It’s official. The UK has become the first country to have a bank run caused by the current market turbulence. The run on Northern Rock bank that started on Friday and is continuing today is sending the public here into a panic. British commentators are speculating that there could be another Black Wednesday around the corner, while the Bank of England is trying to reassure the public that there’s nothing to be alarmed about.
Northern Rock is Britain’s fifth largest mortgage lender and is a massive bank here. So when news broke on Friday that the bank is going broke because of the worldwide credit crisis and the Bank of England has bailed it out with a limitless line of credit, the bank’s customers ran to the branches and started queuing to get their money out in cash. It was really insane, I walked by a branch on Friday and it was complete pandemonium, like that bank run scene in It’s a Wonderful Life.
The deadline for answering the Kosovo question is looming. Some sort of government needs to be put in place by 10 December, when the UN mandate ends. I’m particularly interested in these developments because I send my rent cheque to Kosovo every month as that’s where my landlord is (weird story). If Kosovo becomes independent, he and his family will probably move back here (since he is Serbian) and I’ll be out of a home!
Essentially the problem is this: a majority of the people living in the Serbian province of Kosovo are ethnic Albanians (Albania being the neighbouring country to the west). As with other areas in the larger Yugoslav civil war, a big part of the conflict was tension between the Muslim Albanians and the Christian Serbs. During the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990’s, Albanians in Kosovo conducted a peaceful secessionist movement. In 1995, after the Dayton Agreement ended the Bosnian War but did not address Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was formed in 1996 with the goal of attaining an independent Kosovo. They employed guerilla-style tactics against Serbian police forces, paramilitaries and regular civilians. The situation devolved into complete chaos and Serbs began massacring Albanians, triggering a US-led 78-day NATO campaign in 1999. An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians and 3,000 Serbs were killed during the fighting, a majority of them civilians and many through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
There was an interesting piece in The Economist last week about Belgium and whether or not its existence really makes sense in the 21st century. Ostensibly it was just about the current conditions in this one tiny country, but in effect it cuts to the heart of the future of Europe as a whole.
The magazine asks the question, given that we’re now in month three of Belgium having no new government because the two parties can't agree, is it time to revaluate the Belgian state? After all if the parties, made up along ethnic/linguistic lines of French-speaking Walloons in the south and Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north still have so much tension after nearly 200 years, perhaps the time may be coming to rethink Belgium’s status.
One of the most striking things about Helsinki is the dominance of its skyline by two very different churches. Approaching the city from the sea, you see the blazing white Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral to the west, and the glowing red Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral to the east. Inside the two cathedrals, the differences couldn’t more striking. The Russian Orthodox cathedral is littered with golden Byzantine iconography, while the Lutheran church is a sparse, monotone mass of white walls.
Given their geographic locations, its not hard to see the two as symbols of a country torn in two different directions, between the Lutheran Swedes to the west and the Orthodox Russians to the east. Finland spent 300 years under Swedish rule, followed by a century under Russian rule after Russia wrested the territory from the Kingdom of Sweden in 1809. It was only in 1917 following World War I that Finland declared its independence and became an independent country for the first time in its history.
I'm here in Stockholm, just got back from my first day of interviews for the story I'm working on. Luckily all the appointments were relatively close to one another (it's a very centralized city, nice change of pace from London!) so it was relatively painless. Although they all started to get rather repetitive and by my last interview of the day I was definitly ready to be done.
So I'm back in my hotel room to write a quick blog before I meet my friend for dinner. My hotel is laughably horrible. I was trying to prove a point, or something, by booking the cheapest hotel I could find.
Yesterday a statue of Nelson Mandela went up in Parliament Square, and it got me thinking. In a city with more statues than dentists, at what point do we start reevaluating the ones that are already here?
I mean logic would tell you that, on a practical level, if this city keeps putting up statues at the rate it has been they’ll be no room left in the public parks for anyone to walk around. But on a more sentimental level, one has to note that the kinds of people we’re chiseling into stone today are quite different from the people we immortalized a century ago.
Take the new Mandela statue for instance. When I went to visit it last night I saw that it faces a statue of Jan Smuts, who was the South African prime minister at the inception of white rule. Winston Churchill, perhaps the most well-known statue in the square today, helped to draw up the du-jour segregation plan at the outset of South Africa’s independence.
It’s official. The UK has become the first country to have a bank run caused by the current market turbulence. The run on Northern Rock bank that started on Friday and is continuing today is sending the public here into a panic. British commentators are speculating that there could be another Black Wednesday around the corner, while the Bank of England is trying to reassure the public that there’s nothing to be alarmed about.
