My former colleague from my South Africa days Roy Reeve is now leading a vast mission to export EU police and justice systems to Kosovo.

This startlingly expensive exercise aimed at a fast-forward modernizing of Kosovo in a way a goose is forcibly fattened to produce foie gras will quickly come up against the problem that the average witness in Kosovo is more loyal to his ethnic community than to the truth.

The expensive UNMIK mission failed to cope with a profound cultural problem of intimidation of witnesses. My prediction is that this EU invasion will not do much better in any timescale that matters.

Here’s an interesting civil rights question for Roy. How many members of the 1900 or so EU folk now descending on Kosovo will be renting accommodation from Kosovo Serbs who fled the province and have had their property grabbed by Albanians who pocket the lucrative proceeds?

Here’s another. How much effort will be put in to getting those many thousands of displaced people, many living in utterly awful conditions round Serbia, back to their homes or otherwise arranging fair compensation for them?

This ‘right of return’ was a corner-stone of our policy in Bosnia and was by any international standard of measuring such things a remarkable success, albeit necessarily a protracted one.

The unyielding emphasis put on this in Bosnia contrasted shamefully with UNMIK policy in Kosovo.

One hapless and hopeless European leader of UNMIK was Hans Haekkerup. H2 at one point visited Belgrade and met EU Ambassadors. Even the least cynical of them were taken aback when he was asked what he planned to do about the tens of thousands of Serbs displaced from Kosovo and blandly replied, as if baffled by the question (which he probably was), "they are not my constituency".

So Roy, good luck in trying to push through a forced marriage between the virile Balkan Mr Kosovo and coy European Miss Laura Norder.