Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  During a break I gave Holbrooke more details and reminded him that he had to call Nimetz and Vance, that we didn’t want to look like we were poaching, worse yet have them hear anything on the news. Vance’s and Nimetz’s sensitivities aside, an announcement on the interim accord would be a powerful signal that our team meant business. It would set us up as different from the parades of negotiators that came before us. Greek-Macedonian issues did not amount to much in the international press, but everyone in the Balkans would take notice.

  As the evening came to an end after dinner, Milosevic heard Holbrooke and me talking about the next day’s travels. He approached us in his usual emphatic way: “You are completely wrong if you think you can solve that problem.”

  “Watch us,” I replied.

  “Take it easy,” Holbrooke told me. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

  We arrived in Athens and went to see the elderly prime minister, George Papandreou, who looked older than anyone I had ever seen. His young wife, a former flight attendant from Olympic Airlines, attended to his needs as he agreed to our proposal, all the time telling us how untrustworthy the team was in Skopje. Holbrooke turned to me to then explain our reading of the outstanding issues and how we would solve them. I laid out the issues as the prime minister gazed at a wall, seemingly uninterested but reiterating that we could go ahead as proposed. Neither he nor his younger and feistier foreign minister commented on the remaining items. They seemed to want to get out from the embargo they had imposed, perhaps, I speculated to Holbrooke, because it was harming commercial interests in northern Greece.

  As we drove back out to the airport, Holbrooke turned operational, wanting to make sure he knew exactly the whereabouts that afternoon of the U.S. chargé d’affaires for Embassy Athens so that he would be available if we needed to get back in touch with the Greeks while in Macedonia.

  In Skopje, we went to President Gligorov’s residence, away from the downtown, at the foot of Mount Vodno. Holbrooke was in full deal-closing mode as he laid out all the good things that would come with the Greek-Macedonian interim accord, an arrangement that would create a broad foundation for the two countries to normalize on all issues except for Greece’s insistence on a name change for its tiny northern neighbor. He said that he would personally make sure an American ambassador was quickly named and dispatched to Skopje. He tried to interest Gligorov in a more direct relationship with Prime Minister Papandreou. Gligorov ignored the offer while he continued to look at Holbrooke carefully, as if sizing him up. I thought at that moment of the asymmetry. For us it was a deal to jump-start our Bosnia shuttle; for Gligorov it could be the future of his country.

  The president quickly turned to his favorite set of talking points, his government’s strongly held position that the Greek embargo was illegal and would be determined as such in international law. Holbrooke, for whom references to international law never led to any good, immediately returned to the subject at hand, that the Greeks were prepared to meet in New York City in September and sign the interim accord. The Greeks promised the remaining issues would not hold up a signed agreement that day. If Gligorov’s government was prepared to do the same, this would be the long-awaited breakthrough.

  Gligorov would not allow himself to be hurried, despite Holbrooke’s theatrical looks at his watch as he explained the need to leave for Athens and, to a perplexed host, the fact that we could not be late because of the U.S. Air Force’s strict rules on crew rest time.

  Gligorov would not be pushed, and he began a point-by-point discussion of the issues, and why it would be problematic to expect them to be resolved in a single session. Holbrooke turned to me seated on the couch and in an exacerbated tone whispered: “Chr-is,” somehow turning my name into a two-syllable word with the second part slipping into a higher pitch. I motioned with a rolling gesture of my hand to keep at it, that it would be okay. Foreign Minister Crvenkovski, sitting on a couch opposite ours, interjected to say that he knew the text well and that if the Greeks were really ready to accept these points as we had laid them out, then this could indeed be wrapped up in a single session. Holbrooke, who hadn’t paid the slightest attention to the foreign minister, turned his full attention to him as if he were a bona fide BFF. He talked about the modalities of the agreement, expressing his personal sympathy and respect for the Macedonian position and for their skepticism about the Greeks. He had instructed our chargé in Athens to stand by the phone and at a minute’s notice to go to the Greeks if there was any confusion.

  The president, not sure what to make of the fact that some hapless American diplomat was standing by the phone in Athens, nodded approvingly. After forty-five minutes of sizing him up, he had concluded that Holbrooke was a closer, and was not going to allow this one to slip by. He got back into the conversation by agreeing to the plan. Holbrooke turned back to Gligorov, leaving his BFF in midsentence.

  And then Gligorov said, “Mr. Holbrooke, I have one more request. Could you leave Mr. Hill here?”

  I was slow to pick up on that, since I had been working on a heart attack for most of the meeting. But Holbrooke understood immediately.

  “You want Chris as your ambassador here?”

  Crvenkovski confirmed that that was what the president had in mind.

  “Okay, you got him. I need him for a couple more months on Bosnia, then he’ll come here as the first U.S. ambassador. Chris, you have your next assignment!”

  “Um, sure, Dick, that would be great,” I managed to say, but the craziness had started to get on my nerves. “Would you mind mentioning this to our secretary of state or president, what with them both having a role in this sort of thing? And, by the way, did you ever call Nimetz?” Holbrooke ignored me and turned back to Gligorov and Crvenkovski, dismissing me with a downward chopping motion of his hand.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “with your permission I would like for Foreign Minister Crvenkovski and I to go out and announce that there will be a meeting on September 13 for the purpose of signing the interim accord.”

  President Gligorov shot an admiring smile Holbrooke’s way and told him to go ahead, still shaking his head in amusement and realizing he had been totally won over.

  “Do you have time for lunch?” Gligorov added, mentioning that Holbrooke had talked about needing to get back out to the airport and on our way to Ankara.

  “Of course, Mr. President. I would be delighted. As much time as you can spare.”

  As Dick made the announcement in several quick calls to senior Washington officials (though not, to my knowledge, to Nimetz), I talked to Gligorov and his aides in a reassuring tone. Buyer’s remorse is an ever-present danger to a diplomatic deal. The ambassadorship seemed distant and unreal to me, and I felt I knew more about the laborious process of being selected than Holbrooke did, that it might have been one of those last-minute points in a negotiation that helps the atmosphere but is never actually realized. Indeed, it wasn’t until mid-November 1995 that the secretary offered me the position. Of course, I was delighted.

  8

  ON TO GENEVA

  The trip to Greece and Macedonia was only part of the itinerary that busy September 4. From Skopje we headed to Ankara for an overnight visit to meet with Bosnian president Izetbegovic and his team and secure his support for our agreed principles, then back to Belgrade to get the same from Milosevic. Nothing was easy.

  We were trying to achieve agreement on what was essentially a repeat of the previous summer’s Contact Group plan on how Bosnia would be divided 51–49, and spelling out what kind of autonomy the two elements of the federal structures would have would become the first objective of the shuttle. We called the paper that we intended to announce in Geneva on September 8 the “Agreed Principles.” Those principles, however, weren’t so agreed at first. Izetbegovic reluctantly agreed to the two entities—the Federation and the Sprska Republic—but objected to the name for the latter, since the use of the term republic implied sovereignty, or at least the possibility that
the Bosnian Serbs would someday achieve it. For his part, Milosevic objected to calling Bosnia a republic and preferred a weaker formulation like union, which could suggest more of a confederation than a unitary state. He also insisted that the Serb entity be allowed to refer to itself as a republic, which would give him far more latitude in dealing with the Bosnian Serb leadership.

  But Milosevic had also agreed to Bosnia’s “present borders” (that is, no land grabs to be given over to Serbia) and “continuing international recognition,” a concession to the fact that Bosnia was indeed in existence and that the Serbs recognized this fact.

  In Ankara, Izetbegovic agreed to participate in Geneva by sending his foreign minister, Mo Sacirbey, to join the Yugoslav foreign minister, Milan Milutinovic, and the Croat foreign minister, Mate Granic.

  As the hour of 10 A.M. on September 8 approached, there was no sign of Sacirbey and Holbrooke was going into full-scale panic mode. Unbeknownst to me, he had had a rough telephone conversation earlier in the morning with Sacirbey, who had just insisted that in the document “Bosnia-Hercegovina” must be called the “Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” a change that would be a bridge too far for the Serbs (especially at this late hour).

  After that morning phone call—which at the time I knew nothing about—Dick asked me calmly around 9 A.M. to make sure Sacirbey arrived okay. This wasn’t the sort of request Holbrooke usually made of me, but I agreed to do so and asked if he would like me to do the same with Milutinovic and Granic. He said no need, so I immediately called the Bosnian mission in Geneva and reached Sacirbey, who assured me he was getting ready and would be there soon. Around 9:30 I called again and was told he had left for the U.S. mission. A few minutes before 10 A.M., there was no sign of Sacirbey and Holbrooke approached me in a rage.

  “I asked you to do one thing. One thing. One thing only, to deliver Sacirbey, and he’s not here!” His shouting was audible throughout the room as people looked over to see what was going on. On the one hand I thought that at forty-three I was a little too old to be screamed at in a way that I hadn’t heard since childhood. His behavior was particularly egregious in that he had not bothered to tell me that he had had a shouting match with Sacirbey minutes earlier over the inclusion of the word republic. On the other hand, I composed myself long enough to think about the unimaginable pressure he was under. The press was already there, and if for some reason Sacirbey were not to show it would strike a potential deathblow to his management of the process. A Geneva meeting without the Bosnians would have been a fiasco, and I knew Washington would turn such a disaster into a blame-Holbrooke moment. I had already learned—and would again later—how lonely the position of a special envoy can be. And besides, as Strobe Talbott had told me earlier, “when dealing with Holbrooke, one has to accept the good along with the bad. It is a total package.” I decided to stand there and take it, and to assure him I would find Sacirbey.

  A minute later Sacirbey walked in, apologizing for being late due to the Geneva traffic. Holbrooke greeted him as a long-lost family member, and I took my seat immediately behind Holbrooke. Holbrooke chaired the meeting, starting with his insistence that Sacirbey, Granic, and Milutinovic shake hands for the assembled press while representatives from the Contact Group, nine seats in all, gathered around a small table.

  Holbrooke moved the meeting along quickly, not wanting to give anyone time to think of some way to mess it up. By prior agreement, there was no discussion about the Joint Agreed Principles, while each participant made a short statement. A member from the Yugoslav delegation, the “vice president” of the Bosnian Serbs, Nikola Koljevic, rose to make a statement from the backbench to protest the proceedings, but he was ruled out of order. The press was allowed to photograph the event, and it was over almost before it started.

  The shuttle continued for almost three weeks before all the delegations were to head to Wright-Patterson Air Fore Base, near Dayton, Ohio, for still another three-week process, which would finally conclude the “Dayton Peace Accords.” Just days after Geneva, on September 13, we were back in the field to negotiate a halt to the bombing in return for lifting the siege of Sarajevo.

  Milosevic had asked us to come to his hunting lodge north of Belgrade, in the hilly part of Vojvodina known as Fruska Gora. In this meeting he got right to the point about the ongoing bombing campaign against Serb forces in Bosnia. The campaign had continued since Paris with only a short pause to allow for what turned out to be fruitless conversations between UN commanders and the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic. Milosevic was adamant that the bombing needed to stop if more progress was to be achieved toward a peace accord. He proposed a general cease-fire on the ground. Cease-fires in Bosnia, as in many other places, seldom held for long if no political arrangement quickly followed. We were not ready with a political arrangement. The Joint Agreed Principles had begun the process, but there was much to be done. We proposed instead that Bosnian Serb forces withdraw from around Sarajevo, lifting a siege of that city that had become the longest siege in Europe since World War II.

  Milosevic explained that he could not negotiate this on his own. Mladic and Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic would have to do it.

  “And they are here.”

  “Where?” Holbrooke asked in astonishment.

  “Over there.” Milosevic gestured over his shoulder. “In a villa.”

  Holbrooke asked for a break and huddled with the team.

  “Should we talk with them?”

  Everyone agreed with should.

  “Should I shake their hand?” Holbrooke asked. I thought it was about as inappropriate a question as I could imagine. Given how far we had gone in just two weeks, that we were standing on the cusp of ending years of brutal killing in the Balkans, and of lifting the siege of Sarajevo, how could he ask whether to shake the hand of people we knew would eventually be in prison if there were any justice in the process?

  “Dick, for Christ sake, do it, and let’s get on with this and go home.” No one disagreed.

  As Mladic and Karadzic walked in, each with his own awkward gait, they both looked to me like the Serb peasants they were: Mladic a short, murderous one, and Karadzic a tall, murderous one—the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt observed at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s. Holbrooke greeted them as stiffly as possible, though he did shake hands with both. Later a journalist would ask me whether he shook hands with them, and I responded I hadn’t noticed.

  Mladic acted as though he had been brought there under duress, with Karadzic acting as the conciliator, urging Mladic not to leave and occasionally offering his considered opinion that all the violence was caused by the Muslims and Croats. He explained that the Bosnian Serbs were the victims while maintaining a stranglehold on the lives of two hundred thousand people living in Sarajevo. He frequently invoked the name of Jimmy Carter, who had met with him and other Bosnian Serbs in their “capital” of Pale and made a statement after his talks that had convinced the Bosnian Serbs that he was their friend.

  With no progress, the discussions broke for dinner, and I found myself sitting across from Mladic, who remained hunched over his food, chewing on a bone held in his hands, having dispensed with the knife and fork. We talked a little, but he was not interested in substance, asking me gruffly how it was I could speak some Serbian.

  After dinner the delegations sat outside on a large veranda. After what we assumed was some prompting from Milosevic, Karadzic surprised us with a proposal that the U.S. side work on a document. If for no other reason than to get away from this miserable Bosnian Serb delegation, all of us—including Bob Owen, Don Kerrick, and Jim Pardew—worked on a statement that in effect meant the Bosnian Serbs would pull their forces from Sarajevo. Discussions over the document went to deep into the night, with Milosevic playing a passive role and Karadzic urging his military colleague to participate with General Wes Clark on defining the weapons to be withdrawn. Holbrooke explained that the bombing would continue unless there was
an agreement on Sarajevo. In fact, Admiral Bill Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told us a week before that almost all the targets had already been struck, and that at best there were just a few more days before aircrews would in effect be asked to “bomb rubble.” Holbrooke had asked for the pace of the attacks to be slowed, a gross interference in operations that was not well received within the military. We knew that unless there was a major decision to start hitting infrastructure and other targets, the bombing was going to be over soon. But Holbrooke wasn’t about to reveal that to the delegation.

  At 2 A.M. Wes Clark reported that the document was agreed to. Holbrooke had wisely resisted the Bosnian Serb demand that he sign; he did not have Washington’s authorization to negotiate such an instrument in the first place. If he tried to send it back for the dreaded clearance process in order to get permission to sign, it would have been returned with numerous proposed changes. But when it was done and sent in as final, no one in Washington, not even the wordsmithing NSC staff, tried to argue.

  The Bosnians, however, were another story. When we met with them two days later in the war-torn city of Mostar, some two hours south of Sarajevo, President Izetbegovic and Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic were visibly angry that the bombing had been halted. I told Holbrooke that I thought they were not convinced that the pullback would be for real, and that their opposition would cool in the days ahead. Holbrooke was sufficiently alarmed that he asked Bob Owen and me to accompany Silajdzic back to Sarajevo over the same road that Bob Frasure and the others had been killed on a couple of weeks before. As we walked to the vehicle, Holbrooke gave Bob and me tips on how to handle Silajdzic, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were being asked to go over a mountain road whose condition had caused the fatal accident involving our colleagues.