How Soccer Explains the War

Scenes from the Maksimir Stadium riot, 1990

“The war in Croatia started on a soccer field“, my roommate told me last night. On May 13, 1990 a riot broke out in Maksimir Stadium between fans of the Croatian club team Dinamo Zagreb, the Serbian club Crvena Zvezda, and Serbian police Milošević sent to Zagreb to monitor the game. National tensions were extremely high in the weeks before the game. Just one week before the brawl, Croatians rejected the Yugoslav Communist Party and elected the Croatian Democratic Union under nationalist leader Franjo Tuđman. The election effectively signaled Croatia’s intent to declare independence from Yugoslavia, a move vehemently opposed by then President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević.

Numerous small fights between Dinamo fans (the Bad Blue Boys) and Crvena Zvezda fans (Dejilie, or “heroes”) broke out around Zagreb on the day of the game. When Arkan, a notorious gangster, war-criminal, and owner of Crvena Zvezda reportedly led the Dejile into Maksimir Stadium chanting “Zagreb is Serbia” and “We will kill Franjo Tuđman”, a large group of the Bad Blue Boys clashed with the Dejile in the stands and later on the field. Seats were torn up and used as weapons, and a large number of people were stabbed. The Serbian police targeted the Croatian fans and the fight culminated with Dinamo Zagreb captain Zvonimir Boban kicking a police officer who was beating a Bad Blue Boy. Ironically, the police officer was a Bosniak, and later publicly forgave Boban.

The brawl broadcasted a scene of national violence to the region. It was a highly visible explosion of ethnic violence that resounded deeply across a tense and fracturing Yugoslavia. Seven months later Croatia ratified its constitution and declared that Serbs in Croatia were no longer a “national minority”, but a “constituent nation”. A year after the fight in Maksimir Stadium, Croatia declared independence, and in August 1991 Serbia attacked Vukovar, beginning a full-scale ethnic war.

The soccer field today is still a microcosm of national tensions and political realities in the former

Serbian fans holding a banner that reads "Knife, Wire, Srebrenica" at the 2005 Bosnia v. Serbia World Cup qualifying match

Yugoslavia. When Bosnia played Serbia in a World Cup qualifying match in Belgrade in 2005, fights broke out and 19 people were injured. Nationalist chants and insults were exchanged by the two sides. Bosnian fans waved a banner that read “We have 250,000 reasons to hate you” referring to the exaggerated number of Bosnians killed in the war (the currently recognized number is 100,000), while Serb fans made held up pieces of wire, representing the wire that was used to tie up Bosniaks prisoners massacred at Srebrenica. The fighting stopped the game, and FIFA ruled it a draw. The acidity of the insults and the inability of the 4,000 police officers present at the game to contain the violence made loud and clear the resilience of the war’s ethnic tensions and the proximity of violence in the region.

Cinema of Flames

August 15^th kicks off the 14^th annual Sarajevo Film Festival. Arguably the most important cultural event of the year (the odd “running of the bull” in the countryside notwithstanding), the festival brings in films and directors from across the Balkan Peninsula and Western Europe. This year’s program will be available online in August.

Recent Balkan cinema leads the region’s tradition of self-examination. Popular right now among academics is the formulation that the Balkans is a region positioned (artificially) in between antagonistic cultures (the West and the East, namely) and as a consequence only able to develop a culture that is at base antagonistic to itself. Specifically, it is argued that the West imposes this in between-ness by simultaneously excluding the Balkans from Europe and claiming it as European. Thus, the story goes, there can be no idea or ideology of the Balkans. A Balkan person opposing the Western ideology that excludes him will oppose basic elements of his own ideology; he can only feel at odds with himself.

However, several classics of Balkan cinema suggest a different story. Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1997) ends on a Yugonostalgic note, concluding that a country and culture once did exist, but was riven apart by the raw fact of violence which was primary over any type of ideology. In Sotiris Goritsas’s Balkanisateur (1997), the two protagonists travel from northern Greece to Switzerland. Equally as alienated in Bulgaria as in Switzerland, the two return happily to Balkan Greece and indifferently walk past a sign noting Greece’s recent entry into the EU. Geopolitics is not a problem.

These films, along with art from the war which effortlessly exploited Western commercial symbols, offer a picture of the Balkans which, when looking at itself, is not inhibited by its otherness from the West. Though certainly concerned with questions of the region’s relation to the West, these threads of Balkan culture seem to make steps, rightly or wrongly, in a decidedly post-national direction.