fyi, there are some really nice effects available for scriptaculous... you don't need to write your own. i'd suggest looking up Effect.Phase... it even supports toggling which means you can use it for fading in and out with every load\unload very easily. anyway... just have onclick or onmousedown inside your <a> call your function and have it fwd the url as a variable.
Code:
<a class="country" onclick="fadeout('put your url here');">english</a>
then you can have your function reference it
Code:
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
//<![CDATA[
function fadeOut(url){
blah blah window.location=url
}
//]]>
</script>