Denis MacShane

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1855346.html#cutid3

I was interested to read information which I already knew well but told from the point of view of a junior minister in the British government of the mid 2000s. MacShane includes extracts from his own diaries, apparently unrevised, which is honest of him but perhaps a little confusing for the less well-informed reader. It is also striking to realise how much the debate in the House of Commons matters to MPs, as opposed to how little the rest of the world cares about it (certainly outside the UK, and probably outside Westminster). MacShane doesn't really answer the question in the title of his book, but most readers will have made up their mind before opening it.

Where MacShane did add value for me was his dissection, if I may use the word, of the claims by a Swiss politician that Hashim Thaçi, now prime minister of Kosovo, had during the 1999 war been involved with removing organs from captive Serbs to trade them on the international market. It always seemed to me just from the logistics of the alleged process that this is a vanishingly improbable allegation; MacShane adds extra details as to the implausibility of the sources, and, more importantly, the internal politics of the Council of Europe to explain why such an appalling and patently untrue rumour was given legs. I would add that, by comparison, the transport of Albanian corpses to mass graves in Serbia by refrigerated truck during the war is rather well documented. (Those of us with longer memories also recall the Martinović case.)… (altro)