bosnet-digest V5 #64 / Tuesday, 13 February 1996

From: Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Bosnia-Herzegovina News Directory

CONTENTS

[01] Joseph Brodsky - In Memoriam

Joseph Brodsky - In Memoriam

"New Republic" - 2/19/96

MORE THAN ONE: On January 28, 1996, the world became a stupider place. Joseph Brodsky died. This jaunty, thinking, lovable, burning man was, in his work and in his person, what used to be called a world-historical figure. He owed his magnitude, of course, to his biography, which is well-known: born in Leningrad in 1940; denounced for "pornographic and anti-Soviet poetry," and harassed by the Soviet authorities, and imprisoned in a mental institution, and tried secretly in February 1964 for "social parasitism"; condemned to five years of hard labor in the freezing northern region called Arkhangelsk, where he passed his evenings learning English from a tattered anthology of English and American poetry; returned to Leningrad, a year and a half into his sentence, owing to international pressure; banished from the Soviet Union in 1972, after which he made his way to the United States, whose poet laureate he cheerfully became; the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. But the Brodskyan dimensions were not established only by external events. This was a huge-souled figure, whose inner force was fully the match, in power and in complication, of the outer force that tried, and failed, to extinguish it. Brodsky was not only brave. He also had something to say. He was a great big bear of idealism. Not idealism in the sunny psychological sense, that prepares one for the best: he always prepared himself for the worst, and he saw the comedy in pessimism's endless preparations. (He combined a pessimism about human nature with an optimism about human freedom in a way that made him a perfect American.) No, he was a sublimely unpsychological man, and his idealism consisted in the unreconstructed belief that the ideal is real; that the invisible is the proper prize for our dealings with the visible; that as the world moves from the high to the low, we must move from the low to the high, and discover the blessing in being its instrument. "What dictates a poem is the language": this typical sentence, from 1977, is not formalism, it is spiritualism; or if you will, it is classicism conceived as a spiritual practice. For American readers, Brodsky's poetry was trapped in Russian (and his English poems did not altogether escape the trap--but who will ever honor the language in that way again?); but when he read his poems in the original, when he stood unkeening and closed his eyes and chanted his verses, as if they were not things he had created but things he had discovered, the sacerdotal character of his calling was startlingly plain. Happy was the modern man who was unembarrassed by the visionary prospect. All this, and so smart. Brodsky's mind was like no other: he thought analytically in images, he sharpened ideas by treating them poetically. He had answers for so many questions; and he had so many questions. He drank, he smoked, he wrote (in these pages, too), he talked, he helped friends and strangers, he defeated dictators, he lived intrinsically. Until he stopped, he never stopped. As his beloved Hardy wrote, "These were the things we wished would stay; /But they were going." Now they are gone. In 1963, he wrote an Elegy for John Donne, and these are its concluding lines, with two words altered:

Sleep, Joseph Brodsky, sleep. Sleep soundly, do not fret your soul. As for your coat, it's torn; all limp it hangs. But see, there from the clouds will shine that Star which made your world endure till now.

Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

Murat Erkocevic <[email protected]>

Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Davor Wagner <[email protected]>

Nermin Zukic <[email protected]>

[02] Bosnian RTV Satellite Broadcasts

Contributed by: Frank Tiggelaar <[email protected]>

===

12-02-1996

>>>> Bosnian TV News' Audio will be available on the Internet from today <<<<<

Bosnian Televison is now broadcasting on Eutelsat II-F3. For those of you within Eutelsat's foot-print, here are the data for your receivers :

Eutelsat II-F3, 16 degrees East, frequency 11.080 GHz, horizontal polarisation, sound carrier at 7.02 MHz.

Initially transmissions are on a daily basis between 22:00 and 01:00 CET (=GMT+1)

Work has been under way at the Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina Information Pages Europe to bring a digitized daily news-bulletin from the station out on the Net. With winds between 5 and 7 Beaufort during the weekend we were unable to install the 120 cm dish at 25 meters altitude, though, so audio quality will be mediocre during the coming days as we have to use the old 80 cms dish; as soon as the wind calms down we can improve this (forecasts look favorable for Thursday).

During the relatively short transmissions there is one 30" News Bulletin on air. In Real Audio format this would mean approx.1.8 MB of digitized audio per program.

We would like some feed-back from the people interested in our news service on the following :

1) Would you like the full News to come on line, or just the headlines ? 2) Would it be a good idea for us to chop the news into three 10 mins segments, so you can decide for yourself if you download 600 KB, 1.2 MB or 1.8 MB ? 3) Would you be interested in other programs from BHT (for instance political discussions) to become available on the Net ? 4) Does anybody know a source for the BHT program-schedules ? There is no teletext service (yet ?) included with the signal.

Damir Tomicic Frank Tiggelaar

Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina Information Pages Europa

Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

Murat Erkocevic <[email protected]>

Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Davor Wagner <[email protected]>

Nermin Zukic <[email protected]>

[03] Correction - PHILIP Cohen's "Serbia's Secret War"

Philip Cohen's

"SERBIA'S SECRET WAR"

Doctor Cohen's long-awaited book has just been announced in the Texas A&M University catalogue (ISBN 0-89096-686-5) and wil be published in the course of the Spring 1996.

"Dr. Cohen's book destroys these myths," Professor Stipe Mestrovic, the editor of Texas A&M University East EUropean Series said. "We hope that the book will be read widely and put many a historian to shame."

Professor Mestrovic adds that the manuscript has been given raving reviews by some top scholars in the field, such as the Oxford professors Norman Stone, Marc Almond, and Noel Malcolm.

"Dr. Cohen's book exposes some of the myths used by Serbian extremists today in the former Yugoslavia to justify a new round of genocide and 'ethnic cleansing,"

Stephen W. Walker, Director of the American Committee to Save Bosnia said. "As a result it will make the task of revision lets and war criminals all the more difficult."

The book can be ordered by calling 1-800-826-8911 or by writing to:

Texas A&M University Press Drawer C, John Lindsay Bldg. College Station, TX 77843-4354.

The price is $32.95 plus $4.00 for shipping.

Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

Murat Erkocevic <[email protected]>

Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Davor Wagner <[email protected]>

Nermin Zukic <[email protected]>

[04] Conflict And Crisis (Banac, Cohen, Mestrovic, Walker, Lewis, Rieff...)

Roger McNeil for Bosnia Advocates of Metrowest

NOTICE

"CONFLICT AND CRISIS IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA"

A several-day symposium at Wellesley College; Rte. 135, Wellesley, Massachusetts, MARCH 4 - 8, 1996

MONDAY, March 4 4 p.m., Journalists Panel * Anthony Lewis, "NY Times" columnist * Randolph Ryan, "Boston Globe" reporter

TUESDAY, March 5 4 p.m., Panel on "Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing" * Stjepan Mestrovic, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University; Author of Habits of the Balkan Heart, The Barbarian Temperament, Balkanization of the West * Philip Cohen, M.D., advisor to the UN Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Author of the forthcoming Serbia at War with History * Srdja Popovic, human rights lawyer 7 p.m., Talk by David Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West

WEDNESDAY, March 6 4 p.m., Panel on "Nationalism" * Liah Greenfeld, Professor, Boston University * Philip Kohl, Professor, Wellesley College * Dzemal Sokolovic, Professor, University of Sarajevo 7 p.m., Talk by Brian Hall, journalist and author of The Impossible Country

THURSDAY, March 7 4 p.m., Talk by German documentary filmmaker Sybille Bassler 7 p.m., Talk by Ivo Banac, Professor, Yale University; author of The Yugoslav National Question

FRIDAY, March 8 4 p.m., Panel on Activism * Steven Walker, head of American Committee to Save Bosnia * Sheri Fink, head of Students Against Genocide * Larry Rosenwald, Professor, Wellesley College Evening: A Celebration of Bosnian Culture

Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

Murat Erkocevic <[email protected]>

Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Davor Wagner <[email protected]>

Nermin Zukic <[email protected]>

[05] ACSB Hotline: EXTRADITED!; No Pictures

This is the American Committee to Save Bosnia's Bosnia Hotline, updated Monday, February 12, at 8:30 P.M.

HERE ARE THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS ON THE DIPLOMATIC FRONT AND ON THE GROUND IN THE BALKANS:

The Bosnian government today extradited two Bosnian Serb officers to the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. The government had announced last Monday that it had recently arrested eight Bosnian Serb officers traveling in government-held territory. The Tribunal, praising the government's cooperation, had asked Wednesday that the two individuals extradited today, Gen. Djordje Djukic and Col. Aleksa Krsmanovic, be held pending further investigation. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke announced today that the Bosnian government had agreed to submit a list of suspected war criminals with supporting evidence to the Tribunal. The Tribunal is to select from the list those individuals who may be subject to future arrest.

An IFOR spokesman admitted Sunday that IFOR troops are not provided with pictures or even names of indicted war criminals. The U.N. War Crimes Tribunal responded today by sending IFOR the names and pictures of 36 of the 52 individuals indicted thus far. On Friday, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, twice indicted by the Tribunal, traveled openly in Banja Luka. Journalists noted that he passed through at least four IFOR checkpoints, including at least one manned by U.S. troops, without being detained.

The Bosnian Croat leadership controlling half of Mostar Wednesday rejected the arbitration of the city's redistricting handed down by EU-appointed administrator Hans Koschnik. A Bosnian Croat mob briefly occupied EU offices in Mostar and surrounded and battered Koschnik's car for more than an hour, leading Germany and the EU to call on Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to ensure the safety of EU personnel. Koschnik's plan creates six districts, three each with Croat and Muslim majorities, but also a central administrative district. The Bosnian Croats charge that the seventh district would, effectively, create a fourth Muslim-majority district and violate the Dayton Federation agreement of November, 1995. EU officials Saturday delayed plans to introduce 100 police from Croatia into Mostar. Almost 600 Spanish IFOR reinforcements, including light tanks, were dispatched to the city.

NATO Commander Gen. George Joulwan met with Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev in Tuzla Wednesday to discuss the cooperation of 1600 Russian troops with U.S. forces in northeastern Bosnia. Grachev called Thursday for the release of Bosnian Serb military officers held by the Bosnian government under suspicion of war crimes.

World Bank officials announced that Bosnia may gain membership within the next few months despite its arrears in paying back its share of the former Yugoslavia's debts. The Bank estimates that Bosnia will require more than $5 billion in reconstruction aid during the next three years.

The ACSB Bosnia Hotline is updated weekly, with more frequent updates when developments warrant.

You can reach the ACSB Bosnia Hotline at (202-319-7189) or at our site on the World Wide Web at http://users.aol.com/amcomsabos/home.html.

Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

Murat Erkocevic <[email protected]>

Dzevat Omeragic <[email protected]>

Davor Wagner <[email protected]>

Nermin Zukic <[email protected]>