It's only Balkan roll

The Serbian Red Cross winning an international first aid competition in Limerick didn’t make the RTÉ headlines, but the only thing considered more important on Belgrade’s B92 TV was the collapse of the latest Kosovo independence talks. Even allowing for a slow news day, you’d expect them to offer their two million-plus viewers something a bit more meaty, big and bouncy.

“You know what it is?” proffers B92 producer Tomas Grusic when I confront him at the country’s EXIT Festival. “People are so fed up with Serbia being talked about negatively overseas that when something good happens they want a fuss made about it.”
While all that expert bandaging has been quickly forgotten, it’s a rare conversation with a Serb that doesn’t include mention of them qualifying at a canter for the 2006 World Cup, possessing three of the finest female tennis players on the planet and winning this year’s Eurovision Song Contest with Marija Serifovic’s, er, remarkable ‘Molitva’.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Grusic winces. “I’m not a big fan of Marija Serifovic’s music, but I’m delighted she won and that next year’s contest will be held in Belgrade because it’ll make people here feel less isolated.”
It may be 12 years since they entered into the Dayton Agreement that ended the main Balkan conflict, but in many ways Serbia remains a pariah state.
As well as treating 50,000 people to such musical heavyweights as Robert Plant, Snoop Dogg, Basement Jaxx, The Prodigy, Roger Sanchez, Frankie Knuckles, Groove Armada, Beastie Boys, Lauryn Hill and CSS, the aforementioned EXIT Festival’s goal this year is to highlight it being almost impossible for young Serbs to travel abroad.
Even if they can afford the €250 – an average month’s wages – to obtain the necessary EU visa, the additional proviso that they own property means that only the rich elite are able to get a foreign stamp in their passport.
She may earn a decent wack as a systems analyst, but the furthest 24-year-old Andjela Petrovic's been from her home on the Bosnian border is Belgrade where she currently works.
“My generation’s still paying for Slobodan Milosevic, even though we’re the ones who took to the streets to get rid of him,” she says, referring to the September 2000 mass protests that sent Slobo and his equally odious family packing. Does Andjela feel let down by America and the EU?
“Yeah, and by our own government as well,” she responds. “People still thinking we’re monsters is mainly their fault.”
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has certainly done his country no favours internationally by failing to deliver General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. While Milosevic’s henchmen remain at large, say Brussels, there’s no prospect of Serbia being allowed to join the EU or those prohibitive visa requirements being waived.
Attending EXIT seven years ago would have been tricky because the bridge leading to the festival site in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, had just been blown up as part of a NATO campaign that didn’t stop until 23,000 bombs and missiles had been dropped. Along with 600 military and police personnel, 1500 civilian adults and 600 children were killed and thousands more injured. The environmental cost alone was $3 billion – a hefty bill for a country which at one point had a 600,000% annual inflation rate. To put that into layman’s terms, something costing €10 on Monday would by Friday have set you back €36.
All of which seems a very distant memory as Tanya Stephens kicks off the Thursday Main Stage action at EXIT with a set that demonstrates why she’s currently Jamaican dancehall’s hottest property.
Cracking as the four-day bill is, the real star is the Petrovardin Fortress, aka the Gibraltar of the Danube, which is sprawling enough to accommodate 29 different stages hosting everything from old school punk and Balkan turbo-folk to industrial grindcore and happy house. In deference to July temperatures that rarely dip below 30-degrees, it’s a sunset-to-sunrise affair which doesn’t get going properly till past midnight.
With all the talk there’s been recently about anti-social behaviour at Irish gigs, it’s worth noting that I didn’t see a single pint nicked, tent burned or person peed on. Not that you’d want to upset the patrolling Serb policemen who have a gun, riot stick and serrated-knife dangling from their midriffs.
Their primary role is to search punters going in for drugs, which throws up such unexpectedly comic moments as the chap in front of me having the clingfilm removed from his sandwiches and the filling probed for illicit substances.
The days of EXIT being an exclusively Balkan affair are long gone, with a colony of 10,000 Brits in the nearby campsite which, Oxegen and ‘Leccy Picnic eat your heart out, has its own beach. Despite ‘hooligan invasion’ scaremongering in a local paper – we didn’t know The Evening Herald had launched a Novi Sad edition – the atmosphere in the main Trg Slobode square couldn’t be more convivial as festival-goers of all nationalities overcome last night’s hangover by starting work on a new one.
By Saturday it’s obvious that the intercourse between Serbs and their guests is more than just social – a fitting curtain-raiser for the following week’s Enter UK: British Social Influences In Novi Sad seminar, which sadly I won’t be around to guest lecture at.
EXIT and its attendant shenanigans are a dream come true for Tomas Grusic who was part of the B92 start-up team that very publicly took on Slobodan Milosevic and his goons.
“We never knew when the police were going to turn up and shut us down,” he reminisces none too fondly. “Then there were sanctions and money shortages, so even if promoters had been able to bring in big bands, nobody could have afforded the tickets. To have this going on – and the Rolling Stones playing as well today in Belgrade – is a very special thing for Serbia.”

Want to be part of next year’s EXIT Festival? Details of the 2008 event will be announced soon in Hotpress and on www.exitfest.org where you can re-live some of this year’s highlights.