From Everest, and my life as a mountaineer, I went almost immediately to work in Bosnia as director of an aid agency. Little had changed since I had worked in the war in the former Yugoslavia some eight years before. Hatred still existed between the ethnic groups, but my task was to rebuild homes that had been destroyed on both sides of the ethnic divide during the war, and to help displaced families to move back to their pre-war homes.
I headed up a multi-ethnic team who worked incredibly well together to rebuild their broken nation. There was little doubt that this would probably take decades to achieve, but a start had to be made.
In the middle of the area where I worked was Srebrenica, which had come to symbolise the horrors which had occurred in many places during the war. In 2001 it was still a battered village, but such things as the opening of a bakery, which my organisation had sponsored, were, bit by bit, helping the community to rebuild itself.
Again I went walking in the hills, which was now a bit safer than it had been when I was previously there as most of the minefields were now well marked.
Sarajevo remained a broken city. The old town was largely untouched, but towards the airport, and on the hills overlooking the city, there were constant reminders of the savagery of war. The most poignant lasting signs of what had taken place were the remains of the 1984 Winter Olympics. The large car park alongside the ice skating arena where Torvill and Dean won their figure skating gold medal had become an overused graveyard, while the banking of the bobsleigh track showed the marks of countless shell holes.
In many of the areas where we worked, mass graves were still being discovered and, where possible, every effort was being made to identify the dead. There was a strong rumour that overflights by aircraft using sophisticated equipment had identified all of the mass graves at the end of the war, but there would have been chaos if their locations had all been announced at the same time. The publication of their locations was, therefore, being drip fed year by year.
Despite all this, there was a determination that the country would not be allowed to slip backwards into a state of anarchy. One example was the return of skiers to the slopes above Sarajevo. It was not the finest skiing that I had ever experienced, and it was difficult to appreciate that, some nineteen years before, the greatest skiers in the world had hurtled down those slopes. The chairlifts were certainly the flimsiest I had ever used, but equipment can be easily changed – what was more important was the need to restore hope to the people of Bosnia, and the return of large numbers of skiers to the slopes was a symbol that some things were starting, albeit at a slow pace, to return to normal.
From Bosnia I moved back to the UK to become, at the age of fifty, director of operations for the largest school expedition company in the world – who were running over 400 expeditions each year to every corner of the globe.
The civil war in Bosnia officially ended in December 1995. It had gripped the interest of the world’s media, largely because it was a European conflict. Only two months later, in February 1996, the civil war broke out in Nepal which was to last over ten years, but unlike the war in Bosnia, this conflict received only sketchy coverage from the world’s media.
The war was launched in Nepal by Maoists in an attempt to establish a republic by overthrowing the Nepalese monarchy. During the ten years of the conflict it is estimated that over 15,000 Nepalese were killed and, to put this into some context, during the forty years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, just under 3,600 were killed.
What now seems bizarre in retrospect is that while the war was being fought expeditions to the high mountains remained largely unaffected. There was the very odd incident, but the impact on trekkers was far more noticeable, because the Maoists often stopped trekking groups to demand that they contributed towards the Maoist cause.
The biggest contributor to the Maoist cause, although he wasn’t aware that he would be at the time, was Crown Prince Dipendra who, on 1 June 2001, shot dead nine members of the royal family including his mother and father, the king and queen, before shooting himself. For a nation that literally worshipped their king, this was an enormous tragedy.
It took Dipendra four days to die, during which time he was technically the king following the death of his father. Had he survived, having committed regicide, infanticide, fratricide and patricide, there is no doubt that the country would have been plunged into a constitutional crisis, but his suicide had prevented this. Gyanendra, Dipendra’s uncle, succeeded him as the king.
Gyanendra was a particularly unpopular monarch, and his son Prince Paras, by now the crown prince, was even more unpopular than his father, having previously been accused of murdering a popular Nepalese singer. He was despised by the Nepalese for his playboy lifestyle, which I witnessed in 2007 when I was heading up a UN team to verify the status of Maoist combatants. I was at a meeting at a hotel in Kathmandu when a clearly drunken Prince Paras strolled over to introduce himself with two Western girls hanging on to his arms, with his wife following on sedately behind.
In 2005, the king suspended the constitution and assumed direct authority for governing the country. This was another home goal by the royal family, which made the monarchy even less popular, while at the same time increasing support for the Maoist cause. In the face of broad opposition he restored the previous government, and his reign officially ended two years later when the government declared Nepal to be a republic and abolished the monarchy.