I am entranced not only by the sound of my voice, but also by the sight of it.

Here once again is my contribution to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, describing my long and ever-fascinating diplomatic career.

Many points of interest here, including on South Africa's not-so-peaceful transition away from apartheid to ANC-dominated democracy:

I had a huge row on this with someone in Warsaw years later. I can even tell you who it was, because no-one will ever read the transcript. It was David King, the former Government Chief Scientist.

It turned out he was from South Africa. We were sitting there in Warsaw having a lunch talking about science policy and global warming and he said – I’m really pleased to be here in Poland, because I come from South Africa. Poland like South Africa had a peaceful transition to democracy.

I said Poland wasn’t that peaceful because quite a few people were killed, but South Africa’s wasn’t peaceful at all. He said – What do you mean it wasn’t peaceful? I said – Thirty thousand people were killed. Hacked to pieces and burned alive.

He said – That’s just ridiculous. I said – It may be inconvenient, and it may be that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but it strikes me as a bit thick to call South Africa a peaceful transition. It just wasn’t peaceful. If 30,000 Poles had been killed we’d have heard about it. Poland had Father Popieluszko and one or two others, and that’s about it.

 Anyway we had this absurd row, with the Poles watching like that Hitchcock film called Strangers on a Train where all the heads are turning to and fro at the tennis match. Eventually we declared the end of hostilities and changed the subject.

I went back to the Embassy and got on to London and said – How many people died in the transition away from apartheid? And the answer was - over that period – seven or eight years period – what you could define the transition as – 30 to 40, 000 known deaths – those sort of numbers. There was basically a civil war going on in different parts of South Africa among the blacks. But the so-called peaceful transition took place because few if any whites were massacred. Anything else was sort of weird unimportant African stuff.

And so your question; was it successful? Well, how do you measure success? I met a woman once whose twin sister had been necklaced by the ANC. She was a PAC supporter. The world let loose revolutionary terror in the townships and the World Council of Churches and these people did nothing about it. In fact if anything they encouraged it and Winnie Mandela with her matchbox – it was disgusting. There were crucifixions going on in the townships just a mile or two away from the Embassy in Pretoria. (Tape change)

CC ... So the question is, how do you measure success? We brought to power a government, an ANC Party, whose subsequent incompetence has led to the more or less winding down of the best electricity system in Africa because of lack of investment.

But above all – according to the Harvard study which came out the other day – 300,000 people have died over the AIDS problem who maybe needn’t have died. Now this is a tremendous disaster, and it’s sort of tucked away on page 3 somewhere, so hideously embarrassing it is that the ANC government has led to this result. It goes beyond any measure.

In the last ten years we’ve had a Labour government, a lot of whom invested hugely, personally, in the anti-apartheid struggle. Tony Blair, Robin Cook – this was one of the big moments of their life and there was a big moral campaign, and for them the ANC are for all practical purposes above criticism. And we’ve sat there watching 300,000 people die because of mistaken policies which we all knew were a farce.

I saw in the paper the other day the government are giving £50 million to South Africa who’s now got a new health minister, to deal with this AIDS problem. It’s the mother of all shutting the stable door after the horses have bolted and died. I’m pleased to say if you type in South Africa peaceful transition into Google, my website dumping on the peaceful transition comes up on the front page at number 3. So the truth is out there somewhere.

Or try this spirited passage on the transition (or not) from communism in Russia. Should we have insisted that Lenin be removed from Red Square?

... People say now this was a failure of shock therapy. The trouble was there wasn’t enough shock, and there wasn’t enough therapy. If anything, we should have been more radical in some of the things we’d done in terms of upsetting the old order and breaking up the old monopolies. We certainly should have been more radical in pressing for Lenin to be taken out of Red Square. It was a moral blunder not to press for that.

 

MM Could we have got away with that?

 

CC You could only get away with it only if you decided it was important. I think there was a feeling of – Oh well – Leftism in that form is over, so why bother pushing it?

 

If you get on my website again you’ll see reference to my telegram about a tale of two vampires. The Nazi vampire was killed at the end of the Second World War. The Communist vampire wasn’t killed. It lies there in Red Square but no-one’s driven a stake through its heart, and it just keeps coming back.

 

Leftism in the Foreign Office and western thinking generally, it’s a profound thing. The idea that you should drive a stake through the heart of communism ... people would say – Well why? Why are you being so divisive? It’s all over. They didn’t realise you had to kill it off. And Mrs Thatcher would have been much better on this, because by then John Major had come in. He wasn’t one of nature’s stake-drivers. He probably would have agreed with it, but he wasn’t somebody who was going to push it.

 

MM Well I suppose you could say what’s it got to do with us?

 

CC What it’s got to do with us is that we have to kill vampires. Otherwise they return through the back door. As indeed they’ve done.

 

So there were decisions made which were not dramatic enough. There were issues about the Katyn massacre in Poland which Yeltsin pushed – but we didn’t really take them up thematically. Because there was always a feeling – Well we don’t want to do this, in case it provokes the opposition to Yeltsin. It was odd. We pulled our punches, but the argument against doing what I wanted was that you can only do so much and we were all working flat out.

 

I still think there wasn’t a big enough ideological component. A lot of western governments didn’t want to gloat, be seen to be gloating, and maybe there’s somewhere between gloating and being much more determined. When the Second World War ended we organised all these conferences at Wilton Park on de-Nazification. We didn’t do de-Communistification, or whatever the word would be. Because we didn’t think we needed to.

 

MM Where would it have got us?

 

CC It might have got us to a lot of good places if you brought a lot of these people across and taught them about the rule of law. Don’t forget in Russia they’ve got no living memory of anything other than communism. In Eastern Europe it’s different.

 

What you said makes my very point. It wouldn’t have got us anywhere, why bother, it’s too big and it’s too complicated. My point is, this is one of the greatest intellectual convulsions in modern history and we tried to do it on the cheap. The Know How Fund was what, fifty million, a hundred million over eight years – peanuts.

 

We gave quite a lot of money writing off debts which I suppose was theoretically real money, but in terms of the money we invested in transforming those societies, given the scale of what was needed and the scale of where they’d come from, it was just absurd. Just not up to the job. We saw this after Milosevic was killed in Serbia. We tried to do it on the cheap. Stupid. It was a bad investment.

There are moments when you invest a bit more money because they’re historical moments. There was opportunity to put thousands of people through courses, as opposed to tens or scores or hundreds of people through courses. It’s just a good investment and we didn’t have a leader who had a strategic vision in that sort of way. Plus there was other money around – it’s not our job – why should we bother – dah, dah, dah.

 

There’s always a reason for not doing anything, and slowly the moments pass. Years later you see Putinism there. One wonders if one had invested a bit more in pluralism, would we have quite ended up where we are now? Some say of course you would, because that’s all there is in Russia. Other people would say no – it would have made a difference. Personally, I would like to have seen us make a bigger effort...

Read the whole thing, as they say. My life and its contribution to the times.

Via Tim Worstall, this magnificent essay by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair about the cultural and other problems which have led Greece far down the road of folly.

It's quite long, but all the more devastating for that as the writer follows the mysteries of corruption and tax-cheating into almost unbelievable nooks and crannies.

Read the whole thing, and wonder quite what it means for the wider European Union. Could an eventual North v South split emerge in a formalised fashion in due course?

Two profound philosophical points came out.

First, how a society without the rule of law and cogent, reasonably honest government shrivels down to extended family machinations as there is so little wider social trust allowing people to get things done other than by connections. This is the core argument in my paper about Amazon Space. Michael Lewis describes it with unrelenting accuracy:

No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate.

And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.

The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.

Astounding examples aplenty given.

Second, when things have drifted into such a miserable state is it in fact possible  for recovery to happen?

Can a body of people in effect get themselves into such collective fatigue/anxiety/uncertainty and mutual disappointment that there is no way to turn things round, short of an external power running the place for a few decades and so delivering the institutional backbone the place needs to function in the modern world? 

Michael Lewis wonders:

Remember much praised FCO blogger Philip Barclay, who achieved some distinction in writing about Zimbabwe when he was posted there despite the inevitable constraints of working in the UK mission?

He's written a book about Zimbabwe, which maybe gets closer to the heart of what was happening there (and how the civilised world responded, or not) than his blog did.

Here it is:

Buy it. It's sure to be vivid - and readable.

And to be an interesting contrast to Craig Murray's writing. Both were dealing with grisly, torturing regimes. Philip stayed the course, even though he must have had many qualms about the wisdom and energy of UK policy towards Mugabe.

Who - if either of them - will be seen to have made any difference for the better?

The BBC have been in touch asking if I would be interested in joining the panel on the next Big Questions programme, featuring lively debates on moral issues.

One possible subject would be the ever-fascinating subject of Homosexuality in Africa - as looked at briefly by me here. And here.

Check out this interesting Guardian piece by Madeleine Bunting which tries to 'put the issue in context', prompting an avalanche of comments for and against.

I alas had to decline the BBC request - already booked for a distinguished luncheon engagement next Sunday. But I suggested to them that they might try to break the question down to more manageable issues:

• should Western societies take a view on homosexuality in Africa?
• if we do take a view and decide that we want to influence things in a more liberal (by our lights) direction, what sort of policies are likely to work and what are not?

Iain Dale has quickly been on the case, getting a speedy and (I think) sensibly cautious reply from our new DFID Minister Andrew Mitchell:

But we should beware appeals for us to make aid a political weapon. Malawi is a desperately poor country, where about 40% of the people live on less than 34p a day. Britain’s aid plays a vital role in reducing this poverty.

We must not let down the people of Malawi. Rest assured, we, and our major international partners, will make urgent representations to the government of Malawi to review its laws to ensure it meets its commitments to human rights.

And this conviction will remain firmly in our minds when we negotiate the way we deliver our aid in future.

Mind you, it is one thing to wag our censorious finger at little Malawi.

Nigeria is something else.

Here's a remarkable website, apparently devoted to looking at the international development circus from a point of view of some, hem, scepticism:

Hand Relief International

a charitable organization committed to working anywhere where generalized poverty and misery will ensure significant levels of comfort for our staff

They are off to Liberia - for a conference!

During the congress itself, I am looking forward to fascinating discussions about what differentiates “aid” from “development” – solving this thorny issue once and for all, by means of a list of action points developed by subcommittees, will greatly help the HRI coalition of affiliates on the ground make another significant step towards becoming a regional leader in achieving MDG no. 8 – “develop a global partnership for development”.

Me? I hate cynicism.

Over at Craig Murray's place I posted a modest little comment on his piece about Eugene Terreblanche:

Craig,

As you know, I was posted at the British Embassy in South Africa as apartheid ended. I attended a rally of Terreblanche's AWB movement once.

The worrying thing about Terreblanche's murder is that it seems to echo an insidious 'Kill the Boer' Africanist nationalist ethnic cleansing of the sort Mugabe has led in Zimbabwe, an achievement of sorts for African Pay-Back Time but at a cost which will leave most Zimbabweans unnecessarily impoverished for decades more to come.

If that is the sort of fate which faces South Africa too down the road as the generation of township youngsters schooled in ANC/Communist 1980s ultra-violence work their way up the country's demographic pyramid, prospects for the southern part of the continent are bleak indeed.

And lo!, Craig graciously replies:

Charles,

And an excellent job you did too, much though I hate to admit it!!!!

Posted by: Craig at April 5, 2010 7:35 PM

So far so unexceptionable.

Then along comes Roger Irrelevant, thinly disguised as a certain anno:

Charles Crawford

English aristocrats also did a good job of negotiating with Hitler not to invade the UK. Well done, Sir. When you pass GO, please don't forget to pick up £200.00.

Posted by: anno at April 5, 2010 9:08 PM

Maybe one day by pure chance I'll be walking down the street and someone seemingly normal brushes past.

It is anno.

But alas I'll never know.

For no obvious reason the BBC website uses inverted commas here and there to give a hint of 'qualifying' or subjectifying or something words or phrases.

Look at this latest example:

Eugene Terreblanche 'killers' in South Africa court

I suppose there might be a case for putting the word killers in inverted commas if the idea is to suggest that it remains only an allegation that they were in fact killers.

But no:

The two farm workers, aged 28 and 15, have admitted beating him to death in a dispute over unpaid wages, police say.

So is there a sly implication that the police are lying?

Oddly enough, here the BBC uses the M-word:

The murder of white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche has reopened many old wounds in South Africa.

It's all so ... confusing.

Update: the BBC story has changed in the past couple of hours so that the 'killers' have disappeared from the title. But they have left their traces elsewhere.

Now the story has this (emphasis added):

The BBC's Jonah Fisher in Ventersdorp says about 500 people gathered outside court - divided equally between white supremacists, local black residents and the police.

How on earth do they know that every 'white' person there is a 'white supremacist' or indeed that every 'black' person is a 'resident'?

Propaganda masquerading as 'reporting'.

The murder of Eugene Terreblanche has forced into prominence a number of difficult issues for South Africa.

Namely the startling murder rate for 'white' farmers.

And the fact that for all the impressive political reconciliation achieved (or not) in South Africa since apartheid ended, the ANC still enjoys celebrating its success with its war-song "Kill the Boer".

I never met Eugene Terreblanche. But as part of my job in the Embassy in South Africa to go to more exotic parts of the South African political spectrum, I did meet many so-called conservative if not extreme Afrikaners such as Carel Boshoff and Clive Derby-Lewis, who subsequently went to prison for murdering top South African communist/ANC figure Chris Hani in 1993.

Plus on one fine day back in 1990 or thereabouts I went to an outdoor rally for the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) at which Terreblanche appeared on his horse. The event was strangely demure, hundreds of Afrikaner families having neat and tidy picnics as the prelude to Terreblanche's windy oratory.

The AWB and various other such organisations of varying degrees of militancy are always presented as 'far-right', whereas of course they were and are primarily national-socialistic. Far from wanting to exert 'supremacy' over Africans, a strong theme was (and remains) a separate homeland for Afrikaners where they can run their own affairs and preserve their undoubtedly specific culture and religion, within a highly communal context and tight central economic control.

Carel Boshoff has given the greatest thought to how this that this homeland should be achieved in a way obviously not at the expense of South Africa's African majority, to the point of creating a small private Afrikaner enclave called Orania. It has not taken off.

The AWB as led by Terreblanche were a more primitive, blustering and sporadically violent group bent on threatening racial confrontation aimed at partitioning South Africa, but never quite getting round to it (other than a farcical but bloody attempt in 1994 to stop the Bophuthatswana homeland being reincorporated into South Africa).

The harsh reality of South Africa is that Kill the Boer political idiom as a metaphor for 'black' African supremacy is very popular. It was this exuberant militant chanting which led to communist Joe Slovo being publicly humiliated at one of the first ANC rallies after the ANC was unbanned.

Up in Zimbabwe it is precisely this Africanist sentiment which has motivated Mugabe to drive his country into the ground. Better a land racially cleansed of 'white settlers', achieved if necessary at the price of destroying much of the country's agricultural and industrial infrastructure.

South Africa is heading in the same direction, but from a far higher economic altitude and with a shallower glide-path towards eventual disaster. The steady attrition of attacks on white farmers (and the sadistic violence often accompanying them) is just part of that deeper process.

As for Eugene Terreblanche, he achieved notoriety for his vainglorious 'white supremacy', and ended up being hacked to death by obscure workers motivated consciously or otherwise by ideas of lumpen African supremacy. 

I wonder if in his final horrible seconds alive he was surprised. 

Should we care about the appalling HIV rates in South Africa, if the people of South Africa elect someone who does not care either?

Want a hyper-epidemic? All you need is a tradition of polygamy AND high levels of female autonomy. Big Men have their little network of wives and/or lovers. Women buy in to duty sex for the status and security, but get to run their own little networks on the side, for the fun of it.

That has been the pattern in South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries where more than one adult in seven has HIV.

But woe betide anyone who points this out. At best, you are insensitive to cultural traditions. At worst, you are perpetuating racist myths of the hypersexualised African male, blah, blah, blah.

Shouldn't people get what they deserve?

Update: a reader who knows the subject writes:

Surely the real irresponsibility lies within the card-carrying ANC? It's they who really choose the country's leader.

Well, sure.

But I think the point the writer of the above article was getting at was just that.

We need to have the courage to tell Africans bluntly that certain African cultural norms are dooming them, and not flinch when accusations of RAAACISM come flying back..

And we also need to speak out strongly against the folly of ridiculous leaders who in one way or the other play to dangerous African superstitions and prejudices and make things worse.

When Nelson Mandela dies, how many of the thousands of obituaries round the world will blame him for not roundly denouncing Thabo Mbeki and his crazy AIDS policies, which have led to hundreds of thousands of African deaths? 

Isn't it a perverse form of racism - and in any case a policy hugely damaging to Africa - not to press hard points like this?

One of the most doom-laden assertions from the Climate Change tendency is that said Climate Change causes mass conflict.

See here for a classic noisy example: genocide in Darfur was caused 'at least in part' by Climate Change.

But even the Guardian strikes a note of caution.

As do the ICG:

Yet the relationship between climate change and conflict is complex and not yet sufficiently understood. This is in part because climate projections are somewhat limited in geographic and temporal specificity, and different societies have different capacities to adapt to changes and related effects. But it is also because the processes that produce violent conflict in any particular situation are often complicated.

Although environmental change likely never has been and never will be the sole or proximate cause of deadly conflict, it can contribute to conditions that make it more likely or severe.

And, of course, less likely and less severe (eg if previously dry areas start to get wetter). But that positive aspect does not suit the narrative.

Since no significant conflict round the world in the past 2000 years can sensibly be ascribed to Climate Change (despite large climate changes to and fro throughout that period) it seems best to tip-toe quietly away from this one.

Chris McDowell (formerly FCO, now City University in London) is a serious international expert on the problems of people being displaced en masse because of conflict and huge development projects. He nails it here:

Remember the Sharpeville Six?

They were six South Africans convicted of the murder of a local township leader who 'collaborated' with the apartheid regime. Their case became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle.

What happened? In early September 1984 in Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg) township protesters angered at rent rises converged upon the house of deputy mayor Dlamini. He was dragged from his house, knocked down and set alight. A horrible murder.

The police eventually arrested six people. They were charged under a legal doctrine called 'common purpose', which originates in English law. The general idea is that when a group of people embark upon an unlawful or dangerous acctivity and someone gets hurt, they may be found jointly liable even if it is not clear who precisely caused the harm. See Wikipedia:

... the doctrine derives from R v Swindall and Osborne (1846) 2 Car. & K. 230 where two cart drivers engaged in a race. One of them ran down and killed a pedestrian. It was not known which one had driven the fatal cart, but since both were equally encouraging the other in the race, it was irrelevant which of them had actually struck the man, and they were held jointly liable.

In the Sharpeville case the police claimed to have sufficient evidence to implicate the six in the murder, even though a large crowd had been involved cheering and dancing as Mr Dlamini was burning.

The case became an international sensation when the six were sentenced to death. Controversy centred on both the facts of the case - gruesome but not clear - and the quality of evidence adduced. The 'common purpose ' doctrine too was attacked (absurdly) as a manifestly unjust principle. But the key aim was to show that the apartheid system was incapable of justice. For many activists, journalists and diplomats following the trial, the legal and factual subtleties were irrelevant.

Edwin Cameron then was a fast-rising human rights lawyer who raised cogent professional doubts about the verdicts. Here he is many years and much seniority later talking about the legal issues involved.

Anyway, with huge international pressure mounting the case made its way upwards towards South Africa's Supreme Court in Bloemfontein.

I went along to represent the Embassy to hear the pleadings - one of very few foreign diplomats present.

Representing the Sharpeville Six was Sydney Kentridge QC, who previously had won global acclaim for his work at the inquest of Steve Biko. Here is the CV of one of the most remarkable lawyers of our times.

How, I wondered as a barrister manqué, would Mr Kentridge tackle this one? The eyes of the planet were on him. Every anti-apartheid activist on earth was willing him on to merciless rhetorical demolition of the apartheid regime.

He rose to speak. And in a few dramatic sentences he mastered the courtroom completely.

Not by attacking apartheid. Rather by describing in appalling heart-wrenching detail what had happened to Mr Dlamini as he was beaten and then burned alive by that Sharpeville crowd.

Then, having confronted the evil horror of the crime in itself, like a priest in an Orthodox church swinging the insense jar he began to sprinkle grains of doubt here and there, to and fro, until he made a powerful case that the sentences were unsupportable on the facts and law and, yes, accordingly unjust.

Just terrific technique - it gave the accused their best chance..

But it was not enough. The stony-faced top South African judges under the PW Botha regime decided that the sentences had to stand, and turned down the appeal.

Hours later President Botha granted them a reprieve from their death sentences. In an equal opportunities gesture of defiance he also reprieved four white policemen sentenced to death for murdering blacks.

The point of this now?

Just that having read the opening arguments for Serbia at the ICJ, I feel that they might have done with some of that Kentridge wisdom and acknowledged fully and fairly the miserable oppression of Kosovo under the Tito/Rankovic period and then in the 1980s and on into the Milosevic 1990s.

That would have helped establish that the new leadership in Serbia wanted to occupy its fair share of the moral high ground now, all the better to underpin its formal legal case that Kosovo's UDI was inappropriate and unlawful.

As it was the presentation was strong and effective and principled, but somehow ... depersonalised. It just was not at the level of sheer class that Sydney Kentridge showed all those years ago in dusty Bloemfontein.

It summed up the general approach of Serbia on the Kosovo problem for long decades.

Namely that it is eternally attached to the idea of Kosovo and (maybe) all the territory of Kosovo too - it's almost irrelevant that all those Albanians are there. 

Over at Open Democracy a long and learned piece by Roger Riddell on the impact of Development Aid: a board member of Oxford Policy Management, a Principal of The Policy Practice and a member of DFID’s the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact (IACDI).

This mighty analysis explores at length whether the question "Is Aid Working?" is really the right question.

It finally comes to what looks to me like a sensible conclusion: that the systemic problems of international aid will not be addressed until ...

... those running aid agencies agree among themselves to devote far less energy and far fewer resources to defending aid by providing evidence of their own agencies’ successes and instead channel far more energy into highlighting aid’s systemic failures and weaknesses and into urging that they be addressed.

If such leaders believe there is a moral reason to provide aid, they should be leading the campaign to address aid’s systemic problems. This, in my view, is where the discourse on aid should be focused.

Well, quite so.

But just a thought.

If the problem is that people are poor and so need inefficient Aid, maybe there should be some hard focus on the tried and proven way to lift people out of poverty?

This article is, according to Word Count 4661 words long.

In it the words/phrases business, freedom, private sector do not appear once.

Why not?

Isn't that the right Aid question?

Few new entries these days as I am back in Brussels trying to earn some money for Christmas presents.

While I am away have a look at the lively writing over at Samizdata at the moment.

Including a link to this energetic piece about Zimbabwe and how the retreat of the Mugabe-style state from the economy has led to a dramatic turnaround  Zimbabwe's fortunes.

It reminds me of the triumphant arrival of Scientific Capitalism in post-communist Russia. In the early days at least.

And for a brutalist analysis of the dangers involved in trying 9/11 'suspects' in US civilian courts, see Pat Buchanan's tirade here - notable if only as an example of the sort of vehement criticism these trials might well attract in the USA as they drag on.

Back to normal on Friday.

A lively piece of work by Craig Murray looking at the prospects for Ghana getting rich and ruined by Oil Money.

Knowing nothing about Ghana or indeed about Oil Money, I leave it to you to work out whether his well-turned analysis makes sense. It is certainly interesting enough. 

But this caught my eye:

At the same time, revenue must urgently be directed to rural infrastructure, to increasing farm prices and developing agro-processing industry, on a scale not previously attempted. Ghana already has a major problem keeping young people in farming. Think how much this will worsen when oil starts to flow.

Why should young people stay on farms now that the country is going to get rich? Ghana as the anti-Nigeria, ie a new hi-tech Singapore-style place rather than a typical agriculture exporting African country?

Is not the point of acquiring such largesse that it gives a country the chance to look at quite different options, not merely ways to impose top-down solutions based on old ideas?

On a previous posting of mine about the BNP, one Chris made this comment:

After the brouhaha of the BNP Question Time this interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nh6w4 with Kwame Kwei-Armah went unnoticed on Radio 7 (as most things do) and yet (some 26 minutes in) we hear strikingly similar concerns voiced about multiculturalism and miscegenation.

Kwei-Armah laments the fact that 6 out of 10 Afro-Carribean men are in a mixed relationship, he describes this as "assimilation" not integration, responsible for "the death of my tribe" the "disappearance" of my community.

When Griffin says this he sounds ridiculous and dangerous, and when Kwei-Armah says it he is authentic and intellectual.

I was interested to listen to this (Note: the link has now vanished under BBC iPlayer rules). And yes, there after some 26 minutes this actor and award-winning playwright bemoans the fact that the cultural community from Grenada and other parts of the Caribbean is being 'assimilated' because people from it are having relationships with Others.

This, he says, is bad - something precious is being lost.

Is it?

Check out this interesting article on 'language death' which suggests that the spread of variations of English is bound to continue as (crucially) English is relatively easy to learn. Just as languages fade away, so will many current cultural distinctions (and associated prejudices and discrimination) based on them.

Is not that a huge gain for civilisation?

The strange fact of the matter is that the Afrikaners who set up apartheid were cruel and unfair, but they were intellectually honest. Rigid separation of different cultures is a powerful way to keep minority cultures alive and distinct. 

They realised that if you want to do it properly you have no choice but (i) to set up rigid legal classifications of people in each culture concerned, and (ii) have some concept in law of 'group rights' to allow geographical clusters of one culture to keep others out as far as possible.

And it worked:

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Hence in UK today it is minority community leaders who insist on all the dreary bureaucracy that goes with explicitly apartheid-style 'racial' or 'ethnic' classification when one applies for jobs (and Parliamentary seats...), as a messy way of somehow trying at least to keep tabs on how each supposed 'minority' community is faring. 

But let's face it.

Some cultures are authentic and vibrant and richly deserving of some sort of protection against 'assimiliation', however vilely they treat eg women and gays.

But others (working-class 'white' males, middle-class rural huntsfolk) are deemed in progressive circles to be per se pernicious and backward-looking. 

That's just the way it is.

This Libya business gets worse.

Now the UK government is tangled up in explaining what it did or did not to to help victims of IRA terrorist bombs get compensation from Libya, source of the IRA's Semtex explosives.

Here is a piece about the basic legal claim involved.

To my long-lost legal mind, there is an issue about 'remoteness' here. It is one think Libya (whatever 'Libya' means in this context) supplying explosives to the IRA, another to hold Libya responsible in law for any eventual harm caused by for IRA murdering.

Would victims of IRA shoot-outs be likely to get far suing Russia for making the AK47s used by IRA gangsters? Methinks not.

The fact that Libya has paid compensation to Lockerbie bomb victims' families looks to be not relevant, in that there the direct link between Libya and the bombing/bombers was established.

Be that as it may, the litigation trundles along. So the issue arises: what if anything should HMG do to support it?

If HMG takes the view that this is something on which Libya properly might be pressed officially to respond, what way forward offers the best practical outcome?

Openly siding with the families in the case will please the families, but might make Libya dig in its heels. Quiet, nagging diplomacy and top secret lunches at the Travellers Club may be more likely to get somewhere, but the fact that such diplomacy is quiet may let the Libyans think we don't mean it, and the families may think HMG are not really trying.

Plus any direct involvement by HMG may give the Libyans a plausible excuse to stall any legal proceedings pending official discussions, and the whole thing will drag on inconclusively for years.

A typical Art of Diplomacy conundrum.

So how best to proceed is not obvious.

But it is obvious how not to proceed: by being uncertain/evasive and not looking people in the eye.

Memo to next government: don't be silly and try to get away with all Presentation and no Substance. But do get Presentation right, from Day One. This means being measured, firm but friendly, adult and straightforward. Easy.   

A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the 'Lockerbie bomber'.

Very difficult to say, because it's a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail.

My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the night in 1986 when US planes bombed Tripoli (in response to clear evidence linking the Libyan leadership to anti-American terrorism) after taking off from airfields in the UK to do so. I was the FCO Resident Clerk fielding a torrent of angry calls from the public. One of my first blog postings described the experience.

Two years later came the destruction of Pan Am 103 which crashed on and around Lockerbie. The finger of suspicion pointed at Libya. Sanctions were imposed.   

Over the following years it all slowly changed.

The Cold War ended. Colonel Gadhafi's eccentric if not narcissistic Arab nationalism started to look a bit limp and self-indulgent compared to Islamist violence. Heavy sanctions on Libya took some sort of toll.

Then 9/11. President Bush gets tough. Very tough. Saddam is toppled then arrested and put on trial.

All this gave Colonel Gadhafi a lot to think about. Gadhafi decided that that the time had come to try something new.

A very private message was conveyed to a senior MI6 officer... Here is a vivid and well-sourced account of the whole story as seen from the US perspective.

The elements of a Big Deal emerged.

If Libya accepted responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am 103 and paid out compensation to the families of the victims, plus stopped playing with weapons of mass destruction, sanctions could be lifted and everything normalised. Why, Colonel Gadhafi could be respectable again. 

And, basically, this is what has happened.

The Libyans wrote a letter to the UN Security Council in 2003 which, while carefully drafted, got as close as such a text is ever going to get to accepting responsibility for the atrocity. Sanctions were lifted, in stages. 

And, in due course, Prime Minister Blair visited Libya. Relations were normalised and smoothed out, even if the colour scheme and rug weren't:

As a significant extra element in this story, two Libyans were surrendered to the British and put on trial for the bombing. One was convicted.

An exhaustive and exhausting expert blog by Professor Robert Black pores over the issues surrounding the less than satisfactory conviction of that man, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi.

My view(s)?

1     The decision made in Edinburgh to send a dying Al-Megrahi back to Libya falls, just about, within the scale of what is reasonable. But I would not have voted to do so, broadly for the reasons given by Liam Murray. Michael Binyon makes some trenchant points too.

2     The idea that London/HMG had nothing to do with the decision (ie that it was Scotland's alone to take) is obviously phoney. Hence the row now developing. No decision such as this would be taken in Scotland without a closely coordinated eye being kept in London on the manifold foreign policy aspects for the UK as a whole. See the Observer yesterday, not least this:

Meanwhile, details emerged of a second letter written by the Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis to the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, confirming that there were no legal reasons not to let Megrahi go and concluding: "I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application." 

3     If Al-Megrahi did not do it, there is now simply no chance of identifying, arresting and successfully prosecuting those who did. And in any case the really guilty terrorists were the people up the hierarchy in Libya (and/or elsewhere) who ordered the bombing, or gave a sly wink to those lesser villains who might do it.  

4     Ignominious, embarrassing, perfidious or whatever you want to call it, maybe the whole thing is for the best, all things considered:

• We and the Americans used a powerful and sustained policy of carrot and stick to bring Libya to accept responsibility for this horror, and pay compensation, and also renounce its weapons of mass destruction.
• This is one of the biggest Western foreign policy achievments of our times (compare North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and so on ), and a huge step forward towards making Northern Africa a partner, not a foe.

Where Diplomacy meets Reality?

Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband's observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism:

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

He added: ‘The importance for me is that the South African example proved something remarkable: the apartheid regime looked like a regime that would last forever, and it was blown down.

It is hard to argue that, on its own, a political struggle would have delivered. The striking at the heart of a regime’s claim on a monopoly of power, which the ANC’s armed wing represented, was very significant.’

Eeek.

Where to start?

On the Miliband/terrorism point, the FS was either simply wrong or missed a key point.

It is not whether terrorism is 'morally justifiable'. It is whether those who use terrorist methods to win power are more likely than not to use terror to stay in it.

Insofar as South Africa has emerged from apartheid 'peacefully' and today is in not too bad shape, it is because the ANC/SACP did not use terrorism (other than against fellow Africans which as we know did not count) on any great scale.

On the whole (and wisely, albeit at great cost) the South African masses did not rise up violently against apartheid, but let unrelenting pressures and contradictions of different shapes and sizes erode it.

In fact, if there was an ANC/SACP armed struggle at all it was against other African groupings (PAC/AZAPO/Inkatha). Which is why some 30,000 Africans and almost no 'whites' were massacred in South Africa's legendary Peaceful Transition to Democracy.

Plus the ANC/SACP/UDF in the mid-1980s had a clear policy of unleashing 'the worse, the better' revolutionary terror in the townships, with necklacings and other horrors being perpetrated by groups of demonic school-children. Hence, 20+ years later, South Africa's amazing violent crime rate.

In short, ANC/SACP terrorism did not 'blow down' apartheid. P W Botha's heart attack and the collapse of Communism in Europe did.

The BBC link to the interview coyly describes Joe Slovo as a 'leading member of the ANC and the first Housing Minister in Nelson Mandela's government'. The point, of course, is that Slovo was the leading South African communist and formal head of the 'military wing' of the ANC/SACP alliance. Slovo was at the heart of ANC/SACP policy-making for years, plus a close suck-up of Moscow and  vigorous apologist for Communism anywhere he found it.

So here we have the ghoulish spectacle of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband extolling the merits of this dark character, a great friend of his own Marxist father Ralph Miliband.

Slovo by the usual standards of Communists was something of a moderate and pragmatist. He had to be. Years of exile forced him to grasp that the South African masses were not to be mobilised for a brisk, amazingly violent surge aimed at toppling apartheid. And he seems to have been avuncular in large doses, chatting over Marxist ideology with assorted Milibands. What a great life indeed!

Yet Slovo has to bear a significant responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the SACP/ANC in the townships in its drive for sole power as apartheid ended, and the calamitous crime-rate thereafter. Not an issue I suspect the Miliband family has given much thought to, such is the Labour Party's fevered admiration for the ANC/SACP.

Plus, while Slovo was devoted to the cause of freedom for South Africans, he was openly and shamefully against freedom for those trying to cast off communism.

See how the SACP urged Moscow to suppress the pro-freedom movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Slovo later claimed to have had personal doubts about this, but fealty to Moscow was a prerequisite for leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. And that was what counted, not some higher principle of real empowerment and freedom for all.

His ideological writings were ghastly beyond description. His famous piece Has Socialism Failed written in 1990 is a cracker of the genre. It agonizes over the ruin which has come to the classic Communist project as the Berlin Wall crashed, and meanders in a jargonised pseudo-logical way towards a purported condemnation of the 'Stalinism' which Slovo had championed for most of his life.

Avuncular Joe scratches for nuggets of Marxist hope in the wreckage:

The transformations which have occurred in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are revolutionary in scope. With the exception of Romania, is there another example in human history in which those in power have responded to the inevitable with such a civilised and pacific resignation?

We should remember De Gaulle's military response in 1968 when ten million workers and students filled the streets of Paris. It is not difficult to forecast how Bush or Thatcher would deal with millions in their streets supported by general strikes demanding the overthrow of their system of rule.

Huh?

Of course for Slovo Communism in fact did quite well in lots of respects:

Among other things, statistics recently published in The Economist (UK) show that in the Soviet Union - after only 70 years of socialist endeavour in what was one of the most backward countries in the capitalist world - there are more graduate engineers than in the US, more graduate research scientists than in Japan and more medical doctors per head than in Western Europe. It also produces more steel, fuel and energy than any other country (The World in the 1990s; Economist publication).

How many capitalist countries can match the achievements of most of the socialist world in the provision of social security, child care, the ending of cultural backwardness, and so on? There is certainly no country in the world which can beat Cuba's record in the sphere of health care.

Lies and/or specious drivel.

It was all just a mistake:

We believe, however, that the theory of Marxism, in all its essential respects, remains valid and provides an indispensable theoretical guide to achieve a society free of all forms of exploitation of person by person.

The major weaknesses which have emerged in the practice of socialism are the results of distortions and misapplications. They do not flow naturally from the basic concepts of Marxism whose core is essentially humane and democratic and which project a social order with an economic potential vastly superior to that of capitalism.

My own abiding personal memory of Slovo comes from 1990, a huge rally organised by the ANC/SACP in Jo'burg soon after they were unbanned. Slovo was the final speaker. The crowd had been brought to life by the late Chris Hani leading rounds of cheery Kill the Boer chants and dancing.

Slovo at last rose to speak. Perhaps the proudest moment of his career to date.

And as he started droning on, the Africans started to go home in their droves. Who was this boring old white man anyway?

Slovo on centre-stage could see for himself what was happening. The South African masses were at last voting freely, albeit with their feet. And not for him!

The more impassioned his voice as he glorified the SACP/ANC, the faster people left. It was really remarkable. By the time he finished he was almost shouting, but to desultory applause - the stadium was close to empty.

All the pro-ANC media and its white Leftist elite of course ignored this astonishing spectacle in reporting the event. It was not just appallingly embarrassing for themselves in their self-proclaimed intellectual leadership roles. Worse, far worse, it did not fit the Narrative.

Was Slovo's a 'great life'? In its own tenaciously dogmatic, blinkered, selfish blood-flecked way, perhaps it was.

Does he deserve a fawning BBC piece led by a British Foreign Secretary?

No.

If Mr Miliband is looking for a real Great Life hero, why not go for a poorly educated working man who led a true bloodless democratic revolution in the part of Europe where the Slovo and Miliband families came from?

Such as this one.

Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims.

(Update: picking up a helpful comment below, I do not mean to accuse Mr Fitzpatrick of deliberately 'using the media' to get his account of this event publicised. From the reports I have seen it is not clear to me whether he did this, or whether media outlets separately got the story and then he responded to them as he did. Or indeed whether he responded to a press enquiry and then saw an opportunity to crank up more widespread coverage. Many possibilities!)

An interesting issue of politics colliding with etiquette. He has been attacked from all sides.

Such as Archbishop Cranmer:

Where is the courtesy, the grace, the humility, the respect for the fact that this was somebody else’s day? The arrangements were the personal choice of the bride and groom. How they chose to seat people and conduct their wedding was entirely up to them.

But Jim Fitzpatrick has succeeded in turning the biggest and happiest day of their lives into a PR stunt and an anti-Muslim media fest...

The problem, Mr Fitzpatrick, is that your party has mistaken social cohesion for multiculturalism. You have destroyed community cohesion by pandering to the whims of every minority and creating a hierarchy of rights in which each and every disparate group now vies for supremacy. There can be no cohesion where there is no harmony, and no harmony in a climate of perpetual struggle for supreme rights.

But Mr Fitzpatrick declares defiantly: "I’m not pandering to any minority opinion.”

Labour's raison d'être of the past decade has been to pander to every minority opinion - and principally that of Muslims and homosexuals. Jim Fitzpatrick is either a fool or a liar.

And from the activist Left, Random Blowe:

... the way Fitzpatrick has reacted has been particularly boorish and insulting. This was a private function; the bride and groom, Bodrul Islam and Mahbuba Kamali, chose how they wanted their ceremony conducted and as a guest, Fitzpatrick should have either accepted this out of courtesy, even if he didn’t agree with it, or left discreetly and without fuss.

What he most certainly shouldn’t have done is use the ceremony’s rituals to launch into an attack in the East London Advertiser on the Jamaatis that run the LMC and the newly-married couple caught up in this are quite right to feel aggrieved that their wedding day has been “hijacked for political gain”.

As one comment on The Daily (Maybe) said, it would have been different if the event had been a political meeting. The social conservatism that lies behind customs such as gender segregation is undoubtedly shared by a number orthodox religious traditions and this often throws up some important dilemmas for those on the Left who campaign in areas where religious belief is strong.

How far should courtesy extend towards individual religious and cultural practices, or to religious-based organisations for that matter, before this starts to clash with our own values?

Mrs Crawf and I faced something like this at least twice in our diplomatic careers as I recall.

In Sarajevo we were introduced at a reception to Yusuf Islam, viz former singer Cat Stevens. He politely shook my hand but did not shake my wife's, as Muslims of a certain persuasion do not do that sort of thing.

Lofty religious principles? Or rude/obnoxious?

Before that in South Africa we were invited to dinner at the home of a senior lawyer from the Black Lawyers Association. He was a prosperous Zulu living in a smart house in a smart African area.

Imagine our surprise when we sat down for dinner and it turned out that his wife was not permitted to join us - she had to serve the food from the kitchen as per Zulu tradition. I have to say that it did not occur to us to walk out in protest at this (for us) startling sexism in what otherwise looked like a typical African upwardly mobile modern household.

What's odd about this Fitzpatrick episode is the implicit assumption by his critics that he has to 'respect' the cultural traditions of the hosts, but that his own cultural traditions somehow count less.

If he and his wife are uncomfortable at events involving gender segregation, why should they be expected to stay at them? If they think that parts of our society are getting more reactionary in their attitudes to women, should they not say so?

The answer perhaps lies with the sort of argument used by Archbishop Cranmer. NuLabour have created and supported (and paid for via all sorts of taxpayers subsidies) various defaults in favour of certain forms of 'tolerance' but not others.

In particular it has become fair game in progressive tendencies to berate conservative Western religious views eg on homosexuality/women, but champion non-Western proponents of far more extreme and violent positions.

At one point in Warsaw liberal European opinion was muttering about the reactionary social and allegedly antisemitic views of the Polish Families party who were for a while in a coalition government with Law and Justice. I noted that the FCO had been congratulating itself lavishly on an event in Turkey featuring 'dialogue' with various radical Muslims whose reported positions on homosexuality/women/Jews were beyond vile.

So I sent an email to London asking whether we now had a policy of flatly opposing white-skinned European antisemitic homophobes, but extending the hand of dialogue to brown-skinned Asian antisemitic homophobes.

No answer.

My good pal John Sawers is to take over as Head of MI6, the first (mainly) FCO person to do so although he did start off there a while ago before crossing to join the FCO.

He enjoyed a brisk ride to the top with an unusual amount of sharp-end operational content, including pioneering  'township diplomacy' in twilight apartheid South Africa - he was the first Western diplomat to meet Nelson Mandela after Mandela emerged from prison.

Later he also served in Iraq when things were especially difficult. Did I help send him there?

The Times has the best analysis of John and his life and times, albeit curiously omitting any reference to his deft tennis backhand. And here is part of a great speech he gave in Boston.

Mind you, I recall a lively exchange we had back in 1996 when I was HM Ambassador in Sarajevo and he was Political Counsellor in the Embassy in Washington.

John said that US troops would pull out of Sarajevo soon after the Bosnian 1996 elections because that's what President Clinton had promised. I by contrast, closer to the sprawling building works going on as the Americans built bowling alleys and other phenomena on their Bosnian bases, suspected that they would be there for a lot longer than that. 

And they were.

Intelligence work is like any other. Link accuracy, realism and wisdom to hard facts, and you don't go far wrong.

Congratulations.