It's No Accident

People were setting off fireworks all day yesterday for Bajram, and of course it continues today. The ecumenical New Year's holiday is the biggest holiday of the year in this most multiconfessional corner of Europe. Explosions, especially in this city, are disturbing for Marina, and many people above the age of 18 or so will agree with her when pressed. For the past couple of days, however, the firecrackers have become so ubiquitous that no one seems to care anymore.

Saw a few more landmarks today, the highlight being the corner where Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand of Austria. No city on earth has birthed as many clichés as Sarajevo, but the most famous of these is that the city kicked off the great trademark horrors of the last century, and also played host to some of its last.

Also downtown is the city's famous synagogue. Sarajevo's Jews were sephardim who fled the catastrophic and bloody Catholic takeover in Spain during the fifteenth century, finding refuge in the more tolerant Muslim world. They were part of the millet system of governance that the Ottomans had for minority religious and ethnic groups, so that by the time of the national awakenings of the nineteenth century, Bosnian Jews organized their proto-nationalist and reform organizations in cooperation with other groups but -- just like all of them -- along the same millet lines. One of the downtown streets and several shops and buildings nearby carry the Spanish-derived Ladino name of their organization, quaintly rendered in Serbo-Croatian spelling as La Benevolencija. The descendants of those Bosnian Jews who survived the Holocaust were airlifted en masse out of Sarajevo during the most recent war at the expense of international Jewish relief agencies. The synagogue, meanwhile, has been carefully maintained and beautifully restored, in stark contrast to the neglected façades of the Austro-Hungarian buildings on the other side of the Milacka River. This too must have been done mostly with donations from abroad, since the remaining Jewish community here is tiny or perhaps even non-existent: no one was in the visitors' office when we stopped by.

Sephardic synagogue, Sarajevo

The early afternoon featured a trip to the Ali Paša neighborhood, another on the western edge of the city. My Bosnian Serb in-laws lived here before and throughout the last war, after which they moved to Canada. This part of the city was also partially invaded by the Četniks and was on the front lines throughout the war, just like neighboring Dobrinja. After the war there emerged an audio recording of Ratko Mladić -- Bosnia's tinpot Jenghiz Khan, the scourge of Sarajevo and now a fugitive -- ordering his batteries to bombard the neighborhood freely because "not many Serbs live there." In addition to being evil, this was utterly ludicrous, since Ali Paša -- its Muslim name notwithstanding -- was an ethnically mixed neighborhood, as indeed was the entire city.

Now, a part of the sprawling neighborhood has been decently restored: the city of Barcelona -- another Olympics location and a sister city of Sarajevo -- rebuilt and even attractively painted several blocks of the utilitarian concrete housing complexes.

Ali Paša, Sarajevo, December 31, 2006. This portion of the neighborhood has been rebuilt by the city of Barcelona

Just across the street, however, an even larger block of buildings still shows the effects of bullets, shrapnel, and grenades, with the gaping holes hastily patched with brick. Yet in this same vast, decrepit block you can find the King Fahd mosque, a hideous gray structure built in 2000 that is unlike any mosque I have seen thus far in the Balkans. Not nearly as large as a typical mosque in Istanbul, it is large by Bosnian standards (reputedly the biggest in the country) and boasts two angular minarets. Saudi Arabia claims to be the largest donor to Bosnia's reconstruction, but the stark contrast between this and the much better efforts of the Spanish across the street is the best possible illustration of the Saudis' priorities.

Ali Paša, Sarajevo, December 31, 2006. These apartment buildings -- all of them inhabited -- are more typical of what the neighborhood likes like eleven years after the end of the war.

King Fahd mosque, Sarajevo. Located on the same side of the street as the damaged apartment buildings

This is of course the stronghold of wahhabi Islam in Bosnia. Men on the mosque grounds are bearded, and an unusual number of women in the neighborhood at large -- not a majority, but an unusual number by Bosnian standards -- wear the hejab. Both sights are a rarity elsewhere in Sarajevo and in Bosnia generally. I spent some time trying to think of a parallel to this odd and well-funded cultural invasion by a cult so at odds with the long tradition of Islam in the Balkans. Then I realized that it reminded me of the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America, bringing both obscurantist theology and quietist (or even reactionary) politics to besieged and abused people.

Just a block away, the Croats are building a new and very large Catholic church. Yet more assertion of ethnic identity at the expense of more urgent social needs. Even this would be more understandable if Bosnian Croats weren't all standard-issue European Catholics, going to church only on holidays. Bosnia's avuncular and good-natured Franciscans are a welcome contrast to the priests in Croatia proper, who are basically fascists; it is not the monks who run the show in the local church, however, but the hierarchy, and they see to it that they get their share of the money that might otherwise go to the religious projects of the other ethnic groups. More urgent -- and non-sectarian -- projects suffer as a result.

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Kurban Bayram is the Turkish word for Eid al-Adha, the end of the Hajj. It also commemorates the day when God tested the loyalty of Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Ishmael, and then substituting a ram instead. (For those of you who don't know: it is Ishmael -- father of the Arabs -- rather than Isaac -- father of the Jews -- who is nearly sacrificed in the Qur'an.) Muslim families in Bosnia -- as elsewhere around the world -- slaughter a sheep today and have a feast. Marina wasn't in a position to impose us on the family feasts of any of her Muslim friends today, so we found other things to do.

Bajram banner in the evening, Sarajevo

Today we visited Dobrinja, the neighborhood on the western side of town that served as an Olympic village in 1984. I took photos of the former front lines: after the initial Serb assault here in 1992, they parked themselves as far forward as a row of buildings that is about thirty yards from another row of buildings where the Bosnian (Muslim) army similarly situated its front line. And there the lines held for over three years, with the two sides exchanging fire occasionally, but where most of the time the Četnik snipers occupied their time by hunting the civilian population of the neighborhood like animals. Marina's building was the first building on the other end of a wide-open space with a parking lot -- a distance, in American terms, of about the length of a football field, perhaps less -- inside Muslim territory. I saw the spot where a grenade hit their apartment, as well as the spot just outside the building entrance (on the other side of the building) where Marina was hit by a Četnik sniper bullet (Christmas Day, 1992; she was 14). We also visited the apartment itself, where my father-in-law's name is still on the door on a stubborn piece of masking tape. The rest of the building is now inhabited, but this apartment has been abandoned for over ten years (only one other person occupied it briefly when Marina's family left); the family is now attempting to lay their rightful claim to it, since it will have resale value when it is renovated.

Dobrinja, Sarajevo, December 30, 2006. During the war, the building on the right was occupied by Serb snipers; the building on the left was occupied by Bosnian Muslim troops

Bullet holes and grenade impact craters abound in Dobrinja, on the sturdy cement-block socialist apartment buildings and in the asphalt of the sidewalks. The street names here once bore the names of great progressive figures from around the world, in the Partisan tradition of internationalism. Not anymore. Marina's own street was fortunate enough to keep its name -- Emile Zola -- but the names of Simón Bolívar (Marina's elementary school), Salvador Allende, and Martin Luther King did not survive. I recognized none of the new names, and Marina didn't know most of them, either. Yet another subject for a j'accuse in a land that has provided occasion for so many.

Dobrinja, Sarajevo, December 30, 2006. This apartment building is located about 150 yards from the former front lines, if that. The middle window is the fifth-floor apartment of the Antić family. The Serb forces fired anti-personnel grenades at this apartment building heavily populated by civilians. One of these punched through the wall below the window and exploded in the Antić family living room.

The names on the mailboxes testify to the success of the nationalists' program of ethnic cleansing: there are no Serbs or Croats living here. There is a brand-new mosque here, and it is built in the austere, whitewashed style characteristic of foreign brands of Islam.

A few blocks away and you are in Serb territory (then, and still): this edge of the city is part of Republike Srpska. The Orthodox church here was unfinished at the time of the war, but was used prodigiously by snipers who killed people from its towers. It has since been completed and is the Orthodox holy place in the neighborhood -- a statement of Četnik contempt for anyone who lived in the neighborhood during the war. We passed through the Republike Srpska area by cab on our way back to the other part of town, and it is astounding how it looks like a different country. All roadsigns and advertisements instantly switch to Cyrillic script. In Yugoslavia, all Serbo-Croatian speakers learned both alphabets and can read them with ease, but in Bosnia the Roman script was the preferred one, and that went for all ethnic groups. Not so now in this sliver of the country, but it is obviously being done for crude nationalist purposes.

We went to an Internet café in the evening and learned that they really did go right ahead and execute Saddam Hussein. They picked a hell of a day to do it. The choice of date is obviously calculated for effect, and will inevitably have gruesome -- even sacrilegious -- associations for Muslims everywhere. It will also have no effect on the Iraqi civil war.

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Walking around the central city of Sarajevo, you could be forgiven for thinking that the city has fully recovered. Markets and shops are active, and foreign banks and grocery chains have brightly-appointed branch offices and storefronts. Many buildings still show signs of quick patchwork where bullets and shrapnel once did their work, but this does not detract from an overall impression of normal activity.

These appearances are deceptive, because this is also the area that houses foreign embassies and missions like OSCE, so the mostly young people who work here are among a relative few in Sarajevo who have regular employment, and each of them is likely the main breadwinner for an entire family. The older people who live in the neighborhoods on the hills ringing the city center have pensions, but these are meager and the World Bank is suggesting that they be cut even further. The state is extraordinarily dysfunctional, with a complicated electoral system where people vote for seats dedicated to one of the three ethnic groups, including a three-way presidency. It is not clear how much the government actually does apart from providing patronage jobs to the ethnic political parties. Much of its revenue comes from foreign aid and development sources, and funding for cultural activities falls by the wayside: the National Museum and the former Museum of the Revolution (now a museum of Bosnian history) are neglected, with their libraries closed because they do not have heat.

One of the most recognizable buildings in town is the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian city hall which was later the National Library of Bosnia. The Austrians attempted to imitate the architectural style of the city's earlier Ottoman rulers; the result was a strange but beautiful amalgam, the façade of which managed to avoid the effects of shelling and bullets during the last war. The interior caught on fire, though, and after a dozen years of peace, it is still boarded up. There is a rumor that the Austrian government provided money to restore it, but that the funds got lost in the kleptomaniacal Bosnian bureaucracy.

Former city hall and National Library, Sarajevo

Most people here are secular and modernist in their mentality even if they hold some religious beliefs and even stronger and more bitter nationalist resentments. The desperation of the war years did create some space for the growth of religious cults. The Hare Krishna movement set up shop here during the siege and used delicious Indian food to hook in hungry young people who otherwise subsisted on plain rice and Vietnam-era US Army MREs. Even more disturbing than this bizarre but quietist Hindu sect is the growth of "Wahhabi" Islam among a small but increasingly belligerent subset of Bosnian Muslims. Bosnia saw an influx of Arab and other Muslim mujahideen during the war; they arrived at the invitation of the Izetbegović government, and saw Bosnia as one more front in a war with hotspots as disparate as Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Most Bosnian Muslims -- let alone Croats and Serbs -- found their doctrines alien and their sectarian militancy disturbing. Yet their austere theology and reactionary politics eventually found some Bosnian sympathizers as the war dragged on, and as rural Muslims fleeing the Četnik massacres in places like Srebrenica arrived in Sarajevo to settle permanently (often in the former homes of Serbs and Croats who had fled the city and even the country altogether).

Islam in Bosnia is of the Sunni/Sufi variety dominant in Turkey, and the sect dominant in Saudi Arabia -- called wahhabi by everyone here -- has no historical roots here. Its presence is of recent vintage. Today we entered the most famous mosque in Sarajevo, the mosque of Gazi Huzrev Beg. It was designed by Mimar Sinan, the legendary 16th-century Ottoman architect who designed the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul (as well as his masterpiece mosque, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne). As the major Muslim landmark in the city, it was shelled by the Četniks during the war, and was "restored" in 1996 by a Saudi aid agency. The building's interior still has beauty, although its decoration was more colorful and traditionally Ottoman before the last war. The exterior, meanwhile, has a truly odd look: the Ottoman-era stone above a certain height was covered over in a sort of whitewash unlike anything I had seen in Istanbul. All of this is the work of the wahhabis, who frown on all extravagance or ornamentation like the strictest of Christian Protestant iconoclasts. The Gazi Husrev Beg mosque -- and others, I am sure -- is now a place of contestation between most Bosnian Muslims on the one hand and the new wahhabi sect on the other. Most Bosnian Muslims consider what has been done to this mosque to be a mutilation, even a desecration. There are also intense and petty disputes about the "correct" Islamic way to pray, and reports of wahhabis harrassing Muslim women who enter the mosque without the head coverings deemed necessary by wahhabi standards.

Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo. Entrance as seen from its courtyard

Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo, with recently whitewashed dome and minaret

The respective political parties favored by the ethnic groups are getting even worse than before, with an extreme nationalist winning the Serb presidency while openly stating that he wants to hold a referendum for Republike Srpska to join Serbia, and with an equally hardline candidate from the "Party for Bosnia and Hercegovina" displacing the candidate of the SDA (Izetbegović's party) among Muslims. The former Communists (SDP) were pleasantly able to capture the Croat presidency as the Croat nationalists split and progressive-minded Muslims and Serbs crossed over to vote in the Croat election in order to help the SDP. There is only so much you can do in this position, of course. Ethnic nationalism is still the main axis of politics, and among the country's Muslim plurality (which in Sarajevo is now a heavy majority) there is not yet an openly religious party, though that seems to be only a matter of time.

SDP election poster, Sarajevo, 2006. "Choose justice!"

Posted by John Lacny at 05:59 PM | Permalink

Today our route passed through picturesque northern and central Bosnia. Part of my impressions may have been colored by the weather: the thick fog that had surrounded us in eastern Slavonia lifted by mid-morning, and there was plenty of sun on the trip through the Bosnian mountains. I thought it the prettiest countryside I had yet seen anywhere in the Balkans. Small towns and villages with small Catholic churches gave way to a stretch with Orthodox churches and Cyrillic lettering on the street signs (Republike Srpska), and the number of tiny single-minaret mosques became steadily more frequent until they were the dominant religious buildings in central Bosnia.

Crossing a bridge in a northern Bosnian town, as seen through a bus window

We switched buses in Zenica, a place that I could describe as the Pittsburgh of Bosnia, except that Pittsburgh is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States and Zenica does not have much beauty to speak of. Maybe it is the Gary, Indiana. In any case, most of its imposing socialist-era industrial plants are now inactive. But it also lies in a valley, and the winter fog was thick again, lending the town an even grayer aspect. Perhaps some day this town will produce a Bosnian Bruce Springsteen.

You can measure how awful the war was in a region by clear visual cues and by the number of names redolent with horror that appear on the roadsigns. In eastern Croatia we were not far from Vukovar, and in addition to the minefields, there were plenty of buildings where the patched-up bullet holes were clearly visible. Even that doesn't compare to Bosnia. On the winding road from Zenica to Sarajevo, which crosses the snaking River Bosna nearly a dozen times, there are several entire villages that were burned out during the war, and to which no one has returned in the intervening eleven years. By now the roadsigns, too, show you to places like Mostar, Goražde, and Sarajevo itself.

The life is definitely back in Sarajevo. The streets are busily clogged with cars, and the whole city smells of the exhaust that gets trapped here with the winter fog. Marina reports that this was a common odor before the war as well, so it is nothing new.

We are staying with a woman who is a friend of the family and part of the city's dwindling -- and aging -- Serb population. She was in the anti-Nazi underground in Herzegovina at the age of fifteen, and her late husband was a Partisan and a Party member in the Tito years. When the last war hit, their house ended up behind the Serb lines, and they had to flee behind the Muslim lines to the center of the city. When they returned, the Četniks had wrecked the place and made off with most of the medals and other valuables he had earned from a lifetime of service to a country that no longer exists.

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Lipovac is a tiny village near the Serbian border where my Croatian in-laws live (the Bosnian Serb in-laws mostly live in Canada).

When the Serb-dominated "Yugoslav" Army advanced here in 1991, the entire population fled. It was effectively a no-man's-land for the duration of the war, and was gutted and destroyed. When Croatia took it, the government decided to rebuild it as a sort of model village, situated as it is so close to the Serbian and Bosnian borders. Understandably, the few Serbs who had lived here before the war decided not to return.

Elsewhere in Slavonia and Krajina, the war had the neighbor-against-neighbor quality that was soon to characterize the bloodier fighting in Bosnia. When Croatia declared independence, Croatian Serbs largely welcomed the invasion of the Serbian army and allied paramilitaries. On one drive last night -- from the larger town of Vinkovci to this remote village -- we passed a schoolhouse that was once the regional headquarters of Arkan (nom de guerre of Željko Ražnjatović, arguably the most psychotic of Serb war criminals). The conflict in Croatia soon developed into a stalemate as the two sides awaited the outcome of the Bosnian debacle, and when everything was settled in 1995, the Croatians expelled virtually all Serbs living in Slavonia and Krajina -- an estimated 200,000 people.

Village life now is the kind of rural idyll that intellectuals throughout history have longed for until they got bored with it. Marina is anxious that we not take a walk in the garden for fear that there might be landmines, and she's probably right. Even though this is a well-populated area and supposedly cleared, there are active minefields just outside of town with skull-and-crossbones signs to warn the unwary. Rain and soil erosion are bound to move some of the unexploded mines, and it seems inevitable that there will be a few unhappy accidents a year from now until the end of time. Other than that, though, there's an absence of excitement, and I'm sure people here are grateful for the quiet. This year the family pig had a prodigious and adorable brood, though the nearby smokehouse presages their eventual fate, since it houses the (tasty) remains of their relatives from last year.

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We left Belgrade in mid-afternoon, so my impressions are even more superficial than usual, but I will note that Serbia is very inexpensive. The dinar is weak, plus the only major tourist attraction we visited -- the ruins of the "white fortress" from which the city gets its name -- is situated in a public park, and was free of charge. Only the highest point in the ruins -- with its picturesque view of the confluence of the Sava and the Danube -- charged admission that was the equivalent of about 30 cents.

Confluence of the Sava and the Danube. As seen from the white fortress, Belgrade

It was near election time, and posters for the barely-distinguishable political parties were everywhere. Among these were more featuring the fascist Šešelj. In addition to the urban graffiti that typifies any city on earth, there are plenty of reactionary graffiti as well: Chetnik symbology, "Kosovo is Serbian," "1389," etc. We saw one or two buildings that had been bombed by the US from the air in 1999, but the city is bustling and active around them; it is obvious that Belgrade was not hit very hard by the wars that broke up Yugoslavia.

Our second stop was the "House of Flowers," where Tito lies buried. Not many locals come here; Serb nationalism rejects Tito as a Croat and Slovene as well as a Communist. Admission is free, and the scene is painfully sad: memories of a more civilized day. We signed the guest book. There had been visitors from all over the former Yugoslavia in recent days: Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia -- but it was obvious from the names that the great majority of recent visitors had been Bosnian Muslims.

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Spent all day on the train to Belgrade. A white Christmas in the Bulgarian and Serbian countryside -- or it would be, if it weren't celebrated twelve days later here. Serbian sleeper cars are slightly preferable to the Bulgarian ones we'd traveled in previously.

The Serbian conductor of our car is a Yugonostalgic who refers to socialist Yugoslavia as "the time when God walked on earth."

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We are leaving Istanbul tonight after a stay of four days and three nights. I know already that this has been the highlight of my trip, though I won't write about it at length since I can't say anything that you won't find in a dozen tourist guides. We still didn't see all of the major spots (we missed Dolmabahçe Palace, for instance), but our stay here consisted mostly of visits to the great landmarks of the old city: Aya Sofya; the "Blue Mosque" of Sultan Ahmet I; Topkapı Palace; the Basilica Cistern; we even caught a Mevlevi Dervish ceremony (the "whirling dervishes") at Sirkeci Station on our way out of town.

I do recommend seeing some of the "real Istanbul" beyond the tourist areas: this we did by going to Űsküdar (on the Asian side) where we ate very cheaply (fresh fish) before walking to Selacak to take a small ferry to the island fortress of Kiz Kulesi (which has been turned into a not-so-cheap café).

I have not been a great world traveler, so take it for what it's worth when I say that Istanbul is the most beautiful city I have ever seen, far surpassing Vienna. I was stunned at how deeply blue were the waters of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn even on gray winter days like these; by the site of the Blue Mosque at night during the call to prayer, with the seagulls circling between the minarets; and by the tasteful way the city's ancient treasures and Ottoman monuments have been preserved, restored, and presented for the edification of the public (which is to the credit of the Turkish government -- no one's favorite and least of all my own -- though the archaeological museum, which is still superb, nevertheless strikes me as scandalously neglected).

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Turkey economizes on modern national heroes: Atatürk is as ubiquitous as the Turkish flag itself and the only figure on the currency. I don't know much about Turkish politics, but I get the distinct sense that the secular pieties of the Kemalist ideology favored by the military are wearing thin with the people at large, though there are few who would say so to anyone in public -- let alone an American -- since "insulting Turkishness" is still a criminal offense.

There looks to be a lot of new multi-family housing under construction on the outskirts of the city, at least along the train route. The conventional wisdom is that there will eventually be a bad earthquake here, so this could be sleazy real estate speculation.

Mevlevi Dervish ceremony, Sirkeci Station, Istanbul

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Sofia was once the world capital of anti-imperialist struggle, the place where you could head for some political training -- perhaps before spending a few days vacationing in a Black Sea resort further east -- and then arrange for a Bulgarian freighter to ship some AK-47s in advance of your return to the jungles of Vietnam or the bush of Namibia.

Sofia isn't like that anymore, so I regret to report that I won't be bringing back any special struggle-oriented presents for my comrades. Capitalism has not been kind to Bulgaria -- what land has it ever treated nicely? -- so that it did not recover its pre-1990 standard of living until 2004, and as with all capitalist recoveries it has benefited some and not others. The train station has a group of near-beggars who accost travelers for money in exchange for carrying baggage, and we saw several homeless people. This is juxtaposed to a trendy elite -- small by Western standards, but visible -- and economic development Vegas style (casinos and strip joints).

All of that said, the central city is a compact but lovely visual gem, with Orthodox churches as the centerpiece. Most of these are built on the sites of former mosques, or (like the gigantic church of St. Alexander Nevsky) were constructed in honor of the Russians for taking the country out of the hands of the Ottomans in the late 19th century.

Church of St. Alexander Nevsky, Sofia

Monuments to Bulgaria's enduring friendship with Russia are virtually all of this distasteful Tsarist sort, because the landmarks of the Communist period have been destroyed. I regret to say that this is true of the mausolem of Georgi Dimitrov, which was literally blown up. Dimitrov was the first leader of postwar People's Bulgaria, but he is also famous outside of the country for being the man who defied Hitler after the Reichstag fire, and for formulating the Comintern's Popular Front strategy. Say what you want about Dimitrov's behavior in the period of the Purges; the truth is he had a courageous streak and an intelligent mind, and it is well-known that he was discussing some kind of Balkan Socialist Federation in cooperation with Tito, a possibility quashed by both the Tito-Stalin split and Dimitrov's own death. We'll never know what might have happened with this; perhaps Balkan assistance (in defiance of Stalin's own caution) would have meant victory for the Greek left and the earlier birth of a stronger, multipolar socialist world. Instead we had Tito deftly playing both sides, the Greek partisans drowned in blood, and Bulgaria with an especially stupid and nepotistic nomenklatura even by Eastern Bloc standards. The services it provided the Third World are missed -- just not in Bulgaria itself, where the ex-Communists quickly won the first elections after the collapse, but where the memory of People's Bulgaria is wiped from any official acknowledgement.

Bulgaria joins the EU on January 1, which is the height of ambition for all political parties here, except perhaps the neofascists of Ataka, a nasty new party that directs its ire at the country's Turk and Roma minorities. As for the sights, the best church of all was the remarkable 4th-century St. George, an unassuming stone structure that houses within it some impressive ancient frescoes that were uncovered when the building was converted back to a church after years as a mosque. Understandably, photos were not permitted here, so without that, and with the socialist monuments long gone, I was pleased to snap a photo of the closest thing I could find to a revolutionary site here: the plaque on the front of the embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

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The overseer of our sleeping car from Vienna to Sofia was a jaded Bulgarian who complained about the Serbs most of the time. With Marina's native Serbo-Croatian and her working knowledge of Russian, she is able to understand a chunk of what Bulgarians say and also communicate with them in a sort of pidgin Slavic.

Most of the train ride was through rural Serbia, though we also passed through Belgrade and Niš. The hiller parts of rural Serbia remind me of some of West Virginia and similar places in my native Appalachia. I mean that not only topographically, but in the visual aspect of rural underdevelopment. Small-town Serbian houses are tidily-kept, though the towns in general are neglected and public buildings look run down. This despite the fact that Serbia -- apart from Kosovo of course -- was untouched by the Yugoslav wars. The sanctions must have hit hard here.

Several of the more picturesque rural settings were marred by what looked to be very crude extractive operations -- I think quarrying, not mining -- that have demolished entire hills. Once again reminiscent of Appalachia -- though I doubt Serbia has many local green movements.

Did see one poster protesting the war crimes trial of Vojislav Šešelj, the fascist paramilitary leader and politician.

Extractive operations in rural Serbia

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Christmas actually is a big deal in Austria, of course, though their Christmas kitsch is a good deal less annoying than ours. Mozart is everywhere -- he was not especially well-liked by the Viennese in his lifetime (Prague was more enthusiastic), and lately he's been reduced to selling candy.

There is a lot of reactionary statuary here: Maria Theresia, Franz Josef, et. al. The beautiful St. Stefan's Cathedral has a memorial (in Serbo-Croatian) in honor of the Croatian Nazi "martyr" Archbishop Stepinac -- a muted but disturbing counterpoint (for those who know) to the official Monument to the Victims of War & Fascism a few blocks away.

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I am in Vienna in preparation for my honeymoon/tour of the Balkans. One of the great small things about Europe at this time of the year is the relative absence of cloying, kitschy Christmas music.

My German is so bad as to be functionally non-existent, but on the plane I noticed someone reading a newspaper with a large photograph of Richard Perle, gesturing in an attempt at profundity. The headline quoted him as saying "Es war eine gute Idee." For those of you who don't know German, this translates roughly as "Richard Perle is a fucking idiot."

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Dennis Kucinich is a great and principled political leader. He is a rarity among politicians of all kinds -- let alone members of the US Congress -- in that he fights unflinchingly for the people. His distinguished record goes back as far as his early tenure as mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s, when he saved the city's municipal power system from being sold off to the robber barons of the power companies -- a move that eventually cost him his mayoralty as the companies (and the city's creditors!) piled on. The official media story that the "boy mayor of Cleveland" was a failure has stuck with him ever since, even though most people in Cleveland eventually realized that it wasn't true. Fifteen years after the fact, everyone knew he was right to do what he did, and he could get elected to the state senate -- despite the Gingrich wave of 1994 -- on the slogan "Kucinich: Because He Was Right." Since then his working-class district has elected him to Congress by wide margins, and he has been a voice of principle despite ridicule by the powerful.

Political leaders should not be punished for being right, which is why you should applaud Kucinich's entry into the race for the presidency even if you think his campaign is such a longshot that you won't even consider participating in it. I agree with the criticism of his 2004 campaign that he did not have the right people at the table from the very beginning, that his core supporters ended up being mostly the flakier leftists, and that he ended up looking like an isolated gadfly as a result. The whole thing was painful to watch, because Kucinich is not like that at all; he is a real fighter with a real base, and an unfailingly serious person. It is disgusting that we have a political and media system that so thoroughly undermines people of substance like Dennis.

Here's to hoping that this time, his supporters and his campaign will be a constructive force in adding to the debate and pushing the national mood to the left. I doubt very much if he has the capacity to generate the kind of Rainbow-like energy that we need to do something like that. John Edwards -- whose politics are nowhere near as reliable as Kucinich's -- could prove a more useful vehicle for that purpose. I am not wedded to the Kucinich campaign -- but I will not attack it. My watchword for 2008 is pas d'enemies a gauche!

Tags: kucinich, 2008, John Edwards, no enemies to the left

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Pinochet cheated justice to the very end.

Technorati tags: good riddance, pinochet

Posted by John Lacny at 03:39 PM | Permalink

Comrade Hugo Chavez's margin of victory is impressive, as expected.

Posted by John Lacny at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)