Zeko, Peternel and little Zurovec cleaned the streets and collected legal and illegal waste all morning, then he appeared

Toni Ivanišević’s weekly review takes aim at the grandiose language surrounding Marko Perković’s concert in Vukovar. In a deliberately exaggerated declaration, Prime Minister “Plenki” proclaims the peaceful reintegration of the region complete after what the article describes as one of the singer’s most magnificent, modest and humble performances.

The satire then imagines the prime minister thanking the relatively few members of Vukovar’s Serbian community who stayed home after his appeal. Their safety, the piece jokes, depended on accepting Perković’s musical supremacy over Baja Mali Knindža. Those who preferred Baja, it adds, received a safe corridor out of Croatia and toward Serbia.

The article turns to Perković’s wartime claims, portraying him in mock-heroic terms as a figure who nearly liberated Vukovar in 1991 but was prevented from doing so. It says he never explained what stopped him. The imagined audience responds with sobs and screams, while the review piles on increasingly extravagant images of what might have happened had he reached the wartime front.

The next entry describes an alleged attack on former football coach and player Igor Štimac in Split. According to the piece, a 54-year-old woman identified as S. V. was arrested after sliding into him from behind on the waterfront and tearing his cruciate ligaments with her high heels. The injury, the article jokes, temporarily interrupts Štimac’s political ambitions after he had said he planned to return to politics to save Croatia from the “red danger.” The excerpt then shifts to Serbia and its mourning for Ratko Mladić, continuing the review’s acerbic treatment of nationalist mythology.