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.

The punditry gushes forth re Tony Blair and his memoirs.

Here on the Right is Simon Heffer, quiet Ayn Rand fan and very conservative in all respects, liking Mr Blair (whom he knows) but being baffled by the poor writing:

It appears to be a book written in tune with all the most unpleasant and cynical marketing techniques of modern publishing. Its tenor is often pure Sylvie Krin. The gossip in it will amuse those who like such things – whether about Mr Blair's liking a drink, his lusts for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Queen's being "haughty" (a somewhat off-colour observation for her former first minister to make, we should reflect) – but is hardly becoming of an elder statesman.

How much this is the result of an instruction from his publishers to provide something that will make money, and how much it is the product of Mr Blair's own personality, one cannot be sure.

And on the Left, Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman who looks with some scorn at the Blair record on Iraq:

Six of the country's top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic.

Cambridge University's George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

... No, I just think you're being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.

One of the odd arguments against the Blair policy on Iraq is that it blames the West in general and Bush/Blair in particular for all the suffering caused by UN sanctions against Saddam's Iraq before the invasion. The Hasan piece drones on in this sense:

No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of "genocide".

As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war".

What is it with Leftists? They say they want multilateralism and non-violent pressure against unjust regimes which brutalise international law and attack their neighbours. In this case they got exactly that.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and the planet more or less united around the proposition that he should be thrown off the premises. With bizarre restraint the first President Bush did not used the US presence in Iraq after Saddam's defeat to topple him.

Which meant that other measures were then needed to keep this madman under control. Including sanctions.

The whole point of sanctions is that they have bad effects. Admittedly the broader the sanctions, the worse the effects on ordinary people and the erosion of middle-class social stability. That, presumably, is again an intended market signal to the masses concerned to rise up and overthrow the regime provoking negative international reaction which is damaging their interests.

In practice odious regimes do well from sanctions and often even manage to blame the sanctioneers for the negative results, as happened in the Iraq case.

The core point is that if ordinary Iraqis suffered pain and deprivation from the sanctions regime, there was a simple answer.

Saddam could have agreed to step down to end the suffering of Iraq and its people, maybe negotiating some sort of immunity guarantees and/or safe passage to a state ready to host him. The international community thereupon could and would have helped Iraq supervise free and fair elections and so bring about a generously supported transition to reasonable modern pluralism.

That approach would have avoided all the misery and violence which happened.

That such misery and violence did in fact happen was squarely attributable not to Bush and Blair but to Saddam's and his national socialist regime's greedy desire to cling to power, no matter what.

Thus Leftish/progressive moaning about Blair's policy on this point at least is trivially dishonest, if not wicked propaganda.

That said, I don't think I'll be buying this book. Mawkishly written, plus the fact that Blair left Brown and so many other misfits in key positions for so long showed that, basically, he put his wretched party's interests (and his own) ahead of those of the UK. I have paid enough for his selfishness already.

Christopher Myers, the newly appointed 'Special Adviser' to Foreign Secretary William Hague, has resigned amidst a gush of crass innuendo from Guido and others re a possible homosexual relationship between Hague and Myers. 

Willaim Hague's statement on the issue has dignity and barely concealed anger - one of the most remarkable (and frank) things ever said by any Foreign Minister anywhere?

Iain Dale is upset, somehow assuming that this a bleak day for blogging and that 'political blogging' as such is diminished by this episode:

For those who doubt it, they forget (probably conveniently) that I spoke out against the bloggers who accused Gordon Brown of having mental problems. I freely admit that I don't get it right all the time, but when I get it wrong big time I try to hold my hands up and apologise.

I hope that happens in this case. The fact that Guido Fawkes has printed the Hague statement with no added comment indicates a growing realisation (I hope) that he called this one wrong.

I am afraid that all of us who blog have been sullied by this experience, even though only one blog was making the insinuations. I said on Radio 4's PM that there was part of me tonight that is ashamed to call myself a political blogger this evening, and I meant it. That may sound a bit holier than thou, but it is how I feel.

A somewhat self-absorbed and self-indulgent view? Why should he think that 'all of us who blog' have been sullied by this experience?

I don't.

Do journalists for serious newspapers feel 'sullied' by the ravings of tabloids? No.

None of this would have happened had Mr Myers not been given a unique and influentual role at the heart of UK foreign policy work. William Hague in his statement defended the appointment of Mr Myers thus:

Christopher Myers has demonstrated commitment and political talent over the last eighteen months. He is easily qualified for the job he holds.

The fact remains that there is not a whisker of evident benefit coming to taxpayers from this appointment. Even if (as some have wondered) Mr Myers is qualified for the job of an FCO Special Adviser, the job (in my view) should not exist in the first place at a time of such a squeeze on public finances.

Guido looks to have blown it on this one, but he is merely the latest and noisiest exponent of a fine tradition of political muckrakers.

See eg this from Zoe Archer, another story of people supposedly sharing a room:

... 18th century scandal rags gave readers plenty of outrageous behavior. Consider, for example Mrs. Crackenthorpe reporting on:

...Madam Slender-sense, who is lately fallen ill of a swelling she receiv'd by a slip the last ball night. Some are so rude as to say that Beau Garsoon, the French dancing master, was the occasion of it; and Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since.

There was even a European angle:

... the French exile libellistes who flocked to London to publish scandalous or sexually salacious pamphlets in the hope of extorting lavish suppression fees. These ‘smut-mongering’ pamphleteers have become prominent figures in the recent historiography of the French revolution, with many historians contending that their ‘desacralizing’ and frequently pornographic publications sapped the foundations of the monarchy.

Not a bleak day for anything.

Just the unruly and sometimes downright unpleasant din of our hard-won freedom to lambast our leaders, hard at work.

Update: Guido apparently has replied himself on Iain's blog. Scroll down through the comments:

If ever there was a time for our leaders not only to behave with propriety, but to be seem to behave with propriety, this is it. It is disappointing to watch you climb on a moral high horse and go in the wrong direction...

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?  

The Daily Telegraph reports that the new EU Ambassador In Washington Joao Vale de Almeida is bent on elbowing out of the way such diplomatic minnows as HM Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald:

Mr Vale de Almeida has stressed to Washington officials and politicians that under the EU's' Lisbon Treaty, he has more power than his predecessors. "I'm the first new type of ambassador for the European Union anywhere in the world," he said. "I'm supposed to have a wider mandate than my predecessors."

Mr Vale de Almeida said: "Our delegations now cover a wide spectrum of issues well beyond the economic dimension, trade dimension and regulatory dimension, to cover all policies in the union, including foreign policy and security policy...

In a comment that has come to symbolise the American view of the EU, Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, is once said to asked: "When I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?"

In a response to that question, Mr Vale de Almeida declared: "In this area code, you call me." The ambassador insisted that he did not wish to "impose myself" on member states' ambassadors, who will continue to oversee "bilateral matters." But he declared: "Where we have a common position, I am the one leading the show."

Where to start?

Let's start here, with Mr Vale de Almeida's appointment to this top job. A controversial choice.

His mainstream diplomatic and sharp-end overseas credentials? Nil, other than an important job running Commission Chairman Barroso's office in Brussels, reached via the giddy heights of the EU's policies on something called Youth:

Youth, Society, Communication. Particular responsibility for Youth policies and programmes, including White Paper on future of Youth Policy in Europe and Open Method of Coordination on Youth

So when Hillary Clinton picks up the telephone at 0300 hours to ask the new EU Ambassador about a sudden crisis, she is not likely to get an informed and operationally nimble response (unless of course the issue involves Coordinating EU Youth, in which case she has hit the jackpot).

Surely there's more to it than this? As Mr Vale de Almeida himself says, where the EU has a Common Position he leads the show.

But therefore what exactly?

Common Positions tend to be limp, unreadable texts drawn up from lowest common denominator drafting exercises expressing such agreement as might be manageable as between 27 countries.

See eg this one on Cuba which has floated listlessly, dead in the water since 1996(!). The point being that there is no consensus to say anything simple and reasonable such as "The EU calls on the Cuban leadership to hold free and fair elections".

On perhaps the one basic issue where the USA might expect the EU to take a robust and united view, namely which countries in Europe exist, there is no Common Position: various EU member states do not recognise Kosovo.

In other words, if there is a Common Position it probably means that the subject is operationally unimportant or at least politically routine, even if various and not unworthy EU spending activities will flow therefrom.

Moreover, the EU Ambassador in Washington has a tough job in maintaining even that Position. He dare not stray far if at all from it, lest he annoy one or other member state who approved that Position and only that Position.

This means that if Hillary asks him what direction EU policy is likely to take if (say) things get worse in N Korea, he'll have no mandate to have a sensible conversation with her. Because the direction of said EU policy - if there is to be one going beyond mere declaratory noises - will be shaped mainly by the EU Bigs (London, Berlin, Paris and so on) ,as always. As he will have to tell her if she rudely asks.

In other words, the EU has indeed given Washington a single telephone number to call.

But all Washinghton really gets is a telephone answering service with a complicated digitalised menu leading to monotonous readings of assorted Common Positions which the USA already has in its files.

For a sensible conversation looking at a wide range of options including top-level handling of the N Korea portfolio at the UN in New York, here's the place they need to call.

Here's an interesting one.

The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is homosexual. He has decided not to take his partner with him on official visits to countries where homosexuality is a prosecutable crime.

His somewhat obscure argument as quoted in the excellent Spiegel Online:

We want to promote the concept of tolerance in the world ...

But we also don't want to achieve the opposite by behaving imprudently. At the same time it is important that we live according to our own measures of tolerance and that we do not adopt the sometimes less tolerant measures of others.

This position prompts an energetic rant from one Henryk Broder:

One doesn't have to read his remark twice to understand what it signifies: Tolerance is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't push our luck. This is more than the usual hot air from a politician. Westerwelle's words are an example of moral hara-kiri in slow motion, and they're a disgrace for Germany...

When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene?

Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to spell and more or less resembling how the name was pronounced in English. Thus we preferred Kirgistan to Kyrgyzstan or even Kyrgystan when describing the territory known as the Kyrgyz Republic (Кыргыз Республикасы).

The FCO Department dealing with Geographical Names were aghast and launched a fierce rearguard action, arguing that the 'correct' way to deal with such problems was to use the formal standards for transliterating (or whatever the word is) the original linguistic form into English. Thus here the (to us) somewhat strangled Russian ы vowel is best represented with a y, not an i.

Tricky. To my ear the ы sounds most like the ur sound in murder, or indeed the ir sound as in fir-cone.

This issue also comes round in Polish. Thus the muted uh sound represented by the y in Kaczynski - in Polish the i vowel is prounced quite strongly as a short ee (as in me).

The brave policy officers lost out to the holders of the purist flame, so now we have Kyrgystan on the FCO website.

This looks like a feeble compromise, to avoid scaring English-speakers by removing a z. There is a definite z sound in the local languages - the people there are Kyrgyz - so if anything it ought to be Kyrgyzstan.

There is no logic to any of this. If there were, we would not call Deutschland 'Germany'. Partly it's fashion and partly some sort of linguistic political correctness: once upon a time we had Peking, then we were told that it was Beijing. The Chinese started to get peeved that we were not using the name of their capital correctly, and said so.

Paree anyone?

The only issue in all this of course is the eternal one. Who decides?

Take the FCO. It had and for all I know still has a team of people who are deemed to be the Deciders, and from whom the FCO and the rest of Whitehall and thereby much of the UK media and schools take a lead. This echoes an earlier tradition when decisions of this sort were issued by an unchallenged authority.

But these days things are different. Authorities are challenged. Not only governments make maps. People themselves do en masse, using Google and other technologies.

Which is in part why Google has different names for different places, depending upon where you make the search.

Geography and borders - like everything else these days, becoming more ... elusive?

As usual there are pros and cons:

Unpopular as it may be, such uncertainty has become a central dynamic of life on the Internet. The erosion of traditional authority is followed quickly by anxiety over its absence, from Google to Wikipedia to the lesser-known precincts of PetitionOnline—where millions of people direct their impassioned grievances not to any official arbiter but straight into the ether.

What results is an irony. The digital culture that encourages the inclusion of multiple names for a single feature on a map is the same digital culture that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Iranians to voice their discontent. The very medium incites nationalism, yet also frustrates it.

... What is Google? Is it a repository for all of our mutually exclusive claims, or is it a higher power to which we appeal? It cannot be both, and yet we seem to treat it as both. This tension may only heighten going forward.

“In a world where mapmaking is cheap and anyone can do it,” Goodchild says, “you would eventually expect things to become more and more local.” In such a future, either we will reconcile ourselves to the lack of a central arbiter, or the conflicts will be all over the map. 

Great article. Read it. Via Browser.

What was Kim Philby really up to when he started working for the Soviet Union?

Boris Volodarsky follows the complicated story:

Stalin had decided that one of the ways to solve the ‘Spanish problem’ would be to assassinate Franco. In 1937 Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, sent several operatives on a mission to murder the Caudillo.

Before the GRU officers started to move, the NKVD asked Maly in London to find an agent for a risky assignment in the rebel zone. Philby was chosen partly because he had expressed interest in Spain and had holidayed there with his wife in 1935. It was not concealed from Philby that his task would be to find a way to approach Franco and kill him...

Read on ...

Have you read this production of mine from 2008? An extract:

Recently I was a Harvard-sponsored seminar at which issues of international 'humanitarian intervention' and the Right to Protect were discussed.

I recalled seeing signs as one entered Harvard Square: Cambridge is a Domestic Violence-Free Zone.

I said that if you were walking down the street near Harvard and saw a man beating his wife/child/dog brutally with a stick in his front garden, you were morally and maybe even these days legally obligated to intervene to stop the violence.

Thus we long ago moved on from the idea that the 'sovereignty' of one's home was a shield behind which seriously illegal acts could proceed uninterrupted.

So if it is unacceptable to brutalise one person in one's own garden, why is it acceptable to brutalise millions of people in one's country without fear of being stopped?

Enter the Right to Protect (R2P), the idea (a) that states do have exclusive sovereignty over their own internal affairs but also (b) that that sovereignty is qualified: other members of the international communty may intervene to stop massive crimes against a population when that population's own government is either taking part in the mayhem - or is powerless or unwilling to stop it.

Sounds ok?

My piece analysing David Cameron's high-profile speeches in Turkey and India has attracted some attention, and various well-taken comments.

Part of the problem for a speechwriter for a top politician is to work out who the audience is, and craft the words accordingly.

Most speeches of any consequence by (say) a British Prime Minister overseas have several different audiences. They include:

• the people sitting there on the day, among whom may well be some local VIPs whose ears will be closely tuned to note certain policy nuances and inclusions/omissions of familiar diplomatic code-words
• the local media outlets (electronic and newspapers) for the in-country foreign audience
• the UK media - what is the headline you want them to carry?
• the international media: what headlines do you want to see in other countries who maybe follow closely UK policy and the policies of the country you're visiting?
• academics, think-tanks, chattering analytic classes - they'll pore over the text in slower time to see what if anything looks to be new/different and what may lie 'behind' any changes
• the PM's own political allies in his own party and its coalition partner - do some different policy emphases there need acknowledging/fudging?
• the PM's domestic opponents - what will the Opposition look to attack

In other words, it's all very well talking blithely about a speech needing 'key messages'. But getting exactly right different key messages to these different audiences is no easy job.

And let's not forget one other audience: history. How will this speech read in ten or fifty or one hundred years' time?

One other point about Key Messages. In the immortal words of Frank Luntz, It's not what you say - it's what they hear.

The speaker may think that the key messages in the speech are neatly turned for style and significant in policy terms. 

And they may well be. My point in that earlier piece was to suggest that they also might come across - be 'heard' by one or other of the various local audiences - as patronising or trite.

Getting that right is not about being good with words. It's about having a subtle, experienced understanding of what works and does not work for Indians, for Serbs, for Brazilians, for Malaysians and so on. Each community has (for better or worse) its own sense of what British Prime Ministers represent and how they should behave.

Hence the fact that many Bosnians felt insulted when PM John Major appeared in war-torn Sarajevo in a military jumper. That mode of dress may or may not have won some brownie points with TV viewers back in the UK. But it blew the whole visit presentationally in Bosnia. 

He was saying: I have come here to help.

They were 'hearing': This person is treating us disrespectfully - if our leaders can manage to look smart in this ghastly war-zone, so should a British PM! 

See also the bizarre visit of PM Tony Blair to Sarajevo in late 1997, when his spin-doctors refused to let him say a single word to Bosnian media people. The Bosnians 'heard' from this visit: rude, too grand to talk to us, flying in and out in a couple of hours - he doesn't care.

All of which brings us to David Cameron's unwise remarks about Pakistan and terrorism during his India trip. As Andrew Rawnsley describes it:

That remark was not planned. It came in an answer to a businessman at the very end of a Q&A in Bangalore.

It was a gaffe. I am using here the classic definition of a gaffe: it is to say something which is true, but liable to cause controversy, embarrassment or harm if spelled out in public. Scoring him on presentation, he stands tall at home, but is still finding his feet away...

Here is the view of John Elliott who is based in New Delhi:

Cameron was of course on target with his criticism of Pakistan, but India was not the place to say it because it diverted attention from his investment-oriented visit – unless you take the Machiavellian approach that it increased media coverage of a trip that might have otherwise made few headlines.  

It was also unwise to make such a snap remark without planning for the downside – in this case endangering Britain’s links with Pakistan’s intelligence services.

That's mainly right. Pakistan opinion will be all the more likely to be really annoyed by senior British remarks such as this when they are made in India. All sorts of subliminal and other thoughts surge to the fore in Islamabad:

• is he taking India's side in the Kashmir problem?
• why is he saying such things before he's even talked to us, and on the eve of the President's visit to London? Deliberate provocation?
• why is he undermining the people in Pakistan who want to modernise the country? This sort of thing simply allows the extremists to play populist cards against the West and makes a hard job even worse...

Key message for senior speechwriters and speakers?

Remember that there are many audiences listening to or reading your every word.

And that what you are saying and what they are hearing may be quite different.

Update: a very clever piece by Hugo Rifkind over at WSJ muses on what if anything in David Cameron's recent so-called public speaking gaffes was in fact wrong or unwise or ineffective. See eg this:

The spin, from Britain's Conservative Party, is that Prime Minister David Cameron did not commit "gaffes" on his recent, whirlwind world tour, but was in fact just "speaking his mind."

I am always wary of people who say "I speak my mind," as though that was a good thing to begin with. It's a better strategy, surely, to think your mind, pick out some edited highlights, and speak those. Otherwise, what's the point of having a mind at all? You might as well just have your mouth wired up directly to somewhere else entirely...

Yet, which of these messages was really a gaffe? It's a decent rule of thumb in politics that you can always afford to annoy the people who need you the most.

British Conservatives need David Cameron, so he annoyed them to agree with America. Israel needs British support, so he annoyed them to agree with Turkey. Pakistan needs Britain in Afghanistan, so he annoyed them to agree with India.

True "plain speaking" could never manage so many twists and turns. This was David Cameron speaking his mind by speaking the minds of other people. Gaffes aside, to my mind, this was a pretty impressive performance.

Not that I'm speaking my mind, of course. No. This is just the edited highlights.

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.

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.

The FCO has a new Permanent Under Secretary (ie top HQ civil servant cheese), namely Simon Fraser.

The Guardian of course gets it wrong:

Although the highly regarded Fraser has worked in the Foreign Office before, it is unusual for the permanent secretary to be recruited from outside the ranks of the diplomatic service.

In fact most of his career has been with the FCO. I know because he was in the group of graduate new entrants which included me, back in 1979. Latterly ( and is often the way these days) he has been on various secondments including to senior positions in Brussels and in Whitehall.

A few years back Simon played a leading role as FCO Director for Strategy and Innovation in the ghastly wholesale reorganisation of the FCO to focus on so-called Strategic Objectives, which devalued classic bilateral diplomacy and so led directly to the fiasco over the Pope's visit earlier this year.

Simon is unfailingly genial and (now) impressively well qualified in all sorts of complex top-level policy areas including world trade. His breadth of professional experience is a good match for leading a diplomatic service which needs rebooting after years of Labour decay (although some might wonder if he is not just a bit too steeped in undiluted Mandelsonism?). He has a very different, livelier personal style which should go down well with Ministers and even the fed up FCO masses.

Plus he has Middle East experience (Baghdad and Damascus) although he is not really a typical FCO 'camel'. Do we dimly recall a long-lost episode when he was moved from a Private Secretary job over his rather too friendly relationship with a Palestinian lady?

Maybe it was someone else.

In any case, that was another country, and we were very young.

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. 

Over at Business and Politics I brood on the dismal sniggering by UK business people when the Prime Minister informed them that he had summoned the UK's Ambassadors back to London - and made them all fly economy class.

Inappropriate. If you publicly sneer at your own team, won't everyone else do the same?

More important, it's counter-productive in the Prime Minister's own terms. He says wants the UK's Ambassadors to support British business. How does he think that in fact they can do just that?

Why does this sort of thing make me, a libertarian-minded conservative, feel queasy?

Partly it’s the hint of the faux-egalitarian blokeiness which characterises our tragic age, a sense that high-end behaviour and practices are less worthy than the lowest common denominator ‘solidarity’ of everyone having a pint in the pub.

That, you recall, was something New Labour cultivated ad and indeed ultra nauseam. In January this year it got David Miliband into trouble in India, when he annoyed the Indian Foreign Minister by calling him by his first name, a move at once naively patronising and culturally insensitive. So much for all those FCO diversity targets.

Whereas the media have focused yet again on the lame issue of Ambassadorial residences overseas, no-one has mentioned the sniggering feebleness of the business people whom the PM addressed.

According to the Indy they laughed when Mr Cameron said that all the Ambassadors had been ‘made to travel economy class’ to join the London meeting. Huh?

Why did no-one have the guts to call out something like this:

“Excuse me, Prime Minister, but we are hoping to win a huge contract in Nigeria. You got it 100% wrong.

 Having our Ambassador in Tokyo sweating in economy class rather than talking for hours to the Nigerian Finance Minister who was in Club on the same flight sends the Nigerians all the wrong signals as to how his views are valued in London.

And, much worse, it misses a terrific chance to lobby quietly for this deal and many others on that long and boring flight!”

Shame on you, business-people. You deserve what you'll get.

Being a serious former Ambassador Oliver Miles manages to give the lame FCO diplo-blogging genre the thrashing it richly deserves AND do so in an elegant Guardian article:

Why do diplomats (and Whitaker's article quotes some examples from Americans as well as the British) feel the need to let it all hang out?

The reason is simple. The Miliband regime in the Foreign Office, obsessed with "process", "image", and to be blunt anything trendy, encouraged the idea that running a blog was a good career move.

I wrote about this strange phenomenon back in 2009. See also this:

The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can't work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both.

Just say a diplomat posted a blog entry politely speculating on the wisdom of current Climate Change or Middle East policy. Imagine the scenes in Parliament:

"The Secretary of State apparently can not persuade even his own senior officials of the wisdom of this policy! Why should we take any notice of him?"

Which is why the FCO blogs are a friendly but bland product, making no serious contribution to the 'global foreign policy debate'.

This angry piece by Melanie Philips shows what happens when a busily blogging Ambassador starts to be rather less than bland in a policy area of huge sensitivity, such as the Middle East.

I agree with Oliver:

Let's hope William Hague will blow the whistle. There is a good Yorkshire saying: Hear all, see all, say now't.

Although one might gracelessly quibble with the wayward apostrophe in now't?

Democratist replies to my earlier posting:

I have a number of points to make about the following statements you made in "International Election Monitoring: Keeping Democracy Honest?"

 

"The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that."

What about LTOs and the Core Team? They are the field for two/three months and provide a lengthy reports on the political context - meeting all the key national and local politicians and bureaucrats - these will be factored into the "Preliminary statement" (on the day after E-Day) and the "final statement" that comes out a few weeks later.

Also - 10% coverage of all polling stations provides more than enough information to get a very good idea of what is going on - ask a statistician.

"It is not much use international observers dutifully watching voting and counting of an election where some candidates have been unfairly excluded and/or where the media coverage of the campaign has been skewed massively to favour one side (ie the ruling tendency)."

Yes it is - because we make it clear that this is what happened, and provide lots of evidence of how this was manifested on the ground. This can have important implications in the days following the election, precicisely because the OSCE has such a good reputation with the populations of these countries - and this can have a major effect on what happens there in the days immediatly following the election (e.g. Georgia 2003, and Ukraine 2004). Even Serbia in 2000 - although I suspect you know more about that one than me.

On the contrary, the very fact that international observers are observing such an election might be said to give its outcome a legitimacy it richly does not deserve.

Yes and in the past the OSCE has refused to observe for this very reason - e.g. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan several times.

"We make our first report of what is to be a long day. Then we move on, spending only 20 or 30 minutes at each polling station. At various intervals we must phone our LTO team and read out, question by question, our results. The tick-box approach is evidence of the EU’s lack of trust in our judgment. We are data collectors, not observers. It speaks of a bureaucracy keen on statistics that it can brandish scientifically."

Again STO work has to be seen in the context of extensive core team and LTO reporting.

"Even when an election is obviously unfair and international observers say so (as in Sudan this year), the self-proclaimed winner just brazens out the criticism and carries on regardless of EU hand-wringing"

The OSCE and EU are separate organizations - my piece was about the OSCE ODIHR  (I am not an especially big fan of the EU). Observation is certainly no panacea (but tell me what is?) But, even where where dictators just "brazen it out" the observation does at least have the effect that it adds to their bad press, and - as in the cases of Georgia 2003 and Ukraine 2004 (both observed by the OSCE) can contribute to their overthrow. Why do you think the Russians have been so petrified of "colour revolutions" since 2004? Why do you think they prevented the OSCE for observing their parliamentary and presidential elections in 2007 amd 2008?

While I think that it would be great if the UK sent its own observation teams (although it would take a while to build up the same sort of credibility the OSCE has in the region), I think it is somewhat unlikely given that they aren't even willing to send 10% of OSCE observers at the moment (as they had usually done prior to 2008) - since, as you may have noticed, HMG is presently a bit skint...

Fair enough.

The OSCE 'space' differs from other international areas as its members have made all sorts of specific commitments to each other, including to take seriously OSCE election observation teams' findings. OSCE election observer teams who point to serious shortcomings therefore have a different sort of political weight.

Which indeed is one reason why Moscow and some other former Soviet area capitals manoeuvre to try to cut back OSCE activities and/or credibility.

And why Democratist is right to urge HM Government to keep paying its full share of the bill as a strategic investment. Even in these financially tricky times.