A Fortunate Life

by Paddy Ashdown

  On 26 September, just after a pretty difficult Lib Dem Conference during which there were more determined attempts to close off my options with Blair, I left once more for Kosovo. This time I went with the official support of the British Government and carried Blair’s personal letter to President Milošević warning him not to misjudge the resolve of the West to act if his aggression in Kosovo continued. We went into Kosovo itself, passing through the mountain crossing from Macedonia. My first night in the Kosovar capital, Pristina, was spent in the Park Hotel, which had until recently been the city’s premier brothel and was still fully equipped with lurid black-and-crimson nylon sheets on the beds and a plain-glass bathroom window, positioned precisely at genital height, overlooking the whole of town.

  In Pristina I met up with Britain’s outstanding Ambassador in Serbia, Brian Donnelly, and also with the redoubtable head of UNHCR in Kosovo, Morgan Morris. On our second day we drove from Pristina to Kosovo’s western city Peć, passing long columns of Serb tanks and armoured vehicles which were pulling back after a major operation in the Drenica region against, they claimed, KLA forces. Already stories of the horrific massacres of civilians were emerging from this area. We could see tall columns of black smoke rising as we passed. Brian Donnelly commented that the armoured columns did at least appear to be moving back to base, which was consistent with Milošević’s recent promise to the international community that all military operations in Kosovo had now ceased.

  From Peć, we turned east again, skirting the Albanian border under the mountains on whose peaks I had sat a few weeks earlier. We briefly visited the little jewel-like twelfth-century Serb Orthodox Monastery of Dećani, where we were shown round by Father Sava, later to become famous during the Kosovo war as the ‘cybermonk’ because of his mastery of the internet. We then continued through the shattered villages I had seen being bombarded in July, following the roads parallel to the Albanian border and visiting the site of a massacre of Serbs by the KLA on the way. Around midday, we started to hear the sound of distant artillery fire and shortly afterwards crossed a low ridge to see laid out before us the whole of the Prizren valley running south to Macedonia, its little villages burning in the sunshine, and high columns of smoke rising in black palls into the summer sky. Now we could also see bursting artillery rounds and hear the crack of the guns as they fired somewhere off to our left and the crump of their shells echoing round the horseshoe valley in front of us. Brian Donnelly immediately pulled out his satellite phone and got through to London to report that, far from ceasing, Milošević’s military operations had now shifted from the Drenica area to the Suva Reka/Prizren region, where artillery and tanks of main battle units of the Serb Army were being used to bombard defenceless Kosovar villages. In the course of his conversation he held the telephone receiver up so that his colleague in London could hear the sound of the barrage.

  We managed to speak to a frightened man who ran a roadside garage nearby. He explained that the Serbs were targeting each village in turn. First, the police would arrive, demanding that the village give up its weapons. If the villagers said they didn’t have any, they were given a deadline to deliver some, on pain of being shelled. Frequently villages had to resort to raising money to buy weapons so that they could hand these over before the deadline. In this way, he claimed, a circular black market in weapons had been established, run by the Serb police. Arms that had been purchased from the black market by one village were duly handed over to the Serb army, who then passed them on to the police, who sold them back into the black market, ready to be purchased by the next village threatened, and so on. I was inclined not fully to believe this story, particularly since I had seen the quantity of arms being shipped over the mountains from Albania a few weeks earlier. But Morgan Morris said that UNHCR had evidence that there was truth in it. The arms I had seen had chiefly gone to organised units of the KLA, she said, and not to village defence forces, though no doubt many of these did have some shotguns and old rifles.

  I asked our informant whether the villages we could see being bombarded had somehow resisted the demand to turn in weapons and if this was their punishment? He replied that they had fully co-operated, but were still shelled. He said that the routine was always the same. First, the demand for arms; then, after they had been collected, the soldiers came and told people to leave, as the shelling was about to start; then, after the village had been evacuated, organised army looting teams came in with lorries and carried everything of value away; then the shelling and burning began. He said that Milošević’s plan was to drive them all out. Again, I was inclined to treat this as exaggeration at the time. But it was subsequently proved to be correct – what we were seeing that day, though none of us knew it at the time, was the beginning of Milošević’s Operation Horseshoe, which reached its climax during the subsequent Kosovo war and whose aim was a ‘final solution’ for the Kosovo problem based on the expulsion of the entire Kosovar Albanian majority population from the province.

  It was now getting late, and we risked not being able to get back to Pristina before the start of the curfew imposed by the Serb authorities if we did not leave immediately. Brian Donnelly decided to return to Belgrade, so that he could brief his fellow ambassadors on what was happening and co-ordinate further moves with London. Morgan Morris and I decided that we had to get into the area being shelled to see conditions there for ourselves.

  So, very early the following morning, under a light but persistent drizzle and in the company of the BBC’s David Loyn and a camera team, we retraced our steps to where we had been the day before and then dropped down off the ridge into a nearby village, where we met with the elders. They told us that they had just been visited by the Serb police who had demanded weapons. They had clubbed together and raised some money to buy enough weapons to hand over. I asked to see these. Mostly they were very old and very rusty Russian-made rifles, which were clearly unusable, and some very unstable-looking but fully armed hand grenades weeping with condensation. I warned them to be very careful indeed of the latter, as they looked as though they might go off at any moment – and one of them told us some hand grenades had indeed exploded recently, killing some Serbs who were handling them at the time. The BBC filmed the weapons and broadcast the film in their report that night. Much later, Milošević, then on trial in The Hague for war crimes, was to dig up this footage and use it to support a claim that I had, on behalf of the UK Government, been involved in secretly arming the KLA.

  Morgan Morris and I then continued our attempt to get into the area being shelled by the Serbs, but we were soon stopped at a Serb military checkpoint, where we were ordered out of the area. We pretended to obey their instructions, driving off in the direction they pointed us in. But then, as soon as we were out of sight, we turned off the road and made our way back over very bumpy farm tracks towards the villages that were being shelled. Before we could get to the first one, however, we found our road blocked by a miserable convoy of refugees, including women, very young children and the elderly, sheltering from the rain under canvas sheeting and heading away from their village and out of the area on foot, old farm carts and decrepit tractor-drawn trailers. They told us that they had been given a deadline of midday to leave their village, after which it would be shelled. The deadline was now fifteen minutes away, they explained, and they were keen to leave as soon as possible. We wished them luck and pressed on deeper into the area, passing through the deserted village and moving towards the sound of the shells which were now, we estimated, not too far ahead of us. But before we could get right into the area being bombarded we ran into another Serb checkpoint. Here the Serb officer in charge was very aggressive and completely unimpressed with my attempt to pull rank by saying that I was an emissary of the British Prime Minister and would be seeing his President Milošević the following day. What was worse, he started threatening our Albanian interpreters, two local women who were well known to the Serb authorities. Morgan and I agreed that to press on against their
orders could place our interpreters in jeopardy if the Serbs caught up with them later – and, besides, we now had all the evidence we needed of what was going on. So we acquiesced to being escorted out of the area under Serb armed guard.

  Later that day I met a senior Serb commander and told him that what I had seen was a clear breach of the Geneva Convention, for which he and other commanders could be indicted. He seemed to me much more concerned about the prospect of being indicted at The Hague than about the threat of NATO bombing.

  That night I drove to Belgrade and stayed the night at Brian Donnelly’s ambassadorial residence,* ready to see President Slobodan Milošević the next day. In the morning I first met with the US Ambassador, Christopher Hill, who told me that his people had done some research which confirmed that what Brian Donnelly and I had seen was indeed a clear and flagrant breach of the clauses of the Geneva Convention laying down the rules governing armies’ treatment of civilian populations. He gave me a marked-up copy of the relevant paragraphs to take with me when I went to see Milošević.

  When it came to the tragedies of the Balkans many Western statesmen saw Milošević as part of the solution. I had always seen him as the source of the problem. So our meeting was a rather tetchy one. I handed over the Blair letter, stressing that he should not underestimate the West’s resolve to act if the appalling scenes I had seen yesterday continued. He denied any such acts had taken place and said this was all got up by the Press. I told him his officials were lying to him; these disgraceful acts were indeed taking place, because the British Ambassador and I had seen them with our own eyes the previous day. He said that, as a politician, I didn’t understand what had to be done when fighting terrorists. I replied that, as a soldier, I had fought terrorists several times in my life and lost good friends to them. And I knew that what his army was doing was not the way to beat terrorists, but instead to multiply their numbers. What was more, the actions I had witnessed were a clear and flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention for which he and his army commanders could be held accountable. Indeed, now that I had, in the presence of the British Ambassador, informed him of what was being done by his army and was leaving with him the relevant passages of the Geneva Convention, he himself could no longer claim to have no knowledge of what was happening or its implications, and could therefore end up being held responsible for these actions before the court in The Hague. The next time I saw Milošević was in The Hague, where he was on trial for war crimes, when I gave evidence about the events I had witnessed. I reminded him of this conversation with the words, ‘I warned you, Mr President, the last time we met, that this is where you could end up – and here you are.’

  Back in London I wrote a report for Blair proposing, among other things, that the court in The Hague should be encouraged to initiate immediate proceedings by indicting the Serb commanders of the operation I had witnessed. I still believe that, if this had happened, Operation Horseshoe might just have been stopped in its tracks, and the whole tragic course of the Kosovo war might just have been avoided.

  Events were now moving steadily towards two concurrent climaxes. The first was the wider international crisis over Kosovo, the second, the narrower personal climax in the relationship I had established with Blair more than six years previously.

  At a long meeting on 27 October, two days before the publication of Roy Jenkins’ crucial recommendations on electoral reform, Blair told me that he would have to draw back from our Chequers agreement, because he did not feel he could overcome increasing opposition from within the Cabinet, and could not risk splitting the Government.

  Look Paddy, I don’t want to let you down. We have come a long way together. But you must understand that there are limits beyond which I cannot go at the moment. I remain committed to the long-term process, but I can only do what is possible now.*

  I replied that I would try to think of a way through but could not easily see one. If this failed, I would have to stand aside in due course. All would depend on his reaction to the Jenkins recommendations. If he could be warm about these, there might still be something to play for. If not, it was all over.

  When the Jenkins Report was published two days later, Blair’s response was entirely neutral. Later that day Robin Cook (a long-time supporter of electoral reform) rang me and, in a conversation which he said I should treat as ‘never having taken place’, told me that there had been a discussion about Jenkins at Cabinet that day.

  Mo [Mowlam] and I won the argument intellectually. But, since Tony hadn’t taken a firm lead, the debate swung the other way, and the best Mo and I could get was that the Cabinet’s position should be neutral.

  Blair had been uncharacteristically silent, Cook complained, adding that he was really worried about Blair’s lack of leadership and inability to make decisions sometimes.*

  The coup de grâce came on BBC Newsnight that night, when Jack Straw, then Home Secretary and so responsible for the whole constitutional agenda, was anything but neutral, rubbishing the whole Jenkins Report in the most contemptuous terms. Blair rang me in apologetic mood next day. I told him that I was fed up with finding ways round his retreats from what we had already agreed and how angry I was about Jack Straw’s comments the previous night. If he did not now make some statement that would counteract the negative spin Straw had put on Jenkins, then everyone would know that Jenkins was dead, and, if that was the case, then so was our project.

  No such statement ever came. Britain’s best chance of getting much-needed electoral reform for Westminster was dead, and my time as Leader of the Lib Dems was coming to a close. Two days later I told my closest adviser, Richard Holme, that, though we had achieved much, the ultimate aim of my strategy was now unachievable, and I had concluded that my usefulness to the Lib Dems as their Leader was over. I had therefore decided to resign at the earliest opportunity, which would enable me to do so on my terms and hand over to my successor as smoothly as possible.

  In November there was one more attempt to revive things, this time initiated by Blair, but it came to nothing. The long dance was over. We had failed to recover the chance we lost on the night of 2 May 1997. Perhaps it would have been different if Labour’s majority in 1997 had been smaller. Perhaps not.

  Looking back, I have concluded that there were several reasons for the failure of our plans. Way back in 1997 I asked Richard Holme, ‘Do you think Blair really means it?’ His reply was, ‘Yes. But then the best seducers always do!’ So, did Blair mean it? In the end, I must leave others to decide. But I do not believe that, as a new Prime Minster facing huge challenges at home and abroad, he could have afforded to spend as much time as he did on something he had no intention of carrying out. And his most senior colleagues in the Cabinet, such as Brown, Straw and Prescott, who were surely in the best position to know, certainly believed he meant it – which is why they opposed it so strongly.

  I think the fault lies elsewhere.

  Tony Blair has many extraordinary qualities: an outstanding ability, second only perhaps to Mrs Thatcher, to locate and stimulate the erogenous zones of the British public; and very considerable personal courage. He also has an exceptional ability to recover when on the back foot. It used to be said of Gladstone that he was terrible on the rebound – Blair is, too. He has, too, an unfussy, unpompous and straightforward approach to problems and people, an ability to take criticism without rancour (in 2001, when the Government was going through a bad patch, I warned that many people in Britain saw him as a ‘smarmy git’, and he never turned a hair) and a mind interested solely in the practicalities of politics and unencumbered by its creeds.

  I remember being particularly struck by the contrast with Mrs Thatcher here. If you took a proposition to her you could see that the first question she asked herself was whether this was something consistent with her personal creed. Then the second was, ‘Will it work?’. Most politicians are like that. But with Blair the only question was, ‘Will it work?’. This was a weakness as well as a strength, for in politi
cs beliefs, creeds and principles are the sheet-anchors that hold the ship’s head to the sea when the storm blows. The fact that Blair had abandoned socialism but never really found something else to replace it meant that he was far too often blown around by the prevailing winds – especially, in his latter years, those blowing from the direction of Fleet Street.

  But, whatever his formidable and many strengths, Blair had weaknesses, too. First, although I think he spoke the truth when he said the partnership with the Lib Dems was the big thing he wanted to do to reshape British politics, it never was the next thing he wanted to do. Hence the delays, which in the end killed us. In politics waiting for ‘the ripe time’ is important – but you have to be able to spot the ripe time when it arrives. A leader’s powers are always greater on Day One than on Day Two, in the first month than in the second, and so on. The early days are the golden period of leadership, when almost anything is possible. After that, the capacity to do is eaten away by events and an inevitable decline in support which comes from the necessity to make decisions. I fear that, in Tony Blair’s case, these early ‘golden hours’ of leadership were wasted, as his Government appeared to decide that the most important achievement of his first term would be to get elected for a second one.

  The second problem lay in Blair’s overestimation of the power of his most formidable weapon: his charm. This was indeed a most prodigious instrument in his hands: I remember, like St Augustine, who pressed a rusty nail into his palm to resist the temptations of the devil, preparing myself for our meetings with the armour plate of a clear set of objectives in order not to succumb to his persuasiveness. But the problem was that Blair believed that he could overcome all obstacles through personal charm and did not see that, with hoary old warhorses like Prescott and Brown, this was simply not enough.