It's a hard life in the tranzi world

Well, not hard in the usual sense of the word but one does have to do a certain amount of twisting and turning. Take the case of Farouk Hosni, Egypt’s Culture Minister, a close friend of President Mubarak and leading candidate for the top job at the UN Education Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco.

An article in the Wall Street Journal gives a delightful account of his many twists and turns to accommodate everybody. First he tells a Muslim Brotherhood MP that he would burn Israeli books himself if he found any in the Egyptian libraries (what else would be the job of a Culture Minister?); then he backtracks in the light of the various protests, though UNESCO seems to have had no official or unofficial reactions to that comment.

Why should anyone wonder? Is that not what politicians do on a regular basis? Backtracking, I mean, not burning books, though that comes up from time to time as well. Sadly for Mr Hosni, the issue is a little harder to deal with.

With a plum U.N. job slipping out of his reach, Mr. Hosni backtracked. He said the "book burning" remark was merely "a hyperbole -- a popular expression to prove something does not exist." The minister, who is close to President Hosni Mubarak and his wife and considered a liberal by local standards, went further the following day. He told Agence France-Presse that it is "a big mistake that Israeli books have not yet been translated (into Arabic). I have officially asked for it to be done. If people protest, I don't give a damn."

So, three decades after the Camp David accords, would Mr. Hosni support the opening of so far nonexistent cultural ties with Israel? What about a museum of Jewish antiquity and culture in Cairo? The Egyptian went into reverse again. Impossible, Mr. Hosni said, as long as "there are bloody attacks every day against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza strip."

Let me guess. There will be no Israeli books translated into Arabic and stocked in Egyptian libraries and bookshops, not even those that oppose Israeli policies. Perhaps Mr Hosni would not be too happy about Egyptians wondering why it is that writers in Israel can oppose their government's policies with no fear of being silenced or imprisoned while in Egypt even blogging is hazardous if it happens to be outside the accepted political line.

Needless to say, France is officially backing Mr Hosni's candidacy for the UNESCO job. There may be a certain amount of embarrassment on the subject.

Meanwhile, as the indispensable UN Watch has documented, the new expert acquired by the UN Human Rights Council to oversee its standing enquiry into "Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law" is Richard Falk, known for his support for truther 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Here is Hillel Neuer of UN Watch trying to find out what Mr Falk's explanation is for his curious ideas and why is the UNHRC continuing to ignore SecGen Ban Ki-Moon's suggestions that they should start looking at other violations of “the principles and bases of international law” (whatever that may be), not to mention serious human rights problems across the world:

Thank you, Mr. President.

Professor Falk, we appreciate this opportunity to ask you questions.

As we gather to address the Middle East, let us all commit to a future where every child, Palestinian and Israeli alike, will see the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become reality.

With this goal in mind, Professor Falk, let us turn to the report that you presented today, HRC 7/17.

One of the report's exceptional features is its sharp criticism of the United Nations itself. Leading UN institutions and officials are accused of being insufficiently supportive of the Palestinians, of failing to acknowledge international law, which, according to paragraph 54, "brings the very commitment of the United Nations to human rights into question."

The report criticizes the United Nations role in the Quartet and the Road Map for Peace. It criticizes the United Nations Security Council and one of its permanent members in particular. It criticizes the United Nations Secretary-General, suggesting, in paragraph 53, that he may be refusing to fulfill legal obligations out of political reasons.

Professor Falk, my first question to you is by what methodology does one challenge some UN decisions, while accepting others uncritically?

Why are there no questions about today's Agenda Item targeting Israel, as expressed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on 20 June 2007, and I quote: “The Secretary-General is disappointed at the Council’s decision to single out only one specific regional item given the range and scope of allegations of Human Rights violations throughout the world.”

Finally, in light of the concerns expressed by the President of this Council -- in the newspaper Le Temps and elsewhere -- about the credibility of this council on the Middle East, could you tell us what credibility you expect your reports to have, when leading newspapers such as The Times of London are commenting on your support for the 9/11 conspiracy theories of David Ray Griffin, who argues, and I quote from the Times article of April 15th, "that no plane hit the Pentagon," and that "the World Trade Center was brought down by a controlled demolition"?

Thank you, Mr. President.

There is then an attempt by the Egyptian delegation to delete the entire statement and question as being irrelevant to the Palestinian issue. This is rather interesting as normally we are told that everything is relevant to the Palestinian issue. Still, the request was refused, which is a step forward for the UNHRC. Here is the video.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has voted unanimously in favour of classifying rape as “a tactic in war and a threat to international security”, apparently in the teeth of objections by China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam and to the delight of human rights organizations.

As a matter of fact, the definition is accurate enough – mass rape as a method of waging deliberate war is not new and well understood. Next up is a report on how widespread the practice is and what can be done about it. We are looking forward to proposals on severe action by the UN in cases of widespread rape by UN peacekeepers.

Aren't we glad to be funding NGOs?

That is, needless to say, a rhetorical question. Apart from anything else, if we were glad to be funding them, we would do so and not have money compulsorily extracted from us for the purpose. NGOs are not charities that live on voluntary donations but are provided by taxpayers’ money.

This story comes via the Taxpayers’ Alliance blog, which quotes a recent report from NGO Monitor, to which they do not link. Tsk, tsk. But then, it is not always easy to do so, which makes me wonder how often NGO Monitor might suffer from hackers.

The Executive Summary, which is only one page, outlines the problem. The EU is, according to its own propaganda, committed to a peaceful solution that will not involve the destruction of Israel or the expulsion and worse of the Jewish population of that country. (Anyone who thinks that the destruction of Israel will bring peace to that part of the world has not been paying attention.)

That’s the propaganda. The reality is that

Between 2005 and 2007, the European Union provided tens of million Euros from public funds to numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of which are politically active in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In addition to offering services, their reports are perceived as providing expert information to policy makers, journalists and others, and their campaigns have significant political impacts. These activities however, are often inconsistent with the stated objectives of both the NGOs and EU frameworks under which they are funded, including the use of funds ostensibly designated to promote peace, for pursuing political objectives which undermine the protection of human rights.

The Report gives details of the NGOs that have received money to promote their political agenda:

This detailed research documents the degree to which EUfunded NGOs exacerbate conflict and advance particular political agendas. Many of these groups participated in the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban conference, and their reports and campaigns repeatedly refer to Israel as a “colonial entity”, and “racist and apartheid state”, while promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Some EU-funded NGOs also consistently advocate a rejectionist Palestinian narrative of the conflict, erase the context of Palestinian terrorism, falsely accuse Israel of “war crimes” and seek to undermine Israel’s Jewish identity.

The chances of the next Durban conference, scheduled for 2009, being anything but another anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-Western hatefest are slim.

Some of the problems are endemic to NGOs and all tranzis, particularly the European Union, the one fully political expression of tranziedom and it boils down to one word: unaccountability. Forget transparency – it means nothing. You can open up the odd meeting to audiences and publish any number of documents. As it happens the EU is quite good at publishing documents; considerably better than our own government or civil service. As long as there is no direct line of accountability to those who provide the money, which is the poor benighted taxpayers, corruption, both financial and political, is inevitable.

Whether the organization in question is a relatively small one like the London Development Agency, whose shenanigans played their part in Ken Livingstone’s downfall, or a much larger and better financed NGO or those über-tranzis, the EU and the UN, the result is always the same.

Naturally enough, the most ruthless and corrupt players take control. So far I have not seen any suggestions for reform that would overcome these problems as unaccountability is endemic to NGOs and tranzis, there being no direct link between funding, political decision making and specific project management.

After all, there is nothing particularly surprising about the following:

This report also examines the limited transparency and accountability in EU funding for NGOs. Despite the tens of millions of Euros provided by taxpayers, there is no uniform framework or central database for obtaining information regarding which NGOs the European Commission funds. Moreover, much of this funding information is unavailable or hidden beneath numerous bureaucratic layers. The various EC offices that do provide some information on NGO funding use different systems to display this data, making comparison and analysis particularly difficult. Although some EC officials cooperated in providing funding information to NGO Monitor, the difficultly in obtaining this data reflects the lack of transparency. Some requests for specific funding information went unheeded.

In addition, the official guidelines by which the NGOs are selected to receive public funds are very vague, allowing for a high degree of individual preference and bias on the part of EC officials. These (often) anonymous officials and outside experts decide on the allocation of millions of Euros to highly political NGOs, yet are not subject to any external process of accountability. The absence of specific performance indicators to evaluate the impact of EU-funded NGO projects adds to the accountability deficit.

Outrageous, maybe; surprising, no. To be fair, I do not get the impression that NGO Monitor is surprised.

While we are on the subject of NGOs, let us take another look at that interesting and self-righteous organization, Amnesty International. We have written about it on various occasions, for instance here and here. To sum up a long and tedious development, Amnesty International has fulfilled its exemplary role in O’Sullivan’s First Law – not being specifically a right-wing organization it became a left-wing one.

No longer does it limit itself to helping prisoners of conscience in various oppressive countries. The organization’s main role now seems to be, despite the research done by its overworked and underpaid staff (not, naturally enough SecGen Irene Khan), to attack the West, particularly the United States and Israel with other countries that have the temerity to fight terrorists and terrorism coming close behind.

NGO Monitor has been looking at Amnesty International in connection of that organization’s reports on the Middle East. Here is the summary of its latest findings:

NGO Monitor has systematically analyzed Amnesty International’s Middle East coverage in 2007, applying a quantitative methodology, similar to that used to examine the agenda of Human Rights Watch.

The results show that in 2007 Amnesty singled out Israel for more condemnation than Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Lebanon, and Algeria.

More items were published condemning Israel, than the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Hezbollah combined. If detailed reports are used as an indicator, Amnesty ranks Israel and Iraq as equally the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East.

Israel’s democratic and open society ironically invites disproportionately negative reporting from Amnesty International. Access to information facilitates more comprehensive research than in less democratic regimes; democracy demands higher standards of human rights, according to Amnesty International’s Israel branch; external factors, such as media attention, dictate AI’s policy.

Amnesty's 2008 annual report (covering events in 2007) is yet another example of the NGO's highly biased approach. It presents a gross distortion of the conflict, selectively reports events to remove the context of terrorism and ignore human rights issues not related to its political agenda, while repeating un-sourced and anecdotal claims.

Not precisely what Amnesty International should be doing but as a tranzi NGO it has long ago abandoned its useful role of campaigner on a single but very important issue.

On the organization’s own website one can find all sorts of interesting matters. There is, for instance, the appeal to world leaders to do something about human rights. Well, not to the ones who can do something about it, with the exception of China and Russia, both up to a point, but leaders in general.

Amnesty International’s Report 2008, shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries.

True enough, but then all those countries are in the United Nations and have all signed the Universal Declaration as well as any other declaration going. In any case, the collapse of the Soviet Empire has brought about a certain amount of alleviation on the subject of human rights though that event had little to do with the UN or that wretched Declaration, which had been strongly influenced by the Soviet Union back in 1948.

So, apart from bringing down unpleasant regimes, something AI does not approve of, as we know, what else can be done?

“The most powerful must lead by example,” said Ms Khan.

China must live up to the human rights promises it made around the Olympic Games and allow free speech and freedom of the press and end “re-education through labour”.

The USA must close Guantánamo detention camp and secret detention centres, prosecute the detainees under fair trial standards or release them, and unequivocally reject the use of torture and ill-treatment.

Russia must show greater tolerance for political dissent, and none for impunity on human rights abuses in Chechnya.

The EU must investigate the complicity of its member states in “renditions” of terrorist suspects and set the same bar on human rights for its own members as it does for other countries.

Ms Khan warned: “World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost. As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses that can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.”

An interesting list and even more interesting emphasis on what matters in human rights. Apparently, it is the war on terror that produces most of the crimes and they are the ones Amnesty International feels the need to emphasise. Iraq and Afghanistan, eh? Not Iran or Syria, one assumes, or is it to be assumed that those two countries are looking to the United States for leadership?

China and Russia are chided lightly and in a very limited fashion, particularly the former. We must not get too worked up about real tyrannies where free speech is suprressed and all critics of the political regime and of officialdom are imprisoned. Oh and it has the highest number of capital crimes and rate of executions after trials that are the shortest in history. Not something Amnesty International should pay attention to?

What of the latest annual report? The Introduction lives up to all one’s worst expectations. It seems that matters have become worse in the last sixty years despite the hope that was engendered by the end of the Cold War which “were dashed by the explosion of ethnic conflicts and implosion of states that unleashed a spate of humanitarian emergencies, marked by massive and vicious human rights abuses”.

So, um, how did the Cold War end, what were the immediate results, why were there these hopes and who unleashed the various conflicts? Indeed, why was there a fertile ground for those conflicts? And why is the name of the Soviet Union not mentioned in this rather sketchy outline of the last sixty years?

Could it be that the powers that be in Amnesty International actually share ex-President, now Prime Minister Putin’s view that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the greatest geopolitical disaster?

Moving down we find that the worst human rights abuses happen in the United States (our old friend Guantánamo again) and the EU is rapped over the knuckles for not controlling the member states when they exercise “rendition” of terror suspects to countries where they might be ill-treated at the CIA’s behest. No, since you ask there is no particular evidence and no mention in the Introduction of the fact that there are human rights abuses in other countries. And since when have terrorists been political prisoners to be supported by international NGOs?

There is no question about it, Amnesty International sees the war against terror a far greater problem than the terrorism itself, no matter what some of the more detailed chapters in the Report might say. Their website talks far more about protecting rights in the fight against terrorism than about protecting rights against terrorists.

The real problem about NGOs is that they are not charities who live exclusively from private donations. There are big donors, of course, but a reasonable amount comes from government and tranzi funds, in other words, from the taxpayer, whether we like it or not.

What the future might hold

Last Monday I attended no less than two separate talks on, as it turned out, related topics. In the morning Michael Barone, one of the best known American political commentators, author of many, many articles and columns and of several books, most recently, of “Our First Revolution: the remarkable British uprising that inspired America's founding fathers”.

Barone spoke about the presidential race in the United States, not a subject we cover too much on this blog for several reasons. In the first place, it is much written about in the main stream media, though I would not trust British journalists on the subject. They were, after all, convinced that Kerry would win in 2004, a position whose absurdity was clear to anyone who followed events in the American media and the blogosphere.

Secondly, it is a subject that is widely discussed in the American blogosphere. Nothing we say can rival the extensive knowledge and grasp of detail displayed by the likes of Barone himself, Michelle Malkin, Christopher Hitchens or Mark Steyn, to name just a few.

Thirdly, this is not really our subject, apart from the need to point out periodically, that there is this country in which the executive and legislative, properly separated, are both elected by the people of that country. Look upon it and despair about our own situation. No wonder people are gnashing their teeth in envy and calling for the rest of the world a.k.a. the great and the good as well as the tranzis and the NGOs to impose their decisions on the American people.

Still, the President of the United States is an important person for all of us and occasionally we need to look, at least in general terms, at the process that will decide who that person is going to be. A briefing by Michael Barone is a good opportunity for doing just that.

The first thing to be noted (and I do wish British commentators in both the old and new media would do so) is Michael Barone’s strong and reiterated assertion that the result of the presidential election is, at this stage, unpredictable. Obama is not about to be anointed as POTUS, though it is more than likely that he will be the Democratic nominee, not without some trouble there, as it happens.

I may add that Obama’s recent faux pas of threatening people with all sorts of nameless things if they keep quoting what his wife said in a public speech as part of her campaigning on his behalf “inappropriately” has not won him many supporters. The ones who have descended into Obamania are there and will stay there. He needs many more votes, though.

Michael Barone is not an Obama fan but that is not why he remains uncertain about the outcome. He is far too good a commentator to take the wish for the deed. The truth is that the outcome is uncertain because American electoral politics is once again experiencing a big shift and because there are many doubts about all the candidates, Barack Obama, in particular.

His description of American politics was that it has moved from trench warfare with clearly signposted lines and entrenched positions to open field warfare with politicians and voters moving around, separately or in groups.

It is true the President Bush’s approval rating is low but the Democratic Congress, elected with much fanfare in 2006, rates even lower. Recent by-elections have gone the Democrats’ way but, as in this country, people vote differently and less “responsibly” in by-elections than in general ones.

Another sign that the Democrats are doing well is a much higher proportion of people identifying with them than with the Republicans. This, however, is a tricky issue. Republican self-identification was at its highest in 2004 since the 1930s when these questions were first asked. What Mr Barone did not add, as all of us know, is that the Republicans did win the odd election or two during that period. So self-identification is not necessarily a guide to a more general voting pattern in the country.

Democrats this time round have shown themselves much better at fund raising, utilizing the internet for that purpose very successfully. But all indicators that there is a swing to them from the Republicans go fuzzy when it comes to the presidential campaign, whose intra-party bitterness has had a negative effect, so far as one can tell, on the electorate.

Above all, the presidential campaigns hinge on responses to specific candidates.

Within the Democratic Party there is tribal warfare being waged between the black and other groups (the latter including Hispanic and Asian ones as well as Jewish), between older and younger voters and between upscale and downscale ones. How that will play itself out when the candidate is finally chosen remains unpredictable. Notoriously, Obama is very unpopular among non-black working class voters, who still make up a very large part of the Democratic Party’s supporters. On the other hand, will any of them go so far as to vote for John McCain? It’s not impossible as McCain is centre-left but it is far from a given.

Much of Mr Barone’s talk concerned detailed analyses of figures and groupings, subjects that are not for this blog. He did mention that, so far, there has been little concentration on specific issues and a good deal of discussion as to whether this election will mean the end of the forty year long conservative political hegemony. Again, that is not a given, since in those forty years there were various electoral results.

However, it is fair to say that there is a new generation of electors who do not remember the horrors of the seventies and cannot be scared by them. We face a similar situation in this country and it is an inevitable one.

Voters of that kind in the States cannot see that big state is necessarily a bad thing. Voters of any kind in Britain find it hard to believe that big state is not a good thing so we part company from our brethren over the Pond.

However, the same generation of voters, added Mr Barone, wants to have choices and knows about them through the internet. This could mean a possible Republican opening to that generation. Oddly, he did not mention the widespread popularity and influence of right-wing blogs, who definitely do have a link with the post 1970s generation.

The economy, which is stubbornly refusing to sink as low as it has been predicted for some time, could give either candidate an advantage. If things are not as bad as people say, voters might want to stick with the existing party or they might decide to give the other guys a chance, knowing that things remain fairly safe.

Then there is the question of foreign policy, one that does concern us on this side of the Pond.

Foreign policy may or may not play an important part in the election though the question of security undoubtedly will. Again, one cannot quite predict the outcome as the situation in Iraq has improved considerably and not all the efforts of the MSM and of Democrat politicians can disguise that fact. McCain, as the man who had always advocated something like the present surge, may well reap the benefits.

This is one of Obama’s weak points as he stumbles from one idiotic statement to another and tries to bluster his way out of it. His extraordinary outrage at Bush’s general comments on appeasers in the Knesset, which stated to all the world that he thinks of himself as one, is one more thing that might harm him later on in the fight against McCain.

Barack Obama’s pronouncements on foreign policy have been muddled and full of contradictions as well as showing a distinct lack of knowledge or understanding. It is hard to decide on the biggest gaffe. Was it the reference to 57 states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii? Or was it his completely unhistorical assertion that in talking to the enemy, in this case Baby Assad of Syria and Ahmadinejad of Iran, not to mention various terrorists, he would be following in the footsteps of FDR, Harry Truman and JFK.

Sadly, neither Roosevelt nor Truman are known for too much parlaying with the enemy and the one time Kennedy tried it, in 1961 at the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev, the results were disastrous and he foreswore any future exercise of that kind.

A fascinating article in the IHT gives a good account of that event and its outcome, suggesting that Obama should pay a little more attention to what Kennedy really learnt from it all.

One interesting point about foreign policy ties up with the other talk I attended later that day. In his recent speech on foreign policy John McCain suggested that a new organization should be created perhaps in place of, perhaps in parallel to the United Nations – a league of democracies.

The Henry Jackson Society hosted Professor Thomas Cushman, Founding Editor and Editor-at-Large of the Journal of Human Rights and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College when he spoke on that very subject.

The first part of that proposition is easy to outline and prove. Just a few examples to do with UN peacekeeping scandals and the Human Rights Commission, not to mention the Durban Anti-Racism Conference, and you have managed to prove to many people’s satisfaction that there is a great deal rotten in Turtle Bay, though the chap next to me did not really like Professor Cushman’s description of the UN as a league of autocrats. According to him matters could be improved if we could make the Security Council function better. When asked how he envisaged that he became somewhat coy.

The problem is, of course, with the second part of the proposition, the creation of a league of democracies, as proposed by Professor Cushman and various colleagues of his. The international community, as it exists, explained the good professor, is problematic in that it pays more attention to “international law” than humanitarian principles, which means that individual countries can do what they like with the UN, as representative of that community, powerless to act.

Which leaves us with the need to define "international law".

There is also the problem that the UN consists of those very countries that break all the supposed founding principles of the organization. The idea of setting up a parallel organization that would consist only of countries who agreed on certain principles and would accept that desirable interests, such as freedom, democracy and human rights, should also be vital interests, sounds tempting. I have heard it enunciated in general and not so general terms on several occasions. But the devil, if one may say so, is in the detail.

First of all, it is interesting to note that, though the idea of a parallel organization to the UN is seen by many on the left as being neo-con and, therefore, an emanation of Satan, it has actually become a talking point among politicians of differing hues. And the left with some exceptions, as Professor Cushman rightly pointed out, ceased to interest itself in human rights or freedom some time in the middle of the twentieth century if not earlier.

Thus there are suggestions from Democrat-supporting think-tanks of such names as Alliance of Democracies, Community of Democracies (this one from Madeleine Allbright) and Concert of Democracies. John McCain has suggested League of Democracies and mused about the possibility of about 100 members.

Given that the name League of Democracies irresistibly reminds one of the ill-fated League of Nations, it may not be the right one to go with but none of the others sound particularly attractive either.

Professor Cushman thinks that’s too many as it would be hard to find 100 certified democracies. I’ll say. His idea that at first the new voluntary organization should be restricted to just a few – number unspecified – of solid democracies that will not turn into anything else.

That raises one or two problems. How do you define a solid democracy? How long does it have to have been one? What are its characteristics? Let’s see now. We’ll have the Anglospheric countries, Britain, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India. India? Hmm. There are a few problems there but, I suppose, one could overlook them.

What of the other European countries? The Scandinavian ones, certainly. France, I suppose. Germany has been a successful democracy long enough to count. But what about Spain, Portugal, Greece and the East European countries? Russia, presumably, would not qualify and neither would China. Japan probably yes. But what of Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and other South-Eastern countries? It exhausts me just to think of all the problems of definition.

Naturally, I was unimpressed by Professor Cushman assuming that the EU, of all organizations, could be a model for the new one in the way it has assimilated new members, first providing them with strong guidelines on how to become worthy of membership. The EU is not a loose organization of democratic states but a less than democratic state in the making and Professor Cushman, with all his astonishing qualifications, fails to realize that. How seriously should we take his other statements?

Furthermore, it is unclear whether this organization is to be anything more than just another talking shop, though this time not with an anti-American, anti-Western bias (maybe we had better keep France out, after all). When I asked whether he envisaged an integrated force that would intervene in countries that abused human rights most flagrantly, the good professor openly told me that he was being evasive because he sees that problem as being well into the future. I think not. If you set up an organization you need to decide at an early stage what the aim is and, in general terms, how that aim is to be achieved. Otherwise, you blunder into badly planned scenarios.

There are a few points to be made here, though. Firstly, it is good that the subject of how to by-pass the UN to the point when it might disappear, is becoming part of mainstream American political discussion. Of course, the best way of achieving that objective would be to stop giving the wretched organization money but, I suppose, it is reasonable for politicians to be able to say that there is an alternative to something that is completely rotten and corrupt but is seen as a shining star of human hopes, if only it could be polished up a bit.

On the other hand if Obama does become President (and with all those idiotic gaffes, McCain’s chances are looking better and better) he will not want to do anything. He, as Professor Cushman said, will be a hero at the UN.

Secondly, the idea of making it clear that countries that actually believe in certain principles, even if they do not always act on them, are basically different from those that merely sign up to agreements and proceed to violate them before the ink is dry is full of potential.

Thirdly, there is no harm in affirming that those principles, based on freedom and democracy should become part of the democratic countries’ interests. Nor is there any harm in creating some organization in which the United States will be merely first among equals and, surrounded by allies, will take cognizance of them. Actually, as we have written before, it is not true that President Bush or any of his predecessors refused to listen. He merely refused to listen to America’s enemies.

Fourthly, national sovereignty is a severely overrated concept. The only reason the UN is stuck with it is because the Soviet Union insisted on putting it into the founding charter (and the meeting that signed it was organized and managed by the well-known Soviet agent Alger Hiss), wishing to prevent any discussion of its own record on freedom and human rights. But if those concepts are to trump national sovereignty there has to be a decisiveness about the need to intervene if necessary, a way of defining when that necessity arises and a method of achieving that intervention. None of which, it seems to me, are even close to being discussed seriously by the potential founders of the League of Democracies.

The real crisis has yet to come (Part 2)

If, as we argue, the worst of the current "food crisis" may be over – in the short-term – if the obscene rush to turn food into fuel continues, we will over the medium to long-term be seeing massive shortages of food, precipitating a global crisis. The problems of the last two years will be seen as but a harbinger.

The devil, as always, is in the detail, and that detail is extremely difficult to find – itself a telling indicator. But, starting that the beginning, the figures tell an alarming tale. Here, we rely on an 2006 FAO report, ethanol production had expanded by 53 percent from 30 billion litres in 2000 to about 46 billion litres in 2005.

That report was based on the EU share of renewable fuels in total transport rising to 5.75 percent, when it was expected that world ethanol consumption (the favoured biofuel) would reach 54 billion litres by 2010. As we know, though, the EU is not stopping there. It current 2020 target is ten percent.

In broad terms, the FAO provides a damning indictment of that target. It estimates that the EU would need to convert about 70 percent of its agricultural land to provide that amount of energy, adding that the United States, Brazil, and Canada would require about 30, 3, and 0.3 percent of agricultural land, respectively.

At the moment though, we have an interesting situation. Ethanol production in Europe is in a state of collapse. Owing to the bizarre tax situation which allows US ethanol to undercut European-produced product, much of the supply is produced from US-grown corn (maize).

The problem here is that this situation cannot last. According to latest market reports, global maize production is currently 772 million tons, with US corn at 332 million.

Next year, the harvest is only expected to increase to 777 million tons, which will not meet the increased ethanol demand arising from the United States. As a result, it is expected that we will see a global decrease in stocks of 103 million tons. Furthermore, since corn is also used for animal feed, increased production in this sector would require replacement by sorghum, barley, oats, and wheat, creating pressures elsewhere in the supply chain.

From that, it would appear that increased European demand to meet the EU target - which has just been increased to 2.5 percent of total transport fuel consumption, as an interim step toward the 10 percent target - cannot be met from US sources.

Nor is that situation likely to improve. The week before last, President Bush proposed a new energy bill which would increase the US biofuels mandate to 162 billion litres by 2022, or quadruple the volume required under the current "Renewable Fuel Standard". This alone dwarfs the 75 billion litres previously predicted for 2020, based on earlier targets set in the United States, China, Europe, Japan and Brazil.

Brazil is a good indicator of the way things are going. Initially, EU member states though they could rely on importing some of their requirements. One place they looked was Brazil, which is planning to increase its ethanol production from sugar, producing 32.7 billion litres in 2015, as compared to 13.5 billion in 2005.

Unfortunately, Brazil intends to absorb most of its increased production domestically and is looking to export only six billion litres of ethanol per year. That would barely dent Europe's needs, which – according to one estimate - are expected to grow to 21.5 billion litres a year. For each ton of wheat, 336 litres (approx) of ethanol is produced, so this would need 63.9 million tons of wheat, nearly half the EU's total wheat harvest.

That is the measure of the scale of the EU's problem, even if the figure came from a Brazilian website. That we had to look there illustrates the extraordinary difficulty in finding hard data on the level of biofuel needed to meet the EU's ten percent quota.

The only hard figure we were able to find from commission sources, in a study dated 2001, related not to the 10 percent target, but to the original 5.75 percent quota settled at that time, applying only to the EU-15 (pre-enlargement).

The contribution from biofuels needed to meet that lower quota was estimated then to be around 17.5 Mtoe (Million tonnes oil equivalent) on which basis the 10 percent quota, calculated on the same basis, equates to 30.4 Mtoe. The 30.4 figure equates to not 21.5 but 38.5 billion litres of ethanol.

In fact, the EU anticipates that the quota will be met by a mixture of ethanol (blended with petrol) and biodiesel, but such is the lack of data that, to develop the argument, it is easier – for the time being – to work with a notional 100 percent ethanol production as a basis of calculations.

Identifying an annual requirement of nearly 40 billion litres of ethanol (or equivalent) truly points up the enormity of the task the EU has set its member states. If wheat were used as the feedstock, 120 million tons would be needed. That would absorb well over 90 percent of the entire EU wheat production and use 15.6 million hectares of prime agricultural land – or more than a quarter of the total cereal area in the EU. (Currently, the usable agricultural area of the EU-27 amounts to 183 million hectares. About 108 million is arable land, of which the cereal growing area is 59 million.)

Herein lies the huge disconnect. In its 2001 report, when the EU was considering only a 5.75 percent biofuels quota, it drew attention to the amount of set-aside available. At that time, with voluntary set-aside of 1.6 million hectares, the total stood at 5.6 million hectares.

"Given this surface of set-aside and considering only primary biomass as a function of the crop grown," said the commission, "between 4 and 15 Mtoe of biofuels would be supplied for transport uses, making for between 1.2 and 5 percent of total European petroleum products consumption."

From this, two points emerge. Firstly, the commission was effectively relying on turning the whole of the set-aside allocation to biofuel production. But, even then, much of it was already being used for a variety of industrial purposes, ranging from animal feed to hemp and even lavender and linseed production. Secondly, after the "food crisis" had taken hold last year, the commission suspended set-aside to allow the land to be used for food production.

Given the much of the land was already in use, the commission was indulging in what amounted to Enron-style triple-counting, allocating the same land to general industrial use, then to biofuel production and finally to food production.

Furthermore, the range of figures offered by the commission, on the amount of land needed, is extraordinarily wide. At its most pessimistic, we see that to produce 1.2 percent of biofuel would need 5.6 million hectares. On that basis, the ten percent quota would use up to 46 million hectares, nearly all of the total EU cereal and four times our estimate. Even at the most optimistic, the commission figures put the land requirement at over 11 million hectares.

If by now, the impression is of a confusion of figures, that is an accurate reflection of the state of play. Furthermore, the various estimates must be seen against the recent performance of the commission, in forecasting cereal yields and prices.

Having seen relatively high commodity prices in 2006, it actually forecast a record harvest for 2007 and declining prices. In fact, we saw the price of milling wheat in Rouen rise from €179 to almost €300 per ton while market prices for feed barley increased in the wake of rising wheat prices. In France barley prices have doubled since the summer of 2006, reaching €270 per ton in Rouen at the end of September 2007.

At the same time, its forecast of a total cereal production of 270.9 million tons for the year actually turned out at 255, while consumption hit 267 tons against a forecast of 268.

The commission having sold off much of its intervention stocks, this turned the EU - which has traditionally been a net exporter - into a net importer (eventually having to import 18.9 million tons), forcing the commission to take emergency action in December 2007, suspending import duties on all cereals except oats, buckwheat and millet.

What this basically amounts to is that the commission was comprehensively caught out, displaying a lack of competence that is quite staggering. And it is this same commission which is offering what amount to back-of-the-envelope calculations and indulging in triple-counting of land availability, all in an effort to assure us that its biofuel policy will have little or no impact on the price or availability of food.

If the EU was the only player in the game, this could be the case but, with biofuel having become a global obsession, the 27 member states are at the centre of an epidemic of insanity. They will be competing in a cut-throat market where the total demand will outstrip supply. The net effect can only be shortages and price hikes, with developing countries the main losers.

But, as we have seen in recent months, even marginal shortages of some commodities can have a dramatic effect on prices even in developed countries, adding significant amounts to food bills.

Despite this, the commission rejects criticsm of its policy. The huge tragedy of that is, without the insane rush to biofuels, the world agricultural system is well capable of meeting current food needs and the increases in demand for the foreseeable future. The crisis that has yet to come will be artificial, unnecessary and devastating in its effects.

COMMENT THREAD

The real crisis has yet to come (Part 1)

Some 40 percent of the EU budget still allocated to the Common Agricultural Policy. With the commission claiming as its flagship policy the fight against "climate change", and its biofuels quotas an important part of that strategy – all in the context of the current "food crisis", this puts European agriculture once again at the centre stage of EU politics.

Rises in food prices also have a strong domestic impact, giving a political "edge" to a matter of strong international concern.

It should thus come as no surprise that these issues have risen up the political agenda and have captured the interest and much of the attention of this blog, especially as the serpentine twists and turns of a rapidly developing situation defy easy analysis and require careful attention. Inevitably, therefore, these issues will tend to dominate the posts, and will do until some clarity or resolution is reached.

That said, there seems to be no resolution on the horizon, the latest development being a dramatic downturn in the price of wheat futures on the Chicago market, the benchmark soft red winter wheat falling to its lowest level since November at $8.01 a bushel on yesterday, 40 percent below its record peak of $13.50 a bushel in February.

This is variously reported by the BBC and others, lending sustenance to those who claim that the recent spikes in wheat prices reflect speculative pressure rather than any real market shortage.

Nevertheless, it was the case that the global wheat production for 2007 was 601 million tons while demand peaked at 612 million, and although the shortfall was met from global reserves, imbalances – often caused by government intervention (or lack of it) – did contribute to the upwards price pressure.

Anyhow, as would be expected, soaring prices have triggered increased wheat plantings for the current season, estimated at 3.6 percent globally, allowing the International Grains Council to project a record world wheat crop of 645 million tons for the 2008/9 harvest, weather conditions permitting, against a projected consumption of 619 million tons.

This global estimate includes predictions from the China National Grain and Oil Information Centre, and important player on the global scene. Although the US is known for its wheat growing, China is in fact the world's largest producer, delivering over 100 million tons annually, more than double the US output. India, incidentally, is number two, producing 70 million tons or thereabouts.

According to the Chinese figures, winter wheat output will grow 1.3 percent this year to 102.6 million tons, lifting its total wheat output, including spring wheat, to 107.6 million tons this year, up 2.5 percent from 2007.

What is puzzling about this buoyant forecast is that yields seem unaffected by the agricultural damage, estimated at 80 billion yuan (about $11 billion), caused by the great winter snow disaster.

This may be explained by the fact that the snows largely affected production in Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou provinces, while the major wheat growing areas are in the eastern Shandong and northern Hebei provinces.

However, Anhui, and Jiangxu are also important wheat-growing areas, so one wonders just how accurate the estimates are, given a totalitarian regime where information is tightly controlled. The USDA, though, seems to think that it is mainly the rapeseed crop that is affected. The snow may even have been beneficial to the wheat crop, in easing some local drought conditions.

With the focus on wheat, we are not entirely out of the woods. Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, an agricultural analyst at Barclays Bank, suggests that the price of other grains like rice, sugar and corn could remain high. "The increase in wheat planting could come at the expense of other crops - it's a zero sum game," she says.

This seemed to be borne out by Chicago prices. July rough rice futures soared 2.3 percent last Wednesday to a record $24.85 per hundredweight. Said Kenji Kobayashi, a grains analyst at Kanetsu Asset Management in Tokyo, "Some of the main rice producing countries have imposed export curbs ... and this has combined with low global stocks to drive rice higher."

A day later, though, US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer was exuding reassurance, saying there was no shortage of rice in the United States. He put the surge in rice prices down to speculation about future rice shortages – in part, at least. "We don't see any evidence of the lack of availability of rice. There are no supply issues," he declared.

Ramming in the message, he then added, "Part of the price issue is speculation because we're so close to capacity...that if something disrupts it like the weather pattern then you can start seeing some supply issues. But today there are no supply issues that we see in the marketplace or in the foreseeable future."

On the face of it, therefore, one could perhaps tentatively suggest that the crisis is over, or largely under control – given that there are no weather events which have a major impact on yields. But what is missing from the equation is any estimate of the crops needed for biofuels. This we explore in Part 2.

COMMENT THREAD

Lies, damn lies and David Milband

We lost – wholly predictable, but that does not make it any easier.

Meanwhile, despite horrendous problems with the internet (remaining connected for no more than a couple of minutes at a time), I have managed to complete the transcript of the Milband – Hague "debate". It is posted on EU Referendum 2.

When it comes to defending his beloved treaty, foreign secretary David Miliband is a liar. Not once, but many times offering a naked, unreconstructed, obvious lie. And the worst of it is that is opposition counterpart, William did not pick him up on it, thus letting him get away with it without a serious (or any) challenge.

The particular lie is familiar to use all, uttered on the Today programme this morning, when Milband told listeners, again and again that, the "constitutional treaty has been abandoned". This, he claimed, Angela Merkel had claimed, along "with every other European head of government".

Thus does the whole of the foreign secretary's case for opposing a referendum stand, building on his careful omission of the term "constitutional concept" which was actually what Angela Merkel and her fellow heads of state said.

Thus is Miliband's case built. It is rather appropriate that, like the construct he so loves, he has to rely on a diet of lies and deception. Read the transcript, and note the comments from Nick Robinson. None of the political parties come well out of this and, as for Hague … beyond contempt.

I'll post an analysis of the debate as soon as I can, internet connection permitting.

COMMENT THREAD

The clash of the giants (not)

This morning, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and William Hague, the Tory spokesman on foreign affairs, debated on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the referendum issue on the constitutional Lisbon treaty. This is the transcript:

James Naughtie: The Commons will decide today whether or not there will be a referendum on the European Reform Treaty – the Lisbon Treaty. The Government says it's not necessary because the treaty is no longer a constitution on which a referendum would have been justified.

The Conservatives say that it is a constitution in all but name and that there should be a national vote. The Liberal-Democrats who could put the government in real peril if they joined the Tories in the voting lobby are abstaining although there may be some rebels. We heard from their leader Nick Clegg earlier in the programme and he reaffirmed the abstention pledge.

So let's hear the argument. The Foreign Secretary David Miliband is in the radio car. The Conservative’s foreign affairs spokesman William Hague is at Westminster. Good morning to you both.

Both: Good morning.

James Naughtie: Mr Hague: What is it that convinces you that, despite the changes made to this treaty, it is still a constitution in all but name?

William Hague: Well every government in Europe other than the British government maintains that the substance of the constitution is still there. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the fundamentals of the constitution have been maintained and indeed when you look at it, ninety percent of the constitution is still the same: the new EU president; the EU foreign minister - albeit renamed the High Representative - the loss of more than 50 national vetoes. We could go on with a long list of these things. And I asked the government, I asked the Foreign Secretary last autumn to publish a comparative table, a comparative analysis clause by clause of the constitution and the treaty. Significantly they were not willing to do so.

James Naughtie: David Miliband, why if Angla Merkel for one says that the fundamentals are the same, why do you insist that the constitution has been abandoned.

David Miliband: Well, I oppose a referendum on this treaty for the same reason that William Hague voted against a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which is that neither of these treaties exercise a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the nation state and the European Union.

And as for Angela Merkel she, along with every other European head of government, announced last June that the constitution had been abandoned – the words of every single European head of state. Why did they say that? Because voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the previous Constitution.

James Naughtie: Mr Hague, if it hasn’t been abandoned, why did they say that it had?

William Hague: Well, of course it suits people promoting the constitution to say its no longer a constitution …

James Naughtie: By your argument they don't need to make that case in Europe because they’re not fighting the same kind of battle of battle that the government is here.

William Hague: But of course they want to help those governments that have difficulty with the concept, as here in Britain but the important thing of course is what is in the thing and ninety percent of the content is absolutely the same. Many of the Articles …

James Naughtie: Give us an example of one thing which changes the relationship between the national state and the EU, so that we can discuss the specifics.

William Hague: Fifty vetoes are lost, for instance where we now have a unanimity requirement, in fifty of those areas we move to qualified majority voting…

James Naughtie: OK …

William Hague: Let me just add one thing. Very significantly, what we were debating in the Commons last night, the power is taken in this treaty to abolish all remaining vetoes other than in defence without any recourse to any further treaty. And that is something quite different, on a scale different from what we've seen before.

James Naughtie: David Miliband.

David Miliband: I think that exposes exactly the argument that there isn't a fundamental shift in the balance of power. William Hague talks about fifty-one vetoes. Sixteen of them don’t apply to the United Kingdom because we're not members of the economic and monetary union and because we have our own opt-in on justice and home affairs. Another fifteen or so of them are purely technical matters to do with pension rights and the appointments of various committees. Twenty of them are actually in the British national interest in areas where William Hague wants to see more action. Let me give you examples: in development assistance, for example, and disaster aid relief or in terms of some of the energy deregulation

These are areas where it is actually in the British national interest. And it’s absolutely clear that on any reckoning that there are fewer changes in qualified majority voting in this treaty than in the Single European Act or the Maastricht Treaty. So I think that this exactly exposes the core of the argument which is that we are a parliamentary democracy and only in circumstances where there is a fundamental shift in the balance of power, for example if we wanted to join the euro, then we should we go back to the people. Otherwise we have our own parliament people make their choices at general elections and there simply cannot be stood up that there’s a shift in the balance of power.

As for the second example that William Hague gave, there is a triple lock on all of the changes that he alleges are going to be smuggled in by the back door. Every government has to agree them, including our own, so we have a veto. Every parliament has to agree them, so our own parliament for the first time has a veto on change. In additional the European Parliament has to play a role. And the truth is that the isolation of the Tories is not just on the issue of whether or not there should be a referendum, because as I say every government in Europe has said the constitution has been abandoned. The real issue is that they oppose the Lisbon Treaty itself, even though it means more voting weight in the European council of ministers for Britain, even though it cuts the size of the commission, whose bureaucracy is always being attacked, and even though in important areas of foreign affairs it actually streamlines the delivery of foreign policy delivery that is decided by member states

James Naughtie: William Hague.

William Hague: Well yes, let me come back on that because first of all large parts of this treaty were opposed by the government itself as David Miliband himself knows. He often tries to portray that the Conservative party as being alone against it but many of the foreign policy provisions in it were opposed by his predecessor Margaret Beckett until the final few days of the negotiation on the treaty. Now David argues that the loss of vetoes, the twenty particular vetoes he mentions, are in the national interest and I say they are not …

James Naughtie: All of them?

William Hague: Yes. The issue today, however, is something different. It is should the people be able to decide about that. And while he says that none of us argued at the time of Maastricht for a referendum, no political party in the 1992 general election said it would hold a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. Every political party in the 2005 election said it would hold a referendum on what is essentially this treaty.

James Naughtie: Are you making the point that the commitment to the referendum on Maastricht would have come from a pledge in the manifesto and not from the content of the treaty itself?

William Hague: Absolutely because what we're dealing with here is something that goes wider than Europe. It is an issue of trust in politics. What are we going to say to all those people … we as members of parliament go around and say you must vote, politics matter, elections count and in future we will have to explain that an entire House of Commons, elected with a commitment to a referendum, decided by a majority that it would not have that referendum because the majority thought it would not win …

James Naughtie: In practical terms, Foreign Secretary …

David Miliband: Let me come back there because William Hague has said something that is absolutely extraordinary, which is that the content of a treaty that parliament is discussing has no impact on whether or not there should be a referendum.

Illegible

David Miliband: Don't interrupt because you have said something that I think is very, very unwise. You’ve just said that the content of a treaty has no impact on whether it should be in a manifesto. So, for example, if there wasn’t a manifesto commitment to have a referendum on the euro, but a government decided that it should … enter the euro, it wouldn’t be bound to go to the people. I say that it's the content of a treaty that matters. So in the case that I've just given, if the government suddenly decided it didn’t want to join the euro, it would be bound to consult the people by virtue of the nature of the fundamental constitutional issue that it involved. And I really think that, on reflection, William Hague will realise that it’s absurd to turn over hundreds of years of precedent, where are parliament is the place to decide these issues. How many people have come onto this programme saying they want parliament to play a bigger role in our national life. Here is chance for parliament to do its job in a competitive way, as you see from all the debate about this vote today. And then for general elections to decide the nature of the government. It must be the case that it's on fundamental issues of principle where people are consulted

William Hague: The overriding issue of principle here is that a referendum was promised …

David Miliband: On a constitution which has been abandoned.

William Hague: Which has not been abandoned. And a family solicitor who told people that a document had been abandoned when ninety percent of its content was the same would be drummed out of his job.

David Miliband: Hang on, 27 heads of government have .. [illegible]

William Hague: … hundreds of years … Well look at the heads of government. Bertie Ahern says thankfully they haven’t changed the substance. Ninety percent of it is still there. The Spanish Prime minister said a great part of the content of the constitution is captured in the new treaty. This is what the heads of government have said.

David Miliband: But I can trade you quotes as I've shown because you've started by alleging that Angela Merkel, the head of Germany said it was the same as the constitution … [interruption] Hang on, hand on, well I've said she said its abandoned. I can give you back the Conservative Dutch prime minister ….

James Naughtie: We've heard quotes from both sides, yes. Let's move on, finally.

David Miliband: The constitutional treaty abolished all previous treaties of the European Union. It did something that was legally unprecedented. This treaty – it was rejected by the voters - this treaty says we should not abolish all previous version of the treaties of the European Union. Instead, we should amend the institutions of the European Union. That seems to me to be something that parliament was created to scrutinise and decide on.

William Hague: And look at what has happened when parliamentary committees, cross-party committees with a Labour majority have examined this question: the foreign affairs committee, the European Scrutiny Committee. The European Scrutiny Committee concluded that the treaty, the Lisbon Treaty was substantially equivalent to the constitution and efforts to portray it as otherwise were likely to be misleading.

David Miliband: I'll have to come in there …

James Naughtie: Very quickly, foreign secretary, very quickly foreign secretary …

David Miliband: William Hague has read half of the sentence. What the ESC has said, the European Scrutiny Committee said, was that for those counties didn't have the protocols that Britain has negotiated, in respect, for example, justice and home affairs, there were significant similarities. So let's be absolutely clear about what parliamentary committees have said. In key areas of structure, in key areas of content, and in consequence as well, the Reform Treaty has significant differences from the constitutional treaty. And those are important in our discussion. But the fundamental issue is, does it constitute a fundamental shift in the balance of power, in which case the people should be consulted or is in fact a job for MPs. And I believe that, as an amending treaty, it's a job for MPs.

James Naughtie: Can I just ask you foreign secretary, one last question. Isn't the politics of this clear? And isn't it the case that you as a government are pretty well losing the argument on Europe because, by every measure of opinion we've got that you'd lose it?

David Miliband: I am sorry that you have given William Hague a points victory in the last ten minutes discussion [illegible]. I would dispute that. No, I don't accept that proposition. I think that there is an important principle here, which is what's the job of parliament? And the job of parliament must be to scrutinise legislation and then decide whether or not to pass it. In exceptional cases where there is a fundamental shift in the balance of power, then of course there should be a referendum, and the scrutiny should be intense and the scrutiny should be serious. But in the end this is what we pay MPs for.

James Naughtie: Foreign secretary, William Hague, thank you both very much.

Comment by Nick Robinson, political editor (abbreviated).

What's striking though about this I think Jim, is that we thought that this would be a huge story, didn't we – this story of the Lisbon Treaty. This debate seemed likely to dominate the Spring and it really hasn’t. This is the first bit of attention it's got.

Now some people have criticised the media, the BBC for not giving it enough attention. But shall tell you why. The front benches have conspired to make it dull. The government doesn't really want much attention on it, there is a degree of embarrassment on it, that they’ve changed their position on the referendum, not one but twice in recent years.

The Conservatives, yes, are united in the main in favouring a referendum, but they believe that William Hague tried winning elections by being eurosceptic and failed. And he's one of the leading Tories in saying let's not bang on about this issue. And the Lib-Dems for their own reasons, really know that they are split on the issue of the referendum and therefore have also chosen not to give it a great deal of attention.

So it is likely that there will be no referendum. The Lisbon Treaty will be signed …

COMMENT THREAD

"It will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo"

Kosovo’s declaration of independence last Sunday was the least surprising event of this year (though, naturally, there is plenty of time to go for more dog-bites-man-supermodel-takes-drugs stories in 2008). While I am not at all surprised that Serbia and Russia are going through the motions of rage and astonishment I find the silliness and ignorance of commentators in the West – for once, I think, the blogosphere is slightly worse than the MSM – perpetually odd.

When Hashim Thaci was elected to be Prime Minister of Kosovo last November he announced that he would declare his country to be independent as soon as possible after December 10, when the international mediators were supposed to report back to the UN on the progress of negotiations over Kosovo’s status.

The negotiations led nowhere and the UN continued to procrastinate. The election of Boris Tadic, supposedly pro-Western but really little different from his more nationalist rival, as Serbia’s President earlier this month speeded up events. Mr Tadic may want Serbia to be in the EU – promising the Serbs great prosperity through that move – but he, too, was against Kosovan independence. For that matter, no Serb politician at this time is interested in any arrangements with Kosovo apart from some kind of a return to the past, something that was clearly never going to happen. But then Yugoslavia was never going to be turned into Greater Serbia either but it took ten years of war, thousands of dead, tens of thousands displaced and severe economic hardship for the Serbs to accept that.

President Tadic, backed by the Russian government, has gone to the United Nations Security Council asking for the independence to be annulled and Serbia’s “territorial integrity” to be restored.

Serbia has also recalled its ambassador from Washington and filed legal charges against Hashim Thaci and the Kosovan leadership in general. Other measures against countries that insist on recognizing Kosovo are being threatened:

Last week, Belgrade vowed to downgrade — but not break — diplomatic ties with all nations that recognize Kosovo's independence.

Later Monday, the Foreign Ministry said ambassadors to France and Turkey also were ordered back to the country, following their formal diplomatic recognition of Kosovo. They were withdrawn for "consultation until further notice," the ministry statement said.

"America and the European Union are stealing Kosovo from us, everyone must realize that," said Tomislav Nikolic, the head of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party. "From this moment on, we must count the days until we liberate Kosovo."

I haven’t heard the word “liberate” used in that sense for some time. Well, not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Prime Minister of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, who describes himself as being more nationalist than President Tadic, has attacked the United States for backing Kosovo’s independence bid, saying, in a way that is all too familiar to those who have ever paid any attention to Serb rhetoric, that President Bush and other European supporters of Kosovo will go down “in black letters” in Serbian history. There are rather a lot of black letters in Serbian history, so there is no real need to worry.

Prime Minister Kostunica also stated on national television:

Today on February 17, the fake state of Kosovo was illegally proclaimed on [Serbia’s] territory under the control of NATO. This was an act of legal violence. The United States puts force above law and showed that they were ready to break international laws for their own interests.

On the whole, it is not all that advisable for Serb politicians to talk about putting force above law. Those of us (and I exclude the many who have been commenting on the event in a hysterical and ignorant fashion) who recall the Yugoslav war of the nineties remember the attack on Slovenia, the bombing of Vukovar, the massive attack on Bosnia, not to mention the conduct of that war and the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. One could argue that these were all done by people who put force above law.

In fact, given the outcome of that prolonged war as far as Serbia is concerned, one has to wonder whether Serbs might not be admitting to themselves that those ambitions for Greater Serbia were a very big mistake. Without them some form of a lose federation might still have been in existence on the territory of former Yugoslavia (as created in 1918).

But then, modern Kosovo under that name has been part of modern Serbia only since 1912. The idea that Kosovo has been a Serbian province for many centuries is something of a myth propagated very successfully by the Serbs. Come to think of it, Serbia itself existed as an independent state only sporadically between the early fifteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth. At other times it was part of Hungary, of the Ottoman Empire for a very long time and, subsequently, of the Austrian one.

The argument that Kosovo is somehow naturally part of Serbia depends entirely on the fact that in the fourteenth century it was just that and the Battle of Kosovo, which was not quite a decisive Ottoman victory but which the Serbs consider themselves to have lost, was fought near Pristina in 1389.

Not many borders in the world are the same now as they were in 1389 and there is no particular reason why Serbia’s should be. This posting is not really the place for anything remotely resembling an analysis of the complicated history of the Balkans in the early modern period: the toing and froing of armies; conquests, other conquests, reconquests; alliances formed and broken; states and statelets emerging, disintegrating and reconfiguring. There has been much written on the subject by historians of the period.

The point is that none of it is of any relevance to the twenty-first century and there is no reason why decisions should be taken on the basis of what the situation was like for a few years in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

It is fair to say that Kosovan resentment has been in existence since 1912 and was certainly strengthened by the gay abandon with which it was included into a country of Southern Slavs after the First World War. The Albanians are not Slavs but neither are they Turks or close cousins thereof, as described by one blogger, whom I shall not name, not wishing to embarrass him.

The history of Yugoslavia between the wars consisted to a great extent of attempts to turn the country into the Kingdom of Serbia and resistance to that from other member states. This may sound familiar to those whose memory extends as far back as the mid-nineties.

The history of the Second World War in the region is muddled and contradictory while being possibly more violent and ferocious than anywhere else. There was a great deal of collaboration with the Nazis but also a great many uprisings and various guerrilla campaigns, sometimes against the Germans, sometimes against other guerrilla groups.

Yes, indeed, there were Albanian partisans, just as there were Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ones. And there were collaborators among all those people. That’s the way it goes under occupation where there is a certain amount of internal resentment already. Britain supporting first one group, then another did not help matters.

Moving right along we come to Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, built on the bodies of those murdered by him and his henchmen in the years after the Second World War. He did, subsequently, keep some kind of a balance between the various republics by a mixture of oppression and mild economic reform.

Even before Tito’s death it was clear to many that the country will not survive him for long. Furthermore, it was said, the trouble “will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo”. Tito died in 1980 and the country staggered on for a few years.

Trouble did begin in Kosovo in 1987 when a youngish party apparatchik saw that he could turn a more or less routine episode of nationalist trouble-making by Serb and Montenegrin activists to his advantage.

The best description of what happened can be found in Noel Malcolm’s “Kosovo: a short history”, which may not be unbiased (no history book is) but is remarkably detailed and knowledgeable (apologies for all the funny names and spellings but that is what you get when you deal with the Balkans):

In April 1987 news came from Kosovo that the group of Serb and Montenegrin activists round Bulatovič was intending to bring another large protest to Belgrade. They asked the Serbian Party president, Stambolič, to come and speak to them first in the town of Kosovo Polje; reluctant to enter such a hostile bear-pit (he had already made several speeches criticizing Serbian nationalism), he sent his deputy, Slobodan Miloševič, instead.

As Stambolič later recalled, Miloševič had never shown any interest in Kosovo, and had even said to him on one occasion: “Forget about the provinces, let’s get back to Yugoslavia.” But the events in Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 were to change all
that.

While Miloševič listened to angry speeches by local spokesmen in the ‘House of Culture’, fighting broke out between the large crowd of Serbs outside and the police, who responded with their batons. The fighting had been carefully planned by one of the local Serb leaders, Miroslav Šolevič (local, at least, in the sense that he lived there: he had moved to Kosovo from the Serbian city of Niš): as he later admitted, he had arranged for a truck full of stones to be parked outside the building, to give the Serbs a copious supply of ammunition.

Miloševič broke off the meeting and came out to speak to the crowd, where he uttered – luckily for him, on camera – the words on which his entire political future would be built: “No one should dare to beat you!”

The crowd enraptured by these words, began chanting “Slobo, Slobo!” With a skill which he had never deployed before, Miloševič made an eloquent extempore speech in defence of the sacred rights of the Serbs. From that day his nature as a politician changed; it was as if a powerful new drug had entered his veins.

Phrasing it slightly less eloquently, I would say that he transmogrified himself from a second-rate Communist thug into a first-rate nationalist thug, in the process ridding himself of his friend and political patron Stambolič, elevating himself to the presidency of Serbia and, in a somewhat unconstitutional fashion, of Yugoslavia and acquiring a large number of either foolish or knavish supporters in the West.

The rest is history of a particularly unpleasant kind but one that seems to have disappeared down the memory hole as far as many people are concerned. The truth is that few people bothered to follow the story of the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo; or read the subsequent reports of oppression and human rights abuses that were coming out of Kosovo in the early nineties; or bothered to understand how Yugoslavia disintegrated and what Serbia under Miloševič was trying to achieve by what methods.

Just a few points to be noted: the war did not start in 1999; that was the end-game with NATO intervening decisively to prevent a repetition of the events that had taken place in Bosnia. It was not started by the German recognition of Croatia and Bosnia, which came about six months after the start of the bombing of Vukovar (that’s in Croatia and was bombed by the so-called Yugoslav but, in fact, Serbian air force) and after an EU-sponsored referendum in Bosnia had produced a decisive pro-independence result.

Once again, this is not the place to go into all the details of the war of Yugoslav disintegration that took up the nineties. In a way, it was historically satisfying to see that the end of the century resounded with problems in and around Sarajevo, the place of those famous shots (fired by a Bosnian Serb) that plunged Europe and the world into the mess from which we have not, as yet, extricated ourselves.

As far as Britain and the EU are concerned we need to remember that the part played by our own Conservative government was disgraceful. One needs to go no further than Douglas Hurd’s justification of the arms embargo of people who wanted to fight for their own and their countries’ survival by the words “we do not want to see a level killing field”.

(Subsequently, Mr Hurd was found negotiating a special deal with President Miloševič for NatWest Bank. The deal fell through after a certain amount of publicity. As I recall Dame Pauline Neville Jones, fresh out of the FCO, where she, too supported Serbian claims to keeping Yugoslavia together, was involved in those negotiations.)

The EU was in the process of being formed through the Maastricht Treaty and saw the Balkan troubles as a wonderful opportunity to assert itself on the international scene. With Jacques Poos, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, who held the presidency at the time proclaiming that this was “Europe’s hour” and Jacques Delors sniffily telling the Americans to mind their own business, the EU was all set to sort the problem out.

Unfortunately, the EU’s idea of sorting out the problem was to insist on the inviolability of federal Yugoslavia, to brand all opponents of it as nationalist extremists, to encourage Miloševič in keeping the “sovereign” state together, no matter what it took and to deny Bosnian and Croatians the right to defend themselves.

It all ended very badly, indeed, with NATO, led by the Americans and the British under a Labour government having to intervene to stabilize the situation, at least temporarily. As the Dayton Agreements refused to deal with the Kosovan problem, that temporary state was short.

In 1999 NATO had to intervene again and in effect separate Kosovo from Serbia, who has, since lost its junior partner, Montenegro, as well.

Why the EU should take that view is understandable. As the push to speed up integration in Western Europe gathered momentum, the disintegration of existing federal states, first the Soviet Union, then Yugoslavia, was distinctly unwanted. While guaranteeing the borders of the Soviet Union as Commission President Delors proposed at the infamous Rome meeting of the European Council was beyond the Europeans’ capabilities, something, they thought, could be done to keep Yugoslavia together.

The subsequent crisis clarified two problems: one is that “Europe” was not quite as united on various international issues as its leaders pretended to be; and, secondly, that in the absence of a clear policy and, above all, a military force to support that policy, neither the ideology of integrationism nor the desire to stand up to the Americans was sufficient.

A more peculiar development was among eurosceptics. While many, as could have been expected logically, supported the break-away member states of Yugoslavia, many if not the majority, astonishingly, bleated about the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, the evil Croats and the non-existent Bosnians (that was before anyone who was even theoretically Muslim was described as being evil by definition).

Much of it was half-digested propaganda emanating from Belgrade, whose officials had been well trained in such matters, being high-ranking members of the Communist Party. Some could be attributed to lack of interest until British troops were involved and since this was Blair’s war, it had to be a bad one.

There were idiotic rantings about German plots to send storm troopers into Croatia or wherever. And there were badly argued references to something called the Westphalian system, which is not quite what people seem to think it is. (At which point I must excuse myself. The Treaty of Westphalia and its implications will have to wait for another posting.)

It would have been sensible for eurosceptics to stop looking for parallels to the EU in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin (parallels that do not stand up for one minute) and to look a little closer to home. No the EU is not like Yugoslavia, though there are certain similarities, not least that strange system of rotating presidency.

The point is that Yugoslavia was an artificially created federal state, whose members decided that for various reasons they wanted out. For eurosceptics to support the representatives of the federal state in their fight to suppress those movements for national self-determination is illogical to put it mildly.

To swallow the image of Miloševič and his thugs as fighters either for Yugoslav sovereignty or freedom from Islamic jihad (as defined some years afterwards by people who have clearly never met a Bosnian or a Kosovan) and to support the “sovereignty” of whatever state he happened to be in charge of is fatuous in the extreme.

Let us imagine a situation in which the European Union has managed to transform itself into a sovereign state by considerably more peaceful means than the creation of Yugoslavia, let alone its re-creation under Tito. According to the logic outlined above, no member state will have the right to secede and no outsider will be able to help with that secession because that would be breaking up a sovereign state, which is clearly against the Westphalian system. Think about it.

So we come to the situation as it developed since Sunday’s widely expected declaration of Kosovan independence. Understandably, it has caused certain flutterings in various dovecots though why there was so little preparation for this event remains something of a mystery.

For the rest of the posting I shall ignore the stupid and ignorant comments made by eurosceptics on the subject of Kosovo and Serbia (have I used the word ignorant before?) as being par for the course. As we have said on this blog many times, the reason we keep losing lies in ourselves not in our enemy.

Let us concentrate on what matters. Kosova, as it is known, is now an independent state. Well, at least, it is independent from Serbia, though it has been described as an EU Protectorate. Dusan Reljic, the Kosovo expert interviewed by Der Spiegel sounded doubtful about the effect this will have on the international system. In particular, he was worried about the situation the UN might find itself in:

The fact that the majority of Western countries are recognizing this move by the parliament in Kosovo means that the West has opted for a resolution to this situation outside the UN system. And this of course is not strengthening the UN.

Very few things do strengthen the UN and, in particular, it is not strengthened by its venality and corruption or its inability to come to any kind of decision in emergency. Come to think of it, the UN was in the Balkans for a couple of year in the nineties – a great effort that was in Bosnia, that culminated in the Srebrenice massacre.

This seems to have been forgotten as the latest news is that Serbs in northern Kosovo have threatened the UN police.

What of that other transnational organization that once, a long time ago, felt that the Balkans were its problem not to be solved by anyone else?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think that EU's failure to show a united front on Kosovo has damaged its attempts to have a coherent foreign policy?

Reljic: It shows that there is a plurality of thinking within the European Union and the EU is not a homogenous bloc. I don't think that any one expected the EU to act as a single state. The EU is not a single state.

The decision of the Kosovo Albanians to proclaim independence is not something that the EU has endorsed. The EU has been pushed by the US into this position. This was not original EU policy.

Then again, original EU policy was not all that successful.

Before we go into the details of what the EU might or might not be doing about the latest twist of Balkan history, let us look at the notion that the international system will suffer irrevocably by this upheaval. The chances are that there will be a fall-out, though it is hard to predict where.

The most immediate result was South Ossetia and Abkhazia declaring that they wanted independence from Georgia – much to Russia’s horror but more of that later.

The question is surely whether there is something sacred about the international system as it stands. Like the climate which has been changing ever since its existence the international system has never stayed in one place for very long. The very idea of that is ludicrous.

As it happens, there was relatively little change in the years between 1945 and 1990, apart from the fully expected disintegration of the French and British empires. The descendants of those have stayed more or less in the borders defined by the “imperialists” and all joined the existing international structure, particularly the United Nations.

Is there some reason why the post-1945 construct should last for ever? Right until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the assumption among many commentators was that it would do just that. That event was not the end of a process but the beginning. Many things will change in the international system, some for the worse, some for the better.

After all, the international system, as it exists now, includes the United Nations with all its outpost organizations, the European Union and many other transnational organizations that are claiming ever more power, pointing to the Second World War as the reason for it.

In other words, many of us would like to see changes in the international system as it exists. We do not necessarily mourn events that undermine it.

So what is the European Union doing about its backyard? In the first place, as Javier Solana pointed out:

The EU has already decided to send a mission, a mission of stability, a mission of rule of law. It should contribute to the stability of the Balkans.

A mission always seems like a good idea but whether it will contribute to anybody’s stability is open to question.

The defence ministers are discussing “the possibility of building a special security force in Kosovo as well as measures needed to prevent clashes spreading to Bosnia and Herzegovina”, though Chief Foreign Affairs Honcho, Javier Solana does not seem to think that there will be any necessity for reserve forces to be employed. More like, there will be no reserve forces to employ.

KFOR is there, led by NATO with some UN involvement, trying to keep the peace in northern Kosovo, which is predominantly Serbian.

While the EU is playing some part in Kosovo in terms of its structure, its members seem unable to agree on whether to recognize the new country or not. Germany, France, Italy and the UK have more or less recognized its independence, following the lead set by the United States. Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Romania have announced that they will not do so. Slovakia and, presumably, Bulgaria are undecided. In other words, that common foreign policy remains as elusive as ever for the same reason as before: there are few common interests across the European Union.

Countries that have potential seceders are worried about the effect Kosovan independence will have on them. Others maintain that they have close relations with Serbia, what with them all being Orthodox though this does not stop Greece or Serbia from opposing the war against terror, despite most terrorists at the present being Muslim.

Serbia is once again doing is best to antagonize its possible supporters. Not only have there been riots in northern Kosovo, where the Serbs are, presumably, hoping that the Bosnian situation will repeat itself and the “motherland” will come to their rescue. Unfortunately, the situation has changed and it might be worth the Kosovan Serbs’ while to work out how they can work the system peacefully.

There have been riots in Belgrade itself. A large, government-backed rally of 200,000 or so, dissolved into violence as groups attacked embassies of western countries that had recognized or semi-recognized Kosovo. The American embassy was set on fire and an unidentified dead body was found when it was put out. The embassy staff is all accounted for so the body must be one of those who had invaded the building but did not get out in time.

It is all America’s fault, say the Serbs. They should not have encouraged or recognized Kosovo.
Meanwhile, to continue the policy of antagonizing potential friends and supporters, the Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic issued all kinds of threats as he spoke to the European Parliament.

In an emotional address to MEPs just three days after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, the country's foreign chief argued that Serbs "will not go quietly. We shall strive for what is just and rightfully ours."

In the subsequent debate there were references to the events of 1999 (though not 1989) and suggestions that Kosovo’s case was unique. Mr Jeremic, apparently, laughed though whether bitterly or not is unclear.

"The case of Kosovo is truly unique, because the international community had to step in to protect it on humanitarian grounds, and it became a protectorate for nine years," argued Dimitrij Rupel, the foreign minister of Slovenia, the current EU presidency country.

But his Serbian counterpart, Mr Jeremic, laughed off this assertion, saying: "Do any of you honestly think that just by saying that Kosovo is sui generis, you will make it so? That there will be no consequences to the stability and security of the international system, just because you say it won't?"

Mr Jeremic also confirmed that Serbia would break off diplomatic relations with all EU countries that have already recognised Kosovo or will do so. "And we shall undertake all diplomatic, political, measures designed to impede and reverse this direct and unprovoked attack on our sovereignty."

On the whole, I think we can live with those threats. Presumably, when Serbia refused to contemplate what might happen if Mr Thaci fulfils his promise, its politicians thought that the threats were of some real significance. The idea of saving us the cost of another embassy, several consulates and other diplomatic paraphernalia sounds quite attractive. Can we have a few more threats of that kind, please?

The Americans have already started evacuating some of their non-essential staff from Belgrade.

One presumes, the EU will go on discussing and debating for some time, contributing some security forces and aid to Kosovo; also criticizing Serbia for its behaviour, trying to bribe the country out of its intransigence. Will it work? With the support of the United States, probably. But on its own the EU, as ever, will achieve very little. After all, it is no use pretending we can actually afford to make members out of the detritus of former Yugoslavia, given that we are still trying to recover from taking in Romania and Bulgaria.

Serbia is being supported in the UN by Russia and China. Birds of a feather, I suppose, and I have no doubt those commentators in Britain who are weeping about Serbia are very proud of being on the same side as those two countries.

China has no dog in this fight and will do very little. Its reaction is partly an almost automatic anti-Western stance and partly a statement of its own attitude to regions that might break off. The problem is not so much Taiwan that is de facto independent, though that might change one day, but Tibet and Chinese Turkmenistan.

These are countries whose claim to independence is stronger than Kosovo’s but it is not even discussed by the Chinese government or media. There is not the slightest possibility that, unless China implodes, the example of Kosovo could be followed by Tibet. After all, the example of East Timor was not.

That leaves Russia as Serbia’s supposed patron. Back in 1999 Russia still had a free media and I used to read the newspapers avidly. Their reporting and analysis of what was going on in the Balkans were far better than anything seen in the British ones. Of greatest interest was “Izvestiya”, which has since sunk back to almost its Soviet level of boringness and inconsequence.

It was quite clear from all that was written by various people, whose opinion on what was going on in Serbia/Kosovo was different, that nobody thought Russia should get involved. Every time President Yeltsin staggered up in a drunken haze and threatened Russian retaliation, his ministers immediately made it clear that he didn’t really mean it and the old man has had one too many again. He-he.

As a result, I confidently predicted to all those in various parts of the political world who got all excited about us upsetting the poor Russians that nothing would happen. I was right. Apart from that odd and only marginally successful dash to Pristina airport after which the Russian soldiers had to be fed and watered by NATO troops, nothing happened.

Mark my words, so it will prove now. Russia is not worried about Serbia and is not going to waste its inadequate forces in the Balkans. The Wall Street Journal pointed out on Monday [subscription only, I fear]

With no troops or permanent interests on the ground, however, Moscow seems likely to be happy to score political points against the West – and then, as always in its dealings with the Balkans, abandon the Serbs to their fate.

What Russia is interested in is developments on her own borders. No, I do not mean Chechnya or Dagestan or Ingushetiya. Kosovo’s independence will not make a jot of difference to that problem, which has been going on intermittently since the end of the eighteenth century when the Russians first moved into that part of the Caucasus.

The problems I am talking about are South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both at present in Georgia and both regions where Russian has been stirring up trouble and, on various occasions, getting involved in military activity. The point that journalists here have missed is that Russia is not at all keen on these two autonomous republics becoming independent of Georgia.

Once they have shaken off the shackles of Georgian oppression (or so they seem to think) they will become Russia’s problem and the latter will lose many of the excuses for interfering in Georgian affairs, at least militarily. Furthermore, it is true, as Russian officials say (and there is good reason to suppose that they might even be telling the truth) that Chechnyan terrorists and fighters (boyeviki) routinely hide out in South Ossetia then acquiring the region all for their own may not be seen as a bonus by the security forces.

Despite the two autonomous republics declaring their wish to become independent, Russia has not so far recognized them and has not indicated that it intends to do so. Let us face it, the international structure that some people are so worried about is, at present, in Russia’s favour and she does not want to upset things too much. Oh, and by the way, it does not matter what we do or say. That nice Mr Putin will still be unpleasant to us. Live with it.

The informal meeting of the 12 CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States – all the former Soviet republics apart from the Baltic ones) heads of state yesterday has passed without any incidents. In fact, it was quite successful, as normally there is a boycott or two and you rarely get the whole dozen together.

According to Interfax, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not planning to appeal to the CIS heads of state to be recognized, anyway. President of Abkhazia Sergei Bagapsh explained that a great deal of preparatory work will have to be done before that appeal can be made. I would guess, at least some of the preparatory work will be finding out what the Russians really want from their unreliable allies.

Will Kosovo survive? For the time being yes. One can never really predict much for the Balkans but it is protected by NATO and aided by the EU. Its chances of survival are as good as those of any new Balkan state.

Will it be a democracy as the Kosovan government promises? Again, the chances of that are as good as in any other former Yugoslav country. Much will depend on the behaviour of the Serbs in the north of the country when they realize that Serbia will not come to their aid. Much will also depend on the behaviour of the Serbian government. As we know from the example of Northern Ireland, having a larger neighbour who helps troublemakers is not conducive to peaceful existence.

Much will also depend on the Kosovan government and whether they live up to their fine words.

Meanwhile we have to live with the fact that the Balkan kaleidoscope has been given another shake and this situation is likely to remain for some time. With a bit of luck, the international system has also received another blow from which it will find it hard to recover.