Notes on wristslapping

East Ethnia's friend from Yakima notes in the comments to an earlier post that the sentence given to the people who were convicted of setting fire to the mosque in Niš was a "slap on the wrist." Thanks to AR, let's have a look at what their wrists got three months for.

1. Niš, March 2004.

2. The mosque after the attack.

3. Support for the arsonists from the Hair Club for Men.

Disappointed with the real world?

Try 20 things that only happen in movies. Observant people will notice that in fact, there are 40.

Tough on crime

So the young men who were convicted of setting fire to the mosque in Niš have been sentenced. Five months for one of them, three months for seven of them. Just to show how impressed he was at the severity of the sentence, one of the convicted arsonists, Dušan Mančić, responded by declaring, "Death to Muslims." Majesty of the law, nego šta.

Dark, but neither spontaneous nor vulgar. Like a truffle.

That is the sort of humor that science predicts you will find on this blog. People who prefer prankster-type humor will have to try another blog.

the Wit

(56% dark, 34% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)
your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK


You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.

I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.


Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.


PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais





My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 81% on dark
	You scored higher than 2% on spontaneous
	You scored higher than 34% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Since you didn't ask about Harry Potter

But yes, Azra read the new book and so did I. It may be a sign of the diminishing isolation of the Balkans that the first copies were available in Belgrade (at the Akademac bookstore) at midnight on the same day they were available everywhere else, apparently for the first time. In any case, it is a bit of a poor benefit, as the books are expensive and a translation is not promised until September.

Some of the local commentary on the book had to do with the approach to identity in the fictional wizards' world -- national-chauvinist insistence on "purity of blood" is definitely looked down upon, and the view of multicultural pleasure as drawn by the amused fascination with non-wizard conveniences seems a little bit trivial and market-based (however, the slinky French stereotype that is set up at the beginning of the story is demolished at the end -- something there about emotion?). The approach to authority in the stories remains conditional: teachers and ministers are to be respected if their motivations are in order. The American and European commentators who see the books as a "liberal" story may be right on that point, and the image of a harried but professional officialdom struck a nice contrast for some Balkan commentators. The only figures in the book interested in power for profit or its own sake do get interests on their side, but are thwarted (in one passage, Dumbledore says, by "love," but that may be beside the point).

There is an interesting reflection by Mika LaVaque-Manty over at Left2Right looking at the Harry Potter universe as one of disenchanted modernity, with all the obligatory references to Weber and Kant. It is followed by an equally interesting discussion at their comments site. Most of it turns on the interpretations of morality in the books and whether the stories can be taken as any kind of serious moralno štivo.

For me, I've discussed it a bit with my daughter. We have both read the whole thing but not yet made it through the joint reading aloud. I appreciate that the morality business is not too heavyhanded (check Oscar Wilde's heavily laden childrens' stories for a comparison). On the other hand, our discussion of the whole "love" business has been limited to a categorisation of the varieties in the book of what is described in Ms Rowling's fine British parlance as "snogging."

Your virtual prosecutor

Serbia's special prosecutor for war crimes now has a web page presenting their work. For now it has some basic legal documents, the indictments they have issued (in relation to the Ovčara case), contact information and some news. Under "predmeti" it looks like it will be possible to follow the progress of cases. The "stručni radovi" section has legal interpretations by the prosecutorial staff on a variety of topics (in HTML, and also downloadable as PDF). Currently the site is only in Cyrillic, but they promise an English version and a Roman script version by September.

Back in Boston

Just arrived in steamy Boston. I'll try to put something up on what I learned in the course of my travels as soon as I figure out what that was. In any case, posting will be uneven from me until mid-August or so, as we are off on a long automotive journey across the mysterious space that knowledgeable people assure me exists between the American coasts.

Love is more than Octavia and Felicia can tell

Whoever says crime doesn't pay needs to review the stats. A pompezni sendoff and a shiny new Czech automobile wasn't enough to smooth the path of Vladimir Lazarević to his retirement home on the North Sea. He also got a budget outlay of around a half million Euros. The government is now defending itself by saying it hasn't actually cut the check. A peek at the readers' comments section of the B92 site gives a variety of reactions, among them the delightfully phonetic "Čizs krajst."

Update: Finance minister Mladjan Dinkić is claiming that a clerical error is in question, and that the appropriation was meant to be not just for Mr Lazarević but for all of the ICTY detainees the government is paying off. Even if his claim is true, the thesis stands.

Corporate identity

Eleven British soldiers have been charged under the statute (whatever that means) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) with war crimes in Iraq and are to stand trial in Britain. Sky News, which I've started watching during the London bombing inquiry because they reported rumors and speculations much more quickly than the BBC, which still often behaves as the moutpiece of Her Majesty's Government, carried the news this morning accompanied by pictures of, you guessed it, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, also in The Hague. To complete the confusion, The Hague is also host to the International Court of Justice, or ICJ; if I remember correctly, Boris Tadić referred to the ICJ when he should have mentioned the ICTY in remarks to the press he made last week.

If the president of a country that has a lot of business with the ICTY and the ICJ can't keep them apart, what are we mere mortals to do? The least they could do is, as a matter of urgency, to move two of the three to, say, Cork and Riga, if it has to be in Europe at all. Any other suggestions?

Super special guest post! Maniac Shop on the Exit festival! Nowhere but East Ethnia!

Note: Thanks to Maniac Shop for the update. If anyone wants an English translation, look at the comments.

MANIAC SHOP for EAST ETHNIA

EXIT 05



Ovogodisnji EXIT je, kao uoastalom i svi prethodni, bio po svemu NAJ. Najveci broj izvodjaca, navjise bina, najvise posetilaca, najludji provod. Od 7. do 10. jula masa muzicara uveseljavala je masu ljudi koja je, usput, popila i masu piva. Sve u svemu bilo je odlicno. Niceg nije nedostajalo, pa ni kise. Bili su tu i BBC Radio 1 koji je prenosio koncerte, i MTV-ovci koji su nastavili sa snimanjem filma o festivalu. Sto ova multikulturalna humanitarna manifestacija svakako zasluzuje, buduci da vec neko vreme vazi za jedan od 4 najvaznija muzicka festivala u Evropi, barem po izjavama ovih iz BBC-a (a sta oni pa znaju). Na sajtu festivala www.exitfest.org se nalaze spiskovi svih grupa i pojedinaca koji su nastupali, a od zvucnijih imena treba pomenuti Ian Brown, Garbage, Underworld, Carl Cox, Fatboy Slim, White Stripes.



Humanitarna (ili humanisticka) crta cele stvari je ove godine trebala da bude ostvarena gestom odavanja pocasti zrtvama genocida u Srebrenici, prekidom programa na par minuta, u ponoc, 10. jula. Barem je tako bilo najavljeno od strane organizatora festivala. Ubrzo je usledila reakcija (a koga drugog) radikala, trenutno na vlasti u Novom Sadu, gradu koji omogućuje postojanje EXIT-a, uz izjavu njihovog zamenika prvog coveka Tome Nikolica da, kao, ako se to desi, sledeceg EXIT-a nece biti. Kao, nije u redu jednu takvu manifestaciju, gde se mladi druze, zabavljaju i igraju, tako bezocno zloupotrebljavati i odavanjem poste zrtvama Srebrenice ispolitizovati celu stvar!? Yea, right...davanje pomena pobijenima u ratu je politizacija. Nije pomoglo ni to sto se odustalo od prvobitne namere da se pomenu SVA stratista, na svim stranama, i izjava zamenila pesmom koju bi otpevala Eni Lenox, organizatori su ustuknuli i i stvar je propala. Radikali bi se mogli naci i sledece godine na vlasti, i tako...



Ali ako ostavimo po strani izopacene radikalske umove, ostaje porazavajuca cinjenica, koja se lako moze utvrditi posmatranjem javnog mnjenja u Srbiji, i kojom su se, verujem, vodili i organizatori festivala kada su se povukli iz konfrontacije sa pretnjama, da svest u vecine Srba nije spremna na katarzu.
Ko zna, mozda na EXIT 10 cujemo pesmu Lenoxove ili neku ljudsku rec. Ako ga bude bilo.

Written by http://maniac.blog.hr

Sentences for political murders

After a sentencing earlier this month for another another attempted murder of Vuk Drašković, today several members of the so-called «Unit for Special Operations» (JSO), together with former State Security chief Radomir Marković, were sentenced for another attempted murder of Drašković and the kidnapping and murder of Ivan Stambolić. Four members of JSO (including Milorad Ulemek) got maximum sentences of 40 years, while Radomir Marković got just 15. The JSO members were also required to return (to whom?) the money they were paid for their participation.

Slobodan Milošević and Nebojša Pavković were also named in the indictment, but spared trial because they were occupied elsewhere. This may be a logical move or may be, together with Marković's comparatively light sentence, taken as a sign that it still pays better to be a ranking member of a conspiracy than one of its employees.

Thanks to AR for the photos:


Milorad Ulemek takes a moment to wonder about the optometric services available in prison


Slobodan Milošević and Ivan Stambolić, in the days before Milošević had the power to order murders

Tracing the new quasilegal rhetoric

If it is true that the discussion in Serbia about Srebrenica—marginal and wholly instrumental participants left aside—has moved from dispute over the facts to dispute over whether the facts can be characterised as «genocide» or not, this needs to be explained. Some possible hypotheses:

1) The criminals know that they are losing both the legal and political terrain on which they have been claiming their heroism and innocence. So now they are using distance and surrogates to try to bargain over the verdict in advance.

2) In the preparation to make a public recognition of genocide as well, the familiar old faces are being trotted out for a last round of denial before their well-earned return to obscurity.

3) The issue is not about events but responsibility, namely the effort of the members of the criminal conspiracy to present their own responsibility as somebody else's, reducing the question of recognition to one of fear of consequences (On this point see the quasilegal reflections of the by no means uninterested party Ratko Marković on whether the criminal conspiracy in which he participated was a «regime» or a «state» in today's Večernje novosti.)

What makes the third possibility seem more likely is that it can be fully explained by events that are already known, and it does not require making predictions about events in the future.

The beauty of blogging

The beauty of blogging is that it allows you to rant on without necessarily advancing our knowledge. Debating Holocaust deniers, for example, is such an exercise in futility since nobody serious can disagree about the key facts. That doesn't keep fools like Major General (ret.) Lewis MacKenzie -- who was nowhere near Bosnia in the summer of 1995 -- to declare that the massacre in the UN safe haven "was not a black and white event in which the Serbs were solely to blame." (He's right on that one -- I'd also blame the Dutch.) He doubts that more than a few thousand were murdered (which presumably would make it somehowe okay). He blames the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica for provoking the attack. He claims Naser Oric (whose name he misspells twice) was responsible for as many killed Serbs outside Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serbs were for killed Muslims inside the town. And he concludes, with admirable intellectual coherence, that the massacres couldn't possibly have been genocide because the Serbs let the kids and the women get away.

MacKenzie, of course, is a notorious revisionist who has been paid by Serb lobby groups for his fine work promoting their viewpoint. But I'm afraid that his views carry a certain weight with people on the far left who'd rather sacrifice a few thousand Muslims than allow any course of action that might result in an increase in U.S. power, or who compulsively dispute everything that is "fed" us by the "corporate" or "mainstream" media.

What I don't understand is how a fine paper like the Globe and Mail can give space to such lunatics. (By the way, it seems like you need a subscription to access the MacKenzie op-ed, but in a service to mankind another balanced news source has reproduced the piece on their website.)

Lesson 1 in autoamnesty

Having resigned his ministry in disgrace, Andrija Hebrang is turning to the former sociologist turned horsie spokesmodel Slaven Letica to score a few points with his country's far right. The two want to propose a declaration to be passed by the Croatian Sabor for the tenth anniversary of "operation Storm" declaring in retrospect it and everything that happened in it to have been legal. The reasoning is that the action was an "allied defense against terrorism."

Lesson 1 in autoamnesty: the amnesty should apply to charges. Hebrang and Letica are clearly influenced by their colleague Bozidar Delic, who told Hague prosecutors today that whatever he had done must have been legal because "we had the right to self defense." These kinds of statements work nicely for public opinion where the perception that ICTY defendants are being tried for having participated in war at all is popular. What was illegal in 1995 and 1999 and remains illegal now is the expulsion of civilian population: not the military action itself but its conduct.

Never again?

For those of you in Europe, be sure to check out Srebrenica: Never Again? by Leslie Woodhead, on tonight (12/7) at 10pm on BBC 4 and at 10:15 on Arte. For a brief blurb, check here.

A word about genocide

Let's avoid falling into caricature. My little idyll with the fascists was unique. These are people who deprived of the extreme positions they take would have little else to keep them occupied. In any case, as their chants suggest, they do not exactly shy away from taking a few swigs of collective guilt (responsibility being a bit beside the point).

Their moderate wing is represented by the media that have never got out of the habit of safely endorsing them from afar. A case in point would be the tabloid most loyal to the old regime, Večernje novosti. Their approach in the past couple of weeks has been, to borrow the categories first articulated by Vojin Dimitrijević, to move from «denial of the fact» to «denial of the law.» However much they relativise (this was the paper that published the list of Serb victims last week), they are no longer openly contesting the version of events in Srebrenica which has been established by research and in open court.

Their approach now is to contest the qualification of the events as genocide. This ranges from citing politicians warning against the chimera that Serbs may be labelled as «a genocidal nation» — but enough of that, it is a category which, if it exists anywhere, does not exist in law: strictly for popular consumption. But twice in the last week they have run long interviews (both times on the top tabloid page 2) offering technical denials of genocide. First Smilja Avramov was quoted as accepting the facts but denying that it was genocide because «there was no intent.» Then today a young law professor, one Škulić, came foward with an argument that there was no genocide because only men over a certain age were murdered.

Take or leave the arguments: to my mind, they have a sophistic quality and while they might get by in a seminar room, the existing record of jurisprudence makes them untenable in a courtroom. But step back a bit, too — the strategy amounts to denying genocide by recognising crimes against humanity (of course it is not identified this way in Novosti). If all that is left is to test different legal theories against the facts, let the trials begin.

My fascist weekend

So you don't think the slow pace of posting has been an indication of inactivity. On Saturday I spent the afternoon with the Serbian Radical Party. They had a new film to present, called «Istina» («Truth»), meant to be their response to the onslaught of new information about crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Bosnia. The event was held in the large cinema at Sava Centar, heavily advertised and an overflow crowd was assured by the lot full of buses from various provincial places bringing SRS supporters from places where their party is the only one with a local organisation to the city.

The ceremony began with speeches from the SRS leadership—a greeting sent by Vojislav Šešelj from the Hague, dramatically read by Aleksandar Vučić, the presentation of the usual scenographic bit players at right-wing events (the frail Patriarh Pavle, the diabolical Smilja Avramov, the former poets whose names nobody remembers). Then acting Radical-in-chief Tomislav Nikolić gave an outwardly conciliatory address recognising crimes and the need to punish them, but denying any uniqueness for the Serbian side. I thought that this was an interesting step forward for SRS, staking out a new position between denial and recognition which would place them in the spineless center of Serbian politics, but my friends persuaded me that this is the public face which SRS trots out every six months or so to hide the private face. Perhaps so, as they have put a good deal of effort into developing an outward surface which might resemble that of a legitimate political party.

The film itself offers little of interest. For the most part it is a new montage of propaganda clips that anybody who watched Serbian state television during the time when SRS and their allies controlled it already saw repeatedly between 1991 and 1995, and again for a period between 1998 and 2000. What new material there is has no source attribution. The film itself is not signed by an author. My own feeling was that the handpicked SRS audience was not particularly impressed either, as there was a lot of sidetalk, milling about, and complaint about the quality of production. If this is the right wing reply to the existing evidence, it may be an admission that they do not have replies.

On Sunday evening we went to the commemoration of Srebrenica victims which was organised in Belgrade by the feminist human rights group Žene u crnom, on the city's principal square. A circle of activists and supporters, mostly dressed in black, held white roses in a circle around a makeshift memorial of votive candles. Some held banners declaring «never again» in different languages, some held banners identifying them as visiting activists from other countries. There was a large and mostly disengaged police presence, in partial riot gear and doing nothing.

Around the perimeter milled a small group of spectators and a smaller group of local fascists. There were not many fascists, perhaps twenty or thirty, and several of them were faces that I recognised as regular provocateurs from previous public events. Most of them hung back away from the perimeter of the group while a few of them circulated around the perimeter shouting insults. At one point a group of them moved into the center of the circle, but were escorted out by a single police officer. At another point a group of them launched into some football-fan style chants—one of them threatening violence against human rights activist Nataša Kandić (who was there, of course), and another the increasingly familiar ominous rhyme «Nož, žica, Srebrenica» (literally it is not much—«knife, wire, Srebrenica»—but its intent is to threaten a reprise).

Then some of the fascists tossed a tear gas grenade into the center of the circle. The participants in the commemoration dispersed, the semisentient police did nothing that anybody could observe, and there was a brief moment of disruption. My wife and I ducked into the restroom of a coffee shop to wash our hands and rinse our eyes, and then everyone returned to their positions, the participants to the circle, the fascists to shout and toss things from the wings, and the police to discreetly and inactively stand at a few points between the two groups. The ceremony continued in deliberate silence, with some people coming to the center of the circle to light candles, then the participants to place their roses at the makeshift memorial (a paper sign at the top of the steps below the equestrian statue at the square). The police escorted the core activists and international visitors away, we hung back to chat with friends, and a friend bet that the memorial would remain in place five minutes. She was off by four and a half, a group of five young fascists immediately ran up the steps, ripped the memorial sign, and ran away.

My fascist weekend was less tragic than sad, a recurring meeting of incomprehension, incapacity and powerlessness. My wife and I went off to have drinks with our friends, raise a toast to our first (really!) taste of tear gas, and share our wonder. The old guard is finally in retreat, five years after kobajagi losing power. But there is no new guard, and if there were it would have a hard time finding anything to say, and if it had anything to say not many people would be willing to listen.

"Well, nothing. They listen to music."

A dear friend whose father was an intelligence officer told me about the day in the early 1980s when he decided to cut his hair short and get an earring. His father asked about among the intelligence folk, and determined that he "was either an anarchist or a punker." About anarchists everything is more or less known, yes, but what was up with this new category of "punker"? The answer among the intelligence officers was "well, nothing. They listen to music."

These days the fifth annual Exit festival in Novi Sad is under way. It is the biggest cultural event in the city and the only festival in Serbia that consistently attracts a large crowd of visitors from around the world. The concert lineup gets better every year, and the creativity of the organisers is more than obvious. The festival originated as a way of showing a different face of Serbia in the waning agonies of the Milosevic period, and continues to mean something now that the neofascist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) has taken power in the city government of Novi Sad.

Which is where the difficulty comes up. This year the festival coincides with the anniversary of the massacre of the civilian population of Srebrenica. The organisers thought to recognise this with a minute of silence at the performance. The SRS responded by asking whether the organisers thought they might like to have another festival next year, or not. Now the minute of silence for the victims is degenerating into a flowery gesture for peace in the world.

So is it really "well, nothing. They listen to music"? Or is the SRS so persuasive that the youth follow their command? Or is it that if you scratch a young progressive, you find a Radical underneath?

Srebrenica and all that

If it weren't sad it'd be funny.

On 10th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre, UN recommits to rehabilitation

I'm sure the headline writer at the UN news service missed the bitter irony contained in this news dispatch -- the UN, under whose protection the 8,000 men and boys killed by Serb troops were, "recommitting" to the rehabilitation of the town, which is managed by a largely dysfunctional and corrupt bureaucracy. (I have no proof to back this accusation up, but I suspect we might see some solid evidence published soon.) Well, it wouldn't be the only irony surrounding next week's anniversary. How about this?

"Ten years after those tragic events, they continue to haunt us and serve as a reminder that such atrocities must be met with all necessary means and that there must be the political will to carry the policy through," said Mr. Tharoor [Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications].

You mean, like we're doing in Darfur?

Musical news puzzling, sad and great

As people try to figure out whether the continued popularity of Bijelo Dugme means anything or not and the entire world mourns the passing of the great Luther Vandross, may I just note that Stevie Wonder has set to rest any doubts that he is still fantastic with his engrossing, amusing, inspiring and just darn good new single (with Prince and En Vogue), «So what the fuss.» Listen to it, and see that the fuss is about something.