Tag Archives: Serbia

Serbian elections, short version

Posted on by

The mostly pro-European Democratic Party (DS) did surprisingly well — possibly because of a surprising last-minute from Brussels to give Serbia a “Stabilization and Association Agreement”. This was fairly blatant intervention on Brussels’ part, but it seems to have worked — at least in terms of getting more votes for DS.

Prime Minister Kostunica’s increasingly nationalist and obnoxious Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) tanked and burned, possibly because they overplayed their hand — they were all Kosovo, all the time, and pretty explicitly anti-European.

The Serbian Radical Party (SRS) got 28% of the vote, which is almost exactly what they got in the last election, and also the one before that.

The Socialist Party of Serbia (Milosevic’s old party, still kicking) did okay, picking up a few extra seats.

So the vote totals are: Continue reading →

The most important European emigrant of 2008

Posted on by

I’ve been meaning to write about the Serbian elections, and the continuing slapfest over Macedonia, and some more about the frozen conflicts, and all that good stuff. But first:

Niko Bellic is Serbian.

He’s not just a generic Eastern European; he’s a Bosnian Serb who fought in the war as a teenager. The game’s backstory (which is revealed over many hours of play) involves his war experiences, and his issues with them pervade the whole game. Also, he seems to have come from rural Bosnia, so he’s initially pretty baffled by American urban culture.

So: is this a simple-minded decision, reflecting a vulgar stereotype of Serbs as violent thugs with a taste for organized crime, ignorant peasants who are thrown into culture shock in the modern world? Or is it an inspired choice, allowing the writers to make the protagonist character more complex and morally ambiguous, and position him as a “fish out of water” observer of the madness that’s modern American street life?

Note that Niko Bellic is not inherently evil. Nor unsympathetic. In fact, you can play him as a hero, albeit a rather noir one. (Yes, you can also go around killing people at random, but that’s your problem, not Niko’s.) And he’s presented as likable, and even — in the first few episodes — somewhat innocent.

On the other hand, providing the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto is not exactly a point of national pride. Niko is now the planet’s most famous Serb, and he’s a small-time crook with issues.

On the other-other hand, Grand Theft Auto! Come on! How cool is that?

So: good or bad?

Comments from informed readers welcome. N.B., you don’t have to have played the game to be “informed”, but you should at least read about it. Not hard, right? It’s the biggest and most famous video game anywhere ever.

Non-Serb commenters are encouraged to pause and ask themselves “what if Niko Bellic were [my nationality]?” Still cool?

What think you, commenters?

Letting Serbia decide for itself

Posted on by

This analysis from Reuters of the dynamic between the EU and Serbia in the run-up to Serbia’s general election 3 weeks from now points to an extremely ham-handed attempt by some EU countries to influence the outcome, which seems like a strange way to handle an election in any country, let alone one with as fraught a regional situation as Serbia.  The issue is whether the EU should offer a Stabilisation and Association Agreement, but the incumbent PM Vojislav Kostunica has made clear that he wants no part of it and views it as an attempt to get Serbian ink on a document that would implicitly recognise the independence of Kosovo —

Continue reading →

Haradinaj walks

Posted on by

The Hague has acquitted former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj of various horrible war crimes.

This is not much of a surprise. One, while the case against the KLA leadership generally is pretty strong, the case against Haradinaj personally wasn’t so much. Two, Haradinaj put up an aggressive and very competent defense. And three, various witnesses were assaulted, intimidated, or otherwise convinced to change their stories. Testifying against a popular KLA commander-turned-popular politician: not so easy.

In this context, I should probably give a link to the recent Human Rights Watch report noting that the criminal justice system in Kosovo still sucks. The report mentions intimidation of witnesses as a particular problem. Which is no surprise to anyone who’s spent much time in Kosovo.

That said, I’m not sure they would have been able to nail Haradinaj even if everyone had testified. He’s a very smart, very charming guy; he put up a very good defense; and the standard for conviction is very high. The prosecutors case consisted of a lot of “bad things happened when you were around, you were in charge, you would have to have known” type stuff… ironically, a bit similar to the way they tried to make the case against Milosevic a few years back. If Slobo had lived, he might have walked on most of his counts too.

Anyway. In the usual zero-sum way of Balkan politics, the Serbs are going nuts — all parties united; everyone agrees that this totally proves the Hague is victor’s justice — while the Albanians are dancing in the streets. Longer term… well, Haradinaj will be back in politics now. He was actually a pretty good Prime Minister during his brief term. It’s not clear how much of that was telling the international community what it wanted to hear, and how much was sincere. We may soon find out.

In other Balkan news, the Greeks vetoed Macedonia’s entry into NATO, but Croatia and Albania got in. Probably worth a post, but I have a limited quota for arguments with Greek nationalists (“yes, your country has ethnic minorities… no, really it does…”) and I’ve about used it up.

Can’t believe all you read in the media…

Posted on by

…I’m getting rather worried about the normally reliable B92. Doug M expertly dissected the organ-legging story a week or so ago; I’ve just come across this article from 26 March reporting on a UN document describing Kosovo as the “heart of [the] Balkan drug route”. Alarming stuff – essentially confirms the rumours and prejudices of many Balkan-watchers, sealing them with the official seal of UN approval.

Except that it is fictitious. The actual UNODC report contains precisely none of the statements reported by B92. Combing UNODC’s archives, I did find a relevant sentence in one of their reports from last year. The UN says (p. 83), “Some cases of cocaine shipments via the Black Sea to Romania and via the Adriatic Sea to Montenegro often organized by Albanian criminal groups, have already been observed.” This is ever so slightly different from B92’s report of what the UN said, which is “The Albanian mafia has recently begun taking over the control of ports in Romania, in addition to the already solid network existing in Albania and Montenegro”.

In fairness, it’s not B92’s original report, though most people will have seen it on their site; it originates from Tanjug, the Serbian state press agency, reporting from New York. But shame on B92 for not checking out Tanjug’s sources.

An unpleasant anecdote from 1999

Posted on by

Via the invaluable B92 website comes a nasty little story from Albania.

In her book, “The Hunt”, to be published in Italy on April 3, the former Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte states that, during investigations into war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, against Serbs and other non-Albanians, the prosecutor’s office was informed that persons who disappeared during the Kosovo conflict were used in organ smuggling operations.

Yah, that’s right. Organ smuggling.

More below the cut. Continue reading →

Elections in Serbia, again

Posted on by

Serbia’s government seems to be collapsing.

The cause is, of course, Kosovo. Most of the EU countries have now recognized independent Kosovo, which pretty strongly implies that they won’t accept a Serbia that still claims Kosovo into the EU.

Last week, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party introduced a resolution in parliament calling on the EU to “clearly and unambiguously” confirm Serbia’s territorial integrity as a condition for further European integration. Since 16 of 27 EU members have now recognized Kosovo, this was not likely to happen. But PM Kostunica’s party went along with it. The other coalition partners in the government, the Democratic Party and G17 Plus, said that they wouldn’t support the resolution. (They said its aim was not the defense of Kosovo, but putting a halt to European integration.)

Kostunica then said that he “no longer had confidence in the sincerity of his coalition partners to fight for Kosovo,” and before anyone quite knew what was happening the government had collapsed.

It’s a bit of a surprise. I expected the government to survive, largely because almost everyone is afraid of new elections. But the Radicals seem to have decided that it’s worth rolling the dice; they seem to think they won’t lose seats and, in the general mood of national funk following the loss of Kosovo, may gain. They might be right. What’s less clear to me is why PM Kostunica went along with the Radical resolution. My best guess is that his nationalist rhetoric of the last few weeks has been so strong that he’s really painted himself into a corner.

Anyway, it looks like elections will be on May 11. More on this in a bit, I’m sure.

Kosovo, this and that

Posted on by

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 →

The interesting smell of burning embassies

Posted on by

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 →

Economic Interdependence Knits Europe Together (Perhaps)

Posted on by

Well, sort of. I somehow doubt Jean Monnet would have been thinking of this when he came up with the idea of a Europe so closely bound together by trade war would be forever impossible. Rogue Planet reports that the biggest buyer of Bosnian armaments is…Serbia. Bosnia is also the biggest supplier to Serbia. Yes, that’s right; the people who were the targets of the JNA’s artillery in 1993 are selling its current owners the shells to go with it, and the people whose kinsmen were driven out of eastern Slavonia in 1995 by the Bosnian and Croat armies are relying on them for their ammunition.

I’m not sure whether this is a heartening sign of increasing inter-dependence in the Balkans, a merely pragmatic way of bringing in some foreign exchange and taking advantage of the fact both parties have the same knockoff Soviet equipment, or insanity.

As they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Given that one of Bosnia’s few assets is a collection of Yugoslav arsenals and a big pile of left-over ammunition, you can hardly blame them for trying to turn them into cash. But Serbia? Right now on the eve of Kosovar independence? Isn’t that a tad risky?

In fact, the weapons may well be safer in Serbia than any of the alternatives. An under-reported story of the times has been the export of large amounts of weaponry from Bosnia-Herzegovina to a wide range of wars around the world. Not only is the Bosnian government keen to sell, it’s also spectacularly corrupt, and its officials are known to have connived at smuggling arms past the EU checkpoints at the ports and airports. One of the biggest arms-smuggling networks, that around Jet Line International and Tomislav Damjanovic, actually got started in the Bosnian war, and they were involved in the notorious incident of the 99 tonnes of armaments bought by US agents in Bosnia for use by the Iraqi army, and flown out by the even more notorious smuggler Viktor Bout, that never arrived in Iraq and remain untraced to this day.

Given that there is not currently a war in the Balkans, and that Serbia is more like a functioning state than, say, Iraq or Somalia – both places that have imported (and possibly re-exported) guns from Bosnia – it’s quite possibly better that the weapons go to Serbia than anywhere they are more likely to be used or to vanish into the black market. This, of course, assumes that the Serbs are not planning to re-sell them, which is quite a large assumption.