Blogs from West, Serbia, Europe - page 5

First, a note to my family and anyone other people or groups to whom I promised to send postcards (you know who you are): I did, in fact, uphold that promise, and postcards were sent out from Sarajevo around July 8th. As you've probably learned from my blog by now, practically everything in the Balkans is super inefficient. As such, it should come as no surprise that I recently discovered those postcards are probably inexorably lost in the Bosnian postal system. There is another round of postards being sent out from Belgrade tomorrow; we'll see if they fare any better. Now, on to today's topics: allow me to be excited for having handed in our executive summary for our disputation for a moment. YAY! With that, my team now prepares our judge's rubrics, questions, and plans ... read more

Technically, I went back to America today. Gotta love embassies. The US Embassy in Belgrade is, like the one in Sarajevo, a legitimate complex that overshadows every other embassy. Once again, I know where I'd go if anything ever went bad here. Unlike Sarajevo, this was a fairly comprehensive meeting at the Embassy. We started it off with Ambassador Kirby himself, followed by a Human Rights employee, an economist, and a representative of USAID, all hosted by a member of the Public Affairs team. The perspectives were, obviously, diverse and profound, but it all tied together quite well with what we've been learning. Some interesting tidbits for you: the only country with a slower railroad system than Serbia is North Korea. Japanese rarely, if ever, say "no," but rather "yes" and you're left to interpret the ... read more

For my fellow economic fans out there: tough luck today. Nothing about economics at all. Side, but related, note: if you have a queasy stomach, you may want to skip the paragraph starting with "TORTURE." We visited an exhibit today that centered on Communist Oppression in the early Yugoslav era (1940s). This was around the time that the Soviet Bloc was dominating much of eastern Europe, and the communist regimes ruled with minimal opposition. The point of this exhibit was to show that what little opposition existed was brutally shut down. While Stalinism was taking over Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries in the area, Yugoslavia was all about its leader, Josip Broz Tito. You'll notice in one photo - a map of eastern Europe - that most black marks incorporate Stalinism, or more blatantly, the ... read more

10 days left. That's it. We leave Belgrade on the morning of the 11th day from now. This Dialogue has absolutely flown by, and yet we've still got about a dozen meetings and day trips planned. Today we covered two more meetings, both of which I loved. One was Ivan Vujacic, who was the Serbian Ambassador to the US from 2002-2009, has served as an economics professor and has held almost every post but president in the Serbian Democratic Party. The other was Ana Trbović, who is a rising star in one of the local private universities and also spent a fair amount of time in Boston, including a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I mostly loved these meetings because, at long last, economics was a focal point. As ... read more

Let me preface this blog post by noting one thing: unlike Bosnia, Serbia actually functions as a unified country. Granted, this makes sense because, unlike Bosnia, Serbia mainly consists of just Serbs, while Bosnia includes Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. Note that Serbs are Orthodox Christians, Croats Catholic, and Bosniaks Muslim. As such, the tensions are more than just ethnic differences; they are deeply rooted in religious conflicts. The reason it's necessary to note that was our group activity today. We visited the a Serbian Court, where we met with representatives of the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor. This court was established to prosecute those who committed war crimes during the Yugoslav wars that plagued the area in the early 1990s. However, it was interesting to follow and learn about because they have issues with some ... read more