Unlike in America, in Greece, the right to citizenship is based not on where you were born, but to whom you were born. According to Greek law, a person is Greek by blood and ancestry. Thus someone born in Sydney or New York with a Greek grandparent can claim Greek citizenship more easily than an ethnically African or Asian child born under the shadow of the Acropolis and taught in Greek schools.

But soon that may change.

A new draft law introduced at the end of last year would grant citizenship to an estimated 250,000 children who were born or raised in Greece, but whose parents are not Greek.

Second-generation immigrants, as they’re often called here, have been fighting for this right for years. In 2008, I met and interviewed a young woman named Athina Bontigao who was born in Athens to Filipino parents. She had spent her entire life in Greece, but lived with the uncertainty of not knowing whether she would be allowed to stay in the only country she had ever known.

Many second-generation immigrants even face arrest and deportation. Until very recently, Greece not only did not give young people like Athina citizenship, it gave them no special status or even the right to long-term residence. At the age of 18, when they no longer qualified for residency through their parents, many became illegal.

In one story that made news last year, a young man named Dimitris Kiniatzoui, who was born in Greece to a Kenyan mother and Nigerian father, was arrested and threatened with deportation. He was considered an illegal immigrant in Greece — but also didn’t qualify for citizenship in any other country. He was stateless.

The previous government changed the law to give second-generation immigrants the right to apply for a 10-year long-term residence permit when they turned 18, and at the end of that period, the  ability to apply for citizenship. So, at the age of 28, after spending their entire lives here, they might qualify for citizenship, although each step of that process — getting a long-term residence permit, applying for citizenship — involves grappling with Greece’s arcane bureaucracy, not to mention huge fees.

Immigrant groups are cheering the new law, which has been a high priority for the new government. But many Greeks feel uncomfortable with the idea that someone with black skin or a Slavic name could call himself Greek. Some Greek political parties on the right say the draft law is too generous, and undermines the Greek national identity.

Immigration is still very new to Greece — or, at least in its modern, multicultural form. For most of the 20^th century, Greeks themselves left in search of a better life in places like America, Australia or other parts of Europe. They say Melbourne is the third largest Greek city in the world.

But the world is changing and its no longer just nations built on immigration like America or former colonial powers like England and France, that are dealing with mass immigration. Greece has been slow to adapt to this new reality, but whether Greeks like it or not, immigration here is a fact. Non-citizens now comprise nearly 10 percent of the population, most of them from Albania and other Balkan countries.

The debate over the proposed law is likely to be fierce, but it’s a conversation the country needs to have.

Albanians love 42 for his support of the 11-week NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which led to the Serbian military withdrawal from Kosovo and the placement of the province under United Nations administration, and 43 for supporting Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February last year.

But now Kosovo Albanians have shown their special gratitude to Clinton — who is seen as the architect of the NATO bombing campaign — by erecting a giant, 10-foot tall, golden statue of the former U.S. President.

Clinton visited Pristina for the statue’s unveiling, but appeared slightly sheepish about the whole thing:

Bush got a similar hero’s welcome in Albania in June 2007, when he made an official visit there. The capital Tirana was festooned with American flags and huge posters of Bush’s face, in a style reminiscent of the city’s communist-era parades. It was strange to see the giant, concrete pyramid that had been built by Albanian’s former communist dictator Enver Hoxha as his tomb draped in red, white and blue.

Eight months later, Kosovo Albanians waved American flags and held aloft “We love America” signs during their independence celebrations.

All this was at a time when America wasn’t exactly the most popular kid on the global playground.

Kosovo (the ethnically Albanian parts, at least) and Albania are still probably the two most pro-American places in the world — they may even be more pro-American than America. At the very least, they’ve shown greater enthusiasm for America’s recent foreign escapades than the American people as a whole.

Albania, which recently got into NATO with U.S. backing, has been loyal supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has sent hundreds of troops to the two conflicts. America was even able to use its leverage there to coerce the poor Balkan country into taking some of the prisoners — most of them Chinese Uyghurs — who they wanted to release from Guantanamo Bay but for various reasons couldn’t send to their home countries.

For the Bush administration, support from Kosovo and Albania, both majority Muslim, was seen as an important counterargument to allegations that America was waging a war on Islam.

But the new Clinton statue may be bad news for Bush. Kosovo was probably the only state in the world that might have erected a statue to him and it’s unlikely even they will adorn their streets with two giant statues of American presidents.

But how do you brand a place like Kosovo, whose very status is disputed and whose name is more likely to conjure images of war and ethnic conflict than the kind of pleasant feelings that make you want to go on vacation there?

Well, the international advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi has now created a slick new television commercial and slogan, “Kosovo: The Young Europeans,” to help burnish Kosovo’s international image and fuel its quest for recognition.

The campaign seizes on Kosovo’s comparative youth in the context of an aging Europe, trying to present it — and its people — as young and dynamic. The average age of people there, according to the campaign, is 25.9.

The promise of Kosovo’s youth is a refrain I’ve heard often from optimistic young people there in recent years. Kosovo lacks great natural beauty or an abundance of memorable architecture (the capital Pristina’s most notable landmark is the boxy and far from charming Grand Hotel) or even really any established modern industry. Instead, young entrepreneurs dream of building a new economic future as a high-tech center by tapping into the Kosovo’s young, well-educated population.

But that will be a difficult task given Kosovo’s still unresolved status — blocked by Serbia, which considers its  seccession illegal, it still lacks, for example, its own telephone dialing code or recognition by most international organizations — and the ethnic tensions that continue to divide its population.

Last year, I attended Kosovo’s independence celebrations on a bitterly cold February day, when tens of thousands of jubilant Kosovo Albanians braved the weather to dance on the streets of the Pristina. Kosovo’s Serbs took to the streets too, but in protest, not celebration.

Even then, as Kosovo declared independence from Serbia with American backing, it lacked the basic symbols of a state. On that day, it was the red and black flag of Albania — along with a smattering of American flags — that people waved.

The international community — or at least the part of it that backed the declaration of independence — had made clear to Kosovo’s leaders that their new state had to be a multi-ethnic one, and that any new symbols needed to include Serbs and other minorities. That meant, for example, no black two-headed eagle, like the one on the Albanian flag.

The new branding campaign draws on the new symbols the were developed as part of the independence process, particularly Kosovo’s new flag which has a blue background, the shape of Kosovo in gold and six stars representing its six peoples. It also recalls the independence celebrations, during which giant yellow letters spelling the word “NEWBORN” were erected in the center of Pristina.

The well-produced Saatchi & Saatchi commercial full of beautiful young people is designed to brand Kosovo to the outside world. But it’s not clear yet whether even Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population identifies strongly with the new national symbols it presents. And its clear that at home, there’s still a lot of work to be done building a Kosovo identity that has room for all its people.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/10/28/branding-kosovo/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/10/04/a-question-of-semantics-kosovo-macedonia-and-northern-cyprus/ http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/10/04/a-question-of-semantics-kosovo-macedonia-and-northern-cyprus/#comments Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:32:37 +0000 Nicole Itano http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/?p=69 Writing about the Balkans and Cyprus is a semantic minefield for any reporter covering this region. As journalists, we strive for neutrality. But often here, seemingly innocuous words or phrases are heavily loaded with meaning. In many cases, there are no neutral terms. This is especially true when it comes to the names of places, peoples, and nations.

These are issues that are taken extremely seriously by governments and ordinary people. They may seem like silly disputes, but often they strike at the core of peoples’ identities. It’s easy here to offend with what you say — or don’t say. And in many people’s eyes, not taking their side is no different than being overtly biased.

Here’s a brief guide to three of the biggest linguistic tangles in the neighborhood:

Is Kosovo a country?

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, with the backing of the United States and many other Western powers. But Serbia says that declaration was illegal.

So far, 62 members of the United Nations (out of 191) have recognized Kosovo’s independence. It’s not a member of the United Nations, but it is in the IMF. Even the European Union is divided.

So is it a country? And if not, what is it? A breakaway province? A self-declared republic? And if it’s not a country, what do you call its leaders? Can you be a prime minister if you don’t have a state?

Clearly, declaring independence alone isn’t enough to make you a country. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic declared independence from Azerbaijan, but not even its patron Armenia recognizes it.

Nor is recognition by some states in and of itself enough to qualify. Nearly 50 states and the African Union recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (usually referred to as Western Sahara). But few journalists outside of Africa would refer to it as a country.

Where is Macedonia? And who are Macedonians?

The southernmost bit of the former Yugoslavia refers to itself as the Republic of Macedonia, but it has been in a long dispute with Greece over the use of the term “Macedonia.”

The northern region of Greece is called Macedonia and is home to Pella, the capital of ancient Macedonia. Greeks say they are the true descendants of Alexander the Great’s ancient Macedonian empire and that their Slavic-speaking neighbors are trying to steal their heritage — and perhaps even their land.

In Greece, and in international institutions like the United Nations, the country is referred to as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM for short. Greeks call the citizens of the country “Skopjans,” after the name of their capital, Skopje.

The government of the Republic of Macedonia/FYROM is in fact trying to lay claim to the ancient heritage of Macedonia (most independent historians would say spuriously). They’ve renamed the Skopje airport after Alexander and plan to erect a giant statue of him in the center of the city.

But moderates point out that their country has no other name for itself or its citizens. If they’re not “Macedonians,” what are they? The also say Greece has no right to interfere with what they call themselves.

A UN mediator has been trying to hammer out a compromise, which would probably include some sort of double-barreled name for the country, perhaps with a geographical qualifier.

But for now, the dispute is more than a mere linguistic squabble. It’s keeping the country out of NATO and threatens plans for European Union expansion into the region.

How to you refer to the Turkish-controlled part of the island of Cyprus?

The government of the region refers to itself as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but Greek Cypriots refer to it as Turkish-Occupied Cyprus. In Greek Cypriot media, officials from the region are often qualified with “so-called,” as in “the so-called president of Turkish-Occupied Cyprus.”

Most Western journalists have settled on term “Northern Cyprus,” which satisfies neither side. Greek Cypriots in particular dislike the term and say they are the only legitimate government on the island, which was divided by force when the Turkish army invaded in 1974. Turkish Cypriots point out that the invasion occurred in response to a coup backed by Greece’s military junta that toppled the island’s legitimate government.

Greek Cypriots often fight the use of the term “Northern Cyprus.” When the Royal Academy of Arts in the United Kingdom organized an exhibit on Byzantium last year, for example, the Greek Cypriot Byzantine Museum refused to lend any artifacts unless all pieces from the northern part of the island were labeled as coming from “Turkish-Occupied Cyprus.” In the end, museum officials there told me, they could not come to a compromise and did not participate in the show.

Trying to figure out what to call the institutions and leaders of Northern Cyprus is also a linguistic nightmare. When Mehmet Ali Talat meets Dimitris Christofias, can you say two presidents met? And how to you refer to someone in the Northern Cypriot government? The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus does hold democratic elections, but the only country that recognizes it is — not surprisingly — Turkey. Greek Cypriots say that using official titles for Northern Cypriot officials legitimizes an unrecognized state. They have a point, but we journalists have to call them something.

It’s hard enough to write about all this when you have time to consider your words carefully. Pity the poor broadcaster who has to navigate this minefield while live on air.

The area near the town of Grammatikos where the worst fire began on Friday.

The fires that raged since Friday outside of Athens forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes and have burned at least 35,000 acres of forest, farmland and olive groves.

Greeks are shocked, but not surprised.

Scenes of fire-wrought devastation are becoming an all too familiar phenomenon here and many here are asking why.

In August 2007, Greeks watched in horror as a wave of fires killed more than 70 people, many of them trapped as they tried to flee mountain villages in the country’s southern Peloponnese region. At the time, there was spike in environmental activism and Greece’s government promised to take action to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

Yet almost exactly two years later, Greeks are again glued to their television sets, this time watching as fires destroy neighborhoods in expensive suburbs on the edge of Athens. So far, no causalities have been reported. But the environmental and economic damage is extensive.

So why are forest fires becoming an increasing problem here and across the Mediterranean?

One reason may be climate change. Recent years have been among the hottest and driest on record (although this year, in Greece at least, has been milder) and climate scientists have long predicted that drought and heat waves in the Mediterranean region would result in more frequent and more devastating fires.

But in Greece, at least, politics and poor planning also play a role. Despite pledges after the fires of 2007 to reform the country’s underfunded fire service, little progress has been made.

Forestry experts also say Greece and other Mediterranean countries have poured money into fire fighting — buying expensive airplanes and other equipment — while neglecting fire prevention.

For now, Greeks are captivated with the drama of the moment. But as the fires dim, public anger is likely to grow. That could pose a threat to the country’s fragile governing party, New Democracy, which was already struggling to hold onto its slim majority in parliament before this weekend’s fires.

Photo by Nicole Itano

That’s the charge Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who in 2006 helped uncover the truth about the secret C.I.A. detention camps in Europe, is currently investigating. On behalf of the Council of Europe, a leading European human rights body representing 47 countries across the continent, Marty is on a fact-finding tour this week in Albania and Serbia.

The explosive allegations first became public last year when Carla Del Ponte, the outspoken former chief war crimes prosecutor for the United Nations, published her memoirs.

In her book, co-authored by former New York Times journalist Chuck Sudetic and released in English earlier this year under the title “Madame Prosecutor,” Del Ponte said she had investigated credible claims that during and immediately after the Kosovo war, ethnic Albanian fighters transported hundreds of people over the border into Albania, where they were held in secret prisons, tortured and killed. Some prisoners, her sources told her, were murdered after their organs had been harvested and sold.

Del Ponte also said her investigation was blocked by UN and NATO officials, who didn’t want to look too closely at allegations that muddied the easy narrative of bad Serbs and good Albanians that justified NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia.

Kosovo officials and former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) officers deny the accusations but, in the wake of Del Ponte’s memoir, a number of media and human rights organizations have conducted their own inquiries.

An in-depth investigation conducted by the BBC, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), found evidence of secret KLA prisons in Albania. The BBC produced a half-hour radio documentary and 12-minute television piece, while BIRN published its version on its website. Al Jazeera English spoke to Serb prosecutors and visited a farmhouse in rural Albania where Del Ponte says she was told prisoners were held:

Del Ponte is a hated figure across the region and many people — of all ethnic groups — have lost faith in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the UN court responsible for prosecuting war crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Kosovo Albanians think justice has been too slow and that even those found guilty have been let off with easy sentences, while Serbs think the tribunal is an anti-Serb conspiracy, aimed at blaming them alone for the breakup of Yugoslavia. The court’s failure to investigate allegations of kidnapping and organ trafficking by KLA fighters is seen by many Serbs as proof that it is biased.

Marty is widely respected for his independence and willingness to speak truth to power, and his conclusions will likely carry weight, at least not already convinced of the truth of one side or the other.

But whether the allegations are true or not, the response to them shows that post-war justice process has done little to help people in the region come to terms with the past.

All sides in the Balkan wars still want to see themselves as victims and others as the aggressors. But war is rarely simple and its execution always ugly. While it is true that Kosovo Albanians suffered greatly from Serbian aggression during the last years of the 1990s — thousands died and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee to neighboring countries — that doesn’t mean crimes weren’t also committed against Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/08/04/were-serbs-murdered-for-their-organs-during-kosovo-war/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/07/31/rewriting-history-at-the-acropolis-museum/ http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/2009/07/31/rewriting-history-at-the-acropolis-museum/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:28:45 +0000 Nicole Itano http://thefastertimes.com/southerneuropeandthebalkans/?p=33 ATHENS, Greece — The none-too-subtle subtext behind the recent opening of Greece’s new Acropolis Museum was that the time had come for Britain to return the famous Parthenon, or Elgin, Marbles, which are still in display at the British Museum nearly 200 years after they were hacked from the famous building and hauled off to London by a British aristocrat.

But although the museum was designed to boost national pride, it recently found itself under attack from the country’s most powerful nationalist institution, the Greek Orthodox Church.

Earlier this week, the museum announced that it was removing a scene from an animated film — censoring it, according to its Greek-French creator — depicting Christian priests destroying part of the Parthenon, after complaints from the Church.

The offending scene, which was excerpted from a short made in 2004 by Academy Award-winning director Constantin Costa-Gavras, can be seen here in the director’s original film beginning at about 1:30:

So why all the fuss?

The Greek Orthodox Church and Athenian democracy — represented most fully in popular imagination by the Parthenon — are the two most powerful symbols of Greek nationhood. So the idea that Christians might once have been less than respectful to Greece’s ancient past strikes at the heart of the Greek national identity, and the Church’s role in it.

Of course, it is widely documented that early Christians tore down ancient monuments and that the Parthenon was once used as a church (and later, as a mosque). But, for many Greeks, those are inconvenient facts, best left unexplored. According to the Associated Press, “Greek officials contended the film misrepresented the attitude of the Greek Orthodox Church toward Greece’s ancient heritage.”

History in this part of the world is often as much a nation-building project as it is a process aimed at trying to understand, and learn from, the past. In Greece, nationalists, as well as the Greek Church, have often resisted versions of history that veer from the mainstream “good vs. evil,” “vs. them” narrative taught in schools.

In 2007, for example, the Church led a campaign against a new history textbook for 11 year-olds that it said minimized Greek suffering under the Ottomans. Greece’s center-right government eventually withdrew the books.

Other countries in the region have faced similar battles over history and how it should be interpreted. Last year, the Greek Cypriot government came under fire after it tried to revise the country’s elementary school history curriculum in a way that showed Turkish Cypriots in less negative light. Serbian and Albanian children in Kosovo still learn very different versions of the past and, of course, in Turkey, talking about whether there was a genocide against Armenians in the early years of the 20th century remains taboo.

Some historians in the region, like those involved in the Joint History Project, are trying to encourage a less one-sided approach to history.

But, as the recent decision by the Acropolis Museum illustrates, they are still in the minority.

UPDATE August 5, 2009: The Acropolis Museum announced it would not edit the film after all, but clarified that it showed early Christians, not priests, destroying part of the Parthenon frieze.

As deep-pocketed tourists roast themselves on Greek beaches, the country is cracking down on the thousands of penniless arrivals who have come not to worship the sun gods, but in search of refuge and a better life.

The country’s new policy on illegal immigrants seems to be to lock them up and send them home. Unfortunately for Greece, the second part isn’t so easy.

Over the past month, the Greek government has passed a flurry of draconian new laws aimed at tackling illegal immigration. The new regulations dramatically extend the length of time undocumented migrants can be held and plans are underway to transform a series of unused military facilities into a network of immigrant detention centers.

Police have already begun stepping up arrests.

In recent weeks, authorities have also cleared two well established immigrant squats, including a makeshift camp in the port city of Patras that was home to hundreds of Afghanis and an abandoned courthouse in Athens lived in by North Africans.

But Greece faces a growing dilemma. While it can arrest and detain illegal immigrants, deporting them is much more difficult. Many lack any documentation, making it difficult to determine their country of origin. And although Turkey has signed an agreement with Greece to accept back illegal migrants that pass through its territory, in practice it accepts few.

On Monday, Human Rights Watch said that Greece was transporting large numbers of migrants to the country’s north and warned that the country might be preparing to illegally push them back over the border to Turkey.

It wasn’t so long ago that Greeks themselves crossed oceans by the hundreds of thousands in search of a better life in foreign lands. But today’s Greece is a (comparatively) prosperous European Union country and every month, thousands of desperate Africans and Asians, many seeking refuge from poverty and war, are washing up on Greek shores.

Greece lies on Europe’s border and has become an increasingly important entry point to Europe for people smuggling. Last year, an estimated 150,000 migrants were arrested after entering the country illegally. Most come via Turkey, by sea to one of Greece’s islands, or over the northern land border the separates the two countries.

Now Greece — home to just 11 million people — says enough is enough. It’s full.

At a recent press conference with UNHCR, Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis called on other European Union countries to help her country deal with the growing problem, saying Greece was sympathetic, but overwhelmed.

“There are always certain limits and when these limits are transgressed, reflexes start emerging,” she said. “These reflexes are criticized strongly, but they are to be expected when the limits that society can tolerate are transgressed.”

But international and local human rights groups charge Greece with failing to uphold its obligations to protect the rights of refugees and say migrants are being held in inhuman conditions.