Blog from the Balkans

Zagreb, Croatia.

The Balkans – for many people the name conjures up images of a decade of war, ethnic hatreds that go back centuries and have lived on into the 21st. That corner of Europe in which violent conflict seems to lurk just under the surface.

The wars of the 1990s are vividly remembered here. A professor on the Croatian coast tells me how she delivered her son in a hospital without lights, blacked out in expectation if an imminent Serbian shelling from the sea. A university student recalls spending episodes in her middle school years in a Zagreb bomb shelter. A friend explains that her stubborn parents refused to leave their hometown even after it came under regular shelling. Twenty-five miles away, she could only go visit when the road looked safe.

This is my second trip to this region in the last year. Last fall I was in Montenegro, invited by a group of community activists to offer training in public advocacy. This week I am in Croatia, studying how citizens are mobilizing to help shape decisions about the public budget.

Countries like this are called, in the jargon of global development, "transition countries". Transition from Yugoslavian Communism to European capitalism. Transition from warfare to peace. Transition to a future that people here are still trying to define for themselves.

This morning I met with the leadership of the second largest labor federation in the country. I could just as easily have been back home in Bolivia. The IMF and World Bank are at work here trying to convince the country to privatize its water and its public heath system. People are nervous, especially labor groups. The other privatizations here haven’t turned out so good for workers. One by one the nation's economy is not only being put into private hands but foreign hands.

As in Bolivia, the tool in the hands that come from Washington is debt. Countries like these have borrowed a bundle from abroad and now the payback includes not just cash but changing the economic rules of the game to the IMF's and Bank's liking.

The people of the Balkans have suffered horribly in the past fifteen years. A third of this nation was occupied for five years. Hundreds of thousands of Croatians fled the Serbian takeover, left their communities and became refugees. And this pales against the horror of "ethnic cleansing" operations that took place nearby in Bosnia and Kosovo.

What do Croatians want now? In addition to peace they want democracy – the right to self-determine their own futures, both political and economic. Yet here, as in Bolivia, democracy is really a power sharing relationship with global institutions over which the nation has little influence.