Simple Loyalties

Events at Stadion Maksimir in Zagreb on 13 May 1990 have been mythologised as causing the Croatian War of Independence. Declan Da Barp examines the complicated nexus of football and politics that has played a key part in shaping Croatian national identity in recent decades.

June 2021

On the approach to Stadion Maksimir, home of Dinamo Zagreb, it would be easy to miss the plaque tucked away in the corner of the car park. It is hard to miss the message, though: “To all Dinamo fans for whom the war started on 13 May 1990, and ended with them laying their lives on the altar of the Croatian homeland.”

The words sit to the right of Croatian soldiers depicted above the riots which erupted in the stadium on 13 May. This plaque, erected by the Bad Blue Boys, Dinamo’s hardcore fan group or ultras, commemorates the actions of the many ultras who fought during the Croatian War of Independence and the Maksimir riots. It is central to a myth surrounding the game that has been propagated by the group.

The riots erupted one week after the first parliamentary elections where the anti-Yugoslav Croatian Democratic Union party won a majority, which had further stoked the nationalist fans’ desire for Croatian independence. In the lead-up to the match, there were hours of street fighting. Once the fans were let into the stands and the barrier fence separating the BBB and the Delije, Red Star’s ultras, had given way, there was very little the authorities could do. The match was abandoned, and has since been mythologized as the game that started a war.

“The TV stations started early because there were already tensions, there was fighting in the city. When they showed the stadium, it was just chaos,” said a member of the Delije, at that time an 11-year-old Serbian growing up in Croatia. “It was warfare rather than a football game.”

The disintegration of an idea, and of a nation, was being broadcast live to the world – and this was but an indication of what was to come. The nationalism seen on 13 May was a symptom rather than the illness it is often presented as, according to Tea Sindbæk Andersen, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen studying football and politics in the Balkans. It was the result of a decade of rising nationalism within Yugoslavia. The tension was apparent in the terraces, with the increased use of nationalistic chants and banners (including fascist imagery) from both the Serbian and Croatian ultras, explained Andersen.

There was no longer a Yugoslavia but six new republics with six distinct nationalistic narratives. These groups reinforced extreme views, as Yugoslavia witnessed ultras embracing far-right and fascist beliefs. Ultra groups can act as a radicalizing force upon young men, outlined Mark Doidge, a senior research fellow at the University of Brighton studying ultra culture. He points to the demographics of ultra groups and those that subscribe to far-right beliefs as primarily young, white males who are looking for a purpose – it is the ultra groups who provide them with a sense of belonging. “They feel excluded in other parts of their life and football provides that, and I’m guessing the same for these radicalized groups,” said Doidge. “It boils down to who belongs at our club and how do we see our club… if you don’t fit into that you will be excluded.” Ultra groups are also built on comradery: a group idea which both radicalizes and protects individuals, said Doidge, which often leads to violence. The Maksimir riots were an extreme example of this.

In the case of Dinamo, the story was not about the club but national identity – distinguishing between who is and is not Croatian. The club was harnessed by Franjo Tuđman, Croatia’s first president, to foster an idea of Croatia. That is why this game is remembered – not for the result, as Red Star had already won their 18th league title, but rather for the symbol it gave to Croatian nationalists. The 1980s had been a decade of turmoil in Yugoslavia, with the country experiencing political deadlock and a rising tide of nationalisms.

Tuđman was the one spearheading the new idea of Croatia. A politician and historian, Tuđman began to associate himself with Croatian nationalism in the 1970s in his defence of the Croatian language, and his revisionist writings about Croatia’s Second World War regime, the Ustashe. Tuđman aimed to downplay the crimes committed by Ante Pavelić and the Ustashe, and his association with that regime seeped into Tuđman’s view of Croatian nationalism.  

Under Pavelić, the leader of the Ustashe, Croatia had become uncompromisingly Catholic and espoused a similar worldview to the Nazis, viewing Slavs, Jews, and the Romani as sub-human. According to Catherine Baker, Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull, the Ustashe systematically murdered an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Serbs during the war. Many other Serbs were forcibly relocated or converted to Catholicism.

This ethnic hatred never truly disappeared. “There is no way of not calling this a genocidal fascist regime that Croatia had during the Second World War and that lack of proper condemnation of that is a huge problem,” said Andersen. Fascist symbolism became more prominent within greater Croatian society during the 1990s, but especially within the Croatian ultra groups. The Ustashe’s greeting, Za dom spremni, was one of the symbols embraced by the BBB, and it lives on in Croatian society today.

The symbols of the far right were evident during Croatia’s EURO 2016 campaign, both in qualifying and at the tournament in France. Racist and homophobic banners and chants were paired with protests aimed at the Croatian Football Federation, the HNS, and the former vice president, Zdravko Mamić. Along with Damir Vrbanović, the federation’s executive director, and Davor Šuker, the president, Mamić held a tight grip over the Croatian national and domestic game. While working with the HNS, both Mamić and Vrbanović were executives at Dinamo, where the two were convicted of defrauding the club of €15.5 million in 2018. Mamić is currently living in Bosnia–Herzegovina to evade his six-and-a-half year prison sentence.

“He was this unscrupulous guy, who started in football but then spread like cancer throughout the fabric of Croatian society,” said Aleksandar Holiga, a Croatian football writer. The years of Mamić’s control saw many Croatian football fans become disillusioned with the national team. Many were tired of what they perceived as the hijacking of the team for financial gain and wanted to make their voices heard. While there are no organically organised national team supporters’ groups, says Holiga, the heterogeneous group of Croatian fans viewed EURO 2016 as a platform to protest on an international stage – even to the detriment of their team. “Football is such a powerful symbol of statehood and patriotism in Croatia that everything can be seen through it much more clearly than in other walks of life,” said Holiga. “When people started protesting against [Mamić], the most powerful tool they had at their disposal was UEFA and their fines and their sanctions.”

The first incident occurred during a qualifying match against Italy at San Siro in November 2014, when flares were thrown onto the pitch and racist chants, including Za dom spremni, were heard from travelling fans. While the BBB and Hajduk Split’s Torcida group were not officially involved, Holiga has no doubt that individuals from those groups were present. This resulted in the return match in Split being played behind closed doors.

The incident which followed in Split in June 2015 shocked the world, and the HNS and Croatia faced widespread condemnation. A 12-metre-wide Swastika was chemically sprayed into the grass, an act which was undoubtedly designed to garner international attention. Many experts on Croatian politics and football assert that if this incident had been ideologically motivated, the stylized Ustashe “U” or Za dom spremni would have been used instead. “They chose to put a swastika to avoid any confusion,” said Holiga. “If you pick something that is universally condemned, that’s that.”

This incident was characteristic of the more radical protests in the run-up to EURO 2016, which culminated in the infamous incident that interrupted Croatia’s second group game against the Czech Republic in Saint-Étienne. The disturbances and in-fighting in the stands were just the latest in a long series of examples of the extreme lengths Croatian football fans were willing to go to protest against the HNS, and the disagreements within a heterogeneous group of supporters from across the country.

“It clearly showed the existing cleavages within the heterogeneous group that is the fans of the Croatian national team,” said Dario Brentin, a PhD candidate at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. “They thought their increasingly radical forms of protest would also be understood as acceptable and it was shown in this one moment that this was not acceptable.” Brentin sees this moment as a “breaking point” for the protests, which lost momentum and popular support following the repudiation of their actions in the media and society writ large.  

Back in 1990, it was Tuđman who understood the political potential of football, as he created a new Croatian national identity that was firmly attached to Dinamo Zagreb. “Franjo Tuđman was well aware of the potential that sport had for this newly emerging democracy and […] certainly the realignment of Croatian national identity,” said Brentin. He associated Dinamo Zagreb with the idea of Croatia throughout his reign, even pushing to rename the club ‘Croatia Zagreb’ in the 1990s. “I don’t think it’s an accident that Tuđman picks them as his club,” said Tamir Bar-On, a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey and senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). “If you look at ultras, this is one of the more radical groups in what they stand for.”

The politics of the BBB aimed to foster this idea long before that famous game in May 1990. “They have very simple ideas of loyalty. They had complete loyalty to Dinamo and complete loyalty to Croatia,” said Andersen. “The Bad Blue Boys made the connection themselves.” In making this connection, the BBB became deeply political, violently promoting the ideas of a Croatian nationalism connected to far-right and fascist beliefs. This is in contrast to Red Star, who were becoming Yugoslavia’s – and thus Serbia’s – team. As such, the violence that day was seen as a prelude to the war that would begin the next year.

In the mêlée that ensued after the BBB tore down the fence separating them from the Delije, the Yugoslav police intervened, and in Croatian accounts of the event, they did so only in support of the Serbian fans. Then it happened… Zvonimir Boban, captain of Dinamo Zagreb and an outspoken Croatian nationalist, took a run-up before leaping boot-first at a Yugoslav police officer who was attacking a Dinamo supporter. No matter that the police officer was a Bosnian Muslim, this act has been glorified as a symbol of Croatian nationalism and the event which started the Croatian War of Independence.

 “[The kick] is a hue that this multi-ethnic Yugoslavia is not going to work,” said Bar-On. “It’s being held together by a fictitious idea and the real idea is the idea of blood,” he said. “That is reinforced by the Dinamo Zagreb fans and their plaque.” The image of Boban’s kick was used widely by the Croatian press and the BBB themselves. It featured prominently on the club’s website and magazine in the years that followed, alongside patriotic phrases like “independent Croatia.”

According to Andersen, depicting the events of 13 May 1990 as the start of the war aims to inflate and uphold the BBB’s place in the founding of Croatia. “They are saying that the football match started the war, which I insist is definitely not true,” she said. “Say ‘actually we were the ones who started the war, and we were the ones who continued the war and won it and made these huge sacrifices for the country.’”

Indeed, many ultras participated heavily in the fighting which ended the Yugoslav state. Many were motivated by patriotism and nationalism, grown out of the underground groups that surrounded football, and many had learned how to fight from these groups. Many other Balkan clubs have statues to their fallen dead, but only Dinamo link theirs to the specific events of 13 May 1990. By telling the story in this way, Andersen says, they aim to homogenize the event. They aim to hide the fact that Dinamo Zagreb and the other Croatian teams returned for the 1990-91 season; that Boban continued to play and score for the Yugoslav national team; and that the military conflict itself did not begin until 31 March 1991.

Words: Declan Da Barp | Imagery: Imago; Dario Brentin; Suradnik13