Coming at this a few days late, so be it…. a small token of after-the-fact solidarity from a veteran of the anti-NATO continuum (graphic from Prague 2002). Once again, a story the international media neglected to cover was the high level of policing in Bucharest, raid of the anti-NATO convergence center, and turning potentially disruptive people back at the Romanian border. There are accounts of what went down here and here, where there are also some pics and rather curious videos. One thing i found particularly interesting – if not surprising - was the state-media collaboration prior to the NATO summit:
“The local corporate media has also been in a frenzy about "dangerous anarchists" who are going to descend on the city and break store windows. One TV news report on Realitatea TV yesterday morning encouraged viewers to throw rocks at any demonstrators that they see on the streets.”
Really, what is there to say about this? It’s a strange equation: stop civil unrest by encouraging civil unrest. Isn’t state-sanctioned stoning of people who aren’t with the program the precise lack of freedom the West is wasting so much oil and so many lives to protect us against? The sad thing is that in Romania, more than a few individuals likely considered such advice to be prudent. i’m reminded of a wonderful book by Mircea Eliade, The Old Man and the Bureaucrats, in which he draws out the gross self-contradictions of the Romanian surveillance systems under communism: the only way the old man can subvert the political machine is by telling them stories that are equally nonlinear and nonsensical.
Yet the dictatorial history is a past ideally left behind. Now reincarnated into a democratic state and member of the EU, this is what we get:
“Gandul [a Romanian newspaper] focuses on the 30,000 intelligence officers from everywhere in the world who arrived in Bucharest in order to ensure the security during the summit. "Eyes in the skies", underground monitoring and ground checks take place everywhere.”
Elsewhere i found the number of so-called security personnel to be only 27,000, and ok, the robocops aren’t all Romanian and Genoa back in 2001 was worse (there were also 1000s more demonstrators), but no matter. People in Eastern Europe who have long-term memories and discuss life in the region during the communist era tend to concur that Romania’s Securitat shared the anti-honor of being most ubiquitous and unwieldy with East Germany’s Stasi (for those unfamiliar with all this: the Stasi were hardcore iron curtain bad guys). i’ve read that 1 in 3 people were informers and nobody trusted anybody else, understandably. So, when you think about it, throwing rocks at dissidents and having hoards of police around to back you up is maybe a familiar, easily re-accessed drill for the average Romanian of 40+ years. It’s not my intent to disparage the Romanian people here; rather, i’m just wondering how much they realize that hosting these summits brings long-term upgrades to their own state security apparatus which might come back to bite them? Personally, i don’t believe there’s any coincidence between the historical legacy of “shut up or we’ll shoot you” and the newly formed “security” relationships the US has been pursuing with any of the former Warsaw Pact states – or the eagerness with which these new NATO members revitalize their old habits of command and control.
Romania, let’s remember, has been playing host to extraordinarily renditioned prisoners and is now the CEE HQ for Northrup Grumman. They also just signed a contract with Lockheed Martin for 17 Multi-Mission Surveillance Radar systems, which “can easily be transported by air, sea, truck or rail and can be deployed in less than 60 minutes.” That’s a far amount of mobile hardware for a country that currently has no threatening enemies, nor any wars on its borders. Of course, these kinds of deals are promoted as job creators, but that’s standard fare and anyway, we all know what it really means. The US has been using their Black Sea ports for refueling and troop transport, and has a commanding presence at Romanian military bases. Romania was promised enormous amounts of Iraq reconstruction money (although it’s hard to unearth how much of that actually became a reality) and all sorts of propaganda was generated to explain to “they, the people” why working with the US on Project Iraqi Freedom made so much sense. The point i want to make here is that the US is using this country big time to manage its military activities in the Middle East, and it’s certainly in US interests to make sure that Romania is secure in every aspect that term can encompass.
As something of an aside, it seems to me that the tension between Russia and NATO now is not because one or the other feels particularly threatened in standard “let’s have another Great War in Europe” fashion. There’s far too much interdependency now between the EU and Russian Federation for that, and it’s just hard to imagine either party initiating such a war. What is much more likely, imho, is that Russia sees a serious conflict unfolding between itself and the US in the Middle East/Central Asia, and US military bases in Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, et al. thus present a significant, combined problem. It’s impossible to get closer to the Mideast battleground without getting closer to the Russian bear, and naturally the bear is going to growl at you when you threaten its territorial domain. What i'm seeing in all this is that the US is using the newest NATO bloc, the countries that are easily manipulated by a combination of dollars and fear (tho one wonders how anyone can drool over dollars these days), to back up American presence in the world's main oil & gas belt.
After W left Bucharest he went on to Croatia, where more of his freedom and security blather was spewed onto the feet of Balkan leaders. There, protesters were not so actively contained: "Croatian television reported protesters had tried to hand Bush a huge postcard with pictures of Croatian towns and resorts reading 'Please, don't come back.' " Unfortunately for the Balkans, it seems likely that whomever moves into the White House in 2009 is going to continue the current policy of subjugating real freedom and security on the peninsula in the cause of US strategic imperatives. Welcome to NATO: please remember to check your independence in at the door.
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