Serbia's Exit Festival: Revolutions, cruise missiles and jail-time

“One guy I was locked up with was in charge of smuggling drugs for the area and there were various other serious criminals, though often with those kind of people, although they live outside the law they also follow quite strict codes of behaviour. Strangely enough, business people also follow the same codes; street codes, whatever. Jail was a good life experience for me, all in all.”

Sitting in a South Kensington hotel foyer on a sunny spring morning, Exit Festival co-founder Bojan Boskovic is a long way from the prison cell he was thrown into in 2004 by nationalist politicians just one month before that year’s event. Pointing out that jail time on the CV is practically obligatory for successful Serbian politicians, the one time student agitator turned festival chief admits he was unflustered by the overall experience, despite even going on hunger strike for ten days. “It was really OK,” he smiles, “I had a lot of support in the cell, people liked me there.”

While fellow Exit staffer and PR chief Rajko Bozic went on a sympathetic hunger strike outside, Bojan admits to sneaking ‘a bit of chicken here and there’ with physical violence also something he had no fear of. “Errm, we know a lot of people, obviously,” he smiles. “It was funny because the guys in the cell were like ‘hey, can you get us some job when we’re out, can we do something’ but even the guards were asking if they could be involved in the festival too. So then I started thinking ‘this country really has changed- everybody wants to work’.”

Four years later, Exit is acknowledged as one of the premier destination festivals in the world, attracting over 10,000 Brits last year and countless thousands more from across the Balkans and the rest of Europe. Born out of an anti-Milosevic student campaign led by Bojan and his fellow Exit founders Dusan Kovacevic and Ivan Milivojev, the event has become Serbia’s biggest cultural asset for normalising relations with the EU, an issue that’s more topical than ever, following Kosovo’s recent unilateral declaration of independence.

“One thing that’s obvious is that there aren’t going to be any more wars in the Balkans at the moment – I hope ever,” Bojan predicts. “This Kosovo issue has obviously provoked a deep emotional crisis in Serbia which is understandable, it’s a very delicate issue. But in our view the Balkans have suffered enough. Exit’s position on this topic is that we’re the people’s festival which came out of the ideas of freedom of speech and democracy. We’re very pro-European; we see Serbia and the Balkans as an integral part of Europe and the European Union and we want to do everything in our power to be there as soon as possible.”

Rewinding to the last Balkans/ Kosovo conflict in 1999, Bojan and the rest of Novi Sad’s population endured a 3 month nightly bombing campaign by NATO forces, in which cruise missiles were used to terrorise the population and wipe out much of the city’s infrastructure. At the time Novi Sad was governed by the Democratic Opposition, ironically a party in opposition to Milosevic, though the city was devastated nonetheless, with even cluster bombs dropped on residential areas on a number of occasions. Power supplies, water and sewer systems were destroyed and three principal bridges across the Danube were cut in the attacks separating the town proper almost entirely from Petrovaradin, the historic village and fortress where the festival now takes place.

In 2005, the devastated bridge stumps still remained exposed and unrepaired close to the beach area site of Exit’s day time raves, only being repaired fully in 2006, though today the situation’s a lot quieter, says Bojan. “The Kosovo problem has been inherited from the Milosevic times and there hasn’t been any good policy towards Kosovo for decades, stretching back to the Second World War,” he stresses. “The situation has calmed down now, I don’t think there will be any more events like that,”

Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): The US State Department website urges Americans to leave Serbia at the present time, what do you make of that?

Bojan (Exit): I think it’s blown out of proportion, I don’t know any Americans who’ve left personally, apart from a couple from the US Embassy. There haven’t been any situations of Americans being treated badly personally and whoever has been to the Exit Festival before knows that Serbians are very generous people. We are also launching the Exit Foundation this year and the Americans will be in charge of that – they’ll be the captain of this team. That’s a political statement.

Skrufff: How did you get involved in creating Exit in the first place?

Bojan (Exit): My story is quite funny. My father was, and still is, a professor at the University teaching Physical Chemistry, so in the ‘90s he would explain to students what was going on in politics in terms of relations between electrons and protons. Such as ‘this is Slobo (Milosevic), these are his bad guys the protons and they are corrupting these electrons’. One of the ways that the government was repressing all those people who believed in free speech and democracy was to force them to join the army. So you’d go into the army, they’d send you somewhere dangerous and you would probably get killed, because there was a war going on. Therefore we moved to Canada and lived there for two years. I came back to Serbia in 1995 right in the middle of the crisis when there were hundreds of thousands of Serbs coming from Croatia (following ethnic cleansing). From 1995 onwards I witnessed pretty much all the horrors that were happening in Serbia, including the NATO bombing and everything else. Myself and the whole Exit crew also really lived this story of trying to fight against the autocratic regime of Milosevic and that’s how Exit started. We put a lot of heart into it and within two or three years we could already see the shape of Exit and we knew it was going to be a big deal internationally. And yet, you’d still turn around and see these bridges torn to pieces. It was an amazing sight and contradiction.

Skrufff: What were you doing in Novi Sad in the 90s?

Bojan (Exit): We were all studying. I was at the faculty of electronic engineering and we were issuing a lot of initiatives and plans to change the regime. We were constantly challenging the regime and we formed an organisation, we were interviewed by the police many times. The idea was that we could use culture, music and an independent state of mind to change the government.

Skrufff: When the missiles landed on the bridges, where were you that night?

Bojan (Exit): I was running towards the bridges when the missiles exploded because my sisters were rollerblading on the promenade that runs alongside the Danube. I was running there with my father. They were about 100 metres from the bridge when that happened. I have two younger twin sisters.

Skrufff: Were many people killed when the main road bridge was destroyed?

Bojan (Exit): I’m not sure about the exact number of casualties but I can certainly tell you there was a lot of irresponsibility involved in this act of bombing this bridge. It pissed me off how NATO representatives presented it; they were very arrogant. One thing about Novi Sad which is specific to the city is that many Novi Sad residents have second homes on the mountain close to the city where they go and spend their weekends. This bridge was blown up on Sunday evening at 8pm when all the people were coming back. That was a pure demonstration of arrogance. It’s quite different bombing a bridge at eight o’clock in the evening compared to 4 o’clock in the morning. I was very angry about that. It’s good that a couple of years after that we can say that brought the first people to Serbia for Exit and they had the best time of their lives. They felt safe and welcome, it shows that we really were the prisoners of our regime.

Skrufff: You were jailed for a couple of weeks in 2004 just before that year’s Exit Festival, what happened, how were you treated?

Bojan (Exit): It happened three weeks before Exit. Firstly, I need to tell you some background about Exit. We have a strong political stance but we are not aligned to any particular political party. Our standpoint is that Serbia and the whole of the Balkans should be part of Europe. But not only politically but also mentally; that Serbia should be democratic and free and that all people should be able to live free; that we should glorify and embrace the higher values of humanity, freedom of speech: these are the values we stand for and these values are quite progressive for some political parties in our environment. Exit is a political organisation in that sense and we have quite a lot of political influence with the young people that come there. Young people in Serbia are banned from travelling, they cannot go to Europe, they cannot attend European universities – they’re isolated. Exit presents a window to them. It’s crazy that 20 years after the Berlin Wall you have another wall in Europe that’s even higher. We were three weeks before the festival and one week before the Presidential elections and some extreme elements of the government were looking for a scandal and they wanted to present us as people that are bad for Serbia. This story was developing for quite some time. They started by saying we were drug addicts then claimed we were thieves and were stealing money, so we were put in jail. It was very ridiculous, we had the police in our office for months.

Skrufff: When you were detained did they arrest you in a raid?

Bojan (Exit): No, we were invited for an interview at which they informed us we were dangers to society then we were put in front of the judge, who was the same judge who operated throughout the 90s for the Milosevic government and was on their payroll.

Skrufff: What did they charge you with?

Bojan (Exit): The reason we were put in jail was because we gave away too many free tickets. She asked ‘did you take an official decision on how many free tickets you would give away?’ and I said ‘what the fuck are you talking about? There isn’t a single politician in Serbia who pays for a ticket at the festival’. (laughing). We’d be giving all these politicians tickets when they asked, saying ‘sure, come, just stay away from me, don’t bug me’. Don’t get me wrong, there are nice politicians that really have helped us, and understand our story, but than again there are those we have nothing to do with. Then she said ‘you’re going to jail’ and she sentenced us to jail for one month. The reason why we were in jail because they felt we were a danger to the witnesses. Which is ridiculous because the witnesses were people from Exit.

This year’s Exit Festival happens July 10th-13th, and headliners include 2 Many DJs, Sven Vath, Claude Von Stroke, Ministry, Francois K and many more. For more info check out www.exitfest.org.

Check out this clip of the mighty Danny Tenaglia at last year’s Exit (when are you coming to Australia Danny?!):

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Miss_Nefarious says...

on April 12th, 2008

I was at EXIT 2005. I went by myself and it was the best thing i ever did! It was an awesome festival! Serbia is an amazing, beautiful country. Congrats to Bojan and his team for all there hard work!

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