Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1 How Football Explains the Gangster’s Paradise
2 How Football Explains the Pornography of Sects
3 How Football Explains the Jewish Question
4 How Football Explains the Sentimental Hooligan
5 How Football Explains the Survival of the Top Hats
6 How Football Explains the Black Carpathians
7 How Football Explains the New Oligarchs
8 How Football Explains the Discreet Charm of Bourgeois Nationalism
9 How Football Explains Islam’s Hope
10 How Football Explains the American Culture Wars
Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
RED STAR BELGRADE is the most beloved, most successful soccer team in Serbia. Like nearly every club in Europe and Latin America, it has a following of unruly fans capable of terrific violence. But at Red Star the violent fans occupy a place of honor, and more than that. They meet with club officials to streamline the organizational flow chart of their gangs. Their leaders receive stipends. And as part of this package, they have access to office space in the team’s headquarters in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Topcider.
The gangs have influence, in large measure, because they’ve won it with intimidation. A few months before I arrived in Belgrade to learn about the club’s complicity in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Red Star fan clubs had burst into the team’s training session. With bats, bars, and other bludgeons, they beat three of their own players. After their havoc, they aren’t typically shy about advertising their accomplishments. In this instance, the hooligans told reporters bluntly that they could “no longer tolerate lack of commitment on the pitch.” It took only one phone call to organize an interview with a handful of them in their first-floor meeting room at the Red Star headquarters.
The Belgrade neighborhood around Red Star is cartoonishly ominous. An enormous gaggle of crows resides on the stadium’s roof. When goals are scored and the crowd erupts, the birds flee—across town, it’s possible to gauge the results of a game based on presence or absence of an ornithological cloud above the skyline. On the other side of the street from the stadium, the family of Arkan, the most notorious warlord and gangster in Serb history, lives in a castle he constructed, a nouveau riche monstrosity with tiers of towers and turrets. When I loiter near the house for too long, a large man in a leather jacket emerges and inquires about my business. Because of the atrocities committed by Arkan’s men, I describe myself as a lost tourist, nervously ask him for directions, and walk away briskly. On the evening of my visit, the sky is gunmetal.
My translator had arranged for me to meet with Draza, a leader of a Red Star fan club that calls itself the Ultra Bad Boys. He had persuaded him with the overblown promise that an interview would bring glory unto the club and world renown unto the achievements of the Red Star fans. Six of Draza’s loquacious colleagues join him. At first glance, the Bad Boys look entirely unworthy of the first part of their name and too worthy of the second. Aside from the big red tattoos of their gang name on their calves, they seem like relatively upstanding young men. Draza wears a fleece jacket and chinos. His head of overgrown yet obviously manicured hair has the aura of a freshman philosophy student. As it turns out, he is a college student, swamped with preparations for exams. His comrades aren’t any more menacing. One of them has a bowl haircut, a pudgy face, and an oversized ski parka that he never removes—he looks like the kind of guy who’s been shoved into his fair share of lockers.
Perhaps to increase their credibility, the Bad Boys have brought along a gray-haired man called Krle, who wears a ratty black San Antonio Spurs jacket. Krle’s sinewy frame gives the impression that he fills his leisure time with pull-ups on a door frame in his flat. Many years of living a hooligan life have aged him prematurely. (When I ask his age and occupation, he changes the subject.) Unlike the naïve enthusiasm exhibited by the teens, who greet me warmly, Krle blares indifference. He tells my translator that he has only joined our interview because Draza insisted. His one gesture of bonhomie is to continually pour me warm Serbian beer from a plastic bottle. After I taste the beer, it hardly seems like such a friendly gesture. But because of his angry gray eyes, I find myself drinking glass after glass.
Krle serves as senior advisor to the group, a mentor to the aspiring hooligans. Putting aside his intense glare and unfriendly demeanor, I was actually glad for his presence. My interest in Red Star centers on the 1990s, his heyday as thug, when the fan clubs played a pivotal role in the revival of Serbian nationalism—the idea that the Serbs are eternal victims of history who must fight to preserve a shred of their dignity. With little prodding, Draza speaks openly about the connections. Unfortunately, his monologue doesn’t last long. Exerting his authority with volatile glances and brusque interruptions, Krle seizes control of the conversation. He answers questions curtly.
“Who do you hate most?”
A pause for a few seconds’ worth of consideration. “A Croatian, a cop: it doesn’t make a difference. I’d kill them all.”
“What’s your preferred method for beating a guy?”
“Metal bars, a special kick that breaks a leg, when a guy’s not noticing.” He sharply stomps down a leg, an obviously well-practiced move.
Because the beer has kicked in, I try to get closer to the reason for my visit. “I noticed that you call Arkan ‘commandant.’ Could you tell me a little more about how he organized the fans?”
His look is one of deep offense and then unmitigated fury. Even before the translation comes, his meaning is clear. “I shouldn’t be answering your questions. You’re an American. And your country bombed us. You killed good Serb men.”
As good a reason as any to redirect the conversation to another topic. In an aside to my translator, which he didn’t tell me about until after our interview, Krle announces, “If I met this American asshole on the street, I’d beat the shit out of him.” Krle then drops out of the conversation. At first, he stands impatiently on the far side of the room. Then he plops into a chair and leans back on its hind legs. When this ceases to hold his attention, he stands again and paces.
In the meantime, his protégés continue their enthusiastic descriptions of violence. They tell me their favorite guerilla tactic: dressing in the opposition’s jersey. This enables them to befriend visiting fans, lure them into their cars, transport them to remote locales, and beat them. They boast about their domination of fans from Partizan, their Belgrade rivals. Draza especially relishes describing a game against Partizan the previous season. Thirty minutes before kick off, the Ultra Bad Boys had quietly gathered their toughest guys at one end of the stadium by a small outcropping of trees. Each thug carried a metal bar or wooden bat. They formed a V-shaped formation and began to rampage their way around the stadium, beating anyone in their path. First, they attacked the visiting fans. Then, they slugged their way through a horde of police. The Ultra Bad Boys attacked so quickly that neither the cops nor the Partizan fans had time to respond. In their path, they left lines of casualties, like the fresh tracks of a lawnmower. “We made it around the stadium in five minutes,” says Draza. “It was incredible.”
Aside from Krle’s paroxysms, the Ultra Bad Boys never curse. They consider themselves to occupy higher moral terrain than their foes: no use of firearms, no beating of the enemy after he loses consciousness. Draza explains, “Partizan fans once killed a fifteen-year-old Red Star supporter. He was sitting in the stadium, and they fired flares at his chest. Those monsters killed the boy. They observe no limits.” The Ultra Bad Boys speak until they exhaust my questions.
As I put away my pen and notebook, Krle reengages the group. He stands over me and demonstrates the three-fingered salute of Serb nationalism, the peace sign plus a thumb. The gesture signifies both the holy trinity and the Serb belief that they are the planet’s most authentic representatives of the holy trinity. “Now you,” he says in English. I comply. Before I leave the room, Krle makes me repeat the gesture four more times. When I later describe this moment to a human rights activist who has spent many years in Belgrade, he tells me that, during the war, paramilitaries forced Muslims and Croats to make this salute before their rape or murder.
Krle had been a Red Star thug during the club’s most glorious year. In 1991, the team won the European Champions Cup—the most prestigious annual prize in club competition. That team had been a metaphor for the crumbling hulk of Yugoslavia. Despite its history as a vehicle for Serb nationalism, Red Star had included players from across the country, even a vociferous Croatian separatist. Each state of the old Yugoslavia had developed widely accepted ethnic stereotypes that sports commentators then transposed to its players. Slovenians were superb defenders, tirelessly trailing opposing forwards. Croatians possessed a Germanic penchant for pouncing on scoring opportunities. Bosnians and Serbs were creative dribblers and passers, but occasionally lacking in tactical acumen. At Red Star, an amalgam of disparate Yugoslavs bundled their specialties and beat the superpowers of Western Europe.
This performance should have given a modicum of hope for the salvage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. But in the shadow of this championship season, in Red Star’s headquarters and stadium, the destruction of this Yugoslavia was being plotted. From Red Star’s own ranks, a hooligan paramilitary force was organized and armed. Krle, who took a bullet in his leg, would serve in this army. The Red Star fans would become Milosevic’s shock troops, the most active agents of ethnic cleansing, highly efficient practitioners of genocide.
It’s hard to imagine that Ultra Bad Boys are typical figures. They seem a product of a war-torn country and its diseased ideology. But they’re really not such a homegrown oddity. Starting in the 1980s, the soccer hooligan widely came to be considered a leading enemy of the West. “A disgrace to civilized society,” Margaret Thatcher once said. Based on death toll—more than one hundred in the 1980s—the English were the world’s leading producer of deranged fans, but they were far from alone. Throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa, violence had become part of soccer’s culture. And even in places where violence had long accompanied soccer, it became more widespread and destructive in the eighties and nineties. The Serbian fans were merely a bit better organized and much better armed than the rest of the world.
Susan Faludi and a phalanx of sociologists have an explanation for this outburst. They have written about downsized men, the ones whose industrial jobs were outsourced to third-world labor. Deprived of traditional work and knocked off patriarchal pedestals, these men desperately wanted to reassert their masculinity. Soccer violence gave them a rare opportunity to actually exert control. When these fans dabbled in racism and radical nationalism, it was because those ideologies worked as metaphors for their own lives. Their nations and races had been victimized by the world just as badly as they had been themselves.
Economic deprivation and displacement are obvious explanations. But there’s so much these factors can’t explain. Ultra Bad Boys like Draza can also be college boys with decent prospects. The Chelsea Headhunters, the most notorious English hooligan gang, include stockbrokers and middle-class thrill seekers. Besides, human history is filled with poor people, and rarely do they get together in groups to maim for maiming’s sake.
Something different happened in this era. An ethos of gangsterism—spread by movies, music, and fashion—conquered the world. The Red Star fans modeled themselves after foreigners they admired, especially the Western European hooligans. The name Ultra Bad Boys was ripped off from Italian supporters’ clubs. Another fan club called itself the Red Devils, after British club Manchester United’s nickname. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Red Star hooligans would go to the British Cultural Center in downtown Belgrade to scan the papers for the latest antics of English hooligans. The Serb hooligans also paid tribute with their fashion. They wore Adidas track suits, gold chains, and white leather sneakers, just like the crazed fans they read about on the other side of the continent. Of course, the genealogy of this aesthetic had other roots than England. It borrowed heavily from African American gangster rap, a favorite genre of Serb youth, and filched mores from the emerging Russian mafia. Gangsterism and its nihilistic violence had become fully globalized. And it was in the Balkans that this subculture became the culture and unfolded toward its logical conclusion.
In the history of hooligan warfare, no battle has been quite so spectacular. A year before Red Star lifted its European Cup, it traveled to Croatia for a match against the rival club Dinamo Zagreb. Signs that the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia might not have much more life could be seen all around Zagreb. Two weeks earlier, the Croats had elected the ultranationalist Franjo Tudjman, a former general and former president of the Partizan Belgrade soccer club. Tudjman’s adoption of Ustache icons—the symbols of the Croatian fascists who collaborated with Nazis to kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs—roused the long-dormant national passions of his people.
During the thirty-five years the charismatic communist Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia, he had suppressed bad feelings over World War II, simply declaring the expression of such feelings illegal. Yugoslavia had never come to terms with the fact that its two largest constituents had slaughtered one another. Now, with communism dissolving, the old wounds reopened. Serbs and Croats began to openly expose one another’s war crimes—and demand justice for them. A rush of breathless revisionist literature described the “hidden history” of World War II. The books were turned into TV documentaries. And the TV documentaries were reduced to potent political slogans that moved the national agendas in nationalist directions. As one of his first acts, Tudjman “demoted” Serbs from the Croatian constitution. The new, or rather old, enmity could be seen visibly at the soccer stadium. In matches between Serb and Croat teams, fans sang about their respective slaughters.
The match between Red Star and Dinamo, however, was the first time in fifty years that Yugoslavia had seen its ethnic groups openly battle one another. At first, the trouble seemed manageable by the standards of the European game. Red Star fans ripped down billboards and shouted, “We will kill Tudjman.” When the Dinamo fans began throwing stones at them, the Red Star fans used the billboards as shields. Fences that separated the opposing fans mysteriously disappeared. A brawl engulfed the entire stadium, with the combatants identified by the color of their shirts, and then moved onto the field. The police handled the situation with ineptitude. As a cop beat a Zagreb fan, a Dinamo player called Zvonimir Boban intervened with a flying kick into the officer’s gut. Helicopters descended on the stadium to evacuate the Serb players from the melee.
To anyone watching, it was clear that both Serbs and Croats had come ready to fight. Rocks had been carefully stockpiled in the stadium before the game, waiting to be thrown. Acid had been strategically stored so that Croatian fans could burn through the fences separating them from their Serbian counterparts. Standing next to the Red Star coach, guarding him from the violence, was an even more ominous presence, a secret-police hit man called Zeljko Raznatovic. Through his career as a gangster, he’d reached mythical proportions, so much so that everyone simply referred to him by one of his approximately forty aliases. Considering all the Muslims he would later massacre, it is ironic that he went by the Turkish name Arkan.
Arkan came of age in the placidity of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a Balkan’s version of June-and-Ward’s America, where Serbs and Croats were supposed to be happy neighbors. But Arkan had bucked communist conformism. His father had served as an officer in Tito’s air force and used the military rulebook as a Dr. Spock-like guide for raising his son. Predictably, the harsh discipline backfired. By about age sixteen, Arkan had dropped out of a naval academy, stowed away to Italy, and taken up life as a petty criminal in Paris. Not long into this stint, he was nabbed and sentenced to three years in juvenile detention. Unlike the other Yugoslav criminals with whom he teamed, Arkan hadn’t become a thief to fund a luxurious gangster lifestyle. One of his cronies recounted celebrating a heist in Milan with whiskey and whores. Arkan refused to join the party. He sat alone in a room with the window open, letting cigarette smoke escape, performing calisthenics.
The myth of Arkan has more to do with the aftermath of crimes than the crimes themselves. He had a magical capacity for escape. In 1974, the Belgians locked him up for armed robbery. Three years later, he broke free from prison and fled to Holland. When the Dutch police caught him, he somehow managed to slither away from prison again. That same year, he repeated the feat at a German prison hospital. The masterpiece in this oeuvre was his appearance at the Swedish trial of his partner Carlo Fabiani. Arkan burst into the courtroom carrying a gun in each hand. He aimed one at the judge and tossed the other to Fabiani. Their audacious escape through a courtroom window could have been orchestrated by Jerry Bruckheimer.
With such attention-grabbing escapades, Western Europe became too hot for Arkan. Back in Belgrade, he reconciled with his father and then worked his connections to the Yugoslav security apparatus. Well before Arkan’s return, the police had begun recruiting criminals to perform dirty work, mostly assassinating exiled dissidents. As part of the government arrangement, the criminals could violate the law abroad and then return to haven in Yugoslavia. Arkan became a star in this system, and he flaunted his status. He drove through Belgrade in a pink Cadillac. After he killed a cop, an extremely rare occurrence in the well-ordered communist society, he unsheathed his Ministry of Interior credentials and casually walked out of his trial.
In his brash manner, Arkan had prefigured the late-eighties transition away from communism, an epoch when gangsters and smugglers came to rule the booming Serb economy. And he was more than just a representative figure. He helped Slobodan Milosevic, who became the Serbian Communist Party boss in 1986, manage an exceptionally tricky task. Milosevic had amassed popularity and power by exploiting the long-suppressed nationalism of the Serbs. But as a cynic he also understood how quickly these inflamed passions could turn against him. Nationalism needed to be carefully regulated. One glaring danger spot was the Red Star Belgrade stadium, where the team’s hooligans had become politicized. They had begun lofting placards with the faces of Serbian Orthodox saints and the ultranationalist novelist Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Party. Their chants called for secession: “Serbia, not Yugoslavia.”
It wasn’t strange that the stadium should become so fervent. From the start, Red Star had been a bastion of nationalism. Under communism, eastern-bloc soccer clubs adhered to basically the same model of sponsorship. There was usually a team founded and supported by the army; another with the police as patrons; others aligned with trade unions and government ministries. In Belgrade, the army supported Partizan and the police backed Red Star. To Serb nationalists, the army represented the enemies of their cause. The ideology of the communist army rejected any notion of separate Serb identity as anathema to worker solidarity and ethnic harmony. Tito’s partisans, the namesake of the army club, had murdered, jailed, and beat the Chetniks, the army of Serb nationalists (some say fascists) who had also battled the Nazis. It had suppressed the Serbian Orthodox church. With such odious opponents, Red Star became a home for those Serbs with aspirations of reclaiming their nation.
Throughout Red Star’s history, police eminences sat on its board. In 1989, Milosevic’s interior minister was there. The minister understood that Red Star had become a caldron of post-communist alienation and an uncontrollable mess of gangs, especially ultranationalist ones. Newspapers filled with stories decrying the stadiums as symbols of “general civilizational disintegration.” To control the mess, the police tasked Arkan, a Red Star fanatic himself, with corralling the fans.
Arkan negotiated a truce among the warring factions, placing them all under one organization, with himself at the helm. Where Red Star fans had called themselves the “Gypsies”—an opponent’s insult that they had turned into a badge of honor—Arkan renamed them Delije. Like Arkan’s name, the new title derived from Turkish. It meant something close to heroes, and its distinctly martial connotations fit the new spirit of the club. Almost instantly, Arkan imposed the same discipline that he practiced in his own life. Petty acts of violence ceased. “Red Star’s management proclaimed him its savior,” one of the team’s official magazines reported. Krle, who had become a foot soldier in the Delije, told me, “It was impossible not to have respect for a man like that.”
As Arkan tamed the nationalists within Red Star, the political tides turned. Milosevic’s nationalist rhetoric had convinced the leaders of Croatia and Slovenia that they couldn’t remain partnered with the Serbs—or, at the very least, Milosevic gave them a pretext for stoking their own nationalisms. Croatia and Slovenia moved toward declaring their own independent states, declarations Serbia countered with war.
Romantic trappings of war could be found everywhere. The media railed against the Croatian treatment of its Serb minority, a story that tugged at the heart strings of the nation. But Serbia didn’t have enough men in its army willing to go off and do the dirty work. Draft dodging became a rite of passage. My translator described to me how he faked insanity and created pus-filled infections on his face to end his service after fifty-two days. Young men slept in different apartments each night, hoping to evade the conscriptors. At one desperate point, police began pulling men from restaurants in Belgrade and shipping them to the front. In addition to the problem of the rank and file, there was the problem of the brass. The army’s high command had emerged from a military culture steeped in communism. They had been trained to believe in an even-handed Yugoslavian state arbitrating between the ethnicities.
Without a reliable regular army, the Serb leaders began to discreetly compile paramilitary forces. Arkan’s Delije proved an irresistible recruiting vehicle. The Delije, after all, had a reputation for inflicting cruel violence and then celebrating it in their songs (“Axes in hand/and a knife in the teeth/there’ll be blood tonight”). Under Arkan, they were now operating within a carefully delineated hierarchy that responded to the commands of a single leader. And as they proved against Dinamo Zagreb in the famous televised match, they actually enjoyed fighting Croats. The government preferred this hooligan style. Serbia didn’t need conventional troops to fight another army. Very little of that sort of combat actually took place in the Balkans. The government needed a force that could terrorize civilians, causing Muslims and Croats to flee their homes in the territories that the Serbs hoped to control.
In Yugoslav papers—and for that matter across the world—war had been a metaphor for sports. Teams would battle and attack; they had impenetrable defenses and strikers who fired volleys. Now, Arkan’s men brought the metaphor to life. As he put it in an interview a few years later, “We fans first trained without weapons . . . Since our first beginning I insisted on discipline. Fans make noise, they want to get drunk, fool around. I decided to stop all this with one blow; I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking, and everything went on track.”
Arkan called his army the Tigers, but they might as well have been called the Delije. Recruits from Red Star trained at a government-supplied police base in the Croatian town of Erdut. They were, by all accounts, armed to the hilt. Writing in a Belgrade sports paper in 1992, a reporter filed a dispatch on the Tigers: “I wind back the film of my memories and distribute these brave boys through all the stadiums of Europe. I know exactly where each of them stood, who first started the song, who unfurled his flag, who lit the first torch. The Delije have left their supporters’ props somewhere under the arches of Marakana stadium and have set off to the war with rifles in their hands.”
But they hadn’t left all their fan behavior behind. The Belgrade anthropologist Ivan Colovic has shown that the fans took their stadium songs with them to the front. They tinkered with the lyrics ever so slightly to place them clearly into military context. Red Star players would drive to Arkan’s camp to visit wounded fans. Red Star’s captain Vladan Lukic told the Serbian Journal, “Many of our loyal supporters from the north end of Marakana [stadium] are in the most obvious ways writing the finest pages of the history of Serbia.”
Arkan’s army fought in the first Serb offensive of 1991–92 and immediately began to earn its notorious reputation. Pictures of Arkan’s exploits turned the West decisively against Serbia. Most famously, there were the stomach-churning photographs from Bijeljina. In one, Arkan kisses the president of the Bosnian Serb Republic while standing over the corpse of a Muslim civilian. Others showed Tigers kicking lifeless bodies and stepping on the skulls of their victims.
When Croatia launched a well-armed counteroffensive in 1995, Arkan remobilized his army. He watched the Croats reconquer territory on the television in his home across from Red Star’s stadium. As his wife recounted the story to me, the images made him violently angry. “They are killing my people. I need to go to war,” he exclaimed. At the time, Arkan had only been married a few weeks. His wife says that she appealed to his sense of marital obligation. “You’ve got a family to think of now,” she told him. Instead of rebutting her, he silently retreated to their bedroom. Ten minutes later, when she went to check on him, she found him dressed in his fatigues and beret. Within thirty minutes, after one phone call, his army had assembled in front of the Red Star stadium.
Arkan waged some of his bloodiest offensives near the Bosnian town of Sasina. To oversee his operations, he set up a command post in the manager’s office of the Hotel Sanus. From there, he sent the Tigers on patrols to detain Muslim men, evict their families, and loot their homes. Theft had become a prime goal of the Tigers. One witness told the Los Angeles Times, “When they entered a cleansed Muslim house, a couple of them would head for the kitchen and start moving out kitchen appliances. Others would go for the television and the VCR. Somebody else would start digging in the garden, looking for buried jewelry. You could always recognize Arkan’s men. They had dirty fingernails from digging.” As the Tigers captured Muslims in Sasina, they transported them to Arkan’s hotel headquarters. Some were beaten and interrogated. Others were crammed into a basement boiler room, five square meters in size. For more than three days, the Tigers kept thirty men and one woman in this space, without food, water, or adequate ventilation. A bus transported detainees from the boiler room to the foot of a hill looking up at a village church. They killed all but two of the detainees, shoving them into mass graves that would be exhumed a year later. By the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia, according to State Department estimates, with throat slitting, strangulation, and other forms of execution, Arkan’s Tigers had killed at least 2,000 men and women.
Arkan’s crimes had been documented well. In Serbian society, it wasn’t hard to find out about them. Milosevic hadn’t curtailed access to the Internet, hadn’t banned satellite dishes, hadn’t tossed out the human rights activists. The Belgrade dissident Filip David told me quite simply, “We knew.” But instead of greeting Arkan with moral opprobrium, Serbian society turned him into a hero.
Many of the Serbs who watched Arkan’s veneration, now compare it to the laudatory, fascinated coverage that Americans devoted to John Gotti and Al Capone. This comparison, however, understates both Arkan’s wickedness and the swooning of the Serb press. With regular appearances on the wildly popular Minimaxovision variety show, Arkan presented himself as a charming persona that even the country’s middle class could adore. He used these cameos to announce his marriage to the pop star Ceca and the impending births of their children. When he married Ceca in 1994, TV carried the event live.
The war hadn’t just made Arkan famous; it made him rich, too. Patriotism had provided the justification for looting on a grand scale. Arkan ran his network, the Tigers, as a black market sanctions-busting conglomerate, cornering monopolies on petroleum and consumer goods. Some in Belgrade jokingly dubbed the city’s shopping districts “Arkansas.” Here, the American gangster metaphor really does work. Like many Mafiosos before him, Arkan was intent on parlaying this newfangled wealth into legitimacy. More specifically, he hoped to become the president of a championship soccer club that would provide him with international prestige and even more adoration. When Red Star wouldn’t sell the club to him, Arkan set out to create his own Red Star. First, he bought a team in Kosovo and purged its largely ethnic Albanian lineup. Then, in 1996 he traded up for the Belgrade club Obilic, a semi-professional team that had lingered in Yugoslavia’s lower divisions for decades.
Part of Obilic’s appeal was its namesake, a knight who fought at the Serbs’ defeat in the 1389 battle for Kosovo—the defining moment in the national narrative of victimization. Just before the battle, Obilic infiltrated the Turkish camp and stabbed the Sultan Murad with a poisoned dagger. Arkan added to this preexisting mystique, figuring himself a latter-day Obilic. He changed the color of the club’s uniform to yellow, a tribute to his Tigers, and made the tiger a ubiquitous symbol spread through the stadium. Its face greets you as you enter the club’s headquarters. It appears on the doors of vehicles the club owns.
Almost instantly, under Arkan’s stewardship, the club triumphed. Within a year of arriving in the top division, it won the national championship. Arkan liked to brag about the secrets of his success; the fact that he paid his players the highest salaries in the country; that he forbade them to drink before games; that he disciplined his players to act as a military unit. But his opponents provide another explanation for Obilic’s impossibly rapid ascent. According to one widely reported account, Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker’s kneecap if he scored against Obilic. Another player told the English soccer magazine Four-Four-Two that he’d been locked in a garage while his team played against Obilic.
At games, Arkan’s message to his opponents was clear enough. Obilic’s corps of supporters consisted substantially of veteran paramilitaries. These Tigers would “escort” referees to the game in their jeeps. At games, they would chant things like “If you score, you’ll never walk out of the stadium alive” or “We’ll break both your legs, you’ll walk on your hands.” As English newspapers pointed out, it was in the player’s best interest to adhere to the demands. Fans were frequently waving guns at them.
According to Belgrade lore, Arkan made a habit of barging into opposing teams’ locker rooms during half-time, where he would shout abuse. To avoid this fate, Red Star once simply refused to leave the field during the game break. Its players loitered on the pitch, even urinated on the side of the field, rather than risk encountering Arkan. After another match, Red Star Belgrade striker Perica Ognjenovic complained, “This is not soccer, this is war. I think I’d better leave this country.”
With its overnight success, Obilic had qualified to compete against other top teams in the European Champions League. But even the European soccer officials—not exactly sticklers when it comes to criminals and dictators—couldn’t tolerate the presence of Arkan at their stadiums. They banned the club from continental competition. To get around the ban, Arkan resigned from the club. He installed his wife, Ceca, as his replacement. It didn’t take a prosecutor from The Hague to poke holes in this sleight of hand. When I interviewed Ceca, she told me, “I was the president. He was the advisor.” She chuckled at the mention of both president and advisor.
Obilic never flourished in continental competition. Arkan hadn’t dared lock players from Bayern Munich and other giant European clubs in garages. Soon, Obilic began to slip in the domestic game, too. After Obilic’s championship season, clubs understood that throwing the championship to Arkan had exacted too great a financial cost. They banded together and dared Arkan to kill them all. “The teams called one another and said, ‘We can’t let this happen again,’” the theater director and soccer columnist Gorcin Stojanovic told me. With the clubs aligned against him, Arkan deployed intimidation less frequently. Obilic began to fade into the middle of the league table.
In the end, Obilic may have been Arkan’s undoing. There are many theories to explain why in January 2000 he was gunned down in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, where he liked to take his morning coffee and use the gym. One holds that Milosevic’s son Marko had resented the monopoly that Arkan possessed on the black market. Another holds that the secret police needed to eliminate Arkan. He knew too much and could be too easily lured to The Hague to testify against Milosevic. Or perhaps it was simply a gangland battle over turf. There is, however, another explanation, one that I favor for its poetic justice. Obilic might have been the proximate cause of his death. His partners had resented that he took such a large share of the profits from the sale of players; they felt that they could no longer do business with him. After he exploited soccer to destroy lives, soccer would now destroy his own.
There had always been a small, liberal anti-Milosevic opposition within Belgrade. Around the time of Arkan’s death, their moment finally arrived. Hardship had brought Serbs to an epiphany: What had a decade of warfare achieved, except international isolation and stupendous inflation? To jump-start the anti-Milosevic movement, the liberal leaders called in two groups to provide bodies for demonstrations, the student union and Red Star’s Delije. Ever since the late eighties, Milosevic had worried that the Delije’s sincere attachment to Serbian nationalism might stand in the way of his cynical machinations. Now, the Delije rose to obstruct him.
Red Star fans like to say that they were the agents of political change. Indeed, the guys at the front of the barricades and the ones who stormed government buildings in search of evidence proving Milosevic’s corruption wore replica Red Star jerseys. They would leave games to fight with police near Milosevic’s villa. There, Delije members like Krle and Draza shouted for opposition politicians to “Save Serbia from this mad house.” At games, they sang, “Kill yourself, Slobodan.” To prevent protests, at one point, Milosevic’s regime allegedly began buying up tickets to national team matches and distributing them to friendly faces.
Serbs have placed Milosevic’s overthrow in 2000—the Red Star Revolution, let’s call it—in the pantheon of great anticommunist revolts. They see it as the conclusion to the Velvet Revolution that began in 1989. But had this revolt changed a nation, with anything like the transformative effect of Havel’s ascent to the Prague castle, or Walesa’s presidency? For a revolt to change a nation, the Serbs wouldn’t just have to pull down the iconography of the dictator Milosevic, as the Russians had knocked over the figures of Lenin. They would have had to topple Arkan, the wicked id of the country, from his central place in the culture.
When I visited Belgrade, Arkan’s image remained upright. Two years after the Red Star Revolution, and three years after his death, he still haunted the streets of Belgrade. At newsstands, his mug gleamed on the glossy covers of big-selling tabloids. In bookstalls, he stared heroically from dust jackets. Notices fixed to lampposts advertised a kick-boxing match held in the commandant’s memory.
Obilic exists as the greatest monument to the man. Its stadium may be the most thoroughly modern building in Belgrade, with swooping steel, glass, and a row of plush executive suites. Arkan’s old office overlooks the field from the top of an adjoining tower. By post-communist standards, it’s a remarkable room. Marble and Persian rugs cover the floors. On top of a wooden bookshelf, a framed photo lovingly captures the warlord in his battle garb. The room’s massive wooden desk displays a bronze statue of Arkan with Obilic’s championship medals draped from his neck. In a far corner, a collection of swords pays homage to the warrior Obilic as does a canvas-and-oil portrait of the medieval swain. On a shelf, in plain sight, a box advertises itself as containing a laser-guide for a pistol.