Part IV. The end of (the Bosnian part of) the Balkan wars and the demise of ZTN

I began facilitating the yugo.antiwar conference at peacenet in mid-1994, and soon thereafter participated in maintaining the ZTN links. Somewhere along the line I, along with Ivo Skoric, Paul Garrin, and Eric Bachman, responded to the technical evolution of the Internet by setting up the original zamir chat mailinglist/conference/website. This work, though done out of Boston, put me in touch with the technical as well as editorial side of things, and I think I got a pretty good picture of ZTN. The following observations on the demise of ZTN are based on my experiences from '94 to the present (Feb. '99). I believe they're in the main correct, but they're open to revisions from those who were involved on the ground in the Balkans.

With the coming of the Dayton Accords in November 1995, I hoped, along with a number of activists, that ZTN, free from wartime crises, could solidify the services at the existing nodes (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Beograd, Pristina), set up nodes (or at least inexpensive dialups) in more areas, and generally increase its reach. (Indeed, an informal satellite-radio/email link to Bihac from the US had proved to be very useful during the war, and the hope was that this link could be strengthened, even though most other forms of communications to Bihac were, even after Dayton, still difficult or impossible.)

However, events conspired to foil these hopes. After an initially slow start, independent, for- profit ISPs (Internet Service Providers) with full internet capability (i.e., web access) began to appear, and to draw away the new member base that would have otherwise gone to ZTN. As mentioned in Ivo's Part II above, the ZTN software was not fully Internet-compliant, and with the coming of the web, ZTN began to lose its pre-eminence as a communications medium of choice. As events proved, the lack of web capability increasingly isolated ZTN from the wider Internet, and hence from the younger online community. A promising start toward rectifying this was made in 1997-98 by Andreas Jaeger at the zamir-RI (Rijeka), who put ZTN software "on top" of the TCP/IP layer, but financial constraints forced abandonment of those attempts. Another problem, already appreciated by some even in '98, was that the ZTN software was not Y2K-compliant. By '98 there was no one available, certainly not on a volunteer basis, to rewrite the software. It became apparent that the all-round incompatibility of ZTN's technical infrastructure meant that it would be increasingly more difficult and expensive to maintain in a web-based communications environment.

During the war years, the ZTN nodes were maintained by volunteers, who often under conditions of acute physical danger. After Dayton, with activists understandably returning to normal lives, beginning to make salaries again, it became increasingly difficult to maintain staffing of the ZTN nodes. It was particularly difficult to ask activists on the technical side to maintain ZTN, as they could most rapidly rebuild their lives by taking work involving web-based or multimedia projects.

Another element was a general weariness with war and with the struggle to rebuild that transnational culture which ZTN attempted to embody. Activists in the countries which fell out of the wreckage of Yugoslavia had quite enough to do to rebuild their neighborhoods, towns, and countries, without trying to breathe new life into transethnic or pan-slavic dreams. The war wounds are so deep that it's generally recognized it will require generations for them to heal, and that perhaps the better part of wisdom would be to put off transborder pluralism for the present. With the de-emphasis on transborder work, a lot of the energy went out of the ZTN idea.

The international networks and organizations which had supported ZTN during the war were also uncertain how they themselves should move from a BBS-based to a web-based Internet, and were increasingly reluctant to lend financial support to the BBS-based ZTN system.

All these factors conspired to make the funding as well as technical interest in ZTN dry up. Currently, zamir-ZG, zamir-SA and zamir-TZ are still in operation, but increasingly less reliably. Much of the energy in Zagreb is going into the web-based www.zamir.net, Bosnia-Herzegovina now has the .ba domain, inhabited by a number of commercial ISPs, who, as far as I can see, provide as much access to peace groups as well as individuals, as is required. The same can be said for Serbia. Kosovo links to the rest of the world through web sites in Albania. In general, online activists are finding it easiest to gain access by means of commercial web-based mailinglist providers, and this approach is apparently slowly but surely supplanting the conference-based system that was the mainstay of ZTN and indeed the rest of the APC. It turns out that under TCP/IP, as long as a country has sufficiently robust backbone providers, groups resisting illegitimate or oppressive regimes can get their extended online services from providers that need not be geographically proximate, or part of a proprietary system, as long as the groups can pay the (usually modest) subscription fees. In such an environment, ZTN could not compete.

The question today for online activists is, How can the increasingly ubiquitous availability of Internet access be turned to actually bringing about change? Related questions, though not ones that activists involved in immediate liberation struggles have time for, are: How much of the Internet can we retain for civil rather than commercial ends? Will the Internet and online activism be a force for cohesion and cooperation, or, as is seen in the proliferation of *separatist* and purist web sites, will it turn into a force for disintegration and xenophobia?

There *are* still active peace, reconstruction, and even resistance grassroots groups in all the countries of former Yugoslavia. Indeed, I get the impression that new groups, with new energies, are springing up. As a practical matter, computer-mediated-communications still plays a role in their work. But it's not clear to me how the Internet may be used to tie these groups together into an overall movement, or if an overall communications system would increase the groups' effectiveness. It's worth pondering while we await the next historical moment out of which will spring another heroic, communal effort such as ZTN proved to be during the wars and the death of former Yugoslavia.

Ed Agro, Boston, 26 Feb. 1999