#Ago Huskic

[frontproofmedia]

JUNIOR DOS SANTOS DEFEATS FABRICIO WERDUM BY SPLIT DECISION IN GAMEBRED BAREKNUCKLE

JACKSONVILLE, FL. – September 9, 2023 – MMA legends and former UFC Heavyweight Champions Junior “Cigano” Dos Santos (22-10) and Fabricio “Vai Cavalo” Werdum (24-10) went head-to-head in the main event of Jorge Masvidal’s Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA event Friday night from VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla. In a duel between two extremely experienced mixed martial artists, Dos Santos was able to do enough to best Werdum by split decision.

“I’m feeling awesome tonight,” exclaimed Dos Santos in victory. “I feel like it was an amazing fight.”

Near the end of the first round, Dos Santos cut Werdum over his right eye, causing it to bleed considerably. The second round featured a lot of stand-up action with Werdum attempting to lure Dos Santos to the canvas in the later stages of the round.

The third and final round saw Dos Santos use his punching prowess to nearly shut Werdum’s left eye, making it very difficult for Werdum to see and defend himself.

In the end, judge Barry Luxenberg scored the bout 29-28 in favor of Werdum, while judges Troy Wincapaw and Daniel Torres both had it 30-27 for Dos Santos.

“This was my first time fighting bare knuckle and I loved it,” continued Dos Santos. “It was amazing. I feel good. My hands are feeling a little sore, but that’s okay. I’m fighting someone that everyone knows was really well prepared. Everybody knows the legend that he is and I should avoid that ground game. You guys want me to go to the ground with that guy? No way! It’s jabs, crosses and hooks.”

With the win tonight, Dos Santos is now in line to face the winner of Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA’s next main event, which will see heavyweight brawlers Alan Belcher and Roy “Big Country” Nelson meet in an explosive clash on Saturday, October 28 from Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, Miss. Additional details on that event to come.

The co-main event featured Joel “King Bau” Bauman (9-3) stopping Maki “Coconut Bombs” Pitolo (15-11) by technical knockout. As Bauman pummeled Pitolo with unanswered blows, referee Larry Folsom intervened and called a stop to the action at 2:36 of the second frame.

The featured bout of the evening showcased a fight between a pair of 135-pounders that appeared closer than the scorecards indicated. Joshua “Wide Open” Weems (12-3) topped Irwin “Beast” Rivera (12-7) by unanimous decision with judges Barry Luxenberg, Solimar Miranda and Daniel Torres all seeing the bout the same, 30-27 in favor of Weems.

In a featherweight attraction, Ago “The Bosnian Dragon” Huskic (9-5) defeated Brandon “Killer B” Davis (14-12) by unanimous decision. Judges Solimar Miranda, Daniel Torres and Troy Wicapaw all scored it 29-28 in favor of Huskic.

Anthony “The Assassin” Njokuani (17-13) scored a unanimous decision win over Brandon “The Human Highlight Reel” Jenkins (16-11) in a 165-pound matchup. Judges Daniel Torres and Troy Wincapaw both turned in scores of 29-28 and judge Barry Luxenberg saw it 30-27.

In a crowd-thrilling catchweight contest, Joey” El Cazador” Ruquet (10-4) beat Joe “The Party” Penafiel (11-7) by technical knockout. Ruquet cut Penafiel badly, knocked him to the canvas against the cage and rushed him with a flurry of punches that proved too much for Penafiel, causing referee Andrew Glenn to end the fight at the 3:01 mark of round two.

Jhonasky “La Maquina” Sojo (14-4) defeated Tyler “Zombie” Hill (11-8) by technical knockout in a catchweight scrap. Referee Larry Folsom stopped the fight 4:52 into the first stanza.

Jacksonville native and all-around sensational athlete, Reggie “Black Dragon” Northrup (2-0), defeated Cody “The Reason” Herbert (3-4) by unanimous decision. Judges Solimar Miranda and Daniel Torres both scored the contest 30-27, with judge Troy Wincapaw scoring it 30-26, all in favor of Northrup.

Shahzaib “King” Rind (1-0) made his professional MMA debut in style, defeating Carlos “Diamante” Guerra (7-8) by technical stoppage. Due to a series of unanswered blows, referee Andrew Glenn halted the catchweight bout action at the 2:40 mark in round one.

In the opening bout of the evening, featherweight Juan “Wild Child” Alvarez (2-0) stopped Christopher Wingate (1-2) with a heel hook submission just 13 seconds into the opening round.

Image Credit: Danny Perez/Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA

[newstfionline]

In Bosnia, Entrenched Ethnic Divisions Are a Warning to the World

By Andrew Higgins, NY Times, Nov. 19, 2018

MOSTAR, Bosnia and Herzegovina--When a fire breaks out in the Bosnian city of Mostar, Sabit Golos, a veteran firefighter, knows that he does not have to worry unless the flames take hold on the Muslim side of what, from 1992 until 1994, was the front line in a vicious ethnic conflict.

That is because Mostar, though long at peace, has two separate fire brigades, one made up mostly of Muslims like Mr. Golos, who are responsible for putting out fires on the east side of the old front line and a second one staffed by Catholic Croats who douse flames on the other side.

The line vanished long ago as a boundary between warring communities and does not officially exist. But it lives on in the mind, an emblem of the ethnonationalist fissures that paralyze Mostar and the whole of Bosnia.

As Europe and the United States struggle with the rise of ethnic nationalism as a divisive force, Bosnia’s divisions offer a dark lesson in how, once cleaved apart by fear and fighting, communities can stay splintered long after many people have forgotten what it was that pushed them apart.

The entrenched disunion here was reflected in recent national elections, marked by nationalist rhetoric and open questioning of Bosnia’s continued existence as a state.

“Europe is worried these days about the rise of the far right, but this place was way ahead of the curve in showing how dangerous and enduring ethno-nationalism can be,” said Tim Clancy, an American resident of Bosnia who worked in Mostar throughout the war helping victims of the fighting.

Both of Mostar’s fire brigades are part of the same municipal fire service--just as Mostar’s two garbage collection companies, two hospitals, two electricity companies, two bus stations, two popular nightclubs and two soccer teams all technically serve the same city. But they are in reality barricaded behind the zigzagging line drawn in blood a quarter of a century ago, during Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.

“Everything in this town is very clear. Everyone knows whose territory lies where,” Mr. Golos said, adding that his brigade never gets asked by Mostar’s fire service dispatcher to fight a blaze in an area that was controlled by Croat forces during the war, no matter which of the city’s two fire stations is closer.

“You are looking at your own future here,” said Adnan Huskic, a scholar in politics and international relations at the School of Science and Technology in Sarajevo. “We have been dealing with the rise of nationalist populism for years.”

Instead of creating a unitary state, the 1995 agreement that halted the bloodletting in Bosnia--reached in Dayton, Ohio by the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia--only entrenched the nationalist elites that prosecuted the war. It divided Bosnia into two “entities”--a Serb-run Republika Srpska and a mixed Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the summit of this ramshackle state stood the presidency, controlled by three elected presidents, one each for Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims, who are known as Bosniaks.

Authority was further subdivided, largely along ethnic lines, with the establishment of 10 local units of government called cantons, each with its own president and set of ministers who duplicate many of the functions of the weak national government.

Mr. Golos, the Muslim firefighter, said he has many friends across the ethnic boundary and feels no enmity toward Serbs, who started the fighting but have now mostly left the city, or Croats, who rained artillery shells and sniper fire into his neighborhood during the war.

But he worries that, instead of fading, wartime divisions have only hardened. Because of largely segregated schooling, a postwar generation of young Croats and Bosniaks, Mostar’s two main ethnic groups, often know only members of their own group and have little or no shared experience.

“We have moved backwards, not forward,” Mr. Golos said.

His 20-year-old daughter, Amila, attended high school in the same building as Croat students but never mixed with them because students went to classes in shifts--Muslims from 7:30 a.m. and Croats from 2 p.m., a common arrangement in Bosnia.

She said she has no Croat friends, though she does know a few Serbs. On weekends, she added, Muslim youth go to Art, a nightclub in the east of the city, while Croats prefer Pink Panther on the other side of town. “I don’t want us to be divided like this but have to accept that the division exists,” she said.

Like many young Bosnians, she is now thinking about emigrating to Western Europe, because work there is easier to find and better paid and also to escape the despair that grips many young people.

The economy is growing, thanks in part to large infusions of foreign aid, but unemployment among young people is nearly 60 percent.

For more than two decades of staggering from crisis to crisis, Bosnia’s fragile system has defied predictions of imminent collapse. This ability to survive against the odds, however, is now seriously at risk, said Paddy Ashdown, a British politician who from 2002 to 2006 served as Bosnia’s most senior foreign official, its so-called high representative.

The problem now, he said, is not just that Bosnia is still so divided but that Europe and the United States are themselves so polarized and have diminishing interest in Bosnia’s troubles. The emerging vacuum is being filled by Russia and Turkey, each keen to reassert itself in the Balkans--Russia as a protector of the Serbs and Turkey on behalf of Muslims.

“These times remind me of the 1930s. Everything is falling apart. The center cannot hold,” Mr. Ashdown added.

Rupert Smith, a British general who commanded United Nations forces in Bosnia at the time of the Dayton agreement, said the American-brokered deal was never meant to be a long-term settlement but simply “a cease-fire agreement” that mirrored and inadvertently reinforced the ethnic divisions on the ground at the time.

But he thinks that the Clinton administration made a big mistake by pushing for early Bosnian elections that “only cemented divisions,” he said in a telephone interview, because they favored the nationalist groups that had created the conflict.

Over two decades later, the same parties or successors rooted in the same ethnic allegiances still dominate national and local politics. In Mostar, power is divided between the Croat HDZ and Bosniak SDA, the same parties that reduced the center of the city to a wasteland.

“It is often said that war is a continuation of politics by other means, but here in Bosnia politics is a continuation of war by peaceful means,” said Adis Maksic, head of the department of international relations and European studies at International Burch University, a private college near Sarajevo. Bosnia, he added, is “not so much at peace as in a state of non-war.”

While friction between communities is rare in daily life, Amna Popovac, an activist in Mostar for Nasa Stranka, a multiethnic party struggling to break down barriers, said nationalist political leaders, all of them men, constantly stoke fear of conflict to rally support and avoid tackling real problems. “Testosterone plays a big role in our politics,” she said.

Bosnia’s biggest curse, said Ms. Popovac, the activist in Mostar, is not ethnic or religious enmity but its nationalist political leaders, who fan the fears of the communities they claim to represent to save themselves and a deeply corrupt system that has enriched them.

“Just follow the money,” she said.