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Another two Kosovo Serbs are murdered as the international community, local Serbs, Albanians and Belgrade clash over decentralization plans.
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Judging by opponents' rhetoric in the presidential elections, Yushchenko was set to launch a linguistic revolution in Ukraine. So far, he hasn’t.
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The new Bulgarian governing coalition is a deeply divided one. Can it take the country to the EU by 2007?
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Solidarity’s 25th anniversary highlights Poland’s clashing views of itself – and the twists that history can take.
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The ’90s were an essential period in our lives. They represented the awakening, let's say. I sit and go down the memory lane back to those awakening years. The 90s meant the Revolution… Ok, and what happened right after that? Well, I received aid transports! We got huge quantities of clothes, all tenaciously packed and wrapped in small or big cardboard boxes.
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On 14th June in the morning, around 11.30, when the miners’ cohorts, waving their bats, invaded Bucharest, I was walking down Magheru Boulevard, heading to the Union. I met two colleagues, a property man, Bordeianu and Vasile Neagoe (a coward for a fact) a production manager. They were also heading to the Union. When we reached the traffic light in front of Nottara Theatre, we wanted to cross the boulevard towards Eva shop. The miners were zealously marching on the middle of the boulevard, entirely blocking it.
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In September 1996, when I got the job here, Metro was the first supermarket in Romania. Until then there had been only … the Mega Image in Lizeanu Street. It had opened a year before. It was awfully crowded there too, people were crammed up inside because it was something new … Still, there wasn’t much difference between a supermarket and a regular grocery store. But Metro was something completely new.
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I think that the 90s represented the most beautiful and incredible period in my life. They followed immediately after the so-called revolution. I had taken part in it ever since the beginning and people were convinced that we would experience a tremendous transformation – we still couldn’t say much about its nature, but we could swear it wasn’t far –, and we understood democracy as a form of anarchy with meetings in the public square, University Square and all the other activities I participated in.
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I arrived in Bucharest in 1989, when I began my faculty studies; well, it was actually the Agronomics Institute. After graduation, I specialized in naïve music criticism and public and private sound effects. I still work in the field. I’ve lived in Bucharest ever since. What can I say? I was lucky then, as I am lucky now, to find an escape: I lived in underground rockers’ communities with all sorts of weird hippies and interesting people. That was my good luck.
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The education reform began in 1990 and it took some dramatic turns, as serious and touchy problems were approached without full knowledge of what they presupposed. First of all, thanks to a programme financed by the World Bank, they changed school textbooks. Alternative textbooks were printed by companies which had won public auctions and competitions, but the syllabus was still the same. New textbooks covered the old syllabus. At the same time as the movement for changing the textbooks, there was also a movement for changing the curricula and the syllabus. They first built the roof, and then the walls and they left the foundation to be built last.
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An interview about the role of orality, objectified in rumours, gossips, and opinions, in the dissipated and hesitating political, public and private life of Romania's first postcommunist years.
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Until the ’90s our favourite walking places had been those outside the inhabited areas of the city. We became aware that we were going through a frenzy caused by the colourful shop windows and by the multitude of names.
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The scholarship, meaning the purse with gold (or silver) pieces offered by various education institutions or by organizations/ foundations, like Soros, to students from Romania, was (and still is) an opportunity which is viewed from a variety of perspectives by each individual. I am the fortunate beneficiary of such an opportunity. I shall briefly recount what and how it happened and how I perceived/ still perceive the series of events which has brought me here (meaning to Teheran at the moment and to Bahrain in general).
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In the first years after the Revolution I can’t say that I achieved much. I didn’t have much money, apart from what my parents gave me and that wasn’t much. Around ’92, thanks to my friends, my curiosity and my defying character, I started doing drugs. First I did it for fun, but I soon became addicted to heroin. I had already become familiar with a lot of young people who sold drugs but money to get them was the real issue. Heroin was very expensive and I needed ever more. I couldn’t give up drugs, so I had to find a way to make money. I began by taking things from the house and pawn them for drugs. Later I was planning on getting them back.
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1991 was the year when I passed and at the same time failed my university admission exam. Chronologically, because emotionally things were different, this is the short story: I had failed the admission exam for the public University and nothing else really mattered, in spite of the fact that my folks were really happy for me being a student within the private teaching system.
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We began our little frontier trade immediately after 1989. A lot of Turkish firms mushroomed around Gara de Nord, offering transport to Istanbul (there where coaches leaving every hour – you weren’t even allowed to book your place in advanced, you just went to the station and got on the coach to Istanbul). Many people went there, bought all sorts of goods from the Turkish bazaars and then returned to Romania where they would sold them. As we wanted to go to Istanbul in search of the old Byzantium, we decided to take one of these coaches because it was much cheaper and much more convenient for us.
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In evaluating the postcommunist Romanian cinematography, not the charts and paradigms prove to be relevant (being, in fact, inoperative and futile). What eventually matters is a huge - and undoubtedly unpremeditated recovering effort of the anthropological dimension: all Romanian movies after 1990 - no matter the quality!- represent a devoted mirror of the human mutations (sociological and of any other kind) that the Romanian society has undergone during the past fifteen years. From this perspective, the value of the cinema productions comes second to the interests an anthropologist can take in any of the titles appeared after 1990!
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The first supermarket I came across had a slightly different name – it was a supermarché. I mention the name because the most powerful effect it had on me was at the level of sound. Almost any conversation on this topic would end in a cheerful and anxious conclusion, “They said we would go again!” The most frequent questions were, “Have you been to … yet?” and we would list the various departments: toys, wines, sweets etc. Now I remember less what I actually saw there and more what impressed me, the magic I felt when I uttered those words.
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For me, the first days of the Revolution especially meant the contact with the West. Why was that? Because my brother, who lives in Switzerland, was a very active member of the Helsinki group, with very many press contacts and he used to give my address to everybody. Hence, right from the first day, when the whole story broke out in Bucharest (after taking my family to a safe place, taking into account that bullets were whistling around there), I started to heroically broadcast about the unfolding of the events, below the living room table, God knows what or for whom. Later on, when arriving to Germany and Switzerland I was surprised to find out that people used to know me due to those first ‘reports’! Back then, an encounter with a foreign journalist who sensed the set-up in Timişoara, but afterwards was forced to write exactly the opposite was my first question mark connected to the background of the press liberty.
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I was a student, belonging to the YCU1, when the Revolution started in Târgu-Jiu. Without it, I could have become the vivid reincarnation of the new man. This thought startles me even now, giving me shivers down my spine, hence a sometimes-ravishing revolt against communism, against manipulation and the well-concealed lie.
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