The End of the Line

Who will mourn the Celts?

2011-03-09T18:30:00.003-05:00

The journalist and historian Marcus Tanner has, since 1988, written books about borderlands and countries that have imploded because of ethnic, religious and cultural differences. His first noteworthy book was a history of Croatia, now into its third edition (2010), and his most recent is about the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus, whose kingdom encompassed much of modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Balkans. That said kingdom eclipsed following his death, and the extensive library that Corvinus once owned became scattered, with Hungarian nationalists later claiming that the day his library was restored, the old, greater Hungary would rise again.

Not too long ago, I picked up a copy of one of Tanner’s books that had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. The subject matter, I confess, was somewhat alien to me. All the same, I came away from the experience with a greater appreciation for something that I had previously known little about. The Celtic experience has had lasting influences throughout continental Europe and North America (to say nothing about Australasia, for that matter). I remember, one summer, visiting a site of Celtic ruins just outside Bratislava, Slovakia – the Celts made it farther eastward than that, I later learned.

The Last of the Celts, first published in 2004 (Yale University Press), is a gentle interlude in his literary repertoire that, while not dealing directly with geo-political disintegration, encompasses culture, religion, identity and – most crucially – language, particularly as it concerns the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, Ireland, France, Nova Scotia and Argentina.

Taking the contemporary “Celtic revival” as a backdrop, Tanner argues that this popularity in such a revival is superficial and only skin-deep. One may think of St. Patrick's Day revellers drinking "green beer" to prove their Irish-savvy qualities. True Celtic culture, which has pretty much extensively involved language usage, is steadily declining, even in a fortified place like Wales and its Welsh speakers, and may not last into the next generation.

His book is a combination of historical and cultural analysis, combined with his personal travels and (extremely keen) journalistic observations of these Celtic hinterlands and their people. The result is a fascinating, in-depth, but ultimately melancholy book that chronicles the swan song of the Celtic peoples. It is tragic, not in the least given the Celtic influences to be found in our own cultures worldwide – and this goes beyond Halloween, jack-o-lanterns, bagpipes and fiddlers.

Tanner sets out the two linguistic branches of Celtic languages, Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx) and Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), and visits the Scottish Highlands, the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man before proceeding to both North and South Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. He leaves Europe for Nova Scotia, Canada, where a Scottish settlement once thrived until the turn of the last century, before finishing off in Patagonia (Argentina), of all places, where a number of Welsh colonies were established beginning in the 1860s. These, too, were eventually crushed by linguistic and cultural assimilation, as well as the unfriendly vibes from Argentina’s later authoritarian rulers.

A short review cannot do Tanner’s work proper justice, but it appears that in all ten chapters the experiences have a number of commonalities. Tanner emphasizes that religion once guaranteed a certain preservation of language, but with the spread of Protestantism and Non-Conformism throughout the British Isles, the attacks on the Scottish Gaels, for example, were unrelenting. The eventual decline in religious observance was one factor that consigned the use of these languages to older folks. Along with bagpipes and fiddles, which were slated for bonfires for their apparent decadence-spewing qualities, was also Gaelic.

It survived, as did fiddle- and pipe-playing, in Nova Scotia long after it had eclipsed in Scotland, but Nova Scotia’s modernization and end of isolation, notably after the First World War, unleashed a torrent of Anglicization. Celtic music survives in Nova Scotia, and this is the only remnant of a much larger Celtic identity; Gaelic is pretty much never spoken outside of a few specialists and linguists. In Brittany, the unrelenting presence of French, as well as an official state ideology that permits only French usage and is unfriendly to minority languages, has done similar damage to the Bretons. Most Bretons, it seems, worry more about the economy than the revival of their identity.

Similar is the thorough non-existence of Manx and authentic Cornish, two extinct languages that died out long ago. In Cornwall, the last celebrated Cornish speaker is an unlikely hero, in the form of Dolly Pentreath. Her usage of the language apparently manifested the most when would-be patrons that refused to buy her fish became the objects of Cornish cusses. She died in December 1777. While Cornish experienced a revival in the last century, it is just that: a revival, which likely does not do the original language justice in pronunciation and intonation. To make matters worse, there is a schism among Cornish speakers over authenticity and accuracy, which only serves to fudge any attempts at a real revival.

Welsh and Irish are different, Tanner points out. Northern Ireland, he finds, has bastions of Irish speakers that are greater than in the Irish Republic, particularly in Belfast, though they are no doubt responses to the ugly sectarian violence of the so-called “Troubles.” In the Irish Republic, the usage of Irish is permitted and even encouraged – the Irish government finances Irish-language media, for example – but the unwitting effect is that most Irish prefer English, given it has been so entrenched anyway. “Economically, culturally, gastronomically, sexually, and in terms of fashion, Dublin, London and New York have practically converged. A great levelling of former distinctions has taken place. Sentimental patriotism and a disappearing accent are virtually all that now divide this homogenised society” (p. 347).

There is, however, less of a sense of looming extinction in the Irish cases; less so in Wales, where Tanner finds that Welsh has a banal quality that actually ensures the survival of a language. Tanner recounts an experience at a supermarket in Caernarfon, observing teenagers buying beer, and speaking amongst themselves and the cashier entirely in Welsh. “It surprised me,” he writes, “because in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man I had never seen such mundane activities carried out in anything but English. I had seen or heard Gaelic used in churches, in music and in seminars and on signposts and in beautiful books, but I had never seen it used by what might be described as ‘yobs.’”

He continues: “A language and culture can only stay alive when they are worn casually and unselfconsciously. Welsh has that quality.” Listening to Welsh spoken in a north Pembrokeshire village, Tanner reports being in an “earthly, ordinary place with a jukebox in the corner churning out 1950s American hits,” where “the crowd of men and women shouting at each other above the din spiced their Welsh almost constantly with English swear words. It all seemed alive – a natural affair, rather than some kind of cultural project” (p. 214).

While Welsh may be the high point of The Last of the Celts, not much else by way of Celtic identity and survival has this quality in Tanner’s book. When languages disappear, he points out in his Conclusion, so too do adages, stories, traditions and other bastions of an identity that can never be truly replaced by the best-intentioned revivalists. We are witnessing the end of the Celts, though readers like me may wonder if anyone is even watching.

The end of a hiatus

2011-03-08T19:19:00.000-05:00

Not since the fall of 2009 have I posted on this blog, and this is something that I have sought to change for quite some time. I was starkly reminded of this when, a few weeks ago, I helped someone put together their new blog so as to promote their business -- it felt like I was re-learning that which I had already known, and had been doing for many years!

There has certainly not been a shortage of news-worthy subjects on which to write. It is just that 2010-2011 was the year of disappointments for me, and also a rejigging of priorities and professional trajectories. Some intellectual heroes of mine lost their lives. Still others went through personal life changes and tragedies. Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and he continues to receive treatment for it.

On the political front, some crazy things have happened. While everyone continued to lament the state of the economy, even though we are now technically in recovery mode, the Balkans remained much as they have, with Croatia, somewhat grudgingly, moving ahead with their EU-minded reforms.

Montenegro, on which I have written often, has officially become an EU candidate country, and its veteran leader, Milo Djukanovic, stepped down for the second time, to be replaced by Igor Luksic, whom I have met personally on a number of occasions. Kosovo's third anniversary was overshadowed by its continuing problems of governance and corruption (just like its second), as well as lurid allegations that its leaders were involved in some kind of organ harvesting mafia. Serbia, meanwhile, kept teeter-tottering on whether it would speak to Prishtina and launch overdue status talks about minorities, trade, links, and so on.

Amid all of this, the EU has been the watchdog, contending with bailing out irresponsible and volatile member-states like Greece and Ireland facing economic meltdowns. It is something that has brought into question the viability of the Eurozone and the EU project itself -- one, however, that I happily predict will survive the tumult better and bigger. Croatia and Iceland are the newbies to be in the wings, though they will likely be the last of the accession countries for quite some time.

My country, Canada, remains in thrall of a political question that becomes more boring with each passing day. It is one mired in questions of opinion polls, minorities versus majorities, opposition party politics, the viability of coalitions, the evils of separatism and opportunism, and the utter embarrassment of hoped-for leadership that, if the polls are correct, has done nothing to change the landscape on Parliament Hill.

Certainly, my family has gone through a number of transitions and challenges, culminating in illness and life changes that happened so quickly when looking back at them. Things are looking upwards now, and the unknown of the future is partly what makes it so exciting! At the time, though, it was quite dark, which is ultimately why The End of the Line has been put on the back burner.

Rest assured, however, ladies and gentlemen. All of that is now about to change. Over the next few weeks, some changes will be made to this site, but all for the better. The Line is back. 2011 beckons, as does an enhanced, refined and glimmering future. I beseech you to join me in the ride! Thank you, also, for your patience -- I trust that it will have been well worth the wait.

Why on Earth is Slovenia doing this?

2009-11-10T13:45:00.000-05:00

Slovenia remains the smallest of the former Yugoslav republics that had the blessed fortune of being spared the devastation wrought on its former co-republics. There were small skirmishes, and a helicopter was shot down on its territory, but the Belgrade-controlled Yugoslav National Army withdrew from Slovenia after just ten days of fighting. Slobodan Milosevic had better things to do, so to speak, by moving on to Croatia, which had a sizable Serb minority, particularly around the Krajina region.

Slovenia (along with Croatia) was the richest of the former Yugoslav republics, and moved towards free market capitalism and democracy the quickest. Some tourist guide books -- and now officials from the Slovene government -- have gotten on the bandwagon, and are trying to get the rest of the world to forget that Slovenia was once part of that bygone entity called Yugoslavia. When academics and journalists talk about the Western Balkans, Slovenia is noticeably not included in this definition.

So, in short, this country of some 1.5 million people (or is it closer to 2 million now?) has fared remarkably well. It joined NATO and the EU in 2004, and was the first ex-communist country with mature-enough financial institutions to join the Eurozone.

With all of this remarkable and exemplary progress, one can only wonder why on Earth Slovenia's government has elected to do this? "Slovenia's ruling coalition parties have joined opposition parties in calling for a referendum on a border deal agreed with Croatia...The four ruling parties as well as Prime Minister Borut Pahor and President Danilo Turk have decided to support the opposition initiative and said on Tuesday they will only ratify the border agreement if it secures majority support in a referendum, expected in early 2010."

Not long ago, newspapers that pay attention to this region of Europe had hailed a victory between Pahor and his Croatian counterpart Jadranka Kosor, who had signed an agreement ostensibly resolving a long-running dispute over the Adriatic Bay of Piran and demarcations between the two countries that were fudged during the Yugoslav period.

The problem? "The move may again complicate Zagreb's bid to join the EU, since Slovenia has blocked Croatia's EU entry negotiations pending a solution to the 18-year-old dispute." One cannot help but be reminded of another referendum in Slovenia's recent past, which embarrassed its leadership and dismayed human rights observers. After independence in 1991, Slovenia removed other Yugoslav nationals living in the country from official registries, thereby stripping them of their residency rights.

The government moved to fix this sad state of affairs, only to be squashed by a referendum. As the BBC's country profile for Slovenia reports, "Parliament later passed a bill restoring their citizenship but a referendum held shortly before EU entry in 2004 overturned it by an overwhelming margin." This came just on the eve of entry into the EU: what irony!

Now, Slovenia will have another referendum, while Croatia's EU bid, which it needs quite badly, is again left dangling in the Adriatic wind. But the authorities say we should not fear anything, but fear itself: "Nevertheless, the ruling parties are confident they can win. According to Reuters, a recent opinion poll showed 48.5 per cent of citizens would support the agreement while 14.6 per cent were undecided." Let us hope so.

Atta boy, Klaus!

2009-11-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

So ends the twilight zone of uncertainty surrounding the EU's Lisbon Treaty. The last vestige of resistance to a process that would streamline decision-making in the EU and make it into the global power it should be has vanished.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a free market economist par excellence, accepted the decision of a Czech constitutional court, which rejected a complaint against Lisbon, and subsequently ratified it just a short time ago.

As such, a new European Council president post is in the offing, as well as a common foreign minister that will trump the current arrangement of a foreign affairs representative and the external affairs commissioner. Time now, it seems, is of the essence -- bien sur, I say, given that this whole affair with the Lisbon Treaty has been in an uncertain pipeline since the early summer of 2008, when the Irish electorate voted, in a referendum, against it (they subsequently affirmed support through a second referendum held recently).

From the report: "The Eurosceptic Czech leader had recently said he would no longer attempt to block the treaty, after receiving the promise of an opt-out from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights." It seems that this opt-out was driven, yet again, by the need to "avoid property claims from ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II."

A further step, then, which is cause for celebration. The bit about the Sudeten Germans, however, remains the sore spot it was post-1945, but that is another story.

Visas and diplomatic spats

2009-09-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

There are moments when I really question decisions made by the Canadian government concerning aspects of how it conducts its foreign policy. This Ottawa Citizen story, headlined "EU warning: may impose visas on Canadian diplomats; Retaliatory step to push Canada to lift visas for Czechs," is just one of those times.

Back in July of this year, this country's Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney -- probably more well-known for his publicized spat with British MP George Galloway, whom Kenney banned from speaking in Canada -- imposed visa requirements on both Mexican and Czech citizens. It has, predictably, raised quite the storm, though the Czech case appears to be more threatening, just because of the far-reaching consequences that are involved in raising the ire of one of the most powerful political and economic blocs in the world.

From the paper, quoting EU justice minister Jacques Barrot: "This situation is not acceptable -- not just for the Czech Republic but for the European Union as a whole. The European Union is a whole and it is not right and proper for Canada to require visas from one member of this ensemble." Later, the paper points out that "Ottawa reintroduced the requirement for Czechs to obtain visitor visas in July after hundreds of minority Roma from the central European country sought asylum in Canada."

There are, in my view, several issues that emerge from this little charade. First, for quite some time now, Canadian authorities have been wriggling in their offices over protectionist sentiments in the United States, particularly the "Buy American" clause in recent stimulus packages. A wise remedy, that both Ottawa and Brussels had begun to toy with, was to create a Canada-EU free trade agreement, which would begin to offset the excessive reliance on exporting 80%-odd of our goods south of the border. It is hard to see how this chilling of relations could be conducive to such a vital long-term objective.

Second, there is the issue of resources, and the rather lackadaisical approach Canada has taken to its consular obligations and responsibilities in the recent past. "Barrot said as a first step, Canada should open an office in Prague where Czechs could obtain Canadian visas, instead of having to travel to Vienna as they do now." This report fails to point out that Canada already has an embassy in Prague. It also has an embassy in Bratislava (Slovakia). Yet the Prague embassy is also accredited to Slovakia, but visitors from both countries must go to Canada's embassy in Vienna for long-term visas, or for other consular affairs -- no mean feat for many people in both countries who don't exactly have a ton of disposable income.

Canada has been shutting down a number of its offices throughout Europe. I know, off-hand, that its consulate in Saint Petersburg has been closed, as has its embassy in Sarajevo (in this last case, Bosnian applicants will have to go to Budapest for their needs, even though Bosnians require visas to visit the EU too...). Still other countries do not have Canadian consular offices on their soil, like Montenegro. Why this sparse presence, in light of these new realities?

Third, there is the Roma question: the visa requirement was imposed after several asylum requests came disproportionately from Czech Roma, who most certainly face nasty discrimination, not solely from extremist gangs and such, but also from everyday people (I speak from seeing this so many times myself). While Ottawa certainly has the right and obligation to filter out bogus refugee and asylum claims from all countries, this approach is closer to throwing the baby out along with the bath water.

One can only hope that the situation will stabilize, and the Czech government has been gracious enough (well, also quite pragmatic, since tourist dollars account for a lot, especially in Prague) to not reciprocate on Canadian travellers. But problems, little as they may seem, always have the enduring potential to grow into something quite nasty. Alas, this is a case in point.

Microcosms of transition

2009-08-24T12:06:00.001-04:00

Finding myself back in Canada following a seven-month stint in Montenegro, I am still sorting through my experiences. Being a subscriber to regular news items from the excellent Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), I found that much of what I witnessed and experienced in Podgorica (and elsewhere) was complimented by the informed content I read from the folks at BIRN.

I frequently found myself pondering the issue of relationships and the lives of young people outside the academic/professional sphere. I was especially curious to see how people my age related to the transformations taking place in their society, as well as how these changes were affecting them.

Montenegro is a special case in point, since the country is so small; its population is somewhere in the vicinity of 650,000, so I was expecting some degree of modesty and conservative traditions to predominate everyday life. Everyone knows someone who, in turn, knows some other people; what goes around comes around. Networks are extremely wide and strong in the Balkans, a legacy of a decade of war and crippling sanctions, but also steeped in tradition.

This story, therefore, is slightly unrelated to what I have described, and it deals specifically with Serbia. Its conclusions and implications, however, apply and extend to Montenegro, and some of what I learned and observed while there. This piece reports: "Health officials report that between 150,000-200,000 abortions are carried out every year in Serbia, news-site Mondo reported Monday...Every twelfth woman between the ages of 15-49 years has had an abortion. Most had not used contraception."

Serbia's total population is a little higher than 7,300,000. In the early 1980s, Serbia already had the reputation for having one of the highest abortion rates in Europe, a fact that nationalists failed to point out when they identified the high Albanian-speaking population within Kosovo and the declining number of Serbs in the province.

I do not know the statistics for Montenegro, but they are something just as frighteningly high, in proportion to the country's small size. Statistics are hard to come by, since Montenegro keeps getting looped in with Serbia, despite three-plus years of independence (go figure). Someone told me that it was in the range of the thousands.

Returning to this story: "[Dr. Katarina] Sedlecki [of the Family Planning Centre of Serbia] considers the abortion situation in Serbia as severe as every fourth abortion was carried out on women who had already had four or more abortions...She added that there are few organised efforts to promote sex education, or to provide information on how to limit family size in Serbia's family planning programme...Sedlecki stressed that economic factors are not the main reason for the high number of abortion cases in Serbia."

The story points out that other researchers indicated that there remain low levels of knowledge concerning contraception, the nature of abortions, "a belief that modern contraceptive methods are harmful to health, and a number of psychological barriers, [including] those arising from relationships with partners." They should also have pointed out, as I witnessed first-hand repeatedly, the social stigmas that befall women in particular that choose to become sexually active (or are just perceived to be such).

Little else can be said from this report, only that so many of the social problems confronting these 'transition' countries, like Serbia and Montenegro, are as much structural and political as they are societal and habit-borne. Montenegro is the tougher fish to fry, just because these realities are shrouded in tradition, secrecy and patriarchy. I found myself frequently frustrated, unfairly perhaps, by such tradition-honed factors that have persisted, despite the obvious negative outcomes that result. This arena of abortion rates in the region is just one aspect of this, and persists not so much out of necessity as it does because of other factors that, evidently, trump economics and the tangibles.

Revolutions have this invisible, yet potent factor to take into account. Montenegro (and Serbia) has a long way to go -- a generation or two, I would reckon -- before anyone can talk about full-out success in conquering legacies and habits forged by past experiences. I say this with sadness, because Montenegro is a country I adore, and consider like my second home and nationality.

Just another day of ‘standard operating procedure’

2009-06-03T09:51:00.000-04:00

Torture has been a constant in world history for as long as rivalries, war and intelligence gathering has taken place. Extreme situations and circumstances, the reasoning has gone, denote the need for extreme measures; to fight fire with fire or, according to the last U.S. administration, to fight terror with terror. The ends justify the means, and in the Iraqi arena of the ‘war on terror,’ these extreme, ostensibly intelligence-gathering measures against “security detainees” were helping to save the lives of American soldiers being killed by insurgents.

The many photographs of prison abuse and torture that were published worldwide in 2004 horrified as much as outraged. It was a phenomenon matched by the grotesque reactions from official circles in Washington DC – President Bush admitting to the low ebb to which America’s image had dropped, but then reiterating “we do not torture,” even though irrefutable proof would continue to emerge that, certainly in Iraq, torture not only happened but was sanctioned at the highest level. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, in moments of almost homicidal and maniacal bluntness, has continuously justified the use of heavy-handed techniques as indispensable to fighting America’s new enemies.

So much of what happened at Abu Ghraib – that is, the tip of the proverbial iceberg that the public knows about – started out as a legal grey zone that originated with the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, not long after the 9/11 terror attacks. Then, like a snowball, one thing led to another, and this legal grey zone that identified Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters as not belonging to any existing nation-state and, therefore, a loophole within the Geneva Conventions, set out the groundwork for what was to follow in what the Bush administration identified as another arena for the ‘war on terror.’ In short, the ghoulish and obscene photographs of American volunteers doing these things to Iraqi detainees failed to tell the whole story.

Over the course of a short time span, I read the book Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch, a journalist and writer that I deeply admire, having first read his work on post-genocide Rwanda, as well as his lesser-known book about an unsolved murder in New York City. This is his first collaborative work, having co-authored this book with the filmmaker Errol Morris, who had earlier released a documentary of the same name (I have yet to see it).

To say that I was expecting something mind-blowing is doing an injustice, though what I expected is just what I received, as will anyone else that reads this book. It not only conveys just what and how Abu Ghraib happened, as told through the words of its chief perpetrators and participants, but also is a potent rebuff to those supporters, past and present, of the Iraq War and regime change. While torture and the usage of “black sites” has been used by the Central Intelligence Agency since its inception post-1945, so much of what is written here reads like the past: the same old story of intelligence failures and techniques that have taken place time and again.

There is so much to say about Standard Operating Procedure, as the darkness it dredges up is presented in a fast-paced tone, but is inherently complex and multifaceted at the same time. The United States, and by extension the entire ‘coalition of the willing,’ were sent to post-Saddam Iraq in March 2003 to neuter the threat posed by the old regime’s weapons of mass destruction and sponsorship of terrorism – links that, notwithstanding a few diehards that insist that there was a connection between these things, did not exist. What started out as a belief that the abuse of prisoners, a term never used by the coalition forces, was the result of a few rogue elements turned out to be an open manifestation of authorized usage of intense techniques to gather what was supposed to be a source of vital information about the post-Saddam insurgency in Iraq. The President, the Vice-President and the Defence Secretary, not to mention the occupation forces themselves, remain culpable for all that happened.

Yet, when all was said and done, a small handful of individuals were punished, and no one above the rank of sergeant was prosecuted. In fact, even before the scandal came out, government and military echelons were more interested in finding ways of keeping things quiet and out of the spotlight – an effort thwarted in no small part by journalists and some within the military that approached them with these incriminating materials. The head honchos, and all members of the Central Intelligence Agency were given a quiet, but guaranteed immunity. There are standards, it seems, and there are standards.

The story Gourevitch and Morris have written is largely told from the voices of the Military Police stationed in Abu Ghraib and the surrounding military zone. Morris, who was the main interviewer of these key participants, has had plenty of experience in interviewing, and his skill at getting his subjects to simply talk is beneficial as it is revealing. Most of these personnel were clueless as to what they were supposed to be doing, and were entrusted to extract intelligence from what turned out to be mostly Iraqis caught in the wrong place and at the wrong time, with no significance whatsoever – about 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were innocent of any wrongdoing, insurgency-related or otherwise.

Those that managed to be acquitted of any wrongdoing by nefarious Iraqi judges were sent back to Abu Ghraib for months on end, pending their official release approvals. In between this, a few American MPs began taking snapshots of interrogations as a way of distancing themselves from what they knew was inherently wrong; one of them, Sabrina Harman, said she took the photographs because she wanted to document and bear witness to the crimes in the prison, thereby acquitting herself of any responsibility. There were others, of course, that were not so benign, and delighted at the chance to slam heads against walls or sexually degrade inmates.

Some critics have looked down on the decision Gourevitch and Morris made in not including any of the abuse photographs in the book. Just as well, since they only tell part of the story – and they can be found all over the Internet and in other documentary collections. While Gourevitch is impressively detached from his subject and offers no personal disgust into his work, it does sometimes seep through, serving as a reminder of the ubiquity of disgust, shame, disappointment and outrage that he must have had to confront while putting this book together.

Since then, US President Barack Obama has effectively spelled an end to the ‘war on terror,’ having ordered not only the closure of black prison sites worldwide but also of Guantanamo Bay’s facilities. Obama has also made plans to re-criminalize torture, thereby potentially seeing investigations and legal proceedings against senior members of the old Bush administration. He has also indicated a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq in the foreseeable future; a decision that, while significant and another break from the past, may well end up doing far more harm than good. Everywhere one looks concerning Iraq, they come away having seen an indelible mess and screw-up that will beguile and horrify for a long time. Gourevitch and Morris have put together a work that will stay relevant long after this war has fully ended.

You are the perfect drug

2009-05-12T11:22:00.000-04:00

Trent Reznor is probably best known for his creative and absolutely smashing musical entity Nine Inch Nails. Last summer, my best friend and I were fortunate enough to see the group perform at the Air Canada Centre; the stifling summertime heat was matched by the absolute intensity and mind-blowing performance they delivered.

Reznor's personal experiences of addiction, depression and darkness is as much sad as it is hopeful, as he overcame his personal demons while still maintaining a commitment to his musical genius. I remember, back in late 1994, when I first heard The Downward Spiral -- a little shocking looking back, as I was just in elementary school -- and being hooked on it, off and on since then.

Granted, I have a bigger appreciation for the old Trent of the Pretty Hate Machine and Broken days, but I still listen to his newer stuff, the most recent of which he allowed to be downloaded, for free, off his web site. I am sad to hear rumours that he may not be touring as Nine Inch Nails for the next while, if ever again. I guess he just reached and crossed a personal threshold that now warrants a quiet retreat and recovery. All the same, hats off to the man.

I came across this long, but fascinating article about Nine Inch Nails' initiatives outside of their music, and into the ways in which they distribute their work while simultaneously reconciling themselves to the new realities facing the record industry and keeping links with their fan base alive and well. Those realities are, of course, the rise of Internet-based file sharing and downloading of music, often illegally -- something that inevitably is nurturing a whole generation of youngsters that view music as something they are entitled to pluck and use as they see fit.

I still have vivid memories of eagerly going to a local HMV music shop to buy the newly-released album from a given band, without having heard anything from it, and then driving home, trembling with delight at what I will expect when I fire up the CD. There is a certain magic quality to this, which probably explains why I still, to this day, buy CDs -- even though they are played just once, technically, on my computer, which then feeds everything to an IPod.

Where has all the magic gone? Computers, the Internet, mp3 files, ITunes -- that all sounds too robotic, which says much for where we are going as a society...but that is also going off topic.

"Reznor hasn't been trying to save the record industry, and doesn't push himself forward as any kind of example or seer. All he has been trying to do is to release Nine Inch Nails's music to the greatest effect. Some of the financial decisions he has made along the way seem almost suicidal. But, even so, perhaps more than anyone else right now, he has been offering the record industry a remarkable lesson in survival and some clues as to how, for those who are smart and passionate and flexible, there are ways forward."

The whole story is there, for anyone that wishes to read it all. Reznor and, by extension, Nine Inch Nails achieved what is, for many, almost unachievable; they did not let it get to their heads, nor did they forget their humble and servant-status origins before moving deep into the mainstream (and the perks that have come with it, both artistically and financially). I reckon, speaking as a fan and admirer of Reznor and his music, that this is the proverbial icing on the cake: as practical as it is a recognition of, and homage to, his fan base, as much as it is self-preservation in the face of changing realities.

As this article wraps up, "Now theirs is a more controlled, coiled anger; the sincerity without the damage. Reznor has prospered by realising that there are some changes it is dumb not to make." Music-making meeting the politics of the recording industry, and an embracing of the new realities that emanate from it: that is the perfect drug, if there ever was one.

Citizenship and assimilation

2009-05-05T06:12:00.000-04:00

The former Soviet republic of Moldova, with a population of just over 4 million, remains one of the smallest post-Soviet republics. It is also the poorest country in Europe, with a dilapidated infrastructure, outmoded agricultural techniques, and about one-fourth of its working population that does not technically work in Moldova.

In 2001, President Vladimir Voronin, of the Communist Party, became President; his government recently was re-elected, but not without triggering violent spasms of unrest in the capital of Chisinau that forced a recount reiterating the Communists' victory.

It is also the site of a peculiar form of separatism, east of the river Dniester, which is populated by a sizable number of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, along with Moldovans, but which is controlled by former Soviet political elites that played the nationalism card just before Moldova became independent in August 1991.

Really, though, the conundrum over the 'Trans-Dniester Moldovan Republic' is a thinly-disguised squabble between the Moldovan authorities and the ex-Soviet elite in Tiraspol, who preside over an enclave of Soviet-style decorum and bravado, complete with rampant organized crime, illicit weapons dealing, human trafficking, and minimal central authority. The "president" of Trans-Dniester, Igor Smirnov, runs the place as his personal fief, with his two sons running a good deal of the breakaway state's business.

Moldovans, historically, have ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties with neighbouring Romania; between 1918-1940, Romania and Moldova were one country, and it was following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1940, followed by the insanity of the Second World War, that Moldova became a part of the USSR. Few politicians in post-1989 Romania have been keen on nurturing irredentism in Moldova, given the country's nasty poverty and the instability it harbours with Trans-Dniester.

The Romanian government, however -- along with Russia -- has long been accused of meddling in Chisinau's affairs. Curious, then, that the Romanian government has been making it easier, as of late, for Moldovans to acquire a Romanian passport, much to the chagrin of the Moldovan authorities. Romania's President, Trajan Basescu, says he wishes to avoid a new "iron curtain" from falling between the two countries, but one cannot help but wonder if this is just an alternative to the mud-slinging, territory-altering prospect of somehow reunifying the two countries together. The last time this possibility emerged was right in 1990-1991, but Romania was nowhere near its current level of stability and economic prospects, let alone EU and NATO membership, at the time.

"This mass granting of the Romanian citizenship is a way to assimilate the Republic of Moldova...We see it a threat to the statehood, a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of our country." Or so says Vladimir Turcanu, a Moldovan MP. More than 100,000 Moldovans have Romanian passports already, and there are another 20,000 applications in the pipeline (though President Basescu cited a figure of 650,000 envelopes at the Romanian embassy in Chisinau).

If this all keeps up, Moldova may well become a closer rendition of post-Soviet Armenia, another poverty-mired country in which one-third of its population has left the country for a better life abroad since 1991. Eighteen years of supposed nation-building and identity-fostering will have been in vain, and a country will have virtually vanished, to be replaced by...what?

We will, we will...but should we, and can we?

2009-04-23T09:42:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, there are developments that encompass a multitude of issues all at once. The news that Turkey and Armenia are, apparently, set to repair and resume ties of some sort after mutually committing one another to persona non Grata-status since 1993, stands out in this regard.

The issue covers, first, the endemic issue of what happened to Anatolian Armenians in 1915, and whether or not it actually constituted genocide. It is a subject best left to historians on both sides of the border, but sometimes such things are just not possible. Too often, nationalists are unable (read: unwilling) to concede facts and think in a level-headed fashion and are more interested in scoring polemical points.

That is an issue in itself. Turkey's ambassador to Canada was recently withdrawn over Prime Minister Harper's referral to 1915 as "genocide," a stance that Ottawa has taken, much to the chagrin of Turkey. South of the border, President Obama is likely set to reiterate his personal stance on the issue (affirmative) at the end of April, when a remembrance day by Armenians takes place, and US Presidents traditionally speak about the subject.

Then, there is the nature of Turkish-Armenian relations that have remained foul, symbolically, for a century, but which became acute post-1993 over the Nagorny Karabagh war. This is an enclave within the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, populated now totally by Armenians, which turned into a quasi-kerfuffle between Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1988. Following 1991, it turned into a full-out war between the enclave, backed by Armenia (and Russia), and Azerbaijan (which also received help from Russia -- go figure).

A fragile ceasefire was imposed in May 1994, but Armenia and Azerbaijan remain technically at war, with skirmishes sometimes taking place. Peace efforts since then have all failed, mainly because Armenia and Nagorny Karabagh's leadership have been more interested in pursuing nationalist policies and catering to the shouts emanating from the Armenian diaspora (think former Armenian President Robert Kocharian versus his predecessor Levon Ter-Petrossian).

Azerbaijan, on the other hand, pumped to the brim with hard and bountiful oil cash, is one of the world's most corrupt states, with a small clique, run first by Heidar Aliyev and now his son, Ilham, controlling the political landscape. The Azerbaijani side of the coin has, in turn, been unwilling to pursue a resolution to the conflict because of domestic political factors that have consistently opposed a reconciliation with the Armenians.

Even now, in the spirit of Turkish-Armenian normalizations, Baku is howling: the status of the Nabucco oil pipeline is at stake, which would reduce the EU's dependence on Russian energy, but which Baku is threatening could be compromised by a shift to the Russians, given that they have already offered to buy Azerbaijani crude at European prices. "Opening the border could lead to tensions in the region and would be contradictory to the interests of Azerbaijan," Azeri Foreign Ministry spokesman Elkhan Polukhov has said.

Finally, the icing on this ziggurat-like cake is Turkey's EU ambitions. Ankara's support for Baku has raised the ire of the folks in Brussels (though, admittedly, it does not take much for them to find issue with Turkey in the best of times), as has its stance on the events of 1915. Turkey's trajectory is also at issue now, a certain 'damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't'-like scenario.

At the same time, it is being pressured by the United States to assist regional peace efforts through its traditional brokerage and go-between efforts at mediating long-standing crises in the region, as between Israel and Syria, and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

This is definitely something to watch, as the stakes are enormous and the issues laden with every kind of explosive you can imagine.

Milo, vi ste kralj!

2009-03-27T04:22:00.000-04:00

Elections are all over Europe these days. Slovakia recently had presidential elections, which will have a second round in a run-off vote some time in April. The Czech government collapsed recently, the outcome of which remains uncertain. Macedonia (or 'FYROM' to those sensitive of the name) held presidential elections this past weekend too, as much in a bid to prove to the world its capability of holding free and fair elections independently.

Montenegro is due to have a parliamentary election on Sunday. Several individuals are running as representatives of coalitions or blocs in a bid to try and win the position of government head, though no one questions that the long-standing incumbent, Milo Djukanovic, will win. The man, in one fashion or another, has held the position of Prime Minister and/or President of Montenegro since 1991, making him something of a relic of everything that has happened in the region.

Television, for about one month now, has been allocating certain slots for "political marketing," ostensibly giving all contenders space to voice their views and try to woo would-be voters to select their number on the ballot. Djukanovic's bloc, known as the "Coalition for a European Montenegro," has, by my reckoning, been dominating the scene. It is as if the voting public already knows that he will win. Quite ironic, given that Djukanovic's bloc has been using the slogan of "Sigurno," which means "assurance," in his campaigns.

This report, by contrast, in reporting on the possible closure of the KAP aluminium plant in Podgorica, suggests the Prime Minister called snap polls in a bid to win a victory before the financial crisis became really acute in the country, thereby affecting his popularity. For a country of some 650,000 people, the closure of this plant, along with a large mine, would affect 4,000 workers -- KAP aluminium alone makes up 40% of the country's industrial production.

There is a burgeoning tourism industry, but many owners of coastal hotels and resorts, buoyed by the economic boom following independence in June 2006 that spurred massive renovations, are now wondering how they will pay their creditors given that less tourists will come this summer, owing to the financial crisis worldwide.

Whoever wins the vote -- and my rather unremarkable prediction is that it will most certainly be Djukanovic -- has a lot on their plate. In fact, this is an icky understatement. Other sentiment, however, says it is not a matter of just winning, but that there is no one else but Djukanovic to lead Montenegro at a time like this; he brought the country this far, so why not let him take it a little further, given that the EU and NATO (via Olli Rehm) have been applauding the country's progress thus far.

Montenegro never had a war on its territory. If anything, it was like a sideshow to the other Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, though details are emerging relating to the country's culpability in some crimes and collusion with Belgrade in this regard. It fared remarkably well, and stands poised for a status of incredulity. For now, however, observers will be watching this election and the broader means by which its winners will tread the economic storms looming fast.

"The victims and perpetrators are still among us"

2009-03-20T05:06:00.000-04:00

Following the Second World War, occupied Germany wound up being partitioned, albeit gradually, into two distinct entities that became a symbol of Cold War divisions in Europe. There was a democratic, free-market West Germany, as well as a communist, non-democratic and Warsaw Pact East, whose official name was the "German Democratic Republic." Berlin was a divided city.

That basic history masks the other, more serious and trenchant diversions that took place following 1945. As a component of the Soviet Bloc, East Germany had a KGB carbon-copy secret police responsible not only for foreign intelligence gathering but also domestic surveillance. This police force, known as the Stasi (fully, 'Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,' or "Ministry for State Security"), was officially founded in 1950, and was among the most ruthless and brutal of the Eastern Bloc's secret police forces, matched perhaps by the wickedness of Romania's Securitate, or Czechoslovakia's Statna/i Bezpecnost (literally, "State Security").

Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal was unsparing in his opinion of the Stasi; he said that they were "worse than the Gestapo." Their surveillance and torture techniques became legendary, as well as the sheer cruelty with which they pressed their agenda. Apparently, a German daily alleged that the Stasi had even partaken in radiating some political opponents, so that they would get cancer within a few years. One out of every fifty East Germans was a Stasi informer, with some estimates stating that this is too conservative a number.

Every post-communist country has had to deal with the particular legacies that emanated from the Cold War, one of them being purging and/or reforming these ex-surveillance agencies known only for their coercion and repressive policies in enforcing communist rule on their populations. The processes, known as lustration, has had mixed results: some countries, like the former East Germany and the Czech Republic, have been vigorous (albeit imperfect), while others, like Romania and Slovakia, were ruled in the 1990s by old-style governments that were unwilling to do so. Others, like Albania, have just begun.

Germany, after reunification, had the double misfortune of not only coming to grips with the Nazi past, but also the Stasi/East German legacy. This last bit remains an issue. Consider this BBC story, which deals with a former, albeit unwilling informer, of the Stasi, who has remained haunted and affected by this past ever since the Berlin Wall came crashing down. This particular woman became a so-called "Romeo spy," tricked into unwittingly handing over West German secrets to the Stasi by being seduced by one of its agents and reassured that her information was being used by pro-peace Western groups.

"It's like an invisible amputation of the soul," this one woman declared. "I am totally alone, I don't have any family, I don't have any friends," but for eleven dogs that she has in her house -- in the Netherlands. After 1990, she was prosecuted and given a suspended sentence and fine, though the agents that cajoled her, and thirty other women, into giving away state secrets were given immunity; to this day, they receive state pensions for their service.

Mind you, Germany has complex, yet very thorough laws on access to information for people affected by the secret police. With a set mandate of operation, the former East German archives enable people to access and read their files, sometimes enabling them to track down their former informers, though this is not sanctioned or officially encouraged. Oxford intellectual Timothy Garton Ash, by his own investigations, confronted those that informed on him when he was in the DDR in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He wrote about them in his book The File. There is now, in Berlin, a Stasi museum -- next time I visit Germany, I will make it a point to check it out.

Some say the Germans have become good at confronting their nasty pasts. The double-whammies of Nazism and Communism are no mean feats to deal with. West Germany went through a period of amnesia throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s about its Nazi past before finally confronting its legacy, through studies of history, popular culture and political will.

Ghosts of the Stasi, however, remain painfully at issue, despite the methodical efficiency of reconciling this dark period. This kind of healing may take a longer time yet to set in.

What if...?

2009-03-13T08:46:00.000-04:00

Former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was murdered six years ago in Belgrade. The story, or at least one of many, is here.

His death left a lot of unfinished business in the matter of Serbia's transition, although the groundwork he had established looked very promising. He was shot right outside his government's headquarters, dealing a nasty blow towards overcoming Serbia's recent history and its endemic image, which is still alive and well in many circles of "opinion," of political instability, economic stagnation and lawlessness.

Not a whole lot to be said about this anniversary, but only to ask the inevitable: how would things have been different if the man had lived? How, particularly, would he have handled the pressing question of Kosovo's status, or the issue of remaining war criminals at large?

The 1980s revival in Europe

2009-03-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are probably familiar with some of the noteworthy tunes from those years, even if we cannot quite place a song name or artist to a particular song. In other cases, someone might describe the `80s as a ‘bygone era,’ but for anyone living or working in Europe right now, this is most definitely not the case.

Attend a dance club, and you will find yourself – as I was, just a few nights ago – standing still and baffled, reveling at that point in your mind between familiarity and recognition, before realizing that what a particular deejay is playing is a heavily-remixed version of a song that made its debut in the early 1980s. In this particular case, it was New Order’s ‘Blue Monday.’ Or, alternatively, go for an evening stroll down a street, and you will hear a familiar jingle emanating from one of the open-door cafes and bars you pass by.

The 1980s are alive and well in Europe, and it is like a blast from the past. In the same way, it is also as much a reflection of how much has happened since then, and a reassuring nod that new generations, many of who have no recollections of those times, can now appreciate some of the musical magic that defined a generation from twenty-plus years ago. I count myself as one of the lucky ones: I am old enough to remember record players, as well as actual vinyl wrapped in record sleeves; cassette tapes were considered a musical space shuttle, because it meant you could actually record your records onto them and then, inevitably, play the stuff in a car stereo.

My older sisters dressed in the fashion of those times, and had the characteristic hairstyles. I remember being totally enthusiastic for one boyfriend that would drive up in our driveway in a sporty Chevy Cavalier Z-24, with a souped-up muffler that could still be heard blocks away. I remember riding my bike with friends, and the high point would be to eat packs of jawbreakers until your mouth hurt from all the gum and crunching. Care Bears, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Brave Star, Ghostbusters, GI Joe, Golden Girls, Thunder Cats, Star Trek TNG, and a whole host of other memories trickle back. I admit my evident nostalgia.

I counted New Order, early-era Depeche Mode, Guns `n Roses, Pet Shop Boys, Dire Straits, The Police and The Cure, just off the top of my memory, as stuff that has been making the rounds here in Montenegro. Television, radio, and club scenes…even the Podgorica police station was playing these tunes!

It also makes for effective advertising: I recently counted my second online CD purchase – yes, I still buy physical CDs rather than opt for ‘downloads,’ since computers are fallible, and data loss is a sad reality – of music from the 80s, stuff and bands I knew about, but never pursued seriously until now. No better way to keep expanding my rather limited musical horizons than the present.

A lot of crazy things were happening in the 1980s: the Cold War was reaching its final decade, and the nuclear issue had become especially frightening, which often became fused with the cause of environmentalism. Communism in Europe slowly began to unravel, permanently changing the alignments that had defined the second-half of the last century. Free-market capitalism was stretching far and wide, often via the expansion of multinational corporations. The AIDS epidemic was in full-force by then, and young people were curbing the sexual excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. Gay rights activism made significant breakthroughs, only to be stigmatized by this epidemic as being an exclusively “gay disease.”

The then-called “third world” was experiencing calamities that began to be broadcast on international television. Other developments in such countries sometimes motivated American covert interventions, as in Central America. Economics and recession were on many working people’s minds. Conservatism appeared to be spreading, particularly in Britain, the United States, West Germany and Canada, which created a backlash in the artistic and cultural communities.

All of these factors, and many more, thematically and structurally influenced so much of the music of the 1980s. It was easy, after this decade passed, to laugh off the fashion and musical excesses of those days, but that there is a new revival happening now is amusing and fun.

But, this might also be the sign of troubling prospects that go beyond nostalgia: music, as with other cultural and artistic mediums, very often is an outlet of how segments of society reconcile the realities of everyday life and current events, particularly the negative and disquieting ones. That the 1980s are being revisited and, quite often, relived again may well be the telltale sign that some believe recent history is repeating itself, or that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If so, then why not learn from the generations before us that went through much the same thing -- and make a lot of fun out of it in the meantime?

Flashbacks to the past

2009-02-05T06:58:00.000-05:00

One would think that, in a perfect world, Nazi-hunting, as a profession, would be an antiquated and unnecessary profession. Of course, given the plethora of war criminals from other conflicts that remain at large and, more often than not, given refuge by countries that fail to grasp the significance of prosecuting them, war criminal-hunting remains highly important.

Sometimes, though, hopes are dashed by realities, and this story tells a very horrific and nasty tale. Aribert Heim, an Austrian-born doctor who joined the Nazi Party in 1935, and who later conducted grotesque medical experiments at a number of concentration camps during the Second World War, was once considered to be still at large. Now, it is alleged, he died in 1992, while living in Cairo. Yet there remains an unclaimed bank account in Germany, also in Heim's name; his relatives cannot claim it until there is proof of its owner's death. Thus far, it has remained untouched, making it ever so possible that this old killer is still alive, somewhere.

Heim was detained for a time by the U.S. Army after the war, but made it out. I remember researching that Dr. Josef Mengele -- another Nazi doctor and experimenter nicknamed "Dr. Death" -- was held by the American authorities for two months, under his own name, after the war -- had similar luck in evading the authorities. Anyone interested in reading the full story about this particular case should check out Gerald Posner and John Ware's biography. Adolf Eichmann also spent time in an American-run internment camp, from where he escaped in 1946, though he was using an alias, I believe, since his name began to appear at the Nuremberg trials then underway very frequently.

It was thought, for much of the time, that Heim was living somewhere in South America -- the same destination for thousands of ex-Nazis/fascists following 1945, given that the regimes there, like those of Juan Peron and Alfredo Stroessner, were more than friendly to these individuals. Peron apparently set aside 10,000 blank Argentine passports for the use of former Nazis. The likes of Eichmann, Mengele, Rauff, Stangl, Pavelic and others all come to mind.

This will be a fascinating, albeit spooky development to watch. Consider this older, but still relevant piece about the world's remaining war criminals from the Second World War, and you will find that the number is still not unsubstantial. Let it be a lesson, however, given that these initiatives are a last push to get those still remaining at large, in the current climate: Nazi and/or fascist crimes should not hold exclusivity over the war criminals of today. I cannot help but lament that the vigour and outrage surrounding the capture of criminals from the Second World War is often markedly different from pursuing the likes of Ratko Mladic and company.

Where's my Stolichnaya?

2009-01-27T04:42:00.000-05:00

Oh no! Russia, that bad old, Cold War-honed, newly-resurgent superpower, willing to bully its immediate and distant neighbours with its control of vital energy supplies and natural resources, is on the move again! Just look at what they did to Georgia this past August, and what they have just done to Ukraine! Watch out, because the Russians, growling and mean bears wearing human faces and swilling vodka straight from the bottle, will pounce on us and rip our heads off...

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- whatever. Christian Caryl is a journalist that I much admire, ever since I came across his reportage in the wake of the October 2002 Moscow theatre crisis, and the ensuing catastrophe that followed in its aftermath. He has written another fine piece, in the form of a book review, dispelling the tale that Russia and the "West" are on the verge of a "new Cold War."

I get embarrassed when I watch some American TV programs, which always fall into the trap of portraying not only Russians, but most Central/East Europeans as corrupt, degenerate and bumbling idiots that can easily be tricked or seduced by alcohol or wads of well-used cash...American dollars, no less.

It is very true that in the West, another term I am sometimes wary of using but nothing else comes to mind, there is a lingering Cold War mentality regarding the bestial nature of the "East," and the last American administration was particularly keen on nurturing it. Bush's would-be successor, John McCain, upheld all this, as with his comments about Vladimir Putin's eyes and the three letters of "K-G-B" appearing.

Heck, when I told people I was moving to Montenegro, many eyed me with fear, as if I was going to live with machine gun bullets ricocheting off my roof, or that I would become a gangster. Long story short, those popular stereotypes are alive and well, mainly coming from people that would probably be hard pressed to know specifics about Russia -- let alone point out Montenegro on a map.

Caryl does concede, however, that Russia's internal problems -- demographic, identity-related mostly -- is a real threat, and not in the least for the Russians themselves. He argues, as does the subject of his review, that Russia's post-Soviet, post-Yeltsin sense of grievance trickles into the way it conducts its politics: "It is precisely Russia's intense, revisionist nationalism, born out of the perceived humiliations of the Yeltsin period, that represents a threat not only to its own neighbors but also to Russia itself."

So many of the seemingly-old issues confronting Russia in the 1990s, like organized crime, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, crumbling Soviet-era military and nuclear facilities, and the vulnerability of Russia's reliance mainly on its natural resources that fluctuate according to world market values, are still at issue. But that we are poised for a new confrontation with Russia? That's stretching things way too far. The real threat comes from ourselves, but also, he seems to imply, from Russia's own self-neglect, especially regarding problems that remain unchanged. Unfortunately, only the Russians can fix these.

Caryl calls for a united NATO bloc, certainly, in being firm and consistent in its relations with Russia. He also calls for greater accountability and security, particularly with energy companies based in the West, which are all too often just front companies used to launder money that originated from sketchy and corrupt sources.

But he also points out that consistency and even-handedness on the part of international groupings, like NATO, the Group of Eight, and the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe, is essential. It might also be prudent to be a little more careful and strategic where the matter of NATO membership to places like Ukraine and Georgia are concerned.

Now that the European Union relies, give or take, on Russian energy supplies (30%, by last count, of the EU's stuff comes from Russia), and that there really is no clearly-defined East-West paradigm shaping the way countries on both sides of the Atlantic conduct their foreign policies, it becomes all the harder to fix our households.

As a starter, though, perhaps the respect Russia so clearly wants and demands might not be a far-off request to grant? Besides, Russia's political elite do not lack intelligence, and know that they stand, in the long run, to be on the dirty end of the stick if they allow themselves to become international pariahs, with investors and prestige turning a blind eye to them. After all, in this world of capitalism, the free market, and the power of international finance, it is pin-stripe-suited CEOs and Chairpersons that have more power than tanks, missiles and nuclear arsenals.

The Cold War really has departed forever.

Facts speak for themselves

2009-01-26T03:56:00.000-05:00

I sincerely hope that there are flaws in this poll's methodology. If not, then they say much for the political forms of deliberate self-harm that appear to have become more endemic in Serbia, particularly where the recent past is concerned. "Two-thirds of Serbs would not turn in fugitive genocide suspect Ratko Mladic, whose arrest is necessary for Serbia's further progress towards the European Union, according to a poll released on Friday [23 January]..."

"Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing said only 14 percent of people answered 'yes' when asked whether they would provide information leading to the capture of the wartime Bosnian Serb commander, whose arrest comes with a multi-million reward. Sixty-five percent responded 'no.'"

The report later quotes an official working for this particular marketing company, who explains that, "In a choice between a hero and a villain, it is hard to expect from people a straight 'yes' when asked whether they would turn him in...The authorities still have not managed to explain to the people the gravity of the crimes he was charged with."

Contrast that to this recent development in my current home country of Montenegro: in May-June 1992, Montenegrin police arrested and deported a large number of Bosniaks living in the country, and had them deported back to Bosnia-Herzegovina. These deportees disappeared shortly thereafter, and only a small number of bodies have been found since then. Others, apparently, were killed on Montenegrin soil: an ignoble legacy that parallels the role of Montenegrin auxiliaries in the shelling of the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, also in 1992.

But now, contra Serbia above, the Montenegrin authorities have admitted and confronted this dark legacy, at least partly. "Following a government session on December 25, 2008, Miras Radovic, [Montenegrin] Minister of Justice, announced that court settlements had been agreed for 42 cases concerning people deported in May 1992 worth 4.13 million euros."

The aforementioned compensation agreements should rightly serve as a role model for Montenegro's neighbours, which have yet to even begin confronting the recent past, and the dark id of shared responsibility for heinous crimes that they all hold. But, it appears, some are more interested in myths and legend rather than in solid realities that tell a very different story.

Post-New Year's hangovers, post-Soviet style

2009-01-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

Political hangovers are constants, and in the post-coloured revolution spheres of the former Soviet Union, one can argue that they are especially searing and dizzying. With yet another gas crisis currently underway, and with EU-Russia relations at an all-time low following the summer's events in Georgia, this reality has now trickled into the question of eventual NATO and EU membership for these states.

Not that the question of membership has ever been dead-certain, of course. The fact that these countries are located in such proximity to Russia, and by their special post-Soviet legacies that could take many, many decades to resolve and/or reconcile, serious observers have been loathe to say something like this could happen anytime soon.

Ukraine, or so this report identifies, is a special disappointment, not only because of its close proximity -- and sometimes epicentre position -- to the current gas row now underway, but because the two titans of the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko (one called the "gas princess" by some of her critics), spend more time fighting amongst themselves rather than battling the ubiquity of red tape and corruption that remains a constant in Ukraine.

I have also read elsewhere that the EU is on the verge of launching a lawsuit against Russia and Ukraine over the halting of gas deliveries; it is the second time in the span of days that reassurances have been met with contrary conduct. Here in Montenegro, my current home, the effects are negligible, but just north-east of me, in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and beyond, there is a cold snap underway, and people are actually questioning their ability to heat their homes and businesses in light of the shortages that could well ensue soon.

Not the ideal way to usher in the New Year, that's for sure; but, given the track records set in the events of recent years, perhaps it should have been expected. I hope that a future post of mine will not start to argue that all the optimism and hope of Georgia and Ukraine's coloured revolutions was in vain. Boze moj.

Salutations from Montenegro

2008-12-30T04:49:00.000-05:00

One day to go before New Year's Eve, and I thought it befitting to post a mega-update on what has been going on since the end of November/beginning of December! For those not in the loop, I temporarily relocated to Podgorica, Montenegro, beginning on 1 December. It was an uneventful journey, but for the last leg of it, in which we literally flew through a thunderstorm. The turbulence was horrible: something the likes of which I have never experienced before.

I am working at an economic think-tank in the city, have a flat not far from the office, and am still getting myself into a routine -- but, being Montenegro, spontaneity is also the order of the day! My other main objective is to learn as much Serbo-Croatian as I can; I am about one-fourth through a course on the subject, and find myself getting ground down in grammatical rules, conjugations, and such. Perseverance, however, is the order of the day, and I will conquer this challenge.

It has been a little strange being away from home over the holidays, and keeping in regular touch with family and friends has reminded me of what I am missing at home -- and, of course, what I am not missing, particularly as it relates to the weather and endless snowstorms! Montenegro is much as I remember it from my last visit this past summer, though I am seeing additional details that I overlooked (or, more likely, blissfully did not see) before, especially some of the harsher aspects of life in the country and region, more broadly.

I will post more substantive details soon enough. For now, rest assured that I am around, and kicking. A happy New Year to all readers, and I look forward to 2009 -- challenges, fears and opportunities alike that it promises for us all.

So much for the fundamentalism paradigm

2008-11-24T22:33:00.000-05:00

When Kosovo declared its independence this past February, some of its detractors made subtle claims about the Muslim nature of Kosovan society -- much as those opponents to Turkey's accession to the European Union continue to do so -- and how this could be a destabilizing factor.

Since most Kosovans are nominally Muslim, and because of the serious social and economic problems facing it (unemployment is at nearly fifty percent, for example), so this reasoning went, the new state could become a hotbed of Islamic extremism in Europe. One has heard this same line of reasoning with regards to Albania, and also Bosnia-Herzegovina, two other states in Europe in which the titular nationalities happen to be Muslim.

Well, it so turns out that, like much else that comes from detractors that play the fundamentalism card in the Balkan region, this has been amply demonstrated to be ridiculous. As this Balkan Insight report points out, "Egypt has prevented Kosovo from taking part in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference’s second Ministrial Conference on Women because of ‘political reasons.’" Nothing further is given as a reason; just "political reasons."

It does not take much guesswork to deduce that, given the overt pro-American sympathies in Kosovo (and Albania, for that matter), as well as the reality of a near-complete lack of religiosity amongst the Kosovan population (and far more so in Albania, which was allowed to take part in the conference), most of the Muslim countries that form the OIC are iffy about courting the new state. Not sure where the planting of terror cells or jihadist warriors would play out in such an atmosphere.

While slightly unrelated, one is hard pressed to not also mention the lack of Muslim countries' recognition of Kosovo's independence: just eight out of fifty-seven OIC members have done so. Most of the so-called Islamic world is made up of countries that have perilous human rights situations on multiple levels, many of which deal with issues of autonomy and separatist demands. With so many of these countries wanting little, if anything, to do with Kosovo, where again does the fundamentalism fear come from?

I would venture to guess that such statements say a whole lot more about the detractors themselves than what is really happening in regards to Kosovo.

Haunted houses, still

2008-11-18T13:05:00.000-05:00

One simply cannot make such news up. This particular Balkan Insight story reports on the high levels of political apathy in the Balkan region, and essentially concludes that Montenegro and Kosovo are the only optimists in a region of political and economic pessimists.

The European Union has barely grazed the region, but for Slovenia's May 2004 accession, and Croatia's current (and active) candidate status -- it will be part of the EU club in a couple years' time, by most accounts.

But Croatia is among those most pessimistic countries, which all have high levels of distrust in their political leaders, their economic situations, their future courses (including potential EU membership), and their living standards. This is hardly the kind of life-blood needed for change in the region, especially since those decisive, Brussels-based changes have barely been initiated.

But that is not all. The report also mentions this: "A clear majority across all countries thought the future of the region would be peaceful. Around one in four Serbs and Macedonians (22 per cent and 29 per cent respectively), however, felt there could be another war in the region."

Perhaps a bit of panic-mongering, here. But the makings of such volatility do still exist, even if beneath the surface. All in all, this is a murky portrait, and the proponents of EU enlargement, especially after the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty earlier this summer, have a lot of worked carved out for them.

Ninety years and beyond

2008-11-11T11:31:00.000-05:00

11 November 1918: ninety years ago today was the armistice. It makes this particular Remembrance Day sombre and dark, nor does it help that the weather in Toronto is cold and grey.

Not surprisingly, whenever this day comes, I am always reminded of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 roman a clef, entitled All Quiet on the Western Front. It was made into a couple film versions, the first of which, as with the novel, were banned by the Nazis upon their seizure of power.

It is a bleak, tragic, but also profoundly beautiful story of a group of idealistic young soldiers whose lives, one by one, are destroyed by the nightmare that was the First World War. The novel's chief protagonist, Paul Baumer, depicts his experiences through idealistic -- almost naive -- eyes that gradually adjust to the reality of the war. Nearing the end, the idealism is gone, with little hope of any internal redemption.

Remarque wrote several other war novels, including a sequel of sorts called The Road Back, but it is safe to say that they paled compared to his main masterpiece. This is what made him, and what has also come to symbolize the tragedy and darkness that is war.

Allow me, then, to quote something poignant from the novel. It was a hard choice to make, just because the novel is a work of poignancy.

"Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experiences we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more...

And men will not understand us -- for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us here, already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten -- and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered; -- the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin."

Lest we forget.

Campaign 2008 morning after

2008-10-17T14:07:00.000-04:00

It is slightly later than the morning after the 14 October 2008 federal election in Canada, which was this country's fortieth since 1867. Perhaps it is befitting that I am posting something so much later, as if out of symbolism in the profound shock and disbelief that has hovered over observers and pundits, candidates and others, irrespective of their partisan stripes or ideological dispositions.

In the past, some have told me that I am not necessarily qualified to comment on Canadian affairs, solely because I have spent most of my professional life studying the politics of international places and zones that many English-speakers still tend to view as terra incognita.

All the same, I am a proud and passionate Canadian, and always will be. My parents and other members of my family came to this country to escape war, occupation and certain repression from their particular homeland, and have made this country their permanent home and nation. I hope that this is sufficient backing for me to comment on the events of the past few days without invoking the ire of those that may happen to disagree with what I have to say. It really is not much.

I was closely watching the Liberals in this campaign, as I had many times before on both the federal and provincial levels. Their disastrous defeat, just above their worst historic defeat level in 1867, but also right below that which took place in 1984, is as shameful as it is shocking. It serves as a warning shot to its tattered numbers and members to clean up their act, unify, and start acting like the mighty party that they historically have been in this country.

Ever since Chretien stepped down and allowed his (short-lived) successor, Paul Martin, to take the helm, it is as if the Liberal Party has been cast adrift in a foggy, murky and potentially stormy sea from which they have not been able to set course. They have been like squabbling children without a sense of direction and purpose ever since, winding up with a leader -- Stephane Dion -- whose intelligence and integrity has also been matched by his neophyte-like qualities and narrow-minded intent.

Now, on the eve of what many people are anticipating is going to be his resignation as party leader, he leaves behind a very ignoble legacy. One could compare him to the present US President, whose begging and whining before television cameras in the initial wake of the bailout package rejection made him look embarrassingly un-Presidential.

Is this the legacy that will be bequeathed to Mr. Dion? The Liberals now have Messrs Martin and Dion to chalk up as historical footnotes to their mighty legacy in Canadian political history. The upcoming future leader of the party has these ghosts to contend with, as well as building things up on so many multiple levels; whoever it may be, I certainly do not envy them. Nor do I envy those Liberals that were openly rooting for Dion, calling him the next Prime Minister of Canada. I reckon that they have a lot of egg on their faces that needs washing.

Not all is lost, of course, and the Conservatives can hardly call this a victory for themselves, even though they did win a larger minority government than last time. Voter turnout was at 58-59%, which is the lowest in this country's history; for the Tories, it means that even less people actually voted for them. Then again, this same thing can be said for all the parties that partook in the election.

So much more could have been done by the Liberals, whose 38-day campaign was blighted by mismanagement, mishaps, disorganization, and a confused sense of direction and mandate that lacked simplicity. Dion tried to sell, against his advisers' advice, it now has emerged, a complex plan that left so much open to doubt when most Canadians feared the effects of the current economic turmoil.

So many electoral ridings in Ontario, my home province, had neck-to-neck results that swayed to the Conservatives. They could easily have gone (and, in most cases, could have actually remained) Liberal had they only tried harder and been better at it. The Liberals know a thing or two about winning huge majorities and mandates, but I guess this just could not transpire this time around. It tells a lot about the ways in which many Canadians view politics and the contenders that play out their business on Parliament Hill.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that this election was a warning shot for them. A warning shot that the time for internal disunity and wishy-washy nose-picking is long gone, and serious work needs to be done. A warning shot that their Conservative rivals came within earshot of achieving a majority mandate by actually doing some incredibly ridiculous things during the campaign and before. A warning shot that is a reminder of the importance of unity, direction and the perils of internal divisions.

I just hope these lessons are absorbed and taken straight to heart. Because, if the Liberals are reduced to a tertiary bunch of outsiders in Canadian politics, then I suspect few people, across all the spectrums that reside in this incredible and amazing country, will be snickering.

Elections, elections, elections...

2008-09-17T16:55:00.001-04:00

Elections are everywhere this year. Canadians and Americans are facing them, and coming from the Great White North myself, I have a hunch that our version of them is going to be totally shadowed in significance by what happens south of us.

Ukraine, of course, is facing the possibility of more parliamentary elections in the near future, provided that the so-called "Orange" coalition is able to come back together and actually govern. It collapsed several days ago because of the same old infighting that has characterized Ukrainian politics since the November-December 2003 breakthrough that is beginning to be shadowed by the long hangover in the country.

Makes for a tough transition, to say the least. More elections, in some parts of the world, are a mixed bag of curse and blessing. With an assertive Russia now rearing itself before the former Soviet Union and beyond, it's looking like it will be even tougher for Ukraine to actually assert itself.

Russia, Georgia and everything else

2008-09-01T10:12:00.001-04:00

A brief note on this Labour Day weekend about the Russian-Georgian conflict, which has provoked military and diplomatic responses that are closely rivalled only by the war of words and rhetoric that has ensued throughout the media landscape.

I know little about the nature of Georgia's problems, or the origins of the secessionist conflicts in its regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, only that they too, like the other frozen conflicts across the former Soviet Union, are rooted in the Soviet period and were made fertile by lackadaisical Soviet planners that haphazardly drew maps that did not always correspond to ground-level demographics. Some say this was a deliberate divide-and-rule tactic orchestrated by Moscow in dealing with the other nationalities.

Here, then, is a piece about the war of words and diplomatic pot-shots that show no signs of stopping. At the end of the day, there is everything to loose and nothing to gain -- for everyone involved -- in prolonging it.

No games, please: you're on trial!

2008-08-29T09:20:00.000-04:00

Fresh from a short trip to Turkey and completing some unfinished business for grad school, I was -- as millions of others were too -- greeted with this ridiculous news of Radovan Karadzic's refusal to enter a plea in his trial. This exchange is worth quoting in full:

"As to count one of the indictment," the judge had begun. "You're charged with genocide... How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?"

"I will not plead, in line with my standpoint as regards this court," Mr Karadzic replied.

"I shall therefore enter a plea on your behalf of not guilty," the judge said.

"Is that the position you're going to take in relation to each of the other 10 charges on the indictment?"

"Absolutely, yes," Mr Karadzic confirmed.

As Judge Bonomy entered the not guilty pleas, the former Bosnian Serb leader asked: "May I hold you to your word?"

"Which word?" asked the judge.

"That I'm not guilty," replied Mr Karadzic.

"We shall see in due course, Mr Karadzic," the judge said."

Talk about nerve, this truly is ridiculous. Next thing that will happen is a further song-and-dance about nonexistent conspiracies, illegitimacy, propaganda and victimization by sheer circumstance. I wonder how Karadzic, and others like him, were able to hoodwink so many people for such a long period of time with baseless claims like this.

'The criminal is caught and we leave the money on his account"

2008-08-01T09:24:00.000-04:00

Or so declared Bosnian President Haris Silajdzic, in a recent interview. Amid everything that has happened in the region of ex-Yugoslavia -- Kosovo issuing new passports to its citizens, Karadzic making his first appearance before the Hague Tribunal without entering a plea so as to stonewall, and complaints from some Croatian groups about the evident pro-Ustasha sympathies of a Croatian rock star -- Bosnia remains a sideshow.

In November 1995, the Dayton agreement officially ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and brought the official leaders of all its warring factions to the bargaining table. A new constitution was drafted, and the de facto partition that had ensued during the war became an entrenched reality. As Bosnia currently stands, it is divided into two rough halves: something called 'Republika Srpska,' and the Muslim-Croat 'Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.' It corresponds, give or take, to the respective ethnic make-up of each entity.

Bosnia's President, mixing hope with reality, declared in this interview what many analysts and watchers of the region had noticed all along, but which have been given a new kick-start with Kosovo's declaration of independence back in February. While Bosnia is at peace, barring the divisions among Bosniaks and Croats, as well as of both in relation to Bosnia's Serbs, vicious undertones are at work.

"Bosnia is in peace exactly because that project succeeded. Hundreds of thousands of -- at least half a million -- people are outside their own country because they have been ethnically cleansed, they're not there, because they were forced to get out under the threat of death. Our constitutional arrangement is such that actually it rewards the aggression and genocide and ethnic cleansing and so on."

Partition, whether it be supervised or unilateral, appears to be on the table now, though no one is saying it outright. Taking Kosovo's example, which was a culmination of several ground-level realities that made it a state in everything but name, this becomes all the more apparent.

Peter Galbraith, just as a comparison, has argued a similar trend has happened in post-invasion Iraq, whereby the country is now essentially divided up into three factions/mini-states, a reality that the next American President will have to take into account so as to enact a gradual withdrawal from the country.

Way back, in the aftermath of Dayton, Bosnia's future looked troubled and uncertain; nothing has changed for the better since then, and I would bet that Balkan borders, even after Kosovo, may well still be anything but permanent. That the "great powers" of this new century are doing little, if anything, about this -- though, to be fair, just what can they do? -- makes it all the more frustrating and tragic.

It will, on a humorous note, keep Balkan watchers in business for the foreseeable future.

Economic meltdown in Zimbabwe

2008-07-30T10:04:00.001-04:00

Apparently, the Zimbabwean government has now released new currency: instead of bank notes issued in increments of $10,000,000, they have decided to cut off all the zeroes. So, in this warped form of mathematics, that figure has now become $1. Hyperinflation, eat your heart out.

Robert Mugabe, who won unopposed in the last Presidential 'election,' has now begun reaching out to the opposition, as per the mediation of South Africa's President, although the talks are reportedly in a deadlock. Not surprising, once again.

The BBC's correspondent in the country, albeit by secret camera, has released this report, which I recommend readers watch. Food shopping will take on a whole new meaning after this.

Everything, however, in international affairs, has its origins. I would be interested in tracing the origins of this Mugabe phenomenon in greater depth. Perhaps a project for the future? We shall see.

Will the real Serbian revolution please start now!

2008-07-25T16:21:00.000-04:00

A general rule of thumb surrounding events in Serbia, or involving Serbian populations in neighbouring countries of the region, is that the unsavoury reality of radicalism in the country oozes out, completely contrary to what is happening at a given moment.

I alluded to this factor in previous posts on Kosovo's independence, as well as Radovan Karadzic's capture and, now, likely extradition, as his appeal deadline has passed with nothing happening. The Serbian Radical Party, whose nominal head is also in The Hague facing war crimes charges, is coming out with threats against President Boris Tadic and others that are behind the drive to send Karadzic to face trial.

One Party official is quoted: "We warn Tadic that treason has never gone unpunished in Serbia. This is not a threat, but warning of the fate that followed traitors throughout Serbian history... I would remind the current rulers that they might not be as lucky as Zoran Djindjic. God punishes generations to come, and they should keep this in mind." I especially like the mention of history: get one of the Radicals talking, and you will be hearing about the battle of 1389 before long, and how Serbia, despite saving Europe and Christianity from Ottoman barbarism, was always on the side to be politically short-changed since time immemorial.

Veiled threats, if there ever were any; this is mild stuff coming from the ranks of these anti-establishment and hate-mongering political lunatics. Remember still that their leader, Vojislav Seselj, once publicly advocated a policy of infecting all Kosovo Albanians with HIV, so as to "solve" the Kosovo issue once and for all.

Indeed, the real revolutions will not begin in this part of the world until the recent past, as well as Belgrade's culpability, is fully explained and disclosed without qualifications based on ethnic nationalism and hostilities. More than anything, and here I echo one of my great teachers on the subject, the revolution will only be complete when one-third of the Serbian electorate, which they just did in the last election early this summer, stop voting for the Radical Party.

An addendum on Karadzic

2008-07-23T14:00:00.000-04:00

Marcus Tanner, who covered the Yugoslav wars for the London Independent, and who wrote, among other things, an amazing history of Croatia, gave his two-bits on the media hyperbole surrounding Radovan Karadzic's capture.

"You’d almost have thought they come across Hitler, as the presenters struggled to outdo one another in their choice of superlatives. Everything was the 'worst,' the 'biggest' and the 'gravest,'" he reflects.

Meanwhile, other reports point out that, on Friday, Karadzic will appeal his extradition to The Hague; why some people bother with such formalities is anyone's best guess. While anything is possible in the Balkans, I highly doubt that Serbia will relinquish the process they have set into motion. Let's just hope they repeat it as necessary with those fugitives that remain.

And, as Tanner points out, "I just hope they don’t overdo it now, and so fall back into second gear if and when Ratko Mladic is handed over. Because if I were a Bosnian, that’s the event that would have me in the streets, for I still have a hunch that he, and not Karadzic was the really enthusiastic killer, the real psychopath."

One down, with two more to go

2008-07-22T15:50:00.001-04:00

Every major media outlet is now discussing the news that Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb wartime leader of the country's breakaway Serbian "republic" was apprehended on Monday night in Belgrade, after spending more than a decade living a life on the run.

There is plenty of sensationalism at work in much of the coverage; headlines identifying him as "the world's most wanted man" is rather pushing it, since no one spoke about him, or the Balkan region, for that matter, following the long and painful shadow that was 11 September 2001. Suddenly, Southeastern Europe stopped being so important, except for brief interludes in the form of elections, the formation of new states and the dissolution of old ones. Truth be told, however, is that this region is as significant for the EU as Iraq and the Middle East is for Washington. Regional and continental integration is incomplete without the Balkans.

Rumour even had it, or so I am told, that Richard Holbrooke, the former US diplomat that was involved in both the Dayton peace accords (which ended the war in Bosnia, thus shaping the nature of the country today) and the run-up to the Kosovo war in 1998-1999, had cut Karadzic some kind of a deal that stopped short at prosecution.

It comes at both a sad and optimistic time, as the thirteenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, in which Karadzic was allegedly complicit, is coming up. The Hague tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is nearing the end of its mandate, and its work is now all the closer to completion. There remain two more war criminals on the run, of whom General Ratko Mladic remains the 'big fish.' Is he next? I sure hope so.

Finally, the new Europeanist government in Belgrade is obviously trying to etch up its EU credentials, though it remains both bizarre and revealing that Karadzic was able to get into the country in the first place. Minus his longer hair and bushy beard, how did this happen, and why? The real revolution in Serbia shall not begin until this, and other questions, are satisfactorily answered.

"Lost in a world of lights"

2008-07-11T14:40:00.000-04:00

Or so says Richard Z. Kruspe, known to most music followers as the lead guitarist of the German heavy metal band Rammstein. Some time in 2001, right around the time that his day job band released their third studio album, Kruspe emigrated to New York; years later or, to be more specific, last summer, he released a solo album entitled Emigrate, the same name as his solo project. It only came out in North America a few months ago, so the world can only now fully appreciate this intriguing and delightful debut.

Most of the eleven (or, if you are lucky enough, like myself, to own the limited edition, thirteen) tracks relate, in some way or another, to self-discovery, the theme of emigrating, and personal experience. It is a largely upbeat and positive album, grounded in the realities of failure sometimes being paired with success, but hardly a return to the dark, eerie and in-your-face themes that Rammstein has churned out since 1994.

The aforementioned lyric to the song "New York City" continues, permeating not only the song, but the whole album: "I'm lost in a world of lights / mesmerize my nights / the sky scrapes on building sites / I'm feeling so alive." Or, slightly later, "I'm gonna win / I'm gonna lose / I'm gonna chase it till the end / and if you're walking in my shoes / you're gonna make it or pretend."

The music is a mix: some songs are hard-rock, harking back to Kruspe's Rammstein roots, but others are more melodic, slightly slower and quite catchy. Lyrically, Kruspe's words are simple, but the simplicity of his messages have the effect of striking just where and when they are most potent. This is the type of album one could listen en route to travelling in a foreign land, and then replaying it once there, on a moonlight night amid surf-breaking waters, mountains and the chatter of friends and company.

It is an album that epitomizes independence, breaking roots while simultaneously establishing new ones. Unlike Rammstein, Emigrate is also of a different language, for the lyrics are entirely performed in English, where Kruspe (sometimes not so successfully, one can amusingly notice) tries to use an American accent, but his German background betrays him! This is an exceptional album, well worth the length that it took to be recorded and released. One can only hope that Kruspe, while not ignoring his commitments to Rammstein, will churn out more such albums in the future.

"Hooliganism" in Belarus?

2008-07-04T15:01:00.000-04:00

An understatement, given the scope of the events in the country where, today, a bomb blast, as well as the discovery of a second unexploded device in Minsk, took place. Observers, and the Belarusian opposition (anachronism-sounding, as they are not much of an opposition, nor have they ever been), are predicting more crackdowns as President Lukashenka begins pitting the blame on someone, emboldening his own claims that the outside world and internal fifth columns are out to destroy the country.

But Lukashenka is himself unnerved, it seems, and not solely because the concert he was attending was disrupted by these events. This BBC report cites "rumours," if nothing else, of discontent within secret police echelons, Lukashenka's political circle and other state elements that are brewing beneath the surface. Without a hint of irony, the report states: "Moreover, it happened on the very anniversary of the capital's liberation from Nazi occupation, near the impressive monument to WWII heroes. It could have hardly been more symbolic."

What is indisputable is that this is significant: Belarus long had the reputation, for better or worse, of being something of a sideshow to the Soviet Union and, later, a bastion of old-world and antiquated politics -- and this, of course, not solely coming from me. That bomb blasts have come to this country is telling and a signal that, in the end, everyone is a cohabitant of this insane planet, irrespective of ideology, dispositions or levels of democratic development.

Victory by default

2008-06-30T00:20:00.001-04:00

So it has come to pass: Robert Mugabe is the official 'winner' of Zimbabwe's run-off vote. Never mind that all results have not come in yet, or that a substantial number of ballot papers were wilfully spoilt by disgusted voters. Shams are shams, but this is just plain insanity.

Perhaps he should change his name to Mobutu and eliminate the whole wasteful facade he has made out of elections in the country. Mugabe's already wearing shirts emblazoned with his own portrait, and not even pretending to follow some kind of protocol. Zimbabwe is the fief of Zanu-PF, and the descent carries on.

All this, while the rest of the world pontificates just what else would be prudent to do next. This is not over yet.

When hope dies

2008-06-27T10:27:00.000-04:00

Hope has all but totally died out in Zimbabwe. That is the essence of what is happening in the country today. As I write, a run-off vote is taking place, many weeks after initial presidential elections took place, but the results of which were delayed because President (and incumbent) Robert Mugabe's followers were caught with their pants down after it came to light that they had come second-place.

Veteran BBC correspondent John Simpson, in this melancholy report, writes that the violence, intimidation, killings and arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, stem from this humiliation. It is as if Mugabe, the grand old man of Zimbabwean politics, and the architect of its very collapse, has told his citizenry that this would be the price for resistance, even to obvious electoral shams.

MDC candidate, and official contender for the Presidency, Morgan Tsvangirai, is now hiding in the Dutch embassy, where he is fearing for his life. Mobs of pro-Mugabe vigilantes are scouring the country, checking citizenry if they have voted for Mugabe, while the President himself is assured of a victory, since Tsvangirai officially pulled out of the election. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, without surprise, says it came too late to remove his name from the ballots, presenting two challenges: easier means to identify those casting protest votes against Mugabe, and more window-dressing legitimacy for the unchallenged incumbent.

What comes out of these past weeks, a topic worth examination in itself, is the conduct of South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, who has maintained a platform of "quiet diplomacy," which really amounts to silence in the wake of Mugabe's conduct. Mbeki's conduct has precedent, and goes back to the beginnings of his administration. This New York Review of Books article gives a primer into South Africa's role. Nelson Mandela has come out to criticize Mugabe, but a tad-bit too late, it seems.

This development is becoming far more ridiculous as times goes on. It must show just to what low levels Mugabe's government has dropped, to be engaging in such insults to democracy and ordinary intelligence. Were it not so tragic and impact-ridden, I would wage that Mugabe would be the subject of a really bad comedy. As things look now, it seems we will be dealing with the Zimbabwean President for yet another five-year term...unless, of course, something happens to him personally, but which is a different subject in and of itself.

Back to the home base

2008-06-23T18:48:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the month-plus writing hiatus, but I recently returned from a month-long excursion in Europe that took me to a total of four countries: Montenegro, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Even before I left, I told friends and family that it was interesting that I would be visiting the remnants of two super-federations that, around the same time, collapsed: Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

I had attempted to submit posts while overseas, but I was unsuccessful, since Montenegrin Internet service providers -- or, at least, the one to which I had access -- were slow, while elsewhere, my online time was limited, and I spent it reading and writing e-mails to friends and family, whenever possible.

I am still digesting the whole experience and, quite frankly, I miss all of the countries I visited. To date, this has been the longest excursion that I have taken, but even here, I remain frustrated at only having scratched the surface of understanding and learning of these places. Some of the things I saw confirmed what I had long suspected and written about, while other things baffled me and -- imagine that! -- proved me wrong. In seriousness, I will return very soon, though I am not quite sure how or when, but it will be very soon.

Every trip abroad, whether it be short or long, tells you something about the people that are your co-travellers, but also a lot about yourself. Being away from the monotony and hecticness of home life and responsibilities in Toronto (or wherever one's base may be) keeps you aloof from things, and shows you a perspective one oneself that, sometimes, you would have thought never existed. I went through this experience too, and am still undergoing it.

More to come later; once I catch my breath, political blogging on this wee End of the Line shall resume. Fear not, readers, for I have returned, and the world has not improved one iota while I was gone, it seems!

Yet another collective sigh of relief

2008-05-12T18:25:00.000-04:00

Parliamentary elections were held in Serbia this past weekend. Though predictions were in flux, paralleling the opinion polls of Serbian voters, President Boris Tadic's pro-Western coalition won, though not enough to command a majority in the parliament. Tadic, whose party is, in itself, a coalition, will have to forge a coalition with other parties in order to govern.

It is not impossible: one need only look back to Slovakia following its September 1998 election, in which another "coalition of the coalition" had enough clout to nudge autocratic Premier Vladimir Meciar out of power, even though his party commanded the largest bloc of voters. The Slovak arrangement survived because of the sheer will of its politicians and voters, who were implicitly promised better diplomacy and relations with the EU and NATO.

The latter two appear to be using this same reasoning with the Serbs, though it is hard to tell what the willpower aspect of the electorate looks like. The Radical Party, though suffering an electoral defeat, could theoretically muster enough coalition partners to run a government, and it does have its support base from disgruntled people incensed by Kosovo's independence and the slow pace of economic reforms.

This weekend's election is, perhaps, the dark underbelly to having proportional representation: while it fosters more political pluralism and participation, it also creates the danger of perpetual deadlock and a whole host of deja-vu's the day after elections.

Problematic, yes...but not as problematic as was Slobodan Milosevic, whose ghost still haunts the region.

A further notch for Slovakia

2008-05-10T10:25:00.000-04:00

Though accession to the European Union is considered to be a benchmark for candidate countries, particularly those that had once been part of the Communist bloc, there is probably no other prestige that can be endowed to such newly transformed nations as being invited to join the Eurozone.

Tiny Slovakia, a nation right at the heart of Central Europe, is currently revelling in this reality. It would appear that the fears and ambivalence surrounding the Premiership of Robert Fico -- notably his coalition government involving two anti-establishment parties with a track record of trouble, irresponsibility and semi-authoritarian forms of governance -- has not been as problematic as observers and skeptics had thought.

Fico was elected in 2006, on a slightly left-of-centre platform, whereupon he reversed many of his predecessor's economic and social policies. Apparently, many Slovak voters were concerned that economic reform had been too rapid for them to keep up, and he tapped into this sentiment quite effectively. He had popularity and credentials backing him, including a stint as a human rights lawyer, but also made disparaging statements about Slovakia's prominent minorities. Many votes that had once gone to former Premier Vladimir Meciar's party swayed to Fico.

Acceptance to the Eurozone has been made all the more significant for Slovakia because it is the only post-communist country, but for Slovenia, which already uses the Euro, to have passed such thresholds. As the BBC story reports: "It is only the second former communist country after Slovenia to pass the euro's strict criteria and is likely to be the last for some time...Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states are not expected to join the euro until well after 2010."

It is part of a succession of good news for Slovakia. Ten years ago, when the country was in the throes of economic, political and diplomatic meltdown thanks to Meciar's tenure, of which I recently explored and wrote about, this would have been a mere pipe dream. No more, thankfully. I can imagine that many pints of studene pivo will be consumed over this news!

Missing results and "the mother of all election riggings..."

2008-05-04T10:48:00.000-04:00

Nothing new, it seems, from the elections in Zimbabwe. The "recount" has been predictable, indicating a larger support for the country's official opposition MDC (47.9%), while Mugabe was endowed with second place (43.2%). No one, obviously, crossed the electoral threshold, so a run-off vote is imminent in the coming weeks.

Says Mugabe's former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo: "The mind of the electorate is now so fixed against Mugabe that if he were to contest against a donkey in the run-off, the donkey would win by a landslide not because anyone would vote for it, but simply because people would vote against Mugabe."

Let's hope this kind of momentum keeps up and overshadows any voting irregularities or tinkering on the part of the authorities. If caught with their proverbial pants down, I doubt that Mugabe's loyalists would be able to explain their way out of it. In the aftermath of the spring 2000 parliamentary elections, if I recall correctly, the authorities, though utilizing fraud to win victory, were shocked by the turnout of voters that went against the Zanu-PF grain...and then proceeded to clamp down on all protests viciously and violently by way of revenge.

Cohesive voting contra the authorities could, in theory, eclipse any fraud. If Mugabe chooses to resort to even grander fraud to secure another victory, then it could not be carefully tucked away -- and the rest of the region and world would know what is already, in effect, known. The legitimacy factor would be gone.

If the priorities of outside powers prove conducive to collective amnesia and malaise, however, then perhaps something of this sort would be do-able. After all, "The days that preceded the announcement were dark ones -- broken limbs, burned huts, dead bodies and unofficial curfews were widely reported." All of this would be but part of an ongoing pattern.

Croatian ghosts emerge anew

2008-05-01T14:27:00.000-04:00

This is a story that came out of nowhere: "Croatia has been criticised for a lack of political will in arresting Nazis for the second year in a row."

Granted, the story contains a slight misnomer, as Croatian fascists were not "Nazis" per-se (that is, members of the German National Socialists), but rather, known by their proper name of Ustashe. Their history, and of Croatia during the Second World War, is very ugly.

All the same, it is fascinating that there are still living war criminals from that bygone era that have managed to evade prosecution. It is not surprising, however, that Croatia still struggles in bringing them to justice. The Second World War in the country remains hugely contentious, and even though the historical record of just what happened can be gleaned from sources within the country and beyond, it remains heavily politicized. For those who have experienced such politicization first-hand, like myself, that word is a gross understatement.

The Ustasha movement, while totally marginalized in the interwar period, only came to power thanks to the machinations of the Axis Tripartite. They tapped, however, into the deep reserves of Croatian self-determination, which had been denied to them within the Yugoslav context.

Pegged together, this made them a noxious and dynamite-laden phenomenon. It was made worse by Croatia's nationhood in 1991, which came on the heels of a vicious war with Serbia, in which nationalists toked past history and grievances, including the Ustasha experience, thereby pegging them to an apparent long line of struggles for Croatian self-assertion.

The lingering effects of this last war are still strong throughout Croatia, as Ivo Goldstein has pointed out in his magnificent history of Croatia, and there has been a nasty underbelly of whitewashing of the Ustashe crimes that took place from 1941-1945 -- including the genocide of the country's Serbs, Jews and Roma. This peaked in the later 1990s, with waves of increased conservatism in the country.

As such, bringing it all back to this particular story at hand, it makes it easy for such war criminals (i.e. 92 year-old Milivoj Asner) to evade justice, not just on account of his advanced age, but because there is a lack of will to bring him to justice. Trying Asner, the embodiment not only of evil to objective observers, but of the forces of Croatian "liberation" and "self-defense" for supporters, jingoists and nationalists alike, would be tantamount of betrayal.

Betrayal, after all, in the Balkans is a matter over which people kill, and have been killed.

Belarus, "...further away from Europe and the rest of the world"

2008-04-30T21:20:00.000-04:00

Or so said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesperson, reacting to news from this past March that the US Ambassador to Belarus had been expelled. The country's leadership insists it wants to forge better relations with the West (it has for some time), but without the frills of criticism and objection to a litany of human rights abuses and ongoing waves of political illiberalisms.

There is only so much defiance that can take place before real consequences kick in. Or, at least, that is what would normally be the case. But who, for a moment, really thinks that Belarus -- in the news right now for having ordered the further expulsion of ten US diplomats declared persona non Grata by President Aliaksander Lukashenka -- is a normal country?

I have maintained this contrary stand from the beginning of having studied the country: Belarus, under its current leadership, is an anomaly. It will continue being an anomaly so long as things carry on as they do. Lukashenka belongs to a bygone era, one that collapsed in 1991 because it imploded through and through.

It carries on, though. By some economic, Russian-backed miracle, it does, irrespective of what comes with being a moving train-wreck in a Europe that ceased playing the status-quo card a long time ago. This kind of news is not the first, and nor will it be the last, of its kind.

A heavy anniversary

2008-04-27T00:12:00.000-04:00

`Tis a very sobering and stabbing journalistic piece here at Maclean's, which is a look at the Israeli-Palestinian morass, as it stands right now, coming close to the sixtieth anniversary of Israel's creation.

So writes journalist Michael Petrou: "Israel will be Jewish, or democratic. It can't be both. And if it can't be both, the Zionist dream on which Israel is founded will end. This is the gravest threat Israel faces on the eve of its 60th anniversary. It won't have another 60 years to address it."

In light of this, I doubt that it is an anniversary that many would wish to commemorate, if given a choice. The dream of Israel has come so close, but yet, in light of the ground and region-level realities, it is so terribly far away.

"Kosovo is a reality in our region..."

2008-04-21T15:18:00.000-04:00

Stjepan Mesic is the President of Croatia, having won a second term in office in 2005. While on an official visit to Albania, he made a reference to his country's danger-laden, but precedent-setting decision to recognizing the independence of Kosovo.

Amongst other things, the President noted the following: "Kosovo is a reality in our region and everybody should learn to live with it...The only solution for the future of the region is regional cooperation and European integration."

He also threw a rhetorical shot at the ongoing problems of jingoism and nationalism that have been emanating out of the region -- including from those EU member states that have refused to recognize Kosovo. "We must stop being hostage of the past and the historical myths," he said.

Mesic is a brave and principled man. I remember, way back in 2000-2001, when he came to power following the death of his predecessor, Franjo Tudjman, he was one of the few (or only?) statesmen in ex-Yugoslavia that made poignant calls for reconciliation, an end to ethnic nationalism, as well as a return of Serb refugees to the Croatian Krajina region, from which they had been ethnically cleansed en masse in 1995. The reactions he got from nationalists within his own country was predictable, but it seems that his longevity has been secured; more moderate voices grew and recognized the validity of such points and of moving on.

Now is no exception. Hopefully, Mesic's words are being heeded by those that need such reminders the most.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy...

2008-04-18T11:02:00.001-04:00

...they first make mad. Or so the adage goes.

On 18 April 1980, Zimbabwe scrapped its old name of Rhodesia and became an independent nation, with a new name. Robert Mugabe commemorated it today, the twenty-eighth anniversary of independence, with this speech.

"Our political history is well known, yet with time, we feel more challenged to recall it, especially for those who appear ignorant of it or are deliberately engaged in reversing the gains of our liberation struggle...We, not the British, established democracy based on one person, one vote - democracy which rejected racial or gender discrimination and upheld human rights and religious freedom."

What does not come out of the audio portion, however, is this jingoism: an encouragement for all Zimbabweans "to maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations and the machinations of our other detractors, who are allies of Britain...Whereas yesterday they relied on brute force to subjugate our people and plunder our resources, today they have perfected their tactics to more subtle forms."

Morgan Tsvangirai, on the same day, has been blackballed a "traitor" and British proxy by the Zimbabwean justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, who cites a (forged) memorandum reproduced in the state-owned Herald. Rumour had it that the MDC would include some ZANU-PF personnel in a new government, similar to recent events in Kenya, in the event that such an option would be put on the table. Military hardliners, alas, rejected any such notions.

One need not emphasize that the electoral results from some three weeks ago are still not known. Does this even matter anymore?

On the Hamas bandwagon

2008-04-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

Slightly disturbing news can be found here, with the announcement that former US President Jimmy Carter has embraced Hamas leaders, both literally and figuratively, while touring the region on a latest "peace initiative" of his own. Ask yourselves: would you embrace the likes of these thugs pictured at left?

So Carter saith: "Since Syria and Hamas will have to be involved in a final peace agreement, they have to be involved in discussions that lead to final peace." Quite true...but only when the two actually become sincere and cease in their attitude that seeks nothing less than Israel's complete destruction.

Anyone can do a Google search for Hamas' constitution, which does not mention Israel even once. They can also seek out the blood-stained statements from Hamas leaders relating to their views of the only Jewish state, and the only concessions they would ever offer it. I recall that Ismail Haniyah told the German paper Der Spiegel that he would offer, at best, a fifty-year "truce" with Israel in exchange for recognition.

Yigal Palmor, Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, declared that "One cannot wonder how this attitude is supposed to promote peace and understanding." He was talking about Mr. Carter. Quite so; the former US President's altruism could be served in much better ventures than this particular one.

Thirteen days...and still no results

2008-04-11T16:41:00.000-04:00

Professor Stephen Chan, of London's University College, has an analytical take on the future of Mugabe, which was published in this month's issue of Prospect magazine. Barring the outward support he appears to be receiving from neighbouring African statesmen, his removal from the political scene would be a quiet blessing to these countries -- not the least because Zimbabwe's economic meltdown has meant economic slowdown for these other countries.

Zimbabwean security forces, it is unofficially said, largely voted against the man; some 70 percent, to be specific. The desperation has hit everyone in the country, and these same traditional bastions of loyalty to the veteran leader have extended families that simply do not know from where their next meal is coming. As a general rule, if your army and security services say go, then there is little room for maneuvering or brokerage.

Writes Chan: "On the same day as the politburo met, the new Zimbabwean $50m note was introduced. That will buy a single cup of coffee. 20 per cent of the workforce is in employment, with a a semi-skilled worker commanding a monthly salary of around $700m. No one will give up a 14th of their salary for a cup of coffee. They will spend what they have on food, if food is available. The streets are full of people queuing for money or food, or just walking up and down — waiting. Despite the violence to come, they will wait, I am sure, until the runoff comes, and a very brave people will then consign Mugabe and his hardliners to history and, immunities scorned, to The Hague."

Meanwhile, back on the ground, the BBC reports that the Zimbabwean police have banned all political rallies, effective immediately. The main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is both planning a rally of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in a few days, and has also called on Zimbabweans to resist. "We call upon transporters, workers, vendors and everyone to stay at home. The power is in our hands. Zimbabweans have been taken for granted for too long. We demand that the presidential election results be announced now." Tsvangirai also says the MDC will not take part in any electoral run-off vote.

Historians and journalists are going to have a heyday of sifting through all these developments and details when the dust finally does begin to settle.

Christopher Hitchens on Kosovo

2008-04-10T12:59:00.001-04:00

Christopher Hitchens is one of my intellectual mentors. While I do not always agree with his platforms and political beliefs -- nor do I subscribe to his self-professed atheism and anti-theism, which he has most recently put forward in two books that he either authored or edited -- he is always fascinating to read, and entertaining to absorb.

He wrote, back at the end of February, a Slate column on Kosovo's independence. I recommend that everyone and anyone interested in the subject, or why countries like Canada were correct in finally recognizing its independence, should read it.

Amongst other things, he writes: "It's a shame, in retrospect, that it took us so long to diagnose the pathology of Serbia's combination of arrogance and self-pity, in which what is theirs is theirs and what is anybody else's is negotiable." Later still: "With the independence of Kosovo, the Yugoslav idea is finally and completely dead, but it was Serbian irredentism that killed the last vestige of that idea, and it is to that account that the whole cost ought to be charged."

As an aside: 36 UN countries have recognized Kosovo's independence. Lithuania is currently in the process of recognizing the state, while the Czech Republic, Macedonia and Portugal are slated to soon recognize it too. Other such countries include Bangladesh, Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

What now from Zimbabwe's "caretaker president"?

2008-04-10T12:21:00.000-04:00

First, there is the speculation relating to some sort of re-count of votes. Now, an "emergency meeting" of African leaders in the area around Zimbabwe, to "discuss" the election that took place twelve days ago, of which the results have still not been released? What is there to discuss? Someone, or some people in high-up positions in Harare, have been duped by the election results, and the widespread unpopularity of Mugabe's regime that is quite evident. They cannot exactly hope for electoral miracles, so they are attempting to concoct one.

What is next? A "temporary emergency government" in place, with Robert Mugabe as its leader, to offset the possibility of social and political instability in the country? Never say never; certainly not in Zimbabwe with these current harlequins at the helm.

One thing that was always predictable, as reported here, is this: "Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's state-run Herald newspaper reports the ruling Zanu-PF has increased the number of constituency results it is contesting from 16 to 21." Can anyone detect an acute aura of deja-vu at work here?

"I won for Montenegro and its future"

2008-04-07T11:29:00.001-04:00

Or so said Montenegrin President Filip Vujanovic, whose rule has gone hand-in-hand with that of Milo Djukanovic. Vujanovic re-won the presidential election yesterday, with a support of 51.4 percent of the vote. Either as President or Prime Minister, both of these figures make up the reformed socialists that have ruled unchallenged in Montenegro for almost twenty years. Not sure where the newspaper scan came from, or what the date is. Nonetheless, it conveys just what has happened in this small nation of some 650,000.

The linked report points out: "Since the split [from Serbia], its economy has boomed. Annual economic growth is about 8 percent and foreign direct investment since 2006 has been about €1 billion (US$1.6 billion), propelling Montenegro to the top of Europe's per capita foreign investment list...But it has had trouble getting rid of its image as a society rife with corruption."

Still, it is good news that Andrija Mandic, the pro-Serb candidate, who received just over 20 percent of votes, did not come anywhere near victory. He was set to rekindle ties with Serbia; hardly the time for such things to happen, given Kosovo's recent independence and the open wounds that still make the occasional headline in Canada and elsewhere.

Dith Pran, 1942-2008

2008-04-06T23:16:00.000-04:00

I only came across this news perchance. Anyone familiar with the 1975-1979 period of Cambodian history will likely know of Dith Pran. His story was recounted by fellow New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, and later by director Roland Joffe, when he crafted a sombre, ghoulish, but still phenomenal movie entitled The Killing Fields.

The man survived not only the mayhem imposed on Cambodia as a result of the fallout from the Vietnam war -- which is a story in itself, and is mercilessly recounted by William Shawcross in his 1979 book Sideshow -- but also the Khmer Rouge genocide, which consumed the lives of three of his siblings. As part of their utopian-fashioned national renewal of Cambodia, these bloodsuckers also consumed up to one in four other Cambodians. To this day, there is no one in the country who has not been affected, in some way or another, by them.

He went on to begin a new life in the United States, where he worked as a photographer and journalist, always speaking out about the reality of genocide worldwide. He once said: "The Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot." That last bit is still ongoing, with rather mixed results; indeed, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge's leader, died in a jungle outpost some time in 1998.

Alas, Dith Pran could not stand up to the scourge of cancer, and he died early this morning (Sunday). All who empathize with the tragedy of Cambodia are at a sad loss because of it.

Another day, another term

2008-04-04T15:56:00.000-04:00

What makes the current electoral nightmare in Zimbabwe so intriguing, from the bystander's perspective, is the level of journalistic and analytical multiplicity. It is as if every outlet is saying something different, insinuating a bunch of scenarios and outcomes all at once, and turning the whole problem into one big mud puddle. So much for clarity and awareness.

What is known quite clearly, however, from all the coverage is that official results have still not been fully disclosed. Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has stated that its membership backs its leader to the hilt, saying that they endorse a run-off vote, to take place in the coming days.

The Telegraph's David Blair, however, has written about what really is taking place behind the scenes: "I think the gameplan is pretty clear. The Election Commission is not releasing the results as and when they become available. Instead, it already knows the outcome of these elections. The aim is to manage their disclosure so as to head off popular unrest and prepare the ground for a Mugabe victory...So results showing Zanu-PF and the MDC will be dripped out, before Zanu-PF gradually nose ahead." It looks like the worst prognosis is coming true, and President Mugabe will be in office for yet another fraudulent term.

On that somber note, here is a little shameless advertising. In November 2002, I wrote about Mugabe and the predicament in Zimbabwe. The piece is entitled "The Politics of Self-Preservation." While a lot has happened since then, for the worse, I think that my arguments are still relevant and, quite frankly, have been underscored. The full text can be found here.

Keeping the suspense

2008-04-02T15:18:00.000-04:00

With this ongoing story, that is. With the right kind of international pressure, threats of unrest and frustration domestically, and infighting within the ranks of the Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to compound a likely electoral defeat, Robert Mugabe is a has-been. It is befitting that he has not been seen in public since the election. There is likely not much for the man to see, except the end results of his policies.

David Blair, who is now the Daily Telegraph's diplomatic correspondent, wrote a book on Mugabe in 2002, which I recommend. Entitled Degrees in Violence, it is a work that still stands out for its journalistic qualities and details about the new century in Zimbabwe. I reviewed it some time (i.e. almost six years!) ago here.

Allow me, then, the liberty to quote from this review: "The ironic comparisons between Robert Mugabe and Ian Smith, the last white ruler of what was then called Rhodesia, are striking, since both were bitter enemies, yet have both unwittingly complimented one another. Mugabe has been no different from Smith - racism, xenophobia, brutal suppression of opposition, and more were traits of both leaders. Says Blair: 'Neither should have been allowed anywhere near running a country. Smith's true station in life was, perhaps, treasurer of a provincial rugby club. Mugabe would have made an excellent junior lecturer at the Revolutionary University of Havana. It was their country's enduring tragedy that these men were given such power' (p. 244)."

Let the events of here and now be a suitable way to end things off, without bangs and truncheons, but with the dignity and honour of just throwing in the towel. But, who seriously thinks Mugabe is a man of dignity and honour?

How not to politically promote oneself

2008-03-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

This video is from a recent Slovak newscast, depicting the (angry) leader of the far-right (i.e. neo-fascist) 'Slovak National Party,' Jan Slota, pontificating his views in a Bratislava outdoor bar.

Even if one cannot understand what is being said, his belligerence and bigotry is quite apparent. It is also -- or so I read -- not the first time that he has chosen to promote himself whilst under the influence of booze.

The man is an embarrassment to Slovakia; why he is in the current coalition government of Prime Minister Robert Fico is beyond me.

Fear and loathing

2008-03-24T18:39:00.000-04:00

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. I have constantly been thinking about this book, by the late Hunter S. Thompson, which started out as an article for Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971, as well as the enjoyable 1998 film of the same name. Apparently, it was based on real-life experiences, and the roman à clef's chief protagonists, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, were based on the figures to the left.

I started reading it on the subway and bus ride home one afternoon recently, but had to stop because two well-dressed, and evidently sophisticated, ladies stood next to me. They could see straight over my shoulder. I suspect that their pauses of silence were not solely owing to the banality of their conversation. I devoured it soon thereafter, and it was the type of book that I seldom come across.

This beginning is absolutely ingenious! "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'"

Thompson left more literary output where this is concerned, and I sure as shit will be picking up more of his offerings!

Independent Kosovo and Israel's recognition

2008-03-23T22:02:00.000-04:00

Just came across this editorial, in the online pages of Ha'aretz, one of Israel's biggest and most influential newspapers. It makes a nice case for Jerusalem's recognition of the fledgling European state.

In particular, it states: "The struggle of the persecuted Kosovar people for independence is reminiscent of struggles by other nations for the right to self-determination. The State of Israel, which was established in the wake of the Jewish people's struggle for a national home, should stretch out a hand to other nations seeking self-determination." And later still: "Israel maintains diplomatic and economic relations with Arab and Muslim countries around the world. The government has a unique opportunity to stretch out a hand to the new state, and to prove that the Jewish state is not an enemy of the Muslims."

Win-win would be the nature of such recognition, and most especially for Israel. Particularly now, as Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in some kind of negotiating status over the future, and there are those who still continue to pontificate the "real intentions" of the Israeli leadership in this regard.

Portrait of a self-made lunatic

2008-03-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

This, truly, is a political abomination. Dirty Harry, in the now-classic Magnum Force, once quipped that "a man's got to know his limitations." Stretching this line all the way to Zimbabwe, and we have here the caricature of a man who is at once belligerent, dangerous and stubbornly clinging to the last political lifelines of a country that he has essentially destroyed.

The inflation is at 100,000 percent; this will likely change within a matter of days, for the worse. Up to one-third of the adult population is HIV-positive, and after government-sanctioned stigmas and silence, trickles of aid are but scratching the surface. Policemen are jailed for professing sympathies to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change -- yet they must uphold the President's rule. Food, fuel, water...all necessities, are in acute shortage.

But Comrade Mugabe thinks it is all Britain's fault. His next election promise: "[The British] still have companies here and we have not yet touched them...Four hundred British companies and so they must take care. After elections we will look into that." The only hope lies in the fact that these upcoming presidential elections -- slated for this week -- will be the most contentious and serious threats to the man's rule. Let us, therefore, do just that, and hope.

Nearing the forty percent mark

2008-03-21T12:57:00.001-04:00

Last night, I felt so burned out from events of this week, compounded by the grind of completing assignments, summer plans, et-cetera, that I vegetated before the screen with the original Twilight Zone series. I am nearing the end of the second season, and have seen the evolution of the series, episode by episode, up to now. When I have the time, I want to put something together about the series and its creator, whose portrait adorns this blog on the top-right corner. Taking a trip into the human mess called politics is akin to taking a trip into The Twilight Zone itself...

The Twilight Zone stands the test of time, and its influences seep into the here and now of film, television, stories and symbolism. It is a show that, as it did in the past, offers a twisting view through the imagination prism, of our world, and Everyman-like characters that stand out for not only their banality but their neighbourly-like qualities. Anyone can relate to them, because they are us, and we are them.

Call it, then, entertainment with a purpose; something that not only thrills and chills, but tells us something more about the cyclical and enduring nature of our human conditions. Mr. Serling's art will stand the test of time...for some time to come, I say.

Ottawa's Kosovo recognition - finally!

2008-03-18T15:56:00.000-04:00

The news in the Balkans just keeps on changing! Just a short time ago, Ottawa officially announced that it had recognized the independence of Kosovo. Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, at left, must be happy. Serbia's ambassador to this country, Dusan Batakovic, is set to return to Belgrade, ostensibly only temporarily, awaiting further instructions.

Fledgling news reports have been pointing out that Japan was one of the recent countries that had recognized Kosovo's independence -- leaving Canada as the last G7 nation remaining officially 'on the fence.' Out of solidarity with this body, far more important for Canadian economic and security interests than any other(s), Ottawa finally threw in the towel. Whatever the reason, it was inevitable. Personally, I am delighted to hear this news.

What is ridiculous, however -- and here, this is coming from dissenters, Serbian, Canadian and others -- is the allusion to Quebec, and the implications that the recognition of Kosovo will mean that Quebec will have a greater incentive to separate. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, I would venture to say that such equations just obfuscate ground-level realities and situations.

Why? First, the last time Quebec held a referendum, and the separatists were only narrowly defeated, Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard hammered out the 'Clarity Act,' which clearly outlined specific conditions and procedures to follow in the event of a successful future referendum. It ensures, to this day, that the conditions for Quebec's separation from Canada must be clearly mandated, concise, and heavily structured -- with limitations on what Quebec can expect from Canada in the get-go period of independence, and with the likelihood of territorial changes being made.

As a National Post column points out, and here I quote: "Under Canadian law, as set forth in the Clarity Act, Quebec can legitimately achieve independence, but only on the strength of a clear referendum victory on a straightforward question and after negotiations with the rest of the country for a mutually acceptable settlement that could include the partition of some of Quebec's present territory." Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe himself pointed out, as quoted in this same piece, such rules, and backed Kosovo's independence. "The right of peoples to govern themselves is a universal principle...The proof has been made that the people of Kosovo have decided for themselves to stand upright, that Kosovo should be an independent country." Comparisons to Quebec, therefore, fail to hold any water in such a comparison.

Second, and here again Canadian precedent is clear, circumstances change when gross human rights violations have taken place. Canada's Supreme Court is in clear agreement on this as well. This was the norm in Kosovo following 1989, and only ceasing until NATO's bombing campaign drove Serbian forces out of the territory. It was followed, shamefully but predictably, by revenge against Serbs (and Roma). Kosovo, under UN Resolution 1244, has existed as a de facto independent state since its passing, an international protectorate existing in a state of economic and strife-ridden limbo ever since. The wheels have finally begun to plow forward, though the Kosovans will hardly have an easy or fun time of it.

There has been no Clarity Act equivalent in the Kosovo case, as a combination of stonewalling, stagnation and outright deadlock have characterized negotiations on a final settlement of the Kosovo case. The Serbian (and Russian) side refused to relinquish anything beyond Kosovo's "autonomy," never clarifying just what this would mean, while the Kosovans refused to stay in any arrangements that would involve being part of Serbia. Can one blame them, given the recent past?

Indeed, some of the quieter ho-hum in Serbia has questioned such a position from Belgrade, and the prospects of having an unstable territorial and ethnic underbelly of instability and hostility with no resolution in sight. Would all of this be really worth it in the long-term, all for the sake of a smattering of monasteries, identity and sentimentality in the region, which is already predominantly Kosovan/Albanian, and which will only continue to be so?

Many people are going to be pissed for the foreseeable future, but the long-term will be very different. Tempers will subside, slowly but surely, even though the international rules of the game have been drastically altered by this chain of events. As for now: talley-ho to Kosovo!

The short-term future of Kosovo and Serbia?

2008-03-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

While perusing the New York Review of Books, I came across this concise and to-the-point article by Charles Simic. His key argument, to quote, is that, "As is almost always the case when it comes to the Balkans, a local dispute has been used by the great powers to advance their own national interests, which have little to do with the desire to have justice done."

Emotions and stances aside (including, I admit, my own), it makes Canada's bizarre wait-and-see approach to recognizing Kosovo seem rather prudent, but only if Canada is willing to carry the responsibility that comes with keeping the diplomatic link with Serbia intact. Somehow, though, I don't expect the blue suits in Ottawa to do any such thing. Makes one wonder just how much Canada really matters in this crazy world of ours.

Tomorrow is yesterday

2008-03-16T22:19:00.000-04:00

Nice to know that, Kosovo's declaration of independence aside, that little else by way of news trickles from the Balkan region. Milo Djukanovic, a man who has served as either President or Prime Minister of Montenegro since 1991, stepped down in the summer of 2006, after the republic became a sovereign state. He stayed on in parliament, and was dogged by plenty of scandal and allegations of criminal links -- especially in cigarette smuggling, which is endemic to the region.

It seems, however, that as of February 2008, the veteran politician is back. President Filip Vujanovic declared: "I'm convinced that (Djukanovic) will be fully devoted to the economic development of Montenegro ... and the government will be devoted to continuation of the process of European and Euro-Atlantic integration."

I am due to visit Montenegro for a second time this coming early summer, so it should be interesting to see things transpire from the ground-up. It's also intriguing, and highly amusing, that Balkan politicians are like chameleons: changing colours and political persuasions when need be, but always staying put in their positions come hell or high water.

A sad and sorry chapter closed

2008-03-15T19:12:00.000-04:00

It was eight years ago, as of this coming September, that the Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Ruslanovich Gongadze, disappeared in Kyiv, Ukraine; two months later, his headless body was found buried in a wooded area outside of the capital city. The protests that stemmed from the scandal that came to quickly be known as 'Kuchmagate,' named after the-then President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, and his suspect involvement in the affair, evolved into the same energy that culminated in the country's 2004-2005 Orange Revolution.

Indeed, President Viktor Yushchenko promised that one of the keys to his mandate would be a resolution to the Gongadze murder. Some key personalities, as this BBC report states, fled abroad, while others, like former Interior Ministry chief Yuri Kravchenko, killed themselves a few years after the affair. The true masterminds may never be unearthed, but the three convictions for the actual killers -- former policemen Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych -- have broken the state of immobility and stasis in the case.

Given events in Ukraine since his death, Gongadze's passing may not have totally been in vain, as his dream of press freedom in the country have been significantly boosted since the 2004-2005 events -- themselves spurred not insignificantly by his own online paper, Ukrayinska Pravda. While political crises appear to be blighting the new government of reformists, the changes that evolved from the protests surrounding 'Kuchmagate' are a small step towards progress and change.

Call me naive and overly optimistic, but I hope and believe that time is Ukraine's ally. As for the deceased journalist, who should be an inspiration for all who share in such a profession, may he rest in peace.

Welcome to the new blog!

2008-03-15T12:49:00.000-04:00

For some time, I have been contemplating moving my old blog, also entitled The End of the Line, from its old location on LiveJournal. It had been there since 2004, give or take, with no problems or hassles encountered.

However, as blogs gradually have come to be more mainstream and opportunity-laden for reaching broader numbers of people, it was difficult to get such exposure from the blog's old location. It would not, for example, appear in basic online searches. Several of my blogging friends have opted to use Blogger.com for their needs.

Alas, The End of the Line has been given a new lease on electronic life. Apologies, in advance, if it appears to be rather patchy for the next few weeks, as I still need to get my way around such a new atmosphere, as well as to upload more graphics, pictures, and put further people onto my links' section. I hope that all readers will enjoy what they find here, and learn a little more into what makes me 'tick.'