 I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results. |
| Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace. |
| 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. |
| The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt. |
| 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. |
| I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press. |
| 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. |
| What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party. |
| I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth. |
| Politics is compromise. |
| 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. |
| It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way. |
