10 August 2008 South Ossetia: A Monumental Miscalculation By Gwynne Dyer The three-day war in South Ossetia is settled, and the Georgians have lost. There may be some more shooting yet, but it is now clear that Georgia will never regain control of the rebel territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that President Mikhail Saakashvili […]
4 February 2008 Kosovo: The Least Bad Option? By Gwynne Dyer The Serbian presidential election on Sunday was a near-run thing, but in the end the good guy won. Not that President Boris Tadic is all that wonderful, but he positively glows with virtue in contrast to his opponent Tomislav Nikolic, an ultra-nationalist who served
11 December 2007 Kosovo: Partitions Without End By Gwynne Dyer “In one hundred days we’ve explored almost every humanly known option for squaring the circle of Kosovo’s status,” said German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger last month, admitting that his three-person mediation team (one American, one Russian, and one from the European Union) had not been able
17 May 2007 Cyberwar in the Baltic By Gwynne Dyer Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world — people even vote on-line — but for the past three weeks the country has been under a massive cyber-attack that has disabled the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks and private
1 March 2007 What’s Wrong with Italy? By Gwynne Dyer The most extreme diagnosis of Italy’s problem was offered by journalist Peter Popham in the Independent. He blamed it all on the Vatican: “Imagine that Hitler did not die in his bunker in 1945 but instead cut a deal with the new West German government,
9 July 2005 Srebrenica: Justice at Last? By Gwynne Dyer Sometimes diplomats can be very stupid. Right through late June and early July, British diplomats in the Balkans pushed the notion that Monday’s commemoration of the massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian and Bosnian Serb troops at Srebrenica ten years ago
2 June 2004 The Decline of the West By Gwynne Dyer All the countries whose troops fought in Normandy sixty years ago – the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Poland — are sending their leaders there on 6 June for the last big commemoration of D-Day. The soldiers who fought there and survived
19 November 2002 What Is Nato For? By Gwynne Dyer In the end, they solved the problem of Alexander Lukashenko’s determination to attend the Prague summit of NATO on Thursday and Friday by simply refusing him a visa. Lukashenko, the president and in practice the dictator of Belarus, reacted in typical fashion by threatening the
February 21, 2000 Time to end sanctions against Serbia By Gwynne Dyer A year ago this week, the Rambouillet conference on Kosovo was nearing its end and hopes were rising that war in the Balkans could be avoided. They were misplaced. A decade of Serbian repression of the Albanian-speaking majority in Kosovo had led to
February 21, 2000 Time to end sanctions against Serbia By Gwynne Dyer A year ago this week, the Rambouillet conference on Kosovo was nearing its end and hopes were rising that war in the Balkans could be avoided. They were misplaced. A decade of Serbian repression of the Albanian-speaking majority in Kosovo had led to