In the last training session of FK Tirana before playing the match of the preliminary phase of today’s Champions (20 h) against the Red Star, more than a thousand fans filled the stands of the stadium of the Albanian champion . They carried a banner with a map of Greater Albania, that is, the state that the most radical Albanian nationalism dreams of having, incorporating all of Kosovo, as well as part of Macedonia and Montenegro. The flag also featured the faces of military personnel from the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. Serbia and Albania continue to clash over the Kosovo issue, a region they both claim to be their own and which has ended up becoming an independent state controlled by Albanians. A conflict in the heart of Europe that has turned this Champions League match into a maximum security match, although the covid-19 has prevented spectators.
FK Tirana is the most nationalist club in Albania. And the Red Star, Serbian champion, is known for his ultras, the delije, from which paramilitaries who fought in the Balkan wars arose. In the late 1980s, Željko Ražnatovic, the son of a military man who had become a thief in the middle of Europe, seduced young people in the stands to train them as paramilitaries who would commit war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and also Kosovo. The presence of this club in Albania has awakened ghosts of the past in a region that has not closed its wounds.
The last time the Albanian national team played in Belgrade against Serbia, in 2014, there were already incidents, because some Albanians flew over the Red Star stadium, the venue of the match, a drone with a flag with Albanian nationalist symbols. The match was suspended. For Serbs, Kosovo is a land of great sentimental value because they consider it to be where Serbia was born. Here they lost a battle against the Turks in 1389, a defeat they still commemorate today as their national day. In Kosovo, however, Serbs have not been a majority for a long time. Two million Albanians now lived through the war from 1996 to 1999, in which more than 10,000 people lost their lives. A war that ended with the Serbian withdrawal, which does not acknowledge having lost a territory recognized by most of the international community as an independent state, without joining Albania, as part of the population would like. Three years ago, the Serbian Belgrade Partizan already defeated the Albanian Skenderbeu in Belgrade and then drew in Albania, in a match with incidents in the stands. Now, the visit of the Red Star has alerted the Albanian authorities to the symbolic weight of this club. Already this season, in fact, the Kosovo authorities did not allow the Red Star to enter Kosovo when it was their turn to play a Serbian cup match against Trepca, a club formed by Kosovo Serbs who are allowed to play Serbian competitions for avoid incidents. The match was not played.
This Champions League, on the other hand, will be played. No spectators, but with tension on the outside. And old flags, those that claim a great Albania or a great Serbia, reminiscent of medieval battles and modern crimes. And all on the same day that a PAOK-Besiktas is played. PAOK, a Greek club founded by refugees expelled from Istanbul in the 1920s, against the Turkish champion. Another party with a strong symbolic charge.
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