Lord David Owen: The "Dr. Death" of Balkan Diplomacy

By Ian Williams

Described as ''the Doctor Jack Kervorkian of Diplomacy" by Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnian ambassador to the United Nations, Lord David Owen is one of the oddest choices ever for an international mediator. His ego has defied the forces of political gravity, keeping him afloat when all his enterprises have sunk about him. His constant exhortations to the Bosnians to accept whatever terms the Serbs deign to offer seem more designed to prove his various "peace plans" successful than to serve justice or humanity. According to Edward Mortimer of the London Financial Times, Owen's colleagues compare him with the Allied prisoner of war played by Alec Guinness in "Bridge Over the River Kwai" who ferociously resists Allied attempts to destroy the bridge that he and his World War II fellow prisoners have been forced to build for the Japanese.

A medical doctor, whose saturnine countenance led him to be dubbed "Doctor Death'' by the British satirical magazine Private Eye, David Owen entered politics as a Labor MP in 1966. He rose rapidly through the ranks to become Britain's foreign secretary in 1976, and kept the post for a year and a half. Later, he parlayed his brief cabinet tenure into perennial TV punditry as "former foreign secretary.''

"It was probably a premature promotion for David," wrote British Labor leader Dennis Healey in his memoirs. ''He began to mask his insecurity with an arrogance which was found offensive by many of those who worked for him, from permanent secretary to his messenger or driver. "

On another occasion, Healey was even less charitable about David Owen: ''The good fairies gave the young doctor almost everything: thick dark locks, matinee idol features, a lightning intelligence—unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a s--t.

In 1981 he was one of the leaders of a split in the Labor Party, which at its peak attracted 29 defectors to the new Social Democratic Party. As a manifesto, he republished an earlier book, Face the Future, which now painstakingly deleted all the copious references to socialism that the text had included shortly before, when he had been bidding for control of the Labor Party.

One of the new party's major planks was support for European unity. This is ironic, in view of the sordid deal between the EC partners which led directly to the Balkan tragedy that horrifies the world today. As the Yugoslav Federation began to crack, the British government backed precipitate German recognition for Roman Catholic Croatia and Slovenia in return for Bonn's agreement to let Britain opt out of the "social charter provisions" of the European unification treaty.

By 1987 Owen's party was down to five MPs and soon after down to two—of which Dr. Owen constituted 50 percent. Healey says that ''this was largely due to David Owen's rebarbative personality,'' and quotes one of his partners, Roy Jenkins, as saying that Owen "was like the fabulous Upas tree which destroys all life for miles around it.'' His egotism, and publicly reiterated conviction of his own superiority, made it impossible for his fellow plotters to persuade him to join with the Liberal Party since he stood little chance of controlling the merged party. Like the last of the Byzantine emperors, he did not mind losing political power as long as he could keep the title of Leader of whatever remained.

In 1992. he stood down from the House of Commons and was promptly made a member of the House of Lords by a grateful Conservative Party which, as expected, won the seat he had vacated. Private Eye no longer referred to him as Doctor Death. It now called him Lord Death.

The irony of inviting him to assist Cyrus Vance in mediating differences between the parties in Bosnia was clear for those who had followed his career in Britain. Introducing into the fissioning Balkans the man who had split the Labor Party, divided the Liberal Social Democrat alliance and then run the Social Democratic Party into the ground was on a par with putting Herod in charge of infant care.

The first Vance-Owen plan called for the splitting of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a dozen or so cantons, each of them ethnically mixed, on the dubious premise that the country as a whole could not survive an ethnically mixed polity. For a year, his mediation consisted of telling the Bosnians to give up their dreams of a multicultural democracy, and to put their trust in the hands of people the rest of the world regarded as war criminals. Bosnian Croats and Muslims accepted the plan, but the Serbs kept on seizing territory by force. The plan collapsed. Vance withdrew but, instead of resigning, Lord Owen stayed on to act as choirmaster to attempts by the Europeans to deprive the ethnically mixed Bosnian government troops of arms to defend themselves and force the Bosnian government to accept the demands Owen himself had previously declared unacceptable.

Most recently he has deplored U.S. suggestions that NATO should belatedly act to implement the innumerable U.N. resolutions about protecting Bosnians before the embattled capital succumbs to the rapists and ethnic cleansers, on grounds that such military support might stiffen President Izetbegovic's resistance to diplomatic rape in Geneva. Indeed, Owen's ill-concealed bad temper at the Bosnians for not surrendering brings to mind the Roman historian who said, ''They made a desert and called it peace." No matter how tragic the final result, Lord Owen is likely to regard it as the crowning achievement of his brief diplomatic career.