Thread by @JurajVrdoljak

Not-so-fun-fact: yesterday's #WorldCupDraw gave Milan Borjan, Canada's GK, an opportunity to play against Croatia, country he was born in. Yet also the country he publicly denounces, in quite a nationalistic manner.

Here's why:

Borjan was born in Knin in 1987, which means he was born in Yugoslavia. Four years later the country ended up in flames, and Knin - predominantly ethnically Serbian before the war - was especially heavily affected, as a lot of mixed communities are during such conflicts.

Technically however, Knin was always part of then-Socialist republic of Croatia, and as a result Serbian population had to flee the city once the war ended in Croatia's favor in 1995. Borjan also fled with his family, first to Belgrade & then to Canada in 2000.

He became sort of a journeyman, trialing from Uruguay to Argentina, before making his way back to Belgrade in 2017, this time to Red Star.

One of the first interviews he gave on his return to Serbia was, well, controversial to say the least.

"Big mistake", he said as a reply to a B92 journalist's question on how he feels as someone who was 'born in Croatia, raised in Serbia & plays for Canada'. "I describe myself as someone who was born in Serbia, in Dalmatia, but I feel Canadian as I've spent a lot of years there".

That rhetoric is largely based on those stemming from his support for Krajina, a heavily nationalist rebel-state that separated from Croatian territory in 1991, with Knin as its 'capital'. Krajina 'ended' as the war ended, in 1995.

Here he is wearing a 'Serbian Krajina' shirt.

The story of Krajina was horrific, with widespread ethnic cleansing on both sides. Even though a lot of local Serbs were opposing the rebel rule & the war itself, they all had to flee in 1995. They then basically became 'no-one's people', unwanted in Serbia as well.

Some of them just wanted to make a living by any means, like Borjan's dad who sold strawberries on the streets of Belgrade. But a lot of them, like Milan, embraced that nationalist rhetoric as a mean to blend into their new community in Serbia, now as their 'unwanted' refugees.

Life at times gets very ironic, so he'll now revisit his trauma by facing the team from his home-country, the one he was living in for eight years & where he started his football career, in his local club in Knin.

Also the country he now simply claims to be 'Serbia'.

The point here isn't to have a go at Borjan. Sure, his views are, well, dumb, and they don't help when we're talking about normalizing the ever-strained post-war relations between *his* two countries.

But his views also show how the horrors of war affect people. Young people.

Also, a lot of similarities can be drawn from this story, and the current horrible war stories coming from Ukraine. War destroys communities for generations to come. War makes people do and think horrifying things. War dehumanizes.

We should use football to change that, but...