Author Archives: Doug Merrill

About Doug Merrill

Freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, following stints in Atlanta, Budapest, Munich, Warsaw and Washington. Worked for a German think tank, discovered it was incompatible with repaying US student loans. Spent two years in financial markets. Bicycled from Vilnius to Tallinn. Climbed highest mountains in two Alpine countries (the easy ones, though). American center-left, with strong yellow dog tendencies. Arrived in the Caucasus two weeks before its latest war.

Thanks, Gerd

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Wasn’t Gerhard Schroeder fun? Didn’t Germany, maybe more than any other big country in Europe, need a leader who enjoyed things? Hasn’t public life gotten just a little grayer this late November Tuesday?

The election in ’98 showed that Germany could actually change governments at the ballot box, and not just through parliamentary maneuvers. One more doubt about German democracy laid to rest. The red-green government changed the terms of public debate about immigration, for which I am personally grateful. And I saw the difference in treatment at the local foreigners’ office in downtown Munich. For this honesty, Germany is better off. The SPD and the Greens sent German armed forces into combat in Europe, and on to missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Germany is shouldering its responsibilities as a major nation. For that, all of Europe is better off.

Sure, there were missed opportunities and many things still need to be done in Germany for it to really be ready for the 21st century. But the achievements of the last seven years are not small, and they will not be short-lived.

UPDATE: Another thing. By calling the election a year early, Schröder ensured that her opponents in the CDU would not have time to push Angela Merkel out of the top position. Thus we will not have the insufferable Roland Koch as Chancellor. For the historic first of having a woman as German Chancellor, thanks Gerd.

Orange Update

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In late October, Ukraine re-privatized its Kryvorizhstal steel works in a live auction watched, apparently, by millions on television. The action was a reversal of the privatization that had taken place under the previous government. The old sale would have brought in $800 million. The new sale, to Mittal Steel Germany GmbH, will net $4.8 billion. Broadcasting the auction was a clear sign of transparency, a way of bringing crucial deals out of the back rooms and away from suspicion.

As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted on October 26, that sum is 20 percent of Ukraine’s annual budget. The sale increased total foreign investment in Ukraine since independence in 1991 by 50 percent.

Ukraine still has a long way to go to live up to the ideals of the Orange Revolution, and old structures are hard to root out. But this sale is one of a number of positive signs. Here’s hoping for more, as the first anniversary of the revolution approaches.

A Little Archipelago

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If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Which Eastern European countries, you may ask?

UPDATE: FT Deutschland does indeed say more, as does the FT in English.
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Where All Roads Lead

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So we’re all following the US news, and we know that Bush’s senior aides may be indicted this week for exposing a US spy, right? And the reason the people in the White House deliberately exposed one of America’s own intelligence agents is that they were mad at her husband. And they were mad at her husband because he went to Africa and discovered that what the Bush administration wanted to say about Iraq buying uranium from Niger was not true.

Well. The documents that the Bush administration wanted to hang their claims on were forgeries. And the source of the forgeries, it is becoming increasingly clear, is Italy. La Repubblica is naming names and providing dates. It’s starting to echo in the US press, at the L.A. Times for example, and in the blogs. Questions still abound. Who was behind the forging? Why? Was Iran involved? Did the Berlusconi government know what SISMI was up to? Why were intelligence contacts being run through the Pentagon instead of the CIA? And more…

Josh Marshall has been on this story for a long time, and is all over it this week. At one time, he took a lot of ribbing because he had said in public that it would “shake the tectonic plates” in Washington. Then parts were published or broadcast, and not much seemed to happen. But tectonic plates and their fault lines can be deceiving. It may just take time for the pressure to build up.

Narinci?

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Meanwhile on the borderlands, SueAndNotU sends a reminder that Azerbaijan will be holding parliamentary elections on November 6. The country’s current president, Ilham Aliyev, essentially inherited the job from his father, who had also been Azerbaijan’s communist boss before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Add oil, ubiquitous corruption, the loss of nearly a fifth of the country’s land in a dispute over an Armenian-settled area called Nagorno-Karabakh and something like half a million internally displaced persons resulting from this conflict, and you have a situation ripe for popular discontent. Which is indeed what we find.
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Behind the Scenes

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This is just to let everyone know that we are doing various things behind the Euro curtain right now: fiddling with our MovableType installation, evaluating a new design, and so forth. Most of it takes place in the dead of night, Central European Time. If you’re reading us in the late afternoon or early evening from the US west coast, you might notice, but we hope there are no interruptions.

Also, if you’re getting errors when you view any of our pages, or comments, please let us know in the comments to this entry. Thanks.

This Just Looks Bad

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Is the new double-decker Airbus vulnerable to sudden drops in cabin pressure? That’s the kind of problem suspected in this summer’s crash of a Helios Airways plane that killed all 121 people on board.

The former chief engineer for the company that designed the microchips controlling the motors that runs the pressure valves thinks so. The company, TTTech Computertechnik AG, of Vienna, fired him for going public with his concerns. For good measure, it has sued him in both civil and criminal court. Austria has no laws to protect whistleblowers.
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