Brotherly Woes

Serbs and Greeks are basically "brothers" until the summer comes along and spoils everything. When the summer comes and various newspapers start deciding who our friends and our enemies are, Greeks are usually referred to as out "former brothers". Come September, they are our brothers again.

The loving brotherly feelings start disappearing in the first week of July. Serbs who want to spend their summer holidays in Greece stand in queues outside the Greek embassy in Belgrade trying to get a visa, loudly groaning about the fact that Croats, for instance, don't need one to visit our Christian Orthodox "brothers". A daily newspaper recently revealed that Yugoslavs on holiday in Greece would spend 35 million German marks in August alone.

The feelings boil somewhere in mid-July, when the Greek national basketball team runs into the invincible Yugoslavs at the European Championship, the World Cup or the Olympic Games. Greek basketball fans are surely having a hard time dealing with 15 or so consecutive defeats at the hands of the Yugoslavs, for basketball in Greece, much like in Yugoslavia, is kind of a religion. The Greeks too declare us their "former brothers" after getting beaten on the court and usually add that we are one ungrateful bunch. Their newspapers and television start an anti-Serb propaganda far more imaginative and horrifying than all the stuff written about us by various "Serb-haters" during the war in the former Yugoslavia. For instance, not a single western reporter ever called us "sleezeballs", "pickpockets" or "chickenshits", or qualified our basketball players and coaches as "maniacs" and "faggots".

After inflicting another heavy defeat on our Greek brothers in front of their vociferous 20,000-strong crowd, our assistant coach Miroslav Nikolic decided to be vindictive. "We taught them how to play basketball, we will teach them to forget basketball too", he said after the game.

The Serbian-Greek conflict dates back to the summer of 1995, when the European Basketball Championship was being held in Athens. It was the first outing for Yugoslav athletes after sanctions imposed against Yugoslavia by the U.N. Security Council four years earlier. In all honesty, we should thank the Greeks for that because they agreed to change the tournament format from 12 to 16 teams. But the Greeks lived to regret their decision, for our national team led by the likes of Vlade Divac, Zarko Paspalj, Predrag Danilovic and Aleksandar Djordjevic defeated the Greeks twice to reach the final and shatter their dream of winning the tournament on home soil for the second time.

he 20,000-strong crowd shouted for the Lithuanians and against Yugoslavia in the final match. They booed our national anthem, spat at our fans and threw everything they could grab at our players. Yugoslavia won, much to the disgust of the Greeks, and our newspapers came up with a headline "In a brotherly cage". Yugoslav reporters wondered where that "Olympic brotherly spirit of body and mind so typical for ancient Greeks had disappeared to".

More then 10,000 people came out to the streets of Belgrade to celebrate the historic win and our first gold medal after the sanctions. Somebody got this brilliant idea to move the party outside the Greek embassy. As a result, windows on the Greek embassy were smashed to pieces and cars with diplomatic number plates outside the building were destroyed. A few Greek students were beaten up in downtown Belgrade. Also shattered was the illusion that friendship between the Serbs and the Greeks was stronger than any temptation. At that point, it seemed that Slobodan Milosevic wouldn't spend another summer holiday in Greece.

A week or so later, however, we came back to terms with our "brothers" after a series of apologies. Most of the apologizing came from the Greek side. Many politicians apologized on the behalf of the Greek fans and so did the newspapers that had previously fired up the entire nation to shout against the "ungrateful Yugoslavs". Some dailies went as far to publish apologies in Serbian on their front pages. The Yugoslavs, for their part, were far less enthusiastic in their apologies as they thought that what happened in Athens was incomparably worse than the incidents that took place in Belgrade. Both sides agreed that the media had blown the whole thing out of proportion, although neither Serbian nor Greek newspapers are role models of free media. Both sides started to wonder how on earth a love so strong fell apart over basketball of all things.

Comments and analyses that followed revealed that we actually have a lot in common with the Greeks. We keep looking for friends and have a very hard time finding them, we gloat about things we consider our national virtues, we enjoy listening to melancholic folk music and vent our frustrations through sports. We keep talking about the global anti-Serb conspiracy, they brag on about the Yugoslav basketball clan and the anti-Greek plot. A daily came up with a cynical theory that the Greeks do not like all Serbs, but only those from the Bosnian Serb Republic because the Bosnian Serbs did all those things Greeks would love to. That's why, explained the daily, Karadzic and Mladic had the status of Gods among Greeks.

Greece reached the semi-finals at last year's European Championship in Spain and lost to Yugoslavia once again. This time round, they host the World Championship and want to win it after the United States came up with a make-shift squad rather than a dream team.

Tension flared up once again when the Greek Basketball Federation refused to allow three Yugoslav-born players who took up Greek nationality to swap their Greek passports for Yugoslav ones and play for their home country. Not even Milan Milutinovic, the Serbian president, could swing the situation in our favor as his appeal to three Greek ministers bore no fruit. Once again the Greek press wrote a number of cynical comments about our ungratefulness and dishonesty. The Belgrade press charged the Greeks with deliberately obstructing Yugoslavia and preventing us in the most disgusting manner from putting together the best team we had.

However, the Greeks don't see it that way. Spyridon Hadziaras, the press attaché of the Greek embassy in Yugoslavia, told the Belgrade daily Danas that three of our best players, Tarlac, Gurovic and Stojakovic, took up Greek nationality by their own free will. This is how they became Greek citizens; Red Star Belgrade sold Stojakovic, for instance to PAOK Salonica and found a Greek citizen who formally adopted him. How disrespectful can one be to one's roots? Tarlac, Tomic and Gurovic said shamelessly that their real parents were Greek and actually gave up their own blood. Naturally, it costs a lot of money for this to got through a Greek court quickly enough for everybody involved. The players who wanted to but couldn't play for Yugoslavia knew all this, and so did the Yugoslav Basketball Association. Hence Mr. Hadziaras wondered why the Belgrade media made so much noise about the affair.

"You just can't complain and say so many ugly things about someone who gave you hospitality and did so much for you. You mustn't forget that the Greek Basketball Association was the only one to violate the sanctions and invite your national team to the Acropolis Cup. We also persuaded the FIBA to change to format from 12 to 16 teams so that Yugoslavia could take part in the Championship it eventually won. We did a lot for Yugoslav basketball, perhaps more than anybody else and look what we are getting in return", Hadziaras said bitterly.

In spite of all the arguments on both sides, the opening of the World Championship was marked by efforts of the Greek press to dig out the hatchet and send Greece and Serbia back to war. However, it appears that Athens tabloids trying to raise their circulation are behind most of those efforts. It seems that the hatchet has been only half-unburied, with the option of taking it and using it if need be. Apparently, quite a few people on both sides have done everything they could to prevent a repeat of the 1995 summer when the myth about Serbian-Greek brotherly love fell to pieces like a broken window. A lot of politicians, who are usually the first in line to taste the fruits of success achieved by our top athletes, tried to be as influential as possible. However, our star center, Zeljko Rebraca, stole the show from them and virtually buried the Greeks with his blocks and rebounds.
The Yugoslavs and the Greeks will probably meet again in the semi-finals. The Balkan brothers will probably go to war once again until Milosevic and Milutinovic end their cruise off the Greek coast.

One must admit that Milosevic made a timely effort to be a visionary and prevent any kind of conflict between the Serbs and the Greeks. Back in the summer of 1992, he suggested that Serbia, Greece and Macedonia should form an alliance. "I am convinced that such an alliance would be a major stability factor in the Balkans", he told a Greek television station. The Greek Prime Minister remained silent to the proposal. Milosevic reiterated his vision in 1994 to Andreas Papandreu, who was courteous enough to say that "it was an interesting proposal and the first of its kind Greece has heard of". The Athens daily Ethnos elaborated the idea and said that the capital of the new alliance would be Athens. According to the daily, its first president would naturally be Greek, its military headquarters in Salonika, the university would be based in the Macedonian capital Skopje and the official language would be Greek. Strangely enough, the daily was quite happy to put the bank in Belgrade.

Had the Greeks listened to Milosevic, the hatchet would have been buried for good among the warring brothers. There is no doubt that the alliance would stroll through the ongoing and every other World Basketball Championship provided that no NBA players turned up for he United States. How would the alliance team look? The best Yugoslav players, plus Naumovski of Macedonia and the three Greeks - Tarlac, Stojakovic and Gurovic. All right, maybe Alvertis could fit in too.