The Permanent Mission of Joshie

Well. The time has come to make my way (back) to a continent both dark and scrambled (not unlike breakfast at the Embassy cafeteria or the sense of humor of key DC policy-makers) in search of beautiful scenary, a better understanding of development economics, insight into the writing of Leopold Senghor, diseases I still cannot pronounce, and one wacky white woman who's taking the night flight from Bamako.



Senegal, in all honestly, is a country I know very little about. FCO knows a little more.

I do know that I'll be driving to Venice this evening and tomorrow morning departing Venice - Marco Polo for Paris and then Dakar. I'll spend Friday evening somewhere in Dakar (if you or someone you know happens to own a small enclosure containing one or more of the following: {running water, a toilet, air conditioning, few bugs, a bed} please get in touch with me). On Saturday I'll press on to destinations unknown -- north towards St. Louis, faded colonial glory, safe but frequented beaches, more than decent overland connections with Mauritania? (Yes, Nouakchott is a short 40 km from the border.) Or perhaps south towards the semi-separatist Casamance region?
(Is it even safe? We shall see.)

I am: armed with Slovene hiking boots and the pants really that I have done nothing to deserve. My documents (oh and they are many) are as water-proof as they come. (As it turns out: it's the rainy season! Who knew.) My anti-malarial medication is: safely home on my nightstand, doing little to prevent the invasion of my body by parasites but much for the aestetics of my apartment. I haven't even left yet and already I'm behind to the mosquitos. (Would that I were behind a mesquito! See what you can do.)

That's it. Really. I know my foray en brousse (fear not: I have completely forgotten the entire French language. On the up-side, I am still passable in Hungarian should we meet some errant Magyars nyugatiafrikaban) comes just as I've resumed somewhat regular blogging. All I can ask, gentle reader, is that you bare with me as I navigate through pirogues and la vraie biere afriquenne, hoping that I will be able to update occasionally but hoping even more that I will return home alive. So really. Send me an email sometime before Monday, August 9 to make sure I've survived. This prodigal blogger would certainly appreciate it.

BBC News wishes it weren't in London.

Lucky tourists - they get to leave after a fortnight. The rest of us poor sods will be stuck here until we retire, die or flee.

In today's round of the diplomatic pouch:

Dear Joshua,

Thank you for your support of the Republican National Committee. Grassroots leaders like you are the key to building a better, stronger, more secure future for our nation and all Americans.

Best wishes,
GWB

So on Thursday evening I'll be driving from Zagreb to Venice (oh and on Friday morning boarding an Air France flight for Dakar). Thoughts on Venice?

"Getting lost in Venice usually means running into a number of dead-end streets. But no dead-end street is ever really dead. The following conversation, for example, took place down a dead-end street between a lost visitor and a stranger in a gondola, who floated past him down a small canal:

Visitor: "What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in Venice?"

Stranger: "We've only just arrived."

Visitor: "So what's the most beautiful thing you've seen so far?"

Stranger: "Well, that would have to be you."

Zagreb is 4098 miles (or 6595 kilometers, if you're down with the anti-war crowd) from Boston. A sizeable distance for this errant blogger. And while I can't hope to keep up with the wit and wisdom of my compatriots covering the Democratic convention live on their blogs, I can occasionally take a break from the business of representing the United States to Croatia to reflect on the oh-so-subtle humor of a former Vice President.

Still not a firebrand, sure, but if there's a way not to find the PV funny, I don't know what it is. Quoth Gore: "...but I didn't come here tonight to talk about the past. After all, I don't want you to think that I lie awake at night counting and recounting sheep. I prefer to focus on the future, because I know from my own experience that America is a land of opportunity, where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote."

As Human Rights Watch reports, a Croatian Serb woman was recently convicted in Vukovar of war crimes for denouncing an ethnic Croat. Admittedly, the facts of the Savic case are a bit more complicated (so too are they in Croatian), but the gist is simple. Politically (if that's what it is) motivated prosecution of returning Croatian Serb refugees -- particularly in eastern Slavonia but also around Zadar-Knin -- continue to impede return... along with legal obstacles of identity registration, harassment by local police forces, and a serviceable but unpublicized system of housing care (including reconstruction assistance for returnees).

Prague, as Arthur Phillips' admirers and SE European rail passengers all know, is not a place that's easy to get to. In fact, by this point in human history (the surface of earth has cooled, communism has fallen), you might almost expect a certain level of infrastructure in a country that is, however nominally, European.

Fresh from her Getrude Stein lifestyle of DC socialite gatherings and liberatarian boys, Emmy arrived in Zagreb last Friday after a jaunt down in Dalmatia. Her impressive of the fair capital: sobering. We mostly ate, occasionally napped, and even tried our hand at procuring nut-free ice cream. We braved the utility bill line in the Main Post Office. We however futilely tried to do some shopping on the 10 minutes on Saturday morning when anything in this town is opened. We took a lovely drive through northern Croatia, shopping in Varazdin (some say a "little Vienna." others, less so) and Ptuj -- when will I learn to stop taking girls to eastern Slovenia? I mean, at least Emmy got pizza out of the deal. Admittedly, it was covered in peas and carrots. Then again, it was Slovenia.

But then we attempted to get her to Prague. At $330 one-way flying was unfeasible. There's a Sunday night bus once a week at 6.45pm, but of course it's been sold out for months and you have to stand all 14 hours anyway. So that leaves the train. With no direct rail service from Zagreb to Prague, you have basically two options: change in Salzburg or change in Vienna. Sadly, though, the 9pm overnight to Salzburg last night was delayed some 50 minutes -- at least, we really didn't stay for the exciting conclusion, although word on the platform was that a train had "gone missing in Belgrade." So with the first train delayed and Emmy's connecting train leaving at 4.36am, there was no way she could make it. So we yelled. We bargained. We went to the information desk to find a woman with Die Bahn's webpage open on her desktop. And we eventually got her ticket changed to this morning's 7.30am to Vienna. Which of course was a half hour late. So she might make it. It's hard to say.

So when Secretary Powell weighed in on the situation in Darfur in a PBS interview on 16 July, he made a special point of side-stepping the G-word debacle:

MR. ROSE: But you are sure there will not be a Rwanda there, that too many people...

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I'm not sure.

MR. ROSE: You're not sure?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, it's an open question. The fact of the matter is it's an open question and I'm not going to answer the question before I know what the real answer is. Humanitarian aid is available. We need to do a better job of retailing it out away from stockpiles out to the various camps where people are located and we have to get access to people who are not yet in camps. So we still have a difficult situation and a lot of people are already ill and may succumb to those illnesses as the rainy season goes on and as we get deeper into the year. So we still have a problem. I don't think we have a problem of a Rwandan nature, where tens of thousands of people were lined up and slaughtered en masse. That is not what our problem is.

MR. ROSE: It is not genocide by the legal definition.

SECRETARY POWELL: By legal definition, it does not yet rise to that level. But I have got a team of experts in Darfur now and on the other side of the border in Chad talking to those who have been displaced and they will be reporting back to me next week as to whether the legal standard has been met or not met with respect to genocide.

But too many people are spending too much time arguing about whether it's genocide or not. That's not the issue. The issue is people are in need now and we've got to make sure we're loading the humanitarian pipeline. We've got to make sure that we're getting access for NGO workers, nongovernmental workers to get out there, for the UN agencies to do their work.

***

Then at yesterday's press conference with the UN SecGen (yeah, I work for the government), the very first question broached the same issue: "with reports of nearly 30,000 people killed in the conflict, what would it take for the U.S. to label the situation genocide?"

Secretary Powell responds: "There is a legal definition of genocide, which includes a specific intent to destroy an entire group. And we are examining it very carefully. I have people in the region who are interviewing the victims, who are interviewing the people who have been displaced, and those reports are now coming back to me. Based on those reports, we will make a judgment in due course as to whether it qualifies.

"But I know that there is a great deal of interest in this issue, but it's almost beside the point. The point is that we need to fix the security problem, the humanitarian problem now. Whatever you call it, it's a catastrophe. People are dying at an increasing rate. And we can debate what it should be called or not be called, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is how do we fix the security and how do we put the pressure on the Sudanese Government to do what needs to be done and how do we get the international community more fully mobilized."

So it's all the more frusturating then when the NY Times weighs in with the headline: "In Darfur, Appalling Atrocity -- but is it Genecide?"

So "the road to Montenegro's independence is irrevocable," raves Parliamentary speaker Ranko Krivokapic to BBC News. They've adopted a flag, an anthem, even a national day. I mean really, fellows -- just find a small rock in the Mediterranean and apply to join the EU already.

I suppose Senator Jon Kyl's (R-AZ) critique of the Bureau of Consular Affairs' reponse to September 11 isn't all that surprising. The story goes basically like this: the State Department failed to understand the realities of the post-Cold War world, visa issuance was -- and still is -- designed to facilitiate meaningful travel to the United States for non-immigrants who qualify, then Everything Changed. And still these diplomats -- supported at great expense by the US Taxpayer... to the tune of $200,000 person/year -- still refuse to understand the world is fundamentally different. The Senator call for training is fine -- his insistance that blame belongs at the visa window is not.

John Limbert of AFSA responds more thoroughly in last Friday's Post.

Wonder of wonder! Miracle of miracles! The first Amazon order of my stay in Croatia has finally arrived... and it contains: this. Clam-like am I in my happiness? Fine, go on, weep for the future (of the Democratic Party, if you insist). If I'm not going to be a Washington insider myself, at least I can read about them. Or I would. If only Jeff Grappone would blog every now and then.

In other news, work continues to slam me, though jars of vanilla routinely appear on my desk via inter-office mail. So clearly something's going right. Not much to say about the Czech's defeat last night -- I share the outrage of the Slavs around me that the Greeks are advancing to the Euro 2004 finals against Portugal. I did wake up to some lively radio coverage of the Greek debacle this morning -- apparently, we're still a little bitter than Greece was joining the EU in 1981 while Jaruzelski was busy declaring martial law in Poland. Go on. Tell me they're not related.

First you told me to blog more. Then you told me to blog less about not blogging. Are these mixed signals? And who exactly is this alleged "readership" I keep referring to?

So the good news is: my household effects finally arrived. Two boxes jumped out as particularly alarming.

#17. Contents: MISC
#19. Contents: MISC + BUCKET

I sat on my floor for a while working up the courage to open #17. Contents: ice tongs, a pink iron, some construction paper, a rolling pin, a wind-up walking nose. As I said, miscellaneous indeed.

But can I really open up #19? What could be in there? More ice tongs?? A bucket???

You see the dilemma.