September 11 at the movies

By Daniel Mendelsohn

At a quarter to nine on the morning of September 11J 2001, I was driving down the West Side Highway in Man­hattan in a car filled with scholarly texts about Greek tragedy. It was a Tuesday, and the first session of the seminar I used to teach each fall at Princeton, "Self and Society in Classical Greek Drama," was scheduled to meet on Thursday. Because I'd recently been given a big new office, I had decided to move all of my classics texts from my apartment in New York down to Princeton; which is why, at around eight that morning, I could be found in front of my building on the Upper West Side, loading boxes of books with titles like Tragedy and Enlightenment and The Greeks and the Irrational into a friend's car. After I'd finished, I got in the car and headed south toward lower Manhattan, where the friend who was going to accompany me to New Jersey lived.

My friend and I had agreed to meet at her place at nine, but traffic on the highway was surprisingly light and I reached her neighborhood early. I picked up my cell phone — the display on its exterior said 8:45 — to warn her that I was going to arrive momentarily. "Don't be mad," I said, "but I made good time." I flipped the phone shut, looked up, and a dark flash of something darted into the building that loomed directly before me, which was the north tower of the World Trade Center. A gigantic ball of bright orange fire ballooned out of the tower, followed by vast plumes of dense, black smoke.

Today, when I tell people this story, I say it was like Vesuvius; there was, indeed, something volcanic about the quality of fire and smoke pouring out of the huge black gash in the building's side, which directly faced those of us who were looking at it from the north. But at the time, the first, irrational thought that came into my staggered mind was that someone was making a blockbuster disaster movie. What I thought, in fact, was this: In this day and age, with its sophisticated digital special effects, why would anyone use real planes?

After a stupefied moment, in which the realness of the accident (as I then thought it must be) became apparent,

I swerved my car onto a side street, where already clusters of people had stopped to stare and cry out in awed horror. Shaking, I reached for my cell phone and hit redial. "What's up?" Renee asked. "Turn on the TV, turn on the TV," I said, a little hysterically. "The World Trade Center blew up." But of course there was nothing to see on the TV yet. The amazing thing had just taken place; there was no coverage yet, no media, no commentary, no evaluation, no interpretation. It was just the raw event. What had just happened had not yet become the story of what happened. <...>

RUSSIA

"Business Central Europe. The Annual 2000"

The economy is in a good/bad news situation. Cataclysm has been avoided. The rouble maintains its mysterious stability; and production figures are chugging upwards again after the calamitous drops of 1998. Many observers even forecast modest GDP growth after a rise in world oil prices. Even better, the government has committed itself to a series of reforms — including hard budgetary constraints, better tax collection and bank restructuring — on order to meet the terms of a new $4.5 billion loan from the IMF.

But the apparent recovery is equivocal, not least because official economic figures should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Much of the apparent rise in production is the result of windfall gains for exporters from devaluation. Among the population, conditions have steadily worsened. While production has gone up, domestic consumption has slumped. The average monthly wage is now below $70 — down over one-third in real terms year on year. And unemployment is creeping up, to as high as 18% by some measures.

And if the government's reform's commitment to the IMF sounds a little familiar, that's because it's been promised before. Discussion with the IMF still revolves around the absolute basics of tax and bank reform. These are measures that should have been tackled before the crisis, and certainly not postponed after it.

POLAND

"Business Central Europe. The Annual 2000"

Economy With the 1998 Russian crisis slashing cross-border trade by 40%, the Polish economy faces a rocky time in 2000. Cross-border trade with Russia will tumble further following EU demands that Poland tighten border controls. That's one reason why recent surveys show that just 46% of respondents favour EU membership, compared to 70% two years ago.

Still, while economic prospects for 2000 aren't exactly rosy, they could hardly be called bad, either. Growth should accelerate to 5%, from 3.5% in 1999, while increased pri­vatization revenues will help fund both the struggling budget and social security reform.

Business There are some good business reasons why the Polish economy is faltering. Laggardly privatization (40% of industrial workers are still employed by state firms) means that communist-era companies are an increasing drag on the wider economy. The coal sector alone lost $800 million in 1999, for example, and the government's own economic plans accept that rapid growth can't be sustained until the country's unproductive mines and still mills are sold off.

Still, some long-delayed privatizations were carried out in 1999, including Bank Pekao, LOT airline and the Polski Koncern Naftowy oil conglomerate. That will continue in 2000, when state companies worth some $4 billion should be sold.

That should allow the government to focus on providing a better environment for Poland's uncompetitive private sector, where big improvements in labour efficiency and quality are still needed.

Increasingly, the bigger private companies are accepting they can only survive with a foreign partner. But most Poles work for 2.5 million small companies that produce nearly half of GDP. They remain backward, and largely incapable of competing internationally. If Poland wants to carry on growing, that must change.

"WE DID NOT HANG AROUND TO SEE IF THE GUN WORKED"

John Aglionby in Dili Saturday September 4, 1999

The sound of the smack across my friend's face echoed like a gunshot. I whipped round to see her clutching her left ear and a fiery man shouting at her: "Get out you foreign dog."

This appeared to be a signal to the six men with him to attack us, five journalists investigating an attack by pro-Jakarta militias yesterday morning on the pro-independence suburb of Becora in the East Timor capital, Dili. Another man pulled out a pistol. It was only a homemade gun but we did not hang around to see if it would work. Should I have left with the journalists who at that moment were packing their bags to evacuate on a BBC charter flight?

Several of the militiamen followed us briefly but, thank­fully, made no serious attempt to prevent our escape. Even more passive were the dozen members of the police's crack mobile brigade, all armed with automatic rifles and bayonets. The officers made no attempt to intervene at any time: they did nothing when the militiamen barged though their ranks, heading for us, or when the assault began.

The words of UN spokesman David Wimhurst ran through my mind. "The performance of the Indonesian police has been totally inadequate since polling day."

That was Monday, when 98.6% of East Timorese adults voted, mostly peacefully, on whether to remain part of Indonesia or choose independence.

Since then peace has been hard to find anywhere in the former Portuguese colony, invaded by Indonesia in 1975.

I last left Dili on Wednesday afternoon, to go to the village of Hera 10 miles away, where four people were reportedly killed by militiamen.

The local people described how the militiamen pulled four graduates of the local polytechnic from their car the previous day and took them away. Ten hours later they were dead. The one man who saw the assault is now in hiding, nursing a smashed head and broken arm.