The common denominator of Fenerbahçe supporters is their commitment to football and other branches of sports, and their passionate love for the colours of yellow and dark blue.
But, in that case, why do we identify ourselves here with Vamos Bien? Why do we spell our clubs name specifically like that? Why have we composed a separate platform for this?
This is because members of Vamos Bien are committed to egalitarian principles and critical to all sorts of hierarchies that could take shape in the stadiums. Members of Vamos Bien consider all groups that have been organized by the passion for yellow and dark blue colours as natural allies. We, as members of Vamos Bien, believe in justice and don?t subscribe to any sense of unfairness. We rebelliously value honourable defeats over unjustified victories.
We appreciate labour and skills, and not money. We applaud the ones who struggle with all their hearts to achieve the maximum performance, and not the most costly and expensive ones.
We are against the mass media, which keep conjuring up complete lies, provoking conflict and false spectacle, and destabilising sports clubs in collaboration with other parts with vested interests. We are against the violence in the sports arenas. Conceiving football as a platform of fair competition, we resist the importation of ordinary violence into the sports fields, which has painfully permeated into the all vestiges of societal life in recent years. We protest against the mainstream rhetoric that creates fictive categories of ?terror? instead of looking deep into the reasons of the increasing violence within the everyday life.
We are strongly against sexism. We take women?s rights to support their team as natural as men?s. We will remain critical to all sorts of acts and discourses that have distanciated women from being a part of football stadiums. Therefore we do not accept the use of any discriminatory speech act targeting women, gays and transsexuals.
We, as the members of Vamos Bien, are strongly committed to the struggle against racism and chauvinism. We do not subscribe to the naïve illusion that there is no racism against the black footballers in Turkey. We completely despise the ethnically discriminatory rhetoric posed against the Kurds in the Diyarbakırspor matches; against the Laz in the matches with Trabzonspor and other teams from the east Black Sea coast; Tartarians in the Eskişehirspor matches; Armenians in the Euro cup matches against the French teams; or Greeks during the matches with Greek and Greek Cypriot teams.
We are against the elimination of financially disprivileged supporters from the tribunes. Therefore we will oppose the expensive ticket policies that might keep away tens of thousands of Fenerbahçe fans who have dedicated decades of their lives to the club they are in love with. Similarly, we will remain critical to the growing power of pay-channels that sentence millions of supporters to abjectly priced tariffs. We support the broadcast of football channels in freely accessible broadcast companies.
We will resist to the attempts to transform supporters into spectators, onlookers or customers. Members of Vamos Bien are devout supporters and favour anything that reinforces supporter culture. Hence, we will remain opposed to the use of promotion logos of commercial companies on club jerseys. We will not accept any additional sponsor name to be attached to the name of Fenerbahçe. We consider that such financial support can be instead replaced by other means to be provided by the collaboration between the club administrator and supporters.
We will always be in fight with any club administration, official authority or security or organisator company that prevent the use of flags, banners and all kind of expressions that originate from the supporters, and embellish the stadiums instead with tedious commercial promotion. We are against the ban for flag holder sticks, against the torture practiced on visitor supporters, against any security measure that does not allow the visitor supporters into the matches and the exaggeratedly priced ticket policies that aim to rip the visiting supporters. We are strongly opposed to the reckless use of batons, teargas, handcuffs and guns by the security forces, and to their usually aggressive attitude, which actually reinforces destabilisation rather than creating calm.
We are against the exploitation of football and other sport activities by the vested interests of central government, state authorities, municipal officers and corporate elite. We are against any black market organization and encouragement by the club administrations, and the consequent emergence of chauvinist mafioso formations.
SINCE we are allies with all people that sympathise with the colours of yellow and dark blue, we are internationalists. Vamos Bien is Lefter Küçükandonyanis. It is Can Bartu. It is Karnik Aslanyan. It is Didi, Dadcu and Rapaiç. It is Revivo, Rıdvan, Aykut. It is Pierre Van Hooijdonk, Alex de Souza, Tuncay, Anelka and Appiah. It does comprise hundreds of name impossible to list here. These football players have deserved devotion not because of their ethnicity or nationality but of their belongingness to the realm of football. Therefore, FENERBAHÇE is Turkish, Laz, Kurdish, Circassian, Armenian, Greek, Jew, Brazilian, Serbian, Bosnian, Swedish. It is the brotherhood and sisterhood of peoples.
Members of Vamos Bien are free spirits. They do not obey, and they don?t recognize any domination. They give their decisions with their emancipated reason. They defend participatory democracy. Vamos Bien favours the right of each supporter to be a congress member of the club, and demands the facilitation of conditions for each supporter to potentially take part in the club administration.
We, as the members of Vamos Bien are on the side of labour. We are aware that the local footballer community is not only composed of the players of the three big clubs of Istanbul, and that it exceeds to thousands of labourers actively playing in different levels of leagues. Accordingly, we object to the enslavement of footballers by professional dealers, managers and club administrations. We argue for a syndicate formation that would organise football labourers from all levels. We claim the reactivation of Professional Footballers Association and reorganization of it as the real representative of local football players.
We, as the members of Vamos Bien pursue the principles of democracy. We are well aware of the fact that the realm of sports is composed as a unity by supporters, athletes, technical coaching and club administrations. For that reason, we oppose to the transformation of sport federations, especially the football federation that has developed an incredibly vast budget, into hunting fields for mafioso formations and politically or commercially motivated structures. We defend the democratic reformation of sports federation counsels as completely representative of all segments of the corresponding sport.
We, as the members of Vamos Bien, are sensitive to the environmental problematics. We are against the property speculations on the fields and locations that are ultimately important for public health and life, and we are against the sacrifice of them for implanting of new sport grounds. We support the construction of environment-friendly facilities.
We are in favour of supporting all amateur branches and not only football. We defend the expansion of the spectatorship of sports to all social segments without any discrimination, and we champion the encouragement of everyone to literally practice sports.
We, as the members of Vamos Bien, conceive sport activities as occasions for strengthening geographically transversal solidarity -in opposition against the self-isolating politics of nationalism.