Category Archives: Eastern Europe

Yodok and the hard-labor camps did have several points in common, the first of these being the snitches. During the first days and weeks of our detention, my father and uncle felt most oppressed by the physical demands of forced labor and the looming threat of punishment. The slightest wrong move, it seemed, could mean extra work or a stint of solitary confinement in a sweatbox. This fear, they soon realized, was the consequence of the network of snitches that pervaded the camp. The informants were at every turn. There was no one to confide in, no way to tell who was who. The veteran prisoners sometimes laughed at my father and uncle because of all the naive questions they asked, which only made them more depressed. The only advice their fellow prisoners could offer was to have patience: they would learn to pick out the snitches soon enough. Until then, they would do well to keep their thoughts to themselves. The camp’s common wisdom turned out to be true. Within a few months, we all developed a sixth sense–a snitch radar, if you will–that told us who could be trusted and who could not. Yet a snitch is not necessarily a bad guy. The prisoner is usually picked for the job without being asked his or her opinion, and, in most cases, the honor is not one for which he or she is proud.

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), p. 77

My impression, during my year in Ceausescu’s Romania (as a privileged foreigner, not a prisoner!) was that many of the Romanians who befriended us, and thus had to report periodically on our activities, were among the more interesting and entertaining of our small circle of local acquaintances there. The building manager who lived just across the hall from our apartment, however, was a complete sleazeball. I went out of my way not to ruffle his feathers.

Matt Welch has another update on Romania in the October 2005 edition of Reason that reprises the theme of his 17 July 2004 essay in Canada’s National Post headlined “Rapping the Commies Away: A New MTV Generation in Romania Tries to Drive out Corruption.”

Welch’s current title is perhaps a tad overoptimistic: “The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised: The TV show Dallas helped overthrow Ceausescu. Now gangsta rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet thugs.” But he gives a vivid account of developments in Romanian pop culture during and after the Ceausescu era. Here’s how it ends.

Pop culture, once beaten down to virtual nonexistence, has now become a valuable export. In the summer of 2004, the Moldavian-Romanian boy band O-Zone scored Europe’s No. 1 pop and dance hit, the unbearably catchy single “Dragostea Din Tei,” which topped the charts in at least 27 countries and sold more than 8 million copies. (You’ve probably heard it—think relentless Euro disco, and the phonetic phrase “Numa numa yay.”) And popular gangsta rap bands like Parazitii [‘The Parasites’], despite suffering greatly from domestic piracy and the censorious ways of the National Audio Visual Council (which banned one video simply for the reasonable couplet “alcohol is life/life is alcohol”), have still managed to sell nearly 1 million CDs since Ceausescu was shot.

Unlike the 1989 generation of anti-communist students, these twentysomethings didn’t taste the clubs of miners, didn’t help overthrow an odious tyrant, and didn’t worship at the altar of a 1980s TV show that glorified a morally corrupt business tycoon. “We were more into Seinfeld,” Parazitii manager Munteanu says. Not to mention foul-mouthed 1990s Compton rap sensation N.W.A. “You really need freedom to do this kind of music, you know?”

But their revulsion at corruption, coupled with a government that shares it, offers serious hope that post-communist Europe’s red-headed stepchild will finally emerge from its long, dark shadow and create a country far more free, successful, and interesting.

“On a recent and fairly rare venture into Bucharest’s club scene, I looked at the trendy crowd and felt for a moment that I could have been in Manhattan or South Beach,” said former U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest, who led a daily crusade against Romanian corruption during his three-year tenure, in an exit interview with the monthly magazine Vivid, one of nearly a dozen English-language publications in Bucharest. “Then a series of young people brought me back to reality, stopping one by one at the table to thank me for speaking [out]…. Those who think they’re getting away with corruption are just fooling themselves. A new generation is coming, and it will demand, and indeed create, change.”

And maybe some new wealth. But are the music and film industries really going to help eliminate corruption? Only by motivating voters without fostering cynicism. Otherwise, I would guess that straight-laced bankers are going to be a lot more critical in the fight against corruption than pop musicians.

The Wall Street Journal has a harsh editorial today.

Ten years ago today, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic entered the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica, then being defended by Dutch peacekeepers. General Mladic made three demands: that the townsmen surrender their weapons; that all males between the ages of 12 and 77 be separated out for “questioning”; and that the rest of the population be expelled to Muslim areas. Within two days, 23,000 women and children had been deported. Another 5,000 Muslim men and boys who had taken refuge on a nearby Dutch base were also delivered to the Mladic forces.

As we now know, most of the people surrendered by the Dutch to the Serbs were slaughtered, as were more than 2,000 others, bringing the estimated tally of the Srebrenica massacre to 7,200. Yet the scale of the atrocity alone is not why we remember it. We remember because the men of Srebrenica were betrayed by their ostensible protectors, and that carries some lessons for today.

But Christopher Hitchens is far more brutal.

We still have to endure the disgrace (and the victims and survivors have to endure the humiliation) of knowing that Mladic and his psychopathic political boss Radovan Karadzic are still cheerfully at large. They are not hiding in some dingy cave in the unmapped hinterlands of Waziristan. They are in mainland Europe. Last Friday, when the New York Times covered both the London atrocities and the coming anniversary of Srebrenica, it ran an editorial that smugly inquired “why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism. Many will wonder why the United States is mired in Iraq while Al Qaeda’s leader still roams free.”

Prettily phrased, you have to admit. Others might wonder why the wealthy nations took so long to address the “root cause” of Serbian terrorism-­-the root cause being Serbian fascism and irredentism­–and why it is that Mladic and Karadzic are still gloatingly free after 10 years, not four. The “hunt” for the latter two gentlemen began during the Clinton administration, and on the turf of the sophisticated and multilateral Europeans, as the writer of the above words might have had the grace to admit.

Aljazeera.com also weighs in–and attracts a lot of reader comments.

People in the West who lazily look back on the 1990s as the good old days fail to realize just how much diplomatic, economic, military, and moral credibility the West–the UN, EU, US, NATO–squandered during that halcyon decade before the end of history reversed itself so abruptly at the end of the millennium.

In the summer of 1984, I remember the great relief of returning to normalcy, to the tolerably functional societies of the West after spending a year in Ceausescu’s Romania, the bleakest and most dysfunctional society I have yet encountered. (I know there are, have been, and will be worse.) We could easily endure Romania because we knew that we would eventually escape to a better place. The Romanians, however, remained trapped in their hell, whose brimstone has taken a long time to lose its potency even after the fall of Ceausescu.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, one safe area after another has been attacked from either the inside or the outside, until normalcy has come to include the possibility of yet another outbreak of savage barbarism any place, any time. As last week’s attacks in London reminded us yet again, there is nowhere left to hide. We can only meet those threats head on, anywhere and everywhere, with violent warnings where necessary, as we should have done in Bosnia and Rwanda, while steadily destroying the attraction of the noxious ideologies that feed the barbarism.

Here’s more from David Aaronovitch in The Times Online: ‘If we don’t provoke them, maybe they will leave us alone.’ You reckon so?