The second folder I wanted to mention is titled "Pridnestrovskaya Moldavskaya Respublika – Terra Incognita" and contains a number of articles dating from 2006. The following description is offered of the project:
The project "Transdniester - Revealing Europe's black hole" is an investigation of CRJI, financed by SCOOP in Danemark and SAS in Switzerland. The participants in this project are the following journalists: Vitalie Calugareanu (Chisinau), Vlad Lavrov (Kiev), Igor Boldyrev (Odessa), Alexander Bratersky (Moscova) and foto Robert Ghement.I've become much more skeptical of internet news sources since seeing how slick propaganda sites can be made to look. As with any previously unknown source that one has only seen on the internet, I feel the need to offer some sort of disclaimer. On the other hand, far from looking like something set up just to criticize the de facto Transnistrian authorities, this organization appears to target all of the classic targets you would expect good investigative journalists in the region to go after - corrupt Romanian officials, organized crime, problems in Moldova (including a feature with video - in Romanian only - on the recent scandal about alleged visa-selling at the Romanian embassy in Chisinau) and even Romania's alleged discrimination against Muslims "in its zeal to please the US." So I'm pretty comfortable recommending its fairly recent, firsthand reporting from the PMR. Or how about this - as comfortable as I would be recommending the work of any other equal-opportunity-muckraking outlet. Anyway, I hadn't seen this before, so I wanted to share it.
The journalistic investigation was financed by the Scoop project (through the Danish Investigative Journalists Association – FUJ) and by the organization Small Arms Survey from Geneva.
12 comments:
Does it cite representatives from intnl. orgs. like the EU, OSCE and UN, who have confirmed that he arms smuggling issue vis-a-vis Pridnestrovie is a bogus issue?
How nice of them to claim that Muslims aren't being heavily discriminated against by Romanians. Have they acknowledged Prid's. tolerance on language rights when compared to Latvia and Estonia?
Calling Transdniester "a black whole" is part of an ongoing propaganda campaign that deflects attention away from the greater socio-economic problems evident in Moldova.
The Tiraspol Times (TTT) is far more objective than the three main Moldovan news orgs. At TTT, you will find material that's pro and anti Kosovo independence, an anti-Pridnestrovie government petition signed by Moldovans outside of Pridnestrovie, a recent anti-Pridnestrovie commentary from one of the top three Moldovan news orgs. and regularly posted/published material from inside Pridnestrovie, which is critical of the Smirnov administration (Smirnov's family included). In addition, I know that TTT invited a leading critic of it to submit an article, with the understanding that it wouldn't be censored. That person declined the offer.
Some aren't sympathetic to Pridnestrovie having a Russocentric direction. TTT correctly reflects Pridnestrovie's political climate, while being open to posting/publishing other views.
In first sentence of last post, "he" should be "the".
Mike, please read a bit more carefully - the article about Muslims in Romania does allege discrimination, and the article about smuggling was written in 2003, which I think was before any of the international organizations you mentioned made those statements (actually, I'm pretty sure the UN never had anything to say about it - do you have a source for that other than the Tiraspol Times?).
As for the rest of your comment, if you're going to go to the trouble to comment here, can you try to be a bit more creative and not always set up straw men? I never said anything about "three main Moldovan news orgs," and in any event I have already seen that statement of support for TTT, verbatim, in comments of yours at Sean's blog and AFOE.
Anyway, I think you know what I think of TTT, since my views haven't changed much since our discussion in the comments section of Sean's blog several months ago (which continued midway through the comments section here). The only updates I can provide are that several months later I still haven't received any information from them on how to subscribe to the print edition they claim to have, nor have I received any email updates from them, which they also claim to provide and for which I signed up on their website.
I have to say that I am inspired, in a way, by your persistent promotion and dogged defense of TTT at various internet venues, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that this virtual newspaper continues to post your writings to its website.
Wally, I can't explain my recent pace of posting - I should really be spending time on other things - new baby, new school year, etc. - but I've caught the bug again and have a few more posts lined up, but it certainly won't continue at this pace for too long.
Lyndon:
Congrats. on the new baby.
You've the gall to put the "virtual" label on TTT as you say nothing negative of the Sorosian TOL "Jigs" (hope that's right0, whose LR posted comments about me reflect his/her intellectual (or lack thereof) capabilities. A real class act posting at another class act.
BTW, my last article on the former Moldavian SSR appeared in Eurasian Home.
The record shows that you consistently go out of the way to write against perceived negatives pertaining to Romania and Moldova. This is much different from the way you approach Russia and Pridnestrovie. The arms smuggling tag on Prid. is an outdated and therefore bogus one. TTT doesn't invent realities. It correctly cites individuals and orgs. It also publishes/posts diverse views in a way not found elsewhere (the 3 leading Moldovan news web orgs. included). It offered you an uninhibited column which you declined.
Mike, I'm not sure what a TOL blog has to do with TTT. One is a blog written by a few people, which is clearly an amateur project and has been given an online venue by known sponsors. The other claims - on the internet - to be a newspaper with a print edition and multiple full-time reporters, and is obviously professionally produced by someone, though its sources of funding are unclear and its website offers no information about the publisher.
If one blogger wrote negative comments about you at someone else's blog, I don't understand how that involves me. You make a habit of defaming people in comments at blogs, so I'm not sure why you are up in arms when someone does it to you.
The record shows that you consistently go out of the way to write against perceived negatives pertaining to Romania and Moldova.
Perhaps you'd like to explain how the item I recently posted on human trafficking fits into your pat ideas about my "agenda." And while you're at it, please tell me what "record" shows that I write anything at all about Romania. That said, this is my blog, and I write about the countries and issues that interest me, from my own point of view, so I hope you'll forgive me for not tailoring my topic selection and opinions to be more in line with what you'd like to see.
TTT doesn't invent realities.
Do they, or do they not, have a print edition and/or an email bulletin service? They claim to have both, but I've been unable to receive information about either.
It offered you an uninhibited column which you declined.
I'm not sure what this demonstrates, other than my good judgment in refusing to associate myself with a website I believe is a propaganda project.
Please answer me this - if La Russophobe offered you the right to author an "uninhibited" post on that blog, would you do so?
It has to do with your hypocritically overt biases as shown by how you try to link TTT with LR. The latter is an anonymous bigot, who has written vulgarly half truthful and out-rightly false comments about others. TTT hasn't come close to matching that.
I'm not addressing straw man points that don't deal with the more substantive matter. As per Romania, you recently gave kudos to a piece saying that Muslims in Romania aren't discriminated against as some claim.
You're of course entitled to your views, of which a good portion conform to some of the Eng. lang. mass media preferred biases. Views which are arguably circumspect when met head on in a truly open forum environment.
Mike, no offense, but you are having difficulties with your comprehension. The article I linked to (n.b., a link doesn't necessarily constitute "kudos," as you surely know) in passing, in the post above this comment, begins as follows:
In its zeal to please U.S., Romania tramples foreigners' rights.
There are only a few hundred Muslim immigrants in Iaşi, a city of 350,000 that is Romania's second-largest metropolis, and few of them seem eager to talk about what happened in January 2005. That's when Romanian security forces converged on an Iaşi mosque and arrested five North African and Middle Eastern students enrolled at the local University of Medicine and Pharmacy on suspicion of being terrorists.
It talks about how Romanian officials have discriminated against Muslims in support of the US "war on terror." So, either you didn't read my post - or my first response to your claim about this - carefully, or you're intentionally misrepresenting what I've written. Please try to get your details right, Mike, otherwise it becomes even harder to take you seriously.
"Do they, or do they not, have a print edition and/or an email bulletin service? They claim to have both, but I've been unable to receive information about either."
You're just being lazy. To obtain the print edition, you just have to save the Tiraspol Times web pages you are interested in to your server, and then press "print." You can furthermore staple them together, if you so desire. :)
Wally, it's true, Mike can generally be counted on to comment on certain issues. However, I don't really view the number of comments on posts as a measure of a blog's quality. Often Mike's comments provide repetitive quantity over quality.
As for Mike's blog, as I noted in one of my first interactions with Mike over at SRB, I noticed it a long, long time ago, before it became apparent to me what Mike Averko is all about (i.e., among other things, seizing on and trumpeting the slightest praise of his writings, even when it's not praise at all; attempting to browbeat anyone who doesn't agree with him; and defaming people who have in fact distributed his writings for allegedly failing to do so) and offered (in a comment there) to help him get it functioning properly, but I never heard back from him. I can only assume that he stopped updating it because lost the password to his blogger account, but I guess he could just create another blog if that's what he wanted to do.
Based on things he's said elsewhere, I gather he doesn't think a blog is worth his time, and he won't start one unless someone pays him to. Since that seems unlikely to happen, I guess the free market works. Given how easy it is to have a blog and the fact that Mike's Guardian Talk page is basically a blog (but without the benefits of being picked up by search engines or Technorati or the ability to provide a feed), I think the actual situation is just that he's mastered that interface (as well as the one at the Russia.com forum, where he made over 500 posts) and can't or doesn't want to deal with mastering Blogger or one of the other blog interfaces. Not having a blog really is his loss, though.
I'm not sure about "more effective" - I understand that you might get more eyeballs on your views by commenting at established forums, but then you are forced to either react to a topic framed by someone else or veer off-topic (though Mike has shown he has no trouble doing the latter). Having one's own blog or website where one's original content is archived also allows one to avoid pasting large texts into the comments sections of other people's websites (by using a hyperlink), but it seems that for Mike there is no cut-and-paste too large, so this rationale doesn't work for him, either. Think I've spent enough time breaking this topic down? So do I...
You're just being lazy. To obtain the print edition, you just have to save the Tiraspol Times web pages you are interested in to your server, and then press "print." You can furthermore staple them together, if you so desire.
Chris, thanks, this genuinely made me laugh out loud.
Such is Lyndon Allin's corny sense of "humor". The cut and paste hyperlink freak, who has problems engaging in intelligent discourse.
This explains why Reuters and the BBC haven't picked him up yet, despite his very mainstream views.
His sugar coating of the discrmination against the Gaugauz in post Soviet Moldova, while lobbying for the little requested Latin Romanian script in Pridnestrovie. Ditto his trumpeting of "Russian anti-Semitism" and silence about those in Molodva and Romania who revere Antonescu.
Plenty of little people with blogs, who take cheap unsubstantiated pot shots against those they can't succesfully confront in an honest and frank manner.
Troll on with the weirdos. This is slumming for me.
That's Gagauz. Some of whom I've been in contact with.
Overall, their post Soviet experience in Moldova hasn't been as good as Pridnestrovie's ethnic Moldovan population.
Let the trolls de-emphasize this point with diversionary tactics
And so the hideous specter of stark, raving madness strode through the halls of Lyndon's blog. Eyes aflame and limbs gaunt, flesh pulled back along its skull and its mouth in a hideous rictus grin, it hurled its incoherent prophecies and gibbered its russocentric analysis at the unbending, uncaring walls of fate, which just wanted it to shut the hell up.
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