Self-imposed nationalist dictators lost their power to prevent communication of their people beyond the borders of their police-states. Za-mir Transnational Network (ZTN) was born. International financial mogul George Soros's Open Society Institute is one of the main sponsors of the network, and it uses the ZTN for communication with it's network of Open Society offices in former Yugoslavia. Open Society helps paying expenses to the several alternative and independent media in the region: Feral Tribune, Arkzin, Vreme, B92, Monitor, earlier mentioned Mladina. According to Eric, today there are more than 2500 ZTN users, ranging in age from 12 to 68, in 5 different BBSs (Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Pristine). Most of the BBS's send and/or receive approximately 500 kilobytes a day. this includes public and private messages. This costs approximately 400 DM a month for each system. At the beginning they also supported the costs for transferring the data. In late 1993, the National Endowment for Democracy began to cover the telephone costs (now DM 3,000 a month, approx US$2,000 a month), and George Soros began to fund some of the work. Soros funded most of the Ljubljana system (ZAMIR-LJ; set up in February 1994), and all of the Sarajevo system (ZAMIR-SA; set up in March 1994). The Pristine system (ZANA-PR), set up in October 1994, was funded by groups from the Netherlands. Soros also has financed Eric's work on the system since latter part of 1993. Former Yugoslavia is just a part of Soros's overall financial aid involvement in the countries of former Eastern Europe. As he likes to put it: "Now they don't call it Soviet empire any more, they call it Soros empire."