Stylus Magazine Reviews "Shadows"

Movie Review
By: Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Stylus Magazine, 2007-10-09

Shadows (Senki) (2007)
Director: Milcho Manchevski

Cast: Borce Nacev, Vesna Stanojevska, Sabina Ajrula-Tozija

n the 2003 introduction to the published screenplay of his first feature-length fiction film, Before the Rain (1994)—which appeared actually a few months after that of the screenplay for his second feature, Dust (2001)—Milcho Manchevski expressed his frustration with widespread assumptions about that film as literal historical account. “In almost all interviews I gave for newspapers and television in dozens of countries over the final years of the last century,” he writes, “I kept repeating that Before the Rain is not a documentary about former Yugoslavia, nor about Macedonia, nor is it a documentary at all. I would say: ‘You can see this from the aesthetic approach: it’s shot like a fairytale; look at the camera work, or the editing, or the music. I am using actors. It’s scripted, for Heaven’s sake.’ Who got it—got it.”

Now we have Manchevski’s third feature and again there should be no doubt about aesthetic approach. Shadows premiered in early September at the Toronto International Film Festival and was quickly tapped as Macedonia’s official 2008 Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. Already scheduled for theatrical release in ten European nations, this lovely and moving film is just now making the rounds of US distributors. The other two features, with their extended historical elements and fractured, multiple and overlapping narratives—what Manchevski calls “Cubist storytelling”—are widely rentable in the US. Watching the three features close together is extremely rewarding. Manchevski is building a body of work that will shine in retrospective programs—for shared, reverberating landscapes, elaborated images, and a cadre of supporting actors whose reappearance in successive film makes his work subliminally familiar and easy to enter—and now, for the clarity of his turn into newly personal territory and straightforward narrative.

“Return what’s not yours. Have respect,” says the old woman Kalina (Ratka Radmanovic), murmuring urgently in an ancient dialect that no one speaks anymore. She appears matter-of-factly, in her head scarf and heavy skirts and shawl, a small cross tattooed between her eyebrows in the old way, waiting in the dark on the living room couch of a young doctor. Lazar Perkov (Borce Nacev) has just returned to his apartment in the Macedonian capital of Skopje from his parents’ villa in the lakes district after a year convalescing from a near-fatal car crash. Trying to return to work at the hospital, he misses his already straying wife and little son, who have remained at the lake. He has nightmares, forgets things, fears his recovery isn’t stable, speaks in odd images that cause the unnerved family chauffeur to roll his eyes, and has now had his first visit from the unsettled souls of the dead.

That Lazar doesn’t know what’s stolen or how to put it back doesn’t get him a pass. Preoccupied with his young man’s struggle to emerge from the shadow of his mother’s overbearing ambition, herself a physician (the formidable Sabina Ajrula-Tozija)—impossible not to recall with the film’s final shot of blinding light—Lazar encounters one woman after another who teaches him that ignorance and personal innocence are no excuses, and who invite his wary, steadily growing search. In a land overrun for centuries by intruders, these women are preoccupied with theft and its attendant glaring debt. Manchevski’s images are earthy, specific, free of arid abstraction. For example, one day Lazar searches out the crowded ramshackle home of his mother’s chauffeur, Blagojce (Petar Mircevski), wanting a ride to the country. With his trained scientist’s eye he diagnoses a burn on the driver’s wife’s arm. She patiently explains the birthmark resulted from her mother eating stolen grapes while pregnant.

Manchevski tinkered for several years with the nuances of his film’s title, beginning with the Ghosts and detouring to Bones before settling on the immensely resonant possibilities of Shadows. The word’s added visual dimension encourages our attention toward DP Fabio Cianchetti’s use of reflections, doubling, broken space, and Menka’s propensity for suddenly dropping out of the frame mid-stride and then abruptly reappearing. Cities in Manchevski’s films have always been claustrophobic and disorienting. There’s a similar handling in that maze-like Paris apartment where Bertolucci’s The Dreamers occurs, a film Cianchetti also shot.


Kalina is the first “shadow” who appears to Lazar, identified by her dialect as one of the displaced Aegean Macedonians. A linguist whom the young man seeks out to translate her message also remarks on Lazar’s own name’s Biblical reference to resurrection. Seeking that professor, Lazar meets the lovely Menka, a suicide by hanging (luminously played by harpist Vesna Stanojevska). On a hospital gurney, then waiting for the elevator, Lazar meets the cross, craggy-faced Gerasim, a refugee whose brother nailed a spike into his heel at burial in hopes of magically halting his wandering in the afterlife (Salaetin Bilal, the Turkish Major in Dust). There is an unbaptized infant whom Gerasim awkwardly but tenderly carries instead of abandoning, and Kalina’s sometime companion wolf.

These walking dead may invite Lazar’s curiosity and compassion—and in Menka’s case his intimacy—but they cannot explain their repeated violent deaths or their connection with the cardboard box of old bones that his mother scavenged for her own 1973 anatomy class from beyond the consecrated ground of the cemetery—“not a real grave,” she snorts indignantly—in her home village of Gluvovo. Or what he must do. In the pivotal showdown, slugging each other, sprawling on her office floor, Lazar forcibly takes the bones from his mother in this fight over laying the past to rest or making it “useful” to one’s own ambitions.

That fight over a box of bones has room to contain a parable about the past these shadows more broadly represent, though one of the film’s more courageous qualities is Manchevski’s insistence that Lazar’s own journey carry the film emotionally and dramatically rather than resort to expose. Kalina’s dialect reveals she is from Aegean Macedonia—the eastern territory annexed by Greece in 1913—but the film says little else about her people except that their fate was “exodus.” Manchevski says audiences outside that culture don’t need the specific history to connect with these characters’ pain and longing for relief as abandoned and forsaken peoples.

For those inside that culture, even that slightest reference to Kalina’s extinct dialect evokes the following specifics. In 1912 Greece allied with Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro, declaring war on Turkey. While this ended the Ottoman Empire’s occupation of Macedonia, it led directly to Macedonia’s partition among its neighbors. In Aegean Macedonia, Greece embarked upon a decades-long campaign to change the population’s ethnic composition, forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands, confiscating lands, forbidding languages, renaming places, plundering and destroying villages, and re-colonizing the area with ethnic Greeks from nations to the east. During the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s this campaign accelerated anew. 60,000 were expelled in 1948. Some internments from the mid-40s continued until 1974—the year of Lazar’s mother’s anatomy class—and as late as 1985 Greek laws governing that area excluded Aegean Macedonian descendants from reclaiming confiscated land. In 1991, the modern Republic of Macedonia emerged from the upheaval of Yugoslavia’s disintegration by referendum.

Lazar’s journey is also the artist’s journey and a parable for the work of cinema. It becomes his job because he is the one who is there to see. Let us hope this film is available on US screens, and quickly.

Russia names hawkish Nato envoy

By David Edenden

Good for Putin. Russia needs politicians who know enough to hang on to their wallets while dealing with Nato, a cold war relic that needs to be put in the ash bin of history!

BBC, 10 January 2008

Mr Rogozin is opposed to Kosovo breaking away from Serbia

Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed a nationalist politician as Russia's new ambassador to Nato.

Dmitry Rogozin will become Moscow's permanent representative to the military alliance.

A foreign policy hawk, Mr Rogozin is a former head of the anti-immigration Russian Motherland party.

He has previously warned Moscow the Western military alliance poses a threat and called for Russia to stand firm against independence for Kosovo.

Mr Rogozin has also served as Russia's representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace), a multi-national Strasbourg-based human rights body.

In 2005, Russia's Supreme Court banned Motherland from taking part in elections to the Moscow City Council. The court ruled that a campaign advertisement in which Mr Rogozin appeared was racist.

Mr Rogozin's appointment is a reflection of Russia's more assertive stance towards the West, the BBC's James Rodgers reports from Moscow.

Nato is viewed with great suspicion in Russia - politicians and ordinary people alike see the alliance's post-Cold War eastward expansion as blatantly hostile, our correspondent says.

Mr Rogozin has previously called for Russia to rearm to counter the perceived threat.

Barack Obama and the Greek Lobby

Greater Surbiton Blog
Marko Attila Hoare
(also - The Henry Jackson Society)
Monday, 7 January 2008

Last August, three US senators including presidential candidate Barack Obama introduced a resolution to the US Senate (S. Res. 300), endorsing the Greek-nationalist bullying of the Republic of Macedonia. This resolution raises serious concerns about whether an Obama presidency would pursue a responsible policy vis-a-vis the Balkans.

S. Res. 300 accuses Macedonia of a policy that ‘instills hostility and a rationale for irredentism in portions of the population of FYROM toward Greece and the history of Greece’, on the grounds: 1) that ’a television report in recent years showed students in a state-run school in FYROM [the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia] still being taught that parts of Greece, including Greek Macedonia, are rightfully part of FYROM’; 2) that ’some textbooks, including the Military Academy textbook published in 2004 by the Military Academy “General Mihailo Apostolski” in the FYROM capital city, contain maps showing that a “Greater Macedonia” extends many miles south into Greece to Mount Olympus and miles east to Mount Pirin in Bulgaria’; and 3) that ‘the Government of FYROM recently renamed the capital city’s international airport “Alexander the Great Airport”.’

The resolution, which has been endorsed by at least 75 Members of Congress and is advertised on the website of the Greek Embassy in Washingon D.C., is evidence that Obama and other senior US politicians are pandering to the peculiarly hysterical, nationalistic and ill-informed Greek lobby in the US. That the resolution justifies itself on the basis of something as insubstantial and ill-defined as ‘a television report in recent years’ is evidence of the unseriousness of its allegations. The television report in question appears to be a YouTube clip that briefly shows a school textbook illustrating the historical territory of Macedonia, which was partitioned between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria in 1912-13 (you have to watch the clip quite carefully to catch it). The fact that the YouTube clip was undated may be why the resolution referred vaguely to a ‘television report in recent years’. Likewise, the military textbook mentioned by the resolution appears merely to have displayed historical maps of Macedonia. The Greek-nationalist lobbyists appear to have interpreted this as evidence of a contemporary Macedonian territorial claim on parts of Greece - evidence of a Greek-nationalist sense of insecurity over the Macedonian question that peaked in the early 1990s at the time of Macedonia’s secession from Yugoslavia and that, however baseless, has not gone away. The Skopje airport is indeed named after Alexander the Great, though why this should be in any way objectionable, let alone the object of a senatorial resolution, is really beyond comprehension to anyone who is not a Greek nationalist, and I shall not insult the reader’s intelligence by labouring the point.

S. Res. 300 ends by urging Macedonia (’FYROM’) to 1) ‘observe its obligations under Article 7 of the 1995 United Nations-brokered Interim Accord, which directs the parties to “promptly take effective measures to prohibit hostile activities or propaganda by state-controlled agencies and to discourage acts by private entities likely to incite violence, hatred or hostility” and review the contents of textbooks, maps, and teaching aids to ensure that such tools are stating accurate information’; and 2) to ‘to work with Greece within the framework of the United Nations process to achieve longstanding United States and United Nations policy goals by reaching a mutually-acceptable official name for FYROM’.

It is unclear why people who get their information from random YouTube clips should feel they have the right to lecture sovereign states about what they put in their school or military textbooks. Yet it is the second demand that is the most worrying: the US has already recognised Macedonia under its official and rightful name, the ‘Republic of Macedonia’; Obama and his fellow senators appear to be trying to turn the clock back and destabilise this fragile state in a sensitive part of the Balkans, in order to pander to the nationalist hysteria of the Greek American lobby, thus giving their own domestic political careers priority over the US’s foreign-policy interests.

Let us hope that Obama’s sponsorship of this resolution is simply a cynical ploy to win the Greek-American vote, and will not translate into a genuinely anti-Macedonian policy in the event that he becomes president. For if it does, the consequences for the peace and stability of South East Europe could be catastrophic.

Hat tip: David Edenden, The Macedonian Tendency.

Waiting for Kosovo Independence?

Macedonian elite police officer shot dead
Reuters: by Kole Casule

SKOPJE, Jan 3 (Reuters) - A member of an elite Macedonian police unit was killed and two others were wounded when their car was shot at in the capital Skopje on Thursday, police said.

"Attackers opened fire from a moving vehicle at the police jeep," said police spokesman Ivo Kotevski. "Three officers were wounded, and one of them died on his way to hospital."

Kotevski said the motive for the attack in a Skopje suburb was unknown.

Tensions remain in Macedonia in the wake of a 2001 insurgency by ethnic Albanian guerrillas fighting for greater rights for the country's 25 percent Albanian minority.

Organised crime is also rife in the former Yugoslav republic.

"Shadows" Macedonia's Oscar nominee

"Shadows" set records, Macedonia's Oscar nominee
Macedonian_News_Service : Message: Daily Bulletin:

The world premiere of the latest film by famous Macedonian director Milco Mancevski titled "Shadows," was held at Toronto Film festival on September 9, and Macedonian premiere happened on November 2 at the Skopje’s Universal Hall. The hall was technically prepared for projection of the film with very expensive equipment and largest ever seen movie screen in Macedonia.

A record number of 50.000 people have seen the movie in six-weeks. The film is among 63 countries that submitted films for Oscar 2008 for foreign film nominees.

Milco Manchevski honorary ambassador of culture

Film director Milco Mancevski, awarded with the title Honorary Ambassador of Culture by the Macedonian Government for his contribution in affirming the Macedonian culture in the world.

The Government presented the title, being awarded for the first time ever. Mancevski will be honorary ambassador in New York, where he currently resides and works.

The Government also promoted several other famous Macedonian ambassador of culture - drama playwright Goran Stefanovski in London, the pianist Elena Misirkova – Loza in Vienna, singer Vlado Janevski in Zagreb, theatre director Ivan Popovski in Moscow and singer Zafir Hadzimanov in Belgrade.

An Ambassador of Culture has a diplomatic status and their engagement is on the voluntary basis without any compensation. Their noble and patriotic mission is promotion of the Macedonian culture to the world public.

By David Edenden

On Serbs and Serbia

By David Edenden

I have a complicated relationship with the Serbs and Serbia. Serbs and Bulgarians are "first cousins" to Macedonians, but it turns out we are a dysfunctional family.

I oppose the the independence of Kosovo which is basically a partition of Serbia because it will lead to instability in the Balkans. However, I condemn Serbian nationalists as the basic cause of the collapse of Yugoslavia. Serbian nationalists continue to this day to reject Macedonian ethnicity and the legality of the Macedonian Orthodox Church.

Anyway, here are some of my posts, lest anyone think that I am a "Serboman" because of my anti-independence for Kosovo stance.

The Serbs in the Balkans (The Scorpion and the Turtle) Part 1

The Serbs in the Balkans (The Scorpion and the Turtle) Part 2

Serbs of Macedonia Caught in the Middle

US Hot on Kosovo Independence

Kosovo Independence Would Set Europe on Fire - Serbia-Montenegro Minister

More Bad Press on Jovan

Can't we Orthodox Slavs "just get along"

The Henry Jackson Society - Greeks Must Play by the Rules

The Hellenic tail must not wag the European dog
The Henry Jackson Society:
By Marko Attila Hoare, 31st December 2007

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Greece and Cyprus are, over Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo, pursuing policies motivated by nationalist concerns that are out of keeping with democratic values and counter to EU interests.

2. Greece and Cyprus have since the early 1990s consistently pursued destructive policies in South East Europe that have proved highly damaging vis-a-vis both Turkey and the former Yugoslavia.

3. For the sake of regional stability, and to set an example for how new EU member-states should behave, it is time for the Western alliance to cease to tolerate Greek and Cypriot mischief-making.

---

The ideal of the European Union presupposes that member-states will pursue national policies that take into account the interests of the union as a whole. This means they should not try to drag the EU behind policies that are wholly against its interests, and that merely reflect the exclusive nationalism of the member-states in question. Yet this is precisely what the EU’s two most south-easterly member-states, first Greece and then Cyprus, have tried to do repeatedly since the early 1990s. In several spheres, Greece and Cyprus are pursuing policies that are wholly determined by nationalist motives, that have nothing to do with EU or Western interests or values and that are potentially highly damaging and dangerous. This cannot be allowed to continue if we are to maintain stability in South East Europe.

Greece threatens to veto the entry of Macedonia into NATO unless Macedonia changes its name. This represents the continuation of one of the most farcical episodes in the history of national chauvinism in Europe in the last two decades: Greece’s attempt since the early 1990s to prevent Macedonia using its name. Greece’s ‘justification’ for this, if that word can be used in this context, is that the historic land of Macedonia was solely ‘Greek’, that the ancient Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great was ‘Greek’, and that therefore Greece has an exclusive right to the use of the name ‘Macedonia’, rather like a corporation’s exclusive right to its logo.

It should not be necessary to engage in the childish debate about whether Alexander or ancient Macedon really was ‘Greek’ or not - every undergraduate student of nationalism knows that one cannot simply transpose modern national identities back onto ancient historical figures and lands; still less can ancient history be allowed to determine modern geopolitics. The very fact that contemporary Greek politicians and intellectuals attempt to do just this is evidence that Greece has not yet made the transition to genuinely post-nationalist, twenty-first-century politics. The background to Greece’s bizarre hang-up over the Macedonian name is the conquest of part of the Ottoman territory of Macedonia by the Greek state in 1912-13 - a part that was less than 50% Greek in ethnic terms at the time - and the subsequent brutal Hellenisation of this territory through the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Slavs, the settling on it of Orthodox Greek refugees and the forced assimilation of the remaining non-Greeks through the suppression of their language and identity - something that reached its peak under the fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the late 1930s and after the Greek Civil War of the 1940s.

Greece’s policy of denying the existence of a Macedonian nation while asserting the exclusively ‘Greek’ character of historic Macedonia thus represents the last dregs of a nationalist policy of forced homogenisation. It is equivalent to Turkey’s attempt forcibly to assimilate its ethnic Kurds on the grounds that they are ‘really’ Turks and its continued denial of the Armenian Genocide, or to Serbia’s claim to Kosovo as a ‘Serb land’ on the grounds that there are a handful of medieval Serbian monasteries there. If the EU is to have any meaning at all, it has to have a zero-tolerance approach to exclusivist national ideologies of this type. The Turkish Kurds can call themselves Kurds and speak, write and be educated in Kurdish if they want to; the people of Kosovo can decide for themselves if they want to be part of Serbia or not; and the Macedonians and the Greeks both have the same right to use the Macedonian name. End of discussion.

Yet it is not solely for the sake of our values, but also for the sake of our geopolitical interests that we must take a hard line in opposing Greece over Macedonia. The embargo imposed by Greece on Macedonia after the latter seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991-92 and the bullying that forced Macedonia to change its flag, and to enter the UN under the clumsy acronym ‘FYROM’ (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) dangerously contributed to the destabilisation of this fragile and strategically sensitive state. Western policy-makers have long been aware that Macedonia could not be allowed to collapse - unlike Bosnia, its collapse could lead to two NATO states, Greece and Turkey, coming into conflict with one another. Hence the US made it clear to Slobodan Milosevic, right from the start in the early 1990s, that Serbia would not be permitted to extend the war into Macedonia; hence Macedonia’s peaceful secession from Yugoslavia; hence NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, as Milosevic’s ethnic-cleansing of the Kosovo Albanians threatened to upset Macedonia’s own delicate ethnic balance between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians. In recent weeks, Turkey and Greece have rebuked each other over the issue of Macedonia’s name. Although Turkey is wrong about a lot of things (including Cyprus and Iraqi Kurdistan), on this issue it is entirely in the right and playing a constructive role. For the sake of its own fragile stability and the equally fragile stability of South East Europe, Macedonia’s rapid entry into NATO is imperative.

Greece’s obstructionism over Macedonia is not an isolated quirk, but forms part of a wider regional policy guided by nationalist concerns that has significantly damaged Western interests since the early 1990s - although, to be fair, it was not entirely out of keeping with the narrow-minded Western policy toward the Balkans of the first half of the 1990s. Greece supported Milosevic’s Serbia more wholeheartedly than did any other state; Milosevic was more popular in Greece than he ever was in Serbia itself; Greek fascist paramilitaries participated in the Serb conquest of Srebrenica in 1995. The Greek journalist Takis Michas has described the virulence of Greek support, both at the elite and at the popular level, for Serbian imperialism and ethnic-cleansing in his brilliant but shocking book, ‘Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic’s Serbia’ (Texas A&M University Press, 2002). Kostas Simitis’s PASOK government half-heartedly acquiesced in NATO’s intervention against Milosevic in Kosovo in the face of almost total public opposition and an outpouring of anti-American and anti-Western bile that found murderous expression in the assassination in June 2000 of the British defence attache in Athens, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, by the terrorist group ‘November 17′, supposedly in revenge for the Kosovo war. More recently, in January of this year left-wing terrorists launched an anti-tank grenade at the US embassy in Athens. In Greece, as in Serbia and Russia, the extremes of left and right find common ground in hatred of the US and the West. This red-brown current tends to agitate for more extreme nationalistic and anti-Western policies than those actually pursued by Greek governments themselves, which is another reason why such policies should be opposed on principle.

Greece remains Serbia’s most loyal ally in the EU, and is currently attempting to lead a Balkan bloc, made up of Romania and a more lukewarm Bulgaria, that favours Serbia’s rapid entry into the EU, irrespective of Serbia’s behaviour over Kosovo and over the arrest of war-criminals. This is damaging to Western efforts to resolve the issue of Kosovo and the war-criminals, and to establish a united diplomatic front vis-a-vis Russia. Ironically, Greece’s behaviour shows why we should not allow countries such as Serbia and Turkey into the EU unless they are prepared to abandon national chauvinism and small-mindedness; we want them in, but as responsible democracies, not as nationalistic trouble-makers.

It is not only in the Balkans where Greece has pursued a selfish and destructive policy at the expense of EU interests. Earlier this decade, indicating just how far it was prepared to jeopardise the entire EU project for its own ends, Greece threatened to veto the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe unless Cyprus were included in the expansion. There were very sound reasons why a divided Cyprus should not have been allowed to join the EU, and these immediately became clear. In a referendum in 2004, the Greek Cypriot electorate, under the guidance of Cyprus’s crude nationalist president, Tassos Papadopoulos, overwhelmingly rejected the Annan Plan for Cyprus’s reunification. With EU membership already safely in the bag, Papadopoulos judged that Cyprus as an EU member would be in a strong position to extract a better deal from Turkey. Greece’s New Democracy government under Kostas Karamanlis, for its part, refused unambiguously to endorse the Annan Plan, something that might have encouraged the Greek Cypriots to vote in favour; Greece thus studiously failed to help clear up the mess it had made.

Had EU membership been made conditional upon acceptance of the Annan Plan by the Greek Cypriot electorate, the latter would almost certainly have voted in favour, and this old wound in the flank of the Western alliance would finally have been healed. As things stand, a settlement is now less likely than ever. There is every reason to believe that Papadopoulos and other Greek Cypriot politicians prefer the status quo in Cyprus to any reasonable compromise settlement, and are entirely ready in principle to veto Turkish EU membership indefinitely, pending the total Turkish capitulation that will never happen. Paradoxically, of course, the Cypriots do not wish to see Turkey driven away from the EU entirely, as then their veto loses all coercive power; Papadopoulos’s strategy is a contradictory and self-defeating one. However wrong Turkey’s policy toward Cyprus was and remains, over the Annan Plan it showed itself to be the more reasonable and flexible side. Greece’s pursuit of its own nationalist agenda has introduced the Cyprus dispute, like a foreign disease, into the very heart of the EU; last autumn, the EU suspended eight of the negotiating chapters of Turkey’s accession talks in retaliation for Turkey’s refusal to open its ports and airports to Cypriot ships and planes. Cyprus is now in a position to pursue indefinitely its own selfish and self-defeating nationalist agenda at the expense of EU-Turkish relations. The Hellenic tail has wagged the European dog.

One of the smallest and newest EU member-states, Cyprus is also the most hard-line in its outright opposition to Kosovo’s independence. So far as the Papadopoulos regime is concerned, EU unity, Western interests and regional stability count for nothing: all that matters is that Kosovo’s independence should be opposed, lest it set a precedent for the international recognition of Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. That there are no indications whatsoever that Western states or anyone else will follow up the recognition of Kosovo by recognising northern Cyprus is deemed irrelevant. The Papadopoulos regime, pursuing its own policy of indefinite obstructionism, is no doubt disconcerted by the fact that Serbia’s similar obstructionism over Kosovo is going to be definitely punished by the US and the EU. The so-called ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ is simply a creation of the illegitimate Turkish occupation, therefore not equivalent to Kosovo, which was a recognised member of the former Yugoslav Federation. Still, it will do Cyprus no harm if it learns from the Serbian example that the principle of ‘inviolable territorial integrity’ is not a trump card that bloody-minded states can play indefinitely.

For too long, we have allowed Greek nationalism to poison Western policy. To some extent, this is the result of our own policy errors toward the people of Greece and Cyprus over the last sixty years or more. In one of the sorrier episodes of the early Cold War, we allowed a short-sighted anti-Communist agenda to lead us to support the motley alliance of chauvinist and ultra-reactionary elements, many of them former Nazi collaborators, which made up the anti-Communist side in the Greek Civil War, against a Greek left that had led one of the most impressive anti-Nazi resistance movements in all occupied Europe. It is a moot point whether the anti-Communist victory in Greece served our interests any better than the Communist victory in Yugoslavia; Tito’s Yugoslavia proved more than adept at resisting Soviet domination, while the brutal anti-Communist victory in Greece laid down a repressive and chauvinistic legacy for the country that found its most extreme expression in the Colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-74, and from which Greece has still not entirely recovered. The extreme anti-Communist and former Nazi-collaborator, Georgios Grivas, repaid our support to his side in the Greek Civil War by launching an uprising against British rule in Cyprus in 1955 through the EOKA movement; Grivas’s attacks on Turkish Cypriot civilians sowed the seeds of Cyprus’s future tragedy. Our misguided response to the Greek Cypriot national movement for union with Greece was to play Turkey off against Greece over Cyprus; this policy of divide-and-rule, coupled with the suicidal ultra-nationalist policy of first Grivas and then the Greek Colonels, paved the way in 1974 for the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, something that remains a thorn in the side of the Western alliance to this day.

It is time to turn our back on this long and undistinguished tradition of a modus vivendi between the Western alliance and Greek nationalism, one that has proved consistently damaging to all concerned. There must be zero tolerance of Greek and Cypriot obstruction over Macedonia, Turkey and Kosovo (to be fair, Greece itself has bravely come out in support of Turkish EU membership, in defiance of popular Greek opinion, indicating an enlightened stance on this issue at least). Every time the Greeks or Cypriots try to undermine EU policy or drag it behind them for the sake of their own retrograde nationalism, we should pursue a determined effort to isolate them. Such an effort will pay dividends: not only will it put an end to a persistant policy of trouble-making, but it will set an example for how other new EU member-states should behave.

The Henry Jackson Society - Macedonia on the Move!

Balkan Tiger - The Henry Jackson Society: "Balkan Tiger
By Meelis Kitsing, 5th September 2006

The fountain of youth found in Macedonia? So claims travel writer Richard Bangs. If true, it is surprising that rejuvenation of the Macedonian economy has been so elusive for so long. In fact, the arrival of Macedonian independence in the 1990s came with high levels of unemployment inherited from the structural weaknesses of the Yugoslav economy and international isolation fed by intransigent Greek foreign policy wonks.

The late 1990s saw some economic reforms under the center-right government, but the onslaught of violence between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians forced any type of economic reforms to the backseat, where they remained until just last month. The outcome of elections held on July 5 gives reason to believe in the rebirth. The Western media have emphasized the peaceful nature of these elections in comparison with the violence that accompanied the last elections, in 2002. Yet this primary emphasis understates the implications and significance of the elections results. Some leading papers have even predicted the potential rise of violence stemming from the victory of the center-right and supposedly nationalist Macedonian Internal Revolutionary Organization (VMRO- DPMNE).

The VMRO-DPMNE has learned the right lessons. The party, headed by the youthful Nikola Gruevski, a former trade minister and finance minister in the government headed by the VMRO-DPMNE in 1998-2002, emphasized economic reform in its campaign, not Macedonian nationalism. "We believe that Macedonians want to do more than just survive - they want to succeed. And to succeed we need a stronger, healthier economy - one that delivers jobs and growth, that frees individuals to pursue their God-given potential with a minimum of government interference and that opens up the creative spirit in people," wrote Gruevski in the Washington Times on July 4. VMRO-DPMNE's election platform was based on a comprehensive and detailed study of reforms by other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. Radical reformers of Central and Eastern Europe are seen as examples to be followed.

The VMRO-DPMNE promises to cut public expenditure by 2 percent of the GDP by 2010. It plans to cut red-tape by 2007, thereby enabling registration of new companies to be completed within three days. The party plans to implement a flat personal tax rate of 10 percent by 2008 - a turnaround from the current progressive income tax rates of 15, 18 and 24 percent. The tax rate on corporate profits will be reduced from 15 percent to 10 percent and, following the example of Estonia, the tax on reinvested profits will be scrapped altogether.

Certainly, the implementation of these ideas does not depend on VMRO-DPMNE alone. Having received 34 percent of the vote, implementation of the party's plans depends on the compromises reached with its coalition partners. The negotiations concerning new coalition formation with three smaller parties and one independent candidate ended in principle agreement, giving the VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition 65 seats out of 120 in the Macedonian parliament. The new coalition includes an ethnic Albanian party, DPA, while keeping out of the cabinet another Albanian party, DUI. The DUI was formed on the basis of former Albanian guerillas from the National Liberation Army and was in a previous coalition with social democrats. Inclusion of one Albanian party in the new government coalition indicates that focusing on economic issues has allowed VMRO-DPMNE (which used to be seen as Macedonian nationalist) to make compromises with its former rivals. Being a senior coalition partner in the government and having a strong mandate from the electorate certainly increases the odds of pushing through many of the radical reforms proposed in its election program.

Nevertheless, skeptics may argue that the nature of the new Macedonian government and its ideas may not be sufficient for achieving economic success. The notion that Macedonia could learn from success stories in Central and Eastern Europe rests on assumptions that we can change factors beyond our control - like the weather. Macedonia is located in the Balkans, i.e. its geopolitical situation is different and imposes tough constraints that no government can change.

Certainly some conditions are beyond our control, but there are so many ways we can deal with them. The way we prepare for unpredictable weather carries some lessons for the post-socialist politics of countries such as Macedonia. If we live in a cold climate, we can build houses that are warm for the winter. If we live in a warmer climate, we can build houses with air conditioning. We would make these modifications even if some winters may be unbearably freezing and others milder, a more bearable cold. Some summers can be enjoyably warm and others unbearably hot. We prepare for the worst because we know that the weather is unpredictable.

Judging from the recent history of reform in former socialist countries as well as conventional expectations, nobody would have suspected Estonia to become a wunderkind of economic reform. Comparing Estonia (a country constantly given as an example in VMRO-DPMNE's election program) with Macedonia, it becomes obvious that 20 years ago one would have expected Macedonia to do better than Estonia. The quality of life was better in socialist Macedonia than in socialist Estonia. Yugoslavia offered more economic freedom than the Soviet Union, to which Estonia had been incorporated. Macedonians were able to travel and work abroad - even the thought alone was out of the question in socialist Estonia.

In the early 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia meant uncertainty for both Estonia and Macedonia. Both were new and unknown countries on the periphery of Europe. Many Westerners confused the Baltics with the Balkans. Estonia had a sizeable Russian-speaking minority that made up 35 percent of the population. Macedonia had an Albanian minority which was 20 percent of population in 1990 and has now increased to 25 percent. The confusion was not simply due to sheer ignorance. There were as many experts predicting doom for Estonia as there were "sovietologists" failing to predict the collapse of the USSR in the 1980s. A possible ethnic conflict or even a war with Russia was seen as likely. Despite the disadvantaged starting position and ethnic mix, combined with post-socialist politicking, Estonia emerged as a phoenix.

The reasons for Estonia's success remained invisible to the casual observer for years. While Macedonia chose a gradual, stop-and-go economic reform path, Estonia chose a radical and rapid approach by relying on the invisible hand of the market instead of on government intervention. The rapid economic development of Estonia is not just economic achievement: having benefited the Russian-speaking population in Estonia - it has contributed to social peace, as well. Good economic circumstances are less likely to feed social unrest. Indeed, Estonia has not had any large-scale ethnic conflicts, even if relations between the various ethnic groups are far from perfect.

The fact that thinking along those lines has reached the Balkans is a major improvement. Economic reforms do not offer absolute guarantees against potential ethnic conflicts but they will certainly reduce the likelihood of such conflicts. If the new Macedonian leaders run out of ideas and options for the rebirth of the Macedonian economy, they need not look far for inspiration: According to Bangs,- the fountain of youth is located in Macedonia's capital, Skopje - a mere 23 kilometers away.

Meelis Kitsing is an Honorary Fellow at Copenhagen Institute. This article originally appeared at www.tcsdaily.com, and is reproduced with the permission of the author.

The Henry Jackson Society Likes Macedonians

Adding Insult to Injury: Washington Decorates a Nazi Collaborator -
The Henry Jackson Society:
Marko Attila Hoare, 11th June 2005

"The Bush Administration’s readiness to overturn American diplomatic tradition in this way should perhaps come as no surprise from an administration that has made a habit of overturning diplomatic tradition, for better or for worse. One of the Administration’s first diplomatic initiatives, following Bush’s recent reelection, was to recognise the Republic of Macedonia under its rightful name, delivering a well-deserved slap in the face to Greece, thanks to whose merciless chauvinistic bullying, Macedonia has been forced to labour under the clumsy official denomination of ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ since its independence in the early 1990s. The Bush Administration thereby rewarded a loyal ally,"

Putin--Time Magazine's 2007 Person of the Year

David Edenden: My hero!

Putin--Time Magazine's 2007 Person of the Year:

"It's also reassuring to know that Time's editors didn't get fully hoodwinked by Putin's steely blue gaze or hard-as-rock pecs (which, by the way, are featured on some softpornpolitico websites in Russia today). As stated clearly in it's lead editorial, 'Putin is not a boy scout.' (Nor are any other world leaders I can think of.)"