BUCHAREST: Perhaps only our greatest playwright, Eugene Ionesco, could have gotten this story right. Ionesco's genius was to portray a world in which the absurd is triumphant. Imagine the scene: Bucharest, le petit Paris, a city of three million people with wide boulevards and grand bourgeois villas, stands now a city half in ruins. Poverty runs rampant, orphanages overflow with abandoned children, countless packs of wild dogs roam the streets.
All of this excites little or no interest in the West. Romania's politicians appear to be equally indifferent; they have wasted the last ten years in endless fights, while our postcommunist neighbors reinvented their societies and made themselves ready for membership in the EU.
Then Bucharest's mayor, Traian Basescu, proposes a plan to control the dogs: the city government will put to sleep any dog without an owner. Suddenly, the West's interest is kindled. Not to help us, of course - at least not to help the city that contains armies of feral dogs, making it appear at times like a ghost town in a Sergio Leone cowboy movie. No, Brigitte Bardot - we still anticipate the arrival of Gerard Depardieu any day now - and other celebrities, people unable to shed a tear for our unwanted orphans or for the mass poverty left behind by Ceausecu, fly into Bucharest (undoubtedly by first class) to protect the wild dogs and denounce our mayor.
Our reality, I suspect, would challenge even Ionesco's sense of the absurd. Middle-aged, greying, Bardot arrived in Bucharest not to remind men, high and low, of her charms but to prevent what she called a "canine genocide." Yet, despite the harsh rhetoric, when Miss Bardot and Mayor Basescu met, they parted with a kiss. "For 30 years I waited for this," the Mayor blushed. Unwilling to discriminate between parties, Miss Bardot later kissed our president, Ion Iliescu. Her celebrity recognized, the public's adoration bestowed, she then departed, leaving the wild dogs, and our broken society, to their fates.
The feral dogs of Bucharest are a tawdry legacy of communism, like the many half-built and abandoned blocs of flats dotted across the city and throughout the country. Decades ago, Bucharest held many tiny houses, with courtyards and small gardens. People kept watchdogs to protect their properties. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, most of these homes were forcefully demolished by Ceausescu. The dictator wanted all socialist citizens to live in socialist flats. As tens of thousands of people were moved into tiny, standard issue apartments, many dogs were abandoned. Like Romania's people, they survived only by daily cunning.
Since 1990, successive mayors promised to tackle the problem of these hundreds of thousands of feral dogs. But even bigger problems - housing and street crime - also existed, so nothing was done about them. Besides, many people opposed killing the street dogs. Every now and then a few were caught, sterilised and released. But the packs multiplied and multiplied.
Mayor Basescu wants to be the next leader of the Democratic Party (now led by former Prime Minister, Petre Roman) and is said to be preparing to run for president in 2004. Success as Mayor of Bucharest will boost his chances, and what better way is there for a politician to promote himself than by "cleaning up" some seemingly intractable problem - particularly one that symbolizes ten years of incompetence and despair.
So, all street dogs, the mayor promised, would be caught and quarantined. The old and sick would be killed by euthanasia; the rest sterilised and vaccinated. Meanwhile, people would be asked to adopt as many dogs as possible. Those not adopted would share the fate of the sick and old.
Even before the Bardot visit, demonstrators besieged City Hall in opposition to the plan. A human rights defender, Gabriel Andreescu, compared the looming fate of the street dogs with the Holocaust and Gulag. A leading journalist, Cristian Tudor Popescu, reproached animal rights defenders for their moral relativism and insensitivity to human suffering.
Our politicians usually shout at each other, but Basescu cleverly disarmed his critics by talking to representatives from animal rights groups. He told them that he rejected cruelty to animals, but insisted that it was his duty to promote the interests of people before dogs. He asked them (many of the representatives were well-to-do women) to set a personal example by adopting a street dog.
Ionesco was no moralist, but even he would not deny one moral to be drawn from this story: when societies avoid taking necessary measures, things only get worse. For just as the wild dogs of Bucharest multiplied over the years, so too did Romania's unsolved problems. Vast social problems demand an entire community's commitment, not just resolution from above. Of course, you cannot "adopt" abandoned factories or the unemployed masses in the way that dogs can be adopted. Nonetheless, a community must and should assume and share its burdens.
One day, Romania might actually learn this lesson. I doubt, however, that celebrities like Miss Bardot will ever recognize the absurdity of their misplaced priorities - to come to a country where millions live in despair and dire conditions, and show concern for only the wild dogs.
Must be the insecticide, food, and the birch tree dance <don't ask> 
