by Emir Imamović

"The truth is: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron," Nick Hornby says at the beginning his novel Fever Pitch (1992), which has been widely acclaimed as the best soccer book ever written. And truly, this novel—slim but packed with self-mockery—is an ideal primer for anyone who wishes to enter the mind of the soccer fanatic, to discover what drives him to see the stadium as a church, enter it with a religious reverence, and experience an emotional high watching twenty-two men play what in the end is a simple game.
Were Hornby not English and a fan of Arsenal London—if he was, say, from Bosnia-Herzegovina and had spent his youth at a stadium in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Mostar, Banja Luka, Široki Brijeg, Trebinje, or Zenica—he may not have become quite such a literary sensation. He would probably have been equally talented, and it is not impossible that his literary debut would have been about soccer. But he would have given it a more somber title.
We have said that the first book of our imaginary Hornby would be mainly about soccer, so let’s forget about any metaphor linked to the country’s recent history scorched by the Serbian blitzkrieg and divided by the mutual hatred of its inhabitants. It is true that soccer stadiums were used as starting points for mass deportations in the campaign of ethnic cleansing, and that—especially in eastern Bosnia on the border with Serbia—they were collection points for people whose remains were later exhumed from mass graves. As it turned out, the mass stadium brawl between Serbian fans of Red Star Belgrade and the Croatian fans of Dinamo Zagreb in the last season of the joint soccer league of socialist Yugoslavia was a foretaste of the brutal war that followed and was to turn what had been the most open noncapitalist society into a testing ground in the search for ultimate evil. [ ...]
It would be interesting, if possible, to find someone in Oslo, for example, who knows nothing about Bosnia-Herzegovina, acquaint him afresh with the basics of its recent history, explain to him how three peoples continue to live here who differ significantly only in terms of religion (Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox), and then demand from him that he pass judgment on Bosnia after attending matches of its Premier League. That is a clumsy competition with a total of sixteen clubs and an average of just a few thousand spectators per match. It is highly probable that our Norwegian would predict straight out Bosnia-Herzegovina’s future to be even gloomier than its past!
Well, let’s try and put ourselves in his position. Here we are in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, at a match between the home club Borac (Fighter) and the Sarajevo club Željeznićar (Railwayman). The fans in the grandstands are mainly locals, attired like soccer fans in most countries of Europe: scarves, caps, flags, the works. Down on the pitch we see the host team Borac from Republika Srpska’s most open city—its administrative, political, and cultural center—and their opponents, the visitors from Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its largely Muslim population. About a decade has passed since Serbs from Banja Luka marched and took up positions around Sarajevo, when Željeznićar’s stadium was on the front line. The Vultures, as the organized Borac fans call themselves, have hung a banner on the stadium fence with the words "Knife, Wire, Srebrenica," which rhymes in Serbian and is a clear allusion—and acceptance of—one of the greatest crimes since World War Two in which around 8,000 Muslims were murdered, as well as a message telling the visitors what their fate ought to be. Behind the banner young men with T-shirts sporting the two most wanted Serbian war criminals—Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić—sing songs glorifying the Chetnik movement from World War Two and voice the desire for a Greater Serbia and the end of Bosnia. […]

Emir Imamović was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1973 and lives today in Sarajevo. Since 1992, he has worked both for television and the print media. He was also a war reporter in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Afghanistan. He currently publishes in Dani, the most influential news magazine in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the Sarajevo magazine Gracija; he writes screenplays for documentary films and is preparing his first novel.

The present text is an excerpt from Emir Imamović’s contribution to Leap into the City.