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

by Christopher R. Hill

  Holbrooke and I ignored it, and Dick got going: “Mr. President, President Clinton, Secretary Albright, and I”—huh?—“have decided to name Ambassador Hill”—I didn’t have that title when I last had met Milosevic, and he looked over at me, nodding approvingly at my new status—“as our new envoy to assist in finding a solution to the Kosovo crisis.” I glanced at Milosevic.

  Leaning forward, his right hand on his knee, Milosevic responded, “Mr. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke”—Milosevic enjoyed being one of the only people on earth to know Holbrooke’s full name—“there is no crisis. There are just a few Albanian separatists that the American media is fond of talking to, and our security services are dealing with. Do not concern yourself with a crisis.”

  “Nonetheless,” Dick continued, “we believe the situation is becoming more serious, and needs to be addressed, and I hope we can—”

  “Mr. Holbrooke, I do not need an envoy. Kosovo is a part of Serbia. It is a domestic problem. Serbian people could never accept a foreigner dealing with their own internal problems. Did you not notice that on April twenty-third there was a national referendum and ninety-five percent of Serbs completely rejected any foreign mediation to solve the Kosovo crisis? But I can say to you that Ambassador Chris”—he paused to look at me, and smiled as I cringed—“is welcome anytime to see me, and can go anywhere he wants in Kosovo.”

  I was on as the mediator despite Milosevic’s disclaimer that no mediator was necessary, but I had no great sense of accomplishment. I took over the conversation from there, believing it was not in my interest or anyone else’s that Holbrooke be perceived as the envoy, especially as he was not even working for the government at that time.

  Our next stop was Kosovo itself. Holbrooke did not know the players there, so it fell to me to introduce him. We visited Rugova in his ramshackle LDK offices, along with other LDK leaders, including Fehmi Agani, the vice president, as well as Rugova’s interpreter. Rugova visibly lit up at the prospect of an American envoy based in nearby Skopje and devoted entirely to Kosovo, not Bosnia. We met with Rugova again that afternoon in his home. Rugova always had his television on while he received people in his home. At first I thought it was a precaution against Serb wiretaps, but I later concluded he just liked having the TV on all the time.

  Holbrooke proposed an idea we had pursued with Milosevic the previous day: “Would you be willing to come to Belgrade and meet with President Milosevic?” Rugova clearly was not interested and started to express his reluctance, but before I could make the case for the meeting, Holbrooke blurted out another idea: “And after visiting Belgrade, I know that President Clinton would be very interested in meeting you at the White House.”

  It was the old negotiator trick, to package an unpleasant element with something much more palatable. But, of course, nobody in Washington knew that Holbrooke was going to offer a presidential meeting. Those meetings are the coin of the realm and are not offered lightly. Presidential schedulers—people for whom saying no comes very naturally—are almost as powerful as the person whose schedule they control. But Holbrooke was riding high in the years following Dayton and had no doubt that he could pull it off.

  On May 15, I went to Belgrade to be nearby when Rugova met Milosevic for an inconclusive meeting. On May 28 Rugova met with President Clinton in the Oval Office (for another inconclusive meeting). Meeting people, as I tried to explain to Holbrooke, was really not the issue here. The problem remained that Rugova was fast losing influence on the ground to the KLA. His meeting with President Clinton, taken together with his meeting with Milosevic, was not going to change that situation.

  In June I began to shuttle between Kosovo and Belgrade in an effort to find common ground between the Albanians and the Serbs in the form of a joint statement that would restore (and then some) Kosovo’s autonomy, and establish the basis of a negotiation. The State Department sent me Tina Kaidanow, an extremely capable officer, fluent in Serbian from her recent assignment in Belgrade. I also included in the team Embassy Skopje’s skillful press attaché, Phil Reeker. Tina and Phil came with me on almost all trips, while Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones ran the embassy in Skopje.

  The European Union also appointed a negotiator, a knowledgeable, intelligent, and all-around good diplomat, the Austrian ambassador in Belgrade, Wolfgang Petritsch. Whether it was because he was from neighboring Austria or that his descendants were originally from Slovenia, Wolfgang knew the Balkans well. He was also a pleasure to work with. He understood the complex history, the effects of the Ottoman Empire and of the national churches on national identity, the mythologizing of the Serbs about Kosovo, but at the same time the importance of Kosovo to the Serbs. He was bright, dedicated, moderate, and worked well with everyone. I was delighted to have him as a colleague and to have the Europeans as partners in the entire process. If the endgame was to join the Balkans to Europe, a project that had been somewhat delayed by four hundred years of Ottoman occupation, it was obvious that the European Union needed to be a partner throughout.

  The negotiations Wolfgang and I were conducting (usually with different daily itineraries, but always coordinated with frequent meetings and telephone contact) took place against the backdrop of a seriously deteriorating situation on the ground. Within days of the meeting with Clinton, up to twenty Kosovo Albanians were killed in apparent retaliation for the killing of a Serb policeman in Glogovac. Despite the fact that it had been the Dayton peace process that brought the war in Bosnia to an end, many people believed it was the NATO air attacks and could not understand what diplomacy we were waiting for in Kosovo when air strikes would do the trick.

  Our diplomacy was viewed as just an extension of our raw power. In Washington the unholy alliance of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives demanded action. In one meeting I found myself in front of Paul Wolfowitz, who rarely encountered a problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by dropping a few bombs, and Mort Abramowitz, a former head of the Carnegie Foundation who rarely encountered a village in the Balkans he didn’t want to see turned into an independent state. They were combining forces to pressure the U.S. government, even though philosophically they came from very different perspectives.

  The triumphalist mood in the United States in the 1990s was palpable. No problem, no matter how gritty and entrenched in decades or centuries of miserable and sordid history, was outside our capacity to solve, usually by force. Those who did not subscribe to this worldview were supposedly trapped in the past, unable to understand the new paradigm of the “new American century.”

  Thus the Balkans with its historical legacy would be the crucible of this instrument of might and right. Rwanda would be, according to this view, the last chapter of the previous era, where old concepts of sovereignty and national interests had yielded to disastrous consequences. Rwanda would live on as a brutal reminder to those who could not embrace the future.

  The trouble, of course, was that not every country embraced this future of Pax Americana. The French, for starters, had concerns, especially with a country (a “hyperpower,” as then foreign minister Hubert Vedrine was calling the United States) that eschewed UN Security Council imprimaturs on armed interventions. The free ride we had had in the early 1990s with the new Russian government had come to an end, especially when the Russians came to understand that our respect for their interests did not include keeping former Warsaw Pact countries from joining NATO.

  Americans on the left and right increasingly asserted an American exceptionalism that seemed to many across the globe to put us above the law. Our tendency to reduce enormously complex historical issues into Manichean morality plays did not sit well with Europeans. There was no question the Dayton peace process had been a success, thanks to American leadership. But as much as we had tried to share the success with all the Contact Group members from Europe, we paid a price there, too, for solving a European problem for them and then—as we did in the postconflict reconstruction—sticking Europe with the bill while we l
ooked for another war.

  We were not going to be successful in ending the Kosovo violence unless we first worked with the Europeans. And if it came again to war, we needed the Europeans at our side.

  As the dusty Balkan summer of 1998 wore on, I realized that bringing the Serbs and Albanians around a table to end the violence was looking more and more remote. The Albanians had one thing on their minds: get NATO, that is, the United States, to intervene militarily. What was low-intensity conflict in one way became low-IQ warfare in another when Serbs time and time again retaliated for often minor provocations with brutal and excessive force, which would be thoroughly documented and increase worldwide sympathy for the Kosovar cause.

  To help protect the civilian population from Serb attacks I began an effort with Milosevic to convince him to accept an international observation mission. He refused.

  “But you allow diplomats accredited to your country to visit Kosovo,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but they are diplomats accredited to our country. They are not international monitors.”

  “But aren’t they allowed to report what they see when they are in Kosovo?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can they go in a group?”

  “Yes, of course. That is up to them.”

  “Well, then can we call them the ‘Kosovo Diplomatic Monitoring Mission’?”

  “That is your business what you call them.”

  Thus the monitoring mission, KDOM, which would eventually number some two thousand diplomats, was born. I was one of the first to visit Kosovo in this capacity. And as I walked down a street south of Peje, a large town in the west of Kosovo, I sensed that much had been accomplished in the creation of KDOM. But as I continued on past a row of abandoned Albanian homes, whose inhabitants had fled to the mountains, I heard a small explosion in the back of a house some twenty feet away. I jumped back and saw the house go up in flames. It was as if the Serbs were saying, “Hey, KDOM member, monitor this!”

  Rugova had been the de facto leader of the Kosovo Albanians for more than a decade and, certainly in my view, deserved to be treated with respect. But he was increasing being dismissed in Washington as ineffectual, and more tellingly, as not in charge of the men with guns.

  In late May, Gelbard stole a march on this issue by meeting with a KLA group in Geneva at the time that Holbrooke and I were meeting with Rugova. The implication was that Holbrooke and I were with yesterday’s news, while Gelbard was with the people who counted. But as Dick and I journeyed out into the Kosovo hinterland before he returned to the United States, we came to a small town in the southwestern part of the province called Junik, which had been the site of violence. Village elders invited us to a farmhouse where we sat on the floor with glasses of strong, sugared Turkish tea to listen to what twenty villagers sitting with us had to say. A few minutes into the meeting a KLA fighter looking like Che Guevara joined us, in a full store-bought camouflage uniform, and sat down next to Holbrooke. There was very little room, and to anyone looking at the wire service photo that was shown around the world the next day he seemed to be sitting in Holbrooke’s lap.

  Holbrooke realized that even though this more than evened the score with Gelbard, it could cause him the same problems with Milosevic that Gelbard had incurred a few weeks before. Holbrooke asked me to go back to Belgrade the next day to meet with Milosevic and assure him that Che’s entry into the room was entirely unexpected.

  The next day Milosevic rose grudgingly to greet me and, as we sat down, threw the newspaper picture at my lap and said, “Do you know the problem this is for me? I want to work with you and Deek,” as he called Dick, “but the Serbian people are very angry now. Very angry.”

  I explained to him that notwithstanding the photo of the KLA guerrilla sitting in Holbrooke’s lap, we had no part in it. I pointed out that mediators should talk to all sides. He interrupted to point out something we already knew, which was that this wasn’t going to help Rugova, either.

  But he finally seemed ready to let it go. He had seen the report of Gelbard’s meeting as well, and figured (correctly) that there was some level of competition going on between Gelbard and Holbrooke. His last comment on the issue: “I like Deek. But for the sake of career he would eat small children for breakfast.”

  11

  UNFINISHED PEACE

  Phil Reeker, Tina Kaidanow, and I continued to make the rounds in Kosovo through that brutal summer and fall of 1998, meeting with Albanian politicians and visiting areas hit by the violence. An early trip south of Pristina, the Kosovo capital, in our armored SUV earned us a mortar round fired overhead that landed harmlessly but ominously some fifty feet away. We agreed that the chance of hitting a moving vehicle with a mortar round was fairly remote, but we got on out of there quickly anyway. On another occasion, with our car packed with three Kosovo Albanians as we drove south from Pristina for a hoped-for encounter with the KLA leadership, we turned right at the town of Lipjan. We continued south to Shtime, where the highlands begin. We drove through the strangely quiet town and had an eerie sense that something was amiss. As we exited on the western side, we found a group of Serb security forces lying on the ground firing their automatic weapons into a distant tree line. One turned back to us while still lying on the ground in a firing position, and motioned with his left hand for us to get out. Our driver immediately began the three-point turn to reverse the vehicle. At that point our back bumper took several rounds that pinged into the metal. We sped back through Shtime, all of us thinking that this trip to find the KLA might have been a bad idea.

  Fehmi Agani, the usually taciturn vice president of the LDK, was first to comment from the second row of seats, “It is a Serb provocation.” (I guess Fehmi was suggesting that Serbs were pretending to shoot at each other in order to derail our mission.)

  “And a very good one,” I replied. “We are heading back to Pristina.” Veton Surroi and Blerim Shala, also sitting in the second seat with Agani, did not protest. Neither did Phil and Tina, the kids in the third seat of the SUV.

  By June, my team had still not had any serious encounters with the KLA, the men-with-guns whose cooperation in any peace process needed to be enlisted if we were to forge an inclusive Kosovar negotiating team that would have a broad enough mandate to reach a deal. The representatives Gelbard had met in Geneva were indeed KLA sympathizers, but they were not fighters in the field. In early June, KLA fighters moved into a small village along the Pristina-Peje road, the main east-west line that could divide Kosovo if controlled. KLA fighters set up roadblocks and announced rebel control of the area, while establishing the customary tolls, a very old habit in the Balkans.

  Milosevic got word to us that if the KLA did not clear the road he would have his forces clear it for them. Holbrooke, with total seriousness, described the area to an amused gaggle of press corps in Pristina as “the most dangerous place in Europe.” His point was that the prospect for a pitched battle between Serb security forces and Kosovo rebels was real.

  But since Kijevo checkpoint was the most dangerous place in Europe, I went out to see it, a scant ten miles outside Pristina. Taking a U.S. embassy car from Belgrade, I hoped to meet the KLA, get a direct look at how they were controlling the road, and ask them to take me to their leader. Kurt Schork, an intrepid war correspondent from Associated Press (who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone some two years later), asked if he could come along. An interpreter, a junior officer from Dick Miles’s staff in Belgrade, and the Serb driver of the embassy car accompanied us.

  A line of cars with frustrated motorists awaited us as we approached the checkpoint. The waiting cars added to the banality of the whole scene, with armed young KLA fighters, cigarettes hanging loosely from their mouths, dressed in store-bought fatigues. Using a technique I had learned in Albania years before, I determined that the most senior person to talk to was the one with the most expensive pair of sunglasses. I asked him to tell his leadership that the United States wanted to be helpful to
the people of Kosovo, but that checkpoints and the prospects of conflict were not conducive to our efforts, and that we expected a Serb effort to break through the checkpoint here, with possible loss of life. The soldier I spoke with directed us to pull up along the grass and promised to get back to us; then he retreated to the surrounding forest.

  An hour later (a long time on the outskirts of Kijevo), another fighter (my sunglasses rule may not have worked that day) approached us to explain that his was a unit belonging to the Drenica command of the KLA, and that was all he was authorized to tell me. There would be no further conversation. I thanked him, but as we headed back to our vehicle, he called to say we were to stay put. We had attracted a bit of a crowd by then, and while I thought of ignoring the fighter and his colleagues and continuing to walk to the cars, Kurt (with more experience than I) indicated that we should not leave. I told the fighters that we were leaving, and in broken Albanian that I needed to report to the American government.

  The fighters huddled up and the leader returned with the mixed news that we could leave, but that the embassy driver could not. I told them that that was not going to work for us, that it was unacceptable; we would all have to leave together. The fighter told us to wait and headed back to the tree line above. I smiled over at the embassy driver to reassure him that all was going to be okay. He did not smile back. The fighters had already taken his documents, something that also needed to be reversed before we left.

  Thirty minutes later the fighter returned finally and said we were free to leave. I told him we needed the documents back, and he reluctantly supplied them. I lingered as the others got into the car. I shook hands with a couple of the fighters and jumped in the car as we drove off back in the direction of Pristina, wondering how I could have been so reckless as to drive to a checkpoint and try to find a negotiating partner that way. I reached over the front seat and patted the driver’s shoulder.