Blogoir: March

Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall.

My computer showed a first result from a tiny settlement somewhere deep in Serbia. Kostunica had some 40 votes, Milosevic 20.

This microscopic result in a rural area showed immediately that Milosevic was going to lose, and Lose Big. If he could not win well there, he had no chance in the cities.

The results started to emerge, and this supposition was confirmed. Milosevic had lost!

In Serbia news of Milosevic's defeat spread like wildfire. The regime did not worry. They planned to gather all the results centrally, then do whatever was needed to fix the outcome and announce the Official Result some two weeks after the election.

Because the anti-Milosevic opposition were well-armed with mobile telephones and laptops, this plan collapsed: the scale of Milosevic's defeat was so obvious, so quickly. Pressure on Milosevic to quit mounted fast. Eventually came the famous Bulldozer Revolution on 5 October. 

The point, of course, is that the speedy transmission of accurate election results is at the heart of the democratic process. It allows all sides to know where they stand almost as soon as the polls have closed.

Mugabe is trying to do a Milosevic, delaying the issue of results in the hope that opposition momentum will fizzle out and he can somehow cling on. Plus he is menacingly saying that 'premature' claims to victory by the opposition are in effect an attempted coup (ie justifying force to suppress those making such claims).

A grisly spectacle.

And a classic political problem.

What do Moderates do when Extremists cheat? Do they resort to some sort of force to try to see justice done? If they do, everything could spiral out of control. If they do not, the Extremists may win again.

Maybe if Mugabe was trying to defend a solid record against a bunch of crazed populists one could see some merit in what is now happening. But on the contrary...

What if anything is even more repulsive than the farce now unfolding in Zimbabwe is the studied silence from people in Africa who should be giving leadership. No wonder that Continent is in such a mess. Facile 'solidarity' with any deranged gangsterish leader as long as he is an Authentic African. 

An old joke from that part of the world has a scorpion asking a crocodile for a lift across a wide river. The croc fears that the scorpion will stab him. "Why should I?" says the scorpion, "I'd die too!"

The croc lets him climb on. Halfway across the river the scorpion delivers the croc a massive fatal sting.

"Aaargh, why did you do that?" gasps the dying croc as he starts to sink.

"Africa, Africa!" sings the scorpion, blithely dancing away on the diminishing space available...

The point of the Internet is that it is the World Wide Web, right? So that in principle everyone can get to see everything?

Yes.

That works because websites have common computer addresses within the single overall global ICANN system.

But what if that stopped being the case, with rival regional Webs jostling for position?

New cyber Dark Ages? 

Andrew Kenny bluntly wonders where Barack Obama would fit into South Africa's racial profiling legislation.

This makes depressing but convincing reading.

South Africa's problem is that it is mainly a vast desert. Keeping the water and power systems working across a space that size requires amazing sharp-end engineering technique and sustained policy and operational discipline. And if top-end skills are undervalued or eroded by bungled government policy and/or attempts to achieve better 'racial balance' rather than deploy vital expertise, those systems will decay.

With alarming real-life consequences.

All this mess was both predictable and predicted. Andrew Kenny has been writing about the problems for years.

But huge damage has been done. With a lot more to come.

Wikipedia: a new battleground in the US Presidential elections.

I met Michael Dobbs as he started his career in and around Yugoslavia when Tito died in 1980. He has had a glittering journalist's life since then.

He now is part of the Washington Post's Fact Checker team. And has been busy checking the facts of Hillary Clinton's visit to Bosnia in 1996.

She kept telling audiences about her bravery under sniper fire at Tuzla airport.

Alas ... Not.

Four Pinocchios. Top Score.

Anne Pringle replaces Tony Brenton as HM Ambassador in Moscow, to official Russian smirking. This is, I think, the most senior diplomatic position in terms of batting weight ever achieved by a woman in HM Diplomatic Service. Yo.

One of the problems as a senior diplomat posted overseas is how far one goes in public in making noises critical of one's host government when it is behaving in a way which falls far short of its public pronouncements.

Sir Edward Clay went for it as our High Commissioner ('Ambassador' in a Commonwealth country) in Kenya, finding the corruption there intolerable. And having left Kenya he now finds himself declared 'persona non grata'.

Tony Brenton - after due consideration with HQ in London - associated himself with Russia democratic opposition by both attending and addressing a high-profile Russian opposition gathering just before the St Petersburg G8 Summit in 2006.

The Kremlin pounced on this as a personal, calculated act of defiance by HM Ambassador towards his host government at a uniquely inappropriate time. And from then on his posting saw a sustained campaign of unpleasantness aimed at him personally.

The problem is that one can get away with quite a lot of criticism of a host government as long as it is done quietly. But if an Ambassador is deemed to have stepped over the line and taken sides - however obliquely and politely - in domestic politics, his host government find it easy to justify their poor behaviour by piously adopting the highest tones of synthetic indignation, sniping away until the posting ends.

The Ambassador in other words becomes a 'player', not an informed spectator - and can be ruthlessly fouled.

That said, Western Ambassadors in Moscow face an unenviable problem - how to avoid giving the impression to democracy's friends and foes alike that crass repression of Russia's best democrats by the current authorities is acceptable, or at least tamely accepted?

No easy answer. Tony Brenton did not shrug and walk away from the struggle.  

I would have been a strong candidate for to replace him had I not decided to leave the FCO, and Do Something Else.

So, good luck Anne. You will need it.

Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority - the exploiters.

Marx was right. How vile is Capitalism. Allowing an elite to get rich, then to consolidate their privileged position.

No, that's Socialism.

Ooops.

Looking again at the twitterings of Mr Mahbubani, one comes away wondering why he is so patronising towards if not contemptuous of his fellow Asians.

Let's assume the world is complicated and that running any sort of government structure and pursuing numerous different policy objectives requires ever-higher levels of sophistication and flexibility.

How can any society hope to achieve this?

Let me count the ways:

• Avoid putting all society's eggs in one political basket. Make sure that leaders do not stay in power too long. Make sure that society has a good say in selecting those leaders and removing peacefully those who lie or steal or just underperform. (Call these processes democracy).
• Then also make sure that society has some good, fair mechanisms for arbitrating disputes and stopping the powerful abuse their power. (Call these things independent courts).
• Finally, make sure that the natural inventiveness of the population finds fair expression and that good ideas flourish while bad ones tend to fade away. (Call this a market economy).

Some people might call the package of these basic requirements for any sort of rational government and rational society 'Western democracy'. But perhaps that is too culturally loaded a phrase for Mr Mahbubani. So let's call it instead Being Smart.

What about a country that tries the opposite?

Its leader stays in power for decades, and then when that leader finally keels over one of his (it is always 'his') relatives takes over. This system minimises flexibility and maximises the chances for maladministration and corruption; the mass of people are denied any real choices, including the core choice of all, namely to leave and try to find a country where they can make some free contribution. (Call this sort of rule dictatorship.)

Such a country also prevents independent courts from arbitrating disputes or checking abuses of power. (Call this arbitrary rule.)

And such a country bottles up the inventiveness of the people by curbing market mechanisms and stopping the free circulation of goods and ideas. (Call this state control.)

The usual name for this sort of thing is Communism, or Socialism. But that too is a bit ... retro. So let's call it Being Stupid.

The question for the Mahbubanis of the world therefore emerges.

If Asians are so increasingly well educated as he says, or even if they are not, why should they be denied Smart pluralism and the chance to run their own affairs which 'Western' populations enjoy?

If Asians are oppressed by their own governments, are they so psychologically broken and meek that they want to see other governments from the free parts of the world ignoring their suffering and fatly fawning up to these oppressors in the name of 'dialogue'?

If Asians are denied free, independent courts, is that because in some unsaid, inferior Asian way they are not deserving of such institutions? 

If Asians are not allowed to engage in market mechanisms like most of the rest of the planet, is it because they are genetically too weak or feckless to be trusted with making free market choices?

In short, are Asians Stupid?

Come on, Mr Mahbubani.

Tell us. And tell them.

Take the piece by Kishore Mahbubani on the Guardian's site today: "The Sermons of Cowards".

Into the sausage machine are thrown the usual ingredients. Guantanamo, "the gulag of our times"; the USA's Patriot Act ("In the face of threats from terrorism, the population has, in effect, accepted a reduction of civil liberties" - don't you just love the "in effect"?); former British Ambassador Craig Murray's heroic stand against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan; failure of Western policy against the Burmese regime; and so on.

The usual tone of adopted by non-Western progressives: lofty disdain for 'Western hypocrisy' and double standards, now with added Asian cockiness. Mr Mahbubani is said to be the author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

What is depressing about pieces like this which get quite a high prominence in the 'mainstream media' is that they are so obviously morally and politically trivial. The Mahbubani narrative is saying that Western inconsistencies or poor performance in some areas quite undermine anything Western governments have to say across the board.

Really? Why? If one is trying hard to do something good, why does partial failure discredit the whole exercise?

He also seems to be saying that only 'dialogue' with dictatorial regimes can hope to make a difference:  "History teaches that sanctions and exclusions have never succeeded in transforming societies."

Phew. We all knew that Mrs Thatcher was right to oppose sanctions against South Africa. Oh, but what about the injections of active democratic support which helped end a very isolated Slobodan Milosevic's rule in Serbia?

Mr Mahbubani makes one good point: "We are moving toward a more intelligent world. Globally, the number of highly educated people, especially in Asia, has never been higher. They can now make well-informed judgments about what the west does with human rights."  

Indeed. Those people may be rather sniffy about Western human rights policies. There is something patronising in the tone often used by our leaders when discussing this subject. David Miliband's latest speech likewise somehow lacks ... Weight?

But are those clever Asians really going to be impressed with the argument that where a government is brutalising its own people, the rest of the world should do nothing much other than engage in affable 'dialogue' with the oppressors?

Won't they too want to grab the gadgets pouring out from the globalised industries created by Western inventiveness and pluralism to network against these rubbishy regimes, and help knock them down?

 

The squall over Hillary Clinton's skewed memory of her visit to Bosnia in 1996 recalls to my mind my own no doubt skewed memory of President Clinton's set-piece speech in Sarajevo's National Theatre during his subsequent visit with his wife in December 1997.

During this visit much of that part of Europe was closed down for security reasons. Those of us invited to the Theatre for the address had to be there several hours in advance and sit around doing nothing, much to the fury of eg the French Ambassador.

The speech itself when it finally arrived was rather good: President Clinton in elegant, relaxed form urging the Bosnian communities to work together in harmony just like the multiethnic Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra sitting there behind him. 

The most striking moment came at the start. At that time a lot of hope and effort had been invested by the international community in Biljana Plavsic, President of Republika Srpska, who had taken a brave and more pragmatic/positive stand in Banja Luka against the Karadzic/Krajisnik faction of ultra-nationalist Serbs based in Pale.  

This visit by President Clinton to Sarajevo required Mrs Plavsic to return to the main part of the city for the first time since the hostilities had started; her reputation among ordinary Sarajevo Bosniacs/Muslims of course was mud. So as we waited for the Clintons to arrive she sat up in an upstairs backroom nervously smoking before her public appearance.

As the moment for the Clintons' grand entrance finally approached, Mrs Plavsic entered the auditorium to take her seat.

There was a gasp from the crowd at the very sight of her. The Serbs' own Iron Lady, really back in the city which detested her! 

Then the Clintons arrived. And in an obviously choreographed moment Hillary Clinton walked straight to where Mrs Plavsic was sitting and the two shared a warm-looking embrace. This very public gesture of American support to the hated Republika Srpska President did not go down well with President Izetbegovic and his senior Bosniac colleague Haris Silajdzic, sitting in the front row and rather too obviously not benefiting from the same Clintonian affections.

Plavsic subsequently was indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. She surrendered and expressed remorse for what she had done. She was given a significant jail sentence: eleven years. Former High Representative Carl Bildt respected her work to promote peace in Bosnia following the end of the conflict and no doubt helped ensure her subsequent transfer to a prison in Sweden to serve out her sentence in relative comfort.

So, world leaders and spouses. Be careful whom you hug in front of the cameras. You never know what might come next...

If you get something wrong these days, it can get pointed out out quite fast.

But damage has still been done. And it is creepy how such high-profile matters are often corrected without saying that this correction has happened and why. Are we BBC licence-payers not entitled to rather More?

...can be deceptive. Self-deceptive?

This article makes grim reading. The human cost of Mugabe-ism is soaring to nightmarish levels.

Zimbabwe is a case-book study in the cost of Bad Leaders - leaders who for one reason or the other lose all sense of perspective and responsibility, and who then grab all the controls and point the nose of the aircraft straight at the ground.

There is always a cost for 'intervening' one way or the other against a crazy dictator (Saddam, Milosevic). But there is also a cost of not intervening.

How to measure that cost in Zimbabwe's case? It is far bigger than one can possibly imagine, since it amounts to the large wealth gap between where Zimbabwe could have been with steady if modest economic development over the past decade and where it has ended up now. That gap itself compounds up as time passes by, soaring far beyond what any conceivable external assistance packages can put right. Zimbabwe is experiencing a calamity which will not be put right for decades, if ever. 

Needless to say, Mugabe seems to think that he is doing the right thing by running for office yet again on his fine record, albeit with a good insurance policy. 

Meanwhile back in the United States the political Tower of Babel is babbling away. Ghastly though that phenomenon undoubtedly is when looked at from that point of view, what it represents is the unruly conversations of millions of free people hammering away at myriad points of view to help elect a new President. Who will get elected. And in due course step down gracefully.

Civilisation at work.

Type "South Africa peaceful transition" into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this:

South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world.

Wikipedia proclaims that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made remarkable progress in consolidating the nation's peaceful transition to democracy.

And so on.

The question of South Africa's transition came up unexpectedly during a lunch I hosted in Warsaw for a senior UK science delegation. The British guest of honour opined that it was excellent to be in Poland, a country which like his native South Africa had had such a remarkably peaceful transition to democracy.

I alas could not restrain myself. I asked what exactly had been peaceful about South Africa's transition. Had not some 20,000 people been killed in sustained political violence over that period?

This prompted a lively response from said visitor. What was I talking about? Of course South Africa's transition had been peaceful. To say anything else was quite ridiculous!

I ploughed on, suggesting that if Poland had lost some 20,000 people in its efforts to shake off communism we would not have called that 'peaceful'. South Africa's death toll in political violence far exceeded anything seen in Europe's move from communism. Maybe that carnage had been in some way or other inevitable, and in the Greater Scheme of Things worthwhile? But let's not pretend it did not happen.

After a couple of more lively rounds like this we somehow changed the subject, much to the relief of our bemused Polish guests.

On returning to the Embassy I got on to the Africa experts in London, just to check that I had not gone mad. Did they have any figures for political violence in South Africa as the apartheid period ended?

They did. They sent me statistics produced by the reputable South African Institute of Race Relations which indeed showed that between 1985 and 1996 deaths from political violence in South Africa had exceeded 20,000, with a large number of these taking place in the KwaZulu/Natal area.

In Poland by contrast deaths from political violence of different shapes and sizes during the Solidarity period and through to the first free elections were very rare, to the point where individual killings of pro-democracy activists were a major event. Above all the fate of Father Popieluszko.

That said, how peaceful was the Polish transition? Maybe not too many people died, but during the Martial Law period thousands were beaten or tortured or imprisoned or harassed or otherwise brutalised for their political beliefs. From the outside it probably looked relatively calm and restrained. If one was at the receiving end of this nationwide wave of state oppression it probably did not feel that way.

So when is a Transition officially said to be Peaceful? When the killings are few and far between - or when they occur on such a large scale that they are too embarrassing to report?

Here I am at my desk, pecking away at the keyboard, hopping from website to website, wondering what to look at next.

Millions of people round the world are doing the same. Yet how many of them are wondering what makes all this actually work? How does it happen that one types a phrase into Google and within less than a second hundreds of thousands of possible references appear on one's screen?

Here is the answer, a wonderful analysis of the systems running the Internet - and the fascinating issues of how it is all powered.

Read and be amazed.

Even though this website vaunts my status as a qualified Mediator I have not had anything much to say on this subject up to now.

This in part because I am still developing my experience in this fascinating but little understood area. This week I took the CEDR qualifying assessments involving two carefully scrutinised role-play mediations.

The very word 'mediation' sounds just a bit ... soppy. Surely it is not a job for tough guys?

In fact, mediation requires steely discipline and concentration. It basically is all about helping feuding parties to look at the wider picture and stop feuding and cut a deal. This involves letting them blow off steam in a private environment, then cleverly coaxing them to move from Positions to Interests and finally Settlement.

Mediation is Cheap! If the dispute in question is already in the court system, the chances are that the parties are racking up heavy costs which far exceed the costs of any mediation and may not be recovered whatever the eventual expensive outcome.

I watched one mediation a few weeks ago in which the plaintiff and defendant had been arguing to and fro for almost eight years in a row over building works. The costs incurred over that period exceeded the sum needed to settle the matter. Jarndyce is alive and well. 

Parties in litigation tend to dwell slavishly on the headline sum they hope to receive if they win everything they want. They pay much less attention both to what achieving that knockout victory will cost them in financial and stress terms, or to their realistic chances of achieving it. As our ADR course tutor put it, "it sounds good if your lawyer tells you that you have a 90% chance of winning a case in court. But would you want to get on a bus if one in ten exploded?"

Mediation is part of what these days is called 'alternative dispute resolution'. In fact litigation should be the 'alternative' last resort phenomenon. Taking a case to court is little more than getting on a train without knowing where it is going, how long the journey will take, and what the ticket is going to cost.

So, oh world. I am qualified. And raring to go.

Some of you out there must be involved in fatuous disputes which are dragging on expensively.

End the misery. Hire me.

 

This nicely-turned essay by David Mamet has attracted quite a lot of attention.

It describes him trying to link his changing political beliefs to the way the world appears to be in real life.

Never a bad idea?

President Bush has given a speech on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq intervention. Here is the full text.

Of course all sorts of people think that this intervention has been nothing but a Disaster which needs all the adjectives from Dave Spart's thesaurus to describe it. Here's an example from the Guardian website. One can almost feel the writer's fingers skidding on the keyboard amidst the flecks of foam. But the site also gives this fair-minded piece by Michael White.

One striking thing about the intervention has been the historically low casualty rates on the Allies' side. This fascinating document describes in some detail US military casualty figures over many years - see for example the consistently high numbers of people lost every year through accidents. It shows just how well US forces in Iraq have done in dealing with the military problems they faced. 

Of course Iraqi civilian deaths since the intervention have been far higher, but most of those have been caused by the activities of terrorists and psychotic political forces of different varieties. What do we think would happen if these people actually prevailed and took over Iraq? Back to the good old days?

How to take a view on whether an intervention is 'worth it'?

The Korean War is hardly ever mentioned these days. Yet it was a major set-piece military confrontation with a pro-democracy UN force led by the Americans (and including eg Belgium and Luxembourg) clashing head-on with Communist Chinese forces and a large Korean pro-communist force.

Total Allied losses were some 40,000 soldiers. The war ended in a messy stalemate which has persisted ever since. Korea has stayed divided between North (communist) and South (Asian pluralist).

This situation is in fact the greatest social science experiment in human history. How have the two parts of Korea fared under such different management styles for over fifty years?

Well, North Korea is achieving fine results in not using power and contributing to global warming. Otherwise its total economy is now about the size of the market value of South Korea's largest bank.

What this means in practice is that millions of North Koreans live and die in conditions of brutalised destitution, if not downright starvation. For no reason other than the selfish ideological vanity of its tiny leadership clique. A deliberate waste of human life on a scale which is almost impossible to grasp.

Had the UN forces not stood firm against the communists' onslaught, albeit at the heavy cost of 40,000 Western lives, the whole of Korea would have been taken over by those lunatics. Thanks directly to us, many millions of South Korean lives have been saved from the consequences of communism and made worthwhile. 

Is it really so impossible to imagine that in fifty years Iraq will be doing pretty well in some sort of sui generis Arab pluralist way, directly thanks to what we did to throw out the Saddam regime and the sacrifices made by the Allies and Iraqi people alike as a result?   

If you have not read it yet, rush out and buy A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe.

A big novel in all senses of the word, weighing in at 742 pages in my edition. It is crafted with sizzling style. Try this for syllepsis:

"...long legs glistening with youth, lubricity and panty hose..."

The subject of the book is Charlie Croker, a bull-like Atlanta property developer. Larger than life, but sinking into financial trouble. He is summoned to a meeting with his bankers who tell him to start selling his assets to pay his massive debts. The scene features a clash of towering obnoxious egos.

At one point the ruthless banker asks Croker to leave the room as he and his colleagues need to cactus.

Croker can't follow, and asks several times whether he really heard the word cactus. The banker assures him that he did say cactus, and asks again that Croker step outside.

"Are you trying to say caucus?" Croker was all but snarling.

"No, cactus" said the Artiste with a merry smile. "This time we want all the pricks on the outside." 

Magnificent.