Boeing 777 evacuation test
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAkAcQOnQY[/youtube]
EU fails to appoint Bosnia envoy – again
The EU’s attempts at finding a replacement for the bloc’s envoy in Bosnia has moved from drama to tragedy, with Emyr Jones Perry rejected alongside the latest candidate, Valentin Inzko (the Austrian ambassador to Slovenia, since you ask). Meanwhile, as James Lyon notes in the IHT,
The oft-repeated EU catechism is that Bosnia must tackle reform processes on its own, and that after the transition Bosnia’s feuding politicians will magically resolve their quarrels. Brussels assumes that the lure of EU membership will somehow induce nationalist politicians to bury ethnic agendas and pass reform legislation guaranteed to weaken their own patronage systems. They fail to note that the current trajectory will remove the last remaining international obstacles to renewed conflict.
To move out of the current funk, a serious EU envoy has to be picked who, with a US Presidential Envoy to the Balkans, can begin to charting a new transatlantic course. So here’s my initial list of nominees for the job:
Horst Teltschik, GE
Wolfgang Ischinger, GE
Jan Pronk, NL
Jean-Marie Guenno, FR
Michael Steiner, GE
Salomon Passy, BU
Des Browne, UK
Michael von der Schulenburg, GE
Soren Jessen-Petersen, DK
It is easy to find more senior candidates, but they are unlikely to take the job . So the key is to find someone strong, but willing to live in Bosnia.
Tough at the top
The UN has just published an update to its Human Development Index (HDI), the league table that compares living standards in all the world’s countries.
At the top of the Index sits Iceland, which the UN believes has the world’s highest living standards but which most other observers think is basically bankrupt (public debt is running at over $30,000 per head). In 5th place is Ireland, also in dire straits as foreign investors – the mainstay of the recent boom – pull out and the government runs out of money to pay off its mountainous debts.
I don’t know about you, but if I was Norwegian, Canadian or Australian, and therefore enjoying the 2nd, 3rd and 4th highest living standards in the world, the curse of the HDI would be making me very uneasy indeed.
Another rendition for Mohamed
Disgraceful comments today from Con Couglin, the Daily Telegraph’s ‘executive foreign editor’, on the release of Binyam Mohammed.
Coughlin thinks Mohammed should be sent to Pakistan – the country where he was tortured – “so he can learn what the Taliban was really like” and bring himself “up to date on the Taliban’s latest governmental practices, such as stoning adulterers to death and cutting off the limbs of those accused of theft.”
This is red meat for the Telegraph’s commenters. “The further costs of keeping this scum alive and here far outweighs any other consideration,” one writes.
Coughlin has good sources in US intelligence, sources who have assured him that Mohamed was a highly placed Al Qaeda operative, one who confessed to his US interrogators that “he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions.” That this confession was extracted under torture doesn’t seemto bother Coughlin at all.
Most galling of all is the fact that Coughlin isn’t able even to get the details of Mohamed’s arrest right, claiming he was “he was arrested wandering around Afghanistan.” Perhaps he should read his own paper, which accurately reports that Mohamed was arrested in April 2002 in Karachi airport, as he tried to board a plane back to the UK.
(It would not surprise me at all if Mohamed is/was a low level Al Qaeda operative by the way. If he was, torture has made it impossible to prosecute him.)
The peacekeeping crisis in numbers
The new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is out! This sturdy volume, which I helped set up in 2005-6, has chronicled the long decline of peacekeeping since then. This year’s excellent volume (now stewarded by my colleagues Sarjoh Bah and Ben Tortolani) opens on a particularly grim note:
2008 was the worst year for peacekeeping in over a decade. The largest and most visible peacekeeping operations faced serious military and political reversals. These endangered not only specific missions, but the entire global peacekeeping enterprise. No major peacekeeping provider was unaffected. The United Nations was tested in Congo and Sudan, NATO in Afghanistan, the EU in Kosovo, and the African Union in Somalia.
Today’s FT takes up the story:
United Nations military operations might have reached their limits, with the two largest peacekeeping operations stretched to breaking point in the past year, the organisation’s chief peacekeeper warns in a report to be published on Tuesday.
The warning from Alain Le Roy, under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, appears in a foreword to the annual peacekeeping survey of the New York-based Center on International Co-operation. It comes a year after the centre’s last review criticised the security council for authorising big new peacekeeping missions round the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors were overtaking their ability to deliver. [GOWAN INTERJECTS: I told you so!]
The UN is currently responsible for 18 peace missions worldwide that deploy 112,000 uniformed personnel at the cost of almost $8bn a year. “UN peacekeeping is now at an all-time high,” according to Mr Le Roy.
In the light of the near-collapse last October of the peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN’s largest, the security council has finally taken note. France and the UK have launched a review on how best to fix a system that one diplomat at the UN described as “breaking at the seams”.
We may yet save peacekeeping from strategic collapse. But can we save it from anonymous diplomats resorting to cliches?