Syndicate: Radio Repor

["lisa haskel" <lisa@lisa.demon.co.uk>]

Dear All,

Yesterday evening, in chaotic but friendly backspace-style, Radio 
Deep Europe netcast for two hours between 5pm and 7pm GMT.

Syndicalists Toni Prug, Lina D. Russell, Mare Tralla, Manu Luksch, 
Armin Medosch and Gordana Novakovic, and good Syndicate friends 
Rachel Baker, Giovanni D'Angelo and David Cross gathered to make the 
programme and contribute.  Plus a half dozen or so other backspacers 
and friends dropped by.  Mongrels Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood 
lent much needed equipment, and a few more supporters appeared on the
IRC.

Despite equipment shortages and breakdowns - endemic to this 
small-scale production - we got some resemblence of a programme out 
reviewing news, opinions, alternative sources of information and 
pointers towards issues we could address immediately within our own 
countries.

We made telephone interviews with Micz Flor and some Serbian 
colleagues at Public Netbase in Vienna, Adam Hyde from the B92 
campaign in Amsterdam talked about the independent media situation in 
Serbia, Kosovo, and the border areas in Macedonia, and Florian 
Schneider from the Cross the Border campaign in Germany who had some 
very useful points to make on the issue of refugees, army deserters 
and asylum seekers and how to lobby governments on these issues.  

>From Backspace: Rachel Baker contributed her own re-worked version of 
newspaper headlines in her PPP service, Armin Medosch contributed a 
collection of mainstream media clips and choice pieces of political 
outrage,  Lina Russell and Tony Prug gave live simultaneously 
translated updates on the situation in Belgrade and elsewhere from 
FRY taken from the chatlines and message boards on beograd.com., Manu 
contributed music and  David Cross talked extemely eloquently about 
the sub-culture of army life as he understands it from his contact 
with one of his brothers who is in the British Army in Bosnia and 
probably now Macedonia, and the difficulty of reconciling this family 
relationship with his own position. 

As well as commenting on the current situation, its escalation and 
complex effects, many of us mentioned the contradictions and 
challenges of receiving news of this conflict from mass media 
sources, personal sources and the semi-public forum of the Syndicate.

I hope that there is some value to this exercise, even as the crisis 
escalates and many on the Syndicate list - in ways that I fully 
support - turn their attention to trying to trying to articulate 
and present a position to governments and humanitarian agencies. I am 
trying to weigh this up myself.

One immediate effect is that another good Syndicate friends: Matthew 
Fuller and I/O/D have suggested that we "hijack" a slot in their 
presentation of his new artwork at London's ICA to talk about the 
lists, the radio project, the underlying arguments and potential 
future initiatives.  Extracts of the audio material will provide a 
resource for this kind of presentation which I think will be very 
valuable, which provide something to present more publicly other than 
the list texts. Maybe this can help preserve the delicate 
integrity of the forum which Andreas and Adele have talked about.  

Maybe this is is a resource others can use.

I will post again soon to let you know the whereabouts of the 
archived programme and prepare a running-order so that those who 
watn to can select extracts.  Some new audio files have been uploaded 
since the programme so I will try and make these available aswell.

With many, many thanks to all who contributed to and supported the 
programme and very best wishes to all,

Lisa