DO­HA, Qatar (AP) — The Ser­bian foot­ball fed­er­a­tion was charged by FI­FA on Sat­ur­day for hang­ing a po­lit­i­cal ban­ner about neigh­bor­ing in­de­pen­dent state Koso­vo in the lock­er room be­fore play­ing Brazil at the World Cup.

It showed a map of Ser­bia that in­clud­ed the ter­ri­to­ry of its for­mer province, which has been an in­de­pen­dent state for near­ly 15 years, and the slo­gan “No Sur­ren­der.”

Pho­tos cir­cu­lat­ed of the ban­ner draped over the lock­ers of Mi­los Veljkovic and An­dri­ja Zivkovic ahead of the team’s 2-0 loss to Brazil on Thurs­day in Qatar.

Koso­vo’s soc­cer fed­er­a­tion for­mal­ly com­plained to FI­FA and its sports min­is­ter, Ha­jrul­la Ceku, de­scribed the im­age as us­ing the World Cup to pro­mote “hate­ful, xeno­pho­bic and geno­ci­dal mes­sages.”

FI­FA cit­ed a sec­tion of its dis­ci­pli­nary code that cov­ers mis­con­duct in­clud­ing “of­fen­sive ges­tures, signs or lan­guage” and “us­ing a sports event for demon­stra­tions of a non-sport­ing na­ture.”

Soc­cer’s gov­ern­ing body gave no timetable for a ver­dict, though Ser­bia next plays on Mon­day against Cameroon.

Since Koso­vo was made a mem­ber of FI­FA and UE­FA in 2016, the Eu­ro­pean soc­cer body has en­sured for se­cu­ri­ty rea­sons that its na­tion­al teams can­not be drawn with Ser­bia or Bosnia- Herze­gov­ina in qual­i­fy­ing groups for the World Cup and Eu­ro­pean Cham­pi­onship.

The is­sue of Koso­vo’s in­de­pen­dence sparked a 1998-99 war in which about 13,000 peo­ple died. Ser­bia launched a bru­tal crack­down to curb a sep­a­ratist re­bel­lion by the ter­ri­to­ry’s eth­nic Al­ba­ni­ans. NA­TO bombed Ser­bia in 1999 to end the war.

Koso­vo uni­lat­er­al­ly broke away from Ser­bia in 2008. The Ser­bian gov­ern­ment, with sup­port from Chi­na and Rus­sia, has re­fused to ac­knowl­edge Koso­vo’s state­hood. The Unit­ed States and most of its Eu­ro­pean al­lies rec­og­nize Koso­vo as an in­de­pen­dent coun­try.