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.

Chess my ass

Posted on by

Various sources are reporting that the Russians have rolled out of South Ossetia and into Georgia proper, and are mounting a major attack on the town of Gori. Gori is about 15-20 km south of the South Ossetian border, and about 70-80 km from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. Russian forces are also massing along Georgia’s border with Abkhazia, preparing to open a second front there.

The Russians are also sending signals about regime change; Foreign Minister Lavrov said that Russia “no longer sees [Saakashvili] as a partner”. They’re also ostentatiously ignoring Georgia’s request for a cease-fire.
Continue reading →

Georgia: played?

Posted on by

Well, the South Ossetia conflict is going pretty badly for Georgia. The Russians appear to have cleared Tsikhinvali, and they’ve moved over six! hundred! armored vehicles into theater. Russian bombers have struck at a number of military targets inside Georgia, and the Russian Navy is maneuvering off the Georgian coast.

It’s increasingly clear that the Russians were very ready for this conflict. In fact it’s looking like the Georgians did exactly what Moscow wanted.

Was Georgia played? We’ll probably never know, but a couple of thoughts come to mind. Continue reading →

South Ossetia: alea jacta est

Posted on by

That’s Latin for “throw the dice high”, and that’s what it looks like Georgian leader Saakashvili has done.

I’m no longer the Fistful’s Man In the Caucasus — I left in March, after the violence in Armenia. Doug Merrill is now the go-to guy: he’s in Tbilisi, very close to the action. But he’s asleep right now, and it looks like some of our readers are still awake, so FWIW here’s an impression from a distance. Half-informed, amateur war analysis follows.

Who started it? — Looks like Georgia. The sniping earlier came from both sides, but the Georgians have clearly launched a major ground offensive, and that doesn’t just happen by accident.

Why? Why? — What follows is a mishmash of guesses. Take it with a big grain of salt.

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital) and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

So, is it working? — It’s too early to tell, but it’s not looking good. Continue reading →

Meanwhile, that whole free movement of labor thing

Posted on by

So when the 10 new EU members joined in 2004, the old EU-15 came up with a clunky compromise about the free movement of labor: each old member could decide for itself, but they’d have to publicly review that decision after two years (2006) and then again in three more years (2009) and then after seven years, in 2011, they’d have to drop all restrictions and let the Poles and Hungarians in. (I say 10 new members, but really this only applied to 8, because Cyprus and Malta are so tiny that nobody cared to put restrictions on them. So, this was really about the “EU-8” — Poland and Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks, Slovenia and the three Baltic states.)

The old members came up with a bewildering array of responses, ranging from total liberalism (Britain, Ireland, Finland) to sharp restrictions (Belgium, Austria).

Then three years later, in April 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined. The EU adopted the same two-three-seven rule for these new members as well.

The existing members — which now included the 10 new members — came up with a different bewildering array of responses. Some members that had been very liberal to the EU-8 closed their doors to the new two, while some that had been conservative reconsidered.

So we’re now at the point where you need a chart. Fortunately, our friends at the Beeb have prepared one! Here it is.

What’s interesting is that this is a snapshot, a complicated picture that’s on its way to becoming much simpler. May 2011 is less than three years away. And when all the EU-8 have complete freedom of movement, it’s unlikely that many countries will keep restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians.

But here’s a thought: will the EU keep the same rules for newer members? One might think not… after all, Croatia and Macedonia are pretty dinky. But waiting beyond them lies Turkey. So, almost certainly the seven-year rule will be implied on the new Balkan members as well, even if most members will promptly wave them in. In fact, all of these countries already have arrangements with the EU allowing some movement of labor.

(The interesting exception: Kosovo. In fact, movement of labor out of Kosovo has been getting harder, not easier. But that’s a story for another post.)

As for the effects of all this… well, that’s the big question, isn’t it. Watch this space.

Turkey: splitting the baby?

Posted on by

So, a happy surprise: Turkey’s Supreme Court didn’t outlaw the governing party. But it did rap them sharply across the knuckles, cut their funding and put them on notice.

At first glance, this looks like a good outcome. Maybe a very good outcome. The Court saves its face and dignity, but doesn’t thwart the democratic will of the electorate, nor provoke a potentially disastrous confrontation. AKP survives, but gets a painful warning. Everyone can claim a win.

At first glance… but I know just enough about Turkish politics to know how little I know. Any more informed commenters want to jump in?

Some stupid stuff about Ukraine

Posted on by

While researching the recent floods in the Ukraine, I stumbled across this wince-inducingly stupid article. It appeared a few weeks ago in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

The article is by Richard Wagner, a Transylvanian German writer. (Well, former Transylvanian. Like most T-Germans, he emigrated from Romania as soon as he could get out.) While much of the article goes off on a red herring chase about whether “Galicia” is really European or not, the core of it is here:

Ukraine is firmly anchored in the Eurasian region that traditionally answers to Moscow. The cultural-historical fusion with Russia reaches deep into the past to the Kievan Rus, the original formula of the East Slavic concept of state, as does the Byzantine-Orthodox hold on mentality and society. The majority of the population speaks Russian and geographically and geo-politically speaking, the country has a number of non-European coordinates that are indispensable to Russia: the Black Sea, Crimea, the Caucasus. The Ukrainian economy is tightly bound up with its Russian counterpart, it is reliant on Russian raw materials and energy resources, and is organised along the same lines. The same goes for the political structure of post-Soviet society which, in both countries relies on the Byzantine habitus and the survival skills of Homo sovieticus. Oligarchic interests and a bizarrely ad hoc party landscape define the political climate in both Russia and Ukraine and no end of bold “Orange” revolutionaries will be able to change this. They have defended their honour, but they don’t hold the political reins.

A good many of the western proponents of the Ukrainian entry into EU and Nato are governed by imperial desires. These are either American strategies aimed at weakening Russia, or EU superpower fantasies. Yet it would be extremely hazardous to over-stretch the unconsolidated EU project. Precisely because Europe now has the unique historic opportunity to regulate its business, we should recall the Occidental idea at the heart of the project. This is something that was strongly emphasised by its founding fathers in the fifties, politicians like Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer.

The Occidental idea is incorporated into cultural and geo-political borders…

And then off on the Galicia thing.

Austrian journalist Martin Pollack tried his hand at a response, but got sidetracked in much the same way. However, Pollack does ask one rather silly question: “How does an author who comes from the Romanian Banat region come to do such a thing, I ask myself.”

Well, that’s easy: it’s because Transylvanian Germans always saw themselves as a cut above, a breed superior to their Romanian neighbors. The T-Germans contributed a lot to Romania, but it was always very much de haut en bas. In that sense, Wagner’s screed is exactly what you’d expect.

But it’s worth engaging with, at least briefly, because it raises a lot of bad ideas and conveniently bundles them together. Continue reading →

Transnistria: underwater?

Posted on by

It’s sometimes hard to get solid news about Transnistria. No international news agencies report regularly from there, and it doesn’t have a good English-language site. News stories about the breakaway state tend to come out of Russia, Moldova or Ukraine, often in the local languages.

So it’s not clear what impact the recent flooding is having there. (For our non-European readers, the last week has seen huge floods across southeastern Europe. There are at least 13 people dead in Ukraine and several more in Romania and Moldova, thousands of people have been evacuated, and the damage is in hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.) Since Transnistria is basically a thin sliver of low-lying land along the bank of the Dniester river, you would expect they’d have problems, but it’s not easy to find out what’s going on.
Continue reading →

The best amusement park in Europe

Posted on by

It’s Playmobil Funpark, just outside of Nuremberg.

— Big: you can stay all day and still not do everything.

— Cheap: just 6.50 per kid. Food prices are also reasonable (okay, by amusement park standards) and you can bring a picnic if you like.

— Varied: whether your kid wants to climb, dig, play, or run around and scream, there’s something.

— Interactive: instead of passive “rides”, pretty much everything at PFP is interactive, from the huge sandbox to the large building full of toys. (Playmobile toys, of course.)

Really, I was astounded. It’s not Disney World, no — not as big, not nearly as over-the-top amazing — but on the other hand, a family of four can have a wonderful day for under 100 Euros.

About the only negative is that it’s targeted at a fairly narrow age group: big enough to climb and build, small enough to think it’s cool. Say ages three to ten. My six year old thought this was a solid slab of heaven. Five years from now he’ll be curling his lip. But you’re never going to make “Playmobile Land” interesting to teenagers, and the narrow-guage marketing makes it work better.

Oh, and: not to indulge in national stereotypes, but this park is just astonishingly clean.

It’s the end of July: vacation time. Where would you take the kids?

Karadzic arrested!?

Posted on by

Breaking news in the last hour is that Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade. Karadzic, you may recall, was the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He’s under indictment for about twenty different war crimes, and has been on the run since 1996.

Few details are available yet. The arrest was made in Belgrade earlier today. It’s not clear by whom. (The Serbian Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police, issued a brief statement saying it was not involved.) The Serbian government formally notified the Hague Tribunal this afternoon.

As always in these matters, there’s some mystery and confusion. Just last week, officials in both Serbia and the Republika Srpska had announced that they didn’t believe Karadzic was in their countries. This was actually plausible! The new Serbian government had just arrested another war criminal in Belgrade a few weeks ago. So you’d think Karadzic would have stayed well clear.

Was he simply stupid? Or was he lured back to Belgrade somehow? Or was he there all along? If the latter, then former Prime Minister Kostunica surely knew about it… and was lying his ass off to the Hague and the world for five years straight. I’m no fan of Kostunica, but I’d hate to think that.

On a personal note: for years my wife has said that Karadzic was living “down the street” from us back in the early 2000s. At that time, we were living in the street Golsfortieva (that’s Serbian for “Galsworthy”) in the neighborhood of Vracar in central Belgrade. She picked this up from talking with the neighbors, and for five years it’s been a running joke in our house. “Right down the street from us!” “Right, sure, yes, dear. Whatever, okay.”

Well, at least one source is claiming that the arrest was made in… the neighborhood of Vracar, in central Belgrade. Headline: Blogger’s Wife ‘Very Satisfied’ By Arrest.

Anyway. A day or two may pass without much news, as under Serbian law the accused has the right to challenge certain aspects of his arrest — most notably, whether or not he’s really the person in question.

Still: great news, if true.