The depressive Estonian and his prominent lover

An occasional series about people behind the scenes in Brussels.
I don't know whether it is appropriate to betray this memory of a friend. But then all writing is betrayal. I write this post today because well Christmas is often ia season of depressives, and when I think of depressives I think of Mart.
I lived with this Estonian cameraman, Mart, for a while. Actually he was no longer working as a cameraman – his onetime boss, M., Estonian television’s one-time only foreign correspondent, formerly based in Brussels, had returned home to be with her husband, who worked in the Estonian defence ministry in Tallinn. Her successor as correspondent Indrek, found no use for his services – after leaving
Indrek, he worked a little as a freelance for Czech television, then the European Union’s own broadcasting service, then…nothing.
He still had a few months of his Estonian press accreditation to run, though (the card has to be renewed every year), and before I got to know him I used to see him in the press centre, on the phone most of the day and into the evening long after most other correspondents had filed and gone – like me, he sometimes stayed until midnight. Judging by the fact that he was speaking Estonian, and the way he looked
furtively around him, I figured he was on the phone to Estonia quite a lot and that he was quite a lonely man. The parliament’s press centre offered free calls
around the world then – he was just of several journalists staying on late, using the facility every night, and not even the most assiduous. A number of
African journalists used to stay every night too, speaking tribal languages and/or French to people they knew clearly in Zaire or Rwanda or places like that.
One joker had a running gag with a friend or relative of his:
“Ici Osama Bin Laden,” he used to say, followed by a chesty, rollicking laugh. I hear it often; I sat opposite him.

I got to speak to Mart at a drinks party. He wasn’t an Estonian nationalist – a first – and seemed highly intelligent, sensitive and interesting. He was older than he looked: 38. He told me how he had almost lost a leg serving with the Soviet army
in Kamchatka. Like me, in those weeks when parliament were in session in Brussels, about half the time, he was a habitué of the various drinks parties held in
the lobbies of the EP. After a while, if returning from an interview at 630 or so to the press room, and seeing Mart on the phone, I’d tip him off if I had seen
preparations for a drinks party underway – tables wheeled out, penguin suits rubbing bottles of champagne, stagiaires gathering, ready to pounce on
the peanuts, the free wedges of parma cheese…
We’d usually stay drinking later than most other people, and we’d find ourselves going on to pubs and clubs as the receptions closed. I started crashing outin his flat, and, gradually, over a number of mornings drinking green tea and listening to his Jan Garbarek albums, I got to learn the story of Marianne – and his other women. Marianne had got pregnant, had an abortion, left him, and now he had no sexual energy left.I told him he was a very interesting guy but that he should avoid sentences in the first person pronoun because then he suddenly became boring. I worried about Mart: his father, a philosophy professor, had committed suicide. I stayed with him, in an informal arrangement that suited the uncertainties regarding how long I would be staying in Brussels. I felt I had a duty to get him a girlfriend: this, he said, would solve all his problems. He was in a bit of a Catch-22 though: no on wanted him in his current state.
I sometimes chatted up girls on his behalf. One such was the formidable Irish politician Avril Doyle’s beautiful assistant Kate, a real Irish beauty: pale, faintly
freckled skin, elfin eyes, full lips. Long dark hair.
He had seen her in the European parliament and
announced: “That is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”
Well, since last week anyway, I thought.
One evening, in the Wild Geese, I introduced Mart, who made awkward conversation with her. He came back and reported that they might meet up …nothing happened though over the next few days. It wasn’t clear if he had her phone number or if they had just agreed to have a further chat when they saw each other again…another evening in the Wild Geese, he went over, hand in pockets, hunched shoulders, (he was well over six feet tall) wearing a velour jumper which I knew smelt unwashed. (I wish I had been a good enough friend to tell him before we went out.) He returned, inevitably, a few minutes later.
“I think she likes me.”
Later in the evening I got talking to her – she said (diplomatically) that Mart seemed handsome, and nice, but alas he had a boyfriend.
I went to dance. An hour passed. Then I went looking for Mart with rising panic – out of self interest,I confess, since I had nowhere else to stay. I need not have worried. There was a roped off quiet area where people could sit at candle lit tables and chat – Katie was sitting with her girlfriend with whom she had danced somewhat tentatively earlier and had that slightly self conscious air of someone who is aware they are watched. Which of course they were. Not one metre away, on the other side tf the rope, Mart was standing, hands on picket, hunched, STARING. Standing,a figure of depression – his mouth in depressive downturn. He probably stood there in his tall stoop for a good ten minutes, transfixed. Like my grandfather after his wife had died.
“That is not the way to seduce a woman, Mart,” I said later.
“The security guards actually told me to move.
“Well, it was VERY obvious.“
He chuckled: a true surprise eruption. the first time I had heard him laugh for months.
“Keep it up Mart.” I qualified the comment, to avoid misunderstanding: “I mean, keep up laughing.”
Shortly afterwards I moved out – I had somewhere else to stay.
About a day or two later, he stopped turning up at the European parliament. He left a note that his press card had run out. I didn’t see him much – he had no
phone, he lived too out of the way to make a speculative spontaneous visit, and though I emailed him from time to time, telling him to come to parties
– I had him signed in by assistants I knew - he only came out once or twice that spring.
I only saw him a few times a year these days and we seldom have the intensity of relation to discover what his love life is like.
But recently I was at an European council summit – the highlight of the EU season, a biannual ceremony when all prime ministers of all member states gather and discuss iover two days the future direction of the union. Thousands of journalists turn up – there is a buzz in the air, the summits sometimes go on very late into the night. There is free food and drink from the bar, and loads of gossip and rumour. The EU set up work stations and free phones – sitting at one such work station I heard behind me.
“Ha, ha – ici Osama Bin Laden.”
Well – just as well the African found this. Because the parliament had by then stopped its free global phonecalls policy. (The grand summits, being so important and of such short duration, had no such restrictions)
The joke brought back thoughts of Mart – and I thought of Mart lying one February evening while the snowflakes were falling gently outside on cushions on the floor while I lay on his sofa, and Mart translating every single sentence of Tarkovsky’s Mirror in its unsubtitled Russian original version into English for my benefit. Two hours: quietly, doggedly – because he so wanted to give.

That is three years ago, but when I went back to his flat in November, it was empty, and a neighbour said she was wrorried he might commit suicide. He told me his family had considered putting him into a mental home. I am considering contacting M, who is now one of Estonia's most prominent politicians. Even they have baggage.

EU doesn't pass too many laws

An occasional entry in a series on why Europe can be unfairly maligned,
Gunther Verheugen, the powerful German commissioner for industry, has been in the headlines this week. Photographs have been circulated that show him holding hands with his assistant on a nude beach in Lithuania. The German media have leapt on the story; his wife has told reporters she knew of the trip. Both assistant and Verheugen deny an affair. They are acknowledged though in Brussels to be very close, and that you cannot get through to him without first passing through her. It has been speculated that the story of their close relationship was brought to the attention of the press by EU officials enraged at his recent strong attacks on the regulating instincts of the EU bureaucracy. Which brings us to the subject of this post.
There is a good argument - and Verheugen makes it frequently - that says that Europe wants to introduce too much regulation. It doesn't follow that all the regulation it wishes to introduce is poor and superfluous.
In some cases Europe wants to introduce entirely sensible regulation which is banned by veto-holding member states, the result of which being that Europe can have poorer rules on a subject than the US.
This is not a Europhile screed. Sometimes EU regulations can be absurd. For instance, the law on protection from optical radiation - sunlight to you and me - which would have required builders and masons to wear a fairly ridiculous shape of hat. Another rule concerned the ideal ergonomic shape of a farmer's tractor seat.
But these overreported examples must not obscure the fact that sometimes governments are responsible for foisting legislation on the commission - those seats were a German - and other times, goivernments are reactionary when it comes to sensible laws, the stupidity of which decision is obscured by clouds of euroscepticm unfairly targeted blather.
Consider the example of cheap disposal lighter and children's safety. (Cheap lights, under two euross, since dear ones pose little threat: Cartier lighters fall beyond regulation, since their owners reintrudce the implement into their pockets quickly after use.)
Europe does not have child proof lighters. The US does. They are cheap, the modification costing only a few more cents, and they save lives. In 2004, the number of children who died from fires in the USA was down 60 percent on 1993, the year the regulations were introduced: in that latter year there were an estimated 5,000 fires, with 170 deaths and 1,150 injuries involving children younger than five years of age. Since then, Australia, Canada and New Zealand followed suit. Not Europe, though.
Why? Because domestic importers intervened to put pressure on national governments. The regulations that require childproof safety catch for cheap lighters woulkd discriminate against lighters from China, which lack such a feature. Brussels is replete with lobbies and special interest groups, from the inernational timber association to the association of international bus manufacturers. In 2001 one of the more abstruse members of the club was formed, the "Association of European Importers of Cigarette Lighters," or "Elias" for short, was founded on the initiative of a Hamburg firm that imports disposable lighters from China. Their motive was simple: to oppose legislation that could harm their business prospects.
At their first meeting, held in a hotel in Frankfurt, the ladies and gentlemen in attendance made no bones about their aims. Chinese commercial representatives started visiting member state capitals, complaining that the regulation harmed free trade. Their anxiety was based on the following Hobson's choice. Raising the prices beyond the limit of 2 euros at which safety catches did not need to be installed would erose the competitive price advantage with manufacturers in Europe and Japan; installing the safety catches, while only a few cents, would first require buying expensive patents - and these were held by European firms. Either way, the Chinese would be in trouble, Towns such as Wenzhou, with 200 manufacturers made over 850 million lighters annually, provided Europe with 80 percent of its imports. The importers' lobby went into action. Not by apppealing to European alytruism towards manufacturing towns in China, but to euroscepticism about Brussels bureaucracy.
And the results were soon on display.
When the commission wanted to publish its paper on harmornised standards, they came up against objections from national capitals. The testing requirements for the new lighters were too complex, absurd. The test for child proof standards required 100 children no older than 51 months of age, no more two children present in the same room, even the minimum space between their chairs was specified. A lighter passed the test if 85 out of the 100 children couldn't light it up. Bavaria's minister for Europe had a field day when she presented the testing requirements to the Bavarian parliament in October, scoffing at these symptoms of “Excessive regulation, an out-of-control bureaucracy”, she scornfully pointed out how little this had to so with "normal people living normal lives in this country". And promised to take the battle to her government, who would take it to Brussels. The commission had been presented with the "overly bureaucratic" argument before, in direct representations from the importers' lobby.
But are these tests really so ridiculous? In fact, Bic at Clichy-la-Garenne near Paris has been carrying out these tests since 1993, since as the world's largest manufacturer of disposable lighters it caters also to the American market. The tests are not so onerous since they only have to be conducted once for each model; and such scientific testing is standard in all manufacturing areas where there is consumer protection - in medicine packaging for instance, when making childproof caps.
But the commission must submit to the member states veto, and still a billion or so lighters without safety mechanisms flood into Europe every year.
Unwitting though Bavarian ministers for Europe may be about this, there is a tradeoff between Chinese jobs and European child safety - and in this case the winners were Chinese jobs (and European importers.) But to say it onesidedly it is victory against against excessive regulation - when "pro business" America has had rules for 15 years on this - is, as must be evident, far too simplistic. A few weeks ago, in Holland a four-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were seriously injured in an apartment fire in a Rotterdam suburb. A helicopter rushed the children to a hospital, where both died. An inquiry determined that they have been playing with a cigarette lighter.

Bildt and the burning of Sudan

At the EU summit at the weekend there was the usual feverish excitement - hundreds of journalists with their laptops, drinking in the bar, watching the television screens, clustering around spokesmen emerging from the talks. So - Turkey's application has been put on hold. That's plenty written about elsewhere. I have a feeling this is one area where even elite public opinion (just read the Guardian blogs) is pretty much united - against. But for the purposes of what I want to write today, what is interesting is how Sweden's foreign minister made a minor splash, quoted even in the British paper. Sweden hasn't had a guided foreign policy for years now, and its practitioners have been silent on the European scene.
But the new foreign minister is Carl Bildt, a man of a strong personality, much experience (ex Swedish prime minister, chief peace negotiator in the Balkans, a kind of godfather of Baltic independence.) and many European contacts. He is well known in Brussels, frequently contributes to the op-ed pages of the international press, and sits on the board of various EU think-tanks. He is highly respected.
His appearance in the international press is in connection with his hard core pro-enlargement stance, rare among Europe's leaders these days. This will probably earn him friends among liberals elsewhere. But in fact - in a story I have been researching for two weeks (see passim) - he has not always acted so selflessly in favour of the underdog. (if you assume Turkey is the underdog in these negotiations.)
I am thinking about his involvement in the Sudan.
During what one could call his relative wilderness years - when he was without a formal heavy post from Balkans peacemaker in 2001 until his surprise appointment as foreign minister in October - Bildt was a prominent figure in Lundin Oil, one of the biggest investors in Sudan's growth industry - the oil that fuels an arrogant regime's defiance of the world. The association made him rich. It is also quite controversial.

I wonder if Carl Bildt ever dreams about little black boys, hunted, running for their lives.
Hydrocephalic, uselessly lolling heads, small sticklike legs like pistons powering through the dust, as Antonov bombers circle overhead. A boy, separated from his parents, that disappears into the swamp, or becomes a child soldier - if he is not killed by the horsemen who come riding in behind the bombers.

He must have known - well before the oil development started. Six months before the company he had business interests in, Lundin Oil, Sweden's largest independent, started developing its concession there were negative reports about what was happening in a neighbouring concession, owned by Canada's largest independent oil company, Talisman, from a number of respected NGOs, UN figures and from a Canadian human rights commission.
This is what the UN's Sudan rapporteur wrote. Leonard Franco, on oil development in western Upper Nile, October 1999:
[Reports available to the Special Rapporteur indicate that] “long-term efforts by the various Governments of Sudan to protect oil production have included a policy of forcible population displacement in order to clear oil-producing areas and the transportation routes of southern civilians….”
This is what a Canadian government Harker report set up in response to Talisman's prospecting said a few months later.
"On 9 May 1999, a new offensive was launched from the Nuba Mountains and Pariang. Antonovs and helicopter gunships supported troops using armoured personnel carriers. Roads built by the oil companies enabled these to reach their destinations more easily than before. From April to July 1999, the decline in population in Ruweng County seems to have been in the order of 50%.”
"The civilian population living in oil fields and surrounding areas has been deliberately targeted for massive human rights abuses---forced displacement, aerial bombardments, strafing from helicopter gunships.”
This is what Amnesty wrote in May 2000: ”Government forces have used ground attacks, helicopter gunship and indiscriminate high-altitude bombardment to clear the local population from oil-rich areas. This massive displacement of the local population followed the deployment of additional weaponry and forces specifically drafted in to protect the oilfields. The military tactics of the government's security forces of destroying harvests, looting livestock and occupying the area is designed to prevent the return of the displaced population."

A few months passed before Lundin, having made no acknowledgment of the reports, forged ahead in its own sector, . Southern Sudan is without doubt one of the most underdeveloped areas in the whole world; in an area the size of France, the population of 8m black Africans have been held back by decades of neglect by central government, Khartoum in the Arabised North; there was one stretch of tarmac road in the whole region, in the centre of the administrative capital of Juba; in nsome areas maternal mortality rates are one third, and a child much more likely to die giving birth than complete primary school.
The six month wet season made work harder - a paved road was needed.
As in the neighbouring Talisman sector, villages were situated in the way of the road and needed to be cleared. One of the first villages attacked in Lundin's sector was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the
forest with six of his grandchildren. "We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top," he said. "Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They’re going to Rier, to the
oilfield."
A few days later, the village of Kuach was attacked by troops who arrived in lorries. "When I heard bullets I took one child and ran naked to the forest,’ said Simon Dual, a father of two. "But it was far and three people were killed as they ran. When I went back the next day to see what had happened, I found the house burned and the body of my child, Stephen, in the fire. They want to chase us off our
land because they want the oil."
Journalist Julie Flint, who covered the events, wrote that "the second wave of displacement [after Talisman] came as Lundin attempted to build its road. Many of those displaced in this fighting escaped with nothing but the clothes they were wearing when government forces attacked their villages.".
"It it was a story, from villages all the way down to Rier - villages like Chotyiel, Guit, Dhor Riang, Chiengyar, Chotyien. Small villages - some of them with barely 1,000 inhabitants - but villages that made up a relatively densely populated area despite the swampy nature of the land."
Of course it's not black and white. Two groups of southern militias that were used by the government defected to the opposition to fight the government for southerners' right to oil, they fell out and fought each other. But it is also true that Lundin and Talisman were the facilitators for the violence, and that Canadian human rights delegation led by Sudan expert John Harker, sponsored by the Canadian foreign ministry, visiting Sudan in December 1999 interviewed many people who felt that the oil discoveries had brought nothing but ill. "Did a foreign oil company ask our permission to take our oil, and sell it? Why is a rich country, taking our oil without our permission, and without any of benefit to us?” one eyewitness that Harker interviewed said. “We are going to lose our lives for oil,” one civilian predicted. Referring to their displacement, burned houses, disease, and dead children, he said: "The discovery of oil has caused these problems—before, the Arabs weren’t able to exploit the oil but now they can with the help of the west. The Arabs are united against us and want to push us out.” Another simply stated to the Canadians, “By the time your report is out we will be dead. The [government of Sudan] will kill us because you visited.”
By August 2000, NGOs reported flying in relief plaves over the Lundin oil road and seeing an empty landscape, all villages deserted, and government armed posts every few kilometres. Tens of thousands of southern Sudanese had been displaced.
Soon after, the respected organisation Human rights Watch, who had sent Lundin a letter early on what of the repeat activities that were happening, received a reply expressing scepticism that the violence was taking place, blaming a shortage of Lundin's own staff on the ground.

So what did Carl Bildt – prominent board member and adviser at Lundin - have to say when he was finally interviewed about this in April 2001, by a Swedish journalist? By now yet another UN special rapporteur had written about the displacements, yet another report by a western NGO, Christian Aid, had come out, and there were numerous international journalists' accounts.
Bildt said: "To leave the area - which is the consequence of stopping all activities - would be both wrong and dangerous. Everyone wants us to remain in one way or another. That applies to all people there - they rather would like us to do more and more.”
Then he said: “And neither the UN nor Amnesty have said we should leave - while they say clearly that the activities shall be carried out in such a way that they contribute to the respect for human rights. These are good demands - and we plan to live up to them.”
He then said:
"After careful checks been able to say that the reports about planned and extensive people displacements in the area where Lundin is active do not correlate with reality.”
Finally he said Swedish TV: "As far as I understand it's a matter of moving a number of people. This is not completely unusual, it is as in Sweden when you build motorways."
So there was no change of course. Though he represented a commercial operation, it is strange that one of Europe's premier statesmen seems to have dropped his humanitarian negotiating instincts: in the interview, he talked blithely about the southern Sudanese preferring to have a western democratic presence than the Chinese. But his company did not walk the walk by putting any of that western superiority on display: no concern for human rights of the displaced (which of course they denied against the evidence existed), no constructive attempt put pressure on the regime by withdrawing expertise and work until a ceasefire had been obtained (while holding on to the concession), no distancing from the regime by dialogue with the rebels, no follow-up of the suggestion to set aside a trust fund from oil revenues for the south, no attempt to ban military flights from oil company airfields and stop the flight ban on relief flights, no attempt to institute monitoring processes independent of the small number of own security guard and the inveitably biased Government of Sudan forces that maintained their larger security to ensure that those human rights were lived up to, no call to have the International Labour organisation monitoring recruitment to the oil concession, which excluded southerners ...is it any wonder given past western exploitation and Lundin's own his in the area that the rebels continued fighting. The fighting continued unabated, as rebels who felt disenfranchised from the oil wealth they felt was theirs poured into the cleared areas and harassed the government troops and the oil workers.
Lundin pulled out, then pulled out permnanently. Talisman had pulled out of their concession a year earlier. But there was a difference. The Canadian government had written the Harker report, deeply critical of their largest independent company's activities. The Swedish government had done no equivalent thing. Talisman pulled out because of human rights pressure. Lundin pulled out because of the security situation. The attitudes of the two companies as expressed by their spokesmen was also different. Jim Buckee, president and chief executive of Talisman Energy Inc., the Calgary company at the heart of a controversy over the exploitation of Sudan's southern oilfields, wrote to shareholders this week saying, "I would like to make it clear that Talisman is vehemently opposed to forced relocation for oil development and I personally believe such practices are abhorrent." Carl Bildt said, more defiantly: "It would be easy for the company to leave but the oil will still be in ethe ground, and others would take over. The Chinese are the ones who want to expand in Sudan."


Failure to engage successfully in Sudan hasn't harmed Lundin's profits, from other territories - cashing in on the company's share options and shares have made Carl Bildt the richest politician in Sweden. The Swedish press have left him alone; while they managed to get the arts minister sacked for the heinous crime of not having paid her TV licence. “The media are awed by his reputation,” said Egbert Wesselink of the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan.
Regarding his presence at the recent EU summit, left wing political commentator Lena Mellin wrote effusively of the right-wing foreign minister after giving him a five star "power rating." "In the area of foreign policy, not many people beat him. He knows everyone worth knowing in the world," she cooed.
As for many of the displaced, their fates are not recorded since that slew of reports in the 2000-2003. "None of them have received compensation," says Julie Flint, the Sudan expert. Perhaps they now make up some the 1.5m southerners in displacement camps outside Khartoum. Bildt refuses to answer questions on either the regime of Sudan or his past involvement there, to the Swedish press. His deputy, Gunilla Carlsson, wrote an op-ed piece a few months ago urging UN intervention in Darfur. Now she is silent. The exact closeness of Bildt's relationship with the Sudan regime - (called genocidal by secretary of state Colin Powell, and subject to US sanctions)- which after all granted Lundin a concession and provided itys "security" - would be interesting to look at. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is very hostile to UN intervention in Darfur. And the new Swedish foreign policy, clearly, has not spoken out against Bildt's old Khartoum interlocutor - in contrast to Blair, for instance,who talks of EU sanctions.
It is sad that a talented man who aspires to be Europe's foreign minister based on his achievements to undo the vicious effects of ethnic cleansing in Europe seems to have this murky story of forced displacements in Africa hanging over him. This most productive of men - who keeps a blog and a website devboted to his essays and daily musings - reaelly does need to explain himself regards his involvements in a country and company that have provided his main source of income in the last five years. His last vaguely Sudan related published words came in October on the death of Adolph Lundin, the roguish, bucaneering patriarch of the oil company that bears his name and Bildt's patron. lavishing him with share options in several of his companies. In a short comment, Bildt cited him as an inspiration while adding that he wasn't a man of the "fine salons". We would like to know more.

Idiot's guide to the EU, by a useful such one.....

While waiting for the end of week EU summit - and no, Bing didn't phone incidentally - my thoughts turn to what Europe is about. It's good to have outsiders; they force you to think. And I wrote the screed below.

It's funny, as soon as you write something you stop believing it - so it is in my case. After the piece defending Europe - and I sometimes wonder why I do this - I thought, this is complete nonsense. Anyways.

"...the EU is *not* an heir to the constructivist society of communist Russia, not an heir to the French revolution. It is not run by a revolutionary, unaccountable cadre of irreligious zealots and fanatics, all speaking French and producing pyramids of corpses in the abstract interests of Mankind. (The EU has never killed anyone, unlike the US.)
I used to think so, at university and living in the UK. Many British and American academics sitting in Oxford or wherever probably think so still, in their deluded fantasy.
But practical experience - occasionally useful you know, to have practical experience of something - of Brussels tells me it is ivery different. There are just too many checks and balances, too many different national interests, too many actors - the whole corporate, legal, NGO world is THERE, represented, including from the US. (And there are many nations and actors that are religious.. Others are not....it's not an issue) So many of them would cry foul at the slightest infraction on freedom. There are literally hundreds of meetings every day of expert groups, seminars, between all areas of business, finance, civil service and politics of mature democracies in the square miles that comprise the EU capital.
There is highly transparent decision making, monitored by the world's largest press corps. Everything is online, every commission official is contactable.
Everything has to go through multiple stages of verification. This is how the EU legislative process works: everyone has a say:
If you went to Brussels, and bumped in Mandela one day, the chairman of Texaco and ultracapitalist the next, a left wing NGO scurrying through the corridors on the third, and you spouted your stuff about the new Soviet Union, they would laugh at you. Elitist, yes.
But not totalitarian, not centralised. And it takes years to get a decision through that satisfies everyone.

It is the place of European - and globalised - dealmakers, got that? It is the City of London/New York Stock Exchange of world politics;Europe at the core, the rest of the world in concentric circles.The same international elite that goes to the city to make money goes to Brussels to lobby for financial legislation.
Every evening, the global elite with their briefcases get on the eurostar high speed trains back to London, under the channel, to Paris, to Dusseldorf....

Now my conceit about it being a Burkean aristocracy is this.
These "players" act in moderation to each other as aristocrats in the English parliament did of yore. The EU is not democratic - does not fish for the votes of the single mother of Birmingham or the Amsterdam ethnic street youth - it is no more a democracy that pre 1832 reform act England was. But aristocracies can sometimes make for better legislation, and make for better preservation of freedoms, and guarantee the rule of law, than democracies - especially populist democracies of interwar east Europe that persecuted Jews, or the revolutionary people's democracies that quickly turned totalitarian of France/Russia post 1789/1917.

In fact there are more checks and balances than in the modern UK. While British political instincts are good - its people are more tolerant and open to argument than continentals - the system at the moment is close to an elective dictatorship. That is, once elections are held, the ruling party and government always has a majority in parliament, MPs always vote with their government because they want jobs in govt. The revising chamber, the House of lords, is weak.
Tony Bliar has lost one or two votes in the last decade. It is not the same as parliament of Burke's era, when MPs were unwhipped and just voted with the best argument.
The closes approximation to the House of commons of say 1780 is actually the European parliament, where I have spent god knows how much time. Because MEPs (members of the European parliament) cannot get jobs in govt, I guess they are like the senate, they cannot be bribed into loyalty. They are a genuine revising chamber, looking at arguments on their merits. This is where reasoned, moderate Burkean rumination goes on.
Because of this elective dictatorship in the UK, I always tell lobbyists that if they want something done they should go to Brussels. Why? Because the effective British opposition at the moment is not the conservative party (which under the system always loses every parliamentary vote), it is MEPs and - above all - -those nation states who oppose those bits of legislation that, say, the British govt wants to introduce. Lobby for instance the French or Danish government; they have real power to oppose Blair. The British parliament does not.

As you know, European law precedes nation state law, it is an increasingly federal system, with nation states akin to US states, and Brussels like Washington. Probably sixty percent of legislation coming into the statute book of any given country come from Brussels; the rest are "local", ie nation state, issues. The nation state also has some powers to revise or adapt the general directives coming from Brussels.
But it is at the nation state level where the balance of power is dysfunctional. Ie the supra level is "balanced", and subject to checks and balances, it is when we get down to the UK level that we have elective dictatorship.

That is why Blair likes going to war. War is still a nation state issue. He has complete omnipotent powers here. More than he has about say, fish stocks or civil liberties.

Language of Barbarians

There have been two worthwhile events towards the end of the week. One has been the launch of the transnational radical party in the European parliament, in which Maurizio Turco, a rather cool Italian MEP, gave the keynote speech. Policies such as legalising drugs are part of his box of ideas. Fifteen minute speeches by the Esperanto Radical Association, the Antiprohibitionist International League and the anticlericale.net organisation give some flavour of its ideas. I didn’t stay too long. It will be interesting how it follows up.

Another was a conference on Human Rights featuring – here is a sample – one senior adviser of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. The United Nations People’s stateless organisation secretary general, the Lao Movement for Human Rights. I will be writing about this elsewhere; but I want to tell a little story.
At lunch, I left the meeting and went to a bar café in the area of Matonge. It has a high Congolese population. Congo is Belgium’s former colony. A president, the first freely elected in 40 years, Laurent Kabila, whose father was assassinated a few years back, had just been sworn in. Kabila is very popular in the east, which is Swahili-speaking and under the influence of the English-speaking neighbours to the east. He is less popular in the west, which is French and Lingala-speaking. The fact that Congo has been the battleground for “Africa’s World War” between Rwanda and Uganda on the one hand, and Angola, Nambia and Zimbabwe, which killed up to three million people, is less well known than it should be in the West. The war ended in 2003, a threat of renewed conflict still lingers.
I bought a group of about five people beers. Then one leaned over and said: “English is the language of barbarians.”
I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, given the accusations of complicity to genocide flung back and forth between the French government and the Rwandan government.
I had a sense that language, supremacism and mass murder could well be linked in Africa. The French government supported the French-speaking Rwandan Hutu militias withdrawing to Congyo in 1994. In turn, the French say the guerrillas who went on to form the Rwandan government who came from Uganda where they had been reared and trained in rebel camps in an Anglophone environment also committed butchery, English is now the de facto language of Rwanda.

There is no doubt that British commercial culture can sometimes grate when you have come from the continent, the P&O ferries forming an introduction to this. But I felt a rare twinge of pride, coming back on the coach. (The trains had hiked their prices to a level even newspapers wouldn’t pay for.)
We were searched by French customs officers, who asked quite intrusive questions, and stopped everyone. My experience of British customs is that they only stop people on suspicion. And they have to write up a note, which you have to sign, after the search is completed. The French officers snapped their rubber gloves in a loud and rather juvenile way.
When we got back on the bus, there were several Belgian Moroccans with whom I struck up conversation, each saying that Britain was a much less racist than the continent, more fair, more open. Shortly after, British passport officers in civilian suits welcomed us into the UK with a smile.

Nokia nation shuns mobile workers

An occasional series of stories from little-covered Scandinavian countries. It's been the Finnish presidency of EU for six months - and the climax of this period is the bi-annual summit of European leaders due to take place on Friday. I will try to write about it then: one of the key issues will be the Turkish membership question, which is on the rails, a tug of war between member states who want to retard the process, and others that are impatient - one of which countries is Finland. With that in mind, until then, this little story catches my eye
EU legislation is one thing in theory; another thing, as everyone knows, in practice. So also with free labour mobility. On 1 May Finland – new holders of EU presidency - proudly joined a number of other member states, including Portugal, Greece and Spain in opening its borders to labour from the new member states. The UK, Sweden and Ireland opened their borders already in 2004.
So is it easy to get a job in Finland now? Not really, if the experiences of a Polish journalist from Wroclaw are anything to go by. Her newspaper sent reporters to all the capitals that had opened their borders, to pose as ordinary job applicants. The Lisbon, Athens, London, Stockholm and Barcelona bound hacks had all found menial jobs within a week.
The girl who drew the Helsinki lot was less lucky.
“You can’t even get a job as a cleaner without some knowledge of Finnish. It was told that measuring and mixing cleaning fluid was so demanding English is not enough, even though everyone spoke it,” Aleksandra “Ola” Pezda wrote afterwards, for Gazeta Wyborcza. “They don’t really want foreigners here.”
She was told that she was the wrong sex to get a job as a painter; though she might get a job handing out copies of metro later. At two employment agencies serving foreigners, Eures and Staffpoint, she was told that "nobody will accept an application form" if she does not speak Finnish, Europe’s most complicated and most obscure language. She went around restaurants, called about available jobs and went to St Henry’s Catholic church. In other cities these have “Wailing Wall” noticeboards for jobs, usually for the Polish community. In the Helsinki church the only notice was for alcoholics anonymous. Pezda was astonished to see the largest trade union headquarters she had seen anywhere and speculated whether this was the cause of the Finns’ hostility to foreigners. She was surprised the Finns wanted so much personal information by email, unlike other cities. “They are afraid to say no to your face,” she was told.
She found Helsinki extremely expensive; and one Pole she did meet was only ever able to send back 500 euros a month. Even student restaurants were unaffordable and she learnt to bake her own bread. People knew the prices of everything down to the last cent. Finally she did find a woman called Ritta who apologised for the application forms being only in Finnish – the first Finn to do so. Pezda went out into the street and hailed a Finn at who random, who could help her through the labyrinthine application. However she never got to know if she was given the job, since she had to catch her plane back home, and the manager had said “I will see you later, maybe in a few weeks.” My thought about this: if the Finns have made Enlargement the principal theme of their presidency, it could be because they do not fear it.

When I hear culture I reach for my EU dictionary

I am in Brussels this week. This is a typical routine on my biweekly commutes to that city, for your reference.
I spent Monday at a culture conference, the contents of which have been somewhat anti-culture. The meeting concerned the online consultation that DG culture (in its wannabe way, perhaps) held earlier this year: with a number of citizens giving their input, the commission produced a briefing statement, brought in several bigwigs from the DG - including commissioner Jan Figel - and devoted a day to talking about it with various cultural stakeholders in European arts policy of whom you will, of course, never have heard.
Outsiders were informed that since "its inclusion in the Treaty on the European Union, cultural cooperation has become a new community competency." So what can Europe do for culture?
Here is a sample of the online consultation inputs - all of which are from leading stakeholder figures (didn't see any citizens), from organisations such as the International Photography Network and the Nordic Innovation Centre.
"We need to have a closer cooperation with stakeholders from different sectors supporting Culture and Creative Industries. If Europe should contribute to a professionalizing of the Creative Industries, we must strongly emphasise on the role of the Creative Industries entrepreneur through enhancing the knowledge of the economic setting and business know-how."
"Yes they are linked. Contribute - by making clear that the cultural disciplines have always influenced each other through history. - organise crosscultural concerts as well as crosscultural exhibitions, to be performed/shown in more than one place. - by creating chances for artists to take part in exchange and co-operation programmes. Give them more chances to elaborate projects on cultural integration."
Then:
"Art and culture come from the grass roots way of life. Artists should be empowered to continually reflect this social phenomenon with their artistic creations. The EC should empower inter-statal organisations to lead their members to the goal of integration in diversity."
I don't know quite what to make of all of this; the conference speeches were in the same vein.
I did vaguely why the conference hadn't invited in, say, Gunther Grass or Ryszard Kapuscinski to bring some liveliness into the proceedings.

At the usual elaborate lunch I met the chair of MTV Europe. We discussed Steve Strange, a music DJ from our youths - the early 90s - whom I remembered interviewing once at a European parliament theme television programme recording at the station's studios in Camden Lock, London. "We are trying to become more serious," he said.
MEPs were quizzed on what the knew of European youth culture. Patricia Rawlings - an authentic bluerinse Tory, no longer in the EP - was shown a man who walked on stage in bikers' gear, unzipped a banana from his trousers and started to eat. She replied, "He is obviously a squatter." (He was a heavy metal fan.) Another MEP in an elegant suit lamented that not enough discussion was devoted to the 20 million youth unemployed in Europe but spoilt it somewhat by bringing out a balloon which, when she had inflated it in front of my face, said, "vote socialist" - and I remember finishing my article with the words "MTV is becoming more serious, but not as serious clearly as the European parliament."
Of course, it was the facetiousness of youth. Now I know that the European parliament - indeed the whole EU - truly is a serious place.

Sudan's not-so-good good guys

A break from covering Europe.
I have been researching a story on Tabitha Shokaya, the health minister of Sudan, for months now. It’s for the New Scientist; the attraction for them is that she is a female science graduate in a war zone, in the country with the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. A health minister of a government accused of committing genocide (by the US house of representatives): I phoned the snarky Sudanese embassy, who said I should write a letter via them, then they might get back. Another phone call and I got the health ministry in Sudan’s phone number: got through to a guy – assistant, smart-sounding, English-speaking - who could get me through to Her Excellency, gave me his email, weeks went past, another phone call got his phone number, which was the wrong number. Finally I called a British journalist, Peter Moszynski, whom I had met at a British Medical Association garden party in the summer, who told me he had adopted one of the Lost Boy war orphans (children make very good fighters, and they can be drugged) , brought him to London, made him into a rap star (long story), Africa’s greatest, and the now millionaire young man had turned on Peter and sued and impoverished him for taking him out of his natural environment – ie a refugee camp where owning a plastic receptacle that can be hired out to the highest bidder counts as being a rich person.
After telling me this story, Moszynski had recommended me Shokaya; I was looking for someone to profile in Africa, and he told me of this woman of contrasts in the Sudanese government, facing enormous chalenges; he now gave me the phone number of a man called Suleiman Rahel, an exile politician, who in turn gave me Shokaya’s number.
The war in Darfur, western Sudan, is usually thought of – by the common public – as one happening between two, rather monolithic, forces: the rebels of Darfur, and the "Muslim" Government of Sudan.
What is seldom discussed is that the Government of Sudan is a coalition with the SPLM, the Southern Sudan people’s liberation movement, who clinched a very generous peace deal last year, after decades of fighting the north. They are “black”, “Christian” and have the right to secede from the rest of rest of Sudan on 2011, subject to a referendum, bringing more than their fair share of oil wealth with them. Sudan is now Africa’s third biggest oil exporter. (Carl Bildt stuck his filthy nose in, blog passim). Until then they have 9 out of 27 seats in the national coalition government in Khartoum. What role have they been playing in the government’s decisions – a government in which their membership often seems to be forgotten?
According to inside sources, they lie low, and don’t care very much for the plight of the Darfurians. They say: “They are all Muslim anyway (like Khartoum) and what did they do for us when we were fighting as rebels were fighting the government?” And they rather enjoy the discomforts that their coalition partners and erstwhile opponents, the National Congress Party, have with the international community.
Yet, my source reveals, this attitude is becoming increasingly noticed in the ministries of the west – including Britain’s ministry for Africa, the department for international development – and disliked. The SPLM were supposed to be the good guys; they wanted a united, secular democratic Sudan; and they if anyone ought to show grace towards a rebel movement with similar aspirations to their own – the aspiration of their community to achieve equal footing with Khartoum.
Yet, now that they have the oil guarantee they are just waiting for the secession deadline.
Furthermore, they don’t seem to be running their own part of the country that well.
Forty percent of the Government of southern Sudan’s budget – subordinate to the joint SPLM-NCP Khartoum government under the federal system – is spent on security. How much is spent on health? According to NGOs I spoke to, Southern Sudan has some of the worst health indicators in the world, obscured by pan-Sudan statistics. In parts of eastern Sudan, the maternal mortality rate is one-third. The AIDS rate is soaring because of the newly-open borders with Uganda, rapes from the war, and widespread denial and low condom use. Malnutrition rates at 20 percent are extremely high. NGOs, which feed the south, are hamstrung by bureaucracy and failure to have their security guaranteed, so many have pulled out./ New legislation has just been passed – which the SPLM didn’t stop – that allows the sequestration of NGOs’ assets, some thanks you might think. Failure to communicate between the different layers of bureaucracy means NGOs who received the green light from Khartoum need re-authorisations to operate at state level. There are too many chiefs and not enough Indians – too many specialists and not enough barefoot doctors. A large part of the medical corps are working in London anyway. Food aid now has to be rerouted through Khartoum rather than the more convenient Kenya.
It seems to me Tabitha Shokaya, whom I am re-interviewing tomorrow, should reverse the poor impression of the SPLM by showing she is actually doing a good job, both on behalf of her region and the Sudan over which she is, after all, federal health minister.
This means presenting a plan for tackling the cascade of health problems just mentioned; dealing with the security situation in Darfur that prevents aid getting through. Then – persuading her boss, president Omar al-Bashir, to devote more of the oil largesse to health - which even in northern Sudan is poor. These things, will I am told, restore the somewhat battered reputation of the SPLM in the West.

I've seen things

Self mockery is the signal of modernity

I remember 1992, the first time I went to Auschwitz with my girlfriend.
We came back to Krakow, got drunk on vodka, fell asleep, woke up and discovered we had covered each other’s forearms with tattoos and prison numbers – in ballpoint pen. Later we got drunk on more vodka as we discussed war and history, and made love. Krakow was just a haze.
Poland has always had that effect, on me anyway. Its overwhelming maudlinness, its frequent ugliness and let’s face it excellent social lubricants – and, these days, a patched up heart - always brings out the same reaction, and earlier I wrote a piece of spirited free association, immediately after a week-long study visit to Poland with other journalists last week, paid for by the foreign ministry.
The reason for the ministry's exercise in public diplomacy is that
Poland, which comes bottom in many EU social and scientific indicators, and has a bit of a problem in Brussels with its conservative leadership, is clearly trying to promote itself as a modern, youthful, vibrant society and economy. We were asked to write a short piece on what we think of Poland as a new member of the EU. I think Poland's membership is great, but my opinion is irrelevant. More profitable is to answer the question: what does the rest of Europe think of Poland as an EU member - and how can Poland make itself more popular and successful.

I have before me a document from the Rzeszow investment agency, which informs me that the university of Rzeszow has twenty-thousand students and there “more and more graduates every year”. Heineken, we are told, has invested here, and labour costs are a fifth of what they are in the UK. Rszeszow is a partner city of Klagenfurt. Every tenth IT specialist in Poland graduated from the city.
I read this yadda, yadda at home, given to me after an investment seminar in that city on Monday– and I find my mind alas drifting back, to misty autumn streets in the old town of Krakow, holding the hands of a tragic Polish girl in tight skirt, black tights and a masters degree in philosophy, who told me all about Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, the Warsaw uprising – and Czeslaw Milosz. Statistics about how Rszeszow region is the trade cross-roads for south eastern region of Europe do not tether me to the here and now, I am afraid. So now to the essence of this article.
Why is this? Why is the tragedy of Polish history much more interesting than the groovy new Poland of the EU future that the foreign ministry wants to promote. Is it only me, and my personal history, or would others have the same perception? If the latter is the case, I think the foreign ministry should take stock.
I think the latter is the case. Not all investors or tourists care about history of course, but that is the wrong approach: there are many would be investors who do know about Polish history who could be persuaded to come if that knowledge is linked with the hard facts about investment opportunities. The sorrow and the pity could make a difference between a French firm buying into Malaysia or buying into Poland.
This campaign has to be managed carefully, so as not to put off those not interested in history at all, and perhaps to hold back the innate tendency of Poles to be off-puttingly gloomy and or a bit arrogant about their past when allowed to be themselves. Last week I met Poles who were cravenly lost in a transatlantic businessman's identity; but I suspect there are strong countervailing, pompous nationalist forces in today's Poland of the Kaczynskis that will act backwardly on the collective personality.
May I propose some slogans which, while they might not be used - should not be used - are markers for the new identity not in what they say but the manner in which they deal with Poland's property: its past, That is, mocking, sardonic and subversive, sending up native tendencies and showing rather than just stating that Poland is a modern country, since mockery is the pre-eminent modern idiom.

Holocaust

So: the current investment and tourism slogan is “the heart of Europe”, a cliché if there ever was one, and not even unique, since about half a dozen other countries lay claim to the same thing. It's accompanied by a cute heart that reminds me of some nice girl with a ponytail presenting some investment campaign or other but doesn't really communicate much.
How about something invoking the holocaust; it is a huge taboo at the moment, and the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, with his alter ego Borat the Kazakh reporter, is becoming a cult figure in the US for his film, where he travels around the country making faux-naif jokes about Jews which people take at face value. The film gets five star reviews in the US and British media, and liberals everywhere love its sophistication, because the joke is on the anti-semites.
So - on the mockery theme - where Australia has “where the hell are you, mate” as its campaign which is very successful. Poland could have something like “People used to come here to work for free”; or “Millions came and never left”, which echoes yet subverts a whole history of serious investment/ corporate recruitment slogans.
Okay, so maybe not. But you get the gist. Moving on to a less controversial subject a picture of the Mazurian lakes in autumn, emphasising the emptiness. "They have all gone to work in England." Or, a picture of a bottle of expensive bottle of vodka and the words "Rarer than a successful cavalry charge."
My time is up. Polish history packs a wallop, if managed and mediated rightly.
ENDS

The happiest country, the saddest country

Back in London, how to sum up Poland?
What a Gothic country! It’s a country of dignity and elaborate politeness, of perpetual autumn and rainy potholed streets over which presides some Stalinist monstrosity of other, of wide, unexplained urban spaces; of ubiquitous Polish eagles. Of aching, pathetic innocence and underlying toughness. It’s an erotic country of small female gifts and gestures; of police brutality and corruption. It is proud and noble to make tears well up in your foreign observer’s throat, yet also dependent on what the “West” thinks – yesterday, today and I suspect always.
Of Scandinavian work ethic, Prussian militarism, American religiosity and Balkan backwardness. It’s the smell of sweat, cigarettes, rye bread and vodka; the sound of American accents in business centres.
It’s overwhelmingly white and a long, long way from Brussels or London, London on a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park where all the roller bladers in many ethnic varieties gather.

It is Janusz walking his little white lapdog under the moonlit naked trees who sniffled a little, voted for Kaczynskis and wanted to go the army to protect his girlfriend. It is Henryk in Cracow punching his palm and saying “I was a security guard in Chicago.” And saying: “I khate Jews.” So did his friends, all in bomber jackets, hunched over Lech beers. Henryk was about 40. This in a country where the Jews are not a nation but a nomination. It was the drive (a secret policeman?) who drove our bus, spooning Zurek soup at a lunch stop saying “the roads are no better than ten years ago.” Where driving at night is like being a member of Bomber Command, over blackout Germany, and the fifth gear is seldom used. It is Marcin, the Danish-speaking diplomat, who says: “Kaczynski is is my boss. We are always inviting foreign journalists.” Who adds: “But I can’t understand why half my friends go to church every Sunday.”

Poland is memories of Pascal’s wager and what came after vodka, which is the Information, and which comes at night. The memory and the flavour, boiled cabbage and dirty snow, umschlag platz and empty offices ringing phones. High ceilings and low toilet pans, and women’s better memories. The deserted spa hotel and the fateful offer of coca-cola. The cross on the hill, the cross on the other hill, and the end.

It is being asked to take your shoes off at Rzeszow Aurport, noted terror target. It is the investment conference.
It is the Lowry paintings, outside Lodz railway station. It is the land of the Easter baskets and proffered sausage. Of the lost millions, though this time to west. You’ve seen it in some old film somewhere. It is one legged men in propaganda films about the lost borderlands, hopping down a village streets, in image as black as a crow, to cheap, potent fiddle music. The young intellectual with his spatulate fingers talking about the election of the bishop of Warsaw.

It is of carpeted hotel bars that look like a German rock star’s lavatory, that are never staffed, that play radio stations that only play radio jingles.
It is the devoted love of Polish boys and girls, docile, enviable Slavic love, of the peeled orange and the shared rucksack. It is the purposeful long distance coach with men who’d better learn English fast. It is the self destruction of success; fomented by twin potato heads in a nation that never seems to laugh, at least at itself.
It is of the second chances that belong to all of us, coming over the bridge, after the road, and seeing Stalin’s gothic super-ego lit like the Empire State building. It is the happiest country; it is the saddest country. And it is better to love than to hate.

Vote against Turkey with your euro note

Reading the news over breakfast in a Krakow hotel, about the next big enlargement headache...if you thought Poland was big to swallow!
As suspension of EU Turkey negotiations loom, as Turkey is set to refuse to respond to an EU deadline to open its ports to Cyprus, I recall meeting in Brussels a group of French campaigners who have found an innovative use for the euronote: as a pan-European voting slip for situations when national governments fail to oblige with an immediate referendum or election. The group, Rayez la Turquie, argues that against the wishes of Europe's citizens European leaders are marching the EU towards Turkish integration with Europe. There is apparently going to be a referendum in France on this, but not for several years, and having passed through all the various preconditions, Turkey's membership might then already be a fait accompli. Few if any of the other member states will be holding referenda. The campaigners' solution? Use the Euro note is a signal of protest by crossing out with a ballpoint pen the Turkey that appears in the bottom hand corner of the reverse side of the note, which is decorated with a map ofEurope. "Cross Turkey out" is the campaigners' rather direct slogan - what, pray, would it translate to in German? Rayez la Turquie assures Turkophobes that the notes will remain legal tender - "they cannot refuse the money" - particularly if the cross is a subtle one. They hope, perhaps optimistically, that from a European population 65% against Turkish membership - 350 million - at least one million people are committed enough to vandalize the currency. At a defacing rate of 100 notes a month, that's 1.2 billion euro notes with Turkey crossed out in 12 months. With the average European poll producing only a million votes either way, what politician could resist such an avalanche of protest?The group's jolly ideas opens the horizons. For recondite observers of euroland monetary politics, there is the opportunity to cross out the central bank chief and substitute one's own candidate. Anglophobes who thinkBritain is a retardant to the European project can cross out the UK - but that could be confusing as British eurosceptics - those with euro notes in their possession - might take to doing that too. Crossing out the euro symbol itself would be a less ambiguous signal.

How Poland can make itself liked in one easy step

About a dozen European Union journalists have been wined and dined in Poland in last week, by the foreign ministry, which wanted to know what we thought of Poland. There is a disparity between what Europe thinks of Poland and Poland thinks of Europe. In the EU consultants Anholt’s global nation brands index of 35 countries, polling thousands, the country is near the bottom, 30th place. On the other hand, Poland gives the European Union its top position. Almost no one else in the whole world, apart from the Czech Republic and Argentina, likes Europe as much as Poland does.
Why is Poland so poorly perceived? Perhaps partly because of distorted or ignorant reporting, or absent reporting. My fellow journalists on a trip this week were not overly knowledgeable about Poland, which must irritate the proud elite of this country no end. Our first session started: “We let you ask the questions, since we find there are some basic misconceptions about Poland.” My friends made progress, learning to say please and thank you in Polish by the end of the week.
It is frustrating but not much can be done in the short term; and it is instructive to realise that perception of a country probably depends as much on the underlying reality – reality at least seen by insiders with integrity - and it is this we must now examine.
One pan European value is arguably free speech.
Last February the rallying cry was “we are all Danes now”; Europeans set aside their differences over common agricultural policy, the constitution and the various day-to-day events of Brussels and newspapers across the continent republished the offensive Mohammed cartoons that got Jyllands-posten in trouble with Arab opinion worldwide.
It is a safe bet that a European country that has a poor track record on freedom of speech is going to be worse regarded by its fellow Europeans than a country with a better record. Poland under even the Kaczynski brothers at least seems to be aware of the propaganda value of freedom of speech, since on the last day we were taken to a government-funded Belarusian language radio station, Radio Racija, “Radio rationality”, which sends dozens of hours of programming on various wavelengths, Belarusian music and politics, into that authoritarian country, a traditional sphere of interest for Poland, a country where president Aleksander Lukashenko has ruled since 1994 and won elections in March this year with eighty percent of the vote, a distinctly dodgy result.
I am sure Belarus deserves its near bottom ranking on the Reporters sans Frontieres list, though I was surprised that the brave reporters – who look like the men who ran the freedom movement show in Poland and Hungary in the eighties, bearded, cardiganed, idealistic – were not actually jailed for their reports; they travel freely in and out of Belarus; there is minor psychological hassle from the police, but their worst difficulties seem to be failure to receive accreditation and prohibition to talk to Belarusian government officials. What is instructive to make is a comparison between Belarus – widely held to undemocratic – and Poland itself, a member of the EU which has signed up to an acquis that includes guarantees of freedom of speech.

Poland bottom

What were not told on the tour, and I am not surprised, is that Poland itself is the bottom-ranking EU country for freedom of speech (58th place, far below neighbours Czech Republic and Hungary). The editor of one satirical magazine was fined for criticising the Pope; the editor of another magazine had to cut an offending article out of 80,000 copies before could get put on the streets for an article calling the Kaczynski brothers liars; and the state authority in charge of monitoring broadcasting, KRRIT, fined a private Polish TV station Polsat 125,000 euros after a guest on a Polsat talk show made fun and mimicked the voice of the presenter of the Radio Maryja group, which has acted virtually as a mouthpiece for the Kaczynskis among the catholic, rural, uneducated poor that form their base. This same state council has never once criticised Radio Maryja for its frequent anti-Semitic remarks.
What this means for what isn’t said in Poland as a result of these “signals” is anyone’s guess: there could be a great deal of self censorship that prevents people from crossing the line into persecution. There is a ban on photographing the Kaczynskis in profile. (see photo).

But it is instructive to see how the Kaczynskis treat the less fettered foreign press as an indication regards their attitude to domestic media: famously the German liberal paper Die Tageszeitung said the twins resembled potatoes in July and that their experience of abroad was “limited to the spittoons at Frankfurt airport”.
This prompted prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to call on the German government to apologise for the paper’s remarks, much in the manner ironically the worldwide Muslim councils showed their failure to understand separation between government and media by asking the Danish prime minister to apologise for the cartoons back in February. Warsaw regional prosecutors launched an investigation into whether the paper broke article 135 of a Polish law that imposes a sentence of up to three years for journalists who insult a Polish head of state. A favoured catholic newspaper, Nasz Dziennik, meanwhile listed 16 German correspondents in Poland and told people to remember their names. Tageszeitung’s Warsaw correspondent was banned from speaking to Polish officials, RSF reported.
Before I went out to Poland, I was intrigued by reports that Jaroslaw – who lives with his mother – is gay, since his brother, Lech, the president, has earned the ire of the European commission by banning gay pride marches in Warsaw and he himself has argued for banning gay teachers in schools. There have been allusions to it. Apparently Lech Walesa said on a recent TV programme, Teraz My, that at his birthday party a decade earlier, “Lech Kaczynski brought has wife and Jaroslaw brought his husband.”
I asked the foreign editor of Gazeta Wyborcza if this was true, and he shrugged, and his colleague dissembled. I took the answer as a no. Such caution does not surprise since, according to Gay City News, a US publication that quotes extensively from insider Polish homosexual journalist sources, one TV journalist, Mikolaj Kunica, who refused to edit out an interview remark by an old Kaczynski friend that indicated his possible gayness was fired by the head of Polish television.
It is probably a good idea if Poland does what it takes to move up the press freedom rankings as it prepares to promote itself as a good EU member. The essence of salesmanship is that you have to have a good product – and even then it might not work. This great country deserves all the success.

I've seen things

Europe as a bladerunner fantasy...

(see below, and see above)

The Bladerunner metaphor that explains Brussels

What is Europe about....an occasional series.

I have been engaged in vigorous exchanges of email with some American friends over Europe recently. They are north-eastern academics, picture thirtysomethings in woollen V-neck sweaters, scattered in elite campuses set in rolling wooded hills across the north-east. They are anglophile, with anglophile prejudices.Onen group's preconceived idea has been that it is some elitist project, driven by irreligious jacobin commission officials - unstable, unanchored in the wishes of the majority, driven by a desire to impose an abstract system of governance on a group of organic societies. They are followers of the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. They tend to think the revolution is going to fail. Another group has argued that the EU is heir to the Third Reich; they point to the elitism of the EU institutions; the fact that an early version of the EU was on the third reich drawing board, that Germany has bankrolled the EU for much of its existence; that European socities are poor at integration, that we have anti-semitism and a very rightwing parties (I know, but that is what they think). They also think that the EU - based on my description -seems to developing an elite kind of person, the superior European, different and manner and very contemptuous of the "democratic" American...and others. They have a point. There are in Brussels a lot of youngish Germanic men in horn-rimmed flasses and sidecombed hair, thin noses and superior intelligence - bureaucrats who plan the new Europe who make you think, mmmm, I wonder what they would have been doing sixty-five years ago, probably subcategorising people of Jewish ancestry according to the blood status of their grandparents into Mischling grade I or Mischling grade II. In those days they would have banned bad genetic blood lines of humans; today they ban genetic crops. Facing these arguments - whose common factor is that Europe is a pretty elitist place, I tell them a little story about dreams. While the European institutions gift their employees with extra-ordinary means to fulfil their potential, this is under threat - and that's bad. Let the threat to the elitists be told with reference to a well-known science fiction story. Confused? You won't be. Read on.
You, my intelligent American friend, D, a journalist, are in Brussels. It is lunchtime, Albert Speerstrasse, the long parade route that runs to the centre of Brussels. Actually it is called rue de la loi. They cleared workers housing twenty years ago, small organic housing, with squares and parks. Now the area is just one of concrete office blocks housing the 26 directorates that run the affairs of 500 million people.At lunchtime, thousands of European officials pour out of the Berlaymont, and the Justsus Lipsius, the two biggest buildings in a parade of low skyscrapers in the area. Many hold the Financial Times. Hundreds are milling around in the lobby of the Council; many have neckscarves and compact trolley suitcases of airhostesses. There is an intense sense of busyness, as high heels clack on the black marble floors under a high atrium ceiling. You always liked European girls; they are all in skirts, and you wonder who they will be spending the night with....most girls do, after all, have someone or other. Their average age is about 27. There are few north Italian aquiline faces: no blacks, Arabs, no obvious Jews. (There are in fact very few Jews working in the EU) The friend emerges: his name is Christophe Langenmarck. You hail a black mercedes limousine cab. He tells you immediately he is balling an interpreter; he also tells you he was working on legislation with the Americans about the new European Galileo satellites. He takes you to the Place Jourdan, a square preserved from the developers where you can have sancerre and halibut in the spring sunshine. He tells you he has been listening to Gary Numan. That it is the music of the new Europe.Hard, metallic. Then he tells why he liked Bladerunner. Because the replicants seem to be the bad guys, but it emerges that they are the good guys. They are the aristocrats. They are created by the inferiors, human beings, and their violence when escaping to earth can be explained by the fact they are looking for the one gift denied them: a normal lifespan. They have to be killed. Deckard - Harrison Ford - the bladerunner - is dispatched to kill them. He kills all but the leader, Roy, who saves Deckard just as he expires himself, under his replicant's shortened lifespan. At the end of the movie, Deckard himself realises he is a replicant - and will probably die shortly. Humankind used a replicant to kill replicants, the only one to take them on.
"You destroyed the EU," Christophe says. "You are a bladerunner."
And then your friend quotes the last line by Roy in the film. ""I have seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
He doesn't have to spell it out: what he means is that the clever people who work for the commission, travelling business class all over the world, see and meet people the average voter and reader of your paper never has, never would. They meet the top thinkers, top politicians, visits killing fields and refugess camps, protected forests, the Houston space centre and the inner sanctum of the Kremlin. And out of this they have a vision for a greater Europe - a greater Europe for all, but led by them.
On your way back home on the London tubr from Heathrow airport, you pass all the commuter homes, containing suburban lives, as you read the Evening Standard headline that the EU will dissolve itself within three years. You feel rather sad for those who saw things people wouldn't believe.

British junior doctors fear foreign competition

Covering Europe, you see a lot of old people behaving selfishly. (the vigour of youth, the guile of the old.) But young people can behave badly too; back in London, I met up with a number of junior doctors whom I had met earlier this year at their annual conference. My conclusion: Junior doctors in Britain are under pressure – and they have started acting mean. And they do not want to be quoted on this.
They are suffering unprecedented competition for junior doctors’ posts due to a number of factors. The launch of a number of programmes that bring doctors who have spent time off sue to illness, travel or having families back into the profession. The establishment of six medical schools in the last few years, churning out thousands of extra graduates. The creation of a new specialised health professional – the care practitioner, who can do some of the jobs doctors can do – anaesthesia, surgery, general medicine – but lack the doctor’s breadth of experience and judgment. They are also much cheaper and quicker to train and employ. Then, uniquely in 2007, a shorter foundation programme of two years introduced in 2005 whose graduates will emerge to compete directly with the first graduates from the earlier, three year programme.
Then there is competition both from EU doctors and from those further overseas, the overwhelming majority from India.
None of this has been balanced by an expansion in nearly as many doctors’ posts, despite the shortages demanding to be filled by the introduction of the European working directive and its shorter hours.
The average junior doctor’s position now has several hundred applicants for it. You don’t need to be an economist to see the irrationality of training doctors at £30,000 from A-levels through to graduation only to dump most of them on to the dole queue. Something had to give. It was the overseas, commonwealth doctors.
They have been coming for decades; unlike other international workers, who required work permits, graduate doctors from overseas could just apply, on the same basis as any British citizen, for any hospital job. The NHS needed them: their English language skills were excellent; their undergraduate training based on the British system. They in turn got excellent postgraduate training – the seven long years of twenties and early thirty-hood being so called house doctors, then specialist registrars, before graduating, subject to professional exams, to the desired goal, the acme of medicine – a consultant’s position. Then they would return to India where an NHS training was a badge of excellence enabling its benefactor to command huge private fees.
Under not so subtle pressure from the youth wing of the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, the government stopped the work permit free regime in March and ruled that Indian doctors would only be able to fill a vacancy in a hospital only if it could be proved that the post could not be filled by a suitably qualified British or EU graduate.
While many Indian doctors in their late stage of postgraduate training, those in their first two years and those looking for work are in jeopardy: the first training posts are usually six month contracts and when these run out these doctors will, basically, have to go home, since it is extremely unlikely hospitals will be able to prove that hundreds of EU and British applicants ahead of the Indians in priority are unable to fulfil the junior posts’s requirement, which are classic first step the ladder menial tasks
No one keeps records but, of the 40,000 doctors of Indian origin working in the NHS, you cpould be talking of a few thousand vulnerable Indian junior doctors.
Dr Prasada Rao, chairman of the association and a general practitioner in Stoke-on-Trent, spoke for many when he said: “We are concerned that the UK is beginning to turn its back on the vital links that we have with the Commonwealth.”
Some British doctors expressed outrage at the decision: “It is basically a kick in the teeth,” said Dr Jim Stuart, clinical director of the Manchester Royal Infirmary’s A&E department.
For many, if not all, of the doctors who have just turned up from India and were looking for their first jobs, or have been here a short term in one or two short contracts and have no other job to go to, it marks a brutal end to a dream. On top of med school back in India, the investment of a fare to England, the fees for tests proving linguistic and professional competence, there is the cost of rent and lodging in the UK. The investment was accompanied by the hope of being able to earn back the costs; but every evening, the Shri Mahalakshmi Hindu temple in east London dispenses free food to indigent doctors from the Asian subcontinent.
Dr Rao told me from the BMA’s annual conference that there had been no change in the situation since March; and that several demands for concessions to be given a grace free period for unemployed doctors to find a job for two years had gone unheeded.
Looking at Indian junior doctors’ websites, there is a certain resentment about the EU, which is perceived as imposing these laws and whose doctors are thought of as being less well trained and compatible with the British system. But while EU doctors cannot be denied entry to the UK, there was no EU pressure to rescind the permits to Indian doctors. It was a British government decision, pushed by the BMA, and useful to blame on the EU. Still,. It’s yet another indication of how Britain is becoming more European.

The French disguise their linguistic aspirations

What is the English translation of the French word multilingualisme?
Has any francophone politician ever used it in any sense other than “proceedings ought to be carried out in French instead”.
This morning the agreeable Jean Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who also chairs the monthly meeting of eurozone finance ministers, gave a rather witty breakfast speech on the euro, entirely in French, because he said (in English), he had a commitment to diversity of European languages. “Otherwise everyone will be speaking English.”
But diversity of two is not much better than diversity of one. No? How many French-speaking politicians preaching multilingualism ever go on to make a speech, or take questions, in German? As it happens Juncker is one of the few francophone top leaders who could have done so; but didn’t.
As the French preach multilingualism repeated eurostat indicators show that the French are no better at speaking Europe’s other main languages than the British (and are among the less competent at English). French history is not known for tolerating France’s minority languages.
Ah, here comes the new Brussels unauthorised dictionary definition, from our cynical man in the interpretation booths. “Multilingualisme: n. A disguised aspiration for French linguistic hegemony. Colloq. ‘We are going to knock you Brits off your perch.’”

MEP attacked for supporting cult

The favourite project of the European parliament's most prominent Human Rights campaigners, Edward McMillan-Scott MEP (blog passim), has been dismissed by a Chinese diplomat. McMillan-Scott has been prominent at backing claims by the outlawed Falun Gong religious group that their political prisoners are used for "organ harvesting": that is, they are killed as demand for their kidneys, hearts and livers arises from rich foreign buyers.
In May McMillan-Scott (left, on another crusade) went to China to interview two Falun Gong activists who had been released from prison, where they had been tortured. They were now unemployed as the police had refused to sign a document saying they were not fit to work and could be taken on.
When McMillan-Scott left, his interpreter, a western national, was arrested and questioned, and McMillan-Scott's assistant says one of the two activists has since "disappeared".
In August McMillan-Scott accompanied the Canadian lawyer, human rights campaigner and former deputy foreign minister David Kilgour to Australia and New Zealand on a consciousness-raising trip for the claims, which have been widely circulated in the western media, but never fully corroborated. Kilgour published a report earlier this year which included telephone transcripts with prison hospital directors which suggested that Falun Gong body parts could be supplied at short notice. Websites advertise organs in English for tens of thousands of dollars; given the known shortage of voluntary donors in China, and the short waiting times offered, the report concluded that there had to be a large "pool" of donors from which organs who could be harvested.
The government official, who did not want to be named, said: "Falun Gong people are lunatics. Their claims are shit; they say are persecuted because they want to escape China's one child policy and receive asylum in the States or Europe. Their way to get asylum is to say that they are persecuted," he said.
Falun Gong involves breathing exercises in the Yoga position, and is regarded as cranky but harmless, in the west, where it has millions of adherents, particularly among youngish and alternative people. In China it has been banned since 1999. Falun Gong's worldwide circle of supporters mount vigils outside Chinese embassies around the world, and frequently demonstrate on Chinese government visits,
"In China, on the coast, people live normal consumer lives, 99 percent of the population is happy, and growing richer. The leader of this evil cult, Li Hongzhi, is a lunatic. He said he would have flown to Paris on a celestial wheel if his friends hadn't stopped him and put on a plane. They also believe in UFOs."
"Of course they are against the government, but they are fanatics, like the 7/7 bombers. But their mouths pour out lies. We have a saying: in a dog's mouth you cannot expect ivory teeth."
Amnesty international have said they are continuing their own investigations into the report. A spokesman said their investigations continued to be hampered y the particular difficulty of collecting reliable evidence in China, including official restrictions on access for international human rights organizations
Dr Stephen Wigmore, head of the ethics committee of the British transplant society,k has warned against Europeans going to China for organ transplants until the issue is clarify Until camps are given full access to ied. But McMillan Scott - founder of the European Democracy initiative, and strong promoter of democracy in the Middle East - has warned that China's reputation could suffer when showcasing itself at the 2008 Olympics.

Horrific tale of human Chinese takeaway

Heroic Mr MacMillan Scott

Edward MacMillan Scott doubtless has numerous talents.. He is vice president of the European parliament, after all. One of these talents is the ability to pick a good assistant. Congratulations Jennifer Forrest, for going to China with your boss and coming back with a detailed and gruesome account of how Falun Gong prisoners are treated. Falun Gong is a harmless spiritual belief system, sometimes called the new Chinese Yoga, the daily practice of which by millions of Chinese people gets up the Chinese government’s noses. The police force arrests FG practitioners after tip offs, and put them labour camps, and calls them insane.
Then they are slaughtered for their organs, and these are transplanted into westerners. There is no cumbersome judicial process. Like fish in a Chinese fish restaurant, they are just, kept alive, indefinitely, until needed. Until the cell door key turns. Talk about Chinese takeaway! They are still alive when strapped to the operating table. Their hair is taken for wigs, every organ torn out, by experienced surgeons working in teams; stored, and used. The husk of the body is thrown into an incinerator. Hippocrates would not have been impressed.
Always detail! And Forrest provides it. She and Macmillan met two practitioners at a seedy, anonymous, identified hotel in Peking. One was Can Dong, aged 36, another Niu Junping, aged 52. There were filmed and interviewed with their backs turned. There was an interpreter; he was arrested immediately afterwards and questioned by police for seven hours. .
China is hosting the Olympics in 2008.
Can Dong told the MEP that he started practising Falun Gong in 1995, before the persecutions. He liked its peaceful principles; a subsequent eye problem was cured by its practice. Nine days after he got married, he was arrested. He has seen his wife for three weeks in the last four years.
He made jade jewellery for export to Europe in the camp, was kept in cells with dozens of other political prisoners, including Tiananmen square protesters and Buddhists. The police tortured him with sleep deprivation He is unemployed. He is one of the lucky ones.
Sterling chap that he is, McMillan Scott took at a business card and said to Can Dong that if he needed help, give him a call! No doubt they will do lunch next time Dong passes through Brussels.
Then, man number two. His story. Nu Jinjian’s wife was still breast feeding when she was throwin in jail. She spent 10 hours a day from the ceiling with a rope a round her neck, her topes only just touching the ground. He had to spend 100,000 yuan to secure her release. He showed the MEP and his assistant the burns he had suffered while being prodded with an alectric baton; he was eventually released with the help of a doctor. He is unemployed, bevause the police have to sign a document declaring a citizen fit for work and, as said, they think the Falung gong are insane.
McMillan-Scott asked Niu Jinping whether there was anything seditious about Falun Gong. He said no. And then the MEP flew back to Europe.
I have summarised the document, so don’t do it justice. But it is a good little report, much better than the usual shit MEPs put out.
Now, my story. A few weeks ago I went down to the House of Lords. There I talked to Lona; due to my inferior interviewing skills compared to Forrest, and the fact that I lost my notes that day, all I can remember is that Lona worked 16 hour days in her labour camp, made chopsticks, her friends had to do some of her quota to or the cops would punish the whole team for being tardy; she had her blood and extensive health tests taken. She was given food that made her dizzy and confused, Lona renounced Falun Gong and was released. Shortly after, on 19 May her husband was arrested, and sentenced to 2.5 years in a labour camp; the government seems to like these conjugal swing door arrangements. Her friend who was with her in Paris was beaten with iron bars; another she believes has been harvested.

Kilgour report backs up

Often the movement demonstrates outside Chinese embassies abroad, often imaginatively. (see picture) This time Lona was - soberly dressed - down at the Lords to give eyewitness support to David Kilgour.
Kilgour is an upper-class Canadian, as patrician tall, blue eyes, craggy, lanky, wit as dry as the prairie wind. Top family – his brother-in-law is John Bruton, ex PM.
He has been an MP for decades, and was its deputy foreign minister until last year . The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation calls him the only romantic figure in Canadian foreign affairs – its Lawrence of Arabia. He cares about some things more than others. He traded in his vote with the one minority government of Paul Martin so that the Canadians would put boots on the ground in Darfur. Which didn’t happen; because the government fell on another issue.
Since May he and David Matas, the director of Helsinki Watch Canada, have putting together a report on the organ harvesting. They have put their considerable reputations on the line
Here are their analysis of the disgusting persecutions of the Falun Gong: I won’t say more here. http://investigation.go.saveinter.net/
Did I say that China will be hosting the Berlin Olympics in 1936?
.