A Fortunate Life (61 page)
Authors: Paddy Ashdown
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 Ju
ne 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 sebi
ŝa 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 sebi
ŝ
a 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.
We sat round a rough table outside the tent and chatted, as I idly
watched some clouds beginning to gather in the distance and silently mar
velled at the Drina sparkling in the sunlight thousands of feet below us
and the tumbling cliffs pouring down the mountains into the valley below.
This is where the Emperor Diocletian in the third century drew the line to
separate the Eastern and the Western Roman Empires.
Ahmed’s life story, as he told it to me in the slanting sunlight on his
little patch of land on the mountainside, was just a modern version of the
fate of so many particles of human dust caught up in the conflicts
spawned by this great fault line down the march of the centuries.
A Muslim, he had been born in this house, as had his father and his
grandfather before him. His grandfather had lived to a hundred and
twenty-five, and his father to over a hundred. The land round here and
the special air of the Drina valley, was the best in Bosnia, he said.
*
Everybody here lived to a ripe old age – unless they were killed in the
mindless storms of war which, generation after generation, swept over
them for unknowable reasons in far-away places.
Then, their lot was not peace and the quiet enjoyment of simple lives,
but burnt houses and blood and the swift exodus to the hidden, tradi
tional places in the caves and forests where father, and grandfather too,
had hidden before. And then always the sly return when the madness had
passed and the back-breaking job of rebuilding their houses, reclearing
their land and replanting their crops.
It had happened to Ahmed three times in his seventy-seven years. First
the Germans burnt his house in 1941, then the Partisans in 1943. Then,
in 1992, Arkan came.
†
He had been the worst. He killed everything, father,
son, mother, daughter, sheep, cats, dogs – nothing was left alive.
As Ahmed told his story, a small crowd of his neighbours materialised
around us. One, Ŝemso from a neighbouring village, showed me the wound
in his jaw where he had taken a bullet fleeing from Arkan’s troops as they
had swept through the mountains to his village.
Ahmed told us many had died. Every house had been burnt. He had
stayed behind with his son to try and defend their homes. They had held
Arkan up for a couple of days, but his troops had heavy weapons, and the
villagers only had only hunting rifles. In the end they had been forced to
flee. He and his family had spent the war years in besieged Sarajevo.
But three years after the war ended he decided to try and return. At
first they had just come back for the weekend, braving hostility from the
local Serbs. Then, two years ago, they had received a tent from UNHCR,
which they had put up alongside their burnt-out house and come back for
good – except if the winter got really bad, when they returned to Sarajevo
to stay with relatives until the better weather came.
At about 6 o’clock the skies suddenly opened, and it started to rain
fiercely. We took shelter in a nearby empty house. Soon the rain changed
to hailstones, which got progressively larger and larger until they were the
size of a gob-stopper marbles, dancing in wild profusion on the grass and
rattling cacophonously off the corrugated roof of a nearby shed. We
watched as showers of unripe plums were knocked off the trees and
Ahmed’s vegetables took a severe battering. After about twenty minutes it
stopped, and we wandered out to inspect the damage.
To my horror I saw that the hailstones had gone right through the rot
ten fabric of Ahmed’s tent, in which Jane and I were to spend the night.
The tent now looked as though a host of shotguns had been fired at it, and
there were large puddles of mud where we were to sleep.
Ahmed and I decided to go off for a walk while the ground dried, pick
ing our way along the mountainside on an old track, until we came to an
ancient graveyard of
stećaks
*
positioned on a prominent saddle overlook
ing the Drina valley. Ahmed told me that he thought that the
stećaks
were left by the Romans, but I told him that historians believe them to be
from the time of the Bogomils, who were originally heretic Christians who
had come to Bosnia in the thirteenth century.
He told me that there are other, older graves nearby and pointed out a
collection of broken stone sarcophagi poking out of the ground about fifty
metres away. These appeared, to my uneducated eye, to be much older,
perhaps even Neolithic.
We then wandered back along the track, chatting about history, the ancient
settlement of this land, of life, of war, of our children, of women and of plum
harvests and the countryside. By the time we got back to the tent, a large fire
had been lit and the
sać
†
was steaming away on the fire, smelling delicious.
We all sat down under the gathering twilight, drank beer, ate lamb
and chatted by the glow of the fire until it grew dark, and the stars came
out, and the moon shone in a watery sky above us.
At around ten o’clock everyone started to drift off home.
It had been agreed that Jane and I should sleep in the tent, so Ahmed
Sebiŝa went off to a neighbouring house, which had recently been
rebuilt, while we settled down for the night.
Before we went to bed Ahmed told us to watch out for snakes. When
they first moved back they had lived in a nearby stable and had been
constantly plagued by snakes. Several had come in each night, and they
used to hear them hissing and fighting with Ahmed’s dog (a stocky little
terrier of uncertain breeding, but courageous as a lion. Ahmed said he
had been out seeing off a wild boar which had come to forage in Ahmed’s
vegetables the previous night). Neither of these stories was especially con
ducive to settling down for a good night’s sleep.
Nevertheless, dog tired, we fell asleep fairly quickly, lulled by the
sounds of the night and the drip of the wet canvas above us.
The next morning we were up at 5.30 and washed at a tap fed from a
nearby mountain stream. Everything damp and musty. This morning the
clouds were lying in the valley below covering the Drina. But as the sun
came up these gradually cleared to reveal an astonishing view down the
valley, of the Drina sparkling in the early morning sunshine below us.
In due course we all gathered around the embers of last night’s fire, which Ahmet fanned into a roaring flame again and on which he soon had a pot of strong Bosnian coffee bubbling away, waiting for us. We all sat down, some ten of us, to a breakfast of cold lamb, kajmak
*
pura
†
and boiled eggs before saying our farewells and returning down the valley.
Jane’s emails recorded her own impression of other visits we made together to all the four corners of Bosnia during our years there and of some of her work with those who had suffered most. (On these visits out of Sarajevo, we were careful to ensure that we visited and stayed with families from all three of Bosnia’s communities, equally – although, coincidentally, all the descriptions quoted here relate to visits to Muslim families.)
