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 […]
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 […]
The European Stability Initiative do lots of good solid analytical/policy work. Have a look at this ingenious proposal for resolving the absurd problem of Greek opposition to Macedonia’s name: How can this conundrum be resolved? It can be done through a constitutional amendment in Skopje that changes the name of […]
I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function. "Oh,we have the usual – a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days." Really? Why do you need young […]
Here. Be shocked, as the Truth is revealed.
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 […]
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 […]
Former British Ambassador Oliver Miles is on a roll in the Guardian. After giving Ambassadorial blogs the thrashing they so richly deserve, he now writes with eloquence and good sense about what Ambassadors actually do: When I worked in Belfast, I was warned by a home civil service colleague not […]
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 […]
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 […]
