by | 10 July 2004 · 1:41 pm

Suppression of Free Speech in South Korea

The Asia Times runs a Pyongyang Watch series by Aidan Foster-Carter, who on 18 May 2004 described a sad case of Double jeopardy for North Korean defectors, but also bemoaned broader tendencies toward the suppression of free speech in South Korea. And this was before the SK government began restricting Internet access.

In the new South Korea, thuggery pays. It is here that bullies, enemies of free speech, of toleration, of democracy are being nourished in the country’s so-called progressive democratization. Not only are they challenging the values of free speech and toleration, but now they are attacking the victims who seek asylum from the tyrannical regime in North Korea….

You’d suppose that these refugees, many of whom have suffered terrible privation and persecution, would be welcomed with open arms in Seoul, wouldn’t you? Don’t the hearts of all good South Koreans go out to their oppressed, starving Northern brethren? Don’t they embrace the few who make it to freedom? Don’t they give them every help and encouragement, to bring closer the day when all Koreans can reunite in the freedom and prosperity that the South now takes for granted?

Well, no. Make that, hell no. And listen to this: on April 20, North Korean defectors opened an Internet radio station in Seoul. (Korean speakers can access it at www.freenk.net)…. What person with an ounce of human decency could possibly not wish Free NK well?

Fact is, many South Koreans are not sympathetic – and some are downright nasty. From day one, Free NK has been hassled and harassed – to the point where, after less than a month on the air, it now may have to close down: the building’s landlord can’t cope with the pressure, so he’s given Free NK notice to quit by the end of this month.

It’s an astonishing and shameful tale…. [They] have been subjected to “continuous threatening phone calls” and e-mails…. Critics get physical, too. A guard at the building said “strange people” come to protest every day….

Even if the actual bullies are a minority, their violence – for that’s what it is – has been nourished in a noxious new soil that is spreading in Seoul these days. I fear I was wrong about democratization in South Korea. At least some of those who fought against dictatorship weren’t, and aren’t, true democrats. What they hated was the generals’ right-wing politics, not authoritarianism per se.

Such self-styled “progressives”, who rule the roost in the new South Korea, seem to me merely to have turned the old values inside out, rather than made true progress. I sometimes think Koreans don’t do shades of gray, but prefer gestalt conversions: a total switch of world view. They flip.

In the bad old days, woe betide you if you said anything good about North Korea in Seoul. Now it’s a mirror image: If you say anything bad about Kim Jong-il, you’re a traitor. Even if, like the defectors of Free NK, you’ve suffered grievously under the Dear Leader – and therefore know whereof you speak, unlike head-in-sand fellow-travellers living safely south of the border.

I find this mentality not only despicable, but baffling. What is wrong with these people? Why do they not only defend tyranny, but attack its victims? What’s in their minds, let alone their hearts?

See also NKZone‘s post entitled Big Brother in South Korea.

UPDATE: Muninn offers a more nuanced take on Korean Media and the Political Pendulum.

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by | 9 July 2004 · 8:46 pm

Circumcision: A Sensitive Etymology

So Linus [a Javanese Christian] lived with the idea of decay, a precious world in dissolution. His recent trouble with the young Muslims of Yogyakarta was like part of the new uncertainty.

“I write a short cultural essay for the local paper. I was in charge this year of the Javanese and Indonesian literature section of the Yogya art festival. In one of my columns I tried to present the Javanese music that still lives in our society but is not popular today. In the gamelan there is an instrument called the sitar, and a group called sitaran. As far as I know, people use this sitaran group at weddings and circumcision ceremonies. I tried to understand the custom of circumcision. I know from the Old Testament that the prophet Musa introduced this custom, and Musa is Jewish. Jewish in Indonesian is jahudi [= Yahudi] and circumcision is jahudi-sasi [see below]. I wanted to make a historical-cultural point. To make for a better festival. I wasn’t touching the Muslim custom only, because Christians here also practice circumcision. Today it’s not only a religious thing, but a health precaution.

“I went to the paper, the office, on Thursday afternoon, two days after, to get my money for the article. Seventy-five thousand rupiah.” About thirty-five dollars. “And the journalists told me that some young Muslims had just brought some leaflets to the newspaper. The leaflet said, ‘Hang Linus. Linus mocks Muslims.’ They were trying to stir up the students.”

I said, “Weren’t you expecting something like that?”

“I was surprised. I thought that if someone doesn’t agree he would write in the newspaper against what I had written. Maybe they have a crisis of identity as a young generation. They are young people who have not finished in the university.

“I came home, and in the morning some soldiers came here with a captain and said, ‘Linus, what did you do? Did you mock the Muslims?’ I said, ‘No.’ The captain had a copy of the article. He said he didn’t see any reference to Muslims. Then he said, ‘And now we will all go to Yogya. And follow me, please.’ We went, to the fourth level of the local command.”

It was Linus’s way of expressing the seriousness with which the army took the affair.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 82-83

Hmm. Something’s not right. My Kamus Inggris-Indonesia (Cornell, 1975) lists only two base forms for circumcision: sunatan (> penyunatan) and khitanan, and doesn’t list anything like sasi at all (except sasis ‘chassis’). The root khitan, like most kh- words, is probably from Arabic, but sunat has an interesting alternate definition: “2. skim money off the top of a budget so that the grantee gets only a portion. Anggaran y[an]g lima belas juta itu di-[sunat] lima Five million were taken from the budgeted 15 (so that the department received only 10 million of the amount allotted).” The second practice (‘skimming’) seems far more universal than the first (‘skinning’).

I wonder if “jahudi-sasi” is Javanese (not Indonesian) for ‘Jewish rite’. Compare Javanese sasi Muharram (Muharram being the first month of the Muslim year). But, in that case, the order should be sasi Jahudi because modifiers generally come after nouns in Indonesian and Javanese, as in French or Spanish.

Moreover, there is a sasi meaning ‘taboo’ that seems to be more common in Maluku and eastern Indonesia, far from Java. Could Naipaul’s Linus, the Javanese Christian, have been a Christian of Moluccan ancestry?

Sasi: a varied family of customary practices and laws (or rules) which establish limitation of access to individually or collectively controlled territory and/or resources. To place sasi on an area means to put into effect a time-limited prohibition on entry and behavior within that area. Individual trees, as well as entire regions of orchard lands or “wild forest”, might be placed under sasi (ZERNER, 1994:1118)

In the Moluccas of eastern Indonesia, customary practices to control access to resources are generally known as sasi in which harvest of selected coastal and land resources are subject to particular regulation. The function and history of sasi are diverse. For instance, sasi lola (trochus shell) spread extensively throughout the Moluccas in the mid 1970s when economic demand for the shell neccesitated control over its harvest while sasi lompa (sardine-like fish) is found only on Haruku Island and its origin may be traced back several hundred years. [Note that the modifying noun that identifies what the taboo applies to always follows sasi.]

Land and marine resource ownership in Irian Jaya is historically clan-based. But when Indonesia took over Irian Jaya in the late 60’s, the Jakarta government declared that all land belonged to the state by law. The traditional community-based system of marine resource management called sasi forbids the use of specific resources for a designated period of time in order to allow them to recover.

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by | 8 July 2004 · 5:19 pm

Fifth Anniversary of 18 Tir 1378 (Persian Calendar)

The fifth anniversary of the 1999 student uprising in Iran falls on 8 July–18 Tir by the Persian calendar. The constitutional monarchy-oriented Iranian Voice describes the events of that day and offers a photo gallery.

Five years ago the Islamic Regime forces attacked the student dorm on July 8 as students held a peaceful gathering protesting the closure of a popular daily paper. Islamic regime reported one person dead and 34 other injured but the press reported that the number of fatalities and injured was much higher. Some 4,000 demonstrators were said to have been arrested.

The left-oriented Iran National Front, supporters of former Prime Minister Mossadegh–elected in April 1951, deposed by coup d’état on 19 August 1953 (28 Mordad)–posted a long write-up on the first anniversary of the uprising.

Today, we observe the first anniversary of the pro-democracy uprising, which was led by the students and widely supported by the Iranian people that was crushed by the dictatorship. On the night of 18 Tir 1378 (July 8, 1999), after the pro-democracy students had returned to their dormitories from their protest sit-in against the closure of a newspaper, in the middle of night, the forces of repression attacked student dormitories, murdered and beat up our young brave students, and imprisoned the pro-democracy nationalist activists. The forces of tyranny attempted to destroy the opponents of dictatorship, whether the student activists, nationalist activists, or the ordinary people on the streets who have had enough with the ruling dictatorship.

And the right-oriented Activist Chat quotes Human Rights Watch.

“The European Union’s weak response to continuing human rights violations in Iran is deeply disturbing,” said Whitson, “It’s time for the European Union to condemn Iran’s record of persecution and torture and to set real benchmarks that the government must meet.” Human Rights Watch called on the Iranian government to release all political prisoners and effectively prohibit torture immediately.

The Democracy for Iran website based in Germany has a listing of demonstrations around the world on this date. When left, right, and center are agin’ ya, ya gotta be screwing up big time.

In the lead-up to this date, Far Outliers has posted a series of excerpts from V.S. Naipaul’s account of his travels in Iran in 1979-80 and in 1995: on the hanging judge of the revolution, on revolutionary disillusionment, on punishing the bourgeoisie, on revolutionary fashion, and on the revolutionary blame game after things began to go sour. I have no idea how accurate Naipaul’s impressions are, but I suspect they capture a prevailing sense of twin disillusionment with both the Khomeini Revolution and the likely outcomes of either counterrevolution or progressive revolution. On this score, you can count me ‘cautiously pessimistic’.

The final installment follows.

They want to control your way of sitting and your way of talking, Mr. Parvez said. And Tehran at night, in some of its main roads, was like an occupied city, or like a city in a state of insurrection, with Revolutionary Guards and, sometimes, the more feared Basiji volunteers at roadblocks. They were not looking–on these almost personal night hunts–for terrorists so much as for women whose hair was not completely covered. And not so much for weapons as for alcohol or compact discs or cassettes (music was suspect, and women singers were banned).

The people of Tehran could spot these roadblocks before the visitor did. One night, when we passed some people who had been picked up, the lady driving us said it was all a matter of knowing how to talk to the Guards. Once, when she was stopped, she had said, as though really wishing to know, “What is wrong with my hijab [headdress], my son?” And the young man, of simple background, not feeling himself rebuffed or challenged by the lady, but thinking he was being treated correccty, had let her go. Such were the ways of obedience and survival that people had learnt here.

But parallel with this was a feeling that this kind of humiliation couldn’t go on. Though all the capacity for revolution or even protest had been eradicated after forty years of hope and letdown, and people were now simply weary, after all the bloodletting–first of protesters in the Shah’s time, and then of the Shah’s people after the revolution, and the communists, together with the terrible slaughter of the war–there was a feeling now, with that weariness, that something had to snap in Iran. And, almost as part of wishing for that breaking point, stories were being told now that Khomeini had really been foisted on the Iranian people by the great powers; and that certain important mullahs were making their approaches to people to ask for their goodwill when things changed, and the Islamic Republic was abandoned.

That was 9 years ago.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 154-155

UPDATE: Robert Tagorda recorded his experience of the 2003 commemoration in Los Angeles.

My new friend told me that he moved from Tehran to “Irangeles” when he was eight. Since then, he said, he’s been organizing demonstrations, calling CNN and other news organizations regularly to devote more time to the mullahs’ atrocities, and distributing videos of women stoned to death. He accepted that his 72,000 brothers and sisters in the area couldn’t all be there with us, though it troubled him a little to think that the “majority of the silent” would likely be the first to enjoy a free Iran. When I asked him if his group ever approached the antiwar students at nearby UCLA, he only questioned why they didn’t speak out when Iraq fought his people. When I asked him if President Bush should intervene, he flatly said “no”: Iranians themselves are ready to take back their country….

I left with mixed feelings, but my optimism prevailed. In 1986, at the age of nine, I immigrated from the Philippines as the People Power Revolution brought democracy. Sue me for believing that Iranians can do the same.

Pejman Yousefzadeh (Pejmanesque) has much more.

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by | 7 July 2004 · 8:39 pm

Lankov on the Fate of North Korean Defectors

NKZone contributor Andrei Lankov’s latest article on North Korea in this week’s Korea Times concerns the Fate of Defectors

In September 1994, a young North Korean named Kim Hyong-dok arrived in Seoul. It was the end of a long trip: he had spent two years trying to secure a passage to the South. He succeeded against all odds and came to Seoul full of expectations.

Two years later Kim Hyong-dok made another escape attempt — this time he was trying to flee back to the North. He was apprehended and jailed, since an attempt to go to North Korea without proper permission is still a crime under South Korean law. In 2001 Kim Hyong-dok — by that time a university graduate and a clerical worker in parliament, remarked: “I shall not escape any more. Utopia does not exist anywhere.” Alas, comprehension of this fact comes to most North Korean defectors with great pain.

North Korean defectors do not fare well in the South. Between one third and one half of them are unemployed, and most others are relegated to low-level unskilled jobs….

Indeed, the heroes of almost all of the “success stories” of the North Korean defectors come from the elite. There is nothing surprising in this. Members of the North Korean upper crust have a good education and possess leadership skills, they know how to learn and how to manage, and last but not least, they have social ambitions.

However, this does not bode well for the future political transition of North Korea. It appears the only leadership material available in the North will be found within the existent elite. The local Party secretaries would become democratically elected mayors, and will avow their loyalty to democracy with the same zeal they once gave to their professions of loyalty to the Great Leader. The secret police operatives will become successful entrepreneurs, and the children of people who sent hundreds of North Koreans to prisons will graduate from the best universities to lead the sons and daughters of their parents’ victims. We have seen it in many other ex-Communist countries.

But what is the alternative? Will it be possible to prosecute all those who played a part in the crimes of the regime? Unlikely: there are far too many of them. And who will become the administrators, teachers, policemen, and engineers in the post-Kim North Korea whenever it arises? And, should unification occur, would not the wholesale replacement of the elite by Southerners be an even greater evil?

I suspect that, when that time comes, smugly superior southern Korean attitudes toward their benighted northern compatriots will resemble smugly superior New England Yankee attitudes toward their benighted southern compatriots–attitudes that still prevail nearly a century and a half after the end of the Civil War! The North will be Korea’s Mississippi for decades after unification. And the supreme irony will be that Koreans up north will soon enough begin to welcome investment from Japanese and American firms, their former external arch-enemies, just as southerners in the U.S. welcomed investment from Japanese and German firms only a few decades after World War II.

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by | 7 July 2004 · 7:41 pm

Lankov on North Korea’s Empty "Breakthroughs"

NKZone‘s Andrei Lankov had another article on North Korea in last week’s Korea Times headlined Breakthroughs End in Naught.

Once every few years the world media discovers that a new historical breakthrough has just taken place in North Korea. These lofty epithets are normally used to describe a new turn in the seemingly endless (and rather fruitless) negotiations between Pyongyang and Seoul or, alternatively, to inform readers that Pyongyang has finally decided to reform its economy.

Being a sort of Pyongyang-watcher for 20 years, I have grown very skeptical about these recurring statements. Indeed, we have witnessed a number of such “breakthroughs” — all of which ended in naught.

In the mid-1980s, Western journalists loved to speculate that North Korea was on the eve of dramatic changes; and so one of the first bouts of media hype about the forthcoming “opening” of the North Korean economy occurred in 1984.

The reason for these hopes was a Joint Venture Law passed by the North Korean parliament in September of that year….

However, it soon became evident that no serious investor was showing interest in North Korea. Ethnic Koreans from Japan, active supporters of Chongryo, opened almost all the joint ventures. And even these people whose pro-Pyongyang sympathies could be taken for granted did not rush to the North with serious money.

Indeed, journalists who hailed the Joint Venture Law in 1984 tended to forget that North Korea had already acquired an unfavorable reputation in the international capital market. In the early 1970s North Korean companies and banks solicited credits from Western banks. In a few years their debt to the West reached some $1.3 billion. In those days, Communist countries were believed to be good borrowers — irrespective of what the Communist leaders thought about the greedy capitalists, they understood the importance of good credit ratings.

To the great disappointment of Western bankers, North Korea proved to be an exception to this rule. Pyongyang did not care much about repaying debts to the USSR and China — and did not see any reason why Westerners should be treated differently. Thus, in the late 1970s, Pyongyang became the first Communist country to default on its loans. Of course, its credit rating was ruined, but the North Korean bosses hardly grasped the importance of this fact.

In the 1980s, however, they learned about the importance of credit ratings the hard way. The Western businesses simply refused to deal with a partner they believed to be unreliable.

During the 1980s, Romania’s Ceausescu and North Korea’s Kim Il-sung had a mutual admiration society, both being determined to achieve national autarky (called Juche in North Korea). But Ceausescu seems to have learned a valuable lesson from the misfortunes of North Korea, and later Poland. He bled Romanians dry in order to repay his foreign loans. In fact, Thomas P. M. Barnett (author of The Pentagon’s New Map) writing in the Christian Science Monitor on 28 December 1989 (a few days after the Ceausescus had been executed) thinks this was Why Ceausescu Fell: His Silent War Against the Romanian People Backfired.

This silent war dates back to 1982, when Ceausescu implemented severe austerity policies designed to retire the nation’s foreign debt by 1990. Why so quickly? The Romanian dictator had witnessed Warsaw’s near default on its large foreign debt. Poland’s subsequent economic collapse convinced Ceausescu that his regime had to avoid this scenario at all costs.

This was the era when pig’s feet were labeled patrioti in Romanian because they were the only part of the pig that stayed in country.

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by | 6 July 2004 · 8:31 pm

Short-lived Chinese Intellectuals

Asiapages reads depressing news about Chinese intellectuals.

A recent survey by the State Commission for Economic Restructuring reveals that China’s intellectuals, a broader term used in China to cover academic scholars or any professionals who have an advanced education, have an average life expectancy of 58–at least 10 years less than the general public.

She observes that “over-eating, over-drinking and little sleep have also been blamed for such short life-spans.”

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by | 6 July 2004 · 7:59 pm

Indonesian Presidential Elections

I was going to post something on the Indonesian presidential elections but, as usual, The Head Heeb provides far better coverage of contextualized current events in the part of the world I monitor–even though the proprietor is away and guests have taken over his kitchen. In this case, Conrad Barwa serves up a 4-course meal: Susilo Bambang Yudhyono as antipasto, Megawati as primo, tough Gen. Wiranto as secundo, and Amien Rais as dolce (far niente).

While there, be sure to scroll down to Daniel Geffen’s informative post about the contested Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

UPDATE: Macam-Macam has more on the Indonesian elections.

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by | 6 July 2004 · 7:48 pm

Cambodian Americans on the Fourth of July

Santepheap, the Cambodia Weblog, offers the following compilation for the Fourth of July.

Americans were paying attention to Cambodian-Americans this Fourth of July.

Chantra Gooch talks about her life before, during and after the Khmer Rouge regime Utah’s The Spectrum

Timothy Chhim (second item) talks about his life in New York’s Journal News.

Vanna Phim told her story in The Lowell Sun.

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by | 5 July 2004 · 10:42 pm

Naipaul on the Revolutionary Blame Game

No one I met spoke of any kind of revolution as a possibility. That idea, so loved by Iranians of an earlier generation, had been spoilt now, as in the old USSR; revolution was a word that had been taken over by the religious state. No one ever spoke of the possibility of political action. There were no means, and no leaders in sight. No new ideas could be floated. The apparatus of control was complete. The actual rulers, though their photographs appeared everywhere, were far away; government here, as someone said, was “occult.” And still, in the general inanition, there was a feeling that something was about to happen. It made people nervous.

One afternoon, as we were driving up into the mountains above Tehran, Mehrdad, after seeming to say that people had learned how to live with the restrictions, abruptly said the opposite. He said, “Everybody is frightened. I am frightened. My father and mother are frightened.” (Poor father, again.) “They are not sure what the future will bring for them or for us, their children. They are not so worried for me. I am an adult now and can look after myself. But my brother is very young. The eight years or so he has to live before he becomes an adult are going to be very dangerous years.”

With this insecurity, certain fantasies had taken hold. The most extraordinary was that Khomeini had been a British or European agent. I had heard it first from Mr. Parvez, and had thought it part of his paranoia. But then I had heard it from many other people. There had been a meeting in the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, according to this story, and the Powers had decided to foist Khomeini on the Iranian people. The Iranians were simple people; they could be persuaded by skilled propaganda to demonstrate for anything; people had joined the demonstrations against the Shah not out of conviction, but simply to do what everybody else was doing. The establishing of an Islamic state in Iran was an anti-Islamic plot by the Powers, to teach Muslims a lesson, and especially to punish the people of Iran. And, as if answering those fantasies, there were even signs of the faith being questioned in certain aspects.

Mr. Parvez had said, “The war [against Iraq] was fought in the name of Islam. It was a blessing in disguise. Without the war people wouldn’t have got so fed up with Islam.” That had seemed extreme. But then I had detected wisps and shadows of religious uncertainty in some people’s conversation. Just as–in these fantasies issuing out of a people stretched to the limit by revolution, war, financial stringency, and the religious state–it was said that Iranians were not really responsible for the Iranian revolution, so I heard that Iranians were not really responsible for the more dramatic aspects of the Shia faith. The bloody scourgings of Mohurram, the mourning month: the idea was really imported from Europe, from the Catholics; it had nothing to do with the original faith.

I talked about this to Mehrdad. He said, “It’s something habitual. Our enemies are always responsible. Blaming others, not ourselves.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 226-227

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by | 5 July 2004 · 9:22 am

Romania’s "Big Dig" Turns 20

Transitions Online translates a recent story from Evenimentul Zilei [‘The Daily Happening’?].

On 26 May, Romania marked the 20th anniversary of the inauguration of the Danube-Black Sea canal. A dream of the then-communist authorities, the canal became a symbol of the nightmare of communist repression, at least during the first part of its construction between 1949 and 1951. After a break of 25 years, [former Romanian dictator] Nicolae Ceausescu resumed the construction process. It took another eight years of work–a huge national labor project followed by years of glorification of what the communists called “the Blue Thoroughfare,” and it was celebrated again and again during communist national festivities in the “Song of Romania.”

The construction of “the dustless road” [as the canal was called in a novel by Romanian writer Petru Dumitriu, an proponent of the social realism movement in the 1950s] required studies by more than 1,000 experts in construction and more than 33,500 execution reports. During its construction, 300 million cubic meters of soil were excavated, and some 3.6 million cubic meters of concrete were used. The result was a navigable canal 64.4 kilometers long with two, 310-meter-long double locks at each end.

Built on the backs of the country’s political detainees, with blood, effort, and maybe too much sacrifice, the Danube-Black Sea canal remains the biggest project ever carried out in Romania. But 20 years after it was opened, the canal works at only 40 percent of its capacity.

The idea for a canal linking the Danube River with the Black Sea reportedly originated in a Soviet “suggestion,” when Stalin sent a stern order to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej [the Romanian communist leader until 1965] to liquidate the opposition in Romania. “I will give you the technical equipment, and you can solve two problems at the same time: You get rid of the kulaks and the landed gentry and irrigate Dobrogea [the territory between the lower Danube River and the Black Sea],” Stalin is said to have told the Romanian communist leader sometime in the late 1940s in Moscow….

Construction on the canal officially started on 15 July 1949. The labor force came from three sources: paid workers, forced labor, and military conscripts. The political detainees were euphemistically called “forces from the Interior Ministry.” […]

Ceausescu had the idea of resuming construction after a 1972 visit to Antwerp, Belgium, and a 1973 trip to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where he learned about a project called “the Canal of Europe,” which aimed to link the Rhine with the Danube–a 3,500 kilometer, transcontinental river route….

On 26 May 1984, with tens of thousands of people lining the two sides, Nicolae Ceausescu inaugurated the canal in festive style. The project at the time was estimated to be worth 10 trillion lei [approximately 3.3 billion average monthly salaries in Romania at the time]….

The canal today links the Danube with the Black Sea and can be used in both directions. With the opening to traffic in 1992 of the Main-Danube canal in Germany, a direct link between the Black Sea and the North Sea (through the ports of Constanta and Rotterdam) was established. It has a capacity of 10 million tons of traffic a year.

On 26 May 1984, Mr. and Mrs. Far Outliers were close to finishing a grim but fascinating year in Romania. We took a day trip by train from Bucharest to Constanta and back in the spring of 1984, crossing the Danube bridge and looking for the traces of the shortcut canal that so many Romanian dissidents spent their last years digging. The train was jam-packed, with people standing a handspan away from our heads blowing smoke into our hair. I finally tried to open a window. What an uproar that caused! Real springtime air on uncovered heads was deemed far more deadly than cigarette smoke in our lungs. In Constanta, we visited an impressive (but empty) mosque and the history museum, had lunch at a faded rococo casino, and were forbidden to take photos of the picturesque Port Tomis, lest it betray secrets to the U.S. (or Turkish?) navy.

Halfway Down the Danube has more.

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