blind traveller--book review

Travel writing

Farsighted
Aug 24th 2006
From The Economist print edition



A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
By Jason Roberts



HarperCollins; 400 pages; $26.95.
Simon & Schuster; �12.99

Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

LIEUTENANT James Holman was already a remarkably good naval officer
when he went blind in 1811, at the age of 25. What he did after that
was extraordinary. In an age when blindness usually meant a life of
passive gratitude at best, and beggary at worst, Holman became an
international traveller. He journeyed alone, with very little money,
trusting to his natural gift for friendship.

Holman observed acutely what he found, by ear, touch and smell. Using
a clever device, a noctograph (carbon paper on a rigid wooden frame),
he wrote it down. His descriptive powers were so good that, at the
height of his fame, he was Britain's best-known travel writer. Holman
journeyed across Russia to Siberia and back, visiting Africa, India,
China, Australia and Latin America and a lot of Europe too. Locomotion
was by sailing ship, horse and foot�and by those means he covered
250,000 miles (400,000km), according to Jason Roberts, who has
unearthed his story.

The author paints a convincing and well-researched picture of Holman's
early life as an apothecary's son in Exeter, his stellar naval career,
his growing ill-health, and the bleak prospects that awaited him as
his vision dimmed. The descriptions of the gruesome medical treatments
then available for disorders of the eye are stomach-turning.

He also pieces together the details of Holman's travels, using his
published works and the observations of others. Holman's first long
trip, to Russia, is particularly well drawn: disgusting meals,
bureaucratic barriers and a charming English widow in Irkutsk, a town
boiling with money in a way that is reminiscent of Russia today. He
makes an interesting link between Holman's trick of banging a stick to
gain an aural picture of his location and other similar techniques
being developed to help people use their ears as their eyes.

What Mr Roberts does not manage to do is portray his subject
completely convincingly. He says, frequently, that Holman was a
charming conversationalist, an able linguist, a great ladies' man,
resourceful and uncomplaining. But what of the vices? Was Holman,
perhaps, a bit garrulous? Or self-important? That would certainly help
explain the remarkable eclipse of his career in later life.

Some of this, no doubt, can be ascribed to prejudice, and to jealousy.
Mr Roberts makes a lot of that, perhaps too much. What seems atrocious
now, of course, was the way of the world then. But the end result, for
all the excellent detective work and atmospherics, is a touch
unsatisfying. Disabled people may be heroes, but they are not
necessarily saints.

gotcha (reprised) from European Voice

Disinformation flows along the Dniestr river

By Edward Lucas

On 17 September a non-country will be holding a non-vote. The non-country is Transdniestria, a strip of land sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine.

The non-vote is a poll about its future – by some counts the 11th since the Transdniestria authorities declared independence from Moldova proper in 1990. But no credible outsiders will observe it. The outcome is not in doubt.
It is also a non-vote because the question is oddly phrased. Voters are asked to support either the leadership’s current line, of independence leading to ‘association’ with the Russian federation, or to rejoin Moldova. That is not a mandate for real talks about the future, but a rejection of them. It’s the same old dreary story of posturing and deadlock.
What is new, however, is the energetic efforts by the Trandsniestrian authorities to make their case in English, online. When I last visited the Transdniestrian capital, Tiraspol, back in 2001, it was an internet-free zone.
Now that’s changed. There’s tiraspoltimes.com (published by an elusive Irishman), pridnestrovie.net, visitpmr.com and transdniestria.com. They are well-written – mostly by native-speakers of English – well-designed, and well-targetted at outsiders whose sympathy with the underdog might lead them to support a self-declared state struggling against the disdain of the international community.
What puzzles me, though, is who is behind this. Earlier this summer, in two articles for The Economist, I raised some questions about another outfit supporting Transdniestria, the self-described International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty (ICDISS). This had published a heavily-footnoted report, in grand lawyerly style, about the legal basis for Transdniestrian independence. This report was cited by the sites above, and others in Russia, as a sign that western opinion was coming round to the Transdniestrian viewpoint.
Trouble was, the ICDISS had no phone number, address, legal status – and no identifiable funding, history or personnel. The distinguished international lawyers cited as sources disclaimed any involvement. Its excuses (provided only by email) were threadbare. Every trail that might prove its prior existence goes cold, or looks alarmingly like an outright forgery.
At first I thought I smelled a Kremlin disinformation campaign. But on closer examination that seemed too flattering. The steely professionals of the Yasenevo ‘sanatorium’ (as the Russian Foreign Intelligence headquarters in southern Moscow is nicknamed) would be ashamed of such amateurish efforts, so easily exposed by a few clicks of a journalist’s mouse. The fingerprints were of cowboys, not colonels.
It seems more likely that the ICDISS is a bunch of lightweight opportunists in Washington DC, paid for by tycoons and goons in Transdniestria, perhaps with the encouragement of sympathisers in Moscow. The same money probably pays for the other websites, and also subsidises ‘Breakthrough’, a local youth movement that apes similar pro-Kremlin efforts in Russia. Coincidentally or not, similar stunts are being pulled in the Caucasus and the Baltics.
Fake think-tanks, spurious reports and manufactured protest movements were common currency for both sides in the old Cold War; now they are popping up in the new one. Unprecedented money, effort and brainpower are now going into pro-Russian mischief-making in Europe’s backyard, to general indifference.
Whether you see it as merely entertaining, or outright sinister, the information war disguises hard questions for both sides. Once the European Union admits Romania, the question of what to do with next-door Moldova – and therefore of Transdniestria – cannot be dodged. And what does Russia really want? So far, it has maintained Transdniestria as a lucrative irritant.
But ambiguity has its limits. Transdniestria wants to become another Kaliningrad. Does the Kremlin want that? And if not, what?

skype face value

Face value

Communicating the Skype way

Aug 17th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Sten Tamkivi, the Estonian manager of Skype, is helping to change the face of telephony

Skype

LIKE most people doing important jobs in Estonia, Sten Tamkivi is alarmingly young. He is 28—practically a greybeard in a country that once had a 27-year-old foreign minister. And like many Estonians, he is reticent and modest. Asked for his job title, he looks apologetic. “I think I am director of operations,” he says. “We're not that big on titles.” Most people in his shoes would be boasting. Mr Tamkivi runs Skype, one of the software world's most subversive and fastest-growing businesses.

Founded by a Swede, Niklas Zennström, a Dane, Janus Friis, and a group of Estonian programmers, Skype's proprietary, voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) software allows its 113m registered users to call each other free of charge. The company makes money, on the other hand, when its customers place calls to traditional telephones—but these are still extremely cheap. Skype and other VOIP companies threaten to undermine incumbent operators' pricing structures and gradually to wipe out the traditional, high-margin telephone business.

Late last year, Skype's founders sold their share in the business to eBay, an auction and trading website based in California, for $2.5 billion, plus another $1.5 billion if Skype hits certain performance targets. Meg Whitman, chief executive of eBay, recently said that she expects Skype to bring in revenues of $200m in 2006 (though the firm is not yet profitable). Mr Zennström is Skype's chief executive and its public face, but he leaves day-to-day operations and developing the firm's software to Mr Tamkivi and his team, and Skype's research and development division is based in Estonia.

Like its product, the company's culture seems to be based on long-distance communication. Indeed, the most important internal business tool is Skype itself, particularly its instant-messaging system, Skype Chat. Its first advantage, says Mr Tamkivi, is “presence data”. You can signal whether you are out, busy, reachable elsewhere or free—and all your colleagues can see. An unanswered e-mail, by comparison, tells you almost nothing. If required, you can add a video-conference or phone call at the click of a mouse. Of particular value is the fact that Skype chats are not only encrypted but work only between people who trust each other—the best possible defence against spam. And chats allow lots of people—sometimes 50 Skype staff, Mr Tamkivi says—to communicate with each other, “for minutes or for years”. The chat history is instantly accessible to all participants: “try to achieve that with a long e-mail thread,” he says.

Here is a snatch of Skype chat where Mr Tamkivi and two colleagues are discussing a future presentation:

13:37:48 Alex Kazim says: Ott, especially need you to look at the slide where I try to explain how VOIP works. This is like me trying to explain quantum

13:41:28 Sten Tamkivi says: try the electron: VOIP can be viewed as a particle or wave at any point in time.

13:41:57 Alex Kazim says: hehe

13:42:41 Sten Tamkivi says: for added abstraction and analyst awe, describe it as a thought or a smell

13:45:03 Alex Kazim says: it's a state of mind. A veritable Tao of VOIP

13:46:07 Ott in Tallinn says: uh, you're not holding back :) by the way—according to our brandbook—Words we do not like—VOIP, Internet Telephony etc :)

13:47:03 Sten Tamkivi says: according to the same book, words we do like: share, baboon...

It is hard to imagine such informality (or healthy dislike of jargon) surviving in many boardrooms. Skype's programmers—there are around 150 of them in total, from all corners of the world, with an average age of just under 28—are a formidable bunch, but the company tries hard to seem as ungeeky as possible to its users. Skypenauts like Mr Tamkivi don't want their ingenious software to be technically fascinating—they don't even release the source code. They just want it to be very easy to use.

And it is. The people who police company networks, indeed, worry that their computers and bandwidth are being hijacked into handling Skype's calls. Like Google's Gmail, a powerful and well designed e-mail service that people often prefer to their company's own system (to the chagrin of IT managers), Skype may prove too attractive to squash. Mr Tamkivi's next big project is to move Skype beyond computers, onto gadgets that people carry in their pockets. The first Skype-capable mobile phones have come on the market; some handheld computers run it too. Another plan is to have Skype on a memory stick.

The man and his machines

Mr Tamkivi founded his first software business at the age of 18, and he dropped out of university after a year—he says he still wishes he had a better grasp of economics. Although born in a country occupied by the Soviet Union, he barely remembers communism; it was already collapsing when he was 10. He is determined that Estonia, which is already a power in European information technology (albeit a tiny one) should make a success of capitalism. He has spoken out repeatedly against the government's xenophobic visa rules, which make it hard to hire programmers from India and China. And he wants to get the education system to sponsor foreign academics to teach computer-related disciplines at Estonia's universities. The country's programming talent pool is heavily over-fished, not just by Skype but by other software companies that appreciate its nonhierarchical, open-minded and direct business environment.

Mr Tamkivi wants to preserve Skype's original culture as the company grows under eBay's wing. Estonian companies have done well elsewhere in the Baltic states, but no Estonian-run firm has ever been as international in its staff, outlook and activities. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Mr Tamkivi's Skype chat status is so often set to “do not disturb”.

food books review

Culinary memoirs

The glories of food

Aug 10th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Books and food don't always mix well

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany By Bill Buford Knopf; 318 pages; $25.95 Random House; 336 pages; £17.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation By David Kamp Broadway Books; 416 pages; $26 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food By Warren Belasco University of California Press; 396 pages; $55 and £35.95 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

HOWEVER enthusiastic and knowledgeable their authors may be, books about food are rarely as palatable as the meals they describe. Accounts of other people's eating lose a lot in the telling, while kitchen horror stories may be gripping, but fail to satisfy.

Bill Buford's “Heat” is a glorious exception. The author is a world-class wordsmith: a writer on the New Yorker and before that the founding editor of Britain's best fiction periodical, Granta. He is also a keen but (by his own admission) “fundamentally clueless” amateur cook. He lacks a sense for time and quantities; he can't plan. The food that he inflicts on his friends is burnt or raw or both.

Perhaps, he thinks, spending a bit of time with professional cooks might help. Someone less obsessive might start off taking a few cookery courses, or working in a gently paced kitchen with some indulgent tutors. Not Mr Buford. He starts off as a “kitchen slave”, the lowest of the low, in one of New York's best Italian restaurants. It helps, a bit, that it is owned by a friend, Mario Batali.

And that's what gives this book its depth. It's not just about food, and cooking, but about the culture and history that surround them, and a journey into a world where managing words comes a poor second to skills with flavours. Mr Buford also has a biographer's gift of bringing characters to life. From the humble slicers and dicers who dream one day of running their own place, to titanic personalities such as Marco Pierre White, a volatile London restaurateur, Mr Buford fills his book with people as pungent and spicy as the food. Mr White's spectacularly chaotic life is matched only by the gargantuan appetites of his New York counterpart, and one-time student, Mr Batali, who rejoices in the motto: “Wretched excess is just barely enough”.

What starts as a journalist's jape turns into a sometimes disquieting mission. Mr Buford's desire to understand the lore of meat, for instance, leads him to decamp with his long-suffering wife to a dingy Italian hill town where a temperamental butcher will sometimes (if he likes you) sell you the best meat in Italy. In the end, though, Mr Buford's book deserves to be a bestseller, and his fans will be pleased that his culinary odyssey has only begun; he finishes the book consumed by curiosity about French cooking.

Mr Buford's uninhibited joie de manger is in stark contrast to the leaden prose and patronising tone of David Kamp's history of American gastronomy. The sort of person who reads restaurant guides for fun, and sees food as a branch of fashion, may enjoy his interminable account of chefs, restaurants, dishes and fads. The diligence of the research is certainly striking: if everyone mentioned in the book buys a copy, it will do well. But for the general reader, the onslaught of names is overpowering. And whereas Mr Buford's asides are uproarious, Mr Kamp's are tiresomely cutesy.

It is a relief to turn to Warren Belasco's ingenious analysis of the way in which optimists and pessimists alike use food to illustrate their vision of the future. Malthusians think we will starve. Cornucopianists believe an age of plenty is just round the corner. One lot say food is getting cheaper and better than ever. The other insist that it is increasingly less nutritious and environmentally unsustainable to produce. As well as science fiction, he mines journalism, advertising and political propaganda for examples of false predictions, ranging from the amusing (dog-sized cows in every garden, according to Reader's Digest in 1955) to the outright foolish, all handled with a welcome mix of scepticism and tolerance.

Mr Belasco concludes by suggesting that forecasts need demystifying. “We need to be more savvy about the rhetorical conventions, false dichotomies, inappropriate analogies, questionable assumptions and dubious calculations that keep cropping up whenever the future is discussed.” Second helpings of that, please.

Screening Poland's past

We've got a little list

Aug 10th 2006 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

Cleaning up Poland's communist past is a messy business

SLEAZE, pervasive and corrosive, is either the biggest problem in Poland, or a myth created by paranoid bigots. For the centre-right government, spies old and new, with their deep connections to the communist past and crooked business chums, must be rooted out of public life. For much of the country's elite, that sounds dangerously like a witch-hunt.

Poland has largely dodged the issue of collaboration with the old secret police. That reflects the way in which Polish communism crumbled in the summer of 1989—by negotiation, and not abruptly. Later that year, in countries such as the then Czechoslovakia and East Germany, communism simply collapsed. In those places, screening was tough initially but, as a result, the issue has gone away.

Under Poland's current, limited, law, only around 27,000 holders of senior public office are subject to vetting. They must sign a statement that they never co-operated with the communist secret police; this is then checked—as far as possible—with the huge intelligence archives now run by the Institute of National Remembrance, known in Polish as the IPN.

Not everything in the IPN files is true—and many things that are true are not in them. Their selective use is poisonous, destroying careers and lives. Last year Bronislaw Wildstein, a prominent journalist then working at the IPN, leaked an unofficial list of up to 240,000 names contained in its files. This gave no indication of whether those cited were victims of the regime's surveillance or collaborators in it.

The case of Zyta Gilowska, finance minister until June, highlights the system's flaws. A secret police file seemed to incriminate her, so she was fired from the government. But once she ceased to be a public figure, the vetting court said it was unable to hear her case, or even tell her what she was accused of. She has now appealed, looks likely to be found innocent, and may even return to the government.

For Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twins who are respectively Poland's president and prime minister, reforming all this borders on an obsession. The governing coalition is pushing through parliament a new law on vetting that will screen up to 500,000 people for contacts with communist-era secret services. Depending on how it is interpreted, the new law will include most civil servants, teachers, academics and managers of state firms. The IPN will take over from the court.

But the new bill has some big drawbacks. One is that it is poorly drafted. It seems not to distinguish between those who were contacted by the secret police but declined to co-operate, and those who collaborated actively. In effect, that creates a presumption of guilt. People risk losing their jobs if they cannot prove their innocence of a charge based on elderly files, peppered with forgeries and exaggerations. Another worry is that vetting may reveal snooped data on juicy but irrelevant matters such as personal gossip.

The lower house of parliament has hurriedly passed the new bill; the upper chamber is likely to amend it, to try to protect victims of totalitarianism from suffering twice. According to Jan Olszewski, a former opposition activist and prime minister, the parliamentary deputies who drafted the bill were mostly too young to have had much contact with communist rule. Senators, on the other hand, are older, and include more ex-dissidents who understand the dilemmas and contradictions of life under totalitarianism. Bogdan Borusewicz, the leader of the upper house and a founder of the Solidarity trade union that toppled communism, suggests starting from scratch: correcting the lower house's bill, he says, would be like “changing a cow into a horse”.

Whether bovine or equine, the bill is belated. Exposing communist-era collaboration might have been useful in the 1990s. But nowadays the corruption and abuse of power that have flourished in the post-communist era are a bigger issue.

To tackle that problem, the government has set up a powerful new anti-corruption agency. It is also screening all 2,000-odd officers of the WSI, the military intelligence service. This is the biggest bugbear: a lawless, unreformed communist-era bureaucracy, the government says, that has escaped all political control.

This week the deadline expired for WSI officers to confess to past misdeeds, including leaking secrets, hindering criminal proceedings, using violence, illegally influencing the authorities or having unauthorised contacts with businessmen or journalists. Once checked and absolved, their authors may then join the new military intelligence services to be formed on October 1st. Some worry that this is all too quick, too politicised, and may disrupt Poland's military security.

Cleaning up public life in Poland is a fine aim. Having waited so long, it would be a pity not to do it properly.

Slovakia

Slovakia's odd coalition

Iffy and whiffy
Aug 10th 2006
From The Economist print edition


Slovakia's new government is neither mad nor bad. That's mildly reassuring

Get article background

NIGHTMARES in ex-communist politics feature populist, racist and authoritarian parties. So Slovakia's new coalition government, consisting of all three, promised sweat-drenched nights for liberal-minded Slovaks and outsiders alike. But not all bad dreams come true.

A prime bogeyman for outsiders and liberal-minded Slovaks is Jan Slota, the leader of the radical right-wing Slovak National Party. He is known for his intemperate remarks about the country's Roma (Gypsy) and Hungarian minorities. The former, he said, were a problem best approached with a “long whip in a small yard”. He once said he would like to flatten the Hungarian capital, Budapest, with a tank. His convivial lifestyle attracts attention too (he explained an anti-Hungarian remark by pleading drunkenness).

But he has been sidelined. His party, which polled 11.7% and won 20 seats in the 150-member parliament, has just three ministers, none of them important.

A second creature of the night is Vladimir Meciar. As prime minister until 1998, he made Slovakia a pariah in western eyes, and a paradise for goons and gangsters. But, like Mr Slota, Mr Meciar is not in the government. His party won 15 seats and has two ministers, neither in big jobs. Top posts in the police and the security services, magnets for power-hungry Meciarites, have gone to neutral candidates.

The third spectre is the economic populism of Smer (Direction), the main coalition party. Its leader, Robert Fico, is now prime minister. He used to talk about ending Slovakia's flat tax, stoking welfare spending and intervening more in the economy. But the government programme launched last week offered only vague and watered-down versions of these plans.

Higher spending, chiefly on education, health and pensions, plus lower VAT on some items may cost 40 billion koruna ($1.5 billion), according to the Bratislava office of ING, a bank. “Millionaires”, as the government calls those earning more than €1,300 ($1,670) a month, may pay more income tax. The net result will be a higher budget deficit, at least 2.2% of GDP by the year-end. But the government insists Slovakia will adopt the euro in January 2009.

Given the cost of propping up the koruna as the government wobbled into place, joining the common currency soon seems wise. After blowing more than €3 billion on backing the currency, the central bank last week raised interest rates by 50 basis points. Any more rude shocks would have left Slovakia looking vulnerable.

Slower privatisation, softer policies and fiddlier taxes may be regrettable in a country noted until recently for its radical reforms. But they do not spell doom. The bigger worry is competence. Few in the government have held office before. The finance minister, Jan Pociatek, is a notable lightweight, best-known as a restaurateur with a penchant for flashy motorcycles. In the parliamentary debate last week on the government programme, he repeatedly declined opposition invitations to elaborate on the spending plans.

A lacklustre team of ministers means that Mr Fico's strong personality will dominate the government. It is reassuring that he wants to keep Slovakia in Europe's political and economic mainstream. But making public finances shipshape for the euro while keeping his supporters and coalition partners happy will be hard.

gotcha! (2)

'Covering tracks'
Disinformation

Covering tracks

Aug 3rd 2006
From Economist.com

How to disguise, inflate and disappear on the internet

TRACKING down the International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty (ICDISS) which seems to be a front organisation for a Kremlin-backed rogue statelet called Transdniestria (see article), is easy at first, then very difficult.

The first port of call is, of course, icdiss.org. This is nicely designed and eloquently written. At first sight, it looks like just what it claims to be—the product of some seasoned foreign-policy wonks who want to get their hands dirty in helping new countries to get on their feet. But all the details are strikingly vague.

The website’s registration can be found at srsplus.com. Googling those details shows no trace on the internet for the “Robinson Corbett-Smith” who registered the site on January 14th this year. The address given is a hotel. The phone number is incomplete. A reverse IP search reveals that the site is hosted in Riga, Latvia, along with 850-odd others, mostly relatively innocent such as rapegod.com, but also pridnestrovie.net and visitpmr.com which are propaganda sites for Transdniestria. These sites acknowledge help from the ICDISS.

A Lexis-Nexis search for the ICDISS, in all languages and media going back 20 years, produces not a single entry. None of the people supposedly working for it—Joseph Connolly, Megan Stephenson or William Wood—appear in any plausible foreign-policy context in internet searches. A Wikipedia entry is authoritative but vague. It refers to a foreign-policy blog, diplomadic.blogspot.com, which it implies has connections to the ICDISS. But this has been largely defunct, and contains no mention of the organisation.

The Wikipedia entry’s history shows that some unkind person has tried to change it, to say that the ICDISS is based not in Washington, DC but in the Transdniestrian capital, Tiraspol, and is made up not of 60 diplomats and specialists, but four officers of the ministry of state security there.

The original author of the entry, who works under the name of Liliana Dioguardi, has changed it back to the more flattering version. So who’s she? Someone of that name, apparently an Italian-based Venezuelan émigré, has contributed in Spanish to an internet discussion in 2004. But her mobile is disconnected and her landline doesn’t answer. An e-mail brings no response.

Further investigation of the ICDISS website reveals several different versions of a controversial document on Transdniestrian independence, which has been published in the Russian media, supposedly authored by eminent Western jurists. The Russian version is subtly different in its attribution, saying that the report is “based on” their work. The English version says it “draws from research by a number of noted attorneys, in particular the following:” Later versions drop all the attributions—presumably after complaints from the individuals concerned (which have been seen by The Economist).

The report is supposedly based on a conference held at the Beacon Hotel in Washington in April. The hotel says it has no trace of such a booking.

Meanwhile, an e-mail to the ICDISS has produced a response, apparently from Ms Stephenson. She has been interviewed in the Tiraspol Times, an online magazine produced (again, expertly but mysteriously) in support of the authorities there.

But whereas that interview is forceful and forthcoming, Ms Stephenson is polite but elusive when dealing with The Economist. A list of questions includes:

1) Who funds you?

2) Where are you based?

3) Who are your trustees?

4) What is your tax status?

5) What are your publications?

6) Was your April 2006 conference on PMR (the Russian acronym for Transdniestria) public? If so, who attended it?

7) Who are your staff?

8) Why does your website not give a physical address or phone number?

9) Why is your website registered in Mexico?

In response, she says merely: “We tend to shy away from publicity, in part because it may hurt our access and work but—more importantly—because it is potentially damaging to our collaborators in the countries where we work to affect [sic] changes.” Repeated requests bring a few more details. The ICDISS was active in trying to topple Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, she says. Some of their people are still in jail there.

That chimes, faintly, with Ms Dioguardi’s involvement on their Wikipedia entry. But there is no other trace of ICDISS involvement in Venezuela on the internet, barring a single line, in faint, tiny type, at the bottom of the home pages in English and Spanish on militaresdemocraticos.com. The report’s author, Mr Wood, supposedly a Mexico-based lawyer and former United Nations bureaucrat, is on holiday in Guatemala and uncontactable. The hotel bill for the mysterious Beacon hotel conference is in the New York office of Mr Connolly, supposedly the director of the ICDISS steering committee. He declines to fax a copy, instead making veiled threats of legal action.

It is possible that ICDISS is a genuine but publicity-shy outfit that was involved, quixotically or self-interestedly, in trying to topple Mr Chávez, and now, for whatever reason, is promoting Transdniestria. If so, it would be very easy for Ms Stephenson to prove her bona fides, for example by giving a phone number for some reputable person or organisation that could vouch for her organisation. Despite repeated requests over several days, this doesn’t happen.

Gotcha! (1)

Old and new information tricks

Disinformation

Aug 3rd 2006
From The Economist print edition

Cold-war propaganda wars return

AP

Lenin's Transdniestrian headquarters

SOVIET propagandists were experts in the art of disinformation: planting specious stories in obscure corners of the media, claiming, for example, that the CIA invented AIDS. Now Russia's interests are once again being promoted by information sources that look plausible, at least until you look closely at their antecedents.

Take, for example, the International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty (ICDISS), a grand-sounding outfit that says it works on “result-oriented nation-building for new and emerging states”. It produced a report in July supporting international recognition for Transdniestria, a breakaway region of Moldova that has had Russian support and Western disapproval since a brief civil war in 1992.

Slickly produced and heavily footnoted, the report was publicised in Russia and Transdniestria as evidence that influential outside opinion was conceding the case for independence. That would be in sharp contrast to all Western governments' policy to date, which has been trying, rather ineffectually, to reunite Transdniestria with Moldova.

The report says it is based on the work of a bunch of well-known international lawyers, including a serving State Department official, and academics from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard. It implies they attended a conference at the Beacon Hotel in Washington, DC, in April 2006.

The truth is rather different. For a start, the Beacon Hotel has no record of any such conference. None of the supposed outside experts attended it. Those contacted crossly denied involvement, though one, a doctoral student, says he did offer some advice. The ICDISS has now removed the names from the report.

That is puzzling enough. But the ICDISS is even odder. It has no address and no telephone number. Although its website, and an entry on a write-it-yourself encyclopedia, Wikipedia, claim that it was founded in 1999, there is no trace of its activities, or of its supposed staff members, in news databases or the internet before January this year. Since then, it seems to be solely involved in promoting Transdniestria. It claims to be based in America, but does not appear to be a charity there.

Its website is registered at a hotel address in Mexico, with a phone that does not answer, and operated from a server in Latvia. And that is positively illuminating compared with the report's other supposed publisher, the Euro-Atlantic Joint Forum Contact Group, which seems to have no existence other than its logo.

The report itself is written in professional legalese, peppered with Latin phrases and confident references to precedent. But some bits read awkwardly, with mistakes (telephone “centrals” rather than “exchanges”) often made by Russians writing in English.

Reached by e-mail, the ICDISS programme director, identifying herself as Megan Stephenson, declined to talk on the telephone, or to give details of ICDISS financing, staff, headquarters or other activities. The group wished to keep a low profile because of its previous involvement in protests in Venezuela, which had led to the arrests of its activists, she explained. A sentence on a dormant Venezuelan opposition website does acknowledge help from the ICDISS, although how, when and where is not clear. “If you wish to reach for the somewhat strained conclusion that our little group of volunteers is a Kremlin front, then so be it, but I again state clearly for the record that this is not the case,” insists Ms Stephenson.

The Transdniestria report is oddly similar to a recently published English-language “psychiatric assessment” of the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili. This claims, falsely, to be endorsed by Western hospitals and research institutes. It portrays the Georgian leader (a Russian bugbear) as a paranoid hot-head.

One plausible conclusion is that the Kremlin is engaged in a new push to support Transdniestria and three similar statelets, as a response to the likely acceptance later this year of independence for Kosovo, a province of Serbia mostly populated by ethnic Albanians. Victor Yasmann, an analyst in Prague, predicts that Russia will invite the four to join the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Russian-led talking shop. That would be a half-way house to their full independence, a gain for the Kremlin and a setback for the West.

Certainly Moldova, poor, weak, divided and neglected like no other ex-communist country, seems to be hotting up. Transdniestrian politicians have blamed Moldovan provocateurs for a bomb attack on a bus in Tiraspol, the capital, that killed eight people on July 6th. Transdniestria will hold another referendum on independence on September 17th. Western countries will not recognise it, but Russia may.

In Moldova proper, the Gagauz minority (Orthodox by religion, Turkish by ethnicity), which is strongly pro-Russian, is restive. It may demand independence too. The economy is reeling from a Russian embargo on its main export, wine—which is also imposed on Georgia. Transdniestria's economy, based on arms, steel and trade (critics say smuggling) is thriving.

Faced with all this, some in Moldova despair of an independent future. Better, perhaps, to abandon dreams of joining a cold-hearted Europe, and fall in with Russia's wishes: a neutral and federal Moldova, with a special status for the Russian language. Others ponder dumping Transdniestria and rejoining kindred Romania, from which they were separated by Stalin in 1940. That idea seemed outlandish, until it was floated last month, with seeming seriousness, by Romania's president Traian Basescu.

Such thoughts are a distraction, argues Andrei Popov, at a think-tank in Moldova. The real task should be to reform the country's dismal justice system, local government and investment climate. Enviability is the best way to stability, not fretting over the means of failure.

help needed in investigation

I am writing a piece for this week’s Economist about an outfit called the ICDISS (International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty). It has published, together with an organisation called the Euro-Atlantic Joint Forum Contact Group, an “academic” treatise about Transdniestria’s claim to independence.

http://www.icdiss.org/members/pmr/b219-rev1.pdf

This document cites a bunch of well-known international lawyers as sources. Those I have contacted say they have had nothing to do with it. The document has been gleefully quoted by various Russian and Transdniestrian officials as “proof” that top western lawyers are backing their claim.

The ICDISS has no published or traceable phone number or address. The website is registered in Mexico city, but the address turns out to be a hotel. The phone number doesn’t work. It shares a server in Latvia with several pro-Transdniestrian sites (and many hundreds of quite innocent ones). It claims to have had a conference in April at the Beacon hotel in Washington—which can find no trace of such a booking.

The ICDISS declines to say who funds it, where it is based, who works for it, when it was founded, or what else it does. There are three people associated with it. Megan R Stephenson (program director). William (Bill) Wood, supposedly a lawyer and former UN staffer, and Joseph Connolly, plus Mary Rose Edwards. Someone claiming to be Ms Stephenson replies, politely but very evasively, to my emails. Lexis-Nexus and Google searches turn up no trace of the ICDISS in any other context, except, rather mysteriously, on one page of a dormant anti-Chavez website, and in a blog entry by someone called Gladys Haines.

There may be a completely innocent explanation for all this, and the last thing I want to do is attack an innocent but publicity-shy outfit for being a Kremlin front, when in fact it is nothing of the kind.

So I would be grateful for any help that readers of this blog can offer. Has anyone heard of the ICDISS in any other context? Or of Ms Stephenson (this link here is her only published comment, and shows her picture)
http://www.tiraspoltimes.com/interviews/megan_stephenson_western_ngos_can_make_headway_when_governments_cant.html

or Mr Wood (who is supposedly in Guatemala and uncontactable) ?

My deadline is tomorrow evening so I need to know as soon as possible.

Please do not cross-post this or write about it until in other media until Thursday evening when the story comes out.


Many thanks, and good hunting!
Edward

corruption from this week's Economist

Finance & Economics
Corruption in ex-communist countries
Judge or be judged
Jul 27th 2006From The Economist print edition
In the ex-communist world corruption seems to be declining. Mostly
TURNING an aquarium into fish soup is simple. Turning the fish soup back into an aquarium is not. For the ex-communist countries, stabilising economies and introducing market mechanisms has proved the easy bit. Remaking public institutions, and making them clean and efficient, is much harder to do and to measure.
A new study published this week by the World Bank* casts an optimistic light. It asked almost 10,000 firms in 26 ex-communist countries (Turkmenistan was excluded) and Turkey about the cost and frequency of bribe-giving, and their views about the nature and nuisance-level of corruption. This time, for comparison, it included five other European countries.
Compared with the previous surveys, in 1999 and 2002, it suggests corruption in the region is becoming a bit less frequent, costly and damaging. Although some countries are doing better than others (Georgia is a strong performer, Russia a weak one) nowhere is it getting comprehensively worse. In many countries corruption is falling on every count.

The trend is favourable—but, the authors note, still reversible. The Czech Republic, for example, scored well in 2002 and seems to have gone backwards since. But there's a twist. That firms complain more about corruption may be a good sign if it means they are becoming less tolerant of it. The most depressing feature of the report is the high incidence of firms in Russia—fully a fifth—that say they pay bribes often but do not regard it as a problem. That figure is four times higher than in the eight nations now in the European Union.
Most progress has been made in customs administration, which used to be slow and predatory but is now quick and clean. That reflects the changes in the countries that have joined the EU and those in the Balkans that are eager to join. The average “bribe tax”—the share of turnover paid by those firms that pay bribes—has declined from 3.6% to 2.9%, though booming economic growth means that the total of bribes paid is probably rising.
The report says corruption hurts private firms more than state-owned ones, small more than large, new more than old, locally owned more than foreign. In short, the weak suffer more than the strong.
One big remaining problem, especially in the poorer ex-communist countries, is the justice system. In the early post-communist years, the trend was to give judges great independence but low salaries. That was a recipe for corruption. The new approach is to pay them more and police their activities more strictly. That is working—particularly in Romania—but it is a slow slog elsewhere.
Other kinds of corruption are harder to deal with. Public procurement is notably dirty—though not noticeably worse than in some countries of “old Europe”. High-level political corruption, or “state capture” in the jargon, is also a lingering curse. That is when bribery affects not just the implementation of policy, but its conception. As the Russian proverb says, a fish tends to rot from the head.
* “Anticorruption in Transition 3: Who is succeeding and why?”: www.worldbank.org/eca/act3

Dubrovnik blues

Croatia's seaside socialism and crony capitalism

By Edward Lucas

My first visit to Dubrovnik was as a black-marketeer. Hitch-hiking through the then Yugoslavia in the summer of 1985, my brother and I, fervent evangelists for capitalism, were trying to practise what we preached. A long lift took us from Graz in Austria to the Dubrovnik bus station, but we initially found few takers for the foil-wrapped bricks we had brought from Vienna: Yugoslavs in those days bought their coffee in beans. Then my brother, showing his characteristic business acumen, slit open one of the packages, unleashing an enticing aroma and banishing suspicion. We quickly sold the lot.
This month I was there again, for what at first sight seemed like a meeting of the Balkan Bodyguards' Association. The hotel was full of muscular, alert-looking men in loosely-cut suits, gruffly discussing engine sizes, muzzle velocities, and radio frequencies in a hotchpotch of local languages. But behind the biceps, I glimpsed some politicians, including Nursultan Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan), Mikheil Saakashvili (Georgia), Dan Fried (America's brainbox regional fixer) and top representatives of most of the countries of the neighbourhood.
The conference was Croatia's attempt to show that it is a constructive regional player, friends with its neighbours and worthy of speedy entry to the EU and NATO. To some extent it worked: anything that gets the enlargement train on the rails and moving is welcome.
But there were some curious features. One was a complete absence of any critical local voices. Croatia has a bunch of independent-minded NGOs and institutes. None came, though there were plenty of independent outsiders from farther afield. Equally, there were no opposition politicians from the region-though plenty from elsewhere, such as Carl Bildt, the former Swedish conservative prime minister. Some might wonder if the Croatian authorities are nervous of something.
I tried to find out why. "Don't blame the diplomats: they know it's stupid. It's the foreign ministry protocol department" said one well-informed outsider. "They just make sure that any invitations to undesirable people get lost".
It is hard to avoid the impression of Croatian control-freakery. The authorities have just been criticised by the International Federation of Journalists for appointing a number of political cronies to the board of HINA, the main news agency (and that in itself is odd: why does the state have anything to do with the media anyway?). Some journalists say that advertising from state-owned industries is used to reward friendly media outlets and withdrawn from critical ones. One local think-tank compares Ivo Sanader, the Croatian prime minister, to Vladimir Putin of Russia.
That may be too harsh. But there is an interesting analogy. Just as the top-heavy and incompetent Russian state survives thanks to the rents (unearned income) from the country's oil and gas wealth, Croatia's stodgy economy lives off the rents of tourism. The country scores very poorly on indexes of economic freedom: labour laws are restrictive, taxes high, foreign investment puny.
Yet the combination of climate and coastline is so compelling that only gunfire will keep tourists away (which it did, during the war).
Now Croatia has plenty of visitors again, and they are well-fed, well-sunned and well-refreshed. But even in Dubrovnik's top hotels and restaurants you do not feel, to put it mildly, that you are the customer of a world-class tourism industry where intense competition is driving standards ever-upwards.
Yugoslavia was in theory a communist dictatorship, but it did not feel like one. Now in theory, Croatia is a normal capitalist democracy. But it does not quite feel like one. Even the glitziest conferences cannot fix that.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

The shoelace handicap

Jul 20th 2006 | WARSAWFrom The Economist print edition
Central Europe risks becoming a bad advertisement for the further expansion of the European Union
TIME was when “new Europe” felt superior to “old Europe”. Before joining the European Union in May 2004, the eight ex-communist candidates transformed their economies and political systems, changing everything from competition policy to food-hygiene rules. They dumped bad communist habits and odd post-communist ones alike. Governments of left and right showed impressive determination to qualify for the club. Those that the European Commission found lagging, such as Lithuania and Slovakia, made strenuous efforts to catch up. Abroad, new Europe proved an eager ally, deploying armed forces for peacekeeping in the Balkans and for American-led interventions in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Some of the headiness of that era still lingers. The newcomers' economies continue to grow strongly (see chart). At this rate, living standards will catch up with the European average within a generation. But in many other respects, the region is stagnant or going backwards. The reform momentum has petered out. These days the only ex-communist country with a strong reformist government is Romania. It, along with somewhat less reformist Bulgaria, is outside the EU. Both expect to join in 2007.
For their counterparts inside the EU, political weakness seems now to be the rule. The Czech Republic, after a tie in last month's election, has no government at all. Estonia, Latvia and Slovenia all have cautious coalitions, preoccupied with sharing the fruits of power rather than pursuing further reform. In Slovakia and Poland the coalitions have an added ingredient: extremist populist parties of left and right. Lithuania has a weak minority government. Only Hungary has a solid government made up of mainstream parties—and it is probably in the most alarming economic situation. Public debt is ballooning, and both the currency and bond markets look wobbly.
The effect is like that of a bunch of runners going briskly but with their shoelaces undone. Accidents are waiting to happen across the region. In Estonia and Latvia, the fear is of runaway growth—a nice problem, perhaps, but one that risks a crash. One possible cooling mechanism would be for the two to open their labour markets to migrants, but neither government has the vision or grit to push that through.
Lithuania and the Czech Republic suffer from fractured political systems unable to produce any plausible government. In contrast, Poland and Slovakia suffer from too much government, not too little. After nine months of bickering, Poland's new prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, won a vote of confidence this week. But his priorities are moral—eg, purging ex-communists—not economic. He has few convincing plans to trim the state and create the sort of modern economy that might tempt back the 1m-plus Poles working abroad.
Foreign policy is flagging too. Enthusiasm for American-led coalitions has cooled, but with no alternative in sight. There is no coherent strategy from the eight central European countries on such crucial issues as relations with Russia or energy security. Poland, for example, is trying to diversify its gas supplies, whereas Hungary is co-operating with Russian efforts to prevent this.
To be fair, cynicism and timidity over reform are not unique to the post-communist bit of Europe. Nor are extremist or populist parties. Italy's post-fascist party, Flemish nationalists, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and Austria's Jörg Haider have all pushed the boundaries of tolerance farther than their counterparts to the east.

Nor is it clear that the region is suffering now from bad (or no) governments. One common worry is that it may damage their chances of joining either the Schengen passport-free area, or the euro, or both. Yet, given today's fears in western Europe over legal and illegal migration, the expansion of Schengen is some way off. As for the euro, joining the single currency looks a risky step, particularly for the larger ex-communist countries—so a slippage in the timetable may be no bad thing.
The real dangers are different. One is that the central Europeans need deeper reforms if they are to stay ahead as their labour costs rise. Being cheap has served them well, but they now face competition from countries that are cheaper still: Romania and Bulgaria close to home, China and India farther afield. That puts the emphasis on quality, flexibility and innovation—none of which is a strong point. Universities are mediocre and overcrowded, even by the dire standards of continental Europe. Spending on research is feeble.
Worst of all, unstable and populist governments in the new democracies offer a poor advertisement for continued EU expansion. Arguably, the prospect of EU membership for the western Balkans is all that prevents a return to violence there. In the longer run, the lure of joining the EU is also the best way to keep Turkey, or ex-Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, on the right track.
But are politicians in western Europe ready to tell their voters that the EU needs more countries like those that joined in 2004? Support in old Europe for further expansion is sliding: in the 15 old members, only 41% are now in favour, compared with 47% in 2003 (and 66% in the new members). Nutty politicians in Poland and Slovakia, baffling stalemates in the Czech Republic and Lithuania and a belief that a chunk of the continent will stay backward may lead voters farther west to feel disappointed by past enlargements—and to be hostile to any future one.

Edelman from European Voice

The caustic complaints of a ghetto survivor

By Edward Lucas

Lodz (pronounced Wootch) is one of the most lacklustre cities in Poland. But in a leafy suburb of this hard-scrabble former textile town a living legend is puffing his way through his 87th year.

Amid clouds of smoke (he likes unfiltered Gitanes) and in a room decorated with a striking mixture of modern Polish art and a Playboy calendar, I interviewed Marek Edelman, who is the last surviving commander (indeed one of the last survivors) of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising.
If you are American or Jewish, you will certainly have heard of this: it is when the ghetto's prisoners, armed with pathetically few weapons and even less ammunition, staged a Masada-like revolt against their Nazi tormentors.
It is sometimes confused with the later Warsaw uprising of 1944 when the country's underground army, loyal to the exile government in London, seized the capital and then defended it for two desperate months against hopeless odds, while Soviet forces cynically waited on the other bank of the Vistula river. The crushing of the uprising made it easier for them to install a puppet regime, which was driven from power only in 1989.
It would be nice to think that this history would bring Jews and Gentiles together in Poland. Sometimes it does. But accusations of prejudice from both sides cloud Poland's history of remarkable religious tolerance. Which is why I had gone to see Edelman.
Unlike almost all Polish Jews, he was neither murdered by the Nazis, nor did he emigrate during the disgraceful periods of post-war persecution. He usually crops up in the media doughtily defending his homeland against accusations of ingrained anti-Jewish feeling and behaviour.
That's right. There is a lot of nonsense talked about Polish 'anti-Semitism'. Sure: prejudice exists as it does anywhere. In my experience it's more often shallow than deep; it was stoked by Communism and since then I think has been declining.
But it is easy to exaggerate, particularly with the use of lazy phrases such as "Auschwitz, a Polish concentration camp" (when Auschwitz in fact was built and run by the hated Nazi occupiers).
Now Edelman is troubled by the tone and status of Radio Maryja, an obnoxious station run by an unruly and opinionated Roman Catholic priest. It used be a fringe affair. But it is now close to the government.
That's the other thing bothering Edelman. The main coalition partner, Law and Justice, is a socially-conservative Catholic party with muddled views on economics and foreign policy but no trace of anti-Semitism. But it is in alliance with the League of Polish Families. This is an ultra-patriotic, ultra-Catholic party which idolises a pre-war politician, Roman Dmowski, who thought that only ethnically pure Poles could be real patriots. It also has a youth wing whose gatherings attract a thuggish type of supporter (entirely unwished-for, it insists). Senior figures habitually conflate paedophilia with homosexuality.
So Edelman is speaking out, in uncharacteristically caustic terms. Law and Justice, which has roots in the dissident Solidarity movement, is betraying its heritage, he says. The party leadership's "desire for power is so great that they would get cosy with the devil". That cynicism is a "time bomb".
That was before the resignation of the prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and his replacement by the Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Marcinkiewicz oozed reasonableness. I don't know what the provincial, conspiratorial Kaczynski oozes, but it certainly isn't that. Edelman, sadly, may have to do quite a lot more complaining before he's heard.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist

a rant from the Daily Mail

Yo Blair! What those words (plus an expletive) reveal about Bush and poodle Blair

BY EDWARD LUCAS, Daily Mail 21:57pm 18th July 2006

The occasion was a grim one. The fates of millions of people were to be decided in a few days of hurried discussion about opening the second front in Western Europe during World War II.

Stalin, sinister and jovial, chided Winston Churchill for refusing to agree to have 100,000 German officers shot. The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was ill and incoherent, scarcely able to resist the pernicious advice of his officials to be nicer to the Soviet Union and cooler to Britain.

That ill-fated meeting, the Tehran conference of 1943, was the first time that the two leaders of the free world - the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States - met the master of the Kremlin.

This week, six decades later, witnessed its direct successor: the G8 summit in St Petersburg. Again, there was no shortage of wrongheadedness, short-sightedness, timidity and cynicism at the meeting of the world's top industrial powers, whose agenda covered the toughest questions of conflict in the Middle East, trade, energy, security and the environment.

As expected, there was more talk than action. But there was a strikingly new ingredient: the extraordinary banality captured by an open microphone which eavesdropped a private conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair.

Read the full transcript and watch the video of their chat here

Dubya, the master-mangler of the English language, greeted our PM with 'Yo Blair!' - a salutation more common in the ghettos of Washington DC than in its diplomatic salons.

But it is not just the greeting which seems to so belittle Blair and by definition Britain as well. The truth is that this snatch of dining-room farce will dull the spirits of every patriotic Briton.

Mr Blair offers to go to the Middle East to pave the way for a peace mission by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's infinitely more able sidekick. Mr Blair says humbly: "If she goes out, she's got to succeed - whereas I can go and just talk."

What a damning indictment of Britain's weakness, of the contempt in which we hold ourselves, and of our readiness to prance to the tunes of others.

Phoney

Does it not occur to Mr Blair that going to 'just talk' might confirm the sadly well-founded feeling in both Arab and Israeli camps that Britain's role in the region is that of a duplicitous phoney? It would be cruelly fitting if, when Mr Blair next visits a foreign potentate, they ask him whether he is there for a real discussion, or wishes 'just to talk'.

Having exhausted the diplomatic lexicon, the two leaders quickly retreat on to safer ground. Mr Blair, it seems, has bought Mr Bush some item of clothing, a sweater.

The American leader is touchingly grateful. Oddly, his conversational register switches from rap patois to the language of an Enid Blyton story, as he chirps 'it's awfully thoughtful of you'.

Then the conversation moves back to geopolitics and provides further reason for despair.

Mr Bush pronounces that "what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s*** and it's over".

And that's it. Does Mr Bush really believe that the longestrunning, costliest and most intractable international conflict in the world will somehow be 'over' if one bunch of terrorists can be strong-armed into stopping their cowardly rocket attacks on Israeli civilians?

What about the murderous rejectionists of Hamas, now the government of Palestine, and Iran's leaders who want to 'wipe the state of Israel from the map'? What about Al Qaeda? What about the mills of hatred financed by Saudi Arabia across half the world, which teach impressionable Muslim youth that the West and Israel are evil and deserve only destruction?

The depressing truth is that for all our previous disappointments, the shallow, callow nature of Mr Bush's world view is still capable of shocking us. He may have the right ideas - on bringing democracy to the Muslim world, for example. But his inattentive approach and botched planning are reflected all too savagely in these throwaway remarks.

In one sense it is perhaps comforting that the leaders of the two English-speaking nuclear powers are so comfortable in each other's company that they chat as easily as two teenagers.

But the familiarity and laziness of their discourse jars hideously when set in the context of the summit. For these are not two dullards with some piece of GCSE coursework to be plagiarised. These are our leaders, and on the table is the prosperity and safety of the world.

At one point, Mr Blair casually refers to the stalled world trade as the 'trade thingy'. Mr Bush replies rather plaintively: "I just want some movement." They are referring to nothing less than the future of the world's economic system which now hangs by a thread thanks to the timidity, greed and incompetence of the politicians visiting St Petersburg.

Without movement by the rich countries on farm subsidies, and by poor countries on opening their protected home markets, the world will spiral downwards into protectionism and poverty.

It is no exaggeration to say that the astonishing gains of globalisation, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past decade, are now at stake.

That is not a 'trade thingy' - and to call it that reflects a flippant approach that demeans both the speaker and the listener.

To see how far we have fallen, contrast the chit-chat of our prime minister with his American chum to the tone of correspondence between two friends nearly 70 years ago. When Roosevelt learned of Churchill's appointment to the War Cabinet in 1939, he wrote as follows:

MY DEAR CHURCHILL:

It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty. Your problems are, I realise, complicated by new factors but the essential is not very different.

What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch. I am glad you did the Marlboro volumes [historical works written by Churchill] before this thing started - and I much enjoyed reading them.

With my sincere regards,

Faithfully yours,

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

In that letter, there is intimacy, respect and trust - everything that one would wish for in the relationship between the two great leaders of the free world.

They are literate, thoughtful men: one writes books. The other reads them.

Mr Roosevelt's casual use of 'thing' to describe the war is as unexceptional in the context of his lucid prose as Mr Blair's 'thingy' is jarring.

The two men's bond, which defeated Hitler and imperial Japan, was echoed in the equally dignified and affectionate relationship between Thatcher and Reagan: a friendship that conquered communism.

But what Mr Bush and Blair so dismally fail to realise is that a leader's symbolic role demands dignity and a sense of occasion.

Nobody is perfect (Mr Reagan, infamously, once tested a microphone by saying, jokingly: 'Let's bomb Russia'). But especially in a semi-public event, are we not entitled to hope that our leaders speak to each other with intelligence and dignity?

For the bedraggled lame ducks of London and Washington, that is evidently too much to ask.

Edward Lucas is East European correspondent for The Economist

Captive nations

Why 'Captive Nations Week' still matters

By Edward Lucas

Few people have heard of it now, though the White House proclaims it each year, as it has done since 1959. During the Cold War the third full week in July was a chance for victims of the evil empire to highlight their plight.

After chanting "Nyet-Nyet-Soviet!" outside the embassy for a bit, a gaggle of Poles, Balts, Czechs and Ukrainians, and their British hangers-on like me, would go to a pub and engage in slightly stilted conversation about the evils of communism (easy) and the unique merits of our own country (trickier).
Now the week and even the phrase "captive nations" have fallen deeply out of fashion. If you search hard on the internet you can still find faint traces of the once-mighty architecture of organised anti-communism. The World Anti-Communist League has renamed itself and retreated to Taiwan. The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, the European Freedom Organisation and others have wound up completely.
For the most part, that's good. Some of these outfits were distinctly odd, or worse, with links to the Moonies, ex-Nazis, and Latin American and Asian dictators. And though you still find communists here and there, without superpower backing they are no more influential than flat-earthers.
But the principle of commemorating the captive nations (including those now uncaptive) is a good one. For a start, it is a useful reminder that the Soviet Union was not just a failed economic system; it was an empire. The Cold War gets remarkably blurred in hindsight. This puts it back in stark focus.
It is also useful because not all the captive nations are free. Turkestan (in China); Ide-Ural (now Tatarstan and Bashkiria); Chechens and Ingush, Karelians and the Mari are all still under what any fairminded outsider would call colonial rule.
Other countries are free but in pieces: Georgia and Moldova both have Kremlin-backed illegal statelets on their territory, which are fast integrating into Putinland. The Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, told me last weekend that when he goes to his country house north of Tbilisi, his mobile phone picks up a signal from the breakaway 'republic' of South Ossetia and shows a message saying "Welcome to Russia".
The once-captive nations will only be truly free when they are both whole and safe. That means, above all, joining NATO. It is remarkable how the Baltic states' membership of the alliance, though accompanied by so much teeth-sucking and clucking when it happened, has proved to be a huge success. Without NATO, the Balts would now be in a grey zone, where Russia would be demanding that its 'interests' be accommodated. As NATO members, though there are constant pinpricks of mischief-making, the Balts are firmly out of the game.
Ex-captive nations, like ex-kidnap victims, deserve a special ration of sympathy and support. That is not always forthcoming from the rich, timid and lazy countries of 'old Europe'. Saakashvili told me of a letter to Woodrow Wilson he had discovered written from Georgian freedom fighters around the time that their country's brief post-1917 statehood was being crushed by the Soviet Union. "If you don't help us, no one will," the signatories had written. The letter never reached the White House and all those involved were jailed; most never saw freedom again.
It is to George W. Bush's credit that he wants to keep expanding NATO, first to the western Balkans, and then to Georgia and (if it survives) Ukraine. It would be nice if that enthusiasm were echoed more loudly in the lucky half of Europe that was spared communist captivity.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

© Copyright 2006 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Poland's government Twin problems
Jul 13th 2006 WARSAW From The Economist print editionPoland is suffering from a bad image. Blame the Kaczynski brothers
Reuters
One of them is now prime minister
IT IS easy to argue that the Law and Justice party has done disappointingly little in the nine months since it won Poland's parliamentary and presidential elections. But in one respect it has done a lot: once a regional heavyweight, respected in America and around Europe, the country now attracts ridicule and condemnation.
The main culprit is the president, Lech Kaczynski. Chaotic organisation, poor staff and inexperience have led to a series of gaffes, rows and snubs. The latest was his withdrawal from a trilateral summit with France and Germany after a satirical article in a minor German daily. By insisting that the German government apologise, Mr Kaczynski cast doubt on his understanding of press freedom.
Another culprit is the right-wing League of Polish Families, one of two small parties in the ruling coalition. It attracts a thuggish fringe, deliberately conflates homosexuality with paedophilia, and has failed to shake off accusations of anti-Semitism. The Israeli ambassador refuses to meet its leader, Roman Giertych, who is deputy prime minister and also in charge of education. Mr Giertych's father, Maciej, a member of the European Parliament, recently made a speech praising Franco, Spain's fascist dictator, as a hero and statesman of a stature Europe is now sorely lacking.
Mr Kaczynski's identical twin brother Jaroslaw, who runs the Law and Justice party, is doing his bit too. This week he took over as prime minister from Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, who was the country's most-trusted politician, and also proved himself a competent negotiator on Poland's behalf at European summits.
The switch was a big surprise. Mr Kaczynski argues that the government will be more stable if he is running it from the front rather than from the back seat, as before. By becoming prime minister, though, he is breaking an earlier pledge, when he argued that it would look odd to have the two top political positions in Poland occupied by identical twins.
Now the Kaczynski brothers (particularly Jaroslaw, who is the brainier and bossier one) are in full charge. Their priority is to press ahead with the moral regeneration of Poland, which implies fierce criticism of both its communist history and the sleaze and injustice of the past 15 years. In practical terms, that means tough anti-corruption measures and a purge of the public sector.
Much of this is welcome. Poland has been shackled by the influence-peddling of the old elite. The justice and interior ministries have been notably successful of late in putting more police on the streets and bringing more criminals to justice. The defence minister has closed down the lawless military intelligence service.
But this is only part of what is needed. There remains a huge need for reform in the public administration, such as tax collection. Shake-ups in pensions, welfare payments and farm subsidies are also long overdue, but they may be blocked by the two populist parties in the coalition. Mr Kaczynski has brought in a well-respected free-market economist, Stanislaw Kluza, as finance minister, after a previous incumbent, Zyta Gilowska, was forced out on (possibly trumped-up) spying charges. But the Kaczynski brothers still have a strong welfarist streak.
For now Poland's economy is booming and public finances are buoyant. Growth this year will be over 5%; inflation is the lowest in the European Union; unemployment is coming down. Foreign firms, including Toyota and Google, are eagerly eyeing up Poland. Much of the credit goes to Mr Marcinkiewicz, who wisely avoided picking fights with such Law and Justice bogeymen as the central bank, the European Commission and foreign investors. He will be a hard act to follow.

HOW JOSEPH Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev would have relished the irony: the leaders of the rich free world kowtowing to the authoritarian ruler of a state that is rich only in oil, gas and ruthlessness.

As Western leaders pack their bags for the first G8 summit hosted by Russia, starting in St Petersburg later this week, every one of them knows the event is a sick farce, of which President Putin's Soviet predecessors would have been proud.

On the surface, the arriving Western leaders will be smiling. But they are intensely aware that there is only one agenda on Mr Putin's mind: to increase his iron grip on his country and rebuild the once-mighty Russian empire. America's vice-president Dick Cheney warned Russia in March to stop bullying and blackmailing those fledgling ex-Soviet states that were once part of its empire.

Mr Putin was utterly contemptuous in response, warning in his state of the union speech days later that Russia would build up its economic and military might, so as to make his country immune to foreign pressure.

For good measure he savagely mocked America, calling it 'Comrade Wolf'. The days are gone when such remarks could be dismissed as bombast by the leader of a ruined empire.

Though Russian living standards are pitiful by the standards of real G8 countries such as Britain, France and Germany, billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues make the Russian state flush with cash. Putin has given notice that it wants to be strong, too.

In the days of the Cold War, when the Kremlin tried to match the West in an arms race, the economic costs proved so crippling that they destroyed the whole country. But the steely-eyed Putin is much cleverer than the geriatric despots who used to run the Politburo. His arms race will be based on brains, not brawn.

Russia is already developing and deploying ultra-modern nuclear missiles, such as the submarinelaunched Bulava and the land-based Topol-M, that will be near-impossible for Western defences to counter. Spending on high-tech conventional weapons is soaring, too.

But military might is not the only weapon in Putin's arsenal -- the other is economic power, and he is wielding it to devastating effect.

Georgia and Moldova, the two weakest former Soviet republics, are facing a crippling economic war. On the one hand the price of their gas, delivered by Russia's monopoly pipelines, has soared. On the other, their main exports of wine and mineral water have been banned from the vital Russian market.

And old Soviet dirty tricks are at work, too: an official psychiatric 'assessment' of the Georgian leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, is being circulated. Bearing the imprint of leading Western psychiatric institutions, it makes him out to be a sex-crazed nutcase.

Yet the Kremlin-inspired document is a forgery from start to finish.

The message to the former empire is simple: abandon your dreams of joining the EU and Nato, and return to the iron embrace of your imperial master.

I am no stranger to the despotic nature of Putin. As a correspondent in Moscow in the early years of his reign, I was immediately sceptical of his sinister background and motives.

I saw a lot of him once he became my neighbour. I doubt he saw me, fuming at the side of the road as his presidential convoy swept past at 90mph all the way to the Kremlin from his newlybuilt presidential palace in our village of Kalchuga, ten miles outside Moscow.

Even then, Putin's country home highlighted for me his regime's increasingly authoritarian, bullying style.

For one thing, it was new -- Putin hadn't inherited the sumptuous country retreat of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

That was because the deal between Russia's crooks and spooks that brought Putin to power in 2000 included an iron-clad agreement that the outgoing Yeltsin clan would not just be immune from prosecution for corruption but also keep the spoils of office -- the cash, cars and mansions.

Any president sincerely committed to breaking with the past would surely have shunned the pompous, greedy lifestyle of old -- including the heavily policed convoy that cleared cars off the road every time he wanted to go to the office. Not this one.

The Putin 'dacha' or cottage -- it was about the size of Sandringham -- had been built at amazing speed and in great secrecy on a disused airfield at the edge of our village. That infuriated my sons, who were learning to ride bicycles there.

But although the Russian state may be corrupt, lethargic and stunningly incompetent, when the man at the top wants something done, whether it is building a new house or a new missile, it happens fast and ruthlessly.

Our Russian neighbours in the village were unhappy at the rush of other developments that followed Putin's arrival. One new rich neighbour with

close Kremlin connections concreted over the village green to make a driveway for his mansion, beating up an elderly neighbour who objected.

Then a property company, also with Kremlin links, started bulldozing a nearby forest for housing.

That taught us some lessons about Putin's Russia. The first was that a decade of freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had had an effect -- the villagers reacted not with traditional Russian apathy but with lawsuits, petitions and, when all else failed, direct action: they blocked Putin's road to work.

The second -- and sadder -- lesson was that the grotesque habits of the Stalin era were still there. Protests and petitions were not just brushed aside, the organisers were brutally intimidated.

'We will turn up with a bit of paper saying your house is built on our land, and then we will bulldoze it,' a shadowy official told my next-door neighbour.

Clearly, Putin is no Stalin. Although tens of thousands have died in Chechnya, including in the sinister, brutal 'filtration camps', there is nothing to compare with the Gulag and artificial famines in which tens of millions perished.

And Russia is, at least on the surface, a democracy, with some lively if struggling media outlets, the semblance of contested elections and a strong desire to integrate into the structures of the civilised world.

Russian companies are queuing up to list their shares on the London stock exchange. 'And if they don't let us, we'll buy it,' jokes one rich Russian.

Yet the sinister echoes of the past grow ever louder. Russia has abandoned any attempt to put its Stalinist history behind it. School textbooks skate over the crimes of the Stalin era, presenting them as tragic mistakes or justified responses to external aggression.

Few Russian schoolchildren have any idea that Stalin was allied with Hitler until 1941, and jointly carved up the peaceful countries of Eastern Europe.

Putin himself describes the collapse of the Soviet Union -- Stalin's empire -- as 'the geopolitical catastrophe of the century'.

Imagine a German leader saying that of the Third Reich.

And imagine how that sounds to the brave, freedom-loving Estonians, occupied by Stalin in 1940 and regaining their independence only in 1991. How would the Dutch feel if a German leader openly expressed nostalgia for the days of Hitler and Himmler?

The truth is that, under Putin, Russia's lust for imperial expansion is stronger than it has ever been since the Cold War. But he wants to rebuild Stalin's empire using banks, pipelines and financial threats rather than tanks and barbed wire.

With its monopoly supplies of gas and oil, Russia has already forced the former captive nations to hand over their energy supply companies, thereby regaining a crucial foothold in the economies of the former Soviet bloc.

And that economic foothold soon turns into a political one. Murky Russian-backed energy brokers sprout like mushrooms in the former satellites, spraying directorships, political donations and outright bribes over the fragile political landscapes of these new democracies.

Indeed if Gazprom -- the Russian energy giant -- succeeds in its stated intention of buying Britain's Centrica gas company, it is hardly far-fetched to worry that the same noxious mixture of influence-peddling and mischiefmaking will quickly take root in Britain's own fetid political culture.

'I know how much a congressman costs. What about an MP?' a Russian tycoon asked me ten years ago. Then I thought he was just teasing me. Now I would not be so certain.

For Putin's long-term plan is to establish economic dominance also in the complacent and greedy countries of 'old Europe'. The first thing is to sabotage any plans for diversifying gas supplies.

Russia is desperate to stop the Nabucco pipeline, an EU-backed project to bring gas from Iran and central Asia, which threatens to challenge its own monopoly of gas deliveries from the east.

So do plans, bravely pioneered by Poland, to import more gas in liquified form by tankers from sources other than Russia. These projects are expensive but as vital to our security as radar was in World War II.

But just as politicians in the 1930s preferred appeasement to rearmament, our Western politicians are failing to support the scheme, preferring the short-term, easy gain of gas deals with Russia to the hard work of establishing the continent's independent energy security.

This takes us to the crux of the forthcoming G8 negotiations. On one side there is Putin, desperate to increase his stranglehold on European gas supplies and sign up long-term deals with Western consumers.

On the other is Europe's need to maintain a diversity of supplies from a free market. The stark fact is that Putin is likely to be the winner, offering persuasive arguments and incentives that are attractive in the short term to the West but for which we will pay dearly.

For there are no signs of Putin embracing Western-style financial and political reforms -- indeed, quite the reverse.

Mikhail Kasyanov, the prime minister who ran Russia during the startling economic success of Putin's early years, told me last week that the Kremlin is now full of thugs and yes-men. 'There is nobody willing to stand up to Putin in an argument,' he said. That sounds all too like the craven culture surrounding Soviet leaders.

Although Putin claims to dislike personality cults, every Russian office in the public sector (and many in the private sector) has a picture of the President on the wall.

The Kremlin is a law unto itself, intervening in politics, business and the legal system as it pleases -- a kind of power that Britain abandoned, at least until the dying days of the Blair government, with the signing of Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago.

At first sight it is hard to see why Putin has done so well. A dull, publicity-shy bureaucrat with not an ounce of charisma, he seemed sure to be swept aside by some bouncier character.

But for the public, President Putin was sober, young and athletic -- everything that his predecessor Mr Yeltsin wasn't.

And for the Russian elite, he was the ideal compromise.

The spooks, longing to restore Russia's great-power status, liked him because of his intelligence department background: not quite the top drawer, perhaps, but certainly part of the charmed circle that had studied at the Red Banner Institute, the top Soviet spy school.

All KGB officers are trained in target acquisition -- gaining an enemy's co-operation through bribes, flattery or threats, and then bending them to your will. Putin will have every opportunity to display these talents when he plays the host in St Petersburg.

Privately, Putin even enjoys showing off the fruits of his spy networks and their dungeons packed with information. A Western newspaper editor who met him was amazed when the Russian leader murmured at the start of the interview, in English: 'I hope your wife's mother recovers soon.'

Not even the editor's closest colleagues knew that his mother-inlaw was gravely ill.

It is this combination of guile, charm and utter ruthlessness that has enabled Putin to increase his grip on power.

Everyone who has dared challenge or resist his rule has been sidelined, neutralised or humiliated. The Yeltsin advisers are gone. The tycoons are in jail, in exile or in political purdah.

The media is cowed. The opposition parties are shams, run to give the appearance of pluralism to the Russian public and the outside world, but with no chance of taking real power.

The once-mighty regional chieftains who used to run Russia's cities and regions are now merely nervous servants of the Kremlin.

Putin understands the way that corruption both fuels Russia and makes it manageable. When the rules can be bent and are impossible to observe, everyone is vulnerable.

He has unleashed the two most sinister forces of his country's Stalinist past: the totalitarian habits of the security services and the imperialist urge that lies deep in the Russian psyche.

Putin is trying to recreate an empire reminiscent of the Soviet Union -- feared by its own people, its neighbours and the West in equal measure.

And the tragedy is that we in the West are letting it happen.