The long-awaited decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 22 July 2010 came as good news for the people of Kosova (Kosovo). In offering its non-binding opinion in a case that had been brought by Serbia following the Kosova parliament’s declaration of independence on 17 February 2008, the ICJ stipulated that Kosova’s declaration did not violate international law or breach United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 (passed at the end of the war of 1999 which had removed Serbian military forces from Kosova). In effect, the world court ruled that Kosovars had done nothing wrong - that the Republic of Kosova was a legal entity.

This positive opinion for Kosova came as a surprise to many observers, for the majority expectation was of a more ambiguous result. But in a longer perspective, the decision was a belated acceptance of a reality that should already have been accepted by the international community two decades ago - when the wars of ex-Yugoslavia were about to begin in earnest (see Goran Fejic, “Midnight in Belgrade, dusk in Brussels“, 12 July 2010).

In August 1991, the Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia (named after its chair, the French politician Robert Badinter) was tasked by the European Union with advising it on the legal aspects of Yugoslavia’s prospective break-up. The mistake it made was completely to ignore Kosova, failing to treat it alongside other constituent republics and instead regarding it as nothing but a part of Serbia - even though the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 had established Kosovo’s effective equality with the seven other constituents of the Yugoslav federation (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and Vojvodina). This meant that it fulfilled all the constitutional prerequisites of a state according to international law.

But if Kosova was a unit of Yugoslavia with a large degree of autonomy (and even took its turn in holding the rotating state presidency), it was also tied to Serbia. This dual constitutional reality meant that its power to chart its own future was in practice limited. In 1989 the autonomy that Kosova had been guaranteed under the 1974 constitution was revoked by the then president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic.

The failure of the international community to take Kosova’s full reality into account continued with the Dayton accords of 1995 that ended the Bosnian war, and thus became part of the spiral that led to the war of 1999. In this longer timescale, the ICJ’s “advisory opinion” both lifts a weight that has prevented the region from moving on and opens the way to new opportunities.

The reactions

It is natural that the most joyful reactions to the ICJ verdict came from inside Kosova. The country’s president, Fatmir Sejdiu, said that the opinion removes the dilemmas faced by states that have not yet recognised the Republic of Kosova: the prime minister Hashim Thaci and the foreign minister Skender Hyseni said that the court had acted rightfully; the deputy prime minister Hajredin Kuqi described the ruling as a victory for Kosova and the region alike. 

This view was echoed across the political and media spectrum. Blerim Shala, vice-president of the opposition AAK party, commented that the clear and precise ruling created a new political and diplomatic reality. The activist Shkelzen Gashi argued that the road to Kosova’s membership of the United Nations is open, assuming that (as required) the Security Council will unanimously recommend this course to the general assembly, and two-thirds of the assembly will then vote in support.

The leading United States and European politicians also approved the ruling, with the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton urging Kosovo and Serbia to put differences aside and move forward towards their future as part of Europe. The European Union’s top diplomat  Catherine Ashton also emphasised that  “the focus should now be on the future”, reflecting the foundations on which the EU is built - good neighbourly relations, regional cooperation and dialogue.

In Serbia, the negative overall reaction was reflected in the foreign minister Vuk Jeremic’s statement that Serbia would maintain its position and never recognise Kosovo’s independence. Jeremic expressed confidence that the opinion was technical only, and that any political decision taken at the UN general assembly would go Serbia’s way. An emergency session of the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution on 26 July supporting the government’s line by a large majority. But some analysts see the prospect that Serbia’s thinking about Kosova will gradually shift towards an acceptance of the ICJ opinion’s implications (see Florian Bieber, “Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia: after the ICJ”, 28 July 2010).

The future

But there is a contrast between the view of high politics and the reality on the ground, where much more than the ICJ opinion will be needed before Kosova can move forward. The Republic of Kosova has been recognised by sixty-nine countries to date, and any substantial increase from this number will take time.

Even less straightforward will be how Kosova emerges to full effective independence, when the country still has several international missions with (in some cases) overlapping mandates and competing interests. This puts Kosova’s authorities in a bind, where their need to negotiate and manage a complex set of relationships is in tension with their search for a clear, independent international profile.

The issues of recognition and administrative independence are closely linked. A crucial part of Kosova’s workload is to lobby hard for more global recognition - starting with the five European Union member-states that have withheld recognition (Romania, Spain, Greece, Slovakia and Cyprus). A successful outcome here would spur a contractual relationship with the European commission, and speed the process of UN membership.

In turn this would help Kosovo clarify a muddled governance system, with its five competing authorities:

* UNMIK, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo

* ICO/EUSR, the International Civilian Office/European Union Special Representative (tasked to oversee implementation of the Martti Ahtisaari plan on Kosovo’s future status, and support Kosovo’s European integration)

* EULEX, the European Union Rule-of-Law Mission

* the government of Kosova

* Serbian parallel structures operating in some Serb-majority areas, such as Mitrovica in the north

Amid this confusion and the condition of “supervised independence” that it reflects, a European Union perspective for Kosovo remains distant. The country cannot move towards EU integration without implementation of the Ahtisaari plan and recognition from all EU member-states; the Ahtisaari plan cannot be implemented without the cooperation of local Serbs and the Serbian government. Whether Serbia will now contribute to this process or continue to want it all (both EU membership and Kosovo) will be unclear for some time. So despite the International Court of Justice ruling, Kosova’s situation is still stalemated.

If the European Union had taken Kosova more seriously back in 1991, at the outset of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, many Kosovar (and other) lives and huge amounts of money (mainly European taxpayers’) would have been saved. Now, Europe needs to learn the lessons of this history, of its own disunity, of the ICJ opinion - and play a leading role in the vital political decisions that lie ahead.

Almost a decade on from 9/11, the chickens of the War on Terror are coming home to roost. Law suits against the government and its agencies – of which Binyam Mohamed’s is the highest profile – allege UK complicity in torture. The cases swirl with satellite litigation. In some parts of Whitehall, they call it ‘lawfare’. But outlaws are a thing of the past, and a fundamental principle of British justice is universal recourse to the law.

The concern among civil servants has been widespread and high-level. Concern at the time and money tied up in defending the cases, at supposedly naïve human rights ‘absolutism’, at judges who ‘just don’t get it’. The assertion is made that these cases themselves threaten the safety of the realm, conflating national security with national embarrassment. All of this has led to a powerful sense that something must be done, whether that be cosy cups of tea with the judiciary, smearing the litigants and pulling their legal aid, or an inquiry to put these issues to bed, which is where we find ourselves now.

The inquiry that has been announced will be judge-led and some mix of public and private. The default should be one of openness, with material being heard in camera only where strictly necessary. The inquiry’s success or otherwise will be determined by the extent to which it: lays bare the truth, as a necessary precondition of reconciliation and learning; recognises and compensates victims, offering them remedy and reparation; holds perpetrators to account, at every level; deters potential offenders; and restores public trust. Where lies have been told, by alleged victims or alleged perpetrators, they can be disproven. And international law can again be worth more than the paper it is written on. Bygones cannot altogether be bygones. Sometimes, we need to look back in order to see ahead.

Some uncomfortable home truths may emerge. Perhaps the fog of war clouded judgments in MI5 back then when it was not so used to operating against neo-jihadis overseas. The system of checks whereby the relevant secretaries of state are made aware of activity with the potential to embarrass the government appears to have broken down. But I would be very surprised if British agents actually pulled out any fingernails. More likely, we sent questions into torture chambers, held our noses and looked away. Forgetting Luther King’s exhortation that ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter’, we may not have spoken out as forcefully as we might have done, or as forcefully as international law demands. Whatever the outcome, when the inquiry is said and done, what will be important is how we move on.

International problems associated with detention and interrogation in asymmetric conflict will not go away. Torture will continue to do violence to the defenceless, using their bodies against their souls. The prohibition on torture will remain a golden rule: universal, unqualified and non-derogable. And the torturer will remain – hostis humani generis – an enemy of mankind.

Yet a fundamental dilemma will also remain: UK intelligence liaison with the likes of the Pakistani ISI has saved British lives. We have good reason to believe that the ISI sometimes torture their detainees. They will always deny that, if asked. Such an intelligence relationship therefore inherently runs the risk of being perceived as – or, worse, actually being – collusive in torture. The only way to avoid that risk would be to terminate the relationship. That could cost British lives.

Whether or not our security and intelligence services end up colluding in torture in the future should be about more than the niceties of how we define a word like complicity. We must have some clear red lines. The exercise of drawing them would be improved by public debate, which we may now get, since the government has at long last published its new guidance for British interrogators. But the fact that this guidance – a Police And Criminal Evidence Act for the Agencies – until recently still hadn’t been published (unlike the terror threat levels) more than a year after the previous prime minister stated to parliament that it would be disclosed illustrates a more fundamental problem, namely one of who is calling the shots.

When the country’s democratically elected leader – the man with the mandate – promises something, it cannot be right that nameless and faceless spooks can make him break that promise. Shady bureaucracy must not be allowed to trump democracy. The same applies, for instance, when it comes to the prospect of admitting intercept as evidence in court, where for too long bureaucratic objections have got in the way of British justice, necessitating ‘special’ legal arrangements to impose controls and restrictions without proper trials and convictions. Politicians need to have the confidence to challenge the ‘deep state’, make decisions, and see to it that they are implemented. There were early signs of this from the Obama administration – ordering an end to forced disappearances, secret detention, extraordinary rendition and torture – and now perhaps from the Coalition here. 

In a world where intelligence is used to justify state violence, including war, how it is governed – scrutinised, overseen, held to account – is of both public interest and national importance. Spying may be the second oldest profession, but the governance of intelligence needs to get with the times. In the modern information age, coupled with the decline of deference, ‘leave it to the experts’ is no longer good enough. All organisations benefit from accountability. MI5 and MI6 are no exceptions. But the Intelligence and Security Committee is weak and is too dependent on those it seeks to scrutinise. And a ‘no failure’ culture in the security service stymies progress and lends itself to cover-up.

As ippr’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century found, legitimacy in security policy is a strategic necessity, not a liberal nicety. It is an influence-multiplier, mobilising allies and solidifying support. Legitimacy is strengthened by robust governance. It is undermined where accountability is absent, as it often appears to be when it comes to the operation of other countries’ intelligence and security agencies: cue the CIA’s drone-bombings in Pakistan by remote control from Langley, Mossad’s recent assassination in Dubai, or the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. In the end though, as Northern Ireland – the Guildford Four, internment, Bloody Sunday – taught us: in counter-terrorism, short cuts lead to long delays.

We live in a global security environment of shared destinies and shared responsibilities. In this interconnected and interdependent world we are going to have to collaborate with partners – not just The Five Eyes – on whom our security in part depends, and whom we cannot compel or control. How this globalised intelligence activity is governed is an important question for our times.

As the then prime minister wrote in 2009:

‘Our National Security Strategy – and the hard, often dangerous work our dedicated Armed Forces and others do in putting it into practice – is grounded in core British values of fair play, human rights, openness, individual liberty, accountable Government and the rule of law, because we cannot protect our country and our way of life unless we do so in a way that clearly exemplifies and protects those values’.

He was right. But was he in charge? 

Young people today face a future of debt, joblessness and ecological disaster. How should young people respond to the hardships and humiliations handed down by the older generation? Do we need reform, revolution? Ahead of the UK Feminista summer school this weekend, Laurie Penny, of the Penny Red blog and the New Statesman and Rowenna Davies of the Guardian, debate what the strategy should be. All the posts in this thread will be by women. In parallel with it we have started a discussion between men about the need to end discrimination against women. All genders may join in the comments.

Not every generation gets the politics it deserves. When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time for free to causes led by grown ups.

Now more than ever, the young people of Britain need to believe ourselves more than acolytes to the staid, boring liberalism of previous generations. We need to begin to formulate an agenda of our own.

There can be no question that the conditions are right for a youth movement. The young people of Britain are suffering brutal, insulting socio-economic oppression. There are over a million young people of working age not in education, employment or training, which is a polite way of saying “up shit creek without a giro”.

Politicians jostle for the most punishing position on welfare reform as millions of us languish on state benefits incomparably less generous than those our parents were able to claim in their summer holidays. Where the baby boomers enjoyed unparalleled social mobility, many of us are finding that the opposite is the case, as we are shut out of the housing market and required to scrabble, sweat and indebt ourselves for a dwindling number of degrees barely worth the paper they’re written on, with the grim promise of spending the rest of our lives paying for an economic crisis not of our making in a world that’s increasingly on fire.

Just weeks ago, as news came in that the top 10 per cent of earners were getting richer, 21-year-old jobseeker Vicki Harrison took her own life after receiving her 200th rejection slip. Whether a youth movement is appropriate is no longer the question. The question is, why we are not already filling the streets in protest? Where is our anger? Where is our sense of outrage?

There are protest movements, of course. It would be surprising if anyone reading this blog had not been involved, at some point over the past six months, in a demonstration, an online petition or a donation drive. We do not lack energy, or the desire for change, and if there’s one thing that’s true of my generation it is our willingness to work extremely hard even when the possibility of reward is abstract and abstruse.

What we are missing is a sense of political totality. From environmental activism to the recent protests over the closure of Middlesex University’s philosophy department, our protest movements are atomised and fragmented, and too often we focus on fighting for or against individual reforms.

We need to have the courage to see all of our personal battlegrounds - for jobs, housing, education, welfare, digital rights, the environment - as part of a sustained and coherent movement, not just for reform, but for revolution.

For people my age, growing up after the end of the cold war, we have no coherent sense of the possibility of alternatives to neoliberal politics. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek observed that for young people today, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

For us, revolution is a retro concept whose proper use is to sell albums, t-shirts and tickets to hipster discos, rather than a serious political argument.

Many of us openly or privately believe that change can only happen gradually, incrementally, that we can only respond to neoliberal reforms as and when they occur. Youth politics in Britain today is tragically atomised and lacks ideological direction. We urgently need to entertain the notion that another politics is possible, a type of politics that organises collectively to demand the systemic change we crave.

Revolutionary politics involve risk. Revolutionary politics do not involve waiting patiently for adults to make the changes. They do not come from interning at a think tank or opening letters for an MP, and I say this as someone who has done both. Revolutionary politics are different from work experience, and they are unlikely to look good on our CVs.

The young British left has already waited too long and too politely for politicians, political parties and business owners from previous generations to give space to our agenda. We have canvassed for them, distributed their leaflets, worked on their websites, updated their twitter feeds, hashtagged their leadership campaigns, done their photocopying and made their tea, pining all the while for political transcendence. No more; I say no more.

A radical youth movement requires direct action, it will require risk taking, and it will require central, independent organisation. It will not require us to join the communist party or wear a silly hat, but it will require us to risk upsetting, in no particular order, our parents, our future employers, the party machine, and quite possibly the police.

The lost generation has wasted too much time waiting to be found. Through no fault of our own, our generation carries a huge burden of social and financial debt, but we have already wasted too much time counting up what we owe. It’s time to start asking instead what the baby boomer generation owes us, and how we can take it back.

No more asking nicely. It’s time to get organised, and it’s time to get angry.

Laurie

Laurie,

You paint a vivid picture of a young, struggling underclass being exploited by adults, and it’s obvious your cry for revolution comes straight from the heart. But do we really want to make age another battleground in our communities? As members of the left, don’t we believe that the real divides in our society aren’t between young and old, but between the rich and poor, the powerful and the vulnerable? Do we really have space for another division?

As a true believer in progressive politics (and at 25, perhaps still a young person), I believe we should be allying ourselves with all those who feel oppression, not just those of a similar demographic. The alternative is to risk segregating ourselves into another youth playpen, disconnected from the left’s mainstream movement. Let’s fight for the bigger picture, not a youthful self-portrait.

It’s a common mistake of adults to assume that because we’re young, we all think and feel the same. Sure, young people tend to feel injustice particularly sharply as a demographic because we all start at the bottom of the jobs pile. But that doesn’t mean that all young people are powerless to the whims of adults. Conservative headquarters are filled with fresh-faced young graduates that are working on policies that screw over people old enough to be their parents and grandparents. How does a “youth movement” deal with that?

Nor do I agree with your vision of revolution, as beautiful as it sounds. Bringing this system to collapse would result in massive economic instability that would undermine the employment chances of all people – young and old. It would fly in the face of the last democratic vote and threaten the social stability of our communities.

So what’s my alternative? Your passionate eloquence leaves my response vulnerable to looking like a tired defence of the status quo. But I share your fierce urgency for change – I just don’t want to see young people tearing down the system. Instead I want to see us enter it, take charge and reshape it. I want to see us filling the youth wings of our political parties and demanding they give us more power, as Young Labour is already doing. One initiative I’m pushing for helps to get young people into local government, not as token youth reps or pen pushers or photocopiers – but as legitimate representatives of their communities.

In short, I want to see a generation that fights for each other rather than on the streets. A youth movement that stands by fellow interns, refuses to work without pay and raises the temperature on educational funding. Yes this will take direct action and organised protest. And yes our targets will often be ‘youth issues’ - but they should always be part of a bigger picture, as the students and lecturers who stood together at Middlesex will tell you.

I can understand your frustration. After thirteen years of a ‘progressive government’, we are still told that we can’t afford to pay for internships, let alone redress substantial inequalities. But we mustn’t underestimate the difference that policy can make, as this Conservative budget is about to prove.

I agree with so much of your clear-spirited diagnosis of the problems. It’s your solutions I’m questioning. Are you completely disillusioned by the system? Is there really no hope for change from within? And if not, why do you keep voting in our elections, and urging others to do the same? Can political parties help turn things around, or might they just as well disband? I’d like to know how you think the system should change to make young people like yourself believe in it again.

Row

Row,

You asked if there isn’t hope that young people can change the system from within. The short answer is: none at all, if that’s all we’re planning on doing. For too many people our age, political activism is just something that looks good on our CVs, something that involves photocopying, distributing leaflets and answering the telephone for adult politicians whose agendas we may not necessarily agree with - often for free.

We worry, and rightly so, about being shunned by the establishment, when really we should be trying to impose our own values upon it. Fortunately, that doesn’t necessarily have to involve pepper spray and water cannon. You say that you want to see “a youth movement that stands by fellow interns, refuses to work without pay and raises the temperature on educational funding… direct action and organised protest.” in my book, that’s the very definition of revolution. Revolution is about challenging hierarchies of labour, property and power; it’s not just about slogans and terrible hair, and sometimes revolution can work in the gentlest of ways.

You say that a call for young people to rebel poses a risk of further division in our communities, but I firmly believe that generational politics and the politics of class and capital should not be mutually exclusive. Young people in particular need to understand that our place in the hierarchy of labour and property is lowly, insecure and unjust, and only by developing a sense of solidarity and real rage will we begin to approach that understanding appropriately.

My greatest fear for our generation is that we will grow up to inherit a poorer, harsher, more difficult world than our parents without once having mustered the courage to question what brought us to this point.

Even before the financial crash, most of us who grew up through New Labour’s exacting reforms to secondary and higher education have been conditioned from an early age to see ourselves as little more than commodity inputs. Now, with wages low, job security non-existent and seventy of us competing for every vacancy, there is a danger that we will feel too frightened of being left behind by the market to demand our rights to work, housing, a decent standard of living and a sense of security that means more than a neoliberal soundbite. We have been trained to compete, and to see one another as competitors, and this too is a reason to cherish revolutionary spirit.

What do I mean by revolution? Not blood in the streets, although direct action must be a part of any movement. Not just anger: raging at the baby boomers won’t solve any of our problems by itself. Deep ideological questions of class, equality and the nature of late capitalism will continue to matter to people our age long after we have buried our parents and taken on the work of running the country. If we are to stand a chance of doing so with any semblance of maturity and responsibility, we need to remember what it’s like to believe in change, change that’s not a slogan on a poster or a platitude from a pundit but a concrete plan to improve our lives collectively.

That’s why I’m quite serious in calling for revolutionary sentiment. We need to understand how badly we have been let down by the system, because one day we are going to be in charge of that system. People don’t truly treasure things until they’ve fought for them, and it’s only by fighting for political emancipation, equality and social justice that we’ll be able to pass those things on to generations who will come after us. If we truly mean to create a decent society for ourselves to inherit, we need to risk upsetting people. We need to risk being badly behaved, and making ourselves less, rather than more employable. To do politics properly, we need to risk getting in trouble.

Laurie

“Ma-ma, mam, ma-ma…”  My youngest daughter, furious at being put to bed for a rest, is practising sounds under the blanket.  She can hear the older girls outside, whispering to each other in a carefree way, and is probably cursing grown-ups to herself for regularly and obstinately insisting, nay forcing, little ones to have a rest.  They should try it themselves….  Oh, dearest child, if you only knew how wonderful that would be.  At the dacha, in the fresh air, where the birds twitter happily and the wine is cool.

The average Russian’s love affair with the dacha goes through several stages during the course of his life.  At the beginning you’re not asked if you want to go – you’re just tagged on to the group.  At that stage you don’t have anything against it. Then you do, but the adults pay no attention to your despairing protests and drag you along. They’re convinced that without that gulp of fresh air you won’t survive. Or could it be that without your help they won’t manage to dig over those interminable flower and vegetable beds? Then, for some reason, you yourself start planning to go to the dacha at the weekend. The last stage is when in early spring you take all your worldly goods, up sticks and off to your country villa with its 500 sq.m. This is proof to the whole world that you have no need of the Canaries and there can be no better possible holiday that the endless ploughing-sowing-weeding of cucumbers-tomatoes-courgettes and peppers.

These assertions are based on scientific evidence. The Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion has published data proving that in 2010 20% of Russians plan to spend their holidays at the dacha. 55% are going to spend them at home. Only 1 in 20 people intend to go abroad, and 1 in 10 plans to go to the Black Sea. People are prepared to spend on average 16,000 roubles on their holiday. Not very realistic for the provinces, I can tell you.

The other day my colleague had a call from her sister in Petersburg. They haven’t met for a long time and are missing each other. The sister suggested they go on holiday together in Europe, as the Petersburg airline has a sale on so a return ticket only costs 200-300 USD. My colleague refused. Not because she doesn’t want to see her sister or has already criss-crossed Europe and seen everything. No. It’s just that for the provinces this kind of money is unrealistic.  Regional carriers have no competition, so for us a one-way ticket to Petersburg costs minimum 200 USD. 

The beach in Russia’s top Black Sea resort of Sochi. Only 1 in 20 Russian citizens intend to go abroad, and 1 in 10 plans to go to the Black Sea.

The same colleague is now trying to arrange her summer break by the sea. On the internet she found an acceptable hotel in Anapa for 1,500 roubles (approx. 50 USD) a day, all mod cons, 100 m. from the sea.  But the problem is getting there. Two days in a stuffy train compartment with a 2-year old would be hard work. The 90-minute flight from Orenburg to Anapa costs 7000 roubles (230 USD) with a discount for the child.  So 25,000 roubles (821 USD) for the two of them – and that’s only the travel.

The travel agency is offering a holiday costing from 12,000 roubles (394 USD) (including the flight) on the same Black Sea, but in Turkey.  People in the know maintain that this year Turkey will beat all the records for the number of tourists from Russia.  We have no fear of terrorism, road accidents, pouring rain (this kind of trifle we don’t even notice).  Crimea could compete by offering Black Sea holidays, but the service there is still Soviet – though the beauty of the landscape and Crimean wines might help one to overlook such nuances. But here too the outlay is pretty scary for an ordinary provincial would-be tourist.

However, we Orenburgers are lucky. We can be restored to health without even leaving the region. 75 km from Orenburg we have our own spa, Sol-Iletsk [sol is Russian for salt ed]. Well, calling it a spa is perhaps a bit over the top: it’s more like a hamlet or a small, extremely dusty and dirty little town. It’s on the border with Kazakhstan and its main selling point are the salt and mud lakes, rather like the Dead Sea in Israel. The best known is Razval Lake, 6.8 ha with a maximum depth of up to 22m and a steep cliff on one side, more than half made up of rock salt. The water in the lake is a powerful saline solution: the salt content is more than 200g per litre of water. Razval doesn’t freeze over, even in the hardest frosts, and from a depth of 2-3 metres down to the bottom the water temperature is below 0°. The region of the Iletsk saline dome has another 6 lakes (Dunino, Tuzuluchnoe, Novoe etc) which have reserves of therapeutic mud.  In the summer months these lakes have countless hordes of a small reddish brine shrimps Artemia Salina. 

Sol-Iletsk, a favourite spot for Orenburgers. The water in the lake is a powerful saline solution: the salt content is more than 200g per litre of water.

The salt water and mud are very effective treatment for people with skin diseases and joint pain.  But the service holidaymakers get in Sol-Iletsk leaves a lot to be desired.  People are specially outraged by the fact that for the last 7 years they have had to pay up to 200 roubles (approx. 6.5 USD) per person for access to the lake, with only minimal services on offer.  The toilets are terrible, there are queues for the showers, the beach is not very clean and there’s a battle every morning for the deckchairs.  The local authorities have leased out the whole territory for 30 years to private companies, who are pumping money out of people while they can.  The population of Sol-Iletsk is slightly more than 20,000, but during the season there are up to 2.5 times that number of visitors.  So you can do the sums.

This year the local procurator’s office has suddenly spoken up, after a 7-year silence.  First the law enforcers went to court over illegal charges for people wishing to bathe in these unique lakes.  They «unexpectedly» remembered that under Russian law all lakes are classed as natural features under regional management, so they have to be accessible to everyone.  The court verdict was that entry should be free.  The companies complained.  The matter has not been solved, but the spa season has already begun.  For the moment the price is half what it was last year. 

The procurator’s office has suddenly woken up and handed down another decision: the spa is life-threatening for tourists.  The problem is an enormous rock slip which has appeared extremely near Razval Lake.  This was supposed to have been filled in at the beginning of the spring, but after the procurator’s intervention it emerged that, in spite of instructions from the spa’s director, the 10m-crater is still there.   «Sinkholes are quite common»,  we are assured by those for whom the bathers (which is the name the locals give to the holidaymakers) represent purses for them to extract as much money as possible from during the season ……and everything else can go to hell.

The region has so far had its fair share of problems this season, because the current heatwave has been going on for more than month.  Today the temperature is 36° and forecasters are saying that the day after tomorrow it’ll be 42°.  The sowing season is over, but in some parts of the region lack of rain meant they had to stop sowing spring crops.  For our agricultural region, where 40% of the population live by farming,  this situation is near fatal.  One longs to shelter in the shade by an expanse of water, but each year there are fewer and fewer such places. 

My husband is a passionate fisherman.  He’s not a poacher.  At spawning time he fishes with only a hook.  Yesterday he came back from his latest outing very depressed.  There are gobies and minnows in the Ural River now, which means the water is cleaner.  But it’s a shame that only our cat would be satisfied with the size of the fish.  Kuzya was purring happily and smiling, but might it not be that even this happy little animal will quite soon have nothing to catch? 

The Ural River is 2428 km long (1164 km run through our Orenburg Region), which makes it the third longest European river after the Volga and the Danube.   The volume of water in the Ural also puts it among the thirty biggest European rivers – but it’s getting shallower.  Quite recently this massive artery was almost without fish.  At the end of the 1970s the Ural produced 33% of the world’s sturgeon, and 40% of its black caviar.  Over the last twenty years the fish population has shrunk by more than 30 times.  Or so the biologists tell us.  I’m nearly 40 and have never heard any tales about sturgeon:  fishermen are delighted to talk about their catches, but I’ve only heard about a 2kg Caspian asp (Aspius rapax) and a catfish that was 2m long. 

We are all to blame for this. We’re interested in grabbing as much as we can and only the best bits. 15-20 years ago there were about 2000 small rivers and lakes along the length of the Ural River.  During the spring floods the river used to overflow its banks and the lakes would fill up.  Now they’ve dried up completely and even the Ural doesn’t have much water.  This is why there are fewer varieties of animals living here. Last weekend, though, we were 40 km from Orenburg and we saw eagles, herons, marmots, beavers, ground squirrels and apparently roedeer have been seen there too. But the little lake so beloved by our family, Zmeinoe [Snake Lake], is obviously just going to turn into a bog.  It’s only 50m from the Ural River, but no water has flowed into it for several years.

The average Russian’s love affair with the dacha goes through several stages during the course of his life.

Tomorrow we are told it will be 42°. These kinds of temperatures scare me. Last week almost all the woodland around Orenburg went up in flames because of the heat and a strong wind. There was a strong smell of burning in the city. The next day one of my friends went past the site and said it looked as though it had been bombed. It started just because someone was driving past and threw a cigarette butt out of the window.  Or someone thought it might be interesting to see if the poplar seed tufts would burn. Or someone decided to tidy up all the rubbish in the forest area in one go. So….not even grass grows there any more now.

But it’s growing at my dacha – unfortunately!  I pull it up all the time, but it’s like Sivka-Burka [a Russian fairytale horse which springs up out of the earth ed], but it goes on coming up. You know what?  I’ll plant lots of it in front of the house, my husband will fill the pool under the apple tree with water and the girls and I will pick strawberries.  It’s not for nothing that our fellow citizens like holidays at the dacha.  It’s quiet and peaceful.  There might even be nightingales singing……

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A Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer shot a suspected robber this morning at a fast food restaurant.