In 1911 Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society, which based its teaching on Hindu ideas and philosophy, brought Krishnamurti, a brahmin child named after the Hindu divinity, and his brother Nitya, to England. Lady Emily took the two boys “under her wing” and the young Mary grew up knowing them well.
Although in later life she was not a strict theosophist, she was interested in psychic matters and remained dedicated to Krishnamurti, writing several books about him, including Krishnamurti, a three- volume biography (1975-88), and The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (1990). Her determination to preserve Krishnamurti’s good name extended to her writing a secret rebuttal of an Indian woman’s derogatory account of his life.Lutyens remembered Annie Besant as being the only person in her life for whom she felt any hero worship, and from her childhood encounters with theosophy she gained a respect for the beliefs of others which stayed with her throughout her life.She was born in London in 1908, the youngest child of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, the daughter of Edward Robert Lytton, Viceroy of India and first Earl of Lytton. The Western governments must announce that the external borders of Yugoslavia are not in question. The swiftest way to provoke their hostility is to instil the suspicion that the Nato protectorate in Kosovo will lead to the creation of a greater Albanian state. The support or at least the acquiescence of Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro are all important to the success of a limited war. And despite the politicians’ platitudes that invading Kosovo will be dangerous, Nato will win the war.The greatest threat to the successful prosecution of an invasion is doubt in the minds of Kosovo’s neighbours about Nato’s aims.

Tony Blair is carefully leaving open the opportunity to authorise a land invasion. The Pentagon has admitted that there are plans for an invasion. The establishment of a protectorate will be difficult enough without having to cope with an all-out Balkan war.The Western governments are tortuously manoeuvring towards accepting the inevitability of using ground troops through double negatives and what they leave unsaid. This will be impossible without an army to keep the ethnic Albanians and Serbs from each others’ throats. There will have to be a Nato element in that force if the ethnic Albanians are to accept it. While this now forces Nato to protect Albania, Nato must ensure that the fighting does not to spread to Macedonia and Montenegro.
To ensure that this does not happen, Nato needs to hold fast to its political objectives. At yesterday’s meeting in Brussels, the 19 Nato members pledged to attack President Milosevic until he “accedes to the demands of the international community”.

The most important of these demands is that the Yugoslav regime allows Kosovars to return to their homeland and live there in tranquillity. This is hardly surprising given that Albania has recently handed over control of its airspace and ports to Nato. Albania is now the base from which Nato has decided to land its punches on Serbia. President Milosevic is thus justified to regard his regime at war with Albania. THE MOST ominous development of the war in Kosovo has come with the news that the Serb forces in the province are shelling Albania. The great danger now is that the war will spill over into Macedonia and the Yugoslav province of Montenegro, leading to more burnt villages, dispersed families and an acceleration of the violence.

As Nato talks about “tightening the screws” on Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia, his army is continuing to ignore Nato bombs and wage the war on its own terms by shelling the towns of Tropoja and Padesh in northern Albania. There will be few in Northern Ireland who will want to resume the bombing over the issue of decommissioning The pity is that it only ever takes a few.. If the IRA chooses to hamstring Sinn Fein, it will have thrown away peace for the sake of a symbol. There must be every effort to show the IRA that decommissioning weapons does not represent surrender but the opportunity to create a just future for Northern Ireland’s Catholic and republican people.However, Sinn Fein cannot expect much more from the British government If these talks fail it will be the IRA’s fault. The British government has sensibly offered to make concessions about the presence of British troops in Ulster in return for some IRA weapons being decommissioned. Even without the Garvaghy Road, the European elections will take up politicians’ time and goodwill.The Hillsborough Declaration, issued by the British and Irish governments before Easter, set out a draft agreement for decommissioning. Another series of riots on the Garvaghy Road between police and Unionists before the executive is in place could create the kind of lawlessness that would kill the negotiations.

To add fuel to the flames the Orange marching season begins in June. However, some deadlines are not arbitrary.Last year’s referendum in Eire that secured the abandonment of the claim to sovereignty over the six Ulster counties depended on setting up a new government in Northern Ireland in a year’s time. To let the talks drift on would almost certainly lead to the end of the Good Friday Agreement The negotiations were meant to have concluded by Easter. In shifting the deadline, Mo Mowlam showed that she was aware that the political process should not be stymied by such negotiating devices as deadlines. At first Dr Mowlam and her Irish counterpart will be presiding over the negotiations.