A River of Tears Flows Along Half the Danube

Dumitru Melicencu, 48, is a skilled mechanic who does engine repairs at the local shipyard. But that’s not often these days, because hundreds of miles upstream at Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, the Danube River is still blocked by the wreckage of bridges that NATO bombed last year.

“When the blockage began, a crisis started here,” Melicencu said. “Commerce with other countries was lost. We had no more work.”

Rising amid the Grimm’s fairy tale beauty of Germany’s Black Forest, the 1,770-mile Danube flows through or alongside nine countries with a total population of 202 million. Having the Danube blocked at Novi Sad is like having the Mississippi cut at Memphis.

But rather than dividing one nation, this blockage has reopened the wounds of the Cold War, leaving Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine deprived of their cheapest and most emotionally evocative link to the rich countries of Western Europe.

For those upstream from Yugoslavia, the blockage of the river is an inconvenience. For those downstream, it is a disaster. And a Danube journey brings the difference into sharp relief. Idyllic scenes of pleasure in Germany and Austria give way to the resentment-filled struggle for survival that marks life in the poorest former Soviet bloc countries.

As Europe’s greatest west-to-east river, stretching from the heart of Europe to the edge of Asia, the Danube has served for two millenniums as a crucial highway. It once formed the boundary of the Roman Empire. During the Crusades, Christian knights made their way down it to fight in the Holy Land. Asian invaders, from the Mongols to the Ottoman Turks, used it to carry out attacks on Europe.

Even today, in southern Germany and Austria, the Danube is beaded with medieval forts--storied tourist attractions whose occupants once extorted taxes by threatening to block trade on the river. The current blockage at Novi Sad, which would not be physically difficult to eliminate, now serves Yugoslavia in much the same way. President Slobodan Milosevic’s government is linking resumption of normal traffic to financial help in repairing the damage from the air war that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization waged against it to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in the Yugoslav region of Kosovo.

In Regensburg, Germany, Laszlo Zoltan Feher, 40, captain of a Hungarian boat used to push barges, said he fears the river won’t be reopened until Milosevic loses power. But he thinks that day may not be far away.

“I believe Milosevic is finished,” Feher said. “Milosevic has made many wars, and the Yugoslav people want him to go.”

Charlemagne’s Dream Fulfilled

The Danube’s role as a freight highway starts at the southern German town of Kelheim, where the river connects to the Main-Danube Canal. By linking the Danube through the Main River to the Rhine River, the canal makes river shipping possible from Rotterdam, on the North Sea, across all of Europe to the Black Sea.

The opening of the canal in 1992 fulfilled a dream that goes back to Charlemagne, who in 793 launched work on a canal designed to link a tributary of the Danube to a tributary of the Main. The ditch was abandoned after little more than a mile, but the idea never died.

Yugoslavia’s wars of the 1990s have meant that the full potential of this transcontinental river link has yet to be realized.

Since last year’s Kosovo conflict, many shipping companies--especially in Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine--have been hit hard by the blockage at Novi Sad. The ruined bridges leave narrow channels that barges can slip through only with extreme care. Also, a pontoon bridge made of barges stretched across the river blocks all shipping.

The pontoon bridge can be opened by special arrangement, but that occurs only rarely. In May, completion of a new bridge at Novi Sad marked a step toward ending the blockage. But clearing of the bombed bridge’s wreckage and further diplomatic progress between Yugoslavia and the West will be needed before shipping once again flows freely.

For the people who live along its banks, the Danube is far more than a now badly functioning superhighway for barges carrying steel, fertilizer, grain, coal, ore and other freight. Its waters may be brown with mud and pollution, but it is still Johann Strauss’ “Beautiful Blue Danube.” The favorite encore for the Vienna Boys Choir is still that waltz, whose opening lines translate as “Danube so blue, so beautiful, so beautiful.”

The Danube is also a link between nations and a symbol of shared history.

A Proprietary Feeling in Austria

In much of Austria, the river is a wondrous playground, especially in the enchanting winegrowing country of the Wachau region and in Vienna, where spacious riverbank parks draw hordes of weekend strollers, joggers, bicyclists and anglers. Given the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with Vienna as the capital and Budapest, now the Hungarian capital, as the second city, Austrians also are keenly conscious of how the Danube links them with Hungary. But few want to feel tied to countries farther downstream.

“When you talk about the Danube River, [Austrians] think it is theirs,” not a link all the way to Romania and Ukraine, said Horst Ihmann, a retired Austrian pharmacist.

Ihmann was on a holiday trip to Durnstein, a beautiful medieval town on the Danube that still has the ruins of a fort where England’s King Richard the Lionhearted was imprisoned in 1192-93 on his way home from a crusade. Tens of thousands of Austrians visit it each summer.

Asked whether Austrians have felt any impact from the river’s being blocked at Novi Sad, Ihmann said he had never heard of the blockage.

A Dam Surrounded by Bitter Controversy

Flowing east from Vienna, the Danube soon enters Slovakia, created when Czechoslovakia split up in 1993. Near Slovakia’s border with Hungary, the river flows into a long, shallow lake that rises behind the Gabcikovo Dam, long the subject of bitter controversy.

Czechoslovakia and Hungary agreed in 1977 to a joint dam project in the area, but a strong anti-dam environmental movement arose in Hungary in the 1980s. It helped lift the Communist regime’s lid on dissent and eventually contributed to the 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Hungary then backed out of the project, but Czechoslovakia and then Slovakia went ahead with a scaled-down version. Hungary and Slovakia still argue over the issue.

East of the dam, just before the Danube turns south, lies an exceptionally scenic stretch, with the great cathedral at Esztergom rising majestically on a riverside bluff. Budapest itself, built on both sides of the Danube, is one of the river’s greatest gems.

Botond Szalma, general director of Mahart Hungarian Shipping Co., is among the many shipping executives in the countries along the Danube who are bitter at NATO’s actions during and after last year’s war. Szalma says his firm is losing about $4 million a year in income because of the river’s blockage and that it faces the permanent loss of some markets as customers switch to new suppliers and different means of shipping.

“Can you imagine someone bombing the Mississippi in the middle?” he asked with a touch of despair.

For many Hungarians, the economics of the river are secondary. The Danube is still a deeply loved national treasure. Just as Americans may feel the quintessential spirit of their country in Mark Twain’s tales of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the Mississippi, Hungarians can find the soul of their own land in such writings as Attila Jozsef’s “By the Danube.”

That poem, which includes a plea for reconciliation among the nations along the river, goes in part, “By the Danube, whose gentle waves embrace past, present and tomorrow, the battles our ancestors had to fight resolve into peace in remembrance’s light.”

Janos Fercsik, 65, a physics professor from the steel mill city of Dunaujvaros, about 35 miles south of Budapest, was out strolling with his wife along the riverbank, an activity they both love. He mentioned Jozsef’s work when asked about his feelings for the Danube.

“You have to be a Hungarian to understand” the poem, he said.

His wife, Emilia, tried to explain. The river “is a kind of symbol of Hungary’s fate,” she said.

Downstream from Yugoslavia--especially in Romania, which has long been particularly dependent on river shipping--the pain from the blockage is immense. And bitterness over the indifference of Western Europe and the United States runs deep.

“Clearing the Danube is a matter of extreme importance for Romania,” Mugur Isarescu, the country’s prime minister, said recently, adding that the country’s shipping concerns had lost $100 million in revenue and laid off most of their employees. On a visit to Washington in May, Isarescu pleaded for Western countries to separate the policy of sanctions against Yugoslavia from the need to clear bridge wreckage from the river.

The blockage threatens the complete destruction of Romania’s river shipping, said Stan Bone, general manager of Giurgiu Nav, the country’s biggest shipping firm, based in the Danube port of Giurgiu. The industry’s survival should be considered a matter of national security, he added.

“Just think what would happen if, on the Mississippi, American ships couldn’t sail anymore and they only had foreign ships,” he said.

In eastern Romania, the Danube bends to the north, ultimately to touch the Ukrainian border. For goods headed to or from the Black Sea and beyond, the shortest shipping route is through a 30-mile canal that links the Danube to the Black Sea port of Constanta.

There, as in much of Romania, frustration runs high at a failing economy that has shrunk 15% over the past three years.

“We haven’t created democracy,” complained Ferat Ceaus, 55, a Constanta resident who in his younger days helped build ships for export to North Vietnam. “We’ve created anarchy. It’s a shame. Many factories are shut down. There are many thieves and homeless on the streets. You didn’t see homeless under [Communist dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu.”

While most freight takes the Constanta canal, the river continues north to Galati, where it turns east again. In Galati, a key port and industrial center, and in Tulcea, the next major Danube town, Romania’s generally severe unemployment has been worsened by shipping-related layoffs. Many men in the region kill time, find pleasure and bring home something to eat by fishing in the polluted waters with hooks and lines or with 6-foot-square nets suspended from wooden frames.

“Since the bombing, people in Tulcea have gotten bitter, and they blame the Americans for not clearing the river,” said Iom Savu, 42, a Tulcea taxi driver. “The economic losses are huge, and a lot of unemployment results from this.”

As its waters flow toward the Black Sea through the Danube Delta’s three main channels and a network of lakes and wetlands, the river slips back into a lost era. Along the Sulina channel, the Danube’s central route to the sea, passenger boats are a lifeline, stopping at timeless villages cut off from all road connections.

Tourism Was Another Source of Income

The wetlands--with names like Stinking Marsh, Gypsy Gulf and Cuban Lagoon--have a rejuvenating effect on the river’s polluted water, and the area abounds with wildlife, especially birds. A cyanide spill from a Romanian gold-mining complex that contaminated tributaries of the Danube in January, leading to massive fish kills in Hungary and Yugoslavia, had no visible effect here.

Many delta people make their living fishing or farming fish, often moonlighting in the summertime as hosts for the foreign tourists who in past years came by the hundreds to enjoy boat tours amid the delta wildlife. Tourists usually must pay more than $100 a day, or two months’ wages for a local worker, for even the smallest boat.

“My philosophy is treat the tourists as well as you can and don’t ask for a price. Let them decide,” said Lucian Lazar, 25, a fisherman from the delta village of Crisan, who said he sometimes provides meals and delta tours for foreigners.

Tourists, however, have been scared away from the entire Balkan region by last year’s fighting, said Victor Iancu, president of S.C. Navrom-Delta, which provides passenger boat services in the delta.

Sulina--the Danube’s final destination on the Black Sea, a town of about 4,000 with a laid-back ambience, quaint waterfront and ornate Romanian Orthodox church--is “dying slowly but surely,” Iancu said. “They had a fish-canning factory. It’s closed. They had a shipbuilding yard. It’s almost closed. Because of the bombing, traffic on the Danube isn’t profitable anymore. Economically speaking, people are doing very badly. Most are unemployed and living on social security.”

Anger at the U.S. Over Decision to Bomb

Echoing a theme heard often in Romania, Iancu said that because the United States has “all this economic and military power,” it “could have solved the Yugoslav problem much more easily and peacefully.”

“I still today don’t understand why you bombed those bridges,” he said. “We, the common people, are the ones who feel the effect of those decisions, and we do not understand why we have to live with these consequences that we did not create ourselves.”

Melicencu, the Sulina ship engine repairman, is bitter toward both foreigners and his own country’s leaders.

“Many people say the Communist system wasn’t good,” he said. “But the economy was better then. Working-class people like myself didn’t have to worry about having a job.

“Now nobody is building anything anymore,” he went on. “Everything is being abandoned. Sulina should have become a great tourist city, more beautiful than it was. But what people have done to this country in recent years has thrown us back to the 1920s.

“We have so much catching up to do.”