BBC - Around the World - Ariel's 'Foreign Bureau' - 4th May 2004

By Nick Hawton, Bosnia correspondent, 4th May 2004

The wife of Europe’s most wanted man smiled as she handed me the cup of coffee. "I would love to know where Radovan is," she tells me with a glint in her eye. "But it’s better that we do not know – for security reasons, you understand."

It had taken many weeks to arrange, but finally I had my interview with Ljiljana Karadzic, the wife of Radovan, the former Bosnian Serb leader charged with genocide by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. He has been on the run for almost ten years – since 1996.

As Radovan’s grandchildren wandered in and out of the kitchen for cake and orange juice, his wife (formally head of the Bosnian Serb Red Cross) told me her husband was innocent of the massacre at Srebrenica and how the West had betrayed him and how...

Suffice it to say, if there is one thing about Bosnians, indeed anyone from the former Yugoslavia, it is their ability to talk and talk and talk. No problem with doing vox pops here.

And there is a lot to talk about in a political system which has four presidents, 13 prime ministers, three religions, two alphabets and one foreign ‘Lord High Protector’ whose job it is to keep everybody at least arms length apart.

At the moment this honour is bestowed upon Paddy Ashdown, he of Liberal Democrat stock. Well, if you are not going to be British prime minister, why not become the effective ruler of a country with powers which would make officials from the British Raj blush?

Like Ashdown’s, the job of the international journalist here is to walk the tightrope between the different communities operating in a Byzantine system of politics where you need a sixth sense to know why things really are the way they are.

I am not sure what the BBC’s editorial guidelines say about the use of a sixth sense...

And all this in a country which is surely one of the most beautiful in Europe, if not the world. Fifty percent of the land is covered in forest. There are rugged mountains, deep gorges, roaring rivers. Have you seen the silky green of the Neretva river?

And that is one of the challenges here, trying to balance the bad news with the genuinely good news, like the Glaswegian who is turning 30 square miles of former minefields into fields of organic lavender (he expects to be the world’s largest exporter of organic lavender in a couple of years’ time).

And that is Bosnia’s problem – image and how to improve it.

As one of the two BBC Balkan journalists covering other areas of the former Yugoslavia is an important part of the job. If there is one thing about this place, it is its sheer unpredictability.

In the past 12 months I have covered the assassination of the Serbian prime minister, the death of the Macedonian president in a plane crash and the bizarre gunfight among members of the UN police force in Kosovo, which left two Americans and one Jordanian dead.

You can always guarantee something big is just about to happen.

And the more you travel around the region, the more you realise how interconnected the whole place is, not just geographically and economically, but also among its peoples. Sometimes you think they have more in common with each other than they care to admit.