Krkowhat?

It was a fine film, and I have seen this clip used for many things, including the Dallas Cowboys and Senator Clinton. But thanks to Nedim for sending along the latest subtitling.

A tree fell on it

For better or worse (more likely than not better), Dragan Marković Palma has just squashed the hopes of Vojislav Koštunica and Vojislav Šešelj to form a government together. You never know where help is going to come from, do you?

Winston Napier

A moment of silence please for my friend and former colleague Winston Napier, whose wit and insight rivalled anybody's.

Here are remembrances from Aldon Lynn Nielsen and David Pugh.

Grist for the rumour mill

While there is wild speculation about the efforts to form an ultraright government with DSS and SRS in coalition, or as some media have it, a government for the security services and (presumably only some of) the tycoons, there is other speculation that the whole show is an effort by SPS to enhance the price it can demand for entering a coalition. This comes in the face of two bizarre events: Vojislav Šešelj sharing his deep thoughts from his cell in the Hague, and at the same time SPS chair Ivica Dačić repeating an image from a bygone era by heading off to Moscow to be told what he thinks (by whom?).

Still the guesses remain that SPS is buying time and has put conditions to SRS and DSS that they are not likely to accept, like control of both the Interior ministry and the intelligence agencies. SPS also has a deal-killer for both coalitions, complete rehabilitation of Slobodan Milošević, Mirjana Marković and their sundry criminal relatives. And there are claims that SPS is talking concretely with the DS-led coalition "For a European Serbia." What sorts of concrete things? Rumour is that DS is offering SPS the ministries for infrastructure, social services, and for Kosovo. Alongside these offers, it seems Vuk Drašković would like to be ambassador to the United States, and a few names are being mentioned as a possible prime minister: Gordana Matković, Bojan Pajtić and Mirko Cvetković (that last name surfaced early on, just after the elections, as a nonparty figure who might be acceptable to both DS and SPS). Another name that has been floated is that of Ivan Vujačić, who would need some work if Drašković were to head to Washington to replace him.

It is not clear who is feeding this information to the media or whether any of it is accurate. Assuming that the basic bit of speculation holds, and SPS is carrying on negotiations with DSS and SRS that are destined to fail, the question remains whether for DS, the price of forming a coalition with SPS might not be higher than the price of spending some time in opposition.

Translating: To the second page of the street

There is of course no substitute for a careful translation by an attentive and well informed human. The Google translation tool does not pretend to be such a substitute, and anyone who has used it knows that it is not one: the results are often comical. Nonetheless it is useful for getting a rough sense of something you might not be able to understand otherwise. And now you can get a rough sense in ten more languages -- Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish. So enjoy.

In which Eric learns a new bit of UK-ish academic jargon

"Lecture kebab" signifies a course for which you have general oversight, but in which most of the actual lecturing is done by a series of visitors.

Fun with DSS and SRS

Lose an election, get a mayor.

Update: Looks like that was either a false alarm or a report that came before its time.

A formula that adds up to 126

According to Blic, it is DS + the Hungarian Coalition + SPS. Blic is close to DS and may have inside information, and they promise more detail in tomorrow's edition (NB: Blic does not always make good on promises of this type). The article claims the deal will be announced when the final results are announced, which should be Thursday night at the latest.

Do I have an opinion on this possibility? I do indeed have several. They vary between two extremes -- the first of which is that it would be a shame to see criminals back in power again (moderating factor: they never left), and the second is that if SPS were ever to become a real political party with a programme that bears some resemblance to its name, this would be good for everyone.

Update: Tihomir Loza has some reflections on the subject too.

Un hombre sincero de donde crece la palma

More fun with electoral math: all eyes are on SPS seeking to set a juicy high price for itself. But probably three or four parliamentary seats will go to Koštunjavi's coalition partner Dragan Marković Palma. Any mother would love the fellow, who is well versed in the classical music canon and once used the podium of the parliament (when he was a deputy for Arkan's party) to ask the police to carry out a coup. But now as the mayor of an increasingly prosperous small city, he wants to attract investment, and that means Europe, and that means no room for Radicals. DS has already shown repeatedly how willing it is to swallow its pride and sacrifice its supporters' beliefs. Would they rather do it with the devil who never held a monopoly of power than the one that did?

Why were the polls wrong?

This is not the first time in Serbia, and is not likely to be the last, in which the election results differ fairly widely from the results of preelection surveys. What are some of the reasons this might be happening?

1. There are too few survey agencies. Not that I am wishing for more survey agencies (however convenient they might be in providing short-term employment for graduate students). But as a rule, one survey does not necessarily tell you much. It becomes possible to figure things out when you are able to make comparisons over time, or when you can compare surveys done by different agencies on the basis of their samples or methods of analysis. Patterns mean more than individual results mean.
   
2. The experience is not long enough. More elections means that pollsters have more familiarity with sources of error, in particular the patterns in the tendencies of people to misreport their own preferences or likelihood of voting. Although elections have been fairly frequent in the past few years, the experience of free elections only dates to December 2000. Patterns are not yet well established.
3. The political environment is volatile. In established democracies, most votes can be accounted for by regular patterns. Regions and populations have fairly consistent tendencies, and the factor that accounts for most voting behaviour is family tradition. This does not happen in environments where parties appear and disappear with some regularity and where the population changes.
4. Something is at stake. People do lie, and they lie more often about things that matter. Surveys on the brand of toothpaste people prefer will always get more accurate results than surveys on people's sexual or religious practices. In many established democracies where major parties converge toward the centre, political preference is more like toothpaste. In polarised societies it is more like religion and sex.
5. Things really do change. Survey agencies had a guess about how much the stabilisation agreement with the EU, signed two weeks before the election, might help DS. But the deal between Zastava and Fiat, and the visa concessions made by European governments, came in the final week. There wasn't time to account for them.
6. The media and communications landscape is not unified. Not everbody has a telephone. Younger people are likely to bypass the phone companies entirely and rely on mobiles. This has the effect of skewing samples. Also, not everybody has access to the same information media. Independent sources of information reach the urban entres more regularly than they reach the smaller towns and villages.

Having said all that, the surveys have not been so terribly far off, and in hindsight it may be possible to say that Strategic and Medium did catch a growth of support for DS in the final week. And anyone who has been following the primary contests in the US Democratic party knows that the pollsters have a fairly uneven record in those elections, too, so some lack of predictive power is not necessarily a unique characteristic of newer democracies. And after all, the fact that the world is not entirely predictable is probably on balance a good thing.

I suppose it beats "Keep on truckin'"

Your insightful BBC blogger ponders, "I wonder if a portrait of Tomislav Nikolic will ever stare down on my slumbering form when I visit Belgrade." Hey man, it's your business, put up any poster you want.

If at first you sort of succeed

The first projections from CeSID look fairly surprising: although the DS-led coalition and SRS appeared to be running about even in the preelection surveys, CeSID projects an advantage of over 10% for DS -- 103 seats to 76 for SRS. However, it will get more complicated. It takes 126 seats to form a government. DS can probably count on the 7 seats that minority parties are expected to get. LDP will have another 13, but DS wants to avoid dealing with them. So the coalition of DS + LDP + minorities gets at most 123 seats, three short of where they need to be.

That leaves two potential coalition partners who are at best undesirable: DSS with 30 seats and SPS with 21. SRS could form a weak government with their fellow recipients of DB largesse in SPS and DSS with 127 seats. Or DS could try to pick off one of them, at the cost of their capacity to govern.

Look for a lot of things that will be euphemistically called incentives that will be used to encourage individual deputies from SPS and DSS to switch their loyalties.

And in the meantime, be pleased that it will at least not be easy for SRS to return to power.

Results tonight, turnout high

As you no doubt know, voters in Serbia are electing a new parliament today. As in the presidential elections in January and February, CeSiD is reporting that turnout is very high and will perhaps be higher than ever. Follow their site for updates and for returns after the polling places close. Things to watch for:

1. Most of the preelection surveys show the DS-led coalition and SRS running about even. One of them will be the largest group in the new parliament but neither one will have a majority. This means that smaller parties will decide who forms the next government.
2. The biggest of the small parties is DSS (in coalition with NS). Surveys show them running somewhere between 12 and 14 percent, but I am tempted to think that this is overestimated, considering that in the last parliamentary election they got around 16 percent and in the meantime they have alienated many of their supporters. This may very well be wishful thinking on my part, however, and I could be carried away by the thought that the cold dead hand of Vojislav Koštunica might have no influence at all on upcoming events.
3. LDP may well be gaining in influence, although they undoubtedly have a fairly restricted base and hence an upper limit. A strong showing on their part would limit the capacity of Mr Tadić to form another coalition with parties who are fundamentally opposed to the wishes of most DS supporters.
4. The strange creature that uses the word "Socialist" in its name will probably get some meaningful number of seats in the parliament. Neither of the larger parties has the guts (and probably not the room to maneuvre either) to avoid a coalition with them. They are thieves, so will go with whoever offers them the most lucrative patronage.
5. Turnout in Vojvodina and Sandžak will determine whether the minority parties remain marginal or decide who forms the next government. Although it could be argued that their strongest interest is in supporting DS, they may have a stronger interest in being represented at all, and so could easily decide to give a margin of victory to SRS rather than sitting on the sidelines for an indeterminate period.

By law a government does not have to be formed quickly, so we could once again see a situation in which even when we know the results, we still do not know who won. But pleasant and unpleasant surprises are both always possible.

Update: Estimating again around 5PM, the turnout looks as though it might not be so high after all. Low turnout is a reason to be worried about the result.

Update2: If history is a guide, when turnout is low then fascinating things happen during the final hour of voting.

A blast from the past

In 1999, Zoran Đinđić and Slavoj Žižek had a chat. Đinđić is occasionally pretty interesting and Žižek is, well, symptomatic.

Irony

Today is the day of victory over fascism (and coincidentally, also the day of Europe). Will Sunday be the day of victory of fascism over us? Some guy gives his prediction for the New Statesman.

Update: Oh my goodness, there is an audio version too. With catastrophic pronunciation.

Društvo za unapređivanje napretka

Every day it seems there is a wondrous new scientific finding.

Kad je interesa nije sramote

The Radicals may say that they will not cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Inconsequential as that may seem given the present government's behaviour, it seems that the sentiment is not reciprocal: the Hague is happy to cooperate with them, lavishly. TV fans will doubtless remember Božidar Delić, the dashing general who chatted so frequently with Slobodan Milošević during the latter's trial. Now Blic is reporting that Delić had a lucrative gig hiring out his private archive to the Tribunal for the Haradinaj case, in which he was set to testify but withdrew for reasons the Tribunal spokesperson will not discuss. Killer quote:

The Milošević trial gave the best insight into the way the retired general works. According to sources at the Tribunal, he brought with him six hundred documents that he intended to present as evidence. That might not have been a problem during the trial, if the prosecution had not earlier requested from Belgrade the majority of just those documents. However, our government replied that they simply did not have those documents.

The article goes on to claim that former chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte, against the protests of the lead prosecutor in the case Geoffrey Nice, proposed dropping the entire set of charges related to Kosovo in order to assure a chance of peeking at Mr Delić's etchings. And there is a small effort to calculate how much Mr Delić was paid for his services.

In the likely event of an electoral disaster on Sunday, Božidar Delić is the probable candidate of SRS to take the position of Minister of Defence. From that position, he should have a better capacity to sell military documents to the people to whom he loudly claims to be opposed.

Update: Where was Ms del Ponte's friend on 25 March 1999?

In memoriam

Let's take a little break from the words of such thinkers as Tomislav Nikolić, Goran Davidović, Gordana Pop-Lazić, Vojislav Koštunica, Velimir Ilić and the rest of them. There are also, and have been in the lands of East Ethnia, fine thinkers who were also fine people and who have made fine interventions. Vreme features an obituary about one of them, Milan Kangrga, written by another one of them, Lino Veljak.

One hand washes the other

There should be no stopping Koštunica now that he has the endorsement of Goran Davidović.

Dragulji from the history of voting fraud

The year was 1968, the competition was Eurovision, and we do not necessarily have to believe the Guardian's assurance that this or any other song by Cliff Richard was "actually one of the better entries." But its second place finish may not be valid evidence one way or another. Because apparently what happened was that old Francisco Franco sent the representative of Televisión Española around Europe to funnel money to other television and publishing outlets, buying up series, arranging for concerts and promotions, the works. This infusion of cash translated into a phalange of votes for the Spanish entrant, a very serious (oh, let's quote the Guardian again: "trumpet-tootling, bodice-ripping") song by Massiel called "La la la." Of course there is a video. And another. Rock out to the vote-buying, boys n gals.

The future is so bright

Not all of the intellectuals are afraid of the return to power of the extreme right. The mediocre ones among them never lost their desire for position and publicity, and held a conference to outline their goals. The lucky attendees got to hear Kosta Čavoški fantasise about new wars people could be killed in. Easily outdone by years of living in soft and luxurious enemy territory, Srđan Trifković merely drooled over the prospect of being able to fire people from their jobs because of their ethnicity and imagined, should a traveller ever chance into the country, that it might be fun to abuse them.

A note to the nationalist right

You see, the problem with killing and threatening to kill everyone prominent who disagrees with you is that it does not remove all of the obstacles to your remaining in power. You also have to kill everyone who supports them, and regardless of how often you have tried that remains a majority of the people who voted in the last election. That would not be enough either: you would also have to kill everyone who despises you, and that would be most of the people in the world. And even if you should make progress there, you would still have to go after everyone who turns against you or knows anything about you.

Uranak

It is a while since East Ethnia has been with you! Your humble correspondent spent a while travelling, had surprising good luck in selling one much-loved Boston apartment, had even more surprising good luck in obtaining visas for Mrs Ethnia and the Ethniette (even Lajoš the wonder dog is more or less sorted), managed to hit one pleasant conference and give one nice little lecture, and spent much time in the comforting hands of airline corporations. Now it is back in London for exam season, gaping at political disasters (more about these elsewhere in future posts), and another exciting round of flat-hunting.

The Balkans have been up to much of the same, but we will tell you about that in more detail, won't we?

And if any of the dear readers here are members of the monstrosity known as Facebook, you may want to join the group of our friendly little Centre to find out about our upcoming events. Next week we will have a conference on new research organised by our friends at Goldsmiths, and soon we will have details up for the launch of the new book by Celia Hawkesworth on 22 May.

In the meantime, if any of you have leads on a nice but not too costly 2-3 bedroom rental on Muswell Hill, do let me know. And if any of you have clever ideas on how to run iTunes through my little mini stereo (it has a USB port!) you will earn my gratitude.

Back at cha.

Bogohuljenje

Rastko Nemanjić knew the difference between political power and faith, having traded one for the other. So that he would also have been able to recognise that when people try to trade in the latter for the former, the initial promise is probably instrumentalised and false.

A higher power once showed it was aware of this, when lightning struck the large concrete object that bears the name of Sveti Sava and no other relationship to him on the day of Sveti Sava in 1995. One might also expect the dean of the faculty of law to be aware of this, but one would be wrong.