Apparently the “normality index” is “based upon some standard statistical measures of the the top interests list. If the top 20 interests of a users friend are the same as the top 20 overall the normality score will be 101%.” Why 101% rather than 100% I don’t know…

Cheryl Morgan has a nice line in the latest Emerald City, that “most American claims to admire Celtic culture are on a similar level to telling someone from India that you really love that wonderfully authentic Indian writer, Mr. Kipling.”

Good line, but not necessarily so, as my wife pointed out to me. Compare the twee Celtic fiction written by the sort of person who takes The Mists of Avalon as a religious text with Kipling’s stories: can no doubt put me right on this (as she has done to others) but I think Kipling wins hands down; he was after all writing about a real, recent or even contemporary India, which he had experienced at first hand (if more briefly than most of his readers realised), rather than inventing a non-existent past of social and sexual harmony and haunting pipe music, with everyone worshipping the Mother Goddess in an archipelago unsullied by the Saxons or Christianity. Actually one of my favourite drawings by the Irish political cartoonist Martyn Turner has a crowd of ancient Celtic warrriors cowering behind the ramparts of their fort as missiles are hurled at them from below. One of them is saying to the others, “I can’t wait until we get Christianity in here and get rid of all this tribalism.”

Of course, I don’t want to give the impression that Kipling’s India is better than that of a writer who is actually Indian. But I do think his India is better as India than the Ireland of a writer who has never lived in Ireland. It’s interesting to note that Kipling’s Kim is actually an Irish boy, Kimball O’Hara; and that the only novel I’ve read about India recently is River of Gods, by Irish writer Ian McDonald. As Niall Ferguson points out, there are a lot of connections between India and Ireland.

I’m thinking about all this largely because it interests me anyway, but also because I’ve proposed to Farah Mendlesohn that I might give a paper at next year’s WorldCon in her track on the Matter of Britain. I must say my initial approach was going to be to take the hig road of slagging off the diaspora for trying to tell me what kind of country I grew up in. But I’m now beginning to reflect -as I found ten years ago for my Ph D thesis – that there may be something to be learned from the comparative experience of other countries as well. Hmm.

Dave Barry in New York has “witnessed a dramatic confrontation: A lone, courageous police officer faced an entire sidewalk full of commuters and told them he could not let them through to their subway station. Now if this had happened in, say, Des Moines, the crowd would have peacefully dispersed, because (a) Iowans are low-key, and (b) Des Moines has no subway.”

And there’s more:

“Karl Rove… depending on your political perspective, is either the (a) chief political advisor to President Bush, or (b) the Antichrist. Some people claim he’s the brains behind the president, who, let’s face it, does not always appear to be 100 percent aware of what he is thinking.

“This was demonstrated Monday when the president said we could not win the war on terror, and his aides had to clarify this by explaining that what the president meant was that we COULD win the war on terror. (John Kerry immediately released a statement stating that he strongly disagreed with both of the president’s positions.)”

and more:

“the protesters began chanting a chant that I cannot repeat in the newspaper except to say that it utilized wordplay involving the president’s last name.”

…or early morning media, if you’re in Australia. Just did five minutes on ABC’s morning radio news programme talking about Kosovo. Had to keep kicking myself to not refer to spring, summer etc, as if these were terms with world-wide application. Started the interview a bit weakly but I had got it togther by the end I think. Now in Belgium, it’s time for bed.

It’s a cliche, I know, but Hannah Arendt’s phrase about Eichmann was the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard that Radoslav Brdjanin had been sentenced to a 32 year jail sentence by the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. I knew him very slightly in my Banja Luka days. In early 1997, at the start of my mission to make contact with and strengthen opposition political forces, his political party was more or less the last on my list to meet; I found them in a basement room under the municipal art gallery (once the terminus of Bosnia’s first railway line). Brdjanin explained to me how he had once been a high-ranking politician but had been expelled by Radovan Karadzic from the ruling party when he protested against corruption. His colleagues had chosen him as leader of their new dissident party “because I was the shortest”, and they had lots of support. However the wicked manipulation of the elections which the international community had allowed meant that they had got fewer votes than they had members. His colleague Milan Trbojevic noticed my sceptical wince at this last point, but Brdjanin was too full of himself to stop; by the end of the conversation I was regretting my investment of time – I did go back to the basement a couple of times, but basically to use the rather decent restaurant next door.

I also began to hear rumours of precisely what Brdjanin had been up to before he fell out with Karadzic over the division of the spoils. Even among the remaining population of Banja Luka, he was pretty unpopular; people remembered how the electricty had mysteriously stayed on in his house even during the power cuts and the NATO air strikes. But most visible of all was the devastated landscape of Kozarac, just before you get to Prijedor driving from Banja Luka, where for ten kilometers along the road the landscape was nothing but bombed out houses of what had once been a prosperous town. The famous camps so memorably filmed by ITN in 1992 were here. Brdjanin had been the head of the Crisis Committee of the Krajina, responsible for setting the whole thing up.

Over the next few months the political situation in Banja Luka turned upside down as the local leader, Biljana Plavsic, broke definitively with Karadzic and assembled a grand coalition of all the opposition forces to take power. Brdjanin got back into the parliament but didn’t get an executive position. His friend Trbojevic became minister of justice. A few months after I moved to Brussels in 1999, Brdjanin was arrested by NATO soldiers while walking down the street in Banja Luka on the war crimes charges. Trbojevic’s reaction was, I thought, rather nuanced, as if he didn’t really mind his friend being arrested and facing a long prison term.

Well, if you have the stomach for it, you can read the summary press release, or you can read the full judgement, or you can just take my word for it; in a curiously precise formulation, Brdjanin is found responsible for the murders of “at least 1669” civilians, and of organising a general campaign of terror and deportation against non-Serbs around Banja Luka, who he wanted to see reduced to less than 3% of the population. He does at least get cleared of genocide, mainly because so many people were forcibly displaced from their homes but not killed.

Brdjanin’s co-accused, Momir Talic, won’t be punished by the international court; he died last year, and has I hope been dealt with by a different tribunal.

1) The Warrior’s Bond, by Juliet E. McKenna

Funny to think that a year ago I’d never heard of Juliet McKenna; but we met and got on well at P-Con last September, and as a result I’ve been buying, reading and enjoying her books. I don’t read a lot of fantasy as a rule but have a loyalty to certain authors, and I can continue my path through Juliet’s novels while waiting for the next George R.R. Martin volume to come out.

This is a bit different from its three predecessors in the Einarinn series, with battles on the high seas against strangely magical opponents replaced by a political drama, set in the capital city and watching the machinations of the great houses against each other. One of McKenna’s successes is that her world possesses a certain depth; every character has an almost tangible hinterland of family and friends. The Empire she portrays is a breathing, developing and somewhat fragile polity. (She’s less convincing on the languages but nobody except Tolkien has ever done well on that score.) The book reminded me a bit of Feist’s Rise of a Merchant Prince (one of only two by him that I’ve read) but is much better – characters less wooden and generally more sympathetic. You wouldn’t want to start reading McKenna with The Warrior’s Bond but it’s certainly enough to get me to buy the fifth and final one in the series.

The Bush daughters’ speech is not very funny. Maybe you had to be there.

The school siege in North Ossetia naturally attracts the sympathy of anyone who, like me, saw off their kids to the start of a new year yesterday morning. Nothing is more awful than pulling children into a conflict for which they cannot be responsible and of which they know nothing. Obviously the local resonance for me is the affair of the Holy Cross school in North Belfast from a few years back – deeply unpleasant for the kids and parents concerned, though obviously not as bad as what’s happening in North Ossetia now.

But I’ve been following a similar, if less dramatic, incident over the last few weeks which seems to have had zero coverage in the Western press. On 26 July, the security forces in the separatist region of Transdniestria seized control of an orphanage in the town of Bendery (also called Tighina), while the orphans were out on a trip, because the staff teach the children using the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic alphabet (this is, believe it or not, one of the main issues in the little-known Transdniestrian conflict). They also closed down three schools in Transdniestria at the same time. The orphans, whose ages range from 8 to 15, managed to sneak past the militia the next day and broke into their own home. Since then they have been surviving on food and water supplies brought in by international officials from the OSCE (two of whom have worked for me in the past) and UNICEF.

This isn’t an action by unaccountable and anonymous terrorists from forgotten parts of the Caucasus, it’s harassment of children – who have already lost their parents – by a Russian-backed government that claims to want recognition as an independent state. Last week the EU and US imposed visa bans on the Transdniestrian officials who are believed to be responsible, but since none of them was likely to be travelling to the West any time soon anyway, I don’t see it having much effect. I find it utterly extraordinary that no Western journalist has given this affair any column inches at all in the last five weeks. See news coverage (from a Moldovan newsagency) here.

Added later: Also IWPR article about it here.

Lunch today with a French Green MEP. My French is not good. Her English is worse. Luckily her Italian adviser speaks both fluently. I reflected that I would like to blame my French teacher when I was in third form, who was too much of a political activist to really take to teaching, but unfortunately the record shows that I learnt French for another two years after she left the school.

Coming out of the restaurant I bumped into her, as she was elected to the European Parliament herself last June. She didn’t remember me but I gave her my card. Bygones should be bygones.

I’d been thinking of doing a post about the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire, pushed a little bit by ‘ reminiscences about the Bad Old Days, by ‘s latest post about terrorism, and by the fact that I participated in a live panel discussion with John Hume and Albert Reynolds about it on RTÉ radio yesterday (don’t worry, Dublin-based readers – you didn’t miss much).

But I just heard another interesting factoid: that today is the tenth anniversary of the opening of (supposedly) the first internet cafe, Cyberia in London. Internet cafes per se have made a huge difference to the way we work. I’ve posted entries to this livejournal from internet cafes in Kosovo and Azerbaijan. Touring Macedonia during the 2001 conflict, every small town, whatever its local ethnic majority, had one. Of course it also means that when travelling on business, you have less time to relax because the possibilities of doing routine office work are that much greater…

And mention of the 2001 conflict in Macedonia (which I wrote a lot about at the time, eg here and here) brings me back to the IRA and terrorism. In other countries – in both Macedonia, with regard to the Albanian insurgents, and Ireland, with respect to the IRA – the US is prepared to recognise that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy; and that a security response to terrorism can never be the whole story. George Mitchell in Ireland and Robert Frowick in Macedonia were both sent in as US envoys to help push the men of violence onto a purely political path. Both succeeded (Frowick got his timing slightly wrong in the process and had to be replaced by James Pardew). But a key element to their success in both cases was that a political path was possible; that a peaceful and democratic strategy was a credible alternative; and also that any serious effort at a purely military solution would have meant misery for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Apart from the 9-11 Commission in their excellent report, I don’t see anyone saying this in America with respect to the Middle East. I don’t know enough about it, but it seems to me that for any unemployed young man in the Arab world, political paths are blocked; peaceful and democratic ways of changing the world for the better are not obviously going to work; and US policy isn’t doing a lot about that. The fact that the most rapidly democratising regime in the region (not actually Arab, of course, and the reformists are currently on the back foot) is Iran, which has been ostracised by the United States since the 1979 hostage crisis (which took place before 60% of today’s Iranians were born), demonstrates that US policy has some way to go before it is seen as synonymous with democracy and freedom.

There have been some faltering steps in that direction. I had an email yesterday from a former colleague, wondering if I knew any European politicians who might be interested in a trip to Baghdad to help in a training course for members of the new Iraqi assembly. The fact that there is such a programme is of course a good thing. The fact that none of my politician friends, all of whom opposed the war, would be seen dead near a US-sponsored training program for what is seen by a lot of Europeans as a puppet assembly, is a bad thing. (I referred my friend to one of my former political enemies, who is pro-war.) But even if by some miracle this process does lead to a new democratic and peaceful Iraq, how is the US going to repeat the trick for other repressive Arab regimes which happen to already be American clients? Unless there is an answer to this question, the “war on terrorism” will end in defeat.