September 17, 2008
BUY ME SOME PEANUTS AND A BIG CUP OF BILE...:
When soccer divides people (Matteo Tacconi, Reset Doc)
In this Balkan country [Bosnia], devastated by the 1992-1995 war and still divided along the front’s old lines, soccer causes even greater divisions. The Serbs, barricaded in the Srpska Republic – one of the two federal regions – support the Serbia team. They feel Serbian, not Bosnian. And they consider Belgrade, and not Muslim Sarajevo, scornfully renamed “Europe’s Teheran”, their real capital.Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2008 11:27 AMIt is sufficient to quote a statement made a couple of weeks ago to the weekly newspaper Dani by the Serb-Bosnian Prime Minister Milorad Dodik to understand how the Serbs in Bosnia feel about soccer. “Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to support the Bosnia-Herzegovina soccer team, except when it plays against Turkey” said Dodik. Why Turkey? It is a legacy issue. The fact is that in the conscience of the Serb nation, the century-old battle against the Ottoman Empire that enslaved Serbia for five centuries is so deeply-rooted that Turkey, even now that it is no longer the beating heart of the sultans’ old empire, is often seen from a retroactive and anachronistic perspective.
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