Ex-Bosnia Governor Paddy Ashdown Dies

Paddy Ashdown, one of the most notable High Representatives of the international community to Bosnia, has died in the UK aged 77 following a recent diagnosis of bladder cancer.

Best known in Britain as an energetic former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, after his resignation from that post in 1999 he continued his career abroad, becoming High Representative to Bosnia from 2002 to 2006.

Ashdown was born in then colonial India in 1941 and grew up in Northern Ireland and England before joining the elite Royal Marines and the secret intelligence service, SIS. He quit the military to join and later lead the Liberals, becoming a long serving MP for Yeovil in the west of England from 1983.

A fierce opponent of the West's watch-and-see policy towards the 1992-5 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, unusually for a senior Western politician, he insisted on flying to Sarajevo in 1992 and seeing what was going in the besieged city himself.

There, in December 1992, he called for air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. "We will not allow Sarajevo to fall to Serbia in a final act of aggression," he said.

He later told Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy that he considered British and Western policy towards the conflict a disgrace. "It was a terrible sin of the West to allow those years of war," he told Vulliamy.

He lambasted the UK again for its inaction in 1995, following the fall of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia to the Bosnian Serbs and the subsequent massacre of thousands of Bosniaks.

Having declared that "Bosnia is under my skin", he was a natural candidate for the post of Office of the High Representative in 2002.

As Bosnia's de-facto governor for the next four years, Ashdown made full use of the so-called...