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" The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s? "

Paddy Ashdown

Way

How

Politics

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Paddy Ashdown

Politics

Compromise

" My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut. "

" We have to make their livelihoods viable, get them the proper prices for their produce, try and make them stay rather than sell their property and leave again. "

" I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold. "

" I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do. "

" We who came here saw what was happening. This was far more than a war in a faraway place. This was a moral imperative, a terrible vision of the future. "

Paddy Ashdown

Moral

Place

" I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads. "

" We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war. "

" Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years. "

" It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations. "

" I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth. "

" It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results. "

" I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No. "

" Maybe it's legitimate criticism, though it can be hurtful. Maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention to the people with whom I would have a natural affinity as a liberal, and they feel let down by that. "

" I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war. "

" I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press. "

" People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt. "

" It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them. "

Paddy Ashdown

Fools

Grief