In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Within Rumania itself he ruled like a European Mao Tse-tung. In the 1970s, the economy began encountering the same problems faced by other communist states. The nation's industry was pronouncedly obsolete, the enormous oil refineries worked at only ten per cent of their capacity, and as a result of its collectivisation the agricultural production of Rumania – once a breadbasket of Central Europe – was waning fast. In 1981 the country even began to ration bread.

  Ceauşsescu dealt with these problems in his own peculiar way. The only problem, he claimed, was that Rumanians ate too much, and so in 1985 he introduced a ‘scientific diet’ for the whole country. Energy consumption was subjected to rigorous restrictions: while chandeliers with more than 7,000 bulbs were being hung in the Palace of the People, the only thing the shops sold were 40-watt bulbs. Two thirds of the lamp posts in Bucharest were disconnected.

  The country's female population was sorely tried. Ceauşsescu was worried about the sharp decrease in the birth rate: abortion and contraception were banned. Working women had to report to a gynaecologist every month. From 1983, all women were expected to bear at least five children; childless and sterile women were punished with higher taxes. These population policies had dramatic results: crowded orphanages full of abandoned children, countless women who died or were maimed at the hands of illegal abortionists.

  Rumania was the most extreme example of Stalinism-without-Stalin and of the leader-worship and megalomania such a system brings with it, and in the regime's final years the situation only became worse. Work was resumed on the notorious Danube-Caspian Sea canal; in the 1950s, rumour had it, the regime had already worked to death some 60,000 of its opponents on that project. The old plans to ‘systematise’ the rural areas and incorporate the farmers into ‘agro-industrial communities’ were revived. In the end, though, only two villages – both of them close to Bucharest – were actually wiped off the map. But traditional houses were razed to the ground everywhere: their inhabitants were given twenty-four hours to pack their belongings and move out.

  Meanwhile, the Ceauşsescus lived in a wholly different world. Today one can rent their villa in Bucharest for $650 a night, and my interpreter had arranged for a guided tour. I go in and I find myself in the house of a cowherd who has just won the lottery. The mind boggles: the gold toilet-roll holder belonging to son Nicu, the hot pink bathroom belonging to daughter Zoë (the drainpipe under the washbasin is gilded too), the dining room of carved oak, the sentimental paintings of a Gypsy girl and a pine forest, the bedroom wallpaper with 2,000 hand-painted roses, Ceauşsescu's personal bath with 12 taps and 10 pressure gauges, the home cinema with a system of bell signals for the projectionist: Wait a minute! More volume! Stop! Lights! Change the film!

  The cellars are still full of the remains of their blithe existence, with hundreds of the duo's coats, suits, dresses and shoes, now on sale for anyone who wants them. ‘I don't understand,’ my guide says, picking up one of Elena's light-blue mules. ‘Lovely, expensive, excellent quality. But we can't get rid of them. The young people don't want this model any more. And look here, aren't these fantastic pyjamas?’

  He tells me that, in the course of their hurried departure on 22 December, 1989, the couple left this house carrying only two blue bags filled with blankets and large loaves of bread. In their final hours, Nicolae and Elena had again become what they truly were, deep down: two farmers’ children on the run.

  My interpreter takes me on a tour of the city's ring road. We zigzag carefully around one pothole after the other, below us lie the metal rooftops of an old prison complex, a herd of sheep blocks the way, a Gypsy family has set up camp along the road with two wooden caravans, a child comes trotting by with a horse and wagon. Finally we reach Bucharest's rubbish dump. The tip covers an immense plot, an endless series of grey, smoking mounds marked by the occasional orange fire, an inferno of soot, rotting food, bottles, cans, car tyres and old plastic. Through the clouds of smoke you can see figures poking around everywhere, rummaging, bent over, every day.

  Rumania is probably the poorest country in Europe, according to the Human Development Index (2000). It is even worse off than, say, Cuba. Average annual inflation hovers around sixty per cent. The population is decreasing, less than half have access to good drinking water, only one in every five households has a telephone. Thirty to forty per cent of the voters choose ultra-right wing, nationalistic parties.

  At this moment, some 4,000 homeless children wander the streets of Bucharest. You see them everywhere: they beg, sell cigarettes and matches, wash windscreens at traffic lights. I even saw one diminutive beggar, with big, pleading eyes, kissing the front of a car. They have run away from home, or have simply been sent out to live in the street. At the House of the Smart Boys, Tonio, his balaclava pulled down to just above his eyes, is acting as doorman. He lived in the city's tunnels for more than five years. He looks seven, but he is twelve. Nicu is smoking a cigarette. He looks eight, but he is fourteen. Alexandru welcomes me and shows me his new white jacket, and beneath it his little dog. He looks nine, but he is thirteen. All of them, however, radiate an extraordinary energy and self-sufficiency.

  ‘Living on the street ensures that two things become well developed: your ability to fend for yourself, and your social skills,’ says Adriana Constantinescu, supervisor of this children's home. ‘Some of them can't give you the time of day, they sniff glue, but if for any reason they get into trouble they know immediately how to react. The only thing is, they've never known any form of human affection. This leaves them completely disoriented in life. We're a kind of substitute family for them, a stopping-off place between the street and a new family, or a life on their own. We give them a bed, food and they go back to school. And that works well.’

  This project reaches about 300 children a year. The clothes worn by newcomers are burned behind the house. The pile of rags smokes and stinks. Sometimes a foreign television crew will show up at the door: where are the children of Ceauşsescu? Adriana: ‘Those journalists want to show the television images from the 1980s all over again, with emaciated, sick children. They don't realise that those children have already grown up, they're in the army, or in prison, or they're working as bodyguards for the new rich.’

  She knows all about the crowded orphanages of the Ceauşsescu era, because she worked in them herself. But today's street children are of a different ilk. ‘Under Ceauşsescu there was a shortage of everything, but in that time many families still lived just above the subsistence level. It wasn't until after the 1989 revolution that they sank beneath the absolute poverty line. Then there was no way for them to get by. These days you sometimes find entire families living on the street, sometimes you also have very young children who grow up as transients.’ These are, as she repeats again and again, the children of 1989, of the post-communist era, of the West's shock therapy, of the promised land that never arrived.

  Chapter SIXTY-FOUR

  Novi Sad

  FIRST YOU FLY TO BUDAPEST, THEN YOU SPEND FIVE HOURS BOUNCING along in a minibus; that is how you finally arrive in the world of Slobodan Miložsević. Serbia has been boycotted by the West since 1991, the airport at Belgrade has been closed for years, and this is one of the few means of getting there. Many of the passengers wear tracksuits – the standard former Soviet Bloc outfit of the 1990s – or black leather jackets. Behind me, a man's voice drones away like a dentist's drill. Occasionally I am able to make out a word: Davidoff, Volkswagen, America, Ben-Gurion airport.

  This part of the country is called Pannonia. The wooden derricks above the wells stand out like gallows on the marshes. ‘Welcome to the black hole of Europe,’ the man beside me says. He works as a football coach in Oldenburg, and he is a product of the old Yugoslavia.‘I was born in Belgrade. My mother came from Montenegro, my father was born in Bosnia. My sister lives in Croatia, and I live in Germany. Work that one out!’ At the border, the Serb militiamen yank open the doors of the bus.

  For centuries, rich and fert
ile Vojvodina was a part of the Habsburg Empire. Today it is Serbian, but the area is still inhabited by Croatians, Germans, Bosnians, Jews and Hungarians. It is the land where ‘the Hungarian celebrates in tears’ and where, according to the author Aleksandr Tisma, the people hang themselves from the rafters ‘the way other people say goodnight’. The broad skies above this land will never offer anyone peace and safety.

  It was in the early 1990s that I first visited Novi Sad, the hub of Tisma's world. There was no writing going on then in this Serbian provincial capital: the Yugoslav wars were in full swing and everyone was too busy arranging for petrol, cigarettes and bread. The Western boycott had resulted in a devastating shortage of everything. New banknotes were being issued almost every week, in new denominations with eight zeroes or more, all bearing the portraits of serious-looking professors, generals and national poets.

  The streets were lined with cars with flat tyres. The petrol smuggled with great difficulty past the embargo was sold in two-litre soft-drink bottles. The road in from the border was dotted with burned-out wrecks, in which something had apparently gone wrong with the plastic jerry cans stuffed under the back seat. At a street market I saw an elderly woman trying to sell her best coat. She lowered her eyes in shame. It was a dark blue cloth coat with a light fur collar and elegant buttons, once purchased in a festive mood and proudly cherished, now worth no more than the price of a piece of bread and a few potatoes.

  In December 1999, however, Novi Sad comes as a relief after Bucharest. That is, at least at a first glance. My newspaper reports that the West still considers the economic boycott one of the most effective means of putting pressure on Miložsević's regime. Those government ministers should walk these streets. Everywhere in the city – officially almost devoid of energy – the lights are on, the traffic is heavy, the markets and shops are full of Western European goods. Heaven knows where it all comes from. The black market, it seems, has found thousands of leaks and loopholes, and some people are making a bundle off of all those Western European principles.

  I am welcomed to town in Novi Sad's newest restaurant, run by a former fashion model and opened only last Sunday. French wines, Dutch beer, fresh fish brought in daily from Greece. The restaurant is cheery and full.

  My table companion is an old acquaintance, Sarita Matijević, a onetime television journalist who now works for George Soros. As the evening proceeds she becomes increasingly melancholy, she talks about how once, long ago, she visited Amsterdam on the queen's birthday. ‘We travelled around the canals by boat, everyone was dancing and singing. But then it was as though all the sound had been switched off. Suddenly I realised, for the first time, that my life would never be normal again. I thought: from now on, we no longer belong, we're no longer a part of Europe.’

  I had met Sarita during that first visit to Novi Sad, in 1993. It took place during a few completely normal weeks in February: the children with their backpacks slipped and slid over the frozen piles of snow on their way to school, the shopkeepers opened their shutters, the girls applied their make-up, the teachers started their lessons with a grumpy cough, the trains blew their whistles, the factories churned out goods and the hissing of the espresso machine in Café Sax sounded like a promising start to the day.

  One might almost have thought that there was nothing wrong, back then in Novi Sad, had it not been for the blackouts at the strangest times of day, if only the hospital behind the dark red walls had not been full of wounded soldiers, of amputees, and if only the radio had not broadcast reports from the front all day. The city's favourite cafés and restaurants had fallen quiet, and it was that sudden dearth of laughter and conversation that frightened the people of Novi Sad more than all the fighting and inflation put together. Everyone was working and the muddy buses were still running on time. But as the few students still left in Café Sax told me, the mood was one of ‘make believe’; they lived, as they put it themselves, ‘in the twilight zone’.

  Just imagine: for a cup of coffee that cost 15 dinars only last summer, you now paid 3,000 dinars. So then, what difference did it make? In 1990, a doctor's monthly salary had been around a thousand euros at today's rates. After three years of war, that same pile of dinars was worth no more than twenty-seven euros. One of Sarita's colleagues says: ‘As intellectuals here, we live as though we're in Berlin in 1933: are we going to leave, or will we stick around and see what happens? No one here talks about anything else.’

  I went with Sarita to visit her parents. After dinner the Serbian news came on, a programme that sometimes lasted for up to ninety minutes. Handy electronic maps showed the shifting front lines as though it were a weather report, the analyses made constant reference to blood, soil and the Serbian knights of the Middle Ages, the atrocities committed by the Croatians and Bosnians were exhibited in grim detail; those on the Serbian side remained unmentioned.

  Often enough, the propaganda did not even consist of lies, but of half-truths, which made it all the more convincing. ‘If you listen to Radio Zagreb you hear exactly the same stories, but with the roles reversed,’ Sarita said. She provided a simultaneous translation of everything that was said, including her father's comments; before long, however, she lost her professional discipline and began peppering her translations with comments like ‘at least, that's what my father says,’ and ‘at least, that's what my father's generation thinks’ and ‘which is, of course, utter nonsense’. In the end, all attempts at translation ground to a halt, and father and daughter spent the next hour shouting at each other.

  In the 1990s, four wars broke out within what had once been Yugoslavia. The first was a brief armed conflict that arose when Slovenia declared its independence in 1991. The second was an all-out war in 1991–2, and had to do with Croatia's secession. The third and most complicated conflict was fought out in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992–6. And the fourth war, in Kosovo, broke out in 1998 after years of tension, and ended with NATO intervention in 1999.

  The Yugoslav wars formed a bitter finale to the twentieth century. They belonged to that century, and were in many ways a product of it: the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the crude carving-up – ‘like a cake’ – of Central Europe and the Balkans in the conference rooms at Versailles and Trianon, the massacres of the Serb population by Croatian Nazis, and countless other unsettled accounts from the first half of the twentieth century. The regimes of Slobodan Miložsević, Franjo Tudjman and other nationalistic leaders reflected tendencies that had been seen for decades in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. They were anti-democratic and anti-liberal (the heritage of almost half a century of communism), they focused on ethnic purity (a legacy of National Socialism) and they were pronouncedly nationalistic and anti-Western (a leftover from the pan-Slavic movements that preceded the First World War).

  The unexpected dynamism of their nationalism, the vent they gave to the huge pressure on millions of humiliated farmers and town dwellers in an impoverished Eastern Europe was new, yet at the same time all too familiar. It was a primal force that leapt out of the darkness, like the monster everyone thinks is dead at the end of a scary movie. But this monster had not been defeated yet.

  NATO waited a long time before intervening, and clear rifts were regularly seen between the United States and its European partners. That, too, was new. When the West finally took decisive action in 1999, the attack was of a strikingly technical nature: the operations took place at high altitudes and from great distances, with as few risks as possible for the Western soldiers involved. It was a war of bombardment, aimed particularly at Belgrade, Novi Sad and a small number of other cities. And so, for the West, the war in Kosovo, the final war of the century, served as a counterpoint to the First World War. The national governments in 1914 had willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of troops. In 1999, for NATO, that was unthinkable. The fighting was limited to the use of missiles and bombers. In Kosovo, the West never engaged in a ground war.

  In the final account, the Yugoslav wars were
also typical publicity wars. There was a constant manipulation of death counts. NATO smugly televised direct hits on Belgrade, as though the city was a pinball machine. For Miložsević, the national television stations comprised his most important asset, more important even than the army, politics or party. The wars ran on fear, particularly among the Serbs: the fear of decimation, the fear of a repetition of the cruelties of the Second World War. And nothing whipped up those fears more effectively than television.

  The history of the Yugoslav wars is complicated. From the fifteenth until far into the nineteenth century, Yugoslavia – like the rest of the Balkans – had acted as a highly prized buffer zone between the three great religious traditions: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. Many mountain people lived almost exclusively within their clans and isolated village communities, and it was to them that their loyalty was given. Boys and men were regularly press-ganged into the armies of the warring powers; most of their contact with differing convictions took place on the battlefield. The key virtues were bravery, a sense of honour and loyalty to the clan.

  At first there were no major ethnic tensions. The Ottoman Empire was relatively tolerant, its population divided only along religious lines and not by ethnic origin. Western Europeans travelling through Thrace around 1900 noted to their amazement that the people in a mixed Greek/Bulgarian village had absolutely no idea whether their ancestors were Greek or Bulgarian. That played no role whatsoever. All they knew was that they were Christians.

  The First Yugoslavia, also known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was created at the Versailles peace conferences, as part of the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. The new nation was dominated by the Serbs; partly because they formed the largest local minority, and partly because they had fought on the side of the victorious Allies. Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina had sided with the Habsburgs and were seen rather as the spoils of war and treated accordingly. Meanwhile, the central government remained weak and the villages fought out their own disagreements: Serbs against Croatians, Croatians and Serbs against Muslims, Croatians and Muslims against Serbs,‘my brother and I against my nephew, my nephew and I against the foreigner’.