Kosovo will be cheering for Swiss against Serbia

Pristina: Kosovo’s team are taking no part in the World Cup but emotions are running high ahead of Serbia’s match between Switzerland, whose squad includes three players from Kosovo.

Midfielders Valon Behrami of Italian club Udinese, Arsenal’s Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri of Stoke were all born in Kosovo and all three played in Switzerland’s surprise 1-1 draw against Brazil.

Along with Bologna’s Blerim Dzemaili, born in neighbouring Macedonia, Albanianspeaking players made more than a third of the starting line-up against Brazil.

The children of immigrants to Switzerland, they have not commented on today’s match in Kaliningrad which could be decisive for qualification from their group.

Only Shaqiri commented, when the groups were drawn in December, saying: “Hmm, I like this draw.”

However, relatives of the players make no secret of the symbolic importance of the match when seen from Kosovo’s capital Pristina.

For Valon Behrami’s uncle Qaush, his nephew will have a “special motivation for victory” today, because his parents suffered while Kosovo was Serbia’s province.

“They both lost their jobs and father was persecuted,” Qaush said.

Agon Xhaka, a 22-year-old football player, said the father of his cousin Granit was in a prison during the regime of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and that the “family emigrated after he was released”.

Like dozens of thousands of others, during the 1998-1999 war between Kosovo ethnic Albanian pro-independence guerrilla and Serbian forces, the families of Behrami, Xhaka and Shaqiri took refuge in Switzerland.

There are no official figures, but an estimated 200,000 Kosovo Albanians live in Switzerland, a striking number when compared with Kosovo’s 1.8 million inhabitants.

This emigration dates back to before the Kosovo war.

Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj also lived in Switzerland, working as a bouncer and karate instructor before retuning to Kosovo and becoming one of the pro-independence guerilla leaders.

The last of the conflicts that accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia claimed some 13,500 lives. More than 10,000 of the victims were Kosovo Albanians.

The war ended when NATO bombing forced Milosevic to withdraw his troops.