China Today, Croatia Tomorrow? Will Technology Kill the State of Uhljebistan?

March 7, 2019 – Or will Uhljebistan kill technology? How will technology affect the corrupt State within the State in Croatia?

When I lived in the last days of the Soviet Union and the emerging, chaotic newly independent Russia from 1991-93 (and for my army of conspiracy theorists, yes I was a KGB, MI6, UDBA triple agent), one of the things that was interesting to watch was the arrival of the major Western brands in the country. McDonalds, Coca Cola, the banks, the insurance companies, Irish pubs, the consulting companies and the luxury car companies.

It stays with me for I have spent most of my life living in countries where consumers were always looking abroad for the latest thing. Things would eventually come, but if you wanted to know what the future was like, you looked to places like the United States for technology, for example.

One of the scariest things I read recently, in an increasingly scary online world of technology, was the Chinese government’s experiment in social control, where citizens who fall below a certain level of social credit are punished and unable to do certain things. As The Independent reported a few months ago, the government blocked more than 11 million of its people from buying plane tickets, and more than 4 million from taking the fast train due to their low level of social credit. As The Independent writes:

People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished.

Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.

Punishments are not clearly detailed in the government plan, but beyond making travel difficult, are also believed to include slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets.

Imagine if that came to Croatia?

It is something I have been thinking about for a while, and then last night, someone sent me a link to the Croatian tax authority website about a former associate who owes me and a good deal of other people quite a lot of money, before she managed to quietly disappear from the country some time ago. My former associate’s debt to me was nothing when compared to the 250,000 kuna debt to the tax authority. I was transfixed by the site. One company, which is still active, owes more than 200 MILLION kuna, and there are thousands of citizens with debts of over 100 thousand.

My former associate recently flew into and out of Croatia, with no concern in the world. Meanwhile, in China, a little fake news and smoking in the wrong place, and you could get grounded…

While I wouldn’t expect – or want – the Chinese experiment to take off here or anywhere else, it does bring me back to my one big hope for Croatia’s future – that technology will eventually defeat the corrupt State within the State known as Uhljebistan. If you have never visited Uhljebistan, here is a quick introduction.

A little like those days in the early Nineties in Moscow, looking at more advanced democracies to see what comes next for Croatia gives mixed messages, but at least some glimmers of hope. Institutions such as the EU are far from perfect, but with more supervision, transparency, and the advance of technology can and I believe will make a difference in the long run. Part of the problem, of course, is that those in power in Zagreb have no invested reason to change the status quo, because it suits them very well. But with more decisions being made in Brussels and with a greater international spotlight on Croatia and its institutions, there is a tiny momentum to make some change in the right direction.

The most spectacular example of technology and success in recent Uhljebistan history was back in 2010, when the mercurial political blogger and data guru Marko Rakar noticed that there were more registered voters in Croatia than actually existed in the country, clearly an absurd situation. Upon closer inspection, he found one address in a village near the border with Hercegovina which didn’t actually exist. Despite that fact, no less than 404 people were registered at the address, Dusina 0, 76% of the village population. In the words of Tech President back in 2010:

Rakar says that Croatia is the only country in the world “where the number of voters exceeds the number of inhabitants.” In one town, he found the suspicious address of “Dusina 0” (who lives at “zero”?) with 404 registered voters–76% of the town’s total voter roll. By posting the whole list online in searchable form, he invited his fellow Croatians to investigate their own neighborhoods and towns, and to report the results back to his site, Pollitika.com. The resulting uproar was front-page news in Croatia for days, and has provoked a serious debate about amending the country’s constitution to prevent the practice.

Some 800,000 names were removed from the electoral list, as a result, a significant number in a country with a population of 4.2 million. The same country which 9 years later has a population of less than four million. The emigration continues…

Rakar was also associated (he denies involvement) – indeed, even arrested – for another website regarding the number of war veterans, which mysteriously rose from 326,000 in 1996, one year after the war, to more than half a million in 2010, 15 years after the war ended. Tech President again:

Less than a month ago, he was arrested and briefly detained by the police on suspicion of posting a secret list of 501,666 veterans from the 1991-1995 Balkan war. The site provoked an immediate uproar in the country, as millions of people went looking for the records of people they know as well as prominent national figures. The site exposed the fact that some public figures who had never served in the military were ostensibly receiving lucrative veterans benefits like premium health care and duty-free car imports, and that about 20,000 people had been registered as veterans despite serving 15 days or less in the military. As there were only 326,000 vets on the list a year after the war ended, many Croatians suspect that thousands have illegally obtained veterans benefits through corruption and bribery.

A different set of inflated numbers was in the news recently, as Index journalist Marko Repecki took a look at the number of people registered in the Croatian healthcare system – 4,159,169 – more than actually live in Croatia.

With greater accountability and transparency demanded by the international community and the EU, coupled with the power of technology, the opportunities to mask such blatant abuses of the system should become less and less. And with greater pressure from international institutions and the EU, so too should be the current practice of turning a blind eye.

“Haha, I love your optimism,” a friend told me in the pub last night. “Technology kill Uhljebistan? Uhljebistan is invincible, mate, you are more likely to see Uhljebistan kill technology.”