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

by Christopher R. Hill

  “I owe you a beer for that.” He kept his eyes on the road, driving at breakneck speed, and said softly in a very sober tone, “Bottle of whiskey.”

  Later that summer, we would finally succeed in making our way into Drenica along dirt roads, eventually finding the KLA headquarters in a mountain town called Likove, high above the KLA-controlled Drenica valley. It looked like a military camp one could find anywhere. There was a makeshift Albanian national flag, the black, two-headed eagle on a red background, mounted on a crude flag pole. There were some Yugoslav national army (JNA) vehicles, obviously found somewhere in one of the JNA’s many depots. In Yugoslavia’s heyday, the JNA was a well-equipped army with a doctrine of citizen-soldiers, reserves, all fully trained from stints in the army, with orders—and regularly drilled—to report to local assembly areas in the event of a foreign invasion, which was usually understood to mean a Warsaw Pact move. As the crisis deepened at the start of the 1990s, these depots became the origin of the fighting between local reserves and the locally deployed regular JNA units. Kosovo was no exception to this pattern of violence that began in Slovenia in 1991.

  We entered a drab, ugly cement building that had been built with another purpose in mind years earlier, during Tito’s reign, when central authorities tried to bring the accoutrements of large-town living to small villages.

  Our conversation with KLA members—young men in beards, their camouflage uniforms with KLA insignia sewn onto their sleeves—did not reveal much, and certainly no interest in participating in a negotiating process. I learned that this KLA unit was implacably opposed to Rugova and deeply suspicious of Pristina’s intelligentsia. This fact was brought home to me when Veton Surroi, the editor of Pristina’s main newspaper, who was a consistent Rugova critic and a vocal and courageous voice for Kosovo’s independence, was led off and banned from our meeting. We didn’t see him again until we were ready to get into our Chevy Suburban and head back in the gathering dusk to Pristina. The basis of suspicion about Surroi was the fact that he was the son of a former Yugoslav diplomat who had represented Tito’s Yugoslavia around the world, including in such far-off places as Latin America. There did not appear to be much else against Surroi, except that he was not from Drenica.

  These desultory encounters did help begin a process where the KLA began to reveal more about itself. It was often clannish, as the exclusion of Surroi had suggested, with most senior leaders coming from the Drenica area, but in the summer of 1998 its ranks had swelled with new recruits who joined whatever local structure existed. Whoever was leading the KLA, it was becoming less a Drenica affair. The KLA became a fixture not just in Drenica, but also throughout the province.

  The search for a KLA leadership structure, as Gelbard had discovered in Geneva, uncovered many such self-described leaders. That search was fast coming to dominate my time through the summer and into the fall. Rugova’s LDK was not immune to such war fever, and in areas out in western Kosovo, armed units loyal to the LDK began announcing themselves, usually in the form of checkpoints in the middle of nowhere, or in the killing of local Serb police, followed by a proud announcement of the event and then the inevitable retaliation against the population in the area.

  As difficult as it was to recruit the KLA into the peace process, things were equally problematic back in Pristina, where resentment against Rugova and his LDK was building. Rugova became increasingly detached, unwilling to engage except to repeat slogans about Kosovo’s right to independence. I met with him weekly and experienced some of the same frustrations, though I retained my respect for his personal integrity and his vision for Kosovo and its role as a part of Europe.

  Rugova was a Kosovar nationalist, but not a sectarian with any interest in Muslims in Europe, as Izetbegovic had sometimes been seen as in Bosnia. In addition to being a serious writer, poet, and thinker, he was also an amateur geologist. At the end of each visit to his upstairs living room, I would leave his home with still another “Rugova rock,” often some kind of magnesium ore sample rich in interesting colors from Kosovo’s geological endowment. The rocks began to weigh me down as I realized that Rugova seemed more interested in describing them than in telling me what he was prepared to do to reach out to Rexep Xosia or other opinion leaders in Pristina. As visitors tried to talk with him and engage him on Kosovo’s politics, he would flip through cable television channels, absentmindedly stopping sometimes on the cartoon channel.

  I realized that my efforts to forge consensus around negotiating a peace document were increasingly divorced from Washington’s sentiment of getting on with military action. As the Serbs carried on their counterinsurgency operations and casualties rose, human rights organizations and activists were beating the war drums, which was putting more pressure on our relationship with the European Union, which was still suspicious of the value of any military intervention. Longtime human rights and peace activist Bianca Jagger arrived on the scene late one morning. After a few meetings in Pristina and before getting back on a plane in Skopje early that evening, she told me we should be supporting the KLA, and as for Rugova, “he’s finished.” Nobody in this part of the world is ever “finished,” I thought.

  On a late summer morning on September 9, Serb police pulled bodies out of an irrigation ditch near the village of Glodjane. All told, some thirty bodies were found. The victims were evidently killed by fellow Kosovars, although that account was disputed. I didn’t think it much mattered to those villagers, but it was a reminder that these conflicts seem always to be fought not between armies but between civilians, or often one side’s army and the other side’s civilians.

  I became more of a monitor to noncompliance than a mediator in a peace process, because neither side seemed interested in reaching an agreement with the other, a reminder that the odds of finding a solution are often very long. While many major European countries were not prepared to give up on peace in the former Yugoslavia, the country that counted the most, the United States, had clearly done so. My efforts became relegated to demonstrating that we had tried and failed to force through a peace deal.

  • • •

  In early fall the Serbs began a new tactic: clear out the villages along the main trunk lines, a move that bought them the enmity of the world while doing nothing to enhance their own security. The overall dynamic of the war soon became clear enough: KLA would move into a village and fire an automatic weapon at a Serb police vehicle driving by. A reinforced Serb unit would return, often with a 20mm cannon originally designed as an antiaircraft weapon, now used instead on mud huts. Rounds would be emptied into peasant homes, and the inhabitants would take to the hills behind, fleeing for their lives. When the Serb forces moved on, the KLA would tell war correspondents to come and have a look at what the Serbs have done.

  This brutal tactic on the part of the Serbs, quite apart from whether it was justified by any provocation, or subsequently exploited by calls to foreign media, was too much for Western capitals to stomach, even those terrified at the precedent that an independent Kosovo might mean for their own country’s internal divisions. On September 23, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1199, demanding a cease-fire, Serb withdrawal, and return of displaced people. The resolution also called for further measures, an ominous warning to the Serbs of the cost of noncompliance. Three days later the Serbs gave a reply of sorts: they killed thirty-five villagers, including twenty-one members of a single family in the village of Goren Brine.

  In early October, on a drizzly day, Tina, Phil, and I went up to some of the mountain areas, where we understood displaced persons had gone to escape the onslaught near Ostrozub and Malishevo, in east-central Kosovo. We journeyed up a small dirt road in our armored Chevy Suburban, encountering a couple of KLA checkpoints before finding the camp. There, throughout a dense mountain forest, we saw thousands of people huddled under sheets of plastic and in makeshift plastic tents, with blankets and clothing covering the cold ground. I met with several groups to hear their stories, which seldom
varied much in the central plot line: they heard automatic rifle fire, followed sometime later by the louder sound of Serb weaponry. Did the Serbs order them out? No, they just knew they were supposed to get out of there or face the consequences.

  I told the villagers that we were working hard to get them back in their homes, that it was our top priority. At that point, a young man spoke up to say that the people didn’t care about getting back to their homes. They wanted independence for Kosovo.

  An old man with no teeth stood up and stared at the political commissar in disgust before turning to me and saying: “I want to go home. Zoti Christopher, can you get me back in my house?”

  “I promise to do my best,” I answered, with little confidence that my best could come even close.

  We drove down the mountain track, horrified by the sea of humanity we had just encountered, especially at the sight of the ill-clad children in the cold, wet mountain air. Tina, Phil, and I were deeply concerned about what would happen to these people when the winter finally settled in. We drove south along the road, past the larger village of Rahovec, near Malishevo. There we saw Serb forces busily, but unhurriedly, setting the town on fire.

  The next day, I took a flight to Belgrade and confronted Milosevic about that village burning. I also told him about meeting villagers on the side of a mountain, omitting the part about the possible KLA presence, since I didn’t want them to become a further target for his forces. Gone was the bravado of the past, along with the humor, albeit sardonic, that he had used to amuse his guests. He stood up and paced the room, very uncharacteristically, called for a telephone, and made a call to what I presumed was a military aide as I sat waiting.

  “That unit had been transferred. They will be gone today,” he said firmly.

  “Good,” I responded. “I’ll be back there tomorrow.”

  The unit was indeed gone by the next day, but it didn’t matter at all. Another unit took its place, and the violence continued.

  By this time in the fall I had succeeded in bringing Rugova together with the “independent intellectuals” in Pristina to discuss what an autonomy arrangement could look like. I was assisted by Jim O’Brien, a State Department lawyer with close ties to Secretary Albright, and by Jonathan Levitsky, a political appointee lawyer who worked with Jim in the State Department’s policy planning office. They were putting together drafts that carefully threaded the needle between Serb sovereignty of its territory and complete autonomy for the Kosovars. The drafts were ever more favorable to the Kosovars, but in the absence of an independence provision I knew that I could not convince the Kosovars to accept them, nor would the Serbs go along. It became more of an effort to show the other members of the Contact Group that we were doing all we could to find a diplomatic solution. At best, it would be an unfinished peace.

  As the war on civilians wore on, nobody in Kosovo was interested in autonomy anymore. They wanted complete independence, and with every documented example of Serb excess, they felt correctly that they were getting closer to their goal. Those prepared to work on autonomy were denounced as weak or pro-Serb.

  On October 12, NATO ministers approved an “activation order,” or “ACTORD” in NATO-speak. The ACTORD, in effect, became the “further measures” noted in the Security Council’s Resolution 1199. Dick came back to the region after a three-month absence as a “private consultant,” having long since left the government, to deliver the tough message to Milosevic that he must either pull back his forces and allow the return of displaced people, or otherwise face NATO bombing. Milosevic complied, at least for the time being, but the Albanians, like the Bosnians three years before, had no interest in a cease-fire. They wanted a bombing campaign. Nevertheless, Milosevic’s compliance allowed the ACTORD to be suspended, though not rescinded.

  I urged Rugova to come with me for a swing through Malishevo, Ostrozub, Rahovec, and Suharek and meet people returning to their homes. Rugova had increasingly become a shut-in, either for security reasons (and they were always present) or for psychological reasons, which I worried about more. Rugova, more than any conceivable leader who might emerge from the still-opaque KLA structure, had national and popular appeal in Kosovo, and I feared for the day when the Kosovo people dismissed him, as he had been by Bianca Jagger and other instant experts on Kosovo. I could see that whether Kosovo gained independence through constantly expanding autonomy plans that would allow time to thicken the institutions of democracy, or instantly through a general war, it was coming, and a person of Rugova’s stature and commitment to moderation had to be part of it.

  I took him in my car on November 3 first to what had been a scenic small village, Banja Malishevo. The minaret of the local mosque had been toppled by a very accurate tank round, and the carcasses of livestock that had belonged to the village inhabitants were still rotting in the fields from a month before, when the Serbs used them as target practice. We continued out to the small village of Ostrozub, where we also got out on the main street, now teeming with returned inhabitants carrying and dragging their belongings back from the mountain forests where they had hidden for weeks. The reaction to the sight of Rugova was extraordinary. People, hesitant at first at the sight of their leader of more than a decade, approached him and draped their arms around his neck, kissing him on his cheeks. Some hugged him and dropped to their knees, kissing him on his hand as if he were the pope.

  I stood back to absorb the totality of the scene. For those who had written him off, I wished they could see him now. What makes some politicians charismatic and others not has always been an elusive concept for me, but on this day I saw that Ibrahim Rugova was a force to be reckoned with—perhaps the reason the KLA and others were so harsh on him.

  As I stood watching him, his soft and gentle voice obviously of such comfort to those gathered around him, people who had gone through so much, an old man approached me as fast as his limp could bring him. He started calling for me as he got within earshot, “Zoti Christopher, Zoti Christopher!” I didn’t know who he was, but I put out my hand to shake his (I guess I thought I should press the flesh as well that day), but he ignored my hand and ran into me, hugging me with all the force he could. As he slobbered kiss after kiss on my two cheeks, saliva pooling on the sides of my face, I recognized him as the man whom I had met in the mountain camp. “Mr. Hill, I am in my home just as you promised. I am back home.” I hugged him and kissed him back.

  • • •

  I knew, however, that his torment wasn’t over, and that it may have just begun. If Milosevic had thought he was intimidating the Kosovars, he was doing quite the opposite, and in so doing was making any type of negotiated process more difficult. The team back in Washington under the supervision of Jim O’Brien and Jon Levitsky continued to make revisions to the autonomy proposal, but as the Serbs continued their rampage the revisions continued to be in favor of the Albanians and less and less acceptable to Milosevic and the Serbs. Milosevic lost interest in making any concessions on the document, as did the Albanians.

  Unlike Bosnia, where Milosevic had displayed an interest in settling, Kosovo was a different matter. “You might as well ask for my head,” he said after reading drafts that banned the Yugoslav military from stepping foot in Kosovo. And when the entire project became known as an “interim accord,” because the Albanians could not negotiate on the basis of giving up their aspiration for an independent Kosovo, Milosevic was done negotiating.

  I kept presenting updated versions of what, unfortunately for my reputation, became known as “the Hill Plan.” Each version had the dubious characteristic of being less than what the Albanians wanted and more than what the Serbs said they were prepared to accept. Serbs and Albanians rejected two more updated drafts in November. “Well,” I told Tina and Phil in mock optimism, “at least they agree on something.”

  In early January 1999, the KLA captured eight members of the JNA and demanded a swap of prisoners, a normal procedure in wars, but not one that had ever been accomplished in the K
osovo conflict. The Serbs promised only that retribution would be swift and furious.

  I met with Milosevic in his office in Belgrade. He was angry, indeed barely able to contain himself. After two hours I got him to accept a prisoner swap, but there was a catch. Insisting that to agree to a swap would be to invite more such “kidnappings,” as he called them, he agreed to the swap provided the Serbs were released ten days before the KLA soldiers. Having worked the issue for hours, I knew it was the best I could get, so I made sure that in ten days the KLA were to be released.

  “This is our agreement. Is that correct?”

  “Of course,” replied Milosevic. “You have my word.”

  That was a comforting thought, I muttered to myself. But I agreed based on the following: If he released them after ten days as he promised, it would be the first such agreement in the war and offer a tiny bit of momentum to the process. If he didn’t, I would immediately resign. I started finding myself rooting for the latter outcome.

  I journeyed back up to Likove, this time in winter, the dirt roads having long since turned to mud. Phil and Tina, and also then Colonel Dana Atkins, who was representing General Clark’s staff at NATO, accompanied me. Along the drive we could see scores of displaced people. It was hard to tell where they were coming from as they walked in the open fields alongside tractors and trailers, presumably looking for a place to spend the night. I brought Bill Walker, the very newly appointed head of the international monitors, a veteran of all sorts of conflict and revolution in Latin America. We had dispensed with the “diplomatic observer mission” chapeau as of October and now had an appropriately titled mission, the Kosovo Verification Mission. (Verification was seen as a stronger, less passive concept than merely monitoring compliance, although these distinctions sound more important in Washington meetings than they do on the ground in Kosovo.) Our mission was under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Bill was a senior U.S. ambassador with a number of tough assignments in Central America. That did not mean, however, that he had necessarily ever seen the inside of a Balkan history book; but he was a gruff and tough character who could be relied upon as such with all parties to this very fragile cease-fire.