This is Serbia Calling by Matthew CollinLeadtext: "We are the generation which has ceased to exist." Belgrade rock singer (2000)Welcome to the surreal life. A city where everything is permitted, and nothing is permitted. Where anything is possible, and everything is impossible. Where everything appears normal, but nothing is as it seems. Welcome to Belgrade, city of chaos. In Serbia''s capital, just over 12 months after the end of the Western bombing, few signs of airborne destruction remain - only the stacks of anti-NATO souvenir postcards on streetside stalls and a few collapsed state buildings, expertly gutted by the precision hits of smart bombs. War tourists and thrill-seekers looking for a holiday in someone else''s misery will not find much to delight them here.
When the sun goes down and the nocturnal parade begins, cafés bustle with light and music as the city comes out to play. People look well-dressed, well-fed. This could, on first impressions, be any central European capital. It is, as so many things are here, just an illusion - one which quickly evaporates to reveal the truth beneath. In the designer bars of the Old Town, the soundtrack might be the latest Western dance imports, but the babble of voices attests to very different circumstances. It is the peculiar quirks of language which give the game away, words or phrases used in an unfamiliar manner. However a conversation begins, it will inevitably drift towards a discussion of ''the situation'', towards politics, what is happening ''inside'' and ''outside'', and towards the one over-riding, universal desire: to live a ''normal'' life. In the West, ''normality'' is virtually taken for granted: it is the perennial, unchanging state of affairs.
It is unremarkable, and thus rarely mentioned. Yet its meaning could not be more different for the young people of Belgrade - for this is a generation whose normality has been snatched away, and replaced with uncertainty, poverty, war and violence. Those who grew up in Belgrade in the nineties were the dispossessed - a generation for whom time stood still. As one local record producer says: "The years from 20 to 30, these are the best years of your life. And they were stolen from me." Under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, normality is a dream, a distant and uncharted Utopia; it signifies the opposite of everything that has happened to Belgrade''s citizens over the past decade: four wars; a brutal police force running rampant; riots in the streets; a state of mass psychosis generated by the shrill propaganda of television; violent xenophobia as native tongue; the militarisation of the urban landscape; all-pervasive deprivation; gangsters and war profiteers becoming the social elite, and murderers elected to parliament. They watched their lives collapse around them. Their country shrunk - from mighty Yugoslavia to the tiny, wretched pariah state called Serbia, its name a byword for atrocity the world over.
Their horizons receded. Their social lives were corroded by deprivation and the relentless silencing of alternatives. Their friends emigrated in search of life and liberty. Some were killed on the front-line. A few killed themselves slowly, with heroin or alcohol. They were discouraged from travelling outside the country, and information was prohibited from coming in from outside. Belgrade became a prison cell, with its walls slowly closing in. From a distance, the convulsions which ripped Yugoslavia apart inspired horror and disgust.
But what did it feel like, from the inside, to have ''normality'' stripped away and replaced with fear and misery? Ten years ago, if you had asked someone of 25 what life would hold for them in Belgrade over the coming decade, they might have answered with a little trepidation, but still with some hope. They would not have predicted a series of dirty wars, a mass exodus of the brightest and most talented young people, the triumph of mafia overlords, and the effective establishment of a martial dictatorship, the last of its kind in Europe. That young innocent of 1990 - if he or she existed - would most likely have left Belgrade long ago in search of peace and prosperity in America, Britain or Australia, as hundreds of thousands did during the 90s. This is not their story. Instead this is the story of those who stayed in the city, and struggled to survive, and tried their best to resist the whirlpool which dragged their lives relentlessly downwards into darkness. It is a tale of courage, foolhardiness, and a sheer bloody-minded refusal to give in, however high the odds were stacked. It focuses on a small group of idealists who simply wanted to play rock''n''roll and tell the truth about what was really going on, and the coterie of like minds which coalesced around them, warming their hands at the flickering flame, keeping their dreams alive. They were few, thousands perhaps - in Milosevic''s Belgrade, the current was so strong that many couldn''t help being swept along.
They didn''t always have the right answers. Sometimes the signal was too weak, or the transmission was fuzzy, or the interference got too strong. Sometimes there were, frankly, no answers that made any kind of sense at all in the face of the madness that reigned. What they had was a small radio station - a student channel which evolved into one of the most powerful, dynamic and challenging broadcasters in the Balkans; one which compared favourably with the finest in Europe. This story revolves around that station, Radio B92, or B2-92 as it is now known after the latest state intervention usurped its premises, its frequency and its name. B92''s tale mirrors the torrid contemporary history of Serbia - but, like all mirror images, it is an inversion, the complete opposite of Milosevic''s reality. Whatever happened in the city was reflected by B92; the political riots, the protests against the war in Bosnia, the vicious state crackdowns, the draconian laws and the bully boys in their black leather jackets, the glory days of the winter of 1996-97, when it seemed the people would finally carry all before them - and the depression which came afterwards, when little really changed. Whenever political opposition flourished, they were right there, broadcasting it and amplifying it.
Their voice could only be silenced by the crudest of interventions, and even then it returned, irrepressible, an energy which could not be destroyed. But most importantly, what they tried to do was create a parallel world, one in which people still cherished human rights and justice, in which the world wasn''t split into believers and heretics, good Serbs and delinquents, fighter for the heavenly kingdom and the evil forces of Western decadence. They dreamed of a world without borders, without xenophobia and hatred. They chose the international call-signs of techno and rock''n''roll over the parochial, folksy paeans to nationalism: the music of life over the music of death. They tried to tune into global progressive signals rather than the flatline monotone of isolation, while all around them Serbia looked inwards, gnawing on its own bones. In a country where politics and culture became one and the same - vehicles for unhappiness and oppression, orchestrated by the state and its lackeys - theirs was a vibrant cultural resistance, a unique fusion of pop culture and politics. They tried to keep alive some semblance of normal life, and of the spirit which thrived in the decade before the craziness took hold and turned them into marked men, citizens of one of the most hated nations on earth. These were not typical young people.
They did not, in many ways, represent their generation. They didn''t vote for Milosevic, nor did most of them serve in the army, or emigrate. Although they attempted to reclaim the ordinary, they were anything but. As Veran Matic, one of B92''s founders and still its central figure, says: "We were selfish, because through the station we came to create the things that we lacked and those we wanted most. We created a world to live in which was practically severed from the reality of repression that surrounded us. It was perhaps the only way we could survive." This story takes place in that parallel world, and attempts to trace its contours.