The Great Migration

After three days of obsessively and feverishly checking, rechecking and monitoring the status of airports, flight schedules, airline information and train schedules across Europe, I'm shortly heading to Sarajevo's infamous little airport to begin The Great Trek Home of 2010. Like some others two thousand years ago, we're makign a laborious and hazardous journey from the East in search of a Christmas miracle: fully-functioning flight connections.

We commented yesterday that in the same way that Irish people still talk about "The Long, Hot Summer of 95" (ah, those were the glory days), we'll probably still remember The Christmas Chaos of 2010 for some time to come. I'm scheduled to leave Sarajevo at 3.05pm this afternoon, and supposed - in theory - to arrive in Kerry some time after 2.00pm tomorrow. It remains to be seen how on earth that'll ever work out.

In the meantime, Happy Christmas to one and all; I hope that your evenings will be boozy, your family not bickering, your presents wrapped with a big red bow, your mistletoe be occupied, and that your own Great Trek Home be not so great, and not so much of a trek at all. See you all on the other side of 2011.

(In other news, Sarajevo's Eternal Flame has finally been relit. Perhaps there is hope for a brighter and warmer new year after all).

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to go shopping

A new shopping centre opened this weekend just next to our office, so we went for an expedition at lunchtime today. I have mixed feelings. Yes it's beautiful, shiny, new and convenient. Of course I am going to go there all the time. But.... I know this is going to be an entirely predictable, middle-class ethics rant, but please, humour me.

I mean, some of the stuff in there is just fantastic. Clothes shops, electronics shops, pharmacy, all within reach of your lunchbreak. No longer do I have to trek through the snow, possibly visit two or three different shops and then carry heavy shopping bags home; now there's a really big, really attractive supermarket in the basement. If you're used to Bosnian corner shops run by grumpy old men, or of walking half a mile to get to a big supermarket before paying for a taxi home with your bags, this is a big deal. My word, it was like the first time I ever walked into Marks and Spencers Foodhall. Granite counters, varnished pine and recessed lighting! Imported wine! A take-out deli! Low and behold, untold and unknown exotica like blue cheese and - oh, wait for it - PORK! Ham, sausage, bacon! There are very few things I miss, living in a majority-Muslim city, but pork is - surprisingly - one of them.

And best of all, the shopping centre also has places to eat over there. Anyone who knew me in Dublin will know how often I b*tched about places like Dundrum Town Centre exploiting a captive market with corporate coffee chains charging extortionate prices. Today I threw off all of my principles and eagerly embraced a foodhall. Our office has only two cafés; any kind of extended choice at lunchtime is eagerly welcome.

So yeah, the shopping centre's great. But on the other hand... I walked inside, we looked around, and I thought, just like that, I'm right back in Dublin. Why do shopping centres in any and every part of the world look exactly the same? It's so... depressing.

Today it was absolute bedlam in there, you could hardly walk around for the crowds... but none of the shops were busy. The whole of Sarajevo had gone there for a walk and a look around. But no one has any money to go shopping. Most people didn't even go into the shops and pick things up and look at them. They just looked in the windows and then strolled away. The local joke is that shopping centres here need to have as many cafés as shops, because no one ever buys anything but everyone goes out for coffee.

I've written before about how there's at least a 40% unemployment rate here. Every weekday afternoon, the city centre is heaving with pedestrians, while every seat in every café is occupied by young people slowly smoking, sitting for hours with empty coffee cups before them. Today, all those people left the streets and came to the new shopping centre instead. Yes, the weather's miserable so it makes sense, and everyone wants something new to see. And going by the deserted halls of other shopping centres, I'm pretty certain that in a few days they'll all go back to strolling on the streets and drinking cheaper coffee elsewhere.

But today there was something so grim about everyone sitting around the new cafés in the shopping centre, really delighted with themselves and enjoying a day out. It reminded me of a stressful day in an Irish - American - British - Spanish - anywhere - mall, queueing, getting run over by parents with buggies, getting shouldered by people who couldn't be bothered making space for you as they passed. Ferhazdija and the old town with its pedestrianised streets and alleys are so neighbourly when everyone's out walking, the youth checking each other out, the grandparents with little kids, the middle-aged looking on, disapproving. Because they're all there every day, and most likely all do know each other. That atmosphere was dead in the shopping centre.

And yes, I know exactly that I sound patronising; coming over here and working for an international organisation and begrudging Sarajevo for getting on with what every other country deems progress. Yes, I know, I wasn't here during the war when all of this must have been an unimaginable dream. I don't begrudge it to them in the slightest, but hear me out.

During the Irish boom (oh, back in the day!), almost overnight the whole country was suddenly filled with identikit housing estates, shitty cardboard-box apartment complexes, and vast noisy shopping centres on new motorways around the cities. Very little public transport, just traffic jams outside. Every little town got a big Tesco supermarket, built of pre-fabricated glass, sitting in the middle of acres of parking. Meanwhile town centres (old, unplanned, poky, lacking parking, but hence quirky, charming and distinctively Irish) withered, while locally-owned businesses were replaced with branches of Euro2 and Eastern European food shops. And everyone was so excited about it, and so proud of it. And now where are we?

I find all that as convenient as anyone else - I remember very well having to drive an hour to Cork to do any kind of shopping for clothes, Christmas, birthdays - but I find it deeply miserable that Irish families now take their kids for a day out to shopping centres on Sunday . I totally avoid those places at the weekends because they're full of screaming, tired kids and parents who'll ruthlessly run you down with baby buggies. Actually I avoid them in general, I'd prefer to just get the bus into the city centre and soak it all up. And I know that not everyone can do that, or has the time and energy to do that. I just still don't see this as a trend to be glorified.

I just don't think of shopping centres as progress, so why on earth does Sarajevo need four of them when no one can afford to buy anything there? It can't possibly provide that much employment or income, I don't see this as marking an economic change. Please prove me wrong if you have figures that show otherwise, but the fact that this new centre is located beside two multi-story buildings filled with international organisations and multinational financial firms suggests that this new venture may not be entirely targeting the locals for it's clientèle. Apparently this new centre's been built by an American consortium; the last centre to open last year is owned by a group referred to locally - mysteriously - as "the Arabs".

There's something really quite tragic in imagining Sarajevo deserted because everyone's out in the suburbs.

Ugh. And the worst is I'm almost disgusted with myself in advance because I know I'll be making use of it all the time...

Snijeg!

SNOW!

I can't help it, I get excited about snow. I'm Irish: I was reared on a reality where three inches of snow meant school was cancelled and you were officially given permission to stay wrapped up in a warm bed listening to the muffled silence outside for as long as you liked before spending the rest of the day frolicking like a toddler.

The snow arrived while I was in Zenica at a conference organised by one of the field offices. To give you an idea of how bizarre the Bosnian climate is, it was 18 degrees Celsius when we arrived at 10am; when we left at 4pm, it was 0 degrees with a raging blizzard and psychedelic purple lightening. It was a fun drive back to Sarajevo.

Here are some photos of the vantage point from my window tonight, as I sit here wrapped up on my sofa in a duvet, drinking tea, and dreaming of snowmen tomorrow.

Eternal Flame

On Mar

šala Tita, one of the main arteries running through the city centre, outside the fading bulk of an Austrian imperial mansion - previously the city's grandest hotel, once a makeshift Nazi prison during the wartime occupation of the Balkans, now a government ministry of some kind - sits Sarajevo's eternal flame.

It's not hugely ostentatious. An alcove built into the building's porch is carved with names in that squared, art deco font universally used on Soviet memorials; the alcove curves around a small green metal laurel wreath on the pavement, which contains a flame like a small campfire.

The flame commemorates those who died during World War II; specifically those who fought as partisans against the Nazis for the liberation of Yugoslavia. Not that anyone really talk about it in that context any more, of course; the partisans simply fought against tyranny in the name of freedom. Best not to mention the politics that surrounds the memory of that hard-won state. Somehow, in general, the Yugoslavian resistance manages to be remembered as the fight for the freedom of its' constituent peoples, even though those peoples many years later started killing each other so brutally.

On 28 November - Bosnia and Herzegovina's National Day, the day in 1943 that Yugoslavia declared its modern boundaries, although the occupation lasted into 1945 - the country's three presidents laid wreaths in memory of those partisans before the flame. Two days later, on the 30th, the flame went out. It's still out. Eternal no more.

Nothing I've seen here so far has for me summed up so perfectly the state of this small little country. The eternal flame sits to the side of a wide pedestrian area, where the unemployed and disenfranchised youth of the city walk aimlessly up and down the long, straight Ferhadija all evening and afternoon, gossiping and checking out the other unemployed and disenfranchised youth. The odd tourist poses for a picture in front of the flame, girls approach it to bend elegantly over their high-heeled boots and light their cigarettes, and the beggars stand around it warming their hands. Otherwise, no one takes any notice of it at all. So short, unceremonial and unattended was the wreath-laying on the 28th that a friend who lives directly across the street didn't notice anything going on outside.

And now the flame's gone out. A few days afterwards someone took away all the wreaths, and since then it's just been sitting there, unlit. The thing that strikes me is that no one seems to care. The internationals and the ex-pats are appalled: chatting about it at the Organization meets with small gasps of shock and shaken heads at this terrible faux pas, this symbolic gesture of neglect and disfunction. But there's been nothing about it in the press (or at least in the English-language consolidation of the press that we read, which usually reports almost exclusively on issues of governance, reconciliation and the international community). There's been no official explanation of whether it's due to a fault, or a dispute with the gas company, or for maintenance work, or whether it'll be relit at all. It's just gone out, one more thing that doesn't work properly - neglected, faulty, disparaged, disassociated - in a country which I've heard described a lot more than once since I got here as a failed state.

That image of beggars warming their hands around the flame, of teenagers indifferently using a memorial to light their cigarettes, stays with me. It seems a natural progression to the abandoned metal bracket on the pavement, no longer symbolic of anything.

So much for the memory of the fallen partisans; so much for all that shared history before 1991; so much for violence which had at least a common purpose; so much for commemorating anything that doesn't reflect your own ethnic group's victimhood.

Just another day in the Former Yugoslavia.

(Wish I could take credit for them but the photos are courtesy of Blaseur and Maciej Dakowicz)

Free Ali: Hilary Clinton's visit to Bahrain

Hilary Clinton arrives in Bahrain tomorrow on an official state visit. Jenan Al Oraibi, wife of Ali - who I have written about previously - has this evening issued an open letter asking Mrs Clinton to raise the issue of Ali and the other Bahraini political prisoners' torture and ongoing arbitrary detention with the highest political authorities in the country.

Spread the word.

http://freeabdulemam.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/open-letter-to-hillary-clinton-from-imprisoned-bloggers-wife/

The distinguished Secretary of State, Mrs. Hilary Clinton,

Pleasant greetings,

I am the wife of arrested Bahraini blogger Ali Abdulemam. Ali is the father of my four year old son Mortada and my twin daughters Sarah and Fatimah who are younger than a year old.

I have received news of your impending arrival to my country Bahrain. I would like to send to you my urgent appeal for help in the releasing of my husband who has been imprisoned in Bahrain since September 4th of this year.

My husband was arrested after being summoned before the National Security Apparatus with accusations – which were never proven – of “spreading false information.” The National Security Apparatus publishedan explanation immediately following his arrest . After a global campaignby bloggers and defenders of the freedom of opinion and expression and human rights , instead of reviewing the detention order of my husband, his arrest was publicized in the media and he was depicted as a terrorist in the media and government communiqués.

Madam Secretary,

It has become clear to me that my husband has been subjected to the crudest forms of torture and physical and psychological abuse throughout his time in prison. He was forbidden from meeting with an attorney throughout the harsh investigation and his time with the public prosecution. In fact, my husband met with his lawyer for the first time in the courtroom. The court also denied the lawyers’ requests to present the barbaric torture my husband was subjected to. The court continues to proceed with the prosecution of my husband based on coerced confessions that have no connection with my husband’s personality, which is known by all the people of Bahrain, especially his family and blogger friends all over the world. Furthermore, the media has refused to publish the torture and abuse my husband was subjected to or the proceedings of the trial which we know are full of difficulty and hardship.

Madam Secretary,

My husband was fired from his job at Gulf Air which he was devoted to for thirteen years without a single accusation or examination by the investigative council. Thus, with my husband’s arrest alone we are immediately faced real suffering that increases with the continuation of my husband’s absence which agonizes me and his three children.

I wish to inform you Madam that I consider all that we have faced as a family and all that my husband has faced up to today as a result of my husband’s sincere expression of his views and aspirations in reform and goodness for Bahrain and the region. My husband protests peacefully through blogging on what he considers to be harmful to the interests of the people. Ali supports and calls for reform in Bahrain and Iran by devotion to individual freedom and the freedom to express one’s opinion. That much is obvious from his blog posts.

Madam Secretary,

I am certain that you will meet with the highest officials in Bahrain on your anticipated trip. I am also certain that those officials will immediately comply with any appeal from you to enforce justice and release my husband. Therefore, Madam Secretary, I implore your sympathy, and all that is provided for in the values of American freedoms, as I appeal to you to include my husband’s case on your anticipated trip’s agenda. Your support will surely strengthen the value of democracy and freedom which support the development of justice, peace, and tranquility.

I would like to thank you for taking on this moral responsibility. I sincerely hope you will support my request.

Jenan Al Oraibi
The wife of arrested Bahraini blogger (Ali Abdulemam)