BOSNIA: Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative for Bosnia, may today impose sanctions on Serbia. He discusses his role in the Balkans with Daniel McLaughlin in Sarajevo
Nine years after an internecine war killed 250,000 people, Bosnia is looking to Northern Ireland as a possible model for its multi-ethnic political future.
Lord Ashdown, the international community's High Representative for Bosnia, sees power-sharing structures such as the suspended Stormont Assembly as a way of uniting the Balkan nation's mutually-hostile Muslim, Serb and Croat communities.
"It would look more like Stormont than Westminster," says the former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat Party. "Power-sharing agreements will be an integral part of the democratic process, and I think that's fine," he told The Irish Times in his office in Sarajevo. "It will be built on power-sharing structures that people would find very normal in Belfast, but may find very strange in Buckinghamshire."
The son of an Irish-born British army colonel who retired to a pig farm in Comber, Co Down, Jeremy Ashdown was nicknamed Paddy at public school in England. He later became a Special Boat Services commander and served in Northern Ireland.
The leader of the Lib Dems from 1988 to 1999, Lord Ashdown has represented the United Nations and European Union in Bosnia since 2002, with what he calls a mandate "to put Bosnia on an irreversible path to Europe".
The goal of eventual EU and NATO membership came a little closer last week, when the EU took over peacekeeping duties in Bosnia under the slogan "from stabilisation to integration".
Lord Ashdown has pushed for the creation of a nationwide military command structure, tax system and police force, and the creation of an independent judiciary, but Bosnia's administration is still deeply fractured along ethnic lines.
Co-operation between Bosnia's Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska is patchy at best, hampering efforts to combat powerful criminal groups which traffic arms, drugs and people through the Balkans and on to Western Europe.
A greater problem - as far as Bosnia's EU ambitions are concerned - is Republika Srpska's chronic inability or unwillingness to catch indicted war crimes suspects.
Lord Ashdown sacked 59 Bosnian Serb officials last summer for obstructing the capture of men such as Mr Radovan Karadzic and Gen Ratko Mladic - both wanted for the massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 - and their extradition to the UN tribunal at The Hague.
"The problem is that the security structures of Republika Srpska are shot through with infiltration from those who would seek to protect rather than catch war criminals."
He was speaking as news broke that the Bosnian Serb military had kept Gen Mladic on its payroll until mid-2002 while telling the world that it had no idea where he was and that it had broken contact with him. Lord Ashdown has no time for the argument of Serbia's prime minister, Mr Vojislav Kostunica, that the arrest of alleged war criminals would destabilise the country.
While lambasting Belgrade's failure to help Bosnia reintegrate with the rest of Europe, the former British MP also urges Europe to do more to help combat problems which blight the Balkans more than a decade after they collapsed into war.
"Organised crime networks tie into war criminals' networks and operate across borders and ethnic lines. They are trafficking women one day, drugs the next, and perhaps materials for terrorist operations another day. It's like a criminal Fedex system - put whatever you want to deliver to a European city into one end of the pipeline and it comes out of the other."
Lord Ashdown says he is leaving his post next November - "or so my wife tells me" - but has plans no let up until then in his pursuit of Bosnia's most wanted war criminals.
"We cannot let 150-200 individuals hold a whole country to ransom and prevent its citizens from achieving the only future they can have - a future in NATO and Europe."