In the Serbian newspaper Borba of 2/3 October 1993, Radio Brod producer Jasmina Teodosijević published a personal account of her three months aboard the broadcasting ship stationed off the coast of the former Yugoslavia. Even decades after the horrors of the Balkan War, her reflections remain deeply moving and strikingly relevant.
“Your radio helped me realise that I am not the one who is mad because I do not want war – those who want war are.”
That was how one of the many refugees from the former Yugoslavia, among Radio Brod’s most loyal listeners, expressed his feelings.
By Jasmina Teodosijević
Two days after returning from the sea, following three months aboard Radio Brod, there is one thing I miss above all else: the sea itself. And so I hardly know where to begin this story. With the smell of the harbour in Bari and my first encounter with the ship that became, all at once, our home, newsroom, restaurant, infirmary, beach and promenade?
Or should I begin in the middle – on a moonlit night when neither the Bora nor the Jugo [the two dominant and opposing prevailing winds along Croatia’s Adriatic coast] stirred the sea, but some deeper, mysterious force drew the water upwards from the depths, gently rocking this wondrous, ever-changing creature while I stood on deck discussing Bulgakov with Darko Rundek?
Or perhaps I should begin at the end: only a few days ago, when I left the ship in heavy seas, transferring from a small inflatable boat to a yacht before turning round one last time. For the first time I saw the enormous fish-like bow of the red-and-blue steel vessel which, for a brief period, had been our own microcosm, our floating island and our final Noah’s Ark.
The sixty-five-metre “steel fish” had originally been built as an icebreaker. Later she was fitted with cranes and scientific equipment for oceanographic research in the Arctic. Afterwards a two-storey white accommodation block with additional cabins was added when she served off Africa as a supply vessel for oil platforms under the name Cariboo.
More recently she was dispatched to the Adriatic carrying a fifty-metre aerial mast, generators and the complete technical equipment of a medium-sized radio station. She was now neither truly a ship nor a broadcasting station, neither fish nor fowl, and bore the name Droit de Parole, after the organisation that had founded Radio Brod.
Questions concerning the legality and flag of what was, in essence, a “pirate” radio station are best left to its founders. The same applies to the task of persuading the international community, in the light of Radio Brod’s experience, to revise international broadcasting regulations.
Our own purpose aboard Radio Brod, however, was altogether different. The constantly changing team of fifteen people – seven journalists, two sound engineers, two translators, two producers and two music editors from Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb, Podgorica, Split and Ljubljana – had come for one reason only: to work honestly and to produce the best radio programme we possibly could.
Was that really possible? On a ship drifting or lying offshore in its own maritime universe between Bari and Lastovo, unless the Bora, as happened on one occasion, drove us far out into the Adriatic towards the Montenegrin coast. On clear days we could make out Mljet, Korčula, Lastovo, the white speck of Dubrovnik and the mountains of Montenegro.
Strictly speaking, there was no proper anchorage. Our anchor reached only twenty metres below the surface, while the sea beneath us was almost a kilometre deep. You became acutely aware of that while swimming – and equally while working.
We relied on our own judgement and on a vast network of people ashore who helped to sustain the programme: outstanding correspondents in Sarajevo, Podgorica, Split, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, Zagreb, Washington, Brussels and Geneva. I should especially mention the tireless and indefatigable Jelena Lovrić. In addition there were friends and colleagues who supplied us with information, background and advice, alongside the news agencies, monitoring of other radio stations and every other possible means of gathering news.
The question most frequently asked by foreign journalists, who almost besieged Radio Brod because of its unique character, was:
“How is it possible that you – Muslims, Serbs, Croats and others – can live and work together here in peace while your countries are at war?”
The question puzzled us. After all, that was precisely why we were there: because we wanted to live and work together. To us, it was the most natural thing in the world.
How could we explain to these visitors that the only thing people genuinely quarrelled about on board was the telephone? His Majesty, the telephone – our indispensable working tool, through which reports were recorded, interviews conducted and contact with the outside world maintained.
Our broadcasting schedule was demanding: four hours of morning programming, three hours every afternoon, continuous news bulletins, music programmes, broadcasts for UNPROFOR and, naturally, the main evening news bulletin at 9.30 pm. Our technical resources, by contrast, were extremely limited.
The newsroom consisted of a single room on the upper floor of the accommodation block: eight by five metres, equipped with two mobile telephones connected to a Revox tape recorder, a satellite telephone, six desks, two computers, two coffee machines – one of them broken – a filing cabinet, a sink, a dishwasher that also no longer worked, and a seating area where endless “republic chess championships” were contested between the teams from Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
During one of our stays in Bari we were visited by young Edo from Sarajevo and his wife Nadira. With their son, then only a month old, they had escaped from the besieged city and had managed to establish a modest new life in Bari.
Young, intelligent and highly capable, they were simply waiting for better times.
Edo said:
“I listen to Radio Brod regularly, and I love all of you. On your station I hear people from every part of the former Yugoslavia who are still prepared to speak of peace and tolerance, who say intelligent and humane things instead of spreading hatred. Your radio helped me understand that I am not the one who is mad because I do not want war – those who want war are.”
The same determination not to give in to hatred was expressed by a young woman from Mostar, interviewed by journalist David Bellon during one of the rare opportunities to enter the besieged city. As shells exploded nearby, she quietly tried to comfort her three-year-old son.
Her father had been shot dead outside their front door just two weeks earlier. Her husband had disappeared without trace following the outbreak of the Croat–Muslim conflict on 9 May.
She said that, in order to survive, she had forced herself to stop feeling. Now she feared only one thing: that when this nightmare finally ended, she would no longer be capable of feeling anything at all – that she might never be able to love again.
The reports from Mostar were among the most harrowing broadcasts I ever heard – or presented – on Radio Brod.
One particularly unforgettable account came from the British journalist Charlotte Eagar, who spent some time as a guest aboard Radio Brod. She described a visit to an improvised hospital in the cellar of a building in Mostar, where she saw a nine-year-old girl lying beside her injured brother.
Half-conscious, the child reached up with her only uninjured hand and pulled a blanket across her body after a doctor had uncovered her wounds so that they could be photographed and shown to the journalists.
“That simple gesture of human modesty,” Charlotte said, “is something I shall never forget.”
A different kind of sadness emerged in one of our programmes featuring “People at Other Addresses”, in which distinguished film directors Rajko Grlić, Srđan Karanović—both then living in the United States—and Goran Marković, who had remained at home, reflected on their lives.
Asked when they expected to make films again, all three answered with such profound scepticism that the loss of creativity and intellectual energy itself seemed to have become one of the defining tragedies of our time.
In a conversation with my colleague Ines Sabalić, Janusz Bugajski of the American Institute for Strategic Studies argued that Slobodan Milošević had decided to move against Vojislav Šešelj [the nationalist Serbian politician and leader of the far-right Serbian Radical Party (SRS)] for both domestic and foreign policy reasons. Among these reasons, he suggested, were hopes that international sanctions might eventually be lifted, together with expectations concerning political developments in Russia.
When a conversation with Mirko Klarin in Brussels alerted us to a meeting taking place aboard the aircraft carrier Invincible, someone even jokingly suggested that we should simply take our own small boat and sail out there.
Instead, we spent the day telephoning the NATO headquarters in Naples, the British Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy Headquarters, the Foreign Office and, finally, [Thorvald] Stoltenberg’s office in Zagreb.
Thanks to our correspondents in Zagreb, Belgrade and Split, Radio Brod nevertheless succeeded in reporting the story by the end of what had been an exciting and highly uncertain day.
The same was true of our live coverage from Geneva, Brussels and Washington.
Remarkably, there were very few political arguments on board. There were certainly lively discussions, but they were accompanied by an extraordinary degree of tolerance and understanding for one another’s lives and experiences. Every member of the crew carried a personal story that could easily have filled a novel.
Nino [Nikifor Simsić] still had his wife and children in Sarajevo, and there were days when he could barely swallow a mouthful at lunch.
Mirna [Imamović] was trying to build a new life in an unfamiliar world, tirelessly searching for a country where she could finally settle.
Kostas‘ [Konstantin Jovanović] wife and children were refugees in Croatia, while his mother could learn how he was only by listening to Radio Brod in Teslić.
P. [Petar Savić] had just received his call-up papers.
S. [Another colleague] was trying to fulfil every one of his ambitions at once.
During my first few days on board I even argued with Ines about language. She insisted that I should call her language Croatian and mine Serbian, and that they were not one and the same.
To me, however, it still seemed obvious that we spoke the same language and understood one another perfectly well.
In time she taught me that the ship’s small engine was called a “šotel”, that a cabin should never be referred to as a “room”, and that the gangway was known exclusively as the “siz“.
When we finally parted, she gave me an old photograph of Virginia Woolf, which we had found together somewhere aboard the ship.
On the back she had written: “From Ines – for inspiration.” And beneath it, in hesitant Cyrillic letters, carefully formed by someone unaccustomed to writing the script: “And have a safe journey.”
[Italicized comments by Martin van der Ven]
Read: Radio Brod – Freedom of Speech in the Adriatic
