Serb prayer for political footie

Serbian football fans travelled from Ikealand to Nokialand a fortnight ago to put up a banner with the legend "Kosovo is Serbian".

Although the European Football Federation UEFA has banned political slogans inside any football stadium, the well-meaning Nokis read it as a statement as simple as "Lapland is part of Finland". Luckily they could not read the original banners, which were in Serbian and celebrated Ratko Mladic´, Serbia’s most wanted (by the UN, anyway) war criminal.

But presumably the message came over loud and heart-sinkingly clear to Serbian president Boris Tadic´ as he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Finnish Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn at Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium. Tadic´ could at least console himself that Serbia thrashed Finland 2-0.

A few days earlier, the Serbian government had handed over to Carla del Ponte, the hard-nosed UN prose-cutor in The Hague, the Yugoslav army’s former "assistant commander in charge of information and safety" Zdravko Tolimir, a Mladic´ underling of the (allegedly) ethnic-cleansing tendency.

But this sacrificial lamb, or wolf, is unlikely to suffice for Serbia to have any realistic chance of joining the queue for EU membership, as many Serbians now seem to want. Surrendering Mladic´ remains a sine qua non.

Nor is that the end of the new Serbian government’s headaches. Another well-known Noki, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, is in Vienna tirelessly working on the ultimate nightmare for Serbia independence for Kosovo.

For Belgrade he is bad cop to Rehn’s friendly good cop, who chats about football and stuff all the quarrelsome parties have in common. Mr A is more like the type with the smoky voice asking nasty questions from behind the interrogation lamp.

In both Croatia and Serbia, football hooligans have a natural link to their respective warlords and generals with a tendency to take mopping-up operations that centimetre or so too far. As early as 1990 the fans were conducting full-scale battles during Zagreb Dynamo v Belgrade Red Stars ‘friendlies’; at one point the Yugoslav authorities had to evacuate Red Star supporters in helicopters.

Do these countries really belong to the EU? Let’s be charitable. As long as there is life there is hope, or anyway the Eurovision song contest, which Serbia won in Helsinki last month. The huge popularity at home of the triumphant, openly gay, singer Marija Serifovic suggests Serbian society may be more tolerant than, for example Poland, an EU member state.

In May 2008 the ever-excruciating Eurovision contest - in its own way as politically charged as football - moves to Belgrade. The idea, presumably, is to persuade the Serbs to be more pro-European, ie, not be quite so thuggish, and steal a bit less. Who knows? Marija’s title song ‘Prayer’ might even come true.

Serbian football fans travelled from Ikealand to Nokialand a fortnight ago to put up a banner with the legend "Kosovo is Serbian".