continue the activities that paved the way for the change of the regime. The people really were great and I have kept those connections right up to this day, as I stand here talking to you overlooking the Danube. How would you summarise the importance of what they did? They showed that another way was possible. That a creative, liberal community of people could still exist amongst this nationalism and war mongering. They not only soothed the other troubled souls with their music and cultural activities, but also provided the information that was being blocked out by the state media system. And so they kept the lights on in the darkness. Turkish band Replikas, Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013 Photograph Matthew Collin
a different kind of people from those you read about in the papers. These people were resolutely against this militaristic and nationalistic regime. What were your impressions before you went there as a western journalist? I’d been to Bosnia and Croatia before, just after the end of the war, so I knew some stuff, but not much about how it had affected people in Belgrade. And when I got there I just thought that this was such a fascinating story. It was not just about people who were trying to keep some spirit of humanity alive despite their horrific situation. It was also a wider story about young people using culture as a means of opposition to a repressive government. When was The Face article published? It must have been a couple of months after I got there in November 1996. The article developed into a story about the protests and these incredible people I had met at this inspirational radio station. I’d gone there thinking this would be a wholly political story. I had to do a lot of convincing work with the editor to make The Face interested in such a story. But it turned out there was this incredible music and culture angle as well, which made it much more interesting, not just for the magazine but for me personally. And that developed into This is Serbia Calling. What made those people so determined? 150
Actually a lot of them had known the last years of peace in Yugoslavia in some ways as something of a golden time. Unlike other people in the Soviet Bloc, they had passports that meant they could travel. Because of the loans the government was taking, the economy appeared on the surface to be healthy. The people could travel to the coast in
‘WHAT KIND OF REGIME WOULD BOTHER WITH SOME GUY FROM A STYLE MAGAZINE?’ Croatia in the summer, they could go to London to buy records. So for them there was this remembered past of freedom and possibility. That was annihilated in the war years from 1991 to 1995, followed by an increasingly repressive government trying by any means possible to stay in power. So the people had this memory of a better way of life contrasting with the darkness of the present. I think that knowledge of a better past fuelled people’s abilities to maintain hope. And that helped them
How did your previous jobs prepare you for writing about the political issues in Serbia? My first full time journalistic job was at i-D, so that doesn’t sound like the ideal preparation for a Balkan war zone. I had been involved in some small way in political activism as a teenager though, and had always been interested in that. Then after leaving i-D I had worked at Time Out for three years and then moved to The Big Issue. We were doing a lot of investigative work with a really strong news team. So that side of my interests developed there. It must have been a very tense time to be in Serbia. Were you scared? No I really wasn’t. They had kicked out the BBC correspondent, but I guess I felt so small time working for The Face. What kind of regime would bother with some guy from a style magazine? I think I was so far below the radar that I was an insignificant threat. Your next book, The Time Of the Rebels, focused on the youth resistance movements in the following decade. When did the internet become an important tool for them? The first time it was used as this wide resistance tool would have been during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. It was used to spread information and mobilise people to demonstrate at certain locations. Now everyone is using the internet for everything, so it’s become something of a cliché to talk about it as a tool for activists, but then it really was new. Now of course, as we