TRUST - Misplaced. Betrayed. Restored. Balkan fellowship for Journalistic Excellence 2016 by ERSTE Foundation

Misplaced. Betrayed. Restored Masenjka Bacic

Bojan Blazevski

Serbeze Haxhiaj Adrian Lungu

fellowship.birn.eu.com

Marija Jankovic

Diana Mesesan

Elvis Nabolli

Aleksandrina Ginkova Maria Milkova

Dimitra TriantAfYlLoy

Contents

INTRODUCTION 3 Foreword 4 ABOUT THE PROGRAMME 46 PARTNERS 46 BIOGRAPHIES OF FELLOWS 47

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe Aleksandrina Ginkova

Page 14

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia Masenjka Bacic

Page 5

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel Bojan Blazevski

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses Serbeze Haxhiaj

Page 10

State of the Unions in Serbia Marija Jankovic

Page 22

Page 18

Published in 2016 by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Regional Network Branilaca Sarajeva 14/I, 71 000 Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina Editor: Matthew Robinson Local Editors: Ana Petruseva, Besar Likmeta, Gordana Igric, Jeta Xharra, Marija Cheresheva, Marian Chiriac and Sofia Papadopulo

Cleaning Up Romania Adrian Lungu

Romanian Roulette Page 26

Diana Mesesan

Page 30

Proofreader: Anita Rice

Maria Milkova

Designed by Miloš Sinđelić All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in any retrieval system of any nature, without the written permission of the copyright holder and the publisher, application for which shall be made to the publisher. © ERSTE Foundation Open Society Foundations and Balkan Investigative Reporting Regional Network

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children

2016

An Albanian War on Drugs

BALKAN FELLOWSHIP FOR JOURNALISTIC EXCELLENCE

Elvis Nabolli

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands Page 38

Dimitra Triantafylloy

Page 42

Page 34

Introduction

Dear Reader, Thank you for your interest in this publication - it brings together the hard work of ten outstanding journalists, chosen from a host of others by an international jury. When the ten embarked on the 2016 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, it was expected that this year would bring major political decisions. And it did. Brexit, Trump, right-wing parties, debates with trolls and false information – all of them speaking to issues of trust, and the alarming erosion of it. The Balkan Fellowship was set up to counter distrust: to provide readers with a high quality story they find interesting to read, well-founded and facts-based, a story that will improve understanding and point the way in the extraordinary times we face. These are articles written with the benefit of time and based on a wealth of information garnered from deep reporting. They are checked and checked again. While the articles deal with the overall topic, they are also contributing to it on a meta-level: information is the basis of trust. At the very heart of a well-informed, self-conscious and strong society lies an informed debate, which we can have based on such stories. These articles, translated into several languages and republished in local, regional and international media, are invitations to broaden one´s own horizons. These were the kind of articles – stories – that we had in mind when creating the Balkan Fellowship a decade ago. The assumption that trust and quality journalism go together remains unchanged. Year after year, foreword after foreword, it is stressed that quality reporting is needed more than ever, and it is. The importance of quality journalism will rise, as will the challenges ahead to make sure it is accessible and read by many. ERSTE Foundation, OSF and BIRN are proud to treasure this responsibility and to support quality journalism in these turbulent times. Congratulations to all the 2016 fellows. Enjoy their stories!

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Foreword

rust in a partner, in an employer or an elected representative, trust in a collaborator or a leader. Trust is at the foundation of any relationship – personal, financial or political. The absence of trust spells the erosion or breakdown of such ties, and is at the core of this collection of reportage.

addicted to their products, and finds some overlapping interests that may explain why not.

From Croatia, Masenjka Bacic tackles the question of abortion, a right enshrined in law but increasingly under threat from conservative trends in Croatian society. Can a woman trust in the state to uphold her rights, can she have faith in those who offer support but harbour their own agenda?

In Bulgaria, Maria Milkova tells the story of how the state is trying to rebuild trust in the care it provides for disabled children, and how far it has to go in overcoming a legacy of neglect and abuse.

Elvis Nabolli heads into the Albanian Alps to ask whether the state can be trusted when it says the drug barons will no longer hold sway. In Serbia, Marija Jankovic looks at how trust in trade unions has evaporated, leaving workers largely mute in the face of years of punishing transition. Serbeze Haxhiaj tackles trust at its most basic level – trust that one’s physical safety will be protected, that justice is stronger than those who would corrupt it. For witnesses to war crimes in Kosovo, trust is in short supply, but some are undeterred. In Greece, Dimitra Triantafylloy explores what happens when a health system crumbles and patients begin placing their faith elsewhere – in neighbourhood pharmacists, in the promises of nutritional supplements or in their own untrained hands.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Trust, too, has played a part in one of the biggest stories in a generation, as refugees and migrants place their faith in the protections and prosperity of Europe. In Bulgaria and Hungary, Aleksandrina Ginkova looks at what happens when that trust is not reciprocated and vigilantes take to the borders. From the Adriatic to the Black Sea, from Palermo to Plovdiv, this year’s fellows have travelled widely to tell the stories of how trust can be shaken, squandered, misplaced and – sometimes – restored. They have interviewed octogenarian architects, witnesses to war crimes, mafia prosecutors, drug smugglers, care workers, vigilantes, doctors, police officers and, of course, politicians.

From Macedonia, Bojan Blazevski talks to an ageing generation of architects whose trust in the state and its respect for their work has been shattered, their creations covered up or obscured from view by a return to antiquity.

Their hard work, the long hours and tough questions paid off, and the results are particularly valuable at a moment when issues of trust are at the heart of momentous changes beyond the Balkans, from Brussels to Washington and Whitehall. Trust in one’s neighbour, in newcomers, in the tried and tested. Trust in false promises and ‘fake news’.

Misplaced trust? Diana Mesesan in Romania asks whether gambling operators can be trusted to treat those

This book shows we can continue to trust in the power of great journalism.

Matt Robinson Editor, Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence

Adrian Lungu looks at whether Romania can clean up its act, literally, in the wake of a fire that shook the trust of Romanians in the political elite.

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia The Bethlehem Centre for Unborn Life, a shelter for pregnant women near the Croatian coastal city of Split

he house stood beneath palm trees, with thick walls and green shutters typical of Croatia’s Dalmatian coastline.

Inside, Meri Bilic, under dyed auburn hair, busied herself in a half-installed kitchen amid colourful piles of children’s toys and clothes.

Masenjka Bacic - Split, Zagreb, Skopje, Belfast

Bilic, 49, was overseeing the renovation of the house for its mission as the Bethlehem Centre for Unborn Life, a refuge for pregnant women driven by family or financial circumstances to consider aborting. In exchange for keeping the child, the centre will give them free board and lodging for a year.

Photo: Masenjka Bacic

Women who abort, it says, risk depression, sexual dysfunction, cancer, drug addiction and suicidal thoughts. “It was a genius idea,” Bilic said. “The most difficult thing is to get to our ‘users’ because what’s typical for abortion is that every woman wants to do it in secret.” “Bethlehem,” she said, “is the first line of defence. We are foot soldiers in a war.”

A screenshot of the website Klinika za Pobacaje (Abortion Clinic) Photo: Masenjka Bacic

Croatian women struggle to exercise their right to abortion, driven into the shadows and illegality by the rise of a hostile conservatism.

A donation from local nuns near the southern port city of Split, the house is the fifth Bethlehem facility in Croatia. It was not hard to find. Bilic’s mobile phone number is listed among others for Bethlehem houses on the contacts page of a website that appears as the top result in a Google search for ‘klinika za pobacaje’, Croatian for ‘abortion clinic’. The site, www.klinikazapobacaje.com, masquerades as an advice page offering information on the process and consequences of abortion, but a picture of scissors dripping with blood quickly reveals its true intentions.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Masenjka Bacic

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia Bilic is part of a growing movement to end abortion in predominantly Catholic Croatia, a right enshrined in law for decades but increasingly hard to access. The newest member of the European Union, Croatia has among the lowest rates of abortion in Europe, falling dramatically since the country broke away from socialist Yugoslavia in a 1991-95 war that reawakened a sense of national identity rooted for many Croatians in their Catholic faith. An investigation for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, however, suggests the official figures do not tell the whole story. Fearing stigma and blocked by a large number of doctors who refuse to perform abortions in public hospitals on grounds of their faith, many Croatian women are forced to have unregistered, illegal terminations in private clinics. Those pregnant women who seek out help due to family or financial problems are often directed by the state to Catholic-inspired shelters for women and children, which in Bethlehem’s case mix warnings of damnation with promises of salvation in exhorting them not to abort. Now, with the rise to power in 2016 of a conservative government, the legal right to choose to have an abortion is under direct and public threat, echoing developments in Poland in October where only mass protests halted parliament from a near-total ban. It has parallels, too, with moves in ex-Yugoslav Macedonia to restrict abortion, and in Kosovo, where social stigma is fuelling illegal terminations. “The position of women in society is … under threat [and] becoming the space where an ideological battle is being fought for the profile of Croatian society,” said Croatian sociologist Valerija Barada. Shrinking access In 1980, according to the World Health Organisation, there were 701 abortions per 1,000 live births in Croatia, then part of a socialist Yugoslav federation where abortion rates were generally high. The figure began falling rapidly with the outbreak of war in 1991 when Croatia declared independence, and by 2014 had dropped to 76 per 1,000 live births, the lowest rate in the Balkan region compared to 156 in Albania, 168

“Women Must Decide Their Fate”

hile attitudes harden against abortion in Croatia, at the other end of the European Union in Ireland and Northern Ireland, there are signs they may be softening. “It’s not ‘will we have a referendum’ but ‘when’,” rights campaigner Ailbhe Smyth told BIRN in Dublin. “There is a momentum for change on the ground.” Ireland and Northern Ireland, together with Malta and Andorra, have some of the most restrictive laws on abortion in Europe. For generations, such restrictions have driven women to cross the water to England or Wales to terminate pregnancies, in a lesson for what may await Croatia if it moves to tighten abortion legislation. In 2015, the Westminster Department of Health in London carried out 5,190 abortions on women over the previous year with addresses outside of England or Wales, the Belfast Telegraph reported in May 2016. Sixteen per cent were from Northern Ireland and 66 per cent from the Republic of Ireland.

in Montenegro, 195 in Slovenia, 201 in Macedonia, 259 in Serbia, 401 in Romania and 416 in Bulgaria. A general fall in Eastern Europe is partly explained by the more widespread use of effective contraception. But in Croatia there are other reasons too, rooted in a rise in ‘traditional values’ of family, nation and faith, and in the difficulty women face in exercising their right to abortion. Abortions in Croatia are allowed at public hospitals and one private hospital in Zagreb. But of 375 doctors certified to do the procedure, just over half refuse to do so on the basis of a 2003 law that introduced the right to conscientious objection, according to a 2014 report by the Ombudsperson for Gender Equality. Critics say the right is poorly regulated, leaving some areas of the country with barely any doctors prepared

“We are foot soldiers in a war” – Meri Bilic, head of a shelter for pregnant women near Split 6

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Northern Ireland has stricter pregnancy termination laws than the rest of the UK, permitting abortion only if the woman’s life is at risk or if continuing the pregnancy may result in serious long-term damage to her physical or mental health.

that read “Smash the church, smash the state, women must decide their fate.”

Women are increasingly turning to abortion pills that can be ordered online. But taking them is illegal.

But the mood may be changing, in part perhaps because of the damage done to the reputation of the Catholic Church by sexual abuse scandals and an investigation into the treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies in Catholic-run homes. In 2014 it emerged that almost 800 infants were buried in unmarked graves in the grounds of one such home in County Galway.

“I could go on the web and buy them. I could put them here on my desk, but taking them is a crime,” said Breedagh Hughes, director of the Royal College of Midwives in Northern Ireland. In April, a Belfast woman who bought pills online to end her pregnancy was given a suspended prison sentence. The next month, 71-year-old former social worker Diane King and two other women handed themselves in to police, saying they had broken the law in helping someone to have an abortion by ordering pills online. At the Belfast Rally for Choice in July, King told BIRN her case was still under investigation. “I would love to go to court,” she said. One woman at the march carried a banner

to carry out abortions. For example, in Split, Croatia’s second largest city with 180,000 people, just one out of 25 gynaecologists at the state hospital conducts abortions. The story of Sani, whose surname BIRN has withheld, is not untypical. When she fell pregnant in 2011 at the age of 18, the public hospital in Split told her none of its doctors performed abortions. So Sani called her gynaecologist. “She told me she’s bringing babies onto the earth, not killing them,” she said. Finally, Sani told the parents of her boyfriend, who called a nurse they knew, who arranged the abortion, illegally, with a doctor in a private clinic in a small seaside town nearby. In Sani’s medical record, the termination is recorded as a miscarriage. She paid 340 euros, more than twice the official average in public hospitals. The most expensive public hospital is in the southern tourist magnet of Dubrovnik, where an abortion costs 405 euros – roughly equivalent to Croatia’s monthly minimum wage. “A majority of doctors in Croatia will cite conscientious objection in some or other way, but there is one group of them for sure… who won’t do it in hospital for whatever reason, but will do it privately,” said Dr Zdeslav Benzon, a doctor at the Split hospital who refuses to perform abortions.

In Ireland, women who abort face up to 14 years in prison. Health workers who assist risk fines of €4,000.

Abortion rights activists have been spurred by an overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote in a referendum in 2015 to allow same-sex marriage. In February 2016, Amnesty International published a poll in which 87 per cent of respondents in Ireland said they favoured expanding access to abortion. Seventy-two per cent said it should be decriminalised. “Huge progress,” said Smyth, “but it is slow.”

The hidden abortions almost certainly account for the fact that, while the number of legally induced abortions has fallen rapidly, the proportion of terminations registered as occurring for ‘medical reasons’ more than doubled from 21 to 48 per cent between 1998 and 2014, according to state statistics. “A large number of abortions are being registered as having medical reasons,” said sociologist Barada. “In the context of such a conservative public discourse, to carry that stigma as the one who openly does abortions, you are the power of evil.” Likewise for a pregnant woman, Barada said: “It is not easy to go to the hospital and have an abortion.” That was underscored in October, when Catholic antiabortion activists of the 40 Days for Life group published on Facebook a call to prayer outside a hospital in the eastern town of Vukovar the following day, having learned that a woman was due to have an abortion there. The hospital ordered an internal investigation and the State Attorney’s Office ordered its own probe amid uproar among rights groups over how confidential medical details were leaked. Masenjka Bacic

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia Taking inspiration from Texas, the hospital prayers are now held in 24 cities across Croatia. They began in 2013. That year, prominent US anti-abortion activists Lila Rose and Judith Reisman held a series of lectures in Croatia. Reisman spoke as a guest of the medical schools in Zagreb and Split. A group called Vigilare was one of the organisers. Vigilare’s logo features on the Abortion Clinic website that directs women to the Bethlehem houses, though the group declined to answer questions from BIRN regarding its involvement with the site. Referrals Catholic clergyman Pater Marko Glogovic opened the first Bethlehem house in 2010 in the town of Karlovac. The organisation now offers accommodation for up to one year for 19 women and their children at any one time. Glogovic told BIRN that the Karlovac house alone had provided a roof over the heads of 70 pregnant women since opening, on condition they go through with the birth. The Karlovac house received more than 300,000 euros from unspecified donors over the past three years, according to financial reports filed to the Ministry of Finance. Silvija Stanic, head of ‘Step-by-Step’, a support and counselling organisation for young pregnant women

“In general we are always full, but since mothers sometimes stay only a short time, we can always take in new ones,” Glogovic said by email. Bilic said she met Glogovic some 11 years ago when she fell pregnant outside of marriage and lost her job as a religious studies teacher. He convinced her not to abort and she joined the cause. Bilic described her approach. “When a woman is in a state where she wants to abort, she is very sensitive,” Bilic said. “I get her tears, and when I get these tears, it is … a foundation where rain has fallen, fertile ground to discuss all options.” She does not stop there, however. Shortly before BIRN spoke to Bilic, a women’s rights activist and another woman approached her. One of them pretended to be pregnant and said her boyfriend wanted her to have an abortion. They recorded the conversation and gave a copy to BIRN. According to the recording, Bilic told the woman pretending to be pregnant that she could stay in the house in Split for five years, far longer than the one year Bethlehem actually allows women to stay, if she agreed to keep the baby. She urged the woman not to tell her parents she was pregnant and warned that if she aborted she would fall into such a terrible depression that she would be unable to complete her university studies.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: Masenjka Bacic Meri Bilic, head of the Bethlehem Centre for Unborn Life near Split

Photo: Masenjka Bacic

“When a mother has an abortion, she becomes a walking crypt, not a crypt but a torture chamber,” Bilic told the woman. “Come to the house, don’t tell your parents anything. When the time comes that they do see you’re pregnant, when there’s no way back, they will react strongly, like this or like that, you call me,” she said. “I’ll give you a room, you rest and enjoy yourself.”

Glogovic also said he had nothing to do with the Abortion Clinic website, but supported its intentions. “I did not encourage or create, nor am I the editor of this site, but I certainly give them my blessing as they are a symbol of the David versus Goliath fight against lies and violence towards women and children.”

“If the alternative to sleeping under a bridge is an institution where she has a roof over her head, of course it is a rescue. But I wonder, at what price?” “The separation of religious principles from the state … is extremely important, but it’s not happening in this case. This is experimentation with a person’s life.”

He said the “private person” behind the site had simply copied the Bethlehem contact details from other sites and that Bethlehem’s were not the only numbers listed. “I met the initiator of the site once or twice in my life, and I’ve visited the site perhaps once. But I repeat, they have my blessing and support as they are doing a good deed”.

Nevertheless, Bethlehem says it regularly receives referrals from the authorities.

“We haven’t done anything illegal, against anyone,” she said. “We are not crazy, we are not fanatics”.

Silvija Stanic, who runs an organisation called Step by Step that offers counselling and psychological support to young pregnant women, said she did not have any direct experience with Bethlehem but has reservations.

BIRN asked the Ministry of Social Policy and Youth for confirmation of whether social workers directed women to the Bethlehem group and for its assessment of the group’s activities, but a spokeswoman declined to comment.

BIRN also asked Glogovic about Bethlehem’s methods. “Everything is done in complete accordance with the law,” he said by email.

“What I have heard about Bethlehem is that it’s a house for women to give birth in. I can’t be overly happy with that, since what happened to freedom of choice?”

The authorities have rejected criminal complaints about the Abortion Clinic website. In response to a complaint by the Ombudsperson for Gender Equality, Visnja

Bilic later followed up with the woman’s friend, sending her a text message that read: “A nun said she would take the child if necessary. Tell her I am begging her to accept.” BIRN later asked Bilic about the recording and the text message. Bilic said she had meant that the nun would take in both the women and her child temporarily.

“Doctors and nurses will let us know if a girl needs help,” said Blazenka Bakula, the head of the Bethlehem house in Zagreb. The house she runs, she added, has “wonderful cooperation” with the Centre for Social Welfare, the main state welfare body.

Masenjka Bacic

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia Ljubicic, the Ministry of the Interior said in early 2016 that it had found no criminal wrongdoing, Ljubicic’s office told BIRN. Rise of the Right Croatia’s war for independence in the early nineties inspired what sociologist Barada called the ‘retraditionalisation’ of gender roles, with the man as “warrior” and woman as keeper of family and nation. As the Catholic Church grew in power after independence, so too did disdain for the socialist, secular past, and its relatively progressive approach to women’s rights. In the former Yugoslavia, abortion on “socio-medical” grounds was permitted in 1952 and in 1974 the federal constitution declared it a “human right to decide freely on childbirth.” Based on this, Croatia in 1978 passed a comprehensive law on all aspects of fertility regulation, including abortion. Conservatives today say the 1978 law was adopted under an undemocratic regime and must be changed. Barada said the issue of abortion “is fertile ground on which to reaffirm and reinforce traditional values and a certain political agenda”. “If you wish to promote traditional politics, it is important to choose issues that will easily polarise society, and abortion is one of them. It carries with it a significant stigma.” Six months after Croatia joined the EU, conservative pressure groups scored their first major victory in December 2013 when an organisation called ‘In The Name of the Family’ forced a referendum on whether to change the constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Some 66 per cent voted ‘Yes’.

The conservative movement has since equipped itself with a cable and internet television channel called Laudato, funded in part by Catholic organisations in the United States and Germany, and with a news portal, narod.hr, that went online in early 2014. The movement’s rise climaxed with an election in late 2015 that brought to power the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, and with it a number of prominent right-wing figures, including Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a former activist of In the Name of the Family. Croatia’s coalition government collapsed in June 2016 but the HDZ won elections again in September. On October 10, the Constitutional Court, under a new president, said it would consider a challenge lodged a quarter of a century ago to the constitutionality of Croatia’s abortion legislation, declaring the country “mature enough” for such a decision. A ruling is expected by the end of the year. A day after the Court announcement, the HDZ party said in a statement: “Abortion on demand should not be banned because this unwanted occurrence cannot be reduced by a ban, but through education.” The law, it said, should be “modernised” to include such measures as mandatory counselling and a ban on abortions on grounds of the gender of the child.

A ‘March for Life’ in Zagreb in May 2016, organised by conservative groups opposed to abortion

Photo: Masenjka Bacic

The strategy has echoes elsewhere in the Balkans. In 2013, Macedonia introduced strict measures including mandatory counselling, the requirement that the woman submit a written request, a three-day waiting period before the abortion can be performed, and heavy fines for doctors who do not strictly follow procedure.

Macedonia is mainly Orthodox Christian, but has a large and growing minority of mainly Muslim Albanians. Backed by the Macedonian Orthodox Church, the rightwing government has campaigned against abortion and in favour of higher birth rates, fearful that the ethnic balance is tipping towards Albanians.

“One of the motives for adopting this law is the salvation of the Macedonian nation and race,” said Macedonian rights activist Igor Jadrovski. Like Croatia, he said, authorities had cited the need to change a law adopted during the Yugoslav era, to bring it up to date. “But it was just a mask,” he said. Mainly Muslim Kosovo too has echoes of the situation in Croatia, though for different reasons.

“Stop Following Me” The Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast opened in 2012 as the first private clinic to offer abortions to women in Northern Ireland, within the strict legal framework allowing terminations only to preserve the life of the mother or if the pregnancy poses serious physical or mental health risks.

‘Don’t talk to me. Stop following me.’

It is frequently the site of anti-abortion protests. Natalie Biernat volunteers at the clinic, escorting women as they enter and leave:

And I was saying to her, ‘Do you feel good about yourself, that you harass women who leave this clinic?’ And she kept saying it. And when she realised that I was not going to give her the answer she just said loudly, ‘I will pray for you’.

“There was one time, even after I had been volunteering for quite a while … they (protesters) thought I was a client. So as I left, she (a protester) started to come after me and said, ‘Are you there trying to have an abortion?’ And I just said,

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

And she followed me the entire way … over the traffic lights to the station. And she kept saying over and over again, ‘All you’ll ever be is the mother of a dead baby.’ Over and over.

In the past they’ve had a little model … a foetus. A little tiny one. And they will follow them (clients) and try to show them. Or when a woman leaves they’ll say … ‘Don’t

kill your baby’. Or they will sprinkle holy water on the doorstep. You get a lot of women who come in and usually they are a bit older … They will say, very, very openly, ‘I never thought I would have an abortion, I don’t agree with abortion.’ I’ll have one woman, two women in the same day saying to me, ‘I don’t agree with abortion.’ Yet they were in the clinic. And one of them said: ‘you know, I would have been like the protesters, against abortion, until this happened to me.’ And then she found herself in a situation where she was pregnant and she couldn’t continue with the pregnancy, for whatever reason.”

There, the stigma surrounding single mothers often drives women to abort, but restrictive laws and fear of being shunned by society mean many do so secretly and illegally in private clinics rather than turn to the one public clinic authorised to carry out the procedure. Doctors at the public clinic make no secret of their opposition to abortion, and a poster in the room where it is carried out declares the practice “a crime”, BIRN reported in August. “Mature enough” In May, between 5,000 and 10,000 people took part in a rally in Zagreb entitled March for Life, proclaiming the sanctity of the family. At the head of the march was the conservative movement’s most prominent leader, Zeljka Markic. Next to her was Masenjka Bacic

Abortion Rights Under Fire in Croatia Sanja Oreskovic, the wife of the then prime minister, Tihomir Oreskovic. “Every reasonable person will choose life over death, and everything else is just nonsense and fear,” Oreskovic told reporters. It was the first march of its kind in Croatia, and a sign of the times. “It is about disciplining female sexuality and the female body,” Barada said of the ongoing debate. In today’s Croatia, “To do an abortion and talk about it in a normal way, to not feel guilt, is not simple.” Undercover, this reporter called the general public hospital in Split in late June, early July and again in October to enquire about the possibility of having an abortion. In June, the woman who answered said the only doctor who performed abortions was not at work and said to call again the following week. BIRN received the same answer on the next call. In October, a woman again answered the phone. “Abortion?” she asked. “What abortion? Intentional? Who’s going to do that for you here?” BIRN wrote to hospital director Ivo Juric with questions regarding whether and how abortions are carried out in the hospital. He replied: “All the doctors in the Clinic for Women’s Diseases and Obstetrics work in accordance with the laws and current regulations of the Republic of Croatia.”

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Masenjka Bacic

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel Slavko Brezoski, 94, stands on Skopje’s main square, where the modernist department store he designed in 1956 has been hidden behind a neo-classical facade

lavko Brezoski was already an established architect when the city around him was reduced to rubble one July morning in 1963, an event that would dominate the rest of his working life. The earthquake that struck the Macedonian capital Skopje, then part of the former Yugoslavia, just over half a century ago killed more than 1,000 people and wiped out around three quarters of its buildings.

Bojan Blazevski – Skopje, Ljubljana, Katowice

The ageing architects behind Skopje’s cutting-edge resurrection from a 1963 earthquake cry copyright foul as their acclaimed modernist creations are engulfed in antiquity.

One of the few left standing was a department store that shared its name with the city, designed by Brezoski in 1956 and built in 1960 on the central square. A five-storey creation of white marble and glass, it is one of Brezoski’s best-known works, part of a wave of modernism that swept socialist former Yugoslavia and which would see post-earthquake Skopje rebuilt in a futuristic style unrivalled in the region. Today, however, the building – which later became the City Gallery – is unrecognisable. It is one of dozens of buildings hidden or about to be hidden behind neo-classical facades and hollow colonnades in a radical makeover of the city called Skopje 2014, designed to resurrect antiquity and burnish a sense of national identity based on Macedonia’s claim to Alexander the Great.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: Nevena Brezoska

Now 94 years old, it pains Brezoski to see what has become of his work, worse still, he says, because he never gave his consent. Thin and frail but of firm voice, Brezoski told BIRN he met the mayor of Skopje, Koce Trajanovski, and an aide in 2013 and was given a statement to sign saying he had no objection to the change of facade. Brezoski refused, and wrote on the paper in an unsteady hand: “Planted for signature. I did not sign.” He recalled telling Trajanovski: “This isn’t for me. I told you that I don’t agree for it to be touched.” But touched it was, along with more than 20 other modernist buildings in downtown Skopje, including the seat of the government, now a shining white imitation of the White House. “It hurts when I see how the life’s work of many architects of my generation has disappeared under a Styrofoam tent,” Brezoski said. “With great love and enthusiasm we rebuilt Skopje after the war and the earthquake, only to now see it ruthlessly destroyed.” Bojan Blazhevski

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel BIRN has tracked down many of the surviving members of Brezoski’s generation of Yugoslav-era architects, an avant-garde class that worked side-by-side with a host of foreign architects after the earthquake to turn Skopje into one of the most architecturally progressive cities in Southeast Europe, only to see that vision now erased. Some, like Brezoski, said they refused consent for the neoclassical facelift of the buildings they designed. Others told BIRN they were not even asked, in apparent violation of Macedonian copyright law. BIRN on three occasions asked for an interview with Skopje mayor Trajanovski for this story, but was told he was not available. BIRN also sent detailed questions to the City of Skopje asking for confirmation of Trajanovski’s meeting with Brezoski, and about his complaints and those of other specific architects regarding copyright. On August 11, the public relations department replied: “The authors of conceptual works are always selected in a design competition. We emphasize that the City of Skopje has always been open to authors of previous designs of facades, held meetings with some of the architects, and took into consideration some of their solutions.” It added: “The City of Skopje issues permission for the facade in accordance with the law on construction, not by copyright law. According to the law on construction, the City council determines the look of the facade and the building permit is issued based on this decision.” Croatian architecture critic Maroje Mrduljas described the process as “urbanicide”. “I really don’t understand how this is possible. What kind of laws are applicable and which are not?” Mrduljas, who lectures at the architecture faculty of the University of Zagreb, said Skopje after the earthquake was a “melting pot” of architectural experiments, bringing together architects from across Europe and the former Yugoslavia around a cutting-edge vision for the city centre drawn up by Japan’s Kenzo Tange. Though Tange’s plan was only partially realised, “Skopje at that time was really an urban and architectural experiment, a progressive one of course,” he said. “Nowadays, we are facing a new type of experiment, but a bizarre one, and I have never seen something comparable anywhere.”

‘Eclectic’ Skopje 2014 is the signature project of former conservative Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who critics say ruled with an increasingly authoritarian bent during his decade in power between 2006 and early 2016. He stepped down in January to make way for an early election brokered by the European Union, forced aside by months of political crisis over a slew of damaging wiretaps that appeared to expose widespread abuse of office by his government, something Gruevski has vehemently denied. The election is due on December 11. Gruevski’s makeover of Skopje has already won its fair share of headlines, few of them flattering. The scale is staggering. According to a database compiled by BIRN, authorities have so far spent more than 667 million euros erecting 27 neo-classical and baroque buildings, five squares featuring dancing fountains, dozens of monuments and sculptures and one Triumphal Arch, à la Paris. The Balkan country’s total budget is roughly three billion euros. The government says it is making the city European, after centuries of Ottoman rule and decades of communism. Critics, however, say it is nationalist folly, a clumsy attempt to draw a line linking the glorious age of Alexander the Great to modern-day Macedonia, a link fiercely disputed by neighbouring Greece. The new-look Skopje has been called “beyond kitsch” and likened to a “mini-Las Vegas”. One result of the makeover has been to obscure from view the sharp white angles of the Macedonian Opera and Ballet, a renowned example of Yugoslav modernism designed by the Slovenian architectural group Biro 71. Envisaged as part of a cultural complex descending to the Vardar river, the project was left unfinished, and now the Opera and Ballet have been blocked from the river by a row of neo-classical buildings, a Roman portico and mock candelabras. Under current plans, it will eventually be hemmed in from all sides, yet none of the architects behind the building was consulted on the changes to the original plans and the Opera and Ballet’s immediate surroundings.

PULL QUOTE: “The world really started to look at this architecture…and now we are destroying it” – Ljubljana architecture professor Marusa Zorec 11

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A Skopje tower block with a new neo-classical facade on one side. The back of the building is untouched Photo: Bojan Blazhevski

“Not one institution from either the City of Skopje or the Republic of Macedonia has contacted us or sought our opinion as the authors, nor included us in the jury commission at the outset of construction of the new buildings,” Biro 71 architects Stevan Kacin and Jurij Princes, two of the original four designers, told BIRN by email.

Moral rights

“It is understandable that the investor would want to complete the complex, but we consider it would have been necessary to include in the new solution the Opera and Ballet and the square, to complete their descent to the Vardar,” wrote the architects, born in 1939 and 1933 respectively.

Article 10 of Macedonia’s law on copyright states that the original author of an architectural structure should have first right of refusal to carry out any intended changes. If the author “unjustifiably” refuses, the owner of the building can move ahead with the works, “but he shall be obliged to respect the author’s moral rights”.

“Unfortunately, the new ‘eclectic’ buildings on the bank of the Vardar have destroyed that idea and cut the opera and square off from the city goings-on on the promenade.” Maja Ivanic, head of the Architects’ Society of Ljubljana, said she was “overwhelmed” by the design of the Opera house when she first saw it. “It is beautiful, complex, pure, and clear at the same time, and for that reason a very strong architectural monument,” Ivanic told BIRN. “Skopje has had this innovative architecture long before Zaha Hadid appeared in the architectural world,” she said in English, referring to the ground-breaking Iraqi-born British architect who died in March 2016. “I am really very sorry the government of Macedonia is not capable of seeing it that way.”

Besides Brezoski, Kacin and Princes, at least five other architects of the post-earthquake era have said they either refused consent to or were not even informed of plans to change their designs.

Article 24 goes on to state: “The author shall have the right to object to any modification, distortion, or mutilation of the work, which would be prejudicial to his personality, honour and reputation, as well as to object to the destruction of the work.” Legal cases in Europe over architectural copyright, however, are notoriously long and complex. Even if the architect wins, victory can come too late to save the original design. Skopje 2014’s path was smoothed by a decision on March 23, 2012 by Macedonia’s Cultural Heritage Protection Office to lift the protected status of the main pedestrian zone in central Skopje known as Central City Area II, comprising more than 130 individual structures. Bojan Blazhevski

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel The decision was obtained and published by a Macedonian civil society group called the Centre of Cultural Heritage. The reason given for the move was that the area had become “degraded” by poor urban planning. This reporter submitted a list of questions in person to the director of the Cultural Heritage Protection Office, Viktor Lilcic Adams, but he declined to comment for this story. BIRN also sent detailed questions regarding the complaints against Skopje 2014 to the Ministry of Culture but received no reply. Macedonia’s Association of Architects, which has several times spoken out against the project, also did not respond to questions. Homage The irony of the assault on architecture in Macedonia is that the rest of the world is just waking up to the value of Yugoslav-era modernism, said Marusa Zorec, an architecture professor at the University of Ljubljana and a founding member of evidenca.org, an archive of modernist architecture in Slovenia.

Skopje’s Paloma Bianca office block before work began on a new neoclassical façade. The 86-year-old architect said he was never consulted Photo: Bojan Blazhevski

“The world really started to look at this architecture, to really appreciate its architectural qualities,” said Zorec. “And now we are destroying it.” New York’s Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, will pay homage to Yugoslav modernism in an exhibition in 2018. Co-curator Vladimir Kulic said it would feature the postearthquake reconstruction of Skopje “as one of the great moments of internationalisation of architecture during the Cold War”. The exhibits, he said, will include the Opera and Ballet and the original drawings and model of Tange’s plan for the city centre, which was never fully realised.

Some of the buildings to be featured have so far survived the facelift, “but other important examples have been changed beyond recognition,” Kulic, an associate professor at the School of Architecture of the Florida Atlantic University, told BIRN by email. They include the government building, originally the seat of the Central Committee of Communists. Built in the 1970s, architect Petar Mulickovski drew on elements of traditional Macedonian architecture. He publicly opposed the makeover.

Kulic called the original building “a really important example of modernist regionalism”. “It is deeply ironic that a building that articulated a modern Macedonian identity through inspiration from local vernacular architecture was dressed up in a laughably illiterate version of international classicism precisely in an attempt to forge an alleged ‘Macedonianness’,” he said. BIRN contacted the architect behind the new facade of the government building, Zarko Causevski, but he said

Brandishing the tapes, Zaev said they exposed widespread abuse of office, election-rigging and media censorship by Gruevski’s aides and ministers, and began publishing them. The ruling VMRO-DPMNE party said the tapes were the work of foreign spies and had been “fabricated, edited, cut, copypasted, condensed and modified”. The European Union, however, said they were a cause for

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The Arhitektonika company, of which he is director and which his brother, Nikola, owns, has left the biggest mark on the facades. A BIRN investigation published in July 2015 revealed the brothers have been paid more than half a million euros. In a September 2014 interview with the Macedonianlanguage website Faktor, Causevski explained the preoccupation with neo-classicism. “Why do so many Macedonians on their Facebook profiles put background pictures of buildings from European capitals? Does it come from a need to show that we are part of those cultural values? For me, a large part of the citizens have a need for a clear positioning that … we are part of the European cultural values.”

“Do whatever we want” A political crisis erupted in Macedonia in early 2015 when Zoran Zaev, leader of the opposition Social Democrats, accused the government of running a huge and illegal wiretapping operation targeting 20,000 people.

by phone that he had “no desire for interviews”.

“grave concern”. The government denies any wrongdoing, but the tapes have already triggered an investigation by a special prosecutor into election fraud. Zaev announced each new release as the latest “bomb”. No. 35 purportedly contained the voices of Culture Minister Elizabeta Kanceska-Milevska and then Transport and Communications Minister Mile Janakieski apparently discussing how the protection of a large area of downtown Skopje had been lifted in order to clear the way for the construction of new neo-classical facades. It is not clear when the conversation took place.

BIRN called and wrote to both Kanceska-Milevska and Janakieski directly but neither responded. BIRN also wrote to the Ministry of Culture but received no response regarding the authenticity of the tape, which includes the following from a voice purported to be that of Kanceska-Milevska: “Mile, look, by modifying the regulations we can’t do anything. This is the thing – certain facades in the city, no matter which, were cultural monuments. The prime minister said take them out, for them not be cultural monuments, so that we can do whatever we want. The conservation department has taken them out, so in the plan they are no longer cultural monuments.”

Lazar Dimov, the architect who designed the facade for Brezoski’s City Gallery on Skopje’s central square, also declined by phone to answer any questions when contacted by BIRN. Dimov also took part in designing the new facade on a section of the Paloma Bianca building, a modernist office block a stone’s throw from the shiny white neo-classical headquarters of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party. The original architect of the Paloma Bianca building, Trajko Dimitrov, said the authorities never approached him regarding the makeover. Bojan Blazhevski

Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Remodel “It hurts, the knowledge that as a person born in Skopje and the author of a well-known building in the downtown area, that your building … will become part of a grey, faceless group portrait,” Dimitrov, a leading member of Macedonia’s post-World War II generation of architects, told BIRN. Now 86 years old, Dimitrov was left in the dark, finding out about the plans for his building from journalists. In June, during reporting for this story, scaffolding was erected around the Paloma Bianca, marking the first phase of construction of a new facade. “Even the most valued monument of the Byzantine kingdom – the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – was decorated in Islamic symbols but its architectural sanctity was respected, then and now,” he said. People must understand, he said, “that these are not objects in which only copyrights are disputed, but the identity of my country is disputed.” Political associations

Trajko Dimitrov, 86, said authorities never approached him regarding a new facade for the Paloma Bianca office building he designed Photo: Bojan Blazhevski The communist-built city centre of Katowice in southern Poland, largely intact but decorated with deckchairs and palm trees

It is not just in Macedonia that modernism has come under attack, though nowhere else to such a degree. “One of the reasons is that this period is not yet recognised as cultural heritage as it does not have enough time distance,” said Maja Ivanic, head of the Architects’ Society of Ljubljana. “The other reason is that many people, and even architects and art historians, are connecting modern architecture with the political situation of that period: it reminds them of the negative parts of socialism, so they try to repaint or redo it.” Neither part of the Soviet bloc nor the capitalist West, the Yugoslavia of leader Josip Broz Tito forged its own brand of socialism that gave Yugoslavs a degree of freedom and prosperity denied to their neighbours behind the Iron Curtain. Many in the poor states spawned by its collapse look back on the period with some nostalgia. But for the likes of Poland, for example, communist-era architecture is a hangover of Soviet dominance, an era many Poles would rather forget. The debate over its fate has raged for years. “Now, we are at a halfway [point],” said Polish architect Lukasz Galusek, editor of the Herito quarterly on Central European architectural heritage. “We know that there is a value; we managed to convince many people. But still there are some who are not convinced.” In the southern Polish city of Katowice, where communist authorities constructed an entire new city centre, some residents came out in protest in 2010 against plans to redesign the central railway station, to many a brutal concrete eyesore.

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They ultimately failed, but decades after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, much of central Katowice still stands as a shining example of communist urban planning, home to the UFO-like Spodek arena that was opened in 1971 on the 10th anniversary of the flight that made Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human in outer space. Rather than level the city centre or cover it up, local authorities have planted palm trees and laid out deckchairs on the central square, as if to say ‘welcome to utopia’. Galusek was familiar with developments in Skopje, and put them in the context of identity-building in the wake of communism’s collapse. “This was our case as well,” he said. “It was important to show that national cultures have some deep roots, and I realise that falsification plays an extremely important role in this process.”

Photo: Bojan Blazhevski

Mrduljas, the Croatian architecture critic, said it was far easier to mobilise a defence of individual modernist structures. “When you have the whole city frontally attacked, then it becomes harder,” he said. “Where is the frontline?” Recent developments since Gruevski stepped aside have given the likes Brezoski some degree of hope. In October, the office Macedonia’s special prosecutor announced an investigation into the construction of a museum as part of Skopje 2014. It said several senior officials at the Ministry of Culture were suspected of wrongdoing but did not name them. The ministry, in response, said the construction was carried out in line with the law. The fate of the project, however, rests on the result of the December 11 election and whether Gruevski’s VRMODPMNE retains power.

“We Macedonians,” he said, speaking as if he were a Macedonian, “were occupied by Turks, so we did not take part in the Époque, but if we did we would also have baroque and classicism as any other nation.”

None of the post-World War II architects interviewed by BIRN said they were considering taking their complaints to court. Brezoski said he had another plan, if given the chance.

In Slovenia, Zorec of evidenca.org said modernist architecture was under threat from the poor condition of buildings and changes in ownership and purpose over time.

“I would make them again, correct them,” he said of the concealed modernist structures. “We had an earthquake, but we fixed it. There is no other option.”

But, she said, the threat is not on the scale of Skopje. “I don’t know a city in the world that transformed buildings from one period back to the period of the past,” she said. Bojan Blazhevski

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe Members of the Committee for National Rescue, a registered non-governmental organisation which mounts patrols on the Bulgarian border with Turkey to halt migrants, hold an event in the city of Plovdiv in May

T Aleksandrina Ginkova – Plovdiv, Varna, Asotthalom

Publicity-hungry migrant hunters are a symptom of bigger problems in Eastern Europe.

“Twelve-hour shifts, constantly moving. If you have to patrol, you cover 15, 20 kilometres.”

In Bulgaria, some have been unmasked as petty criminals, others have become minor media celebrities. But no one knows for sure how effective they have been, how many they really number and who is funding them, if anyone. Some groups claim to have tens of thousands in their ranks, but can muster barely a few dozen in public.

“They’re constantly changing routes. We catch them, we stop them; they move, we move. It’s a game of cat and mouse.”

The border officer, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, was in little doubt:

‘They’ are the migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa slipping daily across the frontier from Turkey into Bulgaria and Greece en route to Western Europe, a flow that peaked in the summer of 2015 but continues today, tapping a deep vein of intolerance across the continent.

“They’re just messing around… pretending to be heroes,” he said. “They caught 30 men. I probably caught 3,000 and nobody said anything about me. What’s so important about catching 30 men? Probably the thrill … I don’t know. It’s pointless.”

In Bulgaria, like Hungary, vigilante groups have emerged, posting pictures on Facebook of tattooed men in T-shirts or military fatigues roaming the forests on the border. They are sometimes armed.

Whether publicity-hungry posers or a serious threat to security and human rights, observers agree that the selfstyled ‘migrant hunters’ are a symptom of a deeper issue afflicting Bulgaria, where hate speech and hate crimes are increasingly condoned and the ‘other’ is unwelcome.

he off-duty border guard was thin, tired and visibly nervous. He described his day, almost every day, on Bulgaria’s frontier with Turkey.

They have grabbed headlines in Bulgaria and abroad, winning alternately the acclaim and admonishment of the Bulgarian government. In Hungary, they have been recruited by a right-wing government that in September issued an official call for 3,000 “border hunters” to reinforce police and soldiers on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia.

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Photo: Aleksandrina Ginkova

Ivanka Ivanova, a law expert at the Open Society Institute in Sofia, said she was “not sure there is such a thing as a ‘rise of the civic patrols’ on the border”. But what is clear, she said, is that the state’s reluctance to act against those that do exist, and in some cases its Aleksandrina Ginkova

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe readiness to encourage them, is leading to a climate of impunity. “One in every seven people in Bulgaria has heard comments from politicians and journalists that left him under the impression that crime against certain minority groups is not as reproachable as it would be if the crime was against someone from the majority,” Ivanova told BIRN. “With these public sentiments it is clear that the saturation of the public discourse with hate speech inevitably leads to the perpetration of hate crimes.” Medal Bulgaria’s ‘migrant hunters’ burst onto the scene in early 2016 with two men – Dinko Valev and Petar Nizamov. Valev, a tattooed trader in bus parts, was shown on Bulgarian television patrolling the border on a quad bike; Nizamov posted a video of the detention of three Afghan migrants online, their hands tied behind their backs. Bulgaria’s then prime minister, Boyko Borisov, had initially welcomed the “help” of some vigilante groups, and one group was presented with a medal by the head of the border police, Antonio Angelov, for catching a group of migrants and handing them over to police. But when rights groups and the international media pounced on the Nizamov video, Borisov spoke out against such “paramilitary formations” and the harm they did to Bulgaria’s reputation. Nizamov is the only person, however, to have been charged so far – with the illegal detention of the three migrants – while Valev was placed under investigation in November on suspicion of inciting discrimination, violence and hatred on the basis of nationality or ethnicity. Nizamov’s lawyer has called the case against him “fabricated”. Nizamov himself told BIRN he believed the courts were under pressure to keep him in custody: “I am sure there was an order from above,” he said. Valev has also denied any wrongdoing, saying on Bulgarian Nova TV in November that he was ready to go to prison “for Bulgaria”. According to an opinion poll published in March, just over half of Bulgarians approve of civilians detaining migrants. For the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, BIRN spent time with members of the Committee for National Rescue, a registered non-governmental organisation that

boasts a civic wing called Shipka and a “military unit” called Vasil Levski, names that recall Bulgaria’s fight to throw off almost 500 years of Ottoman Turkish rule from the late 14th Century. The group boasts a level of organisation neither Valev nor Nizamov could muster. One of its founders, Vladimir Rusev, has claimed the organisation has 26,000 members. In an interview with BIRN in a rooftop café in his hometown of Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, Rusev said he funded the organisation through a business he owns with his wife, which he said was involved in private security in war zones for politicians and “the super-rich”. Members also chipped in to pay for fuel and supplies for patrols. Two companies – Due Diligence BG and Due Diligence International – are registered to Rusev and a woman called Antonia Ivanova Stefanova in the Bulgarian Trade Register. Both are registered at the same address as the NGOs Shipka and Vasil Levski in Varna’s old city centre. BIRN could not find websites for either company. Rusev, 57, said he had previously been in the army but declined to elaborate further on his business activities. Bald and stocky with a tightly trimmed moustache, Rusev drove to the interview in a dark SUV with tinted windows, and was greeted by other guests as he entered the cafe. The Committee for National Rescue has affiliations with far-right groups and political parties in Eastern Europe under the umbrella organisation Fortress Europe. In May 2016, it sent a delegation to the Czech Republic at the invitation of the far-right Usvit (Dawn) party. In June, it was joined on a patrol by a former leader of the German anti-Muslim Pegida party, Tatjana Festerling, and its Dutch offshoot, Edwin Wagensveld. Rusev denied receiving money from Russia to stir up trouble in Bulgaria and by extension the European Union. “They are mad because we are volunteers and do everything for free,” he said of the group’s critics. “They should leave us to do our job, to help the state do what it doesn’t want to do to save the people.” The group wrote to the border police chief Angelov on July 25 offering its services to help stop the “invasion”, but Rusev said they had not received a reply. A border police spokeswoman said that any such cooperation would have to be regulated by the law, i.e. by the government.

“This is spreading xenophobia and incitement to violence” – Daniel Stefanov, spokesman for the UNHCR in Bulgaria 15

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Self-proclaimed ‘migrant hunter’ Petar Nizamov at his home in the coastal city of Burgas Photo: Aleksandrina Ginkova

‘More for public effect’ BIRN asked the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, whether it believed the migrant hunters were more active on social media than on the border. Daniel Stefanov, a spokesman for the UNHCR in Bulgaria, replied: “In the main, they are aiming more for public effect.” “This is spreading xenophobia and incitement to violence,” he said. “And it is for sure especially dangerous if the authorities do not react. In this sense, there is no big difference if it is propaganda or real actions because they are both harming society.” Even a member of Rusev’s Committee for National Rescue conceded the group’s activities on the ground were having little effect on actual migrant flows but were aimed more at getting to know the terrain and reassuring residents.

“We have witnessed an Islamic radicalism, but there is also anti-Islamic radicalism that is in no way less dangerous,” he said. Research conducted by the Open Society Institute between 2014 and 2016 and published in Bulgarian in July showed an increase in the number of Bulgarians who have been exposed to hate speech and an increase in the approval of its use, though the majority continues to disapprove. “What is worrying is the public approval for using hate speech, that is extreme nationalism and hate speech, against two social groups – Roma and foreigners,” said the Institute’s law expert Ivanova. “Why this is happening is the million-dollar question and our research cannot give a categorical answer.”

“In fact, we are not decreasing the refugee wave significantly, the effect is around zero,” said Maria Gerina, who coordinates the social activities of the group.

Ivanova said she personally saw two factors; firstly, the absence of a reaction from the authorities, which she said “systematically” fail to investigate hate crimes and hate speech, and secondly the cultivation of “fear and prejudice” by the Bulgarian media.

But like Stefanov, Bulgarian security expert Yordan Bozhilov, president of the Sofia Security Forum and an analyst at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, warned of the influence of such vigilante groups and their rhetoric on Bulgarian society.

“A significant proportion of the people, almost a third in 2016, do not know that hate speech … and hate crime are criminalised. The proportion is even higher among people with lower education. And the trend is negative – in 2014 only one in five did not know that these acts are crimes.” Aleksandrina Ginkova

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe Another study, conducted jointly by the NGOs Media Democracy and the Centre for Political Modernisation, published in Bulgarian in March, exposed an upsurge in hate speech in the Bulgarian media, mainly targeting the Roma minority, refugees and migrants. Based on the statements, articles and content of their website and social media accounts, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee rights group submitted a request to the state prosecution in May for Rusev’s Shipka and Vasil Levski groups to lose their status as non-governmental organisations. By the time of this article’s publication, the Committee had not received any written response. Radoslav Stoyanov of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee said former Prime Minister Borisov, who resigned in November after the government-backed candidate in Bulgaria’s presidential election lost, had “publicly legitimised” such organisations. In their inaction, he said, the authorities and political parties “passively assist the powers that aim to drive the society towards rejection and oppression of marginalised communities. This silent agreement, in my opinion, is the reason these sentiments develop and grow in this society.”

Vladimir Rusev, one of the founders of the Committee for National Rescue, which patrols for migrants on the Bulgarian-Turkish border

BIRN asked a government spokeswoman if the government had an official position on the vigilantes. “No, it doesn’t,” she replied. “What do you expect it to be? How do you imagine such an official position?” “The position that has been expressed by representatives of the government on different occasions … is that the state has ways to defend the border and they are defined by the constitution and the law.” Arguably, the vigilantes have taken their cue from the Bulgarian police, who have been accused by rights groups of widespread mistreatment of migrants. In August, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein expressed concern over the practice of pushing migrants back over the border and “persistent allegations of physical abuse and theft by law enforcement officials at the border”. Attacks against migrants and refugees, he said, were rarely, if ever, punished. “[It is] particularly disturbing to see important and influential public figures expressing support for illegal armed vigilante groups who have been brazenly hunting down migrants along parts of the border between Bulgaria and Turkey,” Zeid said.

Photo: Aleksandrina Ginkova

BIRN wrote separately to the spokespeople of the government and the interior ministry asking for a response to the criticism of the authorities’ stance on the vigilantes, accusations that they tolerate hate speech and allegations of police brutality, but received no reply. Private army Some 1.3 million people fleeing war, poverty and repression reached the EU’s southern shores last year, most of them crossing the sea from Turkey to Greece by boat and dinghy, heading north into Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and beyond en route to Germany and other more affluent members of the bloc. The EU has since tried to shut down the so-called Balkan route, but the migrants continue to come albeit in fewer numbers. Only a small fraction of last year’s total – 30,000 – went through Bulgaria. More than 17,000 had been detained in 2016 in Bulgaria by November. Migrant centres in Bulgaria are full. On November 10, there were 7,039 migrants housed in camps with capacity

“We are approaching the limits of being a civilised society” – Hungarian rights activist Mark Kekesi 16

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for 6,390. The majority wishes to move on, but for those who do not succeed, integration is not easy. “Bulgaria still does not have an integration programme,” said the UNHCR’s Stefanov. “So for the moment the process is stalled and it is not clear if and how it is going to continue.”

“This migrant issue is organised by certain interest groups,” said patrolman Nagy Sandor when BIRN joined a patrol on the Hungarian-Serbian border. “Now it’s people from the Middle East, tomorrow the African avalanche will begin and that will be the end of us.”

In late November, police fired water cannon at hundreds of rioting migrants at the largest refugee reception centre in Harmanli, southeastern Bulgaria.

BIRN witnessed the patrol, involving Toroczkai’s deputy, stop three male migrants who said they were from Pakistan. One gave his age as 14. They said they had lost their identification documents, angering the patrolmen. The police arrived and took over, leading the migrants away.

The unprecedented migration and the strain it has put on state resources has emboldened right-wing groups and parties in Central and Eastern Europe, even in countries such as Slovakia where very few migrants have entered. In Hungary, a major transit country in 2015, the nationalist mayor of the border village of Asotthalom, Laszlo Toroczkai, last year set up his own patrol force and posted a movie-style video on Facebook and YouTube – with patrolmen in speeding cars and on horseback – warning migrants against trying to cross from Serbia into Hungary. In Hungary, such patrols have been legalised with set 24-hour shifts and designated days off. Like Bulgaria’s vigilantes, Hungary’s patrolmen are deeply anti-Islamic, critical of ‘weak’ leaders in Western Europe and steeped in conspiracy theories about grand plans for Muslims to conquer ‘Christian Europe’.

Mark Kekesi, a Hungarian activist with the civil rights group Migszol which advocates for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, said the patrols amounted to Toroczkai’s own “private army”. “We are approaching the limits of being a civilised society,” he said. The Hungarian police in September put out a call for 3,000 “border hunters”, saying they would be given six months’ training and equipped like other police officers with live ammunition, pepper spray, batons and handcuffs. Bulgaria’s interior ministry has already tried to reach out to people living in the border regions for their informal support, by alerting police if they see any migrants. Aleksandrina Ginkova

Patrolling with Impunity in Eastern Europe

Members of a Hungarian civic border patrol, set by a local mayor on the border with Serbia at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.

Bozhilov, the Bulgarian security expert, said the law provided for the government to do something similar to Hungary by organising volunteer patrols. He said this might help “channel” the frustration and aggression of vigilante groups. An interior ministry spokeswoman told BIRN: “Our position towards the local people is that we accept cooperation in the form of warnings (about migrants entering Bulgaria). Actions that can be taken officially in such cases are the jurisdiction of the border police.” Recruitment

Photo: Aleksandrina Ginkova

Twenty-six-year-old Momchil Krumov, one of those in the audience, stepped outside, a strong wind gusting off the river. He planned to sign up. “With this enormous wave of refugees and when the state cannot take care of itself, there comes a moment when the population has no guarantees, no security that the state will defend itself as it should,” he told BIRN later by phone, having joined the group. “For better or worse, I guess for better, the population starts to organise itself. It is a natural process.”

In May, Rusev of the Committee for National Rescue addressed an outreach event in Bulgaria’s second city of Plovdiv, sharing the floor of the gaudy Maritsa Hotel with three other militia leaders who were dressed in military fatigues. Only a few dozen people, overwhelmingly men, had turned out to see them. The hotel takes its name from the river that runs east from Bulgaria’s Rila Mountains, briefly hugging the country’s border with Greece before carving a path between Greece and Turkey on its way to the Aegean Sea. The river is just one of the obstacles many migrants face on their way to Western Europe. After two hours, the audience filed out and one of the men in military fatigues paid 180 Bulgarian lev (90 euros) in cash for the use of the conference room.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Aleksandrina Ginkova

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses Former fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army

alil opened the metal door and instinctively placed his right hand on the Austrian-made Glock pistol in a holster on his belt. A camera kept watch above the entrance to the house, which was set back from the road. The precautions have become ritual.

Serbeze Haxhiaj – Pristina, Palermo

Seventeen years have passed since Halil (not his real name) says he was detained and tortured by Kosovo Albanian guerrillas in a secret prison in the mountains of northern Albania. A Kosovo Albanian, Halil’s crime had been to support the guerrillas’ rivals for post-war power.

A new court faces old problems in protecting witnesses to a dark chapter in Kosovo’s fight for freedom.

BIRN cannot identify Halil by his real name or describe his appearance or whereabouts for the sake of his security, other than to say that he lives in his native Kosovo in the midst of those who would have him silenced. Within months, he expects to take the stand against his torturers as part of a potentially explosive bid to shed light on the darker side of Kosovo’s fight for freedom from Serbian repression, a fight that won the decisive backing of NATO bombers in 1999. A newly-created court, based in the Netherlands, is expected to issue its first indictments within weeks or months.

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Photo: Hazir Reka

The court’s success will rest on Halil and other Kosovo Albanians ready to testify against politically powerful former guerrillas, heroes to many of their kin. The stakes are high, both for Kosovo’s stability and its consolidation as an independent state, and for the witnesses who have come forward. Others before them have paid with their lives, victims of the kind of systematic intimidation that has repeatedly undermined efforts to bring to justice those guerrillas suspected of war crimes. “They tortured and killed us,” Halil said. “I live to bear witness.” The court, which is funded by the European Union, declined to provide any details for this story of the kind of measures it is taking to ensure the safety of witnesses, saying only that work was under way “with everyone making sure that adequate measures are in place to protect witnesses before, during, and after the trial”. Clint Williamson, the American investigator whose preliminary probe provided the basis for the court, warned in 2014 of “ongoing” efforts to undermine his work through interference with witnesses. But indictments, he said, would follow. Serbeze Haxhiaj

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses Due to the time that has elapsed and the paucity of material evidence, prosecutors will rely heavily on eyewitnesses. Many are believed to have already relocated outside of Kosovo and some will have been given new identities. But others, like Halil, refuse to leave.

‘We thought he was going to the US’

atime Selimaj recalls the sunny day in February 2003 when her 23-year-old son, Ilir, packed his bags and left the house having taken the witness stand against former fellow fighters in the KLA.

“It’s difficult to hide in Kosovo,” said Robert Dean, a former senior prosecutor with the United Nations mission that took over the running of Kosovo after the 1998-99 war.

“We thought he was going [to be relocated] to the US,” she said. But he was back two weeks later. She said the UN mission in Kosovo had told him “they could only send him to Montenegro, and he refused to go there”, likely given Montenegro’s close proximity and large ethnic Albanian community.

But, he reasoned, “I don’t think they would agree to go forward with this chamber unless they had the mechanisms in place [to protect witnesses].” ‘Dark cloud over the country’ The new court – known as the Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office – has been set up to try ex-KLA figures behind what Williamson described as a “campaign of persecution” against Serbs and Roma after Kosovo’s 1998-99 war, and the “extrajudicial killings, illegal detentions and inhumane treatment” of Kosovo Albanians deemed to be political rivals. Williamson was appointed by the EU to look into accusations made against the former guerrillas in an explosive 2010 report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, which included the claim that the KLA had removed organs from Serb detainees in northern Albania for sale abroad. The EU announced the creation of a special court to pursue Williamson’s findings and Kosovo, after much hand-wringing and anger, endorsed the move in a parliamentary vote in August 2015. Williamson, however, warned that sabotage tactics were already under way. “As long as a few powerful people continue to thwart investigations into their own criminality, the people of Kosovo as a whole pay the price as this leaves a dark cloud over the country,” he said. Halil has already testified twice in local trials of exguerrillas, brought by a European Union mission, EULEX, that took over the handling of sensitive war crimes and corruption cases in Kosovo when it declared independence from Serbia in 2008. He is under no illusion that his identity remains a secret.

Two months later, in April 2003, Ilir was shot dead at the wheel of his car near the family home in the western Pec/Peja region of Kosovo. An aunt of his, five months pregnant with twins, also died in the vehicle. Kosovo police launched an investigation but no one has ever been charged with Selimaj’s killing. “This case had high stakes, politically,” the UN prosecutor in the case, Kamudoni Nyasulu, told BIRN.

Stefan Trechsel, a Swiss judge who took part in the UN trial of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic

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“This involved a variety of safety/security actions that were taken at various points of the trial process,” he said. “This did not guarantee 24-hour protection and may not have involved restriction to… movement or communication.” The Selimaj family never submitted a formal complaint to the UN over the killing and a spokesman for the mission said it had no record of the case. Nyasulu recalled having lunch, accompanied by bodyguards, over the road from the court during hearings before the investigating judge, when a suspect who Nyasulu said was running for political office sat at his table. “Do you know that right here I can kill you and nothing will happen,” Nyasulu quoted the man, whom he did not identify, as saying.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Trechsel

“They promised us that we will not be known,” he said of European prosecutors during the first trials. “But I think they (the ex-KLA) know us well.” Halil’s protection amounts to the Glock pistol, a bulletproof vest and self-imposed restrictions on his movement.

Political assassinations, detention camps and a wave of revenge attacks on Serbs and Roma after the war left a stain on the guerrilla insurgency, which had won the support of Western powers as they tried together to halt the expulsion and massacre of Kosovo Albanian civilians by forces under late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

He said he was offered relocation outside of Kosovo, but declined.

The guerrillas took political power after the war, and critics say that for years Kosovo’s Western backers shied away from holding them to account in the interests of stability.

“I am not young. I have children with their families here. We are a big family and can’t all move,” he said. Investigation shrouded in secrecy Halil’s family was targeted by the KLA for its affiliation with the party of Ibrahim Rugova, who led a decade of passive resistance to Serbian rule only to be eclipsed by the guerrilla fighters in the late 1990s.

“I live to bear witness” – anonymous Kosovo Albanian witness against former guerrilla fighters 19

Nyasulu said some witnesses in the case had some form of police security but were “not exactly under a witness protection program.” Selimaj was one of them.

The attempts that were made frequently foundered because of Kosovo’s close-knit, clannish society of 1.8 million people, where testifying against KLA fighters is invariably seen as treason. In a country barely half the size of Wales, the former guerrillas hold sway in politics and the security structures. Witnesses against the ex-KLA “are at risk and are in really serious danger”, said Natasa Kandic, founder of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre and a fierce advocate for victims of war crimes in Kosovo and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia.

Kandic said the investigative work of the new court had been “very secret until the end”. “Nobody succeeded in discovering who would be accused, who are the defendants, the witnesses.” “It is important to see that people are safe,” Kandic said. “If witnesses are not safe, it will produce the feeling in Kosovo that nobody is free to… speak out.” Stefan Trechsel, a Swiss judge who took part in the trial of Milosevic in The Hague, said it was of vital importance that the list of witnesses remained secret. “That is a task, of course, for the investigating authorities in the first place. They will be on the terrain, they will have to speak to many, many people and they must do this in a way that does not show whom they regard as witnesses and whom they do not regard as witnesses.” Change of identity

Kandic, however, said she saw cause for optimism.

Halil epitomises the challenge of protecting witnesses in Kosovo, where identities rarely remain secret and the ties of family and home are so tight that the rigours of a full witness protection programme, possibly including a change of identity, often prove too much.

“There are some expectations that it will be different,” she said of the new court, speaking in English.

Trechsel, the Swiss judge in the Milosevic trial, compared changing identity to “civil death”. Serbeze Haxhiaj

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses “Practically all relations are severed, and it is of a doubtful degree of security because those who are after those persons often find out, despite all measures of secrecy,” he said. Kamudoni Nyasulu, a former UN prosecutor, said that during his time in Kosovo between 2001 and 2003 he knew of only one Kosovar witness who accepted the conditions of full protection. “The one man that I recall going into protection broke the rules within months,” he told BIRN by email from his native Malawi. “The extended family ties are too strong for a Kosovar [an ethnic Albanian] to keep a man incommunicado for any extended period.” BIRN interviewed family members of two witnesses who have been relocated out of Kosovo ahead of the new court’s start. They said that new identities are among the options being offered. It is believed that many of the new court’s witnesses are already outside of Kosovo, either having already emigrated or having been relocated for the purposes of the court. All have the option of having their faces and voices distorted when they come to give evidence. But none will enjoy total anonymity, given that defendants have the right to know who is testifying against them and to prepare a cross-examination with their defence counsel. “Therefore, it is impossible to have completely anonymous witnesses,” said Frank Hopfel, an Austrian judge who also worked at the UN tribunal in The Hague.

A beefy man with greying hair at the temples, Cutro said the red tape and restrictions involved in being a protected witness were suffocating. Twice he cancelled interviews with this reporter because of security concerns voiced by his bodyguards. “I choose to remain in my land, because I am convinced that it should be the mobsters who leave from here, not me,” he said. “But one thing is certain – sooner or later the state will forget us… unlike the mobsters, who do not forget.” Italian High Prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia, however, is proud of the state’s achievements in protecting witnesses and tackling the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. He spoke to BIRN in his office at the Court of Palermo, in the week that marked the 24th anniversary of the mafia murder of Giovanni Falcone, the respected Palermo prosecutor whose death galvanised the anti-mafia movement. Italy threw money and men at the fight, going after in particular the mafia heads in an effort to disrupt their organisation. While the mafia remains a potent force, the country has come a long way from the blood-soaked eighties and nineties.

One of a number of officials involved in selecting witnesses for official protection, De Lucia said Kosovo would do well to follow the Italian model by which the work of protecting witnesses and gathering testimony is split between two distinct administrative bodies.

Italian model Witnesses elsewhere in Europe have complained of the price they have to pay in terms of the restrictions of a protection programme.

The European Council in June 2016 approved a budget of 29.1 million euros for the new Kosovo court up to June 2017.

“Often we don’t know which is the more dangerous enemy – the mafia or the state bureaucracy,” said Sicilian Ignazio Cutro, who testified against the Italian mafia and now heads an association of protected witnesses. Cutro has bodyguards, but can make public appearances.

Procedural issues In an interview with BIRN in November, the new court’s chief prosecutor, American David Schwendiman, said witness protection was a “big challenge”.

“It is impossible to have completely anonymous witnesses” – Frank Hopfel, a former judge at the UN tribunal in The Hague 20

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj

“In 25 years, no witness has been murdered,” said De Lucia.

“An administrative authority should take care of the security of the witnesses, if possible, one that is neutral,” he said. Protection involves relocation, new identities, physical and financial security. It has an operating budget of 40 million euros per year.

“We cannot have anonymous witnesses, but only distortion of face and voice towards the public and the possibility to use [written] witness statements.”

Fatime Selimaj, whose son Ilir was shot dead in 2003, months after testifying against former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army

Declining to discuss specifics, he said: “Protecting those who we estimate are vulnerable or who become vulnerable because of participation in this process is absolutely vital. I have the authority to do that, I got assurances of the assistance to help me do that”. One issue he will want to overcome is the legal confusion that marred previous efforts. Local war crimes cases brought first by the UN mission, UNMIK, and then EULEX were plagued by problems of intimidation. The cases were tried by a mixture of local and foreign prosecutors and judges, working according to a legal framework that was partly a hangover of the Yugoslav era and partly imposed by the UN. Court rules were inconsistently applied, jeopardising witnesses, while foreign staff members sometimes did not stay long enough to get to grips with Kosovo’s specific environment and the dangers witnesses faced. In one instance, Nyasulu, the former UN prosecutor in Kosovo, said a case he was involved in was split into two, meaning one group of suspects was tried first and another immediately after. The witnesses were the same. “Obviously this heightened the danger against the witnesses and myself,” he said. “I was living in a military…

barracks to augment my security 24 hours. The witnesses were in their homes.” In another case, under EULEX, a protected witness told BIRN that his identity was leaked, he believes by the defendant or the defendant’s lawyers. He was relocated outside of Kosovo, but said relatives who stayed behind became the target of intimidation. A relative eventually took the stand to dispute the man’s evidence. “I did it for the sake of those who are alive,” the relative, who cannot be identified, told BIRN. Dean, the former prosecutor who worked both under UNMIK and EULEX between 2005 and 2009 and also served as head of UNMIK’s justice department, said: “The consistent application of the law was a big obstacle for everybody.” Speaking of the new court, he said: “I know that they will certainly address those issues and I think that the procedural law as they develop it for the special chamber will take into consideration how to deal with that.” Nevertheless, the court, which was established under Kosovo law, will have to rely to a degree on the cooperation of Kosovo’s government, which includes the main party to emerge from the KLA ranks, the Democratic Party of Kosovo. Serbeze Haxhiaj

Hiding in Plain Sight - Kosovo’s Protected Witnesses An UNMIK spokesman also declined to discuss the mission’s record in witness protection. Hopfel, the judge in the UN tribunal, said the new court’s options were limited and that much would come down to simple reassurance. “To strengthen their courage,” he said, “it is the only way.” Halil, the witness BIRN spoke to, said that European investigators had told him to call them if he had the slightest concern. “I live from day to day,” he said. “Life with such limitations is hard.” In the valley, gunshots rang out, likely from a family celebration. Halil said he felt increasingly under threat. “I am afraid for my family, not for myself,” he said. “They should be in graves,” he said of his tormentors. “Only then will we be equal.”

Ignazio Cutro, who testified against the Sicilian mafia and heads an association of protected witnesses

Photo courtesy of Ignazio Cutro

“An essential element of mutual trust and good will between Kosovar institutions and the Specialist Chamber is necessarily assumed,” Dean said. Hopfel said the new court would have to make very clear to the government that “any interference with the administration of justice will be subject to sanctions”. Courage Kosovo took over responsibility for war crimes cases in late 2014 and is in the process of developing a witness protection programme. Trust, however, is in short supply, said Besim Kelmendi, a prosecutor with Kosovo’s Special Prosecution. “Due to the political and historical context, and a tradition of not believing in justice, witnesses still do not believe in Kosovo courts,” Kelmendi told BIRN. “Under the Hague tribunal, UNMIK and EULEX, there were systematic failures in the protection of witnesses.” BIRN wrote to the press office of the UN tribunal in The Hague about complaints regarding its system of witness protection but received no reply. BIRN also contacted Helena Vranov Schoorl, head of victim and witness support at the tribunal, who said that a study of witness experiences with the court suggested more should be done to develop and standardise support mechanisms.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Serbeze Haxhiaj

State of the Unions in Serbia

State of the Unions in Serbia Milan Ivovic, former president of the Azotara trade union, outside the Azotara fertiliser factory in the Serbian town of Pancevo where he worked for 37 years

M Marija Jankovic – Belgrade, Nis, Pancevo, Zagreb

Bullied or bought off, trade unions in Serbia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia have hit rock bottom, failing the workers they claim to protect.

ilan Ivovic was 10 years old when the Serbian state fertilizer producer HIP Azotara opened its gates for the first time in 1962, over the road from his childhood home in the town of Pancevo on the eastern bank of the river Danube.

“The worker who was in charge of gas invoices at Azotara called me and said, ‘who are you trying to fool? What $300? What are you talking about? Whose side you are on?’ He showed me the invoices and there wasn’t a single price below at least $400.”

He would go on to spend his entire working life – 37 years – employed at the factory, starting on the night shift and eventually rising to become the president of its trade union in 2007.

Ivovic went public, and within four months was out of a job. He says he was turfed out because he exposed a lie. Azotara says his mandate as union leader had expired and that since then he had not reported for work. Nevertheless, the timing raised eyebrows.

Yet in late 2015, barely 17 months short of retirement, Ivovic found himself out of work, declared “surplus” during a very public spat with the state-appointed management. Ivovic had called out Azotara’s directors over the price they had agreed to pay to Russian energy giant Gazprom for the gas that the factory relies on to function. Azotara said it would pay less than $300 (273 euros) per 1,000 cubic metres, a rate that would help keep the factory afloat and jobs safe. The government, which appointed the factory directors, was hoping to sell Azotara to a Russian buyer and had an interest in presenting the Russians as benevolent partners ready to safeguard jobs. Ivovic welcomed the deal, but then received a phone call:

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Photo: Marija Jankovic

“These days trade unions are kept on a short leash,” the bespectacled 64-year-old Ivovic said. “Having seen what happened to me, why would anyone believe in trade unions and wish to join? They surely do not want to risk their jobs.” For many unionists, his is a cautionary tale, one example among many of the weakness of trade unions in the former Yugoslavia after years of bumpy and often brutal transition to capitalism. “It’s a devastating blow,” said Branislav Canak, until recently leader of one of the biggest umbrella trade unions in Serbia, Nezavisnost (Independence). Marija Jankovic

State of the Unions in Serbia “We’ll probably have to wait 50 years for another Ivovic to be born. Everybody kept saying: ‘Have you heard of that Ivovic guy from Azotara, how they took him down, and nobody stepped in to help?’” he told BIRN during an interview before his replacement as Nezavisnost leader in November. “Other trade union members who see the same wrongdoings in their companies will think twice – ‘If I say something, I risk losing my job.’”

collective agreements, at least through strikes and protests, and to join forces with other leftist and progressive actors in a wider social battle.”

Huge job losses, factory closures and a fire sale of hundreds of state-owned companies in the years after the fall of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 have ravaged the ranks and reputation of Serbia’s trade unions.

Socialist Yugoslavia under leader Josip Broz Tito – who ruled for 35 years after World War II – had only one union, of which all state workers were members.

Weak and divided, they are vulnerable to intimidation, susceptible to corruption and almost wholly dependent on political patrons. Their credibility has been shattered among workers by their meek response to a discredited privatisation process that has seen over 600 sales since 2000 cancelled because of corruption or the failure of buyers to stick to the terms, often too late for laid-off workers. In 2008, after eight years of transition from socialism, just 12 per cent of Serbians said they had “a great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in trade unions, according to the European Values Study, a Netherlands-based research project conducted every nine years since 1981 across Europe. Of 47 surveyed countries, only Bulgaria scored lower than Serbia, with 11 per cent. Thirty-eight per cent of Serbians said they had no trust in unions at all. This story, part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme, looks at why. “They (unions) don’t fulfil even the minimum standards of 20th Century unions, and a result of that is the decline in reputation and membership,” Dr Nada Novakovic, a sociologist and research fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences in Belgrade, told BIRN. “All of that makes it easier for the state and capitalists to complete the process of privatisation and transition in their interests.” Marko Grdesic, a US-educated Croatian sociologist, said the role of trade unions was “the same as it has always been – to recruit as many people as possible, to fight for

“On the territory of the former Yugoslavia, very few unions do this.” Political patronage

Jobs were for life and, under a hybrid system of socialist self-management, employees were given a say in the running of the companies they worked in. The union was, however, little more than an arm of the ruling party, rolled out every May 1 to mark International Labour Day in elaborate celebrations that feted Tito with military parades and marching bands. “The union under socialism played exactly the role socialism asked of it,” said Canak. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, trade unions multiplied, but few outgrew what Novakovic calls the Tito-era “childhood sickness” of dependence on a political patron.

The union counts almost all of the company’s roughly 30,000 workers among its members, a formidable force should they come out against the government. But under a collective agreement signed in January 2015 with the Serbian Ministry of Energy, the EPS union receives almost 800 million dinars (6.5 million euros) per year from the state, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Nezavisnost union under Serbia’s Freedom of Information law, raising serious questions about its ability and readiness to challenge the policy of company directors or the political parties that appoint them. “If you give a union a million or two, of course the union leadership won’t challenge you,” said Ranka Savic, leader of the Association of Independent and Free Trade Unions of Serbia, another umbrella union organisation.

“If you give a union a million or two, of course the union leadership won’t challenge you” – Ranka Savic, leader of an umbrella union organisation 23

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Sociologist Dr Nada Novakovic in her office at the Institute for Social Sciences in Belgrade

The most glaring example is the union at Serbia’s electricity distributor and the biggest public company in the country, Elektroprivreda Srbije, EPS.

Photo: Marija Jankovic

Novakovic said unions were compromised in many ways. For example, company managers are often also union members; union elections are often timed to coincide with political party elections; and union leaders are “openly bought”, Novakovic said, with lucrative seats on the management board. Many union leaders also receive extra salaries. “On top of that come per diems, travel expenses, mobile phone expenses, cars, lunches, various extras,” said Novakovic. Working on her doctorate, Novakovic conducted interviews with dozens of trade union officials at EPS. Over a period of five years, she said, only one did not advance up both the union and company ladders. The odd one out had moved into the private sector. BIRN wrote to the EPS union asking whether its leaders were compromised by the financial rewards they receive but received no reply. BIRN also asked EPS whether union leaders are favoured for promotion but received no reply. BIRN was unable to secure interviews with EPS management or union leaders.

“Rising up the union hierarchy is an advantage in terms of professional hierarchy. It’s also a way to advance materially,” Novakovic said. “The closeness of unions and political parties offers the chance of remaining longer in the union leadership, as well as moving into a party or state position.” The unions, Novakovic said, were still at odds over the division of assets inherited from the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, meaning they had expended more energy “dealing with themselves” than with workers. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Serbia has seen little effective industrial action in opposition to painful reforms. These days, Labour Day in Serbia passes with little fanfare, while in Western Europe hundreds of thousands take to the streets each year to vent their anger at capitalism and globalisation. In January 2014, when the government pushed through parliament the most significant overhaul of labour Marija Jankovic

State of the Unions in Serbia legislation in years, there were only meagre protests by unions against measures raising the retirement age for women and making hiring and firing easier. The government has also cut public sector salaries and pensions in order to secure funds from the International Monetary Fund.

“It’s a devastating blow” – Veteran union leader Branislav Canak on Ivovic’s dismissal

“None of the major union centres has opposed the transition ‘reforms’ of the past 25 years,” said Novakovic. Canak was blunt: “Today, workers would go and protest only if they were paid to do so, if we paid for their bus ticket and gave them a daily allowance. Otherwise, they’re better off staying at home.” Savic, the leader of the Association of Independent and Free Trade Unions of Serbia, blamed something else: “There have been attempts to come out united. But those efforts always backfire because someone gives up, or someone strikes a deal with the government,” she said. “Serbian unions are completely disunited and have no solidarity.” The Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Serbia, the successor to the Tito-era union, did not respond to a request for an interview. “Wrong side of the fence” The big unions fiercely guard their privileges. In 2011, a rival trade union was established within EPS. In response, one of the workers involved told BIRN on condition of anonymity that he and several others were excluded from the main union’s Solidarity Fund, a financial aid pot topped up each month with 0.1 per cent of each employee’s salary to provide workers with some kind of support for various life events. He had been paying in since 2010, but said the Fund informed them that a condition of access to the aid was membership of the main EPS trade union. “In the meantime one of these guys had a child, but he did not receive aid amounting to one average monthly salary to which he is entitled. The other one had a death in his family, and the company refused to pay him financial aid,” the man said.

BIRN was given a copy of an internal union report compiled by a union commission tasked in early 2015 with investigating the then leader Zlatomir Dobrisavljevic and his deputy, Aleksandar Pavlovic, over the spending of funds given to the union by the company. The report accused the pair of signing contracts leasing their own private cars to the union, expensing fuel and maintenance costs and over-claiming other expenses.

The press office of EMS told BIRN that it had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by union leaders and that Pavlovic had in the meantime been transferred to another position due to violations of operating procedures and work ethics, independent of his union activities. Dobrisavljevic is also still employed by the company. “The company gives them this money and they spend it as if it was their own,” said a union official who gave the report to BIRN on condition he not be identified. “What’s left for the workers?” The state prosecution in Belgrade confirmed that it had received a criminal complaint of embezzlement against Dobrisavljevic and Pavlovic and said it had tasked police with investigating. Surplus to requirements

Asked about the case, the EPS press office said it was not a question for the company.

Unlike many union officials, Ivovic appeared to have the trust of his colleagues.

EPS trade union leaders could not be reached by telephone nor did they respond to emailed questions.

In 2008, he brought 1,000 workers out onto the streets of Pancevo to protest over the actions of a Lithuanian-Serbian consortium that had bought the Azotara factory from the state two years earlier. The new owners sold a production unit in violation of the terms of the privatisation and salaries went unpaid.

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Andjelko Kasunic, president of Croatia’s Independent Trade Union of Road Workers, in a Zagreb cafe

The report said both men had accepted its findings. BIRN could not independently confirm this given that both Pavlovic and Dobrisavljevic declined to discuss the case when contacted by phone. Neither has commented publicly on the case. Pavlovic remained head of maintenance of long-distance power cables, a position of considerable responsibility, for a year after the inquiry.

“I guess we found ourselves on the wrong side of the fence.”

At Elektromreza Srbije (EMS), Serbia’s state-run electricity grid operator, the union last year filed criminal charges against two of its former leaders, accusing them of

misusing 2,537,484 dinars (20,630 euros) of trade union money between 2011 and 2015 – the equivalent of many months salary for the average worker.

Photo: Marija Jankovic

The private sector is proving just as resistant to unionism. “Unions haven’t really had much success in entering the new sector of small firms,” said Croatian sociologist Marko Grdesic. “It’s proving really hard, due to the resistance of company owners and the weakness of unions themselves.” “The biggest problem is that one part of the workforce is left completely unprotected: precarious workers who work in occasional, temporary or unstable workplaces, particularly young people, women and foreigners.”

Ivovic had come out against plans to separate Azotara’s industrial river port from the main company, worried it would be sold off and the factory would lose access to it. Then, when he disputed the announced gas price, he received a letter, which he showed to BIRN, from deputy director Miljan Djurovic on August 11, 2015 telling him he risked “termination” of employment. Ivovic was forced into early retirement in December 2015. Djurovic told media at the time that the union mandates of Ivovic and three other union members laid off with him had expired and that since then they had not turned up for work at the factory. A press officer at Azotara told BIRN that Ivovic had been declared “surplus and used his right to take a pay off and leave HIP-Azotara Pancevo.”

Ivovic spent nights sleeping on the pavement and days blocking roads until the government took action in January 2009, annulling the sale and bringing Azotara back into state hands. “We were on strike and we were starving,” Ivovic recalled proudly. But six years later, he was at odds with the state-appointed management.

BIRN requested an interview with the Azotara management but received no reply, nor could Djurovic be reached on his landline or mobile. BIRN was unable to get confirmation of the gas price from Gazprom. “People are desperate,” said Savic. “They oppose the manager and get fired. Then we take the case to the court. Most of these people are now in early retirement. They are not even afraid any more, they just want to get out and get it over with.” Marija Jankovic

State of the Unions in Serbia “Most trade union leaders will find a new career and get rich. Most of the trade union members will be kicked out of their jobs.” “When a union does not (cannot or will not) protect workers from job losses, they lose their reason for existing and their standing among current and potential members.” Savic said it was easy to blame the unions, but that they were only a reflection of a Serbian state and society in transition, “with all the ailments transition brings with it.” “We don’t have a proper health system, schooling, education, we have no division of power between the executive, legislature, [and the] judiciary. “Serbian unionism shares the fate of the state and the society in which it functions.”

Former Azotara trade union president Milan Ivovic cuts the grass at his home in the Serbian town of Pancevo

Ivovic said he did not plan to sue, saying he had neither the money nor the time to fight through a court system widely seen as inefficient and politicised. Abandoned Unions in most of Serbia’s fellow former Yugoslav republics fair little better. In the European Values Study of 2008, just 18 percent of people in Croatia said they had “a great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in trade unions. There, one trade union leader was placed under special police protection in 2010 after blowing the whistle on corruption at state-owned Croatian Highways Ltd, HAC, leading to a number of investigations, arrests and indictments over the next six years. “I didn’t fear for my life until one day a police officer appeared at my door. He spent 15 hours a day with me”, said Andjelko Kasunic, president of the Independent Trade Union of Road Workers.

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Photo: Marija Jankovic

One of HAC’s executive board members, Josip Sapunar, was found guilty in 2015 of siphoning money from the company and ordered to return over one million euros. More officials have since been indicted. “A good union will always win legitimacy among workers if it fights successfully,” said Grdesic, the Croatian sociologist. “A union is a living organism that needs constantly to be kept alive. You have to work with people, talk to them, listen to them. But here people are abandoned,” he told BIRN. Even in the process of privatisation itself, unions have been marginalised. “Unions have absolutely no influence over the (privatisation) process, except to be consulted over the benefit programme for surplus workers,” said sociologist Novakovic. “Most often, unions didn’t even have the right to see the sale contract.” Union leaders, she said, simply wait the process out, safe in the knowledge they are protected by their political connections. Marija Jankovic

Cleaning Up Romania

Cleaning Up Romania A recycling plant outside the town of Buzau in southern Romania

O Adrian Lungu – Bucharest, Tallinn

A team of technocrats had a year to try to turn around Romania’s abysmal record on recycling.

n entering Romania’s Ministry of Environment, a visitor must turn their back on the country’s bestknown and biggest building, the parliament. Its sheer size is almost too much to comprehend. For much of the day, it casts a very long shadow.

Roughly five per cent of municipal waste in Romania was recycled in 2013, according to the most recent data from the European Union’s statistics body, Eurostat, compared to an EU average of 28 per cent. Most of the rest ends up in landfills, blighting the countryside.

In the ministry, up marble stairs, past chandeliers, is the first-floor office of Raul Pop. In the corridor sit three miniature recycling bins – yellow, green and blue.

Come 2020, if it cannot achieve a recycling rate of 50 per cent, the country faces sanctions of up to 200,000 euros per day. Some officials are warning of the imminent cutoff of EU money for environmental protection, vital funds for one of the bloc’s poorest nations.

Pop took up residence in June as secretary of state in charge of waste, one of a host of experts drafted into a technocrat government that entered office six months earlier after a nightclub fire that killed 64 people triggered an outpouring of anger over corruption. The government was given a one-year mandate until an election scheduled for December, invested with the hope of the people that things might change for the better after more than 25 years of broken promises since the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the man who commissioned the parliament building. Pop’s brief was recycling – neither popular nor sexy – but indicative of Romania’s slow progress since the collapse of communism. The country is rubbish at recycling and the environment is paying. If nothing changes soon, the people will be paying too.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: George Popescu

With a shaved head and spectacles, 43-year-old Pop is an economist and an expert in waste. His boss, the minister, 47-year-old Cristiana Pasca-Palmer, is an expert in environmental protection who, like Pop, dropped her regular job with the EU in Brussels to join the cause in the wake of the nightclub fire. She brought with her a 34-yearold advisor called Elena Rastei, an environmental activist from the central Romanian region of Transylvania. With the clock ticking to a December election, the three faced a race against time to get Romania recycling, fearful that the clamour for change might die down when the politicians returned. In Pop’s office, the past was in the wood panelling, the heavy desks and chandeliers. The present showed itself more timidly, in a red laptop and EU flag. The parliament, Adrian Lungu

Cleaning Up Romania an uncomfortable reminder of Ceausescu’s megalomania, dominated the view from the window. “Like any other change, there will be a tipping point,” said Pop. “It will grow slowly until it reaches a critical mass and then it becomes a standard way of behaviour.” Stop the rot The fire at the Colectiv club in Bucharest on October 30, 2015 may go down as a watershed moment in postcommunist Romania. Mourning quickly gave way to anger over concerns that safety may have been compromised by corruption. The owners of the club operator, George Alin Anastasescu, Paul Catalin Gancea and Costin Mincu, were charged with involuntary manslaughter and put on trial. Two employees of the Emergency Situations Department of the Ministry of Interior, Antonina Radu and Petrica George Matei, were charged with abuse of office for allegedly failing to perform the mandatory inspections of the club. For the thousands of Romanians who took to the streets in protest, the tragedy was a symbol of the corruption still eating away at the Romanian state and society. Prime Minister Victor Ponta resigned and President Klaus Iohannis turned to a former EU commissioner and agronomist, Dacian Ciolos, to take charge until a new election could be held a year later. Ciolos, not a member of any political party at that moment, filled his cabinet with technocrats, experts, EU officials and civil society leaders. His government issued a mission statement, saying the nightclub tragedy, and its apparent causes, had created expectations within Romanian society “which cannot be ignored”. Pasca-Palmer, a former senior environment official and negotiator at the EU, was among those who signed up, taking the reins of a ministry with a recycling record that flew in the face of the bloc’s vision for a green continent. The cover photo on her Facebook profile is of the protests that followed the Colectiv fire, with the words ‘The day we give in is the day we die’, drawing on the lyrics of a song played by the band that performed at the club the night it went up in flames. The lead singer was the only band member to survive the fire.

Romania has consistently trailed the field in terms of recycling household waste since it joined the EU in 2007, faring little better than its non-EU neighbours such as Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia, all former Yugoslav republics where barely any waste is recycled. Even Bulgaria, which joined the EU at the same time as Romania, now recycles 25 per cent and landfills 70. Ex-Yugoslav Slovenia leads the pack with a 49-per cent recycling rate. But even Romania’s official figures have been called into question. In late 2015, amid the fallout from the Colectiv fire, environmental inspectors and prosecutors launched an investigation into allegations that some of the companies involved in recycling had been falsely inflating their results. The scandal centred on so-called Producer Responsibility Organisations, PROs, created by major goods producers to make sure package waste left over from their products is removed and passed onto recycling companies. Romania’s Environmental Fund Administration, an environmental protection body under the Ministry of Environment, fined six out of 10 PROs tens of millions of euros, though they have challenged the punishment and the investigation is still ongoing. Geanin Serban, executive director of an association of PROs called Eco Romania, told BIRN that the PROs – effectively the middlemen between goods producers, the waste collectors and the recyclers – could not be held responsible for the performance of the actual recycling companies. He complained that the law had been wrongly applied. No silver bullet Pop, who previously worked on environmental matters for the United Nations Development Programme, for Ernst & Young and for the non-governmental organisation Ecoteca, said there was no silver bullet, no “miracle measure” that would get Romanians recycling. Waste management, he said, “works with many small, complementary measures, which have various implementing speeds”. They include: a tax on landfills to make it more expensive to dump waste, a system of Pay as You Throw, PAYT,

“Like any other change, there will be a tipping point” – Raul Pop, secretary of state in charge of waste at the Romanian Ministry of Environment 27

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Raul Pop, secretary of state in charge of waste at the Romanian Ministry of Environment Photo: George Popescu

which levies higher taxes on those households that do not separate their waste for recycling, and a deposit scheme, which effectively reimburses consumers if they return packaging such as cans. “If you do a comparative study, Romania has the cheapest land-filling in Europe. If we have the cheapest land-filling and the weakest performance, maybe that’s a sign,” said Pop. The resistance, he said, came from the mayors of hundreds of municipalities who are in charge of waste collection and wield disproportionate power in Romania’s political system, given their crucial role in getting out the vote for the big political parties. For the municipalities, critics say, the idea of collecting glass, paper, metal, aluminium and other waste separately sounds like an expensive nuisance. It’s easier and cheaper to dump it all as one.

do selective collection, you can put pressure on anybody else [but] they don’t have access to the waste.” “In any country west of Romania, there is selective collection, there are fines for not doing selective collection, there are operators coming and taking the waste separately from your home,” he explained. “In my opinion this is the area where we are lagging behind the most, the separate collection at source.” Addressing hundreds of mayors gathered in the parliament building in July, Pasca-Palmer, the minister, set down the numbers. Romania, like the rest of the EU, had a target to recycle 50 per cent of household waste by 2020. “In the first nine and a half years [since accession] we managed to reach three per cent. So three per cent out of 50 per cent in 71 per cent of the time we had,” she said.

In Bucharest, two of the capital’s six sectors even abolished taxes on waste in 2008 and 2012.

“So if in the first nine and a half years recycling rose on average less than 0.3 per cent a year, in the time we have left by 2020, we must implement solutions that would increase recycling by almost 13 per cent on average per year.”

“Here, recycling doesn’t work for one major reason,” said Pop. “The municipalities are not getting involved. It’s that easy. And if the municipality does not want to

“That’s a performance 39 times better than we’ve done so far. We at the ministry of environment cannot do that alone and probably nor can you.” Adrian Lungu

Cleaning Up Romania One municipality in Transylvania has bucked the trend. Targu Lapus, a small town of around 12,000 people, took one million euros of EU funds in 2008 and bought bins and vehicles for the separate collection of household waste. An exception to the rule “We were more stubborn [than other municipalities],” said the town’s deputy mayor, Vasile Kraus. “We are really proud of this.” Kraus told BIRN that the municipality on average recycles 45 per cent of waste. For those households that do not divide their waste, “we levy fines, in order to teach this”, he said. “This has been going for seven years and there is still some lack of discipline,” he said, particularly in apartment blocks with multiple tenants. “In [individual] households, the percentage is over 90 per cent.” Rastei, the minister’s advisor, said doing nothing was short-sighted. “Political will means a mayor who is open and determined to create a system for source collection and separate collection. He doesn’t have to be politically associated to a party. No way. It means that a man in a position to make a decision will make the right one. “The cost of inactivity, of doing nothing, is much higher. It will have the support of the community, the citizen and future generations.” Responding to the criticism, Madalin Ady Teodosescu, the president of the Association of Romanian Towns, said it was a matter of educating Romanians on the need to recycle. “Politics has nothing to do with it,” he said. Teodosescu told BIRN that the problem would be solved when each of Romania’s 41 counties has a so-called Integrated Waste Management System, a system to coordinate the disposal of waste, including separate recycling bins. Such systems are being created in 32 counties with EU money, but a report published in November in the Romanianlanguage internet publication PressOne.ro said that Romania’s slow and inefficient bureaucracy meant authorities had yet to select operating companies for each of them. “When this [integrated waste management] programme is finished, selective collection will be done,” said Teodosescu. Targets In 2011, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, issued a set of recommendations for Romania, including the introduction of a landfill tax, a PAYT scheme, better regulation and inspections of waste management companies and publicity campaigns to encourage recycling. Little was done.

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Rubbish at the site of Romania’s Vidraru dam Photo: George Popescu

The recycling scandal that erupted in late 2015, however, may have triggered a change. Since it emerged that the recycling numbers were being “forged”, said Pop, the PROs, the collectors and recyclers were suddenly under far greater scrutiny from the authorities and from the big multi-nationals that produce the packaging – the people who ultimately pay for the failure to recycle the waste through higher taxes. Greater demand for recyclables means more money for the municipalities that collect the waste from the consumers. “Until the end of 2015, when the package waste scandal emerged, they [mayors] did not get money from anyone for the recyclable waste, which means that there is no financial motivation to collect separately, that is to invest money in containers or to invest in separate vehicles to pick up the plastic and biodegradable waste,” said Pop. Pop was upbeat in October. A landfill tax, adopted in 2013, was due to enter into force on January 1, 2017, having been postponed twice.

The ministry had also worked through the summer drafting an over-arching waste management bill that Pop said he hoped would enter parliamentary procedure in the New Year.

For some, however, the pace of change was still too slow. Damov, of the recycling company Green Group, said the landfill tax could have been implemented in one afternoon.

Cristian Ghinea, who served as Romania’s Minister for European Funds between April and October 2016, was quoted in the PressOne.ro report as saying: “Let’s be clear; if [the National Waste Management Plan] is not ready by December 31, we risk the suspension of environment funds” from the EU.

“I have the suspicion that the [people at the] Ministry of Environment do not understand waste but understand an NGO-type opposition towards waste,” he said. They had framed the discussion in “emotional” rather than technical terms, Damov complained.

Rules were also being tightened to require municipalities to gradually reduce the amount of waste they landfill or face fines.

Pop said it was hard to comprehend just how much time was wasted on navigating Romania’s labyrinthine bureaucracy.

“The cost of inactivity, of doing nothing, is much higher” – Elena Rastei, environmental campaigner and adviser at the Romanian Ministry of Environment Adrian Lungu

Cleaning Up Romania there, a piece of waste here. They don’t sum it up as a map. We created that kind of a map, to help visualise things, how it really is,” she said, speaking in English. “The idea is that you don’t just clean up, but you clean up the entire country in one day.” The model has since been replicated around the world, including in Romania. In September, the Romania branch held its fifth annual clean-up day, saying more than 130,000 volunteers had filled over 168,000 sacks with recyclable bottles, aluminium cans, plastic cutlery, textiles and other waste. Pop said he could feel things changing, “a little”. “The next years are going to be violent in terms of changes, at the municipality level,” he said. The recycling scandal had shaken things up. “Finally, those who put packaging on the market and create an environmental problem have realised that they badly need the municipalities to function in this area as well,” he said. Photo: George Popescu

In response, Serban, of the association of PROs, said recycling was in everyone’s interest.

Seyring worked on a study of separate collection schemes in EU capitals, commissioned by the European Commission, in 2015.

“It is obvious that the producers and the local authorities have a common interest in recycling as much as possible of the package waste generated by the population, so their cooperation practically becomes compulsory,” he said.

A Romanian woman in Bucharest packs plastic bottles scavenged from bins into a sack for recycling

“You could do a PhD on it – how many people have to sign, countersign, give their approval,” he said. “Of all these things ... to technically resolve them takes five per cent of the effort. The rest is bureaucracy.” In October, the government took a another step forward when it issued an emergency decree giving municipalities the right to levy variable waste taxes on consumers, with those who fail to separate their waste for recycling having to pay more – the PAYT principle. BIRN asked Bucharest’s Sector Three municipality, where the tax on waste is zero, whether it would implement PAYT. It replied that it was too soon to say. “In Sector Three we have a system that works and with which everybody is content,” the press office of the municipality replied. “We will analyse with great care this possibility [of introducing variable taxes] and will only then make a decision.” Market forces Nicole Seyring, head of the waste and resource management department of the German research organisation BiPRO GmbH, said PAYT had proved crucial in cities across Europe. “The effect of this is very straightforward,” she told BIRN. “Separate collection increases very quickly in a city.”

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The Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, declared European Green Capital for 2016, had done a particularly good job of so-called door-to-door collection, whereby households have their own separate recycling bins emptied by the refuse collectors. The amount of recyclables collected per person increased almost tenfold between 2004 and 2014.

Pop said his ministry was not capable of “pulling the cart for everyone. These forces need to function freely on the market”.

Tallinn, the capital of former Soviet state Estonia, was another strong performer, thanks to the sheer amount of collection points it installed throughout the city. It also reimburses consumers 10 euro cents for every recyclable plastic or glass bottle deposited in supermarkets. Estonia is where the Let’s Do It clean-up movement began in 2008, when tens of thousands of Estonians took part in a one-day rubbish collection exercise. According to Let’s Do It, they collected 10,000 tonnes of rubbish in five hours. The key was to harness technology, including Google Maps, to pinpoint the worst affected areas, said Meelika Hirmo, head of PR for the organisation. “People didn’t even think that [garbage] was a huge problem,” Hirmo told BIRN. “Because a normal person does not calculate - a piece of litter here, a piece of litter Adrian Lungu

Romanian Roulette

Romanian Roulette Author: Alexandra Gavrila

H Diana Mesesan – Bucharest, Buzias, Helsinki

Neglect, ignorance and industry influence raise doubts about a Romanian pledge to fight the hidden scourge of gambling addiction.

unched under an umbrella, Dan steps through the drizzle of a cold Bucharest afternoon in April. He is on the cusp of turning 40 and has a few grey hairs to prove it.

Trying to get a grip on their proliferation, the Romanian parliament in May 2015 approved a law on gambling that included, among other things, measures designed to tackle the scourge of addiction.

Otherwise, Dan’s lean body bears no trace of an addiction that began 20 years earlier. His eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses are not bloodshot; his arms are not punctured or bruised by needles.

But an investigation for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence casts doubt on the readiness of the Romanian authorities and the gambling industry to confront the issue.

He heads for a gambling hall in a non-descript district of the capital not far from where he works, convinced he has lost almost everything.

The law hands responsibility for tackling addiction to the very gambling operators that profit from it, while the psychologists hired by the industry to help the likes of Dan have had business interests in gambling. To date, no progress has been made in implementing the anti-addiction measures.

“People believe that all humans are fit to survive,” said Dan, a pseudonym to protect his identity. “But nature is not like that.” Gambling venues have become ubiquitous across Romania since the first big betting hall opened its doors in Bucharest’s central train station in the spring of 1990, just months after Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist rule ended in popular revolt and a Christmas Day firing squad.

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“Public health has been subordinated to the interests of private companies,” said Eugen Hriscu, a psychiatrist and founder of the non-governmental organisation Aliat that deals with various forms of addiction. “Addicts don’t really exist for the Romanian state,” he said. “Right now we have chaos, in which the only winners are the dealers.” Diana Mesesan

Romanian Roulette Between 2004 and 2013, the number of slot machines in Romania quadrupled to 62,000, according to figures from the European Gaming and Amusement Federation.

Misspent Youth A group of young people in jeans and T-shirts gathered to play sport in the grounds of a building under the summer sun. They could have passed for students, were it not for the bars on the windows.

Insiders In 2014, the state reaped 147 million euros from the issuing of gambling licences and permits, says the National Office for Gambling, ONJN, the state body that oversees the gambling industry. Some 87 per cent of that came from operators of the rapid-fire slot machines that the poor and addicted favour. The state’s earnings rose to 266 million euros in 2015.

“The longest I’ve stayed away from the [slot] machines is the seven months I’ve spent in prison,” said an 18-year-old from Bucharest called Alexandru.

Some experts warn the figures speak to a growing addiction in the European Union’s second poorest nation, and to a paucity of regulation mirrored across the Balkans, where cash-strapped states see gambling as a harmless but valuable source of income.

Like many of his fellow young offenders at the Buzias youth detention centre in western Romania, Mugurel was addicted to gambling. He began at the age of 15, skipping school and doing casual jobs. When there was no work, he stole to fund his addiction.

A 2016 survey commissioned by two major gambling organisations in Romania – Romslot and Romanian Bookmakers – estimated the number of what the industry calls ‘problem gamblers’ at roughly 98,000 people, in a population of just under 20 million. Hriscu, however, said the number of addicts was almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands, while Sorin Constantinescu, the head of the Casino Association in Romania, told BIRN: “Gambling addiction has grown worse in the last few years. We as organisers have seen more and more addicts than before.” Constantinescu said gambling operators had recognised the need “to make people aware that they should consider gambling a way to have fun, not a way to ruin your family”. “It’s normal that we want to make money, but we don’t want to make money at any cost or to destroy people,” he said. “Gambling is mathematics. The money returns to us in the end but we try to use methods that are okay, that are as fair as possible to the people and not to push them into addiction.” But critics are not convinced. The law approved in May 2015 calls for the creation of a ‘public interest foundation’, on the board of which would sit Romania’s main gambling associations and which would be in charge of programmes designed to prevent and treat gambling addiction. It also foresees a fund, run by the ONJN, for the prevention of addiction. Each gambling company would have to contribute 1,000 euros per year, rising to 5,000 euros for online operators and the National Lottery, in an industry that some experts estimate has revenues of one billion euros per year. To date, neither the foundation nor the fund exists.

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BIRN was granted access to the centre by the National Prison Administration and interviewed only those young offenders who had turned 18 and agreed to talk. Romania’s state gambling authority, the ONJN, and industry operators frequently

A promoter at a gambling industry conference at Bucharest’s Entertainment Arena Expo in September 2016.

If they are created, both the ONJN and at least one major operator have indicated they will draw on the experience of the industry’s own anti-addiction programme called Responsible Gaming, the only such programme in the country, run by two psychologists – Leliana Parvulescu and Steliana Rizeanu. Parvulescu’s ‘human behaviour’ consultancy, Zivac, lists among its clients the gambling company Game World, owned by Bucharest-based Game City SRL, and the gambling association Romanian Bookmakers. Parvulescu told BIRN that her consultancy work for Game World, focused on “communication and personal development”, ended before she joined Responsible Gaming in 2012 and that her involvement with Romanian Bookmakers is restricted to her anti-addiction counselling.

The law prohibits gambling to those under 18. Operators have the right to ask customers for proof of age, but those in Buzias said the rules were easily dodged. Gambling operators in Romania do not require customers to register, so access is generally not card-controlled as in some other European countries. In interviews with BIRN, the young offenders said they gained access because (a) ‘we knew the employees’, (b) ‘the employees were nice and let us in’, (c) ‘they asked for IDs but didn’t look at them’, (d) ‘we went with older people’ and (e) ‘they told us to hide in the toilets if the police came’. Psychiatrist Eugen Hriscu of the Aliat addiction NGO said many of the gambling addicts he had met began gambling at around 14 or 15 years of age. Many addicts BIRN spoke to said they had started gambling as young teenagers.

Photo: Diana Mesesan

Like Parvulescu, 57-year-old Rizeanu also had a stake in the industry whose addicts she is now tasked with treating. According to the Romanian Trade Registry, Rizeanu and her husband, Radu, opened a company in 1994 called Rino Trading, registered as dealing in gambling and betting. Its address was the same as the psychology clinic Aquamarin that Rizeanu runs and where the industry’s Responsible Gaming programme directs addicts. Rizeanu told BIRN that Rino Trading ceased activities in 2009, the year before she was hired to head Responsible Gaming. The company is still listed in the Romanian Trade Registry, but appears to be dormant. Rizeanu, too, insisted there was no conflict of interest.

She said she saw no issue of conflict of interest. “The industry wants in its gambling halls as many players as possible who have fun. We, the psychologists of the Responsible Gaming programme, have the same interest, namely to have as many gamblers as possible who have fun, just like in cinemas or theatres.”

stress the importance of keeping minors away from gambling.

“First of all because the Responsible Gaming programme is sponsored by the industry operators. Why? Because they don’t need addicted gamblers. An addict is first of all a person who doesn’t have money, a gambler who creates problems in the gambling venue, for the staff and also for customers, like a drunk in a luxury restaurant.”

Romslot, an association of gambling operators and major stakeholder in Responsible Gaming, said it was unaware Rizeanu had previously run a gambling company but said it should not be considered an issue “as long as she does her job within the programme”. “Honestly we haven’t searched for this in the background of Steliana Rizeanu,” Romslot executive director Violeta Radoi told BIRN. “We’ve looked at her professional experience. She is a trainer of trainers. She is a university professor, she has written books.” Rich or poor? Natasha Dow Schull, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of the book Addiction by Design, said the gambling industry in general had invested great effort creating the “myth” that most people can “gamble for fun and it doesn’t hurt us at all, almost like we have some kind of physical immunity to it. And then there is this group that has problems.” Studies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, however, suggest people with gambling problems account for at least 40-50 per cent of the industry’s Diana Mesesan

Romanian Roulette revenues, raising obvious questions over its interest in helping them stop.

Fair Game

According to a 2012 survey commissioned by gambling operators and published online in Romanian, the average Romanian slot machine user had a monthly net income of 290 euros. The average net salary in Romania that year was 342 euros.

In 2013, Goldsmiths, University of London, produced a report entitled Fair Game: Producing Gambling Research.

Rizeanu, however, described the typical Romanian gambler as wealthy.

Based on research in the UK, Europe, Australia, North America, Hong Kong and Macau, its key findings were:

“Gambling halls and casinos are mostly visited by people with a lot of money, who can gamble large amounts,” she said. “Companies don’t need taxi drivers who spend all their money and then the wife comes crying.”

*T he idea of ‘problem gambling’ is politically useful. It focuses attention on individual gamblers, rather than relationships between the industry, the state, products and policies

According to an inquiry by the Australian government in 2010, the risk of becoming addicted increases with the proximity of gambling venues.

*G ambling research is heavily dependent on industry support *F unding programmes prioritise banal questions: researchers are not free to devise critical alternatives unless they wish to remain unfunded

The experts at Responsible Gaming, however, also disputed this. “In our case it’s different,” said Parvulescu. “If he [a Romanian] wants to go, he’ll go. If he doesn’t want to go, he won’t.”

*T here is a lack of transparency about the influence of industry on research and no professional code of conduct governing these relationships

Asked which experts it consulted on the issue of gambling addiction, the ONJN said it cooperated with Responsible Gaming. But still, it did not consider addiction to be a pressing issue. “If you know there is such a problem, you should tell me the numbers. We, as an institution, have no competence or any statistics that could inform us about such a number,” Odeta Nestor, the head of the ONJN, told BIRN at her Bucharest office, where a copy of a local gambling industry magazine featured a picture of her on its cover. Before joining the office when it was founded in 2013, Nestor, 40, worked as financial director at a number of casinos in Romania. “The media is all over (gambling-related) suicides,” she said, “but just think how many people commit suicide because of love or bank loans.” Romania is not alone in Europe in handing responsibility for anti-addiction programmes to the gambling operators. But critics warn that the danger is greater in Romania’s case, where regulation is loose and the state has failed to consult or recruit independent, expert voices not beholden to the operators. Hriscu of the Aliat addiction NGO said: “The level of regulation is very low. From the lack of regulation, the ones who always win are the dealers.” Cristian Pascu, a founding member of the Romanian Gaming Association of Organisers and Producers, conceded “there is a little conflict of interest here.”

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*T he industry has the most accurate and informative data but rarely shares this with researchers

Mugurel, who turned 18 in a youth detention centre in the western town of Buzias Photo: Diana Mesesan after being convicted of theft to fund gambling

Nevertheless, he said: “The education can come from us because we know the industry’s secrets. Educate the consumer to understand the fun element, that you come here to spend time and not as a source of money. Gamble responsibly. But it’s not in the nature of the Romanian gambler.” Slot machines, he said, make gamblers “a little masochistic. Pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, the alternation of defeat and victory that leads to the secretion of dopamine, serotonin.” Free food, drinks The situation is Romania is replicated to a degree across Eastern Europe, where the major Western gambling operators saw a new growth market with the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. Regulation has been playing catch-up ever since. In Romania, just a few months separated the execution of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, and the opening of the first big gambling hall in Bucharest’s Gara de Nord railway station, operated by a subsidiary of Austrian gambling giant Novomatic in partnership with the Romanian football club Rapid. It featured 80 wood-encased slot machines.

Mesesan_4.JPG: Gheorghe, 19, in a youth detention centre in the western town of Buzias. He said he was convicted of theft to fund gambling Photo: Diana Mesesan

“Hordes of people would wait in line outside the gambling hall, pushing the doors so I would open them faster,” said Pascu, who started there as an engineer and rose to become co-owner. “That’s how much they lusted after poker after the revolution.” It was in the mid-1990s that Dan began gambling, as a 20-year old student with little money. He says he went to casinos with friends for the free food and drinks they offered to lure customers. “Giving drinks and food for free was apparently a loss for casinos, but in reality it was an investment in future generations of addicts,” said Dan. During Eastern Europe’s cutthroat transition to capitalism in the 1990s, “casinos were there to sell hope,” he said. The ONJN now estimates that Romania has 70,000 slot machines. Experts say their addictive potential comes from the speed with which winnings are paid out. Such machines were banned in Norway in 2007, where gambling is state-run.

“The number of calls to the helpline dropped to below 50 per cent of the traffic before the removal,” Rune Timberlid, Senior Adviser of The Norwegian Gaming Authority, told BIRN. Finland, where, like Norway, gambling is also nationalised, channels much of the revenues back into social causes, including treatment for addicts. Though effectively bankrolled by the industry, as in Romania, Finnish anti-addiction officials are fierce in their role as advocates for addicts. Mari Pajula, head of Peluuri, the Finnish equivalent of Responsible Gaming, said her organisation tried to maintain a healthy distance from the gambling industry itself. “We criticise how the gaming companies market their products. We criticise the distribution policy, the fact that there are slot machines in every store,” Pajula told BIRN in Helsinki, speaking in English. “This is good about the Finnish system - even though Peluuri is financed by the industry we can criticise.” Corinne Bjorkenheim, who manages the Gambling Clinic in Helsinki, an umbrella programme for addiction Diana Mesesan

Romanian Roulette

Romanians walk past a row of gambling venues in Bucharest Photo: Diana Mesesan

treatment, said: “Ideally there should be a clear cut between the industry and the treatment programmes.” Legal confusion Nestor, of Romania’s ONJN, said the delay in creating the anti-addiction foundation and fund was due to confusion over the relationship between the two. Doru Gheorghiu, the executive director of Romanian Bookmakers, one of the associations that finances Responsible Gaming, also said the law did not clearly define how the foundation would be set up. Even then, Gheorghiu said, “What I can guarantee you is that in 90 per cent of the cases, the person doesn’t face a concrete gambling addiction. The person has other problems.”

BIRN emailed the Romanian Ministry of Health, the National Institute for Public Health and the National Centre for Mental Health and Fight Against Drugs to ask whether they had been consulted on how to proceed in the fight against gambling addiction. All three said they had not been consulted, nor did they have any programmes for the prevention or treatment of gambling addiction. Hriscu of the Aliat NGO said the state’s inaction was dangerous. “I’ve talked to young people in small Romanian towns and these gambling venues have become their meeting places, the community centres,” he said.

It was still drizzling when Dan stepped inside the gambling hall, taking a seat in front of the electronic roulette. No dealer; no betting chips; only a screen in front of him. Dan had relapsed and was no longer living with his wife and child. He had moved back in with his parents and was gambling at night, just like in his youth. He discovered a new generation of addicts, young men who work in supermarkets or drive taxis by day and gamble away their earnings by night. In June, he shared a video on his Facebook profile of the Swiss long-distance runner Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, her legs buckling as she staggered and swayed to the finish line of the marathon at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, a symbol of human endurance. “This is the life of an addict,” he told BIRN. “The ones who manage to survive, they do it with great suffering,” he said. “At every step, every second, there is pain and suffering.”

“Casinos were there to sell hope” – gambling addict Dan on the growth of gambling in post-Ceausescu Romania 33

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Diana Mesesan

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children Tsonka and Tenyo Tenevi with their daughter Teodora, six years after they were reunited under a programme to move disabled children out of isolated state institutions

he residential home was new, the rooms clean and airy. But the lift to the second-floor bedrooms had not been working for months, so the children spent nights sleeping in their wheelchairs or on the sofa.

Maria Milkova – Sofia, Botevgrad, Byala, Apeldoorn

There were toys, too, but it was the television on the wall that captivated the children, while at the table, an elderly carer briefly, clumsily, held a child by the hair to keep her head steady as she fed her. The carer was not rough or abusive. But there it was, in her untrained hand, in the broken elevator and the boredom, a reminder of the recent past, a period Bulgaria is trying to leave behind.

Bulgaria has closed the crowded, isolated institutions that once housed its disabled children, but is still a long way from providing the care they need.

The house, in the Benkovski suburb of the capital Sofia, was one of almost 150 built in Bulgaria over the past six years to house up to 12 disabled children each, replacing the isolated, over-crowded and under-funded state institutions where such children were once held far from the wary eye of society. Bulgaria closed the last of 24 communist-era institutions for disabled children this year, a process known as ‘deinstitutionalisation’ that some nations in Eastern Europe have already been through but which others have still to seriously tackle.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: Maria Milkova

The process has won praise and the change is significant. But closer inspection reveals just how far Bulgaria has to go. It is a cautionary tale for others, such as neighbouring Serbia, which was criticised by Human Rights Watch this year for what it said was the “neglect and isolation” facing hundreds of children with disabilities. For the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, this reporter gained access to the Benkovski facility undercover, in the interests of presenting as true a picture as possible of the successes and failures of deinstitutionalisation in Bulgaria. This reporter entered as a would-be volunteer helper, spent several hours in the home and later put the findings to authorities in charge. The picture, though improved, is still one of under-funding and under-staffing, a lack of training and lingering practices from the past. “The government took a major step, and that should be recognised. But deinstitutionalisation started very well, and then stalled,” said social anthropologist Haralan Alexandrov of the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, who has studied the process since the start. “Everybody loves to build,” he said, “but when the time comes for soft measures… that’s the difficult part.” Maria Milkova

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children Bulgaria launched the process of deinstitutionalisation in earnest in 2010, shamed into action by media reports and outrage in Europe over the horrific conditions endured by disabled children removed from society and wasting away in damp, grey, isolated buildings. Staffing problems They were victims of a policy replicated across excommunist Eastern Europe whereby parents of disabled children were advised to abandon them to the state, which then hid them away. A total of 2,115 disabled children have been moved out of such institutions in Bulgaria over the past six years; the lucky ones, more than 400, have been adopted abroad or returned to their parents, some of whom believed their children had died. The majority, 1,291, have been rehoused in small homes for up to 12 children, built with 85 million euros of EU money and located in communities around the country. The homes are a vast improvement, bright, functional and often centred around the kitchen.

A new care home for disabled children in Botevgrad, 60 kilometres northeast of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia

Experts say the move has yielded immediate results, with children already gaining height and weight. But other indicators are more worrying. “The salary is too low and no one wants to work here,” said Dimitar Manolov, the director of two care homes in Botevgrad, a small town 60 kilometres northeast of Sofia. “In the beginning, we had people coming who were simply unable to find jobs elsewhere.” Manolov listed his other woes: the houses he runs have no specialised transport for disabled children, no cleaners and had experienced some delays in salary payments. “Yesterday, we had to take two children to the dentist,” he said. “A nurse and care worker went with them and we were left with only one care worker. We have nine children here and a total of two care workers at any one time, working on shifts. It doesn’t always work out.” At 250 euros per month, the salaries earned by such care workers are among the lowest in Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU. The new houses receive 9,320 lev (4,758 euros) per child per year, rising to 14,700 lev for the severely disabled.

Photo: Maria Milkova

“Unfortunately, we have to admit we have a problem with hiring staff,” said Minka Yovcheva, the social welfare director in the Sofia municipality. “Most people who had been trained left when the actual work started. It’s hard to convince someone to stay with a salary of 500 lev.” The carers at the home BIRN accessed undercover complained that they had to cook meals for the children overnight because there was no designated cook and they had no time during the day. Under the programme, the children are supposed to see specialists – speech and language therapists, physiotherapists and psychologists – at specially-created day centres, in order to get them out of their houses and into the community. But Yovcheva and other interviewees conceded this was not yet working.

“The magic word is time. Time and a normal environment” – Freddie Wools, Dutch expert in disability care 35

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

“All the children had to be moved to the new houses and by now they should have been attending communitybased day centres,” Yovcheva told BIRN. “The problem with the reform is that this did not happen, and now the children are paying a high price.” Manolov, too, said that for over a year the children whose care he oversees had no access to the day centre, and that they still faced problems because of a lack of suitable transport and the fact he can rarely spare carers to accompany the children. At the Benkovski house BIRN entered undercover, physical and speech therapists began visiting in May thanks to funding from a local non-governmental organisation called the Bulgarian Mothers’ Movement, its chairwoman Rositsa Bukova told BIRN. Force feeding In a study published this year, Lumos, a charity founded by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling to encourage deinstitutionalisation, said most of the children were still not attending support services in the community. “This leads to a situation similar to the institutional approach where the residents are forced to spend all their time in one place,” it said.

The Lumos study was conducted in cooperation with state authorities between October and December 2015. The report noted improvements in height and weight, communication and independence skills and eating practices. However, the report said Lumos experts had also observed continued practices of force feeding and of feeding children lying in their cots. With two carers usually on duty for up to 12 children, the report said: “There is a tendency for meals to be reduced simply to the intake of a set amount of food in a set period of time.” “You need a lot of meaningful care to allow a child to develop an active desire to chew food,” child psychologist Vesela Banova told BIRN. “Caregivers without the proper education are not capable of doing so, regardless of how well-intentioned they are.” Banova took part in the process of rehousing children from Bulgaria’s Mogilino institution, which was the focus of the 2007 film Bulgaria’s Abandoned Children by documentary filmmaker Kate Blewett that triggered an international outcry. Maria Milkova

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children Noting that care workers had no specialist knowledge of how to deal with challenging behaviour, the Lumos study said it was possible that in some cases they were giving children medication in order to manage their behaviour. It said that double the number of children diagnosed with epilepsy or schizophrenia were being given anticonvulsants, and that the use of neuroleptics – used to manage psychosis – “had increased significantly since deinstitutionalisation”. The study also lamented the lack of equipment such as wheelchairs and walkers and of alternative methods of communication, such as picture boards or pictograms. Some children, it said, are left “in a non-stimulating environment where communication is entirely absent or is reduced to a minimum”. Long shadow The old institutions continue to cast a shadow over Bulgaria. In a 2010 report, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee said that 238 children had died in such institutions between 2000 and 2010. It suggested that at least three-quarters of the deaths were preventable. In June 2013, the European Court of Human Rights found the Bulgarian government responsible for the deaths of 15 children and young adults at an isolated institution over the course of three winter months between 1996-97, when the government failed to heed warnings from the director over dwindling reserves of food and fuel. More recently, however, the court in July 2016 ruled inadmissible a case brought by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee over the deaths of two disabled girls, aged 15 and 19, in 2006 and 2007. The court said the committee could not be considered an indirect victim or representative of the two children, raising doubts among rights groups over the continued search for justice for other victims. Freddie Wools, a Dutch expert on care for people with disabilities, said that for those who survived, the legacy of the former institutions would be hard to reverse. “All the children deinstitutionalised in Bulgaria, they are starting now already damaged so it will take a long time before they slowly develop to a relatively normal life,” Wools told BIRN in the central Dutch city of Apeldoorn, where he works for disability care experts De Passerel.

“The magic word is time. Time and a normal environment.” De Passerel has trained Bulgarian care workers and provided advice on the process of deinstitutionalisation. The state-of-the-art De Passerel care facilities, where some residents staff a supermarket and bakery, provided the inspiration for the kitchens at the heart of the new homes in Bulgaria. “It’s a family house, and what’s the heart of the house? The kitchen and eating together,” Wools said. “One of the basic principles we try to apply is that people feel at home.” “A way to make people feel useful is to include them all kind of activities.” But Wools lamented that in Bulgaria’s case, there is “not enough experienced staff”. “What was the purpose of deinstitutionalisation? To close down the institutions?” he asked. “Or was the purpose getting people the opportunity to have a better life? That was the purpose. Building is an important condition, but just a condition. So now the process starts.” Shortage of social workers and nurses Denitsa Sacheva, Bulgaria’s Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy, said the process of deinstitutionalisation marked “a big step forward” but conceded that the standard of care varied across the country. There was an “acute shortage” of social workers and nurses, she said, and some carers had been kept over from the old institutions, bringing with them old practices. In an interview, BIRN asked Sacheva about the problems at the house this reporter gained access to and about the findings in the Lumos report. Sacheva said her ministry would develop a plan to ensure equal access to community-based services for the children, that it was considering paying social workers overtime from 2018 and that funding for the new homes for disabled children would increase. Sacheva said the government was about to launch a 28-million lev (14.3 million euro) project to improve the care provided by social workers. “In general, for a long time the public in Bulgaria looked down on social work, underestimating how important this profession is,” she said.

“For a long time the public in Bulgaria looked down on social work” – Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy Denitsa Sacheva 36

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

The living area of a new home for disabled children in the town of Botevgrad, some 60 km northeast of Sofia Photo: Maria Milkova

Following publication of the Lumos report, Sacheva said authorities had since made a number of checks on houses and issued recommendations. “Deinstitutionalisation is not just a process of building housing units but also providing new quality formal care,” Sacheva said. “There is no way all this can happen at the same time. There is no option to invest in people, in infrastructure, and in improving formal care all at once. These things happen in stages.” Bulgaria’s experience may provide lessons for other countries in the Balkan region yet to embark on deinstitutionalisation – countries such as Serbia, for instance, which aspires to join the European Union. Human Rights Watch, in a June report on Serbian institutions for disabled children, cited cases of segregation, neglect, lack of privacy, use of inappropriate medication, lack of access to education and limited freedom of movement. Moving to harmonise its legal framework with that of the EU, Serbia has in recent years introduced a number of new legal measures to safeguard the rights of all children. But despite the progress, Human Rights Watch said, children with disabilities were still being placed in institutions. The Serbian government disputed many of the report’s findings.

Reunited The difference that specialised or family care can make is enormous. More than 300 of Bulgaria’s disabled children have been adopted, mainly by parents in the United States, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. Seventy-eight children were returned to their biological parents, some of whom were unaware their children were still alive. Tenyo and Tsonka Tenevi were living in Greece when, in October 2010, a letter arrived from Bulgarian authorities informing them that their daughter, whom they assumed had died, was being moved to a new institution. They returned to Bulgaria, determined to take her back. In their home in the eastern Bulgarian mountain village of Byala, Tenyo recalled the day they were reunited. “As soon as we entered the building, the director warned us – ‘don’t get scared of what you’re about to see,’” he said. Tenyo described an emaciated child with a swollen head “staring at a single point”. “My heart broke when we saw her.” Maria Milkova

Past Still Haunts Bulgaria’s Disabled Children Teodora was born in 2003 with severe disabilities including Spina bifida, a birth defect in which the backbone does not fully close. “The doctor told me that I wouldn’t be able to take care of the baby at home and it wouldn’t make sense to take her home anyway,” Tsonka said. Tenyo never saw his newborn daughter. “All they gave us was a birth certificate and then we had to sign several documents giving up our parental rights,” he said. The couple tried in vain to track down their daughter in the months that followed but eventually gave up and spent the next seven years believing she had died. Reunited, Tenyo said Teodora hugged her mother. “She clutched her tight and did not let go. She couldn’t move her body, only her hands. And she hugged her as if she could feel it was her mother she was hugging.”

to feed a child who appeared locked in a foetal position, motionless. “She spent all her time in this position at the institution where she lived,” the carer said. “When she came here she could not walk. It took us several months to teach her but we couldn’t convince her not to fold up like that.” Wools, of De Passerel, said Bulgaria was at the start of a long road. “Deinstitutionalisation is not bringing children into a small group home and thinking, ‘now we’ve finished.’ No, then starts the process of deinstitutionalisation here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Ten years ago I said I think ten years must be enough. Now, ten years later, I say okay, twenty years must be enough… Actually, you need almost a generation.”

Teodora has since improved significantly, putting on weight and gaining height. But her parents struggle to make ends meet on an income of 300 euros per month, just under half of which comes from Teodora’s state disability allowance. The state covers the cost of ten days of physiotherapy per month, but Tsonka said they can only afford to go three times a year due to the cost of accommodation and the long drive through the mountains. Pace of change Prejudices, too, endure. According to a 2014 report by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, not one of the severely disabled children moved out of the old institutions since 2010 was adopted by a Bulgarian family. Worryingly, too, the practice of doctors telling parents to abandon disabled children continues. “It seems like this has been going on for years,” said Tony Marinova, who heads the Association of Parents of Children with Down’s syndrome in Bulgaria. “I’m in touch with parents across the country. Almost every month a new family reaches out to our association.” Marinova said progress was being made. “It is not significant, but things are slowly changing for the better.” “People change, but one of the problems when it comes to abandoning these children is not only the attitude of doctors but also the attitude of the family and relatives who grew up with prejudices… towards the syndrome.” At the new care home in Sofia that BIRN gained access to, the two carers struggled to cope. One of them tried in vain

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Maria Milkova

An Albanian War on Drugs

An Albanian War on Drugs The first shoots of a cannabis plant in a forest clearing in northern Albania

s dusk falls, the path through the mountains becomes increasingly treacherous. Gjergji leads the way, 10 minutes by foot from the road, down into a beech forest to several small clearings where the first green shoots of a cannabis crop are poking out of the earth.

Elvis Nabolli – Shkoder, Tirana, Bari

Albania is uprooting cannabis at an unprecedented rate, but endemic corruption and a failure to target the kingpins behind a multi-billion-euro industry give the lie to the NATO member’s ‘war on drugs’.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

The 21-year-old quit his university degree in order to tend to the plantation near an empty house his family owns in the dramatic wilderness of the Albanian Alps near the northern city of Shkoder. “This plant needs a lot of work. But if we manage it through to the end, the money will be good,” he says. “I’ll renovate my house in Shkoder. Then I’ll leave for England.”

Photo: Elvis Nabolli

potential windfall of tens of thousands of euros for the corrupt officer, if the plants grow strong and tall. These are the grassroots of a multi-billion-dollar industry that in 25 years has turned Albania into one of the chief sources of cannabis on international markets, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Colombia, Jamaica, the Netherlands and Paraguay. In 2013, power changed hands, and a new Socialist government under artist-turned-politician Edi Rama declared war on the cannabis cultivators the following year, with a five-day assault on a notorious drug den near the country’s southern border with Greece.

“More young people like me are up in the mountains taking care of cannabis plantations than down in the town,” he says. But success depends on one thing.

That year, 2014, police seized just over 101 tonnes of marijuana, slightly more than the previous nine years put together. Just over half a million cannabis plants were destroyed, while the next year that number rose to 800,000 and in the first nine months of 2016 police said they had more than doubled the amount of destroyed plants again to 2.1 million.

“It’s only worth it if you have a connection in the police. He’ll tip me off about police operations in this area, so if we manage to harvest it, from 2,000 plants about 200 belong to him.” That is a

Such numbers, Rama’s government says, are evidence it is winning the war after years of impunity under the rule of its Democrat arch rivals.

Gjergji plucks empty five-litre bottles from a stash in the bushes, filling them from pools of rainwater on the forest floor to water the cannabis plants.

Elvis Nabolli

An Albanian War on Drugs An investigation for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, however, presents a more nuanced picture: undeterred, cultivators have dispersed into remote mountain areas; smugglers brag about the police protection they enjoy; Italian investigators marvel at the ingenuity of Albanian crime gangs; and in Europe and the United States, governments wring their hands at the stark failure of their NATO ally to arrest and charge anyone but the foot soldiers. Stubborn poverty, meanwhile, undercuts any effort to convince cannabis growers they have an alternative. “Criminal organisations are learning organisations that quickly adjust to top down countermeasures,” said Jana Arsovska, an assistant professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert in organised crime in the Balkans. “You need the people and the society at large to fight this problem, not just state agencies.” Selective justice The war began in Lazarat, a village in southern Albania that over 15 years had built up a cannabis industry unrivalled in Europe. Heavily armed, the village was responsible for around half of the cannabis production in Albania or some 900 tonnes per year with an estimated street value in Europe of 4.5 billion euros.

Aerial surveillance images taken by the Italian Guardia di Finanza show cannabis plantations in the southern Albanian village of Lazarat in July 2013, and then in July 2015, a year after a police raid on the area Photo: Elvis Nabolli

Its residents, who openly cultivated cannabis in backyards and fields, regularly voted for the Democrats, who last ruled from 2005 until 2013. Rama ordered the downfall of the village’s cannabis industry a year into his mandate, and just a few days before the European Union was set to rule on whether to grant Albania the coveted status of membership candidate, which would unlock more EU funds. Some 800 police officers, including Special Forces in armoured vehicles, tightened a noose around the village over five days in June, taking fire from those determined to defend the crop as they gradually pulled back and fled over the mountains. Some 130,000 cannabis plants went up in smoke, four drug laboratories were destroyed and 80 tonnes of marijuana seized. Dozens of people were arrested.

Rama said police had dismantled “the 20-year-old taboo of a crime zone that declared itself a separate republic and turned into a mark of shame for Albania”. His interior minister, Saimir Tahiri, said it demonstrated the government’s determination “to install the rule of law in every corner of Albania”.

In a progress report on Albania’s application for membership, released in November, the EU commended “remarkable drug seizures and destruction of cannabis plants” but said that the number of convictions remained low. Investigations and prosecutions, it said, “do not go high enough up the drug supply chain”.

The United States’ ambassador to Tirana, Donald Lu, weighed in on the issue in September, telling a group of journalism students that both the current and previous government “have a problem with drug trafficking and there are politicians who have benefited from their connections with drug traffickers”.

But more than two years later, just 10 people have been jailed, mainly on charges of shooting at police and cultivating cannabis.

“Police and prosecution fail to identify criminal gangs behind drug cultivation and trafficking, and efficient judicial follow-up in criminal proceedings is seldom secured,” the report said.

He reminded his audience: “We know there are several members of parliament, there are mayors in Albania and there were candidates for the position of mayors who had convictions for drug trafficking in EU member states.”

The previous year’s progress report had warned that financial investigations, anti-money laundering measures and asset confiscation were “underused”. Indeed, between 2010 and 2015, the report said, fewer than 35 people were convicted of money laundering.

BIRN requested an interview with the interior ministry and emailed questions regarding the issue of police corruption and accusations that the state has failed to target the kingpins behind the cannabis industry, but received no reply. BIRN also requested comment from the state police and border police but received no reply.

The men were widely seen as bit players in an industrial-scale organised crime operation, the leaders of which slipped away untouched, or were more likely never there at all.

“One is arrested when one has no friends either in the police or at the state administration” – New York-based Balkan crime expert Jana Arsovska on Albania’s kinship society 39

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Arsovska told BIRN: “Albanian society works on the kinship or friendship system, and one is arrested when one has no friends either in the police or at the state administration.” “Although the government claims to be ‘fighting’ the drug problem, at the same time we have serious offenders/ drug traffickers going free and escaping prison.”

Adapting to survive There are signs that the crackdown in Lazarat has dispersed cultivators to other areas in order to meet demand; they are increasingly planting on public rather than private land, within forests or on remote, mountain Elvis Nabolli

An Albanian War on Drugs

Wanted Notice Critics of the government have seized on the case of Klemend Balili, a 44-year-old Albanian businessman and former director of Transport Services, part of the Ministry of Transport, in the southern Albanian region of Saranda, as proof of a climate of impunity and government collusion with traffickers. In May 2016, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was involved in an operation that saw Greek police seize around 687 kilos of marijuana that originated in Albania, on top of 451 kilos in January 2014 and almost 700 kilos in April 2015 – all part of a two-year dragnet targeting a single trafficking ring. Greek police said the traffickers used speedboats to transport marijuana from Albania to Greece and then created bogus transport companies to send it to other European countries. Greek and Albanian media identified the chief suspect Balili. Balkan Insight reported that Balili is named in a Greek arrest warrant issued on May 9. He was fired from his state post but remains at large. Albania’s opposition Democrats have accused the government of protecting him from arrest, something the government denies; the Balili family has multiple political connections, according to Balkan Insight and Albanian media reports. A photograph of a cannabis plantation in northern Albania released by police in August 2016

Balili, quoted on the Tirana-based news portal newsbomb.al on May 11, denied the allegations, calling them politically motivated.

Photo: Albanian Police

slopes, making it more difficult for police to detect plantations and identify to whom they belong, police say.

to cultivate thousands of cannabis plants across the country,” he told BIRN in a café in Shkoder.

An internal analysis by the office of Albania’s general prosecutor, parts of which were leaked to the Albanian media in June, said: “During the last few years, cannabis cultivation has spread all over the country and in each region.”

The government disputes that cannabis production is up and that police officers are involved. It also rejects accusations, levelled by the opposition Democrats, of collusion with the traffickers.

“Growers of cannabis sativa,” according to an excerpt of the report obtained by BIRN, “use land which is public property, mostly in forests and pastures, or near water sources and far from residential areas.” A spokesman for General Prosecutor Adriatik Llalla, who was appointed to the post by parliament under the previous Democrat-led government in 2012, did not respond to a BIRN request to confirm the existence of the report and its findings. “The situation this year is incomparable with previous years, due to the huge increase in planted areas,” said Hivzi Bushati, the former head of police Special Forces for North Albania, who was dismissed when the Socialists took power and is now a member of the opposition Democrats. “Without connections within the police and politics, no one has the courage and bravery for such an investment,

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

“The public is creating the wrong impression that there is an increase in surface area of cannabis,” Altin Qato, the deputy director general of Albanian state police, told a news conference in August. “But there isn’t, the police are simply better at identifying it and taking action.” He said the interior ministry had no indications implicating police officers. “If we did, we would arrest them, because collaborators are equal to cultivators.” Later, in September, Qato said eight police officers had been fired and 21 placed under investigation on suspicion of failing to monitor their areas of responsibility.

after World War II, banned Albanians from cultivating cannabis in 1946. The drug had previously been freely traded for recreational use and as a sedative for children. Under Hoxha, the state took control, growing it as an industrial export crop on the grounds of what is today part of the Institute of Agriculture in Kamez, a municipality of Tirana County. “It was very good quality cannabis,” Ahmet Osja, the last agriculture minister of the ruling party before communism fell in 1991-92, told BIRN. “The Swiss wanted it because it was very good quality because of the light. It was used in pharmaceuticals, medicinal herbs and rope.” The end of communism ushered in a decade of intense instability, with civil unrest at home and war in neighbouring former Yugoslavia. Weapons became commonplace, politics became deeply polarised and

crime gangs flourished. A member of NATO since 2009, Albania is still wrestling with the legacy of the nineties and the power of entrenched organised crime networks that extend deep into Western Europe. Arsovska said the short-lived efforts of successive Albanian governments since the fall of communism to tackle the drugs trade were made “more for fame and publicity”, often motivated by the ‘carrot and stick’ policy pursued by the EU towards Balkan countries striving to one day join the bloc. “In general, there is a lack of solid, long-term institutional arrangements to fight organised crime in Albania,” she said. “Organised crime lives in symbiosis with the state institutions.” “Flexible adaptation based on an analysis of ways to circumvent government anti-drug policies helps explain why the illicit drug industry persists in Colombia or in

Fertile ground Blessed with an average 218 days of sunshine per year and abundant water supplies running off the mountains, Albania is fertile ground for cannabis. Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator who sealed Albania’s borders during four decades of paranoid, Stalinist rule

“If you want to do this [transport cannabis], you must speak with those in power” – unnamed drug ‘transporter’ in northern Albania Elvis Nabolli

An Albanian War on Drugs Albania in spite of the governments having dismantled several core organisations, including the Medellin and Cali groups [drug cartels in Colombia], or the Lazarat groups.” The US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook describes “limited opium and expanding cannabis production in Albania” and says ethnic Albanian narco-trafficking organisations are “active and expanding in Europe”. Transporter In Hoti, a remote mountain village on the border between Albania and Montenegro, a smuggler pointed out a narrow path, concealed by bushes and trees. “From this point on, we use animals for transportation,” he said. “The job of the police is simple, once an agreement has been reached. They just turn the radar the other way, away from the mountain in the direction of Shkoder Lake, and tell us when the road is free so we send it safely to its destination.”

Under Albanian law, the cultivation or transportation of cannabis is punishable by between three and seven years in jail, or five to 10 years if part of an organised group. Ringleaders face sentences of between seven and 15 years. From Hoti, into Montenegro, the drugs will then wind their way by road across the porous borders of the former Yugoslav republics, through Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia and finally into the EU’s borderless Schengen zone beginning in Hungary or Slovenia. Other smugglers take a more direct route, by sea or air from Albania’s western shores to the Puglia coastline of southern Italy. A little over 200 kilometres separate Albania’s Durres and the Italian port city of Bari. “Albanian marijuana often comes on very powerful speedboats, over land across Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia, or by small planes called Pipers,” said an investigator with the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian agency tasked with fighting financial crime, smuggling and the drugs trade.

“The criminal-political nexus fed by corruption allows organised crime to flourish” – Balkan crime expert Jana Arsovska “To transport one kilogram of cannabis sativa, we pay 50 euros, and this covers the Albanian transporters and the Montenegrin transporters, while the police take another slice because it’s impossible to transport anything without their permission,” he told BIRN. Transporters use donkeys, he said, laden with between 50 and 100 kilos. “Usually only those who try to go it alone or are not correct with the payments to their contact within the border police get arrested,” the smuggler said. In Hoti, one such ‘transporter’ takes a seat in the corner of a café terrace, facing the road. He gives his name as Gezim. “Everybody here has ears, though they all do it,” he says. Like other transporters, he knows the terrain and has police connections. “At maximum, we have managed to transport 100 kilos in a day, and the payment is the same, 50 euros per kilo. Usually we go during the night or in the early afternoon”, when people are either eating lunch or resting. “If you want to do this, you must speak with those in power. Otherwise, you end up in prison for a very long time.”

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

“Under the last method, traffickers just drop large quantities of drugs in Puglia, where their collaborators on land wait for it,” the investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to journalists, told BIRN in Bari. The Piper planes favoured by smugglers are light, single-engine, two-seater aircraft that can carry up to around 500 kilograms and fly up to 1,600 km without refuelling. A 2015 report by Italy’s Central Directorate for AntiDrug Services cited the use by smugglers of “clandestine runways built up across the Adriatic”. Italy’s National AntiMafia Directorate, also in a 2015 report, said one of the favourite tactics of smugglers was to hide drugs among other goods in “modified trailers, vans or passenger cars” passing through the Bari port. According to Guardia di Finanza figures, in 2014 just over three tonnes of cannabis were seized at the port. That figure fell to 1.8 tonnes in 2015, but on just one July day in 2016, a 10-metre boat was stopped and found to be carrying 1.2 tonnes of cannabis with an estimated market value of 12 million euros.

In 2006, under Democrat Prime Minister Sali Berisha, Albania imposed a ban on private speedboats, targeting traffickers in people and drugs as the government sought to convince the EU to loosen visa rules for Albanians. The moratorium expired in 2013, shortly before the parliamentary election that Berisha lost to Rama, and has not been renewed. Without its own surveillance capability, Albania struck a deal with Italy in August 2012 for the Italian police to take aerial photos of areas where cannabis is cultivated. The images are sent to the University of Naples, where experts calculate the number of cannabis plants. In 2014, the surveillance flights identified 815 plantations containing an estimated 165,000 cannabis plants during flights over just 15 percent of Albanian territory, according to Guardia di Finanza figures. In 2015, it identified 1,200 plantations with some 243,000 plants, also over 15 percent of territory. “We need money” “When the police destroy more crops, they (cultivators) just increase the planted area,” said renowned Albanian crime reporter Artan Hoxha. Hoxha has spent years reporting on drug crime in Albania, and in 2015 received a death threat via SMS from a Dutch-registered phone number.

Smugglers have little trouble finding willing collaborators to grow cannabis, and police officers ready to turn a blind eye. Arsovska told BIRN: “The criminal-political nexus fed by corruption allows organised crime to flourish.” Bribery, she said, has a “long tradition” and is generally accepted. “Looking at the situation in Afghanistan,” said Arsovska, “it is hard to tell the farmers to stop growing opium poppy if you don’t have good alternatives to offer. The moneymaking alternative should be equally profitable and less risky in order for the supply to go down. It is difficult to tell people to stop cooperating with offenders if they don’t have better ways of making money, or if they simply fear retribution.” Gjergji, in the mountains above Shkoder, put it in his own words: “[The buyers] have the money, we have the stuff. It’s that simple,” he said. “One kilo of cannabis can be sold for 800 to 1,000 euros. So you understand how important it is.” “We want to live and we need money. Not all of us will escape, but I hope I will.”

“This year … to make it more difficult for police to attack them, they (drug smugglers) have increased the number of plantations and spread them out all over the country,” he told BIRN, “making it impossible for the police to destroy it all.” “The Albanian police don’t have the numbers or equipment necessary to operate all over the country. Those who get arrested are mostly unorganised individuals or poor villagers, while most of the plantations survive.” The EU’s 2015 progress report said the level of police equipment and logistics was concerning. It said the police force makes “little use” of the strategic intelligence tools at its disposal under an operational agreement with Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency. “The poor capacity of judicial police and prosecutors to detect and investigate complex criminal cases means they are limited to simple investigations ending in arrests in the act, so there is no comprehensive approach to investigations and prosecutions.” The Albanian state police has around 10,000 officers, for a population of some 2.7 million people, earning on average about 350 euros per month. The average wage in Albania is only slightly higher, at 370 euros per month. Almost every fifth member of the workforce is unemployed, and agriculture is the biggest employer. Elvis Nabolli

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands Vasiliki Katsoula holds one of the many boxes of medication she shares with her parents at their Athens home

t first glance, Vasiliki Katsoula and Konstantinos Karaouzas have little in common.

Katsoula is a thickset 48-year-old woman, depressed, out of work and on the brink of poverty in a hardscrabble district of Athens. Karaouzas is a 39-year-old Paralympic swimmer from a well-heeled suburb of the capital, with a sinewy torso and salt-and-pepper beard.

Dimitra Triantafylloy – Athens

Let down by the public health system, some Greeks are sharing pills, skipping medicine or putting their faith in a growing industry of nutritional supplements.

Yet there is one thing they do share – both feel badly let down by Greece’s crumbling healthcare system and are taking their health into their own hands. Having lost her cleaning job and with it her state health insurance in 2010, Katsoula’s chosen tool is a kitchen knife, with which she chops and rations the medication she and her parents share for hypertension, blood sugar, cholesterol, depression and more. “I have high blood pressure, but how can I afford to buy the pills?” asks Katsoula in their ramshackle family home in Aspropyrgos, an area of Athens blighted by oil refineries and a reputation for crime and poverty. Katsoula says the family lives largely off her father’s 900euro pension, reduced from 1,300 euros by government spending cuts, but spends several hundred euros per month on medicines. “Now we owe my pharmacist 200 euros,” she said.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Photo: Anna Pantelia

“I borrow [medication] from my mother. But I have to calculate the dosage for me and adjust it. Sometimes I cut it with a knife. Sometimes I don’t take it at all.” “My mother and father share the cholesterol pills; my mother takes 10 milligrams and my father 20, so if she runs out, I cut my father’s with a knife to give to her.” Karaouzas, on the other hand, says he is fed up with the lack of time, resources and expertise for the treatment of disabled people in cash-starved public hospitals and is tired of the chronic over-prescription of antibiotics for his recurring urinary tract infections. Instead, he is putting his faith in nutritional supplements, in his case a combination of extract of aloe vera and collagen, a protein found in human joints. “It was very good for me, for my skin … and for my joints,” Karaouzas said of aloe vera. “Some aches have receded. It has also helped me a lot with my digestive system.” Katsoula and Karaouzas represent a growing trend in Greece of self-medication, or more accurately improvisation, after six years of one of the worst economic crises of modern times. Some Greeks, like Katsoula, find themselves sharing, skipping, substituting and improvising with pills on a daily basis. Others, like Karaouzas, are turning to a growing Dimitra Triantafyllou

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands over-the-counter industry in nutritional supplements that sees an opportunity in the public healthcare crisis. They have rejected, or feel rejected by, a cash-starved, under-stocked and overwhelmed public health system that saw its funding slashed by 60 per cent between 2010 and 2014.

per cent in July 2014, according to a study published in March 2016 by the independent Greek research body Dianeosis. It now stands at 25 per cent. The rising cost, growing queues and an enduring culture of bribery mean many Greeks are avoiding trips to the doctor. “I don’t want the doctors – they just see money,” said Katsoula.

“Many patients take the wrong medicines either because there are spare ones left over from a family member or because they cannot afford to buy the proper ones,” said Giorgos Vichas, a cardiologist and founder of the Metropolitan Community Clinic, a ‘solidarity clinic’ run by volunteers in Athens that many Greeks turn to for free, donated medicines.

The results have echoes of Greece’s Balkan neighbours in the former Yugoslavia and ex-Communist Romania and Bulgaria, where turmoil in the 1990s ravaged the health sectors, fuelling the over-prescribing or illegal sale of antibiotics and a growing problem of addiction to tranquilizers and antidepressants.

“It’s very often the phenomenon at the solidarity clinic that patients try to make their own combinations of medicine,” Vichas told BIRN. “For uninsured people, this is the norm. Either they improvise, or they don’t take the medicine at all, or they reduce the dosage.”

Legislation in 2014 under a previous government and again under the current leftist Syriza leadership in July 2016 has tried to open up access to the public health system to uninsured Greeks, but doctors and patients complain the creaking and inefficient system is still not working.

“Every medicine can be dangerous if not used according to the advice of a doctor.” Cash-starved

According to the Dianeosis study, 67 per cent of those polled said they had difficulty paying for medicines. A majority said they spent up to 10 per cent of their income on medication.

The Greek public health system has been turned on its head since late 2009, when Athens revealed a gaping hole in its public finances and turned in 2010 to its European Union partners and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, for the first of so far three multi-billion-dollar bailouts.

Thirteen per cent either postponed buying medicines prescribed by doctors because of a lack of money, or did not buy them at all. Ten per cent said they took smaller doses than their doctor had prescribed in order to make the medicine last longer.

What followed were successive waves of withering spending cuts that set Greece on a downward spiral into depression, drove up unemployment and starved an already dysfunctional and corrupt health system of budget funds.

Some, like the Katsoula family, turn to cheaper, generic substitutes.

Waiting times shot up, supplies of medicines and medical equipment dwindled and the number of people left without state health insurance because they were unemployed climbed steeply to an estimated three million, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Uninsured Greeks were denied free or subsidised access to doctors or medication. Even for those who were insured, the list of medicines that the state subsidises for patients has shrunk, as has the size of the subsidies. The proportion that the patient must pay rose from 12.8 per cent in January 2012 to 29.3

After Katsoula’s mother Eleni changed her hypertension pills five times, a doctor advised the family to stop experimenting because it may have contributed to the bleeding that sent Eleni to hospital in April 2016. There, doctors ordered an intestinal endoscopy, but told Eleni she would have to wait at least six months for the next opening. ‘Self-medication continued to rise’ Karaouzas, too, has found little joy in the public health system, which repeatedly prescribed him antibiotics for a recurring infection and, he says, has little time or resources for his special needs since a motorcycle accident 16 years ago left him paralysed from the waist down.

“Either they improvise, or they don’t take the medicine at all, or they reduce the dosage” – ‘solidarity clinic’ founder Giorgos Vichas 43

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Greek Paralympic swimmer Konstantinos Karaouzas holds a bottle of aloe vera extract that he drinks for pains in his joints Photo: Anna Pantelia

Disability associations and watchdogs warn that healthcare cuts have hurt the expertise and resources available for the treatment of disabled people, meaning few are getting the special treatment they need within the public health system. The National Confederation of Disabled People told BIRN that it frequently received complaints that particular treatments required by disabled people were being cut from the list of those subsidised by the state and the cost of care was creeping up. Budget cuts had driven up waiting times and reduced resources, it said. “Social welfare for people with disabilities has been almost entirely left to the discretion of their families,” it said. Athens urologist Christos Fliatouras said doctors were examining disabled people like Karaouzas “without the necessary knowledge”. “People like him need specialists and not just plain urologists. But in Greece there is a lack of regulations, services and a supporting framework.” Karaouzas has turned to homeopathy and expensive nutritional supplements such as aloe vera and collagen in the hope they can help keep him healthy and out of hospital.

At a time when other businesses are shutting shops, cutting their losses and laying off workers, studies suggest the market in nutritional supplements is growing. “Self-medication continued to rise, as public health funds were cut and consumers tried to avoid visiting doctors,” the London-based research company Euromonitor International said in a report on consumer health in Greece released in September. The loosening of rules on the sale of over-the-counter products and liberalisation of pharmacy ownership – reforms made under pressure from Greece’s international lenders – “are expected to create prosperous ground for demand and value sales in consumer health”, it said. “The Greek government’s intention to further reduce the public budget on healthcare is set to drive the selfmedication trend; hence will create prosperous ground for growth in consumer health in the forecast period.” Spiros Terzopoulos of Pharma Centre, which sells pharmaceutical products including vitamins and supplements, concurred, telling the Greek ‘Health’ magazine in 2014 that the reform of the market meant new forms of supplements had emerged “to fill many of the healthcare gaps”. Dimitra Triantafyllou

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands It confirmed that Tsoukaladakis had left the company and declined to comment on his 2014 statement, saying it had been “detached from the wider context of the discussion”.

“The major allies in the evolution of food supplements are pharmacists, who see their customers daily facing many different problems and have taken it upon themselves to act as health advisers and to propose the use of many new supplements … proven to provide solutions to small health problems and alleviate major problems,” he was quoted as saying. Terzopoulos could not be reached for comment.

The EOF told BIRN in an email: “We are in an open communication with the National Council for Radio and Television regarding the advertising of similar products that make health claims.”

George Dokios, the general director of the Greek over-thecounter medicine industry association EFEX, was quoted in June by the consumer healthcare website OTCToolbox as saying the over-the-counter market had increased by 31 per cent in value terms between 2010 and 2015, and from five per cent to 12 per cent in terms of a proportion of the total pharmaceutical market.

At around 50 euros for a bottle of 600 ml, which if taken as per the instructions would last 24 days, drinkable collagen is expensive for many Greeks. Doctors, nevertheless, are alarmed at the degree to which their patients are putting their faith in nutritional supplements.

Online shopping portal Skroutz.gr has reported, in Greek, a 469 per cent rise in sales of food supplements through its website between 2013 and 2014. It said the vitamin and dietary supplements category was among the top five categories of products with the highest growth in online sales.

BIRN was given a leaked copy of the minutes of an April 2015 meeting of the Athens Medical Association, on condition the names of the doctors quoted were not revealed. One said: “Many colleagues call the medical association to complain about the advertising of hyaluronic acid and collagen, due to which patients stop following their treatment.”

Greece’s National Organisation for Medicines, EOF, the state body that approves licences for medication, cosmetics and supplements, told BIRN that the number of applications to put nutritional supplement products on the market had roughly doubled between 2012 and 2014.

Another said: “We have to find out to what extent we can intervene as the medical association to stop this story with the advertisement of substances and products through the internet, television, everywhere, with the result that patients drift away and abandon their treatments.”

The EOF said rules on the kind of claims such products can make in their advertisements were, however, “frequently violated”. Promises Drinkable collagen, a protein found in the human body, has become particularly visible since entering the market in Greece in 2010, often with promises to alleviate joint pain, osteoporosis, arthritis and more. Arthritis Research UK says that trials into collagen’s role in treating osteoarthritis give “mixed results”. Studies into its role in treating rheumatoid arthritis “suggest that it doesn’t have a significant effect in reducing pain and joint inflammation”, the group says, though it adds that “this hasn’t been consistently reproduced across trials”. Giorgos Tsoukaladakis, the former face of the company Collagen Power, told a popular lifestyle show on Greek television in 2014: “It’s a natural anti-anxiety agent. Stress and anxiety has driven everyone crazy. Unemployment has hit every house. There is not a house, not a family that does not have one or two unemployed people.” Clutching a bottle of the company’s flagship product Collagen Pro-Active, he told the presenter: “It helps improve our psychological wellbeing.” Tsoukaladakis is no longer with Collagen Power. Greek pop star Giorgios Sampanis has even promoted the product, featuring it four times in a raunchy 2014 music video for the song Mono Ex Epafis (Only By Touch).

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

The EOF told BIRN that in June 2014 it recommended to the Greek Ministry of Health that Collagen Power be fined 35,000 euros for misleading advertising. Asked whether the fine was actually imposed, an official at the ministry said the complaint was lodged under the previous government and directed this reporter back to the EOF, which referred the reporter back to the ministry. Collagen Power owner Giorgos Triantafillou declined to be interviewed for this story. BIRN also sent the company detailed questions regarding its advertising and the fine. The company replied: “We have not been informed of any decision – or any intention – of the EOF to propose to the Ministry of Health a fine. No fine has been imposed on our company”

He also said a new public database of waiting lists would eradicate the notorious practice of doctors seeking bribes to help a patient jump the queue, known as ‘fakelaki or ‘little envelope’. The practice has worsened under the austerity cuts as medical workers see their own incomes cut, and is part of a wider problem of corruption and tax evasion that Greece’s lenders have said Athens must tackle as a condition of financial aid. “This is a revolution in healthcare!” he shouted. But Vichas, of the solidarity clinic, said that while there had been improvements in providing uninsured Greeks with access to the public health system, long waiting lists and cash-starved hospitals meant many were simply returning to the solidarity clinic. Some Greeks, Vichas wrote in September on his Facebook profile, are still unable to afford even the state-subsidised medicines, not least because of the difference between the retail price and the amount the subsidy covers, a gap that is getting bigger. “The public health system has been ransacked,” said Vichas.

The EOF told BIRN that fines were frequently imposed for misleading advertising. “But companies do not comply, at least not immediately,” it said.

He described a situation in which a patient comes to Greece’s National Primary Healthcare Network, the network of frontline community clinics, with shortness of breath.

“The legal framework is insufficient both in terms of the level of fines and the speed necessary to be effective in such cases.”

“I need him to do a triplex and a stress test, but we do not have the necessary machines,” he said. “For an uninsured person, these can only be done at a public hospital where the person will encounter a huge waiting list and end up finding an opening months away. The time in between can be fatal.”

‘Ransacked’ An advertisement for drinkable collagen outside a pharmacy in Athens, Photo: Dimitra Triantafyllou saying it offers a solution for osteoporosis and arthritis

Baskozos said the Syriza government planned to hire more doctors, nurses and paramedics, that it had managed a modest increase in healthcare spending and was offering free access to the public health system for uninsured Greeks.

Ioannis Baskozos, the secretary general of public health in the Greek Ministry of Health, said he favoured a blanket ban on such advertising. But the government’s hands are tied, he told BIRN. “The obsession of the Troika,” he said, referring to Greece’s trio of international lenders at the EU, the European Commission and the IMF, “is to commercialise medicine.”

Dimitris Kourouvakalis, a nurse at Ippokration General Hospital in Athens and a senior member of the PanHellenic Federation of Public Hospital Workers (POEDIN), described a typical scene: “During the on-call days… waiting times can reach 15 hours, while in one of our clinics there is one nurse for 40 patients. From time to time we face huge shortages. We

“Self-medication continued to rise, as public health funds were cut and consumers tried to avoid visiting doctors” - Euromonitor International research company Dimitra Triantafyllou

Greeks Take Health into Their Own Hands

Vasiliki Katsoula, pictured with her mother Eleni, holds medical bills at their home in the Athens district of Aspropyrgos

reached a point where we didn’t even have gauzes. Many times my colleagues bought surgical gloves themselves, while sometimes we ask patients to buy their own medicines.” Anxiety Rather than brave such hospitals or community clinics, many Greeks simply buy antibiotics under the counter from their pharmacist. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Greece is the EU’s No. 1 consumer of antibiotics outside hospitals – 34.1 daily doses per 1,000 citizens. Within its Balkan neighbourhood, Romania ranks second with 31.2 daily doses; Croatia is 12th with 21.4 doses, Bulgaria 13th with 21.3 and Slovenia is 25th with 14.2.

Photo: Anna Pantelia

tell them that if they do not speak to their doctor you’re not going to give them what they ask for,” she said. Sotirios Tsiodras, associate professor in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the medical school of Athens University, cited research that indicated between 40 and 60 per cent of drugstores sell antibiotics without a prescription. Tsiodras said that six years of the intense economic crisis, anxiety and the state of public health system had left Greeks clutching for straws. “That’s the reason for this trend; instead of going and paying a doctor of good reputation, you go and try herbs or a traditional recipe you got from your grandmother, or anything else.”

Niki Likourgia, a pharmacist in the hillside Athens district of Lycabettus, said cancer patients came to her asking for “medicines for irrelevant conditions, besides their treatment, without consulting their doctor”. “You cannot possibly imagine how many syrups and antipyretics (to reduce fever) they ask for when their immune system is down. They even yell at you when you

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Dimitra Triantafyllou

About The Programme

Partners

The Balkan news media are increasingly required to report on complex reform issues with regional and European dimensions. Regional journalists, however, are underprepared to tackle these issues, lacking resources for appropriate training or the funding necessary for in-depth cross-border reporting.

ERSTE Foundation

To tackle these obstacles, Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence was established in 2007. The fellowship takes an international approach and is designed to support quality reporting, initiate regional networking among journalists and to advance balanced coverage of topics that are of key interest in the region and the European Union (EU). Each year, ten Balkan journalists are selected to take part. Successful applicants receive both editorial back-up and the financial assistance necessary to produce the articles. This ensures participants can travel to research their topic, conduct interviews in person, and broaden their understanding of cross-border phenomenon so that their final stories meet the highest journalistic standards of accuracy and balance. Fellows must be available to attend seminars and editorial sessions during the course of the programme. Participants are expected to complete 2,000-word stories, which will be subject to international-style editorial processes and which showcase top-quality journalism with a cross-border reporting angle. The final articles are disseminated in local languages, English and German and are republished in the Balkans and beyond. The coverage of themes crucial to the development of the Balkans and its integration within the EU is central to the programme. The fellowship sets high standards for Southeastern European journalism and helps the industry to focus on the challenges posed by EU-oriented reforms and to improve understanding among Balkan nations, the wider region and the union.

In 2003, ERSTE Foundation evolved out of the Erste Oesterreichische SparCasse, the first Austrian savings bank. Being one of Erste Group’s shareholders, ERSTE Foundation invests its dividends in social development projects in Austria and Central and South Eastern Europe. It supports social participation and civil-society engagement; it aims to bring people together and disseminate knowledge of the recent history of a region that has been undergoing dramatic changes since 1989. As an active foundation, it develops its own projects within the framework of three programmes: Social Development, Culture and Europe. www.erstestiftung.org

Open Society Foundations The network of Open Society Foundations (OSF) is a grantmaking operation founded by George Soros in 1993, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. On a local level, OSF implements a range of initiatives to support the rule of law, education, public health, and independent media. At the same time, OSF works to build alliances across borders and continents on issues such as combating corruption and rights abuses. One of the aims of the OSF is the development of civil society organizations (e.g., charities and community groups) to encourage participation in democracy and society. http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/

BIRN The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) is a regional media development organisation, working with Balkan journalists to produce reports on a variety of political, economic and social issues. Its member organisations throughout the region run a range of training and public debate projects to enhance the capacity and impact of analytical and investigative journalism. Together, they produce Balkan Insight, the leading publication covering the region’s path to Europe. www.birn.eu.com

Media Partners Prominent German, Austrian and Swiss newspapers, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Standard and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, are media partners of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme. Besides being involved in the selection committee, they actively participate in seminars, support fellows if needed and seek to republish the best articles produced by them. www.sueddeutsche.de http://derstandard.at www.nzz.ch

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Biographies of Fellows

Masenjka Bacic has been a freelance print and broadcast journalist since 2007, focused mainly on social and cultural issues and minority rights. Masenjka has contributed to Internet portals such as STav, Lupiga.com and pogledaj.to, as well as Croatia’s Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper and public National Radio 3. For the fellowship programme, Masenjka will look at access to abortion in Croatia and the attitudes of society and authorities.

Bojan Blazevski writes for the Macedonian architecture, construction and urban development website Build.mk. He began as a parttime reporter six years ago and now covers daily news and writes longer, analytical pieces for the website. For the fellowship programme, Bojan will look at the issue of architectural copyright in the context of the government’s Skopje 2014 overhaul of the Macedonian capital.

Balkan Fellowship For Journalistic Excellence 2016

Aleksandrina Ginkova writes about international affairs for the Bulgarian news website Dnevnik. bg, focusing mainly on the European Union, Turkey, the Balkans and Nordic countries. Aleksandrina has also reported from Brazil and Israel. For the fellowship programme, Aleksandrina will report on the civic patrols trying to prevent migrants from crossing from Turkey into Bulgaria.

Serbeze Haxhiaj is a news editor at the public broadcaster Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK) with a background in investigative journalism on issues such as corruption, justice, security and terrorism. A journalist since 1998, Serbeze has worked for the Kosovo newspapers Rilindja, Zeri, Lajm and Koha Ditore. Serbeze has previously carried out three investigative projects with the support of the Danish investigative journalism foundation SCOOP. For the fellowship programme, Serbeze will look at the issue of witness protection in Kosovo in the context of the new European Unionbacked war crimes tribunal.

Marija Jankovic is a journalist at the Serbian daily Vecernje Novosti, specialising in the energy industry. Marija has worked closely on issues of worker rights and unions for the past five years. For the fellowship programme, Marija will look at allegations of corruption within trade unions in Serbia.

Adrian Lungu is a journalist for the past 15 years, Adrian Lungu has been an editor at the Romanian quarterly magazine Decat o Revista since 2011, having spent seven years at the EurActiv.ro portal that focuses on European Union affairs and policies. For the fellowship programme, Adrian will investigate the recycling industry in the Balkans.

Diana Mesesan is a Bucharestbased features writer who has contributed to The Black Sea, RomaniaInsider, Decat o Revista and Think Outside the Box, with a focus on rights and human interest stories. For the fellowship programme, Diana will look at gambling addiction and the efforts of the state and gambling industry to tackle it.

Maria Milkova is a journalist and photographer working at the Bulgarian national television NOVA tv. Maria focuses on social issues, civil society and human rights. For the fellowship programme, Maria will look at care for disabled children in the context of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ in Bulgaria.

Elvis Nabolli is a journalist for Albanian News TV and contributes to other media mainly from the northern Shkodra region. He began working in journalism in 2006 for the Shkodra broadcaster TV Rozafa and has worked on a number of investigative projects. For the fellowship programme, Elvis will look at cannabis smuggling and the progress Albania says it has made in stamping out the trade.

Dimitra Triantafylloy is a journalist focusing on social issues, health and gender.Dimitra spent a decade on the staff of the Athens Voice newspaper and has contributed to a number of weekly magazines and the main Greek daily newspapers. More recently she has worked with international media covering the Greek crisis and at the investigative magazine The Greek Report. For the fellowship programme, Dimitra will look at why Greeks are turning away from traditional medicine.