Football Nowruz

By Vestnik Kavkaza

On March 23 in Moscow the Olympic sports complex "Luzhniki" hosted the mini-football tournament "Football Nowruz". The event, organized as part of the citywide festival Nowruz 2013, was held under the motto "Friendship of Nations, Football Fraternity." The sports festival was attended by football teams representing national associations and national groups in Moscow, including the team of Azerbaijan, the Armenian team "Ayduk", the team of the Kazakh Diaspora "Murager", the team of the Ukrainian Diaspora "Ukraine" and many others. At the end of the tournament a grand award ceremony for the winners was held. “This is the first time we have held this tournament,” Dmitry Choi, coordinator of the international organizing committee of the tournament. “It is called the First Open Spring Inter-ethnic Mini-football Tournament. With the support of the Government of Moscow, in particular, the Department of National Policy, we were able to gather 16 teams from 16 Diasporas, such as Serbia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Buryats, Tatars. Thus, the sport has united people of different religions, different ethnic origins, and at the heart of the tournament there is the friendship of peoples, a football fraternity.”

“This is a joint project of the Premier League and the Moscow government to attract a large number of social groups that live in Moscow,” Sergey Cheban, executive director of the Premier League. “We would like to work together to solve problems such as mutual respect, tolerance of all fans. I think football is the game that will allow us to solve them. It's great that every time the participants of our events are more and more numerous. I would like to congratulate you, of course, on the holiday of Nowruz, on the celebration of the spring equinox, and I wish that our game continues to unite us and make it possible to communicate more often.”

Russia plans to spend about 500 million rubles for improvement of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional unity. Measures on prevention of ethnic conflicts in Russia are listed in the plan of implementation of the State Ethnic Policy Strategy. A special attention is paid to the mass media: the state will support those editorials which promote harmonization of relations between various nationalities. The plan also says about adaptation of migrants.