A Suitcase Between Friends

By Douglas Hurd

Five hard-hitting short stories and a political essay inspired by Douglas Hurd's visit to Sarajevo in 1992. All demonstrate preoccupations with the world tensions of the nineties, observed by Hurd's acute political eye.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781448211364

Douglas Hurd

Douglas Hurd, Baron (born 1930), is a British Conservative politician and novelist, who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and his retirement in 1995. Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, Hurd first entered parliament in February 1974, as MP for the Mid Oxfordshire constituency. His first government post was as Minister for Europe, and he served in several cabinet posts from 1984 onwards, including Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1984-85), Home Secretary (1985-89) and Foreign Secretary (1989-95). He stood unsuccessfully for the Conservative Party leadership in 1990 and retired from frontline politics during a cabinet re-shuffle in 1995. In 1997, Hurd entered the House of Lords. Viewed as one of the Conservative Party's senior elder statesmen, he is a patron of the Tory Reform Group, and remains an active figure in public life. Hurd is a writer of political thrillers including The Image in the Water, and a collection of short stories in Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil.

Book preview

A Suitcase

Between Friends

Douglas Hurd

Contents

Foreword

The last day of summer

The new disorder

Ten minutes to turn the devil

A suitcase between friends

Heiter skelter

A Note on the Author

Foreword

In July 1992 I visited Sarajevo as British Foreign Secretary and as, for the time being, President of the European Council of Ministers. The visit lasted for only a few hours. We flew in from Zagreb, talked with the UN Military Commander, General MacKenzie, and with those who were loading the relief supplies on to trucks bound for the city. Then we travelled to the city, called on the President of Bosnia, walked with him for a few hundred metres through the stricken streets, had a quick lunch at the United Nations Mess and were on our way back to Zagreb.

Of course I had read many hundreds of pages of reports on Bosnia and listened to many who had visited the country. But a few hours of personal impressions can be worth more than a library of reports. During my visit one of those with me was told an anecdote by a quiet Bosnian Croat. This Croat said that he lived in a suburb of Sarajevo. Until recently his only quarrel with his Serb neighbour had been that, the neighbour’s little boy kicked a football into his garden. Now, a short time later, neighbour and neighbour were trying to kill each other. From this simple anecdote I built this simple story The last day of summer.

Many of us have known Yugoslav friends or colleagues. Perhaps after some acquaintance we also knew whether they were Serbs or Croats or Muslims or Albanians. But for us, and it appeared for themselves, they were essentially Yugoslavs. They were citizens of no mean country. Yugoslavia was well known to western visitors. Its people ate well and dressed well. Its leader, President Tito, was a world figure, conducting a respected and independent foreign policy, one of the pioneers of the non-aligned movement. More perhaps than any other country in the Balkans, Yugoslavia appeared to the outside world to be advancing fast and successfully, albeit under a communist regime.

Now we are led to believe that all this was a sham. We are persuaded that these Yugoslavs whom we knew were all the time longing to return to the ancient tradition of killing each other. We are now informed that Yugoslavia was altogether a myth and that the reality was the racial hatred among its peoples. And indeed their behaviour confirms this version. Sometimes these things are most easily expressed in fiction. I have tried in my story to give an example, based on the anecdote which I heard that July day in Sarajevo, of how quickly attitudes can deteriorate and neighbours convert themselves into enemies, a conversion all the more bizarre among families who are well educated and well established.

I only hope that we have not heard the end of the story. For if this is the end of the story then it is despair. There are no tidy frontiers in the former Yugoslavia. The attempt to produce ethnic frontiers by the so-called ethnic cleansing i.e. the forced expulsion of people from their homes, cannot lead to a peaceful order. One day the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, instead of triumphing in their separatism are going to have to establish ways in which they can live together, co-operating closely albeit in distinct separate states.

But that will be another summer.

The Last Day

of Summer

Turn off that rubbish, said his wife, and Borisav obeyed.

Where is this place Vukovar? she asked, for that had been the main story on the TV news.

In Croatia somewhere.

A long way from Sarajevo, anyway. Such stupidities, shooting and killing, and for what? We don’t want any of that here.

Borisav was not sure. In the Forestry Department where he worked the Muslims and Croats were beginning to talk of independence for Bosnia, whatever that might mean. Serbs like Borisav remained silent. Most of them had worked together for years. Promotion, salaries, houses and schools, the occasional foreign trip, these were what they talked about.

Borisav looked through the sitting-room window at his dusty garden. The narrow strip of land, a hundred yards long, stretched down to an outcrop of rock, below which the land fell steeply away to the red-tiled roofs of the village. A large Yugoslav air force transport plane rose from the airport five miles away. The Forestry Department had done well to build these small, two-bedroom houses for its senior employees 20 years ago. Borisav was fond in particular of a gnarled apple tree at the end of the garden, now heavy with unripe fruit, which must have belonged to an ancient orchard demolished when the houses were built.

His other pride was the wooden summer house which he and his neighbour, Mr Tomic, had built with their own hands, straddling their boundary fence. The effort had taken the two of them almost all their spare time last summer. They had held a great picnic in September to celebrate its completion.

Mr Tomic used to smoke his pipe there of an evening, looking out over the village. Sometimes Borisav joined him, preferring a cheap cigar. They were both Deputy Directors, though in different sections of the Forestry Department. Borisav being concerned with plant diseases and Mr Tomic with accounts. They had not been close friends but the project of the summer house had brought them together.

Borisav’s only son, Ivan, aged 14, was meant to use it for his homework. The homework was particularly heavy this term as his form had switched from Russian to English as their second language. But Ivan was an ungainly lad, without many friends, given to kicking a football aimlessly round the garden when not slumped in front of the television. Indeed, Borisav could see him now, hands in the pockets of his jeans, raising clouds of dust as he trundled the ball under the apple tree. Borisav opened the windows to call his son in.

As if galvanised by the sound of