Video of D.J.'s Satirical Song Provokes Offense in Kosovo

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Saturday, August 21, 2005 By NICHOLAS WOOD

PRISTINA, Kosovo - Most of the satirical songs written at the radio station KZOK in Seattle amuse listeners for a brief life, then fade from the air. But one number from 1999 about the war in the Serbian province of Kosovo has ignited a diplomatic dispute years later and halfway around the world.

The song, written by the D.J. Bob Rivers and set to the melody of the Beach Boys hit "Kokomo," ridiculed what he considered the nonchalant way the United States assumed the role of the world's policeman when it led an air war over Kosovo, a place most Americans knew little about.

The trouble started, Mr. Rivers said, when a group of Norwegian soldiers on peacekeeping duty in Kosovo came upon the song in 2002 and decided to make a rock video of it.

The two-and-half-minute video shows four soldiers miming to the music - dancing on watchtowers and armored trucks, wearing bulletproof vests over their bare chests, performing routines in their military compound and even splashing mineral water on one another.

Over time, the tape (which has a link on Mr. Rivers's Web site, www.bobrivers.com) made its way to the Internet and caught the attention of BK TV, the Serbian television station. When the station broadcast the video, it incited an uproar, and not only because of the dancing and lightly clad soldiers. What was most provocative were the song's lyrics. Verses such as "Protecting human rights, airstrikes and firefights/We'll be dropping our bombs, wherever Serbian bad guys hide," caused deep offense.

The video prompted criticism among Serb leaders of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, a province that officially remains part of Serbia, but has been administered by the United Nations and patrolled by NATO since the two-and-a-half-month bombing campaign in 1999.

A senior adviser to Serbia's prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, said the video suggested that the NATO mission, which was meant to be evenhanded between the province's majority Albanian population and its minority Serb community, was biased.

"Such things only help the Serbian side to prove that there is no security in Kosovo, no respect for human rights and no multiethnicity," Agence France-Presse quoted the adviser, Slobodan Samardzic, as saying.

"The president was very shocked to learn about this," said Vuk Jeremic, the senior foreign policy adviser to President Boris Tadic of Serbia. Mr. Tadic was especially upset because the soldiers came from Norway, a country with a strong record for peace initiatives and conflict resolution, Mr. Jeremic said in an interview.

The video showed that four years after the collapse of Slobodan Milosevic's autocratic government in Serbia, the nation's image abroad is still sullied. "This is what boys from Norway think about Serbs," he said.

Norway's ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, Hans Ola Urstad, promptly issued an apology calling the video "highly regrettable" and promised an investigation. He expressed the hope that the video would not do "serious harm to the longstanding and deep friendship between Serbia and Montenegro and Norway."

The original intent of the song - to question American involvement in Kosovo - had clearly been missed. "It was meant to be very lighthearted, and was aimed at our own government," Mr. Rivers said in a telephone interview, but instead it was taken as propaganda.

He said that for several years he had received e-mail messages from Serbs complaining about the song.

Zoran Stanojevic, a journalist who writes a column about the Internet in the Serbian news magazine Vreme, understood that the song was not the work of Norwegian soldiers. If they were that good at satire they would be "doing stand-up on the radio," not serving in the army, he said.

"If nobody tells you it is a satire, it can sound a bit harsh," he said in a telephone interview. He blamed cultural differences for the misinterpretation. "For example, the ironic use of a love ballad, they didn't understand the idea." Most Serbs still do not know the song's origin, he said.

The Norwegians' video is not the only case of cultural insensitivity by NATO troops in Kosovo. In July, Express, a Kosovo Albanian newspaper, republished an interview by an American soldier with his hometown newspaper. In it the soldier, Sgt. Robbie Nelson, from the 635th Armor unit of the Kansas National Guard, compared local farming methods to turn-of-19th-century America. The article caused some amusement and some anger.

Sergeant Nelson said he had no idea that his article would be reprinted in Kosovo. "I didn't have any intention of causing anybody offense," he said. "I was just telling my local paper what's different about Kosovo."

A spokesman for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense said this month that there would be no proceedings against the six soldiers responsible for the video because they had all left the army.

Mr. Rivers said he believed the Norwegian soldiers were to blame for taking his song out of context. But he was not sure if the video merited an international dispute, or if the Norwegians should have apologized for what was, after all, his song.

"I don't know enough about the world to know who should apologize to who," he said.