HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!-->In Response to Daniel

Happy New YEAR TO ALL bloggers!

 

This promises to be a fantastic year for ALL of us. 2006 for me seems so auspicious, I donno. Maybe it is something about it being 4 years away from 2010, and one year after 2005. Whatever it is, there are so many anniversaries going to be celebrated this year. I know for example that Oct 1956 will be exactly 50 years since the Suez Crisis took place that pitched a then-perfidious UK and French collusion with Israel against Nasser, sending then UN-SG Dag Hammarskjold to tick off the UK. Anthony Eden, then-UK premier would resign. The Guardian newspaper called it “an act of folly without justification”. I wrote a paper on it back in college: http://un_org.tripod.com/suez.

 

It is also fifty years since the Japanese joined the UN; Feb 15 1961 is 45 years since the UN agreed at the Security Council to send forces into Congo. 17 January is exactly 45 years since Lumumba—then Congolese Premier—was assassinated by the CIA, with collusion from the Belgians, with his body cut up and dissolved into acid.

 

Another unspeakable evil was committed 45 years ago in the Congo, and Belgium was key in his assassination—the archives are incontrovertible about this. Hammarskjold would also die in a plane crash in Ndola in 1961, bringing an end to the leadership of one of the most charismatic UN S_Gs in living memory.

 

With what is happening with Russia over gas and Ukraine, I am reminded that 1856 was when the Crimean war took place. 140 years ago, the Russians were hated by the UK like nothing. Their supremacy has been on the silent ascent exactly 140 years later. Napoleon III, then, was key, trying to emulate his uncle in nationalistic feats, but failing badly.

 

The list goes on…In Belgium this August, the country will remember 10 years of the so-called Marche Blanche, for that is the year (same year I started college) that Belgium would play host to one of the biggest and most egregious horrors in the 20^th century: the discovery of the bodies of Julie and Melissa in the cave of the notorious paedophile Marc Dutroux.

 

And many more…

 

Did I ever say? Diplomatic historian by leaning, political scientist by training, and eccentric by day and nightJ

 

I will be back, but work is calling for action plans, and whatnot…

 

Ouch….