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THEORY ON DEMAND
NATO Bombings & List Explosions On March 22, 1999 the Serbian nationalist net artist Andrej Tisma, who had caused earlier controversies on Syndicate, posts: “Message from Serbia, in expectation of NATO bombing. Could be my last sending. But I don’t worry. If I die, my web site will remain”.16 It was the first reference to the deteriorating situation in Yugoslavia. Two weeks earlier, at the Amsterdam N5M conference the situation had not been an urgent topic, even though independent media makers from Belgrade, Prestina, Skopje and other towns on the Balkans had been present. Peace talks in Rambouillet between NATO, Yugoslav authorities and the Kosovo-Albanians had failed to produce an agreement. With mass killings and armed resistance spiraling out of control, Kosovo was well under way becoming the next Bosnia. In the case of Bosnia it had taken Western powers three and a half years to intervene in a serious manner, after years of half-hearted diplomacy, broken cease-fires and limited UN mandates. US bombardment of Bosnian Serb military positions finally brought parties to the Dayton negotiation table. In the Kosovo case, with the spring season close and parties on both sides gearing up for the next big killing spree, NATO took action in a decisive manner, causing a spiral of effects. On March 24 1999“the most serious war in Europe since 1945” (Michael Ignatieff) started. The NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were going to last for 78 days, until the Yugoslav army withdrew from Kosovo in early June 1999.17 Already on the first day the independent radio station B92 had been closed and its director, Veran Matic, had been arrested by the Serbian police.18 The local radio transmission no longer worked, but B92 continued its radio casts via web. No long after the radio signal got retransmitted via satellite. News bulletins in both Serbian and English could be read on the B92 website. In one month the Syndicate group would have its meeting in Belgrade. What was going to happen? Should the meeting take place, be postponed, take place elsewhere? A first sign of life came from Branka in Novi Sad (Serbia), writing a telegram style email: One night under pressure /stop/b92 shot down tonight/stop/internet as a tool of surviving horror?!/stop/without strength to completely control emotions (including fear)/stop/first degree alacrity/stop/every political opponent might be proclaimed deserter or enemy/stop/ lots of love/stop.19
16. Andrej Tisma, U.S.A. Questionaire, Syndicate, March 22, 1999. 17. For an overview of the Kosovo conflict, see Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000; Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, New York: Public Affairs, 2000 ; Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 18. Drazen Pantic, Radio B92 closed, Veran Matic arrested, Nettime, March 24, 1999. See also Katarina’s email, posted on the same day, for more details about the police raid on the B92 offices. 19. Pticica (Branka), Re: news, Syndicate, March 24, 1999.