The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.
Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?
Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a [...]

So someone tried to blow up Yunus-Bek Yevkorov last week. Almost got him, too: they seem to have killed several members of his entourage, including his cousin, and Yevkorov himself is currently in a Moscow hospital with burns and a ruptured liver. He’s expected to live, though.
We wrote about Mr. Yevkorov a few [...]

I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…
Resistance - The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, [...]

As media furiously refrain from speculating, it’s odd to be hoping that a lightning strike, an electrical malfunction, or some combination of both was responsible for the crash of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean last night while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Because there aren’t a whole [...]

I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN [...]

What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about. And at the moment, much of the international effort there is counterproductive and fairly immoral. Don’t ask me; ask hugely [...]

North and south of the Caucasus mountains:
Azerbaijan’s air force commander was shot and killed as he left his home on the morning of February 11 … Lt-Gen. Rail Rzayev, the head of Azerbaijan’s Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defense Force, was shot in the head as he was sitting in a Mercedes in front of his [...]

He should have turned 80 last week.

On the other hand, he came within a sneeze of dying after being stabbed in 1961, and he achieved a thing or two in those seven years.

Normblog - ‘the weblog of Norman Geras’ - is often quite good and I read it when I get the chance, but this recent post of his was pretty bad. Norman says that those who, like Shirley Williams, dislike the phrase ‘war on terror’ have “trouble coming up with compelling reasons for their dislike” of [...]

Just wanted to link to this post about meeting Radovan Karadzic in prison. The writer comes across as a bit naive — gosh, the ICTY cell block is dingy! Karadzic, a former politician turned New Age guru, comes across as charming and at ease with himself! — but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Key point for [...]