Monday last week, we had a meeting at the EU Council Secretariat. Rather to our surprise the EU Special Representative to the South Caucasus, a grand (though jolly) Finnish ambassador, was there – we thought we were meeting only lowly officials. Nonetheless we pressed hard on the case for the EU getting directly involved in the Georgia/South Ossetia crisis to try and short-circuit the stalled peace negotiations. The EU folks looked at each other and said, Hmm, maybe we could try that.
This morning’s top headline in the Georgian news:
“The upcoming meeting between Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania and South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoiti, which the EU plans to organize in Sofia in the near future, will become yet another step towards rapprochement of the conflict sides,” Heikki Talvitie, EU Special Representative in the South Caucasus told journalists after his meeting with Zhvania on Nov. 18.
So sometimes you can make a difference.
Again according to Wikipedia, Gibson has dual US-Canadian citizenship.
Living in X a long time can’t make you an X-an writer automatically, or we’d have to exclude Arthur C from British lists after 1956 on account of his 50+ year Sri Lankan sojourn. (Personally I like to claim him as a Somerset writer, even though he hasn’t lived here in 70 years – partly cos he was born about 30 miles from my father and in the same week in Dec 1917.)