Over at Teekay’s

International News Article | Reuters.com:
SARAJEVO (Reuters) - The wartime commander of the Bosnian Muslim army said on Tuesday he would surrender next week to the U.N. war crimes court, which has indicted him over atrocities by foreign Islamic fighters in the 1992-95 war.

Needless to say, Delic was wartime commander of the Bosnian army, in which quite a few non-Muslims fought. It was the legal army of the internationally-recognized state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not some warlord’s private militia. I thought journalists stopped using these terms many years ago but apparently that ain’t so.

Bosnian Muslim officials and some analysts criticized the indictment of retired General Rasim Delic as an attempt to distribute guilt in the three-cornered war equally but unfairly among Serbs, Croats and Muslims. The Muslims were heavily outgunned and suffered the highest number of casualties.

Uh, how about “The government-controlled Bosnian army was heavily outgunned due to an international arms embargo that favored the Yugoslav army, which had attacked Bosnia together with Bosnian Serb militias under its command” — ? It is of course one of the ironies of the war that (i) the Muslim/Islamic volunteers brought to the Bosnian army what it already had — manpower — while not helping on what it really needed — weapons, while at the same time denting its international image. In other words, accepting these volunteers, most of them Arabs who may or may not have fought in Afghanistan, was supremely stupid. But the reason they were taken in was that nobody else was interested in helping. So there’s a healthy dose of hypocrisy in this whole story. (Disclaimer: of course, everyone should be punished for crimes committed under their command. I just doubt that Delic was really among the top six people in the Balkans who hadn’t been charged yet and needed to be charged in the Hague tribunal’s last, final round of indictments.)

Technorati Tags: Balkania

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Secret Genocide Archive:

The archive [of materials collected by African Union monitors in Darfur] also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the “execution of all directives from the president of the republic” and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

“Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes,” the document urges. It encourages “killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur.”

It’s worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

It seems extraordinary that such orders would exist in written form, so there’s every reason — as Kristof emphasizes — to be skeptical about the authenticity of these materials. It’s almost too hard to believe that even thugs like the Islamo-Fascists in Khartoum would be so stupid as to write this down. Perhaps an eager subordinate decided to commit to paper what he was told? In any case, I think this confirms our worst fears.

Yesterday we had heavy rain all day long and it never really brightened up. Then, while we were having dinner with friends, it turned into snow — again! Just when we thought the worst of winter was over. The streets were covered in this heavy, wet snow and nobody was out there even though it was just around 11pm when we got home. Very nice — as long as you can stay in.

Snow, snow, snow. A winter that started late but with a vengeance. It just started snowing again a few hours ago.

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The Revenge of Ellen Swallow

Whenever we think a topic has been completely dissected and discussed from all possible angles, especially in the blogosphere, we can rely on the New York Times to run one of their anodyne editorials, just at the moment when we think that nothing could possibly be said any more, and do precisely that — say nothing at all whatsoever, but in several hundred words.

International News Article | Reuters.com:
By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States and its allies are expected to face opposition from Russia and China in the U.N. Security Council for targeted sanctions to pressure government, militia and rebel forces to end the bloodshed in Sudan’s Darfur region.

This is the same Security Council that’s supposed to be the locus of the world’s collective interest and whose approval is supposedly required for any military action to be legitimate. (Anyone remember Kosovo 1999?)

Never liked the guy, always jumping to put an anti-American spin on everything, but always grudgingly accepted that when not blinded by ideology, he could be a kick-ass reporter.

Heard him on BBC World (which we no longer get because the satellite dish is snowed in) yesterday, just an hour or so after Hariri’s assassination — in fact, even before we knew Hariri had been killed. He was not only exceptionally composed — this after a massive car bomb exploded near his home, after he’d been at the scene counting the bodies and body parts and burning cars and all that — but eloquent and measured and very much in command of the situation.

Now I admire him even more, and even more grudgingly — he’s one of our greatest reporters.

Lebanon’s recovery from its 1975-1990 civil war owes a lot to the man whose life ended in a brutal bomb attack yesterday on Beirut’s Corniche, just steps from the hallmark St. Georges Hotel. In fact, it’s difficult to think of any postwar period that would have been shaped by a single person to the same extent that Lebanon’s had been by Rafik Hariri.

His detractors, of which there were many, said he confounded his private interest with the public interest of this scarred Levantine republic. But perhaps, if you own a good slice of a country’s real estate, there really is no such difference. Perhaps Lebanon’s interest was Hariri’s interest, and his death really does threaten to derail the hard-won normality.

Lebanon is built on institutions that enshrine sectarianism as a creed, in which the president must always be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim - like Hariri - and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. Anyone setting out to murder Hariri would know how this could re-open all the fissures of the civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Robert Fisk, The killing of ‘Mr Lebanon,’ The Independent (London), 02/15/05 (paid subscription required)

Does that mean — and I haven’t made up my mind on this, though I think I know where I’m leaning — that countries emerging from civil war are inherently unstable if they achieve peace by consolidating the war’s fault lines? If it does, would that also mean that a single, terrible attack such as yesterday’s could wipe out years of patient bargaining and accommodation?

I don’t want to think about what this could mean for Bosnia or Macedonia, which are both highly divided societies with strong group rights and weak individual rights. (The abortive UN plan for Cyprus provided for a similar set-up.)

It would have been interesting to hear Will Kymlicka, who was scheduled to speak tonight at Sarajevo’s Law Faculty but had to cancel because his plane couldn’t land due to the snow. (We now have around ten inches, and it’s still snowing.)

It’s actually kinda romantic — fewer cars, muffled sounds, that sort of thing. View from our bedroom:

Novala of Sodazitron fame sent me, unwittingly no doubt, down memory lane this morning (I worked in Vienna for a few months a while back) and also made me appreciate once again what a wonderful place the internet is.

There’s people out there who think it’s alienating!

Anyway, through a series of associations starting with my St*rbucks post a while ago I arrived at the German Wikipedia article on Viennese cafes and from there, by iron necessity, to the excellent entry on Friedrich Torberg. How amazing! Who’d have thought this dude would have devoted enough followers to have his own entry — and a very good one at that.

I’ve only read one of Torberg’s books, Die Tante Jolesch, oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (Aunt Jolesch, or the decline of the West in anecdotes), which not only evokes a lost world but is a product of it — a world where Germans, Czechs, and Jews lived together or at least next to each other and where the written and the spoken word were cultivated with equal zeal. A world where people had time to talk and write and read — and drink coffee.

There’s a Treatise on the Viennese Cafe annexed to Tante Jolesch: “Vienna is the city of functioning legends. Malevolent people claim that the legends are the only thing that actually functions in Vienna, but that’s certainly an exaggeration.”

Torberg’s take on the time issue — and this was written in 1959 — is this:

This isn’t to say that there are no literary types, intellectuals, or people interested in artistic issues or matters of the mind in Vienna any more. Of course there are. But not only are they tangibly reduced in number, they are also tangibly reduced in their ability to visit the cafe. They are — and this is where sociology enters the picture — busy. They have work to do. They are regulars of these cafes only potentially, not actually. They bring along all the requirements of the regular, just not themselves. They have no time. And having time is the most important, indispensable precondition for any cafe culture — in the end quite possibly for any culture. The regulars of the old literary cafes were also busy: in part with hanging out in cafes, in part with things they could and would do at the cafe.

No, this isn’t a recipe. This is about think tanks.

Seven Oaks Magazine has an interesting piece on the fluffy side of public-policy consulting, taking as examples a bunch of U.K. consultancies.

No need to name names here. Yep, that’s the one.

The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbetters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

I must confess I haven’t read the olive tree, though <blush> I do read Friedman’s columns regularly and find them <blush> <blush> quite good.

But the point I want to make is really something else, and I’ve touched on it in earlier posts about how we deal with information and how unglamorous the process of writing is. Here’s my point: if you spend most of your time producing copy for glossy reports and talking on TV, or perhaps on the phone to reporters, when do you actually get your real job done — thinking? Reminds me of The Sheltering Sky, this beautiful, infuriatingly flawed movie (has Bertolucci made any others?) whose protagonist, Port Moresby, is a composer.

How often do we see him composing?

Once. (We see him decomposing for the rest of the movie, though.)

Point: writing or most forms of intellectual or artistic production are inherently boring for the outsider, and they’re boring because they’re hard work. We don’t live in a time where hard work is valued because we thrive on products that are of the moment, for the moment. Who would fund “serious critical enquiry” if it takes so much time and has very unpredictable outcomes?

God, I sound like one of those anti-globalization idiots.

Speaking of consultants, check out Martin Kihn’s stuff over at Fast Forward. His Consultant Debunking Unit, or CDU, is brilliant, and I can’t wait to get a hold of his forthcoming book, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (Warner Books).

Interesting op-ed in today’s — no, wait, tomorrow’s — Europe edition of the Times on Darfur and international justice by one Stephanie Giry. Money quote:

With the UN panel’s new report, the United States now finds itself in an awkward position: opposing the Security Council’s mobilization, which it spent the summer advocating, because of a longstanding beef against the ICC [the International Criminal Court]. Once again, it is at odds with the UN, arguing that while the Darfur massacres are genocide, they aren’t for the ICC to look into, whereas the UN panel claims that they aren’t genocide but must be examined by the ICC.

Yet the more the two disagree over terminology and methods, the more alike they become: In handling the crisis in Darfur, they seem equally ineffectual and perhaps even irresponsible.

That’s exactly right, and Giry is also right to draw attention in another passage of her piece to the political dimension of all this: it’s not like there’s anything resembling unanimity in the Security Council to act over Darfur, with China being very clearly opposed to anything that could actually hurt the Islamo-Fascists in Khartoum. (Check out today’s story, also in the Times, on the babies now being born in refugee camps, the result of rapes.)

I don’t want to go into the author’s main point: that the panel is aware that these crimes don’t fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction and are pressing for the ICC to take over in order to expand its ambit. That’s a point for the lawyers to debate. Back here on earth, it sure looks like the whole discussion over who holds authority over the issue and whether it constitutes genocide or simply crimes against humanity — which presumably are crimes we can live with just fine — is but a cynical ploy to deflect from effective ways to intervene.

According to BBC World, which is happily running in the background, Danish researchers have determined that girls have an attention span twice as long as that of boys.

According to the study, the average six-year-old boy has an attention span of about ten minutes.

Damn, to be six again!

Some people want to convince us that Europe is a class-ridden place where personal achievement is undervalued, even considered obscene, and family origin means everything, while the US is a meritocracy where personal achievement — especially making a lot of money — is considered the highest virtue.

It’s all true, at least the first half of that argument.

Just seen on BBC World, which tends to be on while I’m working, something called the “Brit Awards.” (Confusingly, a US band called “Scissor Sisters,” which must be really hard for Brits to pronounce — something like “sssss” — won three awards, and Gwen Stefani also got one, but never mind.) Someone called Joss Stone, whom I believe to be a woman rather than a band, also won an award and gave a statement afterwards along the lines of “wow, why am I getting this — I haven’t done anything extraordinary — I just sing, you know — and I’m this girl from <insert stupid place in England>.”

What is this European obsession with place of origin? I can understand that in the case of wine, but with people?

There was another UK band whose first sentence was “we can’t believe this is happening, after all we’re just a bunch of blokes from East Sussex” (I believe — I have no idea what these British place-names mean).

When people introduce others around here, they would say something like “This is Jasmina from Tuzla” or “This is Thomas from Basel.” Would you ever introduce your friend as “Ted from St.Louis” unless he lived there? (When in fact he’s become a real Upper-West-Side boy, our Ted.)

…thanks to the indefatigable Edin H., who not only braved temperatures of -20 this morning to take a van to Kresevo but also made sure to be back from his critical research questions (when was the first occurrence of the word pita in the written record? What is cheese?) in time to provide me with hospitality, which in this case critically included a hot shower with real water.

Whatever civilization first came up with the idea of running pipes into apartments so we could take showers deserves our eternal gratitude. Or mine, anyway.

Now I need to burn the clothes I wore over the last few days.

…with no running water. A good excuse to hole up at home, except that I have a non-postponable meeting tomorrow morning and should, or rather have to, take a shower before then, unless I want to chase away all other customers at the cafe where the meeting is.

There’s always hope.

By the way, what’s this spiel on BBC World about a rapprochement between the US and old Europe? They say (and have been repeating ever since Condy spoke at Sciences Po last night, after a hilarious intro by some dude who spoke hilarious English, underlining what a great school they were and how international and all that…) that the success of Iraq’s elections has prompted the French to reassess their relationship with the US. But the BBC doesn’t ell us — were they maybe hoping the elections would fail? Are they disappointed?

Light posting due to general grumpiness.

General grumpiness due to second day without any water in the house.

No water due to freezing weather.

Freezing weather > frozen pipes > no water > light posting.

Update:

Two dead in cold snap in Bosnia

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP) - Two Bosnians have died in northern Bosnia in a spell of bitterly cold weather.

Since Sunday, two men, whose bodies were found in the open, have perished of hypothermia in the region of the northern town of Banja Luka.

Several schools have been forced to close early because of the cold, police said Tuesday.

The country’s meteorological centre forecasts that freezing temperatures, dropping as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) will last until the end of the week.

Comment: I sure didn’t like that last bit!

If people in this town are walking with their heads turned upwards, anxious expression on their face, bumping into each other and almost getting run over by cars, it’s not so much because they might be crazy — though many of them are, no doubt, including our upstairs neighbor, who’s a very nice, polite woman who always greets us and then goes out into the street and starts screaming incomprehensible stuff at passers-by — no, it’s because we have these killer icicles, some of them several meters long, that nobody feels obliged to take down.

This is one of the aspects of living in a po-co (post-communist) place: nobody’s responsible for anything. “Citizens” feel it’s the “state’s” responsibility to do things, the state feels it’s up to house-owners, and nobody ever gets called on anything. So people get hurt — just yesterday, a woman was hit nearby and had to go to hospital; last year, at least one person was killed in our street.

To illustrate, and courtesy of my wife, here’s one of those bastards — this one in fact hanging from our very own roof:

A (not particularly interesting) article in the Guardian on search engines has this quote:

But do we really want all this new information? “The end result of a perfect search world is that as fast as answers are generated and consumed, new questions come quicker, with the consequence that ignorance expands,” the internet guru Kevin Kelly writes in an email. “What we know we don’t know expands faster than what we know. This has been true for a while and will only continue. Science, in fact, will come to be measured as the expansion of our ignorance, rather than an expansion of our knowledge.”

Up to “quicker,” that statement is spot-on, but the rest seems to me precisely wrong.

If additional knowledge stimulates further questions, why does that translate into expanding ignorance, even if we can’t answer these new questions? Doesn’t being aware of such questions also constitute knowledge?

As the total sum of knowledge increases at a higher rate than our knowledge as individuals (or even just the total sum of information out there vs the information we can process or at least collect, a difference Kelly doesn’t seem to be interested in), the gap between “I know” and “we know” increases. But dealing effectively with information and knowledge — the thing information technology helps us to do — can help individuals catch up with the sum of knowledge or information out there. And that’s what search engines do: they don’t produce information (except perhaps in the unexpected links and associations they create, which surely also contributes to a better understanding of the world out there) but help us gain meaningful access to it.

But effective search engines may in fact contribute to the opposite of what Kelly seems to be saying: the mistaken impression not so much of being swamped but of being in control. It’s very simple: some people react to information abundance (and of course it’s already a subjective line that separates “abundance” from “overload”) with exasperation and apprehension, while others see opportunity and excitement.

What I’m afraid this may breed is a reduced understanding that what we don’t know still shapes our position in the world at large, a feeling of omnipotence in other words. (I should also mention the Rumsfeldian contribution to epistemology here, the distinction between known unknowns — less dangerous — and unknown unknowns — very dangerous.)

In other words, this situation may breed a new pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-understanding of the world out there:

Turkle, meanwhile, says she has noticed subtle transformations in the ways some of her students think and order their ideas. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”

I’m sure Radovan is shitting his pants after hearing from Carla that he might have to face a Serbian court, which is almost certainly biased, instead of the Hague Tribunal, with its unflinching commitment to international justice. Expect imminent surrenders.

Chief Prosecutor of the Tribunal in The Hague Carla Del Ponte urged the fugitives from international justice today to hurry up with their surrender. She noted that “the sooner they surrender, the greater their chance to be tried in The Hague and to serve their sentence in an European country.” The later they get out of the “woods in which they hide”, Del Ponte said, the greater the chance that their trials will be left to the domestic courts and their sentences served in domestic prisons.
SENSE Agency
South East News Service Europe
3 February 2005