A meagre Guardian article by glum Lucy Mangan pulls together some disparate material to argue the case for International Women’s Day. This tended to be quite a big deal in communist Europe, featuring men generously buying flowers and chocolates for their women, then hoping to sit down to a good […]
Remember the resounding spanking the Serbian legal authorities received in a London court over their attempt to extradite former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic to Belgrade on war crimes charges? Now they are trying their luck in the Austrian courts. Former Yugoslav army general Jovan Divjak has been arrested in Austria on […]
Dominique Moisi is a clever and agreeable French intellectual. I met him once over lunch. Here he is, bewailing what he sees as the professional limitations of diplomats who fail to see convulsions coming: In the name of “realism,” diplomats and foreign-policy strategists are naturally conservative. Indeed, it is no […]
Trite (and tritely wrong) comparisons are being drawn between what is happening in different Arab countries and the collpase of European communism. My thoughts: Egypt‘s Berlin Wall Moment? Back in 1990/91 first the Warsaw Pact then the Soviet Union keeled over and died. In the arc of decadent national socialist […]
Here’s an interesting one for those of you interested in the former Yugoslavia space and communism in general. What about the massed archives of the former Yugoslav secret police (UDBA)? Part of the problem with the former Yugoslavia space is that there has been no popular movement in favour of […]
Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh. The BBC is cutting some language services on the World Service: The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota! One of the […]
Dick Holbrooke’s sudden death is a blow to American diplomacy. His cleverness, his relentlessness, his raw humour, his skilled psychological pressure-plays and sheer bravura all combined with a sense of boldly wielding power to make him a uniquely formidable force. I have written about my own meetings with on various occasions. See […]
Wikileaker Julian Assange has been answering ‘live’ e-questions via the Guardian. Here he simply runs away from a serious if long question which. by the way, is not from me: I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against […]
I have just been sent a nice letter from Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne inviting me to be a witness before the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Foreign Affairs when it launches its first inquiry into UK foreign policy. Any ideas on what I should say? (And no, NC, I am […]
Let’s be honest. Honest British folk flee in panic when it comes to foreign names, even easy phonetic ones from former Yugoslavia. Which was why I winced during the Mass of Reparation yesterday in Great Missenden when The Archbishop Metropolitan of Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia) was introduced and mispronounced Lubyanka. […]
