Susa was among those well-known independent journalists in Serbia who, immediately following Milosevic's downfall, were asked to head the discredited state news agencies until new directors and editors can be appointed. Assigned to head the information/editorial desk at RTS, Susa was so disgusted, she said, with the lack of change of personnel and the complete lack of critical thinking she found among RTS staff that she left last week.

"I would watch the RTS journalists, trying to compare news from [independent news agencies] Beta and Fonet and Reuters, and they would suddenly feel confused and tired, they didn't know what the news was," Susa described. "This is the hardest job, to teach people how to think. And we just don't have enough educated, professional people at RTS. We have to educate people to listen to multiple opinions, to create a forum for dialogue."

For more than a decade, the semi-dictatorship discouraged its citizens from thinking for themselves -- that, Susa says, is the major problem. "Seventy-five percent of the Serbian population is basically illiterate. That is basically why state TV is so powerful here," Susa adds.

"You must understand 13 years of repression. Can you imagine, the newsreaders at RTS used to prepare the news by reading Tanjug [the Milosevic-controlled state wire agency] wires directly? Without any comment? They only changed any word if they could find a better word with which to spit at the opposition."

"This is really the biggest problem," echoes Sasa Mirkovic, the young director of Radio B92. "Everyone who was so obedient to Milosevic, now is so obedient to DOS. And as I can see, DOS isn't complaining too much about that."

While Mirkovic's B92 and Susa's VIN, with their combined staff of fewer than 200 people, can't have the reach of RTS, with its staff of 6,000, the independent groups are steeped in what RTS sorely lacks: journalists who know how to handle a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Mirkovic makes clear that, like Susa, he is disgusted with what he's witnessed at RTS, which he describes as a simple editorial transfer of allegiance from Milosevic to the new DOS leadership. And as far as Mirkovic is concerned, he has no desire to take over RTS and try to reform it.

"They [RTS] dug their bed, and they can dig themselves out of it," he said. At B92, "We are with the people, between the opposition and the regime. No authority can be misused. We need to have balance, even in our coverage of the new leadership."

Mirkovic says the station has an important role to play in teaching this society how a democracy should function. "We want to create a TV campaign to remind people that the government exists, and is responsible, to them, the people," Mirkovic says.

Mirkovic spoke to me at a sports cafe down the street from B92's offices in the House of Youth building downtown. Last year during the NATO bombing, Milosevic's police seized the offices, equipment, frequency and name, trying to use the station's youthful image and popularity for Milosevic's propaganda. Mirkovic didn't dare go back to those offices until they were officially restored to the station.

The real B92 was forced to use the name "Free B2-92," and to broadcast on the Internet and satellite TV -- which few Serbs have access to. Its new office addresses were kept secret out of fear of more police raids.

A few days after our interview, opposition leader and new Belgrade mayor Milan St. Protic gave B92 its name and offices back. Mirkovic and his young staff of 150 joyfully moved back into the House of Youth building, down Makedonska Street from state RTS, and the newspaper Politika.

B92 and its parent organization, the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM in Serbian, with some 50 independent TV and radio stations around Serbia as members), have also begun experimental television programming on a frequency provided by the central Belgrade municipality of Vracar. B92/ANEM debuted on Belgrade television last week with a Western-made, Serbo-Croatian-subtitled documentary on war crimes in Croatia, and has followed up with several more war-time documentaries that offer Serbian viewers some of their first television pictures of the wars they experienced indirectly.

B92, ANEM and VIN have long been covering taboo subjects such as war crimes. Now these companies and programs have unimpeded access to the Serbian airwaves. Already, that access is affecting public discourse by articulating subjects, ideas and recent history many people here are aware of, but have not had a forum to discuss until now.

Janko Balat, a documentary filmmaker who has produced three films for ANEM, has dedicated his next film to asking the question, how did Serbia come to suffer Milosevic?

"The most interesting thing for all of us to reexamine is our own guilt for things here," Balat said last week in an interview near Belgrade University's humanities faculty. "Only through portraits of ordinary people, to see what causes an individual to step by step make compromises, in their work, in their families, in their own morals, to accept this life under Milosevic the past 10, 12 years, can we understand what happened here."

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