Two of the least useful questions for consideration of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh are “Who’s right?” and “When did it start?” Both parties have legitimate claims, and both have legitimate grievances.
The 1994 cease-fire, which was relatively new when I wrote the piece, has held up ever since, at least at the macro scale. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Minsk Group, which was also relatively new when I wrote the piece, hasn’t solved the conflict. There’s a reason the piece is titled “Intractable Problems.” Actually, there are several. (The analysis is also a bit OSCE-centric. The organization is obviously not the only lens one could choose to look at Karabakh, but I chose it because it was useful for getting at overall questions of European order and transition.) The potentially worse news is what Doug wrote about: Azerbaijan has heaps of oil money and is putting significant chunks of it into rearmament. That may or may not tip the strategic balance, but it certainly raises the chances of renewed conflict. The sequel to the piece linked here was always going to be titled “Just Add Oil and Money.” Maybe it’s time to dust off the sources.
Okay, first thought: there is not going to be a “Greater Albania” in the political sense.
The Albanians of Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia are evolving away from political union, not towards it. Kosovo’s new Constitution has “no union with any other state” as Article One, and that’s not just wallpaper for the internationals; the Kosovar Albanians, having finally gained their independence, have no interest in being ruled from distant Tirana. Meanwhile the Albanians of Albania are discovering the Kosovars are… well… poor. They’re happy to greet them as cousins, but aren’t interested in adding a large, poor, backwards and densely populated northern province. Macedonia is the only place you can still find enthusiasm for “Greater Albania” , and even there it’s increasingly marginal — the two large Albanian parties both are seeking their advantage within Macedonia, not outside it.
So why the post? Well, because even though there won’t be a “Greater Albania”, the Balkans are seeing a completely new phenomenon: the emergence of Albanians as an important political force.
Twenty years ago, Albania was a Communist hermit kingdom. The large Albanian minority in Yugoslavia was part of Yugoslav politics — dominant in Kosovo, negligible elsewhere. Albanians were not a significant political, social or economic force anywhere outside of Kosovo and Albania itself.
Today, Albanians have two countries of their own and a big chunk of a third. They’re a key minority in Montenegro. And in Greece, they’re set to be a huge minority in a country that doesn’t deal well with minorities. So the 21st century history of the Balkans is going to be, to a great extent, the history of the Albanian Question.
I think this will be a two-post series. In the second post, I’ll look at individual countries. In this one, I want to look at just one question: why do the Albanians suddenly matter? Continue reading →
“All religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them”(1)
Hungarian intellectuals are protesting against the owner of the newspaper Magyar Hirlap, after the paper started printing some genuinely shocking anti-semitic opinions. Specifically, its new columnist Zsolt Bayer took it on himself to describe “the Budapest Jewish journalists” as “justification Jews; their mere existence justifies anti-Semitism”. That’s pretty ugly; it doesn’t help that the trope about Budapest Jewish journalists is an old extreme-right standard that reaches back before the Second World War, and which was pulled out of the rhetorical shed, oiled, and sent back out on the track after 1989 to attack the rootless cosmpolitans, etc, who supposedly characterised the revolutionaries.
It doesn’t help that the newspaper involved has had its political line flipped through 180 degrees since 2005, when Gabor Szeles bought the paper and sacked the editorial team, bringing in people like Bayer instead.
Meanwhile, round the corner in Austria, the head of one half of the FPO, Hans-Christian Strache is trying to draw attention to himself by leaping into bed with, ahem, the vice president of the Serbian Radical Party and a bunch of maniacs from Bulgaria. Why for such a mess? It seems he wants to prevent the decline and fall of Europe.
As a patriotically thinking person, I respect anyone who is conscious of their homeland, wherever they come from. Kosovo has seceded against international law. Therefore, I support the Serbs’ just cause in this question and maintain contact with Mr Nikolic, who is as little right-radical as Mr Sidorov. I’m not scared of contagion, quite the contrary. I believe that Europe’s patriot, whether Serbian, Croatian, or French, have recognised one thing; the decline and fall of Europe can only be prevented together. We are heading for a dissolution of the diversity of cultures in the soup of European unity; European patriots have recognised this.
His plans to head off the decline and fall of Europe include having mosques, but only so long as they don’t have minarets or muezzins.
The good news, of course, is that he’s waving his arms from the comfort of political irrelevance.
Okay, Geert Wilders’ movie Fitna is finally online. It was posted sometime yesterday and the English version has already been viewed over two million times. As I write this the Dutch version is at 2.5 million views. Talk about word-to-mouth!
First, the good news. Wilders did not do anything really stupid and really irresponsible like tear up or otherwise damage or deface the Koran. In other words, there is no reason whatsoever why someone should want to kill him or anybody else over this*. Besides, it turns out there already has been more than enough ado about nothing.
The sixteen minute movie is essentially a copy-and-paste job with verses of the Koran followed by images and speeches of violence and hate in the name of Islam. A good thing about the film is that, at the end, Wilders addresses the Muslim community, or his vision of this community, to tackle the problem of Islam-inspired violence. He does not advocate non-Muslim violence against Islam. The problem with Fitna is that its vision of Islam is terribly one-sided and limited. The movie, basically, could have been made by your average blogger. There is some truth in it, but it gets mixed up with a great number of simplified associations and generalizations.
Anyway, these are my first thoughts. I am writing this in the middle of the night and I think I should have another look at the movie when my mind is well-rested. In the meantime I am looking forward to comments from our readers. You can view Fitna at LiveLeak.com (or here in case of high traffic) and embedded below. Francophone readers can click here. For the time being, I’ll post any updates in the comments section.
*Disclaimer: I do not believe anybody should ever be killed or hurt over an expressed opinion. I wrote this with some of the death threats that Wilders has received in mind.
UPDATE: LiveLeak apparently had to nix the flick but you can still watch it HERE or HERE. Threats suck and are so pre-internets. Plus, they give the movie more credit than it deserves. I am providing the mirror links because now it really has become an issue of freedom of speech. And sadly so.
Astonishing therefore that people are really seeing this film as soft. Are we used already to all the violence that is depicted, don’t we think that using lies, distortions and so on is a problem? It is an irresponsible form of abusing the freedom of speech, not only towards Muslims but also with regard to the people who voted for Wilders. I have spoken to some of them in the past and they have put their faith in him as the one who perhaps could solve the problems they experience. What Wilders has done know is behaving like a charlatan who sells rubbish, nonsense and a pack of lies and something that probably will not solve any problem.
I’m working through the frozen conflicts in ascending order of awfulness. Two posts about Transnistria can be found here and here.
So, South Ossetia. Little mountainous region up in the back of the Caucasus. Used to be part of Georgia. Declared independence in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. There was a shooting war for about a year, which left around a thousand people dead, some tens of thousands ethnically cleansed. When it ended, most of South Ossetia had de facto independence, which they’ve maintained since then with strong support from Russia.
Couple of things you need to grasp if you’re going to understand South Ossetia. One is, it’s not very horizontal. It’s all mountains, with just enough flat ground for one modest-sized town. Almost all of it is over 1000 meters up, about a third of it over 2,000 meters.
Two, it’s not that big. There are only around 75,000 people in South Ossetia. In both area and population, it’s the smallest of the frozen conflicts.
Three, it’s poor. Really poor. I mean, Transnistria is one of the poorest corners of Europe, but Transnistria is Switzerland compared to South Ossetia. It’s basically 75,000 people living on rocks. Okay, okay, not rocks, but this is a region whose traditional economy consisted of driving sheep uphill in spring and back down again in autumn. There’s no industry to speak of. About one-third of the state’s income comes from charging tolls on the single highway. South Ossetia doesn’t export much but timber, sheep and people. Well, and there was a big counterfeiting operation making US $100 bills a couple of years back. But anyway, point is, not much there.
The Ossetians themselves are one of those weird Caucasus groups. Their language is distantly related to Persian; the Ossetians are supposedly descended from the Alans, a medieval nomadic people who were vaguely connected to the ancient Scythians. The Alans had a small empire going in the northern Caucasus back in the 12th century, but then they got badly steamrollered by the Mongols. The survivors fled up into the rugged slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, which is where their Ossetian descendants still live today.
That’s why there’s a North and South Ossetia, by the way: two regions are separated by the spine of the Greater Caucasus range. These are some serious mountains — jagged savage peaks that go up three, four, five kilometers. There’s only one road connection between the two Ossetias. It goes through the Roki Tunnel, which was blasted out by Soviet engineers back in the glorious Soviet heyday of blasting big holes in things. The tunnel is at 3,000 meters altitude and 3.8 km long, and it gets closed by snow every winter. When that happens, there is no way over those mountains by land whatsoever, unless you’re a trained Alpinist with a few days to kill. Ossetians like to talk about the essential unity of the Ossetian people, but geography isn’t really working with them.
Okay, so much for the basics. Now an obvious question: why should you, dear reader, care about South Ossetia? Continue reading →
Two weeks ago Denmark was in turmoil because Danish newspapers decided to reprint the infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad after one of their authors had received death threats. And there is another Islam-related crisis brewing. This time in The Netherlands. I’ll give our readers a brief update on the situation.
Yesterday, Dutch Minister for Developing Cooperation Bert Koenders cancelled a working trip to Somalia because his delegation had received “direct threats”. The reason? Dutch MP Geert Wilders is about to release a fifteen minute self-made movie, called Fitna or ‘tribulation’, in which he will attempt to demonstrate that the Koran is “a terrible and fascist book that inspires people to horrible actions and violence.” The release date should be some time this March.
No-one has seen the movie yet, but Wilders already seems to have collected a few death threats himself and yesterday, in a rather unusual move, the Dutch Cabinet officially distanced itself from the movie and thereby from Wilders’ actions. The official stance is that the movie threatens the security of Dutch citizens and the military abroad. Wilders subsequently accused the Cabinet of capitulating to Islam. Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen and CDA PM Pieter van Geel even called on Wilders not to broadcast his movie because “it could affect security and the Dutch economy”. His alleged response: “They can go and screw themselves.” Employers’ organizations have also called on Wilders not to broadcast Fitna. Wientjes, president of the organization VNO-NCW, apparently stated that the business community benefits from a tolerant climate and that Wilders is not contributing to that. There are stories circulating that Dutch airhostesses are now afraid to fly to certain countries, that the Taliban in Afghanistan have announced to take actions against Dutch people and that a number of international business fairs are refusing Dutch entries.
At the same time several parties and MPs are, albeit cautiously, stressing the importance of freedom of expression. More precisely, Femke Halsema from GroenLinks (Left Greens) and Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen. They do point out, however, that Wilders has the moral responsibility to consider if the goal in this case really does justify the means. And both the Justice Minister and the Minister of Domestic Affairs have talked to Wilders warning him about the risks the movie poses to himself and the country.
Personally, I am really getting fed up with people issuing death threats, or worse, just because somebody expressed an opinion they find offensive even when I understand that some people, like Wilders, really seem to be ‘begging for it’. Consciously stirring up resentment under the guise of freedom of expression, by asking to ban the Koran in The Netherlands for example, is idiotic and makes a mockery of that very same freedom. There is a grain of truth in that the Koran is used by some Muslims factions and individuals as an inspiration/excuse for violence, but these problems are extremely complex and are not going to be solved by a simple, cinematographic book burning session. On the contrary. Still, Wilders is no Hitler and as far as I know he has not been inciting violence against Muslims. And, more importantly, the movie has not even been shown yet.
PS: The Dutch phrase “nobody zit echt te wachten op this movie” in this mock trailer means “nobody really cares about this movie”. I also found a fairly recent interview, in two parts, on YouTube in which Wilders talks to FoxNews about his upcoming movie and his views on the Koran and Islam.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Anyway, we’ll see what happens next.
Hopefully, NOT developing…
Update: Last Sunday some eight hundred people took to the streets in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif to protest “the Danish and Dutch insults against Islam”. The demonstrators, mainly students, shouted “death to Denmark” and “death to The Netherlands”, burned flags from both countries and demanded apologies and the punishment (in court) of those who insulted Islam.
“Recently some Dutch and Danish media, influenced by usurping Zionists, have distorted and insulted Islamic sanctities,” said a statement read out in parliament on behalf of lawmakers which was broadcast on state radio.
I suppose “usurping Zionists” is the Iranian version of our “dirty terrorists”? Anyway, for an interesting, and more refreshing, debate among Muslims about this issue and the matter of freedom of speech, you can visit ShiaChat.com. A few quotes:
They are misusing the freedom of expression. They don’t understand the sensitiveness of issues relating to Islam. They have the right to criticise Islam and its Prophet with academic integrity but insulting and caricaturing is utterly disgusting. Danish cartoons and the film by Theo van Gogh was more of an insult than criticism. I don’t know how insulting the new film is but I should also mention one thing – The Muslim reaction on cartoons and film was out of proportion and very childish.
Well, instead of whining, why don’t you make a documentary refuting what was raised on the film – that is the best revenge. Why go about rioting and proving every possible negative stereotype when a educated critique of the film in terms of a point by point refuting of themes in the movie, or a creation of a counter film pointing out inaccuracies.
You will alwyas find these kind of people rioting, burning and creating nuisance and mayhem. It is because they have no way to vent out their accumulated frustrations. I don’t blame them altogether. Those who are above them have the responsibility . They don’t understand that the Frankenstein’s Monster they have created will swallow their own fellow Muslims.
Update 2 (March 5th): Geert Wilders has apparently registered a website for the broadcast of his movie. It – the site but not yet the movie – can be found right here. And we keep on updating. I have removed some text referring to Wilders’ site being hosted in Canada. It turns out the content is officially in the US. And just now I found out that Dutch PM Balkenende, on a visit to Paris today, has asked Sarkozy for support – diplomatic or otherwise – in case all hell breaks loose… just to be on the safe side. The movie’s release appears to be scheduled for March 28th. What is going on here?
[T]he truth is that the birth of Kosovo is also a profound testament of the failure of the nation state form in Europe to accommodate ethnic diversity. As Michael Mann, in an important article on the “Dark Side of Democracy” had noted, modern European history has built in an irrevocable drive towards ethnic homogenisation within the nation state.
In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill had argued, in a text that was to become the bible for separatists all over, including Jinnah and Savarkar, that democracy functions best in a mono-ethnic societies. Lord Acton had replied that a consequence of this belief would be bloodletting and migration on an unprecedented scale; it was more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy. It was this link that Woodrow Wilson elevated to a simple-minded defence of self-determination. The result, as Mann demonstrated with great empirical rigour, was that European nation states, 150 years later, were far more ethnically homogenous than they were in the 19th century; most EU countries were more than 85 per cent mono-ethnic.
Most of this homogeneity was produced by horrendous violence, of which Milosevic’s marauding henchmen were only the latest incarnation. This homogeneity was complicated somewhat by migration from some former colonies. But very few nation states in Europe remained zones where indigenous multi-ethnicity could be accommodated. It is not an accident that states in Europe that still face the challenge of accommodating territorially concentrated multi-ethnicity are most worried about the Kosovo precedent. The EU is an extraordinary experiment in creating a new form of governance; but Europe’s failures with multi-ethnicity may yet be a harbinger of things to come. Kosovo acts as a profound reminder of the failure of the nation state in Europe.
I don’t agree with that conclusion, but he raises an interesting point. Few EU states have much indigenous ethnic diversity left; the ethnic map of Western and Central Europe has been vastly simplified over the last 100 years, and mostly by methods that would not be acceptable today.
A developing story, of course, but the BBC is reporting that the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy recognizing or pledging to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Wikipedia is also quick off the mark with its entry on the now-official flag.
The EU has papered over its differences, with the common foreign and security policy consisting of saying that Kosovo “does not set a precedent,” and then leaving it to member states to decide their own relations with the territory. Spain is the biggest EU country withholding recognition; others in this group include Cyprus and Slovakia (worried about the Hungarian minority, one presumes, and given the approach of one of the parties in the governing coalition they may be right to, though a Köztásaság Kistranzdunaj (Republic of the Little Area Across the Danube) seems silly).
France has got to be a blow, considering it was the most pro-Serbian Western country during the conflict in 1999. If memory serves, some members of the French military were even charged with passing sensitive information to Serbia at about that time. French foreign minister Kouchner said that at some future date, both would be in the European Union together. I’m not sure that helps.
Consequences? Too early for me to say. It may indeed be a one-off, the last in the cascade of the former Yugoslavia.
Regular readers of this blog will already know my position on Kosovar independence: I completely lack enthusiasm for it, but think it’s the least bad solution. It’s been almost nine years since the 1999 war, and pretty much every alternative has been explored at length. The current situation, where Kosovo is run by the UN, has become deeply dysfunctional. Giving Kosovo back to Serbia is not an option.
So what will happen? Well, the Albanians are getting ready for a huge two-day party. The Serbs are divided; it’s pretty clear that President Boris Tadic prefers a policy of dignified inaction, while Prime Minister Kostunica is hinting broadly about something more aggressive. Closing the border? Turning of Kosovo’s lights? We’ll see in a day or two.
As for international recognition: somewhere between 20 and 30 countries are poised to recognize Kosovo pretty quickly, with a larger number inclined to recognize but planning to wait a bit. There’ll probably be a UN Security Council meeting next week, which will lead to much discussion but nothing concrete.
So, unless Serbia does something stupid — which is certainly possible — in the short run, not much will change. In the longer run, well, I’ve used the phrase “Balkan Taiwan” before. It’s not very close; really, Kosovo is unique. But I expect a long war of diplomatic attrition rather than a crisis. Again, we’ll see soon enough.
, by Christopher Clark, pp. 252-3. It’s a good book, about which more anon.