Dejan Lovren sparks backlash by singing ‘fascist song’ after win over Argentina Dejan Lovren sang a song with fascist associations with Croatia teammates in a celebration video. The Liverpool defender posted the […]

Dejan Lovren sang a song with fascist associations with Croatia teammates in a celebration video.

The Liverpool defender posted the video of himself singing after the team’s 3-0 victory over Argentina on Thursday night.

The song has been adopted as an anthem by far-right elements in modern Croatia, with the band behind it linked to support for the fascist wartime Ustase regime.

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Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura, an activist and writer from the Bosnian diaspora, highlighted the song’s significance after the video had been shared as an example of Lovren’s joy.

“This is an Ustasha (fascist Nazi collaborators) song….” she wrote on Twitter.

Fascist past

Dejan Lovren celebrating Croatia’s win over Argentina.pic.twitter.com/q1UkXhiL95 — LFC Round Up (@LFCroundup) June 21, 2018

With Bosnia failing to qualify, she “was going to root for Serbia and Croatia,” she added. “But between this song and Serbian fans displaying a Chetnik (WWII groups accused of war crimes which later figure in the 90s Balkan conflict) banner during the Mexico game I got reminded that the beautiful game is not so beautiful at all.”

It’s not the first time the Croatia team has been associated with fascist sympathies, with former coach Josep Simonic leading fans in a chant of “Za dom – spremni!” in 2013, the Ustase’s equivalent of “Sieg Heil.”

At the time he said: “Those who are bothered by those shouts should study history. If it bothers someone, then it’s their problem.”

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre condemned the government’s response at the time as showing “tolerance for such outrageous, insulting and clearly anti-Semitic behaviour”.

Ethnic conflicts

The song Lovren and his teammates are enjoying is “Bojna Cavoglave” by Thompson, a nationalist song describing events during the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s.

The line they sing is “Za Dom braco, za slobodu, borimo se mi!”, which translates to English as, “For our homes, brothers, for our freedom, we are fighting.”

The song opens with the “Za dom – spremni!” salute.

It also contains the more contentious lines “You Serbian irregulars, you Chetnik mob, our hand will reach you even in Serbia!” although neither those lines nor the salute appeared in the video.

Thompson are named after a type of machine gun using during the Croatian war of independence. They have had a number of performances cancelled due to their perceived promotion of the Ustase regime, a far-right government that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.