Author Archives: Douglas Muir

About Douglas Muir

American with an Irish passport. Does development work for a big international donor. Has been living in Eastern Europe for the last six years -- first Serbia, then Romania, and now Armenia. Calls himself a Burkean conservative, which would be a liberal in Germany but an unhappy ex-Republican turned Democrat in the US. Husband of Claudia. Parent of Alan, David, Jacob and Leah. Likes birds. Writes Halfway Down The Danube. Writes Halfway Down The Danube.

Frozen Conflicts 3: Welcome to South Ossetia

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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 →

Blogroll bleg

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We’re looking for a few good blogs.

If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed our blogroll is changing. We haven’t cleaned it in a while, and link rot has set in — some blogs have stopped posting, some have moved, some just aren’t around any more.

Cleaning the links is the first step. The second is to find exciting! new! blogs to add to the roster. For this, we could use your help.

So: we’re looking for interesting blogs about matters European. Cast your nets wide, readers — we’d rather have too many links than too few.

For your convenience, our categories are listed below the fold. Continue reading →

In which forms are carefully observed

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Via Unzipped — who is rapidly emerging as the go-to blog for stuff about the current situation here in Armenia — I see that four opposition Members of Parliament are being stripped of their immunity so that they can be prosecuted. For, you know, supporting that coup attempt. You know. The coup attempt.

There are all sorts of funky wrinkles to the situation. Like the border incident with Azerbaijan yesterday. The Azeris trying to probe for weakness at a time of crisis? Or the Armenian government trying to distract people with a foreign enemy? Who knows? — Or the luxury store downtown owned by a prominent local oligarch, friendly to the government, that was looted during the (brief) rioting. Attacked because he was a friend of the government? Or is it true that all his staff evacuated hours before, leaving the store a provocatively tempting target? And the crackdown: was it done by President Kocharian just to crush the opposition, or was it more of a poisoned gift to his successor-elect? Once you start thinking in terms of agents provocateurs and double motives, suddenly it’s all a hall of mirrors.

Anyway. Yerevan is about 95% back to normal. Some armed soldiers hanging around at major intersections, and that’s about it. Shops are open, streets are busy. Some newspapers have disappeared from the stands — the state of emergency has shut down opposition papers — but you have to look twice to spot it. I’d like to say there’s a strange underlying vibe but maybe I’m just not sensitive enough. Of course, if you talk to people individually… well, even people who supported the government are pretty rattled.

It’s hard to say where this is going, but I’m still inclined to bet “status quo”.

A quiet Sunday in Yerevan

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Walked into central Yerevan today.

For those of you who haven’t been following this story: for the last two weeks, tens of thousands of Armenians have been turning out to protest the results of the recent Presidential election. The ruling party’s candidate supposedly won in a landslide, but there’s reason to think the elections were stolen. Yesterday morning, the government ran out of patience, declared a “state of emergency”, and sent a wave hundreds of police into the streets, followed by a second wave of soldiers. There are reliable reports of eight people dead and perhaps a hundred injured.

But that was yesterday. Last night Levon Ter-Petrosian, the losing presidential candidate, issued a statement asking his supporters to stand down. Today…
Continue reading →

Kosovo, this and that

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Random Kosovo/Serbia stuff from the last few days.

First, an interesting Indian perspective on Kosovo:

[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.

Second, a nice piece of snark about last weeks Belgrade riots from the inimitable Eric Gordy.
Continue reading →

Armenia’s dubious election

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So Armenia had a Presidential election last week. Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian — the establishment candidate — won in the first round, supposedly with 53% of the vote.

I’m not much of a prognosticator. I do it sometimes, but I’m not very good at it. Still, here it is: two weeks before the election I made this comment on my home blog:

Armenia’s Presidential election is on Tuesday. I’ve hardly blogged about this, because it’s pretty much a done deal — the ruling party controls all media, has a massive machine in place, and is ready and willing to stuff ballot boxes and juggle numbers if necessary. My prediction: Serzh, the establishment candidate whose ugly face has been everywhere for the last few weeks, will win in the first round by 55%.

I was off by 2%. Amusing bit of trivia: apparently Serzh’s supposed percentage was just .01% different from the winning percentage of President Saakashivili in neighboring Georgia, just a month ago. 53%, boys — just enough so nobody can ask for a recount. More than that looks greedy!

So what does it mean? Continue reading →

Communist takeover in Cyprus!

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Well, okay — they just elected a Communist as their President.

And AKEL, Cyprus’ sort-of Communist Party, isn’t exactly a bunch of ragged proletarians. Excepting some fiery rhetoric, a tendency to wave red flags, and a proliferation of pictures of Che, it’s not too different from a standard European party of the left. AKEL supporters range from headscarf-wearing grandmothers to latte-sipping yuppies. New President Dimitris Christofias did get a degree from Moscow University, but he comes across as a pretty typical Balkan elected official. Attempts by his opponents to paint him as a slavering radical and an atheist enemy of Christendom seem to have backfired; he won the Presidential runoff yesterday by a comfortable margin, 53%-47%.

Still, he’ll be the first Communist head of state in Europe in… oh, a while now. Will he be the first Communist head of state in the EU? I can’t think of another offhand. Anyone?

Christofias has said that he hopes to restart talks with Turkish Northern Cyprus, which have been stalled since Greek Cyprus rejected the Annan Plan in 2004. I wish him luck — he’ll need it. Even with goodwill on both sides, reaching a settlement will be difficult; the Turks are still resentful that the 2004 deal was rejected, a lot of Greeks are either apathetic or actively hostile to any negotiation with the north, and both sides will be vulnerable to nationalist attacks on their flanks. I’d say Christofias’ victory raises the chances of a successful settlement from “zero” to “very slim”.

Still, it’s an interesting development. Let’s see what happens.

Montenegro: Djukanovic is Prime Minister, again, again

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So Milo Djukanovic is back as Montenegro’s Prime Minister again.

Djukanovic is a damn interesting character. When Yugoslavia broke up, most of the pieces were dominated by guys in their fifties and sixties — Milosevic, Izetbegovic, Tudjman. Hell, Gligorov of Macedonia was a WWII vet in his seventies.

Montenegro was the odd exception. Djukanovic was born in 1962, so he was just 27 when he and a couple of colleagues rode Milosevic’s coattails to power in Montenegro. By 1991 he was the youngest Prime Minister in Europe. By 1998 he had squeezed out various rivals to become the most powerful man in the country.

Which he still is today. He’s been in “retirement” for the last year and a bit, but everyone knew this was just a refractory period before jumping back in. Originally it was thought he’d run for President next year, but the current PM fell ill. Sow now he’s going to be Prime Minister for the third time. Continue reading →

The interesting smell of burning embassies

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So a mob attacked the US, Croatian, Turkish and Bosnian embassies in Belgrade today. The US embassy — evacuated in advance — was looted and partially burned. The other embassies also suffered varying degrees of damage.

This came at the same time as a government-sponsored mass demonstration against Kosovo’s declaration of independence. (Yes, Serbia still does government sponsored mass demonstrations. It’s a bad old habit that they still haven’t shaken.) The official line is that the two events were completely unrelated, and indeed the US and Croatian embassies were a couple of kilometers away from the center of the demonstration. On the other hand, there’d already been embassy attacks earlier in the week — the Slovene embassy was broken into and looted on Monday — and the Americans, at least, had pre-emptively evacuated their embassy and asked for increased police protection. Continue reading →

Turkish prosecutor arrested

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This doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention, but Kemal Kerencsiz was arrested last month.

Kemal Kerincsiz is a Turkish lawyer. He’s also the guy who tried to prosecute Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, and several other writers for “insulting Turkishness”. And he’s been arrested — along with 32 others, including several military men — for being part of a massive conspiracy to commit violent acts against enemies of the state. The conspiracy is called “Ergenekon”, and the story is still coming out.
Continue reading →