Yugoslavia, 1990

My first overseas assignment with the foreign service was a temporary posting in late 1990 to the Canadian Embassy in Belgrade, the capital of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The purpose of this assignment was to train me on how to do visa and consular work at an overseas mission. With that first step into the chancery airlock* I entered into a completely new and sometimes baffling world for which an upbringing in mid-sized southwestern Ontario cities had not prepared me.

*In case you’re wondering about the vocabulary, the “chancery” is the generic name for the main building of an embassy. The “airlock” is a double set of bulletproof doors that allows you access to the chancery using a numeric code. Once you pass through the first door you must allow it to close behind you before you can code into the second door, meaning that you’re momentarily locked inside a small passage way. You’re typically on video camera during this period. The system prevents intruders from forcing their way into the building. Later in this post I refer to the "Head of Mission", a generic term that covers Ambassadors, High Commissioners, Consuls General and similar titles given to Canada's chief official representative to another country.

1990 was the last good year for the Yugoslavia. The Slovenian secession of 1991 triggered a decade’s worth of increasingly brutal civil wars and shattered the federation into seven new states (Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). I would witness firsthand the fallout from that decade of conflict when I returned to the region in the period 1999-2002 as Canada’s Immigration Control Officer, but for now I wish to write about that last good year.

Optimism was high in 1990. The Cold War had recently ended and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Yugoslavia had been a Communist country and nominally still was, but unlike its neighbours Hungary and Romania, it had managed to maintain a level of independence from the Russians. The result was that rapprochement with Western Europe was moving at a rapid pace, and western businesses and products had started pouring into the country. Colgate toothpaste could be bought in corner shops, upscale Italian clothes seller Benetton had opened shop in Belgrade, and McDonald’s opened its third restaurant in Belgrade the week I arrived – things that had been unimaginable only a few years earlier.

I lived for six weeks in the recently opened Hyatt Regency hotel, across the Sava river from the old city of Belgrade that perched on the high ground overlooking the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. To one side of the Hyatt was a set of new luxury condo towers, the Genex apartments; on the other side was a miserable shanty town of self-built shacks inhabited by Roma people (more widely known by the disparaging term ‘gypsies’). This was the first time I had seen such a jarring juxtaposition of wealth and poverty; I would see it many more times during my career.

I’ll talk at greater length in another blog post about the nature of day-to-day work in the visa and consular sections of an embassy. For now, I’ll simply mention the general routine I followed in Belgrade. Most mornings I would interview people seeking temporary visas for Canada – tourists, students, and people with temporary jobs waiting for them. They had booked appointments many days in advance. The interviews took place in a small cubicle, with me separated from the interviewees by bulletproof glass. Many applicants didn’t speak English, so translation was provided by a program assistant employed by the Embassy, who sat on a stool next to me. She was my age and was very pretty. Although I was smitten, she wasn’t interested in me.

In the afternoons I interviewed people who had applied to immigrate to Canada permanently. These interviews I did in my temporary office, the applicants being led in by a security guard once they had gone through the metal detectors. I didn’t need a translator for these interviews, since most spoke English well – a main requirement for qualifying for immigration unless you’re being sponsored by a family member. One of the first people I ever issued an immigrant visa to was a woman in her late twenties who moved to Vancouver, lived with her aunt, and got her first Canadian job at Eatons. I know this because she later sent me a letter, care of the Embassy, to tell me how things were working out for her. It was the one and only time that ever happened in my twelve years of visa work.

What I enjoyed best were the evenings and weekends. Sometimes people from the Embassy would invite me to go out with them or visit them at their homes, but many times I was on my own. That was fine, I was more than content to stroll around the streets of the old city – a pastime the French call being a “flâneur”. Like most continental European cities there was a main pedestrian-only street, and it ran from the shopping core out to Kalemegdan, the old fortress from which the city of Belgrade developed. Much of Belgrade had been leveled by bombing during the Second World War, so the architecture along the walking street was fairly forgettable, but the people were fascinating. Many would get dressed up specifically to spend a pleasant evening strolling up and down, gazing in the shop windows and at one another. Having come from Ontario, where pedestrian-only streets are practically unheard of and urban walking is often distinctly unpleasant because of the traffic, I hadn’t encountered anything like it before.

Belgrade had other unexpected surprises in store for me. One weekend night I went over to my supervisor’s house for supper. It was a pleasant evening, but ended early, as she had kids who had to get to bed. Her kids' caregiver - a woman about my age - had stayed on that evening to babysit, and was getting ready to go out at about the same time as me. She invited me to join her as she went to meet some friends at a club, and I did. The taxi drove us into a distinctly seedy-looking part of town I hadn’t seen previously. We hopped out and she led me to a nondescript steel door in the side of an old brick building. There were no signs, just a bright overhead light shining down on the stoop. She pounded on the door and, like something out of the movies, part of the door slid open and from inside came the bass beat music and the glare of an enormous bouncer. She spoke to him in Serbian; he scowled at me but grudgingly opened the door and let us in after I gave him (on her instructions) the equivalent of five bucks. We walked up a short flight of stairs and entered an absolutely packed dance club, full of beautiful people straight out of a magazine. I’d like to say I had a wild night, but in truth my companion and her friends quickly abandoned me for the dance floor. Being disinclined to follow and underdressed for the venue, I left after a drink or two.

The following Friday there was a happy hour or reception or some such event at the Embassy after work. I was chatting with one of the guests, an ambassador for one of the Nordic countries, who was in his mid-sixties. He was telling me about his favourite Serbian painter, Konovic, and about the charms of Sombor where there was a Konovic museum. I said offhand that it sounded cool, I’d have to check it out some time. He said that if I had nothing else planned for the following day, he’d be happy to take me on a road trip to Sombor. We could check out the museum, and grab a bite to eat. Guilelessly I agreed. It was about midway through dinner the following evening in a quiet bistro with a glass of good Montenegrin vranac wine that I realized I wasn’t on a road trip, but on a date. I must say, he was a gentleman, and concealed his disappointment when I declined the invitation to go back to his apartment when we returned to Belgrade. Monday morning at the office my colleague Nathalie was doubled over with laughter at my naïveté as I recounted the story to her.

I received another unsolicited advance two weeks later at the Embassy Christmas party, a tradition at most Canadian missions where all the employees of the Embassy, both locally engaged staff and the Canadian diplomats, plus all their spouses (and often their children as well) are invited to the Head of Mission’s house for supper. I decided to attend only at the last minute, as I was still recovering from a bout of salmonella I’d picked up the week before, the first of many gastro-intestinal illnesses I’d suffer over my foreign service career. At supper I was seated next to a locally engaged secretary from another floor of the Embassy that I rarely passed through. We chatted politely about this and that. After the main course was eaten she turned to speak to the person to her right while at the same time plopping her left hand into my lap, where it remained for several minutes until dessert was served. Like my night club escapade and my dinner date in Novi Sad, this was something new to me. Had circumstances been different, I might have pursued the secretary’s advance, in spite of the briefing I’d received my first day at the Embassy, at which I was warned against fraternizing with locally engaged staff outside business hours without notifying the mission security officer in writing. Fortunately for Canadian security, my post-salmonella tummy was grumbling ominously about the rich food, so I made a hasty departure and spent the remainder of the night alone in my hotel room with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.