A Fortunate Life

Memory is a most fickle and unfaithful thing. Unlike the love described in Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 116, it does ‘alter when it alteration finds and bends with the remover to remove’ – and does so, moreover, all the time and in the most inconvenient manner.

If I had had to write this book relying only on my own defective memory, it would have been crammed full of grievous inaccuracies and gross distortions.

I am therefore most grateful to those old colleagues and friends who have been kind enough to look through the text and correct it. They include Mike Aaronson, Max Atkinson, Mark Ashdown, Tim Ashdown, Julian Astle, Cathy Bakewell, Alan Beith, Michael Boyce, Julian Braithwaite, Nick Clegg, Tim Clement-Jones, Tim Courtenay, Sherard Cowper-Coles, Alison Downing, Sarah Frapple (who has kept my diaries over many years), certain Government authorities, Greg Jefferies, David and Dorothy Hartridge, Archy Kirkwood, David Laws, Alan Leaman, Ed Llewellyn, Roger Lowry, Bob MacLennan, Colin McColl, Tom McNally, John Murphy, Sead Numanović, Sue O’Sullivan, Nick South, Nick Speakman, David Steel, SBS Poole, Roger Taylerson, Archy Tuta, Pat Troy, Rupert van der Horst, Shirley Williams and Amela Zahiragić.

Others, even more heroic, have not only corrected my memory but have also been kind enough to read and advise on what I have written. Their amendments and suggestions have resulted in great improvements. Amongst them are: Simon Ashdown, Steph Bailey, Rosemary Billinge, Ellen Dahrendorf, Les Farris, Miranda Green, Andrew Phillips, Steve Radley, Chris Rennard, Carol Ross, Kate Theurel and David Walter.

From Chapter 12 onwards I have been able to check my memory of events by referring to the diaries I started keeping when I became Leader of the Liberal Democrats at the end of July 1988 and most of the passages reproduced as direct speech in these later chapters, for example my conversation with Tony Blair on the eve of the 1997 election, were recorded in my diary on the day in question.

I also owe a debt to some who have been most generous in providing information and material which has been invaluable to me. In this category I am especially grateful to the authorities of Bedford School, and particularly to Gina Warboys and the team of sixth-formers who were tasked by the then Headmaster, Dr Evans, with searching through the school’s old records and digging up past reports and references to my time there. My thanks also go to the Royal Navy for my service records and reports, as well as to Michael Brunson, Richard Lindley, David Mitchell, Dr Peter Sercombe and those people in Rathfriland who made Jane and me so welcome (especially the Reverend Phillip Thompson), all of whom have been so generous and helpful with facts and advice.

And then there are two people who have done all of these things and more. My wife Jane, whose idea it was that I should write this book, has read, re-read, corrected and advised with great patience and wisdom. And my old friend and colleague Ian Patrick, who through his dedication to detail, good judgement and diligence has, in this enterprise as in so much else I have done, saved me from numberless errors and improved the final outcome immeasurably.

Finally, I would like to thank Michael Sissons of PFD for encouraging me to write this book and Aurum Press for publishing it – especially Piers Burnett of Aurum, who has advised me during the writing of it and, with great skill, edited what I have produced, as well as John Wheelwright, who, with extraordinary patience and a fearsome attention to detail and grammatical correctness, copy-edited it.

All of these, and no doubt more, have made this book better than it would otherwise have been. But none bear any responsibility for whatever infelicities, inaccuracies or inadequacies it may contain.

T
HE WOMAN’S FACE
was stained with sweat and waxy-white and heavy with hopelessness and fear. Her flower-pattern dress hung around her, grimy and formless, but still hinting of a young body and strong limbs. A child of perhaps four clung to one hand, while with her other she pushed a pram laden with assorted cheap household items: some worn clothes, a collection of cooking pots, a coffee
djezva
*
and an incongruous tin of Nestlé’s powdered baby milk. Behind her trudged an older woman carrying a baby which was crying pitifully and an old man bent over a stick. They made up just a small ripple in the miserable stream of dusty stragglers tramping towards the school buildings at Trnopolje under a burning sun, as our convoy, led by a Serb jeep, bumped past them. My mind flew back to that first remembered image – the one that used to haunt me and grow into exaggerated forms in the nightmares of my childhood – the brief glimpse, snatched from between the folds of my mother’s skirt, of a single platform under a boiling sun, carpeted with dismembered bodies, the gore and the smell of putrefaction and that other smell that I recognised now – the odour of animal fear.

Little more than twenty-four hours before I had been sitting up until the cool, starlit hours of the early morning with the ‘President’ of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, at his mountain headquarters high above Sarajevo, drinking
š
livović
†
and talking of philosophy and poetry, of the eternal tragedies of the Balkans and of his life as a psychiatrist and poet. The wonderful, brave
Guardian
journalist, Maggie O’Kane (who, with other journalists, had accompanied me on my visit to see the Serb side of the three-month-old Bosnian war), had warned me earlier that evening that Karadžić was evil and a liar. But, sitting in front of him, drinking plum brandy, I did not believe her. I accepted his assertion that he wanted a just peace if ‘the Muslims’
would only compromise. I accepted his acknowledgement that the Serbs, too, had done some bad things and his promise that they would be punished. Not yet understanding very much about the Balkans and knowing nothing of Karadžić’s ability (shared, I later discovered, by his backer, President Slobodan Milošević of Serbia) to lie straight into your eyes without wavering, I still believed, naively, that it must be possible to see great evil in a man’s face

Of course, I knew there was another side. Two weeks earlier, in the last days of July 1992, I had, on a whim, hitched a lift on an RAF Special Forces
Hercules
and flown into besieged Sarajevo, spent three days there, met the President of the Bosnian Muslims, Alija Izetbegović, been sporadically shelled on Sarajevo airport and made statements urging the West to intervene to stop the carnage.

It was because of this that Karadžić had written to me suggesting that, having seen ‘the Muslim’ side, I should see the Serb side too. The letter had arrived in my London office and was read out to me over the phone as my wife Jane and I were visiting Monet’s garden in Giverny at the start of our annual summer holiday in France. By this time (thanks in large measure to another outstanding
Guardian
journalist covering the Bosnian war, Ed Vulliamy), the first stories had begun to emerge about the Serb death camps at Keraterm and Omarška. Nevertheless, Karadžić’s invitation, civil and quietly framed, seemed to me entirely reasonable – I
should
see both sides. I abandoned our planned holiday in France and, setting only two conditions – that I should take my Lib Dem colleague Russell Johnston with me, and that we should have free access wherever we wished to go – flew from Paris to Budapest and then drove across the Danube plain to Belgrade, from where, in the most frightening helicopter ride I have ever taken, we flew over the Bosnian battlefields to Karadžić’s headquarters at Pale in the mountains of Eastern Bosnia, from where he was directing the siege of Sarajevo.

The day after my
š
livovi
ć
evening with Karadžić, Russell Johnston and I nursed our hangovers through another long car journey, this time behind Serb lines and through what looked to me like relatively peaceful countryside, to the Serb capital, Banja Luka. It was only ten years later that I discovered that the countryside here looked peaceful because Serbian irregulars who called themselves the White Eagles had just swept through, killing hundreds, raping and crucifying women naked on their own front doors, burning houses, laying waste
to the land and driving out all that remained of the Muslim population. Ten years later I was to see their dolls, toys and the remnants of the clothes they wore amidst the tangle of broken bones that was all that was left of around some six hundred of them, men, women and children, at one of the biggest of the mass graves at nearby Crni Vrh.

We arrived in Banja Luka at around three in the afternoon, having been held up by an ambush on the road. The journalists accompanying us had travelled by a different route and arrived before us. They were abuzz with rumours of a new ‘death’ camp which had not yet been visited – Manjača. I insisted that we should go there immediately, reminding the Serb military commanders in charge of this sector of their ‘President’s’ promise that I would be given unimpeded freedom to go wherever I wished. They refused, saying there was a curfew, and I would be shot if I went. I responded that they would have to shoot me in front of the journalists who were accompanying me, and this would not do their cause any good in the face of world opinion, which was now turning against them.

What I found when we got to Manjača that evening was not an extermination camp like Keraterm and Omarška, but a brutal prison in which were incarcerated about two thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys of potential fighting age who had been picked up by the Serbs in local towns and villages during recent ethnic cleansing. Conditions were harsh, even inhuman; medical supplies for the wounded were either rudimentary or non-existent and, although killing was not the specific purpose of the camp, prisoners were being killed, either in random acts of brutality by the guards, or on the instructions of the authorities. That night television images of what we saw were broadcast on news bulletins around the world. Shortly afterwards the Red Cross got access to Manjača. Ten years later, when I was giving evidence at the trial of Milošević in The Hague, one of the prosecutors told me that several of the inmates I had seen in Manjača on that day had, in the course of their evidence, said that there had been many killings at the camp until one day a British MP had come and brought the television cameras with him. After that the killings stopped.

I count this as the best day’s work of my life.

The following day at Trnopolje I count as the worst.

A little beyond the young mother and the remnants of her family and the dusty river of refugees on the road, we came to Trnopolje Middle School.

The scene is still as deeply etched on my mind as that massacre of my young nightmares. The smell of faeces and neglected bodies hung thick in the still hot air. Here were old men, scarcely more than skeletons; wounded, lying on fly-blown mattresses; young mothers with terror on their faces, trying to comfort desperate children; old women sitting on their haunches, staring vacantly into a chasm of misery. A few pathetic torn curtains were erected on poles here and there, for shade or privacy. Most seemed to have abandoned their dignity and submitted themselves to degradation and hopelessness amidst the little stinking piles of carelessly deposited human excrement with which they shared their living space. Amongst them – moving gently and with infinite compassion – was an ITV crew who had also just got there and whose presenter, Penny Marshall, was making a film which later won her a prestigious award.

These were the wives and children and fathers and mothers and grandparents of the emaciated men and boys we had seen the previous day, at Manjaca. One elderly woman told me the nights were the worst. That was when the gangs of marauding Serbs came in to take away the young women to be raped and then, she thought, often killed; for many just disappeared, leaving their children to be cared for by the rest as best they could.

I have never before or since felt such hopelessness or shame, and wept because of it. On my way back to Belgrade I wrote a letter to Prime Minister John Major, telling him what I had seen and begging him immediately to declare Trnopolje a safe haven, under UN protection.

But my shame that day pales into insignificance alongside the greater shame that swept over me nearly ten years later when, back in Bosnia as the International Community’s High Representative, I learned that about three days after my visit (I sometimes torture myself with the thought that it may even have been because of it) the Serbs took away almost all those I had seen, herded them, old men, women and children, to the edge of a cliff on nearby Vlasić mountain and machine-gunned them all into the ravine below. I went to see their splintered bones and broken skulls and the little shards of clothes and toys amongst the weeds – all that was left of those I had seen, who had died in such misery and horror because of the shameless inactivity of my country and those who were in charge of what we are pleased to call ‘Western Civilisation’.

Perhaps it is true of all of our lives that we can pick out a day, or a handful of days, which stand out in Technicolor detail from the grey procession of weeks and months and years. Some, because we are proud of them; some, because they give us pain or shame. Perhaps these are one way of distilling the pattern, range and purpose of a life.

I have, so far at least, led a most fortunate life. I was a soldier at the end of the golden age of imperial soldiering; a spy at the end of the golden age of spying; a politician while politics was still a calling; and an international peace-builder backed by Western power, before Iraq and Afghanistan drained the West of both influence and morality.

I seem, in all, to have travelled a long way and had great luck. But two of my Technicolor days, the best and the worst, fall consecutively in the second week of August 1992. Together they form not just a memory but also somehow a distillation of the theme of my life; that of conflict and its human consequences when the beast of intolerance and bigotry gets loose. Looking back, this seems like a subterranean stream which has appeared, vanished and re-emerged, never completely leaving me, since my very earliest days.