Kosovo - an early to-do list

So, hello Kosovo. It must be nice to be a new country with everything to play for. There’s obviously plenty to do – there’s a new currency to design, tax collectors and tourism ministers to recruit, an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest to pen, a national drink to, well, drink.

On top of all that you need a national anthem – not your usual dirge, but something more likely to scare the shit out of anyone hearing it. In fact something like the hakka, performed by the New Zealand Rugby Union team before each match. This seems to say “We are mighty. You are feeble and have the gonads of mice. We are going to kill you.”

It’s important to get all the cultural sensitivities right and I think that strikes the right note.

Of course it’s a relatively civilised business setting up your country these days. In colonial times we never used to worry about other people's cultural sensitivity. Or their religions, laws, land rights, customs, women, dignity, reserves of spices/gold/slaves/opiates/diamonds/uranium etc.

Our civil servants have sat round many a mahogany table with our allies, carving up continents more or less at random. They've got out protractors, rulers, dividers and all those other geometry instruments that no-one has seen since 1970.

They've drawn nice neat lines round colossal swathes of territory and said OK let's call it Rhodesia. No matter that the new borders slice straight through ancient tribal homelands, bisect your royal palace at the billiard room, give you a piece of lake measuring four feet by 1,500 miles, put the source of your main water supply in the hands of your deadliest enemies and place your bauxite reserves in the Spanish enclave next door.

It’s tough that we couldn't find anywhere for the Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Karen, Welsh, Basques, etc but look, we've DRAWN it now.

These fellows played their cartography to win. If you were so rude as to disagree with their arbitrary geometry, then we'd simply pile in a couple of hundred crack troops and have you swinging from your palace balcony in no time.

These days we can't get away with such whimsical behaviour as you have probably noticed. By and large people can do what they like inside their own borders. Our governments concentrate instead on telling us what we can do in our own homes - individually we're easier to subdue than United Nations delegations, hedge fund billionaires and the Taleban.

One Man's War

It is more than 40 years since I personally declared war on the United States of America in a brief note to the ambassador. For added gravitas I wrote it on proper paper with a fountain pen. Obviously I wasn't entirely sure of the rules, and imagined a possible scene in the Grosvenor Square Embassy mail‑room:

A: Uh oh, we've got a declaration of war here

B: Who's it from?

A: Some kid called David Watson

B: Is it in fountain pen?

A: Yes

B: Does he have any weapons of mass destruction?

A: It doesn't say

B: OK, file it under "Won"

I can't remember what prompted me to this dangerous course of action, but for several weeks afterwards I kept an eye open for strike bombers over our house, and travelled to school as if moving through enemy territory – keeping to the shadows, zig‑zagging across open spaces and wearing a false moustache.

I wondered how the official reply might read – eg:

Dear Mr Watson,

Thanks for your note of the 15th inst. declaring war. We accept, on condition that you sign the Geneva Convention.

Yours sincerely,

The US Ambassador

I mean, when countries declare war on you is it essential to write back to make things official? Or is it enough simply to have a flight of stealth bombers attack your TV station?

Anyway, at least such a reply would have given me a way out. I mean, where do you go to sign the Geneva Convention? Geneva? The Post Office?

However, they never wrote back, leaving me in limbo. When you're entirely on your own, war can be fairly time‑consuming and, what with homework, piano lessons and puberty to deal with, I didn't manage to extract as much value from it as I'd have liked.

With the prevailing level of pocket money, finance was obviously my biggest problem. With more resources I could at least have had some of the paraphernalia – an espionage operation, secret passwords, propaganda, medals, etc.

Of course it says something about the Special Relationship between our countries, or perhaps the embassy filing system, that I had no problem getting a US visa 15 years later. However, the fact remains that I may still be technically at war with America, which is a slight worry.

However, while it has been a rather lonely struggle, there have been no casualties and no problems with reconstruction. In addition, I get to write the history of it, so when I’ve nothing better to do …

In the UK we’ve been tempted, rather unfairly, to see Iraq as one man's war also – Tony Blair’s. But he didn’t so much declare war on Saddam’s Iraq as commit to solidarity with Bush’s US. His real one man’s wars were in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where he came out on top, so I’m glad I didn’t declare war on him.

If he hadn't finished me off by now he'd have handed me over to Gordon Brown last week - a man who's been at war with me, and most other people, for 10 years already. And I think he's winning.