What’s Next? for Serbia — a journalist’s view

“The truth at least once a week”

by Chris Braithwaite

The Belgrade bus is rocketing along the two-lane road, swinging crisply through the curves and churning up the hills to provide stunning views of the Danube, of the fresh-cut hayfields, the orchards and vineyards that line the road.  But I am finally immune to the scenery, partly because I have seen enough of it since my first visit to Smederevo eight months ago in November, partly because I am distracted, trying to understand what Vladan is saying on the mobile phone crushed to my ear. 

I try to ignore the sound of something solid crashing from the luggage rack onto the floor just beside me.  I try to ignore the excited comments, in Serbian, of the woman sitting behind me.  But I can’t ignore the conductor when he makes his way down the aisle, picks up the fallen object, and hands it to me.  It is (or was) my laptop computer.

I tuck the remains down by my feet and go back to the phone.  It is still a mysterious device to me.  In Vermont I took perverse pride in not owning one.  But in Serbia the mobile, like the laptop at my feet, has somehow become indispensable.  “Vladan,” I shout like my late grandmother, who always shouted into the phone to compensate for the distance involved, “I found another mistake.  Page 45.”

“It’s too late,” says the telephone.  “Toza has taken the book.”

I stare glumly at page 45.  Even in the Cyrillic alphabet, the sub-head on Misha’s chapter is clearly a meaningless string of mumbo jumbo.  Serbs may be unique in speaking one language that is commonly, and quite randomly, written in two alphabets.  The language is Serbian, deliberately divorced over the past decade from the Serbo-Croatian that was the common language of former Yugoslavia.  It was written in two alphabets in Tito’s day because Slovenians and Croats, largely Catholic, never adopted the Cyrillic script, which is historically connected to the Orthodox church. 

Serbs move back and forth between the alphabets at will.  A conservative, old-line paper like Politika publishes its news in Cyrillic but prints most of its ads in Latin, which tends to be the alphabet of commerce.  Blic, on the other hand, reinforces its image as an independent new daily by printing in Latin, though the special religious section it published at Christmas was in Cyrillic.

Even a linguistic idiot like me who can barely say Good Morning in Serbian had to master the rudiments of the Cyrillic alphabet to survive more than 24 hours on my own.  Signs at street corners and bus stations, not to mention on the buses themselves, tend to be in Cyrillic.  If I know that following Krunska street will get me close to my Belgrade apartment, I must recognize the signs that say KPYHCKA.  That doesn’t really help much, in truth, because the streets of Belgrade are constant victims of the historic revisionists who keep changing their names.  Taxi drivers still know Krunska (Crown) as Proleterskih Brigada (you get the idea).  At the other end of my block the busy, wonderfully chaotic Bulevar Revolucije has just been renamed in honor of King Alexander.  But Revolution fits the street’s ambiance so perfectly that its shiny new street signs are pretty much ignored. 

To avoid starvation, one needs to know that you can buy a meal under a sign that reads PECTOPAH and is rendered “restoran.”  (Once seated in the PECTOPAH, of course, one is completely helpless.  Some restaurants can come up with an English menu, so you can order exactly what you want.  But the waiter won’t know what the hell you’re talking about, so you won’t get it.  No matter what kind of soup I order off an English menu, I get mushroom soup.  Lucky for me, Serbs make an excellent mushroom soup.  A fine restaurant in Smederevo offers “cheat fish” to its Anglophone customers.  That turned out to be catfish, fresh from the nearby Danube and fried to crisp perfection.)

What Next?, the book I have been so frantically proofreading on the bus, is in English and Serbian, with the latter in Cyrillic script.  Fair enough, since most of the book’s six authors publish community weekly newspapers in Cyrillic. 

It had taken Vladan until four o’clock this Sunday morning to lay out the book’s text and illustrations on his home computer.  After far too little sleep, he’d brought his portable hard drive in to the tiny first-floor (that would be second-floor in the Normal World, up one flight) office of the weekly newspaper Sedmica, where he works as “technical editor.”  His final task seemed perfectly simple: to print out a single copy on Sedmica’s laser printer so I could proofread it before catching the one o’clock bus back to Belgrade. 

Alas, in Serbia as everywhere in the computerized world, “perfectly simple” is a dangerous phrase.  The English came out fine, the Serbian in a daft sequence of oddly accented characters that bore no relation to Cyrillic. Vladan, who left a career as a math teacher for an extraordinarily precarious job with a struggling young newspaper, withdrew into himself as computer jockeys do at such moments.  I paced as far as one can pace in a 350-square-foot office, missing a series of buses. 

Milan Petrovic, Vladan’s boss and my good friend, sat at a vacant reporter’s desk fielding increasingly angry calls from one of his seven sisters, who had driven down from Austria for a visit. A turkey was roasting in the clay-sealed oven in the courtyard of his mother’s wonderful homestead in a nearby village.  I’d had a good look at the courtyard the day before, when the oven hosted a young goat.  It also features a perfectly tended vegetable garden, a hand-cranked well 90 feet deep, a fenced enclosure for the chickens and ducks, and a small shed for the pigs.  “Buy me some pigs,” his mother said to Milan, “I need someone to talk to” — “because you never come to see me” was left unsaid but, in the universal language of Motherhood, perfectly understood. 

Milan’s mother looks like a character actor cast for the role of a Serbian peasant from southern Kosovo, which is what she was until Kosovo became uncomfortable for Serbs and the family moved north in the mid-1980s.  Tiny, her slightly bent body shrouded in widow’s black, she has a strong, deeply lined face that bestowed a wonderful smile even as she told me, on our first meeting, that she wasn’t happy that America had bombed the bridge that crosses the Danube at Smederevo.  (That was the gist of her grandson Stefan’s translation.  I shudder to think what she actually said.)

It would hard to find anyone in Smederevo who thinks it was a good idea for NATO to bomb that bridge, particularly since Belgrade’s far more strategic bridges were left untouched.  But Milan’s mother had a strong case:  her only son was under the bridge at the time. 

When the NATO bombing campaign began, the authorities knocked on Milan’s door, activated him as an Army reservist and took him away, leaving his wife and two sons weeping behind him. Milan believes he was activated precisely because, through his newspaper, he was an outspoken critic of Slobodan Milosevic.

Put in charge of the defense of the bridge with a contingent of about 50 men, he had a fortified post dug directly under the south-shore approach.  He was sitting there on his bunk, untying his boots to change his socks for the first time in three days, when the first bomb hit.  It sent him four feet in the air.  He sent his men away to safety but, because somebody had to “defend” the bridge, he stayed behind.  It seemed absurd, he said, because he doesn’t know how to fire a weapon. He spent his regular hitch in the old Yugoslav Army playing chess with a superior officer.  (He’s currently president of the Smederevo chess club.)

Some time after the bombing, Milan was summoned to court in Belgrade.  Hadn’t he been to the United States recently? the prosecutor demanded. Yes, he had been there on an exchange trip for journalists.  Where did he go?  Just about everywhere:  Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta.  Who did he talk to?  A great many journalists. 

And so, said the prosecutor, how do we know you didn’t guide the American planes to the Smederevo bridge? 

If I had, Milan replied, would I have been sitting under it when they came?

The case was ultimately dropped, but the bombing was deeply traumatic to the family, and left Milan with a small, uncontrollable tremor in his hands.  It is no joking matter.  Yet his story echoes a strain of absurdity I’ve noted in the Serbian novels that I’ve managed to find in translation.  It is the work of writers who believe that they and their society are under the control of a madly arbitrary authority whose power extends beyond human behavior, to logic itself. 

In The Civil War Within, author Svetislav Basara’s character unaccountably shoots his wife in their kitchen.  A reporter arrives promptly to explain that his editor needed a homicide for tomorrow’s edition.  The murderous impulse had come from an antenna atop the newspaper’s building (Belgrade’s downtown is dominated by the forest of antennas on Politika’s office tower).  It remained only for the reporter to record the event. 

In any other place, that would be a deft piece of invention.  In Serbia it is a powerful metaphor for the state-dominated media’s role in reviving the ancient nationalistic hatreds that tore Yugoslavia apart. 

Fired from the Smederevo radio station when Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia took it over, Milan engaged in toe-to-toe combat with the state propaganda system in 1996 by founding Sedmica with its slogan, “The truth at least once a week.”  That and his contacts with America marked him as a suspected traitor when NATO struck in 1999. 

But Milan is very much a Serb, and a Serb who feels displaced from Kosovo by the swelling Albanian majority. He is furious about the bombing. Beyond that, he believes the U.S. had no business interfering in Kosovo or, for that matter, in Bosnia.  On a global level, he wishes the U.S. would stop trying to remake the world in its own image. 

He and I share only the last of these opinions.  So it seems all the more remarkable that, of all the journalists I have visited across the Balkans, Milan is the only one to extend the overnight hospitality of his home. As the book (which I promise to get back to soon) required longer and more frequent visits to Smederevo, Milan insisted that I stay with his family.  I did so, abandoning the Hotel Smedervo ($13 a night including breakfast, with a nice view of the Danube, but a lonely, fading place).

Left to our own devices, Milan and I sit on his apartment balcony, sipping coffee, or beer, or raki, and babbling like inchoate two-year-olds.  “There’s a pretty girl walking down the hill,” is a linguistic Everest for both of us, in the other’s language.  Summoned from her kitchen, Milan’s wife Bebe can help out in a pinch. A culinary genius, she learned her English from her international collection of cookbooks.  Both of their teenage sons, Rasko and Stefan, are competent if reluctant translators.  English is taught in school here, beginning at about grade four.  But like most Serbian youngsters, Rasko and Stefan learned English through direct cultural absorption.  Serbs love American music and American films, which are shown in English with subtitles.  The same is true of the American sitcoms which play endlessly on television.  A quick scan of the TV listings in Blic offers Simpsonovi, Sajnfeld, Nes Bridzis, Seks i Grad and, embarrassingly enough, Dzerija Springera.  Rasko and Stefan are, of course, masters of the Internet.  Serbs tend to be tall, so basketball is a popular sport and the NBA is covered in the press as if the games were being played across town, rather than across the world. 

Serbs, in short, are fascinated by America.  This very sense of affinity made the 1999 bombing particularly hard to bear.  People here feel they were not only assaulted, but also betrayed. But with the notable exception of Milan’s mother, you have to get to know someone pretty well before he or she will tell you so. 

Vladan couldn’t fix the font, and ultimately had to substitute a second Cyrillic typeface.  That forced him to plow through some 48 pages of text, checking the new spacing and hyphenation. 

I was determined to catch the 2:30 bus, if only to release poor Milan to the tender mercies of all those sisters.  The printout emerged at 2:20.  I grabbed it and ran, figuring I could use the hour on the bus to proofread it, and the mobile phone in my pocket to call in any corrections.

I had, sadly, reckoned without Toza. Officially Svetozar Polic, he publishes another struggling independent weekly, Moj Kovin, just across the Danube from Smederevo in Kovin.  The book is a collaboration among several weeklies that belong to Local Press, an association of about two dozen community papers in Serbia and Montenegro. Milan had undertaken the pre-press work at Sedmica, and Toza would print the book in the tiny shop that prints his newspaper.  He’d just learned that the Belgrade company that would do the binding was about to break for a long summer vacation.  Desperate to get the printing done in time, he’d wrestled the layout away from Vladan and rushed back to Kovin.  The book would run as it was, including the nonsensical sub-heads that an exhausted Vladan had missed when he switched fonts. 

Riding into Belgrade, I am reminded that journalists of every nationality and political persuasion have one thing in common:  we can't get anything done until it is too late to do it properly.  I suspect there is a chemical, like the one runners get hooked on, that is released in the brain as a deadline approaches.  Until it kicks in, reporters can't do anything much besides empty beer bottles and fill ashtrays.

The knowledge that I am partly to blame for this particular typographical lapse doesn’t help.  I will sooner or later have to face Miroslav Jovanovic, who is editor of both this little book and, far more importantly, the Kragujevac weekly Svetlost.  (The word means “light.”)  Svetlost is widely regarded as the best newspaper published in Serbia outside of Belgrade.  Some call it the best weekly published in Serbia, bar none.  Miroslav was the first person I approached with the idea for the book, in late March. 

The project began with a western journalist’s conviction things had changed radically in Serbia since I was here in 1998.  Four years ago the community papers in Local Press faced formidable problems.  And like just about everybody else, I blamed these problems on Slobodan Milosevic and his all-powerful Socialist Party of Serbia.  In the “new reality” of 2002, I thought it would be a fine idea to produce a practical guide to what editors should be doing, now that things have changed so much. 

The editors, publishers and directors of Local Press papers agreed to participate in the project.  The brave souls who try and keep track of the Knight Fellows from their tiny headquarters at the National Grange Hall in Washington agreed to put up the necessary funds.  We were in business.

But to my considerable surprise, what my Serbian colleagues really wanted to say is that things have hardly changed at all, and certainly not for the better.

The personalities and parties may have changed, these publishers say.  But among those who have come to power since Milosevic, a fundamental, time-honored understanding of the press remains unchanged.  Miroslav said it best:  “Many of them still preserve the communist concept that media are means of propaganda, available to assist them, and journalists are ‘political workers’ whose duty is to serve the governing ideology.”

In towns like Smederevo and Vranje, the independent weeklies still compete with city-owned papers that draw their sustenance from the municipal budget, their circulation from bulk sales to the big, publicly owned companies.  This is all very frustrating because, in sharp contrast to four years ago, these Local Press papers are working hard at selling advertising, and finding reasonable success.  But when I ask about their ad rates, prices tend to be extremely low — too low to sustain the newspaper.  I think they are wisely charging what the market will bear, but the market is terrible. And foreign donors, after a decade of open-handed support, are clearly getting restless to move on and leave these papers, in the words of Local Press President Vukasin Obradovic, “to find their own sources of finance among impoverished citizens and ruined industry.”

What is the likely outcome of these most difficult circumstances?  Vukasin again:  “If the present situation continues, it will be the media that had a very important influence on democratic changes in recent years that will disappear from the scene.”

Having set down their problems in no uncertain terms, my colleagues decided they should be printed in an internationally accessible language.  The budget allowed for the Serbian-only book I had originally contemplated.  But the Knight Fellowship program came through again, bumping the budget enough to print the book in English and Serbian. 

The Serbian editors have written things that should be shared with the international community, where something of a “party line” has emerged:  Milosevic was the problem, and the problem has been taken care of.  The new leaders are good, and there should be no more fuss about any minor democratic shortcomings in Serbia.  Although the Belgrade weekly NIN wrote recently, I'm told, that Yugoslavia is led by one man who thinks like Milosevic (Kostunica) and another who acts like Milosevic (Djindjic).

After all these changes, the book will be something of a hybrid, combining the grim observations of the publishers with my rather Panglosian advice on how to proceed to a rosy future.  Such is the price of this sort of collaboration, I suppose.  But I do think the advantages outweigh the cost. 

Working with these publishers, rather than for them, forced me to see the reality they deal with every day, and may have rescued me from total irrelevance.  It costs money to print a book anywhere, and a bit of the benefit of this one is that the business went to people who were particularly glad to have it.  Maybe I just missed that deadline fever, after nine months away from the Chronicle.  Anyway, this computer seems to have survived the fall just fine.