At first sight, this sounds altogether too tempting, especially for someone who would really like to have been Prime Minister. But I soon discovered that it was, on the contrary, extremely frightening to have so much power in a country about which I knew so little. I soon realised, too, that any law I passed, or any decision I took to remove an official rested, as the law in any ordinary country does, on public consent. My first conclusion, therefore, was that I could only do this job successfully if I saw myself as the servant of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that, if I ever lost their support for what I did, then my job would be finished overnight – and me with it.
The other way to fail at this job was to try to do everything. I insisted that we needed to be clear about what we would not get involved in. We had to avoid getting distracted by the things it would nice to do, in order to concentrate on the things it was vital to do. So we made a plan which focused on the essentials, and I gave instructions that, as these were completed, we would hand our responsibilities over to the Bosnians and start cutting the size of the OHR.
But I was also, formally, the servant of the international community, and had to get their agreement for any action I took, as well. One of my key tasks as High Representative was to ‘co-ordinate’ a veritable alphabet soup of UN and other bodies, ranging from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), through to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH), the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission (EC), the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the International Criminal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia (ICTY, better known as The Hague Tribunal), the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) and so on ad infinitum. The problem was that, although I had a formal duty to co-ordinate all these bodies, I had no formal powers to do so. For, as I very soon discovered, they all had their own mandates, reported directly to their own headquarters and paid little heed to what I said or did. If I was to succeed in this part of my job I had to do it through force of personality and with a clear plan in my back pocket.
To add to this potential confusion, there exists alongside the OHR an entirely separate and parallel military structure responsible for the security and military aspects of the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. (For most of my time this was the Stabilisation Force, SFOR, commanded by a three-star US general who reported directly to NATO in Brussels.) There was, however, no formal structure for co-operation between me and my military colleague, and before my arrival relations between the two headquarters had traditionally been cool to the point of hostility. One of my early decisions was to mend this division, so that the local NATO commander and I lived in each other’s pockets, felt each other’s heartbeat and acted always as one.
It is sometimes said that the High Representative in Bosnia is accountable to no one. The opposite was the truth. I was directly accountable to the Peace Implementation Council, made up of those countries most engaged in stabilising the peace in Bosnia, whose key Ambassadors formed a Steering Board with which I met every week and whose broad agreement I had to obtain for any major action I intended to take. I was also charged with reporting to the UN Security Council twice every year. In addition, as European Union Special Representative, my boss was the European ‘Foreign Minister’ in Brussels, Javier Solana. I also had to account to the European Commission (for the early years of my mandate the responsible Commissioner was Chris Patten) for the very considerable sum of money allocated to my mandate.
Before I left the UK to take up my new post, a very old friend with much experience in the region warned me that getting things to happen amid the complexities of Bosnia was ‘like herding cats’. What I very soon discovered was that the cats that were really difficult to herd were not the Bosnians I was working with, but the members of the international community behind me. Relations with them were much more difficult and much more complex, and in the end swallowed up much more of my time, than dealing with events in Bosnia. But I knew that the time I spent on this was worth it. Because they were the key. If the international community remained divided, as it was when I arrived, there was little I could accomplish. But if I could get them to work to a single plan and speak with a single voice, then there was nothing we could not do. And that was how it worked out.
There is an old Foreign Office saying; ‘He is a good man to go tiger-shooting with,’ meaning that the recipient of the compliment does not flinch in the face of danger. With only few exceptions, the nations and multilateral organisations which made up the international community in Bosnia proved just such partners. Some, like the governments of the US and the UK and the institutions of NATO and the European Union, were outstanding, giving me unwavering and generous support when I needed it (even, sometimes, when they thought I was wrong) and providing the resources to get things done when I required them.
But all this meant spending a lot of time visiting capitals and seeking their support for what we were proposing to do. Which meant far too much time spent on aircraft and in airports that should have been spent in Bosnia getting on with my job.
The travelling was not just one-way, though. Bosnia was also at the top of the list for many VIP tours of eastern Europe. Over the four years we were visited by the UN and NATO Secretary Generals, most of the EU’s Commissioners, President Clinton, many of the Prime Ministers and Presidents of Europe (but, significantly, not Tony Blair) and countless Admirals and Generals. One of the latter I especially remember. He was a US Air Force General straight out of central casting, with a body built like a bull and one of those heads that passes straight into the chest without the intervention of a neck. I opened our conversation with small talk, asking him whether this was his first time in Sarajevo, to which he replied, ‘Yup. First time I’ve been on the ground. But I bombed it a good deal!’
Inevitably, as with every other job I have done, Jane was involved in almost all I did and carried a very considerable burden of her own, not least because our house during the summer seemed always to be full of visitors and because, as in Geneva, she chose not to employ caterers to handle the diplomatic entertaining my job required but to do it herself. Here are extracts from a few of her emails to friends and family back in Britain, which give a flavour of our life in Sarajevo from her perspective:
2 Aug 2002
On Tues I did a farewell dinner for the US General commanding SFOR (NATO’s force in BiH). We will be sad to see him go, but at least the evening here wasn’t sad!! That’s one thing about being posted to a place for 2 yrs, you get to make friends, then they leave, & you’ll probably never see them again.
24 Sep 2002
Hi,
We’ve been quite busy. Had a supper at our house for some returned refugees, which terrified me. I wanted them to feel relaxed & easy with us. I hope they did. Then we had Chris Patten to stay the night, which meant another dinner, then last night another 10 to supper. Thing go on apace. Paddy is as busy as ever. We had hoped to go walking over the w.e. but the weather prevented that. The 1st plan was that P. should go rafting down some gorge or other with a few mad friends, but they decided that as the temperature of the water was minus 4, it was too cold!
25 June 2003
P’s well, but tired. I still cannot persuade him to take more than 10 days away from here. He has just had a pretty tiring trip to New York, Washington, London & Thessalonica. Back home now for a little, I hope. We had our annual reception last night. I do thank God there is a lot of the Lib Dem in the average Bosnian. The Lib Dems seem programmed to go home as soon as the raffle is drawn. Here, after about 1hr they just seem to melt away
28 April 2005
Poor old P. has been negotiating all week. Left on Sunday, comes home today. I shall be glad to get him back. At least he will be tired & pleased at the unexpected success they had, better than tired and unsuccessful!
Well, have a couple of journalists round to supper, so
must off and make a cottage pie.
Clarissa Eden once said that at the time of the 1956 crisis she felt that the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Jane must sometimes have had similar feelings.
8 October 2002
This weekend was another to zoom past unnoticed, filled with meetings in smoke-filled rooms in our house, impromptu meals & dashing out for more beers, etc. I guess more of the same until a new government is formed. Last time, I am told, it took 3 months.
21 Jan 2003
Last w.e. came and went, without really being noticed. There was a crisis & wall to wall meetings downstairs in the dining room, with lots of tea & coffee consumed. However P. did manage 3 hrs skiing yesterday, between meetings and hair-tearing!!
Over the next nearly four years, despite the crises and the difficulty of herding diplomatic cats, we did manage to make some progress. We took Bosnia’s three armies, which had just fought a vicious war of annihilation against each other, and combined them into one army under the control of the state and on its way to joining NATO. We dismantled the entire complex, fractured and broken taxation system of the country and replaced it with a single VAT system, all in less time than any other country has ever brought in VAT. We got rid of the country’s three secret services and created a single unified intelligence service, under the control of Parliament. We got rid of corrupt judges, created a state-wide judiciary and put together a body of modern law, consistent with Bosnian tradition and European standards.
We made the state government more effective and somewhat better able to govern the country. We stripped out many of the old communist business-destroying laws and liberalised the economy, so that by the time we left in 2006 Bosnia’s economic growth was five percent a year, the fastest in the Balkans – albeit from a very low, war-shattered base. We unified Bosnia’s two customs services into a single service, created a Bosnian equivalent of the FBI at state level and set it to work tackling high-level crime and corruption and arresting or neutralising some of the leaders and crime kings of Bosnia’s corrupt structures, in Government and outside it. We broke the logjam of non-cooperation from the local Serb authorities in capturing war criminals, sending a total of thirteen indictees to The Hague, including some of Karadžić’s and Mladić’s closest lieutenants. And we reunited the divided city of Mostar, whose great bridge was also finally rebuilt and opened in my time. In the process, we handed whole chunks of things the internationals had been doing to the Bosnian authorities and cut the staff and budget of my own organisation, the OHR, by a third.
In case I am giving the impression that either I or the international community did all these things by ourselves, we did not. Nearly all the great changes made in my time were not done by me or using my powers – they were passed through the democratic processes and Parliaments of Bosnia, so that the country could qualify to start the process which, hopefully, will eventually end with full membership of the European Union. It is fashionable in international circles to criticise the dysfunctionality of Bosnia’s institutions and the ineffectiveness of its politicians. But Bosnia’s structural dysfunctionality is not of the Bosnians’ making. It was the international Dayton Peace Agreement which gave this poor and war-shattered country of 3.5 million people, eleven mini-states made up of cantons and entities and no less than twelve Prime Ministers, each with their own mini-government. I am not criticising Dayton here. The compromises and complexities of Dayton were necessary in order to get peace – and there is no responsible person I know, in Bosnia or out of it, who would not have preferred even a very untidy peace, to the continuing slaughter. But this left Bosnia with a huge problem when, with stability and peace achieved, it became necessary to build a functioning state. And that was our task in 2002: to start to build the institutions of effective government. And this meant beginning slowly to dismantle the structures of Dayton, to which most still clung for security, in order to build a state which many had fought and died to prevent coming into existence. The fact that we managed to make some progress down this road depended, not on the wisdom of the international community, but on the political courage and ability to compromise of many Bosnian leaders, whom we often insisted should take the kind of risks with their popularity which very few of our Western democratic leaders would ever have countenanced. The heroes of Bosnia’s slow and painful rebirth are not the High Representatives or the international community, but the Bosnians themselves, and especially the long-suffering ordinary people of this remarkable little country, who, in the main, just want to try to live again as neighbours.
One of the most frightening aspects of my job was that, in order to get things moving, I often had to challenge the opinions of elected representatives – and sometimes use my powers to overrule them, where I believed that what was at stake was in the best interests of all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, rather than the sectional interests of the ethnic groups they represented. This is, on the face of it, an undemocratic thing to do, but the alternative would have been to let progress be vetoed at every step when the representatives of one or other of the three peoples of Bosnia chose to do so. It is also a very scary thing to do. Because, when a politician representing an ethnic interest threatened that his people would be out on the streets if we did X, we had to have sufficient confidence in our own judgement about what the people of Bosnia really wanted, or at least were prepared to tolerate, to be able to push ahead nevertheless. So we spent a very great deal of time measuring and gauging public opinion and building up public support.
My policy was to make myself as visible and available as I could, both to ordinary Bosnians and to their political representatives. I gave instructions that my drivers were not to use the flashing blue lights and police escorts which were (and still are) beloved of international diplomats and important Bosnians alike, but instead to drive around in as normal a way, and with as little disruption to the lives of ordinary Bosnians, as possible. I insisted (against some opposition from our security people) that the gates of my office building should be left open, so that it looked less like a fortress. I instituted regular speeches to Bosnia’s Parliaments, followed by an open Question Time, and made it clear that any decision I took as the international High Representative could be challenged through the Bosnian Constitutional Court, and that, though not legally required to under international law, I would nevertheless abide by its judgements. And I walked to work through the Sarajevo streets and markets almost every morning, instead of using the armoured BMW thoughtfully provided by Her Majesty’s Government. On one of my early walks I came across an old, destitute man selling plastic lighters for one KM* on the corner of Sarajevo’s Cathedral Square. I pressed a 2 KM piece into his hand, wished him ‘Dobro Jutro’ (good morning) and walked on. To my surprise he ran after me shaking his white stick and shouting angrily. I stopped so he could catch up and, puzzled, asked what I had done wrong. ‘What’s this?’ he said with real anger, as with force he pushed my coin back into my hand. ‘What do you think I am? A beggar? Well I’m not. I’m a lighter-seller!’ After that I bought a lighter from him every morning I found him there, bitter winter and boiling summer alike, accumulating a collection of more than two hundred before I left Sarajevo.
To the great annoyance of the Sarajevo carsia (coffee-house society), who thought my job was to be there for them, Jane and I also spent a great deal of time out of the city, living and working with ordinary Bosnians, especially the poorest and most disadvantaged, much as I had done when researching Beyond Westminster or in my old constituency. These visits gave me a vital understanding of what life was actually like for ordinary people. I am a great believer in the African-chief theory of leadership. African chiefs accumulated cattle in their kraals in order to sell or trade them so as to achieve things they wanted to achieve. That’s how I see popularity: not a bubble bath to be wallowed in, but a store which is accumulated to ‘trade in’ when you need to get things done.
These visits out of Sarajevo also gave Jane and me
some of our most moving and unforgettable experiences. Here is one detailed extract from my diary which gives a flavour of one of our trips.
Tuesday 10 June 2003
It took us a good two hours to drive to Visegrad [in eastern Bosnia], with much lightning and rain as we passed over Romanija mountain. But we burst into the Drina valley in glorious sunshine, having followed the old Austrian railway line that runs down through the tight little gorge from Rogatica. Here the road skirts the Drina, plunging through cliffs in a series of dramatic tunnels…. Then sharply left and dizzily up the mountain rampart, skirting along the edge of a steep slope, with the Drina thousands of feet below us as we climbed and climbed. Finally we arrived at the little hamlet of Rogrohica, with barely half a dozen houses, all but one of them burnt out.
We stopped by one blackened and roofless ruin, alongside which was placed an extremely decrepit and disintegrating tent with the faded letters ‘UNHCR’ still clearly visible. This was the home of our hosts, Ahmed and sebiŝa Setkić, who had lived in this tent on this spot, fierce Bosnian winter and boiling summer alike, for the last two years.
Ahmed, brown as a berry with a nose as sharp as a hawk’s and eyes to match, is seventy-seven and sebiŝa sevent-four. They have lived here since the war, eking out a living by growing vegetables, chiefly potatoes, paprika and onions on the little patch of land by their house and waiting for a foreign donation to help them rebuild their burnt-out home.
A Fortunate Life Page 46