BHHRG

The international community’s central ambition was to have the Annan Plan accepted and Cyprus reunited before 1st May 2004. If this didn’t come about, only the internationally recognised southern part of the island would enter the EU on that date with 9 other accession countries. Since the plan was put forward, most efforts had been spent wooing the Turkish Cypriots – successfully as it turned out. Large demonstrations took place in January and February 2003, sending a signal to President Denktaş and his government that people wanted change. This came about on 14th December 2003, when the leading opposition party, the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), which supported the plan, narrowly won the parliamentary elections.

A visit to Roma communities in Eastern Slovakia following recent unrest brought about by sharp reductions in social security payments.

Eastern Slovakia Today

As the  accession date for 10 new member states to join the EU drew closer in the early months of 2004, worries started to be raised in the British media about the likelihood of mass immigration to the UK from the 8 former Communist accession countries. The tabloid press, in particular, focused on the thousands of poverty-stricken Roma people living in economically disadvantaged areas like Eastern Slovakia predicting that many of them would come to  the UK after 1st May thus overburdening the country’s  generous but overstretched social security system.[1]
The British Helsinki Human Rights Group has reported regularly from Slovakia and, in 1998, was one of the first human rights group’s to visit the now notorious Lunik 1X  housing complex on the outskirts of the eastern Slovakian city of Košice  where Roma residents had been moved from their previous homes in the centre of town.[2]

If ex-Communists and their kids are the avant-garde of the New World Order in the east, what about Western Europe?
Although Tony Blair was never a member of the British Communist Party (CPGB) or any of its Trotskyite rivals, it is striking how all of his most belligerent ministers were one-time Party-members (and that lack of enthusiasm for war is expressed - if only by silence - by non-ex-Communists). Blair’s appointee as chairman of the Labour Party, Dr. John Reid was a Communist and is now the public face of New Labour’s New European-style aggressiveness. (In the early 1990s, Dr. Reid was one of the most vocal advocates of the Bosnian Serb cause and a drinking partner of the indicted war criminal, Dr. Radovan Karadzic, before a volte-face - typical of his career - when he became one of the most vocal New Labour advocates of bombing Yugoslavia in 1999.)

BHHRG observed the voting in Paldiski, Keila, Rakvere, Vaike-Maarja and Tartu. On the whole, the voting was conducted in an orderly and peaceful manner, but BHHRG’s observers were struck by the absence of domestic observers in any of the polling stations - the only exception was at Paldiski No. 1, where one observer was present. This observer was actually a candidate from the Russian Party (which campaigned on a platform of overhauling the health system to allow inexpensive Russian medicines into the country). This should set alarm bells ringing for the forthcoming EU referendum is held with a similar dearth of domestic observers.
In other polling stations, BHHRG encountered a few minor problems. In Keila No. 2, also in the 4th district, BHHRG found the polling station housed in a sports complex that did not qualify as a public building. The complex, which included an indoor swimming pool, was a business concern that belonged to a “sports union.” This was odd, considering Keila was clearly a large enough municipality to have schools and other public buildings to serve as polling stations. BHHRG was bothered by the large poster of Reform Party leader and Prime Minister Siim Kallas displayed just beyond the parking lot, a little too close to the polling station entrance for comfort.

Background to the election
Estonia gained independence from the USSR on 6th Sept., 1991, a couple of weeks after the abortive coup attempt in Moscow against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. From this point onward, the Estonian Popular Front, founded in 1988, took the lead in political life. Led by Edgar Savisaar (now Mayor of Tallinn and leader of the Centre Party) and Marju Lauristin (now a leader of the Moderate Party), the Popular Front expanded to include various nationalist parties such as the staunchly anti-Communist “Pro Patria Union” led by one-time prime minister Mart Laar. Eventually the Popular Front disintegrated into the plethora of parties visible in Estonia today, and the republic began its post-independence political life of endlessly shifting coalitions.
There was not much to distinguish the leading parties competing in the 2nd March election from each other. The Moderates, Centre Party, Reform Party, Res Publica and Pro Patria all agreed on issues such as NATO and EU entry, privatization and continuation of the present discriminatory policies towards the Russian minority. The People’s Union finessed their position on the EU question somewhat by stating that it would not support entry into a ‘federal Europe’. A smaller entity, the Independence Party had a different profile being opposed to EU membership, but as it is regularly attacked for neo-fascism, it never surmounts the 5% threshold necessary to gain a seat in parliament.

The official view is that Russia has ‘fought all the way’ to preserve its sovereignty and protect the rights of Kaliningrad’s inhabitants. As negotiations between Russia and the EU over the transit issue dragged on during 2002 the rhetoric coming from Moscow was uncompromising. The EU’s visa plans for Kaliningrad were “worse than the Cold War” and would “divide the sovereignty of Russia”. Mr. Putin, whose in-laws come from Kaliningrad oblast, “flatly rejected the visa plan” and Russia “will do its utmost to guarantee totally the rights of its citizens living in Kaliningrad”.[1]

The monolithic line of the Soviet superpower was promoted by vast campaigns conducted via petitions expressing international solidarity against U.S. imperialism and its lackeys. The “Letter” or the “Petition” expressing the will of the working class or peace-loving nations was a standard Stalinist ploy in public diplomacy. A signature on such a document implied loyalty to much more than the text itself: it was a declaration of fealty to the Kremlin. At the height of the Cold war US actors and intellectuals who had signed Soviet-inspired or CPUSA promoted appeals for peace or international solidarity fell foul of the McCarthyite blacklist.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Orwell, Animal Farm

Orwell’s satire on Stalin’s unscrupulousness is conventionally taken to be his reckoning with the Soviet dictator’s willingness to collude with Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. But the fact that Orwell wrote the fable in early 1944, the latter part of the war when “Uncle Joe” was the West’s ally - and the attempts by British censors to suppress the book - suggest that its target was more Capitalist-Communist connivance in general than the Nazi-Soviet Pact in particular.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc’s Communist regimes between 1989 and 1991 has Orwell’s satire lost its sting?

In November 1997 violent confrontations broke out between between pro- and anti-immigration groups in Dover after a summer in which several hundred Czech and Slovak gypsies had arrived in the town seeking political asylum. Since then the situation has calmed down only to re-ignite alarmingly on the evenings of 13th and 14th August when several white youths were attacked with Stanley knives by groups of migrant youths at a local funfair and outside a petrol station in Dover. Some of the injuries sustained were severe _ in one case a white youth needed 175 stitches. Women are not immune: a 13-year-old girl had 48 stitches after being caught up in the attack.
It seems that local boys had taunted the foreigners. However, many saw the incident as a dangerous scenario that had been in the making for some time. Dover is a small, impoverished port of 40,000 people. The presence of less than 1000 migrants in the town at any one time where they are housed in bed and breakfast accommodation should pass unnoticed. This is not the case: the migrants are seen as compounding the problems of blight and unemployment that disfigure this coastal town. Competition between young males from the town and abroad for the attention of girls at the town’s few entertainment centres also seems to promote tensions.