Am pondering the things I have got wrong in the last year at work. It is an odd list:

• January-March: Serbian government hands over a dozen war criminals
• May: Moldovan Christian Democrats unexpectedly support re-election of Communist President Voronin rather than trigger the constitutional crisis they had threatened
• June: Russians agree to withdraw troops from Georgia (apart from South Ossetia and Abkhazia)
• September: Bosnian Serbs agree to police reforms
• October: Croatia starts EU accession negotiations, followed in December by the capture of fugitive general Gotovina
• November: Bosnian political parties commit to constitutional reforms strengthening central state and weakening ethnic structures

In each case I thought the opposite would happen, though fortunately I don’t think I had said so in public (I did predict in a conference speech at the end of September that Croatia would not get the nod from the EU the following week, which they promptly did). In each case I think the world is a better place as a result (though arguably the Russian withdrawal of troops from Georgia into Armenia has increased tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan). Of course, our role as an organisation is to warn of things that don’t happen; but maybe I am too pessimistic in general? Perhaps I should monitor my own personal predictions next year.