This was not a normal derby
The Eternal Derby always carries its own weather. It is a storm system contained within a stadium. This Sunday was no different. The air inside the Rajko Mitić stadium in Belgrade felt heavy, thick with the smoke from flares and the sheer weight of seventy years of rivalry. Red Star Belgrade versus Partizan Belgrade. It is more than a game.
Then came the moment. Not a goal. Not a foul. A banner. The northern stand, home to Red Star’s most fervent supporters, began to move as one, hoisting an enormous choreographed display. A tifo. It was a vast sheet of fabric, painted with a single image that filled the entire section, a man’s face rendered in stark colours and staring out over the pitch with a stern expression. This was not a club legend. It was a soldier.
The man was Ratko Mladić.
He was the Bosnian Serb general convicted by the international tribunal in The Hague for his role in the Yugoslav Wars. His convictions were for the gravest of acts, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The tribunal linked him directly to the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. He is serving a life sentence. Yet here he was, celebrated as a hero on a fifty foot banner at Serbia’s biggest football match on 7 September.
This was not a mistake. It was not mindless hooliganism. The display was too organised. Too expensive. Too precise. It was a statement. It was a calculated act of political theatre, performed on a stage where the cameras, both national and international, could not possibly miss it. The fans who raised that banner knew exactly what they were doing and what message they were sending to the world, to their rivals across the stadium, and to their own nation. The past is not past. Not here.
The Delije see themselves as heroes
The fans who raised that banner call themselves the Delije. The word means ‘The Heroes’. They are the engine of Red Star’s support, an organised and powerful ultra group whose identity was forged in the fires of the collapsing Yugoslavia. Their history is not just about football. It is about war.
In the late 1980s, as the old country began to splinter, the Delije were consolidated from various Red Star fan groups into a single, formidable organisation. Their leader was Željko Ražnatović. He was known to the world as Arkan. He was a career criminal who became a paramilitary commander, and he used the terraces of the Rajko Mitić stadium as his personal recruiting ground. The lines blurred completely. Fan club became militia.
Arkan’s Tigers, a volunteer guard unit, were drawn directly from the ranks of the Delije. They saw themselves as the frontline defenders of the Serbian people. They were sent into Croatia and later Bosnia, where they committed some of the most brutal acts of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav Wars. They fought. They killed. Then they came home to the stadium. To the Delije, this is not a history of shame but a source of profound pride, a foundational myth of patriotism and sacrifice for the nation.
This is why they raise a banner for a convicted war criminal. To them, Ratko Mladić is not a monster. He is a commander. He is a symbol of the same nationalist struggle they believe they fought themselves, a struggle they feel has been unfairly judged by an unsympathetic outside world. The Hague’s verdict means nothing here. Their loyalty is to a different idea of justice. An idea of Serbia. It is an ideology that finds its most vivid expression not in parliament or on the news, but on the concrete steps of the north stand, painted on vast banners for all to see. They are celebrating one of their own. They are celebrating themselves.
The club stays quiet
The club was silent. After the banner of Ratko Mladić was unfurled, Red Star Belgrade issued no condemnation, no statement, not a single word of regret. This was not an oversight. It is a familiar and calculated quiet. The club hierarchy understands its relationship with the Delije is not one of master and servant but one of codependence, a bond forged in mutual need and shared ideology. To challenge the ultras on their own turf, on the north stand they command so completely, would be to challenge the very foundation of the club’s modern power. The Delije provide the noise, the colour, the intimidation and the ferocious loyalty that defines the match day experience at the Rajko Mitić stadium, a spectacle from which the club directly benefits. They are too powerful to confront. They are part of the club’s DNA.
This silence extends far beyond the boardroom. It echoes in the halls of government. Serbian politicians understand perfectly well what happens on the terraces, and they allow it to continue because it serves a distinct political purpose. The stadium acts as a controlled environment for a nationalism that is useful to them. It is a stage. Here, a hardline patriotic story can be performed for a captive audience, reinforcing a narrative of Serbian victimhood and defiance that plays well with a key electoral base. The government does not need to endorse the message itself. The message is carried on the smoke and the noise from the stands. The state simply chooses not to interfere, granting the ultras a kind of impunity.
It is a transaction. A political ecosystem. The club provides the stadium, the ultras provide the ideology and the spectacle, and the state provides the tacit permission for it all to happen. Football is the vehicle. Nationalism is the fuel. In this space, the past is not a foreign country but a living presence, reanimated each weekend in chants, banners, and carefully choreographed displays of defiance. This is not a failure of policing or a simple problem of hooliganism. It is a functioning political arrangement. A system that benefits all involved. It keeps the story alive. The story of the nation.
Will UEFA do anything?
The question now falls to UEFA. A response is inevitable. The governing body of European football, based in Nyon, Switzerland, operates under a strict set of rules designed to keep politics off the pitch and out of the stands. Its Disciplinary Regulations are explicit. Article 16(2)(e) specifically prohibits messages of a ‘political, ideological, religious or offensive nature’. A banner depicting a man convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international court does not sit in a grey area. It is a clear and calculated breach. A charge is not a matter of if, but when.
Punishment will follow a familiar, almost ritualistic, path. The first step is usually financial. A fine will be handed down, perhaps £40,000, maybe more, a sum that represents a trivial accounting item for a club of Red Star’s stature. It is a cost of business. It will be paid. It will change nothing. A more severe sanction is to force the club to play matches behind closed doors, or to order a partial stadium closure targeting the north stand, the Delije’s concrete fortress. This hurts the club’s finances and creates a sterile atmosphere for a European tie. But for the perpetrators, it is often seen as a victory. An empty stand serves as a monument to their defiance. It is confirmation that their message was received, that it provoked the very authorities they despise.
Here lies the fundamental impotence of UEFA’s approach. Its sanctions are built for a world it wishes existed, not the one that truly does. UEFA sees football as a global entertainment product that must remain politically neutral to protect its commercial value. Its rules are those of a corporation protecting its brand. For the Delije, and for many like them across Europe, the football terrace is not a neutral space at all. It is one of the last true platforms for a political identity they feel is under threat. They do not recognise the legitimacy of a Swiss administrative body to police their history or their heroes. Fines are irrelevant. Bans are a badge of honour. The entire disciplinary process is a conversation between two parties speaking completely different languages, destined never to understand one another.
There are no easy heroes here
It would be comforting to cast Partizan Belgrade as the unwilling dance partner in this grim spectacle. A moral counterweight. That story is a fiction. The other side of the Belgrade derby has its own ultras. They are the Grobari. The 'Gravediggers'. Their reputation for violence is as fearsome as that of their rivals, and their commitment to a hardline Serbian nationalism is just as profound. The very origins of the rivalry provide the fuel for this modern political theatre, with Partizan having been founded in 1945 by the Yugoslav People’s Army, a history that nationalist opponents have long used to paint them as 'un-Serbian'. This historical charge creates a perpetual need for the Grobari to prove their patriotic credentials. They must be more extreme. The result is not a clash of opposing ideologies. It is a toxic echo chamber, a competition between two groups desperate to prove they are the truer guardians of a militant national story.
This endless, circular contest for authenticity makes a mockery of any simple sanction. The Mladić banner was not displayed in a vacuum. It was a move in a game. It now demands a counter move from Partizan’s
A story written on the terraces
The football ground is a simple place. A place for simple stories. But this was not simple. The banner unfurled at the Rajko Mitić stadium was a direct challenge to the accepted history of the last thirty years in Europe. It was a declaration, a deliberate act of remembrance for a man convicted by an international tribunal at The Hague for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. That verdict is a legal fact. It is a historical record. It is not, however, the truth for the thousands of Red Star supporters who call themselves the Delije. For them, the past is a battleground. And the stadium is their chosen arena.
This is what happens when a country cannot agree on its own story. The difficult conversations, the ones about guilt and responsibility, are pushed to the margins. They find a home in places where noise and passion can overwhelm nuance. A football stadium is such a place. It offers a form of raw, collective expression that few other modern venues can provide, a space where thousands of individual anxieties can be forged into one defiant roar. The formal narratives of the Serbian state, often tailored for a European audience, speak of reconciliation and moving forward. The informal narrative, the one screamed from the north stand, tells a very different tale. It is a story of victimhood. It is a story of defiance. It claims the war criminal as a patriot.
The authorities say nothing. The club says nothing. This official silence is not an accident. It is an accommodation. The government of Aleksandar Vučić maintains a careful balancing act, seeking closer ties with the European Union while simultaneously tolerating and at times cultivating the very nationalist sentiments that Brussels finds so alarming. The ultras on the terraces provide a useful release valve. Their pageantry of militant patriotism serves as a reminder of a powerful political force that can be unleashed if necessary. They believe they are rebels fighting a hostile world. They are, in fact, a managed part of the political theatre, their anger a resource to be deployed. They are not rebels. They are a tool.
So the banner appears. A provocation. An act of public memory. It tells us less about the state of Serbian football and much more about the state of Serbia itself. The Yugoslav wars did not end neatly with treaties and trials. Their legacy lives on in these furious, ritualised displays of identity, played out under floodlights for the world to see. The derby on Sunday was not merely a game between two old rivals. It was a 90 minute spectacle revealing the deep, unhealed wounds of a nation still at war with its own past, still arguing about who its heroes and villains really are. The definitive story of those years is not being written in history books. It is being written on the terraces. It is written in fire and smoke.
Sources. BBC Sport: Red Star fans unveil tifo of war criminal Mladic before derby. Al Jazeera: Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade honour Ratko Mladic with tifo.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
