I sent the questions in English, on December 18, as the deputy editor-in-chief of the independent daily Vijesti, so it was etiquette at the level - I was a journalist who wanted to get answers and refresh the economic part of the New Year's double issue.
At first it was strange that my kind aunt, a secretary I guess, is teaching me to send journalistic questions to a hotmail address (chinaemb_hotmail.com), especially strange after Snowden, when you know that Microsoft cooperates with the American security services and that hotmail has been hacked at least twice. But okay - I listened to the instructions and wrote down the address, without much hope that someone would answer me. As a former radio presenter, I also felt a very unusual silence over the phone, the silence of an apartment, I would say, by no means of an embassy where the sounds of phones, faxes, heels, and papers are swarming. None of that, just the voice of a kind aunt, surrounded by the softest silence you can imagine, satin silence, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say - silken silence.
After eight days without an answer, without confirmation that anyone even received my email, I called the embassy again and was answered by a middle-aged guy with no zest in his voice. Again the same silence. Call after two. I call after two and my aunt says that she remembers me, that she did everything she could, she forwarded the message to the protocol, directed me, who was curious, to the right address, and she no longer has the devil's influence.
So who are you madam, if you have no influence, who am I talking to, what is your function? When I asked this triple question, the silence in the receiver reached its peak. Something historic hung in the air. It was the silence of the Chinese state, I recognized, and the monumental moment that followed made me feel like a Westerner for the first time in my life.
SORRY, BUT I'M NOT ALLOWED TO INTRODUCE MYSELF, said the lady, that's what the anonymous woman answering the phone 020 609 275 said, picking up the phone in the name of today's biggest economic superpower, the most populous country and the country with which we signed an agreement on the construction of the section highway worth up to 28 million euros per kilometer.
It doesn't occur to me to talk about the price of the highway, I simply don't have enough economic knowledge to judge such a complex business. That's why I wanted to ask the ambassador, for example, why the agreement was signed on Chinese territory, that is, in the Chinese embassy, and what kind of message it sends to Montenegro. So I wanted to ask how many workers will come and if the Chinese are joking when they say that Montenegro will make money from selling food to the workers. It was not implemented, the Chinese are building roads in Zambia, but Chinese merchants arrived at the market in Lusaka and cut the price of chicken in half. The press of the rotten West also writes that the price of carrots has been reduced by 65 percent - a cry can be heard from Justin Muchindu's stall at the Soweto market. The man is desperate - how dare they come here and crash our market, he asks.
In Tanzania, the authorities got the idea and the Chinese are forbidden to sell goods, to engage in trade while accusations of construction corruption that exceed African standards are pouring in. I wanted to ask the ambassador of China in Montenegro all this and publish his diplomatic return. If that lady, let's call her Mileva, had just introduced herself to me, maybe I would have gotten an answer as to whether it is true that the Chinese exploit people on some construction sites, that is, they harness convicts like marwa, that in some places their concrete is of poor quality, which was something that could not be guessed from the RTCG report from the construction site below the Yangtzekyang.
My imagination doesn't rest and I imagine that Mileva is some kind of housewife who does a top-notch job from home, plays tricks on the Chinese state while reheating sardines and sauteing onions. If something goes wrong, if any problem arises during the construction of the highway to Mateševo, an honest journalist will have two addresses: the stupid Government of Montenegro, who can't wait to hang up on you, and Mileva from the Chinese Embassy, who is very accommodating until you ask her who she is. .
When I think about it, I sent the questions to the Chinese ambassador, including why the Chinese community has not socially integrated in Montenegro, when the ambassador was away, the day after the Summit of the Heads of Government of China and 16 Central and Eastern European countries in Belgrade. The European Union does not have the money to build our roads, so it is protesting that China is trampling the European mainland through the Balkans. And just then I feel like throwing myself into the study of the geostrategic implications of the Chinese presence, I take the digitron to calculate how much that beautiful bridge that goes into the tunnel will cost, then I start to deal with various topics of importance, when I remember the silence and the jitters of the sentence pass over me : SORRY, BUT I AM NOT ALLOWED TO INTRODUCE MYSELF TO YOU.
What's a man to do? I try to determine what bothers me the most in the West and dial the phone number of the company that collects money for the common good, which is what the Internet should be, and on the other end I hear the voice of MARKO ON THE CONNECTION, HERE YOU GO. So where are you Marko, I'm Brano, I just wanted to hear the name! Your services are nothing, you disgust me, especially the way you advertise products, I think that the service in branches is shamefully slow and that your performance is hypocritical - but when a person in a company or country has the manners to at least introduce himself, I tend to I forgive the company and the state a lot. It's possible that I'm wrong, my good Marko, I'd like to be wrong and that the Chinese roads would connect us to the free world, I'm just a little scared.
Oh, of course I hung up. I'm not going to bore the operator Marko, a man at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, who is only comforted by a dose of comfort compared to the Chinese worker. And the Chinese worker, it is known, sleeps in a container and breaks through the hills, far from his birthplace and the court in Beijing, responsible for our debt of 700 million euros, my Mileva.
Bonus video:
