Early Mission Trip to Yugoslavia


NUMBER 028
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JULY 2003




                            January 2016
The World Bank Group Archives Exhibit Series contains exhibits originally
published on the Archives’ external website beginning in 2002. When the
Archives’ website was transferred to a new platform in 2015, it was decided that
older exhibits would be converted to pdf format and made available as a series
on the World Bank’s external database, Documents & Reports.

These exhibits, authored by World Bank archivists, highlight key events,
personalities, and publications in the history of the World Bank. They also bring
attention to some of the more fascinating archival records contained in the
Archives’ holdings.

To view current exhibits, visit the Exhibits page on the Archives’ website.
Early Mission Trip to Yugoslavia

The Bank lent Yugoslavia an amount in various
currencies equivalent to $28 million in October 1951
[Loan 00510]. The loan provided foreign exchange
needed to complete projects in the fields of electric
power, coal mining, non-ferrous metals development,
industry, forest products utilization, agriculture and
fisheries, and transportation.

Rene Brion, a World Bank Staff Member from the
Treasurer’s Department, describes some of the local
color during a mission to Yugoslavia during late 1951
and early 1952, and reflects on the history of Sarajevo.
                                                                   Author Rene Brion
This article originally appeared in the May 1952 issue
of “International Bank Notes.�?

The DC-3 of the Yugoslav Airlines flew over the Sava River, circled Belgrade,
crossed the Danube River twice and landed smoothly at the Belgrade airport.
The weather was glorious on December 1, 1951, and our flight from Frankfurt
over the Alps had been exhilarating. Two American cars of the Yugoslav
Government were waiting for us and took us to the city, where flags were floating
in the wind, colorful in the sun. Blue, white and red national Yugoslav flags and
red flags of the Communist Party were about evenly distributed. I must admit that
the flags and the crowds in the streets were not there to welcome the arrival of
an International Bank mission. It was purely coincidental that we arrived in
Belgrade on the weekend of the national holiday of Yugoslavia. It was not
coincidental, however, that Yugoslavia revealed to us, at first sight, the main
components of her present equilibrium: socialism, nationalism, and Western
techniques symbolized by the Douglas DC-3 and the Chevrolets.

This was the first day of a five-week stay in Yugoslavia. After some time spent in
Belgrade meeting with officials of the National Bank and various ministries, we
traveled around the country visiting Bank-financed projects and implementing, in
                                               the field, supervision of the
                                               Yugoslav loan.

                                                  Belgrade itself is a city where very
                                                  little of the past remains—broad
                                                  streets and avenues and most of
                                                  the buildings not over 30 years old;



Women employed at the Rade Koncar Electrical
Machinery Plant in Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia.
            Photo: United Nations
an opera house where we saw a very good ballet of folk dances; a few legitimate
theatres (one of them staging “Death of a Salesman,�? in translation, of course);
several movie theatres playing, for the most part, American, British and French
pictures; and football games on Sunday afternoons in a large new stadium
packed with some 60,000 people.
In spite of all this, the atmosphere in Belgrade was not so Western as it sounds.
I cannot explain exactly why. It was more a matter of feeling than of logic.
Maybe it was the Cyrillic lettering in the newspapers and in the signs along the
streets, the fur hats, the almost total absence of automobiles resulting in an
abnormal silence; but above all, no doubt, it was my imagination in search of the
exotic.
The West—we found it again later when we
stayed a few days in Zagreb and Ljubljana. But
to me, the climax of the trip to Yugoslavia was
our visit to Sarajevo.

Sarajevo! I heard that name for the first time
when I was a little boy of five, and it was
associated in my mind with a tremendous
change in my environment—a change, as I
discovered later, which was only a reflection of
the tremendous change in the world. Sarajevo!
Every man and woman, every child in Europe,
had said that name and said it again. It
sounded like a strange curse. Until very
recently I never thought I would see Sarajevo.
Now that I have seen it I understand why it was         Checking the assemblage of the
in that city that Destiny chose to strike. It is a       frame and field coils of a large
                                                       generator being built at the Rade
true “meeting of East and West,�? but not a            Konar Plant at Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
recent meeting, as in cities in the Near or Far
East. It is a place where, for centuries, East and
West have met through the coming and going of conquerors, travelers,
merchants, and missionaries of various religions; and during those centuries
Destiny was patiently building up the setting for the drama. On one side of the
stage it elegantly placed mosques, with their minarets looking, in the sunset, like
pink flamingos, and tortuous little streets smelling of oriental pastries. On the
other side it constructed an Austrian town in that Franz Josef style which is a little
too pompous, with just a little too much stucco and a little too many ornaments.
And right in the middle, a peaceful river. And Destiny knew what it was doing in
making that bridge so narrow.
There I stood at the very place where the shot of Princip, the Bosnian student,
started humanity’s current struggle against itself. It all started there. Maybe it had
to start, and it might have started somewhere else; but it started there.

And I was pondering that controversial issue—whether History does repeat itself.