Monthly Archives: February 2008

by Joel | 19 February 2008 · 6:53 am

The Muddled Liberation of France, 1942–46

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 364-365:

Between the arrival of American troops in North Africa in November 1942 and the return of the last French prisoners and deportees from Germany via the Soviet Union (in 1946 or later), French people experienced many different kinds of liberation. Some Resistance veterans looked back on the liberation as a time of disappointment, a time when France ought to have undergone a social and political revolution but failed to do so. Many saw ‘their’ liberation as having been usurped by someone else. People who saw themselves as the ‘real’ Resistance were particularly hostile to the Communists and Gaullists who proved so adept at manipulating memories of Resistance and liberation—though the Communists and Gaullists were both soon marginalized in the political system of the Fourth Republic.

The liberation was not a time of unqualified rejoicing. The arrival of Allied troops in mainland France often marked the beginning of the most violent period of the war for French people. Nazi persecution continued (the last train taking Jews from Paris left on 18 August 1944) but this was now mixed with the less systematic violence of massacres carried out by German troops operating in areas they did not know and with the damage inflicted in some areas by Allied bombardment. In all sorts of ways, the liberation could be a period of horrible suffering….

Perhaps the most curious absence at the liberation was Vichy. Pétainism was not displaced by the first liberation (that of North Africa) because the Americans and their French allies had no particular interest in overthrowing it. De Gaulle and his associates subsequently drove most Pétainists out of the French administration in North Africa, but they did so mainly for reasons of realpolitik rather than principle. Events in the town of Vichy were an odd little sideshow in the summer of 1944. Pétain did not want to be seen to abandon his post voluntarily and the Germans did not want to leave him behind in France. A discreet deal was struck. On 20 August German soldiers broke down the doors of the Marshal’s apartment at the Hôtel du Parc. Pétain’s entourage protested but his bodyguards did not open fire. A crowd of around two hundred gathered outside in the Rue des États-Unis and sang the ‘Marseillaise’ as the Vichy government left its capital. Allied troops did not, however, arrive in Vichy, a place of no strategic importance. Once the Germans had gone, the town was liberated by a mixture of maquisards who had come down from the surrounding hills and policemen who were only too happy to find themselves once again on the right side.

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by Joel | 19 February 2008 · 6:51 am

The Muddled Liberation of French Algeria, 1942

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 318-319:

The significance of American landings in North Africa, and particularly in Algeria, was complicated. Parts of the French Empire had rallied to de Gaulle or been conquered by Free French forces ever since 1940. However, these were mostly distant places with small French populations. Algeria was close to the mainland. It contained more than a million French citizens, including a large number of soldiers. Furthermore, Algeria was not a colony, unlike Indochina, nor a League of Nations mandate, unlike Syria where Free French and Vichy forces had fought in 1941, nor a protectorate, unlike Morocco. Algeria was part of France. It returned deputies to the French parliament, and its European population had resented Vichy moves that seemed to blur the distinction between it and the colonies or protectorates.

Operation Torch was, however, a funny kind of liberation. Landings in North Africa did not involve even the token Free French force that went to Normandy with the Allies in 1944. Furthermore, there were no Germans in French North Africa in 1942 and resistance to the American landings came from French forces loyal to the Vichy government. France was being liberated from the French.

Giraud, the Americans’ candidate for the leadership of the French in ‘liberated’ Algeria, missed his rendezvous with an American submarine that was meant to pick him up from southern France, and was still on Gibraltar when the Americans landed in North Africa. If Giraud was unexpectedly absent, another conservative French military leader was unexpectedly present. Admiral Darlan was in Algiers visiting his son, who was seriously ill with polio. Darlan had no advance knowledge of the landings. Even as American warships approached North Africa, he insisted that the Americans would not break their promise not to enter French North Africa uninvited. When American troops landed, Darlan ordered the French to resist—1,368 Frenchmen and 453 Allied soldiers died in the few days before Darlan changed his mind. Eventually, however, a ceasefire was arranged and the Americans suggested that Darlan himself might lead the French in Algeria. This was an attractive suggestion to an ambitious man who had recently been squeezed out of power in Vichy by Laval’s return, and Darlan signed an accord with Clark, the commander of American forces in North Africa. The British were unhappy with Darlan’s rule in Algeria as were American liberals: the journalist Ed Murrow suggested that letting Darlan rule Algeria was like letting Quisling rule a ‘liberated’ Norway.

Pétain was furious at the Clark-Darlan accords and denounced them six times in the week after they were concluded. Darlan did not denounce Pétain. On the contrary, he argued that he was acting in the Marshal’s name and carrying out the policy that the Marshal was unable to announce openly. Darlan’s suggestion that Pétain was not a free agent was made more convincing by the fact that the Germans invaded the free zone of France in response to the American invasion of Algeria.

Darlan’s reign in Algeria ended on Christmas Eve 1942 when he was shot by a young royalist. The assassin was himself executed on Boxing Day, giving conspiracy theorists much food for thought. Now the Americans installed their original candidate, Giraud, in power in Algeria. Unlike Darlan, Giraud had never held office under the Vichy government and, unlike Darlan, he had always been anti-German. However, he had also expressed loyalty to Pétain and shared many of Pétain’s beliefs. Giraud presented himself as a military figure who did not wish to play politics, a classic conservative stance that meant, in practice, that he would not overthrow much of what Vichy had established in Algeria. He had particularly strong views about one piece of Vichy legislation. He had spent his early life serving with North African units of the French army and had developed a deep admiration for Islam. This made him keen not to restore the Cremieux decree, which had given French citizenship to Jews in Algeria and which had been abolished by Vichy. Giraud believed that the Cremieux decree antagonized Muslims in Algeria, and, in fact, Jews in Algeria did not regain French citizenship until May 1943, six months after the Americans arrived.

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by Joel | 18 February 2008 · 7:47 am

Yugoslavia, 1998: A Dismembered Corpse

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 318-320, 332:

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A COUNTRY CALLED YUGOSLAVIA. It was a medium-sized country in the southeast of Europe, and more than twenty-three million people lived there. It was not democratic, but it had a fair name in the world. Its king was called Tito. Being both largely rural and socialist, this country was not rich. But it was getting a little richer. Most of its children grew up thinking they were Yugoslavs. They had other identities, too, and strong ones. Slovenes already talked of the “narrower homeland,” meaning Slovenia, and the “wider homeland,” meaning Yugoslavia. Its Albanians were always Albanians. Still, it was a country.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, this European country has been torn apart. At least 150,000 and perhaps as many as 250,000 men, women, and children have died in the process. And how they have died: with their eyes gouged out or their throats cut with rusty knives, women after deliberate ethnic rape, men with their own severed genitalia stuffed into their mouths. More than two million former Yugoslavs have been driven out of their homes by other former Yugoslavs, and many deprived of everything but what they could carry in precipitous flight.

In this former country, the grotesque spectacle of a whole village burned, looted, and trashed has become an entirely normal sight. “Yeah, the usual story,” says the journalist, and drives on. A few have grown rich: mainly war profiteers, gangsters, and politicians—the three being sometimes hard to distinguish. The rest, save in Slovenia, have been impoverished, degraded, and corrupted too. Real wages in Serbia are estimated to be at the level of 1959—in the rare event of you actually being paid a wage. In Kosovo, the killing, burning, plundering, and expelling went on throughout the summer of 1998, even as West Europeans took their holidays just a few miles away. It went on though the leaders of the West had all repeatedly declared it would never, ever be allowed to happen again. Not after Bosnia.

If you look at a current political map of Europe, you may conclude that the former country is now five states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (known to diplomats as the FRY, pronounced as in “French fries”). But the reality on the ground is at least nine parts. Bosnia is still divided between a “Serb Republic” (Republika Srpska) and a Croat-Bosniak Federation, which itself is effectively divided between Croat-controlled and Bosniak- (or “Muslim”- ) controlled areas. The FRY is divided between what may loosely be called “Serbia proper,” Kosovo, and the increasingly independent-minded republic of Montenegro. But even “Serbia proper” should be disaggregated to notice the northern province of the Vojvodina, with its large Hungarian minority, and—Oh, delight to the diplomatic historian!—the still partly muslim-settled Sandjak of Novi Pazar. Perhaps one should also distinguish the Albanian-settled areas from the rest of Macedonia. That makes twelve ethnically defined parts to be going on with.

It’s not just we in the West who are largely indifferent. Most inhabitants of most of these dismembered parts themselves live in growing indifference or active antipathy to each other. In Ljubljana, a cultured Slovene woman tells me sadly that her children cannot enjoy the wonderful work of Serbian writers because they no longer read the Cyrillic alphabet. Why, she exclaims, they don’t even understand Croatian! In Sarajevo, a local veteran of the siege says, “You know, if I’m honest, we watched the television pictures from Kosovo this summer much as I suppose Westerners watched the pictures from Sarajevo.” But the feeling is reciprocated. In Priština, the capital of Kosovo, a leading representative of the mainly muslim Albanians tells me, “We don’t feel any fellowship with muslims in Bosnia, because they are Slavs.” In fact, the two groups have diametrically opposed goals: Bosnian “muslims” want to keep together a multiethnic state, Kosovar Albanian “muslims” want ethnic separation.

Across this landscape of extraordinary ethno-linguistic-religious-historical-political complexity crawl the white-and-orange vehicles of an international presence that, in its different, political-bureaucratic way, is just as complicated. SFOR, OHR, UNHCR, MSF, CARE, OSCE, USKDOM, EUKDOM, RUSKDOM: international alphabet soup poured over Balkan goulash. Americans may be the new Habsburg governors here, but French deputies tussle with British ones for priority at court, while earnest Scandinavians get on with laying the phone lines. At Sarajevo Airport, I sit next to a man whose shoulder badge proclaims “Icelandic Police.” Perhaps that Icelandic policeman will now be sent to Kosovo, to keep peace among the dervishes of Orahovac.

Faced with such complexity, it’s no wonder newspaper and television reports have largely stuck to a few simple, well-tried stories: bang-bang-bang, mutilated corpse, old woman weeps into dirty handkerchief, ruined mosque/church/town, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke meets Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, NATO bombers at Italian airbase, preparing not to bomb. Yawn. In truth, it needs a whole book to do justice to each single part….

What have we learned from this terrible decade in former Yugoslavia? And what is to be done? We have learned that human nature has not changed. That Europe at the end of the twentieth century is quite as capable of barbarism as it was in the Holocaust of mid-century. That, during the last decades of the cold war, many in Europe succumbed to fairy-tale illusions about the obsolescence of the nation-state and war being banished forever from our continent. That Western Europe has gone on living quite happily while war returned almost every summer to the Balkans. And we have learned that, even after the end of the cold war, we can’t manage the affairs of our own continent without calling in the United States. Wherever you go in former Yugoslavia, people say, “the international community—I mean, the Americans …”

UPDATE: In today’s Washington Post, Anne Applebaum reminds us that the destruction of autonomy in Kosovo is where the dismemberment of Yugoslavia got underway.

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by Joel | 18 February 2008 · 6:45 am

Kosovo, 1998: Origins of the KLA

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 320-324:

The fresh red blood on the fresh white snow looks unreal, like a new avant-garde exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London. But it is entirely real. This is the blood of two dead Serb policemen, shot at dawn, almost certainly by the soldiers of a tough local commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), violating the October cease-fire….

Our knowledge of the KLA is still fragmentary, partly because this guerrilla army is itself quite fragmentary. It has, as one Western military observer politely puts it, a “rather horizontal” command structure. Each region is different, and regional commanders behave like local bandit chiefs. Nonetheless, we can establish a few significant things about its history, leaders, and support.

First and foremost, Its emergence is the result of Kosovar Albanians despairing of the nonviolent path that they adopted after the province was robbed of its autonomy by Milošević in 1989 and Yugoslavia began to fall apart in 1990-1991. Under their unofficially elected “President of the Republic of Kosova,” Ibrahim Rugova, they organized an extraordinary alternative state, with its own taxes, parliamentary committees, private health service, and, most impressive, unofficial education system, from primary school to university. To the frustration of Western policy makers, Rugova was unbending in his commitment to the goal of independence. To their relief, he was equally unbending in his attachment to nonviolent means. How did he propose to square the circle? By the “internationalization” of the Kosovo problem.

Even in the early 1990s, there were those who thought change would come only with the help of more traditional methods. Many Albanians from this region go to Western Europe for training and to earn money to send home. So did they. Ramush Haradinaj, the local commander almost certainly responsible for that blood in the snow, went off to get his military training in the French Foreign Legion. In Priština, people recall first hearing of a KLA in 1993. But then it was something like one of the terrorist splinter groups from the Western European student movement of 1968. One of the KLA’s more important current political leaders, Hashim Thaci, code name “Snake,” was a student activist in Priština who then went to study in Albania and to raise funds in the West. But most of the political activists who came from three generations of formative student political protest—in 1968, 1981, and 1990-1991—were still for nonviolence.

What changed the balance? The startling answer I am given is: “Dayton.” I’m told this by the veteran political prisoner Adem Demaci, who is now the KLA’s political representative. He dates the true emergence of the KLA to spring 1996, just a few months after the November 1995 Dayton agreement on Bosnia. I’m also told this by Veton Surroi, a favorite source for visitors from the West, whose influential daily newspaper nonetheless supported (some even say inflamed) the armed struggle. And by several others.

They say they drew two lessons from Dayton. After more than five years of their Gandhiesque struggle for independence, the United States made a deal with Milošević over Bosnia without securing even a restoration of mere autonomy for Kosovo. So, lesson one: Nonviolence wasn’t working. Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, the Dayton agreement went a long way toward recognizing ethnic realities created by force. Lesson two: Force pays.

There’s an element of retrospective rationalization in this account. This is not what these same people were telling me in Priština in March 1997. But there is also an uncomfortable element of truth. So long as Rugova kept the lid on his own people, and so long as we felt we had to deal with Milošević over Bosnia, we weren’t going to push him on Kosovo.

The armed rising then grew from two further developments: the looting of arsenals during the violent implosion of Albania in spring 1997, which gave the KLA access to Kalashnikovs galore, and the brutality of Serbian “reprisals” against whole extended families and villages, starting in February 1998. As always, an oppressive army and police were the best recruiting sergeants for the guerrillas.

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by Joel | 17 February 2008 · 2:12 pm

Bucharest, 1984/2008: Back to Tineretului

One of our goals during our very brief visit to Bucharest in January was to see how much things had changed in the neighborhood we used to live in during 1983–84. The first change we noticed was that we could get there on the M2 north–south metro line, getting on at Aviatorilor and getting off five stops later at Tineretului. In 1984, the metro line (now M1) only ran in a broad northeast-to-west arc from (I think) Republica to Semănătoarea (lit. ‘the inseminator’), apparently designed to serve the huge housing blocs in the most populous new suburbs. So the Bucharest Metro has improved a lot since 1984.

We lived at Bulevardul Pionierilor 25, Blocul Z7. Note that Romanian place names look a lot like those in other Romance languages, except that the definite articles are suffixed, as in the masculine singular bloc, blocul ‘bloc, the bloc’, and feminine singular semănătoare, semănătoarea ‘planting machine, the planting machine’. (The masculine semănător, semănătorul indicates a human planter.) There are a few wrinkles. On masculine nouns that end in -e, like câine ‘dog’, the singular article is -le, as in câinele ‘the dog’. On feminine nouns that end in stressed -a, like the Turkish borrowing cafea ‘coffee’, the singular definite article is -ua, as in cafeaua [kafjáwa]. And on the huge majority of feminine nouns that end in unstressed -ă (schwa), like casă ‘house’, the singular article -a replaces the schwa, as in casa ‘the house’.

Like quite a few other streets in Romania, Bulevardul Pionierilor changed its name after the “Revolution” (or lovitură de stat ‘coup d’état’) in 1989. The Young Pioneers were so discredited under Communist rule that the boulevard is now named after the neighboring Parcul Tineretului ‘the Park of the Young’ (in the sense of tinerime ‘collective offspring’). Compare the adjective ‘young’, tânăr/tineri for masc. sg./pl., and tânără/tinere for fem. sg./pl., each stressed on the first syllable; and the noun ‘youth’, tinereţe/tinereţi fem. sg./pl., stressed on the penultimate syllable. Compare also the masc. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms, tineretului ‘of the young’ vs. pionierilor ‘of the pioneers’; and the fem. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms in fântâna tinereţii ‘the fountain of youth’ vs. poluarea apelor ‘the pollution of the waters (= bodies of water)’.

These genitive nouns are used as place names in their own right, as in other Bucharest Metro stops like Eroilor ‘of the Heroes’ or Industriilor ‘of the Industries’. The first things that caught our eyes when we came out of the metro at Tineretelui were the large video panel and billboard advertisements at the corner of the park. Big, ugly commercial billboards hide a lot of distinctive architecture and scenery in Bucharest these days. There’s a lot more traffic, too, than there was in 1984.

Some things were still the same, though: treacherous winter sidewalks with layers of uncleared snow and ice, litter discarded in public spaces, and the odd open manhole cover. One dark night in 1984, we almost stepped in an open manhole while walking down a street with no lights except those of a passing tram. This year, we noticed that someone had thoughtfully stuffed a Christmas tree into an open manhole on Strada Trestiana, right in our path. We were lucky it was daytime.

Our bloc at Pionierilor 25 contained several other flats housing Fulbright and IREX scholars from the U.S. (and apparently still did in 1995). We were a long way from the nicer northern neighborhoods cluttered with foreign embassies. I remember that, as Halloween approached in 1983, someone in the American, British, or Canadian embassy arranged for the diplomats to borrow costumes from the National Opera for an embassy costume party. We were a little worried that some embassy kids might come trick-or-treating at our doors. We had nothing that would pass muster for treats, but I prepared to shock the kids by offering them the boiled heads and feet of four whole chickens we had managed to find at the local market (rationed at two per customer). The chicken with lots of fresh garlic made a tasty broth, but no one came trick-or-treating that Halloween, so we discarded the heads and feet.

We did not eat too well that winter. Fresh food was hard to find. You had to supply your own containers, but eggs and (unpasteurized) milk, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, stale bread, wheat flour, and corn meal were usually available at local shops. Oil and sugar were rationed. However, in order to find fresh meat, hard cheeses, fresh fruit, or toilet paper, we had to keep an eye out for people queueing up at storefronts on our way to and from the city center, then get in line to find out what they were waiting for. At one point, we managed to obtain a big chunk of fresh pork through one of my Chinese classmates in Romanian language class.

On our open balcony, we stored apples, onions, and potatoes in cardboard boxes insulated with newspaper. They were usually available throughout the winter in the central open markets, along with sour cabbage and its broth (used to make ciorbă). The common wisdom for canned goods was not to buy anything that had been produced toward the end of each month, when factories were rushing to fill their quotas. (Each label carried the production date.) We ate a lot of bean soups and stewed apples that winter.

Well, a lot has changed on the food front. Now there is a small but convenient Mega Image supermarket (with signs on the doors saying, “Now hiring“) across from the entrance to the park. We walked in to have a look around and, after a little hesitation, I couldn’t resist photographing the shelves of goods, none of which would have been remarkable had we not longed for such a local market when we lived there 24 years ago. The bread, meat and deli shelves were not in danger of going bare. They even had Romanian-made vegetarian products like tofu in natural, cumin, dill, and pimiento flavors.

However, the prices did not seem very cheap. The average Romanian monthly wage is about 1400 RON (new lei), which works out to about US$600 at current exchange rates, or about $1000 in purchasing power parity. Nevertheless, the Romanian economy has been growing at a feverish pace since 2000. Bucharest, in particular, seems in 2008 to be a bit of a boomtown, much less dreary and downbeat than it was in 1984. But the countryside seems to be lagging behind.

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by Joel | 14 February 2008 · 6:51 am

Bosnia, 1995: Western TV’s Dream Victim

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 173:

In a coffee break, I talk to a girl called Dijana, from Sarajevo. She is in her early twenties and beautiful, with high cheekbones and large, liquid, oval eyes; stylishly dressed in black, carefully made up in white. At first, she is unforthcoming, almost hostile, until I mention the name of a good friend who has been coming regularly to Sarajevo in the worst times of the siege. I add, “You must be totally fed up with all these well-intentioned foreigners always asking the same questions.” “Yes,” she says, and smiles for the first time. “A lot of people come just for themselves, to say they’ve been here, to show off.”

Now she’d like to ask me something. Why did the West do nothing to help Sarajevo? Sarajevo was a very special place before the war. They lived well, better than many in the West. Now their life is utterly destroyed and degraded. Her brother was just starting to study. But he’s been four years a soldier, and she doesn’t think he can ever return to normal life. And the West has done nothing—nothing—just watched them being killed. She wants to say to UNPROFOR, “just clear out and give me a weapon to fight with, and I’ll see if I can avoid being raped or whatever.” Anger polishes her English.

What is she to do? Perhaps she could emigrate, but she doesn’t want to be a dishwasher somewhere. “My children might become Canadian or whatever, but I wouldn’t be—I’d always be Sarajevan.” At the independent Radio Zid, she and her friends try to pretend they live in a normal country. They do reports on films, play pop music, and give their listeners beauty tips. For example, water after rice has been boiled in it is very good for the skin. She smiles, an angry smile.

Like it or not (and she doesn’t), Dijana is a Western television producer’s dream victim. Beautiful in black and white, eloquent, bitter. Victim, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein.

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by Joel | 13 February 2008 · 6:08 pm

Serbia, 1997: What Nationalism Achieved

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 234-235:

Consider what Milošević has done for them. Ten years ago [= 1987] there was a country called Yugoslavia, “and I thought it was in Europe,” says my friend Ognjen Pribičević, one of Belgrade’s brightest political analysts. Economically, they were quite well off compared to the Czechs or Poles. Belgrade looked smarter than Warsaw. Schools and courts functioned more or less normally. They could travel freely. Yugoslavia had a good name in the world.

Now they live in a country known as Serbia, and it is—everyone agrees—not in Europe but in the Balkans. (Before I came out I looked in five popular tourist guidebooks to Europe. Serbia featured in none of them.) Serbia is an international pariah. To be a Serb abroad is like being a German after 1945. Provided, that is, you can even get abroad. You need a visa for almost everywhere. Distinguished professors stand in line for five hours in the cold and are then refused.

Physically, the whole place is battered and run-down. Belgrade reminds me of Warsaw in the late 1970s. If you look at the cars, the clothes, the shop windows, you feel that Poland and Yugoslavia have changed places. According to the (unreliable) statistics, average per-capita income has shrunk from around $3,000 to less than $1,000. The official unemployment figure is close to 50 percent. I visit Kragujevac, a town once made prosperous by the large Zastava car, truck, and arms factory. The war decimated the production of cars (since parts came from all over the former Yugoslavia) but was good for the arms factory. Now the peace has cut the production of arms. Most of the Zastava factory workers are paid some $20 to $25 a month for doing nothing. They line the streets selling blackmarket goods: trinkets, Nescafé, chocolate bars, cigarettes smuggled in via Montenegro.

Back in Belgrade, I am taken to a vast black-market bazaar, full of new Western consumer goods, all imported without paying taxes. There is a great double line of people hawking Western cigarettes, but watch out for the “Marlboros”: They are made in Montenegro. Fake Calvin Klein, Versace, and Nike clothes adorn the stalls—mainly produced, I am told, in the Sandjak of Novi Pazar.

Crime, corruption, and lawlessness are endemic. A notice in the hotel foyer asks you to hand over your personal firearms to the hotel security department. A security man hovers watchfully with a metal detector: Does my tweed jacket suggest a local criminal or a Western businessman? I have never seen so many obvious gangsters, not even in Russia. I note that the phrase used about the election fraud is “when Milošević stole the elections.” Elections are just one of so many things being stolen here.

People don’t trust the banks, so they keep their money in cash. Here, as throughout former Yugoslavia, the deutsche mark is the real currency. “I don’t take dollars,” says one small businessman—”they are too easily forged.” When your money is stolen, you have no redress. Insurance? You’re joking. And the courts? A friend is meant, according to the law, to inherit a flat. But to get it he needs to pay DM 10,000—as a bribe to the judge.

Politics and corruption are deeply intertwined, as in all the post-communist demokraturas. The ruling parties run much of the state as a private business; private businesses protect themselyes by supporting the ruling parties. But one would not like to inquire too closely into the finances of opposition parties, either. The moral environment is as degraded as the physical one.

And what of the Serbs for whom the nationalist standard was supposedly raised: the Serbs in Kosovo, the Serbs “across the Drina” in Bosnia, the Serbs in Croatia? The Serbs in the Krajina, in Croatia, have been completely expelled. The remaining Serbs in Bosnia, impoverished and brutalized, wander around the remnants of their tinpot para-state. There are at least five hundred thousand Serb refugees in Serbia, most of them still without citizenship, let alone economic assistance from the state.

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by Joel | 11 February 2008 · 8:46 pm

Changing Color Values in World History

Anthropologists and cognitive linguists have done a lot of work on the acquisition, psycholinguistic status, typology, and relation to neurophysiology of basic color terms. Now a world history professor has published a fascinating article on the evolution, elaboration, social status, and trickle-down economics of colors in human societies: Robert Finlay, Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History (on Project Muse), Journal of World History 18:383-431. Here are a few excerpts (footnotes omitted).

Dyed garments were the most visible, widespread, and extensively used signs of social status and conspicuous consumption. Rural laborers and common townsfolk everywhere dressed in homespun fabrics of lackluster tones, mainly washed-out browns, blues, and grays. In northern Europe during the late medieval period, wool in natural shades of tan or gray provided most of the clothing. Clerics were supposed to wear linen liturgical vestments of pure white but had to settle for shades of light gray and yellowish-white since the various whitening agents, such as ash, chalk, and magnesium, yielded muddy results. In sixteenth-century England, some common hues for clothing were known as “horseflesh,” “gooseturd,” “rat’s color,” “pease porridge,” and “puke.” In eighteenth-century France, “flea’s belly,” “Paris mud,” and “goose-droppings” identified a dark brown cloth. In China at the same time, “camel lung,” “rat skin,” “nose mucus,” and “dribbling spittle” numbered among the disagreeable colors.

Only the elite could afford or legally wear clothing of certain colors. Sumptuary legislation almost everywhere prohibited low-status persons from dressing in the sort of colors and costumes worn by those in privileged circles. Japanese samurai, Chinese mandarins, Javanese chiefs, Indian Brahmans, Swahili oligarchs, Byzantine ecclesiastics, Venetian patricians, French aristocrats, Spanish hildagos, Aztec and Maya warriors—all dressed in costly dyed garments that set them proudly apart from color-deprived commoners….

Japanese color values were established by the Heian era (794–1185), a couple of centuries after sophisticated Chinese dyeing technology came to the islands. Since Japan entered a lengthy era of national isolation in 794, the prolonged cultural supremacy of the Heian court meant that its color values dominated the elite and remained a reference point on the subject for many centuries. In fact, the Heian preference for “cold and withered” (hiekareru) metaphorical colors of the mind paradoxically resulted in an exquisitely subtle perception of color, one that remains unparalleled in cultural history….

The word for “color” in ancient Japan was iro, which originally denoted a beautiful woman as well as desire for sex with one—the ideogram signifies intercourse, with one person lying on top of another. Iro evolved to evoke the idea of passing time and transient hues. In like fashion, the verb shimiru (to penetrate) came to mean “to dip in dye” and “to absorb color,” while also taking on the nuance of inconstant feelings and fading beauty. The Japanese looked down upon peaches and plums, the most admired flowering plants in China, as vulgar and voluptuous because of their deep-pink blooms. Instead, they esteemed the delicate pinkish-white tint of cherry blossoms, whose petals flowered so briefly. In general, contemporary Western taste highlights the climactic moment of the full-blooming rose and resplendent tulip, but traditional Japan favored the beginning and ending of things, transitional moments epitomized in barely opened buds, faded flowers, and withered autumn leaves.

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by Joel | 9 February 2008 · 3:12 pm

Resistance, Collaboration, Passivity, Pétainism

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 277-279:

What does [Service du Travail Obligatoire (the wartime labor draft)] tell us about the broader nature of the Vichy regime? Most obviously, it shows how resistance, collaboration, passivity and Pétainism always overlapped. Not everyone who evaded STO, or who helped others to do so, was a resistant. Some réfractaires specifically refused to recall their experience in terms of the Resistance or, like Yves Laurent, they distinguished between Resistance and resistance. Some people avoided STO in ways that involved serving the German war economy or even in ways, such as joining the Milice, that involved outright collaborationism. The very confusion of labour policy in France in 1943 and 1944 makes it hard to classify actions in simple categories. Vichy was divided, as some officials sabotaged policies that were pursued by others. The Germans, too, were divided. Different leaders in Berlin had different views about how best to exploit French labour and, especially in 1944, German agencies in France were desperate to secure their own labour supplies even if they did so at the expense of other German employers. The result of this was that many people ‘resisted’ STO by ‘collaborating’ with some German agency.

Response to STO was not, however, simply a matter of institutions and political structures. Such responses were also rooted in French society. In important respects, the orders of Vichy and the Germans were mediated through French society. The direct use of physical force was rarely effective. Such force could frighten the whole community but it could not track down particular individuals, and violence by outsiders broke down the subtle networks of cohabitation on which the occupation rested. Vichy and the Germans could only make STO work by securing the cooperation of powerful individuals—not just, perhaps particularly not, people who held formal positions. This inevitably meant that the social hierarchies counted for much in the implementation of STO. Some of these hierarchies dated back before 1940. A young man who entered a grande école in 1940 stood a good chance of avoiding STO; a young man who entered Santé prison in 1940 stood almost no chance of avoiding it: it was highly likely that such a person would have ‘volunteered’ in order to escape the high mortality rates of Vichy prisons before 1943 and, if not, he would have been taken in handcuffs to the Gare du Nord.

Pre-war hierarchies were, however, modified by the special circumstances of the occupation. Members of the grande bourgeoisie were protected from being sent to Germany but often had to endure considerable discomfort in order to achieve this. Members of the urban lower middle class were probably less privileged in the context of STO than almost any other social group, including those who would have stood below them before 1940. Agriculture, sometimes a poor relation before 1940, did well and young peasants were probably the only social group who sometimes managed to avoid STO without enduring any other serious inconvenience.

Rooting STO in its social context means recognizing the degree of complicity in its execution. This complicity did not just involve institutions and elites. The very people that requis de travail [labor draftees] trusted—local notables and, most of all, their own fathers—often encouraged them to go to Germany. Men in authority (and it was mainly men who encouraged departures to Germany) felt that STO was a lesser evil. The departure of a particular cohort of young men, who had thus far avoided military service, was seen as a price worth paying to protect their communities and families from reprisals. As time went on, this calculation changed. The Germans and their French allies had more and more difficulty in tracing particular réfractaires or those who helped them and were increasingly prone to respond with random acts of violence. STO’s legitimacy diminished as it became clear how harsh would be the fate of those who had gone to Germany, and the chances of avoiding it increased as the liberation approached and the Maquis expanded. By the summer of 1944, the circumstances that had made many feel that young men should obey orders to go to Germany in the summer of 1943 seemed remote. By the time the surviving requis de travail returned home in the summer of 1945, the logic that had seemed to require their departure no longer fitted into France’s vision of herself. Some requis now found that they were blamed for going by the very men who had refused them help when they had tried to find escape routes, or that they were encouraged to keep quiet about their experiences by their own families.

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Filed under France, Germany, labor, war

by Joel | 7 February 2008 · 5:53 pm

Croatia, 1995: In Cleansed Krajina

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 167-169:

Two more days in the “ethnically cleansed” Krajina, this time heading south with my friend Konstanty Gebert, a Polish writer, and Ana Uzelac, his Serbo-Polish colleague from Belgrade. On the roads, there is no traffic except the Croat military police at the roadblocks, a few white-painted UN vehicles, and, incongruously, the occasional smart BMW or Mercedes with German number plates racing past. Presumably Croat Gastarbeiter revisiting family homes or just on safari.

For hour after hour, we drive through the most spectacularly beautiful countryside, along the wooded valleys of the Plitvicka National Park, across the karst uplands, and down to the fortress of Knin. For hour after hour we see nothing but devastated, burned, plundered houses. Roofs burned out; windows smashed; clothes, bedclothes, furniture, papers strewn across the floor. Everything of value removed. Orchards, vineyards, fields, all with their crops gone to waste. No cars left, no tractors, no farm equipment, no cattle, no dogs. Only a few cats survive.

And, for mile upon mile upon mile, we see no single human being. Nobody. Ana has brought from Belgrade the addresses of Serb families that fled, but their houses are very difficult to find, because the villages no longer have the landmarks the inhabitants remember. Could this have been a grocer’s shop? Was that once a white wall? But there is no one to ask for directions.

Cleansing is in an awful way the right word for what has been done here. The Krajina, an area the size of several English counties, has literally been picked clean. This was not random looting. The plundering and burning has been done quite systematically—for the most part, it seems, by Croats in one uniform or another. The object, apart from booty, is simple: to ensure that the Serbs don’t come back. Croatia is to be, so far as possible, Serb-free. Serbenrein.

According to the local UN office, some one hundred elderly Serbs who stayed in their homes have been murdered since Croat forces retook the area. At Gračac, we find fresh graves in the cemetery, numbered neatly on the identical wooden crosses. However, here, as elsewhere, the Orthodox church has been left standing, to show that the Croats are western, civilized people, unlike those barbaric Orthodox Serbs, who raze Catholic churches to the ground. But the vicarage has been torn apart. A children’s Bible and a church calendar for 1996 lie among the litter on the floor.

At Kistanje, once a pretty, small town, we find three family photo albums laid out on stone tables in the marketplace. The wedding. A son’s christening. The ceremony to celebrate his joining the Yugoslav army. As we turn the pages, a white armored personnel carrier of UNPROFOR, the so-called United Nations Protection Force, roars through the deserted town. Ludicrous protectors of nothing. The UN self-protection force.

In places like this, journalists say, “the story writes itself.” Wherever we look, journalistic “color” and clichés offer themselves wantonly, like the whores in Amsterdam. Outside a plundered home, a doll is sprawled across the road, one foot torn off. In the ruins of the family home of Milorad Pupovac, leader of a small would-be liberal Serb party in Croatia, I find a book of children’s verse, Robber Katja and Princess Nadja, published in Sarajevo in 1989. Ana can recite some of the verses from memory. The last poem is entitled “How Our Yugoslavia Grows.” In the rubble of another house I see what looks like a white scroll. Unrolling it, I discover a black-and-white photograph of Tito—the kind that once hung in every public place and in many private houses too. It has a bootmark pointing toward the face.

Knin was the capital of the self-styled Serb Republic of Krajina. Now “liberated,” its imposing hilltop fortress, with the checkerboard flag flying from the top, forms the background to the main election poster for President Tudjman’s nationalist HDZ movement. In the foreground you see Tudjman himself, waving both fists above his head like a victorious football manager. Before the war, some 37,000 people lived in Knin; now even the local government claims only 2,000. Croat soldiers and military police, baseball caps reversed, speed along the deserted streets in their stolen—sorry, “liberated”—cars: a smart Mercedes, a Renault, a Mitsubishi Jeep with the name of the German dealer still advertised on the back. We climb to the top of the fortress and discover the largest flag I have ever seen in my life. It must be at least thirty feet long. Young girls in black jeans and T-shirts are photographing each other literally wrapped in the flag. The cliché made flesh.

As the sun sets over the mountains like a holiday advertisement, we drive down to the Adriatic, across the invisible line to the part of Croatia the Serbs never occupied, and suddenly there is ordinary life: houses with roofs, electric light, curtains, cars, a young couple canoodling on a scooter. In Šibenik, one of the beautiful resort towns on the Dalmatian coast, we gape at the cheerful, well-dressed crowds, the nice hotels and the Café Europa.

Ah, Europe—but we’ve been there all the time.