Lock 'Em In A Room

Martial’s Law of International Political Conferences

The chance that any international political meeting will result in substance is inversely proportional to the shopping available in the city where the meeting is being held.

No meetings in Paris ever accomplish anything. By contrast, meetings held in Dayton, Ohio work out just fine. There is something to be said for locking people in a room—or holding talks in a boring place—until agreement is reached.

There is a conference being held in Brussels this week on the future of Iraq just in case, on the off chance, Saddam Hussein were to leave office and a new government needs to be formed. The delegates will wrangle and they will argue and, finally, if the various factions can manage to stop showing off for their constituents and their patrons, they will arrive at a framework for a transitional administration.

Brussels is one of my least favorite cities in all the world. I don’t find it pretty; its museums are second rate; and the people are in a bad temper because they’ve been living with both the European Union and NATO for far too long. This is a city whose singular icon and tourist attraction is a fountain with a statue of a boy pissing. (In its defense, you had one of the best breakfasts of your life in a hole in the wall bakery recommended by a very nice local man. You rave about it whenever someone brings in croissants. -- ed.)

Brussels is also, alas, not a city where people can hammer out an agreement on Iraq’s future. The shopping is excellent, the dance clubs quite good (particularly the West and Central African ones), and the brothels legendary. And then there’s the ambrosial beer. There is simply too much to do in Brussels in order to have a good working conference. The meetings will start late in the mornings and people will be tired, if not hung over. The sessions after lunch will have to be postponed for naptime.

Still, at the end of the meeting, a document will be produced. It will contain all the necessary ingredients so that the participants can stand around having their photographs taken and giving interviews to CNN calling the meetings a success. That document will be worth precisely the amount of the paper it is printed on and no more for one week. After a week its value drops. Someone will begin telling their constituents that the document screws them. A second person will accuse the first of sabotage and insist that not only should they be cast out of the coalition, but their constituents should also be screwed. And so it will go, to the embarrassment of everybody involved.

(In fact, the embarrassment has already begun.)

Why were the talks on Afghanistan last year so successful? They were held outside of Bonn, not the most stimulating city in its own right, in Petersberg. Petersberg is, I believe, an old castle. It is now a state owned, and very grand, conference center. It is several winding miles outside of Bonn, on a promontory and surrounded by forest. The participants at that conference were, in effect, locked in a room together. They were told that no cars would be allowed to depart “for security reasons”, but that anyone who wanted to leave was free to walk—with the cameras of the world capturing every humiliating step.

You may recall that one delegate, Haji Abdul Qadir, did walk out of the meetings. When he realized that the threat about walking was real, he took a pleasant stroll around the gardens and returned refreshed and invigorated to the negotiating table a few hours later. (Sadly, Mr Qadir was assassinated in July of this year.)

For obvious reasons, Bonn cannot be used for the Iraq meetings—another important meeting is already scheduled for the next week. Well, that and Gerhard Schroeder is in George Bush’s doghouse.

Does anyone have a nice conference room in a boring place that they’d like to contribute to the cause of peace in our time?

N.B. It is almost impossible to find any interesting information about brothels in Brussels on the web, thus no link. There is plenty of EU commissioned commentary and handwringing on human trafficking—which actually makes my point about Brussels.

Posted by Martial