Belgrade can be friendly, but visiting fans should play ball

Gliding into final approach over Belgrade airport, football fans can see the reason for the postponement of the match last month: the air bases, missile sites and radar masts that NATO was on the point of "taking out" until a deal was reached over Kosovo.

Don't expect too many diversions in Belgrade. Wars have nearly bankrupted Yugoslavia, clipping the wings of this once-swinging city. The best-selling Serb book, Kriminal, says: "Belgrade epitomises the Chicago of the Twenties, the economic crisis of the Berlin of the Thirties, the intelligence intrigues of the Casablanca of the Forties and the cataclysmic hedonism of the Vietnam of the Sixties."

Or more simply: hammered by war, sanctions, corruption and gangster wars, Belgrade is a city going nowhere rapidly.

Gangsterism is the only growth industry. Criminals cruise the streets in expensive Mercedes or while away the evenings in the casinos. Or you can see them, and their molls, lounging by the pool of the glittering Hyatt Hotel. Upstairs, one notorious gangster was gunned down in room 311.

Souvenir shopping presents another problem. Many shops have closed, and the bright boutiques that line the downtown shopping malls are among the most expensive in the world. The reason? These are mafia money-laundering outlets.

Cafes and restaurants have signs asking customers to check in their machineguns with their hats and coats, and city hospitals complain that contract killers now use not one or maybe two bullets, but a whole magazine.

But at least the streets are safe. Muggings are rare, perhaps because the criminals are too busy killing each other. The police look intimidating with their machineguns and bulky uniforms of purple and maroon tiger stripes. But they are friendly, as are the people.

To anyone familiar with the news from Kosovo it might be a surprise to find just how friendly the people in Belgrade are. There are few foreigners here, and those who are around are quizzed by the many, mostly young, English-speakers. Taxi-drivers are fair and polite, and will take either dinars, the local currency, or deutschmarks.

Instead of discos and bars, why not try a little history? History is an obsession for many Serbs. Stop at the Military Museum, at the top of the massive fortress that dominates the city, overlooking the bend in the Danube. Inside the dark corridors history comes alive. A historic photograph of Albanians has slogans, both pro and anti, scrawled over it in pen.

The museum has changed its history. Out has gone the communist version, in which all ethnic groups were united by the Red Flag. In has come Serb nationalism.

City-centre kiosks busily sell Serbian memorabilia: army hats, badges, tapes of patriotic songs, or Serb national flags bearing the slogan: "Only Unity Saves The Serbs".

It's as well that Ireland has no tradition of football hooliganism. The hardest of all the paramilitary armies that "ethnically cleansed" Bosnia's Muslims were the Tigers, created from the fans of Red Star Belgrade by the chairman of the team's fan club, Zeljko Raznarovic, better known as Arkan.

Arkan has since moved on to other things, like setting up a Belgrade business empire and starting his own team, Obilic, which last season won the league by playing like a turbo-charged version of Wimbledon.

Travelling with Obilic to Europe this season presented a problem: Arkan is wanted in the West for armed robbery, so he made his wife, the pneumatically-chested folk singer, Ceca, the club president. She gleefully went to the away fixtures, then shocked fans during a TV interview by being unable to remember the names of the Obilic players.

Or you could try the zoo, which is in the midst of one of its many crises. Shorn of funds, it often contemplates whether to keep the best animals alive by feeding them with the others. The latest project to avoid this is an attempt to breed the world's most vicious attack-dog. Puppies of this dog, named Serb Attack Dog, are now padding about the zoo's kennels, but the project is still under development, so they may not be on show.

Night-life is a casualty of the recession, but the mafia ensures casinos remain open and the young dance with abandon in the few discos still open.

And finally, among the many things unavailable in Belgrade is The Irish Times. So if on match day you see a man in a green cowboy hat - there is only one in all Belgrade - come over and offer him a copy. In return I'll stand you a shot of Slivovica, the local tipple, which tastes like a cross between plum brandy and lighter fluid.