Understatement of the week

There are flaws in this book.

Jonathan Freedland in his review of Chomsky's Failed States, New York Times, June 25, 2006

"I didn't mean it that way"

I will spare the readers of East Ethnia the details of the tedious controversy -- interestingly enough, a mostly German debate that seems to have very little resonance in Serbia itself -- surrounding Peter Handke's statements about Serbia, the genocide in Bosnia (and especially Srebrenica), and the role of late President Milosevic. An excellent resource for the whole thing is Caroline Fetscher's blog, which is required reading anyway. (Should you still thirst for yet more and read German, today's Neue Zürcher Zeitung carries a long interview with Handke.) I will equally refrain from commenting on Noam Chomsky's recent interview with the New Statesman.

[I cannot bring myself, however, to refrain from quoting the interview's highlight: "The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible - their troops were there - and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it." If anyone can figure out what he's talking about, please let me know.]

Rather, the point I'd like to make is this: how come two people who have been professionally working with words for several decades and who have received numerous awards for that work don't seem to be able of any unambiguous statement when it comes to the question of war crimes and genocide in former Yugoslavia? Of course, Chomsky is equally obfuscating on a range of other issues, and his extreme negligence -- some might say, willful manipulation -- when handling sources and quotes is legendary. Indeed, the fallout from Chomsky's infamous interview with the Guardian's Emma Brockes (centering on the use of quotation marks and similar), and Handke's current troubles after he spoke at Milosevic's funeral all seem to stem from the same spectacular inability to simply and clearly state what they are trying to say. Pretty remarkable for two guys who make a living dealing with words, don't you think?

The siege of Sarajevo, contd.

An AFP wire report yesterday provides excellent if implicit guidance as to how to deal with the dreaded time between June and September, when very little happens and editors are struggling to fill their pages. (Thankfully, this year we got the World Cup.) As an editor, I very much appreciate such pieces since they help me perfect my craft.

1. Headline properly
This one reads “Bosnian capital shaken by radical Islam,” an evergreen that will attract readers. Try to appeal to the reader's most visceral fears. [Note: This is the editor's job, not the hack's.]

2. Spot trends
It's imperative that what you report is not just a single event but a new tendency:

The people of Sarajevo, renowned for their pluralism, have
been shaken after a series of incidents including the murder of a Muslim woman by her Islamic extremist son who questioned her faith.

Never mind that the only other elements in this “series of incidents” were some couples making out in parks and being harassed by some self-styled guardians of virtue. This allows you to repackage old news--the murder happened on 27 February--and to link the insignificant (a bunch of punks bothering a bunch of kids) to the significant (a murder).

3. Make good use of quotes
This is a critical element in establishing your credibility as a reporter: you've been there, you know the situation, you've talked to the experts.

Upholders of Bosnia's moderate version of Islam say the
problem caused by an influx of hardline fighters during the country's 1992-1995 war has worsened in recent months, highlighted by the gruesome murder.

“Bosnia's tradition of Islam is tolerant, it promotes
pluralism and we should not allow those representing a
one-track ideology to teach us,” says Jasmin Merdan.

The 26-year-old -- a practising Muslim who portrays himself as a “victim” of the Wahhabi ideology before abandoning it -- is one of the few courageous voices in Bosnia who dares to criticise extremism.

The most important thing to remember when using quotes is that they don't actually need to be linked to anything you're saying, as the example above shows. Readers who expect the claim about a worsening situation to be backed up by a quote just don't get it, and the rest will be happy to hear about the courageous young man who dares to speak up.

With you occasionally

Okay, here's the deal: my trusty computer has reached the point of no repair. This means that updating here will be highly limited, at least until Mrs Ethnia arrives in town with her computer next week. Points to Marshall McLuhan for observing many years ago that we tend to become dependent on those things that are invented for our convenience.

In the meantime, there is of course much to report from the country I am in, a different one from the one I entered although I have not gone anywhere. But I am following daily events less than I might, since I have been fortunate enough to get access to the archives of one of the popular daily papers, and am instead spending my days reading newspapers from years ago and scribbling their contents onto index cards.

Unfortunate things, aside from the ones that you might expect, include the weather -- heavy rain more or less every day, and the one sweater I brought along (at Mrs Ethnia's insistence) is getting heavy use. This has also been a sad year for restaurants globally: first with the closing of the best Chinese place in our neighborhood in Boston, and now with the surprise closing of Manjez, the last remaining nonšminkerski place in the center of Belgrade (aside from Proleće). News is that the famous and much admired konobar Draško has moved to Orašac on Bulevar Revolucije, or whatever forgotten personage they are calling that street after now.

Good things in Belgrade: Disciplina kičme, last night at SKC.

Srbija i Fruška Gora

East Ethnia sends you greetings from lovely Niš, which must have more kafići per capita than any medium-sized city in the immediate vicinity. Greetings also from my friend Pedja's computer, which he has graciously allowed me to borrow since my screen has decided it would no longer take instruction from the skalamerija below. Presumably this can be repaired, although I expect that finding a Mac mechanic will have to wait until my return to Belgrade.

There is the possibility that I may arrive to one country and leave from another. The independence referendum in Montenegro appears to have succeeded, just barely, in one of those underwhelming results that lends itself to multiple interpretations. Probably the eventual independence of Montenegro will make little difference to most people there or in Serbia -- the concrete questions that will affect people have to do with property rights, pensions, and the ability of people (students, for example) to cross borders and use benefits freely. As long as these questions are not taken up in bad faith, most people will be likely to carry on as before. The result has been interpreted in international media in many cases either as an expression of anti-Serbian sentiment or as an additional step in the disintegration of what was once Yugoslavia. These are probably overinterpretations, at least in part. The referendum also put a legal stamp on a separation that was already proceeding in fact, and put an end to an expensive and dysfunctional federation which neither had much to show for itself nor, in the end, had much of a will or desire to argue for its continued existence.

Most of the immediate consequences of the referendum will be felt by political elites. About 3000 functionaries will be out of work, together with a smaller number of parliamentary deputies who will not be losing much work, and some ministers. Among these ministers will be two influential ones whose parties are not particularly favored by the Serbian government (of which they are members): human rights minister Rasim Ljajić and foreign minister Vuk Drašković. There should be some mild entertainment as PM Koštunica looks for a way to keep his government alive while trying to satisfy them with the smallest crumbs possible.

As long as I can get access to a working machine and a connection, I will try to post as regularly as I can from the banks of the mighty Nišava. With any luck all technical difficulties should be resolved soon after I get back to Belgrade, and your humble correspondent will humbly correspond.

Clueless in the Balkans

I've been a harsh critic of the EU's approach to enlargement in general and the Western Balkans in particular, but the European Commission did the only thing it could realistically do when it postponed giving Romania and Bulgaria a firm entry date on Tuesday. If it had recommended to the EU member states to postpone entry by one year, it would have removed any incentive for further reform in Sofia and Bucharest since the two would have entered by 2008 one way or another. The Commission would also have set itself up for a nasty fight that it couldn't have won -- postponing Bulgaria's accession would require a unanimous decision by the EU's 25 members, something that would have been impossible to achieve. Giving them a firm 2007 date would have had much the same effect -- it would have provided an incentive for the two governments to slack. Judy Dempsey doesn't agree with this analysis:

By delaying a decision over whether Bulgaria and Romania will be ready to join the European Union next year, the European Commission has sent a negative signal to the countries of the western Balkans Albania and some states of the former Yugoslavia whose chances of joining now seem more remote than ever, according to experts in the region.

She quotes an expert from the "European Stability Initiative," a Berlin think tank that has consistenly managed to be as wrong on Bosnia as one could possibly be:

"The western Balkans has witnessed over the past 12 months that engagement by the EU toward their accession prospects has slowed down," said Kristof Bender, a Balkans expert at the European Stability Initiative, an independent political research group. "The commission's decision on Tuesday only confirms this. Frankly, the EU's credibility in the region has been seriously undermined."

This has it exactly backwards. The EU has lost credibility in the region for many reasons, but being tough on two accession countries that are clearly not fully there yet isn't one of them. What would have happened with the Western Balkans countries if they had seen that membership can be had on the cheap? Would that not have undermined the reformers there much more than the exceedingly fair, and graciously delivered, decision by the Commission on Tuesday to say, "yes, but?" I'm all for enlargement. I also happen to think that the EU has too often gone soft on its own commitments, and I'm afraid we may see many examples of that in the Balkans over the next year. But Bulgaria isn't one of them.

Tranzicija

The grades are in, now a couple more days and I am off to some glamorous summering in exclusive Balkan locales. There will probably be a few days of blog silence, or at least intermittent posting, after Saturday, then as soon as I am able to set up a nice fast connection in Belgrade, your faithful correspondent will be with you again.

Mezzo-Soprano

Živela Slovenija and Montenegro! Michael has bales of liquid video.

Specijalna molba za beogradske čitaoce

Ljudi, uskoro dolazim u vaš grad. Pošto civilizovan čovek, a naročito Srbin, ne može da živi bez brze internet veze, tražim ISP (wajrles, po mogućnosti) koji bi pokrio našu veliku i luksuznu garsnonjeru u vašem gradu (Vračar, da budem precizan). Da li neko može da me uputi u to koje su sve kompanije, kakva im je pokrivenost, koliko iznosi neka normalna cena, koja je oprema potrebna itd.? U suprotnom slučaju, retko ćete imati šta da čitate od mene tokom leta. Unapred zahvalan, vaš verni sluga.

Nonalignment

The Guardian reports today on an investigation by Amnesty International, according to which "the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05," using a network of private companies, "at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN." That firm would be Jet Line International, the successor to the Moldovan company Aerocom, implicated in the illegal weapons trade in western Africa (operating at that time, it seems, at least in part through Serbia). Here is a little bit more on the principal, Viktor Bout. The destination of the weapons was said to be "coalition forces in Iraq," but there is no evidence as to where they ended up.

A question for all you softveraši out there

My browser (the very fine Firefox) runs into the same problem each time I go through my ritual reading of the Balkan online newspapers: at one point, something, probably some script on one of the pages, disables the keyboard functionality. The most noticeable effect of this is that I cannot scroll down the screen using the space bar. I cannot be sure, but I think the culprit is a designer for ANSA, Dnevnik or Glas. I'm inclined to suspect Dnevnik the most, since their page is very javascripty. Any diagnostic thoughts?

Intelligence

Over the past week a good deal of attention has been paid to the uneasy situation regarding intelligence agencies in the United States. With the sudden and unexplained "resignation" of CIA director Porter Goss, a number of questions have been raised regarding the degree to which the departing director and his loyal staff have been involved in a sordid corruption scandal, the effect of a reorganisation of intelligence services on the independence of the CIA from political interference by the party in power, and the ambitions of the Department of Defense to exert control over intelligence activities. The uncertainty was not eased when the president put forward his nominee to succeed Goss: an active-duty military officer who has had a leading role in the administration's controversial (and apparently illegal) domestic surveillance projects. On all these themes, see the ongoing reporting by Laura Rozen.

And what of intelligence agencies in Serbia? Dejan Anastasijević has an overview in this week's Vreme. The latest accusations being put before them relate to the ongoing failure to arrest or locate Ratko Mladić, though this is hardly the full extent of it. At bottom, critics are continuing to raise the question of whether the intelligence services are under the control of the government and whether they work for the interests of the state. And what services are these? Serbia has five intelligence services, reporting to different officials and agencies. These are:

• Bezbednosno informativna agencija (BIA -- Security Information Agency): Headed by Rade Bulatović. Reports to the prime minister.
• Vojno-bezbednosna agencija (VBA -- Military Security Agency): Headed by Svetko Kovač. Reports to the minister of defence.
• Vojno-obaveštajna agencija (VOA -- Military Intelligence Agency): Headed by Veselin Milović. Reports to the minister of defence.
• Služba za istraživanje dokumentacije (SID -- Service for Research of Documentation): Headed by Ljubomir Milić. Reports to the minister of foreign affairs.
• Služba bezbednosti MIP-a (SBMIP -- Security Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs): Headed by Mirko Tomčić. Reports to the minister of foreign affairs.

So: five intelligence agencies, reporting to three civilian officials (to be fair, only the first three have a very broad scope of activity). And how is their work coordinated? Simple: it is not. This may account for some of the failures of the services that Anastasjević lists in his article. On the other hand, some of the failures may be attributed to a bizarre inheritance from the previous position of intelligence agencies in the Communist period, when they were extraordinarily privileged and closely tied to the party in power. Now the intelligence agencies no longer tie their function to the maintenance of a monopoly of power by a party, but more to maintaining their own. The questions raised by their role in the Mladić case (have they stopped protecting him? are they trying to find him?) highlight the extent to which these agencies have remained powerful islands resistant to civilian control.

Živio BH film!

You can find the program for the Third Annual Bosnia-Hercegovina Film Festival online. It will be held in New York from 19 to 21 May, and will include both documentary and dramatic films, full length and short. Among the full-length features (these are the translations of the titles as they appear in the program, for the benefit of people who want to order tickets) are Go West by Ahmed Imamović, Well Tempered Corpses by Benjamin Flipović, Totally Personal by Nedžad Begović, Justice Unseen by Aldin Arnautović and Refik Hodžić, The Dream Job by Danijela Majstorović, and Borderline Lovers by Miroslav Mandić. many of the short films look interesting as well, including a documentary on burek in New York and the sleeper net-hit music video by Damir Nikšić which you may have already seen.

Odvedi me iz ovog grada

Explanation for little posting lately: I have been scrambling to get the end-of-semester grades in, hoping to be able to make my departure to the mystical Balkans unencumbered. In the moments between, we have been watching films. One standout: The Conversation. Before he became Francis Ford Coppola, this fellow was a fantastic director, and this piece featuring an intense Gene Hackman, a sylphy but sinister Harrison Ford, and for fans of the period, a bit of John Cazale and Robert Duvall as well, deserves to be considered a classic. The psychological angles (oh, and the gender stuff) are strictly period-piece, but it is one of the most fascinating takes on surveillance, and the uncertainty of knowledge, I have seen. To say nothing of the soundtrack. Sadly, Walk the Line turned out to be a huge disappointment, succeeding in doing something that the contemporary haters of Johnny Cash never managed to do: turn him into a bundle of VH1-style cliches. More news as the pile diminishes.

Obaveštenje

To all our readers and friends in Dubrovnik: keep your children and household pets indoors today. Dick Cheney is in town.

The rebirth of irony?

This blog will be one of the least timely to remark on the long-running response to the impressively vicious performance by Stephen Colbert at the White House correspondents' dinner last week. This is a yearly event where journalistic insiders slap backs with their sources, and timid humor is traded in the name of appearing to be self-effacing.

Colbert broke the rules, brilliantly: he is a comedian who self-consciously pretends to be a right-wing ideologue, and was speaking to a roomful of people who unconsciously pretend not to be. Video of his performance is available at several spots, including this one. The correspondents' jaws dropped while the president's teeth clenched, and while his routine was ignored by major media (who preferred a tepid routine where Bush exchanged spoofs of his own illiteracy with a lookalike), it has been widely feted in the political blogs.

Was it a comic routine that went over the heads of its audience? A critical moment showing that a comedian is the last person left to speak truth to power? A provocation with unanticipated results? I was impressed, myself -- it seemed like a rare sign of life from a media culture that too often seems to be drowning its own unique blend of blandness and vulgarity. Much of the discussion I have seen of the event has seemed rather predictably pro or contra, but there is a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion on the wonderful Radio Open Source, hosted by Chris Lydon. It is available to be downloaded for your listening pleasure.

Miroodljub

I have just heard on B92, no written articles to link to yet, that Miroljub Labus has given his resignation as deputy premier in the Serbian government, giving as his reason the suspension of accession negotiations with the EU because of the most recent failure to arrest and extradite a prominent genocide indictee whose name everyone knows. He will also recommend, in the spirit of gestures which appear to be a compromise but are in fact pointlessly self-defeating, that his mysterious disappearing party G17+ withdraw its ministers from the government but continue to support the government in parliament.

If any interesting articles on this appear, I will add some links below.

Here is B92's news report, with comments.

Coming: Another war crimes trial

Domestic prosecutors in Croatia are waiting for a decision on the lifting of immunity (expected in seven days), and will then be charging Branimir Glavaš with war crimes against the civilian poulation around Osijek committed in 1991 and 1992.

Update: The commentary by Dragan Antulov (Drax to his many fans) is the lead item at Index.hr.

Inspirational pizza-related thought for the day

The next time you make pizza, instead of making a tomato sauce, try just slicing a few onions very thinly and carmelizing them in olive oil, adding a bit of paprika or rosemary at the end. Spread the carmelized onions over the dough like you would the sauce, and then add whatever you like to add on top. You will be delighted by the result.

Lifers imitate artists

Probably few people would have heard of the film director Slobodan Praljak if he had not received wide international publicity in another role, as the commander of the forces which destroyed the monumental bridge in Mostar. The Internet Movie Database lists three films under his credits (two of which are documentaries from 1990), in addition to a bit part as "himself" in the 1995 documentary The death of Yugoslavia, where he appeared alongside some much better-known performers. The Croatian film database lists just one film, Povratak Katarine Kožul from 1989. I have not seen the film and do not know much about it, but it would appear to have been a serious production: screenplay cowritten with Abdullah Sidran, soundtrack by Arsen Dedić, and a cast which includes some very well respected actors. Unless there is some important information missing, though, it would appear that Mr Praljak's film career was brief and not much celebrated.

Now he believes that he has the opportunity to find a new audience, though. AFP is reporting today (sorry, I don't have a link) that he "intends to show four movies he directed in order to prove his innocence" as a part of his defence before ICTY, where he is accused of war crimes. These would appear to be more documentaries (docudramas, perhaps?) where he is playing "himself," and AFP's description specifies "In one film Praljak, portraying himself, depicts his role in preventing a group of soldiers intending to kill imprisoned enemies. In another he calms an armed Muslim who enters his office demanding compensation for his destroyed house." The reviews will be an unusual format, but then depending on how one counts, showing four films at ICTY will either double or multiply his potential audience. He has already offered the Tribunal his views on ethnonational physics.