You will have to take a lot of this at face value, as there are very few sources that deem the events described further in this article as serious. There are even fewer sources in English. That is not surprising considering the scene is set in the Balkans. And the Balkans is a place where concerts are not taken lightly, especially those of local legendary musicians, which is why the controversy of Serbian superstar Ceca Ražnatović waving a Bulgarian flag at her concert in Veles, Macedonia, is indeed a very serious matter.

If you are not from a Balkan country, it is highly likely that you have never heard of Svetlana Ražnatović, known as Ceca, but she is a household name in the Balkan music scene. She is a performer in the turbofolk or chalga genre, a blend of pop and Balkan folk music with exaggerated “oriental” ornamentation. It is a largely discredited music genre, considered too simple and vulgar. Yet turbofolk concerts gather tens of thousands at stadiums and arenas (a concert hall would rarely suffice); a Ceca concert can draw hundreds of thousands of spectators.

Often called the Goddess or Mother Serbia, Ceca rose to fame during the dark ‘90s, right at the brink of Yugoslavia’s collapse and into the age of mobsters in the Balkans. In fact, she was married to one of the most prominent mobsters and warlords, Željko "Arkan" Ražnatović, until his assassination in 2000. Following his death, Ceca was involved in several lawsuits for embezzlement and money laundering using Arkan’s football club FK Obilić as a front. She was also charged with illegal firearm possession of 11 machine guns and suspicions of harboring members of the criminal group suspected in the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. Ceca was found guilty of the firearm charges and served one year of house arrest. These past legal issues have led to her being proclaimed persona non grata in Croatia and banned from ever entering the country. Despite all the lawsuits, Ceca never stopped writing music and performing, and was even awarded the prize of best Balkan artist of all time in 2005 in Skopje. If none of the above could bring Ceca down, it is as if nothing can topple the Balkan queen. Unless…

On Nov. 1, during her concert in the Macedonian town of Veles, Ceca was handed a Bulgarian flag from the audience, proceeded to hold it, and was filmed kissing it. According to reports, some of the audience left in revolt, while others remained in the concert hall, confused. Ceca herself responded to the backlash by saying that she would pick up any flag from the audience and did not know the two countries “dislike each other”, followed by a statement that she does not concern herself with local politics.

So, why do we care that a Balkan Diva picked up the wrong flag?

Firstly, the current political relations between Bulgaria and Macedonia are on thin ice, with Bulgaria vetoing Macedonia from EU accession in 2020 and demanding constitutional changes to address “that the Macedonian language was simply Bulgarian by another name and Skopje was disrespecting its shared cultural and historic ties to Bulgarians”. Such right-wing nationalistic narratives have previously caused violence and war in the region, while in the current day, they are used as a political bullying currency. Attempting to negate the existence of a language, its people, and history is not only inaccurate but a deeply problematic exhibit of cultural cleansing. That said, picking up a Bulgarian flag in Macedonia is more than a mere mistake and carries context-specific socio-political connotations that are offensive. Ceca’s response that she would pick up any flag, downplaying the context that this specific one carries heavy meaning in the country, is reductive, and it downplays the effects of regional politics on Macedonian identity. Macedonians are not mad that it was a foreign flag; they are mad over whose foreign flag it was. Ignoring this represents the situation as an innocent mishap over a misunderstanding, rather than a loaded political statement, whether it was intentional or unintentional.

Secondly, the argument that Ceca does not concern herself with local politics is simply false. From a husband accused of war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars, to endorsing Aleksandar Vucic, the current Serbian President, who is the reason for mass protests in the country, as covered in previous articles, she has a history of entanglement with local power elites with political agendas. While saying she intentionally picked up the Bulgarian flag in Macedonia might be a stretch, Ceca claiming that she is an apolitical person dedicated only to her music is just disrespectful to all of the people who have been harmed by the politics she has actively supported, whether as the wife of a war criminal or defending a regime that has attempted to suppress opposition and refuses to comply with the demands of hundreds of thousands of protesting Serbians.

Finally, Ceca’s statement that “all flags are equal” attempts to create some naivety to the situation that is not there. Flags are symbols, perhaps the most obvious symbols of all, and their attached meaning cannot be divorced from context. One has to wonder if Ceca would have, for example, picked up a Kosovan flag, considering she has been supporting Serbian nationalist interests her entire career.

On the Bulgarian side, media coverage of the incident keeps a passive-aggressive tone and carefully selects its sources. bTV, one of the most watched televisions and news websites, shares a video from a concert goer captioned “so she dressed like a Bulgarian for Halloween”, the implication clearly being that Ceca’s critic considers the Bulgarian identity a costume and a scary one at that, too. Nationalists in Bulgaria picked specifically on comments like these, sparking debates in right-wing media about whether Ceca actually has Bulgarian ancestry and is paying homage to her “roots”. What this comes to show is that not only do the Macedonian and Bulgarian politicians partake in a discriminatory discourse, but that the media supports it fully, intentionally or not. Considering the rise of fascist language in the political sphere of the Balkans overall, it is not an exaggeration to say that an event like this, in the era of social media, may be used to escalate the violence between Bulgarians and Macedonians now or further down the line. With the foreign relations of the two states already strained close to their breaking point, the opinion of a celebrity with as much sway as Ceca may actually be a determining factor in the development of the Bulgaria-Macedonia relationship. And that would not be unprecedented.

While this specific situation was likely an accident initially, the statements that followed downplay the level of corruption and clientelism Ceca has involved herself in. If it were a non-Balkan artist, or perhaps a non-politically involved artist, arguing that the backlash is unnecessary would have been justified. However, in the current political landscape of rising nationalism and regional disputes, one has to contextualize her positionality to avoid watering down Macedonian public reactions as a dramatic overreaction. Even if Ceca survives the Serbian legal system, it is not yet clear if she will win in the court of public opinion now.