GET CARTER

The scene; a quiet suburban bar, the Sunday night after U2's Dublin concerts. Leaving, I overhear a conversation between a trio in the corner. A young woman insists: "this whole Sarajevo link was in such bad taste."

Her response typifies the harsh criticism the U2/Sarajevo cameo has provoked. Sources in the U2 camp insist that they received little or no bad press on the issue in Europe, but when they reached London, they were put under the hammer by organs as diverse as NME and The Independent. Nor was the Irish response all-approving. Probably the flak was one factor in the band's decision to drop the sequence from their Irish shows. But there was another practical reason. Bill Carter, the American in Sarajevo who initiated the project, had left the besieged city for Dublin. But not to hang out with U2 in their hometown. All last week Carter was based in Windmill, editing down 15 hours of footage for his own documentary on the daily lives of the besieged people of the city.

Obviously, more than anyone else, Carter is the man to interview but I find nobody else has contacted him for his side of the story. A young Californian who'd studied at film school, he is utterly unapologetic about the link. As far as he is concerned, any weapon should be seized to tell the story of Sarajevo.

"This is very personal but if it ruined your concert, I don't give a shit because I'm in Sarajevo and this is my reality. Tough, go watch the television because we can't, we're dying in there."

Sure, but doesn't he think stadium rock is an inappropriate medium?

"No, because you have television and radio who, in my view aren't doing it correctly. And also you have the Vietnam syndrome of turning the television off whenever there's death. We have become too immune to death, whether it's through movies or through television. People have become too removed from death and they don't understand it well enough. If they understood it well enough, we could do more about it."

COMPLEX QUESTIONS

Still, the episode did set up new moral equations. Was the message another reason for their critics to rough up the messenger, U2? Or were U2 guilty by association of the old Don't-hit-me-you're-hitting-my-baby plea? I suspect the former but I'm more exercised by the discovery that I'm the only journalist in these two islands who actually made inquiries of the U2 press office about the story. Everyone else, it appears, made up their minds and ran to their word-processor. Such conduct irritates Bill Carter. "If people in England who'd watched those concerts had done just two minutes of homework, their response might have been different. But they didn't take the time. They didn't investigate me, they didn't investigate how it came about, they didn't investigate Sarajevo."

Carter acknowledges that the initiative came from him, not the band. Visiting them in Verona, he found them willing to help but uncertain what to do. According to Carter, the satellite idea then originated from him and his partner in the documentary project. At first, they thought they might do it only in selected cities like London and Budapest but then, he says U2 "pumped up the volume" and used the idea throughout their European tour.

Carter is also scathing about general misrepresentation of the Bosnian cause. Note Bosnian not Muslim, since he argues the Bosnians and especially the Bosnians of Sarajevo are Muslims by name but not by religion, a fusion of Serb, Croat and other bloods who are hardly regular mosque-goers.

This fiction that they are racially different, he insists, aids the ethnic purists and cleansers and the earliest link from Sarajevo to Bologna featured two guys of Serbian extraction who have no time for the fundamentalism of the Bosnian Serb leader, Dr. Karadzic. For Carter, the choice "is between fascism and multiculturalism."

He argues that John Major's Operation Irma was the real publicity stunt. A thousand children have died in the last 17 months yet the U.N. and the E.C. are unable to protect the hospitals and give them the resources they need. "In Sarajevo," he says, "if they ever had faith in John Major, they've lost it now."

Since all the basics of life are controlled by the Serbs, there's minimal electricity, so few Sarajevans have seen the trans-missions. Only in the last few days before he visited Ireland was Carter able to instal a battery-driven vidiwall to screen the playbacks.

Certainly the whole Sarajevo project sets up a host of complex questions. I only hope the answers won't be utterly conditioned by automatic, unthinking cynicism about celebrity.