‘Welcome to Sarajevo,’ the captain says.
Looking around, I see a collection of wrecked and burnt-out airport buildings, some sand-bagged foxholes, a terrace of ruined tenements pockmarked by bullet and artillery fire, and a large, cheery man wearing a flak jacket, a crazy sunhat and the most enormous white beard I have seen outside a Santa Claus grotto at Christmas.
‘Hi. I’m Larry Hollingworth,’ he says and sticks out a great square, work-calloused hand to greet me.
Larry, the head of the UNHCR (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) operation in Sarajevo, would become a good friend and wise counsellor on everything to do with Bosnia. He would also become famous, in this region and in the world of humanitarian assistance, as the man whose personal courage and dogged determination kept the great city of Sarajevo alive during its terrible three-year siege and, in so doing, undoubtedly saved many thousands from starvation.
Later that afternoon I went into Sarajevo and called on the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegović, at whose huge funeral in the city I would speak more than a decade later, describing him as ‘the father of his nation’. We had a long conversation on the agony of Sarajevo and the tragedies of Bosnia, as a noisy Serb mortar and artillery barrage fell into the streets outside the shattered windows of his Presidency.
Later, when the bombardment had stopped, I walked briefly around the centre of the city, carefully taking Larry’s advice on which street junctions to run across, so as not to give the snipers in the hills surrounding the city too easy a target. I was shocked at the tired, frightened, grey faces of my fellow Europeans, for whom death was now an everyday accompaniment to the daily business of collecting water and rummaging for food in order to stay alive. Afterwards, at the local hospital, I stood at the bedside of a young boy of ten whose stomach had been ripped open by shrapnel, and wept as he died before my eyes.
Our final visit during that day was to a local park, now turned into a makeshift cemetery, where they were already excavating the graves for people not yet dead, but who would be among the inevitable harvest of those the snipers would cut down in the coming winter, when the ground would be too frozen for digging.
That night I spent in a small underground bunker Larry and his team had dug on Sarajevo airport. A particularly heavy bombardment made it difficult for either of us to sleep, so we sat outside on the sandbags, drinking our way slowly through the best part of a bottle of whisky I had brought with me. We talked about this senseless horror, and the culpability of those who had the power to stop it but didn’t, while watching the shooting stars above and their mirror-image of tracer arcing around us, much as one might an especially noisy firework show.
And so it was that in 1992 the threads of my life first became intertwined with the fate and future of the little country of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its extraordinary people.
It began, as have all the most important events of my life, completely by accident. One day in mid-July, two months after the general election, I was walking back from a television interview (on the shelling of Sarajevo, as it happens) with my friend and close adviser Alan Leaman, bemoaning the fact that politics was always so dull after an election; the Government were entitled to their honeymoon period, and the Opposition could only sit tight, watch and wait for them to start making mistakes again. Alan, quite casually and I think not really meaning it, said, ‘You know a bit about wars, Paddy. If you are so bored, why don’t you go out and have a look at the one that has just started in Yugoslavia. You’ve always said that your style of politics is to get out of the House of Commons and see what is happening on the ground for yourself. Well, Sarajevo is where it’s happening – why not go there?’
And so, two weeks later, I was touring refugee camps in Croatia,* experiencing for the first time my uncontrollable Balkan affliction of unbidden tears as desperate people told me of their plight and the horrors they had suffered, while witnessing something that I had never dreamt we would see again on European soil, the use of railway wagons as instruments of ‘ethnic cleansing’. That evening, in a bar in Zagreb where I was having a drink with the local head of UNHCR, Tony Land, I managed to persuade the Special Forces RAF Squadron flying aid into Sarajevo for the UN to take me with them – largely, I think, because I remembered some of the names of the Special Forces guys who used to fly me in my SBS days.
At this point I must backtrack briefly for the benefit of those too young to have followed the Balkan crisis of the 1990s, or whose memory of events has become blurred.
The trouble had started in 1991, when Tito’s Yugoslavia began its violent disintegration. The Slovenians were the first to go, managing their exit largely peacefully. But, as Croatia moved to follow Slovenia, conflict broke out between Belgrade and Zagreb, with Yugoslav jets bombing the Croatian capital and severe fighting between the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Croatian forces, including the bombardment of Dubrovnik. Under pressure from Germany – which had its own reasons for favouring Croatia’s independence – Britain* and other European nations recognised Croatia. This lit the fuse, and the Muslim majority in Bosnia and Herzegovina immediately moved to follow their Croatian neighbours, with their President, Alija Izetbegović, calling for a referendum. In response to this the Bosnian Serbs, under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić, started to mobilise in the hills.
The flashpoint in Bosnia came on 5 April 1992, when a sniper in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo shot dead a Muslim woman, Suada Dilberović, who was on a peace march. This was followed by further slaughter when Serb gunmen shot a number of Sarajevo citizens demonstrating in a park opposite the Bosnian Presidency building. These events, and others, provided the trigger for all-out war between the three communities – Bosniak Muslim (known nowadays as ‘Bosniak’), Croat and Serb – which quickly spread to all corners of Bosnia. By June, Sarajevo was under siege by Serbian forces, the UN airlift (which would keep the city alive for almost four years) had started, and Larry Hollingworth had been sent there to organise the distribution of the aid it delivered. On 30 June 1992, following a UN Security Council Resolution, a battalion of Canadian troops wearing the UN’s blue berets took over Sarajevo airport to facilitate the delivery of aid to the city and other parts of Bosnia. At the end of June, about a month before I flew in to the city, the Canadian UN forces left Sarajevo, and their role was taken over by French troops.
When I arrived back in UK after the Sarajevo trip, I wrote an article for the Guardian, a letter to the Prime Minster and a speech which I delivered to a meeting in London – all with the same message. This was definitely a war crime, probably the beginnings of genocide, would certainly lead to greater instability, could be stopped and should be.
A week later, while Jane and I were visiting Monet’s garden in Giverny outside Paris, Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb Leader, contacted me with a message: ‘You have seen the Muslim side, I invite you now to and come and see ours.’ I could not, of course, refuse and on 8 August caught a plane to Budapest, where I met my Lib Dem colleague Russell Johnston, and we took a car for the long journey across the flat, fertile plains of Hungary to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia proper. All the way our driver listened to a radio station blasting Serb turbo-folk, interspersed with news. At one stage, just after we had crossed the border into Serbia, our interpreter burst out laughing. I asked him why, and he replied that the radio news had just announced that the successor to Gladstone (me) had entered the country on his way to see the Government! The Serbian President, Milošević, was apparently out of town, so the following day I was taken to see the Yugoslavian President, Dobrica Čosić,* in the Soviet-style government buildings in Belgrade. I had not the first idea what he looked like, so was somewhat flummoxed when the great doors on the reception room were opened and I was confronted with a long line of men, all with seemingly identical granite Slav faces, all in identical suits. Fortunately, I chose the right hand to shake. (On a later occasion, in Montenegro, when meeting a Government minister, I enthusiastically shook
the hand of his astonished driver instead!) After what was not a very illuminating meeting, we were bundled off to a nearby helicopter pad, loaded onto an armoured Russian helicopter flown by a Russian (who told me the helicopter was made in a factory outside Moscow that also made tractors: ‘Helicopters one end, tractors the other’) and took off on the most frightening helicopter flight of my life over the mountains of Bosnia to Karadžić’s headquarters in Pale, from where he was directing the siege of Sarajevo. The events of the following two days, when we visited the prison camps at Manjaca and Trnopolje, have already been described in the Prologue.
Shortly after I returned, with the images of these two visits still freshly burning in my mind, I sat at the dinner table next to an extremely elegant and distinguished man in his mid-sixties who spoke in that languorous, easy manner of upper-class Britons born in the early years of the last century. He courteously asked me what I thought of Bosnia and what should happen there. I told him that I had just been there and seen things for myself, so I knew exactly what should happen – we should intervene. He said gently that he didn’t altogether agree. But I would have none of it and told him that I had been there and seen things for myself, so I knew what I was talking about, etc., etc. After I had spent a good fifteen minutes digging this massive hole for myself, someone across the table sought to attract my dinner companion’s attention by calling out ‘Fitzroy!’ Only then did I realise I was sitting next to Fitzroy MacLean, one of my all-time heroes, who had parachuted into Yugoslavia and fought alongside Tito throughout his great guerrilla campaign against the Germans across the mountains of Bosnia in World War Two. Needless to say, he brushed aside with infinite politeness my stumbling apologies and pathetic expressions of admiration.*
As a result of these two trips Bosnia became, even some of my friends would say, something of an obsession. What happened there, I saw – and still see – as the greatest crime on European soil since the Second World War. And Europe’s failure to intervene I saw – and still see – as the greatest act of moral failure and deliberate, culpable blindness of our time. I also saw the Bosnia war as, in some way, our generation’s Spanish Civil War: a time when ordinary people understood better than their leaders what was happening, and what needed to be done, in a conflict that was not a hangover from the past but a predictor of things to come.
During the almost four years of the siege of Sarajevo I visited the city twice a year – once in the summer and once in the winter – making a point of staying for several days with Bosnian friends, and not just dropping in for an hour or two, as most visiting dignitaries did. During these visits I smuggled in aid and medicine for the relatives of Bosnian refugees in Britain, carried letters in and out between distraught relatives and arranged for the secret transport of detonators to enable the blasting of coal from an open-cast mine in nearby Kakanj to continue, so as to keep a local power station going and the city’s lights on, albeit intermittently.
In the House of Commons I asked so many Prime Minster’s Questions on Bosnia that they used to shout ‘The Honourable Member for Sarajevo’ when I stood up. My party (including some of its MPs, I have to admit) grumbled that I spent too much time on the subject; many of my constituents seemed to agree, judging from my postbag, and Labour MPs, though they prefer not to remember it now, used to shout ‘warmonger’ when I repeatedly called for the West to intervene and stop the carnage.
Looking back, I think there is probably some substance in these criticisms. As Leader of the Liberal Democrats I should not, perhaps, have allowed myself to get so obsessed by a single issue. But I still regard this as the best work I ever did in the House of Commons and a cause in which I was privileged to be involved.
Nevertheless, although Bosnia was a constant backdrop to all five years of the 1992 parliament, there were other big things happening too, as Britain moved towards the twilight of the Conservative years, and the Left began to reshape itself for government.
In my first meeting with Party officials after the 1992 election I told them that the Party’s survival phase was now over. We were now no longer spectators. I was determined that, in this Parliament, we would prove that we were back on the field as players.
On 9 May, exactly a month after polling day, I gave what I believe was my most important speech as Lib Dem Leader, and one I had been thinking about for almost a year. It became known as the Chard speech, after the little town in my Constituency where it was made. It proposed, in essence, a new coming together of the Left to form a progressive alliance dedicated to ending the Tory hegemony and bringing in radical reforms to the British Constitution, beginning with a Scottish Parliament.
This speech was received with hostility by some of my MPs and by a large swathe of the Party at large, although it had actually been watered down during successive consultations with parliamentary colleagues. It proposed that we formally start to align ourselves with opposition to the Tories and end what had become a pretence – the Party’s traditional policy of being equally opposed to both Labour and Tories. This paved the way for the long, slow process of shifting our position and ended, three years later, with the Lib Dems’ historic decision to abandon the Party’s traditional ‘equidistance’ from the other two main parties, so enabling us to be an integral part of the tidal wave of change which was to sweep the Tories from power in 1997.
To start with, however, there was no response from Labour, who were at the time in complete disarray after their general election defeat and preoccupied with electing John Smith as their new Leader. My first meeting with Smith was not until October, when we met over a whisky (actually several) in his Commons office. He made it very plain that he would continue to pursue a ‘go-it-alone’ strategy for Labour, didn’t think that creating a broad coalition for constitutional change (which he was genuinely committed to, far more than Blair) was necessary, didn’t want to upset the equilibrium of Labour, and didn’t believe there was room for anyone else in the battle to beat the Tories. We might work together if he needed us, he told me, but not if he didn’t. ‘Let’s develop the habit of friendship, even if this is not the time for formal co-operation,’ he said as I left. I was depressed that his vision was so narrow but well satisfied that this now left the space for the Lib Dems to lead in the process of creating a wider consensus for radical constitutional change, which I knew many of Labour’s natural supporters agreed with.
Our relations with John Smith’s Labour Party were, moreover, not improved by our position on the biggest political issue of the day, the passage of the Maastricht Treaty through the House of Commons in early November. This came just six weeks after the fiasco of ‘Black Wednesday’: Britain’s humiliating exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the devaluation of the pound (which occurred in the middle of our Party Conference in Harrogate in September). Both these events terribly weakened Major’s Government and presented the Opposition parties with a most tempting opportunity to vote with Major’s Euro-rebels and defeat him in the Commons. But if we did this we would destroy Britain’s future in Europe at the same time. After much debate and some arm twisting, especially with Charles Kennedy, who was very uncertain on the issue* (I wheeled out Roy Jenkins to help me here), the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party finally agreed we would stand by our European principles and support the Government. Labour, on the other hand, though in favour of the Bill in principle, said they would join the Tories’ Euro-rebels in order to damage Major and perhaps even, as they saw it, bring his Government down.
When it comes to deciding what you should and should not do in Opposition, I have always believed in the policy of George Lansbury, Labour’s forgotten leader before the Second World War, who said it is usually wisest for opposition parties to reject the temptations of easy opportunism and act as they would do in government. For that is the best way to show the electorate that they can be trusted with power.
There was some further wobbling amongst Lib Dem MPs (Charles Kennedy and Simon Hughes were especially worried), accom
panied by anger and even resignations amongst Party members at large, who fell for Labour’s line. (Our Cowley Street headquarters was receiving some 150 phone calls and about as many letters a day from Party members opposed to our line, about half of whom said they were resigning over this.) As the Maastricht vote approached, hostility towards us from Labour and the left-wing Press for ‘supporting the Government’ grew sharply. But in the end we voted together according to our European beliefs, with the result that both the Government and Britain’s future in Europe survived. This was the vote I am proudest of having cast in my time in the Commons. There was huge, but largely synthetic, anger from Labour afterwards. But sticking to our principles, while Labour abandoned theirs, did us very little harm in the end and may even have done some good.
A Fortunate Life Page 35