Your suggestions, please

Here is the deal: I will be heading off in December to the university in lovely Nishville (yes, I know! The home of Louis and Šaban Bajramović!), where I will have the job of helping the local sociologists improve their program in sociology of culture. The plans are ambitious: for creating a regional MA program in cultural studies (together with other universities in the region) concentrated on the Balkans to, more immediately, putting together a new textbook for sociology of culture. This is one of the results of isolation over the past several years: contacts need to be rebuilt, curricula are fifteen years out of date, and contemporary textbooks and readers need to be put together. It is not just Serbia -- there are no new culture textbooks in Croatia or BH either. Yes, this means I will be maintaining another blog silence for most of December.

This is where you come in. I have a budget from the foundation that is sponsoring our cooperation to bring them publications in sociology of culture that are essential for bringing the curriculum up to date, and portions of which might be excerpted and translated to be included in the textbook. What should I buy them? We are defining sociology of culture broadly -- for example, political sociology and sociology of religion are fair game, together with the usual topics. I have a sense that "border studies" might make for some good analogies, and our friend at Phronesisaical has given some good suggestions.

So, what would you like them to get? What texts do you think need to be in a new reader? The criteria are: 1) they should have been published between 1990 and the present, 2) they should be helpful in understanding the production, character and social life of culture, and 3) they should be, if not about the Balkans, about something for which comparisons and analogies will be useful in the Balkans. My finger is on the "order now! button.

New frontiers in libel

The courts in Croatia should be keeping themselves mighty busy, but fortunately the Balkan scissors can be relied upon to cut to the chase. First the writer Predrag Matvejević was sentenced to a five month prison term for calling out a right-wing lesser writer. Now the philosopher Milan Kangrga is being charged for "libelling Croatianity" (is that a legal entity?) in a newspaper column. The Kangrga case has apparently been transferred from the Zagreb court to a rural district (a place which got a traffic signal earlier this month! And some road paving last month!), which could easily be interpreted as a strategic move to create a greater likelihood of conviction.

4eme Carnaval des Balcans

The Carnival of the Balkans is coming back. The Fourth Edition will be hosted at Science and Politics next week. Send your entries (or suggestions about other people's entries) to Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com by Saturday, November 12th at 8pm EST. The Carnival will go up on Sunday.

I to ti je Amerika

I do not know who the gentleman in the leather trousers is or where or when the photo was taken. It was sent to us by a friend in Njujork. But he has a nice t-shirt.

Of course, there are lots of other places where one can find signs of nostalgic remembrance of Tito.

Take two tabloids and call me

Poor Florian! He read nothing but Kurir and Srpski nacional for a week. Follow his link to see where that led him.

The torture president seeks accomplices

The abuses at facilities like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are already well known. But they may have overstepped their capabilities by setting up "secret prisons" in Europe, because now the EU wants to investigate. Today, the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of the IMT trials at Nuremberg, would be a good day for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales to resign.

Lawyers and scholars of law, attention please

There would appear to be many interesting articles in the new issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. They have bibliographies posted on international courts and tribunals as well.

Roasted potatoes with lemon

When I look over the web searches that bring people to this site, I find that the most frequent sources of visitors are searches for Edo Maajka and Lepa Brena, followed by searches for burek recipes. But lately there seem to have been several visitors looking for potatoes roasted with lemon. Since I seem to have got myself into an exchange with a distinguished blogger from the place where this recipe originates, I had better share it.

Roasted potatoes with lemon
*5 or 6 potatoes, I am especially fond of the kind that are sold here as "Yukon gold." Maybe potatoes from Nunavut would be even better.
*About half a stick of butter.
*About half as much olive oil as you put butter.
*Enough broth (mixed with water from a cube is fine, no need to go overboard) to just about cover the potatoes.
*Juice of one lemon.

Heat the oven to a moderate temperature (350 F or so is fine, but probably it will be whatever temperature you are roasting the meat at, since these potatoes go with meat). Cut the potatoes lengthwise into 5-6 pieces about the shape of the old Citroen "Ajkula." Put them in a roasting pan into which the oil has been poured, cut up the butter into bits, add the broth and lemon juice, and mix. Let it roast for at least an hour, stirring it maybe once or twice, if even that much.

These are good with just about any roasted meat or poultry, but if you happened to be making lamb, it would really be a shame not to make these as well.

Update: Hm, looks like I posted a recipe for this same thing once before, last December. But this one is a little different, which shows, doesn't it, that knowledge marches forward even as we become increasingly powerless and subject to it.

Update2: Be sure to cook everything you eat to an internal temperature consistent with health standards in your regulatory environment of residence. You wouldn't want to suffer the fate of the security police in Mar del Plata, felled by inexpertly prepared lasagna. Isn't that a place where people should be eating fish, anyhow?

Resources on research, journalism, peace, human rights and advocacy

Frequent visitors to this site may have noticed that there have been a few exchanges here about the efforts of some people from outside the region to develop and impose interpretations of events in the region. These efforts have little to do with any of the concerns of people actually in the Balkans -- they are an effort to harness events that have consequences for real people to political arguments elsewhere.

Surprise! There are people in the region with knowledge and perspectives of their own, and they are not sitting around waiting for prominent American or European magazine writers to tell them what they think of themselves. I have begun compiling a list of research organisations, advocacy groups, media and journalism centers, information clearinghouses, and other resources in the area. When it seems complete enough, it will be added to the blog and news resources in the link list. This is a preliminary list culled from my bookmarks and contacts, and your suggestions are welcome. The list does include research institutes (but not universities or academic departments) and does include advocacy groups for peace, human rights and equality (but not political parties). It is partial, and it inclines to the SCG side because that is the part I know best. If you have additions to suggest, they are more than welcome. Here is the first version of the list:

Alternativna akademska obrazovna mreža, Beograd
Asocijacija nezavisnih elektronskih medija, Beograd
B.a.B.e., Zagreb
Balkansko udruženje mladih, Beograd
Beogradska otvorena škola, Beograd
Beogradski centar za ljudska prava, Beograd
Centar za demokratsku kulturu, Beograd
Centar za mir, Mostar
Centar za mir, nenasilje i ljudska prava, Osijek
Centar za nenasilnu akciju, Beograd
Centar za politikološka istraživanja, Zagreb
Centar za razvoj neprofitnog sektora, Beograd
Centar za regionalizam, Novi Sad
Centar za slobodne izbore i demokratiju, Beograd
Centar za unapređivanje pravnih studija, Beograd
Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb
Centar za ženske studije i istraživanja roda, Beograd
Centre for Southeast European studies, Sofia
Citizens' pact for Southeast Europe
Civil dialogue
D@dalos
Edukacioni centar, Leskovac
Fond centar za demokratiju, Beograd
Građanska čitaonica Libergraf, Užice
Građanske inicijative, Beograd
Igman initiative
Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb
Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju, Beograd
Kreativna asocijacija mladih, Kotor
Mediacentar, Sarajevo
Mediaplan institut, Sarajevo
Medija centar, Beograd
Medijska dokumentacija, Beograd
Mreža za afirmaciju nevladinog sektora, Podgorica
NetNovinar centar za istraživačko novinarstvo i medijsku edukaciju, Sarajevo
Omladinska organizacija Kvart, Kraljevo
Open university / Szabadegyetem, Subotica
PALGO centar, Beograd
Pravo gore, Beograd
Projekat Beograd
Youth initiative for human rights, Belgrade and Prishtina
Udruženje Žene ženama, Sarajevo
Ženska infoteka, Zagreb

International and outside observers are great, much of the time. But there is nothing like a familiarity with what people are doing for and about themselves.

Oh, why bother?

Before he became famous in politics for combining a talent for saying things everyone knows with a language nobody can understand (allowing him to slip in a lot of claims which are simply not true, but obscure enough for most people to pass over), Noam Chomsky built a reputation in linguistics for claiming that everyone innately understands things that he imagines they know. All of which led to the definition of the adjective "chomsky" in Dan Dennett's Philosophical lexicon:

chomsky, adj. Said of a theory that draws extravagant metaphysical implications from scientifically established facts. "Essentially, Hume's criticism of the Argument from Design is that it leads in all its forms to blatantly chomsky conclusions." "The conclusions drawn from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are not only on average chomskier than those drawn from Godel's theorem; most of them are downright merleau-ponty."

But he's old, and apparently a lot of people like him. Which is what lets him get away with this sort of appalling intellectual laziness, all of which can be reduced to arguments from personal authority.

It keeps on rocking, back and forth

Last week's NY Times travel article on Belgrade got a wide range of responses over the net. This week there were also two letters from readers giving varying responses. Walter Blass teaches at the interesting "Megatrend University of Applied Sciences," which grew out of a consultancy firm (it would appear to be accredited), and writes that Hotel Moskva is unpredictably air-conditioned but recommends the cuisine at the bizarre Novi Beograd Hyatt (a good place to go if you have just murdered the criminal Vlada Kovačević, not so good if you are the criminal Aleksandar Knežević). While Nancy Anderson is "deeply offended to be told just how much fun it was to be partying there." Two perspectives which leave a person hoping for some middle position. Or any other position.

Short electronic art

Thanks to Maniac shop for linking this announcement. The Sixth Festival of the Short Electronic Form in Belgrade is seeking entries by 20 November. The organisers want electronic works which last or can be consumed in thirty seconds or less, with this year's theme being "The promised land." They are also organising an exhibit of digital photography in public space. Selected works will be exhibited beginning 29 November. Follow the link for guidelines and entry forms.

Friday nonrandom ten: Balkan pop edition

I'm violating the "random ten" rules this time out, all for good educational purpose. A student was just over who is trying to learn the language of everybody's favorite region in a hurry, and I could not suggest that the best way to learn a language (aside from films) was by listening to pop songs without giving him some. So I made him a disc. A sampling of items on the disc:

Cabaret patetico -- Ultima patetica
My but she can sing "I will survive." In Slovenian translation, no less.

Edo Maajka -- No sikiriki
The only pop song I know of which compares the quality of life to burek, which has got to be more appropriate than anybody thinks.

Eva Braun -- Bečej noću
Imagine surfing across Vojvodina. By night.

Jarboli -- Revolucija
Whether they wanted to or not, this group has become the master of political songs that foreground the possibility of defeat. El pueblo unido quizás será vencido.

Jinx -- Tamo gdje je sve po mom
There was a time when you could not enter a coffee shop in Dalmatia without hearing this. Sometimes the coffee was also nice.

Let 3 -- Profesor Jakov
Why can't all pop songs be written in at least four languages?

Oružjem protivu otmičara -- Budi tu
Listeners of a particular generation will have no problem recognising this as a cover of the Bay City Rollers' "I only want to be with you."

Pekinška patka -- Biti ružan, pametan i mlad
It wouldn't be education without some time set aside for a careful study of the classics.

Prljavo kazalište -- Sve je lako kad si mlad
See above comment.

Zabranjeno pušenje -- Hadžija ili bos
This group spawned more than one group with an identical name. Before that, they were outrageous, funny and insightful.

Maybe it might be a good idea to try my hand at a language textbook?

Reports of my demise

I don't think that anything I have posted has got as impassioned a reaction as my announcement that I would be retiring East Ethnia after a year. It seemed like as good a time as any to hang it up. Over a year of blogging, the site has got a decent and active regular readership, some people have (with any luck) been challenged, informed or entertained, a few good debates have been hosted, and I have learned a couple of HTML and CSS tricks. October has been the second most successful month in the life of the blog in terms of number of visits (the most successful month was a fluke: an item was linked by a popular Belgian newspaper, and everything went wild for a couple of days).

My thinking was that the amount of writing I was doing for East Ethnia could be directed toward something more permanent, especially the couple of books I have in plan. My first book was enjoyed by literally dozens of people, and even translated, which gave me the chance to collaborate with the wonderful Biljana Lukić (for whom it turned out, sadly, to have been her last translation). Now I want to move forward on a big project on public memory, together with my brilliant colleague Aleksandra Milićević of Colgate University and my brilliant student Tiberiu Galis. I also have a couple of projects which have been on the back burner for a while that I want to move up, especially two projects on organised crime and the “informal economy.” This means grant applications, research trips and – especially – writing. I guess there are people who manage to combine family, job, blog and professional writing, but it is hard to imagine myself as one of those overachievers.

What I did not expect was that there would be people who would want the blog to continue. Thanks to Katja, Catherine, Darko, Bora, La Lara, Michael and Daniel for your kind words of encouragement. Even Mrs Ethnia got in on the campaign, and the little Ethniette told me, “Tata, I can't imagine you without the blog.” Media presence, eh wot?

Seeking sources of wisdom in this dilemma, I remembered the person who lived next door to us when I was young. She ran a restaurant, the only really authentic Chinese restaurant for miles around in those days (anyone remember the Six Persimmons in Coupeville, Washington?). It was a fabulous place, her set menu. I haven't found a place in my life with food as good as hers. It was a kid's dream to work her stand at the Coupeville festival every summer – all the spring rolls and jook I could eat, and jasmine iced tea! And the parties they had – Mongolian barbecue on the beach in the summer, Mongolian hot pot by the fire in the winter! When she got a bit older she decided the restaurant was more work than she wanted to do, and wanted to shut it down. But her fans (next door) resisted, so she compromised: she moved to a smaller place with a smaller menu. Eventually she would only open the place on Fridays, the day my father would work in Coupeville, and for the last couple of years before she quit entirely he may have been her only regular customer. She has long since retired, but it was a day for celebration when my sister found some of her recipes.

So I will follow her example. I can't maintain the pace of several posts every day, but I'll keep East Ethnia open and put up new items from time to time, according to inspiration. This might be once a week or less, certainly not daily. And I will thank everyone for their support.

A step forward in war crimes prosecution

The special prosecutor for war crimes, Vladmir Vukčević, has detained nine people on suspicion of involvement in the massacre of 48 civilians in Suva Reka in March 1999. Among those detained are six active police officers. Two facts are of special importance here: 1) this indicates movement on the evidence from the mass grave in Batajnica, where victims of massacres (including those from Suva Reka) were moved in 1999, and 2) this demonstrates willingness to prosecute offenders who are neither paramilitary nor former officials, but are officers on active duty.

In case you were wondering

Courtesy of McSweeney's, the story behind the song "I heard it through the grapevine."

Long post: The "human security" report

Last week I promised a response to the UBC Human Security Report. I have finally got through it, and have several responses. Since the response is mostly critical, I want to preface it by saying that I am not dismissing the report out of hand. It represents a very ambitious and original effort to tie together a lot of information that is usually available only in scattered fashion, and also to begin measuring several important things that nobody has measured systematically yet. In that sense, it is a major and meaningful piece of work. This has to be appreciated – along with the fact that hardly anybody gets anything big right the first time out. My criticisms have to do with the categories and methods they use, and also with what seems to be the absence of a framework that would let them interpret both data they have and data that are not available.

First, one big reservation: the title of the report would suggest that it is about “human security,” but every previous use I have seen of this term defines it much more broadly. I understand “human security” as an effort to shift the balance of understanding security away from the strategic concerns of governments and toward the everyday concerns of actual humans. The idea is that the security of the world derives in large measure from how secure people feel in their lives, and that secure people make the greatest contribution to peace. Think of Mary Kaldor's big question: would money and effort be better spent building armed borders around the “green zones” of the world, or contributing to the everyday security of all of those people in the “red zones” who are too often the unprotected victims of violence?

The authors argue, essentially, that they are already measuring quite a lot, and that to take into account all of the factors that might make humans feel secure would be impossible to manage (p. viii). Fair enough – but then what they have produced is not a report on “human security.” When they begin repeating hypotheses (p. 42) about how democracies are more peaceful than other states (hypotheses which are based on a long tradition of deriving definitions from a dependent variable), the claim begins to matter. Developments that took place later than the period covered by the research, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, call the general hypothesis into question: interethnic and intercommunal violence were promoted, torture was reintroduced on an official level, and these things were done by states the authors would define as neither poor nor authoritarian.

The next big objection has to do with theory and methods. One of the first rules of research is that researchers have to recognise that the information that is available will not always tell them everything that they want to know. Also, information cannot think or talk, so it will not tell you what it means all by itself. This is why theoretical frameworks are necessary: they give guidelines as to how to interpret the things you know, and how to anticipate the things you do not know. No decent researcher has ever given “just the facts.”

The main claim of the report is that, although just about everyone believes otherwise, the world is a safer and more peaceful place than it has been in the last 20 to 25 years. They characterise the changes as a “radical improvement in global security” (p. 3). Surprised? The authors want you to be, they regard their report as a major challenge to the conventional wisdom. A word now about “conventional wisdom”: this is a delightful phrase which is usually deployed to suggest that what most people believe is not true, and it works because so many people regard the possibility of becoming “conventional” with contempt and dread. But there is another side to this – it might be that if a lot of people regard something as being true, that is because it is true. This is why “conventional wisdom” cannot really be challenged with a “conventional” label, but has to be challenged with persuasive evidence.

So what is their persuasive evidence? Their argument basically runs like this: 1) there are fewer wars than there used to be, 2) wars are less deadly than they used to be, and 3) there is a decline in the number of incidents of organized killing outside of war. The favored explanation the report gives for all of these is the end of the Cold War, with secondary attention given to the increased involvement of the UN in conflicts. Let's look at the three major points one by one.

On the number of wars – first of all, it is not entirely clear what is measured by counting the number (p. 17) of wars. It is not a general measure of risk. Second, the decline in the number of wars is a conclusion driven by a definition. They define war as a conflict involving two states in which there are 1000 or more “battle deaths” in a year (fewer battle deaths would make a “conflict,” and if only one state is involved it is a “civil war": nothing on how these distinctions are made or whether conflicts between nonmilitary organisations are counted). To give an idea of how misleading the number of wars is as an indicator of security, consider Rwanda in 1994: the number of battle deaths in the conflict between the Rwandan army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front does not pass the threshold of 1000 to be called a war, while the report's categories have no way of counting the at least 800,000 victims of the most intensive genocide in recorded history. The figures the report interprets as a decline in war are entirely consistent with unsettling facts that are already well known: wars are less likely to be conducted between states than inside them, they are less likely to be conducted by soldiers than by private, semilegal or illegal armed forces (or in internal conflicts, by police or semiformal “services”), and the doctrine of “force protection” makes “battle death” one of the least likely consequences of war.

So on to their second point, that wars have become less deadly than they used to be. The report demonstrates what was already known: wars have become less deadly – to soldiers. Again, the conclusions trumpet a result which is not a finding but an artifact of methodology. The data which demonstrate the effects of technologies which prevent armies from coming into contact with one another are already well known (and they do not demonstrate this persuasively, but choose a data set which consistently offers lower estimates of fatalities than other data sets [p.30]). Their observation that “non-state conflicts involved considerably fewer fatalities” (p. 21) is true only in relation to “battle deaths.” On the issue of civilian victims, the authors perform a methodological trick. First they note (correctly) that data on civilian victims have not been systematically gathered in the past. They attempt to address this by commissioning a study of civilian victims in 2002 and 2003. Then they base a global claim about the decline of victimhood on figures which show a decline in the number of civilian victims between 2002 and 2003! This would be like concluding, if it rained yesterday and is not raining today, that the long-term incidence of rain is declining. Only longitudinal data can demonstrate that a trend exists, and data comparing a small number of cases over an inconsequential stretch of time can maybe demonstrate a blip, or maybe demonstrate a theme for future research, but cannot possibly give a basis for a conclusion.

The section dealing with deaths not directly related to war (and deaths which are not “battle deaths” -- which is the largest category!) is probably the single most frustrating section of the report. There are several points where they observe that evidence is either unreliable or not collected systematically, an observation which is both true and useful and which offers a guide to future research.

But there are also several points that demonstrate the changing nature of political violence (the use of child soldiers, violence carried out by proxies rather than by military forces, the deliberate targeting of civilians, the intentional production of displaced populations, the “strategic” use of sexual violence, the production of hunger and disease), but which are not incorporated into the general analysis because their theoretical framework has no place for them. People tend to fear their governments (p. 48), but the authors have no explanation why. So while they know that in contemporary wars armed forces will “avoid major military confrontations but frequently target civilians,” and that powerful states use “high-tech weaponry against far weaker opponents who have few or no allies” (p. 34), they have no way of addressing these developments. Despite evidence that in contemporary wars “battle deaths” constitute at most 29%, and at least less than 2% of war deaths (p. 128), their model insists on using “battle deaths” as a measure of danger. These flaws in the report do not derive from the authors not knowing the facts. It is probably to their credit that the data which would negate their conclusions are right in the report. The flaws derive from their effort to describe human security in the dated and inappropriate terms of Realpolitik.

Add to this that there are several points (the number of victims of political violence, the number of displaced persons, the rate of violent crimes such as homicide and rape, the frequency of sexual violence in wars, the probability of “indirect” victimhood due to war conditions) on which the authors not only admit that there is a lack of reliable evidence, but explain the factors leading to a lack of evidence – and then go on to draw a conclusion! At one point (p. 7), they take underreporting to be evidence of a decline in human rights violations (!). A lack of evidence may be a problem to be observed, but can hardly be basis for conclusions. The desire to argue that the world is a safer place seems to have been stronger than the support for the argument. To the authors' credit, though, at several points they promise that areas on which they have insufficient information (such as “indirect” war deaths, p. 126) will be a theme of the next report.

Generally, the evidence and conclusions seem to be at odds with one another, and this seems to be the result of trying to apply an old and weak theoretical framework to new and challenging conditions. The end of the Cold War has not meant that conflicts have ended; it means that they have changed. Accounting for those changes is probably more the job of a generation than one that can be accomplished by generating a report. The UCB team deserves a lot of credit for presenting what they know and initiating the dialogue. Better to consider their contribution as the first word rather than the last.

How to walk inside on a rainy day

If high winds and heavy rain are your preference, today is the day for you! Fortunately I have a stack of midterm examinations as an excuse to stay indoors. In the unlikely event that anybody was wondering how ordinary activities look on a day like this, here are basic guidelines to walking inside in ten easy steps:

1) Walk into lobby of building, pull dog away from pile of mail that is too large to go into people's boxes
2) Through feat of superhuman effort, pull keys out of wet pocket
3) Take care when going upstairs to step in the middle of each step, rather than balancing on the edge the way you usually do
4) Open apartment door, try to hold dog in one spot until he has been dried a bit
5) Decide against hanging hat by door, figure that doorknob of bathroom may be best place
6) Proceed to knock hat over several times while looking for place to hang raincoat
7) Hang raincoat over tub, place boots by sink
8) Dry dog with old towel, attempt speed and agility in a vain effort to prevent him chewing on it
9) Put on pot of coffee and change clothes
10) Remember that this is the far edge of a hurricane, and there are many people nearer the center than you

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Dealing with issues of waste disposal

It's true: waste disposal in the Balkans is organized haphazardly, there is little systematic attention to environmental planning, and there are a lot of good reasons why a garbage dump should not be right next to lands that are used for agriculture. Whether the best way to deal with this was for the villagers of Međuhane ("between the taverns"?) to barricade the head of the district government in a conference room and not allow him to leave until he ordered the dump to be closed, well, that is another question.

Rosa Parks

The photo, from Library of Congress, shows Rosa Parks being arrested in 1956 (so says LOC's caption -- but shouldn't that be 1955?). She later came to deny the story that her refusal to give up a bus seat, which changed history, was because her feet were tired. In fact, it was consistent with a lifetime of activism. Remembering her, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said, "She stood up by sitting down. I’m only standing here because of her."

Balkanize it and relativize it

I suffer from the great personal misfortune not to read Turkish, so I am taking Index.hr's word on this. Apparently the Turkish diplomatic publication Diplomatik Gözlem has an interesting article on the EU integration process, compaining about what their writer sees as the rush to admit Croatia and SCG while Turkey is having "the brakes put on." To translate directly from Index:

"Diplomatik Gözlem argues that it was Croatia and SCG which played a key role in the 1990s, in which they 'helped' to transform the Balkans into a 'slaughterhouse.' The term 'Balkanization,' which the magazine defines as 'the bankruptcy of international diplomacy,' came into usage for the first time in the nineties to indicate the catastrophe and human tragedy that shook the Balkan region.
[...]
Diplomatik Gözlem offers numerous cases of murders of Bosnian Muslims in the nineties which were committed by Croatian and Serbian forces, and mention is also made of the 'heirs to the Ottoman Empire' who were killed in Bosnia in the nineties."

I haven't found the article on the magazine's site, but then it may not have appeared in English. I can also vouch for my translation of Index, but not for Index's translation of Diplomatik Gözlem (they consistently misrender the publication's title, this much I can tell). It is also not clear how major or marginal a publication this is. If they do actually have an article which says what Index says it does, however, this would certainly raise any number of questions, in a lot of directions. For me the account of "Balkanization" is especially interesting.

A death foretold

East Ethnia began its virtual presence in November 2004, and come November 2005, it will end. It is time for your friendly editor to move forward with a couple of projects, and back to a more traditional kind of writing. There will be some sort of poignant farewell when the time comes for it.

Reading recommendation of the day

Do read Nedim's account of his visit to Priština.

Treat for a lazy weekend day: Monk and Coltrane

This is a wonderful web preview of Blue Note's release of Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, a recording of a November 1957 performance. With Monk on piano, Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. In addition to three tunes, the preview also gives text, video, graphics and photos. The recording had been unavailable until it was discovered (misfiled, it would seem) by a librarian at the Library of Congress in January of this year. We would all be lost and drowning in a sea of ignorance and confusion without librarians.

Ndranghetičica

The police in Calabria announced that they have made 61 arrests in an operation against the smuggling of cocaine into Italy, and that among the people arrested were 10 citizens of SCG. Who says there is no progress in the integration of the countries of the region into international institutions?

Open source, Unicode, everything!

I posted earlier about my frustration with the “standard” word processing program for most institutions, MS Word. The Macintosh version of the program does not support Unicode (I am told that there is a newer version which does, but am not willing to subsidize Microsoft with a reward for doing what they should have done in the first place), which limits the number of languages a person can read and write with the software. Now thanks to a tip from "Barba de chiva", I seem to have found a partial solution. OpenOffice is an open-source word processing, graphics, spreadsheet and presentation package that supports Unicode, can share files with other programs, and is available for free download (though they will happily take contributions, not necessarily in the form of money). There are two versions of the software for Mac. I downloaded the version that is designed to operate “natively” on OS X, which seems simpler and is called NeoOffice/J 1.1.

A couple of notes for anyone who wants to try this out: 1) it's a big hunk of software, and downloading it by following OpenOffice's links through your browser may take a very long time, so try using a peer-to-peer filesharing program instead (I used LimeWire), 2) You do not have a choice of styles when typing with the “Serbian” and “Croatian” keyboards, but if you use “Dialog” as your main font then the shift from non-accented to accented characters looks fairly seamless, 3) you can open all the MS Word files you like, but if you want to (or want other people to) be able to open your OpenOffice files with MS Word, save them as RTF.

Thanks, Barb! This takes care of a long-standing source of frustration, and there is the added benefit of getting a little bit further out from under the thumb of Microsoft.

Malo nas je al...

Vojislav Koštunica knows very well that he would not be prime minister if he did not have the support of Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). But a group of five SPS deputies has decided to make it clearer to him. As reported in 22 October's Blic, they have announced that their continued support for the government depends not on what deals the party leadership makes, but exclusively on the instructions they get from the Šupak of Scheveningen. They are a small fraction (led by Milorad Vučelić if such a thing can be imagined) of a small party, controlling the fate of four other small parties that by their good graces made it big. They are either making a show of overstating their power, or else stating it with perfect accuracy.

News flash! Karadžić not a very good poet!

Imagine. Katja has the scoop, and a textual analysis.

Update: Writing in The Guardian, Euan Ferguson is intrigued by the question of whether it is disturbing that pathological tyrants have hobbies.

Big upcoming media event: Multilingual Katrina survey

I've just received a notice that today New California Media will be releasing the results of their multilingual poll titled "The lessons of Katrina: Has a single event changed the way Americans view poverty, race, climate change and government effectiveness?" The announcement promises the results of their effort to survey "1000 African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Whites (including Asian Indians, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino and Japanese) – in six languages. This survey offers an idea of what a national conversation about Katrina would sound like if all of America’s major ethnic populations were included." There will be press conferences in San Francisco and Los Angeles, plus a nationwide "dial-in briefing" next Thursday, 27 October. On that day there will also be a summary posted at their web site.

Beans!

This is a dish that does not get a lot of respect. People who have done military service recall that they got them all the time. Students get them every Friday, whether they want them or not, and usually they would rather not. Be that as it may, I think they are sublime. But I have adapted the preparation a bit. So here goes:

FAŽOL NA MASAČUSECKI NAČIN
About a cup of good beans (the ones from Tetovo are best; under our diasporic conditions we used some labelled "giant Greek beans"; we have had the insane good fortune to have a Turkish market open in our neighborhood which sells fasulye; some people will tell you that you can use large lima beans, but they are lying)
Soak them for a long time. Overnight is best. It is possible to cheat by putting them in water, bringing it to a boil and letting them go about a minute, then covering them, turning off the heat, and letting the gloppy mess sit for 3 hours at least. When they have finished soaking, just about every cookbook will tell you to rinse them and replace the water, but I never do this. Then bring it to a boil again and let it boil as long as you can, at least 90 minutes. Meanwhile chop up:

2 onions
3 carrots
2 sweet peppers
Chop the unfortunate vegetables and put them in a bowl. Any other vegetable you think would be nice could go just fine here, especially celery root. When this is done heat up some oil in a frying pan and add:

a few spoonfuls of flour
a spoonful or two of good Hungarian paprika (it's best if you know someone who will smuggle it, otherwise the Szeged brand sold in grocery stores will do in a pinch)
Stir the flour and paprika in the oil until the mixture achieves a color of transcendent beauty. Add the chopped up vegetables and fry them in the mixture (y'all call it a zaprška, we call it a roux) for about 5 minutes. This is an old Louisiana trick to allow you to put vegetables into a liquidy glop without them getting soggy and insipid. Then mix the whole mess by spoonfuls into the gently boiling beans and cook it some more.

Serve it in bowls. The traditional thing would be to do it with boiled potatoes, but we prefer it with bread. At this point a spoonful of apple cider vinegar would not be the least bit unwelcome. Neither would chopped parsley. Chopped hot peppers (note to Andras: Russo's in Watertown has Hungarian wax peppers) would treat it like an old friend. Enjoy.

It's a while since we have had a culinary post here, not because nobody has been eating.

A moment for nostalgija

Do any of the visitors here crave a break from the overwhelming troubles of the region and the world? Thanks to East Ethnia's literary lion friend MR, also the lyricist and vocalist for the incipient supergroup Maplewood Feels Good, enjoy this gem from the Bedazzled blog: the Box Tops performing on a prehistoric episode of the Mike Douglas show, featuring a shockingly young Alex Chilton and a vapid interviewer.

On the causes of human misery

According to report by the Human Security Centre of the University of British Columbia, most forms of political violence are in decline in the world since 1990. Among its findings are that "the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly in the wake of the Cold War," and that "wars are not only far less frequent today, but are also far less deadly." Deadly to whom? The report says that "90% of those killed in today’s wars are civilians, and that women are disproportionately victimized by armed conflict." This makes it a bit unclear why these developments are characterized as an "improvement in global security." The Centre's press release (linked above) describes the results as "surprising" and as "confounding conventional wisdom." I would have to agree that it is surprising and confounding, but this may well be because it will provoke criticism of its findings and especially its methodology. I have not yet read the entire report (available in thirteen PDF files) but strongly suspect that many of the results are driven by how the researchers measured (Did India really have 156 "conflict years" between 1946 and 2003? We would have to know what the category is and whether it makes sense.). It doesn't help that a section of the promotional web page titled "data sources" contains only the text "Coming soon." Anyone who is interested enough to read the whole thing, please share your assessment in the comments.

Update: For an alternative representation of the frequency of genocide, try this table prepared by Gregory Stanton's Genocide Watch. For my part, it's hard to avoid the standard methodological objection that all ethnographers have: lots of cases means a poverty of empirical detail.

Upcoming events for Boston-area Ethnians

I just got the periodic notice of upcoming events in the mail from the Boston Network for International Development. Here are two that look like they might be especially interesting to readers of East Ethnia, if they are in the area:

Oct 19, 2005
4:00 p.m.

American Empire in Global Perspective.

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures 2 of 3 - "Why America's Hegemony Differs from Britain's Empire."
(Program in the History of American Civilization) Eric Hobsbawm.

Location: Lowell Lecture Hall, Harvard University
17 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

and

Oct 24, 2005
4:15 p.m.

"The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries."
Panel featuring Andreas Wimmer, University of California, Los Angeles, and other discussants.
Location: Harvard University, Center for European Studies (CES), Lower level conference room
Cambridge, MA

Unfortunately they are set on days when I'm not in town, but if anyone attends, reports are welcome.

Welcome to the archive!

This should be cause for long lines forming on a certain street. The Serbian security services are delivering to the state archive 30.000 pages of documents prepared by the security services between 1956 and 1975 which give their reports on about 1000 people who, according to the government's announcement "were acting from the positions of anarcholiberalism, liberalism and bureaucratic etatism." Even if you do not think that people were following you between 1956 and 1975, have a look at the archive site linked above, they have a nice selection of scanned documents on display.

Is it true, does Belgrade rock?

I have always said so, but now Seth Sherwood, writing in the Newspaper of Record, shows people how to find the answer for themselves. The prize quotation comes from Anton:

On stage, the Partibrejkers tear through a succession of Stooges-meets-Kiss anthems while the throng pumps its fists and yells "Oh, Yeah!" Having endured more than two decades of the vicissitudes of their homeland - the post-Tito comedown, the wars of the 1990's, the economic and political uncertainty under the new leaders - the Partibrejkers are perhaps one more inspiring symbol of Belgraders' endurance. "When you have a strong link to the source of life," the group's guitarist, Nebojsa Antonijevic, said before the show, referring to his passion for music, "the outer situation can't deter you."

I think this is the first big travel feature on the town that NYT has done in my memory. Too bad he gives away the locations of my favorite restaurants.

Update: La Lara isn't sure whether it matters what rocks or not.

Friday random ten, on this random Friday

Today will be a "light posting" day. There is a pile of papers to be graded which I have managed to avoid for longer than I should have, and my brilliant students are coming for lunch. Also, it has been raining for a week and the dog needs a bath. Otherwise, you know the Friday Random Ten deal: open your mp3 player, hit the random button, and share what comes up.

David Bowie -- The man who sold the world
I run hot and cold on whether I still like this fellow, but you have to agree that he is one of the precious few rokenrol idols from his generation who has maintained a shred of dignity.

Groucho Marx -- Hooray for Captain Spaulding
One of Azra's favorites! Insert your favorite Marx joke in this spot.

Električni orgazam -- Pobuna
In 1996 they released a live acoustic "greatest hits" album, which was both preceded and followed by undistinguished periods. This one makes me feel like I am in Belgrade in a club I was obviously never in.

Atheist rap -- Blu Trabant
The Balkans were just about to become competitive with SoCal in the "car song" market. There were already lots of train songs.

Bran Van 3000 -- Drinking in LA
Is this going to be the only song on the list that gets somewhere near the category of commercial hit? Somebody call Albert O. Hirschmann!

The Bangles -- September gurlz
I almost always enjoy cover versions, and do always enjoy Big Star. But if they were going to make the cover identical in every way except for changing the genders, wouldn't it have made sense to do "September Boys"?

The legendary Jim Ruiz band -- My bloody Yugo
It's one of those eternal questions, "who will drive my Yugo when I die?"

Fabiana Cantilo -- Mi enfermedad
She was the vocalist for Los Twist, you know! Everybody needs to listen to a lot more Argentine pop.

Cornershop -- Good to be on the road back home
This is a country and western song, isn't it? This is another group I sometimes love, and am sometimes annoyed by their cleverness. A syndrome?

Prljavo kazalište -- Djevojke bi
A sentimental attachment. I listened to a tape of the great groups of this period, and have been involved with that part of the world ever since. Who knew?

A very fine Friday and weekend to everybody.

Great moments in human intelligence

Where else would anybody have found this description of the new system for coordination of US intelligence services but in the San Jose Mercury-News? With fiendish cleverness named the "National Clandestine Service," it will be overseen by the director of the CIA but:

"the day-to-day operations of the clandestine service will be handled by an undercover officer. That officer publicly is referred to simply as 'Jose'."

Don't give away all of your secrets at once, though.

Your daily starlet update

I was getting worried for a moment there after Index.hr went two straight days with no news items about Keira Knightley on their front page. Now they seem to have got their rhythm back, though.

Long post: Anatomy of denial

When a group of writers calling themselves the Srebrenica Research Group released their conclusions in July, I did not comment on it. This is principally because it was a poorly researched polemical piece, prepared by people who were somewhat well-known for essays in political magazines, but none of whom had any recognition, or indeed any record of research, as authorities on the region. This is probably the reason that media have also generally ignored the report, aside from a few treatments in the right-wing press in Serbia and in magazines for which the authors habitually write. For the most part I considered it a fairly misguided effort by perennial critics of US foreign policy to illustrate their critique. While I have absolutely nothing against critiques of US foreign policy, I do not consider it to be an empirical position, and when empirical positions are subordinated to ideological stances then they do not interest me at all.

But now Talos has posted a link and a few quotations from an article by one of the contributors to the report, which recapitulates several of the major points in the longer document. This does not seem to be by way of endorsing the conclusions, but more as a way of beginning a dialogue on issues related to it. He is requesting responses, and I could not resist taking the bait. My response is lengthy, so I am putting it here rather than in his comments section.

Generally the article by Diana Johnstone struck me as fairly incoherent, partly a collection of factual claims made from a certain political position, but more an effort to recontextualize facts and to attribute motivations to a universe of actors. I understand that what she is producing is polemical rather than academic writing, and that this genre is subject to a different set of standards. But there are theses offered here that look familiar from other places, and so it seemed like the best way to approach them was to try to tease them out of the piece. What follows is my reconstruction of the article in the form of fifteen untenable theses presented in it. The theses are presented in a different order in the article; I have rearranged them into a smaller number of general categories. All quotations are from Diana Johnstone's article, unaltered.

DENIAL BASED ON CONTEXT

✯ Srebrenica happened in the context of a war, and such things are to be expected in wars ("War is a life and death matter, and inevitably leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime").

✯ The VBiH treated the civilian population as hostages ("The Muslim military did not allow civilians to leave, since their presence was what ensured the arrival of humanitarian aid provisions which the military controlled."), which made it predictable that the VRS would murder them, therefore the crime is the responsibility of somebody other than the people who committed it.

✯ Some Muslims were not killed ("But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica?"), therefore the ones who were killed must not have been killed as a part of a plan.

DENIAL BASED ON PRESUMPTIVE EQUIVALENCE

✯ Naser Oric was a criminal ("General Morillon stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, 'engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region'"), which justified attacks against the civilian population in the area where he operated.

✯ Only parties that have committed genocide have been charged with genocide ("The charge of 'genocide' is what sharply distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav disintegration wars"), therefore there must not have been a genocide.

✯ There have been crimes committed elsewhere in the world at other times ("from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq", and also "when the Nazi occupation broke up Yugoslavia"), therefore this crime must not be important.

DENIAL BASED ON INCOMPLETE INFORMATION

✯ Fewer bodies have been identified than the number of people who are known to have been killed ("less than 3,000 have been exhumed"), therefore anybody who has not been identified must either have been an executed prisoner of war or not be dead at all ("this was, then, a 'massacre', such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces"). Where questions of fact are involved, the only objective strategy is to cite oneself (in the name of "an independent international Srebrenica research group which will soon publish its findings in book form" which is an "unbiased investigation and serious historical analysis") while failing to mention all other sources (with which they would appear to be unfamiliar--in 76 footnotes of this report, the authors cite themselves 36 times).

✯ The principle of command responsibility is unfamiliar to Diana Johnstone ("to establish what it calls 'command responsibility' for Serb crimes rather than individual guilt of actual perpetrators. The aim is not to identify and punish men who violated the Geneva conventions by executing prisoners, but rather to pin the supreme crime on the top Serb leadership," and "Clearly, the purpose of the 'genocide' charge is not to punish the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top"), therefore it does not exist in law.

✯ Even though none of the events happened, they were ordered and carried out at a lower level of command ("the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers [or paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case] out of control") than the level of the people indicted.

DENIAL BASED ON ANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES OF RECOGNITION

✯ Memory might be used in the future to mobilise resentment ("The insistence on past atrocities may simply prepare the next wave"), therefore it should not be invoked.

✯ A genocide conviction might be inconvenient for some interested parties ("If Milosevic, as former president of Serbia, can be convicted of genocide, then the Bosnian Muslims hope to win billions of dollars in reparations that will keep Serbia on its knees for the foreseeable future"), therefore it is not justified in law.

✯ It is not certain that punishing one set of perpetrators will prevent another set of perpetrators from doing something else ("when all is said and done, it is an illusion to think that condemning perpetrators of a massacre in Bosnia will ensure that the next civil war somewhere in the world will be carried out in a more chivalrous manner"). Therefore punishment should not be pursued, as long as there is the opportunity to regret the fact that war ever occurs at all.

DENIAL BASED ON ATTRIBUTION OF MOTIVATION

✯The memory of Srebrenica has been used for rhetorical purposes (here Diana Johnstone uses a rich pallette: the rhetorical purposes she declares include a) "to draw attention away from the U.S.-backed Croatian offensive which drove the Serb population out of the Krajina"; b) "to implicate Bosnian Serb leaders in 'genocide' in order to disqualify them from negotiating the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina"; c) "To use 'Srebrenica' as an effective instrument in the restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians"; d) to contribute "to a spirit of 'conflict of civilizations'. It has helped recruit volunteers for Islamic terrorist groups"; and e) "to justify what is perhaps the worst of all the genocidal conditions: war." If I have missed any, or if Diana Johnstone has thought of any more in the meantime, the list can probably be expanded), therefore it must be a false memory.

✯ Diana Johnstone has an ideological definition of genocide ("In the world today, few people, including Bosnian Muslims, are threatened by 'genocide' in the sense of a deliberate Hitler-style project to exterminate a population-which is how most people understand the term. But millions of people are threatened, not by genocidal maniacs, but by genocidal conditions of life: poverty, disease, inadequate water, global climate change. The Srebrenica mourning cult offers nothing positive in regard to these genocidal conditions. Worse, it is instrumentalized openly to justify what is perhaps the worst of all the genocidal conditions: war.") This makes any legal definition unnecessary, and preempts any existing one.

✯ The background against which events occur ("a radically unjust socio-economic world order euphemistically called 'globalization'") preempts any concern about actual events that occur, unless these events are consistent with an a priori premise about which events matter.

I would not have taken the trouble to respond if Talos had not asked for responses, especially since in many ways the quality of Diana Johnstone's analysis speaks for itself. Maybe there is some point in doing it, since she offers a concentrated version of several arguments that crop up from time to time. It never ceases to amaze me that there is a group of people who describe themselves as progressives (and who find some part of the left audience willing to accept that description) while in practice so much of their rhetorical effort goes into creating apologies for violent criminals of the extreme right. The implicit logical connection to be made is that anybody who is concerned about US foreign policy or globalisation is required to support any regime that is declaratively against these things. In the same breath, Diana Johnstone tries to preemptively state her worry that she might be "condemned as an apologist for frightful crimes." She might be, yes.

Prizeless

After the Nobel committee has just reaffirmed that it intends not to make political statements through its decisions and wants to stay out of fads and fashions, it has now announced that this year's prize will go to Harold Pinter, no doubt well-known to readers of this blog as an indefatigable freedom fighter (the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, that is). Go figure.

Football news from all over

Serbia and Montenegro will have a place in the FIFA World Cup finals after their 1:0 win against Bosnia and Hercegovina, thanks to a goal by Mateja Kežman. "Incidents" were expected and the fans of the visiting team were heavily guarded. In the end, seventeen people were injured during the match, mostly by flying objects thrown at them. But navijači are a unique group and their behavior is not, thankfully, the model for everybody else. The journalists from SCG and BiH played a friendly match, which the BiH journalists won 6:4. Then both teams went to a restaurant, where they partied and agreed on further cooperation.

At the sound of the tone

Darko pretty much captures every customer's perception of dealing with the Verizon corporation. Add to that the piling on of charges which nobody can interpret, and continuing to put "long distance" charges on services that cost nobody a thing except the hapless customer. We considered not even bothering to get a telephone when we moved to our new place two years ago. But of course, the reason the phone company has customers at all is lack of choice -- we had to have a phone line to get DSL service, which we had to get to do our work at home (which we have to do for many reasons). But no longer: now we have switched the DSL to "dedicated line" service (also called "naked DSL," but if you do not believe that I am fully dressed as I write this just check the Boston weather report). Our VOIP phone works over it, so no dealing with the phone company at all. Our former phone number is now a mobile phone, so all those people who have the old number can still reach us. I just heard a story on NPR detailing why two million users have done the same. It takes some doing to wear down a lifetime of loyalty to the phone company, but it looks like inaccessibility, indifference, and exploitation can compensate for a whole lot of regulatory protection.

Georgia on my mind

The first phase of a new project by University of Pittsburgh librarians Susan Corbesero, Helena Goscilo, and
Petre Petrov is now up. Stalinka will be an online collection of photos and documents related to the life of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, known to y'all and me as Stalin. The photos (370 of them) are up, and texts will come soon. They warn that their photos are protected by copyright, so I'll illustrate this post with a photo of F. Murray Abraham as Stalin, with Judy Davis in the wry 1996 film Children of the Revolution.

Headline of the day

** Smurfs 'bombed' in UN ad campaign **
UN child agency Unicef launches an ad campaign in which cartoon legends the Smurfs are blown away by an air strike.

Check the story here.

What I found out while away...

Insight #1: "The problem with the city of Sarajevo... well, it's a town!" (My friend K when asked about whether he enjoyed living there.)

Insight #2: Every journalist can be bought. EVERY SINGLE ONE. OK, maybe not old Commie-types who are genuinely uninterested in money (I know all two of them). But it was extremely dispiriting to see, close up, how easily you can buy some ad space (otherwise known as "reporting") in Dani, for example, or how people I used to respect would sell themselves for a few hundred bucks (which they ended up not getting, he he).

#1 plus #2: Not much reason for hope there.

SOAP gets in your eyes

The newest claimant to showering with international recognition in Kosovo is the mysteriously fresh-smelling Serbian Antiterrorist Liberation Movement, or SOAP. Mikan Velinović, who claims to be the commander of the group, is a former wrestler and composer of aphorisms, and briefly ran a private courier service for the ICTY indictee Nebojša Pavković. He claims that the group has 7500 members, that they are unarmed, and that, depending on when you ask him, they are either holding two villages under seige or not. Or else that the movement is of a "humanitarian character." Thanks to AR for the tip.

Update: Oh dear, there's more. Channeling the spirit of Dr Bronner, Mikan Velinović frothed to an interviewer in November that "no normal person can be against SOAP, least of all the US president George Bush." Following the article is a somewhat, erm, spirited discussion of the group's implications, courtesy of your national broadcaster RTS.

Reflections on transitional justice

Helena Cobban, Jonathan Edelstein and Brandon Hamber have launched a new blog, at once discussion forum and resource clearinghouse, on transitional justice. Pay a visit to Transitional Justice Forum to appreciate or join in. The goal is not simply to provide information and reflection on ongoing events (although they certainly do that), but also to interrogate the meanings of justice and the adequacy of institutional mechanisms, as proposed in a highlight post by Jonathan Edelstein. They are also developing a bibliography of published articles available in full-text, small for now but awaiting your additions.

UNICEF's scorched Smurf policy

The advertisement on Belgian television (image courtesy of Večernji list) was meant to raise funds for a UNICEF program for child soldiers in Burundi. It began with an idyllic scene of the popular childrens' animated characters the Smurfs in their village. And it continued with a surprise air raid on the village leaving destruction, death, and an orphaned Smurf child. Belgian UNICEF spokesperson Philippe Henon told media that the purpose of the campaign was to shock viewers and provoke a reaction. No doubt it succeeded in that, but any advertiser will tell you that getting the attention of viewers is only the first job in getting a message across.

The best-advertised plans...

Remember Boris Mikšić? He is the wealthy and once well-connected military contractor who was not elected president of Croatia (he won "morally," he says, but we all know that is no way to get into political office), and subsequently was not elected mayor of Zagreb, but did succeed in getting removed as honorary consul in St. Paul, Minnesota. Now, it seems, he is also not buying the OTV television network. Which is not preventing him from saying that he is. Which the staff of OTV deny.

A brief greeting from the heartland

There is time for a quick dispatch from Champaign (that's in Illinois, Francesco, though I would love to be in Campania--can you believe that none of the members of Almamegretta live here?). Yesterday was a fine lecture, if I do say so myself, and socializing with people from the excellent Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois. I never believed that a Friday afternoon talk on the Balkans would fill a room! Today will be a brunch with the graduate students in the program, then back to Boston.

The actual transport portion of travelling remains one of my least favorite activities, hard on the arms and knees. But the pleasure is in arriving. They have a large and tremendously active program (I keep imagining the suspense film in which one of the characters squints at the camera and says, "I've got a Title VI library and I know how to use it."), and the center is located just steps away from an entirely good enough coffee place and a truly outstanding tapas bar. Although the institution itself gives every impression that space aliens came and ported a huge university to the middle of a cornfield, the fine culinary resources seem to assure that interest is high, questions and comments are sharp, and that the importance of the sounds of Jarboli to any discussion of the region is perfectly obvious. The award for toughest question certainly goes to the formidable and beguiling Maria Todorova, but neither faculty nor students lagged behind. It was a pleasure afterward to relax over dinner and good conversation with Donna Buchanan, Zsuzsa Gille, and Judith Pintar. Without my beloved family here, I had the opportunity to get to sleep early and stay asleep late, and now I've got an hour or so before the next encounter to relax with a new manuscript by the Nishville sociologist Nikola Božilović.

This may be the last moment I get to compute in peace before Monday, so I can join the readers of this blog in the joy that accompanies the return of the mysterious Mr Teekay.

Back

Just returned from couple days in Germany's ugliest town (want to take a guess? No, it's not in the east) after spending 36 days (if I counted correctly) on my Big Balkan Reunion Tour. In fact, Germany's ugliest town looked a lot like what I imagine some forgotten industrial corner of Belarus might have looked in the mid-1980s. (Never mind that this town is supposedly rich and all that.) While I was away: Croatia gets membership talks with the EU. Turkey gets membership talks with the EU. Carla Del Ponte makes best friends with Kostunica and Sanader. Serbia gets SAA talks with the EU. RS is bribed into "agreeing" on police reform. Bosnia gets SAA talks with the EU. Anything I forgot?

A brief blog silence

I am heading off tomorrow morning for a brief guest gig in lovely Urbana-Champaign, so there will probably not be new posts here before Monday. Enjoy a fine weekend, and visit the blogs on the link list to the right.

The Pink empire, more interesting than ever

The Catholic church owns 26 percent of the shares in the Slovenian broadcast outlet TV Prva. Now the Belgrade-based RTV Pink would like to buy the other 74 percent. Pink is of course well known for its turbo-folk promotions, its echt-popular films and series, and of course its glitzy and model-filled "entertainment" program. It has been on the Bosnian market for a while, and in Serbia has recently positioned itself to compete with the slumbering state-owned giant RTS for a shot at dominating the news market. The church might not be so delighted to enter into a partnership with Pink, as the two institutions have some diverging thematic interests. But the results would certainly be interesting.

Gentle and reassuring words of cultural sociology

For anybody who cares to read it, I gave an interview last week to the talented young journalist and writer Nedim Sejdinović. Have a look at his site: in addition to conversations with me, he has also talked to interesting people.

Large scale crime, large scale complicity

There is a little problem with the "individualization" of gross violations of international law. It turns out that murdering thousands of people over the course of a few days, then covering up the evidence is a large technical undertaking. It requires administrative arrangement, technical resources of various types, and the engagement of personnel. How many people? According to the report filed today by the Republika Srpska Srebrenica Working Group, 19,473 "immediate participants" are identified, with as many as 25,083 involved in the events in and around the operation. The larger figure includes 22,952 people under the command of the RS defence ministry, 34 contract drivers and 209 people under the command of civil defense, as well as 1,988 people under the command of the RS interior ministry, "including 15 members of the 'Scorpions' unit" (Note of caution: my calculator says that when the numbers from FENA's report are added up, the total is 25,183, not 25,083). Of the military participants, all but 268 have been identified by name. The names, among which are the names of people still working in public institutions, have not been made public. But aside from opening up the possibility of new prosecutions against people who know very well who they are, the report also underlines the fact that killing on the scale carried out around Srebrenica in July 1995 cannot be done without considerable commitment of resources, planning, and the involvement of institutions.

Ambulatory ambalaža

If you are an admirer of clever technology and small vehicles, then the new "concept design" urban car by Nissan is pretty amazingly cool. In the East Ethnian region, though, they might want to think of marketing it under some name other than "Pivo."

Ne magija istim žarom

When his performance in Belgrade was announced, we reported that David Copperfield had given rise to some Great Expectations. They were not to be. If the review and the response from well-known members of the audience reported in today's Blic are any indication, his show was a disappointing collection of card tricks and the tricking of ducks, with some video recordings of more impressive feats he had carried off earlier. The handbag went quicker than the eye.

Half harmful ... and half harmless?

Although this list came out in May, the blog-based response to it seems to be getting under way now. First the infrequently read right-wing magazine Human Events asked a group of panelists to assemble a list of the ten most harmful boooks of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now a bunch of bloggers are being asked how many of them they have read (I found one list at Majikthise, certainly there are more). I've read 5 of the 10, but undoubtedly should have read more.

K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto: No surprise here, probably everyone who has studied sociological or political theory has read it.

Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao: I did indeed pick this up out of curiousity when I was very young, and found it quite opaque. A line I remember: "A revolution is not a dinner party."

K. Marx, Capital: Charmingly, they give the title in German, even though it is eminently translatable. I'll happily confess to not having read the whole thing.

A. Comte, The Course of Positive Philosophy: I am a little puzzled as to why this is on the list, but then there are a lot of things about the mind of this panel that could be thought of as puzzling.

F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Not my favorite of his books, really, but still Freddy gets blamed for a lot of stuff that wasn't his fault.

They also have a list of 20 "honorable mentions" that did not make the list, of which I have read 9. For my own part, I stand by my position that the most dangerous book is a heavy one on the top shelf.

Update: Another point of view ... the American Library Association maintains a list of the 100 most challenged books, which people have requested be removed from library collections.

"A thought experiment"

There is a good chance everyone knows by now about the Republican party's official spokescretin for virtue and genocide, Bill Bennett, and his advocacy of crime control through applied eugenics. For those who do not, he outraged a good number of people last week by speculating about how "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Yesterday he excused himself by calling his remarks "A thought experiment about public policy." In this thought experiment, he was most likely the control group.

Helmut, the East German taxi driver played by Armin Mueller-Stahl in Night on Earth, received another version of experimenting in thought:

I wonder, what would be the impact on crime of providing all black babies with the financial and social resources available to George W. Bush? Property and violent crime rates might decline, but DWI convictions would skyrocket. The incidence of illegal insider stock trading would increase, but neither the indictment or conviction rate would change.

Neither one of these exercises is a proper experiment, of course, but only the second one offers the prospect of projecting a result from existing evidence.

Barbarogenije is back, and a little disappointed

The Balkans used to be backward, lazy and violent. No more. The wonderful Ivan Čolović explains why they are now authentic, spontaneous, diverse and passionate. They take pleasure and pain to their extremes. The European Union should be begging to join them. Not the way they are, of course, but the way music publishers would like to be proud of. All this is, says Čolović, a marketing trip from one krajnost to another. Just as the ethnologist Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin "refused to be ashamed of the Balkans when she was expected to be," probably today she would "refuse to envy them, now that it is all the more frequently demanded of us." Because sometimes a Balkan is just a Balkan, and not an existential category.

Friday dog blogging

No Friday Random ten this week, as I am feeling a need to acquire new music. I did, however, hear on my favorite local radio station Medeski, Martin and Wood's version of "Hey Joe," must get a copy. This week we have Lajoš in the kitchen, looking very attentive to whatever may be going on in there. The survival strategy of a dog depends on always looking very hungry and very innocent, despite having a diet that is probably far more substantial and healthy than ours. He recently had the opportunity to meet one of his sisters, who was also walking at Jamaica Pond. There aren't too many Schipperkes around here, so when two of them meet the owners always question one another. This owner used her cell phone camera thingie to capture the siblings together, but still hasn't sent me the photo. Ah well.

Unfortunate advertising offers

Got this offer in the mail today as a part of a promotion for a new educational kit from the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Teaching Tolerance" program. I am quite sure that they mean very well, and that they have probably prepared some good materials. But no thank you, really.

Техничко питање за ово козмополитско читатељство

Инспирисао ме је Чип, ко овде коментарише чак на арапском. Јер сам ја заклети Маковац, а вероватно знате да једини ВП програм који не подржаба Јуникод јесте Мајкетисофт Офис за Мак. Сад смо гђа. Етнија и ја направили (на брзаку) један превод, и збиља смо се мучили с тим што не можемо да видимо сва слова. На крају сам неке пасусе пребацио на ТекстЕдит, чисто да видим која су слова у питању. Све једна велика и непотребна мука, можете замислити. Постоји ли неко техничко решење за то? Не могу да верујем да нико није до сада измислио нешто. Иначе су та техничка и визуелна решења за Мак углавном паметнија и једноставнија него она за ПЦ. Мала ствар, знам, али кад се бавим овим послом, морам признати да ми је фрка.

Rock glazba made in Rijeka

Saturday, 9 October will be the world premiere of the film "Ritam rock plemena," in which director Bernardino Modrić and writer Koraljko Pasarić follow the rock n roll scene of Rijeka from 1960 to the present. After that, expect to find it at film festivals wherever there is an audience with a clue.

Globalize it, and I'll intellectualize it

Just came across this (I think) new publication by way of a link from one of my regular newspaper reads. Globalizacija is a "journal for political theory and research on globalisation, development and gender issues." It has several items taking a critical approach to neoliberalism and privatisation, with an emphasis on gender and economic issues. There is also an English language version for those who prefer it, and it would appear to be very much worth a look.

A widening corruption scandal, or something else

Here is a piece of breaking news that came out while we were walking our dog. Apparently Vladan Batić, the former justice minister who is president of the Christian Democratic Party of Serbia, is being held by police in connection with a corruption scandal. The given reason has to do with the release of an organised crime figure while he was minister. No concrete details, except that his party has issued a statement labelling the charges as political and saying that he has begun a hunger strike.

Update: It is still difficult to say what is up here. The official statement is that he "abused an official position" while he was minister, but it is not clear how. If the issue in question is the release from prison of a member of the "Kruševac group," this is something the justice minister could have achieved only indirectly, through prosecutors, judges, or the prison administration. On the other hand, the charge from Batić's party about the government using police to settle accounts with political opponents is not too persuasive either, as Batić can hardly be counted as a meaningful political force. My sense is that larger forces are probably not at stake, but that small ones may very well be.

Another update: On 30 September he was released, with no charges. This would tend to give credence to the thesis that it was political intimidation, though it remains unclear why anybody would have anything to gain by intimidating Batić. Alternatively, the government is such a panic over corruption that it no longer knows what it is up to.

A disturbing public opinion survey

A survey released today, commissioned by the British government and carried out by CeSID, suggests that if elections were held now, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) would get 38%, the Democratic Party (DS) would get 31%, The Democratic party of Serbia (DSS) 9% and Bogoljub Karić's Forza Serbia (PSS) 8%. No other parties would get enough to support to gain representation in the parliament. The results are believable, in the sense that they are consistent with recent election results and other survey findings, and also with the expected erosion of support for the parties currently in power. CeSID also has a decent record of reliable research. Some time will probably pass before elections are called, of course, which means that the balance of forces could change, but not in a direction which would necessarily be predictable.

Assuming for a moment that the results would be as the survey indicates, this would mean: 1) once more there would be pressure for DS and DSS to form a coalition, which would certainly be hugely unstable, and 2) assuming the (not necessarily very likely) coalition mentioned in 1) is formed, the government would still be formed by whoever gets PSS to join the coalition, which means that Karić would be able to demand a very high price for his support. If the government were to be formed by a coalition of DS-DSS-PSS, it would be mostly incapable of action. If it were to be formed by SRS and PSS, the results would be disastrous for everybody both inside and outside the government. If DSS were to try to stay out of coalitions, this would leave an unstable minority government and also possibly the demise of DSS. There is always the possibility of a SRS-DSS coalition, which has been raised in various ways by DSS officials at various times, but would certainly be very controversial both in the party and outside of it. It might seem unreal, but then consider that SPS is keeping DSS in power now.

No matter how one tries to add up the numbers, they would not seem to mean anything good.

The escape Klaus is in the fine print

The Czech president Vaclav Klaus expressed his worry about insistence on human rights to an international lawyers' conference, warning that respect for human rights might lead to regulation in the interest of defending them. Explaining his point, he argued that:

"Many partial, merely so-called rights, like the rights of consumers, children, women, disabled people and so on, replace a traditional understanding of human rights. When those new rights are brought into the legal system and lawyers accept them, they cause many serious consequences which begin to complicate social life and its quality."

It is not entirely clear what sort of "complication" he is concerned about, but it would seem to have something to do with what is involved in respecting the rights of women, children and other groups of which Mr Klaus is not a member.

Finska posla, Part II

I don't know how the story will turn out about the drunken Finnish EUFOR soldiers who spent an evening abusing the guests and staff and demolishing a club in Mostar. But it is not likely to enhance the welcome for international troops in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

On the hyperreproduction of the relations of production

The vice president of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) Milorad Vučelić says that there is really no reason for SPS not to join prime minister Koštunica's government. And really, he may be right, considering that the government relies on the support of SPS for its survival, and pays heavily for that support. The only reason for SPS not to join up would be that they are already well represented in the cabinet and elsewhere.