Blogoir

Ha ha ha!

Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings!

This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, Abhazija (sic), Tajikistan, Chad, Israel and Guatemala. Russian diplomats get extra money - a 20% pay uplift - for the additional stress of working in such ghastly places!

The reason given is that Serbia is a greater conflict risk because of Kosovo. Serbia's Foreign Minister is quoted as complaining that Serbia can not be placed at 'this level', whatever its difficulties might be.

Quite right! Given the gushing reception which greets Russian diplomats in Belgrade, they should jolly well take a pay CUT for the sheer pleasure of going there.

Of course, say the Russians, this is not a 'political' decision. Yet as we know, in wily Russian diplomacy nothing is linked - but everything is linked...

Well, we all have to save the ENVIRONMENT, don't we? Huh? Huh?

Which means going GREEN, right?

Let's hear it for the Continental Hotel in Serbia, deservedly famous for having hosted the murder of Arkan in early 2000. The wifi does not work (much) and the water goes off in the night.

But at least they have taken the idea of Going Green to just the right level of spiritual and political correctness when it comes to their own furniture.

A snappy young Serbian woman with two degrees from universities in the USA comes back to Belgrade to live and work. She gets a good job in a major Serbian bank on the corporate communications side.

She gives a presentation to the bank top brass on how the bank can transform its working methods and effectiveness by using new technology. General delight and applause - they're all impressed.

But after the presentation one of the senior bank executives comes up to her and says "You know, all that clever stuff will never work here. When people look at the sky they tread in dog-shit." She, startled, asks him to repeat his words. He does so.

Next day she hands in her resignation - she won't stay in a place with such foul people and such an attitude to reform, self-improvement and growth.

Serbia loses - again.

* * * * *

Thus it was that yesterday I found myself at the Belgrade Forum For The (sic) World Of Equals conference, an event supposed intended to discuss the prospects for European Security after the USA, Russia, French and other elections in 2012.

The Belgrade Forum is the place where old Milosevic supporters go to die. It is lead by Zivadin Jovanovic, a friendly but formalistic Yugo-communist career diplomat who achieved the anti-distinction of ending up as Milosevic's Foreign Minister after Milosevic was indicted by ICTY.

The Forum champions turgid pseudo-analytical ideas such as this:

Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. It would be a sad future for the mankind if internal one should be based on the principle of hierarchy instead of the principle of democracy! As early as at the low-level economic, technologic, democratic and cultural development, the society chose to discard rubber-stamping and dictate as the means of the retrograde politics.

Certainly, there is no rationale to revive such theories and efforts, such as, for instance, is the theory on “limited sovereignty” and the like. For example, which Western European or North American country would accept an open interfering in its electoral process in the name of globalization and “new notions of sovereignty and territorial integrity”?

... Belgrade Forum strongly condemns any discrimination and double standards, be it in the area of human rights or any other areas, and endorses full observance of both international and national law.

I particularly cherish the idea that Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. What this actually means is an extreme 'relativisation' of any sort of principles - that any nasty little dictatorship has exactly the same moral validity and international standing as a normal democracy.

The logic is something like this:

• all states are equal under international law - the votes of brutalised human rights dustbins such as Zimbabwe, Syria and Cuba are as politically - and morally - significant as the votes of Finland, Canada and Poland when it comes to setting the rules of global order, including (nay especially) human rights norms themselves
• therefore no state has the right to 'interfere' in another state's internal affairs
• therefore even if Milosevic was a monster (which of course he wasn't), that's no-one else's business but Serbia's
• because Milosevic's Serbia was democratic, see?
• and because we're so democratic, we can stop the majority of people of Kosovo voting to escape our benign, democratic rule even after we have treated them with semi-racist disdain for some fifty years

The conference duly lived up to these noble principles, with different Serbian speakers bewailing Serbia's fate at the hands of sundry 'aggressors'. But as the event had generous Russian sponsors, there was an added bonus - various Russian experts and other foreign speakers brought in, mainly to extol the virtues of Vladimir Putin!

These two themes combined in a creepy way. In one laboured presentation after another Serbian speakers gushed their praise of Russia's 'principled stand' and 'patriotic' strength and wisdom. The Russian experts (who being Russian experts evinced a certain steely professionalism and realism amidst the general embarrassment) beamed benignly at this painful sycophancy.

Part of the Russian argument about European security turned on what was said to be the growing role of the CSTO. This, for people not familiar with the politics of the former Soviet space, is a collective security organisation bringing together a number of former Soviet republics. The main political point of this organisation is to head off former republics joining NATO. Armenia has dutifully signed up, along with such otherwise likely NATO members as Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

So question for Serbia. Should Serbia show how independent it truly is and join CSTO? And question for Russia - would you really want these strutting whiny Milosevic Serbs in this happy post-Soviet family photograph?

No-one really wanted to talk about this in any serious way, because of course it's not serious. But instead the thought was wafted round the conference room now and again, like an Orthodox priest swinging a malodorous thurible, to create a mood of naughty 'anti-imperialist' and anti-European defiance.

In this absurd setting it was impossible to say anything sensible. My modest contribution argued that the sprawling institutional legacy of the Cold War (OSCE, NATO, EU, CSTO, Helsinki accords and so on) was slowly losing authority, and that massed citizens power spurred by new technology was challenging political elites from below. Plus for most of the previous three centuries or so Europe (and Americanised Europeans) had defined the world - now the world was starting to define us. We all needed new ideas about what 'security' actually meant in these circumstances, based upon some shared positive values such as pluralism and transparency based on the 'consent of the governed'.

However, I also threw in for good measure the proposition that the Kosovo situation first and foremost had been a defeat for Belgrade policies, where 'Belgrade' represented the capital of Serbia, the policies of Milosevic and the general Serb worldview.

This trite thought provoked a lot of graceless spluttering noises from one Dragan Todorovic, a Serbian Radical Party MP. He then used his presentation to rave away about the glories of Russia and the CSTO, and attacked my cynicism and (yes!) double-standards:

His country defended the Falkland islands for the sake of the sheep, and he denies Serbia the right to defend Kosovo!

Nice one. Lost in his own bewildered burbling, he missed 100% the rather important policy point that a majority if not 100% of the Falklands population wanted to stay with the UK, whereas the great majority of Kosovo's population want to get away from Belgrade rule (and indeed from people like him). 

* * * * *

Conclusion?

Back in 1996 I told Republika Srpska leader Mrs Plavsic, later to serve time at ICTY for war crimes, that too many Serbs reminded me of people who stood on a busy motorway waving the traffic code and crying that everyone was driving too fast: "Good point, but you get run over!"

The sort of attitudes represented at this event yesterday represent complete doom for Serbia.

Look, Serbia. Please listen carefully. 'Ajde slušaj bre!

I agree with the broad proposition that the EU/USA did not really understand the dynamics of the former Yugoslavia, and did not have a clear plan for managing the reasonable and unreasonable expectations of the Serbs as the largest community in SFRY.

So Milosevic had some good points to make. But he time after time blew his opportunity to accept and work with potentially friendly partners by being stupid and violent. One Russian diplomat told me how he'd walked out in disgust after hours of idiotic wrangling and sheer nonsense with him.

The result now is a severely weakened and degraded Serbia - the Cost of Milosevic has compounded up to staggering levels. If that isn't a Belgrade policy failure, tell me what one is.

Yes, you're right. Much of the Western world imposed sanctions, then NATO bombed you. That didn't help. But why did this happen? Could it just possibly perhaps maybe have had a little something to do with Belgrade's policies? And, if so, what might you learn from that to do better next time?

Now what?

It's fine by the EU and NATO if you don't join either of us! Really. Especially if you don't join the EU: British taxpayers won't have to give you lots of free money.

Do what the hell you like. Join the CSTO or ASEAN or create a new progressive Union with Belarus, North Korea and Cuba. Whatever! Just do it. then accept the consequences of your own choices like an adult.

You're good fun when you want to be, but your problems and insecurities have long since ceased to matter much. And please don't hold back other former Yugoslavia communities - or even people in Vojvodina - who think that, frankly, Belgrade's neurotic political classes are just a bit too weird these days.

That said, if Serbia wants to have some self-respect and stop its young people resigning from good jobs and growing up in squalid corrupt towns and cities, try to adopt policies which create wealth and attract investment. Present at least some good ideas.

Sound positive! Friendly! Nice! Don't recycle exhausted Yugo-communist clichés, delivered by exhausted Yugo-communists.

And don't expect Putin-style Russians to care for you either. They know you're weak and demoralised. And that suits them just fine. They'll tend to look on you the way Stalin sneered at uppity Milovan Djilas and boasted about the way the Red Army raped its way down into Serbia:

The Russians will give you all sorts of glittering trophies, because they know finely to calibrate your impoverished expectations. Then they'll buy what's left of your industry for knock-down prices.

True Serbian glory. Achieved at last:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!

Two sljivovica-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right… He loved Big Brother.

Off to Belgrade tomorrow for a conference on Thursday hosted by the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals as supported by Russian partners. The theme is European Security in the Light of 2012 Elections.

Notable speakers include Dragan Todorovic of the Serbian Radical Party, whose programme asserts Serbia's rights over plenty of currently non-Serbia territory in former Yugoslavia. And James Jatras of the American Council for Kosovo which has what might politely be called firm paleoconservative views in favour of Kosovo staying part of Serbia.

The Belgrade Forum is strong on denouncing what it calls 'NATO's crimes' in former Yugoslavia. Plus it has the good luck to draw on the North Korean school of drafting when it sends fraternal messages to other organisations:

The leadership and members of the Belgrade Forum hold in highest regard our thriving cooperation, an outstanding level of our mutual friendship and the evident closeness in opinions on key issues, such as those concerning peace, security, democracy and overall progress.

So insofar as I am there to give a quixotic 'Western'/UK view of the emerging European scene, I can expect to be heavily outnumbered by different proud Slavophiliac tendencies. 

No matter:

The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one ...This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a world brighter than anything we can imagine! To victory!!

I have written a piece for Financier Worldwide on the dark arts of negotiating in central and eastern Europe:

The implicit view is that it is the outcome, not process, which really counts, and that the value of different outcomes can be measured. However, based on my experience as a diplomat in Central and Eastern Europe, contractual or other relationships with businesses there need to factor in a very different way of looking at negotiation.

 

The Russian approach to diplomatic negotiations features an attitude to process far removed from the exquisitely reasonable style of British diplomacy. Moscow diplomats’ training makes this point: “Even if the other side proposes something you completely agree with, never make a move without getting something valuable for it.”

 

Russia typically wants to project strength as an end in itself. Part of any negotiation is balancing incentive-carrots with pressure-sticks: “If you accept our position, we guarantee you a positive outcome. If you refuse, we’ll make sure you get a very negative outcome”.

 

Russian negotiators aim to neutralise that approach by conveying a very different proposition: “It doesn’t matter how much you try to pressure us. First, we can withstand more pressure than you can possibly exert, or even imagine. Second, whatever you do to hurt us, we will do something far worse to hurt you.”

 

That approach emphasises hard practical outcomes, but reveals an attitude to process which is all about establishing psychological ascendancy as the basis for subsequent ‘pragmatic’ discussions. The very vocabulary of Soviet/Russian diplomacy has phrases conveying brooding depersonalised doom: “Negative consequences for your interests can not be excluded.”

Gripping stuff, based on unswervingly bold generalisations. But to read the rest, you’ll have to sign up…

Exhibit A: a superb article describing research which shows convincingly how the influence of the bureaucratic-cultural disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on in today's Europe. Thus:

Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed by other authorities...

Comparing individuals living on either side of the long-gone Habsburg border within the same modern-day country, we find that respondents in a current household survey who live on former Habsburg territory have higher levels of trust in courts and police.

They are also less likely to pay bribes for these local public services, demonstrating that the institutional heritage influences not only preferences and unilateral decisions but also bilateral bargaining situations in citizen-state interactions.

... the cultural norms of behaviour are unlikely to have survived solely by intergenerational transmission within families. It rather seems that such channels as the persistent nature of continuous reciprocal interactions in local communities, the content of knowledge and behavioural patterns conveyed in schools, and the quality of human capital of bureaucrats and citizens may have also played a role.

This sort of thinking - that 'civilisational' characteristics and trends have an existence far beyond immediate day-to-day politics and even medium-term economic development - lay behind Sam Huntingdon's famous but controversial book 'The Clash of Civilisations'. 

Sweeping and brilliant and provocative as it was, fashionable opinion did not much like it: too pessimistic about human progress and with a scarcely hidden anti-Islamic tone (they said).

Yet for me as a Balkanite, much of whose professional life had been spent on and around the historic faultlines of imperial Europe, he was on to something very profound.

Drive up towards Sarajevo from the Croatian coast and almost within a few hundred metres there suddenly comes a point where you cross from Austro-Hungary into Ottoman. The landscape and its mood changes. The attitude to roadside tidiness, gardens, public and private property, trust in government - they are all just 'different'.

Likewise in Belgrade. On the 'main' side of the river you're on the edge of the greater Ottoman space. Across the river and on up into Vojvodina the landscape and 'society' visibly changes. Part of this is (it's said) directly and literally connected with differing imperial legacies: property rights tended to be codified under the Hapsburgs, whereas under the Ottomans land ownership was far less systematic and untransparent. The result today is that land and investment decisions are much harder in central and southern Serbia, which duly stays poorer.

The authors of the study rightly mention Poland. At the 2005 elections clear voting tendencies emerged which could be mapped neatly against the boundaries of Poland's areas when Poland was partitioned up to WW1. People in Poznan (long part of the Germanic civilisational space) titter at the unpunctuality and unbusinesslike sloppiness of people in Warsaw (long part of the Russian civilisational space). And so on.

Read the whole thing. Most impressive.

And then read Exhibit B, Megan McArdle on the grisly problems of the Eurozone:

Europe has two choices: tighter integration, or partial dissolution.  I agree, but I just don't see how the former can work.  The Irish and the Germans and the Portuguese and the Greeks do not identify with "Europe" the way 1930s Americans identified with "America"; neither group is going to readily sacrifice its own self-interest for the others.  

The elites have gotten around this so far by leaning heavily on unaccountable institutions like the central banks, but as Wolf shows, this cannot last forever. 

Unless their economies rapidly start to mend, continuing in the euro will be economic suicide for the PIIGS once the backdoor subsidies stop.  In this week's column, Robert Samuelson notes just how dire things are "Already, unemployment is 14.1% in Greece, 14.7% in Ireland, 11.1% in Portugal and 20.7% in Spain.

 

What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits; but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenues and offsetting some of the deficit improvement."  Add on top of this the drawbacks of an expensive currency and a tight monetary policy for a troubled economy, and they'd have to be crazy to stay...

And see the Eurozone’s problems. Millions of Greeks cry out: “How dare the state/government/EU take away our rights!” But by what moral or political principle can Greek ‘rights’ to receive subsidies take precedence over the rights of non-Greeks to choose not to pay them?

Conclusion?

Neither conservatives nor liberal-progressives in the West have any coherent philosophy helping them decide which institutions, organisations or even values should best be ‘conserved’ by collective action, or how best to do it by suppressing X’s free choice to uphold Y’s privilege. Instead we get little more than mutually abusive political squawking and improvisation which look increasingly and annoyingly detached from reality.

Perhaps in these profoundly unsettling times it is no surprise that the British public show such Euroscepticism counterpoised by general support for the Monarchy which, for all its silver stick flim-flams and illogicalities, represents our best collective hope for some minimal sense of psychological continuity and shared experience?

The fact is that for reasons which are almost impossible to identify and maybe are highly unpopular to articulate, some things 'fit' and some things don't. It looks increasingly as if the EU itself as currently constituted is not a viable fit - the expectations and attitudes in different parts of the EU are simply not manageable within the over-rigid, prescriptive top-down format we now have.

And the more our UK and EU elites tell the public that it is all for the best when it clearly isn't, the more a deep-seated public unease will grow across Europe in a populist and increasingly incoherent way.  

My latest piece over at The Commentator looks at why it took so long to arrest Ratko Mladic, and why our leaders tend to opt for gradual escalation rather than decisive blows to the head:

In late 1996 I sent a secret telegram to London arguing that the massively expensive British and Western investment in Bosnia was doomed to failure if action was not taken against the ICTY indictees, particularly the most senior ones.

My argument was simple. It made no sense for the international presence in Bosnia to go round trying to plant the green seeds of European reasonableness if a few paces behind us followed ICTY indictees pouring plant-killer on those seeds.

The Bosnian communities were not stupid. They did not believe that the international seed-planters were unaware of -- or too weak to deal with -- the war crimes suspects openly trying to thwart progress. The only conclusion they could draw was that for some dark reason a deal had been done with those ICTY indictees. This being the case, why take the international community's “democracy” seriously? The ICTY indictees were looking like the real -- and permanent -- winners in the whole affair.

London by then was coming to the same conclusion. A new policy was worked out with Washington (Clinton by then safely re-elected), albeit at the risk of "mission creep". Specialist NATO troops would now take action to arrest and transfer to the ICTY all indictees.

But which indictees should be arrested first? The prominent senior ones who had presided over policies leading to all sorts of iniquitous outcomes? Or the nasty, less well-known indictees personally involved in carrying out atrocities?

This is where rational policy-making gives way to elusive, top-level political and personal instincts about risks and how to manage them...

The conclusion?

It takes an almost freakishly unusual combination of operational factors and the highest political nerve to launch the sort of audacious raid carried out by the Americans against Bin Laden.

As we saw with Karadzic/Mladic and when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998 and now again in Libya, our politicians default towards “safer” strategies of controlled escalation rather than up-front boldness. Perhaps there’s also an unspoken instinct that however wicked they are, even really bad leaders deserve a certain practical respect? Better a supposedly “measured”, if messy, expensive route “to keep options open” than a strong, ruthless attempt to chop off the very head of the problem.

Yet that policy comes at a high cost. Sophisticated aerial bombardment to limit the room for manoeuvre of extreme leaders usually blows up hundreds of poor regime squaddies while leaving intact (if not emboldened) the worst, and wealthy, parts of the regime which have caused the whole problem.

Plus the problem drags on. And on. And on. This is not obviously wise, obviously efficient, or obviously “moral”...

Here is leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC talking about the Mladic arrest, in standard terms.

Apart from this:

He could – and should – have been taken into custody between 1996 and his disappearance in 2002, but diplomats then did not trust international justice: "The capture of Karadzic and Mladic," said a Nato spokesman, "is not worth the blood of one Nato soldier".

What?

This is wrong and annoying. He doesn't know what he's talking about. The problem was not risk-averse diplomats, but risk-averse politicians. Above all, President Clinton's reluctance to take any military risks.

What actually happened back then is well described on this site, should QCs or other learned commentators wish to read it. 

Here's a comment I have posted on the Serbian hardcore Novi Standard website where lots of effort is being devoted to bewailing the arrest of Ratko Mladic:

Not sure I understand the point here. Why is Serbia or the wider Serbian idea weaker if Mladic is finally brought to face the serious and well-founded charges against him?

These arguments remind me of the arguments I'd sometimes hear in Republika Srpska to the effect that "Of course most Muslims are really Serbs anyway!" To which I'd say "In that case, why were you so pleased to see them killed?". I never got a sensible reply.

Mladic was a serious and skilled soldier, yet he took part a leading role in a number of well documented and utterly shameful actions: his very seniority and undoubted leadership qualities require him to answer for that behaviour. Shame on him for not accepting that responsibility. Compare his embarrassing attempts to hide with Seselj, who almost rushed to the ICTY to denounce his accusers. 

Serbia should be delighted that this dark, lonely man at last can face justice - and perhaps find the redemption he denied to thousands of his fellow-countrymen with their Serb DNA whom his forces mercilessly killed.

Asks Dan Hannan MEP.

He favours one or other but not ICTY as it is too slow and (he believes) too compromised in different ways.

Here is an earlier (quite good) piece I wrote about ICTY and the regional War Crimes Tribunals in former Yugoslavia.

This Mladic one is just too big for these regional tribunals to handle. ICTY is the best we have, as Balkan Insight describes:

In April 2005, in the case against Radislav Krstic, the Appeals Chamber established that the Srebrenica events legally constituted genocide - the first case to be so defined in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Several tribunal cases related to Srebrenica have revealed a great deal of new evidence about this crime. So have the plea agreements of two high-ranking Bosnian Serb officers, Dragan Obrenovic and Momir Nikolic.

These provided valuable insight into the mechanics of the massacre (although Nikolic's reliability as a witness was challenged when it became clear that not all the evidence he gave the prosecutors in his plea negotiations was true). Obrenovic, then deputy commander of Zvornik brigade, provided the closest evidence of a direct link between Mladic and the executions...

The trial of the “Srebrenica seven” that ended in mid 2010- Vujadin Popovic, Ljubisa Beara, Drago Nikolic, Ljubomir Borovcanin, Radivoje Miletic, Milan Gvero and Vinko Pandurevic - further strengthened the evidence base confirming the existence of genocidal intent in the highest circles of the Bosnian Serb Army leadership.

One of the accused, Ljubisa Beara, was identified as a person not only aware of this intent but fully sharing it. Beara was one of Mladic's closest collaborators at the time.
 
Puzzles still remain over when and how the decision to execute thousands Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica was made and by whom, however.

The hope is that this trial, one of the most crucial ever held in the history of the Hague tribunal, will finally answer those questions.

I have a feeling that Mladic will not live long enough to see the outcome.

When Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested in mid-2008 I echoed here a telegram I sent to London from Belgrade in 2001 following the sudden transfer to ICTY of Slobodan Milosevic provocatively titled: "Is Milosevic Innocent?"

My piece "Is Karadzic Innocent?" made the point that it would be easier for ICTY to make a convincing if not irrefutable case against Karadzic than to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Milosevic himself had been guilty of specific war crimes and crimes against humanity in different parts of Bosnia. Karadzic had been at the centre of the Republika Srpska political leadership from the start of the BH conflict and therefore had been that much more closely linked to general and specific atrocities.

What about Ratko Mladic?

Various broad arguments will be mustered in Mladic's defence, if he lives long enough to be put on trial. That he was a loyal Yugoslav Army officer fighting to stop different regional extremists splitting up his country. That he disagreed with Karadzic on many issues and did well to pull together the disparate Bosnian Serb forces into something like a disciplined modern fighting force. That across Bosnia the Serbs were under attack from Croats and Muslims/Bosniacs alike (re-runs of countless WW2 Nazi-induced local atrocities against Serbs) and were compelled to attack to defend themselves.

On Srebrenica, his team above all will point to the fact that against all the rules of war the Muslims/Bosniacs took cynical advantage of the UN protected status of the enclave to sneak out and kill many local Serbs, retreating to the enclave to skulk behind the UN flag, all with the UN forces failing to act.

But these points and more (whatever you think of them) pale into insignificance when compared with the startling fact that in 1995 the Bosnian Serb forces over-ran the enclave to the UN's utter humiliation and captured in different places large numbers of Muslims/Bosniacs. In a range of atrocities men (and some boys) were separated from the women and children and massacred.

The numbers of men killed and buried in mass graves are hotly disputed. Some apologists for the Serb cause argue that 'only' a couple of thousand people were killed and not the 8000 or so cited by the Muslim/Bosniac side, and that in any case a goodly proportion of the people found in mass graves had died in open conflict.

But the Bosnian Serb leadership has accepted that several thousand people were wrongly killed. When I was British Ambassador in Belgrade even President Kostunica's office - who otherwise did nothing to hide their sympathies with the Republika Srpska cause and indeed Radovan Karadzic's plight - gloomily accepted that Mladic had made "a very serious mistake" at Srebrenica. Well, yes, that was one way of putting it.

So if Mladic is fit to stand trial at ICTY he will face overwhelming evidence that Bosnian Serb (and maybe units from Serbia as well) under his direct command committed a whole range of war crimes on a scale and intensity far beyond anything else seen in the Bosnia conflict. We'll never know what made someone from a disciplined military background plunge into these black depths, although the suicide of his daughter in 1994 must have played a part.

After all the years of radical Serb bravado about Mladic and the sure thing that he would never be taken alive, there he was today shuffling off to prison, a decrepit old man who (say Belgrade media) had had two pistols with him but surrendered meekly when he was finally tracked down.

I never met Mladic, who had been indicted by ICTY by the time I got to Sarajevo in 1996, but NATO forces did have direct contact with him in the early months after Dayton (1995) to make sure that the huge NATO presence moving in to Bosnia did so peacefully. One senior British officer told me how earlier in the conflict as a soldier under UN command he had had various direct dealings with Mladic in the Srebrenica area and watched Mladic painstakingly squeezing out his ugly boils during their meetings.

Balkan Insight are doing a great job for all your Mladic needs. See eg this one, with lots of interesting detail including on the way Karadzic and Mladic often disagreed.

* * * * *

Serbia's President Tadic seems to be sticking to his decision not to travel to Warsaw tomorrow for a major meeting of central and eastern European leaders with President Obama, saying that he can not accept the presence there of the President of Kosovo.

Mistake? Yes.

By arresting Mladic Serbia has just made a huge step towards drawing a political line under the policy and attitudes of the Milosevic era. Tadic could expect a rousing reception, although of course that very fact will be encouraging him to stay at home to try to show Serb public opinion that he remains his own boss.

Better in my view to take the chance - and privately and publicly to urge European leaders and Obama to think hard about the fact that as things stand the majority of countries in the world representing the majority of people in the world are still more or less comfortable with Belgrade's side of the Kosovo argument.

My recent piece about the Amazing Vanishing Referendm in Republika Srpska was picked up by RFE/RL (in Serbian/Bosnian) and so got a rather wider Balkan readership than it otherwise might have done.

Any normal person reading it might have thought that it (albeit in perhaps a sardonic and annoying way) basically painted a rather convincing picture of RS leader Dodik outfoxing the 'international community' and so doing a good job for his RS voters, viz Serbs.

Yet for a reason I find hard to fathom, I have drawn down the ire of assorted Serbs who think that I have shown a typical 'colonialist' view of Serbs and Serbian issues.

First a couple of commenters here at the site:

Your text shows again Serbs like trouble makers who drinking and loughing...
I can see arrogant English colonial wiew on some other nations !

Charles, I thought you are a decent man. But your agenda seems to be: demonization of the Serbs!

It is symptomatic that the High Representative, as well as you Charles, are voicing the gravest possible charges of violations of the Dayton Accords but fails therein to offer a single clear reference to any concrete Annexes of the Accords that have been allegedly violated.

Charles, you are selling your soul, for what?

Maybe it was this paragraph of mine which vexed some Serb readers:

Dodik and the Bosnian Serbs laugh heartily as they swig their rakija, amazed at their own cleverness and already scheming on the next one. The principle of holding a referendum at some point has survived - if anything the Ashton visit has vindicated it.

Well, so what if Mr Dodik likes rakija? I do too. I was using a colourful if trite image to depict him celebrating his wily and clever victory over the weary Europeans.

Anyway, over at a Serb website called Novi Standard ("energy is indestructible") they have impertinently run the whole article without permission and provoked a load of rude comments. Examples include (for those whose Serbian/Bosnian is not yet quite perfect):

You may not have noticed, but in the last few days/weeks/months/years (depending on how you look at it) Bosnia and Herzegovina has been teetering on the Brink of Disaster.

Why?

Oh, for all the familiar reasons. Key posts in the central government unfilled, general political deadlock stretching in all directions, and above all a challenge to the High Representative and his authority through a threatened referendum in Republika Srpska.

You might think that if part of the whole point of the dayton Peace Accords was to inflict democracy upon Bosnia, it makes little sense to complain about one or other Entity holding a referendum to consult voters. Didn't the UK just have one?

Yet in this case things are different, because RS leader Dodik is using the referendum on the issue of the High Representative's legal powers to undermine the High Representative, which ipso facto is an attack on Dayton!

What's happened?

The EU has raced to the rescue, the BH High Representative being trumped by an Even Higher EU High Representative, namely Catherine Ashton:

Dodik told a joint news conference that he had chosen to drop the referendum after receiving assurances from Ashton that Serbian concerns about Bosnia's judicial system would be addressed:

"During talks with Baroness Ashton and other European officials in recent days, we received the highest guarantees that the European Union is ready to tackle the issues surrounding Bosnia and Herzegovina's judiciary," Dodik said...

Ashton, whose surprise visit underscored the international community's alarm, welcomed the decision to drop the divisive poll.

The European Union, she pledged, will start reviewing the role of Bosnia's judicial institutions. She also echoed Dodik in saying that "the best way forward is constructive dialogue" on the issue.

Phew.

The first BH HiRep Carl Bildt has been quick to congratulate Baroness Ashton:

carlbildt Carl Bildt

Good reason to congratulate Cathy Ashton on her achievement in Bosnia. It was EU crisis prevention when it is at its best.

11 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

EU crisis prevention at its best?

Remember the kitschy post-WW2 Yugo-monuments?

They are doing the Internet rounds.

But ... what is this over at Instapundit where Megan McArdle is guestblogging?

CREEPY/COOL abandoned Soviet war monuments in the former Yugoslavia.

Posted at 12:41 pm by Megan McArdle

Good grief. The whole point is that Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, so these were/are NOT 'Soviet' - they were built in the 1960s and 1970s, with an eye on celebrating the modernity of Yugoslavia's supposedly non-aligned self-management socialism.

Tsk.

If you want a scintillating, furious polemic on why the Yes to AV campaign lost so heavily, go no further than Liberal Vision:

The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are about 1% of the voting electorate – and are also a statistically extreme group.

Their views do not chime remotely with mainstream British opinion. There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK...

The lessons of all of this should be pretty clear. Never again allow a bunch of well-meaning, self-important Guardian readers to run a national campaign in which they talk to themselves and then blame their embarrassing naivety on external forces beyond their control.

Read that magnificent sentence again:

There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK...

Yet as we know it is the Guardian which most BBC opinion-formers turn to for their deepest spiritual inspiration.

Indeed, Liberal Vision feared the worst lfor the AV campaign ast August - this piece reads well now.

Conclusion?

That any referendum across the UK risks unleashing forces of defiant populism which are unpredictable and unmanageable.

No doubt one reason why the worst nightmare for all three mainstream political parties would be a referendum on the UK's EU membership - who would dare campaign for saying Yes to continued membership after this debacle?

Which in turn is why a sense of popular disgruntlement and disillusionment gnaws away at public life:

"They know we'll say No to lots of things - but they're too cowardly to ask us..."

One reason for the Scottish Nationalists to proceed carefully if they want to win a referendum on Scottish independence - what if for no obvious reason the local populist instinct turns against them?

Meanwhile in Republika Srpska of all places the use of a referendum as a factor in democratic life is under challenge - from the 'international community', as represented in good part by the European Union.

Hmm.

Is it such a good idea to try to block any consultative democratic process, even it the result will be unhelpful and the whole exercise is designed in part to prompt you to look undemocratic by blocking it?

The formidably clever International Crisis Group forlornly tries to find a reasonable way forward:

The 9 May UN Security Council discussion on Bosnia and the 13 May European Foreign Affairs Council should be used to launch a strategic rethink of international policy. This should culminate before the planned mid-June RS referendum.

Specifically: the international community should convene a high-level conference to set its goals in Bosnia, reconfirm its commitment to the Dayton Peace Agreement, remove the High Representative from local politics, develop plans to relocate his office outside Bosnia and give the EU the capacities to become a leading actor...

But here again, is not the basic problem that the supposed solution starts with what clever elite members of the 'international community' want, not what the people of Bosnia themselves might want?

Most of the moral and legal burbling on whether it was right for the US special forces to shoot Bin Laden ("extrajudicial execution/killing" seems to be one the favourite phrases used) utterly misses the point.

Which is that the whole operation depended on brave beyond belief soldiers walking into a potential death-trap and hoping that Bin Laden was not only evil but also lazy and/or stupid.

Thus it must have been quite plausible that the whole shabby 'mansion' where Bin Laden lurked had been wired to explode in case of ultimate need, killing its inhabitants and their attackers alike. 

Why did this not happen? Maybe Bin Laden was too cowardly to contemplate it, or too cocksure that his 'hiding in plain sight' plan was impenetrable?

Or maybe he wanted to do it but never got round to it, as getting sufficient TNT into the complex might have aroused suspicion?

Or maybe there were booby-traps in place but such was the skill of the SEALs that the AQ people got no chance to trigger them?

One way or the other, imagine the thoughts flashing through the minds of the young US soldiers as they worked their way up through the dark chaotic building, driving forward to complete the mission from sheer discipline and courage, yet wondering whether when they threw open one final room the whole place would be vapourised - with them going too.

That final door is flung open. My God - there he is. Smirking in the corner with some woman. Maybe he has booby-trapped the room or has had time to put on a suicide belt.

This is no time for polite negotiation or reading Bin Laden his rights.

Bang. Bang.

End it. And hope to get out alive.

As it happens, we have one spectacular historical example of this explosive suicide involving massed Muslims, this time as the attacking troops.

It came 202 years ago to the month, on May 31 1809 on Čegar Hill, not far from Niš in central Serbia. Turkish forces closed in on Serbian 'insurgents' led by Stevan Sindjelic. Rather than surrender Sindjelic blew up his own gunpowder depot, obliterating himself and his own troops plus a goodly number of Turks.

To mark their costly victory and to warn off local Serbs from trying any more insurrections, the Turks built a tower of Serbian skulls in Niš and sent back Serbian scalps stuffed with cotton as tribute to the Sultan. Nice. 

Parts of the tower are still there: The Tower of Skulls. I had a jolly dinner in Belgrade recently with one of Sindjelic's proud descendants.

So, Washington. Stop faffing about with these wimpy photographs and furtive so-called burials at sea.

Show your true respect for the finest Islamic warrior traditions. Get out a hack saw and the bricks and mortar - and start building.

Here's an unexpected bonus: a series of pictures of the now (mainly) decaying bombastic communist monuments erected across Yugoslavia in the Tito era to commemorate supposedly heroic Partisan achievements or sites of Nazi and other war crimes by the Communists' opponents during WW2:

 In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

From 2006 to 2009, Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images.

His photos raise a question: can these former monuments continue to exist as pure sculptures? On one hand, their physical dilapidated condition and institutional neglect reflect a more general social historical fracturing. And on the other hand, they are still of stunning beauty without any symbolic significances.

Steady on! Stunning beauty rather overdoes it - many of them are sprawling gargoyles of tritely crass communist concrete 'symbolism', defacing the disconcertingly beautiful countryside where these lonely WW2 clashes and massacres took place.

Still, quite a collection - the fact that they are now mostly disintegrating or neglected does give them a new and rather improved 'organic' quality. See eg Tjentište

Here's a bold idea.

That the peoples of the 'Western Balkans' (ie mainly the former Yugoslavia area) push out the febrile internationals and sit down for some hard talking:

With the Powers pushed out the locals - assuming they actually want to settle their disputes - could then grapple with the choreography of dispute reduction.

The first step would be to commit internally - but openly - to construct permanent solutions absolutely certain to anger many of their own constituents. T

his would not involve substantive discussion of “final status” (none exists south of the Sava). Rather, all parties and paladins would agree to deputize a group empowered to do whatever it takes to swap territory, settle debts, guarantee holy and cultural sites, and negotiate whatever else it would take to forge a mutually acceptable new arrangement.

More:

They should avoid both diplomatic niceties and public grandstanding; the only chance for a lasting deal is for them to deal with each other as the intimate enemies they are.

It would be important for no one to hide behind the Helsinki Final Act, UN Security Council Resolution 1244, or other such relics - the “Balkans” of this context are no more durable than those crafted at the Congress of Berlin, Versailles Peace Conference, or the 1995 meetings in Dayton, Ohio. Everything should be up for grabs

But ... but ... what about the international community?!

The EU and US would make a lot of noise and Moscow would look to do whatever it takes to look smarter and stronger than Washington. In the final analysis, (unless they are very stupid indeed) the big powers would accept anything the locals work out if the deal promises to keep a chronically dangerous region quiet.

If the foreigners want to help, after the deal is struck they could provide an international military presence - but only for a short, indelibly defined time - to mitigate the danger of fatal violence that would emerge from whatever partition or boundary changes the parties agree on...

The core problem with this is that while the hard talking continues, attempts will be made to create 'new facts on the ground': what you get from any negotiation depends on what negotiating chips you start with.That process, indeed, will be the real 'negotiation' as the various parties test the practical will and strength of the others.

Plus as the article points out, each side will have its own spoilers, ready to pop up and denounce any deal reached if not actively working to stop any deal being reached.

Yet the key point here is something elemental. If we want to see 'peace' and 'stability' somewhere (Bosnia, Libya, Arab/Israel etc etc), does that peace and stability have to be based on norms agreed by the international community which by definition are generalised/abstracted and unable to take much account of local realities sensibilities?

Or is it better for the local leaders concerned to work out in a spirit of determined, ruthless cynicism what peace and stability really might look like (including eg territory swaps) and then sell that outcome to their own people?

Neither approach guarantees success - at the very heart of the whole problem lies the issue of what the problem in fact is, and the legitimacy of those purporting to have the right to cut deals on behalf of the people who must live with the outcome.

This is why the Bosnia problem is so intractable. The different communities in the region (above all Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs) have incompatible opinions and instincts on what sort of arrangements would work best in the interests of all. That's because, basically, no-one can agree who the 'all' actually are!

Still, my own sense is that the sort of locals-driven hard bargaining process described above - under some sort of international supervision to maintain minimal order and respect for process - is the way to go in the long run.

No other outcome is likely to have lasting local credibility, and therefore the moral basis for people in the region itself making a sustained good-faith effort to implement it.  

But if you say something like this, you disqualify yourself from working in senior EU and/or UK positions dealing with the region. Because what you're saying isn't 'policy' and could be, tsk, very controversial.

What would you rather have, oh world?

A superb Balkan deal on paper which limps from one crisis to another?

Or a grubby deal in real life which mirabile dictu actually works? 

Update: another message from Ivana Arandjelovic responding to the posting below:

Dear Mr. Crawford,

It seems to me we definitely cannot understand each other. I did allow you to post our exchange and use my name but I wouldn't have done it if I had known how you imagined to introduce the whole thing.

Just because I disagree with you, I've been labeled as "all sorts of people"? Then you go on with " a conspiracy theory/hidden agenda thing" although I think I was quite clear about that issue in my postings.

I'll repeat again: I do not  think that there is/was any hidden agenda or a Secret Plan, as you put it. The following quote: "Of course you have a Plan. The very fact that you go out of your way to deny it shows just how sensitive and evasive you are on the subject", is absolutely beside the point as far as our exchange is concerned.

The primary reason we are having this discussion is your statement in B92's show Insajder that there is no political background to Djindjic's assassination. Not once did I say that" West" had a "Secret Plan" or that there are some dark forces at work. That is how you want to see us perceiving the whole situation. And that is called a negative stereotype or bias.  

I think I was clear about what I think about the Western policy towards ex-Yugoslavia, but I'll repeat once again: indifference and lack of knowledge about the region/country played their part in the break-up of the country (not a Secret Plan,mind you) along with the unstoppable forces of nationalism.

Because of all the above-mentioned, I recommend that you at least try to reduce (if impossible to overcome) your biased views and underscore the main reasons we are having this discussion:

1.Investigation of the political background of Djindjic's assassination

2.Your unreasonable attacks on B92

If you can't or don't want to adapt your introduction to the real purpose of our exchange, fine by me. But then post this reply as well.

Regards,

Ivana

* * * * *

One of the charms of writing a blog is that one gets comments from all sorts of people.

Thus my recent posting on the life and times of assassinated Serbia Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic prompted this terse observation from one Ivana Arandjelovic:

You should be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Crawford.

This prompted me to send her an email asking whether I should be ashamed in general or in particular. And that prompted a lively exchange of views today between myself and Ivana.

Ivana is happy that I publish the exchanges using her name, so as they are of some interest here they are (below - I'll give her the last word), unedited other than some added paragraph breaks for ease of reading.

The point (if any) is to show just how vast a gap of understanding there can be between people who on the face of it might be expected to agree on most central points of principle and fact.

In this case, Ivana is dead right on one point - the 'West' got its analysis of the former Yugoslavia scene badly wrong in the late 1980s and policy-making never really recovered. However, my own professional record on this one (ie identifying the likely bad course of events) is acknowledged by anyone who knows the history of this one to have been superb. 

That said, many parts of the world seem to think that 'the West' is far more fascinated by their problems and history than in fact is the case. Which no doubt explains the latest attempts by some people previously close to Djindjic to compensate for their own mistakes and failings by throwing out post hoc ergo propter hoc allegations and insinuations about supposed Western micro-managed meddling deep in Serbia's affairs.

These burblings suit all sides in Belgrade, as it offers everyone an unending reason for no-one one side ever to take responsibility for the country's future. Hey, why bother, if Western and/or indeed Russian diplomats are endlessly manipulating the situation for their own dark, timeless purposes?

So I quote again the brisk passage from my farewell speech in Belgrade in 2003:

Many people dislike the British approach on these questions. Bosnian Muslims say we are anti-Muslim. (Drljaca example). The ‘pro-Montenegro’ tendency says HMG are anti-Montenegro. Many Croats insist the British are anti-Croat. Serbs say that the British must be anti-Serb: London inflicted Communism on us, bombed us in WW2, and again in 1999.

Lots of people across this region talk knowingly about the secret British Plan, cooked up at the Congress of Berlin, perfidiously unfolding down the decades.  No-one knows the Plan. This shows just how secret and perfidious it really is!

I have bad news for this region. I will be prosecuted under the British Official Secrets Act for telling you.

The situation is much worse than us having a Secret Plan. We do not have any Plan. We have no Great Power interests or ‘eternal friendships’ at stake.

To no avail. The cry is returned like a ping-pong ball:

"Of course you have a Plan. The very fact that you go out of your way to deny it shows just how sensitive and evasive you are on the subject" 

Sigh.

Here are my exchanges with Ivana, the most recent one at the top:

For many years I have been a friend of the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies, a sturdy enemy of collectivism based in deepest Westminster. they did fine work in mobilising anti-communist analysis and economic thought during the Cold War and thereafter.

This week they hosted a fine presentation and discussion led by Count Nikolai Tolstoy on the story which never dies, namely the ghastly circumstances surrounding the way British troops under the influence of Harold Macmillan handed over thousands of Russians, Yugoslavs and others to their doom through Stalin/Tito mass murdering.

For background see my posting from October last year and the link there to my RFE piece too.

Nikolai Tolstoy gave a powerful and moving account of his own long efforts to follow this story, which has taken him through a fearsome battle in the English libel courts and then the European Court of Human Rights through to the heart of the Soviet archives in Moscow (that name helped get him in!). Many of his suspicions about the actions and motives of key British and American officers involved had been confirmed in deeply buried Soviet secret documents.

Perhaps his key point at CRCE was to trample on two basic justifications for what happened:

• "you don't understand the confused circumstances of the times, with millions of refugees swarming over Europe"
• "if we had not handed back these people to the communists, we might not have got back our own POWs"

As Nikolai Tolstoy said, those arguments were never made to him by any of the many people of all ranks who actually had been there and witnessed the cruelty involved in sending back the Cossacks and Yugoslavs and other people whose status had not been covered by the Yalta accords. Nor were those arguments prominent in the masses of British military records and diaries he had studied.

On the contrary, it was clear at the time to the British forces doing the dirty work on orders that something deeply dishonourable if not evil was being done, and that considerable deception and lies had been used by Macmillan and others to try to cover their tracks.

Years later some of the soldiers involved were still having nightmares about the shame of what they had seen and done. All except Macmilland the other officer involved (Brigadier Toby Law, later Lord Aldington) had been ready to speak freely about what had happened and their own roles in it. See here for Lord Aldington's obituary which gives his side of this complex story - some of the points made in that obituary in his favour were specifically refuted by Ct Tolstoy at the CRCE meeting.

Ct Tolstoy described how all sorts of detailed and credible evidence demolishing the Low/Macmillan versions had been disallowed for spurious reasons at the later English libel hearings. The usual court transcripts giving the exchanges on these and other points had not been produced due to inexplicable 'technical failures'. Other blatant abuses of process had occurred to limit public knowledge of what was being said. **

As chair of the evening I opened by quoting from this New Statesman article by Tolstoy from April 2000, which has a grim FCO angle:

By chance, I had recently raised with the Foreign Office the barbaric treatment of thousands of Russian and Yugoslav prisoners of war and refugees in southern Austria in 1945, suggesting that the British government should now make some public gesture of regret, and recompense the few surviving victims.

The FO responded by assuring me that no such event had ever occurred and that, even if it had, it was authorised by the Yalta Agreement.

I passed copies of this correspondence to Zoe Polanska who, as a 16-year-old girl, had been among those flung by British troops into cattle trucks for despatch to the Gulag. Her war had been spent in Auschwitz and Dachau, and she wrote to the "Human Rights Department" of the FO to explain that she had been there, and to ask how anyone could assert that cruelties on such a scale had not occurred.

Polanska received a patronising reply, explaining that she was mistaken and implying that she had imagined the affair. Anyone who doubts the arrogance and inhumanity of our diplomatic representatives may consult this correspondence on my website: www.uvsc.edu/tolstoy  

Alas that link no longer works, but if Ct Tolstoy sends me one which does I'll put up a copy of this disgraceful document on this site in the hope of bringing eternal shame on its creator.

Why rake around in all this old history yet again?

Because it's not all that old. The CRCE meeting welcomed two heroic people who had been there at the time, one an English field worker and the other a Slovenian woman who somehow had managed to escape the worst.

It's all about the Perfect Crime:

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'. 

And those Perfect Criminals are still at it. See a move in Slovenia to get a communist WW2 hero's face on a Euro coin. That might just about be tolerable if the post-communist Left in Slovenia worked hard and in good faith to unearth all the victims of communist murders. But, of course, they don't and won't.

It's a real privilege to play a walk-on part in the meetings at CRCE and elsewhere which keep the small flame of Truth flickering brightly. 

**  Correction. Ct Tolstoy has pointed out that the passage above confused the strange processes at the various legal hearings:

... a transcript of the 1989 trial was kept. An interesting point, however, is that Judge Davies prevented the jury from refreshing their minds on a long and complex hearing – throughout their 3-day deliberations they were forbidden to consult the transcript!
 
The ‘accidental’ deletion of a transcript occurred at the subsequent perjury hearing held in secret on 4-6 October 1994.  Again, at the High Court appeal against this judgment held on 23 July 1996, the judges’ adverse judgment was recorded - but not a word of the actual appeal!