It’s reported today from Belgrade that the government of Serbia intends to ask the IMF for a fairly substantial program loan of around $2 billion (which would be a scaling up of a precautionary $500 million facility already in place). One striking thing about the rationale for the request is the speed in deterioration of prospects that it signifies.
From Geert Mak’s visit to Sarajevo in 1999:
Batinic leans over and looks me straight in the eye. ‘Tell me, Geert, honestly: what kind of people are you sending us anyway? The ones at the top are usually fine. But otherwise, with only a few exceptions, the people I have to deal with are third-class adventurers who would probably have trouble finding a job in their own country.’ It makes him furious. ‘To them, we’re some kind of aboriginals. They think they have to explain what a toilet it, what a television is, and how we should organise a school. The arrogance! They say Bosnians are lazy people, but it takes them a week to do a day’s work. And you should hear them chattering away about it! At the same time, everyone sees how much money they spend on themselves and their position. They put three quarters of all their energy into that.’
Not a new complaint, but pungently put. The classic retort, of course, is that if the local people hadn’t made such a terrible mess of their own country, they wouldn’t need the international aid. Mak’s companion does not spare his fellow Bosnians either.
We order another drink, and Batinic starts complaining about the corruption in Bosnia, the rise of religious leaders in the city, the enthusiastic discussions at the university about ‘the Iranian model’. ‘Sarajevo isn’t Sarajevo any more. The city has filled with runaway farmers…’
Batinic’s pessimism has had the upper hand again for some time now.In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak, p. 806
Describing some events in the last months of 1989:
Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded
In Europe, by Geert Mak, p.718
I’m nearing the end of the book, and it’s living up to my initial impression. More, perhaps, when I’m all the way through.
Former PM of Estonia Mart Laar has an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today; incidentally his bio notes that besides his stints as PM, he was (is?) an economics advisor to the government of Georgia. Anyway, being an opinion piece, he’s pushing his view that bad government policy decisions have played an underestimated role in the economic crisis, and in an age when we’ve seen private sector leaders shown the door far more quickly than top government officials, he has a point. But his view of what constitutes good government policy seems to be amount to whether or not the country had a flat tax. So for instance, he gives his homeland a relatively good grade for its economic condition, compared to Latvia, but then we get the news from Edward today that Estonia turned in the 2nd worst EU growth performance in Q4 last year. But glaring in its absence from his list of European liberalisers is Ireland, and there’s a reason for that.
North and south of the Caucasus mountains:
Azerbaijan’s air force commander was shot and killed as he left his home on the morning of February 11 … Lt-Gen. Rail Rzayev, the head of Azerbaijan’s Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defense Force, was shot in the head as he was sitting in a Mercedes in front of his Baku apartment building. Doctors at a military hospital could not save 64-year-old Rzayev’s life, the Interior Ministry announced. … Rzayev had served as Azerbaijan’s air force commander since 1992, after previously heading Baku’s anti-aircraft defenses. …
Most recently, in December 2008, Rzayev attracted media attention after reports surfaced that Azerbaijani military planes had forced a helicopter carrying Minister of Emergency Situations Kamaladdin Heydarov to land. No official explanations were issued for the incident. Azerbaijani mainstream media outlets, however, reported that Heydarov, arguably the government’s most influential minister, had failed to inform the Anti-Aircraft Defense Forces about his flight, allegedly to his villa in the central Gabala region. …
Lt. Gen. Rzayev was among those Azerbaijani generals who strongly opposed any compromise resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, noted Rauf Mirgadirov, political columnist for the Russian-language daily Zerkalo (The Mirror).
Azerbaijani military politics are murky, to say the least, but this bears watching.
Speaking of murky, the murder of a Chechen in Austria may have some interesting fingerprints on it:
A Chechen refugee killed in Vienna last month was the key witness in an Austrian criminal investigation into Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov that could have led to Kadyrov’s arrest last year, prosecutors and lawyers said Wednesday.
The revelation fuels speculation that the killing of Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard of Kadyrov, was aimed at silencing a vocal critic of the Chechen leadership. Israilov was gunned down on Jan. 13, just four days after The New York Times informed the Russian government that it was planning to publish a report based on interviews with him implicating Kadyrov of murder and torture. …
Israilov last year offered information implicating Kadyrov of torture and murder to a team of lawyers in Austria and Germany, who in turn asked Vienna prosecutors to arrest Kadyrov during an expected visit to Austria for the European football championship, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights said Wednesday. …
Around the same time as the request for the arrest, Austrian police arrested a Chechen man who claimed that he had been sent by Kadyrov to kill Israilov, Der Falter reported Wednesday, citing police records.
Jarosch said the case of the Chechen man was not pursued because Austrian prosecutors believed and still believe that they lack jurisdiction.
Oops. Now that Israilov is dead, Austria may have jurisdiction. At least for one crime.
Prosecutors have arrested seven suspects in Israilov’s death, all ethnic Chechens, and five remain in prison, Jarosch said. He said it was not clear whether the killer was among them.
To extension of freedom of movement to the most recent EU accession states, Bulgaria and Romania. The poster in the photo from this TSR 1 story is interesting. Perhaps the Irish government Yes campaign for the Lisbon 2 referendum should think of ideas like this rather than pictures of politicians, as in the failed first referendum.
Some of us had an early start to the week in Brussels, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing a breakfast meeting of the European Policy Centre in the swanky surroundings of the Conrad Hotel, accompanied both by his new EU chief negotiator, Egemen Bağış, and the outgoing EU negotiator, foreign minister Ali Babacan. It was a significant event, Erdoğan’s first appearance in Brussels since the EU summit of December 2004; he had paved the way with a speech to Turkish immigrants in Hasselt the previous evening, appealing to them to integrate into their new homes, which got rather good coverage in the Belgian press. The audience was generally sympathetic (most Brussels insiders are in favour of Turkish membership of the EU, whatever one may hear from the French and Austrians).
Dick Cheney in Azerbaijan 3 months ago –
And we support the people of Azerbaijan in their efforts, often in the face of great challenges, to strengthen democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, and to build a prosperous, modern, independent country that can serve as a pillar of moderation and stability in this critical part of the world.
Meek US State Department statement issued on a slow news day, 30 December –
We deeply regret Azerbaijan’s decision not to renew the broadcasting licenses of Radio Liberty, Voice of America and the BBC. These media organizations play a crucial role in supporting democratic debate and the free exchange of ideas and information. This decision, if carried out, will represent a serious setback to freedom of speech, and retard democratic reform in Azerbaijan.
We remain committed to working with the government of Azerbaijan to find the proper legal framework within which these radio and TV broadcasts can continue.
This came just over a week after the USA had made Azerbaijan eligible for tariff concessions on its exports to the USA — the kind of thing that can be revoked from African countries if they are judged to have regressed on political pluralism. It’s as if there’s something special about Azerbaijan that trumps such concerns.
That’s the difficult choice which faced Hungary as its international support package was put together in the last couple of weeks. One thing that happens between the initial announcement that a package has been agreed and its final endorsement by the International Monetary Fund’s board is that we get to find out a lot more about the specifics of what has been agreed.
The Nation has a cracking, snarky and sharply reported, story out about Rick Davies (John McCain’s campaign manager) and his role in the run-up to Montenegrin independence. Read the whole thing, as they say. What struck me about it was first that AFOE had a damn good little controversy of its own about the same issue, and secondly that the slightly larger controversy – whether Montenegrin independence was at all legitimate, or part of a devious anti-Russian plot orchestrated by the liberal hegemony – now looks very silly. After all, our own dear trolls were very keen to denounce it as a CIA plot against all that was holy, cos of Kosovo and stuff; but it turns out that Davies, in his role as spin doctor for Milo Djukanovic’s campaign, was being lavishly funded by….Russia.
You know, that Russia – big place, with bears, space rockets, birch trees, vodka, pan-Slavic brotherhood, yes? Hilariously, it looks like Davies had the support of Henry Kissinger and at least one Rothschild in this exercise, to say nothing of the aluminium king Oleg Deripaska, new owner of Montenegro’s huge lossmaking bauxite smelter, which you’ll have met in these pages before. It’s as if all the far-left stereotypes about the Balkans were true; but just on the other side. Of course, there’s something of a history of dodgy Russian money and rightwing Republicans when it comes to the Balkans, but that was far more closely associated with Tom DeLay.
As a bonus, the Nation piece is the answer to the question “What is Mark Ames doing with himself these days after The Exile?”