After my exciting red pen adventures at New York airport immigration desk in May, I am taking no chances with my forthcoming family holiday in Orlando. I have registered all of us with the new ESTA website run by the US Government to make easier (in theory – let’s see […]
I swung by the FCO the other day to have a chat about Bosnia. The snappy desk officer dealing with this problem now is 24 or thereabouts. Let’s say she is 24. She was born in the year I was British Olympic Attache at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. She was […]
An interesting pair of Ambassadorial letters to newspapers have appeared in recent days. First, HM Ambassador in Poland Ric Todd wrote in July to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita about the death in a plane accident in 1943 in Gibraltar of General Sikorski. Various Poles continue to insist that this death was suspicious, […]
Via Brian Barder, this really good – and meaty – assessment of the current plight of Kosovo by Jeremy Harding. It in fact headlines the Kosovo situation, but really it is about the Limits of Diplomacy – how far can countries on their own or in teams act deliberately (a) […]
War criminals are war criminals only when they are convicted of war crimes. Until then they are ‘war crimes indictees’, ‘people suspected/charged with war crimes’ or some such neutral phrase. Why? Because it is true. And because it is unwise to give such people any excuse to claim that they […]
A noteworthy sub-plot in the Kosovo situation is a plan by Serbia to ask the UN General Assembly to refer the issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an Advisory Opinion. Serbia looks to be getting some handy noises of support for this manoeuvre from eg Russia and India. […]
These celebrity revivals are sooooo exhausting. First we have the long-awaited return to the stage of Joker Karadzic, although without his funny costume and disguise he was really not that scary. And with him returns Batman Holbrooke, the distinguished former American diplomat whose considerable ego and ruthlessness helped bring peace to the […]
A bit more on Karadzic, alas. Dick Holbrooke says that there was No Deal struck by him with Karadzic under which if Karadzic left political life he would not be sent to the Hague Tribunal. Karadzic in his first appearance at ICTY tried to get this claim established, but failed. […]
Radovan Karadzic appears before the Hague Tribunal today. Kurir (a Belgrade newspaper with pronounced populist tendencies) quotes his lawyer as saying that Karadzic will not accept the start of ICTY proceedings until his laptop and 50 disks are returned to him. These items containing all the elements of his defence and […]
Peter Preston gives a rather overwritten analysis of Serbia and its prospects for joining the EU – see eg the obscure Paul Anka reference. Why, he asks, is the EU mumbling about bringing the former Yugoslavia space (plus Albania) into its ranks? Partly because the EU mumbles about everything. Partly […]
