Blair’s office and mine also regularly co-ordinated our key lines of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions and started to draw up a list of some policy areas, particularly constitutional reform, where we could work together – though even at this early stage Blair made it clear that he was ‘not yet convinced’ of the case for proportional representation. It was from this discussion on our joint constitutional agenda, elaborated at a dinner at Derry Irvine’s house a few months later, attended by teams of key advisers from both sides, that the Cook/MacLennan Commission was born. This would, in due course, produce a framework for co-operation between the two parties on the issue of constitutional reform and lay the basis for the constitutional reforms which formed the centrepiece of the first Blair Government’s legislative programme.
But creating the framework for a long-term partnership was only part of my task. I knew very well what Blair would do next. He would very ostentatiously pick a fight with the unions, abandon socialism and the Left and move his party onto the centre ground. My chief worry was that the Lib Dems would vacate this ground and move to the left. This was not because the Lib Dems are, at heart, socialists – far from it. It was just because the natural tendency of a third party, faced with a constant struggle for survival in a two-party system, is to look for the empty ground and occupy it. Blair was a master of the ‘cuckoo strategy’: occupying other people’s territory and forcing them to move to other, usually more extreme ground. In government he was to do this to the Tories, who made the fatal mistake of ceding the centre ground to him and moving to the right, until, after ten years and under David Cameron, they finally realised their mistake. I was determined that he should not do this with the Lib Dems in 1994, and so I once again turned to writing, producing a pamphlet, which I called Making Change Our Ally. The aim of this publication was to stake out for the Party our own modernising agenda before Blair produced his, and to prevent a retreat to the easy grazing of the pastures of the Left. I published Making Change Our Ally just before the start of our Party Conference in Brighton that year and sent a copy to Blair.
The 1994 Brighton Conference, however, was not one of my finest. My worst fears seemed to be realised when the Party debated two motions: one, mildly controversial, on the monarchy, and the other proposing a more liberal approach to drugs. In normal times I would have regarded neither of these issues as anything to get too aerated about – but in the context of an ascendant New Labour I knew they would be misrepresented, especially by the Press, as a shift to the Left, and that would be deadly for us. In truth, I reacted to both grumpily, and this was compounded by the fact that it looked as though I stalked off the stage in disgust when the drugs motion passed, so making it more of a story*. My predecessor, David Steel, and my successor, Charles Kennedy, would have shrugged their shoulders and said it didn’t matter, which would have been infinitely the wiser policy. But I suppose I am just not that kind of person.
The rest of the autumn of 1994 was spent deepening the relationship with New Labour and carefully widening the circle of those in the know on both sides. As a result, by the end of the year, all Blair’s closest advisers and all mine were in the know and discreetly involved in some way or another in developing a part of the co-operation agenda.
A curious episode took place in October, when I received an approach from Mohamed Al Fayed, who, through my colleague Alex Carlile MP, passed us evidence of a Government minister, Neil Hamilton, accepting money. The ensuing scandal resulted in Hamilton’s resignation and unleashed the era of ‘sleaze’ which so damaged the Major Government. One upshot was that Al Fayed offered me a million pounds ‘for the Party, with no strings attached’. We were now beginning to prepare for the next election, and a million pounds amounted to around a half of our projected election costs – so it was a very great deal of money to us. This was, moreover, before Al Fayed had the reputation he has today. I consulted all my closest advisers and the senior MPs in the Party, saying that I did not believe we should accept the money, not least because, whatever was said, there always would be strings attached. With very few exceptions, they advised that, given what we could do with the money, I was mad not to accept. There was real anger amongst some when I turned the offer down.
On 6 May 1995, the Government held a great banquet lunch in the Guildhall to mark the fiftieth anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day in 1945. Some bright spark at the Foreign Office who had responsibility for the table plan concluded that, since I knew a bit about the Balkans, I should sit next to President Tudjman of Croatia. I had, in fact, met Tudjman before and concluded that he was one of the most unpleasant people I had ever come across. Slobodan Milošević, his contemporary as President of Serbia, was basically an opportunist, but Tudjman had a creed, and it was, as far as I was concerned, fascism in modern guise. So I decided to be a little mischievous. I made sure that his wine glass was never empty and then, towards the end of lunch, and after he had drunk a good deal, asked him as innocently as I could what he thought would be the future for the Balkans? He reached for the printed menu and on the back of it drew a rough outline of ex-Yugoslavia and then an S-shaped line dividing it in two, explaining that this would be the future. There would be no Yugoslavia. In its place there would be two countries, Croatia and Serbia. But what about Bosnia, I asked? Where is Bosnia? ‘No Bosnia,’ was his reply. What about the Bosnian Muslims? ‘They are welcome to live in Croatia, if they obey our laws. Otherwise they can go home to Turkey,’ was the response. But what about the enclave of Serbs who lived in the Krajina in south Croatia? Tudjman said that he would launch a war very soon and drive them all out. I said that could be very costly for his troops. He replied that he could do it with less than a thousand casualties, and I found myself betting a bottle of good Croatian white wine that it would cost him more.
Suddenly I realised what he had told me. The map on the back of the Guildhall menu was the secret deal for the division of Yugoslavia which was known to have been cooked up between Milošević and Tudjman at a remote royal hunting lodge in 1991.* I sent a confidential copy of my diary notes, together with the map on the menu, to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, next day.
True to his threat, Tudjman launched Operation Storm three months later, in August. And, true to his predictions, Croat casualties were light, though the suffering and brutality caused to ordinary Serbs, both in Croatia and in the west of Bosnia was terrible. To start with, the West, and especially the US, appeared to take a hesitant approach to Tudjman’s aggression, probably because Tudjman’s army had been largely trained by the US, and also presumably because they believed that if the Serbs suffered a defeat, that might be helpful in creating better conditions for a negotiated peace in Bosnia. But as I read the reports of the Croatian advance I became worried that this could easily get out of control and result in the carving up of Bosnia which Tudjman had sketched out on the back of his lunch menu. So I deliberately leaked the menu and the story to The Times, which ran a large piece on it. Shortly afterwards, the US finally acted and stepped in to pressure Tudjman to halt his advance. In March 1998 I gave evidence on the basis of the Guildhall lunch and ‘The Map on the Menu’,* in The Hague trial of one of the Croatian Generals (Tihomir Blaškić) who led Operation Storm and who was charged with war crimes.
Three weeks after the ‘map-on-the-menu’ incident, Jane and I were at our house in France, having a rather boisterous dinner with some French friends, when the phone rang. I answered, to be told it was Downing Street. They had the Prime Minister on the line, was I available to speak to him? Just as he came on, Jane walked in from the kitchen and said something extremely salty, in a very loud voice, about the job always interfering with our lives and couldn’t they leave us alone for one minute, to gales of laughter from our French friends. I tried, meanwhile, to be as serious as a lot of red wine and the riotous company would permit.
The subject of the Prime Minister’s call was serious enough. British troops had come under lethal attack from Mladić’s Serbs in
Goražde, one of the ‘safe havens’ which had been set up under UN auspices to provide refuge for the Bosniak Muslims, and some had now been taken hostage. The Prime Minister said that he was recalling Parliament early to announce that he was sending 6,000 more British troops out as reinforcements. Acting purely on a hunch, I suggested that, in fact, the generals were telling him that the safe havens were now indefensible and that he needed to think about withdrawal. The extra troops he was proposing to send were, I suggested, actually intended to fulfil a double purpose. First, they were a show of force. But, second, they were an insurance policy, so that there were enough forces on the ground to carry out a withdrawal, if the show of force did not work. Major replied: ‘Exactly.’
At a private meeting with the Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind on 31 May, just before the House of Commons debate on sending British reinforcements, Rifkind admitted to me that the Government were now in fact beginning to draw up contingency plans for a withdrawal from the safe havens as, in their view, these had indeed become indefensible. I warned him that it would not, then, be long before General Mladić, a past master at probing the will of his enemy, would know about this change of policy. What would Britain do then to protect the Muslims who had taken refuge in the safe havens – now to be exposed after our withdrawal – if they were attacked? He replied that they would be provided with the means to protect themselves and rejected the idea that this would inevitably lead to tragedy.
I have subsequently come to believe that a few days before Major’s phone call to me there had been secret discussions between representatives of the main UN troop-contributing nations and the UN force’s military commander in Bosnia, the French General Bernard Janvier. At this meeting Janvier had, it appears, declared he could no longer defend the safe havens, and it was therefore agreed that they would, in the last analysis, not be protected in future.
Little more than a month later, just before Mladić’s troops took Srebrenica, Dutch aircraft tasked with driving back the Serb attack were ordered back to base at the last minute, and the Dutch troops stationed in the enclave were commanded to withdraw with the women and children, leaving the entire male population of the ‘safe haven’ to the mercy of Mladić and his Serb army. The subsequent slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, by hand, over four days, has become one of the most iconic moments of evil of our time – and a lasting stain on the reputations of those who let it happen. Both the UN and the Dutch soldiers on the ground have, justifiably, been blamed and criticised for this. But the Western powers, whose decision I believe led to the safe havens not being fully protected, have never come under either scrutiny or criticism for their part in this tragedy, even though their decision also contributed to a chain of events which led, almost inevitably, to the Srebrenica massacre.
On the very day that Srebrenica was falling and, unbeknown to us all, the massacres were starting, I met in Stockholm with some Bosnian friends who had come out of Sarajevo specially to see me. They told me that things in the city were now getting desperate. The Serb ring around the city had tightened, and the only way in now was over old logging tracks through the forests on Mount Igman, south-west of the city and then through the tunnel under the airfield that had been secretly dug by the Bosniaks. They begged me to pay another visit, saying that this would help draw attention to their plight. But this time the UN refused to help me get in, saying that it was now too dangerous. The Foreign Office, too, put me under strong pressure not to go, citing the hazard and claiming that ‘if anything happened [to me] it would worsen a fragile situation’. (I omitted to say it could spoil my whole day too.) I talked it over with Jane, and in the end we both agreed that I could not say no. So I arranged to meet my Bosnian friends at 2 a.m. on the morning of 16 July in the little Bosnian-Muslim-held town of Jablanica, some twenty miles south of Sarajevo, and then drive with them in their Renault Five across Igman in the dark. We would then hope to make use of the mist which usually covers the mountain at first light to run the gauntlet of the Serb guns down the last exposed portion of the track into the southern enclave of the city which was still in Bosniak hands. Thence we would go into the city through the secret tunnel.
This was going to be by far and away my most dangerous trip into Sarajevo, and I had a terrible sense of foreboding about it. On most of my previous trips to Bosnia after the first, I had taken a member of my staff. But this time I decided that it was just too dangerous, and so I should go alone. Just before I left, I wrote a short letter to Jane and left it with a friend in case anything unpleasant happened. It contained all the usual things that couples say to each other in these circumstances and ended:
Some will say (and I think you believe) that I am going to S’jevo out of bravado. This is not so. I would not risk my life for bravado – and certainly wouldn’t risk my life with you and my beloved kids for it. I am doing this because I think it has to be done. There are, you know better than anyone, two things which drive me (both will sound pompous) – justice – and I genuinely believe a great injustice has been done to the Bosnian people – and my liberal beliefs. Internationalism is the core of the latter and, if our Party will not stand up for this, who will?
See you!
XXXX
P
In the event my journey into Sarajevo was even more difficult than we had anticipated. My Bosnian friends were two hours late, and we got a puncture crossing Igman. This delayed us so much that, when we came to the most dangerous bit of the journey – descending the last part of the track into the city – it was broad daylight, the hoped-for mist had burnt off, and we were fully exposed to the Serb guns below us. We rocketed down the track at full speed, past still smouldering hulks of shot-up lorries lining the route. The Serb gunners must have been asleep, for they ignored us, and we were able to reach the safety of the Bosnian-held enclave with only a minor dent from a collision with a fast-moving UN aid truck going in the opposite direction.
There followed a mile or so’s tramping through communication trenches in order to reach an isolated house whose basement formed the control point for access to the tunnel that ran under Sarajevo airfield and into the city. When we arrived we were led through a curtain made of heavy material into a waiting room lit by three low-wattage bulbs and some candles. I could hear the sound of a generator gently thumping away somewhere close by. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw we were not alone. The room was full of people waiting to go into the city. Some soldiers, together with a wounded colleague, were smoking and swapping soldierly jokes. Judging from their haggard, hunted look, I guessed, they were returning at the end of their shift on the front lines protecting the city. There was also a disabled man on his way back home after a leg amputation, a young mother with her two daughters, and some old men and women with baskets of vegetables sitting hunched in the corner. There were perhaps twenty-five of us, together with two piles of cases containing ammunition and cigarettes, all waiting to take our turn in the tunnel. The air was full of cigarette smoke and rancid with the smell of bodies. On the right of the room we could see the tunnel running away from us, lit by the same dim electric lights, and to the left of the tunnel entrance, sitting behind a table on which two candles guttered, sat an official who checked the papers of my friends. He asked for my passport and when I produced a British one, asked angrily what I was doing here. My friends explained who I was, that they had permission from the Government to bring me in and that I had taken my chances thus far, just like any other Bosnian. The official produced a torch and shone it my face, and then motioned us to wait in the darkness until our turn came to enter the tunnel. In due course, from deep in the tunnel, we heard the sound of people approaching. Suddenly their shadows leapt ahead of them into the room, followed by their dark shapes moving through us towards the door. They seemed little more than bulky black forms, like the dark spaces in Goya’s paintings of the ‘Horrors of War’. But as each of them pushed aside the curtain and broke into the sunshine, they leapt briefly into Technicolor
life, like a picture taken with flash, before vanishing to the world outside. I counted around thirty in all, including fully armed soldiers, some old women carrying panniers for vegetables, one young man on crutches and a father and mother with two young sons of perhaps eight and ten.
The last man through said something to the official, and we were waved into the tunnel. It was very narrow, lined with planks and supported with wooden pit-props every two yards. The ceiling soon dropped down sharply, causing us to stoop uncomfortably as we walked. Bare electric light bulbs were positioned in recesses in the walls every ten yards or so, and every fifty yards there was a passing place. On the floor of the tunnel were two lines of upturned angle irons which acted as rails along which we pushed or pulled makeshift trolleys, loaded with our packs and suitcases. Other trolleys were piled with vegetables, cigarettes and ammunition being taken into the city. Somewhere in front of me the wounded man had been bundled onto a trolley and was moaning quietly as he was pushed along by fellow soldiers. To start with, there were occasional air holes in the ceiling through which we could see snatches of sunlight, but after a while, as the tunnel dipped downwards under the airfield, these stopped. After about half a mile, I noticed that the floor had stared to get wet. Soon we were carrying our packs again and wading through a foot or so of water. This, I surmised, was the lowest point, where the tunnel passed under the runway and I couldn’t help thinking of the Hercules laden with aid that I had first flown in on, taxiing over my head. After about a hundred yards of wading the tunnel started to turn upwards again towards the entrance about a quarter of a mile further on. Here we were at last able to straighten up, before emerging, to the accompaniment of bird song and the crump of distant shells, into a bleak city square surrounded by ruined houses.
A Fortunate Life Page 37