Over at Teekay’s

Eon, Germany’s biggest importer of natural gas, is pursuing its first gas supply contract with Iran in an effort to reduce its dependence on Russia.

Source: Financial Times, 7 March 2007.

As if proof were needed that “Europe” looks a bit different seen from London, the Economist has this priceless quote in a recent article about alternative dispute resolution:

As well as in Europe, [the CEDR] is training mediators in countries such as Nigeria, Finland and China…

After Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the international High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, spent the first year of his tenure “determining reality” (his words), he now seems to have found a new outlet for his energy: following up critical coverage of his performance with opinion pieces in the same paper. The latest example were two articles in the German daily Die Welt, the first of which reported critics calling him “an embarrassment” while the second summarized the latest Bosnia report by the International Crisis Group.

Schwarz-Schilling’s reaction to entirely justified criticism? A riveting op-ed in Die Welt under the headline, “Time for Ownership.”

The piece, though, makes one, and precisely one, important point: ownership and intervention should not be seen as exclusive approaches to crisis states but each should be deployed in due time. It’s curious to hear someone talk about timing who took a whole year figuring out what almost everyone else had been saying all along, but the point is valid nonetheless. Maybe we should now move on to more important matters in the Balkans, after Schwarz-Schilling has made the OHR an irretrievable irrelevance?

The Office of the High Representative has reportedly been as unhappy with the press coverage it receives as the rest of the world (minus Russia, Serbia, and the Republic of Srpska) has been with the performance of the current High Representative, Christian Schwarz-Schilling. Rumor has it that OHR staff members spend their working hours, financed by the taxpayer, looking into options for legal action against critics. If they didn’t like what’s been written so far, how will they react to what I declare to be the headline of the week?

Bosnia unites to condemn its dozy chief overseer
By Christian Jennings in Sarajevo
The Scotsman, 16 February 2007

Read the rest (for subscribers only) here

The Guardian reports on Schwarz-Schilling’s resignation with the tact one would expect from the British press, under a headline screaming, “German Bosnia chief ‘fired’ after just a year.” Unfortunately, while concentrating on the tone, the reporter also got a whole bunch of facts wrong.

The sense of destabilising crisis gathering over former Yugoslavia intensified last night when the German official in charge of running Bosnia abruptly announced he was resigning less than a year after he succeeded Paddy Ashdown in the post.

Schwarz-Schilling did not announce his “resignation,” which wasn’t a resignation, “last night” but in the middle of the afternoon. He’s not resigning; he’s completing his current term in office, which since last June has been known to last through June this year. And he’s not “resigning less than a year” after succeeding Ashdown — he will have been in office one and a half years by the time he leaves.

Serbia is not “in disarray” after “an inconclusive election;” the democratic block won roughly two thirds of the vote. “Nationalist extremists” have not “emerged as the strongest party” there: the SRS more or less stayed where it had been before, despite the fact that the pressure to deliver war-crimes indictees and yield up Kosovo provided them with some beautiful opportunities for propaganda. (For an excellent analysis of the vote, head over to openDemocracy.)

The whole Guardian story runs to around 270 words. It takes some skill to pack so many inaccuracies into such a small space.

Christian Schwarz-Schilling’s one-year tenure as High Representative in Bosnia has been undistinguished, to put it mildly. However, if you want to blame him, think again: after all, he has done more or less what the international community wanted him to do — prepare the OHR for its phase-out. Now, as I’m reporting on East Ethnia, the OHR’s oversight body seems to have realized its mistake and may be about to phase out the High Rep rather than his office.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time suggests that memories are elusive: they come back not when we invoke them but when they are triggered by some apparently random element with which we come in contact — a particular food, say, or an uneven cobblestone that makes us stumble in the courtyard.

Of course, now that we’ve read Proust we’re on the constant lookout for such random elements.

I always thought when taking up the pipe that the smell of the tobacco would trigger memories of my dad, who smoked the pipe when I was a small boy. (He gave it up in the mid-1970s, I think.) When it didn’t, I assumed it had to do with the fact that I was the smoker, and that tobacco perhaps smelled differently for the person who smokes it.

The real explanation, of course, is infinitely more trivial: when two of the kids with whom I play quiz night at the local Irish pub took our their pipes for a (amateurish) smoke, I realized that they were smoking cheap, flavored baccy while I prefer the non-flavored varieties.

It smelled exactly like my dad’s.

This is where Mrs and Mr Teekay spent the days after Christmas — at their friend Filippo’s house in Dongio, Valle di Blenio, in the Italian part of Switzerland.

According to the Federal Office for Meteorology, 2006 was the fifth-warmest year in Switzerland since systematic measurements started in 1864.

The other record years were 1994, 2003, 2002, and 2000.

I just can’t get excited about something that takes place every year, so I spent a lovely evening with Mrs. Teekay at home preparing some nice food, watching Hal Hartley’s terrific Amateur, and trying to ignore the bloody firecrackers people here seem so fond of. Here’s what’s happened in 2007 so far:

• Number of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq reaches 3,000;
• Slovenia enters the Euro zone as the first post-Communist country;
• Bulgaria and Romania now have an official permit to look down on their neighbors in former Yugoslavia: they are now members of the EU, far ahead of Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia, and even Croatia.

…James A. Baker III. turned from a hard-nosed realist into a cuddly liberal (“you just need to talk to these folks and they’ll play by the rules”);

…yet another 24-hour news channel went on air, its performance proving yet again that there’s barely enough news to fill maybe four hours of TV every day;

…two of my power bricks went belly-up; the second was a replacement for the first one (they’re a neat hundred bucks here in Europe) and worked for about three days before going out in a puff;

…I moved from a hosted Wordpress system to my own domain name. (More about this is a separate post.)

According to a piece in Monday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, the English-language service of Al Jazeera aims “to offer a counterweight to the worldview of the Anglo-Saxon programs.” Whatever this may mean, they seem to be succeeding. I turned on twice last Thursday (or was it Friday?), the first time to find Riz Khan interviewing Harold Pinter at great length about what a great place the Middle East was before the Yankees screwed it all up a few years ago, and the second time to find two guys described as “bloggers from mediachannel.org” talking about how censorship in the U.S. makes it impossible for anyone interested in world affairs to gain an accurate picture. One of the guys actually compared President Bush to Joseph Stalin. The video you’ll find at the top of their website, by the way, is a commercial (presumably a freebie?) for Al Jazeera that includes the memorable slogan, “watch out CNN, watch out Fox News, watch out BBC, watch out world — because this week, Al Jazeera International is going live on television and in English.” (The dude is identified as “Danny Schecter” in the video caption and as “Danny Schechter” just opposite the page. Either way, no idea who he is.)

I have a feeling I might pass this one up for the time being.

Last night on BBC World, a reporter said that some people considered the new UN Secretary General to be “colorless.”

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

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

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

Read the whole thing here.

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

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

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

Read the whole thing here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a report by the Czech news agency CTK:

Czech premier hopes to find common language with Slovak premier

Try English?

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

Stone-throwing Swiss celebrate bicentenary of cultural festival

Source: International Herald Tribune, 9/3

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

Following our own success, Cyprus offers to solve Lebanese crisis

Source: Cyprus Mail

Okay, the hed was tongue in cheek, but the offer is for real, apparently.

From today’s Observer:

Somalia inches towards war

It’s just two bloody hot, I’m racing to finish up my book on “ethnic cleansing,” and I have a whole bunch of other things to take care of. I did manage to write a quick update on the worrying situation in Bosnia over on East Ethnia, however.

(Warning: unwarranted generalizations ahead)

Went to a lecture by John Searle tonight. The guy’s amazing: he’s ancient but more agile than half of the folks in the room. (Not difficult since they were mostly Germans.) He spoke for an entire hour without notes, walking around all the time with one of those little mikes pinned to his chest. He talked a lot about his Bernese Sennenhund named Gilbert. (Previous dogs were named Frege, Russell, and Ludwig, in that order.) Gilbert is a likeable fellar but dumb as a tree trunk — a real beast with no language. He (Searle) kept 900 Germans on the edge of their seats. How come half of the room was sound asleep after twenty minutes last time I heard Habermas? Anyway, it made me want to go back to an American graduate school. I know it’s delusional and don’t worry, won’t happen, but I sure feel like it. This guy could even drag me back into a philosophy seminar.