14 Dec 2010

My friend Richard Holbrooke: Mark Malloch-Brown

The former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown, remembers his friend – the veteran US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who died yesterday.

US diplomat Richard Holbrooke who died yesterday

I first saw Richard Holbrooke bulldozing his way towards me in a Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai border in 1979. Subsequently, I watched him similarly tear his way through New York Upper East Side salons, ex-Yugoslavian political leaders, the United Nations and ultimately Afghanistan and Pakistan, or AfPak as he would bluntly but infelicitously call it.

Throughout our 30-year-plus friendship, I watched him offend thin skinned diplomats and political leaders but – nearly always – get results.

He was a towering figure in his generation of American diplomats. He could not have been a European or Soviet diplomat. Only an American could have got away with it.

He could not have been a European or Soviet diplomat. Only an American could have got away with it.

And perhaps only an American whose bullying and cajoling was deployed for progressive ends. A neo-con, who behaved half as badly as Richard sometimes did in negotiations, would have been quickly banished.

But Richard was a liberal bull: he waded in as a very young Assistant Secretary of State for East African affairs with his friend – and often exasperated sparring partner – the US ambassador in Thailand, Mort Abramowitz, to protect Cambodian refugees and Boat People during the Carter Administration.

I was a young UN officer in charge of the refugee camps and not for the last time the three of us made common cause to put backbone into the US and UN response.

Bosnia

Again, in 1994 coming off a trip to Bosnia with two refugee NGOs that involved many of the same cast of characters he had worked with in Asia, Richard took on, as the US envoy, Bosnia and the protection of its besieged Muslims. Where lesser men would have been overwhelmed he – to all intents and purposes – locked up the parties to the conflict in a US base in Dayton, Ohio until a peace agreement was reached. It was perhaps his finest hour.

Almost as tough a diplomatic challenge was persuading, when he was ambassador to the UN four years later, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under a very suspicious Senator Jesse Helms, to pay its accumulated arrears. Even Richard could not threaten American senators so there was sweet-talking, and even wining and dining in New York, of the old conservative Senator to win him over.

Richard was successful and remained, even after he stepped down from the UN, one of Kofi Annan’s key American friends and supporters.

He died when, as ever, he was making headway against the odds.

In the strange way of the top levels of American official foreign policy, there are years spent away from it when the other party is in power. For Richard, this meant spells in Wall Street during the long years of the Republican ascendancy in the White House.

But always through his involvement with organisations like Refugees International, the International Rescue Committee and later the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria he stayed passionately engaged.

And over the years rough edges were knocked off principally by his third wife Kati Marton, the author. Trish, my wife and I, proudly found we had reintroduced them to each other at a New York fundraiser we took Kati to. Soon they were an item and remained till his death an extraordinary partnership. Some years later I roasted Richard at an event in his honour that I had known him for so long I still remembered him as just “Dick”.

He had come a long way.

Afghanistan-Pakistan

By the end, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was the epitome in stature, if still not in behaviour, of the so-called Wise Men, the elder statesmen, who had in earlier times advised Presidents.

His last role as Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy was I suspect a bitter-sweet experience. I briefly overlapped as his ministerial counterpart in the UK and when we last swapped notes on the experiences several months ago the nasty sniping within Washington cruelly captured in Bob Woodward’s recent book Obama’s Wars and the broken government and leadership in Afghanistan together with Pakistan’s intractable problems weighed heavily on him.

He died when, as ever, he was making headway against the odds. But the job was not done and perhaps even the bulldozer would not have this time prevailed even had he lived.

Lord Malloch-Brown is Chairman of FTI Global Affairs. He was formerly a British Foreign Office Minister and before that was Kofi Annan’s Deputy at the United Nations.