My U.S. readers may be wondering about the atmosphere in Serbia following the death of Slobodan Milosevic. I can report that in some quarters, his death has been dramatically overshadowed by the Eurovision fiasco.
Eurovision is an annual musical competition among the European countries, and every country is allowed to send one representative performer or group. Serbia and Montenegro are two countries, but they share one federal government and get to send only one delegate.
As in any country, Serbia-Montenegro (SCG) has a national competition to determine who will go. To make things fair, the panel of judges is half Serbian and half Montenegrin. The competition was held this past Saturday, and the Montenegrin judges appear to have conspired against the Serbians. They did not give any points to any Serbian entrants, so naturally a Montenegrin group won the contest. How sad to see politics interfering with such a silly and fun competition.
Who will go to the Eurovision contest in Athens will now be decided by a committee because of the apparent foul play, but this situation is indicative of larger issues in SCG. On May 21 the Montenegrins will hold a referendum to decide if they still want to be part of the federation with Serbia. There has been a lot of hoo-ha about how exactly the referendum will be run, how many people have to vote for it to be valid, and how much the separatists have to win by in order to actually break the union. Most of the Serbians I know are watching this with no great concern. One friend asked, though, "Why do they always make it look like people are running away from Serbia? Why don't they ask us what we want?"
Tonight there was a special TV show devoted to the Eurovision controversy. A panel of experts discussed who was responsible and what should be done, and a number of people suggested that the rules should be changed for next year. By this time next year, though, it might not matter any more.
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2 comments:
There is a lesson that still hasnt been learnt regarding the Eurovision thing.
It sounds like reaching but its true - you can compare that fiasco with the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Why? Because if you divide something on ethnic or republic lines they will invariably vote that way too.
This kind of thinking has roots in bureacratic and power elite theory too.
And then you get armchair analysis saying this shows that nationalism is in the ascendancy. Oh dear.
Eurovision. Well, Montenegrians did the same thing last year. Same music group (No name), same game. It's too much.
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