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.

Serbia, Round One

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So Serbia held Round One of their presidential election yesterday.

A little background. It’s only three and a half years since the last election (June 2004), but the secession of Montenegro in May 2006 caused the Serbs to adopt a new constitution. That provided for a new Presidential term, which required a new election. But the constitution wasn’t very specific as to when. A long wrangle ensued, with Prime Minister Kostunica’s party trying to put the election off as long as possible, mostly because Kostunica has come to hate incumbent President Boris Tadic a lot, and he thought later elections would get caught up in the Kosovo wrangle, putting Tadic at a disadvantage. Which is pretty much what has happened.

Meanwhile, Kostunica is ostentatiously refusing to support Tadic. This is a pretty blatant violation of the coalition agreement Tadic’s party made with Kostunica last spring, but there it is: Kostunica doesn’t think he’s bound by that sort of thing.

(If I seem a little bit hard on Kostunica, well, he’s been rather a disappointment. He’s showing a long-term pattern of festering resentment towards rivals, especially rivals who are slicker, better-spoken, more popular and/or smarter. There’s no rule that politicians have to like each other, of course, but Kostunica is bending Serbian politics to serve his personal vendettas.)

So, the first round: Tadic got 35.4%, Radical Nikolic got 39.4%, and half a dozen minor candidates split the rest.

What does it mean? Continue reading →

Dutch to veto Serbia’s SAA?

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Apparently the Dutch have said they won’t approve Serbia’s Stability and Association agreement unless Serbia comes up with suspected war criminal Ratko Mladic.

This comes from the excellent B92 site:

Holland will not let Serbia sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) until Ratko Mladić is transferred to the Hague [said] Dutch European Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans… in an interview published by Belgium daily Le Soir today.

“We have been saying, and I repeated this clearly, that Serbia has to cooperate fully with the Hague Tribunal. This means that Mladić has to be transferred to the Hague Tribunal prison,” said Timmermans.

By the way, I went to the Le Soir site to find the interview. You know what? Everything but the front page is pay-per-view. Cripes. What is this, 2004? That just seems so very Belgian somehow…

Anyway:
Continue reading →

Another blackout in Albania

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So Albania had a country-wide blackout yesterday. (N.B., I’m not going to post about Albania every day. It’s just sort of random.) They’ve had plenty of blackouts before, but this was the first one to talke the whole country down. It lasted for several hours. Fortunately, it happened on a warm day, so nobody froze and there don’t seem to have been any deaths. Still, not good.

Albania has problems with electricity, and has had since… well, pretty much always. Communist dictator Enver Hoxha tried to electrify the whole country, but he did it in a really slapdash way, with generators, equipment and networks ranging from ramshackle to crappy. The country gets all its electrity from Communist-era hydropower plants; hydropower is clean and all that, but the generators are old and in need of constant repair and a season of bad rain (common in Albania) can turn the lights off.
Continue reading →

Kosovo, Kosovo, blah blah blah

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So Kosovo continues to creep — soooo slowly — towards some sort of independence.

Serbia is having a Presidential election this weekend, with a runoff two weeks later. There’s a tacit agreement that nothing should happen before then… the assumption being that Kosovar independence might tip the balance between the incumbent President (moderate and basically decent Boris Tadic) and his challenger (odious populist-nationalist Tomislav Nikolic).

Serbian Prime Minister Kostunica — who, honestly, seems to be getting dumber and more stubborn with each passing year — has said that if the EU sends a mission to Kosovo, Serbia won’t sign a Stabilization and Association agreement with the EU. Brussels has said it will wait a bit (i.e., until after the election). I can see the case for that, but once the election is over… well, this strikes me as the sort of bluff that’s crying out to be called. “Oh, we won’t take the next step towards EU candidacy!” “Fine… don’t.”
Continue reading →

Oil in Albania

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Just ran across this interesting report on possible new oil reserves in… Albania.

Gustavson assigns 2.987 billion barrels with 3.014 trillion cubic feet of associated gas as the P50 prospective oil resources in its oil with associated gas case. Gustavson notes that because of the depth it is possible that the prospects will hold natural gas. In its oil with a gas cap case Gustavson calculates the prospective resources to total 1.4 billion barrels of light oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Gustavson estimates that in the event only gas is present the P50 prospective resource is 28 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Gustavson is a major petroleum engineering firm, so this should be taken seriously.

Just under 3 billion barrels, of which 1.4 bn is the easy-to-refine light oil: how much is that? Well, by way of comparison, Saudi Arabia has 260 billion barrels of proven reserves, and Mexico has 12 billion. So this is not exactly a new Caspian Sea. Albania won’t be joining OPEC. On the other hand, it’s not chump change either.

And the natural gas is nice too — 15 trillion cubic feet is enough to make it worth running a pipeline north to Central Europe. In the next decade, the Swiss and Germans may be heating their homes in part with Albanian gas. It’s not going to eliminate Europe’s reliance on Russian hydrocarbon, or even much reduce it. But it’ll help a bit.

Albania already has some modest oil fields — enough to supply about half the local energy needs. Fortunately for Albania, this hasn’t resulted in massive local subsidies; oil there costs only a bit less than elsewhere in the region. (I say “fortunately” because if it had subsidies, they’d now be impossible to get rid of.) It also has a couple of refineries, so it would be able to capture that much more value before sending the oil along.

The fields are at least three years away from exploitation, and probably more. So Albania will go through another election cycle, and will have some time to get ready. It will need to. While the amount of money involved is modest on the scale of global or even European oil transactions, it’s pretty big in an Albanian context.

Kosovo: then what?

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Okay, so Kosovo is likely to declare some sort of independence in the near future.

“Some sort” covers a lot of ground, but it will be something formally unacceptable to Serbia, and thus to Russia. The negotiations have another three weeks to run, but it’s clear they’re going nowhere; the Kosovar Albanians want independence, and Serbia will never agree to that. So, at some point the knot will have to be cut.

Okay, what happens next?

Former US Ambassador to Serbia William Montgomery has some ideas. I disagree, and I’m willing to stick my neck out a little.

Some fisking follows. If you’re not interested in Serbia and Kosovo, jump now! Continue reading →

Serbia is stable and associated! (Bosnia, not so much)

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So Serbia will get a Stability and Association Pact with the EU (SAA). The pact was initialed last week; barring a catastrophe, it will be formally signed in January.

An SAA is the step before formal EU candidacy, so this is good news for Serbia. It looks like Brussels is trying to strengthen the “liberal and Western” strain of Serbia’s politics before December, when problems are likely to arise with Kosovo. (The current round of Kosovo negotiations is likely to expire on December 10.)

The big loser here, of course, is Carla del Ponte. The SAA was supposed to wait until Serbia had “cooperated fully” with the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). Serbia’s cooperation has been slow, reluctant, half-hearted, and in no sense “full”; Ratko Mladic is going to die comfortably in bed, and the current leadership of Serbia is good with that.

Back in March, I noted that the Belgians (backed by the Dutch) had put a freeze on candidacy negotiations because they wanted to see real cooperation with the ICTY. Well, eight months is a long time in politics. Apparently the Belgians and Dutch were argued around. The current paralysis of the Belgian government may have had something to do with this.

Albania got its SAA last year, and newly-independent Montenegro a few months ago. Bosnia thus becomes the only country in the region without one. Bosnia’s goverment just formally collapsed this week, and they may well be going back to the polls in January or February. So, it looks like they won’t get their SAA initialed until next year at the earliest. Continue reading →

Bosnia’s government collapses

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Well, sort of. Bosnia’s government is still run according to the Dayton Plan, which settled the war back in 1995. So it’s really complicated.

Short version: the representative of the Serb entity, the Republika Serbska (RS), has resigned from the Council of Ministers. The Presidency (which is really a council composed of three Presidents, one from each ethnicity) accepted his resignation today. Officially this means the government has fallen, and elections can ensue, but since this is Bosnia they’re going to slip first into a long period of “consultation” in an attempt to make this un-happen.

Why did the Serb reprsentative resign? Well, because the RS leadership isn’t happy with Europe’s new colonial governor — sorry, High Representative — and his ideas for moving forward beyond the Dayton Agreement. There’s some connection here to the ongoing Kosovo wrangle, because the Bosnian Serbs are getting enthused by Russian support for Serbia; some of the wilder commenters are talking about the RS being swapped to Serbia “in exchange for” Kosovo. This is not going to happen, but there’s definitely something in the air.

Since this is Bosnia, the complications are fractal. Here’s the short version: the Bosnians have 30 days to form a new government, which might happen but probably won’t. If they don’t, then at some point they’ll have to hold elections. Which, since this is Bosnia, will probably not change much.

No, I don’t know what the answer is either.

“Porque no te callas?”

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Well, that was interesting:

SANTIAGO: Spain’s king Juan Carlos I told Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to “just shut up,” bringing an Ibero-American summit to end in spectacular fashion on Saturday.

Spain’s monarch stormed out just before the scheduled end of the forum, visibly furious at Chavez’s description of his former PM as a “fascist” and for launching a wide-ranging tirade that could not be stopped.

The dispute was a dramatic finale for the 17th meeting of the heads of state and government of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America, and Spain, Portugal and Andorra, which started on Thursday.

[Chavez’s] description of Spain’s former conservative PM Jose-Maria Aznar as a “fascist” prompted current PM Jose-Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a socialist, to call on Chavez to show more “respect.” But Chavez forged on, and on Saturday he repeated the contentious f-word in relation to Aznar, adding: “A fascist isn’t human, a snake is more human than a fascist.” An irate king Juan Carlos then stepped in, demanding of Chavez: “Why don’t you just shut up?”

Aparently Chavez was talking over (current, Socialist) Spanish PM Zapata in a wide-ranging attack on (former, conservative) Spanish PM Jose Aznar. There was an attempt to turn off his microphone, but you don’t stop Hugo Chavez when he’s on a roll.

The King’s comment may have been (if I understand correctly, and maybe I don’t) more insulting in Spanish Spanish than in Venezuelan Spanish, because he used the “tu” form. In much of Latin America that’s no big deal, but in Spain (I’m told) it’s only used for close friends, children and animals. So “porque no te callas” is very much de haut en bas.

Unsurprisingly, the Venezuelan media has lined up behind Hugo, and the Spanish — even the leftish El Pais –behind the King; around the world, conservatives are high-fiving, while socialists are fuming that Chavez is a democratically elected leader, who should not be shushed by a hereditary monarch.

Comment threads on this tend to spiral into “Chavez is a dictator!” “No he isn’t!” and “You know, the King was chosen by Franco, but he actually helped end fascism in Spain.” So let’s take the first two as not being very useful, and the last as given. Is this just an amusing break in Iberian good manners, or is there anything deeper here?