10. INDEPENDENT DIPLOMAT, OR THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE

“…The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.”

Democritus, quoted in Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Hargeisa, Somaliland

We are driving along the long road from Berbera on the Red Sea coast, back to Hargeisa, the dusty capital of Somaliland. I am with Edna Adan, the 69-year old foreign minister of Somaliland, a government driver, Magan from the Ministry and a bodyguard. This has not always been a safe road; a year ago, a German aid worker was ambushed here and his Somali companion shot dead. We’ve spent the day in Berbera to witness and celebrate a significant moment in Somaliland’s development as a state. Fifty long steel containers, loaded with wiring and machinery for a large state electricity company, have been delivered by ship at Berbera to be trucked to Ethiopia, 150 miles inland up this road. This is the first official trade shipment other than food aid since Somaliland was reestablished as a state in 1991. A small moment maybe, but a significant one for this diminutive and young country.

Edna Adan is something of a folk heroine in Somaliland. The former wife of one of Somalia’s former prime ministers, she has used her retirement savings and her pension (she worked for the UN) to build and run a maternity hospital in Hargeisa. In a poor town, the hospital is a much-loved institution built from a rubbish tip by a much-loved woman. Wherever we go in Somaliland, she is greeted by patients, parents of patients and simply ordinary people, who stop to thank and admire her.

There hasn’t been much traffic; in fact the road has been all but deserted for most of our journey. But in front of us a white car is driving in the middle of the road, preventing us from passing. It’s an old car and it is spewing a long black cloud of unfiltered exhaust. Although the windows of our four-by-four are closed, the smoke chokes and irritates us. Our driver accelerates and sounds his horn, but still the car in front doesn’t give way. Indeed, it seems deliberately to be blocking our path. The Somalilanders in my car exclaim, “What’s he doing?”, “He’s driving dangerously!” We are a little tense, silently aware of what has happened before on this road. But eventually we get past.

A little later, we stop. Minister Edna (as she is known, or, more often, simply Edna) wants to give the biscuits we have brought for our journey to children we pass. They are poor village children. We can see them chasing goats or simply standing, doing nothing but watching our car go by — a rare sight. Somaliland is one of the poorest countries in the world. The large majority of its people barely subsists. Our car slows when Minister Edna spots a child. But each time we pull over and the driver and guard gesture to the child, they run away. Minister Edna says that she thinks they’ve been warned by their mothers to keep away from strangers. The children scamper away, sometimes shouting to one another. Laughing, we drive off.

Too late! While we were at the side of the road, the awful white car has overtaken us again and once more we are trapped in its fumes. Revving and beeping, our driver tries to overtake, but again the dirty white car sits in the middle of the road, blocking our way. We can see the car is filled with men. Annoyed and perhaps a little nervous, the Somalilanders grow more agitated. With a frenzy of horn and engine noise, accompanied by much swerving to and fro across the otherwise empty road, our driver manages to get our car alongside.

Our bodyguard leans out of the window as we pass and gestures at the white car to stop. As they pull over, he jumps out carrying his AK-47 rifle at the ready. Minster Edna tries to stop him, but it’s too late and he and our driver are quickly making their points emphatically to the occupants of the white car. They’re speaking Somali, but even I can understand what they are saying. I feel nervous.

But within about ten seconds, there is laughter and smiles. The driver of the white car, a young man with the pale, slender mien of many Somalis, emerges from the car. Grinning, he mock-salutes the bodyguard who is now mollified and laughing too. The young man comes to the window. Suddenly, he recognizes Minister Edna. He is immediately shy and even more repentant for his bad driving. Apologizing, he reaches into our car, tenderly grasps Edna’s hand and kisses it, and we move on.

I resigned from the British Foreign Office in September 2004. The breaking point finally came when I testified (in secret) to the official inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD (the Butler Inquiry, as it was known). I wrote down all that I thought about the war, including the available alternatives, its illegality and the misrepresentation of what we knew of Iraq’s weapons. Once I had written it, I realized at last, after years of agonizing, that I could no longer continue to work for the government.

I sent my testimony to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Foreign Office (the chief civil servant, known as the Permanent Under-Secretary). Neither replied. My career as a formal diplomat of the British state was over. My testimony to the inquiry was only the proximate reason for my resignation. For years, my disillusionment and doubt about diplomacy had been growing.

During my work on the UN Security Council, I had often been struck by a very obvious imbalance — between the diplomatic resources and skills of the powerful countries, and everyone else. As British diplomats, we had considerable advantages. With reams of telegrams and intelligence reports, I was better briefed than most other diplomats present. Our mission was among the largest at the UN, with squads of diplomats covering every issue. In negotiation, our experienced lawyers could ensure that any textual changes were turned to our benefit. We could consult our capital in real-time without fear of interception: unlike many others around the table, our communications were secure. And the UK took pride in drafting more resolutions than anyone else: we would send regular statistics back to London to prove it.

Such advantages are available to a handful of the world’s most powerful countries — China, the US, Russia, France, Britain. By no coincidence is their real (economic and military) power multiplied by this less-recognized but nonetheless forceful diplomatic power.

Meanwhile, everyone else was at a considerable disadvantage. The numerous smaller UN missions struggle to cover the enormous and proliferating agendas of the UN General Assembly, Security Council and specialized committees with just one or two horribly overworked and under-equipped diplomats. (At the World Trade Organization in Geneva for instance, many poor countries cannot afford to maintain missions, let alone the experts they need to track and influence highly complex trade negotiations.)

Often those with most at stake are not even allowed into the room where their affairs are being discussed. This imbalance of course does not serve those marginalized, but nor, paradoxically, does it serve the powerful. In this complex and interconnected era, agreements that fail to take into account the interests of all concerned parties are not good or sustainable and too often they fall apart. The ultimate effect is a less stable world. If people are ignored, they tend to find ways — sometimes violent — to get heard.

This was the inspiration behind the foundation of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit diplomatic advisory group. I wanted to try to remedy the diplomatic deficit I had witnessed at the Security Council. The idea was to establish a network of experienced practitioners (former diplomats, international lawyers and skilled analysts) whose expertize would be available to help small, inexperienced or under-resourced countries and political groups with their diplomacy — “a diplomatic service for those who need it most”.

I began work in the basement of my flat in south London in the autumn of 2004. Independent Diplomat’s first contract, signed early the next year, was with the government of Kosovo, to help advise it during the UN-supervised process that would determine the province’s final status. Kosovo, technically still part of Serbia though governed separately by the UN since 1999, was not allowed any diplomatic representation or a foreign ministry, yet it was required to participate in a complex and highly-charged diplomatic process involving many diplomatic actors (to start with, the UN, the EU and the six countries of the Contact Group who dominate south-east European diplomacy, as well, of course, as Serbia itself).

The philosophy of Independent Diplomat is straightforward. We work for our clients. Unlike many other NGOs or international agencies, we are simply at the disposal of the countries and groups that choose to use us. We try to help our clients, through advice and assistance with diplomatic tools, to achieve their international goals. There is only one important condition. All those we help must be democratic and respectful of international law and human rights. No country is perfect in this regard, but the board of Independent Diplomat, which scrutinizes all prospective projects we undertake, must be convinced of the general “direction of travel” of our potential clients. On this ground, we have turned down several groups and countries that have approached us. Our hope is that by helping countries and political groups to use the existing international machinery and international law we are helping reinforce peaceful and lawful means of arbitrating international business.

Our work for our clients consists of behind-the-scenes strategic advice as well as practical assistance with things like communications to the UN Security Council,[58] speeches or formal diplomatic presentations. We don’t represent our clients diplomatically or lobby for them. I always felt that the sight of a sharp-suited westerner lobbying for a faraway group in the corridors of Washington or New York was unconvincing: it spoke more of money than integrity. In any case, having been on the receiving end of such lobbying before, I concluded that the people themselves of a country or region were the most convincing advocates of their own cause.

There is a harder edge to why Independent Diplomat needs to exist. For many of our clients, it is predictable that if they are not heard and their views not taken into account, there may be conflict. Most observers of the Balkans would agree that if the final status process (which is underway as I write this) does not conclude in the formation of a new state of Kosovo, there is likely to be renewed war in that corner of south east Europe. In the Western Sahara, the frustrated wishes of the Saharawi people for self-determination could one day break out into renewed violence, though for the moment the Polisario Front very much abjures it. The ceasefire was agreed in 1991, since when there has not been one iota of progress in fulfilling its conditions.

Though our work is practical, there is also a more subtle element to it. We encourage our clients to be confident and assertive in their demands of the world. It is clear already from our work that many countries and political groups do not feel that the institutions of world diplomacy are “theirs”. They find these forums intimidating and forbidding. Any scrap of attention they receive there is gratefully accepted, when in fact our clients, like any citizens of the world, should be demanding their rights as equals, not as demandeurs. Despite the high-sounding claims of the UN charter or the European Union, the truth is that a great many people feel excluded from these institutions, and perceive that their relationship with them is not of equality but of supplication. It is perhaps not surprising that they should feel this, for in many cases, like Kosovo, they are literally excluded.

By coincidence, our first three clients are self-determination cases. Though in two of those — Kosovo and Somaliland — the governments are democratic and running affairs in their territories (the Polisario do not — yet — control the territory they claim), as non-states they are not given the same status as states in inter-governmental forums such as the UN. When Independent Diplomat finally managed to find a way for the Kosovo Prime Minister, a democratically-elected government leader, to attend discussions of his own country at the UN Security Council, he was not allowed to speak or sit at the Council table (unlike, for instance, Serbia) and he was described, humiliatingly, as a member of the UN Mission in Kosovo delegation, a group of unelected international officials. I found his treatment by officials and diplomats at the Council rude and dismissive, and I said this to my colleagues in the Kosovo delegation. They said they were used to it.

As I write in the summer of 2006, Independent Diplomat has grown to a handful of staff with two offices in London and New York. We are planning to open offices in Brussels (to cover the EU), Addis Ababa (the African Union) and other multilateral diplomatic centers. We are helped by a wide and growing network of advisers and experts around the world who help us case-by-case with our projects. We now have two other long-term clients in addition to Kosovo: the government of Somaliland and the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara (see chapter 6).

Though I still work in diplomacy, it is very different from my career in the British foreign service. What I thought would be difficult has proved easier than I expected and what I thought would be easy has been harder. As a British diplomat I was steeped in the privilege of membership of the closed circle of powerful countries. Leaving that circle, I thought it would be difficult from the outside to work out what was going on inside. I was worried that because I was an “informal” diplomat, the “real” diplomats would not tell me what they were doing. This has not proved to be the case. To my surprise, most diplomats and officials (such as the UN envoys dealing with the Western Sahara or Kosovo) have been open about their work. Indeed, many seem to use Independent Diplomat as a kind of confessional where they tell us what they really think, rather than what their institutions require them to think.

Given the chance, the frustration, cynicism and despair induced by the official discourse of diplomacy can easily spill out. The formal traditions, terms and morals of diplomacy form a kind of strait-jacket that many of the diplomatic world’s denizens are eager to escape from. Officials tell me things as Independent Diplomat that they would never confess when I was a British diplomat. Ambassadors tell me of their secret sympathy for the Saharawis, or the necessity of independence for Kosovo, or their frustration with their ministry (or ministers). Unbound by the official line, their true thoughts are revealed. Members of the great institutions of diplomacy — foreign ministries and multilateral bodies — have asked Independent Diplomat to research policies and ideas that they are not permitted to explore in their official work. This is an unexpected stratum of the world of diplomacy that Independent Diplomat has been able to tap into, and use to the benefit of its clients.

But it has been harder than I expected to establish and fund the institution. Independent Diplomat’s clients are by definition the poor and marginalized, and cannot afford to pay the fees that would sustain a commercial agency. So we have been forced to seek funding to support our work. Naively I thought that fundraising would involve emailing a letter to the various foundations and a large check would soon follow in response. After a few emails came back with the stock rejections from junior staff members, it became clear that this expectation was false.

In the world of diplomacy, the idea has been warmly greeted. Many diplomats immediately recognize the diplomatic deficit that Independent Diplomat was set up to address. Indeed many ask why such a group has not been established before, such is the glaring need. But in the world of charitable foundations and other funders, it has been harder to convince. For many diplomacy is still a very closed world. Some have asked me to explain what diplomats actually do. In the human rights-oriented culture of many large foundations, there is a skepticism (well-founded in my experience) that diplomats do any good at all. Most seem to regard them and their habits as inherently amoral, driven by the heartless calculus of real-politik. Why then would the world need an independent diplomat?

As anyone who has tried to set up a charity or non-governmental organization will tell you, it’s a tough business. There seems to be a kind of Darwinian competition at work for new organizations where the foundations wait to see who will remain standing after their first year or so, to test whether their ideas and commitment are truly viable. Though harsh, it cannot be denied that this technique works. Like the senior officials who decide policy in foreign ministries, the decision-makers in the foundations are guarded by legions of gate-keepers whose job, it seems, is to prevent the hordes of begging NGOs stampeding their bank accounts.

It has taken time therefore to win support — and most crucially funding — for the organization. My first break came from “Unltd”, a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs in Britain. I then was fortunate enough to win a fellowship from the Quaker Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Independent Diplomat’s first institutional grant came from George Soros’s Open Society Institute, appropriately enough, given that Independent Diplomat was designed to address a deficit Karl Popper would have recognized.

The benefits of Independent Diplomat have been many. The slow rediscovery of my own intellectual independence and conscience has been refreshing. I am reminded of how I felt about politics and the world when a student: invigorated, interested and angry. Somehow, being an official diplomat had drained me of one of the things that defined who I was. It had taught me to defend the existing order rather than noticing its injustices and seeking to change them.

More unexpected has been the radical change of view from the other side of the table. Things look very different when you are a Somalilander or a Kosovar. The world does not seem arranged to suit you, rather the contrary. Global institutions can often seem impenetrable and hostile, in sharp contrast to the days when I was one of the countries that ran them. Nor had I realized how much I had to learn from those with whom Independent Diplomat has worked. I have been humbled by the energy and courage of people like Edna Adan of Somaliland. Working with Independent Diplomat has meant that my colleagues and I now spend a lot of time with her, the Kosovo final status delegation or the leaders of the Polisario Front. We have been required to learn how it is to be in their shoes (a process that never ends). In so doing, I have been introduced to values which are less prominent in my own society, whose representatives claim to offer its virtues as a model to the rest of the world. How many ministers in Britain run hospitals funded from their own pension? In Kosovo (described recently in the Financial Times as a “moral wasteland”), the hospitality and generosity shown to me and other visitors contrasts uncomfortably with the experience of social behavior in Britain. “We”, it seems, have much to learn as well as to teach.

In spite of these compensations, my mental journey from formal diplomat to Independent Diplomat has not been easy. Casting off the identity of a British diplomat was a painful business. I missed my former colleagues and the comforting sense of rightness that the Foreign Office somehow wordlessly encourages in its staff. I missed the intellectual framework of interests and what “we” thought of as the immediate point of reference when confronted by any new political situation. It was a struggle to learn again how to work things out on my own. At first, this was vertiginous and uncomfortable, so deeply rooted was the mental framework instilled in me. I felt lost without it.

More prosaically, I missed telling people I was a British diplomat and the approving nods that usually followed such a statement. I confess that I enjoyed the status that my career involved (though interestingly now that I am no longer a British diplomat, people no longer flatter me and instead tell me what they really think about British diplomacy…). The colleagues with whom I joined “the office” in 1989 are now becoming heads of department, some are ambassadors with large residences and official cars. In the early months I thought of this as another enormous phone bill I couldn’t pay thumped on my doormat. I missed the comradeship and team spirit — “the office’s” virtues.

In parallel to this personal disorientation, I felt a more political fragmentation. When I read the press or traveled, the old sense of order and certainty I had enjoyed as a British diplomat fell away. The forces I saw at work in the world, of economy, belief and human behavior, seemed less and less under the control of governments and the organs of international cooperation. The world appeared much more complicated and chaotic than it had when depicted in the flow of telegrams and memos which had hitherto comprised the lens through which I saw it. The international meetings, with their grand statements and assumption of control, continued. But now I was no longer part of them, it was not mandatory to believe their claim to be in command of events. Indeed, it seemed clearer and clearer that they were not.

This was disconcerting. As a diplomat but also as an ordinary person, I had been comforted by the belief that the ubiquitous “they” of governments were in control of matters, that if things went wrong, they could put it right. Now I had seen how wrong governments could be, and how poorly they understood the situations they claimed to be arbitrating, I could no longer pretend to be comforted. Like Neo in The Matrix, I felt I had taken the red pill and seen the world as it really was, rather than as we wished to believe it: the desert of the real.

On September 11, 2001 I was in New York at the British mission to the UN. Like millions of others, I witnessed the event that triggered the “War on Terror”. I experienced the horror and grief on the streets of New York (my apartment was on Union Square where crowds would gather to mourn). That night, I told a friend that governments would seize the chance to reassert themselves.

From the inside, I watched my government adopt the US Administration’s naming and framing of their reaction, from using the name “9/11” (no one in New York called it that until Washington did), to the adoption of the metaphor of the “War on Terror”. It was clear from the beginning that this nomenclature implied, deliberately, a particular response: militaristic, a-legal. That it also played straight into the hands of Al-Qaeda, who sought and reveled in the status of enemy of the West, seemed not to occur to its originators. This was obvious to all those like me who had worked on the Middle East and watched Al-Qaeda for years. It was equally obvious that any solution to the “terrorist” problem would require at last addressing the noxious and enduring problems of the Middle East — in particular Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, the case above all others that drove the sense of injustice and the accusation of the West’s “double standards” in its approach to the Muslim world.

Four years later I was in London when suicide bombers, young men from my own country, struck the underground and busses. The invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq had not undermined the appeal — or rather the anger — that drove young men to kill others. Instead, they had strengthened it. Governments — Russia, the US, Britain — continue to use the word “terrorist” and now “Islamic fascist” as a means of closing off discussion of the deeper causes of conflict, ones which they show no intention of addressing, whether in Palestine, Chechnya or anywhere else. Meanwhile, these governments claim that the “terrorists” are attacking our “values” or “freedoms”, when even the most cursory reading of the motives of the terrorists shows that it is our governments’ policies in the Middle East that provide at least part of the cause of their rage, rather than our “way of life”.

All such governments want to pretend, and their populations — like me — want to believe, that they are capable of protecting their people and controlling the affairs of the world. In the disorder of the early twenty-first century, they seem less and less able, just as their rhetoric becomes more and more strident. We seem caught in a spiral, where the more our governments use brutal tactics to defend their claim to protect us, the more they will incite those who wish to attack us. As long as this goes on, we can only expect more violence and disorder.

The cliché of contemporary discussion of international affairs is a cliché for a reason: more and more of our problems are transnational in nature, and do not lend themselves to solution by individual states but only by collective action. Terrorism is one, but so are disease (SARS, bird flu), global warming and migration. To deal with these issues, the traditional calculus of identifying one country’s interests, then arbitrating these with other countries, makes little sense. The causes of these problems are complex, and their solutions require detailed, long-term and collective action.

For all the novelty of these global crises, the challenge is still a basic and familiar one: how can we govern the world? How can we design and implement good, effective policy?

Over fifty years ago, Karl Popper pondered this problem and produced in The Open Society and its Enemies a vigorous and thorough exposition of why democracy was the only effective system of government. The dilemma we must deal with today is that there is no global democracy. Those designing policy whose impact may be felt worldwide have scant access to those experiencing its effects. It is unarguable therefore that we need ways for those affected by international policy to respond to those who formulate and implement it, whether in the Security Council in New York, or Washington or Moscow. Independent Diplomat is one small way of tackling that problem. I hope it will grow and expand, for the need is great, as the many governments and political groups that approach us bear witness. But even I would not claim that alone it would be enough.