Zoo TV - Sarajevo Satellite Link-ups

Sarajevo Satellite Link-ups

As the 1993 Zooropa leg unfolded, U2 became concerned with the uncertain political situation of post-communist Europe and the resurgence of radical nationalism. A number of these European shows featured live satellite link-ups with people living in war-torn Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo/Bosnian War. The transmissions were arranged with help from American aid worker Bill Carter. Before their 3 July show in Verona, Italy, the band met with Carter to give an interview about Bosnia for Radio Televizija Bosne I Hercegovina. Carter described his experiences helping Sarajevo citizens while surviving the dangerous living conditions. While in Sarajevo, Carter had seen a television interview on MTV in which Bono mentioned the theme of the Zooropa leg was a unified Europe. Feeling that such an aim was empty if ignoring Bosnia, Carter sought Bono's help. He requested that U2 go to Sarajevo to bring attention to the war and break the "media fatigue" that had occurred from covering the conflict. Bono wanted the band to play a concert there, but their tour schedule prevented this, and McGuinness believed that a concert there would make them and their audience targets for the Serbian aggressors.

Instead, the group agreed to use the tour's satellite dish to conduct live video transmissions from their concerts to Carter in Sarajevo. Carter returned to the city and was able to assemble a video unit. The band had to purchase a satellite dish to be sent to Sarajevo and had to pay a £100,000 fee to join the European Broadcasting Union. Once set up, the band began satellite link-ups to Sarajevo on nearly a nightly basis, the first of which aired on 17 July 1993 in Bologna, Italy. To connect with the EBU satellite feeds, Carter and two co-workers had to traverse "Sniper Alley" at night to reach the Sarajevo television station, and they had to film with as little light as possible to avoid the attention of snipers. This was done a total of ten times over the course of a month. Carter discussed the deteriorating situation in the city, and Bosnians often spoke to U2 and their audience. These grim interviews deviated from the rest of the show, and they were completely unscripted, leaving the group unsure of who would be speaking or what they would say. U2 stopped the broadcasts in August 1993 after learning that the siege of Sarajevo was being reported on the front of many British newspapers. Though this trend had begun before the first link-up, Nathan Jackson suggested that U2's actions had brought awareness of the situation to their fans, and to the British public indirectly.

Reactions to the transmissions were mixed, triggering a media debate concerning the ethical implications of mixing rock entertainment with human tragedy. The Edge said, "A lot of nights it felt like quite an abrupt interruption that was probably not particularly welcomed by a lot of people in the audience. You were grabbed out of a rock concert and given a really strong dose of reality and it was quite hard sometimes to get back to something as frivolous as a show having watched five or ten minutes of real human suffering." Mullen worried that the band were exploiting the Bosnians' suffering for entertainment. In 2002, he said, "I can't remember anything more excruciating than those Sarajevo link-ups. It was like throwing a bucket of cold water over everybody. You could see your audience going, 'What the fuck are these guys doing?' But I'm proud to have been a part of a group who were trying to do something." During a transmission from the band's concert at Wembley Stadium, three women in Sarajevo told Bono via the satellite transmission, "We know you're not going to do anything for us. You're going to go back to a rock show. You're going to forget that we even exist. And we're all going to die." Some people close to the band joined the War Child charity project, including Brian Eno. Writer Bill Flanagan believes that the link-ups accomplished Bono's goal for Zoo TV of "illustrating onstage the obscenity of idly flipping from a war on CNN to rock videos on MTV". U2 vowed to perform in Sarajevo someday, eventually fulfilling this commitment on their 1997 PopMart Tour.