Blogoir

Here is a round-up of interesting links on the so-called GZM controversy in the USA - should a Muslim cultural centre cum mosque be built close to the site of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York?

Or not? If not, why not?

Peter Beinart says that in revealing a geyser of Islamophobic hysteria (or something like that) America has disgraced itself:

Once upon a time, the “war on terror” was supposed to bring American values to Saudi Arabia. Now Newt Gingrich says we shouldn’t build a mosque in Lower Manhattan until the Saudis build churches and synagogues in Mecca—which is to say, we’re bringing Saudi values to the United States.

Not exactly.

What in fact has happened is an unSaudi-like good ol' US public intellectual ding-dong about Rules and Values, with all sorts of people on Left and Right alike spiralling off in unexpected directions.

Take William Dalrymple, not normally associated with wild-eyed radicalism, who points out some of the subtler issues involved. The Cordoba Centre is being supported by the Sufi tendency in Islam, one the West should encourage:

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists... 

His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

Victor Hanson Davis is more cynical:

Here at home well-meaning liberals would applaud the audacity of hope in positioning a mosque near the 9/11 site in order to “commemorate” the “tragedy,” as a token of tolerance where all could come together and thus avoid another misunderstanding of the sort that sent two airliners crashing into two skyscrapers. 

Abroad, the message would, of course, be interpreted quite differently: To the radical Islamists, a mosque rising near Ground Zero well before a new World Trade Center is constructed is a message of Islamic triumphalism — in the long tradition of minarets on the conquered Santa Sophia in Istanbul, the eighth-century Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem rising on the site of the destroyed Jewish Second Temple, and the great mosque at Cordoba retrofitted from the gutted Christian Church of St. Vincent.

Elsewhere too views diverge. See eg some Muslim Republicans:

Muslim Republicans like David Ramadan and Randa Fahmy Hudome see it as a free-exercise issue that shouldn’t be demagogued for midterm gain, and longtime blogger Aziz Poonawalla gave a thoughtful interview to fellow blogger Scott Payne reiterating his support for the project and his misgivings about how both opponents and Park51 management have handled the subject.

Why not go all the way on tolerance while we're at it? Build a bar for gay Muslims right next to the new Center:

"I hope that the mosque owners will be as open to the bar, as I am to the new mosque. After all, the belief driving them to open up their center near Ground Zero, is no different than mine. My place, however, will have better music."

Here's an interesting one.

The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is homosexual. He has decided not to take his partner with him on official visits to countries where homosexuality is a prosecutable crime.

His somewhat obscure argument as quoted in the excellent Spiegel Online:

We want to promote the concept of tolerance in the world ...

But we also don't want to achieve the opposite by behaving imprudently. At the same time it is important that we live according to our own measures of tolerance and that we do not adopt the sometimes less tolerant measures of others.

This position prompts an energetic rant from one Henryk Broder:

One doesn't have to read his remark twice to understand what it signifies: Tolerance is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't push our luck. This is more than the usual hot air from a politician. Westerwelle's words are an example of moral hara-kiri in slow motion, and they're a disgrace for Germany...

When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene?

Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to spell and more or less resembling how the name was pronounced in English. Thus we preferred Kirgistan to Kyrgyzstan or even Kyrgystan when describing the territory known as the Kyrgyz Republic (Кыргыз Республикасы).

The FCO Department dealing with Geographical Names were aghast and launched a fierce rearguard action, arguing that the 'correct' way to deal with such problems was to use the formal standards for transliterating (or whatever the word is) the original linguistic form into English. Thus here the (to us) somewhat strangled Russian ы vowel is best represented with a y, not an i.

Tricky. To my ear the ы sounds most like the ur sound in murder, or indeed the ir sound as in fir-cone.

This issue also comes round in Polish. Thus the muted uh sound represented by the y in Kaczynski - in Polish the i vowel is prounced quite strongly as a short ee (as in me).

The brave policy officers lost out to the holders of the purist flame, so now we have Kyrgystan on the FCO website.

This looks like a feeble compromise, to avoid scaring English-speakers by removing a z. There is a definite z sound in the local languages - the people there are Kyrgyz - so if anything it ought to be Kyrgyzstan.

There is no logic to any of this. If there were, we would not call Deutschland 'Germany'. Partly it's fashion and partly some sort of linguistic political correctness: once upon a time we had Peking, then we were told that it was Beijing. The Chinese started to get peeved that we were not using the name of their capital correctly, and said so.

Paree anyone?

The only issue in all this of course is the eternal one. Who decides?

Take the FCO. It had and for all I know still has a team of people who are deemed to be the Deciders, and from whom the FCO and the rest of Whitehall and thereby much of the UK media and schools take a lead. This echoes an earlier tradition when decisions of this sort were issued by an unchallenged authority.

But these days things are different. Authorities are challenged. Not only governments make maps. People themselves do en masse, using Google and other technologies.

Which is in part why Google has different names for different places, depending upon where you make the search.

Geography and borders - like everything else these days, becoming more ... elusive?

As usual there are pros and cons:

Unpopular as it may be, such uncertainty has become a central dynamic of life on the Internet. The erosion of traditional authority is followed quickly by anxiety over its absence, from Google to Wikipedia to the lesser-known precincts of PetitionOnline—where millions of people direct their impassioned grievances not to any official arbiter but straight into the ether.

What results is an irony. The digital culture that encourages the inclusion of multiple names for a single feature on a map is the same digital culture that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Iranians to voice their discontent. The very medium incites nationalism, yet also frustrates it.

... What is Google? Is it a repository for all of our mutually exclusive claims, or is it a higher power to which we appeal? It cannot be both, and yet we seem to treat it as both. This tension may only heighten going forward.

“In a world where mapmaking is cheap and anyone can do it,” Goodchild says, “you would eventually expect things to become more and more local.” In such a future, either we will reconcile ourselves to the lack of a central arbiter, or the conflicts will be all over the map. 

Great article. Read it. Via Browser.

As the Hiroshima bombing anniversary passes again, Richard Fernadez asks a question:

Try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war.

Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.

Here's the answer.

A thoughtful reader writes:

There is one issue that occasionally troubles me.  It is quite obvious in politics and senior positions elsewhere, that leaders cannot have a grasp of everything.  Thus they must trust to their judgement on whom to believe on particular issues. 

This is particularly important on issues where the informed consensus (or its self-professed members) have not got it right, either totally or in significant part.  I think here of issues such as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  Eventually, any wrong consensus must break; how can that be made to happen sooner?

So, how is it best for leaders to decide whom to believe, on matters beyond their personal detailed competence (and also those where there is not time to learn up on the whole issue)?

Very good questions.

In the British system at least, our leaders rely upon a combination of formal and informal advice.

On the formal side there are the posts of Chief Scientific Adviser, Chief Medical Officer and so on -- senior experts tasked with making sure that top levels of government have the best possible scientific/technical advice available. As well as that, individual Departments also may have in-house experts in science, economics and other specialist fields.

Leaders also likely to have a range of senior outside experts upon whom they call now and again to get a feel of the ebb and flow of debate as seen by clever people not within the system.

Plus, of course, individual experts may well send in their suggestions and complaints about official policy; a well-written letter from a senior expert sent to the Prime Minister will require an answer served up by the Whitehall system as a whole, and the fact that the letter has been read so widely down the policy chain itself acts to keep people on their toes and not take conventional wisdom for granted.

Beyond all that lies the hullabaloo of democracy. Think-tanks, commercial research organisations, scientists working for large corporations, amateur enthusiasts and energetic bloggers: they are all whirring away to get their points across in one way or the other. Letters to government ministers and/or MPs make an impact in this sense. The official system has to keep alert to public thinking and concern, whether it wants to do so or not.

All that said, no leader can take into much of this stuff. At the high policy levels knowledge declines steeply and instinct kicks in. The more so since the issues leaders in fact focus on may not be the issues under discussion.

Take the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The assembled armies of climate NGOs and lobbyists seemed to think that the issue was all about "climate change". But as the conference end-game loomed quite different priorities emerged for the key leaders concerned, namely their own reputations and how their own countries might best jostle for position in the new global order. Hence the ensuing fiasco.

Climate Change is perhaps the classic example of policy area where it is impossible to pull together an expert consensus. Partly because the science itself is so complicated. But more importantly because expertise is required from so many different areas and such long timescales are involved. Not to forget the enormous financial and other costs needed to change course in any way which counts.

Sir David King previously was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and a prominent voice calling for Action to deal with CAGW. I myself lost faith in his judgement over his emotional reaction to unwelcome facts in a completely unrelated area.

How does a consensus break down? Depends what you mean by consensus.

Even if a large bloc of scientific opinion takes one view, public opinion may not take the same view. This in fact is a genuinely difficult area for leaders. On the one hand, they are being given credible expert advice pointing clearly in one direction. On the other, they know that if they move in that direction they are likely to lose votes.

The Climategate episode exemplifies this dilemma, albeit in a not unhelpful way in that it points to the need for much greater transparency and integrity in scientific process -- in a world of highly networked collective intelligence, the days of a small elite telling us all what to do and think our numbered. I hope.

Conclusion?

Leaders are no different from the rest of us. They sit in an office having little idea of what is going on down the corridor, let alone further afield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is not mastering scientific briefs, but rather avoiding the temptation constantly to be "doing something" when each and every problem appears.

You're seriously ill.

The doctor says something like this:

You may now need to think about your best options. It looks to us as if you have the following two basic options:

• Option A:  we use the most aggressive medical techniques we can find to try to cure you. But you are in bad shape. We give you only a 2% chance of living for another five years, as against an 80% chance of dying within five months. Those five months will be miserable and painful and undignified, and almost all spent in hospital.
• Option B:   we mainly stop treating you other than administering painkillers, and let nature take its course. You are almost certain to die within ten months, maybe less or maybe more. But you'll be able to live at home and feel far more relaxed and happy.

What to do?

Read this superb article by Atul Gawande about the way vast medical costs are being thrown at people to eke out a few more months of miserable life. It suggests that by reducing treatment more people in fact would live longer and die more easily. 

The point is not only that the way things now work is (arguably) wasteful and unwise. We also do not tend to get the options spelled out to us fairly and frankly, the emphasis instead being on 'battling' illness to the very end.

Not a bad strategy in many cases. We all know people who did so battle and made it through to years of good life thereafter.

We also know people who are kept more dead than alive by modern medical ingenuity - is that what they would have chosen had they been offered a choice?

No good answers. But the questions come up with growing intensity as we try to grapple with what 'society' can or can not 'afford'.

Read the whole piece if you read nothing else this week. 

A London court has rejected Serbia's application to get former Bosnian/Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic extradited to Belgrade to face charges on the infamous Dobrovoljacka Street killings in Sarajevo in 1992.

The word 'rejected' perhaps does not do justice to District Judge Timothy Workman's demolition of Serbia's case. Perhaps 'blew to smithereens beyond all recognition' would be more accurate.

The judge probed behind the Serbian application, exploring not so much the substantive merits of the case itself but rather the implicit and explicit motivations of the plaintiffs. He examined the fact that other substantive and credible war crimes processes (ICTY and in Bosnia) had found no case for proceeding against Dr Ganic:

On the first day of this extended hearing I was satisfied that there was prima facie evidence of an abuse of process and as a result of that ruling evidence has now been adduced in relation to that issue.

No evidence having been adduced to show a striking or substantial change in the evidence available to the ICTY or to Mr Alcock, I have concluded that there is no valid justification for commencing proceedings against Dr Ganic.

But much worse, from Belgrade's point of view, was this: 

I am satisfied from the evidence of Mr Arnaut that during the course of these extradition proceedings attempts were made to use the proceedings as a lever to try to secure the Bosnian Government’s approval for the Srebrenica Declaration.

If indeed the Government [of Serbia] was prepared not to pursue these extradition proceedings in return for Bosnia co-operation, that in itself must be capable of amounting to an abuse of the process of this court. Some corroboration of Mr Arnaut’s evidence could be found in the unusual circumstances in which an application to vary conditions of bail was made to this court to enable Dr Ganic to return to Bosnia.

It would appear that that application was founded upon attempts at diplomatic agreements. I am also satisfied that the descriptions in the request [of the alleged grave breaches of Geneva Conventions] are as described significant misrepresentations.

The combination of the two leads me to believe that these proceedings are brought and are being used for political purposes and as such amount to an abuse of the process of this court.

The Serbia side says it will appeal against the ruling.

My assessment? See (if they use it) my piece for the Independent tomorrow.

But for now...

There is a maxim of Equity which says that equity must come to court with clean hands.

In this case Bosnian/Bosniac hands are far from spotless. The Bosniac leadership wail in rage at anything which suggests that they themselves and their predecessors may have made any unwise or immoral moves in the chain of events culminating in the violent collapse of Bosnia, or in their conduct of the ensuing conflict.

Instead they park on one big principle: that the Serbs (and indeed just Serbs) are Guilty.

Which means - as they see it - that an attempt by Belgrade to open episodes such as the Dobrovoljacka Street killings and cast some blame on senior or any Bosniacs must be at best ill-intentioned, and at worst downright evil.

(For about as reliable a view of what actually happened as we are ever likely to get, see this interview with Jovan Divjak, a senior Serbian JNA officer who bravely decided to fight on the Bosnia side of the conflict.)

Meanwhile the Serbs in Belgrade and Banja Luka try forlornly to salvage something from the wreckage of Milosevic's policies.

They (mainly) accept that Milosevic, Karadzic and the rest of that cast of weird second-raters pursued ruinous immoral policies, but they then froth up arguments that, bad as Belgrade's leaders were, others leaders were not really much better and even, perhaps, worse.

And this argument does have some merit. One of the very best things Robin Cook achieved as Foreign Minister was to act upon the proposition that Croatia's leader Franjo Tudjman was in much the same category as Slobodan Milosevic, ie a zany and pernicious national socialist cum fascist menace to European values. Cook stubbornly held the line against all sorts of EU pressures to 'show flexibility' towards Tudjman. Tudjman then helpfully died, isolated and unmourned by moderate opinion round the planet.

The Bosnian case is a harder one for Belgrade to prove. OK, Izetbegovic was a convinced if (by many standards) moderate Islamist, but he was defending a weak position.

Belgrade had all sorts of options to deal with the BH conundrum, but Milosevic chose to let rip Arkan and all sorts of vicious gangsters as a political tool. Far from using its weight and intellectual resources to show modern leadership, Belgrade went on a massive binge of greedy violent cynicism, seemingly relying at each stage on erratic improvizacija and Western lack of resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that any London court is likely to have in mind the fact that sixteen years on Belgrade has still not arrested General Mladic and thereby confronted the horror of Srebrenica. And that, accordingly, Belgrade's claims to be able to deal fairly with war crimes trials may well be true, but somehow held hostage to deeper political manipulations.

Belgrade here looks to have made a blunder in trying to trade behind the scenes with Sarajevo: 'Ajde bre, we'll end the Ganic extradition application in London if you guys cut us some slack on the Srebrenica declaration going through our Assembly...

Whereas in normal Balkan bazaar terms this sort of thing makes perfect sense, a steely London court not unreasonably could conclude that the whole extradition application had nothing (much) to do with Justice and was more about shady political machinations.

Result?

Serbia has taken a severe tonking in a London court today, following a pretty miserable result at the ICJ last week. The Bosniacs will be exultant, feeling that this represents a historic day of vindication for their core 'narrative'.

All of which said, anyone watching the evasive interviews with Ganic and other leaders on the gripping Fall of Yugoslavia video series will feel that something dark and dishonourable did occur at Dobrovoljacka Street. Not much chance now of justice being done for the victims of that war crime, alas.

Bottom Line?

Belgrade under democratic and fair-minded leadership can make all sorts of important points about the collapse of Yugoslavia. Not all Belgrade's arguments were bad just because Milosevic made them.

But until Belgrade bites the bullet and arrests Mladic, those arguments look contrived and morally hollow.

Washing those dirty hands is much better than pointing with them at the grime on others' dark fingers.

Welcome Browser and other new readers. After reading my thoughts below, check out this piece I wrote back in 2008 about inat. If you don't understand inat, you can't understand Kosovo or Serbia or anything about former Yugoslavia. Sorry, but there it is.

* * * * *

The International Court of Justice has ruled that the declaration of independence "is not in conflict with international law".

The ICJ site is overwhelmed so I can not yet share with you my wise thoughts on the full text of the decision.

Quickies anyway.

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia's request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be 'in accordance with international law', since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town's independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is 'in accordance' with UK law - free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It's what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift...   

Why did Serbia pose the Kosovo question in this odd form? Maybe because it did not want to force the ICJ to answer head-on the Kosovo independence question (eg Is Kosovo now a state recognised by international law?) in case the Serbs lost, thereby incurring an epochal defeat?

This 'advisory' ruling on this curiously open-ended question allows Belgrade to say that nothing significant has been decided one way or the other, so its struggle against Kosovo's independence blithely continues.

The ICJ ruling itself confirms that view in a sense, saying that the Court has not taken a view on whether the consequences of Kosovo's independence declaration have included Kosovo acquiring statehood.

According to B92 in Belgrade (in Serbian) Russia has been quick to confirm that it will not recognise Kosovo for (in effect) this very reason.

If other global big-hitters such India and China and Brazil and South Africa likewise decide to stay put and not shift their view, Kosovo's awkward half-in, half-out international status will drag on indefinitely - the map at the link shows how poorly Kosovo has done with the East/South of the planet.

On the other hand, the headlines round the world will tend to present this as a Win for Kosovo's cause, which in due course might well lead a larger number of countries to recognise Kosovo as a full independent state.

Basically, Kosovo falls into the All Too Difficult box for international law and policy.

Why? Because it is astride two huge tectonic plates underpinning global order and so is bang in the middle of a jurisprudential, political and moral earthquake zone. 

One plate is all about the right of identified peoples to be independent - the principle of self-determination).

The other is all about the circumstances under which existing states can split up into smaller or different formations (or not) - the principle of territorial integrity.

So it all wends its way back to the cynical deals done within the EU and between key European capitals and Washington back in the early 1990s. Basically, it was agreed to recognise Slovenia as an independent state since it (sort of) ticked both boxes simultaneously.

Slovenia was dominated overwhelmingly by Slovenes (self-determination).

And it had an undisputed geographical/political identity as a republic within the former Yugoslavia (territorial integrity), so its independence flowed neatly in parallel with the recognition of Russia and the other former Soviet republics as independent states.

Kosovo certainly makes its mark in the self-determination box, but as it was 'only' a province within Serbia (albeit with many attributes of a full republic, including membership of the eight-person SFRY Presidency itself) the territorial integrity issue is far less clear.

The more so since our cherished Helsinki Process norms basically lay down that there shall be no change in borders within Europe without the consent of all concerned. Which in this case there manifestly isn't.

Here is a tidy Russian look at the wider issues of principle at stake for Europe as these two tectonic plates grind away against each other. 

Implications for Bosnia? Not many.

The Republika Srpska leadership (more or less in coordination with Belgrade) will continue to press the self-determination argument: if Kosovo's declaration of independence is not against international law, why should Republika Srpska too not make a similar declaration at some point?

Down the road in Sarajevo the Bosniacs will noisily insist that the territorial integrity principle is supreme, and that RS itself is in different ways 'illegitimate'.

The Balkans. Where nothing is ever settled.

Here is an interesting account from Devil's Knife of his participation in a public discussion on Freedom and all that.

I can imagine that his account of the end of Friendly Societies had some people bemused, but it is an interesting story:

As in other things where the state starts to provide a service, they crowded out the Friendly Societies. After all, if you were a relatively poor manual worker, you could not spare your three shillings per annum to the Friendly Society and the three shillings that the government was taking directly from your pay.

And so the Friendly Societies all but vanished, along with the communities they nurtured. And with them went the libertarian model of welfare—of people getting together as a voluntary collective in order to look after themselves. And so the model of state as mater and pater—the state in loco parentis, with all the intrusive hideousness that concept has spawned—was started...

It's the actions of regular people that are the most significant, serious, and worthy of respect, and they don't deserve to be treated like dolls when, in reality, the only truly and moral libertarian proposition is that they should be masters of themselves.

They did so in the past, and their aspirations were crushed by corporate whores and political shills: and in removing the ability of people to organise themselves, these evil people also removed the desire for them to try.

It is this that has led to our "broken society"—the cynical ambitions of the vested interests, backed up by the monopoly of violence that a corrupt and venal state willingly brought to bear upon its people.

Hmm.

If I am forced to work for someone against my will, that form of oppression is called slavery.

Slavery is a priori Bad, for various reasons:

• it creates a relationship of arbitrary pseudo-superiority imposed by violencce
• it belittles the slave - what sort of life is worth living in enforced servitude to someone else?
• it degrades the moral sense of the slave-master - why take responsibility for anything when you can beat a slave into doing the work?

Hence the famous line (emphasis added) of Satre in the preface to Frantz Fanon's furious attack on the psychology of colonialism, Wretched of the Earth:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot...

Of course, it is one thing for the slave to use violence to free himself/herself. That requires strong nerves and, perhaps, a willingness to die in the attempt.

But maybe it is even harder for someone to resist the temptation to want to be a slave-owner - to free oneself from the very wish to live at the expense of others.

As described in this peerless line - the far other side of Sartre's insight:

The legal processes surrounding the attempt by Belgrade to get former BH Presidency member Ejup Ganic extradited from London to Serbia to face war crimes charges rumble on.

The latest hearing has ended. According to the Sarajevo media, judgement is expected on 27 July.

Needless to say, media reports of the detailed legal issues at stake have been fitful. Some attention has focused on the various claims made by the Ganic team:

• that Serbia's application was flawed on its face or substantively
• that it has no substantive merit and/or presents no evidence which has not been presented in other courts and dismissed as inadequate
• that Ganic can not expect a fair trial in Belgrade

Lawyers representing Serbia have replied:

• that there is enough evidence to launch a substantive prosecution in Belgrade
• and that the Hague Tribunal and other courts are cooperating well with the war crimes courts in Belgrade, and indeed congratulating Belgrade on its work in this difficult area - a fair trial will be assured

My barrister training back in the mists of time taught me one thing: to look at the merits of the case in hand.

The point here (as far as I can see - I may be wrong) is that this is not a case about war crimes. It is about extradition law.

The London courts are not expected or even empowered under the relevant law and guidlelines to delve far into the substance of the allegations against Mr Ganic.

They are dealing with allegations made by state A and against a citizen of state B. Their task is primarily to ascertain whether as a matter of law state A (here Serbia) has met the standards required for Mr Ganic to be transferred to Belgrade.

In terms of where the matter stands procedurally, the Home Office guidelines for cases involving Category 2 territories (which both Serbia and Bosnia are) suggest that we have just had the 'extradition hearing'.

This is interesting (emphasis added):

Some countries are not required to provide prima facie evidence in support of their request for extradition. These countries are (as of 1 January 2007):

Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Liechtenstein, Macedonia FYR, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Russian Federation, Serbia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America.

Then there's this:

The judge must satisfy himself that the request meets the requirements of the 2003 Act, including dual criminality and where appropriate, prima facie evidence of guilt; and that none of the bars to extradition apply (the rule against double jeopardy; extraneous considerations; passage of time or hostage-taking considerations).

Finally, he is required to decide whether the person’s extradition would be compatible with the convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998.

If he decides all of these questions in the affirmative, he must send the case to the Secretary of State for the latter’s decision whether the person is to be extradited. Otherwise, he must discharge the person.

In other words, Serbia does not have to clear too high a legal hurdle on the substance of its extradition request, since Serbia (like Bosnia and Herzegovina) is among the countries whose word and processes are deemed by English law to be respectable enough not to merit deeper investigation.

If the judge decides in favour of extradition, the case goes to the Secretary of State, but only for further consideration under three headings. The Secretary of State is not to look at the wider merits of the issue:

Secretary of State

Where a case is sent to the Secretary of State she (sic) must consider whether surrender is prohibited because:

1. the person could face the death penalty: This is an absolute prohibition unless the Secretary of State receives an adequate written assurance from the requesting state that the death penalty will not be imposed, or will not be carried out, if imposed
2. there are no speciality arrangements with the requesting country: The condition of “speciality” requires that the person must be dealt with in the requesting state only for the offences in respect of which the person is extradited (except in certain limited circumstances)
3. the person was earlier extradited to the UK: this might require the Secretary of State to obtain the consent of the earlier extraditing country, before the person can be extradited on to the requesting state...

If the Secretary of State does find that surrender is prohibited, she must order the discharge of the person. If none of the three prohibitions apply, or appropriate assurances have been given, the Secretary of State must order the person to be extradited.

In the Ganic case the three rather technical prohibitions applied at the political level do not (I assume) apply. So if the Secretary of State is in due course presented with a ruling from the judge confirming Ganic's extradition to Serbia, on the face of it that ruling will have to be upheld.

If the Secretary of State does order extradition Ganic can appeal, just as Serbia can appeal against a decision in favour of Ganic by either the judge or the Secretary of State.

And who knows, maybe wily lawyers on either side will come up with other proceedings (eg based on UK or EU Human Rights norms) to add new complications.

In short, plenty of legal juice - and juicy fees - remain to be squeezed before Mr Ganic very finally gets on a plane bound for either Belgrade.

Or Sarajevo. 

At long last we are starting to be honest about the national indebtedness issues we face:

The true scale of Britain's national indebtedness was laid bare by the Office for National Statistics yesterday: almost £4 trillion, or £4,000bn, about four times higher than previously acknowledged.

It quantifies the burden that will be placed on future generations, and it is the ONS's first attempt to draw together the "off-balance-sheet" liabilities that have been accumulated by the state. The figures imply a huge "intergenerational transfer" – broadly in favour of today's "baby boomer" generation at the expense of younger people and future generations.

The debt primarily consists of the cost of public sector and state pensions, and of payments promised to private contractors under private finance initiatives. It far exceeds any of the figures so far published for the national debt, the largest current estimate for which is £903bn. That is projected to rise to £1.3trn by 2015...

It's impossible for us mere taxpayers to put our heads round what that means, although the Indy tries:

Failure to cut back now or raise taxes – and there is little sign of the population clamouring to make life easier for the as-yet-unborn – will leave future taxpayers with an additional burden of £200,000 each over their lifetimes to pay for the public services enjoyed by this and previous generations.

Even with current plans to reduce the deficit, the tax bill would still be as high as £150,000 over the life of someone born in 2011.

Hmm. A bit more than £2000 per year over a lifetime suddenly starts to seem not quite so bad? These figures are enormous. But the national wealth generated by millions of people working away over generations is even more enormous.

One way or the other, the article brings out well the emerging question of 'intergenerational justice' - how far should we be borrowing from unborn people to pay for rubbish like climate change exhibitions at the UN?

And once we start thinking that government now should pay only for what people living now really can afford now, the size of government might well start to fall pretty fast as voters look hard at what they really want to pay for.

This also explains the nervous efforts made by collectivists to get away from the language of tax and debt.

It's not debt. It's investment, see?

Fine. Some of it is. A road built now benefits people well into the future.

But no business gets a blank cheque from the bank to make investments which have costs now and results later. Governments have to stop pretending that they are different.

As is deftly argued by Jonathan Davis who has the temerity to wonder whether Paul Krugman is talking tosh:

Not even to begin laying the ground for reductions in public spending today, let alone to confront the huge unfunded liabilities that lie beyond budget planning horizons, makes little sense. On past form it will take years for any cuts announced today to be fully implemented, if indeed they can be achieved at all.

Just as 364 economists turned out to be wrong when they denounced Sir Geoffrey Howe’s infamous 1981 UK budget, it is not axiomatic to me that Prof Krugman and co are right this time round...

As his ratings and credibility slip-slide away, President Obama eyes the various US election races later this year. Will the Democrats do terribly? Or merely awfully?

One plan he has - maybe the only plan he has - is to blame everything bad on the previous Bush presidency. Hence his claim that he has had to deal with this grim legacy:

... a decade of misguided economic policies — a decade of stagnant wages, a decade of declining incomes, a decade of spiraling deficits.

Luckily he has Keith Hennessey to remind him of some basic facts. So he won't make that mistake again.

Liam Murray notes that the Department of Health has four speechwriters, one for each Minister.

Plus 35 other people in the PR/Spin area.

This is ridiculous.

Cut. Then cut harder.

The Observer gives us a savage critique of the looming disaster facing civilisation as we know it thanks to the massacres being proposed for the UK's public sector by the new coalition government.

More! It's written by a senior civil servant. Anonymously.

How senior, pray? Can't be that senior or s/he would have been sent on diversity training ages ago for committing vile crimes against the English langauge

In any case, it's not so much a savage critque.

More a mess of over-adjectivised cold porridge, great gobbets of which are sploshed down on the page:

Speaking last week to junior civil servants, I found it impossible to muster the usual energy and excitement. I normally ignite the groups with a vision of our higher purpose and entrance them with the dream of a long bright career.

Sadly my dream is dead. I don't know what we are doing or why we are doing it. I can't escape the feeling that all our dynamism and creativity – so long targeted at the problems in our society – has been turned inward.

Hmm. Were you a happy dynamic dreamer when Labour were in charge? Yes!

Vast systems have been built to freeze spending and implement cuts. They are sucking everyone in. This is a turning point in our island history.

Aaargh. It's ... a vortex!

The Lib Dem ministers are still not strong enough to make an impact. They have fought skirmishes and successfully tested the Tory defences, but they are not ready for a full-on offensive. Having swallowed the budget like rotten food, they have been laid low by a debilitating virus.

Chemical weapons?

The media is (sic) failing too... Before, the battle lines were drawn and every figure had their currency.

Now, it's all confused – like a giant chessboard where the black and white armies have fused and pieces are on the wrong squares. Two kings is an exciting prospect, but how can you work with four knights and too many pawns who all need somewhere to go?

Political pawnograpghy.

The coalition is like an old house. Summer masks all manner of problems. The hot weather makes many things more pleasant.

But when autumn arrives, the wind and rain will ruthlessly expose the gaps and cracks.

Where simile meets metaphor.

You might ask why I am writing this diary.

At last. A sensible sentence. The answer?

The civil service is being eroded by a pungent acid that will soon dissolve the foundations of our politics. The solid oak beams of state are being cut to pieces and the roof will come crashing down.

Clunk.

Silence.

Democratist is someone who follows the goings-on across the former Soviet Union in some depth.

Here he takes up William Hague's recent speech on UK foreign policy, and makes an interesting point about how the UK invests in foreign policy outcomes in that complicated region:

OSCE election observation is about the best value for money currently available to the UK in terms of its overseas aid/foreign policy in relation to the former Soviet Union. Election observation played a key role in the development of the Baltic States in the 1990′s, and more recently in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova (considerably improving the relationships of each of these countries with the UK, and allowing for far higher levels of co-operation than had previously been possible).

It retains huge potential to positively influence developments in countries as diverse as Belarus,  Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and even (over the longer-term) Russia itself. All this at a total average cost of just over £600,000 per annum (apparently less than the current value of the FCO’s wine cellar).

Sounds reasonable. But is it true?

Election observing has grown into a busy lifeform in the past two decades, with sizeable numbers of international observers using rights under OSCE and other arrangements to watch the conduct of elections across Europe and far beyond.

Good grief, they even look at our beloved UK elections - and find them wanting.

The laudable aim is to bring an outside and supposedly independent eye to bear on elections, to check and confirm that they have indeed been 'free and fair' and thereby (it is hoped) to deter abuses and help 'cement' democratic process and values.

The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that.

It is not much use international observers dutifully watching voting and counting of an election where some candidates have been unfairly excluded and/or where the media coverage of the campaign has been skewed massively to favour one side (ie the ruling tendency).

On the contrary, the very fact that international observers are observing such an election might be said to give its outcome a legitimacy it richly does not deserve.

Read, for example, this full and frank account of the lot of the Short-Term Observer in an EU-funded observation in Venezuela:

We make our first report of what is to be a long day. Then we move on, spending only 20 or 30 minutes at each polling station. At various intervals we must phone our LTO team and read out, question by question, our results. The tick-box approach is evidence of the EU’s lack of trust in our judgment. We are data collectors, not observers. It speaks of a bureaucracy keen on statistics that it can brandish scientifically.

The trouble is that it is quasi-scientific: a lot of the data we have to take on trust, such as opening times – and the polling staff are rarely going to admit to tardiness.

Which helps explain why in some cases the 'international community' is keen to pronounce an elections outcome 'good enough' despite manifest and radical flaws. There is no obvious alternative to doing so.

Even when an election is obviously unfair and international observers say so (as in Sudan this year), the self-proclaimed winner just brazens out the criticism and carries on regardless of EU hand-wringing:

"These elections have struggled to reach international standards. They have not reached them all," said Veronique de Keyser, the head of the EU observer mission in Sudan.

Mrs De Keyser said that, especially in the oil-producing south, there had been cases of harassment and intimidation of voters "which has nothing to do with a democratic process".

She praised the enthusiasm of voters and said opposition parties had been free to voice complaints throughout the process.

That's a good example of what I hate about such EU or wider 'Western' missions. They typically are loath to say what is blindingly obvious, viz that they have watched a farcical parody of democracy and that no-one should treat the outcome as legitimate.

Why? Because the governments sending and supporting these missions suspect (not unreasonably) that whatever happens they are stuck with a bad outcome dragging in to the indefinite future, and so condemning it outright makes their job harder. Plus there is no outcome so scandalous and unjust that the UN will not proclaim it legitimate.

Thus our Observers act like unhappy chickens and peck in the local dust for crumbs of comfort to include in their Report, such as the fact that 'opposition groups have been free to voice complaints'.

Huh?

That merely shows how bad the abuse is - the ruling elite have skewed the process to the point that they are so confident of winning that they can allow the opposition to make some puny oppositionist noises!

Still, the fact that there is some sort of scrutiny, however limited it might be, arguably cheers up local people a little and does (perhaps) edge things towards less flagrant abuses.

Which often is the best or only scrawny progress available.

One story of British election monitoring.

The Yeltsin administration in 1993 opened up the whole Russian election process to international scrutiny, and an army of observers duly appeared.

We wily Brits decided that it made little sense to limit our effort to staring at lines of stolid Russians casting votes. The only place which really mattered was the national nerve centre where all the regional results were sent and aggregated.

So waving OSCE identity badges a few British obervers including people from the Embassy gained admission to that national election nerve centre in Moscow, much to the bewilderment (and some annoyance) of the Russian officials there. They then had a fascinating time spending the night watching results pour in from all those time-zones and be tallied for overall outcome purposes.

And, indeed, as far as we could see the nation-wide votes as finally announced fully and fairly reflected the results as fed in from local and regional voting centres.

As for the British role in all this, my guess is that for reasons of economy and general reluctance to 'rock the boat', this new coalition government will opt for the quiet life option of doing such exercises through an EU framework, thereby diluting a distinctive steely British voice.

In other words, that Democratist is right to have concerns:

... if the UK does not put people forward to work as observers, it means that certain, perhaps less well-intentioned countries gain proportionately more influence in the process of observation, and will be able to have greater influence on subsequent OSCE  statements and reports over the coming years.

In a worst-case scenario, such an outcome could do significant damage to the OSCE’s reputation – and (as the Foreign Secretary so correctly noted in his speech) such damage is not easily repaired.

Quite.

A nicely turned piece in the Guardian by Kamil Tchorek on how a more mellow Jaroslaw Kaczynski missed becoming Poland's new President by only some 200,000 votes.

Update: the final gap in Komorowski's favour was a full million votes out of some 17 million cast. Look at the map via the link to see how Poland divides fairly neatly down the middle in its voting instincts. 

And note the final percentages:

Komorowski 53%

Kaczynski 47%

Precisely what I predicted after the first round. Good to see that old diplomatic analytical magic still works. A bit. 

Two weeks ago I made my prediction about the Polish Presidential elections:

My bet this evening? Komorowski to edge home in two weeks' time, something like 53% - 47%

Earlier today it looked as if Kaczynski might have squeaked home, but that bet looks more or less to be the final result. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has conceded defeat on the basis of the exit polls. The gap between the two candidates may narrow somewhat as the votes are counted, but not enough to allow Kaczynski to win.

Kaczynski did very well to close the gap to this extent, and his Law and Justice Party are well placed now to consolidate their position as the leading opposition grouping, or even actually win the next Parliamentary elections.

As for Bronislaw Komorowski, he will have to show some guile in leading Poland without seeming the prisoner of Citizens Platform, the governing party. PM Donald Tusk has been able to blame former President Kaczynski for blocking various reforms - now he'll have to take more responsibility for specific political outcomes.

It will be interesting to see whether Radek Sikorski survives as Foreign Minister. Some muttering is heard that Komorowski may prefer him shunted back to the Defence Ministry with eg former communist turned wily independent-minded social democrat Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz replacing him, as a gesture to the centre left.

In any case, well done Poland for managing the Smolensk disaster and its painful political aftermath with such dignity and attention to due process.

Both Kaczynski and Komorowski have campaigned honourably and well. A model of how modern democracy should work, acting as both a source of national stability - and a moral value in itself.

Remember Richard Murphy? The man who wants more tax, closely followed by lots more tax?

Watching him and Tim Worstall slug it out is one of the UK's best blog battles.

Anyway, Richard is taking up the government's willingness to let the public suggest stupid laws for abolition. He suggests getting rid of Low Value Consignment Relief:

Low Value Consignment Relief (LVCR) relates to the import of goods, very largely from the  Channel Islands on which VAT is not charged because of the exemption provided in UK law, and allowed under EU law, which permits with a sale value of less than £18 to be imported VAT free, even though VAT would be due on such imports if worth more than £18.

Tesco and other retailers are, according to RM, 'abusing' this facility:

... ship goods from the UK, largely to order, and then post them back again. The export from the UK is VAT free. The return is VAT free and the UK High Street price including VAT is undermined, so undermining UK tax revenues by more than £100 million a  year, undermining the UK High Street by forcing shop closures and undermining UK jobs as a result: a massive triple whammy.

Zounds. What will clever accountants think of next? Although presumably this scheme works only because the goods sold are a bit cheaper and some people get work running it, so should not the utility for workers/consumers of all that  be factored in to the overall social cost/benefit calculation?

Anyway, this posting led to a libertarian-inclined RM reader commenting that if the government here and elsewhere in the EU wants to set up such rules, it is right and proper that businesses operate within such rules to maximise their advantage. Leading RM to say this, after some to-ing and fro-ing in the comments:

... you are also hopelessly wrong. Greed never was and never can be the basis for morality. And without morality these (sic) is no society

A bold and ambitious claim indeed. Not clear to me where 'greed' comes into the issue. So I penned the following (admittedly rather condensed) observation:

Sure, greed is bad. But ‘greed’ comes in many forms and includes people in government and trades unions and feckless welfare scroungers as well as errant high capitalists.

The only thing between us and the Stone Age is human creativity, energy, ambition and determination. You seem to characterise much of those vital forces as ‘greed’, juxtaposing such greed against the inherent righteousness of government and bureaucracy funded by levies on the results of creativity, energy, ambition and determination, and extracted by force by the state.

Having worked for HMG for nearly 30 years, most of it serving in authoritarian/communist and former communist countries wrecked by excessive state power, I utterly disagree with you.

Prompting Richard rudely to draw on the logic of Roger Irrelevant and say this (emphasis added):

Respectfully, if that is an argument you have a great deal to learn about the art

I made the point that greed (and all those other characteristics you attribute to it) are pointless without morality.

You seem to observe that you have no perception of what morality is because you worked in communist countries fr thirty years - the latter being a point so irrelevant to any current consideration it is hard to see why you mentioned it, except to prove the lack of evidence for your position.

If you can’t do better than that please don’t bother to comment again.

Charming!

My latest reply:

The second and final round of Poland's Presidential elections takes place today.

Bronislaw Komorowski (Citizens Platform) is hoping not to get pipp'd at the post by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (Law and Justice), twin brother of President Lech Kaczynski who died in the Smolensk disaster.

Which of them is the more 'right-wing'?

I have written before on the difficulty of applying our political labels to Polish politics:

A much better way to look at these things which gives a spread of views for Poland at least is to have two different axes:

• Economic:  State - Market
• Belief:  Religion - Atheist

Looked at this way much more articulated differences appear between the parties.

Civic Platform occupy a blob mainly on the Market side but dipping down into the Atheist camp. Law and Justice occupy a blob which overlaps significantly with Civic Platform but which is also notably more Religious/State. The former communists rebooted as social democrats are a blob with both Market and State but notably more Atheism.

As Poland is, yes, a Catholic country it is not surprising that the two parties (Civic Platform and Law and Justice) which now express in different ways a not too extreme combination of State and Market but with more Religion than Atheism occupy nearly 75% of the popular vote.

True to form, Jaroslaw Kaczynski has been making more overtly 'State' noises to try to woo poorer voters, although as you know Citizens Platform too have been moving in an etatist direction recently. Kaczynski even said some nice things about communist-era leader Gierek ("a communist, yet also a patriot"), a brazen nod to former communist voters.

On private morality issues (divorce, gay marriage, abortion, women's rights) there is nothing between the two candidates. If anything Komorowski is rather more 'conservative' by instinct at least.

On EU questions, Komorowski and his party are notably more EU-enthusiastic than Kaczynski and his. But Kaczynski has cleverly added some new, more mellow European tones to his post-Smolensk rhetoric and talks about greater CAP support for Polish farmers - not an issue where he might easily find common ground with the UK in the looming EU Budget negotiation.

That said, insofar as there may need in the coming years to be far-reaching EU measures to tackle the Eurozone and other structural problems, Kaczynski and David Cameron should easily agree on a rebalancing involving more member state and less Brussels. Kaczynski squeezed in a flying visit to London during the campaign.

Who's going to win?

It looks increasingly like a re-run of the 2005 election, when Citizens Platform Donald Tusk had a solid lead after the first round but was overtaken in the final days of the campaign by Lech Kaczynski.

So, don't be surprised if Komorowski fails to win in the final count, after leading comfortably in the polls for many months.

If Kaczynski does win, it will be down to his brilliant political calculation and canny execution carried out amidst intense private pain after the Smolensk crash - he and Lech were as close as any two siblings can be.

Life in Poland will proceed fairly well, with a mainly market-inclined, technocratic Citizens Platform in government dealing with the Polish Body, and quirky, grumpy, and very patriotic Law and Justice keeping a close eye on the Polish Soul.

A good outcome for the Conservatives here as well.

Sorry not to have been more active recently, folks. But I have had to travel to Stuttgart, Geneva, Warsaw/Cracow and now Brussels all in the past ten days, while keeping an eye on our attempts to sell Crawford Towers.

My latest manoeuvres involved leading a course on Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy. I tried with some success to distinguish between home-based dilemmas, which typically should be managed within the HQ organisation's rules and house culture, and dilemmas at an overseas posting where relationships between colleagues are completely different and things look and feel different.

Plus overseas postings are where policies collide furiously with real life, throwing up all sorts of moral and operational conundrums (or, lawks, should that be conundra?)

What, exactly, is an ethical dilemma for a diplomat representing a democratic country? After all, a dilemma is a dilemma only if you treat it as such - otherwise it's a fact of life.

Should a diplomat brush private moral concerns aside, saying that if the policy has been approved by a fairly elected government in a lawful way, that sets a sufficiently robust moral framework of checks and balances within which to operate?

NB this is not the same as a bland "I was only obeying orders" defence as used by Nazi concentration camp guards, since it presupposes a substantively fair and democratic process leading to the policy concerned - in such cases it arguably is reasonable for an official to outsource part of his/her own conscience to that wider process of consultation and debate.

In any case, what is a fair way to allow diplomats to express private reservations and have them taken into account? And, then, if such a procedure is available but fails to give the unahppy civil servant enough moral certitude, then what?

Should a diplomat who feels that a given policy in aim or outcome is inherently immoral simply resign? Why not? 

One of the few examples of a senior diplomat resigning on an issue of principle was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, an FCO Legal Adviser who in 2003 chose to leave public service when she could not accept that it was lawful to use force against Iraq without a new UN Security Council resolution.

She made a prominent case that the invasion of Iraq was unlawful and so in one or other sense Just Wrong. But let's remember that a significant number of her Legal Adviser colleagues either disagreed with her on the core arguments or, if they saw decisive force in her argument, nonetheless decided to stay within the system and pursue their moral choices in a different way.

Watching this the general public might be tempted to think that the likes of E Wilmshurst and C Murray are in some ways heroic figures, whereas their colleagues who did not leave the system were less principled or even cowardly.

However, would the public really want all the heroic principled people to quit the FCO or the civil service, leaving the shop run by only snivelling jellyfish who remain behind?

One of my very first postings here touched on all this:

Maybe I had lacked imagination previously, but this episode brought home to me for the first time that in my own rather limited and indirect way I was a non-trivial part of (and as it turned out some sort of spokesman for) an elaborate process which had led to some people far away dying violently.

That a diplomatic service career sometimes involved grim moral dilemmas. And that if that was not what I was ready to face in a job, I should get another one.

I still think about that night. For a few hours I was one of the few voices available to the public defending an unpopular UK government decision which had led to military action and numerous deaths in Libya.

I was not myself in any way involved in the policy chain which had brought that decision about. Yet surely as a promising middle-ranking FCO policy officer I somehow had to be seen as more 'involved' in some of the moral responsibility coming with that policy than eg a cleaner or messenger, even if cleaners and messengers themselves played an important functional role in helping that policy be delivered.

Anyway, it was an interesting course which helped shape my own thinking in new ways. 

Is the nice point about training that the trainers often learn more than the course participants?