Western Balkans

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for this debate, which, sadly, is timely and appropriate. I thank her for giving me the opportunity to tell your Lordships’ House about an event that took place in Sarajevo on 27 December. Joseph Ingram wrote a report of it and he said this. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina held a spontaneous commemorative service in the “iconic, reconstructed city hall”. The hall was,

“filled to capacity, and despite being nationally televised, had people lined up outside trying to be part of it. The ‘Mothers of Srebrenica’, a group that represents survivors of the most horrific massacre of innocent civilians on European soil since World War Two, had announced that they too intend to honour the work of this extraordinary human being”.

The event was dedicated to one man. He was born in India. He grew up as a lad in Northern Ireland. He left school, joined the marines and became a captain, a diplomat and spy. Then he gave up everything and, after a period on the dole, went on to become a youth worker and eventually the gallant MP for Yeovil. In this House, we knew him as Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, but he was always Paddy.

He had a wide range of interests. He had forgotten more languages than most of us have ever learned. He could quote the poetry of John Donne at will. He was an informed and passionate supporter of activists for democracy in Hong Kong, when nobody else took any notice, and he packed more achievements into a lifetime than most of us could imagine, but he was always first to admit that the source of his great strength was Jane. In public she was a quiet figure, but to those of us who know her she is a charming, funny and formidable woman.

I will give you one vignette which sums up both of them. Like all good leaders, Paddy used to invite people in to advise him, talk to him and argue with him. In 1992 I was one of the small group. Early one morning, he posed us the question: should I go to Bosnia? We went round the room and we all said no. We gave him all sorts of reasons why it was a really bad idea, and I left the meeting certain of only one thing. He was going to go. We all saw the TV pictures recently, but what we did not know until we read his autobiography was that he had come under fire, as the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, told us. But he went because he saw a group of people being treated unjustly, and he thought that he could and should do something.

Some months later, I was talking quietly to Jane at our party conference and I said to her, “It must be awful for you and the kids when he goes off on trips like that”. She said, “It is, but what is much worse is having to put up with him when they stop him going. Then he is just unbearable”. She went on to say that whenever Paddy went to the Balkans he carried thousands of letters backwards and forwards to people starved of news and desperate to know about their relatives. He never wrote about that.

From Somerset to Bosnia, from the people in the highest echelons of the UN to small groups of local Liberal Democrats, we were very privileged to walk alongside him, a remarkable man with a vision of a world in which freedom, justice and fairness exist for all in their diversity. It will be a great privilege to carry on his work.

I am pleased to say that one of the great things I got to do was to talk to Paddy a lot about the Balkans. I have been on visits recently to Kosovo and Serbia and have been to other parts of the Balkans in a private capacity. I am a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kosovo. I would always come back and talk to Paddy about what I had seen, and he would give me a whole other level of understanding. It was not just his appreciation of the politics of the region but his absolute understanding of people—from the most hardened of embittered fighters to women and young people—that gave him a completely unique perspective, which he took back and forth and around the world to different policymakers. So it is with his help that I speak today.

On my trips to the region, I have been immensely impressed by our embassies. The FCO presence in the Balkans is truly remarkable. I am indebted to Denis Keefe, our ambassador in Belgrade, for this amazing tome about the complex history of British-Serbian Relations from the 18th to the 21st Centuries. The noble Baroness, Lady Helic, referred time and again to the historical context in which we have to look at things. It is a long and complex history which stems from the geopolitical significance of the Balkans and the United Kingdom. It is absolutely right, as she and noble Lords said, that we hold this debate today in the knowledge that whatever happens with Brexit, the calibration of the British geopolitical standing will have a huge difference. In all the visits I have made since Brexit has been on the agenda, not just to the Balkans, there is an acute sense that people around the world understand that our place in the world will change. As a trading partner we will be different if we are not part of the EU. Others may say that we have a different place in the world, but those of us engaged in this are perhaps mistaken if we assume that we can carry on with the same sort of bilateral understanding we have had until now.

A key and central thing we need to do as a result of this debate is to ask the Government how they are going to recalibrate their relationship with third parties such as the western Balkan states in the new relationship, whatever that is, with the European Union. We cannot work on the assumption that all the agreements and good will we have had to date will continue. I took part in the civil society summit in September. I understand that the United Kingdom does and will continue to wield an immense amount of soft power. I have been tremendously impressed by the work of the British Council throughout the western Balkans. Things such as arts programmes may not appear to have a direct relationship to security, but we know they do. If we secure and cement relationships, particularly emotional relationships with young people, we are having a direct impact on the security of our nation. It is interesting for anybody who goes there to hear politicians, particularly in places such as Serbia, draw very much on the political relationships they have with Russia and that side of the world, but to look at the young people and to understand that their economic and cultural aspirations lie in Europe.

On the question of civil society and investment in it, at the summit the British Government made a commitment to continue their involvement in various programmes. I wonder whether the Minister could give more detail about this in his response. When I was in Kosovo and Serbia, two things struck me as being of the utmost importance: the role played by women in the development of business and economics, and the role of young people. One cannot but be struck by the level of unemployment among young people. If these countries are to thrive, it will be in new areas of industry and with a new approach. Investment in young people and in women will be paramount. What are the Government going to do to support women and young entrepreneurs in particular?

We all know that you cannot have security if you do not have a basic, functioning democratic structure. Much is being done—particularly through the EU—to strengthen programmes for democratic engagement, and the investment the EU has so far put into anti-corruption programmes is important. How will the UK Government continue to be involved if Brexit goes ahead? The threat is that we could become estranged from policy-setting within the European Union and take a divergent path. That would serve neither us nor the countries of the western Balkans at all well.

Finally, I believe that the Westminster Foundation for Democracy is to have renewed investment. What does the Minister envisage this will bring about, particularly in relation to strengthening opposition political forces in the various parliaments? When one visits parliaments, one is keenly struck by the lack of a credible and formal opposition—not in one particular country, but in all of them. This is a tremendous weakness. It does not help with the democratic oversight of the functions of government.

I return to my friend Lord Ashdown and one of his many quotes about his time in Bosnia. By any stretch of the imagination, he achieved remarkable advances in the most difficult of circumstances. Looking back on his time dealing with men, women and young people who were severely traumatised but desperately hoping to work their way towards normality and economic advancement, he said:

“History teaches us these lessons for the interveners: leave your prejudices at home, keep your ambitions low, have enough resources to do the job, do not lose the golden hour, make security your first priority, involve the neighbours”.


My question to the Minister is how, in the shadow of Brexit, will the UK maximise its historic ties to the western Balkans and succeed in doing this?