The World Today: January 2010: January 2010

For Palestinians, the New Year promises little reprieve from their multiple uncertainties. They and their leaders are divided between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Fateh and Hamas. Their president says he wants to retire. Elections – due this month – cannot go ahead unless they resolve their differences or accept further fragmentation. The Israeli government prefers conflict management to resolution. The renewed efforts of the international community, invigorated by the seeming determination of United States President Barack Obama to bring the parties to the negotiating table have thus far foundered.

The International Criminal Court believes it is marginalising Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir following his indictment on charges related to atrocities in Darfur. He decided to pull out of an Islamic summit in Istanbul in November and earlier cancelled plans to visit a number of African states. But the policy of seeking justice in such cases where peace efforts are underway, is deeply controversial.

No end is in sight to the crisis in Somalia, which only gets worse. The international community has grown accustomed to it being without effective government. There are few expressions of sympathy for the daily victims of violence in Mogadishu or audible concerns over the profound humanitarian disaster. The suggestion by former Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch- Brown last July that Somalia rather than Afghanistan poses the greater terrorist threat to Britain, produced only a ripple of interest. Piracy now plaguing the seas can still capture media attention, yet the response has not gone much beyond spawning a lucrative protection industry to share the spoils of state collapse. Something new must be done.

Brussels has often been a byword for bureaucracy, now, keen to burnish its image abroad, it is soon to be known as a force for diplomacy. So should Europe’s national diplomatic services be on their guard, or can they gain from the new arrangements?

The advent of the fax, internet, email, video or telephone conferencing and other forms of information technology has transformed the means of diplomacy. Instructions to an embassy can be cleared within a foreign ministry and through other government departments in minutes. The globalisation of news may mean that a crisis manager in a capital will know about a disaster in a foreign country while the embassy is sleeping. The diplomat’s job is increasingly not to compete with CNN or Sky or BBC World, but to add value with analysis, with physical presence among the victims of a disaster and by making contact with the local authorities in the case, for instance, of a kidnapping.

On January 17, Ukrainians go to the polls for the third time since President Viktor Yushchenko took office five years ago. The country has since evolved from a virtual democracy into an immature democracy. There is little danger that this process will unravel, but every danger that it will go no further. Add to this the political misuse of the H1N1 flu epidemic, a dire economic crisis and enigmatic deals with Russia; the election remains open and it is not clear what problems it will solve.