The Wild Boys of Trešnjevka? This is the name of the group of underaged boys who for the past months have been carrying out a series of racist expeditions which have shocked Zagreb. At the end of July, they assaulted five Arab students in the passageway of Cibona tower, several days later, they demolished a Chinese store at Remiza, and on 6 August, they beat up an 11-year old boy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat before turning on a Pakistani tourist they came across in a tram on Ozaljska Street.

In all these incidents, the leader was 16 year old student of the elite XV High School, the son of a wealthy Albanian family, owner of a goldsmith’s shop and a court interpreter for the Albanian language. The young Albanian, obviously was trying to prove that he was worthy of this peers, who had proclaimed themselves as a superiour race of Croatian nationality. This definition of Croatian “superiority” was their own – at the age of 16 – When did he, as he believes, manage to master the first 400 pages of the Croatian edition of Mein Kampf? “But Adolf Hitler considered the Slavs to be a servile and lower race and not a higher and ruling race,” Nacional’s reported warned him. “Maybe yes. But Croats are not Slavs, but Germans,” responded the leader of the Wild Boys of Trešnjevka, trying desperately to find an answer in his collection of chapters read.

The news of the racist incidents in Zagreb’s Trešnjevka neighbourhood has not only upset the public of the Croatian metropolis, but has also aroused a silent debate between the police and the media. Informed of the Zagreb sub-cultural scene, younger reporters attributed these four cases of violence to the radical skinheads. Their older colleagues recognized the remnants of the HDZ xenophobic regime, which for years stimulated Ustasha fascism in these violent teenagers. They stated that this group of Trešnjevka kids is no more than a symptom of general racism in Croatia.

On the contrary, the police announced that this was a group of youngsters who had gone wild, against all conscious ideology, oftentimes under the influence of alcohol, due partly to the explosion of their own hormones. The conclusion by police inspectors is based primarily on the fact that the 11 year old Egyptian boy was beaten and kicked when he refused to give the boys a few kuna. This incident different from the classical torture of adolescents against younger and weaker kids in only one detail: the attackers beat him wearing ‘Doc Martens’, the undoubtable mark of self-proclaimed skinhead ‘warriors’. At the end of the 1940s, the ‘Doc Marten’ boots were created as cheap footwear for the English working class, postmen, bus drivers and other, and only decades later would they become an expensive underground fashion label for kids who wanted to look dangerous and powerful. If the skinheads in Europe are truly an expression of interracial conflict, then in the conditions of Croatian national and racial uniformity, they are primarily an attempt to copy world trends and lifestyles. But that does not mean that they are less destructive.

The second police argument for the theory of youthful angst is seen in the statements made by the group members themselves. They were identified as the violent youngsters and called in for questioning, they arrived at the police station in the company of their parents, dressed like the peace-loving teenaged majority, humble, tame and on the verge of tears. When separated from the pack and frightened with threats of jail terms, all of the boys denied their belonging to the notorious skinheads and all other subcultural groups. And, in fact, their collective denial and their lack of belonging to the skinheads was taken into account in setting up the police charges against them. The bravest among them was the 16 year old Albanian, who claimed to be a sympathizer of the skinheads. When his father heard of this confession, the child was instantaneously removed from Trešnjevka and that crowd. The rest of the gang say they have neither seen nor heard from him since. The experienced and wise father concluded that permanent separation from the gang was the most important step for the maturation of his son.

And that is how the young Croatian rebels – when the danger of sanctions appeared – found themselves in a conflicting situation. In their rush, they tried to affirm themselves before the skinheads as a mature, politically aware group, following the most brutal models from the film “American History X”. “No blacks will dare to come to Trešnjevka, because we’ve forces away all the gypsies and the Arabs and succeeded in frightening them,” explained one of the Wild Boys for Nacional with exceptional pride: as though the creek and central station of the tram company – which is the heart of his neighbourhood – were truly subjected to a massive black invasion.

However, as soon as they were faced with the world of adult authority, under the masks of heros, aggression and arrogance appeared the faces of terrified boys who are not overly ready for a risky confrontation with the dominant political culture of their parents and adult officers of the Croatian police. Unlike the main characters from “American History X”, who was prepared to pay hard time for his project of a perfectly white America, the Wild Boys were more than ready to betray and give up their skin tradition after only a short period in the local police station. In short, the film of the American skinheads does not have a happy ending. As a very clear message to the teenagers from Trešnjevka who are playing with serious racist games, the main character kills a black man, is sent off to prison where he is brutally raped by his racially clean and perfectly white fellow inmates.

To make the humiliation of the Wild Boys complete, on the Nova TV news program, an adult founder and elder leader of the Zagreb skinhead scene informed the domestic public that the minor Trešnjevka racists are neither known nor recognized in their circles, that they are no more than rich kids without any understanding for the history of the movement that was born in the London ghettos.

In short, after they lied during the police questioning, the Wild Boys agreed to speak to Nacional’s reporter in order to save at least a shred of their “heroic” image in the eyes of the famed and established skins from other neighborhoods. Four of them appeared at the meeting, all with the same shaved heads. One decorated his bald head with sideburns, that had just started to grow on his teenaged face, while a second fought teenage acne. A third looked big and menacing until he began to laugh, lovely as an angel. The smallest among them was radically different from the ideal of the Croatian Arian: a sweet child, with dark skin and black, long, hippy hair which, for who knows what reason, spites the identity of the bald Wild Boys.

According to their story, they make up the third generation of Wild Boys. Ten years ago, this group was founded and named by boys who today are 25 years old, some of whom are their older brothers. Their brothers are today students, thinking about their future professions, have grown out of their neighbourhood gangs, have new friends, girlfriends and other interests. “My brother tells me that this is a phase I will grow out of,” said one of the four, “and my mom claims that it would be stupid for me to end up in jail because of a lower race. She took away my Doc Martens, thinking that that would keep me from fighting. Now I wear tennis shoes. They’re even more practical. When I get in trouble, I can run away a lot easier.”

The group numbers about thirty in Trešnjevka. They spent their childhood together, building up a generational solidarity as the youngest Dinamo fans, excluded from the older fan clubs. Today they are much less interested in Dinamo; they spent most of their time hanging around the local football club Trešnjevka. They move in very limited circles. By day they regularly attend school, in the evening they gather together at the bridge over Črnomerec creek or in the nearby park. There are no girls in the gang. Like all adolescents, the clan is based on the narcissistic idea of their physical strength, which should compensate for the trouble of their in between stage of neither boy nor man. They are not interested in much: they do not go to discoclubs, they read nothing but what is required in school, they avoid the city centre and other Zagreb neighbourhoods. They found “American History X” at the video store. The majority of the Wild Boys have not even seen the film: the majority of their knowledge on the look of the American skins, their habits, racism and fights come from word of mouth. For them, concentrated in their park and bridge, the world is as exciting and immortal as a film scene: the actor is famed because he kills or was killed, and then he appears again, alive and well in another film.

The third generation of the Wild Boys sees themselves as an avantguard Croatian-Arian race in the realization of defeated Hitler, they are certainly dying of boredom over the school holidays until they can find a victim to raise their adrenalin. And the best targets are little kids and isolated foreigners. The higher race does not know the tradition of equal battle in their attacks. In their “defense” of their neighbourhood from their imaginary enemies, their creative activities come down to writing graffiti by which, like dogs, they mark what they consider to be their territory.

“We hate blacks, yellows, browns, Jews, Serbs, gays, Communists and leftists,” states their ideologist, the reader of half of Mein Kampf, exactly what is expected of a skinhead. “That’s an awful lot of enemies. Considering their numbers, that makes you doomed to defeat,” stated Nacional’s reporter. “True,” one stated surprised, “that’s a lot of enemies. But for now it’s most important that the yellows and browns don’t hang around Trešnjevka,” he added, trying to save just a shred of his project.

“Hitler wasn’t right about everything,” added the smallest one. “Mussolini even less. He needed a few years to come into power, while Ante Pavelić needed only a few days. Pavelić was better than the both of them.”

“Don’t think so. Mussolini financed, trained and installed Pavelić as the Ustasha leader. Which is why they were both defeated in all aspects,” Nacional’s reporter responded, to which the entire Nazi-group sat quietly confused.

The presentation of the Wild Boys began shiningly before the camera. After they ran home to change from their day clothes into their parade uniforms – which consisted of cut up jeans and black shirts with Dinamo emblems – they lined up against the bridge. The scene reminded somewhat of a pioneer-scout group, and somewhat of a formation of bodyguards hiding a bare-faced gentle face. After their experience in the police station, their dreams of fame and power have not succeeded in defeat the fear of the consequences, perhaps even pedagogical beatings, if their mothers, fathers and the strict policemen recognize them on the pages of the newspapers.

“First of all, write that no one is manipulating us. We thought out everything on our own and carried out everything on our own,” said one of them at the end of our meeting, obviously insulted that none of their elders recognized the originality of their Nazi and racist ideas, their skin clothing and boots, and their exceptional characters of hunters of harmless Arabs. However, we must not expect these young boys whose universe stretches from the park to the creek to have historical memories. They have identified themselves with the skinhead, among the various movements that the youth and teenaged culture in the last three decades have fallen into, and chosen this one because they consider it to be very subversive and alternative. However, at its peak, Nazism rests on a similar crowd of social marginalists, without any memory, knowledge or experience.