National Harmony? Not in This Contest

For Serbia and Montenegro, the Song This Year Will Be the Sound of Silence

BELGRADE -- No Name, a boy band from Montenegro, the western end of the bifurcated country of Serbia and Montenegro, was just getting ready for an encore.

Then the bottles came flying from the audience.

It was the riotous finale of the competition to choose Serbia and Montenegro's entry in the annual Eurovision Song Contest, a popular music festival. The contest pits pop groups from all over Europe against one another, with the winner decided by popular vote from as many as 600 million TV spectators across the continent. This year's finals are in Athens.

The championships almost always include some sort of nationalist intrigue -- Greeks vote for anyone but Turks, Slavs vote mainly for each other and no one votes for the British because they invaded Iraq. But rarely has a country fought with itself over its own candidate.

Enter Serbia and Montenegro, which is still wrestling with the aftermath of a decade of ethnic wars that tore Yugoslavia, to which both entities once belonged separately, into uneasy pieces. Two regions still attached to Serbia are itching to exit: Kosovo, a province that was, practically speaking, freed by NATO bombs in 1999, but is demanding formal independence in talks with Serbia; and Montenegro, a republic that is voting on independence next month.

What does all that have to do with a competition that has featured songs with names like "Diggy-Loo Diggy-Ley," "Boom Bang-a-Bang" and the unforgettable "La, La, La"? How can a contest once won by Abba and Celine Dion have geopolitical significance?

Well, No Name was made up of three Montenegrin guys with good teeth who sang a ballad, "My Love." Their rival, Flamingos, was, in politically correct fashion, made up of a Serb and a Montenegrin (wearing Blues Brothers fedoras). Flamingos sang the bouncy "Crazy Summer Song."

The jury in the contest last month was made up of four Montenegrins and four Serbs, even though the population of Montenegro is about 650,000, compared with 10 million in Serbia. The Montenegrin judges voted exclusively for the ethnically pure No Name. The Serbs threw a few votes No Name's way.

The result: No Name won, as it had the year before under exactly the same circumstances, with a unanimous vote from the Montenegrin judges and a few from the Serbs.

To the audience at Belgrade's Sava Center auditorium, it looked too much like politically ordained voting. Spectators rose, screamed "thieves" and booed lustily. They tossed bottles at the stage and drove No Name away. Flamingos rushed in and played the encore. "This is the land of wonders," the master of ceremonies said dryly. Rules are rules and technically, No Name should be on its way to Athens.

But RTS, the Serbian state television station that co-sponsored the event (with Montenegrin TV) refused to endorse the result. RTS called for a replay, with the judges replaced by phone-in votes from the television audience. Montenegrin television refused to go along. So no singers from Serbia and Montenegro will go to Athens.

"It is better not to have a common representative at all than to accept, for the second time, the manipulations, pressure, blackmailing and tribal voting, and to eagerly obey the will of musical clans and political mentors," said Aleksandar Tijanic, director of RTS.