Blogoir

A reader asks:

I'm dimly aware of some of the covert aid the US offered to Milosevic's opposition prior to his downfall.  I am wondering if you can share some details about those events as well as whether your government also provided similar aid.

This would be a very long posting were I to answer it in full, and who has time for that?

Yes, there was plenty of assistance given to anti-Milosevic tendencies in Serbia from 1999-2000. Most of it was not really 'covert', at least insofar as the Milosevic regime knew what was happening. His political opponents would turn up at the FCO and other Western Ministries and seminars quite openly. No-one expected Milosevic to massacre Serbs in large numbers to stay in power.

Milosevic himself confidently expected to outmanoeuvre all of us. He called an election, banking on simply proclaiming himself the winner come what may then brazening out the ensuing uproar.

Hah.

The point there was that Milosevic had been indicted by ICTY. This meant that the earlier policy ("better the devil you know") was no longer credible or possible. We had to invest in Serbia's future, not its bonkers present. So we did, in all sorts of ways.

One of my favourities was to set up an 'off-shore centre' (so to speak) in Budapest where we ran a series of seminars for Serbian democrats to help them formulate real-life policies for actually running Serbia as and when Milosevic fell. This had several positive effects:

• it made everyone more serious
• it showed the opposition people that we were investing systematically in them and in Hope and Change
• it sent a signal that such change was inevitable (as eventually summed up in the anti-Milosevic campaign slogan Gotov Je - "He's a Goner")

This model can and should be rolled out to many other situations.

Behind all that, other things were done to get across to senior people around Milosevic that they would be better off leaving the sinking ship, or at least not fighting to defend it when the democratic monent finally arrived.

In Iran things are very different. Ahmadinejad is unindicted and may well end up simply crushing any attempts to change things, so the temptation lingers on in Western capitals to 'keep options open' (better the devil you know, it will take a hard-liner to cut a deal, cliché cliché etc etc). Wedge-driving at a high level in such a theocratic space is far harder.

Plus there is no sign now that the USA under new management wants 'regime change' as a policy goal across the Middle East (other perhaps than in Israel). The sense of the Obama Cairo speech was to reassure 'moderate' Arab conservatives and regimes, such as they are, that the USA wants to work with them in a measured way, not against them. Evolution, not Revolution.

Which is fine, until the oppressed people start to fight back for themselves in a rather revolutionary way.

There is a lot on this site about the problems we and the people of the former Yugoslav region face in where precisely the borders of new states should be, and how those new states should be defined.

Try this. Or this.

Former US Ambassador to Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia/Montenegro Bill Montgomery has written again about the philosophical contradictions in US/Western policy:

In both those countries, we have become trapped in policy “boxes” that make it impossible to achieve stability or long-term solutions, despite enormous investments of personnel and resources for almost two decades.

This is because we continue to insist that it is possible, with enough pressure and encouragement, to establish fully functioning multiethnic societies in Bosnia and Kosovo with no change in borders. And we have consistently ignored all evidence to the contrary and branded as obstructionist anyone who speaks openly about alternative approaches...

The end result is continued tension between the two Bosnian entities, a dysfunctional country, and the prospect of many more years of efforts by Western politicians — like Vice President Joe Biden on his recent visit — to pound a square peg into a round hole.

I know of what I speak: For more than 15 years, I was one of these pounders. I finally came to understand that the historical experiences in this region have implanted a mind-set very different from our own. We keep expecting the people in the Balkans to think and react as we do: It is not going to happen...

He opts for solutions which are "achievable", notably some sort of partition of Kosovo and allowing the Bosnian Serbs a referendum on independence:

The fact is that both in Bosnia and in Kosovo, independent local forces can take matters into their own hands and in a very short time bring about renewed violence that we will be hard-pressed to contain. And we simply cannot afford to become even more entangled in the Balkans.

Like an alcoholic whose first step is to recognize he has a problem, we need to accept that the current policies are not tenable. Only then can we start thinking constructively about solutions which can bring lasting stability to the region.

A position which of course prompts the angry retort that any sort of separation of Republika Srpska "rewards genocide":

His call is shortsighted, dangerous and insulting to the victims of genocide and aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It reminds all freedom loving Bosnians of the genocide committed against Bosniaks in the current territory of Republika Srpska and beyond. It also brings Serbs one step closer to realizing the genocidal call of Slobodan Milosevic for Greater Serbia, where all Serbs could live in one country, one nation, one land.

Why should there be separate nation states in this region based on religion alone. The fact that the land of current day Republika Srpska was created, as a direct result of genocide and the ethnic cleansing of its non Serb population, makes Montgomery’s call for independence absolutely absurd.

Why is this question so difficult? Because it straddles a smoking trembling fault-line in one of the great earthquake zones of diplomacy and indeed moral philosophy, namely self-determination. Where and how do people live together? What if they don't want to live together?

When the former Yugoslavia started to wobble as the legitimacy of 'rule from Milosevic's Belgrade' seeped away, there were two principled ways forward.

One lay in creating a way to let the peoples of that territory negotiate new borders based upon the classic idea of self-determination (ie creation of new polities based on predominant local ethnicity/religion/identity).

The other lay in proclaiming that the former internal borders of the SFRY would be the only accepted basis for new external borders, but that each new country would have to accept nice behaviour towards minorities.

The EU and US had an eye on policy towards the former Soviet republics where it was deemed essential to split up the USSR along internal republic borders to guarantee that someone had formal responsibility for those nuclear weapons sited outside Russia. So in an unhappy way the same principle was applied to the former Yugoslavia.

This worked well in Slovenia, as Slovenia was populated primarily by Slovenes. We could compliment ourselves that we were cleverly ticking both the territorial and self-determination boxes simultaneously.

But elsewhere where the Yugoslav ethnic mix was more complex, this did not work. Nor did it apply so obviously to Kosovo, not a republic within Yugoslavia but an 'autonomous province' within Serbia (albeit with Kosovo enjoying most constitutional attributes of a republic including a member of the eight-person state Presidency).

Why? Because Principle collides with Reality.

If people on the ground do not want to be part of the country they are in, they sooner or later start to 'opt out' - peacefully or otherwise.

Which brings us to a battle of wills. How far are the central authorities supported or not by the international community able and willing to persuade or (if necessary) compel those opters-outers to stick with the existing arrangements? How far are the opters-outers really prepared to push things (Scotland/Quebec/Basques)?

Turkey is not going to let the Kurdish population within its borders secede. We have seen what Moscow did to Chechnya. Anyone remember Nigeria/Biafra?

So pick your example. And pick the argument you fancy from the volleys to and fro among international lawyers as to why one situation is really (or not) the proper precedent for another.

In Bosnia the argument that Republika Srpska as it is now is a "product of genocide" has rhetorical and political force. But only up to a point. Plus it does not address the issue of principle, namely that if the Bosnian Serbs want to leave Bosnia and take some territory with them, why is that in principle unreasonable?

In Kosovo the core argument is that the Kosovo Albanians overwhelmingly reject Belgrade rule. But why does that mean that they should have the whole territory, when Serb-majority parts of Kosovo overwhelmingly reject rule from Pristina?

Bill Montgomery is right to say that it makes no political sense to try to establish peace in the former Yugoslavia space on a basis which leaves the largest community there (ie Serbs) feeling cheated and resentful.

But what about Reality? Is it in practice possible to move from where we are now to something  more coherent in principle without creating huge new practical problems which set back the lives of people in the region for yet more decades?

If we accept that there are to be 'territorial adjustments' in that part of the world, the rival communities will sprint towards creating 'new facts on the ground' so as to increase their bargaining positions. Result? A soaring potential for renewed conflict.

Bill of course realises this, saying that any such moves would need "demonstrated will and readiness to use military force to prevent violence along the way". But he rather glosses over the reality that Balkan bickering is no longer of interest to anyone other than the protagonists. NATO troop numbers in the region are declining.

In short?

Staying as we are looks to be unsustainable. Moving anywhere better looks implausible. Hence unhappy and unstable stagnation.

Welcome to the Balkans.

What's left?

Just this, with a creepy life of its own down the decades and centuries::

It is hatred, but not limited just to a moment in the course of social change, or an inevitable part of the historical process; rather, it is hatred acting as an independent force, as an end in itself.

Hatred which sets man against man and casts both alike into misery and misfortune, or drives both opponents to the grave; hatred like a cancer in an organism, consuming and eating up everything around it, only to die itself at the last; because this kind of hatred, like a flame, has neither one constant form, nor a life of its own: it is simply the agent of the instinct of destruction or self destruction. It exists only in this form, and only its task of total destruction has been completed...

Last night I was back again at the Frontline Club to hear Allan Little talk to Nick Hawton about the latter's new book The Quest for Radovan Karadzic:

When everybody else seemed to have given the hunt, one journalist doggedly followed his trail, travelling from the snow-capped mountains of Montenegro to the killing fields of eastern Bosnia to the corridors of power in Belgrade, in search of the man accused of some of the most horrific crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War...

He uncovered a tale of intrigue, murder, betrayal, spies, dirty deals, international politics and innocent victims...

The event was well attended with many Balkanites and people who had followed events closely there at different points, including a few who had met Karadzic himself.

Nick Hawton (who knows the region as a BBC journalist) gave plenty of sensible insights into the Karadzic saga. He argued that as he understood the sequence of events, soon after the Dayton Accords in 1995 Karadzic started to prepare his hideaway in Belgrade and indeed was there for most of the period until his arrest.

Hawton said that If Holbrooke did 'do a deal' with Karadzic, where was the written evidence? Maybe there was an informal understanding, but why would Karadzic have believed that that might bind the Tribunal? If Western intelligence agencies had not managed to identify exactly where he was in all that time, "Disgraceful!"

Hawton said that it was clear that former Serbian leader Kostunica had known where Karadzic was hiding - when Kostunica fell from power in 2008 Karadzic promptly was arrested, although he had been under close surveillance for some time before the arrest.

I threw in a generous dose of my own take on these matters, to some interest from the audience.

Some Q&A below to sum up my view for the record.

Remember the Wider Context

From 1991-2008 there were several overlapping phases in the extended Karadzic drama:

• 1991-95:  Bosnia Conflict: Karadzic a familiar interlocutor with Western diplomats and peacemakers
• ICTY 'secret' indictment: no willingness to arrest him on the part of Western governments - ICTY and its authority were still developing
• ICTY open indictment:  Karadzic starts to become persona non grata (not invited to Dayton) but is still politically active
• Run-up to 1996 post-Dayton elections:  vital for President Clinton that these pass off peacefully with Karadzic not in evidence (Clinton's own re-election looming that year). NB NATO/SFOR rules of engagement do not instruct IFOR/SFOR troops actively to track down and arrest war crimes suspects. Karadzic 'persuaded' (in part with pressure from Belgrade) to withdraw from public life
• 1997:  US/UK with others decide actively to try to arrest ICTY indictees, starting with 'low-hanging fruit'. British special forces kill Serb ICTY indictee Drljaca when he resists arrest (Note: this insanely is denounced in Sarajevo Bosniac/Muslim media as pro-Serb British plot). Other ICTY indictees start to go underground. Karadzic known to be lurking in Republika Srpska, leaning on RS leaders to go slow on Dayton cooperation. Other 'lesser' indictees nabbed by IFOR/SFOR. Karadzic sinks from view.
• 1998-2000:  Kosovo conflict erupts. Milosevic too indicted by ICTY, and has no reason to cooperate with West to arrest Karadzic
• 2000:  Milosevic falls. Kostunica (friend of Karadzic) becomes FRY President on pro-reform ticket; refuses to do throw his personal authority behind bringing Karadzic/Mladic to justice. Top Serbia reformer PM Djindjic manoeuvres towards ICTY cooperation, with various senior Serbs surrendering to ICTY
• 2003:  PM Djindjic murdered - gangster tendencies re-assert themselves in Serbia
• 2008:  Kostunica falls over his inflexible Kosovo/Europe policies. Reformer Tadic triumphs. Karadzic arrested and sent to ICTY

The point of rehearsing this history is to bring out that at no time until just before he was arrested did we have a coincidence of Western and Serbian top-level political will to effect Karadzic's arrest.

You got Saddam. Why not Karadzic/Mladic?

Exactly. Western forces arrested Saddam some months after invading Iraq when huge military forces occupied the country and could throw their technical and personnel weight behind finding him.

Had we done that in 1996 Karadzic/Mladic could have been arrested quickly. But President Clinton would not authorise the action - fear of another Blackhawk Down fiasco in an election year. Holbrooke says this in so many words in his book. Thereafter it got harder, the more so as NATO's presence in Bosnia ebbed and Milosevic was indicted.

Why did you smart MI6/CIA not find him in all that time?

Have you any idea what's involved? The Serbs are outstanding improvisers. They consume grilled meat topped with generous helpings of Inat in huge proportions. British and American officials are followed constantly and stick out like sore thumbs. A heavy disinformation campaign was waged to keep us running around chasing dead-end leads.

That said, we tried mighty hard, and I believe we got very close to identifying him and his whereabouts on a couple of occasions in recent years. But getting close and then propelling the action needed to get him arrested and transferred to ICTY in the face of stalling from the Serbian top leadership was doomed to failure. Even had the lugubriously nationalistic Kostunica been minded to put the word down to Karadzic to hand himself in, the murder of Zoran Djindjic did not encourage risk-taking.

Why could not the SAS go in to arrest him without Serbia's consent?

The prime responsibility for arresting an ICTY indictee lies with the country where that indictee is located. Given the disinformation being deliberately thrown around to create uncertainty, no British leader properly could authorise a military snatch raid knowing that there could be a shoot-out leading to British/local deaths - and maybe Karadzic/Mladic not even there.

Where's Mladic?

Pass. But probably surrounded by a group of tough Serb soldiers whose orders include not letting him be taken alive?

Could you yourself have done more?

I wish that the ethical foreign policy Labour Government had not allowed the Americans to trump my own idea of trying to persuade Karadzic to surrender. Without the highest-level authority I had no safe or meaningful way to proceed. So, no.

Lessons?

Front-load for success. There is never a better time to hit these villains than when your force and resolve are at their height and you have Momentum, as NATO had in 1996 and the Americans had in 2003 in Iraq. If you let these issues get tangled up in your own domestic politics as President Clinton did (and maybe all things considered that indeed was the wisest call for him to make), you miss the moment and make things far harder for yourself and any passing peace process. Conspiracy theories grow like weeds and your local credibility wanes.

But there always are wider considerations at stake, especially in a democracy - that's life.

The claim by the defence of Radovan Karadzic that he had a deal with Richard Holbrooke ("This is it - leave public and political life in Republika Srpska and you won't have to go to the Hague." "OK...") is back in the news again.

Back in mid-1996, only a few months after the Dayton Peace deal, I was in London for a senior meeting to discuss how the Karadzic issue should be managed. I was HM Ambassador-designate for Sarajevo, and was allowed to sit at the back.

Carl Bildt (High Representative) plus senior American and European diplomats argued crossly to and fro in the FCO Map Room about how far the international community in Bosnia could and should press to force Karadzic from the forthcoming Dayton elections.

The issue came to a head over election posters. Should posters supporting Karadzic's political party with his picture on them be tolerated? Or should OSCE (led by US diplomat Bob Frowick) ask NATO for the support needed to stop them?

The Americans (no doubt with a view to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign) argued forcefully that Karadzic had to be forced from the scene. How could we accept an ICTY indictee being glorified?

The Europeans with (alas) the Brits to the fore countered that we had to proceed with caution; being too assertive with the Serbs could collapse the elections and wreck Dayton.

This was my first serious encounter with a hard Bosnia negotiation - I had missed the immediate policy decisions of the conflict while on a posting in Moscow. Watching it as a newcomer to the deeper issues and the psychology of some of the top diplomats involved, I thought that the Americans won the intellectual and moral argument hands down. The British arguments were clever but technical - they seemed nervous and unconvincing.

Anyway, it was decided to press for Karadzic to withdraw fully from the elections. So what did the Americans then proceed to offer him by way of inducements to do so? Anything?

The Karadzic defence claim that he was offered ICTY immunity soon after that London meeting:

He says Mr Holbrooke, then the US envoy to Bosnia, agreed to provide him with immunity at a meeting in Belgrade on 18-19 July, 1996.

Mr Karadzic does not claim to have attended the meeting, but says the former Bosnian Serb assembly speaker, Momcilo Krajisnik, and foreign minister, Aleksa Buha, were there and could testify to Mr Holbrooke's alleged promise. 

Thus, Questions.

Is the Karadzic claim plausible?

Yes. Very much so.

Is it of any legal consequence? Probably not.

No US diplomat could offer a promise of immunity binding on the Tribunal without being armed with the highest and explicit authority of the Tribunal to do so, which it surely did not give.

Is this unfolding saga potentially fascinating and embarrassing for Holbrooke and Mrs Clinton, whose husband must have been involved in this power-play in part for his own political purposes?

Yes. Although if it comes to it they will surely brush aside proof of any promises which the then Clinton team may have made as being purely a ploy for the Greater Good...

Here is a wannabe high-browish piece about Grand Theft Auto, a cleverly violent computer car-based game appealing to most boys of all ages.

The hero of the game is one Niko Bellic, a computerised Balkanite tough egg (Serb?). I suspect that no Serb/Balkan name has a double ll in it following the orthographic reforms of Serbian led by Vuk Karadzic well over a century ago - surely Belic would have been a better try?

Be that as it may, the review looks at the game in terms of its gritty depiction of the immigrant experience as our Balkan newcomer tries to grapple with the contradictions of New World Capitalism:

But he also betrays Mikhael in the name of capitalist production; Mikhael is dangerous, yes, but murder is the stock and trade of such men. The trouble is that his murderousness is no longer profitable; it has, in fact, gotten in the way of the mob’s profitability. His dedication to an outmoded form of production, more than anything else, leads to Mikhael’s destruction.

In the New World, blood loyalties are replaced with contracts, honor with rules, ritual revenge with law. It isn’t that the Old World mode is not just as arbitrary or dangerous; Mikhael is already self-destructing, and Niko, very much an Old World soul, is burdened by considerable misery. The difference is that the new mode is self-aware, and its subscribers can therefore self-modify in order to remain profitable.

If you say so.

What I spotted was this sentence:

The character is viewed from a third person perspective and has free reign over accessible regions.

It is an interesting example of one phrase morphing into another. The original idea is that someone shows or has or is given a 'free rein' - letting a horse gallop ahead where it will without hauling on the reins to steer/slow it.

As most people now have little if any dealings with the world of horses, the phrase is mutating into something which sounds and means the same but loses the original imagery while gaining a plausible replacement - hence the new form free reign.

Something similar is happening to expressions like 'sow confusion' or 'sow discontent'. Banal ignorance of both spelling and agricultural metaphor is bringing into the language the strange but maybe not totally inappropriate new metaphor of sew confusion, as I saw now and again in Foreign Office drafts.

Anyone has other examples?

Sorry readers. An exhausting couple of days clearing out the parental garage.

This old radio of mine emerged - a hefty but magnificent Pye Cambridge International. 

One of these cost a huge 42 guineas in 1954, the auspicious year of my birth. Not easy to say with any certainty what that price means nowadays, but one nifty website aids the calculation: either £789 (using retail price index) or £2,181 (using average earnings). So in any event a superb piece of kit.

This valve radio belonged to the Embassy in Belgrade and when new technology arrived it was no longer needed. So I bagged it, back in 1984.

I tried to start it today for the first time in twenty or so years. It came to life but wisps of smoke appeared - dust on the valves burning as they wheezed back into life?

So, off to be overhauled it goes. When I can find a box big enough to ship it...

Alas such marvellous engineering achievements are worth next to nothing now - almost certainly less than the cost of restoring it. They are just too big and clunky for modern houses. Just like my LP collection and the Linn LP12 system and huge heavy speakers which drive them, driven into obscurity by the iPod and its fit-in-your-pocket cleverness.

Which for no good reason reminds me of one of my first postings, musing on the awesome Khazzoom-Brookes postulate - the idea that the invention of more energy-saving devices makes it cheaper to save energy, so we use more of it overall.

Another radio memory from communist Yugoslavia. I visited a house in Vojvodina one day in 1982 or thereabouts, where they had an old working radio the size of a modern fridge if not bigger. The sound was magnificent: deep, rich, strong. I bet it's still there somewhere. 

Rummaging through my career files today I read again the 1997 letter to us from Diana, Princess of Wales expressing thanks for what the Embassy had done to help her on her visit to Bosnia to highlight the dangers of landmines - as it tragically turned out, the last public engagement she undertook and one which the Embassy had to help organise at literally three days' notice(!)...

Here is a Sunday Times report of the visit. The media 'story' at the time as she left Sarajevo of course was not landmines but her relationship with Dodi Fayed.

Her letter to me dated 13 August 1997 must have been one of the final official letters she signed before her fatal car crash on 31 August in Paris.

Something special to keep in the family archives.

RFE/RL has many excellent pieces on the less settled parts of Europe and beyond.

Here is a gloomy piece about the current trends in former Yugoslavia, arguing that with so many other problems going on elsewhere the 'international community' is not gripping Balkanic divisons which are reappearing busily all over the place:

For political leaders in the Balkans and others who have their own agendas, this is a perfect opportunity. The cat is away, and so the mice will certainly become brave -- and will step up their efforts to use empty stomachs to create more hot heads...

Which means that:

... the global economic crisis, the lack of democratic habits and institutions, and the complete absence of a plan for future development have created fertile ground for nationalism and renewed ethnic conflict across the Balkans.

The wars in the Balkans have been put into pause mode. There were no winners, no losers, so all sides can claim victory and march on. New flags of nationalism are again waving in the region. Can it be long before people begin digging out their weapons as well?

Welcome back to Bosnia as High Representative, my excellent former colleague Valentin Inzko!

Thus:

The new high representative will be the seventh. Most likely, he or she will be in office to mark the 15th anniversary of the creation of the post of high representative with the task of supervising postwar normalization and the transition to stable democracy. But after 15 years of trying, Bosnia is neither stable nor democratic.

Rather than serving as midwife to a new democracy, the EU high representative is just a nanny to a sickly patient who refuses to take his medicine.

Ouch.

Or is it that the fact there is just too much poison in the system for the patient ever to get better, whatever modern diplomatic medicine might try to do?

"I can resist everything except temptation."

Oscar Wilde for Minister of Culture in Albania?

Spiegel Online International carries all sorts of excellent pieces, beautifully written in or translated into English for a wider audience.

This one about Islamic extremists in Sarajevo is thought-provoking. And not all the thoughts are positive:

The obliteration of Israel is heralded in a torrent of words. "Zionist terrorists," the imam thunders from the glass-enclosed pulpit at the end of the mosque. "Animals in human form" have transformed the Gaza Strip into a "concentration camp," and this marks "the beginning of the end" for the Jewish pseudo-state.

Over 4,000 faithful are listening to the religious service in the King Fahd Mosque, named after the late Saudi Arabian monarch King Fahd Bin Abd al-Asis Al Saud.

The women sit separately, screened off in the left wing of the building. It is the day of the Khutbah, the great Friday sermon, and the city where the imam has predicted Israel's demise lies some 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) northwest of Gaza.

It is a city in the heart of Europe: Sarajevo.

This analysis poses a Good Question:

Could a radical, potentially violent parallel society be emerging in the Muslim dominated region of the war-torn republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, eight months after the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European Union?

Don't expect Bosniac leader Haris Silajdzic to answer:

Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, sits a few buildings down the street, in the presidential palace. He played a very active role as foreign minister and prime minister during the war but now, after years of power struggles, the one-time beau is starting to show signs of exhaustion. Nevertheless, he is still widely regarded as one of the most artful advocates of Muslim interests in this multi-ethnic state.

Silajdzic says he sees no indication of an Islamization of Sarajevo or Bosnia. In his opinion, it is more important to talk of ensuring that the Muslims receive justice after the "genocide" of the 1990s.

For anyone interested, there latterly have been three main streams in the political organisation of the Bosnian Muslims aka Bosniacs (and for those who really need help, here is the difference between Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian muslims, and Bosniacs):

• secular social-democratic, let's-all-get along stream: not unpopular and even appealing to a lot of people, with Zlatko Lagumdzija to the fore
• overtly nationalistic, demagogic, Bosnia is the Muslim part of former Yugoslavia stream: Haris Silajdzic is the undisputed exponent of this view, which plays up the ethnic identity and territorial demands of the Bosnian Muslims rather than any specific Islamist agenda
• overtly Islamist stream: people who want to create an openly Islamic space in Bosnia as part of a longer-view Islamic agenda. Not all of these people are obvious extremists in themselves - the late Alija Izetbegovic was if anything an ultra-liberal by global Islamic standards. But other parts of this stream spiral off into foreign-funded fanaticism and potential terrorism.

For a small community (some two million people) in a small country, the rivalry between these philosophically distinct and largely mutually exclusive tendencies looks like a recipe for incessant divisions. Which is what the Bosniacs have, and why issues going to the modernisation of Bosnia take a distant back seat.

The region's Serbs and Croats tend to suspect that the Silajdzic nationalist view is merely the radical Islamist view wearing a thin tactical disguise of Westernisation. So they behave defensively towards it, which undermines the secularist Bosniac approach, which reinforces the nationalist/Islamist tendencies, which reinforces Serb/Croat 'we told you so' angst, and so on.

Which, looking at the demographics of Bosnia, is Bad News for the Dayton process. And for Europe?

Why should the Bosniacs spend too much energy filling in all those thousands of EU application forms and cutting back corruption when (they might think) there is a much bigger prize in sight in a mere 1100 weeks or so: the collapse of Dayton and the rewriting of the basic Bosnia deal - on Bosniac/Muslim/muslim terms?

Then the real fun will start, as the nationalist/Islamist tendencies start to fight over what terms those might happen to be.

Incoming. Slowly. But surely.

My new observations on this ever-fascinating subject are in the latest Total Politics (free registration needed for the E-zine).

See eg:

Yeltsin’s Moscow before that (1993-96) was fascinating in big policy terms, but a grinding, debilitating place to live in. In late August the air abruptly went chilly as the Russian Winter geared up. By the following April the Embassy was a squabbling wreck, everyone fed up with filthy frozen ice and overheated apartments. As warmer weather approached, reports of deep-frozen drunks emerging from melting snowdrifts (and hefty twenty foot-long icicles crashing down to kill pedestrians) did little to ease our flagging spirits.

And the world's first British chauvinist's guide to possible postings, including Belgrade/Balkans:

Why does the EU work as it does?

One Massive Point about the EU which tends to get lost is that it is all about the biggest member states giving exaggerated and unceasing reassurance to the smaller ones. This explains why the voting weights as per the current Nice Treaty work hugely to the disadvantage of Germany in particular, with the UK/France/Italy Spain also doing fairly badly.

The effect of this is that the Bigs can not overpower the Not So Bigs and Smalls, even though the Bigs pay more heavily into the common Budget and have far more actual people.

Strip out all the obvious explanations for how this came about and there is something deeper going on: a strategic deal based upon the relative stability of national population weights as between the various member states.

Because the respective population weights of the various member states vary at a slowish and predictable pace, those states can sign up to these 'discriminatory' voting weight arrangements safe at least in the knowledge that they know what to expect for some time to come - they can not be caught out by abrupt demographic jumps, and accompanying demands for the rules to be rewritten.

That said, changes do accumulate up. And down.

Try to imagine an EU in which the UK was the largest country and Germany third after France. That could happen comfortably within the lifetime of children at school now.

Still, fifty years is quite a long time in immediate policy terms. Twenty years is only some 1040 weeks - not such a long time. 

What if a community in a divided multi-ethnic society thought that the numbers were working very fast in its favour? That within a mere 1000 weeks or so it could have a predominant demographic position, and so be able to change the constitution to rewrite the country's rules completely in favour of an effective mono-ethnic outcome on its own terms?

Would not this stunning historical prize dominate that community's political thinking, and be more attractive than doing all that boring work needed to join the EU?

Welcome to Bosnia, via this remarkable must-read analysis.

The dreary saga of General Mladic rambles on. Successive Serbian governments have pressed the civilised world that it is not fair to hold Serbia's European prospects hostage for one crazy war criminal. Some in the civilised world agree.

Yet that argument goes the other way too. Why is one crazy man exerting such an influence over so many people that it has not been possible to nab him and send him on his way to the Hague in over a decade?

A survey in Serbia appeared to show a strong popular reluctance to hand over war-crimes indictee General Mladic to face justice:

... what makes Ratko M a friend of two thirds of Serbian citizens? Why do they feel so indebted to him?

Few things are more horrible or dreadful than those for which Ratko Mladić is indicted. If you look at it that way, hardly anyone would have reason to protect and defend him except his direct accomplices. How do you then get from a handful of accomplices to 65% of the polled adult citizens of Serbia?

Good question.

The answer alas lies somewhere here:

We sort of do not want to go back, and we definitely cannot go forward; trapped in a purgatory closed on both sides, we are often infuriated by mass oblivion, but this is an illusion: there is no oblivion, because there has never been an awareness of the Events That Happened.

You cannot forget something that you never even knew, and you did not know because you made a great effort not to find out and not to understand, because it is nicer and easier that way. 

I think that Mladic is like Lenin mouldering away in Red Square.

A potent symbol of something so uniquely awful in the local culture that in a  strange, unspoken way many people feel actually proud of its awfulness, even when they have suffered from that awfulness - and therefore proud of their own furtive complicity in it:

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it - but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about 'moving on'. 

Perhaps the Serbs and Russians by some chance are increasingly related:

The propensity to rely on spiritual unity with Russia, displayed particularly by the country’s president and foreign minister, arises I guess from sheer helplessness, intellectual as well as political...