A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  However many voices were whispering in Bill’s ear that the famed Blair machine was trying to upend him and grandstand, fortunately he didn’t let it bother him for long. And on the decision that mattered, he was moving in the right direction and with considerable courage.

  Over the next two weeks, it became apparent that the American resolve to see this through had hardened. Clinton was arriving at the decision to prepare and if necessary implement the ground-force option – at least in his own mind, but it is remarkable how quickly such things are communicated almost by osmosis through the system. Press reports to that effect started to circulate.

  On 27 May, we spoke again and I followed it up with another personal note. He was not fully convinced, but we were on a trajectory. I also pointed out that a victory against Milosevic could be the signal to offer a whole new future to the Balkan countries, within Europe.

  Interestingly, on 1 June, David Miliband sent me a note from Florida, where he had been at the same time as the president; David minuted that he thought Clinton’s mind was made up and now the issue was only how he could persuade the American people.

  As our resolve grew, so Milosevic’s started to collapse. We were nearing the end. As European leaders met on 3 June, the UN negotiators led by President Ahtisaari of Finland went to Belgrade. Milosevic was prepared to capitulate. Over the coming days, there were some ups and downs but essentially it was over. On 10 June, the agreement for the complete and unconditional withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo was concluded.

  There was an extraordinary epilogue, which arose in this way: the idea was for the Serbian forces to withdraw, and then NATO would go into Priština airport. On Friday 11 June, we awoke to news that there was a delay, and suddenly we were told Russian forces intended to occupy the airport. Throughout, of course, the Russians had been strongly opposed to the military action, which was one reason why we couldn’t get a UN Security Council Resolution. They were obviously very closely connected to the Serbs. If they then took over the main airport, it would turn everything into a fiasco.

  Russian planes demanded airspace to fly through Hungary to get to the airport. Russian tanks were on their way from Bosnia. At this point Wes Clark decided we had to take the Russians on. He wanted to order General Mike Jackson, the British on-the-ground NATO commander, to fight for control of the airport if necessary. Wes was Mike’s commanding officer for these purposes. It was, therefore, very tricky. Did we really want British forces fighting Russians? I didn’t think so.

  Wes was absolutely right to be mad at the Russians. It was a total breach of the understandings that had been made. It was inflammatory and it threatened the peace.

  I came out of a meeting to take the increasingly frantic calls ricocheting around the system. Charles Guthrie thought we should be extremely cautious. Contrary to all propriety in chains of command, I called Mike Jackson myself. Fortunately he was a very sound and solid citizen, brave though not daft; but also in a difficult position: Wes was his commander-in-chief. Mike explained an order was an order. What should he do? The US forces hadn’t arrived. Only the Brits were on the spot. To fight, or not to fight? Mike clearly thought fighting the Russians was completely crackers. I told him to play along, ignore the order and stay cool. He sounded relieved.

  Finally, after a couple of days of farcical toing and froing, the Russians said it had all been a mistake and the matter was settled. I often wondered what would have happened if I had told Mike to obey the order to fight. Doesn’t bear thinking of, really.

  The Russians were very weird to deal with at this time. Yeltsin was a man of considerable courage and had done a great thing for his country in defying the coup against the democratic forces after the Gorbachev changes in Russia. But by the time I knew him, he had become, let us say, a bit unpredictable. I recall meeting him at an international summit shortly after the Kosovo conflict. We had exchanged some pretty harsh words about it, but it was all over now, so he came across the room to greet me with one of his famous hugs. I was happy to be embraced, as it signalled that the feud was a thing of the past and now we could all get on. The hug began. The first ten seconds were, I thought, wonderfully friendly. The next ten began to get a little uncomfortable. The following ten started respiratory problems. I finally got released after about a minute and staggered off in search of a stiff drink. I think he made his point.

  I got to know Vladimir Putin far better than I ever knew Boris Yeltsin. It was a relationship that began really well, and though over time it cooled – as a result of Iraq, but more perhaps as a result of the worsening Russia–US relationship – I never forgot the initial warmth, and never gave up trying to understand what made him as he was and is.

  One thing I did get completely: when Russia was the Soviet Union, although it had the wrong system of government and economy, it was nevertheless a power; it was treated with respect, even feared. It counted. I understood how glasnost, perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall may have liberated Russia from Communism, but it also made it seem to lose its position in the world. Yeltsin, for all his strengths, was not someone capable of regaining that position. Putin was; he is quintessentially a nationalist.

  I also had a serendipitous connection with him. Our friends the Strozzis, whose villa in Tuscany we used to visit, were Russian on Irina’s side. They are a remarkable family. He is a professor whose ancestor has been associated with Machiavelli, and she is a strong-minded and delightful person. Together they have produced two extraordinarily talented daughters who both speak five languages. Irina’s family had fled during the Revolution and settled in France, where she and her brother Vladimir were brought up, but they continued to be engaged with Russia. A good friend of Vladimir’s was the then mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, who was also the patron of Putin. I met Sobchak at the Strozzi villa in 1996, and once more before his premature death in February 2000 (supposedly from natural causes).

  This gave me a point of connection with Putin, who had been Yeltsin’s prime minister before running for president himself. As prime minister, Putin had prosecuted the war in Chechnya with vigour and, some said, brutality. Though I understood the criticism, I was sympathetic to the fact that this was also a vicious secessionist movement with Islamic extremism at its core, so I understood the Russian perspective as well.

  I met him just before he took over as president in 2000, when others at that time, including Jacques Chirac, gave him something of a cold shoulder. Of course, in time that all changed and their relationship became very close as mine waned. Back then, Putin wanted Russia to orient towards Europe, and our first meeting was in St Petersburg, the most European of all Russian cities. He admired America and wanted a strong relationship with it. He wanted to pursue democratic and economic reform in Russia. We were the same age and, it seemed, shared the same outlook.

  We met at the Mariinsky Theatre to see an opera conducted by Valery Gergiev. Putin had chosen the opera carefully: War and Peace by Prokofiev, written as a morale booster for Russian nationalism and caricaturing Napoleon as Hitler. It was an extraordinary occasion and all of Russian top society was there. One thing happened which I often recalled to myself in future years. Vladimir and I walked through the beautiful corridors of the magnificent nineteenth-century building. In a similar situation in the UK, I would have been greeting people, shaking hands, engaging and being engaged; with Vladimir I noticed people fell back as he approached, not in fear or anything; but a little in awe and with reverence. It was a tsar-like moment and I thought: Hmm, their politics really isn’t like ours at all.

  Vladimir later came to believe that the Americans did not give him his due place. Worse, he saw them as circling Russia with Western-supporting ‘democracies’ who were going to be hostile to Russian interests.

  In vain, I tried to get him to see that actually we supported those countries in their wish for democracy, not because we saw them as a strategic bulwark, enfeebling or encircling Russia, but because we genuinely believed t
hat if they wanted to have the same freedom as us, we should allow and encourage it. I even proposed (and got accepted at NATO) a new arrangement for cooperation with Russia, which gave them a far greater involvement in NATO decision-making.

  But in time, my efforts failed. Iraq; National Missile Defence which, in a sense understandably, they saw as aimed at them; the weakness, as they saw it, of the American efforts to construct a proper partnership; and most of all, the Western belief that under Putin’s leadership Russia began to exhibit undemocratic and tsarist/KGB tendencies – all of this conspired to put him in a position where he believed it was better for Russia to be ‘independent’ (i.e. difficult) and to pursue a foreign policy of a very nationalist kind.

  However, I never lost that initial feeling for him or the thought that had circumstances transpired or conspired differently, the relationship could have prospered. And that’s how politics is.

  Another reason for the difficulty in my relationship with Vladimir was that I think he found my approach to foreign policy intervention at best odd and at worst dangerous. To him, major powers should work out their interests in a fairly traditional, hard-headed way and implement them. Talking of moral causes was a serious mistake. It destabilised when stability was key. It started a row about rights and wrongs, which just got in the way of necessary power-brokering.

  I’m afraid, however, Kosovo had not diminished my appetite for such intervention where I thought it essential to resolve a problem that needed resolution, and where a strong moral case could be made.

  In Sierra Leone in early 2000, a further challenge presented itself. It is one of the least discussed episodes of my ten years as prime minister, but it’s one of the things of which I am most proud. However, the important thing is the lesson it can and should teach us.

  The tale of Sierra Leone – and I hope its future chapters are brighter – is a metaphor for what happened to Africa. Fourah Bay College in Freetown has a link with Durham University, where my father taught. It used to be one of the top universities in Africa and as good as many European ones. In the 1960s, Dad would go out to teach in Freetown. At that time, Sierra Leone was a country freed from colonial rule, with a strong governing infrastructure and a GDP per head around that of Portugal.

  Between then and the late 1990s, the country went on a downward spiral that was as tragic as it was entirely avoidable. By the time we came to power, the democratically elected government looked as if it would be toppled by a collection of gangsters, madmen and sadists known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and the country’s abundant natural resources – particularly its diamonds – were being systematically plundered. The people were caught in the middle.

  When the government tried to insist that the future should be decided by an election, its supporters were subjected to a campaign of medieval brutality. When I visited after calm was restored, I drove through village after village. Every third or fourth person would have a part of their right arm missing. The RUF’s response to the demand for a vote had been to cut off the voting hand of the people – literally.

  Preceding our intervention was the usual round of negotiations, agreements, declarations and general attempts to find common ground between factions who had none. For two years, the diplomatic saga dragged on. A UN force was sent, but, as ever, was mightily constrained, both politically and logistically.

  Britain, the former colonial power, had an especial interest. We contributed some observers and military advisers to the force, but it was plain the situation was going nowhere but downhill. Ceasefires came and went. In May 2000, it suddenly turned really ugly as the RUF renounced the latest ceasefire and went on the rampage.

  President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who was a kindly and decent man, had just come to see me to beg for help. When the RUF finally threatened to take over the whole country, there was a simple decision: did we leave it to the UN force, who had already shown that they couldn’t really contain the RUF, or did we decide to act ourselves?

  As usual, Charles Guthrie was clear and unambiguous. He said: We have out there a force of a thousand or more men. We can send more. We can send a battleship. If you want us to sort out the RUF, let’s do it. The instructions were given.

  The British had been defending the airport at Lungi. Their mission was expanded, and over a number of weeks they did indeed sort out the RUF. Their action gave the UN a chance to bolster its force. The RUF leader Foday Sankoh was arrested, and during the following months there was a build-up of the international presence, a collapse of the rebels and then over time a programme of comprehensive disarmament, with the former RUF soldiers being gradually absorbed back into Sierra Leone society. The country’s democracy was saved.

  After that experience, I became ever more convinced that there had to be a proper, well-equipped standing force for Africa, preferably African in nature, with a mandate to intervene and be deployed in situations such as Sierra Leone. The problem in much of Africa is conflict. You can ship in enormous amounts of aid, but unless you deal with the root causes – fights over resources and territory, weak or corrupt governance – the aid is only ever going to be a sticking plaster and, as such, subject to being ripped off and the wounds reopened at any time. I advocated such a force, and with Kofi Annan pushing hard, the UN eventually agreed it. It’s still in the making today, though the capability has grown. Without addressing these gaping inadequacies in practical politics, all that development aid will salve our conscience but not save the countries most in need of salvation.

  During the Kosovo conflict, I had the opportunity to address the Economic Club of Chicago. In that speech on 24 April 1999, I set out what I called a ‘Doctrine of the International Community’, a rather grand title for what was really a very simple notion: intervention to bring down a despotic dictatorial regime could be justified on grounds of the nature of that regime, not merely its immediate threat to our interests. It was an explicit rejection of the narrow view of national interest and set a policy of intervention in the context of the impact of globalisation.

  It was such a break with the past that I was careful to hedge the doctrine with limitations, in case it was thought madly quixotic. Even so, it drew predictable criticism for making foreign policy a moral cause. Interestingly, in the light of later military campaigns, many on the Republican right took issue with it, seeing it as contaminating a proper and prudent regard for the only thing that matters: the American national interest. But, of course, my point was that this interest had to be more broadly defined in the new era.

  I set out five major considerations when considering intervention.

  First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved?

  In retrospect, applying those tests to Iraq shows what a finely balanced case it was, and why I never thought those who disagreed were stupid or weak-minded.

  But the doctrine itself comes down not only to a debate about foreign policy, but also to a judgement, and a judgement rather familiar across the board in politics: how best to bring about change, assuming change is necessary or strongly desirable. Change can happen by evolution, and it can happen by revolution. This is true of the way a country proceeds towards freedom. Russia in 1917 is a case in point. It could have changed through Kerensky and in a step-by-step social democratic advance, but it happened in fact by Bolshevik revolution. It is true also of more mundane areas
of politics: public services or the economy can be changed by gradual reform, or they can be changed sharply, as with the Thatcher revolution in industry in the 1980s.

  But here is the point: if a system is malfunctioning, it does need to change, whether that change be gradual or abrupt.

  In some cases of regimes that are oppressive and dictatorial, there is nonetheless a process of evolution that is discernible in the right direction. The reforms may be slow, but there is a direction and it is benign; or at least, it is not threatening.

  In other cases, the regime’s very nature lies in its oppression. It has chosen to be what it is. It will not change, not by evolution, not by the exercise of its own will – because that will is directed towards oppression – and for a long time, at least, it will not change by the will of the people who, because they are oppressed, lack the means to overthrow the regime. Its malign nature will deepen.

  Even with regimes like this, the answer cannot be always to intervene. They may pose no outside or external threat; or it may be easily contained diplomatically. It may – as with Mugabe – be simply politically impractical to intervene.

  But where there is such a threat and intervention is practical, then a judgement has to be made. If change will not come by evolution, should it be done by revolution? Should those who have the military power to intervene contemplate doing so?

  The dangers are evident. As I said earlier, such an attitude can lead to rash adventures and to consequences worse than those of the oppression. That’s the case some would make on Iraq, to which we shall come later. But non-intervention also has its consequences, as again I said earlier. In each military campaign I engaged in, there was a history of non-intervention before the intervention. Milosevic had removed autonomy from Kosovo in 1989, and the tension and suffering had built for almost a decade. Bosnia was the epitome of the non-interventionist philosophy; and of its consequences. In Sierra Leone, through all sorts of cobbled-together compromises, non-intervention or mild intervention had held sway for several years. In other words, evolution had failed. The only thing that was going to work was solving the problem, not pacifying it. And of course in a different part of Africa, in the small state of Rwanda, the non-interventionists succeeded in holding back those who took the genocide as a call to arms.