Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
“Because we believe that wars are behind us, we expect the student newspaper Index will have a future in the times to come!” I said this in January 1992 for the Student Television in Novi Sad, dressed in a funny mustard-colored suit, and lived to tell the tale.
Three months later the bloody war in Bosnia broke out. Complete editorial board of the student newspaper Index, with me at the helm, was sacked and thrown into the street after just two issues. On the front page of the first issue, among others, we announced the interviews with Goran Milić (Yutel), Zoran Đinđić (DS) and writer Slavenka Drakulić. Enough for the Union of Students of the University of Novi Sad to unanimously sack us and declare us “anti-people elements”, although on the same cover page there were announcements of the “appropriate” people, Nikola Koljević (SDS) and Dragoslav Hercen, Rector of the University of Novi Sad. That evening, at the local TV channel 3P which was part of the TV Novi Sad, a round table was organized which was supposed to justify our dismissal. One of the participants said that there is evidence that my father grilled an ox (!) when the HDZ won the elections in Croatia. Around dawn on that 2 April, a handmade explosive device blew up the big “German” gates of our family house in Bač.
That is how (in)famously started our publishing history, which these days recorded its 25th birthday. My parents – of course – begged to go back to studying at the Faculty of Law (I reached the fourth year with 9 as my average grade) and to give up on fruitless efforts, “so no one would get hurt because of your writing.”
At 23 years old, it seemed to me like a “gift from heaven”. Finally we were living our “years of living dangerously”, as in the cult film of Peter Weir which I had watched a couple of years earlier, and which inspired me to get into journalism.
A few days later, Bosnia burst in flames. Mile Isakov, the then President of the Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina offered me to come to them, at Zmaj Jovina 4 street. It’s the iconic address, from where every night at 19:30, during September of 1991 when the siege of Vukovar started, we were holding alternative news program named The Window (Prozor) where hundreds of people gathered in the central city street had the opportunity to hear the things that were not reported in the official state television news.
500.000.000.000 dinars
We accepted Mile’s offer and in late April the Nezavisni Index was born, which published texts by Dimitrije Boarov, Drasko Ređep, Mihal Ramač, Dusko Bogdanovic, Marina Fratucan, Mile Isakov and a large number of independent journalists and intellectuals from Novi Sad and Belgrade. The war in Bosnia was still raging on at the end of May when the UN sanctions came down on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia began to feel fuel shortages and galloping hyperinflation … In October that year, faced with the threat of dismissal, this time from the other direction – the supporters of “autonomy” and “opposition” – we decided it was time for a new episode. We left to a rented apartment in Grbavica in Novi Sad and started the episode that was initially called Novosadski Index, and in the summer of the following year, 1993, it changed its name to Svet. The rest is history.
In this seemingly suicidal act, to our surprise, we were followed by most of the authors and columnists of the Nezavisni Index. The late Mihajlo Svilar, then director of AMB Grafika printing house and latter mayor of Novi Sad in front of the SPO, offered to donate printing plates, the Open Society Fund (Soros Foundation) helped us with a certain amount of paper…
A month later, Mihal Ramač brought to our office, located in the aforementioned two-room apartment in Grbavica, Mr. Hoffman, Attache for Culture and Media of the US Embassy. Our then secretary Suzana Jotanović, today Šačić, who a few months earlier came as a refugee from Bosnia, bought a Smoki and served it to Hoffman in a plastic refrigerator tray, because we had no other dishes. After that we took him to lunch at a nearby “Piroš čizma”, once popular, but now closed restaurant of Hungarian national cuisine. Suzana is still working in our company, now as our advertising director in Sarajevo, where she returned immediately after Dayton.
Soon after, our colleague Gordana Jovanović received a five-week scholarship to the United States and, together with Duška Jovanić, in 1993 she went to New York and Washington, while a year later, in January 1994, I also went there on a five-week study in the US, in the framework of the International Visitors Programme. At the time of my departure to the United States, biweekly Svet, back then our only media product, cost 500,000,000,000 (five hundred billion) dinars, and during the course of a single day we would readjust the price with stickers on the front page several times, and we would take the obtained money immediately to buy deutschmarks (DEM) from dealers on the street, because inflation galloped from hour to hour. However, the inflation equally dragged down the price for printing of newspapers that we received from the Forum, so at the moment of payment, it was under one deutschmark. I guess, among other things, that’s also one of the reasons why it bankrupted…
American Dream
My first trip to the US was also dramatic. Before departure, one of our very few advertisers, Nikola Kitanović, alias Raul Amon, gave me a 500 DEM bill “to have, if need be.” My total “savings” at that time was 50 DEM. I went by bus from Novi Sad to Belgrade, where in front of the hotel Slavija I was supposed to be picked up by a mini-bus that would take me to the airport in Budapest (standard procedure at the time of sanctions, when the airport in Belgrade was closed).
The bus broke down somewhere near Stara Pazova, which was a commonplace occurrence in those times. I hitchhiked another bus and somehow reached Slavija. My mini-bus, unfortunately, did not. I asked the first taxi driver the cost of a drive to the border with Hungary. 500 deutschmarks. OK – let’s go. We stopped first in Batajnica, to fill the gas tank in his backyard. I gave him the 500 DEM I got from Raul Amon and on the border boarded the first bus of Montenegro Expres that came along. I arrived at the airport in Budapest at the last minute, our only gate to the world in those years.
At the airport in Washington I was greeted by Tom Countryman, State Department official and husband of Dubravka Trklja, who would be my guide in the United States over the next five weeks. Tom later became one of the most important people in the State Department during the reign of Hillary Clinton. He retired recently at the age of 57, as many other officials of the State Department who did not want to work under the new administration. Great people, American Tom and Belgrader Dubravka. They met in the eighties when he worked at the consulate in Belgrade.
After a few days in Washington, we went to Atlanta. I often describe the scene from the hotel there as a milestone in my career. In one room the TV was airing Clinton’s first State of the Union speech, and it was being followed by three people; in the next room, in the lobby, a report on the affairs related to the estate of Michael Jackson, Neverlend, was on TV. There sat 50 people. Until that moment, to me – coming from a country where multiparty system was only just beginning, and where war was raging in the neighborhood – politics was the most important thing in life. In the US, I realized that, if in the future I want to be independent from the influence of the state, political parties or foreign foundations, the only thing that would bring that to me is show-business. Later we were in San Francisco, Las Vegas, on a farm in Columbus, Nebraska, in Boston and, finally, in New York, where I watched my first musical life (“Cats”) and did an interview with George Soros that was arranged by Beka Vučo. A snowstorm had grounded all the planes from the JFK for three days, and since I had already checked out from my hotel, Dubravka and Tom offered me to use their New York apartment, since they needed to return to Washington.
After five weeks I was back in Serbia. Governor Dragoslav Avramović had introduced the convertible dinar. Hyperinflation stopped. The Washington Agreement had brought peace between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, and a year and a half later, Dayton officially put an end to this period of war in the region. It was the ripe moment for Svet to become the first Serbian tabloid, with paparazzi photographs, large headlines and attractive design, which made it much different from the old school magazine newspapers, like the TV Revija, TV Novosti, Sabor, Ilustrovana Politika etc. Perhaps only Marić’s Duga in those days was the way we wanted to be. All five of the mentioned magazines were shut down in the meantime – Svet will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year under this name, and in addition to it, we today have four more weeklies in this segment – Scandal, Star, Hello! and, since last year, Glorija…
DB closes the circle
In this transitional period in mid-nineties among the columnists of Svet were Olja Bećković (full two-year column on the last page), today’s provincial premier Igor Mirović (column Desno od Raja – To the Right from Paradise) and current minister Aleksandar Vulin (column Levo od Raja – To the Left from Paradise).
During that first visit to the United States, I arranged with the International Media Fund that they send us aid, which consisted of three Pentium computers, one A3 scanner and one A3 printer. At the time, once a week we rented an XT computer to enter into it all the texts and on the big “A” floppy we took them, along with photographs to be scanned, to the designers “with more powerful machines” in another part of town. This assistance of the IMF to us, in such situation, and from today’s perspective, was unimaginably important. A year later the equipment arrived, they brought it with the US Embassy vehicle with diplomatic plates. Overjoyed, we took it up the stairs to the apartment on the second floor of our building with no elevator. Five minutes later, customs officials knocked on the door of the apartment, accompanied by employees of the State Security and they took everything. We were later even fined for a customs offense, and the Americans, apparently already in the “accession phase” of conciliation with Milošević on the eve of Dayton, did not want to “tighten” things on this issue, although I was prepared to do a suicide press conference at which I would say that “Milošević’s State Security confiscated the property of the Government of the United States …” Eight years later, in May 2003, at the trial of Slobodan Milošević in The Hague, one of the protected witnesses said among other things: “Then, in 1992, I was recruited by State Security and one of the first task was to bug the premises of the weekly Svet…” What we had previously only assumed became crystal clear, and it did not take long to realize how State Security knew when we got the equipment sent by the IMF. In truth, I’ve always thought that “bugging” me would be a complete waste of resources, since it was enough to put someone under the window, because of how loud and reckless I talked then, and how I talk still.
Circulation of the first Serbian tabloid grew dizzyingly. The 1999 New Year’s issue sold in more than 300,000 copies and we had the resources to buy Pentiums on our own. At the end of the nineties, in addition to Svet, we also launched a number of magazines that dealt with love stories, the famous Zona Sumraka and, just somewhere in the wake of 5 October 2000, our first magazine on glossy paper – the monthly Moja beba… One year later came the magazine Lepota i Zdravlje, to this day the highest selling and most read women’s monthly magazine in Serbia and the only magazine that has its local editions in local languages in all six states emerged from the former Yugoslavia.
To the first major attack of foreign competition, which happened with the arrival of Burda in 2002, we responded with persistent visits to Hamburg, to the company Bauer Verlag, until we got the license for the magazine Bravo. We were so annoying that Veljo and I were even allowed to light a cigarette in the conference room on the top floor of Bauer building, which seemed unthinkable in the corporate atmosphere of Hamburg’s media giant. A little later, licenses arrived for JOY, for the magazine BravaCasa, Hello, The Economist and others. Alfred Heinze, who back in 2002 gave us the license for Bravo, works in Burda since recently, so we are again working together.
In the meantime, we have launched a printing house which today employs 125 people and have established companies in all countries in the region. Today we have 350 employees, we issue 84 magazines, we have 12 Internet portals and organize more than 80 conferences and festivals a year, but I do not allow myself to forget the role of one drawer full of Smoki, one homemade hand grenade, one banknote of 500 DEM and a TV set in the lobby of a hotel in Atlanta.