Spent yesterday in Paris as guest of the WEU Institute of Strategic Studies, who were holding a conference about Albania. Considerable drama in the morning as James Pettifer, well-known Albania expert, walked out rather than share a platform with Misha Glenny. Misha told me about this at breakfast in the hotel; I then bumped into James who said to me that he was leaving, that he and Miranda Vickers and Noel Malcolm all had the policy that would not share a platform with Misha because of his “racialist and chauvinistic views”. Since James Pettifer is the most rabidly pro-Albanian writer I have come across, including any Albanian or Kosovar, it seemed to me completely unjustifiable. Misha of course has his biases, but so do we all, and he certainly doesn’t have Pettifer’s fanatical devotion to one particular ethnic group. As I said to him later, some people – especially those who believe in the myth of a multi-ethnic paradise in pre-war Bosnia – cannot forgive him for writing about the faults of all sides in the Yugoslav war. Nicole Gnesotto, the president of the institute, impressed me by inviting Misha to replace James in making the keynote speech at the conference. Which he did extremely well, though clearly upset by the affair.
Rebecca West wrote sconfully of the late nineteenth century that “English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacres and never the massacrer”. She was right. Of course Rebecca West herself then broke her own rules and formed an unbalanced attachment to the Serbs.
Meanwhile the Montenegro story rolls on and on. I found I was getting nowhere with drafting the statement by concerned citizens, and finally Michael got interested and did it for me. We shall therefore try and go somewhere with it next week. A journalist called me on Thursday to say that he had seen a draft constitution for a reformed federation comling out of Solana’s office. I called Solana’s office and found that this was not quite true, but they had been “helping” Belgrade write their proposals. Hmm; secretariat to the Council of Ministers to the European Union, or legal consultants to dodgy Balkan governments?
“Stiff” by the same author was also fascinating.