Late December meme -- For Autumnnia -- Tales from the Balkans

[rthstewart]

Travel- autumnia asked about travel.

Compared to some of my friends (econopodder I'm looking at you) and family, I don’t think I’m especially well traveled. I also candidly admit that despite my pushy SIL and BIL INSISTING that I will LOVE a certainly place and wow that pisses me off, there are certain places (indeed large swathes of places) I have no particular interest in visiting.

Something I will mention, because it was formative experience, is when the spousal unit and I volunteered, on a whim no less, to do democracy building in Romania, right after the Wall came down in the early 90s. Romania was no workers’ led shipyard strikes or Velvet Revolution. It was a messy, terrible business. On Christmas Day, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were put up against a wall and shot. When you wandered the country and saw the depredations, I understood the urge. It wasn’t as difficult as Albania or the Asian republics, at the time, but it was close. In our case, because it was considered a hardship post, we had access to the Embassy and that did make thing easier.

The moment from when we put in our application until we were boots on the ground was, maybe 4 weeks, tops. It happened really fast. No language. No experience living in what we could call was, at the time, 2nd or maybe even 3rd world. It was insane. Stupid, naïve Americans.

Landing at the airport was surreal. At the time, dogs and chickens roamed the runway, there were all these Soviet-style military plans and tanks covered with rotted camouflage netting, and when you disembarked, you went through a busted metal detector, to get into the country. There was a lot of that sort of thing -- the trappings of modernity covering something dark, disturbing or broken – 16 year old soldiers holding guns that had no bullets, stores selling expired and counterfeit contraceptives and light bulbs that didn’t work, doctors washing hands and instruments in the same sink with the hospital mops, expensive, donated computers that weren’t plugged in. There were no staples, paper, or copy machines so original, official documents were sewn into cloth-bound binders. As our translator would say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” and if people had working clocks or watches, they would still fib about times and missed appointments. Lying was a way of life and a matter of survival.

There were horses, goats, rats, and busted everything on the drive from the airport to the center of Bucharest. You could still see toppled statues of Lenin and Ceaușescu and bullet holes in the walls.

One tour book described the railway station as “like a grisly murder scene you can’t tear your eyes from.” Trash, soot, gigantic Soviet-style concrete bloc buildings, unfinished, and busted cranes hanging in the air. . Our apartment looked down a giant boulevard, deliberately built one meter wider than the Champs-Élysé, to the giant People's Palace, Casa Poporului, smaller only than the Pentagon, filled with marble and crystal. We were told to never identify ourselves as "volunteers" -- that = "slave labor" in Romania - conscripted to build this unfinished monstrosity. Hundreds of giant crystal chandeliers and people would get one 40 watt lightbulb for the whole winter.

The damage done to the Romanian psyche was worse still. In a story, I tried to capture some of the experience.  Grizzled veterans would hobble up to us saying “We’ve been waiting for the Americans since Yalta.” The Soviets came instead.  

We worked on a mass grave, coordinating with a human rights group to obtain a forensic anthropologist to examine the remains. It was one of the saddest things ever when we filed into the cold, grim room with a single, high window and a dangling bulb, and the Doctor (a Dane who wrote in German, spoke with an English accent and lived in Argentina) just let out a long, sad sigh for the task failed even before his work had begun. The Romanians who had discovered the site had undertaken the excavation themselves and mixed up remains beyond any hope of repair. We think this is a bullet wound in a woman’s skull! No, the doctor said, that’s pick axe mark in the jaw bone of a cow. There were all naked, we found nothing! No, the Doctor, answered, pointing at the green marks on the ribs. This is oxidation caused by copper-based buttons. It was fascinating, to reflect on what a society’s purpose was to, literally, dig up a tragic past – identification and bereavement? Reconciliation? Closure? Justice?  There would be no justice here.

In the offices of one official in the Ministry of Justice, he was privileged enough to have CNN and there was live coverage of the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. “That. We want to be able to do that to Baptists and Mormons and anyone else who isn’t one of our permitted religions.”

If you didn’t want to contract HIV from reused needles in the hospital, you shouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place.

It was an interesting time that I think of often when I consider how things are here -- my time in the Narnian fandom, the American political landscape, the economic hardship and income inequality, the racism, ignorance, poverty, violence, sexism, bigotry, and crumbling infrastructure.

Comments

[cofax7]

Wow, this is remarkable; I didn't know you'd done this kind of work. How long were you there? And did you feel that you'd helped accomplish anything in the way of nation-building?

[rthstewart]

We were there for a year. I came away pretty negative about this type of American-based aid programs. In some places they were hugely beneficial. Our situation was very difficult and they really didn't want American advisors. The Romanians we dealt with were very proud of their VERY antiquated French civil law tradition and they wanted the French. But the French weren't there, we were. So much of our program was designed to keep American donors and supporters happy and so there was a big emphasis upon conferences, which we thought were ridiculous, frankly, but gave supporters a chance to come and rough it in Romania for a week. In other places, in other countries, with other support, it worked better but not where we were, when we were there.

And what was provided was often SO FAR above what they actually needed. Going back to my examples above, when clerks are sewing original court documents into ledgers, one day at a time, and when there isn't paper, a stable electrical grid, or staples, developing an electronic system for the handling of court records is simply ridiculous. hence, the computers that sat in their boxes.

Most didn't understand the basics of purchase and sale of real or personal property -- the government owned all the real property. "Does your Congress set the price for each house sold in America?" "How do you know if a price is fair?" "Don't you really have a big computer that does all this? That's how your economy runs, isn't it?"

Profound ignorance at the very highest levels of government of the basics of market economies. It's so easy to see how the oligarchs ended up with all the property -- Cut off the head but the body of the old regime remained. It might be different now, but that's how it was then.

But, we did have the entire State of Oregon code -- the largest non-Romanian law library in the country. And those basic nuts and bolts of State commercial law were HUGELY helpful to begin to build the basics of a civil law-based society. Things like how to accomplish eminent domain, what was necessary for a binding contract, basic open meeting laws, basic rules on issuance of permits for demonstrations. We did that kind of thing all the time. Our legacy, the most useful thing was work we did with a young, earnest commercial lawyer. We wrote basic form commercial contracts -- lease of commercial or apartment space, purchase and sale of personal property, employment, consultancy. We found donors and we got it published in a form that the user could copy it -- if they could find a copy machine, paper and toner-- or tear the pages out and fill in the blanks, or hand copy it. It became, for a time, a hugely popular, very important, simple, basic document that could begin to order business lives in simple and predictable ways. This was the kind of really basic work that was needed at the time and was something I remain very proud of 20 years later.

The mass grave work was important -- beyond our mandate, but we got the prosecutor who asked for our help in contact with the right group. I worked out with the country's first public interest lobbyist on some things involving open meetings, requiring that votes by elected officials be public and recorded, sunshine laws, FOIA, and a public assembly law. I can't say we won anything and eventually the lobbyist gave up and found a European to marry who got her out of the country but it was the kind of thing were every victory was incremental, 2 steps forward, 3 steps back, and hoping to lay the groundwork for a better future, eventually.

[edenfalling]

That sounds like heartbreaking work -- and as you said, often very miscalibrated by the donors. It sounds like importing a Staples outlet, lock stock and barrel, might have been one of the most helpful things imaginable.

I went to Romania -- specifically Transylvania -- for a couple weeks with a church group in the summer of 1997. The oldest continually surviving Unitarian church (by which I mean a religious organization, not a building) is among the ethnic Hungarians of Transylvania, dating back to the 1500s. And after 1990, a bunch of Unitarian Universalist congregations in America picked up partner churches in Transylvania. We did things like send money to build a new physical church so our partners could stop meeting in the minister's house, or print hymn books, or buy a van to help transport members of the congregation who had no cars, etc. I think we also helped sponsor a couple people who wanted to attend American universities.

Visiting the town (Barót in Hungarian, Baraolt in Romanian) was extraordinarily odd. It was majority Hungarian -- well over 90% -- and the Romanian Hungarians were either Catholic, Reformed (aka Calvinist), or Unitarian. Yet there were TWO Romanian Orthodox churches, built by the government to promote the "state" religion. And the Unitarians couldn't build their own church, because they hadn't had one before WWII and putting up a new one was illegal under Ceaușescu. One of the Orthodox churches stood completely empty and its assigned priest basically used the grounds to grow maize, right in the middle of town.

At that time, inflation was terrible beyond belief -- pumps at gas stations had "x10,000" chalked beside the official numbers, because the machines simply couldn't count high enough. Communist concrete housing blocks -- the most ugly, soulless buildings I've ever seen -- were everywhere. So were horse-drawn carts, because people either couldn't afford cars or couldn't afford gas. Our little group stayed in the minister's house because there was no local hotel. Things I usually took for granted, like rest areas on highways, or clearly marked parking lots and spaces, or paved roads, often flat-out didn't exist.

And yet, the countryside was gorgeous, and people were clearly doing their best to live and work and have fun when they could with family and friends. And the energy and productivity of the tourist industry was astonishing.

From what I've heard, tensions between the Romanian majority and the ethnic/linguistic Hungarian minority have not gotten much better since then, though the living standard of the country as a whole has thankfully risen.

[rthstewart]

Sorry for being so late to get back but thanks SO much for sharing. You were there not long after I was. We traveled in Transylvania quite a bit and it was beautiful but oi those old ethnic rivalries still persisted. Something we did experience and perhaps you did was the arrangement for dinner at breakfast -- would you like the porc for dinner? Or the porc? We always felt badly for the pigs we saw on the road as we suspected one of them ended up on our plate that evening.

As for the religious issue, the story I related up above about the burning of the Branch Davidian comound and the "Can we do that to Baptists?" stems from precisely the issue you relate. The law was frozen in pre-WW2 and reverted back once Ceaucescu fell. Further, as a civil law system, coupled with the Romanian psychological dependence upon being told what to do after so many decades of repression, and the institutional power of the Orthodox church, there were only -- 3? official religions and no incentive to change the current system. No other religions could exist lawfully without a law permitting them. Everything else was a cult. We were asked by some interest groups to help draft a "law on religion" so that other groups, like the Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and others could actually operate officially and legally. The whole process was SO bizarre to Americans -- a law establishing religion would be unconstitutional on its face. (And this underscores why they really needed experts other than Americans -- we had no idea how to draft or advise on a civil law on establishing and legalizing religion. But we were there and others weren't so you did the best you could).

One of our last official events was a conference on religious "tolerance" in Iasi. It was a nightmare. The speakers on behalf of the official religions (many of whom collaborated with the Securitati so distrust of them was rampant and justified) were frothing over the cults that were actually doing things like making religion fun and accessible, by providing services to people, and so on. One patriarch said that other religions should be banned to prevent people from leaving the Orthodox church. Hence the query from the Assistant Minister of Justice who didn't just want to ban the "cultists" but burn them in their homes.

[edenfalling]

What I mainly remember by way of food is a LOT of cabbage, and several variations on goulash and paprikash. Which are more Hungarian than Romanian dishes, but then again, ethnic Hungarian community. *shrug* Also people kept offering me alcohol even though I was only 15 years old. I mostly drank bottle water, tea, and Coca-Cola for two weeks, because town water was not to be trusted if it hadn't been boiled. On the other hand, there were occasional pull-offs beside highways where natural springs/streams had been corralled into little fountains or pools, and we got in the habit of carrying large water bottles around to refill at those whenever we got a chance. It was the exact opposite of America that way, where we trust tap water and treat roadside springs with deep suspicion.

Transylvania is actually the place where one of the oldest European laws on religious toleration was proclaimed. The 1568 Edict of Torda legalized Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism in addition to Catholicism. Of course, nothing was said about the Romanian Orthodox church, because at the time Transylvania was ruled by a Hungarian elite and who cared about the peasants from another ethnic group who spoke another language... *headdesk* And later laws on religious toleration were often interpreted to mean churches couldn't change their doctrinal positions, on pain of losing their legal protections. *double headdesk* It's a situation that seems utterly bizarre from an American perspective, and one that would definitely be better handled by people from a country with a civil law tradition rather than a common law tradition.

[heliopausa]

This is such major stuff; I expect it informs all your writing, one way or another. It's such a huge, huge thing that you were involved in - hard enough to try to help a society recover from natural trauma or war-trauma, even when there's an underlying sense of unity against the common enemy who bombed or "disappeared", but when there's nothing at all that can be taken as solid - no truth, no justice... rebuilding from the ground up.

And land law is the basis of just about everything in society - enormously important work. Absolutely fundamental.

Staggering stuff to have been involved in.

[rthstewart]

It's hard to describe what it means to have a "civil" society based upon the rule of law. It's a system that allows for the regular ordering of personal, commercial, civic, political and financial activities, in predictable ways, based upon transparent rules, accountability, and universal sufferage. I'm sure there are treatises of political theory upon it as opposed to my wholly experiential observations.

[philippos42]

Wow.