[A-List] Bosnia: Ashdown to the rescue

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

King Paddy

He used to lead a small British political party. Now he's running a European
country. Julian Glover joins 'high representative' Paddy Ashdown on his
mission to save war-torn Bosnia

Friday October 11, 2002
The Guardian

In the heart of Europe a British politician is governing a country whose
language he hardly speaks. He enjoys an autonomy and authority which Queen
Victoria's colonial administrators would have envied. Everybody knows him
there. Everybody looks up to him. Everything centres around him. And yet
Britain has almost completely forgotten him.

When I walked into the dusty studios of Radio Mostar late last month, Paddy
Ashdown, the International High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was on
his way. There were bullet-holes in the lift door and the town outside was
partly in ruins but Ashdown hardly seemed to notice. The former Liberal
Democrat leader has never been one to shy from gunfire, and now, brow
furrowed, eyes narrowed and jacket tossed over his shoulder, he strode into
the studio as Bosnia's boss to beg and berate his people. "The question is
simple," he says through his interpreter. "Will you join Europe or will you
be left behind as the stagnant pool of the Balkans?" It is not the only time
in the day Ashdown uses the phrase "stagnant pool". It visibly shocks his
audience. But he aims to shock. Complacency, he says, has failed.

Anyone who watched Ashdown lead the Liberal Democrats will recognise the
sense of mission. He seems to have twice the energy and twice the passion of
a man whose biggest job before now was leadership of a small British
political party. You almost feel that post was a practice run for saving a
nation.

And Bosnia needs a saviour. Though the Balkan war came to a halt almost
seven years ago, the Dayton agreement that silenced the guns did not end the
country's pain. The world has poured in some £33bn, including military
costs, but signs of war are everywhere, even in central Sarajevo, a city of
blasted tower blocks and scarred houses. Despite 12,000 Nato troops,
organised crime thrives.

Political life too is in a rut: still trapped in obstructionism and the
nationalist language of the war. The tangled peace settlement left
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country with the population of Scotland, with 13 prime
ministers - one for every 175,000 citizens - 57 political parties and
perhaps 4,500 politicians (no one knows the full number). Public workers go
unpaid. Corruption is a growth industry.

Four months ago, Ashdown arrived to sort out the mess. His predecessors had
been bureaucrats; he promised action. But can one man rescue a nation?

The man himself appears to have his doubts. At dawn, as we leave his modest
offices - four or five storeys, potted geraniums in the yard - in his black
armoured BMW, he wearily predicts the day ahead. Judges will complain they
are unpaid, farmers will say they have no land and weeping mothers will be
unable to return to their burned-out homes. "Bosnia has been ruled by the
Ottomans, the Hapsburgs and the communists," he says. "So it's not
surprising that the people regard me as just another Hapsburg governor,
someone they should petition to get their problems solved." But beneath a
weary shrug about getting 1,000 letters a week, there is a hint of pride.

The petitioning goes on all day from frustrated people with insoluble
problems who have never before had a chance to speak to someone important.
He looks sorry at their plight.

Caught in commuter traffic on Sarajevo's main highway - nicknamed sniper's
alley because of its past exposure to Serb guns - Ashdown's official car
halts by packed trams shuddering along grass-covered tracks. There are
bullet holes everywhere and the first snows of winter have reached the
mountaintops. A far cry from pavement politics in Yeovil. Yet Ashdown is
still on the campaign trail. On October 5 Bosnia went to the polls in an
election that its new ruler described as "a last chance". Though he uses
verbal formulas to avoid being seen to back individual politicians - "ghosts
of the past", "reformers", "this election is about the future" - it was
clear enough who Ashdown supported: "Any individual who will produce what I
want - a state on its way to Europe." But the results of the poll showed the
scale of his task. Turnout fell to a post-conflict low of 55% and
nationalist parties outperformed moderate rivals who had been running
Bosnia-Herzegovina for the past two years. Some interpreted the result as a
slap in the face for the international community. But Ashdown only redoubled
his determination to get his message of reform to every corner of the
country.

Nothing - not Marshall Tito nor five years of war - has prepared the people
of Bosnia-Herzegovina for the Ashdown campaign machine. A mix of confidence,
charisma and sheer momentum, it stuns voters who have never heard of a spin
doctor or soundbite. "Why do you keep repeating the same thing?" asks one
local journalist who hasn't yet come to terms with what it means to be on
message.

At a public meeting in the Serb town of Trebinje, Ashdown runs in, throws
his mobile across the room to an aide and demands questions. The audience,
big sullen people who have had to cope with war, capitalism and democracy
all in a decade, are first shocked, then encouraged to complain about their
position. This is a new kind of politics for Bosnia.

I put it to Ashdown that there are similarities between what he tried to
achieve in British politics and what he is doing here. "You could say we're
putting into practice the 1992 Liberal Democrat manifesto," he says as I
perch in the back of his car and a policeman salutes by the roadside. "It's
about the devolution of power, investment, European integration and
coalition building."

Among his problems is the military's persistent failure to capture the two
most wanted war criminals in the country, Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and
his military commander Ratko Mladic. Karadzic, says Ashdown, "is wandering
in the company of goat-herds and exercising his baleful curse on this
country" - but will be caught. Later, rumours circulate that he is hiding in
the hills somewhere beneath the flight path of the aged Slovenian airforce
helicopter Ashdown takes home that night.

His authority as high representative is ill-defined but not far short of
absolute. A sort of unelected monarch watching over troublesome politicians,
he can effectively sack anyone, appoint anyone and arrest anyone he believes
to be obstructing peace - and has done so, courting controversy earlier this
year by removing one of the country's deputy finance ministers and
dismissing a string of judges. One observer compares his powers to those of
Charles II.

Are these powers a democrat should have? The answer sounds practised. "My
job is to abolish my job," he says. "It has a Gilbert and Sullivan title and
powers that should make a liberal blush." Was he blushing? If so I did not
notice it.

But Ashdown knows well enough that democracy has not worked: this month's
election only brought further political paralysis and he understands he can
only achieve economic and legal reforms if he forces new laws through
without the approval of the country's many parliaments. "It was a mistake to
bring democracy here before the rule of law and it's a mistake we've
repeated in Kosovo," he says. He implies that action will be taken on crime
and economy with the election out of the way, whether the winners like it or
not.

The danger is that Ashdown's high profile will only make the country more
dependent on international leadership. By now we are driving fast down an
empty limestone valley in the autonomous Republika Srpska and the official
convoy has acquired a police escort with flashing blue lights. Ashdown gets
agitated. "Can't we get rid of the police?" he asks. "I hate that sort of
thing." The car is sent away.

This turns out to be the most encouraging visit of the day. Stolac, a hot,
dry agricultural town in the middle of nowhere, was the scene of some of the
worst atrocities in the war - the sort of place where neighbours blew the
roofs of each others houses by pouring petrol onto an upstairs carpet and
waiting for the vapours to reach a lighted candle on the ground floor. Croat
forces flattened the local mosque and drove out the Muslim population. In
the past year some have begun to return.

Ashdown visits an agricultural cooperative which exports herbal oils to
Britain. It is a small scheme but a good one - multi-ethnic and with 500
active members. Behind the crowd that gathers around Ashdown, an elderly
Bosnian Muslim husband and wife attempt to rebuild the ruins of their house,
the man slowly breaking concrete with a builder's hammer.

The return of most refugees to their homes has been the triumph of postwar
reconstruction. "We've invented a new human right here, the right to return
after a war," Ashdown says. "It's absolutely astonishing, a huge success by
Bosnians and the international community that has gone unrecognised."

But his visit to Mostar had suggested that success is only partial. Before
the war it was a mixed town: now it is a divided one. "I always get
depressed when I get to Mostar. We have made less progress here than
elsewhere," he says.

We turn a corner and he leaps out of the car and into a glitzy hotel for a
meeting with local aid workers. Ashdown tells his staff that their jobs will
end soon. Mostly young, idealistic westerners, they look anxious. Gently, he
eases them towards the thought that outsiders cannot stay forever, or even
for long. "I'm keen to get the international community onto a glide path to
something different," he tells me afterwards. "What we have now is near
imperialism. We need to move from a quasi-protectorate to something more
acceptable."

It is hard not to be won over by Ashdown's commitment. In a day we travel
250 miles by car and helicopter over rough mountains. He has no lunch and
hardly time for a coffee and a cigarette. He has been doing this for four
months, with only a week's break. Why do it, I ask. "Bosnia gets under your
skin. It's certainly got under mine." A moment later, as we round a corner
into a vast, pine-clad valley, he points through the window. "We're just
going past one of my houses. I've bought a patch of land by the lake." His
wife Jane is with him in Sarajevo. The couple have started to learn
Serbo-Croat.

Ashdown insists this is his last job. "After this I'll retire to my garden."
But in a country where division looks certain to block leadership from
within, could there be room for an outsider to dream of leading it to the
European future in which he so strongly believes? Only a daydream, no doubt,
but it is hard to follow him for long without suspecting he has dreamed it
too.