The Fall

Banja Luka entered into 1996 with checks as the main form of payment. Salaries and pensions are still being paid with the increasingly worthless pieces of paper. Only the post office, electricity and water companies accept them at face value while others, including food stores, halve their value. Banja Luka stores sell goods for dinars, the checks and foreign currency. Street dealers sell 10 DEM for 33 dinars or 90 dinars in checks. Salaries in the city have also dropped from 70 to 35 dinars and pensions are even more tragic when you know that even in happier times the lowest pensions stood at just 19 dinars.

Ping-Pong

The education ministry dealt with the strikes in elementary and high schools caused by low salaries by ignoring them and imposing other measures where necessary. To give their protest significance, teachers at the Valjevo high school which last year won the Vuk Karadzic award for achievements in culture, refused to grade their students and left them without report cards. Assistant education minister Vojislav Brnovic reacted through the Kolubara district schools coordinator with a message for principal Goran Bojicic: "clean up the mess or get dismissed". Teachers then threatened to quit their jobs but the ministry knew what it had to do: it told teachers that they were obliged to grade their students or send them all to qualifying exams. Now the teachers are doing overtime to grade their students.

Rejuvenation

At a meeting in Kovin, Uros Suvakovic, head of the Young Socialists of Serbia, announced a generational renewal.

Does he know of the results of a December poll by the Mark-plan research agency on which generations in Serbia trust Slobodan Milosevic the most? Voters, sympathizers or members of the ruling party only graduated elementary school and are aged 54 on the average.

Stamps

Herzeg Bosna has big problems with its constitutional and legal existence but not with state practice. it has its own license plates, ID cards, administration, army all the attributes of a state even postage stamps. One of them (posted in Vitez in December) is an example of moral and political significance. It shows Mostar with the old bridge as if General Prljak's guns never shot it down and is emblazoned with the words the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatian Community Herzeg Bosna.

Two questions arise: first, is the painting of the Mostar bridge a cheap advertisement for tourists or do they intend to rebuild the bridge and second, how is it that Herzeg Bosna still exists after the Dayton agreement.

Vanishing

Dunja Blazevic, former director of the Student Culture Center and known art critic, disappeared from Yugoslav citizenship lists last autumn, through a ruling by the FRY consulate in Paris which refused to extend her passport.

Blazevic insisted on an explanation and was told that the documents proving her SFRY (former Yugoslavia), FRY and Serbian citizenship are "not relevant"; that there is no deadline for a reply although it is proscribed by law; that she should seek the help of her husband Papic (the former Yugoslav ambassador to the OSCE); that they won't accept appeals to the ruling although the law says an appeal can be lodged through the consulate; that "she will never get a passport and should look for another state". When she asked what specifically was the problem (the ruling was under the abolished article 43 on "hostile activities abroad"), Blazevic was told that she knew what she had done.

She asked around and found out that the consulate based its ruling on the fact that she has a Bosnian government passport. The Bosnian embassy in Paris claimed that she neither has now ever asked for their passport but that confirmation in writing didn't help. In the end, Blazevic found out that a jealous fellow art critic had gossiped around that she had a green Bosnian passport. Bosnian passports are blue not green. What Blazevic did have was a fake passport made by the Slovenian art group Neue Slovenische Kunst (not a travel document) which she showed around. That was excuse enough for the consulate to remove the citizenship she had for 50 years.