Blogoir

Today the latest edition of DIPLOMAT magazine arrived.

I opened it to find an article written by me which I could not remember writing(!). So I read it with much enjoyment and appreciation.

Check it out. It describes my attempts as an argumentative young diplomat to persuade the Embassy in Belgrade in 1983/84 that the then Yugoslavia was possibly heading for a breakdown, with unfathomable consequences. To no avail.

Which prompted me at the time to write my legendary MTS, Non-MTS paper - as per one of my very first blog postings here.

My DIPLOMAT article describes what happened next:

I left the post in 1984. Back at HQ I went along to Personnel to discuss my future. ‘You are getting a reputation for being argumentative,’ said the frumpy HR lady. ‘Wouldn’t you argue if you saw disaster looming but everyone else ignored it?’ I replied in some exasperation.

‘See, you’re arguing again,’ came the smug response.

I still remember this conversation so vividly, not least the supercilious but unimaginative female on the other side of the table. I pointed out to her that it had been annoying dealing with senior Embassy colleagues who instructed me to go out and talk to Yugoslav dissidents and get their devasting observations on the fecklessness of the Yugo-communists, but then could not spell when they wrote afterwards that these people were 'obviously dissaffected'.

"I find that hard to believe", she sniffed.

Pshaw.

And so I moved onto the Air Services Desk and then FCO Speechwriting. The Cold War ended. A mere 300 weeks or so after I left Belgrade, Yugoslavia indeed collapsed into appalling violence and ghastly war crimes. Huge British and international resources were poured in to help stop the fighting and pay for post-conflict reconstruction.

Yes, I had been argumentative. I had even been right. What I see now, with the benefit of much more experience, was that I had not been convincing.

Not that it would have made much difference had I been convincing. Finance Ministries don’t want to adjust their plans to warnings of disaster. They prefer to ignore the problem and instead pay out reluctantly as and when disaster creates real problems, which the taxpayer is prepared to fund to clean up.

In Yugoslavia’s case, this was far more expensive than the cost of investing in diplomatic initiatives to bribe the reckless Yugoslavs into calming down.

What are feisty young Chinese or Indian diplomats now drafting in their European Embassies? Maybe a paper entitled ‘The eurozone: MTS, or non-MTS?’

Will they be allowed to send it back to HQ?

Read the whole thing.

Working on some slides for a Mediation Technique presentation in Geneva next week.

Mediation as a professional discipline has some core assumptions. One of the most noted is the idea that there are three levels in the way people look at disputes, namely PIN:

• Positions
• Interests
• Needs

Thus Kosovo. The Serbs and Albanians alike say noisily "Kosovo is ours!" They have incompatible positions.

Yet 'below' that level there are (it is argued) some areas of common interest - not fighting over the place, moving towards EU membership, getting richer and so on.

And below even that, maybe some common needs: maintaining credibility, not being humiliated, staying alive and so on.

Thus a mediator trying to help Serbia and Kosovo sort themselves out will want to move the discussion from Positions through Interests towards Needs, exploring ideas for building on those areas where existential agreement can be found rather than focusing on implacable differences.

Another way of looking at negotiation is a ZOPA: Zone of Possible Agreement.

• Mary wants to pay between £5000 and £8000 for a new car.
• Nancy is ready to sell her car for as little as £6000 but hopes to get £9000.

Somewhere between £6000 and £8000 is the zone of possible agreement, a price both could accept with more or less satisfaction.

Thus the skilled mediator coaxes the parties to move from their extreme positions and look instead at where interests might overlap.

In the Kosovo case, even the International Crisis Group is now looking at territory swaps as the potential ZOPA:

The international community should facilitate as complete a settlement as is possible, leaving it up to the parties themselves to decide how far and in what direction they can go to achieve the goal of recognition.

The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues. Neither Pristina nor Belgrade proposes this openly, but officials in both capitals have begun to speak of it quietly in contacts with Crisis Group.

Many in the international community would be unhappy with this option. Crisis Group believes that ruling out this or any specific mutually-agreed option from the onset, however, would risk freezing the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, with no guarantee of eventual resolution.

So much for theory.

All of this assumes some sort of intrinsic ability of the parties to look 'rationally' at what they want now and in the future. To weigh up options in some sort of calm, cooperative spirit, based upon (ultimately) the motherly comforting notion that we are all human beings on Planet Earth together and that there are better things to do here than fight.

Which is usually fine, or at least good enough.

But there are cases where parties each seemingly have internalised different, incompatible levels of rationality.

Such as, in the Balkans, Inat. Someone playing the Inat card is claiming to gain psychic or negotiating strength from the very perverse intensity of his/her irrationality:

See - you are right to say that what I am doing is against my interests! But that's the point.

The fact that I am prepared to do insane things in response to their antics shows just how strongly I feel about this!

And because I am being driven insane, I can not be reasoned with in your bourgeois/sentimental way. Take it or leave it! 

It may be that it is all a wearying bluff, a highly calculated attempt to extract specific negotiating advantage by feigning wild-eyed lack of calculation.

But what if it is real? Or if the effort of doing all that feigning somehow warps the mind of the feigner and starts to create a genuine level of irrationality if not madness?

Sure, with enough therapy and patient counselling this may be turned round.

Does anyone have a quiet couch big enough for Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosniacs and Croats to lie on for a couple of decades while they get it all off their chests?  

An ever-alert reader notes that on the B92 website in Serbia I am described as Carls Kroford.

Huh?

On Charles, the cyrillic alphabet has its own separate letters for our ch sound, one for a 'hard' ch and one for a 'soft' ch: very roughly the difference between choose-day and Tuesday. Similarly Polish: a hard ch is written cz.

When Serbs transcribe that into Latin script, the usual formula is to denote a hard ch with a little accent on top: Č (ч in lower case cyrillic). A soft ch appears like this: Ć (ћ in lower case cyrillic)

To make it all the more tricky for foreigners, whereas many Serb names end with a soft ch (Milošević), some end with a straight c which has the same sound as the ts in cats (Kragujevac).

B92 uses a simplified Latin script for its English language version which omits the accents and gets rid of letters not sounded in English anyway. So Čarls becomes Carls.

As for Kroford, Serbian does not really have the long sound of the English word 'awe', so it improvises with the next best thing, namely an o as in 'otter'.

Plus being a sensible phonetic language Serbian writes as it sounds where possible, so the hard C beginning Crawford is invariably written with a K (as in kapetan, a Serbian version of captain).

So Crawford becomes Kroford.

Simple.

My piece at the Independent on the outcome of the Ejup Ganic trial in London provokes the usual flurry of comments:

Mr Crawford is one of the morons that manipulated both US and UK foreign policy towards Bosnia in the 1990s. As an officer in the NATO force that arrived in Bosnia in 1995 I can say, unequivocally, the Bosnian muslims were just as much criminals as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. It is time to start punishing their leadership as well. The Ganic story is not over.

What about those poor conscripts who have been burnt down by
thugs who call themselves ,,Bosnian Army,,? Do they deserve justice?No?And why? Because,they were Serbs.How unfortunate. How much did you get paid for your ,,opinion,,? Lunch? Shame on you!

Appalling! His excellency, the former ambassador Crawford (to Serbia) reminds Serbia that it should shut up because that is the script handed to it by the International Community. Serbia is guilty by definition, so the accusations of war crimes that Serbia may have against others are not to be considered (Ex turpi causa non oritur actio)! Talk about specious syllogisms! 

Mr Charles Crawford is a man of honor and integrity. SHame on you for attacking him.

Some background.

The Independent asked for 400 words. I sent them some 500. They condensed that down to 330 without sending me a final version. So key nuances which went some way at least to tackling points made in the critical comments were lost.

Such is Journalism.

In case anyone is still interested, here is what I think is the full judgement.

The judge said this:

There is nothing within the request which would bring the conduct alleging issuing a command to attack a military convoy within the meaning of a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions 1949. However there is a reference to an Ambulance within the convoy and the request alleges that Dr Ganic expressly ordered an attack upon the Ambulance within the convoy. To that limited extent I am satisfied that the conduct alleges an extradition offence.

I am not satisfied that the rest of the convoy had any right to protection or that the soldiers in the 30 vehicles were prisoners of war.

Without having heard the evidence presented it is hard to say why he reached this conclusion. But it is clear from the video footage of the Dobrovoljacka St shootings that the JNA convoy was leaving Sarajevo under some sort of UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Is there really no case to answer that it is a breach of the laws at war to attack a convoy in such circumstances? Apart from the wider policy issues, this finding directly contradicts the testimony of a British expert on the whole story whom the judge praised for his accuracy.

The Serbia side does not appear to have found any satisfactory answer to the Sarajevo/BH side's arguments that Serbia offered to let the Ganic extradition request lapse in exchange for political support for Serbia Srebrenica Declaration. The judge reasonably gives significant weight to this in support of his wider concern that Serbia's application was in one way or the other 'politically' motivated.

The judge took evidence from various notable people on that point including from Dr Schwarz-Shilling (sic and Lord Ashdown), former High Representatives in Sarajevo. Both asserted that the extradition request "is about politics rather than justice". Since neither of them have lived in Belgrade and both have seen the BH issue mainly from the vantage-point of Sarajevo, their evidence on this point should have been dismissed on the grounds of irrelevance.

Lord Ashdown even linked the extradition request to the date of the opening statement by Radovan Karadzic at ICTY, a linkage so footling that the judge explicitly dismissed it.

The judge was improperly dismissive of the role of the Belgrade war crimes courts and seemed to accept as true various tendentious generalisations about Serbia and Serb views put forward by Noel Malcolm and others.

These statements persuaded him that Serbia's application should be barred by Section 81(a) and (b) of the Extradition Act 2003 on the grounds that the request had been made "for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality and political opinions". This in my view is a far-reaching and obnoxious finding, based upon noisy assertions rather than hard facts.

All in all, a powerful but not especially coherent and convincing judgement. That said, in the circumstances it probably was correct enough.

It looks as if the Serbia side had not prepared its case re launching the extradition request and then thought through how best to handle the extradition hearing. It did poorly in presenting witnesses to rebut the openly 'political' case put forward by the Bosnia side. And by attempting some behind-the-scenes deal with Sarajevo while the matter proceeded in the UK courts, Belgrade foolishly laid itself open to a charge that its 'real' intentions were 'political' rather than legal/justice focused.

To be 100% clear for the record.

I am NOT saying or suggesting that war crimes against Serbs should not be prosecuted. I pressed hard for that to happen when UK Ambassador both in Sarajevo and Belgrade.

Nor am I saying that because of Srebrenica/Mladic Serbia is disqualified from running war crimes trials in Belgrade, or from putting in extradition requests such as this one.

Nor do I believe that Belgrade is unable to run a fair trial of non-Serbs. I do think that keeping fair is a difficult problem for all the local war crimes processes in former Yugoslavia:

The ICTY is not the whole story. Special courts for “lesser” war crimes have been set up in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. These important trials are little acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted a Kosovo family in Belgrade to give evidence in one of the first trials, involving alleged war crimes by Serbs in Kosovo. They said they had been treated honorably by the Serbian authorities.

The core problem with these trials is that each ethnic community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalized their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when “their” court is expected to put on trial one of “their” people. They hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from “its” community. Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka Street killings?

The reality is that every community in the former Yugoslavia sees itself as a victim of something or other. And a central part of being a victim is that you never get justice. So local politicians who believe in pushing the war-crimes agenda face an uphill task -- where are the votes in doing so?

To make it even more difficult, the Serbian government is (as the Amnesty woman at the “Storm” screening rightly pointed out) undermined when other European countries won’t respect Belgrade’s warrants to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war-crimes charges. It makes no sense for the European Union to insist that the region run these trials to high international standards and then not respect local efforts to do that.

BUT...but...

The hard fact of it is that there is a nasty, neo-national socialist tendency in Serbia which flourished under Milosevic, and that those poisonous attitudes infect the way the Serbian elite presents itself. (Similar neo-national socialist tendencies of course are alive and well among Croats, Albanians/Kosovars and Bosniacs/Muslims, a key point lost on some of the supposedly expert senior witnesses presented by the defence at the Ganic trial.)

Serbia's internal struggles continue over what Serbia and Serbs represent both to the world and to themselves.

And that was what ultimately undermined Serbia's case in London; in form and substance it just wasn't convincing.

My piece in the Independent:

Belgrade's application in London looked like a weird attempt to cover everything in political slime to make a specious Serbia-favouring syllogism:

All slimy people are guilty

All involved in the Yugoslav imbroglio were equally slimy

Therefore all were equally guilty – and, by the way, equally innocent.

This sits (putting it mildly) uneasily with the facts...

Update: my piece has been picked up by B92 in Belgrade - with added picture!

A London court has rejected Serbia's application to get former Bosnian/Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic extradited to Belgrade to face charges on the infamous Dobrovoljacka Street killings in Sarajevo in 1992.

The word 'rejected' perhaps does not do justice to District Judge Timothy Workman's demolition of Serbia's case. Perhaps 'blew to smithereens beyond all recognition' would be more accurate.

The judge probed behind the Serbian application, exploring not so much the substantive merits of the case itself but rather the implicit and explicit motivations of the plaintiffs. He examined the fact that other substantive and credible war crimes processes (ICTY and in Bosnia) had found no case for proceeding against Dr Ganic:

On the first day of this extended hearing I was satisfied that there was prima facie evidence of an abuse of process and as a result of that ruling evidence has now been adduced in relation to that issue.

No evidence having been adduced to show a striking or substantial change in the evidence available to the ICTY or to Mr Alcock, I have concluded that there is no valid justification for commencing proceedings against Dr Ganic.

But much worse, from Belgrade's point of view, was this: 

I am satisfied from the evidence of Mr Arnaut that during the course of these extradition proceedings attempts were made to use the proceedings as a lever to try to secure the Bosnian Government’s approval for the Srebrenica Declaration.

If indeed the Government [of Serbia] was prepared not to pursue these extradition proceedings in return for Bosnia co-operation, that in itself must be capable of amounting to an abuse of the process of this court. Some corroboration of Mr Arnaut’s evidence could be found in the unusual circumstances in which an application to vary conditions of bail was made to this court to enable Dr Ganic to return to Bosnia.

It would appear that that application was founded upon attempts at diplomatic agreements. I am also satisfied that the descriptions in the request [of the alleged grave breaches of Geneva Conventions] are as described significant misrepresentations.

The combination of the two leads me to believe that these proceedings are brought and are being used for political purposes and as such amount to an abuse of the process of this court.

The Serbia side says it will appeal against the ruling.

My assessment? See (if they use it) my piece for the Independent tomorrow.

But for now...

There is a maxim of Equity which says that equity must come to court with clean hands.

In this case Bosnian/Bosniac hands are far from spotless. The Bosniac leadership wail in rage at anything which suggests that they themselves and their predecessors may have made any unwise or immoral moves in the chain of events culminating in the violent collapse of Bosnia, or in their conduct of the ensuing conflict.

Instead they park on one big principle: that the Serbs (and indeed just Serbs) are Guilty.

Which means - as they see it - that an attempt by Belgrade to open episodes such as the Dobrovoljacka Street killings and cast some blame on senior or any Bosniacs must be at best ill-intentioned, and at worst downright evil.

(For about as reliable a view of what actually happened as we are ever likely to get, see this interview with Jovan Divjak, a senior Serbian JNA officer who bravely decided to fight on the Bosnia side of the conflict.)

Meanwhile the Serbs in Belgrade and Banja Luka try forlornly to salvage something from the wreckage of Milosevic's policies.

They (mainly) accept that Milosevic, Karadzic and the rest of that cast of weird second-raters pursued ruinous immoral policies, but they then froth up arguments that, bad as Belgrade's leaders were, others leaders were not really much better and even, perhaps, worse.

And this argument does have some merit. One of the very best things Robin Cook achieved as Foreign Minister was to act upon the proposition that Croatia's leader Franjo Tudjman was in much the same category as Slobodan Milosevic, ie a zany and pernicious national socialist cum fascist menace to European values. Cook stubbornly held the line against all sorts of EU pressures to 'show flexibility' towards Tudjman. Tudjman then helpfully died, isolated and unmourned by moderate opinion round the planet.

The Bosnian case is a harder one for Belgrade to prove. OK, Izetbegovic was a convinced if (by many standards) moderate Islamist, but he was defending a weak position.

Belgrade had all sorts of options to deal with the BH conundrum, but Milosevic chose to let rip Arkan and all sorts of vicious gangsters as a political tool. Far from using its weight and intellectual resources to show modern leadership, Belgrade went on a massive binge of greedy violent cynicism, seemingly relying at each stage on erratic improvizacija and Western lack of resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that any London court is likely to have in mind the fact that sixteen years on Belgrade has still not arrested General Mladic and thereby confronted the horror of Srebrenica. And that, accordingly, Belgrade's claims to be able to deal fairly with war crimes trials may well be true, but somehow held hostage to deeper political manipulations.

Belgrade here looks to have made a blunder in trying to trade behind the scenes with Sarajevo: 'Ajde bre, we'll end the Ganic extradition application in London if you guys cut us some slack on the Srebrenica declaration going through our Assembly...

Whereas in normal Balkan bazaar terms this sort of thing makes perfect sense, a steely London court not unreasonably could conclude that the whole extradition application had nothing (much) to do with Justice and was more about shady political machinations.

Result?

Serbia has taken a severe tonking in a London court today, following a pretty miserable result at the ICJ last week. The Bosniacs will be exultant, feeling that this represents a historic day of vindication for their core 'narrative'.

All of which said, anyone watching the evasive interviews with Ganic and other leaders on the gripping Fall of Yugoslavia video series will feel that something dark and dishonourable did occur at Dobrovoljacka Street. Not much chance now of justice being done for the victims of that war crime, alas.

Bottom Line?

Belgrade under democratic and fair-minded leadership can make all sorts of important points about the collapse of Yugoslavia. Not all Belgrade's arguments were bad just because Milosevic made them.

But until Belgrade bites the bullet and arrests Mladic, those arguments look contrived and morally hollow.

Washing those dirty hands is much better than pointing with them at the grime on others' dark fingers.

The European Stability Initiative do lots of good solid analytical/policy work.

Have a look at this ingenious proposal for resolving the absurd problem of Greek opposition to Macedonia's name:

How can this conundrum be resolved? It can be done through a constitutional amendment in Skopje that changes the name of the country today, allowing Athens to support the start of accession talks later this year, but that also foresees that the change will only enter into force on the day Macedonia actually joins the EU.

This effectively 'solves' the problem in principle in a way the Greeks should accept, but brings in the solution down the road on Macedonia's EU accession, giving Macedonia the necessary guarantees.

Clever. Mutually reinforcing but asynchronous (ass-'n'-chronic?) incentives towards good behaviour.

And read this one on the constitutional mysteries of Belgium, suggesting that the puny (in comparison) constitutional mysteries of Bosnia and Herzegovina should not be an obstacle to BH's EU membership. See eg Belgium's Constitution:

Article 1
Belgium is a federal State composed of Communities and Regions.

Article 2
Belgium is composed of three Communities: The French Community, the Flemish Community and the German-speaking Community.

Article 3
Belgium is composed of three regions: The Walloon Region, the Flemish Region and the Brussels Region.

Article 4
Belgium has four linguistic regions: The French-speaking region, the Dutch-speaking region, the bilingual region of Brussels-Capital and the German-speaking region. (…)

(Depending on whether the language in which the Constitution is written is French, Dutch or German, the respective Community and Regions are mentioned first.)

Phew.

Here.

Be shocked, as the Truth is revealed.

Welcome Browser and other new readers. After reading my thoughts below, check out this piece I wrote back in 2008 about inat. If you don't understand inat, you can't understand Kosovo or Serbia or anything about former Yugoslavia. Sorry, but there it is.

* * * * *

The International Court of Justice has ruled that the declaration of independence "is not in conflict with international law".

The ICJ site is overwhelmed so I can not yet share with you my wise thoughts on the full text of the decision.

Quickies anyway.

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia's request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be 'in accordance with international law', since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town's independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is 'in accordance' with UK law - free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It's what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift...   

Why did Serbia pose the Kosovo question in this odd form? Maybe because it did not want to force the ICJ to answer head-on the Kosovo independence question (eg Is Kosovo now a state recognised by international law?) in case the Serbs lost, thereby incurring an epochal defeat?

This 'advisory' ruling on this curiously open-ended question allows Belgrade to say that nothing significant has been decided one way or the other, so its struggle against Kosovo's independence blithely continues.

The ICJ ruling itself confirms that view in a sense, saying that the Court has not taken a view on whether the consequences of Kosovo's independence declaration have included Kosovo acquiring statehood.

According to B92 in Belgrade (in Serbian) Russia has been quick to confirm that it will not recognise Kosovo for (in effect) this very reason.

If other global big-hitters such India and China and Brazil and South Africa likewise decide to stay put and not shift their view, Kosovo's awkward half-in, half-out international status will drag on indefinitely - the map at the link shows how poorly Kosovo has done with the East/South of the planet.

On the other hand, the headlines round the world will tend to present this as a Win for Kosovo's cause, which in due course might well lead a larger number of countries to recognise Kosovo as a full independent state.

Basically, Kosovo falls into the All Too Difficult box for international law and policy.

Why? Because it is astride two huge tectonic plates underpinning global order and so is bang in the middle of a jurisprudential, political and moral earthquake zone. 

One plate is all about the right of identified peoples to be independent - the principle of self-determination).

The other is all about the circumstances under which existing states can split up into smaller or different formations (or not) - the principle of territorial integrity.

So it all wends its way back to the cynical deals done within the EU and between key European capitals and Washington back in the early 1990s. Basically, it was agreed to recognise Slovenia as an independent state since it (sort of) ticked both boxes simultaneously.

Slovenia was dominated overwhelmingly by Slovenes (self-determination).

And it had an undisputed geographical/political identity as a republic within the former Yugoslavia (territorial integrity), so its independence flowed neatly in parallel with the recognition of Russia and the other former Soviet republics as independent states.

Kosovo certainly makes its mark in the self-determination box, but as it was 'only' a province within Serbia (albeit with many attributes of a full republic, including membership of the eight-person SFRY Presidency itself) the territorial integrity issue is far less clear.

The more so since our cherished Helsinki Process norms basically lay down that there shall be no change in borders within Europe without the consent of all concerned. Which in this case there manifestly isn't.

Here is a tidy Russian look at the wider issues of principle at stake for Europe as these two tectonic plates grind away against each other. 

Implications for Bosnia? Not many.

The Republika Srpska leadership (more or less in coordination with Belgrade) will continue to press the self-determination argument: if Kosovo's declaration of independence is not against international law, why should Republika Srpska too not make a similar declaration at some point?

Down the road in Sarajevo the Bosniacs will noisily insist that the territorial integrity principle is supreme, and that RS itself is in different ways 'illegitimate'.

The Balkans. Where nothing is ever settled.

How to run a railway system with startling incompetence and/or amazing system destabilizing losses?

Learn from Greece:

Losses at Hellenic Railways, however, continue to mount — at the rate of 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day. Its total debt has increased to $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product...

Some have argued that Hellenic Railways should shut down the majority of its routes, especially in the mountainous Peloponnese region where trains manned by drivers being paid as much as $130,000 a year frequently run empty.

Or just up the tracks in Albania where at least things are on a more modest scale:

Last year the railways had an income of €9m, of which €5m came straight from the government.

I blame it on all those olives.

The legal processes surrounding the attempt by Belgrade to get former BH Presidency member Ejup Ganic extradited from London to Serbia to face war crimes charges rumble on.

The latest hearing has ended. According to the Sarajevo media, judgement is expected on 27 July.

Needless to say, media reports of the detailed legal issues at stake have been fitful. Some attention has focused on the various claims made by the Ganic team:

• that Serbia's application was flawed on its face or substantively
• that it has no substantive merit and/or presents no evidence which has not been presented in other courts and dismissed as inadequate
• that Ganic can not expect a fair trial in Belgrade

Lawyers representing Serbia have replied:

• that there is enough evidence to launch a substantive prosecution in Belgrade
• and that the Hague Tribunal and other courts are cooperating well with the war crimes courts in Belgrade, and indeed congratulating Belgrade on its work in this difficult area - a fair trial will be assured

My barrister training back in the mists of time taught me one thing: to look at the merits of the case in hand.

The point here (as far as I can see - I may be wrong) is that this is not a case about war crimes. It is about extradition law.

The London courts are not expected or even empowered under the relevant law and guidlelines to delve far into the substance of the allegations against Mr Ganic.

They are dealing with allegations made by state A and against a citizen of state B. Their task is primarily to ascertain whether as a matter of law state A (here Serbia) has met the standards required for Mr Ganic to be transferred to Belgrade.

In terms of where the matter stands procedurally, the Home Office guidelines for cases involving Category 2 territories (which both Serbia and Bosnia are) suggest that we have just had the 'extradition hearing'.

This is interesting (emphasis added):

Some countries are not required to provide prima facie evidence in support of their request for extradition. These countries are (as of 1 January 2007):

Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Liechtenstein, Macedonia FYR, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Russian Federation, Serbia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America.

Then there's this:

The judge must satisfy himself that the request meets the requirements of the 2003 Act, including dual criminality and where appropriate, prima facie evidence of guilt; and that none of the bars to extradition apply (the rule against double jeopardy; extraneous considerations; passage of time or hostage-taking considerations).

Finally, he is required to decide whether the person’s extradition would be compatible with the convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998.

If he decides all of these questions in the affirmative, he must send the case to the Secretary of State for the latter’s decision whether the person is to be extradited. Otherwise, he must discharge the person.

In other words, Serbia does not have to clear too high a legal hurdle on the substance of its extradition request, since Serbia (like Bosnia and Herzegovina) is among the countries whose word and processes are deemed by English law to be respectable enough not to merit deeper investigation.

If the judge decides in favour of extradition, the case goes to the Secretary of State, but only for further consideration under three headings. The Secretary of State is not to look at the wider merits of the issue:

Secretary of State

Where a case is sent to the Secretary of State she (sic) must consider whether surrender is prohibited because:

1. the person could face the death penalty: This is an absolute prohibition unless the Secretary of State receives an adequate written assurance from the requesting state that the death penalty will not be imposed, or will not be carried out, if imposed
2. there are no speciality arrangements with the requesting country: The condition of “speciality” requires that the person must be dealt with in the requesting state only for the offences in respect of which the person is extradited (except in certain limited circumstances)
3. the person was earlier extradited to the UK: this might require the Secretary of State to obtain the consent of the earlier extraditing country, before the person can be extradited on to the requesting state...

If the Secretary of State does find that surrender is prohibited, she must order the discharge of the person. If none of the three prohibitions apply, or appropriate assurances have been given, the Secretary of State must order the person to be extradited.

In the Ganic case the three rather technical prohibitions applied at the political level do not (I assume) apply. So if the Secretary of State is in due course presented with a ruling from the judge confirming Ganic's extradition to Serbia, on the face of it that ruling will have to be upheld.

If the Secretary of State does order extradition Ganic can appeal, just as Serbia can appeal against a decision in favour of Ganic by either the judge or the Secretary of State.

And who knows, maybe wily lawyers on either side will come up with other proceedings (eg based on UK or EU Human Rights norms) to add new complications.

In short, plenty of legal juice - and juicy fees - remain to be squeezed before Mr Ganic very finally gets on a plane bound for either Belgrade.

Or Sarajevo. 

Remember the attempt by Serbia to get former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic extradited from London to Belgrade on war crimes charges dating back to the early days of the conflict in Bosnia?

After a flurry of media interest when Ganic was first arrested, it all went quiet after BH Presidency member Haris Silajdzic visited the UK in March, no doubt because he was given a firm private steer by the FCO that once the application was lodged the law must take its course, and that banging on about it being a 'British politically motivated process' would be stupid.

Anyway, the main hearings have started today. Mr Ganic has been living quietly here on bail in the meantime.

The Belgrade authorities are piously insisting that they are playing this one strictly by the letter of the law, leaving it to the courts in London to decide what should be done. The Bosnian/Bosniac leadership are insisting that the courts will decide in favour of rejecting the application.

Should be interesting. 

I am pleased to let you know that I have joined Castle European Estates as an Advisory Board member, with a view to helping them bring significant new international investment to the Western Balkan region (ie former Yugoslavia) and beyond.

I am in good company.

What did David Laws do wrong?

As I understand it, he claimed back from the taxpayer (that's you and me) a load of money for renting a room from his 'partner' without disclosing that he had a close relationship with said partner.

The homosexual aspect has nothing to do with it.

Nor does the fact that he might have claimed back even more money from us had he rented a room somewhere else at an arm's-length (so to speak) commercial rent.

Iain Dale makes an eloquent case here but gets it wrong, I think:

If he had moved into a one bedroom flat the taxpayer would have been paying far more. If Laws was seeking to maximise his income he would have either designated his Somerset home as his second home and claimed for the mortgage on that, or he would have bought a property in London and claimed for that. He didn't, and yet he's being mercilessly slagged off.

What we have done here is create a system where MPs are now, on average, claiming far more than they used to before.

Yes! True. But that is irrelevant. What we are aiming at is to rule out - for any use of public money - financial hanky-panky between family members or people in some sort of close private bond. Even if it costs us something extra to uphold this level of honesty.

It is not enough that transactions involving public money must be honest. They must be seen to be honest.

In my Balkan postings I was now and again lobbied fervently by local Embassy staff members urging me to offer a vacant job to one of their relatives:

"We have served the Embassy honestly for years - you can rely on Sasha to do the same!"

I told them firmly that even if we ended up recruiting someone less able and less honest, there was a vital value for Brits in having an honest process. Which meant a process in which everything was above board and transparent. Sorry, but we were just funny that way.

I spent an hour today chatting to a senior Greek financial expert (based here) who told me in great detail how petty corruption had overwhelmed the Greece system at all levels. Much of the way things have been fixed in Greece goes directly through family members. And look where all that has got them.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to allow the Embassy to rent for Embassy staff a flat I owned, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% transparent competititive way with no involvement from me.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to instruct the Embassy to buy supplies from a firm owned by one of my relatives, even if the cost to the taxpayer was less than the market rate, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% normal transparent competitive way with no involvement from me.

It was wholly improper for David Laws to claim back all this money from renting a room from a close friend without declaring the close friendship.

If he were not ready to do that, he should have moved somewhere else. Or simply not claim any rent allowance.

He has done well to resign promptly and with dignity. Viva British democracy.

Simple, really?

Update: Matthew d'Ancona gets it spot on:

We did not take advantage of the financial support available to couples, such as travel to and from my constituency,” pleaded Mr Laws in mitigation. Again, however, that was his choice.

His wish was that the relationship between himself and Mr Lundie should remain private. As a consequence, the proper course of action was clearly for him not to make any claims at all related to Mr Lundie’s properties.

In spite of the impression one might have formed from the expenses scandal, MPs are under no obligation to make such claims. I doubt that many taxpayers, considering the prospective impact upon their lives of the painful public spending cuts ahead, will have felt much sympathy with Mr Laws’s argument that he needed £40,000 of their money to protect his sensibilities. Privacy, in this case, was available for free.

Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent:

There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova's multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax - which owns Uzbekistan's most valuable economic assets ... Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov.

And we all recall what an appalling piece of work Gulnara is:

... charming and girlish ... in a simple dress and laughing eyes ... giggling at my light conversation...

The other day I bumped into a long-lost colleague from MI6. We exchanged some Balkan yarns.

He had done superb work for HMG and Western civilisation by taking a deep breath and diving deep into the darkest Balkan cesspools, where war crime suspects meet football club gangsters and cigarette smugglers in tawdry late-night casinos. To such an extent that his accurate intelligence information thereby gleaned was not trusted back at HQ - to HMG's detriment.

The point about diplomacy is that in one way or the other we need to deal with the world as we find it, Gulnara and Karadzic and Karimov and North Korea and all.

Where I part company with Craig is that he boasted about his access to the higher parts of the Uzbekistan system but instead of using that access to make a systematic and significant difference, he turned all his fire and energy on his own team.

And got precisely nowhere in terms of changing Uzbekistan for the better.

Poor technique.

Update: The EU (improbably) as ... Dirty Harry. Click through to the wonderful link.

* * * * *

If I were a diplomat from Mars reporting back to HQ on the wheeler-dealings of the pitiful earthlings in this part of the planet, I'd be starting to suggest that the days of the UK's full membership of the EU are numbered.

Not so much because the UK masses reject the EU (although plenty are very unhappy with it). But because the EU is now mutating fast into something the UK masses (myself included) will not accept.

See this elegant analysis by the BBC's Paul Mason of the implications of the vast Eurozone New Deal whose sheer size has impressed the markets (for now) - emphasis in the original:

The fact that this is called a "special purpose vehicle" - a term we all remember from Enron, Lehman and the London Tube PPP - gives the game away. Like all SPVs it is designed to make unclear who ultimately shoulders the risk. Since "Europe" does not have any money itself, the implication is that Germany, France and Italy now stand behind the rest of Europe. But the implication will be hidden behind bilateral deals, clauses etc.

Why it is radical becomes clear if you compare it to the Bank of England's move to print £200bn. That £200bn shows up on the "balance sheet" of the Bank, not the British government. But the Bank of England is ultimately an arm of the British state - whatever its formal constitution says. Ditto the US Federal Reserve. However, the ECB is a central bank without a state to underpin it...

The move to printing money is a signal that the EU has to create something more like a state to back the ECB.

Not only is the EU now committed to much stronger fiscal - i.e. tax and spending - oversight. It is now implicitly committed to becoming an economic super-state...

Election Day across the UK looms. The Labour Party are set to lose power. Hurrah.

But will they lose badly enough to be obliterated? Or somehow only enough to stay in business and start scheming anew after some ritual blood-letting?

Here's my own New Labour Story.

I joined the FCO in 1979 as a naive and truculent leftist, fresh from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the USA. Trade Unions - good! Mrs Thatcher - horrible! How dare she and Raygun stand up so defiantly against the Soviet Union and all those of us who only wanted Peace?

Then I was sent to communist Yugoslavia, where it dawned on me that so many things I had thought and been told about Socialism were simply untrue, or (worse) calculated lies.

I came back to the UK in 1984 a fervent believer in the utility (and morality) of free markets and Western democracy. I played my part in helping the Thatcher government end apartheid in South Africa. Then she fell, but I was in London for the early Major years as Communism ended in the Soviet Union and across Europe.

Off to Moscow and then Bosnia. I missed the twilight lugubrious Major years and the huge acclaimed election victory of my old college chum Tony Blair.

A real sense of new energy was there, and the FCO raced to embrace it. Change! And Hope!

As a supporter of democracy, I saw no reason for concern. After all those long Conservative years it was time for a change. And Labour seemed to have the right ideas for keeping public finances in good order.

My own first significant encounter with New Labour came in 1997, when Robin Cook visited Sarajevo. He was impressive, if somewhat distant and cross. But also obsessed with the media - he rudely kept the Bosnian Foreign Minister waiting for the best part of an hour as he fiddled with a press statement.

I later heard from a colleague who had first hand from Robin Cook his corrosive, cynical philosophy: "If anything goes well in the FCO. I'll take the credit as Foreign Secretary - if anything goes badly, the FCO takes the blame". This of course slaps the convention of Ministerial Responsibility in the face. Cook did not care.

In late 1997 PM Tony Blair visited Sarajevo. We (Embassy/FCO) had a huge row with No 10, as his Campbell team refused to let him meet any Bosnian politicians - only a photo-opportunity with the troops was needed for UK press purposes, thanks.

This absurd position was eventually overturned, but Blair paid only a fleeting visit to Sarajevo and bizarrely left Bosnia without saying a single word in public to Bosnia. An irresponsible and, again, downright rude way to behave, driven by his odious spin-doctors.

However, seeing advantage in being tough on the causes of international crime, Labour did do a good job in changing course and using British troops to start to arrest war crimes indictees. Not that they did all they could to get Karadzic to surrender? 

Anyway, I was cooling off at Harvard when NATO bombed Kosovo, returning to London in mid-1999 with a big promotion, thanks to Robin Cook who had valued my directness. He played a significant personal role in the concerted international effort to support free elections in Serbia and Croatia, not least in holding the line against any EU concessions to Croatia's ghastly President Tudjman. The fall of Milosevic and the work done by HMG to bring that about was Robin Cook's finest foreign policy achievement. I ran that policy in London.

Yet by then the glamour of all that new Labour energy and sense of reform was wearing off. 'Diversity' had transformed itself from welcome creative fairness and flexibility into neurotic processes. Anti-bullying initiatives were swarming in the FCO, the one placid place in the world where anything like meaningful bullying was almost non-existent. Endless 'change initiatives' and political correctness were demoralising everyone.

And lawks, death by Targets:

Yet don't I dimly recall that it was Ministers in this Government who made us draw up Strategic Priorities in the first place? Yes, it's all coming back ...

First we had seven.

Then we had eight.

Then we had nine.

Then, gloriously, we reached ten!

Now we are reduced to a measly four Key Policy Goals, albeit with free added Surge. All in some 260 weeks.

Pathetic replacement of substance by interminable process. Brought about all because Gordon was squabbling with Tony and Peter, wooing Clare and Robin and Jack. Babies.

As the years passed a new sense of incompetence and sheer sleaze emerged. The FCO had the extraordinary indignity of getting Margaret Beckett as Foreign Secretary. 

In her previous Ministerial job she had visited Warsaw with her husband in tow as one of her generously publicly funded Advisers. He said nothing but fell asleep in meetings with Warsaw Ministers. Too ghastly for words.

Margaret Beckett was smart enough in an Old Labour way. But she knew nothing about diplomacy and international relations, so burbled away instead about Climate Change. The FCO atrophied.

Then as Ambassador I had to lead the UK position in Poland when Tony Blair made significant concessions on the UK Rebate in the 2005 EU Budget negotiations.

By then the splits and dysfunctionality at the heart of New Labour were merely embarrassing. No 10 officials dismissed Gordon Brown as Mrs Rochester, the mad woman shrieking in the distant attic. 

As it happens, on that one Gordon Brown was right. The UK had a superlative position after the French and Dutch referenda blowouts on the EU's Constitutional Treaty. We could have forced key reforms and really redefined the EU on our terms.

Tony Blair made the fatal strategic mistake of wanting to be loved, extending the hand of friendship to the French while they were flat on their backs like upside-down tortoises, gasping for air. And he got nothing in return.

No, not quite right. What he got was the Lisbon Treaty, which Blair/Brown bundled through Parliament in the face of explicit Labour election pledges that the British people would have a referendum. Maybe Blair thought that for this generosity he was a cert to be elected the first EU President under the Lisbon Treaty? Sucker.

So there it is. The election campaign splutters on. Tony briefly appears to tick the box of campaigning, but without trying. Gordon has shown what he really thinks about working people. 

Peter is already scheming about how to get David elected as leader after Gordon crashes.

What truly appalling people they all are. It's all about them, not about the country.

What's worse? Labour politics of irresponsibility? Or Labour aesthetics of  unrelenting vulgarity? Narcissism. In red polyester socks.

Labour once again have ruined public finances, causing damage which will echo down the generations. They have presided over sustained banal corruption among MPs. After stunning new public spending the UK's underclass problem is worse now than it was in 1997, an appalling if scientifically important outcome. It's official - state socialism is a Failure.

Our diplomatic network and underlying leadership have been badly damaged. Billions have been wasted on phoney international assistance, much of it channeled via the UN and EU and so lavished on European consultants.

Some diplomatic moves have been jaw-droppingly incompetent - see eg the Copenhagen fiasco. So much for the Mighty Brain of David Miliband, that gushy admirer of foreign communists.

Labour can't even grasp one simple implication of Diversity (and simple good manners, which I believe are still taught at Eton if nowhere else): be polite to foreign leaders.

All in all, a remarkable, historic disappointment, in outcome and philosophy alike

Somehow the Conservatives have not quite managed to lay out a clear, honourable alternative. With a record like Labour's no-one other than John Prescott's elderly relatives should be voting Labour ever again.

Yet Labour lingers on, helped by the armies of loyal collectivist serfs they have created in the BBC and countless public sector appointments. They can not campaign on their record, so they spread dirty sneers and fears. Such is the debased public space they have left us that some of this works.

It is left to Labour diehards like Brian Barder to rummage around in the slimy debris looking for a few nuggets of idealism - and to scrape together reasons for voting against the dreaded 'Cameron':

... there are at least two other powerful reasons for dreading a Cameron government:  first, the Tory commitment to repealing the Human Rights Act, one of the Labour government’s greatest and bravest achievements, and an indispensable bulwark for the private citizen’s rights against an over-mighty executive (and we can only guess at what the Tories would replace it with);  and secondly, the certainty that William Hague, as a committed Europhobe, enjoying the feverish support of the even more Europhobic wing of the Conservative Party, will destroy what little influence we still have in the EU, having already thrown his party’s lot in with a raggle-taggle group of right-wing, sometimes antisemitic, homophobic, neo-fascist European fringe parties when Britain’s natural partners are the moderate, liberal, socially responsible parties of the European centre, including the governments of Germany and France.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ... [wakes] ... has that sentence finished yet?

Huh? Where are the reasons for NOT voting Conservative? You've given us two reasons for voting for them!

The Human Rights Act can and should be replaced with something based less on European jurisprudence and more on common law principles. Good riddance.

And as for the EU, a government armed with a firm mandate against yet more ill-conceived 'integration' is just what we need as the whole EU project squeals at the seams.

* * * * *

At poignant moments like this we turn, inevitably, to Elvis:

The party's over
Your time is up
You've had your last pointless teardrop
Washed down in that broken coffee cup
This magic moment concludes when that cigarette ends
Did you get what you wanted?
Well I suppose that depends...

The party's over
Time we broke up
It always seemed like a bad dream
One where I finally woke up ...

Ian Bancroft's articles on the Balkans are always interesting and perceptive, not that I always agree with them.

See eg this one about Bosnia, as previously linked.

Yet something has been gnawing away in my mind about the picture of Ian which the Guardian uses.

Yes. Got it!

Are he and Kraftwerk by some chance related?

If only Bosnian political parties would behave in a sensible orderly way.

Just like the Robots:

We are programmed just to do
anything you want us to -
we are the robots

Once I send a witty telegram to the FCO from Sarajevo entitled:

Bosnia: The Plot Thickens - And The Thicks Plot

The deep problem in Bosnia is that the place is rotten with feckless Yugoslav communist self-management philosophy.

The idea that you can talk and talk about 'politics' and borrow money from the West without paying it back.

Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of the former Tito Yugoslavia's six republics was a special beneficiary of self-management. Funds poured in to what was one of the most undeveloped parts of Europe to build arms factories and other heavy industry. The Titoists had the idea that these installations would be better protected by partisan warfare against invading Americans/Russians in the Bosnian mountains than on the plains of Vojvodina.

Which was no doubt correct. But it helped create a sense across Bosnia that it needed to do nothing but live off other republics, themselves supported by unwise Western loans intended to keep 'non-aligned' Yugoslavia out of the Soviet orbit.

In a nutshell, this was Tito's foreign policy:

Moscow: sell us cheap weapons - or we'll have to turn West!

West: give us cheap loans - or we'll have to turn East!

It worked a treat. Until Yugoslavia went bust as the Cold War ended.

The greatest metaphor for Bosnian official cluelessness for me was the Sarajevo Holiday Inn.

This architectural calamity in bright yellow and dull purple and the world's naffest sofas was built for the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, when I was the UK team's Olympic Attache:

It took serious damage during the siege of Sarajevo. Once the war ended, it was rebuilt.

But no obvious effort was made to modernise it. It was restored to its pre-war state at significant expense, including the hopeless check-out system. It was as if the Bosnian leadership(s) wanted simply to turn the clock back, not take stock of a transformed world and try to find out how best to create new wealth in it.

Because of the war and its own parochial self-absorbed political culture, when the Cold War ended Bosnia never had any popular movement for liberal reform. Instead it had ruinous gangster-ethnic feuding.

Now, many years later, things are still stuck. As Ian Bancroft well describes in the Guardian:

As the British electorate prepares to go to the polls, Bosnia and Herzegovina's own elongated pre-election period enters a more frenetic phase. Amid talk of referendums and rivalries, however, the key issue of economic reform remains sidelined.

The economy contracted by some 3.5% in 2009, and with unemployment currently hovering at around 40%, this should be the single most important issue for Bosnia's electorate. Nevertheless, as in previous years, election campaigns will be fought not on the basis of who can deliver change, but on who can best protect "vital national interests".

His piece links to this unerring wisdom:

The Bosniac elite in Sarajevo with intermittent support from some in the 'international community' want BH-wide government harmonisation and the constitutional changes they think must occur for that to work.

Yet the fastest way to harmonise the space across Bosnia would be for the larger Federation entity to become super efficient and economically booming with Serbs welcomed into a good share of top positions, so that Serbs clamour to leave Republika Srpska and live there. Instead the Federation is inefficient, wasteful and over-governed, to the point of near-bankruptcy.

In these circumstances (and ignoring for now their own nationalistic cynicism), the Bosnian Serbs not unreasonably fear that Sarajevo's demands for 'harmonisation' are all about extending to Republika Srpska negative forms of majority/Bosniak control (including ethnic discrimination) rather than any real desire to make the country as a whole 'work better'.

In other words, the absence of 'harmonisation' ought to be inducing tax and overall efficiency competition between the two Entities to attract people and investment. And it is. But Republika Srpska is on the whole winning that competition, and sees no reason to surrender its edge.

The thicks are still plotting.

And glorifying war criminals.

A reader prompted by my piece on Srebrenica points me to this long analysis by Milivoje Ivanišević of the 'context' of Srebrenica, including numerous massacres by Muslims/Bosniacs of Serbs in the area before the enclave fell:

The dead Muslim fighters of Srebrenica have now finally become completely innocent, and are present in various schemes developed by those who never knew them and who, today, still devoid of any sensible foundation, have adopted them and “defend” them.

The imposed cult of Srebrenica is still keeping watch over our conscience, and has become a metaphor for the unimaginable, and in addition to of all this, it has even become a metaphor of the genocidal crime Serbs carried out against the innocent local residents of an inaccessible Bosnian town situated at the bottom of a ravine.

Put some tedious rhetoric aside and there is a lot of noteworthy detail here which does offer a corrective of sorts to the conventional view. Go and read it.

But the piece ultimately fails:

During the next two days, a dozen soldiers from 10th Sabotage Detachment, who were on leave, were gathered, and they committed what is today qualified as a genocide. The shooting to death of captured Muslims is not the subject of this discussion...

Sorry, but if you don't take that as a central feature of the issue, something rather significant is being missed?

There ensues a long and somewhat confusing analysis of the numbers and names of people found in mass graves, and when precisely they died.

The conclusion? Instead of a Conclusion (sic):

The wartime pasts or biographies of commanders and soldiers of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina are filled with attacks on Serbian villages and the killings of individuals of Serbian nationality. They showed no mercy to Serbian villages and their residents. The evidence is overwhelming.

These facts contradict the constantly proffered thesis that Srebrenica was about the victims of genocide or Muslim civilian victims. It is certain that some of them were executed after having been captured, but many more of them died in battles while attempting to break through [Serbian lines of defense] to Tuzla. They also suffered losses from internal conflicts and infighting.

This amounts to a macabre, neurotic view of the issue which does not helps Serbs or the wider Serbian cause.

There is an honourable way for Serbs to deal with Srebrenica.

Namely to follow the example of Sydney Kentridge QC and begin in chilling detail with the appalling facts of the mass Mladic killings of prisoners; acknowledge them for the war crime they were; accept in a spirit of true penitence that in one way or the other the Milosevic regime (as elected and supported by millions of Serbs) had some sort of responsibility for this situation; and only then move on to the 'context'.

Anything else is nothing but this:

They were dirty, so why blame us for being dirty in reply? Plus since we were only responding to their dirt, even if our dirt was bigger than theirs (which we dispute) it was justified. See?! Our dirt is cleaner than their dirt!

That is not good enough. It leads Serbs and Serbia deeper into a now familiar moral abyss.