16 - 22 March 2004

22 March 2004 Dozens killed in the province’s worst outbreak of violence since 1999.

PRISTINA, Kosovo--In the worst spasm of violence in Kosovo in five years, violence among Albanians and Serbs, UN police and KFOR troops on 17-18 March resulted in up to 28 deaths, more than 850 injuries, and the destruction of several hundred houses and 30 Orthodox churches, monasteries, schools, and other public buildings throughout Kosovo. More than 3,500 Serbs fled their homes in the Serbian province that has been run by the UN since 1999.

Police arrested more than 160 people. According to a UN spokesperson, more than 50,000 people took part in 33 riots before tensions eased on 19 March.

Anti-Albanian and anti-Muslim demonstrations broke out in several Serbian cities, including the capital, Belgrade, where an Islamic community center was attacked and set afire by a mob. A historic mosque was burnt down in Nis, close to the Serbian-Kosovo border. Mobs in Belgrade also tried to attack the Albanian and some other embassies but were stopped by police.

The clashes in Kosovo broke out when Albanians protested the drowning of two children in the Ibar river on 17 March. The only eyewitness, a 13-year-old boy, told Albanian-language media that on that day several Albanian children were chased into the river by two young Serbs, who unleashed a dog on them. The incident took place in the village of Caber, near Mitrovica. A third child is missing and presumed drowned.

When the news broke in Mitrovica, Albanians in the southern part of the divided city went out in protest. Entering the northern sector where Serbs are the majority, they clashed with Serbs and with KFOR troops and police of UNMIK, the UN agency that administers Kosovo. At least three deaths and more than 300 injuries resulted.

Soon, thousands of Albanians gathered in the streets of the provincial capital, Pristina, and headed for another trouble spot, the village of Caglavica, three kilometers away, where Serbs had been blocking the highway to protest the 15 March wounding of a Serb teenager, allegedly by Albanian gunmen.

The angry Albanians torched several Serbian houses and police cars until UNMIK police and KFOR used tear gas to disperse the crowd.

THE VIOLENCE SPREADS

Similar scenes as in Mitrovica broke out in several other towns in the province. Serbian enclaves were attacked in Pristina, Kosovo Polje, Obilic, Djakovica, Prizren, Pec, Klina, and Bijelo Polje. Albanian protestors clashed with police and KFOR troops and set fire to Orthodox churches and Serb-owned houses.

In the evening of 18 March, Kosovo Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi and other members of his cabinet spoke with Albanian protesters near Caglavica. Rexhepi promised that if they dispersed, the highway would be open within hours. The protesters went home, and the next day KFOR unblocked the road.

During the two days of unrest, the Kosovo government and other Albanian political leaders strongly urged all those involved to stop fomenting violence. They said that the continuation of violent acts put the overall security of Kosovo at risk and raised questions about the future of the disputed province.

“We voice our deepest concern about the large number of victims and wounded during the recent turmoil. The government strongly condemns the destruction of churches and monasteries that are the cultural and religious heritage of Kosovo. The government also condemns the destruction of houses of citizens, regardless of their ethnic background,” Rexhepi said.

The Kosovo government said it would open a special fund to repair all private, religious, and cultural buildings destroyed during the wave of turmoil.

President Ibrahim Rugova told a press conference that the latest violence worked against independence for the province. “We condemn violent protests, which resulted in deaths and injuries. We ask the citizens of Kosovo to stop protesting and get back to normal life. These violent protests damage the image of Kosovo and are against the process of freedom, independence, and democracy in Kosovo,” the president said.

“Kosovo, NATO, and the West have not fought for a Kosovo only for Albanians or for a violent Kosovo. Violence is not the way to solve problems, violence only creates problems,” said Hashim Thaci, the former political head of the Kosovo Liberation Army and now the president of the Democratic Party of Kosovo.

The head of the UN mission to Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, said that violence was the worst possible message that Kosovo could send to the international community. “The whole world is watching how the people of Kosovo behave with each other and with the international community five years after the international community at great expense intervened to stop the violence,” Holkeri said.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer pinned the blame for the unrest squarely on the Albanian majority in Kosovo.

“If Kosovo Albanians think that by orchestrating this violence, they will get what they want, then they are very wrong,” Scheffer told the BBC. “My message is that the people who are organizing this violence will lose the international community’s trust."

HOLKERI: NO ETHNIC CLEANSING

The officials of the main Albanian political parties say that the recent events are a result of accumulated problems, which the international institutions failed to solve. They accused UNMIK of being too slow in resolving problems. According to them, UNMIK has neither undertaken measures to prevent the outbreak of the revolt, nor has it ensured territorial integrity of Kosovo, as it has allowed Serb gangs to enter Kosovo.

Kosovo newspaper publisher Veton Surroi wrote in Koha Ditore that for the citizens of Mitrovica, the bloody protests were just another episode in a situation that was anything but normal.

“The inhabitants of this town are constantly being told that Kosovo is progressing and that work is being done on solving their problems. So a silent consensus was created over the last five years that you can live even like this. The citizens could not do anything, and politicians mentioned Mitrovica only in their electoral campaigns," Surroi said.

Holkeri said on 21 March, two days after the clashes ended, that the situation had improved markedly. Holkeri rejected the use of the term “ethnic cleansing” by NATO’s commander for South-East Europe, Gregory Johnson.

“Those words are too strong,” he said. “There are plenty of Kosovo Serbs who have not accepted to move away from their home areas.

“Unfortunately there has been a great deal of damage and many Serbian houses have been destroyed, together with a couple of Serbian Orthodox churches," Holkeri said.


For more articles on Kosovo--as well as related Internet resources, books, and music--visit our Serbia and Montenegro country page, at http://yugoslavia.tol.cz.

Serbia: Out for Vengeance
Will Belgrade see the outbreak of violence in the province as a signal to change tactics on Kosovo?

BELGRADE, Serbia and Montenegro--At least 3,600 Serbs displaced, 30 Serbian churches destroyed, seven Serbian villages and some 350 houses torched: this was the result of what NATO is calling a wave of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It was three days of explosive violence by Albanian mobs that left as many as 28 people dead and more than 800 injured.

The “brutal, orchestrated, and simultaneous” violence, as one NATO commander in Kosovo called it, has all but destroyed the idea of a multiethnic society in the province and revealed the failure of the local UN administration and NATO security strategy.

The behavior by crowds of angry Albanians was “in reality ethnic cleansing, which must not continue. That is why we have come to Kosovo,” said Admiral Gregory Johnson, NATO commander for South-Eastern Europe, speaking in Pristina on 18 March, the day after violence broke out.

On 17 March, Albanian TV reported that three Albanian children had drowned in the Ibar river, near the northern Kosovo town of Kosovska Mitrovica, after being chased by Serb children. This version of the story, which was based on an interview with a fourth Albanian child, “was never corroborated nor confirmed," said the UN's chief of police for northern Kosovo, Barry Polin.

Thousands of Albanians didn't need anything more than the child's account. After hearing the story, angry crowds crossed the Ibar river into northern, Serb-populated Kosovska Mitrovica and began clashing with the local population. UN and NATO forces were outnumbered and unprepared.

In dozens of Serb localities, as well as multiethnic towns and villages, thousands of Albanians went on a rampage, burning houses and churches, and attacking Serbs.

UN police and NATO KFOR troops were seemingly stunned at the intensity of the violence, as the mobs turned on them and began destroying their vehicles. Throughout the first day and night of violence, UN and KFOR officials acknowledged several times that they had lost control of the situation in several regions of Kosovo. Clashes between Albanians and international troops throughout the provinces lasted for hours.

By early Thursday, the situation seemed to have calmed down somewhat. Then, a second wave of attacks began.

“You have 10 minutes to leave or you will all be killed,” Albanian police officers told Serbs living in the town of Obilic, shortly before Albanian mobs began storming houses and setting them ablaze. One man whose house was attacked, Nikola Stolic, spoke to TOL by telephone from Pristina, from which he had been evacuated along with hundreds of other Serbs by KFOR.

“We just had time to grab our documents. We barely escaped being lynched,” Stolic said.

This pattern repeated itself in dozens of other localities in Kosovo. In the Serb village of Svinjare, near Mitrovica, members of the international press corps witnessed the burning of all 130 houses in the village, with Albanian flags left waving on some charred remains. Albanian youths were seen looting what was left untorched, and many domestic animals were butchered and left lying in the streets.

Churches were also a prime target. Some thirty Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries were burned or razed during the attacks. Among them, jewels of medieval architecture, such as the 11th-century Bogorodica Ljeviska, the 14th-century St. Archangel in Prizren, and the 14th-century Devic monastery in the central Drenica region. All six of Prizren’s orthodox churches--home to the medieval Serb, Tzar Dusan--were destroyed.

According to the UN, 24 people died and 831 people were injured during the three days of violence. More than 50 KFOR troops and about 100 police were injured. Seven Serb villages and more than 350 houses were burned. In Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, KFOR evacuated every Serb--all the families living in the only Serb building in town and the head of St. Nicholas church, who was found hiding in the basement of the burning church building.

INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION

Things began to quiet down when NATO officials announced on 19 March that they were sending 2,000 special anti-riot troops to join the 17,000 KFOR soldiers already in Kosovo.

General Alberto Primicerj, the Italian KFOR commander for western Kosovo, was the first to characterize the violence as coordinated.

“I believe that a plan to put Kosovo on fire and [in] blood was ready for some time,” Primicerj told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

Primicerj’s counterpart in northern Kosovo, General Xavier Michel, said the attacks were “brutal, synchronized, simultaneous, and spread in the entire zone under my control.”

In Pristina, Admiral Johnson also stressed the orchestrated nature of the violence and said the crowd had engaged in ethnic cleansing.

In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said he deplored the attacks on peacekeeping troops and warned that the violence could damage the province's chances for a stable future. "This latest outbreak of violence and senseless loss of life will only make it more difficult for Kosovo to meet the standards that the international community has laid down for the creation of a stable, multiethnic, and democratic Kosovo. No one except the extremists can hope to gain from such violence.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladmir Putin issued his strongest statement on the Balkans in years, calling for “strong international reaction” and an end to the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.

In Strasbourg, the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Peter Schieder, said he was shocked by the attitude of Albanian leaders in Kosovo who “did not condemn clearly the anti-Serb violence.”

In Belgrade, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica called the attacks a “pogrom.”

And during a memorial ceremony for the victims in Belgrade, Archbishop Amfilohije said, “To talk about an interethnic conflict in Kosovo is a big hypocritical lie. What is happening in Kosovo is called a pogrom against a nation and its history.”

Faced with near-universal criticism for keeping silent during the violence, Albanian leaders in Kosovo publicly condemned the mob's actions three days after it began.

“We condemn firmly the acts of unprecedented destruction of cultural and religious patrimony,” said Bajram Rexhepi, prime minister of Kosovo.

Hashim Thaci, head of the ultranationalist Democratic Party of Kosovo, said, “Those who torched Serb houses and Orthodox houses are nothing but criminals who should not be tolerated."

DID THE UN FAIL?

The outbreak of violence has refocused the international spotlight on the region, certainly, but it has also riveted the Serbian people, media, and political leaders.

Some 220,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians have fled Kosovo since 1999. Between 80,000 and 120,000 are believed to be still living in the province, mostly in the north, but some live in various enclaves throughout the province. Their movement in these areas is extremely limited.

Kostunica has promised to take a firm diplomatic action to secure a new “institutional arrangement” that would give Serbs in Kosovo more autonomy and protection.

Belgrade-based political analyst Predrag Simic said the idea of a multiethnic Kosovo is “mortally touched” by the fact that the main violence occurred in places that were theoretically multiethnic. The only areas in Kosovo where Serbs remain are those where “they constitute a compact community,” he noted.

The head of the Forum for Interethnic Relations, Dusan Janjic, said the UN has failed in Kosovo “because their policy was not based on reality, but on [the] fiction of formulas such as a ‘multiethnic society.’ ” Serbs and Albanians are now so divided that the international community needs to find a new “institutional reorganization” to protect the Serb community, he added, based on a model of Bosnia or Cyprus.

Jovan Teokarevic, of the University of Belgrade, said Serbian political leaders should use this opportunity to redefine their strategy on Kosovo now that the UN and NATO strategy has failed.

The international community, he said, “should put back under its control most of the authority it has passed on to the local institutions” in the last couple years.

--by Sasha Grubanovic

For more articles from Serbia and Kosovo, visit our Serbia and Montenegro country file, at http://yugoslavia.tol.cz.


Georgia: A Second Rose Revolution in Bud?
Saakashvili faces down the leader of Ajaria in an attempt to nurture a late flowering of November’s 'rose revolution.'

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia--Brinkmanship is becoming the stock-in-trade of Georgia’s new president, Mikheil Saakashvili. In November, he led tens of thousands of Georgians from the streets and into Tbilisi’s parliament building, facing down government troops and removing President Eduard Shevardnadze. He now appears to be using the same tactics to remove the leader of the largely independent region of Ajaria, Aslan Abashidze. The rewards of last week’s victory over Abashidze in the largest crisis that Saakashvili has faced since becoming president in January could be a crushing victory in parliamentary elections on 28 March--and even the ouster of one of the most powerful politicians in Georgian politics over the past decade.

Long before he became president, Saakashvili had made it clear that he regarded Ajaria’s leader as “a medieval feudal lord” and his transformation of the region’s autonomous status into de facto independence from Georgia as unacceptable. Abashidze has for years withheld taxes and customs duties from the central government in Tbilisi and has been pushing for the region to be made a free-trade zone. Opposition has been stifled, international election monitors have been refused entry, and these unmonitored elections have returned figures showing over 90 percent support for Abashidze and his backers.

Last week’s confrontation between Abashidze and Saakashvili had been brewing for weeks. Georgian prosecutors, who have been investigating the finances of relatives of Shevardnadze and others in the former political elite, have started to turn their attention to the business activities of relatives of Abashidze. In Ajaria, opposition activists and a journalist had been attacked and newspapers closed. Attempts by Georgian politicians to campaign in the region had also been thwarted.

When even Georgian Finance Minister Zurab Noghaideli was detained on 13 March in Ajaria, Saakashvili responded by heading for Ajaria the next day. Denouncing an “armed mutiny” by Abashidze, he promised “I will take control over Ajaria.” He found his path blocked by armored personnel carriers and armed supporters of Abashidze. After an impromptu rally on the border, Saakashvili gave Abashidze 24 hours to acknowledge Tbilisi’s authority by disarming "illegal armed units," and, to underline his demand, he ordered Georgian troops to cut off roads into Ajaria, the air force to halt plane service into the region, and the army to go on high alert.

Abashidze, who was in Moscow at the time, labeled Saakashvili’s aborted visit a coup attempt (Georgia’s president had, he said, 4,000 special forces ready to enter Ajaria) and hurried back to Ajaria’s capital, Batumi. Claiming that “the Georgian president is threatening to shoot down my plane," Abashidze eventually reached Batumi via Turkey. He arrived on 15 March to find Georgian warships blocking Batumi’s deep-water port--a major transit point for oil exports heading to Western markets--and no oil coming into the region by rail. He and his associates also found that their bank accounts had been frozen and that Saakashvili had threatened to freeze the accounts of every company in Ajaria.

Abashidze responded by sending his security forces to the Ajarian borders and imposing a state of emergency over the region.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov followed him to Batumi, acting as an official envoy of the new Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and as a mediator for his “friend and brother,” Abashidze. Luzhkov pinned the blame for the crisis on Georgia, and the Russian government warned Georgia not to resort to "provocations, ultimatums, and use of military force."

However, Abashidze found Moscow unwilling to heed his calls for Russian troops to help (Batumi is home to one of two Russian bases remaining in Georgia since the Soviet era).

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe also tried to bring the two sides together. In comments made on 19 March, Solomon Passy, the foreign minister of Bulgaria, which currently holds the presidency of the OSCE, pointed to a fundamental breakdown in communication between the Georgian and Ajarian leaders. Passy told a conference of heads of post-communist states in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, that in the run-up to the crisis Abashidze had been angered by televised comments made by Saakashvili. Passy had responded by asking Abashidze why he used television as a medium for communication.

Meanwhile, Georgian authorities continued to ratchet up the pressure on Abashidze, on 16 March ordering the arrest of six Ajarian officials, including a senior minister, for harassing journalists and opposition supporters.

With tensions mounting, Georgian Parliament Speaker Nino Burdzhanadze flew on 17 March to Batumi for an eight-hour meeting with Abashidze. The result was a promise from Abashidze to meet Saakashvili the next day, 18 March.

Symbolically, Saakashvili chose to follow the same route he had tried to take just four days earlier. Speaking at the Bratislava conference, Saakashvili said that throughout his hour-long journey from the Ajarian border to Batumi there had been “a huge number of people on the road with roses in their hands,” symbolizing their desire for a “rose revolution” in Ajaria such as the rest of Georgia had experienced in November. Journalists report a less triumphal procession, pointing to the gun-carrying Abashidze supporters who mixed with the crowds.

But once in Batumi, Saakashvili was able to meet crowds of supporters, some of them chanting “Misha, Misha,” a diminutive of Mikheil.

When he emerged from three-and-a-half-hour-long talks with Abashidze, he claimed victory, telling a cheering crowd of thousands on Batumi’s main square that “we have resolved all the issues” and that “nothing can separate me from you, my friends."

Saakashvili agreed to lift Georgia’s blockade of Ajaria, promised talks on constitutional changes to give regions greater autonomy, and gave Abashidze “a promise that [the Georgian authorities] won't arrest him--not real immunity but no immediate prosecution."

In return, Saakashvili won promises from Abashidze to lift the state of emergency, allow Saakashvili and other government officials access to the region, introduce a more transparent system of control over the region's finances, and give the government in Tbilisi control over Batumi's customs offices.

Critically, he promised to allow the 28 March vote to go ahead. Abashidze, long a thorn in Shevardnadze’s side, allied himself with Shevardnadze shortly before the president’s ouster and continues to view the results of November’s parliamentary elections as valid. He had therefore been opposed in principle to holding a new vote.

ABASHIDZE’S TWILIGHT ZONE?

Saakashvili’s hope appears to be that free elections on 28 March will remove Abashidze from power and that rigged elections would prompt Ajarians to rise up in a repeat of the “rose revolution” in Tbilisi.

The question would then be whether Abashidze and his security forces would be willing to do what Shevardnadze and Georgian forces were unwilling to do: to try and quell unrest by force. Abashidze’s climb-down over the past week in the face of an economic stranglehold appears to reduce that risk.

So, too, may Russia’s response to this crisis, though substantial question marks remain. Russia has kept peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two war-zones from the early 1990s, and a military base in Batumi. In each case, Russia’s involvement is seen by Georgian and international observers as not being neutral, a point underlined by Saakashvili when he claimed that Russia recently provided Abashidze with four tanks.

Saakashvili has been trying to improve relations with Russia by, for example, inviting Russians troops to conduct joint patrols of Georgia’s border with the warring Russian republic of Chechnya. Saakashvili’s underlying attitude toward Russia, though, again became clear in Bratislava when he said that Russia’s “favorite occupation” was to “stir up trouble” in Georgia.

In Bratislava, Saakashvili, who had earlier dismissed Russia’s attempts at mediation with the words "I do not need mediators to deal with my subordinates," praised Russia’s restraint in this crisis and the fact that Russian troops “did not move an inch.” Its inertia could undermine Abashidze’s position.

Even if Abashidze is not removed from power, Saakashvili’s victory over him could result in an immediate and dramatic change in the political environment. Saakashvili, who won 96 percent of the votes in the presidential elections after his stand against Shevardnadze, can expect his confrontation with Abashidze to improve the already-extremely-good chances of his supporters in the parliamentary elections. A strong vote would increase his personal mandate and, combined with a high 7 percent threshold to enter parliament, could reduce the number of parties on the Georgian political scene.

The internal political divisions that have riven Georgian politics would then be lessened, enabling Saakashvili to play a stronger hand in relations with the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose leader is suffering from very poor health.


For more articles from Georgia, visit our Georgia country file, at http://georgia.tol.cz.

Slovenia: A Symbolic End to Transition
First among the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Slovenia officially becomes a donor and not a borrower.

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia--According to at least one set of criteria, last week Slovenia became the first country of Central and Eastern Europe to finish the transition from communism to a full market economy. On 17 March, Slovene political leaders and World Bank officials met in Ljubljana to sign a “letter of graduation,” officially changing Slovenia’s status from a borrower to a donor country. World Bank President James Wolfensohn then learned firsthand that Slovenia is also a thriving democracy: an anti-globalist pelted him with paint-filled water balloons.

The occasion marked a clear victory for Slovenia’s economic planners, who had repeatedly quibbled with World Bank officials over the speed of reform since the country joined the bank in 1993. From the beginning, the relationship focused primarily on providing policy advice and support for institution-building rather than on high-volume lending. Nevertheless, World Bank officials often regarded Slovenia’s transition approach as too slow because the country had opted for a gradual transition from socialist planning to privatization. In the eyes of the bank that pace was less a matter of strategic choice and more a case of excessive foot-dragging.

Over the past decade, commitments to Slovenia have totaled $129 million for four projects. In addition, the bank has funded a Global Environment Facility project to phase out ozone-depleting substances and two ongoing programs: a Real Estate Modernization Project supported with a $15 million loan and a Health Sector Management Project aided by a $9.5 million loan.

Despite past differences, World Bank officials today regard Slovenia’s approach as well-suited to the country’s special circumstance of having been Yugoslavia’s most-developed republic: the Slovenes had already started the transition in the late 1980s. That head start and the economic planning since then have enabled Slovenia to meet the World Bank criteria for entry into the esteemed club of developed nations: access to international capital markets, stability of international capital flows, the establishment of institutions that enable social and economic development, and a per capita income higher than $5,185 ($9,810 for 2002). The country’s GDP growth has averaged a solid 4 percent since 1996, but last year the growth dropped to 2.3 percent. Foreign direct investment reached record levels in 2002, mostly linked to privatization.

“Slovenia sits at the heart of Europe and provides an economic bridge between the existing EU members and those who aspire to be ‘integrated’ in the future,” Wolfensohn told reporters during his March visit. “The country is well-equipped to play the role of transition front-runner, both by helping to build capacity in neighboring Balkan countries and by sharing its own reform lessons.”

After the signing ceremony with the World Bank’s vice president for Europe and Central Asia, Shiego Katsu, Slovene Finance Minister Dusan Mramor said he hoped that the status would help boost Slovenia's international image and its credit ratings. Slovenia would now have a say in international financial decision-making, Mramor said, adding that the country is prepared to take over its donor responsibilities. As soon as former Yugoslavia successor states settle open questions on their shares of foreign-debt claims, Slovenia would be willing to write off its debts owed by Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Guyana.

The signing of the graduation letter is also important for the Slovene economy because Slovene companies will now have more chances to compete for projects financed by the World Bank.

There’s more work to be done, however. According to the latest statistics, economic growth in 2003 reached only 2.3 percent, well short of the predicted 3.7 percent. Analysts have advised the government to concentrate on stimulating small businesses as a way to reverse those falling numbers. And on a societal level, the government will have to act more decisively to crush burgeoning intolerance, most recently illustrated by the bitter debates surrounding the building of a mosque in the capital and reinstating the residence status of 18,000 people unlawfully erased from the registry in 1992.

THE COLORS OF SPRING

Slovenia’s graduation was a bit overshadowed by a minor anti-globalist attack on the World Bank president and Slovene finance minister. As they were walking to the capital’s main cultural center--the site of a presentation of a book on Slovenia’s transition--protesters threw paint-filled balloons at Wolfensohn and Mramor. While Wolfensohn had some luck and remained largely unpainted, the finance minister’s head was covered in green.

The anti-globalist movement United Colors of Resistance explained its action in a written statement: “Today we colored the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, in spring colors and so provided an important message. The World Bank likes to present itself as an institution that reduces world poverty. But in reality the World Bank is one of the main instruments of neoliberal globalization, a globalization that is pushing the world into a permanent war and unbearable poverty and inciting peoples to hate each other.”

The World Bank president was then interrupted as he addressed the book presentation at the cultural center. After managing to infiltrate the assembly room, a protester stood up and attempted to unveil a banner. But the security services this time acted more swiftly, tackling the demonstrator immediately and escorting him outside.

The head of World Bank as well as Slovene politicians took the incidents in stride. Prime Minister Anton Rop said that in a way the presence of anti-globalization protesters actually demonstrates that Slovenia has made progress and is a democratic state. Wolfensohn remarked that he was thankful to have received a bit of St. Patrick’s Day color.

“By becoming a part of the elite club of donors, Slovenia is assuming its share of the responsibility for world development,” concluded the daily Delo in a commentary published on 18 March. “Although its voice will be almost negligible, Slovenia will at least have a chance to grab attention with its ‘green proposals’ [ecological ideas] and not just with green balloons.”


Looking for a window onto Slovenia? Visit our Slovenia country file, at http://slovenia.tol.cz.

Poland: The Church Semi-Militant
After 23 years leading Polish Catholics, Cardinal Glemp makes way for a Euro-skeptic, anti-pluralist from the eastern borderlands.

POZNAN, Poland--The church that commands the faith of 19 in 20 Poles has a new chief executive officer.

Poland's Roman Catholic bishops gathered in this western city on 18 March to elect a new chairman of the Polish Episcopate: Archbishop Jozef Michalik, 62, the bishop of Przemysl. Michalik replaces Cardinal Jozef Glemp as chairman. Glemp will retain the now titular function of primate.

"I am not announcing any new program, because it is history, time, and the people that will create it," the new Catholic leader said during his first press conference after the election. He was quoting the words of the legendary primate and cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. Michalik also declared the will to cooperate with both believers and non-believers.

Archbishop Michalik is the first head of the episcopate to be elected under new rules that introduced a maximum of two five-year terms. Both of Michalik's predecessors served for much longer: Glemp for 23 years and Wyszynski--who took office at the onset of communism in Poland in 1948 and whom Glemp replaced in 1981--for 33 years.

GUIDING THE FLOCK IN NEW DIRECTIONS

Michalik will have a shorter time frame to work in and a very different set of political and social conditions to deal with.

His predecessor, Glemp, served during the transition period from martial law through the change of regime and the run-up to Poland's accession to the European Union. Michalik will guide the Polish Catholic Church through the first years of the country's EU membership and--a thought many Poles shudder to think of--will sooner or later manage the Polish Church under a pope other than Polish-born John Paul II.

Commentator Roman Graczyk thinks the new chairman's role will be considerably less influential than those of his two revered predecessors, not least because of changed political and social conditions.

"He does not have to possess all the features of a charismatic national leader, for it seems that our problems will be typical of an emerging consumer society," Graczyk wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza on 16 March.

That does not mean Michalik will not face major challenges, though, above all, the challenges posed by freedom. "Communism fenced us off from freedom, but also from the trouble it brings. After 1989 ... [freedom] is a real civilizational challenge. And also a challenge for the church," Graczyk wrote.

In the homily he delivered during a High Mass after his election, Michalik showed that he was well aware of this and indicated that the Church should uphold conservative values.

"We have to prove that pluralism based on moral relativism is harmful to democracy, for it may, if without God, transform into totalitarianism," he told the congregation.

Michalik has long been considered a leader of the Polish Episcopate's conservative wing. A more liberal group is represented by such bishops as Tadeusz Pieronek or Stanislaw Gadecki. During the election, the bishops appeared to hedge their bets by electing Gadecki as Michalik's deputy.

"Recently the media have speculated on the division between conservatives and liberals in the Episcopate. By choosing Gadecki, the bishops wanted to underline that there were no such divisions," the editor in chief of the respected Catholic monthly Znak, Jaroslaw Gowin, told Rzeczpospolita on 19 March.

Pieronek told journalists before the vote that the results would be like "a sunrise." After Michalik emerged the winner, he lived up to his reputation for mischievous remarks by revising his statement, saying, "It's not sunrise; it's rather the moon that rose."

Whether or not that was a veiled suggestion that the Polish Church now faces darker times, the new chairman of the Episcopate has gone to some lengths in the past few years to shake his reputation for conservative nationalism.

For instance, during the 1993 parliamentary elections in which the church backed the Catholic Electoral Action party, Michalik made a widely reported remark that "Catholics should vote for Catholics, Christians for Christians, Muslims for Muslims, Jews for Jews, masons for masons, communists for communists. Everyone should vote as their conscience tells them to." But he now maintains that the Church should distance itself from direct involvement in politics. He also referred to the "dishonesty" of political parties using "Catholic" in their names, although no such parties are represented in parliament.

During his tenure as bishop of the eastern diocese of Przemysl, Michalik cooperated with the sizeable Greek Catholic minority, who follow the Orthodox rite but are administered by the Vatican. As Rzeczpospolita commented, he once refused to participate in a meeting of Poles from the former eastern territories now part of Ukraine on the grounds that it would express nationalistic and anti-Ukrainian sentiments.

LOOKING FOR THE GOLDEN MEAN

Michalik, however, was not afraid to go against the grain of the Catholic Church in Poland, or even the pope himself. He has failed to echo John Paul's enthusiasm for Poland joining the EU and did not take part in the accession referendum last June, telling Christianitas magazine, "I am not afraid of the EU. Neither do I trust it that much."

In the same interview he charged that the EU, by being too ideological, posed the threat of a new kind of totalitarianism.

Views like that are almost unheard-of in European churches, according to Gazeta Wyborcza religious affairs writer Jan Turnau.

"The Polish Church should be more open. It showed this when the bishops supported Poland's accession to the EU. The pope's clear stance moved the bishops to support modernization," Turnau wrote.

At home, however, the church under Michalik will face a number of perhaps more-urgent problems than the EU, Graczyk says.

One is introducing greater transparency, especially in facing up to sexuality among priests. Church leadership also needs to take a stance on Radio Maryja, the private Catholic radio station that on the one hand became notorious for its anti-Semitic comments but also played an important role for the flock by airing popular religious programs.

Radio Maryja, as well as the liberal face of Catholicism in Poland, perhaps best represented by the Krakow-based Tygodnik Powszechny magazine, may both be a problem for Michalik, Graczyk says. Both take an independent line, while the new leader would like to see the church unified, with lay Catholics playing a subordinate role.


Our Poland country file at http://poland.tol.cz is your source for Polish news, features, statistics, maps, and annual reports.



The Bulgarian Television X-Files

SOFIA, Bulgaria--A contract between Bulgarian National Television (BNT) and the Russian advertising company Video International has led the country's media watchdog council to fire the station's director.

Five of the nine members of the Council of Electronic Media (CEM) voted to sack BNT General Director Kiril Gotsev on 16 March.

The ruling, Gotsev told Darik Radio, took him by surprise. “It’s amazing. You know, ridiculous people make ridiculous decisions. I think they definitely broke the law and I’ll be back on my post soon.” He told the Standart newspaper, “This decision is pathetic. The council has failed to find any formal legal flaws in the deal.”

The council, the independent authority charged with regulating radio and TV broadcasting in Bulgaria, controls registration and licensing. The National Assembly elects five of its members and the country's president appoints four.

The body’s main powers are supervision of the broadcasting activities of radio and television operators and ensuring compliance with the Radio and Television Act. The group also appoints, and can dismiss, the general directors of Bulgarian National Radio and Bulgarian National Television.

The council appointed Borislav Gerontiev, a member of BNT’s board of directors, as the acting head of the station.

The council began investigating Gotsev’s professional conduct in January, when he secretly signed a contract that turned out to be deeply controversial. The deal gave the Russian company Video International exclusive control over all advertising time on BNT. In theory, it put the Russian company in a position to influence programming.

WEEKS OF DEBATE

The council made its decision on 16 March after two hours of discussion, and in a statement said Gotsev's removal had nothing to do with the Video International contract.

The council said he had allowed an offensive characterization of the Bulgarian prime minister to be broadcast during the station's "Voices" talk show, which is hosted by well-known right-wing Bulgarian journalist Yavor Dachkov. The council also said Gotsev had not allowed the Caolin Co. to respond to comments broadcast during the "Actual" and "Every Sunday" talk shows. According to the Radio and Television Law, any person or company has the right to defend its interest and answer allegations made against them.

But one member of the council who didn't agree with its decision, Rayna Nikolova, told the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency that “there’s no real legal justification for CEM to terminate Gotsev’s mandate as BNT’s general director." Nikolova was one of two members who left the 16 March meeting in protest.

CONTRACT CONTROVERSY

The controversy goes back to January, when Gotsev signed the contract with Video International without the knowledge of the broadcaster's board of directors.

In an interview with Capital, the country’s most influential weekly newspaper, Gotsev defended his decision to act independently. “This is not a contract that should [have been] approved by the BNT board because we are not saying or buying anything, and the deal is not under the provision of the Public Procurement Act.”

Gotsev also said he was prepared to show the contract to the broadcaster's board members but would first ask them to sign declarations of confidentiality.

The contract conforms to the country's trade law but according to the council, it breaches media law and circumvents the Radio and Television Law, which prohibits influence on the programming and editorial policy of the media. Media experts who spoke to TOL agreed that the contract violates the Radio and Television Law and the Public Procurement Act.

Georgui Lozanov, a prominent media expert and former member of the council, said the contract “threatens civil society and freedom of speech because it puts Bulgaria’s only public television broadcaster under economic influence.”

On 9 February, members of the council proposed for the first time that an acting director replace Gotsev until the investigation ended. At a special meeting of the council two weeks later, on 25 February, to consider Gotsev's future, the broadcasting head escaped dismissal by one vote.

In an official statement at the time, the council cited several examples of what it said were a lack of transparency in Gotsev's managerial practices.

“BNT’s director systematically violated the Radio and Television Law and has not kept to the program with which he won the competition" for his post, said council member Margarita Pesheva. She noted that BNT's advertising revenues have fallen under Gotsev's leadership.

The contract with Video International is unique in Bulgaria, since it gives the Russian company the exclusive right to sell BNT’s advertising time for three years. Video International would receive a 21 percent cut of the sales, including a commission and reimbursement of administrative costs.

Gotsev described the three-year deal as a simple contract between the broadcaster and a commercial agency.

An investigation published in the 20 February issue of Capital revealed that the terms of the contract oblige Video International to increase BNT’s revenue by 15 percent the first year and 10 percent in each of the next two years. BNT posted around 17 million lev in advertising revenue ($10.7 million) in 2003. Last month, Gotsev predicted that 2004 ad revenues would rise to 20 million lev if the Russian company fulfilled it commitment.

The contract also includes a default penalty of 3 million lev ($1.9 million) if either Video International or BNT wants to opt out of the contract before 28 January 2007.

For weeks, Gotsev has been waging a public relations battle in the press in an attempt to minimize the significance of the contract. But one thing is certain: it would be hard to find a decent manager who would sign a contract giving 21 percent commission in exchange for only 15 percent promised growth.

In fact, it was his denial of the contract that first triggered the public's interest in the issue. For three weeks after it was signed, Gotsev and BNT's management board denied that a deal with Video International had been made.

Eventually, Capital obtained a copy of the contract and published it on 14 February. The document clearly showed the signatures of Kiril Gotsev, Financial Director Svetla Mileva, and Marketing and Advertisement Director Velislav Velev.

MONOPOLISTIC PRACTICES?

Video International was founded in 1991 by Mikhail Lesin, now the Russian media minister. The advertising company made its reputation on the now-famous, “I believe, I hope, I love” television spot it produced for President Boris Yeltsin's reelection 1996 campaign.

Lesin has been a controversial media minister ever since. He is not well-respected among independent journalists, and in July 2000, the Russian Union of Journalists named him "Press Freedom Enemy No. 1."

As head of Russia's politically charged media industry, Lesin has the power to grant or deny broadcasting licenses to TV stations and newspapers and to distribute subsidies to state media. Lesin sold his interest in Video International in 1994.

"My connections with Video International have been checked by the authorities many times, and not once have they been able to find anything wrong," Lesin told the U.S. weekly Business Week in March 2001.

Russia’s leading advertising industry website, AdMarket.ru, has reported that Video International enjoys a virtual monopoly over television advertising in that country, thanks to favorable contracts with the state-owned television networks. Video International controls more than 70 percent of Russia’s TV advertising market (according to The Jamestown Foundation). The company is in a rapid expansion mode and has bought Russia's largest print-distribution networks. It has been seeking out contracts with state-owned media networks in Bulgaria and Romania for some time.

“Yes, we are interested in the Romanian market,” Video International General Manager for Bulgaria Sergei Vassilev told Capital on 14 February. “It is larger than the Bulgarian one. We do not have any more precise plans for expansion, probably the Baltic States, but sometimes it is difficult to work there as people have a psychological barrier when it comes to Russians.”

Vassilev said the contract with BNT is not exclusive: “We do not take all its advertising time,” he said. “We just make money for our customer, who is very important, as the customer is not the advertising agency, it is the media. We are like the lawyers. The way a lawyer defends the interests of his client, we defend the interest of the media.”

But media experts in Bulgaria admit they are concerned that Video International will be in a position to force BNT to make program changes to help the company sell more advertising time. This would violate the Radio and Television Act, meant to ensure independent journalism.

“It is true that in the contract, signed by Video International and BNT, it isn’t mentioned that VI can force BNT to make any program changes,” Velislava Popova, a media expert at Capital, said. “It is also true that BNT is selling advertising [based on] rating points for every single program element, so a program's rating are extremely important if [advertising for it] will be sold. Logically, it is quite possible for VI to have certain requirements for the BNT program scheme in order to gain more advertising revenues.”

Popova said that representatives of Video International had told Bulgarian journalists that although the company is capable of offering a range of programming consulting, it has no plans to do so with BNT. "I think that the possible changes in programming concept is a very sensitive issue, so probably that’s why BNT and Video International are refusing any further comments,” she added.


For more articles on Bulgaria--as well as related Internet resources, books, and music--visit our Bulgaria country page, at http://bulgaria.tol.cz.

'New Europe' Pushing for a Wider Europe

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia--Days before NATO expands to take on board seven new members and six weeks before the European Union opens its doors to 10 countries, Europe’s former communist states are pushing for further expansion of the West’s major political and security institutions, NATO and the EU.

In a conference of eight prime ministers and two presidents in Bratislava on 19 March, leaders from the Baltics to the Caucasus called for NATO and the EU to expand their membership and their programs deep into the Balkans and beyond the Black Sea to Russia’s southern rim.

Introducing the conference, which was called "Towards a Wider Europe: The New Agenda," Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda specifically urged NATO to “take concrete steps towards inviting Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to join” when it meets in Istanbul in December. He also called on the alliance to invite Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro to join its Partnership for Peace, a program that provides non-members of the alliance with military aid and training.

In a joint declaration, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Macedonia, Romania, and Slovakia also called on the EU to extend to the Caucasus its Neighborhood Policy, a new program that frames relations with the EU’s new neighbors. The joint task of the EU and NATO to create a united Europe was, they argued, only half-complete.

At Istanbul, NATO and the EU will have a "crucial opportunity" to send "a clear political message, that the doors of enlargement will remain open for all qualified," Macedonia’s Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski said.

Membership of NATO and the EU should not be "a distant dream in 10 or 20 years, but much, much sooner," Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano insisted.

How far expansion might one day extend was shown in the support for greater integration with Black Sea countries, and debate about how to deal with the EU’s new eastern rim--Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, fresh from a crisis with the leader of the semi-independent region of Ajaria, argued that Georgia’s “rose revolution” showed that Georgians understood that their “main chance for the future … is [the] freedom and democracy” offered by European integration.

However, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Guenther Verheugen, immediately poured cold water on the aspirations of Georgia, other Caucasus countries, and Eastern Europe. Romania, Bulgaria, “the western Balkan countries and possibly Turkey” were next in the list for expansion. “But for the other countries we do not have accession on the agenda,” he said.

"Enlargement or accession is not the only instrument [to forge greater integration] that we have in our toolbox,” he said.

Debate at the conference and at a gathering of think-tank experts on 18 March suggested that experts and leaders in the region believe that many outside the EU believe the current “tools” that the EU offers are inadequate and that enlargement and European integration is--and should be--driven by a different dynamic and logic than outlined by Verheugen.

Experts at the think-tanks conference expressed deep-seated unhappiness with current, secondary forms of integration being offered by the European Union, in particular to Moldova. Its inclusion in the EU’s Neighborhood Policy without any explicit offer of eventual EU membership places it in the same category as Tunisia and Morocco.

Others complained about an imbalance of funding, with the EU devoting four times less money to the western Balkans than to Sicily, which is four times smaller in population, and fewer resources to countries on its eastern periphery than to North Africa.

The argument for enlargement was couched in moral terms by Latvia’s new Green prime minister, Indulis Emsis, who said it was the new EU members’ “moral obligation to share with others … what we have benefited from.”

Dan Fried, a member of the United States’ National Security Council, saw self-interest as the driving force. NATO and EU enlargement was, he said, driven by demand, not by values.

Quite how far this demand can go--and how it can affect EU policy--was recently demonstrated by the applications to join the EU submitted by Croatia and Macedonia. In both cases, officials in Brussels asked them not to apply but they sent in their applications nonetheless. Since then, there has been a gradual shift in attitudes in Brussels in favor of their cases for application.

Such examples of increasing self-assertiveness from the eastern borders of the EU could deepen existing divisions within the EU and encourage discussion, primarily in Germany and France, about an “inner core” in the EU. The pressure on Germany and France was increased at a parallel meeting of the region’s finance ministers in Bratislava. They called on EU member states to meet their obligations to keep their public deficits below 3 percent of GDP. Both France and Germany have flouted this regulation in the euro-zone’s Stability Pact for the past two years.

However, questions about divisions within Europe and across the Atlantic were largely buried by an apparent consensus that greater security requires further expansion and overshadowed by the terrorist attacks in Madrid on 11 March and an explosion of ethnic violence in Kosovo on 17 March.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Dzurinda called for NATO and the EU to formulate a strategic approach towards the western Balkans ahead of the likely talks on the status of Kosovo in 2005. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and a United Nations special envoy to the Balkans in the 1990s, stressed the same point. Writing in the Financial Times, Bildt wrote that “the entire policy of managing the region [of Kosovo] crashed down” in Kosovo’s “Black Wednesday.”

At the conference, he also condemned the EU and NATO for not taking earlier, more decisive action to prevent the bloodshed in Kosovo.

UN forces had been too thinly spread on the ground, he argued.

For Jamie Shea, NATO’s deputy assistant secretary, global terrorism is now a central reason for expanding NATO. Speaking on 17 March, he argued that “the more countries we have in the bloc the more effective will be in the fight against international terrorism."


War of Chechnya Conspiracy Theories Spreads to France

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia--The war of insinuations and denials between Chechen insurgents and Russian’s Federal Security Service (FSB) spread to a new locale last week: France. Two French newspapers received a letter, allegedly from Chechen rebels, warning of imminent terrorist attacks. But even before the threats could properly be investigated, the rebels claimed the letter was a forgery--a supposed provocation planned by the FSB.

Sent by e-mail to Le Parisien and Le Monde, and addressed to French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the letter threatened to launch high-body-count operations that would make "blood run to [France’s] borders." It was signed by “Movsar Barayev commando" who claimed to be a member of the “Servants of Allah, the Powerful and Wise One.” The name was nearly identical to Movsar Barayev, one of the Chechen rebels who captured Moscow’s Nord-Ost theater in October 2002. Movsar Barayev, however, was killed when Russian troops stormed the building.

Coming in the wake of the deadly bombings in Madrid, the French authorities said they were taking the letter seriously even though it was the first they had heard of the group, which threatened to import techniques from Chechnya and Gaza that "have never been used in the West until now." Among other things, the letter said that the French parliament’s recent decision to ban women from wearing headscarves in schools had prompted the “Servants of Allah” into action.

NOT US

Chechen representatives rushed to deny any connection with the letters. Agence France-Presse referred to an interview given by Abu Sayaf, a Chechen rebel commander, on the separatists' website, Kavkaz-Tsentr. "There is no such thing as a Movsar Barayev brigade," Sayaf said. "It is a lie. We are not waging war with France. France did not attack us. We are waging war against the Russian empire. I call on the French government to stop its anti-Chechen propaganda ... and to stop assenting to Moscow's lies."

Akhmed Zakaev, a representative of rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov now living in Britain, also got into the act, speculating that the FSB may have been involved. "The fact that Russian Special Forces have already transferred their methods of terrorism to deal with political opponents has been confirmed in Qatar,” he told Echo Moskvy in a radio interview on 17 March. “I don’t exclude that Russian special forces would have decided to run such a provocation as explosions in the metro or something else in Paris to get more firm support from France [for their war in Chechnya]."

"Unfortunately the French Interior Ministry has become a branch office of [FSB spokesman Ilya] Shabalkin because the same kind of rubbish that Shabalkin is spreading is being taken up immediately by law enforcement officials in France," Zakaev said.

Other rebels went one step further, claiming that they had received information about an FSB plot from an FSB officer whom they had captured 14 March. They claimed that 200 kilograms of explosives have already been delivered to France and stored in the Russian embassy in Paris, according to Echo Moskvy. No proof of those charges has surfaced, and many observers chalked them up to the ongoing propaganda battle that also centers on a series of other attacks in the last five years. Some opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Chechnya allege that the FSB had a hand in the bombings of three apartment blocks in 1999 in Moscow and Volgodonsk. The attacks left hundreds dead and were a key reason behind Russia's decision to start a second war against Chechen separatists. A wave of support for Putin helped the then-prime minister win the presidency in March 2000.

Russian officials from the FSB and the Russian embassy in Paris were quick to deny involvement with the French letter. "This is absolute rubbish and a spring complication of schizophrenia," said Sergei Ignatchenko, an FSB spokesman, in an RIA News interview 17 March.

Zakaev’s mention of Qatar referred to a widespread belief that Russian FSB officials had assassinated a former Chechen rebel, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, in Qatar on 12 February. The authorities in Qatar have arrested two men, reportedly FSB employees. Russia continues to deny any involvement, although Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told ITAR-TASS on 17 March that the country would not exclude dealing with terrorists living abroad. "This is a question of a concept linked to operations of Israel against terrorists from Palestine and also to actions against Talibs in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, and overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq," he said.

Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta newspaper journalist specializing in Chechnya, also said the Qatar killing represented a turning point. "As for information that FSB wants to blow up France, I wouldn't be surprised by anything after the Qatar story, I mean Yandarbiyev's assassination. Of course he was an unpleasant person, but it doesn't mean it is necessary to return to the practice of political terrorism, which was [practiced] in the Soviet times," Politkovskaya said in an Echo Moskvy interview, also on 17 March.

ON THE HOMEFRONT

Meanwhile, back in Chechnya, a new prime minister was appointed last week to head the local government. Sergei Abramov said his main priority in economic development would be stimulating the rebuilding of the devastated republic. “Construction means thousands of new workplaces—a revival of the economy and its growth. This is what we need now like air," Abramov told FK-News on 19 March.

Of immediate concern are the tens of thousands of refugees in neighboring Ingushetia who are in the process of returning to Chechnya. While Abramov insisted that conditions for the return of the refugees have already been created, international human rights organizations counter that the federal authorities have been applying immense pressure to get Chechens to return to what is still essentially a war-zone.

"Now more people want to leave Ingushetia. But that’s because, on the one hand, it is just dangerous to live in tent settlements in Ingushetia now, and, on the other, [authorities] promise to pay compensation for destroyed residential spaces only in the case if they [the refugees] return to Chechnya," said Ludmilla Alexeeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, quoted on the news website Grani.ru.


For more on Chechnya, visit our Russia country file, at http://russia.tol.cz.


Drug Trafficking, Addiction Grow in Kyrgyzstan

Despite several years of anti-drug campaigns, Kyrgyzstan’s narcotics trade continues to boom, threatening the country’s stability. Moreover, the rate of addiction to opiates--easy to come by on the heroin highway that stretches from Afghanistan to points West—is climbing.

The issue figured prominently during European Union Commissioner Chris Patten’s Central Asia tour, which wrapped up on 19 March. It was the first such EU visit to the region since 1996.

Geography explains much of Kyrgyzstan’s predicament. Nearly 60 percent of the opiates transited from Afghanistan, the world’s leading producer, are conveyed through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Some 50 heroin labs responsible for processing raw opium are supposedly located in the vicinity of the southern city of Osh, the Kyrgyz Drug Control Agency reports.

Afghan poppy production reached a four-year high last year, and Kyrgyz drug seizures increased with it. In 2003, Kyrgyz drug-control officials seized 3.5 tons of illegal narcotics, a 22 percent increase over the preceding year, according to the UNODC.

Kyrgyz authorities are also concerned about the rise of "hard-drug" usage among Kyrgyz. In an interview with Eurasianet, Kyrgyz Drug Control Agency chief Kurmanbek Kubatbekov estimated that opiate use now accounts for 70 percent of the country’s illicit drug consumption. A decade ago, the majority of Kyrgyz users preferred marijuana. The UNODC places Kyrgyzstan’s total number of drug users at between 80,000 and 100,000 individuals out of an overall population of roughly 5 million. Though not at epidemic proportions, the figure represents a sixfold increase over 1994 levels.

Conditions are ripe in Kyrgyzstan for the narcotics trade to take even deeper root. To locals living in rural areas, drug trafficking offers a way to stay out of poverty. In 2002, the latest year for which figures are available, Kyrgyzstan reported a per capita income of just $2,900, the second lowest in the CIS after Tajikistan. By comparison, a kilogram of heroin can fetch as much as $5,500 in Bishkek, according to UNODC data. The Kyrgyz government estimates that unemployed and uneducated Kyrgyz accounted for 93 percent of all narcotics-related crimes in 2003.

Perhaps ironically, Kyrgyzstan was the first Central Asian state to introduce legislation regulating trade in narcotics. At the same time, annual public health expenditures in Kyrgyzstan are among Central Asia’s lowest, at a mere $145 per capita, according to the UN Development Program (UNDP).

That leaves the country at high risk for the spread of HIV/AIDS. According to government statistics, drug users who share needles account for 80 percent of the country’s HIV cases. The UN reports that such cases are heaviest in the border regions with Tajikistan, where access to heroin is easier. In fact, a February 2004 report from the UNDP reported that more than half of the 364 HIV cases reported in Kyrgyzstan in 2003 can be traced to just one prison in the Osh district. To combat this problem, the country has introduced a needle-exchange program, aimed particularly at Kyrgyz prisons. A 9 March report by the AKIpress news agency said there may be as many as 1,600 HIV cases in Osh.

The region’s opiate trade has reportedly helped fund arms purchases and other needs for Islamist radical groups in the region. International law enforcement authorities remain concerned that many trafficking operations continue to be run by radicals. Sensitive to the possibility, Kyrgyz officials continue to address the issues of terrorism and drug trafficking in tandem. During 25 February talks in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov appealed for international help to curb drug trafficking even while highlighting the rise of religious extremists within the region.

In tacit recognition of the link, the United States pledged $6.3 million in 2003 to help establish the Kyrgyz Drug Control Agency. A U.S.-assisted program to enhance Kyrgyz surveillance of passports is underway, and a senior U.S. adviser is slotted to travel to Bishkek before July to advise the government on recommended law enforcement and legal reforms to help combat the opiate trade.

The United States and the European Union are not the only players with an interest in a solution to Central Asia’s narcotics worries. China also is paying close attention to the trafficking issue, concerned that drug-trade profits could finance potential separatist action by Uighur radicals in Xinjiang Province.

On 1 March, China expressed willingness to cooperate with other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to combat drug trafficking throughout Central Asia, the Xinhua news agency reported.

--by Eurasianet

This article first appeared on Eurasianet, an online magazine covering the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Turkey.