Peace Journey

"Bildt is a former Swedish Prime Minister from the early 90s, who became European Representative in the Balkans after the war. He didn’t have an especially dynamic role, because in the summer of 1995 the Americans were increasingly committing themselves – partly because of the fall of Srebrenica, partly because they lost some very good men in the course of their own attempts to mediate – and it had become quite personal. So they engaged, in the formidable shape of Dick Holbrooke, and there was some sort of an outcome, which was the Dayton Agreement, after which Carl Bildt was rebaptised International High Representative, and I joined him as special advisor. Despite my earlier diplomatic career, there wasn’t much to match what you go through in trying day after day to bring together people who have been slugging it out in the most awful war for three to four years. Bildt’s job was to try and create a political dispensation after Dayton that would bring the Croats, Serbs and what were called Bosniaks – Muslim Bosnians – into some sort of structure so that they could work together. It was a thankless job – and keeping the international coalition of support together was another very difficult thing, because he reported to the Americans, Russians, French, and British, who all had different views about how things should be handled. What his book shows is this remorseless 20-hour-a-day routine of talking one moment to operational people within political parties causing difficulty to the implementation process on the ground, then getting a call from Warren Christopher, saying: ‘We fully support you, Carl, but we want to have a meeting with Milosevic in Italy so that we can be seen to be bolstering the Dayton Agreement one more time.’ It was precisely this diplomatic game played at this high level which undermined the prospects for Bildt achieving the credibility that would make the Bosnians play ball. So it’s a book which is quite a hard read: a restrained – you might say Nordic and moralistic – description of the weaknesses of the people there with whom he negotiated day by day. I think the book does project the many-sidedness of modern interventions. They are thought of as peacemaking, as seeking to entrench peace, as being about economic development, but there actually are so many dimensions: from the media, to how the courts operate, to policing, all of which you have here, in what is from my own knowledge a painfully honest and accurate depiction of what that assignment meant to Carl."