Football in the Balkans: Spark meets tinderbox (The Economist/Gazeta Blic)
Gazeta Blic re-runs an opinion piece by Tim Judah that originally appeared in the Economist.
There is nothing like a football match to push simmering ethnic tensions to the surface. No love has been lost between Serbs and Albanians for more than a century, and in modern times the battle over Kosovo has further divided the two peoples. In 1999 ethnic Albanians fought Serbs in the then-Serbian province, which was wrenched from Serbian control by NATO. In 2008 Kosovo’s majority Albanians declared independence.