by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: Forget piercing and/or sentimental questions on the subject of the old Ottoman Empire; the Turks are themselves ambivalent about it at best (assuming they remember it at all). Besides, its every vestige was obliterated by Atatürk. (Secularists still love Atatürk, as you’ll see from the photographs of him in white tie on top of your date’s parents’ television.) By his death in 1938, he’d rallied the army and prevented Turkey’s asphyxiation at the hands of Greece, who’d had the sense to side with the Allies in World War I; established state industries; changed the written form of Turkish from Arabic to Latin; broken the stranglehold of the Muslim religion; abolished the wearing of turban, fez, and veil; given women the right to vote; and insisted that everyone come up with a last name (e.g., Atatürk), just like the ones they used on the other side of the Bosporus. Consequently, Turkey has been that rarity, a Westward-minded Muslim—although, and this is important, not Arab—nation. As for the Kurds, just hope the subject doesn’t come up. After fighting a fifteen-year war for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey, the PKK finally declared a cease-fire in 1999, and its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured. A couple of years later the Turkish government, making nice in order to impress the European Union, finally acknowledged its fifteen million resident Kurds—whom it had always insisted on calling “mountain Turks” instead—by legalizing, on paper at least, limited Kurdish-language education and media broadcasts. But the Kurds want more, causing steam to rise from the collars of Turkish nationalists. Meanwhile, after calling off its cease-fire in 2004, the PKK has been misbehaving again, launching attacks from its new digs in northern Iraq. Of course, the Turks are past masters at what we today call ethnic cleansing, but given current sensitivities, you’re better off not asking what happened, back in 1915, to the eight hundred thousand or so Armenians who used to live up by the Black Sea.
Separated at Creation?
Two bullet-riddled, bombed-out mountain regions whose residents are notorious for serious issues with authority and an inability to stop fighting among themselves. Both straddle classic East-West fault lines and have the kind of strategic importance that attracts foreign interference. Both turned psycho in the early 1990s, when the Communist regimes that had kept them, since World War II, sedated or straitjacketed, finally collapsed. Both have been boosting evening news ratings with assorted atrocities for more than a decade. The problems plaguing these two geographic powder kegs are centuries old, multilayered, and devilishly complex, but let’s face it, the hardest part, for many of us, is just remembering which is which. The following pages may help. THE BALKANS
WHAT ARE THEY?
A mountain range and peninsula in southeastern Europe. The term “Balkan states” refers to the countries of the peninsula: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (a.k.a. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, part of Romania, and the European piece of Turkey. Not to be confused with the Baltics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—up near Sweden.
Forms an unofficial border area between Western and Eastern Europe.
WHAT WERE THEY?
From 1945 to 1991, the republics of the west-central Balkans—now the independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro—constituted the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. What was left of Yugoslavia after the secessions and civil wars of the 1990s became, in 2003, a loose two-part federation that was formally renamed Serbia and Montenegro. By the time you read this, however, Montenegro may have reluctantly packed up and left.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM (in 250 words or less)?
Well, you can’t entirely discount basic personality disorders, but centuries of subjugation by one conqueror after another have left the diverse peoples of the Balkans, especially of the western Balkans, with a tangle of conflicting customs and divided loyalties, ample reason to mistrust each other, and a predilection for the kind of gung-ho nationalism that’s easily manipulated by outside powers with hidden agendas. For thirty-five years, Josip Tito managed to hold together Yugoslavia, a crazy quilt of eight nationalities, five languages (written in two different alphabets), and three major religions, by raising living standards and promoting pride in its status as the only Communist state not under Moscow’s thumb. But when the economy crumbled after Tito’s death in 1980, ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians who’d been living next door to each other, sharing the same factory lavatories, and dancing—albeit warily—at each other’s weddings for years suddenly took to murdering each other’s mothers and raping each other’s kids. Some may have been more enthusiastically homicidal than others—the Serbs certainly come to mind—but every group committed atrocities and engaged in some degree of “ethnic cleansing.” Although the worst of the infighting was over by 1995, NATO’s 1998–1999 invasion and bombing of Serbia didn’t improve the general quality of life. Blood feuds, a demolished infrastructure, widespread poverty, massive unemployment, huge displaced populations, political corruption, organized crime, occupation by foreign “peacekeepers,” and the consumption of copious quantities of slivovitz combine to keep regional stress levels high.
MAJOR HOTSPOTS
Kosovo, a Serbian province bordering Albania and Macedonia. The Serbs, who consider it their historic heartland, refuse to give it up, while its 90-percent-ethnic-Albanian population will settle for nothing less than complete independence. A UN protectorate since 1999, when NATO bombs finally drove out the Serbs, it remains in a political limbo while organized crime takes over and foreign mujahideen set up shop. Albanian Kosovans, who are powerless and nearly all unemployed, take out their frustrations on the few remaining Serbian residents.
Macedonia, scene of a six-month civil war between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians in 2001.
NEXT UP
Albania, 70 percent Muslim, which dreams of a “greater Albania” that would include the sizable ethnic Albanian populations of neighboring countries. THE CAUCASUS
WHAT IS IT?
A region of rugged mountains and surrounding lowlands between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Geographically part of Asia, but full of historical and cultural ties with Europe. Think of it as a kind of wild frontier between the two. The northern slopes of the Caucasus are occupied by seven autonomous republics of the Russian Federation. (For the record, these are Adygeya, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachai-Cherkessia, and North Ossetia, but you’re not likely to remember them without writing them on your hand.) The southern section of the Caucasus, called the Transcaucasus, includes the newly independent nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Don’t confuse the Caucasus with the Carpathians, the relatively peaceful European mountain range that links the Alps with the Balkans.
WHAT WAS IT?
Until 1991, the whole area was part of the USSR.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM (in 250 words or less)?
For starters, there’s the Tower of Babel effect resulting from more than fifty different languages being spoken in an area roughly the size of California. This means that the Caucasian equivalents of the residents of Berkeley and those of Oakland, for instance, can’t understand each other. Not that there are such equivalents in the Caucasus, of course. Instead there are more tribes, clans, and complex kinship alliances than your average central government could effectively list, much less manage. The manageability issue is especially thorny in the North Caucasus, one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse regions on the planet and the source, if not always the site, of most of the violence over the last fifteen years. Nearly all the republics of the North Caucasus are Muslim, dirt-poor, and ticked off, either at the government or at each other. Most of them loathe the Russians, to whose empire they’ve had to pretend to pledge allegiance for a couple of centuries while muttering ancient curses under their breath. The two exceptions: North Ossetia, an enclave of mostly Christian people who have traditionally supported Moscow and t
end to be a little better off than their neighbors (Beslan, where three hundred hostages, most of them children, were killed during a terrorist attack on a school in 2004, is in North Ossetia), and Chechnya (see following), whose residents have always shouted their curses, preferably while spraying Russian soldiers with bullets or blowing up tourists in Moscow. That’s just for starters, though. Throw in a few thousand radical Islamists; a motley assortment of bandits, warlords, and crooked politicians; every imaginable variety of underworld activity; Russian security forces at least as out of control as the people they’re sent to repress; and a widespread belief in the cheapness of human life, and you begin to get the flavor of the North Caucasus today.
MAJOR HOTSPOTS
It would be simpler to list the places that aren’t inflamed, if we could think of any. Certainly, the least promising candidate to host a Winter Olympics would have to be Chechnya, which has been struggling to break free from Russia’s hammerlock since the days of the tsars. The Chechens haven’t forgotten the way they, along with the citizens of four other republics, were marched off in the snow by Stalin during World War II, on the pretext that they were Nazi sympathizers. When they were finally allowed to return in the 1950s, those who’d managed to survive came back mean, mad, and loaded, as it were, for bear. Chechnya declared itself independent in 1991 and a few years later the Russian tanks rolled in, intending to crush the Chechen regime like a pesky mosquito. Almost two years and many thousands of corpses later, Chechen guerrillas succeeded in driving the Russians out. The republic was de facto independent until 1999—although the place was no more peaceful or law-abiding then than it had been during the war—when the Russians invaded again. Now, with a puppet government in place and thousands of locals “disappearing” every year, those Chechens who aren’t busy taking potshots at Russian soldiers from their own village rooftops are crossing borders, looking to stir up a little jihad in neighboring republics and the newly minted countries to the south.
NEXT UP
Possibly, the Russian Federation itself. The instability of the North Caucasus could, it’s predicted, strain the central government to the point of collapse, as the war in Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union. Oh, and then there are those Caspian Sea oil reserves. Still largely untapped, they raise the stakes in the region, both for Soviet-era apparatchiks hoping to make a comeback and for foreign power players such as the United States, which has, for the first time, established military bases in the Caucasus—as, you know, outposts in the “war on terror.”
Dead-Letter Department
While military alliances—expedient and temporary—had been going strong for centuries, it wasn’t until the League of Nations took shape, shortly after World War I, that a lot of people began to think ongoing participation in some larger order might be a good idea in and of itself. And for fifteen years or so, the League really did seem to make for a less scary world, a world with an agreed-upon place to talk things over, however stupidly or insincerely. Today, the United Nations, successor to the League, is by far the most comprehensive of the world organizations that matter: Only Taiwan, the Vatican (fondling its gold brocades), and a handful of South Pacific island nations (presumably saving those tourist dollars and coconut revenues for something more appealing than a membership fee and a Manhattan brownstone rental) don’t belong. Beyond that teem economic unions, trade organizations, ethnic orders, and social and charitable societies; you pacifists will be happy to learn there aren’t a lot of military alliances left. Here’s a look at some among them that tend to do business under their initials alone. NATO (NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY
ORGANIZATION)
Formed in 1949, with Berlin under Soviet blockade and the Communist world looking downright monolithic, by the usual suspects: the United States, Canada, and ten European nations (Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Portugal). The West’s bottom line in the old days, when war and rubble-strewn residential neighborhoods were still front-and-center in most people’s minds, NATO was a military-defense treaty providing for mutual assistance and collective action in the event any member of the alliance was attacked—“an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” is how the treaty reads—as well as a way of letting the world know what side of the geopolitical fence you were on. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, vouchsafing the “free world” ’s southern flank; West Germany signed on in 1955, Spain in 1982. France, in a move that had all the earmarks of a bad attack of PMS, withdrew its armed forces from joint military command in 1966, though sticking by the alliance in spirit, and headquarters were moved from Fontainebleau to Brussels.
NATO was, to its credit, an alliance that actually worked: It kept the Russkies at bay and made them think twice about trying any funny business; naturally, they had their own alliance, the Warsaw Pact. In 1991, a reunified Germany pledged allegiance to NATO and the Warsaw Pact closed up shop. Then, in one of those ironic, Days of Our Lives reversals that were a hallmark of the post–Cold War era, four former Warsaw Pact members (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia), craving security just like anybody else, applied for full NATO membership. In 1999 they were invited to join. By that time the question was: With the Soviets gone, who, exactly, was the enemy and what were all those supreme NATO commanders supposed to be doing to earn their keep? Regional conflicts (the Gulf War, for example), terrorist organizations, and natural disasters had never been NATO’s idea of a good time. Yet, after dithering through a long and tortured midlife crisis, NATO undertook the biggest military action in its history—and its first-ever use of force against a sovereign state without UN approval—in 1999, when it bombed Yugoslavia for eleven weeks in an effort to stop “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. The operation led to a truce in the Balkan war, despite the fact that the rusty NATO air command apparently missed more targets than it hit. Since then, it has been up to NATO troops to keep the peace, such as it is, in the region. But it was the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, that finally took NATO off the endangered-species list. Suddenly, even Russia agreed that something ought to be done to maintain world peace. So the NATO-Russia Council was born, giving Russia an equal say with NATO members on policies to deal with terrorists and other security threats. NATO has made the most of its new role; in 2003, its troops left European boundaries for the first time to assume command of UN-mandated peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, and not long afterward the alliance launched a rapid-reaction force that would allow it to respond to threats anywhere in the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was bitterly opposed by France and Germany, provoked a NATO crisis in 2003, since several alliance members took part, even though the alliance itself did not. In 2004, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all became full NATO members. Nowadays NATO doesn’t have to worry about a shortage of enemies to defend against—its secretary general lists political convulsions in adjacent regions, jihad terrorism, failed states, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, just for starters. But it still has a couple of kinks to work out. For one thing, Europe doesn’t have all that much to contribute to NATO, militarily speaking, since it’s gotten used to depending on the United States for protection, and NATO’s forces are already stretched thin. For another, the tendency of the current U.S. administration to bomb first and build consensus later doesn’t strike some NATO members as what they mean by the term “alliance.” Stay tuned for further developments. Or not. EU (EUROPEAN UNION)
A simple trade pact that grew and grew over the space of four decades, the EU integrated and replaced at least two previous European bonding experiences, including the so called Common Market.
It all began modestly enough in 1952, when six industrialized if somewhat battered nations of Western Europe—France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg)—pooled their coa
l and steel resources and abandoned protective tariffs on them in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), thus permitting the ready flow of those two commodities across their borders, under the direction of a “high authority” to which each nation surrendered a little of its sovereignty. Soon enough the group had eliminated all shared tariff barriers and facilitated the free movement of workers and money among themselves, as well as hit upon a unified trade policy with regard to the rest of the world. By 1992, the ECSC—which in the interim had done business as the European Economic Community (EEC, nicknamed the Common Market and nick-nicknamed the Inner Six) and the European Community (EC)—was finally the European Union (EU), committed to nothing less than the exploration of complete economic and, even more amazing, political union (although citizens of member nations would presumably still be permitted to hum their own favorite folk songs). Now there were twelve countries aboard, with the addition of Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, stretching from the Atlantic to the Aegean, containing close to 350 million people, and accounting for an annual output considerably bigger than that of the United States and double that of Japan. Three more countries—Austria, Sweden, and Finland—signed on the dotted line in 1995 (three others—Norway, Sweden, and Iceland—said no thanks), and in 2004, the EU underwent its biggest expansion yet when it took in ten new states—the Eastern European nations of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all formerly Communist, plus Malta and Cyprus—bringing the total number of members to twenty-five. Bulgaria and Romania are up for membership in 2007, while Turkey, which has been waiting in the wings forever, tries to content itself with membership talks that could take another decade.
