Wu Wei

Saakashvili still hasn't visited Kutaisi after 13 days

His disastrous order to blow up the war memorial in Kutaisi, ignoring local and national feeling, resulted in the death of a mother and daughter who were hit quite a long way away by large chunks of flying concrete.

He rushed home from the Copenhagen summit, but still hasn't gone near Kutaisi after 13 days.  

A new news service Georgiamediacenter is enjoying its character assassination of him.

See the video of the demolition here or perhaps don't, as You Tube warns you it is too gory.

Lithuanian food goes international: potato pica

Foreigners don't have much very complementary to say about Lithuanian food.  When I am asked about it, I usually say it's 1001 ways to cook potato, many of which should be banned.

I now get Lithuanian adverts when I sit down with Facebook, which are a good way of catching up on what is going on.

I shouldn't have been surprised when I was presented with a recipe for potatoes, should I?  But potato pizza?  I know Lithuanians are big eaters of pizza, but I have never seen anywhere in the world a recipe for potato pizza.

 

Skanaus!

And just in case you need the recipe:  here it is from the popular mothers' website www.mama.lt.

RIP Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant

It seems I got so excited about the view of the fireworks on New Year's Eve that I never posted this.

Tonight at midnight, Ignalina NNP finally closes. 

From January 1998 to March 2003 (long before I started blogging), my work in Lithuania was mainly about persuading Lithuania to lose its self-appointed title as the country with most nuclear power and manage the energy sector without it.

Ignalina NPP has two Chernobyl type reactors, which Lithuania agreed to shut down at a later date, in exchange with financial help for safety improvements intended to be temporary.  During the period of my work, the government continually wriggled out of the deadlines.  Finally it made a bargain where the EU could pay for most of the decommissioning, and Lithuania would commit to definite dates for closure of each unit (2005  and 2009). 

Without this bargain, Lithuania would not have been able to join the EU.
The story of the negotiations is one which will have to wait for another day.

2005 came and the first unit went.  Nobody missed this unit much, as it was not needed, since electrical demand had shrunk after independence and Belarus had stopped paying for its imports of electricity. Nevertheless, still there were suggestions that the second unit should not be closed until it had been replaced by a new safe nuclear power plant.

Now Ignalina NPP is really going to close and there are few that will mourn it, even less people will panic about the lights going out, and nobody will be surprised that the price of electricity will go up, even if it won't double, like all the scare stories.

But has the government taken the intervening time to prepare for closure?  Not really.  They have not succeeded to get either funding or an agreement with neighbouring countries to share the cost of a new plant.  Consequently, electricity will come from a rehabilitated old gas fired power station, until someone does make a sensible decision.

The power sector experts in Lithuania do  not generally favour this solution, but since nuclear stations cost a lot, and take a lot of time to build, there's not much choice.

Traditionally the experts have worried about whether Russia will cut the gas off, if gas-fired electricity generation is chosen.  They should now not be worrying IF the gas will be cut off, but WHEN it will not be exported from Russia.  Russia's gas production is falling, and little new production is anticipated, so it simply doesn't have enough gas production to meet all its future domestic consumption and its contracted exports to Europe especially when all the new pipelines it wants are added.  Hence why it is making offers that the 'stans' can't refuse to take the gas off their hands and to control the routes by which it reaches Europe.

So Lithuania, look sharp before the lights go out next time.

However, it's not long since the Economist led with the same head line for Britain: "how long till the lights go out.

With very similar reasons.

Albright Deployed Snake, Missile Pins Against Putin, Hussein - Bloomberg.com

I haven't blogged much recently, so I'm just editing some of the draft posts I stashed away, for the silly season.

Albright Deployed Snake, Missile Pins Against Putin, Hussein - Bloomberg.com.

After being called an "unparalleled serpent" by the Iraqi press in 1994, Madeleine Albright met the country's officials wearing a snake brooch.

“Before long, and without intending it, I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal,” Albright writes in her book, “Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomatic Jewel Box” (HarperCollins). Used at the right time, the symbol “can add warmth or needed edge to a relationship.”

Hot air balloons in winter

Hot air balloons are a common sight on summer evenings in Vilnius, but I never expected to see one in winter.

But my new desk with its view from the sixth floor over the river meant I could spot this hardy soul. I suppose there are thermals even at -3oC. 

  

It's nicely positioned just over the green domes of the Russian Orthodox Church.  It looks like it's riding on the smoke from the power station (or perhaps it's the cooling towers), though I'm sure that's just an illusion.

Christmas in Vilnius

Not had much time for blogging over Christmas, but Sloph took the photos here: 

Happy New Year to you all.  2009 seems to have been generally horrible for most people I know, so here's hoping it gets better.

Berlin May Recall Envoy Amid Charges He’s Too Soft on Russia | News | The Moscow Times

Berlin May Recall Envoy Amid Charges He’s Too Soft on Russia | News | The Moscow Times.

We are all wondering what the result of appointing a German as Energy Commissioner.

The exchanges of senior personnel between ministries and RWE and EON is well known.  So no doubt we can expect to see more Germans in DG TREN.

Shall we see Gazprom experts advising on competition?

Industrial killing

An interesting but worrying article on Holocaust Prevention from the International Crisis Group here

The Holocaust was a minutely organized and completely structured -- not to mention disturbingly well-documented -- genocide, miles away from the messy realities of their countries. They could look at the camp and the gas chambers and recognize nothing familiar. In fact, the visit may have only confirmed their belief that their countries were incapable of mass atrocities, when all they are really incapable of is the industrialized method.

The passage of time and the different cultural context of mid-20th-century Central Europe only added to the distance, making the events of that era seem even less familiar to African, Latin American, and Asian participants living in 2009. It is harder to identify parallels with one's own culture, harder to see the signs and harder to admit any similarities. It allows a psychological distance from anything that might occur in their countries.

Of course, this is not the intention of the seminar organizers, the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation's Raphael Lemkin Center for Genocide Prevention and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The goals of this unique and admirable project were, first, to train government policymakers in the latest genocide and conflict prevention and intervention strategies. Second, the organizers are seeking to help these participants build an international network of diplomats and others who understand the warning signs and can act to help halt disaster before it strikes.

Seminar instructors, like me, deliberately pointed out the universal potentials, stressing the similarities between the Holocaust and later genocides and other mass atrocities. Still, I sensed both organizers and speakers had a bit of a tough time reaching some participants. Perhaps it is simply too hard to compete with the place-specific impressions one gets upon visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I did naturally talk to some participants about this -- about how what they saw resonated with them and their own countries' situations and potentials -- but it was rather unsatisfying.

This issue goes far beyond a couple dozen participants in a seminar in Poland. I suspect too many people in the wider international community still only recognize genocide in this one most specific sense. They are always looking for Birkenau -- expecting industrialized killing rather than seeing genocide the way it unfolds today. They ignore the evidence that in the right environment, simple machetes can be just as effective as rail networks and gas chambers.

No answers to the question "how do you turn people with machetes into a killing machine for hundreds of thousands, to achieve killing on an industrial scale?" But clearly it can be done too, and not just as a one off.