Geopolitical Discourses: Paddy Ashdown and the Tenth Anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to John O’Loughlin and Carl Dahlman for comments and to Dino Djipa of Prism Research for sharing some of his public opinion data.

Notes

1. Paddy Ashdown, ‘Dress Rehearsal for a Global Tragedy,’ The Guardian (4 August 1992) p. 19.

2. Ashdown's high profile call for more robust intervention to stop the war in Bosnia was viewed as a political strategy to embarrass and undermine John Major by some. One political observer described Ashdown as a ‘consummate grabber of headlines’ but wondered if his party had a future ‘except as a vehicle for his own success.’ Peter Dobbie, ‘Doubts the Haunt Paddy the Persuader,’ Mail on Sunday (13 September 1992) p. 19. His attacks on John Major provoked vitriol in response. “Ashdown oozes sanctimony,” said one Conservative MP, “and he goes big on Bosnia. What's this pissy little party doing going on about Bosnia?” Steven Castle, ‘Liberals Cry Foul as Macho Major Kicks Paddy ‘The Pimple’ Ashdown in the Pants,’ The Independent (24 December 1995) p. 8.

3. James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (New York: Columbia 1997).

4. Ashdown's life was threatened when he visited the notorious Omarska concentration camp in August 1992 by a Serb war criminal (subsequently shot by the SAS). Travelling in December 1992 visiting British troops and Bosnian villages swollen with the displaced, Ashdown's party came under mortar attack. His quote “one mortar round is just like another” echoed in the press as a testimony to his courage and a rebuke of that of the British government. Maggie O’Kane, ‘Ashdown under Fire in Bosnia,’ The Guardian (15 December 1992) p. 1; Paddy Ashdown, ‘Strangulation of a city,’ The Guardian (17 December 1992) p. 17. New Labour leader Tony Blair and Ashdown have long had a good relationship and discussed a possible coalition between their parties in the autumn of 1997. When Ashdown stepped down as Liberal Democrat leader in July 1999, Blair commended him for being “well ahead of the rest of us and right long before the rest of us” on Bosnia and Kosovo. Blair's government lobbied to have Ashdown named to posts in the United Nations and in Kosovo. Jackie Storer, ‘Ashdown Praised by Blair in Last Question Time,’ Parliamentary News (21 July 1999).

5. Ashdown's hectic schedule precluded a formal interview. The archive of his speeches is on the OHR Web site at http://www.ohr.int/ohr-dept/presso/presssp/archive.asp. The performative delivery of the two speeches I attended deviated from the actual text. Also, on both occasions, Ashdown answered questions from the public audiences which are not part of the Web site archive. The USIP has a Web site where all the Washington conference speeches can be heard via streaming audio: http://www.usip.org/events/2005/1121_dayton.html.

6. See Neven Andjelic, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The End of a Legacy (London: Frank Cass 2003).

7. Ashdown bore witness to this when he described his conversation with Croatian President Fanjo Tudjman at a London dinner in 1995. Tudjman sketched a map of a Bosnia divided between Croatia and Serbia on a napkin. Ashdown told the story before the International Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague in the trial of Bosnian Croat general, Tihomir Blaskic.

8. Brendan Simms points out that throughout 1992–1993 Ashdown called for the establishment of ‘safe havens’ and for the use of troops and air power to protect Bosnian Muslim civilians from attack. Yet Ashdown never called for military intervention to re-establish a multi-ethnic Bosnia. Simms concludes: “By a considerable irony, therefore, the most prominent parliamentary critic of government policy on Bosnia inadvertently furthered Whitehall's attempts to ‘humanitarianise’ the conflict.” Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin 2001) pp. 296–297.

9. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1998); Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House 1998).

10. Ivo Daalder, Getting to Dayton (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution 2000); Derek Chollet, The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005). The search for a ‘more coherent map’ on the part of the Americans meant they were, in practice, not averse to Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ falling to the Serbs.

11. American policy makers at the time, like Peter Galbraith and Dan Serwer, now claim that the war ended too soon. At the December 2005 Sarajevo conference Ivan imonovic, legal advisor to the Tudjman government at Dayton, told of a call from US Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Tudjman indicating that the capture of Banja Luka would be detrimental to Croatian interests. In conversation with Holbrooke at a later date, Holbrooke admitted that ending the war before the capture of Banja Luka was a mistake and asked “Why did Croatia listen to the US anyway? You are a sovereign state.”

12. Venice Commission, Opinion on the Constitutional Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Powers of the High Representative (11 March 2005). Available at www.coe.ba/pdf/CDL-AD2004004-en.pdf.

13. Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1996) p. 77.

14. Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1999).

15. For a discussion of the OHR grand strategy see Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Embedding Bosnia-Herzegovina in Euro-Atlantic Structures: From Dayton to Brussels,’ Eurasian Geography and Economics 46/1 (2005) pp. 51–67.

16. Interview with an international official, Sarajevo, 30 November 2005. The ‘Bulldozer Initiative’ was designed to break the log jam of bureaucracy hindering the establishment and conduct of business in BiH. Businessmen, under OHR direction, made suggestions which were fast tracked through parliament with OHR pressure.

17. Prism Research asked the question ‘Do you consider BiH as a failed country?’ September 2005 from 1550 respondents across Bosnia: 24.5% of self-defined Bosniaks, 43.6% of Serbs and 52.3% of the Croats in the survey answered ‘Yes.’ The ‘don't know’ response among Serbs was 18.4% and 9% for the other two groups. The United Nations Early Warning System reports has a standard question: ‘Are you very proud to be a citizen and national of BiH?’ In the last quarter of 2004 the figures in Bosnian majority areas were 76.7% but only 20.1% in Serb majority areas and 36.1% in Croat areas. In the first and second quarter of 2005 the figures were similar: 72.8% and 77.4% in Bosnian majority areas, 18.6% and 22.4% in Serb majority areas, and 33.9% and 35% in Croat majority areas. Thus less than only one in four Bosnian Serbs and one in three Bosnian Croats feel any pride in belonging to BiH.

18. Michael Pugh, ‘Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia Since Dayton,’ International Peacekeeping 12 (2005) p. 453.

19. Ed Vullimay, ‘Farewell, Sarajevo,’ The Guardian (2 November 2005).

20. V. Popovic, D. Raduški, ‘Interview with Paddy Ashdown,’ Nezavisne Novine (21 November 2005) (OHR translation available at http://www.ohr.int/print/?content_id=36045).

21. Nicholas Wood, ‘Can an Iron Fist Put Power in Bosnia's Hands?’ New York Times (5 November 2005) p. 5.

22. BBC News, ‘Ashdown Urges Bosnia Justice,’ 24 December 2005. Available with BBC Radio 4 audio interview at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4557446.stm.

23. Vullimay, ‘Farewell, Sarajevo’ (note 19).

24. The denial of past atrocities is not, of course, particular to BiH as the contemporary cases of Turkey and Japan prominently illustrate. In contemporary Bosnian political culture, Bosnian Serb leaders accentuate the future and criticise those who ‘bring up the past’ whereas Bosniak leaders accentuate the crimes committed during the war and argue that Bosnia cannot move forward without war criminals being brought to justice. There are multiple ongoing efforts to promote a reconciliation process in Bosnia both locally and internationally. The US Institute of Peace has sponsored a working group of historians, from the former Yugoslavia region and beyond under the leadership of Charles Ingrao, Purdue University around the theme ‘Explaining the Yugoslav Catastrophe: The Quest for a Common Narrative.’ The United Nations Development Programme and the Open Society Fund for BiH released a report ‘Justice and Truth in BiH: Public Perceptions’ (September 2004, available at http://www.undp.ba) that documented deep sense of grievance that remains among Bosnia's population about the war, with levels higher among residents of the Federation than Republika Srpska. Support for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was high among all ethnic groups: 56.71% among Bosniaks, 57.62% among Serbs and 48.96% among Croats.

25. See Carl Dahlman and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Broken Bosnia: The Local Geopolitics of Displacement and Return in Two Bosnian Places,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95/3 (2005) pp. 644–662.

26. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, José Maria Mendiluce, Haris Silajd˛ic, ‘Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina Ten Years On,’ Le Monde (11 October 2005). English translation by the Bosnian Institute in The Bosnian Report 47–48 (September–November 2005), available at http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/default.cfmat.

27. Paddy Ashdown, ‘Then and Now – Peace-Building Challenges in Bosnia and Herzegovina,’ Dayton, Ohio (18 November, 2005).

28. Speech by the High Representative, Paddy Ashdown to RSNA, Banja Luka, (21 April 2005).

29. Interview with Don Hays, 13 April 2005, USIP, Washington DC.

30. Ian Traynor, ‘Revealed: US Plans for Bosnian Constitution,’ The Guardian (10 November 2005). The American constitutional expert who helped craft the DPA, Jim O’Brien, described the tripartite Bosnian presidency as an exercise in ‘Yugo-nostalgia’ in an address to the OSCE Sarajevo conference. He pointed to many sections of the agreement's text which were inserted to offer flexibility for reform and modernisation of the governance structures of BiH. These reforms, however, require the will of all BiH's groups to make them happen.

31. See, for example, Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, ‘Travails of a European Raj,’ Journal of Democracy 14/3 (2003) pp. 60–74 and David Chandler, ‘From Dayton to Europe,’ International Peacekeeping 12/3 (2005) pp. 336–349.

32. In his columns during the Bosnian war, Paddy Ashdown was an advocate for greater capacity on the part of the United Nations and the European Union to intervene early to prevent conflicts in former Communist lands from erupting and spreading. A common EU defense policy was inevitable and Britain should be actively involved in shaping it. See Paddy Ashdown, ‘Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad for All Our Bosnians,’ The Observer (27 November 1994) p. 28 and ‘Europe Must Fight its own Battles,’ Evening Standard (29 November 1994) p. 9.

33. On the democratisation effects of EU enlargement see Milada Anna Vachudova Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005).

34. These figures are not official and best guesses based on the detailed population estimates by Bosnia's two entities. They are drawn from the presentation by Damir Josipoviy, ‘Sustainability of the Dayton Territorial Division for the Process of Integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina,’ at the OSCE conference ‘Dayton – Ten Years After. Conflict Resolution and Co-Operation Perspectives,’ Sarajevo, 29 November – 1 December 2005.

35. Sumantra Bose classifies BiH as a consociational confederation. Consocilationalism gives priority to collectivities rather than individuals – quotas, tripartite presidency, House of Peoples, etc. – while confederation is where the federal units – entities – have more power than the central government. The OHR is trying to move towards a more federal consociational structure, with the ‘shared role’ component of federalism strengthened to facilitate coherent decision making and stable functional governance. Sumantra Bose, ‘The Bosnian State a Decade After Dayton,’ International Peacekeeping 12/3 (2005) pp. 322–335.