The tribute to a war criminal that scandalizes European football

Barcelona“Direct to Potocari!”, General Ratko Mladic ordered his troops on July 11, 1995. Potocari is a village north of Srebrenica where thousands of Bosnian Muslims had taken refuge from Mladic’s Serbian troops, as there was a United Nations Blue Helmets base there. However, they did not protect them, and Mladic’s troops entered Potocari, where they separated the men and women and executed more than 8,000 people. Today, in Potocari, thousands of white headstones rise in the cemetery next to the museum dedicated to the Srebrenica crimes. Mladic was arrested in 2011 in Serbia, where he had been hiding for 15 years, and sent to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal. During the trial, he confronted the judges and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. Last week he died in prison at 84 years old.

This weekend, the phrase “Direct to Potocari!” appeared at the Red Star Belgrade stadium under a large banner showing an image of Mladic. The radical fans of this Belgrade team decided to pay tribute to the general before the match against their eternal rival, Partizan (2-1). The players from both teams and the fans, eternally at odds, agreed for once to hold a minute of silence in memory of a war criminal. On social media, the local club posted an image of the tribute with an emoticon imitating a military salute. Mladic’s funeral has divided Serbian public opinion, where the general still has many supporters who filled the streets of the main cities with posters dedicated to him. Many citizens tore them down.

But at the Red Star stadium, known as the Little Maracanã, no one dared to whistle during the minute of silence. Despite its name, which refers back to the times of socialism, this club has for years become a stronghold of radical Serbian nationalism. In fact, at the gates of the stadium one can see today a Soviet-made T-55 tank that had seen combat during the Balkan War in Croatia. The tank was brought by the club's radical fans, with the approval of the authorities and the board. The radicals are known as Delije (heroes, in Serbian), the group responsible for bringing the tank and for the tribute to Mladic. The Delije first became infamously known in the spring of 1990, when at least 59 fans and 79 police officers were injured during the incidents at the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb. That day, the Delije broke through the security fences and invaded a stand with Croats, whom they assaulted.

Already then, Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, had appeared in the stands. The son of a policeman and a communist militant, he was a young man who had begun to rebel against his parents and the authorities and who fled to Germany, where he dedicated himself to stealing cars and trafficking. In the eighties, he returned to Belgrade, where he took control of the Delije group, where he would recruit young people to form a paramilitary corps with the support of Serbian politicians. He baptized them as Srpska Dobrovoljačka Gard, the Serbian Volunteer Guard, but everyone would know them as Arkan's Tigers, since their leader had a tiger as a pet that he brought to the military training they conducted in the outskirts of Belgrade with the complicity of the authorities.

Arkan, who had direct contacts with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic through the head of the State Security Service, Jovica Stanisic, did business at the stadium and went on training that paramilitary group, which entered into action in 1991 in Slavonia, a Croatian zone at the time where many Serbs then lived. Later he committed crimes in Bosnia, where he collaborated with Ratko Mladic and the president of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic. His group also committed crimes in Kosovo. But if Mladic and Karadzic had to hide because international justice was looking for them, Arkan, defiant, decided not to hide and after the Balkan War lived with all kinds of luxury in Belgrade, where he married the trendy singer Svetlana Ceca Raznatovic and did business. In fact, later he tried to buy Red Star. Since he could not, he acquired a modest fourth-division team, Obilic, and made it rise to the First Division, until winning the league, by buying and threatening rivals. In the year 2000, Arkan was murdered, surely by organized crime.

The Delije have remained linked to Serbian radical nationalism and members of the group were even investigated for the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003.

Now they have once again sparked a scandal with their tribute to Mladic, who was handed over by the Serbian authorities after years of hiding him. Karadzic was also arrested and tried, after years in hiding under a false name in Belgrade. Karadzic, by the way, had also worked at Red Star. In 1983, when he already held the title of doctor expert in psychology, he was the psychologist for a team that these days has remembered the figure of one of the darkest people in modern European history, Mladic. Karadzic, at 81 years old, remains imprisoned. The day he dies, they will surely remember him in the same stands, which shows that the wounds remain unhealed in the Balkans.