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Next in Line is a journalism project aimed at bringing candidate and potential
candidate countries for EU membership closer to audiences in Central Europe and other
member states.
The project was co-funded by the European Union with further funding from the
ERSTE Foundation and ran from December 2011 to November 2012. It sought to
highlight the potentials and challenges of current EU enlargement toward the Western
Balkans, Turkey, and Iceland by involving some of Central Europe’s leading publications
in reporting on a wide range of issues in candidate and potential candidate countries.
For this project, Transitions partnered with some of the best and most popular
publications in the four Visegrad countries: Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), Respekt (Czech
Republic), and Týzden (Slovakia), as well as the Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ)
in Budapest, which recruited journalists from Hungary’s most important magazines and
newspapers. Together, these publications and TOL reach hundreds of thousands of
readers in Central Europe and elsewhere.
Over the course of the project, journalists from each partner publication made a
number of reporting trips to candidate or potential candidate countries. They relied on
the assistance of top local reporters, who in many cases were TOL’s long-time
collaborators.
Rather than current affairs, the project mostly focused on social and political topics
capable of communicating long-term issues that the EU hopefuls are facing. The
resulting stories dealt with topics as diverse as the fallout of Iceland’s financial crash;
Serbia’s ethnic and religious diversity; the role of religion in Turkey, Bosnia, and
Albania; Montenegro’s efforts to keep Roma children in school; and the challenges that
the Croatian city of Vukovar, which was completely destroyed in 1991, faces months
before the country’s expected accession to the EU. All articles were aimed at stimulating
greater interest in these countries among key stakeholders and the wider public,
ultimately leading to increased familiarity and interaction with people from the future
members of the European Union.
This publication features a selection of the stories originally published in Polish,
Czech, Hungarian, and Slovak in the partner publications, as well as in English in
Transitions Online and on the project website, www.nextinline.eu.
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FOREWARD
ALBANIA
The End of Concrete Mushrooms
Let Us In, You Bastards!
In Albania, Madrasas Even the Secular Love
Ancient Durres Battles to Preserve its Past
BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA
Bosnia’s Armies of God
Sarajevo Saviors
“The Tension in the Western Balkans
Will Persist for a Long Time”
CROATIA
Vukowar and Peace
ICELAND
Taming Volcanos
Women’s World
What Has the Crisis Done for Me?
MACEDONIA
Macedonia’s Cooling-Off Period
Fear & Loathing in Macedonia
MONTENEGRO
Speaking Their Language
Death Threats and Deadlines
SERBIA
Serbia After the Elections: A View
from Three Regions
The Exporters of Revolution
TURKEY
Turkey and the EU: Between
Hope and Disillusion
Three Tons of Nuts for Cinderella
Cultural Differences and Minority
Rights in Turkey
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Bunkers on the beach near Dhermi, Albania. Photo by
The End of the Concrete Mushrooms
JnM_RTW/Flickr
As Albanians deal with the morethan-700,000 bunkers built by Enver
Hoxha, for some it’s a squaring of
accounts with communism; for
others it’s the deal of a lifetime
by Witold Szablowski
22 June 2012
TIRANA | First, you pack old tires around the
bunker and set them alight. Or you put a sack of
agricultural fertilizer with a high potassium content
inside it. That makes a primitive bomb, and the
bunker blows up.
“All to make the concrete crack,” explains Djoni,
a construction worker from Berati in central
Albania. “Once it cracks, we whack it with hammers
to get to the steel that’s inside. There can be as
much as two tons of it – a kilo earns you 15
eurocents at the recycling center. So from one
bunker you can make 300 euros!”
“That’s a lot of money in Albania” – the average
salary was about 250 euros in 2010 – “especially
when it’s literally just lying on the ground,” he says.
But Djoni sees only about 20 or 30 euros per
bunker, even after days of hammering away, with
the rest going to the construction company.
Still, he’s not complaining. For the past few
years Albania has been in a construction boom that
has inflated the price of steel, and that has not even
been halted by the crisis in Italy and Greece, where
hundreds of thousands of Albanian immigrants
work. Some experts say the boom is fueled by the
Italian mafia, which by building tower blocks that
no one needs in Albania – some of which stand halfempty – is laundering its dirty money. But the
Albanians take no notice of that.
“The crisis isn’t being felt here in Albania,”
Djoni says. “Our prime minister boasted that apart
from Albania, the only other country in Europe that
isn’t in recession is Poland – our growth rate for
2011 was over 3 percent.”
Djoni also worked in Greece for several years,
at Piraeus, but he tired of playing cat and mouse
with the local border guards, who regularly catch
Albanians working illegally. “My health’s not what it
was,” he says. “Here I earn less, but I spend less too.
It comes out about the same.”
So during the day Djoni builds new housing,
and in the evenings he tops up his salary by
demolishing the bunkers. With the extra money, he
has finished building his own flat and has sent his
children to good schools.
The construction boom is one reason Albanians
have started taking notice of the hundreds of
thousands of bunkers that mar their landscape all
the way from Shkoder on the
Montenegrin
border
to
Konispol, a stone’s throw
from Greece. Until now they
have turned a blind eye to
them, but now that steel has
become considerably more
expensive, whatever Djoni
extracts from the bunkers
during the night returns to
him by day as reinforcing
wire.
“Under communism I did
my military training in
bunkers like these,” Djoni
says. “We were taught how to camouflage them in
case of attack. On the one hand it’s a part of my life,
but on the other, I don’t feel sorry for them in the
least bit. They’re a symbol of very bad times – they
should all disappear.”
alliance command demanded to see maps of their
distribution. And consternation arose, because
there weren’t any maps. Someone once suggested
that there are 750,000 of them, and now everyone
keeps repeating that.”
The bunkers have become a permanent feature
of Albania’s landscape. They stand in the middle of
cities and on the edges of villages, in graveyards and
playgrounds, they stand on mountaintops and halfsubmerged in the sea. When
they plow the land, farmers
often have to make a wide
detour around them. You only
have to travel by train from
Tirana to Durres, about 20 miles,
to count several dozen of them,
some in courtyards right next to
the houses.
Elton Caushi, a tour guide
from Tirana, is fascinated by the
bunkers. He has worked out a
route for his customers to tour
the most interesting ones. “For
instance, there are several of
them in the ancient city of Apollonia, among the
ruins left by the ancient Greeks,” he says. “The
tourists love them, which the Albanians can’t
understand.”
But why on earth were these concrete
mushrooms built at all? Enver Hoxha, who ruled
Albania with absolute power from 1944 until his
death in 1985, was afraid of being attacked by other
states, both communist and non. “He was paranoid,”
Izhara, the political scientist, says. “He thought
everyone wanted to invade Albania.”
She recounts Hoxha’s shifting alliances – first
with Yugoslavia until a quarrel with its leader, Josip
Broz Tito, then with the Soviet Union until its period
of de-Stalinization. “So he made an alliance with
China and – seeing enemies everywhere – started to
arm the country to the teeth and build the bunkers,”
Izhara says.
They were meant to protect Albania from
invasion by Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact, and
NATO. They were fear made concrete: over the
centuries Albania had been invaded and occupied
by the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Bulgarians,
the Venetians, the Turks, the Italians, the Austrians,
the Germans, the Serbians, and finally the modern
Greeks.
“Hoxha appealed to a sensitive spot for the
Albanians,” Izhara says. “The bunkers were built
for us, rather than for foreigners – to frighten us
and to instill discipline. To rule us more easily.
Nowadays it might seem absurd, but people of my
parents’ age – now around 70 – truly believed the
whole world wanted to invade us.”
Tour guide Caushi likens life under Hoxha to
that in contemporary North Korea, “They persuaded
us that the first thing the Americans, Russians, or
Greeks thought about on waking up each day was
how to conquer Albania,” he says. “We were
completely cut off from information; my uncle went
“On the one hand it’s a
part of my life, but on
the other, I don’t feel
sorry for them in the
least bit. They’re a
symbol of very bad
times – they should all
disappear.”
COCKTAILS AND TRYSTS
Gjergj’s bunker is painted green from top to
bottom. On its front hangs a dazzling sign saying
“Bunker Bar.” And although the beach at Shengjin,
where Gjergj has his bar, is not the loveliest, he’s not
put off. “We might not have much sand,” he says,
shrugging, “but we do have our concrete
mushrooms, our Uncle Hoxha’s toadstools. Poland
hasn’t got any, nor has Italy, not even Brazil. People
come from all over the world to look at them!”
Gjergj invites me inside his mushroom and lets
me look out of the firing slit, which is aimed in the
direction of Italy. Then he shows me a large, metal
stick hidden in the depths.
“I used to keep it for the drunken customers
who don’t always want to pay up,” he explains.
“Nowadays I keep it for the guys who come to blow
up the bunkers. I’ve been running this bar for 12
years now, and I won’t let them lay a finger on it!”
Gjergj is right about one thing – the Albanian
bunkers are unique in the world. In a country only
slightly bigger than the U.S. state of Maryland,
inhabited by barely 3 million people, the
communists built about 750,000 of them. No one
knows exactly how many there are. “Under
communism, everything to do with the bunkers was
top secret – the army never published the figures.
And then along came democracy, they lost the
documents and now no one’s capable of counting
them precisely,” says Ina Izhara, a political scientist
who, like many of the young people here, divides
her time between Albania and Italy. “When we
joined NATO a few years ago, apparently the
to prison for 20 years because he watched a film on
Yugoslav TV and told a friend about it, who
informed on him. The majority preferred not to
take the risk. They listened to Radio Tirana and
tried not to stick their necks out.”
So for years the Albanian government built
fortifications rather than roads or flats. Up to 12
people lived together in areas of 50 square meters,
because all the engineers were working for the
army, and all the concrete went to build the
bunkers, which were never actually used for
military purposes.
“We most often use them to lose our virtue,”
Izhara says. “I haven’t had the experience, but I’ve
heard lots of stories, including a recent one from a
friend on holiday in Sarande. “He said it was awful.
He got frozen to the bone, and he ended up
stepping in a turd.”
ICONS IMPLODING
Hoxha died in 1985. A month before his death
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet
Union and the winds of change began to blow in all
the communist countries. Except for Albania. Here,
in 1990 Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, was still
using the propaganda machine to persuade
Albanians that life in Poland following the change
to a capitalist system had gotten considerably
worse.
But by then Albanians knew better. The system
began to founder, until in 1992 Alia handed over
power to Sali Berisha, former head of the Labor
Party
Some bunkers
can even be
found
as part of
playgrounds.
Photo by
slazgrc/Flickr
organization at the medical academy in Tirana,
who had a better sense than the other apparatchiks
about which way the winds of history were
blowing. Berisha became president and is now the
prime minister.
But for years neither he nor anyone else in
power has touched Hoxha’s bunkers. “No one ever
had any idea what to do with them,” Caushi says.
But in 1999, when the Serbs started to bomb
Kosovo, he says, they hit bunkers in northern
Albania. “And suddenly it turned out that these
structures, which were supposed to survive an
atomic bomb, had just fallen apart as if they were
made of clay! For lots of people it was a shock.
Suddenly they could see that the power of
communism was a matrix, a delusion, not the
truth.”
At that point a second, civilian life began for
the bunkers. People lost respect for them. In the
countryside, farmers started keeping cows, goats,
and pigs in them; in the cities until recently they
served as refrigerators. But now that Albania has
grown rich, almost everyone has a refrigerator at
home, so people have started throwing rubbish into
the bunkers.
It’s different in the capital. Blokku is a district
of Tirana that in communist times was closed off
and guarded; this is where the bigwigs lived –
Hoxha, his ministers and comrades. Every building
had a concrete shelter in the basement.
“These days Blokku is the biggest rave in
Tirana,” jokes Kamelja, a law student. “There are
several really great bars and discos in the old
shelters. For people my age, the 20-year-olds, these
places have a completely different meaning than
they had for our parents.”
Right next to Hoxha’s abandoned villa is a
smart café and an elite English-language school.
Opposite sits a gambling arcade.
In the generation that knows the bunkers only
as strange concrete mushrooms, the idea of finding
new uses for them has taken hold. Elian Stefa, a
young Albanian architect, did his
graduation project on them. He
drew bunkers made into minihotels, and even cellars for cooling
wine. “I’d be happiest of all if
someone opened a hostel in a
bunker,” he says. “We did a
visualization of what such a place
could look like. Everyone likes it,
but there’s no one brave enough to
be the first to do it.”
Caushi knows well what they’re
talking about. “My tourists would
pay anything to stay the night in
something like that,” he says.
poor, it had lots of enemies. All those actions were
necessary.”
Ndrecen says the pyramid, like the bunkers,
should be blown up – which he says is likely,
considering the high price of steel.
The pyramid’s demolition would be “the start of
our mental release from communism. As long as we
go on living in the world invented by the
communists, the spirit of Hoxha will continue to
prevail here,” Ndrecen says.
While Djoni, the construction
worker from Berati, is destroying
bunkers using his own makeshift
methods, the army is doing it
much more methodically. “They
have special pneumatic drills,”
says Djoni, almost whistling in
admiration. “Apart from that,
they’re allowed to fire at them
from tanks and mortars. They can
do as many as 10 bunkers a day.
That’s 3,000 euros! I wonder what
they do with the money?” he
muses.
I tried to find out all about it
at the Albanian Ministry of
Defense, but my questions got stuck somewhere
between departments. But in 2009, a reporter for
Agence France Presse found tanks destroying the
half-submerged mushrooms at an Albanian tourist
resort in the Seman district.
The bunkers had become a safety hazard by
creating whirlpools that sucked in swimmers.
According to AFP, at least five people had drowned
that way the previous summer.
Helping with the demolition was Besnik Lasku,
a former soldier who had helped to install them.
“The bunkers were meant to be able to resist
everything, but the fortifications failed in their one
and only battle – against the sea,” Lasku told the
news agency.
“The bunkers were
meant to be able to
resist everything,
but the
fortifications failed
in their one and
only battle –
against the sea.”
‘OUR MENTAL RELEASE FROM COMMUNISM’
In the center of Tirana sits a different bunker –
a great big pyramid, built just after Hoxha died. It
was meant to be his tomb and a place of pilgrimage
for schools, the military, and workers.
Today the pyramid is empty, covered in feeble
graffiti. The bravest local skateboarders ride down
its steep walls. “I pass it every day on my way to
work,” says Gjergj Ndrecen, whom Hoxha’s regime
locked up for seven years for disseminating “enemy
propaganda.” “I just distributed a few antigovernment leaflets,” says Ndrecen, who works for
a foundation that helps former political prisoners
who are in financial straits. “I would have been
inside for far longer if communism hadn’t
collapsed. That’s why every time I pass this
monstrosity my blood boils. No one has ever
answered for the hell they made us live in.”
The communists, who killed some 50,000
people in Albania and set up re-education camps
for thousands more, have never been brought to
task. Ramiz Alia died last year at the age of 86. A
few of them did serve time in prison, but the
sentences were only for abuse of power and
financial fiddles, not for the crimes of the system.
Toward the end of his life the former dictator gave
an interview to the BBC in which he admitted that
not all the death sentences in the communist era
were justified. He said he regretted that.
Not so Nexhmija Hoxha. The dictator’s 92-yearold widow appeared not long ago on a show that is
extremely popular in Albania, presented by Janusz
Bugajski, an American political scientist with Polish
roots. During the 90-minute conversation she
refused to show the slightest remorse. “I don’t
regret anything,” she said. “Our country was very
Witold Szablowski is a reporter for Gazeta
Wyborcza, where this article originally appeared.
Gjergj Erebara, a reporter for the newspaper Shqip,
contributed to this article. Translated by Antonia
Lloyd-Jones.
Let Us In, You Bastards!
Albanian border-jumpers ask, who
will save the collapsing EU, if not us?
by Witold Szablowski
29 June 2012
KONISPOL, Albania | The village consists of a
few dozen houses picturesquely scattered across
green hills. You can stay overnight in almost any of
them; it costs a few euros. At any one of them you
can also ask for someone to guide you across the
border – as the crow flies it’s less than two
kilometers from Konispol to Greece.
“My great-grandfather used to guide people
across the mountains in the Turkish era,” boasts
Jani, who earns money as a guide himself. In the
strictest secrecy Jani tells me that he shows his
customers the way to Igoumenitsa, 29 kilometers
from Konispol, and sometimes even to Ioannina, 55
kilometers away.
“What’s it been like during the Greek crisis?” I
ask him. “Fewer customers?”
“Quite the opposite! I used to come back from
Greece empty handed. Anyone who went there
stayed until he was caught and deported. But now
more and more I have customers for the return
journey too.”
“Do they come back because there’s no work in
Greece for Albanians?” I ask.
“There is work,” Jani says. “More of it even,
because we work for much less money and more
reliably than the Greeks. Some of them regularly
come home to bring back their cash – no one trusts
the Greek banks any more. But some come back for
good and set up business here. Albania is having its
five minutes – you can do better here nowadays
than in Greece.”
Jani’s words are confirmed by the figures.
According to the Ministry of Finance, since the
Greek crisis began 70,000 Albanians have returned
home. That’s about 15 percent of those who’ve been
working there.
“The returning immigrants have pumped at
least 2 million euros into our economy,” former
Deputy Finance Minister Florjon Mima reckons. For
Albania, which for several years has been
experiencing a level of economic prosperity never
known here before, this is an additional stimulus
for growth. “We still have high unemployment,”
Mima adds. “But the returning emigrants are
bringing in new ideas, new energy, and new
strength. Their return is invaluable.
A CAT AND MOUSE GAME
You have to make quite an effort to get to
Konispol. The Albanians are fighting for the
European Union to recognize them officially as a
candidate for membership. One of the conditions is
to secure their borders, regarded as the Achilles
heel of the entire bloc, so the military and police
checkpoints begin a dozen kilometers before you
reach the village. I have no problem driving
through them. But if an Albanian has no passport
or has a stamp in it to say the bearer has been
deported from Greece, he or she won’t get into
Konispol.
In October 2008 five people drowned in Lake
Butrint, trying to avoid the checkpoints by boat. “I’d
never take a risk like that,” says Izeti Guri, shaking
his head. The 17-year-old from nearby Gjirokaster
paints fishing boats at a port in Greece. He walks
across the border on his own. He saves money on a
guide, and, as he says, he knows every step of the
way. “I’ve already walked across to the Greek side
eight times that way, and there’s no reason to risk
your life. Even if the Greeks catch me, they’ll just
take me back to Konispol. I’ll pay five euros for
another night’s stay and in the morning I’ll try my
luck again. And so on, until it works. Only people
whose boss has told them to be at work on a
specific day might take a risk. Luckily my boss is
flexible.”
“And they’ve never caught you?”
“Only once, two years ago. I left Konispol and
was daydreaming or something, and I ran straight
into a patrol. They deported me, but they were kind
enough to let me watch the semi-final of the UEFA
Champions League on TV at the police station first.”
“And do they often catch people now?” I ask.
“Apparently they don’t catch anyone at all!”
Izeti says enthusiastically. And repeats a story
which people in Konispol have been passing around
with an unconcealed tone ofSchadenfreude: “The
Greeks know that without the cheap workforce
provided by the Albanians their economy will
collapse even further this year,” he says. “We do all
the worst-paid jobs, usually without tax and
insurance too. The government in Athens can see
that the Albanians are leaving. So they’re doing
everything to keep us there.”
The police in Gjirokaster, the regional capital,
have also noticed that the Greeks haven’t been all
that strict about catching illegal immigrants
recently. Officially, the spokesman for the local
police tells me to go to the ministry in Tirana, or to
his Greek counterpart. But unofficially his
colleagues are very talkative.
“Lately the pressure on their side has eased off
a lot,” one said, requesting that his name not be
used. This was in the spell between the hung May
elections and the new vote in June that finally
produced a coalition government. “I don’t know
whether it’s a strategy, or just general slackness. But
since the [May] election ... they give the impression
of having completely ceased to protect the border.”
In 2009, the Greeks threw 50,000 Albanians out
of their country. A further 20,000 were turned back
by the Albanians and didn’t even get as far as
border villages like Konispol. This year the figures
are sure to be much lower, they told me in
Gjirokaster. How that will affect the negotiations
with the EU, no one knows.
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
Albania’s
prospects
for
full-fledged
membership talks with the European Union are
now the main political talking point. In November
Brussels is to say whether the country is ready for
official candidate status. The Albanians sip coffee
after coffee – it’s the national drink – and try to
figure out where exactly they are on the chessboard
of Europe.
“Our chances are slender,” says Gjergj Erebara,
a reporter for the newspaper Shqip, frowning. “The
ruling Albanian Democratic Party has made the
union into an artificial hare that has to be pursued,
but you’re not allowed to catch it, because then the
corruption would have to stop and lots of local
arrangements would have to come to an end.
Nothing will come of it in November.”
Edi Rama, leader of the Albanian Socialist
Party, the main opposition party, is ready to tear the
ruling party to pieces: “The whole EU has seen how
Prime Minister Sali Berisha has rigged one election
after another, first the parliamentary, then the local
government elections,” he says. Rama was the
mayor of the capital, Tirana, for three terms, but
lost the 2011 race in what he says was a very
strange way: He was ahead in all the polls, and led
by a handful of votes after the first count. The
election committee then ordered a recount, which
Rama lost by a slightly less microscopic margin.
The Socialists have never stopped blaming
machinations by Berisha’s party for their defeat in
the 2009 parliamentary elections. They boycotted
parliament for months; when opposition parties led
a big demonstration against the government in
January 2011, security forces fired on the crowd,
killing three and fatally injuring a fourth protester.
“To this day no one has answered for that. How
can a country where things like that happen even
think of joining the EU?” Rama asks.
An EU diplomat accredited to Tirana admits off
the record: “Since the shootings Berisha has been
boycotted by union leaders. For over a year no one,
apart from [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor
Orban, has been willing to meet with him. It’s hard
to conduct sensible negotiations in these
circumstances.”
Berisha, Erebara admits, is a very canny
politician. “And he’s extremely good at diverting
public attention away from the real problems” – as
when the affair of the pride parade blew up.
ENTHUSIASTIC, UP TO A POINT
Edi Marku is almost 60, he has on a peaked cap
of the type gentlemen of his age like to wear, and
he’s holding a placard which says “Hands Off My
Butt!” He is one of several dozen people protesting
against the gay pride parade outside the parliament
building in Tirana.
“You know, I’d very much like Albania to join
the European Union,” he tells me. “The EU will help
us to build roads, it’ll support us financially, and
our young people will be able to study abroad – I’ve
got two daughters who are students. But if the price
is acceptance for degenerates, then we’ve got to do
some more thinking about it.”
Sexual minorities stirred up a great debate
once before in Albania, in 2009. At that time
Berisha jumped way ahead not just of his own
electorate, but most countries in the EU, when
instead of responding to the first stirrings of anger
over the elections, he announced his support for the
legalization of homosexual marriages. The
Albanian public erupted, but Berisha is the head of
a conservative party that sympathizes with Muslim
organizations, so there was nobody to oppose him.
Early this year, when the Pink Embassy
association announced plans to stage the first gay
pride parade in Tirana, everyone waited to see
what the prime minister would say.
“All the journalists, as journalists do, began
looking for someone who was against it,” Erebara
tells me. “And they found someone – the deputy
minister of defense. He said all gays should be
kicked in the butt. Next day, as if on command, the
U.S.
Embassy
and
the
European
Union
representation responded, saying that everyone in
the Albanian government should remember to
respect the rights of the homosexual minority. In
this way, a few months before this important
decision, the debate about joining the EU changed
into a debate for or against homosexuality,” he says,
shaking his head. “Do we really have no more
serious problems?” he asks rhetorically. And starts
listing the problems himself: “Unemployment is up
to 15 percent, and for the young, educated people
there are no other prospects but to leave for Italy.”
The problem with the pride parade solved
itself: the Pink Embassy, fearing for the safety of the
participants, decided to postpone it. Berisha is the
master of similar games with public opinion. When
in 2011 the opposition began to bring people on to
the streets, he announced that his government had
just started negotiating to bring back from India the
body of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the most famous
Albanian in the world, even though she was born in
Macedonia. Indian diplomats rubbed their eyes in
amazement, because no one had ever mentioned it
to them. But the goal was met: Albania forgot about
the government’s difficulties.
“It might work once or twice,” Erebara says.
“This time too, everyone is talking more about gays
than about negotiations with the EU. But in the long
run Berisha will lose. The Albanians are the most
pro-EU nation in Europe, and they can’t understand
why we aren’t in the community yet.”
Indeed, Albanian enthusiasm for the EU is
unmatched. In Turkey public support for joining
the EU struggles to climb above 50 percent. Support
has fallen sharply in Serbia, which bought its
candidate status by handing over war crime
suspects Milosevic, Karadzic, and Mladic to the
Hague Tribunal. Even the EU’s next member
Croatia is far more euroskeptic than Albania.
“Support for EU membership has remained at
97-98 percent for years,” Erebara says. “No country
in the history of the union has ever had such
results. Here, by contrast with Turkey, for example,
even the hard-headed Muslims are euroenthusiasts.”
“We definitely support our country’s entry into
the European Union,” Agron Hoxha of the Muslim
Community of Albania agrees.
But what is to be done with this enthusiasm, if
Albania isn’t driving the negotiations forward?
“They’re counting on being able to join the EU on
credit,” an EU diplomat says. “They joined NATO,
even
though
they
haven’t
fulfilled
the
requirements. However, the alliance recognized
that Albania’s strategic position was important
enough to turn a blind eye. But I don’t think they’ll
manage it this time. Albania is too far from the
union’s standards, and Europe – after the crisis in
Greece – is becoming more principled about these
things. The union is sure to make certain gestures –
for instance, Albania already has visa-free travel to
the Schengen area, and it has a very good trade
agreement. But until the government really starts to
change the country, there’s no question of starting
negotiations.”
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?
Life in Konispol dies out after 8 o’clock at night.
The candidates for emigration go to bed before
then, because most of them get up at 4 a.m., eat the
standard local B&B breakfast of boiled eggs, a
tomato, and a roll with jam, drink coffee and set off
so as to reach Igoumenitsa by evening.
Those who cannot get to sleep sit it out in the
centrally located café. I’ve arranged to meet Izeti
Guri here. He tells me in English everything he’s
found out about his fellow countrymen sitting here.
“This man has a brother in Greece, and they
run an office cleaning business together” –
indicating a middle-aged man with a moustache.
“That one has a Greek girlfriend and boasts to
everyone that he’s going to marry her and get an EU
passport.”
Pointing to a couple sipping Coca-Cola by the
wall, he says, “And this one could enter Greece
legally, but his wife hasn’t got a passport.”
We sit down with the couple. In their early
thirties, they’re from outside Tirana, and recently
celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary. Elton
works in Thessaloniki demolishing buildings. His
wife Zhujeta used to work as a secretary in a school.
“A new principal came in and he hired a friend of
his in my place,” she says. “I was left without a job.
Elton asked the people where he works, and we
were lucky. I’m going to work on an olive
plantation.”
“Are you going away for long?”
Elton and Zhujeta look at each other. “At most a
few months,” she says. “We have a 9-year-old
daughter. She stayed behind with her grandmother.
We’ll be missing her.”
“Life in Albania is getting better all the time,”
Elton says. “We’ll put aside a few thousand euros
and try to set up a small business, maybe a shop or
a driving school – I used to earn some extra cash as
an instructor, so I’d manage.”
“And why don’t you stay in Greece?”
“You know,” Elton muses, “I’ve been going there
for 12 years. I’ve never heard a single good word
from a Greek. The only thing they ever write in the
papers is that we rob them, and they burn our flags
and tell us to fuck off back to Albania. One time I
worked for a guy who ran off with the money and
never paid me a penny for six months’ hard slog,
and I didn’t even have anywhere to report it. And
suddenly, when the crisis began, they started to
respect us! Even the tabloids have changed their
tune – until now they only ever wrote about us to
say that some Albanian murdered someone.”
The man with the Greek girlfriend, Jovan, feels
the same way.
“Only a year ago my fiancée’s parents had a
problem with her having a boyfriend from Albania.
They refused to meet me,” he says. “They made
jokes about keeping the car keys away from me.
And now? They’ve invited me to dinner, they ask if
there’s some way they can help me. I went to
university in Shkoder, so my future father-in-law
himself has started asking me how I can get my
diploma validated.”
“Why the change?”
“They can see that they can’t manage without
our manpower.”
“Only we can save Greece now,” someone says
quite seriously, and the others nod.
“You see? The future of the entire EU is in our
hands. But you bastards refuse to let us in,” 17-yearold Izeti says, laughing.
Witold Szablowski is a reporter for Gazeta
Wyborcza, where this article originally appeared.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
In Albania, Madrasas Even the Secular Love
Under communism, Tirana’s madrasa was shut down for 25 years. It reopened in 1990.
A Turkish-based Islamic movement
committed to interfaith dialogue,
globalization, and making money is
changing the face of the country’s
school system.
by Ky Krauthamer
19 October 2012
TIRANA | It’s the first week of the new school
year and teenage boys race down corridors,
shouting and laughing, on their way to the next
class. In the tented gymnasium in back of the
school, girls are taking phys ed.
Tirana’s madrasa – coeducational, with a
curriculum heavy on English, science, and
computer skills, and a few Christian students
among the Muslim majority – does not fit the
standard image of a Muslim school. But then Islam
in Albania, like the country itself, stands apart in
many ways.
The Muslim community invited the Sema
Foundation, an Albanian education organization
backed by Turkish investors, to operate the
madrasa in 2005, school co-director Hiqmet Patozi
says. The external influence is underlined by the
large Turkish flag that flanks his desk, opposite
Albania’s standard.
The growing Turkish presence in Albanian
schooling takes some explanation, considering
Turkey’s limited economic presence here and the
chilly relations between the two countries since
Albania shook off Ottoman rule in 1912. Turkish
business interests began investing in Albanian
education nearly 20 years ago, when the country
was painfully emerging from 45 years of isolation.
The money has kept flowing ever since, as have
questions about its sources.
Epoka
University
is
a
Turkish-backed
institution that recently moved into a new campus
near Tirana’s airport. It graduated its second class
this year, with 112 students earning diplomas.
Provost Hamza Aksoy, a native Turk, said the
school’s initial backers sought to strengthen bonds
between his compatriots and Albanians.
“We share the same mentality,” said Aksoy, who
came to Albania 12 years ago to work at a Turkish
high school and now holds Albanian citizenship.
Five of the country’s seven madrasas, a halfdozen secular private schools, and two universities
in Albania are affiliated with a loose network of
Turkish schools and businesses known as the Gulen
movement, after its spiritual fountainhead,
Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Turkish Sufi scholar.
Schools aligned with the movement, generally with
Turkish upper management and a core group of
Turkish teachers, operate in some 140 countries,
including some with only tiny Turkish or Muslim
communities. Uniquely in Albania, movement
followers run Islamic as well as secular schools.
“Gulen interprets Islam in a positive manner,
not a radical one. Gulen encourages his followers to
devote themselves to education and to establish
educational institutions at every level, based on
certain moral values,” Aksoy said, but he would not
be drawn out on whether the university’s financial
backers or Turkish staff actively participate in the
movement.
“Gulen institutions do not publicize their Gulen
affiliation anywhere they operate,” said Bill Park, a
British expert on Turkish politics.
MODERNITY AND MONEY
Gulen, born near Erzurum in 1941, studied
with Sufi teachers and at religious schools and
began preaching while still in his teens. He also
drew inspiration from the writings of Said Nursi, a
Turkish theologian who called for
the reintegration of science into
Islamic
religious
study.
His
followers established their first
schools in Turkey in 1982. Ill
health forced him to give up active
preaching in the late 1980s, by
which time he was one of Turkey’s
most influential Islamic figures.
A website run by his followers
says the movement “focuses on the
betterment of the individual
toward a positive change in
society.
The
movement
is
distinguished for its support of
democracy,
its
openness
to
globalization, its progressiveness
in integrating tradition with
modernity, and its humanistic outlook.”
The estimated 1,000 Gulen schools are
concentrated in Turkey; Turkic-speaking Central
Asia; parts of the Balkans; Germany, with its large
Turkish population; and the United States.
Another feature of the movement is its
attractiveness to the entrepreneurial Turkish
middle classes who provide its major funding
source. Gulen followers own or have sway over
many businesses in Turkey, from the largest daily
newspaper, Zaman, to banks, hospitals, and radio
stations.
The movement has no official structure or
membership, but certain features mark its
followers, according to Kerem Oktem, an expert in
Turkish politics and European Islam at Oxford
University.
Oktem calls Gulen “a modern missionary
movement,” yet the mission has business and
educational goals as well as a religious side. “They
seek to change the image of Turkey in the world,”
he said, largely through the network of secular
schools. “Their aims are not necessarily to convert
everyone to Islam.”
The activities of movement followers, however,
sometimes attract negative attention. In the United
States, authorities have investigated several of the
estimated 120 publicly funded Gulenist schools for
alleged violations of immigration rules in importing
Turkish staff. Newspapers including Der Spiegel
and The New York Times have reported on
suspected Gulenist links to the nationalist wing of
Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party
(AKP).
In Albania, a country where countless private
schools jostle for the small middle class’ education
lek, the Turkish schools’ appeal appears to lie in
their reputation for high academic standards. They
demand academic and personal discipline, offering
a curriculum heavy on English, science, and math
and an excellent chance of being accepted at a
university, foreign as well as domestic. For
Albania’s secular elites, these advantages far
outweigh the schools’ Islamic tinge.
Another attraction of the madrasas is
economic. Students pay no fees,
thanks to the support of the Sema
Foundation. In contrast, tuition at
secular Gulen schools is out of
reach for most Albanian families.
At the most elite school in the
network, the English-language
Memorial International School of
Tirana, tuition starts start at 3,000
euros
for
preschool
and
kindergarten and rises to 5,750
euros for grades 10 to 12.
Some Albanian critics of the
Gulen movement fear what they
call its creeping encroachment
into the country’s educational and
Islamic spheres. Only here do
Gulen-affiliated organizations run
madrasas in addition to secular schools. In 2010, a
small group of religious leaders trained in Arabicspeaking countries formed the League of Albanian
Imams. They and others accuse Gulenists of easing
their way into the main offices of the Muslim
Community, which operates five of the country’s
seven madrasas in partnership with the Sema
Foundation and last year took over Beder
University, the country’s first formal Islamic
institution of higher education.
But the gradual extension of Turkish influence
in Albania more likely came about through a
combination of unique circumstances, Oxford’s
Oktem argues.
When religion was made legal again in the
early 1990s, Albania’s Muslim community, like
others in the region, was happy to accept the
generous funding being distributed by Islamic
organizations in the Gulf states. After the 9/11
attacks, when the United States made clear to its
Oktem calls Gulen
“a modern
missionary
movement,” yet the
mission has
business and
educational goals as
well as a religious
side.
Balkan allies that it did not welcome Arabinfluenced Muslim networks in the region because
of their alleged support for extremists, the Gulf
money began to dry up, Oktem said. The Muslim
Community then approached the Gulen movement,
already active in secular schools since the early
1990s, with a request to take responsibility for the
madrasas.
Those who fear a creeping Turkification of
Albanian politics and business are well wide of the
mark, Oktem says.
“Turkey, and the Ottomans, in general do not
have good associations for many Albanians. Most
Albanians were educated into a fiercely antiOttoman national identity,” he said.
Albania, which broke away from Ottoman rule
in November 1912, was at once among
the most loyal and the most prickly of
the empire’s European possessions.
Many Albanians rose to high positions
in the sultan’s service. At the same
time, the isolated tribes of the mixed
Catholic and Muslim north existed in a
state of near-autonomy for centuries,
and even in the more loyal central and
southern regions, Muslim beys carved
out semi-independent fiefdoms.
“There may be a constituency in
Albania that is more pro-Turkish or pro-Ottoman,
but the Albanian elites are strongly secular and
tend to anti-Turkish views,” Oktem said.
group of about 50 investors in Turkey. The
university is owned by the Albanian-registered
Turgut Ozal Education Co., which also operates
Memorial International and several other schools.
A kindred organization called Gulistan Institucionet
Arsimore (Gulistan Educational Institutions) runs
schools in Tirana and Shkoder and a language and
college-prep center in the capital.
Like other Albanian private colleges, Epoka’s
academic offerings focus on in-demand fields like
public administration, economics, and engineering.
All courses are taught in English. There are no
plans yet to offer majors in the humanities or
sciences, Aksoy said. Most of the three dozen or so
private post-secondary schools in Albania resemble
technical colleges rather than research-oriented
institutions, but nonetheless, scions of
Albania’s political and business leaders
have studied at Epoka, according to
Albanian media.
Aksoy said Epoka never intended to
be an elite school, but he did not
distance himself from the idea. “We are
a very successful school and we attract
successful people,” he said, while
stressing that grade-point average is the
primary
criterion
for
selecting
applicants.
The Tirana madrasa also boasts of its academic
success. Almost all graduates go on to university, codirector Patozi said, most in secular fields. The
curriculum is approved by the Education Ministry;
one hour in seven is devoted to religious study, said
the school’s Turkish co-director, Kasim Ilhan. There
are a few Christians in the current student body of
460, and they, too, study the Koran. After all, Patozi
said, smiling, “It is a madrasa.”
He acknowledged being acquainted with
Gulen’s works.
“If he is in favor of peace and interfaith
understanding, that is good. I have read him, but
others, too,” Patozi said. “There was Islam before
Gulen and there will be Islam after him.”
“There was
Islam before
Gulen and
there will be
Islam after
him.”
TROUBLE IN TURKEY
Fethullah Gulen emigrated to the United States
in 1999 after Turkish media leaked tape recordings
in which he supposedly called for his followers to
lie low and gather strength before coming out
openly for an Islamic restoration in the officially
secular country. In 2000 he was convicted in
absentia of attempting to establish a religion-based
state. The verdict was overturned in 2008, but he
has remained in seclusion at his house in
Pennsylvania rather than return to Turkey.
Publicly Gulen sets a high value on interfaith
and intercultural dialogue, secular education, and
democracy, and has said he opposes bringing
religion into politics. He has lent his name to
professorial chairs at the Catholic University of
Leuven,
Belgium,
and
Australian
Catholic
University, and to a research institute at the
University of Houston.
Typically, after getting a chain of schools up
and running in one country, Gulen followers will
move to a new region and start networking and
building relationships, as happened in Albania
shortly after the fall of communism, Oktem said.
Gulen schools usually receive start-up funding from
Turkish investors and charities. Eventually, the
schools are expected to at least break even.
“Ideally, they can then bud off people to seek
out ground for new schools elsewhere,” he said.
Epoka University provost Aksoy said primary
funding for the nonprofit institution comes from a
Ky Krauthamer is a senior editor for TOL. The
contents of this project are the sole responsibility of
Transitions and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the European Union. Madrasa photo by Besar
Likmeta.
Apartment buildings of various ages surround the Byzantine forum in Durres. The ancient city controlled the western
Ancient Durres
Battles to Preserve its Past
end of a major Roman road; today, its port is the busiest in Albania.
Unchecked growth in Albania’s
Adriatic port city leaves history
in the construction dust.
by Ky Krauthamer
11 October 2012
TIRANA | Visitors to Durres, Albania’s oldest
city, often pose in front of the bronze figure of John
Lennon, sitting on a bench just outside a 15-story
luxury apartment tower near the port. Few notice
the unmarked remnant of a Roman wall to the side
of the building, and fewer still, unless they are
locals, know that an Ottoman-era building
associated with the early days of Albanian
independence used to stand there.
Wildcat construction has plagued Albania since
the end of central economic planning 20 years ago,
and the authorities have often seemed helpless to
bring it under control. The country urgently
required new housing and commercial space in the
1990s, after decades of underinvestment by the
isolationist regime of communist leader Enver
Hoxha. In many cases, builders never bothered to
obtain permits. In places like Durres, with its many
layers of archeological remains underlying the
present street level, builders often side-slipped the
lengthy procedure for legalizing construction in the
old center.
“Developers can buy anybody” in Durres, says
archeologist Lorenc Bejko, who when he headed the
Institute of Cultural Monuments five years ago
initiated one of very few lawsuits anywhere in
Albania against a builder accused of damaging a
historic site – though the case was ultimately
unsuccessful. Here, the conflict between the
demand for new housing and the need to preserve
a rich architectural heritage is more visible than
anywhere else in Albania.
In 2008 the government sought to cut through
the tangle of overlapping authority among state
agencies by establishing the Archeological Service
Agency (ASHA) with the legal muscle to supervise
archeological work at construction sites. Experts
refer to this as “rescue archeology” because
whatever is not surveyed, photographed, or taken
away for preservation is likely to be lost forever.
In an interview shortly after being named to
head ASHA in 2008, Roland Olli spoke of a “legal
vacuum” leading to “uncontrolled construction” in
Durres. Olli, a construction engineer by training,
says the situation is far less dire today.
“The urban development in the second biggest
city in Albania is still a potential risk which
jeopardizes the archeological heritage. Even though
the ancient city of Durres still remains a hot spot,
we cannot speak anymore about ‘a legal vacuum,’ ”
he said in an e-mail.
Bejko admits as much, while maintaining that
much irreparable damage has been done, not only
in Durres: Recently, listed buildings from the late
19th and early 20th centuries were torn down in
Shkoder and in Korce, where local people
demonstrated in August after the overnight
demolition of the house where in 1916 nationalist
guerrilla leader Themistokli Germenji raised the
flag of the Autonomous Albanian Republic of Korce.
The mayor pledged to consider their plea to rebuild
the house, and city hall asked prosecutors to
investigate the demolition, according to news
reports.
Preservationists are also irate over the new
apartments being built just below the medieval
castle of Kruje, the seat of Albania’s 15th-century
national hero, Skanderbeg.
IF WE BUILD IT, THEY WILL APPROVE IT
The number of buildings in Albania grew 35
percent between 2001 and 2011, and much of the
boom occurred in the two largest cities, Tirana and
nearby Durres, as rural dwellers flooded to the
cities in search of opportunity. State agencies
charged with protecting the historical fabric of the
cities struggled to keep pace, especially in Durres,
where any new building in the historical center is
likely to turn up a Turkish, Venetian, Byzantine, or
Aspects of Durres: The 15th-century Venetian Tower in the
foreground with the new building on the site of Prince
William of Wied’s home behind it. The cranes of the port
are visible at top right.
older walls and artifacts. Construction, and the
busy port – Albania’s largest with a capacity of 1.5
million passengers and 65,000 containers per year –
helped the city gain population when most others
have shrunk since the end of communism.
Ironically, preservation was easier under the
communists, says one young archeologist. The
gaping Roman amphitheater, the city’s major
historical attraction, was excavated starting in the
1960s when the authorities ordered the houses on
top of it to be razed. A meter or more of soil still
remains to be excavated at the lowest level of the
amphitheater, where gladiators fought before
crowds of 15,000. The archeologist, who requested
anonymity, admits that restoration done in the
1990s was inferior to the work of the communistera archeologists, who after all enjoyed generous
support as they gradually exposed one of the
country’s most dramatic monuments.
In contrast, most of the discoveries of the past
20 years in Durres – mosaics, public baths, walls
and foundations mostly from the Roman and
Byzantine periods – are now invisible because they
lie in the cellars or yards of private houses, and in
most cases were re-covered with soil or concrete
after being examined by experts.
The apartment tower on the site of the Ottoman
palace inhabited by Prince William of Wied during
his brief rule in 1914, and many other buildings
erected in the past decade in the historic center of
Durres, may be the last of their kind. Thanks to
zoning regulations prepared by the Archeological
Service Agency in collaboration with local
governments and other state agencies involved in
heritage preservation, new construction is now
prohibited in Durres and seven other cities in the
area with the highest density of archeological
remains, “Zone A,” Olli says. Archeologists have
proposed to extend Zone A in Durres in line with
recent discoveries.
In Zone B, areas with a lower density of
historical finds, all construction projects must be
approved by another agency, the National Council
of Archeology, which can then request ASHA to do a
“diagnostic excavation” and supervise the entire
project.
Bejko says that although Albania’s culturalpreservation laws are up to European standards,
implementing them is another matter. In disputed
cases, the process of approving development, doing
archeological work, and monitoring construction
can involve a half-dozen agencies, all under the
aegis of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, Youth, and
Sports. Critics of this system say its Achilles heel is
the lists of protected properties. Bejko and others
point to Durres as the prime example of how
developers tweak the system by lobbying at the
regional or national Cultural Monuments Institute
for a property to be de-listed. In the end, the
minister of tourism and culture has the final say,
but he can always claim to have relied on expert
advice from his staff, Bejko charges.
Little firm evidence exists to back up these
claims, but it is suggestive that over many years of
frenetic building across the country, the Cultural
Monuments Institute has lodged only one legal case
against a builder, in 2007, over damage to historical
remains in Durres’ Zone B. Bejko, who led the
institute at the time, says the case died when
prosecutors came to him saying they might
investigate whether the lawsuit
had damaged the builder’s
business. The real reason was to
freeze the legal process to give
the developer time to finish the
project, Bejko maintains. He
argues that the judicial system
favors
developers
and
construction-hungry
local
officials.
Albania’s
much-criticized
judicial system came under the spotlight again on
10 October in the European Commission’s
recommendation to grant the country EU candidate
status, “subject to key judicial and public
administration reform measures being completed.”
The Byzantines extended the old city walls to a
length of four kilometers. A century ago, the
massive walls, further strengthened by Venetians
and then Ottomans, were virtually all that was left
of ancient Durres; the 1911 edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica noted, “Few traces remain
of the once celebrated Dyrrhachium.”
“Lack of professionalism” and
“a wrong attitude toward heritage
preservation” in state agencies
convinced Bejko to move on and
become a professor of archeology
at the University of Tirana, he says.
He hesitates when asked to name a
project
where
developers,
archeologists, and local authorities
worked
successfully
together.
Finally, he suggests a hydropower
project and early stages of the Trans-Adriatic
Pipeline. In these cases, though, builders are
following strict rules set by the World Bank and
other international donors, in addition to Albanian
law.
Only the country’s nascent civil sector is
capable of driving a wedge into the cozy relations
among politicians, business people, and judges, he
says: “We need civil society groups to protect
heritage from our own institutions.”
Not far from the Byzantine forum stands a
multistory apartment building that appears to be
still under construction. An unpaved driveway
leads down to what was probably intended as a
parking garage. The entire sub-surface level, large
enough to accommodate several dozen cars, is open
to the elements and is now covered by a greenish
pool of runoff water and leaking sewage.
Somewhere below the water and floating plastic
waste lie traces of a Roman floor mosaic.
The man who developed the building left town
before it was finished, Sami Trimi says. Trimi, a
man in late middle age, sold the property in 2003.
He now runs the Internet cafe on the ground floor.
“It makes me cry to see it,” he says, looking at
the pool.
“We need civil
society groups to
protect heritage
from our own
institutions.”
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE
FORUM?
While apartment construction goes on
frantically in the suburbs of Durres, the pace of
building in the old town has slowed, leaving many
wondering how so many projects managed to get
the certificates and permits needed to build here. In
the case of Prince Wied’s palace, the family that
owned it in pre-communist times won the property
back in the restitution process before demolishing
it a decade ago. Other projects that bring painful
memories to preservationists were new structures,
like the 10-story residential and commercial
building erected in 2000-2001 over one part of a
charming Byzantine forum excavated in the 1980s.
For scholars and tourists alike, Durres is a
unique layer cake of much of the country’s history
going back to the time of the Illyrians, an ancient
people claimed as the forefathers of the modern
Albanians. The important Corinthian colony of
Epidamnus was founded, probably on one of the
hills above the modern town, in the seventh
century BC; in 431 BC, fighting between the town’s
aristocratic and democratic factions set off the
Peloponnesian War. Two centuries later, Romans
and the forces of the Illyrian queen Teuta disputed
the city, which served as a Roman beachhead for
their expansion into Macedonia and Greece.
By the first or second century AD the city, by
then known as Dyrrhachium, was rich and
populous enough to fill the large amphitheater built
at that time. Under Roman rule, and for centuries
after the fall of the Western Empire, Dyrrhachium
flourished as a major trading center at the western
end of the main cross-Balkans trade route, the Via
Egnatia. Though small, the elegant columns and
imported marble of the Byzantine forum with its
colonnade surrounded by the foundations of shops
speak to the wealth of the early-medieval city.
Ky Krauthamer is a senior editor for TOL. The
contents of this project are the sole responsibility of
Transitions and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the European Union. Homepage photo from
Wikimedia Commons; forum photo by Besar
Likmeta.
The huge King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo was built with money from the Saudi government.
Bosnia’s Armies of God
Photo by Aktron/Wikimedia Commons.
More than 15 years after the war
ended, some find a new way
to stake out territory and assert
their differences.
by Tihomir Loza and Berina Pekmezovic
9 August 2012
They are everywhere. Often lavishly built and
ridiculously tall, some look like architectural
pranks. Sometimes they are built on former school
or kindergarten grounds or in the front yards of
houses whose owners have been chased off. Often
they glitter in their unseemlyopulence right in the
middle of a neighborhood that has obviously seen
better days. Very occasionally you come across one
whose modesty and sense of human purpose
reassures somewhat.
Along with sprawling shopping centers,
uncountable gas stations, and loads of unfinished
or empty houses in suburban areas, new or rebuilt
churches and mosques as well as other religious
objects, such as landmark crosses, are without
doubt the most striking visual feature of today’s
Bosnia. They have mushroomed since the 19921995 war.
Such manifestations of religiosity, featuring
super prominently in public and private life, might
give the impression that Bosnia is a particularly
pious nation.
Priests regularly speak in public on matters
ranging from sex and eating or drinking habits to
foreign policy, art, education, genocide, or court
verdicts. They are usually taken very seriously.
In Christian parts of the country crosses often
look down from hilltops or dangle from necks.
Military and police units, kindergartens and
schools, as well as government institutions have
their patron saints.
In Muslim-majority areas, things as diverse as
business gatherings, parliamentary sessions, and
international art festivals are rescheduled because
of Ramadan.
While the state still does its usual admin bit on
births, weddings, and deaths, few families would
nowadays dare not to let the priests play a role in
letting them in and out of this world or get married.
No matter if your faith is actually shaky. Priests are
trained not to be squeamish, so even ardent atheists
qualify. Bosnia’s last communist leader was buried
earlier this year in the graveyard of an important
mosque in a ceremony presided over by no less
than the head of Bosnia’s Islamic Community.
Of course, public and
private lives in many former
communist countries have
been “retraditionalized,” said
Zlatiborka
PopovMomcinovic, a philosophy
professor at the University of
East Sarajevo. “The fall of
communism ... left a values
Zlatiborka vacuum.
The
old
Popov-Momcinovic [communist]
system
of
values had disintegrated and
that brought about anxieties, with people lacking a
sense of belonging and the old moral norms and
rules no longer valid,” Popov-Momcinovic said.
She suggests, however, that a fair bit more than
simply filling the gap left by communism is going
on in Bosnia. Religion is the main ingredient of
Bosnia’s ethnic identities and therefore divisions,
with its function now being to “ideologically
legitimize divisions and conflicts” and “turn our
small differences into substantial ones and cement
them,” she said.
Type in “kriz na” (cross at) and Google offers to
finish your thought as “Kriz na Humu.” Hum is a
hill that towers above the city of Mostar, where 19
years ago the Catholic Bosnian Croats and the
Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) fought one of the most
vicious battles of the war, ending in what is still in
effect a divided city. The gun that brought the iconic
Ottoman Old Bridge down in 1993 was fired from
Hum. The bridge was reconstructed after the war.
The Croats controlled the hill, which can be
seen from any corner of the city. So when peace
broke out due to a draw on the battlefield, what
better way of making clear that the Croat claim on
the whole of Mostar is still alive than to erect a
huge cross right on top of it for everyone to see?
Ivo Markovic, a Franciscan theologian in
Sarajevo, argues that in
postwar
Bosnia
religious
objects have been built “to
show who a particular
territory belongs to.” “The
cross above Mostar is a
message to the Muslims. HVO
[Croat
wartime
militia]
encircled all Muslim areas by
Ivo Markovic
crosses to tell them that those
territories don’t belong to
them, so the cross here is a hostile symbol, a sign of
division,” Markovic said.
Which is why Bosnian Serb war veterans in
2008 proposed to erect a 26-meter-high cross on a
hill overlooking Sarajevo, now dominated by
Bosniaks. One of the hills from which the Orthodox
Christian Bosnian Serbs shelled the city, Zlatiste,
remained part of the country’s Serb entity,
Republika Srpska. The initiative to build a cross,
which would have been visible from the city center,
was abandoned after protests from Sarajevo and a
counterproposal from the Bosnian Serb strongman,
Milorad Dodik, then prime minister of Republika
Srpska, to build a church instead.
Or perhaps for a better salt-to-open-wound
example, consider the new Serb church in Budak, a
location near Srebrenica just a stone’s throw from
one of the mass graves and the memorial center
where thousands of Bosniak victims of the 1995
Srebrenica genocide have been buried.
The Bosniaks play the game of marking their
territory with places of worship equally well. For
example, the Turhan Beg Mosque in Ustikolina,
thought to be the oldest in the country, was
destroyed by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1992-1995
war. Ustikolina is in a narrow stretch of territory in
eastern Bosnia that now belongs to the BosniakCroat Federation entity, nearly surrounded by
Republika Srpska and very close to Bosnia’s border
with Serbia. When the mosque was rebuilt in 2007,
instead of the original-size minaret of some 30
meters (98 feet) it got a new one twice as high, “so
that it can even be seen from Serbia, to show that
this is Bosnia,” Markovic said.
Nerzuk Curak, a political scientist at the
University of Sarajevo, calls this phenomenon
“urine marking.”
“Rebuilding of any religious object destroyed in
the war is worthy of support. Often they are part of
cultural heritage. They should be rebuilt to look
There’s no mistaking the message sent to Mostar’s
Bosniaks by the cross on Hum hill Photo by Berina
Pekmezovic.
exactly as they used to, but
political environment demands that you manifest
they often aren’t. Instead of
not only your belonging to the religion that defines
beautiful,
old
Bosnian
your ethnic group, but often also your religiosity. In
mosques
we
get
fact, if you are ambitious you won’t go wrong if you
megalomaniacal mosques that
parade it. Come to church when large crowds – or
do not testify piety, but power.
better still, cameras – are there and get into the first
When religion testifies power,
row. You may be known as a heavy drinker, but
it is overbearing, which
come Ramadan, make sure to tell everyone that you
clashes
with
religious
are fasting.
Nerzuk Curak
principles,” Curak said.
Put religion aside, Bosnia unfolds in front of
No institution has data on
you as a remarkably homogeneous nation. All
prayer attendance today compared with before the
Bosnians speak the same language (often all at the
war. It is clear, however, that many more people in
same time), cook similar food, laugh at the same
Bosnia come to churches and mosques now,
jokes, nourish procrastination as life’s preeminent
especially around religious holidays, though some
operating mode, consider compromise a dirty word,
places of worship seem much busier than others,
share the love of the same Latin American and
likely because of overcapacity in some towns. In a
Turkish soaps, and are almost universally
2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor survey, more than 76
intolerant of that menacing natural phenomenon
percent of respondents said religion plays an
that occurs when windows at opposite ends of the
important part in their everyday life. Half of those
house are left open by a careless member of the
polled claimed to have participated in a religious
household, otherwise known as draft.
ceremony in the previous week.
This cultural proximity, if not exactly a
The three largest ethnic identities of Bosnia
sameness, extends well over Bosnia’s borders to
formed along religious lines in the Ottoman era.
encompass much of Croatia, Serbia, and
Religious affiliation has been the main component
Montenegro. “All of our ethnic groups came out of
of ethnic identity exactly because Bosnians of
religion,” Markovic said. “There are, for example,
different ethnicities are very much alike in many
Montenegrins
who
collectively
moved
to
other respects. Under
Herzegovina.
They
communism – which
were
Orthodox
in Yugoslavia for the
Christians. But in
most
part
places where there
marginalized rather
were no Orthodox
than
persecuted
churches, they went
religion
–
many
to Catholic ones and
people,
especially
that’s
how
they
better-educated city
became Croats. They
dwellers, saw their
now have relatives
religion primarily as
who are Serb,” For
a part of their family
example,
he
said
heritage from which
Vojislav Seselj, an
they drew, with more
ultranationalist Serb
or less enthusiasm,
leader facing wartheir ethnic identity.
crimes charges, has
Institutions
of
Croat relatives in
organized
religion
Herzegovina.
played little or no
The
term
part in their lives.
“narcissism of the
While
officially
small difference” has
Bosnia is still a
often been used in
secular
state,
reference to South
organized religion is
Slav
nationalist
now inescapable.
excesses. Yet the fact
You simply can’t
that
Bosnians
of
hide from a force
different creeds are
that, in cahoots with
very much alike –
political
parties,
and in many cases
busies itself with
literally related –
things ranging from
does not render their
denying or justifying
separate
ethnic
genocide
to
identities any less
regulating
the
real or easier to
A Serbian Orthodox Church is being built near the Srebrenica
activities of Santa
reconcile. On the
Claus.
The
sociocontrary,
Bosnians
memorial center. Photo by Berina Pekmezovic.
and their brethren in Serbia, Croatia, and
Montenegro have often demonstrated fairly
convincingly that they are capable of making the
most of those differences, the last time in the 1990s
when they made a spectacle of themselves.
It is often said that the peace hammered out in
November 1995 at Dayton, Ohio,
has turned out to be a
continuation of war by largely
peaceful means. Few would
disagree, for it is obvious that
more or less the only political
issues that excite the three
dominant ethnic blocs in Bosnia
are the same ones that exercised
them just before and during the
war: identity, ownership of
territory,
and
political
representation. In other words,
Bosnians disagreed and still
disagree on what Bosnia was, is,
and, most of all, should be. At
least at the national level, they
seem capable of politically addressing little else.
It is largely thanks to this blockade of the
political process that Bosnia is lagging behind its
neighbors on the road to membership in the
European Union. Along with ethnic divisions, the
slow pace of reform, corruption, and disrespect for
human rights have been of concern for the EU for
years. The issue that currently halts the country
from submitting a credible membership application
is linked to a December 2009 ruling by the
European Court of Human Rights that Bosnia’s
electoral legislation discriminates against people
not belonging to one of the three biggest ethnic
groups. Incredibly, Bosnia’s politicians haven’t yet
agreed on how to comply with the ruling. Even
though the court is not an EU institution, the EU
insists that Bosnia comply first and only then hope
for candidate status. “That was the first thing we
should have done to show that we don’t
discriminate against citizens on ethnic grounds, but
that’s yet to happen,” said Zlatiborka PopovMomcinovic, the
philosophy
professor.
“Bickering over
that still goes on
and they can go
for
even
five
more years as
this model of
democracy
is
slow.
...
Institutions are
slow and there is a question mark over how long it
will take us to fulfill conditions and pass laws that
would make us fit for EU membership.”
Not that these divisions necessarily affect
everyday life as much as politics. While most
people do subscribe to one of the three conflicting
political narratives this doesn’t necessarily
determine their choices when it comes to
friendship, business, or indeed maintaining family
ties across ethnic divides. While tacit or even
institutionalized segregation persists in all parts of
the country – though with sharp variations from
one place to another – a lot of life manages to
escape this reality, unlike, for
example, in 1970s Northern
Ireland, where sectarianism left
very little space for everyday
interaction between the two sides.
One may wonder where the
big deal about all of this is. Isn’t
this advent of religion expected or
even natural? With the demise of
Yugoslavia, the country and its
three “constituent peoples” found
themselves in a situation unlike
any other in their previous
history. Once they formulated
very different answers to that new
situation, it was only natural that
they emphasized the most obvious
differences among them, which then opened the
way for religion to rein supreme over public life
with all the expected abuses and excesses. The huge
influence of clerics on politics, culture, and pretty
much everything else may be promoting all kind of
backwardness and is often plain ugly – all that
mandatory religiosity of ordinary folks, many of
whom clearly don’t really mean it, is surely quite
demeaning – but all of that is bound to subside as
Bosnia inevitably stabilizes and moves forward.
Still, one would struggle to spot any harbingers.
On the contrary, the bond between politics and
religion seems to be going from strength to
strength. And if institutions of organized religion do
indeed dictate public and private attitudes and are
often indistinguishable from political structures,
one wonders how the three biggest ethnic groups
will ever overcome social prejudices that unite
them – such as intolerance of sexual minorities or
non-traditional religious groups – let alone the
prejudices they hold toward one another in which
religion plays the
starring role.
Take the socalled
“minority
returns,” which are,
of course, a good
thing. “People who
return to now form
a [local] minority
are the best people
this country has. No
one favors them.
They live in an unfriendly environment and
deserve a monument, for they are trying to ...
renew Bosnia’s ethos [of living together], which we
are now being told never existed,” Curak, the
political scientist, said.
Yet nearly all such returns are accompanied by
the building or reconstruction of a place of worship,
Along with ethnic
divisions, the slow
pace of reform,
corruption, and
disrespect for
human rights have
been of concern for
the EU for years.
“People who return to now form a
[local] minority are the best people
this country has. No one favors them.
They live in an unfriendly environment
and deserve a monument.”
with politicians never failing to attend the opening
ceremony. Investment in education or health
facilities, let alone jobs, comes later, if at all.
Consider another example from Mostar. For
centuries, the city had a vibrant Serb community.
The majority of the city’s 25,000 Serbs fled during
the 1992-1995 war. Some have returned to a city
now in the grip of the Bosniak-Croat contest for
control, a place where Serbs no longer count for
much politically and are perhaps for that reason
left alone for the most part. In recent years more
Serbs have expressed a wish to return. The
government of Republika Srpska is keen to help by
co-financing, you guessed it, the reconstruction of
an important church. It will also open its own office
in Mostar. Furthermore, Belgrade has also
repeatedly said it is keen on Mostar Serbs to return.
To support them as well as to recognize Mostar as
an important regional trade center it will open a
consulate there later this year. Serbia’s consulate
and the office of Republika Srpska will be housed at
the Bishop’s Palace, the seat of region’s Orthodox
Bishop, an arrangement that will admittedly
eliminate commuting costs from efforts to maintain
the oneness of Serb affairs in the city.
A fair bit more consequential recent example of
religion’s grip on life in Bosnia is from Sarajevo,
where an attempt last year to start addressing
discrimination in the education system was nipped
in the bud by a coalition of religious authorities and
a nominally secular political party. Emir Suljagic,
education minister for the Sarajevo Canton,
ordered the local public primary and secondary
schools to remove from students’ overall averages
their marks on religious education, which is
optional; students who attended religious education
classes ended up with unfairly higher grade
averages than those who didn’t, simply because
nearly all of them received
high marks. The response
from the Islamic Community
was swift and brutal. Its
head and other leaders
threatened violence unless
the
measure
was
withdrawn. They insulted
Suljagic, who then found in
Emir Suljagic his mailbox a threatening
letter complete with a bullet.
One would have expected Suljagic’s Social
Democratic Party, which came first in the 2010
elections campaigning for secular, civic values, to
have stood by its minister, yet “my party simply
sacrificed me and caved in to pressure from the
Islamic Community,” said Suljagic, who was forced
to resign.
Curak, who described the Islamic Community’s
response as “scandalous,” said Suljagic’s proposal
was rather modest. Indeed, many among Bosnia’s
liberal minority would argue that religious
education has no place in state schools, not least
because kids are being separated as young as 7,
with those belonging to minority groups or
choosing not to attend any religious education
classes running the risk of stigmatization.
Yet, such voices are unlikely to be a match for
the leaders of the three biggest religions in Bosnia
who, unsurprisingly, are in total unison when it
comes to the status of religious education. For
example, they take the fact that religious education
is not yet taught in secondary schools in Republika
Srpska and some cantons in the Bosniak-Croat
Federation very seriously indeed. As Franjo
Komarica, the Catholic Bishop of Banja Luka, told
Deutsche Welle in March, religious leaders are
“patient but determined” and are “working step by
step” to make sure that religious education is
introduced in secondary schools throughout the
country.
Tihomir Loza is deputy director of Transitions.
Berina Pekmezovic is a reporter with the Center for
Investigative Journalism.
Sarajevo Saviors
Twelve thousand dead and irreversible damages.
The heroes of the siege of Sarajevo
20 years ago keep saving the city
even today, as ethnic tension
escalates once again.
by Tomas Sacher
August 22, 2012
SARAJEVO | When Jovan Divjak walks along
Sarajevo’s main street, Ferhadija, everyone
recognizes him. To passers-by, this smartly dressed
man in a white shirt is like a magnet. Everyone
wants to be photographed with him, shake his
hand, get his autograph. Yet Divjak is neither an
artist nor a politician. He is an army general. And a
Serb one. A representative of the power that for
most Sarajevans is the epitome of evil.
It’s been 20 years since the inhabitants of the
Bosnian capital woke up to find that a genocidal
war had broken out. The locals say that people like
Divjak are like a glimpse of light in the dark and
their presence here in Sarajevo is as important
today as it was before. The war claimed some
12,000 dead in the Sarajevo streets alone. The
horrific scenes that unraveled here are hard to
forget. And ethnic tension is escalating again. When
people like Jovan Divjak walk the city’s streets, it is
a reminder for the locals of how they could
mobilize themselves at the worst times.
Jovan Divjak was a Serb general in the Yugoslav army who
refused to attack Sarajevo. Instead, he helped the city
create a force to defend itself.
SCARS AND CEMETERIES
Sarajevo, or at least its oldest part, is a
picturesque tourist center with abundant souvenir
shops and fashionable cafés. People hurry on their
way home from work, visitors head for mosques as
Ramadan begins, and amid them backpackers from
Western Europe weave their way, attracted by the
boisterous atmosphere of local bars. But even in
Ferhadija Street, marks of events that 20 years ago
irreversibly changed the destiny of this unique and
beautiful city are hard to ignore.
“Here was one of the first [explosions]; people
refused to follow orders from Serb commanders.
were not as cautious yet and didn’t hide,” Divjak
These included seemingly minor organizational
points to a small crater in the middle of the
changes, but also the requirement to disarm local
pedestrian zone. Its separate layers are highlighted
“non-Serb” garrisons.
by thick red paint. An inscription on a nearby wall
Disobeying Belgrade’s orders landed Divjak in a
explains that at this spot a
military
prison
for
mortar killed four dozen
several months. When
people at once. There are
he
came
out,
the
many
similar
“scars”
situation seemed even
visible in the city, among
clearer to him, so he
them striking, meters-long
stopped
following
holes in facades of highorders completely. His
rise buildings, as well as
involvement in a 1992
numerous smaller bullet
attack on a column of
craters. Most former parks
withdrawing Yugoslav
and green spaces have
troops resulted in the
been
turned
into
issuance of an arrest
cemeteries. The largest
warrant that in Serbia is
one, in the Kosevo quarter,
still in effect, even
covers the entire football
though the Yugoslav
pitch of one of the former
war-crimes tribunal in
Many of Sarajevo’s buildings still bear the scars of war. The Hague determined
Olympic stadiums.
“No one then could
in 2002 that there was
imagine how quickly a
not enough evidence to
functioning and seemingly cohesive society could
prosecute him. Divjak was arrested in Austria last
collapse,” Divjak says, reminiscing about the
year on the Serbian warrant but a Vienna court
bygone fame of the Olympic metropolis that in the
refused to extradite him over concerns that he
1980s boasted a standard of life comparable to
would not receive a fair trial in Serbia, and he was
some Western European cities. Although the
released.
country was ruled by an autocrat seated in
At the start of the Bosnian war, Divjak’s stance
Belgrade, Czechs could only dream of the
represented a major move against the tide of
civilizational level of the Yugoslavia the late 1980s
events. The general was the commander of
in respect to the accessibility of coveted goods or
Yugoslav troops in the Sarajevo region and his
the fact that a Yugoslav passport allowed for fairly
decision not only undermined the legitimacy of
easy travel to both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Serbian attackers, but also provided vital
Gallantry, jokes, perfect French – Jovan Divjak
encouragement to the nascent Bosnian army for
cannot conceal his education at a military
which Sarajevo’s defense became a fated challenge.
university in Paris. But the deep admiration of
The fall of Yugoslavia into the pit of bloody
Sarajevans could hardly be incited by nothing more
disintegration is well-known history today. Mass
than an aging gentleman’s charm. The general has
ethnic cleansing, such as was perpetrated in
earned it by his personal, yet – through its social
Srebrenica, constituted an attempt by the Serb
symbolism – extremely
majority to expel the
important revolt.
Muslim population from
Divjak, then a high
most of today’s Bosnian
officer in the Yugoslav
territory. Sarajevo may be
army,
had
suspected
the key, symbolic piece of
months before the first
the puzzle. It was here
Sarajevo mortar fell that
that independence of the
hard times were coming.
most ethnically mixed
As Bosnian politicians
part of the Balkans was
began to discuss their
declared. And it was in
plans
for
declaring
the Bosnian capital that
independence,
the war turned into a
unprecedented military
conflict unparalleled in
exercises were launched
any Yugoslav or other
with army technology –
modern warfare. The
and almost exclusively
inferno of urban warfare,
ethnic
Serb
troops.
Veteran Goran Chuk as we can now watch via
“Officially, these were
media in countries like
military exercises, but
Syria, lasted an incredible
after a while it became apparent that a noose was
four years. And during this time, Sarajevo’s
tightening around Sarajevo,” the general says,
population – Muslim Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs –
recalling the moment when for the first time he
were cut off from the outside world by an
took control of the most
important parts of the city.
The rugged terrain and
hundreds of narrow streets
provided enough room for
shelter.
And
Sarajevans
themselves
credit
their
resilience to a considerable
psychological advantage.
“We had nothing to lose.
We were convinced that if
Serbs conquered the city,
they would kill us anyway.
And it needs to be said that
Serb
soldiers
did
not
particularly enjoy shooting
at their own neighbors,
either,” Goran Cuk, one of
later army officers and
current chairman of a
Bosnian
war
veterans
association,
recalls
in his
The city is full of beautifull scenery, but at the same time also a perfect trap.
modest office near the city
center.
impenetrable military barrier.
The response of Sarajevans took the Yugoslav
army by surprise. After a few initial unsuccessful
‘MAKE THEM GO INSANE’
attempts to take direct control of the city, it changed
Divjak has only one explanation for what
its tactics. An order issued by Serbian army
happened in Sarajevo in the 1990s – imported
commander Ratko Mladic went down in history,
hatred. “People of various nationalities and
recorded in a BBC documentary. “Fire mortars on
religious faiths had lived here side by side. I
the whole city,” came the command, through a
couldn’t imagine I would fight against my own
walkie-talkie held by an officer observing Sarajevo
neighbors and friends,” our guide recounts, while
from a mountainous shelter. “Don’t let them take a
standing on one of the hills surrounding the city.
breath. Make them go insane.”
“One thing is certain: from the military viewpoint,
According to statistics released by the UN after
it didn’t look good for us at all.”
the
war,
an average of 330 mortars fell on Sarajevo
From where we stand, visitors can take in the
every
day,
some days several thousand. A single
impressive sight of the historical city adorned with
mortar
killed
almost 70 people in the middle of a
the spires of dozens of minarets and orthodox
Sarajevo
market.
Mortars hit bus stops, schools,
churches, straddling the banks of the Miljacka River
funeral
processions.
and surrounded by misty ranges of forested
mountains. At the beginning
of 1992, positioned in these
scenic views, 1,000 cannons
and hundreds of tanks were
aimed at Sarajevo. A unique
landscape relief of the halfmillion city nestled in a single
valley
thus
enabled
a
practically hermetic siege.
For the Serbian fighting
force, it made for easy prey.
But Divjak’s hastily formed
Bosnian army grew into a
force no one expected. Within
days, thousands of volunteers
of all nationalities were
recruited. The total number
over the four-year blockade
neared 50,000 men who,
armed with the remnants of
weaponry
collected
from
abandoned
Sarajevo
barracks, surprisingly quickly
The spot on Ferhadija street where an artillery grenade fell.
And that was not all. Recently finished sports
facilities that just eight years before hosted a world
“celebration of peace,” the Winter Olympic Games,
served as hideouts for Serbian army snipers. A
concrete bottom of the bobsled track still shows
holes fitting exactly the barrels of sniper guns
aiming at whoever happened to walk along the city
streets below.
To get to them with heavy military technology
was a nearly impossible task. “We constantly
launched small attacks to surprise the snipers and
steal some of their ammunition. Sometimes we
succeeded in pushing Yugoslav camps a bit farther
beyond the city limits, sometimes it was just a
desperate attempt to interrupt shooting,” Divjak
says. His men gathered in different places of the
besieged
city.
The
Sarajevans’
military
headquarters was located in the partly collapsed
building of a former gasworks; smaller bases grew
in dozens of places in city housing developments.
The primary task for patrols was always the same:
to guard main traffic arteries and keep Serbian
soldiers beyond the boundaries of inhabited
territory.
A MISSION IN LIFE
At that time, in early 1992, thousands of
refugees fled Sarajevo. People desperately tried to
escape from places where death was an everyday
threat. UN troops, which in mid-1992 took control
of the Sarajevo airport, strived to organize
evacuation by air, but only a few thousand
Sarajevans were lucky enough to reach safety that
way. Civilian air traffic was considered excessively
risky due to snipers, but a number of ground
transports were also stopped and returned. Some
vehicles made no headway as they were showered
by bullets right after they set out on their journey.
A secure route to safety outside the territory of
the war-torn Bosnia required passage through
dozens of military checkpoints and permits from
three armies – Divjak’s Bosnian army, the occupying
Yugoslav army, and the Croatian army, which
controlled the western border of the country and
some adjacent territories. Organizers from the
ranks of the Red Cross, foreign nonprofit
organizations, and individual Sarajevans still
remember the difficulty of compiling passenger
lists. Often it took several months to contact
pertinent army delegates by mail or in person,
either on the soil of the UN-controlled airport or at
army headquarters. Sometimes soldiers would
strike names of entire families from the lists out of
pure personal hatred. In the end, fewer than
200,000 Sarajevans were able to leave the city out of
more than half a million. It is a huge number, but
still most of the population lived through the siege
until the end.
“I couldn’t just go and leave everything
behind,” Faruk Kulenovic says with a shrug,
standing in an austere office of the Sarajevo
hospital. At the beginning of the war, the head
physician of the trauma department managed to
whisk his wife and two sons to the safety of
Faruk Kulenovic was one of a handful of surgeons who stayed behind to tend to the wounded.
neighboring Croatia. But he resisted his family’s
urging to join them. “Essentially, there were two
types of people who refused to leave,” the sinewy
man in his 60s relates in a calm voice. “Those
believing that the war inferno must end any
moment, and people like me who felt their place
and mission in life were right here.”
For the duration of the siege, Kulenovic’s clinic
and a military hospital were the only facilities
performing surgeries in the city. The surgeons’
routine caseload included 100 patients a day on
average; they had to operate on people with
gunshot wounds, injuries sustained from mortar
shrapnel, torn limbs, and burns. “We divided the
day into three eight-hour shifts. Just like the sniper
shooting, admission of patients didn’t stop at night,”
Kulenovic recounts. Besides
him, only six other physicians
worked at the clinic during the
war, some of whom had not yet
completed medical studies.
Most of the 32-member team of
surgeons left the city shortly
after the fighting broke out.
To move around the city
meant sneaking along the
walls; in some streets carpets
were suspended on ropes
above the walkways to impede
the snipers’ view. City transit
almost instantly collapsed, only sparse cars were
driven by those willing to take the risk. Each time
Sarajevans ventured out of their flats they put their
lives in jeopardy, but they had no choice.
Within the first days of the siege, Serbian
soldiers cut off the electricity, gas, and water supply
to the city. At the same time, gangs of Sarajevo
criminals looted most of the city shops – with the
exception of bookstores – and households began to
quickly run out of food. Although markets offered
all kinds of goods including groceries, prices were
in West German marks and few could afford to pay
them. Social benefits that the paralyzed Sarajevo
administration was capable of disbursing were
worth about one package of coffee and for the
locals had only the symbolic meaning that the
authorities were still functioning.
Without foreign humanitarian aid, most
Sarajevans would have starved to death. Many war
witnesses can still recall the precise contents of the
humanitarian aid package that each Sarajevo
household was eligible for. A typical weekly
package for one family contained two kilograms of
flour, rice, and pasta, canned fish, oil, and washing
detergent. Aid came from around the globe.
Since winter temperatures in mountainous
Sarajevo frequently drop to minus 20 degrees
Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), the critical
task, besides supplying food, was to try and keep
people warm. Window panes, smashed by pressure
waves from exploding mortars, were replaced with
plastic foils marked with a UN logo. The locals
recall how first trees began to disappear from city
parks, followed by wooden furniture, books, and
even highly flammable magnetic tapes from reel-toreel recorders.
THE JEWISH INSTINCT
Guests of the Jewish cultural center seem
relaxed in the lazy afternoon. Tea is being served
and wrinkled men sitting by windows smoke strong
black cigarettes. A diminutive man seated amid a
group of chess players and debaters does not stand
out at first glance. A former commercial lawyer and
successful businessman, Jakob Finci will soon
celebrate his 70th birthday. Finci is one of those
who voluntarily decided to endure wartime in the
besieged city. Just as in the case of surgeon
Kulenovic, many locals are still grateful for his
decision.
“It may have been some
Jewish instinct, but we had a
hunch something very bad was
coming,” Finci says, recalling the
time when the first news of
growing tension around the city
started coming to the synagogue.
The advice for members of the
Jewish
community
was
unequivocal: renew expired
travel documents and apply for
an Israeli visa. But community
leader Finci made another
decision.
Weeks before the first shot was fired at
Sarajevo, all free space on the ground floor of the
synagogue began to fill with boxes and bags. To the
astonishment of friends and colleagues, Finci,
armed with money from a hastily organized fundraiser among families of Sarajevan Jews, hauled to
the city more than a three-month supply of durable
foodstuffs and medicine for the 1,500-member
community. Shortly after the war broke out,
however, two-thirds of the Jewish community fled
the city and it became apparent that the supplies
were excessive. So Finci’s people, first on the stairs
leading up to the synagogue, later at a nearby
abandoned shop, and finally even at the central
marketplace, began to collect orders from the sick
and distribute free drugs.
As Finci now proudly points out, their team of
two physicians and nurses alternating at an
improvised doctor’s office in the synagogue was
composed not only of Jews, but also of Bosniaks and
Serbs. And the distribution mechanism of medical
supplies worked on the same principle. “In all that
nationalist and ethnic madness, being Jewish
suddenly became an advantage. Soldiers treated us
as people who were not at the center [of the war
conflict] and who did not side with any party,” Finci
explains. For these reasons, his organization, La
Benevolencia, managed to bring in more medical
supplies by trucks even during the blockade.
Statistics from Bosnia‘s Health Ministry show that
this small Jewish organization supplied a full 40
percent of the drugs for Sarajevo during the siege.
“It may have been
some Jewish
instinct, but we had
a hunch something
very bad was
coming.”
The underground tunnel into Sarajevo is nearly one kilometer long.
THE MACHINERY OF SEGREGATION
Finci’s La Benevolencia continues operating to
this day. Although it stopped distributing medical
supplies a long time ago, it still strives to at least
partially retain its former role of a go-between
among the warring nations – by organizing
education courses, concerts, exhibitions. Just
tonight the municipal gallery is teeming with
visitors to an art opening. The hall of the gallery is
packed. Yet a foreign visitor might be puzzled.
Sarajevo is nowadays a city of cemeteries; graves
and burial places are ubiquitous. So why would
plaster miniatures of tombstones the size of a few
centimeters, on display at the gallery, spark such
interest?
According to Finci, the answer lies in their
symbolism. They represent traditional tombstones
used in the Middle Ages, when the population of the
Balkans was not divided into Serbs, Bosniaks, and
Croats, but included several allied tribes. “This is
the common history of all of us, a joint tradition in
which faith or nationality doesn’t matter,” Finci
says. “And awareness of our common roots is
something that can help us in the future.”
The understanding that Finci is trying to
achieve seems an impossible goal under the present
conditions in Bosnia. Of the country’s 4.5 million
prewar population, only half still lived in their
former homes after it was over. Some 600,000
refugees lived in camps set up in Bosnia, and
another half a million fled abroad. Those who
returned after the war often found just wreckage,
but even more frequently they found new tenants
occupying their abandoned home, who refused to
move out.
Bosnia’s constitution guarantees all returnees
the right to claim their former assets, but the reality
is different. Legal proceedings would drag on for a
decade with no ruling. Pouring oil into the fire has
been an unspoken effort to convert Sarajevo’s
mixed neighborhoods into strictly Muslim or Serb
colonies like in most of the Bosnian territory. Today
the country is still divided into two administrative
units – the Republika Srpska and the Federation of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population
composed mostly of Bosniaks, Croats, and other
ethnicities. Both administrations are under the
umbrella of a third, central government, still
cooperating with a special EU mission.
This
postwar
administrative
machinery,
observing the composition of the population in
different parts of Bosnia, was proposed as an
interim solution but is still in place. Local
commentators attribute the inability to change that
not just to an increased interest in numerous
ministerial positions (some 50 seats in all three
governments are up for grabs during elections), but
also to lingering distrust that inhibits the Bosnian
society’s efforts to move forward. In addition, most
parliamentary parties base their political programs
on an escalation of conflicts between Muslims and
the rest of the population. Ethnic division of
elementary schools is a common practice; Serb and
Muslim children are taught under one roof but are
segregated, because most parents want it so.
The underground tunnel into Sarajevo is now a popular
site for tourists and backpackers.
HARD TIMES
Naturally, this situation has had an impact on
the country’s economy. Statistics show that the
government’s administrative expenses account for
over 40 percent of Bosnia’s budget annually. The
country suffers from unemployment of over 40
percent, a crumbling social welfare system, and an
obsolete and costly health care system. Most young
Bosnians cite as their main goal in life emigration
to Western Europe or the United States.
Even local observers are reluctant to predict
the future development of Bosnia’s politics. Most
believe the current interim administration will go
on for decades. At the same time, there has been
news lately about politicians from the Serbian
entity seriously considering a definitive division of
the country into two territories. (both the UN and
the European Union reject this solution due to the
persisting ethnic mix of the population; no postwar
treaty makes it acceptable either).
Is there any peaceful solution to this situation?
“As long as barriers continue to exist in the minds
of common people, politics can’t be expected to
change that,” says Vildana Selimbegovic, editor in
chief of Oslobodenie, the most influential Bosnian
daily. In her view, it is important to dismantle as
quickly as possible the segregation practices of the
Bosnian education system and strive to prevent the
formation
of
strictly
Serb
and
Muslim
neighborhoods.
Selimbegovic, a former Sarajevo war reporter,
believes that the four-year blockade that united the
city population in its burdensome legacy could
work as a key memento. Perhaps that is the reason
why Sarajevo is so keen on opening numerous war
museums. The best-known, though minimal in size,
opened years ago at the place of an almost
kilometer-long tunnel dug by Sarajevans halfway
through the siege, which led beyond the enemy
line. From a hidden place in a Sarajevo suburb, the
bulk of food and arms, diesel oil, and even
electricity flowed through the tunnel to the city.
Projects recalling life during the blockade are
sprouting on the Internet, and a siege museum has
been designed to be built right in the historical
heart of the city. What the locals deem most
important is that none of the foregoing suggests any
anti-Serb or other ethnic sentiment. “All takes place
at the level of common trauma that has united the
city,” Sarajevo film director Haris Pasovic explains.
It is his craft – art – that could encourage the
younger generations to reconsider their dreams of
emigration. Pasovic’s Film and Theater Academy
has earned a reputation as a prestigious school
attracting hundreds of Bosnian and foreign
students. And there might be more opportunities.
Former prominent war figures like Divjak
represent important elements of Bosnia’s nascent
elite. Almost immediately after the end of fighting,
in the mid-1990s, Divjak formed a foundation
distributing stipends for students to attend Western
European universities. Nearly 1,000 gifted
Sarajevans have won the stipends to date. Divjak’s
foundation
aims
to
establish
long-term
collaboration with the stipend recipients so they
would return to the Bosnian capital with their
newly acquired knowledge.
The foundation has been successful so far, but
Divjak himself is not too surprised. People form a
relationship with Sarajevo for their whole lives, the
general explains. And once they fall for the city,
they will always want to come back. “Behind all the
suffering and problems, we can clearly see a story
of people’s perseverance and tenacity leading to the
desired outcome,” the retired general proclaims
with a mighty dose of pride. “Who was born here
wants to die here, too.”
Tomas Sacher is a report for Respekt, a weekly
magazine in Prague. Photos by Matej Stransky.
“The Tension in the Western Balkans
Will Persist for a Long Time”
By András Németh
December 11, 2012
Mladen Ivanic was born in 1958 in
Sanski Most, Northern Bosnia. He
graduated from the Belgrade University
with a Ph.D. He later studied in Mannheim
and at the University of Glasgow. He began
his career as a journalist before changing
his career path in 1985, when he started
teaching at first in Banja Luka, and then at
the University of Sarajevo. During the
disintegration of Yugoslavia that took place
from 1988 to 1991, he was a member of the
office of the President of Bosnia. In 2001, he
was elected prime minister of Republika
Srpska, one of the entities composing the
Bosnian federal state. From 2003 to 2007,
he served as the Bosnian Minister of
Foreign Affairs. He is currently the vice
president of the federal parliament and
president of one of the largest Bosnian Serb
opposition blocs, the Democratic Progress
Party. He has not abandoned teaching, and
currently conducts post-graduate training
courses in Banja Luka in cooperation with
the University of Sussex and the University
of Bologna.
Things seem to develop rather slowly in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. There is still no agreement
between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims about
the constitution and the economy is still in
recession.
MI: Yes, the unemployment is approaching 40
percent in RepubliKa Srpska and there are still no
investments, so it is a miracle that anything works
at all. The biggest problem is that we have no
perspectives of improvement. It is difficult to find
reasons to invest in our country, while you can find
at least a hundred arguments against such an idea.
When the civil war ended in Bosnia in 1995,
billions of dollars of investments and aid
poured into the former Yugoslav republic, and
for several years the development of the country
was fast-paced. What has changed since then?
MI: There is a general lack of confidence in the
political system and the country’s stability.
Foreigners say that there is security, but only while
the office of the High Representative in Sarajevo is
still open. Nobody knows what will come after its
closure which, according to the plans, may happen
pretty soon. One can expect major changes only
when a new generation of politicians will appear.
They should be able to bypass the endless debates
about the constitution and be capable of focusing
on practical things instead. The debate surrounding
basic laws is currently frozen, and it will take at
least fifty years to reach an agreement on how to
run the country.
Your openly pro-secessionist political rival,
Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, has been in
power for several years in Republika Srpska. Do
you see any chances for his replacement?
MI: Not yet, but the opposition is finally united,
and I hope that we will be able to win a majority in
four large cities, Bijeljina, Doboj,
Trebinje and Gradiska. The
feelings of the voters are
changing, Dodik has already lost
one fifth of his supporters and
will
not
win
the
next
parliamentary elections. He will
be defeated because he has
talked a lot, but accomplished
nothing tangible.
Can that be attributed to
his nationalism?
MI: All the political parties
in Bosnia are nationalist, and all
of them are talking about
national issues. We do that too.
The difference is that Dodik and
his
cronies
need
such
nationalistic rhetoric to wield
their power. Seven years ago, he
was
an
advocate
of
multiculturalism, and that is
how he managed to secure the
support of the international
community. He then realized that, if he sticks to
that line, he will not be able to stay in power for
long. Approximately 90 or even 95 percent of our
voters are Serbs, while the supporters of the Social
Democratic Party, which claims to be a multiethnic
party, are mostly Muslims. A country like ours can
only operate like this.
What could the way out be?
MI: When I was Prime Minister, I always said
that we could succeed only by cutting the oversized
public sector and by reducing taxes. We can be
competitive only by keeping the costs low. Seven or
eight years ago, many Croatian and Serbian
companies were registered i nBosnia due to the low
taxes, and it was worth investing in the country.
Dodik and his government raised the taxes, and
now the capital outflow exceeds the amount of new
investment.
What is the relationship between Republica
Srpska and the federal state with its centre in
Sarajevo?
How can the common state of
Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croatian
federation be strengthened?
MI: This is nonsense. I do not deal with such
issues. Bosnia cannot have a single head of state, a
single government and parliament in the
foreseeable future. And none of its composing
entities can separate from Bosnia at this point. The
Dayton Agreement ending the civil war was
difficult enough to reach, and since then there has
been little consensus among us about anything at
all. It is obvious for all of us that this political
context will not change for a long time to come.
Anyone who speaks about the independence of the
Republika Srpska or about the
unitary Bosnian state does this
only to collect votes.
Will Bosnia-Herzegovina
continue to exist as it is now?
MI: Its people have learned
to live together, but the
politicians
refuse
to
acknowledge the existence of
the word compromise. The
Croats want a Croatian entity,
the Bosniaks are preaching
about strengthening the central
power, while the Serbs want to
secede. Keeping the country
together would need some level
of
cooperation,
but
the
politicians prefer to incite
hostility in order to stay in
power.
Your heroes are those
Serbian
soldiers
dubbed
chetnik war criminals by
Sarajevo. The Muslims celebrated in the capital
are mass murderers in your eyes. Is it possible
to rule a common state in such conditions?
MI: I have no idea. It is not by chance that I did
not give a clear answer to your previous question.
No one knows what will happen to Bosnia in a few
years’ time, it could remain one country mainly
because of the local presence of the international
community. In Republika Srpska, 90 percent of the
politicians and voters would probably vote for the
secession, and the vast majority of Croats would
also opt for the secession of the Croatian regions.
The French and the Germans had been
killing each other for centuries, but 12 years
after World War II, they initiated the Common
Market, and by now they have formed a
strategic partnership. In Bosnia, the civil war
ended 17 years ago, but there is still no
cooperation between the various parties. Who is
responsible for this failure?
MI: The international community is not
responsible for this. We are unable to step over our
own shadows. We have been unable to restore the
trust between our ethnic communities because
there have been too many wars and hostilities
between them. Peace will only come if the country
becomes part of a larger entity. We never had
periods of tranquility when we were independent,
but we did when we were a part of the Ottoman
Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or
Yugoslavia. During those times, the national issues
were somehow removed from the agenda. I am not
necessarily talking about the European Union when
mentioning such an entity. It may be a new kind of
regional cooperation among our countries.
According to public opinion polls, the
popularity of a EU membership is decreasing.
Why?
MI: Because people are less and less interested
in that. They say that, by the time we will get the
membership, the European Union will fall apart
anyway. The EU is too far away from us, people
consider it a beautiful fairy tale that has nothing to
do with everyday life. And they do not know
enough about it, because Europe has been off-limits
to us for a long time. The partial abolition of the
visa regime was one of the few things that brought
a small change in this respect.
people want the same independence that Kosovo
Albanians have. The answer was that Kosovo was
different from Bosnia. But when I wanted to know
what the difference was, I received no answer.
How harmful is for the region the fact that,
a few months ago, formerly aggressive
nationalists have become members of the
Serbian coalition government (in Belgrade)?
MI: Neighboring countries as well as EU
member states will continue to monitor Belgrade
for a few more years. Serbia will still be invited to
regional meetings, but the number of bilateral
meetings will decrease significantly. However,
there will be no major policy changes, the members
of the present government may use tougher
rhetoric than the former head of state Boris Tadic,
but Belgrade will remain a pro-EU country willing
to cooperate. The independence of Kosovo,
however, will not be recognized.
The process of integration cannot speed up,
because Bosnia is not meeting the criteria.
MI: Yes, because politicians are not interested
in integration: it is much easier for them to
manipulate people, if Bosnia is alone.
The situation is not calm in Kosovo, the
other multiethnic state of the region, either.
What are the future prospects of that former
province of Serbia?
MI: Kosovo has been a serious problem for a
long time. The lesson that Kosovo teaches other
separatist entities is that, if someone is violent
enough and creates an army, it eventually reaches
its goal. But those who think that Serbia will soon
accept the independence of its former province are
completely wrong. And this means that the tension
in the Western Balkans will remain high for a long
time. The Serbs and the Albanians should be forced
to conclude a compromise amongst themselves. No
matter what the agreement will be, no external
decision should be forced upon these two nations.
But the Serbs and the Albanians have been
negotiating different issues for decades, and
have never agreed on any major issue so far.
MI: That’s because one of them was always the
favorite. As long as you have the support behind
you, you will not compromise. In the 1980s, for
example,Serbia was the favorite. When I was the
Foreign Minister of Bosnia, I told my colleagues
attending
a
European
meeting
that
the
independence of Kosovo was not a good idea. If
Kosovo is allowed to become independent, why is
Republika Srpska not allowed to do the same? Our
András Németh is a reporter for HVG. This article
originally appeared in the daily newspaper HVG.
Photos by András Németh.
by Andrej Ban
December 17, 2012
Vukowar and Peace
VUKOVAR, Croatia- Sometimes, after having
had enough of life on the mainland, Ivica Franic, a
Vukovar war veteran, comes to the winter marina
or the „parking lot“ of his ten meter long aluminum
ship. He built the ship with his own hands in four
and a half months. All the comfort you can think of
is at hand on the ship. He can eat and sleep there,
and it can even be heated in winter. Now is the
time of the year when Franic cruises the few
kilometers along the Croatian part of the Danube
river, while enjoying himself. „I cruise alone most
of the time. I do have girlfriends, though,“ the
massive man with big hands smiles knowingly.
Things are quite clear for Franic. In his view,
the real culprits for the Yugoslavian wars were
never tried and hence, never sentenced by the ICTY
Hague tribunal: „My 17-year-old stepbrother was
killed just because he was my brother. But then
again, he had a Serbian father and Croatian
mother.“ He has bitter words to say about Tomislav
Nikolic, the current Serbian president: „He must
never be allowed to enter Croatia. He was
photographed with men in the chetnik uniforms, do
you understand what this means?“ Franic has no
high hopes about the EU accession of his country.
„For my generation, it will bring nothing
spectacular. However, the elimination of borders
A war memorial in Vukovar
will provide new possibilities for the young.“
By the way, how about the elimination of
borders? It was here in Vukovar that the tensions
between opposed ethnic groups largely subsided.
On the other hand, Drago Hedl, a journalist with the
daily Jutarnji list made a good point when he wrote
that: “Are these groups still divided by an invisible
glass wall? This city is frequented by groups of
journalists, including from the foreign media,
wanting to find out whether Croats, who are the
majority, live „together“ with Serbs, or rather „side
by side“. The journalists, however, need not probe
deeply and search for barriers, because the former
take on reality is true. The irony of fate, though,
makes old traumas reappear. Such was the recent
case of a Serbian woman who criticized the
Croatian state for failing to repair a school. Her
husband, though, was one of the chetnik fighters
who threw grenades at the school during the war.
Let‘s return back to Franic, though. A former
colonel in law enforcement, he retired six years
ago. His family gives meaning to his life, along with
his ship, water, and the Danube island of Mala Ada.
The location can be seen from downtown Vukovar.
The head of the Danube Sports and Fishing
Association that has 500 active members (one fifth
of them being Serbs), Franic organized a number of
voluntary work events in Mala Ada over the past
few years. The result is breathtaking: they planted
200 trees on the island with sandy beaches, built
two playgrounds for beach volleyball, and a
number of shelters and restaurants. Furthermore,
each year in June on the Danube Day, they would
give away a thousand portions of fish soup. The
inhabitants of Vukovar hunt for crayfish in the
clear water, relax and engage in sports. And,
they’ve mostly forgotten about what their elders
went through.
„There was a primeval forest and we also
cultivated parts of the area,“ Franic says with pride
when showing the pictures of the island on his cell
phone. „However, the Yugoslavian army shelled
Vukovar from Mala Ada during the war. The
helicopters took off, fired a rocket and then landed
back to safety. The only thing you could do was to
pray that their engines would stall,” he says after a
pause.
Heroes and traitors
Croatia has long deserved accession to the
Union, although the country had to wait for five
years for the arrest and trial of Ante Gotovina and
two other generals. However, a Hague court
recently acquitted them of all charges due to lack of
evidence about the war crimes they allegedly
committed against the Croatian Serbs during the
Storm (Oluja) operation. Today, Gotovina is a
national hero for Croatians, while for Serbs, the
court in Hague lost the little credibility it ever had.
The people in Belgrade speak about selective
responsibility. However, each year at the end of
November, they devoutly remember the fall of
Vukovar in 1991. The city was conquered by the
Yugoslavian army and Serbian paramilitary units
that committed many massacres and war crimes.
The most atrocious of them all was the execution of
about 260 injured Croatian fighters and medical
staff from the Vukovar hospital, which occurred on
a nearby pig farm in Ovcara, now a memorial site.
The local people would like to forget about the
war and how the world betrayed them, but they
can‘t. They celebrate their generals instead. In
Croatia, they are certainly far greater heroes than
politicians. One of the politicians, Ivo Sander, was
Once a widely recognizable symbols of Vukovar, the city’s
water tower, frequently targeted during the siege, won’t
be restored. Instead, it will remain in its present shape to
serve as a memorial.
Once a thriving multi-ethnic city with beautiful baroque
architecture, Vukovar was completely destroyed in 1991
completely. Today life is returning to the city.
an former Prime Minister who was recently
sentenced in Zagreb to ten years in prison for a
large scale corruption scheme taking place between
2003 and 2009, while he was in office. He had
allegedly receive over 12 million Euro in bribes
from the Hungarian MOL concern and the Bank of
Austria.
Ivana Ivankovic, a journalist from Zagreb,
speaks about the deep frustration that pervades the
Croatian society before the EU accession. The
research shows that 48 to 52 percent of people
support the EU accession. In her opinion, Croatian
people are not really interested in Europe. This can
change, however, if some countries, the
neighboring Slovenia in particular, would try to
hinder the process. „Sanader is today the most
hated person in Croatia. At the same time, people
realize that it‘s correct to show Brussels that we can
hold even a top-notch politician accountable,
although he, ironically perhaps, did the greatest
work for EU accession,“ says Ivankovic. She adds
that the general disgust in politics also increased
due to the case of Radimir Cacic, the first Deputy
Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, who had
to recently resign after being convicted of causing a
traffic accident in Hungary in which two people
died. You can add the falling Croatian economy for
the fourth straight year, and the rising
unemployment which ranked as the third highest in
the Union after Greece and Spain. „The only good
news is the fact that we experienced the best tourist
season in our history,“ says Ivankovic.
Violence against urbanism
Two months, three weeks and three days. This
is how long the siege and the war itself lasted in
1991 in Vukovar after Croatia‘s declaration of
independence. The multiethnic city of 40,000
inhabitants who once had beautiful baroque
architecture saw, on one side, 1,800 lightly armed
defenders of the Croatian National Guard, among
whom 10 percent were Serbs, plus some 300 police
officers and 1,100 civilian volunteers. Against them
stood a vast force of 36,000 heavily armed soldiers
of the Yugoslavian army (JNA) and Serbian
paramilitary units that „took care“ of the ethnic
cleansing. The war resulted in more than two and
half thousands of victims on both sides. A total of
700,000 grenades and rockets fell on the city where
starving civilians hid in cellars for many months. At
times, the city was shelled by 12,000 rockets and
grenades a day. Vukovar became the first city in
Europe that was completely destroyed after World
War II.
Many JNA soldiers refused to obey orders after
seeing the effects on the city defenders and
civilians. Afraid of dropping the morale, the
commanders ordered shooting against their own
positions and the suicide rate rose. At the end of
October, a JNA unit of Novy Sad refused to attack
the Borovo Naselje outskirt of Vukovar, and fled
instead. Vladimír Zivkovic, a tank driver, lost his
nerve and drove his tank from the Vukovar front
line all the way to the parliament building in
Belgrade where he was arrested. His mutiny
provoked a chain reaction. „We are no traitors but
we do not want to be aggressors,“ many JNA
soldiers shouted in the media.
The siege ended tragically with the fall of the
city, and the killings and lootings that followed. Up
until 1998 when Vukovar was handed over to
Croatia, the city was administered by the United
Nations. Remarkably enough, many Serbian
inhabitants who lived here for generations in peace
with their Croatian, German, Jewish or Ruthenian
neighbors refused to listen to the propaganda sent
by the warmongering Milosevic from Belgrade.
They did quite the opposite and defended the city
together with the Non-Serbs. And when many
Croatian refugees were leaving the city, they
preferred to give the keys from their homes to
Serbian neighbors whom they trusted, rather than
to the Croatian police. On the other hand, the Serbs
who settled down here after WWII and the
displacement of Germans behaved aggressively.
Deep down, their motivation was the destruction of
urban multiculturalism. Bogdan Bogdanovic, a
former mayor of Belgrade, described the war in
Vukovar as „urbicide“, that is, violence against
urbanism.
A city of parallel worlds
Croatians and Serbians live together in
Vukovar, rather than in separate enclaves. There is,
however, one place where Franic, the war veteran,
would never go. It is the Serbian restaurant
Mornar, or „The Sailor“. He would be never able to
cross the entrance marked by a neon sign in
Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Nowadays, the identity of
Vukovar is represented by traces of war shoved
under the carpet, new opulent glass and steel
buildings, as well old houses damaged by bullets in
the plaster. Also, there is a polarity caused by
memories of raids by „chetniks“ (Serbs) and
„Ustashi“ (Croatians). There are unrepaired houses,
mostly Serbian ones, as well as new apartments for
those who returned. Vukovar also means a bitter
memory of President Franjo Tudjman who refused
to evacuate the women and children during the
A monument in remembrance of 260 patients and hospital
staff killed by Serb troops at Ovcara farm.
war. It also means the honorable memory of Boris
Tadic who visited the city as the first President of
Serbia and bowed to the victims of war. Today, it is
the bitter taste left by the words said by Mr. Nikolic,
the current President of Serbia. In May 2012, before
the second round of presidential elections took
place, Nikolic admitted in the interview for the
daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that „there
are dreams that cannot be fulfilled, such as the
dream of Big Serbia“. When asked whether he
knows that there are more Serbs [in Vukovar] today
than ten years ago, he responded that Vukovar used
to be a Serbian city, so Croatians have no business
in returning there.
Vukovarians know what they know. They know
that the time of wars and parallel lives is now over.
About half of the pre-war population returned to
the city where now every fourth adult has no job.
Hundreds of people are still missing. Pain knows no
nationality. Both Serbians and Croatians established
anonymous phone call centers where people can
report findings of human remains. There are no
minority schools, only those where the instruction
is in Serbian, albeit with the Croatian curriculum.
Zeljko Sabo, a Croatian and the current mayor,
represents a nice example. Even though during the
war he was deported to Serbian camps and he lived
horrible things, he says that he does not identify the
language and writing with the war. „I don‘t mind
the Cyrillic writing. If more than 33 percent of the
total population in Vukovar is Serbian – and the
limit has almost been reached – they will have the
right to use their language in official dealings,“ says
Sabo. He adds that „We have restored the pre-war
multiethnicity. The city sends the clear message that
all minorities represent its wealth.“ The mayor
emphasizes that, over the fifteen years since the
end of peaceful reintegration of Vukovar, under the
UN administration until 1998, not a single incident
or crime related to the war in 1991 occurred, and
this says more than anything else.
ANDREJ BÁN is a reporter for Tyzden. This article
originally appeared in Tyzden. Translated by
Lubomír Groch.
by Silvie Lauder
July 9, 2012
Taming Volcanos
REYKJAVIK, Iceland | Icelanders sometimes
liken their lives to that of a fly perched atop an
anvil. They have to be constantly on alert because a
crushing strike of the hammer may come at any
moment. On a volatile piece of hot land amidst the
cool Atlantic Ocean, the hammer is constituted by
more than thirty active volcanos. Their human cohabitants have already learned to both dodge and
harness the tremendous power. And the country
that has barely recovered from a financial crisis
today views the tempestuous landscape with
renewed hope.
Inga spent her childhood haunted by
nightmares of molten lava flowing toward her
home. When it eventually happened, it was a relief.
“And there it was, the volcano finally erupted,” the
amiable blonde shares in perfect English. “Now we
know what it’s like and that we can survive it.”
Although Inga Júlia Ólafsdóttir (27) is strolling
along a field of lush green barley and behind her
looms a silo and cows are mooing, she hardly looks
like a farmer’s daughter. With straight platinum
bangs, pink nail polish and a black miniskirt she
looks more like the cool young Icelanders in
Reykjavík’s coffee shops. The impression is correct;
just two years ago Inga still belonged to the city
crowd.
The eruption Inga talks about is that of
Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that erupted in the
spring of 2010 after it had been dormant beneath
the glacier for nearly two centuries. The following
week, apprehensions about the impact on jet
engines of tonnes of volcanic ash spewed out by the
volcano resulted in cancellations of more than a
hundred thousand flights. The event, perceived by
the rest of Europe and the global press as a threat to
civilization (Obama will not attend Polish President
Kaczynski’s funeral! Thousands of passengers
stranded at airports, costs amounting to billions!),
was, in the context of Iceland’s history, a mere
episode of little importance.
I WON’T GIVE UP
That’s exactly how Icelanders looked at it. “It is
just as well that we have foreign media – thanks to
them we learned there was a state of emergency in
Iceland. And we would have thought nothing
extraordinary had happened,” wrote political
commentator Egill Helgason when the eruption was
at its peak. Aside from similar sarcastic comments,
newspaper stories contained words of relief that
Eyjafjallajökull caused some distraction from
endless debates about the repercussions of the
Inga Júlia Ólafsdóttir near her family’s farm next to a
glacier and the volcano Eyjafjallajökull
financial crisis that brought the country to its knees
in 2008.
The first impression from the plains sprawling
directly under the volcano reaffirms the
descriptions of a “cute” eruption, as Iceland’s
people still dub Eyjafjallajökull’s awakening. One
has to employ a great deal of imagination to link
this idyllic scene with volcanic activity. Fuzzy
sheep and stocky Nordic horses are lazily grazing
in vast grassy valleys, where the eye never meets a
tree under the cloudless sky, and rivers fed by the
glacier and branching out into dozens of streams
are running fast into the sparkling sea. The breathtaking landscape is only sparsely populated by a
farm or a cottage belonging to some Reykjavík
inhabitants who need to make a 90-minute journey
south to get here.
Only when the wind starts blowing grey ash
from higher altitudes that grinds between teeth of
both sheep and people can we gauge what force of
nature we are faced with. One part of the glacier
capping Eyjafjallajökull reaches out into the
Markarfljót valley like a finger: this ice mass,
normally pure white with turquoise glints, is still
ashy grey and the surrounding landscape looks like
a barren alien planet – no birds disturb the silence
and not a single leaf adorns the blackness of
volcanic ash and lava rocks. Sheep used to graze up
there too, but after a hasty evacuation they never
returned. This is where the flow of “jökullhlaup”,
which is the local name for a muddy mix of
volcanic ash, rocks and water produced by
Eyjafjallajökull (similarly to any ice-capped
volcano), rolled down after the eruption.
The final bill for some two thousand local
people shows why this eruption has earned such a
lenient nickname. Icelanders have experienced
much less cute eruptions. For instance, after an
eruption of the Laki volcano in the summer of 1783,
when in excess of a hundred craters forming a 25kilometre-long chain had spewed out ash and lava
for eight months, one-fifth of the island’s
population (more than ten thousand people) and
most of their animals died. Those who survived
faced starvation because ash smothered some of
the crops and the rest failed due to subsequent
rapid weather changes.
Eyjafjallajökull – since its power was only onethousandth of Laki’s explosion – did not claim a
single human or animal life. Of some hundred and
fifty local farms only one was closed down. Repair
of the damage cost millions, but it was covered
partly by insurance and partly by government
compensation.
The story of the Thorvaldseyri farm where Inga
is from has also had a good ending, at least for the
time being, even though its thousand hectares of
fields and pastures with a two-hundred-head herd
of cows and dozens of sheep are located right
under the south edge of the volcano. For weeks on
end, the wind blowing from the volcano emitting
tonnes of ash had blown toward the farm that
Inga’s great-grandfather purchased more than a
century ago and now her parents and brother run.
Their testimony is evidence that, as “cute” as the
eruption was, it was still dramatic to be unable to
see a thing and hear scared animals wailing in the
darkness. The family feared they would lose the
farm. But Inga’s mother quickly restored her
Icelandic composure, “Yes, we thought we wouldn’t
be able to farm here afterward, that it was the end.
But [we thought that] only for a day. Then we
decided we wouldn’t give up.”
The aftermath of the eruption has been
affecting the farmers to date. They have yet to put
back into operation their mini-hydroelectric power
plant built by Inga’s enterprising grandfather in the
1920s that had made Thorvaldseyri energy selfsufficient. The sediment of volcanic ash in the
water keeps clogging the machinery. But there is
also a surprisingly long list of positive effects of the
eruption: for instance, volcanic ash has proved its
“fertilizing” reputation. “We haven’t had to use any
fertilizers since the eruption,” Inga confirms.
In a hut they originally rented for pressing
rape seed oil, a year ago they built a visitors’ minicentre and a souvenir shop through which thirtythree thousand visitors have passed since.
Incidentally, a family friend – filmmaker – was just
shooting a documentary about the farm at the time
of eruption. A tranquil farmer’s portrait was
instantly transformed into a testimonial of a
victorious fight against the volcano that is now
Volcanologist Karolina Michalczewska at work.
shown in the centre.
In addition, the family
realized that while they were struggling to get rid of
tonnes of volcanic ash, tourists collected it as a
souvenir. The result of this equation is extra
income that has helped Thorvaldseyri’s owners get
back in the black two years after they almost gave
up amidst the volcanic darkness.
ICE AND FIRE
Iceland is volcanos. Literally and symbolically.
Without them the island would not have come into
existence. “Without volcanic activity Iceland would
still be sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,”
says Iceland’s leading volcanologist Haraldur
Sigurdsson.
Volcanos are also responsible for
expansion of Iceland’s territory; when the Katla
volcano (a larger neighbour of Eyjafjallajökull)
erupted in 1918, the southern coastline of the island
stretched out into the sea by several kilometres. The
area of the Heimaey island in the Vestmannaeyjar
archipelago, located some twenty kilometres south
of Iceland, was enlarged by one-fifth after an
eruption of the Eldfell volcano in 1973, while the
molten lava conveniently remodelled the local sea
port. A decade before an undersea volcano created
a brand new island, Surtsey, that today is Iceland’s
southernmost territory and scientific laboratory in
one. Volcanos contribute to Iceland’s existence in
yet another way: an almost treeless country suffers
from severe erosion and volcanos at least slow
down the “crumbling” process.
When this piece of land in the northern part of
the Atlantic Ocean was initially discovered by Irish
monks at the end of the 8th century and later by
Vikings, its tumultuous volcanic development was
far from over (and is not up to this day). Which is
what they must have found out right away; soil
analyses show that shortly before the arrival of first
settlers one of the volcanos had erupted and the
island was covered with volcanic ash. And the
settlers’ descendants have seen evidence over and
over: of thirty active volcanic systems, thirteen
have erupted at least once since the beginning of
settlement, one eruption every five years on
average. Over that time, the record-holders Hekla
and Katla have woken up seventeen and thirteen
times, respectively. “The volcanos have done their
best to get rid of people,” says Páll Einarsson,
professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth
Sciences of the University of Iceland, laughing. “But
they failed”.
They have scored partial success though:
following the Laki disaster, the Danes considered
an evacuation of the island’s population to the
mainland, since Iceland was then under the Danish
Crown. But the Icelanders rejected the invitation,
allegedly with the words, “Better live with volcanos
than with occupiers!” A hundred years later,
however, after more eruptions, sheep epidemics
and famines, several thousand islanders left the
country, in particular for Canada. Only about a
century ago the humans began to catch up in their
uneven struggle against volcanos, specifically when
Icelanders started figuring out not just how to best
map out volcanic activity and protect themselves
against it, but also how to use their fiery mountains
to their benefit. The number of victims has fallen to
a minimum (conversely, Iceland’s population has
risen from sixty thousand before the Second World
War to more than three hundred thousand at
present), and the small island community began to
prosper from the volcanos. Today, Icelanders are
intrepid amateur volcanologists who discuss
volcanos at coffee shops, create art about them, and
never miss a close sighting of an eruption.
POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT
Lake Kleifarvatn is located thirty kilometres
south of Reykjavík. The landscape there is typically
devoid of any human activity within sight, with
endless lava plains with moss of all shades of
brown growing all over them. It is morning and
Karolina Michalczewska’s (28) gigantic Toyota SUV
has just climbed a nearly impassable path to one of
the peaks on the south side of the lake. Here, driven
into the ground amidst rocks, is a barely visible
metal “point”, and above it is a GPS station which
continuously monitors its position in collaboration
with a satellite. Karolina, a doctoral graduate
student at the University of Iceland and a native of
Krakow, Poland, accompanied by another student,
Telma, exchanges the battery that powers the
station and downloads into her notebook all data
collected over the past week. She also checks
whether the point is in the right position. Later, in
her office at the Institute of Earth Sciences of the
University of Iceland in Reykjavík, she analyses
data from this station (and another thirty she
regularly checks in the region) and inputs the
results in graphs and tables. For the past two years,
the tables have shown a discernible trend: the land
in the region lifts and sinks in regular periods. The
Polish scientist’s research has unearthed other
peculiarities of Iceland’s co-existence with volcanos,
which attract a great number of foreign scientists,
who are in turn often amazed at the expertise and
enthusiasm of the local population. A few days later
in Reykjavík, Gro Birkefeldt Müller Pedersen, a
Danish geologist specialized in volcanic formations
on Mars, elatedly confides that finally she has
found a place where she feels people understand
what she is doing. “When you say in Denmark that
you study lava structures, people have no idea what
you’re talking about; here, they instantly ask for
specifics and know what it’s all about,” says Gro.
The land movement at Lake Kleifarvatn has
also been keenly observed. “People keep calling, the
public interest is tremendous,” Karolina observes
with laughter. But there is no need to call. Instead,
one can just make a few clicks with a mouse.
Scientists gathering data all over Iceland don’t keep
it for themselves, but post it on their website in
collaboration with Icelandic meteorologists. In
addition to Karolina Michalczewska’s tables with
her findings, the web shows data from the entire
island mapping out occurrence, strength and other
specifics of earthquakes for the past forty-eight
hours. Every day, the map of Iceland is dotted with
colourful marks: for instance, red circular dots
represent an almost direct transmission of mild
tremors, i.e. tremors measuring up to 3 on the
Richter scale occurring within the past four hours.
(Tremors of higher magnitude are marked with
asterisks.)
When scientists mention that Icelanders absorb
the data on volcanos during their morning coffee, it
sounds a bit pompous, but it’s the reality: farmers,
tour guides, civil servants, journalists and the
general public, they all do it. “I take a look at it
about every couple of days,” says photographer
Bjarki Gudmundsson at a coffee shop in downtown
Reykjavík, nodding. “It calms me down. I like to
know what’s going on.” No wonder these amateur
volcanologists are well aware why they should be
interested in a piece of volatile land at Lake
Kleifarvatn, even though it moves only a few
centimetres. When the land moves in an area
smelling like rotten eggs and vapours are rising
from many places, it might mean it is expanding
prior to an eruption. “It might, but it needn’t. An
eruption may occur, yet we don’t know when and
we don’t know how big it will be,” Karolina
Michalczewska acknowledges.
Although some foreign media, especially in the
United Kingdom, once again paint a near-disaster
scenario for Reykjavík, the locals don’t fret. And
even if some volcano eventually does erupt,
residents can be expected to run not away from it,
but exactly in the opposite direction, as happened
many times in the past. When Iceland’s most
notorious volcano Hekla reawakened in the winter
of 2000, rescue workers had to help thousands of
Icelanders. However, they were not pulling them
from the crater of the raging volcano, but from
traffic jams and snow banks in which cars with
curious passengers from all over the country got
stuck. Old people, young children and pregnant
women, they all wanted to see Hekla. “The eruption
started on Saturday exactly at the time of the main
evening news, so everybody immediately knew
about it, and the moment thousands of people
arrived there a huge snowstorm began,” Páll
Einarsson recalls. “Volcano watching is popular
entertainment for Icelanders and it’s hardly
surprising – it’s a wonderful show where nature
demonstrates what it can do.”
OPEN GAME
Naturally,
the
often-mentioned
volcano
Eyjafjallajökull also caused a lot of excitement
among the local residents that some remember
better than the eruption itself. Margaret
Rundlfdóttir (75) was born in London, but during
forty-five years of farming in a remote corner of the
Markarfljót valley she completely forgot the hustle
and bustle of the big city. Recently, Margaret
handed her sheep farm to her daughter and has
since enjoyed the serene life and breath-taking
scenery scarcely disturbed by human activity. The
Rundlfssons’ farm is situated on a slope facing the
volcano, providing a good, yet safe view. That’s why
an “observation station” was built near their house
and local authorities directed there forty thousand
cars and two hundred buses just the first week after
the explosion. “Never before had we seen so many
people here,” the retired farmer shakes her head,
while sitting at the glass-walled veranda of her
house. “Even the Japanese were here, which I didn’t
understand at all. Why would they come look at our
tiny volcano when they have so many at home and
much bigger ones!”
People are attracted to the fiery cones even
when those are momentarily dormant. Painter
Arngunnur Ýr Gylfadóttir, who returned home with
her American husband after years spent in San
Francisco and Amsterdam, captures volcanos in her
paintings, and also buys land around them. “I’m
just irresistibly attracted to them, they are so
fascinating,” says Arngunnur. They inspire writers,
musicians, architects. A new concert and
conference centre, Harpa, which opened in
Reykjavík last spring, is a tribute to Iceland’s
landscape and volcanos. Although the panelling at
this latest gem of the nation’s architecture is not
made from genuine lava rock, its dark grey colour
and porous structure were designed to remind of it.
The main concert hall is completely decorated in
dark red and named after the Eldborg volcano, the
“flaming castle” in western Iceland. The glasspanelled facade is made of parts shaped to
resemble hexagonal crystals of basalt – volcanic
rock covering ninety per cent of the island’s
territory.
This hunger for information and its generous
satiation (an opposite approach to that applied
elsewhere in the world where authorities and
scientists tend to at least partially withhold
information to prevent panic) is precisely what
some say explains the peculiar calm of Icelanders in
their relationship to volcanos. “When you tell
people everything, they won’t panic that
somewhere something is happening they don’t
know about,” says Páll Einarsson.
There are more prosaic explanations, however.
“It‘s because we’ve got lousy weather here,” says an
agile man with big glasses, gesturing. You would
never guess he is seventy-three years old. Haraldur
Sigurdsson can enthusiastically talk for hours about
his field, which he has been pursuing for forty
years and is still active at it. He spent this past
February in Papua New Guinea studying local
volcanos, while occasionally he would board a
special submarine to monitor volcanic activity
hundreds of metres under the sea level. “The
weather here is so volatile that volcanos are not
extreme; in fact, they are the standard,” explains
the legendary volcanologist who has secured a
worldwide acclaim by discovering the Pompeii of
the East, the city of Tambora on the Indonesian
island of Sumbawa, which was buried by an
eruption of the eponymous volcano in 1815.
Whereas in Hawaii volcanos mar the idyllic
paradise of pleasant temperatures and the
turquoise ocean, in Iceland they just belong to the
family of unusual natural phenomena. If you spend
three months a year in permanent daylight and
another three months in complete darkness, if you
have to rebuild bridges and roads over and over
again because unpredictable glacier rivers keep
tearing them down, if the weather changes every
hour, then you are unlikely to be really shocked by
lava shooting into the skies. According to
Sigurdsson, evidence of this goes back centuries.
Although he continues in his globe-trotting style, he
has slowed down a bit. Recently he founded a
Volcano Museum in his native Stykkishólmur on the
Snfoellsnes peninsula, displaying his own vast
collections. During his travels he also collected art
(his museum comprises stained glass from a 19th
century New York synagogue, Japanese china and
Nicaraguan naive art) and explored legends
relating to volcanos. “In many places people linked
volcanos with dreadful deities, but Icelanders
perceived them in a sober, more realistic light,” he
says. “People here feared them, respected them, but
never viewed them as something supernatural and
did not worship them out of dread.”
Indeed, old sagas and folk tales feature giant
lake worms and elves, but there are few deities
harming people through volcanos. Katla, for
example, is named after an old, morose cook, who
drowned a young herdsman. Tortured by guilt and
fearing her feat would be exposed, she jumped into
a glacier. No one ever saw the murderer after that,
but her bad blood awakened forces of nature. Later
emerged some visions of a “gate to hell” and “Judas’
imprisonment” but, as Haraldur notes, they mostly
originated from foreign sources. In the 12th
century, the French Cistercian monk Herbert of
Clairvaux described Hekla as a gate to hell, but he
never actually saw it. Local chronicles relate a tale
from around 1000 when the Icelandic parliament
Althing succumbed to Norway’s pressure and
adopted Christianity. When a nearby volcano
erupted a day after the crucial decision, some
chieftains interpreted it as the previous gods’
revenge for the betrayal. “One of the chieftains
stepped up, pointed to old lava around them and
asked what the gods punished them for when they
spewed out lava in the past,” says Sigurdsson.
“Already at that time he rejected the notion that
volcanos were controlled by gods.”
BLUE LAGOON
Vapours are rising from a small, milky opaque
pool of turquoise colour, surrounded by black lava
fields. The depth of the pool is barely to an adult’s
waistline, yet all bathers are completely submerged
in it – except for their heads. The outdoor
temperature does not exceed fifteen degrees
centigrade, but the water is a pleasant thirty-nine
degrees warm. On top of that, faces of the heads
bobbing on the pool surface and blissfully grunting
are smudged with white mud. The scene
resembling
a
zombie
horror
movie
is
complemented by another odd view: a huge
steaming power plant reminiscent of Verne’s Steel
City, its giant pipes pointing to the sky and releasing
clouds of steam with a deafening hissing racket. We
are at the Blue Lagoon, forty kilometres southwest
of Reykjavík. There probably isn’t a tourist
guidebook failing to mention this attraction. What
the guidebooks do not mention is that this place is a
symbol of Iceland’s journey from poverty to
prosperity over the past half-century and the hope
that the country will continue in this journey
despite the devastating financial crisis.
At the beginning there was a hot spring.
Because the water had to be extracted from
considerable depth, its utilization was not
developed until the early 1970s when it was
facilitated by more advanced technologies (but
buildings in Reykjavík were first heated with hot
water in the early 1940s). Today the Svartsengi
power plant supplies power to some twenty
thousand residents of nine towns in the region and,
as a bonus, the Keflavík international airport. Soon
after the power plant was put into operation,
someone noticed the recreational and curative
potential of the pools forming around the plant. The
water in the pools is in fact a waste product of the
hot spring that first generates electricity in the
turbines, then passes through special equipment
separating steam for heating of houses in the
nearby towns and, finally—by then cooled down to
The Blue Lagoon
The Blue Lagoon with the Svartsengi power plant in the
distance
a tolerable temperature—is discharged from the
plant. Around four hundred thousand domestic and
foreign visitors come to the Blue Lagoon annually,
with the spa operator ranking among top-earning
Icelandic companies.
In recent years, tourism has grown into one of
Iceland’s major industries, accounting for five per
cent of GDP, compared to only three per cent in the
Czech Republic. The sharp depreciation of the
Icelandic krona in recent years made trips to
Iceland much cheaper. Statistics show that 565
thousand travellers visited the country last year,
whereby in the mid-1980s the number was below a
hundred thousand a year. Paul Stevens (57)
remembers the times of well under seventy
thousand visitors, “Today people still come here to
enjoy empty space, but back then there wasn’t a
soul here.” Paul has just ordered tea and chocolate
cake at one of the oldest hostels on Iceland,
Fljótsdalur, offering a view across the Markarfljót
valley of the aforementioned “dirty” glacier, and he
has enjoyed this view every summer since 1971
when he first came as a student. Later he began to
return to work as a tour guide who sits out the
winter as a university library employee in Stoke-onTrent, the UK, and come May he moves to Iceland
and heads hiking tours up to the glaciers. Demand
for his services grows each year from people
hailing from more and more distant parts of the
globe. “Back then no one even thought about
vacationing here,” says Paul. “Today there is an
awareness of Iceland.”
CHINESE MIRACLE
For a number of places in Iceland’s remote
corners, this “awareness” means new hope, one
example being the picturesque fishing town of
Siglufjördur on the northern coastline of the island.
Once a prosperous settlement that lost more than
half of its population after schools of herrings had
been decimated in the 1960s, it has regained many
inhabitants who need to serve thousands of tourists
arriving here to admire the fascinating maritime
scenery. Besides tourism, the region profits from
geothermal energy which not only provides
relatively cheap and clean energy–no other country
boasts a larger proportion of renewable energy
sources–but also opens a new chapter for the
economy crippled by the crisis. These sources help
Icelanders lure energy-intensive industries. The
local climate is especially favourable for data
storage as it adds to the mix, in addition to low-cost
electricity, icy cold winds necessary for cooling and
easy on the budget (unlike costly air-conditioning,
Iceland’s cold weather comes free of charge). Over
the past year, several such centres have been
established, the last one this spring at the former
NATO air base near Iceland’s second largest city of
Keflavík. Although none has yet been snatched by a
global Google-type giant as in Finland, their future
looks promising since Icelandic services are
cheaper due to specific climatic conditions.
Foreign countries’ envoys do not head
northward solely because of the energy sources (a
month ago the British energy minister came to
Iceland to discuss supplies of electricity to the
British Isles), but also to acquire the country’s
know-how. Since the Icelanders began to employ
mass utilization of hot springs in the 1920s, they
have considerably improved the pertinent
technology. In April, these new methods brought to
Iceland even China‘s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. It
was a remarkable visit dubbed by Icelandic
commentators as a “small miracle”. The prime
minister of an Asian superpower accompanied a
hundred-member delegation arrives in a small
island whose population roughly equals that of a
residential block in Shanghai, and he does that
prior to visiting major European capitals. In
addition to showing interest in crude oil and
natural gas, thought to be hidden under the bottom
of the northern seas, the Chinese were also keen to
learn about Iceland’s technologies for extracting
geothermal energy. The politicians from these two
very different countries agreed they will apply
them both in China and in joint projects across the
globe.
This article was originally published in the Czech
magazine Respekt. Translated by Lenka Rubenstein.
Photos by Katerina Malá. See more photos from the
trip atwww.respekt.cz/fotogalerie
Women’s World
by Silvie Lauder; translated by Lenka
August 2, 2012
Some say that nowhere in the world do women
enjoy a better life than here – although Iceland’s
reputation as a “women’s paradise” seems an
inaccurate cliché since the country is hardly the
Garden of Eden. Nonetheless, the position of
Icelandic women, as well as their male
counterparts, is quite remarkable.
Johanna, Asta, and Agnes know one another
well. Still, in Iceland, everyone is on first-name
terms and knows each other. At first sight, these
three women don’t have that much in common: the
first two grew up in Reykjavik, and the third is from
a fishing village in the far north. The first started
her career as a flight attendant, the second was a
teacher, and the third wanted only to serve God.
One is a glamorous platinum blonde, the other two
inconspicuous brunettes. All are married with
children; one is lesbian. Still, each has made it to
the top and together they embody the distinct and
unusually strong position of women in today’s
Iceland, because these three women are at the helm
of the country’s major institutions.
Johanna Sigurdardottir, 69, is the prime
minister, the first woman to hold that post in
Iceland’s history; Asta Ragnheidur Johannesdottir,
62, is the speaker of the Althing, Iceland’s
parliament. In the spring, Agnes M. Sigurdardottir,
57, was elected bishop of the Icelandic Lutheran
Church, becoming the first woman to head the
church to which almost 80 percent of the
population belong.
On the last day of June, voters were poised to
decide whether the fourth key state position would
also go to a woman. Polls showed former reporter
and television moderator Thora Arnorsdottir
running close behind or even ahead of the fourterm incumbent in the presidential election.
Even
though
Olafur
Ragnar
Grimsson
eventually was returned to the presidential palace,
there was an interesting facet to the election.
Arnorsdottir, a mother of five, had been pregnant
for most of the campaign and for the last few weeks
she campaigned with a newborn baby.
Such a constellation of women in high
government and church positions – unheard of in
other countries – reflects Iceland’s social changes of
recent years. On a global scale, the social
democratic prime minister is the first openly
homosexual head of government. Two years ago
she married her long-time partner, Jonina
Leosdottir. Unlike in some other countries,
Icelandic gays and lesbians don’t enter into
registered partnerships, but frequently get married.
And they even do so on religious ground. While
previously this required putting some pressure on
the Lutheran bishop, Agnes Sigurdardottir, the new
head of the church, doesn’t question this right at all.
To see that something is different in this
country, you don’t need to study international
gender equality statistics. It is obvious at every step,
starting with boarding an airplane. Czech Airlines
plays music by Smetana and the first woman
pictured in the airline magazine is a scantily
dressed blonde luring passengers to a beer festival.
Icelandair plays the global musician Björk and,
while the magazine also shows a blond woman on
the first page, she is an aircraft pilot holding a
joystick. Football commentary teams on television
always include at least one woman. The
internationally acclaimed thriller series by Yrsa
Sigurdardottir, dubbed a “new Stieg Larsson”
similarly to a number of other Scandinavian
writers, features a female heroine, allegedly a
typical Icelandic woman: Thora is a divorced
mother of two, but also a tireless attorney who
takes on tricky cases that often bring risks to her
life.
This trend doesn’t apply solely to women,
however – gender equality works two ways here.
For instance, Czech divorce courts are notorious for
granting custody of children almost exclusively to
mothers, while Icelandic fathers have a
significantly better standing in this respect. In
addition, men in Iceland can take a three-month,
government-paid leave to care for newborns; in the
Czech Republic, men are entitled to only a few days
after the birth. Joint custody and so-called
patchwork families, in which the parents’ new
partners also get involved in the upbringing of
children, are quite widespread. In addition, the
average lifespan of Icelandic men is longer than in
most Western countries.
Statistical data confirm this impression. Since
2006, the World Economic Forum has been
monitoring gender equality with the help of dozens
of indicators, and Scandinavian countries have
been on top from the beginning. But in the past
three years, even the other famously gender-equal
Prime Minister
Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir
(Photo Globe
media / Reuters)
Scandinavians
could
not
surpass
Iceland.
Paradoxically, Iceland’s financial collapse helped
solidify its lead; afterwards a number of top
positions in government and banking went to
women, which led to a raft of stories in the foreign
press headlined “Women Clean Up Men’s Mess,”
and considerably improved the proportion of
women in both politics and business.
Currently women outnumber men in the
Icelandic cabinet and hold about half the seats in
parliament and regional governments. Among
OECD countries, Iceland boasts one of the highest
proportions of women on the labor market. When
Newsweek compiled a list of countries with the
most favorable conditions for women two years
ago, using indicators for health care, legislation,
education, business activity, and politics, the island
state found no competitor among 165 other
countries.
ENGLISH-SPEAKING BRIET
How has a volatile, sparsely populated piece of
land become a “paradise of equality”? Isn’t this
perfection a little suspect?
There is a popular explanation drawn from
ancient history: Icelandic legend is overpopulated
with intrepid female seafarers and warriors.
Archeological finds provide scientific evidence that
Viking women could measure up to their male
counterparts whether in battle or on voyages of
exploration. And Icelandic women of the postViking era are said to have toughened up by taking
care of the family and homestead when men
disappeared for weeks to catch fish.
“These are popular theories, but they are
wrong – fishing was the male occupation in the
Mediterranean countries as well, and look at
women’s position there,” says Audur Styrkarsdottir,
originally a journalist and political scientist and
currently head of the National Library’s archive of
women’s history, which over the 37 years of its
existence has collected thousands of letters,
photographs, and books.
With a little exaggeration, this special feature
of Iceland may be attributed to one woman’s
command of languages rather than to the Vikings.
Briet Bjarnhedinsdottir was the eldest daughter of
poor farmers in the north. Although born in the
mid-19th century when there wasn’t a single girls’
school on the island, thanks to her father she
learned to read and write, and thanks to her
growing hunger for literature she later learned
Danish and English. When American women
fighting for equal rights were looking for allies in
other parts of the world, they found one in
Reykjavik, and an influential one to boot. Briet, at
that time a financially secure widow, published a
widely-read monthly, Kvennabladid. In addition to
serialized novels, recipes and ads for “cheap
potatoes,” the magazine soon began to carry
articles calling for equal rights for men and
women.
Icelandic women, inspired by the magazine,
formed organizations and became the driving force
of social change: they founded asylums and soup
kitchens for the poor. They started schools and
provided free school lunches for poor children, and
introduced sanitary standards in public buildings
that reduced the spread of disease. The first
hospital built in Reykjavik was funded with money
raised by female activists. This may explain why the
demands of women’s organizations were not as
fiercely opposed as in other countries – they did not
focus solely on women’s issues but were included in
a large family of social changes the women fought
for. “The key factor was that women’s organizations
have become a part of the system and did not stand
outside of it,” Styrkarsdottir says. “And [women]
succeeded in changing the system from within.” At
the end of the 19th century, women already held
seats in the Reykjavik city assembly and were able
to push for new measures through the authority of
a public body. It was this integration into the social
system that helped amend a number of regulations
affecting women, from inheritance to election laws,
years ahead of many other countries.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
A few meters from Reykjavik’s main street,
amid new concrete buildings, sits a small one-story
house in a traditional style. The paintings in a cozy
office on the first floor are somewhat disturbing:
One depicts a small figure consumed by dark red
flames and trapped in a maze of barbed wire,
another shows a corpse-like face with dark spots
instead of eyes, spewing fire, and a huge clawed
hand seems to reach out of a third painting.
“This is Kristin’s story as she painted it herself,”
says Gudrun Jonsdottir, head of Reykjavik’s
Stigamot center for victims of sexual violence and
human trafficking, motioning her head toward the
From Iceland’s history museum: women
after the Viking era
depressing decorations.
Kristin was sexually abused as a child and later
became a heroin addict. She made money to buy
the drug as a prostitute (the horrifying face
belonged to her pimp, the groping hand to her
customers). The last painting in the series is
dramatically different: a bright red figure against a
colorful background raises its hands in a victorious
gesture. Therapy sessions at the center helped the
young woman with a complicated past to pull
herself together. She quit using drugs and
prostituting herself and began to work in
campaigns to combat prostitution. But there are no
paintings in the office portraying mundane scenes:
last fall Kristin committed suicide.
“It’s not that simple with the women’s paradise
in Iceland,” Jonsdottir says. “In many respects it’s
the same here as elsewhere.”
She isn’t referring just to prostitution and
sexual violence. A closer look reveals that Iceland
indeed is no alien planet, but a society quite similar
to others. Thora Arnorsdottir, the unsuccessful
presidential candidate, fared well in opinion polls,
but she still had to face questions about why she
was running for office while pregnant and whether
she would manage to juggle presidential duties and
care for a newborn. And it may have cost her the
seat. “Some people told me they wouldn’t vote for
me because of that,” the candidate was quoted as
saying in the press. Before the financial collapse,
the macho image of the financial world – fast cars,
inflated egos, and risk-taking far beyond the
bounds of common sense, was celebrated here just
as elsewhere. The success of the financial sector
had an impact on women holding down jobs:
studies found that financiers receiving fat salaries
were more likely to push their wives to quit work.
Sexual harassment is not quite unique in
Iceland either. “If some guy did it to her properly,
maybe she’d become a normal woman,” fitness
trainer and TV celebrity Egill Einarsson wrote
about a female member of parliament on his blog a
few years ago. That did not stand in the way of
using his photo – as a role model for many young
men – on the front page of the telephone directory
later on (although it did spark controversy, which
escalated after police investigated Einarsson on
suspicion of raping an 18-year-old woman).
There is general belief here that the high
proportion of women in politics has made a real
impact on society, in ways such as the availability of
large-capacity preschool facilities almost fully
financed by the
government,
which
contribute
to
Iceland’s birth
rate
of
2.1
children
per
family, one of
the highest in
Europe. Or the
quick rebound
to
prosperity:
Iceland’s
economy
is
growing again.
Conversely, the
high
representation
of women in
politics has not
yet resulted in
any
serious
diminishment of sexual violence, prostitution, or
human trafficking. Two years ago, parliament
passed a series of laws restricting strip clubs and
criminalizing the purchase, although not the sale, of
sexual services. But some strip clubs found ways to
stay in business and prostitutes there have no
shortage of customers. Last year, Jonsdottir teamed
up with 80 other female activists to offer sexual
services using false names and photos. Hundreds of
men showed interest. The event had its tragicomic
side – one of the women got a response from her
father, another from a co-worker) and it did spark a
public debate, but failed to prompt police to do
anything.
Despite the new legislation, no illegal strip club
has been closed and only a few men have been
given suspended sentences for purchasing sex.
Statistics on domestic violence and rape are even
less paradisiacal: the reported number of rapes per
100,000 inhabitants far exceeds the figures in the
Czech Republic and many other European
countries. That can be attributed to differences in
legislation or to a higher proportion of rapes being
reported. However, in an extensive survey
conducted in 2008, four-fifths of women who had
suffered domestic violence said they did not report
it. The ongoing public debate and court rulings still
lean toward the well-worn clichés about
provocative clothing and blaming the victims;
moreover, the proportion of unsolved cases is
higher in Iceland than in other countries.
MOM, MOM, SON
Vesturbar is coveted by all young families –
nicely renovated blocks of flats surrounded by
green spaces, with two public swimming pools in
the vicinity, all just a ten-minute walk from
Reykjavik’s centre. The tenants of one flat have just
unwrapped and positioned a new oak dresser, a
wedding gift. The wedding, attended by dozens of
family members and friends, took place in May at
the main church in
Hafnarfjordur, the
bride’s home town
some 10 kilometers
south of the capital.
The dresser instantly
attracts the attention
of Bjorn Olé, the 15month-old son of the
newlyweds, as he
tries to climb it.
It looks quite
ordinary. But an
uninformed visitor
might be astonished
that
the
bride,
Sigrun,
married
Hildur,
another
woman, in church,
Newlyweds Sigrún and Hildur and that little Bjorn’s
father
is
an
unknown
sperm
donor. Looking at the satisfying, “normal” life of
Danish teacher Sigrun and sports instructor and
tour guide Hildur, we might think the Edenic image
is not too strong. After all, the prime minister is
openly lesbian. But, perhaps surprisingly, she has
been criticized by the lesbians and gays themselves.
“She mentioned it publicly only once, saying it is
not part of her role,” says Arni Gretar Johannsson
of Iceland’s leading advocacy group for sexual
minorities, Samtokin ’78. “But we feel that she
should speak about it.”
However, Iceland’s sexual minorities benefit
more from tolerant legislation than political
speeches. Where in the 1970s many homosexuals
fled to Denmark and other countries to avoid
discrimination, today they can get married, even in
church, and adopt children, unlike in most
European countries.
This article was originally published in the Czech
magazine Respekt. Translated by Lenka Rubenstein.
Photos by Katerina Malá.
What Has the crisis done for me?
by Witold Szablowski
December 7, 2012
“Thanks to the
crisis, I came to
appreciate my father,”
says an unemployed
Viking.
“I issue fewer fines,”
admits a policewoman.
“I finally have time
for my family,” says a
smiling businessman.
“Thanks to the crisis
we are real Islanders
again,” agrees a doctor.
WE KNOW WHO WE ARE AGAIN
Call me Anna. There’s no need for formality.
Here we all call each other by our first names – our
surnames are just our father’s names, so they don’t
particularly matter. Just like the Arabs, isn’t it?
Anna has grey, shoulder-length hair. Around her
neck she is wearing a large piece of amber, a
souvenir from a trip to the Polish coast. She has put
it on specifically for our meeting. For over thirty
years Anna has been a doctor working for the
Icelandic national health service.
You want to talk about the crisis? When the
crisis began, a man came to see me at the surgery –
he was a healthy forty-year-old with thick hair and
shiny fingernails. As soon as he came through the
door, he started to complain that his head ached, he
couldn’t sleep, and he had a pain in his side, a tight
feeling under his ribs.
That was a few days after our black week in
October 2008. The three biggest banks – Glintir,
Landsbanki and Kaupthing – collapsed like a house
of cards. As one of the journalists said, they were
robbed from the inside; their owners took most of
the money out of them. It looked as if the entire
country would collapse at any moment.Research
showed that one in three Icelanders was thinking of
emigrating. From dawn to dusk we had our hands
full. People were emotionally upset, so their blood
pressure shot up.
So we did all possible tests on this man, and the
results showed that he was as fit as the god Thor.
But he went on wailing that he couldn’t sleep at
night and kept being sick. And had a constant
headache.
I was thinking we ought to send him for a CAT
scan, but suddenly he started trying to play strange
games with me. He said I must understand that his
company was making workers redundant, and he
was sure to be laid off, but he had three children.
And so I should help him to get a state allowance.
Good grief, how furious I was! A healthy man
on state support? My parents had eight children.
They were farmers. My father had to work very
hard from morning to night because Icelandic soil
is barren. He and my mother had to stand on their
heads for us to have enough to eat. My father
worked to the end of his life, and if anybody had
suggested state support he’d have seethed with
rage.
I told him all this. But today’s young people
subscribe to completely different values. Capitalism
has taught them to be cunning. They’ve gotten used
to having good cars, good clothes and mobile
phones. Before the crisis nobody here walked –
people drove everywhere in cars. And what cars!
They imported the most expensive makes like
Moscow oligarchs. The children were obese like in
American films. Everything came to them easily,
and they never had to work hard.So, when the
banks started to collapse, they did everything they
could to carry on doing nothing. So, this man
shrugged his shoulders at my arguments, muttered
something and probably went off to find another
doctor.
After that, a few more people came in with
similar requests until word got around that it was
impossible to get me to fix anything. And they
stopped.
So the undoubted merit of the crisis is that it
has reminded us who we are and where we live.
We are a small, bleak island in the middle of the
ocean. If we want to be rich, the only way is
through hard work, not scamming and financial
speculation.
THE CRISIS GAVE ME BACK MY FATHER
If it weren’t for the crisis, I would still be a prat.
I’d still be driving about Reykjavik in a Land
Cruiser, sleeping with girls who’ve had their lips
enhanced, and I’d still despise my own father. And
I’m sure I’d never had managed to talk to him again
before he died.
Sigurjón is thirty-six with a long beard and hair
tied in a pony tail. Three times a week he goes to free
yoga classes – this is how one of the non-state
organisations is helping Icelanders to cope with
crisis-related stress.
Now I am unemployed, but for five years I was
someone. I was a financial Viking. That’s what
people used to call us, and we really did feel like
Vikings, except that instead of animal skins we
wore suits, and we raided other countries
economically.For example,we offered far higher
interest rates on deposits than any bank in their
country. We called it “outvasion”, “the biggest
success in the history of Iceland”. If somebody had
doubts, we would show them coloured graphs
which clearly indicated that we had a bright future
ahead of us, that we had the world at our feet, and
that things could only get better. Nobody really had
any doubts.
Except for my father – introverted, like most
fishermen. If he ever said anything, it was about
nets, fish, shoals, hooks or cutter engines. Even
during our most important family gatherings he
would be just waiting to slip out to the harbour on
any excuse – the engine had seized up, his net
hadn’t dried out. If he could have, he’d have spent
days on end sitting there.
I was on better terms with my mother. I was a
late child, the only one, and if anything didn’t go
right for me, she would hug me, comfort me and
support me. My father was made of stern stuff. You
fell over? So?Get up and keep going. Don’t snivel.
All his life he worked hard and he expected me to
do the same.
But when I started work,Iceland was opening
up its markets. Earlier on, everything here had
been state-owned. Now it was all going to be
private. And we were all meant to benefit from
that.
My parents sent me to medical school – their
dream was for their son to be a surgeon. But when I
was in the third year, all my friends went off to
work in business. “Medicine?” they snorted with
laughter. “We’ll be importing doctors from the
States and Europe. This place is going to be a world
business centre,” they said. Who wouldn’t have
been tempted?
A friend from high school gave me my first job.
We sold people securities correlated with the credit
market. I didn’t understand any of it, but it wasn’t
necessary to understand anything there. We had a
table from which it clearly emerged that it was
impossible to lose on our securities. I did pretty
well, and did further training in the evenings, so
after a year I was head-hunted by another firm. I
did even better there, and a year later I became a
manager. That was when I bought a 100-squaremetre apartment. On credit, of course.
I’ve never forgotten how everybody laughed at
me at the office party because I had only bought
100 square metres – my staff already had flats that
were 150 or 200 square metres in size. But – I want
to stress the fact – we were the smallest pieces on
that chessboard. I was only in charge of eight
people, who sold our products over the phone. We
were at the very bottom of the ladder, but even so,
one young man in my department got himself
alabaster ornaments for his bathroom from Italy.
He laughed the loudest at the size of my flat, but a
year after the crisis began, he attempted suicide.
They only just managed to save him. He had taken
out a loan in francs (“they’ll always be weaker than
kronas”), and now he has to pay off half a million
Euros.
My father never came to see my flat. He told
my mother it was all nonsense, and that wasn’t how
you earned money.
But my mother came often. I remember her
look of admiration when I drew those coloured
columns and tables for her, and explained why our
economy would always keep growing. She even
stopped nagging me about a wife and child. I kept
saying I’ve got plenty of time. For now I must earn
as much as possible, sow my wild oats, and then I’ll
think about children. And indeed, I had girls by the
cartload. They all wanted to have a boyfriend with
even the mildest connection with the world of high
finance.
My mother invested all her savings in those
cretinous securities of mine – one and a half million
kronas, which is about 10,000 Euros. She lost the
whole lot. When our three biggest banks simply
collapsed one after the other, I couldn’t understand
any of it. Only a month earlier I’d been on a
training course in London, where they said Iceland
had ten times as many reserves as obligations and
that no other country in the whole world was as
stable.
At that point, I was afraid. I was hellishly
afraid.
First, I was afraid they’d hang us. There are
300,000 of us here; everyone knows everyone, and
at the time everyone was furious with the bankers.
One day a friend called from a branch in central
Reykjavik.
“Hide your car. Immediately!” he screamed into
the phone.
“Why?” I asked.
“Some people have just set five Land Cruisers
on fire in the city centre. They’re heading for your
estate.”
Only later did it turn out that the burning Land
Cruisers and beaten-up bankers was just a rumour.
But the world I lived in had ceased to exist.
Whoever had money or a family went abroad. I
stayed behind – with my apartment, debt, and no
skills that could be of any use to society. There was
no going back to medicine; nowadays I wouldn’t
even know how to put in stitches properly.
For the first two months I just lay in bed. I
didn’t pick up the mail, I didn’t answer the phone,
and I ordered food over the internet. I told my
mother I was in Norway, looking for a job. Lots of
people were going abroad then, so she had no
trouble believing me.
After two months I got out of bed and went – I
still have no idea why – to the harbour. Maybe the
blood of five generations of fishermen was calling
out to me? Maybe whenever something gets
screwed up in his life, a fisherman seeks the
answer from the sea?
So I went there, sat down and started staring at
the sea. I went on and on sitting there, until, like in
a movie, my father appeared. And he said: “Come
on.Your mother’s made some soup.”
And he held out his hand to me.
You see? My father hadn’t seen me for two
months, then up he came and invited me in for
soup, as if at that moment soup was the most
obvious thing in the world. So, we ate it, then we
ate seconds, and then we watched television
together. I looked at my old man, at his hands
ruined by work, and I had never felt so close to him
in my entire life before.
These days I do odd jobs for a friend who
shoots commercials. I carry the equipment, and I’m
learning a bit of computer graphics. I managed to
sell the car to a German. He bought it over the
internet. I lived on the proceeds for more than a
year, even though he paid a third of the purchase
price.
I couldn’t sell the flat because nowadays few
people in Iceland can afford it. The moment the
krona fell, the cost of my loan came to 300 per cent
of its original value. Luckily, the government issued
a law that says the value of a loan cannot be more
than 110 per cent of the value of a flat. I feel a bit
odd about the fact that somebody else will have to
pay for my stupidity. But I have no alternative. An
expert came and valued the place, and now I pay
100,000 kronas per month, which is about 600
Euros.
In 2008, the average loan was worth 240 per
cent of the value of the property. Thanks to the law
that benefited Sigurjón, the Icelandic banks have
amortised debts worth at least 1.6 billion dollars.
The experts stress that by giving preference to the
interests of citizens over the interests of the
financial markets, Iceland is emerging from the
crisis much faster than countries like Greece. The
Fitch agency raised its ratings this year to
investment level.
BECAUSE OF THE CRISIS I HAVE MORE WORK
How this whole crisis began I can’t say. We’ve
already had various scenarios offered,including the
idea that we should pack up and buy a ticket for
Icelandair... What do you mean, you don’t know
what Icelandair is? Air Iceland, Iceland’s airline,
which flies to Warsaw, too.
Basia is a fifty-eight-year-old Pole. She has a
fashionable hair style (“a friend from Poland
persuaded me”) and painted fingernails and toenails.
She is a cleaner, working ten hours a day – five at a
hotel in central Reykjavik and the other five in
offices.
I found out all about it at work. I got there at
six, as usual, and my manager Margret said, “Basia,
kreppa, kreppa,” and did a thumbs-down to show
things were bad. At first, I thought something had
happened at the hotel – there had once been a
situation where an American guest got drunk in the
bar, lost his wallet and accused me of stealing it.
Luckily, we have magnetic cards and it clearly
emerged that nobody but the man himself had gone
into his room, but I was desperately upset, I can tell
you.
This time nothing had been lost. Margret took
out her cigarettes, led me onto the terrace, and her
hands were shaking as if she had a fever. And the
whole time she kept saying just one word: kreppa,
kreppa.
Eventually, at seven,Ania came along, a student
who knows Icelandic, and she said a big bank had
collapsed and that kreppa means crisis. Then, I
understood it all. A month earlier our Margret had
taken out a loan for a bigger flat. A twenty-year
loan.
We tried to console her somehow. I told her in
my broken Icelandic that there was akreppa in
Poland when communism collapsed, hyperinflation
followed and from one day to the next people lost
all their money. My husband worked at a ballbearing factory, and we prayed every day for him
not to be laid off.
“We survived it, and you will, too,” we said to
that Margret. But I could see that didn’t comfort
her, so I took Ania, and we went to clean a room
that had been vacated in the night. We switched on
the TV to hear what they would say, but at that
point no one knew anything yet – it was all just a
guessing game. If anybody had been expecting two
more banks to collapse a few days later, I think
they’d have been crying on TV.
Then their kreppa really started to get going.
And suddenly there was no more work for the
Poles. Earlier, there had been a very large number
of us here, but they’d given us the worst jobs. And
suddenly unemployment began to rise, and
suddenly they wanted to do those worst jobs
themselves.
The first to leave was Zygmunt, who worked
here as a bus driver. His contract came to an end,
and he simply didn’t extend it.
Then it was Zosia and Andrzej, a married
couple who worked at a supermarket. They said it
wasn’t worth risking their health, as it was a very
stressful time.
I wrote to my son to say he’d better prepare
himself. My husband was pleased, because he’s
already retired in Poland, and he gets bored on his
own. But my son wasn’t happy.He has small
children, and the few pennies I send each month
come in very handy. Ania also kept saying we
should wait out the winter, and then we’d see. And
she was right. In spring it turned out our hotel had
more tourists than we might have expected. The
krona had fallen, and suddenly people started
being able to afford to come here. This year it has
been crazy – they’ve taken on two extra girls for the
cleaning because we couldn’t do all the work.
People keep coming and going – apparently the
place is fully booked until mid-November. There
have always been a lot of tourists here, but now it’s
complete madness. All Europe is coming here – to
shop, to see the volcanoes or for fun.
I have far more work than four years ago. I
earn less because the krona is now worth half as
much as in 2008, but I’m not complaining. I make
10,000 a month in our money. That’s a lot? But I
work at the weekends too, sometimes for twelve
hours at a time. Also, life here is much more
expensive. Half the money goes to my
accommodation – five of us rent a place together –
and food, and I divide the other half between me
and my son.
It’s just a pity my husband doesn’t want to
come here – I’d find him a job instantly. But he’s
afraid to get on board an aeroplane.
I GOT A NEW JOB
For me the breakthrough moment in the crisis
was when I heard our Prime Minister say, ”May God
protect Iceland.” It was the sixth of October, the
very start of the crisis.
At that point I thought, bloody hell, what’s God
got to do with it? Is it God’s fault we’ve got this
crisis? No! We’ve got it because of our politicians.
Except that they didn’t feel the blame at all. Then, I
thought it was time to change them. And that I
should be the one to do it.
Why me? It was a time when everyone was
being critical, but no one really wanted to step out
of the ranks and take the lead. The politicians on
the other hand were behaving as if it wasn’t a crisis,
but as if somebody had been sick at a party, and
everyone was pretending it had nothing to do with
them.
Jón is forty-five, and for over twenty years, he
was Iceland’s most popular comedian and comic
actor. In 2009, he and his friends founded the Best
Party, which has injected a lot of energy into the
island’s fossilised political system. In his campaign,
he promised free swimming pools with free towels, a
polar bear for the city zoo, and also that, thanks to
him, until 2020 Parliament would be a drug-free
zone. “We’ll turn Reykjavik into Disneyland and
every unemployed person will be able to get his
picture taken for free with Mickey Mouse,” he said.
When questioned about his political skills, he
said they were the highest possible because for
several years he had worked at a mental hospital.
Asked why he wanted to go into politics at all, he
replied,: “Times are tough. I want to have a
permanent job for myself and for my friends. We
want to do as little as possible for the most money.”
The Best Party won the Reykjavik city council
election in 2009 and gained five of the fifteen seats on
the city council.
It only looked silly. In actual fact, we took the
campaign very seriously from the start. And from
the start, I knew we would win.
We founded the Best Party just after finishing a
film called Fangavaktin (“The Prison Sdhift”). It was
the cinema version of a very popular television
series. In it, I played a petrol station attendant, a
bald communist who mouthed off political remarks
at every opportunity. He was a bittersweet
character: part comical, part serious. He had a great
deal in common with my father, who was a life-long
committed communist with an answer to every
question. Whenever a new First Secretary was
appointed in Moscow, we would get his portrait
from the Soviet embassy and my father would
proudly hang it up in the sitting room.
I remember that in Brezhnev’s time, my mother
couldn’t stand it any longer, so she threw my father
and his portrait into the cellar. I was a teenager
then, smoking my first cigarettes, so I used to go
down to the cellar to have a smoke with Brezhnev.
All of it was and is partly silly and partly serious –
the cigarettes, the film, and my campaign.
Why did people vote for me? I think that
message got through to them. The programme itself
was silly, but it was about deadly serious matters.
And it said,“Our politicians have gone so far beyond
the limits of the absurd that whatever I say I’ll
never catch up with them.”
It was obvious for ages that something was up.
On New Year’s Day 2003, I was invited to appear on
television to chat in the studio with a politician and
a businessman about what lay ahead of Iceland in
the near future. That was the time when the banks
were handing out loans for everything without any
guarantees.They were virtually forcing them on
people. And I said that, in my view, we were
heading for an unhappy economic situation
because that wasn’t normal. The politician and the
businessman shouted me down, saying that anyone
who criticises loans must be an idiot and that loans
are the fuel of the economy. And that I shouldn’t
talk about things I knew nothing about, because
they didn’t try telling me how to tell jokes, did they?
They made me look like the village idiot,but a
few years later it turned out the village idiot was
right.
Since Jón has been the Mayor of Reykjavik, he
has been all over the media. He is famous if only for
his daring costumes at the annual Reykjavik Gay
Pride march. At the first one, he appeared as a drag
queen. This year he was dressed in the style of
Pussy Riot.
But it goes further than dressing up. Jón found
the city indebted to an amount exceeding its
income over five years. He raised municipal taxes
and the price of electricity. He reduced the salaries
for everyone employed by the city, including
teachers, transport workers and officials, some by
as much as twenty per cent. He stopped paying
subsidies for children’s after-school music lessons.
“From the Polish perspective those might seem silly
things,” says Basia the cleaner. “But here they took
all those cuts very badly.”
In spite of all this, most of the capital’s citizens
praise Jón’s work. And his friends call him “the
greatest victim of the crisis” because he swapped
the fun job of a comedian for boring
administration.
Ha hahahaha! The greatest victim of the crisis!
That’s good, I must remember that. But I don’t feel
like a victim.
Though, in fact, my predecessors had an
infinitely easier time of it. The mayor’s main task
was to cut the ribbon at each new building site.
Everyone liked him.
Governing during a crisis is much harder. In
any case, our demands only sounded comical. Take
the polar bear, for example. Everyone saw that as a
joke. Meanwhile, every year our hunters shoot at
bears that swim here from Greenland. They kill
them, although there’s no need. We could make
them a nice enclosure and promote them as the
city’s mascot. We could also catch them, trap them
in nets and take them back to Greenland. Make a
bit of a show of it, and it’ll be a tourist attraction.
But the hunter mentality still prevails among us:
Did something move? Shoot it! Since I’ve been
mayor, I’ve regularly written to Parliament about
this matter. So far to no effect.
However, Jón’s conversations with the
Ministers of Health and Finance have brought
results. Despite the crisis, he is building a new
hospital in the centre of Reykjavik at a cost of
several million Euros. Plenty of the citizens are
critical of this decision.They do not think a crisis is
the time to start more building projects,but Jón
believes the standard of health care in Iceland still
leaves much to be desired and that the hospital is
essential.
I FINALLY HAVE TIME FOR MY FAMILY
Dear Mr.Björgólfur,
I would like to know what the Icelandic crisis is
like from the perspective of one of Iceland’s richest
citizens. Would you be willing to meet with me to
answer a few questions? (At your PA’s request, I
enclosed an outline of them in this e-mail.)
Yours sincerely...
Dear Mr.Szablowski,
I would be happy to meet, but I am no longer
living in Iceland, so I will answer your questions by
e-mail.
Honestly speaking, I have never been happier,
now that I have less money and more quality family
time. It sounds simple enough, but I had to travel a
bumpy road to reach that destination.
I had a bad feeling for two or three years, but
the figures kept proving me wrong.I certainly feel
responsible. I was one of those best equipped to
assess the situation. I was one of those who perhaps
could have softened the blow if I had been
fortunate enough to recognise the warning signs for
what they were. I knew the weaknesses in the
Icelandic economic system – the smallest
independent monetary system in the world.I should
have
seen
how
incestuous
the
business
environment in Iceland was, and I should have
recognised the lack of infrastructure and the need
for systemic change. In retrospect, the signs were
there.
Why didn’t I say anything? Well, I
overestimated the strength of the financial system
as a whole. I was not alone; most bankers and
economists realised the weaknesses but thought we
had means of defence. I apologised to the public of
Iceland for not having done enough to prevent the
harmful consequences of the rise and fall of the
Icelandic banking system.
Björgólfur is forty-five now. Until 2008, he was
the richest Icelander – just before the crisis his
wealth was valued at 3.5 billion dollars, which put
him in 249th place in the world, according to the
Forbes Ranking (Jan Kulczyk, the richest Pole, was
recently in 463rd place). He invested in banks, new
technologies and mobile phones; among others, he is
the owner of the Play network, the fourth biggest
mobile phone operator in Poland. It is estimated that
because of the crisis his wealth was reduced to 1
billion dollars.
He made his first big money in Saint Petersburg
from beer: he and his father bought a large brewery.
In Russia, it was a time when the mafia was making
a lot of money, and to this day his opponents make
charges against him that he must have been in with
one of Russian mafia organisations to be allowed to
make money there.
Björgólfur has responded to these accusations
many times, saying that the money he made in Russia
was absolutely clean. He used it to buy Landsbanki,
the oldest Icelandic bank. In 2008, Landsbanki ended
up on the edge of bankruptcy and had to go into state
administration.
You ask what I lost because of the crisis. I
mainly lost sleep, money and respect. Out of those, I
only feel bad about losing the respect that I had
worked hard for.In 2010, I reached a settlement of
debt with all my creditors. It’s going according to
plan, but it will still be years before it is completed.
I spend my time on building my family, and that is
my absolute priority. But I am also focused on
building my companies. The key ones are the startups that need to be carefully nurtured in the first
ten years, such as the Play mobile network in
Poland.
But the biggest lesson I learned from the crisis
is that life goes on. I found out that even though the
economy was crumbling and my business nearly
wiped out, life continued. At a slower pace, granted,
but that was welcome. In the meantime, the family
has grown, so it’s good to be able to spend more
time with my wife and children.
I GAINED PEACE
Because of the crisis we bring in far fewer
fines. I have the data from the first half of 2008 and
from the first half of this year. The number of
accidents and collisions has come down by over 40
per cent.
Jóhanna has a strong handshake and dark hair
in a pageboy cut. She’s forty-two and has worked for
twenty years in the traffic police. She comes to our
meeting by scooter. “I love it, I feel like an Italian on
it,” she jokes. “Unfortunately, you can only ride it for
two months of the year in Iceland. After that it’s too
cold.”
Why has it come down? Do people leave
their cars at home? Or travel by public
transport?
No, not at all. Icelanders would rather go
without their dinner than give up their cars. They
say only pensioners and immigrants travel by bus
in Iceland. And it’s true. There are just as many cars
as before the crisis. But firstly, the drivers have
noticed that if they drive according to the rules they
burn up to 20 per cent less fuel, and for many
people that money has significance these days. And
secondly – this is the great paradox of the crisis –
people are far less stressed. They’re not in a
hurry.They’re not racing after God knows what. As
if the collapse of those banks has allowed us all to
slow down a bit. There has been a great
improvement in the driving culture, for instance...
Meaning?
Nowadays, it’s no longer the case that the cars
won’t stop for a pedestrian standing at a crossing.
During the “outvasion” that wasn’t at all typical. I
myself used to issue a lot of fines to drivers who
virtually ran over pedestrians’ feet because they
were in a hurry to get to a business lunch. And
people are nicer to the police. And to each other. As
if the mere fact that we have stopped thinking
about money so much has freed us of a sort of
burden.
But surely during a crisis people think about
money more, not less?
From my observations it appears that in a crisis
people don’t think about money but about food.
What to give the children for supper. What to eat
themselves. If they have that secured, other things
don’t cause them stress.
When the crisis had only just started, my
husband and I were terribly scared. He’s a lawyer,
he was working for two developers, and that
branch of industry was the first to go bankrupt. We
seriously thought of leaving for Norway. My sisterin-law lives there; she would have helped us to find
jobs. I speak Norwegian, so with a bit of luck they
might even have employed me in the police because
I love this work. We even laughed to think that a
thousand years after our ancestors, the Vikings,
sailed here and annexed the island, we would be
making the journey in the opposite direction.
A lot of people did leave then. Our neighbours
went to Denmark because they both went to college
there and had some contacts. A friend from work
went to Norway; her husband is a doctor and he
found a job at a clinic in Oslo. Now both couples
write to say they’re homesick, that they miss
Iceland, and that perhaps they took the decision to
leave too quickly.
Because this crisis actually hasn’t turned out to
be quite so deep or as terrible as it was supposed to
be. Unemployment rose sharply for a while, but
now it is at only 5 per cent again, which means
anyone who wants to work can find a job.
Economic growth is at 3 per cent, in other words far
higher than in the European Union. Our wages
have come down a bit, but it’s enough to live on, so
I’m not complaining. The state has helped people
who had big loans to negotiate reduced rates with
the banks.
In short, Iceland has got away with it. And we
have too. I’m still working for the traffic police. And
my husband has branched out and does legal
analyses for airline companies.
THE CRISIS TEACHES HUMILITY
All this harping on about the crisis infuriates
me. We were the fifth richest country in the world;
we fell to twelfth or fifteenth place and everyone’s
moaning about the harm that’s been done to us.
Arni is forty and speaks Polish, as well as
Icelandic because he studied at the Lodz Film School.
He is a director and screenwriter, and he lectures at
the Reykjavik Film School. His feature films have
been shown at major international festivals,
including Cannes and Karlovy Vary.
Now, he is working on a serial about the crisis,
although, as he says, “finding the money for an
expensive film about a crisis in a country where the
crisis is happening is not easy.”
Here we have a very strong social welfare
system, and people don’t quite know the meaning
of a real crisis. They watch the news on plasma TV
screens and weep about how poor they are. When I
was a student in Poland, I sometimes used to go to
the Baluty district in Lodz. They’ve been having a
crisis there non-stop for several decades! Some of
the children have never seen their parents working.
So, whenever an Icelander starts to complain too
much, I just say,“Show a little humility.”
Here people behave like the third generation of
immigrants to the United States: the grandfather set
up a small shop, the father turned it into a milliondollar business, and the grandson squandered the
lot and went belly up.
We’ve done exactly the same with our country.
Witold Szablowskiis a reporter for Gazeta
Wyborcza. This article was originally published in
Gazeta Wyborcza. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A Macedonian
army
reservists tank
crew at the
battle for the
village of
Aracinovo.
Photo by
Military
Journal/
Wikimedia
Macedonia’s Cooling-Off Period
Commons.
by Ljubica Grozdanovska Dimishkovska
November 7, 2012
SKOPJE | Macedonia has two recent histories:
one for ethnic Macedonians and another for the
ethnic Albanians who make up about a quarter of
the population.
The two sides fought a short-lived conflict in
2001 for which they have no shared definition. Was
it an armed conflict (the most commonly accepted
term), a terrorist campaign, or a war for Albanian
civil rights?
That divide has left the history classroom a
potential minefield, and this summer a group of
European and Macedonian history teachers
launched the latest of several attempts to minesweep the curriculum.
A Macedonian army reservists tank crew at the
battle for the village of Aracinovo. Photo by Military
Journal/Wikimedia Commons.
Some of the resulting recommendations – to
focus on agreed-upon historical events and avoid
contested issues – can hardly be called bold. Those
involved, however, hope the approach can hold
until a time when the facts and not the myths of the
conflict can get an airing in the classroom.
History teachers “need training on how to teach
history by respecting the diversity in the country
but also supporting a sense of belonging by
overcoming the present separation in Macedonian
and Albanian narratives,” said Jonathan EvenZohar, a senior manager in the European
Association of History Educators, which worked on
the project along with the History Teachers
Association of Macedonia.
Not that children are learning much about the
conflict anyway. Mire Mladenovski, president of the
Macedonian teachers group, said primary and
secondary school students do not learn about the
history of Macedonia since its independence in
1991, simply because the last 21 years are not
treated in the history books. Albanian and
Macedonian students use the same textbooks.
Most educators agree that most recent history
should no longer be avoided. Mladenovski said the
effects of Macedonia’s transition from socialism to
capitalism, for instance, should be included in
history books; although it’s recent, it’s hardly a
divisive subject.
“People from different nationalities were and
still are facing high unemployment. That’s common
for many people, regardless of their nationality or
religion,” he said.
But the conflict is another matter.
“In order for a historical event to be processed
in the books, you have to have a historical distance
from it,” said Todor Chepreganov, director of the
Institute of National History.
Chepreganov said he supports the effort to
write a common history book, but aside from issues
of timing, he is skeptical that it can succeed, given
that any new curriculum or books must be
approved by ministers who are the product of the
country’s rancorous and divided politics.
“Everybody involved in the writing of the new
history will have their own starting point of view
about the historical facts and events,” he said. “We,
the historians, might find some common ground.
But, in the end, the final word must come from the
politicians. And that’s doubtful.”
Indeed, while historians search for a model
that helps students of different nationalities learn
to communicate, the country’s politicians embrace
policies that emphasize their differences.
A recent rift between the two largest parties in
the governing coalition, the VMRO-DPMNE and the
ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration
(DUI), has been exacerbated by the VMRO-DPMNE’s
support for a measure that would confer special
benefits on those who fought in the 2001 conflict on
the side of the Macedonians and exclude the
Albanian fighters.
The political crisis peaked on 18 August – the
Day of the Army of the Republic of Macedonia –
when Defense Minister Fatmir Besimi, an ethnic
Albanian from the DUI, placed flowers at a
monument to Albanian Liberation Army fighters in
the northern village of Slupcane. Inhabited largely
by Albanians, Slupcane was heavily shelled by the
national army in the 2001 conflict. The act angered
many
Macedonians,
including
inside
the
government.
Xhabir Deralla, the president of the CIVIL –
Center for Freedom think tank and human rights
watchdog group, said the parties in Macedonia’s
dysfunctional politics have an interest in keeping
the nationalist fervor alive, since it gives them a
way to distract people from ineffective governance
and
more
pressing
issues.
Macedonia’s
unemployment rate has been stuck above 30
percent for years, and the average monthly wage is
30,323 denars ($638).
At least on paper, however, the effort to write a
shared history has the support of the government.
“All nationalities living in this region fought
together for the freedom, the independence, and
the statehood of Macedonia, even though
everybody writes their own history,” said Deputy
Education Minister Safet Neziri in a statement.
“Instead of uniting, the facts present in history
books are dividing the students.”
A working group of historians is advising the
ministry on a revision of history books, but the
group has not said which events will be included in
the new versions. The European history teachers
association has criticized the process as opaque and
called for members of the Macedonian teachers
group to be included. The review is likely to take
years.
Among the recommendations in its August
report on history education in Macedonia, the
European association also called for new online
educational materials to better engage students and
more transparent procedures in the Education
Ministry for textbook writing and publishing.
TRY, TRY AGAIN
The country’s recent past is littered with
attempts to devise a shared history curriculum.
In 2001, under the aegis of the European
history teachers group, education officials in
Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Albania teamed up to
train teachers in a curriculum that promoted
democratic
values,
human
rights,
and
multiculturalism. The program also aimed to create
apposite teaching materials, including textbooks.
Five years later, the country’s Helsinki
Committee for Human Rights launched a
reconciliation project for Macedonian and Albanian
students at one high school in Skopje. In a debate,
students presented radical versions of each side of
the 2001 conflict. The point was to make the history
teachers – one Albanian and one Macedonian – who
oversaw the debate try to bring those competing
versions closer together.
Then in 2008 Macedonia was one of 12
countries in southeastern Europe to take part in a
project that examined how schools across the
region taught about the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman
Empire, World War II, and the establishment of
Balkan nation-states.
It’s not clear if these efforts have made a lasting
impact on schools.
Macedonia-born Shadije Rushiti Ibraimi is a
junior researcher at the Swiss Center for Peace
Studies in Basel who is studying whether there are
effective models already in place in Macedonia for
teaching peace and reconciliation.
Given that new textbooks will take years to
produce, Ibraimi said the short-term focus needs to
be on teaching methods. Specifically, she said,
teachers should encourage their students to spot
discriminatory language and passages in textbooks
and to seek out other sources of information that
could provide a different angle.
But she said real progress will depend on
politicians, who “set the agenda of the system,” as
well as parents and the media, who help shape
children’s attitudes.
Deralla, of the CIVIL think tank, said it’s worth
waiting to get the “common history” approach
right. He said communities need to hash out their
own history before they can start talking to each
other.
“Once the silly nationalist myths and ghosts are
cleared out within each community, the historians
will be ready to work together to create a common
understanding of history,” he said. “If this doesn’t
take place first, this initiative will be sidelined by
politics.”
Ljubica Grozdanovska Dimishkovska is a TOL
correspondent in Skopje. The contents of this project
are the sole responsibility of Transitions and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Fear & Loathing in Macedonia
by Uffe Andersen
November 23, 2012
Today, there´s no war in Macedonia, and there
hasn´t been for more than eleven years. So why do
the people who fled their homes a few kilometers
from the capital during the armed conflict between
ethnic Albanian insurgents and government forces
in 2001 still live in ‘temporary housing’? The
refugees themselves and the people who today live
in Aracinovo give very different answers. In that
way, the Aracinovo case is emblematic for the
overall atmosphere in Macedonia and for how the
two largest ethnic groups in the country see each
other.
Apparently, it´s now all coming to a head.
The Angelovskis seem to know how their two
canaries feel. They know what it´s like to live in a
too limited space, so they don´t lock the birds in
their cage, but let them fly out of it whenever they
want. Then the birds flap around the 10 or 12
square meters large room – from time to time
taking a rest on the desk lamp or pot plant before
again throwing themselves into the air, and after
more criss-crossing finally returning to the cage.
That is their home, after all.
In the same way, the tiny room on the third
floor of a students´ home in Macedonia´s capital,
Skopje, is also home to the Angelovski family - after
all.
“When you´ve got children, you have to create
an environment which feels like the one in normal
homes”, explains Diana, in her late 30es, alluding to
her two daughters.
“That´s why we´ve got pets, and why we´ve
made sure to have internet”, Diana says – ducking
to not get in the way of a bird - and points to the
most prominent furniture in the home: a computer.
When the Angelovskis sit in front of it, surfing the
internet or writing e-mails, they aren´t limited by
the claustrophobic surroundings, and in the virtual
world they are equal to any other internet user. For
a while, their home seems almost normal. And
according to Diana´s husband, that is exactly the
point:
“All we want is the chance to live a normal life”,
40-year old Aco, says – explaining: “We do not
demand food for free, or that someone pays our
electricity bill. But we ask to have a real flat in
which we as a family can live and watch television
and all that – like everyone else. In safety”.
Diana and Aco live with their two daughters, of
eight and 15, in the small room a short bus ride
from the center of the Macedonian capital. The
students´ home has dozens of rooms exactly like
this – all meant to house two young people from
outside Skopje while they´re at university. But on
the 3rdfloor live families like the Angelovskis.
For students, their room forms the frame for a
temporary life – and as such, it´s bearable.
Officially, the Angelovskis live here temporarily, as
Ethnic Albanian organizations announce demonstration
‘against discrimination’; in the background a smaller item
from the ‘Skopje 2014' project.
well. But this temporariness has lasted more than a
decade, and nothing points to it ending any time
soon, Aco says.
“Our eldest daughter was four years old in
2001, when she opened the front door of our house,
and saw those men in black uniforms outside, with
beards, and automatic weapons”, he recalls the day
in June eleven years ago.
“You can imagine the impact that had on her.
Just ask her teacher in school how closed she is as a
person”, Aco says. ”She´s afraid of everything and
everyone”.
With their daughter of eight, it´s a different but
not much better story:
“Our youngest was born when we were already
living here and doesn´t really know what this’
Aracinovo’ is; she´s only heard about it as ’that
place’ .”
The girl has never been to the village which is
so central to her parent´s lives – although
Aracinovo is only 15 kilometers away, practically a
suburb to the capital.
Pictures of ethnic Macedonian and Albanian students
exhibited on the street in front of a ‘gimnazija’.
Shaving in Ohrid – a few kilometres from the border to
Albania where a peace agreement was signed in August
2001.
The family lived in Aracinovo east of Skopje
when tensions between Macedonia´s two largest
ethnic groups in 2001 turned into armed conflict.
170,000 people had to leave their homes during this
so-called ‘small civil war’, most of them ethnic
Macedonians.
Two out of three people in the country are
Macedonian, while one fourth are ethnic Albanian.
At least, that´s what the census in 2002 said but like
most other things connected with Macedonia´s
ethnic relations, what was supposed to be a sheer
fact, is strongly contested.
The Ohrid Agreement which ended the armed
conflict in 2001 gave special rights to ethnic groups
who make up more than 20 percent of the
population, and many Macedonians believe the
census was manipulated to make the number of
Albanians exceed that fifth.
Conspiracy theories are fed by the fact that the
president of the census commission stepped down
when the commission wasn´t allowed to meet the
last three months before the census, and wasn´t
allowed to control the figures before they were
released. The head of the statistical institute, on the
other hand, was fired. At the time, however, all
parties accepted the published census results
(showing 25.17 percent Albanians) but speculations
have never stopped. They can never become
anything but speculations – but will probably never
stop, either. They have become part of the large
body of distrust between the two ‘nations’.
Just how hard it will be to root out this distrust
was glimpsed in October 2011 when a new census
was scheduled to take place.
The census was preceded by a fierce debate in
which Albanians insisted that the many ethnic
Albanians who work abroad and only come back
for holidays should be counted as part of the
Macedonian population – whereas Macedonians
pointed to international rules according to which,
they said, they should not.
When the 2011 census got under way in
October, accusations of pressure and falsifications
ensued, and the census was cancelled. A new
census will be arranged “as soon as possible”, but so
far, there´s no sign of it. That´s because census
figures lie at the very core of the AlbanianMacedonian conflict.
Basically, it´s a question of power: the larger a
certain group is, the more rights it has, the more
positions in ministries, municipalities and public
companies. Briefer, the question is: whose country
is Macedonia?
Whatever the exact numbers, the ethnic
Albanian minority in Macedonia is significant. And
after Macedonia in 1991 broke loose from
Yugoslavia, they felt treated as second class citizens
in the new country which most Macedonian
politicians perceived as a ‘nation state for
Macedonians‘. The Albanians demanded more
cultural rights but also political influence and jobs
in the public sector, with some wanting the
Northwest of the country – where Albanians make
up the majority – to secede.
Inspired by secession in Kosovo and insurgent
attacks in the south of Serbia – a few kilometers
north of Aracinovo – a guerilla movement was
formed which used the same abbreviation as their
colleagues in Kosovo, in Albanian called UÇK.
“Back then, there were many paramilitaries of
Albanian nationality in Aracinovo, and we were
forced to leave our home by the members of those
groups”, Diana recalls events in their village in June
2001.
“They had weapons, and presented themselves
as ‘UÇK’. They told us that ‘either you leave your
home, or we cannot guarantee your safety’. And as
we had our daughter to take care of, we left”.
The 2001 conflict lasted from February to
August when a peace agreement was brokered by
Nato, the EU, and the UN in Ohrid, near the
Albanian border. The Ohrid Framework Agreement
guaranteed
decentralisation,
equitable
representation, including in government, and right
to the expression of identity to in particular ethnic
Albanians. But it also stipulated that people who
had been forced to flee their homes during the
conflict, should be returned and have their
belongings back.
On the 20 minute bus ride to Aracinovo.
The Angelovskis don´t want their acquaintances to see
their room – so here´s the corridor that they’ve shared
with other refugees for 11 years.
Most places, that did happen: both Albanian
and Macedonian refugees returned. But not to
Aracinovo.
Before 2001, around 85% of the population in
Aracinovo was ethnic Albanian. The Macedonians
were forced to leave during the armed conflict, and
only a handful of families have returned. It´s
estimated that in all of Macedonia, 800 people are
still refugees – or ‘internally displaced persons’,
IDPs, as refugees are called when they are refugees
in their own country. Originally, around 760 fled
Aracinovo, and of those are some dead – IDPs have
an abnormal high mortality – while many have sold
their houses and land. Around 250 still live in
similar circumstances as the Angelovskis inthe
students´ home in Skopje: They have a few square
meters per person, cook in the corridor – which is
filled with sacks of potatoes, mobile cooking gear
and the like – and share a couple of showers and
toilets which are also on the corridor.
Several other hotels and barracks in Skopje and
a few other towns function as temporary housing
for displaced persons. But today, there´s no war in
Macedonia, and there hasn´t been for more than
eleven years – so why don´t those people just go
home?
“Our house is destroyed, there´s nothing to go
back to”, Diana simply says – adding that “during
theeleven years where no one has lived in it, wind
and weather has broken it even more down”.
The state won´t help them restore the house –
and even if it did, they wouldn´t return, she says.
Pointing to people who have gone back to the
village and ”had unpleasant experiences” or even
been murdered, and to rebuilt houses which have
again been set on fire, she concludes that ”it´s
unrealistic to talk about returning. I don´t feel safe
there”.
She acknowledges, “there are Albanians in
Aracinovo, who want to live together with
Macedonians – but the majority doesn´t want us to
come back”.
Few Macedonians feel able to return to
Aracinovo. But how do the Albanians feel – those
who stayed in the village when the Angelovskis and
hundreds of others left? Why did the Macedonians,
according to their fellow villagers, leave their
homes and lives, and why don´t they go back to
them?
The bus leaves for Aracinovo from the center of
Skopje every 20-30 minutes, and the trip takes less
than half an hour. But Aracinovo is another world.
Little is going on in Aracinovo. Many shops,
cafés, and restaurants seem closed for the winter,
though it´s not winter. No sound of active
workshops is heard in the streets, but a few men
linger over coffee at out-door tables. They watch
surprised and carefully when unknown people turn
up.
Realizing that I´m ‘from the West’, they call a
man, Xhezair, who speaks some German – being
one of the many who´s worked abroad. When I
start talking about Makedonci, he switches to
Yugoslavia´s lingua franca, Serbocroatian, and
hurries to correct what he believes is a
misunderstanding:
“No-no! In this village live only Albanians”.
It seems that the Macedonians who lived here
are already distant history. And yet – from the outdoor café on the Aracinovo hill-top, we can see the
town where most refugees now live, Skopje, down
in the valley by the river.
Reminded of the Macedonians who fled more
than ten years ago, Xhezair says that he doesn´t
know why they left. But why don´t they come back,
then?
“We have a bad situation between Albanians
and Macedonians at the moment”, Xhezair explains,
refusing to have his picture taken, and only giving
his first name. “All Albanians are out of work, they
have no education, they´ve got nothing!”
So, according to Xhezair there are tensions
between Albanians and Macedonians because the
Albanians are suppressed by the Macedonians and
underprivileged.
That´s the most widespread Albanian version
of things. Likewise, the Albanians in Aracinovo
have their own view of why the Angelovskis and
other Macedonians don´t return:
“Because they´ve got a better life where they
are now”, Xhezair says, and people standing around
mumble agreeingly.
But
having
come
straight
from
the
Angelovskis´ tiny room in the students´ home, one
has to object: their life there is hardly better than
the one they had in their house, and working their
fields, here in Aracinovo. The girls never invite
friends home, and their parents asked for no photos
to be published of their room – so that their
acquaintances wouldn´t see how they live.
“But they only live in that room formally!”,
Xhezair exclaims. “Each of them are paid 400 euros
a month to live there. Four times 400 euros, that´s
1600 euros – so much money that ten of us
Albanians cannot earn it in a month!”
Xhezair explains with contempt that the room
in the students´ home is just a smoke screen, and
that the Angelovskis are paid to lur foreigners and
journalists into thinking that Macedonians cannot
return to their homes in Aracinovo.
“Pff! Why didn´t you ask them, how much they
got when they sold their house here?”
In fact I did ask the Angelovskis what they´d
done with their house and land during their decade
as displaced persons.
“98% of Macedonian houses in Aracinovo have
been sold to Albanians – but very cheaply”, Aco
says. “A house with a yard goes for 5-7000 euros,
when it ought to cost 50-100.000. In the same vein,
land is sold for a euro a square meter”.
He adds that many former Aracinovo citizens
are unemployed and have to sell their possessions
to have something to live from in the ‘temporary
housing’. Aco himself works as a bus driver, so the
family hasn´t had to sell neither house, nor land.
But it´s not of much use to them, either:
“If I could, I´d live from farming our land – but
we don´t dare. The Albanians work the land now –
and don´t pay us anything for it, of course”.
But in Aracinovo, when getting Aco´s
explanation, Xhezair starts out agitatedly in
German for emphasis:
“Alle lügen, alle lügen!”
The Albanians around him acquire overbearing
expressions upon hearing that Macedonians
supposedly have to sell their houses and land in
Aracinovo very cheaply.
“Everybody lies, everybody lies!”, Xhezair
repeats, and asserts:
“They tell you that they don´t dare come back
because of the Albanians but it´s all a lie, alle
lügen!”, he switches back to German.
“The reason that they haven´t come back is
that they don´t want to live with us. They sell their
houses here for 100.000 euros, and have been given
jobs and their own flats in Skopje, in down-town”.
In the students´ home, Diana explains that
she´s out of work, whereas Aco makes around
300euros a month. That´s in no way enough to pay
the rent for a proper flat, let alone buy a house, Aco
points out, stressing that “the Macedonian state is
responsible for what happened, and for not being
able to guarantee its citizens´ safety. Even today,
it´s not able to do so in that part of the country”.
But although the family sees the state as
responsible for their situation, they haven´t joined
fellow refugees who have taken the state to court,
hoping to be compensated for their property and
suffering. The court cases have so far run for ten
years with pending appeals.
“People are very disappointed with the courts”,
Aco says. The IDPs will probably end up taking
their cases to the European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg, he thinks, because “some are hardly
able to pay the rent for a flat for one year with the
amount they´ve been given”.
Back in Aracinovo, Xhezair asks an interesting
question:
“What did the Macedonians tell you about why
they haven´t returned to Aracinovo?”
The strange thing is that those people for a
decade have been living a twenty minutes bus ride
from each other – and then they ask a stranger, an
outsider who has just arrived, what the others think
–?
That´s one sign of just how little ethnic
Albanians and Macedonians communicate. It´s no
coincidence that the EU in every report about the
country´s steps towards membership has noted a
“lack of dialogue” as a serious impediment to
progress.
That is nothing new, of course, since the armed
conflict in 2001 can be seen as just the most
extreme expression and result of that lack of
dialogue. But during the latest months, tensions
between Albanians and Macedonians have again
been growing. As so often, they have their roots in
different views of the past.
The latest instance is the law which the party of
ethnic Macedonian PM Nikola Gruevski in
September put in front of the parliament. It offers
compensation, free health care, employment, and
cheap housing loans to the army soldiers who
fought the ethnic Albanian insurgents in 2001. The
insurgents – like those who in June of that year took
Aracinovo – won´t get such privileges as they, in the
perspective of the law, acted as enemies of the state,
and as such in no way deserve privileges.
The country´s ethnic Albanias, however –
including the largest of their parties, the DUI, which
is part of Gruevski´s government – sees the law as
discriminatory and “anti-Albanian”. They believe
that the 2001 Ohrid Agreement demands that the
insurgents get the same treatment as the soldiers.
So deep goes the disagreement that the
government may break up because of the law, and
the third early elections since the current PM took
office in 2006 be proclaimed.
How- and whenever the crisis is solved –
there´s sure to be another. The law is namely just
yet another expression of the main bone of
contention
between
the
country´s
ethnic
Macedonians and Albanians.
They have each their view of what happened in
the past – from thousands of years ago over
Macedonia´s time in the Ottoman Empire to the
2001 conflict.
Emblematic was the argument in 2009 when
the Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts
published an encyclopedia. Ethnic Albanians all
over the Balkans demonstrated against it, burning it
or the Macedonian flag in public – both in
Macedonian towns, in Pristina in Kosovo, and in
Albania´s capital Tirana.
The main cause of the outrage was the
statement in the encyclopedia that Albanians
settled in what is now Macedonia from the 16th
century onward – while Albanians believe that
their forefathers were the ancient people Illyrians,
and that ‘they’, therefore, were in the Balkans long
before anyone else still living in the peninsula. The
Macedonian Academy was forced to withdraw its
lexicon, and has promised a new edition the
soonest – with no sign of it after three years.
All of the world´s most important news
agencies reported on the ”nationalist encyclopedia”
– and none of them on the corresponding lexicon
published a year earlier by the Academy of Science
and Arts in Tirana. This lexicon claims that the
Albanians are the most ancient people in the
Balkans while not mentioning Macedonians as an
ancient people, at all.
The
Albanian
Academy
explains
the
Macedonians as Slavs who arrived in the peninsula
‘only’ in the 6th century – whereas the
Macedonians understand themselves as partly
Slavs, and partly as inheritants of Alexander the
Great. The Albanian lexicon also proclaims two
towns in Macedonia, Bitola and Krusevo, to be
Albanian.
Though there´s been no demonstrations or
official protests against the Albanian encyclopedia,
comments in internet fora suggest that ethnic
Macedonians feel as offended by the way Albanians
present them, as the other way around.
“Where are now the Macedonians – shouldn´t
they be gathering in the squares to burn Tirana´s
encyclopedia?”, one reader asks ironically on
Skopje daily Dnevnik´s internet site.
Another generalizes on the way things work in
the Balkans, seeing the Albanian encyclopedia as
“just another proof that history is no science but
propaganda used to celebrate oneself, and to
humiliate one´s neighbors”.
“Today´s degree – or lack – of civilization
shown by Albanians, Greeks and Macedonians”,
‘Neron’ goes on, “shows that none of them has
inherited any kind of positive features from any
kind of ancient culture”.
This is a minority view, though. Because even if
the point about ‘a lack of culture’ is often made, this
critique is normally directed exclusively at the
other.
Another example of how the past feeds today´s
conflicts is the still ongoing quarrel over the renaming of schools in some municipalities with a
majority of ethnic Albanians. The local authorities –
ethnic Albanian – have put up new name plates so
that those primary schools instead of Macedonian
writers or anti-fascist fighters are now honoring
terrorists and ideologues of ‘Greater Albania’ – a
150 year old project to unite all areas in which live
ethnic Albanians. At least, that´s what ethnic
Macedonians feel.
Albanians, however, see the alleged terrorists
and nationalists as fighters for national liberation.
And
though
central
authorities
–
ethnic
Macedonian – have demanded that the old name
plates be returned (the procedure for name-change
was disregarded, they say), the local authorities
have refused. To which the ethnic Macedonians
don´t know how to react:
If they pull down the plates, they can be sure to
see new protests by ethnic Albanians. And if they
let the schools keep the new names, they´ll be
approving a view of History that is at odds with the
ethnic Macedonians´, visibly dividing the country
Already several years ago, EU commissioner Rehn
promised negotiations about EU membership ‘as soon as
possible’ – as here on Macedonian television.
in two camps with worldviews that exclude each
other.
Such a division is exactly what ethnic
Macedonians are desperate to avoid, keeping the
country physically together in a ‘unitary state’ –
unlike the ‘federalization’ that many Albanians
would prefer.
The disagreement about school names seems
trivial but embodies the conflict which was merely
temporarily solved by the Ohrid Agreement in 2001.
Already, ethnic Albanian and Macedonian
pupils are physically fighting over the names of
their schools, Dnevnik wrote in October, lamenting
”that the children are ready to go to the end, with
fists and knives defending the names of those
personalities, maybe not even knowing who they
were or what they created”.
Or as political scientist Gjorgji Tonovski told the
same paper in September: ”The only solution that I
see to avoid more serious disagreements is that all
schools in the country are given a number instead
of a name”.
This may sound like a Solomonic solution – but
not only names of schools but of streets, squares
and other public buildings pose similar dilemmas.
The names of public spaces frame people´s
everyday lives in a way they hardly notice – the
more effectively creating the framework for their
worldview, too. Therefore, changing the names of
public spaces is the quickest and cheapest way of
re-writing History. And this is exactly what has
been happening all over Eastern Europe since the
fall of the Berlin Wall – but only recently, the trend
has reached Macedonia.
Many streets in Macedonia are still called after
the lifelong president of Yugoslavia, Tito, and other
anti-fascists from the Second World War. Both
among Macedonians and Albanians some wish to
keep such names but they´re now being removed
because the majority wants to instead celebrate
national heroes.
The problem is that there are two sets of
‘national heroes’ supposed to replace Tito & Co. on
the street signs: a Macedonian set, and an Albanian
– making up abstracts of each their irreconcilable
histories.
Typical for the view of history promoted by the
ethnic Macedonian elite is that Bitola´s city council
in September decided to rename 24 streets, among
them ‘Ivan Milutinovic Street’ into ‘Filip II of
Macedonia Street’.
Milutinovic was a leading partisan who in 1944
died during the liberation of Belgrade – whereas
Filip II was the father of Alexander the Great who
since 2006 has been at the center of the centre-right
government´s view of Macedonian identity. This is
most obvious in the capital´s central square where
a 29 m tall equestrian statue of the ancient king was
raised in 2011. It cost around five million euros – a
sum which caused uproar in the country in which
every third is out of work, and those with a job
make on average 450 euros a month. And yet, the
statue is just a small part of the multimillion project
‘Skopje 2014' meant to ‘beautify’ the capital with
dozens of other monuments and buildings.
This has contributed to ethnic tensions as most
of the construction celebrates the ethnic
Macedonian
past,
in
particular
stressing
Macedonians´ ‘roots in Antiquity’.
The country´s ethnic Albanians, however, are
bent on expressing their national identity, too. This
is seen in the new school names but also in names
of streets and squares which municipalities with an
ethnic Albanian majority are busy changing. Some
streets are ‘given to’ cultural figures but others are
named after insurgents from the 2001 conflict – that
Macedonians in general regard as terrorists – or eg.
After ethnic Albanian leaders who during WWII
collaborated with the German and Italian
occupiers.
In short, if all names that Albanians and
Macedonians disagree about should be avoided by
instead using numbers, children would end up
going to ‘school number 5, 27th Street, near Square
12'.
Names are a touchy issue – no one knows that
better than the Macedonians who for two decades
have been involved in the so-called ‘name dispute’.
At first glance, this doesn´t have anything to do
with the tensions between Albanians and
Macedonians – but it has.
Macedonia´s neighbor to the South, Greece,
believes that the very name of the country,
Macedonia, implies a claim on parts of northern
Greece which is also called ‘Macedonia’. Therefore,
the UN tries via a mediator to negotiate a solution
that both countries can accept – and meanwhile,
Macedonia´s official name is ‘The Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia’, or ‘FYROM’ for short.
The UN negotiations, however, haven´t moved
much since their start in 1995, and Greece now tries
to make Macedonia change its name by blocking its
entry into the EU and Nato until it does. Tensions
between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians are
now rising because of that, as well.
“There must be put pressure on Greece”, an
official from the prime minister´s party says in the
party office in the northwestern town of Tetovo.
The official, Angel Karapetrov, like most ethnic
Macedonians, rejects the demand of name-change
because it´s not only about the name itself, he says:
“What the Greeks really demand is that we
change our language and identity. They claim, it´s
only about the name – but if you change the name,
you change everything”, he says, taking one of the
mentioned ‘compromise names’ as an example.
The UN mediator has suggested, the country be
named ‘Northern Macedonia’ but “If the country
becomes ‘Northern Macedonia’, then we become
‘Northern Macedonians’ – and we cannot live with
that!”
Thus, to most ethnic Macedonians the name
dispute is a question of identity. And identity is
worth more than money can buy – which is exactly
why, the government spends millions on stuff like
the Alexander monument.
But identity is also worth more than any
welfare, or security which membership of the EU
and Nato seems to promise. And it´s at this point
that the name dispute with Greece becomes a
conflict between Macedonians and Albanians.
To Albanians, the name ’Macedonia’ doesn´t
mean much, and many blame Macedonians for
clinging to it.
In Tetovo, two out of three are ethnic Albanian,
and not far from the Tetovo-office of the PM´s party
one of them stresses that ”Macedonia didn´t even
exist before 1945. Until then, the area was called
’the Vardar Province’”.
Vardar is the river which flows through the
capital, Skopje, and which between the World Wars,
in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, gave the surrounding
region its name.
“After ’45, there was The Socialist Republic of
Macedonia, now there´s The Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia – so I don´t understand
what´s so horrible about also becoming The
Republic of Northern Macedonia?!”, the middleaged man summarizes a view common among
ethnic Albanians.
According to one poll, 77 percent of the
country´s ethnic Albanians want to change the
name of the country to unblock the way to Nato and
the EU. But an even larger part of ethnic
Macedonians – 82 percent – refuse to change the
name, even if that means exclusion from the EU
and Nato.
That´s
why
many
Albanians
accuse
Macedonians of stopping the country´s integration
with the EU. But when they do, they ‘forget’ e.g. that
all elections in the country, except the most recent,
were blighted by violence, even shootings, and
cheating which mostly happened among Albanians.
So their ethnic group has been a hindrance for
European integration, as well. Ethnic Macedonians
didn´t and don´t forget to point that out.
In such ways, Albanians and Macedonians
often put the blame for problems on each other. A
row of ‘incidents’ during the last couple of years has
added to the distrust.
Apart from the by now almost routine burning
A street
market in
majority
Albanian
Tetovo.
of flags, hate-chants at sports matches, arsonattacks on churches, fistfights among students etc.,
in late February an ethnic Macedonian policeman
off-duty shot dead two young Albanians in the town
of Gostivar. Circumstances are unclear – allegedly,
he had his young daughter with him, was slapped
in the face, and shot several warning-shots. But an
incident in April is even more enigmatic.
At Orthodox Easter, four young men who´d
gone fishing at a lake near Skopje were lined up
and shot by unknown murderers. A fifth was shot
dead nearby, probably having witnessed the crime.
The victims were all ethnic Macedonian, and soon
afterwards, twenty ethnic Albanians were arrested
– though authorities exclusively mentioned them as
“islamists”. Their families, however, say that they
never had anything to do with radical Islam.
Neither court case has really started yet, so
nothing can be known about the innocence or
otherwise of the suspects. Only one thing is certain:
whatever sentences are given in the end, theories of
conspiracy are sure to live on.
Macedonians seem to believe that most
Albanians want a Greater Albania, and that their
political parties, NGOs and other organizations
actively work on creating it.
In the Tetovo office of the ruling Macedonian
party Angel Karapetrov, eg., sees the various
incidents as a sign that the Albanians want to
divide the country:
“The Albanians believe that the peace
agreement makes Macedonia a bi-national state”,
he says about the Ohrid Agreement which stopped
the armed conflict in 2001, and which was
supposed to outline how the country should
function in the future.
“But the treaty says that the country is a
unitary state. So, we just have to explain to them
what the peace agreement is really about”,
Karapetrov says.
Judging by what business student Enver says at
the entrance to the Albanian language university in
Tetovo, however, it´s doubtful that the country´s
Albanians will be satisfied by a mere explanation:
“If [prime minister] Gruevski wants to divide
Macedonia, it´s up to him – and people certainly
won´t put up with this much longer”.
With ‘this’, Enver means the perceived
discrimination against ethnic Albanians, suggesting
that the idea of carving an Albanian unit out of
Macedonia is still alive. And maybe a minibus
driver who´s waiting for customers for the trip to
Skopje just outside campus explains why it is:
“I´m 42 years old, and have never had a job”,
he says, believing that the economy would benefit
from membership of Western organisations.
“That´s why we Albanians want to get into
Nato and the EU so that the country will open up,
will see economic development and so on”.
According to him, Macedonians don´t care
much about the EU and economic development
“because they are fine with things as they are. They
all have a job – whereas I have to drive this bus
without even having a license for that work”.
At 30%, unemployment is among the highest in
Europe but Albanians are convinced that they are
more unemployed than ethnic Macedonians. No
statistics are kept on that, and even if there were,
many would doubt the figures, and build their
worldviews independently of them.
Whatever reality looks like, Macedonians and
Albanians often experience it differently. Opinion
polls, e.g., show that four out of five ethnic
Macedonians believe that all citizens and
nationalities in the country are equal – equal before
the law, have equal opportunities and so on. But
more than nine out of ten ethnic Albanians say that
different ethnic groups are not equal.
“Most people in this town are on social security.
There are no jobs for Albanians. The state doesn´t
help us – to us, the state doesn´t exist”, Xhezair says
back in Aracinovo.
He opposes this to his belief that ”
Macedonians can get work. And you should go to a
place where Macedonians live to see how nice and
clean the streets are there. And then look at this!”,
Xhezair says, pointing to the holes in the street and
the garbage lying around.
He himself has no job, but gets social security of
40 euros a month, he says. That´s much too little to
live from, but not unusual. A younger man claims
he receives 25 euros. The lack of jobs and money
makes reconciliation between Macedonians and
Albanians harder, Xhezair suggests:
“Yes – it´s no good; we´ll have to wait ten more
years, and then see how things are. Another ten
years”.
To the people who fled Aracinovo in 2001, ‘ten
more years’ seems a new eternity. But in a way Aco
in the students´ home in Skopje agrees:
“Let me put it like this: at the time of the day
when the children go to school or return from it,
you´ll see two policemen standing at every bus
stop. That´s to make sure that the Albanian and
Macedonian kids don´t start fighting”, Aco says.
And concludes that “many more years will have to
pass before we can feel certain that there´ll be no
more conflicts. As the situation is now, I really
don´t know where things are going”.
Uffe Andersen is a freelance journalist based in
Smederevo, Serbia. This Piece was submitted as part
of Next in Line's Citizen Journalism contest.
Speaking Their Language
A pilot program in Montenegro
reaches out to Roma parents, in
their own tongue, to bring home the
importance of keeping kids in
school.
by Barbara Frye
4 December 2012
PODGORICA | Montenegro’s newest effort to
keep Roma children in school is happening far from
the classroom – and often involves neither student
nor teacher.
Instead, it takes place in shacks, tents, or
housing containers and usually comes down to a
simple conversation between two adults.
Today that conversation is between Elvis Berisa
and 24-year-old Djulja Seljimi, whose son, Ramiz,
attends Savo Pejanovic primary school in
Podgorica. A second-grader, Ramiz has been acting
up during class and bullying other students. Berisa
is a mediator for the school, and he has come to
Seljimi’s container house to talk about Ramiz’s
behavior.
At first, Seljimi is surprised and confused – she
doesn’t know who Berisa is or why he is there.
Calmly, he introduces himself and explains that the
child is being naughty in the classroom. The news
does not have quite the
desired
effect:
the
mother looks at her son,
who stands at her side,
and roars, “I’m going to
beat you.”
By this time, a
crowd
of
curious
children has gathered
around the container in
a sprawling refugee
camp on the outskirts of
the Montenegrin capital
where Seljimi lives with
her three sons.
His voice still calm
and even, the 21-yearold Berisa explains that Ramiz has been attending
school regularly and his grades are fine.
“He likes to go to school, but sometimes it
seems that he gets overwhelmed,” Berisa tells the
mother. “It’s not a problem, but he shouldn’t tease
other children and bully them.”
Seljimi promises to talk to her son, and they
leave it at that.
Berisa’s job is to act as a bridge between the
school and the parents of Montenegro’s Roma and
Egyptian students (Egyptians are an Albanianspeaking minority whose links to Roma are
disputed). He is one of two mediators at the Savo
Pejanovic school, in a program launched this year
to battle the staggeringly high rate of truancy – 54
percent, according to the government – among
Roma and Egyptian children. He makes his rounds
almost every day, cajoling, counseling, listening,
and troubleshooting.
Most of the parents welcome him, he said,
because “they can speak with somebody and tell
him in their language what problems they’re trying
to solve to bring their children to school. They have
somebody who will listen to them.”
Those problems run a wide range, from a lack
of suitable clothes to a language barrier to foreign
citizenship that obliges a family to leave the
country temporarily to obtain crucial documents. A
2009 count put the number of refugees from the
Balkan wars still living in Montenegro at more than
16,000. The census does not count displaced people,
so it’s impossible to know how many are Roma, but
a report this year by an EU anti-racism commission
said there are more than 4,000 members of the
Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian minorities from
Kosovo alone living as refugees in Montenegro.
Many of those families, like Seljimi and her
children, have lived at Camp Konik for 14 years.
They lost what little they had this summer, when a
fire swept through the camp. The ramshackle leantos destroyed by the blaze were replaced by tents,
which are now giving way to containers. But the
basics of life are still in
short supply.
“When I talk with
people from the camp,
saying, ‘Please send your
children to school, but
those children have to be
clean,’ they answer, ‘How
are we going to do that?
We don’t have any clothes
to send them in,’ ” Berisa
said.
Then
there
are
attitudinal
obstacles.
Berisa said some parents
he
meets
consider
education a waste of time. “I try to explain to them
that if their child doesn’t even learn how to write or
count, even when they get old, they’ll do the same
job he’s doing as a 5-year-old. He won’t be able to
sign documents, drive a car, basic things.”
He also reminds parents that it’s illegal to keep
their children out of school.
Jadranka Gavranovic, a psychologist at Savo
Pejanovic, said the school works with the Red Cross
to get necessities for its poor students. It has also
started sending out “invitations” to wayward
parents to come in – and to bring their children
with them, as required by law.
"I try to explain to them that if
their child doesn’t even learn
how to write or count, even
when they get old, they’ll do
the same job he’s doing as a 5year-old. He won’t be able to
sign documents, drive a car,
basic things.”
“The parents sometimes come only because of
the fear that the inspector will come knocking on
their door,” Gavranovic said.
SOMEONE LIKE THEM
The 2011 census counted about 4,500 Roma and
Egyptian children in Montenegro, but due to the
stigma of identifying as a member of either group,
those numbers are likely underestimates.
The EU-funded mediator program is one part of
an effort to dismantle, one by one, the obstacles
that keep those children at home. That task is made
trickier by a simultaneous effort to move more
Roma children from Camp Konik’s primary school
to the city’s better-equipped facilities, where the
camp children are in the minority. When children
are pushed out of the camp school, their drop-out
rate tends to soar, according to the Open Society
Institute’s Roma Education Fund.
Mediators like Berisa work in eight pilot
schools across Montenegro. They are chosen by a
group of advocacy organizations on the basis of
their language skills – more than 60 percent of the
country’s Roma and Egyptians claim Romani as
their mother tongue – and experience working with
children.
Tamara Milic, a specialist on inclusion for the
Education Ministry, said the idea grew out of an
existing program that had Roma assistants in the
classroom. Education officials decided more direct
outreach to parents was needed.
“For that community, it’s more important if you
have someone to mediate between the school and
parents,” Milic said. “[Someone] who came, of
course, from the community, who is [of] Roma
origin, and helps the school explain to parents how
important school is.”
Berisa lives with his family in one of the houses
that ring the Konik camp. In addition to his job as a
mediator, he is one of three Roma law students at
the University of Montenegro, and he works part
time as a journalist at a prestigious weekly
magazine.
Speaking Romani is an important aspect of
Berisa’s job, but he also plays a more subtle
motivational role, according to Gavranovic, the
school psychologist.
“The children like to see Elvis in school. He’s a
model for them, that life can be different,” she said.
“When we talk with Roma children here, we
say, ‘Look at Elvis, he also started attending
university.’ So we give them a good example, trying
to present to them a different kind of reality. Their
home is one reality, but there are different realities
as well, which are achievable.”
Barbara Frye is TOL’s managing editor.
The contents of this project are the sole responsibility
of Transitions and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the European Union.
Aida Ramusovic, a journalist for TV Vijesti in
Podgorica, contributed to this report.
Death Threats and Deadlines
The perils of being a journalist in
the Balkans' "quiet" country.
by Barbara Frye
23 November 2012
PODGORICA | Mihailo Jovovic could hardly
believe what he was seeing. It was late one night in
August 2009 and he had just watched the city’s
mayor hop out of a car on a Podgorica street and
slap a photographer for Vijesti, Montenegro’s
leading daily newspaper.
“Can you imagine?” said Jovovic, the
newspaper’s editor in chief. “Why are you doing
this? Are you normal?” Jovovic said he asked the
mayor. “And he turned to me and he slapped me. I
thought, ‘This is really crazy.’ ”
Soon afterward, Jovovic said, the mayor’s son,
who had been at a downtown
café with his father and
others, walked over – and
struck him on the side of the
head.
The photographer had
gone to the café on a tip that
Mayor Miomir Mugosa was
parked
illegally.
The
newspaper had only that day
run a photograph of the
mayor’s illegally parked car.
With the night duty reporter
gone, Jovovic had taken the
assignment himself.
Summoned by someone
in the Vijesti newsroom, police
arrived but Jovovic said, “They
were more afraid of the mayor than I was.” As the
journalist tells it, they didn’t search for the gun that
Jovovic said the mayor’s son had held to his side.
Nor did they take witness statements or footage
from nearby surveillance cameras. “They were
more trying to hush everything up.”
But the truly crazy part was to come the next
day – and to last for three years.
Jovovic was diagnosed with a punctured
eardrum – which could have resulted in serious
charges against the mayor’s son – and taken in for
surgery the next morning.
When word of that injury got out, the mayor’s
driver, who Jovovic said was there the night before
but not involved in the dispute, showed up at the
hospital with a scratch on the side of his head
complaining about headaches. He said Jovovic had
struck him.
From there, Jovovic described a scenario of
badly compromised institutions, including a
hospital and law enforcement agencies. The driver
was diagnosed with brain damage and Jovovic was
brought up on criminal charges. He was looking at
one to eight years in prison.
“From the point where the police arrived, I
realized firsthand how the system works in
Montenegro when somebody close to the ruling
circles or somebody from the ruling circles is
involved,” Jovovic said.
This summer, he was acquitted and the
mayor’s son, who eventually admitted hitting
Jovovic, received a suspended sentence. The
prosecutor has appealed the acquittal.
The mayor, who was fined for disturbing the
peace in connection with the attack, said he had
been defending himself against Jovovic and the
photographer.
At least in that attack the journalist knew who
had struck him, and why. That’s not the case in
most of the assaults on Montenegro’s journalists,
especially those from Vijesti, that have occurred
since 2004. It’s a black eye for the country as it
begins negotiations to enter
the European Union – press
freedom is one of seven
areas that Brussels told
Montenegro to focus on
nearly two years ago.
Most
who
have
watched the attacks go
unpunished year after year
say that in the long term,
this small country needs to
eradicate a culture of
impunity that has its roots
in one-party rule: the same
party, a successor to the
Communists, has governed
Montenegro since 1991. The
lack of viable opposition
parties has left a vacuum, into which the national
press and some watchdog groups have stepped.
The persistence of corruption in Montenegro’s
clannish society, also cited by Brussels as a priority,
makes journalists’ work even more dangerous.
While that might change as the country works to
meet EU standards, some signs suggest that
Montenegro is not quite ready for its cleanup.
Milo Djukanovic, leader of the ruling
Democratic Party of Socialists, is set to become the
country’s new prime minister after October’s
parliamentary elections. Djukanovic has been
either president or prime minister since 1991, with
the exception of a few short interregnums. In the
2000s, he was investigated in Italy for links to
organized crime and tobacco smuggling, charges
that were eventually dropped in a dispute over
whether he enjoyed immunity as a head of state. A
journalistic investigation earlier this year revealed
that a taxpayer bailout of a Montenegrin bank
controlled by Djukanovic’s family had been
triggered by bad loans to his family members and
associates – which were funded in the first place
primarily by major government deposits.
“From the point where
the police arrived, I
realized firsthand how
the system works in
Montenegro when
somebody close to the
ruling circles or
somebody from the ruling
circles is involved.”
But even in the short term, the country has not
managed any plausible prosecutions of the attacks
on journalists. When someone is caught, it’s usually
small-time thugs, who profess puzzling motives.
That’s what happened to Zeljko Ivanovic, a
Vijesti co-owner and managing editor. It was
September 2007, and Vijesti had just celebrated its
first 10 years of publishing. At the time, Ivanovic
said, Djukanovic was waging a war in statecontrolled media against Vijesti because of its
critical coverage. As he was leaving the anniversary
celebrations in the wee hours, three men emerged
from a doorway, he said, two of whom began to
beat him with sticks. He escaped and they sped off
in a waiting car.
“But that was nothing compared with horrible
things the government did after that attack,”
Ivanovic said. Two men were tried for the assault.
Neither Ivanovic nor two other witnesses said they
matched the description of the actual attackers. The
men could not say where Ivanovic’s car was that
night, and they contradicted each other’s testimony.
Their
motive?
The
suspects told the judge they
were angry that Vijesti had
included their names on the
police blotter for a petty theft
that took place in a provincial
town two years earlier.
“It was really funny. It
was theater,” Ivanovic said.
They were sentenced to
four years in prison, reduced
to one year on appeal. They
ended up serving two months,
according to Ivanovic.
“My case was organized
by the highest level of the
mafia in Montenegro,” he said.
Likewise, Vijesti reporter
Olivera Lakic received death
threats last year and in March was attacked after
reporting on the alleged production of counterfeit
cigarettes at a Montenegro factory. A 29-year-old
man was sentenced to nine months in prison for
the crime. Lakic has resigned and declined to be
interviewed for this story.
In 2008, a sports writer for Vijesti was beaten
after making comments on a Serbian television
program about corruption in soccer.
Last year, three of Vijesti’s vans were hit by
arsonists.
But the gravest attack of all was not on a Vijesti
journalist: Dusko Jovanovic, editor in chief of the
Dan daily newspaper, was murdered in a drive-by
shooting in 2004. One man is serving a 18-year
prison sentence for the crime, but he claims the
evidence found on him was planted. The
prosecution waited for years to test DNA evidence
on two other suspects and the trail of others
involved has apparently gone cold.
And those are just the physical attacks. In the
past three years, Vijesti has had to defend more
than 100 libel cases in court, Ivanovic said, and
over the last five years lawsuits have cost the
company more than 100,000 euros ($128,000).
During the same period, Vijesti’s advertising
revenue from the government or ruling party has
declined by 1 million euros, according to Ivanovic.
He said most of the government advertising has
migrated to Pobjeda, a poorly read daily that was
once the organ of the Yugoslav-era Communists.
Journalists at other private media have been
the targets of attacks and lawsuits as well. One of
them, Petar Komnenic, is now the host of the
country’s most-watched public affairs program, on
Vijesti TV, the newspaper’s sister station. But in
2007, while working for the weekly Monitor
magazine, he was sued by a high court judge after
writing a story that said judges on that court had
been placed under illegal surveillance by police and
prosecutors. Despite the testimony of a judge who
had been Komnenic’s source for the story, and the
presentation of documentary evidence, Komnenic
was fined 4,000 euros. When he refused to pay, the
court changed the sentence to four months in jail.
Komnenic,
though,
remains a free man. After
pingponging between lower
and higher courts, his case
has been quietly dropped by
the authorities following a
protest from the European
Commission.
“They just put it under
the carpet,” he said.
Tea Gorjanc-Prelevic is
executive director of the
Human
Rights
Action
watchdog group. “We deal
with freedom of expression –
it’s very precious, important
for us – but if I had to choose,
I’m concerned about the
judiciary,” she said. “Because
we cannot live without freedom of expression but
I’m more concerned with the state authorities and
... when I see how judges behave and state
prosecutors, I’m completely depressed.” She called
the prosecution of Ivanovic’s attackers a “sham.”
Gorjanc-Prelevic said the state prosecutor’s
office, whose responsibilities include overseeing the
police,
often
simply
accepts
the
police’s
explanations for the lack of progress in
investigating human rights violations instead of
pushing them. Reinforcing the impression of a
paralyzed justice system, authorities generally
refuse to comment on investigations.
“It shows that they don’t give a damn what the
public thinks of them because as long as they’re
supported by the ruling party, that they’re safe in
their positions, they don’t care what the public says.
This is the impression,” Gorjanc-Prelevic said.
In May 2010 Human Rights Action submitted a
list of 12 cases of alleged human rights violations in
Montenegro, including attacks on journalists, to the
state prosecutor’s office to ask what progress had
“It shows that they don’t
give a damn what the
public thinks of them
because as long as
they’re supported by the
ruling party, that they’re
safe in their positions,
they don’t care what the
public says. This is the
impression.”
been made. The prosecutor initially refused to
answer, but after two years and a court battle, the
group finally received responses.
Among them: that attempts to find others
involved in Jovanovic’s murder have stalled and
that investigations into a 2007 attack on a journalist
and the 2008 beating of the Vijesti sports writer
have gone nowhere.
The state prosecutor’s office did not respond to
requests for an interview or comment.
ROLE PLAYING
If a faltering judicial system promotes an
atmosphere of impunity for attacks on the press,
then a stagnant and incestuous political scene
underlies the troubled judicial system. With a
largely neutered opposition, would-be reformers
say they struggle to get the ear of those in power,
and they often take on functions that are better
suited to an opposition political party.
“On a daily basis, you will see more initiatives
made from media and made from civil society
organizations in comparison to opposition parties,
and it’s true, to be totally fair and honest, that in
our country, you have government, you have very
limited capacity of the opposition, and you have the
very strong role of media and civil society,” said
Ana Novakovic, executive director of the Center for
Development of Nongovernmental Organizations.
It was Human Rights Action, for instance, that
led the charge to decriminalize defamation and to
reduce the penalties assessed in civil defamation
cases.
But if some media, along with civic groups,
must play the role of the opposition, observers
including Novakovic, Gorjanc-Prelevic, and others
say coverage often goes beyond the bounds of
healthy ideological differences.
“You have two approaches: supportive toward
government and totally against government,”
Novakovic said. “And when you try to say that
something that government did was good and in
line with European standards, in line with
protection of human rights, you are not interesting
for these media.”
In a pre-election speech to a congress of the
Democratic Party of Socialists, Prime Minister Igor
Luksic said the newspapers Vijesti and Dan and an
anti-corruption watchdog group were working with
two new political parties as part of the opposition.
“It is the same head, speaking through various
mouths. Those are not independent media, but the
media aligned behind the same kitchen. When you
boil it all together, it does not smell good,” Luksic
said, according to Balkan Insight.
Novakovic condemned the remark and, in an
open letter to Luksic, Jovovic said it encouraged
assaults that took place at the party congress on
Dan and Vijesti reporters.
Ivanovic bristled at the notion that Vijesti is an
opposition mouthpiece. He said Djukanovic has
tried “to present us as the same as his media: they
lie for him, we lie against him.”
“The government and its people everywhere
try to say that the media are politically divided,
some media for the government and some media
for the opposition,” Jovovic said. “But if you are a
journalist, if you are a media group of people who
wants to do its job properly, you have to write about
the bad things whoever is in question –
government,
criminals,
shady
businessmen,
businessmen close to the government. ... You have
to write about them, and it’s tough luck if you do it.
We cannot ignore it.”
Vijesti has a patchwork of ownership: the
Austrian Styria Media Group AG holds 25 percent;
the nonprofit, Prague-based Media Development
Loan Fund holds 30 percent; and four local owners,
including Ivanovic, hold 45 percent.
“I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that
one private media chooses not to speak in favor of
the government, especially when that government
is in power for the last 23 years,” Komnenic said.
“It’s the same government that went to wars
together with Milosevic, the same government that
was involved in cigarette smuggling. ... Those
magazines have nothing to do with the opposition.
They are not sponsored by the opposition.”
Instead, Komnenic and others blasted the
fawning coverage of the ruling party and those
linked to it in government-owned media.
“They are using my money for their campaign
in the public media. They are controlling the public
media. That’s illegal. That’s not legitimate,”
Komnenic said.
An OSCE analysis of coverage before the
parliamentary elections was inconclusive on that
score. It said public radio and television “devoted
57 percent of its political and election prime time
news coverage to governing figures, showing a lack
of analytical reporting and a neutral tone toward
[the] opposition.” In contrast, the observers found,
“Private broadcasters monitored devoted 54
percent to state representatives and the ruling
coalition, frequently negative in tone.”
A spokesman for the Montenegrin government
did not respond to questions from TOL by press
time.
Most interviewed for this article said they were
optimistic that EU entry negotiations could help
straighten out the country’s twisted media scene,
and they pointed to the changed defamation law as
an early success. Some stressed that Brussels,
having learned its lesson with Romania and
Bulgaria, will begin and end negotiations by
focusing on rule of law issues, which include
judicial reform, human rights, and freedom of
expression.
Dragan Mugosa, spokesman for the EU
delegation in Montenegro, said the number of
attacks on journalists has declined since 2009, when
Brussels began considering the country’s EU
membership application.
“It’s totally unacceptable to have any violence
against journalists, and what we expect is that if
such violence does occur, that the police investigate
thoroughly the situation, and if necessary, take
measures, the prosecutor takes action and basically
that the case is processed quickly and that
perpetrators of these aggressive crimes against
journalists are taken to court. We expect the
authorities to be rather tough in this respect,”
Mugosa said.
In addition, he noted that the EU had prodded
Montenegro to bring its stratospheric court
judgments against reporters – some in the tens of
thousands of euros – more into line with standards
set by the European Court of Human Rights and
with average Montenegrin salaries.
On the other hand, Mugosa said, the country’s
press also has work to do, citing a lack of qualified
people in some newsrooms and cases of
unsubstantiated allegations and flatly wrong stories
getting front-page treatment.
That frustration is mutual. Some journalists
and activists deride the restrained statements about
press freedom that appear in reports from Brussels.
The only criticism on the subject to appear in the
most recent assessment of Montenegro’s readiness
to join the EU, released in October, reads: “Efforts to
investigate and prosecute old cases of violence
against journalists need to be stepped up.”
“They never put it on the table, say, ‘You have
to resolve these cases,’ ” Ivanovic said.
Jovovic said Montenegrin officials have gotten
away with mischief because in some ways they’re
not as bad as their neighbors.
“We don’t make troubles. We don’t have a
Kosovo, we don’t have Hague tribunal problems. ...
They say very often Montenegro is the success story
of the Balkans. They don’t pay enough attention or
they don’t want to pay enough attention [to]
democracy in Montenegro, human rights.”
UPDATE: TOL received the following email
response from the Montenegrin government’s
public relations office after deadline. It has been
edited for style.
The legislation in Montenegro does not require
state institutions to publish advertisements in all
daily newspapers and it is left to the institutions’
discretion to choose where they will publish their
tenders, vacancies, etc. In accordance with the
measures aimed at reducing public spending, the
institutions are chiefly guided by the principle of
cost-effectiveness, i.e. choosing the financially most
favorable option for advertising.
In fact, rather than taking away revenues from
independent media, the government has invested
efforts to help the media to cope with the economic
crisis. It has provided a bailout package for print
and electronic media, granting an 800,000 euro
subsidy to the press distribution company Bega
Press and writing off the debts of electronic media
outlets for the use of frequencies and broadcasting
infrastructure worth 4.4 million euros.
We would disagree with the critics who say
that the police and the prosecution are doing little
to solve these cases [of attacks on journalists], as
there has been a consistent track record in the past
several years of measurable progress in their work.
In 2011 Montenegro was the country with the
lowest crime rate in Europe.
Defamation has been decriminalized and a
limit has been set on financial claims for
compensation in litigation cases, in line with
relevant European standards and the case law of
the European Court of Human Rights.
Most recently, on 8 June 2012, the Basic Court
in Podgorica sentenced one person to six months in
prison for threatening the safety of journalist
Olivera Lakic, while on 20 June 2012, another
person accused of assaulting Mrs. Lakic was
sentenced to six months in prison.
The government has no influence whatsoever
on the editorial policies of any media outlet in the
country, including the state-owned media.
The work of the broadcast media is governed
by an independent regulatory authority, Agency for
Electronic Media, whose council is elected by the
parliament, while the print media are governed by
the principle of self-regulation, in line with
European standards.
Barbara Frye is TOL’s managing editor. The contents
of this project are the sole responsibility of
Transitions and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the European Union. Photos courtesy of Vijesti.
Serbia After the Elections:
A View from Three Regions
by Andrej Ban
July 5, 2012
Elections held on 6 May appear to have
confirmed Serbia’s aim of joining the European
Union, despite the victory of the Serbian
Progressive Party. While the new government will
be led by the Progressives, a four-year-old offshoot
of the anti-EU Serbian Radical Party, the victors
have positioned themselves as center-rightists and
formed a coalition with the Socialists, with both
governing parties affirming the country’s EU
course.
But it would mistaken to conclude that Serbia is
over past dramas. No other European country has
been so imprinted by ethnic conflict in the past 20
years. Kosovar Albanians have a favorite joke:
“Srbija kao Nokia,” or “Serbia is like Nokia” – a
smaller model every year. Montenegro is gone.
Kosovo’s independence, even if still not accepted by
Russia, China, and five EU member states, is now a
topic of open discussion among brave Serbian
politicians and intellectuals like Liberal Democrat
Cedomir Jovanovic, one of the leaders of the
protests that toppled Slobodan Milosevic, and the
former radical Vuk Draskovic. There is breakaway
talk from some politicians in Vojvodina, the
autonomous, prosperous northern district that is
home to 26 nationalities, including many ethnic
Hungarians and Slovaks. And the southern Presevo
Valley, inhabited mostly by ethnic Albanians, is in
turmoil – eight alleged organized crime bosses were
arrested there two days before the election,
prompting talk in Tirana and Pristina of “Serbian
repression,” reviving the vocabulary of the 1990s.
Ivica Dacic, former Interior Minister and head
of the Socialists, emerged as the real winner of the
parliamentary
voting.
With
neither
the
Progressives of Tomislav Nikolic nor Boris Tadic’s
Democrats winning an outright majority, the thirdplace Socialists could play kingmaker, which Dacic
parlayed into an appointment as prime minister.
Tadic, whose presidency
saw the last war crimes suspect
extradited to The Hague, lost his
office on 20 May to Nikolic; even
Tadic’s
biggest
supporters
complained of the country’s
worsening economic conditions.
This is fertile soil for false
illusions
and
Socialist
hallucinations about the Serbian
dilemma: to focus on the EU or
on Russia, which has signed a
free-trade agreement with Serbia? There is talk of
of the big Slavic brother, “Putin the messiah” –
more popular here than any Serbian politician.
Nenad Popovic, vice-president of Vojislav Kostunic’s
Democratic Party of Serbia (distinct from Tadic’s
Democratic Party), dreams about attaining power
and securing billions in direct investment from
Russia. He does not say what kind of an investment,
though. Dejan Mirovic of the Radical Party talks of
war reparations from NATO and orienting Serbia
toward countries that did not bomb it.
Miroslav Prokopijevic, an economic analyst in
Belgrade, smiles at such statements. Serbian
exports less to Russia than to Kosovo. “Russia
represents only 6 percent of our trade exchange
and therefore is not an alternative for Serbia over
the EU countries, as they make up 60 percent,” he
says.
Here is a taste of how Serbia’s present and
future look looks from three different ethnic,
economic, and geographic perspectives.
SUCCESS STORY: KRAGUJEVAC
Even if multiethnic Vojvodina in the north and
Muslim Sandzak and Albanian Presevo Valley in the
south branched off from Serbia – and that is sheer
fiction – there would remain an important region
(besides Belgrade) in the middle: industrial
Kragujevac and the fertile surrounding region of
Sumadija, populated by 2 million inhabitants.
Founded in the 16th century when area was
under Turkish domination, Kragujevac served as
the capital of Serbia from 1818 to 1841 at the behest
of Prince Milos Obrenovic. The first Serbian
Constitution was proclaimed in Kragujevac in 1835;
the city was also home to Serbia’s first printing
plant, theater, newspapers, and military academy.
There was a revolt in the
barracks in 1918, when
mostly Slovak soldiers stood
against
Austro-Hungarian
rule. A memorial stone with
surnames like Hudec, Danis,
Salaga, Gal, and Jesensky
reminds visitors of the 44
fatalities from the suppressed
rebellion.
Kragujevac has suffered
several such blows. The Nazis
killed 7,000 men in the city in response to guerilla
attacks, shooting 50 Serbs for each German
wounded and 100 for each German killed. During
the socialist era the popular Yugo cars were made
in the Zastava factory; it also produced guns, and
thanks to the Milosevic-era sanctions it went
bankrupt in the 1990s. NATO air strikes during the
Kosovo war sealed its fate – there were no deaths,
but 38,000 people lost their jobs in a day.
But Italian car maker Fiat rescued Zastava in
2008, taking majority ownership. The new Fiat
model 500L has begun production there. In recent
years Kragujevac has changed its look, from forlorn
ghost town to modern metropolis. As Italian and
other foreign managers streamed in, property
prices tripled, and restaurants and cafes are
thriving.
“The Italians are kind and they enjoy our
Serbian cuisine: cevapi, pleskavica, kajmak,” a
waitress at the Prestonica restaurant in Kragujevac
says. “At first they looked at us like we lived in
trees, but now they feel at home here.” Despite the
arrival of well-paid businessmen, the restaurant
has not raised its prices; one can eat there for a few
euros.
Veroljub Stevanovic, the mayor of Kragujevac,
is an energetic fellow given to superlatives. “I grew
up in the Zastava factory and led the assembly hall
as an engineer. I can tell you, to compare the Yugo
and today’s Fiat is like comparing New York with a
small African town. It is possibly the most modern
car factory in Europe. Super, great, the best!”
A leader of the United Regions of Serbia, a
political coalition formed in 2010, Stevanovic looks
beyond his own region for models for success.
Kragujevac’s recipe is “similar to that of Kia in
Slovakia or Hyundai in the Czech Republic. Global
investors are lured in by a cheap and qualified
workforce, state grants for workplaces, tax breaks,
and, as a bonus, low prices for places to build.”
Kragujevac was also the first city in Serbia to send a
representative to the EU to prepare pre-admission
matters, in 2010.
AT HOME IN BACKI PETROVAC
While the mayor boasts that Kragujevac has the
“biggest shopping center in the Balkans” (called
Plaza), Backi Petrovac, a municipality of 14,000,
mostly ethnic Slovak inhabitants in Vojvodina, has
the largest water park in Europe, according to coowner Jan Brtka. AquaPark Petroland was built in
2009 by the Aqua Term Invest with nine investors
from Slovakia and one from Serbia, the
aforementioned Brtka. Its pools have hot thermal
water that flows in volume of 19 cubic meters per
second at a temperature of 47 degrees Celsius.
“It would be a sin not to use this natural
treasure,” said Brtka, whose ancestors from
Terchova in Slovakia came to Vojvodina amid a
wave of Slovak emigrants in the 18thcentury. “We
even have visitors from Ukraine now.”
Brtka, a member of the Democratic Party,
supported Tadic. He is optimistic about Serbia’s
future; otherwise he would have left, like many of
ethnic brethren, who go to study in Slovakia and do
not return. Three hundred empty houses create one
of the biggest problems in Backi Petrovac town
proper, where half the the 6,500 inhabitants earn
their living through agriculture.
“The ethnic composition is changing as, instead
of Slovaks, Serbs move into those empty houses,”
says mayor Vladimir Turan, also of the Democrats.
“What do we expect from elections? A better life,
new investors, the establishment of industrial
parks. We have no other option, as we are a state in
transition. We had the biggest factory for brooms in
Europe. It’s bankrupt. Two new ones have been
started, but they employ only half [the workers]
from the former factory.”
SERBIAN ORIENT NOVI PAZAR
Seven children, two wives, and a degree from
the Islamic University in Algeria: not the usual
profile for a Serbian presidential candidate.
Muamer Zukorlic received only 1.1 percent of votes
in the first round of balloting on 6 May, and he
could hardly have expected more. But the 42-yearold religious leader, a native of the village of Orlje
in Sandzak, knows what he is doing (see interview
below). If nothing else, his presidential run is a
great marketing move for him and his tribesmen.
Serbia might need more time to accept a
Muslim president, but Zukorlic is not humbly
waiting. “In a situation when we do not have very
visible candidates, it would be selfish to hide my
quality program from voters,” the mufti says. He
keeps journalists cooling their heels while
assistance take him his traditional outfit, a black
caftan and white head cover; during the campaign,
he appears in public only so attired.
Zukorlic’s program has two main points:
historical reconciliation of Serbs and surrounding
nations, and vast investments from the Muslim
world. Such a vision, promulgated by the founder
and first rector of the Muslim university in Novi
Pazar, no doubt terrifies Orthodox Serbs. But the
reality of discrimination here is long-lived and runs
in the other direction. Muslims account for more
than 90 percent of the regional population, but state
offices, hospitals, and police departments employ
mostly Serbs. The Muslims are politically divided,
with support split among three parties.
Located in southwestern Serbia near the
Kosovo border, Novi Pazar is a town with an
oriental atmosphere. What can you find there?
Many mosques, minarets, stylish tearooms, cafes,
and craft shops in small, narrow streets lined with
crumbling wooden houses. What spoils the image is
the giant hotel Vrbak in the center of the town, built
during the 1980s in a style that could be described
as Islamo-Socialist Realism.
As in Transylvania, where ethnic Hungarians
and Romanians argued about the inscription on a
statue of 15th-century king Matthias Corvinus, the
biggest quarrel in Novi Pazar is about an emblem:
what to call the city’s main square. It is officially
called Town Square, because the Serbian state does
not agree with the name favored by locals. They
want the square to carry the name of the Ottoman
general Gazi Isa-beg Isakovic, who established the
city in 1461 and built its first mosque and madrasa.
Mufti Zukorlic’s native Orlje lies over the
mountains, about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles)
southwest of Novi Pazar, and the city’s political
quarrels do not reach there. Orlje has about 60
houses, and a quarter of them are empty. At
noontime, you are likely to meet only pensioners.
One of them is Smajo Zukorlic, a relative of the
mufti. He supported his kinsman in the presidential
race, but he is laconic about the political situation:
“Mufti is my man, but I know he will never become
the Serbian president. He can only get votes which
he will pass to Nikolic.”
Smajo has remained in Orlje with his wife, but
his four sisters, his two sons and their wives, and
his three grandsons all live in Germany. They
return to Sandzak only twice a year, for holidays. “I
would go too, but what would I do there except
stare at the walls of their empty flat?” the old man
says, looking at the mosque in the valley.
This article was originally published in the Slovak
magazine .tyzden
* * *
“A Breeze of Freedom”
An interview
Gordana Mitrovic
with
Kragujevac
journalist
What is characteristic of this town?
I have been working here as a news reporter
for 20 years. Now I work for local TV as well as the
nationwide agency Beta. When the opposition won
in 1997, Kragujevac was free and quite independent
from Milosevic and his power. Today’s mayor, who
has been in a faction since 2005, has always been a
step forward. He used to lead the party Together for
Sumadija and supported Tadic in national elections
in 2008. Now he is a deputy of Mladjan Dinkic,
chairman of United Regions of Serbia (URS). Dinkic
used to be in power but after the reconstruction he
parted from President Tadic, gathered regional
mayors [and] ex-radicals, and established his own
party.
How does URS differ from other parties?
They emphasize decentralization, thus finances
do not go just to Belgrade but are divided equally
among regions.
Is Serbia strongly centralized?
You might say so. The government withheld
some money last year but after pressure from
towns it was changed.
What
is
Tadic’s
attitude
towards
centralization?
Whenever he visits Kragujevac he has a
“dogfight” with the mayor. Serbia somehow cannot
form regions. We have an “as if” region because
Sumadija’s executive branch has no real power or
jurisdiction.
How did it happen that during the Socialist
Milosevic era, Kragujevac came to favor the
opposition?
The town has always had a spirit of change.
Kragujevac is a former capital city and people still
respect this fact. During the wars of the 1990s the
reserve soldiers refused to go to Bosnia – the
healthy core always protested.
Were you here during NATO bombing in
spring 1999?
Yes. The worst was the bombing of Zastava. It
woke us up at 2 a.m. We were hiding. On 24 March,
the first day of firing, bombs were falling on
barracks but nobody was killed. People stayed
together with their families. I stayed at work – back
then in radio – but colleagues were sent home for
their protection. Companies did the same thing.
Who did you blame more: NATO or
Milosevic?
Milosevic, naturally. Here people saw into
what was happening – we were listening to Radio
Free Europe, and the media were more open to the
opinions of the opposition than in Belgrade.
What is it like to be a journalist [in
Kragujevac]?
Since the new mayor stepped in, one can feel a
breeze of freedom. Ironically, as the new
democratic power got stronger, it displayed the
same behavior as the one that we wanted to
overthrow. I felt the greatest pressure when the
[Democratic Party] mayor, Vladko Rajkovic, also a
change agent, stepped into office. I left my work in
radio within a year. A much less critical attitude
was expected, and the time allotted for opposition
[views] was measured in minutes.
So I see it like this: as democracy gets stronger,
journalism falls deeper. It is good that new
investors come, but it is nonsense that the daily
news starts with the same line – about the Plaza
shopping center. The local TV is under control here
– investors need publicity.
Belgrade journalists say that Tadic’s
Democratic Party has manipulated the media.
How is it here?
The local government imposes a certain level
of control. The Beta agency offers me freedom, as
local TV is a form of ghetto. A local government
director called Beta, saying I am supposedly
sending
out
“incorrect
information”
from
Kragujevac. URS politicians are similar to Tadic, but
they see themselves as irreplaceable and are sure
they can bring new investments. They hardly
“climbed” over 5 percent and got into parliament.
* * *
Take a Chance on Me
An interview with Muamer Zukorlic, presidential
candidate and religious leader of Muslims in Serbia.
What kind of local or international media
interest did your candidacy raise?
Incredible interest. Serbian media were
shocked at first. Then those under the control of the
Serbian regime started an organized chase after
me. It bothered me, but then I understood that my
candidacy was a threat for important political
factors.
Which ones?
Mostly Tadic and his partners.
Did you have an opportunity to talk to him
or Nikolic during the campaign?
No. This was the weirdest campaign so far. The
regime led it in a certain way to avoid all possible
confrontations with the serious candidates.
You ran to be president of all Serbian
citizens. What do you want to say to the
Orthodox majority?
This is why I called my program “United Word.”
Serbia has been stigmatized by getting into conflict
with neighboring nations for the past hundred
years. The title “United Word” personifies the
challenge for all inhabitants, but mostly the
majority, to come together around our collective
fundamental values. I deliberately dress in this
traditional outfit – with this image I aim to show
that it is possible to be a rigorous Muslim, a
religious leader, even while accepting the rules of
democracy. We will see whether Europe is able to
perceive it as a chance or as a threat.
Have you talked to voters outside your
region? What has been their reaction ?
While elections were underway I was in the
United Arab Emirates and there was little time left
after my return to Serbia. I had a big gathering at
the Sava Center in Belgrade on 27 April. But I
received about 100 letters from people of different
ideological and social orientation from all over
Serbia. That was a rather positive discovery.
Did the Serbs express fear about your
candidacy?
Serbian media claimed that Sandzak, a mostly
Muslim region, is a center of radicalism,
Wahhabism. Numerous police raids used to happen
here. My answer is that Serbia lost its ordinary
chances for rescue. Only uncommon ways are left,
and I introduce them.
What about fearing you?
The fear is present but is smaller. Voting for me
feels hazardous for the Serbian nation and I
understand that. But the Serbian nation is
historically notable or liking to take risks. I said:
“You took a risk when you fought with the Turks on
the Kosovo plain 600 years ago and you lost. You
took a risk when you were in conflict with NATO 13
years ago, and you also lost. Now you can take a
risk with me, and you will win.”
Do you seek autonomy or some special
status for Sandzak, like Vojvodina has or
Kosovo had during Tito’s reign?
Sandzak should become an autonomous region.
Naturally, we are talking about autonomy in the
scope of the Serbian constitutional framework and
respect for the borders and sovereignty of Serbia. I
believe that it could contribute to stability. One of
the seven principles of my program is to reconcile
relationships with our neighbors. I mean mostly the
historic reconciliation between the Albanian and
Serbian nations, also between the Bosnian and
Serbian nations. There will be no stability without
this.
How do you imagine doing so?
The only way to speed up the historic
reconciliation is to elect me president of Serbia.
Then Sarajevo, Pristina, and Tirana would not
perceive Belgrade as their enemy. My program
anticipates the creation of a mini-Balkan union
among Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Kosovo,
Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
Are you afraid of anti-Islam sentiment if
the radicals win?
No. I am more prepared to accept Nikolic’s
honest conservatism.
Text and photos by Andrej Ban, a reporter for
Tyzden.
Srdja Popovic helped start the movement that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic by setting a turkey loose on the streets of
The Exporters of Revolution
Belgrade. Now he travels the world helping other activists.
How the former student activists
who toppled Yugoslav strongman
Slobodan Milosevic are teaching the
world's oppressed to rise up.
by Tomas Sacher
3 October 2012
BELGRADE | Among the shops at an
inconspicuous building in the Serbian capital’s
Gandijeva housing development is an unmarked
door with the word “CANVAS” on the buzzer. On a
recent afternoon, CANVAS Executive Director Srdja
Popovic greeted a visitor with a warm smile. The
office has a few desks, a computer, and a
conference table. It gives little impression of
CANVAS’ work. But then Popovic is rarely there. He
had just returned from several weeks abroad and
planned to fly out again in two days.
“South Sudan and Burma are my next
destinations,” Popovic said.
Since 2003, the Center for Applied NonViolent
Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, has offered a
unique product in countries like Burma: a guide to
overthrowing authoritarian regimes through
peaceful resistance. The nonprofit taps Popovic’s
experience leading the student movement that
toppled Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic
over a decade ago to train would-be revolutionaries
to identify and attack the Achilles heel of autocrats.
As Popovic likes to say, revolution is first and
foremost a “carefully organized and planned
action.”
Anyone can hire CANVAS. They need only
convince Popovic their fight is just and pay the
travel expenses of his small team of “lecturers.’”
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, the Arab Spring, the
recent political opening in Burma – CANVAS has
had a hand in all. It represents the worst fears of
autocrats from Russian President Vladimir Putin to
Belarusian dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Despite some skeptics, CANVAS has been getting
a lot of attention. The prominent U.S. magazine
Foreign Policy tapped Popovic for its 2011 list of the
Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Wired magazine
called him one of the 50 people who will change the
world. There’s even talk of a Nobel Peace Prize
nomination.
THE RISE OF THE RESISTANCE
Almost exactly 13 years ago, a turkey with a red
flower fastened to its head appeared on Belgrade’s
main street. At first people ignored the bird, but
soon a gathering crowd began to cry, “Look, that’s
our first lady!”
“You understand, the president’s wife wore
exactly the same flower in her hair,” Popovic’s
longtime friend Ivan Marovic said at a Belgrade
cafe one recent afternoon. “Everyone made the
connection.”
Without Marovic, there would arguably be no
CANVAS. As university students, he and Popovic
pulled off the turkey stunt and other acts of
nonviolent resistance that would change the course
of Balkan history. In the late 1990s and 2000, they
organized concerts, rallies, and other events to
challenge Milosevic, the former communist
apparatchik who rose to president of Yugoslavia in
1997. This nascent opposition grew into the Otpor!
(Resistance!) youth movement that boasted tens of
thousands of supporters at its peak and ultimately
forced Milosevic to resign in October 2000.
“The country was in a total economic and social
morass,” said Marovic, who was an engineering
student at the time. “That man led us into three lost
wars and yet refused to give up power.”
Marovic became the Resistance’s spokesman,
with Popovic as its strategist. Most of their early
collaborations took place over beers at the pub, but
Marovic eventually convinced his parents to let him
use a vacant studio apartment in central Belgrade
for meetings. From there, the movement quickly
developed a structured leadership, as well as a
message. The students devised a simple symbol: A
clenched fist above the word “Otpor!,” which began
to appear all over Belgrade.
For both the Resistance and the wider public,
the turkey stunt was a tipping point, according to
Marovic. As word that a turkey was loose on the
street spread, he recalled, “soon the police showed
up as expected. First they just watched the scene,
baffled, but then they decided to intervene.”
Just as they got hold of the bird, a team of
“animal protectors” hiding around the corner
appeared and demanded its release.
“The officers were totally unprepared for
something like that and began to babble about the
turkey being detained,” Marovic said. “In the eyes
of the bystanders, they suddenly looked like idiots
serving a ludicrous regime. People were beginning
to realize that it was possible to not take them
seriously.”
The tactic of “small-scale protests and
innuendoes” continued. In summer 1999, as Europe
prepared for a solar eclipse, Marovic placed in
central Belgrade a giant telescope that, through the
eyepiece, showed Milosevic’s head falling toward
earth as a shooting star. Other Resistance activists
collected change for “Milosevic’s retirement” in the
streets. When the group sliced a cake decorated
with the name “Yugoslavia” in central Belgrade, the
biggest piece was cut for the politicians.
‘HOW MUCH LONGER?’
The Resistance “reinvigorated the population
.... most people were tired and resigned,” said
Popovic, the son of two well-known Serbian
journalists. “Our goal was to awaken their interest
and convince them that what they lived in was not
normal. How did we live then? Zero prospects,
sanctions imposed by the West, thousands of
Serbians fleeing to live abroad.”
Some 20,000 Serbs died during conflicts in the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Many more
suffered the deprivations of poverty and life in a
mafia-controlled state. At the turn of the
millennium, average monthly wages in the Czech
Republic, a historically poorer country than Serbia,
tripled those in the Balkan nation.
To achieve its goal, the Resistance relied on
more than just pranks and “innuendo.” In January
2000, it organized a concert in Belgrade to celebrate
Orthodox new year. But instead of corking
champagne at midnight, activists projected the
images of war victims on a screen in the city center.
“These are the victims of the regime, the head
of which is still in power,” an announcer said. “How
much longer?”
Initially, Milosevic left the movement alone.
“Frankly, they couldn’t do much else,” Popovic
said. A government crackdown, he added, would
have only reaffirmed public perception that
Milosevic knew only governance by force.
The regime eventually changed course, though.
Dozens of activists were arrested after the Interior
Ministry labeled the Resistance a terrorist
organization in early 2000. But it was too late – the
movement was already well established, with some
70,000 members by midyear. Well-organized and
professional, it had even won grants from German
and U.S. nonprofits. Several media outlets defended
the Resistance for dispensing legitimate, nonviolent
criticism. Increasingly, ordinary citizens began
joining demonstrations and identifying with the
group.
“The main problem of the opposition politicians
was a lack of consensus, but we succeeded in
uniting them through a simple slogan – ‘fair
elections for all,’ ” Popovic said, referring to a
filmed scene of opposition leaders holding a
Resistance banner in Belgrade.
ALWAYS BE PREPARED FOR INFILTRATION
Recorded on video and in photographs and
documentaries, those days are the foundation of
CANVAS’ training materials.
“For example, the sections about the response
to the first wave of arrests are truly indispensable,”
he said, tapping a DVD case of the documentary
Bringing Down a Dictator.
One scene shows demonstrators gathering
outside police stations mere minutes after
Resistance activists had been detained. They are
writing reports for the media and international
organizations and, using a megaphone, demanding
health updates on their colleagues.
“Of course, there are many detailed methods of
response,” Popovic said, flipping through a copy of
CANVAS’ guide to civil resistance, “Nonviolent
Struggle – 50 Crucial Points.” “We have simply
organizing a revolt in their home country,” she said.
organized them in a universally applicable model.”
“That’s why we do not officially represent CANVAS,
The primer comprises everything from
and we travel abroad as tourists.”
illustrations to advice on internal security.
She and her colleagues travel in pairs to run
“Names, dates, numbers – none should be
workshops that last around a week and are usually
discussed via open channels such as telephone or
held on the “safer” soil of a neighboring country,
the Internet,” according to the guide. “Always be
assuming local activists can travel there.
prepared for the possibility that agents of the
“So far, the people with whom we’ve
regime might infiltrate your network.”
cooperated, even repeatedly, have suffered no
If some tips seem banal – “move forward by
harm,” she said, rapping the table.
making small steps” – Popovic said the guide’s
CANVAS does not actively pursue clients. But
simplicity
is
its
anyone can try to hire
strength. There are
them,
not
only
dozens of books, he
“revolutionaries.”
added,
with
This includes LGBT
detailed
and women’s rights
descriptions
of
groups
or
even
nonviolent political
election monitors.
conflicts. Regarding
“If we see the
his
influences,
goal as interesting,
Popovic cited the
we are glad to help,”
U.S. scholar Gene
the
lecturer
Sharp, author of the
explained.
classic The Politics
CANVAS
only
of
Nonviolent
asks for plane tickets
Action and founder
and accommodation
of
the
Albert
for
the
lecturers,
Einstein Institution.
premises
for
the
“Our
success,
workshop,
and
a
In October 2000, the square in front of Serbia’s National Assembly symbolic
however,
has
fee that
was a riot of protesters and teargas as the building burned. often varies “from
definitely
come
from
the
case to case. There
experience we have
are many applicants.
lived through and the fact that we are willing to
The lecturer travels abroad around once a month.
arrange a personal meeting with activists
And she and her colleagues often stay in touch with
practically anywhere in the world,” Popovic said.
clients, some of whom have become lecturers
CANVAS has organized hundreds of workshops
themselves.
in more than 50 countries. It has 10 permanent
lecturers, mostly Serbs, but also Ukrainians,
SUBURBAN RESISTANCE
Filipinos, and South Africans. Tens of thousands of
Today, Popovic no longer calls himself an
people have downloaded “Nonviolent Struggle,”
activist. “Those times are gone – let’s say these days
translated into several languages including Arabic
I’m primarily a theoretician,” he said.
and Persian.
Friends from the Resistance days describe a
strong-minded intellectual with an interest in
ON SAFE SOIL
politics since adolescence. After Milosevic’s ouster,
To experience a “workshop for revolutionaries”
Popovic even won a parliamentary seat. But he
is, unfortunately, impossible. CANVAS has allowed
stepped down three years later and, today,
only one journalist to attend an on-site lecture, and
describes Serbia as a troubled country struggling to
solely to demonstrate that it was “nothing
become a “decent society” once again.
conspiratorial,” as Popovic put it. That journalist
“The slow building of democracy requires at
was Foreign Policy‘s Tina Rosenberg, who visited a
least the same zeal we used to have, only more long
workshop with activists from Burma, which has
term,” he said. “I like this work much better on an
seen a political thaw after years under a military
international scale.”
junta. She describes an initially tense though
For years, Popovic has also collaborated with
ultimately
collaborative
and
constructive
several European and U.S. universities. He has
environment.
lectured on “nonviolent political struggle” at New
In Belgrade, a female lecturer said training
York City’s prestigious Columbia University and
sessions resemble a “university seminar, only
claims to be relatively content off the streets.
[they're] more intense and somewhat more
Suburban “resistance,” Popovic said, suits him.
serious.”
Some in Serbia, however, doubt Popovic’s
The lecturer agreed to meet after several
evident humility and altruism. CANVAS, skeptics
requests and only on the condition of anonymity.
say, is a lucrative business.
(Popovic is CANVAS’ sole public face.)
Popovic counters that CANVAS is a low-cost
“Whoever contacts us risks being accused of
operation with only three-full time employees and a
single office, in Belgrade. From the beginning, it has
received funding from a friend of Popovic’s from
the Resistance days who is now a prominent
Serbian businessman.
“We do not receive any huge amounts from
funders, the workshops are almost free,” Popovic
said. “The talk about a fortune is silly.”
Still, in June Serbian journalists reported that
Mohamed
Nasheed,
the
former
Maldivian
opposition leader who served as president from
2008 to 2012, gave CANVAS the island of Tinad.
Nasheed has said the gift is part reward for
CANVAS’ help when he was in opposition and part
haven for its activists should their lives ever be
endangered. Popovic sees no conflict.
“The Maldivian constitution bars us from
actually owning the island. We were just given a
concession for 35 years,” he said, adding that Tinad
is a great venue for organizing workshops and
other events with local nonprofits.
CANVAS AND THE ARAB SPRING
In spring 2009, Mohammed Adel was a 20-yearold Egyptian blogger and activist with the April 6
movement, named after a botched protest the
group tried to organize in April 2008. Adel knew of
and admired CANVAS’ books, films, and work in
Ukraine and Georgia. He introduced himself to
Popovic over email, requested a meeting, and
eventually took a weeklong course in nonviolent
resistance in Belgrade that summer.
“I
got
trained
in
how
to
conduct
demonstrations, how to organize people on the
streets, how to avoid violence,” he later told Al
Jazeera English.
The outcome is well-known. The April 6 Youth
Movement became a key organizer of the 18-day
street protests in Cairo that upended the 30-year
rule of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
CANVAS has played a similarly pivotal role in
other revolutions.
“I doubt we would have succeeded without
their assistance,” former Ukrainian student leader
Alexej Tolkacov said via telephone, recalling how
CANVAS helped mobilize Ukrainians for the Orange
Revolution after the disputed 2004 presidential
elections.
Then the leading activist in the Pora! (It is
time!) youth movement against Leonid Kuchma,
president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, Tolkacov
described touring the country’s regions with
CANVAS lecturers and organizing two-day seminars
for local students and nonprofits.
“We learned to work with slogans and
symbols,” Tolkacov said. “We began to point to the
destructiveness of “kuchmism” and its key
characteristics: arrogance and mafia-ism.”
Ukraine, however, also demonstrates that
revolutions are fragile.
“It turned out that, without a functional civil
society, things can easily turn around,” Tolkachov
said, referring to Ukraine’s widely recognized
backslide since 2004. “I’m now skeptical about fast
revolts. I believe much more in slow grassroots
work.”
To that end, Tolkachov leads a nonprofit in Kyiv
that, among other activities, holds public debates on
the potential benefits of Ukraine joining the
European Union.
IN THE RING WITH POPOVIC
Since the beginning, Otpor has relied on a
network of foreign activists in its work from
Georgia to Kyrgyzstan.
“Our function was to maintain a kind of
information exchange network,” Slovak activist
Marek Kapusta said. “We used to travel to Serbia
and later to Ukraine, and the network kept
expanding.”
Popovic wants to retain this web of contacts
while bringing on new trainers to update CANVAS’
curriculum.
“Of course, our approach has been evolving,”
he said. “Autocrats learn quickly. What worked 10
years ago might not work any longer, so fresh
resistance experience is invaluable.”
Still, Popovic said, all successful revolts have
three pillars: a unified protest movement, planning,
and, critically, nonviolence. Indeed, when Popovic
last spoke with activists from war-torn Syria, he
tried to persuade them that a boycott of state
companies, not armed conflict, is the most effective
tactic.
“Something similar worked perfectly in the
Republic of South Africa a decade ago,” Popovic
said. “A number of state enterprises depend on
domestic demand, and it is their money the
government still uses.”
Recent research supports Popovic’s approach.
In the 2011 study Why Civil Resistance Works, U.S
scholars analyzed more than 300 attempts at civil
resistance over the past 100 years and found that
nonviolent movements were more than twice as
effective as their violent counterparts at achieving
stated goals.
“As soon as protests turn into an armed conflict,
it is a kind of defeat,” Popovic said. “It’s like
challenging [Mike] Tyson to a boxing match. Why
not play chess with him instead? Our playing field
is called creativity.”
Tomas Sacher is a reporter for Respekt, a weekly
magazine in Prague. The contents of this project are
the sole responsibility of Respekt and Transitions and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the European
Union Translated by Lenka Rubenstein. Photos by
Matej Stransky.
Turkey and the EU:
Between Hope and Disillusion
The ever-bustling Istiklal pedestrian street.
by Attila Horváth
October 11, 2012
Turkish society benefits more from the
preparations for joining the European Union than it
would from membership itself. The EU needs a
prosperous Turkey more than Turkey needs the
Union. In Istanbul, you often hear such views
expressing both hope and disillusion in potential
EU membership.
I did not have much experience with the laidback attitudes experienced in Turkey, and I felt
somewhat reluctant to talk to two young men who
just came up to me at the Taksim Square, famous
A photo of the Dolmabahce Palace from the sea.
for its Monument of the Republic, in the heart of
Istanbul.
I soon realized this way of making friends is
just a part of everyday routine. We started to chat
and this conversation allowed me to get answers to
a few questions.
“Yes, of course, we want our country to join the
European Union. Maybe we aren’t completely ready
yet, but a lot of things are changing in Turkey,” said
Burak, one of the two young men. The other,
Cagdas, added: “What do we expect? Many of us
believe that membership will lead to more jobs,
higher wages and better standards of living.”
Their words also revealed some bitterness:
More and more people here believe that the EU
doesn’t want Turkey to be a member, because the
culture and religion are different.
Their thoughts precisely hit the core of the
issue, I realized after talking with EU experts.
Turkey became an EU candidate in 1999 and since
then it has been strongly linked to the European
institutions. Accession negotiations began in 2005,
but many people think that under the current
conditions, Turkey will never be integrated into the
European Union.
Turks believe that their country belongs to
Europe, but this is of more symbolic importance
than it may relate to real advantages. “Our
economy has not been particularly affected by the
global financial crisis. Our bank system is stable,
our
companies
are
prospering. Many European
firms have already placed
their operations in Turkey
and have produced large
profits, benefitting from the
hard work of the Turkish
people,” said Yakup Kocaman,
business editor of the Yeni
Safak newspaper.
Kocaman added he hasn’t
experienced
general
Yakup Kocaman
discontent in the society.
Although the minimum wage
is only 700 Turkish liras, so just over 300 euros, it’s
sufficient to make a living. “We all, of course, want
to move higher. For example, Istanbul is considered
an extremely expensive city, but 75 percent of the
population can still afford to own a property here,”
Kocaman explained.
The main engine for Turkey’s economic
dynamism is its youthful society – the average age
of the population is about 24, among the lowest in
the world, said Nurhan
Toguc, chief economist at the
Atat Yatirim investment
company. “Many European
countries struggle with huge
state debts, but we do not,”
she said.
“The Turkish society is
very mobile, people are
ready to move any time
from the Eastern regions to
Western Turkey for seasonal
work. At the same time,
Turkish
migration
to
Nurhan Toguc
An tram on Istiklal Avenue.
Western Europe has slowed down, and an
increasing number of young Turkish people return
due to the rising unemployment in the EU and the
improving opportunities at home,” Toguc said.
LINGERING POVERTY
Only about 22 percent of women hold jobs,
compared to more than 60 percent in the EU.
Special inducements would be needed to encourage
more women to get jobs, Toguc said. And though
the quality of life has gradually improved for the
past 10 years, poverty remains. The rich are very
rich, the poor is very poor.
Nevertheless, people appear happy to be
content with what they have. This positive attitude
has cultural roots: Turks maintain strong bonds
with family and friends, and they can always count
on a helping hand in times of need.
“I think, if Turkey joins the EU, it will be mostly
beneficial for Europe. Power relations in the global
The Gate of Constantinople in Istanbul with the Suleiman Mosque in the background.
economy will transform, and in the newly shaped
system our country will play an important role.
China in Asia, Russia in Central Asia, Brazil on the
American hemisphere, Germany in Europe and
Turkey in the Middle East. Turkey will become a
leading power,” said Nurhan Toguc.
As for the state of governance and democracy,
there is both criticism and support. Answering a
question about government pressure on the news
media, Deniz Ergurel, a free-lance journalist and
secretary-general of the Media Association,
described the situation this
way:
“News
about
the
intimidation of journalists is
not true. The state of
democracy has improved
and led to larger freedom of
the press since the ’90s. The
situation is still not perfect,
but the relevant laws are
much better. If you want to
understand the situation
here, you should know the
Deniz Ergurel
circumstances in Turkey.
Terrorism is a problem and authorities have always
taken tough actions, and the groups supporting
terrorist groups have been under really great
pressure. But articles can be written about
anything, including the Kurdish issue. The social
media community has been an important forum for
expressing different opinions.”
Ergurel believes that the EU accession process
will stimulate democratization and broaden
fundamental rights in Turkey, benefiting the whole
society. The country needs further reforms, he said.
A new, democratic constitution should replace the
current one which was adopted in 1982 during the
military regime.
“Indeed, we have good
and progressive laws, but
they
are
not
always
implemented,” said Sanar
Yurdatapan, a musician and
human rights activist who
heads the Initiative for
Freedom of Expression.
“The civil sector is growing,
but it is not strong enough
yet, many spheres of public
are
not
Sanar Yurdatapan governance
transparent. The media are
under government and economic influence exerted
via owners.”
“Although the sultanate system was abolished
and the republic was established 90 years ago,
Turkey still functions as a strong patriarchal society
where traditions are often more important than the
written law,” Yurdatapan said.
“In the past few years I witnessed many
positive changes, but the issue of the EU accession
has divided our society. The European Union
expects Turkey to meet many requirements which
it had not demanded from others. This
disappointed a lot of people. The Turkish economy
has been steadily growing and this may easily make
people think that we should take our own path.”
Attila Horváth is a reporter for the Hungarian daily
Zalai Hírlap, where this article was originally
published. The contents of this project are the sole
responsibility of Transitions and Zalai Hírlap and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the European
Union.”
During the nut harvest, weddings and vacations are cancelled and some restaurants close down in Ordu, because every
Three Tons of Nuts for Cinderella
hand is sorely needed.
by Lucie Kavanová
November 19, 2012
RDU, Turkey - Two kids are crouching amidst
the branches of a thick bush. The siblings Semanur
(12) and Ibrahim (14) are nimbly picking spiny
rosettes of hazelnuts from the ground and throwing
them in a bucket. Their small hands have to pull the
branches of the hazel tree closer to shake off more
nuts. Instead of attending school, the sister and her
older brother spend six months travelling across
Turkey to find work. Just like other tens of
thousands of Turkish children, they set out in the
spring to harvest tomatoes and apricots, and in the
autumn they dig potatoes and pick cotton. But now,
as the summer draws to an end, all the children
head towards the north where the harvesting of
hazelnuts is in full swing.
The crunchy kernels are Turkey’s national
pride; three-quarters of the worldwide production
are harvested here, bringing into state coffers each
year the equivalent of close to EUR 800 million. A
flock of international producers, such as Ferrero
and Nestlé, buy local nuts for their chocolates. The
nuts used in the children’s delicacy Nutella are also
harvested in Turkey. But child pickers, who account
for a large part of Turkey’s hazelnut harvest
workforce, are hardly getting any sweets. Children
as young as eight work and live in conditions
reminiscent of the harsh times in Europe at the
beginning of the industrial revolution or of the
Great Depression in the early 1930s.
SIX MONTHS OF HOLIDAYS
Following Semanur and Ibrahim, we climb a
narrow paved road which rises steeply from Ordu
to the rounded hilltops. Along the road, huge
tarpaulins with drying nuts are spread in front of
the houses, on rooftops and even around mosques.
Women sit among piles of nuts, their long skirts
fanned out around their hips, pawing through the
crop to remove husk residues and worm-infested
nuts.
As soon as the road reaches the mountains, a
beautiful vista of the Black Sea opens up and an
endless range of green hills lining its coast, thickly
covered with bushy hazels – a full half of Turkey’s
hazelnuts (around 350 thousand tons) are grown in
the vicinity of Ordu. After riding up the road for a
while, the car stops at its destination. The Duran
family’s white-washed house is surrounded by
sacks of harvested nuts and, on the side, husks are
dried for their future use as fuel for the stove or
litter for the animals. Right behind the house, the
orchard of the Durans stretches up a steep slope.
You can get there via a muddy path that is
crumbling underfoot while its reddish mud sticks to
your shoes. You should, however, try not to think
guaranteeing the minimum purchase price, the
about the swarms of ticks living in the bushes. After
farm is no longer bringing much profit. Duran gets
a few minutes’ walk, five-hundred-kilo sacks of nuts
the equivalent of EUR 1.8 per kilo of nuts. He
appear through the trees and, right behind them,
harvests only about eight tonnes on average, so he
the first nut pickers, including Semanur and
spends a good part of the year abroad working on
Ibrahim Kili.
construction sites. “Sure, the kids should be at
They come from the city of Silvan found some
school, but it’s not my problem – it’s their parents’
seven hundred kilometres away from here, not far
responsibility,” he says.
from the border with Syria. “Our parents have a
He hires the children because if he refuses to
small farm with chickens and cows, but we are
do so, the entire family of harvesters threatens to go
eight siblings altogether and animal farming alone
to another farmer. “The harvest lasts only several
can’t support us all,” explains the petite Senamur,
weeks and there’s a shortage of labourers at that
who is dressed in jeans and wearing a baseball cap.
time of the year, so I can’t afford to send them
She is the youngest labourer at the Duran farm. She
away,” says Duran. He knows he violates the law
spends only six months a year at home with her
and could be fined, but he takes the risk without
parents, in their two-bedroom house. From April to
major worries. “We’ve never had any inspection
October, the children, distributed among extended
here, and even if we had, the fine is about eighty
family members, roam Turkey to contribute to the
euros per kid,” he says. “That would still pay off.”
tight family budget. Because of this, they miss four
months of school every year. “It’s quite normal, in
CHILDREN OF THE SEASON
the spring almost the whole class leaves for work.
Turkey has signed the UN Convention on the
It’s up to the teacher to fail or pass us, and so far he
Rights of the Child, and child labour is officially
has always let us pass,” adds Ibrahim, wiping off
prohibited. Still, tens of thousands of children work
sweat with his hands covered in bruises. The end of
in Turkey as street vendors, shoe cleaners, sex
August is still very hot here.
slaves and seasonal harvesters picking hazelnuts
Naturally, the siblings would prefer to spend
and other crops.
the summer watching TV or playing with friends as
The topic of the “hazelnut children” was taken
they used to a few years ago. Semanur started
outside Turkey’s borders by the Dutch-Turkish
working this year, while it’s the third year for
journalist Mehmet Ülger. In 2010, the national
Ibrahim. “But we’re poor, so what can we do? I
Dutch television showed his TV documentary,
don’t even have decent shoes,” Semanur points to
Children of the Season, which depicts stories that
her sneakers looking three sizes too big. Duran pays
are similar to that of Ibrahim and Semanur. He has
them the same amount he pays adult labourers: 35
documented the lives of families from the country’s
Turkish lira a day, or just over EUR 15, which
southeastern provinces as they load their vans
roughly corresponds to the minimum wage in
come spring and head to wealthier regions. Ülger
Turkey. They would not hear anything about a ban
demonstrated that the migrants are under constant
on child labour. “Sometimes we get bored and we’d
stress, as their work without written contracts for
like to go to school more often,” says Ibrahim, “but
different farmers every month limits their ability to
if we didn’t come here, we wouldn’t eat. Unless our
protect themselves against working overtime for no
parents find a better-paying job, we need the extra
pay, getting overworked and living in very poor
money
we
make
conditions.
The
here.”
journalist
also
A few metres
reiterated the wellaway, Mustafa Duran
known fact that the
is
smoking
a
need to work makes
cigarette. A greychildren miss school,
haired man with a
landing them in a
giant moustache, he
vicious circle. Without
is friends with an
education, they will be
influential
local
unlikely to find a better
politician, who is also
job later, leaving them
an acquaintance of
with the only option of
our interpreter. This
migrating, just like
is why, unlike other
countless generations
farmers, he agreed
before them did. And if
after being prompted
they have a lot of
by the politician to Showers and electricity are available for the first time this year. children as many of
talk about the child
their parents do, the
(A harvesters’ camp near the city of Ordu) children will have to
labour employed on
his land.
start working at an
Duran
himself
early age as well.
works hard in the nut farm: he helps carry the
The
documentary,
which
showed
that
sacks filled with nuts, he weeds and trims off the
multinational corporations are tied to child labour
bushes.
Since
the
government
stopped
in Turkey, caused uproar in The Netherlands. A
Labouring on plantations causes tens of thousands of Turkish children to miss up to half of the school year.
number of activists from the Stop Child Labour
organization launched a massive campaign. They
inundated western importers with letters and
forced Dutch and European politicians, among
them Czech EU Commissioner for Enlargement
Stefan Füle, to pressure the Turkish Ministry of
Labour and Social Affairs to address the problem.
The success of these methods of combating
child labour has been proven in Ecuador, the
world’s largest exporter of bananas. Human Rights
Watch issued a report in 2002 which describes how
school age or even younger children work on the
banana plantations of this South American country
to help increase the family budget for a daily pay of
$3.50. The report was quickly picked by
international media, such as The New York Times,
the Guardian and Fox News, and the interest of the
public made banana importers react. The U.S., as
the largest importer of Ecuadorian bananas,
threatened to impose sanctions. As a result, the
Ecuadorian Ministry of Labour enacted stringent
legislation banning child labour, and the
government introduced frequent inspections on
plantations. According to the statistics of the
International Labour Organization, each year thirty
Ecuadorian inspectors check around four thousand
plantations and send home two thousand child
workers.
In addition to such government measures, the
implementation of the Fair trade certificate caused
changes by guaranteeing set purchase prices to
farmers,
provided
they
meet
social
and
environmental requirements. In the past decade,
the exporters have raised the purchase prices of
bananas by two-thirds, which means that the
Ecuadorian school children no longer need to
contribute to family budgets. It’s not like children
are out of the woods completely, however. Some
only moved to less exposed industries or to more
remote farms where inspectors don’t come often.
Still, the data from Human Rights Watch and
UNICEF shows that the proportion of child workers
in Ecuador fell to one-fifth of what it was a decade
ago.
Examples outside the developing countries
prove that it takes decades to fully eradicate child
labour. Great Britain passed its first legislation to
regulate child labour in the 1830s, but twenty years
later one-half of children under 15 years of age
were still working in the British Isles. The total
prohibition of child labour and, in particular, its
enforcement, had not been achieved in Great
Britain until a hundred years later, in the late
1930s.
FAMILY RULES
Turkey has already taken the first steps on this
road. Two years ago, the Ministry of Labour and
Social Affairs raised the minimum age of child
labourers from 12 to 15. The governor of the Ordu
Province announced that the aforementioned 80euro fines would be levied on both the parents and
the farmers who allow children to work. The
problem is that none of the people from the farms
or camps we visited has ever seen any inspector.
The same applies to the project of providing
education for the children of seasonal migrant
eyes shining out of their sun-tanned faces that are
launched by the ministry this year. Theoretically,
adorned with small tattoos. Their heads are
teachers should come to harvesters’ camps and
covered with multi-coloured scarves with glittering
help children catch up with their schools’ curricula,
beads sewn into them.
but nobody has seen them either. Local experts say
About a thousand Kurds can consider
that one of the contributing factors is that the
themselves lucky to be living in this camp. They
migrant workers in the camps are mostly ethnic
have secured such relatively comfortable living
Kurds who have traditionally been the target of
conditions through a “first come first served”
prejudice in Turkey. “People see them as inferior,
system. Just a few kilometres away are camps
which is why Kurdish
where people not only
child labour is not a
carry water from the river,
priority for officials. They
but have no drinking water,
create a variety of laws,
no toilets, and the only light
but don’t enforce them,”
after dark comes from their
says Esin Uyar from the
fires. Most residents in the
humanitarian
NGO
government-funded camp
Support to Life.
came from the city of
“That’s not true, we
Adiyaman located in the
have
been
intensely
south east of the country.
involved in addressing the
None of the women can
problem in the past two
read or write, while the
years,” Ordu Mayor Seyit
majority of men have
Torun says in response to
completed only elementary
the accusation. “We have
A harvesters’ camp near Ordu education.
spent considerable funds
“Our
parents
also
on combating child labour, our officers go to farms
travelled roughly three-quarters of the year, so we
and check whether children work there,” says the
spent only a limited time in school,” says the thirtystocky mayor while seated in a luxury office that is
five-year-old Süleyman Gözek. He is sitting with the
abundantly decorated with his photographs and
other men on a carpet in an open tent, drinking tea
has a view of the sea. But when asked how much
with the visitors from the typical tulip-shaped
money was spent and how many inspectors they
glasses, while his three wives are seated behind
have, Mr. Torun has no answer. “I was never
him. “A year ago we camped here, and there were
interested in [obtaining the figures],” he said.
no sanitary facilities or electricity at that time. We
The only effective government measure so far
had only our own tents and there were few of them,
has been the earmarking of the equivalent of EUR
so we had no privacy whatsoever. It is much better
11.7 million for improving the sanitary conditions
now,” says the well-built, dark-haired man dressed
in several camps. One of them is a settlement about
in tan trousers and a striped shirt.
an hour drive west from Ordu, where three
Adiyaman, with a population of two hundred
hundred tents, some marked with UN logos, have
thousand people, has an 18% unemployment rate.
been erected on a parched piece of land. At the
For instance, Süleyman lives on seasonal work. As
entrance stands a new mosque, and further on a
the head of a twenty-member family he must work
little
house
with
hard,
just
like
his
showers and toilets.
children, to support all of
Although the pickers
them. The decision to
still carry water from
have a large family is one
the
river,
the
of the reasons why
drinking
water,
children must also work
considered a luxury
on
plantations.
“My
by many, runs from a
religion
bans
tap not far from the
contraception and sees a
buildings. And there
blessing in a big family.
is
also
electricity
Who would take care of
here.
The
space
me when I’m old if not
between
tents
is
them?” says Süleyman
littered with rubbish
Gözek. According to the
and mounds of nuts,
Turkish social workers,
while children in
sex education has yet to
360 Czech crowns a day. The teacher will understand. (Right:
ragged clothes play
arrive in the notoriously
Semanur Kilic) underfinanced southeast.
ball, and chickens
run through the visitors’ feet now and then. The air
Not far from Ordu is another place with an
is suffused with an aroma of freshly baked bread
apparent improvement in the living conditions. The
pancakes, roasted peppers and stewed eggplant due
Uzunisa camp, built last year on the outskirts of
to the women in colourful skirts preparing food on
Adiyaman by the government, offers the same view
open fire. Many of them have bright blue or green
of simple government tents standing amidst dirt
Özer Akbasli, farmer and president of the Chamber of Agriculture in Ordu.
and litter, but in addition to sanitary facilities it
boasts the large, brick building of a community
centre where the aforementioned Istanbul-based
NGO Support to Life works with children. The
German food giant REWE (owner of the Billa and
Penny Market Czech retail chains), which also
imports nuts from Turkey, donated EUR 100,000 to
Support to Life for the education of the little pickers
in Uzunisa. “The goal was to offer the children an
alternative and something they can do while
migrating with their parents, by helping them catch
up with school work,” the social worker Esin Uyar
explains. A huge banner on the one-story building
reads, “Dear parents, say no to the child labour
used in hazelnut harvesting.” The harvest activity
has already switched to the mountains, so only a
dozen tents are left, but just a week ago the camp
housed a thousand people and hundreds of
children attended tutoring sessions and the
kindergarten.
“The tutoring held in camps could be one of the
simpler and, in the short run, more feasible ways of
assisting the children working on hazelnut
plantations,” Leonie Blokhuis of Stop Child Labour
confirms. Even when the parents don’t bring the
children to work with them, they have to bring
them along during their travels across the country,
and they don’t have much choice about keeping
them occupied during the day. However, no other
camp can offer a service similar to that in Uzunisa.
A FOUR PERCENT RISE
The US food company Noor is testing another
way of alleviating the children’s situation through
fair trade farms in Turkey. At one of them that is
located near the city of Giresun, none of the
workers are younger than sixteen and a number of
them are secondary school students who speak
some English and make use of school holidays to
earn extra money. Their employer, Özer Akbasli, is
also the president of the local Agrarian Chamber.
“Noor offered us a four per cent increase to the
current purchase price and subsidies for fertilizers.
We can grow more crops and, at the same time, pay
more to the employees,” says Akbasli. Noor’s farms
are marked with signs reading “This is not a place
for child labour” and the company’s representative
visits the farms in person to see if the policy is
being observed. “About eighty farmers have signed
up so far. It’s not many among the hundred
thousand farms engaged in hazelnut business in
Turkey, but we have just begun,” notes Akbasli.
Other than the government and the parents
themselves, the key to solving the problem lies
primarily in the hands of multinational
corporations buying Turkish nuts. And all the main
players have eventually responded to the appeals of
non-profit organizations: Ferrero, Nestlé, CAOBISCO
(the
Association
of
Chocolate,
Biscuit
&
Confectionary Industries of Europe), REWE and
Kraft. All of them participated in a June 2012
meeting in Ankara where they pledged to “prepare
action plans”. But Nestlé has been the only one to
date to take an important step to eliminate child
labour from its products. It is currently not
possible, given that the farms don’t supply nuts
Preparing
harvested
nuts for
processing.
only to Noor, to trace the farm the international
food companies buy nuts from and to check
whether child labour has been involved. Without
proper documentation, the kernels are passed from
the harvester to the farm owner and then, through
an intermediary, to the roasting plant, and finally to
the exporter. “We started this year to require
suppliers to provide exact data about the passage of
our nuts,” says the Nestlé spokesperson Chris Hogg.
“We expect the system to become completely
transparent by 2014, by then we will be able to
control our specific suppliers more effectively.”
Ferrero, which imports around one third of the
nuts it uses from Turkey, is less specific. “ We must
first monitor the current situation and then we
could proceed to completely eradicate child labour
by 2020,” says Hana Masková from the legal
department of the Czech branch, voicing the
company’s official stand.
The most effective and also most demanding
solution is to eliminate the key reason for the
Kurdish migration to such plantations, namely the
high unemployment in the south east of the
country. Agriculture had long been the traditional
source of livelihood for the 15 millions of Turkish
Kurds. They had been running their own, mostly
tabacco farms, and despite having large families
they were able to make ends meet.
All of that changed some thirty years ago.
Turkey launched several major economic reforms
in the 1980s: the government slashed subsidies for
the agriculture sector, stopped guaranteeing
minimum purchase prices and, consequently,
caused a mass exodus from rural to urban areas
where farmers sought jobs in factories. At that time,
in 1984, the Kurdish terrorist organization PKK
declared an armed struggle for the independence of
Kurdistan. Dozens of attacks against the Turkish
army and government buildings sparked retaliatory
military actions from the government. State
funding for the Kurdish provinces was slashed.
Although the fiercest conflicts between the
government and PKK ceased in the late 1990s, the
south east has remained considerably poorer than
the rest of the country, with triple the national
unemployment rate and the education system in
shambles. Often up to a hundred kids crowded in a
single classroom are thought by one teacher.
According to Leonie Blokhuis, “the improved
conditions in the tent camps and the legislation
concerning their inhabitants are a step in the right
direction, but it won’t solve the roots of the
problem.” What might help is an increase in
government spending on local education, local tax
relief to attract investors, or support for micro
lending. No such measures have been taken in the
south east yet.
Lucie Kavanová is a reporter with the Czech
magazine RESPEKT, where this article was originally
published. Translated by Lenka Rubenstein. The
contents of this project are the sole responsibility of
RESPEKT and Transitions and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the European Union.
Prayer in the Shehzade mosque
Cultural Differences and Minority Rights in Turkey
by Attila A. Horvath
November 5, 2012
Although an increasing number of people have
been practicing religion in Turkey, this doesn’t pose
a threat to secular society,
because of the decisive role of
the advocates of a secular
republic. In spite of the social
diversity, cultural conflicts in
Turkey are relatively rare
compared to those in other
countries of the Islamic world.
However, two minority issues
remain unsolved.
A guest arriving in Turkey
will find a seemingly open,
tolerant and colorful society,
and won’t probably perceive
any of its internal tensions.
Tourists train their cameras
towards the magnificent mosques of Istanbul, while
Muslim believers kneel on their prayer-rugs, and
groups of women wearing traditional veils walk to
their daily chores while pop music roars from
luxury cars. ‘Typical’ Turkish faces are just as
common as those of other ethnicities.
“Almost everyone here is Muslim, but religion
does not overwhelm people’s lives. The conflict
between modernization and tradition isn’t
apparent unless provoked,” said Sanar Yurdatapan,
a public intellectual.
The new statehood founded in 1923 in the wake
of the independence war brought about
fundamental changes in society; in fact, it created a
new society. The Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate
as a religious power ceased
to exist; a number of
ancient Turkish customs
were prohibited; and the
role of Islamic judiciary
was replaced by a secular
rule of law. In addition,
society had to accept a new
alphabet, new dressing
codes, a new education
system and a European
orientation. The Westernstyle
reforms
of
the
founder of the republic,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
still provide the framework
of everyday life, though they pose heavy
conundrums as well. The longstanding pursuit of
autonomy of the 15 million Kurdish minority
remains unresolved even
today, and Armenians have
been fighting for the
official recognition of the
murders committed by the
„Young Turks’ movement”
in 1915-1917.
“I think that the further
Cafer Solgun
democratization
of
the
“Almost everyone here is
Muslim, but religion does
not overwhelm people’s
lives. The conflict
between modernization
and tradition isn’t
apparent unless
provoked.”
The Nusretiye mosque with minarets in Istanbul
country would require a change in the state
ideology, given that nationalism is present in
Turkey even nowadays. Although it doesn’t appear
in legal acts, as discrimination officially doesn’t
exist, it is widespread at the level of the
mentalities,” said Cafer Solgun, a Kurdish-born
writer, activist and president of the Organization
for Confronting the Past and Research of Social
Events. “We must unveil the sins of the past, but it
is a grueling task, because political parties are
competing to prove their loyalty to Kemal’s legacy.
The Turkish state has been unwilling to recognize
the Armenian genocide because of potential claims
for compensation,” added Cafer. “Nevertheless,
there should be more talk about the grievances
affecting Kurdish people,” he says. His organization
focuses on research about the Kurdish uprising in
Dersim (1936-1939) that was brutally put down by
Turkish authorities.
ARMENIANS
AND
ROMA IN TURKEY
The office of Agos, the
most
influential
newspaper
of
the
Armenian
minority
in
Turkey, is still located in
the building where a
Rober Koptas
young Turkish nationalist
fatally shot the then editor-in-chief, Hrant Dink, in
2007. Dink had often written about the Armenian
genocide. “This topic has been a taboo ever since,
because the state ignores the deeds of the past.
Murders and deportations are not mentioned in
schools or on television,” said the current editor-inchief Rober Koptas. According to the most
widespread Turkish point-of-view, there was a war
going on, so “a few thousand people” might as well
have died.
“This rejection of the genocide has somewhat
changed in recent years, but this process is slow,
which is understandable given that Turks have to
face their own past. In fact, the status of minorities
has improved. Fifty thousand Armenians live here
in Istanbul, we have our own newspaper,
television, digital media, and school, but it is more
difficult to preserve our identity in other parts of
the country. Culturally, we live in a mixed
environment, we live together with Turks, and
mixed marriages are common; at the same time,
fewer and fewer people speak Armenian. Hidden
discrimination is also a problem. Armenians,
Catholics and other non-Muslims are often
regarded as ‘second-class citizens’, and are not
allowed to hold certain positions,” said Robert and
added that he is not a nationalist. He lives here, he
loves the country and works to transform it into a
more democratic society.
Erdinc Cekic, the president of Edrom, a Roma
advocacy organization in Edirne, and Balik Ayhan,
a singer of Roma origin from Istanbul, share a
rather positive opinion about the status of the Roma
minority. According to the official statistics,
between 500,000 and 900,000 Roma people live in
Turkey, but their actual number maybe 3.5 million,
with 300,000 living in Istanbul alone, Cekic and
Ayhanargue.
‘Most of us are Muslims; we also consider
ourselves Roma and at the same time Turk. We
Erdinc Cekic (leftl) and Balik Ayhan with the author in the
middle
Men’s ritual washing before prayer in front of the Suleyman Mosque in Istanbul
generally try to preserve our cultural identity, but
the majority of young people do not speak our
mother tongue any more. The Roma population
living in big cities integrates easier into the Turkish
society and tends to discard our traditions,” stated
the president. He spoke approvingly of the
government integration program started in 2009
whose focus has been the
education and employment
of Roma.
“We don’t experience
strong discrimination, but
Roma people have hardly
any voice in politics, because
they have neither a minority
status nor parliamentary
representation. Few of us
Fatih Ceran
work in leading positions.
Roma people work in selfgovernments only in those places where they
represent a higher percentage of the population,
like in Edirne,” he said.
Roma issues are seldom covered by the media,
although recently, inspired by the popularity of the
singer Balik Ayhan, more and more people have
embraced their origin. Balik believes that he has
good chances of becoming the first Roma member
of the Turkish parliament.
There is no antagonism between Western and
Turkish values, or between various religions, said
Fatih Ceran, the assistant director of the Journalists
and Writers Foundation. When we suggested that
the most famous Turkish writer, the Nobel-prize
winner Orhan Pamuk, often describes serious
conflicts, Fatih said, ‘I think it is unjustifiable to
depict such a dark and simplified picture of our
society.”
‘Radical groups do exist
in Turkey, but people
usually
live
together
peacefully.
This
is
a
multicultural society that
accepts ethnic and religious
minorities. Some had lived
here long before the Turks.
Most minorities have their
own media; their members
can launch their own
businesses, and use their
Gabor Kiss
language.
Besides,
the
public
administration
employs more and more representatives of
minority groups, so the situation is improving. You
won’t find a deep divide between the two Islamic
branches either (i.e. the Alawite minority and the
Sunni majority),” he emphasized.
STRONG FAMILY
How does a visitor with a different cultural
background view the modern-day Turkey?
“The basic unit of Turkish society is the
extremely strong and excellently functioning family
unit that also has a special impact on the economy,”
said Gabor Kiss, the Consul General of Hungary.
“People appreciate their family and their
homeland. Just to give an example: expatriate
entrepreneurs feel it is their personal duty to
support their home town through investments. This
mentality is the engine of Turkey’s rapid growth.
Banks finance various projects; there is an
abundance of raw materials and cheap workforce.
We have a growing number of qualified people, as
the state invests huge sums in education,” Mr Kiss
said.
“As for the relation between religion and
politics, there is no need to fear the growing control
of Islam over state authorities,” the Consul General
continued. It is a fact, though, that many people
follow the codes of their religion and more and
more women wear the traditional Islamic attire.
But it is against the interest of important political
figures to destroy the basis of the modern, secular
republic built in the 1920s by Kemal Ataturk.
‘It is the government’s basic interest to
separate the state from religion. I call this special
Turkish model, the ‘Social Democratic Islam,’
whereby the practice of religion is promoted but
the state does not encroach upon the private life. I
think the coexistence of religions is ideal nowadays.
For instance, the local chief rabbi invited Jews,
Christians and Muslims during the month of
Ramadan as guests to his synagogue in Istanbul,”
Mr. Kiss added. “On the other hand, the power
structure of the state is strongly centralized and this
has certain effects on the quality of democracy,” he
said.
We also asked two Hungarian women living in
Istanbul how they managed to fit into Turkish
society.
“The habits and customs vary in every family
and differ from district to district. There are places
of entertainment in Istanbul where women
wearing chador are not welcome, while in another
district women wearing shorter skirts are frowned
upon. I married into a modern-thinking family and
have been living here for 17 years. I am a Catholic
and had no difficulty adjusting to Turkish life,” one
of the women said. The other woman also told us
how lucky she felt as her Turkish husband’s family
immediately accepted her without demanding a
religious conversion.
“I could mention several contradicting
examples, too. Deeply religious families insist on
the woman’s conversion to Muslim faith. I think
that wearing a chador is partly a political question:
the government promotes such signs of religious
devotion to show the world how strong the Islamic
culture in Turkey has become. More and more
people express their identity through external
religious symbols, but I personally have never
experienced any tension just because I come from
another culture.”
Attila Horváth is a reporter for the Hungarian daily
Zalai Hírlap, where this article was originally
published. The contents of this project are the sole
responsibility of Transitions and Zalai Hírlap and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the European
Union.
Translated by Eva Elekes. Photos by Attila Horváth.