Target Practice
SARAJEVO Spring, 1999 - Timing really is everything. I know because I spent much of the latter part of February and first half of March in a vain attempt to obtain a visa to Serbia and Montenegro. If I'd managed to get that visa, I would have been in Belgrade just in time to get my ass kicked out again with the rest of the Western press corps. I, too, could be sitting somewhere on the Croatian/Serbian border and watching the bombings from across the way. With some gumption, I might have been able to make it to Macedonia in time for the anti-Western riots there last weekend, and the seemingly endless stream of refugees. Or, with some help from a "friendly" Serbian government official, I might have been allowed back in to watch kids in the center of Belgrade pin paper targets to themselves and rock out to the wailings of Ceca Velickovic the wife of notorious Serb paramilitary leader Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic as they held up signs like "Fuck Off! Our music's better!"
In January, as I started the IRP Fellowship in International Journalism that's landed me here in the Balkans at this busy time, I was a bit concerned about getting a visa to Yugoslavia. Even though I'm the American editor of an independent literary magazine in Belgrade called Alexandria. Even though I was working on a project about Serbian media with the backing of a large charitable trust. Even though I'd done oodles of research on media in Serbia, and I'd made contacts with a lot of media types there. It's not easy, especially if you're doing any kind of journalism.
I was right to be concerned. The Yugoslav consulate in Washington a squat, ugly gray building beamed down from a architectural netherworld into an otherwise pretty neighborhood in northwest D.C. never granted me a visa. They didn't tell me "no," but I never (as sales folks like to say) "got to 'yes.'" I filled out a form that was as long as my arm, and supplied pictures, letters of invitation and various other stuff calculated to impress the folks who grant these visas. When I called before the three-week deadline that the embassy imposes on itself to grant journalist visas, I was told in no uncertain terms that there would be no discussions before the three weeks were up. When I showed up after three weeks of waiting, the staff seemed flabbergasted that they hadn't heard from Belgrade.
"It's been a long time," the woman admitted from behind the plexiglass. She called out her boss, who told me that he'd send an "urgent telegram." (Phone, fax, e-mail?) I explained that my departure to their country was imminent, and that the ticket was non-refundable. "That is on you," he replied with a smile and a shrug. They told me to call the next day.
I did, and I got nothing but a chilly "We haven't heard yet." This game continued until two days before I left, when I changed my ticket to Sarajevo. I felt some chagrin about it, until I saw the pictures of the three American soldiers abducted from Macedonia on Thursday. It was a moment in which I suddenly realized that I had gone about this "getting into Yugoslavia" thing all wrong. Instead of going to the ugly gray building and filling out forms like a schmuck, I should have just wandered along the Macedonian/Yugoslavian border with a gun. Instant entry! And a tour of the TV station as well! I might even have completed a study of the Yugoslav judiciary system during my show trial.
In a number of ways, I feel close enough to the action here. As I write this, I can hear NATO jets streaking overhead on their way to somewhere in Serbia and Montenegro. At the twice-weekly press conference that the layers of international bureaucracy convene every week at the Sarajevo press center for NATO's stabilization force (SFOR) on Thursday, the air was thick with unease.There's particular worry about the effect that the bombings will have on the delicate waltzing between the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats who are living together here in an enforced peace under NATO guns. In the question and answer session, journalists prod Simon Haselock (the press spokesman for High Representative Carlos Westendorp) about the collective assessment of the international community that Republika Srpska which is made up of Bosnian Serbs is stable. If it's so stable, the question is put, why are international offices closing and officials being evacuated?
Haselock gets testy, telling one reporter that he's being accused of "trying to falsely suggest that everything is sweetness and light in (Republika Srpska)." He adds that the situation in the Bosnian Serb part of the country is "relatively calm," and that the level of demonstration is "relatively peaceful" compared to many other similar demonstrations. "I've seen worse football crowds in London," Haselock quips.
It's a surprise to me that there hasn't been more tension in Republika Srpska, especially with the crap that Radio Television Belgrade is pumping out. Watching Thursday night's edition of Dnevnik was like being swaddled in a cozy Serbo-centric world where the defenders of Serbia are capturing the enemy and parading them on television at the same time that the peace-loving president is inviting the leader of the Kosovo Albanians (Ibrahim Rugova) for uneasy handshakes and the signing of peace agreements. (There was a long, lingering camera shot on the signatures.) Kosovo is referred to as a "problem" in tones that suggest a delay on the subway rather than a mass ethnic cleansing. The destroyed bridge in Novi Sad is also shown as evidence of the senseless NATO aggression.
Another newscast that I saw on local Serbian television in Bosnia on Friday afternoon was equally fallacious and provocative, citing the "brutal force of NATO aggression," and noting with perfect aplomb that the Kosovo Albanian leadership was splintering and fleeing the region so that they could "pull strings from afar like mafia bosses." pictures of Kosovo Albanians were shown, but in this topsy-turvy world, they were fleeing the bombs of NATO into the safety of the Belgrade bus station. Even more hilarious was a Bosnian friend's account of a Saturday report that she saw which claimed that the NATO air strikes in the center of Belgrade missed their intended target (a maternity ward) and "accidentally" struck the Serbian interior ministry.
Most Serbs that I know are a lot more savvy than this. In varying degrees, their TV has been like this for ten years. If you read Laura Silber and Allan Little's The Death of Yugoslavia, you know that Serb television and an equally pernicious reaction by Croat television tossed gas on the growing politcial fire in the early 1990s. In my research on Serbian media, this picture of Milosevic's tactics in creating a media stranglehold crossed ideological lines completely, from Newsweek contributor Zoran Cirjakovic (whom I talked with on a cell phone call to Pristina during the Rambouillet talks) to Srdja Trifkovic, a Balkan analyst and former advisor to Republika Srpska president Biljana Plavsic. Cirjakovic and Trifkovic are at very different places on the map. Cirjakovic once published a blisteringly sarcastic piece in Newsweek about Serbia's cachet with outlaw nations and its effect on the perception of Serbs abroad. Trifkovic is a historian whose polemics can be equally sarcastic in their insistence that Western policy is completely blundering (and, yes, anti-Serb). But both men agreed that Milosevic's media policy was simple and devastating: grab control of TV and major media organs like the Belgrade daily, Politika, and let the other small-fry mostly do what they like. Thus, there's the appearance of a "free press," but it's a press that can't get its papers on the kiosks, or its programming on a strong enough signal to be at all influential. When an independent paper or station gets big enough to be a threat as the daily newspaper Dnevni Telegraf threatened to do this past fall the government steps in to shut it down in a "legal" manner via fines and court appearances under a restrictive new media law.
Most Serbs I talked with in my reserach try and tune it out, or read between the lines, or put out their own media. Alexandria, for instance, is a literate and articulate magazine that reprints stuff from the Washington Post Book World and Foreign Policy magazine in translation, and then mixes in articles ranging from analyses of Serbian writers like Danilo Kis to my own takes on gangster rap, Madonna and Joy Division. The courageous souls at Radio B-92 were doing something even more radical with their radio station and their web site: giving a complete view of the news every day, with little sugar and lots of medicine. Considering the media devastation in Serbia itself, what's shocking to me isn't that the Serbs in Serbia are taking to the street wearing targets, but that a Serb disapora privy to pictures of the forced march of Kosovo Albanians is equally vociferous.
I've been able to stay in e-mail contact with my friends in Belgrade, and they seem to have retained some sense of humor and perspective. (What kind of war is this, by the way, where everyone still gets e-mail?) My friend Dusan Velickovic, the editor of Alexandria, tells me that a cafe nearby his apartment changed its name from "New York" to "Baghdad Cafe." Jasmina Tesanovic one of Serbia's best and most humane writers, and Dusan's wife sent me an e-mail telling me that she had to dash off her message because the air raid sirens were blasting yet again.
Jasmina's piece in the Guardian on March 27 is still the most vivid thing I've read about Belgrade in the grips of the bombing. "Teenagers," she wrote, "are betting on street corners: whose planes have been shot down, ours or theirs; who lies best; who hides their casualties the best. As if it were a football match."
There's Haselock's soccer analogy again, and you can certainly make an argument that war has been Europe's most popular sport for centuries. That's a clever notion, as clever as pinning a target to yourself. But cleverness often fails you. I was sitting in a cafe on Dalmatinska street on Thursday night, pounding Tuborg beers with Mirsad, a journalist at a Sarajevo daily paper. We discussed a number of journalism issues for my Pew fellowship project, and when we'd flogged that horse to death, the conversation turned as every conversation does here these days to the bombings. We both marvelled at the clever propaganda twists that the Serbs had come up with over the past week: the concerts, the tortured name-calling in the Radio Television Serbia newscasts, and those ubiquitous targets that the concertgoers in central Belgrade pinned to themselves. I saw that even Arkan interviewed on the BBC has a target on his tie. Will Milosevic turn up with a target tie for his next television address? Clever, clever.
Mirsad took a pen and drew a target on the back of the bill for the Tuborgs. As he did, a thought flashed in my mind, and I just blurted it out. "The Kosovars didn't have time to draw targets to wear," I told Mirsad. He nodded and ordered us two more beers. "You're right," he said. That's a hard fact, and it's anything but clever. It's also a fact that we'll have to live with for a long time to come.
My Serb friends are already living it. I got another e-mail message from Jasmina on Saturday, joking about my proposal to finally get into Yugoslavia by wandering the border and hoping to be abducted. "We often talk," she writes, "of what it would have been like if you were here: we have comic and scary versions, for all of us, and they are part of our every day fun and fear. We survived the night in the crisis centre of Alexandria, with a good basement, next to an underground station. It was fun but it is a full time job, we are all exhausted, we were in ten with two dogs. I am writing the war diary I can send it to you these days for your information, all the best Jasmina."
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