Wu Wei

Another crime of Stalin

I'd never heard of this one either.

My Simferopol home yesterday noted that the Crimean Tatars' deportation by Stalin in 1944 for supposed German sympathies was not the only disaster to befall them.  Some Tatars were simply left behind on the Arbatskaya Strilka and drowned. 

She shows a map of a narrow strip of sand pretty much like the Curonian spit in Neringa, but maybe narrower, looking at her photos.



Now mass drownings have to be organised by someone, so calling it drowning is not very accurate.  Murder is actually what it is. Genocide possibly, if the numbers are high enough.  (Er, how high do they have to be? 7000 in Srebrenica is the precedent?) 

What happened to the rest is not very pretty according to Wikipedia:

All Crimean Tatars were deported en masse, in a form of collective punishment, on 18 May 1944 as special settlers to the Uzbek SSR and other distant parts of the Soviet Union. The decree "On Crimean Tatars" describes the resettlement as a very humane procedure. The reality described by the victims in their memoirs was different. 46.3% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. This event is called Sürgün in the Crimean Tatar language. Many of them were re-located to toil as indentured workers in the Soviet GULAG system.

Perhaps as well not many people live in Neringa, and the Germans had already fled, otherwise Stalin might have tried the same solution on the coast of Lithuania in 1945.

However, there are still some Tatars left, again according to Wikipedia

Today, more than 250,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea and about 150,000 remain in exile in Central Asia, mainly in Uzbekistan. There are 5,000,000 people of Crimean Tatar origin living in Turkey, descendants of those who emigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Dobruja region of Romania and Bulgaria, there are more than 27,000 Crimean Tatars: 24,000 on the Romanian side, and 3,000 on the Bulgarian side.

I was working in Kyiv in 1994, when the Crimean Tatars came back to the Crimea.  Our Deputy Minister (a rather humane character with good intentions) frequently had to go to try to solve the housing crisis their return caused.  Whether it is solved now, I am not sure.

Mistranslation of the year

From the translation of

THE SUMMARY OF THE ENERGY STRATEGY OF RUSSIA
FOR THE PERIOD OF UP TO 2020

from the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation in 2003 available here

we learn the following

Bowels’ Use and Management of the State Bowels’ Fund

The current condition of mineral and raw base of fuel-energy complex indicates
the necessity of cardinal changes in the mechanisms of reproduction of raw base of
carbohydrates. The imperfection of state control system in the sphere of
reproduction and use of strategic kinds of raw material can lead to the forced
labour-rent of the best supply, slow rates of new fields’ development, nonobservance
of projects of development, slow rates of supply preparing and other
negative tendencies, threatening the energy safety of Russia.


The main task of the public energy policy in this sphere is the reproduction of the
mineral-raw base of hydrocarbon and other fuel-energy resources and rational use
of Russian bowels for providing the stable economic development of the country.

After reading the whole section and laughing at all the unfortunate other expressions,

• long-term and half-term programs of bowels’ study,
  
• the main control functions... in the state regulation of bowels use;
• perfection of Russian legislative branch, connected with the bowels use;
  
• checking of financial state of the client when giving him right for bowels use;
  
• development of measures on the increase of economic responsibility of the bowels users

I finally puzzled out how this had come about. Somebody has found the expression "bowels of the earth".

As it's on an EU website, you would think someone at the EU might have even read it and suggested a change.

Technorati Tags: Russian energy strategy, translation

Defenders of freedom

Is there only me who has noticed that the countries in the FT survey here, which don't want to go to war with Russia, in order to defend the Baltics,   have themselves a rather poor record themselves with defending freedom? 

Or do Germany, Italy and Spain have some other explanation? 

The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine

I'm just catching up on my two week backlog of the Economist which despite Georgia's lack of a postal system still manages to arrive.  It normally arrives 5-10 days late, but the ones due immediately after the war didn't make it at all, which was a blessing as I had already bought and read them on my travels.

Sometimes reading the news a week or so later is enough to make things that would normally be past their sell by date become live again. And so it was rather unexpectedly with this book review:  Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine by Marion Nestle. 

I'm not so desperate for reading matter that I would normally bother about a book telling me how in the spring of 2007 contaminated pet food killed thousands of cats and dogs in America.  Even though my cat would probably want me to read it.  It doesn't get a very good review, but they do say it deserves a wider readership.  It seemed to be yet another story about the failure of American Regulators in cahoots with the bosses of American pet-food companies, and lack of supervision in China.

I was having a laugh about Bee's summer job last year packing organic cat and dog food.

But then I read the word melamine and looked closer.

It seems the outbreak was caused by shipments of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate from China that had been adulterated with melamine and cyanuric acid, two cheap chemicals which are rich in nitrogen.  Now doesn't that begin to sound familiar?

According to the review, the book says:

Since the usual test for protein in animal feed just measures the level of nitrogen these chemicals can be added to far more expensive feed ingredients without anyone noticing.  Both chemicals can be tolerated in small doses but  are harmful in large doses, and they are even more dangerous when combined, producing crystals in the urine and causing potentially fatal kidney damage. 

Now isn't that beginning to sound very familiar?

The review continues:

the contaminants also found their way into the human food chain, "salvaged" pet food (left over from the production process) is fed to chicken and pigs and wheat gluten also goes into feed for fish and farm animals.

Personally I have had two mild kidney infections in the last year and put it down to old age, but now I'm beginning to wonder. Perhaps I'm safer in Georgia where food is normally imported from Turkey not China.

But how come the Chinese are still getting away with melamine substituting for protein in milk products, over 18 months later. Did no one tell the Chinese, or did they not care?  And what else has got melamine in now?

Unfamiliar fruit

Life in Georgia is full of unfamiliar fruit. 

First there were the ones which looked like big black raspberries or a bit like loganberries or very big cultivated blackberries. They fell all over the pavements leaving a sticky black stain.  I decided they were mulberries.

Recently there have been some small bright red things, a bit like very small plum tomatoes but also a bit like hips.  They came and went rather quickly so I never got to try them.

Now there are these brown things a bit like acorns.  I was a bit suspicious they were really acorns, and asked the stall lady who's a friend of mine by now with my stupid questions.  No, she said they were fruit, and you could just eat them, without sugar.  Then she gave me a little bag full for a present.

They taste like apples but have a plum stone.  A bit like crab apples but not sour, just crunchy.

At the moment we also have a new crop of hazelnuts, chestnuts (which seems very early to me, since they never appear till November 5 in the UK) pomegranates and persimmons, as well as all the usual apples, pears, grapes etc.

This must be the saddest news

The Tbilisi Times (not a paper I have heard of before but it can be found here) reports:

17 Georgian unknown soldiers were buried in a communal grave in Tbilisi on August 30. Shalva Dolidze, Commander of 41st battalion of the 4th brigade, was also buried beside the communal grave.
The report says that "some" of the 145 Georgian soldiers killed in the war were unidentified. 
The only way that I can imagine that these days soldiers are not identified is that there was not much of them left.  But surely someone must be looking for them? 

Civil.ge reports the numbers here:

The officially registered number of Georgian citizens killed during active hostilities is 370, as of September 15, according to information posted on the Georgian Defense Ministry's website.

The civilian death toll is 188; 168 Defense Ministry personnel are listed as dead and 14 from the Interior Ministry.

According to the Ministry of Healthcare and Social Welfare, the number of civilians killed in the war may change after the Georgian side gains access to and inspects the areas currently occupied by Russian troops.

In an earlier report:

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch (HRW) representatives said on September 11 that civilians killed in South Ossetia numbered “fewer than 100.”

Tatiana Lokshina, a Russian researcher for HRW who visited the region, said trips to a hospital and cemetery, and conversations with residents had failed to corroborate claims by Russian and South Ossetian authorities that thousands of civilians had been killed in the region, The Associated Press reported.

Initially, Russian officials claimed that 2,000 civilians had been killed in South Ossetia. In late August, a representative of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office said 133 deaths had been officially registered at that time.

I always thought it was suspicious that the Russian came out almost immediately with the number of 1400 killed, but only hours later raised it to 1500. Almost like they had a press release already.

Has anyone seen recent figures for the number of refugees now in North Ossetia or how many Russian soldiers were killed?

Update on family life

Well it's a farflung family.

Sloph is off to Moscow for three months on a language course, after finishing Oxford.  Now she has to decide what to do in life.  Our family never just decides to buckle down and get a 9-5 job.



Her  brief spot as a guest author on my blog during the war has not convinced her to start her own blog, unfortunately.

Bee spent the summer interrailing in South East Europe.  You can read all about it on her new blog Allbran here.  So far she has only got as far as Prague: Checking in - Czeching out, doing what all British young people do in Prague: drink.  Not all the details are the ones a mother wants to hear, but at least I know what she is up to from the blog.  Wait for further details on Istanbul, Tirana, Pristina.  While I was blogging on the war, she was busy visiting Castle Bran: war what war?

Of course these days when Oxford University proctors snoop on Facebook to see what pranks their students are up to, you never know what university admissions tutors use to select their students.  But who am I to tell her what to write.

Questions of nationality: Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia

A couple of weeks ago, the Georgian Times published an article entitled "Demographic Information on the Abkhazian and South Ossetian Populations".

The data seems to be based on government (Tsarist Russian and the USSR) censuses so we can assume the figures are correct apart from the author's typos, (and possibly mine) and any errors and changes in the way the censuses were conducted and nationalities classified.

With those caveats, I have produced the following tables.  The article was written in the old Soviet way, making lists of the figures so that no patterns are visible. 

First Abkhazia.

At first I could understand that Georgians were miffed when Abkhazia broke away as I had always thought that a lot of Georgians lived there.  Then after reading a bit more and finding that Abkhazia had been an autonomous region of Georgia under the USSR, I could understand perhaps that they wanted to continue with some form of self-rule. Independence is catching, even if it isn't always economically viable.  Look at the debates about whether Scotland could afford to be independent from England.  The general feeling is that they missed the boat and should have declared independence when gas and oil were discovered in the North Sea.  Now it is nearly all gone, they are  a bit late, even though they can get lots of money from the EU.

Here is how Abkhazia developed as far as nationalities are concerned, according to this article (figures for the Abkhazian Autonomous Republic within Georgia):

		Year
Georgia	1800	1832	1865
Abkhazians	52,000	56,600	60,000

No figures provided for Georgians to compare with that.

Abkhazia	1886	1926	1939	1959	1970	1989
Abkhazians	28,320	55,918	56,200	61,200	77,300	93,300
Georgians	34,806	67,494	91,900	158,200	199,600	239,900
Armenians		25,677	49,700	64,400	74,900	76,500
Russians		12,553	60,200	86,700	92,900	74,900
Greeks		14,045
Not identified*	5,647	25,329	53,900	34,200	42,340
Total	68,773	201,016	311,900	404,700	487,040	484,600**

*calculated from the total minus the rest.
** total of the above, no total provided in the article.

Leaving aside the big differences in the two sets of figures for 1865 and 1866 and possible dispersal of Abkhazians in Turkey, the result seems pretty clear that most of the population of Abkhazia has been Georgian for a considerable time.  Of course Abkhazians may have not bothered to classify themselves as such in the USSR, Georgian being good enough at the time.

But from those figures (admittedly produced by Georgians) it's pretty clear why Georgians lay claim to Abkhazia.  Also it's clear why there were so many IDPs from Abkhazia, and why they were still not absorbed into Georgia proper, if the government didn't do much to help.

Now South Ossetia.

Georgia	1800	1832	1886	1897	1926	1939
South Ossetians	29,300	32,300	71,000	81,500	113,298	148,680

Georgia	1959	1970	1979	1989	2002
South Ossetians	141,200	150,200	160,500	164,100	38,028

In 1989, South Ossetia, which only had the status of oblast' in Georgia, demanded unification with North Ossetia. In December 1990, the Georgian parliament declared South Ossetia no longer autonomous (sic), and began suppression of newspapers and bans on demonstrations. During the resulting fighting, according to the article more than 100,000 Ossetians fled from Georgia and South Ossetia to North Ossetia. The article says 10,268 of the South Ossetians now reside in Tbilisi.  Which then raises the question of how many south Ossetians lived in Georgia and how many actually in South Ossetia during these years?  And again, how many have reclassified themselves? 

That leaves around 28,000 recently in South Ossetia who have either fled north or south again, or stayed in their villages.  Claims of genocide have generally died down on both sides.

Of course nationality can be rather subjective question.  In Istria, a peninsula containing Slovenes, Croats and Italians, people have responded to the nationality question in various ways over the decades.  Many say they are Istrian first and anything else second.  When fascist Italy took over Istria, it might have been politic to say Italian, and when the Yugoslav partisans came back, then Yugoslav was perhaps more useful.  These days, when Croatia is not quite in the EU, European might be the best answer.

tags: nationality question, georgia, south ossetia, abkhazia, istria

Mistakes on both sides?

Finally, a partly convincing reason why the Georgians didn't close the Roki tunnel in the war as their first  move.

According to this assessment on EurasiaNet of Georgian strategy, the Georgians (or perhaps just Saakashvili) didn't think the Russians would risk their military reputations after the defeat in Afghanistan and the ongoing war in Chechnya. 

"We expected that the Russians would fight with the hands of the separatists".

Georgian soldiers who fought in South Ossetia told EurasiaNet that they thought their initial mission in the breakaway region was to stop separatist attacks on Georgian villages in the area. On the morning of August 8, the Georgian government cited shelling on two Georgian villages as the reason for its decision to move on Tskhinvali.

"Our goal was to put an end to fighting in the area  and take control," said one senior lieutenant from Georgia's 3,500-strong 4th Brigade, a unit that bore the brunt of the fighting on August 8. "Nobody in the army expected a war with Russia."

The realization that Georgian forces were not up against South Ossetian militia, but an opponent who could vastly outnumber the Georgian army in numbers and firepower came as a shock, sources say. "The main thing is that the scope of the threat was underestimated, while our own combat capabilities were overestimated," commented one defense ministry source, who asked not to be named.

That seems very strange.  Even I knew that Russian troops had been carrying out exercises in the Caucasus in July; that Russian railway troops had repaired the railway in Abkhazia and there had been a build-up of Russian peacekeepers in the two breakaway regions, as well as "North Ossetian militias" probably from Kadyrov the Russian backed "ruler" in Chechnya.

According to the Georgian interviewed,

The (Russian) tanks (arrived) from the southern mouth of the Roki tunnel, a border passage that provided the conduit for Russian forces and materiel. The Georgians’ failure to seal off the tunnel has been repeatedly cited as a critical strategic error. Georgian officers were aware of the tunnel’s significance, but they lacked the force to seal it. "Had we had a chance to destroy the Roki tunnel we would’ve done it," said Deputy Defense Minister Kutelia. "The tunnel is tucked under a rock and it is very hard to destroy or block it unless you get really close."

So that's it then.  Saakashvili thought he would go and give a few South Ossetians a bloody nose (as Putin would say) with his new American trained army, and found he had walked into a trap containing Russian tanks which had coincidentally just been waiting to come through the tunnel.  And nobody thought about bombing the tunnel, rather than blowing it up?
 

On the other hand, there are plenty of articles eg here (some improvement on Chechnya but poor coordination, and poor equipment) and here (Georgians had a good plan, but Russians responded more quickly with overwhelming force, was one view; another that there was a failure of Russian forces to use air power to knock out key Georgian institutions and especially Georgian artillery) about the performance of the Russian army in this war, which don't make happy reading either.   The seond article (from the NY Times) concludes

there is a very real danger that the war between Russia and Georgia will drag on, with the possibility that the United States will resupply Georgia or provide it with various kinds of technologies that Russian forces are not currently capable of neutralizing except at the cost of far greater losses than they have suffered up to now

Well so far that hasn't happened, though Putin has produced a much larger budget for re-equipping the armed forces with more Russian equipment. But will that solve the problem?

I have only the following hearsay stories to add.

The Russian soldiers are so badly supported that they have been begging for food (reported by people working for the UN, sorting out emergency assistance).  No wonder they are looting.  It's clearly one thing to get tanks through the Roki tunnel and another to get supplies.  Presumably Russian soldiers are just billeted on the local population.  Probably the South Ossetians were not so pleased to have to feed the army as well as cope with war.  No wonder they took some it out on the Georgian villages. If you are going to make a habit of invading other countries, especially those without railways, then you are going to have to develop your logistics.  The railway troops are not going to be able to do it.  There can't have been many railways in Afghanistan before it was bombed back to the stone age either. 

The Russian soldiers who broke into the well-equipped Senaki barracks were caught on the closed circuit TV cameras.  When they saw the stocks and equipment which the Georgian soldiers had, they became really angry.  No wonder they were reluctant to withdraw until they had managed to cart it all away. That's going to give them something to think about when they get back over the border.

Anyway, like the rest of us capitalists, the Russian government has other things on its mind at the moment, dealing with that phenomenon pointed out by Marxism Leninism: the crisis of capitalism.  Let's hope it is just an "ordinary" crisis of business confidence rather than the terminal "historic crisis of capitalism" when all the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system cause it to collapse. 


Technorati Tags: war, Georgia, Russia, crisis of capitalism,

Menu bad translations

These are always hilarious, but Neeka has some specially good ones here from a restaurant menu in Kyiv.

I can't wait to try "narrow-minded bried mushrooms"  (actually it's not even spell-checked and has come out as narrov-mindecl)

It's anyone's guess what these are:

• seat-fich
• Sheat-bish Steak
• Fisher cheat-fish

Even the photos don't help to identify things. 

I seem to remember I've been there, and this restaurant might actually be one of a chain.  So you'd think they could manage to find one competent English speaker or a dictionary. 

On the other hand perhaps they attract customers this way.

Technorati Tags: menu, translations, Kiev