Blogoir

Former Bosnia Presidency member Ejup Ganic has been released on bail, albeit subject to some strict conditions. Serbia has to continue mustering evidence for the process to move forward.

In the end current BH Bosniac Presidency member Haris Silajdzic did not visit him in jail, but instead remonstrated with David Miliband about the whole business.

The British Government are sticking to the line that this is a purely legal matter with no (no) political connotations in any way whatsoever either for the present or in terms of any view of what happened in the past. See HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Michael Tatham, on his blog (in Bosnian!).

That position, of course, is exactly what critics of the whole affair are attacking:

Please. Be serious. How can the fact that you have arrested a former senior Bosniac on war crimes charges emanating from a Serbia which refuses to hand over Mladic be 'solely' a legal matter?

Fair enough. But that's today's Europe. Better to tackle complex questions by stuffing all concerned with the Porridge of Procedure than through ethnic cleansing and the rest?

So on it all trundles. As things now stand, it is hard to imagine that the Serbia side will not assemble enough material to persuade a judge that prima facie the issue deserves a substantive hearing (unless, that is, the Bosniac side knock down the extradition application on jurisdictional or other procedural grounds).

Is a British court in due course to pore over the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the Dobrovoljacka St shootings back in 1992 and try to reach a conclusion?

"It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest."

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

Over at Business and Politics.

Thus:

Remember the Bible parable of the Prodigal Son? He squandered his fortune but saw the error of his ways and crept back home. He was warmly welcomed by his father, who explained the significance of his repentance to an older brother unimpressed by the precedent being set:

This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The moral core of this story turns on the fact of his sincere repentance – and an unambiguous willingness by the wastrel to work hard to put things right.

The Bible does not say that the wastrel is ‘entitled’ to carry on sponging off his relatives indefinitely – that they have to show him limitless ‘solidarity’.

As we look at Greece’s manoeuvres to persuade partners and markets to lend them yet more money to help stave off self-induced Disaster, the issues boil down to this:

• Is Greece serious about repenting its erstwhile wasteful ways?

• Is Greece capable of sustaining the sort of brisk standards now being set by Poland?

Indeed. So what are the answers?

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz reports that the Bosniac member of the three-person Bosnian collective state Presidency, Haris Silajdzic, is travelling to London to visit Ejup Ganic tomorrow - presumably in jail. The office of the Serb member of the Presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic mournfully complains that he still has not been informed.

This (if it happens) has to be an extraordinary first in the Diplomatic History of the Universe - a head of state visiting another state specifically to meet a prisoner from his country held in that state's prison on an extradition charge.

Come on, British media, DO SOMETHING ON THIS STORY! Don't leave it to me to report this first! I'm just a humble blogger.

Meanwhile legal challenges to the court decision not to release Ganic on bail continue, as do moves by the BH side to muster arguments on the substance of Serbia's extradition request. Serbia is still pulling together the documents it says it needs to support its case.

Ganic's renewed bail application may be heard later this week. 

Background over at Balkan Insight on Ganic's high-powered defence team, including Clare Montgomery who was part of Pinochet's defence team.

Here is what looks like the original British Arrest Warrant for Ejup Ganic (click on the Arrest Warrant.jpg link)

It contains a seeming serious error (emphasis added), saying that Ganic is accused in a category 2 territory, namely Serbia of the commission of an offence the conduct of which occurred in that territory ...

Is this a mistake of some sort based on the information Serbia has put forward?

Or have bemused Brits in the Westminster Magistrates Court failed to grasp some of the basic points of the collapse of Yugoslavia - annoying but possibly justifiable?

Or is Serbia deliberately claiming (to get its jurisdictional credentials established) that at that point the independence of Bosnia had not been generally recognised by the international community (Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the UN only on 22 May 1992 - my birthday), and so Sarajevo was still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and thus within a single legal space, of which Serbia is now the sole remaining heir (insofar as there is one)?

Or is there some Serbia implicit link to the Karadzicistic idea that Sarajevo by that stage already had been divided into two parts, ie 'Serb Sarajevo' and the rest?

If either of the latter two, blimey.

If (more likely?) it is some sort of footling mistake, I would not suspect that the nature of the mistake would make the whole arrest to be so improper as to derail the extradition request, if (if) the issue of where the alleged crimes took place is not in itself a substantive issue (eg for jurisdictional reasons)

Meanwhile here I am on Radio Free Europe talking about the case, as translated into Bosnian/Serbian.

If you don't speak that, forget using the Google Translate button to get it into English - you'll still have no idea what I said! It seems to think I discussing pilgrims.

At the risk of boring everyone, here is an excellent interview with Jovan Divjak about the Dobrovoljacka St killings and the politics of it all now.

It's in Bosnian/Serbian (not as Google says Croatian), but if you use the Google Translate button you'll get more than enough of it in somewhat strangled English to get the essence of what he is saying.

Key points:

• Divjak insists that there was no formally organised attack, but rather attacks from a number of different units with unfortunately no central command possible - a certain chaos
• But (Note: as an honest soldier) he accepts that whereas the Bosniacs were defending themselves, there were 'proceedings' not in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
• "Of course you ask yourself, who did the shooting?. It's known who did it" (Note: the Google translation gets this key point 100% wrong!)
• Ganic at the time was indeed substituting Izetbegovic as the most senior Bosniac commander. But who precisely ordered what should be determined by the Prosecutor's Office, not the media.
• As and when the whole affair comes to trial, Divjak's own statements will be judged to show how far and in what respects he himself bore responsibility  
• Tensions between Bosnia and now Serbi are as high now as they were when the war ended, with Serbia in particular unable to face up to the way Karadzic was supported from Belgrade. Facts clearly established at the Hague Tribunal are being ignored for propaganda purposes.
• But the Bosniacs too are unwilling to accept massacres committed by their side.
• Politicians on all sides have an interest in keeping up tension as the only way to advance their own plans; see for example former Serbian PM Kostunica on TV blaming the Muslims for everything which happened

Gripping stuff, for those of us able and willing to follow all these Balkan tensions in any detail...

The wider point is this.

With the possible exception of Slovenia, a tricky case in itself for reasons going back deep into WW2, no former Yugoslav republic has found a way to strike a way between defensive exclusivist 'national'/nationalist/ethnic politics and a different inclusive pluralism.

Put to one side the fascinating sociological fact that this is the dismal result of decades of intense central communist propaganda in favour of Brotherhood and Unity - something those insisting on 'ever-closer union' within the EU might want to think about.

The simple fact is that all the different communities across former Yugoslavia can not imagine ethnic disarmament - moving to a situation where issues are looked at on their merits, rather than in terms of which community 'somehow' will gain an edge.

In fact this problem has a lot of disarmament game theory in it:

Of course we are ready to disarm - we are good Europeans! But given our long history of being brutalised, it is only fair that the other sides have to put down some weapons first to show their sincerity

Haha. A typical banal Balkan trick. They are saying that we should put some weapons down to make it easier for them to attack us again. They must be planning new attacks. Let's get a few more weapons, just in case

See?! We told you so. We make a fair offer aimed at achieving disarmament - and they start getting new weapons! How can we trust them?

There appears to be no way out of this centuries-long psychological and immoral, suspicicious morass. One name for it is the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome.

Is the problem especially acute in Serbia? Arguably yes.

The good news there is that as much the largest former Yugoslav republic Serbia necessarily has a different, 'larger' sort of democracy and democratic potential, which has to incorporate different ethnic communities and does so pretty well for day-to-day purposes.

However, at the level of state policy there is an unhappy tension between lumpen 'nationalist' ambition and modern pluralism. A fine article by Srdja Popovic describes how that confusion affects the main force for change in Serbia, the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

... when I saw their program, I realized that it incorporated two contradictory parts. The first part advocated widely defined democratic values, freedoms, civil rights, market economy, and the other part was nationalism in its darkest form. I would sign the first part in an instant, and the second part I wouldn’t even dream of signing.

And now, looking back, I see how even then they were impressed by the success of the Right and of Milosevic’s supposedly leftist party which pursued right-wing policies. So they realized that they would remain isolated and alone if they too didn’t give their contribution to nationalism. 

The party was constantly being divided by this built-in contradiction, and the result is Tadic’s slogan – both Kosovo and Europe. He is responding to the contradictory demands which they themselves made at the very beginning.

This explains the historical reconciliation narrative, because they now want to reconcile the two irreconcilable parts of their program. They want to do it on a personal level, on a governmental level, on the state level.

... But it can’t get us anywhere, it is self-paralyzing, because it is confined by the two conflicting forces which it contains. It is a void, and this void is wasting the precious little reformatory energy this society has.

All that spills over into Bosnia too, whose self-absorbed leaders (admittedly operating in a bizarre constitutional framework imposed by Dick Holbrooke) have blown their opportunity to build a successful modern economy.

Which is why I am sitting here today writing about a dirty little massacre 18 years ago, one squalid episode in a far wider series of horrors which few if any leaders in the region really want to accept as a whole.

What really happened in chaotic Sarajevo in and around Dobrovoljacka Street on 3 May 1992?

The range of views appears to be broadly as follows:

Core Serbia/'Serb' Claim:   perfidious massacre of JNA soldiers attempting to withdraw from Sarajevo under UN colours as per an agreement duly reached with the Bosniac leadership, with senior Bosniac leaders including Ejup Ganic personally responsible either directly or implicitly. Slam dunk war crime.

Bosniac Claim Version 1:   understandable formal military response to previous JNA brutality and kidnap of President Izetbegovic - JNA themselves broke the agreement under which they could withdraw. That said, not known who gave the orders to shoot. No war crime - chaos of war, which Serbia started

Bosniac Claim Version 2:   spontaneous, irregular but more or less understandable/justifiable attack by Bosniac irregulars responding to JNA aggression the previous day. No formal orders given. No war crime - just a mess

Bosniac Claim Version 3:  a fully legitimate attack on a fair military target: at worst the Bosniacs were in 'technical' breach of a ceasefire unfairly imposed on them as a condition for getting back their kidnapped leader. Even if orders were given, as it was a proper military attack the issue is of no significance. No issue here folks, so move along

* * * * * 

The Serbian claim lies behind the Serbia government's latest attempt to secure Ganic's extradition. But what level of hard evidence will they need to put forward (a) to make a convincing and finally winning case for extradition now, and (b) to secure a conviction if the issue ever gets to trial in Serbia?

The Death of Yugoslavia videos suggest different version of Bosniac Versions 1 and 2, as articulated by Ganic himself and others. For a good, detailed account of the "it was all a mess" approach, read this interview with Jovan Divjak, one of the few people in the whole Yugoslav collapse disaster to have kept a reputation for integrity:

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Ejup Ganic:

Bosnia has demanded his release and supporters claimed Britain had allowed itself to be used as pawn in the long-running battle between the two former Yugoslav nations.

The Telegraph quotes both an unnamed spokesman for Lady Thatcher and Robin Harris, her former speechwriter:

"She is deeply concerned. It is a mark of her regard for him that he is one of the relatively limited number of people she has met recently. She is worried about the precedents that these arrest warrants represent to visiting statesmen to London and absolutely urges a quick resolution."

Robin Harris, Lady Thatcher's former speech writer, said: "The idea that Serbia can now just actually indict and seek the extradition to Serbia of people who were, in fact, of course defending the local population against Serb-inspired aggression as long ago as 1992 on Bosnian rather than Serbian territory; and that actually such a request should be even given any kind of proper consideration at all by the British courts is to me quite astonishing,"

They also cite me(!) as saying that Ganic would joke "that his career was doomed because he had been born in Serbia". Which of course is not what I have said: how could I, when he was a leading member of the Bosnian Presidency and having an evidently undoomed career?

Idiots. Sigh.

The big policy question raised by Lady Thatcher is a good one. What are the limits of freedom?

On the one hand, we want to be open to foreigners (including political leaders) visiting here both as tourists and on business.

On the other, we do not want foreigners coming here to escape justice when they are wanted in their own countries for alleged crimes.

Plus we do not want unjust regimes to insist that foreigners on UK soil be sent back home to face trumped-up charges.

Plus we do not want to annoy generally friendly foreign states whose ideas of democracy are, hem, less sophisticated than ours by implying that they are incapable of running a fair trial.

Plus we do not want to be the world's default option for anyone wanting a job and free benefits and claiming to be an asylum seeker.

Nor do we want our legal system to be abused through politically motivated 'lawfare' by 'activists' issuing arrest warrants for foreign leaders they don't like.

Oh, and we also want to see all war crimes suspects brought to justice.

And we do not want to waste our time trying to fathom out in nano-level which countries are capable of running a fair trial or not, in general and in particular cases. Since almost none are (we suspect).

Which is why we want to make it fairly easy to extradite people to especially trustworthy international state partners in the EU and beyond, whose motives and ability to dispense justice are deemed (by us) to be (more or less) above suspicion. That means you, Serbia - and Bosnia and Herzegovina too!

Not to forget that we want to keep politics out of the courts.

Except that we do not want the courts taking decisions for tedious narrow legal reasons which could screw us in our international dealings.

Hence we have an odd hybrid system with detailed rules laid down for how extraditions are to be run by the courts but with ultimate authority lying with the Home Secretary (whose own criteria for stopping an extradition approved by the courts are tightly defined).

And did I mention the Human Rights Act?

Phew. Does anyone care to rank these policy considerations in priority order?

No. I thought not.

Mr Ganic's case ticks a number of these boxes simultaneously, which is why the line coming from Robin Harris is open to question.

Plus huffing and puffing that it is wrong to look at extraditing someone 'who was only defending his country' is a perverse reading of what happened, namely an attack on a convoy including UN vehicles which was trying to leave Sarajevo under a deal agreed by the Bosnian leadership including Mr Ganic himself. Watch the videos.

This one falls clearly within the war crime - case to answer category. A point not lost on Bakir Izetbegovic (son of former Bosnian President Izetbegovic who himself was in that convoy). Here he is quoted on B92 from Belgrade:

Neki zločin se tamo jeste desio, al' ga sasvim sigurno nije učinio Ganić, niti je odgovoran Ejup Ganić za njega. Jeste tamo bilo stradanja ljudi, ali će tužilac svoje reći...

Some sort of crime did happen there, but for sure Ganic did not commit it, nor is Ejup Ganic responsible for it. Yes people were massacred there, but the prosecutor will have his say...

Meanwhile as expected the question quickly appears of how far BH-level institutions might weigh in on Ganic's behalf if there is no consensus on the issue.

Republika Srpska leader Dodik has argued that it is 'unacceptable' for BH official money to be made available to help get Ganic out on bail, and has accused the BH Prosecutor's office of ignoring the Dobrovoljacka St massacre and other crimes against Serbs for political reasons.

Back in Sarajevo Bosniac and Bosnian Croat politicians are variously calling the whole business a scandal if not unfriendly act by Belgrade, and demanding that Belgrade focus on arresting General Mladic rather than prosecuting Ganic (Note: good point).

And Ganic's daughter is claiming that the British authorities are abusing her father's human rights by denying him contact with his family and the Bosnian Ambassador in London.

In short, a gripping foreign policy gužva.

Dnevni Avaz reports that now the Bosnian authorities are considering weighing in and sending an extradition request to London, asking that former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic be extradited to Sarajevo rather than Belgrade!

This looks to be an attempt to create new legaL complications based on the proposition that Ganic is a BH citizen and so must be prosecuted for alleged war crimes in Bosnia rather than Serbia, as a bilteral agreement between Bosnia and Serbia reportedly lays down.

But it rather goes against the previous Sarajevo political line that any charges against Ganic are contrived. Is Sarajevo prepared to argue in the London courts that the Dobrovoljacka St shootings of 1992 were after all a possible war crime committed by the Bosniac side, and that Ganic has to answer for them?

Maybe this idea in fact will go nowhere as any extradition request to the UK has to come from the BH state level and the Bosnian Serb representatives at the BH level are unlikely to approve it?

This morning's Dnevni Avaz newspaper in Sarajevo has plenty on the Ejup Ganic story. Here.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to read Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, some of the interesting points in the article as yet unreported in the UK media - British scoop, right here:

• Mr Ganic's son Emir is reported as saying that Mrs Thatcher, a 'very close friend' of Mr Ganic, has sent her lawyers to help him - they represented him yesterday in court in London
• Action is in hand to raise £200,000 bail money
• Ganic is being held not under some sort of Interpol or other arrest warrant but under the 2002 UK/Serbia extradition agreement
• Which opens a 'key question': is Ganic a Serbian citizen and so subject to this agreement, or not?
• Son Emir says that his father was born in Serbia and had a Yugoslav passport when Yugoslavia broke up, but he never applied for a Serbian one, so he does not have Serbian citizenship
• British Ambassador in Sarajevo Michael Tatham has said that this situation represents no form of political or diplomatic statement by the British government about past events 
• Bosniac BH Presidency member Silajdzic is insisting that events in Sarajevo in 1992 are solely the responsibility of Bosnia and that BH and Serbia have signed an agreement to that effect - experts from his office are en route to London to help Ganic
• Serb BH Presidency member Radmanovic is saying that the arrest of Ganic shows that international legal processes are working as they should

The whole issue may turn on the issue of how Serbian citizenship is defined.

Yugoslav citizens had Yugoslav passports, and many continued using them long after Yugoslavia itself collapsed (they finally expire at the end of this year). They were also 'citizens' of their native republic.

Serbia for legal purposes was agreed to be the 'continuation' of Yugoslavia. So if a former Yugoslav citizen did not make the positive step to renounce his Yugoslav/Serbian citizenship, did it continue on paper even though that citizen had acquired a new citizenship of another former republic? Can citizenship in that part of the world lapse through desuetude?

Interesting formal point, since of course many Bosnian Serbs and Croats also have citizenship (and passports) of Serbia and Croatia respectively - a galling fact for Bosniac Bosnians who find themselves subject to different visa regimes when they travel. See also the convoluted issue of Serbian passports and people living in Kosovo.

Did Mr Ganic somehow positively do enough to keep his citizenship options open?

A Serbia claim that any former Yugoslav citizen who did not take formal steps to renounce Yugoslav/Serbia citizenship remains a Serbian citizen would lead to the bizarre result that anyone from former Yugoslavia could be subject to an extradition request emanating from Belgrade - not an outcome likely to appeal to international courts. 

The arrest of former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic here in the UK in response to an extradition request from the Belgrade authorities is a striking development. See this short account on the Belgrade-based B92 website.

In fact the issue has been rumbling on for a couple of days, with Bosniac leader Silajdzic in Sarajevo unwisely denying that anything amiss was happening.

Here is a quick piece I have done for the Independent website. It gives what I hope is a fairly untendentious (and highly simplified for space reasons) account of the confusing events in Sarajevo's 'Volunteer Street' back in 1992, when a convoy of Yugoslav Army (JNA) troops withdrawing was attacked.

Amidst heavy fighting arising from Bosnia's declaration of independence and pro-Yugoslav forces' attacks on part of Sarajevo, Bosniac leader Alija Izetbegovic had been captured by the JNA. A plan emerged. JNA forces surrounded in Sarajevo by Bosniac forces could leave the city in exchange for Izetbegovic's release.

Agreement to this effect was reached with UN active engagement, to the point of UN vehicles leading the convoys intended to effect the swap.

To get a sense of what all this was about, there is no better source than the magnificent Death of Yugoslavia TV series.

Here is part of it describing the negotiations over Izetbegovic's release, with Ejup Ganic himself figuring prominently in interviews afterwards and in live footage taken at the time:

This then describes what happened: 

Legal and foreign policy questions swirling away in the coming hours and days will include:

• is the Serbia extradition application properly made in itself?
• do the circumstances back in 1992 as alleged by the Serb side in principle meet the legal requirements for extradition now?
• can enough persuasive factual evidence be adduced by Belgrade to show that there is a case to answer?
• what about other agreements between Belgrade and Sarajevo on how war crimes allegations arising from the BH conflict are to be handled - should a UK court take cognisance of them?
• do wider political factors need to be taken into account, and properly might be by the English courts? What impact might Ganic's extradition to Belgrade have on already unhappy Bosnian internal processes and prospects for EU membership? (Answer: negative) 
• even if the political impact might well be negative, should the UK government properly stay out of this one and let the legal chips lie where they fall?
• and many many more

On the substance, the vivid Death of Yugoslavia footage shows clearly where the Bosniac leadership seek to escape any responsibility for the Volunteer Street shootings. Their argument is (variously) that parts of the deal had not been finally nailed down and/or that they had no operational control over the actions of Bosniac militia forces who acted (they claim) spontaneously.

As in all such situations, it is next to impossible to prove how far any attack was explicitly ordered by the leadership, as opposed to encouraged by a sly wink at the right time.

Did Ganic and/or some of the other Bosniac leaders/commanders plan all along to double-cross the Serbs, suspecting that that is what the Serbs would do to them if things were reversed? What if anything did the UN people on the spot know or suspect?

Bear in mind too the wider politics now.

President Tadic in Belgrade is pressing Serbia's Parliament to pass a resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. And, as luck has it, Radovan Karadzic's trial at the Hague Tribunal moves into the media spotlight again.

Tadic needs to show Serbia's public opinion that he is taking a position of principle - just as Serbs allegedly responsible for war crimes in Bosnia need to face justice, so do those suspected of crimes against Serbs.

Meanwhile in Sarajevo Bosniac President Silajdzic is loudly insisting that any extradition of Ganic will amount to Bosnia's legitimate self-defence being put on trial, yet another example (he says) of the 'relativisation of responsibility' for the Bosnian conflict at the main victims' expense.

Phew.

Will we see another protracted example of other countries' affairs being pored over exhaustively in the London courts?

Note: declaration of interest. I knew Ganic and his family quite well when I was in Sarajevo and he was a top leader of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the so-called 'Muslim-Croat Entity'). He was a genial wily negotiating partner, albeit often ruefully joking that his prospects were limited in Sarajevo as he was seen by other Bosniacs as a bit too Serb/Yugoslav (he was born in the Sandzak area of Serbia).

I was far away in London in mid-1992, knee-deep in the papers generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. So insofar as I know anything about the Volunteer St shootings it is not from first-hand experience. 

Exhibit One:  Robert Baer, former CIA officer, looks at the the evolving world of organised assassination.

Exhibit Two:  Professor Kenneth Anderson praises President Obama's efficient use of Predator strikes in and around Pakistan:

... of all the ways it has undertaken to strike directly against terrorists, this administration owns the Predator drone strategy. It argued for it, expanded it, and used it, in the words of the president’s State of the Union address, to “take the fight to al Qaeda.”

* * * * *

Once upon a time wars were sort of personal. A King or Emperor would be peeved at the temerity of another King or Emperor or Duke in challenging his authority or grabbing some land. A mass of hapless conscripts would be rustled up and led off to battle.

That went on for a long time. Civilians were there to be looted by foraging armies as they passed through the countryside. 

Then it all got big and impersonal, as Machine Age wars emerged - vast armies slugging it out, with startling levels of casualties, all because of rivalry between states or ideologies. Civilians supporting the war effort became targets themselves as the notion of 'total war' took hold.

Now war is shrinking again, almost to nano levels. Technology is allowing individual opponents to be targeted and hit with something close to unerring accuracy. 

This poses important policy and legal questions.

Once a state declares war, new rules kick in. See Wikipedia on the Laws of War for a gallop round the main points. Kenneth Anderson has a learned blog on the subject. 

Basically, once war is declared (and assuming that that itself is done lawfully - see the Chilcot Inquiry) violence on a significant scale is justified (including collateral damage) as long as the force used is reasonably aimed at the rights targets with as much proportionality as might be mustered, plus reasonable efforts made not to harm civilian targets, and so on.

The invention of new hi-tech weapons is changing all that. Why blow up large numbers of combatants when it is relatively easy to zap specific enemy leaders and/or their senior henchpersons?

Why indeed? Hundreds of Serb squaddies were killed when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998. Yet Milosevic was not targeted. Something seems not quite right there.

In short, Predator killings are the most humane form of war ever invented.

But once war moves into that sort of phase it starts to look much more personal, and lose the 'impersonal' implacable quality of larger-scale choreographed hostilities.

In fact it starts to look more like assassination. Or even common murder, but done in a 'cowardly' way by remote control from far away, a ghoulish video-game experience for an amused operator. 

If a state thinks that only a tiny number of enemy leaders are the real problem, is it not better or even right for civilian police to be used to arrest them? Who gives any leader the right to order such 'extra-judicial killings'? Isn't that sort of thing a tiny step away from murdering an opponent in a Dubai hotel?

Of course, a busy predictably progressive campaign to delegitimise this sort of warfare is well under way. Kenneth Anderson's excellent article above describes in great detail how it works, and how it is gaining traction at the UN and elsewhere. He bemoans the Obama Administration's failure to step forward and strongly justify the policy:

What the United States says regarding the lawfulness of its targeted killing practices matters. It matters both that it says it, and then of course it matters what it says.

The fact of its practices is not enough, because they are subject to many different legal interpretations: The United States has to assert those practices as lawful, and declare its understanding of the content of that law.

This is for two important reasons: first to preserve the U.S. government’s views and rights under the law; and second, to make clear what it regards as binding law not just for itself, but for others as well...

... upholding the American view requires more than simply dangling the inference that if the United States does it, it means the United States must intend it as law. Traditional international law requires more than that, for good reason.

The U.S. government should provide an affirmative, aggressive, and uncompromising defense of the legal sense and sensibility of targeted killing. The U.S. government’s interlocutors and critics are not wrong to demand one, even those whose own conclusions have long since been set in stone.

This is the nub of it - what self-defence means in the modern world:

A broader legal category than “armed conflict” (a subset of it), self-defense might consist of tiny strikes using, for example, covert CIA actors against terrorists, yet not rising to the full level of sustained fighting that crosses the legal threshold into “armed conflict.”

It might be invoked in places and ways outside of traditional theaters of armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq. The president’s legal advisers should be elaborating the legal arguments for self-defense, and not solely armed conflict, as the proper international law “frame” of the president’s statements.

As previously noted, this is a classic Amazon Space issue:

The best (if not only) way to deal with individual terrorist formations lurking in foreign lands - if the governments of the states concerned are unable or unwilling to do it - is not to invade the place and create all sorts of new tensions and contradictions.

Instead it is to proclaim them to be enemies and then hit them before they hit us. 

Thus a new international law precept starts to emerge.

Every country in our networked world benefits from the network. So every country has a responsibility to do what it can to defend the global network from attacks by criminal extremists trying to wreak wider havoc.

If a country can't or won't suppress extremists on its territory, it necessarily forfeits its sovereignty to the extent necessary to allow others to defend the network by taking such action as they see fit, with minimum intrusiveness and respectable proportionality.

The great advantage of this approach is that it keeps the issue of war where it belongs - at the level of states and state sovereignty. States are given a positive incentive to deal firmly with extremists on their soil, since failure to do so will lead to their sovereignty being temporarily qualified as others step in to do so.

If by contrast a state is clearly unable or unwilling to take action against our enemies lurking in its territory and known to be plotting violence against us, that is in effect an unfriendly act against us by the state concerned. It is then our right and duty to respond at the state level with all possible proportionality and care to deal with the problem.

In other words, with a well-aimed Predator.

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers

* * * * *

Former warrior-diplomat Al Haig has died, aged 85.

The obituaries are noting his unique contribution to the English language:

The Washington Post’s George F. Will called him as “an aerobic instructor for the English language, making it twist and stretch.” His instructions took the form of “Haigspeak,” which uniquely combined periphrasis, convolution, and bureaucratese, with a healthy salting of neologisms. “Caveat” was a verb in Haigspeak, and “epistemologicallywise” an adverb.

Basically, he inclined towards convoluted vocabulry of an extreme order.

To the point where (I was told) the following remarkable episode occurred.

Haig was US Secretary of State during the Falklands crisis. The then British Foreign Secretary and a team of senior officials had a meeting with him in Washington.

It went well enough. They departed in the car. Then they started to analyse what he had said. It became clear that one important sentence had been so opaque and tangled that its meaning was quite unclear.

Hence, an awkward question arose. How to go back to the US side to try to get the sentence explained?

It was rather embarrassing for the Foreign Secretary to telephone Haig to ask him to translate himself. But if the Brits asked his officials they might give an answer which was not what Haig meant, if indeed Haig's people themselves had understood what he had meant.

A lively discussion ensued.

Somehow it was sorted out.

And we retook the Falklands.

Hurrah.

It is not easy (for me at least) to work out exactly what is said to have happened with the passports used by the group alleged to have murdered Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Were they 'cloned' or fraudulent?

Let's put possible options on the table.

1  Real blank passports, misused:  in secure British government locations in the UK and overseas are piles of 'blank' passports in serial number order, waiting to be issued. Procedures are in place to check regularly that the stocks of blank passports match the lists of passports printed and despatched to each location to await issue. 

I have done some of these checks myself in Embassy strong-rooms. It would be relatively easy for a corrupt UK official to steal a few of these blanks to pass on to gangsters/KGB/Mossad, but the risk of detection would be very high since sooner or later it would be spotted that issuing numbers were out of sequence with stock-lists and production/despatch-lists.

2  Real passports of real people, misused: the killers could have managed to get hold of real, properly issued passports of real people and alter and then use them for their own purposes. This would have to be done very well for it not to be detected, although having observed for myself the meticulously microscopic and ingenious efforts of teenage boys to alter dob on ID cards to win under-age access to Warsaw nightclubs, that presumably is no problem. The original owners would have to be left with an almost perfect copy of their passports to avoid suspicion. Too complicated?

3  Fake passports of real people, original identities kept: the killers borrowed a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but retained the purported identity of the original owners. If that was done in this case, why would the serial numbers be incorrect?

A day after Dubai police announced the names of the Irish suspects as Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron, a spokesman for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said: "We are unable to identify any of those three individuals as being genuine Irish citizens.

"Ireland has issued no passports in those names."

The passport numbers had the wrong number of digits and did not contain letters as authentic passports do, he added.

4  Fake passports of real people, new identities: the killers took a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but added new names and manipulated the photographs to create new identities.

Some combination of 1-4 above: maybe this was done for operational reasons (a hurried job, and/or the killers could not acquire enough passports in any one category and/or wanted to mix 'n' match to reduce the risk of detection and/or later muddy the waters).

Was the operation a rushed and bungled Mossad job but then deliberately presented as being rushed and bungled to point the finger of suspicion elsewhere?

These Middle East waters will swirl and churn for a few days, but then revert to their normal deeply muddy state:

Officials in Dubai have confirmed that the Gulf state is now considering rescinding the 11 international arrest warrants issued on Tuesday, including the six British citizens initially named as suspects ...

Police declined to comment today on reports that the two Palestinians being held in the emirate were extradited from Jordan last week and include a security official from the Palestinian group Fatah, Hamas’s fierce rival in the occupied territories. The Palestinian Authority has denied the report.

What's the difference between the way top leaders deal with other and the beery ruminations of blokes in pubs, banging on about the about the mischief and duplicity of foreigners?

Less than you might think!

More from me (if you can face it) over at Business and Politics.

On Iran - who is weak and strong in the Negotiations between Iran/USA/Russia/China:

It all boils down to a simple proposition: you don’t win more in any negotiation than your objective strength deserves.

In a struggle between a lion and a hyena, different sorts of strength (physical power, agility, guile, deviousness) all come into play.

And on a more metaphysical level, what does it mean to say that resources are 'finite'?

Is "Toyota’s stuck throttle ... a metaphor for our greedy, addictive, all-consuming, cancerous so-called civilization"?

Er. No.

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.