Cut It Out

When the warlords of Bosnia were raiding villages and rounding up people to be shot, I was living some 150 kilometres to the east, in the relative safety of the Serbian capital under Slobodan Miloševic, and working as an intern at a Belgrade daily called Borba. Between the NATO bombing of Serbian targets in Bosnia in 1995 and the bombing campaign that was ahead of us — of Serbia and Montenegro over the war in Kosovo in 1999 — the Miloševic camp was making ever bolder moves and speeding up the takeover of the opposition media. Borba was the last daily to come under the regime’s thumb; it became Naša Borba when the entire newsroom rebelled against the new imposed directorship and continued to publish with greatly diminished capacity. I kept working, along with the rest of the last intake of apprentices to Naša Borba, wondering for how long the defiantly independent paper could pull it off, and what would come first: running out of money, a knock on...