He has been in journalism for four and a half decades, today he is the director of the Sarajevo Media Center, and he is better known as the author and producer of several important documentaries ("The Years Eaten by Lions", "Untitled", "Exhibition"...). He has won several international awards for radio and TV documentaries. Anyone who knows at least a little about Sarajevo will know how strong a mark he left on the cultural and media scene of the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But also the entire neighboring countries, as well as the former Yugoslavia. He was born in 1955 in Nikšić, but spent his whole life in Sarajevo. He was only 24 years old when he became the author of the cult radio show "Primus", from which the famous "Top List of Surrealists" was born. His name is Boro Kontić.
WEATHER: You once stated that there are no small tasks in journalism and recalled a humorous story about the beginnings of your career.. Sometime in the seventies, you became famous reporting from Sarajevo's Elektrodistribucija...
Boro Kontić: I started working as a journalist as a student, in the editorial office of Sarajevo's Radio 202. I had a few months of experience when I was assigned a task within the New Year program. By the standards of the time, he was so modest that he couldn't be more modest. I was a reporter from the central room of Elektrodistribucija. More prestigious tasks, from interviews with city leaders to chatting with popular entertainers, went to seniors. In the mid-seventies of the last century, the New Year's celebration was the icing on the cake of the annual cycle of Yugoslav holidays. And that in the Balkans always meant, if not a skewer, then a hot oven. On the eve of the so-called craziest night of the year, it was rarely cold. Which is to say: the consumption of electricity jumped enormously. And on that pre-holiday afternoon, Sarajevo's electrical system began to fall apart. In the schedule of the multi-hour program, I had two modest short reports, but, thanks to the ovens, I unexpectedly became the most important reporter. All connections broke except for the one from the electrical switchboard. Then I adopted the rule that there are no secondary topics and unimportant journalistic tasks. Perhaps in that pre-holiday collapse, the germ of a preference for topics and tasks that are lightly treated as marginal was conceived in me. Propensity, in today's phrase, to challenge.
Among other things, you deal with the history of journalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, even in the so-called. region. How the concept of journalism and our profession have changed over the past fifty years? Where we came from and how far we have come? What about political influence?, journalistic depths and superficialities?
You can also go back 174 years. When you look at the press from Bosnia and Herzegovina from the first issues of "Bosanski prijatel" in 1850, you will notice one constant. The first editions of Bosnian newspapers have a euphoric epistle in the opening pages: "Slavodobitnica svetlome gospodar Omer Pasha Latas". This, it is not too bad to remind, was sent by the Turkish sultan to restore order in Bosnia with the sword. Latas very quickly sent the author of the laudatory poem, Ivan Franja Jukić, into exile, from which he never returned. And the first, almost daily newspaper, the Sarajevo "Vjestnik" from 1866, published a great poem in the first issue in honor of "His Highness the Bosnian Vizier Osman Šerif-paša", the then president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the end of the First World War, only the opening photo changed on the covers of newspaper yearbooks. Instead of the Austrian emperor, we have a portrait of King Alexander. Then Ante Pavelić. And in 1945, Josip Broz Tito was on the cover. Today, of course, the rulers do not have a monopoly on the front pages, but when you open the front pages... What will you see first? The muzzles of local politicians, the kind of masters of our surrogate lives. Local journalism is essentially a servant of politicians and not at the service of the public.
And what was it like to be a journalist in besieged and shelled Sarajevo? How many of you actually that period, from 1992. to 1995. years, determined, both professionally and personally?
The siege of Sarajevo found me as the editor-in-chief of the Second Radio Program, but already in mid-April 1992, I became a journalist-reporter, because all four programs were canceled, that is, they were combined into one - the war program. Quite a few nights after completing the task, and because of the curfew, I used to spend the night in the building of Radio-television Sarajevo, catching a short sleep on an improvised bed made up of three chairs in a row. I also did a regular weekly show entitled "On-Call Microphone". It was a kind of political summation of the week. It had an undoubted patriotic charge, but without pathos or sentiment. Almost all editions are preserved in the archive. Recently, I listened to several shows. Today, it is almost unimaginable to me, even impressive, that in that scarcity and limited space, we managed to make real small documentaries. I also hosted central news shows. Then for two years he reported daily for "Glas Amerika". For war reporters, we recruited all journalists, including former so-called cultural figures. I remember how one of those pre-war cultural figures called from the police station where the data about the grenades that were fired at the city, about the killed and wounded were collected. In the evening Dnevnik, in a sonorous voice accustomed to reporting from opera premieres, he announces another night under siege: "A night is coming whose name I dare not even say." All in all, it was good, as they say, to get to everything. I arrived to be wounded. I was hit by shrapnel from a shell, fortunately a few centimeters away from where it would have been fatal. Unfortunately, many of our journalists were not so lucky. And that is already a separate topic.
You are the author of a documentary film "Years eaten by lions" in which you search for answers to the questions of where and what journalists warmongers are doing. It seems they didn't really lack anything, and even if it is today, 13 years after the film was made, the situation in this regard is even worse. In Serbia, let's say, they still "they rock" and are at the very top of the power pyramid.
That is logical. In our country, they will forgive you everything, including war crimes, but they will never forgive you if you are against "our cause". Propaganda journalism had a key goal: to justify crimes. When it is falsely reported that "Serbian children are being thrown to lions" in Sarajevo, it implies that everything is allowed as a reaction. That those people were deservedly under siege, deservedly under shells, deservedly killed, starved, terrorized in all kinds of ways. If you noticed recently, the people in Gaza were also declared animals first, and then what followed. And now, the fact that you correctly state that 13 years after the creation of my film, the situation is no better, maybe even worse, is not surprising. The war, in fact, is essentially not over. The goals have not been fully achieved. Not only are they on stage who are continuously, as you said, "rocking", but a worthy youngster has been recruited in the meantime. Said by the poignant sentence of the German Nobel laureate Günther Grass, from his testament novel: There is no end to it! The title of the novel is, it is worth emphasizing – Cancer walk.
When you look at the countries of the former Yugoslavia, specifically those in which the so-called. BHSC language, which are, in your opinion, the main similarities and differences of their media scenes?
I'll cut it short as a diagnosis: the open wound of the region is tabloid journalism. It is a notorious fact that it dominates the media scene in Serbia and that it is one of the most profitable export items. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, journalism is divided into entities, so it can often seem to you that it is about areas that have not even met on the road. The public services that we all pay for are, unfortunately, a political tool. Today, the Montenegrin media scene is literally a fight for the state. Those who work on her head would deny you even this C in code BHSC language. Montenegrin language. Croatia has a more or less organized media picture, where there is not an incredible number of televisions as in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They still have a decent number of journalists who tirelessly question the government and even cause the dismissal of ministers. There are, admittedly, also in the remaining part of the so-called BHSC area, but with a more pronounced climate of fear and retaliation. In the Western world, it is worth repeating parrotily, politicians are more afraid of the media than the other way around. We have to reach that starting position. Difficult. But, I think, doable.
Sarajevo Media Center, the organization you have been leading for three decades, recently published a publication about journalists who were witnesses at the Hague Tribunal. Two journalists "Times", both deceased today, Dejan Anastasijević and Jovan Dulović, they testified in The Hague and because of that experienced many, is an understatement, inconvenience, that is, their lives were literally threatened. In general, how much did journalists help to find out the truth about wars and what are the basic ones?(r)uke publications?
At least thirty-five journalists from around the world testified before the Hague Tribunal. That is less than one percent of all witnesses before this court. In other words, they had little influence, but their contribution was significant in understanding the context of the war. At the same time, there are well-founded opinions that the Hague Tribunal was established precisely because of journalistic reports, especially the discovery of the camps "Omarska", "Trnopolje" and "Keraterm" in the summer of 1992. they are worried and that they don't want to endanger their contacts". The famous Roy Gutman, who is the author of the book A witness to the genocide, he explained his refusal to testify succinctly: "Journalists work in accordance with the law, but they are not subordinate to it". These days we are starting to edit a series of documentaries in which we will publish interviews with journalists - witnesses. Unfortunately, we will not have Dejan Anastasijević among them, but we will use recordings of his testimony. In one of them, Slobodan Milošević casts doubt on his war journey, and that he could not have been in so many locations during the war: Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, etc. for Dejan to answer him: "Until now, I have not been able to be in several places at the same time, although I would like to."
The media center also deals with the archiving of media legacy. One gets the impression that the states and nations in these areas, who are very proud of their traditions, there is a chance that they will be left without (archived) the recent past, especially those that are not mainstream. Someone told me recently, I don't know if it's true, that the Jutela program is not archived. Is that so and why is that so?
What is certain is that Jutel was not archived in Sarajevo. It probably ended up in the hands of former journalists of that company. Whether all and how much, is the question. Radio-television BiH itself today has an archive with some 150 thousand hours of programs. More than 17 years of different shows. Serbian Radio and Television, I read somewhere, could continuously broadcast the archive for more than 25 years. There is also another foreign archive. While we were working on a monograph on Radio Sarajevo (1945-1992), one of the people who worked at the time tried to find in the archives some of the famous shows that people wrote about in that book. He was amazed to find that none of those shows existed in the archives. Those shows were simply not archived. But that's why every party congress, from republican to federal, has been preserved extensively, almost to the last discussion. Today, in the archives of Radio BiH, there are almost no well-known shows that listeners still remember and mention. So it's not just the volume of the archive, which is not insignificant, but the selection that deprives you of insight into what people have remembered. I could not find several of my documentaries. They are probably overwritten. I am particularly sorry for one, because it contained a completely unknown song by Arsen Dedić, which, as far as I know, he never recorded except then. He sang about the fate of Victor Jara, a Chilean poet and musician, who was executed by the military junta in a stadium in Santiago in September 1973.
You often stay in Belgrade. You have the possibility not only to look at Belgrade from Sarajevo's point of view, but to see how much the public in Serbia is interested in Sarajevo and in what way, his past and present. How things stand in that respect, almost three decades after the end of the war?
I will answer you briefly, referring to a fresh picture. Dina Merlin's guest appearance in Belgrade. Impressive response from the Belgrade audience. Willingness to sing in choir with Merlin whether "Bosnom behar probeharao" or something to that effect... It seems idyllic. Merlinovsky. However, you will forgive me for the dissonant tone in the question - would that same audience unanimously reject the recently increasingly aggressive thesis that Sarajevo was not under siege. Or - whether the judgments of the Hague Tribunal are recognized. More specifically, the genocide in Srebrenica. Kebabs, coffee in Baščaršija, Merlin and Halid... That's good, but what are we going to do with the aforementioned issues that become the neuralgic points of the relationship. And Belgrade and Sarajevo have always been connected. So many people who marked these cities lived in both cities. So many reasons for serious dialogue. Which, to put it in the phrase of fashionable jargon, would have to move out of the "comfort zone". One of its constant determinants is the numbered trinity "caboas, coffee..."
You were the author of a famous radio show "Primus" and editor of the Youth Program of Radio Sarajevo, as well as one of the driving forces behind the creation of the famous "Surrealist Top Lists". When talking about the Surrealists, one of "general places" is that they were "clairvoyant", that is, that they predicted what would happen in the nineties, until today. Yet, was it a case of clairvoyance or the insiders could already see where things were leading?
They were certainly not clairvoyant, but as talented and sensitive young men, they easily noticed social disharmony, public lies and hypocrisy, political sleaze. Those antennae of theirs were constantly vibrating. At the same time, they were humorous in the best sense of the word. That top list of surrealists started in my show in May 1981. The authors were high school students at that time. The youngest among them, Zlatko Arslanagić, was in the second grade, the others in the fourth. They started with stories dominated by the jargon of Sarajevo, only to produce top political satire a few years later. I really remember those few years in the eighties with joy. By the way, I was also young at the time. When I started The Surrealist Top List, I was 24 years old. But let me return to their clairvoyance. The top list of surrealists was also broadcast in my war show in 1992/1993. And sometime in the summer of 1993, before the farewell show, because we started making a TV series, they make the final sketch. At that time, there were many shows on the radio that were dedicated to our people - or refugees, or those in temporarily occupied areas, or in camps, or here, or there. For example, a show for our citizens in exile. And now they are constructing a new radio show which, according to them, is dedicated to our citizens, who are full of everything. Well, now tell me, is that title from thirty years ago really an announcement for today?
The top list of surrealists is, at least partly, and became a victim of wars and national divisions. As well as the famous band Zabranjeno pušenje. How do you view Davor Sučić's recent public debates? (Sejo Sexon) and Nenad Janković (Nela Karajlić)?
It started with copyright. That's right for you. Everything basically starts from the probate hearing. Sula (Davor Sučić) warned Karajlić to use his songs and not pay royalties. That is, he signs himself. What is that if not theft? Then, as it already happens in these areas, the issue of relations with Sarajevo, the war, etc. To cut it short: I was closer with Neleta in times of peace, and with Sula in times of war. They say that war best shows what people really are like. By the way, Sula, which many do not know, is the author of ninety percent of the No Smoking repertoire. He wrote all their key songs. And before, and especially after the war. He rebuilt the band in Zagreb, but never courted that environment. Just as he did not court Sarajevo either. In Zagreb, he even goes by the stage name Sejo Sexon, which he does not want to change. Do you think it was easy to publish songs with that name? An extra cup or Jugo 45 in Zagreb in the nineties? And dozens of others. When I asked him how he was doing, he answered: "I like to tell what I saw and experienced." What do I have to lose? The Ustasha won't listen to me? So what?!”
Nele fit into the projected Serbian narrative because, I assume, he thought it would make his existence in Belgrade easier. He got the Chetniks, but he lost us.
Surrealists, popular music, but also the overall culture in Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina was on the rise during the 1980s. Sarajevo has become, many will say, the main cultural center of SFRY. How it happened? And what is today, so many years later, the rest of it? What is Sarajevo?, scarred city, managed to save from that today?
Sarajevo in the eighties did not just appear. In Kišov's phrase: it was not created from foam. There was a lot going on before that. The cordial openness of the city, above all. At the same time, its mosaicity. It is one of the few European cities that did not have a dominant nation. All of them are similar, from Thessaloniki, Sofia to Izmir, they have long since sunk into the dictates of one nation. People came to Sarajevo from all directions. Then, the development of the University, students from all parts of the country. Among them is Kornelija Kovač, who decisively influenced the pop music boom in the city in the sixties. Poets, especially Sidran, Trifunović. In my opinion, there are two important events: the opening of Skenderija in November 1969 and the organization of the Winter Olympics in May 1978. This pushed the city forward in everything. Ideologically, Sarajevo, like the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was quite rigid. Our unfortunate politicians, I guess, thought that this was how the value of that community with three peoples, nationalities, religions, etc. was preserved. Then he came new wave and it started to thaw a little. Films, music, theater, literature... Huge energy worked then. The inertia of those eighties continues today in Sarajevo. Well, the people who started the Sarajevo Film Festival, one of the world's events, were important participants in those eighties of the last century. A good number of bands have their roots in those times. But what I don't see is any new, original driving force.
You are the author of the biography of Professor Zdravko Greb, an emblematic character of civil BiH. What does he mean for BiH and is there still hope for his idea of a civil state of BiH?
Zdravko Grebo knew that civil BiH was a utopian idea, but he did not fail to say - that it should be fought for. And he did it consistently for half a century. From the student demonstrations in 1968, when he led the protests, until the end of his life, in January 2019. He was a Yugoslav, "but without imperial ambitions", the first to resign from the Central Committee of the SK Yugoslavia and a rare person from this area whose nationality most did not know . I think he was the first politician from BiH whom the whole of Yugoslavia accepted as their own. Earlier than all of them, he publicly said "that the communists are destroying this country", noting that since 1970 there has been no concept in our country, but "slander, living in a lie and a quote". He had not an ounce of optimism about our entry into Europe. He assessed it as a game between a rich and a poor relative and concluded: "We are not a poor relative either. We are a candidate for a poor relative". Since the publication of my book, I have noticed that interest in his intellectual heritage has grown in Sarajevo. I wrote it with that intention in mind
You are also the author of a documentary film about Ivo Andrić, who unexpectedly or expectedly became a victim of the Yugoslav wars of the nineties. Some dispute it, others like it. Many of them are ready to declare him a Serbian nationalist, even someone who incited hatred by his actions. From your film it can be concluded that he is, actually, quite the opposite, was a man who feared nationalism. Who really was Ivo Andrić and what is it about his character and work that is suitable for political use?
Ivo Andrić is such a monumental personality of local cultures that whenever they try to squeeze him into a local frame, the frame turns out to be the cheapest Chinese plastic. It shoots. I think all his life he just wanted to be left alone. Yes it works. And as is well known, in our country these important figures try to be used for short-term, especially political goals. They lead them like bears. Admittedly, many jump into those roles willingly. With a ready-made ring in the nose.
In that last song of his No title from 1974, the year before his death, which I used in the documentary listing what he wanted, Andrić states: "Bidth and vastness, open vista / A little free breath".
In a letter from 1919, he said to his interlocutor: "I see my duty in Yugoslavia as being silent and thus at least reducing the noise of everyone around me by one voice." In the thousands of pages of prose he wrote since 1920 and short stories The road of Alija Djerzelez, the largest part is based on Bosnia and Herzegovina and its hard history. Even in his last public appearance, in December 1974, a few days before going to the hospital from which he would never return, he told his Eckermann - Ljuba Jandrić - that he had never separated from Bosnia: "What I consider my spiritual reach - that is a gift obtained from Bosnia".
Can we assume what Andrić's attitude would be towards the use of his name and works, produced by Emir Kusturica and Milorad Dodik, embodied in the walls of Andrićgrad?
I'll use logic leave pro toto. Part for the whole. The part illustrates the whole. Milorad Dodik countless times in his attack on Bosnia attributed the sentence to Andrić: "Where logic ends, Bosnia and Herzegovina begins." Who whispered this apocryphal quote in its most innocent form to Milorad Dodik, a former student of the food processing school majoring in meat processing, remains a mystery. Emir Kusturica? If so, I claim that he could not have heard it in the Second Sarajevo High School, which Kusturica and I attended in the same years, even reading Andrić as an elective for the entire school year. When, on what occasion and in front of whom did Andrić utter that sentence? Until there is an answer, here I am to quote one of the statements of "Andrić", which are circulating on social networks: "I wish you a champion!" If anything, this fabrication is downright benign, after all, witty in comparison to Dodik's hoax. Let me return to your question, and with a short statement: what kind of brick, what kind of walls.
Although we didn't want to talk about current topics, in this traumatic post-election period, I can't help but ask you how you feel today, Vučić's Serbia?
Worrying. After all, a society that has not overcome the objectives of the nineteenth century, and has adopted the technology of the twenty-first century, is a dangerous combination.
