A Fortunate Life (60 page)

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:

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.

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.