River City Writers Speakers: Stacy Sullivan

Terms:
~Milošević, Slobodan: President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He also led Serbia's Socialist Party from its foundation in 1990.
~Stalin, Joseph: as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. During that time he established the regime now known as Stalinism. As one of several Central Committee Secretariats, Stalin's formal position was originally limited in scope, but he gradually consolidated power and became the de facto party leader and ruler of the Soviet Union.
~Hitler, Adolf: an Austrian-born politician who led the National Socialist German Workers Party. He became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 and Führer in 1934. He ruled until 1945.
~Détente: a French term, meaning a relaxing or easing; the term has been used in international politics since the early 1970s. Generally, it may be applied to any international situation where previously hostile nations not involved in an open war de-escalate tensions through diplomacy and confidence-building measures. However, it is primarily used in reference to the general reduction in the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and a thawing of the Cold War, occurring from the late 1960s until the start of the 1980s. In the Soviet Union, détente was known as разрядка ("razryadka", loosely meaning relaxation, discharge).
~Yugoslavia: describes three political entities that existed successively on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe, during most of the 20th century. The former constituent Socialist Republics of Yugoslavia, now independent States, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo, formerly an autonomous province of Serbia, is a partially recognized State which declared its independence in 2008. It was not a socialist republic of the former Yugoslavia; it had the status of a socialist autonomous province within Serbia along with Vojvodina.
~Kosovo: is a region in the Balkans, presently under the ad interim control of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force. Its Provisional Institutions of Self-Government have recently declared independence from the Republic of Serbia, which contested the act; as the Republic of Kosovo, it has received partial recognition.
~Albania: a country in South Eastern Europe. Albania is bordered by Greece to the south-east, Montenegro to the north, Kosovo to the northeast, and the Republic of Macedonia to the east. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the west, and on the Ionian Sea to the southwest. From the Strait of Otranto, Albania is less than 100 km (60 miles) from Italy. The country is a member of the United Nations, South East Europe Cooperation Process, Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe (OSCE), Council of Europe (COE), and World Trade Organisation. It is also a potential candidate for membership in the European Union and NATO. Albania is a parliamentary democracy that is transforming its economy into a market-oriented system. The Albanian capital, Tirana (Tiranë), is home to 750,000 of the country's 3.6 million population. As a result of the opening of the country in the post-communist era, Albania is now undergoing a development boom as its telecommunications, transport and utilities infrastructure is being revamped.
~Bosnia and Herzegovina: is a country on the Balkan peninsula of Southern Europe with an area of 51,129 square kilometers (19,741 sq mi). The last official census in 1991 recorded 4.4 million people, which was prior to the 1992-1995 war, while an unofficial census in 1996 by UNHCR recorded a postwar population of 3.9 million. Its 2007 residential population is estimated at approximately 4 million. Formerly one of the six federal units constituting the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina gained its independence during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Bosnia and Herzegovina can be described as a federal democratic republic that is transforming its economy into a market-oriented system, and it is a potential candidate for membership in the European Union and NATO. The country is home to three ethnic "constituent peoples": Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. Regardless of ethnicity, a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina is often identified in English as a Bosnian. In Bosnia, the distinction between a Bosnian and a Herzegovinian is maintained as a regional, rather than an ethnic distinction. The country is politically decentralized and comprised of two governing entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, with District Brčko as a de facto third entity.
~Serbia: a landlocked country in Central and Southeastern Europe, covering the southern part of the Pannonian Plain and the central part of the Balkan Peninsula. Serbia is bordered by Hungary to the north; Romania and Bulgaria to the east; the Republic of Macedonia and Albania to the south; and Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to the west.
~”Ethnic Cleansing”: various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory in order to create a supposedly ethnically "pure" society. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia. Its typical usage was developed in the Balkans, to be a less objectionable code-word meaning genocide, but its intent was to best avoid the obvious pitfalls of longstanding international treaty laws prohibiting war crimes.
~George Soros: is a Hungarian-born American financial speculator, stock investor, philanthropist, and political activist. Currently, he is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. According to his own website, Soros claims his support for the Solidarity labour movement in Poland, as well as the Czechoslovak human rights organization Charter 77, contributed to ending Soviet Union political dominance in those countries. His funding and organization of Georgia's Rose Revolution was considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial to its success, although Soros said his role has been "greatly exaggerated." In the United States, he is known for having donated large sums of money in a failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004. On BookTV, November 12, 2007, he said that he supports Barack Obama for the Democratic candidate in the 2008 election, but says that John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden are all fine candidates, as well. Soros is famously known for "breaking the Bank of England" on Black Wednesday in 1992. With an estimated current net worth of around $8.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 80th-richest person in the world.
~Abu Ghraib: an Iraqi city 32 km (20 mi) west of Baghdad. It became internationally known as a place where Saddam Hussein's government tortured and executed dissidents, and later as the site of Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal where the United States military's torture of Iraqi detainees was revealed in a series of photographs published in worldwide news media. Under Saddam's Ba'ath government, it was known as Abu Ghraib Prison and had a reputation as a place of torture and some of the worst cases of torture in the modern world. It was sometimes referred to in the Western media as "Saddam's Torture Central". The prison was renamed after United States forces expelled the former Iraqi government, which had called it the Baghdad Central Confinement Facility (BCCF) or Baghdad Central Correctional Facility. In May of 2004, Camp Avalanche, a tent camp on the grounds of Abu Ghraib for security detainees, changed its name to Camp Redemption at the request of a governing council member. The prison complex was built by British contractors in the 1960s, and covered 280 acres (1.15 km²) with a total of 24 guard towers. The size of a small town, the area was divided into five separate walled compounds for different types of prisoners. Each block contained a dining room, prayer room, exercise area and rudimentary washing facilities. Cells contained up to 40 people in a space four meters by four. By the fall of the government in 2003 the five compounds were designated for foreign prisoners, long sentences, short sentences, capital crimes and "special" crimes.
~”Fixers”: a local journalist who guides, translates, and arranges interviews.

Questions:
1. How did you get connected with the Albanian community of New York City?
2. Why report overseas? What got you involved in covering issues overseas?
3. What did you hope to accomplish through writing and publishing the article that uncovered Idema?