McCracken Archives

From Minefield to Wheat Fields

2011-09-27T02:06:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I walk Remi on a path just outside of Kittsee, on the Austria/Slovak border. A few of these signs are posted, which in Slovak read: "WARNING state border." I'm assuming they're left over from the Soviets, since they warn rather than welcome. I'm told the fields here were riddled with mines about 30 years ago, but now hold apricot orchards, and farmers tend crops of corn and wheat.

Wall Street Journal/Austrian Finger Wrestling article

2009-03-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Here is my Wall Street Journal article on fingerwrestling, which appeared in early March

Christiania, Some 40 Years On

2009-03-03T03:18:00.000-08:00

My article last month in the Christian Science Monitor on Christiania, the commune in Copenhagen.

A Newspaper is Born

2008-12-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Last year (October 2007) I was called in as a consultant for the start up of a new English-language daily in Saigon.
In a special local edition for the Lunar New Year a few months later, I was asked by the editor to write about my experience working on the new venture.

It was published in Vietnamese, but here it is in its original English:

January 2008
Copyright Patti McCracken

Inside the cupboard was a half empty box of Choco Pies, chocolate drink mix, cheese-flavored crackers, loose tea bags along with two or three tea-stained glasses, some type of freeze-dried noodles and a rolled-up sleeping mat that I didn't know was there.

Outside the cupboard was a breed of bedlam known only to newsrooms. A mass of untidy papers and wordbooks stacked like piles of poorly-laid bricks, trash cans bloated with empty takeout cartons, journalists shouting commands at each other, a pacing managing editor; and in the midst of it all was Xuan Anh, whom I would come to call my Wunderkind.

A few weeks earlier, I'd stepped off the plane in Saigon and was greeted by two grateful editors who had summoned me from Austria to help them launch a new English-language daily. Thanh Nien publishes a successful weekly magazine, daily newspaper and online journal, so its street cred was already well-established. But the launch of this English newspaper had snuck up on the staff in a hurry. So they hastily cleared a room and fitted it with computers and networks, printers were hooked up, office furniture was hauled in, and a pack of young and mostly untrained newshounds stood at the ready. By the time I arrived, we had 10 days to figure out the rest.

This is my job. I dart and skip across the continents as a journalism trainer, working with reporters who need a leg up to catch up in a world that has been less than fair. I bounce around in economy class, sleep in saggy beds, stay away from the drinking water, eat questionable food, argue with the cleaning ladies, get disgusted with taxi drivers, watch dubbed tv, get lonely for home, and let insomnia finally give way to sleep amid the creaks and strains of a foreign city that has expanded to include me. And every now and then, I'm a witness to kinship celebrating itself in the guise of a would-be stranger. This is my life.

He stood in the back of the empty newsroom on the morning I arrived, waiting for me to approach so he could introduce himself. "I'm Xuan Anh," he said, extending his hand, his syllables blunted by the Vietnamese influence on his English. "Call me Anh."

I learned that he had studied in Ireland for a year, was new to journalism, and had a habit of flexing his fingers back and rubbing his palms on his trouser legs when nervous or happy. He sat and walked and stood as straight as an arrow, his dress shoes tap-tapping on the floor as he raced around. He was eager and efficient and earnest. I would later learn that he was equal parts strong will and soft heart, but for now, it was his eagerness which moved me.

Anh and I were to work together on the design and structure of the newspaper; giving it an identity and a strong forum in which to showcase the articles.

On that first evening, managing editor (Mr.) Thinh walked me over to a calendar that hung on the back wall and circled two dates. The first one was only seven days away.

"This is when we need to have all the pages at the printing house."

"And this," he said, pointing to the second date, less than a week and a half away, "is when we go live with the first issue."

I told him it was impossible. There was no way we could design a newspaper from the ground up, train designers, organize a newsroom hierarchy, structure a copy flow and coach journalists on how to report and write for an English readership in a week's time, with an already understaffed and overstressed newsroom.

"We must," Thinh said, and walked back to his desk, leaving me standing at the calendar. He had many things to do, and little time for disbelief.

So we set to work. While Anh and I toiled at designing the logo, the icons, the column widths, the fonts, the point sizes, the frame sizes,... the rest of the novice design staff huddled in close around the two of us, soaking up information piecemeal, then scuttling back to their computers to come up with additional ideas on their own.

Our working days were stretching into the wee hours, and I was getting bone-tired. My insomnia ramped up, so sleep didn't come until well after the sun came up.
It wasn't long before I overslept, and one of the designers was sent over to the hotel on her motorbike so she could jar me awake and haul me back into the newsroom.

The days were disappearing, our energy dissolving. The editor-in-chief, who also oversaw the other news operations, had lost his voice along with his ability to focus for very long, even with a steady stream of coffee and his beloved cigarillos at hand. He hadn't slept in more than three days.

Section editors were tapped out, fried, re-reading the same sentences over and over again because exhaustion allowed them to do nothing else, except skip like a record needle. There was no life outside the newsroom; no newborns to cuddle, no miscarriages to grieve, no sick parents to comfort. Not this week, not now.

I was averaging three hours of sleep a night back at the hotel, always awakened by an overzealous cleaning crew, if not a journalist on a motorbike and a mission.

But Anh never left. He was fixed there. As were a few others, I later learned. He told me he slept there, rolling out the little mat he kept stored in the cupboard. He told me it was too far to go home, and anyway, he didn't want to wake his relatives.

Doctors will say that the pain is the worst, the most intolerable, just before the fever breaks. Marathon runners say the final two miles are horrifically unbearable.
Two nights before the launch Thinh leaned back in his chair, defeated. "We're not going to make it," he said. The doctor telling the patient's family the grim prognosis.

Launch day was as long and grueling as all of the others, and I felt guilty for slipping out and seeking sleep. Anh had also had trouble staying awake the last few days, and from time to time would place some white noise headphones over his ears (to drown out the shouting journalists), drop his forehead to the desk, and rest himself for 10 minutes or so.

But somehow the page count was dropping. Steadily, each page closed. No major glitches.

As the printing house received the final page of the first edition of Thanh Nien daily in English, those still left in the newsroom erupted in applause. And the endearing Vietnamese smiles emerged, broad and unabashed. There was backslapping and handshaking and relief masked as laughter. The fever had broken, we'd crossed the finish line. We made it.

We celebrated that night, late as it was. We planted ourselves at an outdoor restaurant and drank beer and talked about Hanoi and Thinh's new baby; we talked about boyfriends and girlfriends and who has them and who doesn't; we talked about parents and hometowns, and every now and then we stopped to congratulate ourselves. I watched Anh and the others with their newfound family. And I remember thinking I wasn't so lonely for home just then.

After leaving the restaurant, we stopped at the paper to pick up a copy of the first issue, which was already back from the printer. I was headed to my hotel, and Thinh was going home to his wife and newborn. But Anh and the others were staying on at the newspaper. They would make their way back up to the newsroom, open the cupboards that held all the teas and crackers and mats. After some chatter and exhausted, giddy laughter, sleep would come.

And we would do it all again the next day.

Vietnam Traffic Madness

2008-10-01T09:23:00.001-07:00

You can find my article on riding motorbikes in Vietnam in the Christian Science Monitor today.

Austrian Wine Taverns

2008-08-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

For the August edition of the Brussels inflight, I wrote about the Heurige tradition in Austria.

Pedaling Along....

2008-06-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to my latest article for the Brussels in-flight magazine on cycling through Austria, with a WHOLE LOT about Hainburg snuck in!

Coming in from the Cold (War)

2008-03-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a piece on "Ostalgia" that I wrote for a Brussels in-flight magazine.

2008-01-09T13:48:00.002-08:00

Austrians and Sex

2008-01-09T13:48:00.001-08:00

Here's my latest article, written for The Smart Set

Cleansing the Past in Omarska

2007-12-11T01:21:00.000-08:00

www.thiseurope.com

By Patti McCracken

It is an unexceptional and most ordinary place.
There used to be a ceramics factory nearby, and not far from the factory was a shuttered iron ore mine called Omarska, once the biggest producer in all of Europe.
Back in the 1980s, Omarska churned out three million tons of iron a year and its large complex of buildings laid out amidst the ramshackle beauty of this westernmost part of Bosnia was the largest on the continent.
So we already have the ceramics factory and the ore mine. Now let us add to that the school in a neighbouring village, where the workers from the factory and the mine once sent their children. This completes the cluster of buildings that became, in the early days of the Bosnian War, the site of some of the most heinous war crimes to be carried out in the recorded history of Europe.
It is stunning then to note that three years ago, this mine was purchased by steel giant ArcelorMittal. The world's largest steel company bought a former concentration camp and – despite repeated promises – has quietly resumed iron ore mining without erecting a memorial to the lives lost, or bodies and minds tortured.
The concentration camps opened in May 1992 and were shut in August of the same year, when two British reporters - one toting a TV camera - happened upon the living skeletons held captive there. Those that had not yet died by that time were transferred to a prison camp at another location until December of the same year.
Survivors groups gathered in late summer to honour their own on the 15th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. While there, they held funerals for 140 more bodies that have been recently found and identified.
Of the three sites, the Omarska camp was the most monstrous, having been upended by a volcanic wickedness that transformed it from the most prolific iron mine to the most horrific torture facility. And it happened so swiftly that only the darkest of nights and darkest of souls could conspire together to make it happen.
And now Omarska has become a money-making venture between the Republic of Srpska - the Serb-controlled entity within Bosnia - and ArcelorMittal. In fact, it is the largest act of privatization since the war.
In 2006, the Financial Times named Mittal its Man of the Year. And in May of this year, Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People. Mittal is Britain's richest man - net worth $25 billion in 2005 - and has a 51 percent controlling interest in the mine, leaving 49 percent to the Republic of Srpska. Newspaper reports go easy on Mittal, stating it was unclear if he knew he was buying a former concentration camp when he bought the Omarska mine.
Yet, to date, and despite efforts by survivor groups, there is not a single plaque or sign in Omarska to note the horrors that happened during those early days of the war, and a head-strong congress of deniers will say the torture didn't happen. There were no concentration camps here, my friend. There were no radical Serb nationalists who detained, viciously tortured, and killed their ethnically Muslim and Croat neighbors.
Stay on the bus, don't get off here, there is nothing to see.
They would be right, in one sense: there is nothing to see. The rapes, the starvation, the beatings, and the sadistic sexual mutilations that resulted in mass death have been buried by a collective will; buried and ignored like the some 1,700 bodies in the mass grave that is believed by many to lie beneath Omarska. In fact, there is a strong chance the machines from the mine were used to put them there.
It is an Olympian leap to imagine Mittal was unaware of the atrocities when he bought the mine, given the international coverage of the camps. But he knows now. He has met with survivor groups - such as the Dutch-based Optimisti organization - agreeing to keep at least one area of the mine, known as the "White House," as a museum. Yet his promises during the last three years have been so far postponed and frozen, and as yet unfulfilled. In October, ArcelorMittal made yet another promise to the survivors to finally proceed.
No one in the steel company's London office, or its offices in The Netherlands and Luxembourg, returned phone calls or answered emails regarding ArcelorMittal's unfulfilled agreements with survivor groups.
Some of the 60 or so guards at the concentration camp had worked at Omarska when it was in operation as a mine before the war. Having signed an agreement with the Republika Srpska to give priority employment to Serbs, what is the possibility that at least some of his current workers on the payroll put those bodies there?
The Serbs have put up some memorial plaques - honouring Serbs who died elsewhere in Bosnia during the war. There is not a single commemoration or acknowledgment of the thousands of Muslims and Croat Bosnians that were victimized and murdered by those they used to call their neighbors and their friends.
The school is in use again, too, and the end of the academic year has been moved up by city officials - from late June to May 24 - the same date in 1992 the school building was opened as a concentration camp for Muslims and Croats. Even the region's town fair, which was traditionally held in the middle of May, was moved to April 30, the date the Serbs "liberated" the town.
Because of the barbarity of the acts that now define Omarska, a separate war crimes trial was held at the Hague, in which four men were convicted. One ringleader, Milan Kovacevic had, after the war, already confessed during a brandy-filled afternoon with the British reporter who discovered the camp, making comparisons of his misdeeds to Auschwitz. Kovacevic died unexpectedly in prison before the trial started.
When the trial was over, the judges reported this: "Extreme brutality was systematic ... dead bodies were left to fester for days at a time and a terrible stench and fear pervaded the camp....a regular stream of murders, torture and other forms of physical and mental violence ... unbearable conditions appear to have driven the detainees insane ... the corpses were so numerous, they covered some 50 or 70 metres."
The survivor groups are not asking that the mine close, despite the nature of who is profiting from this tainted land; they are requesting that their suffering be acknowledged. It really is that simple.
Man of the year, world's most influential: Please step up.

Sweet Georgia

2007-11-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

The Guardian
By Patti McCracken
November 8, 2007

The coat check near the front desk had been a gun check not so long ago, where businessmen deposited their machine guns and pistols before heading back to their rooms. The metal detector nearby had been disabled, but still stood upright and ready for duty. The hotel, newish but built in the Soviet style, was - simply by default - a little office centre of sorts for foreigners, since there were scant resources available in the city, including working fax machines.

The world outside had not yet filtered into Georgia, and there was little way to access it once inside the country. But in a small room down the corridor from the hotel reception, international newspapers could be printed out off the Communist-era teletext machines. And that's why I was there - for those precious newspapers.

It was still dark outside when I arrived breathless at the Sheraton, having left my apartment at 4.30 in the morning to flag down a tumbledown taxi with a broken windscreen, a partially broken steering column and questionable brakes.

I had flown into Tbilisi two days earlier for a two-month stay, and my luggage was somewhere else, as were all the materials for the journalism workshop I was set to run, come daylight. The Sheraton and its teletext newspapers were my only shot - there were no international papers sold anywhere in the city, and I was about to face a room full of journalists who wanted to see them.

This was six years ago and the Republic of Georgia was a derelict affair. No running water in the evenings, sporadic electricity, and no gas to provide heat in winter for sometimes weeks at a time. No public services, such as mail delivery, telephone directories, or emergency call centres. No traffic lights, no road repairs. Crumbling facades and decrepit infrastructures. No cops except for the corrupt ones, no jobs except for the connected ones, no medical care except for the elite ones, no end in sight for the two embittered conflict zones, Abkhazia and Ossetia, and no hope for change.

One afternoon I joined my Georgian journalism students to listen to a guest lecturer from the United States. He had been a civil servant, now retired, and stood before them to speak of the great changes he saw in store for their country - proof being the new Marriott under construction downtown.

Nino shot up out of her chair to defy him. Nino was shy, but inestimably strong-minded, and she demanded to know from him just what, exactly, was going so well in her country. She spewed a laundry list of ills, including a 40% unemployment rate, rampant corruption, poverty, and unresolved warring factions in the breakaway republics, of which she was a victim.

Nino, a refugee from Abkhazia, had lived for years with her family in one room of a condemned high-rise tenement. She was furious. His lecture was patronising in its optimism. Her outrage was echoed by her classmates.

But a leg up from the west finally did offer a chance for Georgia to become a junior member of the team. The US government started the ball rolling by sending 150 military experts to whip Georgia's ragtag squad of would-be soldiers - none of whom had uniforms or were paid - into an army. And western investment, in the form of a pipeline pumping oil from Azerbaijan, started to flow into the country. But corruption kept most investors at bay. Everything stagnated.

The Orange revolution in Ukraine taught the people of Georgia that change was possible in the former Soviet republics. ‘Enough is enough,’ cried Georgians in 2002, who took to the streets 100,000-strong to topple crusty, corrupt Eduard Shevardnadze and his posse of politicians. The Rose revolution was born.

Georgia has a history of larger-than-life leaders - Stalin among them - and it reveres tough guys in the top office. So the election of the
US-educated, Russia-hating former lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili as president appeared to give Georgian voters everything they had ever dreamed of.

"I think traditionally, largely because of our Soviet past. Georgians tend to see a president not like Americans or European nations, do, but as a leader who should be worshipped," says Christy, one of my former students who is now a high-level journalist in Tbilisi.

I was back in Georgia after the Rose Revolution, and clearly progress had been made. Electricity was uninterrupted in Tbilisi, roads were paved, traffic lights installed, newer cars were gradually replacing the aged, ramshackle Ladas, facades were being repaired, and businesses were multiplying. And there seemed to be hope.

I had watched the transformation of eastern Europe during the late 1990s, and was relieved to see it finally take hold in neglected, worn-out Georgia, which had generally fared worse than its western neighbours under Soviet rule and had an even steeper climb out of the rubble.

But just four years after the Rose revolution, Georgia has staged an about-face on Saakashvili. The man they elected as a firebrand has slowly morphed into an autocrat and the people have unexpectedly, noisily, risen up once again to give voice to their anger about shady goings-on in high office.

The list of grievances is long, but at the top is the suspicious exit from the country of the former foreign defence minister, allegations of high-level cronyism and corruption and the absence of news about future elections – a poll is supposed to take place in Autumn 2008 but Saakashvili has refused to name a date

So Georgians have taken to the streets again, with over 50,000 protesting against the government on Nov. 3. On Tuesday, the rallies started to turn ugly, with police firing water cannons and tear gas on overnight protesters – over 500 of who were hospitalised.

Meanwhile, Saakashvili remains resolute. He will not concede on any issue and will not step down. On Wednesday night he issued a 15-day state of emergency that includes a clampdown on the independent media and a ban on rallies.

"It's scary," says Christy. "I really could not have imagined things would turn out like this just a couple of years after the revolution."

The plans, such as they are, for what's next are grandiose, unmapped and impractical. Some opposition leaders are rumoured to be scheming to storm parliament, while others are speculating that an entirely new form of government should be inaugurated, although no one can agree on what kind.

If Saakashvili is ousted - and let's hope whatever happens next is as peaceful as possible - who will replace him is a big unknown. If Georgia sticks to its penchant for larger-than-life leaders, then controversial billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, the country's richest man, is said to be preparing to jump into the hot seat.

Whoever emerges victorious from the power struggle is in for a rough ride. Bullied by a Russia it has spurned but with little chance of joining the EU or NATO, Georgia is set to remain in Europe’s limbo land for the foreseeable future.

Beleaguered Algeria

2007-09-12T04:24:00.000-07:00

The Guardian
September 11, 2007

By Patti McCracken

She collected my right hand in hers and held it fast all the way to the mosque. We darted along between parked cars, first on this side of the road, then that, around the front of this person and the back of another. Jasmin was like an impatient and harried mother, and I was the kid stumbling over myself to keep up, and trying to understand the urgency tinged with fear that sprinkled her palm with sweat.

I didn't know then that she had put herself in danger to accommodate me.

I was in Algiers for four months working as a journalism trainer with Jasmin's newspaper, and had asked her to take me to a mosque. I arrived in the newsroom that Friday to prepare. Scarf in hand, I was met by Jasmin and her fellow women reporters, who flitted around me, fitting my headscarf with pins taken from their own; stepping back, from time to time, to appreciate their handiwork.

It was the first time I'd ever been to a mosque, and once inside, Jasmin relaxed. We were in what appeared to be a converted storage room, with a high wall separating the women from the men and, of course, the imam. At Jasmin's urging, I snuck a peak over the wall before I left, at the brilliant blue and white tiles that overlaid the walls and floor of the magnificent prayer room.

Back out on the street, Jasmin's angst returned, this time heightened, stemming from the men mingling at the front of the mosque. "They won't like you being here," she said, her clouds of worry engulfing us both.

The unofficial safety instructions were pretty clear when we arrived in Algiers last year, if scant. Women should avoid going out after dark without a man, daily routines should be altered, and never, under any circumstance, should we get into a taxi.

Algeria is struggling to emerge from more than 15 years of bloodshed. In the early 1990s, an Islamic extremist party was poised to win an election when the military postponed the second round of voting. This spawned an angry, aggressive and all-out horrific campaign of terror that lasted some six years and claimed the lives of about 200,000 Algerians.

Since 2000, when now-ailing president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was all but placed into office by the military (and then more officially elected in 2004), the terrorism has been significantly curbed. And the city of Algiers itself has stood strong, having experienced, until recently, no real threat for years.

It is well-fortified city. During my first few weeks in Algiers, I stayed at the famed hotel St George, which employed policemen with AK-47s on 24-hour watch. On an evening out at the theatre with locals, we encountered nearly as many policemen as citizens out strolling about.

Yet the terrorism began creeping back. While I was there, an extremist group announced a happy marriage with al-Qaida and the honeymoon soon began. A bus carrying US government contractors was machine-gunned and bombed on the outskirts of the city. A police station was bombed and smaller devices went off close to the downtown press centre, near a hospital.

In April, two bombs were detonated inside the capital, including a suicide bomber who blew up 25 people outside the prime minister's office (injuring around 200), officially bringing terrorism back to this north African nation.

Originally formed in the late 1990s from the civil conflict, the terrorist group now calls itself al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

Despite the increase in attacks, most of my Algiers colleagues still felt secure, certain the strikes would wane after the May legislative elections. But the only thing certain is the cynicism that comes with generations of war, and with 200,000 citizens dead at the hands of so-called neighbours, co-workers, bakers, shopkeepers and businessmen.

Each workday morning, my interpreter and I would meet early to review some of the newspapers. Nadir would move swiftly through each article, translating headlines, scanning articles and giving me summaries of the contents. Just days after the attacks targeting foreign workers, he found something that concerned both of us. "This one here quotes a warning to Algerians not to be seen with Americans," Nadir said, "or we risk becoming collateral damage."

I remembered Jasmin's grip on my hand.

But Islamic Maghreb has decided not to limit their attacks to foreigners, or to pre-election mayhem. Last week they struck twice: first in Batna (about 200 miles from Algiers), where a suicide bomber blew himself up among a group gathered to see President Boutiflika. Twenty were killed in that bombing.

And in another deadly blast this Saturday, a suicide bomb struck a coastguard barracks, killing 30 in a town about 60 miles from the capital.

Last night I contacted a colleague still in Algiers, to find out how everyone was doing. She said nothing has changed, except they are making plans to move to a more secure apartment.

When the bombings started again last spring, I got an email from the editor of Jasmin's newspaper. "Don't worry more than necessary," he wrote, "I mean everyone here has a lot of experience with these events. All is 'normal' now."

Far Out on the Right

2007-09-06T01:11:00.000-07:00

The Guardian
Sept. 5, 2007
By Patti McCracken

Istvan Csurka is perhaps the most outlandish man in Hungary, or at least in Hungarian politics. As the leader of the far, far, far right MIEP party, he is so anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-roma, anti-capitalism, anti-American, anti-Russian, anti-anything western, anything Eastern, that the only word for him is neo-nazi, which, by the way, does not insult him.

So, by comparison, the far, far right Jobbik party, is not necessarily considered fascist, even though its members carry the Nazi-era Hungarian flag, and the party recently inaugurated its own militia.

In a ceremony at Hungary's prized Buda castle, the Magyar Guard was sworn in as about 1,000 supporters looked on, including members of the clergy. The new paramilitary group claims it will "defend Hungary physically, morally and spiritually".

The merely far right party, the Fidesz, moved slowly to separate itself from the Jobbik party's latest shock stunt. A few days after the militia induction ceremony, Fidesz vice-chairman Zoltan Pokorni asked members to keep their distance from Jobbik: "What was happening under the name of the guard was bad, bad for the country, and bad for the people."

The Fidesz party is the only right wing party with any muscle to speak of. It is the primary opposition party, after prime minister Gyurcsany's Socialist Party ousted it from power in 2002.

Jobbik placed itself at the forefront of last autumn's riots against Gyurcsany, who tumbled from grace when he was caught on tape admitting he had lied to the Hungarian people about the state of the economy.

Thousands upon thousands of people turned up to protest during those dark days for the Socialists, but those waving around and wrapping themselves in the Nazi-era flag - and believed to be instigators of the violence - were taking their cues from the likes of Jobbik.

The Jobbik party is generally thought of as being in the same camp as Austria's Freedom Party. But unpopular. It garnered less than 1% of the vote and has no seat in parliament ("Jobbik" is a play on words, meaning "better than others"), yet its strength is in the towns and villages, where a message of solidarity and national pride are a comfort during what has turned out to be a bruising vault toward capitalism and economic stability.

Gyurcsany's critics suggest he is exaggerating the role of the Jobbik party, casting it as a "bogie man" to deflect attention from his lame duck tenure. But Gyurcsany and the Socialists did not create a fringe-right paramilitary group to protect the morality of the country, as Jobbik said it will.

Hungarian politics has been battling intolerance from all parties. In addition to the extreme right groups and the conservative Fidesz opposition party, even the Socialists voted against citizenship rights for Hungarians living outside the country's current borders (at the close of the second world war, Hungary was carved up by the Allies, leaving the bulk of its countrymen living outside the newly-rawn parameters).

And not even the liberal party is off the hook, considered by many to be anti-Arab.

Yet no other party has created a militia and hoisted the Nazi-era flag in a claim of patriotism. Gyurcsany sent a letter to Hungary's chief prosecutor, asking him to pay special attention to the Jobbik's actions. Maybe this is to move the spotlight away from his own political problems. Or maybe it is to keep a watchful eye on a nationalistic fringe party stirring up trouble.

All in the Family

2007-08-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

Families In Business Magazine
August 2007

By Patti McCracken

It was a stunning and bold concept. To bring together under one roof every piece of metal, every pane of glass, every engine part, every last bit of the undercarriage, and every detail of the interior, right on down to the cushions; and then use hundreds of individuals to assemble the pieces into automobiles on one snaky, layered line. It was a demonstration of breathtaking efficiency.
Henry Ford paid his workers handsomely for their work on the assembly line, enough so they could afford their own cars after they rolled out of production. High pay equaled high profits, or so went the theory of Fordism.
But the mass production and muscly labor unions which defined the 20th Century have proven too inflexible and rigid for the far-reaching twenty first; so American Fordism has taken a back seat, and China and India are driving the new model of Capitalism.
The emergence of Chindia is forcing American companies to redefine the way in which big business operates.
"The family-owned businesses--along with all businesses-- are being affected dramatically," said Stephen Hochberg, CEO of Mage, a business consulting firm specializing in private companies.
"Many businesses now find that their customers have moved to China with their operations, which pushes them to start up actual operations in China. Or they find that their customers are traveling there to create direct sourcing arrangements," says Hochberg.

San Francisco-based Bechtel, which was founded around the time of Henry Ford, has been at the forefront of the move toward China and beyond. "For global projects we have to draw more and more on global resources to remain agile and competitive," says Bechtel's Jonathan Marshall. "The aluminum smelter we are building in Iceland was designed in Montreal and New Delhi, uses steel from China, purchased its casting pots in Bahrain and got most of its labor from Poland because of the very small Icelandic population."

While China and other emerging markets are favored locations for plant facilities, India's strength is in back room services: IT resources, call centers, engineering strategies.
The pull toward India is still primarily from smaller and medium size businesses, according to Hochberg, although that may not be for long. "The expectation is that as the business community becomes more educated, the business landscape within the US will experience major change."

India's economy grew 9.4 percent in 2006, the fastest in nearly 20 years. China's economy grew even faster, at a rate of 10.7 percent.

Stavis Seafoods,Inc., based in Boston, has been relying on imports for about 40 years, starting with Canada in the late 1960s and Taiwan in the 70s. It now imports from China. "In the last 10 years, China really has exploded," says CEO Rich Stavis.

Stavis lauds the Chinese factories his seafood firm uses, saying they are better equipped and better staffed.
"There are some smaller filets, like parch, which have small bones. If they are processed in Canada, the bones are left in, but if they're processed in China, they pull them out, because they have more people working in the plant."

Another benefit Stavis sees is better physical plants. "Because they've come relatively late to the dance, they have state of the art facilities. This is much better than some that are 20 or 30 years old," says Stavis. " They can make a very high quality product."

Some would disagree, including the US government, which last month banned the import of some seafood from China, declaring the products unsafe for consumers, and forcing Chinese officials to crack down on factories.

Stavis is quick to respond. "We've been proactive in our imported products. We are buying from reputable vendors and have visited a vast majority of the plants that pack our brands."

Carefully choosing partners in China is key, as Stavis has found, as is devoting time and effort into training them, and fostering relationships.

Steel company TWMetals works closely with its international customers to help stay competitive abroad, concentrating on their specific, local needs, and cooperating with them.
"Our customers want us to be a bigger part of their business and manage portions of their global supply chains," says Bob Mraz, Director of Sales and Marketing. "We identified opportunities early on and deployed in-country teams to assess how best to serve the customer." TWMetals is a subsidiary of O'Neal Steel, a Birmingham, Ala. based corporation. O'Neal's profits jumped from 800 million in 2004, to 1.3 billion the following year, in part because of success abroad.

Capital expenditures by US companies is set to fall dramatically, from 51 percent last year to 45 percent in 2007. This is normally a harbinger of bad news, causing profits to plunge. But economists say that a factor in the decrease is the trend by US and European firms to work out of facilities in developing countries, such as China and Eastern Europe, where it's cheaper.

In turn, the relative economic growth in these regions means more opportunities to do business.

Bechtel has already taken advantage of the improving economy in some of these regions. It is a diversified company, able to compete in several sectors, including energy, power, telecommunications, mining, and in the case of its project in Romania, civil infrastructure. Bechtel is building a highway there.

"Rising standards of living increase demand for the kinds of infrastructure we build, and make our business less dependent on the United States market," says Marshall.

Chindia is fast becoming an economic superpower, which has many in the US fearful. But analysts are quick to point out that the rise of these emerging markets can be beneficial to American firms.
Here is why:
For US firms, the manufacturing sector has shifted East, but in its place has been born the innovation sector.
More importantly, the economic base of second and third world countries, including post-communist regions, is rapidly rising. India's new middle class has reached 300 million people, larger than the entire US population.
With the rise of the middle class in India--heretofore nonexistent-an entirely new market of 300 million consumers is opening up to US companies.

Successful corporations tend to see Chindia, not as a threat to profits, but as an opportunity for growth.
"We are located in both [India and China] and our business is growing exponentially. Many American companies are opening in these countries and want to keep the benefit of material aggregation, quality and exceptional service for their global vendors," says Mraz. "Globalization is the cornerstone of our strategy."

Bechtel also views Chindia as positive, not a negative.
"We've worked on major projects in both China and India--we don't lump them together--and we have established engineering offices in each, as a sign of our commitment to them," says Marshall.

India and China provide many companies with a chance to do what they could not otherwise afford to do domestically. This expansion does not always entail cutting domestic job and and shipping them overseas, but it means expanding services instead, and at a reduced cost.

But, as in the case of the banned goods from China into the US, it pays to be vigilant about finding quality partners abroad.

"We're not necessarily getting the cheapest product at the cheapest price," says Stavis. "We need to get the premium quality for our customer."

A Life Out of the Newsroom--and Into the News

2007-05-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
Christian Science Monitor

VIENNA
On a wickedly cold Chicago day eight years ago, I walked to work, made my way through the newsroom cubicles, entered my editor's office, gave her three weeks' notice, and then sat down at my desk.

I had stunned myself.

Less than two years before, I'd moved 1,000 miles to take this job as an assistant editor, and suddenly I was about to move several thousand miles more to get away from it.

Getting that Chicago job was the opportunity I had, for so long, envisioned for myself. The sudden offer to go there, and the money that came with it, seemed to be the "law of attraction" that had come into my life and set itself up as a constitution.

But the same quickened energy that propelled me to Chicago stirred up later to propel me out. My editor showed personal behaviors that were bullying and deceitful. My boyfriend appeared full of angst and pain that I simply could not will away. My resplendent downtown loft was quietly poisoning me with a gas leak that took the life of my joyful dog. And for a final bruising, my landlord's divorce-minded wife was forging my signature on documents, trying her own deceitful means to take my home away from me.

In this typhoon of grief and confusion, I allowed violent forces to slam my life shut and propel me onward. It was time to go.

But where? And how?

Years before, I had taken a leave of absence to be a journalism trainer in Eastern Europe, working alongside local reporters in ramshackle newsrooms, trying to help them help themselves. It was that vivid experience, an awakening to the world around me, that I wanted to hold again.

So I quit my job; quit my cool, downtown loft apartment; quit my cool boyfriend; sold my car; put my furniture in storage; hugged my friends; packed a duffel bag as tight and as full as I could; and moved to Europe with little money and fewer job prospects.

Since then I have wandered through and worked in 20 countries across Europe, Asia, and North Africa, acquiring, along the way, a London Black Cab in England; a Jack Russell terrier in Tbilisi, Georgia; and a home within myself that I cannot explain.

I have walked out of the newsroom and into the news. I am sometimes afraid, overwhelmed, overtired, thrilled, lonely, amazed, inspired, and sometimes a very long way from the familiar. But my days are no longer instantly filed and stored into memory, sorted by years and milestones. Instead, the events in my life are worn like a cloak wrapped around me, the deepening layers swaying with me as I move. The layers are vast and varied, marked by a flirting with lives alien to my own.

I have drunk fermented milk from Kyrgyzstan, eaten congealed fat in Hungary, and witnessed a man stuff every available inch of a Romanian Dacia car with grapes (for homemade wine).

I have seen hillside villages on fire because of civil unrest in Macedonia, been threatened by the Russian mafia in Moldova, and been moved to tears and nightmares by the sadness that calls itself Bosnia. I have been accused of being a Communist by a Croatian taxi driver, screamed at by a Russian veterinarian, and bitten on the arm by a 13-year-old Slovak boy. I have been secreted into a mosque by an Algerian, transported at midnight to a Sarajevo hospital by a hotelier, and comforted on a bus by an elderly Serbian man on Sept. 11.

I have shared an overnight train compartment with a Bosnian soccer team and held my hands over my ears as drunken, lederhosened Germans crooned their way through three countries.

I have had my heart shredded into little pieces by orphaned babies in the Republic of Georgia, and that same heart healed by a hero who doggedly, obsessively, champions their cause.

In Vietnam, I have learned that a man really can transport a six-foot bookcase on the back of a motorbike, that a photo of Ho Chi Minh on the desk never hurts in Hanoi, and that the kindness and warmth of the Vietnamese does a heart good.

And I have learned to take toilet paper with me wherever I go.

I have exchanged the night life of big American cities for sipping tea with babushkas in Eastern European villages.

I have learned, I hope, that words are sometimes no more than weighted obstacles, and that an unspoken language of shared feelings and experiences is as close as I'll ever come to truth.

Ambling along in a train bound for I don't care where, I still feel the same sense of liberation that I get when I have fallen in love. Holding hands and who knows where it will all go. But isn't it lovely? And please don't let it stop. Propel me onward.

• Patti McCracken is a syndicated columnist and freelance journalist based near Vienna. She works as a journalism trainer throughout the developing world.

A Long Way From Home and Lovin' It

2007-05-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
Spotlight Magazine
May 2007

It was a blue Chevy, and it was the autumn after the summer of love, and they were four girls on an American road trip, far from home, about to walk into a dark and broody bar somewhere in Colorado.
It was intimidating, this bar full of locals craning their necks to see who were the new kids in town swinging through the saloon doors. But the girls warmed the place with their youth, and warmed hearts with their colt-like use of English and their exotic accents.
It wasn't more than a matter of minutes before some of the locals asked these European madchens to attend their Native American ceremonial dance, and decades later the gesture is still tenderly recalled by one of the erstwhile travelers.
"We started a conversation, saying 'we are from Europe,' and the next thing we know we're being invited to this big celebration," says Elisabeth Speiser.
"It was really impressive [at the ceremony] to see these youngsters with these large feathers [headdress] dancing in a circle. It was something to see. And I think the Indians were touched that foreigners had come and were interested in their own way of life."
Speiser, an Austrian, and her three German friends put a whopping 25,000 kilometers on that blue Chevy in 1968, crisscrossing America, and skimming across into Canada and down into Mexico, too. A dizzying pace, considering it was done in a month. They started in New York, and zoomed along to the famed but now faded Route 66, visited Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and as many places as they could pack into such a short trip.
"That was a great experience," says Speiser. "The people were very friendly. And very helpful.
It was the first step out of my country.... and it is still the greatest time in my life."
Speiser is now an investigations specialist for Raiffeisenbank in Vienna, but when she came to New York as a 20-year-old au pair, she was just a small town girl from Tyrol. "I arrived at JFK [airport] and knew how to say 'yes' and 'no' but that was about it."
She learned English during her year and a half in America, and later spent some time working in South Africa. She has continued to travel back and visit America with her family, having been to at least 47 of the 50 states.
Since Speiser's days of ricocheting across the continent in a Chevy, on the pennies she saved working as a nanny, opportunities for Germans who want to work abroad have blossomed.
Websites such as monsters.com post a variety of work opportunities for foreigners. A South African site, jobs.co.za, reports that it currently has 250,000 CVs in its database.
South Africa is suffering a brain drain, so there is a lot of full time work for educated professionals.
"For the past 10 years, the main draw has been for people with engineering skills, whether it be IT, business engineering, or basic mechanical and electrical engineering," says Tertia Calitz, managing director of jobs.co.za.
On the other hand, in countries such as the United States, which has a plethora of white collar workers, but lacks skilled laborers, companies tend to look for temporary employees when considering foreign applicants. Seasonal workers, like farmhands or campsite helpers, are in demand, but the problem of working abroad under these circumstances can be one of logistics. Since green cards are not issued for such work, and visas are temporary, the guest worker must periodically return to their home country to comply with government regulations--not easy or cheap when the home country is several thousand miles and an ocean away.
So for those who are happy with just a short-term gig, spending a summer working as a bartender or groundskeeper might be the way to go. Or do as Speiser did, and sign on as an eau pair.
But if a career of globetrotting strikes a chord, then there are companies and organizations that fit the bill.
Every couple of years the Wirtschaftskammer Oesterreich has an intensive training program in Vienna, in which Austrian university graduates under the age of 28 can participate. There are only 10 spots available for more than 100 applicants, so competition is tough, but for those who succeed, a lifetime of travel is secured.
"Basically, our job is to be like little international gypsies going around the world," says Dr. Gustav Gressel, Regional Manager for North America and Latin America at the Wirtschaftskammer.
Gressel's terms abroad are from 5-7 years. His first international assignment was in New York, followed by Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, back to the US (Houston, TX), a relatively brief stop back in Vienna, and then off to Brussels. He's preparing for his next move, which will be to Thailand, and will come sometime this summer.
"If I had it to do again, I'd probably do it all over again," says Gressel.
"You have to be prepared to learn all your life. A different country means a different background, so you have to adapt every time." says Gressel. "That's the challenge, but that's also the fun of it."
But for every international gypsy happily ambling around the planet, there is a grousing spouse or kids following behind. Or, at least, potentially.
"The only negative thing is the hardship on the family. The partner has to come with and start everything from scratch," says Gressel. "And my children all react differently. I have three kids. One is angry and says she feels rootless. Another is thrilled and thanks me, and the third is in the middle." Note: if you feel this quote emphasizes the age of both of the sources with internat'l experience, it might be best to leave it out.
Gressell credits openmindedness with a successful work experience abroad, and that goes hand-in-hand with cultural sensitivity.
The Germany-USA Career Center in Massachusetts places native German speakers with firms in the USA, and is very clear about what it looks for in successful candidates.
“[you are often hired because] you are a native German speaker and you are fluent in English. But even more important will be your ability to cooperate and communicate in a highly diverse, multicultural environment, compared to what you are used to," writes Rob Delton in a recent email. Delton is Director of Career Services at Germany-USA Career Center in Massachusetts, and as in the case of jobs.co.za, Delton's firm also has a high interest in recruiting Germans with technical or engineering backgrounds.
"If you're just starting out, the best way to go would be to get an internship or an academic exchange program," says Delton. "But at any stage of the career we want experience that tells us that this person is open to new or different perspectives."
Calitz of jobs.co.za in South Africa agrees. "Workers just have to get used to the kind of people here. The culture is more diverse and it's a question of mutual respect."
Speiser piled 25,000 kilometers onto that old Chevy, but what she gained in personal experience is immeasurable.
She still keeps in contact with her New York 'family' and with her American Road Trip girls. She has developed a philosophy of life that she credits with her days as a naive au pair, showing up on the doorstep of New York with little English and a lot of hope.
"Changing and learning. That's pretty much what life is."

For Many Algerians, New Violence Feels Tragically "Normal"

2007-04-27T01:38:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
www.worldpoliticswatch.com

They are forgettable doors, windowless and pale, unfit for a city with as grand a constitution as Algiers, battered though it is.

Sometimes a peephole is centered in the middle like a cyclops, maybe harboring a burly man winking behind it, but the doors are otherwise faceless, as intended.
They are dotted all over the city, faithfully guarding secrets, and Nadir used to constantly point them out to me when we were out walking.

"See that door?" he'd say, and my eyes would scan for a door. "That's a bar. During the terrorism the extremists liked to bomb bars, so they had to be kept hidden, and the guy would only let in someone he knew."

Nadir would repeat the commentary every time we passed a bar door, assuming I would be fascinated, as maybe some other foreigner he encountered had been. But it only made me sad.

In the early 1990s, an Islamic extremist party was poised to win an election when the military postponed the second round of voting. This spawned an angry, aggressive and all out horrific campaign of terror that lasted some six years and claimed the lives of about 200,000 Algerian citizens.

Nadir's brother was one of them. "I'd been working [as an interpreter] for the UN [in Algiers] when my mother called and told me to come home immediately" he said. "I didn't find out what it was all about until I got there."

His brother was killed by a bomb, he said; his best friend's throat was slit while on a bus at what turned out to be a fake checkpoint. Recounting this, Nadir puffs on his black market cigarette, betraying no emotion.

Since 2000, when now-ailing president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was all but placed into office by the military--and then more officially elected in 2004--the terrorism has curbed significantly. And Algiers itself has stood strong, having experienced no real threat for years.

But last week two bombs were detonated inside the capital, including a suicide bomber who blew up 25 people outside the prime minister's office (injuring around 200), officially bringing terrorism back to this North African nation.

I was in Algiers between October and February working as a journalism consultant for a newspaper, which is where I met Nadir, my interpreter.

One evening I stood alone outside the newspaper building, Nadir and some of the other journalists quick to catch up with me. It was time for them to ask what I thought of Algeria, and they had followed me out there to get the score.

I had already been there a few weeks, so platitudes were discarded, words uncloaked. There is a menace on the streets, I told them, that I hadn't recalled feeling before. And I said I was baffled by communication: I often felt led with both hands down the wrong path. The conversational equivalent of fun house mirrors.

The editor-in-chief explained to me why. "During the terrorism, we had no idea who to trust. This wasn't a real war with real sides. You never knew who the bad guys were, so you learned to say what you thought you should say."

"And we learned to read body language extremely well," added Nadir. "That's how we communicate now instead."

From Europe, the inbound flight into the capital swings across the tip of the Bay of Algiers and glides farther over the city, which stands awash in a chalky white mass of French colonial structures. The plane then sweeps around to bring the full Bay into view, in all of its magnificence.

This city and this nation is as dramatic as its coastline, and its history as tragic as the hearts that behold it.

It is a country that was mostly assembled by occupiers--Romans, Arabs, Turks and then the French, who held onto it for more than 130 years, finally releasing the nation back to its own in 1962, after a hard-fought, decade-long war.

The city has survived, although wears its scars as open wounds. The cafe lifestyle imported by the French was banned during the years of terrorism for safety reasons, and because people rarely trusted each other to sit and have a coffee together.

The Casbah, the older, wiser cousin of an Old Town, is dilapidated and crime-ridden, and foreigners only enter with a guard.

Algeria has been more stable in recent years. But in certain pockets of the country, bombs are still routinely used in the absence of guns to wipe out opponents or threats; traversing the country overland is reckless, at best; and Westerners taking taxis (especially alone) is simply not done.

Standing there outside the paper, as the sun eased its way out of the sky, I asked the handful of reporters if anyone had friends or relatives killed by the terrorists, as Nadir had. All said they had.

But seven years into relative peace, with a fledgling but promising economy, they seemed to feel the worst was behind them.

Yet during the three and a half months I was there, activity began to increase. The extremist group had recently announced a happy marriage with Al Qaeda, and the honeymoon soon began. A bus carrying United States government contractors was machine-gunned and bombed on the outskirts of the city. A police station was bombed, small bombs went off close to the downtown press center, near a hospital.

When the publisher--whose spouse was killed in an act of terrorism 10 years prior--discovered I had donned a hijab and visited a mosque with a local female journalist, a finger was sharply wagged in my face. "You cannot go there, Patricia. It is too dangerous for you and too dangerous for me."

As the publisher retreated back behind an office door, I remained in the corridor, taken aback, the two editors with me also silenced and discomfited by the stern warning. After a short pause, I told one of the editors that I liked to window shop in the mornings. Is that okay? Probably, he said. Except you should alternate your days and times, and never go to the same shop twice.

Despite the increase in attacks last fall, most of my Algiers colleagues still felt somewhat secure, certain the strikes would wane after the May elections. But the only thing certain is the cynicism that comes with generations of war, and with 200,000 citizens dead at the hands of so-called neighbors, coworkers, bakers, shopkeepers, businessmen.

And last week's horrific attack made that clear. As the editor-in-chief wrote me in an email two days later: "Don't worry more than necessary. I mean, everyone here has a lot of experience with these events. All is 'normal' now."

On Being Virginian

2007-04-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
Spotlight Magazine
April 2007

"I'm a Virginian. Virginians are the most conceited people on earth. There's nothing higher you can aspire to." Lady Nancy Astor

"I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you." William Faulkner

The kodachrome has clouded with age, the vivid yellow of my mother's bathing suit refashioned into a soft and muted tone, and the sharp whites of the boat now paled and blended into a once blue sky. But as the custodian of my young yesterdays, this kodachrome has done its primary job of locking in on my mother as a 30-something woman who wears a chic bathing suit and perches her youngest child, her sixth child, upon her hip. The two of us are next to the captain's wheel on Uncle Walter's boat; she holding me, smiling placidly and expertly into the camera, me in my little blue dress, squinting my eyes at the bright sun, unsmiling.
Uncle Walter had a stately home on meadow green land that rolled right down into the Chesapeake Bay, where he docked his boat just to the left of his boathouse. Up the hill was stationed an old tree that held on its branch a yards-long swing, upon which I would stand, knees knocking, hands sweating, heart slamming furiously against the inside of my chest wall as I swung high above the hill, above the boathouse, ready for flight into a bay which seemed to hurry by beneath me, until the swing withdrew and lowered over the grass again.
That old wooden swing is as definitive of my Virginia summers as iced tea sipped on front porches, sand-speckled suntan lotion lathered on, a salty ocean, goober peas (peanuts) eaten from huge burlap sacks, the shade of weeping willows, sweet corn sold from roadside stalls, and bushels of crabs (caught during grand outings on Uncle Walter's boat) dumped live into a porcelain bathtub, soon to be steamed and eaten.
This is the kodachrome of my Virginia youth, yet still unfaded.
The Virginia that colored my childhood was as vivid as the Virginia that vaulted from our elementary school history books, or that beckoned us from the highway with innumerable signposts glorifying battles or heros (both actual and otherwise).
When we studied history as schoolchildren, we were taught about our state in elaborate and dramatic detail, teachers arranging impromptu re-enactments of the first colonial settlement at Roanoke inside the classrooms, desks pushed against the walls to create more room in the "fort." All other history was learned by default or by proxy, since everyone knew that any history of any significance was rooted in Virginia.
What other kid would name their doll Pocahontas, as my sister did, than a Virginia kid? A few years ago, another sister convinced her own five kids to dress up as pilgrims and Indians for Thanksgiving--the very first of which, incidentally, took place in Virginia. The kids wizened up the next year, nixing the bonnets, three-cornered hats and feathered headdresses, but what other family would have done that even once, except a Virginia family?
In that classroom fort, some nine-year-old boy played the part of Sir Walter Raleigh, an Englishman credited with creating the first settlement in the New World. It was on Roanoke Island that Raleigh pitched his camp, in a land that became known as Virginia, (named for Queen Elizabeth I, the "virgin queen"), and which, at one point, consumed most of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, from the southern tip of South Carolina, to the northernmost point of Maine. (Roanoke Island is now part of North Carolina).
Sir Walter Raleigh is as big in Virginia history as is George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, two original native sons. We knew Raleigh as a pre-founding father, a brave explorer, a Virginian even, like ourselves, whose British past was something less than noteworthy.
Raleigh sailed to the New World in the 16th Century, using mostly his own money, hoping to profit from gold that was reported to be abundant along the coast. It turned out to be "Fool's Gold," just fistfulls of pyrite that still blanket that part of the coast.
A second group of colonists followed Raleigh's first team, still determined to reap substantial reward. This group of about 100 people attempted to settle decades before the establishment of Jamestown (considered the first official colony), and before anyone back in England realized the brutal and bare bones existence that would ensue.
In a mystery that remains unsolved more than four hundred years later, the colony that followed Raleigh's vanished within a year. Raleigh conducted a search, and teams of archeologists have searched since, and no one has answered the question of what happened to these people, this lost colony. Several theories are floated, one of which is that the colonists "went native," migrating into the Appalachian mountain range and joining a local tribe. Some experts believe they are the people known today as "melungeons"--often considered a pejorative-- a pseudo- ethnic group residing in the mountains, whose skin tone is darker than that of their Caucasian neighbors, but who bear English surnames.

The first time I remember taking a family trip was to drive about 50 minutes to Manteo, N.C., just across the Virginia border, to see the play "The Lost Colony," staged in an ampitheater by a host of local amateur actors. I was five. Some twenty-odd years later, my sister took her British husband to see the play, still an annual production, and he wept with mirth as the actors glided in and out of their faked British accents.
The original "first family trip"---one taken before I was born, ---was a drive to Jamestown, where my two eldest brothers donned Captain John Smith hats and ran with fake Indian spears around the re-created fort.
Jamestown Settlement was established by Captain John Smith, after 18 earlier attempts at settlement by colonists had failed. But again, conditions were harsh, and archeologists now believe that during the early years, known now as the "starvation years," the region experienced the worst drought it had known in 700 years. Bad relations with the Indians made matters worse. More than half of the settlers died in the first year, and manic letters home to England demonstrated that madness, most likely caused by malnutrition and dissentery, was rampant.
But after a few years, some successful tobacco crops were planted, meaning goods could be shipped back to England; and the inclusion by marriage into the colony of local Indian princess Pocahontas meant better relations with the natives. And later on, continental Europeans began to arrive, including German craftsmen along the likes of glassmakers and carpenters. Things began to prosper.
The Jamestown National Historic site has matured nicely, and is now part of the National Park Service. This spring, Jamestown will host a visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, in honor of Jamestown's 400th anniversary: the beginning of America.
Just a stone's throw away is the famed city of Williamsburg, the former capital of the nation and home to America's first university, the esteemed College of William and Mary. Colonial Williamsburg is a portion of the city marked off for tourists, where streets are filled with faux yet stylish millenary shops, apothecaries, and blacksmiths, and where shopkeepers and craftspeople are dressed in colonial-style garb.
Farther on up the road from Jamestown and Williamsburg, and further into the tangled and darker narrative of the South, lies the city of Richmond. It is the state capital, and during the Civil War served as the capital of the Confederacy.
Along with other southern states, Virginia ceded from the United States over the issue of slavery, but not before a division within its own state, a part of which broke off and stayed with "the union", becoming the state of West Virginia.
To be Virginian is to be baptized into a legacy of not only the birth of a nation, but to be awash in the struggle that nearly shattered it.
Virginia was pro-slavery, full of antebellum homes and plantations built and sustained by the hard labor of Africans brought over in the slave trade. Virginia was in the heart of the rebellion, and as a matter of tradition, still honors as heros what most of America views as traitors.
One of the main thoroughfares through Richmond is Monument Avenue, decorated with statues of what can only be described as treasonous Americans (they did, after all, cede from the nation)--such as Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, the military leader of the Confederacy. All monuments allegedly face North, as if in defiance of what many Virginians still call the "War of Northern Aggression."
In parts of Virginia, Robert E. Lee still ranks higher than even George Washington, as he represents a steely pride.
There is a legend about Lee that circulates through some of the state, one that places him after the war, after his defeat, after slaves were freed, after Virginia and the rest of the South was reunited with the country it sought to disband. Lee is seated in church, surrounded by an all-white congregation, when an emancipated slave walks in (a place he was heretofore forbidden to enter), walks past the rows of white people, walks up to the altar to receive Communion, and kneels to pray. After a few moments General Lee cracks the stunned silence of the white parishioners by rising from his seat and shuffling to the altar, where he joins the black man; a man he fought hard to keep bound in chains. The two foes stay alone at the altar, kneeling together in prayer.

The famous sons all Virginians flaunt are the eight presidents it has delivered--more than any other state.
It's worth noting that the only book Thomas Jefferson ever felt moved to write was about his home state ("Notes on Virginia"). Jefferson's home Monticello is exquisite. He designed it, as well as the campus of the elite University of Virginia in Charlottesville (toward the Blue Ridge Mountains), a college he founded.
George Washington's home in Northern Virginia is Mount Vernon, just a few miles beyond Old Town, Alexandria, a charming, revolutionary war-era town center on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
A few years back I was helping my friend Tim look for an apartment in Old Town. We came upon a one-bedroom carriage house, in which we had to constantly duck to keep from hitting our heads on the beamed ceilings. The place was tiny and impractical and he fell in love with it. Only later did he find out that it was built by George Washington's ferryman. He then loved it even more, despite the bumps on his forehead when he forgot to duck.

We have a proverb in America: You bloom where you were planted. One of my brothers now lives in Memphis, and he tells me that he knows he's crossed into Virginia when the hickory gives way to pine.
I know I'm home when I can taste the salt of the ocean in the air.
Before I left the US to live in Europe, I swung back home from Chicago for one last breath of Virginia. On my last night, I tucked a sleeping bag into my car and drove to 76th Street, the north end of Virginia Beach, and where my childhood had been played out in technicolor. Where my sister had taken my small hand into her small hand and gently brought me past the breaking shoreline, day after day, until I was old enough to go it alone. Where the waves arced above our heads before gloriously crashing down, or bringing us gleefully back to shore. Where the sand was golden. Where thunderstorms rolled in like freight trains, making us squeal and run for cover. Where I was planted.
I rolled out the sleeping bag and got inside, cradling myself to get warm and shuddering with the thrill and fear of being alone with the mighty ocean at night. I awoke just before dawn to a softer rhythm of the waves lapping at the shore. Oh, Virginia.

Welcome to the Stalin Museum

2007-03-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
Published: Virginian Pilot

The keychain costs about 50 cents. It comes in a little plastic bag with
a staple through the middle, and is sometimes given away free to
visiting foreigners.
On one side of the keychain is a thumbnail size photo, a scratchy black
and white of the revolutionary when he was in his early 20s.
On the flip side of this cheap souvenir is an image of the same man
about 30 years later, no longer a revolutionary, but a despot who
commanded one of the most heinous reigns of terror in the history of
mankind.

Welcome to the Stalin Museum.
Actual facts are of little consequence here, much as they were when the
museum opened in 1937, when Stalin was still very busy arranging mass
murders and ethnic cleansings, the tremendous scale of which are still
being felt half a century after his death.
Josef Stalin is a hero to many here in his hometown of Gori, Georgia,
and most certainly in the halls of this museum--a local boy done good.
He is the man who put Russia on the map and transformed it into a mighty
superpower, the man who liberated Europe from the Nazis and saved it
from Fascism. He is the good son, the poet, the brave freedom fighter,
the diplomat, and even the genius inventor. And in these hallways of
praise, he is Ghandi, DaVinci, Galileo, Martin Luther King and the Dalai
Lama all rolled into one.
He is, as many Georgians like to say, "the great son of the Georgian
nation."
The feeling was never mutual, the great son holding such contempt for
his countrymen that he dismissively referred to his homeland as "that
small area of Russia, which calls itself Georgia."
This sad city of Gori is everything that is wrong with Georgia today,
and what is wrong with Georgia today is rooted in Stalin. It is
wreckage, hopelessness, alcoholism, vandalism, poverty, joblessness,
paranoia, violence, pollution, grime, neglect, despair. But what drives
Georgia's misguided reverence of their fallen hero is the same force
that drove Stalin to become the monster he was: a massive inferiority
complex. To those who feel small, infamy is equal to fame, and without
Stalin, this little country is just "that small area.......which calls
itself Georgia." A nobody.
He didn't hate himself, but he hated who he was, Josef Jugashvili from
Georgia, a poor cobbler's son. He was born in the one room, ramshackle
house that sits adjacent to the museum. In America it would be known as
a humble log cabin, Lincolnesque.
A garish, marble, parthenon-style structure has been erected around
Stalin's boyhood home, incongruously dwarfing the tiny house. It hugs
the house tightly, squeezing out whatever charm the tiny house may have
once had, mocking its small size; but Stalin was apparently quite
pleased with the structure built to honor him, proudly comparing it to
the one constructed over the stable in which Jesus was born.
Stalin was born in Gori, but his mother sent him off to the seminary in
Tbilisi to become a priest. He became a bank robber instead, an
insurgent who stole money for "the cause," and would end up being carted
off to jail or hauled to Siberia for his contributions to the Bolshevik
Revolution. He was the worker bee--the one who handed out leaflets and
helped organize worker strikes.
He tried out several names during this period, but what truly shed his
skin of Georgia, a land which was an unwilling colony of Russia, was his
decision to name himself Stalin, a Russian word meaning "man of steel."
He didn't hate himself for his weaknesses, he hated others for their
strengths. After wrestling power away from influential intellectual
revolutionaries, which he was not, he eventually had them killed and
essentially named himself supreme leader: or rather, transformed the
once mid-level, clerical post of General Secretary into one of two most
powerful positions in the world.
The museum guide does not mention this. She also fails to mention the
multiple millions of displaced citizens--entire republics ethnically
cleansed, purportedly for the greater good of Russia. Nor do we learn
about the millions of citizens Stalin had murdered-estimates of the
number killed go as high as 50 million by some scholars, but most agree
he is responsible for the violent deaths of somewhere around 20 million
of his own countrymen. In his rush to industrialize the USSR and
overhaul the agricultural structure--a process known as
collectivation--the most successful farmers were executed (they were
considered counter-revolutionaries), and those that resisted the
government takeover of their property met the same fate (also
counter-revolutionaries).
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," Stalin
is famous for saying, proving himself to be made of steel.
The museum is without electricity or proper plumbing, as is much of
Georgia today, so the halls are lit by a flashlight or someone's
lighter, and are cold and drafty some days. The chill is appropriate,
lending itself to the image of what the world has come to understand
Stalin to truly be: a monster.
But the evidence is not here. Instead, visitors see photos of Stalin
with world leaders , family snapshots of him with his wife and children,
and propaganda about how he nearly single-handedly fought off the
invading Germans and regained Europe's freedom in World War II.
Visitors are not told that the photos have been airbrushed to place
Stalin with the world leaders, that his wife and son committed suicide
and his daughter sought political asylum in the United States, and that
Stalin's refusal to listen to advisors' stern warnings about Hitler's
impending invasion, and his subsequent mismanagement of the war cost
millions of innocent lives.
There are photos of the victories, people celebrating in the street at
the war's end, but no photos of the millions killed by Stalin in his 30
years of terror, no photos of the displaces citizens, no photos of the
intellectual revolutionaries he so despised, including his archrival
Trotsky,exiled to Mexico and later assinated by Stalin's men (they used
an ice pick(.
And no photos of Georgia before the wreckage of Stalin's reign, when
she was a nation of poets, with traditions steeped in an ancient
language and a mythology that still influences the world; no photos of
when she was a bustling trade center, proudly part of the famed Silk
Road.
In Kruschev's famous "Secret Speech," in which he forthrightly
addressed the Communist Congress about Stalin's murderous mentality, he
calls him "an absolutely insufferable character....everywhere and in
everything he saw "enemies," "two-facers" and "spies."
In this museum, the Red Room is the last room visitors see. It is
mostly empty, dramatizing the effect of the single item in the room, the
death mask, which is positioned in the very center and encased in a
large block of glass.
The excessive size of the empty room, the moody red walls, the thick
block of glass, all make Stalin's face look so diminutive, so small. In
here he looks like a nobody.

Link

Travellin' Prayer

2007-03-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
Copyright Spotlight Magazine
May 2007

It was a blue Chevy, and it was the autumn after the summer of love, and they were four girls on an American road trip, far from home, about to walk into a dark and broody bar somewhere in Colorado.
It was intimidating, this bar full of locals craning their necks to see who were the new kids in town swinging through the saloon doors. But the girls warmed the place with their youth, and warmed hearts with their colt-like use of English and their exotic accents.
It wasn't more than a matter of minutes before some of the locals asked these European madchens to attend their Native American ceremonial dance, and decades later the gesture is still tenderly recalled by one of the erstwhile travelers.
"We started a conversation, saying 'we are from Europe,' and the next thing we know we're being invited to this big celebration," says Elisabeth Speiser.
"It was really impressive [at the ceremony] to see these youngsters with these large feathers [headdress] dancing in a circle. It was something to see. And I think the Indians were touched that foreigners had come and were interested in their own way of life."
Speiser, an Austrian, and her three German friends put a whopping 25,000 kilometers on that blue Chevy in 1968, crisscrossing America, and skimming across into Canada and down into Mexico, too. A dizzying pace, considering it was done in a month.
They started in New York, and zoomed along to the famed but now faded Route 66, visited Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and as many places as they could pack into such a short trip.
"That was a great experience," says Speiser. "The people were very friendly. And very helpful.
It was the first step out of my country.... and it is still the greatest time in my life."
Speiser is now an investigations specialist for Raiffeisenbank in Vienna, but when she came to New York as a 20-year-old au pair, she was just a small town girl from Tyrol. "I arrived at JFK [airport] and knew how to say 'yes' and 'no' but that was about it."
She learned English during her year and a half in America, and later spent some time working in South Africa. She has continued to travel back and visit America with her family, having been to at least 47 of the 50 states.
Since Speiser's days of ricocheting across the continent in a Chevy on the pennies she saved working as a nanny, opportunities for Germans who want to work abroad have blossomed.
Websites such as monsters.com post a variety of work opportunities for foreigners.
And a South African site, jobs.co.za, reports that it currently has 250,000 CVs in its database. South Africa is suffering a brain drain, so there is a lot of full time work for educated professionals.
"For the past 10 years, the main draw has been for people with engineering skills, whether it be IT, business engineering, or basic mechanical and electrical engineering," says Tertia Calitz, managing director of jobs.co.za.
On the other hand, in countries such as the United States, which has a plethora of white collar workers, but lacks skilled laborers, companies tend to look for temporary employees when considering foreign applicants. Seasonal workers, like farmhands or campsite helpers, are in demand, but the problem of working abroad under these circumstances can be one of logistics. Since green cards are not issued for such work, and visas are temporary, the guest worker must periodically return to their home country to comply with government regulations--not easy or cheap when the home country is several thousand miles and an ocean away.
So for those who are content with just a short-term gig, spending a summer working as a bartender or groundskeeper might be the way to go. Or do as Speiser did, and sign on as an au pair.
But if a career of globetrotting strikes a chord, then there are companies and organizations that fit the bill.
Every couple of years the Wirtschaftskammer Oesterreich has an intensive training program in Vienna, in which Austrian university graduates under the age of 28 can participate. There are only 10 spots available for more than 100 applicants, so competition is tough, but for those who succeed, a lifetime of travel is secured.
"Basically, our job is to be like little international gypsies going around the world," says Dr. Gustav Gressel, Regional Manager for North America and Latin America at the Wirtschaftskammer.
Gressel's terms abroad are from 5-7 years. His first international assignment was in New York, followed by Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, back to the US (Houston, TX), a relatively brief stop back in Vienna, and then off to Brussels. He's preparing for his next move, which will be to Thailand, and will come sometime this summer.
"If I had it to do again, I'd probably do it all over again," says Gressel.
"You have to be prepared to learn all your life. A different country means a different background, so you have to adapt every time." says Gressel. "That's the challenge, but that's also the fun of it."
But for every international gypsy happily ambling around the planet, there is a grousing spouse or kids following behind. Or, at least, potentially.
"The only negative thing is the hardship on the family. The partner has to come with and start everything from scratch," says Gressel.
Note: if you feel this next quote emphasizes the age of both of the sources with internat'l experience, it might be best to leave it out. "And my children all react differently. I have three kids. One is angry and says she feels rootless. Another is thrilled and thanks me, and the third is in the middle."
Gressell credits openmindedness with a successful work experience abroad, and that goes hand-in-hand with cultural sensitivity.
The Germany-USA Career Center in Massachusetts places native German speakers with firms in the USA, and is very clear about what it looks for in successful candidates.
“[you are often hired because] you are a native German speaker and you are fluent in English. But even more important will be your ability to cooperate and communicate in a highly diverse, multicultural environment, compared to what you are used to," writes Rob Delton in a recent email. Delton is Director of Career Services at Germany-USA Career Center in Massachusetts, and as in the case of jobs.co.za, Delton's firm also has a high interest in recruiting Germans with technical or engineering backgrounds.
"If you're just starting out, the best way to go would be to get an internship or an academic exchange program," says Delton. "But at any stage of the career we want experience that tells us that this person is open to new or different perspectives."
Calitz of jobs.co.za in South Africa agrees. "Workers just have to get used to the kind of people here. The culture is more diverse and it's a question of mutual respect."
Speiser piled 25,000 kilometers onto that old Chevy, but what she gained in personal experience is incalculable.
She still keeps in contact with her New York 'family' and with her American Road Trip girls.
She has developed a philosophy of life that she credits with her days as a naive au pair, showing up on the doorstep of New York with little English and a lot of hope.
"Changing and learning. That's pretty much what life is."

Lydia's Life

2007-03-07T05:51:00.000-08:00

This was supposed to run in the Chicago Tribune, but it hasn't yet.
--Patti McCracken

She is an old woman now, but she remembers the day her father was taken.
It was the middle of the summer; they had both come back from working in the fields, she says, and she was inside doing housework while he was out in the yard.
Someone from the mayor's office appeared and told her father to come with him, and Lydia never saw her father again.
"I think he knew he was in danger," she says, "because he was trying to teach me everything about the farm, as if he was in a hurry for me to know."
To speed up the "russification" of the Soviet Union states--in this case, the small country of Moldova situated near Ukraine--Stalin turned force labor into an industry, one which played a central role in the Soviet economy. Whether it be the gulag (a vast network of nearly 500 camps throughout the USSR, each containing thousands of prisons) or deportation to colonize the bitter, hostile terrain of Siberia--every non-Communist was at risk.
And successful farmers were especially at risk, considered to be counter-revolutionaries because their notable business skills did not fall into Stalin's concept of collectivization.
Lydia's father was a successful farmer.
Stalin required quotas to be met, x number of people for x number of prison labor camps. So blacklists were compiled at local levels, and anyone crossing the wrong person, well, had someone from the mayor's office come calling.
"Our house was near the town hall, and all the time, especially after the war (WWII), a lot of reconstruction was going on. My father was a good farmer and had all of this equipment, and they always came to him to use his stuff. My father finally got angry and [told them] please don't bother me anymore," says Lydia. "And the mayor's office took revenge in the worst way."
That fall, after her father was taken from his front yard, Lydia started college in Moldova's capital city, Chisinau, not far from her village.
She stepped outside during a break in classes one afternoon. A large, flatbed truck filled with workers rumbled past. Someone shouted at her, a man was shouting from the truck. "Your father is in here! Your father is in here!" shouted the man. "He's in here, but he's too sick to stand up!"
As the truck trundled on out of sight, and as Lydia stood shocked on the sidewalk, she only then recognized the man screaming at her about her father. He was a neighbor, a man from the same village as she, who had disappeared on that same hot summer day her father did.
She learned her father was in a prison in Chisinau and each Saturday she'd try to bring food for him, knowing it would be consumed by prison guards, but bringing it nonetheless. Thousands of prisoners would shuffle past in a thick line, shoulders crouched, heads down, forbidden to look up, click clacking in their handmade, wooden shoes. Lydia is startled by her memory of the click-clacking wooden shoes. Says she can't believe she remembers the click-clack. She utters a "hmm", and gives a little nod of disbelief at what her brain has held onto all these years.
She and the others would stand quietly as the parade of prisoners passed by, making their way from the canteen back to their cells. "If we shouted their names," says Lydia, "guards pointed guns at us to shut us up."
Word got out that winter that her father had died.
In a few years she would also be taken away.
It was dark out. A late night in early July, the same month her father disappeared years before. There was a ruckus unfolding on the street below, and her Russian roommates moved to the window to see what was going on. Lydia stayed put, but strained to hear what the other girls were whispering about at the window in their native tongue. She got up to see for herself. From their second floor window the girls watched as a Russian soldier entered the house across the street.
The night of July 5, 1949, was the largest Siberian deportation that Stalin conducted in Moldova, carrying away nearly 36,000 people overnight--12,000 of them children. The only other one occurred June 12, 1941. Both happened in the dead of night, both were a surprise, both stole lives and livelihoods in a single blink.
But Lydia only saw a single Russian soldier enter a single house. It was not history yet, and she could not yet see her own history reflected in it.
On her lunch break the following day, she went over to her uncle's house for a quick visit. He lived near the food shop where she worked and there were no customers about--eerily quiet, she would later reflect--so she just wanted to nip out for a few minutes to say "hi."
She entered through the front gate. No one at first appeared to be home, but the front door was standing wide open. Unusual. A small dog was in the yard. In the house she noted other things--her cousin's handbag on the table. Inconsequential snapshot memories of small dogs and handbags have inserted themselves like props into Lydia's recall of her life's drama.
She also remembers seeing two women in the kitchen; one was a neighbor she recognized, a communist, who was helping another woman count things, such as spoons and plates, taking an inventory of her uncle's household items. Writing down what could be used, what couldn't.
She slipped unnoticed into another room, but her crying led them to her. Who is this, said the inventory-taker. The niece, said the neighbor. The two of them kicked her out of her uncle's house and resumed tallying up his family's possessions.

Lydia says she wasn't in shock but her actions would indicate otherwise. She didn't go to her family in the village, or return home even to cry, she simply returned to work.
They found her there at the shop. Four people pulled up in a truck--two Russian soldiers, a driver and her sister's husband, a Communist who led the soldiers to her.
Her boss, also a Communist, appeared from the back office and began taking a little salami and cheese from the store shelves and putting them into a bag to give to her.
Why will I need this, asked Lydia. Maybe they will take me out to the woods and shoot me, she said.
You will need the food for your journey, said her boss. You're going to Siberia.
And then suddenly Lydia knew. She knew everyone knew but her. She knew why her Russian roommates were whispering the night before, and she knew why so few people were in the shop (had either been taken already, or knew she would be), and she knew that her communist boss had information about her fate and hadn't warned her. And that her brother-in-law had betrayed her.
"I don't know why he did it," said Lydia. "Maybe because he was frightened of what [his fellow] Communists would do to him if he didn't."

The two guards circled around her with their guns drawn.
You don't need to do that, she told them, I won't escape. We have our orders, they said.
At the train station she was asked if she wanted to travel to Siberia with her mother and younger brother.
"You've taken my mother, too?!?! Of course I want to be with her!" she said.
They were loaded onto cattle cars. Her memory is fussy. Particular. She doesn't remember how many people were in her car--only that it was overcrowded--or if there were young children, but only that she had a watch, and that the train left the station at exactly 1 a.m. And that they had only one layer of clothes.
"My family was lucky because we had a spot near the little window, so it was easier to breathe." said Lydia.
She tilts her head slightly to the left, to demonstrate how she slept, that she slept standing up and rested her head against something. Or someone.
There were a number of Jewish people in her car and one of them was Anna, who became her best friend.
She doesn't recall what was talked about by the others to pass the time. She didn't talk much to them. Kept to herself. Says she wasn't very sociable.
"Anna still teases me about the sash I had that I'd take and put over my eyes to try to sleep." says Lydia, closing her eyes and miming with a make-believe sash.
They were in a cattle car and thus, no toilets. The train stopped periodically--Lydia doesn't recall how often--so they could go outdoors.
After two weeks they were allowed to take a bath.
After two more weeks they arrived in Siberia. When they arrived, they arrived at nowhere. No houses, no roads, no paths; an isolated, uninhabitable forest near a river.
Much can be recorded about Lydia's life in Siberia: chigger bites and mosquito bites so bad faces were swollen beyond recognition; working outdoors in -40C temperatures without adequate clothing; under constant surveillance by guards. Four weeks standing up in an overcrowded cattle car with no toilet facilities.
They are the facts. They are no testament to the indignities and hardships endured by millions of unlucky Soviet citizens.
Nearly every Moldovan has a relative or knows someone who was sent to the gulag or to Siberia. Fathers and grandfathers were taken and put on the front lines without weapons during wartime, an easy and cost-efficient way for Stalin to rid the USSR of dissidents.
Others were taken because of special skills, and still others because they were blacklisted for spite, like Lydia's family.
Memoria, a non-profit in Chisinau, has been set up to memorialize these victims, and to help them psychologically cope with a tragedy that few will speak of.
Molly Lamphear, a peace corps volunteer, is putting together an oral history, so that when this younger generation is ready to hear, they will have something to listen to. Lydia's sash, the click-clacking wooden shoes, her uncle's house, her roommate's hushed tones, her betraying brother-in-law, will not be forgotten.
Lydia and her family spent six and a half years in Siberia, returning home to Moldova only after Stalin died in 1953.
"We heard the news of Stalin's death on the radio. A Russian worker [at the Siberian camp] was crying. She said 'Look at them! Stalin has died and they are laughing!' " she says.
When she came back to Chisinau her former boss (the one who packed salami and cheese for her deportment) asked her why she didn't stay. Didn't you like it there, asked the boss.
Her brother-in-law is still alive, and she shrugs before she stops to talk about him.
"When I came back from Siberia I saw him. The only thing he said to me was 'I'm sure you're upset with me.' "

In Algeria

2006-12-13T13:52:00.000-08:00

I've not been posting articles for a couple of months--while I'm on assignment for a journalism training project in Algeria. More articles will be posted after the New Year. Meanwhile, my other site is updated regularly:
Link

Gyurscany's Conscience Should Count for Something

2006-10-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Patti McCracken
World Politics Watch Exclusive
As a joke, he once called the Saudi Arabian soccer team "terrorists," something Arab states found not so funny. And as a jab at an older politician he was replacing, he said "every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman," something women found not so funny.

And last month an audio tape surfaced that was not a jab and not a joke, but an admission of lies, lies, lies about the economy, something the people of Hungary found not funny at all.

Hungary's hip Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurscany has never been in hotter water, but he has never exactly been out of it, either. And that has as much to do with his character -- which can be egotistical, arrogant and feckless -- as it does with Hungary's troubled Communist past, which is woven tightly and inextricably into the untidy democracy that has emerged today.

The leaked tape recorded Gyurscany in a private meeting last spring with fellow party members saying that he and his government had lied to the electorate "morning, evening and night," about the state of the Hungarian economy, which is in far worse shape than he or his Socialist party led on. "I don't want to do that [lie] anymore," he said. Gyurscany is the first prime minister to win a second term in office during the 15 years of post-communism.

A couple of years ago I was working on a story in a backwater town in Hungary, an interpreter sitting beside me in a restaurant, beers on the table, and a television in front of us showing then-prime minister Peter Medgyessy speaking.

"What's he saying?" I asked.
"He's answering questions. It has come out that he really was a Communist spy for 20 years, [as had been reported]," said my interpreter. "They're all spies."

There is a common problem for post-communist states: After the Wall came down and democracy moved in, the only candidates qualified for the jobs of running the government were the communists that had been overthrown. No one else had any practical experience.

So after a quick makeover, the Communist Party became the Social Democrats, and, voila, communists were repackaged into democrats, ready to serve.

And 45-year-old Gyurscany (pronounced Gore-chaan) followed suit and remade himself. He had been a communist youth leader, having served as a vice president of the Organization of Young Communists, president at the university level, and vice president again of the organization's successor. When Communism fell in Hungary, he left politics and returned to it later as a democrat.

Like many successful ex-communists, he is despised by the have-nots for the money he made during the transition period. Always a man in the right place at the right time, Gyurscany profited from the Communist collapse by forming an investment company that bought up formerly state-owned companies, polished them up, then re-sold them. With a net worth of about €15 million ($19.5 million), he has become the 50th wealthiest man in Hungary.

After the fall of Communism, the middle class and working class Communists were marginalized. I have friends whose parents were fired from their jobs because they had been members of the Party.

But for the jet set -- the communist youth leaders and the spies --opportunity has continued to knock. Not only did being a communist spy not hinder Gyurscany's predecessor's rise to the top position in the country, many believe Gyurscany's (third) marriage to the granddaughter of a powerful Stalin-era communist secured him political favors.

"He is an opportunist who played both sides well," says Dr. Bela Bodo, a Hungarian history lecturer at the University of Missouri. "He was close to the fire, part of the apparatchik, and had info that others didn't have, which helped him in his [investment] business. He became rich because of his political connections. Then he turned around and became a politician because of his business connections."

He reinvented himself by turning from a communist into a wealthy capitalist, and reinvented the Social Democrat party by giving it a modern face, which has upset many within his party. They feel as though he has hijacked it.

And many Hungarians do not like his manner.

"Hungarians are not, in general, happy people, and the prime minister is relaxed and easy going, and it rubs people the wrong way," says Bodo.

But Gyurscany has a strong crop of supporters, those who believe in his abilities, his mission, his commitment; those who believe he is a refreshing change from the graying group of conservatives that weigh down the right. His supporters like his shoot-from-the-hip style, they like that he keeps a blog (filled with personal anecdotes and political opinions), and they like that he is, in their eyes, a self-made man. They don't care so much that he lied because he confessed it, and was repentant.

And prime ministers lie. Presidents lie. George W. Bush and members of his administration lied before Congress and the UN and the people of the world about the premise of war in Iraq. And Tony Blair lied, too.

So when the top democratic leaders of the world are lying, why should the world expect more of young, struggling democracies?

Gyurscany's arrogance surely has led him to say foolish things, this is clear. His arrogance led him to believe that there were not enemies around him, recording his words to later use as a weapon against him. But his strength is that he confessed his lies to his own party. His strength is that he had the conscience to want to right the wrong he had done to his people. How many world leaders will follow him down that path?

Patti McCracken is a writer based near Vienna, Austria.

The terrorist bombings you didn’t read about

2006-09-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

BC-TRANSNISTRIA-COMMENTARY:VP — op-ed, world, itop (810 words)

(NEWSCOM PHOTOS)
MCT FORUM
By Patricia McCracken
The Virginian-Pilot
(MCT)
Last month, in a little-known spot on the globe, a trolley bus ambled along a Soviet-era street on a hot afternoon, and blew up before it reached its next stop. Eight people were killed, and 46 injured in this July bomb blast, creating a rumble not quite strong enough to pique the interest of the war-fatigued Western press.
It happened again last week when a trolley bus on a similar route, this time touring around on a quiet Sunday afternoon, was blown to bits, killing a 50-year-old man and 6-year-old girl. Ten people were injured, many of them seriously. The following day, a live grenade was found on a university campus and turned in to authorities by a security guard. Both bombs and the grenade were all made of the same explosive material.

It is the unremarkable Dniester River that snakes a divide between Ukraine and Moldova, forming, on its right bank, a burdensome and troubling patch of land known as Transnistria.
On its left bank is Moldova, a tiny wedge nation tucked into the shadows of Ukraine and Romania, trying hard to gain back Transnistria, a self-declared “republic” that broke away from Moldova in a short but bloody civil war 15 years ago. Before the Russian army rushed to the aid of Transnistria, 700 people had been killed in two months of fighting.
Crossing the border into Transnistria is a walk back into a Soviet yesteryear. The cities are bleak, urban deserts, with roads still named for old communist leaders and babushkas peddling sunflower seeds on the sidewalks.
Unrecognized by any other government in the world, Transnistria remains contentedly occupied by 1,500 Russian troops, issues its own currency and lavishly celebrates its “independence day” each year.
Yet this patch of land the size of Rhode Island is heaving with explosives and ammunition. Aged Soviet arsenals that were stockpiled here after World War II now total 50,000 weapons and 40,000 tons of ammunition, much of which, experts believe, are being modified and sold to terrorists.
This renegade republic is run mafia-style by President Igor Smirnov and his son, Vladimir, who controls a consortium of businesses. But it’s the family’s control over the notoriously porous borders — infamous for trafficking women, drugs and the extensive cache of weapons — that truly lines their pockets.
Although numerous efforts have been made to resolve the Transnistrian conflict, Russia has backed out of agreements to disarm the region. New rounds of talks earlier this year, which included the United States for the first time, again achieved no results.
So the illegal weapons trade thrives. Not only is there the old Soviet arsenal to be sold off, but it has been reported (by The Washington Post) that legitimate factories are covertly producing arms.
Meanwhile, it seems no one can agree on the nature of the July and August bombings.
Some argue that they were premeditated, and designed to destabilize the region before coming elections in September. The propaganda coming from the Transnistrian side points the finger at Moldova, insisting the attackers came from outside the region.
Others argue that the blasts were simply accidental and coincidental, that the bombs went off during transport to the border. Vladimir Antiufeev, the head of the MGB — what used to be the KGB — goes so far as to suggest that the bombs were merely radio-controlled devices used to kill fish in the river, and that both went off in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whether the twin tragedies were terrorist acts or accidents, the larger issue may be how the explosives were obtained; and why, if accidental, would people be regularly transporting bombs through the city center. Who were these bombs intended for?
Moldovan and Western officials were not allowed to investigate the crimes, and Russian investigators have been tight-lipped about what has been found.
So while the world’s eyes are trained on the hot spots in the Middle East, the little, unrecognized “republic of” Transnistria slips under the radar, busily modifying old weapons, manufacturing new ones and offering them to terrorists. Unrecognized, indeed.

Unrecognized "Republic of" Transnistria's Deals in Weapons

2006-08-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Last month, in a little-known region of the globe, a trolley bus ambled along a Soviet era street on a hot afternoon, and blew up before it reached its next stop. Eight people were killed, and 46 injured in this July bomb blast, creating a rumble not quite strong enough to pique the interest of the war-fatigued Western press.

It happened again last week when a trolley bus on a similar route, this time touring around on a quiet Sunday afternoon, was blown to bits, killing a 50-year-old man and six-year-old girl. Ten people were injured, many of them seriously. The following day, a live grenade was found on a university campus and turned in to authorities by a security guard. Both bombs and the grenade were all made of the same explosive material.

It is the unremarkable Dniester River that snakes a divide between Ukraine and Moldova, forming a burdensome and troubling patch of land, known as Transnistria, on its right bank.

On its left bank is Moldova, a tiny wedge nation tucked into the shadows of Ukraine and Romania, trying hard to gain back Transnistria, a self-declared "republic" that broke away from Moldova in a short but bloody civil war 15 years ago. Before the Russian army rushed to the aid of Transnistria, 700 people had been killed in a mere two months of fighting.

Crossing the border into Transnistria is a walk back into a Soviet yesteryear. The cities are bleak, urban deserts, with roads still named for old communist leaders and babushkas peddling sunflower seeds on the sidewalks.

Unrecognized by any other government in the world, including Russia, Transnistria remains contentedly occupied by 1,500 Russian forces, issues its own currency and travel visas (although is not allowed to actually stamp a passport), and joyously and lavishly celebrates its "independence day" each year.

Yet this patch of land the size of Rhode Island is heaving with explosives and ammunition. Aged Soviet arsenals that were stockpiled here after World War II now total 50,000 weapons and 40,000 tons of ammunition, much of which, experts believe, are being modified and sold to terrorists.

This renegade republic is run mafia-style by president Igor Smirnov and his son, Vladimir, who controls a consortium of gas stations and grocery stores, as well as a cigarette company. Profitable as these enterprises are, it's the family's control over the notoriously porous borders--infamous for trafficking women, drugs, and the extensive cache of weapons--that truly lines their pockets.

Although numerous efforts have been made to resolve the Transnistrian conflict, Russia has backed out of agreements to disarm the region. New rounds of talks earlier this year, which included the United States for the first time, again achieved no results.

So the illegal weapons trade thrives; as it is not only the old Soviet arsenal to be sold off, but it has been reported (by the Washington Post) that legitimate factories are covertly producing arms.

Meanwhile, it seems no one can agree on the nature of the July and August bombings.

Some argue that they were premeditated, and designed to destabilize the region before upcoming elections in September.

The propaganda coming from the Transnistrian side points the finger at Moldova, insisting the attackers came from outside the region.

Others argue that the blasts were simply accidental and coincidental, that the bombs went off during transport to the border. Vladimir Antiufeev, the head of the MGB--what used to be the KGB--goes so far as to suggest that the bombs were merely radio-controlled devices used to kill fish in the river, and that both went off in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether the twin tragedies were terrorist acts or accidents, the larger issue may be how the explosives were obtained; and why, if accidental, would people be regularly transporting bombs through the city center? Who were these bombs intended for, and why is no one stopping them?

Moldovan and Western officials were not allowed to investigate the crimes, and Russian investigators have been tight-lipped about what has been found, if anything, despite a promise to make the results public.

So while the world's eyes are trained on the hotspots in the Middle East, the little, unrecognized "republic of" Transnistria slips under the radar, busily modifying old weapons, manufacturing new ones, and offering them to terrorists. Unrecognized, indeed.

In the Pocket of Romania's Grief

2006-08-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken

TICHILESTI, Romania
Ioana and her daughter, Domnica, are pulling out family photos.
Domnica
goes for the flat, narrow box on the shelf above the bed, while Ioana
pulls an overstuffed shoebox from beneath the bed. They talk over
each
other and get in each other's way in a struggle to pull out the best
photo of him, the one that really captures who he is.
He is a tall man with a broad, smooth face. He looks placidly into
the
camera, unsmiling, but not stern. His name is Calin and he is the
father, the husband, and they miss him so.
"I didn't expect my father's death," says Domnica. "I tell my
mother we
should stop crying because other people die so much younger. He was
75
and we had him for all this time."
They say he was brilliant. Ioana says her husband could have been
anything if given the chance. They say that when he was a young boy
Calin skipped 6th grade, going straight to 7th, because he was so
smart.
“You know,” says Domnica, pausing to reflect on her father’s sad
destiny, “my father was really, really too smart to be here.”
For more than 60 years, Ioana has lived in Romania’s must hushed
community--a leper colony called Tichilesti--the commune-like
facility
secreted away in the otherwise heavily touristed Danube Delta; a
pocket
of shame concealed inside one of the country’s most prized regions.
This
is Europe's last remaining leper colony and as such it seems
ironically
fitting that it is located in Romania, a country desperate to leave
behind its troubled past and redeem itself in the eyes of its more
sophisticated neighbors. Forced into isolation and poverty and, some
would say, tortured, by a cruel dictator for decades, Romania was, in
many ways, Europe's leper. It longed not to be forgotten by a world
that
had left it long ago.
But this is a new Europe, one without communism and dictators, and
in
Romania's struggle for acceptance, something as hideous and unsavory
as
a leper colony is unseemly baggage. Acknowledging the existence of
Tichilesti in anything above a whisper would seem to be nothing less
than an unpatriotic betrayal. Romanians are deeply embarrassed by the
leper colony, and hence eager to forget those who gave up hope long
ago
of ever being remembered by anyone.
From the nearest city of Tulcea, Tichilesti is almost an hour's
drive
on back roads and is marked with only one dinky, battered road sign,
which is posted on a steep curve, directly opposite the turnoff to
the
colony.
Straight up a gravel road, past the doctor's tottering house on
the
right and the shrubs on the left, and past the two story building
that
was once a clinic but is now used for recordkeeping, is the center of
this rapidly dwindling community. On the site of a former monastery,
the
main area is lined with small, attached, scruffy buildings aligned in
two rows, which enclose a parklike patch up the middle. Outside, in
the
parklike setting, it feels more like the meditation retreat it once
was,
not the clinic grounds it now is. Down to 28 people from a heaving
high
of 300 near the turn of the last century, the place also feels
vacuous,
like wandering through a Wild West ghost town--too big for itself. It
is
death without renewal, winter without spring.
With the disease largely under control in the region, the
population in
Tichilesti is shrinking; but the shame and isolation, leprosy’s twin
legacies, live on here.
Residents greet guests with much fanfare, as it is rare that anyone
comes to see them. Those who are able, such as Ioana, come out of
their
little houses and rooms to see what all the fuss is about. There are
ice-breaking questions, awkward silences, and occassional bursts of
laughter, but handshakes are often met with a quickly withdrawn hand,
jerked back reflexively to hide a deformed and shameful limb.
Gifts of chocolate, a rare treat, are hoarded away for future
consumption. And in a somewhat ceremonious manner, residents shake a
payout from visitors, a bribe of cigarettes and pocket change used to
barter with the staff in exchange for help cleaning their little
rooms
and tending their gardens. They have no use for money themselves
since
there is nowhere to buy anything, including cigarettes. They simply
need
help doing things they are no longer able to do on their own, but it
doesn't come free.
The isolation here is striking. Residents tune in the old TV in
the
clubroom for news, but only one station comes in and has fuzzy
reception
(a gargantuan satellite dish, donated by a church group years ago,
remains unused because the necessary transmitter was not purchased
along
with it). So they listen to the news and talk about anthrax and the
“recent misfortune in America,” but otherwise live in a cocoon so
void
of experience that the ordinary becomes extraordinary for them.
Almost
childlike, they want to know what it's like to ride in an airplane,
if
all Americans are rich, and 70-year-old Vasile wants to know about
tall
bridges. He saw a book once on tall bridges, he says, and wants to
know
what it feels like to travel over such a bridge.
And Costica, who has had one eye removed and is blind in the other,
insists on obtaining a copy of a photograph that has been taken of
him.
He wants to own the photograph he can't even see, as proof that
somebody
was here with him and listened to his story.
A couple of benches outside the clubroom are the meeting place for
the
more outgoing and able-bodied members of this tribe--chief among them
being Maria, a scrappy, pudgy woman who sits hunched forward, hands
in
her lap, and who is known for her funny quips, and Feodor Ivanov,
known
simply as Ivanov, who likes to tell dirty jokes.
Aside from a few sidekick benchsitters that accompany Maria and
Ivanov,
the rest of the population tends to keep to themselves--retreating to
the little houses that some of them built long ago, or to their
lilliputian rooms, the former monastic cells now filled with all the
clutter and memorabilia of a non-monastic life.
Costica's room is crammed with stuff. The air in his little
matchbox
room is almost too thick to be air. The stench, an unidentifiable
cleaning concoction used throughout the colony, is wretchedly foul,
stifling, relentless. The stench grips the lungs the same way sub-
zero
temperatures grip them on a bitter winter day--with piercing
surprise.
While formidable Nurse Milosovici re-applies some gauze and ointment
to
his limbs (although she declines to say what effect such treatment
has),
Costica, 72, talks animatedly about his heyday, back when he was a
carpenter and before he got leprosy. “I worked alot,” he says. He
especially loved designing doors, the more elaborate the better since
woodworking was his great love. “I had the ambition to build
beautiful
doors, ones that would be better than the rest,” says Costica,
detailing
the types of doors he would build if he still could. He is lost in a
reverie that has carried him far from this room, where his wife lies
on
the adjacent bed ensconced in a screaming match of epic proportions
with
Nurse Milosovici. He ignores them, although it is impossible to
understand how. While their bellows crowd this thick little room even
more, Costica gets lost in himself, recalling his glory days and also
thinking aloud about where he will put the photo that has just been
taken of him once he receives it (he will put it to the right of his
bed, he decides).
Another resident, Ana, wants to show off her house. She points
behind
the row of white buildings to a spot in a lightly wooded area,
wherein a
tiny yellow house is nestled. No more than two small rooms, the house
is
without indoor plumbing, without even a kitchen, and overlooks an
ill-tended garden. The absence that winter has brought seems to
dramatize the deficiency of this house: its utter wee size, its
neglected yard, the worn, slippery stone steps and the wobbly railing
which surely make for perilous climbing during icy weather. Despite
the
lack and meagerness of this house, it is large in other ways, mainly
in
the pride that Ana has for it. And its warm butter color against the
backdrop of a small winter forest is not without its charm.
Ana built this house with her husband, who died a few years ago,
and
she is concerned about what will happen to it when she dies since
there
will be no one to look after it.
“It will just crumble. There will be nobody here and it won’t
last,”
she explains.
Like the disease, Tichilesti itself is cloaked in a bit of mystery
and
scandal. Until the late 1800s, it was a functioning monastery, but
legend has it that allegations of homosexual activity among the monks
forced the monastery to hastily disband. According to the tale, a
leper
colony that was located just across the border in Ukraine, was moved
to
the monastery site--the condemned monastic site now transformed into
a
leper colony, a place to house society's most dreaded outcasts.
They have almost nothing. No need to own formal clothes because
there
is nowhere to go. No need for a telephone, because there is no one to
call. Families they were once a part of are now part of the past.
But when Ioana's husband, Calin, was alive, he tried to make up
for
the isolation that defined Tichilesti. Segregated from the rest of
the
society, he and Ioana created a profound unity with their two hearts.
Calin and Ioana met here and married when she was just 16 and he
20. At
the time, Ioana showed no symptoms of the illness, but had been
brought
here at 13 with her sick mother. But Calin had symptoms when he was
quite young and went blind just one month before Domnica, their only
child, was born.
"He never got to see her." says Ioana, shaking her head, still
disbelieving such a harsh fate.
Sitting in the tiny house that the three of them once shared,
mother
and daughter take turns talking about him, trying to make clear the
wonder that he was, and why their hearts are still aching with his
absence.
They are reminiscing. Ioana recalls a dream that Calin once had. He
told her one night that he had a dream about their daughter. What did
you dream, Ioana asked him, curious about how this blind father would
behold their daughter in his dreams, the one he had cuddled and
comforted, but never seen. He said he dreamt he saw Domnica coming
with
a group of young people from a church in Tulcea.
"I asked him 'What did she look like?' He said he only saw her from
behind. He said he couldn't see her face." Ioana's head drops and she
seems to fold in on herself, becoming ever so small and compact, like
a
little suitcase carried away by her very large grief.
Domnica, who never contracted the disease despite growing up here,
likes to tell how the handful of other children living at the colony
(before the state removed them all) would come to her father for
tutoring. Calin so loved geography that he memorized the contour of
countries, despite his blindness, and could draw them for the
children
to help them learn their lessons.
"He would draw with his stick the outline of Romania, Russia,
Hungary,
Yugoslavia..." says Domnica. "The doctors said he could have been
something."
Often referred to as Hansen's Disease, named for the German doctor
who
discovered the bacteria that causes it, the ancient disease of
leprosy
is still reliably full of secrets and scorn.
Consider this fairly well kept secret: Until 1999, there was a
leper
colony in the US, in Louisiana. It wasn't called a leper colony, but
was
known simply as Carville, and its residents were like crusaders who
worked to de-stigmatize the disease by campaigning to change the name
to
Hansen’s Disease, a name free of the age-old stereotype of cripples
and
beggars.
More importantly, a team of scientists working at Carville discovered
in
the 1940s that leprosy could be cured, although it would take another
40
years before the right cocktail of medications was assembled to
effectively treat it.
There are 15 Hansen's Disease clinics in the United States.
"We have 170 patients in our registry, but we are only actively
seeing
about 70," says Stephanie Burns, a nurse who works for Boston
Hansen's
Disease Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts. "We follow them to be
sure
they don't run into trouble. The newer ones are put on what's called
triple therapy and that treatment runs two to three years."
Apparently, the news of a cure has not reached Romania, or at least
it
hasn't reached Tichilesti. Nurses at the leper colony insist that
their
job is to treat patients for other ailments, since, they claim, there
is
no cure for the disease. When presented with evidence that there is,
indeed, a cure, and one that has been widely promoted by the World
Health Organization for more than 20 years, the information is
dismissed
with an indifferent shrug. "I treat them for colds, tonsillitis,"
says
staff nurse Cornelia Bungheiu, who knows alarmingly little about the
disease.
And the only doctor on staff, whose neglected house sits at the
entrance to the colony, never seems to be here. According to Nurse
Milosovici, he prefers Tulcea.
Leprosy is a bacterial illness, and as such it is transmitted the
same
way a common cold is: through the air. The bacteria that cause the
common cold are highly contagious, but leprosy is not. However, it
strikes mostly in poorer regions because the people living there
often
have compromised immune systems: their water is unclean and they
suffer
from malnutrition, two factors which leave them more vulnerable to
catching the disease.
There are two types of leprosy. The most common form causes skin
lesions
and is relatively harmless. The second form, the kind that Ioana and
Calin contracted, is more serious, since the bacteria not only
invades
the skin, but the nerves, the inner lining of the nose, lymph nodes,
muscles, and the organs, such as the spleen and liver. In a quarter
of
these cases, deformities result. And because of the way in which the
bacteria affects peripheral nerves, it can cause blindness.
Domnica worries about her mother, not just because she is without
Calin
now, but because the disease has left her with no feeling in her
severely disfigured hands and feet. She poses a danger to herself.
The grotesque deformities that can result occur for a couple of
reasons. Sometimes the nerve damage prevents people like Ioana from
having any feeling in the affected area. If a hand is burned or a
foot
is broken, the injury can easily go unnoticed and untreated, allowing
gangrene to set in. Once the limb becomes gangrenous, it must be
amputated. Or else they get a condition called necrosis, when the
blood
does not get to the bones and tissue, causing them to decay.
Every resident was brought here by force. Some, who recognized they
had
symptoms of leprosy, hid in their houses, keeping a low profile,
until a
neighbor or a cousin would rat them out and call the police to come
take
them away. Others, thinking they had nothing more than a rash on
their
arm, would visit the doctor and, then----whoosh--suddenly they are in
a
police van on the way to a place called Tichilesti. No phone call
home,
no hugs goodbye. Most of them had never even heard of Tichilesti.
Once
here, most of them have never left.
To compensate for the lifelong isolation, many of the residents have
manufactured a world, borrowing impressions and recollections from
people they knew on the outside. They excel at characterizing events
which they never attended, describing in lavish detail who wore what,
how many people were there, how much fun everyone had and how late
everyone stayed. The walls of their little houses and their little
rooms
are adorned with photographs of people they've never met, of weddings
they never attended; keepsakes of another's memory, and a sad
testament
to a life denied the experience of living.
Ioana came here in 1940, which is, of course, when her isolation
began. It was the middle of World War II. Soon her country would
annex
part of Hungary, and Russia would commandeer Romania, forcing it into
communism. Tyrannical dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu would bring a once
proud nation to its knees, ruling with such ferocity that he is
famous
for saying "who needs an army when you have fear." Still, the members
of
Tichilesti felt it all like the breeze of a feather, unaffected by
the
political and sociological changes, and unaware of the cruelty that
Ceaucescu was dispensing to their fellow countrymen. "We didn't know
what was going on in the cities, that people had no food, no power,"
says Ioana.
And later, communism tumbled and national boundaries were again
redrawn. But it was only of passing interest to Tichilesti, whose
members are said to have been more impressed with the new postage
stamps
that came from these new republics than with the vastly altered
political landscape. Like a child examining currency from a foreign
land, these stamps were hard evidence that the world outside was
changing.
After the Romanian revolution in '89, Calin took advantage of more
relaxed rules about leaving the colony grounds and ventured into the
nearby villages. After so many decades of living here, most residents
found it easier just to stay put, but Calin liked to visit the old
people (the ones who would let him), especially the invalids that
couldn't leave their homes. And he especially liked to go during
Christmas to sing them carols.
He did that the Christmas of '98. He left the colony grounds and
boarded a bus in a nearby town. Ioana used to plead with him not to
go,
worrying something terrible would happen to him because of his
blindness. No one knows exactly what happened, but he died on the
bus.
It was very near Christmas, no one was around to help, and he died on
a
bus in the town.
A few days later, on Christmas Day, villagers poured into the
Tichilesti chapel for Calin's funeral until the tiny church was
brimming
with people who had come to pay tribute to the man "who could have
been
anything." Inside the church two worlds converged, the lepers
sitting
side by side with the townspeople, all of their voices filling
Tichilesti with Calin's favorite songs, the carols he sang to the
villagers' loved ones. And for a few hours that cold December day,
the
people of Tichilesti were not forgotten.
But the villagers soon returned to their homes and the singing
voices
were replaced with the more familiar sounds at Tichilesti --a few
barking dogs, the occassional classical record warbling out from what
must be an old victrola, the faint sounds of roosters crowing from a
nearby farm, and the sound of crunching gravel as patients shuffle to
and from the clubroom. But mostly it is just quiet here.

Honor Killings in Europe

2006-07-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

This article can be found online at the San Francisco Chronicle by following this link:

Link

Imagine that if a teenaged boy walks up behind his sister, points a loaded gun to her head and pulls the trigger, the likelihood is that, as a minor, he’ll spend no more than a couple of years in jail for snuffing this human life. And murdering his sibling in cold blood is all worth it, by the way, to restore the sacrosanct family honor.

These so-called honor killings are carried out in conservative Muslim enclaves that bind themselves to draconian beliefs, and are committed because of an apparently wayward sister or daughter. In the honor culture of Islam, women are viewed as cultural symbols, and therefore Muslim males have the right (or the duty, as some may see it), to control their actions, since it is believed that the source of all respect stems from women. So maybe the girl dates a Christian, or she openly flirts with another boy (Muslim or otherwise), or adopts a Western way of dressing and behaving--all can be a death sentence for a girl born into an iron-handed Muslim family.

According to the United Nations, about 5,000 honor killings take place each year, most of them in the Middle East.

But they happen in Europe, too. Honor killings have steadily risen across the continent during the last 10 years, according to Europol, as countries in the West absorb Muslim immigrants but fail to adequately assimilate them. Many of these immigrants come from Turkey — not from the secular mainstream, but from remote villages where a more stringent form of Islam is applied. And the weapon of choice used for bloodshed is a gun or knife held in the grip of a brother’s hand, -- often a teenager, so as to lessen the sentence when it is handed down.

Police authorities from across the European Union met recently to discuss the troubling trend, while Denmark became the first country to stiffen the penalty for these murders. It was hailed as a landmark decision, because for the first time in a European court, several family members were tried for an honor killing, not just the triggerman.

In the Danish case, the courts sought justice for the execution-style murder of 18-year-old Ghazala Khan, who only days before the shooting had gotten married (to another Muslim). The family was upset at the speedy marriage, as it apparently violated their religious convictions.

Khan’s brother fired the shots, but the Danes convicted nine members of Khan's family, including her father, who conceived the plot to murder his daughter. In fact, he received a life sentence, the brother received 16 years in jail, and an aunt will spend 14 years in prison for luring the victim to what she thought was a family meeting to reconcile.

Although EU states offer no statistics, Europe's leading weekly newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, estimates 50 women have been "honor killed" in Germany since 2000. Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are also countries contending with the problem.

Authorities throughout Europe have been reluctant to intervene in the domestic affairs of immigrant Muslim families, but have now begun to re-open unsolved murder cases that took place within Islamic communities during the last decade.

Why honor killings are happening at all in the EU can best be understood by taking a look back. After World War II, Western Europe experienced a flood of Turkish immigrants--most of whom were poor and uneducated--who came to help rebuild its fallen cities. But poor assimilation has left many European Muslims disenfranchised and has led to increasingly radicalized Islamic practices.

This is especially true in Germany, which for 20 years permitted separate schools (taught in native languages) and housing for immigrants when its gastarbeiter (guest worker) program was introduced in the 1960s . The early thought on this was to display tolerance for other cultures and religions. But this setup turns out to have reinforced the closed community, which can shun Western values and make room for extremist imams to take control in the ghettoes.

And although German schools are now integrated, there are still a number of classes at public schools taught in Turkish, and kids go home and tune into Turkish television, further pushing identity with Germany out of reach. This is exacerbated by the state's immigration policy, which does not allow children of gastarbeiters to hold German passports, even if they were born on German soil. They must, instead, remain citizens of their parents' native land.

However, countries in which Muslims have been better integrated have relatively fewer problems with strict sharia [Islamic] law. For instance, in Austria--a country with a high concentration of Muslim immigrants, yet no known honor killings--the Muslims have always been placed together with other Austrians in high quality public housing upon their arrival. Children of immigrants have always been educated in the Austrian schools, where they are taught only in German. And it helps that some of Austria’s Muslims hail from Bosnia, widely considered to be more liberal. This, in turn, can influence the Muslim communities toward Western ways, minimizing the practice of sharia law, so at least there is a partial acquisition of Western values.

But if Europe is to effectively halt the horrors of these murders, Turkey knows it must also step in line. Having always straddled between Europe and the Middle East, its hopes of ever joining the EU grew slightly brighter when it passed a comprehensive human rights package last year. New laws call for harsher prison terms for honor killings, stopping a tradition of lighter sentences when it comes to recovering "family honor."

But alternative ways are being found to restore "honor" that keeps everyone out of jail. Instead of offering up their sons as killers, family members bully the dishonored girls into killing themselves.

The UN reports that 36 women in Turkey have killed themselves for family honor so far this year.

The deaths are called "virgin suicides" and last month the International Herald Tribune reported on a 17-year-old Turkish woman identified only as Derya, who came under pressure from her family for her romantic involvement with a classmate. She received a death threat via text message on her cell phone. "You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first." It was from her uncle.

Derya received several death threats from her brothers and her uncles, up to 15 a day. After repeated attempts to commit suicide, including trying to drown herself in the Tigris River, she fled to the security of a women's shelter.

How many Muslim women and girls in Europe have been forced to claim their own lives is unknown. Nor is it truly known how many have been slain over the years; as Europe has not been counting the casualties that have been mounting while it slept.

Bush blows in, and few are smitten

2006-07-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

By Patti McCracken
a freelance writer who lives in Austria
Published July 2, 2006

VIENNA -- When Mozart was 12, he rode to Vienna in a carriage with his family, walked into the grand Hofburg Palace, sat down at the piano and played for Empress Maria Theresa for two hours. He had met her a few times before, and had even crawled up into her lap when he was 6 and covered her face with kisses. From then on, she was smitten.

For more than 600 years the Hofburg Palace was the seat of power for the mighty Habsburg empire that ruled Central Europe, playing host to kings and queens, czars, presidents and prime ministers.

On June 21, its doors were opened again, this time for a modern-day emperor of sorts, President Bush.

It was the largest and most costly security operation in the history of Austria, and for a visit that lasted just a few hours.

Highways shut down, leaving commuters stranded for hours; shops were unexpectedly closed along secondary routes, trapping customers inside; and the entire inner city was off-limits to everyone.

Austrians were stunned at the display, and not the least bit smitten with their guest.

Not that they are a nation of people who take kindly to Bush. Seventy percent of Western Europeans have an unfavorable view of the president, but that figure is even higher among Austrians.

`Strong skepticism here'

"There is strong skepticism here [about Bush]," said Christoph Hofinger, managing director of SORA, a social research institute in Vienna. "The Europeans in general are relatively ambivalent [about the president], but the Austrians have more negative attitudes."

In Vienna's 19th District, reasonably far from the inner city and the security lockdown, a group of young bank employees gathered on the day of the summit to talk about Bush.

This region of the city used to be a village of wine farmers, with taverns known as heurigens, whose owners have long stuck a little pine branch outside to let patrons know they served the local wine.

But this area has grown into the most posh of all districts, brimming with embassies occupying stately mansions, with a smattering of office blocks allocated to spots along the busier roadways.

On this day, this small group of bank employees sits inside, some cupping plastic Coke bottles or small cups of coffee during a break from their work.

"His first problem is his personal involvement in the oil industry," Verena Bammer said. "It is a conflict of interests. He works for millions of people now but acts as though he is working for his own future and personal interests, and not the world."

Martin Aigner complained that he has to pay 1.24 euros for a liter of gasoline ($6 a gallon), noting the steep rise in oil prices since the start of the Iraq war. "I backed the war in Afghanistan because this was a direct reaction to 9/11," Aigner said. "But in Iraq, it is clear he is after the oil."

Since the end of World War II, Austria has had a staunch tradition of neutrality, first imposed as a condition of liberation from Allied occupation and later transformed into a source of national pride. According to Hofinger, that explains the layers of criticisms heaped on Bush. "Unlike France, or Germany or the UK, Austria has no military ties to the U.S.," Hofinger said.

Renee Silberhorn, another bank employee, is eager to talk about Bush and wants to warn him that Europe is important, that Bush must care about Europeans.

"The EU is getting bigger and bigger," he said. "So many countries are in NATO, but also in the EU. So what should they do in the case of war? Should they go with NATO, or with the EU? Their loyalties will be with the EU."

People still not swayed

The political community has seen a slight shift in the past year, with Bush reaching out more to his allies in Europe by endorsing, for example, international involvement in the Iran situation, and even making a concession on Guantanamo Bay at the Vienna summit.

But the people still see him as a tough-talking cowboy.

"For the first time Bush is using diplomatic tools but, among the population, there is still a lot of mistrust," said Hofinger. "It will take some time."

There is misconception too, especially about how Americans view their president. Many here believe Bush enjoys a comfortable popularity in the States, and they grow quiet when told of his consistently low ratings in the polls.

"The people remember the nation standing behind George Bush after 9/11, and then they see that he was elected twice. They don't see the poll numbers. They think, `They re-elected him, so they must like him,'" Hofinger said.

So if Bush walked into the room, what would these young bank employees say to him?

Silberhorn would offer a solemn scolding to the president. "I'd tell him America is not the world police, and that there's been a lot of collateral damage," he said, sighing. "A lot of collateral damage."

As a quieted highway awaited the president when he departed Vienna, 3,000 Austrian police officers, 1,000 members of the U.S. security detail and untold numbers of military troops patrolled the streets. Helicopters circled overhead, dipping low enough for people in this calm country to see the sharpshooters hanging out from the side, as well as the infrared and thermal cameras attached to the helicopter's nose.

First a motorcycle cop, then another, and finally a whir of more than 50 vehicles in Bush's entourage whizzed toward the airport and on to Budapest.

No, Austria was not smitten with this guest.

Link

Bringing the Past to Vietnam

2006-06-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

I am nine years old and have just walked into the middle of the living room; the television is on behind me and my mother is in the darkened kitchen in front of me. She is in her purple robe that has only one pocket and zips up the front; her small shoulders are hunched forward, as if warding off the cold; her hands grip a cup of coffee, and tears are rolling down her face.
I hear the television and ask what a cease-fire is and she tells me it means the war is over. In my mind it is a school morning (a Wednesday), but the house is empty save for us, and my mother keeps repeating: Stephen won't be drafted, Stephen won't be drafted; and I am alarmed by her crying and my own sudden spring of tears, but at the same time feel rather light, (except for the weight of my tears), as if I am the relieved mother whose eldest son was spared the fate of soldiering a lost war. I move toward my mother and hug her awkwardly on her left side, careful to avoid the coffee cup still tight in her hands. We are two figures, my mother and I, hunched alone in a kitchen. The Vietnam War is over.
I knew the war from television, from my brothers explaining the draft lottery system to me, from my angry, agitated father (if they tell you to fight, you fight), from my older sister's silver bracelet, upon which was etched the name of a P.O.W. she prayed for (Robert Fant, Jr.). I thought it was honorable, this bracelet, and suspenseful, like an unfinished book.
I knew the war from songs on the radio: One Tin Soldier and Tie a Yellow Ribbon, the lyrics making my nearest sister and I--two little kids in pigtails who played with frogs--grow reverent whenever we heard them (and children are so good at reverence). I knew the war like a kid knows her own neighborhood--intimately familiar with patches, but unrecognizable as a whole, or from a distance.
But I came to know the war best through Pam Christian. Pam sat beside me in third grade, and she transferred this knowledge of war to me the day she came in waving a photo of her father. Until then, I assumed she was touched by the war in ordinary, external ways, like I was. Touched, but never wounded.
I think it was a black and white photo, I think the whole family was in the picture, I think she was sitting in his lap or beside him, and I think it was taken right before he was deployed.
I remember the photo as large, but it was probably small, or at least small enough for Pam to cart around with her (or sneak from an album), and be comforted every time she felt a hint of its form in her notebook, or her bookbag, or her little third grade purse.
"I don't really remember my Dad," she told me, reminding me that she hadn't seen him since she was two. "But I think I remember he had a beard."
This was a daughter trying to have a father, and her loss ran through me.
A lot of the kids at my school didn't have fathers around, all of them Navy men out at sea half the year. When the Dads came home, they gave their little girls dolls they had bought at the PX, all with the same pinched, haughty face, and garishly outfitted in grand traditional clothes from the Philippines, Spain, Morocco.
But Pam's dad was a P.O.W., not a sailor, so no fancy dolls for her to put atop her dresser. And only an uncertain, unfixed memory of her father's beard kept her tethered to him.
She was waving about the family photo on this day because the war was over and he was coming home, Michael Christian the P.O.W. was coming home, and he was her dad.
He visited us at school soon afterward, but the only thing I remember is seeing the two of them outside on the blacktop together. It is as if I am looking from afar, and I see Pam clutching her father on his arm with both of her hands, hanging on him and dripping from him, trying to melt into him and erase a lifetime of his absence in a single afternoon. It is a memory I have always found both touching and unsettling.
Christian was a Navy pilot, shot down in 1967, enduring years of torture from the Viet Cong, reportedly often caged and beaten.
He was fighting against Ho Chi Minh's spread of communism to south Vietnam. But the Vietnamese had gotten good at fighting, warding off the Chinese, then the French, the Japanese, and finally the Americans. As Ho Chi Minh told the French in the 1940s, "You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."
The French ignored him, and proved him right, and America resolutely followed suit. About three million Vietnamese were killed in the Vietnam War, soldiers and civilians from both the north and south, compared to 58,000 American soldiers. But "Uncle Ho" was right, we lost and he won.
When I got on a plane to Vietnam last month, I took with me the memory of Pam's photo, my mother's tears of relief, my brother's great escape from the draft, my songs, my sister's bracelet, and an American's guilt and shame.
Yet Vietnam was no longer a war, but a country. I snaked my way through the sidewalks tipping with vendors, postcard-sellers, pedicurists, barbers, children playing, and all manner of people sitting or lounging in plastic chairs, eating, or drinking green tea and smoking. Mothers would lock eyes on me, point, smile and whisper to their small child, who would then grin and wave, sometimes offering a tender "Hello," in English.
I was in Vietnam working with a group of local journalists on the startup of a new magazine. They kept trying to teach me how to say simple Vietnamese words, and Mr. Tai, whose body hints at the legacy of Agent Orange, delighted at my pronunciation of "smile" (in Vietnamese, a phrase meaning "the flower on the face), wherein I would over-dramatize my already poor language skills, sending him into peels of laughter.
I spent many afternoons sunning myself at the Rex Hotel in Saigon, where the infamous daily Five O'Clock Follies press briefings were conducted during the war, detailing how well everything was going, and how we were winning. Afterward, the reporters would go the edge of the roof and watch mortar attacks on the outskirts of the city.
Taxi drivers liked to ask where I was from and when I'd tell them USA, they'd look at me in the rearview mirror and smile, sometimes offering "beautiful country" or "USA nice."
One evening I was invited to attend a wedding reception of one of the journalists. It was a big, bold, splashy, gaudy affair, the hall bedecked with heart-shaped everything, and a dj spinning muzak and karaoke.
Children were everywhere, ducking under tables and running in circles around the servers. I sat beside the managing editor, and two seats from him sat an old man whose right hand was severely deformed. The editor pointed to it, leaned into me, said "Napalm," and then refilled my beer.
The children quieted and cleared the aisle as the bride's family proceeded to the front. The groom's family was next, followed by the bride and groom. A choreographed dance was performed, some toasts were made, and then it was back to the DJ, and back to the children's games as Tie A Yellow Ribbon managed to ease from the speakers and servers dashed around topping up beers. Everyone seemed to have flowers on their faces, and I was a long way from home, a long way from that kitchen, a long way from 30 long years ago.

New Immigration Test Toughest on Turks

2006-04-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

www.tcsdaily.com
April 12, 2006

Resurrecting the cities felled by war was a burden too high for Germany to undertake without extra hands and hammers pitching in to help. So in the years following World War II, the country welcomed -- encouraged -- guest workers from Europe's poorer countries, namely Turkey, who were grateful for the opportunity. After the reconstruction was complete, the steady tide of immigrants still streamed in, taking jobs which offered low wages and low security, but jobs nonetheless.

But Germany, like many European countries, has no history as a nation of immigrants. Unlike the UK, Australia, or America, there are no melting pots or "mixed salads" there. But the gastarbeiter plan has worked, more or less, for decades, and Germany is generally aligned with other European Union nations regarding immigration laws and policy.

Still, the cultural fault line in Europe is setting Muslims farther adrift from Everyone Else, and the recent flurry of strict immigration laws imposed by a handful of west European nations is increasing the seismic rumble.

"More and more EU states are introducing tests which will make it more difficult for applicants," says Dr. Rainer Bauboeck, senior researcher at the Institute of European Integration in Vienna.

Further complicating the immigration procedure in Germany is that it varies from state to state: Each district can decide whether or not to give a test, and also decide the content, which can include obscure local historical and cultural questions. There is no federal test, candidates from western countries, such as the US, are exempt, and exams often include questions that demand an opinionated answer.

"Some tests are targeted at Muslims, and test whether or not they can conform to 'European values,' such as gender equality," says Bauboeck. "But these are viewed as discriminatory. You cannot ask questions only of Muslims."

Apparently, you can. The Netherlands made headlines in recent weeks when it announced it would force applicants from Muslim countries to view videos of topless sunbathers and homosexual contact, to determine if they were ready to immigrate to the liberal Netherlands. And the German state of Baden-Württemberg wants to follow suit with its own video on gays and nudity, and already has composed a controversial questionnaire that has some leaders up in arms.

"It asks for opinions on gays and lesbians, gender questions," says Cev Ozdemir, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament, and the first MP in Germany with Turkish/Muslim heritage. Ozdemir finds it ironic that members of the conservative party in Germany, never ones to embrace homosexual rights, now find themselves defending gays and lesbians as part of European culture.

The severe tone struck by lawmakers may reflect post 9/11 fear: The Madrid and London bombings, the rioting in France after two Muslims youths were killed, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh have made Europeans jittery. But in Germany there is another thread of resistance related to a small but troubling band of extremism conducted within the Muslim community itself. This has to do with gender issues, arranged marriages, and justice meted out within the family structure.

Honor killings -- when one family member murders another because the "family honor" has been violated -- have occurred in the German Islamic communities at a rate of about five per year during the last decade. Recently, three Turkish-Kurd brothers went to prison for killing their sister because she was acting too Western (she divorced her husband from an arranged marriage and became an electrician).

Some argue that the tight-knit, transplanted Muslim communities have insulated themselves even from the evolving modernity in their country of origin. Thus, parts of Germany can be more extreme than parts of Turkey. German writer Peter Schneider describes these parallel worlds within Germany as a "new wall rising in Berlin."

But how can this wall be stopped? Should Germany, or any other country, intimidate to integrate? "The point is not to provoke, but to inform," says Ozdemir. "But the question seems to be: How can we provoke people rather than how can we integrate them." Opposition leaders argue it is unlawful to target Muslims. "It's like making special legislation for blacks or Jews," says Ozdemir.

He cites an example of what he calls provocative questioning. "We recently had a case where an applicant got additional questions not on the test. He was asked: Does your wife swim? Everyone knows that conservative Muslims don't allow women and men to swim together. But the man answered 'yes, my wife swims.' So the second question was: 'Does she wear a bikini?' If she does wear a bikini, what then? Does she go before them and they judge whether or not her bikini is acceptable? This is something out of Monty Python."

What are European values? How are they evaluated? And is it constitutional to test someone on what many in free countries consider a private matter? "Even the Pope could not become a citizen," says Ozdemir, "because the question of a female boss would be a problem for him."

The writer is a journalist based in Vienna.

The new Auschwitz no one had imaged

2006-04-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

- Patti McCracken
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, April 2, 2006

We sat at a table near the window overlooking a slim patch of river -- a rather unremarkable river, except in the way it slithered by unnoticed on its way out of town. The air was still, so thick and still, and it was intolerably, menacingly hot on this summer day. My colleague and I downed our coffee, and having finished our breakfast, hung around a bit longer to go through the stack of newspapers in front of us.

We were journalism trainers, and the local weekly newspaper in this east Bosnian town had begun a popular series in which a victim of a war crime was profiled each week, including those who had spent time in the nearby Omarska concentration camp. The editor said printing the survivors' accounts was a way for the community to begin to heal, and to document what had happened.

It was our job to critique the stories journalistically: Were they fair? Had facts been verified when possible? How many sources were interviewed? Was the coverage and presentation too sensational?

Despite the oppressive heat, our waiter had restless energy. He kept circling back to us, asking if we needed more juice, more coffee, more water, and then he'd circle back to the counter and eye us from there. I remember him -- his dark thinning hair, his dark eyes, his round face, his compact body. When it was clear we were about to leave, he came back to our table for the last time, tapped his finger on the newspaper's front page photo of a suspected war criminal, and started muttering.

"He says that's a bad man," said my colleague, translating. "He said that man did horrible things to the people here."

The waiter, with his dark brown eyes, crouched down to me, his Bosnian face fronting my American one, pointed to an emptiness in his mouth where some teeth had been beaten out, and said quietly, "Omarska."

And then his brown eyes began to cry.

Omarska is the horror that was never supposed to happen again after Auschwitz. It is the oily blackness of soulless madmen who crack their brothers' backs, beat them, starve them down to ghastly skeletons, and worse.

A survivor, Rezak Hukanovic, writes of the torture in his book, "The Tenth Circle of Hell."

"Thirst, hunger, gang rapes, exhaustion, skulls shattered, sexual organs torn out, stomachs ripped open by soldier assassins of Radovan Karadzic."

If the late Slobodan Milosevic was the mastermind of the Bosnian war, Radovan Karadzic was it's premier architect, organizing such camps as Omarska (which he would mockingly label an "investigation center" when reporters came snooping about) to ethnically cleanse a region of its non-Serbs.

In May 1992, intense shelling in and around Omarska forced residents to flee their homes. Upon doing so, many were captured by Serb forces and either killed on the spot or marched off to one of the handful of concentration camps in the area.

The Omarska camp operated for about three months, in which time, the U.S. State Department estimates, up to 5,000 people were killed. Those who were able to return home found their houses occupied by Serbs.

Bosnia has three main ethnic groups, Bosniaks (Bosnian-Muslims), Croats and Serbs, and under Josip Broz Tito's communist regime, ethnicity was essentially a nonissue to the people of Bosnia, as in the rest of Yugoslavia. People married each other, worked together, lived in the same villages and neighborhoods, leaving ethnicity a matter only for the census-takers.

But mighty Milosevic's calls for a Greater Serbia ignited a nationalist flame that shined like a beacon for the likes of Karadzic, who schemed ways to ethnically cleanse vast territories of Bosnia for the purpose of uniting them with Serbia.

This was the third of four wars Milosevic would carry out against his own people, killing hundreds of thousands, and eventually snuffing out the existence of Yugoslavia itself.

Serbs were not the only war criminals to emerge from the Bosnian conflict; Bosniaks and Croats also shoulder blame for shameful acts, a fact many Serbs feel is unjustly overlooked. But it was Milosevic's Serb soldiers who shot like snipers at civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, who killed, execution-style, nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in a matter of hours, and who left us the disturbing legacy of the Omarska concentration camp.

I was in the central city of Tuzla the night a helicopter lifted off from there carrying a captive Milosevic to The Hague. The following morning, I walked around the city -- its once charming main streets now pockmarked by mortar attacks -- and tried to read faces for signs of joy, vindication, relief. The faces gave away nothing, nothing at all, and I thought maybe the war had taken it all from them.

The day his trial started, I sat on a stool in a Bosnian cafe and watched the Bosnians as they stonily watched Milosevic. The country is now divided into two entities, and I was in the Serb-controlled part, waiting to meet a dear friend, a Bosnian-Serb editor who lost both of his legs in a car bomb attack for reporting about war crimes. He had received several death threats before the 3-pound bomb was placed under his car on his birthday, and I asked him once why he risked his life for war criminals.

"The best thing for Serbs here," he told me, "would be to distinguish between war criminals and Serbs as a whole. Not every Serb is a war criminal."

My friend nearly died exposing the crimes, but the most wanted criminal remains free. Most think Karadzic now lives in a mountain cottage in Serbia, with 20 or more footmen to buy his food, his coffee, his wine, his clothes and his beloved books, because he is, after all, a poet.

No one has found him yet. He slithered away unnoticed, swimming with the current of Omarska's river of tears.

Patti McCracken, a frequent contributor to Insight, is based in Austria. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Tribute to Rob

2006-02-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

He arrived in Vienna with the dust from Kabul still on his clothes. He was a lot thinner, alarmingly so, and blamed it on the bad food in Afghanistan; and he was twitchy, looking over his shoulder every few seconds, a habit he picked up from living in a war zone.
But the trademark cigarette still hung from his lips, and his sentences were still a traffic jam of cuss words, and he still needed to look you dead in the eye every time he spoke.
Afghanistan had changed him, but he was still Rob.
By the time we got back from the airport and dinner it was late. We sat in the semi-darkness of my living room, me on the sofa, and he cross-legged in the blue armchair, next to the table where he had meticulously set up his little ipod stereo.
I have a stereo we could have listened to, a nice one, but I understood his roving journalist's need for constancy in battling the twin demons of isolation and uncertainty. The ipods, the tattered, favorite book, the photos, the particular, idiosyncratic brands of candy bars and coffees that are the long-term travelers' security blankets--nothing is familiar, so we carry Familiar with us.
So we sat in the semi-darkness, listening to great music off a not-so-great sound system, talking about journalism, what it was like teaching Afghan journalists, the nature of love, being a parent, how he met his wife, his mother's death, his daughter and how proud he was of the person she was becoming, how much he hated working in an office, how much he hated burkas, and I can't remember what else.
A couple of days later I hurried him to the train so he could get to the Carpathian mountains of Slovakia. He was only on a short break from his 6-month training assignment in Afghanistan, so was anxious to fit in his quiet mountain time.
I didn't know then that it would be the last time I saw him, the last time I heard his booming voice, and the gentle Virginia accent which softened it.
I first met Rob Eure in the Republic of Georgia, where we were both journalism trainers in a new program there.
I had printed out a photo of my beloved Jack Russell and taped it to my wall, and the next day a photo of an Airedale appeared beside it, and both had been lowered so they were at eye level when sitting in my chair.
"That's my dog, Lyla," Rob said, of the airedale. " They can keep each other company."
Then he pulled out photos he had carried with him from his adopted state of Oregon: of his wife, his daughter, and of the airedale. His wife's name was Deane, his daughter Addie. "It's short for Adeline," he told me. But I can no longer remember who she was named for. It seems important now.

I learned a lot about Rob during those few months in Georgia. I learned about Deane, Addie and Lyla. I learned that he studied theology at University of Virginia, that he was a Red Sox fan, and that he was the son of a newspaperman, the kind that aren't taught to be one, but simply born to be. I learned he had to drink freshly ground coffee, that he smoked but didn't drink, and that he liked to run. I learned that he was self-deprecating and modest; and that he gave no warning when changing topics in conversation, expecting you to jump on board his train of thought--snap, just like that.
I learned that he was a curmudgeon, a yellow dog democrat, obstinate, quick-tempered, soft-hearted, passionate, contemplative, often naive, unpolished, gruff, disastrously politically incorrect and a champion of the underdog. I learned that he was his father's son.

I learned all of this but it took a personal drama of my own to witness the depths of my friend's beautiful heart.
My dog had fallen ill after ingesting poisons, presumably in the Tbilisi apartment. I took her to Rob's apartment to get her away from the toxins. She was dying, I knew the signs, and I booked a flight back to my home in Austria so my vet there could try to save her.
There was a flight leaving at 5 a.m., and Rob decided there was nothing he could do but stay with me through those hours of anguish. He sat beside me when my dog had a convulsion, petting her and calming her. He went with me when I walked her, examining her every move and assessing it with me. He called his wife, a former vet's assistant, because he knew if I heard her kind, calming voice, I would feel better.
I told him he must be so tired, it was so late. That's what the coffee is for, he said, as he ground away the beans on his little hand-cranked coffee grinder.
That evening, I learned what loyalty is. Rob's heart expanded to contain me and my little dog; he would not abandon me, because what I felt, he felt.
This is my Rob.
And this is the Rob that the journalists he trained around the globe held so dear. The Rob who stood side by side with them, fighting mightily for press freedom. Not quietly, but angrily, loudly, madly. The Rob who was a reporter because there was nothing else he could ever have been. The Rob who saw the same in them, and fought for it.
The Rob whose beautiful heart simply stopped beating. Maybe because it felt too much. Maybe because it could no longer contain all that it simply could not abandon.

Meet the Spammers

2006-02-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

Spotlight Magazine
December 2005

Back in the days of Prohibition, Eliott Ness for years dogged Al Capone and his club of infamous, headline-grabbing gangsters, who gripped Chicago during the 1930s. Bootlegging was their business, and a mighty profitable one, at that; and Capone slipped through the Fed's fingers time after time until finally Ness nabbed him.

Now there is a new breed of gangsters in the 21st Century, slippery figures in the underworld of cyberspace, who dodge the authorities while making a mint off of what most consider a mighty nuisance. They are the spammers.

Steve Linford, the would-be Ness of the net, is doggedly hunting them down, determined to put them out of business.

Linford heads Spamhaus, a private group of about 10 volunteer hackers from around the globe with a mission to fight spam by tracking down the senders.

But Linford is worried that spam will soon be more than a nuisance. "The email [system] is on the edge of meltdown," he said.

More than half of all emails sent are spam.

Two spammers that top Linford's "To Nab" list are Scott Richter and Alan Ralsky, the self-proclaimed King of Spam, who operates out of his three quarter million dollar house in Michigan.
In Ralsky's basement are twenty computers using nearly 200 email servers spread out over the US, Russia and India, which transmit about 650,000 emails an hour. Each day, a billion emails are sent from Ralsky's suburban home.

Ralsky is an ex-felon. A former insurance salesman, he was convicted in 1992 of fraud. Two years later, he was convicted of fraud again in a case involving financial institutions in Ohio and Michigan. He subsequently lost his license and declared bankruptcy. After purchasing a couple of computers and buying a couple of emailing lists, he was clearing $6,000 a week in no time.

A recent lawsuit failed to shut him down, but did force him to push some of his operations overseas. This means only that the email he sends is routed through a server in, say, India, instead of a server in the United States.

Anti-spam forums are full of venom for Ralsky, along with stories of revenge-seekers who discovered his mailing address and deluged him with truckloads of mail-order catalogs.

But he is undeterred, claiming his business is legitimate.
"There is no way this can be stopped," Ralsky said. "It's a perfectly legal business that has allowed anybody to compete with the Fortune 500 companies."

And then there is Scott Richter, a high-profile, media-savvy spammer who managed to keep his multi-million dollar enterprise up-and-running, despite lawsuits and smear campaigns aimed at crippling his business. Richter is 33, older than the current lot of spammers, and one of the richest.

He made his money in the food service industry, but decided the overhead costs were too high, as were the risks and return on the money. So he got into the internet and after a few false starts, the money began rolling in.

His spamming company, OptInRealBig, made Real Big profits last year, grossing nearly $20 million, with Richter paying himself a 1.2 million dollar salary.

At one time, Richter's company was ranked by Spamhaus as the third largest source of spam in the world.

Like Ralsky, Richter is a convicted felon (fencing stolen property in 2002), and soon found himself in court again, this time facing Microsoft and the State of New York, which charged him with sending fraudulent emails. Last summer Richter settled the suit for $7 million. As a condition of the settlement, Richter agreed to no longer send unsolicited spam. In return, Linford's Spamhaus dropped him from its list of Most Wanted.

This is somewhat of a coup for the anti-spammers, since Richter's realm of operation was severely restricted, and he took a cash hit, as well.

Another moral victory came for AOL when it successfully sued a spammer who stole email lists. AOL subsequently gave away the seized property in a contest to AOL subscribers (a Hummer and bars of gold were among the loot).

But this is merely the tiniest of dents in what is a billion-dollar industry, as well as an incalculable drain on worldwide computer systems and businesses.

Dubiously named for the "spreadable ham" produced by Hormel, spamming is the new bootlegging, a cocktail of get-rich-quick with a dash of catch-me-if-you-can. But weapons are keystrokes, not guns. These are geek gangsters.

So-called "email marketers" make their money in a number of ways. One option is to sell discounted items online directly. Mass emails are sent out, luring customers to a website which sells, for instance, weight-loss pills. In this case, the spammer buys and sells the products directly.

Another option is to contract to an outside marketer, (for instance, a mortgage company) which means the spammer is not responsible for buying and selling items, but gets a commission for every customer sent to the mortgage company site.
But how the spammers get the email addresses is of the greatest concern to lawmakers and antispammers. When someone types an email address into a website, that address can be "harvested" by a complex software, until a database of millions is completed. Millions of these email addresses can be burned onto a CD and sold to spammers, or even generated by spammers.

Sometimes the email lists are legally bought and sold. But often spammers hack into a system and steal the information.

Anti-spammers estimate that there are less than 200 people responsible for nearly 90 percent of the junk email that ends up in the Inbox. The final 10 percent is made up of 1,000s of part-time spammers trying to get in on the action.

The Can-Spam law, passed in 2003, promised to curb the flow of unwanted email, but the effect on spammers has been negligible. The cost of running an email marketing business is next to nothing, and spammers tend to slip easily under the radar and remain there, mainly by using false identities and covering themselves with layers of fake email addresses and websites.

And big business is viewed by some as an inadvertent supporter of the thriving spam industry. Many large companies pay dues to the Direct Marketing Association, a political action committee which lobbies government for looser marketing regulations.

"This group is misguided. They fail to realize that their legitimate members' message is being lost in the noise of spam," says Julian Haight, director of Spamcop, a spam-blocking system.

Smaller companies who hire email marketers are also complicit, according to Haight, who says that many turn a blind eye when it comes to how customers are directed to their sites.

Further complicating matters is that laws differ from state to state, and country to country. And since the internet is essentially borderless, little is being done to stem the flow.

Nevertheless, there is a cult of anti-spammers working triage to keep the blight that is spam from spreading, often delighting in exposing a spammer's identity and harassing them. For every spammer, there are a 100 or even 1,000 anti-spammers trying to hunt him down. The hunt has become a grass roots industry in and of itself.

But they have a lot of work ahead of them.

"I'll never quit," said Ralsky. "This is the greatest business in the world."

There is no Europe Here

2006-02-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Chronicle
Chicago Tribune
February 2006

RIBNITSA, Transnistria -- I ask myself what is a nation.

I am traveling in the back seat of a car and Vitalie sits to my right. He has been animated and chatty on this trip, but as we roll toward the border he becomes withdrawn and anxious. He works his hands into fists and shoves them under his legs. His back stiffens and he turns his head away from the window, refusing to look at the policeman who has come around to his side of the car and wants to see his passport.

Vitalie is seething, leaning in closer to me as his resentment repels him, like a natural force, further away from the car window, from the policeman. I am careful to take short breaths so as not to breathe in too much of his loathing.

"There shouldn't be a border here," says Vitalie. "I shouldn't have to go through passport control in my own country."

I am in Moldova, a tiny, wedge nation tucked into the shadows of Ukraine and Romania. Vitalie is my interpreter and together we are crossing the border into Moldova's breakaway region, the self-declared republic of Transnistria.

Moldova is a country the rest of Europe seems to have put in its pocket and forgotten about. It is, by far, the poorest nation in Europe. A quarter of its population of four million has fled the country in search of work, and recent research shows that another quarter would leave if given the chance.

The only freely-elected Communist government in the world is right here in little Moldova, but it nonetheless faces resolutely west, tirelessly resisting the tug from Russia's strong arm, which wants to pull Moldova once again back under its sphere of influence.

And Transnistria is the tool it uses. About the size of Rhode Island, Transnistria is on the left bank of the Dniester River. For the longest time it was part of Ukraine, but then the Germans and Romanians used it as killing fields to purge Europe of about 150,000 Jews during World War II. After the massacres it was known as the Forgotten Cemetery, until the Soviets populated it with Russians, stuck a bunch of military bases there, and began using the region to stockpile vast amounts of weapons. Meanwhile, Stalin took it away from Ukraine and gave it to Moldova.

I give the border guard my passport and watch as he carefully tears off a tiny corner of notebook paper, presses it firmly with a red stamp, and then places the torn bit of stamped paper loose inside the fold of my passport. This is my "visa" and it costs a laughable 30 cents. I do not get a real visa because Transnistria is not recognized by anyone as a real country and is forbidden to actually stamp my passport.

This wannabe nation broke away from Moldova soon after the Soviet Union dissolved. Russia ran quickly to its aid, and after a brief but costly civil war with Moldova--up to 700 dead in a few months--a cease-fire was called. But that was 15 years ago and, to date, nothing has been resolved. Transnistria remains contentedly occupied by Russian forces, while joyously and lavishly celebrating its (unrecognized) independence each year.

We've crossed the border into a Soviet yesteryear and entered the all but emptied city of Ribnitsa, a bleak urban desert. Only a handful of people can be seen on this workday; no packed trams, or even dirty buses, are spotted--just aging, putty-colored Ladas on the roads still named for old communist leaders, and babushkas peddling sunflower seeds on the sidewalk.

In my pocket is money from a country that doesn't exist.

As in much of Eastern Europe, the streets are lined with row after row of communist blocs, the infrastructure so weak the some of the buildings crumble a bit when touched. And this day the sky, in solidarity--or maybe mourning--is the color of cement. A flag, draped across what must be a government building, still sports a hammer and sickle.

There is no Europe here.

This renegade republic is run mafia-style by president Igor Smirnov and his son, Vladimir, who controls a consortium called Sheriff. There are Sheriff gas stations, Sheriff grocery stores even Sheriff cigarettes, at every pass. Profitable enterprises, indeed, but Vladimir also directs customs, the inflow and outflow of goods, which includes a sizable weapons industry.

There are an estimated 50,000 weapons and 40,000 tons of ammunition warehoused in Transnistria, allegedly watched over by 2,500 Russian troops. And the Washington Post reports that several large factories in the region are still covertly manufacturing arms. And this is why Russia cares about Transnistria. Many believe that a good number of those weapons are being passed along to terrorists via Vladimir's porous borders.

For years the international community (including, more recently, the United States) has been trying to broker an agreement on behalf of Moldova, whereupon Russia would withdraw its troops and disarm Transnistria. Talks last week produced zero results again.

Weapons may be free flowing here, but information is most certainly not. Nearly all of the media are state-owned, and the scant independent news outlets that have managed to keep operating face constant lawsuits by authorities, designed to shut them up. The cost in fees is crippling, which is the point.

We are sitting in the office of a leading independent newspaper editor. She sits behind her desk, leaning forward on her elbows, tap-tapping her cigarette into the ashtray. She speed-talks, making it a challenge for Vitalie to keep up. Across from us is a life-size oil painting of Lenin.

The editor says she was sued for printing an article critical of the government's plans for privatization. Even the woman interviewed for the story was sued. According to the editor, the government collected $15,000 from the newspaper, and $5,000 from the woman--hefty sums considering the average monthly income in Transnistria hovers around $100.

"We had a good lawyer this time, quite well known for representing the mafia," she says, "but we still lost."

After photos with Lenin we head to a cafe across the street, where the editor talks about other aspects of her life: How she can't talk to her cousins on the other side of the river (in Moldova) since the government cuts the mobile phone links. And how she can't cross the border to buy a washing machine (better quality, better price), because she has to prove, with photos, that she needs one. "How do I prove I don't have something?" she says to me in Russian, tipping her head up to blow the cigarette smoke away from my face.

We say goodbye back at the newspaper and climb in the car again to head back across the border of the non-state state. Vitalie reminds me to find my little piece of notebook paper.

"It might be 30 cents to get in," he says, "But it's a $70 fine if you don't have it, along with some tough harassment."

The writer is a journalist based in Vienna.

U.S. explorers to mine alpine lake for Nazi loot

2005-09-04T05:50:00.001-07:00

Patti McCracken
Sunday, August 14, 2005
San Francisco Chronicle

Alfred Egner drowned.

He was just a workhorse, really, a 19-year-old boy from Munich, hired by a couple of former SS officers in 1963 to dive down to the murky bottoms of Austria's Lake Toplitz and resurface with fistfuls of treasures secreted away in this alpine paradise.

It wasn't his first dive in Lake Toplitz, but he may have gotten tangled in some of the hundreds of logs that line the bottom, or something may have gone wrong with his equipment.

Regardless, he never retrieved what the two men were most likely looking for: secret codes to Swiss bank accounts, which had been sealed in waterproof tubes and dumped into the lake by Nazis at the end of the war.

The Nazis used Lake Toplitz as a vast, submerged cellar, warehousing millions of dollars' worth of stolen art, gold and jewels, among other things.

This exceptionally beautiful region of Austria, known as Steiermark, is in the heart of the alpine forest, and Hitler and his men thought it a perfect retreat from Allied soldiers, a place in which to hide out and regroup, free from enemy bombers. And also a great place to bury booty.

Egner was not the first to go looking for it. Others started diving for treasure just after the war ended, having seen military trucks dump in crate after crate of mysterious goodies for months and months. The Nazis eventually commissioned locals to do the deed, bringing the crates by oxcart, transports which occurred more and more frequently in the frantic last days of the war.

Two news organizations -- Germany's Stern magazine in the 1950s and CBS News in 2000 -- sent treasure hunters to delve the depths of Lake Toplitz.

Over the years, much has been recovered, including millions of counterfeit British and American currency, as well as the press that minted them. But some say most of what was dumped in Toplitz is still in Toplitz, and so divers still go down searching for their pots of gold.

However, environmentalists are concerned about the ecological effects the dives are having on the region. "There is a hazard for the lake if there are too many explorations," says Bernhard Schragle, a spokesman for the Bundesforste AG, Austria's forestry service.

As an alpine lake, Toplitz holds a precious balance of freshwater on the top and saltwater on the bottom. Between the two layers are ancient logs, so any disturbance to the logs releases salt water and threatens the ecosystem.

"For the last few years, there have been many 'black' (illegal) divers, who dive without permission. We don't see them, we just see what they leave behind," says Schragle.

Hoping to remove the mystery and therefore dissuade future divers, the Bundesforste hired a professional exploration team to examine Lake Toplitz and resurface the treasures that have been lost there.

Global Explorations, based in Gainesville, Fla., will spend the next three years mapping the lake using global positioning satellites, and then exploring spots targeted specifically by the map.

Norman Scott, the founder of Global Explorations, and his team plan to use small machines and unpeopled submarines, which will allow explorers to spend significantly greater lengths of time underwater, as well as limit any potential harm to the lake.

American investors are backing the project, which may cost up to $4 million. Under Austrian law, the profit from recovered materials will be divided between the Austrian government and Global Explorations, with a portion going to the Jewish Federation.

If ownership can be determined, the Austrian government forfeits profit to the heirs, who will then negotiate fees solely with Global Explorations.

As the war neared its end, this so-called Alpine Fortress was a chaotic hive of activity. Retreating Nazis had fled to what they thought was a safe zone, with wild designs to construct the "Fourth Reich" from this camp.

Meanwhile, resistance fighters remained pocketed in the surrounding forests. All the while, more and more valuables were being lowered in crates (allegedly built to be easily resurfaced), into Lake Toplitz, most of it stolen from European museums and libraries.

Among the art and archives was gold from the Romanian church and drugs (the Slovak prime minister brought nearly 300 pounds of morphine to be secured from the reach of Allied hands). Then there was the counterfeit money, which was to be used primarily to collapse the British economy, left in what was to become one of Austria's greatest modern mysteries, its own Loch Ness.

Not all believe the lake's floor is lined with treasures. But Scott says he's going for the gold. "We're going after the $150 million that was dumped there, the excess counterfeit money and the sealed tubes" (containing Swiss bank codes), he says.

Anti-Islamic Prejudice Roars in Austria

2005-08-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

Patti McCracken
Sunday, July 10, 2005
San Francisco Chronicle

Not long ago, I was riding the U-bahn in Vienna. The train ducked into underground stops, thundered through concrete tunnels, then emerged at street level at a more ambling pace.

It was slow enough for me to catch sight of a stunning billboard that I read twice just to make sure I understood. "Wien darf nicht Istanbul werden," it said. "Vienna must not become Istanbul."

What an ugly statement, I thought, to be dominating the streets of such a magnificent city.

The ads were part of a smear campaign by the ultra-right Freedom Party (which has since splintered into two parties) against a Turkish art exhibit, in which Turkish flags were draped around the Wien Kunsthalle museum.

This was based on a similar campaign a few years ago, when the Freedom Party's slogan was "Vienna must not become Chicago," a hostile reference to the influx of East Europeans after the fall of communism.

Immigrants make up almost 10 percent of Austria's population, so no one can argue that Austria has not pulled its weight by accepting foreigners after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It took in 690,000 in 1993, twice as many as five years before, as well as refugees, including 90,000 during the Bosnian War.

Now the Islamic community is expressing outrage at recent revisions in what is an already highly regulated immigration structure.

It might be a stretch to claim that Austria's immigration laws are too restrictive. Since the 1960s, it has had a policy of accepting workers from less developed countries, albeit conditionally. Furthermore, the nation ranks fourth among European Union members in taking asylum seekers (after England, Germany and France), no small feat for a little country of only 8 million people.

However, the reins are tightening, and it's the extreme right wing that is pulling them.

Delivering a steady diet of xenophobia at a time when many Austrians are afraid of newly opened borders with the Eastern bloc, the Freedom Party (FPO) briefly surged in popularity by preying on these fears.

Once in parliament, the FPO put a stranglehold on the immigration law, instead promoting a policy of "integration before immigration."

But why do the two have to be exclusive? And what does it mean to integrate?

"They (the extreme right) mean total assimilation," says Guenther Rathner, a sociologist at the University of Innsbruck, who has studied xenophobia in Austria.

"In the long run, immigrants always tend to assimilate after the second or third generation. This is in every culture. But the ultra-right has used this platform before. They say the immigrants have to dress like us, speak better German than us. But it's all a ruse to promote fear," he says.

Rathner's study also showed that, despite its reputation, Austria is no more xenophobic than other nations.

But many Austrians are afraid. For years after World War II, they rested surprisingly comfortably in the folds of the Cold War. They felt safe from yet more warfare and protected by being on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Their troubles were few.

Austrians worried that once people in poorer countries had a peek at Austria's goodies, the jig would be up. But generally, the worry was for naught. True, robberies in some border towns have been increasing, especially car theft, but these acts are usually carried out by crime rings operating from neighboring countries. In fact, records show that immigrants in Austria are more law-abiding than nativeresidents.

Austrians hang on to the stereotype of the dangerous and troublesome outsider. A friend of mine in a small border town with a large Turkish community near Slovakia reflects a common attitude when he says immigrant Turks are OK individually, but not in groups.

Like many others, he believes that Turkish men treat women poorly. But when pressed, he says he doesn't know any Turks personally and has no personal knowledge of Turkish men in this town abusing or disrespecting their wives.

In Rathner's study, Austrians said they didn't mind immigrants, per se, but felt it was important to fan them out so they don't form communities. This way, the immigrants have a better chance of assimilating, or so they said.

But it seems the Austrians would feel less threatened if other cultures are not allowed to take root. So as the world expands, so does it contract. With the uncertainty that globalization brings, comes the retreat in Europe and certainly in Austria to the village mind-set that is so familiar.

For 3,000 years, Europeans stuck to themselves as a means of survival against invading forces. And though now there is no threat, not much has changed. Not yet.

Donald Duck's Reading Material Questioned

2005-06-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Poor Herr Hoepfner. He never would have imagined that a job as a comic book editor would ever include taking on anything controversial or anything Mein Kampf.

But it seems Donald Duck and his nephews were recently spotted with an issue of the Fuehrer's political treatise by an eagle-eyed German reporter, looking to drag some famous feathers through the mud. To Mr. Duck's credit, the infamous book was atop a heap of trash, but that hasn't made a difference to Hoepfner, editor-in-chief of Mickey Maus in Berlin.

"There's no story here. It's a 55-year-old comic strip that has been reprinted. That's it," says an exasperated Hoepfner.

"It's been all over the world at least 100 times," he says of this strip, first printed in the April 1950 issue in the United States, and including a frame showing Donald and the boys looking for lost wallets at a junkyard, with Mein Kampf amidst the rubble.

"Disney is, for us, definitely non-political, and that's the way it's meant to play," says Hoepfner.

Maybe so, but it hasn't always been that way.

As Norwegian filmologist Per Arne notes, the U.S. military moved in to Walt Disney Studios the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, setting up shop to repair anti-aircraft machinery.

"When the war broke loose, Disney lost a major part of its international revenue.... this goes a long way to explain why Disney didn't react negatively when the military practically requisitioned his Burbank studios," says Arne.

In fact, Disney struck a deal with the military that would end up providing him with more than 90 percent of his commissions during the war.

Not only did Disney use his cartoons to promote politics, he also won a 1942 academy award for "Der Fuehrer's Face," in which swastika-draped drums beat out tunes, and where Donald Duck is first introduced to Mein Kampf.

Disney also created "Education for Death," a stunningly overt and overbearing piece of wartime propaganda slamming the Hitler Youth.

It wasn't just Mickey and Donald. Bugs Bunny got in on the action, too, maybe most famously in the short "Herr meets Hare," in which Hitler's right-hand man, Herr Goering, is lampooned as a buffoon, replete with mocking, lederhosened, stereotypes of Germans. Along with other propaganda and racists cartoons of that era, Warner Brothers later refused to release it for re-runs after 1968, essentially banning it from the airwaves.

But after all the mockery and poking fun at the enemy, the cartoon propagandists stopped after World War II. There was no more of Popeye defeating the Japanese armed with his spinach, or Superman killing Hitler, or Bugs and Mickey peddling war bonds. Wars took on a different shape after the Second World War, with no definitive enemy, fuzzy objectives, and military might that even Bugs Bunny couldn't outwit.

As Martin Goodman (aka Dr. Toon) writes in Animation World Magazine:
""...nothing could survive a rain of missiles, any one of which could incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in one swift nuclear flash. The toons were as helpless as we were; just as unprepared to fight such a war, and certainly just as unable to envision the world that would be left following such a conflict."

Modern cartoons, such as South Park, have had something to say about Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, albeit not at the request of the U.S. government, and often quite late in the game.

And all of the wartime political parodying by Merry Melodies and Disney animation make a little quarter-inch cartoon picture of Mein Kampf--less than a simple footnote to a Donald Duck story line--seem insignificant.

But it was significant enough for the Germans to censor it from the 1950s translation of the cartoon. And it is sensitive enough for Hoepfner to be nervous about any attention, concerned that it will be viewed as promoting Naziism, not opposing it--with potentially disastrous results in today's Germany.

Publishing the real Mein Kampf is forbidden in Germany and elsewhere around the world, one way in which the nation is atoning for the past, and keeping neo-Nazis at bay. (Great Britain and the US have separate publishing rights, unaffected by the German law, but even then, many booksellers, such as Amazon, refuse to sell the book).

"Practically no one in Western Europe is able to look down the branches of their family tree without finding a Nazi sympathizer or two, myself included," says Arne. "Humans are humans, and there is no Nazi gene found exclusively in Germans. Still, if anyone bears the shame today, it's them."

And, as far as Hoepfner is concerned, he is more than pleased that an anti-Nazi message be sent by cartoons. "I most definitely have nothing against the message [the cartoon] sends against the Nazis." says Hoepfner, "Definitely not."

And, as Hoepfner points out, the Mein Kampf that Donald stumbled upon was, after all, in a pile of garbage at a junkyard.

The Widows of Srebrenica

2005-06-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

We went to a different cafe this time. Normally, we went to the one with the shaded garden and delicious soup, secreted away on a side street and just up a couple of blocks from the local newspaper, where I was working as a consultant. But on this day it was just me and Alma, my interpreter, so we decided to go someplace I hadn't been before.

I'm sure Alma was drinking fruit tea, I'm sure I was drinking a Coke, I'm sure it was a little cold inside this Bosnian cafe, a little underlit and very smoky. And I'm sure that I've never seen a body so physically overcome with hatred as was Alma's when she recognized the only other two people in the place, two men sitting a few tables away from us, drinking espresso, smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. Two happy, relaxed men.

Alma sat in her chair and shook. Do you see those men over there, she asked me, not waiting for an answer. They've done horrible things. Horrible, horrible things, she kept repeating, her tremors addressing the scope and depth of horror endured.

I listened. Alma told me that these men had committed some of the worst war crimes in Bosnia. She spoke of how they made fathers rape daughters in front of a village forced at gunpoint to watch. Fathers, who surely would have rather been shot 100 times in the head and heart rather than rape their own child, did so, with guns held to their lovely daughters' heads. If you don't rape your child right now, they were told, we will shoot her.

Alma spoke of brothers forced to molest brothers, and mothers forced to watch. Alma's words tumbled out, the hell of Bosnia tipped on her tongue.

Meanwhile, back at the other table, the two men sipped their coffee with steady hands.

This is the final tragedy that is Bosnia, to have to dine and commune and work with the very same people who dragged your brother's naked body through the streets of town, tied with rope to the back of a pickup truck; or who starved you down to sixty pounds in a concentration camp; or who tried to blow you up with a car bomb, taking your legs from you.

But the forced family rapes, starvations and bomb attacks are merely footnotes for the widows of Srebrenica, who lost 8,000 husbands and sons in a matter of hours, while Dutch peacekeeping authorities sat idly by. And as we now see from film footage released last week (Abu Ghraib soldiers aren't the only ones who like to record the torture they induce), the 8,000 men and boys were deeply psychologically tortured before they were killed. And masterminds of the Srebrenica massacre, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic--the Hague's most wanted war criminals--are still on the run, nearly 10 years after the end of the Bosnian war. Reports say both are in hiding, but my colleagues, who live in Karadzic's hometown of Nicsic, Montenegro, laugh at this notion, saying he has, from time to time, dropped in at local cafes.

Alma and another journalist from the newspaper were once talking to me about what it was like when the war started in April 1992, when snipers opened fire on civilians in the streets of Sarajevo. They said it was only in looking back did they see something was amiss. People were leaving town, going on unplanned "vacations". Alma's best friend since she was a toddler--a woman who lived just across the hall--left 10 days before without saying goodbye to her. Apparently, these people had been tipped off to the war's impending onset, allegedly because they had Serbian last names. So these people fled, knowing the loved ones they left behind were in grave danger, but not warning them.

Nearly a year later, Alma got a letter from the friend, who was writing from Belgrade. She cradled her four-month-old, screaming son as she climbed into the bathtub--bracing against a mortar attack that had already begun--and settled in to read the letter. The friend said that things were really hard in Belgrade because she missed her friends in Bosnia, that the prices were higher, and that she was sorry she didn't say goodbye to Alma, but that she hoped she understood. Alma said she was shaking uncontrollably then, too. From the shells raining down on her building, from the betrayal, or from the blinders her former friend wore, she knew not which.

Up until the Srebrenica footage was released, many in the Balkans donned blinders, too, and claimed the massacre didn't happen, or that it was blown out of proportion, or that it was war and, therefore, justified. Tell that now to the pregnant friends who were not warned of imminent and severe danger; and tell it to the widows of Srebrenica who heard 8,000 shots fired, claiming their beloved men and boys one by one. And please tell it to Mr. Karadzic and Mr. Mladic, the next time they are spotted at the local cafe.

Moldova Struggles to Gain Identity

2005-05-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

The people of Moldova like to say that if a stick was planted in the rich Moldovan soil, a bountiful fruit tree would grow.
But to walk on Moldovan soil is to walk on a land that has been mired in struggle since its earliest existence. The land is rich, but the people are poor, having been threatened, fought over, and occupied for nearly its entire existence.
About the size of the state of Maryland, this small country is sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, and wedged between East and West.
Formerly part of the Soviet Union, Moldova has the only freely-elected Communist government in the world.
An estimated 25 percent of the population (four million) have fled to the West in search of jobs, and the money sent back home from workers abroad is one of the few reliable cash flows into the economy.
Culturally and historically, it is rooted with Romania; both having been conquered by the Romans, both still speaking the same language, both sharing the same customs and traditions.
The Russians annexed Moldova during the Bolshevik Revolution, but the Romanians acquired it shortly thereafter, and held onto it until World War II, when the Russians seized it again.
As Stalin did with all lands umbrella'ed under the USSR, he sent scores of Russian workers to Moldova to help industrialize the nation, as well as to force the Russian culture on the region--a form of colonization. Nearly overnight, the Romanian language was replaced with the Russian language, the two bearing no similarity to each other whatsoever.
Moldova gained independence when the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, having its first taste of freedom.
Its first move was to change the official language back to Romanian, but recast it as "Moldovan," so as not to alarm the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic groups into thinking that Moldova would again unite with Romania.
But many worried about just that, including the largely Russian enclave in the region of Transnistria, which chose to break away from Moldova.
Backed by Russian troops, Transnistria waged a short civil war in 1992, in which 300 Moldovans were killed before a peace treaty was signed after only two months.
But the issue is unresolved. There are an estimated 1,500 Russian soldiers still in Transnistria, guarding massive stockpiles of aging armaments, over which the Russians seek to maintain control.
Services into the rest of Moldova are restricted. Mobile phone connections are interrupted, internet sites are blocked, and television reception for Moldovan channels cannot be received. No newspapers from the rest of Moldova can be purchased in Transnistria.
The cities there are like an urban desert, and remind many Moldovans of the days when the Soviets ruled---no cafes, no modern cars, no billboards--none of the hallmarks of a capitalist city.
Crossing the so-called border into the region is like crossing into a lawless no-man's land. Since the "Republic of Transnistria" is not officially recognized by any other nation in the world, passports are not permitted to be stamped. Thus, a guard tears off a small bit of notepad paper, stamps it, and places it inside the passport. It costs 30 cents.
The region is primarily run by a consortium called Sheriff, which is overseen by the powerful Smirnov family. All major enterprises--gas stations, supermarkets, cigarettes brands--are all owned and operated by Sheriff.
The Smirnovs also control customs at the border, a troubling situation for Moldovan authorities, who are struggling to stop the flow of weapons trafficking and human trafficking (people being sold for sex and/or slavery) from their country.

Striking for Media Values

2005-04-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

Moldovan journalists go on hunger strikes to be heard

By Patti McCracken
Published in Global Journalist, Spring 2005

Last summer, Moldova’s state television and radio broadcaster, Teleradio, fired everyone on staff because a law stipulated that such an action was necessary to truly become a public broadcaster. Angry and frustrated by the lack of transparency and the methods of conducting the test, about 400 journalists at Teleradio went on strike.

“The law provided only that the employees be rehired if they passed a test, but it didn’t establish any criteria in order to be able to determine who is professional and who is not,” says Olivia Pirtac, a lawyer specializing in media issues at the Independent Journalism Center in Chisinau.

According to Corina Fusu, a former Teleradio journalist and one of the leaders of the strike, the tests were subjective, depending on the employee. Custodians were asked what they would do if they walked into a room and found a picture of Lenin on the floor. Drivers were asked arbitrary history questions, such as what year Napoleon was born. Fusu, the host of a popular political show, says she came under fire for giving air time to opposition leaders.

“For my test, they examined my film[s],” Fusu says. “They looked at how many seconds each party was on air and asked why more time was not given to [Moldovan President] Voronin.”

“The reporters were not consulted about their views on how the transformation would take place,” says Federica Prina, European Program Officer at Article 19, a London-based media watchdog. “A lot of them felt very marginalized.”

When the strikes first started, the journalists staged a sit-in protest at the Teleradio newsrooms but were ousted when authorities claimed there was a bomb in the building.

Undeterred, the journalists moved their protest to the state radio building and then to the central park in Chisinau, where the number of supporters grew into the thousands.

The strike continued to gain momentum, and many reporters went on a hunger strike for about a month. With permits in hand, strikers set up tents in front of the state radio building to continue their vigil.

Although the reporters staged the protest within a legal framework, friction with police and other authorities continued. One evening violence erupted when attackers raided the protest site, dislodging tents and attempting to remove the strikers. There were reports of beatings, including at least one of a broken leg. Fusu and others are suspicious about the raiders and say they operated with the skill and knowledge of policemen. They find it odd that television cameras were immediately at the site to record the rampage.

Teleradio’s report of the event portrayed the journalists as the aggressors, not the other way around. Teleradio representatives refused to be interviewed for this story.

This was not the first strike for Moldovan Teleradio reporters. Two years ago, about 400 journalists protested increasing censorship of their material. That strike also garnered significant public support and was bolstered by Western nations and the Council of Europe, which put heated pressure on the communist government to privatize Teleradio.

As a result, referendums were passed that would eventually lead to the transformation of the state-run media outlet.

The original referendum drafted by a local broadcast union, APEL, was dismissed by politicians, and parliament ended up passing its own version of the law.

Under APEL’s draft, endorsed and approved by the Council of Europe, the transfer from a state-run medium to a public broadcast outlet would be overseen by a consortium which included communist and opposition parties, Teleradio staff and various other non-governmental organizations.

But this was a sticking point for the ruling party, which demanded that such a committee be comprised solely of the president and parliament representatives. This version of the law was passed after some controversy. The journalism community guardedly supported the new law because it had more positive qualities than negative ones. The end result would, after all, be a public broadcast company.

Under much pressure from the West but lacking the political will to privatize, the communist authorities used the referendums to increase control of the media by using the rehiring process to handpick management and journalists ahead of the 2005 elections, held for March 6.

The Communist Party’s grip on the Moldovan press was getting tighter overall as the election neared. Two months ago, it created a coalition with six other pro-government publications and ordered all state institutions to finance individual subscriptions for all of the employees. According to the online magazine Moldova Azi, each institution had a “ten-day period to comply and report back to their superiors.”

Media NGOs, such as the Independent Journalism Center and the broadcasters union APEL, have been on the forefront of change, including lobbying successfully for the decriminalization of the penal code that eliminates prison terms for libel and slander.

IJC Director Angela Sirbu has written, however, that reporters are still subjected to “hefty financial penalties ... for writing or broadcasting anything that insults a person’s honor or dignity.”

Media monitoring provided by the IJC shows that since Teleradio became a public company last summer, its bias has actually increased by allowing more air time for President Voronin and less for opposition parties.

“We can’t really describe Teleradio as a public organization, despite the [so-called] changes, it has a lot of bias,” says Article 19’s Federica Prina. “It definitely favors the establishment. It does not serve the needs of the public but the needs of the authorities.”

Moldova is not the only post-Soviet country where the press feels pressure from the government. Although the countries of Eastern Europe have evolved in different manners, all suffer in varying degrees from government oppression; all are learning alone to define the role the press will have and to differentiate between independence and opposition when it comes to reporting and interpreting the news.

For instance, the Russian media are still heavily influenced by President Putin. Russia’s major media conglomerate is operated by Gazprom, a mega-gas company that dominates the post-Soviet scene far beyond Russia’s borders.

The Kremlin has come under fire from regional and international journalism communities for controlling the free flow of information during national crises, such as the Kursk submarine disaster, the siege of the Moscow Theater and the horror at Beslan grammar school. The Kremlin has also been criticized lately for generally cracking down on the media’s quest for information.

In Belarus, authorities have openly forced some international media NGOs to pack up and leave. Censorship is the prevailing complaint among journalists and ranges from direct censorship by authorities (including threats), to mincing of words and the ever-present self-censorship, which is evident throughout much of Eastern Europe.

Until a few months ago, Ukrainian media were famous only for the tragic fate of freelance reporter Georgiy Gongadze, who was allegedly murdered by government authorities in September 2000 while reporting on corruption at the highest levels (See IPI Global Journalist Third Quarter 2004). Gongadze became the poster child for oppressed media throughout Europe. Now Ukraine is famous for a peaceful transition of power, largely thanks to reporters for the state media who refused to broadcast the propaganda and misinformation of the ruling party.

Post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe have a short history of independence, only 14 years. Until the new laws work in reality, not just in theory, it may be too early to talk about their media as free.

Street Smarts

2005-03-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

By PATRICIA McCRACKEN
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 16, 2003

The London taxi is a relic

For which my zeal is evangelic.

It's designed for people wearing hats,

And not for racing on Bonneville Flats.

A man can get out, or a lady in;

When you sit, your knees don't bump your chin.

The driver so deep in the past is sunk

That he'll help you with your bags and trunk;

Indeed, he is such a fuddy-duddy

That he calls you Sir instead of Buddy.
--Ogden Nash

A couple of years ago, several London cabbies walked into a hospital and had their heads examined.

Researchers at a local university wanted to find out who had the biggest brain, so 50 volunteers, including 16 London cab drivers -- the study's target group -- agreed to have their gray matter analyzed under an MRI to determine their cerebral size.

As it turns out, London cabbies have big brains, indeed.

Some might argue that they just have big heads and no one needed an MRI to establish that. They also might argue that the big-headedness that sometimes befalls cabbies and compels them to shout opinions has nothing to do with oversized hippocampi.

The hippocampus is the area where memories are made. In birds, this part functions as their nucleus of navigation; it instinctively pilots them along their exact migratory route each season. London taxi drivers have strained their brains to increase their navigational function by enduring the Knowledge, a massive examination that all the nearly 24,000 drivers had to pass before taking the wheel of the 20,000 London Black Cabs.

The test is a memory marathon made up of a series of oral exams that can take up to four years to complete. And it may indeed result in a larger hippocampus, in which to store all the new info.

Knowledge Boys, as the students are called, learn the 1,242 square miles of central London fanning out in a 6-mile radius from Charing Cross, London's epicenter. This includes 25,000 streets, on which the cabbies learn restaurants, pubs, landmarks, butcher shops, pet stores, music shops and retirement homes.

They learn hardware stores, coffee shops, shoemakers, dental offices, electronics stores and plumbers. They have to identify a little-known office on the ninth floor of a little-known building. They have to know where the blue plaque (noting a historic site) for Oscar Wilde is and where the blue plaque for D.H. Lawrence is, and the shortest distance between the two.

Like the Black Cab itself, the Knowledge is a London institution, a rite of passage rooted in 150 years of history and having more to do with the journey than the destination. As defined in Jack Rosenthal's award-winning play, The Knowledge, students set out to learn London and end up learning about themselves.

"The Knowledge never leaves you," says Derek O'Reilly, a London cabby for 12 years who heads the team of trainers at the Knowledge Point School, a Knowledge college of sorts.

"I can still smell the examining rooms. I can still see their (examiners') faces."

Kebabs and kinsmen

He's waiting for Gary Zylberszac, who has called and is a little miffed to find that Shenholds did not order kebabs for him, as he'd asked.

Shenholds, a.k.a. Bozo One (Zylberszac is Bozo Two), hangs up the phone and digs in. "We do this about every Friday night. There are loads of cabs here. Sometimes about 30. Between 8:30 and 10, this is where I'll be."

Sitting in the back of the cab gobbling kebabs, the foot traffic in and out of the car is picking up. Zylberszac finally shows up and sandwiches his huge frame into the back of the car, balancing his kebab plate on his knees the way Shenholds does.

Mentes Safaoglu, a British citizen from Cyprus, climbs inside, as does Alan Farey, a.k.a. Kentucky Fried Chicken (he sports a Colonel Sanders goatee), although both are kebabless.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, a cabby for 26 years, is fed up. Says he is a London taxi driver only because it is a job that offers flexibility.

"You can't get away from (the job). All of a sudden something will happen, and then I hate this bloody job," he says.

Before he steps out of Shenholds' cab, he asks if anyone wants a collection of London Black Cab memorabilia that he can't seem to stop collecting. He doesn't really like it. He doesn't know why he collects it. He's thinking about selling the stuff on eBay. "I have about 80 pieces, even glass ones. I even have a Black Cab candle," he says.

Where is Bonjour Billy, someone asks. Bonjour Billy was expected to show up, but no one has seen him tonight.

Zylberszac is swapping stories with the others about fares they've had, but no one tops his story about the person who got into his cab as a man and exited as a woman.

"It was a bloke that got in. When she got out, it gave me a shock, it did," he says.

He talks about having to make a court appearance and wonders if he will have to wear his badge, an oval brass emblem worn over the left breast that makes Black Cab drivers the five star generals of London's roads. Shenholds assures him that he will have to wear it.

They talk about which taxis they like best.Zylberszac and the others like the newer ones, and Shenholds just likes everything taxi.

The legendary Black Cab. It is the definitive icon in a city of icons. It is nothing a car aspires to be, neither sleek nor fast, yet its style is enduring. Intoxicating.

The same model was produced for nearly 50 years, and the hallmark largesse of the design ensured that a gentleman could get in without removing his bowler hat. It was replaced by an updated version in the late '90s; it costs about $48,000.

A few years ago, unregulated cabs -- called minicabs because of their size relative to the Black Cab -- snuck onto the streets and have been a nuisance to London cabbies ever since.

"I 'ate it when they call 'em 'cab drivers,' you know what I mean?" says London cabby John Purdue. "I ain't got no time for them, and I ain't got time for the people who ride in them.

"If you was ill, you wouldn't call in a witch doctor, would you, to make you better? You'd go with the hospital and all that. These guys ain't got a clue where they're going!"

Recently, the city has moved to regulate the tens of thousands of minicabs, hoping to force out the undesirables. But London cabbies are unswayed.

Like his father, Shenholds has been a London cabby his whole life. It is who he is, how he defines himself. Everything he does is about the London taxi.

As a side business, Shenholds rents his cab for movies, as does Zylberszac, and sells Black Cabs to private citizens, even shipping a few to America. Cabbies also can make an extra $3,000 a year by splashing advertising on the outside of their cars, a contentious move for purists who prefer Black Cabs to stay black.

There are, on average, a whopping 31,000 people in London needing a cab at night, and many are American tourists who have been told to get into only a Black Cab. Taking the advice literally, they let the estimated 30 percent of Black Cabs that sport advertising, or are painted another color, pass by.

The 'Corridor of Fear'

Not all London cabbies swap stories over kebabs in the back seat of their cabs. Many prefer the few remaining cabmen's shelters, the lilliputian edifices that bring to mind the White Castle burger joints that popped up in the United States before the Great Depression, except they're smaller by at least half.

Built about 130 years ago as a means of keeping cabbies out of the pubs, regulations specified that they could be no bigger than a horse and buggy. Hence, up to 30 men sometimes squeeze themselves into a building the size of a Fotomat.

Nine of these historic landmarks are left, and the cabbies still flock to them to grab a bite to eat, rest and unload.

"I like the camaraderie. Everybody is in the same boat as you. They all understand the difficulty of dealing with the public," O'Reilly says.

While the veterans unwind at the cabmen's shelters, a host of Knowledge Boys are at the Public Carriage Office, circling like dogs around two suited men who have just emerged from their respective Appearance Days, a 15-minute exam that takes place in what has for years been known as the "Corridor of Fear."

The examiners ask pickup and dropoff points, and the Knowledge Boy must recite the most direct route, a challenge, as one London newspaper described it, akin to "walking blindfolded up a down escalator."

So the other Knowledge Boys, who study London's tangle of streets on mopeds with maps fastened to their windshields, want to know what was asked. Were you asked about the Finnish church? What about the American Peanut Council -- did they ask you where that was? What about the Ice Cream Federation?

"You go out every day, every morning, and pick up the points, new points," Knowledge Boy Tim Yildiz says. "But then you go down there (for an Appearance) and you forget everything. It wakes me up at night.

"We just want to finish the Knowledge and have a life again."

Trainer O'Reilly agrees that doing the Knowledge is all-consuming, citing a student who said that her husband complained because she accidentally screamed out street names during times when he would rather have heard heard his name.

The Knowledge Boys' Appearance Day nerves will be nothing compared with their first-day jitters. Purdue, who has been driving about 25 years, says he was so nervous he was nearly sick. And O'Reilly drove around for about an hour, afraid to put the taxi light on.

The examiners are drill sergeants, testing the mettle of Knowledge Boys as much as their knowledge of streets, hence a 75 percent dropout rate.

To get more drivers on the streets, Mayor Ken Livingstone has proposed making the Knowledge easier, but even the Knowledge Boys don't want that, despite the 60-hour weeks, the abandoned relationships and the crippling nerves each Appearance Day. It is a personal challenge as much as a professional one.

"The Knowledge is what makes London's taxi drivers what they are: the best in the world," says proud cabby Shenholds.

Knowledge Boy Yildiz still has to endure a few more Appearance Days, writing in a recent e-mail that homeopathic remedies and a gentle examiner helped ease some of the angst a few weeks ago over his most recent exam.

He doesn't know if he will celebrate with friends first or go out on the roads right away, but if all goes as planned, Yildiz expects to join the ranks of "London's best" this summer, whereupon, after a brief ceremony, he will pin the brass badge over his left breast and climb behind the wheel of a London Black Cab.

Then, stepping in line with an old tradition, Yildiz will let his first fare ride for free. Once he turns the taxi light on, that is.

-- Patricia McCracken is a freelance writer living near Vienna.

Bush: Hear What the Europeans Think

2005-02-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

By Patricia McCracken
Virginian Pilot
Published February 20, 2005

HAINBURG, Austria — For 50 years the border that separates Slovakia from Austria was closed, for there stood the Iron Curtain.

On one side of the border is Slovakia’s capital city of Bratislava, a one-time magnet for Vienna’s elite and a city that slumbered through the communist years, awakening to find the world had all but forgotten it.

On the other side is the small medieval town of Hainburg (population 6,000), famous as the boyhood home of composer Josef Haydn and for the 1683 Turkish invasion, which left all but eight citizens dead.

Up through the 1980s, little Hainburg was heaving with 3,000 soldiers who patrolled the border, but now it is quiet, supported by a local tobacco factory, and otherwise itching for a future beyond its rich and colorful past.

The border dividing the two countries will soon be closed again, but only for a few hours while Bratislava hosts the Bush/Putin summit Thursday at the Bratislava Castle.

In the Landman Café on Hainburg’s main street, a couple of Slovaks and a couple of Austrians are having coffee together, talking above the music and the occasional bursts of laughter from the beer-drinking side of the café.

They have gathered together on a Monday night to chat about the upcoming summit and their opinions about George W. Bush.

Karol Homola, a development manager from Bratislava, is happy that the summit is taking place in his city, even if the $9 million price tag is prohibitive for this still struggling democracy.

“It will give Bratislava a chance to be on the world stage, even if only for a few hours. Everyone still thinks we are [together with] Czechoslovakia, or mistake us for Slovenia,” he says.

But Karol and his wife Claudia, a nurse, worry that Bratislava’s moment in the spotlight could make it a target for terrorism, which turns the talk from the summit to the key player, Bush.

“Only after Sept. 11 did everyone realize the world is small and there are no real borders,” says Karol. “And when America attacked Afghanistan, we supported it. But there was not a good enough answer given as to why they attacked Iraq.

“Up to that point, the world supported America. But if they attacked Iraq, who’s next? It scared us. I mean, if America sees there is a problem here or there, shhsshtt, shshht” (he makes a sound something like a machine gun), “they strike everywhere.”

To Rudolph Toth, a retired Austrian shop owner, “Bush has the right intention but he is doing it in the wrong way. For example, if I have a good way of doing things in my home, I cannot go to you and say you have to do it also. And then when you don’t do it, I get mad and hurt you until you do it my way. Forcing you is not the right way.”

Karol grew up under the communist regime. “Look what happened in Eastern Europe. They tried to push an ideology for 50 years and it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. You cannot push people to do something. They have to do it on their own, whether it’s communism or democracy.”

Claudia wonders why Americans cannot see the danger. “Are they so bored by 50 years of peace? And it costs so much money. I see on CNN that it is bankrupting them.”

Harald Leban, an Austrian biochemist and amateur photographer. is concerned that what has happened before will happen again, another world war. “In Europe we are a little bit worried about this. Just finish one war and then maybe you can think about another one,” he says.

“If you are looking for heroes, you start a war. War provokes a sense of nationalism,” says Karol.

“Bush reminds me of the crusaders in the Middle Ages. He is like a conqueror,” says Rudolph. “He has the right idea, but he wants to bring democracy with power and war, and that’s the wrong way. Europeans have another sense. A better way is through diplomacy.”

The group is reminded of Europe’s inaction in Bosnia, and that America stopped a war in Europe’s own back yard, not Europeans. And that it was American intervention that eventually ended World War II.

“But it wasn’t Bush who came to WWII and it wasn’t Bush who came to Bosnia.” says Harald. “We are speaking about Bush. He does it the wrong way. He is too severe. I think what we try to piece together in the last 50 years he has destroyed in a matter of months.”

“It isn’t his [Bush] job to save the world,” adds Claudia.

The conversation moves on to how Americans perceive Europeans, and if they think Americans understand the cultural differences that exist in Europe.

“I don’t think they have a clue,” says Claudia.

Harald disagrees. “It depends on what kind of American. The ones I know understand our cultural system.” he says.

“I don’t think Bush understands us, but his advisers don’t either,” says Karol. “I do think they should do a little research about the world if they want to say something to the world.”

“If we could play the elder brother to the U.S., I think the only thing we could tell them is listen to history,” says Harald. “Do you know of any war that was really won by one side. I mean really won?”

It’s getting late and Harald’s wife has called on his cell phone to see when he’ll be home.

The waitress brings the check, goodbyes are spoken, and the Austrians and Slovaks leave the warmth of the Landman Café and head out into an icy February chill.

Patricia McCracken, based in Austria, free-lances and teaches journalism in Easter Europe and Central Asia. She is from Virginia Beach.

A Brief Chance for Slovakia to be on the World Stage

2005-02-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

By Patti McCracken
Published February 20, 2005
Chicago Tribune

A few years ago I was at a barbecue hosted by an American couple in Bratislava, Slovakia. There weren't many people there, but I remember this one guy, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, now a civilian, who was in Slovakia to help train its military.

He said it was really challenging to train fighter pilots when there wasn't even any fuel for the jets. No fuel for the jets, I repeated, just to be sure of what I had heard. No, he said, the Slovak government had no money to pay for fuel, so the planes were all grounded.

We all laughed about it, how silly it was to train pilots without even leaving the ground, and we carried the joke as far as we could, concocting stories about imaginary simulators, imaginary airplanes and imaginary paychecks.

Since that time, Slovakia has begun to crawl out of the cave of communism and economic disaster, and it has even joined NATO and the EU.

And the same bankrupt military that the American civilian helped train five years ago will patrol the skies of Bratislava when President Bush meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

Throughout much of its existence, Slovakia has been little more than an afterthought to the rest of Europe, just an ingredient added to the mix.

As part of the Austrian empire for centuries, and then united with the Czech Republic and under Russia's communist thumb, Slovakia withered in the shadows.

But several years after the Iron Curtain was yanked down, Slovakia divorced the Czech Republic (amicably) and pointed its radar West along with the others, standing as a single, independent nation for the first time in centuries.

But it has an identity crisis.

"Everyone still thinks we are [together with] Czechoslovakia, or mistake us for Slovenia," says Karol Homola, 34, a development manager from Bratislava. "[The summit] will give Bratislava a chance to be on the world stage, if only for a few hours."

Angst and disdain

The summit puts Slovakia in an unusual position because its tremulous angst over America's next move, whatever that may be, is matched only by its disdain for anything Russian.

Both of these concerns are outmatched by its desire to be visible to the world for a day or two.

Thus, playing host to a summit with a loathed Russian leader and a feared American president--at a crippling cost of $9 million to this struggling economy--is worth it to be featured on CNN.

This will be the first time a sitting American president has set foot on Slovak soil. President Bush will make a speech on Freedom Square in the center of the city, the same spot where perhaps 100,000 people stood up against a mighty power 15 years ago and demanded to have their freedom back, all without a single bullet fired, a single person killed.

Slovakia is a gentle nation, and Bush's demeanor and intensity frighten many here. Most are happy to be released from the grip of Russia but know from experience that such change must come from the will of the people, not the will of other governments.

"Look what happened in Eastern Europe. They tried to push some ideology for 50 years and it didn't happen," Homola said. "It didn't happen. You cannot push people to do something you want. They have to do it on their own."

Despite the politics, Slovaks are more concerned these days with cameras and spotlights. Everyone talks excitedly about how the border with Austria will be closed during the summit (Bratislava abuts the Austrian border), not stopping to realize that it will be the first time the border has been closed since the communist days.

They talk about seeing the Bratislava Castle on television and hope the icy weather will turn warm so people will see the city and want to come visit.

And a Slovak newspaper Web forum goes on ad infinitum about a (mostly) failed attempt by an American conspiracy theorist to organize a protest in Bratislava against the war, as well as against various unfounded claims of government cover-ups.

The first to post a response is a Slovak who writes nothing about the war or his desire to participate in any protest, but requests only that the protest route be scenic so that Bratislava can "advertise herself nicely on this occasion."

So much for civil unrest.

Spending for the summit

This is a beautiful country, but still a poor one, with average salaries still hovering around $200 a month. Nonetheless, the government has somehow found money to fuel the fighter jets, to buy new police and military equipment, and to buy riot gear, ironic for a country of pacifists who gave the world the Velvet Revolution.

The U.S. is bankrupting itself with war, said Homola's wife, Claudia, and so Slovakia will bankrupt itself with a summit between two leaders the people oppose.

But Homola thinks at least some good will come out of it.

"People will get to know Bratislava and will want to come visit. And one thing we are excited about is our president said he will talk to Bush about letting Slovaks enter the U.S. without a visa," Homola said. "No promises, we're told, but maybe."

Can a King Be a Saint?

2005-02-11T03:55:00.000-08:00

By Patti McCracken
St. Petersburg Times

His uncle, Archduke Ferdinand, was shot dead on a street corner in Sarajevo.
If it hadn't been for that--a Serbian militant's bullet-- he never would have ended up being king in command when the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved in a puddle at the end of the World War I; never would have been forced out (doubling back on his decision to abdicate, and thus deposed), and never thrown into exile by the British on the Portuguese island of Madeira. And all of this by the age of 35, which is when he succumbed to pneumonia and where Emperor Charles I story ends.
Except it doesn't end there. Apparently, Charles I lived on after his death in the form of a miracle when, in 1960, a nun in a Brazilian convent, praying for Charles' beatification while clutching a photo of him, went to sleep, and awoke the following morning able to walk for the first time in years.
Thus, the life of Blessed Charles will begin when he is beatified by the Vatican October 3rd, along with Anna Katharina Emmerick, a German mystic whose visions were recorded by a devotee, eventually inspiring Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ."
The Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, the Vatican commission that oversees claims of sainthood, voted in favor of Charles I beatification last December.
The steps to sainthood start at the local level with the regional bishops investigating claims of divinity in the life of the candidate (who must have been deceased for at least five years). The candidate's name then moves forward to a panel of religious leaders, and, if approved, the pope states the candidate is a role model for Roman Catholics.
Beatification is the second step, in which a miracle attributable to the person has to have occurred, as it did with Charles I and the alleged miraculous healing of the Brazilian nun.
For sainthood to be considered, an additional miracle would have to be linked to the person.
But no miracles happened in WWI, certainly not under Emperor Charles I' watch, and his controversial moves to end the war are being highlighted by those who question his political prowess, and thereby his beatification.
"He was too weak for the challenges facing him," says Helmut Rumpler, history professor and Head of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Hapsburg Commission.
"[The war] was not a catastrophe for the Hapsburgs, but it was a catastrophe for a unified central Europe. I'm not sure why he is being beatified."

The war was sparked by the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Ferdinand (gunned down during a tour of recently-annexed Bosnia), and later ignited by the Austrians to avenge his death, but the argument for war had been festering for some time.
Germany was a powerhouse at the end of the 19th century, and consisted of a loose alliance of independent states. The largest kingdom, Prussia, organized a plan to align the German-speaking countries under one nation--a sort of Greater Prussia. This worked, and nearly overnight, Prussia became an economic force to be reckoned with, and upset the balance of power in Europe.
That balance of power included the Hapsburg Dynasty, (the Austrian Empire) which was not under Prussian rule, and whose power reached east over Europe, engulfing countries as far afield as Ukraine.
Strategically isolating neighboring France, Germany/Prussia created a triangular alliance with the Hapsburgs and Russia.
This alliance essentially worked. Until it stopped working. Austria and Russia being on the same side was tricky, since each had an eye out for grabbing the weaker Balkan nations, such as Bosnia and Serbia. So what happened? Russia took it's ball to France's court, later joined by Britain, and World War I was started.
When Charles acceded the throne two years into the war, upon the death of Emperor Franz Josef in 1916, he was met with contempt by many within the royal family's inner circle. They felt he was ill-equipped as a soldier, much less as a leader during "The Great War." Such was the lack of respect, that one of his prime ministers is recorded as having said: "He is 30 years old, looks 20, and thinks like a 10-year-old."
Nevertheless, he was crowned emperor, and having been a cavalry soldier on the front lines, Charles could readily see the Hapsburg's 500-year empirical rule that reached across half of Europe was toppling down.

Wanting to end the war and escape with control over just Austria and Hungary--something he knew his German allies would not support--Charles secretly took his peace plan to France, via letters to his French brother-in-law.
News got out, of course, that Charles was sneaking behind Germany's back, and when it did, he flat-out denied everything.
Angry at his denials, the French published his letters, which, in turn, angered the Germans, and made any further attempt at peace impossible. He was mocked, labeled a fool and a buffoon. The war dragged on for another year and a half, with a final tally of eight and a half million killed, and the Hapsburg dynasty in tatters.
"He was preposterously naive," says R.J. Stove, an Australian author and Hapsburg specialist. "He did lie in a panic over the 1917 peace initiatives, with lasting damage to his cause."
Many critics hold Kaiser Charles responsible for ordering the use of poison gas during the war, making his claims of piousness a farce, but Stove says this is an unfair accusation, and that the gas was used in 1915, prior to his being crowned emperor.
"That procedure had been decided on by the army high command well before [Charles'] ascension to the throne without any consultation with him. But as for chaotic leadership in the war's last days, yes, [there's] no denying that," writes Stove in a recent email.
His empire in ruins, Charles abdicated and fled first to Switzerland, followed by two miserable and disastrous attempts to reclaim the throne. Finally, he was deposed and exiled in Madeira by the British.
In the eventuality that Charles does make it to sainthood, the Austrian newsweekly Profil, has already assigned his patronage, labeling him the "Patron Saint of Losers."
"Charles really was saintly; totally unworldly in private and public; and unworldly saints do not make competent rulers," says Stove. "All very well to be saintly, but if you are a saint and meanwhile your enemies want .... your intestines on a stick, you have problems."
There are those that argue political motives are behind the beatification, claiming that it is an attempt to revive and empower the Catholic Church in Austria. Others say the critics of beatification are pan-Germanic, ever resentful of the Hapsburg Dynasty.
"Some objections against the emperor are practically the same objections that were present in the year 1917," says Erich Leitenberger, Spokesman for the Archdiocese of Vienna.
"In any case, the emperor was the only head of state during the war who did pay some attention to the great appeal for peace by the pope. [The pope] wrote a famous letter to all the heads of state at this time in which he decried the war as a bloodbath and unuseful. Charles I was the only one who took this appeal to heart and tried to make an end to war," says Leitenberger.
It should be noted that Charles I was the only head of state who was a practicing Catholic (except for the Italian king, at a time when Italy had a beef with the Vatican).
"Charles' sheer niceness would have done him in from the beginning, even if he'd become emperor in peacetime," says Stove.
A saintly politician is an oxymoron to most, as politicians do unsaintly things, like sneak behind Germany's back to work out a deal with France, and then lie about it.
"There are some people that are saying it is better not to beatify, in any case, a politician." says Leitenberger, "but others can argue that even politicians need to have a protector in heaven."

Why Should Europeans Like Americans? Meet Vinny

2005-02-10T06:38:00.000-08:00

By Patricia McCracken
Published: Virginian Pilot
January 31, 2005

It didn't always used to be this way, this chasm that has wedged itself between Americans and Europeans.
There was a time when Europe was exotic, and America was admired.
There was a time when our European ancestry was revered for its Germanic exactitude, its French romanticism, its British reserve, its Swedish stoicism; a time when Europeans hailed Americans for their bravery, and found their naivete endearing, not threatening.
But the leadership that Europeans once respected is now perceived as a bully to fear. Deeply affected by a foreign policy in which they have no voice, they have become mistrustful.
If Europeans need to be reassured that Americans are still worthy of admiration, I give them Vinny.
I first met him in a restaurant in Prague's Old Town about 10 years ago. My memory tells me that we all sat around a long wooden table, and that the conversation was mapped out in bits--huddles of twos and threes chatting and laughing, with occasional bursts of laughter spilling happily, liquid-like, around the table.
At the far end of this long table of American journalists sat Vinny, an insurance executive accompanying his journalist wife. He was telling big, bold fish stories, talking too loudly, topping up the wine glasses and throwing his head back when he laughed, letting you know that what you said was really that funny. And then he'd ceremoniously jot down in his memo pad the funny thing that had just been said.
If there was mention of a good place to buy porcelain, out came the memo pad and a stubby pencil to note the address. If there was talk of cheap opera tickets, he noted it. When someone toasted in Czech, the Czech words were dutifully recorded.
To his way of thinking, his notebook was Prague in his pocket, and he was hungry to know everything. This was his first time there and Vinny didn't sit back and absorb the atmosphere; he harpooned it and brought it back to his cave to devour.
Everything that is grace, Vinny is not. He is big with even bigger gestures, loud, unsubtle and clumsy. He sometimes gets drunk on planes, and he slaughters every foreign version of "hello," "goodbye" and "thank you" by injecting it with a heavy dose of Lower East Side.
He is the American in Europe who is the generous tipper. He is the American who chats happily with the nonplused babushka at the fruit stand, just because it feels good to be friendly. Out of loyalty, he buys fruit only from her.
He is the American who buys Gameboys for an East-European taxi driver's kids. He is demonstrative and driven by emotion; he is sincere; he has a naive belief that good conquers evil; that hard work is the answer to most of the world's problems, and that it is essential to stop and help strangers in need. He is an American.
Like Vinny, I am an American abroad. It would seem that Europeans are intrigued and repulsed by us; they admire our ambition and are turned off by our excess.
But their biggest complaint is the arrogance. U.S. businessmen are patronizing to their European colleagues; American backpackers on the Tube in London make certain their American accents are heard; and imagine the horror when there is no air conditioning in the shops, or worse, credit cards are not accepted.
But to know what that arrogance is born of is to understand that the heart of the American psyche is rooted in the first band of ragtag Englishmen to wash up on the shores of Jamestown. It was bold, it took ambition, individualism, competitiveness, a flare for the dramatic and boastful bravado. It took bravery, ingenuity and generosity of spirit.
Pilgrims landing in Virginia or Cubans floating ashore in Florida. These are our forefathers, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters. This is our gene pool. We pound our chests. But we want the world to assess us and find that they like us, to desire to be us. Europe is old and we are young and youth is envied, or so we think.
A couple of years ago I flew into the Republic of Georgia to work in a journalism training program directed by Vinny's wife, Margie. The packed plane arrived in Tbilisi at 4 a.m., and most of the passenger luggage did not arrive with it. I worried if my driver would still be there when I finished the paperwork.
And then Vinny appeared. Having bypassed security, he was waving furiously at me and shouting my name. I hadn't seen him in eight years. I couldn't stop grinning.
On the way into Tbilisi I sat in the back of the car and watched as the sun rose over the city. I watched David, the Georgian driver, watch Vinny. I saw how Vinny put his arm on the back of the seat, draped behind small David in a brotherly manner.
I watched David pop in a Beatles cassette and I watched how the back of their two heads bobbed side to side as they sang together to a worn-out, tinny "Michelle, My Belle."

Saying Goodbye to CaptainKangaroo

2005-02-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

Virginian Pilot
By Patti McCracken

I was old enough to read, but just barely. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the converted garage, poring over the contents of the thin tattered box in front of me. I used to love to go through this box. I didn't know then that I was nurturing what would become a lifelong obsession of peering into other people's lives.
This box was evidence of a time before I was born, and of a family before I was part of it. It no longer would shut properly, sagging and bulging with the weight of a mother's keepsakes of firsts; tattered edges proof that she, too, took comfort in looking back at these early years.
It was one of their baby books. I don't remember whose, but it doesn't matter because all of them held what captivated me most: two 9 x 12 photos--one of John F. Kennedy and one of Captain Kangaroo.
I don't know why Captain Kangaroo was included. Did he visit Virginia Beach, or Richmond? Did someone send away for his photo? And who was Bob Keeshan, the name I had just learned to read printed at the bottom of the photograph?
I only know that this photo connected me to my brothers and sisters to the same degree that JFK's photo alienated me from them. I was born a year after the president was shot, and had only my mother's compelling grief--which had her putting photos of him in her childrens' baby books--to understand the depth of their sadness and reverence.
But I awoke every school day morning to Captain Kangaroo, just like they had. I sat sleepy-eyed at the counter over a bowl of Quaker Instant Oatmeal; nearby was my father, sitting on the couch, elbows perched on his long legs, reading the paper and smoking his Luckies. I was bridged between the bright lights of the kitchen and a darkened family room, where Moose, ping pong balls, Mr. Greenjeans, Dancing Bear and Captain Kangaroo joined us. On these mornings, I don't remember my mother's clatter, nor my five older siblings' noisy rush to school. I only remember kitchen lights, my father's presence and Captain Kangaroo, a name that still rolls off my tongue as one word. Those sleepy weekday mornings were bubbles of contentment that only a five-year-old has the right in which to exist.
He was the little kid's Walter Cronkite. We trusted him with all of our being to do what we expected him to do; to stand under ping pong balls falling from the ceiling; to show us Tom Terrific doing something heroic again, and to have Mr. Greenjeans teach us another lesson of loving animals.
We trusted Captain Kangaroo to deliver us safely to a place within ourselves that made us content and comforted. We entered our glorious bubbles. Having no control over our fate even ten short minutes into the future, we knew we could depend on Captain Kangaroo to be an anchor for us day after day.
And I loved him.
I loved the red jacket, the straight bangs, the sideburns that occupied most of his face, his velvet voice. His lovely sense of calm.

I live abroad, and went out last weekend in Holland with an American friend. I told her Captain Kangaroo had died, and as our Dutch friends that joined us asked who he was, we simply locked eyes and clinked our two glasses together. Who was he? Our childhood. Our CaptainKangaroo.

Injustice lives, but so does he

2005-02-10T06:27:00.000-08:00

Chicago Tribune,
December 24, 2000

By Patricia McCracken
Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina

He is a brave man. He knows that he is brave and that to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous and false, and he is, he believes, a man of truth. But Zeljko Kopanja is also a wanted man.
On Oct. 22 of last year Kopanja, editor-in-chief of one of the largest independent dailies in Bosnia, left his home around 8 a.m. to meet a friend at a cafe before work, a custom he practiced nearly every workday morning. He began walking to the cafe but, for reasons he still does not understand, he returned to the apartment to take his car instead. He turned the key in the ignition and the car exploded. One and a half kilos of TNT packed beneath the vehicle blew off both of his legs and, at one point, left him clinically dead. It was the day after his 45th birthday.
"It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I had decided to walk. But after about 10 or 15 meters, it happened like a force, some strange force told me to go to the car, and I decided not to walk. I turned on the car. I don't know if I moved it or not, then I heard the explosion--it turned out that the whole town heard the explosion--and I looked over and saw my right leg in the front passenger's seat. And I thought, 'OK, I don't have any pain,' but I turned to the door, and I screamed for my wife to help me. And then I wondered why I was calling for her because she was on the fifth floor of the apartment and could not hear me."
She did hear him, that's how loudly he screamed.
Kopanja may be brave, but he is also a traitor to some. He is a Bosnian Serb, in a Serb-controlled area who had the audacity to investigate and expose war crimes blamed on members of his own ethnic group.
There is a fragile peace in Bosnia, one that is enforced by 45,000 UN troops. But the peace here is superficial because the war rages on in other ways, perhaps most notably against the independent media.
This is a story about bravery, but to appreciate the profound courage of one man, one must also understand the blackness of the human heart, otherwise known as war.
During four years of civil war, nearly 10 percent of the population were killed, and most of those 300,000 people were civilians. One million fled; 800,000 are still considered refugees in their own country six years after the war ended. But the numbers don't evoke the atrocities. They speak to the loss, but not the trauma.
Most of the war crimes were carried out in small mountain villages, areas that had been ethnically mixed for as long as anyone can remember. Muslims, Croats and Serbs worked together, sent their children to the same schools, shared the same apartment buildings, shared friendships.
But during the war all three ethnic groups took up arms against each other, a plan masterminded by a powerful and corrupt few. They fought each other in horrific ways. There was no set battlefield because every inch of space--churches, homes, shops--breathed war. This went on for four years.
As a matter of survival, it became essential for each ethnic group to live among its own. Exchanges were hastily organized, wherein busloads of minorities were gathered and sent to live in areas dominated by their ethnic group.
During one such exchange, a large group of Muslim men had gathered to be transported to another area, their wives and children having already sought refuge in other countries. The men boarded the bus and took off in the direction of their new village. They never arrived.
Serb policement allegedly shot and killed each one of them, 186 in all.
Two years ago Kopanja was tipped off to this massacre. He used to live in the nearby town where the killing took place, and he went there to talk to the people he knew, many of whom, he says, produced evidence of the crime, information he felt he could not ignore. He published an article that pointed the finger at his own ethnic group, sparking the first in a series of death threats that, one year later, nearly cost him his life and did take his legs.
"It's important for American journalists and other Americans to understand what he did," says Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "We have all read stories by foreign correspondents about human-rights abuses. It's a dangerous business to report on that, but it is a deadly business for somebody like Zeljko to report on that. He is a Serb and what he wrote about is atrocities by other Serbs. It is hard for us to understand ... but it is an incredibly charged political climate there."
Kopanja had previously written articles that had upset the authorities, and he would continue to report on war crimes and corruption. he was often summoned to the police station and urged to stop putting his nose where it did not belong and ordered to keep quiet about these visits with the police.
"They used to say, 'Don't tell anybody you were here.' After such talks I would go to the cafe, have a whiskey, and by the time I got downtown, everybody would know what had happened," he said, chuckling.
"But," he says more seriously, "that was the only way for protection, because they knew if I accepted their rules of the game, I would be punished---I would be like a servant."
At 46, Kopanja is Hollywood handsome, with crisp white hair and a quick smile. He leaks charisma. His office is always heaving with ringing telephones and cigarette smoke, and there never seem to be enough chairs to go around. Kopanja holds court from behind his desk, cigarette always in hand, wickedly strong coffee always within reach. For anyone familiar with the pace of a newsroom, the turbulence of Kopanja's office is routine, almost soothing. He is a newsman.
Kopanja never intended to become a journalist. He was a Yugoslav soccer star, "a nice player," he says, referring to his use of technique instead of force, who only entered journalism after being sidelined with hepatitis in his mid-20s.
"I became a journalist by accident. One of my friends asked me if I wanted to be a correspondent for a radio station in Sarajevo, and then I fell in love with journalism. I was infected."
Along with a colleague, Kopanja started his own newspaper, the Independent News, shortly after the Dayton peace accord was signed in 1995. He says it was a good time to start a newspaper. The authorities did not take his publication seriously and were happy to have the presence of an independent newspaper project the appearance of democracy.
As the Independent News began breaking stories on corruption and alleged Bosnian Serb war crimes, the authorities began to crack down on the troublesome news organization.
The independent news media in Bosnia face uphill battles on many fronts.
Most important, some newspapers, including Kopanja's, only have access to the state-run printing press, which often tips off officials about controversial news stories before the newspaper hits the stands. Kiosk operators have been beaten for trying to sell copies of Kopanja's newspaper.
Regardless of the mounting threats and difficulties Kopanja and his staff faced, they decided it was more dangerous not to expose the war crimes. "We figured that the best thing for Serbs here would be to distinguish between the war criminals and the Serbs as a whole. Not every Serb is a war criminal."
full force, and then it was hell for a month.
He is reflective and talks eloquently about the aftermath of the attack. There is physical proof of his vulnerability, and his acceptance of it lends a certain openness and intimacy to conversation.
There is a moment Kopanja says he will never forget. He had been in the hospital for three weeks. Plans were being made for him to rehabilitate in Austria, and someone was arranging for prosthesis fittings. he was in great physical pain, his wounds having not yet begun to heal. After the horror of the last several weeks, he was feeling afraid and confused.
He called his friends to come get him and together they left the hospital and took him in the wheelchair through the town. To be outside with the people, to be with his friends again, that helped. "I just needed to know I was still Zeljko," he said.
"After all these articles about war crimes, I had been expecting someone would threaten me or beat me up, but I didn't think they would try to kill me.
"I don't hate the man that did this to me. I don't know what I would do if I saw him, but I could not hate him. My life's mission is about love and freedom in my society. I cannot then have hate in my heart."
Kopanja could be described as the Martin Luther King, Jr. of East European press freedom, willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice for what he believes. freedom over oppression, unity over division, love over hate. Unfortunately, he is not the only martyr: In 1999, 34 reporters around the world were killed in the line of duty and 19 deaths are being investigated as suspicious. Few statistics are kept on the people like Kopanja--the ones who escape death but not tragedy.
The status of the investigation of the near-fatal attack is at about the same place it was on Oct. 22, 1999. The mangled mess of the car was sent to Scotland Yard but forensic tests yielded no clear results.
In the last 13 months Kopanja has expanded his paper, both in size and distribution. The Dayton accord divided Bosnia into two entities split on ethnic lines--the Republic of Srpska, the western Serb region where Kopanja lives, and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which includes Sarajevo, with a majority Muslim and Croat population. Kopanja's is the first independent newspaper to be distributed in both areas, a significant feat.
Fittingly, he launched the expansion to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the car bombing.

The Death of a Macedonian Hero

2005-02-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

Virginian Pilot/KRT Newswire
Commentary
March 8, 2004

By Patti McCracken

This is Tino's story to tell. He wouldn't think the story needed to be told, because it is everywhere to him, engulfing him, swallowing him, scaring him, shocking and numbing him. He keeps seeing the plane wreckage, and the line of people that snakes around the block, all waiting in the winter cold to lay flowers, light candles, sign the guestbook; and he keeps hearing the pundits chattering about how this could ever have happened and what comes next. And he keeps puffing cigarette after cigarette, running both hands through his brilliant black hair, wondering himself what comes next, how this could happen. Puffing and pacing, puffing and pacing, arms folded across his chest, a chest encasing a pain-filled heart.

Tino doesn't realize that thousands of miles away America is not having the same images of a fallen hero rained down upon them minute upon minute; he doesn't realize that they are not shocked by this, nor saddened. He does not realize that America is a very large island and that Macedonia is in a Balkan bubble, and that what often happens in this small country can only, inevitably, be but a wispy blink to this large land. It is not a lack of heart--for America has heart--but a vast number of miles and an intimidating blur of geography and history which defines the gap.

So on behalf of Tino and his two million grief-stricken countrymen, I will tell the story of Macedonia's heartache.

Skopje is a city of just under 600,000 residents--about the size of Washington, DC---but the complicated ethnic mix of Albanian-Macedonians and Slav-Macedonians, and the post-Yugoslav politics of identity, have burdened this capital city and the nation with often more weight than it can withstand. No time was worse than when I arrived in the spring of 2001. The small plane from Vienna to Skopje was filled with reporters, some of whom I recognized from television. And, as Tino later joked, when Christian Amanpour shows up (CNN's senior international correspondent), you know there's trouble.

I was there not as a reporter, but as a journalism trainer, brought in by one of the many Western media organizations that help train local journalists in developing democracies. Tino, an ace reporter, was to be my interpreter, a job that helped him earn the cash he needed in this dead economy.

My first assignment was a week spent at Dnevnik, a popular Skopje newspaper. On the first or second day, I sat working with a young journalist when some noise prompted much of the newsroom staff to move to a window overlooking a main street that was rapidly filling with ethnic Albanian protesters. It was quick, so quickly that the street filled, and I only remember that the young journalist backed away from the window to her desk, resumed her tasks, and said repeatedly that there was going to be a war. She just knew it, there was going to be war. Her reaction, tinged with a troubling thrill, brought me back to days spent in East Coast hurricanes: a morbid pre-storm excitement until one surveys the human loss in the aftermath.

Macedonia was the only nation to peacefully split from Yugoslavia, and now, after so many years of tiptoeing so as not to awaken a sleeping beast, it was finally about to happen. After 10 years of peaceful independence, when 300,000 lives were lost in wars in the former Yugoslav states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovo province (not including the NATO bombings in Serbia), Macedonia was about to get its due with a Balkan civil war of its own. "It was only a matter of time before this happened." said Tino.

The fighting had been escalating for months, and the country now teamed with reporters waiting for war to be declared. It was an international deathwatch.

Tino and I went to an ethnic-Albanian newsweekly, and from outside the building I spotted fire up in the hills, or maybe it was just smoke I saw. "That's Tetova," Tino said. "Those are the small villages you see on tv being burned." I thought I could smell them, the burning villages.

My work was interrupted by trips to the US Embassy, a rare occasion when reporters and government officials worked together--this time to make a plan to reinstall tv and radio transmitters that kept getting shot down. The problem was how to reinstall, since no one was willing to risk a sniper's bullet.

My downtown apartment was across the street from an army barracks, and I would awake mornings to the sound of gunfire, as the conscripts practiced their shots. I stopped setting my alarm clock, certain that the rifle fire would get me out of bed. A war was coming.

I wrote daily emails to my nieces and nephews in America, trying to explain what was going on, comparing the ethnic-Albanian demand for more rights with African-Americans and the civil rights movement. But no reference worked because 250+ years of history is incomparable to 2,000 years. A piece of land that has been carved up, claimed and reclaimed by conquerors and crusaders and empires and war divvying--and all manner of invaders and occupiers bringing their own customs and own languages--makes for an ethnic mix polluted with old rivalries that can no longer be distilled. Yet they exist and get morphed into modern rivalries, and bring war.

But hope comes along in the form of a hero, and in the form of Boris Trajkovski.

Trajkovski had been elected president of Macedonia less than two years before the rebel fighting began, and by a clear majority of voters on both sides of the ethnic divide.

In Skopje he was often known, endearingly, as Boris. He was known as a man of fairness, a man of tolerance and reason. He would take this nation that stood teetering on the edge of all-out war--the final, explosive powder keg of the sad Balkans--and bring it back to a nation of peace. In a time of civil uprising, he was their Martin Luther King. He was the man to whom Macedonians looked to save them from themselves.

When rebels burned villages and threatened moves on Skopje, he moved swiftly, but, to most minds, fairly. He prepared for war, but planned for peace.

Javier Solana, EU foreign affairs chief and Trajkovski's partner in the Macedonian peace agreement, was shocked at the news last week of Trajkovski's death in a plane crash over Bosnia. "He was a man of great passion and vision," said a visibly shaken Solana.

Before I left Skopje that spring of 2001, before there was a peace agreement, and before there was an incomprehensible plane crash three years later, Tino and I walked along a sidestreet in the city. We stopped for Tino to show me some graffiti he had spotted. In gigantic blue letters, it read: "We love you, Boris"

We paused. "If anyone can stop this war from happening," said Tino, "It's him."

Street Smarts

2005-02-10T05:36:00.000-08:00

BY: PATRICIA McCRACKEN
St. Petersburg Times

The London Taxi
The London taxi is a relic
For which my zeal is evangelic.
It's designed for people wearing hats,
And not for racing on Bonneville Flats.
A man can get out, or a lady in;
When you sit, your knees don't bump your chin.
The driver so deep in the past is sunk
That he'll help you with your bags and trunk;
Indeed, he is such a fuddy-duddy
That he calls you Sir instead of Buddy.
Ogden Nash

A couple of years ago, several London cabbies walked into a hospital and had their heads examined.

Researchers at a local university wanted to find out who had the biggest brain, so 50 volunteers, including 16 London cab drivers É the study's target group É agreed to have their gray matter analyzed under an MRI to determine their cerebral size.

As it turns out, London cabbies have big brains, indeed.

Some might argue that they just have big heads and no one needed an MRI to establish that. They also might argue that the big-headedness that sometimes befalls cabbies and compels them to shout opinions has nothing to do with oversized hippocampi.

The hippocampus is the area where memories are made. In birds, this part functions as their nucleus of navigation; it instinctively pilots them along their exact migratory route each season. London taxi drivers have strained their brains to increase their navigational function by enduring the Knowledge, a massive examination that all the nearly 24,000 drivers had to pass before taking the wheel of the 20,000 London Black Cabs.

The test is a memory marathon made up of a series of oral exams that can take up to four years to complete. And it may indeed result in a larger hippocampus, in which to store all the new info.

Knowledge Boys, as the students are called, learn the 1,242 square miles of central London fanning out in a 6-mile radius from Charing Cross, London's epicenter. This includes 25,000 streets, on which the cabbies learn restaurants, pubs, landmarks, butcher shops, pet stores, music shops and retirement homes.

They learn hardware stores, coffee shops, shoemakers, dental offices, electronics stores and plumbers. They have to identify a little-known office on the ninth floor of a little-known building. They have to know where the blue plaque (noting a historic site) for Oscar Wilde is and where the blue plaque for D.H. Lawrence is, and the shortest distance between the two.

Like the Black Cab itself, the Knowledge is a London institution, a rite of passage rooted in 150 years of history and having more to do with the journey than the destination. As defined in Jack Rosenthal's award-winning play, The Knowledge, students set out to learn London and end up learning about themselves.

"The Knowledge never leaves you,'' says Derek O'Reilly, a London cabby for 12 years who heads the team of trainers at the Knowledge Point School, a Knowledge college of sorts.

"I can still smell the examining rooms. I can still see their (examiners') faces.''

Kebabs and kinsmen

It is Friday night. A general dampness that hangs in the air from the previous day's rain makes everything appear shiny under the streetlights, and London cabby Ray Shenholds steps into the back of his Black Cab and gets himself situated, nice and comfy. On his knees he levels a plastic plate of kebabs, which he has just gotten from a cabby hangout called Effes.

He's waiting for Gary Zylberszac, who has called and is a little miffed to find that Shenholds did not order kebabs for him, as he'd asked.

Shenholds, a.k.a. Bozo One (Zylberszac is Bozo Two), hangs up the phone and digs in. "We do this about every Friday night. There are loads of cabs here. Sometimes about 30. Between 8:30 and 10, this is where I'll be.''

Sitting in the back of the cab gobbling kebabs, the foot traffic in and out of the car is picking up. Zylberszac finally shows up and sandwiches his huge frame into the back of the car, balancing his kebab plate on his knees the way Shenholds does.

Mentes Safaoglu, a British citizen from Cyprus, climbs inside, as does Alan Farey, a.k.a. Kentucky Fried Chicken (he sports a Colonel Sanders goatee), although both are kebabless.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, a cabby for 26 years, is fed up. Says he is a London taxi driver only because it is a job that offers flexibility.

"You can't get away from (the job). All of a sudden something will happen, and then I hate this bloody job,'' he says.

Before he steps out of Shenholds' cab, he asks if anyone wants a collection of London Black Cab memorabilia that he can't seem to stop collecting. He doesn't really like it. He doesn't know why he collects it. He's thinking about selling the stuff on eBay. ""I have about 80 pieces, even glass ones. I even have a Black Cab candle,'' he says.

Where is Bonjour Billy, someone asks. Bonjour Billy was expected to show up, but no one has seen him tonight.

Zylberszac is swapping stories with the others about fares they've had, but no one tops his story about the person who got into his cab as a man and exited as a woman.

"It was a bloke that got in. When she got out, it gave me a shock, it did,'' he says.

He talks about having to make a court appearance and wonders if he will have to wear his badge, an oval brass emblem worn over the left breast that makes Black Cab drivers the five star generals of London's roads. Shenholds assures him that he will have to wear it.

They talk about which taxis they like best. Zylberszac and the others like the newer ones, and Shenholds just likes everything taxi.

The legendary Black Cab. It is the definitive icon in a city of icons. It is nothing a car aspires to be, neither sleek nor fast, yet its style is enduring. Intoxicating.

The same model was produced for nearly 50 years, and the hallmark largesse of the design ensured that a gentleman could get in without removing his bowler hat. It was replaced by an updated version in the late '90s; it costs about $48,000.

A few years ago, unregulated cabs É called minicabs because of their size relative to the Black Cab É snuck onto the streets and have been a nuisance to London cabbies ever since.

"I 'ate it when they call 'em cab drivers, you know what I mean?'' says London cabby John Purdue. "I ain't got no time for them, and I ain't got time for the people who ride in them.

"If you was ill, you wouldn't call in a witch doctor, would you, to make you better? You'd go with the hospital and all that. These guys ain't got a clue where they're going!''

Recently, the city has moved to regulate the tens of thousands of minicabs, hoping to force out the undesirables. But London cabbies are unswayed.

Like his father, Shenholds has been a London cabby his whole life. It is who he is, how he defines himself. Everything he does is about the London taxi.

As a side business, Shenholds rents his cab for movies, as does Zylberszac, and sells Black Cabs to private citizens, even shipping a few to America. Cabbies also can make an extra $3,000 a year by splashing advertising on the outside of their cars, a contentious move for purists who prefer Black Cabs to stay black.

There are, on average, a whopping 31,000 people in London needing a cab at night, and many are American tourists who have been told to get into only a Black Cab. Taking the advice literally, they let the estimated 30 percent of Black Cabs that sport advertising, or are painted another color, pass by.

The ""Corridor of Fear''

Not all London cabbies swap stories over kebabs in the back seat of their cabs. Many prefer the few remaining cabmen's shelters, the lilliputian edifices that bring to mind the White Castle burger joints that popped up in the United States before the Great Depression, except they're smaller by at least half.

Built about 130 years ago as a means of keeping cabbies out of the pubs, regulations specified that they could be no bigger than a horse and buggy. Hence, up to 30 men sometimes squeeze themselves into a building the size of a Fotomat.

Nine of these historic landmarks are left, and the cabbies still flock to them to grab a bite to eat, rest and unload.

"I like the camaraderie. Everybody is in the same boat as you. They all understand the difficulty of dealing with the public,'' O'Reilly says.

While the veterans unwind at the cabmen's shelters, a host of Knowledge Boys are at the Public Carriage Office, circling like dogs around two suited men who have just emerged from their respective Appearance Days, a 15-minute exam that takes place in what has for years been known as the ""Corridor of Fear.''

The examiners ask pickup and dropoff points, and the Knowledge Boy must recite the most direct route, a challenge, as one London newspaper described it, akin to "walking blindfolded up a down escalator.''

So the other Knowledge Boys, who study London's tangle of streets on mopeds with maps fastened to their windshields, want to know what was asked. Were you asked about the Finnish church? What about the American Peanut Council É did they ask you where that was? What about the Ice Cream Federation?

"You go out every day, every morning, and pick up the points, new points,'' Knowledge Boy Tim Yildiz says. "But then you go down there (for an Appearance) and you forget everything. It wakes me up at night.

"We just want to finish the Knowledge and have a life again.''

Trainer O'Reilly agrees that doing the Knowledge is all-consuming, citing a student who said that her husband complained because she accidentally screamed out street names during times when he would rather have heard heard his name.

The Knowledge Boys' Appearance Day nerves will be nothing compared with their first-day jitters. Purdue, who has been driving about 25 years, says he was so nervous he was nearly sick. And O'Reilly drove around for about an hour, afraid to put the taxi light on.

The examiners are drill sergeants, testing the mettle of Knowledge Boys as much as their knowledge of streets, hence a 75 percent dropout rate.

To get more drivers on the streets, Mayor Ken Livingstone has proposed making the Knowledge easier, but even the Knowledge Boys don't want that, despite the 60-hour weeks, the abandoned relationships and the crippling nerves each Appearance Day. It is a personal challenge as much as a professional one.

"The Knowledge is what makes London's taxi drivers what they are: the best in the world,'' says proud cabby Shenholds.

Knowledge Boy Yildiz still has to endure a few more Appearance Days, writing in a recent e-mail that homeopathic remedies and a gentle examiner helped ease some of the angst a few weeks ago over his most recent exam.

He doesn't know if he will celebrate with friends first or go out on the roads right away, but if all goes as planned, Yildiz expects to join the ranks of "London's best'' this summer, whereupon, after a brief ceremony, he will pin the brass badge over his left breast and climb behind the wheel of a London Black Cab.

Then, stepping in line with an old tradition, Yildiz will let his first fare ride for free. Once he turns the taxi light on, that is.

ÊPatricia McCracken is a freelance writer living near Vienna.

Where the Wind Meets the Willows

2005-02-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

By Patti McCracken
St. Petersburg Times

At the start of his show, the deejay urged listeners to call in and
share romantic fiascos. The calls slowly trickled in, but toward the
end of the hourlong show, Rhonda called to rat out her husband,
Sam, who had given her a can of beans for their 10th wedding
anniversary.

The story was not the humdinger that another caller recounted
about a date showing up in drag, but this was, after all, about Sam.
And nearly everyone in this English village knows Sam. He's
Cookham's grocer and mailman.

Through the window of his store, he watches mothers hurry their
children to the schoolyard, then sees them shuffle back again to
pick them up. ""We'll stop at Sam's for a treat,'' is a common refrain
to sooth tired or hurt little ones. He sees BMWs careering around
the blind curve in front of his shop, and people on horseback
trotting up behind, waving to him through the plate glass.

So when Rhonda went on the radio and revealed the sins of her
husband, he was sure to get an earful from the ladies the following
day and a sympathetic nod from the gents.

The radio station to which Rhonda ""spilled the beans'' about Sam
is a makeshift, temporary operation set up in the waiting room of
Cookham's tiny, whistle-stop train station.

With a four-week license from the British Broadcasting Authority,
scores of volunteers scrambled to get the ""Station at the Station''
up and running. Only two volunteers have any professional radio
experience; the rest is a hodge-podge of nearly 500 helpers, all
baffled by the buttons and dials, voice-overs, presentation
techniques, timing and sound checks.

They've never been on the radio, much less hosted a program. But
here they are, cranking out show after show, urgently arranging for
friends to call in during a talk program, finding last-minute
substitute guests, even performing a three-act play, complete with
sound effects.

And so it goes for a month, with the vicar deejaying the breakfast
show, a local writer hosting a jazz program, children dropping by
after school to tell jokes on the air. And, of course, there is Rhonda
calling in to let Cookham know how romantically challenged their
mailman is.

The village of Cookham, which includes two off-shoots, Cookham
Rise and Cookham Dean, is an affluent, tight-knit community
tucked into the shadows of Windsor along the banks of the Thames
River. No one knows for sure the source of Cookham's magnetic
charm. Some say that this village, long a haven for artists and
writers, is a wellspring of creative energy, thus its appeal. Others
speculate that the beauty and history of the region are what makes
it so attractive.

Still others would argue that the creativity, beauty and history
pale in comparison to the all-around goodness of the place, an
untouched, well-preserved innocence that in this world of bombings
and mass shootings is indeed a rare find.

They would all be right. They might argue about it, but they would
all be right.

The artistic undercurrent of this community is strong and is tied
to two of England's famous native sons: Sir Stanley Spencer, a
quirky contemporary artist best known as the subject of the
Broadway play, Spencer, and Kenneth Grahame,
author of the beloved children's classic, Wind in the Willows.

Grahame, who grew up in Cookham and set his book here,
provides a glimpse of what life was like in this village at the turn of
the century. When Grahame wrote his tender story of Wind in the
Willows, about the struggle to maintain a genteel lifestyle while
surrounded by immoral and rowdy neighbors, he was describing the
conflict of Cookham and its splinter village Cookham Dean. A
hundred years ago, Cookham was divided between the haves and
have-nots, the more civilized residents in the main village mortified
by the bawdy behavior of the valley dwellers in Cookham Dean.

"There yet remained in Cookham Dean a number of cottages, with
inhabitants as rude and lawless almost as their gypsy neighbors,''
wrote historian Stephen Darby in the early 1900s.

Cookham Dean was a rough gig back then. Home to thieves and
drunkards, there was peril lurking around every corner. But what a
difference a century makes. The Dean is now the most posh of this
wealthy region, brimming with large estates and Range Rovers.

Much of the lush land in the Dean, and indeed all of Cookham, is
owned and maintained by the National Trust, a department similar
to the National Park Service. Numerous footpaths wind through
the lightly wooded areas and along the river. Within walking
distance is Cliveden, a stately mansion on a massive 375 acres and
once the home of American millionaires Nancy and Waldorf Astor.

There is still a hint of a division between the main village and the
splintered Dean, this time between the haves and the have-mores.
But the troublemakers left so long ago that no one alive remembers
any such type residing in Cookham.

Crime is talked about here, about how awful it is getting and what
is the world coming to. Of course they are talking about the crime in
London. Crime happens so rarely here that when a resident had a
briefcase stolen, her 6-year-old son was traumatized by nightmares
of the event. He didn't see the crime … just the thought of someone
actually doing something like that had never crossed his young
mind before.

The villagers are proud to live here, proud of Cookham's offbeat
history. Few of them know, for instance, that Cookham was once a
favorite getaway for kings; nor do they know exactly what the
Americans did when they were stationed here in World War II. But
ask them about Toad Hall, the Thames mansion featured in Wind
and the Willows, and they gleefully bring you to the front doorstep.
Some even know about the palatial cowshed built by the Astors to
obstruct their view of the village rooftops.

But residents are especially proud of artist Stanley Spencer.
They'll tell you in a flash the story of his bizarre life (he left his wife
for a lesbian), or how he used to walk along High Street carrying his
easel and paints in a beat-up baby carriage. They are proud of the
art he created. So proud, in fact, that his version of The Last
Supper, once considered blasphemous because the disciples' heads
were adorned with real-life Cookham faces, is now hanging
prominently in the parishchurch. A copy of it, at least. The real one
is in the popular Stanley Spencer Gallery on High Street.

"Depending on who you talk to about Stanley, you'll get a
different impression of the type of man he was,'' says Diana Benson,
a gallery patron who gives village tours. ""One person who knew him
says he was nothing but a dirty talker and a groper. Another woman
speaks fondly of him, remembering how lovely he was with
children.''

There may be differing opinions, but everyone here tells stories
about Stanley as if they were in the room with him when it
happened.

The people of Cookham seem to know they are on to a good thing.
The breakneck speed of life in 2000 blends with old world charm
and grace here. Fax machines, cell phones and laptops are a
common sight in the village, but the pace they suggest is tempered
by this gentle environment.

There is still a place in the world where children pick blackberries
on the way to school, or dress up as chimney sweeps for the town
Fair instead of as Luke Skywalker or Ginger Spice.

There is still a place where walking along a footpath to a
neighboring village, among the foxes, badgers, deer and pheasant,
can be more practical than driving.

There is still a place that can round up 500 volunteers to run a
radio station for a month just for the fun of it. And quite a pretty
place at that.

As the wise Rat said about this land in Wind in the Willows: ""It's
my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not
worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.''

The Many Hues of Hainburg

2005-02-10T05:29:00.000-08:00

By Patti McCracken
St. Petersburg Times

A town doesn't age like a person, growing weaker with years,
diminishing with each loss. The burdens it has withstood make a
town stronger, enduring, and in that, comforting. Hainburg, its
medieval structures so prominent, wears layers of kings, invasions,
conquests and defeats. Hainburg's beauty is in its layers.
Stefan Scholz is working on one of thelayers from the small
town's past. He is crouching in the rectory garden at dusk, cradling
a 14th century Jewish tombstone he has recently unearthed. Scholz,
an archaeologist, says that he knows it is Jewish because of the
script, but he has sent photographs of it to experts in Prague in the
Czech Republic to be sure.
Scholz is speed-talking as he darts around the garden, so focused on
what he wants to say that he can ignore the scores of biting gnats
that flit around him in the twilight, pecking at his skin.
His words come rapidly, hooked end to end like train cars, with
scant space between. Listening to him is exhausting.
He is accompanied by a priest, whose garden it is and who stands
with arms folded across an ample belly, and the town treasurer, who
is tagging along to see what all the fuss is about.
Scholz moves from the rectory to the school next door, gesturing
and chattering while tossing out historical factoids about Hainburg,
which is in eastern Austria, on the Danube.
Standing outside the schoolhouse under a now-darken sky, Scholz
says that he persuaded school authorities to let him dig under the
sixth-grade classroom, believing there to be a mass grave from the
Turkish invasion in 1683.
He opens a door. Floodlights starkly illuminate 50 or so skeletons.
They have been under the building for 320 years.
Hainburg was once a place for kings: Members of the Babenberg
dynasty lived here, precursors to the long-ruling Habsburgs.
Ottakar, who became king of Bohemia in the Middle Ages, married
a Babenberg queen in this town. The royal wedding took place at
the commanding Schlossberg Castle, the remains of which still
crown the Hainburg sky.
Hainburg is still considered one of the oldest and most
well-preserved fortifications in Europe. It was a walled town …
most of the wall remains … with three gates (or doors) and 15
towers, all intact.
Hainburg was a mighty protector of Vienna, built largely with the
ransom money England paid to release Richard the Lionheart from
captivity.
In the Middle Ages, there was a significant Jewish community (the
oldest synagogue in Austria is here), and trade was bustling because
of the town's location on the Danube.
So when the Turks stormed Hainburg in 1683, the defeat was
astonishing. It was also massive. Fewer than 100 people survived;
about 8,000 were killed. Some of the dead were buried in the grave
Sholz recently discovered.
The bloodletting that took place in a few days is horrific to
imagine.
Composer Franz Joseph Haydn's grandfather was said to be one of
the survivors. Local legend has it that he, like other survivors,
climbed inside a chimney and hid until the massacre was over.
Inside the stationery store on the main street, a clerk walks to the
back of the shop and points to a cast-iron hatch door on a wall about
8 or 10 feet above the floor. Sylvia Haltschuster says that some
survivors hid there, where there once had been a chimney.
"A woman hid in here with her baby, but only she survived. The
baby was crying,'' Haltschuster recounts as she makes a hugging
gesture to indicate that the mother accidentally suffocated her
baby. She tells the story with a tenderness that suggests that the
tragedy occurred more recently than three centuries ago.
Hainburg is nearly 1,000 years old. There are Roman and Celtic
ruins from a previous incarnation, but the erection of the
Schlossberg Castle in 1050 marks the current town's real birth.
Hainburg tells Europe's story well, for it is big and small: a
pocket-size town packed with past.
Tucked into what is known as Lower Austria, the town has stood
as a blockade … or at its weakest, a helpless witness … to invading
forces its whole life. The 12th century Wienertor (Vienna Door, the
largest medieval gate in Europe) sports enormous stone cannons
embedded at its base, leftovers from an earlier Turkish invasion.
The Celtic and Roman ruins are more evidence of more invasions.
And up until 12 years ago, the Soviets had their weapons dug into
the surrounding hillside, reminding little Hainburg for nearly half a
century that it was just inside the Iron Curtain.
"It was (like living) at the end of the world,'' says Rainer Kern,
36-year-old owner of Rainer's, the only bar in town.
"There was nothing else. This was it.''
Before World War II, it is said, streetcars trundled between
Bratislava (in Slovakia) and Hainburg, which is along the border.
Once part of the Austrian empire, Slovaks and Austrians shared
land, kings and trade.
And although Austria was occupied by the Soviets (among others)
for 10 years after the war, the Slovaks were ensnared in communism
for 40.
Outside of town is an old wooden hut, big enough for one person; it
was used by the army as a lookout post. Alongside it, and extending
about a half-mile or more east to the Slovak border, is a path,
originally worn down by the feet of those running to escape the
confines of communism. People say that the runners were shot on
sight.
But the rapid crumbling of communism brought an immediate
opening of the borders.
"There were celebrations,'' says Michi Brenner, a Hainburg
resident and owner of a popular bed and breakfast along the river.
"People brought candies to the border and special foods to
celebrate'' with the Slovaks, Brenner says. ""I didn't think much on
it then, but looking back now, it gives me goose bumps.''
Slovakia's transition was an uneasy one for Hainburg residents,
who worried about increased theft, job loss and heaps more traffic
as a result of the Iron Curtain being yanked down.
But if it was once the end of the world, the two-lane street that
snakes through the center of town is now a thoroughfare uniting
east and west once again, and town officials are scrambling to figure
out how to capitalize on the possibilities.
They needn't worry. That path worn by runners risking all for a
stab at freedom has been transformed into a bicycle route that
extends along the Danube and leads to Vienna. The only thing
anyone risks along this path these days is a blown-out tire.
Within shouting distance is the Donauauen, the last protected
European rain forest.
Cycling through the vineyards of the surrounding countryside,
and past the boundless fields of sunflowers (watch for the deer at
dusk), it becomes clear that if medieval Hainburg's strength was its
readiness to fight, the power today is Hainburg's tender beauty.
This spring, the fire department held a carnival in a field to raise
money for the Red Cross. It was the annual Volksfest, and it seemed
that all of Hainburg's nearly 6,000 residents came out for it.
Eurotech music blasted from the speakers as Rainer Kern joked,
danced and drank with his friends in a large tent set up for the
revelers.
"We have some (revelers) from Austria, America and Slovakia.''
His announcement was followed by toasts made in three languages:
a noisy Prost! Cheers! and Nasdravie!
Outside the tent, the night was full of brilliant stars, a backdrop to
the ruins of the mighty Schlossberg. Prost!

Casualty of War

2005-02-10T05:28:00.000-08:00

BY: PATRICIA MCCRACKEN
St. Petersburg Times

The village of Tyneham, in the peaceful, green English
countryside, was not a victim of German bombs during World War
II. It was destroyed instead by friendly fire.

Throughout the years of World War II, emotional turmoil,
desperation and sacrifice battered the English psyche far more than
most Americans could ever comprehend.

No place in England sacrificed more than the village of Tyneham.
In fact, the village itself was sacrificed at the demand of the War
Department. It no longer really exists. Tyneham is a ghost town now
and as ghost towns go, it is filled with legend, sadness and what ifs.

The villagers of Tyneham, safely outside the war-torn city where
bombs struck nightly, never thought that they too would have to
evacuate. But they did have to flee the countryside … under order
of their own army, which swiftly commandeered the land for its own
use in an operation that even now, more than half a century later,
seems cruel.

The evacuation of Tyneham happened suddenly, but the military
had for years been using the surrounding countryside as a gunnery
school. Tanks would lumber through the valley like huge turtles and
because they were supposed to be top secret, villagers had to hurry
inside and draw the curtains at the first sound of them, so the
""Hush-Hushes'' could roll by unseen.

It must have been an odd sight, these enormous Sherman tanks
creeping across the stunning landscape that is the Isle of Purbeck.
This is Thomas Hardy country, with mile after mile of rolling hills
and chalky cliffs that drop dramatically into the English Channel.
The beauty here is powerfully quiet, elegant and graceful. And right
in the middle is Tyneham.

It was a small village. Just more than 200 people lived and worked
here, mostly as tenants to the manor house. They were farmers,
tailors, gardeners, and many of them grew up in houses that had
been occupied by their families for generations. The residents of
Tyneham worked together, went to church together, raised their
families together.

Then came the war. By 1940, Purbeck was teeming with soldiers
who had moved in … to vacant houses, spare bedrooms, wherever
there was room. Tyneham's schoolhouse, closed for years because of
low enrollment, was turned into a dormitory for nurses. The Bond
family, who lived in the manor house and owned Tyneham and half
the valley, were kicked out of their 440-year-old-mansion so it could
be used to house the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

At first the Bonds lived there with the women, all 60 of them,
cramming as many as 11 into each room while moving themselves
into two rooms in a small wing of the house. But by the next year the
family sought refuge at one of their tenant's cottages. Although no
one knew it at the time, everyone would be forced from their homes
in Tyneham, and no one would ever come back.

The news was a shock at first because no one really saw it coming.
Even the Bond family, who owned the properties, was not
forewarned. Since the gunnery school was located here and the open
spaces were just right for shelling practice, the War Department
decided that this land would be ideal for training British and
American troops for the D-Day invasion. So there was to be an
eviction.

The notice sent to all the villagers read, in part: "". . . in the
National interest, it is necessary to move you from your homes . . .
The government appreciates that this is no small sacrifice which
you are asked to make, but they are sure that you will give this
further help toward winning the war with a good heart.''

The notice was dated November 16, 1943. Residents had one
month to get out.

It was a crazy month. Since the soldiers had moved in years earlier,
there was virtually nowhere to put anyone. Evelyn Bond frantically
helped her tenants look for other accommodations, not having yet
secured anything for herself.

Everyone scattered to different towns and villages. Some families
were temporarily split up and put in separate homes, and at least
one family moved into a house that had been condemned. One
resident, off fighting the war, returned home only to find it had
been taken away from him.

Despite the chaos, the rush, the upset, at the end of the four weeks
Tyneham was cleaned out. All the furniture was moved, the farm
animals had been sold, and the houses were tightly secured.
Reportedly, there was not a spoon, blanket or pillow left in all the
village, and the last family to leave got out just hours before the
deadline.

On a bitterly cold day, less than a week before Christmas,
Tyneham was emptied of its people but not its heart, as shown by
the note pinned to the church door by a grieving community:

Please treat the church and houses with care. We have given up
our homes, where many of us have lived for generations, to help win
the war to keep men free. We shall return one day, and thank you
for treating our village kindly.

They never did return, of course, although they fully believed they
would. After all, Winston Churchill had promised that they could
come back. In what became known as Churchill's Pledge, he vowed
that they should fully expect to return to their village when the war
was over.

But governments never have been known for keeping promises. In
effect, Tyneham was captured from England by its own army.

""It's sad what happened,'' says Range Warden Tim Mills, who
works at the military range in Tyneham. ""The people really
expected to return to their homes. But many were given better
homes, with electricity and heater access for the water.''

Most people were, if not happy, at least content with their new
houses, which were indeed equipped with conveniences not yet
available in Tyneham. But to say that they were better off because
of such things as electricity and water heaters is to dismiss a way of
life generations old. Like the Bonds, who had lived there for seven
generations over 400-plus years, this was the life they knew, and in a
dizzying 33 days it was all over.

The Bonds were eventually paid about $50,000 in compensation, a
pittance considering they lost 3,000 acres and an Elizabethan
mansion. The rest of the villagers just about broke even, ending up
with adequate housing and reasonable rent, although minus the
charm and history of the land they were forced to leave.

To assume that the villagers felt betrayed by what the government
had done to them would be wrong. It's true, a few of them were
angry and bitter about the broken promise. But the British have an
infinite capacity to take what life hands them and get on with it.
The residents were to file no lawsuits, stage no group protests, make
no demands of Parliament. They simply felt they did what their
country asked of them and that was that.

Now, people are certain of one thing: If the land had been
returned, Tyneham and the surrounding countryside would not be
the thriving natural habitat it has become.

Ironically, it is the presence of the gunnery school that is credited
with protecting the natural beauty. Without it, most people think,
the area would have been built up and overdeveloped, at least by
English standards.

""Had it not fallen into military hands, it would have been hit by all
the things of the agricultural revolution . . . (and) there would have
been holiday cottages, caravan (RV) camps. It would have been nice
to imagine that it would all stay like that, medieval and Saxon fields
staying intact, but it couldn't have done,'' says Rodney Legg,

Legg is founder of the Tyneham Action Committee, which 30 years
ago worked tirelessly to liberate the land from government control,
despite the fact that most of the former residents no longer wanted
to come back. Legg failed at efforts to put the region in the care of
the National Trust, an organization similar to the National Park
Service.

The land was retained by the gunnery school, but concessions have
been made throughout the years, and the military has cleared and
opened up 90 miles of valley and coastal footpaths to weekend
hikers … weekdays remaining off limits because of firing practice.

Another victory for hikers was won last year when Parliament
agreed to consider granting even more access … no small feat
considering the possibility that thousands of live shells contaminate
the grounds.

Not many of Tyneham's final generation are still alive to tell about
the evacuation. There's John Gould, who gave up his long fight to
regain the village but held on to his bitterness; and there's Arthur
Grant, who tried to capitalize on his status by attempting to charge
a reporter $160 for his story.

What Grant failed to realize is that the story of Tyneham did not
die with the people. It lives on as a reminder of what war does, and it
lives on as a legend of the England that used to be.

Tyneham is forever stuck in a time warp, knowing nothing of the
Cold War or computer glitches. Tyneham was not perfect then, but
it is perfect now, having been recreated in the minds of those who
long for a bygone era. In this accidental paradise, time has stopped.

Wandering through the skeletal remains of Tyneham, it's hard to
believe only 56 years have passed. The broken walls and the
roofless, windowless houses look more like the ruins of the
900-year-old medieval castle up the road than the village
abandoned just two generations ago.

The 16th-century mansion was demolished in the '70s, but not
before local gentry swooped in to ""salvage'' precious beams and
pillars. After falling into disrepair, the 600-year-old church was
restored by the military as part of an agreement with a church
council.

The schoolhouse has also been restored by the military and turned
into a museum, although one that, oddly, recognizes the ecology and
wildlife of the region, not the evictees. In a museum that logically
should be dedicated to Tyneham and its people, no mention is made
of what happened here December 19, 1943.

There is no formal dedication to Tyneham, no honor to the
sacrifice that was made here. There are only the rolling valleys, the
footpaths scattered with scampering rabbits and deer, the
spectacular panoramic views along the cliffs.

To walk these paths is to be engulfed in a beauty so touching it
brings forth tears, which in itself is a dedication, a thankfulness for
all that was given.

Patricia McCracken is an American freelance writer who lives in
England.

My Best Friend's Birth

2005-02-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

Great Expectations
Spring 2000

By Patricia McCracken

Nearly two years ago, at 1:15 on a Saturday morning, I think I felt God. I was suffering from jet lag after an overseas flight the
previous night and had been awake for 36 hours. I had eaten only once, at 9 a.m. the morning before. I was shaking with exhaustion
and hunger; I looked atrocious. But still, I felt powerful, omniscient, humbled, silenced. I had just helped my best friend give birth.
It was a boy.

I drove home that early morning feeling as if something about me had changed; that if I looked in the mirror I might find I was no
longer tall, but short; or that my eyes were no longer hazel, but blue. It felt physical, the change in me, although I knew it wasn't.
Looking back, I know my heart grew bigger that night, in ways that I am still measuring.

Wendi and I have been friends for nearly 20 years. She sat directly behind me in Mr. Justice's grade nine English class where she
used to play with my long hair. I liked her playing with my hair because it was like a secret conversation between us. We weren't
best friends then, or even close friends, just school friends. But we got along well, understood each other, I suppose, and her
earnestness touched me. It wouldn't be until four years later, upon reflection at graduation, that we would realize how our friendship
had evolved. Even then, we could only look back, not ahead, so we could not see how our lives would weave together, or in what
ways we would come to rely on each other in the years to follow.

She and I are very different. She is practical and reserved, I am impulsive and melodramatic. She thinks before she speaks, I will
talk ad infinitum without hesitation. She is married and settled in Baltimore, I am single and roaming the world. I haven't always
been comfortable with the differences between us, knowing we don't relate to the world in the same way. But when Wendi asked me
to be present for her baby's birth, I was honoured. Her husband, Jon, would be there, and the midwife said she could have one other
person present, and she asked me. So I was honoured - but I wouldn't understand until later that Wendi was inviting me to join her
journey and be part of her child's life. I didn't know that being with her through the birth would bring us into sisterhood, or that it
would make me realize that the human experience is sometimes a very wonderful one. Thinking it nothing more than a sweet
gesture, I accepted.

On a Friday afternoon Jon called to tell me that Wendi was in labour, and I arranged to meet them at the birthing centre. When I
arrived she was animated and chatty. Excited. But as her labour intensified she became quiet and inert. Primal. She lay on her side
with her eyes closed, her hands folded in front of her. Sometimes I'd notice her shoulder tightening and I'd whisper that her shoulder
was loose, and the tightness would release. Sometimes I'd see the tension in her face or her leg and I would tell her that she was like
a statue, so heavy and stone-like, and then I'd see her face or leg relax. This went on for hours, my relaxation messages to her
muscles. In her state of labour, so natural and instinctive, I was the mind and she was the body, receiving the impulses I sent her. I
was, in essence, a part of her. I had lent myself to her, and I have never felt so alive.

After about eight hours, Wendi was ready to begin delivering. Jon positioned himself on one side of her and I on the other. She
pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. For seconds she would rest in our arms and then she would push some more. When she
leaned back for another rest, I'd tell her that she was strong and she could do it. I believe in you, I know you can do it, I'd say. I
imagine Jon filled her other ear with similar words. But she was getting frustrated and exhausted and we were getting concerned
because she had been pushing for nearly four hours. I can't do this anymore, she'd say, her body too spent to produce tears. Yes you
can, I'd say. And she'd push some more. But she was so tired.

During the last hour, Wendi's energy diminished, but her resolve increased. When she would lean into our arms, she began turning
her eyes toward me, waiting for me to feed her with words about my belief in her. Her eyes locked on mine, looking past my outer
body, looking for the source of the information about the belief I held within me. With our eyes locked and the encouraging words
pouring forth, she was ready to push again. I felt like a vessel for her strength.

Then it happened. With breathtaking speed, the little head was emerging, soon followed by the shoulders, the legs. I could hear
myself in the choir of joyous shouts: "You're doing it, Wendi! You're doing it!" We were all cheering and shouting, thrilled by life.
And without further ado, there he was, this little one, attached to a bright neon cord, in the arms of his father.

My face was wet with tears. In those first few minutes after the birth I learned about intimacy, as his parents gently held him for the
first time. I learned about the human bond, and the love of two hearts. I learned that life can be joyous, so joyous.

I could feel my body shaking, too consumed with emotion to be still in the powerful stillness that surrounded me. I felt powerful and
powerless at the same time; I was both big and small. For the first time in my life, I understood without question what it meant to be
a part of something greater than myself.

I left Jon and Wendi alone with their newborn and began walking the corridors of the birthing centre, hoping to get rid of the
shakiness in my limbs. I found an alcove, a kitchenette for the staff, and sat down on a stool I found there. I wept.

After about five or ten minutes I left my perch on the stool and made my way back to Wendi's room to say goodbye. She and Jon
looked up from their huddle around the baby. "Thank you," she said. I smiled at her and shut the door behind me when I left.

A lot has happened in my life since then. I have grieved a death; fallen in love and climbed back out again; moved to a foreign
country. There is much in my world to make me feel disconnected and fearful at times. But when I think back to that night in
Baltimore when we cheered as we ushered in a new life, and were then awed speechless by its beauty, I know there is unity and I am
not so afraid anymore. Thank you, Wendi.

Placing a Call to the Past

2005-02-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

Patti McCracken
Chicago Tribune
Published September 26, 2004

Inside an airless, rundown building, after dutifully going to Window 8, whereupon I was instructed to go to Door No. 5, I stood in a long, wilted line of people, all of whom had gone to Window 8 and received their instructions to proceed to Door No. 5 before I did.

All of us were in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova--a hiccup of a country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania--and were there to register with the police, compulsory for all visitors. Westerners grew restless and impatient, wishing they had brought a book or had their iPod, while East Europeans stood numbly, lobotomized by daily waiting routines that they inherited from their grandparents' generation under the Soviets.

After a couple of hours, a short game of charades with two officers helped me determine that I needed to go to another police station around the block, where I stood for 2 1/2 hours in an empty hallway, keeping madness at bay by counting ceiling tiles and timing how long it took my gum to lose its flavor (about five minutes).

After Window 8, Door No. 5 and the police station around the block, I was transported to a courthouse, where I walked a narrow hall of doors until I arrived at the double doors at the end of the corridor, which, like the others, was locked. I sat on a hard, backless bench for more than three hours, after which time I was instructed to come back the next day because the judge who granted approval for visits in Moldova was going home.

No one else could help me. It was this specific judge who processed this paperwork and not any other judge.

I returned early the next morning and watched the judge's assistant come out of the double doors (behind which sat the secretive judge), lock the door, walk down the hallway, unlock a door, enter, exit, lock the door, walk back down the hallway, unlock the double doors again, enter and lock them behind her. This procedure happened five times.

Companion in limbo

A man, nothing but a dot at the far end of the corridor, walked steadily, aligning his feet on the edge of the tattered runner carpet. When he arrived at my end of the corridor, he spun around and went back in the direction from which he came. His runner carpet was my ceiling tiles.

Three more hours I sat on my lonely, little bench.

When I finally stood before the judge, I protested about the wait and was told that I could be deported if I so wished to complain.

This is communism's legacy. The secrecy and power that the locked doors imply, each employee with a specific task, unable and unwilling to perform any other task than the one assigned. If your job is to answer the blue phone and not the green one, you answer the blue phone.

In Russia, I stayed in a hotel about the size of the Pentagon. On each floor sat a key lady whose job it was to distribute and receive room keys. I once asked her whether I could have a key that fit better and was told it was not her job to give me an additional key.

But after communism fled the East, it crept into the West, riding the coattails of technology, and is now a thriving industry that telephone users know as the automated help line.

Automated lines are everything that a democracy is not. They are oppressive, non-transparent, inefficient, ineffective, cumbersome and morally bankrupt. They offer the illusion of serving the people while serving only the company they represent.

Don't cross the line

There is no freedom of speech, without risk of being disconnected, silenced. There is no freedom of information--no last names given, no direct lines, not even a location from which they operate is provided or can be verified.

I live in Europe, and recently my U.S.-based e-mail account was inexplicably canceled. I called the hot line and reached Adam in America. Adam told me the database showed a clerical error he did not have the authority to fix. I asked him who did. He said try someone in Europe. Adam answers blue phones, not green ones.

Europe said try someone in America again, so I ended up with Cindy. Let's just say Cindy and her colleagues are key ladies. She's in E-mail Setup, not E-mail Account Problems. Cindy apparently didn't like my tone because she disconnected me multiple times. In effect, she deported me.

Under the Soviet regime, waiting was what someone did, it was an occupation, an exhaustive day's work.

There is a demeanor among the people in Eastern Europe that is less about patience than it is about absolute surrender of will, because everyone knows that once you get your turn in line, instructions will be given to go somewhere else and wait.

And so it is with automated telephone lines, except we in the West still think that Effort = Results, which in a communist system (be it Soviet-generated or computer-generated) certainly does not.

In this new communism we hang on anxiously to our receiver, thinking this next transfer to this next representative will be the one who empowers us with answers. We do not complain, knowing that retribution equals a dead tone.

There is no letter we can write because there is no transparency, with top management and communist elite both shielded from the plebes.

Without an alternative, we do the only thing we can do: We wait.

Welcome to the 21st Century bread line. Please hold.

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Patti McCracken is a freelance writer who lives in Europe.