Hope is not a plan

This is the tenth night of general rioting in France, with the BBC reporting 900 cars burned in this story, though their banner update cites the higher number of 1,300. Violence has spread to central Paris, Toulouse and Nantes. Al Jazeera is reporting on this as well.

Tim and I were discussing this yesterday. This violence appears to be a direct consequence of failure to integrate, or care about integrating, people into society in a meaningful way. There are people in the United States who believe they can force integration by mandating English as the only language and other "cultural laundering" procedures. Far better, I think, to take the route that has been demonstrated to be effective in our first two centuries and integrate people by adapting to include their culture.

The San Jose area features Spanish-language adds for Korean-brand instant noodles. This is what we want, not mandating that people abandon their roots. In time, all roots grow together anyway.

A trial that's going on right now in Istanbul is fairly emblematic of problems Turkey faces in trying for EU membership. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk is charged with "insulting Turkishness" after stating in a magazine interview that the Ottoman empire was responsible for the death of thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians in Turkey.

This goes directly to the long-standing argument over whether there was or was not an Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915; the Turkish government has never admitted that any genocide occurred. From the photographic and documentary evidence I've seen, the genocide did happen, much in the way genocide has occurred in recent years in the Sudan and Rwanda. Pamuk believes it did as well, and must be discussed:

"What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo," the writer explains, at an Istanbul cafe overlooking the waterfront.

"But we have to be able to talk about the past."

Another author has this to say:

"We must face these realities to become a real democratic country. We are giving a struggle for this, to give light to the dark pages of our history," Ragip Zarakolu explains, watching his latest book roll-off the printing presses.

"Some conservative, nationalist and even fascist circles are very disturbed by this, but we are in need of it. Not for the Armenians or any others - but for citizens of Turkey."

Opposing them are those who want to maintain the non-discussion status quo:

"He overstepped the mark," insists group leader Kemal Kerincsiz, adding proudly that his association has also filed charges against eight other writers.

"Pamuk is a literary figure, but he made political comments that were ill-informed, untrue and anti-Turkish. We acted on behalf of all society. Orhan Pamuk should not have played with history, and with the sentiments of Turks."

By denying the past in this way, people continue the negative legacies of their forebears. Honest understanding of the good and the bad lets you celebrate and continue the good while excising the bad and never repeating it. I can only believe that those who deny the evils of those who went before already feel somehow disempowered, and can either not stand to let go of false pride in their history or want the option of repeating what went before.

The BBC story

Jacques Chirac made a bit of a splash yesterday with the following comment, made during a visit to a nuclear base in France:

"Leaders of any state that uses terrorist means against us, as well as any that may be envisaging - in one way or another - using weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would be exposing themselves to a firm and appropriate response on our behalf."

"That response could be conventional, it could also be of another nature..."

He also indicated a change in policy to allow graduated, rather than total, use of nuclear weapons, as well as their use to protect strategic interests in addition to population centers.

Of course, the big question remains "How do you use nuclear weapons to target a stateless power?" If the various incarnations of Al Qaeda, for instance, live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, what do you do about that? At best, nuclear weapons seem to be a threat against states to clean up their interiors, but that presents its own host of problems, ranging from a military response (how would Pakistan respond to a tactical nuclear strike on their territory?) to the generation of additional enemies (just how much vengeance do you generate if you destroy even a mid-sized town in another nation?).

Even so, the reinstatement of some form of conceptual "mutually assured destruction" policy might be partially worthwhile, if only by dint of putting other states on notice that they have to police their local radicals well. And even without such a policy, everyone does need to think about just what any nuclear-armed state would do if something truly bad -- for example, a smallpox attack -- wiped out some significant fraction of its population.

Of course, as with the Cold War, almost no one really wants to see someone try to call another nation's bluff. Unlike the Cold War, there are far more stateless agents out there who might not fear the consequences.

The BBC article
The Al Jazeera article
The CNN article
The GlobalSecurity.org entry on France's nuclear weapons
The GlobalSecurity.org summary table of nuclear capabilities

France has an estimated 350 nuclear weapons and four nuclear submarines (the latter carrying 64 of the nuclear devices -- others are independent missile systems and plane-launched).

As reported by the BBC, the Italian parliament has passed legislation that "permits the use of guns and knives by people in homes or workplaces to protect lives or belongings."

This new law is not going through without controversy:

However, the centre-left opposition expressed concern that it would encourage violence and lead to increased use of firearms.

A criminal lawyers' group also criticized the law, saying it amounted to allowing "legitimate offence".

This is a fascinating article when compared with the general American point of view on the topic of self defense. Whether most people are armed or not, imagine trying to convince people that they aren't legally allowed to use a weapon to defend themselves, especially in their own homes.

Also, the concept that a measure would be bad for "delegating use of force to citizens" is starkly different from our point of view. To someone raised on the idea of government by and for the people, the concept that force is delegated from the government, rather than to the government is a little unsettling.

I leave the comment by the criminal lawyers' group to indicate that Italy is no stranger to ridiculous statements.

Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide, died.

The BBC story
The Al Jazeera story
The CNN story

ETA, the Basque terrorist separatist group, has announced a ceasefire, as reported on in this story. This is their first ceasefire since one in 1998, which they broke within a year. You can read the full text of their message here. This is the key bit:

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna has decided to declare a permanent ceasefire from 24 March 2006.

The Spanish and French states must recognise the results of this democratic process, without limitations of any kind. The decision we Basque citizens make on our future will have to be respected.

Though ETA continued attacks after September 11, it's believed that they've finally had to give up on killing via bombings following the Madrid bombings of 2004. It's quite possible that, like the IRA, ETA members think they can no longer run the risk of being associated with the broader umbrella of "terrorism" with its new, Al Qaeda taint.

ETA stands for "Euskadi ta Askatasuna", which is Basque for "Basque Fatherland and Liberty." Their territorial claims include the current Basque administrative region in Spain, three territories in France and the Spanish territory of Navarre. You can read more about ETA in this Council on Foreign Relations report.

An unconfirmed posting by an al Qaeda-associated group indicates plans to kill four Russian embassy staffers kidnapped earlier this week.

The message follows on the heels of the group's unreasonable demands that Russia withdraw from Chechnya and release its Muslim prisoners in the space of 48 hours. Once again, even were the Russians entirely gung-ho on this idea, the impossible deadline points toward the validity of the actual demand as anything but a propaganda piece.

However, there's an important footnote in this story:

Chechen fighters on Tuesday demanded the release of the hostages.

Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled foreign minister in the Chechen rebel "government", denied any links to the Mujahidin Shura Council.

Much like Hamas before them, the Chechens, while showing very few qualms about using similar tactics, refuse to be associated with al Qaeda.

The Al Jazeera story

You know your state is a world power when it's making environmental agreements with sovereign nations.

Today, Tony Blair and Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a joint mission statement indicating that:

Britain and California will "commit to urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote low carbon technologies".

And:

"California and the UK recognise the linkages between climate change, energy security, human health and robust economic growth," it adds.

"Working together, California and the UK commit to build upon current efforts, share experiences, find new solutions and work to educate the public on the need for aggressive action to address climate change and promote energy diversity."

They are also looking at potential cooperation on an emissions-trading plan.

A spokesman for the British consulate denied that this is a workaround for President Bush, who withdrew from the Kyoto global warming accord and has been proactively shunning news of the need for environmentally driven changes for years.

Of course, on the whole, it makes sense for the UK (GDP $1.83 trillion) and California (GDP $1.54 trillion) to work together. And, if one did want to work around the executive, it's better to deal with 12.5% of the American economy than nothing at all.

Last month, German police discovered two identical bombs in trains in Dortmund and Koblenz. Both failed to explode, but would likely have caused massive casualties.

The BBC story about their discovery

They now have two suspects in custody, one arrested last week in Germany, the other having just been arrested in Tripoli. The first man is Lebanese; no word on the second, although it seems likely given where he was picked up.

The BBC story about their capture

The al Jazeera story about their capture

So why hit Germany? Options include a "local" disgruntlement, given that Germany is not the greatest place to be an immigrant, or an attempt to force Germany out of Arab or Muslim territory. At the moment, the Bundeswehr is active in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Operation Enduring Freedom's Horn of Africa subsection, and a small presence in the Sudan.

The military of South Ossetia nearly bagged a big catch -- the Georgian Defense Minister. His helicopter was successfully struck by ground fire and forced to make an emergency landing in Georgian-controlled territory after what the South Ossetians claim was a violation of their airspace.

The BBC story

A background on the territory

In March, the Basque separatist (and terrorist) group Eta announced a ceasefire, with the professed aim of promoting a democratic resolution to the question of Basque independence.

Last Saturday, Eta spokespeople announced that the group has no plans to disarm, and that it "confirms its commitment to continue to fight... until independence and socialism for the Basque country is won."

Eta has not yet carried out any attacks, so this may simply have been a rhetorical push to try and gain a little more leverage in any potential future negotiations, or to avoid losing credibility.

As an aside, it's apparent from their speeches that Eta wants not only a free Basque homeland, but expects to be in charge of that homeland once it becomes independent. I imagine many Basque people would like their own country; I'm not as certain that they'd want it to be a socialist country.

The Al Jazeera story

Four months ago, four Russian embassy staffers were kidnapped and killed in Iraq, as I discussed here. Putin reportedly ordered Russian special forces to "take all necessary measures to find and destroy" the killers. Checking back on things, there has been exactly zero news on this topic -- as there would have to be, if Russian special forces were actually at large in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

But the organization responsible for the murders, the Mujahidin Shura Council, was the same group that took to the streets in Ramadi earlier in October to declare the town part of a (Sunni) Islamic state within Iraq.

This suggests Russia has not been able to resolve this problem. Then again, the vigorous declaration up front may have been an end in itself.

Amidst a continuing dispute with Georgia that centers on the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia but which is really about Russian control over Eastern Europe, that has seen Russia deporting Georgian diplomats and spiking Georgian gas prices while enacting a trade embargo, and amidst controversy over whether the Russian government was involved in the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, Russia has now announced that it's going to ban imports of EU animal products.

The ostensible reason? The Russian government claims that two pending EU members, Bulgaria and Romania, have poor animal health standards.

The real reason? Most likely that the Russian executive is upset about declining influence over its Eastern European neighbors. The last time Russia threatened a ban on EU animal products was ahead of the entry of another eight former Eastern bloc nations into the EU.

Although Putin appears to be effectively consolidating his control within Russia, the heavy-handed nature of these interventions or would-be-interventions have increasingly driven its neighbors toward the EU and the US.

The International Herald Tribune article

Today, paroled loyalist murderer Michael Stone attempted to breach the Northern Ireland parliament buildings at Stormont, where discussions over devolution were taking place. He came in with a gun, a knife, and one or more bombs, and was rapidly tackled by Stormont security.

Stone most likely falls into that category of people who, despite espousing a sectarian cause, wouldn't be happy were their ostensible wishes to come true, as it would remove the actual thing that gives them meaning -- the celebrity and power involved in being a player in "the struggle."

Check out the video associated with the linked BBC article to see that at least some other people can't put their sectarianism away, either. Note especially the speaker who can't help but make a strongly political statement about the devolution talks, then tacks on a comment that, of course, the important part was that no one was hurt.

Good work by the Stormont security staff, who unhesitatingly took on an armed man.

The BBC article

Friction between Russia and its neighbors -- all components of the former Soviet Union -- continues.

Georgian forces detained two Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia, accusing them of smuggling. They were later released as a "manifestation of goodwill." Showing less goodwill, Russia held Manana Dzhabelia, a diabetic Georgian woman, for two months pending deportation. Unfortunately, she died in custody, the second such death since Russia began expelling ethnic Georgians. She is said to have not received proper medical care while being held.

Meanwhile, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns has called for Russia to withdraw its remaining troops from both Georgia and Moldova, and to keep out of internal conflicts in neighboring states. In response, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called for an avoidance of "politicized solutions" to these problems.

Russia's ambassador to Serbia has stated that Russia will use its veto power to block any U.N. settlement on the status of Kosovo if that settlement is unsuitable for either party involved:

“In case the status solution is not acceptable to both sides — both Belgrade and Pristina — the Russian side will use its veto power,” Alekseyev was quoted as saying.

Or, translated, "We're going to keep Kosovo from separating from Serbia, because the government of Serbia doesn't want that to happen."

Also:

Serbian officials repeatedly have said they count on Russia’s veto in the Security Council to prevent Kosovo independence, but Alexeyev comments to B92 mark the first time a Russian official confirmed such a possibility. There was no immediate comment from Moscow.

Russia in the past has urged both sides to find a negotiated settlement and warned against one-sided solutions. Moscow fears that Kosovo independence could set a precedent for Russian-backed separatist regions in the former Soviet Union.

MosNews story

Documents placed in the British National Archives show that in 1976, various officials warned Prime Minister Harold Wilson that a war with Argentina over the Falklands was inevitable, if talks did not occur. They also point to the ongoing debate about the expensive measures that would have had to be taken to put in place preventative defenses around the Falklands. This kind of debate -- how much prevention, and how much is it worth? -- comes up over and over again in international affairs.

You can read more about the 1976 papers by clicking here.

Delving even deeper into history, this year the United Kingdom will finally pay off its World War II debts owed to Canada and the United States. The loans of $4.33 billion from the US and $1.19 billion from Canada will end up costing the UK $7.5 billion and $2 billion to pay off.

The UK still owes and is owed money from World War I, but all such payments have been on hold since 1934. I wonder if, perhaps, some of the countries involved no longer exist.

You can read about the UK making good by clicking here.

British investigators are trying to figure out the whereabouts of a businessman who may have been traveling with one Dimitri Kovtun, the latter now under investigation by German authorities for his possible role in trafficking polonium. Russian authorities refused the Germans access to the Aeroflot flight Kovtun took to Germany, instead insisting he was not an assassin, but rather another assassination target. They've gone on to offer -- with a straight face -- the suggestion that former Yukos oil executive Leonid Nevzlin was behind the killing of Alexander Litvinenko. This claim might be vaguely more credible -- although not actually credible -- were Russia not already trying to get Nevzlin extradited from Israel on somewhat suspect fraud charges.

Of course, if you don't buy that Nevzlin did it, maybe you'll go for another former Yukos executive. I'd recommend Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the basis of his already being in jail, but the Russian Prosecutor General's office beat me to the punch. They've questioned him already.

With misdirection this clumsy, it would be better for Putin to just be quiet and leave it alone. Litvinenko's already out of the news cycle; blaming Yukos execs just pushes him back in.

Much like tenured loser Michael Stone in Northern Ireland, at least some component of ETA appears to have walked away from the permanent ceasefire the group declared last March.

In the process, they appear to have killed two Ecuadorean men, despite calls ahead of time to clear the structure. Of course, that might just be one of those risks one takes when destroying huge public buildings. And had they been lucky and not killed anyone over a political issue that lacks support even in their own ethnic base, they'd still be burning through recovery and rebuilding funds that could instead have gone to public health and other services for their people, to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars.

Renouncing violence brought ETA to the bargaining table, against the wishes of the conservative opposition in Spain. Now they've given up on that table in favor of the vanity project of expressing their personal power through indirect violence.

A century of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams pettiness is better than a day of Michael-Stone-style madness. Whoever's acting out their insecurities in ETA needs to get that message.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

The second expected body has been found in the wreckage of the Madrid airport. Diego Armando Estacio, 19, and Carlos Alonso Palate, 35, both of Ecuador, were killed in their car by last week's ETA bombing of the airport.

No matter what, calls ahead of time or no, if you're setting off bombs, you're going to kill people.

al Jazeera article

"Who remembers now the destruction of the Armenians?"

From this CNN article, transcripts of taped conversations between Husein and his aides prior to killing 180,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign:

"I will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all," a voice identified by prosecutors as that of Majeed, Hussein's cousin and a senior aide, is heard saying.

"Who is going to say anything? The international community? Curse the international community," the voice continued.

This is not to make the Hitler-Hussein comparison, but to point out that anytime a genocide is ignored, it sends the message that you, too, can get away with genocide.

This is also not a time for people to self-righteously say "Well, we toppled this genocidal bastard," because the Anfal campaign happened on the Reagan-Bush watch, and we left it alone because it had very little to do with us.

Just like Sudan.

It's not really children's week so much as children's month.

In an unsurprisingly immature statement, Eta mixed a denial and an acceptance along with some misdirection to yield a piece of junk press release:

The paper said: "Eta affirms that the permanent ceasefire started on 24 March, 2006 still stands. It claims responsibility for the attack at Barajas (airport)."

Eta said it had given advance warning of the attack and condemned the fact that the targeted building had not been evacuated.

So, for the record, they blew up a building, but their ceasefire is still in effect. Great. So when the Spanish government razes every structure in the Basque territory to the ground (which they're not going to do, of course), but doesn't intend to kill anyone, that's also maintaining a "ceasefire." Good to know.

And, since they didn't mean to kill anyone and were good enough to make a call ahead of time it's not their fault that they murdered those two men who were so foolish as to think you could safely rest in your car in a parking garage. Instead, it's the fault of the government for not evacuating. Or maybe them, for being asleep. Who knows?

Again, if you're blowing things up, you're killing people. If I walk into a room, yell "Look out!" and start shooting wildly, "They didn't get out of the way in time" is not going to be an adequate defense.

Much like Michael Stone in Northern Ireland, the remaining Eta members are probably no longer the True Believers, but the needy, those who have a pathological desire for public attention, but are similarly unwilling to accept responsibility for bad outcomes.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

An amnesty offered by the Russian government to Chechen insurgents expired last night. The amnesty was first offered July 15, after the killing of Chechen leader Shamil Basayev, who was behind the 2004 school attack in Beslan. Although specific figures differ, the Russian antiterrorism committee says about five hundred insurgents have surrendered under the amnesty.

Mosnews
AP reporting

In many ways.

India joined the "able to launch and recover spacecraft" club this week, as a capsule was successfully recovered from the Bay of Bengal following eleven days in space. The Indian space program has an uncrewed lunar mission scheduled for February of next year, and hopes to have an astronaut in space by 2014.

You can read the full details in this al Jazeera article.

Over in this BBC article, BBC South Asia bureau editor Paul Danahar discusses the real take-home lesson from a recent, well-publicized racism incident on the UK version of Big Brother (a reality TV show):

But more interestingly the incident has also shown that India, contrary to the fears of British diplomats, has become comfortable enough with its position in the world to see things like the Big Brother row in perspective.

...

But as India this year prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary of independent rule one thing seems to be clear.

The "Britishers" are no longer the bogeymen they used to be because India is no longer suffering from the inferiority complex it used to have. India no longer feels the need to dwell on past injustices because it's too busy getting ready for what many predict will be its future greatness.

...

One English commentator noted after the row erupted that "Shilpa Shetty has taken the supposed British virtues of civility, articulacy, reserve and having a stiff upper lip and shown that.. we lack them".

They did so because they recognised a huge pool of well-educated, English-speaking, middle-class people that could do the job not only cheaper than the folks back home, but often better.

As reported in this BBC article, Italian prosecutors are charging Specialist Mario Lozano with murder in the death of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari at an American checkpoint in Iraq in 2005.

This BBC article compares the American and Italian government analyses of what happened at that checkpoint. Their primary points of disagreement are on just how fast the Italian-driven vehicle was going, how quickly it stopped, and how long they had to react to warning shots. The Italian report posits that:

"It is likely that the state of tension stemming from the conditions of time, circumstances and place, as well as possibly some degree of inexperience and stress, might have led some soldiers to instinctive and little controlled reactions,"

This is probably true. I imagine the relative perception of time for parties on both sides had a lot to do with their position on that night. If you're manning a checkpoint in a country rife with suicide bombers, the approach time of a car seems like seconds, at best. If you're in the car, and some soldiers have just started shooting at you, it seems like forever until they stop.

Both accounts agree that communication between Italian government officials and American officials before the incident was insufficient. It's possible the miscommunication between them led the Italians' American contact to believe that the Italians did not want the presence of their rescue operation (of journalist Giuliana Sgrena) announced, whereas the Italian intelligence officers may have believed the Americans had been warned in advance -- which would naturally lead them to approach the checkpoint with a little less caution.

Sgrena and her associated newspaper have pushed the idea that she was deliberately targeted by "the Americans." Of course, why we'd choose to use a random Army Spec. to assassinate someone, I have no idea. I think bad plans like that really only turn up in movies. In general, the official Italian and American accounts match each other better than either matches some of Sgrena's assertions, at least as I've seen them reported in the BBC.

This looks very much like it's about making a point locally, within Italy, rather than to us or any other outside country. The official reports on both sides say "accident."

After all, were it anything else, why would Sgrena and the other agent be alive?

(As an additional note, I haven't seen anything more specific on the type of murder they're charging Spec. Lozano with, so I don't know if the official case is asserting specific intent on his part to kill an Italian special agent, or some equivalent of voluntary manslaughter.)

Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on EU relations, gave the EU a polite "don't touch our stuff" message with regard to former Soviet territories. Russia still feels it has a claim on these areas, but the expansion of the EU to include former Warsaw Pact nations is rapidly giving the EU common borders with quite a few former Soviet lands -- and prompting the EU to take an interest in local disputes. This isn't great for Russia, which has been sponsoring separatists in Moldova and Georgia (despite being such a stickler about separatists in Chechnya).

At the same time, Russia has announced it is expanding its ICBM fleet, picking up 17 new Topol-M missiles (versus an average 4 per year in earlier years):

President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have described the Topol-M as a bulwark of Russia’s nuclear might for years to come, and hailed its ability to penetrate any prospective missile defenses. Putin last week dismissed Washington’s claims that missile defense sites it hopes to establish in Poland and the Czech Republic were intended to counter threats posed by Iran, and said that Russia would respond by developing even more efficient weapons systems.

Even so, Putin wants businesses in Russia to do as he says, and not as he does. He's warned them to stop using scary language like "expansion" and "market conquest", lest they freak out potential future expandees.

From the AP:

Nearly 60 countries signed a treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from holding people in secret detention, but the United States and some of its key European allies were not among them.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined comment except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty, but that the final text "did not meet our expectations."

Lest you get too caught up in the fact that we haven't signed on, consider everyone else who also declined to commit: Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain...

Notably, various Americans are currently being prosecuted (in absentia) or considered for prosecution in at least two of those countries for renditions carried out within their borders. Of course, inasmuch as the EU member states appear, based on documents from meetings with the US, to have agreed to the policy of allowing these renditions, the pending legal proceedings represent the people in those countries disagreeing with the official policy of their respective nations.

Or, in other words, carrying on a dialogue that will strengthen their respective democracies.

Everyone in charge ends up being a little suspect from time to time, don't you think?

The EU parliament has endorsed a report condemning member states that let the CIA carry out rendition operations within their borders.

Although the report has no force in EU law, Mr Fava [ Giovanni Fava, Italian Socialist MEP and author of the report] said during the parliamentary debate that the related investigation, over a year, had uncovered much new evidence.

It was not possible to contradict evidence or suggestions that secret detention centres were operated in Poland and Romania, the report said.

Countries called out by the report include Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and the United Kingdom. The report also calls for shutting down Guantanamo, and release of any European ciitzens held there.

Curiously enough, the defense of choice for those who are embarassed to have their cooperation with us highlighted is to suggest that the whole thing is an anti-American effort:

Centre-right MEPs - the largest group in parliament - have been highly critical of the report, saying it is primarily motivated by anti-Americanism.

Many of the governments fingered in the report were happy to complain about CIA operations on their soil, right up until someone bothered to point out that these things were all done with the willing cooperation of those governments -- and they "benefited" from the results as much as we did. Trying to tag the report as "anti-American" is an attempt to deflect the core point of the report -- that many, many people cooperated with our CIA on this. The American role has been widespread public knowledge for a while now. If anything, this report is "anti-European responsiblity dodging."

BBC article
al Jazeera article

It's looking suspiciously like the pending British drawdown in Iraq is actually a switchover, as 1,400 troops are slated to head off to Afghanistan to reinforce British efforts against the Taliban. That will bring their total in Afghanistan to a couple hundred shy of 8,000 troops.

Secretary of Defence Des Browne claims that the increase in Afghanistan did not precipitate the drawdown in Iraq. Whether or not this is true, it's certainly a step in the right direction, and shows that the UK is moving toward a more rational application of its forces than our President's emotional investment in not being wrong allows.

Consider again that earlier this month, one of our own generals was in Brussels begging for 2,000 more troops, even as we were planning on tossing another 20,000 or so into Iraq. It's fortunate that, in the absence of timely help from most other NATO member states (save Poland, who upped their contribution from 100 to 1,000 troops), the British government had the will and the wit to send more troops to an area that was once a breeding ground for terrorism, and could be yet again -- potentially bringing Pakistan and its arsenal along for the ride, if we're not careful.

For the Conservatives the shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said the increase indicated that "we are taking a disproportionate burden".

He said success in Afghanistan was "essential" for global security and said there were now questions to be asked about the future of Nato.

I believe we have done tremendous damage to the willingness of NATO partners to participate in the war in Afghanistan, because by sending such limited resources to such a critical region, we've made it seem as unwinnable as the counterinsurgency in Iraq clearly is. Perhaps the additional British commitment will demonstrate that that is not so.

BBC article

It's drawdown time again for the British military. As the Eufor contingent in Bosnia moves from 6,000 troops to 2,500, 600 British troops formerly stationed in Bosnia will be moved out of the area. Once again, the question is whether ths is an intended drawdown following stabilization in Bosnia -- as is the claim -- or if it's an example of "scratching around" as a consequence of military overextension, to paraphrase Liam Fox.

Certainly, the relatively close match in numbers between the British drawdown in Iraq and the planned increases in Afghanistan made those two moves feel like almost a one-to-one switchover. That said, the fact that 600 troops are leaving Bosnia as part of a 3,500-person reduction in Eufor suggests that the Bosnia drawdown, while perhaps timely, was not explicitly done to aid in reinforcing Afghanistan.

Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, who served in Bosnia, welcomed the statement but there were "lessons to be learned".

He said in Bosnia, there was one Nato soldier for every square kilometre while in Afghanistan, there was one for every 600 sq km.

Although I made the occupation-force-versus-area comparison between Iraq and Bosnia in this discussion of the insanity of our limited Iraq war plan, perhaps the more valid comparison is force to population. When Ellwood refers to "one soldier for every square kilometre", he means the initial NATO force of 60,000 troops that went in in 1995-96. That initial force total amounted to one soldier for every seventy-five citizens. The current NATO Afghanistan force is about 35,000-strong, or one soldier for every 885 citizens. It's not the fifty-fold difference that the area comparison generates, but it's still not good. The rule of thumb for a modern pacification effort is on the order of one soldier per 50 citizens -- Bosnia was right in the ballpark here. That said, Afghanistan actually has reasonably competent, reasonably allied armed forces, so there may well be large areas of the country that can be "written out" of security estimates, much as the Kurdish areas in Iraq typically are.

Unlike in Iraq, I remain cautiously optimistic that an increase in troops in theater will actually help in Afghanistan.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

al Jazeera reports in this article about parliamentary voting in the breakaway province of Abkhazia, nominally a part of Georgia, but effectively independent since a civil war in the early 90s. Notably, the separatist struggles of both Abkhazia and another Georgian province, South Ossetia, have received substantial backing from Russia. This is a potentially dangerous game for Russia, as they attempt to drive the fragmentation of states such as Georgia and Moldova on one hand to retain regional dominance, yet throw thousands of lives away and cause massive damage trying to retain Chechnya. It becomes especially worrisome when you consider that some of the killers at Beslan may well have been separatists from the Ossetia region in Russia.

Guns and funds don't politely stop at the borders.

Russia has begun construction on floating nuclear power plants, based initially on the low-end nuclear plants currently used in their icebreaker fleet, and then moving on to midrange plants based on the reactors used in their nuclear subs.

"This is a unique potential in both Russian and world power engineering. We have unique competitive advantages: no other country in the world had so many reactor-years and such a unique nuclear fleet as we did."

Greenpeace, naturally, is freaking out about this.

They're not unjustified, either. As Sergey Kiriyenko, head of the Russian nuclear energy agency Rosatom, said above, the former Soviet fleet has many "reactor-years" of experience. Some of that experience involves ditching nuclear reactors in the sea around the Kola peninsula. Given that the same people who cavalierly scrapped nuclear reactors by simply sinking them are now in charge of making these floating reactor platforms, Greenpeace is right to be concerned.

al Jazeera article

The people of Chagos were removed from their home islands in the late 60s and early 70s by the government of the UK when it leased the island of Diego Garcia to the US (we use it as a military base). Since then, the displaced Chagossians have been fighting for the right to return to the islands

They won the right of return in a court case in 2000, but following several years of inactivity, the government of the UK used royal prerogative to overturn the court decision, arguing that "it would not be right for the Chagossians to be allowed home because of security concerns." (That's an al Jazeera quote, not a quote from any British official.)

That use of royal prerogative has now been deemed unlawful.

Lord Justice Sedley, giving the lead ruling, said the government's use of the Order in Council under the Royal Prerogative - powers that allow action without reference to Parliament - was an unlawful way of preventing the islanders from returning.

"To accept the islanders' right to return but do nothing about it - as it did between 2000 and 2004 - would be meaningless and immoral."

The government has one final avenue of appeal open to it -- the House of Lords. They have a month to decide whether or not to file such an appeal.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

This week brings some contrasting efforts to change the world, two happening in the courts, the third ending up in the courts.

In the Netherlands, relatives of people killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre are suing the Dutch government. While the Dutch governmental response is that all claims should be made against those who committed the massacre, the plaintiffs in this case argue that the Dutch government is at fault for refusing to provide air support for Dutch troops in Srebrenica. Certainly, it's true that people flocked to Srebrenica as a safe haven, only to find that is really wasn't. You can read more in this BBC article.

Elsewhere, the government of Nigeria, as well as the government of the Nigerian state of Kano, have filed suit against big pharma company Pfizer, claiming that it carried out improper trials for a meningitis drug, and in so doing caused deaths, as well as mental and physical problems. Pfizer holds that it did everything properly, and obtained "verbal consent" from parents of children who were involved. you can read more in this BBC article.

Finally, a plot to violently overthrow the government of Laos was busted up in California. Nine people, led by former Hmong general Vang Pao, were trying to buy weapons en masse to equip an insurgent effort in Laos, with the goal of taking out several government buildings. The Hmong, who you may never have heard of, are ethnic minorities in Laos who were backed and equipped by the CIA during our larger war in Southeast Asia. When we pulled out of the effort, we mostly abandoned the Hmong, although some have filtered over to the US, and others ended up lingering in refugee camps in Thailand for years. The BBC has an overview of the state of the Hmong in Laos here. You can read the full article on this abortive insurgency here.

During his three decades in office, Mobutu Sese Seko stole quite a bit of money from his nation of Zaire, squirreling it away in Swiss bank accounts. Estimates of the money stolen place the amount in multiple billions of dollars, money that could really help former Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) deal with any number of current problems. The DRC's government was hopeful that the Swiss government would repatriate something on the order of a billion dollars or so up until yesterday, when the Swiss announced that they'll be handing back $6.6 million instead.

Naturally, the government of the DRC is a little disappointed. The Swiss government insists that's all the embezzled money they have on hand. Did the dictator somehow spend the other $990 million while he was still alive?

Unfortunately for the government of the DRC, they're going to have very, very little leverage over the Swiss.

BBC article

Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia will start Soviet-style long-range bomber flights.

"We have decided to restore flights by Russian strategic aviation on a permanent basis," Mr Putin told reporters at joint military exercises with China and four Central Asian states in Russia's Ural mountains.

"Flights by other countries' strategic aircraft continue and this creates certain problems for ensuring the security of the Russian Federation," he said.

As the article notes, the original cessation of threat flights like these wasn't done for peaceful reasons, but rather because Russia could no longer afford the fuel costs. Now that they have the cash again, Putin is able to restart the practice.

The State Department was fairly blase about the announcement, which is an appropriate response. During the Cold War, the very immediate possibility of nuclear war made these shadowing flights a real problem. These days, they're much more a symbol of Russian prestige, and that's fine.

BBC article

In a semi-surprise move, Vladimir Putin sacked the current prime minister of Russia and has nominated as his replacement Viktor Zubkov. Zubkov is currently the head of a group fighting money laundering for the Russian government, and previously worked for Putin as part of the city government of St. Petersburg. Putin's ostensible reason is providing a new prime minister to help with the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections, but many suspect that he's setting Zubkov up as the next president. The suspicion then is that Putin would effectively continue to manage the country through Zubkov.

Certainly, Putin has acted in other ways to refocus power in Russia on himself and cut into chaos and democratic reforms. It wouldn't be shocking to find he had a game plan to continue to rule the country for quite a while (until Zubkov changes his mind about being controlled...).

al Jazeera article
CNN article

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was well-known for her critical views on Vladimir Putin, especially on the military operations he launched against Chechnya.

Ms. Politkovskaya was shot last October outside her apartment.

Now, someone has been charged with her murder. Who is this entirely believable suspect?

Former Chechen presidential candidate Shamil Burayev.

According to Russian prosecutors, Burayev was part of a cabal of foreign interlopers (If he's foreign, does that mean Chechnya actually isn't part of Russia? Good to know...) bent on destabilizing Russia.

They're just not trying very hard these days. Of course, as they're playing to an internal audience starving for pride, they don't need to.

BBC article

This summer saw an outbreak of the economically devastating foot-and-mouth disease among livestock in the United Kingdom. Thanks in large part to a rapid and concerted response by the government, it was of relatively limited scope -- two farms, $100 million in economic harm.

(Let that sink in for a moment, that a well-handled FMD outbreak hit the UK for $100 million.)

Now, the infection has been traced not to a natural origin but to accidental release of FMD virus from a vaccine facility run by the Merial corporation and housed in a building managed by the UK government's Institute for Animal Health. Here's how it happened:

A two-step chemical strategy is used at Pirbright [the IAH facility] to prevent FMD from escaping in liquid waste. Both Merial and IAH first treat wastewater at their own buildings with a disinfectant such as citric acid. Then, a complex system of pipes takes the water to a shared effluent treatment plant, managed by IAH, where caustic soda is used to raise the pH to 12 and kill off any remaining virus during a 12-hour holding period. Finally, the liquid is released into the sewer.

As it happened, construction crews were digging holes around the leaks at the time, and heavy trucks--without proper IAH oversight--drove through the presumably virus-laden mud. Some of these vehicles later took a road that went very close to the first infected farm. From there, the farmer may have carried the virus to his herd.

Quoted from this article in Science magazine.

It's just these kinds of problems that are the big fear about facilities that work with pathogens. As the Science article discusses, a number of well-known pathogen research centers are also on the older side, and there are concerns that their infrastructure may also lend itself to these kinds of accidental releases. Add to this the possibility for procedural errors -- whether it's letting trucks drive through areas they shouldn't or forgetting to put in a new air filter in your anthrax research lab's exhaust system, and the worry is that an incorrectly managed research center may accidentally spawn the next pandemic.

It is not particularly comforting then, that Texas A&M has recently been gigged in a big way for substantial failings in their own biosafety procedures, including losing several vials of Brucella, the causative agent of the hard-to-treat Malta fever, and accidentally exposing a number of workers to Q fever. Texas A&M interim president Eddie Davis lamely defended TAMU's record by saying that "institutions under that same level of review would probably have findings that would be reportable to the CDC." He then praised the now-former biosafety compliance director for being "very loyal and competent." Competent would be good, but I don't see how loyalty to TAMU helps the rest of Texas if they're not maintaining proper safety.

It's common for people to shrug and move on in the face of regulation, doing just enough to comply. We have to remember, however, that screwing up the safety compliance in a pathogen lab is not the same as failing to maintain a piece of heavy machinery. The latter may result in a massive work accident, but the former might wipe out a city or all agriculture in the midwest.

This week in the United Nations, the bad blood between Russia and Georgia continued, as Russia complained about the deaths of two of its military officers and Georgia, in turn, asked what Russian officers were doing on formally Georgian soil.

Here's the argument in a nutshell:

"One has to wonder -- what was a vice colonel of the Russian military doing in the Georgian forests, organizing and leading a group of armed insurgents on a mission of terror?" the Georgian leader said.

Immediately following Saakashvili's speech, Russia's ambassador to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, told reporters that the men were instructors at an "anti-terrorist training center" and were killed Sept. 20 by knife wounds and gunshots to the head.

This isn't the first time the Georgians have done something about Russians in breakaway Georgian territories. Just shy of a year ago, they detained two Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia.

Although the Abkhazian conflict chiefly makes the news in its "role" as a proxy war between Russia and Georgia, it has an entirely different "life" online. Much like the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Abkhazian conflict is played out in great detail and with much acrimony on YouTube, with videos coming from both sides.

This video from a pro-Georgian poster gives us a list of Georgians tortured and killed by Abkhazians as part of a "genocide" against Georgians:

Other videos have shown ethnic Georgians being pressed into forced labor on farms by armed Abkhazians.

This video from a pro-Abkhazian poster is simply a grab of a news story concerning a firefight between Georgian and Abkhazian troops that left several Abkhazians dead, but with the appended title "Abkhazian Soldiers are Kidnapped by Puppet Republic Georgia."

As much as I've read about the Abkhazian conflict (which started with a war of separation in the early 90s), I'm unclear on who Georgia is supposed to be a puppet of. If anyone can make a claim of puppetry, it's the Georgians, who can point to Russian advisers hanging out in both the Abkhazian and South Ossetian zones.

It's unclear what influence, if any, these YouTube wars have on the real wars they're prompted by, but they do serve as a far more accurate window into the thought processes of everyone involved than any reporting I've seen. Certainly, if you can stomach it, the comments on these videos tell of the level of distrust and anger present in parties to the conflict -- much as they did during the summer war, and much as I expect they will continue to do as this form of personalized reporting and propaganda continues to be so easy and accessible.

CNN article

A would-be bomber (perhaps suicide, perhaps not) was stopped at the United States embassy in Vienna when his backpack full of explosives and nails set off the metal detector, and he panicked and ran.

Investigation is under way right now to determine if his backpack was actually a viable explosive. I'd put even odds on it not being viable -- a bomber who doesn't realize they're going to set of the metal detector, and who then leaves (instead of rushing the facility and detonating the device) may not be entirely there. Apparently, he has yet to give any kind of coherent statement, either.

The would-be bomber is a Bosnian national.

BBC article
International Herald Tribune article

As part of a package of laws designed to alienate the hell out of anyone foolish enough to immigrate there, the French parliament is now considering adding a voluntary (but at the applicant's expense) DNA test to "expedite" immigration of family members. Although this is making the top headline here, perhaps more important are tests given in one's home country designed to demonstrate good knowledge of French language and "values."

A number of Americans who have had a handful of generations in this country to develop their own xenophobia would like similar requirements for simple immigration. Of course, a key consideration is that French treatment of their immigrant and minority populations led to widespread rioting and burning of cars all throughout Paris. On the other hand, we have, well, a work force that reliably integrates into American culture within a few generations.

Of course, one of the consequences of our melting-pot approach is that you end up with a bit of that culture blended in. For those who are worried about this, I assure you that in a couple generations, your kids won't think twice about going to an Indian pub or celebrating a Chinese holiday, and a whole new generation of American xenophobes will be afraid of those weird folks from Antarctica.

BBC article

This week, al Jazeera reminds us that violence often comes as a result of a mismatch between national borders and ethnic boundaries. In our modern age, these conflicts are the unwieldy children of sometimes arbitrary and sometimes very intentional batching and dividing by the major powers of the twentieth century. The territory once bounded by Soviet borders is a poster child for this issue, whether it's Georgia trying not to further subfragment following its release from the USSR, or the ongoing problem of Tatars returning to the Crimea half a century after Stalin banished them to Central Asia. Similarly, the wake of the Ottoman Empire continues to be alive with conflict, most recently embodied in the declaration by the government of Turkey that they will take military action against Kurdish separatist groups hiding within Iraq, despite past requests from their NATO allies that they not cross that border.

Given the increasing power of the smaller party in modern conflict, and the loss of a major bilateral struggle to drown out other noises, it seems likely that wars of ethnic identity will continue as the defining kind of conflict well into the foreseeable future.

The "investigation" into the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has now netted some additional suspects -- this time, including Lt. Col. Pavel Ryaguzov, a member of the Federal Security Service. Col. Here's the official word, as reported by the BBC:

Investigators believe that he could have passed on details of Ms Politkovskaya's address to another suspect, who in turn gave them to the killer, the source said.

Given that Ms. Politkovskaya wasn't in a protection program at the time, it's hard to say why the killers would have needed a member of the FSS to provide the address of a random journalist. Maybe there are no phone books in Russia. Col. Ryaguzov is added to the already quirky list of suspects centered on a former Chechen politician:

Chief prosecutor Yuri Chaika said at the time that among the suspects were serving and former security officers and that their ringleader was a Chechen gang boss.

Mr Chaika said there were indications that the murder plot had been masterminded abroad with a view to discrediting the Kremlin.

Given that Ms. Politkovskaya was known for writing pieces that exposed abuse of Chechen civilians by the Russian army, this is incredible, in the traditional meaning of the word. That said, a security service that is capable of bombing its own people might well see that as a plausible story to feed to the public.

BBC article

Members of the Basque terrorist group ETA killed a Spanish civil guard officer who was attending a meeting with French police in Capbreton. As ETA often retreats to French territory, the two governments are trying to work together to combat the would-be rulers of a Basque state. This pretty much puts paid to the idea that they aren't actively trying to kill people, although only certified, self-justifying jackoffs think that phoning ahead makes you less responsible for murdering people, so it's a fairly moot point.

Another civil guard member is effectively dead following this shooting, being comatose with no signs of brain function.

The violence really does not bring Basque territories closer to being independent.

CNN article
BBC article

The second officer shot by ETA grandstanders in Capbreton has passed from brain death to clinical death, putting the official tally to two dead from this attack.

BBC article

...if you're blowing things up, you're killing people.

If you're very lucky, like the Corsican separatists who set off bombs in Ajaccio this week, you'll only injure a five-year-old child.

al Jazeera article

Despite the perhaps negative tone of many things I post about here, I am, on the whole, convinced that the trend line of humanity is going in the right direction. Today's example:

Prosecutors in Italy have issued arrest warrants for 140 people over a decades-old plot by South American dictatorships called Operation Condor.

A judge issued the arrest warrants on Monday, following a request from state prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo.

One of the true, positive achievements of the last two decades has been an unwillingness to let old crimes against humanity simply rest. In a very real way, there should be no statute of limitations on wanton cruelty, and more and more often, that is the case. It's never a wasted effort prosecuting these people, even decades and decades after the fact.

BBC article

One must feel for the plight of Vladimir Putin and his allies. After all their effort spent peackeeping in Georgia, resolving the conflict in Kosovo, and solving crimes, now they have to deal with their major political rival being, of all things, disqualified from competing in the upcoming election.

In a surprise move, Russia's Election Commission has barred Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov from running in the upcoming March presidential election, ruling that thousands of his nominating signatures were fraudulent.

On the plus side, Mr. Kasyanov has not suddenly developed any kind of radiation sickness. Perhaps that only happens when Russians foolishly become naturalized citizens of the United Kingdom?

We can all look forward to a healthy turnout and an abundantly healthy percentage of the March vote going to Kremlin favorite Dmitri Medvedev. Such an exciting time for Russia. Imperial, even.

Voice of America article

Former SS prison guard Michael Seifert was extradited last week from Canada to Rome, where he will serve the remainder of his life in custody following his conviction for World War II-era murder. Seifert was convicted in absentia eight years ago by an Italian military tribunal for his role in killing and torturing people during his time as a guard at a prison camp in Bolzano. He was arrested in 2002 at the request of the Italian government, and his attempts to prevent his extradition finally failed this year.

Seifert's extradition has been welcomed by groups campaigning for Nazi war criminals to be brought to justice.

"It sets an example for other war criminals, not only Nazi war criminals, but war criminals related to Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or any other genocide," he said.

Once again, this is one of the good signs of our times, much like the trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders and the prosecution of former South American government officials involved in operation Condor. Every time we do this, we reaffirm that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

BBC article

Kosovo's parliament declared Kosovo's independence from Serbia today by a unanimous show of hands. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica declared it a "false state." Discussion in the U.N. Security Council broke down when Russia said that there was no call to change the 1999 resolution that placed Kosovo under U.N. authority.

Celebrations broke out in Pristina as violence broke out elsewhere.

The declaration approved by Kosovo's parliament contains limitations on Kosovan independence as outlined in Mr Ahtisaari's plan.

Russia's foreign ministry has indicated that Western recognition of an independent Kosovo could have implications for the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

As we've seen in the past few years, the Russian government has been trying to use separatist groups within neighboring nations such as Georgia and Moldova as leverage over those nations. Russia has troops on the ground in nominally Georgian and Moldavan territory, and has even lost some military officers, presumably at the hands of the Georgian military.

The Russian government differs, and dangerously, from the approach taken by its follow giant totalitarian state, China. Whereas China firmly clamps down on its own people and just as firmly refuses to get involved in the internal affairs of neighboring nations, the Russian government has chosen to use as leverage a problem that it itself has. It's unclear how Putin and friends plan to promote ethnic separatism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia without similarly promoting it in Chechnya, North Ossetia, and Kosovo.

BBC article

Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland's first minister, head of the Democratic Unionist Party and general purpose, murder-inspiring sectarian hate-monger, has announced that he's retiring from both the ministerial and DUP lead positions.

Simon Jenkins has some kind words for Paisley in his column:

Then the big man began. Like a revivalist preacher from the deep south, Paisley ranted over the sodden slopes of Stormont. It was electrifying and archaic. The curses of God were called down on "old red socks", the Pope, the "anti-Christ", whom Paisley was later to heckle with primitive discourtesy in the European parliament. Catholics were damned - "they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin" - and King Billy glorified. The crowd sang hymns and roared. It was like watching a mad Celtic druid blessing the Brythonic hordes before confronting the Roman army.

The man was a monster, a fanatic, a hangover from the middle ages. I remember wondering how on earth Britain had allowed Ulster's constitution so to fester as to have this man roaming the woods and hills of Ulster. One thing Britain does not do well is postcolonial partition. It creates a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Paisley, and his antagonist, Adams.

Jenkins sees it clearly:

These men eventually eliminated moderate leaders so they could claim moderation for themselves. They smashed power-sharing so they could share power between themselves. They now pretend that change could not have been faster because the people would not let them. The climate of public opinion in the province was not ready.

That is a lie. These men were the climate, and it was one of systematic bigotry and violence. They chose their methods and terrorised all who opposed them. While religious sectarianism elsewhere in Europe was on the wane, lovers of Northern Ireland had to watch in despair as it drifted to ever greater separatism - territorially, politically and psychologically.

...and...

What restored devolved government to Stormont was not Good Friday but, as Adams claimed yesterday, a decision by him and Paisley to abandon their former ways, stand on their heads and compromise. Each got what he wanted and could seek comfort in old age, lubricated with exorbitant amounts of British money.

Needless to say, Paisley was soon "Paisleyed" by the hardliners he had once led, and has had to resign. As anyone who walks the Falls will know, the Real IRA is still a menace to Adams. The legacy of four decades, if not four centuries, of communal hatred is entrenched in segregated schools and housing estates. The men who now claim to have brought peace to Ulster delayed it so long that their peace is insecure and their landscape traumatised.

Paisley was one of the worst in terms of thriving on the power of the tribalism he stoked in his people, and the countertribalism that stoked among the Catholic minority, and the continuous cycling of the two.

My personal recommendation to Ian, in his dotage, is that he consider missionary work. Perhaps he can go to Saudi Arabia, and explain to the locals just how bad the Catholics are.

BBC article

Tim and I have talked quite a bit about "tribalism" versus "sectarianism." The short version is that when it's white people, it's sectarianism, and when it's anyone else, it's tribalism. Sectarianism is a natural conflict that can happen among civilized people, and that will be resolved in time with negotiations. Tribalism is hard to deal with, and the people it springs from don't think the way "we" do.

Do please note the sarcasm.

The use of tribalism to indict ethnic or religious conflicts among people you don't like and sectarianism to allow those same conflicts among people you do like is what allows people to not take an appropriately dim view of folks like the soon-to-be-departed Ian Paisley and his counterparts in Sinn Fein.

This week, Lord Goldsmith submitted a report to Gordon Brown proposing that, among other things, the U.K. should have a pledge of allegiance, a national holiday celebrating Britishness, and expanded citizenship ceremonies for schoolchildren and naturalized citizens. The obvious targets here, of course, are the disenfranchised Muslim communities that have spawned the U.K.'s blight of home-grown radicals and terrorists. But who's complaining?

"These suggestions are not something the Scottish government would support," said an official spokesman for Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. "Nor would they find favor among parents and schools in Scotland. We don't think it's appropriate to pledge allegiance to the United Kingdom. And under devolution, responsibility for the schools in Scotland lies with the Scottish Parliament."

...and...

Paul Flynn, a Labour Party MP from Wales, said there is virtually no support in Wales for the ideas put forth by Goldsmith.

"I've never described myself as being British, I describe myself as Welsh," he said. "I live in the UK but I'm not happy that it's united and I'm less happy that it's a kingdom."

...and...

In Northern Ireland, where the Good Friday agreement has created a coalition government between those who want to remain in the U.K. and those who want to break away, Sinn Fein officials rejected the plan, saying no one in the party would consider pledging allegiance to the U.K.

Mm. Tribalism, indeed.

CNN article

In this week's NATO meeting, an invite was extended to a very happy Albania, with NATO as a whole declining to fast track the Ukraine and Georgia. Foolishly and notably, Greece vetoed an invite given to Macedonia, on the basis that the name of Macedonia implies some kind of territorial claim on the northern province of Greece that shares that name.

Donald Steinberg comments on this idiocy in The Guardian, as reported here by the International Crisis Group. Some choice quotes:

At the summit, the Alliance was expected to extend membership invitations to Croatia, Albania and Macedonia, but Greece is blocking Skopje's bid due to the name issue. Athens' extreme diplomatic inhospitality towards its newest neighbour is rooted in the national indignation that another country should give itself the name of one of its own provinces, especially the one associated with Alexander the Great and Phillip of Macedonia, and fears that Skopje's use of the name implies a claim to the Greek northern province. Greece has already forced on the Macedonians the appalling moniker, "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", or FYROM, in all international forums. As if Athens would ever accept to be called the "Former Ottoman Province of Greece".

The notion that two geographic locations cannot share the same name would strike many as bizarre. Few would mistake Paris, France, for its counterpart in Texas, or Toledo, Spain, for its counterpart in Ohio. The residents of the Belgian province of Luxembourg have never been threatened by the country of the same name, nor by the Luxembourg Palace in the aforementioned Paris - France, that is. There are so many Springfields in the US that it has become an inside joke on The Simpsons.

...and...

Contrast those strategic interests with the apparent threat that Greece seems to fear. Does Athens really think that the country of Macedonia, with some two million relatively poor people, wants to take over a region in Greece, a country which is far richer and five times more populous? Do they believe that Skopje is pushing the territorial claims of Alexander and seeking an empire stretching not just to Thessaloniki, but all the way to Afghanistan and Egypt?

Glad to see that the government of Greece is doing so much to help here.

BBC article

This week, UK politician Nick Clegg has called for the Serious Fraud Office to reopen its investigation of possible bribing of Saudi officials by the British Arms exporter BAE. The original investigation was closed after it was deemed to conflict in an unstated manner with British national security.

Clegg's call comes on the back of a High Court ruling that the original cessation of investigations in 2006 was unlawful. The Court still has the option of forcing the SFO to reopen that inquiry, whether or not that office of Gordon Brown want to.

The word now is that the unstated threat to British national security was actually a very specific threat by the Saudis to withhold information and support for British antiterrorism investigations if the BAE inquiry went ahead. The fact that the British government of the time went along with that threat displays the startling lack of proper risk analysis that often turns up when the issue in question is terrorism or extremists.

It is appalling that terrorists have been able to hit central London. That said, sixty people per million UK residents died in traffic accidents in 2004, or on the order of 3,600 fatalities, total. Likewise, influenza deaths must far outpace the overall risk of terrorist attack. Similarly with cancer and other illnesses. Thus, the heavy emphasis on counterterrorism can't possibly be purely about the numbers.

In principal, defending against terrorism is a matter of sending the concrete policy message that attacks on your citizens will not be tolerated, and that people who attempt it will forfeit their freedom and occasionally their lives. The core message must be that your people can not be messed with. The willingness of the Blair administration (of which Brown was an integral part) to bend and allow itself to be coerced by a fundamentalist state, to look the other way rather than continue a corruption investigation of a major arms exporter, says that the UK can be messed with.

Put simply, the risk to the United Kingdom of a government that can be bullied by other nations is much worse than the risk to the United Kingdom of losing a fraction of its counterterrorism intelligence.

The calculation was flawed, and the High Court ruling is correct. Corruption is more dangerous, in a real, material sense that leads to loss of lives and wellbeing, than some hiccups in already flawed intelligence.

BBC article

Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russian oil giant Lukoil recently indicated that without major spending on new reserves, Russian oil production could be expected to fall off sharply in the next decade.

In fact, Russian oil output fell for the first time at the beginning of this year, primarily on the back of poor weather and supply issues in Western Siberia. However, the larger problem of the depletion of proven reserves is one that will severely limit Russian oil production in the near future as long as no money is directed into developing new reserves.

Analysts at Citigroup recently said annual increases in Russian output could "no longer be taken for granted" but argued that production was expected to rise until 2012.

"I believe the decline will continue for quite a number of years."

This is not strictly a peak oil issue, in that it is understood that additional oil reserves assuredly exist in Siberia. However, high taxes and a lack of financial incentives to explore for new reserves means that companies have been avoiding extra costs and simply leaning on their available oil fields. As a consequence, the Russian oil industry may hit the bottom of its collective barrel without any replacement in sight.

BBC article

Russia has been playing a tricky game with its neighbors, promoting the fragmentation of states like Georgia and Moldova while vigorously asserting that Kosovo has no right to break away from Serbia. Relations between Georgia and Russia have been especially dismal, with Russian support for two different breakaway provinces that are nominally under Georgian control, and a cold war of sorts between the states that has led to the occasional night-time stabbing of Russian "advisors" in the Abkhaz territory.

This conflict added a new note of discord this week as the Georgian government claims -- with backing video evidence -- that a Russian MiG shot down a Georgian UAV over the Abkhaz territory, and thus while clearly violating Georgian sovereign airspace. The BBC article's embedded video shows a Georgian military officer presenting the alleged video feed of the shoot down, from the UAV itself. Although one can imagine spoofing this kind of thing, the video looks authentic enough.

No one is actually disputing that the drone was shot down. Abkhaz separatists are claiming the kill for themselves, saying that they shot the drone down with an L-39. If the video is authentic, then this story is patently false, as the fighter in the video is not an L-39 (and does, indeed, look much more like a MiG.

BBC article

Following a High Court ruling that the Serious Fraud Office's failure to investigate BAE's bribery case was wrong, the SFO has appealed this decision. In response, they've been allowed to contest the ruling that they acted unlawfully in dropping their investigation. This appeal will be heard sometime later this year.

al Jazeera article

David Davis, the Conservative opposition "shadow home secretary" (explanation of the "shadow" system can be found here) has resigned his position as a member of parliament following the passage of expanded detention without charge in the UK. Under prior law, terror suspects could be held for up to 28 days without charge; the new 42-day limit was pushed heavily by Gordon Brown's administration, although some members of his Labour party were unhappy with the idea and not particularly supportive.

Davis intends to immediately run for re-election for his same seat in parliament, campaigning on the issue of repealing the new 42-day limit.

So, to be clear, Davis resigned so he could run again and make a point about the new law. That's something.

Watching this from across the Atlantic, I admit to being unclear about why UK authorities don't simply charge terror suspects with something ancillary to the primary charges being investigated, thus allowing them to be held. Perhaps that would feel to improper for them. Regardless, the increasing upward trend in detention without charge is worrying, and as we've seen on our end of things, holding people indefinitely causes problems.

On that note, the Supreme court has ruled that detainees held at Guantanamo can contest their detention in civilian courts.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said: "The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

The court has ruled twice previously that Guantanamo inmates could go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention.

But each time, the Bush administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to keep the detainees out of civilian courts.

BBC article on Davis
BBC article on the Supreme Court ruling

This week, the Lithuanian parliament passed a law making it illegal to display Soviet and Nazi images, including images of leaders, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, and other relics of the two totalitarian powers.

BBC Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke says these are the toughest bans on symbols from the Soviet past adopted in any of the 15 countries that emerged from the USSR.

Moscow's official interpretation of history is that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were liberated from Nazi Germany by, then voluntarily joined, the Soviet Union.

In contrast, Lithuania and its neighbors look to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent illegal invasions and annexations of their countries as being perhaps more official than the Russian line.

Certainly, while the common Soviet soldier made a heroic contribution to ending the Nazi menace during the second world war, the government of the Soviet Union has a history of relocation, genocide, and invasion that argues successfully that the Lithuanians are not mistaken in throwing hammers, sickles, and swastikas together in one big box.

BBC article

This week BBC South released the results of its investigation into the use of special surveillance powers by local councils in southern England. These powers -- that allow active surveillance, phone monitoring and email interception by local councils to combat crimes -- were created to help in the fight against domestic terrorism and similar serious offenses withing the United Kingdom. In practice, however, the BBC found that many local councils have spent a significant amount of time putting their constituencies under surveillance in the hunt for comparatively trivial offenses.

Highlights include:

• A family being under constant surveillance, including people casing their home and following them, to determine if they actually lived in the school district into which they were enrolling their children
• In-depth undercover investigations to prevent dog fouling (that is, people letting their dogs poop in public parks)
• Catching people harvesting clams from unauthorized sites

The concept of your city or county government actually tailing you, wiretapping you, and reading your email just to find out if you're letting your dog mess up the local park likely seems patently ridiculous to an American reader, but it's an excellent example of power creep. It's mostly human nature. If you're given a plate full of food, you eat it, and if you're given a tool, you feel strange letting it sit around unused.

This is why the arguments in the US that torture should be legal under some circumstances are so dangerous and corrosive. If a tool is approved for use some of the time, both the opportunity and the pressure are there to apply the tool to other situations.

It is ridiculous to think of using active surveillance teams to check that someone isn't fibbing about which school district their kids belong in, but nonetheless, that happened. You really don't want to be the person who disappears one day off the street on your way to work because an administrator decided that they haven't made a warrantless seizure of someone in a while -- and that's why it's best that these tools never, ever be legal.

BBC article

Every time I read one of the recent spate of articles (or listen to a BBC report) talking about "knife culture" in the UK, I consider how I'd apparently be sent to jail for carrying around the very handy and durable Benchmade folder that I usually have on me. It's a great tool, and I use it all the time to break down excess boxes, cut rubber tubing, separate uncooperative attachments, and a bunch of other uses.

I notably have managed to go without stabbing anyone in the five or so years I've had it.

Over in the UK, politicians are in a race right now to overreact ever more prominently to the idea of a growing "knife culture," whether or not that idea is supported by actual facts. In an attempt to one-up Gordon Brown's remarks that anyone over 16 caught with an illegal knife should be prosecuted, Tory leader David Cameron has said that anyone convicted of carrying an illegal knife should go to jail (currently, about two thirds already do, by the way).

Mr Cameron said knife crime was a problem of "epidemic proportions" in the UK.

"We have to send a clear message that carrying a knife on our streets is completely inexcusable and unacceptable in a civilised society," he said.

Epidemic? From the same article:

In an attempt to play down fears of a knife crime "epidemic", Mr Straw pointed to a survey of accident and emergency departments by Cardiff University which suggested that the number of people needing treatment for injuries caused by serious violence was falling.

Oops. Well, despite that apparent fall in violence-caused injuries, Cameron is convinced that all society needs is a good dose of jailing to handle things. Now, there is the downside that you could potentially end up in jail because you needed a new steak knife, picked it up at the Tesco, and a cop stopped you on the way home. But Cameron has a solution to this one, too:

He urged police to exercise "common sense" by not prosecuting people carrying penknives for angling, or for bringing home kitchen or garden equipment from the shops.

"This is about kitchen knives stuffed down the front of tracksuits," he told The Sun.

Of course. After all, local government in the UK has an excellent recent record of not overreaching when given new powers. It's not as if they're spying on local families and staking out public parks to catch dog owners. You can completely rely on their common sense.

I think if I lived in the UK, I'd just mail order my kitchen knives from Amazon. Surely they won't arrest postal workers for knife violations.

BBC article

UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has proposed a "scared straight" plan for young folk in England and Wales who are caught carrying knives.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said seeing "gruesome" injuries would be a tougher deterrent than sending all knife carriers in England and Wales to jail.

...also...

Ms Smith told the BBC: "I'm concerned particularly about the way in which those who are carrying knives and those who are the victims appear to be getting younger."

"I just think that's a better way of making people face up to the consequences of action and making them more likely not to carry knives again in the future."

Showing a young person that they can, in fact, inflict serious injuries on people using just a knife may not have the deterrent effect MP Smith is hoping for. Certainly, seeing that you can kill or cripple someone with a knife suggests that they actually do "help you to be more safe."

As part of the ongoing attempt by UK politicians to climb to success on the bodies of their own nation's youth, members of all the major political parties are making their own counterproposals to deal with the manufactured knife crisis. The Conservatives want more jail time, and the Liberal Dems say the government is "in denial" about the scale of the knife problem.

That last statement? Assuredly correct. The government, like the other parties, has been acting as if there's a major upswing in violence and a massive, demonstrable "knife crisis." The numbers, however, continue to not support this proposition. Consider:

According to the British Crime Survey (BCS), overall violent crime has decreased by 41% since a peak in 1995.

Knives are used in about 8% of violent incidents, according to the BCS, a level that has largely remained the same during the past decade.

What does the Home Secretary have to say about the lack of support for this wave of fear?

"I think all of us understand, whatever top-level statistics might say, that this [knife crime] is a serious problem - that even if it isn't happening down your street makes you feel nervous and unconfident - and that's what we need to address".

What?

Translated from English to, well, English, MP Smith is saying, "Despite the lack of any evidence that knife crime is a serious problem, we assert that it is a serious problem. You should all be afraid."

Specifically, afraid of teenagers.

It's not uncommon for people in power to attempt to scare people as a political technique. Certainly, our own president is ready to blurt out the words "Al Qaeda" whenever he can't come up with a decent defense for one of his positions, but the remarkable thing in the UK right now is that the fear card that's being played is of the nation's own children.

Curiously, no one panicked years when I and many other teenage boys were given Buck Knives on earning our Eagle in Boy Scouts. That knife has since been preempted in daily use by my Benchmade, but it's interesting to think that either one could earn me jail time in the UK, and would have put me in that fearsome "teenage knife culture" demographic back in the day.

It all makes one sigh.

BBC article

I am put in mind of this Monty Python sketch:

Today, Gordon Brown's administration backpedaled heavily from their suggestion of a scared straight program for knife carriers, after many people very cogently pointed out that the corollary to "showing knife carriers victims of knife attacks" is "exposing victims of recent knife attacks to more offenders."

Well, yeah.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith responded to this, by, um...lying?

Ms Smith insisted she had been talking at the weekend about "knife referral schemes" - where young people caught with knives would "face up to the consequences of their actions", including "graphic" weapons awareness workshops and visits to hospitals to talk to health workers to hear about the impact of knife wounds.

"We are not, and I have never said we are, proposing to bring young people into wards to see patients," she added.

Going back and seeing her describe people going to hospitals and seeing "gruesome" injuries did not give the impression that she was discussing some special seminar with health workers.

Instead, Gordon Brown is going to tackle this imaginary epidemic at its source -- the families. Over 110,000 "problem families" will receive special attention. This will include courses to help the parents supervise their children and "the worst 20,000 families facing eviction if they do not respond."

Say what now? How does evicting families possibly help them control their kids? Does homelessness correlate with better behavior in teens? If someone came along and said, "Behave, or the government will take your family's home", would you be more or less disposed to be a good citizen?

Perhaps the current UK administration is jealous of all the attention Paris garners with those suburban riots.

One thing that I do appreciate is that in each of these "knife crime" articles, the BBC reiterates the exact same set of figures:

According to the British Crime Survey (BCS), overall violent crime has decreased by 41% since a peak in 1995.

Knives are used in about 8% of violent incidents, according to the BCS, a level that has largely remained the same during the past decade.

Hmmm.

BBC article

Not so little, of course, if you are involved in it.

The BBC reports in this article that there are preparations to move children out of South Ossetia and into Russia (most likely, into North Ossetia within Russia). The government of Georgia takes this as a sign that the leaders of the breakaway province are planning on further military action, whereas the authorities within South Ossetia claim that it is a response to sniper attacks and shelling against their people by the Georgian military. Without third-party reporters on the ground, it's very hard to say what's going on.

Tensions have apparently risen following the Russian government's declaration that it will continue it's fairly blatant destabilization plan directed at Georgia by establishing ties with the separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the latter proxy war having even made it so far as to result in Russian deaths.

I continue to be confused about how this does not bode ill for Russia in the long term, as it continues to try and balance between promoting separatism externally and maintaining unity internally.

If you want the official views from both primary parties to this conflict, you can go to the web sites of the State Committee of Information and Press of the Republic of South Ossetia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. From the Ministry, we get this declaration about terrorism in the Ossetian region, and from the Committee we get this rather more blatantly suspect announcement about how the Georgians have packed eight cars with explosives and plan to sell them to random South Ossetian citizens.

Lacking outside confirmation, I can't say whether the Georgian story is true or not, but prima facie the Ossetian press release looks like Snopes-worthy BS.

The government of Rwanda has once again accused France of complicity in the Rwandana genocide of 1994, this time in a report from the Rwandan Ministry of Justice.

The report says France backed Rwanda's Hutu government with political, military, diplomatic and logistical support.

"They clearly requested that the Interahamwes contine to man those checkpoints and kill Tutsis attempting to flee," it said.

The Rwandan report calls for the extradition and prosecution of thirty-three French nationals, including notables such as former president Mitterand and Dominique de Villepin. The French government has used the ever-popular past exonerative to indicate that "mistakes were made," but has generally claimed that French forces helped protect civilians as part of a UN-mandated mission during 1994.

BBC article

Following up on the report that children were being shipped out of South Ossetia into Russia ahead of possible violence, the BBC reports some new developments.

Most notably, the Russian government has indicated that it will intervene if there is a conflict in South Ossetia, with the public motivation of protecting Russian nationals living in the area:

"If events develop according to the worst-case violence scenario, Russia will not allow itself to remain indifferent, considering that Russian citizens live in South Ossetia, particularly in the conflict zone," Interfax quotes [special ambassador] Yuri Popov as saying.

Meanwhile, as the de facto government of South Ossetia claims that the Georgian government is attempting to spark violence, the Georgian government is pinning the blame for recent exchanges and deaths on the Ossetians as well as claiming that Ossetian children are not being sent away in fear of violence, but instead are doing their normal yearly trips to summer camp.

It would be helpful, if possibly very dangerous, to have some non-Caucasian (in the geographical sense) reporters on the scene.

Word of the first meeting between Ossetian and Georgian authorities in a decade may, or may not, have been premature. According to South Ossetian president Eduard Kokoity, there will be no talks tomorrow, as the Georgian government refuses to accept the four-party arrangement the South Ossetians want.

For the record, the four parties there would be Georgia, South Ossetia, North Ossetia, and Russia. The Georgian government complains that this is unnecessarily tilted against them. That seems at once both reasonable and possibly irrelevant. Although it seems redundant to have both North Ossetian and Russian participants, as North Ossetia is part of Russia (for now, anyway), this is not a voting assembly, so the idea of being outnumbered should not matter so much to the Georgian participants.

That said, Georgian Minister for Reintegration Temuri Yakobashvili insists that the talks absolutely will be happening tomorrow.

As we wait to see whether or not anyone sits down at a table in Tskhinvali with the Minister, both Georgian and Ossetian authorities report exchanges of fire. Again. As always for the area, we have no reliable third-party reporting, and one side's stories are comprehensively denied by the other, and vice versa.

We have many hours yet until daylight in Georgia, so it will be a little longer before we know if an actual meeting occurred or not.

al Jazeera article
CNN article

We closed out Wednesday with a pending meeting between the Georgian and South Ossetian authorities counterbalanced by reports of continued gunfire and a disagreement of whether any meeting was going to take place.

Today, Georgia has called a complete ceasefire, and Interfax has annouced that talks will take place on Friday, brokered by the Russian government.

Reports of the talks came just hours after Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, offered an immediate halt to the heavy fighting and said he had ordered his forces not to return fire if attacked.

Saakashvili also repeated an offer of "full autonomy" for the breakaway region and said Russia could be the guarantor of any deal.

Interesting. Notably, the support of America and Russia come down firmly on partisan lines on this one. Whereas Russian deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin has urged "the Georgian leadership to show common sense and stop irresponsible military activities in South Ossetia", American assistant secretary of state Dan Fried had this to say:

"It appears that the South Ossetians have instigated this uptick in violence," he said. "We have urged the Russians to urge their South Ossetian friends to pull back and show greater restraint."

We'll see, once again, what tomorrow brings.

al Jazeera article

Just a few hours after the announcement of a ceasefire to be followed by emergency peace talks, fighting has resumed in the South Ossetian region.

"The government of Georgia has decided to restore constitutional order in the conflict zone," General Mamuka Kurashvili, the head of Georgian peacekeepers in the region, said in comments broadcast on Georgia's Rustavi-2 television network.

"Despite our call for peace and a unilateral ceasefire separatists continued the shelling of Georgian villages," he said.

Also...

An AFP news agency reporter said that two columns of Georgian forces were seen approaching South Ossetia from near the Georgian town of Gori.

One column contained 40 trucks of armed interior ministry troops, some towing heavy artillery pieces, while the other column consisted of about 15 armoured personnel carriers.

As always, it is unclear who actually fired first, but there is some guessing from outside analysts that the South Ossetian leadership is trying to force a large enough upswing in violence to force Russia to leave its advisory and peacekeeping role and fully engage in the conflict. One wonders what we plan to do if that happens.

al Jazeera article

By way of illustrating the tenuous situation in South Ossetia, this is an unedited screencap from my feed reader (this is the al Jazeera feed):

Back to back.

On Thursday, Georgian forces moved into South Ossetia, derailing a previously announced plan for emergency peace talks today. Now, in lieu of peace talks, we have Russian armored columns, as Georgian forces close on the South Ossetia capital of Tskhinvali and a hundred fifty or so Russian armored units, including tanks and APCs have crossed into the area from Russia.

So far, Russia has claimed that ten of its peacekeeping troops were killed by Georgian forces, and the Georgian authorities have indicated that they have shot down some Russian jets overflying their territory.

The Russian government is currently making the claim that Georgian forces are taking part in ethnic cleansing in the Ossetian towns they've overrun (a claim that continues to surprise me for the extent to which it ignores Russia's own behavior in Chechnya).

We can part, for now, on the words of the Georgian president:

Mikhail Saakasvili, Georgia's president, said: "One hundred and fifty Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles" had entered South Ossetia.

"I must also tell you that Georgian forces have downed two Russian jet fighters over Georgia's territory."

BBC article
al Jazeera article

The latest report from Georgia is that Russian units have moved out of South Ossetia and deeper into the heart of Georgia, ostensibly to prevent further Georgian strikes into South Ossetia. Mikheil Saakashvili has alternated between saying that his forces have knocked down a whole bunch of Russian planes and saying that Russia is committing premeditated murder of a small country, and that the world is obligated to come in to help.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive claims, of course. When one compares the size of the Georgian and Russian military and sees that the Russians have very little else to take care of right now, one has to wonder what the long-term plan was on the Georgian military side. It may have been "start some violence, and hope NATO or at least the US has our back." The Russian government, on the other hand, may have made the probably more reasonable assessment that very few people over on the NATO side relish the idea of going to war against Russia -- especially over an issue that is as unclear as that of regaining a separatist province.

CNN article
BBC article
al Jazeera article

I was so taken by this AP headline that I went ahead and quoted it.

It brings up an interesting question that I continue to wonder about, vis-a-vis the Russian government's continued attempts to destabilize some neighbors via ethnic tensions while hoping to hold down its own autonomy-seeking ethnic minorities. Where will the PRC place its support? Obviously, it wants to support another major power that similarly seeks to maintain its own internal integrity, but as China is dealing with its own ethnic separatists, it's a little painful for their government to have to decide to back the Russian effort to lever off South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

I'd still put money on the PRC government just hanging out, hiding behind the Olympics, and saying things like this:

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang issued a statement during the weekend saying the conflict should be resolved peacefully through dialogue.

Indeed. How likely is that to happen?

In response to a request for some background on the current Georgia-Russia conflict, I recently posted a link to this BBC primer and the following, very-high-level explanation to Greg Rucka's blog. The explanation seemed decently concise and clear, so here it is again:

South Ossetia's majority Ossetian population do not want to be part of Georgia, and took the first opportunity to try and separate in 1991 in the nascent days of the most recent incarnation of Georgia as a nation.*

The Russian government, seeing opportunity, supported the Ossetian separatists, including sending in "peacekeeping" troops who make it tricky for Georgian forces to do anything about continued violence coming out of the region.

Last week, increasing yet still low-level exchanges of fire between Georgian and Ossetian forces led to a call for peace talks, a four-hour ceasefire, and then a full military incursion by the Georgian military into S. Ossetia. The official Georgian line is that they took this action in response to a new outbreak of attacks by Ossetian forces. This may well be true, as many analysts believe the S. Ossetian authorities have been trying to provoke a violent enough incident to get the Russians involved in a big way.

Apparently, that happened, as the Russians rolled into S. Ossetia in force, and then continued their assault with air attacks across all of Georgia. They appear to have also bisected the country with their land forces now.

There is also the possibility that Georgia's president (Saakashvili) thought he could draw the US into events if things went awry. If so, that was a miscalculation on his part.

So Russia has certainly been promoting this situation for years, most likely hoping for something exactly like this, but the current Georgian regime did itself no favors by how it has acted toward these breakaway regions.

*Clarification -- This conflict does go back significantly farther than 1991, but 1991 is when things boiled up this time around. This does seem to be the way of things in Europe, and Eastern Europe in particular.

Over on his blog, Greg Rucka pointed out a John Markoff article that showed Russian DoS attacks against Georgia starting as soon as July 20th. This is likely to get the spin of "evil" premeditation over here, but well, duh. Of course, it was premeditated. Russia has been actively supporting two separatist movements within Georgia. Instead, we might want to ask "Why start on the 20th, and not earlier or later?"

The proximate chain of events leading up to the DoS attacks includes:

Alleged Georgian attacks in South Ossetia in early July
Alleged Georgian attacks in Abkhazia, leading to a cessation of any Abkhzian contacts with Georgia, also in early July
Russian admission of overflights of nominally Georgian territory

The last event was an admission of breaking of a prior ceasefire agreement concerning the region, and as such was an out-and-out provocation. When we combine that with the general paucity of poor quality of news coming out of the actual region, it's not hard to imagine that, from the Moscow perspective, there was a clear chain of events that seemed to be heading toward conflict starting in late July.

With the cessation of full-on military action in Georgia, we now wait on the departure of Russian forces from within clearly Georgian territory (and presumably back to South Ossetia and Abkhazia, if not to within Russia itself). At the moment, the Russian government says its military is in the town of Gori, from which the recent Georgian attack on Ossetia was launched, with the sole purpose of removing weaponry and restoring law and order. As reported in this BBC article, the official line is that Russian forces are already leaving.

As highlighted in this al Jazeera article and on BBC radio yesterday, however, eyewitnesses -- including an al Jazeera reporter -- relay different stories. Although Russian troops are basically hanging around, their South Ossetian allies have been going house to house, looting and burning Georgian residences. Several primarily ethnically Georgian villages have been more or less razed. A Russian commentator interviewed on the BBC said (paraphrased), 'theft is horrible, but at least they're not killing people' - his point being that many Ossetian civilians died during the initial Georgian attack, so looting and burning are relatively restrained responses.

However, bringing along the Ossetians may already be causing even bigger problems than displacement and mass property damage:

Talks between Russian and Georgian military commanders ended when Russian-backed South Ossetian forces demanded that they be allowed to police the town, sources told Al Jazeera.

A few minutes later the explosions, possibly from artillery fire, could be heard on the edge of Gori.

A request by the Ossetians to police Gori seems suspiciously like an attempt to expand Ossetian control over areas that are within Georgia's boundaries, without the support of the area in question being traditionally Ossetian. Even with the Russian hammer hanging over their heads, the Georgian military commanders could not be reasonably expected to accept that condition.

In the meantime, even as negotiations and possibly fighting are occurring to resolve a Russian pullout from Gori, Russian armor has moved into the coastal city of Poti, and the claim is being made there that the Russians are wrecking the port. It's unclear what the nominal justification for that would be, as Poti is not particularly near the Ossetia conflict region (in fact, one imagines the Russian armor that made it to Poti came from Abkhazia).

With no legitimate pressure being brought to bear from the rest of the world, Moscow is likely to continue to take their time here as peacekeepers, and to use the opportunity to wreck Georgia as much as they can, while they can, without doing anything immediately obvious like burning down farms en masse.

This week, the Italian Catholic publication Famiglia Cristiana caused a self-conscious stir among Italian politicos by denouncing efforts by the current Berlusconi administration to blame everything on gypsies. The editorial made comparisons to prior episodes of mistreatment of minorities in Europe and surely fired up some memories of Italy's twentieth century fascist government. The current government's clever replies included the popular teenager debate method of simply accusing the other person of doing the exact same thing:

One junior minister, Carlo Giovanardi, attacked the magazine saying: "You are fascists, with your bludgeoning tone".

Wandering back into the land of facts, we should recall that the government recently proposed fingerprinting all those pesky Roma. When this caused an unsurprising surge of unhappiness throughout Europe, their solution was to simply generalize the plan and fingerprint everyone.

Nothing to worry about.

The Famiglia editorial stands out from other challenges made to the current government by dint of not coming from some weird lefty publication, but rather from the Catholic community.

The Vatican released a statement saying that Famiglia does not speak for them. Father Antonio Sciortino, the magazine's director, politely gave a "Well, of course not" answer to this question as well.

It is, on the whole, a heartwarmingly Christian outlook for a Christian magazine to espouse.

BBC article

Russia announced today its formal recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, citing the recent conflict as having forced its hand, much in the way that the Kosovo conflict was the proximate cause of Kosovo's recognition by outside nations as an independent state. Other European countries and NATO have denied the legitimacy of this recognition, creating an interesting mirror image to Kosovo and the Russian response to them.

The move followed votes in both houses of parliament on Monday, which called on Moscow to recognise the regions' independence.

In an interview with the BBC at his residency in Sochi, on the border with Abkhazia, Mr Medvedev later said Russia had been obliged to act following a "genocide" started by his Georgian counterpart against separatists in South Ossetia.

This continues the saga of ethnic groups bucking for their own states as well as Russia alternately being for or against this idea, depending on the ethnicity involved in either the former or new government. We're now in "fuzzy recognition" territory, where nascent countries are considered countries by some, but not all, of the people we're dealing with. That said, it's a little hard to make the case that Georgia should include these areas whose majority populations clearly don't want to Georgian citizens -- but that road of fractured countries certainly doesn't stop in Georgia, or even in Europe proper.

BBC article

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the frequently critical ingushetiya.ru site, was shot and killed while in Russian police custody. The official report is that Mr. Yevloyev attempted to seize a police officer's gun, and was shot in the head in the process.

One might be forgiven for having a degree of suspicion about the claim.

The Ingushetia region, sandwiched between Chechnya and North Ossetia, is the mirror image to Russia's official position of support for the Ossetian minority -- largely because of its historical direct opposition to Ossetia, up to and including a full-scale armed conflict in late 1992, in the early days of post-Communist Russia.

There are a number of factors that go into the unfortunate modern position of Ingushetia, as the even more tumultuous cousin of Chechnya. Perhaps first and most pertinent is that Ingushetia, like Chechnya, but unlike Ossetia, is full of Muslims. The preferential treatment of the Ossetians, most likely on that basis, goes back quite a bit, back even to Imperial Russia. Based on this treatment, the Ingushetians supported the Bolsheviks, but were ill-treated in turn decades later by Stalin, who deported them and the Chechens to the East. This particular deportation was redressed to some degree by the return of the Ingushetians under Khrushchev, but a particular portion of their territory was not returned. This sparked the 1992 conflict.

That brief 1992 conflict ended when Russian troops moved in along the Soviet-established border between the two regions, effectively finalizing the status of the Soviet border, and sticking to the pattern of Russian support for the Ossetians over their neighboring ethnic enclaves.

You can read the full version as reported on by the Rand Institute here.

Yevloyev's death in custody is reminiscent of the shooting death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a death that was entirely believably blamed on a Chechen. In this case, Yevloyev's seizure from the airport in Nazran presumably made it undeniable that he was in custody when he died, so blaming his murder on a rogue Ingushetian would have been impossible.

BBC article

Reunification talks have begun between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders, in hopes of finally reuniting Cyprus, more than forty years on from the civil conflict that split the island firmly down ethnic lines (click here for background on the original conflict).

Wednesday's meeting, the fifth this year between the two leaders, will pave the way for substantive negotiations to begin on September 11, initially focusing on power-sharing.

The leaders have also agreed to set up a hotline so they can remain in constant telephone contact throughout the negotiations.

al Jazeera article

As part of his recent tour of nations in Russia's shadow, Dick Cheney expressed America's full support for Georgia's eventual accession into NATO:

"He was keen to stress that the US was keen to stand by Georgia ... and that he would stand by Georgia's Nato ambitions ... those ambitions which have angered the Kremlin so much to the run-up of the war last month."

I've wondered, as have others, if Saakashvili ordered Georgian forces into the Ossetia region with the hope that Western nations would support him from the inevitable Russian response to this act (inevitable because, among other things, Russia has been pushing independence movements in Georgian provinces for a decade as a provocation and a destabilizing effort). As it happened, the Georgian military folded so quickly, few non-strategic responses from Western nations would have been possible.

The question to ask, then, as we push for NATO membership for Georgia, is what it actually means to the United States for a nation to be a NATO member. You can read the official text of the 1949 NATO treaty here. For our purposes, we really want to look at Article 5:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

In other words, the fact of Russian armor rolling into Georgian territory last month would have been a clear cause to invoke Article 5, forcing all other NATO members, including us, to respond as if Russia had invaded our soil.

Would NATO membership have kept Russia from considering inciting that catastrophe? Certainly, Moscow is taking every opportunity it can to lean on its remaining non-NATO neighbors to keep them out of the organization, and to destabilize them as much as possible while it can. After the fact...well, I must admit that I am much more comfortable with the idea of protecting Poland, which pretty much just sits there, than I am with the idea of protecting Georgia, which has an unfortunate imperial history of its own and where the issue is the attempt to hold onto two ethnic enclaves where the local majorities don't want to be part of the country.

In short, it feels like adopting a broken country.

Regardless of our final analysis in this case, we must remember that NATO is not NAFTA or the UN. Each new NATO member is another potential war trigger, linked to an ever-larger pool of militaries. This may mean that no other nation will ever choose to attack a NATO member, but it may alternately mean a chain of treaty obligations that sparks a horrendous war.

al Jazeera article on Cheney in Georgia
al Jazeera article on Cheney in Ukraine

A fraud trail aimed at the Church of Scientology is set to go ahead in France by the end of this year or in early 2009. This marks a continuation of the Scientology organization's ongoing problems in gaining and maintaining a foothold in several European nations, most notably including France and Germany.

But it been accused in some countries of cult-like practices and exploiting its followers financially.

In Germany last year, federal and state interior ministers declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional, and in France in 2000 a government committee recommended dissolving the Church.

For more on Scientology, you may want to read here before you go and have your personality tested by someone with a resistance meter.

BBC article

In June of this year, the High Court in South Africa ruled against mass killer Matthias Rath, refusing to let him kill large numbers of South Africans by convincing them to switch off of highly effective anti-HIV drugs and instead buy into his ineffective vitamin profiteering effort.

This week, the happy news came out that Matthias has dropped his libel case against the Guardian and its columnist, Ben Goldacre. Matthias initially sued Goldacre and the Guardian after Goldacre called him out on his pandemic profiteering, and the fact that Matthias was actually hurting and killing HIV-positive people in Africa by pushing a massive ad campaign of lies about the effectiveness of his vitamins over known HIV treatments. From the Guardian:

The Dr Rath Foundation focuses its promotional activities on eight countries - the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, France and Russia - claiming that his micronutrient products will cure not just Aids, but cancer, heart disease, strokes and other illnesses.

The collapse of the case will have repercussions around the world. International authorities on Aids welcomed the outcome. Prof Brian Gazzard, one of the UK's leading HIV/Aids experts, who advised the Guardian on its case, said he was delighted at the result. "The widespread provision of anti-retrovirals in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important public health measures of this century," he said. The confusion caused by suggestions that giving undernourished people vitamins and minerals was an alternative to taking Aids drugs was "extremely harmful".

One clear hallmark of a medical scam -- the suggestion that the magical cure is a cure-all. Cancer, HIV, heart disease, and stroke? Impressive.

The court case pulled up some scary material from Matthias, including the text of a complaint made by his companion Anthony Brink against Treatment Action Campaign founder Zackie Achmat in the Hague, in which Brink tried to have Achmat charged with genocide, suggesting that it would be appropriate to torture him as a consequence.

Had the case proceeded, the court would have been presented with details of Brink's complaint to The Hague, which called for Achmat to be permanently confined "in a small white and concrete cage, bright fluorescent light on all the time to keep an eye on him" and force-fed his Aids drugs or, "if he bites, kicks and screams too much, dripped into his arm after he's been restrained on a gurney with cable tied around his ankles, wrists and neck". The complaint was described by the Rath Foundation in January last year as "entirely valid and long overdue".

Trying to get someone charged with genocide is a pretty extreme corporate tactic. Notably, if someone did ever catch Achmat and dose him up with modern anti-HIV meds...well, he'd be okay. As much as liars like Andy and Matt would like to give people the impression that HIV meds are all AZT, modern HAART therapy is effective and has relatively mild side effects, with its major drawback being its expense -- a problem that Achmat effectively challenged and has helped resolve in South Africa. In fact, it was Achmat's efforts to make HIV treatments highly affordable that threatened Matthias Rath's vitamin profiteering, which in turn prompted the attempt to attack Achmat with a genocide charge.

We'll give the last word to columnist Ben Goldacre:

Rath is an example of the worst excesses of the alternative therapy industry; UK nutritionists make foolish claims on poor evidence - they can make your child a genius with fish oils, or prevent heart attacks in the distant future - but Rath transplanted these practices into the world of HIV/Aids, where evidence really matters.

Now that AIDS profiteer Matthias Rath has dropped his harassing libel suit against the Guardian and columnist Ben Goldacre, the Guardian is once again free to report on Rath's malice in Africa and in general on the shocking failure of the South African government to deal appropriately with the AIDS pandemic.

As the Guardian reports, South Africa was ripe for infestation by scam artists like Rath based on the government's AIDS denialism and its unfortunate view that the choice between drugs that work and other practices that don't was somehow an extension of old anticolonial battles. I'd like to once again quote something very important that Barack Obama said in 2006:

"On the treatment side the information being provided by the minister of health is not accurate," he told reporters outside an AIDS clinic in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

"It is not an issue of Western science versus African science, it is just science and it's not right."

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the South African government has been letting its people die by using this, of all things, as a venue to shrug off "Western" influences. Curiously, this has meant repeated intrusions by Western scam artists -- apparently, you're accepted as long as you're promoting nonsense. Consider folks like Michael Hart Jones, who was trying to set up a goat-serum AIDS cure scam. And, of course, Rath, who used incredibly unethical methods to screw up AIDS care in South Africa:

In time, MSF learned that Rath Foundation workers had infiltrated Aids clinics in Khayelitsha. A nurse and the manager of the bustling Ubuntu clinic, Nompumelelo Mantangana, says she discovered that some of the foundation's employees were paying health staff to pass on the names of HIV-positive patients: "We stopped that but not before it did a lot of damage."

She says the Rath Foundation played on the fact that many people came to the clinic only once they were sick, and that ARVs tended to make them feel worse before their health began to recover. "They said, come off the ARVs and take the multivitamins and you will feel better. And you do - but it doesn't mean you are getting well. Eventually you get sick again," she says.

But then, if you're already unethically leading people away from life-saving treatments, it's hard to imagine it being a big stretch to take the extra step and actually steal them away from effective clinics.

For more, read the full Guardian article on the topic, and applaud the Guardian for standing behind Goldacre in the face of this harassing and frivolous lawsuit.

One of the recurring concepts that lets us know that we as a species are headed in the right direction is the idea that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. This week brings us what is expected to be one of the last cases of its kind, war crimes charges against a former Nazi:

Josef Scheungraber, 90, is accused of ordering the killing of 14 civilians in a Tuscan village in 1944.

He has previously been sentenced in absentia by an Italian military court to life in prison.

The killings were in retaliation for a partisan attack.

It is appropriate that, even after this much time, war crimes charges be addressed.

BBC article

Just this last March, a 14-year-old ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan was breached during an incident in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. I gave some background on that situation here, but the short version is that the Nogorno-Karabakh region, located just west of center in Azerbaijan, is predominantly an ethnic Armenian enclave. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, underlying tensions here have been resurrected full force, including fighting from 1991 to 1994, and again this year.

Now, reportedly spurred on by the disastrous outcome of Georgia's recent attempt to rein in South Ossetia, the two nations involved have signed a new agreement to "facilitate the improvement of the situation in the South Caucasus and establishment of stability and security in the region through a political settlement of the conflict based on the principles and norms of international law and the decisions and documents adopted in this framework". Those are the words of Dmitry Medvedev, who helped broker the agreement.

The government of Azerbaijan is surely very aware of the fate of the last government that challenged one of Russia's pet ethnic groups, and wants to avoid being the next Georgia. At the same time, out-and-out ceding of Nogorno-Karabakh represents a loss of one fifth of Azerbaijan, which also seems unacceptable, especially as it will further disrupt the already discontinuous structure of the country by punching a big hole in the center.

BBC article

The Georgian executive just sacked four of its senior ministers, in a move that, to quote the BBC, "comes as President Mikhail Saakashvili is seeking to deflect criticism from the disastrous war with Russia in August. " Given that, it is entirely unsurprising to see current Minister of DefenseDavid Kezerashvili finally getting the boot, to be replaced by his former deputy, Batu Kutelia.

Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said the latest sackings had been expected, especially that of the defence minister.

"After a lost war, someone should be held responsible," the Associated Press news agency quotes him as saying.

Prior to his appointment as a Deputy Minister of Defense, Kutelia was chairman of intelligence services in Georgia's Security Ministry. Kutelia was also the voice of Georgia's plans to revise its defense policy following its crushing defeat to Russia last August, as reported here:

"Military aggression by Russia had not been discussed as a threat of high probability," Kutelia said at a press conference. "The recent developments have confirmed that this threat has come true. Hence, the national security concept and defense planning in this respect should be changed."

Really? It hadn't been discussed?

One imagines Kutelia's role in the new, restructured Georgian executive may be to grab Saakashvili by the lapel and say, "Don't be stupid until we're in NATO."

BBC article

Following winning comments like "Military aggression by Russia had not been discussed as a threat of high probability" by Georgia's newly minted Minister of Defense, the Georgian parliament has released its official report on its crushing military defeat by Russia last August. Their official conclusion?

The army screwed it up.

The Georgian parliament has decided that it did everything right, and systematic problems within its military scuppered the war effort.

"The Georgian leadership managed to halt the Russian military aggression during the August events," the parliamentary commission said. But "serious systematic and personnel failures took place".

It said civilian and military leaders had failed to foresee and prepare for Russian intervention, operations lacked strategy and co-ordination, and there were problems in military communication.

It's not clear in what way Georgian leadership 'halted' The Russian military, but it is clear that the Georgian executive isn't planning on operating in a reality-based manner anytime soon. Not everyone is on the imagination-based game plan, though:

Georgia's former ambassador to Russia, vilified in November when he told the commission he believed Tbilisi had been the aggressor, said he struggled to take the findings seriously.

"The conclusions were known from the very beginning, and say nothing about the fault of the Georgian leadership, which together with Russia led us to the catastrophe we are now in," Erosi Kitsmarishvili told Georgian Imedi television.

Clearly, Russia has been provoking the hell out of Georgia for several years now, but just as clearly, Saakashvili made a remarkably poor choice in initiating a war against a massively superior military power. His unwillingness to accept responsibility for that doesn't bode well for Georgia's near future.

al Jazeera article

In the first major glimmerings of something like past tit-for-tat since the disastrous Russia-Georgia "war" of last year, Russia is now claiming that Georgia has kidnapped one of its soldiers from the South Ossetia region.

Georgia, in contrast, says that one Alexander Glukhov has decided to defect to Georgia, citing poor conditions and lack of food in the Russian military. They have him on television saying this, which, naturally, doesn't have to mean anything about how he actually feels. Given known conditions in the Russian military, this could go either way.

Back before the out-and-out fighting in Ossetia, Georgia and Russia took more covert shots at each other, with the last notable outing leading to the deaths of two Russian officers in the Abkhazia region.

BBC article

EU peacekeepers in Bosnia have stepped up their search for accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, in a move that some might take as a sign that they think they'll find him soon. Mladic's compatriot Radovan Karadzic was picked up last year following a similar upswing in searching of his old haunts, some ten years after his participation in the atrocities of the 90s in Bosnia.

As always, it's good to see that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

BBC article

This week has seen two attacks in Northern Ireland, perpetrated by post-IRA detritus with such awesome names as "Real IRA" and the even better "Continuity IRA." In general, the backlash has been immense, with political figures including former paramilitaries on both sides excoriating this subset of thugs who can't let go.

When a movement has basically achieved its cause, those leftovers who continue with the violence are the losers for whom the violence is fulfillment, and who aren't actually going to be satisfied by achieving their nominal goals. If there weren't any specific movement for them to attach to, they might have ended up hating immigrants, fantasizing about being international mercenaries, or just forlornly watching action movies and downloading online porn.

In the U.S., we have problems when these losers acquire guns. In Northern Ireland, unfortunately, the former prevalence of paramilitaries means that the guns are a given, and the losers were pre-recruited. In time, they will be marginalized even more, until they all age out, get a life, or end up in prison. Then it'll be back to the generic fantasies and normal, day-to-day criminality for people like this. It's something to look forward to.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

If you are, perhaps, ever wondering about the generic worth of tax dollars, consider the case of critical infrastructure that is not maintained. A 30-year-old gas line through Moldova blew on Wednesday, cratering the landscape and reducing gas delivery to the Balkans by 40%.

Infrastructure has, in many cases necessarily, been built in a bottlenecked fashion. Losing a bridge annihilates a commute, and losing a power system can leave a giant chunk of land in the dark. Recent history has taught us that even natural infrastructure, such as fisheries, can be destroyed via poor care.

Or, as I often say when asked why I generally approve of taxes, "I like roads."

al Jazeera article

This has been an active week vis-a-vis Russia news, with three worthy items.

First, current Russian president (and suspected Putin puppet) Dmitry Medvedev made minor waves by giving his first presidential interview to the Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper that has had a number of its reporters murdered out from under them, notably including Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on Russian abuses in Chechnya. Novaya Gazeta is tracking the murder trial here, including the many unanswered questions associated with Ms. Politkovskaya's treatment by the Russian government in the years preceding her murder.

More on the interview here and here and, if you can read Russian, the actual interview is, of course, at Novaya Gazeta itself.

On a related note, the Russian government announced that it is officially ending "counter-terrorism operations" in the much-bombarded republic of Chechnya. This is seen as largely a symbolic change at this point, as Chechen separatists have been kept mostly under wraps since 2004. That said, one might wonder if perhaps they'll be more active as security relaxes. More on that here and here.

Finally, the Russian government has protested as a "provocation" planned joint military exercises between NATO and Georgian troops. The official NATO word is that no heavy equipment will be involved, and this is basically training to cooperate on a UN-style policing exercise. The Russian statement counters that even if the exercise was planned before the Ossetian war, it's not reasonable to have a military exercise so soon after a conflict. I might request that NATO not commit to joint exercises with Georgia until the stupid people have left their executive positions in the Georgian government, but I'm not hopeful about that. More on that here and here.

An interesting precedent concerning seized land came from the European Court of Justice this week, following a series of judgment and appeals dealing with the sale of seized property in North Cyprus.

A Greek Cypriot, one Meletis Apostolides, sued a couple from the United Kingdom for the return of his land in North Cyprus, land that Apostolides was forced to vacate when North Cyprus fell under de facto Turkish Cypriot rule during the 1974 partition of the island. Following an initial judgment in his favor from a court in Nicosia (where Apostolides won by default, as the couple in question did not show up to fight his claim), a challenge was made against the claim on several bases, including the idea that the court who issued the original ruling (a Republic of Cyprus court in the south) had no jurisdiction, and that the claims were fundamentally unenforceable.

The Court of Justice has ruled that the Act of Accession that accepted the Republic of Cyprus (the southern part of the island) suspends application of EU law in the north of the island...but that this suspension does not apply to Mr. Apostolides, as he made his claim in a court on the south of the island, where the law applies. Or, to put it another way, it's not the location of the object of the claim that matters, but the location of the claimant. The Court has also ruled that having some or all of a claim be effectively unenforceable does not mean that the claim itself is not valid. Thus, while the authorities of the Republic of Cyprus can't make it to the location of his property to actually evict the UK citizens occupying it, the judgment that they should be evicted is valid. This is important, since there apparently are financial penalties that Mr. Apostolides sued for as well, and these are enforceable via the mechanisms of the European Community.

There are other components to this ruling, but the upshot is that if if you are a member of the EU, you can effectively sue another member of the EU for damages even if you can't act on the property involved. We might wonder how many other cases this would apply to, and whether other courts might look to this example in deciding rulings concerning seized land and its later resale.

Which, as you might imagine, has many applications worldwide.

You can find the summary of the judgment on this page at the moment; it's Number 39 on April 28, 2009.

al Jazeera article

As protests flare with concomitant government-backed violence in Iran, it can be easy to miss the ongoing unrest in other parts of the world.

Today, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, president of the Russian republic of Ingushetia, was injured during a car bomb attack on his convoy in the town of Nazran (the former capital of Ingushetia, actually). This is just the latest in a string of attacks on government officials in Ingushetia, a string that has already resulted in the deaths of the deputy chief supreme court justice (hit while dropping her kids off at school) and a former vice prime minister (shot outside his home).

Even as Chechnya has "calmed down," Ingushetia has picked up more than its share of refugees from its neighboring state. At the same time, its government has a dubious record when it comes to dealing with internal dissent, including the highly suspicious death in custody of vigorous critic Magomed Yevloyev (whose site, I note, is no longer active).

Despite its apparent pacification of Chechnya via tremendous violence, and the smashing of the Georgian offensive, the Russian government has not managed to actually stop elements of its southern Muslim minorities from taking violent action against local authorities. The latest string of attacks on Ingushetian authorities may well motivate military action much in the mode of the Ossetian and Chechen conflicts. If so, we can expect a new wave of refugees from Ingushetia, but whether they will try to return to Chechnya or perhaps spill into the Ossetias is unclear.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

One of my major news sources is the BBC. A knock-on effect of this is that I keep getting exposed to the curious (read: crazy) panic about sharp objects that has swept through the UK, moving in parallel with the general fear of their own youth that seems to have swept the nation as well. Previously, I've reported on entirely rational plans like evicting families with problem kids, and the general manufacturing of a knife epidemic in the UK. In that latter post, I made a crack about how I'd just order my kitchen knives from Amazon to avoid the risk of being arrested for walking home with them from the local Tesco.

Well, apparently the fear is one up on me there, as a new BBC article reports that, in true scandal fashion, a teenager managed to order some machetes online.

Trading standards officers have called for a ban on online knife sales after a machete was sold to a 15-year-old for £1.50 over the internet.

"As knife crime remains a problem in many of our towns and cities, it beggars belief that so many traders are still prepared to sell potentially lethal weapons to children," said Ron Gainsford, chief executive of the Trading Standards Institute (TSI).

They're going to be awfully disappointed to learn that people can stab each other with screwdrivers and pointed sticks. I'm not sure what the game plan will be the next time someone is beaten to death with a cricket bat.

Clearly, knives (as with guns and pretty much any other weapon) raise the likelihood that violence will result in serious injury and death. That said, they don't cause the violence, and the increasing tendency to panic about kids and assume in advance that they are all criminals isn't going to help promote non-violent resolutions, nor will make those same kids feel like they can comfortably talk to their parents, the police, or other authorities if there's an issue.

Seen from a distance, the current panic in the UK about "those kids these days" is curious and a little sad.

BBC article

The British National Party, home to your UK version of the shrinking perimeter crew, likes to sling about the racism and tickle the fears of people in the UK. Consider this lovely pair of recent speeches from party chairman Nick Griffin (who must, we imagine, loath having a .eu extension on his url):

Establishment Parties Have Turned Britain into a Multicultural Bankrupt Slum, Says BNP Leader

Contrasted with:

"Not in Our Name" - BNP Leader Denounces Racist and Sectarian Vandalism.

Of course, the latter article includes this premium remark from dear Nick:

“Desecrating gravestones – whatever the opinions and even crimes of those who they commemorate – is beyond the pale. Even the guilty dead have innocent relatives...

We're discussing the desecration of Romanian gypsy graves here, so apparently they, like all those damned darkies and Poles, are "guilty." Lovely.

One of the BNP's claims has been that immigrants get to "jump" public housing queues -- that is, somehow they get access to public housing before UK native-born residents. Of course, like any other public process, you could just check your goddamn facts before lying. Or, rather, making claims.

Fortunately, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has done the factchecking for them, and has discovered that they're lying. Or wrong. Whatever.

According to the study, 64% of people who arrived in the UK within the last five years live in private rented accommodation.

But after five years, when many immigrants are able to get residency and become entitled to government help, one in six live in social housing - exactly the same proportion as those who were born in Britain.

In other words, they act just like Brits. Sounds like assimilation to me (although, admittedly, everywhere in the world seems to do a poorer job of assimilation than the U.S.).

As the EHRC points out, the issue then is the perception that there is inequality. Which may, we imagine, come from the BNP straight-up lying about it.

BBC article

Shortly on the heels of the BNP demonstrating their willingness to lie in support of their long-term plan to be horrid people, party chief Nick Griffin has suggested that we ought to just start capping those immigrants. Unless you push him to be honest and say it, in which case he'll withdraw a little:

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over.

"But Europe has sooner or later to close its borders or its simply going to be swamped by the Third World."

This is, by the way, why I appreciate BBC interviewers, for their willingness to call people out on their bullshit. Griffin's revised "plan" would still be murder (yeah, good luck making it to either coast in your life raft). One could imagine recommending scuttling boats and deporting people, and then one might have the EU's current policy.

Apparently Nick fears having those damned immigrants even touch European soil.

BBC article

Following a resounding beating by the Russian armed forces, the military of Georgia subsequently faced the indignity of the Georgian parliament officially declaring that the military was entirely at fault. Now, in what is probably a more even-handed and neutral report, the Georgian military again faces an indignity, learning that it probably wasn't even as effective as it thought it was.

Specifically, a report from the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies suggests that the Russians accounted for exactly half of their own air unit losses.

Notably, this is not the first report CAST has released that is highly critical of Russian air power in the Ossetian conflict. Consider this earlier report that focuses on the operational success of Russian air power in the Ossetian war, without regard for the cause of its air casualties.

In this situation, the Russian Air Force — with its quick reaction times and powerful strike capability — was to provide immediate support to the surrounded peacekeepers and the weak South Os-setian armed groups. Ideally. Russian aviation should have suppressed the Georgian artillery and multiple-launch rocket system positions before the end of August 8. .Another urgent task was to deliver air strikes on the Georgian 4th Infantry Brigade, which was storming Tskhinvali.

Russian aviation attempted to accomplish these objectives, but immediately lost three Sukhoi Su-25 ground-attack aircraft to Georgian anti-air fire. After that, according to eyewitness accounts, there were no Russian aircraft over Tskhinvali on August 8 or the following day — that is. during the most critical period of the conflict. In effect, the Russian military command was forced to bring motor-rifle units into battle from the march, without first gaining superiority in numbers and firepower.

Incidentally, this older report suggests the Russians lost up to ten aircraft as mission kills (meaning they could no longer operate), although three or four of these at least managed to make it back to Russian air bases.

Naturally, a spokesman for the Russian military denies any friendly fire happened. That said, if Russian ground forces really did shoot down three of their own aircraft (and if they'd been going without air cover the majority of the time, who could blame them?), how much more often did Russian ground forces take fire from their own air units?

BBC article

This week met the curious news that Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan had suggested that the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to genocide. Here are the words:

Mr Erdogan made the controversial comments last Friday, telling NTV television: "The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There's no point in interpreting this otherwise."

This is curious, of course, since the Turkish government has, to some extent rather notoriously, rejected the suggestion that Ottoman Turkey committed genocide back in 1915. This has been a big problem for Turkey both in terms of EU entry and in terms of rapprochement with neighboring Armenia.

Naturally, Chinese officials seized on this disjunction between Erdogan's words and his country's official stance. State vehicle Xinhua took a moment out to highlight statements in the EU parliament made against Erdogan's statement, right before going on to talk about how peaceful and harmonious life resumes in Xinjiang (for definitions of "peaceful" that involve pipe beatings of Uighurs by Han Chinese).

Although Erdogan's remark is frankly silly in context, it also gave the PRC a new way to point to the outside world and shout "Bad man!" while vigorously suppressing those within its own borders.

This is, of course, the normal pattern. Or, to paraphrase a friend, "It's only okay for China to kill Chinese people."

BBC article

Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped from her Chechen home and murdered this week. Ms. Estemirova was investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya as part of the human rights group Memorial.

In recent months, she had been gathering evidence of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militias.

There is some depressing mirroring here, as Ms. Estemirova was awarded the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Prize in 2007, that prize being named after journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered while she was also investigating Russian abuses in Chechnya.

This is, in fact, a terrible time for activists in Russia. As the BBC article reminds us, another activist with whom Ms. Estemirova had worked, one Stanislav Markelov, was killed on January 19th. Although the BBC article does not mention this, journalist and anti-fascist investigator Anastasia Baburova was also killed by the same attack. And, as I've mentioned before, Magomed Yevloyev was "shot while resisting arrest" in the troubled Russian province of Ingushetia.

It is hard to be optimistic about the likelihood of an actual investigation into this latest murder.

BBC article

Following on the heals of the killing of a human rights activist in Chechnya, two more people have been killed, although this time it's not clear just how they would have angered anyone in the establishment there.

Zarema Sadulayeva and Alik Djabrailov were kidnapped by armed men from the offices of the charity that Ms. Sadulayeva headed up and found later, dead, in the trunk of their car. Although this kind of killing is increasingly common in Chechnya, it's not clear how Ms. Sadulayeva, who heads a charity that provides care for children injured in the conflicts in Chechnya, would have inspired someone in the government and militia establishment to want to kill her. Unlike earlier killings, the target this time was not an active human rights campaigner.

That said, once kidnappings and killings become the norm, it's easy enough to roll any personal cause into the murder package, so it may not be worth trying to figure out a "why" on the ones that are unclear from a political standpoint. For all we know, some loser in the Chechen establishment was spurned by Ms. Sadulayeva in the past. It doesn't matter why, as the real issue continues to be the condoning of disappearances and killings by the Russian-backed government in Chechnya.

BBC article
New York Times article

The BBC is reporting that after two decades of being lobbied to do so, the German parliament has finally revoked the "war traitor" status of a number of men who deserted from the Wehrmacht during the second world war.

Ludwig Baumann joined Hitler's Wehrmacht when he was 19, but he became a pacifist and in June 1942, he deserted, along with his friend Kurt Oldenburg, while they were deployed in France.

Despite his fearlessness, Mr Baumann was caught by the Nazis and sentenced to death for desertion. He was tortured, taken to concentration camps, and was lucky to avoid being executed.

So why wouldn't a post-Nazi Germany simply go ahead and pardon these men who clearly didn't want to be involved in a totalitarian government that ultimately harmed their nation? Part of it is a sort of generational issue, as you can see in John Keegan's Intelligence in War, where he expresses a sharp distaste for "traitors," even when they turned against genocidal governments run by insane dictators. This falls in line with the idea that government is the state, rather than an underlying ideology - as if, for example, America were not defined by its ideology but rather by whoever happened to be in power at the time.

There may perhaps be object lessons in that sentiment.

A contrasting view would hold that much as "being American" has more to do with an idea of freedoms and democracy than, say, being white, "being German" had more to do with ideas that did not involve large-scale genocide and domination of Europe (I'm punting a bit here, as I have no idea what the fundamental core of German-ness is as a national identity, but they seem to have done well for most of their history not exterminating minority groups, so that's clearly not it).

Mr Baumann says the men who were described as "wartime traitors" were not traitors at all.

"This is a great day for Germany - finally the last sentences handed down by Nazi courts will be lifted," he said.

Absolute loyalty to a nation is not the same as absolute loyalty to the state, or any one incarnation of the state.

BBC article

Hugo Chavez, proud resident of the 70s is now venturing into the 80s by supporting ethnically based independence in some areas but not others.

Specifically, he's announced that Venezuela will officially recognize the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations, following in Russia's footsteps. He similarly follows in Russian footsteps by liberally failing to recognize the ethnically based independence of Kosovo, Ingushetia, and Chechnya. It's unclear why Chechens, Kosovars, and Ingushetians don't merit independence, but perhaps we can ask Chavez to go on about it in one of his extensive television rambles.

New York Times article