Long IR post to follow...
Was reading a Crisis Group report (originally written, I think, for a Turkish news publication) on the differences between the Turkey-Armenia reconciliation process and the Armenia-Azerbaijan "reconciliation process" and I think the strongest chord struck was the notion of reconciliation as something that filters through all levels of society. The article calls it "soccer diplomacy" which is a very apt way of putting it.
Excerpt: "For a decade, civil society organizations have been setting up a wide range of Turkish-Armenian joint events among artists, photographers, youth, journalists, intellectuals, business persons, etc. The very day of the Bursa match, 20 of the most prominent Turkish and Armenian journalists met in a nearby hotel to discuss how they could further support reconciliation."
Now I know next to nothing about the difficulties in Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, but my instincts were to overlay the situation (or at least the applicable parts) to the troubles in the Balkans, most notably in Bosnia, and I wondered what shape a civil society reconciliation process might take. The primary reason for the impasse in the country's growth and progress towards EU Accession is the inability of local politicians to see beyond their own short-term nationalistic inclinations and agree to a political process that calls for compromises on all sides. As a consequence, citizens suffer. Lack of extradition agreements and the failure of prosecutors to coordinate and cooperate means criminals can skate free, and you get things like the visa-regime conundrum that presented itself earlier in the year.
In both these situations, it's elected or appointed officials who fail to serve the people and the people who end up suffering. And the officials, at least for the moment, don't look interested in stepping in the right direction.
Earlier this month, Wolfgang Petritsch, Paddy Ashdown and Christian Schwarz-Schilling, three former envoys, issued a critique of current EU and US efforts at stabilizing Bosnia. They talk at length about the failings of the current initiative, but I think the key statements are (as excerpted below from the BalkanInsight.com report):
"In close cooperation with the United States, Europe should provide financial, structural and organisational support to facilitate a final, effective reform process," the trio wrote.
They said that Bosnia will only be stable in future “if a balance is found between the democratic principle of majority rule, [and] the consideration of the interests of the three constituent peoples as well as others and minorities”.
"Consideration of the interests of the three constituent peoples" assumes the elected politicians are acting with the interests of those people in mind, which is certainly debatable (as no one wants more violence, but that seems to the path local politicians are walking down these days). So what if there was a way to bring about a concerted effort to reach out the civil society. Sort of like cutting out the middleman and going straight to the customer. I get the impression that such efforts would gain legitimacy if they had local roots, but perhaps the key to breaking the impasse lies in building reconciliation among the local populace by way of increased exposure perhaps in the same way that you have ground-level interaction between Turkish and Armenian nationals. This could, in turn, spur voting patterns to reflect local discontent with current political offerings and move the politicians into action. Because the outside-in overtures made by the US and the EU don't really seem to be working at the moment. Perhaps some "soccer diplomacy" is what's needed.
It certainly looks easier on paper (or on screen, as it were) than it probably would be to accomplish and would likely demand maybe a decade or even more of concerted efforts, but the payoff would be extraordinary if such a thing were successful.
Just something on my mind.
In a completely unrelated note, I got a notice from the DEA earlier today about recent triumphs in the War on Drugs and they went through a series of stats.
Between 2008's Project Reckoning, which targeted the Gulf Cartel, Operation Xcellerator back in February, which blew a hole in the Sinaloa Cartel, and this week's Project Coronado, which decimated the La Familia Michoacana drug cartel, there's been a lot of dope on the table, to quote a certain Police Commissioner from a certain acclaimed television drama.
Items seized include: more than 2300 individuals arrested, $152 million in cash seized; 29 tons of cocaine; nearly 5,000 pounds of methamphetamine; more than 80,000 pounds of marijuana; and nearly 600 vehicles.
Impressive, no?
But the other side of that coin is that all they're really doing, at the end of the day, is chopping off a different Hydra head. Pretty soon, they're going to run out of names for their operations. If the recent drug violence in Rio is any indication, the aforementioned stats are unfortunate attempts to steer the focus away from the ongoing waste and tragedy signifying the current state of the War on Drugs that's been raging throughout the Americas for a loooooong time now.
The DC-based Center for International Policy's Plan Colombia has been my premier source for info regarding everything you'll need to know about the Drug War on the Latin American side, as well as policy stuffs on both sides of the border. But this Crisis Group nicely summarizes my own feelings regarding current (and hopefully future) policy in that realm.
That was the macro stuff.
For the micro stuff, namely the effects of the Drug War on urban America, see The Wire.
(Phew. That was exhausting.)
Excerpt: "For a decade, civil society organizations have been setting up a wide range of Turkish-Armenian joint events among artists, photographers, youth, journalists, intellectuals, business persons, etc. The very day of the Bursa match, 20 of the most prominent Turkish and Armenian journalists met in a nearby hotel to discuss how they could further support reconciliation."
Now I know next to nothing about the difficulties in Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, but my instincts were to overlay the situation (or at least the applicable parts) to the troubles in the Balkans, most notably in Bosnia, and I wondered what shape a civil society reconciliation process might take. The primary reason for the impasse in the country's growth and progress towards EU Accession is the inability of local politicians to see beyond their own short-term nationalistic inclinations and agree to a political process that calls for compromises on all sides. As a consequence, citizens suffer. Lack of extradition agreements and the failure of prosecutors to coordinate and cooperate means criminals can skate free, and you get things like the visa-regime conundrum that presented itself earlier in the year.
In both these situations, it's elected or appointed officials who fail to serve the people and the people who end up suffering. And the officials, at least for the moment, don't look interested in stepping in the right direction.
Earlier this month, Wolfgang Petritsch, Paddy Ashdown and Christian Schwarz-Schilling, three former envoys, issued a critique of current EU and US efforts at stabilizing Bosnia. They talk at length about the failings of the current initiative, but I think the key statements are (as excerpted below from the BalkanInsight.com report):
"In close cooperation with the United States, Europe should provide financial, structural and organisational support to facilitate a final, effective reform process," the trio wrote.
They said that Bosnia will only be stable in future “if a balance is found between the democratic principle of majority rule, [and] the consideration of the interests of the three constituent peoples as well as others and minorities”.
"Consideration of the interests of the three constituent peoples" assumes the elected politicians are acting with the interests of those people in mind, which is certainly debatable (as no one wants more violence, but that seems to the path local politicians are walking down these days). So what if there was a way to bring about a concerted effort to reach out the civil society. Sort of like cutting out the middleman and going straight to the customer. I get the impression that such efforts would gain legitimacy if they had local roots, but perhaps the key to breaking the impasse lies in building reconciliation among the local populace by way of increased exposure perhaps in the same way that you have ground-level interaction between Turkish and Armenian nationals. This could, in turn, spur voting patterns to reflect local discontent with current political offerings and move the politicians into action. Because the outside-in overtures made by the US and the EU don't really seem to be working at the moment. Perhaps some "soccer diplomacy" is what's needed.
It certainly looks easier on paper (or on screen, as it were) than it probably would be to accomplish and would likely demand maybe a decade or even more of concerted efforts, but the payoff would be extraordinary if such a thing were successful.
Just something on my mind.
In a completely unrelated note, I got a notice from the DEA earlier today about recent triumphs in the War on Drugs and they went through a series of stats.
Between 2008's Project Reckoning, which targeted the Gulf Cartel, Operation Xcellerator back in February, which blew a hole in the Sinaloa Cartel, and this week's Project Coronado, which decimated the La Familia Michoacana drug cartel, there's been a lot of dope on the table, to quote a certain Police Commissioner from a certain acclaimed television drama.
Items seized include: more than 2300 individuals arrested, $152 million in cash seized; 29 tons of cocaine; nearly 5,000 pounds of methamphetamine; more than 80,000 pounds of marijuana; and nearly 600 vehicles.
Impressive, no?
But the other side of that coin is that all they're really doing, at the end of the day, is chopping off a different Hydra head. Pretty soon, they're going to run out of names for their operations. If the recent drug violence in Rio is any indication, the aforementioned stats are unfortunate attempts to steer the focus away from the ongoing waste and tragedy signifying the current state of the War on Drugs that's been raging throughout the Americas for a loooooong time now.
The DC-based Center for International Policy's Plan Colombia has been my premier source for info regarding everything you'll need to know about the Drug War on the Latin American side, as well as policy stuffs on both sides of the border. But this Crisis Group nicely summarizes my own feelings regarding current (and hopefully future) policy in that realm.
That was the macro stuff.
For the micro stuff, namely the effects of the Drug War on urban America, see The Wire.
(Phew. That was exhausting.)