Entertainment, Sports and Music

What has been has been. Now is the time to finally turn toward good neighborly relations, a gradual reanimation of economic, cultural, traffic and all other cooperation.

"Sounds great to me. Like, as of today, no problems," Momcilo Bajagic Bajaga, a local popular rock and roller told VREME.

"The sea: Rovinj, Mljet, Lastva, Makarska, Tucepi, Vis, Dubrovnik," answers a young Belgrade girl to VREME's question about what she misses from Croatia.

Today it is difficult to locate tourists from Serbia on their favorite pre-war sea resorts on the Croatian Adriatic coast. However, not impossible: on Hvar, throughout August, a story was being circulated of two guys vacationing there who spoke Cyrillic, that is ekavica (Serbian).

"Touristic relations between FR Yugoslavia and Croatia don't exist", says the general secretary of the Yugoslav Association of Tourist Agencies (YUTA) Nikica Radic for VREME. "Nor is anything, as far as I know, being precisely planned in that field. There were no contacts as of 1991 as well as information. Before that, around 50% of our tourists vacationed on the Croatian coast. Afterwards, Croatia as a tourist destination wasn't present, I would say, in the thoughts of our agencies to enable their return in the near future."

It is difficult to say when Serbian tourists shall return to the Adriatic coast, in what scope and how they shall feel once they return there. Most of the tour employees believe that it shall all, as the years go by, commence and at the end, shall become commonplace. Until then, if someone from Serbia insists upon vacationing on Hvar, Cres or Umag, he should prepare himself to outwit those who issue visas and, in case he gets one, be prepared to stand out as an oddity who communicates in "Cyrillic" and explain that he was not in military service under Arkan's command on October 1991 somewhere around Vukovar.

Serbian and Croatian sportsmen have already met on neutral grounds. Milorad Milatovic, leader of the Yugoslav team at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, states for VREME that all the meetings were completely normal and had transpired without a single incident. "As for the rooters," says Milatovic, "we have witnessed in many national championships and competitions that local rooters are the ones who create problems." It is expected that soon many things connected to the Serbian-Croat sports relations shall fall into place.

The president of the Yugoslav Olympic Games Committee (JOK), Aleksandar Bakocevic talks about the contacts with the Croat sport authorities for VREME: "During our stay in Atlanta, the leadership of our Yugoslav team had talks with a number of national Olympic Games organizations. Those talks mainly had to do with the usual things connected to sports. In such a manner, contact was made even with the Croat Olympic Games Committee (HOK), i.e. with the president Antun Vrdoljak, the general secretary and others. The most important agreement we reached there was to renew sport cooperation on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. We also talked about what was going on in our sports and in theirs. Future meetings of the sportsmen from FR Yugoslavia and Croatia shall depend on the international sports calender and we do not anticipate any serious problems there."

While in Belgrade, on both state and private radio and television stations to a large degree and without any problems, both old and new tracks of Croat bands can be heard. In Zagreb, the situation isn't reciprocal. However, the public in both states is actually hungry for "those others". The track, "It's only twelve o' clock" by the Croatian band ET was a turbo-mega hit in Serbia; certain old albums of Belgrade bands like Electric Orgasm or Sarlo Akrobata are selling on the streets of Zagreb for up to 100 German Marks. Not to mention the unauthorized cover songs recording of Croat bands in Serbia and vice versa.

However, despite the interest, no one from Belgrade has played in Zagreb for five years, or vice versa. Will normalization of Serbian-Croat relations enable the public in both states to once again enjoy the concerts of their favorite bands?

"It's one thing when they say that relations are normalized," says Momcilo Bajagic Bajaga for VREME. "And another how things really stand. I didn't have any problems when I played in Slovenia and Macedonia. I would gladly go to Croatia when the conditions are right. We played in Krsko, 20-30 km from Zagreb, and the place was packed. While I was passing through the public, they filled my acoustic guitar with notes from Zagreb, Rijeka, Pula, Karlovac... I found that out later. I noticed that something was rattling in my guitar. I tipped the guitar and found a note that said: 'Pula loves you a lot', 'Come to Rijeka', 'We love you in Karlovac'... Those Croats who live close to Krsko came to the gig, and the public from Croatia even comes to the gigs in Ljubljana."

On the same subject, but on the Serb-Croat rock n' roll connections in the former Yugoslavia, Srdjan Gojkovic Gile as well, leader of the band Electric Orgasm says: "I don't actually know how safe it is, but as far as I'm concerned, I would very gladly play in Croatia. During the first part of my career I played in Croatia very often and we were actually quite popular there, even more so than here. Anyways, during the first part of our career, Electric Orgasm recorded for Zagreb's Jugoton. I would say that we were very close to Zagreb, and I myself was also privately and emotionally very close to Zagreb; in the old Yugoslavia I spent most of my time, apart from Belgrade, in Zagreb and most of my friends are from Zagreb.

Both Gile and Bajaga agree that pirates, even though financially having considerably injured them, have played a great and positive role, i.e. they had enabled their music to reach their public despite the political and national embargo.

"Now after the normalization," says Bajaga. "I hope they will allow our tracks to be played in Croatia. As to whether everything will really be normal, I believe that even those who had signed the normalization agreement don't know for sure. I am for normalization of all the Balkan peoples, not only for the Serbs and Croats".