The latest incarnation of Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, managed to participate in the Eurovision twice. In 2004, the country was represented by Serbian singer Željko Joksimović, who came in second place. In 2005, Montenegrin band with the self-explanatory name No Name was selected there, and the Serbian television suspected the Montenegrin part of the jury of collusion. In 2006, No Name passed the selection for the second time so the country refused to participate in Eurovision, and half a month later the country was splitted in two. Musical scandals have marked more than one state collapse in the Balkans: before the 1990s war , the Serbian channel "TV Politika" aired a selection of Croatian pop hits that were considered "compromising" by the Croats themselves. It became time for revenge so on May 19, 2006 the viewers saw not even one, but 11 "Serbian performances" on the Croatian channel OTV. It was broadcast by a talk show "Pečat vremena", often reduced to a political chatter with bad attempts at humor. Back in 2015, that company still was proud putting their names under a footage of farm animals with text about elections. The idea and director was Pavle Vranjican, the editor - Vesna Klyajic, and the technical advisor - Ivo Krištic.
So on the eve of Eurovision this trio, together with colonel Ivica Pandža Orkan, decided to show a thing that made the phone in their studio burst with indignant calls. "We had to turn off the lights and lock ourselves in because people didn't understand what we were doing", Vesna recalled six years later; "but we just wanted to show how they lived, how they behaved during the war", Ivo added; "it was a very symbolic message for Europe", Pavle concluded. The controversial show was called "Četnovizija" (literally Chetnovision) and took the form of a song contest. But what "contestants" there were! Perhaps, it is necessary to consider each of them separately.
1. Not too interesting beginning, just a 1993 interview with a group of Chetniks in Žitnić, in the end chanting traditional Chetnik song dissonant. One of them is Gordana Lazarević, famous Serbian singer's namesake.
2. A compilation of the "Visors" unit being on the booze in a karaoke bar in 1993. Pavle Vranjican has a film about this unit specially and also showed some footage of them in "Komšije" film.
3. Footage of the armored train Krajina express from the 1991 film, combined with a feast of the 15th Lika Corps (as a Serb who fought there presumed; a Croat witnessed they were local Chetniks from Vrebac and Mogorić), with improvised adaptations of the songs "Kad se braća Srbi slože", "Marširala kralja Petra garda" and "Igrale se delije". At the beginning a phrase in Russian is supposedly heard: "That's we for Alyosha".
4. Video from the contest "Prvi Glas Mladih", held in Topusko in 1992. The song has nothing to do with Serbian nationalism, but for some reason Vranjican mocked it in his film Amarcord as well.
5. A cut from a 1994 film about the Knindže squad, made for the Canadian Serbs (abridged version of the film can be found in Amarcord). The squad's name means "Kninjas" from the words "Knin" and "ninja", there even was a comic book about them and Baja Mali Knindža also has his stage name after them. The original song is performed by the Tromeđa band, appearing in the cut for only a few seconds.
6. Epic intro from "Vukovi sa Vučijaka" film opens a weird mix of two Baja Mali Knindža's music videos and a lot of documentary footage, including some from the first "participant"'s video.
7. The 1992 footage of drunken Serbs on the Psunj mount, edited as it is a music video. At first they indistinctly sing about some star, then move on to "Ti si me čekala". Snippets of the original video in the second part of "Komšije" are also known as "Alcohol + War = Fun".
8. Abridged version of the now very popular video "Jadna Bosno suverena" by Miro Semberac, but here he is signed as Momčilo (did they mean his similarity with the singer Momčilo Bajagić?). In trying to determine the singer's full name, the Internet has at one time produced such bizarre hybrids as Lepi Momčilo and Vojvoda Momčilo Bajagić. The actual screen name means born in Semberija, real life surname is Vasić. What is interesting, in 2006 the OTV used the Superton intro for "Četnovizija" without permission, and 10 years later they received a kind of response from the label which reuploaded their version without changes. The new wave of popularity started due to NSA publication though it had a cut out part at the beginning instead of a VHS static. In 2020 with NSA permission we managed to publish the uncut video sequence.
9. Two legends of the Serbian rock, Minđušari and Bora Čorba, perform a mocking parody "E moj druže Zagrebački" to the song "E moj druže Beogradski" by a Croat Jura Stublić, in which he laments that he has to shoot his former neighbors and friends because of the war. Interestingly, in one scene in Vukovar (1994) film, Stublic's song is played, and the Serbian recruit mentally addresses his enemy with the words "E moj druže Zagrebački". Most of the video is their joint concert in Belgrade in the Pioneer Hall on April 3, 1994, and towards the end it changes to some parts of the still lost official music video, also seen in "Komšije".
10. Captain Dragan Vasiljkovic tells "all the songs are ours" and then sings an English-language song "Šošana" by a Yugoslavian band Zlatko & DAH. Between singing parts, teaching the art of warfare at his Alpha Center is shown. In the lower right corner there is a periodic "kap. Dragan" bar that covers the time of recording (16:45 with seconds). Australian TV channel ABC had used a similar footage with the Eagles song "Hotel California" and a similar time of 23:04 with seconds, probably from the same tape. The video was also featured on the Svakodnevnica talk show with the mentioned Croatian colonel Orkan, who said it was made by a Kostajnica Serb to promote Vasiljković's fighting squad. According to Captain Dragan's representatives, the video was filmed in Knin Castle.
11. "Visors" from the second video making faces to the only well-known Croatian song named "Čavoglave". According to Pavle Vranjican's conception, it is supposed to show that "they realized who is really to blame for their troubles, they solidarized with the "our arm will find you even in Serbia" line".
As you can see, there is no "Serbia strong" among the participants. So why did we write it all down? The thing is that the now legendary song was given a special honor: not to participate equally with everyone else, but to play together with the refrain "cha-cha-cha" from Đorđe Marjanović's song "Pesma raznosača mleka" in the title bars between the clips. If Vranjican stopped making such stuff after that, all that would be left of the whole song would be a short chorus known as "Remove Kebab". That is the chorus, by the way, meant by the title from the YouTube copyright system "Chetnovizija br. 8.-12200", but the link itself leads to the full song due to the fact that Content ID and YouTube Music have different bases.
To select the "winners" to receive the Big and the Small "Golden Dummy" (a baton made of tree stump, referring to the "revolution of the logs"), the clips were uploaded to the "Domovinski rat On Line" website. The results were also published there, but only a screenshot survived by modern time, stating that numbers 2, 4-7 and 10 did not get an "award". In the jingle video about all participant it is stated that number 1 "went to Eurovision", its description on YouTube claims that number 11 "was disqualified". Psykrapmadafaka, who personally saw the "contest", told that the "Small Golden Dummy" went to number 8. Thus, the first place in the poll was "taken" by the Chetniks from Žitnić, second place by Miro Semberac, the Chetniks from Lika & the rock star duo got third and fourth. After summing up all these results, not even a week later, some user named mraak uploaded a Semberac's music video to YouTube in order to "enjoy the comments of primitive Balkan beings of all three varieties" and quickly gained popularity.
In 2007, the second issue of Četnovizija appeared, which included a few fragments that were not included in the previous issue. The new release was not so musical (no one even sings in 6 of the 14 performances), as a pseudo-documentary with some semblance of a plot. The increased popularity of the project is evidenced by the several recordings made by strangers from the OTV premiere and available on YouTube. There are almost no problems with finding the sources of this issue thanks to Vranjican's film "Propast tzv. Republike Srpske Krajine" (actually a collection of looted videos and the Croatian media openly confirm it). The 2007 episode begins with the "election of the president of the Serbian Krajina", and there is more psychedelia in this part than in the "performances" themselves:
1. Part of "Propast tzv. Republike Srpske Krajine": mock startup with audio intro from "Serbia strong" and training evacuation civilians from the village of Tržić Primišljanski (Serbian Krajina).
2. Various Serbian figures talking over the playing of the Serbian military orchestra. The first among the three so-called "blues".
3. A song from the "Vesela budi, Krajino moja" VHS by parodist Milan Malbaša, where the idea of a song contest among the politicians of the former Yugoslavia was played. There are several digitizations of this tape and Baja Mali Knindža's inserted music videos are cut from most of them, which causes different duration of the digitizations. The song itself is Vajta's "Zlatna ribica" as Alija Izetbegović was singing it.
4. Mile Delija's music video "Oj Srbijo majko", which in the original consisted only of documentary footage, mixed with footage of the singer himself from his another video "Travo zelena". Both videos were released on the same cassette, but came to the Croats with SRTV KNIN logo.
5. War-related music video based on the soccer fan shout-out, previously served as a source for the 1st and the 6th issues of Četnovizija 2006 (these, in turn, overlapped with each other as well). The flag in the end is accompanied with a phrase from an agitation video released after the Maslenica aggression. The music video itself was related to Maslenica by its footage, also both clips appeared on the tapes by the Serbian priest Mihailo Mikić.
6. Speech from the "Knin-Kosovo" rally of 1990, a phrase about Europe in Serbia duplicated in the audio.
7. Amateur footage from the 1995 concert of the Krila Bukovice band in Benkovac, remounted so as to give enough attention to both the singers and the audience. In "Komšije 2" there are also fragments with them.
8. Malbaša's parody again, this time Nedžad Salković - Ne klepeći nanulama but as he is Fikret Abdić.
9. Chetnik songs compilation based on the 1987 (pre-war) Era Ojdanić's live who is infamous among Croats for singing Chetnik songs in Vukovar after Serbs taken the city.
10. Fragments from a video Knin TV recorded in January 1995 on Dinara (the reporters were there for 4 hours, 9 minutes from there included in "Propast"), also included meowing accordionist meme, known as "serbo vampir" and by the "Tupac alive in Serbia" parody. Part of the video is also used as background of the 4th verse in the 2013 version of "Serbia strong" music video.
11. The Minđusari - Armija Srpska music video, which not only managed to spread through the networks of the cult project of 2003-2012 "VUČJAK", which operated in the once famous predecessor of torrents eMule and even produced its own DVD, but even went from there to YouTube before the Četnovizija premiere. The only difference was that the Vučjak version had no beginning and the Croatian one contained their own intro inserted there by means of chromakey. The same video can be seen in "Komšije" next to the 1995 Vidovdan parade and same band's video "Ovo je moja zemlja". As it turned out, the clip was shown at that parade (and the version from the parade is superior to other digitized versions in all respects), and the "Ovo je moja zemlja" clip was shown on RTRSK channel right after the broadcast of the parade.
12. Malbaša again, this time just part of a comedy sketch about two neighbors in Krajina.
13. Second "blues" with a military band. This number had the hand of someone trojanhorsee.
14. Reporting during "Oluja", cut short by the attack on the TV center. For obvious reasons, Vranjican is very fond of putting this video at the end of his creations, so you can see the full version in "Propast". Četnovizija version is inconspicuously shortened (it's given away by the TV host's hands), and Zoran Popović's call was replaced by an information table.
The second "Četnovizija" took place, and the next day Serbia took the first place at the actual Eurovision. It seemed that there was nothing more to mock, but OTV released the third and last issue in 2008. Now they "competed" well-known clips from the Internet, followed with doc footage to make a contrast. Serbia strong intermezzo was made from the intro this time. Main (Serbian) audience didn't like such a new format, so this issue is now saved only in watermarked Vranjican's uploads (trailer and winner) and intro in two TV records.
1. Attacking the Catholic church in Sarvaš and dancing to Baja Mali Knindža's song about defending Orthodox Christianity. 3delija3 channel uploaded many Knindža's music videos just a few days before Četnovizija (May 19-20 vs. May 23).
2. The siege of Dubrovnik to Knindža's clip, using the reverse to repeatedly repeat the saying "oj-ha". They didn't even hide the baja-mali-knindza.com URL, where the original version comes from.
3. The Circle of Serbian Sisters charitable society dancing kolo to a speech about Serbian cities of Croatia.
4. Arkan's speech at a rally in Buković, accompanied by... yeah, Knindža. By the way, all his music videos here are from the «Najveći hitovi» tape.
5. Interviews with Arkan's Tigers, including the singer Oliver Mandić. Arkan's address to the Ustaše on the same background appears at the end of the Vranjican's video "NARODNJACI VAšI IDOLI?", released the day before "Četnovizija". The report appears in several films of the studio Vreme, but in 2013 Vesna Klajić mentioned it with a link to her Četnovizija trailer.
6. Video footage of the headquarters of the Chetnik Movement for Kosovo and Metohija and of the "Zvuci sa kamena" ensemble, but with the audio performed by Knindža once again. There are only seven issues here, so Knindža is involved in more than half of them.
7. The only issue that survives in its entirety as the winner. At first glance, it seems that this compilation about Kosovo isn't based on any music video at all, just on the famous "Vidovdan" song, but in fact the original "video" is a 2006 slide show, but the only one scene taken from there was the credits and OTV managed to stuff all kinds of nonsense even into there. It's ironic that the quality of the original slideshow was much better than the "remake".
8. Outside of numbering, but right after 7th issue the trailer shows a man singing a well-known shout-out by Marko Popović. Then on December 5, 1991, a day before the blockade of Dubrovnik, a concert for the two hundred years of Mozart's death was announced on Radio Dubrovnik, so Serbian soldiers set up powerful speakers in Žarkovica, on the hill above Dubrovnik, and started playing patriotic and nationalistic folk songs at the highest possible volume. Some Montenegrin reservist also played the gusle live to make more fun so he was filmed by the reporters.
The "Četnovizija" history ended, but the song history needed a conclusion. So on July 31, 2008, the first session of the so-called trial of the arrested Radovan Karadzić took place. Three days later, on the Pavle Vranjican's YouTube channel, the song accompanied by a mockingly remade music video titled "Radovan Karadzic Haag bluz" (now renamed "Serbia strong orginal bay Radovan Karadzic") appeared for the first time. In the fake music video, Karadzić sits in a session, listens to the prosecutor and nervously drinks water, recalling his alleged atrocities: "prisoners of the Serbian concentration camps", like the disclosed Fikret Alic; some anti-Serbian film, subtitled "Serbian units deliberately attack civilian targets"... The few scenes that remain of the original clip were spoiled by crazy scaling (in some parts you can see the fields that go beyond the screen on the sides) and inserts. Also interesting is that in the third chorus, when Željko Grmuša sings, the color of the image abruptlychanges to green, and if you add the green part to the similar scene from the second chorus with frame-by-frame accuracy, the result sounds like a whole. Most possibly, Vranjican was going to shorten the song by one verse and changed the color for better contrast, but then decided to put the verse back. It is also worth noting that just before the music video there is shown the interview with Nikola Jorgić from the "Vukovi sa Vučijaka" film, its subtitles climb onto the music video so they give it the name "Bog je Srbin i on će nas čuvati".
We don't know anything about further use of the tape by the Croats. On November 22, 2012 the Četnovizija creators dedicated it a "Vesna Kljajić uživo" episode: with better image quality, unseen intro of the last issue and some short fragments they cut while uploading separate videos to their website (literally one frame in the very beginning of 2006 issue, transition between 13 and 14 parts of 2007 issue, longer interference at the end), but apparently no one returned to the tape itself. In 2014, the Domovinski rat On Line site closed down, resulting in the loss of much of its content. In 2018, "machine head" user put the parts of Četnovizija he had together and published a compilation of twenty clips (8/11 from first issue, 12/14 from second issue) with mismatched audio. In the same year, c0dydev found the torrent "Domovinski rat", compiled in 2006 by user Mike_Torello, and found the original files of all the clips of the first release. Then we collected intros of both releases and the two missing clips (thanks to channels LudaDokumenta, 164at44207, ARHIVISTA, svezzz), and also paid attention to the records of TV broadcasts of the second issue on "majstorcic" and "Hrvatske Domoljbne Pjesme 1991" channels and to the 2012 TV program. Well, and in the archives of the Croatian general and director Slobodan Praljak, who became famous for self-poisoning in court, we found a trailer for Vranjican's works. Neither the files of the third issue, nor the results of the first one, nor earlier versions of the introduction to the second one could be found. OTV (now Jabuka TV) doesn't have the archives, and inquiries to the Četnovizija creators just provoked their inadequate responses. In January 2019, Vranjican or his channel manager Krištić striked the most canonical version of the music video claiming it as "copyright infringement" but the strike was cancelled soon and the video lived for another couple of months, until the Kocayine's channel was completely removed for very different reasons...