I thank the Chairmen and the committee for the privilege of having been invited here today. It is a great pleasure to be here. I particularly pay tribute to Ms Edwina Love, who has taken such trouble to ensure the arrangements for bringing me here were smooth and well worked out. It allowed me to bring a young colleague, Mr. Alasdair Ward-Booth, who is following me for the day. I had not met him before today. He is sitting behind me.
I also pay tribute to the role Ireland has played. It was a tremendous supporter for me when I was in Sarajevo as the High Representative and I am very grateful for the continued support the Irish Government always gave me for the difficult things we were trying to do. Ireland is not one of Europe's largest countries but it has punched well above its weight, for example, when it came to insisting that Ratko Mladic be arrested before we moved forward on Serbia. Ireland's role in working within the European Union on Balkans issues is one of which members should be proud. If this country's drive in this area springs from the work of this committee, individual members have a right to feel proud of the work they have done in that respect and for which I am personally very grateful.
The Chairman stated that a story should not be overly influenced by the factual nature of all the bits that are contained in it. I will be quite gloomy, a little blunt and rather straightforward in relating a story. I am from the North. My mum was a good Protestant girl from Rathfriland on the Hill. What was not known about me, at least until 1998 when, as leader of the Liberal Democrats, I came here to see the Taoiseach – I cannot remember on what business but it had something to do with Northern Ireland – people here learned that I am the great, great grandson of Daniel O'Connell. This is a fact of which I am proud and it is known in my family. A press conference was held for me and I was sent out to see the great man's grave on the outskirts of Dublin. My accent is a result of being sent over the water to school in England. When I went to England first I had a broad Belfast accent and my first name comes from those days. As I was saying, I was driving out to the graveyard in the company of an Irish Government driver. I sat in the back of the car and it was lashing with rain as we travelled through the streets of Dublin to visit the great man's grave. In the manner of drivers the world over he spoke to me over his left shoulder. Members will forgive me as there is nothing worse than a foreigner coming to a place like Ireland and pretending he can imitate the accent. However, the words of the driver must be spoken in a Dublin accent. He said: "I gather you are the great, great grandson of Daniel O'Connell." When I said I was he asked if I knew what used to be said about O'Connell. While I knew perfectly well that he was known as the "Liberator", I wanted the driver to say it so I replied "No". He pointed out that it used to be said that one could not throw a stone over an orphanage wall but one would hit one of O'Connell's children. Clearly, when O'Connell was described as the father of the nation it was meant in more than the metaphorical sense. That was the best political put-down I have ever suffered. At any rate, it is a great pleasure to be here.
To become a little more serious we all know the tragedies of the Bosnian war. They are etched on our minds on the modern history of Europe. Two tragedies of the Bosnian peace have followed, one of which relates to Bosnia while the second relates to Brussels. If I may, I will speak of them in some detail in the ten minutes available to me to make an opening statement.
One could argue very cogently that in the first 12 years of the Bosnian peace, which commenced in 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina was the poster boy for how to carry out a successful intervention. When I took over as High Representative in 2002, seven years after the terrible Bosnian war had concluded, 1 million refugees had returned home. For the first time in history, refugees were not simply left washed up where the war had left them but were allowed to return home and they did so. As a young soldier in Belfast, I watched as Catholics were burned out of Ardoyne. They did not return, whereas in Bosnia 1 million refugees returned, even to that Golgotha, Srebrenica. In the 11 years after the end of the war there was complete freedom of movement everywhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Freedom of movement does not exist in Cyprus 30 or 40 years after the island was divided. Moreover, since the end of the Bosnian war, fair elections have been held without violence. They may have been overseen by the OSCE but they were run by the Bosnian authorities. Only now is the Basque country in Spain experiencing such a complete absence of violence during elections. In the first 11 years or so after the war we began to create in Bosnia-Herzegovina the light level structures of a state. I remember returning from Bosnia in 2006 and commenting that we have not succeeded anywhere else in the world in post-conflict resolution and the building of a stable peace. When I state that this period ended in 2006-07 it sounds as though I mean it ended when I left Bosnia but I do not believe there is any particular coincidence between the dates. It just happened that for 11 solid years until 2006, thanks to the European Union and international community and, above all, the courage of Bosnian politicians and their people, Bosnia followed a consistent dynamic, which was about cohesion and moving slowly towards unity and creating a stable peace. It is a terrible tragedy that since 2007, that dynamic has been allowed to be reversed.
I will be blunt about Brussels. While we often place the blame on Bosnian politicians and they carry some blame for what has occurred because responsibility for their country lies with them, do not believe Brussels escapes blame. Over the years that have followed since 2007, Brussels has presided over the unstitching of every single one of the steps forward we made in one form or another. The hard work done by the Bosnian people and my predecessors as High Representative over 11 years when they created institutions of state has been allowed to be unstitched or is at least beginning to be unstitched. In 2007, it was suddenly felt that the job was done, we no longer needed to be involved in Bosnia and we could assume a role of benign oversight without being closely engaged. I stated at the time that Bosnia was held together by two magnetic forces, as it were, one of which was the Dayton peace agreement and use of the High Representatives and Bonn powers. By the way, when I left my post in 2006, I stated that the High Representative's office should close because I believed we could move forward. The second magnetic force was the draw or pull of the Brussels institutions, both the European Union and NATO. The pressures that would draw Bosnia forward along a path that was already established would carry the country the rest of the distance over a period. However, the moment this draw waned or was removed, Bosnia returned to the opposite dynamic, namely, one of fissiparousness and break-up rather than unity.
All of the steps we took over that period have been allowed to be weakened in one form or another. The independent taxation authority and introduction of value added taxation, arguably the greatest achievement in those years, is being allowed to be weakened, particularly as Republika Srpska draws up parallel institutions to run its own taxation authorities. It has created an institution which simply requires it to unplug from the state institution and re-plug into the Republika Srpska institution. The creation of a single army under the control of the presidency is being weakened day by day. Above all, the creation of a single state judiciary with a single state prosecutorial service is being threatened almost daily as these advances begin to be unstitched. On almost every front, the dynamic of unity has been allowed to reverse into a very dangerous dynamic of disunity. The consequence of this reversal is that separatists are now having far too great an influence on the internal climate in Bosnia and the European Union has done far too little to prevent this trend. I will address what the European Union should do in a moment.
The process of reversal was initially centred on Banja Luka and the personality of Milorad Dodic, the Prime Minister of Republika Srpska. However, in Bosnia, action and reaction are equal and opposite. As Milorad Dodic and the separatists in Republika Srpska have been able to basically get away with unstitching all the work we did to create the light level state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so the Croats in Herzegovina have naturally started to do the same thing. It is now the case that the Bosniaks, that is, the Bosnian Muslims, in parties such as the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, have given up on the State and are putting most of their effort into the politics of the federation. Bosnia, instead of moving towards statehood, is now on all three fronts beginning to move towards its decentralised structure. While the entities have to sit side by side, the weakening of the state, which the European Union has done nothing to prevent, is an extremely dangerous development for Bosnia-Herzegovina. This waste and reversal of 11 solid years of work by the international community is a tragedy for Bosnia. The truth is that Europe now has more instruments of leverage and influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina than it has anywhere else in the world. It has its own High Representative, a member of the European Union Community, European Union special representatives and police missions and a huge amount of aid goes in. If Europe cannot stop, within its own borders, the deleterious movement of Bosnia and Herzegovina towards a dangerous situation, how on earth can we claim to have an influence beyond the borders of Europe? If the institutions of our foreign affairs, the external service, is unable to influence Bosnia in a direction beneficial to itself and to the European Union, how on earth can it claim to do so elsewhere in the world?
I am being very blunt now but it reminds me of 1992. Members will remember what happened in 1992. Mr. Poos said this was the hour of Europe. It was not; it was the hour when Europe stood aside and became a bystander to genocide and the United States had to move in. This is a tragedy for Bosnia but I also think I am bound to say, it is a tragedy for Europe.
The failure to use the levers we have is now leading to a very dangerous situation. What is that dangerous situation? Will Bosnia return to violence? My answer to that question is "No" but for the first time, I cannot now exclude that possibility. If members had asked me that question two years ago, I would have said I could not see Bosnia returning to conflict. I now cannot wholly exclude that possibility. It is not likely in my view. My view is that if Bosnia was to begin to track towards reopening conflict, we would see that happening a long way before the event and we would be able to take action of one sort or another to prevent it from happening, although I am bound to say that Europe has not proved very good at taking action of that sort ahead of events.
I cannot tell members what might happen in such a febrile situation - if, for instance, as I said to Bosnian colleagues, a grenade was thrown into a mosque in Doboj on a Friday night. Coming from Northern Ireland, I know what a febrile political situation can result in by accident, so I cannot say that is possible but I cannot say now that it is impossible.
The far more likely case is that while the rest of the western Balkans regions move forward towards Europe, Bosnia tracks back to being a black hole of dysfunctionality, criminality and corruption, which is what is happening. I do not think that is helpful. We will pay the price for the contagion of such a centre of dysfunctionality and corruption. It is through the Balkan pipelines that much of the drugs and many of the trafficked women arrive in our inner cities. We are not immune from the consequences of this. The situation in Europe will be dangerous if we cannot find the means now to reverse this.
What should we do? There are levers available to us and we should use them. Frankly, I think Brussels and the external action service should be much more muscular and energetic about using them. I am told there is no appetite for this among the chancelleries of Europe. I do not think it is the job of Brussels to sit there and wait for the chancelleries of Europe to find the appetite to intervene in Bosnia in an effective way. I think it is up to the institutions in Brussels to formulate the plan and then try to get backing for that. When I was in Bosnia, if I wanted to move forward on combining the army under state control, I formulated the plan, I got Brussels to agree with me and then I went around the governments of Europe building political support. One must be active about this process and not passive. There are levers we can use. We can use the lever of aid.
The biggest lever the European Union has completely failed to use, because it regards Bosnia and Herzegovina as just another accession country like Poland and Hungary instead of one that has come out of a conflict, is to make the creation of a functional state one of the conditions for moving forward on the stabilisation and association process. At present the constitutional reform required in Bosnia to create the light level state and to move it beyond the position of Dayton, so that it can become a functional state, is something which is excluded as one of the requirements for the European stabilisation and association process. When I was there, I said to Brussels that if it would allow me to make the creation of a functional state in Bosnia one of the ESA conditions, I can do it. It said that it did not fall within the ESA and that it was following the same policies it followed with Poland and Hungary. It seems to me self-evident that to join the European Union, one must adhere to some basic standards of functionality.
If a Bosnian interior Minister wants to sit with the Minister for home affairs in Britain or Ireland, he must be able to make agreements on which he can deliver in Bosnia. That is a requirement of functionality. I think the European Union should be much more muscular about making constitutional change to create a functional, albeit light level state, one of the conditions for progress for Bosnia on the European stabilisation and association process.
Second, we should be very much more brutal about isolating the separatists. I do not see any reason Europe's High Representative, Catherine Ashton, should go to Republika Srpska to speak to Mr. Dodik whose avowed intention is to undermine and create the break up of Bosnia and Herzegovina European state. The Republika Srpska has its own representation office in Brussels. If it wants to have one, that is fine but why should we speak to anybody but the representatives of the Bosnian state? We should be much tougher about that. The moment Europe speaks to one of the prime ministers of one of the entities rather than to the state, it says to the Bosnian people that we believe the entities are proto states, which is the point they want to make. We should talk to and work with people who wish to strengthen and create a light level state in Bosnia consistent with European policies and not with those who are not.
The third point I want to make, and arguably the greatest, is that we should use our leverage in the region. The truth about the Balkans region is that the most important thing is not what happens but the linkage between things that happen. We wanted to prevent Croatia from being as it was in the mid-1990s highly destructive in its attitude to Herzegovina, the southern part of Bosnia. By giving Zagreb the impetus, the encouragement to move towards Europe, we made it a price that it did not interfere with its next door neighbour.
The key to Banja Luka lies in Belgrade. Belgrade must be prepared to say to Mr. Dodik that he must adhere to European policies and that it will not tolerate him, official or unofficially, encouraging the break up of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The truth is that Belgrade wants Banja Luka as part of Serbia about as much as Dublin wants Belfast and for many of the same reasons. It wants to move towards the European Union and I see absolutely no reason the European Union should not make it a requirement of Serbia's accession process that it supports European Union policy in the preservation of the integrity of a neighbouring state recognised by Europe and with whom it must have proper relationships. We should also insist that Mr. Tadic should deal with Sarajevo rather than Banja Luka. That is a minimal requirement and if we were to do that, I think we might be able to turn this thing around.
I will finish now because I have gone on for a certain length of time and I do not want to in any way close off questions. I will finish by saying that we have allowed Bosnia to become an abscess. It is not an abscess outside the boundaries of Europe. It is not Belarus, Ukraine or a distant place. It is inside the boundaries of Europe. It is an abscess I fear that is already beginning to affect the future, the personalities and the inter-ethnic tensions within Bosnia and Herzegovina but the contagion of that abscess could easily spread wider. I do not presume that includes conflict but I cannot exclude the possibility. It was Bismarck who said the Balkans are not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier. It was proved twice to us in the last century the unwisdom of that statement. We ought to take steps to make sure we do not have to learn it again in the early years of this one.
