Good morning, Belgrade

Good morning, Belgrade As I write this article about one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, the question which keeps worrying me is: how many people still remember B92 and the Yugoslav war of the 1990s? A war fought in another century. How much background is needed to explain these events? Let me just say this: the war in the former Yugoslavia was the international news story of the decade in which it was waged, and the Belgrade-based radio station, B92, became so famous during this time that at one point Steven Spielberg considered making a film about its heroic story. I would love to see that film. I visited B92 for the first time in 1993 while on a fact-finding mission to the Balkans to identify needy media operations in the former Yugoslavia on behalf of a new organisation, Press Now, based in the Netherlands. I went to Zagreb, Ljubljana and Belgrade (Sarajevo was too dangerous). Of the potential recipients of support on our list, radio B92 sounded the most exciting. Founded in 1989 by a group of young journalists, it had rapidly gained a dedicated following of urban Belgrade youngsters, attracted by its underground music shows and the sheer contrarian spirit of its independent news programming and provocative street actions. I cherish the memories of my first visit: its offices were located right in the middle of the city on the fifth floor of the Dom omladine – a huge dirty concrete colossus of a building that also housed a youth centre and a jumble of small companies and agencies. The building was in a dire state and we had to climb the steep and irregular stairs to the fifth floor because the lift was not working. The door was opened by a rather tired looking man with twinkling eyes and a gun, who led us through a narrow corridor past a row of chairs on which people were waiting, chatting and smoking. They were waiting for Veran. Veran Matic was the editor in chief, and one of the founders of B92, and he was hiding in his office behind an old typewriter. A picture on the wall made him look like Che Guevara. He liked to play with that image. It was midday and he asked whether we would like a beer, while gesticulating to one of the women in attendance to fetch him some bottles. The women discussed the wisdom of the request. The people in the corridor, realising they would now have to wait longer, started shouting through the open door. ‘Mak can wait,’ someone said, who in passing introduced me to the great cinematographer Dusan Makavejev, who tried to grab Veran’s attention. Shouts from another room signalled there was a phone call for Veran. He climbed from behind his desk to answer it. My colleague, in the meantime, was busy changing someone’s dinars into German marks. This triggered further frantic trade. Salaries had been paid and needed to be converted before they became worthless. We had arrived in the middle of a period of hyperinflation. ‘Just like the Weimar,’ said somebody who looked no older than 20. This comment came back to me when, with similar boldness, a good friend of mine, during the Nato bombardments in 1999, declared that she felt ‘like a Jew in Dresden’. The bank notes have a lot of zeros on them and do not look real. Someone grabbed my arm and pushed me along. We were important guests it seemed, and were given the grand tour of the floor. To our untrained eyes, there was not much to see. The windows were filthy and there was a suggestion of a view over the city which we could not really make out. The offices were small and cramped. The mixture of pride and shame with which our guide, Sasa Mirkovic, Veran’s right hand, showed us around, cutting a very straight figure through the people in the corridor and the fog of smoke, struck me as special. Sasa liked orange juice and did not smoke. We were to become friends for life. ‘This is the studio,’ he said, opening a door to four square metres of dreary darkness with walls covered by egg trays and a table with battered sound-mixing consoles; and next: ‘This is the marketing department,’ pointing to a desk with a grand leather chair. ‘This is book-keeping’ – two desks with Remington typewriters – ‘and this’, opening the door to the room with the phone, the largest room, packed with people all smoking, talking and laughing, ‘is … editorial’. The room was a dump. ‘It is not normal,’ he apologised, and I made a mental note that I needed to know what ‘normal’ actually meant. I understood that they were running the station on three phone lines. What appealed to me from the start was the earnestness mixed with a joyful sense of theatre and the absurd which everybody seemed to share. The beautiful PR guy wore a sharply cut Italian suit and was winked at. The fast-talking marketing guy was treated with suspicion because he dealt with the little money nobody else had and owned a car. And the receptionist, acting tea-lady, acting secretary, was somebody’s mother. Somehow they were trying to get it right and knew they were not quite there yet. But they were very nice people. In any other circumstances its broad appeal would have set B92 on a path to growth, but the circumstances were not normal. B92 was on shaky ground. Unbeknown to many, I guessed even to its employees, the radio station was broadcasting illegally as its initial one-year local licence had expired. This secret was a ticking time bomb. Although B92 had positioned itself firmly in the heart of the anti-war scene in Belgrade, by maintaining a very strong factual news programme amid the virulence of propaganda and warmongering of the state broadcaster RTS, it was considered to be of little threat to the authorities because its signal was relatively weak, confined to Belgrade and not even clear in all parts of the city. It was assumed that as long as it was small the authorities would not bother with it. Besides, the authorities were more than happy to use B92’s existence to show the world that they were not that bad. It was a game of cat and mouse. But remaining small was not really what B92 wanted. It was already joking about moving into TV: ‘One of Veran’s mad ideas.’ But B92 had assumed a larger public role than just that of a radio station. It sought to connect the city to the rest of the world. Belgrade was suffering a brain drain. The potential for change was leaving the country. Daily, young people departed by bus with one-way tickets to Budapest, from where they would move on to other parts of Europe, Canada or the United States. This exodus was understandable, because the whole atmosphere of the city was suffocating. It was close to impossible to get newspapers or magazines from Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana, let alone from abroad. International sanctions had compounded the isolationist stance of the authorities. Belgrade was seen as bad and evil. People felt trapped in an image of themselves they could not recognise. Veran strongly believed that Belgrade’s, if not Yugoslavia’s, other face needed to be shown to the world and that its intellectual isolation needed to be broken. This struck a chord with me. I decided to come and help. In the years to come I lived the roller-coaster ride that B92 had embarked on and which has not stopped. While its image abroad was primarily that of a small, rebellious anti-war opposition radio station, I came to understand that its offices were the epicentre of a cultural movement which was gathering momentum by the day. The corridor was the waiting room for an angry but outcast generation seeking an outlet for its creative energy. B92 facilitated, to the best of its ability, the need for plans that could capture and channel that energy. To the sometimes tired despair of core staff, hundreds of projects were processed in an atmosphere that became ever more frenzied. It was as if Veran wanted to take on the sole responsibility for the development of a desperately needed civic society and the moral duty to hold up a mirror. He was a man with a vision and in a hurry, always testing the limits. I remember the organisation of a convoy of bands from Belgrade to Sarajevo, soon after the signing of the Dayton accords. The whole daring enterprise, full of good intentions, hosted by Radio Zid in Sarajevo, was cancelled at the very last moment. Just when the trucks with equipment were ready to move, we were told that the venues, which initially had agreed to stage the bands, were persuaded by the local parties to withdraw. People were not ready. But what would you expect? Equally, later, the initiative to explore a form of truth and reconciliation commission for Yugoslavia was met with questions and criticism. B92 understood, as no other organisation at the time did, the importance of building networks of like-minded groups and people, but also of being inclusive and of bridging divides. It understood the tactical strength of a community that loosely evolved around a shared set of principles, attitudes and style, the unofficial membership card of which was one of the many playful articles of association: a T-shirt, a bag, a cup, a book, a sticker, a whistle. B92 understood the political relevance of these new floating communities in a context where the public arena was dominated by one established political voice. It organised concerts, produced films, published books and pressed CDs; it published a literary review magazine and opened a cultural centre. It created a public arena in which people felt they could breathe, while struggling to keep the station alive and improve its newscast. By the sheer insistence on maintaining a high professional journalistic standard, it managed to obtain the reluctant respect of those whose position it most challenged. (It was later a B92 journalist who got the scoop of Slobodan Milosevic’s arrest.) Its journalists were well informed and wired into the local political and diplomatic community and gradually also became networked into the foreign media presence on the ground. B92 journalists acted as stringers for overseas media and got their stories out via stations such as CNN. In the course of 1996, this networking and community building was exponentially enhanced by the introduction of internet connectivity, albeit very limited still. The internet became the most important tool in B92’s struggle for survival and growth when it met its nemesis after the autumn of 1996. When the ruling party lost the major cities and towns of Serbia in the local elections, the government, scared for its own survival, overturned the election results. In a robust and long overdue act of defiance the people of Belgrade took to the streets. It is difficult to explain how liberating this was for those who had been waiting so many years for a sign of progress. It was like a grand carnival marking the start of an endgame that would still take a few more years to evolve. B92 seized the momentum. When the demonstrators, bereft of any proper news, shouted for CNN, B92’s anchors acted as commentators. Foreign stations were sending the local story home. Throughout this period, B92 was frequently jammed and at one point taken off the air. That night, while the thousands of demonstrators were streaming by, its main news show was read by a young newsreader standing with a microphone, enhanced by powerful loudspeakers, in one of the windows of the fifth floor. ‘This is B92, the eight o’clock news.’ Coincidentally, at the same time, B92 got the long-awaited extra phone lines needed to obtain the capacity that enabled it to send sound over the internet. And so, in the midst of this turmoil, a plan was born to create a network of local stations in those cities where the local government was no longer in the hands of the ruling party. This network would broadcast a core programme of independent news and information and so circumvent the government monopoly on nationwide broadcasting. The programme was sent via the internet to London and a scrambled signal remitted by satellite to be decoded by the stations. The extension of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) which had been founded three years earlieras a nationwide network altered the rules of the game completely. After the demonstrations and the political pressure had let to a reinstatement of the local election results, and B92 had been put back on air, the plan was implemented. The front page of the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Serbia’s revolution starts on the internet.’ By this time the young, intelligent and quiet in-house lawyer acquired the assistance of a team. As B92’s reputation grew, hundreds of internationally known public figures made its offices an important port of call. Politicians, diplomats, opinion leaders, writers and artists were all eager to tap into the fountain of information about the situation that Veran and Sasa kept flowing. It was a reciprocal process. The exposure to prominent foreign figures provided B92 with a safety net, while its independence provided the visitors with the appropriate profile for the times. Being present at many of these meetings gave me an incredibly precious lesson in international politics and I kick myself now for having been too busy living to keep a diary. Throughout these years, B92 received a lot of attention and support from abroad. The necessary discretion that surrounded this support led, unavoidably, to misunderstandings about its size and nature, both inside and outside the station. It led to jealousy among potential allies, petty fights and nasty campaigns. B92’s strongest ally was the local Soros Foundation, but it also received support from the EC, USAID and individual governments including the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France and many private foundations. By 2000, the number of supporters had grown exponentially. Obviously the support was welcomed, and at times generous, but the whole dynamic of raising, receiving and administering it was never an easy ride. And it was never really enough. There were always more plans than resources allowed. And quite often it was not really the kind of support that was needed, and it was often not on time. A select group of very dedicated people took great risks to keep the whole thing afloat. Some devoted the best part of their lives. The most frustrating thing was that most of the support was given with a project rationale, while B92 was trying to be a business. Only a few understood this. Painfully, in 2001, when after the fall of Milosevic the focus of the international community shifted towards the development of a democratic government, I experienced how overnight the support levels dropped as it was now considered time for B92 to become a viable operation. Luckily, there always was a minimum level of core income from advertising revenue and B92 worked hard to maintain this, despite the fact that the market in which it had to operate was directly and adversely manipulated by the authorities. Firms were often dissuaded from using B92 for marketing their products. Although the local representatives of key donors did meet with B92’s management, importantly the station’s strategic vision was not dictated by the funds it received. To be frank, the whole operation was far too free, if not chaotic, to make that possible. The power of its creativity was not really matched by the strength of its management. And there were also too many stakeholders with rather different agendas of their own. It was strongly understood that in the chaotic diversification of funding different streams, B92 would maintain independence. Against this background, it is important to know that Veran did not speak English, and refused to learn it, sometimes exasperating diplomats who tried to arrange for him to have lessons; and he showed a determined commitment to retaining a strong local position. Personally I consider this very complex position the key to B92’s success. On various occasions the station organised humanitarian action specifically aimed at alleviating the suffering of Serbian people. I remember delivering medication to hospitals in Belgrade in 1993, and also a daring aid convoy using taxis, dispatched in the middle of the night to help the desperately tired Serbian refugees from the Krajina. I gradually understood that B92 wanted to make clear that it was very much part of the life and suffering of all people and that it did not shy away from the plight of ordinary Serbians. The actions also signalled that B92 was not a foreign set-up. This position was both real and tactical and it is to the huge credit and inventiveness of Veran Matic that over those years time and again he navigated the political minefield to the benefit of the station. It was real because in the end B92 wanted to be there for its country. There were many times it had to defend itself for not turning its back on Yugoslavia, for staying put in Belgrade and not becoming an exile station abroad. It was the fine line between patriotism and nationalism which it wanted to communicate, which sat ill with the simplistic picture that was painted of its fate in the foreign media. In the fixed clichés of that time, the cat and the mouse, evil and good, nationalistic and anti-nationalistic, it was very difficult to be seen to relate to Serbian people as suffering and in need of help. I think that the complex need to stand by its people was also a motivating element in Veran’s controversial position of condemning the Nato bombardments of Belgrade in 1999. For me, being aware of how much international goodwill was at stake and how big the backlash could be, this position proved at the time that B92 in the end was truly independent of everything and everybody, notwithstanding the mixed feelings I had about it. I admired them for it. In the run-up to the final act of the Milosevic era, B92 suffered many more blows which somehow strengthened its resolve. Its management usurped; its buildings confiscated – a blow threatening to kill all that was gained, Veran was arrested and detained. But the incredible drive and commitment of all who were involved in the subsequent campaigns showed that what was sown had firmly taken root. In hindsight, B92 was at the very forefront of a new media revolution that would sweep through traditional broadcasting. Its innovative drive was fuelled by necessity and turned out to be an exciting early trial of a lot of what has become common dogma in broadcasting: multimedia, placing the audience at the heart of the output, creating a sense of community, of participating, allowing people to talk back. Also B92 proved that it is possible to be both a public-service broadcaster and privately owned. After having launched a TV channel while Milosevic’s castle was still burning, B92 had to swallow the disappointment of not being given a nationwide broadcasting licence straight after the installation of a new government in 2001. But it took the blow on the chin and opened another battlefield: namely to fight for a proper media law and a fair frequency allocation procedure. Last year, B92 celebrated its 20th anniversary. It has become a serious modern media player in a still problematic environment. It employs people who get their salaries on time and pay taxes. It is housed in a modern well-equipped building. But being a private player, it does not have the cushion of the funding available to the public broadcaster RTS. And the economic prospects for Serbia are dire. But I am sure B92 will find a way to survive. ©Adrienne van Heteren indexoncensorship.org Adrienne van Heteren has been project manager for the BBC World Service Trust since 2007. She was director of B92’s cultural centre REX from 1994 to 1997 and was its external relations/foreign liaison officer from 2001 to 2002 Adrienne van Heteren recalls her time at B92 – a small radio station at the forefront of the anti-war movement during the darkest days of the Yugoslav conflict. Adrienne van Heteren Adrienne van Heteren recalls her time at B92 – a small radio station at the forefront of the anti-war movement during the darkest days of the Yugoslav conflict.

Good morning, Belgrade

As I write this article about one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, the question which keeps worrying me is: how many people still remember B92 and the Yugoslav war of the 1990s? A war fought in another century. How much background is needed to explain these events?

Let me just say this: the war in the former Yugoslavia was the international news story of the decade in which it was waged, and the Belgrade-based radio station, B92, became so famous during this time that at one point Steven Spielberg considered making a film about its heroic story. I would love to see that film.

I visited B92 for the first time in 1993 while on a fact-finding mission to the Balkans to identify needy media operations in the former Yugoslavia on behalf of a new organisation, Press Now, based in the Netherlands. I went to Zagreb, Ljubljana and Belgrade (Sarajevo was too dangerous).

Of the potential recipients of support on our list, radio B92 sounded the most exciting. Founded in 1989 by a group of young journalists, it had rapidly gained a dedicated following of urban Belgrade youngsters, attracted by its underground music shows and the sheer contrarian spirit of its independent news programming and provocative street actions.

I cherish the memories of my first visit: its offices were located right in the middle of the city on the fifth floor of the Dom omladine – a huge dirty concrete colossus of a building that also housed a youth centre and a jumble of small companies and agencies. The building was in a dire state and we had to climb the steep and irregular stairs to the fifth floor because the lift was not working. The door was opened by a rather tired looking man with twinkling eyes and a gun, who led us through a narrow corridor past a row of chairs on which people were waiting, chatting and smoking. They were waiting for Veran.

Veran Matic was the editor in chief, and one of the founders of B92, and he was hiding in his office behind an old typewriter. A picture on the wall made him look like Che Guevara. He liked to play with that image.

It was midday and he asked whether we would like a beer, while gesticulating to one of the women in attendance to fetch him some bottles. The women discussed the wisdom of the request. The people in the corridor, realising they would now have to wait longer, started shouting through the open door. ‘Mak can wait,’ someone said, who in passing introduced me to the great cinematographer Dusan Makavejev, who tried to grab Veran’s

attention. Shouts from another room signalled there was a phone call for Veran. He climbed from behind his desk to answer it. My colleague, in the meantime, was busy changing someone’s dinars into German marks. This triggered further frantic trade. Salaries had been paid and needed to be converted before they became worthless. We had arrived in the middle of a period of hyperinflation. ‘Just like the Weimar,’ said somebody who looked no older than 20. This comment came back to me when, with similar boldness, a good friend of mine, during the Nato bombardments in 1999, declared that she felt ‘like a Jew in Dresden’. The bank notes have a lot of zeros on them and do not look real.

Someone grabbed my arm and pushed me along. We were important guests it seemed, and were given the grand tour of the floor. To our untrained eyes, there was not much to see. The windows were filthy and there was a suggestion of a view over the city which we could not really make out. The offices were small and cramped. The mixture of pride and shame with which our guide, Sasa Mirkovic, Veran’s right hand, showed us around, cutting a very straight figure through the people in the corridor and the fog of smoke, struck me as special. Sasa liked orange juice and did not smoke. We were to become friends for life.

‘This is the studio,’ he said, opening a door to four square metres of dreary darkness with walls covered by egg trays and a table with battered sound-mixing consoles; and next: ‘This is the marketing department,’ pointing to a desk with a grand leather chair. ‘This is book-keeping’ – two desks with Remington typewriters – ‘and this’, opening the door to the room with the phone, the largest room, packed with people all smoking, talking and laughing, ‘is … editorial’. The room was a dump. ‘It is not normal,’ he apologised, and I made a mental note that I needed to know what ‘normal’ actually meant. I understood that they were running the station on three phone lines.

What appealed to me from the start was the earnestness mixed with a joyful sense of theatre and the absurd which everybody seemed to share. The beautiful PR guy wore a sharply cut Italian suit and was winked at. The fast-talking marketing guy was treated with suspicion because he dealt with the little money nobody else had and owned a car. And the receptionist, acting tea-lady, acting secretary, was somebody’s mother. Somehow they were trying to get it right and knew they were not quite there yet. But they were very nice people.

In any other circumstances its broad appeal would have set B92 on a path to growth, but the circumstances were not normal. B92 was on shaky ground. Unbeknown to many, I guessed even to its employees, the radio station was broadcasting illegally as its initial one-year local licence had expired. This secret was a ticking time bomb. Although B92 had positioned itself firmly in the heart of the anti-war scene in Belgrade, by maintaining a very strong factual news programme amid the virulence of propaganda and warmongering of the state broadcaster RTS, it was considered to be of little threat to the authorities because its signal was relatively weak, confined to Belgrade and not even clear in all parts of the city. It was assumed that as long as it was small the authorities would not bother with it. Besides, the authorities were more than happy to use B92’s existence to show the world that they were not that bad. It was a game of cat and mouse. But remaining small was not really what B92 wanted. It was already joking about moving into TV: ‘One of Veran’s mad ideas.’

But B92 had assumed a larger public role than just that of a radio station. It sought to connect the city to the rest of the world. Belgrade was suffering a brain drain. The potential for change was leaving the country. Daily, young people departed by bus with one-way tickets to Budapest, from where they would move on to other parts of Europe, Canada or the United States. This exodus was understandable, because the whole atmosphere of the city was suffocating. It was close to impossible to get newspapers or magazines from Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana, let alone from abroad. International sanctions had compounded the isolationist stance of the authorities. Belgrade was seen as bad and evil. People felt trapped in an image of themselves they could not recognise. Veran strongly believed that Belgrade’s, if not Yugoslavia’s, other face needed to be shown to the world and that its intellectual isolation needed to be broken. This struck a chord with me. I decided to come and help.

In the years to come I lived the roller-coaster ride that B92 had embarked on and which has not stopped. While its image abroad was primarily that of a small, rebellious anti-war opposition radio station, I came to understand that its offices were the epicentre of a cultural movement which was gathering momentum by the day. The corridor was the waiting room for an angry but outcast generation seeking an outlet for its creative energy.

B92 facilitated, to the best of its ability, the need for plans that could capture and channel that energy. To the sometimes tired despair of core staff, hundreds of projects were processed in an atmosphere that became ever more frenzied. It was as if Veran wanted to take on the sole responsibility for the development of a desperately needed civic society and the moral duty to hold up a mirror. He was a man with a vision and in a hurry, always testing the limits.

I remember the organisation of a convoy of bands from Belgrade to Sarajevo, soon after the signing of the Dayton accords. The whole daring enterprise, full of good intentions, hosted by Radio Zid in Sarajevo, was cancelled at the very last moment. Just when the trucks with equipment were ready to move, we were told that the venues, which initially had agreed to stage the bands, were persuaded by the local parties to withdraw. People were not ready. But what would you expect? Equally, later, the initiative to explore a form of truth and reconciliation commission for Yugoslavia was met with questions and criticism.

B92 understood, as no other organisation at the time did, the importance of building networks of like-minded groups and people, but also of being inclusive and of bridging divides. It understood the tactical strength of a community that loosely evolved around a shared set of principles, attitudes and style, the unofficial membership card of which was one of the many playful articles of association: a T-shirt, a bag, a cup, a book, a sticker, a whistle. B92 understood the political relevance of these new floating communities in a context where the public arena was dominated by one established political voice. It organised concerts, produced films, published books and pressed CDs; it published a literary review magazine and opened a cultural centre. It created a public arena in which people felt they could breathe, while struggling to keep the station alive and improve its newscast.

By the sheer insistence on maintaining a high professional journalistic standard, it managed to obtain the reluctant respect of those whose position it most challenged. (It was later a B92 journalist who got the scoop of Slobodan Miloševic’s arrest.) Its journalists were well informed and wired into the local political and diplomatic community and gradually also became networked into the foreign media presence on the ground. B92 journalists acted as stringers for overseas media and got their stories out via stations such as CNN.

In the course of 1996, this networking and community building was exponentially enhanced by the introduction of internet connectivity, albeit very limited still. The internet became the most important tool in B92’s struggle for survival and growth when it met its nemesis after the autumn of 1996. When the ruling party lost the major cities and towns of Serbia in the local elections, the government, scared for its own survival, overturned the election results. In a robust and long overdue act of defiance the people of Belgrade took to the streets.

It is difficult to explain how liberating this was for those who had been waiting so many years for a sign of progress. It was like a grand carnival marking the start of an endgame that would still take a few more years to evolve. B92 seized the momentum. When the demonstrators, bereft of any proper news, shouted for CNN, B92’s anchors acted as commentators. Foreign stations were sending the local story home. Throughout this period, B92 was frequently jammed and at one point taken off the air. That night, while the thousands of demonstrators were streaming by, its main news show was read by a young newsreader standing with a microphone, enhanced by powerful loudspeakers, in one of the windows of the fifth floor. ‘This is B92, the eight o’clock news.’

Coincidentally, at the same time, B92 got the long-awaited extra phone lines needed to obtain the capacity that enabled it to send sound over the internet. And so, in the midst of this turmoil, a plan was born to create a network of local stations in those cities where the local government was no longer in the hands of the ruling party. This network would broadcast a core programme of independent news and information and so circumvent the government monopoly on nationwide broadcasting. The programme was sent via the internet to London and a scrambled signal remitted by satellite to be decoded by the stations. The extension of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) which had been founded three years earlieras a nationwide network altered the rules of the game completely. After the demonstrations and the political pressure had let to a reinstatement of the local election results, and B92 had been put back on air, the plan was implemented. The front page of the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Serbia’s revolution starts on the internet.’ By this time the young, intelligent and quiet in-house lawyer acquired the assistance of a team.

As B92’s reputation grew, hundreds of internationally known public figures made its offices an important port of call. Politicians, diplomats, opinion leaders, writers and artists were all eager to tap into the fountain of information about the situation that Veran and Sasa kept flowing. It was a reciprocal process. The exposure to prominent foreign figures provided B92 with a safety net, while its independence provided the visitors with the appropriate profile for the times. Being present at many of these meetings gave me an incredibly precious lesson in international politics and I kick myself now for having been too busy living to keep a diary.

Throughout these years, B92 received a lot of attention and support from abroad. The necessary discretion that surrounded this support led, unavoidably, to misunderstandings about its size and nature, both inside and outside the station. It led to jealousy among potential allies, petty fights and nasty campaigns. B92’s strongest ally was the local Soros Foundation, but it also received support from the EC, USAID and individual governments including the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France and many private foundations. By 2000, the number of supporters had grown exponentially. Obviously the support was welcomed, and at times generous, but the whole dynamic of raising, receiving and administering it was never an easy ride. And it was never really enough. There were always more plans than resources allowed. And quite often it was not really the kind of support that was needed, and it was often not on time. A select group of very dedicated people took great risks to keep the whole thing afloat. Some devoted the best part of their lives. The most frustrating thing was that most of the support was given with a project rationale, while B92 was trying to be a business. Only a few understood this.

Painfully, in 2001, when after the fall of Milosevic the focus of the international community shifted towards the development of a democratic government, I experienced how overnight the support levels dropped as it was now considered time for B92 to become a viable operation.

Luckily, there always was a minimum level of core income from advertising revenue and B92 worked hard to maintain this, despite the fact that the market in which it had to operate was directly and adversely manipulated by the authorities. Firms were often dissuaded from using B92 for marketing their products.

Although the local representatives of key donors did meet with B92’s management, importantly the station’s strategic vision was not dictated by the funds it received. To be frank, the whole operation was far too free, if not chaotic, to make that possible. The power of its creativity was not really matched by the strength of its management. And there were also too many stakeholders with rather different agendas of their own. It was strongly understood that in the chaotic diversification of funding different streams, B92 would maintain independence.

Against this background, it is important to know that Veran did not speak English, and refused to learn it, sometimes exasperating diplomats who tried to arrange for him to have lessons; and he showed a determined commitment to retaining a strong local position. Personally I consider this very complex position the key to B92’s success. On various occasions the station organised humanitarian action specifically aimed at alleviating the suffering of Serbian people. I remember delivering medication to hospitals in Belgrade in 1993, and also a daring aid convoy using taxis, dispatched in the middle of the night to help the desperately tired Serbian refugees from the Krajina. I gradually understood that B92 wanted to make clear that it was very much part of the life and suffering of all people and that it did not shy away from the plight of ordinary Serbians. The actions also signalled that B92 was not a foreign set-up.

This position was both real and tactical and it is to the huge credit and inventiveness of Veran Matić that over those years time and again he navigated the political minefield to the benefit of the station. It was real because in the end B92 wanted to be there for its country. There were many times it had to defend itself for not turning its back on Yugoslavia, for staying put in Belgrade and not becoming an exile station abroad. It was the fine line between patriotism and nationalism which it wanted to communicate, which sat ill with the simplistic picture that was painted of its fate in the foreign media. In the fixed clichés of that time, the cat and the mouse, evil and good, nationalistic and anti-nationalistic, it was very difficult to be seen to relate to Serbian people as suffering and in need of help.

I think that the complex need to stand by its people was also a motivating element in Veran’s controversial position of condemning the Nato bombardments of Belgrade in 1999. For me, being aware of how much international goodwill was at stake and how big the backlash could be, this position proved at the time that B92 in the end was truly independent of everything and everybody, notwithstanding the mixed feelings I had about it. I admired them for it.

In the run-up to the final act of the Milosevic era, B92 suffered many more blows which somehow strengthened its resolve. Its management usurped; its buildings confiscated – a blow threatening to kill all that was gained, Veran was arrested and detained. But the incredible drive and commitment of all who were involved in the subsequent campaigns showed that what was sown had firmly taken root.

In hindsight, B92 was at the very forefront of a new media revolution that would sweep through traditional broadcasting. Its innovative drive was fuelled by necessity and turned out to be an exciting early trial of a lot of what has become common dogma in broadcasting: multimedia, placing the audience at the heart of the output, creating a sense of community, of participating, allowing people to talk back. Also B92 proved that it is possible to be both a public-service broadcaster and privately owned.

After having launched a TV channel while Milosevic’s castle was still burning, B92 had to swallow the disappointment of not being given a nationwide broadcasting licence straight after the installation of a new government in 2001. But it took the blow on the chin and opened another battlefield: namely to fight for a proper media law and a fair frequency allocation procedure.

Last year, B92 celebrated its 20th anniversary. It has become a serious modern media player in a still problematic environment. It employs people who get their salaries on time and pay taxes. It is housed in a modern well-equipped building. But being a private player, it does not have the cushion of the funding available to the public broadcaster RTS. And the economic prospects for Serbia are dire. But I am sure B92 will find a way to survive.

©Adrienne van Heteren

indexoncensorship.org

Adrienne van Heteren has been project manager for the BBC World Service Trust since 2007. She was director of B92’s cultural centre REX from 1994 to 1997 and was its external relations/foreign liaison officer from 2001 to 2002