Well, we all have to save the ENVIRONMENT, don’t we? Huh? Huh? Which means going GREEN, right? Let’s hear it for the Continental Hotel in Serbia, deservedly famous for having hosted the murder of Arkan in early 2000. The wifi does not work (much) and the water goes off in […]
Off to Belgrade tomorrow for a conference on Thursday hosted by the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals as supported by Russian partners. The theme is European Security in the Light of 2012 Elections. Notable speakers include Dragan Todorovic of the Serbian Radical Party, whose programme asserts Serbia‘s rights over […]
I have written a piece for Financier Worldwide on the dark arts of negotiating in central and eastern Europe: The implicit view is that it is the outcome, not process, which really counts, and that the value of different outcomes can be measured. However, based on my experience as a […]
Exhibit A: a superb article describing research which shows convincingly how the influence of the bureaucratic-cultural disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on in today’s Europe. Thus: Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed […]
My latest piece over at The Commentator looks at why it took so long to arrest Ratko Mladic, and why our leaders tend to opt for gradual escalation rather than decisive blows to the head: In late 1996 I sent a secret telegram to London arguing that the massively expensive […]
Here is leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC talking about the Mladic arrest, in standard terms. Apart from this: He could – and should – have been taken into custody between 1996 and his disappearance in 2002, but diplomats then did not trust international justice: "The capture of Karadzic […]
Here’s a comment I have posted on the Serbian hardcore Novi Standard website where lots of effort is being devoted to bewailing the arrest of Ratko Mladic: Not sure I understand the point here. Why is Serbia or the wider Serbian idea weaker if Mladic is finally brought to face the […]
Asks Dan Hannan MEP. He favours one or other but not ICTY as it is too slow and (he believes) too compromised in different ways. Here is an earlier (quite good) piece I wrote about ICTY and the regional War Crimes Tribunals in former Yugoslavia. This Mladic one is just too […]
When Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested in mid-2008 I echoed here a telegram I sent to London from Belgrade in 2001 following the sudden transfer to ICTY of Slobodan Milosevic provocatively titled: "Is Milosevic Innocent?" My piece "Is Karadzic Innocent?" made the point that it would be easier for ICTY […]
My recent piece about the Amazing Vanishing Referendm in Republika Srpska was picked up by RFE/RL (in Serbian/Bosnian) and so got a rather wider Balkan readership than it otherwise might have done. Any normal person reading it might have thought that it (albeit in perhaps a sardonic and annoying way) […]
