects that they consider our humble initiative one of the most popular, constructive and effective contributions to peace, stability and democracy in their area. This is a tribute to the egalitarian approach to children’s football promoted by the Danish Football Association and to the democratic values of popular participation so evident in the Danish sports culture. The Social and Pedagogical Dimensions of the Football Schools
Aside from the political goals already described, the football schools also represent an attempt to motivate the many run-down and crisis-ridden football clubs in the Balkans to create healthy social activities for the local children. We usually tell our leaders and trainers that we want the football schools to be so much fun that the kids will want to play football with their peers all year long. The football school must serve as an inspiration for their everyday practice, so that the children will look forward to their next practice session. We hope that after the school, the kids will beg their parents for permission to join the local football club, thus putting pressure on the clubs and the trainers to shape up. It is important to be aware that children's football in the Balkans is based on elite sports traditions of the old communist days. Training is systematic and scientific, there is much measuring and testing to produce the perfect player, and players are often excluded if their physiological measurements do not fit the mathematical formulae. Practice often looks like a military drill and the kids are ordered to run the perimeter of the field without a ball, round and round. If a group of children want to play football in the Balkans, they have to do it during physical training in school or in the street. Incredible as it may sound, football clubs cannot afford to buy balls, tops or vests for their teams. According to the general secretary of the Yugoslavian Football Federation, this is one of the main reasons why in the spring of 2001 only 20 out of Serbia’s 1250 football clubs organised football for children under age 10. It is also important to understand that as a result of the wars and the economic crisis in the Balkans, there are hardly any other social activities for children besides school. In recent years, more and more kids have formed gangs that spend all their time in the street, engaging in petty theft, random acts of mayhem, etc. More pro-social activities need to be made available to these kids, under adult supervision. Here, the football clubs could play a much more prominent role, attracting children, youths and adults alike, given their strong social networks and spirit of commitment and their traditions for community and volunteerism. It is thus our intention to use our football schools, our leader and trainer courses and the piles of equipment we leave behind in the clubs as a means of inducing the clubs and their volunteer leaders and trainers to open the doors to the local kids. Ideally, clubs would try to create a psychological and social space where skill instruction is supplemented by learning how to engage in constructive commitments with other people on and off the playing field. Our football schools should set a good example that helps the clubs and the volunteer club trainers realise that the healthy development of the child and constructive social relations take priority over the victories to be had by the trainers or the club. When our leaders and trainers have completed their training in the fun football concept, they are expected to appreciate and be able to demonstrate in their training that football for children puts children first. Regardless of talent and qualifications, our participants must feel that they sharpen their skills, that is, they must learn new tricks, fancy kicks or other details too elaborate for normal practice in the club, or they must be given tools or dreams to take home and build on. Moreover, they must have fun playing ball with good friends, thus appreciating the sharing and community that goes with the good game. Finally, it is extremely important that all the players feel they excel and succeed many times during each game or practice session. Systematically repeated experiences of this kind will boost their self-confidence and personality, as well as their desire to play and enjoy a game with good friends. Working with “focus fields” As will be apparent, a football school is about much more than winning and the single-minded development of technical talent. It is the entire physical, psychological and social space in which the football school takes place. It is thus a complex whole with many ”living parts”, each of which interacts in many different ways. Inspired by the Danish sports educators Max Rasmussen and Knud Aage Nielsen we have chosen to introduce the concept of a "focus field" in our football schools. A focus field is an attempt to define some of these living parts that go into a football school––parts that the leader or the trainer can single out for special treatment. Working with twenty-four experienced instructors, including five national coaches, from Bosnia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro we identified twelve focus fields that fall in these categories:
One common feature of our football schools is that, initially, the participants are always unconfident, insecure and unsure about the situation. During the breaks on their first day they often seek out their friends and find security in little groups like deer herding in the woods. This is quite a natural thing to do, for the kids in our schools often have parents who fought a war with each other, and maybe this is the first time they set foot in ”enemy territory”. Other children are nervous because it is difficult to relate to the 200 children and adults that are gathered in the school, or because they feel technically inferior to their peers on the playing field.
As organisers we must confront this anxiety, insecurity and mistrust, since one of our purposes is indeed to turn these negative emotions into something positive through the ball playing and our fun football concept. A basic sense of security is simply a sine qua non if children are to take an active part and learn anything at all. Thus, we go to great lengths to tell our leaders and trainers that it is their duty to create an environment where everyone is comfortable and feel secure enough to join in and give it all they’ve got, where children dare use their imagination and play freely, where it is okay to make mistakes and where the child learns to take responsibility and make a positive contribution to the whole. Ideally, the children learn that community and sharing come about through constructive participation and are dissipated by indifference. To illustrate, when we work with focus fields in the category “Football, sharing, closeness and security,” we put much emphasis on the arena. It is very important to us that we set up the arena such that everybody feels welcome, confident and secure and that we greet the children with our arms open rather than by the stern looks of a drill sergeant, etc. We like to give our schools a bit of a festival mood. Four years’ experience have taught us that the atmosphere is usually better if we ”pack” the activities and have the twelve teams, 200 children in all, practice on one single playing field. In this way the large goals cannot be used, but children cannot take in a whole playing field anyway, and not much space is needed to practice the scissors kick or other technical details. This packing does require, however, precise boundaries between different teams’ areas on the field, a tightly run organisation, music piped into the stadium, local press attendance, etc. The arena has to bristle with the energy of a well-prepared team of leaders and trainers committed to making this the experience of a lifetime for the children. The conscious trainer is another important focus field at our leader and trainer courses. We want the trainers to pay close attention to the behaviour of the individual player as well as the dynamics of the entire group. Specifically, he has to make sure things go in the right direction, which is from left to right in the table below[1] Players’ behaviour:
When boys and girls, experienced players and beginners, black and white play on the same team another dimension is added, something different from the daily practice in the regular clubs, where each team has 16 players of roughly equal skill. The social dimension becomes more important, and our leaders and trainers must ensure that they create a context and a program that use the game and the ball-playing to train the children to:
To illustrate, when we do a particular exercise or small competition with the children, the trainer must ensure that the exercise serves the additional purpose of stimulating group cohesion and commitment. This can be done by simple means: starting the practice session with a loud cheer, playing a few entertaining tag-games, doing a ”deal game” where the children negotiate with each other how they will solve a particular task. You can design an exercise so that it gives special attention or status to the children that are poorly integrated into group. And as a trainer you can confront the issue directly and talk sense to the individual children who act in a socially disruptive manner. The focus field ”Co-operation and communication” is handled in a similar manner. This is about giving, sending and receiving signals, making yourself available to others, signalling where and how you would like to receive or pass the ball, ”making you co-players good” (by passing the ball in a way they can use, to the right foot, the left foot, straight on, while running, etc.). Of course, issues such as these are not just matters of football; they apply in all areas of life. Finally, let me mention that the focus fields under the category Playing fun football deal with the joy and the sheer fun to be derived form the game—hooray football, the truly playful aspects of the game. Thus, there is no physical or tactical training at our football schools at all. However, inspired by the Danish Football Association’s summer football schools and their outstanding programme we are quite focussed on how to train and nourish the magic and the playfulness of the game. Thus, we train the unusual kick, the delicate pass, and the elegant dribble. We try to give the children some dreams and tools they can refine after they leave the school. Why are we so concerned with the playful and fun elements in the game? Because it is immensely gratifying for a child to master a surprising and elegant detail; because it helps each child learn and grow; because mastery, sophistication, imagination, magic and visions are needed in modern football today; because the good game as described above touches everyone who tries it and makes us open up to each other; because the good game is a tremendous tool for managing conflict and because the good game, by its very nature, features the rules of sportsmanship and the democratic values that are so important on the social and political scene in the Balkans today.
[1] Adapted from Knud Aage Nielsen and Max Rasmussen. Spil bold – med livet som indsats (Play Ball – For Sweet Life). Copenhagen, DGI, 1999,.
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