National Harmony? Not in This Contest
For Serbia and Montenegro, the Song This Year Will Be the Sound of Silence

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 4, 2006

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.

A poisonous atmosphere had enveloped the song contest here before any singers took the stage. Serbs complained that No Name's song included a prelude resembling a Montenegrin nationalist anthem. There were also suspicions that, at contest finals in Athens, No Name would change their lyrics to urge Montenegrins to vote for independence. The finals take place a day before the May 21 referendum.

Under European Union rules for the referendum, 55 percent of voters have to approve independence for Montenegro to bolt from Serbia, and at least 50 percent of eligible voters must participate. The E.U. wanted to make the measure comparatively hard to pass, out of a feeling there are already too many Balkan ministates. About half the population is Serb.

The United States has said it would accept the results.

Like the song contest, the referendum is already the subject of fraud allegations. Serbian television broadcast a videotape purporting to show pro-independence Montenegrin activists trying to bribe a man named Masan Buskovic to vote for independence in return for payment of his $1,900 electric bill. The activists say they were victims of a sting and a doctored video.

In Belgrade, the Flamingos remain sour over the whole contest. "Unfortunately, political games ruined our chances," Ognjen Amidzic, the Serb Flamingo, said.

Marinko Madzgalj, the Flamingos' Montenegrin, said the whole spirit of the contest was subverted. "It was ugly. Unexpected. I am somewhat bitter because the contest, usually filled with fun, turned into something totally different, something that has nothing to do with music," he said.

The Eurovision Song Contest, which debuted in 1956, was beset with controversy from the start. Swiss judges, replacing a pair from Luxembourg, tilted the vote toward -- guess who? -- the Swiss winner.

In 1969, Austria refused to participate because Spain, then under the rule of Gen. Francisco Franco, was the host country. Four years ago, the manager of Germany's entry was discovered buying up copies of the performer's records to persuade all of Europe that she was a popular phenom. In the same year, a Slovenian politician panned the country's own entry as a symptom of a "crisis of values." The group called Sisters was composed entirely of male transvestites. Israel's 1998 winner, Dana International (aka Sharon Cohen, and before that, Yaron Cohen), was a transsexual labeled an abomination by rabbis back home.

Last year, Ukraine's song was deemed too political -- it extolled the anti-Russian Orange Revolution -- and had to be changed. There's controversy over this year's Armenian entry, Andre. He has listed himself as a native of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenia wrested from neighboring Azerbaijan in the 1990s. Thousands of Azeris fled what is now an Armenian-controlled enclave deep inside Azerbaijan; the Azerbaijan government says that either Andre identify himself as from Azerbaijan or drop Nagorno-Karabakh from his biography.

In any event, Eurovision in the Balkans seems to have had one uplifting outcome spanning the region's ethnic divides. This year's Bosnian entry, sung by Hari Mata Hari, a Muslim man born Hajrudin Varesanovic ("The Nightingale of Sarajevo"), was composed by Zeljko Joksimovic, Serbia's Eurovision contestant in 2004.