Rick Grant wrote:
<Cut>
> <One more thing, sorry to digress, but licence plates can also be the
> difference between life and death. When Yugoslavia went bi-polar the
> country ended up as a bizarre collection of petty fiefdoms divided along
> Croat, Serbian, Muslim, and various combinations of all three. Licence
> plates in that part of the world proclaim just exactly were you live. This
> could mean big and perhaps fatal trouble to say, a Croat Muslim traveling
> across Bosnian Serb territory, to get to Herzegovinan mobster land, or a
> Serb crossing Bosnia, Croat and Muslim, to get to Albania.
>
> And despite the chaos of civil war there was never any shortage of people
> to man roadblocks to check things like papers and licence plates.
>
> The answer turned out to be an impressive trade in fake licence plates and
> papers, quick release licence plate bolts, and an uncanny knack on the part
> of drivers to know when they might be entering a territory that needed a
> licence plate change. Bribe money was also important of course.
>
> Rick Grant
> 1959 SII 88"
> VORIZO
I may add that in the same period of time, lots of Italian well-doers self
proclaimed a coule of old FIATs an "humanitarna pomocna" (sp?) i.e. an humanitary
convoy, and with a bootload of (often expired) drugs headed to former Yugoslavia
to play the "good rescuers bravely facing the war", in order to have something to
tell about (often with some embellishment) once back home. The Red Cross had its
troubles in explaining all those people tha t good will, if organised is more
effective, and that the Red Cross emblem is regulated under a few international
treaties and needs some cautions in being used... but I am digressing.
Once we had to rescue one of these "war tourist convoys" because of their
registration. They were from Bergamo, Italy and the registration reads BG*######.
They were in a very nasty area in Croatia and suddenly it was clear that
BG*###### is the plate for Belgrad, Serbia, too! They weren't exactly
welcomed....
Andrea
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