Wally of the Week: Mikheil Saakashvili

Well, it looked like it would be a competitive race, but by his actions over the past 24 hours the former employee of New York law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler, (who also happens to be the President of Georgia), has won this week's award by a landslide. Saakashvilli- that really should be Saakaswally-(pictured above with his good pal George W. Bush), thought he could use the smokescreen of the opening of the Olympic Games to launch a brutal military assault against the people of the breakaway province of South Ossetia. In a referendum, 99% of South Ossetians said 'nyet' to any association with Georgia, but hey, what does a little thing like democracy matter when you're the neocons' man in the Caucasus.

But Saakaswally's cunning- (and utterly despicable) plan, has spectacularly back-fired. The murder of ten Russian peacekeepers - and the slaughter of hundreds of innocent South Ossetians has led Moscow to send in the tanks. And the planes. And now the hapless Georgian President is appealing for 'help' against Russian 'aggression'(!- yes, please try and keep a straight face) from the EU and the US.

Right on cue, the professional Russophobes are crawling out from beneath their stones, penning their rabidly anti-Moscow propaganda pieces- a mendacious narrative in which the aggressors become the victims of aggression and the victims of aggression the aggressors. But this is one dispute that even the neocons can't spin to their advantage. Saakaswally took an almighty gamble- and lost. No one is going to go to his assistance. The former employee of Patterson, Belkan, Webb and Tyler is going to be taught a lesson he'll never forget.

Never provoke a bear.

UPDATE: Mark Almond has penned a wonderful piece on the background to the South Ossetia conflict in today's Guardian. It's a great riposte to the mendacious neocon claptrap that's currently doing the rounds. The Exile will be blogging on the South Ossetia conflict all weekend and he's got some great posts up already. And you can read Svetlana's thoughts on Georgia's own version of 'Operation Storm', here.

Beijing does the Olympics proud

Well, how did you find today's opening ceremony? I certainly can't remember a more impressive one. I've always believed that the Olympics should be held permanently in Greece, to avoid the politicking, but after today's incredible show, I think it might be an idea for the Games to be held permanently in China, with the rest of the world chipping in to help with the expenses.
It'll certainly be better than holding them in London. Can you imagine what the opening ceremony in 2012 will be like?

No, I'd rather not either......

It's Voting time again!

No, it’s not time yet for the vote for Best UK blog at the 2008 Weblog awards, the biggest international blogging awards, which, thanks to your tremendous support, and to the chagrin of Britain's self-appointed über-bloggers', this blog won at a canter last year (wasn‘t that fun!), but another award. Here’s the blurb from the organisers:


In early September TOTAL POLITICS, in association with APCO WORLDWIDE will publish the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. It will contain articles on blogging by some of Britain's leading bloggers, together with a directory of UK political blogs, and a series of Top 20s and Top 10s. The book will be available at the Green Party, TUC, Labour, LibDem and Tory Conferences, where TOTAL POLITICS will have exhibition stands.

We're asking for your votes to decide the Top 100 UK Political Blogs. Simply email your Top Ten (ranked from 1 to 10) to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. If you have a blog, please encourage your readers to do the same. I'll then compile the Top 100 from those that you send in. Just order them from 1 to 10. Your top blog gets 10 points and your tenth gets 1 point.

The deadline for submitting your Top 10 is midnight Friday August 8th. Please type Top 10 in the subject line.

Once all the entries are in a lucky dip draw will take place and the winner will be sent £100 worth of political books.
The rules are simple:

1. Please only vote once
2. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents are eligible or based on UK politics are eligible
3. Votes must be cast before Friday 15 August
4. Blogs chosen must be listed in the Total Politics Blog Directory.
5. You must send a list of TEN blogs, ranked. Any entry containing fewer than ten blogs will not count.
6. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name

So, once again, the email address to send your TOP TEN BLOGS to is...

toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com

The über-blogger elite, who think they own the blogosphere (I’m not naming names), and who seek always to set the parameters of ’acceptable’ debate, certainly won’t want to see this blog feature in the top 100. So please vote for it!

But please remember, for the vote to be valid you must vote for 10 UK political blogs. Some suggestions of great political blogs- such as The Exile, Organised Rage and Rebellion Sucks!, can be found on the blog roll list on the right hand side of the page: the blogs on my blog roll list are certainly the ones I'll be voting for! If the blog you want to vote for doesn’t show up on the Total Politics blogs directory, you can always add it by submitting its url and name in the little box on the left hand side of this page.)

UPDATE: I've been informed that the dealine for voting has been bought forward to midnight on Friday 8th August ie tomorrow night! So if you are going to vote, please try and do so asap! Many thanks.

Happy voting!

Letters of the Week: On War Criminals

Well, for the first time ever we have a three-way dead heat. Three excellent letters on the glaring hypocrisy we've seen over the Karadzic affair, published in The Observer and Guardian. Liz Milanovich, Cathal Rabbitte and Peter McKenna (writing on our dear friend Richard Holbrooke, pictured above with members of that charming group of terrorists-oops sorry, 'freedom fighters', the KLA), come on down!

Death of a war criminal (From The Observer)
Though Ed Vulliamy is on a rampage with the Karadzic arrest story ('I am waiting. No one has ever said sorry', Focus, last week), The Observer has overlooked that notorious Croatian Nazi war criminal Dinko Sakic (who died on 21 July) was buried in full Nazi regalia and that his funeral was conducted by a Croatian Roman Catholic priest. Interestingly, 'no one [on the Croatian side] has ever said sorry'. No outrage at The Observer.
Liz Milanovich



(Letters published in Guardian 05/08/08)
Karadzic: an everyday sort of monster

What does Slavenka Drakulic (Comment, August 2) mean when she talks about "our belief that [Karadzic] is different, that he is a monster and nothing like us." He looks no different to any western political leader. Is the massive difference in income levels between OECD countries and the rest of the world a natural phenomenon?

Does it ever require the application of state violence?

Shouldn't Karadzic say he was just doing as the others do?

He could even have been a Des Browne or a Donald Rumsfeld, overseeing mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Iraq. Karadzic is no different to them, except that he lost. Had he won, perhaps he could have become a special Middle East peace envoy?

Cathal Rabbitte, Mumbai, India


"It's an invented story and no one ought to believe it," Richard Holbrooke says of the alleged secret deal with Karadzic (No chance of a fair trial, Karadzic says in first statement, August 2).

In his June 1980 testimony before a House subcommittee, Holbrooke said much the same thing about refugees' accounts of death and devastation in East Timor, and the liquidation of a significant proportion of its population. He hailed Indonesia as "one of the greatest nations in the world".

As the State Department's man in Pacific Asia, Holbrooke channelled covert aid to the Indonesian army in 1975 as it embarked upon invasion and genocide in East Timor.Should we really listen to him when he talks about war criminals?

Peter McKenna
Liverpool

Happy 40th Birthday to Dad's Army!

I hope British readers are enjoying the BBC’s excellent Dad’s Army weekend- to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s wonderful sit-com.

You can watch an extract from the excellent ‘Don’t Panic!’ tribute programme the BBC showed last night, above, and you can read my own appreciation pieces on why Dad’s Army is still so popular here and here.

Just a couple of further points while we're on the subject of Dad's Army:

1. How many of today’s nasty, sneering sitcoms and so-called 'comedy' shows will be celebrated forty years from now? I’m sure it will be a big fat zero.

2. Why on earth haven’t Jimmy Perry and David Croft been knighted? We give knighthoods away so cheaply nowadays, including to pretentious writers of turgid, unreadable books read by probably no more than half a dozen people (yes Mr Rushdie, I’m talking about you); yet we don’t properly honour the two men who have, over the past forty years, bought so much happiness and laughter to millions of people. Don’t forget Perry and Croft didn’t just give create and write Dad’s Army, but It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Hi De Hi too. I'm not a fan of the honours system, but if we are to hand out knighthoods- let's make sure they go to people who really deserve them.

Holbrooke and Karadzic: Here's the Deal

Former US negotiator Richard Holbrooke told CNN that Radovan Karadzic's allegations that he had cut a deal with the US were false.

Do you believe him?

Well, above is a copy, in Serbian, of a written agreement between Holbrooke and Karadzic, courtesy of the Serbian newspaper Kurir, and Svetlana's Byzantine Sacred Art blog.

And below you can read an English translation of the terms.

Then you can make your own minds up as to the veracity of Mr Holbrooke's statement.

Obligations
1. RK is under obligation to submit his resignation to all the state and [political] party functions. Decision comes to force within 90 days, as needed to settle the necessary issues with the rest of leadership. Resignation has to be irretrievable. Influence the leading party officials in a direction of easing the resignation issue and the change in the hierarchy.
2. Until submitting his resignation, RK will not be reaching political or state decisions, nor will he influence others to reach decisions pertaining to any of the following:
2-1 Combat operations on the territory of BiH [Bosnia-Herzegovina]
2-2 Moving the civilian population
2-3 The international agreements: military, economic, security, regional integrations
2-4 Appointing the state, party, regional, cultural administrations, functionaries
2-5 Relocating the financial means
(in force from 5.11.03:30)

3. RK will withdraw from the public life. This includes refusing to give interviews, statements (in person or through the intermediaries), non-publishing [illegible] of political and current problems.

Obligations 2

1. United States Government is under obligation not to influence, directly or indirectly, the SDS leadership [Dr. Karadzic's political party] to affect dissolution of the party.
2. United States Government is making available the sum of 600,000 USD to RK, in the local currency. The sum is designated to enable RK's support in the 6 year period.
3. United States Government is making residential object available to RK, at the location agreed upon during the earlier verbal agreement.
4. United States Government is providing physical protection for RK, not less than 6 men.
5. United States Government has a duty to inform RK about every possible threat to his safety.
Final stipulations:
1. This agreement is permanent.
2. RK's violations of the agreement will be treated as a serious violation of the informal agreement, in the sense of the article 3 paragraph 25 of the Internal Regulations and in that sense it will be sanctioned with the immediate termination.
3. The agreement can be terminated through a mutual consent, or upon the initiative of United States Government.Signed by: Radovan Karadzic (on the left) and Richard Holbrooke (right).Copy of the agreement from Kurir, text of the agreement translated from Glas Javnosti

Olympic Hero: Ivo Van Damme

With just seven days to go before the start of the 29th Olympic Games, here's my Observer article on my all-time Olympic hero, the great Belgian runner Ivo Van Damme.

Who are your Olympic heroes?

If one day this magazine were to publish a list of the 10 most heroic runner-ups in sporting history, Crisp's gallant weight-carrying performance in the 1973 Grand National, Greasepaint's two defeats in the same race a decade later and Queens Park Rangers' heartbreaking failure to win the 1976 Division One title would figure prominently. But top of the pile, I hope, would be the remarkable performance of a 22-year-old Belgian athlete at the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal.

Ivo van Damme arrived in Canada with a sporting chance in 800 and 1500 metres. He failed by a narrow margin to return home with two golds, but made a huge impact on a certain 10-year-old watching on television, thousands of miles away in the Midlands.

It wasn't just the narrow nature of his defeats; there was something about van Damme himself that was so different from the other competitors. For a start, he had a beard. For athletes – and indeed all sports stars – long hair was almost compulsory in the mid-1970s. Beards, however, most certainly were not. There was, too, the question of his nationality: being Belgian is not always a plus point but to a devotee of Tintin and Hercule Poirot it most definitely was.

In that long hot summer of 1976, the bearded Belgian became my hero. I had no doubt, that four years hence, at the Moscow Games (to which my uncle ambitiously planned to take all his nephews and nieces in his Bedford van), van Damme would emulate Kornelia Ender, the East German swimmer who had turned her Munich silvers into Montreal golds. It was not to be. Just five months after the Olympics, van Damme was killed in a head-on collision, on the autoroute between Marseille and Lyon, on his way home from a training session in the south of France. His death, at the age of 22, ensured he would always be the great lost talent of modern athletics.

Ivo van Damme was born in Brussels on 21 February 1954, the son of a policeman. He turned to athletics late, aged 17. His first sport was football, which he hoped to play as a professional. A fractured arm and a family move to the small town of Veltem, in Flemish Brabant, changed all that. Van Damme joined his first running club, Daring club of Leuven, and athletics became his passion. At first he specialised in the 1,500m and 3,000m. His breakthrough came when he dropped back to 800m. The first time he ran the distance he clocked 2:07.20; a few months later he bettered that by five seconds. In his first major international competition, the 1973European Junior Championships in Duisburg, he finished fourth behind Steve Ovett. In 1974, his progress was checked through injury, but in 1975 he finished second in the European Indoor Championships in Berne, breaking Roger Moens's national record. With characteristic courtesy, van Damme waited for his compatriot to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his achievement, before replacing his name in the record books.

After winning the same competition in February 1976, van Damme was set for the 21st Olympiad. Favourite for the 800m was the American Richard Wohlhuter. He was a silver medallist at Munich and runner of the fastest time that year. The Cuban Alberto Juantorena, the red-hot favourite for the 400m, which he duly won, was considered something of an unknown quantity at the longer distance, despite having recorded the second-fastest time of 1976. In the final, Juantorena led for most of the way, winning in 1:43.50, a new world record, with van Damme staying on strongly in second, in 1:43.86, the third-fastest time ever. It was a tremendous performance against an opponent in the form of his life. More than a second and a half behind van Damme, in fifth, was a young Steve Ovett, destined to win 800m gold in Moscow.

In the 1,500m final, a week later, van Damme was up against the 'Flying Kiwi', John Walker, who a year earlier had become the first man to run a mile in under 3:50.00. With the first 400m run in a funereal 62.48 seconds and the 800m in 2:03.15, van Damme, the 800m specialist, must have felt his confidence growing. He was perfectly positioned when he became boxed in by the Australian Graham Crouch. By the time he had manoeuvred himself free, Walker had made his dash. Van Damme flew, but the effort cost him in the stretch and the New Zealander held on by a metre. Van Damme returned home a national hero, but he was not satisfied. He promised he would bring back two golds from Moscow.

It was an Olympics he was fated never to see.

How great could Ivo van Damme have been? The African nations' boycott deprived the 1976 800m final of the talented Kenyan Mike Boit. The 1,500m was similarly devalued by the absence of world-record holder Filbert Bayi of Tanzania and Walker's winning time was the slowest since 1956. Even so, had van Damme continued to improve – and there's no reason why he shouldn't have – one can assume that he would have been hitting the 1:42 mark for 800m by the 1978 outdoor European Championships, a time that would have won him the title. By 1980 (when he would still have been only 26 – Juantorena's age in Montreal), van Damme could have been established as the undisputed middle-distance champion of the world. The Coe-Ovett led renaissance of British athletics may well have had a very different ending.

Van Damme is commemorated in the name of the annual international meeting in Brussels, which has become the scene of several record-breaking performances. This is a fitting tribute to a man who appeared to have time on his side but who ran out of that most precious commodity far too soon.