Paddy Ashdown – Page 15

Keep Calm and Carry On -The Independent 12 Jan 2015

Keep Calm and Carry On

The Independent 12 Jan 2015

They say that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.

The “Charlie hebdo” atrocities of last week are many things; frightening, terrifying, atrocious, a horror, an attack on what we stand for. But, as a phenomenon they are not new, or exceptional or uniquely Muslim.

You do not have to be a young Muslim living in the 21^st century to be subject to radicalisation. It has always been possible to persuade young men (and a few – a very few – young women) of all faiths and none to the believe that it is noble to kill in pursuit of what they have been persuaded is a great cause. As far back as the first century, the Jewish Zealots did it against Roman rule. In the 11^th century the Shia Muslim Hashashin added another word – assassin – to our vocabulary of terror by their attacks on the Persian Government of the day. In our own time we have had to deal with our own “home grown” so called “Catholic” terrorists of the IRA (who by the way killed and destroyed far more than the current wave of jihadist outrages) – as well as the outrages perpetrated by anti-imperialist young middle class white Germans in the Bader-Meinhof Gang and its successor the Rot Armee Fraktion. And then of course there was the 2011 “massacre of the innocents” by Christian fundamentalist Anders Brievik.

Perhaps the closest parallel to what we are seeing now is the Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All entirely “home grown” and without any kind of formal command structures, they too were a collection of “lone wolves” inspired by texts and prepared to destroy lives in pursuit of their dream of replacing states with borderless self-governed entities which, leaving aside that they were based on a political rather than a religious creed, bear a striking similarity to the caliphates of today.

In pursuit of what they called “the propaganda of the deed” they too used the bomb and the gun to kill and maim a large numbers of innocents – as well as an extraordinary number of the most powerful and prominent. On June 2 1919 simultaneous bombs attacks in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Patterson in New Jersey killed a mayor, a state legislator, three judges, two businessmen a policeman and a catholic priest. A year later perhaps the earliest “car bomb” blew up outside Wall Street killing 39 and injuring hundreds more. These were no more than the last lethal splutterings of a spate of anarchist attacks which had been going on for more than 30 years. In 1893 an anarchist bomb in Barcelona’s opera house killed or injured 72. That same year, a hungry, vagabond, socially outcast Frenchman threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies. A year later another threw a bomb hidden in a lunch box into a Paris café killing or wounding more than 20. He, too died shouting “We, who hand out death, know how to take it”.

Among the very ordinary casualties of the “anarchist years”, were also some very prominent ones, too. Those assassinated included a US President, a Russian Tsar, the empress of Austria, the President of France, the King of Spain on his wedding day, the heir to the Austrian empire on the corner of a Sarajevo street, the King of Italy and countless European Government Ministers and notables. Among many dynamite attacks on public buildings they placed the best of half a ton of explosive below the Imperial dining room of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, failing in their first attempt on the Tsar and his family, but killing or wounding more than 40.

Then, too, as now the security forces complained they needed more powers to tackle the threat. After a bomb in the city, the Chicago police, even went so far as to recycle exactly the same piece of gas piping three times in order to prove that they had “foiled” three subsequent “bomb outrages”.

None of this of course is to say that recent events are not serious. Or that we are not under threat. Or that we do not now have to respond in a serious and thoughtful manner.

But if we are to react as we should, then it is as well to remember that what we face is NOT new. And it is not unique and it is not just Islamic and we have been through this before and we should not panic or over-react. Almost every recent generation has had to respond to these kind of events.

And almost every recent generation has managed to do so without fundamentally undermining our freedoms or setting our societies at war with themselves.

It is worth recalling that throughout those same bloody anarchist years around the end of the nineteenth century, the long march towards the European ideal of states founded on individual liberty, tolerance and human rights continued unchecked. Defending the Charlie Hebdo principle means refusing to allow either terrorism or our fear of it to deflect us from that path.

The Prime Minister and the Political debate The Times 30 Jan 2012

The Prime Minister and the Political debate

Competence is not the only quality we hope for from our Prime Ministers. They also set the tone for our politics.

Mr Cameron seemed to understand that when he responded so sure footedly to the public mood after the uncertain outcome of the last election, working with Nick Clegg to put together a different kind of government. For many, myself included, the hope was that the Downing Street Rose Garden “love in” was not just about a new way of governing; it was also about creating a new culture of respect in the public discourse. The end of the old “dog eat dog” style of political debate that so many people find so offensive; so out of kilter with the standards they hope for everywhere else – from classroom, to football terrace, to family home. Maybe now, we hoped, our political leaders would no longer be required to hang up their brains in favour of their political cudgels before entering into the chamber of public debate.

Mr Cameron, indeed, promised just such a thing when he first became Conservative Leader and has even admitted since that he has failed to live up to his own hopes because he just “can’t help himself” when it comes to the fray.

The last few months – and especially the last week – seem to indicate that he still can’t control his urge to return to the “tooth and claw” of past practice, rather than fulfilling his promise to try for something better. The hob-nail boot remains his preferred political weapon.

The result is that, when it comes to the atmosphere of our political discourse under his Premiership, things are not just, not better; they are, arguably, much worse.

Of course we value the robust tradition of British politics. But the personalisation and bitterness of the exchanges at Prime Minster’s Questions – and beyond – is now becoming offensive and distasteful. It is also, from the Prime Minister’s point of view, most unwise. A man with basically decent instincts, he had much to gain from leading a move to a style of politics which, while just as robust, is less dependent on raw tribalism, invective and personal insult and more in tune with the nature of the Coalition Government he leads.

The slide began I think in the AV referendum. No-one is questioning the decisive result of this. It was not the outcome of the campaign, but the way it was conducted which caused the damage. Mr Cameron, under pressure from his right wingers, uttered no syllable – public or private – when Tory Party funders bankrolled a campaign, controlled by his Government’s enemies on the Labour benches and licensed to use the unrestrained hob-nailed boot in personal attacks on his own coalition partner, Nick Clegg. If, as I believe, this could have been stopped with a single word from the PM, then that was an error of taste or worse. If as he claimed, he couldn’t stop it, then it was a failure of leadership. Either way, in creating an unnecessary abrasiveness, even lingering mistrust, in relations with his coalition partners it affected the smooth running of his Government and thus placed the lowest form of politics before the proper and efficient government of the country.

This, arguably was the moment that the present unpleasant tone began to take root in the political culture over which Mr Cameron presides. It has not diminished in virulence, since.

Last week’s debate over the Benefit Cap illustrates the point. The wholesale vilification by Tory MPs and the Tory press of the Bishops for having the temerity to put forward an amendment (note; an amendment, not, as it was portrayed, “blocking” or “killing” the Bill) to the Government’s proposals was as discomfiting as it was distasteful. No doubt there are good reasons why the Bishops amendment was, in the Government’s eyes, misguided. But did these really justify holding them up to the nation for public abuse when all they were trying to do was ensure protection for vulnerable children?

Then there was the spectacle at last weeks Prime Minster’s Questions of Tory MP after Tory MP, egged on by the Prime Minister, laying into Labour for “opposing” the Benefit Cap, when they knew perfectly well that Labour favours the Cap, even if not precisely in the form the Government proposes. Peddling a lie often enough in the hope that it will be believed, may be a good propaganda technique, but it’s a rotten debating one. Over–excitement amongst Tory MP’s at having a policy which is popular and a natural desire to have it all for themselves, is not an excuse for practices which owe more to the techniques of Goebbels, than the conduct of rational debate on a serious subject.

Successive Prime Minster’s Questions have seen a further degeneration in the already depressing tone of the exchanges between Mr Cameron and Mr Milliband. Am I alone in feeling that last week, this plumbed new depths? Perhaps Mr Cameron might take a few moments off his busy schedule next week to look at the tapes and ask himself; honestly – does he think he is doing anyone any good by this? The tone; the bitter invective; the increasing use of highly personalised insults. Do he and Mr Milliband REALLY believe this is the way to win supporters? I suspect that it will have exactly the opposite effect, especially amongst the female voters they seek. Meanwhile, further damage is done to the already low standing of our politics at a most fragile moment.

Of course both men bear responsibility for this. But only one of them is Prime Minster.

Mr Cameron’s first instincts about finding a better way to conduct our political discourse were right. He needs to find his way back to them. At present the tone he tolerates from his Party and its satraps in the popular press – and too often adopts himself – is damaging both his potential and the chances of a new tone in politics which is more in tune with what most people would like to see.

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British Politics Review Sep 2012

Article for British Politics Review (British Politics Society, Norway)

LIBERAL BRITAIN

by Lord Ashdown

British politics and society today has been shaped in hugely important ways by its Liberal inheritance. Indeed, until the early years of the twentieth century, it was possible to think of Britain as primarily a Liberal country.

Liberalism is essentially a child of the Enlightenment, that astonishing period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when people throughout Europe threw off the shackles of the feudal order and began to question everything their predecessors had taken for granted – the divine right of kings, the tenets of established religion, the principle of inheritance as the basis for political authority. The spread of books and newspapers, the development of the scientific method, the acceptance of reason and rationality as the underlying basis for decisions – all mark the beginning of the modern age and its most important characteristic, the belief in the right of the individual to make decisions for him- or herself, rather than having them dictated by monarch, priest or lord.

Liberalism was and is the political expression of this belief in individual freedom. This gives Liberal political parties some distinctive characteristics, including an inherent scepticism towards authority – as I know well from my eleven years as leader of the Liberal Democrats! – and a predisposition to question tradition and received wisdom. Unlike conservatism, Liberalism is a philosophy of change – Liberals believe that the world can be made a better place – but unlike socialism or communism, it does not have a defined perfect end-point – that ‘better place’ is constantly changing, determined by the evolving desires of individual men and women. Unlike nationalist or religious fundamentalists, Liberalism is a philosophy of equality – the belief in the right of the individual to make their own choice is not restricted to particular races, believers or social classes – and therefore also of diversity and tolerance. And unlike revolutionaries and authoritarians, Liberals are reformists, achieving change by persuasion, education and rational argument, not by the imposition of beliefs from above.

The publication of the recent Dictionary of Liberal Thought here in the UK by the Liberal Democrat History Group (Politico’s Publishing, 2007) – to which I was priveleged to contribute the foreword – has helped me think through the ways in which these values have been expressed by Liberal thinkers and politicians throughout the history of these islands. The early Liberals – the Whigs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – fought to curb the power of the monarchy, to establish the rule of law and to create equality of respect before the law. Although out of power during most of the turbulent period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, they nevertheless argued for reform, not repression, as a response to the growing demands for greater freedom of expression.

The Whig approach to reform, coupled with more radical demands from outside Parliament, laid the foundation for the gradual extension of the franchise throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, converting Britain slowly into a mass industrial democracy. At the same time Liberals were at the forefront of economic liberalisation, spearheading the campaign for free trade which took root not just in Britain but throughout Europe, marking what was perhaps the first real era of ‘globalisation’, from the 1850s to the 1870s. There was a strong economic case for free trade, but Liberals always believed in it for political reasons too: free trade helped to forge links between nations, bringing peoples together and reducing the likelihood of war. Liberals sought to establish the rule of law abroad as at home, treating all nations equally and seeking the resolution of disputes through peaceful means. Similarly, they supported the freedom of oppressed peoples and nationalities; tellingly, it was an international rather than a domestic issue – the struggle of the Italian nationalists for freedom from Austria – that in 1859 brought together Whigs, radicals and Peelites (former Conservative supporters of free trade) to form the modern Liberal Party.

The party went on to develop in significantly different ways from liberal parties in continental Europe. Acceptance of the New Liberal philosophy of social reform, which justified a more interventionist role for the state, allowed it to adjust successfully to the rise of organised labour in the early twentieth century. It was the great reforming Liberal government of 1906–14 that laid the foundations of the activist welfare state – graduated taxation, higher taxes on unearned than earned income, old-age pensions, social insurance – that Labour governments were to build on after 1945. But this was for identifiably Liberal reasons, in the name of setting people free from the shackles of poverty, unemployment, ill-health and ignorance. Thus the British Liberal Party became and remained a clearly social-liberal party, unlike many of its foreign counterparts, which dwindled into insignificance in the contest between the new socialist or social democratic parties and their conservative opponents. Although in Britain the Labour Party was a growing presence in Parliament during this period, this was largely due to an electoral pact with the Liberals; Labour at first displayed neither the ability to survive by itself nor any distinctive political programme.

Whether the decline and disintegration of the Liberal Party between 1914 and the 1930s was inevitable is one of the great unanswered questions of British political history. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it had adjusted successfully to the new environment of mass industrial democracy and was set fair to preside over a further period of gradual reform, as it had done since the 1830s. In reality, however, the strains of fighting the Great War left it split into two warring factions just at the time when another extension of the franchise was bringing millions of new voters into the electorate. After a series of political misjudgements, it effectively ceded the role of leading progressive party to Labour, who by then had developed a philosophy and the policies to match, which were more in tune with the rise and eventual dominance of socialist and corporatist thinking in the first six decades of the 20^th century.

This in turn had important consequences for British history. Most obviously, the Labour Party has simply not been as good at winning elections as had been the Liberals. In the period of Liberal–Conservative competition between 1859 and 1914, Liberals were in power for thirty years (55 per cent), whereas in the period of Labour–Conservative competition from 1945 to the last election, 2005, Labour governed for only twenty-five years (42 per cent). Even discounting the inter-war period, during which Labour replaced the Liberals, which saw predominantly Conservative governments, the weakness of Labour’s popular appeal has ensured that the twentieth century in Britain has been mainly a Conservative era. And even when Labour has been in power, it has failed to follow a consistently reformist line, most recently and disappointingly, some would argue, in the period of ‘New Labour’ government after 1997; and when it has reformed it has imposed its policies from the top down, rather than through persuasion from the bottom up.

So there is a strong case to be made for Liberal values once again to inform government in Britain. Our belief in freedom leads us to argue for a government which is run as directly by individuals and communities as possible – decentralised in scale, responsive to the needs and wishes of ordinary people, and one which trusts people to take more responsibility for their own future, in stark contrast to today’s over-centralised and over-regulated Britain. Our belief in social justice and freedom for all leads us to fight against the substantial inequalities of income, wealth and access to services that Thatcher’s Conservatives created and Blair’s Labour has done almost nothing to diminish.

Our belief in the rule of law and the preservation of individual liberties against the power of an over-mighty state leads to our efforts to ensure that measures taken in the name of the war against terror do not destroy the civil liberties they are supposed to be defending. Our belief in internationalism and the creation of effective international institutions makes us strong supporters of the European Union, and a reformed UN and, where necessary multilateral intervention subject to the rule of law.

Liberals have noted the massive shift of power into the global arena, where it subject neither to control nor governance. We have always believed that ungoverned power produces lawlessness and instability. Indeed our belief in the principle that where power goes, governance must follow, has been one of the well springs of our reformist tradition. It follows therefore that we accept that one of the most important challenges of our age is to bring governance and the rule of law to the global space.

This principle is nowehere more clearly evident than in the need to respond to what many argue is the greatest danger the world now faces, that of catastrophic climate change. International cooperation is needed to combat a problem that faces all countries, rich and poor. A commitment to social justice is needed to accept that unless the rich countries take the first steps to reduce the pollution they have themselves caused, we will never persuade the developing world to follow suit. The liberal belief in active government is necessary to ensure that effective laws are passed limiting pollution from industry, and making the investments, in renewable energy and public transport, that are necessary for the long term. And the liberal commitment to individual freedom is needed to set individuals and communities free to use their innovation and imagination in working out their own green lifestyles.

Until a century ago, it could be argued that Britain was primarily a Liberal country. Given the steady decline in support for the two other main parties since the 1970s, it may be the case that over the next few decades this will come to be said once more.

Bosnia – Back to the Future again July 2008

Bosnia moves back to the future again

Sarajevo 25 July

There is a terrible irony unfolding in Bosnia. Karadzic is at last on his way to The Hague. But the division of Bosnia that was his dream is now more likely than at any time since he first became a fugitive.

I flew into Sarajevo the day after Karadzic was arrested, expecting to find a city in celebration because the architect of their four-year torment from the Serb guns which killed 10,000 in the Sarajevo siege, was behind bars.

But, after a brief flurry of jubilation, the mood here is sombre. For people know that, after ten years of progress which made Bosnia the world’s most successful exercise in post-conflict reconstruction, things are now going backwards and there is a real threat of Bosnia breaking-up again.

But now this is happening not because of aggression from outside, but because of the recent weariness, weakness and misjudgement of the international community who are still supposed to be guiding Bosnia to its future.

I think Washington sees the danger.

But I am not at all sure Brussels does. They think Bosnia is done. Their policy now is “don’t rock the boat in Bosnia” while we deal with Kosovo and Belgrade.

This is not just tactically wrong – it is strategically disastrous. If the last twenty years have taught us anything it is that, when it comes to trouble, Bosnia is the fulcrum of the Balkans. Kosovo was never going to be easy, but it was short term and solvable. Belgrade is always going to be central and often, difficult. But, though Serbia has exported conflict, it has not in recent years been its seat. That, down centuries, has always been Bosnia, where even a brief spell of wrong headedness can quickly become the prelude to enduring tragedy. You do not need imagination to know what happens when things go wrong in Bosnia; a memory should be enough.

Bosnia’s predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, originally Karadzic’s creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be and moved into it. Its premier, Milorad Dodik is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms that moved Bosnia towards functional statehood. He has set up parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away. He has used the autonomy granted by the Dayton Agreement to undermine the Bosnia which Dayton envisaged. We do not have to speculate on his intentions, for he has said them plainly himself. He does not think Bosnia can survive and he doesn’t want it to. He does not regard the RS as part of a state, but as a state in itself. To be fair Mr Dodik has, in recent years, been firmly anti-Karadzic. He is not that kind of Serb nationalist. He is an opportunist like Milosevic who uses nationalism for power and who is taking advantage of our short attention span. His control over his mini-state is becoming more and more centralist, while its institutions are more and more subject to serious accusations of corruption. His aim is certainly complete autonomy and probably ultimate secession as soon as the international community leaves or loses interest. Which, by the way, could start midway through next year with the closure of the Office of the High Representative and the end of its executive powers.

Bosnia was the crucible in which the EU’s foreign policy instruments were created. With an EU military force, an EU Special Representative with executive powers, a huge EU aid budget and a full-scale EU Police Mission, the EU has more leverage in Bosnia than in any other country. What will it say about the EU’s pretensions if we cannot or will not act effectively to stop this bust-up happening?

Bosnia’s recent entry into the EU’s Stabilisation and Association Agreement, while welcome, but will not by itself change this dynamic, Chris Patten, when a European Commissioner, used to say that the danger was that the Balkans pretended to reform and the EU pretended to believe them. Now some in Bosnia do not even pretend to reform, but the EU still pretends to believe them. European conditionality used to be a lever for reform in Bosnia. It is becoming less and less so. On all sides, the commitment to Europe among Bosnia’s leaders now takes second place to the preservation of corrupt fiefdoms.

The problem is that Mr Dodik is the only man with a plan. The Croats wait and see. The Bosniak Muslims are squabbling among themselves. Their leaders, from President Haris Silaidzic down, need to start putting the public’s interest before their own. And they need above all to start living in the present not the past and stop, believing that because they are victims they do not need a plan; the international community will always ride over the hill to save them. This is fatally to misjudge the will of the international community post Iraq and Afghanistan. If Bosnia’s Muslims will not even coherently help themselves, they cannot expect others to do it for them.

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested thirteen years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus? We don’t want it, of course, but we are not really prepared to do much to stop it happening.

This is folly of a very dangerous order. Bosnia is not Kosovo or Cyprus. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia’s shining star, the multi-ethnic and markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska. Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe that Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict – most of its people are just too war weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia. That was how it all started, back in 1992.

And the consequences, incidentally, would not end with the Serbs. The Croats in the south have always wanted their own space. If Republika Srpska s breaks away, they will, too. This would leave only central Bosnia as a home for its Muslims. What does it say to the Islamic world if, having once failed to protect Bosnia’s Muslims from annihilation, we now fail to stand up for their right to live as part (the largest part, incidentally) of a democratic, multi-ethnic state? Or if we stand idly by once again, while they are reduced to a rump pocket of Islam in a part of Europe in which they are surrounded by enmity?

It is always more difficult, especially in the Balkans, to defend the preservation of multi-ethnic spaces and resist the creation of mono-ethnic ones. But to do otherwise is always folly and nearly always ends in blood.

It is time to wake up. Bosnia is going backwards again. The EU must now stop running its policy for Bosnia for the benefit of its policy for Belgrade and Kosovo . Brussels must toughen up its conditionality, support its instruments on the ground, resist attempts to undermine the Bosnian state, insist on constitutional reform to make Bosnia more functional and tackle corruption which is becoming ever more deeply embedded. It should also tell Belgrade that a key condition for progress towards Europe will be to support the Bosnian state, and to give no succour to those who seek to undermine it

I am sorry if all this disturbs the comfortable slumber of some capitals, especially in Europe. But I know of no way to whisper a wakeup call and no words to describe the pain that will ensue if Europe, once again, misjudges or misunderstands what is happening in Bosnia.

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Going backwards in Bosnia Hague/Ashdown 2008

Going backwards in Bosnia

The fourteenth anniversary of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords passed unnoticed in November. With ethnic cleansing effectively halted since the guns felt silent after Dayton, a cold but seemingly durable peace has prevailed. The collapse of a U.S.-EU diplomatic initiative in Bosnia-Herzegovina last month went virtually unreported too, as is the fact that Bosnia’s cold peace is under serious threat.

Bosnia-Herzegovina may seem not to matter much to the US in the broader scheme of things – pressing challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the wider Middle East rightly demand great attention. But the fate of the country should matter to Europe, and the risk of a failed state taking root in Europe cannot be ignored in Washington.

Old habits die hard, especially in Europe, where failure in Bosnia-Herzegovina risks becoming an EU niche specialty. War may be hell, but in Brussels serious Balkan diplomacy seems more difficult – so many capitals to confer with, tactics to coordinate, and memos to draft and so little political will to take difficult decisions. The local leaders driving Bosnia towards disintegration are accommodated by the EU, rather than faced down. The EU rests confident that their all-carrots, no-sticks approach linked entirely to the promise of an EU accession process, starting sometime in several years and after the parties resolve several substantial problems on their own, will ultimately change the domestic politics of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the neighbouring Serbia and produce the political cooperation that has been glaringly absent. The U.S. administration is backing this approach, despite the fact that Bosnia-Herzegovina today is further from EU membership than any other aspirant country and some in Bosnia clearly state that they rank independence higher than EU membership.

Bosnia’s economy has grown with foreign aid but the state has not and today it does not work. The Bosnian Serbs have exploited the autonomy they were granted at Dayton, relying on politicking to keep the country divided, its government dysfunctional, and their hopes of secession alive. Some resistance has been overcome only when the international High Representative overseeing Dayton has insisted on it. But even this level of effort has overtaxed the patience and capacity of the EU and US. The High Representative’s office has been allowed to be cheapened and demeaned so that none of the parties, particularly the Bosnian Serbs, heed its efforts. It is now proposed that the High Representative be recast as an EU Special Representative, weakening the role further by removing the US from the frame and stripping out the Bonn powers.

So many European capitals have thrown in the towel on Bosnia that Sarajevo is looking like a diplomats’ locker room. Bosnian Serb leaders continue to use their stalling often insulting tactics while some Bosniak leaders can be equally rigid. The leader of the entity of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik is politically invulnerable and flush with money, jobs, and influence, so long as he positions himself against the state. . With the election season in Bosnia imminent, nationalist rhetoric will certainly increase in all parts. Even the Croatians increasingly talk of their own entity and a break with their federation with the Bosniaks.
What happens in Europe’s Backyard matters: the consequences of Bosnia’s disintegration would be catastrophic. The breakdown of the country into independent ethnic statelets would not only reward ethnic cleansing – surely moral anathema – but would have long term security implications, risking the creation of ungoverned areas in the heart of Europe; a fertile ground for terrorism and crime and a monstrous betrayal of all those who survived the concentration camps, mass graves and displacement of the 1990s.

Bosnia will not solve itself, nor will the prospect of EU integration induce sufficient cooperation among Bosnian politicians. Since 2006 the hands-off approach, leaving difficult issues to local politicians, has allowed BH to slide back. Bosnia needs a momentum-generating way to animate political progress.

We must recognize that all the countries in the region are linked and that we cannot deal with each in isolation. We urge the appointment of an EU Special Envoy for the Balkans, who would work alongside a dedicated US Envoy to deliver a united message to the region. Part of this message should be to impress on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leaders that the sovereignty of the country is unquestionable and its break-up unthinkable. But it should also include a message to European candidate countries Serbia and Montenegro that they are expected to uphold EU policy towards the country and take positive acts to strengthen it.

A robust international approach would focus on a single goal: a central government effective enough to carry out the responsibilities of EU and NATO membership. Each Bosnian leader should have to stand up, or against, that simple idea — and face consequences for his answer.

This breaks from the recent diplomatic failures, which sought to reward the various parties with a little bit of what they want. In its place, we propose that the international community be prepared to use sticks as well as carrots in pursuit of what it, and Bosnia’s citizens, have long favored — an EU perspective. There is a strong argument for the threat of targeted sanctions against politicians who undermine the Bosnian state.

Talk of timelines for the closure of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina must come to an end once and for all. The OHR should only be closed down once we have achieved constitutional and electoral reform, and the High Representative must have the rock solid backing of the EU and US so that all parties know that they cannot sit out the international presence in the country.

Finally the EU peacekeeping mission in Bosnia must be retained and reinforced if necessary, to send a strong signal that neither secession nor violence will be tolerated.

Today Radovan Karadzic is finally on trial in The Hague on charges of alleged genocide and war crimes in Bosnia. As he and others are called to account over their part in the horrendous events of the 1990s, it would be a supreme irony if their plans for carving up Bosnia-Herzegovina were to be realized simply because the international community was too busy to care.

Don’t forget Bosnia 19 Aug 2008

Don’t forget Bosnia

Almost exactly 13 years after American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three and a half year war, the country – perched on the European Union’s flank – is in real danger of descending into dysfunctionality and perhaps even dissolution. As in 1995, resolve and trans-Atlantic unity is needed if we are not to sleep walk into another Bosnian crisis – or worse.

Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, once the darling of the international community (and especially Washington) for his opposition to Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party, has adopted that party’s nationalist agenda without being tainted with their genocidal baggage. His long-term policy seems clear: to place his Serb entity, Republika Srpska, in a position to secede, like Milo Djukanovic did in Montenegro, if the opportunity arises. Exploiting the weaknesses in the country’s constitutional structure, the international community’s weariness and the EU’s inability to stick by its conditionality, he has, in a little more than two years, reversed much of the real progress Bosnia has made over of the last 13, crucially weakening the institutions of the Bosnian state and all but stopping the country’s evolution into a functioning (and EU-compatible) state.

As a result , the fear and tension that began the war in 1992 has been reinvigorated, and an unhealthy and destructive dynamic is now accelerating, with Bosniak and Croat nationalism also on the rise. The recent local elections gave a marked fillip to the nationalist parties.

The situation has been allowed to reach this tipping point by a complacent and distracted international community. The European Union is deeply engaged in Bosnia; and the open door to EU membership has been the critical lever for pressing reforms in the country since it was first made policy in 2003. But the EU has yet to develop a coherent strategy commensurate with its leverage, exposure, potential, and responsibility. Worse still, by proclaiming progress where it has not, in reality, been achieved, the EU has weakened not only its own influence in the country, but also that of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the international military presence (nowadays EUFOR, which succeeded NATO) – both of which have been the drivers and guarantors of progress in Bosnia since the end of 1992-95 war.

It is no coincidence that the degeneration of the High Representative’s influence has coincided with the hollowing-out of EUFOR, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. The military presence has been the implicit enforcer of last resort for international decisions. But now, despite the danger signals, France, Spain and others in the EU apparently want to pull the plug on EUFOR before the end of the year, supposedly in order to prove that EU missions can end.

The EU, fixated on a still undefined “transition” from OHR to an EU-centered mission, seems intent on emptying its toolbox before it knows what tools it will need to enable Bosnia’s transition. It first failed to back its man on the ground, the able Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajčák, at a crucial moment, so fatally undermining his authority in the country. It has now placed him in a position where, with no clear orders from Brussels and very little interest in European capitals, he is struggling to fill the vacuum where a policy should be.

Faced with this situation, the Bosnian Serbs control not only the Bosnian agenda, but the international one as well. They do so with overt Russian backing. Like Dodik, Russia is opportunistically exploiting the EU’s weak resolve, its agenda being to make trouble for the US and EU where possible. Yet Moscow’s equities in Bosnia pale in comparison to those of the EU or US. Their expected attempt next month to close OHR, regardless of whether the job is done, must be unanimously rebuffed by the other members of the international community. OHR has to remain open until the conditions for the international community’s transition to a more normal EU presence are met.

European governments, beginning with Britain and the Netherlands, must prevent matters from getting worse, and should now insist on the development of a clear EU strategy to re-establish its authority and Bosnia’s stability.

Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, should initiate an independent study, whose aim would be to propose a new trans-Atlantic policy, which can lead to a phase of deeper and broader international involvement in the country. It should also examine the creation of a new EU Balkan mechanism in Brussels, explore what adjustments are necessary to the EU’s accession process, and how to kick-start discussions on reforming Bosnia’s constitutional structure – all underpinned by clear, tough and rigorously enforced EU conditionality. This study, which should be available to the new US Administration before it takes office, could be discussed by EU foreign ministers under the Czech EU Presidency, which begins in December 2009, and at a special meeting of the new US foreign policy team and European leaders.

Post-Irish referendum, the EU’s foreign policy will be, above all, a Balkan policy. Attention has recently been on Kosovo. But Bosnia has always been the bigger and ultimately more dangerous challenge. The country’s decline can still be arrested, provided the EU wakes up, the new US administration gets engaged, and both renew their commitment to Bosnia’s survival as a state, maintain an effective international military presence, and begin the process of strengthening the international community’s long-term approach, including by finding ways to untie Bosnia’s constitutional knot.

It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again if we don’t want things to get very nastily worse, possibly quite quickly. And by now we should all know the price of that.

Bosnia is going bad again -The Times – 11 April 2011

Bosnia is going bad again

The Times – 11 April 2011

Nothing better illustrates the West’s susceptibility to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than its contrasting policies towards Libya and Bosnia- Herzegovina. Maximum activity is applied “to prevent Libya becoming another Bosnia”; but inaction, born of fatigue, somnolence and simple bad judgement, is the response to Bosnia, as it slides back towards the status of a failed state, and possibly one at conflict with itself.

In December 2009, I joined the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to warn that, without stronger action to reverse the nationalist dynamic in Bosnia, there was a real risk that the country would break down into independent ethnic “statelets”. True to his word, Mr Hague made Bosnia a key foreign policy priority in the coalition agreement. Since then, the danger of Bosnia’s break-up has not decreased, it has deepened.

Bosnia is currently comprised of into two sub-divisons, called “entities” .Milorad Dodik , the President of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated “entity”, the Republika Srpska, has continued with impunity to use every opportunity to undermine the Bosnian state and push for secession. He talks of a referendum to break away from Bosnia, knowing full well that it was just such a referendum that started the Bosnian war in 1992.

Mr Dodik is not a nationalist — he is an opportunist who uses nationalism for political purposes. But then that was true of Slobodan Milosevic too.

And the consequences of his behaviour are exactly the same as in the early 1990s: increased nationalist rhetoric — and action — from the Republika Srpska capital Banja Luka is generating a response in kind from the Bosniak Muslims in Sarajevo; and some Croats in the south, whose population is dwindling, are resurrecting the old claim for a separate Croat territory which nearly blew Bosnia apart in the early 2000s. The Croat nationalist parties, meanwhile, blocked the formation of the government of the Bosniak/Croat “entity”, which should have been formed months ago, claiming — not without a degree of justification — to have been provoked to this by the Bosniak Muslim-dominated parties in Sarajevo.

Not surprisingly, this is fuelling a sharp rise in ethnic tensions.

Led by Mr Dodik, Bosnian Serbs are now engaged in a full-scale attempt at genocide denial over Srebrenica. In a classic act of provocation, a Serb Orthodox church is now being built next to the mass graveyard of slaughtered Muslims in Srebrenica. It is being constructed without either a legal permit or action from Mr Dodik’s government to enforce his own laws. As a spark for action, the denial of the right to sell vegetables which led to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and onwards to the conflict in Tunisia, looks small by comparison.

Now Mr Dodik is calling for Serbs in the state government to move out of the capital Sarajevo and into the Republika Srpska, next door. No doubt he is doing this to have them in the right place should the moment for secession come. But the parallel with the exodus of many Sarajevo Serbs just before Radovan Karadzic launched his attack in 1992, is not lost on anyone.

And so, little by little, as Brussels sleeps, Washington is distracted and the Chancelleries of Europe, absorbed by their own economic crises, look resolutely in the opposite direction, Bosnia slips deeper and deeper into dysfunctionality — and possibly far worse.

For the moment, conflict remains an unlikely outcome of all of this. But it is no longer an impossible one.

This hands-off policy has to end. The EU and US have to engage again. They have to work hand in glove to do whatever is necessary to prevent the break-up of Bosnia, to help build it into a fully functioning state capable of joining the EU and to overcome those who stand in their way. To say that we are too busy elsewhere in the world is not good enough.

The tragedy is that, for the first ten years after the Bosnian war, the country made more progress towards a sustainable peace than any other post-conflict country in recent history. Then the international community foolishly allowed itself to believe that the job was done and, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, shifted their attention elsewhere. Even more foolishly, Brussels and many European capitals allowed themselves to be persuaded that inaction was the best policy, even when the evidence became overwhelming that the dynamic in Bosnia had, thanks largely (but not exclusively) to Mr Dodik, turned from one of progress towards statehood, to one of retreat back to nationalism and dissolution.

There are many who still seem to believe this — some, perhaps even in the lower reaches of our own Foreign Office. Others can be heard whispering that it is all too much — what would it matter if Bosnia did break up? Surely now, it would do so peacefully?

The answer to that is a resounding NO. The place is awash with arms and with veterans still fit enough to fight. I just cannot see the Muslim Bosniaks allowing themselves to be trapped into a tiny pocket in central Bosnia, isolated, let down by Europe yet again and surrounded on all sides by their enemies. They did not allow it 20 years ago against far greater odds and they will not allow it now.

And even if that could be avoided, which I doubt, what would it say of the West, if having invested so much in persuading more than one million refugees to return to their homes in areas where they were the ethnic minority, we now have to watch an exodus back in the opposite direction, while the nationalists create three mono-ethnic spaces where multi-ethnic Bosnia used to be?

What would it say about our attempts to reach out to the newly emerging democratic Islamic states, if we are not prepared to defend Europe’s oldest Islamic community from isolation?

What would it say of Europe if, as Radovan Karadzic stands accused of war crimes at the Hague, Brussels through, apathy, ignorance or indifference becomes the inadvertent instrument of his policy of dismemberment in Bosnia?

What would it say for our attempt to help Libyans create a sustainable democracy on the other side of the Mediterranean, if we cannot even consolidate one within our own borders in Europe?

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Bosnia Ashdown/Holbrooke 20/10/2008

October 20, 2008

By: Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown

Don’t forget Bosnia

Almost exactly 13 years ago, American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three and a half year war with the Dayton Peace Agreement. Today, the country is in real danger of collapse. As in 1995, resolve and trans-Atlantic unity is needed if we are not to sleep walk ourselves back into another Bosnian crisis.

Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, once the darling of the international community (and especially Washington) for his opposition to the nationalist Serb Democratic Party, has adopted that party’s agenda without being tainted with their genocidal baggage. His long-term policy seems clear: to place his Serb entity, Republika Srpska, in a position to secede if the opportunity arises. Exploiting the weaknesses in the country’s constitutional structure, the international communities’ weariness and the EU’s inability to stick by its conditionality, he has, in two years, reversed much of the real progress in Bosnia over of the last thirteen, crucially weakened the institutions of the Bosnian state and all but stopped the country’s evolution into a functioning (and EU-compatible) state.

Dodik’s actions have been fueled by Russian encouragement and Russian petrodollars. In addition, his longtime rival, the senior president of all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, has often made statements about the need to abolish the two entities that make up Bosnia, and create an undivided, non-federal country. Although Dodik professes to respect Dayton and Silajdzic openly wishes to revise it, in fact both men are violating the basic principle of Dayton: a federal system within a single state. The toxic interaction between them is at the heart of today’s crisis in Bosnia.

As a result the suspicion and fear that began the war in 1992 has been reinvigorated, and an unhealthy and destructive dynamic is now accelerating, with Bosniak and Croat nationalism on the rise. The recently-held local elections gave a fillip to the nationalist parties.

The situation has been allowed to reach this tipping point by a complacent and distracted international community. While the Bush Administration virtually turned its back on Bosnia, the European Union became deeply engaged in the country; the open door to EU membership has been the critical lever for pressing reforms in Bosnia since it was first made policy in 2003. But the EU did not develop a coherent strategy commensurate with its exposure, potential, and responsibility. Worse still, by proclaiming progress where it has not been achieved, the EU has weakened not only its own influence in the country, but also the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the international military presence, (nowadays EUFOR, which succeeded NATO), both of which had been the drivers of progress in Bosnia since they were put into place by Dayton.

It is no coincidence that the degeneration of the High Representative’s influence has coincided with the withdrawal of the US military and the hollowing-out of EUFOR, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. Now, despite the danger signals, France and Spain apparently want to pull the plug on EUFOR altogether before the end of the year, seemingly to prove the purely technical point that EU missions can end.

Like Milorad Dodik, Russia is opportunistically exploiting the EU’s weak resolve, its agenda being to make trouble for the US and EU where possible. Yet Moscow’s equities in Bosnia pale in comparison to those of the EU or US. Their attempts next month to close OHR, regardless of whether the job is done, must be rebuffed. OHR has to remain open – or a similarly-strong organization set-up – until the conditions for the international community’s transition to a more normal EU presence are met. The United States, even in its current lame-duck state, must re-engage.

Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, should initiate an independent study, whose aim would be to propose a new trans-Atlantic policy, backed by Washington’s full engagement and strong EU conditionality, which can lead to deeper and broader international involvement in the country. This study could be discussed between the new U.S foreign policy team and European leaders. A collapse of the Dayton Peace Agreement would be an unnecessary and unwanted additional problem for the new administration.

Post-Irish referendum, the EU’s foreign policy will be, above all, a Balkan policy. Attention has recently been on Kosovo. But Bosnia has always been the bigger and, ultimately more dangerous challenge. The country’s decline can still be arrested, provided the EU wakes up, the new US administration gets engaged and both renew their commitment to Bosnia’s survival as a state, maintain an effective presence of international troops and begin the process of strengthening the international community’s approach long-term, including by finding ways to untie Bosnia’s constitutional knot.

It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again, if we don’t want things to get very nastily worse, -possibly quite quickly. And by now, we should all know the price of that.

865 words

Paddy Ashdown was the international community’s High Representative and EU Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006

Richard Holbrooke was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia.

The Balkans post Mladic The Times – 3 June 2003

Article – The Balkans post Mladic

The Times – 3 June 2003 The Times

Bismarck once famously said “The Balkans aren’t worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier”.

The last century proved, from the battlefields of the First World War to the mass graves of Srebrenica and Kosovo, that they can cost us Europeans a lot more bones than that.

The western Balkans today are no longer expansionary territory beyond the EU’s borders, they are an island of instability, and a potential exporter of crime, within them. Bringing the western Balkans into the EU is no longer enlargement beyond our present frontiers, it is completing the process of unifying the EU within its present ones.

And there are solid reasons why it is our interests to do this.

Firstly it is the only way to ensure that we are not again endangered by this abscess of instability and potential criminality in our midst.

Secondly, this region is home to Europes’s only ancient Muslim population, who are as committed to European standards as they are to Islamic beliefs and understand, as Alija Isetbegovic the leader of the Bosnian Muslim’s during the 92-95 war used to say, that there is no contradiction between the two. Remember that, from 9/11 to 7/7 and beyond, it was the West’s failures in Bosnia which gave Al Qaeda one of its most effective recruiting sergeants. In the new, more hopeful dialogue between Europe and the Islamic world, the European Muslims of the Balkans are a vital asset as both a bridge and a conduit of understanding for both sides. To ensure that these Muslim Europeans become an integrated part of the EU, not a separated enclave within it, is to reassert that our Europe is a truly multicultural and multi-religious space. To leave them out would be to damage both that vision and our capacity for constructive dialogue with the world of Islam, just at the moment when, following the Arab Spring, it promises more than we could ever have hoped for.

Lastly this is a region rich in both natural wealth and human capability. These are deeply able people with a strong intellectual and cultural history whose contribution will enrich the EU and whose exclusion would impoverish it.

But there is, of course a problem. It is perhaps summed up in two conversations I had during the darkest days of the Bosnian war.

The first was in August 1993 when I met Ratko Mladic during one of his full scale artillery bombardments of Sarajevo. “I can take the city whenever I want” he boasted. “Why don’t you then?” I asked. “Because I was trained on Russian principles. If you have a chance of killing an enemy or shooting him in the balls, shoot him in the balls. A dead man takes two people twenty minutes to bury. A wounded one takes ten people, many weeks to look after. As long as Sarajevo is starving, the international community will spend all its effort keeping it alive and have none left to stop me doing what I want to do”.

The second conversation was after I returned from Sarajevo that year, callin for urgent intervention to stop the slaughter. A senior member of the British Government replied “Oh no, Paddy. They have always fought each other in the Balkans. They always will. The best answer is to let it burn itself out”.

I reminded him that if there was ever a region that had always fought each other – for a thousand years and at incalculable cost in blood and misery, not least in our own century it was not the Balkans, but us Western Europeans. We had found in the European Union, an escape from our history – how could we deny the same to them?

Karadzic and Mladic will now follow the fourteen others key war criminals who have already faced justice before the Hague. These men were not the only perpetrators of torture and murder. There were many others and they belonged – let not forget – to all sides in this war without clean hands. But those now at the Hague were the primary architects of the Balkans horrors. Their trials thus offer the region a unique chance to stop dwelling on the past and concentrate on building the only future they can have which offers peace and prosperity– full membership of the EU and NATO.

But if this to be done the EU must raise its game as well.

Brussels needs to stop believing that bringing this region in is the same as bringing in Hungary and Poland and the other new democracies of the old eastern Europe. This is a region emerging from conflict and needs policies to reflect that fact.

The EU must start treating the western Balkans as a region and not as penny packet countries each with their own penny packet policy. In the Balkans what matters most is not what happens, but the connections between the things that happen. The EU will achieve much more when it starts using these; when instead of individual policies for individual countries, it adopts a closely coordinated regional policy and the means to pursue it.

Central to this policy is an understanding that Bosnia, far more than Kosovo, is the key to Balkan peace. So it was in the mid 1990s; so it remains today. Bosnia is now embarked on a dangerous slide towards dissolution – and, as before that is unlikely to happen without blood. The EU needs to show that it will use all means to prevent the break up of Bosnia and is prepared to act against those who have been allowed for too long, to weaken the state in order to prepare for its dismemberment. Appeasement didn’t work in the 1990s and it won’t work today. What Karadizc and Mladic did in their attempt to break up Bosnia has led, at last to trial in the Hague. It would be a terrible irony indeed if, as they stand trial for their crimes, Brussels’ unwillingness, once again, to act decisively makes it the unwitting instrument for others to succeed, where they failed.

I spent four years chasing Mladic in Bosnia. I think of the grieving mothers of Bosnia and rejoice that he is at last coming to trial. But the potential of this moment will be wasted unless we can, not just celebrate an act of justice, but also build on the political opportunities it offers.

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Syria, Alleppo = Total Politics 11 Aug 2016

Aleppo – Paddy Ashdown

As I write, Russian forces claim to have initiated a three-hour ceasefire in Aleppo to allow the delivery of emergency humanitarian aid. This will be welcome news to the citizens who are trapped in the violent struggle between the Russian-backed Syrian army and the coalition of rebel forces. However, as the UN has stressed, this might give civilians a pause from bombing but it is barely enough time to deliver vital relief- in particular potable water, which has become increasingly scarce.

Divided between the Syrian-government backed West and the rebel backed East, Aleppo has become a key battleground in the Syrian war. Just thirty miles from the Turkish border, it is a key city for supply lines. Over the past few months, the Government has appeared to be closing in on the rebel held parts of the city, but in the last few days the rebels have launched a successful counter-attack, which has led to sharp intensification of the fighting.

The fledging peace-process which started earlier this year is in disarray, and this revival of the seemingly beleaguered rebel forces shows that this war is far from over.

It’s now a year since Russia committed its military to fighting on behalf of Assad, and the West has allowed them to dictate the military terms of this conflict ever since. When the UK parliament backed RAF action against Daesh in December last year, the motion acknowledged that the mission against them could only be successful if the conflict in Syria as a whole was addressed, and certainly at the beginning of the year things seems to be moving in the right direction: Cameron hosted the Syria Donor Conference here in London, a tentative ceasefire began, and key actors were finally around the table in Geneva.

Since then, however, the UK’s distraction with EU referendum has given us an excuse to take our eye off the ball. Now it is time to remind both our own citizens and the rest of the world that Brexit does not mean Britain has turned its back on the world, and prove to them that Boris Johnson leading the Foreign Office does not mean that the we no longer have a role to play in serious international issues.

Humanitarian access is not a luxury, it is a right, and UK must support the UN in making sure this is established. Proper access to civilians in Aleppo is not made possible by a 3-hour ceasefire, despite Russia’s claims this morning. Humanitarian corridors must be established to allow UN relief to enter the city, which will require an agreement by all sides, including the rebels. If these corridors can be created, there may well be the chance to develop permanent safe zones or even no-fly zones. Nothing should be off the table, less we risk leaving Syria to another five years of brutal conflict.

I remember watching Sarajevo starve in 1992 because the West would not act. While we dithered a quarter of a million innocents were killed, before finally we were forced to act. Will we never learn? Must we make the same mistake again and leave perhaps two million to the mercy of those who want to make them instruments of war in a brutal conflict whose only purpose now is wholesale and indiscriminate destruction?

If the UN cannot secure safe access on the ground, we must consider flying aid into besieged areas. We cannot allow Russia be a co-conspirator with Assad in holding the lives of these desperate people as hostage any longer. The Government should immediately start the process for a UN Resolution empowering aid drops to besieged areas, if adequate humanitarian corridors are not established.

To do less would be to turn our backs on more than a million people, mostly women, children and the aged, who now live in mortal danger and look to us for help.