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The United States had not recognized Macedonia’s constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, and instead followed the absurd moniker “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” or FYROM. It was not only absurd, but most Macedonians found it insulting as well, an excessive effort to placate the Greek public (and Greek-Americans as well). Use of the name Macedonia out of the context of the FYROM absurdity by any U.S. government official would provoke a swift protest against our State Department in Washington, or the U.S. Embassy in Athens.
Often the State Department spokesperson, Nicholas Burns, would be blindsided by a question from a Greek journalist about the use of the name Macedonia by an obscure U.S. official at an obscure international conference somewhere. The journalists would ask, “Does this represent a change of policy?” which of course it did not, a fact that Burns would always confirm. The obscure official would then be hunted down and admonished for such careless nomenclature. With the U.S.-Greek relationship always burdened by Greece’s frustrations about the U.S.-Turkish relationship, and by U.S. frustrations with Greece over a wide range of issues, including Greek management of its own terrorist problems, the last thing those working on Greece wanted was still another issue to complicate the relationship. The consequence was that the embassy in Athens became one of the primary enforcers of the name issue.
Meanwhile, in Skopje, I could hardly go around calling the country to which I had been accredited by the name FYROM if I was to have any relationships or influence with anybody in the country. Nobody in Macedonia had any intention of changing the name of the country over Greek sensitivities. I started avoiding using the word FYROM by referring to “your country” or, better yet, “your beautiful country.” People liked that at first, but soon understood the gymnastics I was employing to avoid the name issue. “So, Mr. Ambassador, thank you for thinking our country is beautiful. But could you tell us what exactly is the name of our beautiful country?” Finally, after a few months of this, I gave in and started referring to Macedonia as Macedonia. Our embassy in Athens immediately objected, asking whether perhaps the Greek press had misquoted me. I told them no, I was correctly quoted, and that I was done using FYROM. The protests went away, and the press spokesman in Washington began to give such a dry, formulaic response to the Greek journalists that even they got tired of asking. The Greek desk at the State Department ignored the issue, and no one in the front office of the European Bureau complained to me.
Deputy Secretary Talbott came out to Macedonia in March 1998 and gave a serious and scholarly speech at the Academy of Sciences in which he referred to Macedonia. A few protests ensued in Greece, but it was over. I explained to Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones, “Sometimes the best way to change a policy is neither to ask for permission or forgiveness, but to just do it.”
No embassy works well without its locally hired staff, and in Skopje we had some of the best people I had ever worked with in the Foreign Service. One of them was Mitko Burcevski, who had been hired a few years before when the embassy was a U.S. office run out of our embassy in Belgrade. He had applied for a position as interpreter/fixer while he was an elementary history teacher in Gostivar, a two-hour bus ride from his home in Skopje. When the American Foreign Service officer asked how much notice he needed to give his school, he answered, “Do you have a phone I can use?”
Life in Skopje was remarkably quiet for the first two years. There was good family time as I took my two daughters, Amy and Clara, thirteen and ten, ice skating and skiing in the winter, and in the summer my son Nat would visit from his boarding school in the States. We spent as much time as we could on the shores of Lake Ohrid, a mountain lake in the south of the country whose towns and villages date back to antiquity.
It was a tightly knit embassy, but like many embassies around the world the issues we grappled with seldom seized anyone’s attention or imagination in Washington. Rarely did anyone more senior than a desk officer show much interest in the post. Our requests for physical upgrades to what had been a nursery school were politely accepted and filed, as was our request to have marine guards.
10
KOSOVO
“Where It Began and Where It Will End”
In the spring of 1998, the Balkans was set for another convulsion, this time in Kosovo, the Serbian province whose majority population of Albanians chafed at being ruled by Belgrade. Serbs often describe the Battle of Kosovo in June 1389 as the crucible of the Serb nation. They lost to a superior force from the Ottoman Empire, but in the retelling of the story, complete with a martyred Prince Lazar, Serb identity was supposedly born. The actual history of the battle is, of course, more complex. For starters, it is not clear who fought on whose side, though most historians agree that what are now called Albanians almost certainly fought alongside the Serbs and others resisting the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans, not the other way around, as is often explained by the Serbs. Indeed, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Albanians, under the leadership of George Skanderbeg, fought battle after battle against the Ottoman occupation. Every Balkan nationality had its stories of struggle against the Ottoman Empire, but for the Serbs, their struggles seem in their mind’s eye to eclipse all others. Outside the town of Nis, four hours southeast of Belgrade, there sits atop a grassy knoll a round tower some twenty feet high, built by the Turks entirely out of porous concrete—and thousands of skulls belonging to the victims of a Serb uprising in 1805.
The Dayton Peace Accords of November 1995 had reconfigured what was left of Yugoslavia to a rump state consisting of two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. Within Serbia were the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. As the centerpiece of Serbia’s historical narrative, the Serbs would not allow Kosovo to be its own republic, so that it would stay within the Serbian republic.
Yugoslavia’s longtime leader Tito, to square the circle of Kosovo’s inhabitants having their own rights, had created autonomous provinces. Kosovo would have all the rights and responsibilities of the six republics of Yugoslavia, but those rights and responsibilities would be expressed from within a province belonging to Serbia. As if not to make Kosovo the only such province in Yugoslavia, Tito also gave Vojvodina a similar status. Vojvodina is the part of Serbia north of the Danube and is historically linked to neighboring Hungary, with a substantial Hungarian population. With the departure of German landowners after World War II and the influx of Serbs looking for better agricultural land, Vojvodina had become more Serbianized. The solution: Vojvodina would also enjoy autonomous province status and would, like Kosovo, become one of the eight constituent parts of Yugoslavia.
But Kosovo was having none of it, and pressure for a separate republic intensified as the Dayton Peace Accords, taking up Bosnia, reduced Yugoslavia to a kind of Serbo-Slavia. When Milosevic abolished the Yugoslav constitution and began to centralize powers that had previously been given to the republics and provinces, Kosovo began to stir again.
Albanians were also upset that their issues had not been raised during the Dayton talks, an expectation that had no basis for being met as the Bosnian peace process had never envisioned including the Kosovo situation. I was more aware of Kosovo than some others because I had served in neighboring Albania, but as concerned as I was from several trips there in 1994 and in 1995, I realized that compared to the brutal ongoing war in Bosnia, the issue of Kosovo could not be included in already complex talks. When Albanian-American demonstrators came to the gates of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to protest that Kosovo was not on the agenda and demanding to meet with the U.S. negotiating team, Milosevic asked Holbrooke to keep me from meeting with them. Not to my surprise, because he was so focused on Bosnia, Holbrooke agreed to Milosevic’s request and sent instead the chargé of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Rudy Perina.
By the spring of 1998 it was clear that Kosovo’s time in the Balkan Wars had come. As a Kosovo Albanian leader said to me, “It is where it began and where it will end.” The proximate cause was the gro
wth of a Kosovar armed resistance movement that was fast looking to remove the Gandhi-like presence of Ibrahim Rugova as the leader of Kosovo’s independence aspirations. Holbrooke’s first successor in the Balkans was John Kornblum, but by the start of Kosovo’s crisis the reins had been handed to Bob Gelbard. Gelbard was a smart Foreign Service officer whose professional experience was primarily in Latin America, dealing with leaderships tied to the narcotics trade. Gelbard had a passion about his work, but in dealing with Balkan leaders, he fell back on his experience in Latin America and treated many as drug lords.
Gelbard’s approach to his interlocutors was straightforward and brutally honest, excessively so. In the United States, honesty and clarity are often considered virtues, especially on the public speaking circuit. But to people on the rest of the planet, it can be a mixed blessing at best. And in diplomacy, especially involving mediation, a stray comment can become deadly.
In February 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a fast-growing force in the countryside. It had a historical grievance to be sure, but it also had been armed to the teeth with military weaponry looted the previous year during Albania’s “pyramid scheme” meltdown. In Albania’s case, financial institutions took money from the public and at first paid out enormous dividends. Soon those dividends began to shrink, and within months they had disappeared. When the United Nations imposed trade sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992, the Italian mafia moved in and the oil companies, complying with sanction resolutions, moved out.
Enormous quantities of gasoline were shipped up the Albanian coast, arriving in the port of Vlora and departing Albania through Lake Shkodra, en route to Yugoslavia. The mafia-controlled oil shipments created other business opportunities, and soon Albania, no stranger to organized crime, was in the clutches of the international mafia. They were not so much Ponzi schemes, which was what the international press had concluded, as they were money-laundering facilities, a fraud committed against naïve Albanians experiencing their first taste of capitalism.
After the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, normal international trade was reestablished with Yugoslavia, and the underpinning of those money-laundering facilities in Albania, principally from gasoline smuggling, began to decline through 1996 and 1997 as the big money moved elsewhere. When the larger investment schemes completely collapsed in early 1997, civil unrest broke out in several of Albania’s cities. By March, Albania was in complete chaos, as cities began to fall into the hands of well-financed gangs. Government armories were looted and Western embassies began to evacuate their citizens. The U.S. ambassador in Tirana delayed ordering the evacuation in the hopes the situation would improve. Ultimately, the delay resulted in an eventual helicopter evacuation of nine hundred U.S. citizens on what turned out to be one of the most violent days of the disturbances.
From neighboring Macedonia I could see that Albanian government stood on the brink of collapse. By the time order was restored with the help of Italian troops, an estimated three million weapons had been looted, many of them sold to gangs in Kosovo, many of which in turn would soon reemerge as elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The KLA operated sporadically in Kosovo in 1996, but in 1997 attacks on Serb security forces grew more numerous and more deadly. Serb forces responded, and soon Kosovo was engulfed in war. In Macedonia, the public watched with increasing alarm as Kosovo began to descend into chaos.
The KLA, whose ranks of Kosovo patriots also included former smugglers and armed gangs, was careful to keep the identity of its leaders a secret and its politics tightly controlled. Such a level of secrecy helped frame myths that the KLA fighters were Islamic terrorists, Marxist guerrillas, or, in the fertile imagination of Albania haters, both. One fact was clear: Ibrahim Rugova’s leadership did not impress the KLA. In part, that was based on Kosovo’s clan structures. There were also regional issues at play, but more fundamentally it reflected a growing popular feeling that Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) had become corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the public, a reputation that also started catching on with Western nongovernmental organizations, which were now done with Bosnia and facing a steep learning curve in Kosovo.
The United States had long considered Rugova the leader of Kosovo’s political aspirations. I first met him at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Belgrade in July 1989, just days after Milosevic’s infamous visit to Kosovo for the six hundredth anniversary of the great battle, an event that helped drive the Serbs to war. A quiet academic who would not be easily identified as a politician, he spoke in measured tones about the step-by-step process the Kosovars were on, explaining the underground school system his movement had started and funded. Rugova saw little hope in Milosevic but was prepared to meet with him if it could lead to a better outcome.
There are no secrets in the Balkans—it’s too small a place—but it was clear that Rugova’s aim was complete independence, nothing less. He was nonetheless strategically patient about how and when he could achieve his goal. More fundamentally, he shared with most Albanians in Kosovo a deep trust and abiding faith in the United States.
In February 1998, Special Envoy Gelbard, in a misplaced effort at evenhandedness, condemned Serbian police activities in Kosovo but went on to say that the KLA was a terrorist group, remarking after meeting two members of the KLA, “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.”
Gelbard’s remarks about terrorism spiked tensions within Kosovo and caused huge concern that the Serbs would view them as a green light to attack the KLA wherever they could find them. In fact, Serb authorities had long viewed the KLA as a terrorist organization, and whether Gelbard’s comments had any bearing on the situation is doubtful. But within weeks, the Serbs moved aggressively into the Drenica Valley, the heart of the KLA, and attacked the compound of a known KLA commander, Adem Jashari, where they killed him and his entire family of sixteen, including children.
The Serb action was universally condemned, but Gelbard’s own vigorous denunciation of the Serb action, perhaps influenced by his frustration at being blamed for contributing to the Serb rampage, was particularly hard-edged against Milosevic.
An envoy, for which access to all parties is essential, does not always have the luxury of speaking out publicly. That task can be left to all sorts of people in Washington, many of whom rarely travel, let alone have exclusive access to Balkan dictators. I was told that Gelbard compounded his problem during a meeting with Milosevic, his last, when he pounded his fist on the table. He was praised in Washington for his directness, but in Belgrade was shown to the door and never granted another meeting on his own.
With the situation on the ground now deteriorating fast, the Clinton administration had no one who could meet with Milosevic. For many in both the “liberal hawk” and the growing neoconservative movements, lack of access to a dictator was hardly a disadvantage. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had replaced Warren Christopher in 1997, knew all too well from her days as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations what her European colleagues thought of intervention on behalf of the Kosovars, whose case they viewed as straightforward separatism, with all that implied in many such situations on the continent, whether in Spain or Northern Ireland. Albright, who personally found Milosevic repulsive, knew that like it or not, we needed an envoy who could talk to him and vigorously follow the negotiating track until it was obvious, or could be made obvious to our allies and partners in the process, that no progress was possible.
In early May, Secretary Albright called me in Skopje and asked if in addition to my duties as ambassador to Macedonia I could take on the full-time job of Kosovo envoy. I was not surprised by the call, having been tipped off that it was coming. I knew it would mean that in splitting my duties I would be spending more time in Kosovo than in Macedonia. I worried whether being a peace envoy between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians held much prospect for success. Diplomacy is a little like hitting in baseball. If you succeed one out of three
times you are probably doing well. Nonetheless I told the secretary I would do it. Besides, her request didn’t seem like an offer I could refuse.
After explaining the impossible situation Gelbard had put himself in with Milosevic (Holbrooke had already done so in great detail and with great zeal), Albright told me she had asked Gelbard to focus full-time on the upcoming Bosnian elections. She requested that I go to London to meet with Holbrooke, who, although now in the private sector, was acting as a consultant with the administration (and would within the next year become the UN ambassador, replacing Bill Richardson). After meeting in London, we would fly to Belgrade, and Holbrooke would reintroduce me to Milosevic.
Dick had been out of the game for two years. He had made lots more money in the private sector, “client skiing,” as he explained his duties to me. It was clear that he relished being back and was looking forward to the meeting with Milosevic.
Milosevic greeted Dick and me as if we were long-lost friends. As we walked into the White Palace in Belgrade, he offered a stiff handshake to our highly capable chargé d’affaires, Richard Miles. Milosevic always blamed the local diplomat if he had a problem with another country, and he knew he had a problem with us.
Milosevic gestured to chairs we were familiar with and began to recall all the great times we had had together in Dayton; meanwhile, Dick and I wondered how Richard Miles was taking all this in. We practically fell out of those chairs when Milosevic tried out a joke in his article- and preposition-deprived English: “You know what was most important accomplishment of Dayton?” He was recalling the difficulties we had had with Izetbegovic during the last hectic hours. “Americans,” he said, “finally learned what is like to live with Muslims!” The Serb leader then chuckled at his own line.
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