Certainly, poverty kept many Romani children from getting an education. Families often relied on their children going to work to make ends meet. But economics weren’t the only issue. Many Romani parents worked at Skopje’s outdoor markets and earned more than enough to send their kids into classrooms, and still would not. “You could often hear a Rom say, ‘My dad didn’t go to school, so why would I need an education?’ ” Muarem recalled.

Today, though, a typical family conversation in his Shuto Orizari neighborhood is likely to be all about schools and scholarships.

More and more Roma in Shuto Orizari – “Shutka” for short, thought to be the biggest majority-Roma settlement in the world – see education as the key to a better future for their sons and, increasingly, their daughters. Two decades ago, a typical girl from Shutka would have been expected to stay at home and marry by age 16. Today, many Romani girls attend secondary schools, and they make up nearly half of all Roma in Macedonian schools and universities.

Macedonian community development organizations help many Romani youngsters like this girl attend preschool. Photo courtesy of the Sumnal Association, www.sumnal.org.

In a community still rent by discrimination, significantly poorer and shorter-lived than any other Macedonian ethnic group, the steadily growing awareness of the importance of education is a success story. Initially this was thanks to civil activists, but since the middle of the last decade the state has taken the issue on board in earnest, implementing overdue policies – and stumping up funds – to provide educational opportunities for Roma and other marginalized groups.

Philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Foundations was at the forefront of those efforts, launching a program in 1996 to raise Romani enrollment, retention, and graduation rates at all education levels. [Editor’s note: TOL is the recipient of an Open Society Institute grant to support education reporting.] Its activities ranged from information campaigns and supplying new equipment to underfunded schools to providing scholarships for Romani students.

At the time, the government did not see serving marginalized groups as a priority, said Spomenka Lazarevska, director of education programs for the Open Society Foundation Macedonia. “Until 2005, not a single state institution offered help for the serious development of education for the Roma, apart from declaring their support,” she said.

2005 was the year the governments of Macedonia and seven other Balkan and Central European states declared the opening of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, committing to working toward a set of ambitious objectives aimed at eliminating discrimination and closing social and economic gaps. The initiative, since expanded to 12 countries, was the brainchild of international funders, chiefly the Open Society network and the World Bank. Education was set as one of four overarching priorities, along with health, housing, and employment. National action plans followed, yet the Macedonian government only started putting money where its mouth was in 2008, and even then at levels experts argue are far from sufficient.

PRESCHOOL

Poverty plays the most direct role in precluding many Romani kids from the benefits of an educational head start. To enroll a child in an accredited preschool that provides early education, play facilities, and meals, parents must pay the equivalent of about $30 per month. This is a substantial cost for many Romani families, four-fifths of which receive state support for the poor averaging about $40 per month. 

According to the National Statistics Office, just 501 of the 25,056 Macedonian children aged 6 and under attending preschool in the 2010-2011 school year were Roma – about 2 percent of enrollment. Based on the most recent census in 2002, the country’s 54,000 Roma represent about 2.7 percent of the overall population, but their seemingly moderate representation in preschools is probably much greater, as the census almost certainly undercounts minorities. (More realistic estimates put the Roma population as high as 135,000, or 6.8 percent of the population.)

With support from a Roma Decade program called the Roma Education Fund (REF), the national government and 18 municipal authorities have been implementing a project aimed at increasing preschool numbers among Romani children. As of October, the project was helping 400 children attend preschool, according to officials from the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy.

Backed by the EU and REF, a pilot project called A Good Start is helping more kids go to nursery school and kindergarten. It provides daylong preschool for 57 children in Shuto Orizari.

Latifa Shikovska, executive director of the project’s Macedonian partner organization, Umbrella, said two of its main goals are to help children acquire basic school habits and to overcome the language barrier, a precondition for future success in school. The Macedonian educational system does not yet provide tuition in Romani, which for many Roma is their first language.

In Topaana, Skopje’s second-biggest Romani neighborhood, the education and community development organization Sumnal helps 94 children attend preschool and runs workshops designed to help mothers prepare their kids for school.

“When we started out, we worked directly with people every day. We went from house to house. We had to do it that way in order to gain trust among the local residents, and then to raise parents’ awareness of the importance of education,” acting director Stance Dimkovska said. Sumnal has since broadened its scope to run additional services for Romani children and their families in the neighborhood of 5,000 residents.

Shikovska and other activists argue that preschool education should be made obligatory and free, as is the case with primary and secondary schooling. “If preschool education were a legal requirement, the inclusion of children in kindergartens would be 100 percent,” she said.

PRIMARY EDUCATION

Roma are better represented in primary school. During the 2011-2012 school year, 9,924 Romani children attended primary school, according to the Education Ministry. Still, they lag far behind other groups.

While primary education is mandatory, UNICEF estimated in 2011 that only 63 percent of Romani 7-year-olds were enrolled in school, compared to 86 percent in the poorest households overall. The rate of irregular attendance is also high, partly because of children accompanying their families abroad. Visa liberalization, which enables Macedonian citizens to travel freely to most of the European Union, has seen thousands of Romani families opting to leave for long periods, visiting family and friends, doing seasonal labor, or even claiming asylum in prosperous Western countries.

Unlike preschool education, primary schooling has so far seen relatively little intervention by civil society groups, possibly because primary education is considered to be chiefly the state’s responsibility. Senad Mustafov, the Macedonia country facilitator for the Roma Education Fund, said REF has done only a few small-scale projects in primary schools.

“We are a foundation that finances projects rather than implementing them. We do not receive proposals from NGOs to fund projects in the field of primary education,” he said.

Proposals do not abound, but problems do. In Shuto Orizari – where 13,342 of the 22,017 inhabitants are Roma, according to the 2002 census – there are two primary schools, Braka Ramiz Hamid and 26 July. At Braka Ramiz Hamid, classes are held in three shifts to accommodate 2,300 pupils – almost three times the intended capacity – and two teaching shifts are needed at 26 July School.

Recent negative publicity about the overcrowding in Shutka’s schools seems to have prompted the authorities to take steps. According to Redzep Ali Chupi, a Ministry of Education official responsible for minority-language education support, Braka Ramiz Hamid School will soon have 20 new classrooms and four new offices.

“Local authorities submitted planning documentation in the fastest possible manner and new classrooms are expected to be functional in 2013, so the problems with the classroom space in the school will be solved once and for all,” said Chupi, who also sits on the Open Society Foundation Macedonia’s executive board.

University students take part in an event sponsored by the Open Society Foundation’s Romaversitas program. Photo courtesy of Romaversitas.

The prospect delights Shutka parents like Senat Zekir. His daughter, Eleonara, is a fifth grader Braka Ramiz Hamid and one of the best pupils in her class, regularly getting outstanding grades.

“Even though she is still a small child, she is interested in school. She sometimes even cries if she gets a lower mark … but then she immediately starts to study in order to improve,” Zekir said. When the expansion is finished, he added, “the kids will have proper conditions for learning.”

SECONDARY EDUCATION

High schools have seen the most rapid advances among Romani students, in absolute numbers. Less than two decades ago, only 300 or so Roma attended secondary schools, but that figure is now over 1,700.

The state has established several inducements to stay in school, some available to all students (like free public transport), others targeted at minorities.

But the measure usually cited as the most effective in helping Roma progress from primary to secondary school is the scholarship and mentoring program developed initially by the Open Society Foundation and operated since 2009 by the Education Ministry, with support from the Roma Education Fund. For the current two-year phase ending in June, the fund allotted 335,000 euros ($447,000) to help 800 students per year. Scholarship winners receive a monthly stipend of 1,500 to 2,500 dinars ($32-$53), which they are free to use for educational or living expenses.

Chupi said the numbers speak for the project’s success. In its first year, only 433 of a planned 700 grants were awarded because not enough applicants met the minimum requirement of an average grade of 3 on the 1-to-5 system. “But last year, the average mark level increased. Only 120 of the successful applicants had an average of 3, while the rest had a higher average,” he said. “That means that the scholarship is a motivator for learning more and is thus improving the quality of outcomes.”

Because those Roma who do attend high school typically go to vocational training schools, another Education Ministry initiative launched in 2009 is trying to steer Romani youngsters into more challenging institutions by permitting them to enroll with a grade average less than that required for other applicants.

The measure “allows Romani children to get into more attractive schools across the country,” Chupi said. “More Roma are now enrolling in schools where the emphasis is on business and legal education – also secondary medicine schools, grammar schools, art schools, etc.”

But enrollment itself is not the only hurdle. Last fall a business- and law-oriented high school in Skopje, Arseni Jovkov, formed two all-Roma classes, raising concerns among activists about cracks in the official policy of integration.

School officials said the separation policy was implemented for the security of the Roma students, most of whom live in nearby Shuto Orizari. “We believe that these pupils should go home together after classes,” said Zoran Zlatkovski, the deputy principal at Arseni Jovkov, which is also attended by students of Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and Serbian background.

When some Romani students expressed dissatisfaction with the arrangement, the school called a meeting with parents, whose “attitudes were different,” Zlatkovski said. “Most wanted these classes to remain as they are now. Some did want to break up the classes and have the Roma kids study with pupils of other ethnic backgrounds. But the main argument was the protection of the children on their way home. The final decision was made based on the views of the majority of parents who did not want to break up the classes.”

The Romani students themselves are divided on the issue. One, Leonard Abaz, said the school’s Roma tend to isolate themselves. “During the main break we socialize only within each other. Whenever we need something we turn only to each other. Basically, we don’t mingle with the others.”

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

The number of Romani university students, while still proportionally lower than in the population at large, has climbed steadily, from 17 in 1994 to 35 in 1998, 126 in 2002, and 350 now. The completion rate is less encouraging. According to data from the National Statistics Office, just 42 Roma graduated between 2001 and 2008. More recently, the rate has been on an upward trend, with 28 Roma, including 17 women, graduating in 2009 and 22, including 11 women, in 2011. The total number of Macedonian Roma with university degrees is thought to be only about 100.

A major factor in the rising enrollment is a quota system, whereby university applicants who do not meet the admission criteria or are unable to pay a higher fee as private students can qualify for a government-funded place. The student quota is directly proportional to the Roma share of the national population, about 2.7 percent.

Universities are also beginning to introduce their own affirmative action measures. At Goce Delchev University in Stip, students of Romani background are exempt from most fees in the first and second year of study.

Tuition represents only part of the cost of study. Considering their often poor backgrounds, many Roma would be unable to attend university without extra help covering the overall costs of higher education, provided initially by the Open Society Foundation and now by the Roma Education Fund. Open Society’s Lazarevska says that without direct aid to Romani secondary school and university students, there would have been very little progress in raising enrollment. Scholarships and mentoring help have increased both the quantity and quality of Romani students, she says.

Senad Mamet is a final-year student in the food and agriculture faculty at Skopje’s Sts. Cyril and Methodius University and an activist with Romani organizations. He won a scholarship through Open Society’s Romaversitas program, adapted from a similar venture in Hungary, that has helped at least 80 Macedonian Roma graduate from university since 2001.

“It was an additional incentive to continue with my studies,” Mamet said. “The scholarship is really important for us students, considering the financial situation of the Roma.”

Whether Romani, or other, graduates will find a job in their field of study is another matter in a country where the unemployment rate tops 30 percent, among the highest in Europe. Various quota schemes have helped place a significant number of Roma in public sector and government jobs, though not necessarily in their area of expertise. There are, for example, very few practicing Romani doctors. As of the 2011-2012 academic year some 15 Roma had graduated from Macedonian medical schools but only two were working in the profession, according to the Roma Education Fund.

“If you want to work in your field, your parents have to have worked in that field, or they must have a close relationship with a politician,” said Shaip Iseni, who graduated with a dentistry degree and now works for Sumnal.

Still, there has been significant progress for Roma who, a generation ago, had little better to look forward to in the way of employment than work as a bazaar trader. Expanded early education, scholarships, and affirmative action policies, often focused on professional education, are opening doors that were largely closed as recently as a few years ago. Underprivileged parents are increasingly persuaded to focus on education, via both soft methods such as one-to-one outreach by civil society groups and concrete inducements like direct government support to families, conditional on their kids staying in school.

Senat Zekir, the father of a high-achieving Shuto Orizari fifth-grader, said families like his are thankful for such policies. “Instead of having to find additional money from our domestic budget for my child,” he said, “now I know there is a scholarship that can help me and relieve the burden of my child’s education.”

 

Daniel Petrovski is a freelance journalist in Skopje. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, which is co-funded by the European Union. The contents of this project are the sole responsibility of Transitions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

There are people selling roast chestnuts, corn, and sesame pretzels on every corner. And cats – cats everywhere. Begging children sit on the pavement and play plastic clarinets. Bookshops show off Orhan Pamuk novels like trophies for tourists. In a restaurant on a small street behind the Blue Mosque, kebab meat is turning on a spit, echoed by a dervish dancing in a circle. You can watch older women preparing food in huge display windows as the jiggling tram takes you from Topkapi Palace to the Grand Bazaar and Hagia Sophia, a former Byzantine church turned into a mosque and then into the religiously “neutral” museum of today. Cruise ships in the Bosphorus Strait float between Europe and Asia. Here, the Orient meets the West.

Istanbul is the only metropolis that spreads over two continents. It is Muslim yet secular, an ancient and at once modern city. Built 2,700 years ago by the Greeks, it has survived earthquakes and invasions. Istanbul was the center of two empires, Byzantine and Ottoman, both among the strongest in history. It is a universe of its own, with hundreds of names – Constantinople and Byzantium, “Door to Happiness” or “Second Rome.”

Villagers of KARDESLER : “We want European technology, not Christian hegemony.”

The Father of the Turks

Gabriel Pirický, a Slovak scholar of Oriental and Turkish studies, arrived 20 years ago to a very different Istanbul. After completing degrees in Arabic and Oriental studies in Prague and in Islamic societies and culture in London, he took a half-year course at Istanbul University in 1992. He had just done brief stints as a media analyst and at the then-Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry.

“Czechoslovakia was dividing that winter and I did not want to witness it,” Pirický recalls as we sip the traditionally strong tea at a famous cafe in the Grand Bazaar. It is getting dark, and the merchants are packing up. “Istanbul then was the stench of coal and exhaust from Ikarus buses. But at the same time it was a town full of colors, smells, and brightness, while plain gray ruled in Czechoslovakia. Black marketers, mostly from Poland, exported textile goods from Istanbul – from the worst to the highest quality.”

In contrast to the Arab world, Pirický says, he does not feel like a foreigner in Istanbul. Children did not shout at him in the streets. Istanbul is a typical European city by the sea with a rolling terrain, atypically cold for its southern location – it does not snow in winter, but palm trees no not grow. With its concentration of sights, Istanbul can compete with Rome. At the same time, skyscrapers have grown here and global brands shout at you everywhere.

In its latter days, the Ottoman Empire tried to rebound from decline by steering toward the West, mainly France. Even today, 89 years after he founded the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk  is still called “The Chosen One and the Perfect Father of the Turks.” He turned the modernization efforts into an axis of radical change – and he was deadly serious about it.

Kardesler village in Zonguldak: tea rooms reflected in a portrait of the Father of Turks, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The first secular state in the Muslim world ended the caliphate reign in Istanbul and moved the capital to Ankara. Atatürk ’s reforms came into effect authoritatively, as their “father” had opposed traditional Islam since his childhood; like the Soviet Communists, he considered religion a source of evil. At a grueling pace, he managed to transform all aspects of Turkish life. He forbade men, under threat of death, to wear the fez, the traditional red, conic hat. Headgear of a European cut replaced it. Kemalist ideology abolished religion and religious marriages. Europeanization continued via the introduction of the calendar and a radical emancipation of women. Atatürk  set the example; one of his adoptive daughters became a professor of history, another a military pilot.

At a high-speed rate, the Father of the Turks dissolved the ranks of mystics and modernized everything possible, from the family to the state. But language remained his favorite theme until his death in 1938. He replaced the Arabic alphabet with a form of the Latin and introduced the new Turkish – which the nation, himself included, did not really understand. Atatürk ’s weakness was volubility, as demonstrated by the famous 36-hour speech he gave over the course of several days to the national assembly.

Kemalism, like other types of social engineering, did not take consequences into account. Pirický highlights specific examples of how secularism is applied locally. There is no disestablishment; on the contrary, state institutions control what happens and what is said in mosques, and they approve imams. The sense of another, different Istanbul dawns upon entering the Fatih-Çarşamba quarter, sometimes called Istanbul’s Mecca. People are alert to visitors. Women are wrapped in black from head to toe. Men greet each other in the street not with the traditional Turkish “merhaba” but with the Islamic salutation “salam Alekum.” There is a large network of Koran schools.

The Ismaili Shia sect is considered the most conservative wing of Naqshbandi Sufism in Turkey. Its members are characterized by their “Islami” style of dress, which according to them dates to the time of the prophet Muhammad. Walking in this quarter – which in some ways resembles the Orthodox Jewish Mea Shearim area of Jerusalem – it is impossible not to notice Turkey’s biggest Koran school and its immediate neighborhood. The school is situated near the Ismaili Aga mosque; a few dozen meters away stands a grandiose, 19th-century Greek Orthodox school. The Turkish sociologist Müfit Yüksel sees in this territorial juxtaposition a battle for visual and historical dominance over the quarters of Fatih and Fener; Pirický extends that to the entire city.

“Yüksel points out that by granting permission to build a Koran school in the area, the state indirectly created a counterbalance to the historically significant presence of Greeks,” he says. “ It is a reaction to the historically important Byzantine identity of the region – an Orthodox patriarchy reigns over the Fener quarter, and there is also a Bulgarian church – which manifests who really governs in Istanbul.”

Street life in Istanbul.

Is Half a Century Enough?

A hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire was considered the sick man of Europe. This is changing rapidly. Speaking in Germany in late October, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated flatly that Turkey is only willing to join the EU through 2023 – no later. The reasons for the country’s growing self-esteem are evident. Its economy has grown continually at 6 to 7 percent a year, even through the crisis – numbers Europe, drowning in its problems, can only dream of. Then there are the differences in demographic trends. This is a stumbling block: the Germans and French can only dimly imagine a European Union in which Turkey is the most populous country, with 78 million inhabitants whose average age is 29. But they don’t say that to Turkey.

Ankara became an affiliate member of the European Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor, in 1963 and has been debating with Brussels about full membership since 1987. When Erdogan became prime minister in 2002, he set one clear goal: the safe anchoring of Turkey in the West. But the discussions are dragging on, despite progress in the most criticized aspects of Turkish society, human rights and the standing of national minorities. This naturally has bred feelings of betrayal and disdain. In 2004 73 percent of Turks supported EU entry; last year the figure was a mere 38 percent. Nobody says out loud that they are done with Europe, but in business circles there is talk of orientation toward the East.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), with its Islamic roots, easily won last year’s elections – its third straight victory – with more than half the votes. The aging prime minister, perhaps dreaming that a sultan-like role would suit him better than leading a parliamentary democracy, is thinking about introducing the presidential system. Then, as did Putin and Medvedev in Russia, he would switch seats with current President Abdullah Gül (who does not want to take part in this kind of a chess game). The conservative prime minister has also solidified his power over the one-time state within the state – the army. Generals have tried to overthrow the government before. But after dismissing four top officers and having criminal charges brought against them, Erdogan now chairs the Supreme Military Council, securing his authority.

He is well aware, however, that one thing could threaten the popularity of his APT: an open military conflict with the Assad regime in Syria. He has mobilized, but wants to avoid a battle. There are already hundreds of thousands of refugees on the border, and Turkish villages are being bombarded from the Syrian side.

A carpet shop in Istanbul

A Full-Fledged Candidate but Not a Member

Andrew Finkel was born in Philadelphia, to which his parents emigrated from Europe after escaping Nazism. In 1967, when Andrew was 14, his father’s job with a coffee company took the family to Turkey. Istanbul, with its 1.2 million inhabitants was then a town on the brim of the Balkans, a black curtain between the Orient and the rest of the world.

“I remember there was no bridge over the Bosphorus then, and no toilet paper because they didn’t import it yet,” Finkel says with a laugh as we talk over a cup of Turkish coffee at his home on the Asian side of town. His wife, a well-regarded Scottish historian and a recognized specialist on the Ottoman Empire, has just returned home after an hour of shopping.

Finkel returned to Turkey as an adult in the early ’80s to complete research for his doctorate in history. Turkey was poor, still receiving help from the Marshall Plan. “Istanbul had 5 millions inhabitants; today it is 15 million – it has doubled during each decade of my life. It’s a magnet that generates 40 percent of the Turkish economy,” he says. Istanbul, he adds, is more like a country than a town, and he thinks of it as home. It has more people and a higher GDP than, for example, Hungary.

But the mythic city of his childhood is gone forever. Resembling the old professor from Ingmar Bergman’s movie Wild Strawberries, Finkel has returned to a place he hardly recognizes. “Istanbul is an enemy of history. Everything changes so rapidly here,” he says. Finkel has been writing for major Turkish and foreign media since 1989; he has a column in The New York Times and also contributes to The Economist. He talks mostly about Turkish politics. He points out that Turkey has been, since 1995, a member of Europe’s Customs Union. But Europe is changing significantly, becoming more of a political union – and there, Turkey does not yet belong.

Thanks to its European aspirations, Ankara annually receives 1 billion euros a year in foreign direct investment. “I used to tell a joke in 2000 that Ankara actually did not want to be a full member as it was more convenient to remain a candidate country for EU membership,” Finkel says. “In contrast with Central European countries after 1989, Istanbul is not a returning to a Europe where it already once belonged but is taking on a brand new historic project. But Turkey is too big and too Muslim for the Europeans. Before it was too poor, but this is no longer the case.”

He says that if the EU were to divide into a northern core and a poorer south, Turkey will integrate much more easily – into the latter. “I know Turkish elites for whom the EU remains an inspiring project,” he concludes. “They talk about a guarantee of liberal freedom and prosperity, laughing at the same time that it’s like in that American movie where a character points out that he would never join a club that would have him as a member.”

Carsamba neighbourhood in Istanbul’s District of Faith.

The Breaking Point

Dutch historian Joost Lagendijk was a Green Left member of the European Parliament from 1998 to 2009. He focused on foreign politics, with a close eye on the Balkans, and chaired the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, a group of Turkish lawmakers and MEPs that meets regularly to consider Turkey-Europe relations. Like Andrew Finkel’s, the story of his life is intertwined with Turkey: he married a Turkish journalist in 2006 and since then has lived happily in Istanbul. Lagendijk initially taught at a private university, and now he writes a twice-a-week column Zaman, the biggest Turkish daily with sales of 1 million.

“Turkish EU membership was just a fantastic dream up until 1999, because neither Europe nor Turkey was ready. Then the country needed five years to fulfill the Copenhagen criteria. Erdogan’s government has been working on fulfilling the full list and implementing reforms since 2002. Enthusiasm was in the air; four-fifths of Turks were for the EU. The official talks started in 2005 and since then it’s all gone in the wrong direction,” Lagendijk says. “Europe fell into internal problems. Sarkozy and Merkel firmly stand against Turkey’s EU ambitions.”

Lagendijk clarifies the breaking point, which also arose on the Turkish side. “The Economy was thriving; democracy was getting better. But the suddenly panic washed over and the Turks asked, ‘What is happening? We started accession talks, we are doing everything you required, and you are not interested? No matter what we do, you will not let us in.’ …

“I do not agree with the view that Europe is a Christian club where Muslim Turkey does not belong,” Lagendijk continues. This argument has also emerged in the debate within Turkey, unleashing a back-and-forth between extremes that poisoned mutual ties. “Even those Turks who wanted to join the EU saw how big the resistance was on the other side.” He believes it will take a few years for Europe to acknowledge that it is not a Christian but a secular club. “The same goes here: all are Muslims, but only a quarter of Turks go to the mosque. There is a Turkish wine boom now, so after Ramadan everyone drinks – mostly the middle class. For that, Arabs do not like Turks. They label them ‘Muslim lite.’ ” Lagendijk favors Turkish EU entry, but sees it as being eight to 10 years away, at least.

Istanbul’s downtown resembles any western metropolis.

More Against It Than For It

Zaman regional reporter Abdullah Kalabacak’s little car climbs up a hill. Zonguldak – a city of 100,000 near the Dead Sea, 300 kilometers from Istanbul – recedes in the distance. In Turkey, “Z like Zonguldak” is a common phrase when spelling out words. It’s a remote corner, but, if you want to know what Turks think about the world and the EU outside the cosmopolitan metropolis, easier to reach than the poor village in southeastern Anatolia.

So how is the last letter of the alphabet doing? Because of a new gas pipeline, we have to contend with dug-up roads and detour around a reservoir. A bit further along, the local branch of the ruling AKP built a place designed for sheep sacrifices, but it doesn’t get much credit; Zonguldak and the surrounding area is a bastion of republicans from Kemalist CHP, the oldest party in Turkey. We also pass a hazelnut plantation. Three-quarters of the world’s hazelnut production comes from Turkey. Turkish Airlines, proud to have received, for the second time, the designation of best airline in Europe, offers passengers a handful of hazelnuts before takeoff, instead of candy.

Kalabacak admits that he does not visit these mountains; if he has time, the Black Sea is where he takes his family on holiday. After a 15-minute drive, we get to the village of Kardeşler. What we see is the empty square surrounded by tumbledown buildings and three men smoking near the teahouse. They invite us in. One of them explains that Kardeşler has about 200 inhabitants in the summer, just 40 in winter, when families with children migrate down to Zonguldak, where the closest school is. Reportedly, the average age here is 65 years. Our hosts laughed when I asked when a child was last born here, and when Kardeşler last saw a wedding. “A child was born here on the hill five years ago, and there was a wedding last month.”

The men say they used to go to Germany in the 1960s and ‘70s in search of work. Nowadays young people do not need to hunt after jobs in Europe; they find employment in Turkish towns. When I ask about EU accession, a short silence set in. One of the men, an imam who declined to introduce himself, is the one to speak: “We are for European technologies, as they are beneficial to us. But regarding the cultural and religious differences, we do reject Europe,” he says, before leaving for the mosque and Friday prayers. The other two nod in agreement. If there was a referendum on EU entry, the con arguments would outweigh the pro.

The Limits of Europe

Kalabacak, the Zaman journalist, is a dynamic 33-year-old with a mobile phone in one hand and a police radio in the other, even during dinner. He never seems to have free time; at the moment he is going over a small, fortunately victimless mining accident with a colleague in the newsroom.

“I wanted to teach religion once, but I did not get into the school of religious studies. Military forces dethroned the Erkaban government in a so called postmodern overthrow in 1997, and the number of students of religious studies was quickly slashed,” he says. “Then I completed journalism studies. I have grown to like this profession because it allows me to help some people. A miner once stayed trapped in a mine for four days. His relatives were already preparing his grave, as the mine management was not willing to do anything about it. But I wrote an article about it, the state started to act, and the miner was saved on the fifth day.”

It is mining that determined the character of Zonguldak. It was a minor village in Ottoman times. Even when coal was discovered in 1848, not much changed. It was only after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 that Zonguldak became the country’s most important mining center, with 50,000 workers digging at its peak. But as the Kemalist and proletarian fort started to crumble, Turkey began to import cheaper coal from abroad – later replaced by by gas, also imported. Unhappy miners went on strike in the ‘90s but Ankara balked at their demands. About 10,000 work in the mines today.

Still, Kalabacak thinks the country benefited from Erdogan’s rule. AKP’s control is firm; unlike in the past, there are no battles among coalition partners on the political scene. Kalabacak has not been to Europe yet, but he has ambitions to visit Britain or Germany. Living standards and interpersonal relations in Europe interest him, and way it modernized so much faster than Turkey, emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. “We do not want to adapt to Christianity and your culture,” the journalist says. But to your technologies, yes.”

Andrej Ban is a freelancer reporter and photographer in Bratislava. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, co-financed by the European Union. Transitions is entirely responsible for its content, which does not necessarily reflect the view of the EU.  Translated by Lenka Handzusova.

“We are fighting with the military machinery”

An interview with Abdülhamit Bilici, head of the Cihan News Agency and a columnist for Turkish daily Zaman.

Are you for Turkey’s entry into the EU?

I am still for it. We need political and economic reform, and we still do not have a civil constitution. We’ve achieved a lot in the past 10 years, but in comparison with other democracies, a lot is still missing.

But support for accession among Turks is receding.

Yes, that has been the tendency since 2006. The biggest reason is the conflict in Cyprus – Turkey did what it could to get an agreement, but on the other side Greece is blocking everything. And the outcome? The Greek part [of Cyprus] is in the EU and we are punished. Then the EU blocks eight chapters of the accession talks. People see this and they are disgusted. It is a shock for Erdogan’s government – Turkey sacrificed a lot, and what we reap is rejection by Merkel and Sarkozy. What do they want, a privileged partnership or our full-fledged membership? Our economy, by the way, is in better shape than Europe’s. More than half of Turkey’s foreign trade is with European countries, and 5 million Turks live in the EU.

What are the conditions for journalism in a country that is criticized for imprisoning many journalists?

If you compare today’s standards for discussing taboo issues and freedom of opinion in Turkey with those of 10 years ago, there’s been remarkable progress. Yes, many of those who talked about cultural rights for Kurds are still in prison. But one of the TV channels broadcasts in Kurdish. Turkish media are now able to discuss a topic as sensitive as Kurdish autonomy. The media protects the interests of citizens in a normal democratic country, but unfortunately in Turkey the media are a part of the establishment. We went through five military interventions in the past 60 years and the media played a key anti-democratic role. Some of the imprisoned journalists are connected with terrorists, mostly from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]. The law clearly states that supporting the PKK is a terrorist act. I would say that among the 90 jailed journalists, 75 to 80 are intertwined with the PKK. The other category is journalists who collaborated with the army in preparing am attempt to overthrow the government.

Why?

They played a role in the conflict between the ruling AKP, the civil government, and the military in 2002 and 2003. Some problems with the jailed journalists are not related to the freedom of speech but with the structure of the media – many outlets are owned by businessmen who protect their interests. For example, they write about Erdogan in a very critical way, and he usually asks the publisher why that journalist was set against him. The country is undergoing a battle between the government and the state.

What exactly do you mean?

“The state” means the old, bureaucratic military structures. There was an attempted military overthrow in 2008. Government is a guarantee of democracy and sometimes a victim of the state-like media, so for that reason we support it. But we are critical towards AKP leaders and Erdogan. The Ergenekon case, which was an attempted coup organized by military officials, was investigated in 2011. Our reporters who wrote about it had to face more than 500 accusations as well as intimidation. This is not mentioned in [discussions of] media freedom. Our reporters, as a punishment, were not allowed to observe military operations – they did not get accreditation, although this changed three months ago in connection with Syria. We are fighting with the anti-democratic military machinery.

Talking about taboos healed Turkey

An interview with Silvia Tiryaki, a Slovak native and now a political and civil analyst at Istanbul Kültür University.

What do you do?

I have been lecturing on international law and human rights for 10 years. Before that I was teaching the history of political philosophy. I am a vice chair of the International Relations Department and deputy director of the Global Political Trends Center [at Istanbul Kültür University], which I founded with a colleague.

How did you get to Turkey?

My husband is Turkish. I was married here 13 years ago, when it was easy to get Turkish citizenship. Today it is almost harder than in Slovakia – five years of residence, tests, history, and the national anthem.

Do you know the national anthem?

[Laughs] No.

How has Turkey changed in the time you’ve been here?

A lot. Economic growth is notable in everything. Istanbul had 12 million inhabitants, now it has 17 [million]. Some people are upset that we have skyscrapers going up here, but where I first arrived there were just slums everywhere and an old town for tourists.

How has the society changed?

After AKP came to power in 2002, everybody feared the Iranization of Turkey. About five years ago we had passionate discussions about whether women could attend university wearing a headscarves. Before it was strictly forbidden, even in civil administration. I experienced it during my lectures. Students who believed that it was a sin to show hair wore hats or wigs. I was an advocate of covering the head but not of wearing wigs.

Were they emotional discussions?

On a political level and in the media, yes. The ruling “White Turks” were scared of “Dark Turks.” It is not about the skin color but about the fundamental secularity versus religiosity. Today students’ head can be covered; they do not need to wear wigs or sit at home.

Are there any taboo topics that are still not being discussed?

Not really anymore. The biggest were not headscarves but Kemalism and the Armenian genocide. [Overcoming] those healed Turkish society and brought it back to life. When I came here it was taboo to say anything about Atatürk. It very much reminded me of Leninism, in not being able to voice any criticism. I really had enough of our socialism in Slovakia, but there was another golden bust on a dark red baldachin here. Do you still keep it here? I asked. “Be careful what you say, this is our Ata, our Father,” they replied. Ditto the Armenian tragedy. Now it is a matter of discussion whether it was genocide, but before it was impossible even to mention it. Incredible advancement.

Do you see any valid arguments why Turkey should not be in the EU?

No wise ones. Here there is much greater democratic self-control than in the Balkans. Certainly, I understand Europeans’ fear. Nobody says that Turkey should be a member tomorrow, or in five years.

When, then?

Say, in 10 or 12 years.

Things are quite clear for Franić. 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 Nikolić, 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?“ Franić has no high hopes about the EU accession of his country. „For my generation, it will bring nothing spectacular. However, the elimination of borders will provide new possibilities for the young.“

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.

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 Franić, though. A former colonel in law enforcement, he retired six years ago. Hiis 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), Franić 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 clayfish 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,“ Franić  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.

A monument in remembrance of 260 patients and hospital staff killed by Serb troops at Ovcara farm.

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 Ovčara, 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 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 Ivanković, 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 Ivanković. She adds that the general disgust in politics also increased due to the case of Radimir Čačić, 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 Ivanković.

A war memorial in Vukovar

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 % 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 Živković, 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 Milošević 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 Bogdanović, a former mayor of Belgrade, described the war in Vukovar as „urbicide“, that is, violence against urbanism.

Once a thriving multi-ethnic city with beautiful baroque architecture, Vukovar was completely destroyed in 1991 completely. Today life is returning to the city.

A city of parallel worlds

Croatians and Serbians live together in Vukovar, rather than in separate enclaves. There is, however, one place where Franić, 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 war. It also means the honorable memory of Boris Tadić 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. Nikolić, the current President of Serbia. In May 2012, before the second round of presidential elections took place, Nikolić 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. Željko 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 Týždeň. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, co-funded by the European Union, and originally appeared in Týždeň. Translated by Lubomír Groch.

Even a shower can serve as a reminder that the geothermal energy has a major role in the Reykjavík’s energy supply.  The hot water pouring out of the shower head comes directly from water springs located one or two kilometers beneath the ground, and the dissolved sulfur compounds that smell like rotten eggs are impossible to ignore. In hotels, guests are warned that, although the water is potable, one should leave the tap running for a while so as to fully enjoy it as the top quality potable water in the world.

Geothermal energy is used almost everywhere in Iceland. The country itself is an island about the size of Hungary that has a population of 320,000 which lies at the junction of the European and North American tectonic plates.

A water reservoir in Reykjavík

The waste heat produced in the country is used to warm its 740,000 square meters long public road. Out of this surface, 550,000 square meters of road are in Reykjavík, and another 40,000 square meters are the heated downtown pavements located in the Icelandic capital. Orkuveita Reykjavíkur (OR), the energy supply company serving the capital and its surroundings, circulates 75 million cubic meters of water through its 2,700 kilometer long pipe system that has a maximum capacity exceeding 20,000 cubic meters per hour. By law, it also has to pump the water back into the ground. Massive containers able to hold 20 million liters of hot water during winter were built in Perlan, in the southern part of Reykjavík, where a Viking museum and a winter garden attract many visitors all year round.

While water springs at a temperature of around 100 Celsius degrees feed the hot water and heating pipelines, the water with a temperature of over 200 Celsius degrees is also used to generate electricity. The newest power plant built at Hellisheid with an investment of 800 million USD operates at an electric power-generating capacity of 300 megawatts, while its thermal capacity is at around 150 megawatts.

The Blue Lagoon spa complex situated halfway between the Keflavík international airport and Reykjavík is the most efficient example of how versatile water use can be. The Svartseng power plant produces electricity by using the steam of water heated by lava, and the cooling water is run through heat exchangers which also heat the neighboring settlements. The cooled water has a temperature of 37 to 39 Celsius degrees, is rich in minerals and it is used to flood the 5,000 square meters large outdoor lagoon visited yearly by 500,000 people.

Hot springs in Iceland

So far, the geothermal energy seems inexhaustible. However, the Icelandic authorities regularly warn people that they should save their resources. “We have designed energy prices that prevent waste”, said Eiríkur Hjalmarsson, a press officer of OR. He explained that the massive development of geothermal energy in Iceland started after the oil shock of the 1970s. Since the mid-nineties, no oil or gas is used for heating in a country that is geologically the youngest on Earth: half of the island emerged from the sea less than one million years ago.

The debate about the surplus energy derived from the renewable resources is ongoing. Hydroelectric power plants produce 12,000 gigawatt hours, and the geothermal power stations generate 5,000 gigawatt hours. “One possibility is to build underground cables that would export the additional energy. Similar plans are designed for Oslo: the preparations to build a 750 kilometer long high voltage cable between Norway and Great Britain have started. But more and more people believe that the domestic industry in Iceland should be further developed instead, which would enable us to use the electricity with a greater added value” – said Hjalmarsson.

One of Iceland’s geysers.

While Iceland is the leading country in the world for geothermal energy consumption per capita, 15,000 gigawatt hours per year of this energy is produced by the United States, an amount that constitutes only 0.3 percent of the electricity produced in this country. Native Americans considered hot water springs sacred places before the arrival of the white colonizers, and members of rival tribes would even have baths next to each other despite their differences. There are 77 geothermal power plants in operation in the USA, the largest ones being located in California. The second worldwide producer is the rapidly developing Philippines, where 17 percent of the total energy comes from underground hot water springs. The first geothermal power station in the Philippines was built in 1977. Since then, new ones have been built at a fast rate, while the older ones have been increasing their capacities.

In Europe,Italy takes the lead in this respect. The first geothermal power generator, which later became a power plant, was built in Larderello in Northern Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its energy could initially light less than four light bulbs, but nowadays it generates 10 percent of the world’s geothermal energy, or 4,800 gigawatt hours, which supply a million of Italian households with electricity. The Larderello power plant uses hot springs as its source. The springs, which were also known by the ancient Romans, were seen as such an innovative source of energy that a second plant of this kind was built half a century later in Wairakei, New Zealand.

András Németh is a reporter for HVG. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, co-funded by the European Union, and originally appeared in the daily newspaper HVG. Translated by Borbála Tóth. Photos by András Németh

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.

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 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.

András Németh is a reporter for HVG. This article was produced for the Next in Line project co-funded by the European Union, and originally appeared in the daily newspaper HVG. Photos by András Németh.

“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-square-metre 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 a kreppa in Poland when communism collapsed, hyperinflation followed and from one day to the next people lost all their money. My husband worked at a ball-bearing 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.Szabłowski,

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 249^th place in the world, according to the Forbes Ranking (Jan Kulczyk, the richest Pole, was recently in 463^rd 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 start-ups 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 sister-in-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 Łódź 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 Bałuty district in Łódź. 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 million-dollar business, and the grandson squandered the lot and went belly up.

We’ve done exactly the same with our country.

Witold Szabłowskiis a reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza. This articlewas produced for the Next in Line project, co-funded by the European Union, and originally published in Gazeta Wyborcza. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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.

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-year-old 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 Albanian-speaking 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 lean-tos 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.

“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. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, which is co-funded by the European Union. 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.

At 23:59 CET, the submission section to our citizen journalism competition will be shut down, and winners will be announced by the end of the month.  Please check out the Prizes page for more details of what our winners will receive, and take a look at our contest rules before submitting.

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The full video

Mihailo Jovovic

“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.

Journalists and residents of Podgorica protest a series of attacks on journalists in March, after Vijesti reporter Olivera Lakic was beaten. The banner, bordered with the names of victims, asks, Who is Next?

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.

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 state-controlled media against Vijestibecause 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 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 Vijestisports 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.”

Barbara Frye is TOL’s managing editor. This article was produced for the Next in Line project, which is co-funded by the European Union. 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.