European values

This is really by way of a rant. Few things annoy me more than the insistence of the colleagues that everything they do within the European project is in the name of something they call "European values", which never seem to include the nastier bits of our complicated history. The Renaissance, for instance, was full of blood and murder and crime as Harry Lime points out in that famous monologue on top of the Big Wheel in The Third Man.

It is not only the unpleasant parts of European history that are fudged in the name of glorious European integration; there is a reluctance to face up to the reality of those wondrous "European values" because they are the exact opposite of what the European Union and all its ideas stand for.

The reason this came back to me was because I have been reading Gordon Campbell's Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611 -2011, the story of that great work of theology and literature, 400 years old next year. Describing the early English translations of the Bible, or parts of it, Professor Campbell devotes an appreciable amount of space to William Tyndale, the man who is known as the "father of the English Bible".

Most of his life consisted of dodging around various European cities and states, avoiding the various emissaries of the English King and of the Pope and working desperately hard to translate various Books of the Bible and to have those translations published. He was welcomed in the Protestant states and his translations were smuggled into England where they were supremely popular. (Reminds me of the sight of a highly respectable elderly Russian lady doctor hiding a tiny copy of Leonid Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago among her underwear as she was preparing to return to Moscow.) In the end Tyndale's luck ran out and he was tried for heresy in Antwerp, sentenced to death and strangled with his body burnt afterwards. Ironically, this was a year after his great English enemy and persecutor, Sir Thomas More had been executed.

Of course, these days Tyndale would not have survived even as long as he did or not as a free man. For now, in the name of those "European values" that used to allow people to move around and live in places that were more congenial there is a system in place that aims to have just one legal structure, one set of punishments and one ideology to bind us all.

Who is dropping out of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony?

Because this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, still in prison in China (when will Wikileaks publish any documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry?) there is a certain amount of trouble about attendance at the ceremony this Friday. For one thing the actual recipient will not be present but that will not be for the first time in the history of the award.

China is gleefully telling the world that most countries are staying away. Actually, only 65 countries were invited to send their representatives, these being the ones with embassies in Oslo. Of these 44 have accepted but 19 have foound that all their representatives have prior engagements.

The Christian Science Monitor not only lists them but gives helpful paragraphs that explain why the country in question should be particularly anxious not to upset the Chinese government. It seems that after some deliberation, India has decided to accept the invitation, despite the forthcoming state visit to India by the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao.

The Toy Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg is less than completely forthcoming in its support for Liu Xiaobo. There is a certain falling out between the thieves MEPs. The Green/EFA co-leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit of old extreme left-wing revolutionary fame, has accused the two main groups, EPP and the Social-Democrats, of silence on the subject and not expressing any support for Liu Xiaobo. It is not clear at this stage whether Baroness Ashton the hapless and ridiculous Head Honcho of EU foreign affairs will attend.

Well, now, how do we feel about the EU budget getting a fail again?

Not very positive, says HMG. But then all the previous HMGs said the same thing. They really did not like the fact that the Court of Auditors refused to sign off the accounts for the whichever time. They really did not and they were going to do something about it. This HMG, a.k.a. the Cleggeron Coalition is also intending to do something about it. It will do such things, as King Lear said. But what they are they know not any more than the silly old king did.
Lord Campbell of Alloway seems to have been asking this question year in, year out:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the grounds on which the European Union Court of Auditors has withheld approval of European Union budgets.

And year in, year out, HMG gave more or less the same response

My Lords, the Government are concerned that the European Court of Auditors has been unable to provide a positive statement of assurance for the 16th year in succession. The Government support the ECA's work but are concerned at the slow pace of reforms to EU financial management. The European Commission and member states are responsible for disbursing EU funds, and share responsibility for sound financial management. The Government take financial management seriously and will shortly publish a consolidated statement on the use of EU funds in the UK.

Well, that will be reasonably useful though it remains to be seen whether they will add the amount of money that had to be raised in matching funds for projects that the EU had decided on. Still, it does not deal with the problem of the not-signed-off budgets.

Lord Campbell has a solution:

May I by leave ask a question that perhaps the Government may accept? At their behest, by dint of diplomacy, will they seek an arrangement, be it by treaty or by some other means, to ensure that the ECA's decisions are always reflected, and that they are the only decisions reflected, in the contributions of all member states to the budget?

HMG, in the shape of Lord Sassoon, chose to ignore that and to blather instead:

My Lords, I reiterate that we take the situation enormously seriously. It is deeply unsatisfactory, but progress has been made. In their latest report, the auditors have been able to certify a greater percentage of EU expenditure as satisfactory than before. There are significant complications with anything that goes to changes in the treaty arrangements in this area, but the UK is leading by example by, for instance, producing this consolidated statement, which a number of other member states are now producing and which is welcomed by the Commission. We are adopting every route to try to get improvement. We are by no means complacent, nor should the European authorities be.

Then things got out of hand and even HMG found it impossible to agree wholly with Noble Lords who assured all and sundry that there was nothing really wrong with that budget.

Lord Williamson of Horton, for example, who has spent a good part of his distinguished career in Brussels, working for the Commission, rising to the heights of Secretary-General of the European Commission and has, no doubt, a handsome pension to prove it but sees no need to declare his interest, was anxious to set the record straight

My Lords, this is a good report. Does the Minister agree that, in relation to all the administrative expenditure of all the EU institutions, the court concludes without qualification that transactions were free from material error and that the supervisory and control systems complied with the financial regulation? Does he also agree that, in relation to other policies, the court rightly points out that there are some accounting errors and, in agriculture for example, some incorrect claims from member states, which the Commission will no doubt seek to correct and recover, but that this is not a finding of fraud?

What, one wonders, are those incorrect claims that must not be called fraud?

Lord Sassoon demurred:

My Lords, I can certainly confirm what the noble Lord says. This does not necessarily excuse anything. If around 50 per cent of expenditure nevertheless does not meet the standards, whether through laxities in accounting or administration of the expenditure, it excuses nothing. Indeed, the level of fraud itself, which has been much discussed, is nevertheless at a very low level. According to the work of the European Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF, the level of fraud has decreased from 0.2 per cent of expenditure in 2007 to 0.07 per cent in 2008.

Well, OLAF is not the most reliable of organizations in the world and, in any case, the rather flexible definition of fraud does allow the figure to be quite low.

Other interventions came from such luminaries as Lord Kinnock (who also failed to declare his interest, otherwise known as a handsome pension) and Lord Dykes, a reliable spouter of europhiliac nonsense. In this case, he was so anxious to get in and to prevent Lord Pearson from asking what might have been a difficult to answer question that all he could think of was to repeat the stuff about it being just administrative and clerical problems rather than fraud that prevented the budget being signed off. Lord Sassoon was quite tetchy in his response.

How do I get a job like this?

International Relations and Security Network (ISN) a highly regarded think-tank in Zurich has put up a piece about the ongoing OSCE Summit in Kazakhstan. Solemnly it tells us that there are differences between all the members that appear to be irreconcilable.

I'll say there are differences. The President of Kazakhstan talked of a need for another reserve currency in the world without specifying which; Secretary of State Clinton called on the organization to take a greater share in matters of security in the area including Afghanistan, without specifying how they were to do that; President Medvedev huffed and puffed at the very idea of force being used, something that Russia would never dream of doing; and Nick Clegg who was despatched instead of William Hague, spoke about the need for human rights in all OSCE members. And that was just the first day.

It so happens that yesterday I took part in a discussion on the OSCE and its future with two experts, one from Russia, one from Kazakhstan on the BBC Russian Service. Not one of us thought that there was going to be any kind of a break-through for the OSCE in this Summit though the chap from Kazakhstan thought that the country and its leader had got a good deal of kudos from the meeting and, anyway, having a forum in which all these people can meet and talk was quite a good thing. He did not specify in what way it was a better thing than more low-key negotiations between two or more countries.

The Russian expert droned about the pointlessness of OSCE, citing its history of non-achievement and generally expressing the view that such disparate countries cannot achieve much in the same organization. He was going to go on to the subject of UN and the pointlessness of having members like Burundi in it but was interrupted by the programme anchor.

I was then asked my opinion on OSCE's present and future. Unusually, I agreed with the other participants. There will be no break-through and, in any case, nobody knows what sort of breakthrough is needed or wanted. After all, even Clinton and Clegg were talking about two completely different aims, never mind everyone else. But there is, I added, an inertia about all international and transnational organizations. Once they exist they just go on existing. Partly, there are too many people who have a vested interest in their continued existence but largely it is the unthinkability of somebody standing up and saying: the OSCE has never achieved anything and will never achieve anything. Let's disband it. But think how useful that would be.

There are now only two questions to ask. First is why on earth did we send Nick Clegg to Kazakhstan? The second is how do I get a well-paid job with some think-tank to write solemn articles about the bleedin' obvious.

More on those Leaks

This morning there was another item from the department of the bleedin' obvious in the WikiLeaks saga: Putin might well have known about the plot to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko. In fact, he probably did know. Gosh, I thought, not really! Then I thought: has Julian Assange actually got round to publishing Russian cables. He'd better look out then. But, of course, nothing of the kind.

Senior American officials believed Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin may well have known about the operation to murder dissident former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.

Washington's senior diplomat in Europe challenged suggestions that the killing could have been the work of "rogue elements" in the Russian security forces, according to the latest documents posted on the WikiLeaks website.

Assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried said that Mr Putin's attention to detail meant that it would have been difficult for such an operation to be carried out without his knowledge.

We are still in the realm of American State Department cables, acquired by Mr Assange with very little difficulty or danger.

As an article on the Henry Jackson Society site that also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, says:

If Assange is genuinely committed to shining light into the darkness, and exposing real corruption and human rights abuse, we must ask ourselves, where are the ‘Chinese Embassy Cables’? What has become of the ‘Iran Files’? Whither the ‘Chechnya War Logs’?


It is very important to make the distinction between the latest leaks about Russian corruption under Putin, which are allegations taken from Western sources, and the kind of revelations that would be truly devastating to the Kremlin's credibility: damaging revelations, in other words, from Russian state sources. This we have yet to see, and are unlikely to anytime soon.

The point is that Assange has made grandiloquent claims for his activity, quoted in the same article:

Speaking at a dinner of the Oslo Freedom Forum in April this year, Assange eloquently countered claims that he is anti-Western. On the contrary, he said, he is very much pro-Western. The object of his chagrin is not the West but its leaders, who have distorted and corrupted Western values for their own nefarious ends, and he – like all good revolutionaries – is out to claim those values back.

“The United States”, he said, “once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press... [but] when we see the path that [it is now] going down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values anymore”. The United Kingdom is no better, he says. 300 gag orders in force at any one time make a mockery of the notion of a British free press.

So far from the Enlightenment path has the West apparently strayed in its obsession with secrecy and perversion of justice that Assange now likens it to the Soviet Union in the era of Stalin and Solzhenitsyn. He speaks of an ‘Orwellian’ atmosphere of information control, and a muted media made incapable of speaking out.

Confronted by this nightmare, Assange’s duty is clear: “We have become the publisher of last resort... And in that endeavour [we have] been successful in putting over a million restricted documents into the historical record that weren’t there before. That’s more pages of information than is in Wikipedia.”

One's immediate reaction is that this man either knows nothing about Stalin's Soviet Union or is a liar of monumental proportions.

It is, nevertheless, true: if he really cares about freedom, transparency and human rights then he should start looking at some other countries that are somewhat more deficient in those than the West with all its undoubted problems.

It may well be that Assange – who claims that the ‘exponential’ increase in leaks to his site has forced him to refuse further submissions – has received nothing from any of these potential sources.

If that is the case, this in itself says something quite significant. Private Bradley Manning, the US soldier suspected of the latest leaks, can be confident that the worst punishment he will receive for his crime is a jail term if found guilty. Dissidents in the kinds of countries where Assange should be focusing his efforts could never be so certain. A bullet in the head for themselves and their families – no trial – would be the almost inevitable consequence. Small wonder there aren’t many leaks coming out of the Russian embassy or the Chinese mission.

The second answer to this question could just as easily be, however, that Assange is not really all that interested in exposing corruption and human rights abuse at all, rather his objective is to embarrass and weaken the US and its Western allies because he hates them for what they are and what they stand for. How many of the ‘US Embassy Cables’ reveal actual crimes? Sure, Prince Andrew’s comments about the Serious Fraud Office are unpleasant; certainly the revelation that the US Embassy in Paris sent a memo describing Nicholas Sarkozy as ‘thin-skinned and authoritarian’ is a bit embarrassing, but the majority of these leaks can be filed under the category ‘political titillation’ not ‘serious breaches of the law’.

Some of these leaks, however, are much more serious. Many contain highly sensitive information, the exposure of which will unquestionably do more harm than good to the kind of causes Assange claims he espouses. The fact that China may have been secretly communicating its intention to withdraw its support for North Korea, one of the most repressive and murderous regimes on earth, is enormously significant; the fact that Wikileaks has just made that information public will probably set this process back by several years. The revelation, if it can be described as such, that Iran’s Arab neighbours are so concerned about its nuclear ambitions that they are ready to support US-led military action against Tehran will only give an already paranoid President Ahmadinejad further cause to intensify the oppression of ethnic groups within Iran that he suspects of subversive activity.

Finally of course, all those would-be whistleblowers in countries where real corruption and human rights abuse take place will be vastly less inclined to share that information now than they otherwise would have been. If Julian Assange really wanted to encourage whistleblowing about issues that genuinely impact on human lives, instead of just weakening and embarrassing the United States, he would not be so reckless. Of course, the truth of the matter is that this doesn’t really seem to be his objective at all.

And all this time Julian Assange is staying in hiding because the Swedish police want to interview him in connection with a rape accusation.

This is fun

Look what the satellite image of the Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran, also known as Iran Air, taken by Google Earth, has shown up.

This is timely

The Russian Duma has passed a resolution that condemned Stalin and Soviet officials for the murder of Polish officers at Katyn and two other camps. About time, too. Needless to say, the Communist Party argued vehemently against the resolution but was outvoted. Of course, this is not a completely new move. The Russian government acknowledged the crime in 1992 but since then several newspapers close to successive governments revived the old story of the Germans being responsible.
Earlier this year a few key documents to do with Stalin's and Beria's guilt were published on the internet.

Nobody has ever been convicted over the massacre, with Russian prosecutors arguing that those responsible are now dead.

A Russian judicial investigation in 2005 only confirmed the execution of 1,803 victims, while the actual number of Polish prisoners killed at Katyn and other Soviet sites is generally held to be about 22,000, including about 8,000 military officers.

The Duma declaration called for the massacre to be investigated further in order to confirm the list of victims.

The Duma also argued that Katyn was a tragedy for Russia too as thousands of Soviet citizens were executed and buried in ditches there in the years 1936-38, the period of Soviet history known as the Terror.

Which is undoubtedly true. Indeed, it is part of the evidence that the Polish officers were executed in exactly the same way as their "predecessors" in the mass graves.

This will undoubtedly make President Medvedev's forthcoming visit to Poland a happier occasion.

The Wall Street Journal, in its article on the subject, adds an interesting and very moving tale.

Other than WikiLeaks, two notable events occurred over the weekend: Russia's parliament issued a resolution taking responsibility for Stalin's murder of 22,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest in 1940, and Dave Brubeck celebrated his 90th birthday in a set at the Blue Note jazz club in New York City. Permit us to connect the dots of history.

....

Toward the end of a long and very fine set Saturday evening at the Blue Note with his quartet, Mr. Brubeck, who turns 90 next week, took hold of the microphone aside his piano and began to talk about a remembrance of Poland. He said that President Eisenhower had sent the Dave Brubeck Quartet to Poland in 1958 to perform as representatives of the American people. Earlier in his career, Mr. Brubeck had represented the American people as a member of Patton's Third Army in Europe.

After a visit to Chopin's home and being surrounded by "all these pianos," Mr. Brubeck composed a Chopinesque jazz piece with the Polish name "Dziekuje." Mr. Brubeck asked if anyone in the Blue Note audience knew what "dzieuke" means. "It means 'thank you,'" a lady called out.

"That's right," said Mr. Brubeck. "It means thank you. And I want to play this piece as thanks to the people of Poland for resisting Soviet Communism."

One of the many things Hitler and Stalin had in common was their dislike for and distrust of jazz.