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
