Do anti-Yugoslav Western interests Control Radio B292?
by Paul Treanor

[Note from www.emperors-clothes.com : This piece was written about nine months ago but is still quite timely.]

A new radio station using the name of the former B92 radio has started broadcasting in Beograd (Belgrade) under the name B2-92. They also have a new website, taking over where the much-visited Help B92 website left off.

Like the Help B92 website, the new website of Free B92 http://www.freeb92.net/ is owned by KPN Telecom, (a middle-rank European telecom company), through its subsidiary XS4ALL Nederland BV.

Koninklijke KPN NV (Royal Dutch Telecom) is the privatizsed former telecom organization of the Netherlands PTT, originally the ministry for Post and Telegraphy.

Legal control of both the Help B92 website, and the Free B92 website were, and are, ultimately exercised by the board of KPN Telecom. The CEO at KPN Telecom is Wim Dik, a former Netherlands Secretary of State for Foreign Trade.

More realistically, daily control of the content of the websites probably rests with Maurice Wesseling, director of XS4ALL Nederland BV, whose name is under the press release /e-mail announcing the new site.

As you can imagine from this information, B92 is *not* a radical left-wing revolutionary progressive radio station, although an extraordinary number of people do believe this myth. B92 was the Serbian radio of the Soros Foundation, which through its Open Society Funds and Foundations controls a surprisingly large sector of the media in some eastern European countries. (The Soros Foundation got in first, and had the most money).

B92 was therefore never an "independent" radio. Its function was to promote the values of a liberal-democratic free-market society in Serbia and Montenegro, and specifically the classic-liberalism of George Soros. It continued to do this even during the air war on Serbia, when for a time it broadcast from aircraft on the Serbian border (obviously with at least the military approval of the NATO which controlled the airspace), and also from Austria on Austrian government transmitters. Both of these projects were apparently abandoned: perhaps because they were making the station an easy target for pro-Milosevic propagandists. In any case, in the present uncertain climate, the station and its financiers are ready to try again.

For those in any doubt about the ideology of the new station, its website includes a speech by George Soros http://www.freeb92.net/media/statement/soros.shtml This is a commencement speech delivered at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University on May 27, 1999: here is the original at the university website http://www.sais-jhu.edu/events/sorospeech.html

In this speech Soros sets out his view that a world sovereign authority is necessary, to authorize intervention in states. He defends the NATO intervention in Kosovo, as you would expect...

"Nor do I have any doubts that the situation required outside intervention. The case for intervention is clearer in Kosovo than in most other situations of ethnic conflict because Milosevic unilaterally deprived the inhabitants of Kosovo of the autonomy that they had already enjoyed. He also broke an international agreement into which he entered in October of last year."

Soros goes a lot further, though, in proposing that a new alliance of open societies should be set up, to militarily impose an open society on the rest of the world:

"A political alliance dedicated to the promotion of open society might even be able to change the way the UN functions, especially if it had a much broader membership than NATO.NATO could still serve as its military arm."

Remember that B2-92 operates in a society where hundreds of civilians died in NATO bombing a few months ago: it clearly feels that it can now go further than during the war. At the same time, the new version is much more explicitly a Soros/NATO radio than the pre-war version. (I would guess that they have dumped any journalists who had doubts about the tougher pro-NATO line, but I have no confirmation of that).