BELGRADE (39 page)

Red Star’s first supporters came from the elite area of town around Dedinje and Senjak, not far from their stadium. They were generally children of the pre-war bourgeoisie but were later joined by others from more modest backgrounds who eventually formed the first organized supporters’ clubs. During the late 1980s they began to call themselves
Delije
, a Turkish word that in this context roughly equates to the Heroes. The fans travelled everywhere to see their team, singing and waving flags inside the stadium, while gaining a reputation for drinking and violence inside and outside the ground. With the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, their chants became increasingly pro-Serbian and chauvinistic whenever Red Star played a team from one of the other republics.

On 13 May 1990 an estimated 3,000 fans made their way to Croatia to watch their team against Dinamo Zagreb. Intense rivalry was common practice, but this match came shortly after the first multi-party elections in Croatia that elected a government in favour of independence. The meeting between fans from Zagreb and Belgrade was tense and violence flared up. The subsequent riot is regarded by some as the first sign that the ordinary people of Yugoslavia could no longer live together and that the future of the state was untenable.

Red Star fans were linked to the paramilitary formations which fought in Croatia and Bosnia, and in particular with Arkan’s Tigers. One of their chants certainly became popular amongst the nationalists
Serbia to Tokyo (Srbija do Tokija)
, first heard when Red Star took the World Club Championship in 1991. Its initial meaning simply indicated that the Serbian team was playing in Tokyo, but its later connotation was a celebration of territorial aggrandisement. It is open to debate whether the support of football hooligans for Serbian paramilitaries was the result of a plot to engage a large number of aggressive young men in the nationalist cause, or whether these aggressive young men gravitated towards a centre of violence.

Red Star’s local rivals are the Partizan Football Club, founded on 4 October 1945, and named in honour of the resistance movement led by the communists. It was initially formed by the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija or JNA) and their ground used to be called the Stadium JNA but is now named after the club.

The stadium hosted an important annual event in former Yugoslavia. Each year a baton was taken around all republics by a relay of runners. The tradition began in 1945 in honour of Tito’s birthday on 25 May and from the mid–1950s was incorporated in the celebrations for the Day of Youth on that date. The end of the relay was marked in a ceremony when the baton would be handed to the president in the Stadium JNA. The baton began its journey each year from a different republic, but after Tito’s death some voices were raised against the event calling it a spectacle organized by the League of Communists in honour of itself with no real meaning for national solidarity as claimed.

Vesna Goldsworthy recalls the way in which the ceremony was continued in her autobiography
Chernobyl Strawberries
:

For a while Yugoslavs continued to celebrate the day in the traditional manner, with torches lit from eternal flames relayed around the country by handsome athletes, young workers and bright students, in a well-rehearsed marathon which was the first item on the new bulletins throughout the spring. The longer it was since his demise, the more there was to celebrate. Like the widow of a murdered Sicilian Mafia don, the country clung to his memory in an incongruous mixture of mourning and
décolletage
, as if knowing that a collective nervous breakdown would follow once the ritual was no longer observed.

In the late 1980s, as in the other republics, Slovenia experienced its “awakening of the people”. Slovene nationalist opinion was making its voice heard on a number of topics. Sabrina Ramet comments on the Slovene case: “This process can be dated to the publication by the Slovenian journal
Nova revija
(in February 1987) of a collection of articles devoted to the ‘Slovenian national program’, which included,
inter alia
, a protest against the second-class status of the Slovenian language in Yugoslavia.” The complaints escalated and soon the republic was in dispute with the federal authorities in Belgrade on the constitutional right of republics to secede from the federation. In 1987 the baton for the Day of Youth should have begun its journey from the top of Slovenia’s highest mountain, but in an act of dissent it never left. There was clearly a symbolic chain linking this event, the public memory of Tito and the Yugoslav ideal; at least when one disappeared so did the rest.

Partizan Football Club beat Manchester United in the semi-final of the 1966 European Cup but lost 2–1 in the final against Real Madrid. In 1989 they met Celtic, winning in the first leg played in Mostar 2–1, but losing 5–4 in Scotland, although Partizan won the tie because of the rule on away goals. They have a striking internal record with 130 Partizan players selected for the national team, one of whom, Savo Milošević, was capped more times than any other with a total of 101 appearances before he retired from international football in 2006.

Affectionately called the Black and Whites on account of their strip, Partizan hold the record for national championships since the break-up of Yugoslavia and remained unbeaten during the 2004–05 season. They were expelled from the 2007–08 UEFA Cup qualifying stages and given a hefty fine after fighting broke out between their supporters and fans of the opposing team when playing in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina. Their stadium in Belgrade is close to Red Star’s home ground, the local derby always being a potential flash point for violence in the city.

Their fans are called
Grobari
(Gravediggers) for which there are two possible origins. One is that the name refers to Humska Street, where their home ground stands,
humka
being a word for burial mound. The other possibility is that it was used by their rivals from Red Star because the black and white colours of the team apparently resemble outfits worn by the city’s gravediggers. These fans regularly followed the team to away matches in other Yugoslav republics and abroad where their reputation for violence matched Red Star’s. In September 2005 the fans publicly stated their dissatisfaction with two of the club’s officials, Nenad Bjeković and Žarko Zečević, for allegedly lining their own pockets by misappropriating club funds. They demanded their resignation and called a boycott of future matches. The boycott lasted until 2007 when changes were announced to the board of directors. During the boycott even the traditional derby with Red Star was poorly attended.

Ivan Čolović includes a short study of football hooliganism in his book
The Politics of Symbol in Serbia
. He draws a parallel between the fans’ aggression and the mentality of war. He writes:

The story of the collapse of Yugoslavia, in a frenzy of hatred and war, in honour of the gods of ethnic nationalism and pre-modern militarism may also be described as a story of the evolution of violence in Yugoslav sport, especially among hooligan football supporters, and of the gradual transference of that violence, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s, on to the terrain of inter-ethnic conflicts and “greater nation” politics, and thence on to the battlefield.

He describes how in the fervour of the 1980s football supporters carried flags and other paraphernalia proclaiming their ethnic identity in order to associate their team with the national cause. Their behaviour and sentiments ran in parallel with speeches and emblems from public meetings at the time, although expressed without the fans’ pornographic obscenities:

From the mid–1980s, the supporters’ folklore in Serbia (songs, slogans, placards, flags, coats of arms, etc.), was dominated by the theme of ethnic identity, until then sporadic and proscribed. And at the same time that theme began to appear in political communication and propaganda, especially at the populist mass political rallies which gave the tone to political life in Serbia and Montenegro in the course of 1988 and 1989. And the supporters wanted, above all, to present themselves as belonging to “their nation”, Star and Partizan supporters as Serbs, and at the same time to see opposing clubs as representatives of different nations, inimical to them.

Hooliganism on this level, a social evil in times of peace, helped to make the national differences simpler to understand and easier to justify violence eliding the reality of war with mass entertainment.

Red Star and Partizan may be the biggest and most popular football clubs in Belgrade but they are not the oldest. One of the oldest in Serbia is the city’s Obilić Football Club, founded in 1924 and named after the legendary folk hero who killed the sultan at the Battle of Kosovo. The club had some success before the Second World War and continued to play even during the war years. But the two giants established under communist direction after the war dominated the leagues, leaving Obilić a poor relative only managing to make its way into the Yugoslav Third Division in the 1980s.

The end of the state of Yugoslavia was also the end of the big leagues as they subdivided into national divisions. Smaller clubs moved up the ladder and in the 1994–95 season Obilić reached the final of the Yugoslav Cup, which they lost to Red Star. In June 1996 Željko Ražnatović, or Arkan the paramilitary leader, took over the club. Under his lead the club went from strength to strength and in 1998 became Yugoslav league champion. It was the first time that the title had been taken by a team other than Red Star or Partizan since the break-up of Yugoslavia. But when UEFA threatened to ban the club from participation in European matches because of Arkan’s criminal connections he passed his control to his wife, Svetlana Ražnatović, the turbofolk performer known as Ceca, in July 1998. She ran Obilić for a short period before she too stepped down, but took up the reins again in August 2000 in what may have been a tribute to her husband after his murder in January of that year. The club has not managed to follow up its earlier success and has sunk back into the mediocrity from which it came.

After sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were lifted in 1995 daily life began to improve and a degree of normality returned to the streets of Belgrade. Yet it was not long before another crisis interrupted the re-integration of the country into the international community. The Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo were dissatisfied with rule from Belgrade and for a number of years lived in a state-within–a-state, eventually deciding to seek independence. The Kosovo Liberation Army attacked police and security installations, intimidating the non-Albanian population. The Serbian authorities responded with force, and in the estimation of some foreign governments their response was disproportionate and innocent civilians were killed.

NATO convened a meeting between Albanian and Serbian representatives on neutral territory in France in early 1999. The Serbian side rejected NATO’s request to station troops in the region on the grounds that it was tantamount to a surrender of state sovereignty. NATO then threatened a military strike if the attacks on civilians did not stop. The conflict in Kosovo, in fact, escalated and NATO forces began their air attack on 24 March 1999 at about 8.00pm local time.

It was thought on both sides that the bombing of the country would only last a few days; either the Serbs would admit defeat or the NATO partners would not be able to maintain solidarity in the face of growing pressure to halt military operations. In the event, bombing continued almost daily for 78 days. The possibilities of a land invasion were aired in the media but it did not happen.

It was a most peculiar conflict, particularly from a Belgrade perspective. The government of Slobodan Milošević had never been popular in the city and did not do well in elections there. The nucleus of all opposition parties and groups was centred in Belgrade, with large anti-government demonstrations in 1991 and again in 1996–97. Many of those opposed to Milošević believed that they had the political backing of the democratic countries of Europe and North America. But, now the western military alliance was dropping explosive devices from the skies and firing missiles at them. Javier Solana, NATO’s secretary-general, announced,

We have no quarrel with the people of Yugoslavia who for too long have been isolated in Europe because of the policies of their government. Our actions are directed against the repressive policy of the Yugoslav leadership. We must stop violence and bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe now taking place in Kosovo. We have a moral duty to do so.

The first targets were military, then those with both civilian and military uses such as bridges, factories, communications and power supplies.

In her book
The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade
(2000) Jasmina Tesanović provides testimony of what many ordinary citizens thought and felt in those days. Her entry for 4 April 1999 records her reaction to NATO’s repeated views about Serbs: “The wire is finally visible around our cage. We’re bad wild Serbs from the fourteenth century, disguised in jeans, speaking English, but still aliens.” This feeling of being excluded from the liberal, tolerant world outside hurt at first, then became confusing. Tesanović was receiving her news from the city itself, and not only from state television but also from CNN, BBC and Sky News. In a bizarre sequence bombs from the West were followed by news analysis of their impact from the same source.

One of the first effects of the campaign was to unite the population, since, whatever their internal differences, the air attacks were a direct threat to human life on the ground. By night sirens would sound a warning, the planes would be heard and sometimes seen, traces of anti-aircraft fire would rise to the sky, bomb blasts would follow, and then the wailing of emergency services. People at first took shelter below ground but later, realizing that it offered little protection from modern high explosives, they stayed at home. By day there was a mixture of carnival and anxiety. Daily concerts were held on Republic Square. People tried to make sure that
there was always enough food at home, and phoned round to find out if family and friends were all safe. Tesanović comments on how the unthinkable became the norm: “Step by step, down, down, every day crossing a new border of horror, yesterday’s fear, today’s habit.” Later, she continues: