Of all places, just across the street from the government, in the very heart of the capital of Romania, a pitiable display. Local authorities’ action to bring down a terrace that lacked a construction authorisation has held the front page of major daily papers, needed more police than municipality servants, with fainted waitresses and cursing which, although in English, still contained references to mothers.
The owners, otherwise gladly received foreign investors, laid out swastikas and hammer-and-sickles into the street, threatened to block investment flows by lobbying the beer industry and have their cell phones glowing hot with calls for protection. From whom, we don’t know, but we can guess.
The city hall action can be welcomed for the simple reason of being normal, which is often a notable event here. The rules are as clear here as everywhere. Nothing can be built without an authorisation. What was built without authorisation must be demolished.
But this action also has the quality of clearing the city hall’s older sins. Try an experiment: install a kiosk, not necessarily downtown. Without an authorisation, of course.
There will be no immediate bulldozer, but you can bet your establishment will not go unnoticed by budget officials who, after all, have their personal budgets, and will call for an inspection the very next day. In a sweet Balkan style, there are the negotiations, the tokens of attention, the compromise.
Authorisations, laws, public interest go out in thin air. Since city officials and servants are as transient as time itself, the Balkan bargaining repeats every time around.
The “Sydney” scandal has been going on for over a year and has received ample media coverage in its time. A previous attempt to remove the illegal terrace failed: the city hall workers were scared away by the owner’s guards.
A private army in conflict with the authorities, then, and nowhere else than right in front of the Government, two steps away from a police station. The problem was settled at the time with a mysteriously polite and prompt authorisation permitting the use of public domain (not the construction) issued by the sector 1 mayoralty.
This chronic scheming between local authorities and various owners is not rooted only in the behaviour of public servants – who haven’t been too convincing when answering charges of corruption and favouring particular interests – but mostly in the fog and uncertainty Romania is battling in.
Laws are even now unclear in making an exhaustive definition, absolutely necessary in this case, of what is the property of public administration at central and local level, as they are unclear in delimiting public domain from the state private domain. Lacking unequivocal regulations, the judicial system is dragged into interpretations, and the parties in conflict are each right in their own way.
Too often, the struggle is not with or on behalf of a clearly defined owner, but with a quasi-owner or more self-proclaimed owners. The notion of property, essential in a normal society, becomes so “negotiable” that sometimes officials start shaking and back off before a couple of bodyguards.
Arbitrariness and pigheadedness can make anyone the “owner” of a slice of a square, a piece of pavement, a stretch of park land. In all this bedlam, any attempt by the authorities to restore order becomes an event but fails to deal with the problem. After all, Romania doesn’t have that many bulldozers and police officers.