A Fortunate Life: The Autobiography of Paddy Ashdown

A Distillation of Days

THE WOMAN’S FACE was stained with sweat and waxy-white and heavy with hopelessness and fear. Her flower-pattern dress hung around her, grimy and formless, but still hinting of a young body and strong limbs. A child of perhaps four clung to one hand, while with her other she pushed a pram laden with assorted cheap household items: some worn clothes, a collection of cooking pots, a coffee djezva* and an incongruous tin of Nestlé’s powdered baby milk. Behind her trudged an older woman carrying a baby which was crying pitifully and an old man bent over a stick. They made up just a small ripple in the miserable stream of dusty stragglers tramping towards the school buildings at Trnopolje under a burning sun, as our convoy, led by a Serb jeep, bumped past them. My mind flew back to that first remembered image – the one that used to haunt me and grow into exaggerated forms in the nightmares of my childhood – the brief glimpse, snatched from between the folds of my mother’s skirt, of a single platform under a boiling sun, carpeted with dismembered bodies, the gore and the smell of putrefaction and that other smell that I recognised now – the odour of animal fear.

Little more than twenty-four hours before I had been sitting up until the cool, starlit hours of the early morning with the ‘President’ of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, at his mountain headquarters high above Sarajevo, drinking šlivović† and talking of philosophy and poetry, of the eternal tragedies of the Balkans and of his life as a psychiatrist and poet. The wonderful, brave Guardian journalist, Maggie O’Kane (who, with other journalists, had accompanied me on my visit to see the Serb side of the three-month-old Bosnian war), had warned me earlier that evening that Karadžić was evil and a liar. But, sitting in front of him, drinking plum brandy, I did not believe her. I accepted his assertion that he wanted a just peace if ‘the Muslims’ would only compromise. I accepted