Over at Teekay’s

Putting Dayton to Bed
by Mirna Skrbic and T.K. Vogel
29 September 2006
TRANSITIONS ONLINE

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina | A few impatient Bosnian youths could not wait until the general election of 1 October to express their feelings about the country’s institutions. Just days before the vote, they splashed the presidency building in downtown Sarajevo with paint balloons, in colors that stood for Bosnia’s three “constituent peoples” as well as the group of “others,” which is not represented in Bosnia’s three-member presidency.

The heavy-handed reaction by policemen guarding the building sparked protests in the city. The public seemed to be mostly sympathetic to the pranksters as the presidency commands little respect. But will they vote accordingly in Sunday’s poll?

Read the whole thing here.

In Bosnia, War by Other Means
By T. K. VOGEL
September 29, 2006
WALL STREET JOURNAL

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — “I’m not anti-Serb,” Slobodan Popovic said. “I’m just trying to be a normal Serb.”

The difference is important to Mr. Popovic. He’s a senior lawmaker in the parliament of the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia’s two “entities” that were put under a very thin federal roof by the 1995 Dayton peace accords. His Social Democrats are Bosnia’s only truly multiethnic, countrywide opposition. In Sunday’s elections, they are campaigning against a Serb Republic government that nominally is from the same camp — fellow members of the Socialist International. But Prime Minister Milorad Dodik’s specialty is to play the ethnic card. “Dodik aspires to lead all Serbs, not just in Bosnia,” Mr. Popovic said, with just a bit of hyperbole. “It reminds me of the way Milosevic took power, by projecting the image of someone who can solve all problems,” he told me at a pit stop outside the Serb Republic capital Banja Luka in between campaign appearances.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: The piece iss now behind a subscription firewall. Sorry!

The Necropolis at Palmyra (Syria)

Originally uploaded by teekay.

I recently chanced upon prints of these pictures (more to follow) that I took in Syria during a trip in August/September 1990. Since the negatives were destroyed in a flood last year and the prints are yellowing a bit, I decided to scan them. The result ain’t great but it’s better than *not* having them.

The structures you can see in the background are three-story monuments to the dead of this desert town.

I have expressed my skepticism about the “new” UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) before, here and here. France’s behavior in particular has been disgraceful though at some level understandable; I suspect what happened was that the Foreign Ministry drafted the relevant parts of Security Council Resolution 1701 and handed them over to Defense to implement only once it had been passed. The military planners then got cold feet because of the various holes in 1701.

Today’s news only seem to confirm that 1701 will not deliver the “robust mandate” some had claimed it would. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and other newspapers, the deployment of the German contingent for UNIFIL (a navy unit) is being delayed by various conditions the Lebanese government has imposed: UNIFIL patrol boats should not be allowed near the coast and should only be able to search suspicious vessels after receiving permission from the Lebanese government (of which Hezbollah, of course, is a member).

The issue is so delicate that the Germans have now bounced the Lebanese conditions back to the UN for a review whether they are compatible with 1701.

During the war it sounded like the Lebanese and the Europeans couldn’t wait to get a force in place. Now, it sounds as if everyone were just fine with the status quo.

The UN population agency’s report State of World Population 2006 focuses on an issue that is often missing in the debate on ‘brain drain,’ namely the enormous contribution of remittances from migrants to development back home. (The overall theme of the report is the far sexier “women and international migration,” with such mind-blowing revelations as the fact that almost half of all international migrants today are women.)

In 2005, remittances — funds sent by migrants to their country of origin — rang in at an estimated US$232 billion. With US$167 billion of the total going to developing countries, remittances are considerably larger than official development assistance (ODA) and are the second-largest source of external funding for developing countries after foreign direct investment (FDI). Experts consider the actual amount to be much higher, since these estimates do not take into account funds transferred through informal channels.

This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, so bear with me. I’ve been telling people back in Bosnia for years that an overeducated Bosnian working on a German bauštela contributes more to his country’s development than an overeducated Bosnian sitting all day long at Karabit being smart and looking cool (though the four packs he’ll get through that day do help the government budget). UNFPA even has some numbers:

Remittances in Europe contribute 0.5 per cent of the total GDP in the entire region. In certain countries, however, they are much more substantial: 27.1 per cent for the Republic of Moldova; 23.1 per cent for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and 18 per cent for Serbia and Montenegro.

Substantial I’d say, especially considering that once again, these numbers only include money transferred through banks or similar institutions, not through the bus driver or the relative.

Of course, exporting (mostly manual) laborers cannot be a development plan for a country like Bosnia and Serbia. But perhaps figures like those in the UNFPA report will make people think twice before they equate emigration with selfishness and staying — or returning — home with patriotism.

In an article in today’s TCSDaily I talk about the way in which the new war-crimes tapes coming out of Bosnia have provided yet another opportunity for Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks to roll out their stereotypes and prejudices.

In light of the generic, if awful, nature of the pictures, it was perhaps to be expected that they did not prompt a reassessment of well-rehearsed claims and counter-claims. Pundits and politicians on all sides took the footage as proof that they had been right all along in their interpretation of the war and the crimes it had brought.

While I hope that all of this evidence will eventually come to light, I do think that such atrocity tapes add rather little to our understanding of what happened.

From a report by the Czech news agency CTK:

Czech premier hopes to find common language with Slovak premier

Try English?

It may be Sunday but AP managed a brilliant hed nonetheless:

Stone-throwing Swiss celebrate bicentenary of cultural festival

Source: International Herald Tribune, 9/3

The piece itself is worth reading, too — we Swiss are very much in touch with our inner beast.