I spent three days in Kashgar, the scene of yesterday’s attack on some Chinese police, and where I took this photo in its famous and busy market, a couple of months ago.

It’s a city with a long and glorious history - first as one of the key trading points on the ’silk road’ with a famous international trading market - and then in the nineteenth century as a key location in the ‘Great Game’, the epic power struggle between the British in India and Russia, for control of Central Asia. The opening of a Russian consulate there nearly provoked full-scale war between Britain and Russia (in the end it didn’t survive long as a consulate, but you can still stay in the building, as one person I travelled with this year did).

Kashgar now finds itself in the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’ - a huge and sparsely populated province which forms the whole north west of the modern state of China. But although it lies east of the massive Tian Shan range of mountains which forms China’s western boundary, bringing it naturally geographically into China, its people are not Chinese and have much more in common with the central Asian peoples west of the Tian Shan. The Uighurs of this region are ethnically central Asian, have been Muslim for many centuries, and speak a language, Uighur, closer to Uzbek, and which is written in the Arabic script. At various points in history they have attempted to assert their central Asian identity, most recently around the time of the second world war, when the ‘Republic of East Turkestan’ was declared (Turkestan being the whole huge central Asian territory of the peoples of Turkic descent going back to Genghis Khan and beyond).

Ethnically, they are clearly right that they belong to Turkestan rather than China.

But equally clearly the Chinese state, like any great power, is not at all keen to have unstable breakaway regions outside its control sitting on its borders. This is hardly something new from the post-1949 communist period in China - emperors two thousand kilometres away in China proper have long sought to have this region and these people under their control.

And so in many ways the Uighurs in Xinjiang (the Chinese name for the province, which I understand means something like ‘border province’) pose a similar challenge to their Tibetan neighbours.

Read the rest of this entry »

The ICC has hit the news again today because its prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has issued an indictment against Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for his involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.

Involving the ICC in major conflicts around the globe can be far from straightforward – and in this case, the international community faces an extremely difficult dilemma, in judging whether everyone’s objective of ending the conflict and helping those who had had their lives devastated by it, is best achieved by involving the ICC, or whether that would do more harm than good by endangering ongoing peace negotiations among the parties there (some discussion of this is on the BBC here). This is a very similar dilemma to that which the international community faced a few years ago in deciding whether or not to refer Sudanese involvement in the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (with bases in Sudan) and Uganda.

I’m not close enough to negotiations on these issues to make an informed judgement on this precarious balance. Certainly it would be a very difficult call to make potentially to endanger promising peace negotiations by involving the international court.

But generally I strongly believe that we should be supporting the cause of criminals around the world who are not subject to effective legal sanction in their own country, being brought before the International Criminal Court. Some of these will be formally private individuals, but some will be in government – for although Omar al-Bashir is the first serving head of state to be indicted by the ICC, the court is part of the same family of international criminal tribunals on specific countries which brought to justice figures such as Yugoslavia’s Slobadan Milosevic.

The idea that people guilty of such major crimes, who are not ever going to come before a court in their own country, should therefore be brought to justice at international level, is a really major step forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like everyone else I’m enjoying watching the US Presidential race. However also like I suspect a lot of people I’m not really following it closely enough to know what the different candidates really stand for so all I’ve got is how I feel about it. I definitely (and have always done) feel more a Democrat than a Republican, and at the moment I feel Obama could really be something different for America, while Hillary’s been around too long, but this not a very informed view”¦(there’s plenty of those around the internet you can find!).

However as a member of a party which has also chosen its candidate for head of government over the last few months, I do doubt whether I’d be very happy with their system for selection. The stringing-out of the process with part of the election happening every week, certainly seems to increase media coverage.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already written a fair bit about the Chatham House conference I attended recently, but I did just want to add something about the excellent points made at it by William Wallace about the UK’s position in relation to the EU and the US.

For he did a very good job of highlighting some of the choices faced by the UK.

We are in many ways prisoners of the way in which the British public and media like to see some of these issues, which does lead us into some quite odd positions. This view, which he says in a phrase he ascribed to Timothy Garton-Ash, sees everything that Britain has done since 1945 as ”˜footnotes to Churchill’, makes us very worried about any encroachment by ”˜Europe’, but almost totally unconcerned by any such thing by the USA.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most interesting speakers at the recent Chatham House conference which I mentioned here, was a guy I hadn’t heard of before called Philip Wilkinson. Wilkinson had a long background in the army, including the commandos, paras, and special forces, before specialising particularly in counter-insurgency and supporting the development of peace in post-conflict situations, including in Afghanistan, advising the UN, and he is now an associate fellow at Chatham House itself.

He said a number of things of interest to me, but what really grabbed my attention was what was I think his central theme, that in the twenty-first century politics and the military have become too separate. He argued powerfully that because politicians and those engaged in the political dialogue generally rarely now have personal experience of the military, they have a wrong understanding, mostly an exaggerated one, of the sorts and scale of problems that military action can solve. They forget that while military action can certainly be useful, it needs to be fitted within a policy context, with defined political and strategic objectives. The obvious examples to demonstrate this are Afghanistan and Iraq: it’s all very well sending in the military to defeat the government already there, but there’s no point doing that - and indeed you will fail - unless you have some idea what it is you’re actually trying to achieve and what you’re going to do there once the guns have fallen silent.

Of course in general this point - as his adducing of Clausewitz’s familiar point that “War is the continuation of politics by other means” to support it showed - is not new.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Chatham House’s annual one-day autumn conference, and spent a truly fascinating day listening to a very wide range of speakers. I attended the first of these now-annual events about five years ago and it was impressive to see how it has developed over that time. Although the first conference in 2002 was good and interesting, this year they put on a truly impressive range of very high-calibre speakers. This was reflected too in the quality of the audience, with a strong presence of well-known journalists and former diplomats and politicians, as well as academics and others - I found myself sitting all day, for instance, between a professor of international relations and the Swedish Ambassador. It was only a shame that as usual I found myself very much indeed on the younger end of the age spectrum!

Obviously through the day there were a very wide range of issues covered, and I may come back again to comment on some of them, but if there was one theme running through the day which interested me most of all, it was the number of speakers, from different perspectives, who commented on the whole notion of the development of a rules-based approach to global governance.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been meaning to post something for a couple of weeks about how pleased I was to discover that London is hosting an ‘India Now’ festival this summer.

Starting with the somewhat bizarre spectacle of a replica of the Taj Mahal floating up the Thames to be photographed next to various famous London landmarks, it is now incorporating all sorts of activities including for example a three-week festival in Trafalgar Square, and a mela in Ealing, as well as lots of other things.

I think it’s great and definitely plan to go to some of their events, probably the big Trafalgar Square extravaganza.

India means a lot of different things to different Londoners. For a very sizeable number, it is where either they or their parents or grandparents come from.

For many others, India means call centres, which they speak to probably more often they would like. For others, it is somewhere they have been on holiday.

For me, it is the country I was born in, and somewhere I enjoyed travelling through again a few years ago - so I naturally feel some affinity for.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Blair has been defending the global ‘war on terror’ this week, arguing that we need to stamp on terrorism wherever it exists.

Well, about some of this he is right. He is right that there are some people out there who are out to destroy our way of life. (Their religion isn’t the cause of that, it’s simply the banner under which they fight, much as it was for those fighting the crusades a millennium ago). And he is right that there are some people in this country and elsewhere in the west, who think we can respond effectively to that simply with inaction or woolly understanding.

If we want to preserve the principles we value - liberty, democracy, equality, for example - then we absolutely need to be prepared to be robust in taking action to defend them.

But where he is wrong is to think that the policies that he and the current President of the United States of America have followed, are doing that effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »