U2 establishes a satellite beachhead/ bill carter picks up some bullet holes/ an excruciating moment for larry mullen/ the english press eat U2 for breakfast/ salman rushdie emerges from hiding

IN marseilles, France, on July 14 Bono makes his first attempt to bring Sarajevo onto the Zoo TV stage. They have not yet been able to hook up a television transmission with Bosnia, but so far this summer Macphisto's telephone has been good enough for reaching everyone from Pavarotti ("You're slimming down for the nineties!") to Mussolini's granddaughter ("I think you're doing a marvelous job of filling the old man's shoes!") so Bono will try to phone Bill Carter in Sarajevo tonight. After Morleigh has belly danced off stage at the end of "Mysterious Ways" Bono addresses the crowd.

"Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!" he says to applause. "But not in Sarajevo! Not in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I want to call a friend I have there." Bono goes to the onstage phone and hits a long series of numbers slowly and carefully. "I'm trying to get through here, hold on," he tells the audi­ence. He holds up crossed fingers. There's a ringing and then an Ameri­can voice comes on the line.

"Hello."

"Hello," Bono says, "is that Sarajevo? Is that my man, Bill Carter?

"Hey! Hello, Bono! How are you?"

"I'm here in Marseilles," Bono says as the audience applauds, in France, and we are calling to tell you that we love you!"

"Hey, that feels good in Sarajevo! Thank you very much!"

"Tell us what's been happening today."

"Well, as you know, the situation is a little desperate with the basics

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of water, food, and electricity, but everybody is holding up, trying to stick in there."

"You have no water?"

"A little water came to the city today, but we still have no power and there's no food. Old people are starting to die 'cause there's no food."

"They die because there's no food. How do the people of Sarajevo feel about Europe? Do you feel we have let you down?"

"Yeah. There's a bit of a feeling in Sarajevo that Europe has forgotten that Sarajevo is in Europe, and the problems in Sarajevo will eventually become Europe's problems."

"Well, I just want to say one thing to you tonight, Bill. We are ashamed tonight to be Europeans and to turn our backs on you and your people." The crowd claps at this. "We wish you well, we wish you safety, and we will call again. God bless you."

With that U2 goes into "One," and back at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo where he went to wait for the call. Bill Carter feels all hopped up at having spoken to a stadium full of people. Now he's just got to get back to his apartment in the city without getting shot. Night is a bad time to be out around here. Bill had to run across an open field to get to this hotel where Reuters News Service is headquartered and borrow their phone. Now he has to run back.

Three days later he has to take a bigger risk for a bigger payoff. Carter has managed to convince the European Broadcast Union—a satellite pool used by the news services covering the war in Bosnia—that he is not a lunatic, that he really has the wherewithal to make nightly broadcasts to stadiums full of people if the EBU will let him get on their satellite for ten or fifteen minutes. To tell you the truth, I think the EBU is more convinced by the checks Principle sends to their Geneva headquarters than by Bill's entreaties. The bad news is that Carter has to drive across dangerous terrain to get to the Sarajevo TV station and hook up with the satellite. He enlists two Bosnian pals, Darko and Vlado, to run the gauntlet with him. (Darko and Vlado are Serbian, by the way—which demonstrates that Sarajevo includes Serbs who would rather risk death for a multiethnic Bosnia than join the "ethnic cleans­ing," the Serbian nationalists' euphemism for wiping out other ethnic groups.)

The three drive like madmen through the open area called "Sniper's Alley" and make it inside the dark TV station with flashlights. They use

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portable batteries for power and get set up to go live to Bologna. At about 9:45 Carter can hear in his earpiece distant applause and Bono talking to the Italian audience: "Crazie. We're about 500 kilometers here from a city very different to this city. We're going to try to get through to the people of Sarajevo. We're using our high-tech shit. We got them on the phone last week, but tonight for the first time we'll try to get my friend Bill in Sarajevo. Are you there. Bill? We got you on the line?"

Bill looks into the camera and speaks into a hand microphone: "Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me, Bono?"

"Yeah, we got ya." Bill's nervous face is lighting up the Zoo Vidiwalls. "What's happening today in Sarajevo?" Bono asks. "Where are you?"

"I'm in the TV station downtown in Sarajevo. It's about ten o'clock here. Outside the window about an hour and a half ago there were two grenades and one child was killed and five people were injured. So the situation's kind of bad. The food supply is gone, there's no water, there's no electricity. People are eating the grass. To get to water you have to walk two to three hours. Some people faint on the way to get the water. They have no energy.

"Just today I went to the hospital and saw a friend of mine who has a grenade shell in his head here." Bill points to his temple. "He went to get water, about a two-hour walk, and a grenade fell and hit him in the head. He has two daughters who are now probably going to have to get their own water. They probably won't make it. You know, if I got on a plane right now I could be at your concert before it's over. I'm less than an hour away from Bologna. And yet thanks to the EBU and satellite connections we can talk."

Bill hears applause in his earpiece. Then he hears Bono's voice again: "Well, the truth is we don't have anything that we can say to you. We are dumb. We just wanted you to know that here in Bologna, Italy, at this moment we're thinking about you and we pray for an end to your troubles and we pray that Europe will take the people of Sarajevo more seriously than they are right now. They are leaving you, they are ignoring you, we are betraying you. It's only a fucking rock & roll song, but this song is for you. Whatever that means. Good night. God bless you. Love to everybody. Thanks, Bill."

U2 plays "One." Later in the concert, after they perform "When Love Comes to Town" on the B stage, Bono says, "There's something

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obscene about having to beam in pictures from across the waters in Sarajevo to a rock & roll concert. It doesn't quite fit. This is a Bob Marley song. It might say things a whole lot better." And he sings "Redemption Song."

U2 agrees after the concert that the Sarajevo hookup came too early in the show, it threw off the mood before the mood had even been established. The next night they wait until the end of the B stage segment, after Bono's interstellar duet with Lou Reed's electronic ecto­plasm on "Satellite of Love." This time Bono also gets the physical distance between Bologna and Bosnia right. "We're 200 miles, 330 kilometers from Sarajevo," he says to the audience. "These are our next-door neighbors." There is plenty of supportive applause.

"I suppose the thing is with TV you don't know if what you're seeing is real," Bono tells the crowd, spelling out publicly the original motiva­tion for the Zoo TV concept. "You can't tell the difference anymore between the adverts, and what's happening on CNN, or what's coming in on satellite. You can't ask the television some questions. We sent a satellite dish into the city of Sarajevo. We've got a friend there, a cool guy named Bill Carter, a rock & roll fan! Let's see if we can get him on the line. Is it working? Are you there, Bill?"

Carter's haggard face fills up the screens in the Bologna stadium. "Yeah, I hear you, Bono."

"Well, you got fifty thousand people here and we just wanted to say to you that it might not be on the news as much as we'd like, it might not be on the TV as much as we'd like, but you are with us here and you're in our hearts tonight." There are cheers.

"Thank you. It's about eleven o'clock here in Sarajevo. Today the fighting is very little but there's a general fear the town's getting smaller. The perimeter of the town is being fought over and the people are having to come to the center of town, so supplies of food and water and gas are becoming more of a problem. Also tonight about twelve kilome­ters from here about ten to fifteen thousand people, refugees, are being attacked by artillery and they have nowhere to go. On a personal note my friend that had the piece of grenade in his head died this morning."

Bono is staring blankly at the screen now, as if he's forgotten he's on a stage in a stadium full of people. Carter continues, "But tonight I have some friends with me from Sarajevo. This is Darko, who I asked earlier today what is the hardest part of the war for him."

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Darko comes on and speaks in broken English: "First, I want to say hello to all the people in Bologna. Thanks to Bill, U2, and all you people we don't feel alone this night as we usually do, especially within the last few months. Anyway, answering this question: the hardest thing for me. Although we all in Sarajevo have to live with all this death, the hardest thing for me on my personal level is being separated from my family, my wife and kids. They live and they grow up somewhere without me, with no opportunity to contact them. Even more shocked is the fact that my parents live just four kilometers from this place and I'm not able to contact them—maybe, except using such satellite con­nection. I'm not able to contact them for a year. Those are things that are hardest for me during this eighteen months. Once again, thank you all in Bologna."

Bill Carter introduces another guest to the audience, saying, "I have another friend, Vlado, who has been separated from his wife for seven­teen months. She lives in Bologna and there's a good chance she could be here tonight."

Vlado steps up. "I have a small message for my wife, mia cam, Mirita. My darling Mirita, I love you and I miss you. I feel alive and I feel good. Thank you. Thank you, Billy. Thank you, U2. And grazie, Bologna. Ciao."

In Bologna U2 goes into "Bad" and in Sarajevo, Carter, Vlado, and Darko get into their car and drive as fast as they can through Sniper's Alley. Bullets fly around them, hitting the car. They have to floor the accelerator and at the same time kill the headlights. There is almost as much chance of dying in an auto wreck as there is of being hit by the Chetnik gunfire. Finally they pull out of the exposed area and come to rest in the relative safety of a narrow street. They climb out and count the new bullet holes in the auto body.

Bill has gotten so used to the horror of life in Sarajevo that he no longer looks twice at such surreal characters as the head of the local Mafia, who promises safe passage out of the city for the right price and has taken to riding around the town on a horse, pistols dangling from his belt.

Over the next three weeks, U2 does ten more hookups with Bill Carter and his neighbors in Sarajevo. During that time U2 crosses into the U.K. and begins Zooropa's final leg: Glasgow, Leeds, Cardiff, and four nights at the huge Wembley Stadium in London. Over 400,000

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tickets have been sold for these U.K. concerts. Meanwhile Bill Carter finds that both he and Bono are becoming heroes to the people of Sarajevo. The in-concert conversations are being broadcast on local radio, and provide for the Bosnians a slender bit of evidence that the outside world has not abandoned them completely. The satellite trans­missions themselves become more angry, with Carter taking on a slightly messianic edge and the Bosnians he brings on camera accusing the U2 audiences of sitting there doing nothing while we are being murdered. It makes it hard for U2 to regain emotional control of their concerts afterward.

Much of the British press heads up to Glasgow for the first U.K. show and are slapped with an on-screen lecture from a Bosnian woman who tells them, "We would like to hear the music, too, but we only hear the screams of wounded and tortured people and raped women!"

Adam wants to put down his bass, walk offstage, get in his car, and go somewhere where he can bury his head in the sand and not think about what the next song is or who he has to shake hands with after the show.

Larry, sitting on his drum stool under the video screen, listening to this and looking out at Bono standing alone on the B stage, thinks, This is the most excruciating thing U2 has ever been through. He is literally squirming with discomfort. Larry is the band member who was uncomfortable using a bit of video that made fun of George Bush. For him, the Bosnia broadcasts are pure torture.

It ain't a picnic for the audience, either. There is nothing like having genocide shoved in your face to ruin a crowd's partying mood. Bono has certainly achieved his early goal of illustrating onstage the obscenity of idly flipping from a war on CNN to rock videos on MTV. The audience at the U2 concerts may be appalled, and are as likely to be angry with U2 as with the Serbians, but they are not numb. The audience is so shaken that the music can hardly recapture their enthusi­asm.

In August U2 decide they will end the Bosnia broadcasts after their four-night stand in London. They rationalize that, by coincidence or indirect effect, Sarajevo has gone from being virtually unmentioned in the press three weeks earlier to dominating the front pages of the British papers every day. They will bring Bill Carter out of Sarajevo to Ireland for the final three Zooropa concerts.

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As Bono predicted, by the time the tour gets to London the press is savage. They treat U2's reversion to world-saving form as a drunk's wife treats her husband's falling off the wagon. Larry says that with the Sarajevo linkup U2 has set its image back five years—but what is a rock band's image worth when put up against the genocide in Bosnia?

"I like that confusion," Bono says of the blow to U2's new persona. "When I go to the theater I need to know that the actor is not so comfortable on that stage, I need to know that he might be in my face or in my life. There's a script at a U2 show, but you need to know that the script might get ripped up and you might be out there. So occasion­ally when that happens and you think, 'Well, this isn't what I was told this would be! I thought they were all removed now and here they are laying this on me,' that's our job!"

A long anti-U2 tirade in London's New Musical Express says, in part, "The Bosnian linkup was beyond bad taste. It was insulting. Faced with the horrific description of the situation in Sarajevo, Bono was reduced to a stumbling incoherence that was probably the result of genuine concern, but came across as bog-standard celeb banality. What does the band who have virtually everything buy with their millions? The one thing they've never had—credibility. Shame it's not for sale."

In Sarajevo, though, U2 are becoming saints. People grab Bill Carter in the street, telling him how important it is that someone in Europe is protesting the slaughter. There's a new joke making the rounds in Bosnia: "What's the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz? At least in Auschwitz they had gas." During one satellite link a Muslim tells Bono that U2 has given Sarajevo a window into the world, and they pray that some light shines through it.

At Wembley U2 are exhausted, running on fumes, but are deter­mined to shove their Irish attitude down the British gullet. At the end of the run, Bono comes out as Macphisto and makes his nightly celebrity telephone call, this time to fugitive author Salman Rushdie. For four years Rushdie has been eluding a fatwa, a death sentence placed on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini for offending Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses. The Wembley audience is astonished when Rushdie not only answers Bono's phone call, but comes out of hiding and walks onto the stage. Waving a finger in Macphisto's face Rushdie says, "I'm not afraid of you! Real devils don't wear horns!"

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