PERISCOPE

MONEY
Yen Attacks Dollar!
Japan is escalating its war on the falling dollar. After spending 20 trillion yen to slow the dollar's decline in 2003, the Bank of Japan spent another 10 trillion yen in January and February alone, aiming to keep the yen from rising against the dollar and undermining Japan's export-led recovery. The government authorized 21 trillion yen more to be used if necessary in March, and is now requesting an additional 40 trillion yen for currency purchases in the fiscal year, which begins in April. The message to speculators: Japan will respond to betting on the yen with weapons of mass intervention.

The yen-busting strategy seems to have worked: the currency is 10 percent weaker than it would have been without the bank's intervention, by one estimate. In recent weeks it's fallen sharply, returning to fall 2003 valuations of more than 110 to the dollar, while showing a bizarre tendency to jump a percentage point or two, then fall back just as quickly. Befuddled market watchers joke that the Bank of Japan has just one guy buying dollars at any given time, so "the minute he goes and has coffee, the yen begins to move immediately in the other direction," says one London-based hedge-fund manager. The truth, of course, is that Japan is likely fighting this battle with an army of bankers, not just one.
-Jonathan Adams

FILM
Name That Tune, OK?
The best songs make make you feel--tears, happiness, nostalgia. Few tunes, though, inspire passion like "Uskudar," the Turkish name of a folk melody beloved throughout the Balkans. For decades Serbs, Serbian Roma, Bosnian Muslims, Greeks, Macedonians, Albanians and Turks have laid claim to the song as their own. A new documentary examines the roots of the anthem, finding in it an apt metaphor for a deeply divided region, where music is just another battlefield for competing ethnic claims. The film, "Whose Is This Song?" has been shown in Western Europe, India, Turkey, Lebanon and Bosnia; this month it airs on Serb TV.

Adela Peeva, the film's Bulgarian director, takes the viewer on what should be an innocuous journey. Not so. In Bulgaria, an old man tells Peeva that anyone who suggests the song is Turkish should be killed. And in Serbia, she narrowly avoids a beating at the hands of a group of drunken men after she plays them a Muslim version from Bosnia. In the end, her findings are inconclusive; the song's roots have been obscured by time. Sadly, though, the anthem's story is a powerful reminder of how deeply mutual hatred and suspicion still pervade the region.

-Zoran Cirjakovic

AFGHANISTAN
The Very Picture of Propaganda
One of the Taliban's many oppressive idiosyncrasies was its prohibition of photographs or of any kind of reproductions of the human face and body. But now, in a desperate effort to enliven its drab propaganda against the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the guerrilla group is publishing at least three propaganda magazines that for the first time are replete with photos in full color. Azam, or Tenacity, which first appeared as a thin propaganda leaflet in the first months after the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001, has been joined by two other colorful monthly magazines: The Voice of Jihad and Jihad. Several thousand copies of the magazines, written in the Pashto language, are distributed monthly inside Afghanistan and among Afghans in Pakistan.