Last week I attended the annual FCO remembrance ceremony held in November each year to honour FCO diplomats and colleagues who have been killed while on duty.

I try to attend each year, as my friend and colleague Charles Morpeth was killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia in 1997 while working for the Office of the High Representative.

The OHR/UN helicopter was making its way along through one of Bosnia’s mountain areas, which can be prone to abrupt micro-climate fogs. It did not have enough height to clear a high remote hillside and crashed into it. The Ukrainian crew managed to scramble out to safety, but the OHR/UN passengers inside perished when the petrol tank exploded. Terrible. A memorial pyramid now marks the spot.

Another FCO colleague of mine from my Bosnia days, Roger Short, also worked at the OHR office then. He went on to a posting as HM Consul-General in Istanbul and died in the AQ terrorist attack on the Consulate-General building in November 2003. The offices were being refurbished and he was working from a temporary office near the front gates where the blast took place. As I recall the story, his wife Vicky would have been killed too had she not popped out from the office for some quick shopping. 

Eight of our locally engaged Turkish staff died too that day – their names are remembered on the plaque on the wall at the foot of the Grand Staircase where the ceremony takes place. A Roger Short Memorial Fund is hosted from University College at Oxford where he had studied Classics. 

I have an indirect connection with one other name on the wall, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, who was murdered by Greek Marxist terrorists on 8 June 2000. On that day a large gathering of European governments’ Balkan experts including myself had gathered in Thessaloníki for a Stability Pact meeting: the sad news affected all present. His untimely death had one positive outcome, namely a huge and finally successful effort to round up the vile 17N fanatics who had carried out a number of other assassinations. Stephen’s wife Heather played an important and brave personal role in mobilising Greek public opinion against them. 

The FCO ceremony last week touched all the right notes of protocol, dignity and grace. The Foreign Secretary’s address is here.

There are now 18 names on the wall, ten of them from that one horrible day in Istanbul. Two more have been added since 2003, colleagues killed in Kirkuk and Basra respectively in 2006. Given the amazing range of difficult and dangerous situations facing FCO staff round the world every year, it is an impressive tribute to the FCO’s organisation and cool judgement that many more names aren’t there. 

As each year passes the ceremony gets no easier for the families of those who were lost. Charles Morpeth’s daughter had just been born when he died – she is growing up now. As I wrote here previously:

Perhaps the hardest thing I had to do in my whole diplomatic career was to read out a tribute to Charles at a packed memorial service in Sarajevo cathedral, with his parents and wife Helen sitting in the congregation.

My message then applies to all diplomats as they set out on peacekeeping missions: ‘Any of us could have been in that helicopter. Any of us could be in the next one.’