On my Foreign Office travels I have picked up a goodly selection of ‘European’ languages to add to my distant A-Level French and Latin and O-Level German and Spanish. First, back in 1981 I learned lot of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (then called ‘Serbo-Croat’). After that I reached a reasonable standard in Afrikaans – […]
My observations on Power and Purpose attracted this interesting thought from someone in the Mini containing my ever-growing army of readers, himself once closely involved in British government sharp-end business: It always struck me that the FCO was truly excellent when faced with a bad situation. They could be relied […]
Only now has the full tragic truth emerged about Hillary Clinton’s 1996 visit to Tuzla in Bosnia. This authentic tape shows exactly what happened just as Mrs Clinton was meeting a young Bosnian girl at Tuzla airport. US Ambassdor John Menzies and Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic were both blown away […]
When Bad Leaders finally realise that their hold on power is slipping (as looks to be the case in Zimbabwe), various things happen. The ‘mood’ abruptly changes, from Maybe This Time We Can Bring Him Down to When He Goes… The immediate entourage round the Bad Leader are affected. Some […]
Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption. We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia. Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private […]
Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall. My computer showed a first result from a tiny […]
I met Michael Dobbs as he started his career in and around Yugoslavia when Tito died in 1980. He has had a glittering journalist’s life since then. He now is part of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker team. And has been busy checking the facts of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Bosnia […]
The squall over Hillary Clinton’s skewed memory of her visit to Bosnia in 1996 recalls to my mind my own no doubt skewed memory of President Clinton’s set-piece speech in Sarajevo’s National Theatre during his subsequent visit with his wife in December 1997. During this visit much of that part of […]
On the subject of the leaked FCO SpAd document (if that is what it is), Guido makes the following point: "… a document produced by a civil servant, in office hours at the taxpayer’s expense should by rights not be the property of the Labour Party." A similar issue came […]
