How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (3 page)

The myth of Arkan has more to do with the after-math 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 Fabi-anni. 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 care-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

fully 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 sta-
diums as symbols of “general civilizational disintegra-tion.” 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 oªcial 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 stok-ing 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 o¤ and do the dirty work.

Draft dodging became a rite of passage. My translator
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

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 di¤erent 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 o¤

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.”
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

III.

Arkan’s army fought in the first Serb o¤ensive 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

countero¤ensive 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 o¤ensives near the Bosnian town of Sasina. To oversee his operations, he set up a command post in the manager’s oªce 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
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

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
Minimaxovi-sion
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 mys-tique, 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.