Scary topic, I know. But this’ll be fun. The only phrase to describe my reaction to Costco’s spread of Christmas lights this week is utter glee. White LED strands in a white that is a lot closer to incandenscent–not the really high-Kelvin blue, not the amber-ish stuff, no, good warm white. Runs a titch into the green, but I love it. And at $14 for a 100-light, 50-foot string, I can afford a couple. They also have colored strings with eight different colors that look just dandy. Those are a little cheaper than the whites. Despite all these technological improvements in LED Christmas lights in the last few years, there are still a few things that baffle me. The white LED strands draw 8 watts per strand. The colored ones draw 4 watts. Okay, cool. Both of them say you can connect up to three (yipeee!!!) end-to-end, and of course they have 3-amp fuses. Looks like shady math to me in there somewhere. Check it:

Power (watts) = Current (amps) X Volts
so
Current per strand = (Power per strand)/(Volts)
thus
Current = (8 watts)/(120 volts) = .06667 amps per strand

Huh. By that math, the fuse at the plug that goes into the outlet won’t experience 3 amps of current passing through it until you plug in FORTY-FIVE strands of lights. Damn, that’s pretty close to half a mile. And if we’re talking about the 4-watt color strands, that’s 90 strands totaling 4,500 feet, which is almost enough runway for a Beechjet to take off from Bend Municipal Airport.

The physists in my midst will remind me that at some point, the copper wires themselves will start to carry a pretty large resistive load and could themselves turn into “fuses”… specifically the kind known as an electrical fire. Based on my experiences with incandescent strings with 1/2-watt bulbs (the whole string was 50 watts), I could safely string six of them end-to-end… the seventh was what busted the fuse. So I’d say with these, you ought to easily (and safely) be able to get at least 10 strings (a total of only 80 watts at most!) plugged together. I’d have no problem plugging in 15 strings in series. Then again, I haven’t tested this (yet…), so if you light your house on fire trying, don’t come running to me.

I had my birthday kegger last night, complete with keg of Twilight Ale from Deschutes, the hookah, and two rounds each of Kings and Lick-it-and-Stick-it. Alas, despite the valiant efforts of my heavy-drinking friends and a good 200 pumps on the tap at the end of the night, the remaining beer in the keg (several gallons at least, sigh…) was alarmingly flat just now. Yes, there has been ice on it since last night, too. It’s almost enough to make me run out and get a CO2 tank, but that won’t do anything now and who knows when I’ll get a keg again. It was delicious, though. Hell, even mostly flat, it’s still pretty delicious. Aside from the plentiful leftover beer today, it was an awesome good time. Thanks to everyone who came out for my b-day kegger.

Addendum: Turns out I pumped so much air into the keg last night that I simply hadn’t bled enough of it out when I retapped this evening. Once I did that some more, the beer coming out is still nice and cold, and delightfully fizzy. Not quite as fizzy as it should be, but by no means flat. Victory!

In other news related to round things, I’ve pretty much had it with out-of-town drivers in my roundabouts. The most atrocious example was in the Colorado/Century roundabout last week. The guy ahead of me inside the roundabout came to a complete stop at the turn to go down Colorado Avenue. I waited patiently (sort of). Another car stopped behind me. Finally, the guy in front of me made a 90-degree right turn ever so slowly, so as not to hit the concrete barrier at the edge of the roundabout. For future reference, you can keep going around and around inside that thing if you really can’t decide where to get out. I can barely contain my excitement for multi-lane roundabouts. They better set up a practice one in a parking lot so we can all figure out the most effective ways to cut each other off.

Other things I can’t wait for: Trader Effing Joe’s. Their building is making pretty good progress now, and it looks like they’re almost ready to start putting the roof on. D thinks it will be open in December… I’m betting on March. Alley thinks it won’t be until June. Regardless, I swear I’m taking a comp day to camp out in line.

According to the Southeast European Times, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Volker said that the US would recognize Kosovo if the province declares independence. Volker sees this as “the only stable way forward in the Balkans.”

Really? Comments from Republika Srpska’s prime minister earlier linked the status of Republika Srpska with that of Kosovo. Milorad Dodik’s comments implied that, should Kosovo become independent, there would be a drive to separate Republika Srpska from Bosnia. A note to readers — I detected a strong bias in the article against Bosnian Serbs and Republika Srpska. Really, I expected better from the Washington Post.

It is unclear what Serbia’s response to a unilateral Kosovo declaration of independence will be. Both the US and the EU have asked Serbia to clarify what it will do should Kosovo declare independence. Serbia itself is asking for an explanation from the US over Volker’s comments.

For an interesting viewpoint on the Kosovo issue, check out William Montgomery’s opinion piece over at B92.

Things could get really interesting in the Balkans, and soon.

Back to my master’s thesis.

A federal judge declared parts of the Patriot Act unconstitutional today. He ruled that the portion of the law pertaining to national security letters violated both the First Amendment and the Constitutional separation of powers.

In the decision, Judge Marrero wrote that recipients of the letters were “effectively barred from engaging in any discussion regarding their experiences and opinions” about the letters. He said that the F.B.I. “must bear the burden of going to court to suppress the speech.” Because letter recipients were responsible for suppressing their own speech, Judge Marrero ruled that this constituted a violation of the First Amendment.

This is a huge blow to the Patriot Act, and a major victory for the First Amendment.

B92 is now reporting that Serbia’s goals in the Partnership for Peace program no longer include NATO membership. However, cooperation with NATO, particularly on the Kosovo issue, remains a goal.

In other news, the presidents of Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia met on Tuesday to discuss environmental issues. From the looks of the picture, it seems these guys had a great time. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes — I like to see the presidents of Serbia and Croatia together, discussing a regional issue. Hopefully these three presidents can put forth a plan to clean up the Danube. When I was in Novi Sad, we were told not to swim in the Danube due to pollution.

Apparently a B-52 bomber “mistakenly” armed with nuclear warheads flew across several states last week. Whoops.

The best quote in the article comes from Representative Markey: “Nothing like this has ever been reported before and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible.”

Looks like he’ll have to rethink that assessment.

While browsing B92 today (and putting off the inevitable work I must do on my thesis), I found a couple of interesting articles. Slovenia will hold the EU presidency next year, and has pledged to make Western Balkan integration a priority. It will be interesting to see how they do this.

In other news, the Bosnian Croat party has proposed dividing Bosnia into four federal units. The comments people wrote underneath this article are really interesting. There seems to be a debate going on regarding whether this would reward “ethnic cleansing,” or whether it would allow the people of Bosnia to draw their state as they see fit.

A rift is appearing inside Serbia’s ruling coalition regarding whether or not Serbia should join NATO. Given that NATO bombed Serbia not even ten years ago, it’s interesting that this is even an issue. Tadic says some very interesting things in this article regarding Serbia and European integration.

OK. Back to work on my master’s thesis.

Just a quick note to say that I’m back in The States, and all of the stuff I sent from Serbia arrived safely. It might be a bit slow, but the Serbian post office is reliable!

I’ll probably take a short break from blogging to catch up on things here at home. I have to move back into my house today, and I start working at a bookstore next week. It’s amazing what a trip to Europe can do to ones’ bank account.

I spent my first full day home listening to the Mariners game (they lost) and watching the Seahawks beat the Raiders in a preseason game. The University of Washington football season starts today. Go Dawgs! I must say, it’s nice being back in a place where I can talk about football and baseball, and people know what I’m talking about.

I spent my last week in Europe traveling down the Croatian coast. Croatians are blessed with the most beautiful coastline. It’s a rocky coast, and in places, mountains reach all the way down to the Adriatic Sea.

My first stop was Zadar, a walled city on the Central Dalmatian Coast. The city itself is very small — most of it can be seen in a day. At night, the city becomes overcrowded with tourists — it was quite unpleasant, actually. Instead of wandering around Zadar my second full day there, I took a trip to the Kornati Islands National Park. The landscape of the islands is really interesting — it’s rocky with desert vegetation peeking through in places. I noticed that the air was dry — a big contrast when compared with most places along the Croatian coast. There were “wild” donkeys everywhere. They kept fighting, begging for food, and causing a general disturbance.

After my lovely day at the national park, I took the bus to Split, where I met my friend Hillary and her friend Sandra. Split’s Old Town is cute. The focus of the town is Diocletian’s Palace. There’s also a really pretty promenade along the water, near the port. We didn’t do much in Split besides wander.

We took a day trip out to Hvar Island. Hvar is one of the prettiest islands. The Old Town is flanked by two monasteries. It looked like a miniature Venice without all of the crowds. After wandering through Hvar town, we walked out to the best beach on the island — in front of the Hotel Adriatica. Hours of swimming and sunbathing followed. The Adriatic is one of the warmest bodies of water I’ve ever swam in. In the words of a friend of mine, it’s “heavenly.” It’s so salty that it hardly takes any effort to float.

On the way back, we suffered through Mr. Toad’s Wild Boat Ride. t was seriously awful. We were coming back from Hvar Island, and the combination of fumes, choppy waves, and crazy boat driver made everybody sick. People were throwing up everywhere — it was disgusting. I spent most of the ride on the back of the boat, searching for a spot of fresh fume-free air.

When I went inside, I got into an interesting discussion with the Frenchmen sitting across from us. One of them (I didn’t catch his name, unfortunately) and I had an animated discussion about the relations between France and the United States. I told him that almost every American wants to go to Paris. We see it as the center of culture, ideas, and art. He said that many people in France really want to go to the US, as they are great admirers of our culture and natural beauty. It was nice to hear this. I was under the impression that people in France really don’t like us - our governments haven’t been on the best of terms lately. Maybe I will go to Paris in March after all…

My last stop was Dubrovnik. I returned to the place where my love affair with The Balkans began; back to that beautiful walled city. Being able to speak a little Croatian made my trip to Dubrovnik a lot nicer. One of the women in the shops heard Hillary and I speaking Croatian to each other, and she told us that our pronunciation was so good that when Sandra walked in, she addressed her in Croatian! She thought we were from somewhere else in Croatia! That made me happy.

I felt a little self-conscious speaking Croatian. At my university, the South Slavic language is taught together — as Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. As my professor is Serbian, he uses the ekavian dialect widely spoken in Serbia as the base. He makes sure to cover the pronunciation and spelling differences between the three dialects (linguistics say that the “languages” aren’t different enough to actually be considered separate languages. They have the same grammar and the same words, for the most part. As mentioned by someone in an earlier post, it’s like the difference between British English and American English). Because I’d been in Serbia so long, I’d gotten used to speaking the ekavian dialect. Along the Dalmatian coast, they use the ijekavian dialect. For example, the word for “here” in Serbia is “ovde.” In Croatia, it’s “ovdje.”

Most people didn’t mind it that I sounded Serb when I spoke their language. Instead of saying “Govorim hrvatski jezik” (I speak the Croatian language), I started saying “Govorim jezik” (I speak the language).

However, some American expats in the expat bar introduced me to one of the restaurant owners in Dubrovnik. He first asked me if I had any Croatian relatives (I don’t), and then he asked me where I’d been learning the language. “Zagreb? Ovdje?”

I responded truthfully. I told him that I studied Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian at the University of Washington in Seattle. And I told him that I’d been in Serbia for seven weeks at a language school.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. The woman behind him on the steps let out a long “ooohhhh.” And after that, when I made a valient attempt to speak some more, he told me that one of the words I’d spoken was a “Serb word.” It really made me feel like shit. After that, I didn’t try to speak the language with anybody.

One of my expat friends told me later that he had lived in Herzegovina during the Balkan Wars. He probably lost friends, and experienced horrible things.

And I empathize with that. But here’s the thing. Everyone in The Balkans has a horrible story, it seems. It was interesting — afterwards, we started watching YouTube movies in Croatian, and one of the kids there started explaining to me what was going on. He said that the Croatian president didn’t govern for the people, that he was too focused on Europe. He said that Tudjman’s government was corrupt. Funny — I heard similar things when I was in Serbia.

But I want to get back to my earlier point. Everyone in The Balkans seems to have a horrible story. And you hear versions of the same story in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. As Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic writes in “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” — “Did the Croatian Army commit war crimes or not? It is, of course, a hard truth: the war was about forming a nation-state, which involved ‘ethnic cleansing’; two hundred thousand Serbs were forced to leave the Krajina; their homes were burned and plundered ; some four hundred civilians were killed; Serb civilians in Gospic, Pakrac or Sisak were executed en masse; twenty-four thousand Muslims were detained by Bosnian Croatian soldiers in forty-four concentration camps […] However, nobody wants to speak this truth out loud. Nor does anybody want to hear it, for that matter. This is because in Croatia the truth is dangerous. […] In this, Croatia is not alone. Serbs also have problems with the truth. In their own eyes they are the biggest victims of both Milosevic and NATO. Indeed, Serbian society suffered severe consequences — from embargoes to NATO bombing — as a result of the wars it waged against its neighbours, but the whole truth about what happened has not yet surfaced or become part of the public debate. In this respect Serbia and Croatia share a consensus about the lies of the past ten years. The reason is simple, one that goes beyond the Tudjman-Milosevic ideology. Too many people were in some way involved in the war, and too many of them profited from it. It is easier, and much more comfortable, to live with lies than to confront the truth, and with that truth the possibility of individual guilt — and collective responsibility” (15-17).

Earlier, Drakulic describes the differences between what Serbs today are taught about the war, and what Croatians are taught. Croatian children, she says, are taught that the war was a defensive war. And as a defensive war, Croat soldiers cannot have committed war crimes. She says that a child in Serbia would grow up “in denial about the war” (10), implying that they would not even learn about the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in school.

Everybody has a horrible story. Nobody talks about it. There is no established historical “truth” about the Balkan Wars. Drakulic believes that this is the task of the International Criminal Court, a body which, as she explains later, is not regarded highly in either Serbia or Croatia.

Someone told me once that after the Holocaust, children in Germany had to learn about it. In order so it would never happen again. So why, after the worst war in Europe since World War II, are children in Croatia and Serbia taught different things? What Drakulic was describing sure sounded like propaganda to me. And if these stereotypes and misrepresentations of history aren’t addressed, and soon, there is a very real potential that the Balkans could be a powder keg in the future. As Drakulic states in “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” people and countries in The Balkans need to acknowledge their responsibility for what happened during the 1990s. It’s like the region needs to collectively air its dirty laundry, face up to the facts and findings of the ICC, agree on what to teach children, begin building ties again, and move on. There will not be a lasting peace without it.

Croatia will join the EU in 2010 or 2011. Serbia will probably join the EU in the future, after Croatia. What happens if Serbia joins the EU, and there’s all of this baggage between Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia?

I think it was Desmond Tutu who said that we cannot have peace without reconciliation. And we cannot have reconciliation without peace. So we’d better start working on it.

It’s been an interesting summer. Thanks for following along with me on my travels. I know I’ll be back in this part of the world. There’s something about The Balkans that just captures one’s heart and soul and won’t let go. I can’t explain how. I can’t explain why. But I know that I will always be coming back here. I am, like the title of Mark Mazower’s book, another fool in The Balkans.

Good night, everybody.

I included this as a rather long comment to an earlier post. I put it here, for those of you who don’t click on the “comments” link.

Regarding Croatia breaking away from Yugoslavia, I don’t think it’s as easy as saying “Croatia wanted independence. Serbs didn’t. So they went to war about it.” We’ll probably never find the definitive answer as to why there was war in Yugoslavia. In sociology, we have a concept called “collective memory” – basically, the memories of a group. Serbs in Croatia had horrible memories of the Ustashe regime. After Tito took power, all nationalist talk was banned – including mentioning Chetniks and Ustashes (this comes from Glenny’s book, I believe. Most of my sources are at home, and I will double-check this, if I can remember it). People never really talked about what happened during World War II. It was replaced by talk of “brotherhood and unity.”

I have a friend, half-Croatian half-Serbian, who says, “every time I look at the Croatian flag, I see Ustashe.” One of the narrators on the BBC series, I believe (and again, will double-check this), described the Croatian national flag as something like “waving the Nazi swastika in the face of Jews.” People have long memories. The symbols and rallies of the fledgling Croatian state clearly terrified some Croatian Serbs. And with the propaganda coming from both Belgrade and Zagreb, is it really any wonder that they started arming themselves? In the Croatian history section of my guidebook (Lonely Planet – not a scholarly source, I know), it states that Croatia did not adequately protect the rights of the Serb minority in its initial constitution. According to the BBC series, many Croatian Serbs were absolutely terrified, and wanted to stay in Yugoslavia in order that their rights would be protected. They wanted the assurance that they would be safe at home.

I’ve been to Vukovar. I went to Ovcara. I do not in any way excuse the Yugoslav Army, Mladic and Karadzic for what they did to that region. The psychological trauma that people in Vukovar experienced won’t go away anytime soon. I know that Serbian nationalism frightened Croatians – just as Croatian nationalism frightened Serbians. I understand the Croat desire to live in a separate state. But when you have peoples that have intermingled in a region for years, that separation is not going to be easy, especially during a time of extreme nationalism like the 1990s.

As for your comment about Gotovina – yes, I would say to him in person what I wrote on this blog. Nowhere have I said point-blank that he is guilty. He has been accused of some horrific things, and I’m perfectly fine telling him what those are. Granted, from my post, it is clear what my opinions about his guilt or innocence are – I realize that. However, it’s not up to me to decide his guilt or innocence, it’s up to the International Criminal Court. It is my hope that the court is looking at this issue with as unbiased an eye as possible. His actions during Operation Storm, particularly towards Serb civilians, need to be examined. Bringing him to trial, as well as bringing other wartime leaders to trial before the ICC, may help this region heal. Guilty or innocent, if that happens, I think that is a good thing. Quite honestly, I do not know enough about the workings of the ICC to have an opinion on whether or not it is a useful or helpful institution.

My opinions about what happened in Yugoslavia have really changed because of my travels. I’ll probably spend my whole life trying to figure out why things fell apart in Yugoslavia so quickly. I used to think the answers were simple – that Milosevic and Serbia were to blame for the dissolution of Yugoslavia. But I don’t think that anymore. I don’t think you can blame an entire country or just one man for something that really was a tangled mess. I do not think it’s helpful to lay blame – I do not think that will help people heal, nor will it help build and/or strengthen connections in the region. If we start blaming, we will never stop. Right now, I’m here in Croatia, thinking hard about forgiveness and reconciliation. If people don’t forgive each other for what happened in the past – both during the 1990s and during World War II – I do not think this region will know a lasting peace.