The president, the football hooligans and an underworld ‘House of Horrors’

But if Milosevic and his deputy managed to tame the press, they lost their grip on the stadium. Many football hooligans had fought in the wars, and when they came home, “they felt they could define national identity,” said Ivan Dordevic, an anthropologist at the Institute of Ethnography in Belgrade, who wrote his dissertation on football and soccer. nationalism in the Balkans. B., my hooligan contact, said it differently. In the stadium “a new generation came, and they didn’t care [expletive]about Arkan’s wealth or his glamorous pop star wife Ceca, he said. They decided that they had also had enough of Milosevic, who had brought Serbia to economic ruin and pariah status in Europe. In stadiums, football fans chanted: “Kill yourself, Slobodan!” The hooligans joined the political opposition and began serving as informal security during protests.

The big moment came on October 5, 2000, when a week of street protests culminated in the storming of the Serbian parliament, led by hooligans. Milosevic resigned the following night, and for a moment the Serbs were ecstatic. In recognition of their role in his overthrow, some hooligans had their criminal records erased by the victorious Democratic Opposition coalition. “Nothing in the police, nothing in the courts”, said B.. “Were free. We are like angels. Clean slate.” The euphoria quickly faded. The Serbian economy was a wreck and the European Union had no intention of saving a country widely seen as a den of unscrupulous war criminals.

For Vucic, the fall of Milosevic marked a moment of deep uncertainty about his own political future. Years later, he gave a strange interview that hints at his feelings of anger and thwarted ambition. “I sat at home and saw it as a tragedy for the Serbian people,” he said. “Then I went out, some junkies attacked me, so I had to beat them.” He punched them both and knocked them out, he said. But somehow these mysterious assailants got up and came at him again, and he gave them a second beating. “I went back home,” Vucic said, “knowing, of course, that Serbia was facing years of collapse and destruction.”

Serbia’s national identity for centuries has been shaped by feelings of loss and hurt pride. Serbia came under Ottoman rule not long after a legendary battle in 1389, a date spray-painted on walls all over the country. It has not fully regained its independence for nearly 500 years. Those feelings were reawakened in the 1990s, when many Serbs believed they were being unfairly portrayed as the villains of a complex civil war. They also deeply resented the American-led NATO bombing campaign in 1999, which forced the Serbian army out of Kosovo after accusing it of ethnic cleansing and murder. That expulsion allowed Kosovo, once considered a Serbian heartland, to gain independence, another blow to the Serbs.