The end of a hiatus

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?

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!

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

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

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’

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

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.