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I wanted to try a handmade composition and I fell in love with the result :) Here are some coins and a banknote I got from previous holidays..plus some euros to complete the composition.
PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 14: Soldiers from the Castelnaudary 4th Foreign Regiment (Legion etrangere) march down the Champs-Elysees during the annual Bastille day parade on July 14, 2011 in Paris, France. The French National Day celebrates its revolution in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 through various parades and official ceremonies throughout France.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman administers the oath of office and swears in the largest-ever Foreign Service Orientation Class at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on February 24, 2023. [State Department photo by Ron Przysucha/ Public Domain]
OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger meets with Foreign Minister of Sweden Margot Wallström, Vienna, 7 December 2017. (OSCE/MRodgers)
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivers remarks at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Day Memorial Plaque Ceremony at the Department in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 2017. The Secretary paid tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice while serving our country around the world. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 14: Soldiers from the Castelnaudary 4th Foreign Regiment (Legion etrangere) march down the Champs-Elysees during the annual Bastille day parade on July 14, 2011 in Paris, France. The French National Day celebrates its revolution in the1789 through various parades in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 through various parades and official ceremonies throughout France.
SD40-2 No. 3415 is lettered for the Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern, but it is actually working a Huron & Eastern train in Durand, Michigan. Both carriers are property of short line holding company Genesee & Wyoming.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks at the Foreign Affairs Policy Board meeting at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 2016. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]
Legionnaires from 4th Company, 2ème Régiment Etranger d'Infanterie, taking part in a mechanized warfare exercise – March 2019
Photo: 2ème Régiment Etranger d'Infanterie
PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 14: Soldiers from the Castelnaudary 4th Foreign Regiment (Legion etrangere) march down the Champs-Elysees during the annual Bastille day parade on July 14, 2011 in Paris, France. The French National Day celebrates its revolution in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 through various parades and official ceremonies throughout France.
Un groupe de légionnaires du 2e Régiment étranger d'infanterie (REI) patrouille lors de l'opération ''Prométhée'dans le secteur de Géryville.
Operation "Prometheus" – Algeria 1960
Legionaries of 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (REI) during operation "Prometheus"
around the mountainous terrain in the region of Géryville in Oran, This operation is designed to eradicate the separatist in South Oran Algeria
The soldiers were delivered by Sikorsky Helicopters and despite the heat, which forced them to take short breaks, they move through the mountains, which highlights the breathtaking scenic panorama of the region. When contacted the Algerian independence fighters several were killed and one Legionnaire was wounded, the latter is transported on a stretcher awaiting evacuation.
At the end of the mission, a transmitter establishes a radio signal giving the helicopter to approach the helicopter for the troops.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman meets with New Zealand Chief Executive and Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade Chris Seed at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 23, 2022. [State Department photo by Freddie Everett/ Public Domain]
Members of the French Foreign Legion conduct urban operations as part of Exercise Bold Alligator 17 at Military Operations in Urban Terrain Town on Camp Lejeune, N.C., Oct. 29, 2017. Bold Alligator 17 is a large scale, multinational amphibious exercise designed to execute complex shaping operations, amphibious landing and attack, and sea basing operations to improve U.S. and coalition ship-to-shore capabilities. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Abraham Lopez)
The IG4SIB about to knock down the signal at Gratiot, at the end of the MacArthur Bridge approach, with some foreign power in the mix.
Legionnaires from the French Foreign Legion during combat operations while serving in Afghanistan with ISAF - 2011
Photos: Adj. Pelote
The history of the Pakistan Foreign Service is as old as Pakistan itself. Just as the country has gone through its periodic ebbs and tides, so have the Foreign Service and its mandarins experienced periods of perfect calm followed by strong currents of unsettling tumult. It has, in the process, had more than its fair share of challenges and storms.
A constant in the 60 years of Pakistan Foreign Service is the element of envy — of its mandate to man the ramparts of Pakistan abroad, often in unfriendly environs and under daunting conditions — and hostility to those charged with the onus to discharge the mission. Foreign Service mandarins, predominantly drawn from the country’s shrinking middle-class, have been a target of derision, mockery and, often, open hostility from its political masters, representing its feudal elite and soldiers-of-fortune.
Dr Samiullah Koreshi is one of the early pioneers of the Foreign Service and has deftly woven an interesting pastiche of this and other unsavory aspects of the unwelcome ambience in which the service has been cultured over the past decades. Although these are his memoirs and his reason for writing them couldn’t be any other than to highlight the personal imprints he has left on the passage of the Foreign Service over the decades since its inception, and the meandering course of Pakistan’s foreign policy, the history of the service, of which he was a luminary, unconsciously threads its way into his personal account.
He recounts, for instance, a truly hare-brained scheme of Manzoor Qadir, who, as foreign ninister under Ayub Khan, had the reputation of being a genius and a foreign policy wizard, to have only a handful of Pakistani embassies in the outside world: not more than a dozen, to cover the whole wide world. Ayub’s finance minister, Mohammad Shoaib, had an even sillier scheme up his sleeve; he sought not only to reduce the number of embassies abroad but also slash their manpower to an unworkable minimum; just an ambassador and a junior officer. He impishly christened it as ‘a man-and-boy’ team of diplomats.
Shoaib, too, was undeservedly hailed as a financial genius and ace economist whereas his only qualification was that he was a World Bank implant in Pakistan. The fetish with America-returned wizards has robustly flourished to date in Pakistan. The current power dispensation is larded, to our dismay, with such wizard-wonders, aplenty. Bankers with money-laundering credentials have been ruling the roost in Pakistan as economists, par excellence.
Dr Koreshi recalls that all these schemes were the brainchildren of powerful and power-hungry CSP officers who’d struck up an alliance with the army under Ayub. They wanted to do away with the Foreign Service altogether and have, instead, only a general pool of officers, crisscrossing the boundaries of civil and foreign services. The snide purpose was to open the rich pickings of foreign postings to the CSP cabal.
But the gods were kind to the Foreign Service mandarins because they happened to have a man as intelligent and suave as Mr Ikramullah as foreign secretary, for a second time. He saved the service by convincing Ayub of its fatuity. But the service didn’t prove to be as lucky under those who followed Ayub, especially those wearing the khaki in Pakistan. The present regime has taken the process of stuffing the embassies abroad with its favourites to the extreme, at the obvious cost of the service Brahmins.
Dr Koreshi makes some other fascinating, if not exactly sensational, revelations.
For instance, he lifts the veil on the cloak-and-dagger operation of October 27, 1958 — barely 20 days after Ayub had proclaimed martial law in Pakistan — when Ayub’s co-conspirator, President Iskandar Mirza, was unceremoniously bundled off to London in the dark of the night. He reveals, on the authority of Air Commodore Maqbool Rab, his ambassador in Ankara, that Iskandar Mirza had ordered him (Rab) to arrest Ayub upon his arrival at the Mauripur Airbase of Karachi. Rab was Vice-Chief of the Pakistan Air Force and out of inter-services loyalty reported it to his military colleagues. Ayub rewarded Rab for his loyalty with the embassy in Turkey.
Dr Koreshi, who served nearly 40 years in the diplomatic service, has other interesting anecdotes and episodes to tell in his memoirs. All diplomats, invariably, have such anecdotes to recount in their repertoire of memories. Dr Koreshi was lucky that he served in some very interesting places, India (where he served in three different locations, Jallandar, Chandi Garh and Delhi), Russia, Canada, Turkey, Lebanon, Nigeria, Japan, Indonesia, et al and met some of those who were prominent in the making of history. Some of those were colorful characters, like Yasser Arafat, General Yaqubo Gowan of Nigeria and General Suharto of Indonesia, among others.
There’s a lot of Dr Koreshi in these memoirs, a little too much, for some. But this is understandable. It’s basically an account of his personal journey as a Pakistani diplomat, who climbed the ladder of the Foreign Service with hard work, dexterity, wit and great perseverance. He earned a place under the Foreign Office sun on the dint of sheer labour and intelligence. None should begrudge him if he’s suspected of giving airs to himself at some places. Like any other diplomat, he’s entitled to prize some trophies in his bag, as he went around the world, selling his staple merchandise of words and wits.
He credits himself, for instance, for convincing Yasser Arafat to go personally to New York, in 1975, to address the UN General Assembly. That’s was Arafat’s maiden appearance at the UN when he delivered the famous speech in which he said he was carrying a gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Dr Koreshi claims he was the only Pakistani of any consequence whom the legendary Arafat respected from his heart, and listened to like a brother. Well, there seems little reason to dispute this statement, especially now that Arafat has been dead for three years.
Like any other Foreign Service mandarin, Dr Koreshi, too has his fill of regrets and remonstrations. For example, he feels bitter about the in-palace intrigues — quite shameless, at that — of some of his senior colleagues that robbed him of the chance to become foreign secretary under General Ziaul Haq. To become the head of the Foreign Office is a prize coveted by every service Brahmin. He, thus, has every right to feel betrayed and sourly let-down by his own service colleagues. But, the, the Pakistan Foreign Service is, and has always been, like a strait-jacket with room at the top terribly constricted. Being a smaller service, compared to the civil service or police, it has annoyingly suffered from the syndrome of ‘dog-eating-dog’ and colleagues frequently stabbing colleagues in the back, with little remorse or compunction. It’s simply survival of the smartest, not necessarily the most intelligent or competent. To Dr Koreshi’s credit, he doesn’t name the names of those villains who were his nemeses.
But Dr Koreshi himself doesn’t sound too complimenting to his Bengali colleagues, when writing about their conduct in the backdrop of the break-up of Pakistan, in 1971. He faults them for carrying chips on their shoulders against a united Pakistan but conveniently glosses over the less-than-edifying contribution of bureaucrats of West Pakistan who contributed, immensely, wittingly or unwittingly, in the widening of the gulf between East and West Pakistan.
The author had earlier written his memoirs in English. Why did he think of writing them in Urdu, too, should best be known to him. However, in doing so he has done himself and Pakistan a service, perhaps unwittingly. The readership of English books in Pakistan has been on a downward curve for sometime and readers of English abroad aren’t quite that interested in reading the memoirs of a Pakistani diplomat, no matter how colourful or controversial. By contrast, Urdu readership has a much larger and accommodating circle in Pakistan. Dr Koreshi’s memoirs, written in a fluent and uncluttered prose, should be a good and interesting read for Pakistanis, of this generation, as well as for those to follow.
The book is well studded with Dr Koreshi’s collection of mementos and memorabilia, as also with photographs of his with many of those who made history.
DAWN November 25, 2007
No idea how I managed to stumbled upon this one, can any of my Dutch flickr contacts fill in the blanks regarding the Taunus. Looks like a weird, distant cousin of the first generation Cortina, they are probably more closely similar than I realise, as was the case with the later models of each nameplate.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, US President Joe Biden and Camillla, Duchess of Cornwall, talk at a COP26 reception at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow. Photograph: Karwai Tang/ UK Government