It has to be racist surely? Far too coincidental that Newcastle not only has Albanian fans but also that they innocently chose the game against a team featuring a Serb in my opinion but I'd love to be proved wrong!
Bit of a stretch to think that anyone from Albania would come to a match purely to annoy a player in the opposition team. Unless they were locals?
It seems unlikely. No matter what the circumstances were though, why rise to the bait? You've got to have a screw loose if you see the flag and think "I must confront them".
Can't have been racism as Kolarov is Caucasian, and so presumably were the fans who taunted him. Might have been xenophobia. Are these equivalent offences, or is a mountain being made out of a molehill?
There's nothing definitive or scientific about defining race, it's all just made up, so yes, it can have been racism. Serbs and Albanians most definitely consider each other separate races.
Sorry, can't agree. How can an Albanian and a Serb be different races? Granted, there may be no scientific consensus as to what constitutes race, but it's pretty clear that whatever definition you use, Serbs and Albanians are ethnically almost identical. It's not racism by any definition.
Wow, I can't really believe what I'm reading on this thread. Even if those fans were intending to provoke Kolarov, the man should not be offended by a flag! If he's got some sort of problem with Albania or Albanians, he's a ****. It's as simple as that.
Well for a start you're using the terms 'race' and 'ethnicity' interchangeably, so you're going to struggle to convince anyone that you're an authority on the definition of anything Also, Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins are ethnically indistinguishable, Albanians are certainly different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanians Speaking of racism, has anyone seen the Zenit fans statement today? "We're not racists but we see the absence of black players at Zenit as an important tradition," — just mind-boggling.
Let's put it another way then. If an English cricket player fielding at the boundary in Australia is greeted with taunts of "pommie bastard" etc, is this the same thing as monkey chants aimed at black football players? No, of course it isn't, not remotely. I'd put an Albanian insulting a Serb over his nationality in the former category, not the second. Zenit fans are clearly racist. No ambiguity there.
No of course it's not the same, I never implied such a thing. Just because it's your view that Albanians are as similar to Serbs as Australians are to the English doesn't mean they don't see either other as separate races. Since race is a social construct two people of the same race (as you perceive it) could be racist towards one another if they believe they are not the same race.
The Albanian race is apparently of Illyrian descent (yes, Wikipedia), so yeah they're not Slavic and they are a different ethnic group to Serbs. They're also mostly Muslim. With that considered, and also the history between the two countries, I don't agree with Archers Road's comparison. It sounds like Kolarov has seen the Albanian flag and taken issue with it because, like many Serbs, he just doesn't like them for whatever reason. Whether the fans were trying to wind him up with the flag is irrelevant, it's not a decent reason for a person to be wound up.
I read somewhere that Kolorov's issue was that he believed the flag had been brought to the stadium by English Newcastle fans purely to provoke a response. I agree that being offended by a country's flag may seem ridiculous to someone detached from the context but who are we to dictate what people find offensive? The Kosovo War was just 14 years ago and it was only in 2004 that 19 innocent civilians were murdered in conflict between the two countries so maybe do a bit of research before you judge what is offensive?
Well that's crap. There is no excuse for being offended by another country's flag. There may be hard feelings about recent events in the area, but to hold a grudge against the entire country of Albania or the entire Albanian race is pathetic and inexcusable, and it does amount to racism no matter how you spin it.
My post was pointing out that regardless of whether the action is deemed to be racist, the flag waving has caused offence to Kolorov and you cannot decide whether he has a right to be offended or not. If you had lost family members in the war in Iraq and a day later someone was an Iraqi flag at you for example, you might take offence.
You might, and you'd be wrong to. If an Iraqi kills a member of your family, you do not have the right to then be intolerant towards all Iraqis, and any mention of Iraq. In the same way, Kolarov does not have the right to be intolerant towards the entire nation of Albania based on what a few Albanians may have done in the past (which, by the way, is nothing compared to what the Serbian government has done in recent history).
Sorry mate I cannot possibly go along with you here. Someone has accused someone of being racist because of the Albanian Flag. A National flag denotes a Nation not a race!! We often see the Scottish flag, Welsh Flag, German Flag, French flag, Romanian Flag, Austrian Flag just to name a few, flying when you play foreign teams in England. If flying a foreign flag was considered even remotely racist do you think it would be allowed? Of course not......Ok the young man may have been upset at seeing the flag. I cannot understand why especially after it was the Serbs that started the Furor in that part of the world. So a racialist action......... not even remotely.............. a nationalistic one possibly.
You're completely misunderstanding my point. I'm not talking about having an inherent hatred for a whole nation! I'm merely stating that given the circumstances of the aforementioned conflicts between the two countries, Kolorov has every right to find an English man waving a Kosovo flag offensive. In the same way, that you would find your sister wearing an IBM t-shirt the day after the company laid you off offensive. It's not to say you have a hatred of every employee of the company, just that the sibling with no connection to IBM is waving it in your face to provoke a reaction. (crude analogy I know but it's late/early and I should be asleep) If you take the time to re-read my post, you'll see that I said "regardless of whether the act is racist or not". I actually agree with you that flag-waving in it's simplest form is not racist (although it does have some extremely negative connotations in this country with regards to the EDL etc.) I was merely stating that Kolorov has a right to find an Englishman waving a Kosovo flag offensive.
