Football, War and Nationalism

Football often serves as a fetish for war, replaying past conflicts and sometimes even setting off new ones. The international game offers a unique opportunity to unpack the concepts of nationhood and "imagined community". By inviting us to imagine the "nation" in new ways it also offers a unique opportunity the problematic questions of just who and what comprises "the nation" represented on the football field -- and by extension, beyond it.

How Football explains the “Gangster’s Paradise”

• RED STAR BELGRADE, is the most beloved and the most successful team in Serbia. But like every club in Europe , it has fans capable of terrific violence.

• At Red Star violent fans occupy the pride of place: they meet with club officials, their leaders receive salaries, they have access to office spaces in the team headquarter.

• The Fan Gangs won this influence with intimidation• In 2006 some fans burst into the training session

and beat three of their own players with bats, bludgeons and bars “ “we do not tolerate lack of commitment on the pitch”.

• COMPLICITY IN THE BALKAN WARS of 1990s

Breakup of Yugoslavia• The Breakup of Yugoslavia refers to a series of conflicts

and political upheavals resulting in the dissolution of Yugoslavia (the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFR).

• The country was a conglomeration of six regional republics and two autonomous provinces that was roughly divided on ethnic lines and split up in the 1990s into several independent countries. These eight federal units were the six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and two autonomous provinces within Serbia: Kosovo and Vojvodina.

• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Breakup_of_Yugoslavia-TRY2.gif

                                       

Josip Broz Tito

“Brotherhood and

Unity”

Slovene/Catholic 91%Croat/Catholic 3%Serb/E Ortho 2%

Croat/Catholic 78%Serb/E Ortho 12%

Serb/ E Ortho 63%Montenegrin/ E Ortho 6%Albanian/Muslim 14%Hungarian/Catholic 4%

Muslims (43.7%)Croats/Catholic (17.3%) Serbs/E Ortho (31.4 %)

66% Macedonian/E Ortho23% Albanian/Muslim2% Serb/E Ortho4% Turk/Muslim

Patterns of Ethnic Settlement

Facilitated the Conflict and Break-up

Bosnia: 40% ofurban couplesethnically mixed

Key to the conflictKey to the conflict

• World underestimated the power and violence of appeals to ethnicity and nationalism

• Milosevic– purged moderates – played upon old fears/animosities – engaged in specific policies designed to

– perpetuate the fear and – SEGREGATE the populations and REDRAW national

boundaries to their own advantage– specifically calculated the West’s inability/reluctance to

get involved

                                       

                                  

• With the rise of Gorbachev and liberalization of relations with USSR– Yugoslavia was no longer a crucial link to US foreign

policy• US and West was focused on Persian Gulf• WEST not prepared to deal with conflicting goals:

integrity of state v. self determination

Bosnia Bosnia • Geographically it’s in the middle

• Territory was desirable for its access to the Adriatic Sea and for strategic reasons

• It was an example of a truly multi-ethnic society with no majority

• Muslims (43.7%)• Croats (17.3%) • Serbs (31.4 %)

• The population consisted of large ethnic groups • Linked to Serbia and Croatia• Serbia and Croatia wanted these people and their lands to

join Serbia and Croatia respectively, rather than be in a multi-ethnic Bosnia

IRONY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING

• Ethnic cleansing and mass murder produced ethnically pure territorial units

• ultimately produces NEATER maps on which peace settlement could be worked – allowing the safe areas to fall got rid of enclaves that

cluttered the map

• world leaders denounce ethnic cleansing BUT in the end BACK RESULTS which bring peace

After Dayton AccordsBefore the War

BOSNIA

• Declares independence, too– Bosnian Serbs • declare an independent Serb state and lay siege to

Sarajevo, claiming the city as its capital• Yugoslav artillery shell Bosnia/Sarajevo—providing

support to Serb irregulars who engage in ethnic cleansing of Bosnia• 1000 Serbs shells a day hitting Sarajveo• 3,777 hit in 16 hours on July 23, 1993

SARAJEVO BEFORE THE WAR

SREBRENICA 1995

The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, refers to the July 1995 killing, during the Bosnian War, of more than 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The mass murder was described by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War

CAMPS at Omarska

Dayton Peace Accord

Single Bosnia state (country)divided into Bosnia Croat-Muslim Federation and Bosnian Serb Republic (2 republics)joint presidencyfree elections

• END up w/ Bosnia ethnic enclaves each elect strong nationalist governments

NATO implementation force (IFOR) to enforce provisions and ensure electionsWar crime tribunal

• Red Star’s fans played a pivotal role in the revival of Serbian Nationalism: the idea that the Serbs are the eternal victims of history who must fight to preserve their dignity.

• Draze- a Red Star hard core fan-: “We hate Croatians and cops: it does not make any difference; I would kill them all!”; “I like beating them with metal bars and special kick to break legs, when a guy is not noticing”; “Our favorite tactics is dressing in the opposition’s jersey: this allows us to lure the visiting fans, befriending them, offering them a ride in our cars and then transport them to remote localities and…beat them”.

• Red Star vs Partizan: 30 minutes before the kick-off in 2004 the Ultra Red Bad Boys quietly gathered at one end of the stadium by a small outcropping of trees. Each fan carried a bar and a metal bat. They formed a V shaped formation and run around the stadium beating every single person they encountered. First the visiting fans, then the Police; both were taken aback and had no time to respond; many casualties were left on the ground in 5 minutes.

• Ultra Red never curse though; they believe to occupy an higher moral terrain than their foes: no use of firearms (like those the Partizan fans used to hit a fifteen-year-old Red Star supporter), no beating of the enemy when he loses his consciusness.

• Three-fingered salutations: holy trinity (God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit) and the Serb believe that they are the planet’s most authentic representatives of it.

During the 1990s war, Serbian paramilitaries forced Muslim and Croats women to make this salute before raping or killing them.

• In 1991 Red Star won the Champions League (European Champions Cup): despite its history as a vehicle of Serbian Nationalism, Red Star included players from all over Yugoslavia. Indeed, the team was exalted by Yugoslavian TV as a mixture of the best ethnic stereotypes transposed into their players: Slovenian were superb defenders, Croatians have a natural goal instinct, Bosnian and Serbians were masters of dribbling and creative passing although lacking in tactical awareness.

• Their victory over the Western European football superpowers should have given a glimmer of hope for the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia…but the opposite was true.

• From Ultra Red Bad Boys a hooligan paramilitary force was organized and armed. The Red Star fans became shock troops at the service of the Serbian Nationalist leader Milosevic: the most active agents of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Hooligans• “A disgrace to civilized society” [M.Thatcher]

• Based on the death toll the English were –back then- the world’s leading producer of deranged fans (more than 100 victims in the 1980s); but they were not alone.

• VIOLENCE HAD BECOME PART OF THE SOCCER CULTURE; and continued being so. The Red Star fans were merely better organized and armed than other similar formations.

• SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS: downsized men whose industrial jobs had been lost due to globalization and whose patriarchal pedestal had been knocked off, desperately wanting to reassert their masculinity.

• Racism and Nationalism are metaphorical ideologies for their lives: their nations and races had been victimized by the world as bad as themselves.

• Economic deprivation and misplacement are therefore the main explanation. But these factors did not explain everything. Indeed one of the most notorious gang of hooligans –the Chelsea Headhunters- included stock-brokers and middle-class thrill searchers.

• Oddly the Red Star’s fans modeled themselves after foreigners they admired: they went down to the Belgrade British cultural center to scan papers for the latest antics of English hooligan.

• They wore Adidas track suits like the other European fans, borrowing heavily from the aesthetic of American gangster rap, their favorite music genre.

• They were an example of globalized gangsterism and nihilistic violence: a subculture which in the Balkans became a real culture.

• The natural conclusion: the BATTLE OF ZAGABRIA

• In 1990 Red Star traveled to Zagabria for a match against its rival club Dinamo Zagre. Two weeks earlier the Croats had elected the ultranationalist Franjo Tudjman, a former general and former president of the Partizan Belgrade football club, who adopted the symbols of the Ustache (the Cratian fascists who during WW2 collaborated with the Nazi and killed thousand of Serb partisans) rousing the nationalist passion of his people

• Indeed, when Tito rule Jugoslavia, these feelings had not disappeared, but simply suppressed because declared illegal. Yugoslavia had never come to terms with the fact that two of its constituencies had slaughtered one another before the Communist regime took over. And when this disappeared, the old wouds reopened.

• In the match between Red Star and Dinamo passions exploded: Dinamo fans began throwing stones at the Red Star fans who chanted “We will kill Tudjman”; fences separating the sectors mysteriously disappeared. A cop beat a Dinamo fans, vonimir Boban –a Dinamo player- intervened with a flying kick into the officer’s gut (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAt2oIJ8Lec&feature=related ); helicopters arrived to evacuate the Serbian players

• To anyone it was clear that both Serbs and Croats had come ready to fight, since it was later found out that rocks had been carefully stockpiled into the stadium, acid had been stored to allow the Croatian fans to burn the fences separating them from the Serbian fans.

• Standing next to the Red Star coach a mysterious secret police killer known as Zeljiko Raznatovic, later known by his Turkish name: ARKAN

Zeljiko Raznatovic• The son of an officer of Yugoslavian airforce.• Conducted a criminal life in Western Europe• He came back to Yugoslavia in 1983 and worked his connections

with the Yugoslavian security apparatus. Well before his return, indeed, the police started recruiting criminals to perform dirty jobs, mostly assassinating dissidents

• As part of the government-sponsored arrangement the criminals could violate the law abroad and then return to Yugoslavian safe-haven. They were also garanteed immunity within the country

• Arkan became a star in this system: he killed a cop, showed his credentials as member of the secret service and left the crime-scene unscathed.

• Arkan prefigured the late-eighties transition from Communism to wild-capitalism; an epoch when gangsters and smugglers came to rule the Serbian booming economy (the same would have happened later on in Russia).

• Arkan helped Slobodan Milosevic to become the boss of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986 by exploiting the long-suppressed nationalism of the Serbs.

• In order to organize and regulate this resurgence nationalism (and of course use it to his own purposes), Arkan tackled the very dangerous issue of reining in the Red Star hooligans who had begun to lift placards with the faces of Serbian orthodox saints and ultranationalist personalities and who had started chanting “Serbia , not Yugoslavia”.

• Under Communism , eastern bloc football clubs were usually founded and supported by the army (CSKA-Central Sport Club of the Army in several Slavic languages) or the police or the trade unions or the Interior Minister. In Belgrade the army supported Partizan and the police backed Red Star.

• To the Serb Nationalist the army represented a traitor to their cause. Indeed, the ideology of the communist army rejected any notion of separate Serbian identity as against workers’ solidarity and ethnic harmony. It must be remembered that after WWII Tito’s communist partisans had murdered and jailed the Chetniks , or Serb Nationalists, who had also battled against the Nazis.

• Red Star was a home for all those who wanted to reclaim their nation

• In 1989 it was understood that Red Star fans could become an incontrollable mess of ultranationalist “gangsta” feelings and behaviour. To control the mess , the police asked Arkan, a Red Star fanatic himself, to step in.

• Arkan negotiated a truce among the warring factions of the Red Star fans renaming them the “Delije”, a title coming from Turkish (mean. Heroes; they acquired martial connotations and a discipline was imposed.

• In the meantime Slovenia and Croatia seceded and their declarations of independence was countered with war by the Serbian Nationalist government

• The Serbian were lacking a reliable regular army and therefore relied on paramilitary forces. Arkan’s Delije became and irresistible recruiting vehicle.

• Their reputation of violence (especially against Croats) were used as a new hierarchy responded to the commands of a single leader was put into being.

• This paramilitary force at the beginning was used to terrorize civilians, causing Muslims and Croats to flee their homes in the territories the Serbian hoped to control.

• Arkan called this army, THE TIGERS. Recruits from Red Star trained at a government-supplied Police base in the Croatian town of Erdut. They were armed; even Red Star players drove to the camp to visit the training fans or to pay their homage to those wounded in battle.

• “”Many of our loyal supporters from the north end of the Marakana [the as the Red Star’s stadium was called]are in the most obvious ways writing the finest pages of the history of Serbia” [Vladan Lukic, Red Star’s captain]

• Arkan’s army fought all the Balkan Wars from the Serbian Offensive in 1991-92 to the resistance against the Croatian counteroffensive launched in 1995. Arkan waged some of the bloodiest operations of the war: he detained Muslim men, loot their homes, beat people, rape women and kill almost 2000 people by the end of the war.

From RED STAR to OBILIC• ARKAN BECAME FAMOUS AND RICH BECAUSE OF THE WAR.

His patriotism was an excuse to loot on a large scale and exploit the black market (especially after sanctions were imposed on the belligerants).

• He was like Al Capone: some district of Belgrade were called Arkansas; and like many mafiosos before him he was trying to legitimize the wealth he accumulated illegally. More specifically he hoped to become the President of Red Star in order to gain international prestige and adoration. But the owners of Red Star refused to sell the team to him. Therefore he “created” his own team: he bought a semi-professional club- Obilic (named after a Serbian knight who fought against the Ottomans in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovopolije) lingering in Yugoslavian lower divisions.

• He changed the colors of the club’s uniforms to yellow and made the Tiger the symbol of the team. Almost immediately the club triumphed in the national championship.

• Why? Because:Arkan paid his players the highest salaries; he forbade the

players to drink and disciplined them as a military unit….but also because he threatened opponents to be shot or kidnap them or “escort’ referees to the game in jeeps full of his paramilitary troops.

The Obilic “fans” chanted songs like “If you (the rival team) score you will never walk out of the stadium alive” or we’ll break both your legs , you’ll walk with your hands”; and if an Obilic player had not played so well, there was a strong chance a couple of gunmen would have waited for him outside the dressing room.

• But even if Obilic had qualified for the Champions League , European football officials cannot tolerate a criminal like Arkan on the stands of European stadiums. They banned Obilic from all the continental competitions. Arkan resigned from the club and made his wife –a former singer called Ceca- as President.

• The ban was lifted but since Arkan could not dare to threaten the players of European teams like Bayern or Inter Milan, Obilic never succeeded in Europe.

• Eventually the players rebelled and Arkan became a burden for his “mafia’s friends”: he was gunned down by a former body guard in a Belgrade hotel in 2000.