TRIBUNA: LA CUARTA PÁGINA MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Jodorkovski en Siberia
El antiguo patrón de la petrolera Yukos sufre un duro castigo por su quimérica pretensión de intervenir en la política rusa como crítico y opositor democrático del nuevo zar, Vladimir Putin.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 24/02/2008
Tal como van las primarias, es muy posible que los candidatos a la Presidencia de Estados Unidos sean los senadores Barack Obama, por el Partido Demócrata, y John McCain por el Republicano. Y, si es así, qué duda cabe que las polémicas en la campaña serán afiebradas, dadas las discrepancias que mantienen sobre la guerra en Irak, la política económica, la seguridad social y muchos otros temas. Pero, por lo menos en uno, su coincidencia es total, y es seguro que cualquiera que resulte triunfador interpondrá sus buenos oficios para que el Gobierno ruso cese, o por lo menos atenúe, el encarnizamiento con que persigue al antiguo dueño de la compañía petrolera Yukos, Mijáil Jodorkovski, ahora sepultado en una cárcel de Siberia. En efecto, el 18 de noviembre de 2005, McCain y Obama presentaron en el Senado de Estados Unidos una resolución que fue aprobada por unanimidad contra las condenas de Jodorkovski y su socio Platón Lébedev que, según aquel texto, recordaban las peores prácticas judiciales de la era soviética.
Confieso que hasta hace poco no tenía la menor simpatía por Mijáil Jodorkovski de cuyo caso sabía muy poco y al que, de manera vaga, asociaba a los antiguos burócratas comunistas que, en la época de Yelstin, se vendieron a sí mismos, en una mascarada de privatización, las industrias que administraban, volviéndose de este modo millonarios de la noche a la mañana.
Pero un artículo de André Glucksmann en Le Monde y las referencias que en él se hacían a declaraciones de dos grandes luchadoras democráticas rusas, Elena Bonner-Sajarov y la asesinada periodista Anna Politkóvskaya sobre este caso, me pararon las orejas y me llevaron a investigar. Ahora creo que los tres tenían razón y que los castigos y atropellos judiciales de que es víctima el antiguo patrón de Yukos no tienen nada que ver con los delitos económicos que pudo cometer en la actividad empresarial que lo convirtió por un tiempo en el hombre más rico de Rusia, y sí, en cambio, con los apoyos que prestó a instituciones y partidos políticos de corte demócratico, a organizaciones de derechos humanos, a sus intentos de introducir en sus empresas métodos de apertura y transparencia a la usanza occidental y, sobre todo, a su pretensión -quimérica, dadas las circunstancias de su país- de intervenir en la política rusa como crítico y opositor del nuevo zar, Vladimir Putin.
Su historia es novelesca. Nacido en 1963, fue líder del Komsomol (juventudes comunistas) mientras estudiaba Ingeniería. Durante la perestroika comenzó a hacer negocios, abriendo primero una cafetería y luego un comercio que importaba computadoras y mercancías de lujo. Sus ganancias le permitieron abrir un pequeño banco en 1988, que, gracias a su empeño y a sus influencias políticas, creció como la espuma. En 1995 realizó la compra de Yukos, por unos 350 millones de dólares. Dos años después, el valor de Yukos se había multiplicado a nueve mil millones. Era la época de esa orgía de privatizaciones luctuosas en la agonizante URSS y quién puede dudar que esta operación sólo pudo ser posible gracias a tráficos y privilegios de índole política.
Ahora bien, si los orígenes de la enorme fortuna que alcanzó con sus empresas son sospechosas, y acaso delincuenciales, como los de todas las grandes fortunas que surgieron en Rusia de la noche a la mañana en la behetría de la transición de la Unión Soviética a la Rusia actual, todos los testimonios que he podido consultar señalan que Jodorkovski, una vez al frente de Yukos, introdujo una gestión moderna, publicando balances rigurosos, revelando los nombres de sus accionistas, pagando impuestos y distribuyendo dividendos. Estas prácticas le permitieron entablar relaciones estrechas con grandes compañías occidentales, con las que inició operaciones conjuntas. Al ser detenido, negociaba una fusión de Yukos con la Exxon Mobile.
A la vez, empezó a financiar órganos de prensa y centros de información independientes, fundaciones dedicadas a los derechos humanos, organizaciones políticas de índole democrática y liberal e hizo saber -fue, sin duda, su delito capital- que tenía la intención de participar en política activa oponiéndose a Putin, cuyas decisiones y úcases contra empresarios criticó abiertamente. Mientras algunos de éstos, como Boris Berezovsky, presintiendo lo que se venía, huían al extranjero, Jodorkovski hizo saber que no abandonaría Rusia porque no tenía nada que reprocharse desde el punto de vista legal.
Así le fue. Meses antes de las elecciones de 2004 a las que quería presentarse, en octubre del 2003 fue arrestado y acusado de fraude y de haber evadido mil millones de dólares en impuestos. En mayo de 2005, luego de una mascarada de juicio en el que los abogados de la defensa fueron acosados por las autoridades y, a menudo, impedidos incluso de asistir a las sesiones del tribunal, lo condenaron a ocho años de cárcel. Enviado a Siberia y puesto por largos períodos en situación de confinamiento, fue víctima de un extraño intento de homicidio por otro recluso que intentó clavarle un cuchillo en la garganta. Cuando cumplió la mitad de la pena y, según la legislación rusa, podía salir en libertad condicional, ésta le fue denegada y la fiscalía se apresuró a acusarlo de nuevo, ahora por malversación y lavado de dinero, imputaciones por las que podría ser condenado a 22 años más de prisión.
Entretanto el Gobierno de Putin se había incautado de Yukos y llevado a la más próspera empresa petrolera rusa a orillas de la extinción, con el fin de concentrar en el Estado todo el control de la energía, el principal instrumento de influencia y coerción con que cuenta Putin frente a sus vecinos en particular y a Europa en general. El hombre más rico de Rusia no quedó reducido a la pobreza extrema, desde luego, pero su astronómica fortuna simplemente se desintegró y, con ella, se encogió considerablemente el sector privado de la economía rusa.
La situación de Jodorkovski en la prisión siberiana de Chita donde languidece, y en la que, a menos que la presión internacional consiga salvarlo, acaso deje los huesos, se halla cerca de la frontera con Mongolia y las condiciones de los presos son durísimas. El hostigamiento a sus abogados es sistemático y los permisos de visita reducidos a una hora. Una de las razones esgrimidas por la justicia para negarle la libertad condicional fue que durante los paseos en la prisión se negaba a llevar las manos unidas a la espalda. Hasta el momento, todas las protestas de gobiernos e instituciones -entre ellos los de la canciller Angela Merkel y el presidente Bush-, de la Asamblea Parlamentaria del Consejo de Europa, del Senado de Estados Unidos, del Parlamento Europeo, del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos y de innumerables Colegios de Abogados e instituciones de derechos humanos, han sido inútiles.
El caso Jodorkovski ilustra bastante bien la trágica historia contemporánea de su país. Luego de setenta años de autoritarismo dictatorial y economía estatizada el sistema comunista se desplomó por implosión interna y lo sucedió no la libertad sino el libertinaje y la anarquía. En esta situación de caos institucional, desintegración del orden público y colapso de la economía, proliferaron las mafias y el gangsterismo, la corrupción se generalizó, surgieron fortunas vertiginosas y los niveles de vida, ya mediocres o ínfimos de una mayoría de ciudadanos, empeoró a la vez que la desaparición del orden y de la seguridad pública creaban las condiciones propicias para un nuevo autoritarismo. Es lo que trajeron Vladimir Putin y su rosca de antiguos compañeros de la más eficiente (y repelente) supervivencia de la vieja URSS: el KGB, la policía política. La inexperiencia y el desorden en que vivía hizo que el pueblo ruso viera en el nuevo autócrata a su salvador y aceptara con beneplácito el nuevo régimen.
En la nueva Rusia de Vladimir Putin no ha muerto el capitalismo ni mucho menos. Hay muchos empresarios que hacen grandes negocios. Pero a condición de ser dóciles y trabajar en estrecha complicidad con el poder político, que es, ahora, como en todas las sociedades autoritarias, la fuente del éxito y del fracaso de una empresa, algo que depende de los privilegios que concede el poder y no del favor del público consumidor. Y para que no lo olviden, y, sobre todo, para que no vayan a experimentar esa forma de locura que es querer actuar libremente y hasta intervenir en política, ahí está el insensato de Mijáil Jodorkovski, helándose a 40 grados bajo cero, durmiendo en una tarima de madera y preguntándose sin duda por qué maldita suerte la realidad rusa -comunista o capitalista- se parece tanto a las pesadillas de Dostoyevski.
© Diario EL PAÍS S.L. - Miguel Yuste 40 - 28037 Madrid [España] - Tel. 91 337 8200
domingo, febrero 24, 2008
miércoles, febrero 06, 2008
In Hungary, Roma Get Art Show, Not a Hug (Artículo NY Times)
Acerca de la discriminación que aun sufren los gitanos en Europa del Este. Aunque menos violenta que en Rumania o Bulgaria, en Hungría la situación de la minoría Roma sigue siendo de alta vulnerabilidad.
The New York Times
February 6, 2008
Abroad
In Hungary, Roma Get Art Show, Not a Hug
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
BUDAPEST — A show of contemporary Romany art just closed on Sunday here at the National Gallery, Hungary’s grandest museum. The exhibition was the latest nod to Europe’s most despised, and this country’s largest, minority. It came and went uneventfully, which itself was an event, considering the rise this autumn of the Hungarian Guard, a right-wing extremist group, which has made much news dressing up in paramilitary outfits recalling the Nazi era, ranting about “safeguarding national culture and traditions” and marching on a village against what it said was Romany crime there. Nobody is quite sure how extensive the group is or whether it is just good at grabbing headlines.
But the Roma were perfectly sure what “safeguarding national culture” meant.
Around the same time that the guard held everyone’s attention, a Slovak-Hungarian artist named Ilona Nemeth decided to put up bright yellow signs along a stretch of Kiraly Street in a traditionally Jewish but now ethnically mixed part of the city. In the languages of the local residents she posted questions based on the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, which measures the willingness of people to engage in social contacts: passersby were asked (to ask themselves, in effect) whether they would welcome so-and-so, from a different ethnic group, as a tourist, a colleague, a spouse, a fellow citizen.
Authorities from the district ordered the signs taken down hours after they went up, saying the project had stirred trouble where there hadn’t been any. The Hungarian news media jumped on the brouhaha, as they had jumped on the rise of the guard, and a local rabbi, among other neighborhood leaders, took up the artist’s cause. But as Ms. Nemeth reflected the other day, by then the work had produced “a media monologue and not a public dialogue.”
She added: “The Roma are not part of society here. Most of this society thinks they are not our problem. We’re not trying to understand them.”
Ms. Nemeth’s work resurrected age-old questions about the uses of art in shaping politics and public opinion, in this case concerning the Roma, or Gypsies. (The term isn’t considered pejorative here.) An answer of sorts then came with the show at the National Gallery.
The exhibition turned out to be a mess, but an emblematic one. Over the years various surveys of Romany music and art in Hungary have been organized at the Museum of Ethnography and at the Hungarian Institute for Culture and Art, from which most of the pictures at the National Gallery came. This show followed a multinational Romany pavilion at last summer’s Venice Biennale, shared by savvy conceptualists and folk artists, catering to the all-devouring art market.
The National Gallery exhibition, less high-concept, looked more like a flea market, much of it fairly awful, and heavy on self-taught artists with compelling life stories. The pictures included street portraits with drawings about the Roma killed in World War II and Chagall-like fantasies in candied colors.
Arranged in a long, numbing row, the art was assigned to attic galleries so unlike the large, gorgeous rooms for mainstream paintings downstairs that an outsider couldn’t help wondering if the installation had been intentionally devised as a metaphor (Roma here cast as “Jane Eyre” ’s Bertha Mason in the attic of Hungarian society). One evening not long before the show’s end, when closing time was still 30 minutes away, bored museum guards, anxious to get home, hastened out the two or three remaining visitors, trailing behind to make sure no one doubled back, and switching off lights along the way.
Agnes Daroczi, a Romany sociologist and arts advocate, defended the show as part of a long Romany cultural project. She recalled that when Hungary was under Moscow’s thumb, Roma weren’t even acknowledged as an ethnic group, and many of their small farms were bulldozed to promote collectivization, spoiling centuries-old customs. In that difficult climate a Romany intelligentsia emerged.
“We thought if we could gain a foothold in culture and the arts, then we could move closer to gaining human rights,” she said. The first Romany art show she put together was in the early 1970s. “Culture became an artistic tool in a political fight,” she said.
Industrialization had by then produced jobs for some 85 percent of Romany men, roughly the Hungarian average, and by the late ’70s, Romany culture had also come to be linked with a new liberal opposition to communism.
But with the transition to democracy that began in the late 1980s, and the collapse of state industry it caused, Roma found themselves first to receive pink slips. The figures speak for themselves. Roma make up an estimated 8 to 10 percent of the population. Romany unemployment now tops 80 percent; the national unemployment average is 7.7 percent.
In 2005 the World Bank, the Open Society Institute and other organizations initiated in Hungary and eight other countries a program for what’s being called, in typical Euro-speak, the Decade of Roma Inclusion, to improve Romany education, employment, housing, human rights and health care. Last year the government here adopted a plan to carry out that agenda. But Romany children, as they have for generations, still find themselves often segregated in schools and made to play in separate playgrounds.
“In the permanent fight for emancipation, we’ve shown the beauty and diversity of our culture,” Ms. Daroczi said about the art shows over the years. But clearly they have had little if any practical effect on daily life for Roma in Hungary.
One recent morning I found Jeno Zsigo, president of the Roma Parliament, a nongovernmental Romany rights group, looking deeply forlorn in his office in the city’s part-Romany Eighth District. He was mourning the fate of an arts camp he had run for hundreds of Romany children, whose operation has been suspended because, like the parliament, it has run out of money. He blames official indifference.
“Romany art goes on display as a favor,” he said. “There are a lot of talented Romany artists, but the question is still whether there is going to be any real acceptance and integration.”
Gyorgy Kerenyi, a journalist and radio producer who in 2001 started Radio C, the country’s first Roma-run radio station, put the situation in a wider European perspective: “It’s not violent here, like in the Czech Republic or Romania — the Hungarian Guard seems like a small thing — but most Hungarians are prejudiced. The situation hasn’t really changed much in 20 years. The European Union, which is afraid of Romany migration to Western Europe, shakes the hands of Eastern Europeans who start some initiative or sponsor some show, but it’s all window dressing.”
He recalled Romany excitement when Radio C started, finally giving Roma their own voice in the media. “It was like in a Kusturica film,” he said, laughing. “A cavalcade of people showed up, friends, kids, gangs, tucking their heads in to say hello or just to see how it all worked.”
Radio C caters to Romany listeners. Mr. Kerenyi remarked that, for the general Hungarian public, the popular television program “Megastar,” Hungary’s “American Idol,” has probably made the biggest impact: it has lately catapulted several Romany singers to national stardom.
“These were Roma who proudly said they’re Roma, and the program showed their families at home like other families,” he said.
Which still left open the question of the effect of the National Gallery show. Wim Wenders, the German film director, has said that Europeans like to comfort themselves with “the false belief” that the misery and isolation of the Roma is “actually an act of self-chosen freedom.”
You hear this often in Europe. Roma are casually dismissed as criminals and outsiders. The Romany art show, in a similar vein, let skeptics write off the work as primitive or, worse, charming, while functioning as a sop to the national conscience.
Confronted by that thought, Peter Szuhay, from the Ethnological Museum, who put the exhibition together, fell glumly silent. Over the years he has organized what would seem from their catalogs to be intelligent, sensitive shows documenting Romany life — contrasting how Roma are portrayed by others with how they depict themselves. These exhibitions have multiplied over the years as the plight of Roma, despite his efforts, has worsened.
Mr. Szuhay was in the musty loft of his split-level office in the museum, surrounded by peeling paint, fluorescent lights and stacks of papers. He has spent 28 years accumulating the collection that surrounded him.
“You have authentic personalities among these artists, whether they’re academically trained or self-taught, which is a division we’re trying to overcome,” he said. “I want to show how important the Roma are to Hungarians, to make clear they’re like the rest of us.”
Noble sentiments, and true. But the goal today seems as remote as ever. Meanwhile, Mr. Zsigo’s children are still waiting for their summer camp.
The New York Times
February 6, 2008
Abroad
In Hungary, Roma Get Art Show, Not a Hug
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
BUDAPEST — A show of contemporary Romany art just closed on Sunday here at the National Gallery, Hungary’s grandest museum. The exhibition was the latest nod to Europe’s most despised, and this country’s largest, minority. It came and went uneventfully, which itself was an event, considering the rise this autumn of the Hungarian Guard, a right-wing extremist group, which has made much news dressing up in paramilitary outfits recalling the Nazi era, ranting about “safeguarding national culture and traditions” and marching on a village against what it said was Romany crime there. Nobody is quite sure how extensive the group is or whether it is just good at grabbing headlines.
But the Roma were perfectly sure what “safeguarding national culture” meant.
Around the same time that the guard held everyone’s attention, a Slovak-Hungarian artist named Ilona Nemeth decided to put up bright yellow signs along a stretch of Kiraly Street in a traditionally Jewish but now ethnically mixed part of the city. In the languages of the local residents she posted questions based on the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, which measures the willingness of people to engage in social contacts: passersby were asked (to ask themselves, in effect) whether they would welcome so-and-so, from a different ethnic group, as a tourist, a colleague, a spouse, a fellow citizen.
Authorities from the district ordered the signs taken down hours after they went up, saying the project had stirred trouble where there hadn’t been any. The Hungarian news media jumped on the brouhaha, as they had jumped on the rise of the guard, and a local rabbi, among other neighborhood leaders, took up the artist’s cause. But as Ms. Nemeth reflected the other day, by then the work had produced “a media monologue and not a public dialogue.”
She added: “The Roma are not part of society here. Most of this society thinks they are not our problem. We’re not trying to understand them.”
Ms. Nemeth’s work resurrected age-old questions about the uses of art in shaping politics and public opinion, in this case concerning the Roma, or Gypsies. (The term isn’t considered pejorative here.) An answer of sorts then came with the show at the National Gallery.
The exhibition turned out to be a mess, but an emblematic one. Over the years various surveys of Romany music and art in Hungary have been organized at the Museum of Ethnography and at the Hungarian Institute for Culture and Art, from which most of the pictures at the National Gallery came. This show followed a multinational Romany pavilion at last summer’s Venice Biennale, shared by savvy conceptualists and folk artists, catering to the all-devouring art market.
The National Gallery exhibition, less high-concept, looked more like a flea market, much of it fairly awful, and heavy on self-taught artists with compelling life stories. The pictures included street portraits with drawings about the Roma killed in World War II and Chagall-like fantasies in candied colors.
Arranged in a long, numbing row, the art was assigned to attic galleries so unlike the large, gorgeous rooms for mainstream paintings downstairs that an outsider couldn’t help wondering if the installation had been intentionally devised as a metaphor (Roma here cast as “Jane Eyre” ’s Bertha Mason in the attic of Hungarian society). One evening not long before the show’s end, when closing time was still 30 minutes away, bored museum guards, anxious to get home, hastened out the two or three remaining visitors, trailing behind to make sure no one doubled back, and switching off lights along the way.
Agnes Daroczi, a Romany sociologist and arts advocate, defended the show as part of a long Romany cultural project. She recalled that when Hungary was under Moscow’s thumb, Roma weren’t even acknowledged as an ethnic group, and many of their small farms were bulldozed to promote collectivization, spoiling centuries-old customs. In that difficult climate a Romany intelligentsia emerged.
“We thought if we could gain a foothold in culture and the arts, then we could move closer to gaining human rights,” she said. The first Romany art show she put together was in the early 1970s. “Culture became an artistic tool in a political fight,” she said.
Industrialization had by then produced jobs for some 85 percent of Romany men, roughly the Hungarian average, and by the late ’70s, Romany culture had also come to be linked with a new liberal opposition to communism.
But with the transition to democracy that began in the late 1980s, and the collapse of state industry it caused, Roma found themselves first to receive pink slips. The figures speak for themselves. Roma make up an estimated 8 to 10 percent of the population. Romany unemployment now tops 80 percent; the national unemployment average is 7.7 percent.
In 2005 the World Bank, the Open Society Institute and other organizations initiated in Hungary and eight other countries a program for what’s being called, in typical Euro-speak, the Decade of Roma Inclusion, to improve Romany education, employment, housing, human rights and health care. Last year the government here adopted a plan to carry out that agenda. But Romany children, as they have for generations, still find themselves often segregated in schools and made to play in separate playgrounds.
“In the permanent fight for emancipation, we’ve shown the beauty and diversity of our culture,” Ms. Daroczi said about the art shows over the years. But clearly they have had little if any practical effect on daily life for Roma in Hungary.
One recent morning I found Jeno Zsigo, president of the Roma Parliament, a nongovernmental Romany rights group, looking deeply forlorn in his office in the city’s part-Romany Eighth District. He was mourning the fate of an arts camp he had run for hundreds of Romany children, whose operation has been suspended because, like the parliament, it has run out of money. He blames official indifference.
“Romany art goes on display as a favor,” he said. “There are a lot of talented Romany artists, but the question is still whether there is going to be any real acceptance and integration.”
Gyorgy Kerenyi, a journalist and radio producer who in 2001 started Radio C, the country’s first Roma-run radio station, put the situation in a wider European perspective: “It’s not violent here, like in the Czech Republic or Romania — the Hungarian Guard seems like a small thing — but most Hungarians are prejudiced. The situation hasn’t really changed much in 20 years. The European Union, which is afraid of Romany migration to Western Europe, shakes the hands of Eastern Europeans who start some initiative or sponsor some show, but it’s all window dressing.”
He recalled Romany excitement when Radio C started, finally giving Roma their own voice in the media. “It was like in a Kusturica film,” he said, laughing. “A cavalcade of people showed up, friends, kids, gangs, tucking their heads in to say hello or just to see how it all worked.”
Radio C caters to Romany listeners. Mr. Kerenyi remarked that, for the general Hungarian public, the popular television program “Megastar,” Hungary’s “American Idol,” has probably made the biggest impact: it has lately catapulted several Romany singers to national stardom.
“These were Roma who proudly said they’re Roma, and the program showed their families at home like other families,” he said.
Which still left open the question of the effect of the National Gallery show. Wim Wenders, the German film director, has said that Europeans like to comfort themselves with “the false belief” that the misery and isolation of the Roma is “actually an act of self-chosen freedom.”
You hear this often in Europe. Roma are casually dismissed as criminals and outsiders. The Romany art show, in a similar vein, let skeptics write off the work as primitive or, worse, charming, while functioning as a sop to the national conscience.
Confronted by that thought, Peter Szuhay, from the Ethnological Museum, who put the exhibition together, fell glumly silent. Over the years he has organized what would seem from their catalogs to be intelligent, sensitive shows documenting Romany life — contrasting how Roma are portrayed by others with how they depict themselves. These exhibitions have multiplied over the years as the plight of Roma, despite his efforts, has worsened.
Mr. Szuhay was in the musty loft of his split-level office in the museum, surrounded by peeling paint, fluorescent lights and stacks of papers. He has spent 28 years accumulating the collection that surrounded him.
“You have authentic personalities among these artists, whether they’re academically trained or self-taught, which is a division we’re trying to overcome,” he said. “I want to show how important the Roma are to Hungarians, to make clear they’re like the rest of us.”
Noble sentiments, and true. But the goal today seems as remote as ever. Meanwhile, Mr. Zsigo’s children are still waiting for their summer camp.
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