The Hague has acquitted former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj of various horrible war crimes.
This is not much of a surprise. One, while the case against the KLA leadership generally is pretty strong, the case against Haradinaj personally wasn’t so much. Two, Haradinaj put up an aggressive and very competent defense. And three, [...]

Via the invaluable B92 website comes a nasty little story from Albania.
In her book, “The Hunt”, to be published in Italy on April 3, the former Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte states that, during investigations into war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, against Serbs and other non-Albanians, the prosecutor’s office [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy was in Cherbourg to name the latest French SSBN, the appropriately named Le Terrible, this week; and he had a few things to say about the circumstances under which she might be called on to fire her M51 SLBMs. The headline grabber, which everyone picked up on, was that France is going to [...]

It looks like Nicolas Sarkozy’s pet foreign-policy idea has been sporked, good and proper; his idea of a “Mediterranean Union” is now officially an ex-parrot, after it failed to get German support. As we’ve been saying right back to 2005, the key fact of European politics at the moment is that Angela Merkel has achieved [...]

I was going to say this is like movie/book x, but I can’t think of any work of fiction that even comes close.

This doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention, but Kemal Kerencsiz was arrested last month.
Kemal Kerincsiz is a Turkish lawyer. He’s also the guy who tried to prosecute Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, and several other writers for “insulting Turkishness”. And he’s been arrested — along [...]

Liberation operates a clutch of good blogs; as well as AFOE Satin Pajama nominee Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles, which everyone knows, there’s also an absolutely cracking blog on French and European national security issues.
They point out here that Slovenia, which took over as holder of the EU presidency on the 1st of January, is [...]

Early 2004 photos emerged in the media showing Iraqi prisoners allegedly being abused and tortured by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. The impact was devastating and the Bush administration, already under fire by critics for the way it handled the Iraq war, was faced with yet another serious public relations [...]

Despite having read mountains (appropriately) of reporting on the Turkish-Kurdish-Iraqi crisis, I haven’t read anyone who has tried to answer the big question - why do the PKK seem to be doing everything possible to provoke the Turks into invading Iraq after them?
You’d think this was a pretty vital issue; who wants to be blitzed, [...]

It’s a year since the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, and it ain’t getting any better. We’ve had the beginning of a trial; a trial where the prosecutor arrested a gaggle of secret police agents, which might have been a good sign, and proceeded to explain that despite this it was all the fault of “a [...]