The worthy newspaper Blic in Belgrade asked me for a short commentary on my recollections of the Fall of Milosevic a decade ago.

Here is the result. All in Serbian and with an eccentric picture of me by way of bonus. But Google Translator should help you get the gist.

Of course anything I say about the way we worked to help Serbia’s democrats spawns the usual flurry of Balkanic comments saying that at last All is Revealed – Serbia’s democrats are all puppets of Blair and/or working for MI6, as indeed was I.

This period was my finest hour in career terms. It’s a bit like golf.

You whack the ball at the far distant hole, hoping to get a good score. Sometimes – very rarely – it goes straight in the hole in one shot.

In one sense that’s pure fluke. Yet on the other hand, you aimed the ball at the hole using all your skill – and it went in! So surely that counts for something significant?

In this case I myself devised in 1999 a multi-layered international policy which created a quite new international squeeze on Milosevic, coupled with active support for his opponents and EU/US pressure on Croatian leader Tudjman up the road in Zagreb to show some minimal region-wide consistency.

This helped create a new dynamic under which Milosevic called elections in 2000, sure that he would easily win or at least easily fix the result to ‘show’ that he had won. But this time we had helped the Serbian opposition prepare the ground. The scale of his defeat was immediately obvious and the popular protests when he tried to wriggle on in power were massive. He crashed and ended up at ICTY a few months later.

So, yes, I aimed to help Serbs end the calamitous period of Milosevic’s mis-rule, and that period indeed did end. Nice work.

Which is not to say that Serbia jumped from being a miserable failure to a shiny success. It will take Serbia many decades to recover the lost wealth brought about by Milosevic – and by the clumsy Western responses to him. As one of my telegrams to London said, Milosevic has gone, but Milosevicism is still there aplenty.

Still, as foreign policy work goes this was one of the best things done by the FCO in modern times. And I got marked down in my annual appraisal at the end of 2000 on Management, which of course is far more important than, you know, doing stuff.