BELGRADE

  Ramet offers an early example of such sycophancy: “The group Indeksi, for example—prominent in the mid–1960s—penned a song ‘Yugoslavia,’ which included the lines, ‘We knew that the sun was shining on us, because we have Tito for our marshal!’” Other examples include the veteran Đorđe Balašević’s songs “Count on us” (1978) and “Three Times I saw Tito” (1981), although he has not performed them since the break-up of Yugoslavia.

  Teenagers had more of an opportunity to be who they wanted, choose a style of make-up and stand out from the crowd. Uniformity was not enforced on a population wanting to experiment and produce something as a mark of their generation. Belgrade had its own bands and music which really came to the fore in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Writing of this period in his book The Culture of Power in Serbia, Eric Gordy comments,

  Increasingly open to the West since the middle 1960s and still relatively prosperous, Belgrade youth generated a rock and roll culture that, at least in the minds of local fans, was on a par with the pop scenes of Western Europe. In 1981, the British music magazine New Musical Express listed the Belgrade art students’ club Akademija as one of the finest music clubs in Europe. It also rated Belgrade’s punk-pop group Električni orgazam as one of the finest bands in Europe.

  Gordy captures more of the atmosphere of those years and the increasingly critical stance of musicians and singers when he turns to another group founded at the end of the 1970s, Riblja čorba, and its founder Bora Đorđević. He writes of them:

  Bora Đorđević achieved tremendous popularity with the band Riblja čorba (literally, Fish chowder, although the name also contains an implicit obscene connotation) in the first several years of the band’s existence, mostly through his comic songs, which were principally about his own drunkenness and oafishness. At the same time, several of Riblja čorba’s early songs became anthems of anti-Communist rebelliousness.”

  Their song “I Won’t Live in Block 65” is about the reality of life in New Belgrade, while “Member of the Mafia” is a thinly veiled attack on the communists: “What’s a piece of paper to me, where it’s written that I’m a member of the mafia.”

  One of the influential bands from that time was Partibrejkers, who are still performing over 25 years later. They have an official website now where their music is described in the following terms:

  Musically they are some kind of punk version of early 70s Stones style. Blues or better rhythm and blues influences are very strong. There are a lot of bands in ex-Yugoslav countries who sing that way. Try to imagine The Rolling Stones from the early 70s playing punk. It’s not exactly the sound that the New York Dolls had—it’s rawer and faster and more bluesy.

  The bands and their fans were Yugoslavs and international in their orientation, so it is no surprise that most of them reacted against the chauvinist euphoria of the late 1980s. There were some notable exceptions, such as Bora Đorđević, who gave their services to nationalist regimes. On the Partibrejkers’ website one of their fans refers to this period, “But there was big shit going on in Yugoslavia. Garage punk was in some way our protest against nationalistic politics.” Bands from Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana and other major towns travelled and performed to large crowds in all parts of the country. They began touring again as soon as hostilities were over and it was possible to travel. The reception given to groups from other towns, now capital cities of different countries, shows no sign of animosity or hostility. If young people like the music it seems unimportant where the performers come from or if they speak in a slightly different dialect. Perhaps the indifference of youth to playing the card of identity politics produced an ambiguous and dangerous passivity during the wars in former Yugoslavia, but it may now be one of the most positive factors in bringing about reconciliation.

  The 1990s saw the rise of a neo-folk brand of music known as “turbofolk”, which combined the oriental rhythms of traditional folk music with a strong disco beat. Intended to appeal to young people, it evoked nostalgia for a false past of national heroics and the simple virtues of a patriarchal code, while promising the contradictory shallow rewards of success today with fast cars and money. On the surface it offered an authentic Serbian alternative to the decadent internationalism of rock and roll.

  Belgrade became divided as loyalties in populist politics and popular music cut across each other. Turbofolk in Serbia was associated by default with village life and rural identities, but it slid into Belgrade via the social phenomenon of the urban peasant. The population of the city increased fast after the war from about 400,000 in 1951 to just over 1,400,000 in 1981, with newcomers arriving from the villages and small towns around Yugoslavia. Many families retained strong ties with their original homes fostering a ready environment in which to receive the electronic neo-folk melodies accompanied by kitsch parades of glamorous girls. The music was despised by those who preferred the anarchic defiance of punk or rock and roll. But the internationalist side was rapidly marginalized.

  The market for popular music was relatively small and fairly easily controlled, a topic that Gordy discusses in some depth:

  Visibly staking out a cultural position that carries clear political implications—for urban culture, for the decadence of the West, against folk nostalgia and nationalism—Belgrade rock and roll narrowed its own cultural space. As the scene took its cultural importance and cultural mission seriously, the borders of the rock and roll genre hardened. With production and distribution of recordings nearly impossible and press runs down to a minimum, media access also minimal, and only a few performance venues, most of them small, commercial success in rock and roll was out of the question.

  Pop music was caught up in the nationalist policies of the Milošević government. It has also proven to be one of the factors that connect people from all over the cultural space of former Yugoslavia. The Serbian entry won the 2007 Eurovision song contest largely because of votes from neighbouring countries recently at war. Plans are to host the 2008 competition in the Arena building in New Belgrade.

  FOOTBALL AND NATIONALISM

  Belgrade has many sporting venues and has hosted a variety of international events. At the beginning of the Second World War King Peter sponsored the Belgrade Grand Prix held on 3 September 1939. It was won by the famous Italian driver Tazio Nuvolari. The race had the dubious distinction of taking place just two days after Germany invaded Poland and was the only Grand Prix to be staged during the war. It was watched by some 100,000 spectators, almost a quarter of the city’s population at the time. There has been no Belgrade Grand Prix since then as the communists considered the sport a bourgeois amusement.

  In Velmar-Janković’s novel Dungeon the narrator, Milica Pavlović, compares the number of those watching the race with those, like her, attending the opening of an exhibition by the painter Sava Šumanović:

  There were two main events. The more important one, judging by the number of spectators, was the international automobile and motorbike race round Kalemegdan Park; the lesser one, attracting a small attendance, was the opening of the exhibition of Sava Šumanović, in the New University building, on Prince’s Square. (If I’m not mistaken, that is now the Philological Faculty building, on Students’ Square.) Thirtythree racing cars were to take part in the race, six international aces of the track led by the famous Nuvolari (at least I think that’s what that Italian was called: I didn’t read the headlines referring to the international motor car races again) and 66 motorbikes; after a gap of eleven years, Sava Šumanović was exhibiting more than 400 oils, watercolours, drawings, sketches in the seven large rooms of the New University.

  Since the second half of the twentieth century other sports have been more popular than motor racing in Belgrade: basketball, water polo and football. The national teams for Yugoslavia and later Serbia have been very successful in the first two disciplines. In basketball the Yugoslav team took the gold medal at the 1980 Olympic Games. They have been world champions five times, three as socialist Yugoslav
ia and twice as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1998 and 2001, and have won gold eight times in the European Championships, most recently in 1995, 1997 and 2001. Some Serbian players have moved to the United States and had very successful playing careers there including Vlade Divac and Predrag Stojaković.

  The national water polo team has also enjoyed international success taking in total eight Olympic medals; three gold, four silver and one bronze. Only Hungary has won more medals in this sport. The team beat the USSR in the final of the 1968 Olympics, then in 1984 and 1988 beat the United States. The Partizan Water Polo Club has been European champions six times, most recently in 2006, and once took the Super Champions cup. Games are watched with great passion and a win at international level is generally followed by a cavalcade of cars through the city centre, with horns blaring, drivers and passengers cheering and waving scarves from windows.

  The main football clubs in Belgrade are Partizan and Red Star (Crvena zvezda), although they are more correctly names of sporting associations covering a number of disciplines. Red Star was founded on 4 March 1945 and played its first match that day against a team from one of the Partisan battalions. Its second game was held a week later against some British soldiers serving with the military mission. Red Star won. In 1958 they played in the final of the European Cup. Their opponents were Manchester United who flew to Belgrade to play in Red Star’s stadium. The result was a 3–3 draw, but Manchester won the tie 5–4 on aggregate. Their departure was delayed because one of the United players, Johnny Berry, could not find his passport. Their plane stopped for refuelling at Munich as scheduled, but on take-off there was an accident and the plane crashed with many dead and injured. Eight United players were amongst the fatalities resulting from the tragedy. Red Star is the only Serbian club to have won a UEFA competition, taking the European Cup in 1991 against Marseille in Bari. The same year they won the Intercontinental Cup in Tokyo.

  Red Star’s first supporters came from the elite area of town around Dedinje and Senjak, not far from their stadium. They were generally children of the pre-war bourgeoisie but were later joined by others from more modest backgrounds who eventually formed the first organized supporters’ clubs. During the late 1980s they began to call themselves Delije, a Turkish word that in this context roughly equates to the Heroes. The fans travelled everywhere to see their team, singing and waving flags inside the stadium, while gaining a reputation for drinking and violence inside and outside the ground. With the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, their chants became increasingly pro-Serbian and chauvinistic whenever Red Star played a team from one of the other republics.

  On 13 May 1990 an estimated 3,000 fans made their way to Croatia to watch their team against Dinamo Zagreb. Intense rivalry was common practice, but this match came shortly after the first multi-party elections in Croatia that elected a government in favour of independence. The meeting between fans from Zagreb and Belgrade was tense and violence flared up. The subsequent riot is regarded by some as the first sign that the ordinary people of Yugoslavia could no longer live together and that the future of the state was untenable.

  Red Star fans were linked to the paramilitary formations which fought in Croatia and Bosnia, and in particular with Arkan’s Tigers. One of their chants certainly became popular amongst the nationalists Serbia to Tokyo (Srbija do Tokija), first heard when Red Star took the World Club Championship in 1991. Its initial meaning simply indicated that the Serbian team was playing in Tokyo, but its later connotation was a celebration of territorial aggrandisement. It is open to debate whether the support of football hooligans for Serbian paramilitaries was the result of a plot to engage a large number of aggressive young men in the nationalist cause, or whether these aggressive young men gravitated towards a centre of violence.

  Red Star’s local rivals are the Partizan Football Club, founded on 4 October 1945, and named in honour of the resistance movement led by the communists. It was initially formed by the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija or JNA) and their ground used to be called the Stadium JNA but is now named after the club.

  The stadium hosted an important annual event in former Yugoslavia. Each year a baton was taken around all republics by a relay of runners. The tradition began in 1945 in honour of Tito’s birthday on 25 May and from the mid–1950s was incorporated in the celebrations for the Day of Youth on that date. The end of the relay was marked in a ceremony when the baton would be handed to the president in the Stadium JNA. The baton began its journey each year from a different republic, but after Tito’s death some voices were raised against the event calling it a spectacle organized by the League of Communists in honour of itself with no real meaning for national solidarity as claimed.

  Vesna Goldsworthy recalls the way in which the ceremony was continued in her autobiography Chernobyl Strawberries:

  For a while Yugoslavs continued to celebrate the day in the traditional manner, with torches lit from eternal flames relayed around the country by handsome athletes, young workers and bright students, in a well-rehearsed marathon which was the first item on the new bulletins throughout the spring. The longer it was since his demise, the more there was to celebrate. Like the widow of a murdered Sicilian Mafia don, the country clung to his memory in an incongruous mixture of mourning and décolletage, as if knowing that a collective nervous breakdown would follow once the ritual was no longer observed.

  In the late 1980s, as in the other republics, Slovenia experienced its “awakening of the people”. Slovene nationalist opinion was making its voice heard on a number of topics. Sabrina Ramet comments on the Slovene case: “This process can be dated to the publication by the Slovenian journal Nova revija (in February 1987) of a collection of articles devoted to the ‘Slovenian national program’, which included, inter alia, a protest against the second-class status of the Slovenian language in Yugoslavia.” The complaints escalated and soon the republic was in dispute with the federal authorities in Belgrade on the constitutional right of republics to secede from the federation. In 1987 the baton for the Day of Youth should have begun its journey from the top of Slovenia’s highest mountain, but in an act of dissent it never left. There was clearly a symbolic chain linking this event, the public memory of Tito and the Yugoslav ideal; at least when one disappeared so did the rest.

  Partizan Football Club beat Manchester United in the semi-final of the 1966 European Cup but lost 2–1 in the final against Real Madrid. In 1989 they met Celtic, winning in the first leg played in Mostar 2–1, but losing 5–4 in Scotland, although Partizan won the tie because of the rule on away goals. They have a striking internal record with 130 Partizan players selected for the national team, one of whom, Savo Milošević, was capped more times than any other with a total of 101 appearances before he retired from international football in 2006.

  Affectionately called the Black and Whites on account of their strip, Partizan hold the record for national championships since the break-up of Yugoslavia and remained unbeaten during the 2004–05 season. They were expelled from the 2007–08 UEFA Cup qualifying stages and given a hefty fine after fighting broke out between their supporters and fans of the opposing team when playing in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina. Their stadium in Belgrade is close to Red Star’s home ground, the local derby always being a potential flash point for violence in the city.

  Their fans are called Grobari (Gravediggers) for which there are two possible origins. One is that the name refers to Humska Street, where their home ground stands, humka being a word for burial mound. The other possibility is that it was used by their rivals from Red Star because the black and white colours of the team apparently resemble outfits worn by the city’s gravediggers. These fans regularly followed the team to away matches in other Yugoslav republics and abroad where their reputation for violence matched Red Star’s. In September 2005 the fans publicly stated their dissatisfaction with two of the club’s officials, Nenad Bjeković and Žarko Zečević, for allegedly lining their own p
ockets by misappropriating club funds. They demanded their resignation and called a boycott of future matches. The boycott lasted until 2007 when changes were announced to the board of directors. During the boycott even the traditional derby with Red Star was poorly attended.

  Ivan Čolović includes a short study of football hooliganism in his book The Politics of Symbol in Serbia. He draws a parallel between the fans’ aggression and the mentality of war. He writes:

  The story of the collapse of Yugoslavia, in a frenzy of hatred and war, in honour of the gods of ethnic nationalism and pre-modern militarism may also be described as a story of the evolution of violence in Yugoslav sport, especially among hooligan football supporters, and of the gradual transference of that violence, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s, on to the terrain of inter-ethnic conflicts and “greater nation” politics, and thence on to the battlefield.

  He describes how in the fervour of the 1980s football supporters carried flags and other paraphernalia proclaiming their ethnic identity in order to associate their team with the national cause. Their behaviour and sentiments ran in parallel with speeches and emblems from public meetings at the time, although expressed without the fans’ pornographic obscenities: