12 January 2017
A Diplomatic Dance
When the music stops.
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week has seen further rounds of the game of musical chairs played by ambassadors and other diplomatic staff around the world recently.
The thirty-five Russian diplomats expelled from the USA for “acting in a manner inconsistent with their diplomatic status” (i.e. in retaliation for the alleged hacking of the Democrat’s computers during the presidential election, spreading of false news and harassment of US diplomats in Russia) arrived back in Moscow. The diplomats and their families totalled 96 people, and were flown from Dulles airport, Washington, to Vnukovo airport, Moscow, by the Rossiya Airlines VIP unit, in an Illyushin II-96 jet (with the exception of the four diplomats ejected from the Russian consulate in San Francisco, who travelled home separately).
President Putin promptly invited the families to the New Year tree in the Kremlin, a musical show for children which is at the heart of New Year celebrations. Putin invited the children of US diplomats to the same event, instead of ordering the usual and predicted tit-for-tat expulsions; it would have been interesting to witness the children of Russian diplomats and the children of US diplomats taking part in the same song and dance routines side by side around that tree at the centre of Russian power.
As it happens, President Putin didn’t have to tell US diplomats to pack up and clear out – this week, Donald Trump did that job for him. The Trump transition team has ordered all of President Obama’s political appointees to leave their posts immediately – this of course includes all the ambassadors appointed by President Obama personally. There are 55 of them – almost a third of all US ambassadors. This means that many countries – including Britain and most of Europe, and other key allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia – will be without an American ambassador when Trump becomes president. And for some time after, as well; so far, Trump has nominated only two ambassadors – to China, and to Israel – and all ambassadorial appointments have to be approved by the Senate, and Senatorial approval hearings for ambassadors take place only after those for cabinet-level appointments have been completed.
This abrupt dismissal is without precedent. Following the usual procedure, President Obama asked all his political appointees to submit their resignations by Inauguration Day (January 20), but it’s usual for ambassadors and other diplomatic staff to be allowed a number of weeks if not months to arrange their personal affairs – accommodation and schooling for their families back in the USA, for instance. Many of them have protested at what seems to be a gratuitously vindictive step, pointing out that Mrs Trump has been allowed to delay any move to the White House so that their young son can complete the academic year at his current school.
Nevertheless, the round of ambassadorial musical chairs which has just played out in the UK has shown that these things can be done surprisingly quickly. No sooner was Sir Ivan Rogers out than Sir Tim Barrow was in. (So the UK has an ambassador to the EU? Who knew? I certainly didn’t.) Far from showing a government in confusion, it seemed to show a government which knew exactly what it wanted and how to get it.
The game of ambassadorial musical chairs is high-lighting the fault-lines between different nations in Asia as well as in Europe and the USA. Japan protested against South Korea this week by withdrawing its ambassador from Seoul and its consul-general from Busan. The point of contention was a statue of a ‘comfort woman’ which was put up in front of the Japanese consulate in Busan last month; it’s a copy of the statue which was put up outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul a year ago as a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Korean women taken as sex slaves by Japanese forces during World War II. The government of Shinzo Abe was so determined to have this embarrassment removed that last year he issued an apology for the episode in the two countries’ history and made a payment of one billion yen (£7 million) to South Korea, on the understanding that it would indeed disappear. Hence his annoyance that, far from disappearing, it has in fact doubled.
Of course, recent events have also reminded us that ambassadors and other diplomats can find themselves involved in games much more dangerous and tragic than musical chairs. This week, Juma Mohammed Abdullah al-Kaabi, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Afghanistan, was among the eighteen people wounded in a bomb attack on the provincial governor’s guest house in Kandahar; nine other people were killed. And last month, Alexei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, was shot dead at an official function in an arts centre in Ankara; his murderer – an off-duty policeman – claimed to be taking revenge for Russian involvement in Syria.
When Kyriakos Amiridis, the Greek ambassador to Brazil, disappeared last week it was feared that he too had fallen victim to similarly dangerous political violence. His wife reported to the police that he had gone missing during a visit to Rio and hadn’t turned up to celebrate the New Year with her as planned. His charred body was found in a crashed and burnt-out car under a viaduct near the city; but the violence which ended his life doesn’t appear to have been political, after all; his wife and three men were subsequently arrested in connection with his death. One of the men, a young military police officer, is alleged to be the lover of Mrs Amiridis, so it seems that the deadly game which cost the ambassador his life was an even older one than political musical chairs, if that is at all possible.
And to bring the story full circle, from Greece back to Russia where we started, it was reported this week that a senior Russian diplomat – Andrei Malanin, head of the consular section in Greece – was found dead in his apartment in Athens. There was no sign of a break in and the coroner’s report is expected to blame natural causes. But the police investigation continues…
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