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.

It 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.