Danijela Dabić died earlier today of an inoperable brain tumour, which she had been living with for over three years. When I first went out to the Balkans to work for NDI, early in 1997, I hired her as my assistant, and she rapidly became my right hand in dealing with the bizarre and truculent world of Bosnian Serb opposition politics. Working with her in Banja Luka that summer, as it suddenly (if briefly) became the centrepiece of Western intervention in the Balkans, was possibly the high point of my career, and I couldn’t have done it without her.

Danijela was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in January 1976, and her family were among the tens of thousands of Serbs who got out of town when the old Yugoslavia disintegrated; her grandparents were among the hundreds of thousands who fled Croatian forces when the Krajina collapsed in 1995. She was delighted to get the extra mobility that a job with the internationals allowed a stateless young woman in 1997, and repaid us with energy, intelligence and humour. Her occasional freelancing as a translator for visiting journalists gave us links with the Western media, and indeed brought her a brief romance with the correspondent for the London Times.

Well, she was exceptionally bright, and moved onward and upward, taking up a new post within our Banja Luka office as a trainer for political activists, and then spending a year at the University of New Hampshire. It was while she was in the US that she discovered she was ill; she returned to Bosnia in summer 2001 expecting to die, but recovered sufficiently to take up her old job in Banja Luka and indeed to move to Sarajevo last year as head of NDI’s parliamentary program, a post that would previously have gone to an international appointee.

When I last saw her, in late 2002, she was the same as ever, tall, thin, sharp as a razor; her English was completely fluent and idiomatic although (until 2000) she had never spent much time abroad. As a result of her cancer she had given up smoking and adopted healthier eating habits (though she had always disdained the grease-ridden excesses of the local cuisine). She knew then that she was on borrowed time, and was still flying to Boston regularly for treatment. We had an excellent lunch reminiscing about former days, and then a dinner with two of my successors in the Banja Luka NDI office and a couple of other old friends who happened to be in town.

Well, it seems the end came relatively suddenly and without pain, in her home town, which is all any of us can really hope for. The funeral will be at the end of the week, and there’s no way I can be there, so this weblog entry will have to do as a memorial; plus the card we’ll be sending to her parents and brother Saša. As I get older, I know that I will face more such holes opening up in my past. But that intellectual knowledge doesn’t really make it any better. Danijela, rest well. You earned it.