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Ashdown plots way to net most wanted man in the Balkans

Stephen Castle
Saturday 01 February 2003 01:00 GMT
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As a former Royal Marine, Paddy Ashdown, the European Union's high representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, acknow-ledges that capturing the most wanted man in the Balkans was never going to be easy.

The former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, is hiding in rugged terrain near the Montenegrin border where, as Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon points out, Marshal Tito held out "with 15,000 men against six German divisions" in the Second World War.

But Lord Ashdown is frustrated at Nato's failure to pick up Karadzic, who was indicted in 1995 for war crimes. "As long as he is free, after seven years, he cocks a snook at us all," Lord Ashdown says.

Among the best-known faces in British politics, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats never entered government or held public office. But as the high representative in Bosnia Herzegovina he has sweeping powers, more akin to those of a feudal lord than a modern politician, and he wants to use some of them against Karadzic.

"This guy has been running around the hills for seven years and we haven't caught him," he says. "The strategy so far has been what you might call the 'lucky break strategy'.

"You sit around under the tree the poisoned fruit is hanging on and hope for the lucky break, that it falls off and that we are in the right place to catch it. I hope for that too. But we have to stand back and decide whether there is not another parallel strategy, whether the commando raids should be backed by a long-term campaign."

Lord Ashdown has held talks with Pierre Richard Prosper, the US Department of State's ambassador-at-large for war crime issues, on what he describes as "interesting ideas" to tighten the screw. "This fruit hangs on a branch. The branch is part of a tree and the tree has roots. So if you want to get the fruit perhaps you ought to start tackling the roots. So we are talking about means of tackling the Karadzic support network, financial, political, in the Republika Srpska." That was how the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was isolated.

In Brussels, Lord Ashdown works from a discreet building that also houses the offices of the EU's envoys to the Great Lakes, Aldo Ajello, and to the Middle East, Miguel Angel Moratinos. If the EU's influence is debatable in those parts of the world, the Balkans is a rare success story for European foreign policy, and Europe now wants to take over Bosnia's peace-keeping from Nato's S-For.

There are 12,000 Nato troops in Bosnia of whom 10,000 are European, and the EU is talking about beginning work next January. Lord Ashdown is supportive but cautious, and with good reason because it is what he calls a "delicate situation".

In Bosnia, the EU has little public trust and is identified as the power that fiddled while towns and villages burnt in the Nineties. Lord Ashdown says the EU force must seem credible and discussions are needed on whether the EU takes over before or after Nato's next planned troop reduction. With an EU police mission already operating in Bosnia there are details to be resolved over who reports to whom.

And Lord Ashdown is pressing for a debate on the mandate given to EU troops who might be given tasks such as combating organised crime. Although he will not say so publicly, he seems to want a force modelled on the Italian carabinieri, soldiers with a brief to combat crime. Such a development would fit Lord Ashdown's general picture of Bosnia which, he says, is moving from a "post conflict" country to one in transition, a bit like Hungary a decade ago but with the legacy of ethnic discord.

He says: "About 95 per cent of the problems we deal with are not conflict related" and points to the violence-free elections last year.

Although they did not produce the outcome many in Brussels wanted, Lord Ashdown insists the parties seen as nationalist "are not nationalist parties according to their rhetoric", and that "in the last 18 months there has been a remarkable sea-change in people's attitudes on the ground at the lower level".

Huge challenges lie ahead, including the creation of a national customs and VAT system, the introduction of Western bankruptcy laws, and privatisation of utilities. There is about three years to turn around the country's economy, Lord Ashdown thinks, and he believes that things will get worse before they get better as Bosnia heads for a "choppy" few months.

But he also believes the ethnically divided country can emerge from dependency on international aid and stand on its own feet.

"The idea, much prevalent and easily accepted in the West, is that it is a black hole. That's nonsense."

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