A Fortunate Life (58 page)

In the middle of 2001, the international community decided that I should take over as the new High Representative and European Union Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina
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in May of the following year. A senior member of the Foreign Office told me he was present when Tony Blair sought support for my candidature from his fellow European leaders. One of them asked who I was and whether I was really up to such a difficult post, to which Blair replied, ‘Look, this guy led the British Liberal Democrats for eleven years. After that, Bosnia will be a doddle!’

In September Ian Patrick and I set up a small office in the attic of the Foreign Office. Here, over the next few months, we assembled the core team who would help me in Bosnia and started to put together a plan for what I would do when I got there.

I also started to try to learn what used to be known as Serbo-Croat, my sixth language, with the help of an outstanding Bosnian teacher in the Government language school, Edina Kulenović. In fact, the term Serbo-Croat is never used nowadays, and the language is known as Serb in Serbia, Croatian in Croatia and Bosnian among the Muslim population of Bosnia – even though the three languages are, for all practical purposes, exactly the same. But, whatever people chose to call it, this was by far the most difficult language I have ever attempted: partly because I was only able to do it part-time for a short period, partly because of its grammatical complexities, but mostly, I suspect, because my brain was far less supple and agile at sixty than when I had learned Chinese as a twenty-seven-year-old. I cannot say that I became fluent, but I learned enough to understand most of what was being said and to converse on simple, everyday matters.

Over the next few months, three others joined us to complete what would become my personal office. Julian Braithwaite, who was to handle my relations with the Press, came to me from a spell as Alastair Campbell’s assistant in No. 10 Downing Street, having been a diplomat in the Belgrade Embassy before that. Edward Llewellyn, who turned down the opportunity to work for the Prince of Wales in order to join us, was a committed Conservative who had worked for Chris Patten when he was Governor of Hong Kong and, later, a European Commissioner. He also had experience in Bosnia, and now joined the team as my Chief of Staff and head of my political department.
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The third of the triumvirate, Julian Astle, who would look after all my relations with the domestic political structures in Bosnia, had worked in my Lib Dem Leader’s Office as a speech-writer, policy adviser and manager of, amongst other things, our secret negotiations with Blair and No. 10. Together with Ian Patrick, Deana Brynildsen, who was lent to us by the
Canadian Government for confidential duties, our two secretaries, Amela Zahirağvić and Sandra Radosavljević, and three drivers, Dragan Grahovac, Sejo Palo and Mirsad Tufo, all of whom we recruited from the staff of the OHR in Sarajevo, they formed the most gifted and able team of close advisers I have ever had the good fortune to work with.

During the seven years since Dayton was signed, my three predecessors as High Representative had overseen a huge and successful effort to stabilise Bosnia, with the international community pouring into the country more aid per capita than the Marshall Plan for Europe after World War Two. As a result, much of Bosnia had been reconstructed, refugees were now returning home in large numbers, and there was freedom of movement across the country, all under the secure peace established by a massive NATO presence, numbering at one time some sixty thousand troops.

It was clear to me that the stabilisation phase of Bosnia’s return to normality was over. Our job during my mandate was, therefore, not to create peace – that had already been done – but to begin to build a functioning state capable one day of joining Europe. Slowly, over the ensuing months, we put together a detailed plan of what we would do, concentrating chiefly on building the basic framework of a lightly structured state, with most power decentralised. We gave special priority to three areas: establishing the rule of law, getting the economy moving and beginning to tackle high-level corruption in the country.

In the middle of all this, I was suddenly confronted with one of those events that people in public life half wish for, but half dread at the same time. On Saturday 20 October, at Ian Patrick’s insistence, I somewhat grumpily agreed to interrupt a weekend and drive up to London to do a BBC interview at their White City studios. As I was checking in at the BBC reception desk, Michael Aspel emerged from behind a curtain with a cameraman and uttered the famous phrase, ‘Paddy Ashdown, This Is Your Life.’ It was a considerable shock, but a marvellous one, which ended in a very emotional evening with many old friends and some long-lost relations, including, to my joy, my brother and sister from Australia whom I had not seen for more than thirty years.

As soon as I had waved an emotional goodbye to my Australian siblings at the end of a memorable week together, I found myself flying off in the opposite direction, to the United States to try to win the support of the US Government for the Bosnia plan we had assembled. There I saw Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who gave me his unstinting backing and said I could call him up any time if I needed
his help. It was a most generous offer and one I was to take up only once during my four-year mandate.

In the early months of 2002 we visited the other key capitals, mostly in Europe, whose support would be crucial if we were to push through what was by now a very detailed and ambitious plan to begin creating the effective institutions of a Bosnian state and tackle high-level crime. Now we were ready to go. Jane had packed all our stuff, the plan was finalised and my little team was eager to start.

But I had one more thing to do before we left. On 12 March 2002 I was summoned to The Hague to give evidence in the trial of Slobodan Milošević on the bombardment of villages in southern Kosovo and my subsequent meeting with him in September 1998. Milošević had proved a most effective advocate in his own cause and had often showed that he knew more about specific events and places than those who were giving evidence against him. He had also developed a devastating line in sarcasm and had often established a dominance over witnesses, especially simple Kosovars, which had effectively destroyed their credibility. He was able to achieve this because he was completely uninterested in the judgement or procedures of the court, whose legitimacy he contemptuously rejected. His audience was not in the courtroom at The Hague, but amongst his own people in Serbia and Bosnia. I knew our televised encounter (which was heavily publicised beforehand) would be widely watched, including in Bosnia, and if he succeeded in making a fool of me or intimidating me then my authority in the job I was about to do would be fatally undermined. Our meeting therefore became something of a battle of wits in which I tried to keep him tightly confined to the events I had seen and not let him wander off into generalised diatribes about western politicians and the west’s ‘illegal’ actions in the recent war. In the end he proved far less effective than I had feared, and the prosecution and my Bosnia team seemed, overall, satisfied with the outcome. For my part, I was just relieved it was all over. (This was not my last visit to The Hague. At the end of 2002, I was back in the Tribunal courtroom for my third visit, this time giving evidence about what I had seen at the Serb-run Manjaca and Trnopolje camps during my first visits to Bosnia, back in 1992.)

Finally, our preparations complete, the six of us flew out to Sarajevo on 27 May 2002. There Jane moved us into a modest house above Sarajevo old town, and I started my mandate as the new High Representative.

At this point I need to do three brief introductions; first to the Balkans; then to the star of this chapter and these years of our lives, the little country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and finally to the job I had to do there as the international ‘High Representative’.

The best description of the Balkans I know is in Cy Sulzberger’s 1969 book
A Long Row of Candles
:

I was neither footloose, nor a youngster, when I arrived in Sarajevo airport in May 2002, but that in no way immunised me against the fascination and romance of the Balkans that Sulzberger evokes so well. For the truth is that what began as an interest in Bosnia turned, over the next nearly four years, into a love affair with this remarkable country and its people, which for Jane and I has now become inextricably woven into the pattern of our lives.

Some countries are defined by their unity. Bosnia, about the size of Wales, is defined by its divisions. Even the land is divided into three.

Northern Bosnia is flat, alluvial and lies in the flood plain of the Sava River, which marks the country’s northern border and is one of the great tributaries of the Danube. Here they grow corn, wonderful plums and other fruit, as well as superb vegetables.

Then there is middle Bosnia, which I especially loved. This is a country of high, snow-capped mountains reaching up to 6,000ft, deep valleys, primeval forests, vertically sided ravines and raging torrents. Here are bears and wolves, ibex
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and mouflon,
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not because they
have been recently imported, but because they have never left. Here are alpine villages, cut off for three months of the year, where things haven’t changed for a hundred years. And here is a phenomenon so extraordinary that, as someone from flat, boring northern Europe, it always seemed a wonder to me. The Bosnian call them
vrelos
, which just means ‘springs’. But these are completely different from the little gurgling things that I am used to. These are whole rivers that leap, fully formed, crystal-clear and ice-cold, from the foot of mountains. Bosnia stands on the world’s largest limestone
karst
plateau, which runs from southern Austria to the Adriatic. All the rain and snow that falls on its mountains sinks vertically down through the limestone, and it often takes several years for the water to make its way down into underground rivers and out into the sunlight again. Each
vrelo
in Bosnia is different, but all are magic. The
vrelo Bosne
seeps as quiet as a prayer into limpid green pools on the outskirts of Sarajevo, before flowing away north as the Bosna River (from which the country gets its name) to the Sava, the Danube and the Black Sea. The
vrelo Bune
, near Mostar, swims like a sinuous green fish out of a mysterious black cavern over which sits an ancient Dervish monastery. It forms the Buna River, which joins the great Neretva near Mostar and flows south to the Adriatic. Near Livno in the south of Bosnia is the
vrelo
Bistrice
, which, after rain, roars out of the base of a cliff like a lion, flows quietly for a couple of kilometres and then vanishes underground once more, never to be seen again.

And finally there is southern Bosnia – a land of great rolling hills and wide, open valleys – which looks like a scrub-covered version of lowland Scotland. Quite suddenly, as you cross into this part of Bosnia the vegetation shifts from northern European to Mediterranean. This transformation can occur in the space of a few yards, across a single mountain ridge line, with wild raspberries and northern Alpine flowers on one side and sage and wild thyme and
maquis
scrub a few steps away on the other. Life is tough on these great ridges, where a myriad limestone sink-holes steal away the water as soon as it falls, and where the people are as hard as the stones from which they make their living.