Hey, I got in today’s Guardian!

We finished our evening in Vienna at the residence of the ambassador of a small but friendly European country. As I entered the reception room I saw one bloke at the far end scowling at me. I had no idea who he was, but quickly discovered that he has been the head of an international mission which I criticised really trenchantly in a report we published last year. I had in fact heard that he was now in Vienna working for the Special Envoy, and knew that he was a citizen of the country whose ambassador was our host, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I decided to take the bull by the horns, strolled over and introduced myself. “So, you’re working for the Special Envoy now, I hear?”

“No!” he grumbled. It turned out he had been offered a more permanent but less glamorous job elsewhere in Vienna. I did not ask, but I suspect our report may not have greatly improved his career prospects. (Though I would add that if he had run his mission better, we would not have written the kind of report that we did.)

He found an excuse to talk to someone else almost immediately, and did not talk to me or my colleagues, or even engage in eye contact, for the rest of the evening. Fortunately it was a buffet and we dotted ourselves at will around the reception room, rather than a formal dinner with a seating plan. It would have been a bit embarrassing to have to sit anywhere near him.

So, I thought I had it all worked out: land in Vienna at 1 pm, see Austrian diplomats at 2.30; my boss would also be landing at 3 pm, he had another meeting at 4 pm and we could see the UN Special Envoy together at 5 pm.

Except when I landed I found a voicemail from the UN Special Envoy’s office saying, sorry, they suddenly had to go to Italy and could only see us at 3 pm. Called my boss, just getting onto his plane in Brussels; he was furious. Got into town and decided to see what would happen if I showed up in the Special Envoy’s office at 2.30. (The Austrian diplomats were happy enough to postpone to 5 pm; it turned out they had another meeting at 3.30.)

Indeed, that worked out; the Deputy Special Envoy agreed to see me immediately (he has featured here before). Had a good chat with him before he disappeared off at 3.05 to see the Austrian foreign minister at 3.30 (which explained why the Austrian diplomats I had spoken to earlier were happy to postpone my meeting with them).

By this time a) my boss had phoned to say that he was zooming straight in from the airport and b) grumbling noises were emanating from the next office where the Special Envoy himself was struggling with his new communications device. (The Special Envoy has also been mentioned here before.) After twenty minutes I was finally ushered into his presence. At precisely that moment my boss appeared looking ever so slightly flustered. But we had a quarter of an hour’s pleasant conversation before he had to go off to see another senior UN official also based in Vienna (for reasons which are obvious if you look at the report we published on Thursday), and then I managed another ten minutes with the Special Envoy on my own before he threw me out so that he could get to Rome.

People have been asking me why it is that the Special Envoy’s recent remarks bear such a close resemblance to the report we put out a week ago, with an undertone of us taking orders from him – or possibly, from the more paranoid commentators, the other way round! Little do they realise just how chaotic the communication between our two offices has been; it was the first time I had seen the Special Envoy in over a year and I had hardly been in touch with his deputy since our day in Slovenia together in September. What it does show is that we are on the same wavelength in broad terms, even if there is occasional static.

Still waiting for confirmation on Mladic arrest – sounds a bit less likely than I’d hoped. Oh well.

But we finalised the text of the long-brewing report on Cyprus, at last!!!!!

And I’m off to Vienna for 24 hours tomorrow. Bed now.

Happy birthday, !

I hear rumours that Ratko Mladic has been arrested! Fantastic news if it’s true.

has been watching old Doctor Who series:
Second Doctor: The Ice Warriors
Fourth Doctor: The Deadly Assassin [corrected!]
Fifth Doctor: Arc of Infinity
Seventh Doctor: The Curse of Fenric
[Edited to add: Fourth Doctor: The Androids of Tara]

In memory of the late Baba Tahir Emini, I’ve been reading up on his sect, the Bektashi. I was aware, from my conversations with him and with others, that they are of a mystical Sufist tradition, preach tolerance, love, and peace, and consider some of the traditions of orthodox Islam regarding the role of women and the use of alcohol to be distractions from the truth. I was unaware that they are also associated with a particular sense of humour, and that there are a whole set of Bektashi jokes told by the faithful about themselves. Some of them don’t translate awfully well, but one of them I feel sure I’ve heard in an Irish version:

One day the Sunni friends of a Bektashi dervish insisted that he go to the mosque to pray the Friday prayer. As he took his seat in the congregation the hodja spotted him. Wanting to embarrass the dervish, the hodja began to lecture on the evils of alcohol. He began describing in detail all of the natural and religious reasons why drinking any alcohol at all is bad. To prove a point that even animals won’t drink liquor the hodja asks “If you put a bucket of water and a bucket of raki in front of a donkey, which will it drink?”

Someone in the crowd answered, “The water of course.”

“Why so?” enquired the hodja.

Unable to hold himself, the Bektashi exclaimed “Why so? Because it’s a donkey!”

There are other jokes that I think could not be told in any other context than an Islamic one:

A Bektashi was in a mosque one day listening to the hodja give a sermon. He was half asleep when the hodja began talking about the pure virgins that awaited the faithful in heaven.

When he heard the word heaven, the Bektashi came to himself and asked the hodja excitedly, “Hodja efendi will wine and raki be served to the faithful in heaven?”

The hodja became furious and shouted back, “You pagan, what do you think heaven is… a tavern?!”

The Bektashi replied likewise, “Hah! What do you think heaven is… a whorehouse?!”

But I am particularly intrigued by the jokes with a certain universailty, but which also presuppose a very close connection between the Bektashi mystic and God, to the point that certain things are expected as of right from the relationship:

One day, the weather grew very hot. Burdened with thirst, a Bektashi dervish decided to buy a watermelon with some change he took out of his pocket. With watermelon in hand, he found a beautiful shade tree to sit under where he proceeded to slice up his watermelon with great appetite. However, after putting the first piece into his mouth, he found it so sour that it was difficult to eat. He began shouting complaints to the Creator, “Alas my God! Are you so stingy that you can’t even put a little sugar in this watermelon. You always bestow favors on Your servants, but never with what is really needed!” Thus swearing, he finished off the watermelon in spite of its tartness and threw the rinds to the side.

After a while he saw a poor waif, half dead with hunger and thirst, approaching. Not wishing to be bothered, the Bektashi sat still and pretended to be asleep. The poor man came close, saw the watermelon rinds and began to eat them. Discreetly, the Bektashi observed the poor man out of the corner of his eye. He saw with astonishment how each time the poor man took a bite of rind he exclaimed, “My God, many thanks to You! You nourish me in spite of everything with this watermelon rind. You have ensured my subsistence!”

Hearing this, the Bektashi became furious and rose up. He shouted, “Enough of this! I ate the inside of that melon even though it was bitter and torturous and believe me, I let Allah know it. But you! You eat the foul-tasting rind and you thank Him for it? It’s this kind of cheap flattery that encourages Him to keep making poor quality watermelon!”

Anyway, my research will continue.

Has anyone out there ever tried writing crossover fics between the worlds of Little Women and H.P. Lovecraft? After all they share a New England setting, and are separated by only half a century. If there isn’t any already out there, perhaps one of the gifted fic-writers on my friends list would like to try?

Old ones from the Ethnic Conflict Review Digest, 1998-2000:

Making A New Nation, ed. by Danica Fink-Hafner & John R Robbins (about Slovenia)
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, by Anastasia N Karakasidou (about Greek Macedonia)
Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, by David Chandler
Northern Ireland: A Political Directory 1968-1999, by Sydney Elliott and W.D. Flackes with John Coulter

The Ethnic Conflict Research Digest 1998, Vol. 1 No. 2

Making a New Nation, Danica Fink-Hafner & John R Robbins eds (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997) 330pp. bibl. Hb. ISBN 1-85521-656-6. £42.50.

The small southern European republic of Slovenia seems in some ways to have escaped the ethnic conflicts which otherwise characterised the break-up of Yugoslavia. The economy is undeniably the most successful in Eastern Europe; elections are free and fair, with a viable multi-party system; the country itself is charming, if not very exciting. The government vehemently favours joining the EU and the single currency at the earliest opportunity – even the car number-plates are difficult to distinguish from those of neighbouring Austria. The ‘native minority’ Hungarian and Italian populations, a few thousand each in a country of two million, are constitutionally protected with guaranteed parliamentary seats.

But as recently as 1991, Slovenia was part of the same country as Bosnia, as Kosovo, as Macedonia, as Croatia which then had a substantial Serb minority (and no longer does). And the many Slovenian-registered cars which can be seen on the roads of Bosnia today demonstrate that the largest ethnic minority currently living in Slovenia are the tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees who migrated during the war. Although Fink-Hafner and Robbins’ collection of papers tends to present Slovenia as a historic nation newly liberated from an alien Yugoslav state, a less comfortable truth peeks through the contradictions between Janko Prunk’s historical introduction (pp. 21-30), Drago Zajc’s review of the changing political system (pp. 156-171), and Bernik, Malnar and Toš’s essay on the paradoxes of Slovenian democratization (pp. 56-82). This last is one of the most interesting contributions, presenting polling data from 1980 to 1994, including the 1990-91 independence process. The authors point to the sudden crystallisation of support for secession from Yugoslavia in 1990, and to continuing poll evidence of ethnocentrism and xenophobia, to argue that Slovenian political culture is not as whole-heartedly democratic as it is usually portrayed.

Much of the rest of the book concentrates on economics in Slovenia alone. John R. Robbins, who as well co-editing the collection is its only non-Slovene author, contributes an insightful prologue (pp. 1-20), which discusses the problems of democratization, ethnicity and pluralism in a global context, and also an epilogue (pp. 278-294) measuring Slovenia’s “attainment of viability” and prospects for long-term stability. Ethnic homogeneity is no guarantee here; however Robbins’ main concern is the political system’s shallow institutional roots. He is frank about the problems facing a small European nation struggling to enter the New World Order, but basically shares the optimism of his fellow contributors.

Nicholas Whyte, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs – Croatia

The Ethnic Conflict Research Digest 1999, Vol. 2 No. 1

Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, Anastasia N Karakasidou, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 334pp. Index. Bibl. £30.50; ISBN 0-226-42493-6, £30.50. Pb.: £14.95; 0-22642494-4.

This is a gripping and moving account of the construction of Greek nationhood in a municipality near Thessaloniki. Using both oral and official history, Karakasidou reveals how the inhabitants of the town once called Guvezna and now known as Assiros were altered from an Ottoman cocktail of Turks, Slavs and Greeks to the mono-ethnic culture present there today. The space left by departing Turks and Slavs after the town came under Greek control was partly filled by refugees forced to resettle in Greek Macedonia after the disastrous war of 1922. They mostly spoke Turkish themselves as a first language, but, like those Slavic speakers who remained in the town, they became assimilated during the course of the twentieth century. “In many ways,” the author concludes, “the past has become very much a foreign country to the Assiriotes”. (p.217)

But this book is not just about Macedonia, it is about nation-building. Karakasidou complains that “while there is overwhelming concern among Euro-American politicians and diplomats over what nationalism has brought to Eastern Europe in recent years, many seem unaware of the fact that nation-building processes are a longue durée“, (p. 146) and she describes the process in all its brutality. War, religion, politics and capitalism all contributed to constructing the ‘official narrative’ of this particular nation in this particular place over the last 120 years.

Cambridge University Press declined to publish this book, fearing attacks on their Greek staff if the crisis over the official name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia were to escalate. Fortunately it did not, and many Greeks now look to their new northern neighbour as a business opportunity rather than a military threat. Perhaps Karakasidou’s courageous research helped to open up the space in which this became possible. There may be hope for all of us.

Nicholas Whyte, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

The Ethnic Conflict Research Digest 2000, Vol. 3 No. 1

Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, David Chandler, (London: Pluto Press, 1999) 239pp. Index. Bibl. £45.00; ISBN 0-7453-1408-2. Pb.: £14.99; ISBN 0-7453-1403-1.

David Chandler subjects the international community’s efforts to impose democracy on Bosnia and Herzegovina to a rigorous analysis. Beginning with a critique of the concept of democratisation, he gives a chapter each to the issues of sovereignty, power-sharing, human rights, political pluralism, and building civil society, and concludes that the West’s democratisation policy has been driven more by an “external dynamic” of post-Cold War security concerns than by the needs of the country, or indeed of the region. The book is well referenced and includes URLs for the many documents cited from the Internet.

The catalogue of failures in the process of Bosnian democratisation is indeed dismal, but at times Chandler over-eggs his pudding. For instance, on p. 77 he says that in the summer of 1997, “NATO troops occupied the public buildings in Banja Luka, handed them over to [Bosnian Serb President]Mrs Plavsic and disarmed local police loyal to the Pale faction, while a British officer sat in Mrs Plavsic’s office answering her phone.” Police stations were indeed occupied by NATO (and Czech) troops, but other public buildings were not, and the police were disarmed only of items not often included in day-to-day police work elsewhere such as rocket launchers and grenades. Many strange things did happen to the phones in Banja Luka, including my own, during that dramatic time, but I do not recall the incident described relating to Mrs Plavsic’s office.

He also underrates the admittedly modest achievement of the “multi-ethnic” parties in the 1997 municipal elections by stating that they won only 6% of the seats, compared with 5% the previous year. There was considerable variation in the number of seats in each municipal assembly/council, and when votes rather than seats are tallied the “multi-ethnic” parties got more like 10% in 1997.

Chandler is undeniably right to point out that the democratisation of Bosnia has not been successful, as demonstrated by the steadily increasing legislative authority of the international community’s High Representative (not the “United Nations High Representative” as Chandler calls him). He is right also to suggest that the logical development of current policy is towards protectorate rather than democracy. However it is difficult to concur with his key recommendation of simply “granting people greater autonomy”. The international community stood back in 1991-92 when the war began; this should not be repeated. The biggest gap in this book is Chandler’s dismissal of the importance of the process of European integration of Eastern Europe. That is the most hopeful future direction for Bosnia and its neighbours.

Nicholas Whyte, Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels

Northern Ireland: A Political Directory 1968-1999, Sydney Elliott and W.D. Flackes with John Coulter, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 730 pp, index, hb, £30.00, ISBN 0-85640-628-7

Since its first edition in 1980, this directory has been an essential reference tool for anyone interested in the politics of Northern Ireland. The fourth edition was published early in 1994, just before the paramilitary ceasefires. It was exhaustive, authoritative and definitive – up to that point. However it contained little information on the new groups and personalities that came to prominence in the six dynamic years that followed. The new fifth edition, completed during a pause in the peace process in summer 1999, therefore has a tough act to follow. It does not completely succeed. This is particularly true in the “Dictionary of Northern Ireland Politics” section which lists key personalities, themes and events of the Troubles in alphabetical order. One of the joys of previous editions was their wealth of detail on obscure politicians who won an election sometime in the 1970s (or earlier). For the new edition, this should have been judiciously pruned. More space should have been given to those who were elected to the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996 and the new Assembly in 1998, some of whom have entries only two lines long. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition gets only a short entry, and the Northern Ireland Labour group which also participated in the 1996-98 talks has no entry at all. A leading supporter of the Orange Order’s “right to march” is listed, but the leaders of the residents groups opposed to her are not.

There are a number of inaccuracies relating to the most recent period – John Alderdice was not a candidate in the 1994 European election (p. 155); names such as Glendinning (p. 211) and Ramaphosa (p. 443) are misspelt. Besides the “dictionary” section, the other parts of the new edition – a chronology, lists of office holders, notes on security and systems of government – have been updated as necessary. One high point: in the section listing election results, the descriptions of the most recent campaigns are vivid and accurate. This book is still essential, but the new edition is merely useful rather than excellent. I am looking forward to the seventh edition.

Nicholas Whyte, Centre for European Policy Studies

Classic from Dave Barry (f-locked because of copyright)

When people ask me, ”Dave, what’s it like to have a newborn baby in the household?” I immediately answer: ”…”

This is because I am sleeping. I spend a lot of my day in an unconscious state, because my 2-month-old daughter, Sophie, does not believe in sleeping at night. She feels that the nighttime hours are best used for making loud, inexplicable, Exorcist-style noises. At 3:30 a.m., her bassinet will suddenly start shaking like an unbalanced clothes dryer and erupt with a wide range of squeaks, gurgles, chirps, snorts, snuffles, grunts, etc. It does not sound like there’s a lone baby in there. It sounds like the entire Barnyard of the Demons. (Which would be an excellent name for a band.)

Sophie routinely makes noises that cannot be explained by the known laws of physics. Recently, some friends came over to admire her, and we had her all dressed up in a cute little baby outfit featuring little bloomers with cherries on them, and while everybody was gathered around admiring how sweet and delicate and innocent she looked, Sophie — who is, physically, no larger than a standard pumpkin — cut loose with a series of massive, resonating, bloomer-inflating bodily blasts that you would think could be produced only by a 350-pound man who had just won a burrito-eating contest. If I had not been holding her firmly at the time, I believe she would have propelled herself, missile-style, through the ceiling.

”How … cute!” our friends said, as the aroma wafted around us, fog-like.

I’m not saying that all Sophie does is make noises. As a brand-new human being with an inquisitive mind, she is also exploring the mystery and magic of the world around her, by which I mean she is trying to get her hands completely into her mouth. This is her primary goal in life.

Her arms and legs constantly wave around in a random manner, and every now and then, when a hand happens to land on her mouth, she becomes excited and starts sucking on it like crazy. But then, without warning, the arm yanks the hand away, which makes Sophie VERY angry. If she ever finds out who is operating her arms, she is going to give that person a piece of her mind, if she ever figures out how to talk.

Yes, it’s an exciting time in our household, a time of learning and growing and having plastic bags of frozen breast milk in the freezer next to the Tater Tots. In our family, we strongly believe in breast-feeding, which has many benefits, the main one being: Men cannot do it. Not that I don’t contribute! I’m always giving my wife useful breast-feeding pointers, such as: ”Time for you to breast-feed her!” And: ”Time for you to breast-feed her again!” And: ”I would gladly breast-feed her, but, tragically, I am a man.”

(Actually, I suspect that men CAN breast-feed; it’s just that, in the entire history of the human race, no man has ever actually tried.)

I do change diapers. A LOT. It is a known baby fact that babies put out far more material than they take in; physicists now believe that babies account for most of the matter in the universe. If you were to stack up all the diapers I have changed in just two months, one on top of the other, you would never be invited to a party again for the rest of your life.

Our house would smell like a malfunctioning sewage plant, except that we have a product called the Diaper Genie, which encloses diapers in a long, odor-proof plastic bag. As a parent, I believe this is the greatest of all humanity’s inventions, including low-fat Cheez-Its. You take your diaper, you put it into your Diaper Genie, you twist the plastic bag, and, as the French say, Voila! (Literally, ”You are not smelling any more the poop.” )

When your Diaper Genie fills up, you open the bottom and remove an amazing, 15-foot-long, segmented, caterpillar-like Chain of Doodies. We’ve been throwing these away, but it seems to me we ought to be turning them over to the U.S. Air Force as a potentially devastating military weapon.

Another excellent item of modern baby technology is the battery-powered swing. When your baby is in a bad mood because she cannot get her hand inside her mouth, you put her in this swing and let it rock her gently into a blissful state of suspended baby animation lasting long enough that sometimes you can actually take a shower. This device works so well that I think we should make a larger version and use it to calm hyperactive adults.

If you’re a psychiatric professional who would like to explore this idea, let’s schedule a meeting. I want to sleep on your couch.

6) Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia, by Richard Caplan

Richard Caplan has featured here before. This is a good, brief (but very expensive!) book on all aspects of the European Community’s recognition of the successor states to the former Yugoslavia in 1991-93. It is particularly timely as just this last week (in a development so far ignored by the international press) the EU has been at it again, imposing dubious conditions on the forthcoming independence referendum in MontenegroYugoslav People’s Army in Slovenia and Croatia, though as it turned out that was a pale shadow of what was to come elsewhere. Europe’s recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in December actually came in December 1991, six months after the fighting started, so therefore cannot have caused it.

Indeed, there is a good case that the recognition of Croatia in particular helped to regularise the situation there and achieve a ceasefire that lasted for more than three years – a point first made to me way back before I got into the Balkans by the Norwegian scholar Asbjorn Eide, and repeated with convincing detail here. On the other hand, the ostensible purpose of the delay in recognising Croatia – ensuring a better minority rights regime for its Serbs – failed completely; they were already in open conflict with Zagreb and therefore not interested in the EC’s proffered constitutional bells and whistles.

Caplan does not make such a good case for the defence on Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he considers EC recognition to have been the spark that set the conflict going. In my own view, he fails to make a good case which is there to be made. Again the dates simply don’t check out; the fighting started in Bijeljina, a town I have since got to know rather well, in the first days of April and had spread to Sarajevo before the European recognition had been decided. To an extent, of course, this is pedantic; once Croatia and Slovenia had been recognised by the EU, the BiH leadership (of whom I am not a big fan) faced the choice of remaining in a federation dominated by Milošević, with the likelihood of a pro-Milošević coup before too long in Sarajevo as had already happened in Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro, or else going for such international support as they could get as an independent state, despite the consequent risk of a civil war. There is much to criticise about the way Izetbegović handled the situation, and one could also argue that the EU’s recognition of Slovenia and Croatia thus “caused” the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But the fact is that the responsibility lies with Milošević, whose policies had driven Slovenia and Croatia to secede and who had overseen the arming and organisation of secessionist Serbs in BiH (a former acquaintance of mine features in this narrative), much more than with Izetbegović, still less the Europeans.

On Macedonia and Kosovo, Caplan makes the very good point that delaying recognition probably increased rather than decreasing ethnic tensions there, particularly as for Macedonia the delay was over an issue (the name of the country, of its largest ethnic group, and of their language) which was purely an irrational hang-up of the Greeks, but one which the other eleven states failed to confront properly (and have failed to this day). Kosovo is a slightly different matter; while I agree that the distinction between former autonomous provinces and former constituent republics is a rather spurious place to draw the limit for units of self-determination, the fact is that Kosovo (or at least Rugova’s government of the time) was much farther from satisfying one of the key criteria for international recognition: it did not have control over its own territory, even to the imperfect extent that Croatia and Bosnia did over theirs.

There’s a lot more in this book. Caplan makes a good argument overall that although the process may have appeared arbitrary and purely political, in fact by invoking international law the Europeans constrained their own freedom of action in significant ways, and their intentions were certainly to minimise the likelihood of present and future conflict. His discussion of the use and effectiveness of political conditionality in the last chapter is equally fascinating. Conditionality in general is much rarer than I had realised, and if it doesn’t always appear to be very effective, at least it doesn’t seem to be harmful. The conditions placed on the new Balkan states were heavier than those that were placed on Eritrea and Bangladesh, and (though Caplan doesn’t make this point) that was probably a good thing in the end.

Where conditionality fails, it is either a) because the local circumstances are unfavourable (though even then, if it can tie into the agenda of an opposition party that can be helpful) or b) because the international community does it unconvincingly. The Europeans’ attempts to use conditionality suffered more from the second problem than the first. Their refusal to contemplate even the slightest hint of the use of force basically concentrated negotiating power in the hands of those who did not have such scruples. Even deployment of the unarmed European Community Monitoring Mission to Bosnia in 1991 was considered to be too interventionist. Civilised and enlightened western statesmen are often squeamish about threatening the use of force, but you have to wave the stick as well as the carrot sometimes.

Finally, I was very struck by Caplan’s observation that conditional recognition actually has a long history in this part of the world: minority rights regimes in the new states were part of the treaty-making process after the first world war that led to the independence of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; and it goes back still further, to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, when Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Montenegro were recognised subject guarantees of the rights of minority religious communities. 128 years on, Montenegro is going through the same process all over again, as is Kosovo. I hope something has been learnt in the meantime; and I am more hopeful after reading this book.

Having spent all week working on the Kosovo report (published yesterday) and another rather difficult draft, I come home at the weekend with three more writing assignments (including a review for ). Don’t feel in the mood right now.

Meanwhile, read (via Nick Barlow) Tom Baker Says. And on the British in India. And on Ulster Scots.

Edited to add: again.

Baba Tahir Emini, head of the Bektashi community in Tetovo, Macedonia, has died of a sudden heart attack. He was among the most progressive Muslim leaders in the world. I met him (for the second time) back in August last year.

It’s especially sad to lose him at a time when dialogue between Islam and the West could have done with a few more positive messages. (Though the Balkans have not been a particular problem in this respect.)

I got a call out of the blue this morning from a head-hunter – an Italian woman, though based in Spain, looking to appoint someone to run a new “think-and-do tank” (sic) to run pan-European campaigns. I thought at first this was a result of my previous interaction with a Belgian-based head-hunter, but no, it was a totally different set of contacts that put them on to me.

What bothered me about it is that the policy area they campaign in (though it’s one I’m vaguely interested in and probably sympathetic to) is an area of policy that I know almost nothing about. Luckily a friend of mine who works in the next door building does work in a related field, so I took her out for lunch to pick her brains, and was not awfully surprised when she was able to name three other people who she knew and who she would have thought were better suited to the job than me. Odd that the head-hunters didn’t go to them first. (Or perhaps they did, and had their offers rejected.)

I’m interested by my own reaction. I had always sort of said to myself that it is high-level policy work of any kind that atracts me, not the specific international politics/war and peace stuff. But when I put my current week on one side – I’ve spent most of it working on Cyprus, Kosovo and Montenegro, and have to go out shortly for a meeting with the European Commission’s new Special Envoy to Azerbaijan – and balance that against the otherproposed policy area, important and vital though it is, I am just not really excited by it. So in fact it really is the specific policy area that I like, and not the broader nature of the work.

But hey, it’s nice to be asked!

Wow, Karamanlis sacked Molyviatis and replaced him with Dora Bakoyannis! And sacked Skandalakis as well and abolished his job! Crumbs, night of the long knives or what??? (Hmm, I hadn’t realised that Dora Bakoyannis is Mitsotakis’ daughter.) OK, nobody else cares about this.

Quote of the day (on quite a different topic) from who has discovered Irish-American teenage detective Liffey Rivers:

…just the thought that someone (even fictional people) could name their child after a river that smells like fish-scented poo makes me want to burst into tears.

And two more links: Lord Bonkers on the Lib Dem leadership contest, and Ballygobackwards (hat-tip to Jonathan Calder).

got the answer to my earlier quiz.

 19/6 is approximately √10: 10 * 6² = 360; 19² = 361
  9/2 is approximately √20: 20 * 2² = 80; 9² = 81
 11/2 is approximately √30: 30 * 2² = 120; 11² = 121
 19/3 is approximately √40: 40 * 3² = 360; 19² = 361
 99/14 is approximately √50: 50 * 14² = 9800; 99² = 9801
 31/4 is approximately √60: 60 * 4² = 960; 31² = 961
251/30 is approximately √70: 70 * 30² = 63000; 251² = 63001
161/18 is approximately √80: 80 * 18² = 25920; 161² = 25921

So the next in the sequence is 19/2:

 19/2 is approximately √90: 90 * 2² = 360; 19² = 361

points out, reasonably enough, that 9/1 is as good as 161/18 for the eighth fraction in the sequence.

Macedonia’s president was locked indoors for three hours this week after an eagle dropped dead in his backyard and vets wary of the spread of bird flu were brought in to disinfect the area.

Health authorities have confirmed the presence of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in northern Greece, which borders Macedonia, but Macedonia itself has yet to record a case.

Poor Branko!

Hi to Maria of Crooked Timber who I just had an excellent lunch with.

Right, back to work…

Iowans are losing interest in President Herbert Hoover. What a shame. But the staff at his memorial library are thinking about ways of sexing up the 31st president for the new generation:

One idea is a video game that allows children to help Hoover make tough choices, such as putting people back to work or feeding children… Hoover staff are also taking the 31st president’s story into the schools by dressing as historic figures and talking to classes.

Hmm, I wonder which historical figures? The mind slowly boggles.

There is a square named after him in Leuven, thanks to his humanitarian work in Belgium during the first world war.

What is next in this sequence of fractions?

 19/6
  9/2
 11/2
 19/3
 99/14
 31/4
251/30
161/18

F astonished me yesterday, on our way to ‘s, by announcing: “On the planet Mercury, there is no day or night. Mercury always has the same side facing the Sun. This side is always light and hot, the other always dark and cold.”

I gently put him right, and further investigation revealed that he was quoting word for word from Marie Neurath’s Let’s Look at the Sky, passed on to us by his grandmother, who won it as a prize in a Farmer’s Weekly competeition, shortly after it was published in 1952. I am looking through the book now, to find out what other out-of-date information from over half a century ago is corrupting our child’s mind.

Having said that, he had in fact read somewhere else that Mercury’s year is 88 days and its rotation period is 59 days; he just hadn’t quite realised that this was inconsistent with the information from the first book, which is, of course, written in terms a six-year-old finds easier to understand, as well as being a better story, just wrong (as we have known since 1965).

Some of the sf stories of yesteryear depended on Mercury’s supposed behaviour – the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists Clifford D. Simak’s “Masquerade” (1941), Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” (1942), Lester Del Rey’s Battle on Mercury (1956), Asimov’s Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956), Mission to Mercury (1965) by Hugh Walters, Alan E. Nourse’s “Brightside Crossing” (1956) (of course), Larry Niven’s “The Coldest Place” (1964), and Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959), not to mention Lionel Fanthorpe’s first published book, Menace from Mercury (1954); add to that, from Wikipedia, Asimov’s “The Dying Night” (1952), Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky (1956) and Ray Cummings’ Tama of the Light Country and sequel Tama, Princess of Mercury (Wikipedia says 1966 but in fact first published in 1930-31).

That’s a dozen novels and short stories in the quarter century from 1940 to 1965 (not even counting the Cummings efforts). I have to say I can’t think of anything like that number of stories and novels set on the planet, published in the 40 years since we found out what its real rotation period is (David Brin’s Sundiver, Ckarke’s Rendezvous with RamaBlue Mars (1996) and, barring TV and film, that’s it). The old story may not have been true, but it was perhaps more beautiful.

(Hmm. Anyone remember Kinvig? Never mind.)

(PS – did you know that the entire Mariner 10 book is on-line thanks to NASA?)

Am now on Skype at work – nicholaswhyte – I expect I’ll mainly use this for work purposes but who knows?

A very pleasant afternoon spent on the other side of the country (nice to live in a small country) with , Mr and jr. (Thanks for your hospitality: I hope we have the chance to return it soon.)

The way back was not so pleasant. The snow wasn’t heavy but the traffic was barely moving on the motorway – it took literally two hours to get as far as Ghent, not quite 50 km. We moved to the old roads, fossilised remains of the earlier pre-motorway road network, and finally got to B’s respite care place about 9 o’clock rather than the 7 o’clock we had promised; and were home by quarter past ten, the last section proving particularly slippery. So it took the guts of five hours for a journey that should have taken about two.

Tired now. Bed.

I have to admit that I simply cut and pasted from Wikipedia’s article on the USSR State Motto, so you can find more there. The quick guide is as follows:

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! – Russian, of course.
Пролетарі всіх країн, єднайтеся! – Ukrainian – the letter ї is a giveaway.
Пралетарыі ўсіх краін, яднайцеся! – Belarusian – the letter ў is the clue here
Бутун дунё пролетарлари, бирлашингиз! – Uzbek. I wouldn’t have got this; most of the letters are fairly standard except for ё (which you do get in Russian, but this is obviously not a Slavic language).
Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер! Kazakh. The letters ң and қ leap out here, but both are used in other Cyrillic Turkic scripts.
პროლეტარ ყველა ქვეყნისა, შეერთდით! – Georgian, obviously.
Бүтүн өлкәләрин пролетарлары, бирләшин! – this of course is now obsolete; Azeri is now written in the Latin rather than Cyrillic alphabet. I guess this would now be written “Bütün ölkələrin proletarları, birləşin!”
Visų šalių proletarai, vienykitės! – Lithuanian, as well knows. The ų and ė are characteristic.
Пролетарь дин тоате цэриле, униць-вэ! – causes some confusion for people who go through the letters and realise that it is actually Romanian in Cyrillic, or Moldavian as it used to be called. I was puzzling a bit over цэриле, and then realised that in Romanian it is probably ţerile which makes both the Cyrillic transcription and the derivation from Latin terræ more obvious.
Visu zemju proletārieši, savienojieties! – Latvian. The letter ā is a crucial one here.
Бардык өлкөлордүн пролетарлары, бириккиле! – Kyrgyz, though I have to admit I would only have been able to work out that it is one of the five Turkic languages. Wikipedia claims that ү is now only used in Kazakh but obviously that isn’t the case.
Пролетарҳои ҳамаи мамлакатҳо, як шавед! – Tajik, the only Persian language on the list. Also the only one with the letter ҳ.
Պրոլետարներ բոլոր երկրների, միացե’ք! – Armenian, obviously.
Әхли юртларың пролетарлары, бирлешиң! Kyrgyz. Note use of ң (like Kazakh) and ә (like old Azeri).
Kõigi maade proletaarlased, ühinege! – Estonian. õ is the crucial identifier.

That’s the fifteen official languages of the USSR’s republics, all now independent states. The bonus two were languages spoken in autonomous parts of the Russian Federation:

Kaikkien maiden proletaarit, liittykää yhteen! – Finnish, as spoken in Karelia
Барлык илләрнең пролетарийлары, берләшегез! – yet another Turkic language, in this case Tatar. Barlıq illärneñ proletariları, berläşegez!

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!
Пролетарі всіх країн, єднайтеся!
Пралетарыі ўсіх краін, яднайцеся!
Бутун дунё пролетарлари, бирлашингиз!
Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер!
პროლეტარ ყველა ქვეყნისა, შეერთდით!
Бүтүн өлкәләрин пролетарлары, бирләшин!
Visų šalių proletarai, vienykitės!
Пролетарь дин тоате цэриле, униць-вэ!
Visu zemju proletārieši, savienojieties!
Бардык өлкөлордүн пролетарлары, бириккиле!
Пролетарҳои ҳамаи мамлакатҳо, як шавед!
Պրոլետարներ բոլոր երկրների, միացե’ք!
Әхли юртларың пролетарлары, бирлешиң!
Kõigi maade proletaarlased, ühinege!

So, how many of those can you identify? (or even read?)
And a bonus two:

Kaikkien maiden proletaarit, liittykää yhteen!
Барлык илләрнең пролетарийлары, берләшегез!

5) A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

I was complaining a few days ago about authors who make you work hard to read their fiction, and how I expect to be adequately rewarded. With A Clockwork Orange I do feel adequately rewarded. It’s a very short novel about the violence of youth, based a little I guess on the famous battles between mods and rockers of the 1960s. But Burgess manages to lift it into the realm of the universal by two straightforward but brilliantly executed gimmicks.

The first of these, of course, is the nadsat used by Alex and his friends. Rather than use contemporary teenage slang, Burgess invented his own. My Russian is pretty vestigial but sufficient to get through most of the book without worrying too much – in particular I think he’s managed to catch a few genuine Russian nuances and insert them subversively into English, like chelloveck, which basically means “chap”, from человек. Another good bit of wordcrafting is tolchock, which is originally толчок, the Russian noun for “shove”, but in Burgess becomes either a sustained push or a sudden blow, as when Alex and friends are disposing of a stolen car in the canal: “we got out and, the brakes off, all four tolchocked it to the edge of the filthy water that was like treacle mixed with human hole products, then one good horrorshow tolchock and in she went.” I’ve heard people in Ireland used the word “feck” as a verb with similar meaning. And horrorshow (ie хорошо) for “good” is a lovely riff on “wicked”. (There were a lot of other nice touches; I’ll just mention oddy-knocky for одинокий, “lonesome”.)

The second is his choice of classical music as Alex’s personal fixation. Actually I rather get the impression that Alex is unusual even among his peers in his preference. The two girls he lures home are much more into “pathetic pop-discs”, and he doesn’t listen to music with his friends. (No mention of going to actual live musical performances at all – though there are “worldcasts” where everyone gets to watch the same entertainment around the world, closer to Edward Bellamy than Bob Geldof I think.) However, the fact that the music Alex listens to is (mostly) already known by the general reader helps us to get through the barrier created by the language, and his description of why he likes Beethoven’s Ninth is something anyone else who likes it can relate to.

After all that, the book itself? Plot is easy to summarise: Alex is a very nasty and violent boy; he is imprisoned and subjected to mind control which removes his ability to do evil; after public protest the process is reversed; but he finds that he is growing up anyway. The use of nadsat slang actually makes the descriptions of violence in the early part of the book more bearable than it would be if graphically expressed in standard English. The violence of youth is, of course, universal. Just this morning I read this, via :

I finally realized that the giant puddles of water in the sand court were actually covered with giant sheets of ice that were starting to break up. I lifted a five foot piece of it up by one edge and said, “Wow, cool.” I continued on walking around, and when I came back by this area later, there were two ten-year-old boys looking at the same big sheet of ice and saying, “Whoa, cool! It’s a big’un!” Then they took rocks and hurled it at the big piece to break it up, and stomped on it, and other such things that boys like to do. I know it’s what I would have done if I were 25 years younger and were with a buddy.

Libertarians may jump with glee on the sinister role of the State in all this, the brutal millicents/милиции, but I think the involvement of the State is almost incidental; Burgess’ point is about redemption, and that it must come from within, cannot be imposed from outside. In the last chapter Alex realises this for himself, bumping into his old friend Pete who is now married, and reflecting that “I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, yes.” According to Blake Morrison in the introduction of my Penguin edition, the last chapter was actually deleted from the first American version of the book as the publishers felt it was too upbeat (!). Bizarre.

Anyway, a fascinating, horrible and well-constructed book.

Failed to save the day’s work in the right folder. All lost.

On my way out of a reception in Brussels last night, I bumped into one of Catherine Stihler’s people, and asked her (I thought) in jocular vein if she was planning to move back to Scotland with her boss, or stay here and find a new boss after the by-election. She looked evasive and muttered something I didn’t catch. Now I know why. Well done folks!

I didn’t see Question Time last night, but note the following reactions:

Three who think Simon Hughes won:
Nick Barlow (backing Huhne): “Simon won on points from Chris, with Ming third”
(backing Campbell): “I scored it a narrow victory for Simon Hughes, maybe 8/10 for him, 7.5 for Ming and 7 for Chris Huhne”
: “I’d say Hughes edged it overall”

Three who think Campbell did best or joint best:
Peter Black AM (backing Hughes): “Campbell and Hughes performed well. Huhne’s inexperience counted against him.”
Will Howell (backing Huhne): “Campbell and Huhne were well matched, with Hughes further behind.”
Alan Beddow (backing Huhne): thinks Campbell did best and the other two about equal

And one differently nuanced view:
: “All three LibDem leadership candidates are shite”

Looks to me like it won’t have changed anything much – maybe pulled up Simon Hughes’ first prefs a bit but not enough to save him from third place.