(Fara) Spaga

While in Romania corruption may be more visible, I want to stress the point that corruption is not just happening ‘elsewhere’, as have shown big-time recent fraud scandals in Western countries, in both the political and commercial spheres. When I was at a Ministry a few weeks back, I noticed some posters saying something along the lines of information is a right, not a privilege, and that public servants have the obligation to do their job. It is probably not for the first time that campaigns like this are started in the media and government institutions. As AF Robertson (complete source available on request) has recently noted, there is little doubt that the ultimate purpose of ‘anti-corruptionism’ as a global movement is to make the citadels of commerce safer for international capital, rather than to make life fairer for the world’s poor.
I think that the DNA (National Anti-Corruption Agency) is doing a lot of work, and maybe, if you persevere in taking people out of office, you may end up with some person with integrity there. At the top, however, the issue of corruption is deeply entangled with political power struggles. Legislation is permissive and constantly changing, and in front of the law, some animals are definitely more equal than others here. Accusations that will eventually make the corrupt ones go away, or no smoke without a fire? Probably both. I just know this manoeuvring at the top (we are at present without a Minister of Justice again, in Agriculture the Minister got changed 4 times during my fieldwork, see youtube for the famous video from the last Minister’s public bribe reception) from the media, who are clearly swept along with the strong desire to become European, to denounce the stealing politicians, to speak about what happens in this country, and to mark progress towards their own posited ‘Europeanness’. Press information is a good thing, although within the ranks of the press many have enriched themselves through shady businesses (example: Chireac, an editorialist I quoted once mainly for his vileness a few weeks later left the paper because it turns out he had business in his back that no one in the paper presumably had known about…believable?).
One of the problems is the lack of information. People do not know about their rights, and get no information. One the one hand, (political) institutions are not good at sharing information, and making it reach more people. People also just want to get on with their lives and make a living, which is here quite more difficult than in Western Europe – we elect them to govern for us, right? – and have a difficult heritage of ‘the state will take care of it’ of socialist times, and ‘the state doesn’t give a damn’ of postsocialism, so this often gives rise to a ‘bloody politicians, they are thieves, only themselves is who they know’ and ‘what are we to do?’ resignation. Some people would call this ‘lack of civil society’, but I am reticent to put it like that for a number of reasons. There is a definite fracture between the governors and the governed, but in some ways, because of this fracture, corruption persists. Also corruption is not perceived, by your average person, as something very different from stealing, and is usually grouped into this larger category.
Put in the situation of your child/spouse/parent/cousin getting seriously ill, you go to the hospital and you take a bribe for the doctor (if you are unfortunate enough not to have a powerful name or access to private care) if you want him to have a good look. People die because they are not examined, because they did not bribe appropriately, especially if they have the misfortune to get ill on the weekend. Say you are living in a village, and the policeman stops you, you have some money already tucked into your documents that you hand over. You say you want to stay out of trouble, and he might just see that, actually your tyres are crap and there’s something wrong with your lights. He will find something. You want your child to get a job in your own country, you do not want them to leave like all their siblings, so you pay to get him or her into the army, the police, anything where the boss is open to bribing. You do not take the breeching of a property border to court, because you know your opponent is a powerful man, and justice will not be quite as blind as it should be. I am reminded of a friend who gets enraged about how people drive (aggressively, unpredictably – only last weekend 18 people died in traffic accidents, including 2 people from my village, while 46 more got seriously injured), because they get their driving licences without practice (with money), the police is not efficient, the roads are crap, and people are reckless, and, as we drove through this town on the main road, about 20 metres in front of us, a pickup sped out of a side road on the right without caring about priority, and then veered to the left realising they could not stop in this rain, so that we had to manoeuvre around him and it was lucky that no one came from the other side). He started cursing like a pirate, and said then: ‘no wonder people start making the law themselves, and beating people up. Romania is the jungle. You try to conform to the law, and you’re apparently an idiot.’ A similar thing happens to people who have a medium-size company and try to do everything white. They are bound to fail, because they compete with a black system that runs a lot better, because fiscal evasion is easy, and also here bribing is possible, if you run into some trouble.
I am entirely in agreement that while it is easy to love the sinner (in a lot of cases), the game remains condemnable for many reasons.
Corruption reinforces inequalities. ‘They’ build their villas with your money, while you pay double at least.
Corruption does not produce incentives for people to work for a ‘public good’, and does not help to work towards a meritocracy, where the best people are also the most skilled and not just those within networks of nepotism (did you know that the term makes reference to illegitimate sons of popes who were privileged ‘nephews’? aber das nur am Rande). Corruption hinders reform of encumbered bureaucracies, even though it is not the opposite of bureaucracy, as far as I can think today.
One battle does not win the war, but gives a ray of hope: the European Commission has been nagging Romania to get rid of the excessively high matriculation tax that the government introduced at the beginning of 2007 (EU accession, remember), while it had just got rid of the import and internal acquisition taxes. This new tax of course had nothing to do with several people in government being involved in car sale business at the time. Be that as it may, the law violated the acquis communautaire, and if Romania does not change it within two months after having been warned, it will be taken to the European Court of Justice. One citizen from Arad, Ilie Iluna has taken the state to court and won his individual case. The head of the Timisoara finance department is considering to ask for the tax back himself. But now the government has decided to rename the tax (environment), and efforts to contest may be vain. The story goes on!
I know in this post I conceptually mix corruption (the abuse of public office for private gains according to one definition) and differential application of legislation, but I think you cannot, for the Romanian context, consider them separately.