Riot Shields, Voodoo Economics...

In Chukhureti, one of the oldest quarters of Tbilisi, the dodgy district around the train station, electioneering is on the agenda. A member of the Unified Opposition, a coalition of nine different opposition party, is said to come round the corner any moment now and talk to his prospective voters. A police man is already in position, surveying the street. Another one ambles over non-chalantly to join him. People from the neighbourhood have trickled in and are waiting. I chat to the crowd, trying to get a general idea of what people are expecting from the following brief presentation in particular, and the elections in general. So far it seemed to me, people were unhappy with the status quo because of high taxes, and the unpopular, strict methods of enforcing their payments. Now I get to hear the wildest stories of police men dealing in drugs and the extrajudicial executions of children. Forgive me if I hesitate to take these stories at face value, but I have only been in the country for three weeks, and have thitherto been subject only to the Western digested press versions of what's going on in this country.

Then, finally, a young man walks over, energetically shaking hands with everyone he can grab from the flock of people along the side-walk. He is dressed entirely in black,ressembling a Protestant priest to my eyes in that only a spanking white collar breaks the arrangement, neatly tucked out over his slightly washed-out sweater. The talk begins.
"What is he saying?", I ask the woman next to me, hoping for a translation. "He is talking about the bad state the pension system is in, that parents of handicapped children now receive nothing from the state. And that all this will change when the opposition is elected", she explains to me in Russian. She waves him over, and he grants a minute for an interview with the foreign journalist, lays his arm over my shoulder and walks away a few steps from the crowd. "What were you talking about? What is your party's program?" I ask, laconically. "We must bring down this criminal government, if this will not happen through democratic elections, there will be another revolution!", out spurts the propaganda. "So, what in particular is your criticism of the current government?" I nod at his winding explanations, and although the word "privatization", as I mumble in comprehension, goes not understood, that seems to be what he is aiming at. "What is the name of your party? Do you consider yourself to be left-wing or right-wing?" I eventually conclude with one of my naive, Western queries. He answers: "Excuse-me, but that is a non-sense question. First we must make the courts independent, we must decentralize power in this country, then we can speak of a Left, or a Right!" He soon returns to spread his word among the multitude. Women dominate the scene, peppering him with questions, while the gathered men stand stoically in the back. On scrutinizing the crowd I discern the hint of an interested mien on one or two of the assembled faces there in the background. In typical Caucasian fashion the colloquy soon gets out of hand and degenerates into several pairs of people taking turns shouting at each other, their faces lit up with the fever of argument.
As if it hadn't been possible to get more Georgian still, it all came to a natural end when a scuffle between two drunks at the end of the street attracted the general attention and the crowd dispersed in favour of watching that spectacle, children running down the street shouting "Chkhuby! Chkhuby!" (Fight! Fight!).

Earlier version also published at the Georgia Messenger

Dreams are only surrogates, or riddles of the past...

At night I dreamed I was riding a gigantic fairy tale dragonfly with multi-coloured wings and a furry blue face out of which large immobile eyes the colour of polished rosewood peered into the world. Like being airlifting, we were vertically flying up the iridescent surface of a waterfall that in breadth seemed to stretch for a mile. At the beginning I kept thinking we must swoop over the edge and enter a river landscape any second now, but the distance to the white spume and the roar of the water breaking at the rocks on the ground kept growing, and we kept flying higher and higher to dizzying, frightening heights. I wanted to reach the top so badly, but the higher we flew, the more scared I got at the same time. I woke up feeling dejected, feeling I will never reach my goals, will never live up to any of the challenges that enter my life.
I woke up feeling I wanted to set myself free from a great great height.

A few hours later, I tell this dream to Mtvarisa, the girl at the internet cafe whom I have begun to befriend over the fancy peach and mango tea I share with her. "Hmm, doesn't that make you want to live?" she smiles when she sniffs my tea-packages before pouring hot water over them.
Mtvarisa is Mingrelian, and originally from Abkhazia, the war-torn non-nation in North-Western Georgia that once was a holiday paradise for Soviet nomenclatura, but which now, after tides and tides of "internally displaced refugees" have drained it of its life-blood, has become a practically deserted stripe of land, one of the emptiest places in the world. Russian tour groups from Sochi can from time to time be seen wandering on its empty beaches, wistfully searching for the glory of days past in the ravaged beauty of the present.

Mtvarisa's forefathers were invited to settle on the marshland along its shoreline as part of Stalin's larger plan to create an agricultural belt of citrus and tea plantations along the Soviet Union's Black Sea coast, when Abkhazia was first lured into integration into the USSR in the 1930's. Ethnic Abkhazians had been in the minority on their land even before those days, ever since the Muhajir, the great, forced exodus of Caucasian Muslims into Ottoman Turkey, when Russia conquered the region, piece by piece, through a strategy of "divide and rule". Mtvarisa is Mingrelian, and considers Abkhazia, as part of Georgia, her homeland: “You can't imagine how beautiful Sukhumi was, it was paradise on earth”, she has previously said to me, “I so long to be back there again!” Because her brother fought on the side of the Georgians in the war, and records are kept of all surnames, it is impossible for her to even visit her former home city. Only through hear-say Mtvarisa's family found out that their three large houses had been sold and re-sold already three times.

Her family is one of artists. When the war broke out, Mtvarisa was a student at the musical academy, training to become an operatic singer; her father is a professional dancer, who performed Georgian traditional dances at the theatre in Sukhumi back in the day. And still, they haven't recovered their lives, they still only fight to survive, she lets me understand through side-remarks that slip into conversation ("Главное -бороться за жизнь").
In September 1993, when the capital Sukhumi, Mtvarisa's birthplace and home city, was sieged by the Georgian army and virtually razed to the ground in the fighting between the two sides in only 11 days, her entire family had to flee, becoming part of the statistics that lists 250 000 Georgians as internally displaced refugees from that short period of time. "We came to Tibilisi. For 13 years we had to live in a hotel, eight people in one room; can you imagine? I still need Valerian to go to sleep at all." She has told me in detail what she saw happening in Sukhumi and she is lucky to have got out alive. In a mass migration of refugees tragically reminding the Iraqi Kurds' flight into their mountains some 3 years earlier, Mtvarisa and her family, with their belongings bound up in bundles of bedsheets, joint the long lines of hikers that made their way up devious mountain paths obstructed by several metres deep snow, and fled into what Thomas Goltz named the vertical world of Svaneti.“I am 32, but because of what I’ve lived, I feel like I am a centenarian.”


"I, too, saw a dream last night", she now tells me, "it is a recurrent dream I have every week or so. I always dream, I fly home, to Abkhazia. I am flying high in the sky, with my arms spread out as wings. It is night time, but on the ground I can discern the dark-green hills, the meandering rivers and streams of my homeland and I rejoice at seeing it all again. Because it is a dream the snow-covered mountain tops' silvery glow in the distance is brighter than the moonlight itself. As I fly over my country, and I approach the coast, the capital, I get near my house. I can descry the outline of each leaf of the walnut tree in our back-garden, their arteries are translucent and their surfaces gleaming, as if waxed.
But always the same thing happens: Just as I approach my house, they shoot me down with a sling –you know a sling, that boy’s plaything- they shoot me down with it like a bird. They hit me at the neck, always at the neck, I feel a tendon snap as my head is being flung back, I feel the vertebrae of my neck crack, feel a cool splash of blood on my face, and then I spiral downward, taken over by an overwhelming emotion of helplessness. As I find myself on the ground, they surround me, a group of soldiers with their guns. I cry and I beseech them to let me get up on my knees. I want to sing to god. Just as I struggle to straighten myself up, place my hands on my knees and lift my voice - they kill me.”

Mosul

"When Saddam Hussein was in power, Iraq was paradise. A paradise for everyone in it, I swear to you", the boy in the hotel in Dohuk tells me. His name is Moayed. The day before yesterday, he also told me that he sent out 300 text messages in support of the Iraqi girl on the Arabic version of Pop Idol, so in some cases I allow myself a certain reserve in taking his views entirely seriously. The rest of his story is worth a listen though: "I am a new immigrant here. I used to work in the hospital in Mosul. That was when the 101st Airborne was still there. You don't know about the 101 Division? We know. That's for sure.” The French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique briefly analyzed the situation in Mosul in a way as to put precisely the 101st Airborne’s policies at the centre of the reasons for the outbreak of war there. They were one of the sole critics of the otherwise generally accepted version that General Petraeus knew exactly what he was doing in getting involved so intensively with the Sunni majority in that place: “When they left, piece by piece, hell started to break loose. I had to leave my job at the hospital, it became too dangerous. I saw collegues of mine die. My darling died, too."
Moayed shows me the picture of his dead girl-friend which he keeps in his wallet, showing a kindly smiling face neatly framed by a shiny grey headscarf. "Have you seen the US army in Mazi market? They don't even carry a gun here. In Mosul they go to the supermarket in bullet-proof vests carrying machine guns behind their shields. But they still get blown up."

Immediately after the US invasion in March 2003, Kurdish peshmerga, acting according to a long-formulated plan, captured Mosul and Kerkuk. Although they never managed to assert their control fully, they strove to integrate both cities into the autonomous region of Kurdistan. "It is preposterous the Kurds claim Mosul now. Arabs make up 60% of the population in Mosul and we always used to have a certain nationalist pride in that place. We felt we were the last Arab outpost, the last Arab bastion in the North", a Sunnite lady once said to me.
Under the former regime Mosul indeed had been a nationalist centre of support for Saddam, a large source of military recruits and other high officials. It thus was one of the places in Iraq where resistance was most likely to be expected. Only General Petraeus’ sound policies kept it at bay.

The turning point for Mosul came in November 2004 when U.S. troops (and media coverage) focused on the siege of Fallujah. The fact that US troops were withdrawn from it to fight in the battle further south was astutely exploited by fundamentalist groups like Ansar al-Islam which now overtook the city.

Even though Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Moslawi Archbishop , was said to be respected by everyone in the Christian community and local Muslim clerics alike, his kidnapping and killing last month does not seem unsurprising in the light of the stories I heard from local Christians about what Mosul was like in the past; that even as far back as the 1950s, a Christian would have never dared to walk through a Sunni Arab quarter on his way to work for the fear of being welcomed by a hail of stones. The modern day “insurgents” of course display more of a mafia-like character than anything else, since Sunni Muslims endure the same daily risks of being killed or kidnapped if they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
From the beginning of the US occupation of Iraq, multi-ethnic institutions such as hospitals and universities were singled out for targeting by insurgents. This is best illustrated by the examples of Moayed, the former nurse, although a Sunni Arab himself, who now has to work as a hotel clerk in peaceful Dohuk, or Hiwa, the young lad who runs the narguilé shop down the road where I wile away my evenings. Hiwa used to be a hard-studying undergraduate in informatics, but nowadays he has taken to being stoned from about 9 A.M. every day, lamenting the war, desperate to drown out the hopes he once had to take up his studies again.

Places like Hiwa’s, small saloons to smoke hookah pipes, abound in Dohuk; places to consume alcohol however are rare. So sometimes I hang out in Hotel Jihan, Dohuk’s only five star hotel that has a public bar. The security guard lets me through the gate that you have to pass to get behind the several metres high wall surrounding the building with a big smile, “Ameriki? Fermo, Fermo!” –“You’re American? Just go ahead!”. I’m not American, but he does not have to know that. Contrarily, I am here to meet some Americans. Most of the time the bright, large lobby is fairly empty, but sometimes it is peopled with soldiers having come back from their missions in the south, drinking their day away, bored enough to share their lives with whomever sits down to have a beer with them. And so I get to hear some of their observations.
Mosul may well have been feted as the paradigm of well-implemented stabilising policies in the beginning, but the situation has now reversed itself. While the rest of Iraq has undergone a slight transformation to the better, those who were stationed Mosul attest that the war rages on unabated there, and that the place feels most like what Baghdad and Ramadi felt like a year ago.

Also published here: http://www.allvoices.com/
(If their site weren't sop damn slow I could link to the exact article but you can read it here anyway so what the heck)

Rus-Turan

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is the screamingly funny kind of political persona that probably only Russia can spawn. He has been called an ''eccentric'' by the BBC, and ‘the poster boy of paradox and scandal’ by the Moscow Times, but these are certainly among the milder epithets accorded to him.
This ultra-nationalist who has the kind of gift of the gab that at least at some points in the past drew the masses, is not one to shy away from trouble. Persona non grata in his country of birth Kazakhstan for his disparaging statements about the Kazakh people, he is notorious for hurling contumely at his opponents and even getting into not infrequent fist fights with them. He is responsible for such astute political analyses as ‘"Being an MP is not a profession; it's a form of political activity," or his finding that Condoleeza Rice needs to get laid as a response to her criticism of Russia’s foreign policy.
Yesterday he visited Turkey's capital, adding a pinch of spice to the NATO meetings.

As easily laughed at a personality as Zhirinovsky is, it seems that as the Kreml's emissary in Ankara he was able to demonstrate some of the skill that once made him a top player in Russia, hitting exactly the nerve of those Turks who are disenchanted with the EU process.

In line with Putin’s political direction which over the past couple of years has become more and more akin to the path taken during Soviet times, pushing for alliances according to a global dichotomy that opposes Russia to the US, Zhirinovsky exploited the low US-Turkish relations are heading into again and tried to woo Turkey into "changing camps".

During his talk he not only struck out against the U.S., but also against other allies of Turkey, including NATO itself : ‘Nothing of NATO ‘s former influence or power persists. NATO cannot even protect itself anymore, so how will it protect Turkey?’ As an alternative he pledged Russia would always ''stand by Turkey's side''. Elaborating on Turkey’s and Russia’s long history as neighbours and ‘buddies’ he rounded off this promise with the following proposition: ‘Russia, Turkey and Iran should stand shoulder to shoulder and conjointly create ‘Rusturan’!’

He added that ‘once we have founded Rusturan, we will overcome problems such as the Kurdish question side by side.’ Here Zhirinovsky’s wording subtly revealed his fascist streak, since this announcement could be seen as a direct response to the long address that Turkey’s deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek had delivered to the NATO delegates in which he complained that Western members of the organisation not only failed to live up to the promises that had been made to Turkey in fighting the PKK, but even in various ways abetted this organisation classified as terrorist by most of them.

When the dance of the tea leaves settles...

Gingerly, with my fingertips, I pick up one plump little sugar cube after the other and drop them into my tulip-shaped tea glass, watch as piece by piece they add up to form a shaky tower at the bottom. I wait as the dark red tea that shrouds my sight of them eats away at their corners and makes my neatly assembled tower crumble, reducing it to pure glitter.
The brim of the tea glass emits its usual delicate melody when I stir my silver spoon and as the piping-hot bitter-sweet brew runs down my throat, I feel right back at home in Turkey.

I am chatting with an old acquaintance from Ankara in the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre near Taksim Square in Istanbul. The fact that this Kurdish Cultural Centre is named so equivocatingly may be a relic from 20 years ago when the use of the word 'Kurd' was officially prohibited. Still today not few Turks positively flinch when they come across it. Kurdish new year celebrations just went over relatively peacefully though and other news have gripped the country:

The cultural centre's large windows open a view onto Istanbul's largest shop-lined highstreet, Istiklal avenue. Our window directly faces two large and beautiful residential houses on the other side. Between them runs a narrow alleyway at the end of which the entrance to the office building of the TV station Ulusal Kanal is seen. This alleyway, and indeed Istiklal avenue itself, is obstructed by scores of police cars between which the usual crowd of pedestrians are left to weave their way. The police are conducting a raid on the TV channel's head quarters because of the so-called Ergenekon scandal which is right now shaking up the Turkish political landscape.

Ergenekon is the name of a shady underground organisation whose plans for a 2009 coup d'etat in 2009 have just been thwarted. Apart from being assumed of being intimately interwoven with the almost mythical Turkish 'deep state' forces, it is also linked to the military and state bureaucracy. For the taste of some, too many members of the political opposition went to jail during the inquiry into this affair. And so, according to different view points, the government's investigation into Ergenekon was either the last straw that broke the camel's back, or, in the eyes of others, the recent law suit filed against the AKP by the Constitutional Court is simply an effort in obstructing investigations in the Ergenekon case.

If this law suit goes through, it only proves what observant outsiders take for granted any way: that Turkey is nothing but a military dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. Ümit, my interlocutor at this tea table, laconically analyses the situation in the following way: 'In the 70's the same members were part of a party called the MSP which finally got closed down with the 1981 putsch. They reformed in the Eighties as the Refah party; and not much later they got closed down again for being anti-constitutional. Now it happens all over again to the AK. Simply, nothing much has changed in Turkey. '

Despite this rather pessimistic perspective I have heard another, much contrary, even radically fresh opinion: Eventually the main beneficiary of this 'scandal' may turn out to be the AKP itself. Why bother putting through reforms after all, if they'll be able to portray themselves in the glorious light as 'defenders of democracy'? They are very well placed to argue their way out of the whole thing by sounding off about democracy, comfortably resting on the 46% majority they won in the last elections -the sort of results which could make almost any Western European governing party green with envy.

And of course this is only the latest in a row of scandals -the past months were pregnant with them. Such a steady flow of dirty linen certainly helps divert the public's gaze from the issues that are supposed to matter this year: Economic progress, and advancing with the EU accesion.

I blog here now also: allvoices.com

The veil

I don't really presume there is anything new I can say on this old hat of a topic. But last night I assisted a podium discussion about UK identity politics and it was a lady called Claire Fox who, in my opinion, said the most memorable, funny and thought-inspiring thing [I paraphrase]:

"[...]When we talk to these young, Asian-originated, second-generation Muslim women with the thick Brummy accents under their veils why they choose this attire, the answer does not come in the guise of a pious devotion to the prescriptions of an ancient text, but as an agressive assertion of their freedom of choice: "Who are you to tell me what to wear?". These girls are claiming their individuality, not bowing to a hoary set of rules. In fact these statements have more in common with 70's feminist tracts rather than the Koran.

Their mothers, by the way, are outraged.

As a teenager when I went through that phase, I was posturing as a punk, shaved mysef a mowhawk, made it a point of drinking in public, clamouring for attention, but no one paid me any. Yet these girls, they get invited to TV shows, they are talked about in newspaper columns, they even appear on the cover of magazines. It is safe to say that in terms of teenage rebellion they are doing pretty damn well!"

Ludwigshafen and Erdogan in Germany -a summary

Antifa Ludwigshafen reported the town is a particular stronghold of the German extreme right with racist graffitis all over, and that a few years ago only there even was a Neo-Nazi café in the very same building that burnt down last week. And yet certainly the first claim I heard when the event was reported was a firm "It was not a hate inspired crime" by the German media, which some of them have been insisting on even though conclusive evidence apparently still has not been found.

In a climate where claims as peremptory as they were overhasty had been promulgated by the press (both German and Turkish), Erdogan's appearance was a neat political move that helped pour oil over troubled waters. And it was in front of a crowd of 20,000 cheering fans that Erdogan pronounced that sentence that by now has become famous, "Assimilation is a crime against humanity".
Actually, the fact that he had come and spoken comfort to the disconcerted masses was interpreted by some to be indicative of progress in and of itself; the victims were Alevites, and from the South-Eastern town Gazi Antep after all. And yet it was no wonder that it was an Alevite representative in Germany who worked himself up in a fuzz calling Erdogan’s speech "barefaced" and “outrageous”. He elaborated with the words "He comes here playing the role of the great democrat, but he didn't even do his homework." I don't really have to point out the ironies of Erdogan's pronouncement, do I? If I was in jesting mood, I might say that he seemed to be having a little tongue-in-cheek fun up there.

The day after the speech, the newspaper "taz" headlined "Germany's new Minister of Integration" next to a picture of Erdogan against the backdrop of a German flag on their front-page. His speech had not been translated (except for journalists), and even the advertisments had been almost exclusively in Turkish. To aid integration, Erdogan had made the suggestion, Germany should establish Turkish-medium primary and highschools. It is a observation anchored in learning theory that you cannot learn a second language well without knowing your first one perfectly; and it is a real problem that a large part of Turkish immigrants know neither German NOR Turkish very well. However, the arguments against it are obvious. It is hardly in Germany's (or the immigrants') interest to establish Turkish-medium schools, with teachers ”flown in from Turkey", as Erdogan suggested, and thereby create parallel societies. The newspapers have been full with discussions about this, but I must say the controversy to me seems like a lot of hot air for nothing. I’d simply recommend heads of state think before they talk next time around.

Among the heaps of otherwise unexciting articles debating the pros and cons of this proposal, just one short analyses caught my eye: "In Germany optimising integration means doing everything to offer the best possible chance to the individual; in Turkish culture integration means offering openings into society for the whole community".

Newspapers write that some ministers conceded a bilingual Turkish-German university as being within the realm of the conceivable for the future. Personally, I can't wait for the realisation of that. But might I also suggest a bilingual university in Ankara, a Turkish-Kurdish one?
I wonder for which one we'll be waiting longer.