A Babylon 5 fan visits Croatia (part 1, long)

Author: Paul Rubin
Email: phr@netcom.com
Date: 1998/01/05
Forums: alt.fan.mira-furlan
Message-ID: <phrEMB869.BA0@netcom.com>

Here's something I haven't finished writing, about a trip I made last November. I need to check some details with other people, and write the rest of it, but I decided to post it in pieces since it's getting kind of long. Parts 2 and 3 are partly written, but need some more stuff filled in. I'll probably post a cleaned up version later, if people are interested. Comments are welcome.

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A Babylon 5 fan visits Croatia
Alternative title: "Sercon Fanac--wasn't he from Yugoslavia?"
Paul Rubin, phr@netcom.com, December 1997

For the past few months, Moyra Bligh, Brigitte Just, me, and a few other regulars of rastb5m and alt.fan.mira-furlan have been members of B.a.B.e. (Budi aktivna, Budi emancipirana / Be Active, Be Emancipated). This is a women's rights group in Zagreb, Croatia that Mira Furlan has been involved with, so (in my case at least), joining it seemed like a more meaningful way to express fannish appreciation for B5 than buying multiple copies of TV guide or the 9 inch (vibrating?) Delenn action figure from Toys R Us. We've been corresponding with the B.a.B.e. staff about various ways to support the organization overseas. Moyra has set up a web page for B.a.B.e. (http://www.interlog.com/~moyra) and has been working hard maintaining it; Brigitte is now maintaining another page (http://www.golden.net/~bjust/babe/index.html); and another member, Marti, has been organizing some art auctions to benefit B.a.B.e. which you should hear more about later on. As for me (a male), I've taken the view that every organization needs activist members but also members that simply pay their dues and contribute encouragement. That means: I haven't done anything serious so far, except send in a check and drop by for a visit <g>.

The visit came about because a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be in Budapest, Hungary spending some time with a friend. I managed to make a 2-day side trip from there to Zagreb where I visited B.a.B.e.'s office and hung out with its staff members. (Zagreb is a 6-hour train ride from Budapest). Moyra has been posting info about B.a.B.e. to the a.f.m-f newsgroup once or twice a month, so I've been asked to write up a more personal impression.

The B.a.B.e. office and staff are fantastic (more below), but Croatia, and Zagreb, are pretty screwed up places. Those of you familiar with Mira's story (see for example http://www.alpha-omega.net/mfrs/articles/altmcc.html) probably know that already. Croatia is a very nationalistic country with one of the highest tax rates in Europe, mostly spent on military and police. Zagreb itself is a weird superposition of an angry old Eastern European city and a new, yuppified one. Trim, spanking new shops with gleaming plate glass windows bearing American Express and Diners Club decals are jammed between the bigger old grey buildings and it's obvious that there's a wide gulf between those who can afford the Westernized stuff and everyone else. People in the street look considerably poorer (from their clothes, etc.) than in Hungary, which is not exactly a rich country either. And yet prices in the stores are considerably higher than in Hungary, so many people smuggle stuff across the border into Croatia. Zagreb is also an overcrowded city with parking and traffic problems, because its population increased a lot as people from other parts of the country moved there because of the war.

I shared a train compartment with a Croatian guy named Ivan who I'd met on the train. Shortly after we crossed the Hungary-Croatia border, a woman came into the compartment, pulled out a suitcase that she'd previously hidden under Ivan's seat, and left the comparment again. I have no idea what was in the suitcase but was glad that Ivan and I didn't have to explain its presence to the customs agents, who presumably would have thought it was ours.

Ivan was a medical student in his early 20's who spoke pretty good English, and was an intelligent, friendly guy. Unfortunately, he seemed to reinforce Mira's comments about Croatian society being macho and sexist. Ivan asked me what countries I'd travelled in (I told him) and then he asked me about the sexual habits of women in those countries (but in most cases, I couldn't give him any firsthand info). He asked me if I had heard of a famous Croatian tennis player now living in the US (the name had about 15 syllables so I don't remember it). I said no, but there was a Croatian actress, Mira Furlan, on a TV show I liked to watch, and of course he had heard of her. "Is she famous here?" I asked. "Well, not exactly famous--but, she was good. But she isn't Croatian. She is Serbian." I asked if he was sure of this, and said the way I'd heard it, Mira is Croatian, and her husband Goran is Serbian, so they had tried to work in both Zagreb and Belgrade, and people got mad at that. "Here", Ivan told me, "you have to decide whether you're Serbian or Croatian, and she tried to be both. So we don't like her now." Later I told him a funny story of how some Gypsies in the Budapest metro had tried (unsuccessfully) to pick my pocket and he told me, basically, that all Hungarians are thieves. (I've spent a lot of time in Hungary and it's not like that at all. Hungary is one of my favorite places on Earth. But there is a slimy element lurking around, so you have to watch yourself, just like anywhere). All of this was said in a very friendly, conversational way, like these were things everyone knew. I began to feel for what Mira and the B.a.B.e. workers must be up against from the less educated and well-travelled parts of the population, if this was what I was getting from a cultured and (as far as I could tell) genuinely decent guy. Ivan also taught me a few words of Croatian, the most important of which is "hvala" (pronounced "kvala"), which means "thank you". (That's the first word a traveller should learn in any new language. If you don't know any other words, use that one a lot with a smile, and you'll do fine). English is taught in Croatian schools now, so lots of the younger people speak at least a little bit, but most older people don't speak any at all.

We got to the Zagreb train station and Ivan showed me where to change money and get a telephone card, then took off. I got the phone card at the busy newsstand in the station, but had to walk a few hundred meters to the post office to find a phone. This was the first big train station I've ever seen with no public phones. I called Cathrine at B.a.B.e., and she was very happy to hear that I'd made it, as we'd had a communications mishap earlier so I hadn't called to say exactly when I was coming. She gave me directions to the nearby Omladinski Dom youth hostel at Petrijnska street #77, which was operated by a weird, zombie-like guy seemingly out of one of the more freakish Bergman films. I got there about 4 pm and he said if I wanted a dormitory bed I should wait til 10 pm to see if one was available (that's quite unlike most youth hostels, where you book your bed in the morning). I decided not to wait and took a single room (actually one bed in a two-bed room about like a small college dorm room, with private shower--not too bad) for about US$ 30 (payable in Croatian currency only, so I had to go get more change), dropped off my stuff and walked about 2 km to the B.a.B.e. office and finally met Cathrine, the woman I'd been emailing for months and had spoken with on the phone several times, and the other women working in the office: Vesna K., Biljana, and Martina, plus Martina's 5-month-old son Rok.

Cathrine and Biljana are wonderful, young, lively, and friendly. Cathrine is from Norway and Biljana is from Zagreb. Cathrine was the one who I'd had the most contact with, since she answers the email and phones and handles the postal mail. Martina was slightly older, also very nice, though I got to meet her only for a minute or two since she is on maternity leave. Vesna K., the coordinator of the whole organization, didn't arrive til later. I'd been afraid I'd be stepping into something like the Berkeley radfem scene ("women good, men bad") but was received with tremendous warmth. I'd walked from the Omladinski Dom through central Zagreb and past the landmark Croatian National Theater where Mira used to perform, and soon reached the office, which is in a big old apartment building in a residential neighborhood on Prilaz Gjure Dezelica (I spent about 10 minutes practicing pronouncing the name of this street but never really got it right). The building is old and forbidding but the office is modern and well appointed. Its computers are a little slow (older PC's) and are running Windows 3.1 with (just like is typical in the U.S.) an improperly configured and not-quite-working local area network, so people still had to move files by carrying floppy discs around the room. Things otherwise generally worked pretty well. Unfortunately I wasn't able to help with the network problems, since networks are a notorious pain to manage and I've carefully managed to almost entirely avoid using Windows and know almost nothing about administering it. (I use Linux, if you care about such things). Cathrine let me send an email back to Moyra saying I'd arrived at the office, and I watched as the modem dialed up the Zamir network to upload the message. (Zamir is a network in former Yugoslavia operated by peace activists which I think works something like Fidonet, i.e. it's a store-and-forward email network. It hopes to offer Internet access soon, so the office will actually be able to browse the B.a.B.e. web pages, which it has not yet otherwise actually so far been able to see except on some screen captures emailed by Moyra).

Cathrine told me about B.a.B.e.'s big worry for that evening: a TV spot it had made, as part of the international 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence (Nov 25-Dec 10) which were just starting. As Cathrine described it, the spot played the opening words of the Croatian national anthem, which translate to something like "Oh beautiful country" [?] while the bruised face of a battered woman is shown on the screen. Then after the image has sunk in for a few seconds, the caption appears "80% of women in Croatia have been subject to domestic violence" [?]. I saw the spot the next evening and although it was under 10 seconds long and I couldn't understand the words of either the song or the caption, it was still devastating to see. The problem was that the TV station, at the last minute, decided that it wasn't willing to air the spot, first because it didn't like the use of the national anthem, then because it had some problem with the statistic. B.a.B.e. was trying to work out something where they'd get rid of the national anthem and/or change the caption slightly, though of course this would weaken the spot somewhat. I'm still not sure what eventually happened with it.

A little while later, Vesna K. arrived, and she is amazing. Older than the others, vibrant, warm, funny, yet tough as nails and unwilling to take crap from anybody without kicking their ass all the way from Zagreb to the Baltic. Vesna seemed not at all a starry-eyed idealist, but rather, as someone who understood an intolerable situation, saw what needed to be done, accepted the dirty job, and set about shouldering aside the obstacles because, at the bottom of it all, what else is there in life? She asked me if I knew how much a laptop computer cost in the US and I was able to answer her questions (I shopped for one recently), so I felt at least slightly useful. Then Vesna, Cathrine, Biljana, and I went to a fancy restaurant nearby where we were met by Bojana, who had come in from out of town. Bojana is a B.a.B.e. member and is the founder of and working in the Women's Group, on the island of Mali Losinj in the Adriatic Sea, but she had taken the train in to Zagreb to join in the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism mentioned earlier.

[End of part 1]