Category Archives: Transition and accession

A bit of Balkan kabuki

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The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.

Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?

Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a commander in the Croatian Army during their war against the Serbs. Then, after that, he was chief of staff of the Kosovar Liberation Army during the 1999 Kosovo War. Later, he was Prime Minister of Kosovo. He’s sort of retired now, or at least politically in eclipse, but he’s still one of the most important political figures in Kosovo.

The Serbs say he’s a war criminal. They have indictments against him for various horrible acts, including genocide. They tried him in absentia for some of them, back in 2002, and convicted him to 20 years in prison. They’ve managed to get an Interpol warrant for his arrest. So, Interpol member states are supposed to assist in capturing Ceku and, if necessary, extradite him to Serbia.

There have been several attempts to do this. None have yet succeeded. The most recent was last week, when Ceku visited Bulgaria. He was stopped at the border, then detained, while a Bulgarian court considered whether to hand him over to Serbia. After a couple of days the Bulgarians decided no, they weren’t going to do that, and Ceku went free. The Serbian government has expressed outrage, outrage! Ceku is still in Bulgaria but should be heading back to Serbia soon.

So why should anyone care? Continue reading →

Is something stirring in Belarus?

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It’s probably getting lost with so much other news but it’s been an interesting few weeks for Belarus.  For a country that always seemed just a WMD allegation from being another axis of evil country under George Bush, perhaps the experience of more constructive interrnational relations is a bit disorienting.  Yet here we have the IMF actually praising the country’s economic management and specifically its move to a more flexible exchange rate regime (hint hint Baltics?), a friendly reception for an EU delegation, and growing signs that Belarus is moving to a more contentious Ukraine style relationship with Russia, at least as far as Gazprom is concerned.  Although the Belarus row with Russia over gas can be settled for a lot less cash than Ukraine will need to do the same.   Now of course it could just be President Alexander Lukashenko’s realisation that the strategy of being a Moscow-allied strongman has run out of steam.  But for a country that even a year ago looked stuck in a geopolitical rut, it’s evidence that things can change.

Iranian elections, with SCIENCE

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Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count – an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad doesn’t correlate with anything – as if the uniform national swing beloved of psephologists was real, or for that matter, as if someone had simply shifted the numbers across the board. For comparison, he ran the same exercise for the 2005 German elections, which shows a wide scatter of points with a concentration of big CDU leads in the south.

Then, however, comes the genuinely scientific bit. What would Benford’s law, the principle that in most data sets there is a large excess of numbers that begin with low digits, and that therefore fake data can be identified by its divergence from this, make of it? (The data, by the way, is available here.) Well…it turns out that the results pass the Benford test, which may mean that they are honest or possibly that the Iranian Ministry of the Interior reads blogs, too.

Not Exactly a United Opposition

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The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more fronts, one reason why they, collectively, do not appear quite ready for prime time.

Here’s one theme, what role foreign embassies to Georgia should play in the confrontation between the opposition and the ruling party:

Nino Burjanadze, leader of Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, called on foreign diplomats accredited in Tbilisi to react and condemn “illegal actions” taken by the authorities… (Civil.ge, May 21)

Levan Gachechiladze, an opposition politician, called on the western diplomats to give up “indifferent stance” and make “concrete statements” about the crisis in Georgia, instead of only repeating “one word – ‘dialogue’.” (Civil.ge, May 29)

…Opposition leaders said foreign diplomats should not involve themselves in internal politics.

“This is considered as interference in domestic political processes, which they are not entitled to do,” said Salome Zurabishvili, Georgia’s former foreign minister and the leader of the Georgia’s Way Party, according to the Interfax news agency. (New York Times, June 15)

Maybe this is why Napoleon preferred to be opposed by coalitions?

Struggling for the positives

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Usually when an IMF mission issues a departing statement, it’s along the lines of thanking everyone for their hospitality and generally sounding positive about the scope for progress even when circumstances aren’t that great  Not so the just issued statement after the latest visit to Moscow.  It quickly gets to blunt criticism of the government for: lack of clear policy on domestic banking crisis, mismanagement of capital inflows and the exchange rate, botched fiscal stimulus, backtracking on WTO Accession, and in a nod to a favourite topic of our own Edward –

The urgency of advancing reforms is heightened by adverse demographic factors, which are leading to a contraction in the labor supply.

It’s probably hard to get the government to focus on declining labor supply as a problem when they are more focused on unemployment.  But in fact, part of the Fund’s exasperation with Russia may reflect the collateral damage the crisis is already inflicting on its CIS neighbours, which provide a critical part of the Russian labour force.  The decline in remittances to these countries is causing major problems (see pages 24-28) – in fact, the problems look much worse than the more talked about impact of the Arab Gulf slowdown on South Asia.   Overall, the tone of IMF-Russia dialogue sounds like a case of an important country that isn’t planning on needing a Fund program but the Fund views as too important to be left entirely to its own devices.

A Dirty Europeanism from Beneath

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I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN Security Council created one of the world’s most effective criminal networks by trying to deny the former Yugoslavia cigarettes, and much more.

Some points that stand out:

1 – Networks

A common trend in all the criminal systems Glenny covers is a shift from hierarchical structures to decentralised ones; the four dons who controlled the Bombay underworld up to the late 1980s are replaced by a shifting confederation, mostly independent, vaguely loyal to Dawood Ibrahim in his Dubai fastness. The traditional prison gang hierarchies of Russia and South Africa are replaced by flat networks of crooks. The multi-criminal smuggling route through the Balkans, once authorised and taxed by the Bulgarian secret police, warps into a complicated weave of different ones open to every thug in southeastern Europe.

2 – The Great Shift

Everywhere Glenny went, both cops and thieves always said the same thing in the same way; in the early 1990s, they were in control and then “something odd happened”. New forms of crime; new actors; new communities; new drugs. Similarly, traditions and habits that kept things roughly in limits and facilitated both illicit and licit business were suddenly torn apart. Grand old yakuza chiefs were murdered in their beds; the harbour suddenly filled with shiny speed boats with unusually deep and thoroughly reinforced cockpits. And wham! Nothing was normal ever again.

3 – Fake Police and Police Fakes

So much of this proliferating mayhem was driven by the people who were meant to oppose it. In Russia and Eastern Europe, a major force was the sheer number of spooks and wrestlers looking for a job, and for that matter, the existing smuggling systems set up by people like East German STASI Colonel Alexander von Schalck-Golodkowski to raise hard currency. But even more important were the strategic decisions taken by world powers, which often created the legal barriers around which criminal profit grew. The economic blockade on the former Yugoslavia was one; the drugs war another.

4 – Complicity

The great spree would never have been possible if so many people hadn’t been customers, to say nothing of direct corruption. Japanese banks, during the great bubble, were delighted to cooperate with yakuza thugs; the tobacco industry saw nothing at all unusual in shipping absurd quantities of cigarettes to tiny Swiss cantons, from where they were re-exported on ex-Soviet cargo aircraft that invariably needed to make refuelling stops in Montenegro, during which the ciggies and the export papers vanished. The cigarettes crossed the Adriatic in wild-arsed powerboats into the hands of the newest Italian mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia, and went from there to everywhere in Europe. The aircraft went on to the ex-Soviet Union, to Slovakia’s ZTS-Osos and Bulgaria’s KINTEX arsenals, and brought back arms for the Balkan wars, bought with the government’s share of the profits.

Similarly, the iconic European industrial achievement, GSM, used huge quantities of rare minerals from central Africa and the ex-Soviet Union, which arrived on some of the same aircraft, backloaded from further arms shipments after the Balkan wars were over and the region became an arms exporter again. It’s worth remembering that the secret police of Yugoslavia were well aware of arms dealing, having been a big exporter before the Balkan wars. And, more broadly, millions used prostitutes, smoked dodgy cigarettes, and took cocaine.

5 – The Boss Fallacy

So many cops Glenny quotes had the same experience; they finally caught the Big Boss, but everything got worse afterwards. Once the old sheikh was nailed, they expected the crime rate to fall, but instead something odd happened; all hell broke loose. It wasn’t just that the crooks fought among themselves, which the cops usually welcomed. It was that they competed harder, and that the rules and traditions and habits that usually constrained them were torn away with the traditional hierarchy. Suddenly there were no rules, or rather, there was a savage fight to set the new ones.

And killing the hierarchy changed things more subtly. The structure of the underworld changed; it became decentralised, federal, anarchist. The old hierarchies were repurposed to legitimise the new gangs, which meant that their mythos of leadership and of terror could be extended to anyone whose outfit joined the confederation. Arguably, the new structures were not just more survivable but more efficient and more scalable than the old ones.
On the other hand…

Looking across this shady landscape, though, there are some bright spots. There is something inspiring about the vigour of it all, the refusal to listen to the government, the company, the Big Don, or any other authority. The European Union was very keen to talk revolution in the East, much less to open the doors. But long before they were opened in 2004, unofficial Europe was working hard. And, in fact, it had been at it for years; Ameisenhändler at the Bahnhof Zoo, gastarbeiter from Yugoslavia working all over the continent, InterRailers, university system administrators hooking up X.25 and IP links. I remember that one day in 1995, cheap smokes and Czech lager and high-powered German fireworks suddenly arrived in our valley in the Yorkshire Dales, sold weekly in one of our local pubs. The bus route from Leeds to Osnabrück, a subsidised liberty-bus for BAOR soldiers, was also a clubber-transfer link before the arrival of EasyJet.

Practical Europe, of a sort. Crime is nothing if not practical. One of the telling things about McMafia, as it applies to Europe, is just what a society Europe could have been in the last 15 years with a little more courage early on. And we did pretty well anyway.

Ten years since the bombs started falling

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On Serbia. Or, as it was then, Yugoslavia.

The Kosovo War has been debated, God knows, enough times. Still, a couple of things. One is this interesting article from the always-worth-reading Nenad Pejic. (Favorite line: “the official speeches spend all their time remembering that Serbia was bombed but never mention why Serbia was bombed.”) This bit was particularly interesting IMO:

Mladic remains at large and Serbia remains in denial about the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Schoolchildren are taught about crimes committed against Serbs, but not about crimes committed by Serbs. This policy of denial has created an alarming situation among young Serbs. A 2007 poll of youths found that more than 30 percent say “there is no need” to be acquainted with ethnic Albanians. Fifty percent think the Cyrillic alphabet should be given preference to the Latin alphabet. Twenty-five percent “cannot imagine” having sex with a member of another ethnic group, and 20 percent expressed a desire to live in an ethnically pure state. It is unlikely these figures have improved since the poll was taken.

To be fair, I should say it is likely the responses would be similar among ethnic-Albanian youths in Kosovo. I shudder to think what these attitudes mean for the region when this generation takes over political power.

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Warm Up Acts

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On April 9, 1989, Soviet troops put down a demonstration in Tbilisi calling for the restoration of Georgian independence. As Thomas Goltz puts it in Georgia Diary:

This time, however, the local garrison of Soviet army conscripts usually called upon to maintain order was replaced by paratroopers, and when they moved against the sea of unarmed protestors, their weapons of choice and coercion were shovels. Nineteen protestors were bludgeoned to death, and many more seriously injured.

For the 20th anniversary, the opposition is making a substantial push to oust president Sakaashvili, whose term would otherwise run through 2013.

In general, transition countries are better served if governments and high officials are only turned out of office by legal and constitutional means. It took the Slovaks some time to get rid of Meciar, and the Romanians to get rid of Iliescu, but their institutions are stronger for having done so within the regular framework of the state.

On the other hand, the war with Russia last year was a colossal blunder on the part of Saakashvili’s government, the kind that would bring down a leader in a purely parliamentary system. Further, more post-communist states started out with reasonably strong presidencies than ended up with them. Poland, for example, initially gave the president strong powers and in particular the right of co-determination of crucial ministries such as defense and foreign affairs. (This led to several crises during Lech Walesa’s time in office.) In general, the trend across Central and Eastern Europe has been for increasingly assertive parliaments to erode the powers of the presidents. That tendency would also argue for parliament to work on sidelining Saakashvili.

The president and his allies, who still command a majority in parliament, are not about to stand down. And the opposition is working to heat things up. I’m skeptical that Georgia will see a change of government in the next month, but the political temperature is definitely rising.

Good local coverage in English is at Civil.ge. [Update: Their site does not seem to play nicely with Firefox.]
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Here Hare Here

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To the National Theatre for David Hare’s one-man show on Berlin. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. Quite simply, it was embarrassingly, exasperatingly awful.

Hare, in person, is a fan of the southern English amateur/eccentric shtick. He makes much play of not knowing his way around despite having regularly visited Berlin, as he tells us with monotonous regularity, since the early 1970s. Couldn’t he get a map? Or learn some German? But it’s crucial to the amateur/eccentric thing that your put-on ignorance isn’t read to affect your status. In fact, it wouldn’t work if it didn’t sit over a vast pool of arrogance and self-satisfaction; pretending to be a buffoon is a luxury for those who don’t have to worry about being believed.

Self-satisfaction. Yes, there is a lot of this. We hear a hell of a lot about his brilliant friends, that some of them are French government ministers, that he gets free tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic. He works through a repertoire of annoying gestures under his Michael Heseltine hairdo. And so much about buying property. Yes, now. Yes, from a well-known Marxist. But it wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the content.

Berlin was the centre of the confrontations of the 20th century. Hitler, then Stalin. Wall. Wall gone. Nobody wants to talk about it – imagine! The RAF bombed it a lot. The Nazis had several million Jews murdered. There are lots of new buildings, and some of them are not to his taste. But now it’s full of young Europeans who appear to be having fun. People tend to leave home and go there and find ways of life that their parents don’t understand (how does this differ from, say, San Francisco or Bombay?) The bastards.

Gripping stuff, eh. There was worse, though – a succession of tiresome jokes about pompous and patriotic Frenchmen, bureaucratic Germans, ignorant Brits, some truly weird politics, and some observations about Berlin scenes that were factually impossible. We got a lot of stuff about Tempelhof airport without hearing that he can’t always fly there, as he claims, because it’s been shut for three months. The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is apparently a huge domineering building, rather like the Comedie Francaise, and it stands opposite a giant shopping mall.

None of these statements are true; I’ve been there, although like Hare I’ve never been to a play there. I don’t know if the comparison with the Comedie Francaise is valid. The theatre, for what it’s worth, is not at all huge and is situated discreetly behind trees. Am Schiffbauerdamm is a quiet river embankment – the name means “On the Shipbuilders’ River Embankment” which ought to be a clue, but then, Hare’s German is atrocious – with some nice restaurants, but which faces towards the huge railway viaduct that carries both the great east-west main lines and the S-Bahn through the city centre. (Hey, look at the overhead imagery.) In fact, the railway station the theatre looks across to (Friedrichstraße) was once the major crossing point between West and East Berlin, and far from a shopping mall, part of the station was once the border-control checkpoint known as the Hall of Tears (Tränenhalle).

Hare goes for a walk down what he refers to as the Ost-West Achse in the Tiergarten. Well, it’s been called the Straße des 17 Juni since 1953, which is quite important. When he comes to discuss the building of the wall, he attacks Prime Minister Harold MacMillan for not “calling for insurrection in the East”. The street name should have set him sensible. There was an insurrection in the East, on the 17th of June, 1953, when the workers of East Germany rebelled against what called itself the Socialist Nation of Workers and Peasants, the police vanished, the Party network vanished, and Walter Ulbricht’s government called the Red Army and the KGB in to save themselves. The rebels were crushed under the T-34 tracks, in some places literally. After that, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the CIA dreams of “rollback” (very popular with Joe McCarthy) were definitively consigned to the archive. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961, this extended beyond Europe.

What could MacMillan have achieved with this calling-for? Quite a few East German policemen and soldiers deserted rather than build the wall, but they had plenty more. The ones who did didn’t need any speeches on the radio, and one wonders if speeches would have moved the others. As Carlo Levi said about southern Italy under Mussolini, all that came from Rome were speeches on the radio, and the only thing MacMillan could have offered would have been speeches on the radio.

He could probably have got more people locked up or shot, in the best-case scenario. In the worst case, well – this was 1961, when worst-case scenarios were worse. During the Cuban crisis a year later, MacMillan and his defence secretary Peter Thorneycroft kept the leaders of RAF Bomber Command on a short leash, refusing to let them disperse the V-Bomber force for security because this would be an unmistakably provocative gesture, on bases several flying hours closer to Moscow than those of Strategic Air Command.

Hare is a long-time unilateral nuclear disarmer and pacifist. Does he really believe that what the international scene of 1961 needed was more provocation of a superpower by a major nuclear power? What on earth is he on about?

There is a broader issue here; the phrase “to call for” repels me more and more. Its function is to get you out of responsibility for your opinions. I didn’t want war – I merely called for solidarity with the US in fighting terrorism. It also acts as a way of escaping the healthy discipline of detail. It is telling that it is fashionable with the neoconservatives, the Decents, and the hard left all at once – all the retailers of the goods dream-hungry youth demand, according to Leszek Kolakowski.

I call for action on Darfur! But I say nothing of the mountainous problems of projecting force into the roadless and railless interior of western Sudan, nothing of whose infantry are to actually go and get killed there, nothing of who exactly they are meant to kill or threaten effectively to kill, or for what aims. I just called for. Let’s decommission this phrase, like a worn-out nuclear power station – switch it off gracefully, sever the lines and fill the damn thing with concrete, and watch it carefully for a hundred years to see nothing leaks out.

For a slightly more constructive critique, my partner suggested Hare retitle the show as being “Meditations on Flight No…” where the number is the BA flight from London to Tegel. She’s right – everything about it that wasn’t obvious, trivial, or simply wrong was more interesting as an account of international art-bureaucrat culture than of Berlin, or London.

Euro 2012 to be funded by Arab states of the Gulf?

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Has the global financial crisis crossed yet another threshold with indications that the financing of the Euro 2012 Championship could be imperilled?  The successful joint bid of Poland and Ukraine looked on one hand like a smart move to recognize the eastern European fan bases but on the other like a gamble given all the costs that the tournament brings, not least in stadium upgrades.   And with money tight for everything, money for football was perhaps going to be a tough sell.   Hence this interesting Polish courtship of Kuwait –

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