It was an icy morning on December 7, 1991. It was important to get to Sarajevo, where the Yugoslav karate team championship for juniors under 18 was being held, before nightfall and rest before the strenuous competition, and the journey from Ulcinj to the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina could take a long time.
Karate players from the Karate Club "Ulcinj" gathered that morning in front of "Palma", where a van belonging to the restaurant owner and a great friend of the club was waiting for them. Anta Vukmarković ChicagoExcept for Ant and the beardless young men Arben Kurti, Esad Mustafić, Vinko Janković, Steve Janković, Fuad Selita, Agron Ujkašević, Zoran Janković i Naila Kurtović, the first coach of KK Ulcinj was also in the van Djordje Dabovic and club secretary and road leader Brano Jancic.
Đorđe is today the president of SUBNOR Ulcinj, and Brano is the secretary of that Association. They are still together, just like when fate played a cruel game with their lives twice. They remember well the journey to Sarajevo and back and how everything ended well in the end. And it could have been different…
War was already raging in neighboring Croatia, and gloomy clouds had also descended over Bosnia. Weapons clanged ominously on all sides of the country, which was inexorably disappearing in the whirlwind of war. Just a day earlier, on December 6, the JNA and Montenegrin reservists carried out the largest attacks to date on Dubrovnik and its Old Town, and images of the brutal bombing quickly traveled around the world.
Đorđe, Brano, and Anto knew this well, but the young men did not notice their inner restlessness due to the journey into foggy uncertainty.
The atmosphere in the van with Ulcinj license plates was the usual one, as it is before any competition. There was talk of battles, opponents, ambitions...
No one had any idea that a few hours later, they would be recognized as possible saboteurs at the dam, and that they would spend the entire following night on their way back from Sarajevo, due to a breakdown in their van, in the tavern of the future bodyguard of the declared war criminal. Ratko Mladić...
They won bronze at the competition, and if there had been just a little more luck with the draw for the semifinals, they could have won silver.
“Two teams from each of the then republics and provinces applied for the championship in Sarajevo. From Montenegro, we were Budućnost. We saw the championship as a chance to round off a great cycle with a generation that was supposed to confirm that it was one of the best in that great Yugoslavia,” says Đorđe while sitting in the office of the Ulcinj SUBNOR with Montenegrin flags on the walls, framed photographs of the lifelong president of the SFRY, Josip Broz, and a list of all Ulcinj residents who died during World War II.
Everything was going well, Đorđe continues, until they arrived at the dam on the Piva River and decided to stop and take a photo together.
It was early evening, the snow crunched underfoot, the cold was starting to get more and more intense, but Brano says that this did not interfere with their intention to immortalize the picturesque landscape with a joint photograph.
"As soon as the camera clicked, we heard a shot and saw a man with a rifle running and shouting, 'No, no, you can't stop there.' It was a guard guarding the dam. We later found out that the first time he fired a shot in the air was a warning. I thought to myself that he could have shot us the second time, given the times, it wouldn't have cost him anything. He thought we were some kind of saboteurs and we were a sports team, one of the best in the country," says Brano.
They went to the guard's house to clarify the situation over a glass of "Thirteenth July" that Brano brought from the van.
"I ask him if he knows who he is." Ban Glass"He says, 'I know, that's my director.' Well, call him and ask who Brano Jančić, Đorđe Dabović and Anto Vukmarković Chicago are and if we're any suspicious guys," says Brano, how the guard finally "let them through" to continue.
"But we didn't leave him the bottle so he wouldn't shoot again, just in case," says Brano with a smile.
After an extremely unpleasant experience at the dam, the team continued their journey towards Sarajevo. Brano then remembered Đorđe's question about whether he had brought a gun - it was clear to him that the situation could get out of control at any moment and that the evening at the dam foreshadowed the eve of another bloody war, this time in Bosnia.
They arrived shortly afterwards at the "Evropa" hotel next to the City Hall building in the center of Sarajevo, where they had reservations.
"It was an expensive hotel, but we had money back then. We used to joke that even Franz Ferdinand couldn't sleep there, and yet we could afford luxury," says Brano. He adds that everyone at the reception was extremely pleasant and hospitable.
"I saw brochures from various parts of Yugoslavia on the counter, so I gave them some that I had brought from Ulcinj. "Galeb" and "Lido" were still "alive". I told them that people should see which is the most beautiful city on the coast, although everything smells of war to me. A lady behind the counter told me that there would definitely be no war there. I shook my head suspiciously," says Brano, and tells how they were besieged on the street in front of the hotel by dealers offering German marks...
"Everything smelled of gunpowder and war," Brano remembers.
The competition was held on the other side of town, in Mojmilo, in the Olympic Hall. Out of 16 teams, the team from Ulcinj won third place.
"It was a great success - to be in four teams in that Yugoslavia, it's a first-class result. In the semi-finals we lost to the Karate Club Vojvodina, led by the former European champion." Dusan Dacic". I knew him well because I lost to him in the final of the Yugoslav championship in 1978 in Zagreb. We also knew that he had a great team that eventually won the championship in Sarajevo. We were still satisfied because we were returning to Montenegro and Ulcinj with the bronze medal," says Đorđe.
As soon as the competition ended on December 8th, the team packed up and headed back to Montenegro. It was colder than the day before when they arrived in Bosnia.
"It was dusk, we were going over the famous Treskavica where major battles were fought between the Partisans and Chetniks in World War II. The snow was already falling heavily, but Anto was driving flawlessly. He was a friend of the club and never charged us for the ride, he covered the costs himself. As darkness increasingly took over the day, the temperature also dropped - at one point it was between -23 and -25 degrees," says Brano, as new problems began for the team from Ulcinj.
The oil in the tank was starting to freeze, but Anto managed to somehow get the van down the mountain to Dobro Polje. There they stopped, on one side of the street was a motel, and on the other a tavern. The motel was locked, the tavern was open.
"We enter the tavern and tell the owner that we have to spend the night there. We explain to him that the van cannot start because of the cold. We did not know who it was. The man who welcomed us so nicely, we will find out later, was Dragan Mandic who was Ratko Mladić's bodyguard," Brano says, describing how a sports team, all of whom except him were Albanians of Islamic and Catholic faiths, spent the night at the house of Mladić's bodyguard.
Đorđe continues that the owner of the tavern was extremely fair, that he left the tavern open all night for them, they could eat and drink, warm themselves by the stove and take as much wood as they needed. The owner was in the tavern for a while, and later, when he went to sleep, a woman stayed with them, who, as he says, was a cook or a housekeeper.
"She was our hostess all night. The guys were sitting on chairs, and I, Brano and Anto took turns because earlier, while there were still guests in the tavern, the situation had been extremely tense at one point. When we arrived, refreshed ourselves a little and warmed up, our guys felt more comfortable, so some of them started talking loudly in Albanian," says Đorđe.
He said he sensed a certain amount of tension among the guests, but also among the owners. He approached the boys and quietly told them that he did not want to hear another word of Albanian while they were there.
"The responsibility that Brano, Anto and I felt was enormous. There were no mobile phones to call home, and we were all Albanian children with us. War was everywhere. I thought about what would have happened if the boss had told us we couldn't stay here. At that moment I felt a chill and fear, not for myself," says Đorđe.
In a tavern with a fire going, they waited for morning. Some road crews came, poured some gasoline into the tank, cleaned the oil filter, and the van started. They paid a hefty bill and set off for Montenegro. They arrived in Ulcinj in the afternoon.
Just a few months later, the siege of Sarajevo began and one of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century on European soil began.
Winning bronze in Sarajevo at the end of 1991 was the biggest success of KK Ulcinj up to that point. Two years earlier, also in Sarajevo, Miloš Andrović, an excellent karateka, also won bronze in the individual competition in the under-14 category.
"But those were different, still happy times. They welcomed us in Sarajevo then." Rushdo i Maljo Mavrić, our Ulcinjites. He was also Gano Ramovic from the club. Later we went to some picnic spot, I think it was called Jekovac above Sarajevo, to celebrate the success. I remember the whole cafe singing “My Milka, my little one, I am a sailor from Ulcinj”, says Brano.
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