Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Lepi Mića

The Belgrade tabloid Kurir recently occupied a slow news day by 'revealing' how many Croatian pop singers - among them Oliver Dragojević, Severina, and Nina Badrić - were afraid to perform in Serbia due to their 'Serb' origins while 'pure-blooded' Croats were happy to appear 'before a "Četnik" audience'.

Presumably that must have been the same Severina who, Kurir itself announced in July, wanted to play Belgrade's Marakana stadium with Haris Džinović, and who was perfectly happy to appear on stage at the Sava Centar with Ceca and Lepa Brena at the TV Pink awards three years ago.

Never liking to let a fake scandal rest, and clearly not getting as much mileage as they expected from the photos of Jelena Karleuša up to mischief on a cross, Kurir then contacted the Serbian patriotic folk singer Lepi Mića. Mića was somewhat more talkative than the Thompsons of this world, and gladly filled up Kurir's stars page for another day with his thoughts on Severina's 'fascist videos' (in other words, Hrvatica) and her Tudjman T-shirt:

'They are committing musical genocide and deliberately dragging our people from their roots, giving them quality-less music which has nothing to do with Serbdom. They are never off TV screens the length of Serbia [...] while over there they arrest our students, they stop our top sportsmen coming into the country because they're bothered by a picture of Draža Mihailović...'

Here he means the Serbian basketballer Milan Gurović, who was refused entry to Croatia in November 2004 on the grounds that his tattoo of the WW2 Četnik leader Draža Mihailović violated Croatian laws on 'totalitarian propaganda'.

Another duet, then, that won't be happening any time soon...