Milos Vasic started out as a cop. Good training, he said, for what was to come.
As a cop-and later as a journalist covering the cops-he had become cynical and melancholy. He was ready for the worst, when the worst came.
Today, Vasic covers a crazy war in a frenzied land, watching former neighbors kill one another with a hatred ripened by centuries. It’s enough to make him nostalgic for the old days, when killing was just plain murder.
Vasic lives surrounded by the tensions of war, working for the weekly magazine Vreme (Time), which has opposed the war all along. Here in the Serbian Republic of Yugoslavia, that makes him a traitor-or worse-in the eyes of many. But a small circle here sees the magazine’s ragtag office as an island of sanity surrounded by madness, an independent voice in an ocean of lies.
Vasic wasn’t seeking a new employer when he first heard about Vreme. He was trying to sue his old one-the state-owned Nin magazine, where he had worked for 15 years-to force it to publish his work.
Under the communist regime of Marshal Tito, who died in 1980, reporters were used to censorship. Tito wasn’t as harsh as some Eastern bloc leaders, Vasic said, but he was repressive in his own right and didn’t want to provoke the Soviet Union.
In those days, reporters knew what they could get away with.
“You couldn’t criticize President Tito, first of all,” Vasic said. “You could discuss, up to a certain point, the wisdom of government moves, if you were skilled enough. You wouldn’t touch the great big Soviet Union, even with a very long pole. The policy was not to provoke them to anything. But no one was forced to quote Tito or Lenin or Marx or anything.
“It was soft-core totalitarianism. If you were a good reporter, they couldn’t run you. Until Mr. Milosevic came.”
A fate worse than firing
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic gained power in the late 1980s after Tito’s death and amid the disintegration of Yugoslavia. That, Vasic said, was when controls tightened, journalists became government puppets and propaganda became the only name of the game.
Vasic wasn’t fired from Nin. He was rendered useless instead.
Srdja Popovic, a lawyer who defended Yugoslav dissidents, said that “when Mr. Milosevic came to power in Serbia, he did what all dictators did: He put the lights out. . . . All of a sudden everybody was speaking in one single voice.”
The communist world was crumbling then, and suddenly Yugoslavia’s future-always so securely in the hands of the state-was uncertain. Its relatively high standard of living slipped; people grew anxious, worried. Ethnic conflicts, long squelched by communism, flared.
“There was a lot of frustration, a lot of fear about the future,” Popovic said. “Then the demagogues stepped in and realized it was their chance. They played on those frustrations and whipped them into paranoia everywhere.”
In Popovic’s view, Milosevic in Serbia and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman used ethnic tensions for personal gain.
“The demagogues were pushing into a showdown,” he said. “They were actually instrumental to each other’s success. Mr. Milosevic helped Mr. Tudjman come to power in Croatia and he, in turn, helped Milosevic.”
Popovic and a few friends discussed starting a privately owned newspaper, one that would be a “very modest attempt” to keep Yugoslavia together, stem the rising nationalist tide and promote peace.
About that time, Vasic showed up at Popovic’s door, asking for legal help. He charged that Nin was refusing to let him work for his money.
“Most of us were reduced to a cleaning lady’s salary and we couldn’t publish-the usual trick used all around the world,” Vasic said. “I was asking for assignments, I got them, but they didn’t get published. There were all sorts of excuses. The excuse I loved was that I didn’t have the proper attitude toward Croats. I was suspected of liking them.
“Just for fun,” Vasic said, “I thought I’d try to sue.” But when he went to the lawyer’s office, Popovic had a better idea.
“I told him to forget it,” Popovic said. “Better to start our own.”
The best were unemployed
About a dozen people were involved in starting Vreme by then, all carefully chosen to create a vibrant newsroom atmosphere. Its founders had a choice of reporters, Popovic said, because thanks to censorship, “the best journalists were in the streets.”
Many were old friends, now joined together in a cause. Popovic was the main investor.
“I put $100,000 into it, which was enough for eight issues. Nobody thought it would survive,” he said. “I fell in love with the project. I kept pouring money into it. I just couldn’t bear Mr. Milosevic’s glee over our failure. And it was exciting-it was my first encounter with the media business, and I loved the adventure.”
Popovic would invest $600,000 before the magazine, which began in 1990, turned the corner and started showing a small profit last year, he said.
Vreme is housed in the cramped rooms of the upper floors of a downtown Belgrade office building. Visitors stream in and out; a short-wave radio often blares from a desktop.
Vasic sat at a corner desk recently, a mysterious bottle of home-brewed liquor at his side, which he sampled liberally as he worked. Other reporters, hunched over computers in the hectic room, looked up long enough to take a drink.
Another day, a French camera crew crowded in, filming as Vasic talked to reporters from Japan and England. He showed a booklet Vreme helped put together, the “Balkan Survival Guide for Sensible Journalists (Compiled by Local Hacks to Prevent More Losses of Lives).”
Foreign journalists seem to flock to Vreme, one of only a few media outlets here that are considered independent.
“The Serbian media lies, the Croatian media lies, the Muslim media lies,” said Bosnian-Serb journalist Tamara Radlovic. “The real truth doesn’t exist anywhere. But something like it-something like the truth-exists in that magazine.”
Proof of normalcy
But recognition here in Serbia is another matter.
“You can get in a personal depression because there aren’t too many readers, there’s not too much outcome,” said Peter Lukovic, deputy editor in chief. “We know we can’t change the world, but sometimes you think everything is futile. That’s one reason there’s a lot of alcohol in this magazine, floating around. And one reason readers come up here to talk.”
Vreme’s circulation is about 25,000, indicating that many Serbs, especially those outside Belgrade, never see it. War and United Nations sanctions have contributed to out-of-control inflation, and few people have enough money to buy magazines.
Generally, those who disagree with Vreme don’t read it, Lukovic said. But he said it does serve a purpose for its regular readers. “It’s proof to them that they’re normal, a mirror of their thoughts. They read it and say: `Thank God, I’m normal. Somebody thinks like me.’ “
Sometimes there’s a reader who doesn’t agree.
“I have, at times, gotten threatening phone calls and letters,” Vasic said. “But these are amateurs. We deal with them in a very vulgar manner-the Serbian language is very rich.”
Recently, Milosevic has done an about-face on the war and has started pushing for peace in Bosnia. But the views presented by the state-controlled media are still far from Vreme’s.
Recently, Vreme ran one of the goriest stories of the war, Vasic said, detailing Serb atrocities that still go unmentioned by other Serb news outlets.
“A lady called and said, `I read all of it and I had to call to say that nothing is true,’ ” Vasic recalled. “I said, `Lady, I’d really love if nothing was true, but it is. We think it’s our duty to be objective.’
“She said: `I can’t take it. Why do you have to be so objective?’
“I think when we’re able to shake someone’s beliefs, we’ve done a lot, even if it’s only one person,” Vasic said. “You have it on the record, for the record. What we don’t have here is remorse. We are in utter peace with ourselves. We’ve been against the war, against the killing, since the very beginning.”
The government never retaliates, despite Vreme’s constant attacks against Serb war atrocities and the Milosevic government. That makes Serbia different from Croatia, where practically no remnant of a free press remains.
Popovic, who now lives in Connecticut, sometimes urges Vreme to censor itself.
He tells reporters that “they’d be more efficient in forming public opinion if they tried to compromise just a little bit, tried to get just a little closer to the mainstream. They moralize a lot, and if you want to change somebody’s attitude, you don’t tell him he stinks, because that’s the end of the conversation.
“I say, `Try to show a little understanding,’ ” Popovic said. “But they’re angry. They can’t do it. They’re angry, overwhelmed, exhausted. If only the war would disappear, and they could go back to covering everyday news.”
