Milo, vi ste kralj!

Elections are all over Europe these days. Slovakia recently had presidential elections, which will have a second round in a run-off vote some time in April. The Czech government collapsed recently, the outcome of which remains uncertain. Macedonia (or 'FYROM' to those sensitive of the name) held presidential elections this past weekend too, as much in a bid to prove to the world its capability of holding free and fair elections independently.

Montenegro is due to have a parliamentary election on Sunday. Several individuals are running as representatives of coalitions or blocs in a bid to try and win the position of government head, though no one questions that the long-standing incumbent, Milo Djukanovic, will win. The man, in one fashion or another, has held the position of Prime Minister and/or President of Montenegro since 1991, making him something of a relic of everything that has happened in the region.

Television, for about one month now, has been allocating certain slots for "political marketing," ostensibly giving all contenders space to voice their views and try to woo would-be voters to select their number on the ballot. Djukanovic's bloc, known as the "Coalition for a European Montenegro," has, by my reckoning, been dominating the scene. It is as if the voting public already knows that he will win. Quite ironic, given that Djukanovic's bloc has been using the slogan of "Sigurno," which means "assurance," in his campaigns.

This report, by contrast, in reporting on the possible closure of the KAP aluminium plant in Podgorica, suggests the Prime Minister called snap polls in a bid to win a victory before the financial crisis became really acute in the country, thereby affecting his popularity. For a country of some 650,000 people, the closure of this plant, along with a large mine, would affect 4,000 workers -- KAP aluminium alone makes up 40% of the country's industrial production.

There is a burgeoning tourism industry, but many owners of coastal hotels and resorts, buoyed by the economic boom following independence in June 2006 that spurred massive renovations, are now wondering how they will pay their creditors given that less tourists will come this summer, owing to the financial crisis worldwide.

Whoever wins the vote -- and my rather unremarkable prediction is that it will most certainly be Djukanovic -- has a lot on their plate. In fact, this is an icky understatement. Other sentiment, however, says it is not a matter of just winning, but that there is no one else but Djukanovic to lead Montenegro at a time like this; he brought the country this far, so why not let him take it a little further, given that the EU and NATO (via Olli Rehm) have been applauding the country's progress thus far.

Montenegro never had a war on its territory. If anything, it was like a sideshow to the other Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, though details are emerging relating to the country's culpability in some crimes and collusion with Belgrade in this regard. It fared remarkably well, and stands poised for a status of incredulity. For now, however, observers will be watching this election and the broader means by which its winners will tread the economic storms looming fast.

"The victims and perpetrators are still among us"

Following the Second World War, occupied Germany wound up being partitioned, albeit gradually, into two distinct entities that became a symbol of Cold War divisions in Europe. There was a democratic, free-market West Germany, as well as a communist, non-democratic and Warsaw Pact East, whose official name was the "German Democratic Republic." Berlin was a divided city.

That basic history masks the other, more serious and trenchant diversions that took place following 1945. As a component of the Soviet Bloc, East Germany had a KGB carbon-copy secret police responsible not only for foreign intelligence gathering but also domestic surveillance. This police force, known as the Stasi (fully, 'Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,' or "Ministry for State Security"), was officially founded in 1950, and was among the most ruthless and brutal of the Eastern Bloc's secret police forces, matched perhaps by the wickedness of Romania's Securitate, or Czechoslovakia's Statna/i Bezpecnost (literally, "State Security").

Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal was unsparing in his opinion of the Stasi; he said that they were "worse than the Gestapo." Their surveillance and torture techniques became legendary, as well as the sheer cruelty with which they pressed their agenda. Apparently, a German daily alleged that the Stasi had even partaken in radiating some political opponents, so that they would get cancer within a few years. One out of every fifty East Germans was a Stasi informer, with some estimates stating that this is too conservative a number.

Every post-communist country has had to deal with the particular legacies that emanated from the Cold War, one of them being purging and/or reforming these ex-surveillance agencies known only for their coercion and repressive policies in enforcing communist rule on their populations. The processes, known as lustration, has had mixed results: some countries, like the former East Germany and the Czech Republic, have been vigorous (albeit imperfect), while others, like Romania and Slovakia, were ruled in the 1990s by old-style governments that were unwilling to do so. Others, like Albania, have just begun.

Germany, after reunification, had the double misfortune of not only coming to grips with the Nazi past, but also the Stasi/East German legacy. This last bit remains an issue. Consider this BBC story, which deals with a former, albeit unwilling informer, of the Stasi, who has remained haunted and affected by this past ever since the Berlin Wall came crashing down. This particular woman became a so-called "Romeo spy," tricked into unwittingly handing over West German secrets to the Stasi by being seduced by one of its agents and reassured that her information was being used by pro-peace Western groups.

"It's like an invisible amputation of the soul," this one woman declared. "I am totally alone, I don't have any family, I don't have any friends," but for eleven dogs that she has in her house -- in the Netherlands. After 1990, she was prosecuted and given a suspended sentence and fine, though the agents that cajoled her, and thirty other women, into giving away state secrets were given immunity; to this day, they receive state pensions for their service.

Mind you, Germany has complex, yet very thorough laws on access to information for people affected by the secret police. With a set mandate of operation, the former East German archives enable people to access and read their files, sometimes enabling them to track down their former informers, though this is not sanctioned or officially encouraged. Oxford intellectual Timothy Garton Ash, by his own investigations, confronted those that informed on him when he was in the DDR in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He wrote about them in his book The File. There is now, in Berlin, a Stasi museum -- next time I visit Germany, I will make it a point to check it out.

Some say the Germans have become good at confronting their nasty pasts. The double-whammies of Nazism and Communism are no mean feats to deal with. West Germany went through a period of amnesia throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s about its Nazi past before finally confronting its legacy, through studies of history, popular culture and political will.

Ghosts of the Stasi, however, remain painfully at issue, despite the methodical efficiency of reconciling this dark period. This kind of healing may take a longer time yet to set in.

What if...?

Former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was murdered six years ago in Belgrade. The story, or at least one of many, is here.

His death left a lot of unfinished business in the matter of Serbia's transition, although the groundwork he had established looked very promising. He was shot right outside his government's headquarters, dealing a nasty blow towards overcoming Serbia's recent history and its endemic image, which is still alive and well in many circles of "opinion," of political instability, economic stagnation and lawlessness.

Not a whole lot to be said about this anniversary, but only to ask the inevitable: how would things have been different if the man had lived? How, particularly, would he have handled the pressing question of Kosovo's status, or the issue of remaining war criminals at large?

The 1980s revival in Europe

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are probably familiar with some of the noteworthy tunes from those years, even if we cannot quite place a song name or artist to a particular song. In other cases, someone might describe the `80s as a ‘bygone era,’ but for anyone living or working in Europe right now, this is most definitely not the case.

Attend a dance club, and you will find yourself – as I was, just a few nights ago – standing still and baffled, reveling at that point in your mind between familiarity and recognition, before realizing that what a particular deejay is playing is a heavily-remixed version of a song that made its debut in the early 1980s. In this particular case, it was New Order’s ‘Blue Monday.’ Or, alternatively, go for an evening stroll down a street, and you will hear a familiar jingle emanating from one of the open-door cafes and bars you pass by.

The 1980s are alive and well in Europe, and it is like a blast from the past. In the same way, it is also as much a reflection of how much has happened since then, and a reassuring nod that new generations, many of who have no recollections of those times, can now appreciate some of the musical magic that defined a generation from twenty-plus years ago. I count myself as one of the lucky ones: I am old enough to remember record players, as well as actual vinyl wrapped in record sleeves; cassette tapes were considered a musical space shuttle, because it meant you could actually record your records onto them and then, inevitably, play the stuff in a car stereo.

My older sisters dressed in the fashion of those times, and had the characteristic hairstyles. I remember being totally enthusiastic for one boyfriend that would drive up in our driveway in a sporty Chevy Cavalier Z-24, with a souped-up muffler that could still be heard blocks away. I remember riding my bike with friends, and the high point would be to eat packs of jawbreakers until your mouth hurt from all the gum and crunching. Care Bears, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Brave Star, Ghostbusters, GI Joe, Golden Girls, Thunder Cats, Star Trek TNG, and a whole host of other memories trickle back. I admit my evident nostalgia.

I counted New Order, early-era Depeche Mode, Guns `n Roses, Pet Shop Boys, Dire Straits, The Police and The Cure, just off the top of my memory, as stuff that has been making the rounds here in Montenegro. Television, radio, and club scenes…even the Podgorica police station was playing these tunes!

It also makes for effective advertising: I recently counted my second online CD purchase – yes, I still buy physical CDs rather than opt for ‘downloads,’ since computers are fallible, and data loss is a sad reality – of music from the 80s, stuff and bands I knew about, but never pursued seriously until now. No better way to keep expanding my rather limited musical horizons than the present.

A lot of crazy things were happening in the 1980s: the Cold War was reaching its final decade, and the nuclear issue had become especially frightening, which often became fused with the cause of environmentalism. Communism in Europe slowly began to unravel, permanently changing the alignments that had defined the second-half of the last century. Free-market capitalism was stretching far and wide, often via the expansion of multinational corporations. The AIDS epidemic was in full-force by then, and young people were curbing the sexual excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. Gay rights activism made significant breakthroughs, only to be stigmatized by this epidemic as being an exclusively “gay disease.”

The then-called “third world” was experiencing calamities that began to be broadcast on international television. Other developments in such countries sometimes motivated American covert interventions, as in Central America. Economics and recession were on many working people’s minds. Conservatism appeared to be spreading, particularly in Britain, the United States, West Germany and Canada, which created a backlash in the artistic and cultural communities.

All of these factors, and many more, thematically and structurally influenced so much of the music of the 1980s. It was easy, after this decade passed, to laugh off the fashion and musical excesses of those days, but that there is a new revival happening now is amusing and fun.

But, this might also be the sign of troubling prospects that go beyond nostalgia: music, as with other cultural and artistic mediums, very often is an outlet of how segments of society reconcile the realities of everyday life and current events, particularly the negative and disquieting ones. That the 1980s are being revisited and, quite often, relived again may well be the telltale sign that some believe recent history is repeating itself, or that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If so, then why not learn from the generations before us that went through much the same thing -- and make a lot of fun out of it in the meantime?