Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, former international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006, led this week’s House of Lords debate on the situation in the country following its recent election. Here’s what he had to say…

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD): My Lords, a few months before the last election in the last months of 2009, my right honourable friend William Hague and I—well, at least he was not my right honourable friend then, but he is today; he was then the shadow Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—wrote a joint article for the British and foreign press on Bosnia and Herzegovina. We complained bitterly that Bosnia was stuck, that the progress that we had made during the previous 10 years had gone backwards, that the tone of nationalistic rhetoric had risen, that this was dangerous and that Bosnia remained stuck in a mire of dysfunctionality and corruption.

We ended that article with this paragraph:

“Today Radovan Karadzic is finally on trial in The Hague on charges of alleged genocide and war crimes in Bosnia. As he and others are called to account over their part in the horrendous events of the 1990s, it would be a supreme irony if their plans for carving up Bosnia-Herzegovina were to be realized simply because the international community was too busy to care”.

So it was then; so it is, I have to say, today, for Bosnia has not moved one inch forward—it has indeed gone backwards. This is despite the fact that this was a key article in the coalition agreement, one of the very few in the foreign affairs section of that agreement, which picked out the Government’s priorities; despite the fact that we have had in Mr William Hague a Foreign Secretary, until he was relieved of that position, who was genuinely interested in Bosnia and Herzegovina, advised by the admirable Arminka Helic, who is due shortly, to my delight, to join our number here; despite the fact that he knew what had to be done; despite the fact that he had a series of policies to push forward the process of making a functional state in Bosnia and Herzegovina; despite all those things, we are now exactly where we were in 2009.

No, we are in a worse position than we were in 2009, for Bosnia has not gone forward but has gone backwards in the most dangerous way, despite the fact that we have in Bosnia and Herzegovina today more instruments of leverage, power and influence than in other country on earth. We are spending hundreds of millions of euros every year in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have a police mission under the European Union; we have EUFOR under the European Union; we have the largest European Union mission; and yet, because of a drowsy apathy in other European capitals and because of the most signal failure of policy over seven long years on the part of Brussels, Bosnia has slipped backwards.

It does not please me to say these things. This is now both a tragedy and exceedingly dangerous. I shall talk about the tragedy first.

For the first 10 years of Bosnia’s progress, it was the poster boy of post-conflict reconstruction. It moved further than any other country has ever done. We had a million refugees returning even to the Golgotha of Srebrenica—Muslims returning to Srebrenica. We had the genuine building of institutions of functional government. We had free elections carried out by the Bosnians alone to the highest possible standards. In my time in Bosnia, we took the two armies and we welded them together into a single-state army under the control of the presidency. We took the three intelligence services and we welded them together under the control of Parliament. We created in faster time than in any other country a genuine system of VAT revenue in place of a shattered, broken and corrupted sales tax. We brought together the customs services; we began to lay the foundations for the unification of the great city of Mostar. I do not claim these as successes for those who were high representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for we played but a small part in them.

None of these things was done, as the legend now says, by the use of the Bonn powers or by coercion; all of them were done by persuasion. All of them were done by having a co-ordinated policy from the European Union and Washington to drive the process of state functionality. All of them were done not by me but by brave Bosnian politicians such as Adnan Terzic and Dragan Covic, who were my partners in my days there and who took great risks to themselves and believed in the Bosnian state. These were achievements by the Bosnian politicians; they passed through the Bosnian state democratic institutions; they were not imposed by outsiders. And then, in 2007, sadly, the European Union adopted a policy to stand back and take no further action. It would leave it to the policy of ownership.

For seven long years, Bosnia has gone backwards. For seven long years, the noble Baroness, my good friend Cathy Ashton, has presided over the European External Action Service’s actions in Bosnia and we have seen, without any step taken to prevent it, all the progress of those 10 long years successively unravel, starting in Republika Srpska with Milorad Dodik. If there was ever an example of how Bosnia has failed to move forward, in the elections held last week, Bosnia ended up with exactly the same collection of politicians running it as it had before: the same people who ran the war, the same obstructionists.

I ask us to reflect for a moment. It is 20 years next year since the Dayton agreement, and yet, in 20 years, despite all those advantages, despite all the leverage, we have utterly failed to put together the kind of functional state that could provide the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina with a future, the only future that they can have that gives them prosperity and security, as part of the European Union.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, was even persuaded by her advisers to go to visit Milorad Dodik as though he was the head of a state, not the head of an entity, and sit down with him when, on his table, there was a map and flag of Republika Srpska and the flag of the European Union, but no flag for Bosnia-Herzegovina. You could not give a clearer example that the European Union was not interested in the state. Of course, it says that it is, but that is not how it worked out. Every Bosnian knew that from now on the whole emphasis was to be not on the functioning of the state but the functions of the entities. The entire political activity in Bosnia is now spent not on trying to build a functional state capable of joining the European Union but, instead, of investing in the old institutions of division: the entity and the federation. Those are exactly the same ingredients as took us to war.

This is a tragedy. So much has gone missing. We have stood by and allowed this to happen. Because we permitted Milorad Dodik to start spouting the old rhetoric of secessionism, we have an equal and contrary reaction from the Bosnians on the other side; so the rhetoric of division has risen in the past seven years in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rhetoric of unity has faded away.

The mood in Bosnia today confirms to that old Balkan proverb: “Da komsiji crkne krava”, which means, “My neighbour’s cow is dead, that makes me happy”. That is the mood of Bosnia today: not unity, but disintegration; not the building of a functional state but the investment of political power in the entities. What are we to do? You cannot have a more terrible example of a long-term failure of public policy than our failure to build on the foundations of Bosnia-Herzegovina to create the functional state necessary to join the European Union.

Here is where it gets dangerous. We now have instability in Bosnia. We have secessionism in Republika Srpska and deep, deep disappointment among the Muslim community—the largest Muslim community in any European country; an ancient Muslim community that goes back 400 years and understands that there is no contradiction between Islam and European values. It is feeling left out, just as it did in 1992.

A friend said to me the other day, “Isn’t it a good thing that the two great foreign policy challenges of our time—the Ukraine crisis and the crisis of fundamentalist jihadism—never come together?”. Oh yes they do, they come together in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Russia is now playing mischief with the Serbs in Republika Srpska. It is offering it false loans to enable it to duck out of its agreement with the IMF. It is playing the Ukraine crisis right into the heart of Europe. We stand by and do nothing.

At the same time, thank God, the Bosnian Muslims are as difficult to radicalise as you can imagine—they continue to wear their skirts as short in Ferhadija in Sarajevo as they would in any other city on a Friday evening. If you go to Bosnia in weather like this—in still, clear October weather—you see rising above every little Bosnian Muslim village little columns of smoke ascending to an Allah or God who is offended by alcohol, at the bottom of which you will inevitably find a slivovitz still cooking up the plum brandy that is necessary to survive the winter. These are not easily radicalisable people, but there are now significant numbers, not just from Bosnia but from Sanjak, Montenegro and Albania now joining ISIL, because they see no hope left in a nation to which we will not commit the necessary political will to make it into a functional state.

I know that my noble friend will tell me that the Government have supported the continuation of EUFOR. I am glad of that; it is a good move; but EUFOR is the backstop that prevents failure becoming something worse; it is not a plan to take Bosnia forward. I know that the Government are saying that there is a rapprochement between us and Germany that will bring forward some plan for economic and social progress, but that is not the core of it. You cannot create a strong economy unless you create a functional state. Unless we address that and come forward with a series of co-ordinated plans and procedures to achieve that and push it forward, Bosnia will remain where it is.

These are dangerous times; they are very dangerous times indeed. I do not believe that the threat to Bosnia-Herzegovina today is that it returns to conflict. There is no mood for that, thank God, in Bosnia-Herzegovina today, but, for the first time, I cannot totally discount it. I do not know what will happen if a grenade is thrown into a mosque in Doboj on Friday night. By and large, the threat to Bosnia-Herzegovina is that while the rest of the Balkans moves forward, it continues to sink into a black hole of corruption and dysfunctionality from which we do not have the will to move it forward but may never leave because of its destabilising influence over the whole region. That is where we are unless we shift gear.

I am sorry that in our Chamber, where the tradition is for more modulated prose than I have used today, I have had to speak rather bluntly and openly, but I am depressed and frightened by what is happening in Bosnia. I am appalled at the failure of public policy that has led us to this. The Government have to lift more of the burden; they have done much but not enough in this process. I am sorry if in this speech I have been rather stronger than is normal in this place but simply, I know no other; I can find no way to whisper a wake-up call.