Tomorrow's scandal today!

Tomorrow's Danas has a report by Bojan Tončić that the wave of voluntary surrenders of ICTY suspects in Serbia (some of which, like yesterday's hurried transfer of Sreten Lukić, appear to be not quite so voluntary) is being orchestrated by the ICTY indictee Franko Simatović, the former JSO ("Red berets") commander who has been released pending trial. An anonymous source "close to police structures" tells Danas that some people have surrendered in exchange for major financial consideration, while others have been subject to "Frenki's 'bag over the head' method." Expect denials all around.

Rokenrol will never die, but its eyes are pretty red

On 2 April the Partibrejkersi played a show at the club Pazi škola. The Maniac shop has the photo gallery.

Soliciting advice from my esteemed readers

The occasional bouts of erratic behavior from Blogger have me thinking about whether I ought to move East Ethnia to a different host. At one point I set up a page at Blogsome (you can peek if you like, but you won't find much there), but there are a couple of drawbacks, including no easy way to transfer the archived posts and comments and, it seems, no Unicode, which would mean none of the fetching letter Ž.

So my question to you is first of all whether you think this is worth doing, and if so what host you would suggest. My criteria are:

✩It has to be free. I don't make any money off of this, so I won't spend any either.

✩There has to be a way of transporting the existing archive that even a Luddite like me can handle.

✩The more technophobe-friendly the interface, the more interface-friendly the user.

Advice, horror stories, opinions?

A royal wedding in East Ethnia

Forget Charlie Hanover and whoever it is, or Jennifer Lopez and whoever it is this time. East Ethnians have their own celebrity wedding to fete. The Godfather who makes you an offer you cannot understand, Slavoj Žižek, travelled to the global capital of psychoanalysis, Buenos Aires, to find his bride. He met Analía Hounie at a lecture he gave at the Argentine National Library in 2003, and they were married on 6 March of this year. The photos and two tabloid articles can be found at The Wrong Side of Capitalism.



What makes me happiest about being able to report on Mr Žižek and the new Mrs Žižek is that now that I have my computer back I can once more use the letter Ž. Thanks to cultural anthropology king Marko Živković for the link and the tip.

Technical salvation

It took six months of back and forth, but my friends at Apple, after spending more on express mail than they would have spent just doing the repair, have finally come through with a new hard disc! East Ethnia is coming back with a level of efficiency unimpaired by repeated force quits.

However, I am going to have to rebuild my bookmark collection and address book. If you are one of those rare people who enjoys getting mail from me, pop me a message (eastethnia at gmail dot com) and I'll capture a tiny portion of your spirit.

A quick summary of Atentat

Just finished Milos Vasic's book on the Djindjic assassination last night. It is a solid piece of research, very much in his outspoken style which will be familiar to people who have read his articles in Vreme. Some people will find this style engaging, some will find it distracting, but in neither case should this detract from his contribution, which is to set out the characters and methods involved in the alliance between security services and organised crime, and to draw out the connections between what seem to be disparate instances of corruption and violence.

Most of what is presented is material that will be familiar to people who have followed events in the region, but Vasic brings it all together in one place and does a persuasive job of showing how different facts are connected. He also has good answers to those parts of the media campaign conducted over the past two years which have sought either to empty the known facts about the murder of any content or to argue that Djindjic in some way deserved to be murdered.

The book gives at least preliminary answers to what are probably the biggest mysteries of the murder. Those would be: 1) what motivated the government to maintain so much of Milosevic's semilegal security structure in place for so long?, 2) why were responses to what were, in retrospect, the first obvious signs of a conspiracy so weak?, 3) which are the political forces that continue to prevent major criminal cases from being resolved? To walk through the answers in a short blog post would be both giving too little information and giving too much away, so I will hold back. But I can certainly recommend the book as solid, comprehensive and provocative.

I have no information about whether an English translation is being considered or prepared, unfortunately. But it would be a worthwhile publication.

To find and not to find

The police may not have found Nebojsa Pavkovic in the places they were looking. But they seem to have found poor Mr Cosic.



Thanks to MM.

Completely delicate things, wash them cold

No way around it, soon enough Nebojsa Pavkovic will be arrested and extradited to the Hague. Interior minister Dragan Jocic held a most uninformative press conference at which he confirmed there was an arrest warrant, but said little else except to claim that the situation was "completely delicate." Mr Pavkovic has only succeeded in hiding as long as nobody was looking for him, and has otherwise failed to launch a referendum over his fate or otherwise to animate people in his support, since only he seems to share in the image of great importance he tries so hard to project. Expect him and Sreten Lukic, whose competely delicate medical condition also does not inspire widespread concern, to settle into their new homes in Scheveningen in the next several days.

Update: It would seem that a support rally for Pavkovic attracted "dozens" of people to listen to the newest prose stylings of necrophile Kosta Cavoski. That some of the war criminals might get some public sympathy in Serbia is not inconceivable (recall how Vladimir Lazarevic was feted) but Mr Pavkovic, aside from being a violator of international humanitarian law, is also an incompetent, a philanderer, a thief, a publicity hound, a spletkaros and a twit. Not designed for public sympathy.

Update2: Off goes Lukic.

Whacked by the book meme stick

It looks like I have been infected by one of those chain-post blog thingies, courtesy of the Hon. J. Skelly Wright. What the heck, I'll play, looks like fun:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I read that book a long time ago (for the convenience of this blog's European readers, that would be Celsius 232,7), but if I recall this means that I get burned, right? So is this supposed to be a book that I dislike? Or am I supposed to stretch my imagination and consider that I would want to be burned?

Maybe it is better to consider the question as asking what book I respect enough to take the effort of saving it from burning. In that case it would have to be Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, because it does the most to explain what makes contemporary cultures hostile to culture in general, and how that relates to pleasure. I think.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Way back in my undergraduate days everyone in the seminar had a crush on Molly Bloom! But that may be unavoidable. Also the professor was of the "erotics of the text" school, heavy going for a bunch of recent postadolescents trying to look smart. But even with the benefit of hindsight, Molly Bloom remains Molly Bloom.

The last book you bought is?

I'm a little ashamed here, but my excuse is that I was looking for something current and popular to use in "Sociology of Culture," for which I often mine the cheesy NY Times bestsellers lists, figuring that it is better to pander than to be frustrated. It was Jihad vs McWorld by Benjamin Barber. The guy's heart is probably in the right place, but I didn't like it. First of all, these "explain the whole world" books always run into the problem of having so wide a scope that they do not get the facts right. Second, even though Barber goes around trying to minimise the effect, I remain offended by the way he uses the term jihad, which is close to the popular journalism usage and has nothing to do with the way that most Muslims understand the meaning of the word.

What are you currently reading?

Atentat na Zorana by Milos Vasic. This is the book that everyone was talking about during our visit to Belgrade last week, and we brought back multiple copies because it is what everyone gave us as gifts for their relatives. It is an effort to recount the murder of Zoran Djindjic, its causes and the responses to it, by tracing the ways in which an alliance between security services and organised crime came to occupy the state then tried to make this occupation permanent. Good stuff. I'm also carrying with me a copy of Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which a student was kind enough to give me as a gift, but much to my regret I haven't got to it yet.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

I haven't got any novels here, even though I like them, but then I rarely read them twice.

1. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. What can I say, it is the family bible. Mark Bittman's general idea is to develop recipes that look impressive but do not involve inordinate amounts of work, and this is an idea that translates well to all spheres of life.

2. A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives by Kenneth Burke, because they have been sitting in my "must read soon" pile for well over a decade.

3. A good Indian cookbook, because there comes many a day when I wish I had a good Indian cookbook. But I never buy them because here where I live there are lots of good Indian restaurants.

4. Economy and Society by Max Weber, because you never know when you will need to find a good Weber quote. He has also rarely been surpassed in terms of theory, especially if you consider theory a set of propositions that leads to the development of new ideas, whether these propositions turn out to be true or not.

5. A phone book. Definitely a phone book.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Quod, because I really want to see what she will say.

The Prairie sociologists, because the heartland must be heard.

Bora Coturnix, because he always seems to find fascinating things I have never heard of.

On this day in 1957

The BBC ran its legendary April Fools documentary on the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.



The BBC's On This Day section recalls: "The hoax Panorama programme, narrated by distinguished broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, featured a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry." Responses ranged from criticism for using serious programming time for an April Fool joke to inquiries as to where a person could buy a spaghetti bush. Follow the link above, and you can watch the original segment.

Obligatory periodic Ceca post

Poor Svetlana Raznatovic wanted to give concerts to her adoring fans in Australia and Canada, but has been left hanging like an apple on a branch. The flower of the Canadian consular service is nagging her for "an interview with the singer for security purposes, likely because she was married to Zeljko Raznatovic," reports the Toronto Sun, whilst the Australian government says that in denying her a visa "her application was treated like any other," according to the Melbourne Herald. Her Canadian immigration lawyer is dismayed, saying that Ceca is "the biggest thing since Britney Spears." But he must not have seen her recently, she is much bigger.

Thanks to loyal reader AR for the tip.

Pro-lifers vs the lifeless, media circus ends

After twelve years of interference by a coalition of publicity-hungry relatives, political poseurs and religious fanatics, Terri Schiavo was finally permitted to die, ending fifteen years of involuntary life support. The long-term combined efforts of charlatans from every margin to force institutions of political power to substitute their own judgment for the interest of the person involved should cause everybody to shudder, and then produce a written document rejecting in advance the intrusions of people who make a career of defending "life" against the living.

Update: Nicholas W. over at the thumping Heart of Europe has found a sample of such a document.

Also, the bicyclists

It would seem that Vojislav Šešelj is preparing his defence at the Hague. He seems to be organising it along the theory that, according to the request for discovery he has filed with the trial chamber, «all of the war crimes which the prosecutor falsely attributes to Šešelj, are in fact primarily the work of the Roman Catholic pope John Paul II.» Clearly, a case of mistaken identity.

An import we like

One of the areas where the US continues to fall behind Europe is in the pleasantness of its cities, since for the past fifty or sixty years policy has been to make spaces more accessible to automobiles and less accessible to people. The consequences of this have been congestion, pollution, population flight and sprawl. Now Boston city councillor Paul Scapicchio is proposing that our fair city emulate the example of London, which has tried to control traffic in the city center by imposing entry tolls. The larger businesses will probably oppose the plan, but there seems to be some positive reaction both from Mayor Thomas Menino and Massachusetts transportation prophet Fred Salvucci.

Charging fees by itself, of course, is an incomplete policy. The plan would need to be part of a larger effort to develop a center city pedestrian zone and to invest heavily in the city's certifiably wretched public transport system. Malo da se i mi Ameri civilizujemo.

An end to hassles over castles

A group of 71 big German landowners whose property was seized by the Soviet occupation government between 1945 and 1949 do not have the right to claim compensation from the German government, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. The court found that it did not have jurisdiction to hold the present German government accountable for actions by the Soviet Union or the former German Democratic Republic. As reported by Deutsche Welle, the decision does not apply to land taken after 1949, and there is some controversy over whether the German government accepted a demand by the Soviet Union in 1990 that the postwar land reform not be reversed.

The access of various vons to their castles is mostly a matter of local color and minor interest, of course, but it is possible that the ruling could be meaningful for other cases in which current governments are faced with demands for compensation for acts which previous governments carried out. A few such cases come to mind, but all of them involve states less powerful than Germany.

An explosive coincidence

As it turns out, we were in Belgrade on 24 March, the anniversary of the day that the NATO bombing campaign began in 1999. The evening was punctuated, but not filled, with a lot of reminiscences about who went where, who was surprised by what, who called whom, and so on. Really it was more surreal than tense. On 6 April, there will be another incedniary multianniversary: the day the invasion of Yugoslavia began in 1941, Belgrade was bombed in 1944, and the seige of Sarajevo began in 1992.

So others might also be interested in reading the account by Coyu at Halfway Down the Danube which includes a reminiscence by the American poet Charles Simic of meeting another poet who bombed him from a plane when he was a boy in Belgrade in 1944, and a letter from that poet in response. If nothing else, the exchange suggests that whatever intentional effects bombs have in blowing things apart, there are some unexpected ways in which they bring people together. Which is probably not a reason to recommend them.

On balance, normality and children

Serbian president Boris Tadic's sentiments are most likely in the right place, though he is certainly not the political force against which possibilities are measured. Yesterday at a roundtable on "Thought crime, ten years later" (dedicated to commemorating the prosecution of Belgrade intellectuals for an illegal meeting, a case in which the prosecutor was current justice minister Zoran Stojkovic), he directed a part of his remarks to questions of war crimes. As reported by Danas, Mr Tadic said:

"When I see in Kosovo the grave of a four year old child who was killed because of his Serbian nationality, by Albanians who think that is normal, I regard that as pathology. And I ask whether somebody has killed children of another nationality in the name of our nation. Maybe that somebody has been celebrated as a hero our celebrated in the institutions of this society. In this state there exists a negative attitude toward raising the question of war crimes"

[....]

"So now I am raising that question: what if somebody committed war crimes, killed others --on a fairly massive level-- and is now free? That person comes into contact with our children, he is a part of our everyday experience, he lives a completely normal life, and the consequences of his life are the deaths of other people. And that is done in the name of our nation. How will we build a normal environment in which future generations will be formed as people with normal values, if the state protects or fails to punish people who have committed crimes of this type, people who carry with them a pathology that threatens the security of every child."

Credit to Mr Tadic for raising the issue, especially in a context other than economics. What seems interesting about the way he raises it, though, is his combination of rhetorical elements. First, there is the invocation of balance, in which any mention of crimes by one side has to be prefaced by a mention of crimes by another side. This may be a form of political self-protection, or an effort to invoke the popular psychology of victimhood as the only way possible of directing attention to something other than victimhood. Second, there is the invocation of normality, a construction that I believe originates with the popular chansoneur Djordje Balasevic. In the context, it seems to be a way of dividing the moral universe into malicious peddlers of violence on the one side, and normal people on the other. Clearly normal people would never think of supporting the sort of things that have been done in their name. But as appealing as this rhetoric is for Mr Balasevic as a way of communing with his adoring pan-Balkan audiences, it comes off a bit as autoamnesty coming from a politician. Third, of course, is the theme of children. Presumably we all love our children more than we like criminals, so we know whose interest comes first. This is the construction that leaves the greatest number of questions open for me, and it seems to be fairly new as a part of at least this particular controversy. Mr Tadic seems to be using it a bit broadly, but it is possible to imagine some potential here. Where it might fit is as a part of a general critique of what some people have called (vid. Ivan Colovic) the necrophilia of dominant political culture in nationalism. Cast right, it calls to mind the lamented Stojan Cerovic's question: "Maybe our problem is more a shortage of life than an excess of death?"

Note: The pljeskavica on every streetcorner is better

And probably healthier. Which may be why the McDonald's corporation is reduced to offering popular hiphop artists 5 USD for each instance in which a song of theirs mentioning their Big Mac product is played.

It is an offer that can be refused, of course, but it is also hard not to wonder whether Mickey D will shell out the five bucks regardless of the context in which their product is invoked.

The initiative is probably an effort to increase sales by attracting the attention of people in those age groups who prefer that type of music (I know, great insight, do I get that degree in marketing now?). Kafedzije of smaller size still have resort to the older and possibly less reliable method of making good food.

Special war crimes issue of Spaces of identity

The April issue of Spaces of Identity is dedicated to war crimes. It includes, among other pieces, an article on denial among the Ukrainian diaspora by John-Paul Himka, a reflection on the seige of Dubrovnik by Srdja Pavlovic, a discussion of war crimes in Chechnya by W. Andy Knight and Tanya Narozhna, and a philosophical discussion of war by Lise Hogan and William Anselmi.



All of the articles can be downloaded in PDF format.

While I was away

My friend Milena M. writes to let us know that she has found Ante Gotovina. Thanks, Milena!

The futility of travel

I thought I was reasonably well travelled until I tried this simple game, software which makes a map showing where in the world you have been. Looks like it only adds up to about 9%. Better get moving.



create your own visited country map

Things we discovered while travelling

1. The trains in Italy. They do run on time, are inexpensive and comfortable, and there is this neat game in which you are supposed to punch the ticket before you get on. If you forget, the conductor first looks at you in utter disbelief, then after listening to your attempts to explain in a funny accent, looks at you in greater disbelief, says "Lei non e italiano?," then it dawns on him that there is no way you could understand anything and he scribbles something incomprehensible on the back of it, smiles indulgently and lets you go on. However, when we arrived in Trieste the train workers went on strike, so the next morning our friend drove us to Ljubljana and we continued by bus.

2. The students in Forli. Hello Hanne, Margherita and Guiseppe! I'm back and have got some sleep now, so I will be back to you with the documentation and advice on your papers today. Thanks for providing the pretext for the whole trip.

3. Restoran Zaplet in Belgrade. We already knew that this place was quite elegant and very good, plus it is just around the corner from our apartment. But a milestone was reached when I ordered a rare steak and, for the first time in over a decade of gluvarenje around the Balkans, actually got one. The pleasure of seeing our friends competed the rest of the evening with incredulous culinary joy. Let the cows get as mad as they want to be.

4. The departure of a hero. Since 1990 the best thing about Thursdays has always been Stojan Cerovic's column in Vreme, which would take you through the characters, contexts and events of the week with a shining intelligence, an astounding economy of words, and a turn of phrase that focused sharply, more like a razor than like the kind of dull serrated blade (or rusty spoon) that is so typical of political commentary in most places. Every week he accomplished the amazing feat of reminding hopeless people that a moral compass existed while being clever, provocative and gentle at the same time. I was happy to see that the memorial at the Medija Centar attracted an overflow crowd, made up mostly of people I like and respect, to pay their respects to this courageous and decent journalist.

5. Give them shelter. Congratulations to the Pepper People and to the TV Manijaci, who have got themselves lovely new apartments!

More to come as East Ethnia slowly but surely regains consciousness.

Today back on your computer screens, tomorrow in your heads

Well, then! We are just back from spreading Ethnian joy in Milano, Forlì, Verona, Venezia, Trieste, Ljubljana and Belgrado, an intensive two weeks but probably much better than staying at home would have been. Today I expect to take a few hours unpacking, rescuing poor Lajoš from his domestic doggie exile, getting some items to fill the kitchen, and coming back to consciousness. Boston is as gray and rainy as expected, but our apartment was gloriously cleaned in our absence! Quelle raskoš! Normal posting, then, to resume eveningward unless we all collapse in exhaustion.

Ethnia takes a holiday

Dear readers, I am headed off next week for a trip of two weeks and have a couple of jobs to finish before I go. So posting is going to be in the intermittent to nonexistent range from now to the end of March. I will still check my mail when I am able, but you know how it is on the road, it can't always be done every day. Look for the site to resume full activity after 28 March, and be well.

The second Carnival of the Balkans!

Raise a glass of (homemade, by your uncle) loza, rakica or palinka to Coturnix, who has compiled and edited the Second Carnival of the Balkans! There is so much good writing, clear-eyed observation and ever so slightly dark humor in the Balkan blogosphere that we really expect the EU blogs to be lining up to join.

Design question

Gosh, this is bizarre. All the positive comments on the new design have come from people who use Safari as their browser, but a reader just wrote to me to say that on Internet Explorer, the design is completely different and utterly illegible. Have other people experienced this? The way it ought to look is with a white background, the header white letters on a red background, the text in black letters and the links in blue letters.

Any suggestions on how I might fix this compatibility problem (other than suggesting that most browsers are probably preferable to IE)?

Fun with surveys

Before everyone gets all excited about the survey that shows 30% of Russians wouldn't mind having Stalin back as head of state, think about the survey situation. Somebody asks you a question combining an outrage with an implausibility. Maybe you are confused, maybe angry, maybe annoyed. What do you do? Lie to the questioner, of course. Anything to get rid of this person who duped you into taking what you thought was going to be a survey about topics that matter. If lots of people do this, the survey produces a baffling result that is certain to be reported everywhere. Even here.

Support your local sevdah publisher

Just so you know, Snail Records is your source for the recordings of Ljiljana Petrović Buttler, the Mostar Sevdah Reunion, and Amira (pictured)



Their web site has articles, photos and reviews, but sadly no musical samples.

Nostalgia time

This time around Nova TV will probably be ruffling fewer eagle feathers. They never got to broadcast Petar Vlahov's interview with Ceca, but tomorrow they will go further back into the past.



Fahreta Jahić-Živojinović, formerly the national treasure Lepa Brena, will be appearing on the talk show hosted by Balkan girl Alka Vuica. Glas javnosti expects a perfectly pleasant time to be had by all.

A bit better?

I've messed with the colors a bit. To anybody's satisfaction, by any stroke of luck?

Communicate with baked goods

In Sarajevo, a group of students tried to «congratulate» minister Zdravko Petrović for the great real estate deal he had made in selling the land slated for a new university campus at an extremely low price for a new US Embassy by bringing him a chocolate cake. He told them he doesn't eat sweets and that they should be studying.

No mountaineering or shepherding songs, then

In Blic, football legend Dragan Stojković Piksi, now president of the Football Council of Serbia and Montenegro, politely requests that the state adopt a hymn that audiences will not greet with hoots and whistles. Apparently nobody is willing to show respect for «Hej Sloveni,» and last year's attempt to breed a hybrid compromise by hiring a composer to combine «Tamo daleko» and «Oj svijetla majska zoro» didn't start a new dance craze either. When Savo Milošević (no relation to that other guy, nor to Sladjana) agrees with Piksi, it has to be true.

Nobody seems to like my suggestion that Disciplina kičme's «Novac neće doći» would be a good hymn. So what do you recommend?

Also, pandas are really very cute

Has anybody else noticed how excellent the guest bloggers featured this week at the Pandagon are? Be sure that I mean no offense to Jesse Taylor, the regular editor. He always offers some of the best and most pleasurable analysis around. But Amanda Marcotte (from Mousewords), Lindsay Beyerstein (from Majikthise) and S.L. Zoll (from World O' Crap) are achieving transcendence.

News flash: Second World War ends

The grandsons of Četnik leader Draža Mihailović and Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito are set to meet over the same table where their grandfathers met in 1941, sit and shake hands, symbolically making peace between the two movements, reports Večernje novosti. In the words of Joška Broz:

«Let's leave aside what was and who left what to whom. We have reached the bottom, and now we have to make a state that will allow this people to live. Let's come to our senses, and if they are asking me to reconcile, I am happy to do everything that I can.»

Vojislav Mihailović has also confirmed that he will come. No word on whether šumadijski čaj will be served.

The fake left loves the far right

This passage is on a reasonably popular «alternative news» site:

«Although Milosevic was an elected president, the United States wanted him removed from power. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, spurred on by the claim for sovreignty [sic] by Croatia (backed by Germany) and the unrest in Kosovo eventually led to a NATO invasion and occupation of Serbia. President Milosevic however remained defiant and in power. OTPOR was the group selected to spark popular protests to have him resign or removed from office.»

The factual errors I count are: 1) Slobodan Milošević was not «an elected president,» but was appointed by the parliament in a rush session in 1997 which was scheduled in order to prevent the deputies who were certain to vote against him from showing up (he did, of course, «win» a series of fraudulent elections to a different position earlier on), 2) there is little evidence that the United States wanted Milošević removed from power, and considerable evidence that he was treated as a favored negotiating partner and the «key to peace» in the region (on this point see Richard Holbrooke's memoir), 3) Yugoslavia «disintegrated,» in the sense of having federal institutions which were neither functional nor recognised by the constituent members of the federation, well before any republic declared independence, 4) NATO did not invade or occupy Serbia, 5) Milošević was far more compliant than defiant, abandoning the project of territorial expansion in Croatia, accepting the Dayton and Kumanovo agreements, and being the first to extradite a suspect to the Tribunal in whose custody he now finds himself, 6) Milošević did not resign from office, nor was he removed, but was rather defeated in elections he had himself called in September 2000. Then of course there is the contextual question: nothing happened between Croatia's declaration of independence in 1991 and the Kosovo intervention in 1999? Actually, a few things come to mind.

But I am not persuaded that this kind of nonsense comes from not knowing the facts. Probably it comes more from relying on the readers not knowing the facts, the easier to make a broad ideological point.

Mining for trouble

Nobody will have any difficulty finding people to argue that economic development takes priority over justice, or even that it is a precondition. The point is grist for one-liners of all too many literary icons. For Bertolt Brecht it was «grub first, then ethics.» For George Orwell it was «The belly comes before the soul.» For Mark Twain it was «Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.» And for Billie Holiday it was «You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.»

Anyone can see the point, but the trouble is that the two fields cannot always be separated. Would it be good to revive the mining industry in Bosnia and Hercegovina with the help of international investment? Probably so, for a lot of reasons. But what if the mine site was also the site one of the most notorious camps during the war period? That is the case with the Ljubija complex near Prijedor, in which the giant Mittal Steel has bought a 51% share. The Omarska mine in the complex was the site of the Omarska camp, and the territory includes the unexhumed bodies of 1700 victims of wartime murders. The issue is reported in depth by Igor Lašić and Maja Lovrenović for Feral Tribune (no link, sorry, Feral is a subscription site).

Lakshmi Mittal of Mittal Steel has issued an equivocal statement, reports Feral, saying «We are willing to listen carefully to any requests that they may have» and «We are a significant investor in the area, having acquired both the iron ore and the steelmaking facilities, and are committed to ensuring a prosperous future for the region.» Less formal sources from Mittal suggest the company is likely to be cautious about doing anything that could be perceived as antagonising Serbs. Since Mittal's co-owner is the government of Republika Srpska, Mittal will probably have easy access to information about what might be perceived as antagonistic.

Doth the conscience object too much?

Ah, yes. The commander of the ground troops of the Armed Forces of Serbia and Montenegro, major general Momir Stojanović, is concerned that people are using their right to conscientious objection. As he told attendees at some fun artillery tulum:

«If we continue this way with conscientious objection, as it relates to carrying arms, I believe that one day we will all have a collective conscientious objection to the question of freedom and the defence of the country.»

The good general seems to be aware of the degree of loyalty his institution inspires, and how this relates to conscience.

SEEMO media award, call for nominations

I got this call for nominations in the mail and figured that somebody among the readers of this blog may well have a name in mind.

Vienna, 23 February 2005

Application Details for the Dr. Erhard Busek - SEEMO Award for Better Understanding in South East Europe 2005

The South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) is pleased to announce the Dr. Erhard Busek - SEEMO 2005 Award for Better Understanding in South East Europe.

Sponsored by Erhard Busek, special coordinator for the Stability Pact, the 2,000 Euro award will be given to a journalist, editor, media executive or person educating journalists in South Eastern Europe, thus using the media to promote a climate of better understanding among people in the region and to work towards ending minority problems, ethnic divisions, racism, xenophobia etc.

In 2002, the South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) and its international jury chose Croatian journalist Denis Latin as recipient of the Dr. Erhard Busek - SEEMO 2002 Award for Better Understanding in South East Europe, in recognition of his outstanding efforts in journalism, which contributed toward better understanding in South Eastern Europe. In 2003, the award was presented to Kemal Kurspahic, former editor-in-chief of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje.

If you know of anyone who would be a worthy recipient of the Dr. Erhard Busek - SEEMO Award for Better Understanding in South East Europe, please send a letter to SEEMO with basic details about the person you would like to nominate (along with a professional CV, describing why she / he should receive the award), as well as the contacts of the person you are nominating (media organisation, address, phone, fax, email). If your nomination is supported by an organisation / media outlet, please send us the name of the contact person supporting your nomination, as well as basic information about the organisation / media outlet. If your nomination is supported by other individual / individuals, please send us the necessary details and contacts of the other supporters. We also need your basic details and your contacts (address, phone, fax, email, mobile phone).

Any additional material about the nominated person (such as TV reports on video or DVD, audio reports on cassette or CD, or articles in newspapers), if possible with a short English translation, are welcomed. Please send them with your nomination.

Please send all to:

SEEMO/IPI
"Busek Award"
Spiegelgasse 2/29
1010 Vienna, Austria

Tel: +43 1 513 39 40
Fax: +43 1 512 90 15
E-mail: busekaward@seemo.org


Material will not be returned, so please always send copies of documents, CVs, reports, articles, videos, audiotapes, DVDs or CDs.

The application deadline for the Dr. Erhard Busek - SEEMO Award for Better Understanding in South East Europe is:
1 May 2005
**********

For any further information, please contact Kristina Benkotic, SEEMO Assistant.

SEEMO - IPI, Spiegelgasse 2/29, 1010 Vienna, Austria, Tel (SEEMO + HELP LINE): +43 1 513 39 40,

Tel (SEEMO): +43 1 512 90 11 11, Fax: +43 1 512 90 15,

E-mail: info@seemo.org, Web: http://www.seemo.org
****

SEEMO is a regional network of editors, media executives and leading journalists in South East Europe.

If you want to nominate someone, contact them, not me. I'm just a messenger.

Hotel Rwanda

We finally had a chance today to see Hotel Rwanda, the cinematic adaptation of the story of the urbane hotel manager who housed and protected people who sought refuge in the luxurious Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali.

If there is a story designed for the Hollywood heroic-individual-does-what-they-said-could-not-be-done treatment, probably it is the story of Paul Rusesabagina, who cobbled together connections, inside information, what bribery he could muster and good will to protect people who every major institution, from powerful countries and the United Nations to established religions, outrageously failed to stand up for. Together with the Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, repeatedly undercut by a scandalously indifferent UN bureaucracy, Mr Rusesabagina is one of the few genuine candidates for hero status from the Rwandan genocide. The film prefers Mr Rusesabagina's modest heroism to Mr Dallaire's tragic mode. While Mr Dallaire is demoted to colonel and suffers the further indignity of being played by Nick Nolte, Don Cheadle's Rusesabagina functions at all times as the embodiment of every middle-class virtue a viewer can imagine.

One can only complain so much about the Hollywood treatment. The film is not a documentary and does not pretend to offer a reliable historical record. There have been documentaries, which were sparsely watched. I have taught enough courses in which the explanation of Rwanda has to begin with "where is Africa?" that I am accepting of a little melodrama as the price of getting information out. Still, two things disturbed me. One was the individualistic mode of storytelling in which a few big figures seemed to direct the activity of others (refuge seekers, killers) who matter crucially but do little. In the context, it is confusing. The second is the "plot resolution" at the end, in which a couple of ICTR verdicts are deployed to imply that everything has been resolved and justice done. Anyone who has followed the ICTR and domestic initiatives knows how incomplete this is.

Still, it is a film more likely to enlighten than mislead, and is considerably less sanitized and ideological than the average political thriller. When we left the theatre, there were students outside handing out leaflets proclaiming "Prevent 'Hotel Darfur'." But we know how that story comes out: it was not prevented and nobody will be defended. Maybe afterward somebody in entertainment or journalism will find another heroic individual to celebrate, and everybody can feel a little bit better that such a person exists and immensely relieved that it is someone else.

Reminder: Get your submissions in!

Just a reminder: The second Carnival of the Balkans will be published on 7 March! Send your favorite posts to Bora Zivkovic at coturnix AT gmail DOT com or coturnix1 AT aol DOT com. He just did a brilliant post for the Tar Heel Tavern, a collection of North Carolina blogs.

This year's raspberry harvest

Among the winners of this year's Golden Raspberry Awards for worst achievements in film:

✩Worst film: Catwoman
✩Worst actor: George W. Bush for his role in Farenheit 9/11
✩Worst actress: Halle Berry for her role in Catwoman
✩Worst screen couple: George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice for their role in Farenheit 9/11

Halle Berry came to the ceremony to accept her award with grace and humor, but Mr Bush did not.

Camille Monet on a garden bench eating a taco

This is a delightful item from Viewropa! A Monet calendar livened up with stickers by the poster's Aunt Joan. Quote of the day: «Observe how dinosaurs, teddy bears, and farm machinery bring new life to tired old impressionism.»

We are all (not) Maradona

Emir Kusturica explains to Novosti what he has in mind for the documentary he will be filming on Diego Maradona:

«I want, for all time, to find and to return on film the true idea of Maradona. If that idea is lost now, because of the scandals that have followed him, with the filmic confrontation of his his former life with what Maradona is now, I will try to create anew or return the myth of him.»

And why should anyone believe that true ideas come from anything other than myths? Are there any particular myths that Mr Kusturica has in mind? He tells us, enigmatically:

«in Latin America Diego Maradona is a god to whom everything is forgiven. While here, there does not exist even one hero who is forgiven...»

He wouldn't have any particular heroes in mind.

Technical notes

First off, the consensus response to the new blog template seems to be a bleah from the English speakers, a bljak from the speakers of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (except for the few who are consulting Ham, Babić and Moguš to see whether that should be blatk or blj ak), and a whimper from the dogs. So I'll go back to the drawing board. This may have to wait for the next bout of insomnia.

Second, a brief promotional introduction to the joy of RSS feeds in The Guardian finally pulled me out of my Luddite torpor to go try it. For those who are not familiar with this gizmo, as I was not until about an hour ago, it is extremely simple way of using a software program to monitor your favorite news sites and blogs for new updates. Basically you find the address of the site feed and add it to the list in the program. That way you can just check the feed monitor instead of repeatedly visiting your favorite blogs for updates. Forgive my belated fascination, but I am a nonmember of the technical intelligentsia so these things come to me a little slowly.

I sampled a few programs before deciding that my favorite is the one linked by the illustrious Teekay, called NewsFire. It fits my criteria of being nice to look at, simple to use, and available as shareware. It would appear to be Mac-only, which is only a problem if you are not a Mac user.

The site feeds for this blog are http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/atom.xml and http://feeds.feedburner.com/EastEthnia, should you care to try it out.

Not sure what she means

ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has told Liberation in a forthcoming interview that if genocide indictees Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić are not arrested by the end of the year, she will «release the documents» about the «fiasco» of NATO's failure to arrest the pair. Why? Because she «hopes somebody will be able to analyse and understand» them.

This may be a threat, but who can tell? Likely she knows what is in these documents. She may suspect that somebody else knows. For everyone but that someone else, she is engaging in innuendo.

Good morning, enjoy a silly blog game

I've picked up this thing from Science and Politics, he presumably got it somewhere, pick it up if you like.

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Oh, do you like the new template? The old one was beginning to seem monotonous.

Absolute skating disrupts absolutely

From the magazine Start BiH:

«What sick mind came up with the idea of putting a skating rink one hundred meters from the mayor's office? The racket the kids make disturbs the mayor in his work.»
—Smiljko Kostić, mayor of Niš

Maybe not in Zvezdara

Despite the rain, about a thousand people joined a protest against the replacement of the heads of the district council in Belgrade's Zvezdara by a coalition of DSS and SRS, reports Danas.



Speaking for DS, Dragan Šutanovac warned, «once there was a red-black coalition in power, and now we are confronted by the collaboration of the red, the black and the grey.» The protesters are encouraging DSS delegates to pass on the first district council session called by the new Radical president on Tuesday, and promise a new wave of protests if DSS persists.

The thing about extremes

Oh my, here I just finished setting out the Deep Thoughts of Nebojša Bakarec on finding a «third way» between the extremes of democracy and fascism, when I see Dnevnik has a report on the reemergence of anarcho-syndicalism in Serbia.



Now, all right, I'm from Seattle, and there the people who know about it (most don't) are proud of the fact that the Wobblies pulled off a successful five-day general strike in 1919. If nothing else, it is a bit of our whole uniqueness taština. But the juxtaposition does sort of make the point that people who imagine that they are choosing between extremisms cannot really limit themselves to just two. I'll humbly suggest that it might be better to do real politics. Especially when you control the government.

Equidistance

In today's Večernje novosti Nebojša Bakarec, an official of prime minister Vojislav Koštunica's Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) explains his party's long term strategy as finding a middle road between fascism and liberalism. What, you say? Yes, really. Asked to comment on an earlier remark by his fellow DSS-ovac Obren Joksimović (remember him? from JUL? from the war? from the first DSS government? when Koštunica was forced to fire him as minister of health he got the nickname «Oboren») that DSS could «govern for the next 20 years» in a coalition with the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), Mr Bakarec says:

«That is Obren's personal position. But I agree that party officials cannot come forth with personal positions and not influence the party. But everyone has the right to a position...
How many people are there in DSS like Obren Joksimović who support the Radicals?
There aren't many.
And how many are inclined to the Democratic Party (DS)?
They too, like the ones inclined to the Radicals, are in an absolute minority.
Is the party as a whole more inclined to the Radicals or the Democrats?
We are equidistant from each. Both parties are extremists for us. For them there exist two Serbias, and for us only one. DSS practices the politics of the «third way»...

Asked to explain further the «extremism» of both parties, Mr Bakarec offers his interpretation:

«SRS has a patriotic orientation and I think they they stick to it in a principled way. I agree that sometimes because of that they look like an elephant in a glass shop, because they lose measure. On the other hand, DS is excessively inclined to the foreign factor, just one it seems to me --the United States.»

As the conversation continues, Mr Bakarec also signals the rehabilitation of Milošević's old party, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). Since DSS is already in a coalition with SPS, it is probably not surprising that he wants to up the ante, and declares «there are fewer and fewer alibis for saying that it is not possible to work with SRS and SPS.»

Probably there is some good in an increasing number of DSS officials recognizing openly what their party has been doing undercover since 2000. And it may be true that democracy and fascism are indeed two extremes. It will be interesting to see how voters will take a party that refuses to make distinctions between them.

Can get lots of dissatisfaction

A very interesting item in this week's Vreme presents the results of a three-year project on «Transformational strategies of social groups in Serbia» by the Institute for Social Research of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. Professor Anđelka Milić (hello!) is leading the group of fourteen researchers who are finding:

✩Poverty and unemployment remain high, defeating the high hopes of October 2000, with average wages still just over half the level of 1990;

✩The elite which emerged and enriched itself under Milošević has not only maintained but strengthened its dominant position, with its members holding two thirds of the important positions in the economy;

✩Socialist and traditional values have both declined, but have not been replaced with widely accepted alternatives, leaving a broad base of authoritarianism lacking an object, and a vague and easily manipulable «nostalgia»;

✩The average age continues to rise, as younger people find themselves unable to marry and have children, and 42% of couples with small children live in the homes of one of the couple's parents;

✩A majority of people are unsatisfied with their current condition and prospects for the future, while a majority of young people are seriously considering leaving.

There are more details in the article by Slobodanka Ast.

Ko ne voli Kiš Danila, zemljica mu laka bila

If Danilo Kiš were still alive, he would be 70 years old today and the world would be a slightly better place.



Danas gives an account of the biographical exhibition dedicated to him at the Belgrade city library. The exhibition includes his typewriter, a video of his address on receiving the Andrić prize, a film of an interview with Kiš conducted by Dževad Sabljaković, and a documentary film on Kiš directed by Filip David.
balkania

How to alienate people

Thanks to AR for this dispatch. The rushed decision to sell the Maršalka at a bargain-bin price to the US government for its new embassy sparked a protest by students, to whom the site had been promised earlier for a new university campus. As a part of the protest the students burned an American flag, hardly an unknown gesture in the world but not so frequent in BH. Agence France-Presse reports:

"La caserne du maréchal n'est pas à vendre" et "Les étudiants
ont été pillés", pouvait-on lire sur des pancartes portées par
les protestataires rassemblés devant le siège du parlement.

En marge de cette manifestation, des étudiants ont mis le feu à
un drapeau américain.

Another successful "hearts and minds" program?
balkania

New university campus: Sold, cheaply

It is now a done deal. According to FENA, it is now up to the Council of Ministers to decide how funds from the sale will be distributed, with no guarantee that anything goes toward the promised university campus.

Final score: Students 0, Profiteers 1.
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Call for submissions: Carnival of the Balkans #2

The call for the Second Carnival of the Balkans is out!



This one has a fancy new logo designed by Cicciosax and it will be hosted at Science and Politics with archiving at the Carnival of the Balkans archive site. Send your favorite Balkan posts to Coturnix at coturnix AT gmail DOT com or coturnix1 AT aol DOT com. Publication date is 7 March 2005.
balkania

In Sarajevo (and not only in Sarajevo) America gets what it wants

After I posted the previous message on the controversy over the proposed new US Embassy site in Sarajevo, I received the following message from Andras Riedlmayer, a friend of East Ethnia and an editor of the International Justice Watch Discussion List. He has permitted me to reprint it here, so here is this weblog's first-ever guest post:

The ex-Marshall Tito Barracks, a massive complex across the street from the National Museum and the Filozofski fakultet in Sarajevo, was built more than a century ago as the Franz-Joseph Barracks. After Dayton, the shot-up but structurally sound barracks complex was restored and converted to educational use -- both symbolically and practically a smart move.

More than half of the building complex was turned over to the University of Sarajevo on a 99-year-lease; other parts of the complex have been renovated and refurbished and now house the temporary quarters of the National and University Library of Bosnia and the Oriental Institute, both of which had been bombed out of their original facilities elsewhere in Sarajevo by Gen. Mladic's gunners firing from the surrounding hills.

But all these fine though struggling institutions, which -- as we are constantly reminded -- embody not only the culture of the country but also the hopes for its future, will now have to pack up and find other quarters. Not because of Gen. Mladic, this time, but because the US wants the site for its new fortified embassy.

Whatever dear America wants, America gets... the wishes and needs of the locals don't count (and they'd better keep smiling and not be so bold as to ask for any favors when America decides what it wants and expects to get it - on the cheap, with no questions asked or conditions imposed).

In Skopje, the arrogant SOBs representing our beloved country demanded and got permission to construct their proposed new fortress of a US embassy on the site of a prehistoric citadel overlooking the city; needless to say both the archaeological remains and the 300-year-old Muslim cemetery at the site will have to be bulldozed to make room for the Empire's newest Dark Castle (no doubt complete with a soundproof dungeon in its basement for the CIA torture sessions).

Marshal Tito Barracks during the war (from FAMA's Sarajevo Survival Map)

Refurbished after the war (photos)

"Help Protect Kale Gradiste" (Macedonian citizens' petition)

"One Country's Treasure is America's ... Embassy?"

Commentary by Skopje Dnevnik's Todor Pendarov

"Macedonian Muslims oppose building U.S. Embassy on cemetery"

"Fortress America: Where No Birds or Ideas Fly"

balkania

University campus or massive new armed compound?

On Tuesday the parliament of Bosnia and Hercegovina will debate the recommendation of the Council of Ministers to sell the previous "Marshal Tito" military barracks ("Maršalka") to the US Government as a site to build a new embassy, reports FENA.

The 44,175 square meter site is being offered at a price of 12,868,503.51 convertible marks (KM). This amounts to about 291.31 KM for a square meter. Anyone who wants to purchase a prime parcel of urban real estate would jump at that price -- if I had been able to buy my apartment for that price, it would have cost about 26,217.90 KM, and would certainly be one of the cheapest little two-bedrooms on the planet, going at about the price of a decent new (non-luxurious) economy car.

But beyond the fact that the government negotiated a phenomenally bad price, it also proposes to sell land that had been foreseen for a badly needed new university campus. Jan Zlatan Kulenović of the Youth Information Agency (OIA) of Bosnia-Hercegovina says that the sale of the campus for a new US Embassy would be "the greatest theft committed against students in the history of BiH." Sarajevo University rector Hasan Muratović will also be seeking to assure that any proceeds from a sale be used for building the promised campus, which had previously been agreed between the government and the University but is not declared in the decision of the Council of Ministers.
balkania

The Koštunica-Šešelj axis broadens

First Novi Sad. Then Zvezdara. Now Leskovac too.
balkania

Mercí per leggere mein mrežni balvan

Novi List is on a roll of linguistic purity. Today there is an interview with dr Lada Badurina of the Università di Fiume, who tries to set out an avenue of defence against the threat of English words entering the Croatian language. While making a case for some degree of balance and acceptance, she also proposes that:

»processes of linguistic globalisation must be monitored by linguistic experts, Croatist-standardologists, and their long-term activity (since a process is in question!) should be oriented toward seeking reasonable resolutions, appropriate substitutes for the growth of anglicisms. We are fortunate to have in our tradition a demonstrated model of such an effort, fortunate that the Croatian language has a developed self-defence mechanism.«

(Standardologists, here is the anglicism-free original: »procese jezične globalizacije moraju nadgledati jezični stručnjaci, kroatisti-standardolozi te da njihova trajna djelatnost (jer riječ je o procesu!) mora biti usmjerena na iznalaženje razumnih rješenja, odgovarajućih zamjena i za nadiruće anglizme. Sretna je okolnost da imamo u tradiciji ovjeren model takve djelatnosti, da je u hrvatskome jeziku razvijen samoobrambeni mehanizam.«)

There seems to be a viral analogy at work here. The healthy body of language is attacked by foreign viruses which threaten to undermine its purity, debasing and corrupting it from within. But what is this pure language that is under attack? I am reasonably certain that my dog speaks a pure language, in the sense that it is free of sounds (though probably not gestures) taken from the context of other animals. To the degree that it is a pure language, it is limited in its capacity for communication and expression. Fine for a dog, but humans would have a hard time operating within its boundaries.

What are called languages are, for the most part, the results of efforts by early modern intellectuals to make generalisations about habits of speaking in a territory and impose rules on them that make it possible for them to develop into habits of writing. This was for the most part a political project to 1) lay a ground for the development of a framework upon which a selection of other habits which would be called traditions could be laid, and 2) provide an alternative to the existing international languages of intellectual life, religion and government, especially Latin.

The process basically involved replacing the language of the cities with the languages of each city's periphery. But there was a problem: country people did not have words for all of the technological, mercantile and intercultural elements of urban life. The Greek-Latin hybrid telephone has made it in some form into most languages—it fills an expressive void, competes with nothing and threatens nobody. Where competition exists, it more often describes variety than edges out. It is useful to refer to more or less the same thing as Wienerschnitzel, tonkatsu, milanesa and chicken-fried steak, because if nothing else, they tell us about the sauces and side dishes that might accompany them. Thinking up ways of saying e-mail in a lot of local variants does not create knowledge. Thinking that thinking up neologisms to substitute for exoticisms is defence of a culture is just a sign of paranoia.
balkania

The best Balkan folk in Colorado

Believe it or not, I heard of this group by way of a profile on National Public Radio (NPR), the American network that used to offer much better journalism but still has some of the smartest entertainment programs around. DeVotchKa is a bunch of arty folks from Denver who mix norteño, mariachi, East European Roma folk, and, ah, a whole bunch of other stuff. Think Boris Kovač meets rave-up.



By all means buy their lovely new CD How It Ends, but in the meantime you can enjoy some samples at their downloads page, including «Such a lovely thing,» «Death by blonde,» and «Dark eyes.»
balkania

That imaginary line, crossed again

It happened before in Novi Sad, and it will continue happening as long as there is so little more than verbal assertion to distinguish DSS from SRS. In the not very SRS-friendly at all Belgrade district of Zvezdara (pazite Hrvati a naročito Hrvatice: tamo živi Petar Luković) the president of the district council, DS delegate Miloš Popović, was removed and replaced by Ljubiša Stojmirović of SRS. Voting to install Mr Stojmirović, according to B92, was a coalition of his own far-right SRS, the wonder-what-they-think-they-are-up-to SDP, the why-bother Pokret «snaga Srbije,» and the currently governing DSS of prime minister Vojislav Koštunica.

Interesting then that a survey from early February shows that 55% people either completely or mostly believe the charges made by Beba Popović, who among other things accused Mr Koštunica of agreeing to protect elements of the former regime as a condition of being permitted to assume the presidency in 2000. What remains uncertain is whether Mr Koštunica is doing this for some gain, or because that is his inclination.
balkania

All right, then

Greetings from my own computer! The Apple service department would appear to have come through this time, and I have a shiny new optical drive and logic board. Posting to resume in the earlier spirit over the weekend.

«What is it, you mice»

Now before the Serbian parliament, courtesy of the deputies of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), is a «Proposal to enable the defense of Slobodan Milošević and cease the harassment of the members of his family.» The proposal will not pass for obvious reasons, but the debate on it cannot be stopped easily either, since the presence of 84 members of the Parliament is sufficient to keep it going. And it is going at a rate that soon the members of SRS, Tomislav Nikolić in particular, will have exhausted all of the names of ordinary barnyard and household animals, after which will follow an intraparty debate over whether the names sea or land creatures ought to be used to call the members of nonfascist parties in the continuation of the debate. Which will certainly go on and on.

Reports from B92, from Danas, from Blic .... the parliament may have no credibility, but call a few people mice and dogs, it gets publicity.
balkania

Write the way you vote, look the way you think

A nice bit of niche employment for instrumental academics is the opportunity, every few decades or as political conditions call for it, to pretend to reteach people their language in a way they are certain to ignore. The latest publicly sanctioned effort is the guidebook to the Croatian language edited by Sanda Ham, Stjepan Babić and Milan Moguš, superseding the 1994 edition by Babić, Finka and Moguš.


Like James Joyce, dr Sanda Ham revels in the openness of language

By decision of the Ministry of Education, every schoolchild must keep track of what these three people imagine is most consistent with national traditions this year. Styles are getting narrower. This year, you can say podatci but not podaci, and pogrješka but not pogreška. All the more reason for an increasing number of people to say ne ću (but not neću) and teach their children the language of some other country.
balkania

A new mailing list

Some readers might be interested in this announcement:

A new mailing list has been launched to promote exchange between academics, researchers, practitioners, or anyone else interested in the past (and present) of cities in the Balkan region. Information posted via [BalkanCities] will include: calls for applications/papers, articles, new publications, book reviews, online resources, questions regarding research, and other kinds of announcements. The list will be moderated, yet contributions by the subscribers are highly encouraged to ensure a vivid exchange of information and discussion. You can easily subscribe to [BalkanCities] by sending a blank email to balkancities-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Best Regards,

Maximilian Hartmuth, Istanbul
[BalkanCities] moderator
balkania

If we talk like people

Well! It seems that the ministers of culture of Serbia and Kosovo have established contact with one another, exchanged letters, and are planning to exchange visits. It is such a pleasure to be able to report about politicians in the region doing something decent and constructive. Sincere compliments to Mr Haraqija and to Mr Kojadinovic!
balkania

The light at the end of the tunnel

As the brilliant song I had the pleasure of encountering at the "Sunday Choir" at Viewropa says, "The light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train." But that wasn't what I wanted to write about here. Instead, I wanted to let East Ethnia's loyal readers know that Apple says my computer is repaired, which means I ought to be getting it back tomorrow. So the dry period of light posting should end, with any luck.

In the meantime, you may enjoy this Jon Stewart clip from One Good Move, where he gives his perspective on the little scandal involving a prostitute posing as a reporter at the White House, and reflects oh so thoughtfully on the interaction between blogs and mainstream media.



The file is a Quicktime video, 9.4MB, lasting nine minutes and forty eight seconds.

The glorious cultural revolution

There is an oddly named group out there called Students for Academic Freedom, odd in the semse that its members are not students and they are opposed to academic freedom. It would appear to be yet another vehicle for a fellow known only to longtime dedicated media junkies, the Trotskyist-turned-Stalinist David Horowitz.

One of their activities seems to be collecting denunciations of professors for failing to hold the same opinions as the publicists of the extreme right. I went through the complaints they had compiled hoping to find the names of my friends -- there is only one there, but my compliments to her. The exercise is weakened by the fact that among the things the complainants seem not to have learned at the university are the names of their professors. You could check out their little denunciation archive at the above link, but be warned that what you read will be freaky, and also that you will not be able to read it all since these "students" did not learn how to write HTML code either.

Update: The theocrat really cannot code, so the link above seems to be inaccessible until David Horowitz can find someone who both shares his views and knows how to do anything. That could be a while. But someone else was kind enough to archive the denunciations.

Brotherhood and lunacy

Odd and disquieting reading .... over at Carniola, Mike has stumbled across a debate at a neofascist website on the question of whether Yugoslavia ever will or ought to be revived. Everyone in every group leaves everyone in every other group wondering why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to try to live with them. This is probably an accomplishment of some sort or another.
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South by southeast

I've only read the description, but this new film by Milutin Petrovic sounds very interesting indeed. South by Southeast is a "psychothriller about the fragile boundary between reality and fiction in a society which does not want to modernise, but abandons itself to the work of inertia and lets others decide about about its fate." Among the operating theses is this description of contemporary Serbian society:

"In a time that demands the readiness of every individual and the whole society to confront the immediate past, events are masked, covered over with half-truths, or simply pushed away. If the twentieth century was the century of schizophrenia, the twenty-first century is the final victory of paranoia."

Intrigued to see how this is demonstrated in a mystery plot involving politics, emigres, and a kidnapping? The film premieres in March.
balkania

The universal Vegeta

There is a discussion over at the culinary fetishists' message board eGullet on the unique and mysterious qualities of that fine product of the Podravka corporation, Vegeta.



The person initiating the discussion calls the flavor "essence of Grandma," and also quote's Podravka's publicity material, which inclusively declares, "Vegeta is enjoyed by people regardless of their religions, social classes, traditions, climates and the ways they eat; using either spoons or chopsticks or fingers. Vegeta unites us around a big universal table where we understand each other perfectly well, although we speak different languages." Podravka also lets us in on the little-known fact that Vegeta was created in the same year as the Barbie doll.

In addition: Another discussion at the same site points readers to this bit of culinary theology from the Carnegie Deli: "at the Istanbul Qadiri center (called the dergah), on the last Tuesday of Ramadan, seven dishes are served. Soup serves as a reminder of the importance of water to life; meat and vegetables symbolize the earth; pilaf and borek (meat and vegetables rolled in fillo dough) represent fire. Eggs with pastirma — a Turkish cured meat similar to pastrami — signify Divine generative power, combining the feminine symbol of the egg with the salty masculinity of the meat. Gullac, a rose-scented pastry boiled in milk, is an emblem of Divine love." Salty masculinity?
balkania

A visit to Kosovo

International media are reporting that the big news of Serbian president Boris Tadic's visit to Kosovo is that he said that he was opposed to independence (see this example from the ABC and this example from the BBC). It doen't make too much sense that if an official repeats his government's well-known position that this is somehow news. More likely, Mr Tadic said the only thing that his position allows him to say. But the news is something else. If you look at election returns, the margin for the Milosevic-regime parties was generally provided by Serbs from Kosovo, either by actual voting or by fraud. That margin is still there but it has been diminishing since 2000. The news is that Mr Tadic did what his verbally strident opponents did not do: he showed up. If he had only done that and not said anything, he would already be securing the return of DS to power in the next election. That he did say something says very little.
balkania

Prediction of light posting

The chronic computer problems that I thought had been resolved have returned. Apple is promising me a new hard disc, but in the meantime posting here will be fairly light. It would certainly be nice if this takes care of the problem!

Quote of the day

Lino Veljak, interviewed by Milanka Šaponja-Hadžić in Monitor:

"...if somebody justifies a crime committed half a century ago in the name of the nation they proudly belong to, then in moral and human terms they lose the ability to condemn the crimes that others commit against their nation today. And when everybody does it, then everything is relative and nobody is responsible. How many times have I heard, both in Croatia and in Serbia, at the mention of some massive crime committed in the nineties, the counter-question: and what did they do to us? They justify their own crimes using the crimes of their legionary comrades who fought on the other side, and it all serves to make people forget how that legionary brotherhood solidarily enriched itself on the suffering of their own and other people. They did not fight one another, they fought against the civilian population. The proof of it is the brotherhood and unity that flowers in Scheveningen, which people in our countries hardly know about. Unfortunate and naive people defend criminals and profiteers, who are either directly or indirectly (by means of their colleagues on the opposing sides) contributed to their suffering. The hero Gotovina, the hero Pavković -- and these so-called heroes, quite rightly, cynically laugh at them. That's a tragedy, in the spiritual sense even greater than the tragedy brought on by destruction in the war."

The rest of the interview is at Monitor's web site.

See, nothing in the bunker

So ... presumably in order to prove that they have nothing to hide, today the defence minister, his deputy, and the head of the military general staff gave reporters a tour of the secret bunker at Topčider. This either demonstrates that rumors about the place being used to hide ICTY fugitives are not true, or contributes to speculation about where they moved them in order to facilitate the display.

Modest contribution to the "anti-Americanism" debate

At the reliably interesting online magazine Open democracy, Dominic Hilton has a reflection on anti-Americanism in Europe. Mostly he is trying to dismiss the phenomenon as a shallow fad, claiming that "most America-thumping is pathetically hypocritical, embarrassingly imbecilic, perilously ruinous and, worst of all, as derisorily fashionable as those ludicrous woolly boots everyone’s presently sporting." I don't think I completely buy the argument (it's not improved by the name-calling or the marginal sources), though he is probably right to see a good measure of scapegoating and posturing at work.

I'm ludicrously unqualified to address the question of how Americans are treated from personal experience, since at home my students ask me what country I am from and compliment my English, while in other countries natives stop me to ask for directions. This is probably some vague effect of personal appearance, go figure. So other people have to write those essays about how waiters reacted to them instinctively and how their hastily poured water stands for the disorder in the world. But I can say that I have never experienced the hatred of America and Americans that it has become so popular to claim. That is not to say that there is anything like universal receptivity. From a purely informal perspective, I offer a typology of critiques (not anywhere near exhaustive, of course):

Objection to US politics: No need to list the reasons people object to policies practiced by the US government, especially the current administration. To the degree that the critique is centered on specific current acts, it seems more like an invitation to conversation than an expression of hatred. People who are neither dishonest nor paid representatives of the government should be able to accept the invitation.

Resentment of economic domination: Sometimes the US is taken to stand for the general frustration with the new globalised economy, which is not surprising for either empirical or symbolic reasons. Depending on where the critique is coming from, it can be perfectly valid. Since I am not the head of a large well-connected corporation, I regard this one too as an invitation to conversation.

Assertions of cultural superiority: There are people who will claim to be more civilised, have an older and fancier culture, and so on. That's nice, we have bigots at home too. Ours aren't interesting to listen to either.

Avoidance of the overmarketed product: So much of the zasićenost with America seems to revolve around popular culture, with the oversupply of music, television and film products from this country. Language and production budgets probably have a lot to do with this (it is much cheaper to buy an hour of TV out of syndication than produce it), and a lot of what the US exports is genuine lowest-common-denominator material. But too much America is like too much of anything else. I doubt very much that anything other than good competition will reduce the influence of this very successful export. But there are a lot of reasons it would be good to see reciprocity here, and US media markets open to more than just reruns of British series on PBS.

There is no right to be loved by everyone. Some level of rejection is justified, and some level is bound to exist whether it is justified or not. My inclination is to consider the rapid putrefaction of America's image in the world as a call to make America a better place. But that is probably just idiosyncratic.

Who is at Topčider?

A few months ago, two young soldiers were killed at the Topčider military base in Belgrade under circumstances that have not been explained to anybody's satisfaction. The media speculation that surrounded the incident included revelation of a secret underground complex that had been built at the site during the Tito period. Today B92 reports that Ratko Mladić's chief bodyguard, one captain Branislav Puhalo, commands the Guard Brigade at Topčider, a fact which military people seem to be denying but would seem to be normally a part of public record. Nobody seriously doubts that the military is protecting Mr Mladić. So is he the secret that is being guarded at Topčider?

Linguistic fun for journalists

I'm peeking through the daily papers from Serbia and Montenegro, and it seems that every one of them has an item about the planned marriage of Britain's Prince Charles. This is probably not because of any great enthusiasm for the royals, but because the orthographic rules in those places convert foreign names to their phonetic equivalents. This lets them run the story under the headline "Princ Čarls se ženi Kamilom," which can easily be read as "Prince Charles is marrying a camel."

Cultural heroes of our time

Among them has to be counted Klaudio Šturman, a butcher from Rovinjsko Selo, who has invented a ćevapčići making device that can produce 300 kilograms of ćevapčići in an hour.


Klaudio Šturman and his fabulous invention

Mr Šturman expects his new device to considerably lighten the work burden of his colleagues, who up until now have had to make their ćevapčići one at a time.

Cheap flights?

There may be nothing to this, and all the stories are vague, but there seems to be talk of the low, low-fare airline Ryan Air setting up a hub in either Belgrade or Niš. That would be convenient.

In praise of Ludost

It would seem that Ludost has decided to discontinue and remove her excellent blog. She has posted a farewell essay, but it will only be available for a little bit longer.

Dragi Erazmo has been a favorite site since I first had the good luck to stumble across it, so that daily pleasure will be missed. But of course there are plenty of ways to write and no obligation to do it in this format. What is surprising is that there are so many people, some of them quite good, who are willing to write for an indeterminate public every day, for which they receive nothing in return.

It will be cause to celebrate if Ludost returns to this format in some incarnation, and in the meantime we can hope for articles and books (remember those?).

Wearing the popular culture threat, snugly

For your headless and armless fundie friends, the ultraright magazine National Review is offering these lovely t-shirts for sale. They feature a provocative slogan and a picture of some guy. And they cost $19.95? Filthy!



Wonkette has additional commentary.

Tracking the journalistic threat

News is already pretty widespread in the US about the Bush administration paying journalists to offer opinions, and in one case, it seems, even hiring a dubious character to come to press conferences disguised as a journalist in order to ask Mr Bush planted questions. The cocktail of political conspiracy and gossip is lots of fun, really.

But there is no reason for the EU candidate countries to lag behind! That must be why Croatia's Protuobaveštajna agencija (POA) has put so much work into following the tracks of Globus editor Igor Alborghetti.

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Apparently their original purpose was to show that Mr Alborghetti was a French spy. It turns out he was not, but did you know that with a bit of rearrangement and altering only one letter SZUP can be changed to SPUŽ? Suspicious! They did, however, find that he had a conviction for a very minor drug offence in 1986. Surely this knowledge contributed greatly to the maintenance of public order.

Četnik memorabilia

The previous post about another proposed law declaring Četnici to have been antifascists (next up: a law declaring cats to be giraffes) inspired loyal reader AR to send me a collection of photos from the galleries of the Ravnogorski četnički pokret of Brčko. I think they are too large to display here, but they do provide, as AR says, «evidence of the deadly intersection of the RCP's cherished voelkisch pageantry with religious fanaticism and genocidal ideology.» The Ravnogorci share their unique vision with us here.

The past is another reality, increasingly

Nasty comments have already been made by East Ethnia about the law in Serbia declaring the Četnici, collaborationists from the second world war, to have been antifascists. Now, Asaf Bećirović reports in Oslobođenje, Dušan Sladojević, president of something called the «Ravna Gora movement of the fatherland of Srpska,» wants the parliament of Republika Srpska to pass a similar law. Young rightie politician Goran Sikima has an original idea: «We can just copy the law that was passed in Serbia.»

Mr Sladojević defends his interpretation of who was on what side in that war with the unassailable argument, «they have documents about that at Harvard's institute.» Note: The link to the article is above, if somebody made this quotation up, it is not me.

This initiative is likely to go only so far—there is not much chance that even if the RS parliament were to pass it that it would be approved by the federal parliament. Also it is likely to have only very limited material consequence on its own. But the ripple effect could be greater, since the existence of groups that might have a reason to seek redefinition of their role in processes of violence is not limited to the second world war era.

Culinary report of great importance

Well, we finally got around to trying the place I coyly suggested we might get to last month. My loving wife and daughter decided that a good place for a birthday dinner (39! But my sister called and told me that to her I am always 12.) would be Boston's only Albanian restaurant, Cafe Apollonia at (yes) 146 Belgrade Avenue in Roslindale, beyond even Jamaica Pond.

Our best expectations were confirmed, and we are delighted to say that the Hysi family operates a wonderful little place. Francesco, they have byrek! The menu looks traditional, but chef Marlon Hysi makes them with the innovation you might expect of a Cordon Bleu graduate, which he is. Ivana's Trofte Tave was baked in wine and tomatoes over carmelised onions, Azra's Qebaptore were excellent čevapi, but served over a bed of seared eggplant and peppers, with a thick yoghurt sauce and rosemary mixed in with the meat. I would describe the lamb stew with polenta that I had, but then you would ask me for a bite and I would have to disappoint you. The wine list includes Frankovka from Croatia (good stuff) and also Birra Tirana from Albania (which we didn't try).

The place was not at all crowded, maybe not surprising for a Monday. But they are far out of the center of the city and worth knowing about. We will certainly pay them a visit again!

The Beba saga continues

I've yet to see the whole interview, but Tuesday's Blic has Vladimir Popović agreeing that the military has been protecting genocide indictee Ratko Mladić for years, that this was far from secret in the government, and suggesting that the fugitive may well be in that mysterious and fatal object at Topčider.

So people will probably continue talking about Mr Popović for a bit longer.

IT'S UP!!!!

The first Carnival of the Balkans, that is.

Balkan carnival #1 on its way

I am just going to take my doggie for a walk, then the first edition of the Carnival of the Balkans should be up for your reading pleasure by midafternoon EST. I'll announce it here.

New! Improved! Deadlier sins.

It's hard to know how to sin properly in these values-oriented times, and Richard Jinman reports in The Guardian that it is also important to keep up to date. A BBC survey shows that of the seven deadly sins originally set forth by St Thomas Aquinas (at least he is still current, considering that the tune "St Thomas" first popularised by Sonny Rollins is in the repertoire of Joshua Redman and Cubismo!), only greed still holds any currency. Sloth, gluttony and lust are strictly venal. Our friends at The Guardian offer a handy comparative reference guide comparing the original list of pale gases to the survey results:

Seven deadly sins
1 Pride
2 Envy
3 Anger
4 Sloth
5 Greed
6 Gluttony
7 Lust

New sins
1 Cruelty
2 Adultery
3 Bigotry
4 Dishonesty
5 Hypocrisy
6 Greed
7 Selfishness

BBC presenter Ross Kelly tries to put the changed sin hierarchy in context, explaining that "We're less concerned with the seven deadly sins and more concerned with actions that hurt others. For instance, we're less bothered about anger than we are about cruelty; and, while many of us actually enjoy lust, we still frown on adultery." Meanwhile, the Reverend Tim Silk, a C of E minister, adopts a more straightforward marketing perspective, recognising that "whether we could ever find seven we all agree on is anyone's guess."