USA Today: At Balkans summer camp, dousing the embers of war

BRCKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Like many Americans, when the word “Balkans” comes up, my eyes glaze over as memories of the mid-’90s and Slobodan Milosevic come racing back. The word resurfaces every so often, as it did in July when Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb war criminal, was arrested. Otherwise, most Americans assume no news is good news.To understand the Balkans better, I volunteered at Firefly, a summer camp for Bosnian kids–Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims)–whose families had been war refugees. For a week, these children could forget about ethnic and religious differences and eat, swim and play together. I was told not to ask which language the campers speak, so as not to remind them of their otherness (Bosnian, Serbian and Croat are virtually identical). In a region whose very name is synonymous with ethnic chaos and religious division, the idea was to make things seem less, well, Balkanized.

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Guardian Online: Should Georgia follow Bosnia’s model?

The Bosnian city of Brcko has become an example of how a peaceful, multiethnic community can emerge from conflict

BRCKO, Bosnia — The Russian-Georgian conflict has all the familiar ingredients: ethnic cleansing, headstrong politicians, hyper-nationalist separatists. Not a few commentators likened the conflict to Bosnia circa 1991 – a powder keg just waiting to explode.

And explode it did. Yet perhaps the Balkans, too, holds the solution to bringing about peace in the Caucasus. I have spent the past few weeks working with Bosnian refugees in Brcko, a city in the north whose position along a narrow sliver of land dividing Croat and Serbian parts of Bosnia gave it strategic importance in the run-up to war. Some analysts called it “Bosnia’s Kirkuk”, not because it has oil but because of how disputed it was.

The city was flattened during the war but has since been rebuilt. Most refugees have moved back (albeit in squat quarters outside the city). And its renovated downtown now bustles with activity. Young Bosnians sip espresso, chain smoke and nibble on chevapi (mince meat) in the town’s many outdoor cafes. A glassy new mall swells with shoppers.

More importantly is the way in which Bosnians brought Brcko back from the dead. Though predominantly Serb, the city is now the only truly multiethnic place in Bosnia, an experiment that has been (mostly) successful. While local eateries are still segregated by sect, its courts, schools, and government institutions are by law intermixed between Bosniaks (Muslims), Serbs and Croats. When Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb war criminal, was nabbed earlier this summer, nobody took to the streets in protest. Unlike Belgrade, in Brcko there is no graffiti comparing pro-EU Serbian leaders to Judas.

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NYT: Once Soviet Gray, Now a Colorful Mix

NEXT STOP: KOSICE, SLOVAKIA (This article appeared in the New York Times on August 10, 2008)

KOSICE, Slovakia — DOWN a dingy alleyway lined with beer gardens and hookah bars, an Afro-jazz funk band took the small stage at the Piano Cafe, a smoke-filled lounge in the center of Kosice.

It was not exactly what a first-time visitor expected to find in a Central European town of steel factories and Soviet-era apartment blocs. But as the beat of African samba filled the cramped cafe, an arty crowd of young Slovaks in metal-rock T-shirts and bookish glasses sat in rapt attention, slow-sipping their Mojitos and ignoring the techno music downstairs.

For decades, Kosice, a city of 250,000 in eastern Slovakia, was considered an industrial backwater — if it was considered at all. (Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital, got the attention.) But in the past several years, a beautifully refurbished center has emerged from behind Kosice’s ugly veneer of gray concrete and steel, drawing artists, entrepreneurs and a growing number of tourists.

Hlavni Namesti, the city’s newly renovated Main Square, now gleams with intimate art galleries, white-tablecloth restaurants and upscale hotels equipped with wine cellars. Dormant mines and military barracks have been refashioned into studios for underground artists. And a hilltop collection of unused warehouses is being converted into a site for open-air festivals, electronica parties and laser shows.

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McCain Is Taking Foreign Policy Advice From This Guy?

Nothing pleases me more than listening to the sage wisdom of McCain’s chief ideologue and foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. If you listen to him talk enough, your head may develop sore spots from scratching. I don’t mind that he never passes up a chance to take a pot shot at Obama — that’s what campaign strategists are paid to do. What puzzles me is his long and distinguished résumé of being wrong on pretty much every major foreign policy issue of our time.

But first thing’s first: What’s up with his bizarre preoccupation with time, and the order in which Obama events occur? One imagines he is the kind of person who is puzzled that lightning precedes thunder, not the other way around.

Let me explain what I mean: Scheunemann excoriated the Democratic candidate for giving a speech about Iraq before his trip to the country, not afterward. Similarly, as he told Der Spiegel prior to Obama’s visit to Europe, Scheunemann is upset Obama “is giving his first major speech in Berlin before having met with French or British leaders. I don’t know if it is even delivered before his meeting with German leaders. Clearly he is not taking into account what they say.”

Clearly. Obama apparently is the kind of guy who tries to work the VCR before reading the manual, who refuses to ask for directions, and who forms impressions of people and places without ever stepping foot in their shoes or homes. That is basically what Scheunemann is saying.

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Guardian Online

Photoshop is killing photojournalism

Leave it to the Iranians to make waves by launching a bunch of missiles, only to flub it up by falsifying the photos of missile tests. Yet Iran’s military honchos are not the only ones guilty of using Photoshop for propagandistic purposes. The Kremlin has begun digitally removing images of dissidents from political talk shows – but sloppily leaving their feet in the footage, for some reason. Russia, of course, has a long history of altering images for nefarious reasons – Stalin used to airbrush his opponents out of photographs and insert himself next to his comrade in arms, Lenin.

If a photo is worth a thousand words, then a doctored photo is worth a million. In this age of Photoshop, nothing is sacred ground, not even reporters’ mug shots at the paper of record. Fox News allegedly altered photos of two New York Times reporters its host smeared as “attack dogs” by – yes – yellowing their teeth and moving back their hairlines. Yet this is no case of Republican camera trickery. Remember that Ann Coulter got similar treatment when her leggy body graced the cover of Time Magazine.

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WORTH Magazine

Joie de Productivity
Nicolas Sarkozy thinks his compatriots do not work hard or long enough. The hyperactive president of France also wants the French to be richer. To that end, he wants to scrap the country’s 35-hour workweek, a holdover from the socialist era, to encourage a stronger work ethic and greater productivity. The current system, he has complained, discourages work and cannot sustain France’s costly welfare outlays.

But economists point out that while shaking up France’s short workweek might boost the nation’s lagging economy, it will not necessarily spur greater productivity. That is because in terms of labor productivity, at least as measured by the International Labor Organization (ILO), France already ranks near the top. In its biannual report released last December, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development praised the French labor market, describing it as “quite strong.” Productivity is a yardstick of how efficiently a country’s laborers work and what value they add to the economy. Specifically, it is determined by the annual amount of GDP produced per working-age person, whether employed or not.

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NEW YORK Magazine

Dog Days Debate: Do recent headlines point to a high-crime summer?

Shootings in the Rockaways, shootings in Harlem—it’s like the bad old days all over again. It’s happened just as the weather warms up and after headlines this year about a shrinking NYPD. (The murder rate is up 10.4 percent over last year, and the numbers of rapes and robberies are also slightly higher, but overall violent crime is slightly down so far.) Are we headed for a long summer?

THE COMBATANTS: David Kennedy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, director of Center for Crime Prevention and Control

Randolph McLaughlin Pace University, professor of law and criminal-justice expert

Can you predict whether we’re in for a bad summer?
DK: No. “You can’t tell—nothing will tell you what is going to happen. I’d love to say this is connected to economy, or police strength, or demographics, but none of it is true. What drives this stuff is little street scripts; if you talk to guys, it will be about some very particular set of social relationships that went wrong.”
RM: Yes. “More people are being shot than previously. What happened this week in Harlem is a classic example of gun violence. Whether it’s a harbinger of gang violence or just some kids who got disrespected, the bottom line is they had access to weapons.”
Does the number of NYPD officers patrolling the streets play a role?DK: No. “It’s not a matter of how many but what they’re doing. There isn’t any nice clean relationship between NYPD numbers and levels of violence.” RM: Yes. “Because there are fewer police officers on the street, certainly the police are not targeting the guns as hard as they used to.”

Does warmer weather affect crime?
DK: No. “Public spaces are more crowded in summer, and with people bumping into each other more often, there is a general tendency to see small increases in violence. But it’s usually not dramatic. It isn’t true that an exceptionally hot summer will mean more homicide.”
RM: Yes. “Tempers get frayed when the weather is hotter. Also, people are out in the streets more, there’re more interactions and more opportunities for people to feel disrespected and frankly more targets on the street for criminals to prey on.”

Would an economic slump affect violence in the city?
DK: No. “Part of the reason is this really active street population—the high-rate offenders, your gang leaders and drug pushers—is not too tightly connected to the labor market.”
RM: Maybe. “These guys might resort to some measure to get economic recourse, but most of the crime is committed by kids or young men [not of age to enter the workforce].”

So what’s the determining factor?
DK: It’s almost random. “Twenty percent swings in violence from year to year are not unusual. This kind of violent crime is rooted in really small groups of exceptionally high-rate offenders—gangs, drug sellers—and both victims and offenders are drawn disproportionably from these street sets.”
RM: It’s all about the cops. “There is less attention by the NYPD paid to guns and gang-related violence, so we might see a slight surge.”

SEED Magazine: A Proliferation of Mistakes? Experts begin to rethink US efforts to keep nukes in friendly hands.

The image of the idle Russian scientist, desperate for cash and teeming with nuclear know-how, has haunted American foreign policymakers since the fall of the Soviet Union. Seeking to keep idle hands from the devil’s work, in 1994 the US Department of Energy began bankrolling dozens of scientific institutes throughout the former Soviet Union. A crisis was apparently averted, and the seemingly successful programs have continued through today. But a January 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that two of the Russian institutes receiving US funds had shipped nuclear equipment to a reactor in Iran. The revelation that a nonproliferation program may in fact have abetted nuclear proliferation prompted calls on Capitol Hill to pull the plug.

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The Politics of Counting the Dead after Disasters

(FROM HUFFPOST 5/12/08)
The casualty counts from the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar are staggering. What’s interesting, however, is that whenever a natural disaster strikes, the number of casualties first reported is always deceptively low but creeps upward as more information is made available. Interestingly, the opposite tends to be the case after a man-made disaster (i.e. a terrorist attack or nuclear meltdown) occurs. Recall the reports of tens of thousands dead on 9/11.

So what explains this discrepancy?

After any tragedy, of course, there is a fog that makes it difficult for survivors to ascertain facts. When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, the original casualty count was the haphazard guesswork of eye-witnesses and aid groups on the scene, and thus much lower than the final tally. Also, governments struck by natural calamities, especially those in the developing world, are often too inefficient or negligent to tally reliable data and must rely on the numbers provided by disaster-relief organizations. Plus, natural disasters span a wider breadth, where it takes longer to fully realize the scope of the damage, whereas terrorist attacks occur in small crowded areas, which accentuates the hysteria, making people think the tragedy is greater than perhaps it really is.

But the real reason may owe itself more to politics. When natural disasters strike, there is an incentive for governments to downplay the disaster to avoid outside opprobrium. This occurred in Turkey after the 1999 earthquake, in Iran following its 2003 quake, and in Pakistan after its 2005 quake in Kashmir. High casualties are a tell-tale sign of shoddy construction and poor preparedness — there’s a reason why earthquakes in Japan usually result in casualty stats in the hundreds, not the thousands.

On the flipside, with man-made disasters, when some loony is at fault and not the government, there’s an incentive for states to hype the casualty count. Why? For a number of reasons: maybe to warrant either a) retaliation against the perpetrator, b) sympathy from the outside world, c) money from the outside world, d) money from insurance claims, or d) to rally the troops (see option a).

After the 2003 Madrid bombings, reports surfaced that more than 200 died (the number was eventually lowered to 191). After the Chernobyl meltdown, it was predicted that thousands would perish from radiation poisoning, yet according to a 2005 IAEA report, fewer than 50 people actually died from the accident. That is not to downplay the significance of these acts (or to equate the two, given that the former was deliberate and latter was a result of gross negligence and incompetence), only to point out a behavioral tick in how we respond to natural versus man-made calamities.

Are we forever bound to overplay acts of man and underplay acts of God?

Getting Into Iraqi Kurdistan

Getting into Iraqi Kurdistan by car can be a dicey trick. After a six-hour bumpy bus ride from Diyarbakir, the capital of what some Kurds hope to be their eventual homeland in Turkey, I exit the vehicle in some border town that feels like Tijuana but worse. Kids storm the bus after everyone exits, combing the seats for loose change or scraps of food. I am accosted by taxi drivers. To drive me to Iraq, it will cost me $100, I’m told. I explain I don’t have that kind of money. No problem, they say, and escort me to the town ATM. Here I am, taking out cash, while a litter of taxi drivers huddle around me in excitement, waiting to see who would be selected. Picture that Verizon commercial, with all the people just standing behind that annoying dude with the glasses. That was me.

I finally settle into a cab, but not before the drivers play keep-away with my passport (for police records, I’m told). After a short drive we reach a line of lorries backed up for miles. It’s pitch black and cold outside. We wait for a few minutes until another passenger car finally arrives. The car pulls over and words of Kurdish are exchanged. I’m told to get into this new car. OK, I think. That sounds good. I get into the backseat and the car speeds off down the wrong way on the highway, bypassing the line of trucks.

We get to the customs window. At this point, it’s a big deal my driver is chauffeuring into Iraq an American with a) no purpose for being there, and b) no contacts or lodging options. Things along the border have been tense since a Kurdish separatist group, the PKK, holed up in the nearby mountains began kidnapping and killing Turkish soldiers across the border. The official eyes me suspiciously. The other passenger in the car—an older Kurd who I found out through his limited Russian, is a chauffer from Mardin—keeps telling me “problem,” then makes the international sign with his fingers for money. Translation: Please bribe this official so we can all get on our way. That’s how things work around here, kiddo. I smile at him politely and correct him, “No problem.”

We finally make it past the first checkpoint, only to find out that the next guard is out to dinner. Back in an hour. So a bunch of us cluster around the car, smoking cigarettes. My driver is a dead ringer for Sean Penn, which makes him sort of scary but also weird. When he smiles, it seems strained. We wait and wait as the conversation turns into one of long awkward pauses. The guy who speaks Russian and I go inside the lobby and share some tea. I ask if there is beer and he flashes me an angry stare. “No beer in Kurdistan,” he scolds me. Only chai, or tea. So we drink and talk about what’s better, Ankara or Istanbul? Turns out Ankara is better, he informs me—they treat their Kurds better.

We head back out and finally are waved through to the next checkpoint. I am motioned into an office by a burly border guard clutching a Kalashnikov. I sit down and explain my business. I’m a journalist. Turks are suspicious of Western journalists interviewing Kurdish rebels. He nods but seems unconvinced, as I have no press credentials or proof of lodging, just the name of some joint across the border. Then the guard pulls out of his cabinet a familiar picture of a mustachioed man wearing what looks like a fez. “Who’s this?” he asks. “That’s Attaturk,” I respond. “Yes, Attaturk is number one,” he beams. With that he escorts me out into the cold.

The next checkpoint is manned by Iraqi Kurds. I’m shown into an office and offered tea. The guard likes America but is not buying my story. To pass the time, we drink tea. He finally acquiesces and signs a flurry of paperwork, before asking: “Who are the best—the Turks, Arabs, or Kurds?” Hmm, I think, as I stare at the Kurdish tricolor flag and Che-like visage of the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani adorning the walls. “Kurds,” I stammer. “Kurds are the best.” He smiles and stamps my passport. “Yes. Welcome to Kurdistan.” With that I am whisked back into the car.

By now, it’s very late. We drive through a few more checkpoints before Sean Penn hands me off to another driver. I tell him the name of my hotel. “OK, no problem.” Every request in Kurdistan is met with either a “no problem” or “problem.” You don’t want the latter. We drive along an eerily empty highway with no light. My driver has a cold. We finally arrive at my hotel, and I am greeted by a bevy of Kurdish journalists, sipping chai in the lobby. It’s a happy place and I am relieved.

We stroll around the empty town. “See those lights up there in the mountains?” one of them asks. I nod. “That’s the Turkish army.” I gulp. Not exactly what I wanted to hear. The Turks have threatened to invade Iraq and this town is the first thing in their way. To put my mind at ease, we grab some beers, but they are forbidden in the hotel. No matter, we smuggle them in anyway and drink speakeasy-style in the hotel room. The power then goes out, as is commonplace in Iraq, and the room goes black. Had management caught us? “No problem,” they say in unison. It was common for the power to be cut off. The journalists whip out their cigarette lighters that double as flashlights and beam the Kurdish flag on the walls. I sip my beer and smile: “Welcome to Kurdistan.”