Category Archives: Terrorism

When airport security is part of the problem

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A bizarre story from Dublin.  Short version: A Slovak agency was running a covert security check at an airport, which is presumably Bratislava.  The test involves planting explosive materials in the bags of unsuspecting passengers.  8 packages in total.  7 found.  One made it on to a plane to Dublin, and was brought home by the Slovak migrant who now lives there.  Apparently this was 3 days ago.  It’s not clear whether embarassment or delay in figuring out what had happened got us to today, when Irish police located the explosives and presumably various diplomatic notes are now being exchanged.  The timing suggests that the test was run into response to the Detroit bomb.  One wonders how much of this stuff goes on — perhaps the “someone must have put it there” excuse needs more credibility.

UPDATE: Initial word was sent by telex to the baggage handlers and not the Dublin airport authority.  Who uses telex anymore?

German election roundup

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The last lot of German polls are out, showing a modest recovery for the SPD but nothing strategically epic. However, some polls have shown enough recovery to put some pressure on the FDP’s calculations. We’re in the realm of statistical noise here.

It’s quite surprising just how dull the campaign has been – the main parties essentially arguing that they won’t drop the ball, although they’d be happy with some more votes for their faintly more radical partners. I’m sticking with my prediction that the SPD will pick up a bit more and that then we’ll go into Klausur with the other parties; whatever happens, don’t bet against Angela Merkel as a committee politician. This is despite the economic crisis, and more recently, the Kunduz air raid, which even induced the chancellor to refer to “war”.

It’s not as if nothing is happening; a senior Green resigns over sensational videos of the party’s co-leader. Sensational videos of Renate Künast fishing, that is. This is a resigning matter, but not for her.

As far as the German engagement in Afghanistan goes, there is a row going on about the idea of paying for the training and deployment of 2,500 extra Afghan soldiers in the German sector. This has resulted in a very unusual outbreak of harmony between the CSU and the Greens, both of whom think it’s a good idea; but the government much less so. This wraps into the row between the US and Germany about the Kunduz incident, which seems to be on hold until after the election, just as any decisions about strategy or tactics are.

In fact, all the decisions are. It feels like the current European way; elections without decisions.

Greek journalist sued for writings on Bosnia

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Via Marko Hoare’s blog, here’s an unhappy story about Greek journalist Takis Michas. A few years back, Michas wrote a book about the links between Greece and the Bosnian war — Greek support for Milosevic and Karadzic, Greek volunteers going to fight for the Serb side in Bosnia, and so forth.

Well, now he’s being sued by a Greek veteran of the Bosnian war. The lawsuit seems pretty dubious; the volunteer is claiming that he’s been libelled because Michas described the Greek volunteers as “paramilitaries” who took part in the Srebrenica massacre when (the volunteer says) they were in fact members in good standing of the Serb Bosnian army who just happened to be in Srebrenica around that time. The suit is being funded by something called the “Panhellenic Macedonian Front”, which is an umbrella group for a variety of extreme nationalists. A short interview with Michas, discussing the lawsuit, can be found here: Continue reading →

Russian journalist killed in Chechnya

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This woman may have had the most dangerous job in the world:

A prominent Russian human rights activist has been found dead hours after being kidnapped in the North Caucasus region.

Natalya Estemirova worked for Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest human rights organizations. She was bundled into a car early on July 15 as she left her home in the Chechen capital, Grozny, her Memorial colleague Aleksandr Cherkasov said.

[...]

Estemirova was a lawyer who documented abductions, torture, and other human rights abuses in Chechnya. She worked with reporters, including murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and other human rights groups.

Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said Estemirova’s work was vital to uncovering abuses in Chechnya. She said Estemirova “was one of the main people who documented the most terrible crimes during the second Chechen war: torture, extrajudicial executions, abductions.

“Natasha has until now remained one of the few people who have continued reporting crimes perpetrated by forces controlled by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.”

[...]

Estemirova was awarded the first Anna Politkovskaya Prize in 2007 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Speaking to RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service shortly after, she said the authorities were doing nothing to investigate abuses documented by Memorial.

“Changes have happened, changes for the worse. As far as human rights go, it is worse because, first of all, nothing has been done to investigate the crimes that have been committed in Chechnya since 2000,” Estemirova said.

[...]

Estemirova is the latest of many prominent Kremlin critics to have been killed in what human rights groups say is an atmosphere of impunity. Lawyer Stanislav Markelov, another of those to have worked with Estemirova, was gunned down on a Moscow street in January.

Dangerous jobs: being a human rights investigator, human rights lawyer, or investigative journalist in Russia. Really dangerous jobs: being a human rights investigator in Chechnya.
Continue reading →

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 →

Ingushetia, boom

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So someone tried to blow up Yunus-Bek Yevkorov last week. Almost got him, too: they seem to have killed several members of his entourage, including his cousin, and Yevkorov himself is currently in a Moscow hospital with burns and a ruptured liver. He’s expected to live, though.

We wrote about Mr. Yevkorov a few months ago:

Yevkurov was appointed by Moscow late last year to replace the notoriously corrupt, unpopular, and none-too-competent incumbent. The timing was interesting: just a couple of months after the Georgia conflict. Ingushetia is next door to South Ossetia and just a short drive from Georgia. In retrospect it looks like Moscow decided it could no longer afford to have a loyal-but-hated tool running things in this strategic region, and decided to appoint the most plausible possible Ingush instead.

It’s damnably difficult to get straight news out of Ingushetia — the Russian authorities don’t encourage foreign journalists, while the local government is oppressive and pretty paranoid — but it looks like Yevkurov is trying to make a go of it. He’s much more popular than his predecessor (not hard), and he seems to be peripatetically competent.

Other than the President getting blown up? Not a lot has changed since then. Until last week, Yevkurov was still trying to set things right. And he was still severely handicapped by a moribund local economy — Ingushetia is the poorest republic in Russia; it produces, basically, nothing — and Moscow’s insistence on using federal security forces, who are universally feared and loathed, to “help” the situation there. Continue reading →

Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”

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I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…

Resistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such thought, and another would be a slightly eccentric, neo-Platonist rant with overtones of Ian Buruma’s notion of Occidentalism.

Well, that sounds fun, doesn’t it? Then you have to add in Crooke’s career; the book glosses him as an advisor to the European Commission on the Middle East, but makes absolutely no mention of his term as SIS station chief in Tel Aviv, in which role he negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which lasted until an unfortunate air raid resulted in the deaths of a round dozen civilians and not the Hamas man the Israelis were after. (The story is here.)

The war resumed, and Crooke was recalled; officially this was for “security reasons”, but if anything imperilled his security it was probably that after the event, the Israeli tabloids discovered his job title, identity, and photograph with un-mysterious suddenness. He eventually fetched up in Beirut, running a thinktank called the Conflicts Forum, devoted to contact between Western powers and Islamists. (Time was, it would have been a nightclub, but we live in fallen times.)

So, what upshot? Crooke makes a strong case for modern Islamism as a classical reaction to colonialism and modernisation, or rather an interwar vision of modernity. He relies on an impressive battery of reading ranging into cultural Marxism at one end and into hardcore conservatism at the other. More controversially, he tries to place Islamism since the 1950s in a context of rebellion against free-market economics drawn from Naomi Klein; but the Ba’athist and similar regimes hardly qualify as Friedmanites, with their nationalised oil companies, state military industries, and extensive Soviet influence in administration, secret policing, and military doctrine and structure.

He draws on a battery of confidential interviews, which are some of the most interesting things in the book, to illuminate current ideas and practice, specifically among Hezbollah thinkers. Notably, they argue, the Caliphate should now be seen as a world-wide network of loosely interconnected “communities of resistance”, rather than a state or any other kind of hierarchical organisation. The aim of these is to uphold the practice of an ideal, self-organising community of believers against a total onslaught by the forces of liberalism, which wishes us all to be atomised individuals.

In practice, this demands a sort of liberation theology/community-organising/vaguely anarchist drive to create base groups everywhere, drawn together by the practice of mutual aid and the study of critical texts, and if necessary to form the underground shadow-administration common to all good guerrilla armies.

Crooke is interesting on the military implications of this, but I think what he describes is less original than he suggests. Flat, highly networked command structures, with a high degree of autonomy down to the squad and the individual, are not characteristic of Islamic or Islamist warfare; what he is describing here sounds a lot like Auftragstaktik. Also, he describes the requirements of a Hezbollah leader as integrity, authenticity, reliability, personal charisma, and ability to mobilise others; would anyone at all disagree?

There is an interesting side-trip into Islamist economic ideas. He criticises Westeners who assume that the main aim of these is to find technical workarounds to make the normal course of business sharia-compliant; apparently the real thing is considerably better. However, a lot of it (as described here) consists of accepting a market economy but not letting money be the be-all and end-all of everything, etc, etc; in practice, this seems to mean a welfare state. No surprise, then, that one of the thinkers he quotes had to write an entire book to rebut the charge that his ideas were indistinguishable from European social democracy.

According to Crooke, the main distinction is in the field of monetary economics; but, in so far as his writing is a true misrepresentation of it, it seems to be distinct in a way which isn’t particularly original. Apparently, Islamist economists are very exercised about M3 broad money growth, on the grounds that this represents the growth of credit in a fractional-reserve banking system and that this is the root of the evils of capitalism. Instead, they are keen on…the gold standard, that most free-trade imperialist of economic institutions!

At this point you might want to halt briefly; Islamist Auftragstaktik applied to community organising? The Caliphate in terms suited to Clay Shirky? Dear God, Islamist monetarist gold bugs? Phew! And you could, perhaps, take comfort from the thought that however strange Iranian political thought may be, their economic thought is no stranger than Fraser Nelson’s or Jude Wanniski’s. Placing an upper bound on the strangeness, after all, is probably an important step towards international understanding.

Then we get into the second book. Crooke is always quoting Plato, specifically the apposition between the port and the city; he attacks Karl Popper, and uses a great deal of Horkheimer and John Gray. It is fair to say he accepts entirely the complex of critiques that argue that life is meaningless without a higher purpose usually decided by higher people, that the freedom offered by liberalism is no such thing, that trade (or commerce, or industry) is “mere”; it is harder to say whether he accepts this for the sake of argument, as much of the Islamist thinking he is discussing bases itself on these ideas.

And there is a valid argument that a lot of it claims to represent the up-side of such critiques – the need for a self-empowered, cohesive community, the problems of the free market – but might just as well be the downside. The economy should be directed, at a national level, towards certain “great concepts”; this could be post-war French indicative planning, and might well be, having been written in the 1950s – or it could be a Straussian exercise in National Greatness Conservatism. We should work and care for society; or is it, as one of Crooke’s interviewees says, that “life is not worth living without something worth dying for”?

None of this stuff about “false reconciliation” and “self-pacifying”, materialism, etc, etc, answers E. P. Thompson’s classic attack on “theories that assume that ordinary people are bloody silly“, either. Strangely enough, towards the end of the book, we have a sudden swerve back towards liberalism; freedom is not so bad after all, it turns out, compared with a neoconservatism informed by Leo Strauss.

Curiously, I left the book with a feeling that it had set out to make right-wing Americans feel closer to political Shi’ism.

Rio to Paris

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As media furiously refrain from speculating, it’s odd to be hoping that a lightning strike, an electrical malfunction, or some combination of both was responsible for the crash of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean last night while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Because there aren’t a whole lot of other possibilities that don’t involve explosions.

While flying between the two cities is far, far safer than driving regularly in either of them, the stratosphere is an unforgiving environment, and the possibility of deliberate harm is also still out there. A sad day for both countries.

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.