The fingertips of his palms touch his temples in salute, his rigid facial features signal determination to the utmost: Suddenly, on a July night last year, a piece of completely unreflected contemporary history popped up at Njegoševa 38 in the heart of Belgrade. An oversized graffito of the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić – the man who sent more than 7,000 men and boys to their deaths in Srebrenica in Bosnia – has since been emblazoned on a house wall as an eye-catcher, with the words “General, thank your mother” next to it and in the background a coat of arms of the football club Partizan Belgrade.
But it’s not just his hooligans who guard the oversized likeness in the Serbian capital day and night; it is not only the Belgrade secret police who have been cunningly blocking a neutral overpainting for months; It is, it is considered an open secret in Belgrade political circles, above all the incumbent Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić himself, who holds his protective hand over the monument of shame. In the 1990s, as a reporter for the propaganda channel “Channel S”, he still played chess with his father’s role model, Mladić. Today he, who likes to play the convinced pro-European in the West, is fighting side by side with another national hero for his Greater Serbia cause: Novak Djokovic.
The patriot’s serve
Vučić lets his people know via Instagram that he has repeatedly called the tennis star in the past few days while Djokovic was waiting in Australia for the process of his later expulsion. And the head of the well-fortified western Balkan country with its almost seven million inhabitants also dutifully reports the content of these discussions: “I told our Novak that the whole of Serbia is with him and that our authorities are taking all measures to stop the harassment of the best tennis player in the world “, the head of state hyperventilates. “Serbia will fight for Novak Djokovic, for justice and truth.” But fight? It’s “only” about tennis, one might think. But what Vučić trains again here is the patriot’s serve.
The “harassment” against the “greatest tennis player of all time” – as the tabloid “Informer”, run by a close friend of Vučić, describes this Serbian hero of a new era – has long since reached “unprecedented proportions”, creating a “lynching atmosphere” in the international media and a “witch hunt” held, Vučić gets excited.
“They wanted to make Nowak an example of how the world order works,” the president smashed in volleys towards the western community of states – in order to ward off “an attack on the Serbian people” for the time being.
The lawyer Vučić, who was trained as a businessman in England and who can appear cosmopolitan if necessary, actually wants to lead his country, which has been bled dry, into the EU. But in the days of a new big world conspiracy against little Serbia, diplomacy is inevitably on hiatus. Even Djokovic’s father Srdjan, who alternately referred to his firstborn at press conferences and demonstrations as the new “Jesus”, the new “Spartacus” or the new “leader and symbol of a free world”, allows Vučić mildly. Not without assuring the clan of the unconventional tennis star of his full support for all the future.
pawn for nationalism
Serbia is Djokovic, and Djokovic is Serbia, and Western observers can’t help but get the impression that the 34-year-old Belgrade athlete suddenly has more than just yellow felt balls flying around his ears. The angular giant has become a plaything for a rather tasteless nationalism. Every top athlete knows that political statements are basically poison for self-marketing, so hardly any other athlete in his price range likes to express his ideology. But that doesn’t seem to bother someone like Novak Djokovic in the slightest. But on the contrary.
“Novak is a nationalist, of course, and so am I,” father Srdjan clarified almost two years ago. According to the father in the name of the son, that is actually not a big deal. “We just love our country and our people.” At that time, however, hardly anyone outside of the Serbian interior was interested in this love. But now that the Djokovic case has become an international political issue, the spotlight of attention suddenly falls on the illustrious Novak network.
But where does this political fraternization with Djokovic originally come from? And what is its real foundation? Why, one asks oneself in the West, is a head of state hyping one of his citizens, who wanted to enter Australia unvaccinated, stumbled over a dubious special permit and, to make matters worse, withheld his positive Covid status from those around him for days, as a kind of martyr?
Amselfeld all-purpose weapon
Because the Serbian victim myth, the myth of the self-sacrificing fighting master race of the Balkans, already worked perfectly in the Yugoslav wars of disintegration in the first half of the 1990s and in the Kosovo war in the second half and has served as an all-purpose domestic weapon ever since. Carinthian diplomat Valentin Inzko, who was Bosnia and Herzegovina’s high representative until last year and thus the highest-ranking EU watchdog in the war-torn region, says: “Politicians are deliberately cultivating and fueling this myth.” And Djokovic likes to stoke it.
A good 600 years ago, in the battle on Amselfeld, today’s Kosovo, it was the Christian Serbs who bravely resisted the invading Ottomans – and lost bloodily because no one came to help from the West. Today it is the courageous Djokovic, son of a Serbian Kosovar and new idol of the international opposition to vaccination, who is fighting against a hostile superiority to save the honor of his home country.
First set, first game, serve Novak Djokovic: “We are ready to defend what rightfully belongs to us: Kosovo is Serbia,” proclaimed the star in a video back in 2008, when Kosovo declared its independence.
And so comes what had to come: In Wimbledon, immediately before an important game, her son Novak and the entire family of Scotland Yard were held in the accommodation, says mother Dijana. The reason: Supposedly, she knew this from a neighbor, Albanian groups, “probably drug addicts,” appeared on the scene. “They wanted to kidnap my dogs and demand ransom for them,” says Dijana Djokovic. The four-legged friends remained unharmed, but the son’s concentration suffered. So much so that he ended up losing his match.
But something like that can’t shake a real fighter. When asked about his statements from three years ago in 2011, Novak Djokovic defiantly told the “Spiegel”: “I don’t regret what I said. We want justice, but we just can’t get it.” According to the 20-time Grand Slam winner, Kosovo is “my family’s original home and the cradle of the entire Serbian culture”.
Lullaby and battle anthem
And none other than Novak Djokovic sings her lullaby: When he wins the ATP Cup with the Serbian national tennis team in 2020, the winners don’t sing “We Are the Champions”, as is usual in stadium catacombs after glorious victories – no, In this case, the testosterone releases very special sounds: namely “Vidovdan”, a former folk song that became a kind of battle anthem of the notorious Serbian paramilitaries during the Yugoslav wars of secession: “The battle remains like an eternal flame that burns in our hearts around the Amselfeld truly”
As light-footedly as Novak Djokovic dances across the tennis courts of this world, he staggers through the minefield of the past. “It seems as if he has two faces,” says Herwig Straka, Austria’s most prominent tournament organizer and ex-manager of Dominic Thiem. “When he’s on the tennis circuit, he’s completely normal, fluent in several languages and extremely friendly.” And yet it seems to Straka that Djokovic always manages to “draw strength from his suffering”.
Saša Ozmo, Serbian TV journalist and long-time companion of the national hero, says: “He experienced NATO bombings, slept in the air-raid shelter and smelled the smell of blood at night. His origins, the war and the poverty in Serbia made him strong .”
Oppressed underdog
On the pitch, Djokovic is always the outsider, the bogeyman. Because he tends to choleric outbursts more than others – one might think. But even his ex-coach Boris Becker uses the narrative of the racially oppressed underdog: “The tennis world has been divided into fans of Federer and Nadal for 20 years – a Serb comes along and ruins the party. He doesn’t come from neutral Switzerland, not out popular Spain, he comes from a civil war country called Serbia. Those aren’t ideal omens,” says Becker. Although Aleksandar Vučić could have said the same thing.
And so Milorad Dodik, the ultra-nationalist leader of the Bosnian Serbs and a stubborn genocide denier, has long had his eye on the big son from the heartland: he invited him to his wedding and decorated him with the highest medal in his part of the country. An award previously only bestowed on select figures in Serbian history: Radovan Karadžić, convicted war criminal responsible for the siege of Sarajevo. And Ratko Mladić, convicted war criminal responsible for the Srebrenica massacre. The man whose graffiti has adorned the old town of Belgrade since the summer of last year: it is an oversized symbolic image – also for the parallel world of world star Novak Djokovic.
This story originally appeared in News Magazine #03/2022.
