DUŠAN and I sat in on a meeting between some respected Serbian journalists and our mutual boss the ambassador on the Monday morning. I had expected that they would give him a rough ride over recent events in Kosovo and the perceived collusion between the West and the Kosovan government, or at least have a bit of a dig about the riots taking place in the UK. Neither happened. They were moderate, respectful and hugely knowledgeable. While I felt that I had learned a lot from the meeting, it hadn’t featured either the controversy or the cut and thrust that I had expected (and secretly hoped for, especially as, as a new boy, I knew I could sit tight and not have to say anything). So I had a lot of pent-up verbal aggression in me, and quite fancied saying something provocative.
So on the way back to the embassy I thought I would prod Dušan. Were the media similarly considered and thoughtful in reporting on football, or did certain papers obviously take sides for one team or another? Before I had finished my question, Dušan was bristling. Very much so. Red Star, as the ‘Establishment’ team, benefited from the ‘Establishment’ media, that is to say, all of them. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘As soon as there’s an opportunity to criticise us, they’ll take it.’
The media scene in Serbia suffers from a variety of ailments. Its chief problem is an opaque ownership, with two groups owning significant stakes in four out of five main TV companies and limited transparency as to who owns what in the print media. Political and political-business interference in all media is common, and not surprising when around 70 media outlets across the country depend to some degree on state (and therefore politically-controlled) funding. The chase for ratings in a competitive market had also led to standards dropping across the media scene too.
Even B92, the famously independent radio station turned TV station and web portal, which was shut down repeatedly by the Milošević regime during the 1990s and famously won the 1998 MTV Europe Free Your Mind prize, was by mid-2011 carrying fewer items of investigative journalism and more tired repeats of Friends and Two and a Half Men. The media were, and indeed are still susceptible to the manipulation that Dušan had outlined, not least because, logically, any ratings- and advertising-chasing station would go with the team that had the most fans, which was Red Star.
I am capable of seeing conspiracy theories against my club in most things. Whenever I watch top ten goals programmes or other such clips reels on TV, I always count the number of times that the goals are against Arsenal, to see if the editors are unfairly doing Arsenal down. Sometimes I really think they are. But I didn’t really buy what Dušan was saying. If the whole system, down even to the journalists, was so against Partizan, how had they won the league four years in a row and taken the league and cup double last year? The president supported Partizan. Several other clubs could probably point to a degree of victimisation in favour of the big clubs, but not Partizan.
My faith in the fairness of the system lasted about six hours. That evening, the Serbian FA announced that Partizan were to be banned from playing in their home stadium indefinitely. The entire announcement read, ‘In today’s session, disciplinary proceedings were begun against FK Partizan and FK Novi Pazar, because of the unsporting behaviour of both clubs in their match on Saturday in the first round of the SuperLiga. Also, for the same reasons, the members of the disciplinary committee decided to suspend Partizan’s stadium from all first-team matches in domestic competitions.’
No example was given in the statement, an omission that was picked up by the media. No matter how favourable they could possibly have been towards Red Star, the absence of any proof was too glaring for any journalist to ignore. Partizan, sensibly, merely announced the decision on their website with no comment. The discussion forums on B92 and other websites seethed with Partizan fury and an equal amount of Red Star gloating.
‘What are they doing? We didn’t do anything! Those b*****ds ripped up 500 of our seats and we get punished? Someone in the Federation wanted to equalise for the gypsies being so sh** in Subotica’, fulminated miki83, along with about 800 other black-and-white commentators on B92, including Bora, who asked ‘is this the start of Zvezda’s “Project Europe?”, referring to the Red Star board’s statement of intent at the start of the year to bring Champions League football to the Marakana.
A few fans were more phlegmatic: ‘I don’t know why we’re surprised. I heard all that nationalist stuff on TV. Even though I’m a Partizan fan I hope that the punishment stops that singing’ said another Miki. Butragenjo proved that even logicians are Partizan fans, pointing out: ‘How can a stadium be guilty? People are guilty. Punish them, not the stadium.’
The underlying nastiness between Partizan and Red Star does not take long to surface online. Whenever a question even tangentially linked to fan behaviour and stadium safety comes up, Zvezda fans are quick to recall the tragic death of Aleksandar ‘Aca’ Radović, who was killed during the 113th derby match on 31 October 1999 by a distress flare fired by the Partizan fans. This is an excerpt from the article that appeared in the weekly NIN news magazine, long highly regarded in Serbia (and before that in Yugoslavia). Anything written during the Milošević era, as this was, is likely to have been subject to some degree of editorial control by the government, but it is the most reliable account that I could find.
‘But before the derby, around the stadium there were police at every step. – Have you got anything, asks a policeman of a fan as he lightly touched his pockets. – I don’t have anything, says the guy. – OK, good, on you go says the policeman and starts to check the next in line.
‘Later, next to the fence that separates the north from the west stand: beside a policeman in uniform and stewards, a girl brings forward an overly full rucksack and passes it across the fence to a boy in the north stand [where the Red Star fans stand for the derby at Partizan]. No-one asks what’s in the bag. A moment later rockets and smoke bombs start falling on the north stand.
‘Fifteen minutes after the scene at the entrance to the stadium, after Partizan’s goal, a distress flare flies from the south to north and falls among the Zvezda fans. Then it kills seventeen-year-old Aleksandar Radović from Opovo. Several more rockets then fly over the stadium and land behind it. As claimed by eye-witnesses, help for Radović did not come until twenty minutes later, when fighting had died down between the police and the enraged Delije. The boys in blue, it seems, thought that the reason for the commotion was a fight between the fans, so they attempted to restore order by drawing their batons. Those present say that they called out in vain to the police for help in those first moments ...
‘The police on Tuesday stated that they had found that the rockets and distress flares had been brought into the ground by Grobari leader and FK Partizan kit man Branko Vučićević, known as Gavran [The Raven]. “It has been established that Zoran ‘Čegi’ Živanović, another leader of a Grobari group, bought 60 rockets and 10 distress flares from an unknown person, whose identity is being established,” said Miodrag Gutić, head of the department for prevention of homicide and sexual offences.
‘These items were brought to the Partizan stadium on the day of the derby around 15:30, and given to Časlav Kurandić, who, with the help of kit man Branko Vučićević, brought the bag into the stadium with Partizan’s sports equipment. The bag was taken to the dressing room, and then packages from it were given, through the window of the Partizan junior team’s dressing room, to Goran Matović and Dragan Petronić. Before that, it had been agreed with Živanović that the rockets and distress flares would, via the east stand, be brought to the south. The pyrotechnics were transferred to the south stand across the metal dividing fence to an unknown person, while Nikola Dedovic distracted the attention of the stewards. In the meantime, Živanović had arrived in the south stand, where he took control of the goods and divided them up.’
What still angers Red Star fans is perhaps not so much the act of the firing of the rockets, or even that club figures were complicit. The same happens at Red Star. Rather it is the fact that when the case eventually came to trial, the justice meted out to the perpetrators was so light. In March 2001, nearly two years after Aleksandar’s death, Majk Halkijević, who fired the fatal rocket, was sentenced to one year and 11 months, having not been tried for murder, but on lesser charges of public order offences and ‘general endangerment’.
Zoran Živanović and Časlav Kurandić were sent to prison for a year and a half, as was Mirko Urban, accused of selling the rockets in the first place. Branko Vučićević, the club insider without whose help the rockets could arguably never have got into the stadium in those numbers, received no conviction. Though not the leaders of the modern-day fans groups, I was reliably informed that most of those involved in the incident are still regulars at Partizan games, home and away, and the number of flares entering the stadium is nearly as high.
The following day I asked Dušan whether Partizan’s new punishment was serious. Surely an indefinite ban was unjustified and impossible to impose. I wondered out loud whether the league was so keen to have Novi Pazar as part of it given that insulting them was now illegal, or whether the league wanted to lay down a marker to avoid 29 further weeks where anti-Bosniak chanting featured heavily. I fundamentally disagreed with the Partizan fans choosing to sing nationalist and racist songs, but I couldn’t believe that the Serbian FA were going to shut every stadium in the country down once each club’s fans had (inevitably) sung something rude about Bosniaks. It felt like Partizan were being made an example of.
Dušan was calmer about the punishment than I was. ‘It’s only an indefinite suspension because the disciplinary committee hasn’t had a chance to decide on the final punishment yet. They’ll probably meet next week and give a much smaller punishment, maybe a fine, maybe a one-week closure. What’s going to be more interesting is what happens when Rad visit Novi Pazar this weekend.’
Rad are one of Belgrade’s many lesser (but still top flight) teams, and finished fourth the season before, behind only the Big Two and Vojvodina. Their ‘firm’, United Force 1987 (using English), is feared as one of the more violent and right-wing groups in Serbian football, and travel in decent numbers, despite the club’s small support base. If nominally left-wing and inclusive Partizan were able to get themselves banned, what would Rad do?
The suspension moved off the back pages and towards the front over the course of the day, as Interior Minister Dačić got involved. Dačić’s Socialist party featured heavily on the club’s board, so he had many equities at stake in sorting this out. Dačić said that the police had not been informed of the measures that would be taken against the clubs for alleged nationalist and religious insults, and that it was a matter for the footballing authorities.
Without reference to potential violations of Serbia’s anti-discrimination law in the stadium, Dačić added ‘slogans were recited by both sides, I was there at the stadium so I can say so. There were no incidents, only verbal incidents, not physical contact or any element of violence.’ He added ‘I didn’t hear a mention of Srebrenica, maybe I didn’t hear properly, but I don’t think it was mentioned.’
Dačić did however go some way to appeasing Partizan fans by saying that matches featuring Novi Pazar would be closely followed by the authorities ‘because it’s completely logical that some extremist groups could exploit these situations to voice various slogans’. I hoped, for the sake of ethnic reconciliation, more so than for Partizan’s sake, that this would happen.
Before the next league game and my first away trip, Partizan played in Dublin against Shamrock Rovers in the final round of qualifying for the Europa League, a small consolation for being knocked out of the Champions League. My commitment to Partizan didn’t stretch far enough at that point for a trip to Ireland, so it was another chance to watch on RTS. Or so I thought.
On my way home from work, I had seen a few Red Star fans at the bus stop near my house, in replica shirts from throughout the past ten years. The first thought that went through my head was that it was a shame that Toyota weren’t still Red Star’s sponsors. I haven’t got anything against them.
It then dawned on me that Red Star and Partizan’s games were kicking off at pretty much the same time as each other, the first time this had happened all season. It’s OK, I thought. RTS have two channels. Or maybe one of them will be on Eurosport or one of the Sport Plus channels. Watching the news on RTS 1, about half an hour before kick-off, RTS promised live coverage of both games in a ‘kombinovan prenos’ [combined programme]. Did this mean some kind of split-screen deal, or cutting between the two? It was the latter.
Red Star’s game against Rennes kicked off first, ten minutes before Partizan’s match. Red Star immediately put Rennes under a lot of pressure, and had threatened to score three times when Partizan’s match in Ireland began. Thirteen seconds in, before the commentators had even finished reading out the Partizan line-up, Red Star got a penalty, and we cut back to the Marakana. Red Star scored, and RTS stayed with the game for another four minutes before heading back to Ireland. This time we got nearly 40 seconds before Red Star had the ball in the net again, only for the goal to be disallowed for offside.
The next time that the coverage returned to Ireland, viewers were treated to about six minutes, in which absolutely nothing happened at either end. So the directors cut back to the Marakana, where Red Star had a free kick in a dangerous position. While the Rennes goalkeeper was lining up the wall, Partizan scored. RTS had missed two out of the three most exciting incidents so far. Tomić swept in a controlled right-foot shot from the edge of the area, continuing his good run of goalscoring form, after a flowing Partizan move. Dušan was in Maribor in Slovenia, watching Glasgow Rangers’ away game there with some colleagues from the embassy. I texted him to tell him that his best mate had put Partizan 1-0 up, but he flat out ignored my provocation. Within minutes, Tomić came close to adding a second that would have been a carbon copy of his goal against Genk, and Eduardo shot wide when well placed.
Partizan were not playing well, partly because Stanojević had put out a below-strength team, bringing in defenders Ranković and Stanković, and bringing Milan Smiljanić into the midfield, who had barely featured so far this season. Smiljanić, more often known by his nickname Lola, was one of the more interesting players in an otherwise fairly dull Partizan squad. He had made his first-team debut for Partizan in 2005, when he was only 18, and was made club captain before he was 20. He had then earned a transfer to Espanyol, but had come back to Partizan after three seasons, two less than he was contracted for.
Smiljanić’s main problem seemed to be that he featured more often in the middle pages of the paper – the Zabava [entertainment] section. I saw plenty of pictures of him out and about in Belgrade, where he often frequented the floating pontoons and barges on the river Sava, known as splavovi, which serve as the city’s nightlife headquarters in the summer. He had been linked with many of Serbia’s most glamorous women, including the leading light of the turbo-folk era, and widow of assassinated war criminal Arkan, Ceca Raznatović, 13 years his senior (although he denied it). The latest one had been a contestant in Serbia’s Top Model.
Dušan told me that Smiljanić was a great player, it was just that he spent too much time on the booze. Worse than that, he was the leader of Partizan’s version of the old Arsenal ‘Tuesday Club’, which in this case seemed to involve dragging fellow midfielder Nemanja Tomić round Belgrade and getting him hammered. The provincial Tomić (known as Šumadinho – combining his faux-Brazilian skills with Šumadija – the west/central ‘real’ Serbia of Tomić’s birth, and a byword for peasant traditions) was apparently in awe of the metropolitan Lola. Regardless of who was the ringleader, a rumour had been going round that both Smiljanić and Tomić had been forced to go through extra fitness training at the start of the season as they had both come back in poor shape after eating, drinking and smoking their way through the close season (Tomić was alleged to have been 10kg overweight). And shagging. Without that, maybe Tomić would have tipped the scales even further.
But against weak opposition in the form of Shamrock, Partizan’s hybrid first-reserve team, including a fit-looking Smiljanić, were not really threatened in a dull match. The RTS directors decided to stay with it nonetheless, missing a slick Rennes equaliser in the process. Maybe my Serbian was improving, or maybe the commentators that night were particularly blatant, but the level of bias was astonishing. It was probably the most one-eyed I’ve heard since I watched Formula One on Italian TV, where the commentary is about Ferrari, whether those cars are in the lead, at the back, not on screen or out of the race. The other 22 cars are just a colourful background.
The commentator in Partizan’s game endlessly praised the superior quality of the Partizan team in comparison to Shamrock. He wasn’t necessarily wrong, but as successive passes were misplaced by both sides, and Partizan failed to create any further chances in the first half, the performance didn’t match the hyperbole.
That commentator was a paragon of impartiality compared to the guy covering Red Star, who squealed his way through the first half every time Red Star got the ball. Completely seriously, he claimed that Rennes’ goal was ‘borderline offside’, when the player was at least a yard and a half onside, and appealed for offside a couple of other times even though the Red Star players didn’t. I imagined him with a microphone in one hand and the other arm raised, like a journalistic Tony Adams. He delighted in telling viewers that Red Star’s disallowed goal had ‘certainly upset the Rennes players’ and frequently exclaimed ‘šteta’ [shame] every time that a Red Star player failed to connect with even the most mundane of passes or aimless of crosses.
As the ref blew for half-time at the Marakana, the directors showed a couple of minutes of highlights before switching over to the last ten minutes of the first half in Ireland. My initial frustration (and shouting – alone in the flat like a madman – to change back to Partizan’s game) quickly turned to hope: statistically, showing pointless footage in one game had mostly led to a goal in the other. The hope was false. It was still only 1-0, and the half petered out with the score the same.
In the second half, with Rennes looking like they would come away with a draw, the commentator in the Red Star game decided that the time for neutrality was over, and really pinned his colours to the crveno-beli mast. He proudly declared that there was ‘still time for a Red Star triumph’. I checked later to make sure that I wasn’t over-interpreting this, and ‘trijumf’ isn’t simply a synonym for victory or winning, it carries the same grand meanings of glory and magnificence as it does in English.
In the 72nd minute, Red Star crossed dangerously from the right, and as the ball agonisingly squirmed away from striker Borja, he emitted a noise of such strangled excitement and pain that I can only equate it to the sound that I imagine is made at the point of expiry by those poor men who have died masturbating with an orange in their mouths and a pair of tights over their heads.
I digress. While another pedestrian passage of play by Partizan was on screen, Rennes took a 2-1 lead. All the air escaped the commentator’s lungs, a lot less erotically than ten minutes before. As the replay was shown, I thought I heard him say ‘jebi ga’ [f*** it] as the pictures showed the Red Star defence standing aside as Colombian forward Victor Montano rifled home. But as my brain processed the Serbian, I realised he had actually just said ‘evo ga’ [there he is]. Nevertheless, I had started to understand why Dušan was so adamant that the media’s favourites were Red Star.
Faced with such a barrage of hyperbole, and RTS spending more time on the Red Star game in the second half, I had lost focus on Partizan’s game and had subconsciously assumed they would just see this one out. In any case, Shamrock, despite their best efforts, didn’t seem to have a goal in them.
With just over ten minutes to go, the first sign of a potential self-destruction materialised when one defender missed his kick defending a fairly harmless cross and it bounced squarely onto Rnić’s arm. The ref didn’t award the penalty, not least because it would have been unfair on Rnić to have assumed he could predict such a mal-coordinated air shot from his team-mate. Shamrock’s tails were up, and I could hear Dejan doom-mongering all the way from Novi Sad. For the second consecutive away European game, he was right. Shamrock put together a swift set of passes and their slightly rotund but skilful winger Gary McCabe deftly poked the ball through the gaping chasm of Ivanov’s legs and prodded past Stojković to equalise.
The closer it got to the end of the game, the more Partizan seemed to want to lose. In injury time, their collective paranoia nearly got the better of them. The defence failed to clear a corner not once, but twice, with only some desperate lunging preventing a Shamrock goal. Partizan counter-attacked, and Babović received the ball in a promising position. As Jovančić and Eduardo both made runs into scoring positions that would have seen them outpace the tiring Shamrock defenders, Babović took two touches more than he needed before passing weakly into the legs of a defender, having characteristically dithered. A minute later, Jovančić committed a completely needless off-the-ball challenge that earned him a yellow card, a suspension from the return game, and an immediate substitution.
It was highly fortunate that the final whistle went 30 seconds later. I was additionally happy as my brain couldn’t keep up – I didn’t have the maths skills to compute what exponentially more crass error Partizan might have committed had the match gone on for another minute. A 1-1 draw seemed like a very good result in the context of those last four or five minutes, with the return match to come a week later in Belgrade.