BRAIN DRAIN

Four cheers for the brain drain


I can understand pure protectionism more easily. That is selfish and
timid, but at least it's not disguised as altruism. But a lot of the
moaning about the "brain drain" from east European countries like
Latvia, Lithuania and Poland makes out that it is having a dreadful
effect on these poor post-communist countries (for which read
"aboriginal reservations"). The natives, so this patronising argument
goes, would be so much happier living their traditional lifestyle
(muddy, cold, vodka-soaked) than being spoiled by exposure to the
temptations of western culture.

Instead of celebrating the marvellous opportunities that migration in
a united Europe presents, the old rich countries are pretending that
it's a disaster. How dare those funny little people with their
incomprehensible languages search for a better life elsewhere? How
dare they respond to market signals that tell them that their labour
is more valuable abroad than at home? How dare they try to learn new
skills? They should stop having ideas above their station, and instead
stay at home and go folkdancing in those picturesque felt boots, and
wait gratefully for the nice new roads that the rich world is going to
give them later in the century.

In theory, of course, migration combined with bad government can make
a country collapse. Zimbabwe is a good example. There may be some sign
of that in the more benighted bits of central Asia (I am sure that
anyone who can leave Turkmenistan has done so). But what's happening
in the post-communist countries of eastern Europe is quite different.

For a start, the current wave of migration is quite small. Many more
people moved immediately after the collapse of communism: Jews,
Russians and Germans shifted around in their hundreds of thousands.
But this was less politically sensitive. Germany, albeit not very
enthusiastically, feels that it has to be the ethnic homeland of all
Teutons, however tenuous their connection. Israel feels the same about
Jews (who in some cases got their Israeli passports and moved on).
Russians in the former Soviet empire were welcome home, regardless of
whether they were really persecuted, or just unable to cope with the
end of their imperial privilege.

The difference now is that the migration is economic, not political,
and it's much more short-term. People are going abroad and trying
their luck. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Qualifications may be
unrecognised, or employers unscrupulous. But it's not the end of the
world: if Greece is no good, try Italy. If Britain is overcrowded,
there's Ireland. If nothing works, then there's a bus back home. And
if it does work, the pay-offs are great: money earned can be capital
for a business or pay for education, or a better house. Simply seeing
how a hospital, farm or office in another country works is a
mind-stretching experience.

In short: free trade in people, as in goods or services, matches wants
and preferences precisely, creating more winners than losers. True,
spending long periods abroad is not ideal for marriages, or for
parenting, or for caring for elderly relatives if people. But if
staying put means rotting your life away with ill-paid, boring work,
that's not exactly ideal either.

Some east European employers are complaining. Their nice pool of cheap
labour is indeed draining away. But if they want to tempt the migrants
back, they'll have to work at it, by offering better pay and
conditions, and raising productivity through better management and
more modern equipment. Help! At this rate, those muddy aborigines may
end up richer than us.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist

ESTONIA

Restaurant critics give Estonia three stars

By Edward Lucas

In most of the countries I cover, the prime minister lives in a
bubble, travelling in a large black shiny car from one well-guarded
location to another, surrounded by obsequious advisers basking in his
reflected glory.

If he goes to a restaurant at all, it is a glitzy one with a private
room. If the bill is paid at all, it is certainly not something that
bothers him directly.
That's certainly true in Belarus, which I have just been discussing at
an excellent conference organised by the Open Estonia Foundation (part
of the Soros philanthropic empire).
I follow Belarus fairly closely (in so far as I can without being able
to go there), but I was struck by the fierce new rules on internet
access, which will deprive non-governmental organisations of their
broadband connections.
The draft new law on subversion threatens hefty prison sentences for
crimes such as "discrediting Belarus in co-operation with
foreign-financed organisations and the mass media".
But outside intervention will at best have a marginal impact. The real
problem is the deep Sovietisation of Belarussian society, which has
atomised and demoralised it to an extent unseen elsewhere in the region.
The building blocks of democratic change - impatient middle classes,
patriotism and religion - simply don't exist. So the most important
thing is to do no harm.
A lively debate about economic sanctions ended with a consensus (I
think) that a Soviet-style economic collapse was not going to happen,
and that making Belarus poorer and more dependent on Russia was
unlikely to stoke pro-western and democratic feelings.
The conference's high quality made up for the fact that my other
plans, to see some Estonian policy wonks, had been ruined by the trip
of my fellow-countryman, Tony Blair. His heavily guarded convoy of
limousines had brought traffic to a standstill for large chunks of the
day and the people I most wanted to meet were too busy, either because
of him, or because of the disruption caused.
But late in the evening I got a message that some government advisers
were at a restaurant and I was welcome to join them. That was nice
enough: they might have had enough self-important British visitors for
one day.
As we chatted about Russia's slide to autocracy, the psychological war
it wages against the Baltics, and the strange and dangerous way in
which Western Europe seems to ignore this, a couple more people turned
up, pulling up chairs to the table, sitting down and tucking into the
wine and tapas.
They included the Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. I was
impressed with four things. First, he was not spending time with a
hand-picked group of top policy-advisers for a high-powered
discussion, but hanging out with a rather random bunch ranging from
very senior to rather junior, just to chew over the events of the day.
Second, the conversation flowed naturally. I heard nobody laughing
loudly at the boss's jokes, or falling silent when he spoke. Third,
the other customers in the (very unpretentious) restaurant, and the
staff, showed not the slightest bit of surprise. Fourth, before Ansip
left, he made a point of checking that somebody was dealing with the bill.
I told him how impressed I was, and why. "Estonia's like that," he
replied. "Some German tourists asked for my autograph in a restaurant
recently, just because they were so surprised that I would eat there
like a normal person."
Sadly, I can't imagine this happening in Britain with Tony Blair any
more than it would in Belarus with Alexander Lukashenko. Lucky Estonia.
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.

POLAND

Poland's bravery is lost on Putin's poodles

By Edward Lucas

It's easy to caricature Poland as a country of dim, superstitious peasants. I
remember CNN's Ted Turner doing his unfunny impression of a "Polish
mine-detector"- putting his hands to his ears and hopping clumsily. A Polish
Deputy Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, forced him to apologise.

émigré who has now become Poland's new defence minister and is making waves
again. He has declassified his country's Warsaw Pact files, handing them over to
the national archives. But the international reaction to this reflects another
caricature of Poland, no less offensive, and much more dangerous.
There were plenty of snide remarks about Sikorski's move, but the Financial
Times will serve as an example. It wrote that Poland "risked inflaming tensions
with Russia" and was "prepared to incur Moscow's wrath". Leaving aside the mixed
metaphor (a tendon can be inflamed, but not a tension) this seems a perverse
spin on the affair.
Russia has made no public protest about the opening of the archives. Nor,
according to Sikorski, has it complained privately. So Western opinion is
annoyed not because Poland is picking a fight with Russia, but because it is
doing something that might just possibly at some point annoy the Kremlin - with
the subtext that this would always be the wrong thing to do.
That's a strange way of looking at things and one that is increasingly prevalent
in Western capitals. Poland and the Baltic states are seen as faraway places
with incomprehensible habits, values and grudges, bent on disrupting the
important business of getting lots of cheap oil and gas from that nice Mr Putin.
If Russia hadn't thought about complaining about the declassification before, it
certainly has every opportunity to do so now.
It doesn't really matter what is in the archives; Soviet plans for nuclear war,
plus the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia will probably be the most interesting.
Other countries - such as the former East Germany - have already declassified
their bits of the files.
The point is that the new Polish government is serious about wanting to clean up
the remains of the country's Communist past. It is doing so promptly, to a
deafening lack of applause in the West. I find that baffling. Imagine if a
former Nazi-occupied country - France for example - still had a large pro-Nazi
party that had managed to block the release of the Wehrmacht's wartime archives
there. How cross everyone would be about it, and how glad if a strongly
anti-Nazi party came to power pledging to open the German military files (and
the Gestapo ones too, for that matter). That, roughly, is what has happened in
Poland.
The real reason why bien-pensant Western opinion-formers hate this sort of thing
is that it sabotages the cosy, sloppy, moral equivalence that marked their
thinking during the Cold War years. If you are confronted with incontrovertible
evidence that the Soviet Union was both a monstrous dictatorship and an
aggressive imperialist power, it becomes much harder to maintain that "the USA
and the USSR were as bad as each other".
The fact is that if it wasn't for America, Western Europe would have had a hard
job withstanding Soviet belligerence. Patriots like Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski -
NATO's top spy in Communist-ruled Poland - knew that, which is why for a decade
they risked torture and death to work secretly for the West. But that part of
history is something that many people whose freedom he helped preserve would
much rather forget, if they ever knew it in the first place.
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

ebrd

Compare and contrast in order to catch up

By Edward Lucas

Reading the latest annual survey from the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) of the progress of the
ex-captive nations in economics and institution-building, I wondered
about an ideal world where the engineers are Czechs, the chefs
Hungarian, the soldiers Polish, the bureaucrats Estonian and the
musicians Russian. And in a nightmare world, the bureaucrats are
Russian, the soldiers Czechs, the chefs Estonian and so on. Such jokes
are a good way to make friends - and lose them. No country likes to
dwell on its weak points (and I should say quickly, before my inbox
starts bursting with protests, that I have had many delicious meals in
Tallinn, know some very brave Czechs and highly efficient Russians).

But behind the more-or-less amusing stereotypes is a serious point
about the right way to look at the post-Communist world. There are two
traps. One is defeatism, the other arrogance. The best example of the
latter came in the 1990s, when Russia was the unfortunate beneficiary
of a great deal of enthusiastic and intrusive Western advice and
scrutiny. Locals and others complained with some justice that it was
wrong to expect the country to meet Swiss standards of administrative
efficiency, German altruism in foreign policy, American workaholism
and Dutch openness to foreign trade. It would be fairer to expect, at
least at first, Italian standards of public-sector efficiency, French
political maturity, German flexibility and Swiss cultural openness.
Such critics had a point. It was ludicrous, for example, to expect a
huge country emerging from decades of totalitarianism and isolation to
develop in the space of a few years the financial system of an
advanced capitalist country. The attempt to do so meant that hot money
sloshed round weak crooked institutions, leading to an inevitable
financial bubble that cost millions of Russians their savings in 1998.

But it is wrong for two reasons to take the opposite view and say that
post-communist countries are doing very well if they meet the worst
standards of old Europe.

The first is that the collapse of Communism did give the chance of a
fresh start. In countries like France and Italy, many people still
sincerely believe that the system of past decades can work, with a bit
of judicious tweaking. It was very hard, almost impossible, to believe
that about Communism in 1989. Different countries approached that
fresh start in different ways and with different starting points, but
it was there. Good policies paid off; bad ones brought a high price in
lost time, wealth, jobs and happiness. Hungary got it right with
privatisation for example; the Czech Republic got it wrong. Slovakia
wasted time under the dreadful Vladimir Meciar. Ukraine dithered,
while Russia at least tried to privatise and liberalise.

Second, post-Communist countries don't have the luxury of hanging
about. Italy can still just about afford its comic-opera politics, for
the same reason that it can afford grand opera at La Scala: because
it's a big rich country. Ukraine, if it wants to catch up this
century, can't.

What I'd really like from the EBRD is a detailed comparison that
includes old Europe as well as new. It's good to see that in some
respects ex-Communist countries' business environments are nearing
those in Germany - a country the report uses as a benchmark. But it
would be even more interesting to see further comparisons. How does
Hungary stack up against Austria? Or Estonia against Finland? That
would spur the ex-captive nations to greater efforts - and perhaps on
some fronts be a salutary shock to the richer countries' comfortable
complacency.

COMMIE TOOLKIT

The Communist tool-box still comes in handy


Some of the tools are rusty; others are just plain useless. The skills
I struggled to acquire in communist-era Eastern Europe now seem as
quaint as the ability to hunt a woolly mammoth or sharpen a flint axe.

Or do they? My biggest stumbling blocks: visas, communications and
staying fed, have all but vanished. Bluffing and subterfuge were
essential to get inside places like Ceausescu's Romania, Communist
Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, and to work once there. Not any
more. I no longer envy colleagues for being dab hands at the telex
(remember that?), or for their wiles in getting planned-economy
restaurants to provide food.
Thankfully, it is no longer necessary to know the ins and outs of
Marxist theory, The ability to swap Lenin quotes with Communist
apparatchiks counts for nothing. Languages matter less too: in
pre-revolutionary Eastern Europe, you simply had to stumble through
your irregular verbs, suffixes and declensions. The alternative was to
talk only to a tiny bunch of polyglots; or else rely on a small pool
of imperfect interpreters who were easy targets for secret police
pressure.
Most importantly, there's no risk to life and liberty. Nobody beats
you up. I no longer feel overwhelmed by the moral courage of my
interviewees. Even the most unpleasant post-Communist politician is
unlikely to be as revolting a liar and bully as, say, a Soviet-era
secret policeman.
But some things have stayed the same. Despite a decade in the
limelight, plus EU and NATO membership for the lucky ones, much of the
region is once again below the Western editorial horizon. I remember
beseeching my bosses (I wasn't at The Economist then, I should add) in
the late 1980s to take Yugoslavia seriously.
Now the frozen conflicts of the Caucasus and Western Balkans are again
too complicated and faraway for Western public attention to focus on.
And ignorance is still amazing. Last week BBC World reported,
straight-faced: "Poland is struggling to catch up its richer
neighbours, Germany and [sic] Russia."
More importantly, history is still the key. Understanding Polish
politics is impossible without knowing the difference between the
London and Lublin governments, or the difference between Pilsudski's
and Dmowski's concept of nationhood. Russia is stuck in the cloven
pine of its history. In every country in the region, the simplest but
most revealing question is still: "What were you doing before 1989?
And what did your parents do?".
That touches the biggest similarity: Communism may be dead as an
ideology, but its psychological legacy lives on. Below a thin layer of
post-Communist polish, anyone with a background in the old regime is
likely to have a different emotional, social and moral wavelength:
more hierarchical, more suspicious, more verbose, more rigid (and
perhaps less principled) than the naive outsider might expect.
Cutting through that still requires sharp thinking. As Raymond Smith
explains in his classic work on the communist mindset, Negotiating
with the Soviets, the trick is to decide quickly whether to befriend,
bully or beg. A haughty approach (done with conviction) gets you
almost everywhere: kow-towing to higher authority is deeply ingrained.
If you can stomach it, getting friendly may work too - though you may
have to do a favour in return: personal connections were, after all,
the fuel that kept planned economies functioning. If all else fails,
grovel: humiliation is cheap if it gets you what you want.
It varies, of course. Belarus, Transdniestr and the like are the
worst. They just happen to be where I find my flint axe quite useful too.

EMIGRES

Bringing back Eastern promise of brainy émigrés

By Edward Lucas

I first came across them in the 'Infobiuras' of the Lithuanian
pro-independence movement, Sajudis, in early 1990.

Young, bright-eyed Americans, Canadians and Australians, steeped by
fervently patriotic parents in the history of countries they hardly
knew, bent on fulfilling their historical destiny. They translated
documents into English, briefed journalists, advised politicians and
generally brought a blast of optimistic, confident radicalism to the
nervous, blurry world of collapsing Communism.
Sometimes the results were more spectacular than productive. During
one of the hairier moments of the Lithuanian independence struggle,
when it seemed as though the West, with the honourable but minor
exception of Iceland, was going to abandon Lithuania to the mercies of
Soviet stormtroopers, I remember hearing one beefy young Lithuanian
émigré bellowing down the phone "Don't be such a f***ing jerk!" I
asked him who he'd been talking to. "The American ambassador in
Moscow," he replied tersely.
There were grown-ups too. The most impressive, Stasys Lozoraitis, ran,
unsuccessfully, for president of Lithuania in 1993. He had spent his
whole life as ambassador to the Vatican and United States, in quixotic
service to a country that most of the world thought had disappeared in
1940. He was urbane, polyglot, amusing, and charismatic, with an
Italian wife who added a rare touch of glamour and sophistication to
the drab, stodgy world of Lithuania. Elsewhere, these high-powered
émigrés included a deeply impressive Canadian-Latvian professor of
linguistics, a forceful young man who ran the Estonian section of
Radio Free Europe and an ambitious Polish refugee-journalist, who
after studying at Oxford in the early 1980s spent time in
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the resistance.
The galaxy of talent had some black holes too. There was one adviser
to a Baltic foreign ministry whose sole qualification was a diploma in
bar management and a hard-drinking old bat in an economics ministry
whose previous job was as a junior public relations woman for a theme
park. One of the most energetic and engaging Lithuanian émigrés turned
out to have been working for both the KGB and the Americans (in what
order was never completely clear).
But the presumption then was that even the most modest émigré talent
was badly needed. Even the most superficial knowledge of the way the
West worked was a big advantage. Knowing how to use a computer, handle
phone messages, talk politely to strangers in English and organise
travel to faraway places were all rare skills.
That changed quickly. But the best émigré talent is still around. The
Canadian professor, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is now president of Latvia
and one of the few East European politicians with a claim to world
status. The young man from Radio Free Europe, Tom Ilves, is now a
leading member of the European Parliament. The Anglo-Polish
journalist, Radek Sikorski, has just been sworn in as defence minister.
But the political balance has changed. Now the diaspora appears
provincial and out of touch. In Toronto, Ealing and the Chicago
suburbs, they are still baking the old recipes, learning folk songs,
sending children to Saturday school and keeping the church afloat. But
the diaspora is no longer the political lungs of nationhood: the
source of free ideas and discussion, a constant reminder that the
Communist version of the past, present and future was an evil fiction.
In politics, it's the homeland that's humming.
But not in economics. A million East Europeans or more have gone
abroad in search of jobs and education. That raises a big question for
the ex-captive nations: can they ever attract these bright, mobile
people back home?

belarusaitis

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visiting
Minsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished by
its aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love of
inflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspecting
people. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussian
governments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has now
folded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, my
interlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishful
thinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fed
up with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that I
longed for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in
1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about him
in The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,
who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcome
breath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of years
later I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plant
outside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erratic
and off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Even
the bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunched
them into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]
is the start of something big". His press people, who had been
expecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. A
country that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot of
western interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme of
seminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. The
aim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in the
elections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreed
on a single candidate, the multilingual physicist Alexander
Milinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just clever
and honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said for
many of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made up
much of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaign
and count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis of
his own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise is
that support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plus
suspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not just
the product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelings
of a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show that
these feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are still
strong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's western
supporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. The
regime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polish
fifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, political
and economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU but
Nato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being an
Al-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).
Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.
Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. But
saying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

commie toolkit

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visiting
Minsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished by
its aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love of
inflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspecting
people. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussian
governments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has now
folded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, my
interlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishful
thinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fed
up with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that I
longed for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in
1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about him
in The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,
who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcome
breath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of years
later I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plant
outside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erratic
and off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Even
the bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunched
them into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]
is the start of something big". His press people, who had been
expecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. A
country that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot of
western interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme of
seminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. The
aim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in the
elections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreed
on a single candidate, the multilingual physicist Alexander
Milinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just clever
and honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said for
many of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made up
much of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaign
and count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis of
his own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise is
that support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plus
suspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not just
the product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelings
of a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show that
these feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are still
strong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's western
supporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. The
regime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polish
fifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, political
and economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU but
Nato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being an
Al-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).
Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.
Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. But
saying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

ev september 2005

The disgraceful 'party line' on Eastern Europe

By Edward Lucas

Twice at parties in the last week I've found myself gasping for
breath. Each time I was chatting to pillars of the right-wing British
establishment, solid Cold Warriors with whom I used to agree about the
big questions of Europe's future - America in, Germans down, Russia
out - and so forth.

But Euroscepticism is corroding those comforting and commendable
certainties. One of my pals, a newspaper editor, interrupted me as I
praised the flat-taxes and other reforms sweeping across Europe from
the new member states. "Oh, I'm not interested in that now. I'm for a
pull-out." In vain I tried to explain that the Central Europeans and
Balts would regard his idea of a new EFTA - backed by NATO - as dotty
and unworkable. The constitution had failed, he insisted, so the EU
was dead.
Two days later it was one of Britain's leading right-wing polemicists,
a man who as speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher honed some of the
choicest phrases of the Cold War. I was trying to interest him in the
problems of Europe's eastern fringes, so brilliantly outlined by my
predecessor, Robert Cottrell, in his recent survey in The Economist.
He wasn't interested. The EU would collapse, and Britain should pull
out as soon as possible. But what, I stuttered, would you do about
Moldova, or Belarus? "Those countries," he replied loftily, "will have
to look after themselves." I could hardly believe my ears. A man who,
only 20 years previously, had championed the captive nations' right to
be free of Soviet rule was now consigning the most vulnerable victims
of Communism to the scrap heap of history.
There is something very odd going on here. Britain and British ideas
of a wide, Atlanticist Europe have never been so popular in Eastern
Europe. Memories of betrayals, real or imagined, of Munich, of the
Warsaw Uprising, at Yalta, of the Cossacks, of Hungarians in 1956 and
Czechoslovaks in 1968, are fading into history. Instead, there is
enthusiastic support for British ideas about EU reform, for Tony
Blair's ideas about deregulation, dynamism, flexibility and so on.
Countries wanting to join the EU see the British presidency as their
big chance.
By contrast, the Franco-German axis has never looked more out-of-date
and disreputable. In particular, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have fallen
out of love with France in a way I would have regarded as wildly
unlikely when I covered Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet the people who should be celebrating as the winds of history blow
their way have given up and are huddled below decks, sneering and
jeering, lost in their own world of defunct sentimental nationalism
and vainglorious wishful thinking.
Fuelled by champagne and indignation, I asked both people for an
alternative. If consolidating democracy and stability in the Western
Balkans matters, what possible alternative is there than the big
carrot of EU membership for countries that do the right things, on
institution-building, the rule of law, treatment of minorities,
crime-fighting, intelligence-sharing and so forth?
I would like to report that they came up with ingenious solutions that
would bring all the prosperity and other benefits of the EU without
any of the bureaucracy, waste, corruption, pomposity and jargon that
fuels Euroscepticism in Britain and elsewhere.
Not a bit of it. For the champions of the Cold War, Eastern Europe, it
seems, is once again a collection of faraway countries of whom we know
nothing. That was a callous and disgraceful phrase when used in 1938
by Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia. And it is callous and
disgraceful now.

gulag/applebaum

Gulag gets short shrift from Putinland publishers

By Edward Lucas

Imagine a book, well written, accurate and moving, that gives the
first really thorough account of America's slave trade, told through
painstaking research in previously hidden archives.

A Pulitzer prize? Certainly. World-wide syndication? Certainly. Now
imagine that despite all that, no American publisher is willing to
publish it.
Inconceivable? Not if the subject is the equally shameful one of the
Soviet Gulag and the publishers are not American, but Russian. My
friend Anne Applebaum's accuracy, stylish prose and original research
won her a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the camps. It has sold
hundreds of thousands of copies in 28 editions around the world -
except in Russia, where the book is taboo.
Yet there is huge interest in the former captive nations of Eastern
Europe, where the book-buying public tends not to go for translations
of foreign non-fiction (the elite read such books in English, the rest
lack the time, money or inclination to read them at all).
The hardback Gulag alone has sold a startling 70,000 copies in Poland.
Her agent, the worldly wise New York-based Georges Borchardt, says the
level of interest is "really quite amazing".
Yet the country which suffered most from communism, providing
countless millions of victims to the terror machine, has no
local-language version of the best-available account of what really
happened.
One reason for poor sales in Putinland might be fatigue. During the
glasnost era (and golly, we miss those days now) memoirs, histories
and other works about the crimes of Stalinism were everywhere. By the
1990s, Russians were bored by miserable accounts of their miserable
history. The new fashion in books was escapist detective fiction. Fair
enough: even in Germany, where VergangenheitsbewŠltigung (conquering
one's past) is a matter of solemn private and public conscience, I can
see people have a limited appetite for yet more books about the Nazis.
But does that explain why no Russian publisher wants to publish Gulag?
As a devout believer in free markets, I concede the possibility that
the book would sell so badly - worse, say, than an Icelandic cookbook
- that translating and publishing it would be irrational. But I think
it is more likely that the Russian publishers are practising
self-censorship.
As Paul Baker and Susan Glasser point out in their excellent new book
Kremlin Rising, Russian history is now a matter of high politics,
where the Kremlin intervenes even against specific textbooks that they
think cast the Soviet Union in an excessively (read: any) unfavourable
light.
Anne is trying to raise money to have it published by a brave
non-profit outfit, the Moscow School of Political Studies. But I have
another suggestion. Why not try selling the all-Russian rights to a
publisher in the Baltic states? At a minimum, it could sell among the
new generation of modern-minded Yevrorussky (European Russians) there
who find the cultural and political climate in the motherland
increasingly repellent. Second, it would at least be available to
readers in Russia proper (who mainly order books via the internet anyway).
The best thing would be if Kremlin then denounced the Baltic edition
as a "provocation", or tried to respond by sponsoring a sanitised
account that put the Gulag "in the right perspective". There are too
many lies already. But the more that official Russian history sidles
away from the democratic perspective and scholarly approach of the
Yeltsin years and back to the fawning, distorted junk of the past, the
easier it is to see Vladimir Putin and his "useful idiot" sycophants
in the West for what they really are.

baltic blues

When an Estonian official once asked me about a suitable mission
statement or motto for his country. I suggested, only half-jokingly,
"We told you so".
Estonian smugness is of course legendary. But it is odd but true
that on most important questions the Estonians (and usually the
Latvians and Lithuanians) have been right, whereas outsiders have been
wrong, sometimes wildly so.
I remember being told forcefully in 1988 by one of the BBC's best
Russian-speakers that the "tiny Baltic Soviet republics" wanted only
autonomy from the Kremlin. A handful of "nationalists", mainly
emigres, dreamed of full independence, but it was never going to happen.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice. They never considered
themselves to be a "Soviet republic", but rather an occupied
territory. And they certainly did want independence. They went ahead
with the remarkable Congress of Estonia. Like its Latvian counterpart,
this was an independently-elected alternative (ie non-Soviet)
parliament which sought to recreate the republic abolished in 1940. It
was an important reminder that the Baltic states were not seeking to
gain independence, but to regain it. This was the political equivalent
of raising the Titanic—but most outsiders simply couldn't understand
it, and dismissed the Congress as a nationalist stunt.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice and focussed on restoring the
prosperous, lawful country that was still—just—in living memory.
That included modest attempts to restore Estonian as the state
language, and to try to induce the hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era
migrants to regularise their residence. The outside world (which
mostly has far harsher rules for migrants wanting to naturalise) was
sure this would mean "Bosnia on the Baltic". There were countless
monitoring missions and working groups. But the result was that
hundreds of thousands of people have learnt Estonian (or Latvian) and
gained citizenship. It's worked amazingly well.
Then there was the senior IMF official in 1992 who told Estonians
to back "a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent", rather than
reintroducing (very successfully as it proved) the kroon.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice. The government of Mart Laar
also ignored outsiders who told them not to privatise rapidly and
fully, but to give state industry a lengthy, gentle transition. The
speed of economic change did feel rather alarming (I was running a
newspaper in Tallinn at the time) but it was the right policy. So was
the decision to abolish tariffs and subsidies (now, sadly,
reintroduced as a condition of EU membership). Equally successful—and
accompanied by dire warnings at the time—was the flat tax.
I still remember a western ambassador who was reduced to
helpless giggles in the mid-1990s when I suggested that all three
Baltic states would be EU members in ten years' time. The combination
of outside competition and Brussels bureaucracy would cause them
collapse overnight, he told me. And Nato membership was not even a
joke, just dangerous nonsense—as late as 2000, much of the
foreign-policy establishment in western Europe was convinced that such
a step would destroy relations with Russia.
It's quite a long list, which might make Estonians and their
Baltic colleagues rather sceptical of outside advice. It might also,
perhaps. make outsiders cautious about offering it, and keener to
learn from Estonia's example. So I am pleased that British
commentators are now writing enthusiastically about Estonia's flat
tax. But there is some way to go: the Sunday Telegraph two weeks ago
wrote enthusiastically that: "Mr Laar is tipped as a European
commissioner when [sic] his country joins the EU in 2007."

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist
edwardlucas@economist.com

Transdniestria

Finally, here is the previous week's column from European Voice

Birthday parties have an added frisson when they celebrate a highly
controversial birth. There was quite a bash the other day in the
streets of Tiraspol—a city that few Europeans would find on the map,
although well known to arms-dealers, drug-smugglers, spies and
suchlike. For Tiraspol is the soi-disant capital of the soi-disant
state of Transdniestr.
Depending on your political standpoint, Transdniestr is a valiant
bastion of Russian language and culture, battling against fascists
wanting a Greater Romania, and against American global hegemony. Or it
is a corrupt tinpot dictatorship in a breakaway province that survives
thanks only to being useful to some very nasty strands of Russian (and
to some extent Ukrainian) political and economic life.
But like it or not, Transdniestr was 15 years old this month. It
celebrated in style with a huge fun-fair, bombastic speeches—and most
importantly "official" delegations from the other three unrecognised
statelets of the post-Soviet landscape: Nagorno-Karabakh, South
Ossetia, and Abkhazia.
There is an intriguing air of unreality about the idea of
non-countries conducting pretend diplomacy with each other. During the
Cold War, the Polish government-in-exile in London used to have
meetings with the surviving Baltic diplomats, stranded there in dusty
embassies while their countries were de facto part of the Soviet
Union. Their status was a bit different though: the Balts still had
diplomatic status (because Britain didn't recognise the Soviet
annexation) whereas the Poles were private citizens—at least until
President Lech Walesa invited them to Warsaw in 1990, and, gloriously,
retrospectively recognised their legitimacy.
For less noble reasons, Transdniestrians also hang on, hoping that
stubbornness will eventually bear fruit. But they don't exactly exude
confidence. The official news agency, Olvia-press, recently published
a fascinating commentary "exposing" the various western plots aimed at
destabilising Transdniestr by means of a "coloured revolution". The
first stage was the "transformation of society within Moldova" by
"discrediting Soviet values, forming a pro-Western mentality and, most
importantly, creating…total dependence on American bosses". The first
two of these sound highly desirable. And the third has not happened:
American investors, sadly, are conspicuous by their absence; the US
embassy seems rather underpowered, and the best-known American there ,
the OSCE Ambassador William Hill, is something of a hate-figure for
Moldovan nationalists.
But never mind. Olvia-press goes on to outline the other scandalous
tactics of the Anglo-American hegemons, particularly a highly sinister
programme called "Community Connections" which sponsors "leaders of
public organisations, the intelligentsia, journalists and
representatives of small and medium business" to go on short trips to
America. There, it claims, they are "brainwashed".
That paranoid, exaggerated tone highlights the Tiraspol
propagandists' problem. If their system is so wonderful, then why are
people so eager to go to horrid America? And why is it so easy for
Western propaganda to persuade Transdniestrian youngsters that EU and
Nato membership via a united Moldova will make them freer and richer
than living in a rogue statelet propped up by Russia? Grudgingly,
Olvia-press blames a "certain complacency" among the Transdniestrian
authorities in dealing with the local youth. But it ends up insisting,
with beautiful contradictoriness, that a) the American puppets are
useless; b) they steal their backers' money (that implies that the
brainwashing wasn't that effective); c) Transdniestrians love their
government so much that no revolution is possible; and d) that the
American behaviour is highly provocative and should stop at once.
I decode that to mean that America's democracy-promoters are
beginning to have quite an effect, and the regime is getting worried.
Which is good news.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.
edwardlucas@economist.com

wilder europe Poland worries

The less-than-august omens for Poland

By Edward Lucas

If your job involves Eastern Europe, August looks like a good time for
holidays. As in most of the continent, it is a month when officials
are unavailable, government shuts down and people leave the cities to
the tourists.

But history suggests that it is a very good month if your job is
journalism. Among the stories you might have missed if you regularly
take holidays in August are the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the building
of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the birth
of Solidarity, the first big hole in the Iron Curtain, the botched
coup in Moscow that marked the end of the evil empire, the collapse of
the Russian financial system and the sinking of the Kursk submarine.
Against that background, how did August 2005 measure up? There have
been interesting rumblings from Transdniester, and worrying ones from
Macedonia; a Serbian army helicopter planted a church on the top of a
mountain in Montenegro and the Czech prime minister apologised for the
deportation in 1945 of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. But the month's
really big news has been from Poland.
I don't mean the 25th anniversary of Solidarity's founding, or the
opening salvos in the two upcoming election campaigns. Far more
important are Poland's rows - a Cold War in miniature - with Russia
and Belarus.
Belarus is Europe's only remaining dictatorship, where the regime's
latest target is the country's biggest ethnic minority organisation,
the Union of Poles (UPB). This might seem an odd target. Poles in
Belarus are not highly politicised and the UPB's activities are
inoffensive: chiefly Saturday schools for children, and folk-dancing
events. But the Belarusian authorities are not worried about the
intellectual firepower of their opponents. They just dislike the fact
that they exist at all. Any independent organisation, especially one
with foreign financial and other support, is a direct challenge to the
closed, monolithic society that the regime desires. So it has
dissolved the UPB and installed a more compliant leadership. It has
jailed Polish-language journalists, harassed activists, and denied
entry to, or deported, visitors from Poland.
Although the regime has murdered people in the past, it has not used
force this time. That's not the case in Poland's row with Russia,
which began with the mugging in Warsaw of three teenagers from the
Russian embassy. Russia treated this as a diplomatic incident
resulting directly from Poland's Russophobia, and demanded a formal
apology. The verbal outbursts were followed by physical retaliation:
in quick succession, two Polish embassy officials, and then a Polish
journalist, were beaten up in Moscow.
What's ominous here is not that Russia and Belarus are behaving, as
usual, unpleasantly. It's that the EU seems to have given up trying to
defend its members, like Poland, who most need support. Where were the
protests from other European embassies when Poles were being beaten up
in the streets of Moscow?
When the new member states joined the EU last year, the bold aim was
to convince Russia that it could be friends with Western Europe only
if it dropped its historical grudges against former captive nations in
the continent's east. That policy has, so far, failed totally.
Instead, Russia is enjoying the sight of the powerful countries of
Western Europe scurrying away from any possible conflict. It would be
nice to think that this is just an August blip; that when the
important people return from their holidays, the EU will come out
toughly in defence of Poland.
But I expect they'll play safe. And that, of course, is far more
dangerous.

wilder europe What did communism look like, Daddy?

By Edward Lucas

To raise money for church repairs in my home village in south-west
England, I have just given an illustrated talk there on 'Scrapes,
scoops and spies' in Eastern Europe.

The first problem was showing how countries could appear and disappear
- that's startling in a region that has not been near an international
frontier since 900 AD.
But I found maps showing Europe in 1914, 1922, 1945 and now, which
illustrated well the crucial interplay between history and geography.
Nor was it too hard showing resistance to communist rule, and the
authorities' response.
For the communist seizure of power in 1945-48, I used pictures of two
of my Czechoslovak heroes, Jan Masaryk (the last non-communist foreign
minister, who fell to his death, probably not unassisted, from the
window of his flat high up in the foreign ministry building) and
Milada Horakova. She survived a Nazi concentration camp only to be
hanged after a communist show trial in 1950.
There were excellent pictures, too, of the East German workers'
uprising of 1953, of Hungary in 1956, of the Soviet-led invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-81.
But what was missing from the internet were images of the communist
system itself. (I thought it would be cheating to use commercial photo
libraries, so I was relying only on what the general public can find
via the internet search engine, Google.)
I searched in vain for illustrations of the degradation and
frustration of everyday life, of empty shops and squalid housing.
I did find one picture of the world's worst car, the Soviet-made
Zaporozhets - but it was a lovingly restored one owned by an eccentric
American collector, not the usual stinking rusty deathtrap.
Illustrating the moral dimension, of collaboration and deceit, was
even harder.
Some extracts from works by Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky and Milan
Klima would have done the job perfectly, given the time to read them
aloud: the real face of totalitarianism is sad, shabby compromises
made by sad, shabby people. That is ideal material for novelists, less
so for photographers.
It was hard too to explain wear and tear on my own nerves. Western
journalists behind the Iron Curtain worried often that we were
endangering our contacts, or (occasionally) that they might compromise
us. Soviet-block foreign correspondents in the West were almost
invariably spies; the communist authorities assumed we were too. That
meant a regular diet of hassles (ranging from blocked phones to
honeytraps) and threats of expulsion.
Sometimes these were comical. In Prague the authorities complained
about my frequent visits to the British embassy.
I was happy to explain that I was going not to pick up secret
instructions, but in the hope that the little shop there might have
new supplies of life-preserving Marmite (a yeasty gunk that Brits eat
spread on hot buttered toast).
In Soviet-occupied Estonia I was the first Western journalist to
interview the head of the KGB in Tallinn. I started the interview by
asking: "Am I the first Westerner to come into this building?" He
replied coolly: "Let's say that you will be the first Westerner to
leave it." I got goosepimples: remembering that anti-communist
partisans sent by Britain (and betrayed by British traitor Kim Philby)
had been tortured and murdered in that very building in the 1950s.
When the KGB collapsed in 1991, the Estonians found a machine in the
basement that, seemingly, had been used for mincing up bodies. Perhaps
I should have got a picture of that.

[ps from Edward: we did use a picture of that mincing machine in the Baltic
Independent when I was editing it]

Wilder Europe Oh My Stalin

The unbearable brilliance of post-Soviet songs

By Edward Lucas

It wasn't tuneful, but it was memorable. I was chairing a conference
about `Empire"' in Sweden and on the final evening I got bored with
the official entertainment and suggested a sing-song. These are big
features of British political life, sometimes staged to raise one's
own morale and sometimes to annoy opponents.

When I was a student, in the days when there were still real
Communists who thought the Soviet Union was a "workers' paradise" we
used to wind them up with what to my mind is the greatest political
song of all time. It is sung to the tune of Clementine and the first
verse goes like this:
In old Moscow, in the Kremlin/In the spring of '39/Sat a Russian and a
Prussian/Working out the Party Line.(Chorus)
Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,/Oh my Stalin Party Line/First he changed
it, then rearranged it/Oh my Stalin Party Line.
(It goes on: anyone interested in the rest can e-mail me). Next came
Rule Britannia – the rarely heard full version, which includes the
proto-Blairite lines:
Other nations not so blest as thee/must in their turn to tyrants
fall/whilst thou shalt flourish brave and free/the dread and envy of
them all.
To my surprise, that proved popular, especially among the Swedes, who
have not had a maritime empire for some time. But as the evening went
on, politics began to intervene. The Brits wanted the Wacht am Rhein
(for those who don't know it, the Nazis sing it in the film
Casablanca) but a senior German journalist vetoed it as "contaminated".
Someone else wanted the East German anthem. Admittedly, it has a nice
tune and unobjectionable words. But my ex-wife was from
Soviet-occupied Germany and this was the song of the state which would
have killed her to stop her escaping. So I squashed that one. We
compromised on Lili Marlene – but only the first verses. The final
stanza, an erudite American objected, was a militaristic afterthought
quite out of synch with the melancholy humanism of the rest of it.
And then came the Internationale. Everyone knew the tune. Most people
knew at least some of the words, in some language or another. But was
it right to sing it? My mind went back to another sing-song, studying
German in West Berlin in the summer of 1984. Someone (I hope it wasn't
me) started up with Wacht auf, verdammte dieser Erde and most people
joined in. But two classmates – Polish nuns, friends since our first
subjunctive three months previously – looked at us with silent disgust
and walked out of the room.
And that's the thing about post-Communist songs. There are some
splendidly catchy ones which are so laden with political baggage that
they are utterly unsingable. Hearing the Anthem of the Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic (available, if you're interested, on sovmusic.ru)
makes my flesh creep in the same way that the Horst Wessel Lied does.
When this song ruled, the real national anthem (My Native Land, My
Pride and Joy) was banned. Whistling it could lose you your job, or
land you in Siberia.
I think the solution is parody. Anti-Nazi Germans in the 1930s
produced stinging alternative versions of the Horst Wessel Lied and
the Polish politician Radek Sikorski (now a Washington think-tanker)
has a brilliant, unprintably obscene parody of the Soviet anthem. That
way you get the fun of a good tune and none of the bad vibes. So does
anyone know a good parody of the Internationale?
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.

oh my stalin


In Old Moscow, in the Kremlin
In the spring of '39
Sat a Russian and a Prussian
Workign out the Party Line

(Chorus)
Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,
Oh my Stalin party line
First he changed it, then rearranged it
Oh my Stalin Party Line


Leon Trotsky was a Nazi
We all knew it for a fact
Pravda said it, We all read it
'fore the Hitler-Stalin pact

Once, a Nazi, would be shot see
That was then the party line
Now a Nazi's, hotsy-totsy
Volga boatmen sail the Rhine/
I can bend this spine of mine.

Now the Fuhrer and our leader
Stand within the party line
All the Russians, love the Prussians
Trotsky's laying British mines

Party comrade, Party comrade,
What a sorry fate is thine!
Comrade Stalin does not love you
'Cause you left the Party Line.

Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,
Oh my Stalin Party Line;
Oh, I never will forsake you
for I love this life of mine.

To the tune of Auld Lang Syne

And should old Bolshies be forgot,
and never brought to mind,
you'll find them in Siberia,
with a ball and chain behind.
A ball and chain behind, my dear,
a ball and chain behind…
Joe Stalin shot the bloody lot
for the sake of the Party Line.

Wilder Europe Mari

Mari – the language the Russians want to kill

By Edward Lucas

I like to think it was the only time in the history of journalism that
non-Estonians have used Estonian as a common language. I was in Yoshkar-Ola, the
capital (readers will instantly recall) of the republic of Mari-El, 800
kilometres east of Moscow.


“Used Estonian” should probably read “tried to use”. My active vocabulary
doesn’t go much beyond pleasantries and ordering meals in restaurants. But the
students I was with spoke it fluently. Their native Mari is part of the same,
Finno-Ugric, family of languages, and they had all spent time on scholarships in
Estonia. They did not want to talk Russian with me if they could help it: that,
they told me, was the “language of the occupiers”.
I thought they were joking. But they weren’t. They talked of Russian linguistic
and cultural chauvinism with the same resentment that I had heard from Estonians
and Latvians in the Baltic states a decade earlier.
Their hero was a local journalist and activist called Vladimir Kozlov. I liked
him a lot: he was clever, funny and sensible. There was no point, he argued, in
even talking about independence. The republic is landlocked, remote and the
600,000-odd ethnic Mari are outnumbered by Russians. But it was urgent, he
argued, to save the Mari language and culture from extinction. Television and
radio broadcasts, and Mari-language teaching, had been cut back very sharply. If
that wasn’t reversed, the language would be lost within a generation.
That was three years ago. Since then things have got worse, not better, for the
Mari. Many Mari-speakers have been sacked from jobs in officialdom. The governor
of Mari-El, an abrasive man called Leonid Markelov, used police to stop the main
Mari political movement holding a congress in December last year. In February,
my friend Mr Kozlov was beaten up — on the orders of the authorities, he says.
Recently, Mari activists have resorted to meeting in secret forest locations to
dodge the authorities. That’s highly symbolic: Mari is the last bit of Europe
where traditional pagan worship, largely centred on sacred groves, still
survives.
Now news of the Maris’ plight has spread. The Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe has investigated the issue—although thanks to pressure from
Russia, its report has not yet been published. In May the European Parliament
voted unanimously to deplore the Mari-El authorities’ ethnic policies. This is
thanks to lobbying from the Maris’ ethnic cousins: the Finns (who’ve been
quietly involved for years), the Estonians (much more noisily) and the
Hungarians. Last week the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, Katalin Szili,
said that legislators from the three countries wanted to start formal
cooperation with elected representatives from the bits of Russia with
Finno-Ugric populations.
I doubt the dialogue will be very productive. The Kremlin thinks outsiders’
criticism is just a tit-for-tat tactic, aimed at distracting attention from
Estonia and Latvia’s “discrimination” against Russians on language and
citizenship issues. There may be something in that: it is certainly tempting (if
risky) for former captive nations like the Estonians to tweak Russia’s tail when
they can. But there is a real issue about the Maris’ rights, and it won’t go
away.
And help, from an unlikely quarter, is at hand. This August, the “10th annual
International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies” will take place in Yoshkar-Ola.
Admittedly, philologists and literary critics are not everyone’s idea of a
revolutionary force. But the Mari are thrilled. The conference shows that far
from being useless peasant gobbledegook (as the authorities regard it), the Mari
language is something interesting and important. If only my Estonian was better,
I’d go myself.

Wilder Europe Belarus propaganda

One minor plus of my years as a cold warrior was that Soviet-bloc
propaganda, though usually mad and horrible, was also
thought-provoking and even useful. Partly, it gave clues about their
thinking: "Why does the Kremlin think this is our weak spot right now,
and why are they attacking it this way in particular?". But it also
helped me think about what aspects of our own system were easy to
defend, and what were vulnerable to criticism.

That stimulus has largely withered with communism, and I rather miss
it. There are still echoes of it in Russia, but the focus is narrow:
even the apologists who defend the Stalinist version of history do so
for reasons of neo-imperialism and nostalgia, rather than out of
conviction that Soviet ideology of the time—dictatorship of the
proletariat, dialetical materialism and so forth--was actually right.

But that gap is at least partially filled by Belarussian state
television programmes. They are direct heirs of now long-forgotten
Cold-War offerings such as East Germany's Schwarzes Kanal [Black
Channel], whose venomous denunciations of West Germany's decadent
warmongering were the highlight of my week when I was covering the
"German Democratic Republic" in the late 1980s.

This week, for example, a top Belarussian propagandist, Yawhen Novikaw
(that's the Belarussian spelling: in the Russian that he broadcasts in
he would be Yevgeny Novikov), turned his attention to the BBC and
press freedom in Britain.


"A large-scale political punishment of journalists is taking place
right under their very nose, in their own city of London, and all
British democrats have buried their heads in the sand: we do not see
or hear anything. If such a shame were happening in any other country,
they would come to that country like a clan of crows" he argued.

That's odd. On my many visits to Belarus, I never found any details of
British internal politics, let alone the problems of cost-control in
public-service broadcasters, greatly figuring in popular
consciousness. But Mr Novihaw's lengthy programme did its best to make
the subject of last week's BBC strike interesting and relevant. It was
not just that the BBC was the subject of a vindictive attack by the
"Blair dictatorship", but the "thousands" of human rights lobbies in
Britain were hypocritically silent about the BBC's plight.

Personally, I'm rather sympathetic to the BBC management's attempt,
albeit belated and very limited, to cut the grotesque overstaffing and
extravagance in the corporation. And Mr Novikaw's argument is
preposterous as his facts are wrong: the strike lasted for one day,
not five; even the BBC's most ardent defenders do not link the death
of the weapons scientist David Kelly (murdered by Blair's goons,
according to Mr Novikaw) to the current rows about job cuts.

But the interesting points are different ones. For a start, broadcasts
like these are signs that foreign human rights outfits have the
authorities in Minsk rattled. Belarussian television has been devoting
much time lately to attacking their funding of local opposition
activities. A few days earlier Mr Novikaw attacked "the information
war unleashed against Belarus by Western structures", saying that all
revolutions lead to "blood and devastation".

Secondly, it is precisely because Belarus is a place where
broadcasters are under government control, and where people disliked
by the authorities do end up dead, that commentators like Mr Novikaw
need to maintain that countries like Britain are no better. High
ethical standards and strong institutions create the "soft power" that
will eventually disprove Mr Novikaw and topple his masters. So let's
strengthen them.

WIlder Europe June 2005

Imagine that a gang of thugs in your neighbourhood abducted and raped
your grandmother 60 years ago, stole and ruined your family property,
terrorised your family, and somehow got away with it due to some
failure in the law. Imagine that the gang's grandchildren—who claim to
be respectable citizens—now want to have normal neighbourly relations.
Fine, you might think—except that their version of events is
different. It wasn't rape, but marriage, they say. The property was
legally transferred. And everyone got along fine. So there's nothing
to apologise for.

That's pretty much how the Balts and Poles feel about Russia's
attitude to history. And for the British, these kinds of arguments
can seem rather enjoyable. It is quite satisfying to sit with east
Europeans, agreeing that the Germans have really done quite well
(although of course they will never quite redeem themselves); the
Austrians were worse than the Germans and never denazified properly,
so we can tut-tut about that. As for the Russians, they really are
outrageous, with their falsified, one-sided view of history. They
don't acknowledge properly the murder of thousands of Polish officers
at Katyn; they haven't really renounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact;
they even feel nostalgic about Stalin and ignore their own gulags. No
wonder their democracy is skin-deep and everyone hates them.

But just to puncture the smugness, there is another side to British
history which is particularly on my mind at this time of year. That is
the dreadful events of 1945-47, when British and other allied forces
returned hundreds of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs to their
death at the hands of the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists. These people
had surrended to the British and American forces because they knew
what fate awaited them if they fell into the hands of Stalin and Tito.
Admittedly they included Soviet forces who had switched sides and
fought for the Nazis, in some cases with exceptional brutality and
enthusiasm. In any event, they deserved war crimes trials, and some of
them, no doubt, the death penalty. But others had committed no
atrocities. Some anti-Communist Yugoslavs had actually been on our
side in the war -- at least until we cut off supplies and backed their
Communist adversaries in Yugoslavia's civil war.

British officials insisted—and sometime still insist—that they had
honour to the letter the agreements made with Stalin at Yalta and
elsewhere. Conditions were chaotic in 1945, with half the continent
starving, tens of thousands of British prisoners-of-war still in
Soviet hands, and Stalin extremely popular in both Britain and
America. But the story is still a dreadful one. British soldiers and
officials continued repatriating Russians and Yugoslavs even when it
was clear they were being murdered on arrival. They--we if you are
British—continued even when these people were killing themselves and
their families rather than be deported. We included people such as
Russians born outside the USSR, who were clearly not "Soviet citizens"
and therefore not covered by the agreement.

There's not much to be done about it now, apart from mourn and
remember. Most of the people who suffered as a result of Britain's
shameful behaviour are dead, so there is nobody left to rebuke us. But
when Brits endorse criticism of Russia's historical amnesia, their
censure carries most weight when they also recall that by this time in
June sixty years ago, the first of many tens of thousands of Cossacks
and other Russians, who had entrusted their lives to the British
authorities, were already dead.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist
edwardlucas@economist.com

Wilder Europe June 2005

The Eurovision Song Contest is a rare chance for ordinary Europeans to
show their shared appreciation of cheesy music and tinselly smiles.
There were some nice notes of European togetherness too: the Croats
gave votes to the Serbs, and the Latvians to the Russians.

The single discordant note was that throughout the evening one country
was described only by a euphemism—the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia. In real life, though, only on-duty Greek officials and
their hangers-on actually use this clumsy formulation. The Greek
insistence on quibbling about Macedonia's name looks ever sillier,
more counterproductive and out of date.

It was understandable, perhaps, in 1991, when the British journalist
Neal Ascherson described Macedonia as the "Doomsday machine": the only
place in the region that could start a pan-Balkan war. Macedonia's
neighbours wanted it strangled—or dismembered—at birth: the Serbs
thought it was really southern Serbia, the Bulgarians considered it as
western Bulgaria, and the Albanians regarded it as eastern Albania. If
the Greeks, then the closest approximation to a western ally in the
region, were batty enough to believe it to be northern Greece, why
rile them?

Even so, the reasons why Greece found the idea of an independent
country called Macedonia so threatening were hard to grasp. I remember
an erudite Anglophile Greek trying to explain it with an analogy. It
was, he said, as if France broke up into ethnically distinct bits, he
said, and Brittany announced that it would in future be called the
Republic of Britain. How would we like that, he asked? Surely we
would see this a threat to the territorial integrity of the United
Kingdom, and insist that the new state be called something else—the
Former French Province of Brittany, perhaps.

I could, just, see his point. Given the dreadful way that Greece has
treated its "slavophone" (actually Macedonian/Bulgarian) minority, I
could see that policy-makers in Athens might be a bit nervous about an
independent Macedonia attracting allegiances across the border. But
even that didn't seem insurmountable. Rather than bash Skopje, the
obvious solution was to be nicer to the Slavs in Thrace.

More than ten years on, the Greek position looks indefensible.
Macedonia is a poster-child of post-cmmunist harmony and
reconciliation. It is friends with Bulgaria, with the awkward question
of the linguistic differences between the two languages elegantly
parked. Thanks to the common language, Bulgarian tourists love the
place. And to appease the large Albanian minority, and western human
rights doctrine, Macedonia has become in effect a bi-communal state—a
kind of Belgium of the Balkans. It is messy, but it is working.

Greek businessmen have shown no hesitation about trade and investment
with their northern neighbour, whatever they call it. So why do
officials persist in their mean-minded attempt to bully Macedonia into
a name change? Macedonia has already changed its flag and constitution
to underline the fact that they don't intend to attack Thessalonika
(though anyone who ever thought that was remotely conceivable should
try staying off the raki).

But Greece is still insisting that the country should call itself
(even in English) Republika Makedonija-Skopje. Bending over to be
conciliatory (and keen to get their EU agreement in December) the
Macedonians have even agreed that they will use this bizarre
formulation in bilateral dealings with Greece. Greece should accept
that offer at once, end this dismal feud, and get on with more
important diplomatic tasks—like preparing for next year's Eurovision.
Who knows, in future they might even get some votes from Macedonia.

afghan diary 2001

Travel Diary

A short scrabble in the Hindu Kush




It is an odd kind of excitement. One's mind ought to turn to the
politics of south-west Asia, the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, and
the likely timing of America's airstrikes. But the phone call I have
just had from London, telling me to go to Afghanistan and cover the
war for a bit, has my brain whirring on a very different level. There
are four all-absorbing practicalities. One is to get back to Moscow as
soon as possible (I'm in St Petersburg). Second is to get a ticket on
the two o'clock plane tomorrow afternoon to Dushanbe (the Tajik
capital which is the only jumping off point for opposition-controlled
Afghanistan). Third is to get an Afghan visa, and fourth is to get a
satellite telephone. Of these, the second is likely to be appallingly
difficult. The flights are booked up weeks in advance, and it takes
days of pleading and haggling to get a ticket. Tomorrow morning we
will have just a couple of hours. If necessary, I will go to the
airport and try paying the pilot direct. That sometimes works.

I have missed the last flight to Moscow, and I don't want to risk the
one the next morning being late, so I beetle off to the railway
station. Neatly-ever the seasoned traveller-I drop my wallet in the
gutter as I get out of the cab. Luckily I notice a few seconds later,
and I go back and find it, under the bemused gaze of two policemen.
Perhaps they were thinking of giving it back, perhaps of taking it
themselves. I'll never know. But if that's the only careless thing I
do in the next few weeks, I shall be lucky, and happy.

There are no tickets on any useful train of course, just a ``hard''
sitting place-the dreaded Platzkarte-on a very slow train that
trundles off at 0200: worse than useless. Luckily I am able to bribe
my way into a conductor's compartment on the express train, for a
hefty Rb3000 ($100), which is probably more than he earns in a month.
It was an interesting scam, with a nondescript chap in jeans hanging
around in the ticket office who then whizzed me through the crowds and
controls to exactly the right place. I was worried that having paid
the money, I would then be chucked off the train as an interloper, but
that didn't happen.

So I arrive at 0640, whizz to the office to get a few basics and then
home. The usual school run, with just Hugo as Johnny is ill. I feel in
rather a funk as I say goodbye to him. I am usually very insouciant
(perhaps too much so) about danger. I gaily fly on the worst sort of
aeroplanes, hang out with gangsters, carry very valuable items in the
midst of potential robbers, and hitch lifts in the middle of the night
with total strangers. I usually calm myself with statistics, and that
apart from once being beaten up (in Prague, by riot police, in 1989)
and a couple of car accidents, none of things I have done in the last
fifteen years has even scratched me.

But this time I am really nervous. I think it is because I feel so
ignorant. After nearly 20 years of hackery, I have a basic feeling for
how things work, at least between Tallinn and Skopje. But in
Afghanistan I feel I will be completely at sea. It's not disastrous. I
probably know more than some of colleagues do, and I can probably
rustle up some contacts somehow or other. But it is such a contrast to
the easy time I normally have. And of course it is a country at war.
Presumably there will be bullets flying about, land mines, appalling
food, dirty water, poisonous insects, etc etc. If the children
understood what I was doing, would they really think it was worth it?
Wouldn't they rather that I was an accountant. Or a pharmacist.

I brush these thoughts aside with a firm reminder that there are
hundreds of other journalists there, that I am under no pressure to go
anywhere really dangerous, and that the consequences of not going
would nag me for the rest of my life. To this day I still rather
regret that I didn't go back into Romania in 1989 after being expelled
just as the Ceausescu regime was crumbling.

Anyway, I have more practical things to worry about. If any one thing
goes wrong in the next few hours, I will be "late" --at least for my
self-imposed deadline. The trouble with having a good reputation for
providing just what's needed, on time, with minimum fuss, is that one
has to keep it up. And the better your reputation, the more effort you
have to spend keeping it shiny.

The first thing is to persuade the satellite phone rental outfit that
I need to collect one now, not at midday, which would suit them
better. I am ruthless when it comes to overcoming these sort of
obstacles. But I start wondering whether the same flinty resolve will
work in the crags of Afghanistan as well as it does in the bogs of the
former Soviet Union. Maybe the Afghans are more stubborn than the
Russians. On the way my assistant Natasha calls to say
that-hurrah--there is just one ticket for today's flight but I must
collect it at once. Cash only, it turns out, but providentially there
is a cash machine across the street and I can get out the $620 needed
for the return flight (double the going rate, but it's not my money).
Then off to the Afghan embassy where they have agreed to issue me an
instant visa, instant in this case meaning in about 30 mins, it turns
out. A few frantic moments because I don't have the letter from The
Economist with me, but just in time, my assistant Natasha faxes it
over. I must start carrying stamped and headed notepaper with me.
Another $40, and a painfully slow process of writing out the receipt
by hand, and copying all the details in a ledger. Who will ever look
at it again, I wonder.

It is odd to think of the official Afghan government, controlling only
about a tenth of the country, with all these embassies around the
world. It reminds me a bit of the Baltic embassies in Washington when
the Soviet occupation was ending, but not ended. Rather dowdy, a lot
of people hanging around with nothing much to do, a feeling of status
sustained by make-believe, a little work but rather more activity. I
could probably get an Afghan visa in Dushanbe, but I feel better
having one in my passport already-it's a practical sign that the whole
project really exists.

Then to the satellite place, which again turns out to take much longer
than I expected. The phone is huge and heavy-like carrying a couple of
bricks around. It turns out that I don't have the right sort of cable
to connect it to my equally bricklike laptop. And I don't have even
five minutes to spare to go to some electronics shop and buy one. I
hate this sort of stress. I could have done everthing quite calmly
with a bit more notice. But that's journalism.

Money is another problem. The platinum rule of these trips is to have
masses of dollars in cash. If you've got enough money, you can solve
most other problems. At least one can get hold of dollars in Moscow
now. I can get up to $50,000 on my credit card, but not all on the
same day. I have just had to hand $3,500 over as the deposit for the
phone (they take no credit cards, infuriatingly). I go to the bank on
the way to the airport and take out another $5000, which brings me up
to a barely respectable $6000. I really should have $10,000,
especially as I may end up there for months if things go wrong.
Well-organised correspondents have $20,000 in the office safe just for
occasions like this, I tell myself crossly. Also my money is all in
$100 bills, when what one really wants is lots of tens and twenties.

Natasha meets me at the bank with, at my urgent request, a roll of loo
paper (I have a sudden ridiculous worry that there may be none to be
had even in Tajikistan). I tell myself even more crossly to stop
panicking and fussing.

We have left it terrribly tight, but luckily the roads are clear, the
car is fast, and Konstantin the driver seems pleased to have something
exciting to do, rather than just ferrying me to lunch at the
Scandinavia, and the children back and forth to school. Domededovo
airport used to be a hell hole-filthy, dangerous, unreliable, rude. I
once thought that Strobe Talbott should be handcuffed to a railing
near the Spravochnaya [information bureau, notoriously horrible] for a
couple of days to give him a more realistic view on Russia. But now
the new owners (British libel laws prevent me from describing them as
fully as I would like) have modernised it so it looks better than
Heathrow.

But there is still a frightful scrum at the check-in. There were two
British journalists there from a famous tabloid, loudly trying to get
on the plane, unbothered by their lack of tickets. One is wearing a
blazer, cream trousers, and a silk, paisley-patterned cravat. I hope
he has a solar-powered travel iron with him. There are lots of of
other journalists too. It is all like something out of Scoop! A
hackneyed comparison, but true. None of us knows anything about the
country we are going to. Our bosses (not mine, of course, but theirs)
are priapic with war fever, demanding victories, victories and yet
more victories. One chap quite seriously thinks he can be on the first
tank into Kabul. His ego is bulletproof, at least, but I worry about
the rest of him.

The plane is completely full, and hideously cramped. Very intrusive
Tajik neighbours, rather smelly, and very keen to tell me (in excrable
Russian) things I either know already, don't want to know, or strongly
disagree with. The reason for the crush, I discover later, is that the
Russian and Kazakh railway authorities have stopped the trains to
Tajikistan, so this plane is just about the only way home for all the
illegal Tajik gastarbeiter.

I chat to some of the other hacks-not about the war, of course, but
important things, like flights, hotels, sources and other
practicalities. The more I hear, the more I realise how much I don't
know. How am I even going to get into Afghanistan? The flights are
full; the land border is blocked. There are hundreds of other hacks
wanting to do the exact same thing. Not only that, my background
knowledge is so weak. In most countries I deal with I know the names
of all the main politicians, places, parties, companies etc. It's just
there, in my brain. I can visualise the whole Baltic rail system if I
need (a pointless achievement, but I am proud of it all the same). And
here I barely know how to spell the name of the president.

I solemnly open a new file on my Palm called "Afghan spellings", and
start copying down carefully all these new things I need to know. I
may not understand the story, but at least I hope I won't put people's
names back to front (like the ignorant visiting correspondent in the
Baltics, whom I invented for satirical purposes for my Baltic Outlook
magazine ten years ago. She used to quote people with back-to-front
names like Ivanova Natasha, and Vladimirovich Sergei)

The arrivals hall at Dushanbe airport is a bit chaotic, to put it
mildly. They give the impression that their main business is something
quite different-a military recruiting office or something-and that at
the last minute they have been told to handle some incoming airline
passengers, and are still working out how to do it. But we get through
in the end and I get a lift into town with my American friends, and
then to the flat that clever Natasha has rented for me.

It is huge, clean, and with a friendly owner who has had a journalist
staying before, a woman called Genevieve from France. I have never
heard of her. They assume that she must be a close colleague, so I
have to spend a bit of time making vague but comforting statements
until they are reassured that I am not going to steal their furniture
or whatever. They are basically decent people, but a bit unused to
renting to total strangers. Fair enough. But it is only $20 a day, a
fifth of the cost of the hotel and much nicer.

I swig some tea, which is the nicest thing about Tajikistan, and then
head back to the hotel. This has the important effect of making me
feel that I was very clever in getting a flat. It is a big identikit
Intourist-style hotel, with the only ameliorating feature being an
internet place on the ground floor. No hookers in the bar, but a nasty
smell everywhere, and too many other journalists. Over the next few
weeks I hear about more journalists getting food poisoning from the
hotels in Tajikstan than in the most squalid places at the front. When
I take a look at the kitchens, a few days later, I understand why.

I meet Quicksilver, a friend and colleague from Moscow whose mind and
tongue work faster than almost anybody I know. He is just back from a
trip to the border, where he was swigging vodka with Russian soldiers,
and also turning down an offer of heroin and impromptu sex (actually I
suspect the latter was aimed at his more comely travelling companion,
another journalist). We have a few beers, and then I go off to dinner
with another colleague. We are both impressed by how clean and safe
and friendly Dushanbe is. Not at all the way it is described, with
bullets, bugs and bandits everywhere. We have a lamb kebab, delicious
tomato salad, more beer, tea,. To my delight there are really really
hot peppers, which I crunch with everything, and put a couple in my
pocket for safe keeping. I like Tajik food, I decide.

To my chagrin, though, I have in my hurry left behind a few of the
most useful things in my emergency travel kit. I have almost no
marmite, no tea, no mosquito net, no water purifying tablets. Luckily
I do have nearly half a kilo of biltong, which looks alarmingly like
raw heroin in its shrink-wrap. It is ancient, a souvenir from the last
family holiday (in Cape Town, four years ago). But I am sure it is
still OK to eat.

The scene at the Foreign Ministry the next morning is nightmarish,. A
dozen impatient journalists, in a queue going very very slowly. The
key officials behind closed doors. A man at a computer painstakingly
typing in all the data with two fingers, and then lovingly scanning
and trimming the passport photos (and touching them up to make them
look nice. This is the bit that he really enjoys, I think).

There seems absolutely no chance of getting to Afghanistan at once, so
I decide to ignore the bureaucracy for a bit and have a go at the
diplomats. I manage a nice cup of strong milky tea with the Pakistani
no 2. We both like cricket, so we talk about that, but not about
anything substantive. The ambassador is very good, supposedly, but my
personal recommendation from his counterpart in Moscow doesn't seem to
cut much ice. Preposterously, he claims to be too busy to see me. I
don't feel I am getting very far.

At the foreign ministry later in the morning the queue is even bigger
and a lot tetchier. Everybody feels under huge pressure from their
bosses to get their papers sorted out. ``I spent all day in a queue
for a bit of laminated plastic, and I will probably do the same
tomorrow'' does not impress cost-conscious, impatient foreign editors.
What can I do? I have no pull here. In other countries I would call
the foreign minister himself, or an important editor, or an MP, or
someone else and ask them to hurry things along for me. But here I
can't. I'm just one of the masses. Very good for me.

As usual when I am on an exciting trip, I almost completely lose my
appetite during the day. I haven't had any breakfast, or any lunch,
and don't feel the slightest bit hungry. I read up on the news in an
internet cafe (that would have been surprising a few years ago in
Tajikistan; now it seems quite normal). I have been so precoccupied
with logistics that I haven't really thought about the events
themselves at all. Luckily nothing much seems to be happening.

Then I go back to the MFA and it is miraculously empty. In a scene out
of Scoop! I hand over a $200 express fee for rather ill-defined
consular services, and find myself promised a double-entry Tajik visa,
extended for the next month, plus an accreditation that will
supposedly be ready by this afternoon.

Next is the Afghan embassy, a small tatty building, normally rather
sleepy, but now awash with journalists wanting visas, trips on planes
and helicopters, etc,. At first sight it seems very chaotic, but on
closer inspection I decide that the system works reasonably well in
the circumstances. I am always amazed that my colleagues don't make
any effort to be nice to people. They behave as if they are in Finland
or Germany or somewhere, and just announce their needs, expecting a
swift and efficient administrative response. I always try a few words
of the local language, even if it is only good morning, and ask
people's names, and tell them that I respect their work and am pleased
to meet them. I fix up to see the military attache at 1700 that day,
and move on.

I go with Quicksilver to see a western diplomat, quite an important
one. He is friendly enough, but looks terribly unwell, grey,
chainsmoking, and both agitated and unforthcoming. Nothing is
happening here, he cannot comment on the situation in neighbouring
countries,. and if you are interested in drug trafficking, then you
should speak to the Tajik authorities not to him. Thanks very much
sir. Your tax euros at work.

Outside the embassy there is a terribly agitated Dutch radio
journalist, with probably the world's most useless driver. Not only is
there no common language between them, but the car is a wreck even by
the demanding standards of Dushanbe. He is completely lost, and so is
the driver. (Most Tajiks' sense of direction and ability to map-read,
I am to learn, is even weaker than Russians'--and that's saying
something). The Dutchman has an odd, but presumably satisfying, way of
expressing his frustration. He moans, howls, and bangs the car roof
with his fist. Perhaps I should try that, rather than bottling it up
and pretending not to mind. Anyway, he wants to go to MSF, where he is
hoping to find a Dutch-speaker (any Dutch-speaker) to interview for
his radio report. A clever idea. Where else would you find a
Dutch-speaker in Tajikistan, if not at somewhere like MSF? We
push-start his car, before an appreciative audience of small boys.

At MSF I slip in past the receptionist with an insistent, muttered
excuse, and get straight to the charming Australian woman who is the
head of mission, and a veteran of Pakistan and Afghanistan. We
provisionally agree to have a drink tomorrow to talk some more about
the dismal public health situation. I am gradually feeling a bit more
comfortable. Despite my ignorance, there is a kind of journalistic
canniness and ingenuity that works in any situation, and gives some
sort of competitive advantage. I may not be able to name the members
of the Afghan cabinet, but I do know how to find useful people, and
get in to see them without appointments without annoying them (and how
to annoy them a lot, when necessary). The Dutch journalist is still
shouting, futilely, at the security guards when I emerge.

But I am already getting a bit panicky about where I am and what I am
doing. There is a story of sorts in Dushanbe, about a narcocratic
Russian client state adapting to the geopolitical earthquake now
underway (blah blah blah). But it is only really interesting for those
interested in Tajik politics. Nothing is going to happen without
Russian approval. What the world wants is big clear exciting lumps of
news from Afghanistan, preferably victories followed by peace.
Everything else just muddles the story.

My feeling about Tajikistan, based on perilously little knowledge, is
that there is a precarious compromise between islamists and old Soviet
nomenklatura types, glued together (or lubricated, depending on your
taste in metaphors) by lots of drug money. I didn't see any visible
drug taking in Dushanbe, but a lot of my more diligent colleages have
in their trips around the country.

At 1700 I have my interview with the Afghan military attache from
Moscow, currently in Dushanbe. He speaks fluent English and gives me a
blizzard of victories attached to placenames, none of which I know. I
have tried to buy a map during the day, but there are none to be had
of Afghanistan (although I get a monster map of Tajikistan which has a
bit of Afghanistan on it).

The line he is putting across is that the northern alliance is
stretching the Taliban by launching diversionary attacks in lots of
different places, preventing them keeping their forces on the Pakistan
border, whence an invasion is likely to come. This is the first time,
but by no means the last, that I hear an entirely plausible version of
the military side of the war that seems in retrospect to have no
bearing at all on reality.

There are a lot of rude journalists barging in during the meeting, but
I am fairly firm and keep the Q & A going. The press assistant is a
nice guy called Zereef, who suddenly makes the process of getting to
Afghanistan seem quite simple. Basically there is a regular flight to
Faisabad, which is the provisional capital, but helicopters to the
Panshir and other places are more chancy, because they are needed for
military purposes, and also ferrying tons of luggage for CNN and other
VIPs.

In the evening I manage to get hold of a British friend of a friend
who has actually been in northern Afghanistan as (really, truly) a
tourist this summer, so he gives me some advice. Another chum gives a
crucial satphone number for a top commander. It all suddenly seems a
lot more doable. If only I wasn't so infernally ignorant.

I have a nice dinner at a Persian restaurant with Quicksilver, who is
thinking of returning to Moscow because there is not enough news here,
and the change in Russian foreign policy is epochal. I am not sure
about this but reckon that this is a good time to go to Afghanistan
and I would be silly to change plans now.

The Persian dinner costs about $5 for two. They get beer for us, but
ask not to leave the bottle on the table because it is an Islamic
restaurant. Or possibly they don't have a licence. Tajiks speak very
bad Russian, I notice.

A 0600 start the next morning. I am at the foreign ministry at seven,
and am pleased to see that I am the only journalist there. I am like
the chap in Scoop!, whose success is all about getting up earlier than
the other fellow. Trouble is, he was always wrong and missed the big
story. I am a bit worried about the authoritative letters that I have
drafted, and emailed to the Economist in London and Moscow with the
urgent request to fax them to the Afghan embassy. The fax no there
doesn't work, and I have had them faxed to my driver's office instead
(he is a journalist when he is not being a driver for me at $40 a day)
. So he drops me off at the foreign minstry and goes to look for them
in his office. And indeed they are there.

These are the nuts and bolts of journalism. If you get yourself
properly positioned, with the right bits of paper in the right place
at the right time, then you can break down the huge lump of difficulty
into lots of manageable small bites and concentrate on the story. It
is getting lots of little simple things right. Like having the right
phone no with you. Knowing who to call and where to go, and what order
things must be done in, and always having enough of the right kind of
money.

At about 0730 the nabob of the consular dept comes in, and after a bit
of rummaging finds my accreditation and visa. I come out with a bit of
the vranyo (bullshit) that lubricates life in these countries, and
tell him that the journalists had a meeting last night and we were all
most impressed with the helpfulness and efficiency of his office, and
of him in particular,. Vranyo is not meant to believed, it is is
understood as being not the truth, but the truth as it ought to be
(it's the difference between istina and pravda). He knows as well as I
do that there was no such meeting and no such resolution. But he knows
that I wish that it were so, because I am grateful to him, so he is
happy and will help me again (for a fat fee, of course).

Armed with that I go to the Afghan embassy, where there is already a
gaggle of nervous hacks, all of whom have been told by their desks to
get to Afghanistan asap and all of whom will find it embarrassing if
they have to admit that they are still somewhere else, after several
days of fruitless but expensive trying.

Zereef emerges and marches briskly off, but the amazingly skillful
Phil Sherwell of the Telegraph sidles up to him and I follow,
admiringly, and suddenly there we are sitting in a quite different
office, outside the embassy compound, and Zereef is writing out a list
to go on a helicopter to the Panshir, quite close to the front. I am
feeling a bit queasy about this, as I had really been thinking of a
gentle jaunt to somewhere a bit less warlike. Everyone is assuming
that the opposition will be advancing towards Kabul. But what happens
if the Taliban counter-attack? It seems churlish to raise the
possibility, and I resolve to develop a limpet-like alliance with CNN
if things get tough. This is not as difficult as it sounds. CNN has
terrific clout on the organisational side, but are often a bit weak
when it comes to brainpower. If you think up some clever story ideas
for the harrassed overworked producers (who spend most of their time
worrying about logistics and keeping their pampered correspondents
happy) then they are grateful. That's worked in the past, anyway.

Anyway, I say with the most confident voice that I can muster that
I'll certainly be going too. And there we are, with the list closed.
We beetle off to check that the the foreign ministry has really sent
over the latest list of accreditations to the authorities at the
airport, because yesterday they forgot to do it and several hapless
hacks were refused entry onto the plane.

It all makes me profoundly grateful to the Economist for being such a
patient employer, I can't believe how hard some of my colleagues are
pushed by their desks. Or pretend to be pushed. I think a lot of this
panic is self-induced. I remember the saying at the BBC that "you're
only as good as your last performance'' which always struck me as
remarkably stupid. And nothing's actually happening in Afghanistan
anyway, so why the rush? I suppose the answer is opportunity cost:
while we are kicking our heels here, we can't do other things that
might be more useful and productive.

Anyway we go round and inspect the list, and I see my name and Phil
sees his. So I am fairly sure that it is going to be all right. At the
embassy, it turns out that there is probably no helicopter to the
Panshir, so with a strong sense of relief, I get myself on the list
for the plane to Faisabad instead. Outside, there is an appallingly
rude Italian TV crew who have been waiting for days to get on a
flight. They are togged up in the most fantastic clothes, like war
correspondents from a scene in a rock opera. All identical, everything
different shades of black, except their red bandanas, with lots of
natty pockets and wrap-around sunglasses. I half expect them to break
into song at any moment, but they just stand around, aloof and
snarling by turns. I never see them again. Perhaps they were CIA
people in disguise. But then that explanation must be used sparingly,
because there are so many dodgy and implausible characters to whom it
could so easily apply.

Like war itself, war corresponding is long periods of boredom
interspersed by brief episodes of panic. Today was mostly boredom. I
did manage to get out for a brief lunch of plov, livened up as always
with the hot peppers from my pocket, in cheerful but rather insanitary
café round the corner. I hope I am building up some immunity for the
real thing, though in fact it turns out that the food in Afghanistan
is if anything a bit safer.

Finally we set off to the airport in a tearing hurry, only to have
another hour of waiting. Talk about "hurry up and wait". The airport
is partly a Russian military base, partly the civilian airport for
Dushanbe. Finally we are allowed in, and I was sure that I saw
ammunition boxes being loaded onto a big Ilyushin, There is one more
moment of drama, because the person compiling the lists of
accreditations issued has simply left out one number, between 1973 and
1975. The poor chap, a British journalist, was thrown off the plane
yesterday because of another bureaucratic snafu. He looks as if he is
going to cry. It is partly my fault because I didn't check his name
was on the list when I went to check that mine was. So I wade in using
the tried and tested advice of that greatest of all books about the
mindset in these parts, Negotiating with the Soviets.


This gives three options: bully, befriend or plead. I opted quickly
for the pleading, with a massive dose of inspired vranyo, saying that
the poor chap will be dismissed if he doesn't get to Afghanistan. And
I just keep going, and going, and going, regardless of how many times
they say that it's not in their power, come back tomorrow, get on the
plane, shut up, etc etc. The beefy Russian border guard is the first
to weaken, passing the buck to the Tajik KGB who were also there.
After a lot of spluttering, and a final burst of truly coruscating
Russian from me, they say OK. Meanwhile engines have started, and the
ramp at the back of the plane is closing which makes me very panicky.
I think of sitting on the ramp to stop it shutting completely, but
find the man winding it up is just laughing at me: there is another
little door around the side. I duck round and run along the fuselage
to stop them closing that.too. I look back, and to my horror my pal,
after finally having his passport stamped, runs straight into the
exhaust stream of the engine. I have visions of watching his head melt
in front of me. but luckily he gets away with nothing worse than a red
face and slightly frizzy hair.

The plane is pretty rough, just bare metal benches inside. It seems
reasonably well maintained, although there was a bullet hole, plugged
with some brown gunk, in one of the windows. Just a 40 minute flight
and a smooth landing.

Faisabad airport is spectactularly wrecked. The airstrip itself is
just metal panels laid by the Soviets. At the end of the runway there
are some burnt-out Soviet army vehicles. There are a bunch of ragged
peasants and a donkey, and the huge silver moon rising over the Hindu
Kush. A turquoise sky, huge sandy-brown mountains. The photographers
are happy already.

We bump into town in a clutch of jeeps, on an appalling road. I try to
show my sangfroid by telling everybody, jokingly, that this is
probably the best road in the entire country. Later this turns out to
be true. There are no old Afghan hands around. We are all
tyros--Brits, Japanese, Americans, and a sprinkling of others. All
trying hard to be laid-back. All knowing nothing, speaking no Farsi.
Faisabad (population, supposedly, 100,000, although I find that hard
to be believe) is extraordinarily scenic. Brown mud huts,
higgledypiggledy along a very fast-flowing jade-green river. A strong
scent of woodsmoke. The hotel is a bungalow perched on a rocky outcrop
above the river. We have a nervous shuffle between the rooms (six thin
greasy mattresses, on the floor, in each one). I end up with the
Telegraph (Daily & Sunday) and their photographer, which makes a
comfortable foursome. Interesting how the nationalities stick
together.

The social dynamics are very interesting. A bit like a children's
party. People are interested in each other's toys. One chap has the
most marvellous satphone I have ever seen-just a little bigger than an
ordinary mobile. Everyone else has things like small but very heavy
briefcases. His phone is also an ordinary mobile, and has a thing that
tells you your latitude and longditude.

There is a meal-not a bad one, with rice and meat and the local flat
bread. I am realising that my few words of Tajik don't always work in
Dari, although the two languages are meant to be very closely related.
Thankyou in Tajik is Rah-mat, and in Dari they say Teshekur, which is
very like the Turkish Teshekurederim.

By now the sun has gone down and the town is completely dark, except
for a small red light on the television mast (the only one still
working in all Afghanistan). We have a generator, which is connected
to the circuit inside the hotel in a way that would make any western
safety officer fall on his clipboard in horror. There is a cable, with
two bare ends stuck into the socket on the generator, and the other
two bare ends pushed into a socket in the house. It keeps falling out.
After a bit, one of the Afghans jams a couple of twigs in the holes to
keep it in place. Then Julian, the Telegraph photographer, whips out
some of that marvellous black fabric tape that I am always running out
of, and tapes the whole thing to the wall. Every now and again the
generator stops. I don't actually have anything that I need to charge
up, but if I did, I would be able to, which is a comforting thought. I
call London, just to try out the satphone. It works beautifully.

Then comes one of my inspired breakthroughs. A thickset local chap in
uniform asks if he can use my satphone. I decide on the spur of the
moment to say yes, although I am very strict with him that the call
must be very short. He calls his son in Turkey. Afterwards he is
hugely grateful. He turns out to be the head of the presidential
security service, a chum of Dostum (a notorious opposition warlord)
and a generally very important and useful contact. Some of the other
journalists are amazingly rude to the locals, treating them all as
teaboys. I call him "Colonel" which I think is his rank, although some
time later I find out that he is actually a general. He doesn't mind.
He speaks Russian, about as well (or badly) as I do. We become
friends, in an odd way, even though I loathe Dostum and crooked,
beastly habits. He invites me back home to drink arak with him, but
much to my later regret, I decline. The invitation is never repeated.

Rather boldly, I say that I would like to go out and see the town,
though. He is very dubious about this, claiming that it is too late,
too dark, and that there is nothing to see anyway. But I insist,
politely, and in the end we get a group of five together and we march
through the dark streets until we find a tea-house. We go in, and they
are all watching television (powered by a car battery). The Colonel is
responsible for our security at the hotel, and doesn't want us to sit
down in the tea house, so we tramp back again and go to bed. I have
bought a horrid nylon sleeping bag for a ridiculous $50 in Dushanbe.
It is so badly made that I am cold but sweaty at the same time. The
others all have marvellous hi-tech ones bought in London.

I snore very badly, and like to keep my radio on all night. This
doesn't matter when you sleep on your own, but the others don't like
it at all. For the first time since boarding school, I am woken up
roughly in the middle of the night and told to stop snoring. Several
times. But they didn't fill my mouth with shaving foam, or do amusing
things with boot polish, or carry my bed out into the playing fields.

The next day I woke up very early and tipped a few buckets of cold
water over myself in the rather squalid washroom. The good thing about
having cold baths anyway (which I do) is that this sort of thing has
no terrors. Clean and scrubbed, I go back to the tea-house and have an
early breakfast of bread and tea. It is terribly frustrating not
speaking the local language. I haven't felt like this since I was in
East Berlin in 1984, not speaking German. People are friendly,
curious, probably informative, and the best I can manage is pidgin
Russian with one chap.

I also change some money. The local money is the Afghani. 10,000 is
the highest denomination, and there are 128,000 to the dollar. So if
you try to change $100, you get a huge piles of bricks wrapped up in
newspaper. I settle for $10 to be going on with.

The bazaar is wonderful. Little wooden huts, and a few bigger ones,
along a mile or so of winding rocky track. Lots of interesting smells.
I wish I were a dog, just for a bit. You can buy all sorts of useful
things that they don't sell in England any more, like big tin trunks.
Lots of second-hand clothes-tatty old Austin Reed suit jackets for
about $2. This is where things end up when even the Oxfam shop doesn't
want them. I spend a happy hour looking at the food (freshly butchered
meat, red carrots, garlic, raisins, onions, tomatos) and then, with my
appetite whetted, go back for a real breakfast. It is rather nice.
There is bread, boiled eggs, and a huge crispy cake like a kind of
sugared shredded wheat. Also local cream cheese, and the ubiquitous
green tea. And a sort of sweet crumbly cake, that to my depraved
tastebuds tastes rather nice with hot peppers on it.

I feel rather superior because all the other hacks are still grumbling
about the cold water and queuing for the washroom. I think it is
spectacularly beautiful. I like Faisabad, and am very glad I am here
not at the front, or at Khoja Bahauddin, with 350 other bored hacks
just across the border from Tajikistan.

The president's foreign affairs adviser arrives, called Nazeer, who is
our main route to the outside world. He writes chits, with which you
can get through checkpoints, visit commanders in their dens, etc. But
today nobody is going anywhere soon, because the President is giving a
press conference. This is very bad news for the Sunday Telegraph's
Phil Sherwell, who needs to get to the front-any front-in time to
bring the ``whiff of cordite'' (yes, they really do use phrases like
that) to the breakfast tables of the home counties. There is no time
to get south to the Panshir (two day drive) but he might just get to
the Taloqan front to the west of Faisabad. If so, he needs to start
now. But Nazeer won't issue the permission until after the press
conference. The Afghans can't imagine anything more interesting and
important than a meeting with President Rabbani, even if we can.

On the way in to see the president we are frisked very thoroughly. Not
surprising when you think that it was assassins disguised as
journalists who bumped off Massoud, only three weeks ago. The
interpreter has me in fits of juvenile giggles because he pronounces
"terrorism" like "tourism". This leads to sentences like "there is no
place in Afghanistan for tourism. Afghan people hate tourists.
Tourists come from Pakistan." And so on. Rabbani doesn't say much. But
he exudes a strong sense of disappointment. The hacks are all
expecting him to announce massive military support from the Americans.
But I can well see why it isn't coming. We dumped these people for a
good reason: they were quarrelsome, incompetent, too close to the drug
mafia, and with a pretty bad human rights record. Admittedly, the
Taliban are proving even worse, but at the time we thought the Taliban
might even be better. At least they stopped the fighting, disarmed the
population a bit, and so on.

I am always worried about demonising people. We demonised the Serbs,
and Saddam Hussein, and Khomeini, and the Soviets. And they were
awful. But it creates a very black and white world view, where you
don't even try to understand the other side's motivation, and just
write them off as power-crazed, mad, evil or whatever. Perhaps worse,
you start thinking that your enemy's enemy is really your friend. So
we never took the anti-Hitler Germans seriously, and thought that
Uncle Joe was wonderful.

Rabbani himself is softly spoken, ambiguous, wily, but not necessarily
very intelligent. His son interrupts at one point to correct the
interpreter. ``You mean strategic depth" he says, in perfect,
US-accented English. I try to grab him after the press conference but
fail. I want to meet him. He will know everything about this place,
and will be able to tell me in a language I understand.

After that I walk off to the bazaar, and end up across the river in
the "new town" where the NGOs are. I have a very good meeting with the
MSF people, who are the first real interview I have done. Then I meet
the head of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, who is also very
impressive-a local, very well educated agricultural engineer. I am
looking for the head of the ICRC, when I bump into a very charming
young man called Fawad. He speaks English properly, unlike the
worse-than-useless so-called interpreters who hang about the hotel
offering their services. So I walk back with him-a lovely route along
the irrigation canal, high above the river-and provisionally hire him
for the next day. I can't be absolutely definite, because I have also
provisionally arranged to hire another interpreter jointly with
another journalist, and I don't want to let him down (even though his
English is not as good).

Fawad is very well dressed, in a smart blue blazer and white slacks.
He is a refugee from Kabul, who studied English and computing in
Pakistan, and has come back to Faisabad to support his mother and
sisters. He is desperate to get to Europe, via Dushanbe, Moscow and
the people-smuggling route. I have a miserable vision of him stuck in
some ghastly holding camp in England, or being suffocated in a lorry,
or whatever. But what can I say to him. He is bored rigid. He likes
music, art, girls, the internet-all completely impossible in Faisabad,
where there has been no electricity for ten years, and practically the
only public building is the police station.

I really like him, and tell him to meet me at the ICRC at 0930
tomorrow morning, and I will give him a yea or nea.

The atmosphere in the hotel is very jolly now. The dailies have
something to file, because of the press conference. Some people have
been up to the TV station. The Sunday Telegraph have gone to the
front, hell-for-leather. We talk to them on their satphone and they
have lucked out-finding the forward field headquarters of General
Vahim, Massoud's successor. So they should have some sort of story.
Supper is rice and meat again. I have bought some garlic and peppers
in the bazaar, and some raisins. I am beginning to feel like an old
Afghan hand. I know ten words of Dari, which is nine more than anybody
else. The Economist is very pleased with me simply for getting there.
I have a brilliant interpreter for tomorrow morning. Everything is
going to be fine. Even better, there is a message that the president's
son is willing to see me, sometime tomorrow.

The day starts well, with a lovely 20-minute walk back to the New
Town, and an excellent meeting with the ICRC. I do admire that
organisation. I nickname it the "Committee to save the world". Its
officials are tough, well-informed, discreet, compassionate,
effective. And Swiss, mostly. I don't think I would be able to work
there as a non-French-speaking Brit. But it is a thought, if I ever
get tired of journalism.

Then disaster strikes. When I emerge from the ICRC at 0930, Fawad is
not there. I wait for a bit, and then march furiously back to the
hotel, hating myself, him, Afghanistan and everything. Why didn't he
turn up? He's desperate for money; I'm desperate for a proper
interpreter. The other ones at the hotel are useless. The only
half-decent one (whom I was thinking of hiring) has gone off with some
other people on a trip. What am I to do now? I have interviewed all
the English-speaking NGOs that I need for now. What I want is to be
able to talk to people in the bazaar. Particularly commanders,
merchants, money-changers and the like.

I hang about miserably at the hotel. Even worse, the president's son
turned up looking for me at about 0900, before I had got back from my
meeting. Now he has gone away to the countryside and will not be back
for a few days. Four weeks later, I read all about him in an. American
magazine. It is all maddening. As always, when something goes wrong, I
convene a ferocious mental court of inquiry, put myself in the dock,
and let my worst enemy be the prosecuting counsel. What have I done
wrong? What could I have done differently? How much of this could
reasonably be foreseen? Are there any mitigating circumstances that
really let me off, or are they just limp excuses? What undertakings
can I give that this will not happen again? How will my behaviour
change in future? Can I atone for what has gone wrong? A wonderful
thing, protestantism.

I conclude miserably that I should have hired Fawad on the spot.
That's what a really good journalist would have done. Apart from that,
I must just make the best of a bad job. I try out a few of the other
interpreters, but their English is so bad that it is maddening. It's
not their fault. My French is like that. But they just can't formulate
questions, or give coherent answers. I feel like crying, but instead
resort to that tried and tested fall-back, picking the brains of the
other journalists.

There is one that I like very much, who has been there for a week or
so already. He works for a very grand American magazine, and I
nickname him the Sage because he is so erudite and well-informed (and
funny too, which you don't normally associate with sages). We have a
very happy discussion about semi-colons, spelling, house style, and so
on. All the things that make the Economist fun to work for. And he
likes them too. There is another American there too, too charming for
my taste. And a very dogged Czech photographer called Iva, whose stern
expression belies a very friendly character. We chat a little bit in
Czech. I also talk German to a German TV journalist. Aren't I clever.
But what I need is Dari. Or Fawad.

Suddenly, he turns up. Full of apologies. He had come to the hotel
early in the morning (after I had gone) and been told-quite
erroneously-by one of the nitwits working for the Afghan foreign
ministry that I had left town. So, quite reasonably, he had gone home.

Now everything is all right. We hurtle off to the bazaar. I give him a
crash course in the rules of proper interpreting (ask the question
exactly the way the correspondent phrased it; translate the answer
properly, don't paraphrase it; if you don't understand something, say
so, but don't guess).

We have a splendid hour with the top money changer in the market. I
want him to say something about the bombing of the World Trade Centre,
but he is curiously reluctant to talk about his feelings. Afghan men
don't. He just says things like "well they are human beings too, of
course I feel sorry". Suddenly I get what I want. "Do you sympathise
with them as a fellow-professional?" "Yes, 100%--we're in the same
business. I would like to have worked there myself". It is all
marvellous material for the short sharp article I want to write for
the finance section about the economy of northern Afghanistan.

I am feeling really buoyed up by now. I have got a real story in the
can. A proper Economist story, that nobody else would even think of,
as they bump off to the non-war on non-roads with non-English-speaking
interpreters.

It gets even better. Next stop is the telephone exchange, where there
is a pre-war manual pluggable phone exchange. Just 500 lines for the
whole city, they say (although it turns out that there are another 100
in the new town, too). And a shortwave radio, that connects to other
towns in northern alliance territory. This is how my money-changer
learns about the rates in other places.

We go and have some tea. I meet an adorable shoe-shine boy, who does
my boots beautifully. I talk to him (via Fawad). He has never been to
school, has worked as long as he can remember (now 13, but looks
barely 11). He supports his widowed mother and two sisters on his
wages, about a dollar a day. His brother tries to catch fish in the
river, but doesn't make much money from it. They are refugees, from
Taloqan. But he can read and write. A man called Engineer Habib taught
him. He looks like a really nice, clever, good boy. I think of
adopting him, smuggling him to England, with his family, giving him
all my money, or at least $1000 of it. Or a Meccano set. It is all so
hopeless. How can I really make a difference. Then I have a brainwave.
I tell him to come to the hotel the next morning and shine all the
correspondent's boots.

I also have a hilariously misunderstood conversation with a commander.
I am asking him about his unit, their arms, etc, and it is all going
fine until he mentions that they have x guns, and y rockets and also
"an aircraft". How interesting, I think. What kind of aircraft. He
doesn't know exactly. Russian. How do they use it? It is on a truck.
But how can you fly it if it is on a truck? We don't. So what use is
it? Well (looking puzzled) we fire it. I have a lovely vision of a
derelict MIG-21 being towed round on a truck, useful only for its
cannon. Stranger things have happened. But I am really puzzled. I draw
a picture of a plane on a truck. Is it like that? Hoots of laughter.
It turns out that "aircraft" is an abbreviation for "anti-aircraft
gun". Which is what they have got.

Outside in the bazaar again, I have an interesting but very depressing
meeting with the people selling wood. The country is almost completely
deforested. The price of firewood is shooting up. People can't afford
it. This will be a good Economist story too. I am getting happier and
happier. Even more so when I come to the bit of the bazaar where they
sell weapons. For just 200,000 Afghanis (less than $2) you can buy an
old Lee-Enfield .303, made in 1918. Also unlimited quantities of
ammuntion, stamped 1942. I spend a happy few moments thinking how nice
it would be to bring that back to Somerset for the children to learn
to shoot on, but sadly discard the idea when I think of the scene at
Heathrow. Or Moscow.

Then I cross the river and go to the other phone exchange, where I
talk to the head of communications for the whole town. They have a
municipal satphone there, which is used two or three times a day.
Before the latest trouble started, they had a much bigger satphone,
installed by an Australian called Philip. That offered broadband
services, of a sort, with a bit of internet, e-mail, fax etc. But it
has stopped working. They are not sure why. So they have a brief-case
style satphone instead. The bill is paid each month by the Afghan
embassy, in London he thinks. Amazing how these things work.

I am baffled by the absence of government. This is supposed to be the
provisional capital. But there is no sign of any officialdom, apart
from forbidding looking police station, the phone exchanges, the TV
station, and the governor's palace which is also the president's
residence. Apparently all the ministers are in their home villages,
scattered across the region. Nobody seems to know when or how the
government meets. Perhaps it doesn't need to. Afghanistan, the
anarchist's paradise. Except that every single female after the age of
puberty wears a burqa, so that you can't even see her eyes.

I wander back, tired but happy. I pay Fawad a rather measly $30. It
really offends me when correspondents drive the prices up to a
ridiculous level. I could just as well pay $100, but then what about
some poor Polish journalist who arrives here and finds that he can't
afford a translator. And what about the NGOs who suddenly lose all
their staff to the hackpack? The man in the phone exchange earns $20 a
month. It's a difficult moral question. But the easy way out, of just
splashing money about, is wrong.

I am much too hot. I have assumed that winter is coming, and I am
wearing a thick tweed suit and a flannel shirt, with a thick tie. This
is good because it makes me look respectable. A lot of colleagues look
as if they were on a camping holiday. But I'd like something cooler to
change in to, at least. On the spur of the moment, I stop at a
tailor's and have myself fitted up for an Afghan costume, in a nice
shade of dark green. All of $17, and I am doubtless paying a premium
price. And I buy some presents: Afghan hats for the children, some
lapis lazuli souvenirs, and garish red dresses for my little nieces.
Faisabad mall: unbeatable value for money, breadth of choice, and
friendly service. I'd like to come back as a tourist, honest.

Things get better and better. That evening I meet an interesting guy
who is a former pilot and special forces officer, now a TV fixer. We
get on like a house on fire. I know his wife slightly, from BBC days.
He knocks on the head the highly unlikely story that all the other
hacks have been telling each other, that Faisabad airport has a
crooked runway. The story is that when planes are landing they have to
steer sideways in order not to hit the corner. I am sure that this is
nonsense and he confirms it. He was in a jail in Liberia for a few
weeks because he got caught making a nasty programme about the local
goons, and Nelson Mandela made umpteen phone calls to get him out.

He suggests sleeping outside, which is a brilliant idea. Why didn't I
think of it before. Much better than inside with smelly feet and
snores (other people's, not mine, which are quiet and tuneful). So I
take my sleeping bag outside, and enjoy a blissful night in the open
air, under the blazing stars.

There is also a couple of much less pleasant new arrivals. One is from
a British Sunday tabloid. I call her the Beast. She files a story, as
far as I can see completely fictitious, as she hasn't left the hotel
since she arrived. It is something about the SAS. She claims that she
has it from sources in Hereford. Ho ho. She also insists on sleeping
in the dining room, which is where the guards sleep. I try to tell her
that this is not really fair, because they will not sleep in the same
room as a strange woman. She simply won't or can't grasp what I am
saying. Even when I say that as I am sleeping outside she can have the
spare place in my room. She has a nice tough photographer with her,
whom I like a lot. So the Beast sleeps in the dining room, and six
guards have to sleep outside as a result. I feel ashamed to be
British, and ashamed to be a journalist.

There is also a man from Moscow, a freelance. He has a massive chip on
his shoulder about something. I nickname him the Mizz. I offer him one
of the spare places in our room, with the proviso that if the
Telegraph hacks get back in the middle of the night, he will have to
make way for them (I have promised to keep their places in case they
get back that day). Instead of being pleased that I am saving him from
sleeping in the corridor, the Mizz kicks up a fearful fuss, mainly
because he doesn't like Phil Sherwell. I make a couple of mild
comments in Phil's defence. After all, he is Sunday Telegraph's star
foreign reporter, and this is the foreign story of the decade, so it
is fair enough that they would send him to cover it. As a former
freelance myself I know that it is quite galling if outsiders come and
trample on the turf, but Afghanistan is a reasonably long way from
Moscow, so it is hardly a direct insult

This does not calm him down. In fact he seems to be almost in tears at
the hurts inflicted on him by the Telegraph, Sherwell, etc etc. I say
firmly if untruthfully that Sherwell is a very old friend and I don't
think it makes sense to continue the argument; we should just agree to
differ. But he's not having it, and rants on and on. It is absurd.
Here were are in the middle of Afghanistan (or a corner of it, anyway)
and two grownups are having a totally pointless and increasingly
heated argument. I say very sharply that I don't expect to convince
him, and that he won't convince me, and I suggest we change the
subject. The Mizz carries on, moist with bile. I say it again, with
exactly the same words, inflection etc. This is called the broken
record technique, and works pretty well. He collapses into a sulky
heap, polishing his glasses furiously. I think he is actually crying.
Later he apologises profusely. I am so lucky to have an equable
temper. I only get annoyed when I want to. I can't imagine what it's
like having incomplete control of my emotions. It would be horrible.

It would also be horrible to mind about discomfort. I am really
surprised by how much some of the colleagues seem to object to cold
water, smelly lavatories, monotonous food etc. I suppose I am lucky
having been to boarding school. In fact, it strikes me that northern
Afghanistan is quite like boarding school: no girls, cold water,
inadequate heating, boring bad food, no drink, lots of strange rules,
mostly based on a doctrinaire form of religion, a feeling of repressed
violence. But with land mines. I go to sleep worrying about boarding
schools, both the effect that mine had on me, and what it might do to
my children, if they went there, which they probably won't. But here
it is an advantage, because almost any discomfort produces positive
feelings when you overcome it. I really do understand why pilgrims put
dried peas in their shoes.

I wake up the next morning. The shoeshine boy turns up, and I hustle
the other hacks into having their shoes shined. They have no idea how
much to pay him, and just hand over fistfuls of small denomination
notes in different currencies and he collects nearly $30-more than a
month's wages, in just one morning. He looks so happy, I want to hug
him. I'm very pleased with myself, too. He can do this every day now
(I notice that he has wisely given all the guards a free shoe shine,
so he should be able to come back even when I am not there).

Suddenly I decide that it is time to go home sooner rather than later.
I have got several stories in the can now, and I am worried about
what's happening in Moscow. Quicksilver will be filling his paper with
this supposed huge shift in Russian policy. I don't believe it myself,
but I think I ought to go. Bad news. Nazeer says there is a plane
leaving today, but it won't go to Dushanbe. It will go to
Kurgan-Tyubeh, a Russian military base that the Afghans rent. No
passengers allowed. There will be another later in the week, but the
same route. The only way out is to drive 10 hours or so to Khoja
Bahauddin, the military headquarters, and try to get on a helicopter.

I lose my cool a bit. I don't want to go to Khoja. I don't like the
idea of pleading to get onto a helicopter. I don't like being mucked
around. I don't like the other journalists here much either. The Sage
has gone on a trip. The obvious stories for next week are done. I
can't file easily from here because of the satphone not working with
the laptop. And I want to be home by Friday when it is my turn to look
after the children.

While I am chewing on this, there is a new development. The Beast has
appendicitis. Or at least she says she does. On the one hand I think
this a disgusting and manipulative tactic. On the other, it suits me
if it means there is a flight. After a couple of hours haggling, we
are told that if we pay $900, the plane will drop us off at Dushanbe.
That sounds like a good bargain in the circumstances. So we go to the
airport.

On the way, there is a terrific kerfuffle. We see a military fort on
the other side of the river. When we ask about it, our utterly useless
minder says that there are three hundred American soldiers there. He
knows, because he interpreted for them. We are most excited. The
photographer stops and takes some pictures. When we get to the
airport, we start arguing. I want it as an exclusive for the Economist
website. The Beast wants me to sit on it for a week until her Sunday
paper comes out.

I win the argument, but after a bit, I start getting uneasy. What
uniforms were these Americans wearing. What were they carrying in the
way of weapons? It is all a bit unsatisfactory and vague. I ask the
useless minder how they got in from the airport. In a bus, he says.
Huh? There aren't any busses in Faisabad. I press him a bit. Turns out
he means jeeps. How many jeeps. Seven. Seven jeeps, each with four
passengers. That would mean they each made ten trips, to carry 300
people. No sir. One trip. Turns out that there were thirty, not 300
Americans. All the same, it is interesting. But the more I push, the
more the story disintegrates. I try talking to the eye-witnesses at
the airport, the peasants who work in the fields near by. Yes they say
they saw the Americans arrive. But by now some important Afghans have
arrived, and there is lots of heated conversation in Farsi, which I
don't understand at all. It is terribly frustrating. If this was
Russia I'd be at the bottom of it by now.

The version that emerges is that these visitors had a) no guns b) no
uniforms c) didn't actually stay at the fort, just looked at it and d)
weren't necessarily Americans, just foreigners. Sadly, I decide that
it was probably just a bunch of journalists. But some doubt remains.
Maybe I have just missed rather a good scoop, but I don't feel
confident enough of it any more to risk writing anything. A classic
example of facts getting in the way of a good story.

Idiotically, I have forgotten to take any water. It's very hot.
Eventually, after a six-hour wait, the pilot and others arrive. They
try to extort a further $900 from us, but we refuse, and after a bit
of argy-bargy we fly back to Dushanbe. The Afghan embassy car meets
us, wanting to take the Beast straight to hospital. She says she wants
to go to the hotel instead. So we go there. I drop my bags with
theirs, and head off to a press conference given by Dr Abdullah, the
Afghan foreign minister. It is hugely late-nearly two hours. To my
amazement, after about an hour I see the Beast skulking at the back.
She is better. The whole thing was a ruse. I challenge her, rather
angrily. She says she has a doctor's appointment for the next morning,
and is just killing time. I get really cross. What will the Afghans
think if they find out? What about the next journalist who gets really
ill?

The press conference is quite interesting. One of the speakers is the
UN special envoy to Afghanistan. I do a bit of fast footwork as he is
leaving and get an interview with him for 1900. There is huge pressure
to see Dr Abdullah. A real scrum. But I manage to get in earshot of
him and mention the name of a mutual friend, a Polish politician with
longstanding ties to Afghanistan. It works like a charm. ``That I
cannot refuse,'' he says grandly. The other journalists look
satisfyingly cross and puzzled.

I scramble along with his entourage, who are swatting away the hacks
as if they were malevolent insects. I can't get close enough to him to
fix the time and place. One of his flunkeys says "come to the embassy
at 0700 tomorrow morning". That doesn't sound very promising. "But he
says he'll see me now!" I protest vainly. The only thing to do is to
follow his car and catch up with him at the other end. I leap into the
first taxi outside the hotel. "Follow that big Mercedes" I say, only
to watch with horror as a very sleepy taxi driver pulls some wires out
the ignition and starts fiddling with them. It is hopeless. By now all
the other hacks are streaming out of the hotel, and there is no other
free taxi. Abdullah's Mercedes is already pulling away from the car
park.

Finally, the engine splutters into life, and we lurch forward. But it
is no good. I am screaming at the poor taxi driver. "Get into third
and put your foot down" But he barely understands Russian, and the old
rattletrap keeps stalling and stopping. We are left hopelessly behind.
I try the Afghan embassy-no good. Then the presidential dacha, just in
case he is being received there. I stink, and I am exhausted. I go
home to the flat and have a hot shower. Then I remember, to my horror,
the interview with the UN special envoy. I rush there, but get there
too late. He has just left. Rather crossly, the receptionist says. I
scribble a mortified note of apology. It was the only interview he
gave during his trip, and it didn't happen. Aaaaargh.

So I go off for some beers with various other hacks and try to forget
all about it. But the mental court-martial is in full swing. This is
the second time in twelve years that I've screwed up by taking a
non-roadworthy car. (the other time was in 1990 when I flew to Minsk
on my way back to Vilnius from Yerevan, and tried to save the
Independent some money by going in a Zhiguli not a Volga, and it
swerved off the road and hit a metal bar that smashed through the
windscreen and I had to drive all the way to Helsinki to have my eye
checked for glass splinters).

There is an interesting man in his forties at the hotel who speaks
excellent Farsi. Unfortunately, none of the Tajiks understands him. He
knows an awful lot, but is tiresomely combative, and really very rude
to delightful Indian journalist at the same table. In the end I just
say politely that I find his tone of voice rather tiring, and could he
try to be less argumentative. He collapses completely. This is the
sort thing I never used to be able to do. Now I am older, I can. And I
do. Hurrah for being nearly 40. The atmosphere at the table livens up
a lot, and we polish off a bottle of vodka.

Then I have to retrieve my belongings. The Hotel Tajikistan is
amazingly badly run. If you want to know a room number, they just
grunt at you, scan a handwritten ledger, and then say that the person
you are looking for doesn't exist. It takes me about 40 minutes to
track down the room. When I go up there, I have to persuade the
concierge to give me a key because the room is locked. This requires
some effort, but I manage. I don't think that would work in a western
hotel, just turning up as a non-resident and getting access to
somebody's room when you know only their Christian name, and then
taking a few bags away.

The next morning, Monday, I try marching in to the embassy, announcing
that I have an appointment with Dr Abdullah, just to see what happens.
This often works quite well (the worst they can say is that he's not
there), and this time was a beautiful example. Not only is he there,
but they usher me right in to see him, and he shows no surprise-almost
as if I was indeed expected. I get an unhurried hour with him, which
gives me a most useful overview to go with the stuff I got in
Faisabad. It couldn't have worked out better. Had I seen him last
night I would have had only ten minutes between his other engagements.
And now his plans have changed, he has a meeting in the afternoon, and
plenty of time to spare for me in the morning.

On the flight back the next morning I sit next to a BBC journalist,
who through sheer ingenuity and persistence has got one of the best
stories so far: a British POW held by the northern alliance. The chap
has been in a POW camp for three years, knows nothing about what is
happening in the world. It must have made great radio, because they
had his family on live after the interview. He was born in Burnley in
a Pakistani family, and was sent back home to sort himself out after
being in trouble of some sort. But he got into worse trouble,
recruited by the Taliban and then captured by the other side. I
suppose they will exchange him eventually. But what a pickle to be in.

I spend the next ten days in Moscow, mainly building Meccano models
with the children, but also writing four or five stories. The Faisabad
money changer runs very nicely. The big piece about the northern
alliance gets melted into something else, but I am quite happy with
the result. And I do a rather sour piece about the authenticity of
Russia's shift to a pro-western foreign policy. And something on the
banking system, and something on Georgia. But my thoughts are mainly
with Meccano. It is such fun being with the children.

But the call soon comes to go back to Afghanistan. I had just got rid
of a painfully acquired ticket and it proves impossible to get it back
again. So there is the usual mad rush, bribing my way to a ticket for
an extortionate $500 (normal price $170). I had badly wanted to spend
the whole of Friday at home with the children and in the end I was
away from breakfast until bedtime. That's what I really mind about all
this, not the danger, stress or inconvenience.

I buy a ridiculously expensive sleeping bag (for temperatures up to
-15 degrees) for $100, and a rubber mat for $20, but the camping shop
was so rude and incompetent that I didn't get anything else much.
However, Quicksilver is coming too, and has gone to London to shop. He
is going to buy me an Iridium satphone. It looks like an overgrown
mobile. I hope it works. It is second hand, so the whole thing is only
about £500 including spare batteries etc. I wonder if I shouldn't get
something that I can test in Moscow first. But there isn't time.

I have a lovely time with the children on Saturday, and on Sunday
rather sadly say goodbye and head off for the airport again. The usual
scrum, much fewer journalists this time. I have a really insufferable
neighbour. Bad breath, drunk, smelly, affectionate, loquacious. I am
trying to learn Tajik, and he keeps on slobbering over me in Russian
and wanting me to come and stay with him. I am afraid he is going to
be sick all over me. He goes to sleep with his greasy great head on my
shoulder, dribbling. He is something important in the Tajik KGB, it
seems. It is a three-hour flight. But the chap behind me is very
nice-a teacher of Uzbek, Tajik and Russian, who has been working in
Moscow on a building site and is now on his way home. I like him a lot
and get his address.

It is very nice being in the flat again. I go to the hotel and meet
some other journalists whom I last met in Faisabad. They have had a
wonderful time, riding horses over mountains. It sounds like an
adventure holiday. With land mines.

Monday I spend sorting out paperwork (more money for the Foreign
Ministry) and trying to make sense of Tajik politics. It is not easy.
Almost all the intelligentsia are in exile. I can't blame them. On
Tuesday I go out into the countryside and visit my teacher friend, who
lives in grim village about an hour from Dushanbe. Water once a week,
electricity a couple of hours a day. Not a book in sight, and the
children are barely literate. Still, he is thrilled to see me, and it
makes an excellent (and rare) bit of human interest in an Economist
story.

I am discovering that I have got a painfully useless driver. He can't
drive, doesn't know the geography, and his car is always breaking
down. Also he is full of wrong information. He tells me that
Quicksilver's flight from Munich will be getting in at 0300. So I get
up at 0245 and trog off to the airport, only to find that it doesn't
get in for another hour or so. I am furious, because I have a very
long day ahead, and this is not a good way to start. The driver is
absolutely unrepentant, claiming that the airport gave him the wrong
information. I am now realising that he is quite deaf, and also
stupid. And smelly. There is worse to come.

However I make the most of things by befriending a policeman, who for
a small consideration helps me to find Quicksilver, to short-circuit
all the queues, and even to retrieve his baggage direct from the
baggage cart. This is fun, because it involves jumping on to the
moving conveyor belt in the baggage reclaim area and being whisked
into the nether regions, like an unclaimed suitcase. I have always
wanted to do this, ever since seeing it in A Fish called Wanda. The
scene at the baggage hall is really spectacular. People are literally
punching each other to get in and have first pick at the bags. It is
hard to imagine that this happens several times a week.

But it is 0600 by the time we get home. Quicksilver has had a real
shopping spree, so we look at all the toys. There is a solar panel,
which allegedly is powerful enough to charge anything that can be
connected to a car lighter. There is an inverter, to turn a car
lighter into a mains socket. There is the most expensive pair of
gloves I have ever worn. There are splendid maps of Afghanistan, and
books galore. There are even tiny walkie-talkies, which supposedly
will make life easier, but prove not to work much further than
shouting distance. Only the cleft sticks are missing.

Who should I see, a bit later on, in the huddle of hacks outside the
Afghan embassy, but the unmistakable figure of Sanday Gall. I whisk
him off to the the little impromptu cafe that the wily Tajik ladies
have seet up in the dusty pavement opposite, and when our friend
Zereev, the chap at the embassy who handles the press, finally
appears, I start trying to explain that they have a famous guest, but
there is no need. As soon as I mention the word Sandy Gall he leaps
across the road to shake the great man's hand. "I have read your book
sir" he says, and they launch into animated conversation about mutual
friends and old times.


Everyone thinks that it is Sir Sandy Gall, or possibly even Lord Gall,
but I find out later that it is a mere CBE-Commander of the British
Empire. He seems to be bringing some spare clothes (shirts are
mentioned) for the Afghan foreign minister, It turns out that he had
asked the Afghan embassy in London if there was anything that he could
bring, and they had said warm weather clothes for the foreign
minister, please. Also apparently lots of money for the hacks who have
run out of cash and are desperate for replenishment. Although
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world, it is also
one of the most expensive for journalists, with a jeep to the Panshir
valley, close to the fighting, costing about $2000 from Khoja
Bahauddin, aka Mediastan, where most of the hacks arrive.

There was a plane to Faisabad on Tuesday, and in retrospect I wish I
had taken it, but I wanted to write a solid piece about Tajikistan,
and that needed a couple of days. Also I was waiting for Quicksilver.
Trouble is, there is no plane today,. There were meant to be two. The
alternative is to go overland to Khoja Bahauddin which is a gruelling
15-hour trek with lots of Russian checkpoints and bureaucratic
difficulties, and nothing much apart from other journalists when you
get there. But I am not in that much of a hurry.

So we spend a peaceful day packing and repacking. But it is the same
story on Thursday, and on Friday, and on Saturday. You turn up at the
embassy as instructed, at 0900. The weather is fine. At about 1000,
the embassy people turn up. By then the weather is getting cloudy. The
plane flies without navigation aids, so the weather has to to be fine
all the way. They tell you to come back at 1200. And at 1400. And at
1600. Then they say that they will tell you if there is any news. Then
they say come back tomorrow. I don't mind, really. You just sit around
drinking tea and chatting. It is good to learn to be patient. And you
meet new people. But I am worried that Quicksilver will have a nervous
breakdown if this goes on. He is muttering wildly about retiring.

We do have one rather good interview at another bit of the Afghan
embassy, which is responsible for briefing foreign journalists. They
are doing something wrong, because nobody has heard of them. It is
only when I suggest to someone at the embassy that they could
profitably fill the wasted time by giving us a daily briefing that
they say "oh but that is what Aria-Press does". This turns out to be
an information agency set up by Massoud, and run by the no 2 at the
embassy. Massoud's youngest brother also works there, who is a shy
young man with excellent, Indian-inflected, English. We get a lucid
and convincing briefing, which would be splendid except that it seems
to contradict almost everything I have been told by other Afghans. And
later, most of it turns out not to be true. This agency is supposedly
in touch with commanders all over northern Afghanistan by shortwave
radio. But I doubt it somehow. Even if they are, they are just pooling
exaggerated claims and rumours. It is much better the way they do it
at the Pentagon, where it is mostly untrue but at least the story
stays coherent day by day.

On Friday I finally sack the driver. I am the world's worst manager,
because I am always very optimistic when I hire people, and then very
bad at communicating what I want, and then I get very fed up and just
end up doing the job myself, but without the strength of character to
fire them. But this is too much. For a start he has been late. Then he
cheats us out of a pathetic sum of money involving the purchase of a
compass. And finally, when we ask him to take us out to a deserted bit
of countryside so that we can play with our satphones and pretend to
be in Afghanistan, he is incapable of finding anywhere deserted. We
drive for ages and end up in a farmyard. When I say for the umpteenth
time that I want a large empty space with no people in sight (mainly
because I don't want crowds of curious children) he sighs and drives
us back to the centre of town. When I fire him he proclaims undying
love and says he wants to work for free.

The next day, we actually go to the airport only to be told at the
last minute that the plane is almost certainly cancelled. Everyone
stomps off in a huff, except Sandy Gall, who clearly has something
cooking. While I'm away trying to get permission from the border
guards to go to Afghanistan by land, Quicksilver manages to inveigle
the ITN crew into agreeing that we can go on his helicopter if there
are any spare seats. This is not going exactly where we want-it's
going to Khoja, but that is still Afghanistan and only a day's drive
to Faisabad.

Then there is another bizarre journalistic squabble, with two
Americans, who I call the Grumps. They have had the same idea, but
have negotiated with the Russians who run the airport, not Sandy Gall.
And now they think we are out to cheat them of their places. I think
all this sort of thing is just fair competition. Who knows, there may
be places for all four of us. Although they are furious, and refuse to
speak to us, in actual fact their chances are better than ours at the
moment, because they were able to slip their passports in to be
processed, while ours were still with me at the border guards office.
It is all too silly to be cross about. There is a huge scramble around
the entrance to the chopper, with Sandy Gall's producer wrestling back
the Grumps' formidably burly driver, who is trying to manhandle their
baggage into the cabin. But in the end we worm our way on. It looks
fearfully overloaded and decrepit. I ask the head of airport security
if he would fly on this machine himself. ``Of course I would, it's
Russian'' he says nonchalantly. But then he isn't flying, and I am.
There is a bullet hole in the windscreen, just about where the pilot
sits. I wonder what happened to that bullet.

Khodja is pretty bleak. Flat, mud huts near a slow-flowing river
(which means the drinking water will be bad). Very dusty, which I
hate. Full of miserable journalists. One of them solemnly warns me not
to go outside our compound, for fear of getting lost ``All these
buildings look alike'' he says. In every way, it is not as nice as
Faisabad. We have a farcical struggle trying to put up Quicksilver's
tent in the dark. I resolve to brave the scorpions and sleep outside
too, rather than in the horrid, dirty, overcrowded rooms of the
foreign ministry guesthouse. It was in this building that Massoud was
assassinated by terrorists posing as journalists. The room where it
happened is now a store room for NBC, where they keep thousands of
litres of drinking water.

The main thing is to move on as soon as possible. There is very little
story here, and it has been well-excavated by everyone already. So
there is a lot of haggling with drivers. Very unsatisfactory because
we don't speak the language, or know the real prices. Also the Grumps
don't trust us, which doesn't help our collective negotiation. In the
end we find a decent Toyota for $1000 which will take all four of us
to Faisabad, with a 6am start the next day. There is a meal of sorts,
and then I make friends with a charming clutch of American
journalists, who have things like coffee and water melon. Life looks a
bit better.

Sleeping outside is fun, although maddeningly dusty. I see four
shooting stars, including one very spectacular one. I listen to the
BBC World Service all night, and think deep, rapidly forgotten
thoughts.

The journey the next morning is nine hours, uncomfortable but fun.
Quicksilver decides to sit in the back of the jeep, and I join him
after a bit. It is terrifying seeing the sheer drops a few feet away
as the "road" snakes through the mountains, and a bit worrying going
over a large metal lump in the road that the driver laughingly tells
us is an old anti-tank mine. He is a cheery soul, with pidgin Russian,
so we can talk to him. The radiator boils easily, so we stop every
half hour and douse it with river water. I jump down beside the river
to wet my shawl. Only afterwards do I remember that this is exactly
the sort of place that you risk stepping on a landmine. But I was
following in our driver's footsteps, so I suppose it wasn't that
dangerous really. We pick up various hitchhikers, and Quicksilver and
I get so fed up with the Grumps that first he, then I, move to the
back of the pick-up. There they try to teach him sentences in Persian,
which he parrots back. I am pretty sure that they are actually
teaching him to say "my mother's face looks like the female genital
organs of a donkey" or something similar, because there are hoots of
laughter, and words that don't appear in the phrase books. But it is a
harmless way of passing the time.

It is lovely being in Faisabad again. The Sage is there, with a solid
beard by now. Quicksilver and I get a room to ourselves, but I want to
sleep outside. It is a bit awkward that we are competitors. I don't
mind, but he does. (I later learn that he thinks it is exactly vice
versa). He worries that if he knew what I was writing, he'd want to
use it for his daily. The journalists there have had a strike, because
conditions were so bad. Now the generator has enough petrol, so it
runs for a full six hours a day, and the food is a bit more varied.
It's a Sunday, and I suddenly find myself longing for a chance to go
to church. I expect some of the NGO people have a bible-study or
something on a Sunday, but it's too late to start find out about it
now.

My main worry is finding Fawad again. When I do, there is bad news
(for me, not for him) He's been signed up by a BBC film crew for a
juicy $80 a day, and is about to leave for the Panshir with them. He
promises me that he will provide a friend, just as good. I am a bit
sceptical of this, and rightly so. The new chap proves so bad the next
day that I have to sack him after a morning. He calls me sir, even
when I tell him not to. And he just doesn't understand English. Worse,
he is too deferential to say that he doesn't understand me, so he
guesses, frantically. It gives me stomach cramps.

But I have a good time at the World Food Programme, where the local
boss is just off to Argu, a nearby town, to inspect some cooking oil
distribution. This town has the only long-distance phone line in the
country, connecting it to Faisabad. It is interesting to watch the
poles snake over the hills. The phone is in the military commander's
office. I interview him, and learn that he is against the American
bombing. I arrive back for lunch feeling very superior, having shed
the useless translator.

In the afternoon I go to the bazaar. I want to write about the
miserable snow leopard that is stuffed and on sale in the souvenir
shop. That will make another story. So I already have two, including
deforestation, or three including the interview with the commander.

It is such a luxury working for a weekly. My colleagues on daily
newspapers really do live on their nerves, as do their bosses. "The
Daily Bugle is at the front already. Where are you, you useless
idiot?" Later I met a photographer who had been told to go to Mazar e
Sharif, an enclave in northern Afghanistan completely impossible to
get to without crosssing the front line twice and spending several
days in Taliban controlled territory. I think even a fluent Farsi
speaker from MI6 would find that a challenge. Do it, or we cancel your
contract, he was told.

Actually, newsdesks are not that unreasonable (and he didn't go, and
wasn't fired). But it is in both sides' interest to create this
atmosphere of hectic paranoia, because that's the electricity that
makes things happen. There is also a tendency among reporters to
pretend that they are in places that they are not--"near Kabul" is a
notorious example. And that heats up the competition.

It's gladdening to see how much one's productivity rises once you know
a place a little bit. I have a good mental map of the bazaar now, and
know where the people are who speak English or Russian. There are
several things I want to do but probably won't have time for. One is
to make a phone call to Dushanbe via short-wave radio. In principle it
is even possible for someone in Dushanbe to call me. They would have
to call the Afghan radio office there, and then get through to the
operator in Faisabad, and then have them put the call through to the
hotel. In fact, London could call me (if they spoke Farsi). In fact,
given enough patience and luck, I could even get on the Internet. I
should have brought my Meccano.

I'm also keen to find my little shoeshine boy again. I'm miffed that
he wasn't at the hotel this morning. One annoying change since my last
trip is that the children have started begging. They used to be
friendly, and shout "Hello Mister what's your name". But thoughtless
colleagues have been handing out sweets and money, and now they assume
that all westerners are going to give them things. It's a classic
example of how lazy moral thinking makes things worse. I suppose it's
inevitable. I wouldn't mind handing over hundreds of dollars to them,
but the whole thing is wrong. . Much better to give the money to
Afghan Aid, but some people can't be bothered to think through what
they are doing. But I never find him again. Perhaps he has made enough
money to move on.

Sunday night it is raining, so I have to come inside. I snore
andQuicksilver bellows at me to shut up. An evocative, and not very
pleasant, reminder of school. Somehow, we have the room to ourselves,
and everyone else is crammed in. We also have some whisky in his water
bottle, which we gulp furtively. I don't really approve, but now we've
got it, we might as well drink it.

The next morning Quicksilver has a wash, and splutters and swears
about the cold water. "It's all right for you public schoolboys, but
we state school lads like hot food and hot water", he grumbles. From
the way he talks I always thought he went to Eton or somewhere, but in
fact it was a state school in Doncaster. Funny how the English class
system is always there at the back of one's mind.

I spend the morning writing up my notes from the day before. The great
snare in this sort of trip is that the work ethic drives you to do
more and more interviews, but in the end they are all a blur. The
self-discipline to "waste" a morning writing things out properly has
taken me ten years to acquire. At the back of my mind is the feeling
that a proper journalist would fill his notebook with beautiful
ready-to-use material. But I've almost never met anyone like that.




After lunch, a clean-shaven and rather nervous chap clutching a
dictionary turns up offering to be my interpreter. His English is
miles better than anyone else's (more literate but less fluent that
Fawad's). So I hire him on the spot. Trouble is, he turns out to be
working for the Sage, Iva, and a couple of others. They are furious.
Quite rightly, because poaching other people's translators is a
heinous breach of ethics. An added awkwardness is that he has also
offered his services to Quicksilver, without telling the others. So he
is peeved too. Eventually I am able to persuade them that it was all a
misunderstanding. Particularly as I can show them that I don't
actually want a full-time interpreter-half-days suit me much better.
So they can have him in the mornings and evenings, and I'll have him
in the middle of the day. He earns more, we're all happy. Phew. This
place is stressful enough without bad blood between colleagues..

I go to the bazaar with Hamzi, who turns out to be obsessed with
western sexual mores and the iniquities of Islam. I think he has gone
a bit mad, which is understandable given that he is a well-educated
man marooned in the middle ages. We interview a top commander-head of
security for Badakshan province. The interview goes quite well, but
with a fairly testing quiz on Christian-Muslim relations at the end.
"We recognise Jesus as a prophet, so why don't you recognise Mohammed
(PBUH)". Although our commander claims to be a moderate, there is a
pretty rigid attitude to women. How can it be that in the West a man
can go to a friend's house, even WHEN HE IS NOT THERE, and talk to his
wife? Surely the temptation for adultery is overwhelming? It is so
difficult to bridge this sort of gap, that I almost can't be bothered
to try. Actually they are not really interested in what you say, they
just want a chance to chunter on about how wonderful Islam is and how
unfairly they are treated. There are a couple of useful dodges,
though. One is to say that the Koran is very hard to translate, and
that very few people in the west can read it in Arabic. This is
something they all know, but like to hear coming from us. Actually,
somebody told me, it is not that hard to translate (no more difficult
than the bible). I don't know if that's true or not.

The main thing I take away from the interview is that the bombing is
not very popular among supposedly pro-Western Afghans. And in fact
they are pro-western only in a fairly opportunistic way.

Then I have a long talk with Hamzi in a tea house. One of the main
things about having an interpreter is that you can quiz them about
everything from atheism to zoophilia The former is very rare in
Afghanistan, the latter endemic. There are lots of rude words to do
with the sexual orifices of a donkey.

My radio has been stolen. I stupidly left it in the garden for a bit
when I was playing scrabble with Quicksilver yesterday evening. It is
the very expensive little Sony, and I am very fond of it. No chance of
replacing it in Faisabad. I buy a radio in the bazaar, but it is
almost useless for getting the BBC in English. I am very upset,
because I am neurotic about listening to the news last thing at
night-I just can't get to sleep if I don't know what's happening.

Even more upsetting is that the laptop and Iridium just won't work
together. There is some bug deep inside the laptop that makes it crash
whenever the correction drops. This happens a lot because the
mountains are too high to keep a satellite in constant view. It
wouldn't matter otherwise. So I have to type my stories on my laptop,
and then retype them on Quicksilver's when he has finished filing.
Then I send them as an e-mail from his account. It is maddening to be
let down by technology like this. I just don't know what I could have
done differently, though. I have tried to change this laptop before,
but nobody in London takes my whingeing seriously. I suppose I should
have just smashed it, concocted an excuse, and demanded a new one, but
I can't bear to break a piece of machinery deliberately, even if it
will be to my advantage. But at least I can file, thanks to the
kindness of my colleague/rival.

On Tuesday I spend the morning writing, and then go to the New Town to
interview the MSF chap who I saw last time. He tells me that I am the
first journalist to come to see him twice. Then I talk to the
Norwegian Committee for Afghanistan, about forestry. This is really
interesting-much more than the war. I love stories about the way in
which countries work. This whole place depends on firewood, and
there's very little left. Then to the ICRC. He has been in Kabul, so
he's very informative about how the Taliban work.

In the evening there is an exciting new arrival-a jeep of exhausted,
frightened journalists who have just come from the Pansheer. The
Anjoman pass that they have travelled over is as high as Mont Blanc.
Winter has started, it is snowing hard there, and they nearly didn't
make it. They are all pretty tough chaps, but can hardly conceal how
shaken they are. They plan to set off at 2am to try to be back in
Dushanbe by tomorrow evening. I don't think this is a terribly good
idea, given that the roads are pretty bad even by day. But given what
they have been through, they probably don't worry about it much. It is
by far the most dangerous aspect of this whole war, actually, the
dreadful driving on dreadful roads. If any journalists get killed,
that will be the cause, not stray bullets.

One of them has done a truly courageous thing, cleaning out a really
revolting turd-infested loo in their rented house so that everyone can
have a more or less civilised bowel movement. I think that's much
braver than going up to the front line. Personally, I'd have paid $100
to have someone else do it, which reflects the influence of the
Economist world view on my moral fibre.

On Wednesday there is an interview with the president. The form is
more interesting than the content. He has one of the few decent houses
in Faisabad, with a lot of trees in the garden. The security is pretty
incompetent and the search misses several of my inside pockets. We
hang about for a bit, then get about an hour, myself and Quicksilver
firing questions in turns. Rather more interesting is a talk with his
interpreter, who has studied international law in Malaysia. Most
interesting of all is a long discussion with Nazeer. He has this
annoying but revealing trick of saying "please give some advice. Why
do you western journalists always portray us like this. What can we do
to create a different impression". Fair enough, but as soon as you
start making a few practical suggestions, you just get a long harangue
about how prejudiced you are. I've had this all over eastern Europe
too, and I now know that the only safe exit is to ask questions but
not reveal your own opinion, beyond generalities.

In the evening there are more interesting visitors-a truck, full of
equipment from an American television company, that needs to get to
the Panshir. They have lots of nice toys, including a really small
light generator (Honda, of course). But they are in an impossible
position. The four who got out yesterday only just managed. I don't
think they will make it all, more than 24 hours later. But the
producer is under ridiculous pressure from New York to push on. His
boss tells him "sometimes, Rod, you just have to do as best you can
and then trust in the Lord for the rest". The danger is that they will
get completely stuck in some small village between here and there,
unable to get out until the spring. Or that the lorry will simply roll
down the side of the mountain, killing them.

I have filed all my stories-six in all. I don't know how many they
will use. I am beginning to get a bit twitchy about the route back.
Suddenly, a whole bunch of new journalists arrives. A plane has come
in from Faisabad. They include some of the people we used to wait with
outside the Afghan embassy. They have simply been cooling their heels
there while we have been gallivanting around inside Afghanistan. I
feel very superior and give them lots of patronising advice about
where to shop etc. Someone produces a bottle of vodka and Quicksilver
and I have a very enjoyable game of scrabble. With supreme
consideration, he has leant me his shortwave radio, as well as the
partial use of his laptop. So I am staying relatively sane.

Quicksilver would quite like to make another trip somewhere, but I am
all for taking the chance of the plane back. We have bought huge tin
trunks for our stuff, and make a final shopping expedition. I am
rather cross that we spent too long shopping in the bazaar, and missed
the chance of a guaranteed ride back to Khoja with the friendly
journalist from VOA, who for reasons I don't quite understand has
driven all the way to Faisabad in order to spend less than a day here.
We did get some good souvenirs though (shades of Corker and Pigge).
Quicksilver has a real eye for a bargain. I don't. I pay too much for
things I don't really want.

In retrospect, it is a good thing that we miss the lift. But at the
time I am rather peeved, and Quicksilver even more so. Especially as
the plane is looking a rather chancy prospect as the day wears on.
Some say it is going to Iran. And the weather is bad (heard that one
before). So we hang about and play Scrabble, a threesome with the
Sage, helped by Czech-Canadian Iva, who turns out to be brilliant. I
would be pathetic in any other language, as opposed to being
pathetically competitive in English.

Finally we are told to go at once to the airport. We are four people:
Quicksilver, the Sage, Iva and myself. I fear there will be a long
wait, and we have a sweepstake about how long it will be. Quicksilver
bets an hour. I say 100 mins, the Sage says 120, and Iva an optimistic
30. We meet some more people there who have been waiting for several
hours already. Quicksilver is afraid that is is the Grumps, but it
turns out that they are very friendly NGO people, who have been doing
a needs asssesment. One of them likes Kipling, so we have a few
minutes on that. But she hasn't read the Light that Failed, which is
my favourite at the moment. After about an hour, the pilot has turned
up, and a bunch of 30 skinny taciturn men who look as if they were on
their way to a training course somewhere.

As indeed they are-they are part of the presidential security service,
who are going to be trained in Iran. Plus there is a little boy with
some hideous growth on his face, who is going to have medical
treatment abroad. I'd like to go and play with him, but he is with his
burqa-clad mother, and I don't think I can handle the cultural
problems.

I win the sweepstake with by a minute. I have also won the Scrabble,
which is very bad for my ego. The Sage gets quite cross because he is
not winning. I suppose he is used to being the most erudite, literary,
person around. Scrabble is rather a brutal and narrow test of one's
vocabularly and suppleness of mind, but it is a test all the same. And
I keep winning. The Sage gets even crosser because I get a glance at
his letters, and immediately see that he can do p-i-q-u-e going down
from the opening p-o-n-d-s. He is cross that I have helped him (my
word was much better than what he was thinking of doing). I think of
making a silly joke that pique has piqued him, but decide that now is
not the moment.

The plane is pretty alarming. It seats 25. There are 30 presidential
guards. Four journalists (myself, Quicksilver, the Sage and Iva).
Plus the little boy and two grown-ups. Plus a couple of Afghans along
for ride. The engines are just starting when there is a frantic noise
outside and four more people burst on board. I am rather cross
(because I am scared) but when I hear their story I can see why. They
have just come on an exhausting three-day trip from the Panshir,
including several hours going over the Anjoman pass on foot. Thick
snow, and their bags carried by some helpful Afghan fighters, wearing
plastic sandals. They had just arrived in Faisabad and thought of
trying the airport on the off-chance that there might be a plane.
Somehow, they have persuaded the pilot that when we are this
overloaded already, four more don't really matter. Perhaps one reason
is that two of them are devastatingly elegant (despite everything)
Frenchwomen.

Not that this helps much after we take off. After a bit, the pilot
asks us all to huddle up at the front of the plane so that he can get
the tail up. It is quite a squash, but you can really see the plane
coming to a more comforting angle. I have always been rather
contemptuous of Soviet technology, but having seen what the UAZ jeep,
the Kamaz truck, the MI-8 helicopter and other workhorses can do in
extreme conditions, I am rather more impressed.

The fun really starts when we land-at the wrong airport. Turns out
that Dushanbe airport is closed because of bad weather, and we are at
a Russian military airport instead, where there are no facilities for
processing foreigners. I try some opening vranyo, but it is clear that
this is a pretty serious problem. Serious, that is, in that we may
have to sleep in the plane (the trainee security guards have all
disappeared somewhere). I don't really mind but I would like to be
back in peace and comfort now that I have finally made it back to some
sort of modernity.

I have a very short and very hard think. The first thing is to block
their plans. Then to make one of our own. They want us just to take
the things need for the night and leave the rest on the plane. I
insist that we take all the bags off. If we have our luggage with us,
we can physically leave the airport. If it is locked up in the plane,
and the crew has gone home, then we can't.

So we manhandle all the bags onto the tarmac. That's our first
defensive line. Now what.
Sheer pleading is not going to work. A French colleague suggests a
large bribe. But I don't think that will work. The Russian commander
looks pretty solid to me. It might make things worse. And there are so
many witnesses, we can't bribe them all. And I hate bribery anyway.
The thing to do in these situations is to show that you are friendly,
second that you are powerful, and thirdly that you are trying to find
a way out that suits everybody. Friendly is easy. I hand out
cigarettes to all the Russians (Quicksilver bought 40 packs of
Marlboro with him from Munich, and we still have lots left), and chat
a bit, apologising for having put them in an inconvenient situation.

While doing that I get a feel for who is who. There is a nice young
uniformed Russian called Zhenya, who seems to be the number two. There
is a friendly, patriarchal English-speaking plain-clothes Afghan, who
is clearly the top person on that side (the Afghans rent this airport
from the Russians); but he won't have the clout to get us in. There is
a plain-clothes guy with a moustache from the Tajik KGB. But he defers
to the Russians too. Then there is the solid-looking Russian in plain
clothes who barks out a summary of the position and stomps off.

He won't let us out of the airport without written authorisation from
the Russian borderguard command post in Dushanbe. It is already after
office hours, so there is very little chance of getting hold of anyone
important. He can't call Dushanbe from the airport because his phone
only makes local calls. The only thing that might help is if our
embassies get involved, and make a formal request, either in Dushanbe
or Moscow, to let us into the country.

This is a slender straw, but worth grasping. Luckily we have no fewer
than two Americans. And even more luckily, we have lots of satphones.
Luckily too, I have the out-of-hours number for the American embassy
in Dushanbe, which has just reopened. So I get the Sage to call them
and explain the situation. Meanwhile I call the border guards' press
centre. But they have gone home. I have the home number for the deputy
head of the press centre, but he is not at home. That may be the last
resort for later on then.

The Sage has got through to the American military attache. I pretend
to the Russians that we are talking to the ambassador. The top Russian
comes back, just as the American hangs up because his ambassador wants
to use the phone. The Russian's name is Major Zekirov. I tell him (not
quite truthfully) that we have just had the ambassador on the phone,
and the embassy is working on the problem. This may seem trivial, but
it is actually just the right tactical move. It now gives him an
incentive to solve the problem before the procedural equivalent of an
American airstrike lands on his headquarters. People in countries like
this are strangely deferential towards embassies, ascribing them
vastly exaggerated powers (it is because their embassies abroad
exercise so much power over their own diaspora, I think).

I then grab my satphone and walk back with him to his office, running
through a range of possible solutions (eg we leave our passports with
him and they take us to Dushanbe under escort). I suggest that there
must be a 24-hour control centre at HQ, where the senior officer would
probably be able to issue the right sort of authorisation. Yes, he
admits, there is. Do you happen to have the number? Yes he does. So I
whip out my satphone and try it. Unfortunately the connection is very
bad because by now we are inside his office. But he manages to get
through a couple of times, to the point that his interest is now
engaged. The other Russian suggests some more numbers.

I then suggest that we go back and try on one of the big satphones, so
he comes back to the disconsolate group of hacks who are still sitting
on their bags next to the plane. We try calling the numbers, and get
through. He starts explaining the position. I am beginning to get more
optimistic. Most of the others don't speak Russian, and I decide not
to explain in too much detail what's going on in case it doesn't work.

Meanwhile a couple of other problems have cropped up. The Sage and one
other journalist, who have been in Afghanistan for ages, have expired
Tajik visas. And some of the humanitarian lot don't have any sort of
Tajik accreditation. But by now the bigwigs in Dushanbe are trying to
solve the problem too. I think he has told them that the American
embassy is involved. Thank goodness for a friendly superpower.
Actually, I don't think the Americans have done anything at all yet,
but the incantation alone has some power.

I overhear him asking what to do about the expired visas. They stay
just stamp them anyway. It is clear that we are going to be all right.
He puts the phone down, collects all the passports again, and goes off
to his office. I come with him, chatting gently all the way. When we
get there, I say very politely "so we will be sleeping in our own beds
tonight?" "Absolutely, no problem" he says. I walk back to the plane,
whistling the Beatles' "I've got a ticket to ride" so everyone will
know it is OK as soon as I am in earshot.

It still takes another hour or so to do all the formalities, during
which we have most of another game of Scrabble (interrupted by our
departure, which is sad as I was winning). Another complication is
that the Sage is on deadline, desperate to check the final draft of
his piece. I have never seen him rattled before. I have got the
patriarchal Afghan to find him a powerpoint, but it is under a canopy
outside, where the metal struts prevent his satphone from working. But
he does have a nine-hour time difference with New York, so it isn't
really that bad.

Eventually the bus comes, and we sling all our stuff inside.
Quicksilver wants his revenge, so we have another game of Scrabble.
But while trying to retrieve a dropped tile, he gashes his hand, and
then covers his trousers with iodine while trying to disinfect the
wound. Later on, the same trousers are washed together with my white
T-shirt, which then goes a bilious shade of yellow. Still, a Scrabble
injury is pretty classy.

There are a couple of farcical notes to end on. One is that our bus
gets lost in Dushanbe, and we spend 40 minutes driving around trying
to find the Interior Ministry, where our guard has to register our
arrival. Late that night, I am downing a cold beer in the hotel, when
I am accosted by a buxom and slightly deranged prostitute, who is
trying to proposition an Italian cameraman. He is teasing her,
pretending that he doesn't understand what she is saying (her English
is pretty bad, almost Afghan-interpreter level ). So I get dragged
into the conversation. It proves very amusing. He says "Ah, so you are
suggesting $50. I normally charge $100, but for you my dear, only
$50". She is baffled by that. He elucidates. "You see, I am Italian.
You will remember one night with me all your life--$50 is nothing for
that". She gives a really cacophonous laugh at that, and I find myself
quite liking her, despite her being fat, smelly, with gold teeth and
very ugly fat boots. The photographer then suggests a "zero option".
But she won't have it, and is still hooting with laughter at the idea
that a man might charge a woman for sex.

Suddenly another man plucks my arm. "Could you ask her if she would
come back to the Hotel Dushanbe with me?". Suddenly the ridiculousness
of the situation penetrates the tired, alcoholic fog in my brain.
``I'm the Moscow bureau chief of the Economist'' I snap with drunken
pomposity. ``I've just come back from Afghanistan, and I'm not here to
act as some sort of pimp for you''. He looks stricken. ``I do read the
Economist'', he says placatingly. ``It's a really serious magazine''.
I dissolve into uncontrollable giggles, quite close to hysteria,
really--fuelled I suppose by all the repressed anxiety of the past
week--and head happily home.