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

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 Turkey's ambassador to Canada was recently withdrawn over Prime Minister Harper's referral to 1915 as "genocide," a stance that Ottawa has taken, much to the chagrin of Turkey.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!

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"

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...?

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

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

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?

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.