...and back at the office

If you've been following the news on Afghanistan, you'll know that Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently took command of US and NATO forces in the country. According to what I've read, this is an important step for the US but the Obama administration continues to face tremendous challenges in getting Afghanistan's reconstruction effort back on track. They've got their work cut out for them, particularly in terms of establishing rule of law in Afghanistan.

In comes the UNODC. The division in which I work is - at this very moment! - holding a three-day conference with a number of delegates from Afghanistan's criminal justice community. (And yes, yours truly has been able to attend. It made spending hours copying Dari and Pashto conference documents totally worth it.) The conference provides training on a number of technical issues related to rule of law. The most interesting part of the conference was a session on terrorist financing. The session touched on the crime-terror nexus in Afghanistan (opium sales fueling terrorist activities). The delegates seemed pretty open about the fact that Taliban operatives and drug traffickers are one and the same. The general consensus was that combating trafficking would have a major impact on terrorist organizations in the country.

A US Dept. of Justice representative is attending the conference along with the Afghan delegation. The rep seems really committed to strengthening the country's legal system and he talked briefly yesterday about some of the work he's done with Iraq. Although Iraq (obviously) has a different set of challenges than Afghanistan, it sounds as though the Obama administration has some experts with a proven record of success at the helm of the revamped Afghanistan mission.

Are you calling this "fun"?

My laptop power cord mysteriously stopped working last Friday but came back from the dead this morning. What a miracle. Now it's back to the blog.

Friday marked the fifth - FIFTH - time since I've been in Vienna since I've seen an adult walking down the street playing with a Rubik's Cube. The last time I picked up a Rubik's Cube, the Berlin Wall had just come down.

Another Thursday, another castle

Welcome to another Austrian holiday. What for? Who knows. I've asked three Austrians and none had any idea what the day actually celebrated. Regardless, Austrians got the day off while the UN still ran like a well-oiled machine.

I did little to forestall transnational threats today, but I did create a document that outlines everything the UNODC has done to increase the capacity of national criminal justice systems to effectively combat terrorism. Don't let anyone ever tell you that UN is too bureaucratic to get anything done - substantive work is being done. I have the Excel spreadsheet to prove it.

In non-work news, I made a trip to Belvedere, a former Hapsburg summer palace located right in Vienna (see above). Only a month into living here and local attractions are already becoming blasé - like, "Christ. If this castle wasn't in the middle of this damn park, it would be a straight shot to the nearest subway station." The promiscuous sphinxes that littered the Belvedere's gardens really caught me off guard.

And just a few steps from the entrance to Belvedere was Schwarzenberg Square, which houses a monumemt commemorating the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II. (And did you know that much like in Berlin, the Allied powers divided up Vienna among one another during the immediate post-war period? The Soviet Union thus claimed a part of Vienna.) In the picture below, you'll see a statue of Soviet soldiers with a Russian inscription underneath. If you're not related to me and you're still reading at this point, congratulations.

Screw maps

I navigate by instinct alone. This strategy produces mixed results.*

The language barrier in Austria, however, has made getting lost practically a part-time job. Travelling from home to work is no problem but actually locating something in Vienna is much more difficult - primarily because every street name has a minimum of 16 syllables. Imagine someone tells you to meet at what sounds like "Mariahilfashtrassuh..." It's not even worth my time to Google map that.

What's getting me by is Vienna's excellent (and inexpensive) public transit system. I'm starting to slowly find my way around the city, stop by stop. The U-Bahn system here is as efficient as NYC's subways and clean like Boston's T but doesn't have nearly the same number of crazies as either New York or Boston. And you're free to drink on the train. I think it's pretty clear why The Economist just called Vienna the second most livable city in the world.

*If you've ever been out with me and it seemed to take hours to get to the final destination, I probably told you I just wanted to "explore" the area. I was lying to you. Apologies.

Notes from the field

My knowledge of European current events is limited to what I read about Lily Allen on perezhilton.com and, more recently, the whole Berlusconi/naked young ladies scandal. Yet since moving to Vienna, it's been difficult to ignore the election season - the entire city is covered with candidate billboards and I even got free shots at the bar on Saturday from some guy's campaign (danke!) .

As much as I talk up Austria, the place has some major underlying problems which came to the surface during the elections. Most distressingly, the country - home to the world's third-largest United Nations office - has become increasingly xenophobic. During the election season, conservative candidates attacked Austria's immigration policies and were particularly critical of the country's large Turkish and Balkan communities. And from speaking with Turkish colleagues at work, it's not just political rhetoric - getting service at restaurants and stores and finding housing can be difficult if you're not seen as truly "Austrian."

Today's election results provide a good window into what popular opinion is regarding "outsiders." According to the NYT, Austria's far-right, anti-immigration Freedom Party is expected to take 13% of Parliamentary seats - double the share of the vote it received in the 2004 elections.

You might remember the Freedom Party from the whole Jörg Haider controvery a little under a decade ago. Haider, a Nazi sympathizer, ran on an anti-immigration platform and successfully formed a coalition government with another conservative party in 2000. The party quickly fell out of favor but has recently re-emerged as a force on the national stage. And the strength of the far-right isn't limited to Austria - similar parties in Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands also saw big gains at the polls yesterday. Ultimately, the election results signal an unsettling move toward extremism not just in Austria but across Europe as a whole.

Obama better fix this shit.

More of the same

The slow adjustment process to Vienna has finally begun - I can make my way around the grocery store to buy the basics without problems (although I'm still unable to unlock those goddamn carts), I no longer cling to my guidebook whenever I leave the house, and the painful cravings for Diet Coke have started to wear off.

Again, my weekend was full of bars, some unsuccesful clubbing, and staying out too late. Sure, this will all come back to haunt me - I'm hemorraghing money and I think there may be signs of mild liver damage already in the works. But you only live once, right? And in between bar-hopping and sleeping, I was convinced to see Terminator 4 which, shockingly, I kind of enjoyed.

The most exciting weekend event was that a friend from Italy cooked a few of us a delicious, authentic Italian meal on Saturday night.



On the work front, I'm putting together a database of all the conventions and protocols relating to counter-terrorism. The project is actually pretty efficient - it will provide a clearinghouse of all the big counterterrorism legislation and allow users to search by country to see what an individual state has done in terms of ratifying and implementing anti-terror conventions and protocols. Right now, we're only piloting the project. We're starting with two countries, Madagascar and Nigeria. I could tell you some specific facts about which conventions both countries have signed on to, but I know that would interest no one. Instead, I can tell you that through my research, I've found that Nigeria has a wicked government website. Lola, you should be proud of your country. Madagascar's got a lot of ground to cover to even compete. Another fun fact is that Nigeria's anti-corruption agency, the Code of Conduct Bureau, pledges to "rid ourselves of the cankerworm of corruption." You will never find anything that literary on the US government's sites, that's for sure.

The Commissary = Heaven

Staff members at the UN have access to the Commissary, which allows them to order practically anything in the entire friggin' world at reduced prices. Literally everything. Especially American foods. Unfortunately, interns do not have access to the Commissary. However, my awesome roommate Martin has a connection and we got the hook up on some Commissary goods. We spent most our meager summer stipends on a Commissary spree to get our American food/Belgian beer/expensive perfume fix. We scored tortilla chips, salsa, some Dolce and Gabbana perfume, and bottles and bottles of Chimay. Thanks for making my summer amazing, Commissary.
At work today, I got the chance to help out on some interesting, substantive projects. [Well, let's be honest: those substantive projects were prefaced by a solid two hours of putting together binders for a counterterrorism conference. Those binders did look pretty fly, though.] One of the projects involved putting together a database of all the written constitutions of the world, which required me to 1) locate and 2) read through North Korea's constitution. Here's my favorite line from the preamble:

"Comrade Kim Il Sung was a genius ideological theoretician and a genius art leader, an ever-victorious, iron-willed brilliant commander, a great revolutionary and politician, and a great human being. Comrade Kim Il Sung 's great idea and achievements in leadership are the eternal treasures of the nation and a fundamental guarantee for the prosperity and efflorescence of the DPRK."

And it only gets better from there.