Halfway down the Danube

Serbia: still no government

Serbia still has no government.

(I haven't blogged about Serbia here in forever. Well, that's because I've moved my Balkan bloggging over to A Fistful of Euros. But the Fistful is in limbo at the moment, with comments closed because of a nasty spam attack, so I'll go back to posting this stuff here.)

They had elections on January 21. In a typical European parliamentary democracy, it takes a week or two of haggling and horse-trading after an election to form a government. In Serbia, it takes much longer... after the last election, back in 2004, it took them seventy days. This time they're up to fifty-six days, and counting.

This comes at an interesting time for Serbia; the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovar independence has gone to the United Nations, while Serbia's hopes of EU membership have been blocked by their failure to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal. Not an ideal time to be without a government, but there it is.

More on this in a bit.

Intermarriage, Yugoslav versus American style

How did this discussion start? Doug was down because some people he cares about are still drinking Walker Bush's yellow Kool-Aid. I tried cheering him up by e-mail. Not my forte, as Poppy might say...

The wingnut lifestyle is not a complete counterculture, not even the evangelical portions thereof. And as long as they're interacting with the larger culture -- the extremely latitudinarian sensibilities of a large majority of Americans -- they will internalize some of that sensibility. I've seen it happen close up.

In this sort of tolerant wider cultural environment, only the people who can continually redefine an external enemy according to their own internal mental needs, who must needs [sic] define themselves in terms of combativeness -- the psychologically damaged, in other words -- are able to carry this sort of attitude to the grave.

It's a novelty, me being on the ebullient side, and Doug being morose. Doug replied, in part:

I think that's too optimistic. 1970s Yugoslavia was a tolerant cultural environment, no?

I answered,

Cultural tolerance in the U.S. for most of the wingnut types does not represent a psychological reality. To them, it really does seem like a bad government policy which many bien-pensant whites have gone along with because of their ingrained leftism and dhimmitude, and which the coloreds naturally support because they get bread and circuses (affirmative action, the Cosby show, et cetera). Should the legitimacy of the goverment fall, all this will quickly unravel. Just like Yugoslavia!

As is sometimes said elsewhere, fap fap fap. The psychological reality on the ground, outside of the wingnut enclaves -- which are strongly regionally and generationally defined, among demographically shrinking subgroups -- is very different.

Doug replied,

Um. Go back and look at the [Yugoslav] intermarriage rate.

(So I did. But that's a bit later.)

It was shallow-rooted, I'd agree. But I don't think it was that dependent on government policies, other than in the purely passive sense of the government discouraging nationalism. (Up until the early '80s, anyway. Man, that one went into reverse fast. But it was a reversal.)

Everyday personal interactions: with the notable exception of the Albanians, the different groups got along just fine. Lived together, worked together, hung out together. I'm thinking in particular of the thirtysomething Slovenes I met who were deeply mournful about Belgrade ("we used to pile into the Zastava and drive down there every weekend, party aroud the clock"), but it was pretty pervasive.

I don't think it's a good model for the US, but I don't think it's completely irrelevant either.

So I looked the Yugoslav intermarriage rate up.

Yugoslavia, a steady 12-13% overall from 1962-1989. Highest in the Voivodina: 23 rising to 28% by 1989; lowest in Kosovo: 9% falling to 5% by 1989. Slovenia started the lowest, 8%, but rose to the national norm by 1989. Serbia proper was low -- 9%, Croatia a little higher -- 16%. Compare the Soviet Union, with a 14.9% intermarriage rate in 1979. There's a pretty large literature on nationality intermarriage rates in the former USSR, pre-, during, and post-Soviet. Summary: low to nil before, reasonably high during, and sharply falling off afterwards, except in cases like urban Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

Upshot: the legitimacy of Communism legitimized cross-nationality intermarriage; and the fall of Communism largely discredited it. Unless you're a Yugoslav exceptionalist -- and not yet, you aren't, Doug -- the likeliest hypothesis is that the same type of legitimization applied there as well.

(Keep in mind that Communism made crossing confessional lines much more acceptable. How difficult was it to have cross-confessional marriages in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes?)

And (I forgot to add) Russian-Jewish marriages under the Tsars? Eeeee.

Between US white ethnic groups in 1979 -- most originally further apart than Serb and Croat, or Russian and Ukranian -- it's hard to even get a consistent ethnicity for whitey from the data, the level of intermarriage is that high. Some groups, it's literally over 90%.

Doug was vexed, especially by that last throwaway comment.

Dude. Do not palm cards with me. An Italian-American and a German-American, of any generation beyond the second, are not "further apart" than a Serb and a Croat.

But it was a trap! Heh-heh-heh.

Actually, this is me being obnoxious, because I wrote it after I double-checked the data, knowing you would have this reaction. Turns out that historical exogamy rates were incredibly low in the US for new immigrants and even Nisei until the postwar period. Even lower than Kosovo in Yugoslavia, lower than Armenia in the Soviet Union, for many groups. So it is actually rather striking.

Thus chastened, Doug asked me to post this discussion to benefit all mankind to continue it more publicly. So I did. In the meantime, I looked a few more things up.

In 1979, nearly thirty years ago, most ethnic whites born in the US still had a measurable tendency to marry in-group somewhat greater than random chance (after correcting for other factors), with the exception of German-Americans, who had a slight preference not to marry other German-Americans. The endogamous tendency of the "old ancestral" core of British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian-Americans, taken as a group, was only slightly greater than random, maybe one-and-a-half times. The highest rate was with Americans of Jewish eastern European descent married before the Depression, who were over ten times as likely to have married within their ethnic group as without. Poles, southern Europeans, and French-Canadians fell somewhere in between.

Let's compare. Doug brought up those cosmopolitan Slovenians, who missed partying in Belgrade. (And I can't blame them.) Well, in Belgrade, they would have been eight times as likely to marry another Slovene than random chance would indicate. That's actually better than Slovenes in Slovenia, where the rate was nine times greater than chance. In fact, it's greater than the preference Bosnian Muslims had for marrying each other (seven times).

The only groups in former Yugoslavia which come close to the American pattern of ethnic intermarriage would be Croats and Serbs in Croatia, Serbia proper, and (interestingly) the Vojvodina, where they had in-group marriage preferences only two to four times greater than random. That would be around the amount of Italian-American endogamy when the Godfather movies were produced.

It gets worse when you consider the ethnic enclaves in the other republics. Serbs in Kosovo? Five and a half; not so bad, right? But Albanians in Kosovo, seventeen times. Serbs in Bosnia? Eight times. Croats in Bosnia? Seventeen times.

Now let's look at Russia in 1989. (I think you know where this is going.) Going by passport nationality, only the post-1953 generation of Russians and Ukrainians in Russia (and not even Belorussians) have anything like the ye olde American pattern, and that only in the central urban core of Russia itself. In fact, endogamous preference rises in western Russia by a factor of at least three for the eastern Slav groups, bringing us to Godfather-slash-elderly-Jewish-couple rates of in-group marriage.

Then we start getting into real ethnic enclaves. Younger Tatars and Chuvash of the cities in the north Caucasus region were only around ten times as likely to marry within their group than what random chance would predict in 1989. They were the hip wild carefree ones. The Chechens, on the other hand, were several thousands of times more likely to marry another Chechen, all else being equal.

Sources:

Alba and Golden, "Patterns of ethnic marriage in the United States", Social Forces, 1986, 65:1, 202-223.

Botev, "The ethnic composition of families in Russia in 1989: insights into the Soviet 'nationalities policy'", Population and Development Review, 2002, 28:4, 681-706.

Botev, "Where east meets west: ethnic intermarriage in the former Yugoslavia, 1962 to 1989", American Sociological Review, 1994, 59:416-480.

Fisher, "Ethnic consciousness and intermarriage: correlates of endogamy among the major Soviet nationalities", Soviet Studies, 1977, 29:3, 395-408.

Pagnini and Morgan, "Intermarriage and social distance Among U.S. immigrants at the turn of the century", The American Journal of Sociology, 1990, 96:2, 405-432.

Silver, "Ethnic intermarriage and ethnic consciousness among Soviet nationalities", Soviet Studies, 1978, 30:1, 107-116.

And some others which I forgot to write down. Hey, this was e-mail.

Sofia, briefly

So I was in Sofia for three days.

My first time. We've visited Bulgaria before, but never the capital.

It was okay. About a million people, maybe? Not trashed by megalomaniacal Communism, like central Bucharest; not bombed flat twice, like Belgrade. So, more nice old buildings in the center. Several pleasant parks, with lots of fountains and statues.

In terms of economic development at-a-glance -- things like number of shops, variety of goods in shops, how many cars, how many new cars, how many McDonalds, how many cranes visible on the skyline -- I'd say it looked roughly equivalent to Bucharest. There's a nice pedestrian area, which Bucharest lacks. (Buch has a pedestrian area, but it isn't nice yet.) Bucharest has more cars; Sofia has better drivers.

Skirts are shorter, and styles are wilder. I saw at least a dozen young women with visible tattoos, which is more than I saw in a year in Romania. Not sure if this has any significance. Just... noticing.

There are several impressive Orthodox churches and one impressive mosque. (~10% of the population is Muslim.) Sofia is in a mountainous corner of the country, so it gets cool in the evenings. Very pleasant to walk down the main shopping street in the evening with an ice cream cone in hand, a cool breeze blowing, and a full moon rising over the mountains.

The macroeconomy is interestingly similar to Romania's. More about this anon.

Short version: I liked it just fine, and would go back. Recommended.

De mortuis nihil nisi

... bonum.

UCK

I was going to do that second post on independent Kosovo.

But I discovered that you can't understand internal Kosovar politics without understanding UCK. (UCK is the Albanian name for the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.) And UCK is complicated and interesting enough to deserve a post of its own.

But it's longish, and all history, so I'm putting it below the flip. Skip it if this stuff doesn't interest you.

UCK started small. Back in the mid-'90s, it was just a few dozen angry guys. It wasn't very well organized, and they didn't have weapons beyond a few guns. Some were Yugoslav Army vets, some had fought in Bosnia and Croatia, and some had received training at a secret camp in Albania (about which more later), but we're not talking Green Berets here. Angry guys with basic guerrilla training and some guns.

They started off by attacking the police. This made sense because, after 1989, the Albanian police had been replaced by ethnic Serbs. The Albanian population hated the Serb police, seeing them as brutal and corrupt.

(I can't easily judge how much of this is true, but I think the closest analogy, from an American POV, would be the bad old days when all-white police forces were patrolling all-black urban neighborhoods. If you're old enough to remember Rodney King? Think a Rodney King riot every week or so.

(Additionally, the Albanians say that the Serb cops were grossly corrupt -- thieves and bullies who were much more interested in holding up Albanians for bribes than in keeping order. Hard to judge at this distance, though at least some foreign eyewitnesses agree.)

So the early KLA/UCK started off shooting at cops. And they killed a few of them. But it didn't do them much good. There were plenty of underemployed Serbs willing to work as cops in Kosovo, and the Albanian population just wasn't ready to rise up yet. We're talking 1996, 1997 here: most of the Kosovar Albanians were still sticking with Ibrahim Rugova and his nonviolent resistance. I think this was less from inherent Albanian pacifism than from a sense that the Serbs were too strong to fight, but whatever the reason, few people were willing to take their chances with UCK.

Another problem they faced was the clannish and fissiparous nature of traditional Albanian society. In some ways, this helped them... fierce family and village loyalties made it very hard for the Serbs to get good information on UCK. But, on the other hand, it also meant that there were constant divisions and crosscurrents. Almost as soon as UCK formed, they were killing other Albanians (allegedly for collaborating with the Serbs).

Soon after that, they were being framed for killing other Albanians. The Serbs were perfectly happy to blame violent deaths on UCK "terrorists". So, soon you had people dying who may or may not have been "collaborators", and who may or may not have been killed by UCK, and who UCK might or might not take credit for killing -- in pretty much every possible combination. It got pretty murky, and the net result was not a groundswell of public approval for the men of UCK.

But they kept at it, and after a while they had some breaks.

In 1997 Albania -- then under the erratic and not particularly competent rule of President Sali Berisha -- collapsed into utter chaos. A pyramid scheme caused most of the country's savings to disappear overnight. The economy imploded, and the population rose up in massive and destructive riots.

The Albanian police couldn't possibly handle it. So Berisha called on the army... and the army simply shrugged and walked away. Berisha had been starving the armed forces for years, and had packed the upper ranks with cronies and incompetents. The officer corps loathed him, and the common soldiers were so poor and hungry that joining the rioters made much more sense than shooting them.

Berisha ended up being forced out of office. (Though not for good. He just got back in, after an eight year hiatus, in August of this year.)

One interesting side effect: the soldiers left the state armories unguarded, and the population quite thoroughly sacked and looted them. Hundreds of thousands of rifles, AK-47s and grenades, and milllions of rounds of ammunition, fell into private hands. For months afterward, you could walk into any open-air market in Albania and -- in between the spinach and the pumpkins -- buy AK-47s for $20 each.

This had significant effects on Kosovo.

Up until the autumn of 1997, UCK was still just a couple of hundred angry guys, still poorly armed and equipped. They were killing the occasional policeman, but were in no way a threat to Belgrade's power. But after the Albanian riots, three things changed.

One, most obviously, UCK suddenly had access to a lot more weapons.

Two, they had a secure haven, sort of, across the border. Northern Albania was hit hardest by the anarchy, and didn't really recover for years. From '97 until well after 2000, it was a lawless region run by local gangsters and clan lords. UCK/KLA could move back and forth across the border, and bring in supplies, and the Albanian government couldn't stop them even if it wanted to.

(I mentioned the Albanian training camp. Sali Berisha seems to have been of two minds about resistance in Kosovo. It appears that he wanted a resistance there, if only to distract the Serbs. But he didn't want armed Kosovars running loose in Albania. So, he set up a training camp... but also periodically busted UCK's leaders and threw them into Albanian jail for a little while, just to get the point across.

(This actually seems to have worked. But once Berisha went down, the new government had almost no control over the wild North of Albania, and UCK could do as it pleased.)

Three, it helped shake the Kosovars loose from Rugova. For years, they'd been secretly dreaming that Albania would come to their rescue. After all, it was a real country, with an army and everything! Seeing the Albanian state collapse, and the Albanian army disintegrate like wet paper, helped convince ordinary Kosovars that they'd have to help themselves.

The net result of this was that UCK was able to drastically expand its operations in autumn and winter of 1997. And the result of /that/was that, starting in March 1998, the Serbian state responded with ever more brutal and heavy-handed crackdowns... massacres, burning villages, you name it.

This led directly to the Drenica massacre of Adem Jashari and his family, which caused support for UCK to explode yet again. By autumn 1998 there were roughly twenty _thousand_ UCK/KLA fighters in Kosovo, and the Serbs, increasingly desperate, were on their way to full-blown ethnic cleansing.

By this time UCK had become a serious guerrilla force. They had codes and procedures, a radio station and a news agency, offices, officers, and a general staff. They had Kosovo divided into seven operational zones.

(Students of Yugoslav history may find some of this strangely familiar. Deliberately or not, by 1998-99 the KLA bore more than a passing resemblance to Tito's WWII Partisans. Not too surprising, when you consider that everyone in Yugoslavia grew up watching Partisan war movies and reading about Partisan campaigns in school.)

All of this required money, and some of that money came from pretty dubious sources: drug dealing, smuggling, human trafficking and forced prostitution.

This is because by 1998, Albanian "clans" had pushed out older Italian and Turkish gangs in the heroin and cocaine trade all over Europe. (Some of these clans evolved directly out of the old Albanian Communist Secret Police, the Sigurimi. When Communism fell in Albania, the Sigurimi simply shifted gears and almost overnight converted themselves into Europe's newest organized crime family.) Many of the "clans" were major contributors to the KLA. And there's little doubt that the KLA leadership knew where this money was coming from.

On the other hand, there's also little doubt that the KLA itself wasn't in the drug business. The clans might be willing to support the KLA in the name of Albanian freedom, but they would have never let it take over any of their territory or profits. The KLA received donations from drug lords, but it does not seem to have peddled drugs itself... not because of moral scruples, but because that niche was already occupied.

The drug money was only part of the flow of cash. Albanians in the diaspora also contributed millions. The "Homeland Calling" fund, operating in Europe and America, raised huge amounts of cash for the KLA; diasporids also purchased guns, radios, and other supplies as needed.

So, by the time of the NATO bombing, the KLA was a fully mature and functional guerrilla organization. And in its own eyes, it was the legitimate government of Kosovo before ever the first NATO soldier crossed the border.

This would have consequences for the subsequent history of Kosovo.

Rashomon in the Balkans

Or, we still don't know who tried to kill Radovan Papovic.

Here's a really obscure bit of Balkan history. On January 16, 1997, at about 8:00 in the morning, Radovan Papovic was driving to his job as rector of the Serb University of Pristina. The Serb University was what Pristina University turned into after the Serbs took over in 1990. Pristina University had been an Albanian school with no Serbs; SUP was -- you guessed it -- a Serb school with no Albanians.

(Of course, since the province was 90% Albanian, there weren't enough Serbs to fill the classrooms. So most of the Serbian students were from elsewhere in Serbia, brought in by free housing and other subsidies. But that's another story.)

Papovic seems to have been a pretty obnoxious character. He was a Member of Parliament for the right-wing nationalist Serbian Radical Party. He saw his job as cleansing the University of the Albanian taint and re-colonising Kosovo with eager young Serbs. He seems to have loathed and disliked Albanians -- he referred to them as "enemies" and "monsters" -- and to have gone out of his way to antagonize them. It was his administration that donated the university quad for the "church built in anger".

Needless to say, the Albanians returned the sentiment. Papovic was one of the most hated Serbs in Kosovo. Which, in 1997, was saying something.

So, he's driving to work one morning, and -- kaBOOM! -- a bomb goes off in a car nearby. A big one: an estimated 10 kilos of dynamite, detonated by remote control. Both the bomb car and Papovic's sedan were totally destroyed. By a fluke, both Papovic and his driver just barely managed to survive, though both men were badly injured.

But who had planted the bomb?

Background: a couple of things were happening around this time that helped make the whole business murkier.

One, there had been municipal elections in Serbia a couple of months earlier... and Milosevic's Socialist Party had done shockingly badly. They'd lost many towns, including Belgrade. When Milosevic refused to recognize the results of the elections, there were massive street protests and demonstrations against him.

Two, Milosevic had been negotiating, in his usual coy on-again, off-again way, with the Albanians. Specifically, he'd been negotiating with Ibrahim Rugova (the pacifist leader of the Albanians) about re-opening some Albanian language classes at the University. Surprisingly, the two had reached an agreement, and it was due to be implemented; Albanians were supposed to come back to the University sometime in 1997.

Papovic, of course, absolutely hated this idea. He seems to have considered Albanians a particularly dangerous sort of subhuman: gypsies with guns. He had zero interest in carrying out Milosevic's compromise.

(Of course, Milosevic may not have wanted it, either. He lied a lot, and it would have been perfectly in character for him to sign an agreement he had no intention of implementing.)

It's important to note, BTW, that Milosevic was not an absolute dictator. Strongman, party boss, with all sorts of ways to enforce his will, but his power was not even close to absolute. So a recalcitrant university rector could cause him some trouble.

So. Whodunit?

Here's a quote from Stacy Sullivan's excellent book on Kosovo, Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America.

Serb newspapers reported immediately that the attempt on Papovic's life was the work of "Shiptar secessionists", and the KLA promptly took credit for the terrorist attack, saying that the rector was a "sworn enemy of the Albanian people". But Milosevic, who wanted to discredit the tens of thousands of demonstrators still threatening his rule, claimed that the blast was the work of the "hoodlums and criminals" who had organized the protests in Belgrade and wanted to destabilize Serbia. The Serb mayor of Pristina, who wanted to discredit both the Albanians and the demonstrators, claimed that the Albanian terrorists had planted the bombs with support from the demonstrators. And finally, the demonstrators claimed that Milosevic and his cronies had planted the bomb in an attempt to draw attention away from the protests by destabilizing Kosovo...

Rugova pointed out that the KLA's fax claiming responsibility for the attack was written in Albanian so grammatically incorrect that it could not possibly have been composed by a native speaker. The opposition leaders in Belgrade pointed out that planting a remote controlled bomb was not in keeping with previous KLA operations; this was a far more sophisticated operation that required military or police expertise.

Sullivan's right as far as she goes, but I'd add a couple of points. One, it's pretty ridiculous to think the demonstrators had anything to do with it... most of them were hundreds of miles away, and there's zero evidence that any of them had the expertise to pull something like this off. Two, there are at least a couple of additional suspects.

Someone close to Milosevic, in the secret police or paramilitaries, may have done it in order to sabotage the agreement with the Albanians. That may sound odd, to wreck an agreement by attacking its loudest enemy; but if you turn that enemy into a martyr, it can work. And as it turned out, the attack on Papovic was indeed used as an excuse to shut down the agreement.

Finally, someone on the Serb side may have wanted to take out Papovic himself. The Serbian Radical Party was deeply intertwined with gangsters on one side, and paramilitary killers on the other. They had some fairly nasty internal rivalries. And Papovic doesn't seem to have been a very lovable character. In this version, the point is to kill Papovic; trashing the educational agreement was just gravy.

So. Do we know?

Nope. And we probably never will.

I hate to be anticlimactic, but that's sort of the point. The 1990s were a dark time in the former Yugoslavia. There are a lot of mysteries that won't be solved for years; there are a lot that will never be solved.

That doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned from this little episode, of course. Here's an obvious one: in a guerrilla war, everyone is a target. It's not just that people are shooting and bombing. It's that someone may decide to take you out for reasons completely unconnected to the war, and then blame it on the other side.

Anyway. It's an obscure episode, but it did make a difference. The agreement collapsed; no Albanians went back to school. Rugova, and his policy of peaceful negotiation, were to some extent discredited. So Kosovo was pushed that much closer to the war that would come in 1998 and 1999.

-- Papovic? Oh, he survived, and he's still around.

You may remember us blogging about Serbia's awful Minister of Education last year? The unpleasant nationalist one who wanted to introduce creationism into the school curriculum?

Well, she resigned. But before she did that, she appointed Papovic -- who had survived the NATO bombing and escaped from Pristina before the fall -- to run the Serb University of Mitrovica. Which is, you may recall, the northern 10% or so of Kosovo, the part that's almost entirely Serbian now.

Papovic has run this just about the way you'd expect: firing staff and professors, replacing them with cronies and people who share his hardline views. This being Mitrovica, he's pretty popular -- people there view him as a hard man, a hero who survived being singled out for death by the hated KLA.

Which is fine, except that Papovic seems to be really horrible at actually running a university. (I know. Who would have guessed?) He's so blatantly awful that the European University Association has suspended Mitrovica's accreditation, and ordered a boycott of the school.

So there will be no exchange programs, no visiting professors, no give and take with the wider European world. And the students at Mitrovica, already going to school in the poorest part of a poor country, will be even more isolated than they already are.

I suppose I should try to tell a Kosovo story with a happy ending some time.

The Church Built in Anger

There are a lot of ruined churches in and around Pristina.

(Ruined Orthodox churches, that is. About 50,000 Kosovar Albanians are Catholic, so there are a couple of nice little Catholic churches. Nobody bothered them.)

Short version: when the Serbian armed forces pulled out of Kosovo in 1999, the Albanians rose up in wrath and attacked the Orthodox churches and monasteries. Many of the churches they attacked were hundreds of years old. Some were treasure houses of art... medieval frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, beautiful carved icons going back hundreds of years. The Albanians attacked them all, damaging most and destroying many, smashing, burning and spraying the interior with bullets.

Then, in March 2004, they did it again. About a dozen more churches were attacked, and several were effectively destroyed.

The list of damaged churches is long, and it makes for depressing reading. Few of them have been repaired or rebuilt. Drive in from Pristina Airport, and you can see one just off the road; it's surrounded by barbed wire. Even the churches that survived -- like the magnificent Italo-Byzantine monastery at Gracanica -- have stayed intact only because they're surrounded by heavily armed soldiers from KFOR.

That's the short version, and it's accurate as far as it goes. But -- this being the Balkans, where truth is fractal -- it's more complicated than that.

Right in the center of Pristina, just across from the library, is a large Orthodox church. And I mean large: it's about 25 meters or 80 feet tall, and could probably hold a thousand people.

It's unfinished, this church. Just a brick shell, with empty holes for the doors and windows, and a big golden cross on top. But even unfinished, you can see that it was never going to be beautiful. Orthodox churches tend to look squat and fortress-like to Westerners. But even indexing that out, this church was really... well, squat and fortress-like. It looks like a big ruined bunker.

This church is known to the Serbs as the Church of Christ the Savior, Pristina. The Albanians have a different name for it: they call it "the church built in anger".

To understand what's up with this church, I have to digress for a moent to talk about Pristina University. Bear with me.

Pristina University was founded in 1970, and the Albanians were very proud of it. By 1989 it had over 22,000 students, which was not bad for a province of just 2 million people. And it was an Albanian university; over 90% of the students and faculty were Albanian

When Milosevic took over Kosovo, purging the University was almost his very first act. It was a hotbed of Albanian nationalism, no question; he may also have thought that shutting it down would cripple Albanian political development. Whatever the reason, within two years 90% of the faculty and 98% of the students had left or been expelled.

What remained was a much smaller skeleton of a university, populated entirely by Serbs. Albanians simply disappeared from the campus. Hardline Serb nationalists took over the administration, and a semester or two teaching at Pristina U. became a badge of honor for a certain sort of Serbian academic.

So when the Orthodox Church asked the University for land to build a church, the Serb nationalist administration was happy to oblige. They gave them the university's only large green space, right in the middle: what a British American college would call the Quad.

The Serbs broke ground in 1998. But they hadn't finished by the time of the NATO bombing campaign. So when Belgrade lost control, the church was still unfinished. Someone tried to dynamite it in July 1999, in the chaotic days just after the NATO victory. But the bunker-like appearance is not misleading. The church withstood the attack.

KFOR warned the Albanian leadership sharply not to try that again. The church might be ugly, it might be unfinished, it might be sitting on one of the last pieces of open space in central Pristina, but having it blown up would be just too embarrassing. (And probably a public menace, too; charges big enough to destroy it, laid by unskilled hands, would probably throw pieces of brick and concrete all over the downtown.)

So, for six and a half years, there it has stood. At one point someone moved some Roma refugees into the "quad" area; the Roma used part of the church as a shelter and part of it as a toilet, which led to pretty much the sorts of stories you'd expect.)

The university wants its quad back, and wants the church torn down. No one, they point out, has ever used it. And the Serb community doesn't need it; nobody knows how many Serbs are left in Pristina (they keep a very low profile), but it's not more than a couple of hundred.

Various compromise plans have been floated, such as turning the church into a museum or some such. Nobody's been able to agree.

-- It turns out the Church Built in Anger is far from unique. That list I linked to? If you actually read through it, you'll notice that a number of those churcheswere built during the 1990s. Since the Serb population of Kosovo was not exactly booming during these years, it seems reasonable to assume that these, too, were built more for nationalist than religious reasons.

(I noticed one church that was built in 1992 "as a foundation of the Karic family". I'm pretty sure that has to be Milosevic crony Bogoljub Karic. The Karic family was from Kosovo originally.)

From what I've been able to tell, this seems to be another issue that that Albanians and Serbs can't talk about.

The Albanians insist that all the churches were political. Even the ones that dated back to medieval times, they say, were centers of Serb nationalism, used for political purposes as much as religious. I haven't been able to get an Albanian to admit that some, at least, were real religious centers. Nor that destroying centuries-old churches and religious art was an appalling act of cultural vandalism.

The Serbs, meanwhile, insist that their victimhood is absolute. All their churches, even the ugly shell of the unfinished Church of Christ, were churches , dammit. No exceptions: the Albanians are just barbarians. What kind of savage bombs, burns, loots harmless churches?

Meanwhile the Church of Christ the Savior just sits there. Students have worn trails in the grass around it; pigeons nest inside. Eventually erosion will bring it down if nothing else does. But that may take a while.

Independent Kosovo (1)

I recently said that Kosovo didn't make much sense as an independent country. Let me follow up on that a little.

Kosovo will probably gain "conditional independence" sometime within the next 12 to 18 months, with full no-kidding independence coming some years later. Whether that's a good idea or not is another question. Let's just ask: what would an independent Kosovo look like?

I'll start by assuming that Kosovo won't be partitioned (although I think it should be).

Kosovo is a rough square or diamond about 100 km (60 miles) on a side. It has an area of about 10,000 sq km. In American terms, it's bigger than Delaware but smaller than Connecticut. By European standards, that's pretty small for a country, but not unheard of. Current EU members Luxembourg and Malta are smaller, and Cyprus is about the same size.

Kosovo's population is around 2 million, but this is very approximate. There hasn't been a proper census since 1991, and a lot has happened since then. (A new census is planned for next year.) The Albanian population's birth rate has been high -- very high, for Europe -- but on the other hand there's been a lot of emigration, both formal and informal. So nobody's really sure what the current population is.

The population is ethnically divided. Almost all of the Serb minority now lives in distinct enclaves. The biggest enclave is in the northern corner of the province, adjacent to Serbia. Perhaps 150,000 Serbs live there. Another 100,000 or so are scattered in "island" enclaves of settlement across the province.

The two major ethnic groups hate and distrust each other. There are a couple of municipalities where they manage to work together, but at the provincial level they mostly ignore each other. Serb representatives have been elected to the Parliament, but refuse to take their seats.

There are still incidents of Albanians shooting at or otherwise attacking Serbs and Roma. (The Albanians consider the Roma to have been junior partners to the Serbs. This is on top of the anti-Roma prejudices common to the region.) Serbs keep a very low profile outside of their enclaves.

Geographically, Kosovo is a plateau surrounded by mountains. There are no large rivers going in or out. There is a rail line that runs north into Serbia and south to Macedonia, but there is no rail connection into Albania. There are some decent two-lane paved roads, but no highways.

Kosovo is landlocked and does not have easy access to the sea.

The soil is good and there's plenty of agricultural potential. The province can easily produce surpluses of things like wheat, beef and milk. There's local wine (not that great) and local tobacco (very good). The hills and mountains are full of herdsmen and their flocks.

There are a number of large mines -- lead, zinc, nickel, silver. (The Trepca mine complex used to be the biggest base-metal mine in Europe.) There's plenty of lignite, soft brown coal.

There is a fair amount of industry scattered around -- a cement plant, a battery factory, things like that. Most of it is in pretty bad shape, though. Milosevic fired most of the Albanian miners and industrial workers, and then appointed cronies to run the plants. Most of them date from the Communist period and are suffering from 15 years of deferred maintenance.

The electrical infrastructure is in awful shape, with regular blackouts. Lack of reliable power is a major drag on the economy.

Kosovo's human resources aren't in great shape either. Milosevic deliberately and maliciously set out to cut the Albanian majority off from educational opportunities, and he had some success. Albanians were frozen out of the university system for nearly a decade, and mostly driven out of the high schools too. The Albanian set up their own, parallel educational system, but it was starved for funds. In part because of this, only about half the adult population has education beyond grade school.

The economy is not doing very well. Per capita income is around $1,200 per year. Even at PPP, it's only about $3,000. This puts Kosovo in a dead heat with Moldova for the title of "Poorest Country in Europe".

Economic growth soared after the 1999 war, but has flattened in the last year or so. Unemployment is around 40%. Roughly 35% of the population lives in poverty, with about 12% in "absolute" poverty.

Organized crime is a major problem. Corruption is very prevalent. Politics are fragmented and driven by clan and regional loyalties. The government has rapidly grown beyond the capacity of the tax base; it is heavily subsidized by grants from the international community.

The President, Ibrahim Rugova, has lung cancer. Kosovo's first Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, was indicted by the Hague for war crimes and had to resign. None of this has helped political stability or maturity.

Okay, this is getting kind of long. Tomorrow, I'll talk about some of the good news, and then try to sketch how an independent Kosovo might develop.

A Pair of Timberland Boots

I had a few moments to spare on my last day in Pristina, so I visited the museum.

I ended up kinda wishing I hadn't.

The museum itself is a lovely two-story building, a renovated Ottoman villa, in the center of town. (Pristina doesn't really have a center, but it's near that big intersection where there are, like, four mosques in a two-block radius.) From the outside, it looked pretty promising. Kosovo has no lack of history, goodness knows. So I was looking forward to... oh, I don't know. Stone Age fertility carvings? Roman coins? Ottoman rugs? Surely something interesting.

Well, yes and no. There was only one exhibit in the museum. It was quite a large exhibit. You could spend a while looking at it. No Roman coins or Greek vases; no, just this one big exhibit.

And that exhibit was...

Can you guess?

Weapons.

Swords. Muskets. Bayonets. Rifles. There were blades from the Ottoman days, and a lot of guns from WWI, and some more from WWII. But most of all, there were modern weapons, the kind used by the KLA to fight the Serbs. No, that's not right. Not "the kind", but the ACTUAL weapons used by the KLA. Some of them, anyway.

They had AK-47s and hunting rifles and hand grenades. They had Bowie knives and 9 mm pistols. They had the terrible .50 caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifles, the ones that can blow a man's head off from a mile away. And then they had some more AK-47s.

It might have been more interesting if the posters -- and they were quite elaborate -- had been in English. But they weren't. Only Albanian.

So, in addition to reinforcing an unfortunate stereotype about Albanians, the whole thing got pretty boring. I mean, after the dozenth or so AK-47, they do sort of run together.

There was one interesting thing. It was a glass case containing a pair of boots. They were nice looking boots, almost stylish. Something made me look twice, and there across the tongues was the label: Timberland.

The boots were there, of course, because they'd been the standard boots of the KLA. But that begs the question: what were Timberland boots doing in a war in the interior of the Balkans?

The answer is, they were sent there by the Albanian-American diaspora. The diaspora always supported the KLA, but after the massacres started -- especially the March 1998 massacre of the Jashari family -- they started emptying their pockets, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to keep the KLA going.

Someone sent along some Timberland boots, and the guerrillas fell in love with them. Apparently 1990s Kosovo was still pretty retrograde in terms of boot technology. The local boots were either heavy, clunky, and chafing, or light, leaky, and prone to disintegrate. The Timberlands, though, were warm, watertight, light, comfortable, and lasted pretty much forever.

The KLA guys were living hard and sleeping rough, hiking up and down icy mountains and fording streams swollen by rain, so good boots meant a lot. Once they got a taste of Timberland, they told their American cousins to go back and get another couple thousand pairs. Which the Americans did. And by the time the war was over, the KLA guerrillas had fallen so deeply in love with Timberland boots that they gave them the highest possible accolade... they put them in their exhibit of weapons, right next to the AK-47s.

Strangely, the Timberland Company has not made use of this remarkable story of brand loyalty. Maybe someone should tell them.

-- Oh, yeah. Those scary .50 caliber sniper rifles? Can you guess where they got those?

American gun shows. Some people have used them to kill elephants, so they're classified as hunting weapons in the US. They're perfectly legal in almost every state. So the diaspora supporters of the KLA bought a couple of dozen of them and just shipped them to Albania. The airlines didn't care as long as they were in sealed checked luggage, and Albanian Customs didn't present any problems that a $100 bill tucked into your passport couldn't solve.

They put the guns into four-wheel-drive vehicles, drove them up into the Accursed Mountains, and then took them over the border into Kosovo on the backs of men and donkeys.

A .50 caliber sniper rifle... well, it's really more like a man-portable piece of light artillery. It will punch through the armor of anything lighter than a medium tank. It'll go through Kevlar body armor like a normal bullet through light cotton. You can use it to take out a truck by shooting it in the engine block.

You can buy them at US gun stores too, but then you have to pass a background check, which can take up to three working days. At a gun show, you don't. Most of the Albanian-Americans could have passed the check, but they were in a hurry. So they just went to the gun shows instead.

Timberland boots and .50 caliber sniper rifles. More reasons for them to love America, I guess.

Pristina: Leaving

One of my last meetings was with a Minister of the Kosovar government, and I was struck by a couple of things.

One was that the Minister was pretty young. Younger than me, and I'd be a young-ish minister most places. People say he got to be a Minister because he was a brave fighter in the KLA, back in the guerrilla war of 1996-99. That may not seem like a great criterion for running a big chunk of the government, but you don't want to tell that to the Kosovars.

...Actually, that's unfair. A large minority of Kosovars do think that bravery in the independence struggle should not be the most important qualification for government office. But Kosovar society is pretty clannish, and the war forged very intense loyalties. Especially among those who fought in the early days, when the KLA was small and the struggle seemed almost hopeless.

Anyway. I was also struck by the decor of the Minister's office. It was totally dominated by two things:

-- An enormous blowup photo of Adem Jashari, and

-- A prominently displayed picture of Bill Clinton.

I've mentioned that Kosovars love Americans, right? Let me add: they really love Bill Clinton.

* * * * *

Pristina seems pretty socially liberal. Young people of both sexes dress fashionably. Couples walk arm in arm. I'm told that in the summer, young women walk around with miniskirts, bare midriffs, heels... the whole Balkan hooker-chic thing. (Not that I'm paying attention.)

The Albanians are nominally Islamic, but everyone drinks beer and every restaurant serves pork dishes. In ten days, I think I saw maybe three women wearing the head-scarf.

Still, there were a couple of things that distinguished Pristina from Belgrade or Bucharest.

One was the relative absence of porn. I think I saw a few Playboys, but otherwise I just didn't notice much. (Again, not that I was paying attention.) Either it's kept behind the counter, like in some conservative parts of the US, or it's simply not there. This is very different from other Balkan capitals, where porn is ubiquitous and displayed openly on every single newsstand.

Another came on my last day, when I stopped in a cafe (the 'Bulevardi', just across the street from the Grand) that had a "no kissing" sign. Really. It had a picture of a man and a woman about to kiss, and an X through it, and a sign that said (approximate translation) "family establishment -- please show respect".

* * * * *

-- Pristina Airport is tiny but modern and clean. Check-in and security are efficient and up-to-date. It's served by a couple of big airlines (Austrian Air, British Airways) plus a bunch of regional ones: Malev from Hungary, Adria from Slovenia, Air Albania.

(The slogan of Air Albania is "Fly With Love". I don't know why this pleases me, but it does.)

The Balkans utterly lack a regional air hub. To fly from any Balkan capital to another Balkan capital, you probably have to go far out of your way. Case in point: I flew from Kosovo to Bucharest through Vienna. Less than 500 miles as the crow flies, 1200 or so with the plane.

There should be a hub, and it should be Belgrade. It's perfectly located, and Serbia has the technical expertise and personnel to run a major airport. Unfortunately, Milosevic screwed this up for many years to come, maybe forever.

Pristina... well, it's also got a pretty good location. I have to wonder if they have the chops to run a major regional airport, though. They do pretty well with their little airport, but they'd have to expand it five- or ten-fold, and that would be no small thing.

* * * * *

How you know your Kosovar taxi driver likes you: as you get out of the taxi at the airport (it's a 30 minute ride from the hotel, remember), he gives you a receipt for 5 Euros more than you paid him. See, that way, you can charge your company for 5 Euros more, and pocket the difference!

No, don't ask what he's doing. He doesn't expect any money. He's doing it because you're American! And he likes you!

Why are you looking at him like that?

The saddest thing

The saddest thing I've seen here?

The Yugoslav-era Memorial of Brotherhood and Unity.

It's a 15-meter concrete pillar. Three pillars, really, a few feet apart at the base and joining together at the top. There's an abstract sculpture in fron, vaguely resembling a group of people. (The design is eerily similar to the Martyr's Memorial in central Bucharest, across from the Hilton. Go figure.)

The triple pillar symbolizes the three peoples of Kosovo -- Albanians, Turks and Serbs. It stands in the middle of a big empty plaza, on a pavement of marble slabs, in the very center of Pristina.

"Brotherhood and Unity" was an old Yugoslav Communist slogan, and it was used for everything from roads to summer camps. The main bridge going west from Belgrade (towards Bosnia and Croatia) was the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge; last time I looked, it still was.

So, the B&U Memorial was meant to symbolize the enduring friendship between the peoples of Kosovo, /and/ their place in the greater Yugoslav society -- a united family of peoples. The three pillars, rising, aspiring, joining together...

...someone surrounded it with barbed wire a while back. Probably the UN. Maybe they were afraid someone would vandalize it? But it's really hard to vandalize a concrete pillar. So, the barbed wire has rusted and collapsed. The marble slabs of the plaza are cracked and stained, but if you walk carefully over them you can reach the base of the pillar.

There's nothing there. I mean, it's just a pillar. The concrete is starting to crack. There's a big weeping brown stain on one side about halfway up, probably where the rebar skeleton is starting to rust through.

The abstract sculpture in front is covered with grafitti, but there's hardly any on the pillar itself. I really don't think it's lingering sentiment. More like, nobody even cares enough about this thing to vandalize it.

Kosovo is full of sad stories. But that pillar, monument to the failed ideal of a dead country, standing there unlit, and ignored while the snow fell out of the dirty sky... it just seemed unutterably sad.

A couple of hundred meters to the south is a much newer statue. It's Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero. Now, /that/ statue is in prime condition. It's a beautiful piece, and beautifully displayed. Clean and shining. Spotlights all around.

This place can get to you, yes.

And the occasional bomb

So there have been some bombings in Pristina lately.

Four or five so far this year. Three of them have been attacks on UN police cars. Nobody's been killed or hurt, but it does have people on edge a little.

At least two of the bombings were claimed by a shadowy group calling itself the Kosovo Independence Army. The KIA may or may not be connected to some bandit-like groups of armed men who have been stopping cars in rural Kosovo. Most of these episodes have been in western Kosovo, near the Albanian border -- a region that has always been, ah, difficult to administer.

One difference between the past and today, of course, is the presence of nearly 20,000 NATO troops. And NATO does not seem overly concerned.

There may be several things at work here.

One, there's a lot of resentment of the UN here... some justified, some not. UNMIK, the UN Mission In Kosovo, has not done a very good job of running the province for the last six years. Economic growth has stalled, the Kosovo passport is not widely welcomed, thousands of people are still missing, Kosovo's political status remains in limob, and Albanians and Serbs still hate each other.

On the other hand, the UN inherited a pretty awful situation. And -- insofar as they've had the chance -- the Albanians haven't done a very good job of running Kosovo, either.

But fair or not, a lot of Albanians blame the UN.

Two, the Albanians got in the habit of blowing things up back in the guerrilla war against the Serbs, 1997-99. The attacks on police cars are suggestive. The Serbian police, corrupt and brutal, were particularly favorite targets for the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) back in the day. And there's no shortage of guns, bombs and explosives all over Kosovo; the KLA brought in plenty, and the local mafias have since brought in more.

Three, a lot of Albanians are getting impatient for independence. It's been six and a half years since the NATO bombing ended. How long should they have to wait? They want to be a sovereign nation, and they want it now. This is not a universal sentiment -- I've met patient Albanians, and even one or two who don't think sovereignty is a big deal -- but it's a very common one.

Finally, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest a fourth possibility. This is that the "Kosovo Independence Army" is to some extent a creation of some Albanians -- possibly in the government, possibly not -- who want to spook the international community a little. "Oooh, see, men with bombs! Look, there are dangerous radicals out there! Thank goodness you have us moderates to deal with. You'd better give us what we ask for, or... well, who knows what might take our place!"

I hate to seem paranoid, but this would hardly be unheard of in this part of the world.

What makes me thoughtful is the fact that nobody has been killed (yet). The UN is unpopular, so blowing up the occasional UN cop car doesn't bother people much. But actually killing UN employees... that would be different. And of course it would be a real blow to the Albanian cause internationally.

Kosovo does not lack people who know how to kill. So, if the "Kosovo Independence Army" were really trying to kill UN people, there'd be a lot of dead UN people by now.

Not that this is much comfort to the average UN employee here in Prishtina.

Black birds and cold weather

It's really cold here in Pristina.

I didn't pack an overcoat because -- follow my reasoning here -- it was pleasant autumn weather when I left Bucharest, and Pristina is about 150 miles (250 km) further south. Heck, Pristina is only about 120 miles (200 km) from the lovely Adriatic coast, where orange trees and olive groves bask in the sun. How cold could it get?

Answer: too damn cold to be out without an overcoat. It's been snowing on and off for three days now. The temperature is about -5 Celsius or 23 Fahrenheit right now, and it's supposed to hit -8 or 18 Fahrenheit before dawn. By way of comparison, it's currently -1 (30 F) in Bucharest, falling only to -2 (29 F) in the night.

Why? Why is the more southerly city so much colder?

Because -- DUH, Douglas -- Pristina is much higher up than Bucharest.

Kosovo is a plateau surrounded by mountains, like a mini-Tibet in the heart of the Balkan penninsula. While Bucharest sits at a reasonable 60 m or 200 feet above sea level, Pristina is about 600 meters or 1900 feet up. And it's surrounded by mountains that go a lot higher still. The lovely Adriatic and the wine-dark Mediterranean might as well be on the other side of the moon; this is a completely different climate zone. We may be at the latitude of Naples, but the climate is more like Wyoming.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Nor buying an overcoat, either. That would be like, um, admitting weakness or something.

Meanwhilere, there are these birds.

All through central Pristina, every night at sunset, huge flocks of black birds come and settle in the trees. Really huge flocks. Tens of thousands of them.

As darkness falls, they descend on the city, sqawking and screeching. They fill up the trees like black fruit. And then they _stay up all night_ making the most incredible racket. Really. They cackle, they squawk, they scream. Every few minutes one tree-load, driven by some unknown cue, will lift off en masse, wings whirring, and circle around for a while before landing somewhere else.

They do have certain trees they prefer. You can tell because the ground beneath these trees is white with birdshit. I'm not overly paranoid about germs, but I've quickly learned to give these trees a wide berth.

Someone told me that the birds only do this in winter. Apparently they leave in the spring and spend the summer in the countryside. They winter in the city because... I don't know. It's warmer? There's more food here?

Anyway. I've also heard that these birds are called kos in Serbian. And this is where the name of the province comes from: Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds.

Maybe. What's more interesting to me at the moment is that I can't tell what sort of birds they are. They seem to be some sort of corvid -- the family of birds that includes crows and ravens, rooks and magpies -- but I can't tell just which. Interestingly, the flocks include a few hoodies... hooded crows, corvus cornix. The hoodies are bigger than the other birds, and seem to take the highest (dominant?) positions in the trees. But they're a minority. Most of the flock is composed of these smaller black birds. Rooks? Some sort of crow? Is there anyone out there who knows?

Whatever they are, they're loud and they're dirty. I can hear them outside my window right now, and (I know from grim experience) they'll explode into a particularly raucous chorus right before dawn.

On the plus side, Pristina has very few feral dogs. Apparently they used to be a huge problem -- as bad as in Bucharest, or worse -- until a few months ago, when the government wiped them out in a single day.

The Picture of Adem Jashari

It's twelve feet tall. A banner, really.

It hangs above the door of the Youth Center, which is a really stunningly hideous building from the 1970s. It shows Adem Jashari in full combat regalia... fatigues, assault rifle, enormous beard. Insofar as you can make out his expression (it's a big beard), he looks about two parts menacing, one part mournful.

-- Adem Jashari. He's the great martyr-hero of Kosovo's war of liberation. He was from Drenica, which is a rural region in central Kosovo with a long tradition of resistance to the authorities... Turkish, Yugoslav, Serbian, whoever. Maybe more important, he was a Jashari. Rural Kosvo is all about clans, big extended families, and the Jasharis were one of the richest and most important clans in Drenica, or indeed in all of Kosovo.

Adem Jashari was one of the founders of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was in 1996, after the Dayton Agreement convinced some Kosovar Albanians that there was no hope but war. (Dayton ended the war in Bosnia, but at the expense of completely ignoring what Milosevic was doing in Kosovo.)

In its first year or 18 months of existence, the KLA wasn't much. They had maybe a few hundred active members, in a province of ~2 million people. Most Albanians were still going along with Ibrahim Rugova's program of non-violent resistance. This wasn't because Albanians are a peaceful people. No. It was because Milosevic and the Serbs seemed stronger than ever, international assistance seemed wildly unlikely, and armed resistance looked like a bloody dead end.

So the KLA made a nuisance of itself, but not much more. It killed some Serb police (who were universally loathed as corrupt and brutal), set off some bombs, and managed to make some regions (like Drenica) a no-go area for Serb forces. But overall it accompanied little of military significance.

Until the spring of 1998. In February and March of that year, the Serbs unleashed a series of deadly attacks on Albanian villages containing KLA guerrillas. The most famous of these was on Donji Prekaz, the village of the Jashari family. It was aimed at Adem Jashari, who by this time had become one of the most famous or notorious KLA commanders.

Here's the official Serbian version:

"In the early morning hours of March 5, a terrorist group attacked another police patrol near the village of Donje Prekaze. After police returned fire, the terrorists retreated to their base and dug in at the Jashari family farm in that village... engagement with the terrorists lasted for 27 hours, with a total of 51 casualties. Unfortunately, it was later established that Jashari family members were among them. Terrorists physically prevented them from leaving the farm, despite the police invitation. The Interior Ministry expresses regret and bitterness that these victims were a direct consequence of cruelty and ruthlessness of Albanian terrorists... The fact that he personally shot his nephew to prevent him from surrendering testifies to Adem Jashari’s cruelty. Two officers lost their lives in this action, and seven were seriously injured."

Here's Human Rights Watch's version:

"Human Rights Watch was not able to visit Donji Prekaz, a village with a pre-war population of approximately 1,000 people, due to continued fighting. It is, therefore, the case from Drenica on which the least direct testimony was available to Human Rights Watch. This notwithstanding, Human Rights Watch has concluded that serious violations of international humanitarian law were committed by the Serbian special police: notably, indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants, the systematic destruction of civilian property, and the summary and arbitrary executions of those in detention. Although it appears that some Albanian villagers in Donji Prekaz were armed and defending themselves against the police, the evidence is overwhelming that the police used excessive and indiscriminate force, and that the police executed at least three people after they had been detained or had surrendered.

"The police attacked Prekaz and the Jashari compound [in a] prepared and determined manner. All evidence suggests that the attack was not intended to apprehend armed Albanians, considered “terrorists” by the government, but, as Amnesty International concluded in its report on violence in Drenica, “to eliminate the suspects and their families.” Testimonies collected by human rights groups and journalists indicate several cases of extrajudicial executions and unlawful killings from excessive force.

"An estimated fifty-eight ethnic Albanians were killed in the attack, including eighteen women and ten children under the age of sixteen, and then summarily buried by the police before autopsies could be performed. The exact number and identities of the dead reported by different sources varies slightly, a consequence of the manner in which the burial was conducted, and because some of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.

"According to the Serbian police, the attack on Donji Prekaz was in response to KLA attacks on nearby police patrols. According to witnesses, however, the attack was well orchestrated and included APCs, artillery shelling from the nearby ammunition factory, and special police forces in camouflage and face paint."

The Albanian version... well, I can't find it in English online. But it's basically Butch and Sundance. Adem Jashari goes down, ferocious, heroic, guns blazing defiance. Then the Serbs kill everybody.

The Donji Prekaz massacre turned out to be a huge strategic mistake. It inflamed Albanian public opinion and vastly increased support for the KLA. By summer, KLA membership had soared from ~2,000 to more like ~15,000, and it was on its way to being a serious guerrilla force. The UN Security Council had passed a resolution 'condemning the use of excessive force by Serbian police" in Kosov... the first sign that anyone in the outside world cared a whit about this remote and obscure province. And Adem Jashari, hero and martyr, had entered the realm of legend.

Which brings us back to the picture of him, twelve feet tall, armed and bearded, glowering mournfully at the teenagers passing under him to enter the Youth Center. Is he there as an inspiration to the young people of Kosovo?

Maybe. Or maybe he's there because directly across the street from the Youth Center is the UN compound. In fact, his picture is directly opposite the office window of UN proconsul Soren Jessen-Peterson. Peterson, a Danish diplomat, is the appointed governor of Kosovo; there's a local Parliament and a Prime Minister, but he has final power over everything they do.

But whenever he looks out the window, he'll see Adem Jashari staring back at him.

I should probably say that I think this is pretty dumb. The Kosovars had a hell of a time under the Serbs, so a certain amount of acting out is understandable. But it's been six years, and they're about to gain their independence. Whatever Adem Jasheri was, he doesn't belong up on the Youth Center -- a government building, in a Kosovo that's supposed to be multi-ethnic and respectful of minority rights. And whether Peterson and the UN are doing a good job or not, they should be able to go about their business without a bearded giant with an AK-47 looking over their shoulders.

[Update: this entry continues to attract attention, probably because an Albanian site has copied it. Feel free to comment... but obscene or abusive comments will be deleted. Play nice.)

They Love Americans

Albanians love Americans. And Kosovar Albanians... they really love Americans.

There are US flags everywhere. When I say I'm American, people smile. I had a meeting yesterday with a guy who had a copy of the US Declaration of Independence on his wall. (Didn't speak ten words of English.) And the second-biggest street in town is Bill Clinton Boulevard. It's not quite as important as Mother Theresa Boulevard -- you did know Mother Theresa was Albanian, right? -- but it's close.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Kosovo is one of those places where everyone has a cousin in Brooklyn. There's a saying in Albania that translates, "Fear not! For you have sons in America."

Of course, that's true of a number of countries around here -- Serbia, most obviously -- and it doesn't make them love love love America. No, the big reason is that the US bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999, thereby releasing the Kosovar Albanians from a decade of apartheid, oppression, impoverishment, and collective misery and humiliation, and enabling them to inflict the same on the few Serbs who were too poor or too stubborn to run away.

Little black Balkan humor there. No, what I meant to say was, freeing the Kosovar Albanians from all those awful things -- really -- and setting them on the path to independence.

Kosovo really did have an awful time under Milosevic. From the early '90s onward, Slobo and his allies fired almost all Albanians from government jobs, handed out state-owned properties and juicy monopolies to his cronies, brought in murderous thugs and petty thieves to "police" the province, and set up an explicitly racist apartheid regime whose whole raison d'etre was to grind down the Albanians while looting the place nine ways from Sunday. After 1997, when the Albanians started rebelling, he added bouts of village-burning, midnight murder, and random massacre.

The Albanians could never have gotten out of this by themselves. There were about 2 million of them, but there were over 7 million Serbs, and the Serbs were much richer, better organized, and had all the heavy weapons. They could engage in guerrilla warfare, but they had no hope of actually winning... unless some outside power intervened. Which, in 1999, NATO did.

I say NATO, and NATO does occupy a fond place in the Albanian heart. You'll sometimes see, for instance, NATO flags added to the Albanian and American flags that fly in front of coffee shops and bars. But the Albanians are pretty clear on who was the dominant power behind the NATO campaign, and by golly they're grateful for it.

"Europe," said an Albanian poet once, "is a whore." He was talking about 1913, when Europe stood by and allowed (in the Albanian view) Greece and Serbia to partition most of the lands inhabited by Albanians, leaving only a small rump territory to become the Albania that we see today. Most Albanians seem to know this saying. And while they're not bitter or hostile to Europe -- they want to join the EU one day, like everyone else between here and the Caspian Sea -- they don't trust Europe to protect them. The Americans, though... they can be trusted.

Putting aside the complicated history, and the rights and wrongs of it all, it's... pretty refreshing. When I lived in Serbia, I was never in a hurry to announce that I was American. I always did a quick calculation: is this person old, young? Liberal, conservative? Is it likely that they still resent the bombing?

I don't do that nearly as much in Romania, but still: there's a moment of hesitation or constraint. Romanians pretty much like Americans, but there are exceptions. And even the ones who like us may sometimes want to engage you in a rambling discussion about George Bush or Iraq or whatever.

But here, it's like a little weight has been lifted. I don't have to hesitate a moment.

"Yes, I'm American."

"Wonderful! Very good!" Smiles all around.

It has nothing to do with me personally. Still... it's nice.

Pristina

So I'm in Pristina, in Kosovo.

This is my first time in Kosovo. I came with mixed feelings. On one hand, I hadn't heard much good about the province. "A dump" was the most typical comment. On the other hand, I had been pleasantly surprised by Tirana, in Albania. And... I was curious to see what the fuss was all about.

Brief first impressions:

-- The airport, like every other airport in the former YU, is miles and miles from the city. I can see that in Belgrade, but why did they do that for modest-sized towns like Pristina and Skopje?

-- Thick chilly fog, scented with coal smoke. That bitter brown coal smell.

-- Bad roads. Balkan drivers. An Orthodox Church, empty, behind barbed wire, with weeds growing high around it.

-- Ugly buildings, just like everyone said. Bad '70s and '80s architecture, lots of Communist block apartments interspersed with the occasional flight of fancy. There's a building topped with Fuller domes. It doesn't look nearly as cool as someone obviously thought it would.

-- Cigarette sellers everywhere. In Tirana, they're kids. Here they're young men. Walk down the street, and you'll pass a dozen of them in five minutes. I sat in a restaurant for an hour, and at least seven or eight of them came through.

-- Burek shops. Romania is out of the burek zone, but Pristina is right in the middle of it. The Balkan fast food trinity: burek, pizza, doner kebabs.

-- Cafes. Romania doesn't really have the full-blown Balkan cafe culture. Pristina does. It's like Belgrade. There must be a hundred of them downtown. More.

-- Crumbling sidewalks. A lot of deferred maintenance. The people are, on average, a bit more shabbily dressed than your average Belgrader. But only a bit. Could be a poorish town in south Serbia.

-- Kosovo is still administered by the UN. The UN vehicle of choice is the white Land Rover, and the damn things are everywhere.

-- Holy cow, do these people love Americans. But that probably deserves a post of its own.

I'm staying at the Hotel Grand. Back in the bad old days, this was the unofficial headquarters of the Serbian secret police. Arkan stayed here, with his tigers. Albanians wouldn't dare enter the place.

Today... well, it's just another run-down former Communist hotel. Chilly rooms, threadbare towels, toilets that run. Ugly abstract sculpture from the '70s. There's wireless in the lobby, so there are always clusters of people sitting there, gathered around laptops, drinking Turkish coffee and espresso, smoking, smoking. It feels like someplace that's waiting for what comes next.

Which, in this particular case, is privatization. It goes on the block next year. 300 rooms, centrally located, great fixer-upper. Be the newest hotelier in Europe's newest country! Apply now!

More in a bit.

Heat

It's been a very hot weekend in Bucharest.

Temperatures topped out at 38, but most of Friday and Saturday, they were hovering in the 30s. (For Americans: it was in the 90s, with a peak around 100.) That wasn't so bad, but the humidity... well. I went for a short walk on Saturday afternoon, and the streets were empty of pedestrians. Even the vicious dog who lives down Strada Brasilia, who snarls and lunges whenever I pass, didn't budge from under its car. I came home after half an hour and my t-shirt was drenched in sweat.

Sunday evening, the heat broke with a sudden unexpected cloudburst. It started as a sunshower, drops of rain from a clear sky. Then some clouds moved in, and it began to just pour -- fat raindrops spattering down, the pavement dancing. I took shelter under a balcony. Cars started honking their horns. Some people ran for cover, but others were hopping around yelling, or just standing with arms outstretched and faces turned up.

Afterwards it was still humid, but cooler, and when the sun went down the night was almost tolerable.

Random note: Bucharest has a climate rather like the US Midwest. I spent three years in central Illinois, and this is pretty familiar. But expat friends from Europe and (especially) Britain seem to find it pretty savagely extreme.

Albania again

I'm back in Albania again.

I owe our friends over at A Fistful of Euros some posts, so most of my Albania-blogging will be going on over there. Here's my first post.

I'll try to post here too, as time allows. In any event I'll be back on Saturday.

Evil parents, that's what we are

David is 22 months old and very much two years already. He is my little devil in disguise - incredible charm and charisma liberally coating a will of steel.

Yesterday, we went for a short walk after dinner. Just up the street to the supermarket to get some pistachios, and to check for a portable potty at the maternity store next door. Roundtrip maybe 700 meters. The route leads along Calea Dorobantilor which is a very busy street.

Now, Alan is very well behaved and will hold your hand while walking where it's dangerous. He doesn't always like it but he will always do it.

Not so David.

Did I mention he's already very much in his Terrible Two's?

Well, we started walking and as soon as we closed the garden gate behind us, he yanked his hand out of mine and started running towards the big busy street. All educational experts say that if your child runs away from you, don't run after him. That doesn't work in a busy big city with lots of cars and buses and trucks. No.

So I ran after him and picked him up. Much screaming and kicking ensued. Repeat the following dialogue twenty times over the course of the next half hour:

"David, do you want to walk?"
"YES!"
"Then you have to hold my hand, OK?"
"Yes."
Down he goes on his feet.
"David, take my hand."
"NO!"

Kicking and screaming, repeat dialogue. It gets tiring after a while but we want him to learn this. It's a contest of wills.

His ultimate weapon is the tantrum. He throws himself on the ground - actually, he carefully lowers himself to the ground - and lies on his back, screaming. Usually, we just ignore him and walk away. Sometimes, I come back and distract him. This works or works not. Then I walk away again.

This is somewhat more complicated on the sidewalk of a busy street in Bucharest. The first two or three times, he just got picked up by Doug or me, kicking and screaming. On our way back, though, at a relatively safe stretch of the sidewalk, we kept on walking, carefully watching him out of the corner of our eyes.

First, he was stunned, then the howling began.

Now, it was about a quarter to seven, and that's a very busy time in Bucharest. People are coming from work, doing some grocery shopping, running to catch buses, traffic is thick and slow-moving. Within seconds, David had an audience.

We were maybe fifteen meters down the street, our little boy lying on his back on the sidewalk. He's blonde and blue-eyed just like his brother, so it's easy for people to make the connection between those two adults with the blonde, blue-eyed three-year-old and this pitifully crying, blonde, blue-eyed darling. Oh, the parents! (Dirty looks in our direction.) Why would they do such a thing to such a wonderful little creature! Isn't he adorable? How dare they! (David flashes one of his famous smiles.) Oh, oh! (Flower girl appears out of nowhere.) Oh, you poor little boy, here's a flower for you! (I'm not making this up!) He caused a little commotion and we got a few pieces of advice on parenting.

Sigh. It's very Romanian, that. In Germany or the US, nobody would think of interfering with your educational efforts. This has its bad sides, definitely. But the Romanian way of giving you unsolicited advice about missing hats, gloves, about potty training and bottle feeding, needs some getting used to.

We're here for almost two years now (in two weeks). We smile and say "da, sigur" because we know the intentions are good.

But we still walk away when David throws a tantrum. Because he finds tantrums without a rapt audience utterly boring.

The Dukagjini Code, part 1.75: The coffee cup of forgiveness

As readers may have noticed in previous installments, the kanun of Lek Dukagjini contains a few slightly anachronistic elements. "Blood follows the (trigger) finger" is a central adage of the Code; yet the adoption of the personal firearm must certainly date to the centuries after Lek. (One wonders what the original adage was, if there was an original adage. "Blood follows the hand"? "Blood follows the hilt"?)

In the same way, coffee -- which almost certainly was not consumed in the hills of northern Albania in the fourteenth century -- played an important role in peacemaking under the unwritten law.

Doug mentioned in a recent post how modern Tirana is a city of cafes. But traditional Albania was also a land of coffee consumption. Even poor Albanian households would have a coffee set, with a "metal tray with coffee cups inverted to keep them clean and a tiny pot with a long handle for making Turkish coffee" in the hearth, as Margaret Hasluck recounts in The Unwritten Law in Albania.

(I should note that by "Turkish coffee", Hasluck is using the English name for that style of brewing coffee by boiling its fine grounds, and does not intend any specific ethnic or religious identification by it. Albanians of all faiths drank coffee; and the Turks do brew a fine cup. Languages are weird sometimes.)

Coffee was also a marker of status. A man of standing would be offered the first cup at the table, while a man too slow to kill his enemy would find "his coffee cup was only half-filled, and before being passed to him it was passed under the host's left arm, or even his left leg, to remind him of his disgrace."

As can be imagined, satisfying the demands of honor and blood under the kanun made peacemaking a difficult process. A third party was always involved, and the reconciliation was laden with symbolism. Unsurprisingly, coffee often played an important role. Hasluck provides several examples:

In Shpat the original criminal must take the initiative and go to his enemy's house, escorted for safety's sake by at least one friend. The enemy came to meet him in the open air, but did not offer him his hand, for a man reserves his hand for his friends. Then both went into the house, the coffee, the all-essential to a peace-making, was served, followed perhaps by a meal with meat. Both coffee and meal were 'like a funeral', enlivened by next to no conversation and with little cordiality of mien. A day or two later the enemy must go to the original criminal's house, and the same ceremonies were gone through. Alternate visits had to be paid for some time, until at last the original enemy declared that he had forgiven the other. A marriage very often cemented the peace-making. Occasionally the attempt to make peace broke down -- one's gorge rose at the idea of making friends with the murderer. Then the whole evil story began again, murder alternating with murder.

In Kurbin peace was made by the same methods as in Lumë and Krasniqë. The murderer, who had the sailor collar of his jacket thrown over his head, a sign of mourning and penitence, as well as his hands tied behind his back,a sign of helplessness, remained standing near the door, while his friends sat round the hearth. The host gave coffee to them, but not to him; his forgiveness was not yet assured, and without such assurance he could not drink his coffee. The friends pleaded with the host to untie his hands; they threatened as well as pleaded saying, 'If you like, forgive him -- otherwise kill us along with him'. At length one of two things happened. The host consented to pardon the murderer, got up to throw down his collar and to untie his hands, and bade him sit down and drink coffee, saying, 'You are pardoned, friend'. More frequently, he said he could not at once pardon the man, but would give him a truce of six months, a year, or more; in sign of his mollification he probably gave him coffee, though he sent him away with his hands still tied behind his back and his collar over his head.

Coffee. It's important.

The Dukagjini Code, part 1.5

Doug is still in Albania. "I am still in Albania!" he says. And so, a further anecdote from Pietro Quaroni on the Code of Lek, before the comparative stuff:

One of the chivalrous rules of the vendetta enacted that it could not be prosecuted against anyone accompanied by a woman, a child, or a foreigner. Thus, if a man who knew he was the object of a vendetta -- who was, as they said, 'in blood' -- allowed himself to be accompanied by one of these three persons he was regarded as a coward, disqualified, and shunned by the entire community. This sometimes led to strange situations.

One evening our Legation doctor, Zucchi, was summoned for an urgent operation. A public-spirited man, he would undertake any journey, however distant, by night, in winter, in the depths of the mountains, to tend the sick. On the return journey, the young man who had summoned him suddenly began shrieking at the top of his voice: 'I'm with the Italian doctor! I'm with the Italian doctor! And my mother is ill'.

'Why do you shout like that?' said Zucchi.

'We're crossing the territory of a family with whom we are "in blood". I'm warning them not to attack you by mistake. And also, so they won't think I'm a coward.'

A 'mistake' was the only danger for foreigners, who were considered as outisde the rules of the vendetta, under a kinds of collective guarantee from the whole people. Two unfortunate Americans disembarked at Durazzo [Durrës -- CY], to cross Albania by car and pick up the boat again at San Giovanni di Medua [Shëngjin -- CY]. They were unlucky enough to drive a few minutes ahead of Zog (then President of the Republic) [and that's a bizarre story in itself -- CY] in his car, and were mistaken for him by a family lying in wait. They were killed in one of the many vendettas which then revolved around the person of Ahmed Bey Zogolli.

This incident was described to us many times, with much detail, by the Montenegrin chauffeur of the two unfortunate Americans. He was called Luca Barba, and whenever he passed the place of the crime, he started his account with the words, 'Look, the place where they cut me down...'

In general, as I say, foreigners were considered as ineligible for vendettas.

The Dukagjini Code, part 1

My co-blogger Doug is in Albania. "I am still in Albania," he says. And to think, I used to joke with him about that possibility. Thus, in Doug's honor, let me post an excerpt from Diplomatic Bags, the memoirs of the Italian diplomat Pietro Quaroni.

Some background: Quaroni was stationed in Albania during the interwar years, at a time when Albania was a cockpit for Yugoslav, Greek, British, and Italian (i.e. Mussolini's) influence, under the peculiar rule of King Zog.

As the saying goes, Zog did not so much rule as reign lightly. Much of the country still remained under traditional Albanian law, the unwritten code sometimes known as the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini.

One peculiarity of the Kanun is that it did not rely on state structures for enforcement, much like the early medieval Iceland so beloved by modern American libertarian theorists. In the same way, Albania under the Kanun could be a remarkably violent place, much as the Icelandic sagas describe (and said theorists ignore).

The Kanun has fascinated me for a long time, and I'm pleased as punch that I finally have an excuse to blog about it. So here's Quaroni on how this modern stateless law code operated:

On the city boundary where Cavaja Street begins, the ground rises and some way up the hill a barracks was being built. Perhaps this was why the road here was better maintained (in winter, most of Tirana became a sea of mud); it was a part of the town to which we often came for an afternoon walk. During one of these, my wife saw a peculiar object lying in a ditch at the side of the road; it proved to be a human corpse, a man half-immersed in a pool of water. This was a relatively busy street, and we were surprised that no one paid any attention to it.

When we returned the following day, it was still there, in exactly the same position. The local people were unable to explain what had happened; much gesticulation and a flood of Albanian dialect told us nothing. The mystery was solved that evening by Colonel Sereggi, the King's ADC.

'He must have been killed in a vendetta,' he explained. 'Only members of his family are allowed to bury him. If anyone else touches the body, that person becomes immediately involved in the vendetta with the family who killed him. In the same way, if he had only been wounded, only members of his family could have tended him.' Such was our initiation into that strange and complex institution known in Albania as the vendetta.

Actually, as in Italy, such things were known as matters of blood: gjak.

Since the days of the ancient Turkish empire the honesty of the Albanians has been proverbial. A woman could, it is said, cross the length and breadth of the land loaded with gold and jewelry, and no-one would life a finger against her. So honest are they that, again according to tradition, it is unnecessary to close the front door at night. After nearly three years in Albania, I could confirm some of this from personal experience.

Only in the bigger towns, where attempts were being made to introduce the benefits of Western civilization, were these sterling qualities disappearing. However, honest as an Albanian may be in some matters, he has an extremely quick finger on the trigger, particularly if his family is involved in a vendetta.

Every village has its vendetta. We in Italy are sensibly taught as children that the best way of dealing with a vendetta is to forget it, to pardon our adversary.

I really wonder what Leonardo Sciascia would have said to this. Anyway.

But in Albania the vendetta is deeply rooted in tradition, governed by a code of rules, known as the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini. To flout this is considered a heinous crime, and the transgressor is immediately regarded as an assassin. I doubt whether any Albanian, even among the gendarmes or magistrates, was really familiar with the directives of the new penal code [of King Zog -- CY]; but they certainly knew everything about the rules of the vendetta as a form of private justice, regarded as inevitable and indeed necessary in a country where, at least under Ottoman domination, State justice hardly existed. For centuries the vendetta has been an essential part of the social fabric, of family pride, respect for the rights of others, honour, honesty, etc.

Among the many new measures was Zog's attempt at moderating, if not altogether abolishing, the vendetta. Together with malaria, it was said to be the principal cause of the falling birthrate. Zog tried to persuade his subjects to use his new penal code, with its magistrates, judges, and police force. He was not very successful. The policemen who arrested the transgressors, as well as the judges who sentenced them, were Albanians, some no doubt victims or heroes of vendettas themselves. The churches, in particular the Catholic Church, had a little more success; but only because they did not try to abolish the vendetta, but simply to limit its violence. As in mediaeval times, the Albanian bishops would occasionally proclaim 'God's truce', and vendettas were forbidden on days of church festivals -- particularly at the Feast of the Madonna of Good Cheer, when the mountain tribes, Musselmen as well as Catholics, assembled in the little church at the gates of Scutari [Shkodër -- CY]. The vendetta flourished of course in the mountains, where the tribes were still attached to their old habits and ceremonial.

Next: more on the Icelandic connection.

Free Montenegro! Or maybe not.

I'm working at home this morning, and there was a brief piece on the TV (which plays downstairs from the office, but can be heard in the background) about how Montenegro was thinking really really hard about declaring independence from their union with Serbia. In fact, the Montenegrin President and Prime Minister have presented a petition for independence (sort of) to the Serbian and federal leadership.

More below the fold.

Serbia: medium-small country, population about 7 million (not counting Kosovo).

Montenegro: very small country, population about 600,000. Poorer than Serbia. Mostly mountains, though with a nice seacoast.

Serbs and Montenegrins speak the same language and have been united in one country since 1919. They stayed together when Yugoslavia broke up. Currently they're joined in a federal union as a single country called "Serbia and Montenegro". This began in 2003 and is supposed to last until March 2006, at which point the two countries will reconsider their options. Very broadly speaking, the international community would like to see Serbia and Montenegro stick together. (The region has enough countries already.)

Here's what I wrote about Montenegrin independence the last time Montenegro made loud noises about it (eight months ago, in July):

Montenegrin independence is a deeply silly idea. And most Montenegrins know it!

What's going on here is Montenegro holding itself for ransom. See, if they make a really convincing case that they're about to bolt for independence, then (they think) the Serbs will give them a better deal when it's time to renegotiate the S&M union in a couple of years. Hey, it's worked once already — the present deal is far better for Montenegro than it should be. (Frex, M'gro has 8% of the population but 50% of the ambassadors and diplomatic staff. A Belgrade acquaintance of mine dryly asked if they could find that many M'grins who could read…)

Of course, sooner or later they're going to miscalculate, and push the Serbs too far.

Talos, of Histologion, replied that it didn't seem like a bluff, if only because a lot of Montenegrins had turned out for public support. To which I said:

It's a bluff. It's not hard to rent a crowd of flag-waving patriots in M'gro. (Or anywhere else in the former YU.) But sooner or later Serbia will call the bluff, and then Montenegro will suddenly be in a very interesting situation.

Note that this is rather similar to the way Slovakia split from the Czechs.

Djukanovic [the Prime Minister of Montenegro for the last decade or so -- ed.] is a clever, amoral opportunist. (I know, I know… the very last thing you'd expect to find running a republic of the former Yugoslavia.) Like some other clever, amoral opportunists, he's had a good long run, with some remarkable accomplishments. But he's nearly painted himself into a corner in the last year or so. The economy isn't growing, FDI isn't flowing in, the Serbs can't stand him, people are getting unhappy about things like dead journalists, and the international community is no longer charmed by his 'look at me! I'm a plucky democratic patriot from an appealing small nation' act.

So, time to play the independence card again, and see what more he can screw out of Serbia.

I think the Serbs will grit their teeth and let him get away with it one more time. Losing M'gro would be a huge psychological blow, and the fragile coalition government in Belgrade might not survive. But I can't see this working too much longer.

That was eight months ago. Today... well, I'm still not sure Montenegrin independence will happen. (And I still think it's a deeply bad idea.) But it's looking more likely.

One straw in the wind: the term of the federal Parliament of Serbia-Montenegro expires on March 3. There should have been elections last month to choose a new Parliament. However, neither Serbia nor Montenegro could be bothered. The legislators' terms will expire without anyone being elected to replace them. So in two weeks Serbia-Montenegro will move into constitutional limbo. Not a good sign.

Montenegrin independence would probably happen without violence. That's about all that can be said for it. It would further traumatize Serbia; meanwhile, little Montenegro, poor and isolated, doesn't make much sense as an independent state.

More on this as it evolves.

One day someone will explain to me why the Guardian keeps publishing this stuff

Raoul, in a recent comment, pointed me to an article in today's Guardian.

The teaser: "Reformers blame problems on the legacy of 40 years of communism. But could it be that the reform process itself is responsible? Far from being a panacea, as claimed by eastern Europe's political elite, following the IMF-EU economic prescription has caused hardship for millions."

Ah hah, said I to myself, said I. Before I even clicked on the link? I knew it was going to be one of two people: Mark Almond or Neil Clark. So I clicked...

Ding! You've got Neil!

Well. It's difficult for me to overcome my revulsion to Clark. He's an old Milosevic fanboy. Slobo, says Clark is a "prisoner of conscience", a man whose "worst crime was to carry on being a socialist". His trial is "a travesty".

I guess I could get past that, but then there was the Djindjic piece. Written just a few days after Djindjic's murder, it positively crowed over the killing of "the Quisling of Belgrade". Djindjic, you see, was an American puppet, the "State Department's man", who "enriched himself by selling his country to those who had waged war against it so mercilessly only a few years earlier." Worse yet, there was "evidence that underworld groups, controlled by Zoran Djindjic and linked to US intelligence, carried out a series of assassinations of key supporters of the Milosevic regime". Because of all this, "Djindjic will be mourned by few in Serbia... there are many... who would willingly have pulled the trigger."

'Djindjic will be mourned by few in Serbia'. I was in Belgrade when Djindjic was shot. And I walked in his funeral procession, along with over half a million other people; roughly a tenth of the country's population. And I remember the thousands of candles people set outside Democratic Party headquarters for weeks afterwards; and the flowers, piled higher every day, until we could smell them far down the street.

Well. Raoul wanted to know what I thought of the latest Clark piece.

Not much. The first half is a recitation of statistical bad news about Eastern Europe. Nothing new there. Oh, it's true, and it bears repeating: the '90s were a bad, bad time in this part of the world. Like the Great Depression in the US; in some places, worse than that.

A lot of Americans, and even some Europeans don't get this. Communism fell, and there was an adjustment period, and now we're all happy shiny EU members! Well... no. The adjustment period went on for a decade, give or take, and it was seriously bad news. And it's not completely over yet.

But then Clark gets into the whys and wherefores and, well, you can guess. It's the West's fault; it's NATO's fault; it's foreign capital's fault.

Do I have to say that there are legitimate criticisms to be made of how the transitions were handled? But this isn't it. Nothing in the article is backed by anything but assertion. "These bad things happened; clearly it was the fault of *this*!"

There are also some goofy errors of fact. (N.B., this is pretty constant with Clark.) "The EU's 3% budget deficit rule for euro members means that a fresh wave of deflation is on its way for populations which, since the late 1980s, have known nothing else." This will come as a surprise to Romanians, who have seen two bouts of hyperinflation in the last 15 years; inflation here was at 100% just five years ago, and has still not dropped out of double digits. Similarly, the Poles saw double-digit inflation pretty much every year through the nineties, as did Hungary ; the Baltic States all had terrifying inflation until around 1996. Does nobody at the Guardian fact-check this stuff?

Then there are bits that are true, but don't seem to mean what he thinks. 27% youth unemployment in Slovakia: that's bad, but then it's over 18% in the EU generally, and several new EU members are doing better than that. (Hungary, 15%; Slovenia, 14%. As opposed to 21% in Spain, 22% in France.) And he's aghast at the NATO requirement that new members spend 2% of GDP on defence. Yet this is much less than former Warsaw Pact members used to spend, and it's less than Greece (4.3%), France (2.6%), or socialist Sweden (2.1%) spend today.

And, you know? This is a guy who went to Belgrade in 1998 -- at a time when living standards were far lower than they are in Poland or Hungary today, and the country was being methodically looted by Milosevic and his friends -- and burbled that "what a truly wonderful place was Belgrade!" Because, you see, "state-owned department stores abounded". The poverty, the blackouts, the refugees, the pensioners standing in line for hours for cooking oil, the hyperinflation, the pervasive corruption, the bogus privatizations, and the soaring income inequality as Milosevic's friends and family distributed state-owned companies among themselves... those escaped Clark's notice, back in Belgrade in 1998. But his "delight turned to ecstasy" when he discovered that he could buy books by Tony Benn.

Given this, I'm not too surprised to find that his ray of hope in Eastern Europe's miserable gloom is... an alliance between Marxists and right-wing ultranationalists. Yeah, that's generally worked a treat in this part of the world.

And that's about all I have to say just now. Back to the ICG thing tomorrow, if time permits.

The ICG report on Kosovo

So I just finished reading the International Crisis Group's report on Kosovo.

The report can be found here. (That's the .pdf version. MSWord file on this page.) It's 41 pages long, but reads faster than you might think. Though, as I told Talos at Histologion the other day, I was slowed by scribbling notes in the margins.

Here's the short version: it recommends that Kosovo be given independence sometime in 2006.

Unfortunately, IMO it doesn't make a very convincing case for this. I went in wondering why this would be a good idea; I finished, and I was still wondering.

That said, it's worth reading. Very much so. It doesn't whitewash either the Albanians or the Serbs, and it has several modest but plausible ideas for improving relations between the two groups. In fact, the more modest the ideas, the more plausible they become IMO.

I want to post about this in a little more detail, time permitting. (Which it doesn't right now.) Meanwhile, I encourage anyone who's interested to check it out and comment.

I believe in the predictions of coffee

Before there was Ceca or Severina on the Yugoslav pop music scene, there was... this.

Haradinaj, cont'd

For those who found the last entry interesting, I've written an expanded version for the Head Heeb.

More on this in a bit -- family festivities coming up fast.

Waiting for the last indictments

The Hague Tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia -- remember them? The folks who have been trying Slobodan Milosevic for the last three and a half years?

Well, they're starting to wrap up. The Tribunal must issue its final set of indictments by the end of 2004. In other words, within the next four days. After that, no more new indictments... they have to finish with what they've got.

Now, this is a pretty stupid idea. There are a lot of war criminals still running around. Many of them have committed ghastly crimes, murder and worse. Eight and a half years -- or five and a half, if we're talking about Kosovo -- is not a very long time. (By way of comparison, the US and Israel are still going after a few last elderly Nazi war criminals, and General Pinochet of Chile is facing prosecution for crimes committed in the 1970s.) Yet, once this deadline closes, the many war criminals not indicted will be... not quite home free, no, but able to breathe a lot more easily.

But the Hague Tribunal has been a mess. It has taken much longer and cost far, far more money than anyone ever imagined. So it's going to be shut down whether its work is done or not. (And it's not.)

There's plenty of blame to go around for this sorry situation, and maybe sometime I'll post about it. But in the short run, the big question is: will the Tribunal indict Prime Minister Haradinaj of Kosovo? Rumor in Serbia is that they will, but rumor in Serbia is not always a reliable source.

If they do, it will be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic in their hands. If they don't... well, that will also be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic. Either way, there will be big effects on the region.

More on this soon.

Quote of the Day

If things here will work like in Romania or Bulgaria, we can be quite content. After all, this is the Balkans.

Paddy Ashdown, High Representative, about expectations of a model democracy in Bosnia

Kosovo again

Just read this interesting piece by William Montgomery, former US Ambassador to Serbia. Montgomery was in and out of Belgrade for over a decade, speaks Serbian, and has done his homework. I agree with pretty much everything he says here.

Key grafs:

The Kosovo experience should be a case study for the limits -- and risks --of international intervention. The United States and its Western allies tried virtually everything to encourage Milosevic to treat the Kosovar Albanians humanely... [But it] was an effort doomed to failure, as the combination of Milosevic's desire to remain in power, historical enmity among the ethnic groups, growing national awareness on the part of the Albanian population, and the conflicting views of Kosovo itself of the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians were too much to overcome...

Basically, we solved one problem at great cost (Serbian government massive human rights violations in its treatment of its ethnic Albanian minority) but we created others that thus far have defied solution. What to do about Kosovo? How does it fit into modern Europe? How does it interact with Serbia? How to dissuade the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, southern Serbia, and Macedonia from the use of violence? How to proceed in Kosovo in a way that does not re-radicalize Serbia? How to moderate the still raw forces of nationalism in Serbia and among Serbs, which the bombing campaign fuelled?

So far, pretty standard stuff -- some handwringing, some obvious hard questions. Now here's where it gets interesting:

The job has been made much, much more difficult because of the international community's unwillingness or inability to come to terms with what future it expects for Kosovo and to act decisively to bring that about. Most speeches and policy statements emphasize the importance of a multi-ethnic society. Certainly we make considerable efforts to portray Kosovo as moving towards that ideal end. But the reality is that the degree of hatred, fear, and suspicion among the various ethnic groups remains at or near the levels seen immediately after the cessation of bombing in 1999. For most of the past five years, the international community has failed to recognize that fact and even in the face of incidents to the contrary, continued to portray Kosovo as making great strides toward multi-ethnicity. Even after the violence of this March, a depressingly large number of the UNMIK personnel (and influential government and non-government people in key capitals) do not understand the depth of the problem.

This isn't simply a question of naiveté. There has also been an underlying double standard in Kosovo on the part of the international community, based on the very real persecution of the Kosovar Albanians under Milosevic and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians that took place at and around the initial NATO bombing. The overwhelming feeling of the vast majority of international personnel that flooded into Kosovo in June 1999 was rather black and white with the Serbs as the oppressors and the Kosovar Albanians as the oppressed.

What the international community has been fundamentally unable to fully comprehend and accept is that the situation is now turned on its head with the oppressors becoming the oppressed and vice-versa. [emphasis added]...

I agree with this. I strongly agree with this. As we saw last March, Kosovo is still producing eruptions of violence. Only this time, they're (mostly) directed against the Serbs.

Montgomery keys in on three related problems here. One, the tables have turned in Kosovo. The former victims are now the victimizers. This is a plain fact. Unfortunately, it seems to be very hard for people to adjust their thinking; either the Serbs are Bad and the Albanians are Good, or vice versa.

Therefore, second problem, nobody in authority is willing to acknowledge the reality on the ground. -- Actually, I do differ a bit from Montgomery on this point. I do think that some of the UNMIK and NATO authorities have publicly acknowledged the problem. (Some, not all.) But even those who acknowledge them aren't willing to take the steps to deal with them .

So, third problem, deep-rooted Polyannaism on the part of UNMIK. Everything's just fine here, they'll learn to live together any day now.

This leads to some problems, which Montgomery lays out for us:

[S]ome (perhaps most) of the civilian international personnel in Kosovo even today still have major problems with this concept. And it has led to a lack of sympathy to the very real plight of the Serbian minority even today and a corresponding lack of toughness in response to provocations by the Albanian majority. This has limited the efforts of the international community to effect return of Serb refugees in the face of Albanian intransigence...

The International Community has also accepted and funded the Kosovo Protection Corps, which is the successor to the KLA, is led by General Ceku, the head of the former KLA, is staffed by former KLA members who rather routinely are found responsible for acts of violence against the Serb or Macedonian communities, and whose head (Ceku) routinely declares that he is the head of the Kosovo Army. While it should seem rather obvious that the Kosovo Serbs could never be comfortable with such an organization and that it would be a major impediment to chances of a true multi-ethnic society, it still exists.

Right. Would you want to live down the street from some heavily armed ex-KLA guys? Me, neither.

So what to do about Kosovo now? On the one hand, if the Kosovo Serbs do not come to feel that their religion, culture, language, and way of life are secure, they will never accept rule by an Albanian majority. They will leave, as they left Sarajevo in 1996. There is no question that this exodus will be fuel for the nationalists in Serbia and will also force even moderate politicians in Belgrade to take radical stances in order to survive politically...

On the other hand, Kosovar Albanians will accept nothing less than full independence in current borders. A significant percentage are determined to drive all Serbs from Kosovo, reasoning that as long as any remain, the possibility of Belgrade re-imposing itself over them remains.

Right again. In 1999, Milosevic drove hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians out of their homes and into refugee camps. So pretty much everyone over the age of twelve has bleeding memories of oppression, terror, and flight.

Also, the idea of independence seems to have just fascinated the Kosovar Albanians. They don't believe in autonomy -- they don't see how it's going to work, and they don't see why they should settle for it.

Meanwhile, the Kosovar Serbs have their own, more recent memories of terror. And the fragile coalition government in Belgrade doesn't dare make any major concessions.

Montgomery does at least have an idea:

My solution is pretty simple. Give every city and town in Kosovo the same degree of autonomy and responsibility enjoyed by any single town or city in the United States. I grew up in a town of 10,000 people. We had our own school system, police force, local government, hospital system, and taxing authority. There were clear guidelines for which things were the responsibility of the local government, which belonged to our State governments, and which were the purview of the federal government. If this were done - NOW - and with the full authority and power of the international community to make it stick and be effective -- it would be far, far easier to deal with the broader questions of the future of Kosovo later on.

But the trick is to persuade, force, cajole the Kosovar Albanians to accept this, as the radicals among them will be bitterly opposed -- wanting all authority to be centralized under majority Albanian control. It will also be critical to get the Serbs to accept this concept, because while they may well embrace it totally in Kosovo, they have proved to be very reluctant to de-centralize in Serbia proper despite recurring promises to do so.

Oh, boy, is that ever true. Belgrade is very reluctant to cede any power to the provinces.

I'm not sure why, but the gruesome experience of Yugoslavia might have something to do with it. When Belgrade ceded power to Zagreb and Ljubljana in the 1970s, it greased the skids for the breakup of the country a decade or two later. Decentralization and local autonomy are associated with instability and civil war, I guess.

But, geez, most of Kosovo is already out of Belgrade's control. So we're really only talking about a small region here. I don't know if Montgomery's idea would work or not, but it doesn't seem obviously wrong and stupid; and, really, somebody's got to think outside the box here.

Finally, this:

If this solution or a similar one is not instituted well in advance of any decision on final status, my prediction is that any "final" solution will not be final at all, but we will just move into the next stage of the Kosovo tragedy.

I think any discussion of Kosovo is required to end with a scare. Unfortunately.

Olympic notes

Romania had a pretty good Olympics: 21 medals, of which 8 were gold. That put Romania 14th in the world... not bad for a country of 21 million people. By way of comparison, Romania ended up with more medals than Canada, Spain, the Netherlands or Brazil.

That said, there were some peculiarities. The biggest one: all of the gold medals were won by women. I don't know this was true for any other country with that many golds.

Also, three of the eight golds came in (women's) rowing. Odd, because rowing was not traditionally a Romanian strength.

Meanwhile, Serbia... oh, dear. Serbia won just two medals, both silver -- one in women's pistol shooting, and the other in men's water polo. Not so great, for a country of seven million people -- especially given that Serbia was once the biggest piece of Yugoslavia, a country which used to bring home large numbers of medals every four years.

By way of regional comparison: Bulgaria, eight million people, twelve medals, two gold; Croatia, four million people, five medals, one gold; Slovenia, two million people, one silver and three bronzes.

I'm not sure what this means. After all, Cuba was a big winner (27 medals, nine of them gold, with just twelve million people). On the other hand, Ireland -- one of the nicest places to live anywhere, a prosperous and free country of five million people, the "Celtic Tiger" -- won just one medal. So I don't really think that Olympic medal counts tell us anything meaningful.

That said, the Romanians are pretty pleased.

Name That Balkan Dictator!

It's Pop Quiz Friday here on Halfway Down the Danube, a new feature I am inaugurating in a hopel/e/s/s/ful attempt to get more comments on (and links to) this blog.

Today's question: from the following quote, can you identify the Balkan dictator this person is talking about? NB: one culturally specific word has been changed. No fair using Google.

Well, then, [blank] was dissembling, two-faced; a clever fellow with a marvellous ability to conceal his real opinion, and able to shed tears, not from any joy or sorrow, but employing them artfully when required in accordance with the immediate need, lying all the time; not carelessly, however, but confirming his undertakings both with his signature and with the most fearsome oaths, even when dealing with his own subjects. But he promptly disregarded both agreements and solemn pledges, like the most contemptible class of zek, who by fear of the tortures hanging over them are driven to confess misdeeds they have denied on oath. A treacherous friend and an inexorable enemy, he was passionately devoted to murder and plunder; quarrelsome and subversive in the extreme; easily led astray into evil ways but refusing every suggestion that he should follow the right path; quick to devise vile schemes and to carry them out; and with an instinctive aversion to the mere mention of anything good. How could anyone find words to describe [blank]'s character? These vices and many yet greater he clearly possessed to an inhuman degree; it seemed as if nature had removed every tendency to evil from the rest of mankind and deposited it in the soul of this man.

I'll give the answer later in the week.

Slovenia's "Erased"

Here's an interesting post and thread on Slovenia's "Erased" people. It's over at Michael's excellent "Glory of Carniola" blog.

-- Okay, this is sort of a cheap way to turn my several long comments on that blog into a post on this blog. But it's late and the baby has a cough and is sleeping restlessly, and I'm afraid too much typing will wake him up. So.

Murder in Macedonia

I've mentioned before that Macedonia doesn't seem to get much attention in the world news.

That said, I'm still surprised by the lack of coverage of this story.

Short version: in 2002, officials of the Macedonian goverment murdered seven illegal immigrant workers -- six Pakistanis and one Indian -- and then claimed they were "terrorists" who were planning an attack on the American embassy there.

The point of the exercise? To win favor with the US government, apparently.

(Here's another version with some more information.)

The Legionnaire, cont'd

Five days after surrendering to police, Legija (it's pronounced Leggy-uh, by the way) is still in captivity.

And that's all we know. The news blackout continues.

To paraphrase Dragan Antulov (of Draxblog), the optimists are just glad that Legija is off the street, and hope that he can offer useful information -- more about the ugly nexus of politics and organized crime in Serbia, more about the Djindjic assassination, maybe even something about the whereabouts of much-wanted war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

The pessimists think that Legija's surrender is just the tip of the iceberg. That he had help to stay undercover for fourteen months -- maybe official help. That as an intelligent paramilitary-counterintelligence-antiterrorist-organized crime figure, he'd never have given up without some good reason. They think he surrendered because he cut a deal with Kostunica's government; and that he'll be kept sequestered and and put back into play only when it suits the government (i.e., when he has some particularly damning piece of information about the previous administration, or perhaps some political rival).

"We do know that Legija is not to be believed, that he has outmanoeuvred many people who thought they were a jump ahead of him, and that he has buried many who believed they were better than him," said a former police minister.

Short answer is, we don't know. More on this when there's more to tell.

The Legionnaire Surrenders

Legija "the Legionnaire" is the nickname of the Serbian criminal suspected of masterminding the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic last March. After fourteen months on the run, Legija surrendered to Serbian police yesterday.

This came as a complete surprise. Several of Legija's associates had been captured or killed in the weeks following Djindjic's death. Legija himself, though, had simply disappeared. The general assumption was that he was living someplace far away -- Moscow, say -- with a new set of papers and possibly a new face.

Not. He surrendered at his house in Belgrade. And while his whereabouts for the last fourteen months remain unknown, it looks like he may have been in Serbia for most or all of that time.

It gets weirder. Legija is accused of some heavy, heavy crimes -- assassination, murder, conspiracy, you name it. Nobody has any idea why he might have surrendered. Belgrade is abuzz with speculation, but nobody yet seems to have any hard facts.

-- For those who haven't been following this story, here's some background.

Legija is a native Belgrader; he was born Milorad Ulemek in 1965. In the mid-1980s he fled to France and joined the Foreign Legion. He stayed with the Legion for several years, fighting in Chad, Libya, Beirut, French Guyana and Iraq (the first Gulf War, 1991). It was this phase of his career which earned him his nickname Legija, the Legionnaire.

Legija returned to Serbia at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars in 1992 and joined the Serbian Volunteer Guard, aka "Arkan’s Tigers". This was a paramilitary group that would quickly become notorious for a variety of war crimes; their leader, Arkan, was for many years a particular favorite of Slobodan Milosevic. (Though Milosevic would eventually turn against him, leading to his murder in 2000.) Legija became one of the Guard's commanders, and fought with Arkan in Croatia and Bosnia.

When the Tigers were disbanded, Lukovic joined the notorious Special Operations Unit of Serbia’s secret police, better known as the Red Berets. The Red Berets were nominally an "antiterrorist unit", but they were widely considered to be Milosevic’s Praetorian Guard. Legija became commander of the Red Berets in 1999.

He is suspected of involvement in the murder of four officials of Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement in a staged traffic accident in 1999. (This was one of several not-quite-successful attempts to kill Draskovic himself.) A few months later, during the war in Kosovo, Legija commanded the Red Berets in the field. As in Bosnia and Croatia, he left behind numerous allegations of atrocities and crimes.

Then came the fall of Milosevic. Legija's role in this remains controversial, but the most generally accepted version is that he met with Kostunica and Djindjic -- who were then leaders of the opposition -- and effectively negotiated a change of sides. The Red Berets would not intervene to save Milosevic. The new government, in turn, would leave them most of their privileges and would not prosecute or even inquire too deeply into their lives and their pasts.

Once the new government was firmly in place, though, this arrangement began to erode. Part of the problem was that the West kept pressing Serbia to cooperate with war crimes investigations. Many of the Red Berets were involved in these investigations, either as potential defendants or as witnesses. Another problem was that the Red Berets had deep links to organized crime on one hand, and the radical fringe of Serbian politics on the other. So the new government began putting more and more pressure on the group -- first disbanding them, and then becoming (from their point of view) ever more hostile and threatening.

In the simple version of the story, this led to Legija eventually organizing the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic, hoping or believing that this would destabilize the government. Of course, in Serbia nothing is simple, and there are truly baroque layers of conspiracy theory piled upon the few facts that are generally known and accepted. We still don't know what really happened with Djindjic's assassination, and it's entirely possible that we never will. Maybe I'll do a post on that sometime, but maybe not -- it's complicated.

As I mentioned, several of Legija's associates were captured or killed in the weeks immediately following the assassination. Two of his senior henchmen were supposedly killled in a shootout with police. However, last month an autopsy surfaced that showed they had been killed by shots to the back of the head, probably while bound and kneeling. This to give just one example of the fog of fact that surrounds almost every aspect of this case.

Still: Legija has surrendered. And while this is all very strange, it does seem to be better than having him run around free.

More on this in a bit, if anyone is interested.

Sărut mână!

One of the most endearing greetings here in Romania is "săru'mână" or "sărut mână". Literally, it means "I kiss [your] hand" which is similar to the Austrian "Küss die Hand". Like in Austria, it's both a verbal greeting and an actual hand kiss.

In Bucharest, one mostly encounters it as a verbal greeting -- from men to women of any age. It's very, very polite and Romanian women consider this to be very charming. (That's the feedback from the Romanian women I know but there might be some among our readers who think differently?) Occasionally, though, one does encounter that rare species of man who does follow up with a hand kiss. I have to say, the first time this happened to me, I was quite baffled -- and felt very special. It's like something that you only see in the movies and suddenly you meet it in real life.

I've also heard it said by younger children to me -- so maybe it's not a custom that is dying out, as so many others are. In the countryside, so I've been told, younger folk of both sexes use it to show respect to older people.

Isn't it nice? I just love it. Sărut mână!

Sad Friday Night

A steady drumbeat of bad news from Serbia. I've been blogging about it over at tacitus; you can find my first post here and a followup over here.

I've been in touch with friends there, and everybody seems to be OK. But it's not good news. This is going to force Kostunica to take a more nationalist stand -- not that he'll need much forcing -- since otherwise, the Radicals will eat his lunch. Which they may do anyhow.

So, don't lie awake nights waiting for any more Serbs accused of war crimes to be deported to the Hague. Instead, watch Kostunica and his government play the nationalist card, hard; and never mind what it does to Serbia's image abroad, or its hopes for European integration.

At work this afternoon, I got a call from Claudia. She was watching the rioting in Belgrade on Euronews. "They trashed the McDonalds," she said. "Our McDonalds? The one on Terazije?" "Yep." We'd been in that McDonalds just a month ago; I took Alan downstairs, where he played for half an hour on the jungle gym while I drank coffee and read the paper.

"Oh, now they're showing the mosque," she said. "It's burning. They're burning the old mosque." In the background, I could hear Alan, obviously watching the TV too, saying, "Fire! Fire!"

It's not a happy day.

Bad News from Kosovo

Six people are dead there today. Or maybe more. Reports are confused, but it looks like a major clash between Serbs and Albanians is under way.

Apparently some Serb boys chased some Albanian children into a river, and two of the children then drowned. Mayhem then ensued, with vengeful Albanians attacking the Serbs, the Serbs counterattacking, and so forth.

This is the worst clash in the province since 2001, when Albanian terrorists killed 30 or so Serbs at one go by blowing up a bus. But there's been a steady background drumbeat of violence, with incidents every few months. Children have been involved in a number of these, unfortunately; for instance, several Serb teenagers swimming at a water hole were shot by a sniper last year. No arrests, of course.

Kosovo is already divided along ethnic lines, and has been since the end of the NATO campaign five years ago. The northern quarter or so of the province is about 90% Serb, the rest of it is about 95% Albanian. Re-integration of the two groups has never seemed particularly likely. The best case scenario was that the two would at least tone down the mutual hatred to the point where a small relict population of Serbs could live in relative peace in Kosovo, and Serbs could travel there safely to visit the many Serbian religious and historical sites -- cathedrals, monasteries, the Kosovo Polje battlefield.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be happening.

What happens now? I don't know. The Serbs and Albanians are limited in their ability to reach and hurt each other, in part because they're mostly physically separated, in part because of the presence of an international peacekeeping force. So larger scale violence is unlikely. But the fact that they're still managing to regularly have "incidents" ranging from sniper attacks to full-scale race riots, even under these circumstances, is depressing. It's like watching two guys who have been handcuffed but are still straining to reach each other with their teeth.

Bad news: for Kosovo, for Serbia, for the region.

More in a bit, probably, unfortunately.

At large

The BBC reports that yet another Karadzic search ends in failure. This is no surprise but time is getting short. Serbia has to produce Karadzic until the end of this month or all international aid will dry up instantly (which is to say, no new projects will begin after March 31 -- those which are running will continue to do so.)

Personally, I think he's in Belgrade. Hint for those searchers: Look on Golsvortijeva. We've lived around the corner from presidents and prime ministers all the time since we came to the Balkans. Golsvortijeva was the only exception. I've always wondered whether that meant that there is someone important living around the corner that we just don't know about.

I don't know. It seems as good a guess as any...

One Year Ago Today

I was sitting in a cafe in downtown Belgrade, when everyone's cell phone went off at once. The Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, had been shot twice in the chest and abdomen with a high-powered, large-caliber rifle.

Two minutes later, the network crashed from overload and everyone's phone went dead. But the news followed quickly anyhow: Djindjic was DOA.

It's hard to describe just how shocking and sad this was. Outside Serbia, it was a brief headline, a bit of tut-tutting -- the Balkans are a violent place, you know -- and then forgotten. But in Serbia the reaction was convulsive: an outpouring of shock and grief, half a million people at the funeral procession, then a massive strike, with all the power of the State, against the forces that had organized the assassination.

Djindjic was not very popular when he died. His approval ratings were in the single digits; basically, he was blamed for everything bad that had happened since Milosevice fell, and (perhaps more to the point) everything good that hadn't happened. Serbia's high unemployment, the steady drumbeat of indictments from the Hague, the continued dominance of the old criminal elites in business and society... people blamed the guy in charge.

When he died, of course, the pendulum swung the other way; he became, for a little while, a hero and a martyr. That was wrong too, I think.

Me? Personally, I always liked Djindjic. I only met him once, but he left a very favorable impression: charming, intelligent, energetic. Sure, giving a good impression is part of a politician's job, but that was part of the point; he was a good politician, in the sense of being technically good, and I respected that.

And he had the right ideas, for the most part. He realized that Serbia had to break away from its past and chart a new course, towards reconciliation with the region and, eventually, towards Europe. That he wasn't able to make much progress was mostly not his fault. He made some difficult and, frankly, dirty compromises; but it's hard to see what else he could have done.

A year later, I think we can see more clearly what was lost. Djindjic himself was a great loss to Serbia. If he wasn't a visionary or a healer, he was a sensible and pragmatic political technician with a firm grasp of what Serbia actually needed.

Serbia needs more like him.

Djindjic's leadership was replaced by the clumsy and short-lived Zivkovic administration, which collapsed last November. Today Kostunica, who was first his ally and then his despised rival, is presiding over a rickety new government. Some of Djindjic's assassins are on trial (though the trial itself is deeply troubled and troubing). At least one major suspect, the Special Forces chief-turned-gangster "Legija", remains at large.

I suppose I should add something here about the greater significance of it all and what the long-term impact may be, and such. But I find that it still makes me really sad to think about it.

And we go on.

Belgrade Flashback: White Jeep and Blue Camry

This morning I was at the OPIC conference downtown. OPIC is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and it would take a while to explain what that's all about, so never mind. The key thing here is that Romanian President Iliescu was giving a speech, so there was a lot of security. Metal detectors, people frisking you with wands, and guys in dark suits with the little radio thingies in their ears standing along the wall.

For some reason it made me think of Belgrade in the fall and winter of 2001.

At that time Claudia and I were living in central Belgrade, in a little apartment on a street called Dositiyeva. That's in the Dorchol neighborhood, which is right downtown, near Republic Square and the National Theater.

It was a nice enough neighborhood and a nice enough street, but there was nothing special about it. Except that right around the corner lived a guy named Vojislav Kostunica, who at that time was President of Yugoslavia.

Kostunica had been a law professor, and he'd never made a lot of money. He lived in a little two-bedroom apartment in a pretty ordinary apartment building in a good but not great neighborhood. After he became President, he kept on living there.

Part of this, I'm sure, was to continue to project the image of being a simple, honest man of the people. That was part of the reason people voted for him: because they were sick of Milosevic's arrogance and corruption. But part, I think, was because he was a conservative sort of guy, and stubborn, and just didn't feel like changing his ways.

Anyhow, because he didn't want to move, the security had to come to him. So every day I would leave our apartment and walk around the corner and there would be two security vehicles, parked right in front of Kostunica's apartment building. (Which was literally two doors away from us -- one building down, turn a corner, cross the street.)

What made this interesting was that there were two completely distinct sets of security for him: the white jeep guys and the blue Toyota Camry guys.

The white jeep guys sat in a big white jeep, and they were goofs. They spent all their time smoking and reading magazines. Sometimes they rolled the windows down and started conversations with pretty girls who were passing by. They always had the radio on. I never actually saw them sleeping, but sometimes they'd be obviously and visibly bored, slumped in their seats, morosely nursing a cigarette, staring vacantly out the windows. Mostly, though, they read the sports pages of the newspaper; it really seemed like they spent several hours each day doing that.

After a while I started waving hello to them. They always waved back. I think they welcomed any diversion, however trivial.

The blue car guys were something else again. They wore dark suits and they sat in a blue car with tinted windows. I think it was a Toyota Camry, though I couldn't swear for sure now. It was a nice car, anyhow, but sort of nondescript. And the guys inside never moved, so it took a few weeks before I even realized they were there.

When I did, I started watching them. They didn't play the radio. They didn't smoke. They didn't read the newspaper. And they never rolled down the window to yell greetings to pretty girls. They just... sat. Sat in that car and watched.

I never even considered waving to the blue car guys.

Obviously these were two sets of bodyguards, but who was hiring which? The Republic of Serbia vs. Federal Yugoslavia? Municipal Belgrade police vs. Secret Service? The military?

I never found out. Eventually Yugoslavia liquidated itself (it's "Serbia and Montenegro" now, with both countries having an option to leave after 2006). His country having disappeared, Kostunica lost his job and became a private citizen for a while. The goofy guys in the white jeep went somewhere, and the motionless watchers in the blue car went... somewhere else.

But lately Kostunica has won election as Prime Minister of Serbia. And he's still living in that apartment.

I wonder if they're all back again?

Clean up your own dirt!

There is a disussion on domestic help over at John and Belle's which I found by the way of Apartment 11D. Belle has many smart things to say but I still cannot resist to add my own 2 cents.

See, I don't have as good a reason for employing domestic help as Belle does -- I'm not chronically ill like her. I'm perfectly able to clean up after myself, as much as anyone with two kids under two is able to do this. But I have a maid who comes twice a week for eight hours to clean and do the laundry. I also have a fulltime nanny who takes Alan -- and more and more often David -- to the park all day long. They leave at 9 (11 in winter) and come back at 4:30. Rosy cheeks and all.

In the eyes of some, like Chun The Unavoidable, this makes me a total dork. I'm the evil capitalist exploiter. I'm just scum.

Just, I'm not. I'm actually doing a good deed. Doug and I are supporting two families which would be far worse off if we didn't employ those two girls. We pay them above the going rate which makes us evil in the eyes of whole different buch of people -- there's just no avoiding being evil, I guess.

Anyhow, Vali The Nanny adds valuable income to what her husband earns working at the US embassy. They have a kid and they want to be able to buy him things like a computer and such, which they couldn't on the husband's pay alone. Anda The Maid supports her entire family, including mother-in-law, on the wage she brings home.

They both couldn't not find other work in Bucharest. But even if they did, they both actually make more money working for us than working at any job they could get out there in the real world. The real world here in Romania is a dire place for unskilled workers.

We pay sick days, we give holiday bonuses, we give generous tips on occassion, we function as a lending bank in times of dire need, we give gifts like clothes and toys for Vali's boy.

For that, we get two of the sweetest women who are utterly dependable, very trustworthy, absolutely crazy for our children, and very happy with their jobs. In return, we have a clean house which is rare with two kids, I don't have to do the ironing, which I hate, and the kids have a mother who is much better rested (albeit not well rested) and therefor less of a shrew. It's a win-win situation.

Among expats in Bucharest, it's sort of an unspoken rule to employ someone to do the cleaning up and minding the kids. It's developmental aid applied directly.

I dunno. I just can't bring myself to feel as an exploiter. Principles are nice if you live somewhere where people can afford them.

Belgrade revisited

It was so nice to be back in Belgrade. The people are so outgoing. The city is so full of life. The atmosphere is so upbeat.

We met friends and favorite places, ate once loved pastries at once loved coffee shops, and visited often frequented book shops. We strolled down the Knez to Kalamegdan. We spend an afternoon in Alan's old park. We saw our old house (still empty, waiting for us to come back maybe). Not once did I have to go down or up a single stair without someone jumping to help me with the stroller.

The Danube, oh, the Danube. I really did miss the Danube.

It was a nice visit. It's also nice to be back home. I can say "mulţumesc" again without following up with "eh, hvala".

Lots of food for blog entries, when I'm less tired and less wiped. Flying alone with two kids is not much fun. It could have been worse, though -- I met friends on the plane who helped me and I didn't need to change any diapers. Heh.

Tomorrow, then. I promise.

Letter from Belgrade

I got a letter from a friend in Belgrade yesterday.

My friend -- I'll call her Anna-- is Serbian, a lawyer, and thirty-some years old. She's an intelligent, lively and (I think) perceptive observer of the political scene there.

If you haven't read this post about the elections in Serbia, what follows won't be that interesting. Me, I'm still fascinated by what's going on there, because Serbia seems like a country that's balanced on a tipping point.

So. Here follow some of her comments, slightly edited, and my responses.

The problem with the Government is not only that DSS [Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia] and DS [the Democrats, Djindjic's old party] can`t get along, but also that G17 and DS can`t get along.

True. At the moment, pretty much everyone hates the Democrats. Well, when they were the ruling party, they were pretty high-handed, and there really was a lot of corruption under them. And, of course, they're unpopular because they're blamed for high unemployment and poverty... which wasn't really their fault, but helps make them wonderful scapegoats.

Actually G17 heavily attacked DS and the current Government before the elections.They started the famous Kolesar - Janjusevic affair and the whole story about false votes in the Parliament when the new Governor of NBJ was elected. I do not even think that after all of this they can sit still in the same room.

Kolesar and Janjusevic were two high DS officials who were implicated in money laundering. Prime Minister Zivkovic (who took over after Djindjic was killed) defended them for weeks before accepting their resignations.

The false votes story was... interesting. It took place last summer, after the old government fired the head of the National Bank of Serbia. There was strong opposition to this move in Parliament. So when the time came to vote on his replacement, the vote was very close. Afterwards, there were accusations that the government had used vote fraud -- for instance, by having one legislator enter the password and press "yes" for another DS legislator who was absent (and, in one case, actually in Italy).

If I remember correctly, the DS and the government vehemently denied any wrongdoing... but then, shortly before the election, the DS made some sort of confession that, yes, they did engage in some vote fraud in Parliament, but it wouldn't have affected the outcome. Uh huh. Anyhow, there are indeed reasons for people to be annoyed with DS.

The latest version on the possible structure of the Government is that DSS and G17 Plus and SPO/NS will form a minority Government, supported by DS. I`m not sure how such a mix could function for a week, not to talk about longer period, but this is a widely spread idea.

Actually, Serbia's neighbor Croatia has exactly this sort of government -- one formed by a minority coalition, with one other party sitting outside the coalition but giving "silent consent". Croatia's Peasant Party occupies the outside position, the role that DS will (probably) fill in Serbia's new Parliament.

Mind, it's not a perfect comparison, because the DS is much bigger than the Peasant Party. And in Croatia, the last government is firmly in opposition, not holding the balance between the new goverment and an empowered lunatic fringe. Still, it's an interesting parallel.

DS would love to see DSS and Radikali forming the Government, but it`s unlikely to happen. Although I believe that many of the DSS supporters would not really mind such coalition, I think that Kostunica is aware that it would provoke the slow agony with deadly consequences for his party and he won`t go for it.

Anna is quite right. (Although I think there has been some wishful thinking on the part of Serbian liberals here -- the idea being that a DSS-Radical coalition might act as a purgative, discrediting both parties and making things so bad they could only get worse. Not this time.)

Actually, Kostunica would prefer to see the others forming the Government so that he does not have to take any responsibility for anything, but stay in his 3 bedroom apartment, play with his dog (no more cats) and be soooooooo clever. And wise. And honest. And clever. And wise.

I agree. Kostunica has been very happy in the role of The One Honest Man, staying on the sidelines and holding the moral high ground. Being Prime Minister will make this impossible. I think he realizes this, which is why he wants to be President.

(I note that if he wants to take strong action against corruption and organized crime, it won't be easy for him to keep living in that same apartment. Claudia and I used to live aroud the corner from him, and it's not a great security situation.)

So, we`re still a nice country without the President, the Parliament and the Government, which, I believe, suits perfectly the majority of Serbs. Cause essentially we`re anarchists. And we like the chaos, it is always a good cover for the laziness.

No comment...

Talking about SPS being a descendant of Tito`s Communist Party, well, he certainly inherited some very valuable things like the infrastructure, property and network that used to belong to the party. He also learnt how to maintain that network and how to manipulate people. On the other hand, he never called for Tito`s time, he distanced himself from communists and became popular by presenting himself as an "honest nationalist". Which, of course, he wasn`t. Ideologically, he was neither a communist nor a nationalist. Just an ambitious, rigid dictator, obsessed with power and with no visions at all.

Okay, point; I withdraw the comment. (And I agree with Anna's description of Milosevic, BTW.)

His wife was often talking about greatness of communism, but her party July, as you know, was just a cover for a bunch of thieves, criminals and greedy mediocrities (she qualifies in all categories).

Mrs. Milosevic is widely disliked in Serbia, even among defenders of the old regime. But liberals really hate her -- always did and still do now. Because no only was she a greedy, ruthless opportunist, but she just had no class; she was rather stupid, had no taste, and has always been much too pleased with herself. Slightly reminiscent of Elena Ceaucescu, although Mrs. Milosevic never had the opportunity to do quite so much damage.

Her "July" party used to be the junior partner in Milosevic's coalition. Until October 2000, it received almost as much fawning media attention as the ruling Socialists, and got the same sort of thinly disguised government subsidies and special treatment.

"July" disappeared without a trace in the last election, getting something like 0.1% of the vote. So there's that.

Well, it`s fun to read your blog, although the part on kids sickness was rather sad then fun. I hope that everything is fine by now. It`s so frustrating when the kids get sick and expect you to help them, while in fact you`re not really able to do so. At least you can comfort them a bit.

Thanks for the kind words. We really hope they don't get sick again any time soon!

The cleanest toilet in the Balkans

Is located at the Shell gas station on Route 5 from Ruse to Sofia in Bulgaria, about 8 km from the border to Romania.

Why do I know that?

Well, it's been three months since we last went to Ruse and the car needed to leave the country again - obviously we haven't been able to organise a Romanian registration so far. We forgot over the business with the kids and only remembered last night -- and discovered that we were already two days past the magic date. Since Doug had a big meeting today, it was up to me to drive across the border, turn and come back with a shiny new stamp in my passport.

Let's not dwell on a very unpleasant drive in unpleasant weather on unpleasant streets. We've described the road to Ruse and it hasn't improved much. The only good thing was that the streets were almost deserted, so I didn't have to pay too much attention to other drivers.

The countryside was the same color as the sky, a dirty gray-white, so that one couldn't tell where which ended and begun. I'd been looking forward to seeing the Danube again - a real river, at last! I even stopped smack in the middle of the bridge, left the car, scrambled over the snow that rose up about a meter on the sides, only to take a picture of the river for Doug. I needn't have bothered:

I crossed into Bulgaria, found that Shell gas station, used the meticulous bathroom, had a Bulgarian style sandwich (three cuts into the bun, filled with ham, sheep's cheese and dry cole slaw, then heated - yum!), turned back and left Bulgaria again. When the Bulgarian border guard asked where I'd been, I said "Ruse". Why? "Tourist". Ah, he answered and grinned, to get a stamp, eh? Well, yes. What else should I have said?

I have to add that everybody at the border(s) was super-nice. Single woman traveling in the Balkans. Well, yes.

The Elections in Serbia

Serbia held Parliamentary elections on December 28. That was almost two weeks ago, but hey, we've been travelling and the kids were sick.

Besides, not much has happened since then. You think a Serbian government can form in just two weeks? They're just starting the negotiations.

Anyhow, it's generally agreed that the elections did not have a very good outcome. Somewhere between "disappointment" and "catastrophe" is the consensus.

I'm now going to discuss the election results in a little detail. If you want to jump overboard and start swimming for shore, now's your chance.

Okay, let's take a look at what happened. The election was for the Serbian Parliament, which contains 250 seats. Serbia has a fairly typical Central European system of government, meaning Parliament appoints the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. So any group that can get a majority in Parliament -- 126 seats -- controls the government.

Voting for Parliament is not by district like the US Congress. Instead, voters vote for parties. Each party gets seats in Parliament depending on the proportion of the vote that they received. So, if 20% of the people vote for a party, that party gets (20% x 250) = 50 seats in Parliament.

Simple enough, no? There is one minor wrinkle. To get any seats at all, a party must receive at least 5% of the vote. Otherwise, votes for that party are lost. This is to prevent every dinky little fringe party from getting into Parliament. Most countries with Parliamentary/party vote systems have similar provisions. In this election, this provision had some unforeseen consequences... but we'll get to that.

When the votes were counted, six parties had gotten over 5% of the vote. So these six parties got seats in Parliament. The winning six parties were as follows:

1) The Serbian Radical Party: 82 seats (27% of the popular vote). The Radicals are the populist ultra-nationalist party. They've been described as "neofascist", and that's a reasonable shorthand. They are the only party still committed to the idea of a "Greater Serbia" including parts of Bosnia and Croatia. Their leader, Vojislav Sheshelj, is presently in prison in the Hague, under indictment for war crimes in Bosnia.

The Radicals are really pretty odious. Back in the early '90s, Sheshelj founded a paramilitary group called the White Eagles. The Eagles were involved in all sorts of abominable activities in Bosnia. The Radicals deny any connection with them, but they are very proud to be connected with Sheshelj -- a man who liked to send his bodyguards out to beat up journalists who wrote bad things about him, and who once publicly boasted that he'd gouge Croatian eyes out with a spoon. And while the Radicals did try to soften their image a little for the election -- emphasizing their populist economic platform, and saying they'd only try to create Greater Serbia by "diplomatic means" -- they're still the party of ethnic cleansing.

The Radicals are a pariah group as far as the international community is concerned; and if they ever get into power, Serbia will probably once again become a pariah state. And the fact that the Radicals got a whopping 27% of the vote does not bode well. True, a lot of this was probably a protest vote... things have been tough in Serbia lately, especially in rust belt towns and the countryside. But when one person in four is voting for a party of malignant malcontents led by a thug, it's just not a good sign.

2) The Democratic Party of Serbia: 53 seats (18% of the vote). This is the party of Vojislav Kostunica, the man who defeated Milosevic for the Yugoslav Presidency in 2000. It's more or less a conservative center-right party, although like most Serbian parties it's more about personalities than ideology. They're nationalist, though not malevolently so, and are generally pro-market, although they think the last government screwed up the privatization process.

Kostunica himself is widely popular because he's perceived as being both fearless and honest. (I think this is a correct perception, by the way. We used to live around the corner from Kostunica, and it wasn't because we were living in a ritzy neighborhood... it was because he was living in a small three-room apartment in a modest neighborhood of Belgrade, same as he always had been.)

Unfortunately, even if Kostunica is honest and fearless, he's also pedantic, unimaginative, rather dull, a reflexive little-c conservative, and distinctly inclined to carry grudges. Also, he doesn't really want to be Prime Minister. He'd rather be Serbia's President. That is a separate office, chosen in a completely separate election. It's not to be confused with his old job as President of Yugoslavia. That position disappeared when Yugoslavia was finally, formally dissolved in March 2002, just 16 months after Kostunica beat Milosevic in the "Velvet Revolution" of 2000.

(Yes, it can be confusing. It gets worse, too.)

3) The Democratic Party: 37 seats (13% of the vote). Don't confuse the Democratic Party with the Democratic Party of Serbia -- they're quite different. (I said it would get worse.)

The Democratic Party is the party of Zoran Djindjic, who was Prime Minister for two years or so before being assassinated last March. It's basically a center-left party, pro-market and pro-privatization but vaguely hoping to keep some sort of social safety net.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has been heavily discredited by association with corruption, economic decline, and the failure to achieve any sort of resolution of the Kosovo situation. Me, I think they were lucky to get as many votes as they did. (That's largely because they reshuffled the leadership at the last minute and made Boris Tadic, the relatively popular Defense Minister, their chief.) They made a lot of enemies when they were in power, so a lot of people -- including Kostunica -- don't want to give them another chance, even as junior members of a coalition.

4) G17 Plus: 34 seats (12% of the vote). Isn't G17 Plus just the weirdest name for a political party? I think it sounds like some sort of shampoo. But what it is, is the party of western-educated technocrats. They're the best and the brightest, MBAs and PhDs who will lead Serbia to economic growth and EU membership. Most of their support came from urban voters and what passes for a yuppie class in Serbia.

5) Serbian Renewal Movement/New Serbia: 23 seats (8%). This is actually a Siamese twin, a coalition of two smaller parties, and I admit I have trouble keeping them straight. But if I have it right, New Serbia consists of the monarchists, while the Serbian Renewal Movement is the personal entourage of a very strange fellow named Vuk Draskovic.

About one Serb out of twenty thinks that Draskovic is a mystically inspired, incredibly charismatic visionary who will lead Serbia to renewed greatness. Most of the other 19 Serbs out of 20 think that Draskovic is a vain, self-obsessed twit. (I agree with the 19.)

6) Socialist Party of Serbia: 22 seats (7% of the vote). This is Milosevic's old party, the last remnant of Tito's Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It draws most of its support from the people most unhappy with the way things are: aging pensioners, disgruntled bureaucrats, and the unemployed. In other words, it's a pretty typical post-Communist Communist Party. The only distinctive thing about it is that, like the Radicals, it's aggressively nationalist. Oh, and it still claims Milosevic as its leader, even though he's being tried for war crimes in the Hague.

The Socialists are very friendly with the Radicals. Nobody else likes them much.

Right, still with me? Okay, take a look at those numbers again:

81... 53... 37... 34... 23... 22.

250 seats total, meaning 126 are needed to form a government.

Now, the Radicals -- with that big block of 81 seats -- are pariahs, and nobody but the Socialists will ally with them. (Although it's rumoured that Kostunica considered it.) And the Radicals plus the Socialists only have 81 + 22 = 103 seats, not enough to form a government.

But... if the Radicals and Socialists are in opposition, then it will take all of the other four parties, working together, to form a government. Leave any one group out, and you can't get a majority.

This means that, in order to form a government, the conservatives, liberals, monarchists, technocrats, and followers of Vuk "He Knows the Way!" Draskovic will have to settle their differences. And this will not be easy; nor is it likely to lead to a stable and effective government.

One of the reasons it won't be easy is that the Democratic Party of Serbia (Kostunica's party) and the Democratic Party (the late Djindjic's party) don't get along. In fact, Kostunica publicly said before the election that he wouldn't enter into a coalition with the Democrats. Supposedly this was because they were corrupt, and had bungled running the country's economy in general and privatization in particular. Many suspect that personal resentment on Kostunica's part may also have played a role, as Djindjic and the Democrats repeatedly blocked Kostunica from reaching Serbia's Presidency.

This feud runs so deep that at one point this week Kostunica actually proposed an all-party "grand coalition" government. However, while the Radicals and Socialists love this idea, the other three parties want nothing to do with it -- so it probably won't happen. Probably.

Another problem is that any government involving the New Serbia/Serbian Renewal two-headed calf will have to find a spot for Vuk Draskovic; and Vuk is a notorious prima donna.

And then, of course, any coalition running Serbia is going to inherit some spectacular problems, from Kosovo, to the Hague indictments, to the still-floundering Serbian economy. So there might be a new round of elections in a year or two, especially if the government is a fragile coalition.

There were other parties running, by the way: the Hungarian ethnic party, OTPOR (the student resistance turned political movement), Christian Democrats, you name it. But they didn't reach the magic 5% cutoff, although a couple of them came close.

What makes this unfortunate -- besides the wasted votes, of course -- is that the cutoff used to be 2%. If it had stayed at 2%, then two or three of the little parties would have gotten in. That would have been a good thing, because most of the little parties were OK; they might have been a bit odd, but they weren't about turning the clock back to Tito's time or gouging eyes in the name of Greater Serbia. But it's a moot point now. (Thanks to Dragan Antulov for pointing this out.)

If you've made it this far... well, thanks. I'll keep posting on this from time to time, as time allows.

Meeting the Patriarch

I also met Father Teoctist Arapasu, Romania's Patriarch. Well, we shook hands and exchanged nods, though we didn't actually talk. He was very impressive in his Patriarchal robes.

When I got home and googled him, I was amazed to find that Fr. Teoctist was born in 1915. He's 88 years old! What's surprising about this is that he really, really doesn't look it. I wouldn't have guessed he was a day past 75. He was moving right along, shaking hands and working the crowd, still perfectly quick on his feet. Pretty impressive for a guy who's almost 90.

Teoctist is another guy with an interesting story. He became Patriarch under Ceausescu, and worked quite closely with the Communist authorities: he served as a deputy in the National Assembly, acquiesced in the government's destruction of "inappropriate" churches, and was a key member of the Ceausescu-sponsored National Peace Committee. And when the first demonstrations against Ceausescu began, he sent the dictator a telegram of support.

But a few weeks later, after the Ceausescu's had fallen, he resigned. It's unclear to what extent this was voluntary, as a few weeks later he announced that he couldn't leave office without his own consent. But anyhow, he was out of power for three months.

Then, at the request of a majority of the Romanian Orthodox Synod, he returned. There was a large minority of the Synod that objected, saying that Teoctist was compromised and should have stayed gone. However, the majority view (which seems to have been that nobody's hands were clean, so that it wasn't appropriate to single out Teoctist) prevailed. Teoctist came back, and he's been Patriarch ever since.

Since then, the relationship between the Romanian government and the Orthodox Church has been... somewhat complicated. It's clear that Teoctist is very close to the present administration; apparently he makes regular appearances in the Legislature, and is also seen regularly supporting government positions on TV. Whether this represents the thinking of the Church as a whole is not clear to me.

More on this, perhaps, if I ever think I understand it a little better. (For those who are interested, here's a Radio Free Europe article that seems like a good starting place.)

Meanwhile, I pass along one response I got, when I mentioned how young and vigorous Teoctint appeared: "Why not? He managed to become his own successor."

Snow II

Yup, it's snowing, all right.

Christmas traditions

Romanian Christmas traditions are surprisingly similar to those in Germany, actually. Advent wreaths, presents on Christmas Eve, the decorating... all seems very home-y to me. There are two traditions which we don't have, though: the pig and the carollers.

First, the pig. It's traditional to slaughter a pig for Christmas. Our maid told us of the 170-kilo pig they slaughtered in her home village near Bucharest last week and this morning, I saw two men carrying a dead pig into one of our neighbor's house. The pig of our maid was so fat, it couldn't walk the last couple months of its life. What a fate.

In any case, the pigs are slaughtered and butchered and turned into ham, bacon and sausages. It's dubbed a rural tradition but with all the pigs I've seen lately, I think it's a true Romanian Christmas thing.

The other tradition are the colindatori (carollers). Groups of people -- mostly men in my limited experience -- go from house to house in the Christmas season and sing Christmas carols. And boy, do they sing beautifully. For some days now, they've either come to our door or to the neighbors, so we always get to hear the carollers sing in the evening. It's incredibly wonderful. Here's a site where you can listen to the instrumentals of those carols -- now imagine this sung a capella by good male singers. Hmm. Nice.

Yes, you're supposed to pay them. But I think it's nice enough even with that mundane aspect.

Buying the Economist

I used to read a lot of magazines. I used to subscribe to magazines. I'd get three, four, five of them every week, and I would read them all, cover to cover.

Then I had children.

These days I only have time to read one magazine regularly, and it's the Economist. You can argue with my choice, but there it is.

The thing is, in the Balkans, buying the Economist is not always a simple matter of strolling down to the local newsstand. Ha ha, pas de tout.

In Belgrade, it was very much a game of chance. The Economist would arrive in the country sometime on Friday, usually. And there were five or six magazine vendors who might carry it. Or then again, maybe not. So every Friday evening I would trot around downtown Belgrade, going from one vendor to another. Sometimes it would be at the first or second one; sometimes I would visit all of them with no luck. Sometimes it wouldn't appear until Saturday or even Monday. Nobody could ever explain why.

In Bucharest, it's still a game of chance, but the rules are a little different. The

vendor in the Gara de Nord train station always has the Economist by Saturday morning. That's a little late (it's nice to get it fresh on Friday) but acceptable, so I usually go down to the station with Alan on Saturday. I buy my magazine, he waves at the trains, we're happy. The only issue is that it's sort of a long walk (~2 km) to the station.

But! The NIC supermarket, just a couple of hundred meters from our house, also carries the Economist. Sometimes. And once in a great while, they get it on Friday afternoon. Not usually, no -- usually it doesn't appear until Sunday or Monday, and sometimes it doesn't appear at all. But once in a while, it's there on Friday, half a day before the Gara de Nord. Why? No idea.

Pointless? Not if you're an Economist reader. I don't say it's the greatest news magazine in the world, but it is mildly addictive.

Oh, and: this week they came out with their annual "World Survey". That's a special double-sized issue that they produce every December, in addition to the usual weekly version. That means that, this week, I have nearly 300 pages of crunchy Economist goodness to read...

...when I find the time, of course.

First snow

Well, not really, because we already had a bout of snow in October. This episode seems much more time-appropriate, though.

It's been snowing the last ten minutes or so. It's just past 3:30 on the second advent Sunday, all my men are asleep and I'm wondering whether the snow will stay so that we can build a snowman tomorrow.

[a bit later] Well -- Douglas and Alan woke up as I was writing this, and the snow stopped after just dusting our street. Now it's turning into a very grey late afternoon, dull winter light and the birds huddling in the trees.

Time to make cookies.

Mos Nicolae

Today is the day of Mos Nicolae, whom I know as St. Nikolaus. Doug had a moment of confusion that a Romanian tradition is so well known to me, until he realized that we have the exact same tradition in Germany, as well.

It's a children's holiday, both here and in Germany -- not meaning to imply that older children (aka adults) aren't happy about Mos Nicolae paying them a visit, too.

In the night to the 6th of December, children put their shoes (or boots, they fit more loot) out for St. Nikolaus to fill them. If the child has been good this past year, he will find his boots filled with goodies like nuts, tangerines, sweets and maybe a little present. If he has been a pain, he gets only a stick (presumably to be hit with).

Nikolaus day is one of those days that carry a special magic for children, and then again for parents with small children. It's almost like being a kid again. This year, I declared Alan old enough to get his boots filled. Apparently, St. Nikolaus thought he was a good boy indeed:

Of course, around 6:30 (in the morning!), after having filled up on chocolate and cookies, he went into total suger-overload-hyper-mode and had to be removed from the house to run it off.

Well. It's part of the fun, really.

Btw, Mos Nicolae/Nikolaus and Santa Claus are the same person, of course. Here's a short description from the North Pole People:

"The basis for the Christian-era Santa Claus is Bishop Nicholas of Smyrna (Izmir), in what is now Turkey. Nicholas lived in the 4th century A.D. He was very rich, generous, and loving toward children. Often he gave joy to poor children by throwing gifts in through their windows.

"The Orthodox Church later raised St. Nicholas, miracle worker, to a position of great esteem. It was in his honor that Russia's oldest church, for example, was built. For its part, the Roman Catholic Church honored Nicholas as one who helped children and the poor. St. Nicholas became the patron saint of children and seafarers. His name day is December 6th."

Happy Nikolausday to all those who celebrate it!

The million dollar...

... no, the million lei bill will be released on December 5 -- allegedly to make holiday shopping easier. One Dollar buys 33,800 Lei at the moment - so yes, the million bill will alleviate the cash flow some. However, I think they should have just scratched away a zero or two or three. But nobody asks me... :-)

If I ran the zoo...

... things would be different.

Well, yes. That's because I'm not a zoo person. Most of the times, I just feel very sorry for the animals and that's a gut feeling I can't control. Don't give me the arguments about the conservation of species -- if I see a tiger in a cage, I feel bad for him.

Let's begin at the beginning, though. It was Saturday morning, a glorious sunny day, we had two restless kids on our hands and decided it was the perfect occasion to visit the zoo.

We were prepared for the worst and were pleasantly surprised. The Bucharest Zoo is tucked away in a green, foresty area at the northern end of Bucharest (Baneasa). It's very pleasant out there and has a distinct country feel to it. That is, if you don't venture into the huge construction site that is the residential area of Baneasa and Pipera -- but that's besides the point here.

We arrived early, at about 10 o'clock. The zoo had opened its doors only an hour earlier and there weren't that many cars around. We couldn't spot a parking area, so we just parked our car alongside the road - which turned out to be the parking area because we were charged 30,000 Lei (about 80 European cents) for two hours parking by an authentic looking guy with authentic looking parking stubs.

Another 30,000 Lei brought us into the zoo. Compared to Belgrade, this zoo is, well, rather nice. Much less concrete than the Belgrade zoo, much more metal -- see picture.

(Again, these are thumbnails. Click on the picture to view a larger version.)

The arrangement of animals seemed to me rather eclectic. It started out with flamingos and pelicans, peasants and other birds, then one sort of ran into the tiger cage, to the left were more tigers, a lion, bears, the monkey house (complete with snakes and birds), the reptile house (nice and warm) which also served as a warming station for various homeless dogs.

Since we were early, we came in time for breakfast. This was interesting, gruesome and horrible all at the same time. In the reptile house, the black tegu had two little baby mice in his breakfast dish -- live ones, trying to cuddle together for warmth. I nearly threw up. (Those who know me know that I don't mind gore per se. But to see those helpless little mammals and this stony, expressionless reptile... maybe it's because I'm still nursing.)

The crocodile was cool. It heard the wardens come and scuttled to the door, expecting his breakfast. Imagine his surprise when he was repeatedly whacked on his head with a big hook-on-a-stick contraption and driven back into his pitiful little pond. Then the animal keeper came in and fished the remains of his last dinner, or lunch, or breakfast from the day earlier out of the water. It was eery to watch - like Animal Planet live. The croc stalked him. Doug kept mumbling "watch your back, better watch your back". In the end, nothing happened and the crocodile didn't get breakfast. I guess you have to clear your plate to get more, or something like that. Alan was enthralled. I don't think you can see something like that in a Western Zoo.

We walked down a beautiful alley with more iron fences on each side -- emus next to sheep and lamas and goats.

Interestingly enough, the wolves were kept in cages between the Vietnamese and wooly pigs. One cage wolf, one cage pigs, one cage wolf... I don't know for whom this arrangement was more stressful - the wolves who hear but can't hunt the pigs or the pigs which can smell the wolves but can't run.

In general, the zoo is a bit rundown - rusting metal and crumbling concrete, the cages are small and not exactly equipped with a lot of imaginative interior design, some of the animals don't seem so healthy (one of the parrots is ripping out his feathers, the largers mammals are striding back and forth in their cages in a decidedly odd fashion) but on the whole, we like the zoo fine. It's popular too, because there were a lot of people around. Also, it has quite a range of animals for a small zoo.

I don't think we saw quite the entire collection but Alan started to suffer from brain overstimulation. Most of the times, he sat on his Daddy's shoulders, his mouth hanging open with fascination. We decided it was time to get him to bed for his nap.

When we left, we almost stepped into an evil trap -- traders who sell anything from toy guns over Barbie dolls to balloons and dusters (dusters, you say? I don't know why myself) had set up their stands along the road in front of the zoo. Judging from the kids we'd seen inside the zoo, clutching all sorts of cheap toys, they generally make good business.

Some bare facts on the zoo:

It was first set up as two zoos, one in Bucharest proper and this one in Baneasa, in 1955. In 1962, all the animals had been moved to Baneasa and the zoo became the "Bucharest Zoological Garden". It's almost 6 ha big and houses over 800 animals - mammals, reptiles and birds. Almost half the animals are exotic, the rest are local animal like deer, sheep and various birds.

I'm sure we'll be back. Alan loved it, after all. (Although he was really scared of the elephant.)

Hmm...

If Romania is not getting ready for an imminent war, or preparing for Bush or the Pope to visit, then my next guess is that they are practising for a huge military display on December 1, Romania's national day.

For two days now, soldiers grace the streets everywhere, fighter planes and choppers thunder over our house frequently and I've never seen so much police since we arrived.

Our maid and nanny don't know what this is about. Does anyone else?

Brain Freeze

Romanians are really nice people -- the ones I met and talked to, anyhow -- and they have the saddest stories to tell. One of those stories I just heard this morning, from the nurse at our family doctor's office (yes, we have one now).

She's a charming woman, looks a bit like a pixie with blonde hair and a sparkle in her eyes. Her English is excellent and fluent. So I asked her how she came to speak so well.

Well. She had a scholarship for a nursing school in Dallas, TX, and got her degree there. She was full of high hopes and daring dreams when she came back to Romania with her newly minted degree as a scrub nurse.

The first setback came when she had to realize that the Romanian Medical Board doesn't recognize the professional title of a "scrub nurse". Her diploma was not accepted.

She bit her way through somehow (mind you, all the while she was telling me this story, she poked needles into me; skillfully but they were needles), and got to work at the Floreasca Emergency Hospital. She came to be responsible for all the surgery rooms and was to teach the other nurses how to scrub in. More walls: the nurses didn't want to do such a lowly job. She failed yet again.

Then, she and some of her friends from the nursing school in Dallas (I think it was Baylor) had the idea of founding a nursing school here in Romania. Well, that one went down the drain because this time the doctors didn't like the idea. Nurse practioners, eh. The doctors didn't want any competition.

She tried various other projects and ran smack against walls, yet she is still full of ideas. She works with orphanages -- donates her vacation time to work there -- and is still thinking of getting some form of advanced degree.

How is Romania ever to get out of the swamp if she constantly builds up walls for her brightest and most ambitious people to run against?

A Visit to the Senate

I visited the Romanian Senate last week. I was there to testify before the Senate Committee on the Budget, which was reviewing the new draft Fiscal Code. (Did anyone actually want to know that? I don't talk about my job much here, in part because I doubt too many of you are interested. Anyhow.)

The Senate is the upper chamber of the Romanian Parliament, and it's not supposed to be where it is. I mean, it's supposed to be in the House of Parliament -- that's the huge building that used to be Ceaucescu's Palace of the People. After Ceausescu fell, the Romanians couldn't think of a better use for it, so they decided to move their Parliament into it. And the Chamber of Deputies -- that's the lower chamber of Parliament, equivalent to our House of Representatives -- moved there in 1996.

But the Senate hasn't. They don't want to. They want to stay where they are.

Where they are is a different big building altogether. It's the former headquarters of Romania's Communist Party, downtown on Piatsa Universitii.

Now, it's easy to lump all large public buildings from the Communist period together (big, ugly, inefficient), but in fact they are not all alike. And while the former CP headquarters is not an attractive building, I can see why the Senators prefer it.

Most obviously, it's in a much nicer location. Step out of the Palace of Parliament, and you're on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, with a ten minute walk to the nearest place you can buy cigarettes. Step out of the Senate building, and you're on a bustling plaza full of shops, kiosks, restaurants, and busy students from the nearby University.

But it's also just a better space for the work of a Parliamentary body. The Palace of the People was originally designed for... well, for Ceausescu. It was supposed to be a joint government/party headquarters, and maybe some sort of convention center as well. The Palace wasn't designed with the convenience of the Senate (or anyone else) in mind.

But the inside of the Senate building is... well, "nice" might be overstating. But it's not actively horrible, and it is sort of interesting. It was built in the 1950s, at a time when Communism was still trying to reconcile its Spartan revolutionary tradition with its grandiose ambitions. In the case of the Senate building, the interesting compromise was to eliminate all decoration, but make everything about 25% bigger than normal.

Really. Ceilings are three meters high. Corridors are wide, wide enough to drive a car down -- much wider than in the US Senate buildings. Doors tend to be double and immense. It's like a building designed for a race of seven-foot-tall ogres.

I don't imagine it's the most practical use of space, but you know, it was sort of charming.

Mind, it's possible to take this sort of thing too far. The elevator was also large. But it had a brass bar welded to its sides -- its walls? what do you call the inside of an elevator? -- parallel to the door, at waist height. That is, the elevator was cut in two; you could walk into the front part, but not into the back. The bar was well worn and looked like it had been there for a while.

Why is that, I asked our guide. She didn't seem to hear me. I cleared my throat and asked again, a little louder. She muttered something and looked away.

"It's because the elevator motor isn't strong enough to lift the elevator when it's full," said my deputy.

"What?"

"The motor's not strong enough, so they can't ever fill the elevator. So they welded the bar to prevent people from crowding inside."

I couldn't think of anything to say to that. I still can't. Moving right along.

More fun with the Romanian medical system

Anca pointed me to a web page of a medical clinic that offers subsriptions - an altogether alien thought for a German. They also have a page that lists prices for services (presumably for non-members). I was amazed to find that a visit to a general practitioner costs $10 for Romanians and $50 if you're not a "romanian language speaker".

Go figure.

Key experience

Alan swallowed a key yesterday.

I'm sparing you the grisly details of choking, Heimlich maneuver, desperate searching for a key, not finding a key.

I have to admit I was feeling quite helpless. I mean, a key is such an odd shape - a marble or a coin I wouldn't have freaked quite that much over, but a sharp, pointy little key? (Not such a little key, either - about 4 cm long and 2 cm wide - and please, don't ask how he got hold of it in the first place!)

I called our American health insurance for expats which has a 24/7 emergency service. They put me on with a nurse and a pediatrician. Both recommended to bring Alan to a hospital and have him x-rayed, to make sure that the key wasn't stuck in the airways or in the esophagus.

Hah. Easier said than done. We (i.e. the nanny Valli, David, Alan and I) rushed to the GRIGORE ALEXANDRESCU Emergency Clinical Hospital for Children which is only a few blocks away from us. We should have walked, not taken the car -- parking was wishful thinking only. I ended up parking on a "reserved for Citibank" space, huffed at the guard who wanted to shoo us away and carried Alan off to the hospital.

What a hospital. The Camera de Garda (reception) was dirty and run down, there was a lot of construction going on everywhere which mainly meant dirt, more dirt, potholes and little actual construction work. We jumped over puddles, stepped into puddles, skirted puddles. Asked four doctors for help, were sent around to three different little "pavillions", were turned away, sent somewhere else.

I have to say that the emergency room was really nice - clean, modern, nicely decorated, light green or blue walls, doctors in green garb like on TV - nice. They didn't want us there, either. What a pity. (Now, it wasn't as if they had bleeding and screaming kids there -- the doctors were lounging and drinking coffee, clearly not overworked. I do believe they could have taken a look or two at Alan.)

Finally, I had enough and shlepped my little entourage off to BioMedica, a so-called Romanian-American clinic. They advertise with Western standard medical care, English speaking staff and state-of-the-art medical equipment. I had looked at their website when I researched for such an emergency and I was sure this was the place to go.

Let's just skip talking about traffic and parking.

Bio-Medica was much less impressive in reality. Nobody spoke English. We didn't get past the receptionist who also didn't speak English. Although the website lists three pediatricians, she insisted on sending us back to Grigore Alexandrescu because they "don't do children at Bio-Medica" and anyway, they didn't have an x-ray machine. The only helpful and nice person was another patient who offered to drive us back to the Children's hospital. Sorry, but I didn't feel like going back there.

Off to the next clinic I knew of - the Emergency hospital around the corner on Floreasca. Same thing there ("go to Grigore Alexandrescu").

I was getting slightly flustered. Doug had been working the phones from the office, trying to find a clinic that would actually have an x-ray and be willing to use it on Alan, and he did. That would be Med-Sana, close to the Opera. I was getting more and more frustrated, so it was a good thing that Doug joined me and we could leave Valli and David at home. Doug has a soothing effect on me. I might have just physically assaulted the next doctor, who knows.

At Med-Sana, they were friendly, partly English-speaking and helpful. We were immediately whisked off to the x-ray room. Alan, my curious never-afraid little boy, screamed hell and high water as we wanted to put him on the x-ray table. No way he was letting go of me. We had to hold him down with sheer force. As I turned to get the lead aprons for us (since it was clear we'd have to stay with him as they x-rayed him), they took the shot. Nobody bothered to give us protective aprons nor did anybody ask me whether I might be pregnant as they always do in the West, nor did anybody actually bother to tell us that they were shooting us with x-rays. Well.

We now have a nice picture of the key which, it turned out, currently resides in the stomach:

(Click on the picture to see the larger version.)

The pediatrician was a bit freaked (and how's that for reassurance?). She said she didn't expect the key to pass on naturally and that we should go back to - aha! - Grigore Alexandrescu and have an endoscopic retrieval done. She tried to call up the expert for endoscopies but the number was busy. So she told her secretary to arrange for us to meet this doctor and have him perform the endoscopy later this day. Then she left for her afternoon off.

Ten minutes later, the secretary came back and informed us that Grigore Alexandrescu doesn't want to perfom endoscopy on Alan. It was one of those second-sight diagnoses since they made it without seeing Alan or the x-ray. We were told to go home and wait for two days, then have another x-ray done to determine whether the key has moved on or not.

Well...

Soon in this theater: What goes in must come out.

Belgrade v. Bucharest (1)

We've been in Bucharest for four months now, after two years in Belgrade. So how do they compare? Here are some first impressions.

General layout. Belgrade is defined by its two spectacular rivers and its hills. Bucharest is mostly flat as a tabletop, and the only river is the tiny and stagnant Dumbovitsa. Point: Belgrade.

Streets. Both cities are very confusing to navigate, with a complicated mess of non-parallel streets connecting various sqares and circles. Bucharest's famous "piatsas" (very large traffic circles) do not help much.

Belgrade's streets are in better condition. Much better. One third of Bucharest's street grid seems to be under construction -- very, very slow construction. And much of the rest is in just awful shape -- crumbling asphalt, decaying road shoulders. The potholes can be terrifying.

But Bucharest at least has trees, pretty much everywhere; and the annoying Serbian habit of parking on the sidewalk doesn't seem to exist here. Yet.

Call this one a tie.

Architecture. Both cities were architecturally very impressive at one time. Belgrade, alas, got flattened by the Luftwaffe in 1941, and then again by the USAF in 1944. So a lot of the beautiful old buildings were destroyed... replaced after the war by, of course, nasty-looking blocks and ugly government buildings in the socialist realist style.

Bucharest got through the war OK, but then Ceacescu tore the heart out of it to build the People's Palace and whatnot.

Nevertheless, Bucharest still holds the edge. There are several neighborhoods full of lovely old buildings here -- we live in one -- and where Ceaucescu didn't reach, there are lots of run-down but still beautiful buildings. Point Bucharest.

Driving. Well, if you've been reading this blog, you know who wins this one. Belgrade has about three times as many cars as Bucharest, and most of them are old cars, and people drive pretty wild... and it's still much, much better to drive there than in Bucharest. Point Belgrade.

Taxicabs. Belgrade wins this one running away. Cabs are everywhere in Belgrade, and cheap. They're cheap in Bucharest, too, but they're annoyingly hard to find -- especially when it rains. You often have to call one, and even that doesn't always work.

-- I've been cheated worse in Belgrade, mind; I'd estimate that about one cab in five there has a jimmied meter. On the other hand, by far the most annoying attempt to cheat me was in Bucharest. That was the taxi driver who negotiated a fee with me at the airport -- say $20 -- and then spent the entire 20-minute taxi ride pleading, cajoling, blustering, wheedling, and generally making a non-stop nuisance of himself in an attempt to get a higher price. Unforgettable. And both cities have a, shall we say, laissez-faire attitude towards making sure their taxies are clean and in good repair; and both Serbian and Romanian taxi drivers are likely to view the use of a seatbelt as vaguely insulting.

But I take a lot of taxis, and statistically speaking, it's just way better in Belgrade. You can get a taxi in Belgrade, and that's the big thing. Point Belgrade.

Public transport. Very inexpensive, but always overcrowded, and uncomfortable in hot weather. That's true for both cities. I think Belgrade has better buses, but Bucharest has a metro (subway) which Belgrade doesn't. The Bucharest metro has its little quirks -- its incredibly badly signed, so you have to count stops -- but it's cheap and it's clean. So point Bucharest.

Shopping. Talking about groceries and other essentials here, not the darling new handbag from Prada.

It's Bucharest. Belgrade had only one superstore when we left (a Mercator), though I understand more are coming. Bucharest has six or eight of them, including one right in the city center.

Now, you can curl your lip at superstores, but when you have a couple of very small kids, they just become very, very attractive. In Belgrade Claudia had to go around to three or four different C-Markets to get her shopping done. (C-Market is a chain. They're little general grocery stores, about the size of an American 7-11.) And the stores were always plagued by strange shortages. Sometimes only one store in the neighborhood would have, say, canned tomatoes; sometimes nobody would. But you couldn't know that until you'd pushed the stroller to three or four or five different stores...

In addition to the superstores, Bucharest also has Nics. These are OK neighborhood grocery stores -- like the C-Markets, but bigger -- and there are a couple of them just a few minutes up the street from us.

About the only downside is, we can't find good meat here. In Belgrade, we had a great little local butcher shop right around the corner. Here in Bucharest... well, we're considering giving up on red meat altogether. It's mediocre at best. At worst it's scary. And the ground beef has, um, things in it.

Nevertheless, Bucharest clearly takes the prize for shopping. If we couldn't buy our milk in bulk, well, we'd be making a lot of milk runs.

Weather. Seems to be about even so far. We had a beautiful September here; it's been raining like mad the last week or so. Maybe an edge to Bucharest, but it's too soon to be sure.

Baby-friendliness. Belgrade, hands down. Serbs are completely baby-mad. Sometimes intrusively so -- it can be a bit annoying when strangers stop you in the street to say that your baby's feet aren't covered -- but on the whole it's nice. We never lacked for help in, say, carrying a stroller up stairs.

Romanians aren't hostile or anything like that, and they can be very friendly once the ice is broken, but they're much less likely to initiate.

Do I need to point out that this list is completely subjective and idiosyncratic? I take a lot of taxis, so I can make the comparison. I don't have a lot of time to visit bars and dance clubs these days, so I can't really tell you how the night life compares (though I suspect Belgrade has better music and Bucharest more, mm, adult entertainment venues).

More in a bit.

BYKAPEWT spells Bucharest

Svoboda Square, in Ruse, is nice. Really nice.

It's a huge square, so big it's really a small park, with grass and lots of trees. In the center is an enormous statue of Mother Bulgaria stomping on the Turks. Around the sides are various big buildings: the City Hall, the courthouse. Several of these buildings are quite impressive and a couple of them are downright attractive. There are also lots of cafes, restaurants, and little shops.

Around the square is a small "downtown" area, with a short pedestrian mall, tree-lined streets, another park, and more shops. It isn't very big, and you can tell that Ruse's economy isn't exactly thriving. Like, there was once a McDonald's just off the main square, but it had shut down, leaving just the arches behind. An economy that can't support one McDonald's is, let's face it, pretty feeble; Belgrade has four or five, and Bucharest has at least ten. Nevertheless, the downtown area was quite pleasant. There were plenty of parents with strollers, lots of kids on rollerblades and bikes, and every other park bench had a couple of young folks in a passionate clinch. And people smiled at us.

We walked down the pedestrian street, slowly. Stopped at one point to buy a hamburger; got persuaded to buy a strange sort of Bulgarian salad sandwich instead, which would have been very good if we (okay, I) hadn't ruined it by adding ketchup. Chatted briefly with a bookseller, who had an impressive selection but nothing in English. Window-shopped a little. Ended up at a park with some sort of enormous memorial.

It was the Tomb of the Martyred Heroes, or something along those lines, and -- if you ignored the graffiti -- was really pretty impressive. I would have been interested to find out more, but there wasn't any way to get more information just then... and anyhow, there was another playground, with a really cool slide. So we turned Alan loose again, and he had an absolutely wonderful half hour going up... and down... and up again.

We walked back by a different route, which took us past a memorial cemetary full of Soviet soldiers. There were fifty or so, all with death dates in 1944. This struck me as odd, because I thought Bulgaria got out of WWII with hardly a shot fired -- the Red Army rolled up the border, the Germans pulled out, and the Bulgarians 'joined the Allies'. But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe "hardly a shot fired" was correct, but these kids were the victims of those few shots that were fired... on the scale of WWII, 50 or so deaths wouldn't even get mentioned in the footnotes. (If anyone reading this knows more, I'd be interested to hear about it.)

Getting home from Ruse involved a lot of staring intently at maps, but it was doable. It helped that there were road signs showing the way to the bridge: BYKAPEWT, more or less, meant Bucharest.

(We'd have been in trouble if we didn't know Cyrillic. But the fact is, if you're going to a country that uses Cyrillic, learning Cyrillic is not actually that hard. Dirty little secret: it looks scary as hell, but it's not actually that bad.)

Summary: we liked Ruse just fine. Nothing spectacular, but a pretty town center and friendly people. Good place to spend a quiet weekend, say. We'd go back any time.

PYCE spells Ruse

Ruse is a small city on the Bulgarian side of the Danube. If you enter it by the Friendship Bridge, the first thing you'll notice is the set of enormous cranes on the shore of the river; Ruse is a shipyard and a port. Whether it's a busy port or not I can't say. None of those cranes budged an inch while we were there, but then, it was a Sunday.

We came into Ruse driving sort of randomly in what we hoped was the direction of the city center. By this time we were feeling a certain urgency. Alan was getting restless and bored after two hours in the car, the baby was getting hungry, and I needed a bathroom. Still, we did feel a certain frisson of pleasure when we realized that we were reading signs in Cyrillic again: PYCE for Ruse, XOTNL (with backwards-N) for Hotel, PECTOPAH for Restaurant, and so on. Nice to know the skills hadn't decayed.

We drove past several kilometers of mysterious pipeline, some sort of enormous memorial, around a couple of traffic circles, and ended up parked in front of a large apartment block. It was a random block somewhere in the neighborhood of the train station, chosen solely because it had a playground in front, so that I could run Alan up and down the swings and slides while Claudia nursed the baby.

-- Ruse, like every other city in Eastern Europe, has a lot of pretty dreary looking apartment blocks. The ones in this particular part of the city were notable for being at the less awful end of the post-Communist spectrum. That is, they were big ugly unfriendly-looking things, but they did not look as if pieces were about to fall off of them, and some had plots of green grass between them, with benches and a playground. "This is actually rather nice," I said to Claudia. "Boy, have our standards shifted," she replied.

But anyhow. I put Alan on the swings, and... there was this woman beating carpets. They were Turkish-looking carpets, very colorful. The woman had a headscarf and no expression whatsoever on her face. But she had a carpet beater, and she was hanging the carpets on a rack right next to the playground, and whack, whack, whack, she was just beating the hell out of these carpets.

It was fascinating. I mean, I'd seen carpet beaters before, but I had never actually seen one used to beat a carpet. It was fascinating for Alan, too. Except that he, being not quite nineteen months old, did not bother to politely conceal his interest. No, he stared. Absolutely motionless; enthralled. With his mouth hanging open.

This went on for a good ten minutes: the woman kept beating the carpets, and Alan just stood there staring at her. I put him on the swing; he swung, but he continued to stare with unbroken intensity. He didn't lose interest until she stopped. She, meanwhile, never changed her expression or acknowledged his existence in any way.

More in a bit...

The Bridge to Ruse

Crossing the Danube between Giurgiu (Romania) and Ruse (Bulgaria) is an interesting experience.

At this point the Danube is, as my dear wife has pointed out, frickin' huge. It's big like the Mississippi or the Amazon. More than half a mile across, and deep.

So the bridge is big too. And from a distance, it's a remarkable sight. Almost 3 km or two miles long long -- it arches up and up for a while before going across -- and high: more than 60m/200 feet (say 20 stories) above the water. The view is spectacular. And at either end, there are these... things. Big rectangular towers supported by Greek pillars, like the Parthenon but five times as tall. "Like the Argonath in The Lord of the Rings," said Claudia, and she was right.

Well and good. And then you get past the pillar-things, and you're on the bridge, and it's...

...narrow. Really, really narrow. One lane each way, and not a wide lane. One truck could just barely pass another truck, with inches to spare. No shoulders. No side lanes. No provision for pedestrians or bikers. (Those two people who are biking from Liverpool to Australia claim that they rode their bicycles across it in March 2003; but then, they are insane.)

The road itself is almost deserted. Going over to Bulgaria, there was one truck on the bridge with us. Coming back, one car. Okay, it was Sunday, but still.
At the customs and immigration points on either end, we repeatedly had to wait while officials who had wandered away from their windows came trotting back.

It's weird. Especially when you go home and look at the map and realize that this is the only bridge across the Danube for a long, long way in either direction. The nearest bridge upstream is over 100 miles east; the next downstream bridge is nearly 300 (!) miles downstream.

For bonus weirdness points, at the exact middle of the bridge there is a ditch, and one lane is closed. So, all road contact between the two countries for hundreds of miles around -- cars, trucks, buses -- bottlenecks down to a single lane that goes over a ditch. Which is fine, because there's no traffic anyhow.

The bridge is officially a "friendship bridge". Somehow it makes me think of two people shaking hands while leaning as far away from each other as possible.

The boy at Floreasca

Bucharest is teeming with beggars and most of them are kids. The "street kids" might well be one of the biggest social challenges for the Romanians and the government. So far, they haven't done really well. There are quite a few private initiatives which do great work but they keep running against walls in the form of stupid laws, regulations and requirements which were clearly devised by men in green silk rooms. There is a moratorium on international adoptions for Romanian children until the new law on adoption will be passed. This law is being worked on for years now and in the meantime, the state orphanages are bursting with kids and the situation there is a nightmare.

Anyhow.

Floreasca market is right around the corner from us. It's a big (indoor) green market and I buy fruit, vegetables and eggs there. It's relatively cheap and the produce is fresh and appetizing.

The little Gypsy beggar boy who hangs around Floreasca is about seven years old and he has stolen my heart. He asked me for some money as I was loading groceries into the car. Knowing that many street kids spend their money on glue, I have the strict rule not to hand out money. So I gave him a banana.

Did I make someone happy.

His face lit up like a Christmas tree and he nearly toppled over with the many thank-you's and have-a-long-life's. Then he made himself comfortable on the stairs in front of the market and devoured his banana in no time. As I pulled out of the parking space to drive home, he jumped up and down and waved and smiled. He was by far the most cheerful and polite little beggar boy that I've ever encountered. He's cute and looks smart, with alert deep brown eyes.

Oh, dear.

I want to take him home, give him a bath and fresh clothes, feed him until his stomach aches and watch him sleep in a warm and comfy bed. I want to rescue him out of this pit that Bucharest is for so many, many kids. I've learned here that one cannot rescue every one of them. I've learned that one is much more likely to be bound by stupid government rules than encouraged to do something about the street kids. In the end, there is very little one can do. But a little is better than nothing and a banana or a warm meat pastry now and then makes a big difference to that little boy's stomach.

For all who think they might be able to spare some cash and want to support the work of the Children Relief Network for the Bucharest street kids, click here and donate a dollar or two. I know these people and they do wonderful work. Every little bit helps.

Borders

Having a car registered in Romania is a serious pain in the neck. It involves extensive paperwork and hanging around a dozen of different offices for days at a time. So far, we have chickened out - that means, however, that we have to leave the country every three months with the car in order to avoid penalties or having the car taken from us.

This necessary trip wasn't due until the middle of November but with our planned trip to the States, we had the idea of going on Sunday and getting it out of the way for the next three months. So we packed up kids, snacks, money (good idea, as it turned out), filled up the tank, and were on our way to Ruse in Bulgaria.

Well, the drive was as advertised - hair-raising encounters with unmarked construction sites, your everyday crazy Romanian drivers and a near-death experience with a cow were the high points. It was a darn big cow, too.

Romanians and Bulgarians don't like each other and if you didn't know, you could tell by their elaborate border design. I've crossed a border or two but this one deserves some description.

First, they don't make it easy to find. For some reason or another, the road to this border is circuitous and not well marked. At one point, I suggested to Doug that the signs were actually a ruse to lure us into the backwoods and club us over the heads, then make off with our car. The street was really bad and a flock of ducks was taking a nap on it, too. As it were, we were in fact on our way to Ruse (and how's that for a nice play with words, eh?).

Then, you have to stop at the first inspection. That would be the car inspection. They take 2 Euros from you for unknown reason and let you proceed to the second inspection. That would be passport control. They control your passport, stamp some, write some forms, charge you some money. Then, the next stop is the fees for the car. Then the fees for the street. Then there is another little house that you pass on your way to the actual border and a guy who waves you past, without a fee. I thought that pretty remarkable.

Then, there is the bridge crossing the Danube. Now, the Danube at Ruse is a very serious river. It's bigger than the Hudson at Storm King, said Doug, and for him that means a pretty big river. The bridge is impressive in its own right - all concrete and metal and socialist carving. In the middle of the bridge, right where the actual border lies, there is a boulder on one lane and a bit of a ditch. A small ditch, since it is on a bridge but a ditch nonetheless. I guess they want to make sure that you feel it in your behind that you're leaving the country.

(Click on the picture to see the full version!)

Finally, the other side. More inspections, who would have thought! Four stops, more fees and, I kid you not, a desinfection bath for the car. We (well, the car anyhow) were sprayed with a solution just like in a car wash. Alan made big eyes and I had to take a picture because it impressed me so. When you click on the image, you'll see a larger version and if you look hard, you can see the spray thingies. Well, I thought it was remarkable.

I think they also charged us a fee for the bath, although at that point I'd lost track of how much we'd already spent on fees and taxes. But, hey! We were in Bulgaria, after only about an hour at the border. We were the only ones crossing, btw.

As I said, not much love lost between those two countries.

Article of the Day

A short obituary in the NYT for a remarkable woman:

Elisabeta Rizea, 91, a Defiant Romanian, Dies

A stranger's smile

I swear I can tell you in which country I am just by the way peoples' faces look like when they walk in the streets. Any traveler will know what I'm speaking of.

Here in Romania, it seems as if the entire country is gripped by one collective bad mood. Make that very bad mood. People almost glare at you. The fact that they hardly even smile at Alan emphasises just how unusual it is to smile at a stranger. Not that this deters me most of the times. When people make eye contact with me on the street -- and it's funny, but they do -- then I smile. Very rarely do I get a smile back and if, it's a shy and quick one, as if they were doing something shameful. The only exception are mothers and very old people, but they don't smile at me, they smile at the kids. So there's that.

The other day, I walked up Strada Roma with Alan and David in their Lil' Limo double stroller. We get a lot of interested and baffled looks with this stroller. It seems to be a very unusual thing to have.

So we walked along and I see this woman coming down the sidewalk in our direction. Dark, short hair and slim figure, rather arresting looking. She is carrying a toddler on her hips and next to her walks an elderly woman, pushing a stroller with another toddler. She looks up, sees me and the babies and gives me this warm, wide smile. It felt so good to be smiled at like that. I gave her a big smile back and felt a little rush of joy. So simple to make me happy. And I thought - how nice! Finally someone who's not ashamed of smiling! There is hope for this people!

And as she walks past me, she nodds and says, in a perferct American accent, "Hi", and then continues to listen to the woman next to her talking in English.

Well. My little rush of happiness got a bit dampened by the fact that it was, in fact, not a Romanian stranger smiling at me.

But that disappointment just lasted for second or so. Then I started looking forward to our next visit to the States for yet another reason: lots of smiles there. Nice.

Orthodox Wedding

We went to a Romanian wedding last weekend. The groom was our friend Milo, a Serbian-American attorney. Milo has been consulting all over the region for the last few years. Some time ago, while working in Bucharest, he met a lovely Romanian woman (also a lawyer). One thing eventually led to another, and so there we all were.

It was our first Orthodox wedding ceremony, and it was very interesting. It was in the Sfetu Eleftereu church in central Bucharest. This is a beatiful large church, obviously recently renovated; the interior is dark and cavernous, but every surface is covered with paintings, in a very interesting sort of Byzantine-Academic style. Chairs were available, but everybody stood.

One big difference from Catholic and Protestant weddings: the ceremony is sung or chanted, not spoken. The priests sing for a bit, and then the choir responds. Very lovely.

Another touch that I liked: early in the ceremony, the bride and groom are given crowns, which they wear until the end. (Well, silvery tiara thingies.) These crowns, I was later told, have two meanings. One, they symbolize the new authority of the couple; they have entered into the formal estate of matrimony, and so have taken on both power and responsibility.

Two, they're crowns of martyrdom. I admit, I like that. Marriage involves sacrifice, which means suffering. Sure, a good marriage is much more good than bad. But I like a ceremony that is up front about the difficulty, right at the start.

Finally, at the end of the ceremony the entire wedding party walks in a circle, three times around the altar. Nothing special there, except that the bride had a train about 15 feet long. A little boy, perhaps a young cousin or some such, was holding up the end. The geometry of the situation was such that he had to trot quickly in order to keep up; he was panting visibly by the end of the last circle...

-- And how was it different from the Serbian Orthodox version, I asked our Serbian friends? "The Serbian crowns are gold, and bigger," said one. "Yes, and the Serbian version is longer." "Yes, much longer." I don't know why, but somehow that didn't surprise me.

Mogosoaia

We visited Mogosoaia this weekend, too.

Mogosoia is a former royal palace that has seen a bit more history than is really good for it. It was built in the late 1600s by a fellow named Constantine Brancoveanu, who was the ruler of Wallachia. (Wallachia is now southern Romania.) Brancoveanu was an enlightened fellow with a taste for modern architecture, so his palace was an interesting mix of traditional Byzantine construction (lots of Roman arches) and elements imported from elsewhere (like a Venetian loggia, Baroque decoration, and some very fancy Austrian-style brickwork).

Alas, Brancoveanu conspired against his overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. The Sultan didn't take it well, and had Brancoveanu taken to Istanbul, tortured, and beheaded. (His wife recovered his head and brought it back, and Brancoveanu eventually became a national hero and martyr, but never mind that now.) The Sultan had Mogosoia turned into a "han" -- a sort of Motel-6 for caravans -- and for the next century or so, that's what it was.

By the mid-1800s it was pretty run down. But by that time Romania was independent of the Ottomans, and an aristocratic family bought the crumbling old palace and renovated it.

It stayed in the family for nearly a century, eventually passing to a Princess Martha Bibescu. Princess Martha was a remarkable woman. Born in 1887, she corresponded with Marcel Proust as a girl, was friends with the Romanian and Russian royal families, smoked cigarettes in a jade holder, kept a Parisian salon full of Dadaists, wrote advanced and decadent novels (under her own name) and pot-boiler thrillers (under a pen name), was vaguely involved with some sort of espionage in Berlin in the 1930s, and lived to be 85, dying a very old woman in her beloved Paris.

By that time Mogosoaia had been taken over by the Communists, who turned it into a museum. Princess Martha had renovated the palace again, planted a long alley of poplars along the front drive, and also added a variety of Jazz Age innovations -- fancy mosaics on the floors, an elaborate rose garden. These were allowed to stay, but the Art Deco furniture mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since.

Today Mogosoaia sits on the edge of a rather gummy little lake, surrounded by a park that has seen better days. On the other side of the lake, several large new houses are under construction; they'll do nothing for the view /from/ the old palace, but the people who live there will have a very nice view /of/ it.

But the palace itself is well worth a visit. Claudia and I enjoyed walking around the grounds and climbing up the long staircases to the various verandas and balconies. Alan enjoyed... the gravel. Gravel walks; lots of little pebbles. Pebbles are very interesting. They come in many different shapes. True, they're not good to eat... but you can throw them! When I undressed him for his bath that night, I found a dozen or more inside his clothes.

Anyhow. If you're in the neighborhood of Bucharest, Mogosoaia is well worth a look, especially if you're a history or architecture buff. One day Claudia will show me how to implant links in this thing; meanwhile, you can find lots of pictures by plugging "mogosoaia" into google. Most of the pages are in Romanian, mind you, which suggests that this site isn't too well known outside of this country.

(It's pronounced Mogo Sho Ai-yah, by the way. I'm guessing that's Turkish, though who knows.)

Bucu Obor

Some things here in the Balkans (or, maybe better, Eastern European countries) just require too much time and effort.

I mentioned that moving from country to country means having to find a new source for meat every couple of years, finding a good supermarket (takes months, sometimes), a green market, an organic food store, clothes and shoe stores for the children...

So I'm knitting socks for Douglas. I confess, the latest pair was started sometime in March and the project was abandonned when the nice weather arrived. The unfinished sock including yarn and needles moved with us in June. Now, it's rainy here in Bucharest and cool and I decided to break out the needles and finish those socks off.

I'm knitting with five double-pointed needles, what in German is called a "Nadelspiel" (game of needles). One needle was missing. I'm sure I'll find it one day, I just can't find it now and I want to knit now. I'm impatient in these matters. I can't knit those socks with only four needles. So I decided to go out and purchase a new set of five double-pointed needles.

Hah. You thought it was so easy.

Our nanny sent me to a big "mall" named Bucu Obor. It's basically a big building with the single shops set up in nooks and corners or divided off by means of counters and shelves. Cubicles. That's what those were. Make-shift cubicles.

I took my mother-in-law and Alan and we toured the premises. We thought we were lucky when one of the first "shops" had wool and needles in the display case. We asked and yes, sure, they had knitting needles.

Circular ones. No double-pointed ones.

On we went. This place was huge. Sort of like a very low-grade department store. One place sold stoves, fridges and washing machines galore - they had at least 40 different ones. Another sold fabrics. Yet another more fabric. Balinese masks. Deodorants. Croissants. Pots and pans. Sequins. Shoes. Scents. Odd combinations were also galore: scents and pots. Books and light bulbs. Pens and hairbrushes. It was interesting.

However, we were on a mission. Another place had knitting needles.

Circular ones.

Where to find double-pointed ones? (I'd brought mine, of course, to show and point and grunt, my current mode of conversation in Romanian.) Down the aisle and left.

Yes, indeed! Another shop and they had different kinds of knitting needles!

Different kinds of circular ones.

But down that aisle over there, then right and straight on, for sure.

You guessed it. Circular ones.

I ended up going back to the first shop, purchased size 3 circular needles, cut the nylon string off and thus had two size 3 double-pointed needles, albeit a bit short ones. It's working. But I have one more item on my list of "things to get" once I'm in a first world country again.

Children Relief Network

Donations are needed:

The Children Relief Network

And lots of them, please.

Soon to come: pix and stories of the Baby House.

Driving in Bucharest

Driving IN Bucharest is even more terrifying than driving in Romania in general. More potholes, many more cars -- none of them any slower than on the country roads -- and secret codes that no foreigner can understand. Forget skyboarding or base jumping. Driving a Bucharest traffic circle is the adrenaline surge thrill adventure of modern times.

Everybody goes fast, and lane markings are... suggestions, at best. Everybody swerves around potholes, so you have to be constantly alert for random-seeming high-G maneuvers by the other drivers.

The only rule that Bucharest drivers consistently follow is the one about stopping for zebra crossings. This would be a lot more admirable if the zebra crossings weren't in such weird places. They tend to be right in the middle of the busiest roads. Possibly this made sense under Communism, when nobody had cars, but today it's a recipe for disaster. You're doing 70 km/hr down the street, and then, wham, the guy in front of you brakes at full power.

Did I mention that most of the zebras haven't been repainted since the Ceausescus got on that helicopter? And that the signs for them are often conveniently tucked away behind a tree? Local drivers know where they are anyhow; the poor foreigner must be constantly, knuckle-clenchingly, alert.

Bucharest is now ringed by half a dozen big suburban mega-stores -- Selgros, Metro, Carrefour, Praktiker. (For our American readers: these are the European equivalents to Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Home Depot, and the like.) I'm visiting them one by one, in my protracted and probably Quixotic quest for a dryer that will fit in our pantry. (More on this later, perhaps). So tomorrow I will drive up to Selgros, very carefully...

Driving to Bucharest

I don't recommend it. Driving from Germany to Romania -- from ca. Frankfurt to Bucharest -- is a 3-day drive and it's three days on rapidly declining roads. Add a colicky baby (i.e. very little rest at night) and a heat wave of epic proportions and you have my latest trip.

Michael drove (with) us and that was a good thing - he's a very good driver with fast reaction time and a calm temper. I would have freaked halfway through. What am I saying - I did freak halfway through but it didn't matter much since I was just the navigator...

We had several near-misses by Romanian suicidal drivers (they like to pass you
in the dusk in curves at high speed), including that one bicylist who drove smack across the road between us and the car in front of us, at most 30 feet away and us travelling at 70 mph, and the memorable moment when we had two trucks side by side facing us as we came around a steep curve in the Carpathian mountains. I swear Romanian drivers have a sixth sense, something that tells them when it's only risky to pass and when it's suicidal. There is no other explanation for the fact that we saw only one accident.

It took us six hours to cover 800 km in Germany and Austria. 6 hours to cover 400 km in Hungary. Ten hours to cover 600 km in Romania. Says all, I think.

Together at last

Just a short entry to say that we're all together under one roof, at last.

On Saturday, Claudia and her brother Michael left Germany in our 1990 Mitsubishi, with baby David in the back seat. They drove 500 miles/800 km to the outskirts of Vienna, where they stayed the night. (The hotel claimed to be full, but changed its mind when Claudia played The Baby Card.)

Sunday, Annamarie drove me and Alan to the airport. After a tearful goodbye (Alan loves his grandmother, and she him), we took Tarom (your Eastern European national airline of choice) to Bucharest. Alan made friends with the man in the seat ahead, the woman across the aisle, and the twelve year old boy next to us. Pretty normal flight, in other words. Meanwhile Claudia and Michael drove another 600 km, through Austria and Hungary and into Transylvania, where they stopped for the night in the small city of Deva. No vampires or haunted ruins, but an ex-communist hotel with a really creepy shower.

(Somewhere in Transylvania they outran the heat wave. Up to then it had been really unpleasant -- 35 to 37 degrees [mid 90s Fahrenheit]. The old Mitsubishi has no aircon, so they had to put damp cloths on the baby to keep him cool.)

Monday, the babysitter came at 8 am, I was off to work half an hour later, and Michael and Claudia made the last leg in just six hours or so. One traffic jam and a few terrifying near-misses with Romanian drivers later, they were pulling into our street.

Okay, maybe that wasn't so short. But anyhow, here we finally are.

The Empty Lands

I woke up at dawn. The train was rolling along smoothly, the teenage girls in the next compartment had finally giggled themselves to sleep, and the sky outside was filling up with light. I got out of bed and looked out the window.

Outside was an absolutely flat plain. Fields of straggly, unhealthy looking corn alternated with fields of sunflowers. Miles away in the distance, at the edge of vision, a line of cypress trees marched against the horizon.

And that was all. There were no roads. No towns. No grain elevators. I looked in all directions but I couldn't see... anything. Just absolutely flat land,

stretching to the horizon. Withered-looking corn, millions of sunflowers. And the cypress trees far, far away.

I wanted to go back to bed -- Bucharest was still a couple of hours away, and I could use the sleep -- but the sight was arresting. I'd never seen such an utterly empty country. Minutes passed, miles went by, nothing changed. It was hypnotic.

Then I saw someone: a man, with a scythe. He was chopping down some of the nondescript plants -- grain? weeds? -- that grew between the corn and the sunflowers. A few yards away, a horse stood in front of a wagon, head down.

The sun slowly pulled itself over the edge of the world. The air filled with a faint haze. More miles passed. I saw another man with a scythe, and then a third. I don't know what they were doing. Every mile looked just like the last one: sunflowers, withered corn, sunflowers. There was no breath of air; no frond of corn rustled, no sunflower nodded. Nothing moving except for the train. There were still no towns, no houses, no roads or cars. No tractors. Just mile after mile of the emptly lands and, very occasionally, perhaps every mile or two, a man with a scythe. And the cypress trees in the farthest distance, painted on the dusty dome of the sky.

Eventually I went back to bed.

Later, in Bucharest, I looked at a map. Sure enough, there's a stretch of flat and empty land to the east of the city: Cimpea Burnazului, the Plain of Burnaz. The name sounds vaguely Biblical, though it's probably Turkish.

At a practical level, it's about the poverty of rural Romania and the aftereffects of Communism. Planned villages in inconvenient locations, and no cars or tractors or paved roads in the countryside. No irrigation canals or sprinklers to lay the dust and give relief to the struggling corn. All very understandable.

And yet it was very like a dream, that absolutely empty land, silent and motionless, with the sunflowers bowing their heads to watch us go by.

I Like Belgrade

Man, I like Belgrade.

Not that Bucharest isn't just fine. Bucharest is very nice. But Belgrade... Belgrade has that special something.

It's hard to put my finger on just what. It isn't a particularly beautiful city architecturally; there are a lot of nice old buildings, but also a lot of nasty crumbling socialist stuff. And the air's not very clean, and it can get really unpleasantly sticky in summer.

But it doesn't matter. Somehow I just like Belgrade. Is it the cherry strudel at the little cafe on Teraziye? The view from the top of the Hotel Casina? The friendly booksellers on the Knez Mihajlova? The summer outfits? The mostly honest taxi drivers? The countless little cafes? The rivers?

Or maybe it's just that I have friends there, so I see the place differently.

Anyhow, it was good to be back. I took the overnight train on Thursday night, which gave me three days and two nights. The Hotel Casina is a grubby little place with painfully slow elevators, but it sits in the center of town, and if you know which room to ask for, you can get a balcony with a breathtaking view: eight stories down to Teraziye, with the cathedral to your left, the pedestrian mall on your right, and the Sava River directly in front of you. It's really something.

(Oddly enough, the balcony rooms cost the same as the no-balcony rooms. This suggests to me that the Hotel Casina is still owned by the state. In a few years someone will buy it, and turn those rooms into very, very expensive apartments. Progress, I suppose.)

It was a very full three days, with friends and business and shopping and more friends. At the end, I was very glad to collapse back on to the train. There was something wrong with the electrical system in the sleeper car and the lights wouldn't work and -- this is how tired I was -- I didn't care. I didn't even want to read (well, not much). I fell asleep as soon as we crossed the border and didn't wake up until sunrise, seven hours later and 500 kilometers further east.

Mm, Belgrade. Hope to see you again soon.

Damn, That's Ugly

The Palace of the People was Nicolae Ceaucescu's great monument to... well, himself, really. He had to destroy much of downtown Bucharest to build it; it was completed less than six months before the Revolution. Life Problems for Dictators: you finally get your house finished the way you like it, and then you're put up against a wall and shot.

Anyhow, the Palace of the People is either the second or the fourth largest building in the world, depending on who you talk to. The Lonely Planet says that "Romanians have a love-hate relationship" with it. Maybe. I haven't yet met a Romanian who didn't hate the damn thing.

This weekend I was walking around the downtown for several hours. (It beats sitting at home bored and lonely and missing Claudia. Also, I'm running out of books to read.)

I decided to circumnavigate the Palace.

This took over an hour and was strangely unpleasant. The Palace sits on an artificial hill. It is completely detached from the city around it. And it's really ugly, although it's a very subtle sort of ugliness. Banal rather than brutal. "As if Albert Speer had decided to bore you to death," said our friend Carlos after looking at a picture.

There's also something slightly disorienting about it. It's so big that the brain doesn't really want to register it as a "building". At the same time, for something so big it's strangely... unimpressive, somehow.

The Palace wasn't Ceaucescu's only accomplishment. He thought that Bucharest, as a major European capital city, should have a river flowing through it. Unfortunately the only river available was the tiny Dumbovitsa. It was rechanneled through the middle of downtown and then its flow was slowed down to make it bigger. Unfortunately this made it prone to floods. So they had to put it in a canal, with concrete banks.

It's not exactly the Rhine, or even the Thames. It's maybe two meters deep and 15 meters across. Thick clots of algae float on the surface. If you spit into it, you can see that there is a current, but a very very slow one -- five minutes per meter, maybe. It smells strongly of old socks.

(Remarkably, I saw people trying to fish in it. People will try to fish in all sorts of places. I truly, truly hope they're just doing it for sport.)

I don't want to paint too bleak a picture. The Romanians have turned part of the Dumbovitsa into a sort of promenade, with a little stretch of park along either side and some nice little bridges and paths. Couples stroll along it in the long summer evenings. It still smells like old socks but you stop noticing that after a while.

Still, when you look at what was done to a perfectly nice little stream, you would want to slap Ceaucescu. If, of course, he hadn't already been put up against a wall and shot.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the fall of Communism can be traced to ugliness. Maybe none, and it was all about the obvious issues: people wanting to have food on the table, a decent job, the chance to travel and speak their mind. Freedom and wealth.

But surely at some level people must have gotten tired of concrete.

Hot, hot, hot

It's really hot here. I'm beginning to think that it's not such a good idea to be in the third trimester in June/July. I'm dreaming of a pool. It's said that the French village has a "Club" (pronounced French, please) which boasts a pool. I will have to investigate that. I'm very grateful that our apartment (and the new house) has air conditioning. Drip, drip, drip...

Strada Bruxelles

That's our new address in Bucharest. I will post some pictures as soon as the move with the USB cable for my digital camera has arrived - so let me just quickly sketch the main characteristics.

It's an apartment in a villa, although from the look of it, you'd think it's the entire villa. We have the main entry, amidst flower beds, lilacs and a wildly growing vine with real grapes on it. There is a little courtyard where Alan (and his brother?) can roam around a bit -- the park is also not far away. On the first floor there are living/dining room, the kitchen with a pantry and a toilet. Second floor are three bedrooms (well, two bedrooms and a study, really) and two bathrooms. One of the bathrooms has a shower, the other one has a bathtub. There is also a little balcony on the second floor. The rooms are very high (about 12 feet) and the entire house has parquet floors. The rooms aren't very big but the general feeling is of airiness and lightness. I fell completely in love with it the moment I saw it. I think we will be very happy there.

The location is also very good - just five minutes by foot from Doug's office and right next to one of the busier streets of Bucharest, somewhat north of the center. We have quick access to the road to the airport and the big supermarkets. The park with a big lake and several playgrounds is just ten minutes by foot and there is plenty of shopping around, including a 24-hour supermarket. The neighboorhood consists entirely of old villas and mansions and how we got this house, that used to be rented out for 3750 Euros, for $2500, I don't know. The landlord belongs to the German minority here in Romania, maybe that had something to do with it.

In any case, we have living quarters now and will begin to live there starting next week. Next steps are: get permanent visas and our move going (only with a lease can you get a permanent visa and only with a permanent visa can you import your move). Get internet hook-up. Get settled a bit. Have my Mom, who will arrive next Monday, help me shop for little items and select curtains and such.

We are very happy with our find. So - who's going to come and visit us, then?

Stuck

So today Alan and I got stuck in the elevator of our temporary quarters. Between two floors, with the classic view of the concrete floor and half a door below it and half a door above it. I pushed all the various buttons available, hoping that I wouldn't need the alarm button. I tried opening either of the doors which didn't work - to my relief, actually. I didn't want those doors to open, fearing I'd be tempted to crawl out just when the elevator started moving again. Severed spine and all that. Too much TV, I know.

Well, nothing budged. I rang the alarm bell and... nothing happened. I mean, the alarm bell rang but no reassuring voice spoke out of the loudspeaker (which, btw, I couldn't see anywhere anyway). For the first time that I ever pushed the alarm button it was very anticlimactic.

Next step: I banged against the lower door until the guys from "Alarm Service" who have their office right next to the elevator door finally deemed to look what all the ruckus was about. The first guy only spoke Romanian and left again to get another guy who spoke some English and together they managed to inquire why I was banging the door.

Uh, because I was stuck? (Wasn't that obvious?)

At this moment Alan got a bit restless and tried to climb out of his stroller. I tried to calm him down by reassuring him that we wouldn't starve (we'd just come from the market and bakery, so there was food aplenty) or be forced to soil ourselves (we'd also bought toilet paper and paper towels). It seemed to work and he settled back into the stroller. I didn't even need to bribe him with the strawberry tarts.

So the Alarm guy (who, to make this clear, is just an employee of a security company that happens to have their HQ in our building) suggested that I should push all the buttons. OK. So I tried that again. Nothing happened.

After about five minutes I called Natsa, our nanny, on my mobile and told her that I was stuck in the elevator. I don't know why I did that, I guess I wanted some commiseration. I was just about to call Doug when I, again, pushed the buttons and all of a sudden the elevator covered another meter or so and stopped only five centimeters below the second floor where we live. It was close enough for the doors to release the saftey and open -- and we were free again.

I guess I will just avoid elevators for the next little while.

In one piece

In a hurry and not much time -- just letting the world know that we arrived well and survived (with some dignity) our first encounter with the famous hustlers of Bucharest (them being the luggage carriers at the Gara du Nord).

We found an internet cafe just around the corner from where we live - with an astonishingly fast connection! - so expect some more soon!

[Doug here] We took the overnight train, which leaves Belgrade around 6 pm, crosses the border at about 8:30, and then rolls on through the night to arrive in Bucharest at 7:15 the following morning.

Our experiences of the ride were... varied.

After the border formailites, everybody went into their cabins and it got very quiet. I leaned out the window for a little while, looking at the stars and watching the vast empty plain of the Banat go by in the darkness. Then I climbed into the upper berth, read a good book for an hour (_Dark Star_ by Alan Furst, and thank you Carlos for recommending it), lay awake for a little while listening to the sound of the train, and finally fell into a deep and healing slumber.

Natasha, our baby sitter, had the next compartment to herself. Unfortunately, it was her first time leaving Yugoslavia, /and/ her first time in a sleeper car, and I guess it was all just too strange; poor Natasha didn't fall asleep until far into the night and was distinctly woozy today.

Alan slept for a while on a sort of nest that we made on the floor with towels and his baby blanket. Then he woke up in the wee hours, stood up and poked the person on the lower berth (Claudia) to give him some attention. Having awakened her, he then proceeded to keep her up for over an hour by sort of climbing over her. (This is an _extremely_ annoying habit that he has. More on this later, perhaps.) Eventually, he went back to sleep. It must have been restful and pleasant, because in the morning he was perky and cheerful.

Claudia had trouble falling asleep. The breeze from the partly open window, the little green light over the door, everything seemed to conspire to keep her awake. The unborn baby kept kicking her. She had a touch of heartburn. The train kept blowing its whistle and startling her out of a doze. Then finally when she did sleep, someone started poking her...

So, at the end of the trip it was 50-50: two alert and well-rested males, two torpid and cranky females.

Mind, that worked out okay. The tout at the train station who tried to charge us 25 Euros for having our bags carried 100 yards got the surprise of his life when my wife turned upon him snarling, fangs bared and claws extended. He ended up beating a retreat with less than half that amount and a distinct air of wounded dignity. (Good one, wife.) Then I took the baby on a two-hour stroll through Bucharest while Claudia and Natasha rested in the apartment.

...the apartment: we have a little apartment as a temporary pied-a-terre. It's small but quite thoroughly furnished, and very conveniently located in the middle of town. We'll be there for the next week or two while we hunt for permanent digs.

So, we arrived, we're okay. Some first impressions next time we post.

Further down the Danube

Well, not really, since Bucharest isn't on the Danube. But we are moving further east and will be arriving in Bucharest on Sunday, June 1st.
We already have a full plate for the first week: Doug's starting to work on Monday and I will have to dedicate my time hunting for a place to live. It seems that the rental market in Bucharest is at least as hot as in Belgrade - at least, that's what the prices indicate. My, I could easily rent a nice home in the DC area for what we will have to pay in Bucharest. Let's hope that we can find something equally nice as in Belgrade.

As much as we are looking forward to moving to Bucharest and to being EMPLOYED (can you spell regular pay? We still haven't been paid once for this year!), leaving Belgrade is a bittersweet experience.

We will miss our house. The skylights and the garden in the back which makes for nice cool afternoons on the balcony (although the big tree was knocked down by a thunderstorm two nights ago). The green market around the corner and the little bakery down the street with those yummy pastries. Alan's nanny Natsa and Milena, the maid, who are both mourning about Alan leaving (nobody's really sad about us leaving, or so it seems). Our friends who have made our stay so pleasant.

But there is no time to get misty-eyed. Lots of packing to do.

Green Market

We live just a couple of blocks from a green market, which is a big plaza full of little stands selling fruits and vegetables. Because central Belgrade is somewhat lacking in supermarkets, we go to the green market regularly, two or three times a week.

Pushing a stroller around the market can be strenuous. The ancient paving stones are cracked and tipped, and often damp and slippery too -- the market is cleaned by sprays from high pressure hoses, which washes the loose lettuce leaves and gunk away but makes navigation that much trickier. On the other hand, the sellers love babies. We regularly get extra odds and ends -- a free head of lettuce, a couple of bonus bananas -- because Alan has smiled at some horny-handed farmer.

And he smiles a lot, because he loves the green market.

All those people; all those things to see, great pyramids of tomatoes and buckets of olives; all those exciting sounds and smells. He's always excited to be going to the market (although once we push the stroller over the threshold, he goes into a sort of sensory overload trance state, wide-eyed and silent).

The green market is particularly nice just now because suddenly everyone is selling flowers. The flower sellers sit with enormous buckets full of daffodils and calla lilies, waving wildly at you if you so much as glance at them. And it's hard to resist: a great bunch of daffodils too big to hold in one hand, all sweet-smelling and fresh, can be bought for about $1.50.

I don't want to glamorize the green market. Some of the sellers are obviously painfully poor -- old women sitting with a few strings of garlic and some withered scallions. And all of them, even the kindly ones, will cheerfully sell you bruised apples and limp carrots if you're not paying attention; _caveat emptor_ is very much in force. And visiting the green market when there's six inches of snow on the ground, or cold rain falling hard from a windy grey sky, makes you think of supermarkets in a whole new light.

Still, on the whole, there are worse ways to pick up a dozen tomatoes.

Carnegie Library

We live about three blocks from the main campus of the University of Belgrade. "Main campus" means about four buildings, as the Uni is scattered all over the city. Still, one of those four is the University Library, a very dignified looking building that's painted a curiously pleasing shade of pink.

(At this point I'll just mention in passing that Belgrade has some of the loveliest buildings in Eastern Europe, cheek by jowl with some of the ugliest. More on this topic later.)

Three interesting things about the Library. One, you can't get very far inside -- it's still run on the socialist principle of Authorized Personnel Only. That's not just foreigners, by the way -- even students can't get in without a special permit. (Because, I guess, you wouldn't want students just wandering in and out of a library.)

Second, you can get as far as the card catalog. And the card catalog is, by gum, a real honest to goodness card catalog: a room full of those wooden cabinets with the tiny drawers, each one filled solid with hundreds of hand-typed cards. If you're under the age of 25 you may have no idea what I'm talking about, but this is how they used to keep track of the books in a library. A hard copy database, if you like.

Because of the wars and the economic blockade, Yugoslavia basically missed the entire IT revolution in library science. So they're still using a card catalog. And I mean using it; there were students in the catalog room, flipping through cards and pulling out drawers to sit on the table, just as we all used to do before 1980 or so. And it had that card catalog smell, hardwood and old card stock...

The library does have a CD-ROM with its collection information. But no computer terminals that I could see... so you'd have to either bring a laptop, or browse the catalog at home.

This is not to cock a snoot at the poor primitive Serbs. The catalog room was clean and busy. The system may not be modern, but it works. Under the circumstances, it looks like they've managed extremely well.

Third interesting thing: it's a Carnegie library, funded by the great robber baron's estate in 1926. I knew there were Carnegie libraries all over the world, but I didn't expect to find one here. And, like every library that Carnegie built, it has a bust of the great man himself as you walk in the front door.

Carnegie was a remarkably unpleasant man, but the good that he did seems to be living on.

A strange kind of duality

One cannot call Belgrade a child-friendly city. I have yet to see a restaurant with a changing table or a policeman who will keep Belgrade drivers from parking on the sidewalks, not forcing mothers with strollers to sway into the streets and take it up with cars, trucks and buses.
No bus is equipped for strollers; not only are they always over-crowded but one would not fit through the doors. Aisles in supermarkets are so narrow that one better leaves the kid at home. I'm not even mentioning the bad air quality outside and the much worse air quality in restaurants, cafés or trains. Serbians are very Balkan when it comes to smoking.
However, in other respects Belgrade is the most child-friendly city I've ever been to.

Mothers are always whisked to the front of any queue, be it at the post office, the bank or in a restaurant. Everybody, from teenage boy to old woman, will hold doors open for you and offer to help you carry the stroller up or down the stairs while complimenting you on your sweet offspring.
No, it's true - even teenagers flirt with your baby when you're waiting at the traffic lights. No German or American teenage boy who has an ounce of self-respect would ever be caught doing that. Sellers on the market will give you free bananas and free advice on shoes and hats (both always obligatory on Serbian children, no matter age or climatic conditions).
I prefer this way of being child-friendly to the omnipresent Koala bear changing station in the States or Germany.