Your texts and opinions we would offer to the Yugoslavian public, and from this end we would send you texts of the most prominent of our authors. We are ready to answer to your questions and provide you with the matter-of-fact information available to us.

What gives us the right to ask for your help in building this Bridge is the fact that from the very beginning of the crisis in Yugoslavia we have clearly and frankly been against the war and against violence towards civilians and civil life values. The people who are affiliated with the publishing house "Stubovi Kulture" (David Albahari, Vladimir Arsenijevic, Dragan Velikic, Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic,

Dusan Kovacevic, Vida Ognjenovic, Radoslav Petkovic, Ljubomir Simovic...) have raised their voices against the destruction of cities and Bridges; under difficult circumstances we acted as responsible and clear-minded citizens, sympathizing with other peoples suffering just like with our own -- Muslim, Croatian and Serbian refugees yesterday, as well as Albanian refugees from Kosovo and Serbian refugees from their homes today. At this time, being ourselves exposed to war and collective retaliation destroying everything man has built, and even more importantly the values one could believe in, at his time when Yugoslavian citizens live in shelters and darkened cities, when every single citizen of Yugoslavia is a potential "collateral victim", we will not give up on our need for culture and the best expressions of the tradition, and we will not cease being open to basic values, no matter where they come from.

The project of the "Stubovi Kulture" publishing house has started July 6th 1993 primarily as a literary project, but in the six following years it grew into a project of general culture and historiography. Started in a time not unlike today, during the war in ex-Yugoslavia, a huge inflation, international sanctions and the breakdown of every code of values, the project has since become a publishing house gathering together the leading Yugoslavian authors whose books have been translated and published in more than 30 countries. Having in mind T. S. Eliott's maxim saying that one cannot inherit a tradition, but must create it instead, by his own hard work, the project of "Stubovi Kulture", with its publishing policy, stands for an enterprise of carefully planned "creating of the tradition". With the sentence "Reading is a private affair" on its flag, the whole project is based on the returning to the tradition of private property and civil values. This approach includes a group of the finest of the Yugoslav authors and the most prominent ones from the whole world. The Serbian authors of "Stubovi Kulture" are practically the only Serbian writers whose books are continually being translated in Europe and Northern America, and through the last decade their books have been present in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Split, Ljubljana and Dubrovnik. Thus building a cultural Bridge, in the past six years "Stubovi Kulture" has published the books of Konrád Gyorgy, Esterházy Péter, Bohumil Hrabal, Patrick Modiano, Paulos Matesis, Katarina Frosenson, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Caroll, L. M. Montgomery, Arthur C. Clarke, Anthony Burgess, Miguel de Unamuno, Robert Menasse, Giovanni Papini, Georges Perec, Bruce Chatwin...

The politics will surely find answers and excuses for the murdering of civilians, demolition of Bridges, the bombings of the refugee caravans, destruction of the petro-chemical industry, provoking an ecological catastrophe that may threaten the whole of the Eastern and Central Europe, and for the interrupting of the Danube river traffic...

Those of us who are not politicians, who found no excuse for a similar government policy in our own country, are now not seeking political answers, but your word as a citizen about everything that is happening here. The principal victims of war in Yugoslavia are the civilians and their belongings. The bombs are murdering children, demolishing cities, destroying Bridges, railroads and roads, private property, objects of economy, and burying the future of many generations to come. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated against the regime, asking for democracy, two years ago in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Nis, Valjevo, Kraljevo and other major cities in Serbia, all together 64 of them, for all their efforts today are victims of collective retaliation.

Mr. Srdan Mikovic, Lord-mayor of the city of Pancevo, today the most endangered city in Serbia, situated in the nearest proximity of Belgrade, where a huge petro-chemical complex has been destroyed and a dark cloud hovering over it for days now, has recently shown to a Washington Post reporter a collection of national flags of USA, England and France that he now keeps packed up in his closet. Those flags were carried as symbols of democracy through the streets of Pancevo two years ago, in the demonstrations that preceded to his being elected Lord-mayor, as an opposition representative. Pancevo is today being punished in the most brutal way for that resistance and victory over the regime, and people are fleeing from it in masses.

Those who are cynically wondering if the bombing will last for as many days as we spent on the streets, demanding the return to the basic democratic principles and to the civil and legal society -- perhaps have the point.

In retaliating all of us, NATO uses weapons prohibited by international conventions, attacks objects that should be protected by international treaties, and the news that even depleted Uranium ammunition has been used have not been confirmed, but they have neither been refuted. By bombing Yugoslavia the western military alliance creates an anti- western general mood in the Yugoslavian public and demolishes the basis that the West European countries were built upon.

Those of us who are exposed to the consequences of this inhuman war, the war whose key-weapon are the civilians, believe that this might be the last moment when we can still speak of such topics as the collective retaliation, collateral victims, ecological catastrophe, refugees, civilian life in shelters and darkened cities, traumas caused by bombings, destruction of Bridges, ethics of modern wars, media giving up their own freedom of expression, interruption of the Danube river traffic, the use of literature and culture in a time of war, civilians as a weapon of the modern wars...

If you should find some other topics, we would be very grateful, because that will mean that we can still talk even in a time when we cannot sail the rivers, and the Bridges on them have been destroyed. We hope that you will help us in building at least this of all the Bridges. There are already plenty of those who are demolishing them.

Please send your contributions to: bridge@stubovi.co.yu

STUBOVI KULTURE Publishing house