Prague Property

I was on NPR’s Here and Now on Tuesday to discuss the upcoming Russian elections. You can listen to that segment here.

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Click on “Democracy in danger”

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Europe.view
Monitor, observe, flinch, forget

Nov 29th 2007From Economist.com

Providing fig leaves for a sham democracy

NOBODY’S perfect. That is the short answer to the contested question of why some western observers are monitoring Russia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday and others are not. The dispute involves nuances in political jargon, and obscure outfits with bewilderingly cumbersome names.
Hands up: who knows the difference between observers and monitors? Or between the 55-country Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, based in Vienna), its Copenhagen-based Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA) and its Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR, pronounced Oh-Dear)? Don’t forget the 47-member Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE, in Strasbourg), which is quite different from the European Parliament, sometimes to be found in the same city. A full understanding of which of these matters in what contexts and why is probably a sign of a sad life.
One protagonist in the row is ODIHR, which, depending on your viewpoint, is either a meddlesome and amateurish American puppet, or the continent’s most expert source of thorough election monitoring. The Russian authorities take the former view, and obstructed ODIHR’s efforts until it pulled out.
On the other side are the two parliamentary assemblies, OSCE PA and PACE. Their joint 110-member delegation is observing the election, to the fury of ODIHR, and also of Bruce George, a veteran British politician and election-watcher. He thinks that the Russian authorities will use the observers’ presence to claim spurious legitimacy for the result.
Furthermore, foreign politicians may know a lot about elections (at least if they come from countries where they are free and fair) but they are unlikely to be experts on Russia, or to become so during a brief visit. Nobody is saying so openly, but the willingness of some foreign politicians to accept Russian hospitality, regardless of the consequences, could be seen as a sign of how Kremlin influence is penetrating the central institutions of western democracy.
The parliamentary assemblies vehemently reject that, and decry ODIHR observers’ supposed expertise. “Most of these people appeared to be part-time consultants, unemployed academics and retired people. …. Few if any have parliamentary or political experience in their own countries” sniffs an internal OSCE PA document. Critics also say that it is unclear in some cases who pays for ODIHR’s monitors’ lengthy pre-election stays. Some observers may be spies, retired or even serving.
But the row is not really about a turf war between little-known international institutions. It is about Russia’s future and western influence on it. David Wilshire, a British MP who will be observing the elections in Vladivostok for PACE, says he makes “no apologies for trying to do my little bit to help Russians transform themselves from their totalitarian system of the past to a 21st century democratic system—keeping in mind that it took my own country many hundreds of years to make that journey.”
Spencer Oliver, the secretary-general of the OSCE PA, says “It is better to engage than to disengage.” René van der Linden, the president of PACE, says “It is always better to be part of the process and have a profound discussion afterwards.”

If things were improving in Russia, these would be strong arguments—indeed they were frequently used by most Western governments during the vote-rigging and corruption of the Yeltsin years. But Russia now is abandoning western political practice, not converging on it.
The observers will give their verdict on Monday, probably a tough one, condemning the harassment, fraud and other abuses that characterise the Kremlin’s “sovereign democracy”. That will sharpen the question further: at what point does the spectacle of sham democracy become too repulsive to merit outsiders’ attention—or, worse, their tacit collusion?

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It has been proposed that from April 1st 2010 there will be two charges of VAT on goods and services in India.  Currently in most European countries businesses collect and pay VAT only to one source and many companies find VAT accounting onerous already, especially small businesses.
But imagine collecting two different VAT rates on all […]

Banks, Insurance companies and financial institutions are VAT exempt, generally for most products they supply.  Great you would think for the consumer, however it is not as they cannot reclaim any of the VAT they pay on services or goods.  Therefore it is all part of the cost base on which the consumer is charged.
This […]

An online clinic for those suffering from colitis and Crohn’s disease has just been launched.
The Crohn’s Disease and Colitis Clinic is to be run by the Irish Society for Colitis and Crohn’s disease (ISCC) and is sponsored by Abbott.
According to the Society, the aim of […]

Large amounts of value added tax (VAT) on purchases made in Europe go unclaimed by companies each year. The main reason is that many companies are unaware they can reclaim VAT on purchases made outside their own countries. Another obstacle is the difficulty in making a claim. Such factors as language and bureaucratic complexities can […]

The land where Prague came to be built has been settled since the Paleolithic Age. Several thousands of years ago, there were trade routes connecting southern parts of Europe to northern Europe which passed through this area, following the course of the river. From around 500 BC the Celtic tribe known as the Boii, were […]

Interesting news about Chechnya. The London-based foreign minister Zakayev is now PM of a soi-disant govt-in-exile, whose members will be announced in the next two weeks. This has been elected by 21 surviving members of the last freely elected (pre-war) parliament. It appears to have broken links with the remaining military resistance in Chechnya which should improve its ability to lobby in the West and may help it shake off the stigma that associates the Chechen independence cause with terrorism and organised crime.

I was at a meeting yesterday to launch a posthumously published book of Alexander Litvinenko’s writings. The panel included his father, plus Oleg Gordievsky, Vladimir Bukovsky and Zakayev.

The highlight of the afternoon was Bukovsky’s speech. From my notes

I know that I will not be allowed to register [in the Russian presidential election].. The central election commission said I would ‘never ever’ be allowed to participate even before they had seen a single one of my documents…My task is like it was 50 years ago [when he was a dissident risking imprisonment and psychiatric abuse], to come to the scared disheartened country…say that we were even fewer then and they were stronger, but now we are alive and they are dead…the best thing you can do is stand up and say “I am not afraid”. I don’t know what the response will be but will try and try and try again until either they kill me or they give up [power]

On the West’s response to the murder of Litvinenko, he said

In the 19th century the Royal Navy would have sailed to St Petersburg and bombarded it..it was casus belli. Even in 20th century we would have withdrawn our ambassador. Britain never admitted even that [the murder] was an act of aggression. It should have invoked Article V [of the Nato charter] We should kick Russia out of all international organisations. All NATO countries should have visa ban for Russian high officials. Shamefully, the policy was appeasement.

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Europe.view

Macedonian mess
Nov 22nd 2007
From Economist.com

Time to look past archaic disputes

FOR anyone who cares about peace in the Balkans, few things matter more than keeping intact the country most of the world calls the “Republic of Macedonia”. Its perilous stability will wobble more with looming independence for next-door Kosovo, which will delight Macedonia’s Albanian minority, and stoke the Slav majority’s fears.

In theory, no rich country should care more about Macedonia than neighbouring Greece. Yet relations are hampered by an arcane dispute about nomenclature. Greece insists that “Macedonia” was, is and can only be part of Greece. The name’s use by a region of Yugoslavia was, it maintains, part of a communist-era plot aimed at destabilising Greece. Greece therefore insists that the country be called “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM).

Extremists on both sides use rhetoric (seen, among other places, in clumsily made presentations on YouTube) so ill-phrased and comical that Borat himself could claim authorship. They share the unspoken but absurd assumption that the features of the entity known as Macedonia in ancient history should be of decisive importance in modern ethnography or political geography: because an ancient kingdom called Macedonia existed, only one modern entity can claim that name. The region is still waiting for a statesman to pick that assumption apart.

It is a close call, but the extreme Macedonian nationalist position, which argues that most of northern Greece is “theirs”, is perhaps the battiest. It is as if the Greeks insisted that unicorns were pink while the Macedonians maintained, even more absurdly, that the horned beasts were of a colour found nowhere on the conventional spectrum: moonlight, perhaps.

Greek twitchiness about even mythical controversies was more understandable in the early 1990s, when the whole future of the southern Balkans was alarmingly fluid and unpredictable. Amid disputes over Macedonia’s future involving Serbs, Albanians and Bulgarians, the Greek objection to the name was part of a wider pattern of worries about borders and minorities.

But the Macedonian nuts have little effect on their government’s policy these days. The country has changed its flag and constitution in order to accommodate Greek sensitivities. The forward-looking government in Skopje is into flat taxes, e-government and attracting foreign investment (paradoxically, in large measure from Greece).

Greece, however, still insists that the mere existence of a next-door country called Macedonia “is directed against the cultural heritage and historical identity of the Greeks” and “there is no question of its neighbour acceding either to the European Union or to NATO under the name Republic of Macedonia”.

A lobby group called the “Association of Macedonians” has issued an appeal this week noting that Greece does not fully recognise Macedonian passports and that Macedonia’s state airline cannot fly to Greek airports. That, they say, adds insult to injury.

Slavophone people in northern Greece have had a tough time, not only with mass deportations in 1949 but also in their treatment by the authorities on issues such as surnames and schooling ever since. (Greeks saw the slavophone minority, with some justice, as a security threat during the Cold War, and Greek minorities have been abominably treated too in other countries. But even multiple wrongs don’t make a right).

The great tide of EU and NATO expansion that has served the continent so well in the past ten years is already running worryingly slack. Pushing ahead with Macedonia’s applications to both bodies will change the mood in the whole region. Prosperity and stability in the Balkans will benefit Greece hugely. It is time to relegate the name issue to the backwaters of bilateral diplomacy, and highlight the benefits to Greece of Macedonia’s stability and prosperity—and the dangers of its disintegration.

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