Blogoir: March

My latest piece in DIPLOMAT magazine looks at different territories round the world which do not fit into neat and tidy state categories.

Or do not want to do so.

Turns out there are quite a few of them.

Nice drawing!

Leader of the Bosniac SDA party in Sarajevo Sulejman Tihic has made a very measured response to the Serbia Assembly Resolution on Srebrenica, calling for a similar resolution in the BH Assembly apologising for crimes against Serbs and Croats. He also expressed the hope that the Declaration in Belgrade would change the consciousness in Republika Srpska.

A bold move by the former Izetbegovic party to claim the forward-looking part of the Bosniac electorate and show up the nationalist Silajdzic tendency among the Bosniacs as destructive and narrow-minded?

In any case, an early helpful bonus for President Tadic in Belgrade.

It prompts a Thought.

Good grief. What if sensible Balkan leaders finally started talking quietly to each other?

Here's a plan.

President Tadic of Serbia, new Croatia President Josipovic and future Bosniac Presidency member Tihic sit down and work things out sensibly, reaching some strategic understandings about ethnic disarmament and identifying a basket of policies aimed at fast-forwarding the region towards high European standards.

Within a context of success - and, vitally, local ownership of it - a huge amount can be done. It won't matter that the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo evaporates.

Even Kosovo might start to look manageable.

Nobel Peace Prizes all round.

The adoption late yesterday by the Serbia National Assembly (Narodna Skupstina) of a Declaration on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia has been hitting the headlines. See eg the BBC. And RFE/RL.

The EU has welcomed the move. Others in the region including various Serb liberals have strongly criticised it for not using the word 'genocide'. During the Assembly debate it was attacked from the opposite angle, for giving a damaging and tendentious version of history which in effect blamed Serbs and Serbia for the Balkans conflict.

In Republika Srpska likewise the Declaration has been condemned:

Many Bosnian Serbs say their community also suffered from war crimes committed by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats.

Among them is Slavko Jovicic, a member of the Bosnian parliament from the People's Social Democratic Party of Republika Srpska's Prime Minister Milorad Dodik. Jovicic says that the draft resolution actually exacerbates tensions in the Balkans instead of moving the region toward reconciliation.

"I have the right to say openly, on behalf of the victims from my people, that as long as I am here -- and I hope other colleagues, too -- that this cannot be adopted. That is not possible," Jovicic says. "I know from numerous contacts with voters in Republika Srpska what they have told me. Even if another 15 years pass, maybe another parliament will have more strength and maybe some new truth will come out that will bring our positions closer. I am certain that we will not achieve peace [by adopting this resolution]. We are going toward new conflicts and confrontations of an unforeseeable magnitude."

Oddly enough (or not), few if any of the news reports link to a text of the Declaration so readers can see for themselves exactly what was passed. Because as always much of the interest and deeper 'messages' lie in the detail.

So I have done the media's work and tracked down the actual Declaration deep in the website of the Skupstina itself. A good chance for everyone to practise reading Cyrillic.

As far as I can see, this is the text as it passed. Let me know if I am wrong.

Thus...

The Declaration preamble recalls various key international law norms and agreements, including the Genocide Convention and the Statute of the International Criminal Court.

It proclaims the aim of promoting peace and stability and friendly relations in the Western Balkans based on international law and the "territorial integrity of all state members of the United Nations, including Bosnia and Herzegovina" (Note: deft wording aimed at restating Serbia's claim over Kosovo and not accepting Kosovo's territorial integrity, as Kosovo is not a UN member. Also reminding Republika Srpska and Sarajevo alike that Belgrade does not support Bosnia's division).

The preamble respects the judgement of the ICJ in February 2007 in the case brought against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina (Note: a good outcome for Serbia in the circumstances. The ICJ held that Serbia had not committed genocide at Srebrenica - an act of genocide had been committed by Republika Srpska forces - but that Serbia had not done enough to prevent it happening).

And the preamble notes that under the ICJ judgement Serbia has to cooperate fully with ICTY (Note: a good signal that Serbia accepts that ICTY must be satisfied that Serbia has done everything possible eg to arrest Mladic).

Then the substantive declaration, cast in somewhat convoluted Serbian prose (summary):

The Assembly in the sharpest terms condemns the crime committed on the Bosniac inhabitants of Srebrenica "in the way confirmed by the judgement of the ICJ", as well as all the social and political processes which created the consciousness that achieving one's own national aims can be done through using force against people of other nations and religions, above all expressing condolences and apology to the families of the victims that not everything was done to prevent this tragedy.

The Assembly fully supports the state bodies working on processing war crimes and successfully concluding cooperation with ICTY, particularly the importance of finding and arresting Ratko Mladic to go for trial at ICTY.

The Assembly calls on all former warring parties in Bosnia and in former Yugoslavia to continue with reconciliation and respect the equality of nations and human and minority rights so that no further crimes will happen.

The Assembly has the expectation that other states of former Yugosalvia likewise will condemn crimes against Serbs and express condolences and an apology to the families of Serb victims.

Conclusion?

Pretty good in the circumstances. In fact, I'd say just Good.

These things are always going to be an uneasy political balancing act (in this case both within Serbia and between Serbia and different neighbours). In this case the majority of Serbia MPs agreed enough substance cast in a positive rancour-free moderate tone to be convincing.

That said, the fact that it was such a struggle to get the Declaration through the Assembly shows that a hefty proportion of Serbia's political elite (and society) does not accept the moral and political premise for the Declaration, and/or the way/fact it was adopted. That allows inevitable scope to those who insist that Serbia is being insincere or devious in expressing any apology, however fulsome.

In any case, as I said to a senior Serbia diplomat yesterday the hard fact remains that until Mladic is arrested and sent on his way to ICTY, Serbia does not look as if it is coming to the issue with clean hands.

The corollary is also true. Once Mladic is arrested and sent to ICTY (if he does not shoot himself in the back with a machine gun resisting arrest) Serbia should find the way open to regain a new leadership role in the region - and start to make up fast for all the time lost ducking and weaving on the war crimes issue since Milosevic fell in 2000.

Progress. Let's see how other Assemblies in the region respond, or not.

I twice have written on this site about one of the most remarkable nights of my FCO career.

This posting - my first ever published on this site - described how I single-handedly as FCO Resident Clerk crushed press freedom in Scotland late one night.

And then this more recent effort, about the strange separate event which happened earlier that same evening.

Now I have written a long piece published in the Independent of 30 March about that encounter with Robert Facey, who later committed suicide after leaving the FCO after his substantive career came to an end over his homosexuality.

This Independent piece has been picked up by The Browser. It draws extensively on material provided by the FCO in response to my FOI request a few weeks ago for material on 1980s' FCO policy on homosexuality. The original quotes from that material and the FCO's general approach to the issues read like something from a time-warp. But, of course, it all was a full generation ago.

To be clear. I am no fan of lumpen political correctness and Diversity gesture politics. I think that it is patronising and professionally irresponsible that some British Embassies have flown a LGBT 'rainbow flag' as a banal gesture of gay 'solidarity'.

An Embassy flag-pole overseas is a key symbol of our country, not a place for making political fashion statements. Are we prepared to make this sort of gesture in Saudi Arabia, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Nigeria, or Pakistan, or Washington, or Japan, or indeed anywhere where we value the bilateral relationship and/or where diplomacy and symbolism are taken very seriously?

No, I thought not.

So please don't fly it in Warsaw.

Why have I made a special effort both to mark Robert Facey's memory and to record the way FCO policy evolved all those years ago?

As you go through life you accumulate a number of 'loose ends' - events or people which somehow made a difference, yet where things were somehow left open or unresolved.

In my career one of the biggest national policy loose ends was the Victory Parade in London at the end of WW2 and the fact that Poles representing a free Poland who had fought alongside British troops were not invited - 'communist' Poles attended instead:

The point here was that in London in 1945 the democratic Polish forces who had fought alongside the Allies were not invited to participate in the Victory Parade, lest that cause problems with Stalin, who by then was busy deporting and brutalising and torturing tens of thousands of Poles. A stunning betrayal of Basic Principles by the British Government...

Related to this was the way successive Poles representing Free Poland had been treated with disdain by the Foreign Office during the Cold War.

Which was why, during the State Visit of President Kwasniewski to the UK in 2004, HM The Queen gave an Honorary Knighthood to Ryszard Kaczorowski, a Polish hero who was the final Polish President in Exile when the Cold War ended.

The symbolism of both President Kaczorowski and (former communist) President Kwasniewski being received at the 2004 State Banquet at Buckingham Palace was a moving yet graceful way to deal with all that troubled history, and somehow mark a new start.

Likewise we made sure to give some of the elderly Polish veterans from WW2 who ought to have been at the 1945 Victory Parade an honoured role at the WW2 60th anniversary commemorations in 2005.

A loose end was tied up with high dignity and ceremony, long after most of the people concerned had died. But nonetheless it happened.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining that in my career Robert Facey's tragic appearance in the FCO Resident Clerkery that evening back in 1986 was something which has stayed with me. I hardly knew him, and never saw him again afterwards.

Yet I think the time has come to face up to the fact that the then FCO policy on homosexuality, sincerely upheld as it was, for motives which were not in themselves wrong or disgraceful, did cause a number of people real pain and loss. And in Robert's case drove him to ultimate despair.

We now know better, or at least think we do.

I'd vote for a plaque near the Grand Staircase of the FCO which says simply:

Robert Facey

Foreign and Commonwealth Office 1973 - 1988

Those coming after us who don't know what the plaque represents will ask.

And be told. 

Here is a brisk piece I wrote over at Business and Politics, denouncing Labour schemes to loot football clubs to promote the 'mutualisation' of public services and the 'democratisation' of football club ownership.

This is so repulsive and insane an idea that one scarcely knows where to start.

OK, I'll start here.

A football club in the UK is private property.

It may prosper. It may go bust. That is the business of the people who own the club. No-one else.

Anything else is lumpen communism. 

I'll end there.

My posting on the film Storm and its setting - the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) - quoted two lines from the movie:

Two powerful lines from the film stand out:

• "What are these trials for?"
• "This (ie ICTY) is not therapy..."

Some thoughts.

What is ICTY's mandate and jurisdiction? Thus:

The mandate of the Tribunal is to bring to justice those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991 and thus contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace in the region.

... It has jurisdiction over individual persons and not organisations, political parties, army units, administrative entities or other legal subjects.

Although the ICTY and national courts have concurrent jurisdiction over serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY can claim primacy and may take over national investigations and proceedings at any stage if this proves to be in the interest of international justice. It can also refer its cases to competent national authorities in the former Yugoslavia.

The Tribunal has authority to prosecute and try individuals on four categories of offences: grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The ICTY has no authority to prosecute states for aggression or crimes against peace; these crimes are within the jurisdiction of The International Court of Justice.

Key point: ICTY focuses only on 'bringing to justice' individuals charged with specific war crimes or crimes against humanity. It is not there to give victims of such crimes any special satisfaction ('therapy'). In fact they may well be very dissatisfied at seeing the elaborate efforts made to ensure that people accused by ICTY get a fair trial. And the cost of the whole business.

Since it was set up in 1993, the cost of ICTY has soared beyond anything the UN (and the nations who foot the ICTY bill) expected.

The early years were cheap - very few defendants. But then it started to get expensive, jumping from $25m per year in 1995 to $96m in 2001, then steadily up and up towards the $150m or so for 2010.

That's $3 million a week, going to heavy legal fees, registry work, translation work, witness protection, judges and the rest. Accused persons (ie their lawyers) get legal aid.

161 people have been indicted, at a cost (if my maths are right) of some $12 million per indictee.

In short, a lot of people are getting very wealthy on tax-free payments and allowances, poring over the misery of impoverished Yugoslavs.

Why was it done this way? Above all, why are the trials so slow?

Answer: in good part to avoid a repeat of the Nazi war crimes trials across Europe following WW2.

We tend to remember the supreme trial of the Nazi leadership at Nuremburg, culminating in the death sentences passed on Göring, Streicher, von Ribbentrop and others.

But most people have forgotten (if they ever knew) that there were many other war crimes trials in Europe and the Far East, often conducted at high speed and with scores of executions resulting.

See for example the Mauthausen-Gusen trials: 69 former Nazi officials, most sentenced to death and promptly executed in hearings lasting only a few weeks.

Or the Auschwitz Trial of 1947, which lasted four weeks and ended with 23 death sentences.

And a lot more.

Basically, the Allies handed out very rough justice in a very short time, to the point of attracting sharp criticism from some senior jurists and politicians back home.

Plus, of course, the whole war crimes process was skewed by the fact that countless Soviet war crimes could not be examined, most notably Katyn. The Perfect Crime.

ICTY was designed to be Different. To be carried out to the best standards of procedural and substantive fairness and meticulous records kept, so that decades from now people could understand why it was done that way and agree that, yes, the process for all its difficulties had been legitimate.

Enter furious complaints, to the effect that the process has been skewed from the start "against the Serbs". Look at the procession of Serbian political and military leaders who have gone to ICTY. Why were Bosniac leader Izetbegovic and Croatia leader Tudjman not indicted, when their responsibility along with Milosevic for the start of the conflict and its subsequent conduct was so obvious? KLA atrocities in Kosovo? Scarcely touched.

Searching ICTY investigations of both Tudjman and Izetbegovic were in fact conducted. Did the Tribunal under various political pressures delay issuing indictments against them, knowing that they were both ailing - thereby allowing them to die without that formal stain on their name?

I do not know, but I suspect (a) that there is a case to answer there, and (b) that it will never be answered to anyone's satisfaction.

That said, Serbia can not have it both ways. As much the largest of the former Yugoslav republics it just failed for year after year to give intelligent reasonable leadership as Titoist Yugoslavia dis-integrated, relying instead on brute force and inat.

Those Serbs indicted by ICTY did each play leading parts in appalling events of different shapes and sizes. But not all senior Serbs were guilty. Look at Milan Milutinovic, President of Serbia during key episodes of the Kosovo conflict, acquitted by ICTY on all charges. ICTY has not erred in convicting many different senior Serbs whose behaviour and policies did verge far into the criminal, at huge cost to others.

* * * * *

In any case, ICTY is by no means the whole story. To deal with 'lesser' war crimes special courts have been set up in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia.  

These important processes and the steady cooperation between the different courts are scarcely acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As HM Ambassador in Belgrade I briefly hosted a Kosovo family who had come to Belgrade to give evidence in one such trial. They said that they had been treated correctly by the Serbia authorities.

Here is the impressive list of war crimes trials in Belgrade. And a Wikipedia entry on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The core problem with these trials is that they appear to proceed in a sort of local moral and political limbo. Each community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalised their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when 'their' court is expected to put on trial one of 'their' people, and hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from 'its' community.

And above all they suspect that local courts pull their punches in looking at 'their' war crimes suspects? Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka St killings?

In short, the outcomes you like are obviously fair, those you dislike are blatantly and appallingly unfair - and show that (unlike you) the 'others' can't be trusted to look objectively at these sensitive issues. 

The harsh reality is that every community in former Yugoslavia sees itself as a Victim of something or other. And a central part of being a Victim is that you never get Justice.

Those local politicians who know that this is a hopeless way to think face an uphill task - where are the votes in saying so?

Not to mention the awkward fact that (as an Amnesty woman at the Storm screening rightly pointed out) other European countries have shown themselves unwilling to respect warrants issued from Belgrade to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war crimes charges, the UK setting an important (and she said welcome) precedent in arresting Ejup Ganic.

There is an important policy issue here. It makes no sense for EU member states to insist that the region take ownership of war crimes issues and run these trials to high international standards, and then not respect what look like serious local efforts to achieve that.

That said, Serbs and Bosniacs alike will all be suspecting that Belgrade's decision to press London for Ganic's extradition was in one way or the other politically motivated (see eg tendentious state TV reporting in Belgrade).

The difference is only that most Serbs are quietly cheering, whereas most Bosniacs think it is just more of the same old Karadzic/Milosevic scheming to delegitimise Bosniac resistance and thereby Bosniacs per se. 

All of which and much more combines to ensure that these difficult trials seem to achieve no real higher status in achieving either justice or 'closure' for the region as a whole, even if a small but growing number of war crimes victims do get the belated satisfaction of seeing war crimes perpetrators being sent to prison.

The Conclusion?

Only that great crimes do deserve great punishment. But delivering that punishment in an effective way is far from easy.

Maybe, after all, there was wisdom in ruthlessly executing after WW2 many Nazis believed to have done or led or ordered unspeakable things.

That sort of thing is cruel. But not necessarily unjust in the greater scheme of things. Above all it signals the symbolic end of something bad - and so opens options for a New Start under new rules. 

Has ICTY in its laborious and stunningly expensive way created a New Start and helped end the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome across this troubled region?

We'll know how things are trending in, say, 100 years' time.

Until then, the jury's out.

... things are hotting up.

This website supported by some Facebook activity is attacking Daphne Caruana Galizia in a, hem, rather personal way, .

And she is hitting back:

Your parents’ generation - perhaps even your parents themselves - created a culture of fear and intimidation in this country which led to the suppression of all criticism through the threat of violence.

Now here you are, behaving the same way, but ‘going modern’ and using the internet to do it.

You know you can lie about me all you please and I will just raise two fingers in your wretched, rat-like faces in the mother of all reverse salutes.

Knowing that lying about me won’t work because I don’t give a damn, what do you do instead? You threaten me that if I don’t shut up, you will spread lies about my sons...

Duck! Another lawsuit is flying through the air!

It could be a long sweaty Maltese summer.

Last week I went to a preview of a new film called Storm.

Here is a New York Times review which conveys the gist of it. The story centres on a Bosnia war crimes trial at the ICTY. A Bosnian Serb military officier is on trial, but the case against him wobbles as a key Bosniac witness is shown to have lied.

The feisty woman prosecutor struggles to get new evidence and finds deeper layers of horror at a hotel where systematic rapes by Bosnian Serbs were carried out. But how to get evidence of what happened there presented - will a victim who survived the ordeal be prepared to testify so many years later?

The film is marketed as a 'thriller'. It is not especially scary or dramatic, although it does well in the Bosnian scenes, conveying a sense of bleak black menace and deeper powerful interests at play, all the more effective for being understated.

The plot turns on procedural manoeuvres at ICTY. The court is said to be under pressure to end trials, hence a murky plea-bargain deal is done behind the prosecutor's back to bring the proceedings towards an end without the full extent of the new evidence being presented. The prosecutor and the Bosniac woman victim all end up betrayed in different ways.

As a dramatic device this works well, giving the viewer a well-acted, subtle and interesting (if rather gloomy) movie experience. For my taste the feministic gender clichés were too clunky: the key women were conflicted but principled, brave and defiant, the key men devious, manipulative and unsympathetic. But then I'm male.

After the screening I was part of a panel looking at the issues raised by the film. The session was chaired by a colleague from Amnesty who with two other women panelists familiar with the issues at first hand raised depressing examples of the difficulties faced by many women victims of rape and other abuse in Bosnia (on all sides).

They argued that even if it was bound to be difficult to bring most perpetrators of Balkan war crimes to justice, there were many other ways in which help and support might be extended to victims, especially women. The Yugoslavia conflicts had led to some trail-blazing legal and policy work in this direction, but a lot more was needed.

I pointed out the startling cost of ICTY - now approaching $2 billion since it was set up in 1993, a lot of money to spend indicting only 161 people. This meticulous process was in stark contrast to the scores of war crimes trials in Europe after WW2, some of which involved many defendants but lasted only a few weeks and led to many executions. One result of doing things in this new measured way was much greater scope to defendants - a point I had made to London when Milosevic was sent to ICTY in 2001 (Is Milosevic Innocent?).

I said that in this sense the film had done a good job, bringing out a number of basic legal and procedural themes which were not always obvious to the general public.  

Nonetheless, as an account of the way things work in real life, it looked, ahem, unconvincing. The driving force behind the betrayal seemed to be a jovial but sly senior EU official, keen to move the Balkans countries towards EU membership for the Wider Good. The real-life problem was not that the EU did cynical deals. Rather that it was unable to do any deals.

I added that as the latest arrest of Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic in London on a Serbia arrest warrant showed, moving war crimes trials to countries in the region opened the way to possible political monkey-business.

A lawyer in the audience pointed out firmly that the main victim in the film was Justice; there had been obviously improper (and obviously unrealistic) collusion between the prosecutors and judges, for no good reason.

Another woman from Amnesty in the audience remonstrated with what she saw as my 'dismaying' attitude to war crimes trials in Serbia and elsewhere, which she said had done fine work. London had been quite right to respond to the request from Belgrade to arrest Ganic on war crimes charges - other Belgrade war crimes arrest warrants issued against eg senior Kosovar leaders had been ignored by other European partners, undermining the credibility of local war crimes trials. (Note: time ran out and I had no chance to reply.)

All in all, a fascinating evening. Two powerful lines from the film stand out:

• "What are these trials for?"
• "This (ie ICTY) is not therapy..."

I to think a bit more about the issues raised by these stark statements, namely what purpose war crimes trials for the former Yugoslavia are meant to serve and how far they are capable of being effective.

To be continued. 

Remember Brains from Thunderbirds? Thus:

Such is the bountifulness of capitalism that you buy cool glasses like this (albeit alas not quite so pale blue) on Ebay.

And (via Instapundit) a lucid explanation of the differences between Nerds, Dweebs, Dorks and Geeks.

Is belatedly hosted by Cabalamat of the Pirate Party UK.

NHS Blog Doctor bites the dust.

Socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer and so on Penny Red dislikes the government's Digital Economy Bill:

Across the West, governments are moving to restrict the access of their citizens to unpaid content on the web, creating blacklists and gifting themselves with the power to cut people off from the syncretic world of high-speed information exchange at the slightest provocation.

Future generations will look at campaigns like these in the same way that we think about fascist book-burning parades.

And who does not want legalised brothels in the UK?

For all those of you rightly obsessed with Malta and Bosnia, let's not forget that Poland has a Presidential election again this year.

These happen every five years. A President may serve only two terms.

So, question. Will President Lech Kaczynski win again?

His first victory in 2005 came when he defeated his centre right opponent Donald Tusk in the second round run-off. The TV debates, where the younger and rather glamorous Tusk was expected to shine ended up working in Kaczynski's favour:

The Left-populist Andrzej Lepper had been eliminated in the first round, and his (mainly poor) voters were likely to incline to Kaczynski. Instead of trying to woo them in his own direction, Tusk made a serious mistake in excitedly accusing Kaczynski of being the sort of extremist who would attract such low-life support.

This allowed Kaczynski to say something to the effect of "Look, millions of Poles have suffered during Communism and the transition from it. We need to bring these deprived people in to the political mainstream, not insult and marginalise them!"

Kaczynski that night came across as much the bigger man. And won the election handily.  

My feeling about Lech Kaczynski is that for personal reasons going back deep into the Solidarnosc period in Poland, he and his twin brother wanted to win the 2005 Parliamentary and Presidential elections more to show that their view of history had been vindicated than to run Poland.

Which helps explain why President L Kaczynski's ratings have never been especially favourable. He has tended to issue tetchy pronouncements from his office rather than get out and about and engage with people.

In most Western capitals the Kaczynski twins are depicted as ultra conservative Catholic nationalist/Rightists. This is not accurate. What they represent is a respectable but defensively idiosyncratic patriotic/etatist viewpoint.

On one side they defend Poland's hard-won sovereignty from Russian energy interests, German WW2 property claims and Brussels bureaucrats alike. On the other they make a populist if not socialist appeal to the 'little man' as the victim of Poland's gloomy history, endemic post-communist corruption, and vast impersonal (and usually unnamed) forces outside Poland's control. They (especially the President) are suspicious of deregulation, free enterprise and the sort of wealthy success which entrepreneurship can create.

This grumpy steady-as-she-goes style is a reasonably successful formula in the Polish context. It has had the outstanding virtue of eliminating Poland's 'red-brown' populists completely from Parliament.

But its natural ceiling is about (at most) some 30% of the vote in normal polling. In the 2005 Presidential elections Kaczynski cruised to victory because he was able to add to that base a lot of post-communist centre left and further left voters too, unnerved by Tusk's unabashed free market policies..

So who might beat President Kaczynski this time round (assuming that he decides to run - not yet officially confirmed, I think)?

Donald Tusk, now Poland's Prime Minister, has decided to stay where he is. That has left the way open for his Citizens Platform party to choose their candidate.

Which they have done in an impressively organised vote of party members including Internet voting. Over 20,000 people took part.

The winner was Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, who beat Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski by a strong 2:1 margin.

Why did the steady Komorowski defeat the younger and dynamic Sikorski so easily?

Partly because Komorowski has been a continuous presence on the Polish scene for so long, whereas Sikorski has spent a lot of his life in the UK and USA. 

And perhaps because party members suspected that a Presidential campaign between Kaczynski and Sikorski might play to the strengths of Kaczynski, allowing him to play the Experience and Reliable cards too strongly.

Komorowski by contrast offers both those qualities in generous quantities, but with a much better record than the President of smoothing over problems and not seeming to enjoy truculent political confrontation at home and abroad for its own sake.

Which is why the polls currently have Komorowski a firm favourite to beat Kaczynski, although no doubt the gap will narrow somewhat as the race develops.

So President Kaczynski has a difficult decision. To run again in very unfavourable circumstances and risk an embarrassingly large defeat? Or to stand down, but with no-one from his party likely to have a better chance to beat Komorowski?

As for Radek Sikorski, his ratings with the public are better than his ratings within the Citizens Platform party. He is still on the right side of 50 - he has many more chances to come and surely will take one of them.

Such as in 2020 when President Komorowski's second term ends. If he is ready to wait that long?

Is described by me here at RFE/RL:

... two central questions have never been decisively answered.

Did political reconciliation in post-World War II Yugoslavia depend on an implicit understanding that the horrible interethnic violence of World War II could be put to one side as long as minority communities in the different republics had the wider security of living under a single Yugoslav roof?

If not, how could democracy and minority rights across the former Yugoslav space be guaranteed without creating mainly monoethnic polities?

... Is today's Bosnia therefore even more vulnerable than yesterday's doomed Yugoslavia? After nearly five decades of "brotherhood and unity," the Yugoslav ideal did have resonance and popular support separate from the feuding between the republics and their greedy leaders. Bosnia, by contrast, has no political force championing a Bosnian ideal, open to all.

Izetbegovic once told me that it would take 50 years before Bosniaks dared risk "ethnic disarmament." Bosniak politicians don't lose votes by loudly damning "Serb" provocations and hypocrisy. But by making that the main message, and insisting that only their definition of Bosnia is legitimate, they make it too easy for Bosnian Serbs to argue that there is not enough common ground to build Bosnia successfully.

... the European Union's own policies are "Balkanized." It is time to reorganize the confusing set of authorities and policies dealing with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. These arrangements need to be brought together under a single powerful team which oversees progress towards EU membership.

This would not solve everything, but it should give intelligent but flexible consistency and thereby restore authority to the European effort, which in Bosnia in particular is declining.

If that does not happen, the former Yugoslavia could end up stranded on the steep sand dune of history, unable to climb upward to the green grass of full EU membership or move sideways to a better place without slipping far back down the slope.

Above all, the weary populations concerned do not need a massive legal battle in London over Ejup Ganic, a battle which revisits the origins of the collapse of Yugoslavia and what happened thereafter amid mutual recriminations:

"My just and holy war crime was self-defense!"

"My war crime was also self-defense -- and it was much smaller than yours, so it doesn't count."

Welcome Iain Dale readers.

* * * * *

Am I missing something here, or is this beyond stupidity?

Two German members of the supposedly liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament:

We cannot leave it to private rating agencies to decide whether Europe is creditworthy. By lowering Greece's creditworthiness after the country corrected its budget deficit, they further intensified the crisis. It seems that we have yet to learn from the obvious failure of rating agencies during the financial crisis that preceded the crisis in Greece. We have to learn and address the failings of private ratings agencies.

Here's a plan.

Let's leave it all to the official agencies in Athens and Brussels who dishonestly or knowingly or negligently have led us into this mess.

Not.

So what if private ratings agencies create problems for Greece, the Euro or for anything else.

The reason that happens is that they have established over many years a record for some sort of credible analysis and reliability, so people believe them.

Plus the whole point of freedom is that in the ensuing turbulent ebb and flow of ideas the public get to choose which approach seems to make sense.

No doubt private and public analysts alike got many things wrong when times looked good. Over-optimism is contagious.

But now when things are shown to have been based on dodgy foundations is just the time when we need every piece of analysis we can find.

And if global markets choose to believe the more gloomy ones from private ratings agencies rather than reassuring noises emanating from Brussels and Athens, too bad.

That's an incentive signal. It shows that Brussels and Athens need to work harder not to get to the point where that pessimism looks to be well justified and/or has consequences.

It's called Cause and Effect. Not something the plump members of the European Parliament appear to understand.

Here in the latest Standpoint magazine is an article by Joshua Rozenberg about Mediation and the new, excellent strategic dispute resolution service offered by ADRg Ambassadors.

Alas the most interesting sections of the article about ADRg Ambassadors are not included in the online version.

So to read them you'll have to buy the magazine .

Well worth it.

I think I have solved the problem of how best to elect a BH Presidency in a fair non-ethnic way. Walking the dawg through the mud of Oxfordshire has its uses.

Two Options (Note - based on what might be acceptable to the main parties).

Option One: Ethnicity Lite

The basic Dayton formula is kept (ie a three-person Presidency, with one Presidency member from the Republika Srpska entity, two from the Federation entity).

In each entity every voter has one vote, to be given to any named candidate who has to compete under one of the following pre-defined categories applicable in both entities:

• Bosniac
• Serb
• Croat
• Bosnians
• Others

Any candidate can compete under any heading - if a Serb or Bosnian or Jew or Other thinks that s/he can best represent Croat or Bosniac interests, let him/her run for that category.

In the Federation no more than one person from any one category can go into the Presidency.

The candidate with the highest number of votes wins in Republika Srpska. Two candidates with the highest number of votes chosen in two separate categories win in the Federation.

This arrangement allows people in either Entity to vote for a candidate of any ethnicity. Fair. 

In practice it is likely that a Serb will be elected in RS and a Bosniac and a Croat in the Federation. It is possible that the runner-up on the Bosniac slate would get more votes than the winner of the Croat slate, but not get elected. That can be defended as echoing 'weighted voting' as happens in the EU as between large and smaller countries, where smaller countries get disproportionately more voting weight.

Option Two: Non-Ethnicity

The basic Dayton formula is kept (ie a three-person Presidency, with one Presidency member from the Republika Srpska entity, two from the Federation entity).

In each entity every voter has one vote, to be given to any named candidate who has to compete under categories chosen by the public.

Thus any new category can be chosen if enough signatures are gathered to launch one (the threshhold of signatures being set higher or lower as required).

Hence voters could choose not only ethnic categories but also non-ethnic categories (Libertarian, Beer-Lovers, Social Democrats, Serb, Patriots, SDA or whatever).

The categories list as finally agreed would be the same in both Entities, encouraging pan-Bosnian campaigning.

But as before every voter would have only one vote.

In RS the candidate winning the most votes would win.

In the Federation as in Option One: the candidate with the highest number of votes would get in, as would the candidate with the highest number of votes in a different category.

This would open the way to all sorts of new outcomes. In the Federation a Bosniac would be sure to win one place. A Croat might or might not win the second slot, but could win eg by campaigning as a Social Democrat or a Bosnian rather than as a Croat.

Option Two enables voting on issues rather than ethnicity, and is notably fairer to all voters (giving everyone more choices), but it does reduce the chances of a Croat definitely being elected to the Presidency either as a Croat or at all. Hence it is unlikely to be acceptable to the Croats.

So, Option One it is (unless even the theoretical possibility that a Croat will not get elected is enough to compel the Croats to block the change, as it might well be)

In which case there is no choice but to have Option Three, a four-person Presidency elected in both Entities from the following ethnic categories, with the candidate with the most votes in each category winning:

• Bosniac
• Croat
• Serb
• Others/Bosnians 

Since all BH Presidency decisions are by consensus, the extra person does not affect voting outcomes.

But where would that candidate be elected? Maybe in each Entity there would be a Bosnian/Other list and the candidate winning the highest number of votes in one or other Entity would be chosen, ie the Bosnian/Other Presidency member probably (but not necessarily) would come from the Federation. Republika Srpska might not care about that?

Or it just spirals off into endless wrangling, as it is next to impossible to come up with any formula which does not involve one or other ethnic community having to cede ground on what it sees as an existential issue of principle.

My latest RFE/RL article:

... the former Yugoslavia could end up stranded on the steep sand-dune of history, unable to climb upwards to the green grass of full EU membership or move sideways to a better place without slipping far back down the slope.   

This is excellent.

The amazing Bosnian newspaper Dnevni Avaz has a World Scoop.

A letter from Prime Minister John Major to FCO Minister of State Douglas Hogg - in Bosnian!

Check it out.

The letter (facsimile of an official (sic) translation of Major's letter) is dated 2 May 1993.

The letter appears to be sent to Premier (sic) Douglas Hogg at the Office for Foreign and Common (sic) Affairs. Mr Hogg in 1993 was an FCO Minister of State (ie junior Minister, not Foreign Secretary).

It helpfully tells Douglas what has happened at a Cabinet meeting, to the effect that the UK will never send military supplies to the Bosnian Muslims under the 'train and equip' initiative. It asserts that from confidential sources HMG know that various countries are supplying the Serbs, just as "even the Vatican" is supplying the Croats.

It asserts that UK policy is aimed at preventing the emergence of an ISLAMIC STATE in Europe.

It refers Douglas to an unidentified letter from the USA warning against islamic extremists, which require "our security services" to keep a closer eye on islamic communities.

The UK must at any price avoid talking to Islamic countries such as Turkey about Western policy, but rather press ahead with the Vance-Owen plan until Bosnia is destroyed as a viable state and its Muslim community scattered from their own country:

"Although this may seem a hard policy, I must insist for you and others who take political decisions in the Office for Foreign and Common Affairs ... that this is the right policy ..based on Christian civilization and ethics" 

Other Muslim states have done nothing to help Bosnia - HMG control their governments.

"Although I know that you do not fully agree with me and the Defence Ministry, we need to keep a united front in Parliament and elsewhere especially after the sharp attacks on our policy from the former Prime Minister" (Note: Mrs Thatcher?)

I have posted a comment on the Dnevni Avaz website asking for a sight of the original English version, which the article says the newspaper has.

If this is a real letter it is the greatest journalistic scoop of the century.

If (as I suspect) it is something made up by a dim-witted and ignorant propagandist who has done not even the basic work needed to see what an official letter from the British Prime Minister to a junior government colleague might look like, it is the journalistic poop of the century.

Or maybe it is Bosnian post-modern irony and/or biting Bosnian satire in action?

How are we all to tell?

Which fathead said this:

I spent most of yesterday discussing the politics and prospects of a small southern European country which, yes, has its problems but deals with them in a mature, sophisticated way.

Namely Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In particular, the way in which the Bosnian media on all sides go out of their way to get facts right, and cover fairly and accurately what people say, is legendary. As is the fact that on the few occasions they get things wrong, they quickly admit the error and publish prominent and generous corrections.

That's the tip-top professional way to do it.

Come on, Dnevni Avaz. Soar gloriously to those highest standards.

Publish the original!

The energetic campaign to reform the British libel laws is making progress.

Yesterday the three largest UK political parties all indicated wilingness to make significant changes. And see Jack Straw in the Guardian:

... perhaps most importantly for the media – we'll be looking at whether to introduce a statutory defence to protect publications that are in the public interest. A statutory public interest test which is clearly and simply expressed could help ensure that the work done by journalists, scientists and NGOs to investigate and inform the public can continue – while also preserving the right we all have to protect our reputations.

The Libel Reform Campaign wants More, in the form of:

a commitment from the Government to reform:

• a clearer defence of “fair comment” in law;
• removal of internet chat and interactive online services like blogs from liability,
• exempting corporations from libel law unless they can prove malicious falsehood.

And that the ‘consideration’ to be given to a statutory public interest defence becomes a concrete commitment to a public interest defence. Campaigners have made it clear that this is an “essential requirement for reform that will protect scientists, NGOs and academics.”

Which is where I firmly disagree.

I am not interested in 'protecting' scientists, NGOs and academics. I am interested in a free speech for everyone, and not merely those in cutesy favoured categories.

As Climategate shows, many 'NGOs', 'academics' and 'scientists' need a lot more searching scrutiny from the public, not some sort of special protection.

And why should bloggers be exempt from liability? A popular blogger who libels someone (or who allows a commenter to do so) and whose odious words 'go viral' can do significant damage to someone's reputation very fast.

There is an argument that in today's Tower of Babble world such things just have to be accepted as the way it all works. Fine by me. But then that should apply to everyone equally.

At most we need some sort of reasonableness let-out to deal with commenters. If someone writes something defamatory on my garden wall, I reasonably can be expected to remove it promptly as soon as the fact that it is there is brought to my attention.

Likewise if a commenter on my website arguably libels someone and that is pointed out to me as the website host, I can either remove the offending text or choose to leave it up and face a possible lawsuit. What's wrong with that?

Note! That is a separate point from what is or is not deemed by the law to be the sort of expression which is (a) untrue and (b) does someone reputational damage deserving compensation. 

Which in turn is a separate point from how far if at all any such alleged damage has to be proved in court, and where the burden and onus of proof lie as the action proceeds, and what level of compensation for any proven damage is appropriate.

All of which is a separate point from whether the courts' costs regime encourages 'libel tourism', and whether there should be some way of seeing off obnoxious libel suits being brought in the UK just because something written about a foreigner on a foreign website has been read here and therefore 'published' here.

Some of this is complicated!

The core point is that we need to get away from the idea that there are those in 'the media' and everyone else, with those in the media needing and deserving some sort of special status and/or 'protection'.

The media in their classic form (newspapers and YV) are declining fast. in reach and credibility. New forms of publication are sprouting everywhere.

For libel, one size fits all.

Sometimes Mark Steyn surpasses himself.

See for example this essay about declining civilisations in general and ours in particular. Angry, insightful and full of vivid language.

Examples:

Permanence is an illusion — and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more important, national decline is psychological — and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline...

... even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one...

... The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” — whoops, “deep concern” — over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another — like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

The scary conclusion - my emphasis?

On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario — because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

... The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order — in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can.

As they say, read the whole thing.

From 'new World Order' to No-order World.

Coming your way.

The whole business is all about the French Presidential election cycle and the double-dealings of the key protagonists?

Bien sûr!

While I was HM Ambassador in Poland I was accused of improper lobbying of Parliament.

(Slavist linguistics note: Polish has lifted the English word lobbying and incorporated it into Polish in a strange form - lobbing)

I forget now exactly what the issue was about. Maybe a complicated dispute between the then Polish government and a number of large international pharmaceutical companies over where exactly tax should be paid and how it should be calculated.

In my Ambassadorial zeal to be friendly and helpful, I wrote a letter to the then Speaker of the Polish Parliament describing the position in the UK. I copied the letter to various other prominent people with an interest.

In other words, whatever the merits or not of my letter there was 100% no attempt at concealment or behind-the-scenes manoeuvring.

Which of course did not stop some fatuous MP from lodging an official protest that I had been improperly lobbing to help a UK company.

So, what's wrong with lobbying?

On the face of it, not much.

Democracy is all about rival interests and points of view jostling for position. The closer they get to a decision or a decision-maker, the more intense the jostling comes.

Take our Embassies round the world. The US Embassy in Washington's main task is to lobby fast and furiously to head off US decisions which might harm UK interests. Ditto our Embassies in the EU are meant to press local governments to agree with UK views.

Where it goes wrong is when private interests attempt to influence decisions in murky, untransparent or even corrupt ways.

Where to draw the line?

Not easy. Ministers and senior officials need to get out and about and listen to different ideas. What's wrong with someone at a dinner party having 'a quiet word in the ear' of a Minister to argue for or against a specific policy line? Even if there is thought to be something wrong, it's impossible to stop or control it.

That said, the most odious aspect of the Byers scandal here in the UK (a former Labour Minister secretly filmed boasting about how with the right money he can get access to top Labour people to help press for specific outcomes) is not that he wanted to get paid for giving access.

See what I have written at Business and Politics:

The key issue here is not in fact the banal greed of the would-be lobbyists, horrible and squalid though that is.

Rather it is the fact that they expected to be successful. Which means that certain senior Ministers and/or officials currently in power were likely to be open – arguably improperly – to their furtive blandishments.

So a lot of the noise about transparency for lobbyists misses the point. It’s transparency for Ministerial and Departmental decisions which really counts. If lobbyists and their clients see that their lobbying gets few worthwhile results, they’ll do less of it.

It does not take much to see that if a lobbyist is paid a lot of money to influence a policy outcome, a Minister might do what is needed in return for a generous quiet cut.

That's how a lot of business is done round the world.

So I do not understand why the Guardian thinks that the answer is ... more regulation, this time of lobbying firms.

That will make no real difference to the way Ministers and Departments are accessed. If anything it will make the value of quiet encounters with Ministers away from the limelight even more prized - and expensive.

Nor is there much to be done about senior people cashing in after they leave office.

The fact is that the more senior an official or Minister, the less inclined s/he will be to take any notice of any rules. The rules about avoiding conflicts of interest after one leaves an official job for the private sector can be brought to bear only upon relatively junior people (such as me). See this magnificent shameless example.

In the end it all comes down to fiercely defending values - championing a sense of what is proper and honourable. Values of outcome, as well as values of process as an end in themselves.

For me, the main reason to vote against this wretched Labour government is that in so many areas they have dumbed down the very idea of honour and accountability for selfish, banal, trashy reasons.

Labour took Clintonism and turned it into something even worse: It's not what's right. It's what you can get away with.

Even born-again LibDem Craig Murray agrees with me (albeit in a somewhat confused way):

I cannot for the life of me conceive how anybody in their right mind, other than their corporate backers, can even consider voting New Labour, let alone the working people whose hopes they have betrayed.

Putting this right will be very difficult.