[BRIEF NOTE] Serbia's nice elections news

Over the weekend Serbia had its most recent parliamentary elections, and the news is good.

Pro-Western forces in Serbia began tough talks on Monday to cobble together a coalition, after the electoral commission confirmed they scored an upset poll victory over nationalist rivals.

President Boris Tadic's "For a European Serbia" alliance garnered 38.8 percent in Sunday's parliamentary elections dominated by the issue of Serbian ties with the European Union.

While short of an absolute majority, the alliance was well ahead of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party on 29.2 percent, said the commission.

There had been predictions of a possible nationalist backlash over widespread EU support for the independence of Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo.

In the end, the result "undoubtedly confirmed a clear European path," Tadic said at his Democratic Party campaign headquarters.

"The Democratic Party will be the key player in the future cabinet," said the president, refusing to reveal who might be his prime minister.

"The negotiations will not be easy (but) I warn everyone not to play with the electoral will of the citizens and try to take Serbia back to the isolation of the 1990s," he said in reference to the hardline regime of late president Slobodan Milosevic.

The Democrats' expected coalition partners include the Socialist Party of Serbia, founded by Milosevic, and/or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose leader Cedomir Jovanovic negotiated the late strongman's arrest in 2001.

While it's disturbing that the Radical Party, founded by a man, Vojislav Seselj who is a proponent of eye-gouging, ranks second by popularity in Serbia, it's very good news indeed that the most popular political party in Serbia and the one most likely to form the government is a normal political party. Now Serbia has a fighting chance of catching up to Bulgaria.

[LINK] How do you translate francophonie into Persian?

Kaveh L Afrasiabi's Asia Times article "Iran woos Farsi-speaking nations" suggests that, following in the steps of the Francophonie and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, speakers of the Farsi might now be close to claiming a multinational language association of their own. Drawing on the very strong similarities if not outright identity between Farsi and Afghanistan's Dari and Tajik, Iran might be in the process of using a common language to cement an economic community under the aegis of the Economic Cooperation Organization (Wikipedia, official site). Of course, this all has to fit into the Great Game.

One initiative in particular that Iran is genuinely interested in, and hopeful about its prospects, deals with trilateral cooperation among the three Farsi-speaking nations of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Such a union, if formed in the (intermediate) future, will definitely enhance Iran's regional status and create new linkages between Iran and Central Asia and beyond.

[. . .]

[T]he ECO-based initiative to enhance cooperation among the Farsi-speaking nations has a definite geocultural dimension or ramification, at least as far as Turkey and other Turkish-speaking ECO members are concerned. Iran has always been suspicious of Turkey's, or for that matter Kazakhstan's, attempts to forge closer ties to the Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan and the Turkish-speaking Central Asian states; such attempts, particularly by Turkey during the early and mid-1990s, were perceived as being directly anti-Iranian in nature.

Since then, mutual fears and concerns of pan-Turkism and pan-Persianism have been much dissipated by the growing maturity of Iran-Turkey and Iran-Azerbaijan relations in particular, based on mutual and shared interests, and the initial sound and fury of a "new great game" in Central Asia and the Caucasus has been replaced by the cold, realistic logic of cooperation and interdependence.

Apart from the potential of growing international competition in the region based on the ties of different powers' linguistic and cultural links with the peoples of Central Asia, the main problem facing this project is the United States. As one might expect, the United States is rather hostile to the idea of an Iranian-led bloc including Afghanistan.

[MUSIC] Pet Shop Boys, "Go West"

The first track on the Pet Shop Boys' 1993 album Very is "Can You Forgive Her?", a synthpop song written in a sneaky-sounding 6/8 time that is addressed to a young man who--as Tennant and Lowe have it--not only dances to disco and doesn't like rock, but also has some "youthful follies" and dreams of "changing teams." The song does hit a bit close to home, but it's a well-composed song and who am I to knock a chanson bien faite for being painfully true to life?

The last track on Very, the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Go West", is entirely different. I can only stand to listen to a couple of minutes before I have to skip to another track, or do a quick search for another YouTube video.

My objections all lie outside of the song. The Village People's original version was released in 1979, a celebration of San Francisco's gay scene, an arena for social liberalization and personal freedom that had appeared almost overnight in the decade after Stonewall. A few years later, scientists determined that in a 1978 cohort of gay and bisexual men, 4.5% were infected with HIV, long before the fatal starbursts of the epidemic began to appear. It was absurd that people continents away could be infected with an obscure virus transmitted against the odds by a minor primate species, but it did manage to happen, and here we all are, and there we all were.

This version of "Go West" was born in the AIDS moment. The Pet Shop Boys first performed the song at an AIDS fundraising benefit, and after "Go West" is a hidden extra song that, as noted here, widely taken asw a dedication to a man believed to be Lowe's lover, himself dying of AIDS. Let's not forget that the song's title and chorus can be read not only as an invocation of the joys of west-coast North America, but as a reference to heading into the west.

In the era of HAART, all that wouldn't be especially germane to my life but for the fact that I know quite a few people who have been marked by that almost irrecoverably lethal phase of the epidemic, infected and survivors and bystanders alike. I've finished researching that period in the library: I've got my Randy Shilts and my Ann Silversides and my Edward Hooper and too many others to name here all under my belt. I've just not raised the issue with them, or allowed the issue to be raised by them, at all. Best not to disturb, I think, long-buried pains, or at least best not to be blamed for the disturbances so as to not think about it so as not to bother about it.

I used to think that I remained incurious on this subject because I was polite. Lately, I've lately been thinking it's because I'm a bit of a coward. Whatever's going on, I don't think that I want to associated with the song very much at all. Call that another act of cowardice.