Out of Town January 5, 2008
Belgrade, Serbia- I probably won’t be updating for the next couple of days, but I will have a couple of great stories once I return to Belgrade.
Photos from Kosovo War December 7, 2007
Albanian UN Delegation Dinner November 28, 2007
New York-Last night I attended a dinner party for the Albanian UN delegation.
Albania is the country directly south of Kosovo, along the Adriatic Sea.
The party was on the Eastside, at an Albanian owned restaurant, and as I walked in I committed the social graft of skipping the line to shake the ambassador’s hand.
Sweet formality. I have a lot to learn.
My host pulled me back in line, I shook the ambassador’s hand, and we proceeded into the room.
People were speaking mostly in Albanian. A law student took over my host, so I spoke with a woman from the Icelandic consulate, who was surprised I’d been to Iceland and had once walked fifteen kilometers to see the country’s famous geyser.
An Italian banker considered Albania to be a country ripe for further development. He began investing there thirteen years ago. “Back then,” he said. “You could stand there and wait for fifteen minutes and only see twenty cars. Now you can barely cross the street there’s so many.”
He was telling me this to describe the economic change in the country. Albania offers agriculture and tourism, and he thought that tourism in particular could make the country wealthy.
The problem is that Albania was isolated for so long. It had one of the last communist regimes to fall, and until recently corruption and crime were rampant.
Now corruption and crime aren’t rampant, but they’re still there, and that’s holding investors back.
As is Kosovo.
Kosovo’s instability stops investment in the entire region. “We need this issue settled,” the banker said.
Another women there described how in 2000 her house was bombed and her father shot because her husband worked for the secret police. He had put two members of a mafia family in jail, and the family had come for revenge. They fled to the US, but hope someday to go back. “I miss it. It is a beautiful country,” the women said.
One man who I’ll call David had just come back from Kosovo.
He had been all over the region and everybody was waiting for independence. It was only a matter of time. “They will wait a few months,” he said. “But then they will declare themselves independent.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean bloodshed. As long as Serbia doesn’t attack.
Something that all the Albanians I have met in New York have insisted is that a peaceful conclusion is what is wanted. But if Serbia attacks Kosovo again people will fight, and decisively. Independence has been too long a process.
According to David most likely what will happen is they will declare themselves independent. An army will be raised. They will begin functioning as any other country. And they will simply continue like that. As long as Serbia makes no attempt to oppose them there will be peace.
David also reminded me that when speaking to Albanians Kosovo was referred to as Kosova. He also said that there were no real plans to join Kosovo and Albania together into what the Serbs fear would be “Greater Albania.”
“There’s no need. The border is open anyway,” David said.
Aleksander Sallabanda is the current Albanian ambassador to the US. He is the former health minister and was the man in demand at the dinner.
I asked him if Albania would continue to support Kosovo.
“Albania was the first to support Kosovo in independence,” he said. “We always have and will continue to do so.”
Does Albania want relations with Serbia?
“Albania is a country that thinks to the future,” he said. “We want relations with Serbia. We are looking to the future. But first we want to support Kosovo in independence. We will always support Kosovo in independence.”
Slobodan Milosevic Speech October 23, 2007
End of October
I’m getting myself back together after this car accident. The past month has involved staring at the ceiling of my sisters room (she’s at school in LA) and willing my arm, scalp, and liver to heal.
Its working. I still don’t have a date of departure for anywhere, but I’ve graduated to physical therapy and am feeling secure in the knowledge that even though my arm in more akin to Darth Vader than much else the growth of scar tissue, soft tissue, and the rebuilding of muscles will make the arm stronger then before. Not to mention the three titanium plates and loads of screws I have in me. It’ll be a good way to deal with the folks that like to try to rob me. Hit me. I dare you.
Obviously I haven’t been doing much shooting, but just before the accident I did a few portraits at the Canal Alliance, a non-profit in California. Below is a sample.
As far as Kosovo goes I’m about to post some more YOUTUBE videos from the Balkans.
Serb authorities in Belgrade (capital of Serbia) have told Serbs in Kosovo not to vote in the November 17th elections being held in Kosovo to elect a government for when the UN controlled province is declared independent of Serbia.
So why is Kosovo so important to Serbs?
As anyone can probably imagine, it goes back along way. And to boot, there’s a lot of conflicting history.
At a basic level Kosovo is seen as the place where the Nemanjic Dynasty (1166-1371), who created the Serbian Empire, built many of the monasteries that are seen as the spiritual homes to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The most important monastery is called Grachanitsa and it sits in the town of Pec in Southern Kosovo.
It was also in Kosovo, on a field outside of Prestina that the Serbs were over run by the Ottoman Empire in 1389. The defeat allowed for 500 years of Ottoman rule in Europe. Some consider those 500 years to have arrested the development of the area in many ways. An enormous degree of resentment and hatred was injected into the cultures of the Balkans.
In the late 1980’s Milosevic used the issue of Kosovo, which was then a largely autonomous part of Yugoslavia, to catapult himself into the Serbian presidency. He used the Serbs traditional view of Kosovo as a place sacred to their culture and of the Albanians (who make up 90 percent of the province) as outsiders to rally Serbs around him.
Kosovo also has economic wealth thats important to Serbia. There is lignite, lead, zinc, non-ferric metals, gold, silver, petroleum, and an estimated 17 billion tons of coal. This is not something any country would want to give up control of.
Currently Serbia is offering Kosovo almost complete autonomy, but not independance.
Albanians in the province say they will declare themselves independent after the Dec. 10 Contact Group presentation to the UN.
Sanare, Venezuela May 6, 2007
Caracas, Venezuela
Vendors sell RCTV Flags and Hats. Despite international outcry, one of Venezuela’s opposition television stations, RCTV, will will not renew its license which expires later this month by the Chavez Government because of its part in inciting the 2002 coup. The station is expected to begin broadcasting on cable
5th Anniversary of the Coup April 12, 2007
Today is the fifth anniversary of the 2002 coup attempt against Chavez.
The Government is holding various events in the interior of the country. Yesterday there was a commemoration for the people that were killed by snipers while demonstrating outside the Miraflores palace in the hours before the coup.
As the first speaker took the stage a women in the audience let out an inhuman scream and I feared something horrible was about to happen.
But it was only Chavez.
He’d arrived unannounced to the share the commemoration with his most devout followers. The street was full of red shirted Chavistas waving Venezuelan flags for nearly two blocks. Before the commemoration started I was shooting photos of a man arriving who was being swarmed by people wanting to talk to him and have him sign scraps of paper. I had no idea who he was, but a Chavista nearby suddenly got in my face smiling strangely and pulled his long shirt tight to outline an enormous gun.
At the commemoration there were two North American nuns from Wisconsin. One read a speech while the other conversed with Chavez. The speech reader said God Bless the people of Venezuela and their good president Hugo Chavez. She also said the majority of the people in the United States were with the pueblo of Venezuela.
People where I was were more interested in laughing at her accent then listening to what she was saying.
Several priests and leaders gave speeches and sang songs. When the microphone was passed to yet another priest he said, “I am not really the person you want to hear from,” he said.
Chavez got up on the stage and gave a twenty minute speech. After the coup he performed against Carlos Andres Perez in 19992 and the coup against him in 2002 he wished he had died, he said. He had caused so many deaths. “Chavez…no…no…” the Chavistas yelled. Unlike the North American nun, they were listening with tears in their eyes and looks of devotion. It seemed to them Chavez was a God who was willing to walk among the people, something that has never before happened in Venezuela.
Before the commemoration I’d been at MINCI the information ministry trying to get back on the list for Government events.
At MINCI lines of Chavistas were receiving red t-shirts for the event. April 11-13th was written across them.
There were several tV screens set up outside showing clips of the coup violence with shots of Bush and then Chavez’s triumphant return. The video called for people to come to the bridge at 5 and then to Miraflores on Friday the 13th.
For a short period of time there had also been a single large TV screen set up in the plaza where I live in the east of the city. Only one person was watching it and with a large smirk.
The TV screens in front of MINCI have been around for a couple of months and people do watch them. The ministry is right next to a bank and there’s a lot of passerby’s. The screen in the plaza was a first however and overall I found the propaganda all very Orwellian, too cartoonish and celebratory for an event where a crowd was shot into by snipers from rooftops.
It would be too simple to say Chavez is using deaths of April 11 as another populist rallying point.
He was just as popular before, but now, especially for the people that were in front of Miraflores in 2002, he is a superhuman protector, one of the few Latin American presidents who have ever survived a coup that the US helped plan. That he comes to their commemoration and sits in the audience and cries with them (TV cameras showed tears in Chavez’s eyes during the speakers) brings him even closer to them.
I will also not be allowed back on the MINCI list because of a new mandate from the minister of communication. The only people that can be on the list must be fully accredited by the ministry, which means receiving a work visa from the Venezuelan government, as well providing a letter from my agency, signed by the editor in real ink (as supposed to scanned).
I can’t understand how the Venezuelan Government considers this a good move. Its supposedly to protect Chavez. All the events I’ve attended with Chavez have had very good security where journalists are well searched and documents are such as passports and letters from agencies and publications are provided before hand to MINCI. It can only be a control issue. Unfortunately it will only shut out the independent journalists who are more likely to be pro-Chavez and leave only big media to define the Chavez government, who’s supporters have now taken up the slogan “Socialism or death.” 
Bogota, Colombia March 15, 2007
Life in Venezuela February 11, 2007
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