25 January 2004

 

Dovidjena Croatia

by Randy Sutherland

 

After a five-week visit with my sister, I am leaving Croatia tomorrow.  I have cleaned the apartment that her missionary friends allowed me to use because they went to the United States to deliver their third child.  They had a girl.  I laundered the sheets and towels for the last time with their washing machine and dryer.  Believe it or not, the wash cycle and dry cycle on the unbelievably small-load capacity machines are more than two hours each!  The manufacturers (sorry cant find the apostrophe on the European keyboard) excuse is "conversation of water and electricity."  How exactly a two-hour cycle conserves more water and electricity than a 30-minute cycle is beyond my engineering ken.  My direct experience with these infernal damnations allowed me to understand a comment from Zhelko, my nieces horse-riding instructor.  He said that he used to be a distributor of locally engineered washing machines and dryers, "which were good enough for Yugoslavia.  But with a more open market now, we couldnt compete with machines from other parts of Europe."  He must have done something right before the business failed because he has a big new mansion where he entertained us for lunch (three kinds of meat, no vegetables), a large stable with horses, including one worth more than 100,000 Euros, and a number of vehicles, including a new Jeep. 

 

I met another wealthy business man when I visited Rijeka in Istria on the beautiful Croatian Riviera.  Over a leisurely many course lunch with a different sublime wine for each course, he demonstrated deep understanding of the Enneagram, the psycho-spiritual system based on an ancient Chaldean symbol referred to by the Eastern Mystic Gurdjieff (half Armenian and half Greek but considered Russian) and elaborated into a profound personality typing system for profound spiritual liberation by the South American, Oscar Ichazo.  Under the influence of South American shamanism, Ichazo conceived of the Enneagram and 107 other Enneagons, which he taught in the Mystery school, Arica.  It was taught be one of his psychologist students in Berkeley and from there it influenced Don Richard Rizo (my teacher), among others, who left the priesthood to popularize it.  After lunch, this Croatian entrepreneur took me to his labyrinth and I walked it with fond memories of a similar labyrinth that was laid out in shoes in the desert sand of Northern Nevada.  That night, asleep in his Venetian villa, in a room that I shared with my brother-in-law, I dreamed that someone asked me to read the word on a building that I could see through the window.  In this dream I read the Croatian word, "osiguranje" on the building.  In the morning I asked my brother-in-law what it meant and he said osiguranje means insurance.

 

I leave Croatia filled with fond memories of cats stalking pigeons where bombs once fell in Dubrovnik, adolescents fist fighting in the town square, a young girl carrying three rabbits in her jacket to keep them warm, intriguing images of a man wearing a hat that said "Pro Pain," and Hindu graffiti such as "Shiva Maha Dev" and "Hari Bol," not to mention the "F**k America" graffiti near my sisters Baptist church in Zagreb. 

 

I said goodbye to my apartment where the landlord turns the heat off throughout the building for 12 hours every night in subzero weather.  The landlord also takes advantage of a property tax loophole that allows him to avoid paying tax until the building is completed.  Zagreb is full of these buildings that have perfect interiors but as long as the exteriors are not plastered and there is a pile of bricks and sand outside to make it seem as though it is under construction, the owner avoids paying property tax. 

 

My original plan was to fly to Genoa, Italy, and take a Mediterranean cruise with ports of call in France, Spain and Morocco.  However, a few days ago, my travel agent told me that the ship was seized by Barcelona port authorities due to impending bankruptcy.  So I plan to visit a friend from Cisco days who now works for Dell in Casablanca.  The flight to Casablanca from Zagreb goes via Amsterdam so I will stop off there for a week or so and then continue on to Morocco.  I lived in Morocco from age six weeks until two years old.  I am curious to see what early life impressions might be triggered by a visit to Casablanca. 

posted by Lorenzo 13:34

21 January 2004

  Sarajevo (Bosnia) and Dubrovnick (Croatia)
As a ten-year old in the Kingdom of Swaziland (Africa), I devoured the set of encyclopaedias that my mother bought for me out of my parents' missionary stipend. When I read that the assassination of Duke Franz Ferdinand (heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) sparked World War One, I looked up Sarajevo on the National Geographic map of the world that was pinned to the wall above my bed. In answer to my questions about Yugoslavia, one of the missionary doctors that worked with my father, gave me a book entitled, "You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists)." At that time, I never imagined that I would stand on the spot where high school student Gavrilo Princip shot the Duke and his wife, Sofia.

Last week, when I tried the door to the museum on the assassination site, it was locked. A local told me that it would reopen when Bosnia gets around to editing the exhibit descriptions to remove Communist interpretation of the event. Then he asked me if I had seen "The Tunnel." My blank stare caused him to explain that when the Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo in the early 1990s, the only escape was to run over the UN-controlled airport into Hercegovina. After the Serbs shot 800 people trying to run across the airport runways, the inhabitants of Sarajevo built a tunnel under the airport, which became their lifeline for water, oil, food, and military supplies. So I jumped in a cab in what was "Sniper Alley" and went out to visit Edis Kolar, whose family farmhouse stood on top of the exit to the tunnel. Edis let me walk in the part of the tunnel that has not yet collapsed and then showed me video from the daily attacks on the city, hideous footage of high-rise apartment dwellers prolonging the moment of death by hanging from the balconies by their fingertips as their buildings were bombarded and enveloped in huge flames.

To this day there are still many burned out skeletons of high-rise buildings. Sarajevo is a small city in a deep valley ringed by mountains. I remember watching news in America showing Sarajevo housewives dodging snipers as they ventured out to buy bread. When I asked how the attackers were able to occupy the high ground he explained that, at first, it was the Yugoslavian army who said that they were conducting training exercises. But then the Yugoslavian army morphed into the Serb army because of Tito's mistake of allowing Serbs to monopolize the officer class.

Tito died in 1980. So when nationalistic urges began to strain relationships among the ethnic groups within former Yugoslavia, the Serbian officers were able to appropriate all of the best equipment and resurface as the "Christian" Orthodox Serb army bent on establishing "Greater Serbia" at the expense of their traditional enemies: Catholics and Moslems. So Croatia was forced to buy arms on the black market, due to the arms embargo from the West. The taxi driver told me that he lived near the Sarajevo airport during the war and he said that the UN proved to be a cruel joke from the point of view of the Croatians. The UN did not allow any humanitarian shipments into the airport. The UN agreed to a deal that allowed them to occupy the airport and use it, but only to support the needs of the UN forces. Unfortunately for the people of Sarajevo, the UN forces assigned to the airport were French and Ukrainian, both of whom sympathized with Serbia. The taxi driver recounted a memory of watching two tanks at the airport, a French UN tank and a Serbian army tank, side by side. While the Serbian tank shelled the Moslem neighborhoods, the French watched and smoked cigarettes.

Serbia killed 11,000 people in Sarajevo, almost 2,000 of whom were children. They also killed 2,000 people in Vukovar. I felt personally affected by the history here when a friend of mine and I had to cancel a planned trip to the mountains east of Sarajevo because of a giant manhunt for the fugitive Serbian leader, Radovan Karadzic, wanted by the Hague on genocide charges.

In 1995, the people of Srebrenica also placed their faith in the UN forces: A fatal mistake. As I rode into Sarajevo, I noticed a wall with a giant human skull painted on it and the words, "Don't forget Srebrenica." An hour later as I was watching the BBC news in my hotel room, I saw a reporter standing in front of the same human-skull mural offering a story that the Netherlands army, which was the UN force in Srebrenica, had retreated when the Serbs arrived. The locals laughed at that news story and told me that the Netherlands army did not run away, they stayed and did nothing. While the Serbs killed 9,000 Moslems in Srebrenica by sending out buses and cars to round up the inhabitants and bring them to a killing field, the Netherlands army smoked cigarettes.

Evidence of the war is everywhere. I have seen a few hundred bombed residences and a thousand buildings whose facades are completely pockmarked from machine-gun fire. There are men in wheelchairs and men with shrapnel scars on their heads.

The people of Dubrovnik, a beautiful medieval walled city, were sleeping in their beds when the Serbs attacked them from the air, the sea, and the land. The locals point out that neither Napoleon nor the Nazis hurt civilians when they conducted their campaigns in the area. (However Croatia was a Nazi puppet state and there were concentration camps near Zagreb to contribute to "The Final Solution.") The Serbs hit Dubrovnik with guided missiles and 200 people died, people that did nothing but sell pizza and postcards to tourists. I stayed with the former chief of the military police for the defense of Dubrovnik after he pulled me from the bus and begged me to rent a room in his house. He showed me his photographs of the destruction and described what it was like to be there. The people had no food supplies or electricity for something like two years. They survived on fish that they caught in the sea, and they invented a home-made torpedo to resist the Serbian gun ships: Television sets filled with explosives and nails, able to float because of the sealed TV tube. They named this weapon, "The Television."

Dubrovnik people are influenced by Italy. Venice controlled Dubrovnik during the 18th Century. The people look more Italian and speak with slightly Italian accents and gestures, compared to the Croatians in Zagreb. I even had to adjust the Croatian that I learned in Zagreb. For example, in Zagreb they say "dovidjena" for "good bye." In Dubrovnik they understand and use "dovidjena" but most locals say, "adio" with the emphasis on the first syllable. They say it is slang for "ari vederci." Dubrovnik is on the Dalmatian coast, which is not where the canine species of the same name comes from. The Romans brought Dalmatian dogs with them as guard dogs.

Up the coast from Dubrovnik is an island, Korcula, whose people claim that Marco Polo was born there. Men's neckties are derived from the cravat, which became popular after French soldiers observed Croatian soldiers wearing bright scarves around their necks.

I am on my way back to Zagreb now after visiting Dubrovnik. I am a regular at one of the pizza places in Zagreb and the other day the crew there opened a local newspaper and pointed to a picture and asked me who it was. I took one look and told them, "That is Dennis Kucinich." I explained a little bit about his platform and about how I heard him talk live by telephone at the Prophets Conference. I told them how excited I became when I realized that he is a man of consciousness. I told them that he has risen from two percent in popularity polls to eight percent but that the right-wing US media is trying to paint him into a peace-and-love corner. They told me that his ancestry is Croatian. I told them that I have friends who volunteer for his campaign.

There is a big wide world out here and I am so happy to be exploring. I miss you all but I am not lonely and I am not homesick. It is not so bad to travel alone.
--Randy Sutherland


posted by Lorenzo 06:13

20 January 2004

  A View from the Balkans
(Observations from Randy Sutherland)

In Sarajevo I was hosted by Aida Causevic, a Bosnian woman who endured the war and then went to San Diego to finish high school and attend university. She had to walk through the tunnel under the Sarajevo airport when it was the only escape from the Serbian seige, a narrow low tunnel that does not allow for standing up. As a teenager she had to slosh through the filthy standing water that was always a problem in the tunnel, past dead floating rats and dangerous pipes with electricity and oil flowing through them. I met her when one of my San Diego neighbors, Marco Massimei shot a film starring her. After I sold my house and moved the furniture out, he told me that he had entered a film contest and required an empty house to produce his vision. He won the contest with the film.

If you are interested to watch this five minute film, you will see Aida. Just go to www.theshapeofevil.com and click on Multimedia and then Purgatory. (If you are not a Mac user, take a second to dowload Quicktime for Windows so that you can run the film, Purgatory.) Marco is a renowned independent film producer, director, and screen writer with awards and critical acclaim in the film biz publications. He is also an extraordinary musician who writes his own scores. We have a common interest in studying the Bible. I am happy to have this film memory of the house where I healed and rested after slaving in Silicon Valley for 17 years without a break. Marco shot footage until the sun came up before he declared that he had enough to edit.

Afterwards, over a cup of tea, Aida asked me why I was selling such a beautiful house and I told her that it had served its purpose for me, but that I was now rested and ready for a big change and planning to visit my sister in Croatia and continue around the world from there at a slow pace. She told me that she was from Bosnia and would be visiting there during the time I would be visiting my sister.

If I had not sold my house it would not have been empty for Marco to shoot a film and I would not have met Aida and therefore I probably would not have visited Sarajevo, which is a seven-hour bus ride through narrow mountain passes from where my sister lives. Speaking of coincidences, Aida studies English Literature (as did I) and intends a Public Relations career (which was my career). I was able to refer her to the best PR agency in San Diego and the director has hired her for a PR internship.

When I arrived in Sarajevo, Aida took me ice skating at the facility that was built for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. Ice skating brings up anxiety for me because it was one of the "Youth Group" activities that I had to do with my church when we returned to California when I was 15 years old. We didnt have ice skating in Africa. And because there were no sidewalks or pavements, we didnt even have roller skating.

I had so much fun ice skating in Sarajevo. I fell five times but toward the end I could sort of do it. Everyone was so friendly and helpful. There were about a dozen of us in this ice-skating party: Aidas friends and family. Afterwards we all went bowling, which produced anxiety again for me as it was another thing that I associated with the "Youth Group" when I came to America, after never having bowled at all. Even the name Youth Group did not make sense to me because in Africa, a 15-year old is an adult and yet in America I was being called a youth and forced to go to ice-cream parlors with immature American teenagers in the name of Jesus. I guess the reason that none of the "Youths" in that church had ever seriously studied the Bible was that they were always being bused out to play miniature golf or go on hay rides. I received some healing as a result of facing skating and bowling performance anxiety with Aida. I now have a new imprint, a positive feeling about skating and bowling.

I had dinner with her mother, cousins, uncles and aunts in the house where they survived the war. Aida showed me the basement where they spent so many hours avoiding becoming war casualties. Over dinner, I learned that Aidas 80-something grandfather was leaving for the Haj within a few days and they were brainstorming where to stash his trip money on him, since he is forgetful and might lose a credit card or ATM card.

After dinner, we went out to a few night clubs. My friends pointed out a man in one of the clubs and told me that he participates in "fights to the death," which attract ghoulish sports fans in Macedonia. I also met a Bosnian man who works for the Catholic Relief Agency here, installing Cisco routers to connect the schools! He told that the project is funded by American Catholics.

In terms of food, I felt completely at home in Sarajevo, which has a cuisine very similar to Armenian: Kebabs, different kinds of burreck, yogurt, lockum, baclava, and thick Turkish coffee. Sarajevo is a place that takes kebabs seriously.

The city is fascinating to walk in: Wide pedestrian walks leading past bazaars and open air markets, gypsies trying various schemes to get money, and all of the amenities of a modern city including internet cafes. The first internet cafe that I went to was locked during the middle of the day so I went on searching. I should have known better than to go into an internet cafe named "Club Bill Gates" but I was desperate. After 15 minutes of trying, I never managed to get a browser up on any of the computers. When I asked the staff for assistance, they demonstrated complete lack of concern. So I left and continued up a hill and found a Moslem internet club down an alley up a narrow stairway, where the people took me in and I became a regular. The place had so much atmosphere and warmth. Connection speed was excellent, except when the boys were hogging the bandwidth with online shootem-up games. I never imagined an internet cafe with so much spirit.

In one of my walks I stumbled across the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has an ancient mosaic of Mary. It looks as though someone has fired a bullet right into her chest. I walked onto the grounds with the thought that I could get some insight into Serbian culture and found an office that said, "Museum." Once inside I greeted the woman behind the desk gently in her own language and asked how much it cost to tour the museum. She was completely rude and uncooperative with me and just plain poisonous. She never allowed me to go into the museum using some kind of "holiday" excuse, even though she couldnt explain why the museum store was open to make money on a "holiday." Later that day, when I asked some locals why she had treated me that way, they said, "Oh, with your Armenian eyebrows, she assumed that you were a Turk." So, discrimination is alive and well in Sarajevo, as it is around the world, but at least she didnt kill me for being a Turk in her eyes.
--Randy Sutherland


posted by Lorenzo 10:49