(At Least) Six Parties In Search Of A Coalition

The votes are in after yesterday's election in Croatia: HDZ have 61 Sabor seats, and SDP have 56, not counting the 5 seats voted for by the diaspora which will all but certainly go HDZ's way once they've been counted. Nonetheless, both HDZ's leader Ivo Sanader and his SDP counterpart Zoran Milanović say that they're in talks with other parties to form a government (if only Milanović had been this self-confident when he took over the party leadership in June, he might not be scrabbling for allies now at all).

Javno.hr is playing the numbers game: say SDP brings the urban liberal HNS and Istrian IDS on side. That should give them 67 seats, since Javno found an extra SDP one behind the sofa. HDZ ought to have 66, counting the diaspora, so on comes another round of hunt-the-coalition-partner. The far-right HSP are down to one seat (their leader Anto Đapić), and presumably not even HDZ would have the cheek to make an offer to Branimir Glavaš's Slavonian regionalist party HDSSB after Sanader spent most of last year getting its leader tried for war crimes. Which is exactly why SDP wouldn't dare ask him into government: although, given some of the PM candidate Ljubo Jurčić's off-colour comments during the summer, maybe all bets should be off. The pensioners' party HSU (as tracked by Dr Sean's Diary) have only one seat too, and will probably be auctioning it off to the highest bidder already. The peasant party HSS (5 seats) and shadow-of-their-former-selves liberals HSLS (2 seats) got Sanader out of trouble in 2003, but then there are the five seats for ethnic minorities (who might give SDP a leg up, but then again, might not).

Maybe anyone who can make head or tail of this deserves to run the country...

The Votes Are Not Quite In

There's high praise for Slaven Bilić, the manager of the Croatian football team, in Jutarnji list, where Vlado Vurušić applauds him as a model of 'Croatia as it should be' - making him 'the least typical manager Croatia has ever had.'

Bilić has a law degree, has dreamed of playing guitar with Bill Wyman, 'uncompromisingly suspended three important players [...] for sneaking out before the first qualifier against Russia to go drinking with some Dara Bubamara', and 'forced a nation which has often let itself be led by laughable and small-minded racism to love a dark-skinned Brazilian, Eduardo da Silva'. Although, if his work ethic is 'part of the mentality which, he once said, he obtained precisely by living in England' (Bilić is an ex-West Ham and Everton defender)... then please can we have him back once you've finished?

And if he's a socialist who even HDZ loyalists (read: much of the Croatian footballing establishment) have rallied around, shouldn't someone tell Zoran Milanović before Sunday's election?

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new for SDP (though you'd be best advised not to mention Severina in 2003), nor for HDZ, who went as far this year as to add singer Miroslav Škoro to their party list in Slavonia (Jutarnji list's latest poll predicts that he'll get in). The leading Croatian Serb party SDSS is usually a bit more circumspect, but now that Croatia shuttles its dvanaest bodova at Eurovision across the border as often as it does, there may be hope yet - or so the party apparently thought when it signed up Eurovision winner Marija Šerifović for a secret concert at the Zagreb Velesajam during its campaign.

New York, New York, It's A Wonderful Town

And Marko Perković Thompson probably thinks so after a remarkably positive write-up of his New York concert in the Washington Post.

Unlike the New York tabloids' sensational depictions of a 'Nazi rocker', the Post went along to St Cyril and Methodius church and found:

'he sang a lot of fervently nationalistic, mid-tempo rock songs, most of which sounded like Iron Maiden doing Eastern European folk. And he harped again and again on his favorite themes: love of God, family and Croatia. Especially Croatia, which in his music sounds like a place abused for centuries and still under siege.'

Of course. maybe it depends on which diaspora group which journalist happens to talk to...

Another Rainbow Tour

Over and above the problems in New York, local papers in other cities on Marko Perković Thompson's tour schedule are also reporting protests: that now makes difficulties in Toronto (where the concert has been moved from the original venue to a secret location, due to be revealed in Croatian churches on Sunday morning), Cleveland, and Melbourne, where Thompson is supposed to perform at a football club's social on 28 December.

Thompson's management - no doubt conscious of how little English-language material on the singer is out there - have responded on his official website with English translations of 18 songs which make up the majority of his most recent set list. Only a handful of the numbers from his Maksimir concert are missing from the list, although the omissions do include his Neka ni'ko ne dira u moj mali dio svemira (Don't let anyone touch my little part of the universe), where he made his most direct response to his domestic critics.

At least the tour seems to be more successful than Croatian music's American adventure in 2006, Severina's ill-fated rainbow tour.

Elections And All That Jazz

It's a predictable old place sometimes, Croatia.

When Vesna Pisarović headed to jazz academy in The Hague (making her the only Croatian who's happy to be there?), it didn't take too far a leap of the imagination to expect that her next album would be something in the way of all that, well, jazz.

Neither is it much of a surprise that HDZ's electoral list for Slavonia includes the pop-tamburica singer Miroslav Škoro, the former director of Croatia Records, responsible for one of the best-selling albums of 2005, and sniffily described by Jutarnji list as 'the author of a few tamburica hits'.

If elected, Škoro would follow in the footsteps of Kićo Slabinac, his counterpart in the older generation of tamburica players, who held a Sabor seat for HDZ in the mid-1990s. The Croatian Musicians' Union, for one, would surely look to him to improve the legal protection of domestic musicians by increasing their quota on TV and radio.

And a Happy Halloween to all. It's probably just a coincidence that election candidates have to register today...

UPDATE: Seems HDZ have quite a bit of confidence in Škoro: he's in sixth place on the party list for his constituency, above interior minister Ivica Kirin and defence minister Berislav Rončević.

Hello Elections, Goodbye Maksimir

There's a month to go before Croatia's parliamentary elections - hot on the heels of the Polish version - and still no sign, as yet, of the media's usual pre-election obsession: which singers will be performing at whose election meetings.

After HDZ's star-studded rallies before the first multi-party elections in 1990, most other parties tried to keep pace, making the 'they got paid how much to sing that?' article as common in the run-up to elections as the run-up to New Year's Eve. The level of excitement in 2003, when Severina sang at ten rallies for Ivica Račan's SDP for a rumoured €200,000, certainly hasn't been matched yet in 2007. Possibly because Račan lost the election in a display of unconvincing populism, which Novi list's Jelena Lovrić described as 'Mala-je-dala politics' in a reference to one of Seve nacionale's tartier songs.

One of Croatian music's biggest draws (for better or worse) will be absent in any case. Marko Perković Thompson, once upon a time a stalwart HSP supporter, will be otherwise engaged on a tour of the US and Canada in November - unless The New York Sun, which described Thompson as a 'neo-Nazi' singer in an article yesterday, has anything to do with it.

New York aside, there's already uncertainty whether his 4 November concert in Toronto has been called off or not: Thompson's tour organiser says no, but a Simon Wiesenthal Center press release states that the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had the concert cancelled after a complaint to the venue's owners (much the same route taken by a different group to avert Thompson's Amsterdam concert in 2003).

And it's farewell (eventually) to the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb (the venue of Thompson's largest concert this year), due to be knocked down and replaced with a 53,000-seater affair on the city outskirts in Lanište (near the future handball arena) or Kajzerica. Needless to say, the Maksimir site, now owned by Zagreb council, will be sold off for enough money that 'another football stadium could be built with it' instead.

UPDATE: Leave it to Fox News to intervene in the Thompson case as unhelpfully as possible.

The Thompson Letters

Marko Perković Thompson's reservation on a spot in the news agenda in advance of his Split concert next week has only been made firmer by Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who intervened in the scandal again with an open letter to the singer published in last week's edition of Globus.

In the letter (English translation), Zuroff refers to the numerous responses responses he has received from Thompson's supporters, 'reasonably intelligent people who are convinced that you are neither a fascist nor an anti-Semite' and who 'claim that your sole motivation is pure and noble Croatian patriotism and love of family and the Catholic Church.' He calls on Thompson yet again to clarify his position regarding the Independent State of Croatia (NDH):

'It is precisely because your patriotic credentials are absolutely impeccable that you must be among those who clearly and unequivocally reject the legacy of the NDH and the Ustashe. This will send a clear message to Croatians of all ages that one is not betraying his or her country by condemning the atrocities committed by the NDH and that one can be the most noble patriot by building a homeland which will be a model democracy which accepts minorities and fosters tolerance among different ethnic groups.'

Maybe Zuroff's next letter will be going out to Jadranka Kolarević, the member of HRT's programming council who vigorously defended the broadcaster's decision to show the concert (one of Zuroff's causes for complaint in his original statement on the matter) at the last council meeting (to the discomfort of the council president Zdenko Ljevak):

'Zuroff is forgetting at the same time that his country's army kills Palestinians on their own land almost every day, devastates Lebanon [...] Why did he not protest when the Četniks entered Vukovar? [...] Zuroff is forgetting that the creator of the idea of camps in the NDH was Eugen Dido Kvaternik, a Jew on his mother's side, that the wife of the Poglavnik [Leader] was of Jewish origin, that of 42 NDH generals 8 of them were Jews, that the NDH's artillery commander was a Jew, that Hitler's main investigator for the Near East was a Jew, that in 1945 of the 6 officers at the talks in Bleiburg only three had pure Croatian surnames, while it has been proved for one of the other three that he was a pure Jew.'

Feral, Thompson, And Some Czechs

Feral Tribune is back on its feet after a month of uncertainty - not independently, but as a member of the EPH press group, which already owns Jutarni list, Globus and a variety of other publications including the family/showbusiness magazine Arena. Feral's managing editor Zoran Erceg has cosily told JL that the satirical weekly will continue to be editorially independent, although broader coverage and a graphic redesign are likely now that Feral is financially secure.

Meanwhile, some showbusiness ethnopolitics from further north than usual: the lustration debate in the Czech Republic is spreading into entertainment after the singer Václav Neckář, formerly a member of the late 1960s Golden Kids trio with Marta Kubišová and Helena Vondráčková was accused by Lidové noviny of reporting on his colleagues (including Kubišová, a Charter 77 signatory) to the Czechoslovakian secret police between 1978 and 1987.

Radio Prague reports that Neckář's participation at the annual Trutnov festival (the oldest and largest Czech open-air festival) is now in question unless he provides a written explanation of his conduct at the time, according to a statement by its organiser Martin Vechet:

'Trutnov festival has a very specific tradition which is unusual in western countries. The festival began on the basis of police persecution in communist Czechoslovakia, when police broke up gatherings and illegal concerts, held secretly on various farms. Young people met at such concerts and were dispersed by the police. It would be crass for anyone who even indirectly supported the regime to play at a festival like this one.'

Trutnov first took place as an underground event broken up by the secret police in 1987, and thus celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, with headliners including the Boban Marković Orchestra.

Lastly, Večernji list reports that a New York Times journalist interviewed Marko Perković Thompson after his Maksimir stadium concert. Not that it sounds as if Thompson told us anything we didn't know:

'We talked about my songs, the Maksimir concert, and he was also interested in the iconography. I said that I and my audience, who are people from 7 to 77 years old, are patriots, not fascists. I also mentioned that on several occasions before the concert I said that those who want to wear uniforms ought to wear the uniforms of the victorious Croatian army which won the Homeland War.'

Not that they ever seem to listen...

All Over For Feral?

Readers of Feral Tribune haven't been in a position to appreciate the weekly satirical magazine's take on Marko Perković Thompson's concert, or, for that matter, on anything else: after 15 years as an independent publication (separating from the Split daily Slobodna Dalmacija when the state took SD over in 1992) the newspaper has controversially been forced to cease publication due to an unpaid VAT bill of €68,000.

From a British perspective, it might be hard to see why the press are liable for VAT at all, but from a Croatian one, that might not be the point: a statement from the Social Democratic Party last week alleged that the government chooses not to pursue the tax debts of certain publishers 'because of the ideological character of their publications' (not to mention those owned by the state - the daily Vjesnik and the national broadcaster HRT), while sticking to the letter of the law in the cases of more oppositional media such as Feral.

Although the government announced its intention to reduce VAT on magazines to 10% from its current level of 22% when news of Feral's debt crisis broke earlier in the month, the magazine is already unable to service its existing debt - a financial situation which its editor Viktor Ivančić blames on 'a cruel corporate diktat' by which large corporations avoid advertising in media which are opposed to government politics.

However, among the widespread hand-wringing on Feral's behalf, there's one note of caution from Jurica Pavičić, a former contributor: namely, if the market is so unforgiving towards publications like Feral, why have its editors never followed the lead of Bosnia's Dani or Serbia's Vreme and elevated it from often puerile satire into a mature news magazine? A case in point is the Croatian weekly Globus - which began as a sensationalist tabloid flirting with the radical-right party HSP, but developed after a change of editor into the focus of support for Mirko Galić's Forum 21 initiative which aimed to detach HRT from direct state control.

Nonetheless, it would be a sad day for Croatian civil society if Feral finally petered out, seven years after losing its 'natural enemy' with the death of the nationalist president Franjo Tudjman. The Galić era, meanwhile, did its petering out some months ago when he took up an ambassadorial post in Paris and was replaced - eventually - by Vanja Sutlić. It's taken some time for HRT to assume its post-Galić shape, but the decisive stroke may have come today when the director of HTV Marija Nemčić resigned - along with her radio counterpart Ivanka Lučev - leaving both no 2 positions free for Sutlić appointees.

Nemčić's resignation is likely to have repercussions in the news department (don't forget 2007 is an election year) - and also at entertainment, long thought of as a Nemčić stronghold under its current editor Aleksandar Kostadinov. The Gazette won't be surprised if the new Mr Music Man turns out to be Mario Sedmak, who'd look like a safe pair of hands after the success of the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us formats.

Once Upon A Time In Maksimir

The first leg of Marko Perković Thompson's concert tour to promote his Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj (Once upon a time in Croatia) concluded at the weekend, in front of anything between 35,000 and 50,000 people at the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb. Not that one can be sure of the exact attendance: with the concert delayed for 24 hours after a thunderstorm, many attendees from outside Zagreb or Croatia were thought to have gone home, so the gates were thrown open to ensure a full house for the event extensively billed as 'the concert of Thompson's career'.

Thompson's most famous concert to date, at Split's Poljud stadium in 2002, was always going to be a tough act to follow. Poljud came at the height of protests against the indictments of Generals Ante Gotovina and Mirko Norac for war crimes (not to mention the Hague Tribunal's demand that Croatia extradite its former chief of staff Janko Bobetko, made only a few weeks before the concert), and during a thriving movement of Homeland War veterans opposed to the centre-left government of the late Ivica Račan's SDP - a situation which may or may not have been ripe for political manipulation, depending on which magazines you read.

What really elevated Thompson to the status of a social problem was the behaviour of young audiences at Poljud and elsewhere on the 2002 tour, wearing clothing with the Ustaša logo or pictures of Ante Pavelić (the leader of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War) and performing raised-fist salutes. A scandal in 2004 when Thompson himself was accused of performing a Pavelić-era song in the diaspora didn't help matters, so over and above presenting a new album, the Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj project has an ulterior motive: to show that Thompson represents all patriotic Croats, rather than a political faction.

To this end, concert organiser Miljenko Ćurić announced before Maksimir that Ustaša insignia were banned by law, although enough U-logo caps slipped through for press photographers to come back with the expected pictures - and in a crowd of howevermanythousand people there's not much one can do about spontaneous chants of the best-known Ustaša song Evo zore, evo dana, evo Jure i Bobana ('Here comes the dawn, here comes day, here come [Crna Legija commanders] Jure and Boban') without causing a more serious incident. (How honoured the said Jure and Boban would actually have been is another question. The average Evo zore-quoting teenager seems to know enough about it to understand that it seriously winds up adults, but struggles with the lyrics as soon as s/he gets into the second couplet.)

Part of the problem is defining what should and shouldn't be thought of as 'an Ustaša symbol'. Evo zore, evo dana, referring to the NDH's elite Black Legion, is pretty unambiguous, but Pavelić's recourse to Croatian history in developing the iconography of his state makes some of the classifications problematic. For the Jewish community in Zagreb, which put up the most resistance to the Maksimir concert, the slogan 'Za Dom spremni' ('Ready for the Home') is unequivocally Ustaša thanks to its adoption by the leader of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić. For Thompson, the slogan has legitimate historical precedents in the battle cries of earlier leaders, and it opens his breakthrough hit from 1992: Bojna Čavoglave (The Čavoglave platoon), with which he described his front-line experience with his fellow villagers at the start of the Homeland War.

Thompson's stardom since has been inseparable from his persona as a veteran (an authenticity which surely helped him capture the moment during 2002), and his appeals to respect the memory of fallen soldiers are still prominent throughout Bilo jednom u Hrvatskoj.

Nonetheless, between Poljud and Maksimir the singer has experienced another masculine archetype, fatherhood, and family relationships are a stronger theme on the current album than on any of his previous ones, which were more concerned with relations between grown men (not least comrades in arms). This time around, commemorations of the dead are balanced with songs in honour of Thompson's grandfather, his sons, and his daughter (this last a song in praise of 'Diva Grabovčeva', a Herzegovinan princess remembered for dying in a state of grace when murdered by the Turks) - completing Thompson's triad of values, 'God, the family and the Homeland'.

For the first time in Thompson's career since his 1998 comeback with Prijatelji (one of the first Croatian songs to articulate veterans' resentment), the memory of the war isn't the only aspect of his image, although it remains essential. The concert's organisation itself seemed to point to a subtle reorientation, breaking the tradition of opening the set with Bojna Čavoglave (which was still the plan as late as Thompson's cancelled Sarajevo concert in May) and replacing it with the first track from the new album, the appropriately-titled Početak (Beginning), a song which deals with peace and God's love. Meanwhile, official concert T-shirts have been produced for the first time in green (matching the new album's cover) as well as the traditional black, although unofficial vendors have stayed faithful to the old colour scheme.

(Of course, the most emphatic thing to do would be to drop Čavoglave and the black outfits entirely, but for the sake of consistency it might be a step too far.)

Whether Maksimir reflected Thompson the mature father or Thompson the corporate edition, Sunday's concert seems to have lived up to its billing as a landmark in his career. The evening was just as significant for Tomislav Bralić and Klapa Intrade, who confirmed their place on Croatia's patriotic showbusiness A-list by appearing in the only guest spot to perform their unavoidable hit Croatijo, iz duše te ljubim (Croatia, I love you from the soul) - the cornerstone of the current klapa revival.

No report of the concert was complete without at least one picture of audience members (usually teenage boys) playing up to the camera with Ustaša salutes, although Jutarnji list at first took the trouble to take a wider-ranging look at the crowd - such as a 67-year-old woman who enjoys Thompson's 'national folklore', or a younger woman who has no problems reconciling her Croatian patriotism with her intention to vote for SDP. The most emphatic thing to do might be to deny the Ustaša-cap-wearing types the satisfaction of a photograph rather than framing them with sanctimonious captions about 'the unwanted images' and the like.

Except that then there'd be no scandal to be made, which for the Croatian media (or anybody else's) would probably be a step too far.

UPDATE>: Lupiga and Balkan Baby have been to the concert too.

In Lieu Of A Proper Post

Croatia's Social Democrats have a new leader: Ivica Račan's foreign policy expert Zoran Milanović, who impressed on his talk-show debut with Aleksandar Stanković, put the wind up PM Ivo Sanader, shows every chance of bringing some West Wing-style gravitas to the Croatian left - and, perhaps most importantly for many SDPites, isn't the populist mayor of Zagreb Milan Bandić.

Marko Perković Thompson's concert in Zagreb's Maksimir stadium in two weeks' time, ending the first leg of the promotional tour for his 2006 album, is being positioned as the domestic concert spectacular of the year (hence the 30-metre swords transferred from his album artwork to the set design). A future leg may well culminate in a similar extravaganza at the Poljud stadium in Split, the site of Thompson's most famous concert in 2002.

Anthropology blog Savage Minds has been watching Eurovision from Finland, in what's presumably the last word on that show this season. Not that one should ever speak too soon.

A European Vote For European Serbia?

Following the line of Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner who hailed Serbia's Eurovision victory as 'a European vote for European Serbia', the symbolic connection between the removal of Serbian Radical Tomislav Nikolić as parliamentary speaker and Serbia's 'acceptance' by the rest of Europe has not been lost on post-Eurovision reporters: The Guardian, for instance, headlines its whole-page article 'From pariah state to kitsch victory: how a Balkan ballad showed Europe a new Serbia'.

Jutarnji list likewise emphasises 'how symbolic that victory was in the week where Serbia on account of Nikolić had again become a country dreaded by Europe', and quotes the Vojvodinan parliamentary deputy Nenad Čanak's statement that (Nikolić having called for closer ties between Serbia and Russia) 'Croatia gave us twelve points, so did Montenegro and Macedonia, and Russia [gave us] five. So Tomislav Nikolić has to be dismissed.'

The Guardian's Ian Traynor also interprets the victory as a blow against the 'ear-splitting melange of Balkan rhythms, electronic pounding, and stridently nationalist lyrics' of turbofolk, although Rock and Democracy is less optimistic regarding the longer-term consequences for popular music in Serbia when Eurovision is hosted there next year:

'A mainly eastern bloc led by Ukraine will push into Serbia and then strengthen a growing domestic fruit, and of course you all know that that fruit is called Turbo-folk.'

There's not so much about cultural politics in Serbian tabloid Kurir, which treats Marija Šerifović's win as a victory for the whole nation, celebrated as publicly as the return of sporting gold medallists. (Though Reluctant Dragon, on Belgrade's Trg Republike after Eurovision, couldn't help thinking that some crowd members who were 'chanting nationalistic slogans were nonetheless 'the same people who would probably beat her up in the street if they suspected she was a Gypsy or if it turned out she actually was gay.')

Operation Bljesak Anniversary

Today Croatia marks the twelfth anniversary of Operation Bljesak (Flash), with which Croatian forces liberated western Slavonia in 1995. President Mesić, PM Ivo Sanader and parliamentary speaker Vladimir Šeks have laid wreaths and lit candles in Okučani, while a Zagreb HDZ delegation led by veterans' minister Jadranka Kosor held their own ceremony in Mirogoj ceremony at the Defenders' Cross (a memorial to Homeland War soldiers) and the grave of their party's founder Franjo Tuđman.

The Bljesak anniversary was presumably the occasion for Marko Perković Thompson's concert this evening in Sisak as part of an event organised by the local HSP. (HSP Sisak already introduces its website with a midi of Thompson's first hit on the theme of veterans, Prijatelji (Friends). It remains to be seen whether any Sišćani will use the occasion to express the kinds of sentiments about the late Ivica Račan that one wouldn't write in a condolence book.

Talking of anniversaries, it's also the 300th of the United Kingdom. Any takers for a bet on reaching 350?

UPDATE: courtesy of Neretva River, a proper lowdown on anniversary politics in Sisak.

Ivica Račan: 1944-2007

Ivica Račan, founder of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Croatian Prime Minister 2000-03, has died. A national day of mourning has been declared in Croatia, although the funeral will be strictly a family affair rather than a state occasion.

Obituaries from Jutarnji list, Davor Butković, Mladenka Šarić, Milan Jajčinović, and Index.

UPDATE: No national day of mourning after all.

Piramida Affair: Homeland War vs. Oprah

The resignation of Tanja Šimić as director of programming at HTV is on its way to becoming a fully-fledged scandal: while Jutarnji list implies that her 'punishment' for allowing Croatian Serb politician Rade Leskovac to appear on the Piramida talk show threatens to reintroduce the socialist-era crime of verbal delict, her opponents continue to accuse her of an inappropriate attitude to the Homeland War.

Milorad Pupovac, the parliamentary deputy from the Serb national minority, considers that the affair is 'a witch hunt, rather than looking for responsiblity for hate speech':

On HTV certain reporters and editors continually use hate speech, praise the NDH [WW2-era Independent State of Croatia], insult members of the Serb community, relativise war crimes. But to date they haven't been punished.'

HDZ deputy Andrija Hebrang, however, accuses Šimić of not treating the memory of the war with the respect it deserves:

'She apparently can't stand the truth about the Homeland War. When I complained because one programme about the war was being shown at 4pm on a Friday, she said that the Oprah show goes out at the same time as well. With that she was equating the importance of the Homeland War and the Oprah show.'

Were Leskovac's comments a justifiable expression of free speech? Not according to Hebrang, who told JL that 'it isn't an expression of free speech, but an expression of attitudes against the Croatian state'.

Bora Djordjević on Epicentar: Aftershocks?

Despite threats from a group of Zagreb war veterans that they'd intervene to prevent the transmission of Mirjana Hrga's Epicentar talk show when she interviewed the Serbian rock singer Bora Djordjević, there's been little sign of recriminations after last week's show was successfully broadcast.

The major charge laid against Hrga's Nova TV colleague Petar Vlahov when he went to interview Ceca Ražnatović in January 2005 was that he hadn't asked her the key questions - her attitude to the aggression against Croatia and her response to accusations of involvement in the conspiracy against Zoran Ðinđić - which would have transferred the interview out of the realm of entertainment television and into the field of big-P Politics.

No such allegations could apply to Hrga, who put Djordjević over the political barrel for 25 minutes on last Sunday's show, starting with the question 'Are you a Četnik?' (Djordjević: 'Absolutely', although the two speakers arrived with rather different understandings of četništvo, with Djordjević maintaining that it stood today for 'being proud of what you are'.) Half an hour later, Hrga's audience were well-informed about Djordjević's performances in Serb-occupied Knin and his insistence that conversations about Srebrenica should also remember 'the number of Serbs who died' - and were left under no illusions what Hrga's most vocal guest, HSP (Croatian Party of Right) leader Ante Djapić, thought about it.

(The only shame for viewers who might have liked to know a bit more about the Serbian elections is that Epicentar's other Belgrade guest - Sonja Biserko from the Serbian Helsinki Committee standing in for an unavailable Nataša Kandić - got no more than six or seven minutes of screen time: a quarter of the space allotted to Djordjević.)

Mirjana Hrga, for her part, has been attracting more attention than ever since the interview, at a time when one might expect the press to be focusing on the impending arrival at Nova TV of her old talk-show rival Hloverka Novak-Srzić. Jutarnji list and Globus both carried interviews with Hrga this weekend, in which she explained why she'd invited Djordjević for his first post-war appearance on a Croatian political show:

'Given that there’s radicalisation on the Serbian [srpska] political scene, and surveys are showing that Šešelj’s radicals and Koštunica’s party are getting more and more votes, it was completely logical for me to invite someone on to the show who sang to that same Koštunica for Serbian New Year, and who even without Kostunica fills stadiums and performs in front of 25,000 people. Moreover, he wears Četnik coats of arms on his jackets, he publicly declares himself as a Četnik, he promotes radical ideas… For me that too is Serbia. We in Croatia can’t pretend that Serbia is in Africa. It’s our neighbouring state, and I want to show what’s going on there, I want to say that two Serbias exist.'

As for her guests from the Croatian side - particularly Djapić and veterans' representative Mladen Pavković - Hrga told Globus that:

'I wanted Đapić, as a representative of the Croatian right wing: I wanted to confront him with some, conditionally put, right-wing political option in Serbia, but it turned out those are two [different] worlds, that Ante Đapić is a top European [vrhunski Europejac] for what the other side offers. And I wanted a representative of the branitelji, because they are the people who defended Croatia from just the sort of opinions and plans that Čorba was talking about. I exceptionally respect the branitelji, so I invited them on. I know that for them it was a painful evocation of those memories.'

Anyone For Handball?

A metro system for Zagreb might still be many years away, but the metropolis might soon share a less welcome characteristic with the Gazette's home town of London: losing out on hosting a world sporting championship because the venues weren't ready in time.

London had to hand over the 2005 World Athletics Championships to Helsinki because the British government abandoned a planned new stadium at Picketts Lock and the IAAF didn't much fancy shifting it to Sheffield; Zagreb's flagship event - in partnership with five other Croatian cities - is supposed to be the men's handball world championships in 2009, for which seven new stadia with between 3,000 and 12,000 seats each need to be built.

However, the Croatian government's decision to bypass the usual process of public tender for building projects so that the stadia can be built quicker has turned into the scandal of the week, and the government's U-turn yesterday takes the process back to square one - with proposals to reduce the number of host cities or even handle the whole thing from Zagreb, and crossed fingers that the International Handball Federation will be more patient than the IAAF.

Now Jurica Pavičić in Jutarnji list has questioned why the Croatian state puts such emphasis on sport in the first place:

'For the sake of sport, the Croatian administration is willing to amputate part of a military base and expropriate agricultural land. For the sake of sport, magnificent buildings get built which are not a realistic priority. [...] Nobody except sport has that sort of social power in our society - not science, not technology, not business, not art. Try and imagine in your wildest dreams a situation like what we have today with handball except that the reason is not sport. Try, for instance, to imagine the authorities expropriating a navy yard or preparing a special law because they want to - let's say - build a top-class brain institute.'

Uzmi Stipe...

Croatia's Index portal has previous form for uncovering public figures discussing the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in terms they'd rather have kept quiet about: in 2003, Marko Perković Thompson received the unwelcome New Year's Eve gift of discovering that a recording of his performing Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara had been released on to the internet courtesy of the Indexovci.

Now they've done it again - this time with the Croatian president Stjepan Mesić, who is said to have given two speeches at a Croatian club in Sydney in May/June 1992 (partially transcribed in Večernji list thanks to an enterprising Sydneysider) in which he described the Croats as having 'won twice' during the Second World War:

'The Croats won in 1941 when on 10 April they proclaimed a Croatian state. Because the Croats did not proclaim that state because they were fascists, but because they had a natural and historical right to a state. But the results of the Second World War are well-known, but it is also well-known that the Croats won in that war on a second occasion too because they found themselves together with the allies at the victors' table.'

The second speech involved an exposition of the current war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in which 'we are fighting for our own territory, and they are fighting for other people's', then headed off along the same lines, including the rhetorical instruction to those who disagreed to 'go and kneel down at Jasenovac'.

Neretva River has been following this assiduously all weekend, including reactions from Žarko Puhovski (Croatian Helsinki Committee), Vesna Pusić (leader of HNS, to which Mesić belongs), prime minister Ivo Sanader, and Mesić himself - plus the controversy over two Croatian Television journalists who have been suspended for their coverage of the story.

Mesić is holding to the line that he 'never supported the Ustaša regime', separating the idea of statehood from the criminal reality of the regime itself (The League of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of Croatia, for its part, is still behind him), and that the statement - which he no longer remembers giving - must have been a product of its time when 'it was necessary to win over [pridobiti] and consolidate [objediniti] all people in the defence of Croatia from aggression.'

(And when, he could have added, Tudjman's HDZ - to which Mesić still then belonged - was conducting an intricate balancing act between emigres some of whom believed wholeheartedly in the NDH and international sympathies which certainly didn't.)

Ironically enough, Mesić was himself the butt of insults in the final verse of Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara, which called on Our Lady of Sinj to 'take Stipe away and give us Franjo [Tudjman] back' (uzmi Stipu a vrati nam Franju). Is this the first time Mesić and Thompson have actually found common ground?

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Bosnian Election Time

The three so-called 'godfathers' of Croatian showbusiness politics - the patriotic trio of Marko Perković Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Mate Bulić - are on slightly different sides for once thanks to the finale of election campaigning in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Namely: three Croat coalitions, three possible sets of election rallies to perform at.

Things are largely in the state they're in because of the split in the Bosnian Croat version of HDZ, which was formalised this April when HDZ 1990 (named after the date of HDZ's first election victory in Croatia) broke off from the existing HDZ BiH over the leadership of Dragan Čović.

According to Jutarnji list, Škoro will be performing for the HDZ 1990-coalition Hrvatsko zajedništvo (Croatian Unity) alongside Vanna and rock band Prljavo kazalište (both long-term HDZ allies in Croatia, although the Prljavci wavered in their support somewhat during the early Sanader era), but rumour is that Croatian HDZ warned them not to hire Thompson too in case his associations with the extremist right brought bad publicity.

No such qualms, however, for HDZ BiH, which promptly added Thompson to a portfolio already including 'pure-blooded Herzegovinan' Mate Bulić. It's quite a step up from the situation at the end of August, when it seemed that HDZ BiH's rallies would only be graced by Mija Martina Barbarić. (Last seen coming second in the 2005 Bosnian pre-selection for Eurovision, with a Wild dances-type Herzegovinan ethno-pop song called Ružice rumena which did most of what Moja štikla did, only with less Afrika, paprika, sijeno, slama, sir or salama.)

The far-right (further-right?) party HSP, meanwhile, has hired Thompson's ex-bassist Tiho Orlić, another local boy who Thompson began to launch on a solo career in 2004.

This is all par for the course in an ex-Yugoslav election year: as far as Croatia's concerned, HDZ's 1990 campaign wonks came up with the audience-grabbing tactic of hiring as many singers as possible to entertain the crowd between political speeches, leaving its competitors scrambling to catch up and cram some hastily arranged raly/concerts into the last few days of campaigning.

Herzegovinan showbusiness, however, has more ambitious aims: Mostar's Dnevni list reported a couple of weeks ago that Marko Zelić from the Široki Brijeg record label Song Zelex and record producer Ivo Lesić are planning an annual Herzegovinan Radio Festival (a la the successful Croatian and Serbian models) which would debut in August next year. Potential contestants apparently include 'Marko Perković Thompson, Miroslav Škoro, Dražen Zečić, Mate Bulić and others' - that'll be the usual suspects, then - and, for a longer shot, Macedonia's Toše Proeski and Ukraine's Ruslana.

If she's not available, though, the Gazette is sure they'd settle for Barbarić instead. What else was Ružice rumena meant to be doing?

UPDATE: According to 24 sata in Croatia, it now seems that Thompson isn't having anything to do with the HDZ BiH election rally at all, despite it being clearly advertised on the front page of the party's website yesterday; HDZ BiH supporters will have to be 'satisfied with Feminnem, Giuliano and Ivan Mikulić.'

Let's Take It From The Top

The Zagreb summer-break spirit seems to have infected the Gazette, which is slowly rediscovering its work ethic just as Catherine starts to wind down hers and think about spending a few days looking around castles in the Zagorje.

In approximately chronological order, these would probably have been full-length posts, if I'd had my act together.

Severina performed her summer season with her leg in plaster after an accident roller-skating in the dark, and revealed quite in passing to Jutarnji list that the team for her new album, due out at the end of the year, consists of Moja štikla's arranger Goran Bregović alongside Marina Tucaković, one of Serbia's most prolific pop/folk lyricists. Even more in passing, she described her 2000 hit Ajde, ajde, zlato moje as 'on the borders of turbofolk', although somehow that's less of a surprise than the Tucaković link-up.

Severina's pre-Bregović version of Štikla, the less comically folkloric Moj sokole, has had the sort of airplay one would expect from a summer hit by one of the most famous women in Croatia. Štikla, on the other hand, has not. Hari Mata Hari's Lejla, on the... third?... hand, has had more airplay than both songs put together. Which of the three would a visiting Martian think had been Croatia's Eurovision entry?

The fifteenth anniversary of Operation Oluja and the end of the Homeland War was marked by an official ceremony in Knin, and an all-day celebration in Čavoglave culminating in a concert by the village's most famous branitelj, Marko Perković Thompson. Thompson's own album, due late last year, may be delayed again now that he and his wife are expecting their third child - to be called Jelena if a girl (after the queen?), and Ilija for a boy (after the saint?).

The onset of Bosnian elections nautrally meant a race for the Croat parties to sign up famous musical names from the domovina. As of Večernji list's article in late August, Hrvatska koalicija (the Croatian Coalition) was counting on three acts who had all, in their time, been the biggest name in Croatian showbusiness ethnopolitics: Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Prljavo kazalište. HDZ-BiH scooped up most of the other Herzegovinan pop singers of the moment, among them Mate Bulić, Ivan Mikulić, and girlband Feminnem.

Back in May, the Gazette's eye was caught by the line-up for Croatian singer Zorica Andrijašević's forthcoming album, namely, the Serbian folk songwriting team of Zoran Lesendrić-Kiki and Marina Tucaković (again). Andrijašević has now gone one better, according to this week's Arena magazine, and signed for the Serbian folk label Grand Productions - only the second Croatian singer to do so, says Arena, with the first being Siniša Vuco.

As East Ethnia reported at the time, three of Croatia's best-regarded alternative acts - TBF, Let 3, and Damir Urban - withdrew from Zadar's planned new rock festival Ups! when it turned out that the show would be sponsored by the Foundation for the Truth about the Homeland War, the lobby group founded in January with the aim of promoting... well, what else would it promote. The Foundation, apparently, got involved with Ups! 'to show that the historical truth about the Homeland War is not only supported by people who go to Thompson and Mate Bulić concerts', but may instead have helped to suggest the opposite.

The Gazette's more intrigued by who in the first place could have thought it was a good idea to invite the Letovci - whose current album deals with 'the collective memory, collective romances and irritations of the peoples who live in the states of former Yugoslavia', mainly by rearranging old newly-composed folk songs, adding swear words and wearing false moustaches - to a festival sponsored by an Ante Gotovina defence fund. (At least Gotovina never wore a moustache.)

Allowing me a brief trip into Glory of Carniola territory, the Slovenian singer Saša Lendero - who specialises in translating her Eurovision pre-selection entries into Croatian and re-entering them in Budva Festival or HRF - presented her summer hit Ne grem na kolena, currently available at her official site. It seems it isn't just turbo folk - Slovenian turbo polka - which has made it across from the Serbian and Bosnian markets: the trend for covering Greek pop songs has headed west as well. On the way, it's dropped Despina Vandi's Simera off in Croatia as Lana Jurčević's Odlaziš - but this does seem to be a year when Croatian music realised it had a little to catch up on.