Monday’s resignation of Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas over a massive corruption scandal may well mark a new era of judicial independence in the Czech Republic and possibly the whole post-communist region.

The Prime Minister’s chief of office Jana Nagyova, a regular in the tabloids and allegedly his lover, has been arrested and stands accused of illegal spying and bribing of MPs.

Two military intelligence officers and two former members of parliament face similar charges. Necas himself denies any wrongdoing.

The government, composed of a coalition of right-wing liberal and conservative parties, is resisting opposition calls for a fresh election, hoping to weather the storm with a mere government reshuffle.

Necas, who is intent on leaving politics following last week’s events, tendered his resignation to the President on Monday. He will remain in his post until a new prime minister is appointed.

“This is a good sign of some judicial independence in governance structures,” Petr Lebeda, director of the independent think-tank Glopolis told IPS.

“It could be encouraging for judicial systems in other countries. A message has been sent that there is no such thing as impunity for politicians and high public officials, that anybody who does something illegal can be sued for his crimes.”

Indeed, news of the corruption scandal and the subsequent resignation have sent shockwaves across Central and Eastern Europe, with the media following developments closely.

In the face of weak institutions, the region’s media and particularly investigative journalists have played a crucial role in uncovering corruption scandals and in pushing authorities to act, as is frequently recognised by international anti-corruption organisations such as Transparency International (TI).

Slovakia is witnessing the re-emergence of a public debate on the lack of independence of prosecuting and judicial bodies as well as on politicians’ lack of will to tackle corruption systematically.

In a statement published last year, Transparency International singled out the Czech Republic and Slovakia as home to particularly weak prosecuting bodies, describing them as “vulnerable to direct political influence because of their strictly hierarchical and non-transparent organisational structures.”

In one comment published by leading Slovak daily Sme, commentator Roman Pataj accused the government of “occupying key posts in the Slovak judiciary” and termed its policies in this field as “non-transparent” and “disastrous”.

There were similar reactions in Hungary, where also politicians could be heard: Gergely Karacsony, leader of the opposition party Dialogue for Hungary, reacted by making fresh calls for an investigation into a recent tobacco retail tender which controversially benefited government supporters and their relatives.

Karacsony lashed out at the country’s state prosecutor, calling on him to follow the Czech example while criticising his inactivity: “He lacks the expertise and the courage to step up,” he said, accusing him of protecting government “mafias”.

The Czech scandal has reverberated because it is inserted in a region that faces very similar challenges. The most frequently corruption-related malaise in the region involves unlawful party financing, manipulation of state institutions by political and economic interest groups, murky ties between the business and political classes, and weak prosecuting bodies.

There is also a clear East/West divide: TI’s corruption perception index shows Central and Eastern Europe lagging behind all of Western Europe with the exception of Italy. Among post-communist countries, only Estonia fares well in the index.

Hence the fall of the Czech leader caught many by surprise, not because of the high-level corruption, but due to the fact that authorities acted: “Justice only worked at the lowest levels, once it reached the top levels it would never lead to the courts,” Lebeda said.

While prosecutions of high level officials are not unseen in the region, they are usually reserved for opposition politicians, and convictions are rare.

What makes the Czech Republic different from the rest of the region is the fresh “emancipation of the office of public prosecutor and consequently anti-corruption police,” Ondrej Cisar, a political scientist at the Czech Academy of Sciences told IPS.

“Making a sort of sweeping analogy, one can say that we are going through a prosecutors’ revolution, similar to the judges’ revolution in Italy in the beginning of the 1990s,” Cisar added.

Ironically, Necas himself may be responsible for his own fate, as he ended an old habit – not just in the Czech Republic but in all of post-communist Europe and beyond – of placing political appointees to judicial posts.

Following years of media criticism of various governments over the prevalence of an alleged ‘justice mafia’ that protected high-profile politicians from prosecution, Necas named Pavel Zeman as chief prosecutor in 2010.

Zeman, perceived as an independent, played a key role in strengthening the independence of various prosecution and judicial bodies as well as in starting a wave of prosecutions that reached its climax last week.

This process was one that the “government probably did not actively support, but also did not block,” Lebeda told IPS. The weakness of the coalition government may thus have been a blessing in disguise, preventing any particular political force from asserting its authority over the judiciary.

During recent flooding in Budapest, the Danube rose to 8.9 metres. Credit: Zoltán Dujisin/IPS

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

Record floods in Central and Eastern Europe have highlighted some of the challenges of climate change for the continent, as well as the floods’ potential to spur populist politics.

An extraordinarily long winter followed by weeks of intense rains has saturated soils and caused large rivers, such as the Danube and the Elbe, to overflow. The floods have wreaked havoc in the region, killing 21 people and forcing the evacuation of several tens of thousands.

In Halle, Germany, 30,000 people were forced to leave their homes, after the Elbe reached its highest levels in 400 years. In Austria, mudslides brought about the closure of roads and train lines. The Polish capital of Warsaw was partially flooded, and in the Czech Republic, 20,000 people were evacuated from 700 different localities.

Most of the flood victims – 10 out of 21 – are Czech, having been hit by heavy rains that at one point brought down hail stones of the size of ping-pong balls.

Czechs feared for the fate of their medieval capital Prague, as authorities mobilised heavy machinery to sustain one of the city’s oldest symbols, the Charles Bridge, dating from the 14th century. Hospitals and even the city’s zoo were evacuated.

The Czech government has estimated the damage at 800 million Euros, promising to waive the income tax for companies affected by the catastrophe.

None of this drama was apparent in the Hungarian capital Budapest, where the Danube rose to 8.9 metres, the highest water level ever recorded.

In contrast to the chaos and fear seen elsewhere in the region, the floods became a hotspot for what authorities call “catastrophe tourism”, in reference to the masses of locals and foreign visitors who gather around the riverside, taking pictures and often obstructing authorities’ efforts to contain the flood.

In a city whose bridges are usually a prime location for suicide attempts, many were surprised to see a few daring tourists using them to dive into the flooded river. Citizens appeared equally unconcerned; youths drove skim boards into the water while the wealthiest water skied.

The calm and surreal atmosphere in Budapest nevertheless reflected a situation firmly under control, in the capital as well as in the countryside.

Testing governments

The differences in responses to the floods have highlighted the need for comprehensive and preventive strategies in a region where extreme weather phenomena are likely to increase as a result of climate change.

“Floods such as these put to test the ability of affected societies to adapt,” Sergio Tirado, a researcher at the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy in Budapest, told IPS.

“The impact of climate change will be more or less severe depending on the region’s response, namely in terms of developing early warning systems or improving physical protection barriers against water rises,” he said.

Yet while many activists have directly blamed global warming for the recent events, Tirado was cautious about making direct causal links. “It is likely that as a result of climate change, the frequency of such extreme weather events is increasing, and this problem may grow in future decades.”

The smooth handling of the floods by Hungarian authorities has been hailed as a victory by its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, which in the last few years has become the European Union’s (EU) most controversial politician due to his authoritarian tendencies.

Orbán has been criticised by European officials for his heavy-handed approach to governance. He has been accused of challenging the independence of the judiciary, conducting widespread purges in the public administration and endangering freedom of expression.

As a result, the conservative prime minister, under attack at home and abroad, saw the floods as an opportunity to stoke citizens’ patriotic feelings and regain lost popularity.

Orbán capitalised on the efforts of the 10,000 soldiers, volunteers and even prisoners that were involved in placing some 10 million sandbags along the 700 kilometres of Danube riverside located in Hungarian territory.

During the floods, TV and online coverage constantly showed the prime minister in action: Orbán was always at the site of events, wearing rubber boots and a vest, walking against the river current, flying in helicopters, discussing hydrographic maps with experts and cracking jokes with workers.

Looking extremely tired, the prime minister made frequent live updates on the spot to keep citizens informed on what he called “the worst floods ever”.

Opposition politicians, alarmed by Orban’s successful show off of his leadership abilities, rushed to imitate the prime minister and were seen setting up dikes along flooded areas. Pro-government media were quick to show one of these dikes breaking.

While Hungarians were relieved that only 1,500 people required evacuation and that not a single victim was reported, many of Orban’s opponents will be concerned that his stunts against the forces of nature will convince many that he is strong enough to endure another onslaught of criticism from the European Union.

As the European Union accuses Hungary of shifting towards authoritarianism, a spike in emigration from the country has led many to speak of a politically motivated exodus. Others suggest that economic conditions play a role in the westward flow of brainpower that is leaving Hungary’s future uncertain.

Passengers wait at Nyugati (“Western”) train station in Budapest, Hungary. Credit: Zoltán Dujisin/IPS

Observers agree that ever since the conservative party Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in parliament in 2010, the government has taken many steps to concentrate power, including by limiting the independence of the judiciary as well as freedom of speech.

The government also approved a new constitution that enshrines the values of Christianity, family and patriotism, having drafted it without consulting other parties or civil society groups.

“We are thinking of leaving the country,” says Sára, a young mother in her thirties who lives in Újlipotváros, one of Budapest’s preferred districts among the liberal intelligentsia and middle classes. “My partner, my fourteen-month-old child and I are no longer considered a family under the new constitution,” she explains.

“It’s not just that we can’t pay taxes together. The feeling also makes us mad – with what right does this government say we are not a family? While the rest of Europe is enlarging the definition of family to even include homosexuals, we are going in the opposite direction.”

Many have already made the decision Sára is now considering, but the real reasons behind the emigration phenomenon remain the object of a heated political debate.

While official estimates state that 300,000 Hungarians live abroad, Gyorgy Matolcsy, governor of the Central Bank, recently spoke of half a million Hungarians leaving their homeland in recent years, which would constitute 5 percent of Hungary’s population of 10 million.

Currently about 250,000 Hungarians are registered abroad, although real numbers are likely higher because many migrants do not want authorities to know they left in order not to preclude current or future state benefits.

Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom are the preferred destinations for these immigrants. London may be home to up to 200,000 Hungarians, so many that it is popularly referred to as the second largest Hungarian city."My partner, my fourteen-month-old child and I are no longer considered a family under the new constitution."
-- Sára, a young mother

Yet unlike other countries in the post-communist region, Hungarians have traditionally resisted migrating, partly due to the strength of Hungary’s social safety net, but also for cultural reasons.

Politicians are struggling to explain why this tendency has suddenly changed. The debate has erupted around the worrisome 56 percent of students who consider leaving Hungary, a group that has often participated in international programs and can easily integrate in Western European labour markets.

“The issue has become politicised, but it is underlined by economic and structural factors,” Béla Soltész, a migration researcher at Corvinus University in Budapest, told IPS.

“There is an opposition discourse which blames the phenomenon on bad management by the government, particularly in the education sector, whereas the government pushes the view that those leaving the country are becoming unfaithful to it, putting their individualistic and materialistic needs in front of the good of the country,” Soltész says.

“Both are simplifying the issue,” he adds. “This is a 10-year phenomenon that began gradually with the opening of the European Union’s labour market. In some ways Hungary is catching up with the region.”

Although reliable data on them are lacking, many of the emigrants are well-educated opposition sympathisers with access to social media, which gives greater visibility to the “best and brightest” in the debate.

Some in this group have been affected by recent educational reforms – especially since students now have to sign contracts in order to benefit from state support as they go through their education and must pay back this support if they move abroad.

But in a country where doctors make an average of 700 euros per month, the role of high unemployment and a lack of economic and professional prospects may be more significant than political discontent.

Hungary’s gross domestic product decreased by 1.7 percent in 2012 and no growth is expected in 2013. Unemployment now exceeds 10 percent and is three times higher in the case of the younger generation.

“People with technical formation can nowadays very easily compare their salary with that of their peers in Norway, the UK or Holland, where pay can be ten times higher. And then they may blame the government for these differences,” Soltész told IPS.

While recent youth migration may be short-term, the growth in Hungarian professional networks abroad might turn it into a more permanent phenomenon in the future, Soltész warned. “The most skilled and bright are leaving and the remittances are not that high.”

“Reinsertion could be difficult because the labor market is very informally structured,” Soltész noted. “Qualifications obtained abroad are less important or understood than personal contacts.”

“And we don’t know what will happen to the people who do their whole education abroad and build their professional contacts there.”

“Give gas” was the original name for the Goj motorbikers parade intended for Apr. 21, a day when Hungary’s large Jewish community commemorates the Holocaust in the Peace March.

The Gojs (which means gentile – non-Jew – in Hebrew) planned to ride in front of Budapest’s largest synagogue. Only energetic protests from Jewish leaders prompted authorities to prohibit the event, which took place after changes to the original route and name.

Hungary, a country of 10 million now governed by the conservative Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, had not seen such overt expressions of far-right ideas since the infamous 1940s.

Last November, the ultranationalist Jobbik deputy Márton Gyöngyösi, whose party obtained 17 percent of the vote in the 2010 legislative elections, suggested that the names of Hungarians of Jewish origin should be kept on a registry as they constitute “a national security risk.” He later corrected his statement to mean dual Israeli-Hungarian citizens.

The are more parallels with the 1940s: during the last few years paramilitary militias have marched in Hungarian villages with large gypsy communities in order to intimidate them and bring a message of law and order. Several instances of physical aggression, gunshot wounds and fires have been linked to these marches.

In the case of the marginalised gypsy community, representing up to 7 percent of the population, authorities have done little to protect them from abuse, as was noted in a report published last year by Amnesty International.

Moreover, high-profile supporters of the government have contributed to the atmosphere of hate prevailing in the country: Zsolt Bayer, one of Fidesz’s founders and a close friend of Orbán, wrote last January in the pro-government paper Magyar Hirlap that gypsies “ought not to exist” and called for an immediate solution to the ‘problem’ “regardless of the method.”

Bayer added that running over a gypsy child is correct as long as one “does not think about stopping and steps hard on the accelerator.”

Orbán failed to publicly condemn any of these incidents. Critics claim the Prime Minister fears alienating the most extremist sections of his electorate, which may join the ranks of the far-right Jobbik.

Instead, Orbán has been more preoccupied with purging the various political, judicial, cultural and media institutions of dissenting elements, empowered by Fidesz’s spectacular electoral victory in 2010, which gave it a two-third constitutional majority in parliament.

The overhaul of the country’s institutions has been justified with an alleged need to cleanse public life of the lingering influence of communism.

The government’s actions have also alienated the country from the EU: this month saw Fidesz officials involved in verbal disputes with Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, over the country’s constitutional reforms, which were also the subject of fresh debates in the European Parliament.

The latest constitutional reform has been criticised for criminalising the homeless and favouring the government during electoral campaigns. These same laws had been presented separately in parliament and rejected by the Constitutional Court, leading the government to include them in the country’s fundamental law.

Moreover, the Court has lost its power to revise future constitutional amendments, severely weakening the formal separation of powers in Hungary and leading the European Commission to ring the alarm bell.

Yet analysts claim that talk of Hungary turning into a dictatorship is misplaced: “What we have is a narrow political elite riding mass waves of disenchantment with liberal democracy and economic neoliberalism that manages to establish a rule by decree where there is no space for dissent, for participatory decision-making or consensus-building,” Gábor Halmai, a sociologist and human rights activist told IPS.

“However, this strong-handed politics is supported by a very large and mobilised part of society.”

András Deák, an analyst at the Budapest-based Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, similarly claims the Orbán government “has clearly authoritarian features and obviously tests the limits of democratic governance,” but points out that “all these measures were legitimate in terms of domestic legislation.”

Deák moreover notes the uniqueness of the Hungarian case. “It is difficult to find any post-World War II government in Europe, at which the wish to shake up the country’s political system coincided with such an overwhelming electoral legitimation,” he told IPS.

This may be one of the reasons why Brussels has refrained from going beyond public criticism and infringement procedures which, while common to many other European states, are accumulating at an alarming pace in the case of Hungary.

Moreover, anti-EU sentiments are on the rise in Hungary, with large swaths of the population feeling “their interests are at odds with those of Brussels,” says Deák.

This was made particularly clear by some of the government’s economic measures, namely the taxing of banks and multinational corporations to benefit the middle-class and the national bourgeoise.

The measures were criticised by the EU but enjoyed substantial popular support.

With the EU angered, Orbán’s latest strategy involves attracting more Chinese and Russian investment, coupled by statements criticising the “decadence” of the Western capitalist model. As long as the EU remains merged in a financial crisis, many Hungarians will follow his lead.

Protests in Hungary and Romania are the first signs of anti-systemic mobilisation in the Eastern half of the continent. While protests in both countries indicate dissatisfaction with their governments’ authoritarian turn, their origins differ, as does the European Union’s reaction to them.

Romania, EU member since 2007 and Hungary, which joined in 2004, have both been badly hit by the economic crisis.

Romanian and Hungarian protesters of various social and ideological backgrounds have poured into the streets this month, demanding fundamental changes in their political systems, and accusing the political elite of degenerating into authoritarianism while ignoring growing poverty.

Comparisons with 1989 are rife among demonstrators. Around 80 percent of Hungarians and Romanians believe their countries are headed in the wrong direction and are disappointed not just by their right-wing governing parties, but by the entire political system.

Opposition parties appear hopeless and powerless to oppose governmental authority, especially in Hungary where the conservative Fidesz party won the 2010 elections with a two-thirds majority.

Hungary’s protesters are so far peaceful and well organised: the peak of mobilization was on Jan. 2 when 70,000 people mobilised by several novel social movements gathered in Budapest to protest the government’s new conservative constitution.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had so far ignored mobilisation at home but he has recently come under fire from EU officials who threaten financial and political sanctions against the country.

The EU is arguing that provisions in the country’s new constitution challenge the independence of the central bank, the data protection authority and the judiciary, but the government is also being criticised for curtailing media freedoms, criminalising the poor and conducting purges in the public administration.

Romania’s protests are more spontaneous and at times, violent. Thousands have protested in various cities around the country, the trigger being a government attempt to privatise the healthcare system.

The draft law was in the meantime withdrawn, but people are continuing demonstrations to protest unemployment, lowering living standards, corruption and authoritarianism.

“The protests are a sign of normality, of a society that cannot bear the harshest austerity measures in Europe,” Victoria Stoiciu, a Romanian political scientist told IPS, “but it’s more than that, people are questioning the whole system and the entire way of doing politics in Romania. It resembles the situation of Madrid’s indignados.”

In 2009, shortly after the global financial crisis, Romania accepted a 20 billion euro loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the EU Commission which would help stabilise its currency and its banking sector in exchange for government commitment to austerity measures.

Critics say the government’s commitment to austerity policies has given Romania’s ruling politicians more leeway to act as they please: “Romania has been an extremely diligent and submissive student of the EU and IMF,” says Ciprian Siulea, a founding member of CriticAtac, the main leftist discussion forum in the country.

“This is why the obvious and repeated infringement of democratic rules and values is overlooked. In a certain sense, politics came to an end and we are governed mainly by economics,” he told IPS.

Romania’s government is accused of ignoring official and unofficial mechanisms of social dialogue, approving laws without any consultation or parliamentary debates, manipulating elections and splitting opposition parties with corrupt means.

Labour has been especially hit by the authoritarian drift. Justifying it with austerity measures, the government has promoted temporary employment and facilitated the dismissal of trade union leaders.

National collective bargaining and the collective work agreement, the most important tools in fixing the minimum wage, have been abolished, while the government has created several legal hurdles over demonstrations.

The austerity package has also meant a 25 percent cut in public sector salaries. This has had an enormous negative impact on the image of conservative President Traian Basescu, the ‘big boss’ of Romanian politics.

Basescu came to power as a protector of global capital and free markets against an alleged communist oligarchy in the country, much in contrast to Orban who, while also elected under a promise to protect the population from the post-communist oligarchy, claimed this group was linked to foreign capital.

But now Hungary faces the possibility of a full-blown debt crisis and is seeking a Western loan of 20 billion euros – the same amount requested by Romania in the past – backtracking on its promise to pursue a sovereign and independent economic policy that keeps austerity measures at bay.

This is why Hungarian protesters feel the West is on their side – even if only for the sake of promoting the EU’s economic policy among member states – whereas for Romanians Basescu’s commitment to austerity means the EU will probably keep ignoring their cause.

“Contrary to what happened in Hungary, Romania was very much in line with the economic policies of the IMF and the EU,” Stoiciu told IPS.

However, Stoiciu notes that the Romanian leadership has been careful not to step on the most visible pillars of contemporary liberal democracy. “The abuses were not as flagrant as in Hungary. It is the ‘spirit’ of democracy that has been violated in Romania, not its legal framework. The government, and especially the president, was always playing at the limit of the Constitution, but never clearly against it.”

The massive overhaul of Hungary’s political system by the conservative Fidesz party is raising fears the country’s days as a liberal democracy may be numbered. With opposition parties powerless, it is civil society that has awakened to support a more participatory democracy.

A ceaseless and unilateral stream of legislative initiatives from the party led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban is turning the country of 10 million which joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 into an autocracy, critics say.

The pillars of Hungarian democracy have been shaken by a new constitution and some of the 359 laws Fidesz approved since it came to power with a qualified majority a year and a half ago.

The new constitution, which mentions god and the right to life, came into effect Jan. 2 amid widespread discontent in Budapest.

The constitution also establishes a permanent flat tax with regressive effects which will be very difficult to modify in the future, while new laws have challenged the independence of the judiciary, the media and financial institutions.

Moreover Hungarian minorities abroad, who mostly support Fidesz, have been given the right to vote in a move that may perpetuate the governing party’s grip on power.

A feeling of impotence has taken over opposition deputies, sidelined from all legislative initiatives. Some MPs have even claimed that parliamentary opposition is no longer useful.

In spite of the current democratic crisis, widespread disillusionment with politics dates back to the rule of socialists between 2006 and 2010, when Hungarians were not told the truth about the state of the economy and were then subjected to harsh austerity measures.

Many hoped Fidesz would provide a more prosperous alternative but instead it has only deepened cynicism towards politics. Polls estimate up to 60 percent of Hungarians are so disappointed with politics that they would rather not vote if an election took place today.

But Hungarians, especially younger ones, are looking beyond the party system to show their discontent with the prevailing political regime. Civil society movements are beginning to pop up at an impressive rate, while trade unions are promising action.

In a post-communist region not famous for the strength of its civil society, Andras Bozoki, a political analyst and former oppositionist under state socialism, notes that renewed civic activism is a reaction to “the rolling back of democratic institutions and the rule of law, something we hadn’t seen in the last 20 years.

“Hungary was a liberal democracy according to all international indexes, now it is considered a democracy but not a fully fledged one,” he tells IPS. People are uncertain and hesitant after both governing and opposition parties have disappointed them, “that’s why they are searching for alternatives in new movements.”

At no point was the new alternative more visible than on Jan. 2, when tens of thousands of citizens mobilised by civic movements gathered in front of Budapest’s Opera to protest the coming into effect of the new Constitution.

Among them was Attila Steve Kopias, one of the most visible faces of new opposition activism, with stunts that included getting arrested for dressing up as a homeless person and sleeping on a bench just to call attention to new laws criminalising homelessness.

“Any means of cooperation between the people and political power are being closed, so we have no alternative than to rise to power,” Kopias tells IPS.

“People have lived the last 20 years thinking politics is a job for politicians and we just have to vote. Now they are starting to realise that if we let politicians do whatever they want…they will do whatever they want.”

Kopias is hopeful more Hungarians will follow the trend towards mobilisation and participation: “I am absolutely sure the movement will grow. The big question is will it stop here? It is one thing we should send Orban away, but what should come after that? What kind of country do we want?

“We need precise requests, social justice, housing…but at least people have started talking about the details of politics while before they agreed with whatever their party said.”

Still, a large portion of the population views Hungary’s authoritarian drift passively, and is hostile to the same international bodies and states that criticise Orban’s governing style. Many among them voted for Orban trusting that his ‘unorthodox’ and ‘sovereign’ economic policy will protect them from further painful reforms.

In spite of months of troubling anti-democratic developments in Hungary, outspoken criticism from European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only came after the prime minister curtailed the independence of the Central Bank this month.

“This gives the impression they are more concerned about the Central Bank than about democracy,” Bozoki tells IPS.

Writing for the weekly HVG, Hungarian philosopher Tamas Gaspar Miklos makes a similar point: “The Hungarian people, so often disappointed, may see in the ‘democratic cause’ nothing more than a decorative icing on the increasingly harsh austerity measured pushed by Western powers worried about financial stability.

“We must not be amazed that Hungarian citizens show little enthusiasm for restoring liberal democracy if that means their own destitution,” the former dissident adds.

Fidesz’s last pieces of legislation are being examined for their compatibility with European law. Hungary may have to partially track down considering it is risking a full-blown debt crisis that only assistance from the International Monetary Fund and the EU may be able to prevent.

A year after slamming the door on the International Monetary Fund and announcing that a small country like Hungary could pursue an independent economic policy, conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been forced to kneel to the IMF and ask for help. Was there ever an alternative?

The announcement followed a warning by Standard & Poor rating agency that it was considering downgrading Hungary’s sovereign rating after a new historic low of the Hungarian currency, the Forint.

Governing Fidesz party officials insist they are only requesting a safety net for insurance purposes from the IMF, claiming Hungary will continue to finance itself from the money markets and that nothing will change in terms of economic policy priorities.

These priorities revolve around job creation, support for small and medium enterprises, and provision of family benefits. The government has insisted the burden of the crisis has to be shared by households, the state and the market alike.

Immediately after the announcement critics of the government quickly pointed out that an IMF deal will seal the end of “unorthodox economic policy” in the east-central European country of 10 million that dared to ignore the IMF in 2010.

But if someone thought Hungary had been following some form of Keynesian economic policy in defiance of Washington-consensus based prescriptions, they are wrong: “The policy mix was unorthodox but the individual policies were not,” Hungarian economist Zoltan Pogatsa told IPS.

Lowering taxes was the centrepiece of Orbán’s economic strategy, in line with the prescriptions of one of the mentors of neo-liberal economic policies in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher.

The lowering of taxes was meant to broaden the tax base in a country where tax evasion is rife while allowing companies to hire at low cost. But the latest data shows that tax evasion remains a serious hindrance to the country’s economic growth.

Similarly to the European mainstream, the governing Fidesz also approved cuts in social expenditure, simultaneously financing programmes in favor of middle class families.

His most controversial policies, that earned him the title of unorthodox, involved the nationalisation of the private pension scheme, complemented by windfall taxes on telecommunication companies, banks and other financial firms.

While these measures were termed by the socialist and liberal opposition as unprecedented, they have been tried before: windfall taxes have been collected in such diverse countries as Britain, Austria, Spain and Russia in moments of economic strain.

It is the last two measures that irritated financial markets the most, which had initially reacted well to Fidesz’s two-third majority victory in 2010, hoping that unlike their socialist predecessors they would commit to reducing the debt burden and unemployment.

Fidesz’s latter propensity for erratic policies soon warranted it a negative reputation amid financial circles, and when Italy’s debt crisis spiraled, international attention turned to other highly indebted countries such as Hungary.

Hungary, one of Europe’s most transnationalised economies and highly dependent on foreign direct investment, has a public debt that stands at around 82 percent of GDP, in contrast to Italy’s 120 percent. More than half of its population is currently indebted.

The country’s macroeconomic vulnerabilities were soon exploited, as threats of downgrading created a vicious circle that lead to an exponentially growing interest from speculators.

Hungary’s economic minister has claimed the decision to downgrade Hungary’s sovereign rating was “groundless” and “part of a financial attack” against the country that allegedly dared defy the financially powerful.

The minister boasted a below average budget deficit and a rate of economic growth that exceeded the European Union’s (EU) average in the third quarter of the year. Yet estimates indicate meagre economic growth or even a slight contraction during the following year.

What went wrong? Pogatsa notes Orban exhibits a personality that refuses to be “constrained by liberal or conservative ideology,” upholding a “country-boy mentality that values common sense against dogmatism.”

“Seen what is happening lately in Europe, going against economic dogmatism was one thing he got right,” he notes. However, “it soon became clear that his policies to balance the budget consisted mostly of one- off measures, such as the appropriation of private pension funds or the bank levy.”

While many mainstream economists insist small, open economies like Hungary’s are condemned to follow mainstream economic policies, Pogatsa argues some unorthodox steps could still be taken under such constraints.

“The focus should be on creating employment. It is important to keep the budget balanced and to reduce debt, but cutting should not be done for the sake of cutting,” he told IPS.

“The fact that currently people understand the need for reform creates opportunities to restructure the tax system, to reform the subsystems of the state and to move resources to what represents investments for the future, such as education. It’s all about communicating it as an opportunity.”

But Viktor Orban may be running out of credit with the electorate, after promising to keep the IMF out of the country. During a recent talk at the London School of Economics, he went as far as promising that “if the IMF comes, I’ll go.”

Polls conducted shortly before the IMF announcement showed 78 percent of the Hungarian public dissatisfied with “the way things are going” and almost half of it unwilling to identify with any political party.

Orban has now conceded he is negotiating with the IMF, but insists “nobody can limit Hungary’s economic sovereignty.” Among other measures, experts expect the IMF to demand a reduction on taxes on financial institutions.

Hungary had already become the first EU country ever to receive an IMF bailout in 2008. The previous governing socialists obtained a 20 billion dollar worth bailout in the form of a standby loan to help it avoid defaulting on its debts.

By Zoltán Dujisin and - -
BUDAPEST, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

The imprisonment of former prime minister Yuliya Timoshenko has raised questions about Ukraine’s democratic credentials. But these questions are mostly being raised abroad.

Timoshenko has been sentenced to seven years in prison and a hefty fine for exceeding her authority in a 2009 gas deal with Russia when she was prime minister.

The verdict has been condemned by the United States, the European Union (EU) and even Russia, whch fears the sentence will be used to revise existing gas arrangements between the two neighbours.

It is the EU that keeps President Viktor Yanukovich worried. Formerly known as a pro-Russian, Yanukovich has been energetically pursuing EU integration by signing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU.

EU officials recently cancelled talks with Yanukovich, who still hopes to finalise the deal by December.

“This reaction of the EU is hypocritical because problems with democracy started much earlier here, many social activists, trade unionists, local movements or students were persecuted or killed, and many people sit in jail unjustly and in bad conditions,” Volodymyr Ishchenko, sociologist at the Kiev-based Centre for Society Research told IPS.

“Problems with democracy in Ukraine are much deeper and do not revolve around one person; Timoshenko is just one of the symptoms and not even one of the worst.”

In Kiev’s central street Khreschatyk, opponents and supporters have set up tents in protest ever since the trial began. Numbers have dwindled and currently only some 50 Timoshenko supporters remain on the site, blasting her speeches and distributing leaflets.

“The majority was really indifferent to the trial, except core Timoshenko supporters, of which there are not many left in Ukraine. People don’t show any strong desire to do something in support or against Timoshenko,” adds Ishchenko, who works as protest monitoring director at the centre.

Moreover Timoshenko, nicknamed ‘the gas princess’ for growing immensely rich out of gas deals in the 1990s, might be in for more trouble.

The Secret Service of Ukraine (SBU) has opened another case against her for the embezzlement of 405 million dollars in 1997 and over allegations of involvement in a political assassination.

Timoshenko also faced embezzlement charges and was accused of misuse of Kyoto Protocol funds more recently. Both cases were dropped after her prime ministerial nomination.

It is no surprise that many Ukrainians believe Timoshenko should be in jail. She has lost a great part of her support, with recent polls giving her approval ratings of 10 to 15 percent, down from the 45 percent she obtained in the 2010 presidential race.

A large number of people have welcomed Timoshenko’s conviction, Yevhen Holovakha, a sociologist from the National Academy of Sciences, told the press, adding that people would “perhaps be even more exuberant if all politicians were put inside.”

Sociologists are pointing to the fact that popular indifference to Timoshenko’s fate indicates not necessarily personal animosity, but a complete rejection of Ukraine’s political class from a population that, in its majority, fails to see any substantial difference among political parties.

Holovakha described Ukrainians as increasingly “distrustful of all that is linked to politics, including the government and the opposition,” adding that “too many people believe that a strong hand must put things in order regardless of any consequences.”

In a similar vein, Ishchenko notes “the problem is not why Timoshenko is in jail, but why everyone else is not. In this respect it is unjust. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t deserve it.”

Even some in the pro-Western sector have failed to condemn the verdict. Former president Viktor Yushchenko, an ally and later rival of Timoshenko, told the BBC he did not believe the case was politically motivated.

But the EU certainly does, and its officials have implied that the FTA might be conditional on Timoshenko’s release.

Yanukovich is now weighing his options: on the one hand he is keen to bring Ukraine closer to EU membership, but on the other he is interested in keeping Timoshenko out of the next parliamentary election.

Yanukovich has admitted the verdict was due to outdated legislation which should be modified, but has at the same time insisted he cannot interfere with the judicial branch of the country.

He has also denied any involvement in initiating the case against Timoshenko, in spite of their long-lasting bitter rivalry going back the 2004 elections, rigged in his favour and overturned by the popular Orange Revolution.

“Doubtless, this is a scandalous occurrence that hinders the issue of Ukraine’s European integration,” Yanukovich admitted at a recent meeting with the Slovenian president, according to Ukrainian News Agency UNIAN.

Timoshenko can still appeal the decision and in the meantime Yanukovich might convince his reluctant allies to decriminalise the article under which Timoshenko was condemned.

This is the solution the EU is hoping for. “There is a parallel decriminsalization process under way,” Stefan Fuele, EU Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy told the press. “We still believe that this problem can be solved.”

As a last resort, Yanukovich still has an additional card up his sleeve: he may consider Russia’s insistent offer to join the Customs Union, a move incompatible with the FTA and which would pull Ukraine closer to Moscow’s sphere of influence.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
KIEV, Jun 2 2011 (IPS)

In spite of the nominally pro-Russian government in Ukraine, the country will most likely sign a free trade agreement with the EU by the end of the year, in what will be a blow to Russia’s interests.

This would be the country’s biggest step towards integration with Western Europe ever since Ukraine joined the World Trade Organisation in 2008.

Ukraine is a key market for the region. Its 45 million people constitute the second largest population and economy of all post-Soviet states, behind only its gigantic Eastern neighbour.

In the short-term the EFTA (European Free Trade Agreement) would impose both economic and political challenges for Ukraine, whose biggest trading partners are still the former Soviet republics.

The step is surprisingly being taken by President Viktor Yanukovich, who became known to the world as the Russian-backed ‘villain’ of the orange revolution in 2004.

During the presidential elections that same year, popular unrest forced a repeat vote which was eventually won by the liberal and pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

However, little in the way of integration to the West happened over the chaotic Yuschenko presidency, which lasted from 2005 and 2010. At the same time Yanukovich, who succeeded Yushchenko in 2010, has vowed to bring Ukraine closer to the EU without angering Russia.

So far, Yanukovich’s actions have been more pleasing to the West than to Russia, considering the low initial expections. A recently released WikiLeaks cable shows that even the U.S. embassy considers Ukraine’s President a changed man compared to 2004.

Yanukovich has ensured the resumption of IMF (International Monetary Fund) credits, after a 15 billion dollar loan was suspended in 2009 due to former president Yushchenko’s inability to fulfill his commitments towards the international financial institution.

Ukraine was severly hit by the global financial crisis, verging on state bankrupcy in 2008 and registering a contraction of 15 percent in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth the following year.

Yanukovich took power under favourable economic conditions. Largely driven by strong metal prices, in 2010 GDP growth rose to 4.5 percent, while investments are expected to kick in by 2012 when Ukraine and Poland co-host the European Football Championship.

In what is also an attempt to please both the EU and the IMF, steps have been taken to deregulate and decrease the number of licences and permits, freeze pensions, increase gas household prices and reform the state administration, but there are enormous difficulties in implementation.

“This is especially due to corruption. What the government does is not always what it preaches,” Ildar Gazizullin, economic analyst at the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kiev, an independent think-tank, told IPS.

While foreign investors are expressing satisfaction with the country’s recent political and macroeconomic stability, “corruption is so institutionalised that investors who come to Ukraine must expect to get robbed,” one high-ranking EU diplomat told IPS under condition of anonimity.

Cases of non-competitive tenders, such as the recent case of the privatisation of state fixed-phone monopoly Ukrtelecom, are also still ripe.

Clearly less satisfied are average Ukrainians, suffering with IMF-prescribed reforms, and Russia, who wants to prevent Ukraine from signing the EFTA and instead lure it into a customs union with the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Polls indicate Ukrainians are becoming more pessimistic about their economic prospects and dissatisfaction is growing due to the government’s reforms, particularly price hikes in household utilities and the new tax code.

The new code is likely to benefit big business while hurting small and medium enterprises, which the government is trying to pull back from the shadow economy that accounts for 40 percent of the country’s GDP.

Russia, on the other hand, is disappointed with how little Yanukovich has delivered in terms of pro- Russian policies, and is trying to lure Ukraine into the customs union by offering an annual discount on natural gas prices worth 9 billion dollars.

Such a union would be welcomed by Ukrainian big business, particularly the energy-intensive steel industry that requires cheap gas and that can claim to be the “driving force of economic growth in the short-term,” according to Gazizullin.

If, as seems increasingly probable, Ukraine chooses the Free Trade Agreement over the customs union with Russia, it will face higher duties for Russian imports and limitations to its exports to former Soviet republics where its goods are still needed and competitive.

But EFTA also opens up the enormous European market for Ukraine and it may attract foreign investment in sectors where modernisation is long due. Joining EFTA may also help break many of the country’s government-protected and murky monopolies.

This will be the greatest challenge for Yanukovich, whose financial backing comes precisely from big businesses in the steel and chemical industry. These sectors operate with huge profit margins and fear competition from high-quality EU goods.

Their influence in the present, as well as all previous Ukrainian governments is enormous: six of the 16 current cabinet members are believed to be multi-millionaires who maintain their wealth by registering their businesses in their relatives’ names.

Foreign investors are generally pushed to business sectors of less interest to oligarchs and the state, such as agriculture, where Ukraine’s potential is substantial.

Even here though, the Ukrainian government has been recently criticised for giving preferencial treatment to a partly state-owned monopoly that now has the lion’s share of grain export quotas, limiting the interest of foreign capital to invest.

Officials justify the decision with the need to protect Ukrainian farmers from foreign competition, but critics claim the measure will just help keep land cheap for those with the ability to buy it and prevent farmers from selling their products at world prices.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, May 30 2011 (IPS)

Seven countries from the Carpathian Region in Eastern Europe have signed a protocol to prevent one of Europe’s last natural and virgin forests from disappearing at the hands of illegal logging.

Old-growth, virgin or primeval forests all denote particularly ancient forests of unique ecological value, such as large trees, standing dead trees and an unusual biodiversity which may include several rare or threatened species.

These forests provide invaluable ecosystem services such as pure water, clean air, carbon storage, nutrient regeneration and maintenance of soils, among others.

The ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine signed a Protocol on Sustainable Forest Management in Bratislava, Slovakia last Friday with the stated goal of contributing to the sustainable management and protection of the Carpathian forests.

The Carpathian forests, and particularly the parts falling in Romanian territory, represent one of the few traces of what once were Europe’s large primeval forests.

With the protocol Europe’s biggest remaining area of old growth and natural forests outside Russia will benefit from official protection, and efforts will be made to maintain and extend forest cover.

The signing of the Protocol on Sustainable Forest Management falls under the Carpathian Convention of 2003, an instance of regional cooperation aimed at a comprehensive policy of protection and sustainable development in the Carpathians.

Estimates point to 300,000 hectares of primeval forest within the Carpathian Mountains, and portions of it in Eastern Slovakia, Western Ukraine and Romania are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania constitute Europe’s largest unfragmented forest area. However, according to the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) only 18 percent of the 250,000 hectares of Romanian primeval forest had benefited from protection.

In other countries like Slovakia the situation had worsened to the extent that only 0.5 percent of forests can be considered old growth by now.

Excessive logging in natural and old-growth forests affects not only the virgin forest itself, but threatens also its biodiversity and particularly the indigenous species that require the forest’s habitat for their survival.

“The Carpathian convention protocol is a good sign, a step in right direction and an example for the rest of the world and Europe, but at the same time this problem comes down to one of implementation, and in the region there is a great deal of things in paper that are not put into practice,” Andreas Beckmann, director of the WWF’s Danube-Carpathian programme office told IPS.

“However, in this protocol there is an attempt to put the spotlight on this issue of implementation,” Beckmann says.

Illegal logging is common in the Carpathian region where the various countries are trying to address problems regarding the drafting and enforcement of legislation.

There is also a lack of data regarding the myriad of small wood harvesting and processing companies that would allow the monitoring of wood volumes and origin.

While the Carpathians had remained remarkably preserved until recently, the last two decades that followed the collapse of state socialism in the region have exposed this natural area to unprecedented pressures for development.

Besides illegal logging, infrastructure development in the form of highways, roads, ski resorts and holiday homes is advancing often illegally and within formally protected areas.

However, not all is bad news. The signing of the latest protocol is just one of the increasing legal mechanisms available for the protection of forests in Europe.

The EU has recently approved new legislation against illegal logging and directives which will help address the loss of forest treasures.

“Recent EU legislation puts very specific demands on EU countries in terms of implementation and in terms of sourcing of the timber for the European market. This is directly relevant for EU member states,” Beckmann told IPS.

“While countries such as Ukraine Serbia are not governed by such legislation, they will also be affected to the extent that they export to the EU market,” he added.

Positive examples of fighting illegal logging are, however, also coming from countries in the region, even before the protocol was signed.

The Romanian Forest Agency Romsilva has been in the spotlight since it developed an online timber tracking tool which will help with monitoring illegal logging, a highly progressive solution that may set an example to the rest of the world.

But besides national, regional and EU-level efforts, the inclusion of the protection of forests into the global political agenda was also given a push by the United Nations, which declared the year 2011 to be the International Year of Forests.

The U.N. is campaigning for the recognition of forests as integral to sustainable development. World Bank studies point to over 1.6 billion people depending on forests for their livelihood, with 300 million of them living inside them.

Deforestation, which advances at a yearly rate of 130,000 square km of lost forest, accounts for as much as 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and leads to the disappearance of up to one hundred species a day.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
KIEV, May 30 2011 (IPS)

Accused of being unfriendly towards journalists, Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich has surprised the world by starting an investigation for abuse of power against former president Leonid Kuchma over the murder of an opposition journalist in 2000.

There is disagreement on whether media freedom, which has always been relative, is seriously endangered by the practices of the Yanukovich-led cabinet, considered more authoritarian than that of its liberal predecessor Viktor Yushchenko.

There is no evidence of direct censorship in the country but there have been instances of pressure from owners against their staff and a few cases of physical harassment of journalists.

Ever since the financial crisis hit Ukraine hard, many television channels and newspapers have suffered from reduced advertisement, making them more dependent on their owners, who in their turn privilege good relations with the government in times of crisis.

But in the midst of accusations of disrespecting media freedom, Yanukovich has surprisingly reopened an investigation into the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, killed under the rule of his political mentor, former president Kuchma.

The headless body of Gongadze was found in a forest outside Kiev in 2000. He was known for his outspoken criticism of the Kuchma administration, which lasted from 1994 to 2005, and what he considered its corrupt practices.

Ukrainian journalists and civic actors have for years called for a thorough investigation of a case that symbolises the struggle for media freedom in the post-Soviet country, after being disappointed by former president Yushchenko’s unwillingness to push the inquiry.

While Yushchenko’s pro-Western presidency, which lasted from 2005 to 2010, is credited for increasing media freedom, the former president was also Kuchma’s prime minister at the time of the Gongadze murder in 2000, leading many to believe he had reasons to fear the investigation.

Kuchma has been the most high-profile suspect ever since his former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko revealed the content of secret recordings in which the former president is heard complaining about Gongadze during a meeting with other state officials.

In the tapes, a voice that many recognise as Kuchma’s is heard asking for the journalist to be kidnapped by Chechens, and ordering his subordinates to “take care of him.”

Kuchma has consistently denied the accusations, claiming the tapes are forgeries aimed at discrediting him, and pointing first at Russia, and then at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as the conspirators.

The case became more convoluted after the former bodyguard Melnychenko declared he believed Kuchma was indeed the victim of intrigues.

The former president, who is also suspected of playing a big role in stifling the murder investigation over the years, has taken the accusations seriously, and hired U.S. lawyer Alen Dershowitz, noted for his role in the O.J. Simpson case, to defend him.

While the hundreds of hours of tapes have not yet been fully authenticated, first deputy prosecutor general Renat Kuzmin has confirmed that the voices heard are those of senior officials, including the former president.

The authentication of the tapes may open a Pandora’s box: the tapes include discussions on a variety of corrupt deals involving former and present high-level officials, and there already are voices calling for the opening of new investigations.

Relatives of Gongadze want the former president to be indicted for murder, but Kuchma has so far only been accused of abuse of power.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Victor Pshonka, who last week announced his office had completed its investigation, justified the abuse of power charge by arguing Kuchma had “no intent on the final tragic outcome.”

Adding to the difficulty of the case, there is no witness to confirm a chain of orders coming from the presidential office. So far three police officers have been jailed in the murder case, while a former police general awaits trial.

The one person who could have confirmed the link between high-level officials and the police officers was former interior minister Yuriy Kravchenko, who died in 2005 under suspicious circumstances.

Kravchenko allegedly shot himself twice in the head shortly before he was to testify in the case, leaving a note in which he claimed to be the victim of Kuchma’s intrigues. Investigators concluded he had committed suicide, but many in Ukraine believe he was murdered.

Conspiracy theories are ripe at this stage: many believe the trial is a farce created to clear Kuchma of any suspicions while others see a war between political clans – Yanukovich’s and Kuchma’s – with different financial backers.

“The resurrection of this case, its public humiliation of Kuchma and the renewed spotlight on crimes that occurred during his reign is raising demands that a transparent and fair process occur,” Adrian Karatnycky, senior scholar at the Atlantic Council of the United States told IPS. “Any hint of a cover-up will only undermine Yanukovich’s image.”

Surely, the case will help Yanukovich fend off accusations of selective prosecution aimed against political opponents, an accusation he has faced ever since ordering an investigation into the financial activities of the main opposition leader and former prime minister Yuliya Timoshenko.

Timoshenko has been accused of diverting funds raised under the Kyoto Protocol to place them in a pension fund, and is currently under house arrest.

Yanukovich is also working on improving his image with the press. Karatnycky credits his government for supporting the passing of Ukraine’s first “comprehensive freedom of information legislation” and notes Yanukovich appointed the respected journalist Darka Chepak, founder of the Stop Censorship movement, as the President’s press spokesman.

Chepak used to work with Georgiy Geongadze and his news portal Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth).

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, May 23 2011 (IPS)

Social media is being heralded as a revolutionary weapon for the empowerment of discriminated groups such as migrants. But so far it is the xenophobic far right that has made the most of it.

The discussion about social media tends to focus around famous Internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and YouTube, but generally refers to any innovative or unorthodox means of communication.

In contrast to traditional media, social media is usually web-based, highly interactive, inexpensive and easily accessible to consumers, who can turn into producers without much effort.

Its enormous popularity has forced traditional media outlets to adopt many of the features characteristic of social media, such as open commentary sections and uploading of video features.

Many see signs of hope for voiceless migrants in the rise of social media, but what is even truer is that the far-right has benefited the most from the media revolution.

“Racist and xenophobic people took over first because they had not been allowed into mainstream media,” Arash Mokhtari, a project manager at Quick Response, a Swedish group monitoring media coverage of migrants, told IPS.

“Before, they resorted to leaflets but by now they’ve become very media-savvy, they are very present in blogs and commentary sections,” he said.

One often cited example is the hijacking of commentary sections in terrorism-related news by xenophobes, who use this platform to insinuate links between terrorism and Islamic communities in Europe.

Nobody denies the potential social media holds to spread any kind of ideas, including messages of tolerance, but uncertainty remains as to how to approach it and as to its actual effectiveness.

“The anti-racist majority society needs to be better at learning from these groups in order to resist them. Social media is very democratic and I believe the situation can be changed,” said Mokhtari.

The issue of how to improve migrant integration through social media was highlighted at a conference hosted by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Hungarian presidency of the European Union last week in Budapest, Hungary.

“Social media can be used to communicate messages to youth and children in a way that is close to them: Facebook, YouTube or cartoons can all be used to encourage migrants to participate,” Anke Schuster, project development and liaison officer for the IOM in Brussels told IPS.

However, experts have not found a way to measure its exact impact: “New media tools such as Facebook and YouTube offer quantitative data on how many times material was used, but more qualitative evaluations are needed,” Schuster said.

Also, for organisations such as the IOM or other NGOs (non-governmental organisations) it is hard to match the straightforward language that typifies far-right new media.

“Social media provides opportunities to bring our message across but we need to find the right language to communicate it; readers expect a simple, understandable language,” Jurga Kievisaite, programme manager for IOM told IPS.

While media experts agree a simple language is desirable, some are concerned that down-to-earth coverage of migration issues may come at the expense of understanding the complex processes behind migration flows.

Calls for more human interest stories that connect the reader to the often discriminated and voiceless migrant are met with skepticism by those journalists who insist on the need for analysis and background information and who oppose stigmatising migrants and exploiting their emotions.

But as the still largely unregulated social media keeps booming, concerns grow as to whether either type of story will be written in a professional manner by new media actors such as bloggers.

“Bloggers can deceive and lie, they don’t answer to anybody. That may be freedom of expression, but it’s not journalism,” Aidan White, former general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists said.

“To a part of the population what makes journalism distinctive is a commitment to ethical values. Journalists need to be responsible and accountable,” he added.

Mircea Toma, president of Active Watch, a Romanian media monitory agency, used a more conciliatory tone: “Young people consume more and more new media, so bloggers will become a dominant part of the media landscape. As public communicators they have the ability to influence society, but they are also exposed to the same laws as anyone else.”

Nevertheless, regulation of social media remains a controversial and delicate topic in which the need for professionalism needs to be balanced with the right to freedom of expression.

“Those suggesting regulation have been harshly attacked, it’s considered a dangerous precedent,” Mokhtari told IPS.

“But some steps have been made towards regulations, such as the requirement that people register before commenting online. Anonymity is great but it provides a negative platform for discussion.”

In any case, Mokhtari notes the scope of the new media seems to have changed: “Before, social media was about adopting an identity different from your own, now it is all about who you really are.”

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, May 18 2011 (IPS)

As European leaders increasingly question the concept of Europe without borders and follow each other in announcing the end of multiculturalism, the media response has been mostly to present migrants as destabilising Europe’s labour markets and welfare states.

The role of the media in the worsening image of migrants in Europe was debated in Budapest at a conference titled “Promoting Migrant Integration through Media and Intercultural Dialogue”.

The conference, organised by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Hungarian Presidency of the European Union, ran from May 16-18, and was aimed at helping media representatives provide fair and balanced coverage of migration issues.

With far-right, anti-immigration parties gaining strength throghout Europe, journalists have been signalled as frequent accomplices to rising xenophobia:

“European public opinion is being pressed with the threat of a migration wave. Both politicians and journalists should recognise their mistakes,” Czech sociologist Ivan Gabal told participants.

Mircea Toma, president of Active Watch, a Romanian media monitory agency, mirrored a similar view: “Journalists often don’t look at events with an eagle eye, but rather with the same perspective as anyone in the population,” he said.

The increasing commercialisation of the mainstream media and the profit imperatives it imposes seem to be at the core of the lowering of quality in media coverage of migration related issues.

“We certainly need some transparency rules to see where the funding is coming from and what are the political groups involved,” Aidan White, former general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists told participants.

“There is a crisis within the media, a financial crisis that is reducing the quality of training, of journalism, and ultimately journalists’ capacity to tell complex stories.”

There is a harsh, competitive environment that is leading editors and journalists to violate codes of ethics. “If anti-immigration writing allows the media to stay in business, the media will go for it,” Milica Pesic, executive director of the U.K.-based Media Diversity Institute warned.

Still, blame should not be placed exclusively on the media, White said. “This is not just a problem of the media. Issues related to economic migration are complex, but lack of courage is leading to an unscrupulous form of politics. We are facing a general problem of societal anxiety about our healthcare, our education and our labour market.”

An anxiety which, participants agreed, has peaked with the Middle East revolts in general, and the Libyan crisis in particular.

Since the beginning of what some have termed the ‘Arab Spring’, “no more than 30,000 people have arrived in Europe, but the reaction has been surprising,” Kinga Goncz, vice-chair of the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee told the conference.

“This is not a large number but from reading the media you would think it’s a huge number. There’s a paranoid fear that these people will overburden Europe, while actually some of the economies that are better recovering from the crisis, like Germany’s, require even more migrants,” she said.

The latest crisis has also underlined the ethnocentrism of European media. “Eight hundred thousand people, overwhelmingly migrant workers, have fled from Libya and gone mostly to Tunisia, Egypt, Niger, Chad and Algeria. This indeed represents a migration crisis, but it is not affecting Europe yet,” Jean- Philippe Chauzy, head of the IOM’s Media and Communication Unit told IPS.

The message was, however, not that media should portray migrants positively; instead speakers stressed the need to ensure balanced and accurate reporting.

“Journalists have prejudices of their own,” Pesic said. “It’s very important to know the facts, figures and sources, but even when they have them, some papers will go out of their way to mislead.”

Concerns over lack of journalistic ethic were shared by more than one state official: “Journalists often have an agenda, in the ministries we often provide them with correct, written information and they still write it wrong or put things out of context,” Paulina Babis from the Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Policy told IPS.

Yet some questioned why journalists would even begin by approaching officials and not give voice to those who remain mostly voiceless: “Migrants and their organisations should speak for migrants, not government officials,” White said.

“Journalists will go to the easiest available source, they don’t have time for much else. What we need is an alternative sources handbook that should be made available to them,” he suggested.

Journalists, civic actors and international and state officials agreed the solution lies in increased cooperation between the media and other societal actors.

“Migration is a complex and changing issue and journalists have less and less time to develop expertise. They don’t have the resources to cover an issue which requires a comprehensive understanding of the context,” Chauzy said, speaking to IPS.

“The present context is one of economic downturn and growing unemployment, which is leading to polarisation. That’s why the media should get all the information it needs: biased coverage is less acceptable in an era when access to information is a lot easier than at any other time in history,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Feb 22 2011 (IPS)

EU pressure may force Hungary to step back on some provision of its controversial media law, but its main goal has been achieved before it even took effect: media are intimidated.

On December 21, just a few hours after Parliament approving a law which would allegedly protect the public from offensive material and partial news coverage, close to a million listeners tuned into Kossuth radio to listen to the popular news programme “180 minutes”.

As with many other media outlets, Kossuth radio also saw a change in ownership shortly after Fidesz’s stunning electoral performance last year, in which the conservative party won over two-thirds of parliamentary seats.

Still, many listeners eagerly awaited the prestigious radio programme’s reaction to the yet unenforced law. What followed was a minute of total silence, a “symbolic act to make people reflect,” Attila Mong, who was promptly suspended, told IPS.

The young journalist was the first and most visible victim of the media law which was widely criticized by international media, organizations and the European Union, leading to strong pressure on Budapest to modify some controversial provisions.

In response to a critical letter by the European Commission, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who happens to chair the EU rotating presidency since January, has accepted to make modifications to the law, claiming these would be of a “technical nature” and that criticism against his law had been “ridiculous”.

The commission has asked Hungary to specify its criteria for media registration requirements and for “balanced coverage” from bloggers, while it has requested it to modify provisions which allow Hungary to fine media outlets based in other EU member states.

Yet none of this will help Mong, who now awaits the results of a disciplinary procedure initiated by the radio’s management against him.

While the journalist expected something close to a verbal reprimand, he now stands accused “of violating the labour law, because I allegedly expressed a political opinion in an unsuitable context,” he told IPS.

The Mong case has been seen by Hungarian journalists as a poisoned appetizer of what is to come when the law is enforced and the new Media council, staffed exclusively by sympathizers of the governing Fidesz and given almost judicial powers, will begin supervising Hungarian media.

Defenders of the law point to the decadence of Hungarian journalism, with news reports increasingly dealing with petty criminality and gratuitous violence, and to the rise of Internet news portals connected to the anti-Gypsy and anti-Semitic extreme-right.

But most observers believe Orbán and his party are more worried about criticism from the left than with the admittedly growing strength of the extreme right, whose main representative Jobbik obtained 17 percent of the vote in the last election.

In view of the weakness of the Hungarian journalist class, many are sure that Fidesz will achieve what it is striving for.

“Journalism is badly paid in Hungary and most of the older, most prestigious professionals who would not stand for what is now happening have turned to the business sector long ago,” János Horvát, president of the Centre for Independent Journalism told IPS.

Horvát belongs to the class of prestigious journalists who have abandoned the profession. His career started in the 1970s, when he took advantage of the increasing opening of the Hungarian communist regime to challenge many of the journalistic taboos of the time.

But in spite of present democracy, the climate is now one of regression. “Newspapers will rather hire younger, badly paid journalists who are easier to manipulate, as there is a lot of pressure from both business and politicians on the media,” he says.

The result is self-censorship, an old habit still promoted by authorities. Upon being named head of the Hungarian state news agency MTI last year, Csaba Belénessy did not shy away from claiming that “public service should be faithful to the government, and fair to the opposition.”

Mong is also witness to the growing self-censorship that surrounds him: “I did not receive one show of solidarity, not even from the journalists’ union. People are afraid of losing their jobs and newspapers fear hefty fines. The only support I got was in private.”

All this is happening in a context of general societal indifference. While a recent poll shows that 51 percent of Hungarians find the media law unacceptable and 35 percent are supportive, Hungarians are hard to mobilize on issues which concern mostly the intelligentsia of their capital Budapest.

In spite of a few protests that gathered five to ten thousand people in Budapest, Hungarians are generally more concerned with their fragile economic situation.

“Most Hungarians want, above all, a better life, and I respect that for them freedom of speech comes second,” Mong told IPS. “Still, I did what I did because I don’t want a young journalist to ask me in ten years time: Why didn’t you do anything back then?”

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jan 14 2011 (IPS)

Following the approval of a restrictive media law that led to widespread domestic and international condemnation, Hungarian society is trying to come to terms with the broader consequences of the country’s alleged descent into authoritarianism.

Hungary’s conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán approved a controversial media law last December, making the most of the two-thirds constitutional majority he gained in last year’s parliamentary election.

Supporters of the new legislation claim it will protect the public from content offensive to national, religious or ethnic minorities and from partial news coverage.

The government also created an all-powerful Media Council in charge of monitoring the media’s application of the law, and has authorised it to impose hefty fines which could potentially force dissenting media to shut down.

The Council will be staffed exclusively with sympathizers of Fidesz, the party led by Orbán, causing fears that the law will be used to restrict freedom of speech and attack the non-aligned press.

The move was closely observed by Europe as Hungary took over the EU (European Union) presidency Jan. 1, with various Western European countries making harsh criticism of the law and asking if Hungary was fit to preside over the EU Council.

Although Orbán insists the law is in line with European legislation, the Hungarian government is backing down and admits the legislation will be modified if the European Commission deems this necessary.

In Hungary confusion prevails as media outlets make contradictory assessments of the law and most of the public remains apathetic.

Supporters of the law accuse the domestic opposition of causing panic in Europe, while its opponents warn Hungary is descending into authoritarianism.

“I am prepared to accept that any regulation will be contested by journalists, but we were surprised by the ferocity of the attacks,” György Ocskó, international spokesperson of the Hungarian Media Council said in a public discussion last Wednesday.

The discussion on ‘Is Freedom of Speech Threatened in Hungary’ was held at the Common Sense Society in Budapest and was joined by journalists, academics and representatives of the Hungarian state.

Ocskó defended the law against the mostly critical voices at the event: “Hungary is still a parliamentary democracy and has all the necessary checks, the law will be scrutinized by the Constitutional Court, which is an independent body, and all our decisions can be contested.”

Ocsko was reacting to information circulated in the international press, assuring the public that fines can be judicially contested and paid only after litigation. He also denied journalists could be forced to reveal their sources by anyone other than the police or the judiciary.

But Ocsko was unable to provide satisfactory answers as to why the law was passed without consulting stakeholders and his Council staffed exclusively with Fidesz supporters.

“This law is said to protect the public interest, but nobody in the public asked the Council to legislate,” said Mihály Gálik, professor of media studies at Budapest’s Corvinus University. “No public consultation took place. This is the worst approach, secretly legislating on the media is a contradiction in terms.

“There is one regulatory agency accumulating excessive power and this goes against the principle of checks and balances,” said Gálik. “The media council has too much power to interfere with the day-to-day activities of the media. It takes over powers from the judiciary.”

Even members of the once faithful right-wing press expressed similar criticism: “I’m not surprised by the hysteric reaction of the public and the international community. The regulation was made quickly, it was passed without any public discussion and a media council full of Fidesz people was elected,” András Stumpf from the conservative weekly Heti Válasz told participants.

Still, the journalist argued the problem was not the law itself: “After reading the law, I looked in the mirror but I didn’t see a scared man. I don’t think freedom of speech is in danger. Indeed the government might be able to control the media, but not because of this law. The previous law also had regulations on fairness and impartiality, so formally there is no problem with it, but in real life it might be different.”

Speaking to IPS, Stumpf called the law “idiotic” and “unnecessary”, but explained that the real potential problem lies in the enormous power Fidesz accumulates, of which the media law is just a small part.

“The danger for opponents of the law is not the law itself, but the fact that Fidesz has a two-third majority and may want to control every corner of the country. But that is a different question.”

Stumpf admitted the law contains worrying elements, such as the council’s rights to check the computers of newspaper redactions and to access their business secrets. “If they do that, I will write about it and all of Europe will be able to find out,” he told IPS.

But Europe should not only look at Hungary, Andris Mellakauls, from the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on the Media and New Communication Services told participants.

“Freedom of expression is in danger all around Europe,” he noted. “Just look at the questionable libel laws and misuse of anti-terrorism legislation in the U.K. or at the French minister of Industry asking French Internet providers to block Wikileaks.”

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jan 13 2011 (IPS)

Twenty years ago when the Berlin wall fell, radical privatisation was promoted as a solution to the ills of Eastern European economies. The one country that ignored the West’s recipe– Slovenia – seems to be faring far better.

Ever since state socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe, post-communist countries have faced pressure to build market economies while needing to preserve a social safety net.

The transition was assisted by Western countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and various Western, mainly U.S.-based foundations, who among other things promoted the privatisation of state assets through large inflows of foreign direct investment.

Most external actors firmly believed democracy could only emerge once a market economy was in place, and thus their first efforts went into market reform.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria are now fully integrated in the European Union since they joined it in 2004.

The region’s economies have become largely dependent on attracting substantial foreign investment, leading to the integration of their economies into the West but also to foreign ownership of most major industries, services and utilities.

Privatisation has been among the hottest topics in the region, as many perceive it as having proceeded too quickly and to the benefit of a small elite that became politically and economically powerful.

The new position of these countries in the global economy does not allow them much room for manoeuvre, but Slovenia has proven to be a surprising exception by privileging domestic privatisation and integrating various interest groups in the legislative process.

Its polar opposite are the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were Soviet republics run by centrally planned economies until 1991. After independence they have consistently elected right-wing governments who have pursued a radical version of economic liberalism.

The East-Central European countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have sought a middle way allowing considerable market reforms but maintaining some form of social protection and pursuing industrial policies.

Only Slovenia has considerably diverged from this path and, more than any other country in the region, has created a socially inclusive society without sacrificing macroeconomic performance.

The frequent left-wing governments in the country have imitated many of the social democratic and corporatist arrangements typical of northern European countries such as Germany or Sweden.

Nevertheless, Slovenia has also followed some neo-liberal trends, in regards to labour legislation.

Corporatism is a political-economic system whereby business, labour, and other social groups are accepted as partners in shaping the country’s macroeconomic policies, for instance by agreeing on the minimum wage or on unemployment benefits.

“In Slovenia social dialogue was a tradition, and we continued with it also after independence,” says Rastko Plohl, president of the Independent Trade Unions of Slovenia (NSS), a labour organisation often dedicated to awareness-raising and civic activism.

“An Economic Social Council was established, where tripartite dialogues happen in the area of labour rights and other legislation,” he explains.

Slovenian corporatism has been even more inclusive of labour than most Western countries, which helped legitimise market reforms such as privatisation that elsewhere in the region are often considered to have been unfair and hasty.

Its past as the most liberal and economically western oriented republic in former socialist Yugoslavia, and the communal form of ownership prevailing then was crucial to the posterior inclusion of trade unions in the post- communist legislative battles that defined the new property rights.

In February 1989 “the NSS participated in the Constitutional Council, and managed to bring in articles into the Constituion on workers’ rights,” says Plohl.

The NSS “also demanded a six months long public participation in the public debate, and opened the way for other organizations and to the public, so that everyone could join with their proposals,” the syndicalist notes.

One result was that foreign capital was not allowed to penetrate its economy as easily as in the Baltics or the East-Central European region; instead selective foreign involvement in the country’s traditional light industries was promoted.

Slovenia and the East-Central European states have managed to create export industries that similarly to Western countries rely on complex technology and skilled labour and which, in many cases, already existed in late socialism.

The result was better real wages and working conditions for Slovenes, partly thanks to the greater bargaining power of its high-skilled labour.

The Baltic countries have been celebrated in some of the Western press for their macroeconomic stability and balanced public finance but this has come at the expense of worrying levels of inequality and social exclusion.

Countries such as Estonia and Latvis have combined neo-liberal economic policy to nationalist politics by making sure the costs of transformation would be borne by their large Russian minorities.

Fearful of losing their independence, the Baltic countries have severed as many economic ties with Russia as possible to reduce economic dependency, and Soviet industries that massively employed ethnic Russians were hit especially hard.

Whereas during the mid-1990s Slovenia and the East-Central European countries recovered some of their industrial capacity, Baltic industrial output has been consistently declining.

Baltic exports concentrate around resource-intensive or unskilled labour- intensive industries, similarly to many less-developed countries.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Aug 2 2010 (IPS)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has slapped IMF in the face, shocking an international community used to news of economic difficulties coming from this small Central European nation. But most Hungarians have welcomed it, at least so far.

Orbán is fresh from a smashing election victory in April, in which he obtained a decisive mandate as his conservative party Fidesz – the Hungarian Civic Movement — gained over two-thirds of parliamentary seats, giving it unprecedented power in post-communist Hungarian history.

The prime minister recently said no to a new IMF (International Monetary Fund) credit line that would have prolonged the current 20 billion euro line granted in 2008 under a more cooperative socialist cabinet.

It was his intent to keep Hungary’s deficit in balance by taxing banks and other financial institutions with 700 million euros that IMF negotiators found unacceptable. But Orbán stood firm in spite of international criticism and warnings that Hungary’s currency will soon collapse as a result of stifled investment.

The bank tax would compensate for decreased income tax, as Fidesz has decided to establish a 16 percent flat tax, which it hopes will simplify tax collection and help reduce tax evasion, one of Hungary’s long-standing ills.

The decision is in line with Orbán’s electoral promises, which called for lower taxes, support for small and medium enterprises and an end to austerity measures, and is popular among many Hungarians who resent foreign interference and see it as a recurrent theme in the country’s history.

Many were also happy to hear that when the IMF delegation first arrived in Budapest three weeks ago, negotiators were informed that Orbán was in South Africa enjoying the football World Cup final.

After the failure to reach an agreement with the international organisation, Orbán noted Hungary had already reduced its deficit from 9.3 percent of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in 2006 to 4 percent in 2009, making it “the world champion when it comes to cutting spending.”

Hungary’s deficit is among the lowest in the EU (European Union), and its public debt ratio is slightly above average, but “there are other economic problems, few people work or pay taxes in this country, and there are fears that without reforms the country will return to the previous situation,” Zsolt Enyedi, political scientist at the Budapest-based Central European University told IPS.

So far the financial catastrophe that much of the international financial press predicted after Hungary failed to renew its credit line has not materialised. Rating companies have threatened with downgrading the country of 10 million, but are still hopeful the government will re-engage with the international organisation.

But Orbán insists any new agreement will be reached “not with the IMF, but with the EU.”

Instead, he scored points with many Hungarians who since 2006, before the global financial crisis and under a socialist cabinet, have been subjected to a variety of austerity packages.

The prime minister, who also ruled between 1998 and 2002, had been considered an unacceptable figure for the left due to its relations with the extreme right, but in the last years Orbán has profited from his turn to the left in economic matters and from the unpopular governmental performance of the socialists.

“Hungary recently experienced a major loss of trust in the political system and a highly unpopular government,” Ferenc Laczo, a Hungarian student who participated in the last elections told IPS. “You cannot expect them to do severe austerity measures when they are aiming to rebuild confidence, especially as local elections are not far ahead.”

Hungary will elect local officials in October, but the severely unpopular socialists are not his main worry.Rather, the prime minister needs to keep the momentum of what he called a “revolution at the ballots” last April to prevent an even greater rise of the far-right.

Orbán’s Fidesz has for the last decade been accused of pampering the ultra- nationalist far right, whose strength unexpectedly grew following the global financial crisis.

The last legislatives in April saw the far-right Jobbik, Movement for a Better Hungary, obtain 17 percent of the vote, compared to only 2 percent in 2006. The party built on more than resentment against austerity measures and anti- capitalism. It also switched from anti-Semitism to anti-Gypsy rhetoric, which resonates with the electorate on both right and left and is more acceptable in mainstream political discourse.

Orbán’s honeymoon with the far right is seemingly over, but the government feels obliged to keep distance from the practices of the previous socialist cabinet, which for years it accused of subservience to international capital. Otherwise Jobbik, which took a surprising number of votes from former socialist voters, can claim there is no difference between the present and the previous cabinets.

Fidesz has also been actively showing more nationalist minded Hungarians that it is still engaged in symbolic issues dear to the right. A recent decision to facilitate citizenship proceedings for the over two million ethnic Hungarians living in the regions outside Hungary’s borders has increased regional tension, especially with the northern neighbor Slovakia, home to 500,000 ethnic Hungarians.

But Fidesz’s “revolution” also involves an increasing “centralisation of power,” Enyedi told IPS.

“There have been massive layouts in the civil service, it has tried to create bodies to control the press, it wants to influence nominations to the constitutional court, and is planning to rewrite the constitution,” the political scientist says.

“The government is indeed turning to nationalism and authoritarianism, but those who voted for them were aware of this,” Enyedi says.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Feb 8 2010 (IPS)

The 2004 ‘Orange revolution’ saw a pro-Western leadership emerge victorious in a Presidential vote that opposed them to a pro-Russian candidate accused of vote rigging. After six years of political and economic chaos, the once villain Viktor Yanukovich has reclaimed the President’s post.

Ukrainians face a difficult socio-economic situation. Credit: Zoltán Dujisin /IPS

Following a campaign filled with mutual accusations of vote-rigging plans, the runoff of the presidential vote saw Yanukovich obtain 48.8 percent of the vote, closely followed by Timoshenko with 45.6 percent. The main outcome of the first round on Jan. 17 had been the sound defeat of President Viktor Yushchenko and his anti-Russian line.

In spite of popular fatigue with yearly elections, turnout bordered 70 percent. Representatives from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and the European Union have all considered the election free and fair, and have called on all sides to accept its results.

Joao Soares, head of the OSCE mission saidd “yesterday’s voting was a very impressive example of a democratic election,” whereas PACE mission head Matyas Eorsi said in a press conference that both candidates “should agree that the election was democratic; Ukraine deserves to be applauded.”

Yanukovich secured victory with a message of national unity, geopolitical moderation and economic and political stability to a country that has been bitterly divided and unstable ever since the Orange revolution.

“I think that we have made the first step towards uniting the country,” Yanukovich said. “I will spare no effort so that Ukrainians, no matter in what part of the country they live, feel comfort and peace in a stable country.”

For years accused of not being truly democratic, Yanukovych has said that, although he considered the period following the Orange revolution a “nightmare”, he is “not opposed to the slogans” of democracy and Europe promoted back then.

While it is clear that relations with Russia will continue on the path of normalisation favoured by both presidential contenders, the main question under a Yanukovich government is to what extent he will be accepted by Western countries as a reliable partner.

Yanukovich is not promising EU membership any time soon, but his support for step-by-step Europeanisation shows that the goal of entering the EU has become consensual among both the population and Ukraine’s political elites. Timoshenko has so far refused to concede defeat as many of her allies make allegations of massive fraud, but analysts believe she will eventually admit defeat.

“Timoshenko was defeated with dignity, the numbers show it was a minimal defeat, but if she decides to fight the results she will lose all international support,” Balazs Jarabik, Ukrainian expert at the Madrid-based Foundation for Foreign Relations and International Dialogue (FRIDE) told IPS.

The election winner Yanukovich recognised Timoshenko was “a strong rival or opponent to me” but called on her to lose “with dignity” and follow “the road all the way and admit defeat just like I did” in the past.

“She probably needs time to consult with her political allies and decide whether to stop being a serious obstacle and focus on keeping her premier position,” Jarabik told IPS.

With Prime Minister Timoshenko still holding a majority in the Ukrainian parliament, the prospect of a continued crisis in governance is more than likely.

If the two bitter rivals don’t reach a power-sharing agreement, the solution may lie in Yanukovich calling early parliamentary elections to consolidate his power with a new parliamentary majority that will prove more cooperative. Shortly after his victory, Yanukovich reminded the Prime Minister she “should start preparing for dismissal. She understands this very well. I think she will get a proposal to this effect.”

However, Yanukovich may not be able to accomplish her dismissal without help. Outgoing President Yushchenko has insisted he is not leaving politics, and Jarabik believes that in exchange for certain guarantees, he might use his deputies to support Yanukovich in dismissing Timoshenko from her post as Prime Minister.

“Yushchenko is willing to finish off Timoshenko in exchange for a high price, which could be asking for a prime ministerial position for an ally of his or even for himself, although that would be a bit extreme,” Jarabik told IPS.

The elections also signaled that Ukrainians are less preoccupied with national, symbolic and historical issues promoted by the current President and more concerned with Ukraine’s difficult socio-economic situation.

Yanukovich will inherit a country in an extremely dire economic condition. He will have to prove a more reliable partner to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than his predecessors were in order to obtain much needed loans.

Ukraine’s economy continues to be on the verge of collapse, and budget revenues have diminished as a result of the global financial crisis, which may lead to a new round of privatisations.

Representatives of large businesses will continue to have a say in how Ukraine’s economic policy is run, and the business sectors behind Yanukovich are likely to demand policies that promote exports.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jan 15 2010 (IPS)

Neither the voters nor the West hold great illusions about genuine change in crisis-ridden Ukraine through the elections this weekend.

Once again all candidates are accusing each other of planning vote-rigging and of aspiring to monopolise power ahead of the Jan. 17 presidential vote, which will go to a second round if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote.

The only certainty in the upcoming presidential vote seems to be the political death of the leader of the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, President Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko is trailing behind in opinion polls, with around 5 percent support, and will most likely be succeeded by his former ally and current Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko (15 percent) or his long-time rival and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich, the favourite to win the election with an expected 30 percent of the vote.

The President has warned that his defeat in the election would mean “the surrender of Ukraine’s independence” and economic slavery to “a pro-Moscow project”, but voters seem to have more immediate concerns.

Candidates’ promises of integration with the West and democratisation, constantly delivered since the 2004 mass protests that brought Yushchenko to the presidency, contrast with the harsh reality of a post-Soviet republic suffering from grave economic and political ills.

Ever since the 2004 elections, repeated due to allegations of vote-rigging confirmed by international organisations, Ukraine’s political elite has been engaged in harsh infighting that has resulted in the falling out of the two main symbols of the ‘revolution’, Timoshenko and Yushchenko.

Yushchenko has consistently advocated a more free-market approach, while openly criticising Russia and advocating accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), whereas Timoshenko has moved towards a more conciliatory stance towards Moscow while promising to maintain social benefits.

But the man that seems set to take the presidency of the country of 50 million country is Viktor Yanukovich, the defeated candidate in 2004 and the man who claims he can take Ukraine closer to the EU while maintaining good ties with Russia.

But long gone are the times when the EU seemed to encourage Ukraine to seek candidate status: “There is a ‘Ukraine fatigue’ both in European capitals and Washington, but Ukraine is still a too big and important country to fail, so they are not watching indifferently,” Natalia Shapovalova, Ukrainian analyst at the Madrid-based Foundation for Foreign Relations and International Dialogue (FRIDE) tells IPS.

“Whoever wins, he or she will not radically change Ukraine’s policy towards the EU. The most important is who of the two frontrunners will be willing and capable of consolidating the political elite’s support for democratisation and reform. This achievement will be the most important indicator of the future president’s European credentials.”

However, there are few reasons for optimism. “Unfortunately, there are no signs that post-election Ukraine will emerge from its political and economic crisis. Both Yanukovich and Timoshenko will be more interested in cementing their powers than in undertaking democratising political reforms.”

Many suspect the election winner will attempt a snap parliamentary poll to solidify power. Even Timoshenko may not rule this out, as she currently relies on a water-thin majority.

Candidates have launched grave accusations against each other: All candidates have accused Prime Minister Timoshenko of using administrative resources to win votes, and Yushchenko has gone as far as claiming that “Timoshenko will pose threat number one” to a fair election.

Ukrainian journalists have criticised both the President and the Prime Minister for engaging in campaign actions during official working time.

Timoshenko is pointing the finger at Yanukovich, accusing him of planning to falsify votes in eastern Ukraine, the opposition candidate’s main stronghold.

Yanukovich still suffers from a legitimacy deficit in the eyes of part of the electorate and international actors; he has been connected to the 2004 electoral fraud and has not recognised democratic achievements in the Orange Revolution.

“However, this is also an issue for Yushchenko and Timoshenko, neither of whom ever ordered a fully-fledged investigation into the electoral fraud,” Shapovalova tells IPS.

In Russia the election is regarded more optimistically. While only Yanukovich openly uses pro-Russian slogans to lure its electorate, a Timoshenko victory will also please the Kremlin, “especially in comparison with outgoing Victor Yushchenko who is viewed as extremely anti-Russian by Moscow,” Shapovalova says.

Average Ukrainians above all fear another disruption in gas deliveries from Russia, which usually followed payment disputes with Ukraine, and wish to emerge from the economic crisis.

Ukraine bordered state bankruptcy last year, and has been receiving loans from the International Monetary Fund, which continuously criticises Ukraine’s government for its handling of the budget.

Ensuring gas deliveries and favourable economic deals has become a crucial issue for Timoshenko, who reached a new agreement on gas trade with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last November in Yalta, southern Ukraine.

“It’s comfortable for us to work with the Timoshenko government,” Putin said after the meeting, in which agreements were also reached to cooperate in the aviation, construction, machine-building and nuclear industries.

The validity of the agreements, severely criticised by President Yushchenko, will have to be confirmed by the next President.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Sep 17 2009 (IPS)

The Czech Republic has entered election campaign period with dire warnings being sounded of falling into the Russian sphere of influence, just as the U.S. drops its plans to build a missile base in Eastern Europe.

The ODS has not recovered from the shock of seeing the U.S. Democratic administration drop its plans to extend the U.S. missile defence system to Eastern Europe, which was communicated this Thursday by U.S. President Barack Obama to caretaker Prime Minister Jan Fischer.

Leader of the opposition Social Democrats Jiri Paroubek described the announcement as a “victory for the Czech people.” He added that “what we’ve been saying for three years has been confirmed: there’s no need for a U.S. missile defence shield.”

Topolanek was less cheerful: “This is not good news for the Czech state, for Czech freedom and independence. It puts us in a position wherein we are not firmly anchored in terms of partnership, security and alliance, and that’s a certain threat,” he said.

Former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg, who was a member of Topolanek’s cabinet, said the U.S. decision was a diplomatic gesture towards Iran and Russia, and described it as “pretty cheap”.

Schwarzenberg and former Czech president Vaclav Havel are among the many top personalities who signed a letter directed at U.S. President Barack Obama this summer, cautioning him over his overly conciliatory policy towards Russia.

The letter had wide resonance in the Czech Republic and a few neighbouring countries, but few noticed it outside the region. The British magazine The Economist, known for its harsh criticism of Russia’s foreign policy, termed it “plaintive” and “naïve”.

The letter, written by several ‘intellectuals’ and former politicians from post- communist Eastern European countries, says the radar issue had become “a symbol of America’s credibility,” and warned that its handling will have “a significant impact on the future of transatlantic relations.”

Gocev says “certain members of the former government are heavily invested in support of the base and are desperate to such an extent that they even begged the reluctant American side to build the base. They have to vindicate their position in the face of a clear majority opposing it.”

The previous Czech cabinet, led by the neo-liberal Civic Democrats (ODS) of former prime minister Mirek Topolanek, fell last May after losing a vote of confidence in parliament that was moved by the leftist opposition.

Due to a constitutional crisis, the date of the new elections is still unknown, and in the meantime a caretaker cabinet is running the government.

“The ODS fear losing the elections and they are trying to construct the equivalence that voting for the social democrats equals communists ruling again, which equals being under the Russian yoke,” Petr Gocev, researcher at the Prague School of Economics told IPS. “Conversely, voting for ODS means communism is adverted and represents the only guarantee of liberty.”

Czech media connected to figures like Havel and Schwarzenberg regularly promotes the idea that Russia’s network of spies is influencing developments in the country through contacts with local politicians and non-governmental organisations.

Andor Sandor, former chief of Czech Military Intelligence, has said in an interview that Russians “try to influence political decision-making through public opinion,” while admitting that “civic associations do not know that they are connected to Russian spies.”

The views of officials at the Military Intelligence differ little from this. Its annual report states that “Russia did its utmost last year to prevent the construction of a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic,” adding that “Russian agents are trying to push through their interests in the Czech Republic also via politicians” while returning to “Soviet practice”.

“Here we go again. This is so stupid that it is almost not even worthy of comment,” was how Jan Neoral, founder of the League of Mayors against the Radar reacted to the widely circulated accusations. “I have campaigned against the radar for three years, entirely for free, out of my own convictions, and using my own money.”

Jan Bednar, from the ‘No to the Bases Initiative’, denied the accusations as well, pointing to double standards. “There are also agents of other secret services operating here, in particular the CIA. It is strange that the only thing that is talked about are the activities of the Russian agents.”

The activist also wondered why “no intelligence service has put forward any evidence that Russian spies have influenced us in any way.”

“The Anti-radar movement was always accused of serving Russian interests and being manipulated by Russian intelligence as useful idiots,” Gocev told IPS. “The only reason being, it works. Anti-Russian sentiments prevail among the public since the occupation in 1968 and it is easy to exploit them.”

The left sees political interests behind many of these reports and points to more than professional relations between members of ODS and the intelligence services.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BISHKEK, Sep 2 2009 (IPS)

A U.S. base located just 40km from a Russian base – it can happen in Kyrgyzstan, a new focal point in the great geopolitics of Central Asia where China and Turkey are beginning to show their cards as well.

The country of five million is one of the Soviet Union’s former republics in Central Asia, bordering China and the former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The area has historically been the centre of games between big powers: the Mongols, Arabs, the Chinese, the British and Russian empires have all striven to control this strategic territory.

The U.S. is the big regional novelty. Its airbase has since 2001 been located right at Bishkek’s Manas airport. U.S. military airplanes are among the first sights for someone landing in the country.

Shortly after the U.S. set up base there, Russia opened another base at Kant airport, 40km from Bishkek. It has since tried to reassert its presence in what was once Soviet territory.

Following a meeting between Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev earlier this year in which Kyrgyzstan secured a 2 billion dollar package of loans and investments, Bakiev had ordered the U.S. to close its base.

But after a three-fold increase in rent for the U.S. base to 60 million dollars a year, Kyrgyzstan backed down on its promise to the Russians, though it brought new conditions such as reducing the level of U.S. immunity from prosecution, and getting Kyrgyz troops to guard the perimeter.

The U.S. will also give 36 million dollars for improving the airport infrastructure, another 30 million for navigational equipment, 30 million dollars for counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics operations, and 20 million dollars for development programmes.

“Being a small country with limited economic resources, Kyrgyzstan needs to make the most of this big game of superpowers,” Kyrgyz economist Maksat Korooluev told IPS. “Bakiev has achieved some success in his foreign policy: he managed to receive funds both from Russia and the U.S. while maintaining good relations.”

Kyrgyz officials claim the U.S. base has ceased to exist, and what now remains is a “freight transit centre”, which the U.S. calls a “logistics and transportation hub.” The base will remain a stop-off for military personnel and cargo headed for nearby Afghanistan.

Russia welcomed the new deal, and stressed its difference from the previous arrangement. “I think this will be only good for the common cause,” said Medvedev, who also called the deal a “sovereign right of Kyrgyzstan.”

“As part of the deal Russia is launching another military base in southern Kyrgyzstan that enables Bakiev to fortify strategically important southern borders that protect the country from religious extremists,” says Korooluev.

Russia is using the global economic crisis to aid impoverished Central Asian countries and strengthen its ties with them. Kyrgyzstan’s energy industry is under serious strain, and funds are lacking for developing state infrastructure, which is being heavily privatised.

But it is hardly a game between the U.S. and Russia alone. China and Turkey are making their weight felt.

“Turkey has been always interested in Central Asia to strengthen its position of a big brother in the Turkic world. It subsidises schools and universities, and has a big volume of investments in the economy,” Korooluev told IPS.

Turkish education programmes are especially visible. There are already two Turkish universities, the Kyrgyz-Turkish University of Manas and the International University of Ataturk-Ala-Too. Turkey also funds Turkic academic divisions in other universities throughout the country.

Korooluev says most Kyrgyz are comfortable with the Turkish presence, but the Chinese one is more problematic: “The Chinese are dominating local wholesale markets, and people are anxious about losing jobs. There was a case in which a bus with Chinese shuttle traders was burnt down.”

Between 2004 and 2006 Chinese exports to Kyrgyzstan tripled to 1.64 billion dollars.

Affordable Chinese products are quickly finding their way to Kyrgyzstan’s street markets, and China has invested heavily in upgrading roads to the Kyrgyz neighbour, hoping to boost trade ties and get hold of raw materials to feed its economic growth.

Still, Russia remains the strongest player in the region thanks to a strong diplomatic, military and economic presence, and greater cultural and linguistic proximity.

The U.S. is increasing its presence by helping educate Central Asian elites. In 1997 it set up the American University of Central Asia – located in central Bishkek in front of a statue of Marx and Engels, and in a building exhibiting a stone-carved hammer and sickle.

But ever since the demise of the Soviet Union, foreign and domestic Islamist- linked violence in this overwhelmingly Muslim country has been on the rise. Poorly equipped security forces and the porous borders mean easy entry for militants from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Central Asian governments are now concerned about these cross-border movements as a result of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that lead militants to relocate to ‘safe’ Central Asian countries.

Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev defended the new “temporary” deal with the U.S. by reminding the country’s parliament of the “worrying situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“It is no secret that there is no alternative at the moment to the military presence of the USA in Afghanistan, and our decision is correct from the point of view of security,” Sarbayev said.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
PAMIR MOUNTAINS, Tajikistan, Aug 27 2009 (IPS)

The collapse of the Soviet Union has brought misery to Tajikistan’s remote eastern half. People are being driven once again to live as nomads.

A child fights off electricity cuts. Credit: Zoltan Dujisin

The country of seven million went from being the poorest Soviet republic to being one of the world’s poorest nations. Independence brought the end of state farms, mines, irrigation channels, transport networks and energy plants.

Some Western analysts celebrate the locals’ return to “ancestral traditions”, but many adapting to the realities of the free market see it quite differently.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to,” says Timurbek, formerly a Russian philologist and now a pensioner who has taken to animal husbandry. “Before, nomadism was a matter of choice, now it’s one of necessity,” he told IPS.

Timurbek set up his yurt, a big tent made of wool and with an interior richly decorated with wall coverings, horse bags and carpets, on one of the few grassy fields left on the Pamir’s high plateaus, at an altitude of 4,100 metres.

The Pamirs lie mostly in the Gorno Badakhsan province. The province is home to a mere 3 percent of Tajikistan’s population – little more than 210,000 – but which constitutes almost half the country’s territory.

The Pamirs are among the highest mountain ranges in the world, with altitudes ranging from 3,000 to 7,500 metres. Extreme climatic conditions make this one of the least densely populated areas on the planet.

The 13th century traveller Marco Polo described the region as “nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing,” so cold that “you cannot even see any birds flying.”

Known since the 19th century as the “Roof of the World”, the Pamir mountains have for centuries been crossed by traders using the Silk Road, and later by spies involved in the 19th century geopolitical duel between the Russian and British empires.

Currently the only road through the mountains is the Pamir highway, the second highest in the world, built by the Soviet military in the early 1930s.

The road is now in precarious shape and mostly serves as an opium and heroin trafficking route from Afghanistan northwards. Some call this section of the former Silk Road the “opium highway”.

“Under the Soviets we had all sorts of food in the shops, cheap fuel, buses and roads in good shape,” says Aziz, a semi-nomadic farmer at the yurt camp, as his wife quietly runs a rudimentary machine producing butter and yoghurt from Yak milk.

“It doesn’t mean we liked Stalin, but everyone here misses the Soviet Union,” Aziz, a Kyrgyz of Sunni Muslim confession told IPS. “We couldn’t practice our religion freely, but there was food and work.”

Besides the Tajiks, who are close to Iranians and constitute 80 percent of Tajikistan’s population, the country is inhabited by Pamiris, who, like the Tajiks speak several languages related to Persian, and the Kyrgyz, who settled here in the 18th and 19th centuries and speak a Turkic language.

Locals survive on selling livestock and dairy products, growing vegetables in small kitchen gardens, and on humanitarian assistance, which during the civil war saved the region from an impending famine due to the economic blockade.

Feeling unrepresented in government, Pamiris from the Gorno-Badakhshan declared independence from Tajikistan in 1992, sparking a civil war that claimed up to 100,000 lives, and ended only in 1997.

Since then there has been little compassion from the central government, even though the vast majority of people in the Pamirs live on about a dollar a day.

The nomadic lifestyle at the yurt camp can only be maintained in the summer months. In the bitterly cold winter, when temperatures can reach – 50C, Aziz and others are forced back to the nearby town Murgab, the largest settlement in the region with a mere 6,500 inhabitants.

At Murgab’s “bazaar”, where people often cover their faces with veils as strong winds lift clouds of dust, shopping choices are limited to imported cookies, bread, chocolate bars and mostly expired fish and meat cans sold at exorbitant prices.

The poverty affects education; some children do not go to school because their parents cannot afford school material and uniforms.

Fuel is scarce, and locals are forced to use the scarcely available tersken bush to heat households, leading to desertification.

In spite of the potential for hydro energy, investors consider the region risky because consumers are unable to pay for electricity. Some organisations are now trying to promote use of solar energy, efficient at high altitudes.

Electricity is so scarce that the town is divided into two parts that get it by turns. Some use expensive fuel-run generators.

Many villages that for decades had become used to electricity for heating and cooking now get no supply even in winter. That also makes it impossible to run schools and hospitals in some of these forgotten corners of the former Soviet Union.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jul 27 2009 (IPS)

Canada has imposed visas on Czechs following a year of thousands of visa applications from Roma who point to persecution in the Czech Republic. Czech officials and media put the blame on Canada.

Canada reintroduced visa requirements on Czechs on Jul. 13 after the country of 10 million became the second biggest source for refugee claims after Mexico.

The Czech Republic has responded by introducing visas for holders of Canadian diplomatic and official passports. It is trying to get the EU (European Union) to activate a solidarity clause under which the entire Union could impose visas on Canadians.

Between January 2008 and April 2009 Canada received 2,581 asylum claims, leading it to warn Czechs that if the situation did not improve, it would be forced to reintroduce visa requirements it had lifted in late 2007.

Several Roma activists have called on Czech Roma to leave the country for Canada, noting the rising number of attacks against members of their community. The Roma are a people who migrated to Europe from India since the 14th century. They continue to face widespread discrimination.

In April and May two separate Molotov cocktail attacks targeted Roma families in small localities across the country, in one case causing severe injuries to a two-year-old girl who remains in hospital in serious condition.

Clashes between extremists, supported by anti-Roma residents, and the police also took place last year in the now ill-famed Janov housing estate in Litvinov in the northern Czech Republic, heavily inhabited by Roma.

But some voices have cast doubts on the true reasons behind the Roma exodus. Sociologist Roman Kristof, former director of the Government Council for Romany Affairs, says in a report that this migration is related to the “professional and financial interest” of former Czech citizens in Canada.

Kristof said the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) had “one- sided and biased information on the situation of Romanies in the Czech Republic due to the workers of the human rights industry.” The human rights workers, he said, “are to a large extent identical with the prospectors” who profit from assisting asylum applications.

Roma activists have called this an “insane theory”, and human rights and minorities minister Michael Kocab said neither he nor the interior ministry had any indications that such migration is organised.

“We really believe that the atmosphere in our country has markedly worsened recently and that the Romanies did not feel safe,” said Kocab in a rare official acknowledgments of guilt on the Czech side.

But much of Czech media has taken Kristof’s theory for granted, and says the Canadian asylum system has been overly generous and naïve about “well- invented stories” from asylum claimants.

These views have found resonance also at the top level. “Canada is resolving its own problem at the expense of the Czech Republic,” foreign minister Jan Kohout told the press.

“This problem does not lie in the Czech Republic; it does not lie in this number of applicants for asylum; it lies in the fact that Canada has in today’s world an exceptionally generous immigration law and asylum system,” the minister said.

But this could hardly be the case for Anna Polakova, chief editor of the Czech Radio’s Romany broadcasting, who cited “permanent attacks on my family” and the “radicalisation of society” as the reasons behind her asylum application to Canada.

“What this case told us is that this is not about gaining money or hiding from your debts in Canadian forests, but about daily discrimination and dangers to family members,” Stepan Ripka, Roma programme coordinator at the Open Society Fund in Prague, a humanist society, told IPS.

Ripka says anger in the Czech media relates to a Canadian NGO partly funded by its government “that helps asylum seekers with legal issues in Canada and instructs them on how to apply for asylum. Czech media shows this as NGO advisors telling Czech Roma what to say during the interview with migration officers.

“There are some preferred narratives of discrimination and oppression that work with the officers, but these people did not invent their stories.”

According to polls about two-thirds of Czechs see coexistence with the Roma as a problem, and extreme-right parties, while lacking parliamentary representation, are trying to gain strength through the use of anti-Roma rhetoric.

Caretaker Prime Minister Jan Fischer says these extremists will profit from the Canadian visa requirements as this will be another argument used against the Roma, and that anti-Romany moods will intensify as a result of Canada’s decision.

Hungarian, Slovak and Bulgarian Roma face a similar situation to that in the Czech Republic, but no such wave of visa asylum claimants has been registered from any of these countries.

Czech diplomats have been trying to convince Canada to sign an agreement recognising the Central European state as a safe country of origin, that would make it virtually impossible for Czech citizens to be granted asylum in Canada.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
SARAJEVO, Jul 23 2009 (IPS)

Sooner or later Bosnians will have to abandon their status of quasi-protectorate, and take control of their own state if they ever want to join the European Union.

Bosnia is today a federation divided into an overwhelmingly Serbian Republika Srpska and a Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose ten cantons are mostly divided along ethnic lines between Croats and Bosniaks.

Its supreme authority remains the Office of the High Representative (OHR), created by the international community following a deadly civil war which from 1992 to 1995 claimed the lives of 100,000 Serbs, Croats, and above all Bosniaks.

“Fourteen years of the OHR is enough. After so much discussion about its closure it has become a toothless tiger, and from internal discussion at the OHR it is my impression that actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina are ‘playing’ with this institution,” Helmut Kurth, director of the Bosnian branch of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, a German institution dealing with development cooperation and political education told IPS.

“There remains an important question on the military presence in the country. Probably it is needed, but with a mandate to intervene if necessary,” added Kurth.

While the OHR has been decisive in prompting reforms since 1995 with its power to legislate and to dismiss officials, its mandate has been extended indefinitely, keeping Bosnia in a quasi-protectorate status that prevents it from knocking at the EU’s door.

Bosnia’s chances of joining the EU any time soon are minimal, and worse than those of most countries in the Western Balkans.

Aspects of the political system in Bosnia violate European human rights standards, such as the quota system which requires the president of the RS to be an ethnic Serb, or that of the Federation to be Croat and Bosniak.

Local authorities tend to appoint officials along party and ethnic lines, a problem which may worsen with international withdrawal.

But European integration has a powerful appeal among Euro-enthusiastic Bosnians, with the OHR often citing “European standards” in justifying decisions that may run against the ambitions of ethnically divided local elites.

With talk of closing down the OHR continuing, its centrality is decreasing, and the local political elite is assuming greater responsibility: the 2006 elections were the first organised solely by local authorities.

But there is a long way to go in getting Bosnia’s leaders to agree on the future direction of the country, and little outsiders can do.

“I see very small chances for an international organisation, with its own special internal dynamics, to solve ethnic conflicts. At most it can be a mediator,” Kurth told IPS. “We will probably need some form of EU representation with increased powers, so that it can also mediate between actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

In spite of consensus regarding the need to reform the outdated 1995 constitution, the 2006 attempt to bring it closer to EU standards again failed due to diametrically opposed positions among the Serb and Bosniak political leaderships.

Whereas Bosniaks would prefer a unitary state with a strong central government, Serbs tend to push for further self-governance, and are distrustful of any attempts to be governed centrally.

Many Bosniaks consider the institutions of the RS to be illegitimate results of the conflict. Haris Silajdzic, a Bosniak member of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has repeatedly called for abolition of RS.

Croats, in their turn, have abandoned earlier goals of creating a third Croat entity in Bosnia, and are now more worried about preserving their declining community, which represents only 14 percent of the population in the country of four million.

The remainder of the population is mostly composed of Bosniaks (48 percent) and Serbs (37 percent).

The idea of Bosnia as a unitary state, at the expense of the current federal model enshrined in the Constitution, has even garnered support from some U.S. and German officials.

Advocates of further centralisation note the vast amounts of state and local administration budget spent on public administration, and note it is impossible to carry out a coherent fiscal policy in the country.

But Serbs point to decision-making and implementation having been more effective in the RS while they hardly identify with the Bosnian state: according to a 2006 survey, only a fifth of Serbs felt proud of their Bosnian citizenship, as opposed to 80 percent of Bosniaks.

Ethnic fragmentation is present at every level of governance, from the army to the education system, resulting in poor coordination, lack of cooperation and conflict of competences in a country with 140 often tiny and poorly trained ministries.

Bosnia is home to a large informal sector, which could amount to up to 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and there are ethnic barriers to creating a single market.

In spite of arrests and trials against corruption, businesses are still strongly and informally connected to political parties, whom they support and from whom they expect favours once these parties are elected.

The country also relies on remittances from abroad and international assistance, which will diminish in the years to come.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
SARAJEVO, Jul 16 2009 (IPS)

Apart from sporadic civil society initiatives, Bosnia has attempted little by way of inter-ethnic reconciliation.

Bosnia is today a federation divided into an overwhelmingly Serbian Republika Srpska (RS) and a Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose ten cantons are mostly divided along ethnic lines between Croats and Bosniaks.

The institutional set-up is the result of a civil war from 1992 to 1995, which involved Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, and claimed over 100,000 lives.

For decades living in harmony, politicians have now discovered the usefulness of ethnic difference as a way of attracting votes. Ethnic imperatives have dominated state activity since the end of the war.

A 2003 survey suggested that 37 percent of Bosnians never or rarely have contact with members of other ethnicities, whereas 75 percent did not trust members of other ethnic groups.

A majority of Bosnian citizens would not accept a family member marrying someone from another ethnic group.

Political parties are led by the same religious, political and intellectual elites that were involved in the war, and they strictly represent existing ethnic divisions with little cross-voting registered.

“It’s hard to live in a country with different histories, different truths. There is some mixing, but still we are a split society, much more than in the past,” Emir Kovacevic, coordinator for the Inter-religious Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an organisation which promotes discussions between local religious communities told IPS.

“Many people don’t see the need for reconciliation, and people react very emotionally to discussions,” he says.

Civil society initiatives remain unpopular, and civic actors, often fragmented along ethnic lines, respond more to international donors and their priorities than to local needs.

“Reconciliation will be a long process, but there is no serious effort already started; projects have no impact on society,” says Kovacevic. “The government should initiate the process and other sectors, including religious communities, should then participate.”

Ideas of religious tolerance, so real in the past, are seen as naïve and idealistic nowadays, and religious leaders often play a divisive role.

While constitutionally Bosnia and Herzegovina is a secular state, the Muslim, Christian Orthodox and Catholic religious communities still exert strong influence in politics, supporting candidates of their own communities.

“You see religious leaders advocating for some political parties,” says Kovacevic. “There is financial support to religious communities from political parties.”

A thorny issue persists, he says, over “war criminals, whom religious leaders sometimes do not clearly condemn and take distance from. In some celebrations posters of war criminals are exhibited; it is a great disappointment for the country and it is harming religious communities.”

While most parties only point to war crimes committed by others while concealing their own, there have been some encouraging steps. One came in 2004 with Dragan Cavic, former president of the RS, admitting to Serb war crimes in Srebrenica.

Ethnic divisions are felt from top to bottom in Bosnia: appointments in state institutions often follow ethnic considerations, and there are almost no inter- ethnic party coalitions.

The media, strictly divided along ethnic lines, often low in professional standards, and under control of political power, have also fuelled ethnic dissent.

Education also reflects ethnic divisions, with 14 different ministries dealing with an education system that continues to reproduce nationalist myths.

Exclusion comes through schools’ choice of textbooks, and affects above all the Roma, of whose children only 15 percent attend schools.

“We have a serious problem with schools, there is a strict division of children. If you have a classroom that represents society, that’s good education, but what we have is often two schools under one roof, each with its own language, history and culture,” says Kovacevic.

In the aftermath of the conflict most Serbs and Croats wanted to secede from Bosnia, but nowadays no ethnic group shares that aim.

Most Bosniaks would prefer a unitary state with a strong central government, whereas Serbs tend not to identify with the Bosnian state, and push for further self-governance.

Bosniaks tend to consider RS institutions illegitimate. Mustafa Ceric, head of the Islamic community, once went as far as calling for Bosnia to become a nation state of the Bosniak majority.

On the other hand, Kosovo’s independence from Serbia last year caused uproar in the RS, with its Prime Minister Milorad Dodik suggesting a referendum for independence of the region.

On the positive side, radical nationalist marches and attacks on returnees, churches or mosques have diminished, with inter-ethnic violence mostly finding expression in football matches.

There has been a substantial number of refugees returning, and the number of Bosnians who fear a renewed war in case of an international withdrawal came down from 40 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2006.

Practically all war refugees have seen their property restitution cases closed, although in many cases local authorities place obstacles to actual restitution.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
SEOUL, Jul 14 2009 (IPS)

Very little is known about North Korean society considering the country is so isolated the outside world. Those who flee the country refrain from speaking out, fearing persecution against them or their families. IPS’s Zoltán Dujisin caught up with Kim Young Seong, a North Korean defector, who gave a rare insight into North Korean society. The following are extracts from the interview.

IPS: Why did you leave North Korea? And how? Kim Young Seong: I left in 1997 through the Chinese border, after I was sent to do forced labour at a mine for 2 years. Crossing it was very risky and difficult. There were many soldiers and I risked severe punishment, but a friend who knew the situation in the border region helped me. I stayed in China and Russia for some years and then I settled in South Korea, where I’ve been for seven years now.

IPS: What were conditions like at the mine? KYS: Many people were sent there from Pyongyang as punishment. We were very close, once a week we would drink and talk and I heard many terrible stories. Compared to many others, whose families were also sent to the coal mines and who, like in much of the country, died of starvation, I was very fortunate. My family was one of the few allowed to stay in Pyongyang, because my crime was considered to be rather light.

IPS: How much did people know about the famine? KYS: People knew about it. When I lived in Pyongyang I heard that many people died of starvation in other cities, but it was something I hadn’t personally seen till then. But when I was sent to the coal mine, it was my first time outside Pyongyang, and I saw people dying before my eyes. I will never forget a little girl whom I saw at train station. I was eating the food my mother had prepared for me. I noticed a little girl in a primary school uniform staring at me. She was very hungry and was looking at the food I was eating. But I couldn’t part with my own food or I would go hungry. Those were different times and I was another person. I now have my own daughter. I would like to apologise to her if I get the chance. I still clearly remember her face.

IPS: Can North Koreans travel inside the country and see the situation for themselves? KYS: No, they can’t. They need permission from authorities. It is very difficult to get permission for private business, but there is always the possibility to bribe someone or use your contacts in the authorities. People did not know much about what happened outside their own region, but compared to the past more people are traveling now and there is a greater flow of information, though often illegally.

IPS: How heavily militarized is North Korea? KYS: It’s very heavily militarized. You can feel the military presence everywhere. Military service usually starts when you’re 17, and it lasts for more than 10 years. In this period you are allowed to see your family just once or twice. When I was in the country, people found this acceptable, and took pride in being a part of the army and competed for positions within it. Without your military service you are seen as unaccomplished man.

IPS: Can North Koreans study abroad? KYS: Possibilities are very limited, and the decision is not up to the individual, but the government, which decides who goes where and when.

IPS: People are learning English and there is more interest in the Western world. Doesn’t the state mind that? KYS: Whether North Korea likes it or not, it is becoming more dependent on the outside world and society is becoming more open to it. Authorities know this. In the past, for instance, scientific information was coming from Russia. Russian was an important language, but now engineers, businessmen and scientists are learning English and Chinese very intensively.

IPS: Are there any interactions with Foreigners? KYS: The majority of foreigners are diplomats, businessman, and people from international organizations or non-governmental organizations, and they all live in Pyongyang. There was no contact with foreigners in the past; it was forbidden even to talk to them. If you were a foreigner in the street trying to ask for directions, the citizen could not answer the question, otherwise he would be questioned by security agents: "what did you tell the foreigner?" And there is always someone following each foreigner, a guide who monitors his every behavior. I’ve been a guide myself and I had to report every day on the activities of the foreigner I was escorting.

IPS: Are there internal forces of change at work in North Korea? KYS: My own opinion on several subjects has changed several times since I got to South Korea, because now I lack consistent and fresh information about it. But from newspapers and recent defectors, I hear the ruling authorities have no will to reform politically or economically. But society is changing; there are more markets outside state control, the lifestyle is also changing. People are buying DVD players, clothes, music, computers, and they are more dependent on markets than ever before. People knew nothing of the outside world before the 1990s famine. But that is changing. They now realise how poor they are and feel the need for change. But there is no way for them to express their social discontent, which has grown in recent years.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
SEOUL, Jul 7 2009 (IPS)

With the presence of U.S. soldiers, flesh trade is flourishing near the Camp Stanley Camptown close to Seoul.

Since 1945, U.S. troops have been stationed in the Korean peninsula, with their current strength estimated to be 28,500. The country plunged into civil war between 1950 and 1953 and since then, U.S. troops have remained there, claiming to act as a deterrent against North Korea, the country’s communist neighbour. Prostitution in the region is a direct result of their presence, local observers say.

Russian and Chinese troops also had troops stationed on the Korean peninsula in the aftermath of the civil conflict, but “have since left the area while U.S. troops are still here, in almost 100 military bases,” Yu Young Nim, the head of a local non-governmental organisation which provides counseling, medical and legal care for sex workers, told IPS.

Yu Young Nim’s office is located at the Camp Stanley Camptown, a few metres away from local Korean restaurants, home in the 1980s to U.S.-imported Kentucky Fried Chicken and Subway logos. Locals attest to the slow decay of a town.

In front of one of these restaurants, sits a 36-year old former “mama-san”, which in Korea denotes women supervising sex-work establishments. Like many other retired sex-workers, she looks older than her age, and has decided to open a restaurant.

The “mama-san” prefers catering to U.S. soldiers instead of the more demanding Korean clientele.

“G.I.s eat their food without complaints,” she told IPS. “Koreans always expect to be served like kings.”

It was in camps such as these that a new dish called Pudaettsigae entered the Korean diet: Poor Koreans took ingredients such as sausage, beans, processed cheese from leftovers at the U.S. camp and mixed them with home-grown ingredients.

After being a sex worker for much of her youth, during which she had a son with a U.S. soldier, like other “mama-sans” she opened her own club, where she employed other girls. She had to shut shop three years ago due to declining incomes.

“If the base closes, I’ll try moving to the [United] States; it would be good for my son,” she says. Her son lives in Korea and speaks the language well enough, but got his primary education in English. “I don’t think he could attend a Korean university, but the U.S. universities are too expensive for us.”

She could only wish his father was there to help.

“I have some contact with the grandfather, but barely with the father. He doesn’t send my son gifts, not even a Christmas card. He has so much more money than me and doesn’t do anything for his son,” she says. “My son [believes] he has no father.”

Several U.S. soldiers have married local prostitutes, in many cases impregnating them, only to later abandon them.

“Even in those cases of couples living together, these women can be easily abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, and are victims of physical, mental and financial abuse,” says Young Nim.

“The women mostly come from broken families, backgrounds of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and there is no protection from victims of these crimes,” he says. “After entering the prostitution business they can’t get out.”

U.S. officials have made statements condemning prostitution but have done little to stop it.

“They think this system should exist for the U.S. soldiers. Superficially they stand for a zero tolerance policy but practically they know what is going on and use this system,” Young Nim told IPS.

There has been a reduction in prostitution of Korean women, which “has more to do with the work of non-governmental organisations and the fact that Korea has developed economically,” while “there is no contact with the U.S. authorities. They have a legal office and counseling centre but only for their own soldiers and relatives.”

After the negative publicity, the top military officials of the U.S. army have slowly became more outspoken in their condemnation of prostitution. U.S. soldiers were discouraged from frequenting traditional entertainment districts in central Seoul, although locals say that did little to stop them.

A turning point was the violent murder of a prostitute in Dongducheon in 1992. The finger of suspicion pointed at U.S. troops, though action against them is difficult given they enjoy a special legal status since 1945.

While prostitution is illegal in South Korea, camp towns are practically exempted from crackdowns, and US military anti-prostitution policies have forced these places to minimize their visibility.

Recent anti-prostitution laws are addressing the problems of Korean women, although there is disagreement among local activists regarding their effectiveness. However, they are effective in keeping out foreign sex workers; if arrested by the police they face deportation.

Some 3,000 to 4,000 come annually from countries like Philippines. While Russian, Uzbek and Kazakh women were also known for being trafficked into Korea in the past, now 90 percent of the women working as prostitutes hail from Southeast Asian countries.

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jul 6 2009 (IPS)

The rise of the anti-gypsy Hungarian far right has revealed deep failures in the country’s political system and its civil society.

Hungary is still recovering from the shock of seeing a new extreme-right formation called ‘Jobbik – Movement for a Better Hungary’ gather 15 percent of the vote in last month’s European parliamentary elections won by the rightist opposition party Fidesz.

Many have pointed the finger at the left’s inability to deal with the Roma issue, instead brushing it under the carpet or putting the focus on the “fascist threat” in Hungary. Others blame the rightist opposition for minimising the same threat. There is strong opposition to the right against Roma, a ‘gypsy’ people who migrated to Europe from India since the 14th century.

However analysts have noted that many may have voted for Jobbik as a protest vote in a country deeply distrustful of politicians and politics. The low turnout, at 36 percent, also inflated Jobbik’s impressive results.

Jobbik began as a movement of right-wing university youths, and evolved into a party in 2003, betting on the Roma issue while avoiding the anti- Semitic clichés of other extreme-right parties.

Unlike its far-right predecessors that had their base in Hungary’s larger cities, Jobbik’s anti-Roma rhetoric scored points in the countryside as well, especially in poor areas populated by the Roma.

Besides uniting a previously factional extreme-right movement, Jobbik managed to rally support by presenting itself as beyond left-right divisions and campaigning against “Roma crime”, a topic absent from mainstream politics a mere 18 months ago.

“The Roma is an unpopular topic, so in order to get more votes, the liberals and the socialists thought that the best strategy is not to include this issue in their campaigns too much,” Hungarian anthropologist and Roma expert Gergo Pulay told IPS. “As a voter, if you had a sense of an apparently existing problem and you were searching for a party that says something clear about it, you went for Jobbik.”

The party was also very skilful in using the media to gain visibility, especially by setting up the ‘Hungarian Guard’, a semi-paramilitary group of ‘concerned citizens’ with such aims as protecting Hungarians from “Roma crime”.

While Europe was shocked by the appearance of the ‘Guard’, recent polls suggest that Hungarians are still more afraid of gypsies than of the Hungarian Guard.

Authorities decided to ban the ‘Guard’ in a decision that promises much controversy and court appeals at European levels.

Another factor playing in Jobbik’s favour was the telegenic presence of female politician and lawyer Krisztina Morvai as head of the party’s list for the European Parliament.

Krisztina Morvai, a former member of the Women’s Anti-discrimination Committee of the United Nations, gained prestige in right-wing circles after leading investigations into police violence in the street protests against the socialist government in 2006. Then socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted lying to the electorate on the state of the economy to win re-election, causing furious protests from the right.

Ever since, the extreme right has considered the still ruling socialists as illegitimate, demanding early elections, and growing in radicalism. The left says the country’s radicalisation was nurtured by the main opposition party Fidesz, whose officials are only now condemning Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard, “a guard of clowns,” in the words of Fidesz board chair Laszlo Kover.

However, among lower cadre officials sympathetic views towards Jobbik persist, mutual cooperation within several municipalities continues unhinged and, as many point out, Jobbik’s leader Gabor Vona is a former member of Fidesz.

Ironically, Fidesz’s recent turn to the centre only helped push disillusioned rightist voters into Jobbik’s arms, to which must be added the surprising votes coming from traditional socialist strongholds. As all mainstream Hungarian parties failed to address the acute problem of Roma integration, Jobbik was given the chance to start the discussion on the topical Roma issue, Pulay told IPS.

With a few noble exceptions, Pulay claims there is “no serious ground for anti-racist action in Hungary today. What we see with such campaigns here is that they can only mobilise those who already think the same way, while having no serious influence beyond that.”

Pulay says civil society shares part of the blame: “There is a certain cult of ‘the urgency’ of the Roma problem, giving us little time to think, and requiring immediate intervention. This urgency provides a space for plenty poorly prepared actions by self-appointed experts with very doubtful outcomes.”

Moreover, public opinion tends to blame gypsies for money that actually disappears at higher levels of bureaucracy, the anthropologist told IPS. “As in the rest of Eastern Europe, there is a mushrooming of non-governmental organisations and other programmes that managed to develop their own exploitative bureaucracy throughout the last 10 to 15 years.”

Many believe that the growing hostility towards the Roma minority is connected to the economic crisis. Hungary has been hit harder by the global financial crisis than the European average.

Politicians have also built careers on anti-Roma rhetoric in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and similarly to Hungary, paramilitary-style squads have been formed in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

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By Zoltán Dujisin
SEOUL, Jun 17 2009 (IPS)

Ever since being elected as President in 2008, conservative Lee-Myung-bak has pursued a hard-line policy towards North Korea, with the country’s left also blaming him for recent tensions in the peninsula.

Criticising previous left-wing presidents for being idealistic, conservatives say the policy of appeasement has brought no results.

The so-called “Sunshine Policy” of the progressives had culminated in several common projects, such as the Kaesong Industrial Region located in the North – hosting 100 South Korean firms that produce clothes, kitchenware, and electronic equipment while employing 40,000 North Korean workers.

Citing exorbitant financial demands from the northern side, South Korean firms are beginning to close shop at Kaesong, soon after Seoul announced the suspension of shipments of rice and fertiliser to their impoverished northern neighbour.

“Every elected President has a different approach to North Korea. Under the current global economic situation the previous agreements – which were done hurriedly at the end of previous presidencies – needed reviewing according to the President,” Su-Jeong Kim, foreign affairs senior reporter at the JoongAng Daily told IPS.

Those advocating controlled economic cooperation say an approach of isolating the North could lead to desperate and irrational actions from the Stalinist regime.

But this line of thinking has been dealt a fatal blow following the suicide of former progressive President Roh Moo-hyun, who was being investigated by the state prosecutor for an alleged case of corruption.

His death has left a void in the Korean left, which claims the investigation had been aggressive, politically motivated, and overtly sensationalised.

“At first I cursed him, but then I cried,” Eun-Ae Song, a primary school teacher and supporter of the former president and human rights lawyer’s policies told IPS. “He wasn’t one of those politicians seeking power and money, he was a representative of the common people,” she says.

The former president had been widely recognised as having effectively fought against state corruption, and was noticed internationally for bringing the North and South closer to pragmatic cooperation.

But conservatives mostly believe isolation – to trigger an economic collapse in the North – will do more for regime change than the cooperation agreements of previous presidents, a policy that angers Pyongyang. “North Korea was enraged and asked why the South didn’t accept what it called a historical agreement,” says Su-Jeong Kim.

But the North also faces changes. This month North Korean leader Kim Jong- Il appointed his third son Kim Jong-un to replace him in two years. Unlike his father, who assumed office after being firmly established in North Korean power structures, Kim Jong-un still lacks experience and connections, is just 26 years old, and has spent years studying in Switzerland.

Few dare predict the exact nature of upcoming changes: “Nobody knows what actually happens in the North and what his successor is like, but Kim-Jong- Il’s illness might make him more unpredictable, and he thinks the only way for his regime to survive is to get nuclear weapons before he dies.”

It was indeed North Korea’s nuclear test on May 25 that escalated already tense relations, not just with the South, but also with an international community unsure of Pyongyang’s progress toward producing or using nuclear weapons.

The following day South Korea joined 94 other countries in the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative – created in 2003 to prevent the illegal distribution of weapons of mass destruction, and under which any vessel heading to North Korea is liable to inspection.

The North called it a “declaration of war,” threatened military action and nullified the Korean war armistice, signed in 1953, three years after the beginning of the Korean civil war.

However Pyongyang found itself in an unusually isolated position when Russia and China – traditional allies – for the first time joined the West in supporting a package of sanctions against the country at a U.N. Security Council meeting Friday.

But, while many hope China will be capable of influencing Kim-Jong Il, other analysts have warned against overestimating Chinese influence.

North Korea has in the past refused meetings with senior Chinese officials – including once shortly before a missile test carried out this year – and it has also refused calls from its largest trading partner to reform its economy according to the Chinese model.

In the meantime North Korea is responding harshly to the sanctions, promising to enrich uranium in a seemingly endless escalation.

South Korea is also taking action and, together with the U.S., it has announced a readjustment of their military alliance by 2012, which could include a U.S. guarantee of “nuclear protection.”

The capital Seoul and the 20 million living in its metropolitan area are located a mere 56 kilometres from the northern border, but South Koreans have grown accustomed to the threats.

The upgraded alliance is opposed by supporters of the left, who feel the 28,500 U.S. troops presently stationed in the Korean peninsula are part of the problem: “North and South Koreans are the same people, I don’t think they would ever bomb us. The U.S. presence just escalates tensions, they should leave Korea,” Lee Ji Sung, a student of sociology participating in an anti- government rally here told IPS.

The left say a war effort from the North would most certainly result in a massive retaliation, and the successive nuclear provocations from the Northern side should be seen as simply a way to gain leverage in negotiations.

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By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jun 8 2009 (IPS)

Eastern Europe is promoting nuclear energy as the only way to tackle climate change and reduce dependence on Russian gas, in spite of costs of going nuclear that it cannot meet.

Amid the last Ukrainian-Russian gas spat early this year, officials from several Central and Eastern European countries were quick to point to the need for nuclear energy to reduce problematic imports of Russian gas.

Unlike many countries in the West, public opinion in Central and Eastern Europe overwhelmingly supports nuclear energy, with opinion polls showing 80 percent support in Slovakia and 70 percent in Hungary.

“They see it as a way to export electricity, and they believe the simple solution is to have big facilities,” Olexi Pasyuk, energy specialist in Kiev with Bankwatch, an independent group monitoring European Bank investments told IPS. “But you have to invest a lot, and maybe you get money back in 30 years, if you’re lucky.”

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe will face stiff competition as they are all betting on electricity exports that will require either cheap prices or massive state support. But problems don’t end here.

“The nuclear industry is missing qualified staff and facilities to build all the necessary equipment; at best the world’s industry can build four reactors a year,” says Pasyuk.

Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland all have plans to further develop their nuclear capabilities. “In Europe we have a number of units under construction, and they are very good examples of how costly and complicated these projects are,” says Pasyuk.

Olkiluoto in Finland is one. A showcase project for the nuclear industry, there are already delays that could extend to three years, a budget overrun of 1.5 billion euros, and an incapacity of the French company Areva to live up to Finnish technical and safety requirements.

A similar case is developing in Eastern Europe, where Bulgaria is determined to complete construction of the Belene nuclear plant. The cost of the reactor was to be 3 billion euros; it has gone up to 6 billion euros, and commercial banks are refusing to get involved.

Ukraine has developed a national strategy calling for the creation of 22 new nuclear reactors, but projects are not taking off, and much needed Russian cooperation is not coming.

In Hungary several politicians and industry representatives want new blocs that will double the capacity of the Paks nuclear plant, which ensures 37.2 percent of Hungarian power production.

But many are starting to ask where the money will be found, as each unit is estimated to cost 5 billion euros. Permit procedures can take up to six years, and another six are needed to build a unit and form the necessary workforce.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic seem more determined; the historical ties between their energy sectors are among the closest in Europe, and their governments are traditionally close to the nuclear lobbies.

“Almost everywhere you have dedicated energy companies doing only nuclear, so it’s difficult for them to stop working, and they try to persuade everyone that they are the future while demanding state support,” says Pasyuk.

Czech and Slovak energy groups agreed last week to construct a new nuclear energy source at the site of a nuclear plant whose second Soviet built block from the 1970s was recently decommissioned in line with the country’s European Union accession agreement.

Slovakia, repeatedly noting its energy deficit condition, has also obtained EU approval for building another plant.

Besides the huge costs, nuclear energy also does not offer a solution for those wanting to avoid dependency, because Russians always manage to produce cheaper technology and fuel, and countries in the region rely on it for radioactive waste treatment.

The Ukrainian government, one of the world’s biggest state subsidisers of the energy sector, tried giving one-fifth of the fuel market to the U.S. company Westinghouse over a period of five years. But it soon concluded that the fuel produced by the U.S. government-financed company is almost twice as expensive as Russian fuel, and less suited for nuclear reactors built mostly with Russian or Soviet technology.

Rather than spending billions on new plants, several Eastern European governments are now considering extending the service life of existing plants.

This option too is not without its hurdles. “Experience with lifetime extension in the world is limited; all reactors, even those of the same type, can be different and are special, meaning these programmes need to be designed for each reactor, requiring considerable research and hundreds of millions of euros for every reactor,” says Pasyuk.

“Moreover, it doesn’t resolve the issue that if not now, you need to close the reactors in 15 years, and you’ll still need money for decommissioning.”

Many analysts insist governments should invest in incentives for energy efficiency rather than create additional production capacity.

“Gas is a quite convenient and competitive fuel right now in terms of immediate solutions, and more environmentally friendly than oil or coal,” Pasyuk told IPS.

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By Zoltán Dujisin
PALERMO, Italy, May 27 2009 (IPS)

Eastern Europe has been a major source of trafficking for sexual labour since the fall of communism. Now, other forms of exploitation are catching up.

Forced labour and sexual exploitation were among the topics debated at a conference on trafficking called by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Palermo, Italy, May 21-22.

Many believe Eastern Europe to be the biggest recent source of trafficking for sexual labour, with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Vienna-based international security organisation, estimating that 200,000 individuals are trafficked annually from there to Western Europe, the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.

Trafficking has become widespread as Eastern Europeans escaping poverty, stagnation or conflict resort to illegitimate means to migrate.

“When discussing root causes we have to take into account the collapse of the communist regimes, the social and economic problems that followed, the conflict situations that arose in the Balkans, but also the demand side for cheap services,” says Diana-Florentina Tudorache, formerly a specialised police officer and psychologist at the Bucharest-based National Agency Against Trafficking in Persons.

Major sources of trafficking include Albania, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, all among Europe’s poorer countries.

“Living standards are most definitely a factor,” says Roger Plant, head of the special action programme to combat forced labour at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva. “Workers are in a vulnerable situation, they are ill-informed, they take serious risks, they end up in the most difficult and dangerous sectors of the economies of the U.K., Spain and several European destination countries.

But some rise in living standards would not altogether eliminate the risk of forced labour, Plant told IPS. “According to our studies living standards have gone up in Portugal but there is always a sector of the population which could be at risk of forced labour.”

While the focus has been on sexual trafficking, Todorache says labour trafficking is reaching similar proportions, something the ILO has begun to acknowledge.

“There has been a long-standing problem of sexual exploitation in the region, but we are finding increasing indications that there is forced labour in Eastern Europe outside the sex industry, and that organised crime is also involved in the deployment of workers. There have been reports that show eastern European workers have been moved even to the Middle East,” says Plant.

Workers are usually trafficked to work at construction sites or for seasonal agriculture, sometimes preferring their condition of exploitation to living in poverty in their home countries.

Children, and especially those belonging to the impoverished Roma minority, are also at risk in Eastern Europe. “The extent is difficult to estimate, but many children are victims of trafficking, and unfortunately many of them are trafficked for sexual purposes, such as pornography, or for begging or petty crime,” says Tudorache.

Russia, which has a million victims of forced labour according to the ILO, has gained the dubious reputation of a destination for child sex tourism, with the government accused of not doing enough.

A similar accusation was made against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo where an increase in trafficking and forced prostitution was registered after the Balkans wars of the 1990s.

There is also forced labour closer to the West, in EU member states of Central-Eastern Europe. A month ago China warned its workers not to head to the region because Chinese workers were being exploited.

Still, according to Plant some progress has been made in the region to tackle allegations of trafficking for forced labour and sexual exploitation.

“The mechanisms are being put in place in some of the central and eastern European countries; others are coming to us asking for more training for their labour inspectors and judges on the concept of forced labour,” he said.

While networks of organised crime are behind trafficking, Plant says the focus of governments should be elsewhere. “Mainly we are talking about systemic problems of labour markets with unsatisfactory protection for those migrant workers who are at risk of exploitation,” he told IPS.

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