Tuesday 12711

busy academic day.

first we visited the Serbian Parliament building, very cool building, started in 1905, finally finished in 1935, there were a number of wars and attempted revolutions delaying the completion.

we met with MPs of the Democratic party, the party holds 64 of the 250 total seats in parliament. the two MPs we met with were young in their early thirties, apparently representative of the Democratic party followers. they are currently working on changing up the way elections work, it works like the classic parliamentary elections, in that the people vote for a party, and the party gets a representative number of seats in the parliament, and then fills those seats accordingly with people. however they want to change it so that the voters know who exactly they are voting for, and to what position within the party and eventual government.

we asked them all kinds of questions, the Democratic party is all for EU accession, and doing everything they can, proposing laws and whatnot that will expedite that process.

they also spoke to what their party is doing to address the problems of Serbia, not surprisingly unemployment is an issue, due primarily to the economic crises the world over, but they also point to the education system being inadequate for the Serbian people to compete in a globalized market, so the Democratic party is working to attract FDI, and overhaul the education system to address the unemployment issue.

also they noted that industrial output was at 50% of what it was in the early 1990s, due in part to the economic slowdown, and then the sanctions of the 90s, and the us bombing the crap out of them thing. so the Democratic party wants to attract that FDI to help reinvigorate Serbia's industries.

regarding Kosovo, the Democratic party will likely not ever recognize Kosovo as an independent state as long as it is unpopular to do so, however they respect the Un mandate and will not do anything to upset that issue.

and as far as Bosnia goes, they respect to sovereignty of Bosnia, as well as the Dayton accords, and the agreement between Bosnia and the Republica Srpska, and will not do anything to aggravate that issue at all.

then later in the day we met with some members of CANVAS, which is an organization that provides advisory and training services to people opposing oppressive regimes through nonviolence.

CANVAS is a growth from OTPOR, which was the primary youth, grassroots-ish opposition movement against Milosovic at the turn of the century (i love being able to say that).

CANVAS organizes workshops to help (generally) young people to organize nonviolent resistance to authoritarian regimes, and has since helped advise groups in places like the Maldives, Ukraine, Georgia and Egypt.

The group was certainly interesting, particularly because they refuse aid from governments so they can maintain their freedom, however, as Ionnis pointed out, they are willing to work with anyone as long as the group is pursuing nonviolence, including far far right (neo-fascists). so in my opinion the group loses some respect because they are willing to help extremist groups like that...

then later that night we went to a free show at the Kalamegdan fortress hosted by the Serbian branch of MTV, it was some Serbian DJs, it was... interesting, not really my kinda music, but it was cool to see, an experience. afterwords me and a few other made our way home, stopping at a fountain to drink some of the coldest water ive had in the country, and met a dog, that managed to follow our roundabout prolly 3km walk home, and sleep in front of our hotel.

overall a good day, sorry i missed this post yesterday, ill prolly double post later, and relate todays lazy events.