IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Maarten Reesink
Time   : 14:30 - 17:30
Subject: Tactical media as tools for survival
Date   : Saturday 20 January 1996

"Arkzin challenges journalistic objectivity and journalistic professionality." It may be one of the most intruiging aspects of Arkzin, the bi-weekly anti-war magazine from Zagreb that combines politics and subculture as its main tpics of interest. The words come from Vesna Jankovic, the editor-in-chief, during the session called "Tactical media as tools for survival."

Arkzin started in the spring of 1993 as one of the most oppositional voices in the Croatian media. It focuses on persons and people from the social and cultural margins of society, and raises political issues as well as subcultural ones.

Before the war broke out, the areas of society that could be called subcultural were very diverse, although often quite interconnected. A rich variety of subcultural scenes existed next to each other, often making temporal or topical connections. This whole substructure more or less broke down soon after the war developed. One of the tasks Arkzin has set itself to is to rebuild parts of these subcultural infrastructure, by forming a forum for alternative voices.

This gets more and more important as the current Crotian regime led by Tuchman succeeds over time in stabilizing the stuation in the country and thereby its own powerbase. This means that along with its growing political power, its starts to get a better grip on other parts of society as well, including the flow of money as well as the flow of information.

This makes Arkzin important in at least wo ways. First of all, its tries to find out and tell its readers what has really happened. As obvious a task as this may seem, it isn't all that easy, especially if you go against the grain. Thus, Arkzin didn't join in the massive victorious outcry in the Croatia media immediately after the end of the war, but started its own research on the facts and figures about what had happened during the years before. It did so by getting inside information from the UN as well as various human rights ad humanitarian help organisations.

But Arkzin does more than just looking for the truth. It also gives voice to other kinds of stories, varying from the provocative and the ironical to the subversive. Therefore, it is not just a search for the "other" truth, as it were, at least not in the sense of an objective truth. It is also a major channel for the distribution all kinds of subjective truths from real people, the 'small' but all the more relevant truths, views ad other stories of the victims of the war, as opposed to the traditional 'big' stories produced by more traditional journalism.

The fact that Arkzin is often selfconsciously subjective is therefore not its weakness, but (part of) its strength. It is a very strong plea for subjective journalism as such as a complement for the still neccessary search for facts and figures. Not as a luxury, a nice background illustration of the big picture, but as an absolutely neccessary counterpart to that. It seems to me that especially in times of war, the need these stories may even be stronger than for any other ones.

Maarten Reesink