When I saw photos of Iranian soccer players wearing green wrist bans in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi — standard bearer of the nation’s political opposition — I thought, “Ballsy, but dangerous.”
Now there are reports that some of those players have been punished by being forced off the team. Considering what we’ve seen in the streets of Tehran, they’re lucky if that’s all that happens to them.
Still, it’s unlikely they’ll face what the Iraqi players did back when Saddam Hussein’s son Uday ran that country’s soccer program.
According to a Genocide Watch document, among Uday’s toys were “a sarcophagus, with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so victims could be punctured and suffocated.”
And “a metal framework designed to clamp over a prisoner’s body, with footrests at the bottom, rings at the shoulders and attachment points for power cables,so the victim could be hoisted and subjected to electric shocks.”
Such, uh, motivational techniques … never seemed to translate into victories for Uday’s team.
Oddly enough.
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