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:
The Balkans, which in Turkish means ‘mountains’, run roughly from the Danube to the Dardanelles, from Istria to Istanbul, and is a term for the little lands of Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and part of Turkey…. It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered food, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars. Less imaginative Westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions and fearing their savage terrorists. Karl Marx called them ‘ethnic trash’. I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.*
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† and mouflon,‡ 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.
Bosnia, with a population of some 3.5 million, is also divided into three ethnically. The largest group (about 45%) are the Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks as they are called today. Then come the Bosnian Serbs (about 35%) and finally, the Bosnian Croats (about 17% and dropping). There are also a wide range of smaller groups, such as the Jews* and the Roma people (gypsies). Almost every community in Bosnia is multi-ethnic to a greater or lesser extent, with minorities living in almost every town. Generally speaking, though, the Serbs are a majority in the north, the Bosniaks are a majority in the middle, and the Croats are a majority in the south.
I have often been struck by the similarities between those countries whose fortune (or misfortune) it is to find themselves at the junction of the tectonic plates of race, culture and religion. Countries like Switzerland, Afghanistan and Bosnia are all of them mountainous regions, incredibly beautiful, the battlegrounds of conquerors and the cockpits in which, from time to time, terrible inter-ethnic conflicts break out (before the Treaty of Ticino in 1516 the famously peaceful Switzerland of today was the Bosnia of the middle ages when it came to internal war and ethnic conflict).
Bosnia sits four-square on just such a fault line. It was no accident that the Roman Emperor Diocletian divided the Eastern from the Western Roman Empires along the line of the Drina River, which now marks Bosnia’s eastern border with Serbia. Two thousand years later history has made this region an even more complex meeting point of cultural, religious and ethnic differences. Today Bosnia marks the south-western frontier of the Slav people (Yugoslavia literally meant ‘the country of the South Slavs’), the easternmost outpost of Orthodox Christianity (most Serbs are Orthodox), the furthest north-western foothold of the Turkish empire and the religion of Islam (the religion of most Bosniaks), and the eastern boundary of the rule of Roman Catholicism (most Croats are Catholic). In Bosnia, east meets west, face to face and over the garden fence.
Nowhere is this
better seen than in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, sometimes referred to as the westernmost city of the East and the easternmost city of the West. Lying in a great bowl dominated by the snow-capped peaks that surround it, Sarajevo has a setting which, along with those of Hong Kong and San Francisco, is one of the most spectacular and beautiful in the world. It is, essentially, a garden city, with each house in the old mahalas (neighbourhoods) sitting in its own garden or courtyard. It used to be called ‘the Geneva of the East’ for its famous spirit of tolerance, which, along with its buildings was damaged but not obliterated by the siege. It was here that the adherents of the Albigensian heresy came, fleeing the Inquisition in the thirteenth century.* They are believed by some to have been the carvers of the strange and beautiful ‘bogomil’ tombstones that can still be found even in the remotest places and on the highest of Bosnia’s mountains. And after them, came the Jews, driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella† in 1492. They finally found refuge here, after being persecuted all across Europe, and their ancient language, Ladino, is still spoken by the older members of Sarajevo’s now fast-diminishing Jewish population. When the Jews came to Sarajevo, they brought with them their most precious sacred text, known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, now the city’s most prized possession, carefully hidden from the Germans during the Second World War and securely protected from Serb bombardment during the 1990s siege.
Sarajevo was famous the world over for its jumble of religions and cultures. From our house I could count the minarets of seventy-three mosques. Sarajevo mosques are, in the main, not great, ostentatious affairs but little and ancient and beautiful, each fitting into its community as comfortably as an English church sits in the heart of its parish. Below our house, a stone’s throw from the great Bey’s mosque built in the 1530s, stands the Catholic cathedral, its straight, strong bell-tower pointing with confident affirmation towards its God. And a hundred metres away the Serbian Orthodox cathedral stands, distinguished by its onion domes and characteristic architecture. Here is how Bosnia’s greatest writer, Ivo Andrić, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for literature, captured the sounds of Sarajevo which I could hear lying in my bed every night:
Whoever lies awake in Sarajevo hears the voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral strikes the hour with weighty confidence: 2 a.m. More than a minute passes (to be exact, 75 seconds – I counted) and only then, with a rather weaker but piercing sound does the Orthodox church announce the hour and chime its own 2 a.m. A moment after it the tower clock on the Bey’s mosque strikes the hour, in a hoarse, far-away voice that strikes 11, the ghostly Turkish hour, by the strange calculation of distant and alien parts of the world. The Jews have no clock to sound their hour, so God alone knows what time it is for them by the Sephardic reckoning, or the Ashkenazic. Thus at night, while everyone is sleeping, division keeps vigil in the counting of the late small hours and separates these sleeping people who, awake, rejoice and mourn, feast and fast by four different and antagonistic calendars and send all their prayers and wishes to one heaven in four different ecclesiastical languages.*
George Bernard Shaw, writing with terrible accuracy about his people (and mine) once said, ‘If you put two Irishmen in a room, you will always be able to persuade one to roast the other on a spit.’ There is much of this quality about the people of the Balkans, too. This is the dark undercurrent that lies unseen, but deeply sensed, beneath the seemingly placid surface of life. And it is capable of re-emerging in evil times with terrifying rapidity. This darkness of spirit may be unspoken in ordinary conversation, but it is there, clear enough, in the black humour and the everyday aphorisms which are common across all the ethnic communities of the Balkans. The most famous of these is, ‘Da Komšija crkne krava’ – ‘May my neighbour’s cow die.’ Another illustrates something of the same sentiment with a little more humour and a lot more vulgarity; ‘Lako je tudjim kurcem gloginje mlatiti’ – ‘It’s easy to beat thorn bushes with other people’s pricks.’
The problem, I think, lies in the question of identity, which is all the more important because all three peoples come from the same root, speak the same language and look identical. The Croats can’t really decide whether they are part of the Germanic races to the north, as they would like, or of the brotherhood of Slavs to the east, as they fear. The Serbs know who they are so well that they are prepared to do terrible things to those who aren’t them, and terribly brave things against the whole of the rest of the world, when someone convinces them that is necessary for national preservation. The Bosniak Muslims, meanwhile, have yet to find their true identity. They did not exist as a recognised group during most of the Tito years. Their identity was forged in the crucible of the recent 1992–5 war, whose aim was their extinction and during which they were abandoned by the rest of the world. They are gifted, artistic and hospitable to a fault. But their most powerful identity remains that of victims. Constantly alert and often suspicious, they are fearful of the future, always worrying that it will repeat the past again, especially since 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the ‘war on Islamic terror’.
Actually, it is this very fact which ought to lead Europe and the West to value Bosnia’s Muslims as a powerful bridge in the dialogue of the deaf currently under way between ancient Christendom and newly militant Islam. For Bosniak Muslims are not the new Islam in Europe, which we have suddenly and frighteningly found planted in our inner cities. They are ancient European Islam, which is four hundred years old. Alija Izetbegović used to say that he was a Muslim and a European and could see no contradiction between the two. Walk down Sarajevo’s main street, the Ferhadija, during the corso* and you will see the same for yourself. For Muslim though most will be, there is here as much fashionable finery, as much exposed flesh and as many short skirts as can be observed in any self-respecting European capital of a fine summer’s evening.
Or drive up a Bosniak valley on a still day in late October and note the thin columns of smoke rising through the clear blue air to a God who frowns on alcohol. At the foot of each you will invariably find one of the communal village stills which provides each Muslim family with the ten litres or so of fierce plum brandy (šlivović ) without which none of them would dream of entering the long nights and deep snows of the winter months.
Bosniak Muslims wear their religion very lightly. Which is lucky for Europe, for, even though we abandoned them in the recent war of extermination, they remained resolutely unradicalised. And they resolutely remain so still, despite continued, determined and expensive attempts by Wahabi extremists to make them into militant Islam’s European fifth column.
Bosnia’s history, just like everything else, has been sharply and often bloodily divided, too. It is an old country, which sent knights to the crusades and until the thirteenth century had its own kings, who despatched embassies to most of the courts of Europe. Then in 1463 came the Turks. They ruled for four hundred years. Contrary to popular perception, though, Muslims had special privileges under the Turks, there were very few pogroms against other religions, which were, in the main, tolerated. As the Turkish empire sickened and then died in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Austrians moved in and brought good government, splendid railways, impressive new state institutions and buildings to match. I remember an old man, curious about what being a member of the European Community would bring, once asking me, ‘My grandfather used to tell me that when the Austrians ruled us, if you paid too much tax, they actually gave you some back! Will joining Europe be like that? If it is, then the sooner we get there the better!’
But Austrian rule had only been in place some forty years when a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated their Archduke, on a street corner in Sarajevo (a plaque still marks the spot where the fatal shot was fired and set the world alight). After the First World War the ‘wise men’ who divided up the world could not work out what to do with three untidy spaces left over when the bartering was finally complete. So they drew lines round them
and called them countries: Czechoslovakia, Iraq and Yugoslavia. After that it was just a question of bundling Bosnia and Herzegovina into the last of these, along with its inconvenient neighbours who didn’t have a king powerful enough, or major state interested enough, to stand up for them. In World War Two, Tito used the mountains of Bosnia as the centre of his great guerrilla campaign against the Germans, aided by the British SOE, afterwards reuniting Yugoslavia under his special form of communism. Only his cvrsta ruka (strong fist) could hold the country together, however, and in the aftermath of his death came the terrible years of Milošević and Tudjman. After them came the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, the engagement of the international community, and the time of the High Representatives, of which I was the fourth.
So what exactly was this job – with its title out of Gilbert and Sullivan and powers that ought to have made a Liberal blush – which I suddenly found myself doing in this deeply complex country about which I knew so frighteningly little?
The task of the international High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina is to look after the implementation of the civilian aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement – in other words to build on the peace that Dayton created. In effect, this meant that my job could be as broad as I wished to make it, ranging from education, to human rights, to the conduct of government, to the operation of the economy, to the restructuring of the transport system, to the reconstruction of houses, to the reform of the media, etc., etc. In this job, I could interfere in anything and get swallowed up in everything if I wanted to.
And to help me interfere in everything if I wanted to, I had a staff in the Office of the High Representative (OHR) of approximately 800 and a budget of some €36 million. And to make interfering in other people’s business even more fun, I had an array of formidable powers called ‘the Bonn Powers’, under which I could impose laws, subject only to their eventual endorsement by the domestic parliaments, and remove officials and politicians who were blocking or undermining the implementation of the Dayton agreement.
A Fortunate Life Page 45