World Affairs | SLEEPING WITH PENGOVSKY

I Don’t Need Sex. The Government Fucks Me Every Day.

Besides the border dispute and more or less intelligent pieces on journalism on that issue, there are also other aspects of Slovene-Croatian relations. Yesterday Dr. Arf posted a comment mentioning an “incident” where a Slovenian tourist in a restaurant in Zadar, Croatia forked out 1.300 euros and bought an entire aquarium of lobsters (save those which were already sold to other gests) whereupon he proceeded to release them back to the sea.

Cameraman Ivan Cvirn wearing the infamous T-shirt (source)

In not-so-related news, an auction was held in Croatia for the now-legendary T-Shirt worn by cameraman Ivan Cvirn, who enraged newly minted Croatian PM Jadranka Kosor weeks ago. While shooting footage during her inaugural session of the government Cvirn wore a T-Shirt saying “I Don’t Need Sex. The Government Fucks Me Every Day.”. Jadranka flipped, gave the cameraman a public dressing-down and ejected the entire crew. Ivan Cvirn subsequently lost his job at RTL Croatia (and is now suing them) but he also decided to auction off the infamous T-shirt with proceeds to go to charities. According to today’s Dnevnik, the T-shirt goes to a bidder in Ljubljana, who will fork out 573 euros (or 4.000 Croatian kunas). Since it was a web auction, bidders used nicknames, but pengovsky thinks that the mysterious bidder might be none other than Nedeljko Dabić, a free-wheelin’ and utterly unsuccessful candidate on this year’s EU elections. Why do I think that? Well, the bidder’s nickname repotedly was “50 is more than 100”

P.S.: you can tell the politicians are on vacations, can’t you?

Never Send A Boy To Do A Man’s Job

It seems that some people took the old adage “things are too serious not to be taken lightly”, well, too seriously. Admittedly, Slovene-Croatian border dispute is giving ample material to make fun out of, but there are funny jokes and then there are just sheer egotistic stupidities.

Operation South Shield by Dejan Steinbuch. Yes, it really does include bears (source)

An example of the former are the amazing columns in Dnevnik daily by Boris Dežulović (already featured on this blog), a Croatian journalist, currently based in Belgrade, Serbia who (almost invariably) every week sheds light on various dark corners of the joint Slovene-Croatian trauma and exposes them for what they really are: small-time provincial petty disputes fanned by enormous egos of two-bit-hustlers-turned-politicians who run the show. From time to time, although more rarely, this wry humour approach is complemented b< Ervin Hladnik Milharčič, a Slovenian journalist and a Dnevnik columnist as well, who just happens to be a friend of Dežulović’s. Between the two of them, there isn’t much of the last 25 years history of what once was Yugoslavia that they didn’t witness first hand, including the war which ravaged the once-common country and the prospect of which is (sometimes more seriously, sometimes less) often spoken about vis-a-vis the dispute.

On the other hand, there are plenty of mental adolescents who indulge in fantasies and what-if stories, compare sizes of both countries’ militaries and – although jokingly – play out war scenarios of one sort of another. An example of this came some weeks ago in Croatian magazine Globus, which ran an item titled Imaginary Fight On The Border. Although not totally serious, the article by Boro Krstulović and Igor Tabak played out a possible war scenario between the countries, where – naturally – Croatia came out victorious.

And only days ago Finance (Slovenian would-be WSJ) ran an item titled A Fantasy Story: How Croatia Returned To Europe by Dejan Steinbuch, former editor of Žurnal, a free weekly. Steinbuch wrote a travesty which includes top echelons of Slovenian politics as well as literally every Slovenian who – disguised as tourists – occupy Croatia during the summer. Only this time they do it for real. I imagine the story was prompted by an apparent joke by Croatian PM Jadranka Kosor, who reportedly said to Slovenian PM Borut Pahor that the only way Slovenia will lift the blockade is for Croatia to become part of Slovenia.

Both these articles have a problem – they miss their targets completely. War between Slovenia and Croatia may seem improbable. Hopefully it is. But let us not forget that there have been stand-offs between Slovene and Croatian police in the past and that after every failed round of negotiations a new round of escalations followed. And this summer every time an incident involving a Slovenian in Croatia or a Croatian in Slovenia happens it makes first pages of newspapers.

I realise both articles meant to be funny and – I may be reaching here – tried to show that conflict between the countries is absurd. But to do that in a tongue-in-cheek manner requires considerable skill. These two articles and their respective authors failed miserably in that enterprise. They just look pathetic, terribly not funny and do precious little to help the overall situation. I just wish they were available in English as well, so the world could see the amount of ineptitude one sheet of paper can hold in this part of the world.

Didn’t This Get Us In Trouble The First Time Around?

I was meaning to write this one up for the past two weeks. In case you’re wondering how some investment companies can post huge profits in the middle of the crisis, here’s part of the answer.

(author: Lisa Haney; source)

Powerful computers, some housed right next to the machines that drive marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange, enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed and, their detractors contend, reap billions at everyone else’s expense.

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike. And after growing in the shadows for years, they are generating lots of talk.

(source: NYT)

I don’t know about you, but this HFT seems wrong on a very fundamental level. Admittedly, I’ll have to see what this guru I know will say on the issue, but as things stand two things come to mind: Wasn’t computer-ran trading what caused the Black Monday of 1987? And secondly: wasn’t this kind of market tweaking by profit-hungry investment banks what got us in trouble in the first place?

Slightly OT: It seems that it is not economic changes that hit Slovenia with a couple of months’ delay. The same apparently goes for economic revelations as well. The Rolling Stone magazine article linked above which tells the tale of how theCredit Crunch began, was widely circulated in Slovene media… two weeks ago.

Strange Times We Live In

According to various sources, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is said to have received a letter from President Obama, hand delivered by former President Bubba Clinton. The White House has promptly denied that the Big O. and the Beloved Leader are pen-pals, but apparently Kim said that in order to improve his position within the North Korean hierarchy.

Bubba and Kim keeping a straight face (source: The Beeb)

Which should tell you at least two things: a) that no dictatorship runs on a strict top-to-bottom approach and is hence not a monolith and b) that Obama carries weight even people in North Korea. Which makes for a nice irony, when a leader of a country, which sees the US as its arch-enemy, gains brownie points by getting a postcard from the person, who personifies that particular enemy.

Strange times we live in…

Will Slovenia Lift EU Blockade of Croatia?

According to Croatian weekly Nacional, Slovenia and Croatia have reached a compromise solution regarding the disputed Croatian documentation which precipitated Slovenian blockade of Croatian EU entry negotiation.

Prime Ministers Pahor and Kosor last Friday. Notice how his tie matches her dress (source)

The magazine reports (Croatian only) that an agreement has been reached (or is very close to being reached) during last Friday’s meeting between the newly minted Croatian PM Jadranka Kosor and her Slovenian counterpart Borut Pahor.

If the report is correct (neither Zagreb nor Ljubljana were willing to comment on it) it would mean that Croatia shifted from its position that documents as such do not predefine the non-existent maritime border between two countries, which it was willing to confirm in a separate protocol. Slovenia, however, claimed that documents do indeed predefine the maritime border and promptly demanded that Croatia withdraws the documents, but then quickly ammended its position, saying that it will not lift the blockade of Croatian negotiations until a border agreement has been reached. According to the magazine, Zagreb agreed to withrdaw all offending documents while Slovenia agreed to lift the blockade immediately after the withdrawal.

As you know, all hell broke loose after Slovenia instituted the blocase, especially when we were close to (and yet, it turned out, far away from) holding a referendum on Croatian NATO entry. At that time pengovsky speculated that although the push to solve the border question at this time might have been a good idea, there lurked a danger of Slovenia trying to overdo it and humiliate Croatia while the latter is in danger of totally losing touch with reality, since it was used to playing tables against Slovenia. It seems that this scenario more or less unfolded as predicted, which precipitated the second boiing point:

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Ivo Sanader from the post of Croatian PM was never fully explained. The closest he came to an explanation was saying that he couldn’t deny that European issues played a part in his resignation. At that time pengovsky wrote that it is possible, that Sanader was removed in a in-party coup after it became apparent that his hard-line rhetoric against Slovenia brought Croatia in a pretty bad fix, which he couldn’t lead her out of. Not without totally losing face. But another view prevailed: namely, that there had indeed been a party coup, but from the other end. That it was the true right-wing hardliners and anti-EU politician which had forced him to resign, because he was too pro European.

But if Nacional’s report is correct, than pengovsky’s original thesis seems plausible, since the first thing the new government in Zagreb did was offer a compromise, which – apparently – the government in Ljubljana is only too willing to accept. After all, removing the documents was what Slovenia demanded originally. Such an agreement would dramatically reduce tensions between the two countries and (best of all) would not have to be ratified in both countries’ parliamanets as it would not be an international agreement but rather just a policy change It would also postpone the border issue indefinitely, probably making it far less important once both countries are EU members. Which is good and that is why pengovsky hopes that the report is correct.

If the deal had been reached (and again, this is by no means certain) then this is the second big foreign policy scoop for Borut Pahor’s government (the first one was when he presudaded Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi not to include Slovenian minority in Italy in his 2009 budget cut). The only question is, whether PM Pahor and foreign minister Samuel Žbogar meant to play it like that or were they just lucky…

Ivo Sanader vs. Borut Pahor

Well, sort of, anyway… The following happened more or less by accident yesterday on The Firm™, as pengovsky way lampooning resignation of Croatian PM Ivo Sanader as well some serious “leakage” from Slovene government. More on that in the following days, but suffice it to say, that Thursday’s session of the government was – apparently inadvertently – streamed live over the net, revealing some heavy discord between PM Borut Pahor, minister of public administration Irma Pavlinič Krebs and interior minister Katarina Kresal.

Audio is taken directly from Firm’s archives, while pengovsky spent most of the afternoon putting together the slideshow. Songs include To ni političen song by Vlado Kreslin and Parni Valjak and Maček v žaklju by Let 3. Both songs are Croatian covers of Slovenian songs and are therefore most fitting for the occasion. There’s also a little bit of Požar by Marko Brecelj at the end. For those of you who don’t understand Slovene and/or Croatian, a lot will be lost in translation, unfortunately. But you can still look at the pictures 🙂

Croatian PM Sanader Resigns

In a surprise move Croatian PM Ivo Sanader resigned yesterday, both as PM as well as president of the ruling HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union). News of his resignation started building up yesterday late in the morning and by noon it was certain that he is going to quit. He officially announced his resignation at 1400hrs, saying that he had played his part and that it was time someone else took over. There was a lot of speculation about Sanader running for Croatian president, but he denied the rumours, saying outright that he will not run for any office whatsoever. He will be, however, named honorary president of HDZ after its charter will be amended to that effect.

Ivo Sanader (source)

Despite everything he said, he did not actually explain why he is leaving politics, save that his “job is done. My political life ends now“. This naturally sparked furious guessing as to what exactly prompted him to resign (it seems that no one believes his claim that it took him a while to get there). Speculation spanned from corruption scandals which lately hit too close to Sanader for comfort, Croatian cooperation (or the lack of it) with the Hague Tribunal, dire economic situation in the country, or the stalemate in EU accession negotiations, which was prompted by Slovenia blocking the process due to border dispute. The last one seems plausible, as Sanader himself said that “he cannot deny that it played a part”.

However, there are other slightly more subtle signs pointing to what probably happened. A massive reshuffle took place at the senior level of HDZ, with a lot of new party vice-presidents being named. Furthermore, he proposed that minister for European integration and his second in command Jadranka Kosor take over both the government and the party. This seems to suggest that the initial drive for his resignation came from within the party rather than directly from outside influences.

Basically, we’re talking about a party putch.

It sounds reasonable to think that all of the above reasons played a role, but it seems that the breakdown of EU negotiations was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Namely – with the prospect of Croatian EU membership gone, all other problems suddenly seem much more bleak. It wasn’t that their economy wasn’t down the toilet for some time, but the almost-clinched membership in the Union created a hope (albeit probably a false one) that they will somehow be able to deal with it. The same of course goes for cooperation with the Hague as well as the border dispute with Slovenia – neither would have mattered a pair of fetid dingo’s kindeys if Croatia were an EU member.

But as things stand now, Croatia is faced with a south-bound economy and extremely poor projections for this year’s summer season, rampant corruption which can reach very high in the political and economic strata, an angry war-crimes tribunal and the prospect of joining Iceland and Hungary in the “broke countries club”. Which makes a lot of people wonder if Sanader didn’t just bail out and skedaddled, leaving to others to clean up his mess. This is also very plausible, but experience teaches that power is not easily relinquished. Doubly so in the Balkans. In other words, most politicians have to be carried out of their offices. Ivo Sanader is no exception. His troubles began some time ago, but he managed to control them, first by fast-tracking his country towards EU, and then by taking a hard line against Slovenia in the border dispute. But as Ljubljana obstinately refused to cave in, Sanader’s house of cards began falling appart and the situation in Croatia was suddently revealed for what it really is.

Thus, pengovsky thinks that Sanader just ran out of options and was forced to resign by his own people. The fact that will be made honorary chairman of the party only reinforces the feeling, as such “honours” are usually bestowed upon those whom you want to keep under control, without them doing any serious damage. But removing Sanader of course does not mean that things will improve by themselves. If anything, Croatian EU bid is now definitely stalled and barring a major breakthrough (such as Croatia ratifying the 2001 Drnovšek-Račan treaty on border) this train is not going anywhere anytime soon. They may even have to wait for Serbia.