Not long after I started working for Robin Cook as his special adviser in the foreign office, I accompanied him to Croatia. After a day in Zagreb, then emerging from the repressive Tudjman era, Robin pronounced himself at home in Croatia. I assumed he was referring to the new centre-left government, but he replied that, important as that was, he was actually talking about the fact that all the major politicians—including the president, Stipe Mesic, and the prime minister, Ivica Racan—sported beards.
No European foreign minister made as much of an impact on the Balkans as Robin Cook did between 1997 and 2001. I first met him in 1995 while I was serving with the hapless UN mission in Bosnia, at a time when John Major’s government was refusing to confront the atrocities perpetrated by the Balkan hegemons Milosevic and Tudjman. From the Labour frontbench, Robin relentlessly harried first Douglas Hurd and then Malcolm Rifkind.
Appointed foreign secretary in 1997, Robin drew two lessons from the Bosnian war. First, that ethnic cleansing should never again be tolerated in the Balkans. Second, as he put it, “The era when the murderer of a single person could meet justice while the killer of 10,000 could walk free” had to come to an end. He was from the start a passionate supporter of the international criminal court, established at the Rome conference in 1998.
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