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Between 1997-1998, Carne Ross was speechwriter to the British Foreign Secretary, preparing speeches on all areas of British foreign policy. He then moved UK delegation on the UN Security Council, where he worked on the drafting and negotiation of several important Security Council resolutions, such as SCR 1284 which rewrote the Council’s Iraq policy and established UNMOVIC, the weapons inspection body. Ross resigned from the British foreign office in 2004, after giving then-secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on WMD in advance of the 2003 Iraq war. He has also subsequently testified to the Chilcot Inquiry investigating the lead-up to and conduct of that war.
Ross founded Independent Diplomat in 2004 to address the “diplomatic deficit” created by a diplomatic system that all too often excludes or marginalises many governments and groups most affected by the decisions made within it, and usually those who are suffering the most.
His latest book The Leaderless Revolution was published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster (UK) and Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin (US). His first book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite was published in 2007 by Hurst & Co. (UK) and Cornell University Press (US).
Responses to: Solving the Western Sahara — What Now Remains
The latest diplomatic dance on whether or not former US Ambassador Christopher Ross should be allowed to continue to mediate UN-led talks between the Frente Polisario and Morocco on the future of Western Sahara is symptomatic of a much bigger problem ― the large powers’ unwillingness to advance an end to a dispute that they mistakenly see as peripheral to their strategic interests, and their resultant acquiescence in the brutal and illegal occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco for more than 35 years.
Responses to “Autonomy: The Optimal Political Solution”
