Dear Chess Friends,

In those horrible time for Yugoslavia, Chess Informant tries to continue with normal work. It is not easy at all. Belgrade, where is the head-office of our company, is being bombed every day. Every day there are more destroyed buildings, fires, killed and injured people.

Till now any one of our employees have not been injured. However, many of us are living in the parts of town which are targets of air strikes. To some of them the bombs has fallen only some hundred meters from the houses where they live.

In spite of all this, during the April, we managed to publish "Chess Informant 74" and sent it to all our customers and contributors all over the world. We had a lot of luck in that.

At the moment when bombing started, i.e. March 24, "Informant 74" was in print. In the condition of constant "airstrike danger signals", our printing house has reduced very much its business hours (5-6 hours daily), so that the printing was finished with a delay of ten days. However, after that, a part of the town in which the printing house is situated, Rakovica, has been seriously bombed almost every day. Although it has not been directly hit, the printing house (a very modern one, built three years ago) has been very damaged. Some walls of the building cracked, in some parts the ceilings dropped down, while one corner of the house dropped down completely. The printing house does not work any more.

We sent "Informant 74" to our customers in the last moment. All big deliveries were sent by mail about April 10 ^th . At that moment almost all main roads and railways could be used. In the meantime, a great number of bridges and railways were destroyed and could not be used for traffic (e.g. railways Beograd – Budapest and Beograd – Skopje), so that the mail goes very slowly.

Now our main aim is to survive – as individuals and as company. We do hope that we will succeed in it.

You could help us by posting on your web site a few words about the situation in which is Chess Informant now, that Chess Informant is still existing and it is going to continue with its publishing activity. Our friends from ChessBase have already done it. Here is the text which they put on their site:

Our colleges from Chess Informant write that the book edition of Informant 74 was printed in time and sent to the customers. Informant 73 CD will be mastered next week. While everyday life in Belgrade now bears very concrete dangers and civil infrastructure and economy seem noticeably hurt, the peaceful work of analysing and publishing chess games at Chess Informant goes on as usual.

We would appreciate very much if you could put some similar text on your web site.

Hoping that all this will stop soon and that we will get the opportunity to come back to our normal life, we remain with our kindest regards,

Sincerely yours,

Milutin Kostic

Chess Informant