By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Have you taken a drive along the Montenegrin coast lately, our greatest economic asset? Does it look anything like the European Union to you?
It certainly doesn’t to me. This country looks exactly as it is: a place of ignorance, corruption, broken promises, and a conspiracy of mediocrity committed to discrediting, exiling, or destroying anyone and anything that dares disturb the consensus—the equilibrium—of mediocrity.
From Ulcinj to Tivat it now takes four hours, if it’s a holiday. That stretch of land looks like a series of roadside mass graves. It looks like Gaza. Like Fukushima, after being hit by the tsunami and three nuclear reactors melted down. Our roads resemble those in Congo and Somalia during a mass exodus. Montenegro’s Third World chic wasn’t forged by Western weapons and capital, nor by centuries of colonial oppression and violence. No: we managed it all by ourselves.
In summer, our coast becomes a giant snake made of cars, all motionless, patiently devouring its own tail. Hitler took less time to defeat the Karadjordjevic army, which didn’t even have time to flee to Greece that time. Otherwise, they would probably have taught the Nazis a lesson in 1946. As a side note, 151 German soldiers were killed in those battles—far more than were killed during the years-long occupation of Belgrade, where, according to Vucic’s press, a whopping two were killed.https://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/beograd/2432377-koliko-je-zaista-nemaca-ubijeno-u-beogradu-tokom-okupacije-ako-mislite-da-nije-ni-jedan-grdno-se-varate-foto Still, that’s fewer than would die if forced to drive our roads.
But that’s not the point. OK, we’re a country “opening and closing chapters” in negotiations with the EU, harmonising our laws with the so-called acquis communautaire, aligning our foreign policy with Brussels, and so on. And yet, look around, we are a Third World country. Our roads scream it. So do our airports, one of which is so neglected that the state now redirects passengers to Tirana’s airport – as the saying goes, a neighbour is better than a brother, while the other can’t handle nighttime landings because the state can’t manage to install light bulbs. Apparently, because it plans to sell it off.
You know how this works: the government appoints people who could break a hammer just by holding it. These so-called “management structures” systematically destroy public companies until:
- The value falls low enough that whoever it’s being handed to can get it cheap, and
- The public is convinced that the state simply can’t manage its own assets, so it has to go to the private sector.
This makes me think that it might be time to consider replacing management boards in state enterprises with something cheaper and equally destructive: Ebola. At least it comes at a lower cost.
It’s also, I’d say, high time we rebrand Montenegro as an ideal location for shooting post-apocalyptic movies and end-of-civilisation TV shows. Those are extremely popular—just look at Netflix. Best of all, there’s no need to demolish anything, no investment required, no need for Carevic’s bulldozers—those can be reserved for destroying private property in Cetinje again. We’ve got everything ready. Just leave it as it is. Take, for instance, the area between Budva and Tivat, which looks like a territory five minutes after a giant asteroid strike. It flows seamlessly into chaotic yet picturesque settlements with the flair of Brazilian favelas or the vibrant slums on the edges of Mumbai and Cairo. Then we head east. Past Budva, the capital of our tourism industry and—God forbid an earthquake—a place that would justify millennium-long prison sentences for all those who either enabled or allowed, through inaction, the kind of construction that poses a clear and present danger to the people living there.
Past Budva, the town which looks like a set for a film about a king who’s on antipsychotics, but stopped taking them because he’s convinced the meds are stifling his “creative genius.”
Further along is Bar, which still shows signs that someone with a functioning brain and a sense of public good once planned it: Communists, of course. Between Bar and Ulcinj sprawls an endless strip of illegal settlements, without running water or building permits. That part of Montenegro resembles the Amalfi Coast or the Côte d’Azur in the same way that Travolta from Borča beams resembles John Travolta. Like this:
And then, finally, you reach the far east: Long Beach. Our very own Goa. Long Beach is like The Eagles’ Hotel California: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
You really can’t. On a warm summer evening, if you try to leave Long Beach, you’re greeted by a 10-kilometer traffic jam. The chaos begins because the boulevard and the bridge they built lead—nowhere. After descending from what may well be the dumbest bridge in the universe, you’re immediately stuck on the dumbest detour in the universe. It clogs up right there. I’d bet someone was supposed to demolish an illegal structure, but, it didn’t happen.
As the sun sets and a soft breeze rolls in, you wait calmly in an endless line of cars. To pass the time, you can gaze upon hundreds, no—thousands—of rental houses, offering tens of thousands of beds. Not one connected to a sewage system. What you’re actually looking at is a sea of septic tanks. Just behind those sits our “great tourism potential”—Port Milena. Which, for the record, is so polluted that under the laws of war, it would be classified as a biochemical weapon.
Behind you is our gem, our pride: the Bojana River. There’s no sewage system there either, so everything from the thousands of people squatting on its shores—while speedboats zoom by and turbo-folk blasts from the speakers—ends up straight in the water. Splash. Splash. Splash.
Everything goes into the water. And the water flows into the mouth of the river.
Priceless. One of a kind in the universe. To the west, the sun sets. The first stars appear: shining just like those on the flag of the European Union. You, one with nature, are floating at the river’s mouth: New Age Baptism. You think: This is so cool. This is freedom. This is spirituality. Ahead of you lies the open Adriatic, and beyond it, the world. Behind you, the river carries feces.
A little shit has never been enough to kill human dreams.
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
