Croatian Anti-War Newspaper under Attack

This is one of many legal moves aimed at bankrupting Feral Tribune. That same month, charges were brought against Feral Tribune editors Viktor Ivancic and Marinko Culic under a new law that forbids journalists to "offend" leading officials. The Prosecutor-General's office on May 16 sent the editors a court summons on charges of making President Tudjman "an object of libel and slander" in an article criticizing his suggestion that the remains of World War II Croatian fascists be reburied alongside their victims.

This is but one of many statements by Tudjman minimizing the genocide perpetrated against Serbs, Jews and Roma ("gypsies") by Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustashe regime, which established its own death camp at Jasenovac. Tudjman also recently stated that many of the thousands buried at Jasenovac were actually killed by the anti-fascist resistance - a dangerous and cynical distortion of history. Tudjman's troops in neighboring Bosnia have just carved that country up in a deal with the rival dictator Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia (and the connivance of the US, UN, NATO and EU).

Ivancic and Culic are the first journalists to be prosecuted under the new law prohibiting criticism or satirical commentary on the president, prime minister, parliamentary speaker or chief magistrates. International media organizations and Croatian opposition groups have condemned the law, which imposes a sentence of one-year imprisonment for libel and up to six months for slander. In June, the trial was unexpectedly adjourned on its first day. The trial is scheduled to resume in September, when new witnesses are expected to appear. Neither East Nor West will be organizing a protest at the Croatian consulate in New York to support Feral Tribune. Contact NENW-NYC for details.

Thanks to OMRI Report, Open Society Institute

Stjepanovic Dragan August 96

Stejepanovic Dragan
Mihaila Pupina 7
11420 Smed Palanka
Serbia, Yugoslavia

YUGO PEACE OPPOSITION GOES CYBER

By Ivo Skoric

The key to the politicians' success was communication - or, more precisely, the lack of it. The formerly Communist controlled media in each republic came under the control of born-again nationalists. Independent, alternative-media magazines and low-power FM stations were confiscated by the police if they tried to cross republic lines. Reading newspapers from other republics came to be viewed as unpatriotic. Finally, just before the war started, the Serbian and Croatian governments shut down all communication between the two nations and sealed the borders. The telephone lines in Bosnia-Herzegovina were destroyed when the war spread there in 1991. With the disruption of the postal system, local antiwar and human-rights organizations suddenly found themselves isolated from each other and the outside world. Then, in early 1992, the Communications Aid Project for Former Yugoslavia was initiated by international peace groups, together with local groups like Croatia's anti-War Campaign and Serbia's Center for Anti-War Action. Modems were distributed and the ZTN was launched. Activists in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia can now talk over the internet, with the signal routed through Austria, Germany or Britain.

Thanks to ZTN, nationalist dictators have lost their power to prevent communication beyond the borders of their police states. Now independent pro-peace media like Croatia's Arkzin and Serbia's Vreme publish their electronic editions on ZTN and are read by the "other side." Bosnian refugees in San Francisco have E-mailed contacts back home and traced lost relatives. When Serbian authorities imposed their own directors on the Belgrade newspaper Borba in 1994, the ousted journalists gave the world their side the story on ZTN. When Kosevo Hospital in Sarajevo, the besieged Bosnian capital, was in desperate need of antibiotics last year, it issued an appeal via the network and international volunteers got the medicine through. When 10 opposition activists from Split were arrested by Croatian authorities and beaten in prison in 1993, supporters sent out daily reports via the Net. The beatings stopped.

In 1992 a group of young people barricaded themselves in a local bar called the Zitzer Club in the small village of Tresnjevac in northern Serbia, refusing to be drafted for the war in Bosnia. As the Serbian army surrounded the village, they declared independence and sovereignty, assuming the name Zitzer Spiritual Republic in a parody of the ultranationalism sweeping the region. ("Zitzer" is a local term for a good pool shot). Their anthem was Ravel's Bolero and their coat of arms was a pizza pie surrounded by three pool ball! Peace activists across the border in Hungary spread the word through the Internet, and a New York group, Neither East Nor West, organized a benefit concert in CBG in November 1993 to raise funds to get the Zitzer draft resisters their own computer. Today the "republic" is on-line at zsr@ZaMir-bg.ztn.zer.de.

One of the main sponsors of the network is international finance mogul George Soros' Open Society Institute, which also funds several alternative and independent media in the region, such as Arkzin and Vreme, and has poured war-reconstruction money into Bosnia. The Soros agenda mystifies many observers. After quietly funding pro-democracy movements in Communist world for years, he has recently launched his first political project in the West - the New York-based Lindesmith Center, dedicated to challenging America's war on Drugs (Interview, Oct. "95" High Times). Former Yugoslavia is just a part of Soros' financial-aid involvement in ex-Communist Europe. As he like to put it: "Now they don't call it the Soviet empire any more; they call it the Soros empire."