Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 2 | Looking Back Facing Forward One Reporter's View of the Balkans, page 2 (low bandwidth)

Bratislav Grubacic, one of Belgrade’s most successful independent journalists, calls Belgrade’s now almost round-the-clock traffic, “the price of progress,” a promise of better times for his hometown and country. Downtown, and in the shopping zones of a few suburban neighborhoods, pedestrian traffic also runs thick. Perhaps the first, best sign of a nation reviving: people are out and about.

Grubacic hails what he calls another sign of returning normality, “There is no repression in the atmosphere, no repression of the media.”

Vojin Dimitrijevic, director of the Belgrade Center for Human Rights and a campaigner for civil freedom under Milosevic, tells me he awakens every morning now aware of “the absence of fear,” which he also calls, “a sign of how normal we have become.”

Grubacic and Dimitrijevic, like so many Yugoslavs, are celebrating a normality they have, in fact, never before enjoyed. Most of Grubacic’s journalistic career was spent under the 13-year regime of Slobodan Milosevic (1987-2000), famed for his use of thugs and tax liens against those who waxed too freely in the news media or who worked too vigorously for human rights. Dimitrijevic remembers his constant fear of “the financial investigations and the secret police who came by every week to look things over.”

“No repression” is something new in Belgrade, and the claim that it represents returning “normality” is actually the cover for another, wider claim of more significance made by Dimitrijevic: “What we in Yugoslavia mean by ‘normal’ is just what you mean in America and Western Europe, life with the privilege of privacy, free from war, economic crisis, politics or other overwhelming outside forces.”

In Belgrade these days, there is a new sense of freedom in the air. This freedom may never before have been experienced by Yugoslavs, but it had long ago been normalized for them by CNN, BBC, MTV and the other media calling cards of the modern European-American world, the world to which most Yugoslavs want to belong. It was that world of family life, family shopping, family vacations that Yugoslav after Yugoslav, Croat, Serb, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Kosovar had been referring to whenever I asked them, over more than eight years of mostly war and post-war reporting, “What are you hoping for when this is over?”

“We just want a normal life,” was their reply, hardly aware that the normality they sought was not only far off, but had touched them mostly through their media-driven imaginations.

In the new normality of Belgrade, the media marketplace for information is open and flourishing. “You can push any button on your radio, turn on any channel of the TV and know,” reports Vojin Dimitrijevic, “that you’re not going to be lied to.”

For 13 years, Milosevic filled Yugo-slav radio and television with a wall-to-wall carpet of lies. Lies about the alleged anti-Serb plots of neighbors. Lies about the heroic feats of the Yugoslav Army and semi-official Serb paramilitaries fighting off the vicious attacks of Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims. The net result for most people, says everyone I talked with, all of whom knew the lies were lies, was that the lies stuck.

James Lyon of the International Crisis Group (a multinational organization dedicated to helping to prevent and contain crises) has spent more than a decade in the Balkans as everything from an academic to an entrepreneur to a monitor of the international effort to make Bosnia a civil society. The Milosevic media operation, he tells me, left a populace cynical about his corruption, but blind to war crimes committed outside Serbia. “Most people believe that there weren’t any excesses committed during the wars, and if there were, they were justified. You tell them we bombed Sarajevo, bombed civilians, and they believe the propaganda that the Muslims committed mass suicide.”

“We need a total re-education of the people. We need an energetic drive to bring the issue of war crimes before the public so the ordinary citizen can realize the significance of what was done in his name. That could have a powerful effect.” Pavle Jevremovic, the man speaking this prescription, is a widely respected career diplomat, turned foreign policy advisor to the new Yugoslavic president Vojislav Kostunica. Jevremovic also adds this cautionary note: “We must face up to the crucial issue that advocating a mono-ethnic state in a multi-ethnic space is, in itself, a crime.”

Next page: We must face up to the crucial issue that advocating a mono-ethnic state in a multi-ethnic space is, in itself, a crime.” —Pavle Jevremovic.

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