By Charlene Porter

USIA Staff Writer

Washington -- The chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) have announced that the government's international broadcasters will launch round-the-clock programming into Yugoslavia starting on April 8.

Chairman Marc Nathanson expressed concern about a "media blackout" in Yugoslavia and said, "We must get our message to the Serbian people, and that message is just unbiased news and information about what is going on in Kosovo and the rest of the world."

Programming from the Serbian language services of the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe (RFE) will be broadcast into Yugoslavia via a ring of FM transmitters that is being erected "at a frantic pace" around the Balkan nation. Nathanson said VOA and RFE are working with the U.S. Agency for International Development to put up a transmitter "in an emergency fashion" to begin broadcasts from a neighboring nation.

The initial broadcasts will be carried on frequency 106.5 FM MHZ, reaching Belgrade and most of northern Serbia. The broadcasting board chairman said later expansion of the broadcasts will allow complete coverage of the country.

Nathanson did not specify from which nation the first broadcasts are to begin. He said Bosnia, Bulgaria and Romania have entered agreements with the U.S. to host the transmitter sites. He said the U.S. State Department is still negotiating with other nations in the region to win their support for the emergency broadcasting project.

Ultimately, Nathanson said the government's intent is to build as many as six or seven transmitters to support the 24-hour-a-day broadcasts to Yugoslavia. The broadcasts will be delivered in Serbian, as well as some programming in Bosnian, Croatian, Albanian and English.

Nathanson said that some U.S. government broadcasts are still being transmitted into Yugoslavia on shortwave and AM frequencies. He said the organization's surveys indicate, however, that FM broadcasting is an important news source for 52 percent of Serbia's population.

Previously U.S. government broadcasters have had a presence on the FM band in Yugoslavia, but Nathanson says VOA, RFE and other foreign broadcasters were all pulled from local stations by Serbian authorities at the beginning of the NATO bombing campaign. Independent media have also been taken off the air, leaving Yugoslav government-controlled media as the dominant news source in the country.

The U.S. government broadcasters are also trying to reach out to their audiences via the Internet, and report more than 2.2 million site connections for web sites operated by VOA and RFE since March 21. Information provided by the BBG showed a one-day surge of more than 512,000 connections on March 26. The Internet will also be a crucial mechanism for informing the Yugoslav audience about the frequencies where they can tune in to the new U.S. programming.

The chief of VOA's Southern European Division Frank Shkreli told a press conference that virtually 100 percent of their programming is now related to the events in Serbia and Kosovo. He said freelance journalists are providing reports from Macedonia, but stringers in Kosovo and Serbia are unable to file on the current conflict.

Shkreli, an Albanian-American, says broadcasters in his division are still following the regional view of the unfolding situation by interviewing officials in Kosovo and Belgrade. Recently, VOA's Serbian language service interviewed Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, Shkreli said.

Nathanson said the new programming will include the U.S. government perspective, foreign commentary, general news and the view from Belgrade. But he re-emphasized that the BBG's main concern is the "one-sided" media reporting from Belgrade. "To say that the people of Kosovo, the Albanians, are walking to the refugee camps because they're afraid of NATO bombing is just not the true facts."