Deadly anniversary and cautionary tale

While in Zagreb a little while ago, my wife Danielle and I visited the Croatian Gallery of Naïve Art. There I came across painters I didn’t know but many of whose paintings took my breath away. There were some extraordinary scenes, perhaps above all a string of magnificent landscapes, though there were also intriguing depictions of quite different scenes.

Ivan Lacković, Long Winter: a curious, haunting impact

What struck me most was a surprising painting entitled ‘Guyana 78’ by one of the leading painters in this Naïve movement, Josip Generalić.

Bodies litter the ground, a cross in among them symbolising that they died in the name of a distorted Christianity. There are children among them. In the background, two apes look on, displaying a truer Christian spirit as they apparently share a banana, uncomprehending of the weird human spectacle below them.

Josip Generalić, Guyana 78

The reference is to the mass suicide – or, more properly, the massacre – at the People's Temple Agricultural Project, usually called Jonestown after its founder, Jim Jones, leader of a cult that professed both Socialistic and Christian thinking. The killings took place on 18 November 1978, forty years ago today.

Danielle pointed me to the story of a survivor published by the BBC this morning. It made harrowing reading. The cult members practised mass suicide, taking supposedly poison-laced drinks, only to be told that it was innocuous. Until, one day, it wasn't.

That was after a visit to Jonestown by an inspection delegation led by a US Congressman, Leo Ryan. As it was leaving, members of the cult attacked the delegation, killing five including the Congressman. Jim Jones issued a new  command for mass suicide, but this time for real. He warned that following the murders, Guyanese authorities would attack the cult and take the children. Some 300 children were among the 900 who died.

It was the worst deliberate killing of US civilians before 9/11. An extraordinary, horrific event, worthy of the artistic talent of a Generalić.

Bodies strewn across the ground at Jamestown

It isn’t, however, just the coincidence of seeing the painting so soon before the anniversary that prompted me to write about it here. It’s more because the kind of mindset that drove the Jamestown massacre seems to be growing once more. It’s cult thinking, where a single person is identified as a Messiah, the source of all authority, whose views are not to be questioned however contrary they may be to all evidence. He, and he alone, is to be the source of truth.

These leaders demanding total, unquestioning loyalty, are growing in numbers in nation after nation. Look around yourself and see whether you can’t see some of them emerging near you – or already in power.

They don’t necessarily take their demands for unqualified obedience quite as far as Jim Jones did. But their demand for total commitment is often destructive. And there are many ways people can be persuaded to commit collective suicide.

Some just take longer than at Jamestown.

A road more travelled

It wasn’t just fun to visit our friend Ana in Zagreb over the weekend. It was also highly entertaining. I particularly enjoyed learning a little of her history. And felt one bit of it at least deserved to be shared here.

Ana was born in Podbila, Herzegovina, now a constituent part of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Podbila was a mountain village which had one shop, a church and a primary school.

Podbila, nestling in the mountains

‘Sometimes you’d see the men outside the grocery having a beer.’

‘Because there was no bar or café?’

‘Oh, no. There was no bar or café. Just the shop.’

Most of the men worked holdings that took the form of patches of land scattered across wide distances, sometimes as much as a kilometre apart.

In such villages, intellectual society consisted of the teacher, the doctor and the priest. But Podbila was too small even for that: the doctor was in the next town and the priest only came to hold services.

‘In a little church surrounded by a cemetery. You have the same in England. I saw one in the middle of Birmingham, right in the centre of the city. It looked very strange. We had the same, but it was in the country.’

Ana’s father Jakov was a joiner and building worker. He moved to Germany to make a better living. It was a temporary arrangement but, as Ana pointed out, most of those who went abroad stayed there. Jakov was no exception, living out his life in Frankfurt.

There came a time, however, when Jakov and Ana’s mother Mara decided that Podbila might not offer the most glittering opportunities for a truly world-class education. Which was what they wanted for their two daughters and their son. So Jakov set out to find them a new home.

Ana (left) with Mara and Jakov and her siblings
A little while before she became an eminent research scientist

Mara was clear. She wasn’t prepared to give up growing her own vegetables. She made it clear he was to look for a place in one of the villages outside Osijek, in eastern Croatia, an area known as Slavonia, which was then quite wealthy.

Jakov caught the local bus to the small town of Posusje, where the farmers of the outlying villages used to bring their produce to market. There he mounted the intercity coach travelling to Osijek.

Everything went to plan until the coach reached the town of Okučani. Here it was to turn right, eastwards, and head for Osijek. And here Jakov was seized by doubt.

‘Osijek?’ he thought. ‘We want to educate our children? Osijek’s a great university city, but it isn’t the capital, is it?’

Now in those days there was no such state as Croatia, but there was a nation. Croats, even the ones in Herzegovina, felt a bond to it. And Zagreb was its capital. True, it was only the capital of a constituent republic of the uneasy federation of Yugoslavia, but the Croat capital it nonetheless was.

It was the work of a moment. Jakov changed his ticket. He made for Zagreb. Not a village nearby, but the city itself, as close as possible to the schools and universities.

Except for several visits abroad, Ana has been living in the capital ever since 1979. Now a research chemist and a professor at the University of Zagreb, she’s living proof that her father’s strategy worked out.

The eminent chemist today

On the other hand, Mara never got a proper field to cultivate. Jakov ultimately built the apartment block in which we stayed with Ana, and in which Mara has had a flat ever since she returned from Frankfurt. True, she has a back garden which she can cultivate; true, too, that her brother living in another house Jakov built has a garden and her son-in-law has an allotment both of which Mara has taken over; but it’s urban market gardening rather than anything like real farming as she’d hoped.

As for Jakov, he bought himself a plot in a Zagreb cemetery.

‘This will be my apartment when I return,’ he told his family.

When they asked whether he wouldn’t prefer to be buried back in Herzegovina, he couldn’t see the point.

‘Why? Zagreb’s our home now. This is where my coffin will go.’

And it has.

Jakov a little while later than the previous photo

How might things have been if Jakov had stayed on the bus to Osijek? It’s hard not to believe that they would have been different. But we shall never know.

That puts me in mind of the Robert Frost poem The Road Less Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Just like Jakov. Though he took the road more travelled. And, because we could visit Ana, we – like chemistry – have profited by his decision.

A lovely city. An excellent meal. Great conversation. And some invaluable insights

The soft glow of gaslights in Zagreb's Upper Town

It’s curious being back in a country I haven’t visited for over half a century. 

A lot has changed. Starting with its name. Back then, it was just a constituent republic of a state called Yugoslavia. Today, it’s the independent republic of Croatia.

My first visit was in 1964. Among the few memories that have remained with me was the port of Dubrovnik, with three US warships docked in it. Even at eleven years old, it struck me as fascinating to see a ‘Communist’ nation hosting the US navy. It was testament to Tito’s wit in playing off the great powers against each other, as it was to a more intelligent side of US foreign policy, cultivating better relations with a supposedly enemy power, rather than going to war with it as in Vietnam.

After all, the US won the game in Yugoslavia. Vietnam inflicted their first ever defeat on them.

Flower market in Zagreb's old centre

We did get to Zagreb in 1964, but only to the suburbs. I remember a good lunch and little else. That made it all the more pleasurable to discover how much the city has to offer, as our friend Ana showed us around it on this visit. A beautiful old centre with a huge market offering every imaginable ware, streets offering fine prospects at every turn and glorious views from an upper town whose streets are still lit by gas in the evenings.

Roofs and spires, seen from the Upper Town

It’s a fine, and above all European, city. And the lunch was as good as back then.

With Danielle (left) and Ana
And Marija Juric Zagorka, Croatia's first female journalist

But our conversation was even more interesting than the city.

I’d already discovered in Valencia than when people talk about ‘the war’ they don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Britain, France or Germany, it generally means the Second World War. In Spain, it’s the war against Franco’s Fascists in the late 1930s. But with a chill up my spine, I realised that when Ana speaks of ‘the war’ she means something that she suffered directly herself, where she saw and heard air raids coming in over the city in which she lives.

She’s talking of the war the Serb-led Yugoslav army waged against Croatia to prevent its becoming independent.

‘Not a civil war,’ she assures us, ‘because Croatian forces never set a foot on Serbian territory. It was a war started by the Serbs and fought in self-defence by the Croatians.’

We first met Ana in Strasbourg. She reminded us of the quaint habit there of sounding air raid warnings at noon on the first Wednesday of every month, as a test of their civil defence readiness. The first time she heard it, she froze with terror at hearing the familiar wail with its blood-curdling associations. Only when a colleague realised what was happening to her and explained that it was only a test of equipment, was she able to regain her composure.

To me, such memories belong to my parents’ generation, not mine. And certainly not to Ana’s: she’s significantly younger than we are.

‘For years,’ she told us, ‘I wasn’t allowed to be Croatian. The state tried to force us all to be Yugoslavs, but we never were and never wanted to be.’

The right to self-determination was asserted for all peoples after the First World War. In Yugoslavia, as in Czechoslovakia and other nations, it was never truly applied. Only now can Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and even Kosovans at last begin to live their own lives, free of the authoritarian tutelage of Belgrade.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a mess, of course. Something Ana feels particularly strongly, as she was born there – only 200 metres from the Croatian border, but still inside Herzegovina. For now, there’s a fragile peace, but it’s hard to know whether it will strengthen in the future or break down into renewed conflict.

And what about Croatia itself? Doesn’t Ana fear a new outbreak of hostilities?

‘I don’t think so. After all, we’re members of NATO now.’

At a time when it’s fashionable to write NATO off as the work of the devil – a position shared by Donald Trump and the far left – it’s a salutary reminder that there are people who rely on it for the defence of their freedoms. Maybe the organisation, for its many faults, isn’t entirely without redeeming features.

Nor is it the only international organisation to which Croatia belongs. Another, as important as NATO, is the EU. Coming here is a useful reminder that one of the major purposes of the EU, far greater than its economic role, is to begin to put an end to violence between states, at least in Europe. That’s a continent that has seen more than enough blood flowing from its internal strife down the centuries.

Right up to as recently as the 1990s in former Yugoslavia.

Croexit? No thanks
The Croatian flag flies with pride next to the EU’s

Croatia’s proud of being in the EU. I wish more people in the UK could understand that. Before they undermine the organisation and deprive themselves of its benefits by an intemperate, ill-thought out and self-harming Brexit.

FOOC, CITES and the minefields of international relations

It was my son Michael who persuaded me that I should listen to that great BBC Radio 4 and World Service programme, ‘From our own correspondent’ – FOOC, as we aficionados like to call it, as in ‘FOOC, that’s a good programme’.

The BBC is a much maligned institution. It has become so thoroughly paranoid that it recently announced a series of cuts which, though it denies this, seem designed to pre-empt the far worse hatchet job likely to be done to them if the Conservatives form a new government in a couple of months, as most of us expect, or dread, depending on our point of view. Sadly, Labour has not been particularly well-disposed towards our great broadcasting institution either, but I imagine the BBC rather fear that compared to an incoming Tory administration, persecution by the present lot will look like gentle chiding by a kindly parent. And I suspect they’re right.

Of course, the Conservatives may still not get in – their lead has fallen from 18% to 4% – but that’s another story.

Anyway, I’m deeply irritated by the British tendency to undervalue the very things that we actually do well. The BBC is one of them. And though it’s best known for its TV, it does excellent radio too.

The format of FOOC is simple. A few pieces read directly to the microphone by a correspondent in some out of the way place, like Ashgabat, Kabul, Paris or New York. There are no interviews or studio guests. It’s basically a transposition to the radio of the format of a comment piece from a newspaper. One of the better newspapers.

Today, FOOC included a piece from the CITES conference in Doha which, and I only mention this because it will come up again later, is the capital of the Gulf state of Qatar (Gulf as in ‘the one we don’t call the Persian Gulf any more, since we fell out with Iran’).

For those who haven’t been following this event, CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. It recently refused to ban trade in blue fin Tuna. That decision was a victory for Japan, which used all its diplomatic muscle as well as its financial strength (they used promises of aid to buy votes, which in my book is pretty well indistinguishable from bribery) to prevent the ban being adopted.

It’s curious that people can decide not to make any sacrifice from their Sushi platter now, even at the price of having no blue fin Tuna for it at all in a few years time. Or ever again.

As it happens, I’ve noticed that people seem to get pretty strange when it comes to fishing. In Europe too, fishermen get terribly upset whenever a new quota is proposed. They resist any steps that might harm their living today, even if the alternative is to have no living at all tomorrow. They should take a look at the Grand Banks off the Canadian Atlantic Coast: it used to be said you could walk ashore on the backs of the cod; today fishing in the Grand Banks has collapsed.

Then again, if you’ve ever been cornered by fishermen telling you about the joys and excitements of what they wittily refer to as their ‘sport’, you won’t need me to tell you that they’re a pretty special breed.

In any case, it wasn’t what FOOC had to say about the content of the CITES conference itself that tickled me, it was the account of what happened when delegates were called on to test their voting machines. The chairman asked them to vote on whether Doha was the capital of Qatar – just as a test, you understand. Virtually everyone answered ‘yes’, but Cameroon and Croatia answered ‘no’.

Now is this simply ignorance? I’m sure that there are lots of people, myself included until a couple of hours ago, who might have struggled to name the capital of Qatar. But these guys have been living there for the last year or two, for God’s sake.

Or were we being given a glimpse of a hidden agenda? Are Cameroon and Croatia working on inevitably rival plans to incorporate Qatar into their own territory making Yaoundé or Zagreb, respectively, the capital?

Even more interesting was the case of China, which abstained. Is this because China just likes to abstain? Letting things happen but not being seen to support them? They do it all the time at the UN. Or perhaps they just don’t like casually using their vote, on either side of a question, without having extracted some concession first. You know – for recognition, even by CITES, of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, they would be prepared to acknowledge the status of Doha. With all the necessary reservations, of course. Then again, given what an extraordinarily centralised and bureaucratic regime China is, perhaps they felt that they weren’t authorised to express a view without consulting their government first. Finally, perhaps it was simply a consequence of Google’s withdrawal from mainland China, leaving Chinese delegations without reliable access to general information.

So a few minutes of FOOC this morning gave me a good half hour of amused speculation this afternoon. Well done BBC. And good call, Michael.