Notes -------------------------------------------------------------------- People : ---------------------------------- Author : Carne Ross Text : ---------------------------------- [1] Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. [2] Reproduced from CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (Published by Viking/Alfred A. Knopf Inc., © Simon Schama 1989) by kind permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk) on behalf of Professor Simon Schama. [3] A much-misused term, but in this context it meant chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, and missiles of over 150km range. [4] The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission: this is my footnote in history since I invented UNMOVIC’s name, late one night during the negotiations on Security Council resolution 1284 (1999), which established the agency. [5] We must all be grateful to President George W. Bush who, albeit inadvertently, revealed the truth of the direct and demotic nature of real diplomacy at a G8 summit in July 2006. Overhead on a microphone, he tells Prime Minister Tony Blair (after thanking him for the gift of a sweater) that the solution to the Lebanon crisis was “to get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit”. The President is far from alone in using such language. It is a common misperception that the behavior and speech used in diplomacy are refined, elegant and measured (indeed the adjective “diplomatic” is used to describe such language). In reality diplomacy is often much more crude and harsh. For example, I was once told by a senior Asian ambassador: “I would rather be fucked up the ass with a rusty spoon than agree with you, Carne”. [6] Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, London: Flamingo, 2003, is particularly good. [7] It didn’t help that of course we only had a full embassy in Belgrade, the capital of what was once Yugoslavia. Inevitably the reporting from there tended to reflect the Belgrade view of affairs. There were no posts in Zagreb, Sarajevo or Pristina. This is another way in which the “statist” view of the world contributed to our misunderstanding of that debacle. [8] This was that in German law, thanks to Germany’s history of shifting borders (only “finalized” with reunification in 1990), citizenship is conferred by parentage (or race) not place of birth (ius sanguinis as opposed to ius soli), and thus ethnicity and religion become especially important in determining German-ness. This explains why a child born to Turkish parents, even if raised in Germany with German as its “natural” language, is not considered German, legally by the state or culturally by many if not most Germans. Another consequence was that a Russian of originally German stock (even if many generations previously) had an immediate right to German citizenship, while a Turk born in Germany, even if second or sometimes third generation, did not. One shocking piece of evidence supporting the theory is that German immigration officials were reportedly using lists of German settlers in Russia prepared by the SS in the Second World War to check the veracity of claims by Russians claiming German heritage. [9] At the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, amendments have been made to this chapter to protect national security, as they have elsewhere in the book. [10] There are some, more expert on Afghanistan than me, who argue that a policy premised upon a strong center and subordinate regions was naïve in the first place as it failed to acknowledge the fragmented and essentially tribal nature of the country where all are minorities. A better strategy, they argue, would be to build a more decentralized structure. See, for an example, “The Myth of ‘One Afghanistan’”, Charles Santos, Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2003. [11] In recent years at the UN in New York it has become fashionable to call the nonpermanent Council members, who serve on the Council for a two-year temporary term, “elected” members to emphasize their supposed legitimacy in contrast to the unelected status of the Permanent Five (P5) countries (the US, France, Russia, China, the UK). I have chosen not to use the term “elected” since it is inaccurate when most of the ten temporary members are not elected in contested elections, but are given seats by rote according to their regional group and place in the alphabet. Only two of the five countries elected every year win their seats through competitive elections of the UN membership, which are themselves often stitched up through backroom deals between countries. [12] You will not find in this chapter a discussion of the Oil-for-Food “scandal” that has erupted in recent years. On this I have nothing to add to the excellent Volcker report (to which I testified at length). [13] This term, now familiar to many, comprises non-conventional weapons including chemical, biological and nuclear ones. In Iraq’s case it also meant ballistic missiles over 150km range (the full details were set out in “the mother of all resolutions”, Security Council resolution 687, which in 1991 set out the precise terms of Iraq’s obligations). [14] I hesitate to confess that the delegates responsible for negotiating a particular issue in the Security Council are called “experts” in the unofficial yet traditional nomenclature of that organ. I hesitate to confess it because of course most of us, myself included, were not expert, having no first-hand knowledge whatsoever of the countries we were dealing with. [15] She said this during a television interview on the BBC. [16] The term “Arab street” is one that remains common in western diplomatic descriptions of the Middle East, despite Edward Said’s compelling attack on such Orientalist depictions. Like other such locutions, it reveals far more about its user than what it purports to describe. When reading it, one can safely assume that the originator has been nowhere near the “street”, wherever that may be. [17] See, for example, “Ssh, they’re arguing”, Barbara Crossette, New York Times, 17 June 2001. [18] The word prohibition is a simplification since the import of the goods by Iraq was not explicitly prohibited in any case except that of purely military items, but the export of those goods on the list was to be reviewed by the UN sanctions committee (a sub-committee of the Security Council) and possibly approved if the Committee judged the end-use of those goods to be legitimately civilian. [19] These are discussed in chapter 4 below, but in general amount to the more rigorous enforcement not of generalized trade sanctions but of specific, targeted measures against the Iraqi government’s illegal export of oil (through Turkey, Syria and the Gulf) and the stricter enforcement of import controls at Iraq’s borders. A further technique was the aggressive pursuit of the regime’s illegal financial holdings abroad. None of these measures was ever properly or energetically pursued by either the UK or US governments, thus helping to create the situation where sanctions not only failed to force Iraqi compliance but also produced negative humanitarian consequences, a doubly bad policy. [20] A version of this chapter first appeared in the Financial Times, 29 January 2005. [21] This was the official British inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD headed by Lord Butler, to which I testified in the summer of 2004. [22] The Volcker Inquiry into the oil-for-food scandal found no such evidence. [23] Game metaphors have been common in theories of international relations for some time. “Domino Theory”, for example, proposed, erroneously as it turned out, the idea that if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would “tip over” into communism in an unstoppable chain reaction. Domino Theory was one of the main justifications for US involvement in Vietnam. [24] This policy was thankfully soon changed, largely as a result of pressure from the unions. Britain now has its first openly gay Ambassador (though there were presumably many gay Ambassadors — albeit in the closet — before). [25] As George Lakoff has asked in Whose Freedom?, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. [26] Since this debacle, it has been commonplace for British officials to claim that the threatened French veto blocked the resolution. In fact, there is no evidence that the draft resolution had attracted close to the nine votes required to pass in any case. My own research with other countries on the Security Council at the time suggests the UK’s true vote count was closer to six. In other words, the putative veto was irrelevant, as the resolution could not have been voted through in any case. [27] Most notably Brendan Simms’s Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, London: Allen Lane 2001. [28] One extreme example of this delineation and separation of sides is described in chapter 3, “The Negotiation” (1). [29] The study was published in Science, 7 October, 2005. [30] See The Economist, 29 July 2006 [31] See Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Princeton University Press, 2005. [32] Wherever it is in the world, the British government, like the US government, operates on “Zulu time” otherwise known as GMT. This is one of the myriad small ways that a common identity is fuzed with that other great exponent of the state: the military, which operates on the same time system. [33] This example, like that of Northern Ireland, is — I fear — another reason to believe that terrorism “works”, at least in highlighting a particular dispute if not in resolving it. [34] Independent Diplomat (see chapter 9) now advises the Polisario Front on its diplomacy. [35] Layard, Professor Richard (Lord), “Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue?”, Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures, London School of Economics, March 2003. [36] The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2002 Global Attitudes Survey; Gallup International Survey, the Voice of the People, September 2002. [37] See chapter 4, “War Stories”. [38] Quoted in the Financial Times, 28 May 2003. [39] See, for instance, Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations, London: Atlantic Books, 2004. [40] The British government now does consult “Muslim groups” but at no time during my work on the Islamic world did such consultation take place. [41] Amnesty International Report on Morocco. [42] This cynicism is widely shared among diplomats. In my work on sanctions against Iraq in the so-called 661 Committee of the UN Security Council, one of the UK’s fiercest and most skilled adversaries was a Russian diplomat named Alexsander S. He was beautifully fluent in English and articulate and meticulous in picking apart our arguments. Upon getting to know him, I found that he evinced little or no faith in the system he was serving. For him, it was just a job, advocacy for the sake of advocacy, much as a lawyer. “It’s all bullshit”, he would say, making a wry face. [43] 17 October 2006, Foreign Office Minister of State Kim Howells gave the following answer to a parliamentary question: “The UK fully supports the efforts of the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and his Personal Envoy to Western Sahara, Peter Van Walsum, to assist the parties to achieve a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution, which will provide for the self-determination of the people pf Western Sahara. The UK is in regular contact with representatives of the parties to the dispute and the UN. The UK will continue to encourage all parties to engage with the UN process. There are, however, no plans for a UN referendum to be held in the near future.” [44] This portrait is an amalgam of ambassadors I have known. [45] The 1991 war was widely referred to in the West as the Gulf War, even though there had already been a long and much more bloody “Gulf War” between Iran and Iraq in 1980 -9. [46] See chapter 4, “Them and Us”. [47] See John Gray’s, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, London: Granta, 2004. [48] Reproduced, with kind permission of the publisher, from Christopher Logue’s, War Music, © Faber & Faber, 2001. [49] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991 reprinted edn. [50] George Lakoff’s work on metaphor is instructive on all this. [51] In 2003, during a Middle East summit in Aqaba, President George W. Bush described how he deliberately steered Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Abbas out of the formal room in which they had been seated into the garden. “What I wanted to do is to observe the interplay between the two; did they have the capacity to relax in each other’s presence for starters? And I felt they did.” (Source: Financial Times, 6 June 2003.) [52] Nina Khruscheva of the New School has argued that culture never lies about politics even when politicians do, that for instance that while Donald Rumsfeld denies that the US has an imperial project, the contemporaneous movies Troy, Alexander the Great and Kingdom of Heaven tell a different story (Financial Times, 19 April 2006). I am not sure I would go as far as Khruscheva; Capote, Brokeback Mountain or Crash suggest rather different narratives. [53] Though I have lightly edited the piece, the style and content remain essentially the same as when I wrote it in January 2000. [54] One night in New York, I had to come up with a new name for the agency, in part because agreement seemed to require that we change the name from that in the UK draft up till that point (this was the acronym, UNCIIM, for UN Commission for Inspection and Investigation and Monitoring, a word that, to Russian and French ears, sounded too much like one designed for the pursuit of criminals). We needed a new name that incorporated the key concepts of MOnitoring, Verification,Inspection and Commission. UNMOVIC was the construction which, after several hours of crossword-like pondering, I came up with. [55] For the full text go to www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/ [56] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn, 1996. [57] I would suggest that a classic example of this phenomenon, examined in chapter 2, is that of the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was not only the massacre of Srebrenica that produced a shift in the view of that war as a “civil war”. It was psychologically impossible for the Conservative government, then in power, to admit this, but the massacre and the dawning understanding that the war was very much not a civil war produced a paradigm shift in the incoming Labor government which later adopted in Kosovo an altogether more interventionist approach. [58] Somalia, Kosovo and Western Sahara are all on the agenda of the UN Security Council. [59] GM is famously burdened by massive obligations — amounting to some $85bn — to fund the pensions of its former and current workers. [60] At the inquiry into the death of British weapons scientist (and my former colleague), David Kelly, one of the Ministry of Defense witnesses, Brian Jones, said “I think ‘weapons of mass destruction’ has become a convenient catch-all which in my opinion can at times confuse discussion of the subject.” [61] www.SecurityCouncilReport.org [62] I am aware that this proposal will strike some as unrealistic. Trotsky gave us the notion of a “transitional idea”, a demand that you know to be unrealizable in the current circumstance, but in making it you may nevertheless change the current system for the better, and ultimately it may be shifted to where the demand can be realized. [63] Who included, for instance, David Kelly on whom I and the UK Mission to the UN relied on heavily for expert interpretation of the evidence on Iraq’s biological weapons program. For instance, I asked him many times to brief other Security Council delegations on Iraq’s weapons programs, along with other British experts on chemical weapons and ballistic missiles. Somewhat belying the British government’s portrayal of him after the infamous Today program No. 10 dossier leak, we regarded him at the UK mission as Britain’s foremost and most authoritative expert. [64] In brief, these were that the embassy had neglected on-the-ground political reporting in its rush to sell British goods to the Shah. Sir Anthony Parsons, the ambassador, argued that embassies should always ensure that they had diplomats fluent in local languages who were tasked to go out and listen to ordinary people. He also warned against the tendency in reports back to the capital to emphasize developments favorable to our interests, and downplay less positive news. [65] www.crisisgroup.org [66] My ambassador in Germany once wearily told me that six nights out of seven he was either entertaining officially or attending official dinners. [67] Amnesty International Report, 20 July 2006 [68] The Open Society Institute — not a government, note — is working with universities to develop a Code of Conduct for IT companies operating in China. [69] The UN’s Global Compact was a start at this challenge, but it needs to be more widespread. The Global Compact was, by dint of who instigated it, not a mass activity. [70] Such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. [71] An economist might argue that this concern is easily counted in the amounts individuals choose to give to charity, but this does not take into account reservations people may have — which may inhibit such giving — about the effectiveness of aid and other relevant factors. [72] Shirley Hazzard’s, People in Glass Houses, London: Macmillan, 1967, reprinted 1996, shows that such problems are of depressingly long standing. [73] See his controversial speech “Power and Super-Power: Global Leadership in the Twenty-First Century”, delivered at the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress — Security and Peace Initiative, New York, 6 June 2006. [74] Perhaps another “transitional idea”. From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org Events : ---------------------------------- Notes -- Added : February 14, 2021 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://revoltlib.com/