31 August 2004
Notice: change of address
From September 2, I'll be living in Baltimore, Maryland, again. At first, I can be reached care of my friends Spud and Stephanie, at
2710 N Calvert St.
Baltimore, MD 21218
UNITED STATES
Tel. +1 410-235-8565
My email address remains the same: mflane@acephale.org.
I'll keep you apprised of any further changes. Take care! MFL
Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org
26 August 2004
There's an American PhD student in the Archaeology Department at the University of Sheffield in the UK, from where I write. I'll call her Dee. Dee's in her 30s and from the north of Florida. Her father used to work on an assembly line manufacturing the Phalanx anti-aircraft system. Her mother worked on the government side of the deal. Dee has three brothers. An older one works as a civilian contractor for a major American weapons and surveillance equipment company in Iraq. The younger one is in the US Army Reserve and is due to serve in Iraq in a few months time. Her selection for a PhD programme makes her stand out in her rather military-oriented family, but the family is proud of her achievement. Her choice of studying the Anglo-Saxon era in Lincolnshire, rather than, say, the Seminoles of the Apalachicola, seems not to bother her parents and siblings at all. She recently returned from the States, where she had been trying with some trouble to write her dissertation up and hold down a job with the National Park Service.
Dee is ebulliently friendly and will laugh hilariously if you so much as smile. She has bright blue eyes, magnified by her glasses, set in a fleshy, weather-worn fact; her hair is dirty blonde, bleached out by the sun, and she has a permanent farmer's tan from what seems to be her costume for all seasons: T-shirt, Levis and cross-trainers. Unpretentious American unisex fashion. Many of the Britons around the Department find her spoken drawl charming (if not amusing), and she gets on well with a good number of the non-academic staff, unlike many of her British colleagues and her academic superiors. She likes England well enough, though not surprisingly, she complains from time to time about the weather, and she misses certain American luxuries, like army-size bags of tortilla chips and giant cups of coffee.
Given that one of her brothers is already in Iraq, and another is due to go there soon, Dee is particularly concerned that Americans and Europeans are not getting "the whole story" about that country through the mass media. I have no doubt that she is right in this. However, what she recently told me provides an example of how "firsthand experience" is no guarantor of critical evaluation, nor prevention from always seeing America in the best light. She said that her brother the contractor meets Iraqis every day who thank him, as an American, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I don't doubt that this is true, and some of the gratitude is probably genuine, rather than unctuous. I think such expressions should be no great surprise -- given that Iraq is a country of 25 million people of diverse ethnic identities and religions, some Iraqis urban, others rural -- unless one cleaves to stereotypes of oppressed or "benighted" peoples. Unfortunately, what Dee told me next betrayed exactly this conception. She told me how proud her brother was to have walked by a school one morning and seen little girls lined up to go into class; "you know", she said, "they were never able to do that before".
Here was the cruelty of religious fanatics in Afghanistan, particularly their oppression of women, confused with the mafia-like tyranny and terrorism (note the small t) of the Ba'th regime. I replied gently that what she had said was absolutely untrue, and I gave her a case in point: Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a.k.a. "Chemical Sally", eminent member of Saddam's coterie-cum-government, had not only gone to school, but she was also educated at the University of Baghdad and took her PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia -- my home town. Dee didn't fight the point but just responded, with sudden sullenness, "Oh, well, that's what he told me". I'm sure her brother was the source of the confusion, having earnestly convinced himself that women and girls had been especially demeaned in Iraq, then saw a queue of schoolgirls and thought, "Now there's progress!". Of course, this anecdote should serve as salutary reminder that simply showing someone a different depiction of events or telling "the whole story" (or at least it's proverbial "other side") is not enough; one also has to persuade people to apply their minds to the evidence of their senses. And this can be daunting.
I asked Dee about the American media's treatment of Lynddie England, especially in comparison with Jessica Lynch, and I summarised for her what I had read in the American and British press. "It was shameful!" she shouted. "It was because she was a woman! It was because she was a woman", she repeated emphatically. I agreed with her that this was at least part of the issue. Lest you think that Dee is an apologist for masculine dominance at home in the States, she isn't; she talks louldy about the importance of "equality" for women, and she is happy that her academic supervisor, who opposed the invasion of Iraq (at least at first), touts feminist credentials.
It is probably needless to say that Dee thinks that the British media are appallingly biased against the American government. She listens to commercial web-radio from Jacksonville, while typing her research up. I told her I listen to radio on line from Greece, though I didn't mention that I listen to it in large part to keep myself tuned in mentally on Greek. About listening to Stateside radio while in Britain she declared, "I like it because there's no choice here. No choice!". (The BBC's Radio 4, which Dee told me she does not listen to, produces a number and variety of programmes that America's NPR can only dream of undertaking, and it is an outstanding example of what publicly funded radio allowed its own governance can do.) Of course, the "choice" she speaks of is that all American "consumer" choice between commodities offered under a growing variety of labels, produced by a diminishing number of technological processes -- between "classic rock" and "indy rock", Fritos and Cheetos, Big Macs and Whoppers, Kerrys and Bushes.
What, I wonder, does she make of the choices offered to Iraqis, as Americans once again prepare to select one of two white male millionaires (Catholic and Born-Again labels), who both have ambitions of making Iraq profitable for foreign companies, and as firms like her brother's get more and more of the most lucrative contracts with the broadest remits? I haven't the courage to ask her yet; the issues are obviously already complicated and would entail my finding the strength of thinking with her. It requires more than courage, however, since I would risk crushing a fragile ingenuousness, like that possessed by so many other Americans. Sometimes it seems I just can't find the animus, which a relatively few people in high places deserve more.
Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org
16 August 2004
I'm enjoying watching the athletes compete in the Olympics in Athens. I'm especially keen on the athletics (American "track and field"), swimming, gymnastics and martial arts, though I find that I am usually running errands or doing housekeeping when the badmitton or equestrian events are on. I suppose my erstwhile geographical associations should cause me to cheer harder for Baltimorean swimming champion Michael Phelps. I'm going for my first triathlon next year, and the swimmers have been inspiring me to work on my particular weakness.
It is very regrettable that the modern Olympics are not accomplished without considerable social violence. The games in Atlanta in 1996 were notorious for the bomb that opponents of abortion choice set off there, but they deserve to be at least as infamous for the destruction of low-income housing and small business districts for the sake of erecting the Olympic village and the forced removal from city centre of homeless people sleeping on the streets. Sydney also created "vagrant-free zones" for the Olympics in 2000. Likewise, the much touted "redevelopment" of Athens, of which the Greek authorities are so proud, has taken a bloody toll. At least 14 construction workers were killed in the mad rush to finish the venues (compared with one death in Sydney); the precise number is uncertain, by the Greek government's own admission, since foreign and illegal labour has probably been employed. Furthermore, "cleaning up" Athens has been done at the expense of poor neighbourhoods, Roma people and recent immigrants, most from eastern Europe.
In light of this, I post here something I wrote in 2000, while doing archaeological fieldwork and library research in Greece. It is important to note that I wrote this while memories of the war over Kosovo in 1999 were still fresh. I hope that many of the points I raise are both interesting historically, especially to those who think of Greece just as a tourist destination, and relevant to contemporary issues. Perhaps it will serve simply as a reminder that the problems of the Balkans haven't gone away. Some of the material is admittedly dated: Greece's increasing EU commitments mean that it can be held to account for the treatment of illegal immigrants according to the European Charter on Human Rights, and the ID card system has had to be substantially reformed. All the more reason for the Greek authorities to have got that part of the job done early.
PS: Does anyone want to bet on how many of the 70,000 troops Bush wants to remove from Europe will end up in South America in the next four years, if Junior gets his way? I'd guess at least 30,000. Don't count on the Democrats not to take advantage of the redeployment in like manner.
IN THE SHADOWS OF "SUNNY GREECE": A LETTER FROM ATHENS
[August 2000]
The Olympia restaurant on Freedom Square in Athens' near west side is where I come for something delectably oily and half a liter of retsina. When I have the time and money, I relish its cool whitewashed depths for hours. This working-class neighborhood is a part of the Greece I love. It is a mixture of Greek families established here since at least the 1920s, Roma squatters on the narrow back streets, and young recent immigrants.
It is the festival of the Adornment of the Virgin Mary, and I am sitting in the Olympia. The deep, synchronized wailing of Orthodox priests reverberates through the speakers mounted on the church in the square. Shortly, deacons and acolytes march gravely around the square past the door of the restaurant, carrying an enormous wrought-silver icon of the All-Holy Mother. They are followed by a parade of little girls, incongruously dressed either in classical Greek chitons of vestal white or brilliantly decorated medieval costumes. An honor guard of soldiers backs them up, flying the Greek flag's soft sky-and-cloud colors. Seated on a park bench, oblivious to this spectacle of the ancient mixed with the modern, a Greek widow in traditional black is conversing earnestly with a Chinese teenager who works at his father's wholesale clothing shop next door. On the far side of the square, police on the beat pause in the shade to survey the goings-on, scowling from behind sunglasses. Inside, at the table opposite me, the young Greek proprietor is chatting with a middle-aged Romanian festooned in gold chain. They speak an ad hoc Greek-Romanian creole. Their banter, punctuated by laughter, is syncopated by the frantic dialogue of the film on TV about father and son playboys, one of the innumerable farcical movies of the early 1960s in which Greece is always sunny, comical, shiny and modern. All together it is a picture of relative tranquility in a city of four million and growing. Yet momentarily I feel unsettled, as though adrift in a sea of people clinging to the flotsam of identities and swimming over and under one another in a desperate search for solid ground.
Athens has a face that its inhabitants of 10 or 20 years ago would not recognize. Greek and Eritrean schoolgirls walk arm in arm through the shopping district, and sailors of Nigerian parentage, on R-and-R, sit with their Greek comrades in excited packs in the coffeehouses. Filipino nannies mind wealthy Greek children in the parks. At the same time, such multiethnicity is not wholly new to Greece. Like the rest of the Balkans, Greece has been the scene of ebbs and flows of peoples of various linguistic, social, and religious character, and of conflict between and transformation of such collective identities. Until this century, one could find clusters of non-Greek villages in all the ancient provinces: Serbs in Epeiros and Arcadia, Albanians in Triphylia and Phthiotis, Catalonians in Attica. "Arvanitis," a variant of "Albanian," is a common Greek surname. The population was as variegated as the landscape.
Since at least the time of the War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821-1832), however, Greek national identity has tended to cut two ways -- by language and religion. The former puts Greeks (like Albanians) in a unique category and allows them to identify themselves with classical antiquity. The latter rationalizes greater territorial claims, and much of Panslavism, and the identities of Serbia and Bulgaria in particular, can be understood as a struggle against Greek Orthodox hegemony. The Greek nation-state is still involved in the requisite homogenization of the population, a process that was largely completed, with considerable violence, in western Europe 200 years ago. A century ago, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians were engaged in a fierce propaganda war in what is now the northern half of Greece, establishing competing schools, sectarian churches, and "cultural foundations" [1]. This territory, along with Crete, was only acquired in the last 90 years, after the three consecutive, bloody Balkan Wars. Within living memory in the southwest Peloponnese, where I work as an archaeologist, edict has changed such Albanian and Slavic place names as Pispisa and Vydisova, not to mention Turkish appellations, to something agreeably Greek. Hence today, while simultaneously institutionalizing Greek linguistic, religious, and historico-cultural identity -- through tourism as much as the schools -- the Hellenic Republic also "protects" so called ethnic groups within its borders. National identity cards indicate religious affiliation: Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim. "Ethnic groups" include the vestigial Jewish communities of Macedonia and Thessaly and, importantly, the "Muslim minority" of 200,000 in eastern Thrace, a group cross-cut by Turkish, Romany, and Bulgarian speakers, whose fate continues to be the subject of Greco-Turkish negotiations.
Thus in "stable" Greece -- NATO's long-time Balkan outpost -- both flagrant and insidious ethnic purification and historical revision on the ground have taken place. The Greek national identity that continues to be carved out of the Balkans is now cut on the template of the post-Cold War redefinition of Europe, and this tendency has the potential for further institutional, even military, violence. Moreover, Greece's relationship with the Great Powers, today the European Union and NATO, has never been easy. At a rally against American Defense Secretary William Cohen's state visit in July, a representative of the Athens-based International Coordinating Committee for Peace and Detente, which had protested NATO's bombing of Serbia last spring, declared that "the Americans should learn something from Greek history -- that we do not submit to foreign domination." But even the battle for freedom from "the Turkish yoke" in the 1820s was not so simple, fraught rather with internecine factional fighting and the Church hierarchy split between complicity with the Porte and leading the rebellion. Crucial to the insurgents' success was the intervention of the European "Philhellenes," such as the illustrious Lord Byron, and Greeks from the diaspora, such as the Tsar's foreign minister Ioannes Capodistrias, who envisioned themselves on a crusade to reclaim the ruined seat of the original Enlightenment from eastern despotism. Under the terms of the agreement on independence, Greece's western sponsors imported a monarchy. There followed a decade of occupation by his majesty's Bavarian soldiers, during which they fought constant skirmishes with irrendentist Greek paramilitaries along the frontiers.
Throughout the 19th century, Greece was eager to claim more land from the Ottoman Empire. However, Britain, a principal financier, kept Greece on a short leash, since it regarded Turkey as a bulwark against Russian adventures. During the First World War, with Russia then an ally and Turkey an enemy, Britain relented and encouraged Greece's pro-Entente faction to enter the war against Bulgaria and Turkey. This strategy eventually led to Greece's disastrous campaign of 1921-22 to seize Asia Minor in western Turkey, where a large Orthodox Christian population dwelt, albeit a minority. Nationalist gangs followed in the army's wake, wreaking murderous vengeance on Turks. The Turkish army retaliated by burning Smyrna, during which some 30,000 died (mostly Armenian, but also Greek Christians). This was followed in 1923 by mutually agreed ethnic cleansing, in which Turkey banished 1,000,000 Orthodox Christians to Greece, regardless of their native language, in exchange for nearly 400,000 Muslims, designated "Turks" by the Greek authorities. During the Second World War, Greek communist resistance fighters were tentatively supported by the British, only to be murdered, imprisoned, or exiled after the war by Greek fascists and monarchists with the help of the victorious Americans [2].
To be sure, the US and Britain's role in the Greek Civil War (1944-1949) caused considerable resentment toward Americans especially, let alone among Greeks, who still rarely speak of the Emfylios, as it is known, except in whispers. Likewise, the American blessing given to the brutal and incompetent dictatorship of "the Colonels" from 1967 to 1974 has left some particularly bitter memories. Nevertheless, the majority of precariously affluent urban, middle-class Greeks seems too preoccupied with securing the credentials of worthy citizens of the European Union -- cell phones, laptop computers, Italian fashion, credit cards -- to hold any lasting grudges. The index of prices on the Athens stock market rocketed from around 1500 in August 1998 to over 5000 in August 1999. ("Smile, Greece!" a radio announcer exhorted us.) Merger wars have erupted: Ergobank, already 10-percent owned by Deutsche Bank, recently won the "privilege" of a majority buy-out by Greece's Eurobank, itself owned by the multinational European Financial Group.
Thus the establishment of Greece's place in the world proceeds at frantic postmodern pace. But the glittering Europeanism and the commercial incandescence cast a shadow over the vignettes of ethnic harmony in the shops and cafés, and the stampede for inclusion in the rich man's club is trampling the rights of recent immigrants, as much as it threatens the older minorities. On Athens' main avenues, Serbian-speaking Roma beg for money, displaying Yugoslavian passports and icons of the Virgin in an attempt to appeal to the political and religious sympathies of passers-by. Many are refugees from Kosovo, where, the papers report, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and supporters have singled out "gypsies" for expulsion, in a move reminiscent of Hitler's Germany [3]. Sympathy for Serbs has increased dramatically since NATO's bombardment, but even those Greeks of "Arvanitis" heritage recognize no ethnic commonality with Albanians. In the evening, Albanian families who have come to seek their fortune in Greece sit in huddled groups in the international bus station, guarding gym bags overflowing with cheap consumer goods purchased and possessions not yet pawned. They glance nervously around, hoping to avoid police harassment before taking the special non-stop services back to Sarande and Tirana. Among the things they sometimes hawk: pen-sized laser-pointers that project a ruby-red smiley face, like the targeting device of an ironic weapon.
Kostas Simitis' government blames illegal immigrants for Greece's unemployment rate, officially 10.8 percent, and thus deflects criticism of the austere fiscal measures required by the EU. Coupled with a series of sensationalized violent crimes, this has provided the state with an excuse for persecuting anyone suspected of being an immigrant. In fact, mainly manufacturing and other industrial jobs have been lost, while Albanians, Bulgarians, and Romanians, who make up most of the immigrant work force, do the work most Greeks refuse -- primarily picking and harvesting on large farms, but also building repair, housekeeping, and sometimes construction. A void of nearly 50 years in Greek-Albanian relations and the association of Albanian Muslims with Turks in the minds of many Greeks mean that Albanians bear the brunt of the government clampdown. From end of the Second World War till his death in 1985, Albania's Stalinist president Enver Hoxha succeeded in alienating virtually every country in the world, and for most of that period, Athens and Tirana were, at least nominally, at war. In large sections of Greek society, "Albanian" has all but become synonymous with "criminal" in the last few years. At the very least, Albanians are widely regarded as the lowest of the immigrant castes. Even Wojtek, a Pole who has found work painting the apartment building where I reside, complains that he is "paid like an Albanian." He served with SFOR in Bosnia in 1993, he tells me -- in infamous Banja Luka even, where he presumably saw how it was to be treated like a Bosnian Muslim.
In June, the government announced Operation Skoupa ("broom"), the most recent coordinated anti-immigrant effort, involving a dozen government agencies. The government insists it will round up and deport 500,000 illegal immigrants. However this number is derived, its near equivalent is the 380,000 persons that the state Organization for Welfare and Employment estimates have applied for green cards, for which they have to wait up to year to receive. The "white papers" that the applicants are given as temporary work permits expire after a year, thus effectively denying the coveted green card to many. Not having one's papers means sudden and arbitrary deportation. Despite the fact that the undertaking violates the European Convention on Human Rights, which Greece is shortly to sign, police boast that they bus about 1500 Albanians a week out of the country [4]. The Convention expressly forbids the mass deportation of non-nationals. Stories of the police tearing up immigrants' permits abound, and any weekend night in downtown Athens, heavily armed platoons of police -- often outfitted with camouflage, bullet-proof vests, and assault rifles -- can be seen lining suspected illegal aliens up against the walls. As an editorial in the daily Kathimerini remarked, many of the same Greeks, especially in the media, who decried the "collective guilt" imposed on the Serbs by NATO only a few months ago now support the wholesale expulsion of Albanians, Bulgarians, and Romanians [5]. The Skoupa is not without problems, though; when a large number of Albanians were "swept up" in July, orchard owners in Epeiros, the province that borders Albania, complained that they did not have enough hands for the peach harvest. In fact, the border is usually open at key times of the year, and the operation serves mainly to terrorize and marginalize immigrants, discouraging them from seeking permanent residence in Greece.
One bright summer afternoon in National Resistance Square, opposite City Hall, I witness a group of plainclothes police beating an immigrant suspect who pleads for mercy, repeatedly smashing his head into a wall until he bleeds from nose and mouth. They drag him into the back of a police bus and draw the blinds. I see the driver dowse his hands in rubbing alcohol and pass the bottle back. Bemused tourists look on. Incidents like this, as well as having the police demand from me identification and a plausible story for not looking acceptably Greek, caused me to start recording badge and car numbers. This exercise landed me in handcuffs once. A patrol car stopped me near my home, ostensibly for spitting in the gutter. The first question the officers asked me, however, was "Where you from?" in the abrupt pidgin reserved for suspected foreigners. When they discovered I had an American passport, their demeanor changed from seething animosity to paternal condescension: "Have a nice stay in Greece," they told me. Finding their behavior high-handed, I pulled out pen and paper to write down their details. They then trundled me into the back of the car, and the more puff-chested of the two threatened to have me deported for not knowing that recording information about the police is illegal. I was locked in a stuffy interrogation room for four and a half hours, only to have the officer in charge tell me that "there is no problem" and gently remind me that taking down the numbers of "state cars" is forbidden. In fact, there is no such legal prohibition, as an official at the Ministry of Public Order assured me. Luckily, I speak Greek, my visa is valid, and I am not an eastern European. I only have to suffer such relatively venial treatment at the hands of the Hellenic Police.
The consensus in Greece is that the violent crime rate has increased sharply in the last few years. The Hellenic Police have presented figures indicating that homicide, burglary, an robbery rates are higher among Albanians than among Greeks, though they do not provide a clear definition of terms. Two recent Albanian hijackings of Greek buses -- one in late May, the other in mid-July -- are oft-cited examples of the problem of the foreign "criminal element." The first ended in a bloody shoot-out with Albanian border guards, in which the hijacker, armed with a Kalashnikov, and a Greek passenger were killed and several others wounded. The second ended in a "clean" kill by the Greek police, which was applauded in several newspapers. One included an artist's rendition of the fatal shot, with a red ink blotch representing 23-year-old Arbin Sufa's brains being blown out. What pushed Sufa over the edge, leading him to seize the bus with two hand grenades, was reported in some papers, but is almost never repeated in popular versions. Sufa had his white papers, but Greek banks refused to let him open an account. So, as is often the case, his Greek employer opened one for him, in the employer's name. When Sufa decided to return home with his earnings, he discovered that his employer had claimed them all for himself [6].
The bus hijackings, nonetheless, illustrate the real problem of illegal weapons and other contraband circulating in Greece. Much of this traffic has been associated with the drugs trade and, in particular, to paramilitary-bandit formations in Albania and Kosovo. The KLA and other armed Kosovar Albanian factions have been linked both to heroin dealers and to the pyramid schemers who brought Albania to civil war three years ago [7]. Of course, Greek gangsters profit from this black market too. The Ministry of Public Order offers a "moderate estimate" of 150,000 contraband weapons in Greece, while the police admit that they seized about 2100 illegal automatic rifles last year, mostly by chance discovery [8]. The estimate may be as verifiable as the putative 500,000 illegal immigrants, but the growth of heroin addiction is palpable. Whereas ten years ago addicts were rarely found anywhere but in the most notorious parts of Athens, now emaciated junkies can be found catatonic in every city park and abandoned doorway. The state-financed Organization Against Drugs (OKANA) reports that, between 1996 and 1998, heroin imports from Albania jumped from 10 percent of the whole to 33.5 percent, while the contribution of Turkey, until recently the main supplier, declined from 70 to 50 percent. Furthermore, confirmed deaths by overdose have risen from 62 in 1988 (the first year statistics were kept) to 243 in 1998 [9].
The steps of the National Museum are a favorite place for working-class families with children to relax and play in the summer evenings. I sometimes go there myself to read, enjoy the breeze, and watch the evening promenade. Ascending to the neo-classical portico one night, I encounter a young couple squatting behind a column feverishly laying their needle and spoon out on a cocktail napkin. "Excuse us, for just a minute," one of them quietly asks, "while we do our business." Meanwhile, Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou is busy too, sorting the "good" Albanians out from the "bad." He has agreed to dialogue with Hashim "the Snake" Thaqi, leader of the KLA, erstwhile Stalinist, godchild of Madeleine Albright, and exponent of "Greater Albania." Thus Papandreou has effectively recognized Thaqi's shadowy, mercenary organization as the government of Kosovo, in accordance with the bidding of the Great Powers.
In the calm of the Olympia restaurant, the Romanian has been weighing Greek and Romanian currency in his hands. He walks over to the counter and places the coins in turn on the scales. He laughs happily and beckons the owner: Look! The drachma indeed weighs more than its equivalent in leu [10]. A small touchstone in a world of fickle allegiances.
Footnotes
1. R. Clogg's A Short History of Modern Greece, 2nd edn (Oxford UP, 1986) is a good general historical source. [Back]
2. See G. Alexander's The Prelude to the Truman Doctrine: British Policy in Greece 1944-1947 (Clarendon, 1982) and L. Wittner's American Intervention in Greek Politics 1943-49 (Columbia UP, 1982). Wittner records the earliest use of napalm in the field in Greece. [Back]
3. See Eleftherotypia (newspaper), 30 June 1999. [Back]
4. Eleftherotypia, 1 July 1999, 11 July 1999. [Back]
5. Kathimerini 6 July 1999. [Back]
6. See, for example, Kathimerini, July 17, 1999. [Back]
7. Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has written at length about this connection; see http://www.transnational.org/features/crimefinansed.html. See also Boyes and Wright's "Drugs money linked to the Kosovo rebels" Times (London), March 24, 1999 and Geopolitical Drug Watch 35 (Paris, 1994). [Back]
8. Eleftherotypia, July 24, 1999. [Back]
9. OKANA, Annual Report on the State of the Problem of Narcotics at an International and National Level (Athens, 1999). This is only OKANA's fourth annual report. [Back]
10. Footnote of 16 August 2004: of course, Greece no longer has its drachma, but has switched over to the Euro like most of the rest of Europe. [Back]
Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org
11 August 2004
Well, I got a good response to my essay on "Fahrenheit 9/11", and one upshot is that I'm going to be a panelist at this conference:
THIRD BIENNIAL FILM & HISTORY CONFERENCE
"War in Film, Television, and History"
at the Dolce International Conference Center in Dallas, Texas
(please visit www.filmandhistory.org for more information)
Session: "Fahrenheit 9/11 and the (Culture) War at Home"
Saturday, November 13, 2004
A shout-out to Tim Neal for the reference!
In the meantime, I won't keep those of you who follow my rantings and railings waiting much longer for something fresh.
Take care of yourselves and each other!
Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org
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