Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
1989
Monday, October 19, 2009
1989-The Struggle to Create post-Cold War Europe
Read Central! Europe
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Geography and conflict
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Iris Murdoch and Roma
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Herta Mueller, Nobel Prize in Literature
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Longer list of UNESCO intangible heritage
Also, 76 new inscriptions were made in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, among which Aubusson tapestry and the tango.
20 years after
- Even from the very beginning, we were having on the walls and in our textbooks various quotations from the writings of Lenin and Marx and Engels, what matters in fact was the wonderful and unique way of thinking of the representatives of the ruling party. The whole system was created around an outrageous personality cult. It is nothing to be nostalgic about.
- This personality cult was based on a personal relations system, corrupt, centered on the self-assumed humility of accepting to discuss with idiots because your own and family survival was at stake. Accepting to write an ideological standpoint only because at the end an addition kilo of bread or eggs or cheese was at stake. Never, the system was in itself egalitarian. Always, from the very beginning of the regimes, it was an elite - understood as the top of the social system - replaced another one and tried to steal - no abuse here, some of the old regime representatives were put out of their houses and their goods transferred in the houses of the new communist leaders - the goods and privileges. If somebody is ever dreaming about equality, I must warn it is dreaming about an utopia. Communist produced one of the most selfish and lacking common responsibility political subject. If it is living together in the old, almost destroyed block houses it is more likely that - two of the most common examples:
- It will not care about the other neighbors and will always listen its music at the highest volume possible
- It will threw the garbage directly out of his/her window, preferably in the front of the main entrance in the common building
The so-called common feeling of belonging to "something" as I found expressed in some nostalgic writing, with the example of the youth gatherings was faked: the people gathered there found a reason and a way to spend time together, but it was not the aim they were brought to. The aim was, of course, propaganda and indoctrination. The rest is thinking by substitution.
Cheep and affordable products? Subnutrition and products of low quality, not for everybody, not anytime.
Holidays for everybody at low costs? In bad quality conditions and with the required company and the desired destination. Yes, indeed, it was possible to have at least three weeks out of the town, but in the same places, and with the same people and in precarious conditions.
Cultural opportunities, books at low prices? Another bad joke, because in fact the whole cultural production, in all the Central and Eastern European countries was under the strict control of the party and security system. It was not freedom of thought. Nowhere.
It is anything to be nostalgic about?
The Alternative Textbooks in Romania: Live from the Prison
Shortly: the authors - mostly young historians from Cluj - tried to present in a very systematic and synthetic way the historical moment, focusing more on the history of the present time. One important detail, when we are talking about textbooks in Romania: due to the communist legacy of propaganda, many of the texts for the school use were/and in some cases still are extremely rich in information, data, details, chronology. You don't have the opportunity to think too much by yourself, because you might learn thousand of data about reigns and historical periods. This new texbook was relatively free in this respect and, as the authors themselves explained, it was tailored to answer the preoccupation and the cultural sources of the nowadays Romanian teens.
The scandal started after, one day, the Romanian MP Sergiu Nicolaescu, film director, well known for his movies with heavy historical bias, extremely successful during communism. He took the floor and protested against the way in which the history of Romania is presented in those handbooks, the short space alloted for the moments considered, in his opinion, very important for the historical evolution, as the unification moments, the successful wars etc. At the end of his intervention, he recommended that such a textbook deserves to be publicly burned. Sounds familiar? Not too, for the Romanian MPs who listened indifferently.
From this moment on, the scandal was getting bigger and bigger. The nationalist parties united against the Ministry of Education, the government, the Hungarians, the historians - one of the historians, Sorin Mitu, whose workings haven't been discussed before this public undeserved exposure, is married with an ethnic Hungarian - the World Bank, the European Union and everything was different of speakers. Some of the young historians supported the idea of an alternative presentation of history and a couple of discussions were held, but the "anti" noise was so big, than hardly a professional point of view was heared. The Romanian Academy and a couple of historians from the History Chair of the University expressed their disagreement with creating alternative narratives of the national history and considered the textbook not meeting high standards - nobody pretended it is perfect, it was, we might remember, the first such an alternative textbook after more than 60 years - asking equaly moderation in addressing the issue in the media.
But, the media was continuing the accusations against - hardly to specifically mention who was the target, as nobody was considered clean in this "scandal". The highest point of this tensions was an inquiry made in a Romanian prison: the inmates were asked what do they think about the way in which the national history is presented in those alternative textbooks. Do they consider fair and normal such an approach? Of course, they disagreed.
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Greeks and their myths
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
What was wrong?
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Bad Side of the Internet in Human Sciences Research
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Retiring Intellectual
And an appreciation he made, referring to the difficulty to define intellectuals:
Definition of intellectual is sharpened by the existence of intellectuals in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union who used, or still use, the tools and trainings associated with intelligentsia in the science of anti-intellectual values. Are they really intellectuals?
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The Power of the Powerless
For me, what it defines very well the former communist societies:
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsified the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
OSCE media freedom representative expresses concern about Lithuanian public information law, welcomes authorities' co-operation on improving it
OSCE launches video contest on civil society to mark anniversary of fall of Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain
Statement by OSCE Minorities Commissioner on Slovakia's State Language Act
Sunday, August 30, 2009
When the memories of the past
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Unpleasant truth
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Cultural patrimony, reconsideration of the past and history
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
European cities ask EU
Monday, August 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Education and peace treaties
The writer's heart, in exile
The misleading names of post-communist parties
Among its "aims":
- Capital punishment for those convicted of terrorism, premeditated murder, and other serious crimes;
- The abolition of "non-traditional" and "fanatic" religious sects in Russia;
- Control of all agricultural land by the state
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Remembering
Multicultural stages
Friday, August 14, 2009
We love aliens
Sommer time
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Saving the cultures, on-line
Eastern Europe's Muppies
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Who are the Uighurs?
When East meets West
New violences against Roma in Hungary
There are here two problems.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
A short history of the post-war archives in Romania
Jewish Assimilation in Hungary
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Education and Islam
The Case of the Missing Russian Crime Novel
Monday, August 3, 2009
The new elites, by themselves- The German case
Sunday, August 2, 2009
How to Write?
The never ending battle with the past
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Germany, 20 years after
Thursday, July 23, 2009
OSCE minorities commissioner discusses amendments to Slovakia's language law
For PDF attachments or links to sources of further information, please visit: http://www.osce.org/item/38979.html
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Richard P. Feynman, on scientific freedom and responsibility
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Belfast
Friday, June 19, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Minorities and the economic crisis. The Hungarian case
"The government has duties and moral obligations to Hungarians living beyond the borders which it has to fulfill even under difficult circumstances", said the Hungarian prime-minister, Gordon Bajnai, on the occasion of a meeting with Hungarian representatives from Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. In the same time, the new 41 year-old billionaire prime-minister should fight the economic crisis and the worrying rise of the extreme right.
Kosovo minorities leave, claiming discrimination
The refusal of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership to ensure minority rights is driving out many non-Serb minorities, a new human rights report says.
The London-based Minority Rights Group International (MRG) says exclusion from political and social life and discrimination are forcing ethnic Bosniaks, Turks, Roma, Croats, Gorani, Ashkali Egyptians and even some Serbs out of Kosovo.
"Together with a bad economy, these conditions mean that many members of minority communities are now leaving the new Kosovo state altogether," MRG concludes.
Integration "a fantasy"
Serbia still regards Kosovo as part of its historic heartland and has asked the International Court of Justice in The Hague to rule on the legality of its secession. Serb President Boris Tadic, ahead of a visit to France on Wednesday, told the French daily Le Figaro that Serbia would "never recognize" the unilateral independence of Kosovo.
Kosovo's independence has only been recognized by 60 of the world's 200 countries.
Muslims in Europe
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
On-line research
Street Life
It does all of this simply by probing very, very deeply into the world of a small group of men, most of whom are black, that has adopted a stretch of sidewalk in Greenwich Village. There, depending on their proclivities and ambitions, they sell books, magazines, or secondhand goods, or guard the tables or spaces of those who sell, or panhandle, or in some cases, sleep. These are men, one of whom, Hakim Hasan, writes in an afterword to Sidewalk, whose identities "are hidden in public space."
The term "broken window" comes from a theory originally advanced by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling and adopted by elected officials and police chiefs across the country---that to leave behaviors like minor vandalism unchecked leads to more serious crime. Duneier points out that the theory has subsequently been broadened to refer to social behaviors like panhandling.
He continues: "The men working on Sixth Avenue may be viewed as broken windows, but this research shows that most of them have actually become public characters who create a set of expectations, for one another and strangers (including the criminal element---as, indeed, many of them once were), that Œsomeone cares' and that they should strive to live better lives."
Amy Waldman is a reporter for The New York Times
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Economic crisis sharpens need for effective migration management, say OSCE Forum participants
OSCE Press Release
May 18
Policymakers and high-level experts are in Athens to discuss effective labour migration management at the OSCE Economic and Environmental Forum which started today against the backdrop of the global economic and financial crisis.
In her keynote address, the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, urged OSCE states to further increase co-operation on migration issues and develop comprehensive and effective policy frameworks.
"We have all witnessed the increasing trends of migration as an effect of globalization. The recent developments of the financial and economic crisis complicate the problem and its multifaceted character calls for a more focused and co-ordinated approach as a response of the international community," she said.
"Migration issues are being discussed nationally and regionally, as well as at the international level, and we should start from the understanding that all actors eventually face common challenges and therefore we should all explore, together, possibilities for policy responses."
The three-day meeting will focus on the development impact of migration and gender-sensitive approaches in migration related policy making. The Forum will also review OSCE commitments in the economic and environmental dimension focusing on migration, and identify possible follow-up OSCE activities in that field.
OSCE Secretary General Marc Perrin de Brichambaut emphasized the need to safeguard the rights of migrants in the face of the economic crisis.
"In troubled times, it is vital that we communicate clearly about the positive contribution that migrants make to our societies and also that we counter firmly any rise of xenophobia or scapegoating of migrant workers. Violations of human rights and threats to social cohesion cannot be accepted or ignored. These are our starting points," he said.
Goran Svilanovic, the Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities, said it was important to recognize the benefits of migration to both countries of origin and destination.
"Migratory flows do have significant positive effects on national economies. Some of the wealthiest countries in the world have the highest proportion of immigrant workers, who, in fact do not substitute national workforce, but complement it. On the other hand, origin countries can benefit from remittances and acquired skills and knowledge of their returning migrants," he said.
According to the International Labour Office, regional migrant remittances in the OSCE area amounted to some 50 billion dollars in 2007.
The Athens meeting concludes the 17th OSCE Economic and Environmental Forum and builds on the recommendations and findings of two preparatory conferences and the first part of the Forum, which took place in Vienna in January.
For PDF attachments or links to sources of further information, please visit: http://www.osce.org/item/37691.html
Monday, May 18, 2009
Triumph and tragedy mark 60 years of German sport
DPA May 18 | ||
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Panel Seeks Solutions To Albanian-Serb Divide In Kosovo
Nikola Krastev
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
April 27
Three panels were brought together by the U.S.-based Association for the Studies of Nationalities to examine the challenges facing Kosovo one year after it declared independence from Serbia.
But as the debates intensified, it because clear there were no simple answers.
Panelists had sharp disagreements about the best way for Pristina to deal with its sizable Serbian majority in Kosovo's north, the majority of whom remain deeply loyal to Belgrade.
Some discussion participants suggested a federalist system of government might prove the best fit for Kosovo.
Nebojsa Vladislavjevic, a Serbian analyst who has written extensively on Kosovo, suggested a model close to the 1995 Dayton accord that divided power between Bosnia's Serbs, Croats, and Muslims might bring lasting peace to Kosovo's Serbs and Albanians.
"You need substantial territorial solutions, very radical territorial autonomy for a minority which is essentially under existential threat. And you also need some sort of overlapping sovereignties," Vladislavjevic said.
"That's why I said that the Bosnian-Dayton model is applicable to the Kosovo conflict as it stands right now, because it will provide security to the minority, self-rule, and also extensive links with Serbia. And at the same time you will have power-sharing between the Serbian and Albanian entities."
Others suggested a formal partition was a more practical solution. That would reunite northern Kosovo, where Serbs make up 90 percent of the population, with Serbia proper -- and leave the remaining territory as an undisputed, independent state that even Belgrade would willingly recognize.
But Shinasi Rama, a Kosovo expert and professor of political science at New York University, said such a partition could prove destablizing to the entire Balkan Peninsula, still grappling with the ethnic divisions resulting from the Yugoslav breakup.
While Kosovar Serbs have a natural patron in their fellow Serbs in Belgrade, Kosovar Albanians are far less reliant on their ethnic kin in Albania. A formal partition, Rama said, could hand the Serbs an unfair advantage.
"Serbs [in Kosovo] are being used by Belgrade because they are fully funded, financially supported, structurally organized," Rama said. "The Serbian elite provides leadership to them at the local level, etc. So, in a sense they see themselves as Serbs living in Kosovo."
Social Collapse
Adding to Kosovo's ethnic tensions is its rampant poverty. Unemployment hovers at a staggering 45 percent, suicide rates and criminal activity are rising, and corruption is widespread. Social services like garbage collection are largely defunct, leaving growing piles of refuse piling alongside village roads.
Hundreds of Albanians have had their electricity cut off during the past year for failing to pay their utility bills. But Kosovar authorities have been far more reluctant to cut off services to delinquent Serbian consumers, some of whom have reportedly gone years without paying for electricity.
In another notorious case, ethnic Serbs employed by Kosovo's police force failed to show up for work for over a year but continued to receive their salaries of 200 euros ($260) a month.
Such a situation, said Anna Di Lellio, a sociologist and journalist who has worked for years as a UN consultant in Kosovo, has left many Kosovar Albanians with a sense of deep distrust toward the central government in Pristina.
Anytime the majority feels the minority is enjoying special privilege, Di Lellio said, it's dangerous. "If a minority is not happy, we may solve the problem. But if the majority is not happy, it becomes dangerous for the minority," she said.
"So, actually my concern is for the Serb minority; that they not be presented as special, privileged. Nobody in Kosovo can not show up for work for a year and still receive a salary. But Serbs can do it, and these [Albanian] guys are going to think that they are privileged," Di Lellio. "But they're not. I'm not saying that."
See also:
Joe Biden started the Balkan tour
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Le bonheur en Allemagne?
About stereotypes and how it is necessary to look into reality in order to overcome them:
"Chaque peuple revendique la vertu dont il est en vérité le plus dépourvu. Il en va ainsi du fair-play anglais, du sens de l'honneur espagnol, de la propreté hollandaise et de la prétendue joie de vivre méditerranéenne.
As for France:
"Ils revendiquent l'esprit, la légéreté, la finesse, l'ironie, bref toutes les qualités qu'on trouve chez Jean Paul, Holderlin, Goethe, Heine, les petits chateaux baroques et la musique de Mozart et de Schubert. (...) En vérité, le Francais esf un fier-à-bras dont l'ambition est toujours d'éclipser le reste de l'humanité. Ses écrivains sont des encyclopédistes qui prétendent faire entrer la totalité du savoir et du monde dans une oeuvre massive, énorme, définitive. Faire en sorte qu'il ne reste plus rien à écrire après eux". (:51)
Rock against/with communists, in DDR
Klaus-Renft-Combo band was created in 1958, in Leipzig, then in Eastern Germany. For a while, they supported communist party politics - SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) - with songs as "Chilean Metal" or "That's How Neruda died Too". But, songs like "Doubts" and "The Rock Ballad of Little Otto" criticized the Wall and contributed to the disbanding of the group and the emigration of its members to the Federal Republic. (Photo: concert from May 7, 2009, in Alexanderplatz, on the occasion of the events celebrating 20 years from the the fall of the Berlin Wall)
More luckier, the Pudhys, enjoyed the favors of the communist regime. Considered as "The Beatles of DDR" (in comparison with the "Rolling Stones" - the bad boys from Renft), they played until the end of the regime the role of exemplary socialists. Peter Meyer, the leader of the band, used to say: "We aren't the party types. We prefer drinking milk and cola over alcohol". This non-conflictual attitude brought them lots of advantages. In the 70s-80s, they sold over 16 million records, almost one for each citizen of the DDR, were rewarded with state honors, television and film contracts and toured constantly the Eastern block. The later STASI records revealed later (August 1993) that it was a price - as usual - for such advantages. Peter Meyer had provided between 1973-1989, as Stasi informant (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) information about artists and media personalities.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
In the heart of Java
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EVERY year Indonesia enjoys a national holiday for nyepi, the Hindu day of silence, which this year fell on March 26th. It is not a holiday in India, Hinduism’s homeland. Similarly, in Bayu, once part of one of the last Hindu kingdoms in East Java to be conquered and converted to Islam, villagers welcome the Ramadan fast with a feast, scandalising some of the clerics.
Indonesian religion is “syncretic”, a unique confection, and nowhere more so than in Java, much the most populous island in much the most populous Muslim nation on earth. This fascinating and moving book describes what “syncretism” means in daily life. The author, Andrew Beatty, an anthropologist, spent two periods in Bayu in the 1990s, with his young family. As he documented local customs and rituals, he became drawn into its cultural conflict: between “Javanism” (the pre-Islamic mystical tradition) and orthodox Islam.
Mr Beatty describes the mystics’ ceremonies with sympathy: the interment of the afterbirth of a baby girl by her father, dressed and made up as a woman for the purpose; the night-long dramas finishing with the appearance of a were-tiger, the neighbourhood spirit; the seblang, a “fertility rite at which a nubile girl went into a trance and channelled local spirits”.
The “shadow” of the title is that of encroaching Islamist orthodoxy. A religious teacher seeks out the author as a fellow educated man, assuming he must be on the side of modernisation, since “Islamisation and progress were the same thing”. Politicians in Islamist parties in Jakarta make the same assumption. Women go to university, learn the proper way to do things and start wearing headscarves, chiding their mothers for being backward.
When the first woman in Bayu covers her head, during the author’s first stay, her foster mother “could not bear to look at her”. By the time Mr Beatty returns for a second stay, orthodoxy is on the march. He becomes embroiled in a dispute about the insomnia-inducing amplification of sermons from the local prayer house. One night the speakers blare out a preacher’s rant about the need for holy war.
It is tempting to see this depressing scene as the book’s conclusion: the Javanese idyll smashed by the incursions of alien extremism. But that hints at one of the book’s two frustrations: it is not the conclusion. Well-written, with vivid characters, “A Shadow Falls” is as enthralling as a novel. And like a good novel, it poses the question: what happened next? At the time, 1997, Indonesia was in turmoil, on the brink of economic meltdown and the end of the Suharto dictatorship. East Java suffered a wave of mysterious killings. After Suharto, there was an explosion of Islamist parties. Most have now moved firmly into the mainstream. What the author calls “the ebb and flow of orthodoxy” moves both ways. The reader longs to know what Bayu is like today.
The second frustration is shared by all books on modern Indonesia: its failure to explain a terrible paradox. The author depicts Java as almost an ideal society “of social harmony, empathy and gentleness”. Yet, a generation earlier, as Suharto came to power, Indonesia suffered a terrible peacetime slaughter when at least 500,000 people were killed. The author meets a man who ferried prisoners to their deaths in the back of a lorry. They were tipped over a cliff, and sometimes doused with petrol and set alight. “You could see them twitching in the ravine below.” Bayu was home to both death-squad veterans and the families of their victims. Darker than the shadow of a putative future of Islamic orthodoxy is a bloody past that is both unexpiated and unexplained.
By Andrew Beatty.
Faber and Faber; 336 pages; £12.99
Monday, April 27, 2009
Hungary: Police ups reward for information on Roma crime
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MTI April 25 Hungary's national police chief told MTI on Saturday that he had increased the reward for information leading to the perpetrators of recent attacks against the Roma to 50 million forints. | ||
Jozsef Bencze said the attacks committed against Roma in Nagycsecs, Tatarszentgyorgy and Tiszalok are connected and the perpetrators are believed to belong to the same circle. Instead of the 10 million forints reward that police offered in each of the cases, 50 million forints will be given to anyone supplying information that will lead to the perpetrators, he added. Bencze noted that two people were killed in Nagycsecs last November and a father and his five-year old son were shot dead in Tatarszentgyorgy in February. In the most recent attack, a Roma man was shot dead on Wednesday. The attackers left behind various traces, including two DNA samples, but these have not been found in the criminal registry, Bencze said. A team of 70 police officers are involved in the investigation, including highly experienced criminal experts, he added. Police have so far investigated as many as 10,000 people who were in the vicinity of the incidents, including 2,000 who were questioned, Bencze said. Hungarian police has also received much useful help from international experts in drawing up the suspects' profile, he added Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai said that the government will do all it can to assist the police and create law and order so that no one should have to live in fear in Hungary. He said that the killing of a Roma citizen in Tiszalok was part of a series of shameful acts, and amounted to an offense against the whole of the Hungarian Republic. |