Shared Memories of 1989

The BBC are inviting readers to email in to share their memories of the revolutions of 1989, and their reflections on the impact of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe twenty years on.  There have already been some interesting responses and I imagine the volume of comments will increase. You can read the initial responses here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7900278.stm

Croatian EU Membership Under Threat?

It appears as though issues related to two of my current areas of study, organised crime and disputed borders, may conspire to scupper or at least postpone Croatia’s chances of joining the EU.

Croatia applied for EU membership in 2003, was granted official candidate country status in mid-2004 and entered official entry negotiations with the EU from October 2005. Croatia had been making good progress and was hoping to complete pre-accession negotiations by the end of this year, clearing the way for full membership by 2011. While the most recent European Commission progress report on Croatian accession (published in November 2008) remained generally positive about levels of progress, it did raise serious concerns about continued high levels of corruption and organised crime, strongly stating that ‘more needed to be done’ in this area to meet EU requirements before the country could be considered for full membership.

I explored these developments in a short article (‘Croatia Tackles Crime to Calm EU Jitters’) published by Jane’s Intelligence Digest in December 2008. In brief, the 1990s were a boom time for organised crime in Croatia because post-socialist economic privatisation, opportunities for profiteering and sanctions busting during the Balkan wars and the endemic corruption under Franjo Tudjman’s regime encouraged the establishment of close links between political elites, law enforcement, big business and organised crime. As a result organised crime has often been at best tolerated and at worst promoted by those in positions of power. Croatian intelligence reports highlight the activites of organised smuggling chains dealing in narcotics, arms, cigarettes and human traffic, with high levels of money laundering and counterfeiting linked to organised criminal activities. Working relations have been established between Croatian criminals and their counterparts elsewhere, particularly throughout the Balkan Region and Former Soviet Union, Turkey and Italy. A range of gangland slayings towards the close of 2008 (including the contract killing of lawyers daughter Ivana Hodak on 6th October and the murder of contraversial media magnate Ivo Pukanic in a car bombing on 23rd October, both linked to organised crime) led to demands for concrete action to fight organised crime from both the Croatian public and EU monitors. After a series of public protests against gangland violence and condemnations of the killings by the EC and OSCE (Hans Svoboda, Croatian monitor within the European Parliament declared that ‘either the government must impose some stability and order or Croatia will not be able to join the EU any time soon’), Prime Minister Ivo Sanader ‘declared war’ on organised crime,acting quickly to push a package of anti-mafia laws through parliament and establishing a new police unit, the National Office for Suppressing Corruption and Organised Crime. Dubbed ‘The Croatian FBI’ by the press, a well-publicised anti-organised crime crackdown was launched and dozens of arrests were made before the close of 2008.

While the Croatian government wait for the 2009 EC progress reports to find out whether their recent efforts have been sufficient to convince the EU they are taking a serious enough approach to resolving their crime problem, another issue has raised its ugly head, threatening to derail accession negoiations, this time concerning a disputed borderline along the Croatian-Slovenian coast.

The Bay of Piran is only twenty square kilometres (eight square miles) in area, but provides a treasured outlet to the Adriatic sea for Slovenia, whose total coastline is only 46 km (29 miles) long. Croatia, whose coastline stretches for 1,700 km (1056 miles) argues that a dividing borderline should be drawn down the middle of the bay, but Slovenia fear this would deny their ships access to the sea. This isn’t a new dispute, indeed it dates back 18 years to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991. However the issue has recently been given new impetus as Slovenia (currently the only former Yugoslav state to have joined the EU) are now threatening to veto Croatia’s EU application unless the issue is resolved. While Slovenia are requesting EU mediation to resolve the dispute, Croatia argue that this is a legal, rather than a political issue, so should be resolved by the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

On February 20, European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn encouraged the two countries to ‘work on finding a solution to their border dispute if Zagreb’s EU membership negotiations are to stand a chance of making progress’. Slovenian and Croatian prime ministers Borut Pahor and Ivo Sanader are to due to meet tomorrow (24th February) in an attempt to resolve the matter. If they are unable to reach a satisfactory resolution Croatia may be unable to complete membership negotiations by the end of this year, which will almost certainly delay their entry into the EU.

International Organised Crime in the Czech Republic.

A short article I wrote at the close of 2008 about organised crime in the Czech Republic has just been published in Jane’s Intelligence Digest (‘Foreign crime infiltrates Czech Republic’, 06/02/2009   http://jid.janes.com/public/jid/index.shtml).

While I obviously can’t reproduce the full article here, I will provide a quick general overview of this topic, highlighting  some of the key points:

• Concerns were raised about continued high-levels of non-indigenous organised crime in the Czech Republic last year. A report published by UOOZ (the Czech unit for combating organised crime) in July 2008 claimed that organised crime was dominated by groups originating from the former Soviet Union, Italy, the Balkans and a range of Asian and Middle Eastern networks, who were engaged in a variety of  criminal activities on an incresingly large scale. The 2008 annual report by BIS (the Czech civillian counter intelligence unit) also expressed concern about foreign crime groups infiltrating both legal and illegal spheres of the Czech economy and establishing ties with lawyers, financiers, members of the state administration, police and the judiciary.

• Concern over penetration by foreign criminal groups is not a recent development however. The earliest post-communist Czech intelligence and law enforcement reports, written in the early 1990s, strongly stressed the presence of high levels of non-indigenous organised crime within the country. In 1992 a report compiled by the Czech Ministry of Interior claimed that less than 20% of organised crime was committed by domestic criminals, and by the mid-1990s law enforcement reports estimated that around 50% of criminal organisations active in Czech Republic originated from elsewhere, with another 25% comprised of a mixture of foreign and domestic criminals.

• Similar claims presenting organised crime primarily as a ‘foreign import’ are found in all of the East European countries in the early post-communist period. To a certain extent the level of influence of non-indigenous organised crime was exaggerated to downplay the development of domestic organised crime. However, the Czech Republic is an attractive prospect for many criminal gangs from outside its borders. It’s  geographical location is perfect for incorporation into European smuggling routes, initially bordering EU countries and (from May 2004) becoming a full EU member themselves, while the post-communist economic boom of the late 1990s created favourable conditions for investment and money laundering.

• Criminal groups from the former Soviet Union quickly moved in to establish a strong presence in the Czech Republic in the 1990s, with groups linked to the Moscow-based Solntsevo organisation, St-Petersburg based Tambovskaya group and several organisations from Ukraine, Chechnya, Dagestan and Armenia known to be active on Czech territory. Russian-speaking crime groups have invested heavily in businesses and real estate in areas including Prague, Brno and Karlovy Vary.  Recent reports suggest that criminal groups from the former Soviet Union retain a position of dominance amongst non-indigenous gangs operating in the Czech Republic today, followed by groups from the Balkans and Italy.

• The strong international influence on organised crime means that criminal networks in the Czech Republic today engage in a variety of activities on a transnational scale, including illegal immigration, people trafficking, arms trading and commodity smuggling activities. The country remains a favoured route for drug smuggling, particularly heroin from Asia and increasingly, cocaine from North Africa. Despite some growth in the domestic drug market in recent years, Interpol still estimate that around 70% of drugs smuggled into the Czech Republic are destined for further transport and sale in other EU countries. Many gangs have also moved into drug production, with a number of professionally equipped amphetamine manufacturing laboratories uncovered in recent years.

• While the continued presence of foreign criminals is clear, the Czech underworld is not entirely dominated by outsiders. A number of ‘home-grown’ criminal gangs have faced trial in recent years, most famously the Berdych gang trial, which led to 19 gang members (all of whom were Czechs, including three former UOOZ members) being sentenced on a range of criminal charges in January 2006. Recent evidence indicates that domestic criminal groups are now taking greater responsibility for organising and conducting operations on Czech territory, while analysts admit that increased international collaboration means it is becoming more difficult to classify groups as ‘Czech’ or ‘foreign’.

Poles Mark Twentieth Anniversary of Round Table Talks.

6th February 1989 – Twenty years ago today in Warsaw, fifty-seven representatives drawn from the Polish Communist Party (an official delegation led by then Minister of the Interior Czeslaw Kiszczak) and the banned trade union ‘Solidarity’ (led by Lech Walesa) quietly sat down around a large table to discuss the best way to quell the growing tensions evident in Polish society. The rest, as they say, is history.

Known as the ’round table talks’ these negotiations ran from 6 Feb – 4 April and the resulting agreement, signed on 5th April 1989 paved the way for freedom of speech, democratisation and reform in Poland, which ultimately led to the collapse of the communist regime. The willingness of the Polish Communist Party to enter into a meaningful dialogue with their opponents symbolised a radical break in party policy (just seven years earlier Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski had sent tanks out onto the streets of Warsaw in a declaration of Martial Law to quell protests against his regime), and the events that unfolded in Poland as a result of these talks sent a strong signal to their ‘comrades’ across the East European region that change was now possible, igniting the spark that led to the revolutions of 1989.

The Clue is in the name: Polish Round Table Talks, Warsaw, 6th February 1989

Twenty years on from the opening of the round table talks, while it is events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that have stuck in the popular consciousness as symbolising the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Poles remain justifiably proud of their part in the events of 1989 and a series of commemorative events are planned to mark the occasion. On 29th January a ceremony was held at the Gdansk shipyards (site of the 1980 strike movement and the ‘birthplace of Solidarity’) and a plaque unveiled to celebrate the recent granting of a European Heritage Label to the site for its historic significance. The old Polish embassy in Berlin yesterday (5th February) unveiled a  banner bearing a large photograph of the round table talks and the slogan ‘It started with the Round Table’, with a conference also organised for 9th February to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the talks. The European Solidarity Centre are planning a series of events in coming months, including a musical about the 1980 Gdansk Shipyard strikes and the birth of Solidarity, while a film honouring Father Jerzy Popieluszko (the priest, a leading Solidarity activist, was arrested, interrogated and murdered by the secret police in October 1984) is to be released in March.

The Polish Newspaper Rzeczpospolita today published the results of a public opinion poll indicating that a growing number of Poles now say they feel ‘disatisfied’ with the outcome of the round table negotiations however, with many feeling that the Polish people were cheated or ’sold out’ by arrangements which enabled former communist leaders to retain wealth and influence in the post-Communist period. Lech Walesa, former leader of Solidarity and Polish President 1990-1995 agreed on Monday that the round table talks were ‘a rotton compromise’ and admitted that some of the consequences of the talks ‘proved contradictory to expectations of the participants’. However he defended the actions of those involved and the need for a peaceful compromise, stating that he himself ‘had to behave dishonestly in that situation, but would do the same again’. Walesa went on to explain that:

(It was) a very rotten compromise, base, but without it we wouldn’t have been able to move on. Without the round table communism could have stuck around for 50 years and a day. Certainly, one day communism would have toppled, logically thinking in 30 or 50 years, and it would have ended then in a bloodbath

Current Polish President Lech Kaczynski also agreed, in a statement published in today’s Rzeczpospolita, that while ‘from today’s perspective I believe there was a possibility to negotiate more, that kind of thing is only obvious months or even years later’.

When covering the subject of the collapse of communism in East Europe with my students (most of whom were now not born until after communism had fallen across Eastern Europe), one of the biggest problems I often face is convincing them that the events of 1989, and the course these events took were by no means inevitable. With hindsight it is all too easy to look back twenty years ago and view the fall of communism across East Europe as the only natural outcome of the changes taking place, but at the time that was far from the case. The round table talks are a good case in point. Even today, twenty years on, those who were involved in the process look back and marvel at the way events unfolded in Poland. Tadeusz Mazowiecki (leading Solidarity activist and Poland’s first non-communist Prime Minister 1989-1991) stated earlier today that:

“No one on either side thought events would move so quickly and that six months later my government would see the light of day. All we hoped for from those negotiations at the most was the legalisation of Solidarity, seven years after it was banned by the communists … Nothing was set in stone. Hard-line communists were still very strong.“

And negotiators from the Polish Communist Party have also been marking today’s anniversary by recalling their shock at the course events took in 1989.  Leszek Miller, a communist negotiator in 1989 (and later Polish Prime Minister 2001-2004) argues that:

“I thought it would be a step towards democracy and that Solidarity would take on the role of the opposition, certainly not the role of government straight away … Solidarity got much, much more than it had demanded”

Former Communist media advisor Jerzy Urban also disputes the ‘inevitability’ of the outcome of the round table talks. Referring to the elections held on 4th June 1989 where Solidarity triumphed, winning 99 out of 100 seats in the Polish senate, Urban reminds people today that the Communists were still in charge and that ‘we could have easily falsified the election results, but we chose to recognise them’.

Most other East European countries are organsing events to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989, so I will be writing more on this topic as the year progresses.