THE UNOFFICIAL EMBASSY OF IRELAND’S GUIDE TO DIPLOMACY Part 3 of 3

After a month in Kosovo, the Unofficial Embassy has shut up shop and moved home. The money ran dry and the gig was up. The ambassadors said ciao to the newest country in the world with moist eyes and trembling lips. We had enough laughs for a lifetime but we also learned some valuable lessons about diplomacy that we’d like to share with the rest of you not fortunate enough to have had your own embassy.

BE COOL
An embassy in a foreign country is no different from photos of your girlfriend’s ex in her bedroom. They’re symbols of attachment and influence. Cheeky little reminders from the past. That might explain the heavy fortifications and the paranoia. The Yanks, for example, had automatic spotlights rigged along their walls. They were bright as stadium lights and if an ambassador were to be a little tipsy on his walk home, he might mistake the lights for an alien craft. The Brits, our neighbors, had bollards at either end of the street, which was the biggest pain in the hole. Whenever you ordered pizza as it meant you had to run halfway down the road to collect it. Now, as anyone who’s ever played second fiddle before will tell you, a bitter ex is about as cool as shopping for tampons with your mother. Whereas if you can be the “I’m happy if she’s happy” guy, you steal the high moral ground and everyone likes you. As ambassadors the only thing cold about our welcome was the ice in the Guinness Martinis.

PRESS THE FLESH
It goes without saying that ambassadors should be friendly and never turn down an invitation. Invites open doors to valuable networking opportunities, drugs, and girls. That said, if you were in the game on a full-time basis, you’d really have to pick and choose your parties or you wouldn’t make it through one term. This is a picture of us at one of the many parties we attended. The big guy standing between us is Ramush Haradinaj. He’s the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo and was once the prime minister of the country. In the picture he’s holding a hurley stick, the national sport in Ireland. We used to give them out instead of business cards. Anyway, Ramush goes to us, “You know what I’m going to do with this? I’m going to hit someone over the head with it.” We didn’t laugh. He’s ex-KLA and bench presses in the middle of contract negotiations to intimidate people.

SHARE THE WEALTH
I know very little about Luxembourg. I believe they recently introduced some sort of a watered-down one-child rule as it’s getting packed over there, but really, if you asked me to describe them, I’d have to say they’re like Euro lucky dip. The Lux ambassador lived about three doors down from us in a heavily fortified cottage. The curtains were always drawn. The doors were always closed. Anything could have been going on inside. And that’s exactly the point. If you don’t show and tell every so often, people are just going to assume you’ve something to hide. Embassies should be run like backpacker hostels, where bored kids can sit up till three drinking wine out of cartons and playing Shithead for irredeemable traveller’s checks. They should let them dry their beach towels on the flagpole and call home on the ambassadors’ dime. After breakfast, we liked nothing more than strolling the wings to see how many guests we’d accumulated from the night before. I don’t want to boast, but if in nine months time we get a phone call asking us to be godfathers of a kid named Embassy, I won’t be surprised.

BE A CLOWN
Albanian is an extremely difficult language. There are all kinds of dashes, dots and squiggles jumbled alongside your common everyday alphabet, making it next to impossible for a foreigner to master. On top of that there’s dialects and accents, and a population relatively fluent in English to further complicate the matter. On the first day we learned how to say hello and thank you, then for nigh on five weeks solid, there was precious little else that came out of our mouths. We repeated the words like bird calls. The locals thought us simple, like village idiots from another land. We were light entertainment, and that brings us to the real essence of good diplomacy. Allow the rest of the world to laugh at you. It’s a brave thing to do, but it works. The best way to confront a negative stereotype is to accentuate it to the point of implausibility. And then listen for the crack as it shatters into a hundred pieces. Good diplomacy is turning a cliché to your advantage. Hence we never refused a drink, we blushed if a girl crossed our path, and we turned jigs in the street at the slightest hint of music. And then just when they were thinking these good Catholic gents were safe company for their daughters…

The Unofficial Embassy’s Guide to Kosovo Part 2 of 3

There’s no Irish embassy in Kosovo. There are no motorways or McDonald’s in Kosovo either, but sensing the easiest position to fill would be the diplomatic one, we set up a fake Irish embassy there last month. We had no power to grant visas or offer asylum, but thanks to some booze sponsors we were never more than a playlist away from hosting a good party. Here’s a few things we learned about life in Kosovo.

-In spite of the images the name conjures, Kosovo has become really safe in the past ten years. So safe that the internationals who work there recently had their salaries reduced. They’re not getting danger money anymore and they’re not happy about it. Which is a little like aid workers in Africa throwing tantrums because the famine came to an end. Anyway, it’s only when you’ve got a visitor in town and you’re explaining to them how safe the place is, and you’re boasting how even the pretty girls can walk home alone, that you stumble upon a cavalcade of twenty police cars and half the city closed off while they mop up the recently expired.

-You can smoke anywhere in Prishtina. In our last couple of days we discovered you could also smoke in the taxis and from then on every time we wanted to light up, we’d call a cab, ask him to take us round the block and savour the experience like it was still 1982. Transparency International lists Kosovo as the most corrupt country in the Balkans. Cigarettes are an easy smuggle so everyone sells them. They do the rounds of bars and cafes with trays of smokes selling Marlboros that taste like glass shards and smell like the day after Armageddon. They cost a euro or less.

-I don’t know if this is just a general niceness amongst Kosovars or some clever Anglophone who taught them the wrong expression a long time ago, but whenever you ask for a bill in Kosovo, they’ll tell you how much followed by “If you have it.” And the thing is sometimes you don’t. So when your friendly gypsy cab driver (we didn’t walk much in Kosovo, which might have been a result of all the heavy smoking, but it is possible and some people do) tells you to give him two bucks and you’ve only got a buck-fifty, he’ll say no problem and shoot you a wink. Which immediately brings us back to that whole Transparency International statistic and raises an important ethical question: if one of the outcomes of widespread corruption is that people don’t sweat over fifty cents, could some token laundering, extortion, and kidnapping benefit honest societies in the same way that parks and universal healthcare do?

-Your stories will never beat theirs. You might think the time you were stoned at a party and put a cat on the record player, or the evening you absent-mindedly climbed into bed with your girlfriend’s mother would make for clever silence fillers, but in Kosovo, this will not cut the mayo. No matter what story you tell, they can match it, and then rub it in by going one better with a sentence like: “And the whole time we’d been making out in the middle of a minefield.”

DIY EMBASSY Part 1 of 3

Kosovo gained independence from Serbia two years ago. Not everyone recognized that independence, but of the few countries that initially did, Ireland was one. As you may have heard, the Irish economy is a bit of a car wreck at the moment so they can’t afford to extend their goodwill to Kosovo and establish an embassy. We’re Irish and reasonably diplomatic so we decided to fill the void.

Now in order to be an ambassador there are a few basics you’ve got to cover. One you’ve got to get yourself a pad that reflects your country’s standing in the world. In Prishtina that’s easy as large parts of the city are abandoned–slash–too expensive for the locals. We managed to rent the former US Embassy for a song by simply choosing the option of taking it unfurnished and unheated. Prishtina is almost a mile above sea level and in winter the temperature drops below 50 degrees, so yes we’re ambassadors and we live in a mansion big enough to house a village, but we’re not shimmying round in short-shorts and polo shirts, drinking ice-tea on the veranda. No sir.

Our neighbors are the US Ambassador, the British Embassy, the German Embassy, the Turkish Embassy, and the Bulgarians, whose embassy is so small it looks like a half-finished granny flat, built for a tiny grandmother whom nobody loved.

So far, about one week into our ambassadorial career we’ve been busying ourselves trying to convince people that we’re legit, and also not get evicted for throwing parties. Most people in Prishtina live with their parents until they get married so since they found out we had a big empty mansion in town, they’ve been calling round to smoke joints and mooch our booze. Now that’s fine but the other night half the town came over. The US Ambassador’s attache complained that we were “louder than a disco.” We had to bring him over for tea and biscuits the next day, and avert our first major diplomatic incident.

Also, the British are spying on us. We found a Cadbury’s wrapper in the front garden. But even still we invited them round for our grand opening: Two TV crews, three national newspapers and a whole bunch of kids desperate for the anthems to finish so they could get inside the house and skin up. The German embassy sent their intern along to the opening to suss us out, and the British sent over their consul. She wouldn’t accept any drinks we offered her. My bet is MI5 warned her that we might spike her tea with truth serum, or roofies. She did have a handful of biscuits though which makes me think she must have been the person responsible for the Cadbury’s wrapper.

If anyone wants to come visit please do. Next week, we’re hosting a shamrock planting ceremony and turning the town’s river green. And by then we’re hoping the reggae marathon in the attic will have ended.

The Unofficial Embassy of Ireland on the Telly

Klan Kosovo, Kosovo’s national TV network visited the embassy for the opening today. We did our best to conduct the interview in Albanian, but thankfully the translators took over to save our blushes.

Breaking news in Kosovo

The Unofficial Embassy

Things are proceeding pretty well at the Embassy in Prishtina. We raised the flag and even got our first lines in the local press.

If you want to check out how we’re doing, click on the link.

The Unofficial Embassy of Ireland.

There is currently no Irish Embassy in Kosovo, so we decided to set one up. For the month of February, we’ll be living in the Dragadon area of Prishtina, Kosovo and giving out free cups of lovely Irish tea to anyone who wants to call by. We’re also going to be running an Irish language week, Irish sports days and an exhibition. Kosovo is the newest country in the world, but still only 65 countries in the world recognise its independence.

This is a link to our blog: unofficial embassy