Recordando: Clinton y Solana, «condenados» a 20 años

El presidente de EEUU, Bill Clinton, el ex secretario general de la OTAN, Javier Solana, y otros 12 altos cargos occidentales fueron condenados ayer a 20 años de cárcel en un juicio en ausencia celebrado contra ellos en Belgrado. Estos recibieron la pena máxima prevista por la legislación yugoslava, tras un juicio que ha durado poco más de tres días. El denominado juicio pantomima se enmarca en la campaña electoral del presidente Slobodan Milosevic para el día 24, además de servirle de excusa para evidenciar sus deseos de venganza.

El presidente del tribunal, Veroljub Raketic, explicó que los acusados fueron declarados culpables de incitación a la guerra, violación de la integridad territorial de Yugoslavia, intento de asesinato de altos cargos y crímenes contra la población civil durante los bombardeos de 1999.

También se les condenó por el uso de armas prohibidas internacionalmente, como las bombas de racimo o los misiles antitanque cargados de uranio empobrecido, en su campaña contra Yugoslavia.

Los condenados son dos responsables de la OTAN en el momento de los bombardeos, Solana y el ex comandante en Europa, general Wesley Clark, y los jefes de Estado o de Gobierno y ministros de Exteriores y Defensa de los cuatro países con los que Yugoslavia rompió relaciones durante la guerra: EEUU, Alemania, Francia y Gran Bretaña.

Extraído de El Mundo de Septiembre de 2000.

On December 1:

1640  End of the Iberian Union: Portugal acclaimed João IV as King of Portugal, thus ending a 60 year period of personal union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain and the end of the rule of the House of Habsburg ( (also called the Philippine Dynasty).

1761 Marie Tussaud, French creator of wax sculptures (Madame Tussauds), was born.

1913 The Ford Motor Company introduced the first moving assembly line.

1913  Crete, was annexed by Greece.

1918 The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was proclaimed

1932 Matt Monro, English singer, was born.

1933 Pilot E. F. ‘Teddy’ Harvie and his passenger, Miss Trevor Hunter, set a record for the longest flight within New Zealand in a single day. They flew approximately 1880 kms from North Cape to Invercargill in a time of 16 hrs 10 mins.

1935 Woody Allen, American film director, actor, and comedian, was born.

1939 Lee Trevino, American golfer, was born.

1940  Richard Pryor, American actor, comedian, was born.

1945 Bette Midler, American actress and singer, was born.

1946  Gilbert O’Sullivan, Irish singer, was born.

1955 In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white man and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

1969 The first draft lottery in the United States was held since World War II.

1973  Papua New Guinea gains self government from Australia.

1981  The AIDS virus iwa officially recognized.

1982 At the University of Utah, Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart.

Sourced from NZ History ONline & Wikipedia.

 The Swiss nation has always prided itself on being a neutral country.  Its second city gives its name to the convention which governs how warring nations treat each other’s captured soldiers.  The International Red Cross was born here and the country’s flag, reversed, was adopted as its emblem.

Numerous international organisations, including those dealing with environmental law, trade and sustainable development, torture and pharmaceutical manufacturers have based themselves here; as have the World Health Organisation and the Fairtrade Institute; presumably drawn to the country by its tolerant internationalist outlook.

So it was some surprise this morning to hear that the Swiss were to vote in a referendum to decide whether or not minarets should be banned.  And it was a greater surprise this afternoon to hear that the Swiss have gone along with what is little more than a racist stand.

I use the word racist quite deliberately.  Of course Islam and its followers are a faith and a faith community rather than a nation and a race; but hostility to Islam often appears to be much closer to hatred based on racial identity than any ideological difference about Islamic belief.

At one level, the referendum sounds very reasonable.  Having travelled to the Middle East and to Islamic countries further afield I have heard the Muslim call to prayer being broadcast five times a day across cities.  The truth is that you soon get used to it; in the same way that living in the shadow of St Paul’s in London, as I did some years ago, you soon stop hearing the cathedral’s bells every 15 minutes of the day and night.  But while the call to prayer is appropriate in a country with a long-standing Islamic culture; I would not support the call to prayer being adopted by mosques in Britain.

But the contributors to a report on BBC Radio Four’s Sunday Programme this morning left no doubt that much of the hostility had very little to do with the desirability or otherwise of an amplified call to prayer and much more to do with hatred of all things Islamic.

One of those featured was Swiss MP Oskar Freysinger of the Swiss People’s Party, one of the people behind today’s referendum.  He said:

“The biggest problem is a demographic problem.  The Islamic people, even in Europe, have three or four times the children that we have.  You can only wait 20, 30 or 40 years and the problem will be impossible to resolve because we’ll have two parallel societies living in the same country with internal conflicts between two visions of what a state must be.  That can’t be a harmonic development of Europe.”

Swiss Anti-Islamic Campaign poster

And the poster used by campaigners to persuade people to vote for a ban included a picture of a woman wearing a burqa against a background of the Swiss flag.

The Swiss campaigners have been dishonest.  They are using what appears to be modest stance to send a message to Muslims that they are not welcome.  This will be a particularly disturbing message to the majority of Muslims in Switzerland, as unlike Britain, most Swiss Muslims are former Yugoslavians, who saw their own Mosques destroyed during the brutal war in Bosnia.

How should Christians respond to such moves?  Of course, we believe that Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life and that nobody goes to the Father except through him (John 14:6 and John 3:18).  But that doesn’t mean we should seek to ban those with a different view.  Rather, we should show respect to their beliefs while being prepared to challenge them by preaching the Gospel of Christ. 

This is what Paul did in Greece at Mars Hill / the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34).  He didn’t condemn the locals for their worship of Pagan gods; but challenged them and used his knowledge of their beliefs (the altar to the unknown god) as a tool with which to explain the uniqueness of Jesus’ sacrificial grace.

It is good to see that churches in Switzerland were amongst those uniting against the ban.  And they weren’t acting alone.  Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths and none could see the damage such a ban would bring.
Unfortunately, anybody listening to the Radio Four piece this morning would have got the impression that the churches weren’t united on this issue.  They reported that evangelical Christians were supporting the ban.  Their reporter obviously didn’t ask the Swiss Evangelical Alliance before making such a claim.  The Alliance Evangélique Suisse / Allianza Evangelica Svizzera has produced a detailed opinion document in which they explains why a federal constitutional ban on minarets is the wrong way to resolve issues of coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Switzerland.

Most Christians and people of faith will see this as a further attack by aggressive secularists who want to drive all faith and religions from the market place.  The Muslims are first in line because it is easy to use 9/11 and other recent terrorist attacks to stoke widespread public fear and revulsion.  And, after the Muslims have been sidelined it is a logical next step to say that to prevent Muslims being unfairly discriminated against; similar restrictions should be imposed on all religious groups.

The Swiss vote to ban minarets is wrong on so many fronts.  If I were Swiss, I would be extremely ashamed tonight.

On November 29:

800 Charlemagne arrived in Rome to investigate the alleged crimes of Pope Leo III.

1832  Louisa May Alcott, American novelist, was born.

1849  Sir John Ambrose Fleming, British physicist, was born.

1893 Elizabeth Yates became the first woman in the British Empire to win a mayoral election when she became Mayor of Onehunga.

1893 Ziqiang Institute, today known as Wuhan University, was founded by Zhang Zhidong.

1898  C. S. Lewis, Irish writer, was born.

1910 The first US patent for inventing the traffic lights system was issued to Ernest Sirrine.

1913  Fédération Internationale d’Escrime, the international organizing body of competitive fencing was founded in Paris, France.

 1917  Merle Travis, American singer/guitarist, was born.

1929  U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd becomes the first person to fly over the South Pole.

1932 Jacques Chirac, French President, was born.

1933 John Mayall, British blues musician, was born.

1944 The first surgery on a human to correct blue baby syndrome was performed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas.

1945 The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was declared.

1961 Mercury-Atlas 5 Mission – Enos, a chimpanzee, was launched into space.

 

 Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.

Length: 6:59

Related: nation; state; sovereignty; constitution

Dickerson, Mark et. al. An Introduction to Government and Politics (8th ed.). Canada: Nelson Education, 2010.

Before I left my husband July 4^th weekend, 1974, we had planned a three week vacation in Yugoslavia. I had been captivated by photos I’d seen of its mountains and the beauty of pre-war Dubrovnik. After I had moved out of our apartment, he called to ask if I was still going. I was incredulous – of course not. He wanted me to go with him anyway, but I refused, even when he said we couldn’t get our deposit money back.

I took very little when I left and selfishly left the rest for him to sort through and dispose of. It wasn’t my finest hour, and I knew then that it was unfair and self-centered. I have no justification. I believed I was running for my life, but I knew it looked irresponsible and heartless. I didn’t tell many people at Yale the truth as to why I left, because when I told my former boss she reacted very negatively. She was the one person I thought I could count on, but I was very wrong. A staunch feminist, she took what was then a common stand against homosexuality. Where I thought feminism set me free, she thought lesbianism tainted the fight for women’s rights.

One day in late July I was in the Provost’s office talking to her assistant, someone who didn’t reject me. I explained I had three weeks of vacation coming, but didn’t have anywhere to go or a lot of money. My husband had switched his plans around with the travel agency and went to England for a couple of weeks.

My friend told me she’d just read a letter to the editor of Ms Magazine about a women’s retreat in upstate New York. She got the magazine out, and read the letter to me. The place was in Paradox, New York, and offered a place for women to go who were re-assessing their lives. That sounded like me.

We got out a map, found the town, a tiny dot outside Schroon Lake, and I copied down the address. That night I wrote the woman a letter, explaining my situation and asking what the rates were. I told her when I would be coming – I decided to go for one week since I didn’t know anything about the place or the woman running it – and a week later received a reply. She gave me the sliding scale rates and told me to call when I arrived in Schroon Lake on Sunday, August 4, 1974.

My friend Mary helped me shop for a couple of new outfits, appropriate to a less formal lifestyle. No more hose or heels for me. She told me I had to have a denim shirt. All lesbians had denim shirts, and I couldn’t be without one. I also bought a pair of burnt orange brushed velvet jeans – remember, this was 1974 – and a pair of dark brown suede boots with gum soles.

I read incessantly, but came to hate evenings and weekends because I was so incredibly lonely. Mary spent weekends and evenings with her girlfriend. I walked around the University, often through areas of New Haven that weren’t really safe, but I didn’t care. Every evening I rode my bicycle over to hear the carillon concerts at Harkness Tower. One Saturday, I rode up to the top of East Rock and back, a ten-mile trip, but I was reminded of climbs I’d made with my husband up West Rock. I was restless and anxious, waiting for the trip to New York.

The bus left New Haven at 9:15am, and Mary came down to see me off. I was more than a little annoyed when she teased me about falling for someone during the week. Neither of us knew that the trip would change my life. The bus stopped in Springfield, MA, then on to Albany, NY, where I changed for the trip up I-87, the Northway. I dozed off and on, read a book I’d brought, and wondered what I’d find at the end of the five hour ride.

A teenage girl got on in Lake George and sat next to me. She babbled quite a bit about a church group or camp located in Schroon Lake and asked if I was part of that. I assured her I was not and asked about the woman’s retreat, but she had never heard of one in the area. That made me somewhat uneasy.

When I got off in Schroon Lake, I felt I was looking at a postcard. The majestic Adirondack Mountains soared around me. A road next to a white church ran down to a beautiful deep blue lake. From my bus companion, I knew that Schroon Lake was where the movie “Marjorie Morningstar” had been filmed. The lake was dotted with white sails and the sandy beach covered with people in brightly colored swimsuits.

I took my pack and guitar and sat on the hill in front of the church. No one was there to meet me. I felt very small.

©2009 jgschenck

I need to take you a bit back in time, before I can explain, why I am writing this today. Please bear with me.

During my last year of Law school I had to focus all energy, innovation and intellect on the writing of my thesis. Sometime around my third year in school, I realized that law might be just too black and white for me. You see in life I have been always so fascinated by the colorful zones (as opposed to the gray zones, legalists refer to with extreme fascination.)I had to find a topic of focus that was extremely difficult and challenging (to get me going as sadly, one of my many disadvantages is that, only hard-to-conceive and out-of-the-box concepts get me going) and…colorful. My legal expertise by then was International Law and International Humanitarian Law, so the natural choice of subject-matters would have been Rwanda, the Nuremberg Trials, Yugoslavia, the Balkans etc. Instead…I have always, always found fascination in the analysis of international affairs and/or phenomena based on the assumption that in Waltz’s threefold of sources of actors in the international arena (see: System, State, Man), man was the most psychologically challenging for me. I refuse to accept that man is the ‘victim’ of the system or the way that the state operates, simply because both the state as well as the system consist of men. If we can change the man, we can change it all. Better yet, if we can understand the man, we can then, interpret his reactions in a much more meaningful way.

I had found my topic, which was much more Criminal Law-oriented than international. How on earth would I make it to convince my Yale and Harvard-educated supervisor, to allow this youthful and stubborn Arian kid, to pursue a topic that was so ‘don’t go there’ in such limited time and with such limited resources? She and I, have always had a special relationship. I am not sure I can detect its beginning, but for some reason, I could feel she expected a lot from me. I decided to stop by her office. An archaic,  two-story, roman-like building dressed in Renaissance paintings and even sculptures. Her office was warm and challenging at the same time – nothing intimidates me more than distinguished intellectuals that remain unbelievably humble.

I had sweaty palms, a knot in my throat, my heart was racing like crazy…how on earth would I pull this through? When I told her…she swallowed a couple of times, got up and said ‘Let’s go for a walk, Mr. Schott.’ Am I getting expelled for trying?

We are walking amidst the greatest constructions of mankind, the sun is staring me right in the eyes, and I can’t help but lower my head in the direction of my footsteps. My hands were in my pockets and it almost felt as if they were in a tanning cylinder.

“Mr. Schott, Christopher, under my capacity as your professor and supervisor, I am going to say your topic is suicidal and very difficult to present from an international law perspective. In fact, it’s purely criminal law and I cannot see how you will put the two together. Under my capacity as a person though, I want you to do it, knowing that you remind me of myself and my drive when I was your age. And I will tell you something else Christopher. Unfortunately you are so intellectually and good-heartedly gifted that you will never have true friends in your life. Unfortunately you will always be envied and the people who will surround you, will never be able to understand your extremely giving nature, one that requires nothing in return. All great men died alone, but their art, was good enough to make them content. Unfortunately and I hope I am wrong, you are too special and too gifted for anyone to understand.”

Back then, I was too happy that I got her approval on my topic, that I never really understood why she had to go ahead and tell me all those other things. I had memorized them, simply because anything I cannot fully analyze, I register in my mind to play again and again until I do. My professor was American, she came to Greece to follow the love of her life (an attorney whose office was right above hers), when I asked if she had any regrets following him and leaving her family and life back in Boston, she answered quickly “No, my life is here, with him, besides, where in the US would I be able to have a 3-hr coffee and just look at people walk by every day in the sun?” She became my first mentor, right then and there, and for the next 365 days of my life, we became inseparable: I was working on my thesis at least  6 hours per day and when I would take a break from it, I’d try and focus on other classes as well. I had a specific cubicle in the library -no.8- every morning, I’d wake up, make my coffee, gather my notes together, get my laptop and establish myself in cubicle no.8, one that was right by the window facing the yard of the University (so I could people-watch occasionally, and think of my Professor’s remarks ‘My life is here, with him’. I would leave the library when they’d close the building, and I’d go home only to continue working on how to synthesize what I was trying to prove. My friends wouldn’t get it -they thought I was neglecting them- and the girl I was seeing back then (another law student) whose main concern was to just have me as the date she could show off every Saturday night, was not the person I wanted to share all this epiphany with. I broke off the relationship and I asked for some ‘time off’ from my friends…and then the letters began…

The Death Penalty. That was my subject-matter. And how could I understand the why’s and the how’s and even the when’s, without becoming acquainted with the protagonists of Death Row? I searched and searched, until I found my way to them: letters. An organization based in the UK, a non-profit, who began a system of correspondence between the inmates and anonymous friends, the inmates and the families of their victims, the inmates and God…letters each side would forward to the headquarters of the organization and then the authorities of the organization would forward to the respective recipient. To the scare and disapproval of my mum, who by then had started going to Church pleading for my soul’s salvation, I started reading the letters of inmates.

Until then, I was very pragmatic, harsh and legalistic when it came to the execution of the murderers and rapists of children, helpless women and honorable men. Assault and slaughter are two phenomena I have yet to accept or understand. The doers of these acts, I have yet to characterize as ‘human beings’. Yet they are…

And so, I synthesized my message from Huntsville to Mississippi to London. I got the highest possible mark for the defense of my thesis and two university presses have been wanting to publish it since then. I never published; I never will. But here’s a letter- as we are approaching Thanksgiving, and Christmas, as we are re-thinking of what we did over the last year, as we are realizing who we love and why and as we are putting aside all that’s been keeping us apart, all those stupid and silly reasons, here’s a letter, from a man who cannot change his future.

“I’m sorry it has taken so long to answer your letter. This has without a doubt been the most difficult letter I have ever written in my life and I wanted it to be ‘right’. I’ve done my absolute best to convey my thoughts and feelings to you accurately. If my thinking seems disordered or jumbled on occasion, please bear with me. There is a lot that needs to be said and deciding just what order to put it in is difficult at best. Thus, the delay in answering you.

Before I go any further I would like to assure you that no matter what I say to answer your questions or explain things, Nothing is intended to Justify my past conduct. (In the words of Kind David in Psalms 51:3, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.”) There is no justification for what I have done and I accept full responsibility for my actions. What I did was wrong, Horribly wrong, and it cannot be justified. This letter is not an ‘excuse.’

For the killing of your Papa, I am as sorry as a human heart can be, and I apologize from the deepest depths of my soul to you, and to your entire family. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t feel and agonize under the immensely heavy burden of what I have done. (And this is as it should be!) I know words are so inadequate in a situation like this, but the truth is: I did it, I am guilty, and I am sorry. I would gladly do anything in the world, make any sacrifice, to bring your Grandpa back to you. As God almighty is my witness I swear to you, if my execution would bring your Grandpa back to life, I would willingly walk the green mile in an instant. But sadly, there is nothing that I can do. My death won’t bring him back. It will only create another grave, another funeral, another set of mourners overburdened by their grief. (My family. I deserve whatever happens to me, but my family doesn’t deserve any punishment, just as your family didn’t deserve what happened.) I am sorry that I can’t bring your loved one back to you. I sincerely wish I could.

In March 1989 I have my heart and life to Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior and was baptized in the prison chapel. This is not a case of “Jailhouse Religion” as there is no purpose to that “scam” on Death Row; I am not up for parole and religious conversion is not considered by the courts in appeals. It is something I had to do for myself and in response to God’s promptings when the Holy Spirit convicted my heart. I write this letter hoping that my words will be of some help to YOU, and that you and your family will find peace for your own souls and be reconciled to Christ (not letting hatred or vengeance rule your hearts and lives), and I hope that you will then be able to move beyond your pain and go on with your lives.

Grief, anger, hatred, vengeance…all of these things eat at a person from the inside. They must be dealt with for the sake of your own health, both mental and spiritual. Also, I would encourage you to go get in touch with members of an organization called Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation. They are victims’ families, just like you, and they can help you with your grief and pain. They put out a newspaper called The Voice.

Many things have happened in my life that have caused me to become so remorseful, caused me to be honest about my past, caused me to attempt to make my feelings known to you. And some of it has given me some insight into how you and members of your family might be feeling. While I have been living here on Death Row, locked in this little cage called a cell, both my Father and Grandfather have died. I was adopted as a child and these were members of my adoptive family who helped raise me. In addition, while here on Death Row, I have found my original biological family, the people who gave me away as a baby; but by the time I found them, my biological Mother and biological Father were dead. My real father put a pistol in his mouth and killed himself when he discovered my mother was pregnant with me. He was not her husband…they were both adulterers…I am the product of an illicit affair that had been going on for years. I am a bastard. My mother was killed, murdered, by a drunken second ex-husband in 1979. I never had the chance to know her. He broke in the home, chased her and beat her as she tried to defend herself first with a cast iron skillet and then with a butcher knife, both of which he took away and used against her, and then she fled into a bedroom where he caught her, beat her severely, tied her to the bed, breaking her arm as he bent it around the headboard so that bone was sticking out (it was from this hole in her arm that she bled to death), and he then proceeded to beat and rape her and finally raped her with a bathroom plunger handle and left her for dead. One of her other sons came home later that day to find her dead on the bed this way.

I never got to know my Mother, and a murderer like myself took her from me (Poetic Justice?), so I think I have some thoughts as to how you feel. (In addition this man served only 10 years in prison and has already been granted parole.) I understand your anger, your deep sense of loss, the dark hole you feel deep in the pit of your stomach when you think about it, and I understand your endless questions of ‘why?’ (Why was I never allowed to know my mother? Why was I not loved or wanted by my real family? Why did they abuse me? Why were so many of them dead (Mother, Father, three Brothers, two nephews) by the time I found them? I too have questions of ‘Why?’)

I can also tell you that all answers to your questions ‘why?’ won’t make the pain go away. They will explain things better, but your grief will still exist. They can execute me (and most likely will), and in three months your pain will still be there. (Every follow-up interview with condemned men’s victim’s families bears this out). There will only be another set of mourners, and still you will hurt. There are only two things that can ever make your pain go away. And in the memories of your loved one, a portion of that pain will always be with you, just as the pain of my mother’s loss will always be with me.

I will explain all that I can, answer all your questions ‘why’ and anything else that you may wish to ask. I will do all that I can to help you- but until you deal with your grief and let it go, your pain will never end. I know that sounds harsh, but it is also the truth and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not share this truth with you. As I’ve said, I want to do all that I can to help you, and to help ease your pain. I am sorry for what I’ve done, and this is the best thing I know to do to try and make things better.

And now I will try to answer the rest of the questions in your letter. I will start with a specific question before going on to the next one.

Why did you choose to destroy my family?”

I am not sure whether I should continue writing this, as it gets more intense with time. Let’s allow the readership to decide. I will gladly do so, if you want me to.

In the meantime, I owe you an explanation: how did this come about on this fine Tuesday morning?

I was sitting in my childhood room, browsing through documents, books, items and memories from that era. On the very last shelf of one of the bookcases, I found a publication that was untouched, one I was unfamiliar with and one someone had sent me a few years ago (while I was in Venice trying to help launch two Human Rights NGOs). My mum had forgotten to tell me about this package that had arrived years ago from London. From an attorney, who managed to put together plenty of letters from inmates and publish them. I turn the book open and in its very first page, in blue ink stood a small, handwritten dedication:

“May you capture the Abyss.”

Today of all days, I bumped into a forgotten package from years back, one whose existence I was ignoring, about a chapter in my life that had closed years ago with my graduation, to find a dedication that referred to the name I chose to give to the muse and soul of Matthew, my protagonist just a few weeks ago. A name, my bestest buddy, suggested to begin with.

Now what? Am I supposed to “Give time…time?”

Isn’t the entire sum of existence, the magic of being needed by just one person? Isn’t to live like to love – all reason is against it, and all meaningful instinct for it?

If there is one sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life and true love, as in hoping that another will come and replace it, and in thus, eluding the implacable grandeur of this life, of our destined love.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you…It is, after all, by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of our existence. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. Where you bleed, there lies your heart.

]]> http://pelotadecuero.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/historia-de-la-eurocopa/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:43:26 +0000 pelotadecuero http://pelotadecuero.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/historia-de-la-eurocopa/

La Eurocopa es un campeonato de selecciones masculinas nacionales de fútbol. Es organizado por la UEFA cada cuatro años. En su edición inaugural, el torneo se denominó Copa de Naciones de Europa o Copa de Europa pero en 1968 recibió su denominación actual.

La competición fue fruto de un francés, Henri Delaunay, secretario de la Federación Francesa de Fútbol. Fue quien comenzó a barajar la idea en 1927 pero hasta 1954 no fue cuando empezó a ser una realidad. Algunas selecciones se mostraron reacias a la competición y se consiguió instaurar en el Congreso de la UEFA en 1957, dos años después de la muerte de Delaunay. En su memoria el trofeo que se entrega al ganador lleva su nombre.

Hasta la Euro de 1976 solo participaban cuatro países. Entre 1980 hasta 1996 el número aumentó a ocho. Actualmente son 16 pero en la Euro de 2014 se aumentará a 24 los países que la disputarán.

EUROCOPA FRANCIA 1960.

La competición se dividía en una ronda clasificatoria y una fase final que se disputa en el país anfitrión. Competían un total de 17 selecciones. En esta faltaron países como Italia, Alemania Federal o Inglaterra. A la fase final llegan la Unión Soviética, Checoslovaquia, Francia y Yugoslavia.

En la final ganó la selección soviética (2-1) y destacó el papel del portero soviético Lev Yashin que fue como un muro frente al equipo yugoslavo.

España participó en la ronda clasificatoria pero el General Franco impidió que la selección soviética entrara en España y quedó eliminada de la competición.

EUROCOPA ESPAÑA 1964

Se mantuvo el mismo formato que en la anterior edición. Esta edición la disputaron 29 selecciones.

En la final España se impuso a la Unión Soviética (2-1). La final se disputó en el Santiago Bernabéu. A los seis minutos Jesús Pereda marcó el primer gol del partido, en seguida la selección soviética marcó el empate y a seis minutos del final del partido Marcelino con el memorable cabezazo le dio su primera Eurocopa a la selección española.

EUROCOPA ITALIA 1968

El formato se renovó y se constituyó el formato que ha llegado a la actualidad. En esta edición debutó la República Federal de Alemania con un gran Gerd Müller.

La final la disputaron Italia contra Yugoslavia. Después del tiempo reglamentario el resultado era de empate a uno y la final se resolvió dos días después con un nuevo partido que ganó Italia 2-0.

España cayó en cuartos de final frente a Inglaterra por 2-1.

EUROCOPA BÉLGICA 1972

La fase preliminar se dividió en ocho grupos con cuatro equipos en cada uno. La gran favorita para ganar el título era la República Federal Alemana.

La final se disputó entre la Unión Soviética y la Alemania Federal (3-0) con un gran protagonismo Beckenbauer y Müller.

España en esta ocasión no consiguió pasar la fase de grupos.

EUROCOPA YUGOSLAVIA 1976

Esta Eurocopa ha sido y será eternamente recordada por un penalti que lanzó Antonin Panenka y bautizó con su nombre una nueva modalidad de tirar una pena máxima. Los checos eran los favoritos en esta ocasión aunque el torneo contó con nombres como el de Johan Cruyff o John Toshack.

En la final se encontraron Checoslovaquia y la Alemania Federal. El partido tuvo que resolverse en la tanda de penaltis con el mítico penalti de Panenka que dio a Checoslovaquia la Eurocopa.

España cayó en cuartos de final frente a la Alemania Federal.

EUROCOPA ITALIA 1980

En esta ocasión la UEFA dobló el número de participantes, ocho países entraban en la fase final del torneo. Fue la primera ocasión en la que el equipo anfitrión se clasificaba directamente. Destacó la presencia de Kevin Keegan o Bernard Schuster.

La final fue disputada por Alemania Federal y Bélgica. Partido en el que se impuso la Alemania Federal por 2-1.

España no pasó de la fase de grupos.

EUROCOPA FRANCIA 1984

Destacó la presencia del mejor centro de campo con Michel Platini que era la estrella de la Juventus. España quedó primera de grupo y en las semifinales derrotó a Dinamarca en la tanda de penaltis y llegó a la final contra Francia.

En la final entre Francia y España, los galos se adelantaron de la mano de Platini y en el minuto 90 Bruno Bellone certificó la victoria para los galos.

EUROCOPA ALEMANIA FEDERAL 1988

Entre los grandes favoritos para ganar el trofeo estaban Francia, Italia y Alemania. Con la eliminación de Francia, Italia y Alemania se repartían el favoritismo.

En esta ocasión debutó en la fase final la selección de Irlanda. Jugadores como Paolo Maldini, Frank Rijkaard y Ruud Gullit destacaron en la competición.

En la final se enfrentaron la Unión Soviética y Países Bajos, pese a todo pronóstico. La competición la ganaron los Países Bajos con goles de Gullit y Van Basten.

España no superó la fase de grupos.

EUROCOPA SUECIA 1992

En esta edición la selección de Yugoslavia estaba clasificada para disputar el torneo pero debido a la guerra de los Balcanes fue excluida y su puesto lo ocupó Dinamarca. Destacó la presencia de la selección de la Comunidad de Estados Independientes (CEI) que surgió después de la disolución de la Unión Soviética.

En la final se encontraron las selecciones de Dinamarca y Alemania. Dinamarca no notó la ausencia de Michael Laudrup ya que se impuso 2-0.

España no llegó a clasificarse para la fase final del campeonato.

EUROCOPA INGLATERRA 1996

En esta ocasión el número de equipos se aumentó a 16 que estaban divididos en cuatro grupos de cuatro equipos de los cuales los dos primeros pasaban a cuartos de final, fase que introdujeron en esa ocasión. Aparte de esas innovaciones también se decidió que las fases eliminatorias se decidieran con el “gol de oro”.

En la final se vieron las caras Alemania y la República Checa. Alemania una vez ya unificada consiguió su primer título europeo por 2-1.

España cayó en cuartos de final en la tanda de penaltis frente a Inglaterra.

EUROCOPA BÉLGICA Y PAÍSES BAJOS 2000

En  este campeonato destacó el centro del campo francés que consiguió hacerse con el título, futbolistas como Zinedine Zidane, Didier Deschamps y Patrick Vieira.

En la final Francia se enfrentó a Italia. Los galos se impusieron 2-1 con un gol de Trézéguet en el tiempo de descuento.

España cayó en cuartos frente a Francia con el famoso penalti fallado por Raúl.

EUROCOPA PORTUGAL 2004

Fue la Eurocopa de la sorpresa. Las denominadas “selecciones pequeñas” se impusieron a las grandes potencias futbolísticas.

La final fue un partido muy igualado entre Portugal y Grecia por 1-0. El gol fue obra de Charisteas tras un saque de esquina.

España no consiguió superar la fase de grupos.

EUROCOPA AUSTRIA Y SUIZA 2008

Llegó la hora de que España diera un golpe sobre la mesa del futbol internacional reivindicando la presencia de los “locos bajitos” que controlaban el balón y jugaban al toque.

El punto de inflexión de la selección española fue en cuartos frente a la selección italiana a la que se impusieron en una emocionante tanda de penaltis con un notable Casillas y un sobresaliente Cesc Fábregas que marcó el penalti que nos clasificó a las semifinales. Durante todo el torneo la presencia de David Villa fue destacable y terminó como máximo goleador de la competición.

En la final, España se impusó a la selección de Alemania con un gol de Fernando Torres y un gran control del equipo español.

La próxima Eurcopoca se celebrará en 2012 en Polonia y Ucrania. ¿Quién ganará esta vez? Contaremos su historia.

Socialist Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 1,50 dinar

year: 1978

insect: bee - Apis mellifica

Socialist Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 3,40 dinars

year: 1978

insect: wild bee - Halictus scabiosae

Any form of regular blogging is mighty difficult what with my pending visit to Venezuela, Dollard and Miller’s unfathomable theories about learning and development, my impending exams in January (for which I haven’t studied a word) and constructing new HR structures at work . The only good thing about this day is Robin Mckelle’s “Abracadabra”. Aurgasm is really quite wonderful.

Here are some bits you would enjoy. (Not my bits, of course; they are frozen from the cold communist showers I have been attempting with timed intensity. At the last count, I came up to a satisfactory 4.5 minutes  which I presume is still not upto Chavez’s excellent standards and hence may lead to visa revocation.)

Rambo Amadeus’  ”vulgar”  pitch for Makavejev’s Yugoslavia -

Bastards, morons, assholes, rich producers, idiots and what-not. You have a top-notcher here. So cough up a couple of hundred million dollars so the man can make his movie and make it right. You’ll all die, we’ll all die, but the movie will remain. So if you want to go down in history, like the Borgias, the Medicis, and a few other rich families, fork over the loot.

I have memorized this down to the last word. My screenplay is almost ready and I need to start approaching tubby, mongoose faced financiers and producers now. This will certainly help. Either this or my O-Ren-Ishii venting/slashing of heads atop a round table.

Margina Lien muses about the trajectory taken by undeleted characters -

Dave Barry’s explanation: The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they’re made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not flammable. I’m not making this up.

What’s a Catch-23? It’s like a Catch-22, except there is no catch -

There are a few books that I am a fan of. Matchbooks are good. A lot of people are under the impression that books burn only at a specific temperature. But it’s just not true. I can burn most books at or below 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes below 300, if I soak the jacket in lighter fluid.

This conversation is just an allegory for how badly I want to plow you. (George Orwell)

Okay, so like have a good day and all.

Socialist Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 4,90 dinars

year: 1978

insect: bumble bee - Xylocopa violacea

[Love, Peace & Iconic Brands - 1 2 3 4 5]

In multiethnic and multiracial societies, especially in ones where no one group can have a direct claim at the national brand – is America Irish, German, Mexican or Nigerian; is Ethiopia Amharic, Tigreyan, or Oromo; is South Africa Zulu or Afrikaan – these additional pillars of common identity might be useful in helping overcome frictions that inevitably arise in nationalities of diversity.

Here is a brief hint at a scenario without this brand support structure but with some signs of what was possible or what’s to come.

The brand Balkans is intimately associated with some powerful downers:

My advance apologies to those not familiar with basic timing of events and issues. Basics here. Interesting things have been written on the breakdown of the Yugoslav national identity. Bora Zivkovic, via Andrew Sullivan, contemplates here on the group cohesion provided by the asthetics of the day and usefullness of the self-fed mantra of Yugoslav exceptionalism.

Political managers did create and tap into some powerful myths that made up the identity of a united, Socialist Yugoslavia and what it meant to be a Yugoslav and other things at the same time.

While it lacked a robust market economy with all sorts of iconic brands smoothing out frictions in a slowly emerging democracy, it still produced solid brand identities. Actually, quite an impressive consumer culture.

One of the strongest is not a soft drink, or a technology company, or a clothing line but – understandably and fittingly – a band.

Bijelo dugme lived a couple of lives in the span of its recording existence, 1974 through 1990, the final year of the Yugoslav federation. It came to represent many things; one of them was a pretty nifty association and ownership, to the extent a musical act can, of Yugoslavism and all things cool about Yugoslavia: diversity, Balkans as crossroads, living with the world, rebellious/courageous/tough nature of its people, desire for cultural fusion, good/funny/loser/cynic attitude, and a rainbow variety of patriotism.

It comes easy to wonder about hypotheticals: had there been a big counterweight of iconic, Yugoslav superbrands working with a lot thicker web of interdependent stakeholders vested in the mother brand and fighting to keep their margins, how harder would it have been for ethnic tensions to pass the point of no return (and the failure of the political system to solve economic problems that were becoming ethnic in overtones).

Of course, there is a lot to chew when contemplating this. It seems to support what some of the better chronicles of the saga have hinted at, in particular the unrivaled Vesna Pusic, today Croatia’s head of foreign affairs in waiting, in her seminal 1992 analysis, Rulers and Managers:

But to see how iconic mythology effectively cuts through all the fog, consider what happens for a brief moment in 2005, barely ten years after violent conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia have ended, with no clear winners and inter-ethnic tensions far from being settled or reasonably managed.

Bosnia:

Croatia:                                             Serbia:

The biggest joint venture to hit southeastern Europe had Coca Cola Europe, Bijelo Dugme, German media conglomerate RTL and a myriad of telecommunications, advertising and productions companies do what governments of Western Europe and the U.S. have tried for last 15 years. For short three weeks, the space of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia became one unified mad-money making market that justified a massive investment for an even more massive payoff.

The brief reunion had only three concerts in three capitals. Despite uncertainty and mixed expectations the circus hit each region and caused a frenzy local and foreign investment euro loves the most. Each show was preceded by a week of coordinated bombardment of media specials and most creative brand extensions. Cell phone companies made out; local media cartels made out, as did Coca Cola, as did the Germans, as did the circus CEO, the admired and hated band leader.

This all goes to show the endurance of quality myths and their attraction to profits. Or that in any kind of national market there will be space for some brands to establish widest, most inclusive buyins into a shared identity. They manage to do that by either building on top of some common denominator or by creating one from scratch that cuts through divisions, real or perceived.

In the face of differing attitudes of Serbs, Croats and Bosnians towards their past union and shared federation, the basket of brands and myths that came to make up the concoction of Bijelo Dugme’s 2005 blitz – the band, the symbols of the old state, commercial leftism and Che t-shirt solidarity – was mixed well and timely with now a real and deep realization that turns taken in the last two decades turned out to be decidedly the worst possible.

This is of course to be filed under what-could-have-been-stories. The bias for big solidarity-based brands is strong even in the most dysfunctional of ethnic relations. But this is also completely independent of political notions. Had there been a chance, enduring private mythology would have come along. Yugoslavism could have been a distinctly market-grown identity. Today, in short bleeps of time, the commercial space of former Yugoslavia reveals appetite for big brands, the kinds that due to political and market fragmentation can’t happen.

Now, they had their Cokes also, private sector (close enough) iconology to smooth things over when they get rough, and that’s where the tragedy of missed opportunities lies. Not enough, not enough time. But hints of national brands propping up national identity were everywhere. It’s proper to end the Balkan part of this story here: a late 1980s ad of Radenska, Slovenian premier brand of mineral water, Tri srca, which occupies valuable real estate in the minds of all post-Yugoslav consumers. Even without understanding particular cultural hints, visual or musical, the approach will be clear to you:

1.  “The Real Reason Only Five Detainees Are Coming to New York?

Is it just a coincidence that the five detainees who have indicated they intend to plead guilty are going to New York, but the ones that are fighting the charges are getting military commissions?”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21859

2.  “Mukasey: ‘very high’ risk of attack over NYC 9/11 trial

“The [Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan] is a very secure place….Is it secure? Of course, it’s secure. They’re not going to escape,” Mukasey told a conference of the Federalist Society. “The question is not whether they’re going to escape. The question is whether, not only that particular facility, but the city [at] large, will then become the focus for mischief in the form of murder by adherents of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–whether this raises the odds that it will. I would suggest to you that it raises them very high.”
…
The Man Is A Sociopath

Mukasey wasn’t afraid that torture would cause a terrorist attack when he was brown nosing for the Bush dictatorship!

Mukasey was the judge that covered up the FBI’s involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing. The bomb that went off was made by the FBI!”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21858

3.  What awful news:

“The Pentagon’s Long-Term Plan to Get Back on Campus

The military wants to integrate itself into campus life and therefore gain routine access to rank-and file students to recruit regular soldiers

If the wrestling entertainment conglomerate, WWE, tried to set up a “wrestling” curriculum on a college campus, replete with course credit, training in how to become a professional wrestler, special graduation ceremonies, with Hall of Fame wrestlers Bobo Brazil and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin as featured faculty teaching the history and strategy of the sport, it would be hilarious. But when the military says it wants to purchase a piece of the university and use it to recruit and train its officers, with full certification as a legitimate university curriculum, we are expected (even by the New York Times) to speak with reverence about how honored we are to host them.
…
Beyond direct access to the officers-in-training and the enlistees in waiting, ROTC programs on the campus allow the military to burnish its image while presenting its distinct point of view about national and global issues to the campus. The most outrageous aspect of this is that the university gives students credit toward their degrees for learning military discipline and absorbing military propaganda, but the military’s self promotion extends well beyond their formal classrooms. Officers are given “tours of duty” on the campus — with all the rights and privileges (however meager) attendant with faculty status — where they serve as instructors of for-credit classes, participate in campus intellectual and social life, and present viewpoints dictated by the Department of Defense in various forums that confer upon them the imprimatur of scholarly respect.

As far as I know, ROTC is the only program on university campuses that gives credit for courses that are not designed by qualified scholars and not taught by qualified scholars, and whose instructors are selected by an outside organization who also pays them and controls their lives. The instructors are under orders to teach specific content that has never been validated through any scholarly process and which would fail any such test. And the students subjected to this indoctrination are told by the University that this content is co-equal to other courses and given credit for taking them. And, unlike other courses of study, they are honored for completing this alien curriculum with high profile ceremonies on the campus which are attended and validated by the top officials of the University.”

http://www.alternet.org/rights/143947

4.  “Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution. In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned. Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago.”

http://www.juancole.com/

5.  “Would Our Government Really Start a War to Try to Stimulate the Economy?”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/would-government-really-start-war-to.html

6.  “Hayek: “Emergencies Have Always Been the Pretext on Which the Safeguards of Individual Liberty Have Eroded”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/hayek-emergencies-have-always-been.html

7.  “U.S.: Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16083

8.  “The Disintegration of Yugoslavia

It should be realized that following the collapse of the eastern bloc and the unification of the two Germanies, Berlin saw itself as the strongest player in Europe and actively sought European leadership over which it traditionally competed with France. US military bases that Germany continued to host in the framework of its international obligations after the withdrawal of the Soviet forces presented the main obstacle in the way of the country’s aspirations. There were indications that Germany hoped to have the problem resolved by shifting the bases to the Balkans, where their existence could be based not on Soviet-era international agreements but on a NATO mandate, and where Germany could be guaranteed a place among the key players. What it needed to make the plan materialize was a serious pretext for the Balkan expansion, and the process including the break-up of Yugoslavia and the emergence of several protracted ethnic conflicts spread over its former territory conveniently provided one. The implementation of the scenario began in Slovenia and Croatia, where, due to historic reasons, the German influence was deeply rooted. Already in the 1980ies the German intelligence service had strong positions in Slovenia and especially in Croatia as various émigré nationalist and extremist groups it sponsored gradually made inroads into the administrations. German advisers and NGO envoys flocked to Croatia in numbers in 1989-1990. It was due to their activity that eventually the republic became the scene of the first armed clashes in the former Yugoslavia, which scared even the no less active US representatives. “

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16077

9.  “Obama vs Hatoyama: The making of an unequal, unconstitutional, illegal, colonial and deceitful US-Japan agreement.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16084

10.  “The Right’s textbook “surrender to terrorists”

This is literally true:  the Right’s reaction to yesterday’s announcement — we’re too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country — is the textbook definition of “surrendering to terrorists.”  It’s the same fear they’ve been spewing for years.  As always, the Right’s tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers.  Indeed, it’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

11.  “The new WH counsel and “Scooter Libby justice”
A restoration of the rule of law — meaning an end to immunity for high-level political officials who commit crimes — was a central prong of the Obama campaign.  Those who called for a pardon of Lewis Libby — even on the oh-so-clever “progressive” political grounds concocted by Bauer — were as antithetical to that pledge could be.  Yet here is that pro-pardon Washington lawyer now being named as White House counsel.   Then again, one of the few positions more expressive of “Scooter Libby justice” than calling for a pardon of Libby himself is the view that all high-level Bush officials should be immunized from prosecution — even those who committed grievous war crimes and other serious felonies — because it’s more important that we “look to the future” than it is to apply the rule of law equally. If immunity for high-level war criminals — and for lawbreakinng telecoms — isn’t “Scooter Libby justice,” what is? Viewed that way, Bauer would seem to fit in well in his new position.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

Socialist Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 10,00 dinars

year: 1978

insect: bumble bee - Bombus terrestris

La reciente apertura y posterior aplazamiento de las sesiones de la causa legal abierta contra Radovan Karadzic deberían haber propiciado –no ha sido, visiblemente, así– una discusión, tantas veces aparcada, sobre la condición del tribunal de La Haya para la antigua Yugoslavia. No está de más que nos preguntemos, antes que nada, por las razones que permitieron que en el pasado determinados conflictos –a decir verdad muy pocos– condujesen a la creación de tribunales ad hoc, en tanto otros, la abrumadora mayoría, se viesen privados de semejante honor. Por detrás es fácil intuir que en la perspectiva de las grandes potencias, y en virtud de razones de orden vario, hay, claro, conflictos que interesan y otros que no.

Pero, más allá de lo anterior, hay que subrayar que las taras mayores del tribunal de La Haya para la antigua Yugoslavia no nacen de lo que ha hecho, sino, antes bien, de lo que no ha hecho. Bastará con que, para apuntalar esta idea, aduzcamos dos ejemplos llamativos.

El primero nos recuerda que cuando, hace no mucho, fue detenido en las islas Canarias el general croata Ante Gotovina, acusado de crímenes de guerra en la Krajina en 1995, desde las instancias superiores del tribunal se adujo que el militar capturado era –junto con Franjo Tudjman, el presidente de Croacia fallecido a finales del decenio de 1990– responsable de execrables acciones armadas. La declaración tenía su miga por cuanto el tribunal que hoy nos ocupa bien que esquivó la decisión de procesar en vida al presidente croata. En un retrato cabal de las miserias que estamos obligados a rescatar, era muy cómodo arrojar culpas sobre Tudjman cuando este hacía años que había fallecido. Quienes pensamos que el presidente croata fue responsable, en un nivel no muy lejano al de Slobodan Milosevic, de crímenes de guerra y crímenes contra la humanidad, tenemos que preguntarnos por qué, cuando correspondía actuar con energía, el tribunal de La Haya prefirió mirar hacia otro lado. La respuesta es sencilla: Tudjman era un aliado de facto de las potencias occidentales.

El segundo ejemplo es aún más gravoso. En 1999, pocos meses después de los bombardeos de la OTAN sobre Serbia y Montenegro, dos conocidas organizaciones de derechos humanos, Amnistía Internacional y Human Rights Watch, solicitaron que el tribunal para la antigua Yugoslavia abriese una investigación sobre eventuales crímenes de guerra cometidos, entonces, por la Alianza Atlántica. De manera bien ilustrativa, no es que el tribunal rehuyese encausar a la OTAN: es que se negó en redondo a abrir una investigación que con toda evidencia entraba dentro de sus atribuciones y obligaciones.

No hay que ir muy lejos –parece– en busca de explicaciones para conductas tan reprobables como las retratadas. La financiación del tribunal de La Haya corre a cargo de las potencias occidentales, que con notable eficacia han hecho todo lo que estaba en su mano para evitar que la instancia legal que hoy nos atrae pusiera en peligro sus intereses en una zona y ante unos conflictos de relieve difícilmente rebajable. No hay motivo para pensar que, a estas alturas, semejante dependencia va a tocar a su fin.

Carlos Taibo

Extraído de Rebelión.

I expected to see a few remnants of the Yugoslavian war in the 1990’s but I have been shocked by the extent to which the town of Yukovar still bears the scars.

The story goes that in 1991 this historic town was obliterated and occupied by Serbian aggressors and the non Serbian population expelled and put in concentration camps.  Re integration and reconstruction started in 1997 but from what I can see it is going very slowly.

The weather was aptly desolate as I entered the town passing multiple land mine signs ominously protruding from fields and woods.

Shells of buildings line the streets bearing random and different sized holes. Wooden frames still hanging from windows and burnt wooden roof beams look ready to collapse. It did not feel right taking any photos of the buildings where I know many hundreds of people were killed especially in front of local people. With discretion I wanted to make sure I don’t forget and personally document what damage war can cause to both people and infrastructure and that it does not end when the TV cameras turn another direction.

I have a great respect for the resilience of the people of this town with the constant reminders of pot holed streets and destroyed buildings. There is a common positive message of the importance of the young that flows through information that I read.

Vukovar, that city situated in the east of Croatia once well-developed and with a strong economy needs optimism of the young people who believe in potential of their city, those young people full of trust and eagerness to regain the power of its economy and hope in its future

The giant water tower that will remain as a war memorial is a striking reminder of Vuckovar as I leave the town passing a vast war cemetery and yet more land mine warning signs.

People’s Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 150 dinars

year: 1962

reptile: snake – Coluber leopardinus

In 2007 we went to Ljubljana in Slovenia and visited lovely Lake Bled in the Julian Alps.  The local bus passed out of the city and into the countryside and passed through green meadows flanked by snow capped mountains, vivid green fields surrounding semi Alpine villages with traditional farmhouses and churches.  Finally, after about an hour and twenty minutes on the efficient little bus we pulled into Bled and disembarked into the tourist town and the sunshine.  We planned to walk around the lake but before we started we found a terrace bar for refreshments and debated the alternatives of clockwise or anti-clockwise (a bit like choosing a route around the M25) and we both agreed that anti-clockwise for some unknown reason seemed preferable.

Soon we started our expedition around the lake and set off as planned.  The water was a pleasant turquoise, crystal clear and full of lazy fish resting under the shade of the trees and presumably appreciating and enjoying the fact that fishing here is strictly forbidden.  Quite by chance we spotted something unusual sitting on a rock by the side of the water and upon investigation were surprised to see a Red Eared Terrapin.  I tried to get close but this frightened it and it jumped into the water and swam away.  And then we saw another.  Red Eared Terrapins are not a natural species to the Europe, but have become common due to widespread release of imported pets by the public once it is realised that terrapins in captivity need a lot of care, as they can live to over forty years and they are aggressive, impart a painful bite, and become increasingly difficult to look after.  After they are released into the wild they can grow quite large and can reach the size of a dinner plate and become a real nuisance, chomping their way through native species: fish, newts, toads, frogspawn, dragonfly larvae and, possibly, the occasional young duck.

The water looked inviting so we decided that we would hire a boat and row to the island in the lake with a church.  It had been quite some time since I had been in charge of a boat and my rowing skills were a bit rusty when we cast off and I was called upon to do the Steve Redgrave thing and negotiate our passage across the short distance to the island.  Rowing can be quite a lot more difficult than it looks and I had some early problems coordinating the actions of left and right hand oars to keep us progressing in a straight line and with Kim in charge of plotting the course I had to make frequent adjustments to maintain the right direction.  I found it most helpful however when she began to beat out the rowing tempo in the manner of a Roman galley slave-master but I was worried that I might not be able to cope physically if she decided to up the pace to Ben Hur ramming speed!

We reached the island without incident even though I was slightly concerned by the strange sloshing sound of running water at the front of the boat, I believe the correct nautical term is stern, and I began to worry for a moment that we were certain to take on water and capsize but a quick inspection after we had moored up and with some difficulty left the boat put my mind at rest that this was really quite normal.

There are ninety-nine steps to the church at the top of the island and there is a tradition that if a bridegroom can carry his bride to the top without either stopping for breath or complaining then the couple will enjoy a happy marriage.  If you are tempted to try this super-human feat my then my advice is that you get engaged to a skinny girlfriend because these steps represent seriously hard work just to get yourself to the top without any unnecessary additional burden.  Or perhaps this is simply designed to get you ready for married life.

The island was an interesting little stop-over, it was apparently created one day as a punishment by God, who stopped by one time and was irritated to find his church full of cattle because the villages were suffering from the deadly sin of sloth and had become too lazy to watch over them and had left the church door open, so he made the lake so that in future they couldn’t get across to it.  A nice story but in actual fact the lake is glacial and was formed at the end of the last ice age when water poured in behind the retreating ice.

We left the island and as Kim was convinced that rowing a boat was a straightforward process and that I was simply an incompetent oarsman she decided to take responsibility for the return journey.  She was no better than me of course but I didn’t complain because I was enjoying sitting back in boat enjoying the warm sunshine and the slightly curious meandering route back to the shore.  She did however make a perfect docking procedure and we completed our walk around the lake stopping on route for a pizza and a beer at a bar with a raised terrace and a good view over the lake and after that we completed our circumnavigation of the water and caught the bus back to Ljubljana.

People’s Federative Republic of YUGOSLAVIA

stamp: 30 dinars

year: 1962

amphibian: frog – Rana ridibunda

Admittedly, I have been highly critical of contemporary conservatism’s caustic critiques of President Obama and the Democrats. I have even claimed that the level of vitriol directed at Obama is to some extent historically unprecedented.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Recently in Kosovo, an 11-foot statue of Bill Clinton was unveiled to honor our 42nd president. Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians were celebrating Clinton’s role in launching NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that saved their lives and culture from the attempted ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Serbians. As some chanted “USA!,” “USA!,” Clinton was honored as a hero.

The attention on President Clinton’s good deed—which, of course, was also America’s good deed—was not prominently featured on right-wing media outlets. All of which made me start to remember the days of the Clinton administration, most of which were filled with endless attacks on Bill and Hillary emanating from people I considered to be my ideological allies at the time.

I don’t want to go into all of the lurid details, so I will just cite a couple of passages that sort of bring back the flavor of those times:

Timothy Noah, writing a review of former conservative David Brock’s, Blinded By The Right, for Slate in March of 2002, said:

We know, well before picking up Brock’s book, that an appallingly well-financed hard right was obsessed with smearing Clinton, and that a large proportion of Clinton’s hard-right accusers failed to conform to hard-right notions about morality, being either adulterers, homosexuals, or begetters of aborted fetuses. We know further that Clinton was placed deliberately into a perjury trap, whereupon he committed perjury.

Senator Al Franken (take that Rush Limbaugh!) wrote in his book, Lies (And The Lying Liars That Tell Them):

…did you know that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian? And that, despite her homosexuality, she was having an affair with Vince Foster? Who then had to be murdered to cover up Whitewater? And did you know that Foster’s execution was only one small part of a killing spree that claimed nearly forty lives, including those of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and the wife of an Arkansas state trooper who apparently didn’t “get the message”? And did you know that Clinton, to finance his own gargantuan cocaine habit, had struck a deal with the CIA and the Contras to smuggle duffel bags filled with coke into Arkansas?

If you didn’t, you weren’t reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the American Spectator, or the Washington Times.

Reading these short summaries of the 1990s reminded me of some things I had forgotten, like how fervently publications like the American Spectator had attacked Clinton, and then how those unfounded attacks made it into the mainstream media, sort of like how today some of the nonsense on Fox “News” makes it into the New York Times. Conservatives learned in the 1990s that if you throw enough dook at the wall, some of it will eventually stick.

Franken also reminded me of just how disrespectful conservatives were of the office of the presidency, as they employed epithets for Clinton like: “scumbag” (Rep. Dan Burton from Indiana), “sociopath” (Craig Shirley), “perpetual preener” and “rapist “(George Will), “craven miscreant” (Michelle Malkin).

Additionally, Franken reminded me of the little publication, The Clinton Chronicles, which attempted to link the Clintons to “dozens of murders.” According to Franken, The Clinton Chronicles sold over 100,000 copies, “thanks in large part to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who cofinanced, publicized, and distributed the video…“

Snopes.com had to begin “The Clinton Body Count,” as the bodies of people killed by Bill Clinton were starting to pile up—the last count was “close to fifty.”

Damn! How could I have forgotten that?

So far, Sean Hannity hasn’t had anyone on his program accusing Barack Obama of murdering one of his cabinet members (like when Sean had on Chris Ruddy, who wrote, The Strange Death of Vince Foster). But stay tuned. It’s early yet, and so far no member of Obama’s cabinet has died in a “mysterious” plane crash, so the right-wing hasn’t had much to work with.

At this point I will have to recant my previous claim, and give an edge to Bill Clinton in the Right-Wing Hate Sweepstakes. But, as conservatives continue to document Obama’s plan to destroy American culture—gifted to us by white Europeans—Obama is at least gaining on him.

(Photo credit: Valdrin Xhemaj/EPA)