One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [85]
“You hate them too, though, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the children answered together. “But only because they hate us,” Stefan explained.
“But if your only difference is language, how do you know who to hate if they don’t speak, if they stay quiet?”
“They have a different religion,” Katja said without needing a moment to think about it. “They have mosques; we have churches.” She was growing weary both of my poor soccer playing and my infantile lack of comprehension on this issue that to them seemed so clear, so ingrained that it need not be explored. Hadn’t I heard of the Battle of Kosovo? They had just told me the story. Had I forgotten already? Did they need to tell it again?
“You can know us,” little Miroslaw, the author of the drawing that started our conversation about history said, “by our damage.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can know that we are Serbs by the damage we can do if any shiptar come here looking for trouble.” The word shiptar was the pejorative for Albanians. It carried the same weight as kike, or nigger, or spic would in America. No one was fazed by it.
“If they come here looking for trouble…,” Marko said, smiling and acting out some kung fu moves on Miroslaw. The other boys quickly jumped in, laughing and mock karate chopping.
I turned to Niko, my translator. He was a Serb who worked with the NATO forces, disarming the local population, manning checkpoints, going on patrols. He spoke Albanian and Serbian fluently, though Albanians didn’t trust him because he was a Serb and Serbs didn’t trust him because he worked with the Americans. The Americans bombed the Serbs in 1998, ending the campaign to cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian population and sending the Serbs scrambling for shelter, from the bombs and the Kosovo Liberation Army, the former guerilla force that seized the country thanks to the bombing. Politics limited his friendships rather dramatically. Niko wasn’t prejudiced, though. He didn’t care who was Serb, Albanian, or American. He just wanted to study computers and get on with his life. Watching the boys kick and chop at each other, he shrugged and shook his head a little.
“They are very isolated here,” he told me. “They don’t know any better.”
I watched them roughhouse, the soccer ball sitting idly in the field where my last kick had gone astray. They chased each other around, and I imagined them playing a game like Cowboys and Indians. In Israel it was Israeli and Palestinian. In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi, in Belfast Taig and Prod. Every society in the world has these games of otherness. As I watched the children playing, however, and thought how casually they wrote off the Albanians, how difficult coexistence was proving to be, I thought about another soccer club I had read of, Red Star Belgrade.
Red Star Belgrade was a prominent soccer club in Serbia. When uprisings against Belgrade’s rule of all the provinces of Yugoslavia began in the early nineties, a nationalist thug and wanted gangster known as Arkan drew supporters for his paramilitary group, the Serb Volunteer Guard, from the fan base of Red Star Belgrade. He was a soccer fanatic; he knew the guys who hung out in the bars on game days, who gathered in crowds and went out looking for trouble with the opposing team’s fans. These were his people. They loved Red Star Belgrade as much as they loved their people, the proud and oft-maligned Serb people. Their violence was born of love, of a kind. Soccer and nationalism, as any World Cup observer notices, are never far apart. That kind of love, that kind of loyalty turns easily to violence. What started as a fan club for Red Star evolved into a gang of thugs and turned into much worse.
Arkan’s Tigers, as they were called, ended up acting as a death squad throughout Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo during the nineties, playing a role in the Srebrenica Massacre, the siege of Sarajevo, and in the campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout Kosovo. During the latter conflict, Arkan also owned a soccer club, Obilic, which spent one season as a championship team, until the Union of European Football