Balkanic Eruptions

This posting on Russia/Kosovo/Georgia prompted a pointed comment from reader Will:

Fascinating philosophy question: if X responds badly to your action and cites your action as a reason for that bad behaviour, how far are you responsible for what X does?

Seems to me that the answer depends on what you think of X - what you think X actually is.

Three scenarios:

Mineral:   you can take the long road round the base of the mountain, or attempt a short-cut across a steep slope covered in loose stones. You know that the stones may slip and cause damage to houses in the valley. You go for the short-cut. The stones slide and cause such damage.

You suspect that your footsteps prompted the mini-landslide. If they did, the stones simply made a Newtonian response to some or other physical force you exerted. They had no choice but to slide. You had no real options to calibrate the stones' response to your steps, other than not to attempt the slope at all.

Vegetable:   you decide not to weed the whole of the garden. Nasty weeds/brambles grow strongly in the most neglected areas, less strongly in the places where you keep nature at bay.

Here the response of the weeds/brambles is 'inanimate, but dynamic. Your actions do calibrate to a generally predictable extent what happens in which part of the garden. Your 'responsibility' is more subtle.

Animal:    you live in a nature reserve where some fierce bears roam. How far to avoid the bears? When you can not avoid them, act kindly towards them or beat them back?

You start to feed one bear in a kindly but wary fashion. One day he eats one of your pets. You whack him with a stick. He responds angrily by eating a neighbour's infant. Did you cause that tragedy to happen, not just by hitting the bear but by deluding yourself that a friendly relationship with the creature was possible and altering its consciousness..? 

* * * * *

All this is a convoluted way of pointing to the contradictions in much of the analysis about Russia and whether/why Western actions are 'provocative' to Moscow.

Do we treat Russia's 'fear of encirclement', 'insecurities' and 'anxieties' as, so to speak, inanimate facts of life over which we (and they) have no control other than to top-toe widely round them?

Or are they simple genetically coded facts of life which do respond in a predictable but insensate way to what we do?

Or are they animate/sensate facts of life, where we need keener judgement to get the response we want?  

Or are they human, even reasonable fears?

What if they are human but basically unreasonable paranoid fears?

The gushing Western punditry on Russia contains confusing contradictory elements of all these ideas.

Some people appear to suggest that Russia for reasons of obvious history/geography/Tsars/Communism/vodka has no choice but to behave the way it does. Safest is to adopt a Finlandish stance to avoid risking trouble.

Others argue that Russia of course does have choices, hence all the more reason to behave in a subtle respectful way: keep that bear calm and happy, even if he eats some of your rabbits now and again.

And then there are those who say that Russia of course makes its own decisions, but we have to strive to set a robust context in which they know that bad decisions have bad consequences for them. Eventually they will come to see that they have no more reason to fear 'encirclement' by democratic NATO states than eg Switzerland does.

To answer Will's question.  

I expected Russia to play tough in the CIS if key Western countries went ahead and recognised Kosovo as independent without having secured first a reasonable global consensus and in the face of explicit Russian objections.

NB this was separate from my view on whether and when Kosovo 'should' be independent, or whether Serbia 'deserved' to keep Kosovo.

The vital point was and is that the Kosovo independence issue is partly about Kosovo, but also about a bigger vision of global order. Acts of state recognition are at the very heart of diplomacy - it is a high risk strategy to mishandle them when a UN Security Council member is closely engaged and has Views.

I expected a tough Russian response not so much because Russia cares tuppence about Serbia or Kosovo - rather because Russia does care a lot about some other issues, whose handling turns on a sort of informal shifting balance of power as between differing accepted principles. This balance is not easily defined or articulated at any one moment, but top politicians and diplomats are paid to sense it and manage it. 

To conclude. It may look worthwhile to take a calculated risk. You know that your move can lead to a bad outcome, because you know that someone prone to lashing out may well lash out in response.

You move, and the lashing-out occurs.

You are not in any moral causation sense 'responsible' for that lashing-out when it occurs. Yet you can not complain much when people say you miscalculated somewhere. And you end up having to deal with the damage.

Some actions may be well motivated. Perhaps even Right.

But not, all things considered, Wise. 

Jaded as you must be by my extensive offerings on the Kosovo/Georgia/Russia saga, you might care to look at the related (and vigorous) thoughts of three other former FCO Ambassadorial colleagues:

Sir Ivor Roberts:

How can the West talk of the need to maintain an independent state's territorial integrity and to refuse to countenance forcible changes of borders when that is exactly what the US and most of the EU countries condoned in recognising Kosovo -- against Serbia's will, and in the absence of any Security Council Resolution allowing it? To argue that Kosovo is unique is facile. Each potential secession is special, with its own often violent history ... Be careful what you wish for, says the old adage.

Brian Barder: 

It's too late to undo those Kosovo mistakes now, but it's not too late to begin to recognise them as mistakes and to try to learn some lessons from them in our future approach to Georgia (and Ukraine) in relation to Russia. 

And Craig Murray:

Agreed separations like the Czech and Slovak are no problem, but there is no fixed law for a region wishing to separate against the wishes of the state it is in. Quite simply it depends on having the political clout to get the UN to agree.

North Cyprus is a de facto state which never managed to pull this off, and seems a good parallel for the likely future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Many "Western" states are deeply wary of acknowledging separatists for their own internal reasons - Canada and Spain being good examples.

The Chechen case is important, because it illustrates both Putin's extreme ruthlessness, and the fact that Russia has no principle on its side. Russia supports or opposes the rights of separatists purely as they benefit Putin's aims to expand Russian influence.

I agree with some of what they each say and disagree with plenty.

A reader on one of my posts writes:

Your article seems to be another in a series of lame attempts to minimize Russia's responsibility for her actions in GA with a critique of the West's Kosovo policies. Am I wrong on this?

This is a core point, and (I think) where I part company from my colleagues as above. What exactly are the policy and (as it were) psychological links between Kosovo and Georgia, if any?

That needs a new post to do the subject full justice.

To be continued after I have walked the dog...

Prompted by Karadzic's transfer to ICTY, here in the new issue of Total Politics is a piece from me on my encounters with two other Bosnian Serb leaders convicted by ICTY for crimes against humanity.

What are these people like?

Are they obvious monsters? If not that, at least patently weird? Or seemingly normal people who somehow ‘lost it' on a massive scale?

Read on ...

Welcome Instapundit readers.

While we Crawfs have been travelling the Georgia story has moved on, to the point where French President Sarkozy has been helping broker some sort of truce and possible peace plan.

No end of commentaries too, of course, many dwelling on what this episode tells us all about Russia's apparently resurgent power and equivalent 'Western weakness.

Here is the mordant Spengler saying that Putin should be the President of the USA, not Russia.

Or try the hopeless divisions in the EU, as described by the Guardian.

This rapier-like analysis by Victor Davis Hanson nails most of the right wider points:

We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.

... When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.

When the Soviet Union collapsed a new implicit Deal emerged. It had various elements, some more obvious and robust than others:

• the 'West' would not reorganise its economic and security arrangements developed during the Cold War (primarily EU and NATO) to accommodate a totally new situation.
• Russia was invited to cooperate with the 'West' but effectively from an objectively weak position, and therefore on Western terms albeit with significant Russian involvement (see the pretty good Contact Group period in former Yugoslavia)
• but Russia insisted on and somehow retained the idea that its 'near abroad' (ie the former Soviet Union republics) were more Russia's then the West's.
• The three tiny Baltic republics dashed from the Russian camp and formally joined the Western camp, but while the new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' led by Russia was an institutional flop it achieved its main purpose in Moscow's eyes, ie keeping the other new states involved in a Russian psychological space.
• For some years this seemed like a good enough outcome for the West. Involvement in these deeply Sovietised territories was hard work. Russia was arguably the most democratic state in the CIS and looked to be exporting modest pluralism or at least modernisation to them.
• Latterly we have seen two rival tendencies. The CIS states moving to some sort of open market relationships beyond former Soviet borders and therefore opening up to Western processes (and wealth); in short, having different and rather attractive new options. And Russia gaining a windfall of wealth from soaring energy prices while itself adapting to a strategic transformation.
• This gives Moscow impressive new ways to exert influence across the CIS - buying key assets, 'persuading' CIS leaders that cooperation is in their best interests and so on. Why strap these countries down in close and boring neo-imperial ties with Moscow when it is so much easier to buy or control indirectly the best bits?
• That goes only so far. Moscow has to be especially tough with the (few) parts of the CIS which are still making the greatest formal efforts to join the Western camp. Hence intense Russian efforts in Ukraine while keeping CIS frozen conflicts well chilled, to create local imbalance/uncertainty which Moscow can nudge as and when necessary.
• And, now, Moscow pouncing on Georgian miscalculation to up the ante by overt military intervention.
• This Georgia crisis therefore represents the formal end of the original West/Russia Deal, which was already dead in the water as evidenced in part over Balkan policy in general and Kosovo in particular.
• Russia instead is proclaiming a New Arrangement: that if there are to be Westernising processes in the CIS area they will take place on Russia's terms, and that Russia is ready to use force to defend its self-proclaimed interests.
• Russia could press on and topple the Georgian leadership, and maybe still will.
• But the Russian Mind also will relish the idea of leaving Saakashvili twisting forlornly in the wind, humilated both by having failed to recapture South Ossetia and by having been left standing alone as the USA and all Georgia's European friends watched aghast but did significant nothing to help.
• And the likely Russian tighter grip on South Ossetia also creates a handy pseudo-precedent for Serbia gripping the Serb-controlled territories in northern Kosovo.

Will the West sign up to Russia's New Arrangement for the CIS space? If so, what? And if not, what?

More generally, are we moving to a new, darker and unpredictable international situation?

In which Rules will matter less, Willingness to Prevail a lot more?

Does the objective correlation of forces favour those leaders who in a pre-modern way have a clear sense of what they want - and are ready to take risks to achieve it? Leaders who will think they have the upper hand against other leaders who rely on little more than post-modern flannel and uneasy hopes?

After my exciting red pen adventures at New York airport immigration desk in May, I am taking no chances with my forthcoming family holiday in Orlando.

I have registered all of us with the new ESTA website run by the US Government to make easier (in theory - let's see the practice) getting into the USA. In 2009 it will be obligatory to use the site, so get registered now and avoid the rush.

The site asks for the basic information previously required on that immigration form previously filled in on the plane. But once e-authorisation is given - for the three Crawf children it was instantaneous, for two Crawf adults it took 72 hours - in principle it lasts for two years.

Yay.

Quirky US foreign policy point.

In the various dropdown menus on the site as you fill in your nationality and telephone contact details etc, Serbia is listed. So is Yugoslavia. But not Kosovo.

Endearingly retro.

I swung by the FCO the other day to have a chat about Bosnia.

The snappy desk officer dealing with this problem now is 24 or thereabouts.

Let's say she is 24. She was born in the year I was British Olympic Attache at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. She was 7 when the Soviet Union broke up, 11 when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, 14 when NATO bombed Serbia.

Hence her formative years have seen the 'frozen conflicts' here and there in the former Soviet Union as part of normal life. Abkhazia, S Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdnistria - all mysterious places in a geopolitical limbo where nothing much happens, or can or even should happen.

But ice melts.

Suddenly out of thin air (or so it seems) Georgia - a country hitherto pushing for NATO membership - is battling with Russian forces on its own territory in a struggle to control a few tens of thousands of Ossetians who do not want to be part of Georgia.

Various people warned that if 'the West' pushed ahead with Kosovo independence, Russia would move to change the rules in one or more of these frozen conflicts.

Kosovo course is (for Moscow) a sort of reverse S Ossetia. In Kosovo the Western parts of the international community are leaning hard on Serbia to drop its claims, and would react sharply against any attempt by Serbia to recapture Kosovo by force.

In Georgia the Western sympathies lie with the existing state, and it is Russia helping the tiny South Ossetian community stay separate. Russia plans to get round this conundrum by blaming the violence on Georgian fascism or somesuch, while NB opening a new form of external self-defence doctrine said to aimed at protecting Russian citizens alleged to be at risk beyond Russia's borders in other former Soviet republics. A doctrine with all sorts of ingenious political and other deployment options... 

This FT editorial gets it mainly right:

Mr Putin (and Dmitry Medvedev, his anointed successor) seem to want to prove two things: that Georgia is far too unstable to join Nato, and that they alone can determine the future of the former Soviet space.

But not quite:

They are right that neither the US alone, nor the Nato allies, would dream of intervening in a military confrontation. But Georgia is only unstable because of Russian policies. Encouraging secessionists sends a terrible signal to others inside Russia, especially in the rebellious north Caucasus. Moscow’s policy may be macho, but in the long run it will be utterly self-defeating.

Really?

How long is long?

And is Moscow sending a signal that 'encourages Caucasus secessionists'?

Or is it sending a signal that it means to keep a tight political and/or psychological grip on as much of the former Soviet Union as it can grasp - and that US/NATO had better back off?

Imagine a nice piece of land where under the law anyone can walk freely. Someone brings on to it a few big snapping dogs and lets them roam there.

The law has not changed - but if nothing happens to get the dogs removed or contained, the inclination of many people in fact to go for a stroll may well diminish.

If that situation becomes the norm, the owner of the dogs may feel that that land is now his for all effective purposes.

And he did not even have to buy it.

Memo to the Bosnia Desk: The North Caucasus area is like the Balkans but without the sense of ethnic harmony and self-restraint which has always prevailed in much of former Yugoslavia. Read Robert Kagan.

War criminals are war criminals only when they are convicted of war crimes.

Until then they are 'war crimes indictees', 'people suspected/charged with war crimes' or some such neutral phrase.

Why?

Because it is true.

And because it is unwise to give such people any excuse to claim that they have been 'condemned in advance' and so can not get a fair trial even at an International Tribunal.

So here we quickly see Radovan Karadzic insisting that he can not expect a fair trial because the sustained Balkan and international media witch-hunts against him.

He would say that, wouldn't he?

Yes. But let's not pass him high calibre ammo to make it sound more credible.

Even then, it is one thing media pundits or his political enemies claiming that Karadzic is a war criminal. The court can loftily tune out from such background noise.

Much worse when a Minister from a European government which has actively supported ICTY says in so many words on a Government website that Karadzic "has blood on his hands ...  He organised the murder of thousands of innocent people in a vile campaign of ethnic cleansing."

Luckily his Boss got it right.

Via Brian Barder, this really good - and meaty - assessment of the current plight of Kosovo by Jeremy Harding.

It in fact headlines the Kosovo situation, but really it is about the Limits of Diplomacy - how far can countries on their own or in teams act deliberately (a) to change things and (b) for the better?

A couple of my own speeches have attempted to tackle this Limit from different Balkan angles. But the arguments apply just as well to 'assistance' for Africa, or intervention in Iraq, or the Korean War or whichever example you choose.

The awesome fact about Kosovo is that many billions of UN dollars and EU Euros have been poured into this tiny territory not much bigger than North Yorkshire.

And the results? According to Jeremy Harding, not good:

If intervention was supposed to bring about development, which optimists see as a prelude to civility, it has not been a success. The most startling features of Kosovo, now that the cleansing of the Serbian minority is on hold, are the poverty of the province – for Albanians and Serbs alike – and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in.

Despite the creation of a small millionaire class, 45 per cent of its inhabitants are below the poverty level (unable to meet basic needs). Around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day ... Earlier this year, the British government put infant mortality in Kosovo at ‘35 to 49 deaths per thousand live births’ – at least twice as high as the rest of Serbia and greater than that in Mexico or the Occupied Territories.

How much have we paid to get this outcome?

Much of the disappointment centres on the fact that UN expenditure, now in the order of £25 billion, was ill judged: too much spent on traineeships and seminars – ‘institution-building’, ‘capacity-building’, ‘technical assistance’ – not nearly enough on infrastructure.

Let's recall the wit and wisdom of Major General Gen Raul Cunha:

The situation here is not brilliant and we are a lot to blame. We, I mean the western international community. We have maybe invested here in the worst way and we were not very careful with the money. Each time I take a look at the numbers, I notice that 80% of the investment was made on consultancy and capacity building and, practically speaking, we didn’t build any capacities.

Commenting on Brian Barder's gloomy Kosovo analysis, another former British Ambassador Jeremy Varcoe argues for ... Even More:

I consider the EU now has a duty to orchestrate assistance on a sufficiently large scale to kick-start development and to try to rekindle a sense of hope for all the communities, not forgetting all the minority groups, in this limpingly independent state.

No.

No!

Let's try Much Less.

If we start reducing EU assistance to the level we have given eg to Serbia, we begin finally to compel the Kosovo population and its leaders to think long and hard about how they might use the modest resources of their bleak Balkan plateau to make something like an honest living in today's Europe.  

This will mean some painful political and other sacrifices. Not least a stand by the mass of the population against the violence and corruption presided over by a few powerful Albanian clans. And adopting a much more realistic attitude to how they need to cooperate with their neighbours.

There is only one thing worse than being abandoned by the International Community.

Being rescued by the International Comunity.

An interesting pair of Ambassadorial letters to newspapers have appeared in recent days.

First, HM Ambassador in Poland Ric Todd wrote in July to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita about the death in a plane accident in 1943 in Gibraltar of General Sikorski.

Various Poles continue to insist that this death was suspicious, with one latest theory being that the conniving British persuaded some Poles to effect sabotage. Huge efforts have been made down the years to investigate this tragedy, but the fact that nothing suspicious is ever found makes those who have suspicions even more suspicious.

Ambassador Todd aims once again to put the record straight:

The facts are sad but simple. Plane travel was more dangerous then than it is now. People who travelled by air during the war took risks. General Sikorski was a brave man who took those risks to see his troops and died in a plane crash. The British Government has already released all documents in its archives relating to the circumstances of General Sikorski's death, including the report of the 1943 Royal Air Force Commission of Inquiry and 1969 Report of the investigation into the accident, carried out by the then Co-ordinator of Intelligence, Sir Dick White. 

 Nothing has been found in the Secret Intelligence files to link Kim Philby or anyone else with General Sikorski's death. There is nothing to indicate that his death was not accidental. All the documents are in the public domain and are accessible to all researchers in the National Archives in London. Following their declassification these documents have continually been open to the public.  Nothing is being withheld.

Separately the Polish Ambassador in London Barbara Tuge-Erecinska has written to the Times about an article about Poles in the UK by Giles Coren, which in his usual bruising style takes up the theme of Polish anti-semitism:

... I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.

That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore.

My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.

The Polish Ambassador replies:

... The issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified in his emotional text. During the Second World War Poland was the target of the Nazi Germany’s aggression, and the Poles themselves were treated as the race of sub-humans. Any sort of assistance given to Jews was punished by death. Such assistance required heroism, as it was not only one’s own life that was put at stake, but also the lives of one’s family. Still, it is the Poles that make up the most of those awarded Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.

I will not make detailed references to the remaining aggressive remarks on Poland, unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge. What I find most important is that the general public, as result of similar publications, should not lose an understanding of what the Holocaust was and who the perpetrators were.

In short, Nazi Germany decided to wipe out the whole nation. This was unprecedented in human history. Poland’s role in the tragedy of the Holocaust consists in the fact that the extermination of the Jewish people happened to take place on Polish territory. The author seems to have forgotten that Poles were not responsible for devising and perpetrating this hideous crime...

In each case sensible and dignified letters, giving the readers of the two newspapers concerned (and thereby in effect putting on the public record) a clear official view but with a personal touch.

The general professional issue for Ambassadors is this.

On any given day in the country where one is posted there will be all sorts of annoying, tendentious and even untrue/stupid things being said about one's own country. A few of them bubble up to a wide readership or otherwise gain some public prominence.

Even if there is no reason to think that these views are held or in any way supported by one's host government, the very fact that they circulate potentially affects the 'climate of opinion' in the bilateral relationship.

So, when to write something in response? And what to write?

No good answer.

Not writing has a cost. It may allow erroneous or malign opinions about one's own country to circulate indefinitely, perhaps in ever more lurid fashion.

But writing a letter for publication also has a cost. It somehow dignifies and gives weight to the views being expressed, maybe thereby drawing even more attention to them. And it invites all sorts of further weary sniping from people who have an axe to grind or who just want to poke back at Ambassadors.

The Polish Foreign Ministry has something of a policy to respond firmly every time anything appears in the foreign media implying that the Holocaust was a Polish invention (phrases like 'Polish death camps' prompt a fierce and often successful response).

The British FCO leaves it to an Ambassador's discretion when and how and if at all to respond to annoying local views on official British positions.

I wrote to various Bosnian/Serbian/Polish newspapers on different occasions. I suspect my letters made not a scrap of difference one way or the other.

In especially scandalous or ridiculous cases where material consistently wrong had been published by ostensibly serious papers to the point of suggesting a dishonest campaign against British positions, I went to meet the Editor to offer an official view as and when one was needed.

I used the line that of course they could write what they liked when it came to comment/interpretation, but could we at least try to agree to get the facts (eg of what a British Minister or I myself had actually said) accurate?

That worked in a sporadic way. But often the newspapers concerned just did not care.

All in all, writing an Ambassadorial letter to a newspaper is best done sparingly. But even if you know that it is unlikely to change many minds, you feel better after sending it.

Which is part of the story too.

A noteworthy sub-plot in the Kosovo situation is a plan by Serbia to ask the UN General Assembly to refer the issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an Advisory Opinion.

Serbia looks to be getting some handy noises of support for this manoeuvre from eg Russia and India.

And some Western voices are urging Serbia not to proceed.

See eg French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. And HM Ambassador in Belgrade Stephen Wordsworth. Wordsworth calls the Serbia initiative a mistake and a 'challenge to the EU', although he does note that not all EU member states themselves have recognised Kosovo's independence.

(Translation Note: in Serbian 'Wordsworth' comes out as 'Vordsvort', something like a distant cousin of Voldemort. But I am pretty sure they are not in fact related.)

Back at Pristina University in Kosovo, Professor Enver Hasani is not too worried by Serbia's ICJ idea:

... the goal of Serbia will not be achieved because the creation or destruction of states is a factual matter, not legal ... the initiative of Serbia could falter at the General Assembly of the UN since the odds are good for more recognition to be added to the list by then. But even if Serbia succeeds in getting the decision it wants, that decision could only have moral power and does not oblige anybody ...

These international legal tussles at the ICJ drag on interminably, but they are important symbolically and substantively.

There must be plenty of countries out there who find the Kosovo independence problem a real quandary, and who will be quite pleased if (a) nothing happens to force them to take a view one way or the other for years to come, and (b) the ICJ eventually pronounces for one side or the other (albeit on an Advisory Opinion basis) so they have the option to follow that lead in good conscience.

Plus if Serbia can get the Kosovo problem passed to the ICJ, it buys time and defuses the problem in Serbia's domestic politics for a few years.

A handy outcome for Serbia. Not so good for Kosovo?

A bit more on Karadzic, alas.

Dick Holbrooke says that there was No Deal struck by him with Karadzic under which if Karadzic left political life he would not be sent to the Hague Tribunal.

Karadzic in his first appearance at ICTY tried to get this claim established, but failed. It will return.

Meanwhile Mo Sacirbey (Sacirbegovic), the fomer Bosnia/Izetbegovic Foreign Minister, says that there was a Deal! He cites US diplomat Robert Frowick as the 'unimpeachable' source!

Sacirbey. That name rings a bell..?

Oh yes.

As far as I can tell, his legal campaign in the USA against extradition to Bosnia to face some grave corruption charges is still dragging on.

Surely the point is that even if Holbrooke gave any undertakings to Karadzic to 'go easy' on the ICTY process, they had to be worth little if anything in legal terms.

Once ICTY had issued its indictment on war crimes charges of this importance, it would have to be pursued to the end.

Even if politically and presentationally inconvenient for some people.

These celebrity revivals are sooooo exhausting.

First we have the long-awaited return to the stage of Joker Karadzic, although without his funny costume and disguise he was really not that scary.

And with him returns Batman Holbrooke, the distinguished former American diplomat whose considerable ego and ruthlessness helped bring peace to the Balkans.

Holbrooke grumbles that Karadzic was not arrested once the Bosnian war was over:

In an interview on CNN aired after the court hearing, Mr Holbrooke said: "I negotiated a very tough deal. He had to step down immediately from both his posts as president of the Serb part of Bosnia and as head of his party. And he did so.

"But when he disappeared, he put out a piece of disinformation that I had cut a deal with him - if he disappeared we wouldn't pursue him. That was a completely false statement."

Mr Holbrooke also said it was a grave mistake that Karadzic was not arrested after Nato forces deployed to Bosnia following the peace agreement.

"He should have been arrested. His green Mercedes was parked in its parking spot outside his office for six months after (the peace deal) each day. The Nato commander at the time refused to arrest him even though he had the authority to do so. It was a terrible mistake."

Agreed. A terrible and expensive mistake.

But by whom exactly?

The commander of the NATO Rapid Reaction Force in Bosnia in early 1996 was General Mike Walker (British).

Further up the NATO chain were two Americans, Admiral Leighton Smith as commander of IFOR and at the top of the NATO command chain General George Joulwan, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

Holbrooke in another interview blames Admiral Smith by name:

... Karadzic should have been captured in the first few months after [the signing of the] Dayton [Peace Accords], in early 1996. Even though everybody knew where he was, he was not brought to justice because the NATO commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, failed to exercise his authority. Smith said it was not a mission of his command, which was a terrible thing to do. Had Karadzic been arrested back then, the history of the Balkans would have been much easier during the last 13 years ...

Weedy NATO fails again!

Really?

The point of course is that the arrest of Karadzic required a top-level political decision, since the risks of the Dayton deal breaking up if it all went wrong had to be factored in.

Thus:

... the military warned of casualties and Serb retaliation if an operation to arrest him took place. They said they would carry it out only if ordered to do so directly by the President; thus if anything went wrong the blame would fall on the civilians who had insisted on the operation, especially on the President himself.

This was a heavy burden to lay on any President, particularly during an election year, and it was hardly surprising that no action was taken to mount, or even plan, an operation against Karadzic in 1996 or 1997 (sic).

A 'heavy burden'?

Or is taking a tough strategic decision exactly what a President is paid to do?

Who wrote that politically disobliging passage anyway? No fan of the then US President Clinton, obviously!

The Riddler? 

Radovan Karadzic appears before the Hague Tribunal today.

Kurir (a Belgrade newspaper with pronounced populist tendencies) quotes his lawyer as saying that Karadzic will not accept the start of ICTY proceedings until his laptop and 50 disks are returned to him. These items containing all the elements of his defence and evidence of his innocence of all charges were (says his lawyer) seized by the Serbian internal security police when they arrested him and he was not given the proper receipt.

50 disks of poetry and psychic healing remedies to plough through.

Should not take the Serb authorities and MI6/CIA too long?

Peter Preston gives a rather overwritten analysis of Serbia and its prospects for joining the EU - see eg the obscure Paul Anka reference.

Why, he asks, is the EU mumbling about bringing the former Yugoslavia space (plus Albania) into its ranks?

Partly because the EU mumbles about everything.

Partly because countries like France plan to hold EU Widening hostage to get more EU Deepening (but on French terms, bien sur)

Also because there must be a school of thought out there that the former Yugoslavia should have joined nicely in the 1990s and had one vote - is this all an insane plot by the Balkanites to get themselves six or seven votes?

The arrest of Karadzic prompts another thought.

What if Tadic's Serbia has had a Clever Idea? To hand over all those war criminals, dash for EU standards and join the EU as a polite, penitent, respectable modern country. Even now Serbia is probably better run than some new EU member states one can think of. 

Serbia will believe with good reason there is no prospect of Kosovo joining the EU at that speed - its insititutional base is too weak.

And the point is this.

Once Serbia joins the EU it will be able to Define Terms for Kosovo, just as tiny Cyprus defines terms for Turkey.

Discuss.

A familar argument heard against the the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords in Sarajevo is that in setting up a two Entity structure for post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina they 'legitimized genocide', namely by accepting Republika Srpska as one of the two Entities (the other being called, somewhat confusingly, the 'Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina').

Hence the arrest and expected conviction of Karadzic are being presented by some Bosniak leaders as a handy step towards ending the results of his actions, namely terminating Republika Srpska itself:

"Justice is not complete until we erase the genocide project that is still alive today. Radovan Karadzic has been arrested, Slobodan Milosevic is dead, but their project Republika Srpska still exists,” said Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniac member of the state’s rotating presidency.

The basic problem with this argument is that the Bosniac leadership themselves played a large part in setting up RS.

In 1994 the Americans were fed up with the spectacle of Muslims/Bosniacs fighting Croats rather than uniting to fight Serbs, so they leant hard on the Muslim/Bosniac and Croat leaderships to join forces. This took the form of the strangely named 'Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina', covering territory the two sides' forces controlled.

This formation was given constitutional status at the Dayton Peace talks, but it took almost a year to set it up formally thereafter.

The very basic point is that this was a sort of unique diplomatic Category Mistake.

Why?

Simple. Because by setting up the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina on what was effectively an ethnic basis (ie a space controlled by and for Muslims/Bosniacs and Croats), the Americans (egged on by the Germans) basically gave the Serbs the core of what they wanted, ie something not that.

In other words, if the whole point of Bosnian Serb nationalism and Karadzicism was for the Serbs to be 'separate', the clumsy creation of the 'Muslim/Croat Federation' to solve a short-term military problem achieved precisely that political goal for them!

This 'ethnic' nomenclature lives on years later, despite heroic attempts in Bosnia to proclaim each Entity substantively multi-ethnic and to hack away at 'divisive' symbols and institutions.

Is it surprising that the Bosnian Serbs in fact quite like this deal imposed on them by the International Community and cling tenaciously to it?

Update: Here is Haris Silajdzic pressing these arguments . He feebly tries to get round the point made above by saying that the Bosniacs were forced to sign Dayton "at gunpoint". This is just not good enough.

Haris has a point when he advocates a 'Bosnia of the economic regions', each region defined non-ethnically. The trouble with that is that it of course suits the largest ethnic community, viz the Bosniacs, as they will tend to do best from it. And the Serbs/Croats do not trust them.

I suspect that few readers of this Blog have ever heard of Jovan Divjak.

Here he is.

The point being that while we think about Karadzic and Mladic and all the horrors they helped create, let's remember one true Bosnian, born as a Serb in Belgrade, who fought against them in favour of a truly democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Divjak's case is all the more striking as he was a senior officer in the Yugoslav Army - for him to abandon the 'Belgrade' cause and join the Bosnia cause as a soldier was all the more remarkable.

In fact he was so remarkable in being an honest man that the Izetbegovic Bosniak-Muslim elite of course did not trust him, and sidelined him after the conflict ended.

Had they been truly interested in creating a modern pluralist Bosnia he would have been a central iconic figure. Instead they opted for a policy of No Ethnic Disarmament for 50 Years.

Once everything is defined primarily in such strategic immutable 'ethnic' terms, someone honest and independent who does not fit (or choose to fit) tidly into one or other Category has few chances to make a difference.

And these people tend to be just what is needed to build a reasonable shared future in a bitterly divided society.

Zdravo, Jovane

Are international tribunals for war crimes suspects a Good Idea?

And if so, are they being Done Well?

If not, does that mean that the Idea is in fact not so Good?

Two excellent pieces on these themes: one by John Lloyd, the other by Bill Montgomery.

It goes without saying that there are going to be shortcomings in any process of this sort, especially if the accused is bent on turning the whole affair into a circus as the best way of confusing the issues and trying to 'relativise' his/her guilt.

To this end Vojislav Seselj is putting in a powerful performance (NB a rare example of courtroom transcripts being Not Suitable for Work?).

Likewise any such Tribunal needs to rely on certain cooperative countries' police/military forces to arrest and hand over suspects, and to provide hard evidence perhaps from Top Secret sources.

This means that those countries inevitably start to have some influence over the timing of arrests and even the issue of indictments. Political and other calculations creep in. "You help us - we help you."

So if Milosevic had to be indicted, surely Croatia's President Tudjman who also played his part in some ghastly events should be too? Indeed. 

Yet somehow the indictment with his name on it was never quite issued. 

Did some governments not want that to happen and suggest that ICTY delay matters as Tudjman was ill? Tudjman generously solved the problem by dying. Unindicted - his reputation undeservedly intact to that extent at least.

Similarly Bosnia President Izetbegovic was under ICTY investigation when he died in 2003, when investigations were dropped. Was it really not clear by 2003 (ie almost a decade after the Bosnia conflict) that Izetbegovic too should face some war crimes indictments? Why was it all dragging on in this way?

Lloyd's article includes the following quote from a senior disillusioned British observer of ICTY:

And I saw that the UN, which is supposed to supervise, has no moral compass. It enjoins even-handedness, on ethnic grounds, not on grounds of justice.

Maybe in the circumstances of what happened in former Yugoslavia, which most people would see as some sort of ethnic civil war, this sort of thing is not only inevitable but desirable? If justice is to be seen to be done - most importantly among the communities involved in the fighting - all the issues need a fair objective airing?

NB All of which is not - of course - to say that each leader was "equally guilty".

One thing is for sure. If ICTY and other such Tribunals can not find a way to deal with intimidation of witnesses as happened in the case of indicted Kosovo leader Haradinaj, the process might as well not continue.

To carry on and reach unsatisfactory verdicts when this is going on simply shows weakness, and tells ICTY indictees and their supporters that the worse they behave, the better the outcome - for them.

Exactly the opposite of the message ICTY was set up to send?    

In Sudan too the authority of UN-led international processes is now being directly challenged.

Will ICC keep its nerve and follow through by indicting President al-Bashir?

Too much Karadzic can be wearing, but the pieces at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on the man and his arrest are excellent, especially this one:

In the end, Karadzic miscalculated. His dream of uniting all Serbs in a single state failed, and now they are scattered across five independent countries. His closest associates ended up in The Hague or as fugitives in hiding. Slowly but surely, his fellow Serbs are moving away from his radical nationalist ideology.

All eyes should be on Serbia now. It will be instructive to see how the Serbian leadership handles the situation now that Karadzic has been arrested. How many people will come out to protest? ...

... My feeling is that the reaction will demonstrate that Karadzic is of little importance to them anymore. Life has moved on.

Chandler Rosenberger at National Review Online takes a big picture look at US Balkan policy over the past decade and more.

I might disagree with him at various points. He offers a rather US-centric view.

But he does bring out well that while thematic, sustained and firm approaches to dealing with Bad Leaders have their ups and downs, they can eventually bring positive results.

The problem for diplomats is that they often see the realities of what can be achieved pretty well. It is politicians who do not like hitting the nasty bumps along the road, even when the road is bumpy and one has to go down it to get anywhere.

Hitting bumps on that sort of road is a sign of success, not a sign of failure.

Bottom Line for the former Yugoslavia: no-one else out here really cares what your problems are, but we do expect you to solve them nicely, which means you rooting out the worst disruptive idiots and gangsters who claim to be your leaders.

Got that yet? 

See the words of wisdom of Radovan Karadzic aka Dr Dabic - at his site! (The Ever Increasing Need for Alternative Viewpoints in the Modern World)

Try this one:

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

Via Tim Worstall and Tom Paine.

Can this be real, or is it a fast assembled Serbian spoof?

Who cares?

As I always say, some things are so stupid they can't be true. Others are so stupid they must be true.

What a great place the Balkans is/are.

The steady insight of Lord Owen, with the deafening noise emitted by Simon Jenkins.

Good piece in the Independent too.

But they spoil it by adding a list of War criminals still at large.

These people are not war criminals. They are war crimes suspects or indictees, unless and until they have been tried in their absence and convicted.

Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. Important!

News that the Arabic word for God has been found miraculously enscribed on a piece of meat in Nigeria alas does not impress me.

When I was in Serbia the erudite paper Twilight Zone carried a picture of the image of Milosevic which had been found on a piece of toast.

And these days people are impatient for miracles.

So, praise the Lord, you can make your own.

When Milosevic was abruptly transferred to the Hague Tribunal in June 2001 I dusted off my barristerial wig and sent a lively telegram to London from Belgrade on the theme "Is Milosevic Innocent?".

My point was that linking Milosevic to the calamitous events in Bosnia and other non-Serbia parts of former Yugoslavia in a way capable of withstanding rigorous legal scrutiny would not be easy.

There probably would not be clear documentary or other physical proof linking him as a Serbia leader directly to proven atrocities in Bosnia/Croatia. 

So to convict him at ICTY it would have to be proved beyond doubt that in some less explicit way he was 'responsible' for them - maybe he ordered lesser actions which, given the obvious circumstances, had to lead to such atrocities elsewhere, or at least he did not do all he might have done to stop them.

Could be ... Tricky. 

Thus was it likely that Milosevic was directly responsible for the horrendous Srebrenica massacre? On the face of it, no - why would he have wanted something like this to happen when he knew it would provoke a huge international outcry against the Serb cause generally?

Will Karadzic's guilt be easier to establish?

Probably yes.

Or not. 

He (unlike Milosevic) was (a) an openly influential figure in Bosnian Serb ranks and (b) actually in Bosnia as the conflict raged, meeting the media and genially denying any wrong doing.

His operational responsibility over the Bosnian Serb forces was self-evidently higher, as was his operational leadership capacity to influence political events for the better - hence also higher his legal/moral responsibility for horrors occurring when (and because?) he did not do so.

That said, for those very reasons of proximity he can (unlike Milosevic) attempt at his trial to drum up all sorts of arguments that for every given Bosnian Serb alleged war-crime he was acting closely in one way or the other with the 'international community' on the ground, in its various bungled efforts to bring peace to Bosnia.

And (unlike Milosevic) he can point in detail to Bosniac/Muslim and Croat military and political decisions which (he might say) forced the Serbs into justifiable self-defence measures.

Or he might dwell on the strange ways in which heavy weaponry found its way to the Bosniacs/Muslims during the conflict despite an international arms embargo, with various Western powers not exactly doing much to stop this.

He might force the Tribunal to look hard at the political and moral events leading to the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia, where the Izetbegovic Muslim tendency arguably played a highly irresponsible role. If someone else recklessly starts a fire, is your legal responsibility somehow diminished if you behave badly in the ensuing panic?

And/or he could try to claim - and be able to show - that at different points senior international negotiators made him promises or otherwise deliberately and knowingly influenced his calculations in a way which is now highly embarrassing in some circles. 

In short, he has lots of options for creating a circus, with all this grimly complex history being pored over for years in excruciating detail. There will be no shortage of money for top-end legal defence teams, if he wants them. 

Or is there another option - that he is just worn out by it all, and plans quietly to plead guilty to all charges?

Somehow I doubt it. 

Finally. Radovan Karadzic the former Green activist has been arrested, in Belgrade.

I never met him. By the time I reached Sarajevo in mid-1996 he was already lying low, although not that low. NATO troops were in effect instructed not to look for him or other war crimes suspects, but to arrest them only if they encountered him "in the course of their normal duties".

This seemed to be interpreted to mean that if they knocked him down while driving to and fro between Sarajevo and Pale that might be a good time to detain him, but not otherwise.

The media this morning are linking him to the Srebrenica massacre in Eastern Bosnia, as that is the one most people have heard of. But the main responsibility for that lies rather with General Mladic - still on the run but now having a lot to think about. Suicide runs in his family...

Karadzic looks to have been a second-rate romantic who became improbably entangled in Bosnian nationalist politics and then was carried away in his own self-importance once the conflict really started. He has to shoulder responsibility for many of the ghastly events occurring during the siege of Sarajevo and elesewhere in Bosnia in the first part of the 1990s. He consistently used his political authority to play games and waste lives. 

In 1997 as HM Ambassador in Sarajevo I quietly suggested to London that I try secretly to meet Karadzic with a view to persuading him to surrender - I would have been the first senior international Serbian speaker he would have met. I reckoned that I could find a way to meet him - at that point he had not gone underground completely.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook liked the idea, but allowed himself to be bamboozled by FCO tweebling and consulted Madeleine Albright, who said No.

So I held back. And it took eleven expensive and frustrating years to get him.

If the Tadic Serbs are smart they will hand him over to ICTY v quickly.

Then should follow a very long and involved (and maybe for some in the West embarrassing) legal process at the end of which he'll be convicted and receive a massive sentence.

Good. 

I was a great fan of the Balkan 'yellow press' in all its exotic glory.

Presumably these strange papers and magazines have a non-trivial readership otherwise they would not be published in such profusion. So as Ambassador wanting to develop insight into the thinkings of society as a whole, I felt it well worth swinging through them now and again.

My favourite was Twilight Zone (Zona Sumraka). It looks to have become a bit more suburban of late, being reincarnated as Magic Zone. In Belgrade a few years ago it broke an amazing number of world scoops, which alas the planet heeded not.

Remember the terrifying Calcutta Monkey-Man? 

Twilight Zone discovered that NATO special forces had secretly kidnapped this evil creature and used latest DNA technology to clone it, before bringing it to Kosovo. But it had escaped and was feasting on Albanians! 

Not to forget the genetically mutated beetles created by NATO bombings of Serbia, poised to start breeding in your garden.

Or Tutankhamun's mysterious Ring of Power which caused havoc in the wrong hands. It had been discovered by a malign German scientist and brought to New York, prompting the 9/11 disaster, and after various detours causing earthquakes/plagues/floods was heading for ... Mitrovica!

Unambiguously excellent.

There is also a political yellow press, which hopes society stays cynical and stupid. These publications take a tit-bit of gossip from the editor's cousin working in the police and explode it out of all proportion: All politicians are corrupt! All diplomats are spies! Albanians are dangerous!

Yet these papers too are not without interest, and operate on many levels.

A current sophisticated example is Kurir - see this world scoop of a former Kostunica adviser meeting a former US Ambassador. Sinister indeed.

A further recent scoop is how the British and US intelligence services conspired together to plan to assassinate Serbian PM Kostunica in Sarajevo back in 2002. The evidence is the purported transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation in a Belgrade restaurant between two UK and US diplomats.

Come on, Kurir.

You know that when the waiters in these places change the dirty salt and pepper pots for clean ones, we diplomats always speak louder and more clearly into the new microphones and make up silly stories.

Kurir of course do know this, so they slip in some clever little signals to show the real experts that the whole thing is a spoof, like deliberately confusing 'Anthony' for 'Andrew' within the same sentence. Elegantly done.

This is an elegant analysis from my former US Ambassadorial colleague in Belgrade Bill Montgomery about the current state of mind of Republika Srpska, the 'Serb' Entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bill argues that RS led by Prime Minister Dodik is pursuing a Montenegrin-style war of attrition aimed at making an eventual divorce of RS away from the rest of Bosnia seem inevitable and maybe even desirable.

Here's something I wrote the other day:

There were in principle three ‘balanced’ ways to end the war in Bosnia:

• One Country, Three Peoples, One Political Space:  no subdivisions on an ethnic basis, one person one vote, strong institutionalised arrangements to protect equality and minority rights
• One Country, Three Peoples, Three Entities:  give each of the three rival ethnic communities (Bosniac/Muslim, Serb, Croat) some sort of territorial reassurance within an overall single confederal framework.
• One Country, Three Peoples, Many Entities:  a Swiss-style canton system comprising a single polity, aiming to diffuse ethnic conflict. 

The solution which made no philosophical sense was chosen at the Dayton Peace Conference in 1995: One Country, Three Peoples, Two Entities.  It emerged from a previous phase of the 1990s’ conflict when the Americans and Germans brought great pressure to bear on the Bosniacs/Muslims and Croats to stop fighting each other and join forces against the Serbs.

Under this settlement the Bosniacs and Croats dominating one Entity (the Federation) got too little and typically disagree, creating unaffordable bureaucracy at all levels. The Serbs dominating the other Entity (Republika Srpska) got too much...

As Bill says:

Ironically, the Dayton Agreement itself provides the "weapons" to passively resist the establishment of a strong Bosnian state. On the one hand, it clearly gives the RS definite powers and authorities and the ability to frustrate the plans of the other ethnic groups.

On the other, it is a totally unworkable document whose dysfunctional nature reinforces the failure of the Bosnian state.

The Dayton BH Constitution is a classic piece of work for those interested in short-term v long-term policy outcomes.

Dick Holbrooke railroaded this through partly because he felt that only brutal bulldozer tactics would bring about a BH deal after so much mayhem and international disagreement. Also no doubt to give his boss President Clinton a significant international policy success.

But it was achieved at a price.

The Constitution features obvious 'internal' political and philosphical incoherence (well, obvious to me as a Balkan expert of sorts).

It was a deal signed only by the people who had made the problems (Milosevic/Tudjman/Izetbegovic) with no 'social democratic' voices allowed anywhere near. The people who had run the conflict were just not the people to build a new peace.

And because it was done in such a rush, no proper thought was given to exactly how it would be implemented on the ground. Hence the awful exodus a few months later of thousands of Serbs from Sarajevo, pushed by vengeful Bosniacs/Muslims and 'pulled' by the odious RS leadership who wanted the Serbs to be as separate as possible.

Bosnian Serb leader Krajisnik (later sent down by ICTY for war crimes) cynically but not altogether inaccurately used to tell me that Sarajevo was the "button holding the two sides of the Bosnian jacket together". The absence of this integrating human element in the country's capital is a big reason for Bosnia's continuing underperformance now.

There it is. Over a decade later these contradictions are slowly compounding up.

And we see from the examples of the Kosovo Albanians and Djukanovic's Montenegrins alike just how a steely sustained focus can bring results when there is uncertain international resolve.

Alas the Bosniac leadership have tended to make this difficult situation worse:

"The [Serb] nation may not be guilty, but it is responsible," Silajdzic started his response to the statement that one cannot blame all Serbs. And then he set off into a truly shocking speech about "differences between Bosniaks and Serbs" that boil down to the fact that "we" have not while "they" (Serbs, of course) have been raised as fascists and criminals; consequently this is not a first genocide of Bosniaks and everything must be done that it is the last...

It was immediately obvious (on everyone's faces, even Hadzifejzovic's in Sarajevo studio) that with those words and repeated emphasis on "criminal upbringing" [of Serbs] Silajdzic crossed some sort of invisible, but alarming line between what is permissible and what is not, regardless of political, national or other differences...

Tadic in Belgrade only had to make sure not to miss the opportunity. He asked, softly and without raising his voice: "Who will you make peace with if you reject all Serbs as criminals?"

Indeed.

The point being that having opened the Balkan Pandora's Box of Precedents, we can not be surprised when they fly all over the place, sometimes in directions we do not expect - or want.

The fantastic hopelessness of Craig Murray's Uzbek local staff colleague as described in the previous posting (she did not know whether guests were coming to the Ambassador's key dinner party, so she just guessed!) made me recall an episode back in Sarajevo.

I was down to meet a senior Russian colleague (and a friend from my earlier time in Moscow) from the High Representative's office for dinner on a Monday. I had been Zagreb for the preceding weekend to visit my family who were living there as Sarajevo was deemed too unsafe for young children. But the military plane bringing me back could not fly, so I had to cancel the dinner as I could not get to Sarajevo in time.

I telephoned the Embassy and asked my Bosnian colleague to get on to the Russian's office and let him know with my apologies that I could not make dinner. When I finally returned to Sarajevo I checked with her that she had done this. "Yes."

A couple of weeks later I was contacted by my Russian friend: "I have been waiting for your apology. I came to your flat for dinner, and then to the Embassy, where I found that you were not in Sarajevo. I am surprised and disappointed at your behaviour."

Whaaaaat?

It turned out:

(a) that she had not called the Russian's office to cancel the dinner

(b) that she had lied to my face when she said that she had done so

(c) that she knew that he had come to the Embassy looking for me and had not told me on my return, thereby leaving me in an even worse position vis-a-vis my colleague.

I called her in and gave her the Mother of All Final Warnings.

She usually worked hard and well, but if she could not operate to sensible honest professional standards, she would have to leave the Embassy. She now should leave the office, go home, and come back when she had considerd whether she was up to the job.

She departed, returning in due course. But she never recovered her earlier bounce.

Some tendon in the strong relationship between us had been cut; it never properly healed.

Then I wrote a grovelling letter of apology to my Russian friend, and we finally got round to having that dinner.

He of course graciously forgave me for this British Embassy protocol fiasco.

And moved on to much greater things.

Every now and again one sees a Balkan story of truly excellently bewildering folly.

Take this one:

The latest portion of benefits for war veterans paid on May 12 has left the two Bosnian entities with a budget crisis, FBiH Finance Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda said at a press conference on May 13. Out of the required 50 million Euro currently there is only 7.5 million Euro left in the budget of the Federation of BiH.

Bevanda advised a restructuring of the budget. A few weeks back, he warned that BiH is facing bankruptcy by this September, due to the excessive spending on social benefits for mainly Bosnian war veterans and invalids.

And indeed, a few weeks later:

24 June 2008 Sarajevo: Just 434 Konvertible Marks (€221) remains in the budget of Bosnia’s bigger Federation entity as a result of excessive public spending, a Sarajevo daily reports.

This difficult financial situation may result in major social unrest and have significant political consequences ahead of October’s local elections, reports Dnevni Avaz .

Despite repeated warnings by local and international financial experts, the Federation government has kept increasing public spending, including the recent purchase of a motor boat for its exclusive vacation resort in the town of Trpanj on the Croatian peninsula of Peljesac, the paper claimed.

So now in July: