Naivities and failing empires

While making a raspberry tartellette, I was listening to an interesting but slightly enervating discussion on the public Swedish radio about private security firms. The most (in)famous such firm is the American Academi , formerly known as Blackwater and known for doing dirty work for the Americans in Iraq. But there are several other firms, also Swedish.

To sum up what was said in the discussion: such firms do work that the state has not resources to do, e.g. protect NGO's, which is a good thing, but they do wage violence in the name of the state beyond any political control and compete with the national armies for competent staff, which is bad. All of this is something that is almost never discussed in public.

What struck me most about the discussion was the lack of any historical perspective, and the naivety about our democracy.

First history. Are these firms a neo-liberal phenomenon, typical for our time? Not so much. Outsourcing violence has been, and is being done done before  in many different contexts. Who is doing the massacres in Syria? Not the Syrian army but the Shabiha militia. Shabiha is a pretty new name - a few years ago it was the Janjaweed militia that were talked about. Almost 150 years ago, when the Ottoman empire was unraveling, the Bashi-bazouk were famous for brutality against Christians on the Balkans, notably the Batak massacre in Bulgaria.

The Wikipedia article on Bashi-bazouk notes that "Although Turkish armies always contained bashi-bazouk adventurers as well as regular soldiers, the strain on the Ottoman feudal system caused mainly by the Empire's wide expanse required heavier reliance on irregular soldiers".

I believe this is the key insight - when states and empires crumble, as the US and Syria are today, they are forced to rely more heavily on irregular forces. When the Ottomans conquered the Balkans they did it with a very loyal force of Jannisaries, controlled directly by the Sultan. When they lost it they did it with self-sufficient Bashi-bazouks. Which of course undermines the very essence of the state - its monopoly on violence.

Thus, the rise of private security firms, is a strong indicator of an empire in decline. And these days anyone can see that the West's grip on the world is weakening.

So much about history. Then there was the naivety. It is true that the outsourcing of violence is a democratic problem. But it is not strange that it is not discussed. Since when do we discuss fundamental issues? When did you last see a government official including climate change and peak oil in economic forecasts? Still the same politicians will acknowledge these problems when discussing environmental policies. We live in a state of official denial about the future of civilisation, so why on earth would we discuss this matter?

The eternal crisis

Humanity has become its own greatest enemy. We have made progress, and improved the lives of millions, but at a high price. Our progress has been economical, not spiritual. We have chosen to exploit the earth, rather than to learn to live with it. We have pursued profit up to a point where we are depleted of resources, and not only those profits but our very survival is threatened.

These words are my own, and they all ring true to me. It is not a controversial statement - it is a more or less well formulated sum up of what ecologism stand for in today's debate.

Empirical data seems to support such a vision - no other animal has ever treathened Homo Sapiens. In the first quarter of 2010, 314,7 mn mobile phones were sold, which indicates the enormous scope of economic development. In spite of this, no one would argue that art or litterature has reached a higher level of development. As for how we treat the earth, think about the river Titas in Bangladesh or deforestation in the Amazon (or are we bettering?). Where there ain't much rubber left, anymore. In stead we have to make rubber from petroleum products. I guess you haven't missed we are running out of oil? It is hard to see how we will live in a world without oil, even harder in one more than two degrees warmer, the scenario that we should get used to.

The odd thing is that writing this feels relevant. A few years ago, when I was competition-blogging about climate change, I could easily have written something like this and being praised for it. But it is an old story, and should be so even to my grandmother. Earlier today I finished a neat litte book by the Swedish writer Elin Wägner - Fred med Jorden. Where she writes exactly the same thing. The book as written during the second world war. But the same idea, clad in better words, is easy to locate also in Gandhi's or Tolstoj's writings from the late 19th century.

Isn't is strange, how we can live a hundred year under an immidate threat to our existence? It is easy to think that the ecological question is maybe not so urgent after all, if we have managed so well until now. On the other hand a friend just yesterday told me how fast he had seen the glaciers in the Alps dissapearing, and there is a lot of hands-on information about the loss of ice in the arctic and antarctic regions as well. To presume that a world without ice will be a similar word seems to contradict physics.

Well, maybe there will come out something from the Large Hadron Collider that changes all we know about physics, and explains why ecological crises do not really affect us.

Or maybe this is a political question, as much as one about science. Maybe it is about the clash of two ideologies - one seeing man as master of the universe, and the other one seeing man as a species among others. A clash that has been raging since the beginnings of industrial society.

That is almost certainly a valid description of reality. Somewhere out there there is a reality - less ice and less life, but it is interpretated through our pre-determined minds. I guess that is why we can not really discuss climate change, or environment politics - such topics are most often perceived either as political correctness or as ill-guided radicalism.

The revenge of history

Bulgaria was one of the few east european countries that prosecuted communists after the fall of communism. Todor Zhivkov, the party secretary who had ruled the country more or less as his kingdom was sentenced to seven years in jail, years that he spent in house arrest due to fragile health.

But except for a few spectacular cases like this, the past was left untouched. Maybe convicting Zhivkov even helped to direct public anger away from fellow travellers, and soon more pressing problems emerged when the nation tried to eek out a living within capitalism.

For these reasons or other, Bulgaria was unusually late with opening the files of its former secret service (DS). Not until 2006 where the files opened, and in 2007 a parliamentary commission was appointed to examine them.

This commision, in media referred to as the files commision, has now done its work and released a list of names of people who were cooperating with the DS. Suprising or not, a large number of ambassadors currently working for Bulgarian embassies appear on this list. Among others, the ambassador to Sweden...

The Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov has publicly called for these ambassadors to be replaced. Tough words form a man who has served as a body guard to mr. Zhivkov himself, but he obviously has a point, and the liberal parties agree with him on this.

Borisov as Zhivkov's body guard

The socialists on the other hand, defends the ambassadors, and point at what they have done for Bulgaria's EU and NATO integration. Which is also a valid point, I guess.

Is it right to bring up someone's past twenty years later? If yes - than what room is there for forgiveness and development. If no - then anytthing can be done, as long as no one finds out at the moment. This is a problem that any country with a totalitarian past, not only ex- communist, but also the ex- fascist Portugal and Spain for example, must deal with. I guess that what the files commission's work shows is that the history is something you must deal with. If you try to hide it it will come back with revenge.

Goat Milk 1989 - 2009

I spent the weekend in the best way possible - with my girlfriend Annie in a tent not too high in the Bulgarian mountains. Not only did we have good weather, and a terrific nature around us - the village where we camped , Bela Reka was also the site of a cultural festival in North western Bulgaria called Goat Milk.The theme of the festival was 1989 - our places of memory.






Anna in the tent


A number of work shops were held, dealing with the historical memory through theatre , art etc.
Unfortunately I did not attend more than a few, interesting seminars.







Gregor and his translator.


The first seminar I attended was a kind of presentation of the events in Berlin 1989, told by the (West) German writer Gregor Mirwa. The interesting thing here was obviously the Europan perspective. To me 1989 is something else than a year in East European history. It is rather the moment when Eastern, Northern, Southern and Western Europe's histories met at a crossroad to separate on slighltly different paths again. I find it very very insightful to compare my impressions from this time with those of other Europeans. But it's not so easy to come there, and I think Gregor's seminar would have benefited from stricter moderation.

That being said, moderation is seldom the strong side at Bulgarian events, and maybe not the most important thing at a festival... after all we were not there to work :)

After Gregor followed an emotional presentation of the Iranian born photographer living in Canada Babak Salari's photos from Afghanistan. Salari was highly critical of NATO's involvement in the country, a fact that would have been interesting to discuss. After all Bulgaria is a member of NATO and do have a military presence in Afghanistan. I would also have loved to hear how he experienced 1989 as an Iranian refugee in Canada.

The last seminar I and Annie attended was extraordinary interesting, in fact. Evgeny Mihajlov who was an active cameraman in the magical year screened his original footage from the events in the winter of 1989/90. One could smell a different time in the idealism of the demands, and the sense of a new world order.

The discussion inevitably steered towards today's protesters, and the reason why today's protests gather at most 1000 protesters. I believe it is much too easy to see the similarities and forget the differences back then. I spoke about it with my girlfriend afterwords, and she pointed out that the world in 1989 was a very idealistic place - there as revolution in the air. The problems now are more local to Bulgaria and do not inspire the same emotions. I think it is also important to bear in mind the difference between a handicapped democracy and a real totalitarian society.

Mihajlovs pictures reminded me that nothing was decided in December 1989. No one knew for sure that democracy would win. The protesters had so much to win. And also so much to lose. After going out in the streets like that they could probably kiss all dreams of a career or freedom to speech good bye, had they lost. I fear this is exactly what is happening in Moldova today.

The rest of the evening was sent with local food and cosmopolitan food. The festival was quite cosmopolitan actually, I met three girls from Norway that ran a similar festival in the West of Norway. Sometimes I believe Europe is possible.



Beautiful...

The Great War

I don't have much to do at work. Instead I browse endless internet sites, stringly similar in style and content.

Going through a host of news sites, it struck me how the second world war is still hunting us. The Guardian says Tarantino is making a new, spectacular nazi film that. Of course it is predicted to casue a massive outcry in Germany. Süddeutsche Zeitung discusses the French perception of the german occupation. A DN analzst blames George Bush for being slow to act in the Georgian crisis. He refers to a column in NY Times where Sarkozy is said to look like Winston Churchill in comparison.

Isn't it a little strange that Winston churchill still is our strongest szmbol of staesmanhood? Or that making a film about nazi Germany still feels interesting? I don't doubt that it will make more money than a film about Gorbatjev. Probablz it will make more monez than the film about gandhi as well, which indicate that it´s not the time that has passed that is the issue.

Has so little really happened since 1945 that we still need to refer to the second world war, not only in discussions about war, but as the general specter through which we see Good and Evil? Names like Himmler and Goering are still considered something common knowledge. For how long?

Their crimes should of course not be dimished or forgotten - but this is about us not about them. The question is: what makes them deserve all this attention?

Jugoslavia

I guess it's inevitable these days to reflect about Kosova/o. I still remember when we in Sweden had to learn to say Kosova in stead of Kosovo. And then came the US bombings, and some people didn't agree that albanian Kosova was the politically correct name but serbian Kosovo... It must be futile to someone living down here how much we cared in Sweden, but the Jugoslavian conflicts run deep in me/us, for a number of reasons. One is probably the high number of Jugoslav immigrants in Sweden, another the way the wars finished off the Euforia of a kindom come that actually came after the fall of the Berlin wall, and brought back history and tragedy into our TV sets. And in western Europe the TV is a family member, not to neglect. After all, we experienced the fall of the Berlin wall through the same TV.

And Kosova/o was the beginning, heart and end of it all. I remember the one week war in Slovenia, I was at the hair dressers for old men that I and my brother frequented in Sunne, and waiting to get an old man's hair cut I read the headlinde, written with the extra big types that hadn't been used since the peace -45 saying LJUBLANA!,under it was a picture of a crying woman and bombed houses in the background. The war ended before I had learned to say the name Ljubljana. The war in Croatia was also like some sort of warm up, everyone talked about what would come in Bosnia, and Bosnia came and gave us plenty of reasons to think about the blessing it is to live in a country in peace. Because suddenly it was not only on TV.These same people that you've been seeing trying to escape on long trails with cars, tractors, horse charts and god now what, these people suddenly ended up in your own streets.

I guess the west did some feeble try to make peace but I don't think George Bush or Carl Bildt understood more of it than me It was clear at the end that it was everyone against Serbia and that Serbia would lose. And of course Serbia, embittered and losing, turned against th enemy within - the Kosova Albanians, until they were finally defeated by force by the US. Somehow it always felt like that was the only possible ending of everything, because beginning with Bosnia it was Serbia against the west. And... when it gets down to it - politics grow out of the barrel of a gun like Comrade Mao cynically put it.

When the war came to Kosova/o I remembered my first Jugoslav memories - older than the headlines about Ljubljana - Refugees from Kosova, that came to Sunne in the years preceeding the downfall of Jugoslavia. They used to have exhibitions with photocopied pictures of police brutality in Serbia. I guess you couldn't guess that they would ever be the winning part in any conflict, or even make it to the CNN headlines. They did though...

And of course there is no other choice today than a Kosova that will become a part of Albania. Actually it was liberated by force 1999 and there has been no way back, and no way to negociate a solution. I'm a little worried about Serbia, this could drive them to a Russia ever more distant from the west, and I'm not sure this bitterness will disappear fast. The last defeat adds up to all the other defeats in the Jugoslav civil wars, that adds up to th memories of an extremely brutal second world war, also by European standards, that adds up to the hmiliation under Ottoman rule that adds up to the tragic defeat, caused by a traitor against the turks in 1389... Where was that? At Kosovo Polje, of course...

Not that Serbian people are more tied to their history than others, but there will be plenty of history for nationalist politicians in Serbia to use.

However. Serbia lost Kosovo/a in a war... Let's just face it. Let's not pretend that this loss is something absolutely unique that couldn't happen somewhere else. Of course Transnistrian politicians, or Hungarian nationalists in Romania, will use Kosova as an example to repeat. If it can be repeated or not depends on the political force. I don't think the Hungarians will succeed, but I'm pretty sure that the Transnistrians with Russian support will say that Kosovo got independence by an unilateral proclamation, so will we. And the EU or the US wont't like it, but what will they (we) do? Bomb Moscow?

No... after all I think Comerade Mao was quite right, and we just have to accept the use of force. And the most important is not within which borders Kosova or Transnistria are, the important thing is human rights and the living standard for the people that live there.


DN.se om kosovo
Politiken.dk om kosovo