Eastern approaches

A QUIET stroll through the golden-leaved parks of central Warsaw on Sunday became an assault course involving a long convoy of armoured vans, baton-wielding riot squads, surveillance drones, helicopters, military police, and a scary man in a suit with a curly wire coming out his ear.

November 11th is Independence Day in Poland. It is meant to celebrate the birth of the modern Polish nation. In recent years the occasion has been a chance for small groups of demonstrators with extremist views to try their luck against the law-enforcement arm of the Polish state.

After a day of relatively peaceful marches, the riots in the evening resulted in 22 police injuries and 176 arrests.

LAST December, the Libyan National Transitional Council decided it was about time to tackle the thorny problem of dealing with the thousands of persons who had gone missing in the country over the previous 35 years. The Council authorised the country’s new Ministry of Martyrs and Missing Persons, itself then merely a month old, to handle this issue. Their minister, Mr. Naser Djibril Hamed, then promptly approached for assistance the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

IN the early hours of January 28th, 2006, a young banker named Sandro Girgvliani (pictured on a poster of protestors above) went to a Tbilisi cafe to see his girlfriend. She was sitting with a group of senior interior ministry officials, including the minister’s wife. Mr Girgvliani complained that she was out with men he did not know, and was rude about some of them. Thirteen hours later, three friends found his body in a Tbilisi suburb: battered, bruised and stabbed repeatedly.

Demonstrators took to the streets, calling for Vano Merabishvili, then interior minister, to resign. Police charged four officials with a range of offences, including causing death by intentional wounding.

AT the congress of the ODS, the Civic Democratic Party, last weekend, Petr Nečas, the Czech Republic's embattled prime minister, defended his ODS leadership against a vocal rebellion. But his victory may prove to be a short-lived triumph: Mr Nečas's frail ruling coalition could collapse nonetheless this week.

The prime minister is facing adamant opposition from five lawmakers of the centre-right ODS (the sixth insurgent left the party on October 31st). The renegades reject the cabinet's plan to raise taxes in 2013 in order to meet the European Union's budget deficit criteria and maintain low borrowing costs for the state.

OMINOUS clouds are gathering over the Czech prime minister’s tenuous government as Petr Nečas (pictured above on the left) faces an existential challenge from within his own party.

Mr Nečas's Civic Democratic Party (ODS) is holding a party congress November 3rd and 4th and six intra-party rebels seem intent on scuttling a pair of tax hikes that the premier insists are necessary to control the deficit. Proposals to raise the VAT and the rates paid by high-income earners have been delayed twice already, including earlier this week when Mr Nečas postponed a parliamentary debate until after the party congress.

FOUR years after they left office, Lithuania's Social Democrats are back. In the second round of the parliamentary elections the party won 38 seats in the 141-seat parliament. Their leader Algirdas Butkevičius looks set to be the next prime minister.

But at the head of what government? The obvious partners are the Labour party (Darbo partija) with 29 seats and the Order and Justice party (Tvarka ir teisingumas) with 11. Having held preliminary talks after the first-round elections on October 14th, the three parties met again after the second-round result and Mr Butkevičius confirmed that they had agreed to form a coalition. 

Politics is not mere arithmetic, however.

THE office of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in Kiev takes up part of the first floor of a brick building on Dashavska Street, in a quiet neighborhood in the outskirts of the city. On October 19th, in the morning, Leonid Razvozzhayev arrived there in search of advice on how to apply for political asylum. How exactly he left, and under whose control, is now a question of great intrigue and concern. For Mr Razvozzhayev, the story ends in claims of kidnapping, torture, and a forced confession.