Blogoir

Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz reports that the Bosniac member of the three-person Bosnian collective state Presidency, Haris Silajdzic, is travelling to London to visit Ejup Ganic tomorrow - presumably in jail. The office of the Serb member of the Presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic mournfully complains that he still has not been informed.

This (if it happens) has to be an extraordinary first in the Diplomatic History of the Universe - a head of state visiting another state specifically to meet a prisoner from his country held in that state's prison on an extradition charge.

Come on, British media, DO SOMETHING ON THIS STORY! Don't leave it to me to report this first! I'm just a humble blogger.

Meanwhile legal challenges to the court decision not to release Ganic on bail continue, as do moves by the BH side to muster arguments on the substance of Serbia's extradition request. Serbia is still pulling together the documents it says it needs to support its case.

Ganic's renewed bail application may be heard later this week. 

Background over at Balkan Insight on Ganic's high-powered defence team, including Clare Montgomery who was part of Pinochet's defence team.

Here is what looks like the original British Arrest Warrant for Ejup Ganic (click on the Arrest Warrant.jpg link)

It contains a seeming serious error (emphasis added), saying that Ganic is accused in a category 2 territory, namely Serbia of the commission of an offence the conduct of which occurred in that territory ...

Is this a mistake of some sort based on the information Serbia has put forward?

Or have bemused Brits in the Westminster Magistrates Court failed to grasp some of the basic points of the collapse of Yugoslavia - annoying but possibly justifiable?

Or is Serbia deliberately claiming (to get its jurisdictional credentials established) that at that point the independence of Bosnia had not been generally recognised by the international community (Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the UN only on 22 May 1992 - my birthday), and so Sarajevo was still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and thus within a single legal space, of which Serbia is now the sole remaining heir (insofar as there is one)?

Or is there some Serbia implicit link to the Karadzicistic idea that Sarajevo by that stage already had been divided into two parts, ie 'Serb Sarajevo' and the rest?

If either of the latter two, blimey.

If (more likely?) it is some sort of footling mistake, I would not suspect that the nature of the mistake would make the whole arrest to be so improper as to derail the extradition request, if (if) the issue of where the alleged crimes took place is not in itself a substantive issue (eg for jurisdictional reasons)

Meanwhile here I am on Radio Free Europe talking about the case, as translated into Bosnian/Serbian.

If you don't speak that, forget using the Google Translate button to get it into English - you'll still have no idea what I said! It seems to think I discussing pilgrims.

At the risk of boring everyone, here is an excellent interview with Jovan Divjak about the Dobrovoljacka St killings and the politics of it all now.

It's in Bosnian/Serbian (not as Google says Croatian), but if you use the Google Translate button you'll get more than enough of it in somewhat strangled English to get the essence of what he is saying.

Key points:

• Divjak insists that there was no formally organised attack, but rather attacks from a number of different units with unfortunately no central command possible - a certain chaos
• But (Note: as an honest soldier) he accepts that whereas the Bosniacs were defending themselves, there were 'proceedings' not in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
• "Of course you ask yourself, who did the shooting?. It's known who did it" (Note: the Google translation gets this key point 100% wrong!)
• Ganic at the time was indeed substituting Izetbegovic as the most senior Bosniac commander. But who precisely ordered what should be determined by the Prosecutor's Office, not the media.
• As and when the whole affair comes to trial, Divjak's own statements will be judged to show how far and in what respects he himself bore responsibility  
• Tensions between Bosnia and now Serbi are as high now as they were when the war ended, with Serbia in particular unable to face up to the way Karadzic was supported from Belgrade. Facts clearly established at the Hague Tribunal are being ignored for propaganda purposes.
• But the Bosniacs too are unwilling to accept massacres committed by their side.
• Politicians on all sides have an interest in keeping up tension as the only way to advance their own plans; see for example former Serbian PM Kostunica on TV blaming the Muslims for everything which happened

Gripping stuff, for those of us able and willing to follow all these Balkan tensions in any detail...

The wider point is this.

With the possible exception of Slovenia, a tricky case in itself for reasons going back deep into WW2, no former Yugoslav republic has found a way to strike a way between defensive exclusivist 'national'/nationalist/ethnic politics and a different inclusive pluralism.

Put to one side the fascinating sociological fact that this is the dismal result of decades of intense central communist propaganda in favour of Brotherhood and Unity - something those insisting on 'ever-closer union' within the EU might want to think about.

The simple fact is that all the different communities across former Yugoslavia can not imagine ethnic disarmament - moving to a situation where issues are looked at on their merits, rather than in terms of which community 'somehow' will gain an edge.

In fact this problem has a lot of disarmament game theory in it:

Of course we are ready to disarm - we are good Europeans! But given our long history of being brutalised, it is only fair that the other sides have to put down some weapons first to show their sincerity

Haha. A typical banal Balkan trick. They are saying that we should put some weapons down to make it easier for them to attack us again. They must be planning new attacks. Let's get a few more weapons, just in case

See?! We told you so. We make a fair offer aimed at achieving disarmament - and they start getting new weapons! How can we trust them?

There appears to be no way out of this centuries-long psychological and immoral, suspicicious morass. One name for it is the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome.

Is the problem especially acute in Serbia? Arguably yes.

The good news there is that as much the largest former Yugoslav republic Serbia necessarily has a different, 'larger' sort of democracy and democratic potential, which has to incorporate different ethnic communities and does so pretty well for day-to-day purposes.

However, at the level of state policy there is an unhappy tension between lumpen 'nationalist' ambition and modern pluralism. A fine article by Srdja Popovic describes how that confusion affects the main force for change in Serbia, the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

... when I saw their program, I realized that it incorporated two contradictory parts. The first part advocated widely defined democratic values, freedoms, civil rights, market economy, and the other part was nationalism in its darkest form. I would sign the first part in an instant, and the second part I wouldn’t even dream of signing.

And now, looking back, I see how even then they were impressed by the success of the Right and of Milosevic’s supposedly leftist party which pursued right-wing policies. So they realized that they would remain isolated and alone if they too didn’t give their contribution to nationalism. 

The party was constantly being divided by this built-in contradiction, and the result is Tadic’s slogan – both Kosovo and Europe. He is responding to the contradictory demands which they themselves made at the very beginning.

This explains the historical reconciliation narrative, because they now want to reconcile the two irreconcilable parts of their program. They want to do it on a personal level, on a governmental level, on the state level.

... But it can’t get us anywhere, it is self-paralyzing, because it is confined by the two conflicting forces which it contains. It is a void, and this void is wasting the precious little reformatory energy this society has.

All that spills over into Bosnia too, whose self-absorbed leaders (admittedly operating in a bizarre constitutional framework imposed by Dick Holbrooke) have blown their opportunity to build a successful modern economy.

Which is why I am sitting here today writing about a dirty little massacre 18 years ago, one squalid episode in a far wider series of horrors which few if any leaders in the region really want to accept as a whole.

What really happened in chaotic Sarajevo in and around Dobrovoljacka Street on 3 May 1992?

The range of views appears to be broadly as follows:

Core Serbia/'Serb' Claim:   perfidious massacre of JNA soldiers attempting to withdraw from Sarajevo under UN colours as per an agreement duly reached with the Bosniac leadership, with senior Bosniac leaders including Ejup Ganic personally responsible either directly or implicitly. Slam dunk war crime.

Bosniac Claim Version 1:   understandable formal military response to previous JNA brutality and kidnap of President Izetbegovic - JNA themselves broke the agreement under which they could withdraw. That said, not known who gave the orders to shoot. No war crime - chaos of war, which Serbia started

Bosniac Claim Version 2:   spontaneous, irregular but more or less understandable/justifiable attack by Bosniac irregulars responding to JNA aggression the previous day. No formal orders given. No war crime - just a mess

Bosniac Claim Version 3:  a fully legitimate attack on a fair military target: at worst the Bosniacs were in 'technical' breach of a ceasefire unfairly imposed on them as a condition for getting back their kidnapped leader. Even if orders were given, as it was a proper military attack the issue is of no significance. No issue here folks, so move along

* * * * * 

The Serbian claim lies behind the Serbia government's latest attempt to secure Ganic's extradition. But what level of hard evidence will they need to put forward (a) to make a convincing and finally winning case for extradition now, and (b) to secure a conviction if the issue ever gets to trial in Serbia?

The Death of Yugoslavia videos suggest different version of Bosniac Versions 1 and 2, as articulated by Ganic himself and others. For a good, detailed account of the "it was all a mess" approach, read this interview with Jovan Divjak, one of the few people in the whole Yugoslav collapse disaster to have kept a reputation for integrity:

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

Update: Balkan media are reporting this afternoon that Ganic's request to be released on bail has been refused by the court in London.

B92 says that he may remain detained until 14 March when the deadline for submitting relevant documents expires, but wonders whether there may be a problem with Belgrade sending in all the paperwork...

* * * * *

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports today that Sanela Jenkins ("a Sarajevo woman married to a rich British banker") has paid over £200,000 as bail to secure Ejup Ganic's release from prison, expected later today.

Also that the BH Prosecutor has now sent an extradition request to the British authorities asking that Ganic be transferred to Bosnia: The Prosecutor considers itself solely competent for processing war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina for which BH citizens are suspected.

Fascinating. If this one gets into a full court case, how will Serbia and BH each argue the case that (a) Dobrovoljacka Street was a suspected war crime, and (b) that Ganic needs to be prosecuted for it, and (c) that he needs to be extradited accordingly?

Is this a wise move by the Bosnians? Can not Serbia use it to argue that the BH application is a smokescreen to enable Ganic to escape any serious investigation of the crime, since otherwise why have the Bosnians done nothing about it in nearly 20 years?

The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Ejup Ganic:

Bosnia has demanded his release and supporters claimed Britain had allowed itself to be used as pawn in the long-running battle between the two former Yugoslav nations.

The Telegraph quotes both an unnamed spokesman for Lady Thatcher and Robin Harris, her former speechwriter:

"She is deeply concerned. It is a mark of her regard for him that he is one of the relatively limited number of people she has met recently. She is worried about the precedents that these arrest warrants represent to visiting statesmen to London and absolutely urges a quick resolution."

Robin Harris, Lady Thatcher's former speech writer, said: "The idea that Serbia can now just actually indict and seek the extradition to Serbia of people who were, in fact, of course defending the local population against Serb-inspired aggression as long ago as 1992 on Bosnian rather than Serbian territory; and that actually such a request should be even given any kind of proper consideration at all by the British courts is to me quite astonishing,"

They also cite me(!) as saying that Ganic would joke "that his career was doomed because he had been born in Serbia". Which of course is not what I have said: how could I, when he was a leading member of the Bosnian Presidency and having an evidently undoomed career?

Idiots. Sigh.

The big policy question raised by Lady Thatcher is a good one. What are the limits of freedom?

On the one hand, we want to be open to foreigners (including political leaders) visiting here both as tourists and on business.

On the other, we do not want foreigners coming here to escape justice when they are wanted in their own countries for alleged crimes.

Plus we do not want unjust regimes to insist that foreigners on UK soil be sent back home to face trumped-up charges.

Plus we do not want to annoy generally friendly foreign states whose ideas of democracy are, hem, less sophisticated than ours by implying that they are incapable of running a fair trial.

Plus we do not want to be the world's default option for anyone wanting a job and free benefits and claiming to be an asylum seeker.

Nor do we want our legal system to be abused through politically motivated 'lawfare' by 'activists' issuing arrest warrants for foreign leaders they don't like.

Oh, and we also want to see all war crimes suspects brought to justice.

And we do not want to waste our time trying to fathom out in nano-level which countries are capable of running a fair trial or not, in general and in particular cases. Since almost none are (we suspect).

Which is why we want to make it fairly easy to extradite people to especially trustworthy international state partners in the EU and beyond, whose motives and ability to dispense justice are deemed (by us) to be (more or less) above suspicion. That means you, Serbia - and Bosnia and Herzegovina too!

Not to forget that we want to keep politics out of the courts.

Except that we do not want the courts taking decisions for tedious narrow legal reasons which could screw us in our international dealings.

Hence we have an odd hybrid system with detailed rules laid down for how extraditions are to be run by the courts but with ultimate authority lying with the Home Secretary (whose own criteria for stopping an extradition approved by the courts are tightly defined).

And did I mention the Human Rights Act?

Phew. Does anyone care to rank these policy considerations in priority order?

No. I thought not.

Mr Ganic's case ticks a number of these boxes simultaneously, which is why the line coming from Robin Harris is open to question.

Plus huffing and puffing that it is wrong to look at extraditing someone 'who was only defending his country' is a perverse reading of what happened, namely an attack on a convoy including UN vehicles which was trying to leave Sarajevo under a deal agreed by the Bosnian leadership including Mr Ganic himself. Watch the videos.

This one falls clearly within the war crime - case to answer category. A point not lost on Bakir Izetbegovic (son of former Bosnian President Izetbegovic who himself was in that convoy). Here he is quoted on B92 from Belgrade:

Neki zločin se tamo jeste desio, al' ga sasvim sigurno nije učinio Ganić, niti je odgovoran Ejup Ganić za njega. Jeste tamo bilo stradanja ljudi, ali će tužilac svoje reći...

Some sort of crime did happen there, but for sure Ganic did not commit it, nor is Ejup Ganic responsible for it. Yes people were massacred there, but the prosecutor will have his say...

Meanwhile as expected the question quickly appears of how far BH-level institutions might weigh in on Ganic's behalf if there is no consensus on the issue.

Republika Srpska leader Dodik has argued that it is 'unacceptable' for BH official money to be made available to help get Ganic out on bail, and has accused the BH Prosecutor's office of ignoring the Dobrovoljacka St massacre and other crimes against Serbs for political reasons.

Back in Sarajevo Bosniac and Bosnian Croat politicians are variously calling the whole business a scandal if not unfriendly act by Belgrade, and demanding that Belgrade focus on arresting General Mladic rather than prosecuting Ganic (Note: good point).

And Ganic's daughter is claiming that the British authorities are abusing her father's human rights by denying him contact with his family and the Bosnian Ambassador in London.

In short, a gripping foreign policy gužva.

Dnevni Avaz reports that now the Bosnian authorities are considering weighing in and sending an extradition request to London, asking that former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic be extradited to Sarajevo rather than Belgrade!

This looks to be an attempt to create new legaL complications based on the proposition that Ganic is a BH citizen and so must be prosecuted for alleged war crimes in Bosnia rather than Serbia, as a bilteral agreement between Bosnia and Serbia reportedly lays down.

But it rather goes against the previous Sarajevo political line that any charges against Ganic are contrived. Is Sarajevo prepared to argue in the London courts that the Dobrovoljacka St shootings of 1992 were after all a possible war crime committed by the Bosniac side, and that Ganic has to answer for them?

Maybe this idea in fact will go nowhere as any extradition request to the UK has to come from the BH state level and the Bosnian Serb representatives at the BH level are unlikely to approve it?

This morning's Dnevni Avaz newspaper in Sarajevo has plenty on the Ejup Ganic story. Here.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to read Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, some of the interesting points in the article as yet unreported in the UK media - British scoop, right here:

• Mr Ganic's son Emir is reported as saying that Mrs Thatcher, a 'very close friend' of Mr Ganic, has sent her lawyers to help him - they represented him yesterday in court in London
• Action is in hand to raise £200,000 bail money
• Ganic is being held not under some sort of Interpol or other arrest warrant but under the 2002 UK/Serbia extradition agreement
• Which opens a 'key question': is Ganic a Serbian citizen and so subject to this agreement, or not?
• Son Emir says that his father was born in Serbia and had a Yugoslav passport when Yugoslavia broke up, but he never applied for a Serbian one, so he does not have Serbian citizenship
• British Ambassador in Sarajevo Michael Tatham has said that this situation represents no form of political or diplomatic statement by the British government about past events 
• Bosniac BH Presidency member Silajdzic is insisting that events in Sarajevo in 1992 are solely the responsibility of Bosnia and that BH and Serbia have signed an agreement to that effect - experts from his office are en route to London to help Ganic
• Serb BH Presidency member Radmanovic is saying that the arrest of Ganic shows that international legal processes are working as they should

The whole issue may turn on the issue of how Serbian citizenship is defined.

Yugoslav citizens had Yugoslav passports, and many continued using them long after Yugoslavia itself collapsed (they finally expire at the end of this year). They were also 'citizens' of their native republic.

Serbia for legal purposes was agreed to be the 'continuation' of Yugoslavia. So if a former Yugoslav citizen did not make the positive step to renounce his Yugoslav/Serbian citizenship, did it continue on paper even though that citizen had acquired a new citizenship of another former republic? Can citizenship in that part of the world lapse through desuetude?

Interesting formal point, since of course many Bosnian Serbs and Croats also have citizenship (and passports) of Serbia and Croatia respectively - a galling fact for Bosniac Bosnians who find themselves subject to different visa regimes when they travel. See also the convoluted issue of Serbian passports and people living in Kosovo.

Did Mr Ganic somehow positively do enough to keep his citizenship options open?

A Serbia claim that any former Yugoslav citizen who did not take formal steps to renounce Yugoslav/Serbia citizenship remains a Serbian citizen would lead to the bizarre result that anyone from former Yugoslavia could be subject to an extradition request emanating from Belgrade - not an outcome likely to appeal to international courts. 

The arrest of former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic here in the UK in response to an extradition request from the Belgrade authorities is a striking development. See this short account on the Belgrade-based B92 website.

In fact the issue has been rumbling on for a couple of days, with Bosniac leader Silajdzic in Sarajevo unwisely denying that anything amiss was happening.

Here is a quick piece I have done for the Independent website. It gives what I hope is a fairly untendentious (and highly simplified for space reasons) account of the confusing events in Sarajevo's 'Volunteer Street' back in 1992, when a convoy of Yugoslav Army (JNA) troops withdrawing was attacked.

Amidst heavy fighting arising from Bosnia's declaration of independence and pro-Yugoslav forces' attacks on part of Sarajevo, Bosniac leader Alija Izetbegovic had been captured by the JNA. A plan emerged. JNA forces surrounded in Sarajevo by Bosniac forces could leave the city in exchange for Izetbegovic's release.

Agreement to this effect was reached with UN active engagement, to the point of UN vehicles leading the convoys intended to effect the swap.

To get a sense of what all this was about, there is no better source than the magnificent Death of Yugoslavia TV series.

Here is part of it describing the negotiations over Izetbegovic's release, with Ejup Ganic himself figuring prominently in interviews afterwards and in live footage taken at the time:

This then describes what happened: 

Legal and foreign policy questions swirling away in the coming hours and days will include:

• is the Serbia extradition application properly made in itself?
• do the circumstances back in 1992 as alleged by the Serb side in principle meet the legal requirements for extradition now?
• can enough persuasive factual evidence be adduced by Belgrade to show that there is a case to answer?
• what about other agreements between Belgrade and Sarajevo on how war crimes allegations arising from the BH conflict are to be handled - should a UK court take cognisance of them?
• do wider political factors need to be taken into account, and properly might be by the English courts? What impact might Ganic's extradition to Belgrade have on already unhappy Bosnian internal processes and prospects for EU membership? (Answer: negative) 
• even if the political impact might well be negative, should the UK government properly stay out of this one and let the legal chips lie where they fall?
• and many many more

On the substance, the vivid Death of Yugoslavia footage shows clearly where the Bosniac leadership seek to escape any responsibility for the Volunteer Street shootings. Their argument is (variously) that parts of the deal had not been finally nailed down and/or that they had no operational control over the actions of Bosniac militia forces who acted (they claim) spontaneously.

As in all such situations, it is next to impossible to prove how far any attack was explicitly ordered by the leadership, as opposed to encouraged by a sly wink at the right time.

Did Ganic and/or some of the other Bosniac leaders/commanders plan all along to double-cross the Serbs, suspecting that that is what the Serbs would do to them if things were reversed? What if anything did the UN people on the spot know or suspect?

Bear in mind too the wider politics now.

President Tadic in Belgrade is pressing Serbia's Parliament to pass a resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. And, as luck has it, Radovan Karadzic's trial at the Hague Tribunal moves into the media spotlight again.

Tadic needs to show Serbia's public opinion that he is taking a position of principle - just as Serbs allegedly responsible for war crimes in Bosnia need to face justice, so do those suspected of crimes against Serbs.

Meanwhile in Sarajevo Bosniac President Silajdzic is loudly insisting that any extradition of Ganic will amount to Bosnia's legitimate self-defence being put on trial, yet another example (he says) of the 'relativisation of responsibility' for the Bosnian conflict at the main victims' expense.

Phew.

Will we see another protracted example of other countries' affairs being pored over exhaustively in the London courts?

Note: declaration of interest. I knew Ganic and his family quite well when I was in Sarajevo and he was a top leader of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the so-called 'Muslim-Croat Entity'). He was a genial wily negotiating partner, albeit often ruefully joking that his prospects were limited in Sarajevo as he was seen by other Bosniacs as a bit too Serb/Yugoslav (he was born in the Sandzak area of Serbia).

I was far away in London in mid-1992, knee-deep in the papers generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. So insofar as I know anything about the Volunteer St shootings it is not from first-hand experience. 

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer. 

Edging back to normal life again after three days running around bewinter'd Poland. What a pleasure to be in a country able to cope sensibly with snow.

Far from snow is Haiti.

Ben Macintyre blames the French for brutalising Haiti into paying ruinous reparations for its temerity in wanting to espouse the Liberty part of the French Revolution. An interesting example of the Foreign Policy of Compound Interest - the wealth sucked out from Haiti over many decades has not had a chance to grow steadily to the local population's benefit.

The problem is that once a country ends up in too weak a state to prosper, all sorts of bad people flourish, and all sorts of clever people show up with ingenious schemes to make things better:

Before the earthquake, Haiti had 10,000 non-governmental organizations working there, the highest rate per capita in the world. In 2007, notes Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, it had ten times as much foreign aid as investment.

If people are determined to blame Haiti’s problems on someone other than the Haitians, perhaps they could start by looking at the damage done by the foreign-aid industry.

Except that they won't.

Now the usual international or even national feuding is breaking out over who should do what to help the victims. Should the US Army get involved in directly helping people, or is that best left to 'assistance professionals'?

There was a classic case of this in Afghanistan where DFID demanded that some British Army local project-work be stopped because the work was insufficiently strategic.

They probably were right. Digging a well or putting a roof on a ruined school is not (on one way of looking at it) as strategic as more patiently identifying water and education plans for the region as a whole, preferably with 'full local participation' and 'due account paid to local gender issues and sensitivities' and so on.

Yet while that work trundles on there is no water from the well, and the school can't function.

Maybe the best or indeed only strategy is to get people in a position to start to do practical things for themselves, and then let them work out the strategies.

It reminds me of when Clare Short created DFID. The new Department's bureaucrats were full of themselves, keen to show new and above all strategic thought. So DFID support for the pioneering network of ad hoc local projects in Bosnia as previously run by the British Army soon stopped. Not strategic.

Clare Short herself came on a visit to Bosnia and we went to a small village where there had been a British plan to replace the electricty lines destroyed in the war; this very local scheme had been dropped by DFID as insufficiently 'strategic'.

The Bosnians told her that without power they could do nothing. Clare Short (being a domatic but practical Leftist) saw immediately that they were right and told her people to find the DFID funds to get the powerlines back up. 

A few large, slow, well thought-out, all-embracing, top-down plans?

Or many small, improvised, suck-it-and-see initiatives which together may add up to something - and which give the people who live in these places the chance to mobilise their own resources?

No right answer.

I have been asked by the FCO to give a talk there later in January to a group of foreign visitors about Using Democracy for Peace. Or maybe it was Using Peace for Democracy.

I forget. One or the other.

As always the Balkans is/are a laboratory for cutting-edge research on such scientific issues.

Take Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here is Baroness Ashton at her European Parliament hearings:

... noting that there is no other choice but for the differing communities to live together.

At her parliamentary hearing in front of MEPs Ashton noted that: “They can have as many referendums as they like but at the end this is about one country coming together''.

... she expressed Brussels’ concern about the political situation in the country and said Brussels needs an “effective strategy to overcome the political stalemate in Bosnia-Herzegovina”.

She said she will have regular contact with High Representative Valnetine Inzko in an attempt to find a strategy to overcome the current situation. “The prospect of EU membership is the glue'' that holds the country together, she said.

That (I assume) ad-libbed statement - “They can have as many referendums as they like but at the end this is about one country coming together'' - is remarkable.

Here is Baroness Ashton on the subject of referenda in a different context:

On practically every question ever put to the British public on any subject, when asked if they would like a referendum on that subject, they have said that of course they would. I think that that is a measure of a healthy and thriving democracy.

The point there, where she argues against the British people having a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, is that she appears to be assuming that such a referendum would have full democratic legitimacy, but that in this case it is for Parliament and not a referendum to decide.

Yet in Bosnia referenda are relegated by her to miserable, second-class, irrelevant affairs of no consequence.

That can't be right, if only because it makes no sense for the EU to organise elections in BH then expect politicians to ignore their electorates.

A Bosnian referendum on an issue which shows a strong public mood in favour of Option X duly empowers Bosnian leaders to insist on Option X, whether the EU likes it or not.

And what if a referendum result eg in Republika Srpska one day says that the voters there do not want the country as covered in EU glue to 'come together'?

That said, even though Republika Srpska keeps threatening referenda on this and that does not mean that they are going to hold them: the threat of doing so may help win handy concessions:

For months, the Bosnian Serbs had prevented the country's authorities from extending the contracts of international judges and prosecutors working in Bosnia's highest court – now numbering just 11. The last contract was to expire on Tuesday (15 December). Inzko explained to Ashton, and also to diplomats from the countries that oversee the OHR's work, that he would have to impose an extension...

But Inzko was told that imposing an extension of the judges' contracts was out of the question because nobody had the appetite for a confrontation with Dodik. (It turned out that Canada, Japan and Turkey did – but that was of little interest to the EU.) The international judges and prosecutors working on organised crime and corruption cases in Bosnia would lose their jobs on 15 December – and they did. Inzko was allowed to extend only the contracts of international judges and prosecutors working on war crimes, an issue that is of far less personal interest to Dodik and other Bosnian politicians.

... Dodik announced that the decision to extend the war-crimes judges' contracts carried no weight and might be subject to a referendum in the Republika Srpska.

For the second time in as many months, the EU, together with the US, had tried to appease Dodik, only to find him unappeasable. There could hardly have been a less auspicious start to Ashton's term of office.

Roger Boyes is pessimistic:

The country is bubbling with hatred and it is clear that the Dayton agreement has failed in its central aim of creating a new state capable of forging bonds with its citizens. The old multi-ethnic Bosnian culture, the Balkan melting pot, no longer exists. It has been replaced by a weak state hovering on the brink of collapse.

If Richard Holbrooke still considers Dayton to be a successful model for nation-building, then God help Afghanistan.

How does that help me writing my FCO presentation?

Conflict within a country over who rules it can be managed (more or less) through Democracy.

Conflict within a country over whether that country should exist in its current form is far less manageable - you may get a majority for a continuation of the status quo, but what do you do about the large minority who demanded something different, and who keep using democratic rights to block national integration?

No amount of exhortations that the international community 'be more robust' in and with Bosnia can get round the horrible fact that the key problem is profound disagreement on what Bosnia and Herzegovina is (are?).

The Bosniac/Serb/Croat communities and their leaders just do not and will not agree on what they want their country to be and represent.

Which, by the way, is why Titoist Yugoslavia broke up.

The highly decentralised demands championed by Croatia and Slovenia in particular after Tito died in 1980 (some of us in the Embassy archly called them the Crovenes) were not compatible with the insistence of Serbia/Belgrade that the country needed policies and institutions capable of imposing a more unitary approach.

Or to be precise, there might well have been clever ways to strike a deal and invent something which had enough centralisation to be workable and enough decentralisation to be legitimate and widely supported. But the greedy communist leaders in the different regional capitals struck positions which made that impossible, plus the EU offered some non-trivial bribes only much too late. Nor were mere voters consulted until the divisions were too profound and nationalist fervour officially whipped up

So now in Bosnia the bonkers formula adopted at Dayton in 1995 - One Country, Three Peoples, Two Entities - did stop the war but is not enough to create a national peacetime consensus on either workability or legitimacy. Republika Srpska inches towards holding referenda on different aspects of the Dayton process and international attempts to implement them.

And we see the unedifying spectacle of EU/US diplomats insisting on democracy in Bosnia, but not when it involves asking voters what they really want.

Hence the phenomenon of a wobbly state, propped up by the absence of any workable or legitimate alternatives, and EU money.

Elsewhere we have the opposite phenomenon, wobbly territories wanting to become full states but unable to do so. Welcome to Limbo World:

These quasi-states -- which range from decades-old international flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Ossetia -- control their own territory and operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real countries, and then hope to become them.

In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today's Limbo World countries stay in political purgatory for longer -- the ones in this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15 years -- representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the permanent second-class state.

This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these quasi-states' continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan, if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift capital.

The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

In the middle somewhere is Kosovo, recognised by 64 out of 192 UN members. Not bad, indeed excellent by Limbo World standards, but still not good enough.

Answers?

None in principle or practice.

Since it all boils down to which is better: Peace, Justice or Stability?

And for whom?

And, above all: Who Decides?

Remember my rather dismissive account of the UK's attempt to teach the Russians how to fish, rather than inundate them with free fish? And the ensuing Big Mac Attack?

I have just heard from a former member of the UK Agriculture Ministry MAFF (by no means related to naff) who was engaged on all that work back in early Yeltsin Russia:

I liked your Model Farm item, but it was a bit incomplete.  Fact is, that we in MAFF got so p*ss*d off with KHF and their byzantine procedures that we found some Departmental money of our own that we could legitimately gift to UK private-sector industry (in this case the seed-potatoes sector) to plant the stuff directly on Russian sacred land on the Model Farm territory, with the full and happy support of the Russians. 

As I wisely wrote back in 1998:

My mention in the Times has led to various old friends getting back in touch, including Adam LeBor.

Adam knows his Balkans and has written a much praised book about the rise and fall of Slobodan Milosevic: 

I especially recommend the quote from the 'senior British diplomat' on p. 308 in the hard-back edition.

He also has written many good books about intrigues and double-dealings at the UN and elsewhere. And see his first novel, The Budapest Protocol:

Nazi-occupied Budapest, winter 1944. The Russians are smashing through the German lines. Miklos Farkas breaks out of the Jewish ghetto to find food - at the Nazis’ headquarters. There he is handed a stolen copy of The Budapest Protocol, detailing the Nazis post-war plans. Miklos knows it must stay hidden for ever if he is to stay alive. 

The book jumps to present day Budapest. As the European Union launches the election campaign for the first President of Europe, Miklos Farkas is brutally murdered. His journalist grandson Alex buries his grief to track down the killers. He soon unravels a chilling conspiracy rooted in the dying days of the Third Reich, one that will ensure Nazi economic domination of Europe - and a plan for a new Gypsy Holocaust...

Lots more at his website: http://www.adamlebor.com/

Another writer cum Balkan expert is Misha Glenny, who has used his many insights into Balkan organised crime to look at the global role of top-end criminality ("Very Organised Crime") and its impact on politics: 

Read on.