The Internet and the war in Yugoslavia
Mort, Jo-Ann
IN THE summer of 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic withdrew Kosovo's political autonomy, I was across Yugoslavia on an achingly beautiful Dalmatian island, in search of a Herald Tribune. Let me...
...We didn't even have a phone at the house because installation was so expensive...
...Her entries were reminiscent of journals found after World War II, written with immediacy and drama, where the words themselves almost take on a hushed pallor on the page as the writer fears his or her discovery...
...Let me explain...
...And there were some independent publications published in Serbo-Croatian...
...Will we not only log on, but engage in the world...
...There were no English-language magazines or newspapers in the town's kiosk, nor was there cable television—no CNN, no Sky News...
...involvement in Yugoslavia...
...Discussion groups among anonymous discussants in the United States, Belgrade, and elsewhere became so popular that some of them were closed for lack of space...
...The lack of outside news—or uncensored news—was the real source of my anxiety...
...But will all this interconnectedness matter...
...Yugoslavia today is a wired society...
...It published daily dispatches from Masha Gessen, the Russian journalist who began her dispatches writing anonymously from Belgrade because she feared for her safety...
...I confess, I have no idea what "lack of space" means in virtual reality...
...Here, the talking heads on the television screen came out from behind the ubiquitous background roll of refugees at border points, as reporters filed stories on the networks' Web pages, which essentially told the news that ended up on the cutting-room floor...
...But Internet coverage at its best offered the virtues of both print and television: more immediacy and more depth...
...Even if a site isn't updated, the homepage lives in virtual reality...
...Many nongovernmental organizations updated their sites with information about where to send refugee-relief contributions and what was being done with these donations...
...With the bombing taking place at night, the seven-hour time difference between the United States and Europe made the news a day old when it appeared in the morning paper...
...Not only in Yugoslavia itself but around the world, the Internet has changed citizens' relationship to the war...
...Even at the apex of glasnost, a haphazard censorship still covered Yugoslavia...
...if there was a call, it came to a next door neighbor who yelled to us across the yard...
...CNN even featured e-mail from people in Yugoslavia...
...Just ten years ago, Yugoslavia's communications structure was rudimentary...
...IRECALLED THAT feeling of information isolation while watching news of the current horrors in Kosovo...
...Yuppie sites like Beonet and Beograd.com offer everything from listings of cafes and art galleries to concert 104 DISSENT / Summer 1999 schedules and e-mails about life in the midst of bombing...
...Jo-ANN MORT, a member of the Dissent editorial board, edited the new anthology Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO . DISSENT / Summer 1999 105...
...While television images fade and newsprint crumbles, Web sites remain until their sponsors take them down...
...But the lack of English wasn't the real issue...
...When Milosevic silenced radio stations B21 in Kosovo and B92 in Belgrade, they transmitted via the Internet...
...The New York Times reporting was generally insightful, and analytic—but the print medium showed its limitations in the world of cable and the Internet...
...Ten years ago, a trip to the island of Brac, in what is now Croatia, meant that for the few weeks I was there, I was essentially dependent on my host, a native speaker, to interpret the world for me...
...Left-wing debates about the role of the United States in maintaining global order have flown back and forth by e-mail...
...With RealPlayer software, one could listen to the dissident radio from anywhere in the world, even if it was no longer playing on the radio band...
...today, all one needs to find out what's going on—in any language—is a modem and a laptop...
...But it was in news gathering that the Internet made the most difference this time...
...The site includes a software program to download your very own target symbol for civilian wear—the one seen all over the streets of Belgrade, the bull's eye with the phrase "These are NATO targets...
...For those inside the war zone, the Internet and e-mail probably proved a virtual lifeline and for the rest of us, it offered immediate war coverage...
...But, as of this writing, if you log on to www.b92.net, you can find this message from the station's director, Sasa Mirkovic: "Radio B92 closed down and sealed off/On Friday, April 2/Struggle Continues, We Shall Never Surrender...
...If we visited the larger resort town of Bol, frequented by middle-class Britons on packaged tours, it was possible to pick up a Daily Mail and cull a sentence or two of hard news out of its tabloid pages...
...Finally, he had to seal off B92 completely, in addition to destroying its radio signal, so that the broadcasts couldn't take place on the Internet...
...Ironically, where television failed to give detailed or insightful analyses of the war, their Internet sites at least gave more in-depth perspective...
...I wonder: will betterhoned arguments mean more effective activism...
...Milosevic made no efforts to stop the computer revolution within his otherwise isolated country...
...WILL ALL THIS knowing make any difference...
...Eventually, schlepping my computer to the island meant that I would have e-mail and Internet access, as do tens of thousands of people in Yugoslavia and its former republics...
...That was too much Internet for Milosevic...
...As Michael Massing pointed out in the Nation, while the CNN coverage was superficial or even sycophantic (toward either NATO or the Serbs, depending on the correspondent), it still had the advantage of immediacy, which is lost in newspapers and magazines...
...To coin a phrase, the trick is not simply to imagine the world but to change it...
...The Milosevic regime even has its own Web site: Serbia-info.com , where the Information Ministry crams news of the day, translated into rudimentary English, with highlights like "Organizing the ethnic Albanian terrorists around the world" or "Another message of love and peace from Belgrade: eighteen couples at a collective wedding ceremony send a message to the world that love is stronger than bombs...
...Here, too, the Internet offered new avenues by which to construct a virtual community...
...There were many more possibilities for DISSENT / Summer 1999 103 independent news in the cities...
...The kind of oral arguments that might once have happened in meeting rooms or on street corners were happening in chat rooms...
...Other Web sites also used Internet journals as a device to expand their reporting...
...Milosevic, who took television censoring to a new high—filling the screen with old World War II films in between his state-controlled newscasts—didn't (well, couldn't) censor Web sites outside of Yugoslavia...
...As the years progressed and as Yugoslavia disintegrated, telephones became more accessible, cable came to the islands, and the lack of print product available in the little kiosk in front of the coffee shop on the promenade near the marina didn't matter as much...
...Sometimes during these visits I was so starved for English that I would watch old John Wayne movies with Serbo-Croatian subtitles, just to hear Wayne pronounce the English words...
...Remembering those weeks of news deprivation made me realize that just as the Gulf War was a CNN war, the Kosovo War harkens the coming of age of the Internet...
...e-mail and computers abound...
...Whether microchips (and computer-guided bombs) can defeat a common thug may be one of the remaining ironies of the end of this century...
...The photos of distress on the site are frozen in time...
...In the best sense, this taking of pen to hand—albeit with fingers and keyboard —has forced arguments to be more focused and researched...
...Slate magazine found its niche, as CNN did during the Gulf War...
...In Split, one could buy Time, Newsweek, or the Economist, and in Dubrovnik, one could even find the Herald Tribune and a higher class of British paper—say, the London Times or the Telegraph (but no Guardian—were all those British tourists Tories...
...America Online offered software on its home page so that one could email congressional representatives with opinions about U.S...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
