The other side of the argument


Budapest :: Hungary

At home with those nasty ol Serbs.

Places: Belgrade and Budapest

Coolest thing I did: Saw the place they laid Tito to rest.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: No one in Serbia Montenegro thought anyone would make fun of the new initials of their name.

Before I start, I recently dubbed Croatia the new Greece. Well from the afternoon I have just spent here, I've decided that Budapest is the new Prague. I will explain more later. Just know it's good, and has lifted my spirits somewhat after all that war talk.

So, despite everything that the Bosnians and Croats told me in Sarajevo, the Serbs don't look, talk or even act very differently to them. In order to go to Belgrade by bus you have to cross the border into the other part of Bosnia, Republic of Serbska which is the bit the Serbs got control over after the Dayton Agreement. From the outset, you notice that not much is different, except maybe that there was less aid money to rebuild it, so it's got a few more bombed out buildings. Try telling that to all the people who looked at me like I was insane when I decided to tell them m next stop was Belgrade.

Belgrade, after all this hype, is a bit of a let down. Despite Nato's best efforts in 1999, there are no scars of war visible in downtown Belgrade. The locals are understandably still a bit pissed off with the Yanks, but telling them you are Australian is more likely to get them to tell you stories of their cousin in Melbourne than have them spit on you. I didn't meet any Americans, so I don't know how they are treated, but all the talk at the bars didn't look good for them. Understandable when most people remember cruise missles blowing up their bridge to work a few years back. The bars, however, are another thing. The place is like any other European capital, however it's not real geared up for tourists. There are no hostels, very few tourist shops, and even buying postcards was a chore. I loved it.

The castle itself, it's a castle. Seen one, seen them all is how I'm feeling at the moment. What they do have is a military museum that has the added currency that it lives up to it's claim of having all of Yugoslavia's military history under one roof. The hunters rifles with KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) carved on the butts and the peices of a downed US Stealth Fighter (which the Yanks claim to this day never was shot down) are pretty cool. Exhibits about WW2 are one thing, but I can relate so much more to things I remember seeing on the news.

I was told to avoid politics as a conversation topic, but this is only true if you aren't willing to hear both sides of the story. Let's start with the whole breakup of Yugoslavia thing. The way the Serbs see it, both sides had a hand in ethnic cleansing in both Croatia and Bosnia, however they don't point out the non-Serb ones were mostly revenge killings. As Yugoslavia was a soverign country, the UN stayed out of it's affairs. The Serbs point out none of the independance referendums were legal, even if they pointed out the will of the people. I still agree with the use of force by the UN to break up conflicts, but with all sides chomping at the bit to have another go at each other, I think the region could be in for more turmoil when the Nato troops finally leave.

I saw 2 graves when I was there. The first was of a bloke called Tsar Stephen Dusan (lets call him Steve). Steve is laid to rest in a Serbian Orthodox Catheral that is supported by 4 giant granite pillars. This is more impressive than it sounds. You'll just have to belive me until you all go to Serbia. Steve was an important bloke in Serbian history, because he lost the country to the Turks. Thats right, lost. At the battle of Kosavar Polje (which is part of the problem that sparked the last war in 1999) the Turks routed Steve's troops and ushered in 400 years of rule from Constantinople, starting in the 14th century. Aussies and Kiwis can think of it as kind of like the Serbian Anzac day.

The other bloke was Tito, who was the friendly dictator who both led the Partisan army that fought the Germans in WWII in Yugoslavia, but ran the Socialist Yugo for nearly 40 years. At the beginning of WW2, the Germans managed to set up a facist puppet state in Croatia and set the local facists loose on the Jews and Roma. They took things one step further and decided the Serbs should be sent to the camps too. This steeled up resistance from all the peoples of Yugoslavia and allowed the Partisan army, led by the communists of Tito's party, to become one of the fierces underground movements in the whole war.

After the war, Tito became head of state of the new Yugoslavia and held the country together for the rest of his life. This was no mean feat, and he used both a hybrid free marked socialist system (dont ask me to explain how that works) and a pandering to all the various minorities in the country to keep it all working smoothly. After his death, it became clear his policy of soliciting aid and loans by being friendly commies (they split with Stalin in 1948) would no longer work and the financial crisis that followed still haunts the former Yugoslav republics today.

As a testament to the man, he now resides in a guarded white marble mausoleum looking out over the city. Compare this to Romanias meglomaniac, who they shot and dumped in a ditch somewhere. A tip, dont try and walk there. It takes ages. Bloody Lonely Planet maps.

Post Tito is when the problems started. Another place I saw was the Serbian Academy of Sciences. These guys decided in 1986 to publish a paper saying the best way to hold Yugoslavia together would be to promote Serbian nationalism. Clap, Clap. Milosovic took this up as his cause when he came to head the Communist party in Serbia, and the rest is violent, bloody history. While Big Milo is at the Hague, his wife still resides in the official residence of Tito (which he never lived in) right next to his grave.

So, after nearly four weeks, my tour of Yugoslavia ends. I'm considering going to Macedonia, with a possible day trip into Kosovo later on, due mostly to the fact that one of my oldes mates is a Macedonian living in Sydney. When we were 10 he introduced me to the concept that Yugoslavia was a country set on it's own destructive course by telling me the nationalistic ideas his Dad had told him. I made the mistake of telling him Macedonia was in Greece (well, it partially is) and over the following years of high school, I took more notice of the conflict in the Balkans than I otherwise would, with his Dad chaneling opinions to us via him. This also introduced me to the crux of the problem. Everyone agrees that all the former Yugoslav lands should be demarked by historical borders, just no one can agree on the date. With so many empires, including Greek and Bulgarian ones, moving back and forth over the Balkans in the last 2000 years, everyone tends to pick the height of their empire as the grounds for their current land claims. With that in mind, compromise is the only solution. Try telling the locals that.

One last note. The Name. In what must be the worst editing decision since Osama Bin Ladens boys put blameless Norway on it's list of infidel countries that must be destroyed (I can see OBL raging around the cave yelling "Denmark you falafel for brains, not Norway!), no one noticed that the initials of the country are now S and M. Giggle. They should have gone with M and S. At least we could have only made underwear jokes, instead of ones involving horse whips.

On that, Im off to see what Budapest serves up as a Saturday night.

Pretty scary stuff


Sarajevo :: Bosnia Herzegovina

The war tour.

Places: Sarajevo

Coolest thing I did: Witnessed "sarajevo roses", the impact marks of shells on the pavement, filled in with red rubber.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The common link between the warlord Arkan and the murder of the Serbian Prime Minister this year is a pop star called Ceca.

I know this one comes pretty quick after the last entry, but it's something I had to get out of my head. This place is pretty unique in both it's ancient and modern history, and it's history of tolerence and intolerence at different times. I took the war tour today, and learned a whole lot about the breakup of Yugoslavia that I didn't know. Despite having watched the whole thing on TV and read books on it since, I was shocked at how little of my knowledge stood up to the light of day. I like it when I get taught things and humbled a bit.

I will start by saying that the ministry of bastardry for crane placement is as good at it's job here as it was in Croatia. Everytime you want to take a photo there's a crane in the background. However, here there's a pretty good reason for it. Everything is slowly being rebuilt, from the heart of the old town outwards. In the main shopping street there are very little in the way of signs of the war left. Go back a street at the windowless shells line both sides, only broken up by the occasional rebuilt shop or hotel. I tell you what, if you are a window glazier by trade, now is the time to be here. Nothing has unbroken windows that don't need replacing. A tradesman's paridise.

Just a note on where I'm staying. There are no hostels (the closest thing to one mentioned in the good old LP is now a car park) so you are best to do the whole private room thing. The travel agency put me in touch with a bloke whose house is covered in fold out couches. I'm sleeping in his kitchen with another bloke, who is on a fold out armchair. It's sort of more like a backpacker flophouse than a hostel. Still, he's a nice bloke, dosen't speak a word of English, but chainsmokes and makes a mean turkish coffee for everyone at the drop of a hat. Drinking coffee so tarlike you can stand a knife up in it is screwing with my sleeping patterns a bit, but it's still nice.

The war tour takes you through the city and the important sites of it's 4 year seige. The bloke who does it has patchy English, but manages to not give political opinions on something he feels very strongly about, which shows patience. He is also my brother's age (25), which means he saw the whole thing first hand. Pretty scary stuff.

By the time the referendum for independance in 1992 had been counted, there were Serb forces already ringing the hills around the city. Despite UN presence, the seige began on the announcement of independance and remained until 1995. The Serbs expected a 15 day campaign. The tour took us down the street to the airport, dubbed snipers alley. The reason for this? Walking the street down here, in clear sight of the hills got you a bullet in the head. Here is the first joke the tour guide told us: A Bosnian is sitting on a swing, going back and forth like mad. His mate comes up and says "what are you doing?". He repies "fucking with the snipers". The jokes here are pretty dark.

The street goes to the airport, which the UN moved in to secure in 1994, two years into the seige. This allowed the Bosnians to dig a tunnel to the outside world under the airport, the remaining section of which I visisted. Engineered from two sides, dug with spades and picks in 4 months and the two halves managed to meet right on target, first time. Smart blokes, these Bosnians. This tunnel kept the troops inside alive until the embargo on arms was lifted and the Bosnians could buy proper weapons.

There is a joke. A Bosnian soldier is under fire, out in the open, digging a hole. His mate yells at him "what do you think you're doing?". He replies "Digging for oil". This was how the tour guide explained how the Bonsians felt about the UN and NATO at the time of the seige. What changed it all? The Serbs shelled a marketplace in the middle of the day, the single worst atrocity during the war. The NATO airstrikes knocked out the serb artilery in 5 days. This is a bit of a sore point after 4 years of living under the threat of said artilery with the Bosnians. People here don't like to talk politics with the tourists, and you can see why. It takes alot of discipline to hold your tounge in such circumstances. Politics is a messy business and the decisions made very rarely effect those in suits that make them anywhere like those on the ground that see the results.

The troops of SFOR (Stabilisation Force) still walk the streets and patrol in vehicles, but these days you don't see them do so with assult rifles over their shoulders. The locals explain it like this "They come here, they spend money, they eat in resteraunts and they look at pretty Bosnian girls. They are tourists in uniform".

The people here know they need tourism. Bosnia wasn't the richest part of Yugoslavia, and there is alot to rebuild. They are nice to you, try and speak all the English they can, and accept any money you give them. It's alot easier to tip waiters in places like this rather than the snooty bastards in Paris. You know they really need the money here. The dual effect of seeing just how resilient the human spirit can be and to realise that a brutal, genocidal war happened two hours flight from London is worth the visit here alone. Add to that you will be helping these people rebuild a country more than foreign aid can ever hope to also helps.

This part of the trip has been one of the more educational bits. All I knew about this place was intolerence and war. However, it's been dubbed the European Jereslum because it's the only place on the continent where you will see Mosque, synagogue, Catholic and Orthadox cathederals within 100m of each other. When the turks took over, they tended to not try and convert those who wanted to keep their own religeon. The Jews here came from Spain, fleeing the inquisition. For all the talk these days of how intolerant and violent Islam is and how peaceful and brotherly Christianity is, this is a good lesson to learn.

So will the peace hold? It's hard to be optimistic under the current agreement. While the Bosnians and Croats are living side by side in a federation, a seperate serb republic has been formed for seats in the power sharing goverment, that borders Serbia proper. The ease at which racial tension has been stirred up in the past shows just how easily it could happen again. The only bright spot is the youth here seem more sick of war than their parents are. These are the young men and women that will have to shoot at each other if it comes down to it, so let's hope they are not willing to do what the angry old men tell them this time. If the messy compromise of the Dayton agreement is to hold, that's very important.

Tomorrow, I go to hear the other side of the story. Joy of joys, a 9 hour bus ride to Belgrade. Man, do I love busses. Not. My sleeping patterns are also a bit off due to the call to prayer that comes from the mosque down the road. They come at 5, 9, 13, 17 & 21 oclock, but after that 5am wakeup I just can't seem to get back to sleep. I think the well oiled machine that is Stevil on Tour has been falling apart in the last week. This being by myself again thing is taking some time to readjust to.

Of Svetlanas and Gorans


Sarajevo :: Bosnia Herzegovina

Two big bits of the Yugoslavian puzzle.

Places: Zagreb, Opatija, Pula, Krk, Zadar, Dugi Otok, Split, Hvar, Dubrovnik, Mostar & Sarajevo.

Coolest thing I did: Walked down the former frontline between the Croats and Muslims in Mostar.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: I have the classic signs of dyslexia.

I will start by saying the biggest change from my routine over the last couple of weeks has been the fact that I have not been traveling with strangers for a change. In Zagreb I met up with my companion through all of Croatia, whom I'm not going to name to save her from the gossip harpies. From now on, she will be refered to as YB. Everyone who needs to know knows who she is and why we met up in Croatia. If you are spesh, you may find out in due course.

Right, public service announcement over.

Croatia appears to have become the new Greece. Just about everywhere you go on the Dalmatian coast you find hordes of backpackers from the UK and her former colonies sitting on docks, waiting for ferries. This is about the 3rd or 4th year in a row I can remember alot of people talking about going to Croatia, and in stark contrast to Slovenia, the locals appear to have become a bit blase about the whole thing. It's not yet the land of hostels and cheap food, but it's getting that way. Having a traveling partner helped a whole lot with avoiding alot of this early on. In Zagreb, YB had the spark of genius to decide we should hire a car and drive around the northern coast, on the bit of Istra lower down than Piran, where I'd just come from in Slovenia. This is a good idea and it got us to see a whole lot of the country we would never have seen.

Driving on the other side of the road takes a whole lot of getting used to. I started out by driving the wrong way down a one way street and habitually hitting the mirrors of cars parked on the right hand side of alleys. The hardest thing is working out how wide the car is on the side you aren't sitting on. It's not something you have to remember when the steering wheel is on the right. I also increased my bad passenger status by visibly flinching everytime we approached a corner when YB was driving and quite often inexplicibly swearing like I had torrets syndrome. The only time she really deserved it was when she almost hit a boat being towed by a car she was overtaking. Like a sailor, I proceeded to swear at that point. Still, it was a bit of fun, and I've forgotten how much I missed driving.

We also had the joy of organising private rooms as hostels were few and far between. This seemed to net us the company of old women who were either slightly deranged or very grandmotherly (they all seemed to find it cute that YBs rucksack was almost the same size she was). The digs also varied alot in price and quality, but every place is going to hold a special place in my memory for one reason or another. The choice pick was the one in Dubrov, right in the middle of the walled old town where the old woman gave us ice cream. I'm a sucker for bribery of this kind.

What's Croatia got to offer? Well first of all, it's on the sunny side of the Adriatic so all the same reasons you'd go to costal Italy, you come to Croatia. Hundreds of islands with beaches. The beaches don't have sand for the most part. The most common makeup is small pebbles, but in some places you end up with huge slabs of stone thrusting down into the ocean at funny angles. The water is crystal clear, and you quite often mistake the depth as you can see the bottom clearly.

The history of the coast makes for insteresting old towns too. The Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Venetians, Austrians and finally Yugoslavs all had a bit of a rule over Croatia and they all left their mark, sometimes right on top of each other. My favorite example of this is in Split, where the Palace of Diocletian still stands. Dioceltian I will come to in a minute, but for now all you need to know was he was a Roman Ceaser who decided the best spot to have his retirement palace was Dalmatia. He built quite a palace for himself, and all the other Roman emperors used to use it as a holiday home. After the fall of the Roman empire, the locals took refuge in the walls and built up a city inside it. The layers of different architectures built on top of each other makes for a strange effect. The later Venetian walls were knocked down after WW2 to reveal the original Roman ones, right on the sea front. They also at one stage turned the temple of Jupiter into a cathederal. I didn't know this at first, and when the church service started inside I expected them to start singing "Hallelujah, for Jupiter is Lord!". Not to be.

On the island of Hvar, I rode a bike for the first time since I was drunk in Germany. I don't know why I thought that was worth mentioning.

We built up a habit of refering to all male Croatians as Goran and all female Croatians as Svetlanas. It's hard to explain, but I found it funny, despite dragging the joke out for two weeks.

Dubrovnik deserves special mention as being the place that lived up to the hype. Dubrov was an independant city state through much of Croatia's history (only Napoleon changed this by capturing it with the rest of Dalmatia) and to protect this, it established thick walls all along the seafront. It's a unique city, and the mix of stone and light at sunset makes for an awe inspiring effect. It also looks new for a very good reason. One of the two frontlines during the 1991 war of independance was the southern Dalmatian coast and Dubrov took the brunt of the Serb forces attack during a 7 month seige. There is a map inside one of the walls showing all the damage done by direct hit by shelling, shrapnel and fire and not much of the city made it out unscathed. There are very few places that haven't been restored, giving it that new car smell. The difference some tourist euros can make on the impetus to fix one place over another is apparent. I didn't appreciate this until I went further East.

Besides seeing Kat in Gottingen, Joerg in Munster, Anita in Berlin, Lisa in Berlin and Grantos in Prague all breif encounters, I havn't seen anyone I knew during this trip, and no one for more than a few days. Traveling with YB was a bit of an experience as I haven't been together with one person in and out for 24 hours a day in this entire trip. I think we both took it all in stride and it was a definte winner of a time. I also got to take a break from forcing myself on complete strangers, and in the other times, a break from my own self. I needed to have proper conversations, out loud, with someone who I didn't have to start all over again with. It gets grating asking everyone the same questions and talking mostly about where you are going and where you have just been. I liked talking about real things again. It's been hard to readjust to being in my own company again. Thanks for letting me in on your holiday, YB, it was a blast.

So, early in the morning, I left the safe arms of Croatia and entered into the unknowns of Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH to it's mates). You can see the difference money has made to the reconstruction efforts of both countries almost right away. BiH took the brunt of Yugoslavia tearing itself appart, the 4 year war being a territorial struggle with Croats and Serbs trying to integrate bits of the country into their parent provinces and the Muslims being caught in the middle. Whilst Croatia has had the tourism to restore itself for the most part, BiH has suffered from a lack of tourist sights people want to see and the bad press only a genocidal war lasting four years can bring. And it's all Diocletian's fault.

See Dio was a bit of a bright spark. He decided that this whole Roman Empire thing was a bit big to manage in one chunk and split the thing into too. As fate would have it, he decided the line would go smack bang down the current border between BiH and Serbia Montenegro. When the Romans adopted Christianity a bit later on, the Western half (Slovenia, Croatia and BiH) came under Rome and the Eastern half (Serbia and Macedonia) came under Constantinople. This made the western half Catholics and the eastern half Orthodox. Not a problem, except it's one of the only things that defines whether people are Croats or Serbs. Add to the mix the Turks took a whole bit (BiH and Albania) and converted them to Islam. This left Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs all sharing the common land of BiH. After the Ottoman Turks Empire broke up, BiH went to the Austrians, who weren't real popular. This led to a Bosnian Serb called Princip, a member of the shadowy nationalism movement called The Black Hand, to kill the heir to the Austrian Empire in Sarajevo. After that, we had this thing called WW1. Whoops. Talk about unintended consequences. After a bit of Yugoslaving, BiH ended up with 3 distinct racial groups in one place. When the Serbs started to rant nationalism in Belgrade, BiH decided it wanted out. This left it rife for ethnic tension and the 4 year war that resulted.

Mostar gives you some feel about just what happened. This is a Muslim and Croat town. The very name means "guardian of the bridge" refering to the Turkish garrison that built up around the bridge in the middle of town, Stari Most. It divided the Croats and Bosniaks during Yugoslavia, and when the civil war started, was the target of Croat shelling. It is now slowly being reconstructed with World Bank money and Turkish engineering. The loss of the bridge left the community seperated by the river, and much of the ethnic tension remains, though at a lower level. There are still UN peacekeepers walking the streets, however most do so unarmed.

If you want to see what happened though, you should walk the former frontline. Appartment blocks line both sides of the streets, windows smashed, walls either destroyed by shelling or pock marked by small arms fire. There are warning signs all over the ruins to stay away, due to the possiblity of landmines or unexploded ordinance. This is pretty real stuff for someone who as only seen a real war zone on TV. This isn't a war that happened in West Africa, or the Europe of my grandparents, I was in Uni when this war ended. The guys my age drinking at the cafes saw this with their own eyes, and may have participated in it. That's even more scary.

So, what do people do in a recovering warzone on saturday night? Much what people do everywhere. Young women walk the streets dressed like JLo and the blokes circle the blocks in their hatchbacks pumping 50 cent out of their stereos. I did have the heartening experience of watching young Croats and Muslims all sitting in a cafe by the ruins of the bridge watching the BiH football team playing Norway to get into the European Cup. The only shirts they were wearing were the yellow and blue of BiH, not those of their ethic origins. At least they can forget their differences in a common football team.

I just arrived in Sarajevo, so more on that later. I've been typing a while now.