ears have passed since the country of Yugoslavia passed away. Still, the feelings, about that event, tragic for many who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time during the past decade in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, seems not to have faded at all. Curiously, the emotions appear to be even more amplified as the person is geographically farther and less directly suffers from the events. The remoteness causes anxiety, and anxiety finds its way to the place where nobody is alone and where nobody is any farther from the other than a click of the mouse.

History Language Moderation

ome time ago, with the beginning of the war in Croatia, the telephone communications between the countries emerging from Yugoslavia's corpse became dysfunctional, sometimes purposefully broken by governments in order to restrict the flow of information, about the newly found enemies, to that provided by the government controlled media. The Internet was then used to connect people of good will on all sides through a creation of the Zamir Transnational Net. Later, during the siege of Sarajevo, that network was interfaced with the World Wide Web through the Sarajevo Pipeline, enabling anybody in the world with the web access to participate in communication with Sarajevo and other besieged cities in post-Yugoslav societies.

oday, with the war largely confined to Kosovo, a new need for friendly use of the net emerged: with increased web accessibility both in post-Yugoslav societies and particularly in the post-Yugoslav emigre communities around the world, a number of chat rooms opened on the web. They all reflect the resident anxieties among the post-Yugoslav crowd: some are so-called Yugo-nostalgic sites, mourning the golden seventies of late Yugoslavia, often overlooking the harsh political realities in which many people lived then; the others are rabidly nationalistic, to the point of ostracizing writers who dare to write critically of their positions.

Java reality Chat Ex-Yu People Forum Bosna Chat Internet Monitor Serbian Cafe Cyber-Balkan

e believe that there is a need for a conflict resolution oriented chat room, not a conflict building oriented or a conflict sweeping-it-under-a-carpet one. We also believe that now is the time for a place in the space for all of those who are neither nostalgic about the old Yugoslavia, nor exclusive about their own ethnicity while being xenophobic about others. There is that tiny generation, who kind of skipped the Yugo-indoctrination, yet, at the same time, missed the re- discovery of the sacred national beings (and occasional excavations of historic bones), simply by passing to their adulthood in the values vacuum of early eighties - when the ancient regime was already too weak and tired to rule, and the new rhetoric did not yet find a mouth-piece to scream through it. I consider us particularly blessed because of that and because of all that good old- school punk rock we got to listen to. We deserve a decent chat room on the net, don't you agree? And here it is:

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by Ivo Skoric
& Ed Agro