Halfway down the Danube

Serbia is stable and associated! (Bosnia, not so much)

You know, I haven't done a Balkans post here in a long time.

So Serbia will get a Stability and Association Pact with the EU (SAA).  The pact was initialed last week; barring a catastrophe, it will be formally signed in January.

An SAA is the step before formal EU candidacy, so this is good news for Serbia.  It looks like Brussels is trying to strengthen the "liberal and Western" strain of Serbia's politics before December, when problems are likely to arise with Kosovo.  (The current round of Kosovo negotiations is likely to expire on December 10.)

The big loser here, of course, is Carla del Ponte.  The SAA was supposed to wait until Serbia had "cooperated fully" with the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY).  Serbia's cooperation has been slow, reluctant, half-hearted, and in no sense "full"; Ratko Mladic is going to die comfortably in bed, and the current leadership of Serbia is good with that.

Back in March, I noted that the Belgians (backed by the Dutch) had put a freeze on candidacy negotiations because they wanted to see real cooperation with the ICTY.  Well, eight months is a long time in politics.  Apparently the Belgians and Dutch were argued around.  The current paralysis of the Belgian government may have had something to do with this.

Albania got its SAA last year, and newly-independent Montenegro a few months ago.  Bosnia thus becomes the only country in the region without one.  Bosnia's goverment just formally collapsed this week, and they may well be going back to the polls in January or February.  So, it looks like they won't get their SAA initialed until next year at the earliest.

Hey you! You asshole in Chisinau!

You suck.  You use the goodness of my man to steal his iPod after he's shown HIS KIDS' PIX, for goodness' sake?  How vile do you have to be to do that?

If the gods listen to me, you'll get crotch lice, and painful itchy rashes, and you will not be able to sleep at night, and you will lose all tolerance for alcohol.

You fucking idiot.  You're probably proud you stole my kids' pictures.  Asshole.

To all decent people from Chisinau:  If you see a piece of shit using a silver iPod Nano 2 GB, ask him to see the serial number.  If the number is 7K725CAAVQ5, kick him in the balls and take it from him. Keep the iPod, but kick him, hard.

Thank you.

Serbia: still no government

Serbia still has no government. (I haven't blogged about Serbia here in forever. Well, that's because I've moved my Balkan bloggging over to A Fistful of Euros. But the Fistful is in limbo at the moment, with comments closed because of a nasty spam attack, so I'll go back to posting this stuff here.) They had elections on January 21. In a typical European parliamentary democracy, it takes a week or two of haggling and horse-trading after an election to form a government. In Serbia, it takes much longer... after the last election, back in 2004, it took them seventy days. This time they're up to fifty-six days, and counting. This comes at an interesting time for Serbia; the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovar independence has gone to the United Nations, while Serbia's hopes of EU membership have been blocked by their failure to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal. Not an ideal time to be without a government, but there it is. More on this in a bit.

Intermarriage, Yugoslav versus American style

How did this discussion start? Doug was down because some people he cares about are still drinking Walker Bush's yellow Kool-Aid. I tried cheering him up by e-mail. Not my forte, as Poppy might say...

The wingnut lifestyle is not a complete counterculture, not even the evangelical portions thereof. And as long as they're interacting with the larger culture -- the extremely latitudinarian sensibilities of a large majority of Americans -- they will internalize some of that sensibility. I've seen it happen close up.

In this sort of tolerant wider cultural environment, only the people who can continually redefine an external enemy according to their own internal mental needs, who must needs [sic] define themselves in terms of combativeness -- the psychologically damaged, in other words -- are able to carry this sort of attitude to the grave.

It's a novelty, me being on the ebullient side, and Doug being morose. Doug replied, in part:

I think that's too optimistic. 1970s Yugoslavia was a tolerant cultural environment, no?

I answered,

Cultural tolerance in the U.S. for most of the wingnut types does not represent a psychological reality. To them, it really does seem like a bad government policy which many bien-pensant whites have gone along with because of their ingrained leftism and dhimmitude, and which the coloreds naturally support because they get bread and circuses (affirmative action, the Cosby show, et cetera). Should the legitimacy of the goverment fall, all this will quickly unravel. Just like Yugoslavia!

As is sometimes said elsewhere, fap fap fap. The psychological reality on the ground, outside of the wingnut enclaves -- which are strongly regionally and generationally defined, among demographically shrinking subgroups -- is very different.

Doug replied,

Um. Go back and look at the [Yugoslav] intermarriage rate.

(So I did. But that's a bit later.)

Intermarriage, Yugoslav versus American style

How did this discussion start? Doug was down because some people he cares about are still drinking Walker Bush's yellow Kool-Aid. I tried cheering him up by e-mail. Not my forte, as Poppy might say...

The wingnut lifestyle is not a complete counterculture, not even the evangelical portions thereof. And as long as they're interacting with the larger culture -- the extremely latitudinarian sensibilities of a large majority of Americans -- they will internalize some of that sensibility. I've seen it happen close up. In this sort of tolerant wider cultural environment, only the people who can continually redefine an external enemy according to their own internal mental needs, who must needs [sic] define themselves in terms of combativeness -- the psychologically damaged, in other words -- are able to carry this sort of attitude to the grave.

It's a novelty, me being on the ebullient side, and Doug being morose. Doug replied, in part:

I think that's too optimistic. 1970s Yugoslavia was a tolerant cultural environment, no?

I answered,

Cultural tolerance in the U.S. for most of the wingnut types does not represent a psychological reality. To them, it really does seem like a bad government policy which many bien-pensant whites have gone along with because of their ingrained leftism and dhimmitude, and which the coloreds naturally support because they get bread and circuses (affirmative action, the Cosby show, et cetera). Should the legitimacy of the goverment fall, all this will quickly unravel. Just like Yugoslavia! As is sometimes said elsewhere, fap fap fap. The psychological reality on the ground, outside of the wingnut enclaves -- which are strongly regionally and generationally defined, among demographically shrinking subgroups -- is very different.

Doug replied,

Um. Go back and look at the [Yugoslav] intermarriage rate.

(So I did. But that's a bit later.)

Sofia, briefly

So I was in Sofia for three days.

My first time. We've visited Bulgaria before, but never the capital.

It was okay. About a million people, maybe? Not trashed by megalomaniacal Communism, like central Bucharest; not bombed flat twice, like Belgrade. So, more nice old buildings in the center. Several pleasant parks, with lots of fountains and statues.

In terms of economic development at-a-glance -- things like number of shops, variety of goods in shops, how many cars, how many new cars, how many McDonalds, how many cranes visible on the skyline -- I'd say it looked roughly equivalent to Bucharest. There's a nice pedestrian area, which Bucharest lacks. (Buch has a pedestrian area, but it isn't nice yet.) Bucharest has more cars; Sofia has better drivers.

Skirts are shorter, and styles are wilder. I saw at least a dozen young women with visible tattoos, which is more than I saw in a year in Romania. Not sure if this has any significance. Just... noticing.

There are several impressive Orthodox churches and one impressive mosque. (~10% of the population is Muslim.) Sofia is in a mountainous corner of the country, so it gets cool in the evenings. Very pleasant to walk down the main shopping street in the evening with an ice cream cone in hand, a cool breeze blowing, and a full moon rising over the mountains.

The macroeconomy is interestingly similar to Romania's. More about this anon.

Short version: I liked it just fine, and would go back. Recommended.

Sofia, briefly

So I was in Sofia for three days. My first time. We've visited Bulgaria before, but never the capital. It was okay. About a million people, maybe? Not trashed by megalomaniacal Communism, like central Bucharest; not bombed flat twice, like Belgrade. So, more nice old buildings in the center. Several pleasant parks, with lots of fountains and statues. In terms of economic development at-a-glance -- things like number of shops, variety of goods in shops, how many cars, how many new cars, how many McDonalds, how many cranes visible on the skyline -- I'd say it looked roughly equivalent to Bucharest. There's a nice pedestrian area, which Bucharest lacks. (Buch has a pedestrian area, but it isn't nice yet.) Bucharest has more cars; Sofia has better drivers. Skirts are shorter, and styles are wilder. I saw at least a dozen young women with visible tattoos, which is more than I saw in a year in Romania. Not sure if this has any significance. Just... noticing. There are several impressive Orthodox churches and one impressive mosque. (~10% of the population is Muslim.) Sofia is in a mountainous corner of the country, so it gets cool in the evenings. Very pleasant to walk down the main shopping street in the evening with an ice cream cone in hand, a cool breeze blowing, and a full moon rising over the mountains. The macroeconomy is interestingly similar to Romania's. More about this anon. Short version: I liked it just fine, and would go back. Recommended.

De mortuis nihil nisi

... bonum.

UCK

I was going to do that second post on independent Kosovo. But I discovered that you can't understand internal Kosovar politics without understanding UCK. (UCK is the Albanian name for the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.) And UCK is complicated and interesting enough to deserve a post of its own. But it's longish, and all history, so I'm putting it below the flip. Skip it if this stuff doesn't interest you.

Rashomon in the Balkans

Or, we still don't know who tried to kill Radovan Papovic. Here's a really obscure bit of Balkan history. On January 16, 1997, at about 8:00 in the morning, Radovan Papovic was driving to his job as rector of the Serb University of Pristina. The Serb University was what Pristina University turned into after the Serbs took over in 1990. Pristina University had been an Albanian school with no Serbs; SUP was -- you guessed it -- a Serb school with no Albanians. (Of course, since the province was 90% Albanian, there weren't enough Serbs to fill the classrooms. So most of the Serbian students were from elsewhere in Serbia, brought in by free housing and other subsidies. But that's another story.) Papovic seems to have been a pretty obnoxious character. He was a Member of Parliament for the right-wing nationalist Serbian Radical Party. He saw his job as cleansing the University of the Albanian taint and re-colonising Kosovo with eager young Serbs. He seems to have loathed and disliked Albanians -- he referred to them as "enemies" and "monsters" -- and to have gone out of his way to antagonize them. It was his administration that donated the university quad for the "church built in anger". Needless to say, the Albanians returned the sentiment. Papovic was one of the most hated Serbs in Kosovo. Which, in 1997, was saying something. So, he's driving to work one morning, and -- kaBOOM! -- a bomb goes off in a car nearby. A big one: an estimated 10 kilos of dynamite, detonated by remote control. Both the bomb car and Papovic's sedan were totally destroyed. By a fluke, both Papovic and his driver just barely managed to survive, though both men were badly injured. But who had planted the bomb?

The Church Built in Anger

There are a lot of ruined churches in and around Pristina. (Ruined Orthodox churches, that is. About 50,000 Kosovar Albanians are Catholic, so there are a couple of nice little Catholic churches. Nobody bothered them.) Short version: when the Serbian armed forces pulled out of Kosovo in 1999, the Albanians rose up in wrath and attacked the Orthodox churches and monasteries. Many of the churches they attacked were hundreds of years old. Some were treasure houses of art... medieval frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, beautiful carved icons going back hundreds of years. The Albanians attacked them all, damaging most and destroying many, smashing, burning and spraying the interior with bullets. Then, in March 2004, they did it again. About a dozen more churches were attacked, and several were effectively destroyed. The list of damaged churches is long, and it makes for depressing reading. Few of them have been repaired or rebuilt. Drive in from Pristina Airport, and you can see one just off the road; it's surrounded by barbed wire. Even the churches that survived -- like the magnificent Italo-Byzantine monastery at Gracanica -- have stayed intact only because they're surrounded by heavily armed soldiers from KFOR. That's the short version, and it's accurate as far as it goes. But -- this being the Balkans, where truth is fractal -- it's more complicated than that.

Independent Kosovo (1)

I recently said that Kosovo didn't make much sense as an independent country. Let me follow up on that a little. Kosovo will probably gain "conditional independence" sometime within the next 12 to 18 months, with full no-kidding independence coming some years later. Whether that's a good idea or not is another question. Let's just ask: what would an independent Kosovo look like?

A Pair of Timberland Boots

I had a few moments to spare on my last day in Pristina, so I visited the museum. I ended up kinda wishing I hadn't. The museum itself is a lovely two-story building, a renovated Ottoman villa, in the center of town. (Pristina doesn't really have a center, but it's near that big intersection where there are, like, four mosques in a two-block radius.) From the outside, it looked pretty promising. Kosovo has no lack of history, goodness knows. So I was looking forward to... oh, I don't know. Stone Age fertility carvings? Roman coins? Ottoman rugs? Surely something interesting. Well, yes and no. There was only one exhibit in the museum. It was quite a large exhibit. You could spend a while looking at it. No Roman coins or Greek vases; no, just this one big exhibit. And that exhibit was... Can you guess?

Pristina: Leaving

One of my last meetings was with a Minister of the Kosovar government, and I was struck by a couple of things. One was that the Minister was pretty young. Younger than me, and I'd be a young-ish minister most places. People say he got to be a Minister because he was a brave fighter in the KLA, back in the guerrilla war of 1996-99. That may not seem like a great criterion for running a big chunk of the government, but you don't want to tell that to the Kosovars. ...Actually, that's unfair. A large minority of Kosovars do think that bravery in the independence struggle should not be the most important qualification for government office. But Kosovar society is pretty clannish, and the war forged very intense loyalties. Especially among those who fought in the early days, when the KLA was small and the struggle seemed almost hopeless. Anyway. I was also struck by the decor of the Minister's office. It was totally dominated by two things: -- An enormous blowup photo of Adem Jashari, and -- A prominently displayed picture of Bill Clinton. I've mentioned that Kosovars love Americans, right? Let me add: they really love Bill Clinton. * * * * * Pristina seems pretty socially liberal. Young people of both sexes dress fashionably. Couples walk arm in arm. I'm told that in the summer, young women walk around with miniskirts, bare midriffs, heels... the whole Balkan hooker-chic thing. (Not that I'm paying attention.) The Albanians are nominally Islamic, but everyone drinks beer and every restaurant serves pork dishes. In ten days, I think I saw maybe three women wearing the head-scarf. Still, there were a couple of things that distinguished Pristina from Belgrade or Bucharest.

The saddest thing

The saddest thing I've seen here? The Yugoslav-era Memorial of Brotherhood and Unity. It's a 15-meter concrete pillar. Three pillars, really, a few feet apart at the base and joining together at the top. There's an abstract sculpture in fron, vaguely resembling a group of people. (The design is eerily similar to the Martyr's Memorial in central Bucharest, across from the Hilton. Go figure.) The triple pillar symbolizes the three peoples of Kosovo -- Albanians, Turks and Serbs. It stands in the middle of a big empty plaza, on a pavement of marble slabs, in the very center of Pristina.

And the occasional bomb

So there have been some bombings in Pristina lately. Four or five so far this year. Three of them have been attacks on UN police cars. Nobody's been killed or hurt, but it does have people on edge a little. At least two of the bombings were claimed by a shadowy group calling itself the Kosovo Independence Army. The KIA may or may not be connected to some bandit-like groups of armed men who have been stopping cars in rural Kosovo. Most of these episodes have been in western Kosovo, near the Albanian border -- a region that has always been, ah, difficult to administer. One difference between the past and today, of course, is the presence of nearly 20,000 NATO troops. And NATO does not seem overly concerned. There may be several things at work here.

Black birds and cold weather

It's really cold here in Pristina. I didn't pack an overcoat because -- follow my reasoning here -- it was pleasant autumn weather when I left Bucharest, and Pristina is about 150 miles (250 km) further south. Heck, Pristina is only about 120 miles (200 km) from the lovely Adriatic coast, where orange trees and olive groves bask in the sun. How cold could it get?

The Picture of Adem Jashari

It's twelve feet tall. A banner, really. It hangs above the door of the Youth Center, which is a really stunningly hideous building from the 1970s. It shows Adem Jashari in full combat regalia... fatigues, assault rifle, enormous beard. Insofar as you can make out his expression (it's a big beard), he looks about two parts menacing, one part mournful.

They Love Americans

Albanians love Americans. And Kosovar Albanians... they really love Americans. There are US flags everywhere. When I say I'm American, people smile. I had a meeting yesterday with a guy who had a copy of the US Declaration of Independence on his wall. (Didn't speak ten words of English.) And the second-biggest street in town is Bill Clinton Boulevard. It's not quite as important as Mother Theresa Boulevard -- you did know Mother Theresa was Albanian, right? -- but it's close. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Kosovo is one of those places where everyone has a cousin in Brooklyn. There's a saying in Albania that translates, "Fear not! For you have sons in America." Of course, that's true of a number of countries around here -- Serbia, most obviously -- and it doesn't make them love love love America. No, the big reason is that the US bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999, thereby releasing the Kosovar Albanians from a decade of apartheid, oppression, impoverishment, and collective misery and humiliation, and enabling them to inflict the same on the few Serbs who were too poor or too stubborn to run away.

Pristina

So I'm in Pristina, in Kosovo. This is my first time in Kosovo. I came with mixed feelings. On one hand, I hadn't heard much good about the province. "A dump" was the most typical comment. On the other hand, I had been pleasantly surprised by Tirana, in Albania. And... I was curious to see what the fuss was all about. Brief first impressions:

Heat

It's been a very hot weekend in Bucharest. Temperatures topped out at 38, but most of Friday and Saturday, they were hovering in the 30s. (For Americans: it was in the 90s, with a peak around 100.) That wasn't so bad, but the humidity... well. I went for a short walk on Saturday afternoon, and the streets were empty of pedestrians. Even the vicious dog who lives down Strada Brasilia, who snarls and lunges whenever I pass, didn't budge from under its car. I came home after half an hour and my t-shirt was drenched in sweat. Sunday evening, the heat broke with a sudden unexpected cloudburst. It started as a sunshower, drops of rain from a clear sky. Then some clouds moved in, and it began to just pour -- fat raindrops spattering down, the pavement dancing. I took shelter under a balcony. Cars started honking their horns. Some people ran for cover, but others were hopping around yelling, or just standing with arms outstretched and faces turned up. Afterwards it was still humid, but cooler, and when the sun went down the night was almost tolerable. Random note: Bucharest has a climate rather like the US Midwest. I spent three years in central Illinois, and this is pretty familiar. But expat friends from Europe and (especially) Britain seem to find it pretty savagely extreme.

Albania again

I'm back in Albania again. I owe our friends over at A Fistful of Euros some posts, so most of my Albania-blogging will be going on over there. Here's my first post. I'll try to post here too, as time allows. In any event I'll be back on Saturday.

Evil parents, that's what we are

David is 22 months old and very much two years already. He is my little devil in disguise - incredible charm and charisma liberally coating a will of steel. Yesterday, we went for a short walk after dinner. Just up the street to the supermarket to get some pistachios, and to check for a portable potty at the maternity store next door. Roundtrip maybe 700 meters. The route leads along Calea Dorobantilor which is a very busy street. Now, Alan is very well behaved and will hold your hand while walking where it's dangerous. He doesn't always like it but he will always do it. Not so David.

The Dukagjini Code, part 1.75: The coffee cup of forgiveness

As readers may have noticed in previous installments, the kanun of Lek Dukagjini contains a few slightly anachronistic elements. "Blood follows the (trigger) finger" is a central adage of the Code; yet the adoption of the personal firearm must certainly date to the centuries after Lek. (One wonders what the original adage was, if there was an original adage. "Blood follows the hand"? "Blood follows the hilt"?) In the same way, coffee -- which almost certainly was not consumed in the hills of northern Albania in the fourteenth century -- played an important role in peacemaking under the unwritten law. Doug mentioned in a recent post how modern Tirana is a city of cafes. But traditional Albania was also a land of coffee consumption. Even poor Albanian households would have a coffee set, with a "metal tray with coffee cups inverted to keep them clean and a tiny pot with a long handle for making Turkish coffee" in the hearth, as Margaret Hasluck recounts in The Unwritten Law in Albania. (I should note that by "Turkish coffee", Hasluck is using the English name for that style of brewing coffee by boiling its fine grounds, and does not intend any specific ethnic or religious identification by it. Albanians of all faiths drank coffee; and the Turks do brew a fine cup. Languages are weird sometimes.) Coffee was also a marker of status. A man of standing would be offered the first cup at the table, while a man too slow to kill his enemy would find "his coffee cup was only half-filled, and before being passed to him it was passed under the host's left arm, or even his left leg, to remind him of his disgrace." As can be imagined, satisfying the demands of honor and blood under the kanun made peacemaking a difficult process. A third party was always involved, and the reconciliation was laden with symbolism. Unsurprisingly, coffee often played an important role. Hasluck provides several examples:

The Dukagjini Code, part 1.5

Doug is still in Albania. "I am still in Albania!" he says. And so, a further anecdote from Pietro Quaroni on the Code of Lek, before the comparative stuff:

One of the chivalrous rules of the vendetta enacted that it could not be prosecuted against anyone accompanied by a woman, a child, or a foreigner. Thus, if a man who knew he was the object of a vendetta -- who was, as they said, 'in blood' -- allowed himself to be accompanied by one of these three persons he was regarded as a coward, disqualified, and shunned by the entire community. This sometimes led to strange situations. One evening our Legation doctor, Zucchi, was summoned for an urgent operation. A public-spirited man, he would undertake any journey, however distant, by night, in winter, in the depths of the mountains, to tend the sick. On the return journey, the young man who had summoned him suddenly began shrieking at the top of his voice: 'I'm with the Italian doctor! I'm with the Italian doctor! And my mother is ill'. 'Why do you shout like that?' said Zucchi. 'We're crossing the territory of a family with whom we are "in blood". I'm warning them not to attack you by mistake. And also, so they won't think I'm a coward.'

The Dukagjini Code, part 1

My co-blogger Doug is in Albania. "I am still in Albania," he says. And to think, I used to joke with him about that possibility. Thus, in Doug's honor, let me post an excerpt from Diplomatic Bags, the memoirs of the Italian diplomat Pietro Quaroni. Some background: Quaroni was stationed in Albania during the interwar years, at a time when Albania was a cockpit for Yugoslav, Greek, British, and Italian (i.e. Mussolini's) influence, under the peculiar rule of King Zog. As the saying goes, Zog did not so much rule as reign lightly. Much of the country still remained under traditional Albanian law, the unwritten code sometimes known as the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini. One peculiarity of the Kanun is that it did not rely on state structures for enforcement, much like the early medieval Iceland so beloved by modern American libertarian theorists. In the same way, Albania under the Kanun could be a remarkably violent place, much as the Icelandic sagas describe (and said theorists ignore). The Kanun has fascinated me for a long time, and I'm pleased as punch that I finally have an excuse to blog about it. So here's Quaroni on how this modern stateless law code operated:

On the city boundary where Cavaja Street begins, the ground rises and some way up the hill a barracks was being built. Perhaps this was why the road here was better maintained (in winter, most of Tirana became a sea of mud); it was a part of the town to which we often came for an afternoon walk. During one of these, my wife saw a peculiar object lying in a ditch at the side of the road; it proved to be a human corpse, a man half-immersed in a pool of water. This was a relatively busy street, and we were surprised that no one paid any attention to it. When we returned the following day, it was still there, in exactly the same position. The local people were unable to explain what had happened; much gesticulation and a flood of Albanian dialect told us nothing. The mystery was solved that evening by Colonel Sereggi, the King's ADC. 'He must have been killed in a vendetta,' he explained. 'Only members of his family are allowed to bury him. If anyone else touches the body, that person becomes immediately involved in the vendetta with the family who killed him. In the same way, if he had only been wounded, only members of his family could have tended him.' Such was our initiation into that strange and complex institution known in Albania as the vendetta.

Actually, as in Italy, such things were known as matters of blood: gjak.

Since the days of the ancient Turkish empire the honesty of the Albanians has been proverbial. A woman could, it is said, cross the length and breadth of the land loaded with gold and jewelry, and no-one would life a finger against her. So honest are they that, again according to tradition, it is unnecessary to close the front door at night. After nearly three years in Albania, I could confirm some of this from personal experience.

Free Montenegro! Or maybe not.

I'm working at home this morning, and there was a brief piece on the TV (which plays downstairs from the office, but can be heard in the background) about how Montenegro was thinking really really hard about declaring independence from their union with Serbia. In fact, the Montenegrin President and Prime Minister have presented a petition for independence (sort of) to the Serbian and federal leadership. More below the fold.

One day someone will explain to me why the Guardian keeps publishing this stuff

Raoul, in a recent comment, pointed me to an article in today's Guardian. The teaser: "Reformers blame problems on the legacy of 40 years of communism. But could it be that the reform process itself is responsible? Far from being a panacea, as claimed by eastern Europe's political elite, following the IMF-EU economic prescription has caused hardship for millions." Ah hah, said I to myself, said I. Before I even clicked on the link? I knew it was going to be one of two people: Mark Almond or Neil Clark. So I clicked... Ding! You've got Neil!

The ICG report on Kosovo

So I just finished reading the International Crisis Group's report on Kosovo. The report can be found here. (That's the .pdf version. MSWord file on this page.) It's 41 pages long, but reads faster than you might think. Though, as I told Talos at Histologion the other day, I was slowed by scribbling notes in the margins. Here's the short version: it recommends that Kosovo be given independence sometime in 2006. Unfortunately, IMO it doesn't make a very convincing case for this. I went in wondering why this would be a good idea; I finished, and I was still wondering. That said, it's worth reading. Very much so. It doesn't whitewash either the Albanians or the Serbs, and it has several modest but plausible ideas for improving relations between the two groups. In fact, the more modest the ideas, the more plausible they become IMO. I want to post about this in a little more detail, time permitting. (Which it doesn't right now.) Meanwhile, I encourage anyone who's interested to check it out and comment.

I believe in the predictions of coffee

Before there was Ceca or Severina on the Yugoslav pop music scene, there was... this.

Haradinaj, cont'd

For those who found the last entry interesting, I've written an expanded version for the Head Heeb. More on this in a bit -- family festivities coming up fast.

Waiting for the last indictments

The Hague Tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia -- remember them? The folks who have been trying Slobodan Milosevic for the last three and a half years? Well, they're starting to wrap up. The Tribunal must issue its final set of indictments by the end of 2004. In other words, within the next four days. After that, no more new indictments... they have to finish with what they've got. Now, this is a pretty stupid idea. There are a lot of war criminals still running around. Many of them have committed ghastly crimes, murder and worse. Eight and a half years -- or five and a half, if we're talking about Kosovo -- is not a very long time. (By way of comparison, the US and Israel are still going after a few last elderly Nazi war criminals, and General Pinochet of Chile is facing prosecution for crimes committed in the 1970s.) Yet, once this deadline closes, the many war criminals not indicted will be... not quite home free, no, but able to breathe a lot more easily. But the Hague Tribunal has been a mess. It has taken much longer and cost far, far more money than anyone ever imagined. So it's going to be shut down whether its work is done or not. (And it's not.) There's plenty of blame to go around for this sorry situation, and maybe sometime I'll post about it. But in the short run, the big question is: will the Tribunal indict Prime Minister Haradinaj of Kosovo? Rumor in Serbia is that they will, but rumor in Serbia is not always a reliable source. If they do, it will be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic in their hands. If they don't... well, that will also be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic. Either way, there will be big effects on the region. More on this soon.

Quote of the Day

If things here will work like in Romania or Bulgaria, we can be quite content. After all, this is the Balkans.

Paddy Ashdown, High Representative, about expectations of a model democracy in Bosnia

Kosovo again

Just read this interesting piece by William Montgomery, former US Ambassador to Serbia. Montgomery was in and out of Belgrade for over a decade, speaks Serbian, and has done his homework. I agree with pretty much everything he says here. Key grafs:

The Kosovo experience should be a case study for the limits -- and risks --of international intervention. The United States and its Western allies tried virtually everything to encourage Milosevic to treat the Kosovar Albanians humanely... [But it] was an effort doomed to failure, as the combination of Milosevic's desire to remain in power, historical enmity among the ethnic groups, growing national awareness on the part of the Albanian population, and the conflicting views of Kosovo itself of the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians were too much to overcome... Basically, we solved one problem at great cost (Serbian government massive human rights violations in its treatment of its ethnic Albanian minority) but we created others that thus far have defied solution. What to do about Kosovo? How does it fit into modern Europe? How does it interact with Serbia? How to dissuade the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, southern Serbia, and Macedonia from the use of violence? How to proceed in Kosovo in a way that does not re-radicalize Serbia? How to moderate the still raw forces of nationalism in Serbia and among Serbs, which the bombing campaign fuelled?

So far, pretty standard stuff -- some handwringing, some obvious hard questions. Now here's where it gets interesting:

Olympic notes

Romania had a pretty good Olympics: 21 medals, of which 8 were gold. That put Romania 14th in the world... not bad for a country of 21 million people. By way of comparison, Romania ended up with more medals than Canada, Spain, the Netherlands or Brazil. That said, there were some peculiarities. The biggest one: all of the gold medals were won by women. I don't know this was true for any other country with that many golds. Also, three of the eight golds came in (women's) rowing. Odd, because rowing was not traditionally a Romanian strength.

Name That Balkan Dictator!

It's Pop Quiz Friday here on Halfway Down the Danube, a new feature I am inaugurating in a hopel/e/s/s/ful attempt to get more comments on (and links to) this blog. Today's question: from the following quote, can you identify the Balkan dictator this person is talking about? NB: one culturally specific word has been changed. No fair using Google.

Slovenia's "Erased"

Here's an interesting post and thread on Slovenia's "Erased" people. It's over at Michael's excellent "Glory of Carniola" blog. -- Okay, this is sort of a cheap way to turn my several long comments on that blog into a post on this blog. But it's late and the baby has a cough and is sleeping restlessly, and I'm afraid too much typing will wake him up. So.

Murder in Macedonia

I've mentioned before that Macedonia doesn't seem to get much attention in the world news. That said, I'm still surprised by the lack of coverage of this story. Short version: in 2002, officials of the Macedonian goverment murdered seven illegal immigrant workers -- six Pakistanis and one Indian -- and then claimed they were "terrorists" who were planning an attack on the American embassy there. The point of the exercise? To win favor with the US government, apparently. (Here's another version with some more information.)

The Legionnaire, cont'd

Five days after surrendering to police, Legija (it's pronounced Leggy-uh, by the way) is still in captivity. And that's all we know. The news blackout continues. To paraphrase Dragan Antulov (of Draxblog), the optimists are just glad that Legija is off the street, and hope that he can offer useful information -- more about the ugly nexus of politics and organized crime in Serbia, more about the Djindjic assassination, maybe even something about the whereabouts of much-wanted war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. The pessimists think that Legija's surrender is just the tip of the iceberg. That he had help to stay undercover for fourteen months -- maybe official help. That as an intelligent paramilitary-counterintelligence-antiterrorist-organized crime figure, he'd never have given up without some good reason. They think he surrendered because he cut a deal with Kostunica's government; and that he'll be kept sequestered and and put back into play only when it suits the government (i.e., when he has some particularly damning piece of information about the previous administration, or perhaps some political rival). "We do know that Legija is not to be believed, that he has outmanoeuvred many people who thought they were a jump ahead of him, and that he has buried many who believed they were better than him," said a former police minister. Short answer is, we don't know. More on this when there's more to tell.

The Legionnaire Surrenders

Legija "the Legionnaire" is the nickname of the Serbian criminal suspected of masterminding the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic last March. After fourteen months on the run, Legija surrendered to Serbian police yesterday. This came as a complete surprise. Several of Legija's associates had been captured or killed in the weeks following Djindjic's death. Legija himself, though, had simply disappeared. The general assumption was that he was living someplace far away -- Moscow, say -- with a new set of papers and possibly a new face. Not. He surrendered at his house in Belgrade. And while his whereabouts for the last fourteen months remain unknown, it looks like he may have been in Serbia for most or all of that time.

Sărut mnă!

One of the most endearing greetings here in Romania is "săru'mnă" or "sărut mnă". Literally, it means "I kiss [your] hand" which is similar to the Austrian "K�ss die Hand". Like in Austria, it's both a verbal greeting and an actual hand kiss. In Bucharest, one mostly encounters it as a verbal greeting -- from men to women of any age. It's very, very polite and Romanian women consider this to be very charming. (That's the feedback from the Romanian women I know but there might be some among our readers who think differently?) Occasionally, though, one does encounter that rare species of man who does follow up with a hand kiss. I have to say, the first time this happened to me, I was quite baffled -- and felt very special. It's like something that you only see in the movies and suddenly you meet it in real life. I've also heard it said by younger children to me -- so maybe it's not a custom that is dying out, as so many others are. In the countryside, so I've been told, younger folk of both sexes use it to show respect to older people. Isn't it nice? I just love it. Sărut mnă!

Sad Friday Night

A steady drumbeat of bad news from Serbia. I've been blogging about it over at tacitus; you can find my first post here and a followup over here. I've been in touch with friends there, and everybody seems to be OK. But it's not good news. This is going to force Kostunica to take a more nationalist stand -- not that he'll need much forcing -- since otherwise, the Radicals will eat his lunch. Which they may do anyhow. So, don't lie awake nights waiting for any more Serbs accused of war crimes to be deported to the Hague. Instead, watch Kostunica and his government play the nationalist card, hard; and never mind what it does to Serbia's image abroad, or its hopes for European integration. At work this afternoon, I got a call from Claudia. She was watching the rioting in Belgrade on Euronews. "They trashed the McDonalds," she said. "Our McDonalds? The one on Terazije?" "Yep." We'd been in that McDonalds just a month ago; I took Alan downstairs, where he played for half an hour on the jungle gym while I drank coffee and read the paper. "Oh, now they're showing the mosque," she said. "It's burning. They're burning the old mosque." In the background, I could hear Alan, obviously watching the TV too, saying, "Fire! Fire!" It's not a happy day.

Bad News from Kosovo

Six people are dead there today. Or maybe more. Reports are confused, but it looks like a major clash between Serbs and Albanians is under way. Apparently some Serb boys chased some Albanian children into a river, and two of the children then drowned. Mayhem then ensued, with vengeful Albanians attacking the Serbs, the Serbs counterattacking, and so forth. This is the worst clash in the province since 2001, when Albanian terrorists killed 30 or so Serbs at one go by blowing up a bus. But there's been a steady background drumbeat of violence, with incidents every few months. Children have been involved in a number of these, unfortunately; for instance, several Serb teenagers swimming at a water hole were shot by a sniper last year. No arrests, of course. Kosovo is already divided along ethnic lines, and has been since the end of the NATO campaign five years ago. The northern quarter or so of the province is about 90% Serb, the rest of it is about 95% Albanian. Re-integration of the two groups has never seemed particularly likely. The best case scenario was that the two would at least tone down the mutual hatred to the point where a small relict population of Serbs could live in relative peace in Kosovo, and Serbs could travel there safely to visit the many Serbian religious and historical sites -- cathedrals, monasteries, the Kosovo Polje battlefield. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be happening. What happens now? I don't know. The Serbs and Albanians are limited in their ability to reach and hurt each other, in part because they're mostly physically separated, in part because of the presence of an international peacekeeping force. So larger scale violence is unlikely. But the fact that they're still managing to regularly have "incidents" ranging from sniper attacks to full-scale race riots, even under these circumstances, is depressing. It's like watching two guys who have been handcuffed but are still straining to reach each other with their teeth. Bad news: for Kosovo, for Serbia, for the region. More in a bit, probably, unfortunately.

At large

The BBC reports that yet another Karadzic search ends in failure. This is no surprise but time is getting short. Serbia has to produce Karadzic until the end of this month or all international aid will dry up instantly (which is to say, no new projects will begin after March 31 -- those which are running will continue to do so.) Personally, I think he's in Belgrade. Hint for those searchers: Look on Golsvortijeva. We've lived around the corner from presidents and prime ministers all the time since we came to the Balkans. Golsvortijeva was the only exception. I've always wondered whether that meant that there is someone important living around the corner that we just don't know about. I don't know. It seems as good a guess as any...

One Year Ago Today

I was sitting in a cafe in downtown Belgrade, when everyone's cell phone went off at once. The Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, had been shot twice in the chest and abdomen with a high-powered, large-caliber rifle. Two minutes later, the network crashed from overload and everyone's phone went dead. But the news followed quickly anyhow: Djindjic was DOA.

Belgrade Flashback: White Jeep and Blue Camry

This morning I was at the OPIC conference downtown. OPIC is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and it would take a while to explain what that's all about, so never mind. The key thing here is that Romanian President Iliescu was giving a speech, so there was a lot of security. Metal detectors, people frisking you with wands, and guys in dark suits with the little radio thingies in their ears standing along the wall. For some reason it made me think of Belgrade in the fall and winter of 2001. At that time Claudia and I were living in central Belgrade, in a little apartment on a street called Dositiyeva. That's in the Dorchol neighborhood, which is right downtown, near Republic Square and the National Theater. It was a nice enough neighborhood and a nice enough street, but there was nothing special about it. Except that right around the corner lived a guy named Vojislav Kostunica, who at that time was President of Yugoslavia.

Clean up your own dirt!

There is a disussion on domestic help over at John and Belle's which I found by the way of Apartment 11D. Belle has many smart things to say but I still cannot resist to add my own 2 cents. See, I don't have as good a reason for employing domestic help as Belle does -- I'm not chronically ill like her. I'm perfectly able to clean up after myself, as much as anyone with two kids under two is able to do this. But I have a maid who comes twice a week for eight hours to clean and do the laundry. I also have a fulltime nanny who takes Alan -- and more and more often David -- to the park all day long. They leave at 9 (11 in winter) and come back at 4:30. Rosy cheeks and all.

Belgrade revisited

It was so nice to be back in Belgrade. The people are so outgoing. The city is so full of life. The atmosphere is so upbeat. We met friends and favorite places, ate once loved pastries at once loved coffee shops, and visited often frequented book shops. We strolled down the Knez to Kalamegdan. We spend an afternoon in Alan's old park. We saw our old house (still empty, waiting for us to come back maybe). Not once did I have to go down or up a single stair without someone jumping to help me with the stroller. The Danube, oh, the Danube. I really did miss the Danube. It was a nice visit. It's also nice to be back home. I can say "mulţumesc" again without following up with "eh, hvala". Lots of food for blog entries, when I'm less tired and less wiped. Flying alone with two kids is not much fun. It could have been worse, though -- I met friends on the plane who helped me and I didn't need to change any diapers. Heh. Tomorrow, then. I promise.

Letter from Belgrade

I got a letter from a friend in Belgrade yesterday. My friend -- I'll call her Anna-- is Serbian, a lawyer, and thirty-some years old. She's an intelligent, lively and (I think) perceptive observer of the political scene there. If you haven't read this post about the elections in Serbia, what follows won't be that interesting. Me, I'm still fascinated by what's going on there, because Serbia seems like a country that's balanced on a tipping point. So. Here follow some of her comments, slightly edited, and my responses.

The cleanest toilet in the Balkans

Is located at the Shell gas station on Route 5 from Ruse to Sofia in Bulgaria, about 8 km from the border to Romania. Why do I know that? Well, it's been three months since we last went to Ruse and the car needed to leave the country again - obviously we haven't been able to organise a Romanian registration so far. We forgot over the business with the kids and only remembered last night -- and discovered that we were already two days past the magic date. Since Doug had a big meeting today, it was up to me to drive across the border, turn and come back with a shiny new stamp in my passport.