side gave a damn about me, really, I was just a rhetorical device, a prop used by both sides in their little internal fight". Reaction in Sarajevo Some ten days later, in late December 1984, the news of the Rijeka flap made it back to Sarajevo where more journalists—most notably Pavle Pavlović in the As weekly newspaper—were ready to condemn the band further. In his piece headlined "Otrovni dim Zabranjenog pušenja" (Zabranjeno Pušenje's Poisonous Smoke), Pavlović labels Karajlić's words "an insensitive association and piece of sarcasm that insults right to the heart". The columnist then trails off to even take ideological issue with the humorous sound bytes in radio jingles promoting the December 1984 release of the Top lista nadrealista radio material on audio cassette by Diskoton. He continues by predicting that "the young band's life span will be little longer than that of a butterfly" before adding that "sadly even such short time is enough to indoctrinate the impressionable kids with new thoughts, including continuous ridicule of everything that we've created so far as well as banal, low-brow tampering with the basic tenet of the People's Liberation War—Tuđe nećemo, svoje ne damo". Pavlović concludes by musing "whether the time has come to extinguish Zabranjeno Pušenje's poisonous smoke for good". Being published in a high-circulation newspaper, whose average number of copies distributed per issue regularly exceeded 350,000 by late 1984 (and would occasionally even go as high as 420,000), gave the story a huge audience in the city and beyond. In addition to the high-circulation As tabloid, other Sarajevo-based newspapers such as Ven and Oslobođenje quickly joined in the condemnation of the band via strongly worded op-eds of their own. Ironically, weekly tabloid Ven's relatively short broadside against the band headlined "Smrdljiv dim Zabranjenog pušenja" (Zabranjeno Pušenje's Stinking Smoke) came out in the very next issue after the same newspaper had named Zabranjeno Pušenje the "1984 band of the year" based on its own poll of Yugoslav pop-rock and folk composers. Only one week after awarding the group, Ven distances itself from Zabranjeno Pušenje by expressing "regret we named these young boys the best rock band of 1984" and assures the public that "had the news of their behaviour been available one week prior, they would have never been included in the poll". The unsigned op-ed concludes by telling Vens readers that "these youngsters are using the platform afforded to