Ryszard Kapuscinski Quotes
Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room.
Kapuściński, Ryszard. The Shadow of the Sun. Translated by Klara Glowczewska, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Kennan was talking about the Russians, but the same principle seems to hold with any autocratic government and in some cases even democracies. However, the tradition of secret diplomacy with no transparency is established even in many democracies. Great Britain and France, for example conduct most of their diplomacy in secret as do less democratic governments and tyrannies. They expect us to keep negotiations confidential, which causes American diplomats to be torn between the American view of transparency and the tradition of confidentiality.
Turkey had just defeated a Greek invading army with bitter atrocities on both sides. The two countries were bitter enemies. His colleagues thought Ataturk had lost is sense of reality to even suggest such a thing. 50 years later Greece and Turkey were both in NATO.
He was shot as a traitor when de Gaulle returned. See {587231} and {587230}.
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda accorded him the title "Maestro".
