[URBAN NOTE] Obay

An Obay sign in Toronto..
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I noticed this advertisement last weekend, but Torontoist says that this campaign, comprising a series of fake pharmaceutical ads on the theme of the advertisement opposite has been going on for a while. I'd wondered for a bit whether this was a Church of Scientology initiative, but then I realized it was too imaginative for them. In a more recent posting, Torontoist has made a definitive statement about the campaign's origin.

[W]e traced them, with no small amount of confidence, to a substantially less dramatic source––Colleges Ontario, an advocacy organization representing twenty-four colleges across the province. The organization would neither confirm nor deny their involvement to either Torontoist or, several days later, The Star, but still told us all to wait a few weeks for...something. As far as mysterious ad campaigns go, this one was almost perfect: only breadcrumbs to trace back to the source, a city left to talk about the ad and its message and what it all meant (which, of course, was precisely the point).

But it's finally official: Rob Savage, Colleges Ontario's Director of Communications, called Torontoist moments ago to confirm that Colleges Ontario is indeed behind the ads, and the organization just sent out a press release with information about a media launch event next Monday that promises to reveal "the news behind Obay and its side effects on Ontario’s Post-secondary Education." Torontoist will be there.

[BRIEF NOTE] Canada and Kosovo

The list of countries which have recognized Kosovo's independence continues to grow. In the European Union, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy have all recognized Kosovo as an independent state, while all of the Nordic states save Iceland and all of the Baltic states have either already recognized or plan to recognize Kosovo, alongside other countries like Portugal, Austria, Slovenia, Belgium, Ireland, and Hungary. In Asia and the Pacific, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Australia have recognized Kosovo, and Japan and Pakistan are poised to follow. Libya and Egypt are still studying the issue, but Senegal's decision to recognize Kosovo's independence might presage a broader trend in the Islamic world; the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference has congratulated Kosovars on achieving their national independence. In the Western Hemisphere, Costa Rica and the United States are alone.

Why not Canada? The long involvement of Canadian troops in Kosovo from 1999 notwithstanding, Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence might set a precedent for Qubec separatists, federal government initiatives intended to bring separatism under the control of the federal government like the Clarity Act notwithstanding. The Globe and Mail has more in today's issue.

Mr. Joli-Coeur [. . .] said that should Ottawa recognize the declaration of independence of Kosovo, it will have difficulty refusing Quebec the same status should the province eventually declare its independence.

"The case of Kosovo clearly demonstrates that the essential factors in the creation of a state are the will of the population of the territory concerned and the attitude of the international community," Mr. Joli-Coeur stated in a letter to The Globe and Mail. "The predecessor state does not necessarily play a decisive role in such matters."

Recognizing Kosovo independence could one day backfire against Ottawa, he argued.

"Canada will be reminded of its probable support for the declaration of independence of Kosovo when the matter of Quebec's sovereignty arises in the future," he stated.

Mr. Joli-Coeur was appointed "friend of the court" in 1998 by the Supreme Court to argue Quebec's case in the secession reference referred by Ottawa in the hope of having an eventual unilateral declaration of independence by Quebec declared illegal.

Some commentators distinguish between the Kosovo and Quebec situations by pointing out that, in the former territory, the Kosovar Albanian population was subjected to a decade of apartheid-like rule that culminated in violent ethnic cleansing. Québec, thankfully, has escaped anything like that. Still, the suggestion of an editorialist in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald that should "[hold] off recognition until Kosovo satisfies the UN governance proposals" may well be Canadian government policy on Kosovo. This proposal seems to be similar to that of the Netherlands, and may be similar to the policies of all those countries currently on the fence or concerned about the consequences of Kosovar independence.

(As a side note, I was surprised to be greeted by "Përshëndetje rfmcdpei!" when I logged into my Flickr account for my first post of the day.)

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] A brief demographic history of Kosovo to 1989

Here's my brief effort to come up with a reasonable neutral account of the evolution of Kosovo's population to the end of Communist Yugoslavia. Comments, as always, are welcome.

( First, background. )

( Now, the first half of the 20th century. )

( The birth-rate question in the SFRY. )

( Migration under the SFRY. )

What was the net result of these trends? Albanians in Kosovo emerged as a demographically significant population, responsible for a disproportionately large share of the Republic of Serbia's births and an even larger share of its total natural increase. By the late 1980s, this fact, along with growing concern over the "white plague" of low or negative natural increase among Serbs, combined with growing nationalism on all sides and a considerable amount of ethnic to produce an unseemly mess of nationalist hysteria. Reproduction, sexuality, and gender all played major--and unanswerable--roles, as Mark Thompson described in A Paper House.

Facts were scarce amid the delierium, but were hardly the point. Truth was a necessary casualty of this mobilization, and its medium was myth. When one Djordje Martinovic claimed in 1985 that two Kosovars had raped him with a broken bottle, he became a national martyr, an archetype of Serb suffering and Albanian (Muslim, Ottoman ...) evil. A poetry likened him to the Serb rebels impaled by the Turks of old. In due course the courts and medical examiners agreed the man was unbalanced and his wounds were self-inflicted; but who cared?

A Croatian journalist investigated the many allegations that Serb and Montenegrin women were being raped in Kosovo. Records showed no disproportion among Albanian and Slav criminality in the province, and a lower than average number of rapes. Researchers in Belgrade bore the journalist out; but by the time their dull book of statistics was published in 1990, who cared?

If the official figures proved that hundreds of thousands of refugees had not crept over the border from Albania, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins had not been scared into fleeing the province, who cared? There was no separatist movement of any substance, but who cared? The Kosovars' weary insistence that separatism was not the issue, only confirmed their perfidy (129-130).

Kosovar separatism soon became an issue, of course. The 1981 popular protests demanding Kosovo be made a republic, one of seven without the SFRY, didn't aim for secession from Yugoslavia. By the time that Yugoslavia was dissolving, the idea of Kosovo gaining independence from a threatening Serbia seemed like a good idea.