A Cold War within the Cold War - Romanian exceptionalism

A review of With Friends Like These by Larry Watts



The recent past is a forgotten country. The Cold War now seems a
period as remote as the Thirty Years War, John le Carré’s novels
almost as quaint as those of Dumas père. Those of us who grew up in
the West in the Cold War rather than studying it as history rely on
memories of information that was very partial and misleading. We now
know that the so called satellites of the USSR were very much actors
following their own scripts. Often the supposed puppets were pulling
the strings. Kim Il Sung manipulated Stalin into supporting his attack
on South Korea and Ho Chi Minh inveigled  Russia into enabling him to
defeat the South Vietnamese. Now Larry Watts’ ground-breaking,
enjoyable  and meticulously researched book, which deserves to find a
wide audience, shows that Ceausescu’s Romania posed a threat to the
USSR greater than Tito and comparable with the 1956 Hungarian
uprising, the Prague Spring and the Solidarity movement in Poland.


Eastern Europe was not the story of quislings ruling subject people
on instructions from the Kremlin. The men and one or two women (of

whom Romanians Anna Pauker and Elena Ceausescu were two of the most significant)
who ran the Communist Empire were believers who had risked death and
imprisonment from their enemies and from their communist friends
because of their beliefs. In power they combined as all politicians do
the desire for power, love of manipulation and genuine idealism, to
which they added a ruthless devotion to their grim cause and a
fanatical conviction that they understood the direction of history
which seemed to them scientific but we clearly see to be essentially religious.



Of course Marx and Lenin were wrong. Class is not the
driver of history, nor even are economic interests. Nations command
far more allegiance even from socialists than social classes. Behind
the monolithic appearance of the Soviet Bloc the disappearance
of national differences of course did not happen. What is remarkable
is the degree to which the conflicts between neighbouring countries in
Eastern Europe before 1945 continued seamlessly after the Communists came
to power. The most arresting example is Hungary, until 1918 the most
reactionary country in Europe west of Czarist Russia. There in 1919 in
the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Hapsburg Empire the arch
conservative antisemitic army and civil service enlisted as supporters
of the Bolshevik revolution of Bela Kun a.k.a. Aaron Cohen.
The Hungarian gentile middle class saw in Bolshevik Russia the only
hope  of preserving Greater Hungary, in particular Hungarian
possession of Transylvania and the Banat, which had been occupied

after the armistice by Romania. Kun’s regime hoped the Russian Red 
Army would break through Romanian lines into the Bucovina and link 
up with the Hungarian Red Army. Instead, the Romanian army occupied

Budapest and overthrew the Communists.

Larry Watts's book explains that in the 1944-46 history repeated itself and
the supporters and gendarmes of the Hungarian dictator Admiral Horthy
who had distinguished themselves in Hungarian occupied
Transylvania with great brutality, reinvented themselves as Communist
officials and ‘people’s police’. Stalin encouraged Hungarians to hope
that Transylvania would become a  separate country  or divided between
Romania and Hungary. He played off Hungary and Romania against each

other in the same way that Hitler had done.

Meanwhile the annexation of Bessarabia (now most of the Republic of Moldova)

and the Northern Bucovina (which became  part of the Ukraine) led to the arrests,

deportations and killings of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Romanians who 
found themselves living in the USSR. In addition, Khrushchev in charge of
post-war Ukraine presided over a deliberate famine which Watts says was

probably aimed at ethnic Romanians that may have killed between one and 
two hundred thousand people, while Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of 
the Soviet Republic of Moldavia, may have reduced the ethnic Romanian 
population there by as many as a quarter of a million.

Mutual antipathy between Russians and Romanians (the Mamalizhniki  or
polenta eaters) has long roots in conflict over territory. Russia ruled

Bessarabia (Eastern Moldavia) off and on since 1812. She occupied the rest of Romania on several occasions between 1812 and 1919. It was very feasible had it not been for the other Powers that Romania would have been incorporated in the Russian Empire as were

Georgia, Armenia and central Asia.

Communism only exacerbated things. Engels whose works had the status
of holy scripture for Marxist-Leninists had written that the Romanians
were a ‘degenerate’ people, ‘a people without history’. The revolution
said Engels would ‘annihilate’ the Romanians, wiping them ‘from the
face of the earth. And that too would be a step forward.’ Engels wrote
this in 1849, angry with the Romanians for fighting for the Emperor
against the 'progressive' forces of the Hungarian nationalist Kossuth.
From Communism to Fascism was always but a step.

Gheorghiu Dej the Communist leader of Romania from 1948 till his death
in 1965 was unique among Stalin’s satraps in not being a ‘Muscovite’, a
Communist trained during the 30s in Russia. He won favour with Moscow
for his support in helping reassert Soviet control over Hungary after
the 1956 Revolution and succeeded (one would like Watts to have
explained in more detail how) in persuading the USSR to withdraw
troops from Romania by 1958. Crucially the Romanians also managed to
roll up very extensive KGB and Hungarian spy networks (very often the two
were combined).  These included a series of Hungarian irredentist
secret societies operating in Transylvania run by the Communist
government in Hungary with KGB knowledge.

In the Warsaw Pact Organisation hastily cobbled together in 1955,
Romania from almost the beginning played the role of enfant terrible
and barrack room lawyer. Romania took an independent line, enjoying
good relations with Tito, building the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant
on the Danube without Khrushchev’s permission. In 1963 Dej told Kennedy that he did
not support Soviet missile deployments in Cuba and would never allow
Soviet missiles to be stationed on Romanians soil. The Cuban crisis
may have precipitated an effective declaration of independence in
1963 by the Romanian government who refused to increase military
budgets saying they saw no threat of aggression from the West. The
Bucharest Spring of 1964 Watts convincingly argues should be compared
to the split with Tito in 1948, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and
the Prague spring four years later.

Ceausescu was more disruptive than de Gaulle in NATO. In June 1965,
unnoticed by Western secret services, Romania was dropped from Warsaw
pact military operations. The Pentagon continued to plan on the
assumption that Romania would fight alongside her Warsaw pact partners
even though Romania’s role in the alliance was to impede Soviet
policy. Again unbeknown to the CIA, Romania became a Chinese ally
second only in importance to Albania, a position it used to help mend
fences between China and the United States. For example, Romania helped

persuade Hanoi to negotiate with Washington. In 1967 Romania refused to 
break off relations with Israel following the Six Day War while De Gaulle
aligned with the Soviet position. Romania acted as honest broker between Israel

and the Arab states and can be take some of the credit for the 1978 Camp

David agreement that led to peace between Israel and Egypt.

Ceausescu, alone of the Communist leaders, publically backed the
Prague Spring and condemned the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Yet none of this was understood by the CIA who were spellbound for many

years by the disclosures of the Soviet defector Golitsyn. Golitsyn said that
Romanian independence was a KGB ruse. This Trojan horse  theory which
had been disseminated before Golitsyn continued through
the Gorbachev period. By 1990 it had become the received wisdom in the
West, after Ceausescu’s regime had been overthrown by Romanian
Gorbachevites working in league with the Kremlin and the KGB.

Other legends were circulated according to which Kadar and Gomulka
followed independent lines whereas both were always loyal to Moscow.
General Jarulselski and Urho Kekkonen long-time President of Finland
were Soviet agents. Tito was far more amenable to the Soviets than
Romania and unlike Romania bought Soviet military equipment. He
allowed the Russians to fly over Yugoslav aerospace and use land
transport routes and Yugoslav ports for transshipping arms to Soviet
clients in the Middle East.

Watts tells us that on several occasions between 1968 and 1971 Russia
planned to invade Romania and Honecker of East Germany was told as
late as the end of 1973 that Brezhnev had approved an invasion. Russia
was emboldened by the relative nonchalance with which the Western bloc
has reacted to the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Had an
invasion of Romania been received in the same way, Russia intended to
march into Yugoslavia. In August 1968, the Romanian Communist Party
expected an invasion by the USSR and voted almost unanimously to
fight, though as Ceausescu admitted without hope of success. The Stasi.

 the East German secret service reclassified Romania as an enemy state

at this time. The Americans unaware of what was going on were anxious

to avoid being drawn into a conflict. So was Tito, who had good reason

to fear that Yugoslavia would be invaded after Romania. In August 1968

Tito turned to Great Britain for help, using Sir Fitzroy Maclean as an

intermediary, in the event of a Soviet invasion of Romania. MI6

unlike the CIA knew that a Russian invasion was on the cards. Harold

Wilson discussed with Michael Stewart and Denis Healey the idea of

sending crack troops to fight alongside partisans as in the Second

World War. 1968 not 1963 was probably the moment when Cold War

came closest to becoming hot.

Ceausescu’s famous speech from the balcony of the Central Committee
building on 23rd August 1968 had won him national support but
Nagy and Dubcek had had equal popular backing. Why did the Russians
and their allies not invade? For a number of reasons. Because in
Romania, unlike in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, they no longer had a
sufficiently extensive intelligence network enabling them to
know what was going on in the party or the armed forces or clients in
top positions who could request a Soviet intervention, because
Ceausescu and his colleagues unlike the Czechs would have fought and
because they had assumed national control over their armed forces
which were prepared a military response against an invader from any
direction. The fact that the US, Britain, and perhaps most explicitly,
Socialist giant China had weighed in to deter a Soviet move no doubt
played their role. 


Courted by the Carter Administration in the late 70s

Watts argues that Ceausescu was free in the late 1970s to have led Romania

into a non-aligned position similar to that of Yugoslavia and to have 

competed with Tito for American favours. Instead he decided to create 

an autarchic national communist state, independent of Moscow and

Washington, a path that led him to the firing squad in Tirgoviste on
Christmas Day, 1989.

©Paul Wood 2011

Balkan Journey

Friday 7 August 2009

In England the great train robber Ronnie Biggs slips away from prison.  A figure from my 1960s childhood, playing in the street,  along with Georgie Best, Bernadette Devlin, Henry Kissinger, the  Viet Cong and Cilla Black.

The drive to from Bucharest to Vratza, four pretty hours . A wonderful hotel,  the Chaika Hotel, found by me in a few moments on the net coast €25 a double room overlooking the Vratcata Gorge.  Leaving Patrick in the hotel, I walk through the gorge as darkness falls. Feel proud of myself. Good food.

Saturday

Walking. Lunch. Drive to Sofia. Not via the mountain road. We miss it. I point it out. Patrick doggedly refuses to believe it is the road.

Sofia. Dullsville. Sunshine. Quiet and hot on a Saturday evening in August. 

The Hotel Anel. I thought from listening to Tony  that other people thought nothing of paying €60 a night for a five star hotel but Patrick who does not like to give himself presents is dismayed and I consider expensive places corrupt.

The mosque. The man wants me to wear flip-flops which I decline grateful for the feel of sock on carpet. What kind of Muslims are these? Attractive, empty except for one white foreigner praying energetically, head down and bottom up.

Too much food in a very dimly lit pizza terrace near the mosque full of 20-somethings talking loudly in the dark. 

Sunday, Sofia

The dark (pastel coloured actually) satanic mall in the middle of Sofia doesn’t make me very nostalgic for Communism. That’s far in the past now. I tell myself it makes people happy. Finally with difficulty after I from boredom bought a striped tie in an extraordinary mint green (only Americans wear striped ties I know) we find the exit from Sofia  for Macedonia. 

Kyustendil. Little town near the border with a beautiful derelict mosque. The guidebook says there is no longer a significant Muslim population here no doubt veiling all sorts of human tragedies. Sunshine. Quiet. Balkan. The profound Bulgaria. The great calm of small towns in Eastern Europe.

Just over the border is the monastery of St. Joachim Osogovsky, near Kriva Palanka, Macedonia’s most attractive monastery. In fact there are two twin monasteries, on the Macedonian side of the border perched on a hill, just like one I visited in Syria where the villagers  spoke Aramaic. One is old. Many Macedonian Mass-goers pilgrims, day trippers. Very pretty road through mountains. The journey from Sofia to Skopje took three and a half hours not the seven which it took me when I went by bus including much time on a mountain top waiting while customs officers on both sides went through our luggage piece by piece (I as an Englishman was spared this). by bus. Rain torrential. Skopje.

Much though not all of Skopje was destroyed in an earthquake in the 60s and rebuilt not in a Communist style but in the same style as Winchester would have been rebuilt had it been destroyed in the 60s. The result is that it is charming but a bit like Hornchurch. And what is so wrong with Hornchurch after all?

That great cafe in the centre which Philippe took me to.

The dingy, strange hotel with character, the Jadran, which I discovered last time and found again, with its mock Arab facade.  Setting for a ghost story. By Le Fanu perhaps. Empty sitting rooms on each floor with splendid wainscoting. One has an ironing board in a corner forgotten. Ottoman Empire’s dying gasp. A pastiche built in the lost 1920s before Tito and the horrors of modernity.

Monday Skopje

Woke in the strange room with its ceiling 20 foot high and the chandelier at 5.40 = 6.40 Bulgarian time and escaped and finally found refuge in a hotel where I ate breakfast. The only thing about Patrick that interests me is his inner life and that to a limited degree. And my pride does not want me to be his friend. I am exciting. He is not. So say I. He would disagree about my being exciting, I know, nor if he thought me exciting would he have wanted me as a friend.

Hot. The Muslim town north of the river and I saw many things I didn’t see with Philippe. The bazaar. Tea and lemonade served in cafes for tiny prices. Very very like a small town in Turkey but less spruce than say Antioch?  The cars driving at 10 mph reminded me of Aleppo. Utterly un-European and enchantingly so. We saw three beautiful mosques. There were others but Patrick told me his appetite for mosques is not unbounded. Mine is.

The drive to Ohrid is very beautiful – we took the scenic route but it is hard to remember scenery especially writing this up six days later.

Tetovo the capital of the Albanian region, traffic choked and unexceptional. We did not get out but carried on.

A number of lakes. We lunched overlooking one. Too much very beautiful scenery and too many hair pin bends. Finally Lake Ohrid. Little places on the lake where people rent rooms cheaply looked fun a bit like the fringe of Constanta. The jolly and comfortable hotel for €35. Seemed a great price but now I recall the 80s when I didn’t travel one could stay in the centre of Madrid for £1, Istanbul in a three star hotel for £4.

My first impression was that it would be more vulgar than I had expected and Patrick said it reminded him of the Romanian seaside at which I protested. He wisely said that late afternoon was when resorts were at their worst people coming back dishevelled and sunburnt. Patrick said is it so bad to see people being happy?

Excellent table by the lake in a good restaurant watching the reflection of the lights of the town in the lake. It reminded me of Amasra very much.

Some beautiful women of twenty. A blonde and brunette nymph laughing.

Tuesday Ohrid

Patrick said we should spend the day alone until dinner and this was an immense liberation.

Three cappuccinos a cheese and ham pancake and I reread Mark Marzower on the Balkans. A wonderful essay. History like great paintings and good jokes reveals a hidden meaning in the universe.

The long promenade.

The St Sophia church with the best C 11 wall paintings in the world outside the St Sophia church in Kiev. Where I have also been though I do not recollect any wall paintings

.

Relaxed. Unintellectual. Not too warm. I shall return.

The Muslim quarter with mosques and a market which might be called the bazaar. A British lower middle class voice heard for a moment. An Englishman does not travel abroad to meet Englishmen.

We ate at a dull restaurant of Patrick’s choosing on a road not on the lake.

Wednesday Ohrid

I can scarcely jog any distance. Climbed some of the way to the top of the castle. The small very old churches are closed. A bit like Nesebar before Nesebar was ruined by tourism and synthetic new old buildings.

Patrick and I  get very lost looking for the crossing into Albania. Bad maps and we lacked the courage of our convictions. And Patrick always gets lost for psychological reasons that I do not understand. But we found some places on the Macedonian Western shore of the lake before the border which seemed wonderful. Little villages. The armed 19 year old soldiers guarding a disused border crossing to Albania.  An air of the Cold War within the Cold War between Tito and Hozha. An isolated hotel where they spoke German. Getting lost is the beginning of wisdom or at least of genuine travel.

The mountain crossing and suddenly immense heat. How I wish I had not unselfishly suggested we take Patrick’s old car, the bright red SUV which looks like a Southend hairdresser’s babe hoover but has no air conditioning. Very hot indeed. Amazing scenery much more like from a Clint Eastwood film. Wild. The badlands. A road better than I expected. Pretty reasonable. Deserted country.

Berat. Slummy hot higgledy-piggledy. Down at heel. Eastern. Oh I love it said Patrick and my opinion of him suddenly changed fundamentally. The first time I ever heard him express enthusiasm for something?

The main street at 6 p.m. lined with dusty trees where a dozen ATMs didn’t work for either of us until one released money for me. A kind of corso where young girls walk and families and old couples sometimes with grandchildren slowly. Outside the cheap cafes under the dusty trees sit men of various ages from twenty to sixty smoking and looking. A very curious scene which I want someone to explain. Like the corso in Dubrovnik where girls saunter with friends to be looked at?

[I have been told since by Kim Hakkenberg and Bill Cash that this is common in Romanian provincial towns where it is called the promenada.]

None of this seems post communist but third world. Patrick does not agree with third world, thinks it looks  more affluent than he expected but I do not understand why. All of Albania makes one think that like somewhere in Asia, in some ways Communism brought a kind of progress much as I would very much prefer what went before.

I called my sister to share the scene with her, the very opposite of what she I think would like. I didn't want to make her jealous and perhaps I slightly wanted to remind myself that my tastes are not those of Middle England.

In Berat I like Albania much more than ever before. This is life but not as we know it. This is the Albania I was looking for.

An Ottoman hill-town like Gijrokastra but with much more life. Three mosques. A river running through the town.

I found a good hotel the Malibu Club with AC and a good view and breakfast for €25.

An indifferent dinner, Turkish food, kababs not cooked with love,  in a roof restaurant with a great view overlooking the river.

Thursday Berat

An epiphany as I drew back the curtains and remembered the unexpected view of the bridge across the river and the Ottoman wooden buildings on the other side crawling up the hill. Then I got cross trying to put Carmen in touch with Nir using Facebook and the HTC. Excellent breakfast wonderful olives the best I ever tasted. The guide book said Berat is famous for its green olives and the fame is deserved. I sat for two hours loving the scene from the roof garden of the hotel. 

Hot beyond words, a Middle Eastern heat. The harem built when Northanger Abbey was finished. The inevitable and enjoyable ethnographical museum (the one in Bucharest across the road from my office i was guiltily aware I had never visited and I repaired the omission when I returned).

The coastal road. Hairpin bends but the road has been remade since last year. I saw no deserted beaches (but I remembered them from last year) and someone told me for those you need a boat. The guidebook said that most coves now had a hotel and a single hotel would have been great but we could not find even that.

A road off to the left and the coast and Patrick unlike most drivers is keen to explore. Twenty minutes of rough unmade road and red soil and very sharp hair pin bends and finally a cove with four or five bars on the beach built from straw like the illegal beach bars in Vama Veche in Romania. A cheap hotel which was full. And we found a camping site where for €9 we got a tent with ground sheet and sleeping bag and breakfast and a decent supper. A piece of ground lit by coloured bulbs on strings full of people of twenty bursting with youth and good spirits. A blonde girl with amazing dimples seraphic with happiness and life.

Friday Jar

I was very tired but did not sleep for hours, my first night in a tent.

A good cappuccino on an isolated beach in Albania. Then another and a third. The man selling them to me warned me two was too much.

Sea as clear as water in a wash basin. Every stone as clear at the bottom as if seen through a window. Too lacking puff to jog. I swam, read Kaplan.

The road to Saranda, in places a potholed track last year,  has just been remade. Saranda itself chic colourful. Like where? Like a setting for a Lesley Charteris novel I thought. Like the South of France thought Patrick. Yes.

Great meal at that place overlooking the  sea where I lunched last year: octopus risotto. Some lovely Albanian faces. One in particular intelligent clear-sighted and womanly belonged to a 15 year-old.

The long drive back. Through winding roads among cold damp mountains of North West Greece no doubt as Patrick said full of stories of gods and nymphs. Deserted and very beautiful.

A little town before the motorway called Napoli pop. 5,000 (thank heaven for Wikipedia on the HTC) where I drank a Greek coffee and ate divine baklava from the shop across the street. Patrick asked me not to buy baklava and eat it in the cafe. I asked the waitress if I might and she said yes of course. I still wish you hadn’t done it said Patrick. The best meal of the holiday.

Long drive. Salonica. Walking around negotiating with hotels at close to midnight. I found a 4 star hotel yards from the waterfront for €60 which was more than Patrick wanted to pay. Good to know that Tony Gray is not the standard for spending money on hotel rooms but this was a good deal and I prevailed.

Saturday 15, Salonica revisited

Salonica has this time a certain charm. When were you last here asked the girl in reception. Seven years ago I realised with a start. It has changed a lot in the last seven years. So have I for the worse said I. No doubt Salonica has changed for the better.

No-one in Greece speaks a Slav language she says. She thinks the Jews who built the hotel in 1926 were forced to leave because of problems between Jews and Greeks.

Lunch in a place called Sidirokastro, which Wikipedia on my HTC told me was in Bulgaria 1912-1918.  The conveniences of the 21^st century. I see that little towns in Greece and Turkey are very similar. Full of bright shops and cafes and plastic advertising. Modern. Rebuilt in the 70s. If Macedonia is really Bulgaria, Bulgaria is not very different from Greece. And Greece and Turkey are still the same place. We eat chicken rissotto made with tinned peas and carrots.

Shooting through the mountains of Bulgaria on the motorway then turn off. The Rila monastery as night was falling extraordinary wooden galleries painted white and read. Unlike anything in Romania or elsewhere. The heart of Bulgaria. Empty. We only have a short while before the place closes. Boris III’s tomb. Sculpted on the tomb he looked like a Mosleyite.

After a very long search we find a  hotel that smells of antiseptic like a clean WC. €30 for a suite. Empty sterile room with balcony. Crashed.

Patrick saw that the ads for DJs in Jar includes DJs from Macedonia and thinks this is the future without ethnic hatred. He still thinks he says that decency kindness and gentleness will conquer terrorism. I think ethnic groups live together at best without liking each other and thus is human nature. The world is being remade by liberals who think human nature basically good.  Perhaps they are unusually good themselves.

Sunday, 16 August 2009 Rila

Rila. The monastery burnt down in the 1840s and was rebuilt. Very atmospheric with high arcades which reminded me of the Great Mosque at Damascus. But I still felt cheated – only Victorian. Swiz in Molesworth’s lingo. A coach party of British at 10.30. Bulgaria is no longer obscure. This is however ersatz the real Bulgaria which survived only via the Church. Suddenly I forgot my Metternichianism and became a Bulgarian nationalist. How wonderful that they threw off the Muslim yoke after 500 years.

Long journey home broken by uninspired late lunch at a hotel in Ruse, the Bulgarian river port on the Danube.

Hot sunny motionless Sunday afternoon in Ruse. I tell Patrick: all of us spent our adolescence in Ruse. Patrick: Some of us spent us adulthoods in Ruse.

©Paul Wood 2011

‎"A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind"

I was rather indifferent until the day came. Funny thing the monarchy. 



But come the day! What larks this wedding is! Will there be peeled grapes? 

But 30 years since the last one...

The Duke of Cambridge! An auspicious title! The last Duke of Cambridge one of the great reactionaries said: They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted. 

Thanks to Delia Burnham I was asked on TV to discuss help commentate (dread word). ButI am very glad I decided not to burble on on Antena 3 in heavily accented Romanian about the wedding. What to say? Edward the Confessor bla bla, Prinny bla bla... 



The King and Queen of Romania are in the Abbey with Princess Margarita and Prince Radu. The King of Romania of course met his future Queen at our Queen's wedding in 1947.

The service heavenly though I was at a cocktail party and I did not give it my full attention. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, pretty girls, Romanian champagne, the people one knows, all subsidised by the British tax payer poor chump. A very good sermon by Chartres who says in a Godless age personal relationships substitute for religion which is why marriages fail.

Why can't England always be like that? Book of Common Prayer, beauty, people brought together by patriotism and party spirit not partisan spirit. 

A royal wedding should be a festival of stuffiness. This one is cool instead. Like a Richard Curtis film. 

The new Princess smiles too much, looks Northern down-to-earth. Asked on TV whether she would be a good queen I said the individuals aren't important. The monarchy is what matters. ('Oamenii nu sunt importanti. Monarhia este ce conteaza.') 



Satisfying and funny that the Guardian and Independent are as full of royal fervour as the conservative papers. The Guardian is supposed to be republican. 

Personally I rejoice that the monarchy is not compatible with a meritocratic society, or equality of opportunity, or post-imperial guilt or separation of church and state or multiculturalism. But that's just me - the people in the street don't care about the arguments for and against the monarchy. It is associated with the great cause of cheering us all up. 

The people in the mall may not care about the divine right of kings or social hierarchy but they do care very much about being part of an extended family = the nation, and a very long beautiful tradition = the nation. The royal wedding and the Pope's state visit showed the media class they misjudged the British people completely. 



Stuart Maconie in the Daily Mirror says the new Princess is Middle England - as English as the Six Nations, gas barbecues, Ikea and Dire Straits. I have no knowledge of any of these four things. I always felt a foreigner in my own country and generation. England for me is R.S. Surtees, the Charing Cross Road, the Inns of Court, Trollope and Belloc and cathedral closes, Broadstairs, allotments, 1930s Rupert Bear Nutwood Green ribbon development, the countryside in Derbyshire and Dorset. None of this is very up to date except I suppose the countryside which is new every moment, assuming  executive housing estates are not built are built over it. Even allotments (the unrevolutionary end result of Joe Chamberlain’s policy, in his red republican phase, of land reform – that truly IS English) are going to be sold off to property developers to make money.

A visit to Iraq for fun curiosity and business

Erbil the capital of Kurdish Iraq, effectively an independent country for twenty years, safe to visit, democratic sort of, in the midst of an economic boom and dreaming of being in a decade another Dubai.

Clean lines of a brand new airport. The mildly Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan officially opened it the week after we arrived. Tony is not waiting for us but then I remember this is because we need a 2 km bus ride to the area where he is allowed to be. There he is stocky and shortish and energetic, waving.

The countryside is usually Tony says parched and brown but in March a down of an almost unnaturally bright green covers the ground for a moment.

Lidl our driver speaks some English. Just enough. He is not a Kurd he says but a Christian. Even though he is that rare thing in Iraq an atheist. Tony tells me there are two kinds of Christians Assyrians and  Chaldeans speaking different languages. This is the British Museum made flesh. 

Off to the mountains stopping in a place called Shaklawa which Tony describes as the Kurdish Sinaia but seems a place of little interest. We try to find a hermitage and glimpse a chapel in a cemetery. A Christian church, modern, bare interior like a church hall rather than a church. Heart-warming to see Christians in a part of the world I think of as Muslim.  A ramshackle town built of breeze blocks is a bazaar straggling along the main road. Here we buy Turkish delight and halva and then we turn back just as the scenery becomes interesting. A very slow crawl through many military road blocks in to Ankawa. This is not usual at all says Tony even though Friday is the Muslim Sunday and Saturday is Monday.  The jam is caused by Nowruz the festival of the spring equinox a pre-Islamic festival which since the 1950s has become a symbol of Kurdish national identity. It was banned in Turkey and under Saddam.  Every Kurd leaves town for the day and picnics. Plus the road we were on leads to the Kurdish President’s home town and is guarded jealously. And of course we are here at a time of political unrest in Kurdistan and upheaval across the region. There were bonfires at the side of the road, Kurds were dancing in the evening light and flags were waved.  

Marina a large gloomy restaurant where we can only get a table in the gallery Noemi is one of only two women in the place. The rest are men with Saddam moustaches drinking beer, not looking joyous. Good Lebanese food, good Lebanese wine, a group of musicians with Saddam moustaches strike up Kurdish music and I think they could be a lithograph from a mid 19th century travel book. Everything in this sub fusc place seems to be in sepia.

Tony’s house in Ankawa which is penetratingly cold as he had warned. The kind of cold that comes from never having been anything else than cold.

I have a stamped Iraqi visa in my passport therefore I am. One travels to proves one objectively exists. Does one ever quite succeed?

Iraq has British 3-prong plugs which I suppose are iconic. Proud-making.

Saturday

Lidl's morose cousin, a devout Christian unlike Lidl, knows a way to the Mar Matei monastery which does not leave the Kurdish Regional Army’s remit where all is safe. We do it in only 90 minutes.  Mar Matei (St Matthew named after its founder a monk who sought refuge from the persecution of Julian the Apostate) is a fourth century monastery mostly rebuilt in 1845 It is very close to the border between the safe Kurdish region and the unsafe Iraq held by the federal army. I had found it with some searching in Google images and only one person I spoke to in Iraq had heard of the place. It stands in the mountains commanding a  ravine. No sign posts and, once there, no explanations. This is tourism to use Roland Barthes’ pretentious Marxist jargon uncooked. This I like. Like all tourists I am chasing authenticity which by definition cannot be chased. Two coaches made my heart sink but they had brought a party of pilgrims from Erbil who were on a 3 day pilgrimage. No signs explaining the history of the place and it is always best to be told history not to read it. I found a monk who spoke English who explained the story of the place. They are Assyrians. Many Christians had taken refuge in Kurdistan from the Arab South he said. He agreed sadly that things had been better for the Christians under Saddam.

The monastery is large and I later found on the net (where there is not much to find) that the lower parts of the church are old but the monastery was left in ruins after the Mongols  sacked it, was rebuilt in the 18th century and then in 1845.

Women wander around in jeans and it is good said Tony to be with ones own people. Benign monks. Christianity is very beautiful and the ancient churches of the East so much more so than the recent Protestant heresies. I suppose the Church of England a teddy bear with its stuffing falling out. Here as among the Catholics and the Orthodox is the real thing.

The Christian Middle East. The Middle East is not only Muslim and Christianity is Middle Eastern not European despite Belloc’s 'Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe'. In any case, according to a Professor of Immigration Studies (a new discipline to me) whom I know and who I am sadly certain is right, Europe will not be considered Christian in twenty years. I suppose it will be Christian-Muslim-Hindu-etc-secular-feminist-relativist.

Lalish. Our devout Christian driver got terribly lost looking for Lalish though he asked people repeatedly. He finally insisted that a brand new  building standing empty in a field was the temple and we had to call Lidl to get him to keep looking. The total lack of curiosity of people about anywhere outside the town they grew up in. It is we who are the odd ones with our loves of travelling around.

An  extraordinary and very moving place. There is something very spiritual (over-used word) about the temple and its setting.

The boys who live beside the temple are the temple servants we were told. The snake emblem by the main door (the Muslims and others accuse the Yazidis of devil worship). Fire inside a little shrine. Fire worship? The dark interior. The hanging cloths hanging which we are told it is lucky to tie, make a wish then untie. This seems a religion of superstitions rather than St Thomas Aquninas. The underground cave which is forbidden to us. The sound of water. I thought: where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to the sunless sea.

The temple is surrounded by ruined and semi ruined buildings a sense of decay and untidiness but the hills that surround the place have a moving and strange quality. They really do feel very spiritual. This place has a  very moving and eery but attractive atmosphere. And all unexplained. Even the net has little.

An arch decorated with a  symbol of the sun leading seemingly to nowhere. Strange and touching. I wanted to evacuate my bladder a mile away but Tony wisely told me we were on sacred ground.

A birthday party for a handsome Lebanese Christian businesswoman at Speed Centre a go karting place with pizza restaurant attached where foreigners go and women are normal.  This is one of two expat places. Gloomy, depressing. Lots of nice intelligent Lebanese here to make money but very bored in the evenings. Missing Beirut. So would I.

We rather drag Tony to it and the crowd in their late 20s are he says too young for him. I hadn’t noticed they were younger than me and I am 7 years his senior. I tell him this. I suppose I am immature I say. No, eccentric, he replied.

Everyone bar us is Lebanese and only one is Muslim and he I am told is ‘modernised’ but the man sitting next to me when I ask him if he is a Christian or a Muslim says I don’t mind this question but it could be considered racist.

A man shows me his Phalange membership card and says no-one at this table knows I have this. He tells me his father told him Muslims cannot live in a country where they are not the government.

Sunday

A third day driving. Tony has to work.

A reservoir built by Saddam very beautiful as is all the road. A tiny ancient church which looks as if it was built by a child from clay this year  but has been carefully preserved. Lidl does not know how old it is and the bodyguard does not either. But both know that it is very old.

Sulamaniya the second city of Kurdish Iraq. Lidl takes us to his favourite restaurant where we eat Kurdish food. Much like Arab food but with soups and pickled vegetables – Kurds are a mountain race. The lamb soup was heavenly and I drink Noemi’s too. Beside us a table of women in peasant costume seem very like Romanian gypsies but are I am told villagers. They do I think have gypsies here and I should love to meet some.

Sulamaniya – the prison where political prisoners were kept is closed. They open it for us but it has bad karma. The archaeological museum is closed because today is a holiday. The streets are impassable because of the unofficial anti-government Nowruz festival/protest. This is the centre of the opposition, a tribe which is excluded from the coalition which rules the Kurds.

We pass through Koya which is clearly old and I tell Lidl to stop when I see a castle. It looks almost like a fort in a western. The castle is locked up but I hear a noise and an old man who looks after the place opens it for me and lets us in. The old man was wearing what looked like a dressing gown.  A wide grass square described by thin white battlements. From one corner I look over the town and bonfires lit for Nowruz. The old man who speaks little English says this is 700 years old..

Monday

A morning to relax, two business meetings in the afternoon and couple of hours in the drizzle in the old centre of Erbil which likes Jericho Damascus and Aleppo vies for the distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world. When Rome was seven hills covered in forest Erbil was a sizeable place. The old city is a hill on which towers the citadel a vast building. Two years ago the inhabitants the poorest of the poor were moved out except for one family who remain so that the citadel remains inhabited and when the UNESCO approved works are completed the citadel will be inhabited again but not by the people who did live there. It will become a place for prosperous people to love and Tony who is a bourgeois relishes the idea that it will contain restaurants. As it is the citadel is save for the central street closed to visitors, only by ribbon but this being Iraq and a time of turbulence and Nowruz I decided on Tony’s advice not to hop under the striped ribbon and explore. This is not uncooked. The museums of course are shut for the holidays. The ancient minaret is visible some way off. The town beneath the citadel walls is charmingly decrepit. The bazaar for which Tony apologises is a good unpretentious bazaar. Tony prefers the one in Istanbul.

Nowruz to be honest a little bit of a bore - not even the tribal uprising I had perhaps irresponsibly hoped for. Still got taken by the crowd and involved in dancing and flag waving. I put down my umbrella but was wearing my good suit :) I secretly hoped they might ask me to be their king but I was not to be a second Auberon Herbert.

The houses of prosperous Ankawa Christians are built in a fantastic style which as Noemi says looks good here but would not elsewhere. They  merit a coffee table book but I did not take pictures (I never seem to get round to using cameras). The nearest thing I ever saw to it is the palaces of Romanian gypsies in villages like Buzescu. Near Tony’s house are  a number of mutually schismatic new built churches magnificent in the Arab-Kurdish modern vernacular style –In every case the interior is not quite as bare as a low church place.

Dinner with Tufan at the dark cavernous Hotel Chakra is a success. There is something of 90s Romania about the gloomy heaviness of the hotels and restaurants. The Chakra is built in a strange rather funny Kurdish taste like Lord Leighton’s idea of the East or the Turkish Bath in Jermyn St. I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls. Tufan is a man. And badly injured because of a moment of inattention on his motorbike in Elbesan Albania. He is a Communist and admirer of Kemal. Saddam he says gave the people land. Noemi is enchanted by him platonically. I like him very much too. He has a velvet voice and thinks.

Tuesday

With Noemi towards the Iranian border, we having otherwise rather exhausted Kurdish Iraq’s tourist potential. Idyllic scenery. Waterfalls. Mountains. Noemi thinks they resemble the Carpathians in Transylvania but I think they are very different and very beautiful. A stop for a strange Kurdish lunch beside  the road. Chicken kebab and bread cooked in a tomato broth as I gazed at stunningly beautiful mountain scenery through the window. And the further on the Hamilton Road built by a New Zealander in the 1920s and one of the great road journeys. But the times comes when without reaching the Iranian border it is later than we thought and we turn round.

Thursday

Business meeting at the mall. The future of the world is already here and it is one mall from Vladivostok to Patagonia.

Friday

I get Lidl to take me to the one old church in Ankawa. I guessed there must be one and there was but the only words about it on the net were a little hard to understand.

Other historical evidence confirming the historical depth of Ankawa "Alhjeran" which is found in 1995 in the church of Mar Gourgis sculpted by the writings in Syriac. Here are some information on these stones: The first stone: yellow stone was introduced by 40 cm and 80 cm length. Text carved on the stone says that the church of Mar Gourgis was re-built in the 816. Stone II: the text is also engraved in Syriac and it has the date of death of the priest in 917 m of Hormuz. 

A moustached Christian refugee from Baghdad with a rifle guards it. The church was renovated a few years ago looks modern and unlovely from the outside. The inside is bare with pews,  stations of the cross and almost nothing else but Lidl points out  above the entrance to the chancel a small wall painting of St George a small slaying the dragon which he said dated from 935. Near the church everything has been rebuilt but Lidl shows me one brick wall of venerable antiquity which was he says what the whole little place was like when he was a boy. He is only 28 now I remind myself (he looks 38 - ones twenties in Iraq are not the prolonged adolescence they are in England). Across the road from the church are the foundations of a building which Lidl says is very old indeed and I wonder looking at the grass swards covered in rubbish what it could have been.

A simple Kurdish lunch with Tony, soup and then kebab with rice and zacusca and beans.

Istanbul. Kitchenette a restaurant in the Hotel Marmora in Taksim Sq seems a wonderful antidote to Iraq. I like imperial cities. Paulius takes us first to a restaurant. The food was normal but the view across the Bosporus was quite  stunningly beautiful. Then an expensive fashionable place high up with another great view and then fortunately we were flagging and came home. Lina quoted me saying many clever things the next day which I did not recall and do not recall now.

Saturday 26

Wonderful breakfast of cheese and ham and rye bread brought from Vilnius and of course Paulius’s incomparable view of the Bosporus. For the first time I find myself liking Istanbul modern and comfortable and western though it is. perhaps one has to come from Kurdish Iraq not Romania. Both because Istanbul is exciting buzzy and full of beauty (Erbil is none of these things) but also because Kurdish Iraq reminds one that Istanbul Western though it is is still the Orient.

On Paulius's and Lina's advice I go to Cora  a church with wonderful mosaics made into a museum.

Lunch. We find a place to eat Turkish food in the sun. I like these two foodies. I intend to take food seriously and wine too. Paulius whose favourite country is Germany thinks a Chinese dominated world will be a good thing. Turkey is now looking Eastward will resume its Ottoman role and lead the region to democracy.

I found this on the net by Bernard Lewis in a debate with the insufferable bore Edward Said: 

The Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic Empire were not conquered by more civilized peoples, they were conquered by less civilized but more vigorous peoples. But in both cases what made the conquest, with the Barbarians in Rome and the Mongols in Iraq, what made it possible was things were going badly wrong within the society so that it was no longer able to offer effective resistance.