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
Julian Glover 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. Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4521870,00.html Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
