"Once Brothers"

Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac were two friends who grew up together sharing the common bond of basketball. Together, they lifted the Yugoslavian National team to unimaginable heights. After conquering Europe, they both went to America where they became the first two foreign players to attain NBA stardom. But with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, Yugoslavia split up. A war broke out between Petrovic's Croatia and Divac's Serbia. Long buried ethnic tensions surfaced. And these two men, once brothers, were now on opposite sides of a deadly civil war. As Petrovic and Divac continued to face each other on the basketball courts of the NBA, no words passed between the two. Then, on the fateful night of June 7, 1993, Drazen Petrovic was killed in an auto accident. "Once Brothers" will tell the gripping tale of these two men, how circumstances beyond their control tore apart their friendship, and whether Divac has ever come to terms with the death of a friend before they had a chance to reconcile." (Video Clips on Website)

I was fortunate enough to watch Drazen Petrovic play for the New Jersey Nets against the Supersonics in Seattle early in 1993. The Sonics won the game, but I believe Drazen scored thirty plus points - heck of a shooter.

Issues between Serbs and Croats (people who look the same, speak the same language, and essentially have the same SES) go back to the 13th Century. Hatred for the other is earned from childhood stories about ethnic identity and how one group screwed the other in the past.

Ostensibly it’s about religious differences, but I have known many Serbs who went to church twice in their lives, but hated the Roman Catholic Croats.

It makes the Irish Catholic-Protestant conflict look like sibling rivalry.

"Ostensibly it’s about religious differences, but I have known many Serbs who went to church twice in their lives, but hated the Roman Catholic Croats."

The first deathcamps in Europe during WWII were NOT set up by Nazi Germany, but rather by the Nazi backed Independent State of Croatia to kill Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. The Jasenovac deathcamp was ultimately a kind of prototype for Auschwitz and Dachau, although the Germans were actually more efficient and less sadistic than the Croat Ustashi. And no, the Serbs had never before done anything like this to the Catholic Croats to deserve what they got. Is it and wonder then that even non-religious Serbs would be angry with Croats, given that most of the Ustashi lived out their lives and were never ever punished? I don't think so.

The area of former Yugoslavia has for centuries been "the border area" of several of the world's major religions -- as far South and East as traditional Catholicism went, as far North and West as Islam went, etc. And the way that the various groups kept those borders from not moving was to produce fanatics.

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