By Masha Gessen
I arrive in Belgrade bearing a box of Pampers. A wizened man at the bus station in Zagreb talked me into taking it for his grandchild, whom he has never seen. In Zagrab, the capitel of Croatia, we stood together in a small crowd milling around a bus that would ostensibly take me to Hungary; in fact, it would stop briefly late at night in the medieval central square of a tiny Hungarian town to meet up with a co-conspirator bus that would finish the trip to Belgrade. There is no direct route between the two hostile cities. The border between Croatia and Serbia has been closed to the generell population since 1991. The phone lines have been cut as long. Having convinced me to take the Pampers on my 13-hour journey, the old man ran off, reappearing a few minutes later with a can of Diet Coke and a package of sweet wafers: my reward. "We leave Croatia and go to Slovenia to call Belgrade," he told, opening his worn billford to show photographs of his two daughters who live there.
That's exactly what e-mail is for, 1 thought, adopting
the righteously enthusiastic tone of Eric Bachman, the
founder of ZaMir Transnational Net. ZaMir means "for
peace" in Serbo-Croatian, Transnational means "across
the borders of post-Yugoslav countries," and Net is more
like a fistful of tangled fishing line tossed out between
cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the rump Yugo-
slavia, and a server in Germany.
Bachman, a Vietnam-era conscientious objector who
has been living in Germany since 1969, has the neatly
trimmed look and ringing voice of a management con-
sultant and the beard, plaid flannel shirt, and stupefying-
ly large belly of a European frontiersman gone to pot. For
most of the last 26 years, the 47-year-old American has
been teaching peopie the basics of what is known as
nonviolent conflict resolution. He says things like 1 was
so angry when Chernobyl happened," and after a split-
second pause collapses into a girlish laugh, as if to say, 1
do get emotional, don't 1? Only someone with that much
faith in individual agency could have thought up an elec-
tronic network that would keep the peoples of what
used to be Yugoslavia virtually connected - in spite of
war, international sanctions, and spiraling ethnic enmity.
When 1 appear in my friend Lepa's Belgrade doorway
at six in the morning, Pampers in hand, she forces her
eyes open to stare at me in blank disbelief. The e-mail
message I sent from Zagreb to inform her I was coming
has not arrived. But that doesn't surprise her, nor should
it: the ZaMir system in Zagreb (ZaMir-zg) has been down
for most of the last three days, and the Beigrade ZaMir
(ZaMir-bg), in her experience, is down every Sunday, and
1 had the bad sense to arrive on a Monday, and my mes-
sage won't arrive till that night (three days en route), and
anyway, everything is relative where time, communica-
tion, and life near a war zone are concerned. Take dialing
in for example. 1 dial in to an account at the University of
Belgrade, but after 77 attempts, my PowerBook grows
utterly disoriented and begins emitting desperate busy-
signal sounds, which continue ghostlike even after I'm
sure I've disconnected the phone line. Lepa observes my
distress with the sage tolerance of an older comrade. 1
used to think eight attempts was a lot," she says, "then
12, then 30, and then 1 got a message from this man in
Sarajevo saying hed made 400 that day."
Lepa Mladjenovid is the quintessential ZaMir user:
a hyperactivist in the antiwar, feminist, and gay-and-
lesbian movements who uses e-mail to organize joint
actions with activists in Zagreb as well as to keep in
touch with friends in Sarajevo and with acquaintances
all over the world. 1 pass my evenings with her to the
insistent accompaniment of dial tones emanating from
her laptop; conversation comes to a reverent halt every
time we hear a modern signal that just might result in a
connection. (Fortunately, like a third of the 2,350 ZaMir
users, Lepa uses off-line software that uploads and
downloads messages automatically.)
Unlike the rest of the Eastern bloc, Yugoslavia as a
whole was not separated from the world by an iron cur-
tain. Belgrade residents shopped for clothes in Italy,
young people from Zagreb tookjobs in Germany, and
alternatively minded Yugoslavs like the ZaMir set -
Ljubljana rockers, Zagreb environmentalists - were
members of corresponding communities centered in
Western Europe. After the war began, these cosmopoli-
tans, accustomed to crossing borders at will, suddenly
found themselves cut off from comrades in other parts
of what had once been their nation.
The idea behind ZaMir was to connect groups fighting
against war in a country that was being ripped apart by
it. The first two ZaMir centers began in June 1992 in
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and Belgrade, the capital
of Serbia and the rump Yugoslavia. In early 1994, cen-
ters in Sarajevo, the besieged capital of Bosnia-Herze-
govina, and Ljubljana, the peaceful capital of Slovenia,
were wired. Recent additions include in November 1994
Prigtina, the capital of Kosovo, the majority-Albanian
region under Serbian control within the borders of the
rump Yugoslavia; and this past spring the Bosnian city
of Tuzla. Even the founders of ZaMir seem awed by the
fact that an e-mail network has taken root in the
scorched Balkan earth. 1 mean, people actually have
ongoing conferences across these borders!" exclaims
Bachman. In the words of Wam Kat, a Dutch activist who
has been working on ZaMir-Zagreb since the beginning,
"The most ridiculous, idiotic thing has happened - a
country at war with no money now has the highest per-
centage of e-mail users in the peace movement: every
post-Yugoslav group active in environment, peace, et
cetera, is on ZaMir."
Kat is a 40-year-old globetrotting troublemaker whose
personal mythology is nearly rich enough to rival the
convoluted history of his latest adopted land. The child
of Holocaust survivors, he was wounded in Jerusalem as
a child during the Yom Kippur War; he claims to be an
heir to roughly a third of the Trans-Siberian Railroad; his
dissertation, written in 1977, was a utopian fantasy
about miniature computers; he has 14 brothers, two of
whom are related to him by blood and 12 of whom are
adopted, including three boys saved from Nazi concen-
tration camps and six gay teenagers put out by their
families; of his two brothers by blood, one is a juggler
endlessly traveling by bus between the South of France
and a natural farm in Estonia while the other is setting
up grass-roots print shops in Borneo. Wam Kat has
worked in the peace and environmental movements in
Europe for the last 20 years. With the details of his dra-
matic, novelistic background so difficult to best, it's no
wonder he has spent the last three years in Zagreb,
becoming famous lodally for his role in the ZaMir net-
work, for co-founding a volunteer reconstruction project
in the demolished town of Pakrac, and for posting the
Zagreb Diary online, an ongoing daily chronicle of the
vagaries of a Western European peaceniks life in Croatia.
There is an advantage to having this war in the heart of
Europe, as both local and foreign rhetoric inaccurately
but stubbornly dub the region. For one thing, European
do-gooders - that peculiar social layer composed of
unemployed would-be hippies, draft dodgers, and oth-
ers Kat calls "refugees from their own cultures" - no
longer have to travel to another continent to engage in
exotically satisfying physical labor; they can help rebuild
bombed-out houses an overnight train ride from home.
Even better, Zagreb is a nice town, dotted with lovely
parks and pleasant cafds set off by ensembles of cream,
brown, and gray architectural symbols of Habsburg
refinement. Since the war of 1991, which touched Zag-
reb briefly but devastated areas an hour or two to the
west and south, the Croatian government has [avishly
funded the restoration of the capital, turning it into a
conspicuously shiny example of what the heart of Eu-
rope would look like if it were in Zagreb.
Zagreb is a uniquely nice place to fight against a war,
and running an electronic-mail network is a uniquely
nice way to do it. 1t gives me a good conscience," bub-
bles Andreas J„ger, 21, an apparent surfer wannabe from
Germany who used to run the Zagreb system but has
now moved to the Adriatic coast, where he
dispenses tech support via a cellular tele-
phone. One surmises that if J„ger were back
in Germany, he would be doing something
a lot less fun and satisfying: his military ser-
vice. Like all but one other member of the
ZaMir-zg support fraternity, J„ger sports
shoulder-length hair. His support-team-
mates are Kat; Burkie, a silent, disheveled
character of indeterminate age who was a
sergeant in the German army until meeting
Kat 10 years ago, when he developed the
habit of popping up everywhere Kat goes;
Ognjen Tus, 45, a techno-hippie who main-
tains he drives one of the last Volkswagen
Bugs made in Yugoslavia; and Srdjan
Dvornik, a weary 42-year-old intellectual
political activist.
In each city, the ZaMirites seern to have
a distinct group identity, and most of them
have never met their counterparts in the
other cities. Only Bachman is acquainted
with all the systems operators - there are
two or three of theffi at each node. Some
ZaMirites are geeks, some are intensely polit-
ical, and the Zagreb ZaMirites are notably
cool and generally pleased with themselves
for running such a nifty project.
No more than two of them at a time could
possibly fit into the ZaMir-zg domicile, a
pine-paneled roorn that in summer heat
produces a distinct sauna effect. The six
computers that comprise the Zagreb node
reside on pressboard atop sawhorses. The
file server has been temporarily stripped of
its case, which, technology aggressively
demystified in keeping with ZaMir's use-it-
don't-fetishize-it attitude, has been adapted
as an ineffectual but symbolic liquor cabinet.
For my first two nights in Zagreb, Kat sleeps
stretched out between the two makeshift
tables: he has just rented a new apartment in
Zagreb, but he-doesn't have the keys.
The part of the world that used to be
called Yugoslavia has a peculiar effect on
journalists and other writers: we start ob-
sessively culling vignettes we claim embody
the spirit or logic of the whole place. A town
comes to signify the entire country, a person
its long history, and a lost puppy the over-
whelming scope of the refugee problem.
Perhaps there is simply too much confused
and disheveled life to grok in this land,
where a message from Zagreb to Belgrade
(a six-hour drive before obstacles caused by
the war) needs to travel between 4 and 48
hours via a server in Bielefeld, Germany.
Perhaps it is simply the Balkan trend toward
compartmentalization and miniaturization.
Whatever the reason, the story of Wam Kat's
keys strikes me as properly symbolic of the
entire ZaMir phenomenon.
This is how it went: After being put out by
his girlfriend, Kat rented a new apartment
that had belonged to Kathryn Turnipseed.
This.being the Balkans, she is a separate sto-
ry - a 32-year-old former commercial banker
from New York City who has spent the last
year traversing the post-Yugosiav countries
training women to use ZaMir. Traveling
under the code name Electronic Witches,
Turnipseed is a one-woman campaign aimed
at correcting the male domination of tech-
nology (the first and only female ZaMir sys-
op, in Sarajevo, came onboard just a few
months ago) while helping the various wo-
men's groups working against the war (in all
towns made up largely of refugees, there are
disproportionate numbers of both women
and children). A lot of her students have
never touched a computer. To help thern
overcome fear of high technology, she says,
1 compare computers to things like ovens
and cars. Just like a car, you don't know
what's happening in the engine but you can
still use it, and if something happens, you
call a technician."
But back to the keys: Turnipseed was not
in Zagreb when Kat hoped to bed down in
his new dwelling. When asked where 'he
might be, ZaMirites gave a variety o an wers
from which one could deduce that she had
moved to the Bosnian city of Mostar. As it
turns out, she had moved - across town -
not the border, but was at that moment at a
women's conference in Macedonia, where
she had not received messages. She had one
set of keys, and three more sets were locked
inside the apartment.
Which may not sum up all of the former
Yugoslavia, but it does capture the essence
of the ZaMir network: at the same time the
keys were so close and yet not within reach,
all the ZaMir-zg software and history was
lost somewhere on the three 500-Mbyte
hard drives but utterly inaccessible, because
for two days, the drives had been insisting
they were blank. Attempts to download the
software from Germany were foiled by bad
phone lines. And the backups - the backups
were with Eric Bachrnan, who was "somewhere
between NewYork, Bielefeld,
Tuzla, Belgrade, and Pristina," accord-
ing to a message from Ognjen Tus. "The lat-
est message is that his notebook computer
is broken."
So far, and yet so close: on the first day
of the disaster, Bachman was actuallyjust
a phone call away, at his home in Germany.
On the second day, he was on his way to
Zagreb but couldn't have gotten in touch
with ZaMir because all four phones were off
the hook to prevent users from connecting
to 1.5 Gbytes of empty disk space. Bachman's
notebook was indeed broken, so he was
traveling around with a portable hard drive
- a typically ZaMir low-tech solution to a
high-tech failure.
There is something mind-boggling about
such inefficiency and rumor running a net-
work. Turnipseed suggests that because
everyone is wired, there is no need to keep
one another abreast of physical where-
abouts. But perhaps all the entanglements
In a city where life is reduced to survival,
the proper function of an electronic communication
is to testify to this accomplishment.
and failures also have something to do with
the romance of the war zone, where nothing
should ever work too smoothly and no one
should ever get too comfortable. Perhaps,
too, it is the way of this region, where myths
are born out of thin air and carried through
generations, and where personal fictions are
sometimes the only means of escape.
This is a place where many people are but
the disembodied memories they have left
behind, while others wish they were disem-
bodied - and not just because they have no
place to sleep. "The whole region is a virtual
reality," claims Wam Kat. "Bosnia is a virtual
country, because its citizens are scattered all
over the world."
But Bosnia is an actuality as well, a reality
of relentless carnage, dead children, and
people reduced once again to starving in
the basements of their buildings while,
perhaps, upstairs a modern is blaring, miss-
ing a potential connection in a rare moment
of telephone lines and electricity working
in concert. The most dramatic part of ZaMir
is its link to Bosnia, a year-and-a-half-old
communication miracle maintained in spite
of regular power outages, nearly nonexis-
tent telephone connections, and, of course,
shelling. Messages from Sarajevo to the
outside world pass through Zagreb to
Bielefeld, which in turn distributes the mes-
sages to Belgrade or the Internet. In April
of this year, Bachman hooked up Tuzla,
another Bosnian city.
There are more than 700 users in Sarajevo,
though many of them do not have their own
modems, and some don't even own com-
puters. They come into the ZaMir-sa office
to upload or type in their messages. In a city
where life is reduced to survival, the proper
function of an electronic communication is
to testify to this accomplishment, to let oth-
ers know, and to locate the missing. Since
the initial wiring of the Sarajevo node, it has
been used largely to help friends and rela-
tives separated by war to find one another.
Alexander Olujid - or Sale, as everyorie
calls him - was "found" by a couple of
friends still in Sarajevo, which the 16-year-
old Sale fled with his sister three years ago.
In April 1994, he received a phone call that
passed on a ZaMir e-mail message from
high school friends still in Sarajevo. ®i was
very intrigued," he explains. "How did the
message get here? When they told me by
computer, 1 was interested and asked if they
needed any heip." Soon he was heading up
the letters project in Belgrade.
I wrote to Sale before coming to Belgrade,
and he heartily invited me over e-mail to the
ZaMir-bg office for beer, which, he wrote,
lasts from about 4 in the afternoon till 8:30.
By the time 1 get to Belgrade, though, Sale is
nowhere to be found; he is in Nova Pazova, a
tiny town where, the hope is, he can evade
police and soldiers carrying out the mass
mobilization of refugees from Bosnia.
Nova Pazova is a bumpy 50-minute bus
ride from Belgrade (we pass a sign to Zagreb
- a sort of 1 exist," with no kilometrage
and pointing in an indeterminate
direction, which is just as well, since you
can't get there from here), and the entire
dusty town smells like a chicken coop.
Sale, now a 19-year-old with a disarmingly
downy upper lip, sits on a fold-out velveteen
couch, lanky arms stuck between bony
knees: idle restlessness embodied. His
friends from the Centre for Anti-War Action,
where the Belgrade ZaMir is housed, are
supposed to be on their way over with a
Computer and a modern so he can get back
to work from his hiding place.
1 ask him how long he has been in hiding.
He flashes an embarrassed smile: 1 am not
in hiding. It's sort of a vacation for me."
Which, translated, means something like, 1
am sick to death of politics, and that is the
last thing 1 want to talk to you about."
The ZaMir letters project relies on a score
of volunteers in Sarajevo and Tuzla to re-
ceive messages from ZaMir's Belgrade office
""The whole region is a virtual reality,"' claims
Wam Kat. "Bosnia is a virtual country because
its citizens are scattered all over the world."
and pass them on to addressees by phone.
"There are a lot of things that are needed
for this to work," says Sale. "ZaMir-Sarajevo
has to be working, the volunteer has to have
electricity and a phone and be in the same
part of town as the recipient - you can't
expect someone to carry a message in those
conditions." The most a volunteer can be
asked to do is struggle with the phone to
read a message aloud to the addressee.
Most phones do not reach beyond a par-
ticular neighborhood, however, so Sale has
an incomparable asset as coordinator: he
remembers what Sarajevo telephone ex-
changes are located in which neighbor-
hoods. He estimates that 1,000 people have
exchanged between 5,000 and 6,000 mes-
sages with friends and relatives in Sarajevo
in the past year.
But his work is emphatically not political.
He just loves Computers, he says, this boy
who was forced to leave high school after
his second year, and at ZaMir-bg, he tells
me, he gets to do what he loves.
As much as the Zagreb ZaMirites enjoy the
glamour of their political mission, their
Belgrade counterparts shrink from it in hor-
ror, proclaiming their techno geek-essence
repeatedly: being political in Belgrade is too
hard. It means responsibility. It means cry-
ing, like Lepa Miadjenovid does, when you
read an e-mail message from a friend in
Sarajevo who describes "the vertical sound
of the raindrops falling and the horizontal
noise of the shells flying." No one is relaxed
in Belgrade anymore; it has a lot fewer cafds
than Zagreb, and in those it does have, peo-
ple do not lean back leisurely: they lean in
intensely. In the view of the Western world,
Bosnia-Herzegovina is the residence of
Victimhood, Croatia is the Potential New
Democracy in the heart of Europe, and
Serbia is the seat of Evil. From within Serbia,
people have had to choose between the
tears and weight of responsibility, rabid
nationalist fervor, and forced de-politiciza-
tion; the Belgrade ZaMirites have tried for
the last. And as Zagreb takes its virtual con-
nection to the rest of the world as its due
(it is the heart of Europe, after all, and
carries none of the responsibility for the
Balkan disasters), Belgrade is scrambling
for that connection desperately, hopeful
that through the Internet it can become a
part of the civilized world.
In addition to Sale, the ZaMir-bg team
includes Saga Petrovid and Miroslav Hristo-
dulo, two 23-year-old engineering-student
friends who want nothing more than a
full Internet connection for the rump
Yugoslavia. Of all the post-Yugoslav coun-
tries, full Internet connections exist only
in Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia, though
in Croatia, ZaMir's struggle to get its own
gateway has so far been fruitless. The
republics of Montenegro and Serbia, includ-
ing the Albanian enclave of Kosovo, had
an Internet connection through Austria
starting in 1989, but with the imposition of
international sanctions, this line to the
outside world was cut.
Close to two years ago, Hristodulo,
Petrovid, and about 200 kindred spirits,
all of whom had met through various Inter-
net-related newsgroups on Yugoslav BBSes,
decided to form the Yugoslav Computer
Communications Association (YuCCA),
devoted to devising an on-ramp to the
information superhighway. The first step,
according to the group's mernbers, is a local
UUCP network, which they have lovingly
dubbed the Yu-Internet - sort of a virtual
Internet. "This is so we learn the protocol for
when we get Internet," Petrovid explains,
batting his thick eyelashes like a 5-year-old
trying to rationalize opening his Christmas
presents too soon. The second step is - the
World Wide Web.
At the Organizational Sciences Faculty
of Belgrade University, Professor Bo2e
Radenkovid proudly demonstrates the World
Wide Web. An extraordinarily large and
bearded man, Radenkovid is the head of the
This is the stuff of exquisite inspiration:
Journalists and activists succeeding against wartime
odds. Except the wartime odds are winning.
government's information-superhighway
task force, formed around the same time as
YuCCA. The government of the despised,
boycotted rump Yugoslavia is real keen on
getting on the Net.
"This is a conference on communications,"
booms the giant Professor. "See, these are
the presenters. This is very interesting!'
As interesting as dozens of digitized photo-
graphs of middle-aged gray-suited men
could possibly be. Radenkovid uses the
phrase "very interesting" exactly 38 times;
16 of those times he adds "for you." What is
very interesting forme is that this entire
group of very enthusiastic computer scien-
tists seems to have forgotten the meaning
of the first two Ws in WWW.
"They have very nice World Wide Web
at the Electrotechnics Faculty," Professor
Radenkovid informs me. "And this presenta-
tion is accessible to all 1,200 users of the
Yu-Internet."
Perhaps they stand for "We Want."
The more isolated an area is, the greater
the information deficit among its residents
and the more exposed their desire for a con-
nection to the outside world becomes.
Perhaps no place - certainly no place that's
not currently being shelled - projects the
same feeling of isolation as Kosovo. Kosovo
is a disputed region of about 2 million
ethnic Albanians who are living in a police
state ruied by a tiny Serb majority. Since
1991, Albanians have been shut out of all
the official institutions, including the media,
the theater, and the education system.
They have formed a parallel underground
government and education infrastructure.
Everyone 1 know in Kosovo is concerned first
and foremost with how to get his or her
passport, which has either expired and not
been renewed or was taken away by the
Serbian police; second on the agenda is the
installation and maintenance of a satellite
dish that allows the peopie of Kosovo to
watch Albanian television, which broad-
casts for two hours starting at 6:30 in the
evening - the streets are empty until 8:30.
The average Kosovo Albanian makes no
money. The average working Kosovo Alban-
ian would have to labor for two or three
months just to buy the simplest satellite
dish at 450 German marks. Yet the compa-
nies that import them claim to have sold
110,000 since last year.
It is little wonder that the people of Kosovo
who hear about the miracle of electronic
communications become obsessed with
the idea. Akan Ismaili, the tiny 21-year-old
administrator of the Priftina ZaMir node, says
he read about the Internet in high school and
three years ago took a job with an insurance
company solely because there was a modern
in the office. He used it after hours to call
BBSes wherever he could find them. Last
year, he sent an article about the Internet to
Koha, an Albanian-language weekly magazine,
and was asked to travel the 50
kilometers to the Kosovo capital of Pristina,
where Bachman and the staff of Koha
were cooking up ZaMir's Kosovo node.
Having spent his formative years fantasiz-
ing about the Internet, Ismaili appears dis-
tinctly more comfortable with computers
than with people. After asking me a few
questions, he gets an understanding look in
his eyes: the keywordsjournalist, Eastern
Europe, English language have computed.
"Ah, so you are like a newsgroup," he says
with relief, performing the information-age
corollary of anthropomorphizing.
The only person Ismaili likes is Zana. In
fact, he seems to be in love with her. 'She is a
beautiful young wom„n," he says, stretching
the oooh in beautiful to the point of ecstasy.
"She's the good fairy of the woods. She helps
people in need get out." Zana is the Prigtina
ZaMir node. The name was chosen because
11 za mir" is Serbo-Croatian, the alienating
language of the oppressor. Zana is a favorite
Albanian folk image as well as a popular girls
Frorn some angles, Pakrac looks like a decaying
skeleton of a town. But there are about 4,000 residents
left here, and one stumbies upon evidence of life.
name, making the computer network for
Ismaili just another adorable Prigtina infant.
lt is a modest undertaking in Priftina, and
an uphill battle. At the moment, Zana-pr is
two 386 computers without hard drives or
monitors, hooked up to the local-area net-
work in the offices of Koha. The system has
80 users, many of whom are foreigners work-
ing for international relief organizations.
The local phone lines are so bad that an
organization wanting to use the system reg-
ularly - a magazine or a newspaper, for
example - would have to set aside a dedicat-
ed terminal to make netcall attempts all day
long. But now that Zana-pr has survived
what Ismaili calls ¯the period of childhood
diseases," he is sure it will take off.
One of the few givens of our nihilistic age
of information is that information is an
absolute value. Its free exchange is what
authoritarian regimes have done their best
to prevent. lt has been thought to topple
governments - some would say the entire
Communist bloc fell because of it - and to
start wars. Certainly, the exchange of infor-
mation - insults, rhetoric, revisionist histo-
ries - played a key role in starting the wars
that followed. Peopfe are killed for what they
know or refuse to forget. Shells are fired to
quash information.
These are some of the initial wars of
the information age (the first would proba-
bly be the real-time spectacle of the Persian
Gulf in winter 1991). Like the wars before
them, they have subjected their living vic-
tims to physical and political isolation. But
unlike those wars, they have not created
information vacuums.
With the possible exception of obscure
Macedonia (the only post-Yugoslav country
without a ZaMir node), all Yugoslav-successor governments have attempted to control
the media. On the whole, their efforts -
including Yugoslav president Milosevic's
yearlong all-out war on the independent
media - have failed spectaculariy. Indepen-
dent newspapers survive, though, like Bel-
grade's Nasha Borba (Our Struggle) or
Prigtina's Bujku, they consist of scores of
journalists stuffed into small flats adapted
as office space. They owe their survival in
large part to electronic communications.
Shoestring operations with offices that may
as well be virtual and are paperless of neces-
sity (the price of paper is prohibitive) receive
stories via modern - often via ZaMir - from
their correspondents in various countries,
and from AIM, the Alternative Information
Agency, an association of about 70 post-
Yugoslavjournalists who use a closed Paris-
centered computer network to supply
stories free of charge to independent media
throughout the former Yugoslavia.
On the face of it, this is the stuff of ex-
quisite inspiration: journalists and activists
succeeding against wartime odds in making
an alternative perspective public. Except
the wartime odds are winning. The antiwar
groups and independent media in the
region may have succeeded in getting
hooked up, but this does not appear to have
moved the war any closer to its end. The
most tangible things activists do is mend
people and buildings broken by war, often
only to have them smashed again. This is
what happened in Pakrac in the disputed
region of Western Siavonia, where Wam Kat
and other volunteers had been working for
two years only to have their office used as a
base by Croatian forces that overran the
long-suffering town on May 1. Still, in Pakrac,
the conviction that information must flow
has not been abandoned: in addition to
helping rebuild houses, Kat and his team
continue to teach kids and women the
basics of e-mail. Their impact can easily be
debated - 1 wonder who reads all this stuff,"
Kathryn Turnipseed laments, even after the
monumental effort of training 110 women to
use computer communications software and
to put their stories on the Net. But the effort
does leave incongruous traces.
There was the time, for instance, about a
year and a half ago when Wam Kat handed
his notebook to a 15-year-old Pakrac girl
named Emira Demiri and asked her to type
in her story. "Believe me, it wasn't easy," she
explains. "Its bad enough just having it in
your head, not sharing it, because it's yours,
even if it's bad." This was the story of seeing
her boyfriend blown up in the schoolyard,
about being hospitalized for months and
taking antidepressants for months more.
Kat posted the account instead of an install-
ment of his diary. Letters of support and
gifts poured forth in response, and another
e-mail believer was born.
Emira wears a long-sleeved Nirvana T-
shirt, a reminder both of the fact that con-
temporary war survivors grew up in the glo-
bal village (where they watch MTV) and of
another great Pakrac e-mail success: Last
year, a group of Pakrac girls sent a message
to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic urging him
not to commit suicide like Kurt Cobain, espe-
cially in light of how important his music had
been to the girls'own struggle to survive.
Novoselic responded with assurances of his
intention to stay among the living and a
US$60,000 donation to the Pakrac Recon-
struction Project. Novoselic, it turns out,
bears the name of one of the towns along
the road from Zagreb to Pakrac, segments of
which are ghost land - towns destroyed and
abandoned - but the train still stops there,
as though driven by motor memory.
From some angles, Pakrac looks no
different: a decaying skeleton of a town.
But there are about 4,000 residents left here
- about half its previous population - and
one finds evidence of life, like a volunteer-
organized youth party on the Friday night
I'm there.
Down a few crumbling steps, around the
corner of what may, if there were a light
source, turn out to be either a covered alley
or a large hallway, about 50 teenagers in
plaid flannel and Nirvana T-shirts are packed
into an old classroom. A square white sheet
on the far wall implores in crayon colors:
BELIVE IN GOD [sic]
TOBEGOOD
In front of it, the worlds smallest girl singer
in several layers of grunge croons speeded-up
Beaties covers. The teenagers toss up gangly
bodies haphazardly, their skinny Umbs flying
overhead. The Pakrac volunteers - the same
twentysomethings who have been rebuilding
houses and teaching e-mail - stand back
looking distinctly older, both wearily satisfied
and vaguely dismayed.
"What the volunteers are doing here is
normaiization," Emira explains.
This oasis of frenzied energy in the middie
of a dark, deserted, and destroyed town feels
anything but normal. But then everything is
relative where time, communication, and
war are concerned.
Sale told me he's given up on trying to
discuss politics with friends in Sarajevo
"because all they want is to feel normal." He
explained: 1 wrote to one friend saying, 1
know how you feel: you have no heat and no
food. And he wrote back,'l have my humani-
tarian aid and my firewood, and 1 am fine.-
A couple of years ago, my Belgrade friend
Lepa used to obsessively repeat a line in a
letter from a Sarajevo friend: "What 1 need
you can't give me." No one can. No one can
bring back the dead, guarantee that the new
roof won't be blown off the house just like
the old one, or create any sense of security
for a single person or group living in what
used to be Yugoslavia. Perhaps the best
anyone can do is play the good fairy of the
woods who helps people in need find, if only
virtually, a way out.
Masha Gessen (mgessen@glas.apc.org) is a Moscow-based journalist.
Wired, November 1995