When sport, war and ethnicity collide

Think heritage eligibility rules at last year’s Rugby League World Cup were a tad confusing?

Well hold your hats, because it’s likely to get even more complex and contentious in the not-too-distant future.

There’s some pretty powerful forces within the sport who are pushing hard for Serbia to qualify for the 2021 World Cup and its future incarnations.

Yet the Serbs furrowed more than a few brows when they recently took out an advert that said “anybody with Yugoslavian heritage (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian) get in touch”.

It’s all to do with a little-referenced clause in the rules that allows anybody with heritage in a sovereign state which no longer exists to play for any of the federated entities that constituted the former nation.

So the likes of Yugoslavia, the USSR and Czechoslovakia become tricky propositions.

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Despite the conflict that consumed and surrounded Serbia in the 1990s and its emergence as a stand-alone nation, it can now convince athletes with heritage in countries it formerly opposed to come and wear its colours.

If you need a few minutes to wrap your head around that, I don’t blame you.

Residing in a region of the world where borders have been reasonably stable for the past half century, those from the South Pacific probably have little appreciation for the dilemma.

When Yugoslavia collapsed, there were people who identified as Serbian living all throughout the former Yugoslav territory.

And yes, they (or a parent or grandparent) could have been born in areas which are now considered Bosnia, Croatia or Macedonia – or even Slovenia or Montenegro which, for whatever reason, were not listed in the recruitment advert.

The clause in the Rugby League International Federation eligibility rules stops these people from being cast adrift, left in no man’s land and unable to wear the Serbian crest on their chest.

But it also leaves the door ajar for potential manipulation.

Serbia is currently ranked 16th by the RLIF. None of the neighbouring nations which made up Yugoslavia have an international ranking.

A Croatian who has been Croatian for generations could now decide he wants to represent Serbia to score himself an international league cap.

(Photo by Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)

The likelihood of that occurring is up for debate, but it would be very hard to oppose.

Essentially the sport is relying on integrity and family loyalty to stop widespread fudging of the eligibility guidelines.

At least in the case of Russia and Ukraine, which both emerged from the dissolution of the USSR, there is a rule in place which stops players nominating for one team and then switching to the other.

Both these nations play rugby league, and indeed went head-to-head in qualifying for the previous World Cup.

In Serbia’s case however, there is little point anybody declaring their allegiance to its former Yugoslav neighbours if they don’t have a side.

Should borders stay stable for the next half-century, then the eligibility conundrum will eventually sort itself out as older generations pass on.

The chances of permanent stability happening in a region of flux such as the Balkans are anybody’s guess however.

To add another twist to this predicament, the Hungarian rugby league team, currently ranked 29th in the world, is up in arms that Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine can now lay claim to many ethnic Hungarians, which they have no claim upon.

Because Hungary didn’t completely disappear off the map, but shrank by 72 per cent when the Treaty of Trianon was enacted at the end of World War One, they don’t have the same dispensation.

Hungarian irredentism – seeking to reclaim the former borders and the proclaimed three million Hungarians cast asunder – has remained a passionate cause ever since.

In World War Two Hungary temporarily annexed back parts of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania where Hungarian language and culture was influential, including Yugoslav territory that was home to one million people, many of them Serbs.

Then much of that land was lost again.

Modern day census figures claim there are almost 600,000 Hungarians living in Serbia, 1.5 million in Romania, just under 500,000 in Slovakia and around 300,000 in the Ukraine.
It’s certainly a muddle.

And if some of the bravest world leaders and peacebrokers have been unable to find a suitable solution to all of this, perhaps we’re expecting too much that the RLIF can file this in one neat category.