FREE PRESS ON THE HIGH SEAS

Ex-Yugoslavia: A pirate radio station broadcasts news, rock music and hope to a country at war

Niccolo Vivarelli, aboard Droit de Parole

Newsweek, August 30, 1993

HI, DADDY, I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME.

I'm OK. Where are you ?" The reedy, plaintive voice is that of Eniza Rancovic, a 3-year-old Bosnian girl separated from her parents and living now in the Ciccino Sele refugee camp near Skopje, Macedonia. Her plea will be heard throughout most of ex-Yugoslavia, relayed from a 220-foot refitted icebreaker moored at a secret spot in the Adriatic Sea. And there is a fair chance that it will help reunite the scattered Rancovic family. "Desperately Seeking" is a regular feature on Radio Brod, the sea-borne radio station that provides citizens of the war-riddled country with most of the neutral objective news they can get. The program has already brought scores of Yugoslav refugees back in touch with their loved ones.

Indeed, Radio Brod is one of the rare, positive byproducts of the grisly civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Dreamed up by an idealistic newspaper editor from Montenegro and financed mainly by the European Community, Radio Brod went on the air last April 7. The good-guy pirate station delivers a professional mix of objective news, culture, music and encouragement to the country's increasingly isolated and ill-informed population. Eight shipboard journalists, six sound engineers and 30 reporters - throughout the former Yugoslavia as well as in Geneva, Brussels, New York and Washington D.C. - prepare reliable news programs that contrast sharply with the propagandistic and self-serving broadcasts of the warring parties. Even the Serbian militia and the Yugoslav secret police tune in to Radio Brod to learn what is really happening.

Blazing sun, 16-hour shifts: The station is up and running now, but it hasn't been easy. Virtuous as it may be, Radio Brod blatantly violates the 1982 Montego Bay Convention banning broadcasting from international waters. The tiny Caribbean Republic of St. Vincent and Grenadines was the only country prepared to register the radio-ship, Droit de Parole (Freedom of Speech). Then the government of St. Vincent caved in to pressure from Serbia and silenced the station for most of July. Counterpressure from many other countries reversed St. Vincent reversal, and Radio Brod is now back on the air. Life is still no picnic. The journalists put in 16-hour shifts under a blazing August sun and the constant possibility of a torpedo attack. But the daredevil newsmen and women are not cowed. On off-hours, they sunbathe on the ship's landing ramp (known as the beach) and dabble their toes in a sea reputed to be infested with sharks.

Everybody on board accepts the risks and hardships gladly. "This war is not my war," says Jasmina Teodosijevic, 43, the respected former foreign editor of the Belgrade daily Borba. "This war was created by misinformation. We are trying to put things in perspective so that people can perhaps start communication again." Says Darko Rundek, 37, a rock star and former director of Radio Zagreb: "We have to look to the future, not backward." Rundek, who is now Radio Brod's music director, refuses to broadcast the music of Zagreb's all-too-short cultural awakening of the 1980s, lest it reawaken nationalistic "nostalgia in Croatian listeners."

Teodosijevic is a Serb and Rundek is a Croat. The Radio Brod team includes respected and well-known journalists from each of ex-Yugoslavia's warring regions, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians as well as Muslims, plus a French ship captain and a mixed French and Indian crew. This ecumenism is intentional and, indeed, central to the Station's mission. In a recent interview broadcast over Brod, Srdjan Karanovic, a well-known Belgrade film director, said he would like to make a movie one day about the disasters befalling his country, but only if he could use "a crew from all parts of Yugoslavia". Nikifor Simsic, 49, a journalist from Sarajevo, points to his own family as an example of the war's senselessness: "My father is a Serb, my mother is a Catholic, my wife is a Muslim. So what are my children?"

Most of the station's crew subscribes to Teodosijevic's claim that "in ex-Yugoslavia, there is much less hate, anger and resentment than you might imagine." And it is their job to prove it. No one really knows how far they are succeeding, but they have already taped 3.000 refugee messages since April. A hundred letters have come in from teenage rock, jazz and rap fans. The station is regularly blasted by the partisan papers on all sides. But perhaps the strongest indication that Radio Brod works is the story of Mirna Imamovic, 30, a Bosnian journalist who now runs the station's "Desperately Seeking" feature. Through her own program, she found her mother after an eight-month separation.