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

by Christopher R. Hill

  “I want the embassy open to the public tomorrow, so we have much work to do today. We need to remove all these cars, and clean the parking lot so we can park new cars here. We need to sweep up all the glass so that we can begin to install new window glass. We need to clean the front walls so that painters can paint over the graffiti. We”—I don’t know why I kept saying “we”—“also need to clean up the front of the embassy so we can get the flagpole back up and the flag up, and up today. I don’t want people to see us looking like this. Okay. Let’s move!” Like a football team breaking a huddle they went to work with looks of grim determination.

  At five that afternoon Rudy appeared at my office door with an anxious look on his face.

  “Rudy. What’s the matter?”

  “Sir, we just raised a new flag. Come see it.” Several of us ran out to take a look. I had never seen such a beautiful sight in my life.

  The deputy chief of mission, Paul Jones, returned late on the night of the attack from a road trip outside the city and took over much of the internal operations of the embassy, chairing our “emergency action committee” and providing Washington with frequent “Situation Reports” to reassure them that our eyes and ears were open and we were on top of things. I focused on the Macedonian government to reassure officials that we would remain open, while also convincing people in Washington that remaining open was a workable plan.

  A team of about seventy-five marines arrived that first morning to take over for the army’s quick reaction force. Paul urged nonessential personnel to leave so we could be down to an absolute minimum in the event we had to evacuate. The Macedonian government, realizing its mistake, had begun to cooperate by sending far more police than we needed. They also blocked the road in front of the embassy, a rather classic instance of closing the barn door after the horse has fled.

  After a few days, Washington agreed. We were staying. All the European embassies, watching carefully for our cue, had also decided to stay. We had no idea how or when the Kosovo War was going to end, but we were going to stay in Skopje.

  The war dragged on and on. It was a very strange war in that it consisted of the U.S. bombing targets in Serbia every day to convince Milosevic to change his mind and allow NATO forces into Kosovo. Bombing to change someone’s mind is a new one in the annals of war. To change someone’s mind, do you bomb bridges? Factories? Villas? Ministry buildings? We bombed them all, and still Milosevic would not change his mind. European allies began to worry that he would never give in, while liberal and conservative hawks in the United States began to call for a ground invasion. I accompanied Wes Clark to see President Gligorov. Wes asked the president for permission to pre-position equipment in the event a decision to invade Kosovo was made. Gligorov asked Clark, “If I agreed to your request, will you allow us to join NATO?”

  Clark explained that such a decision went beyond his authority, that he understood there were problems associated with Macedonia’s entry into NATO, including technical issues involving the readiness of its forces to work with NATO, and a continued foreign policy problem with NATO member Greece over Macedonia’s name.

  “Because, General Clark,” Gligorov continued calmly in his measured voice, as if having ignored Clark’s answer, “we are Serbia’s neighbors and expect to be for many years. And the Serbs, as you might know, have long knives, but even longer memories.”

  Clark refocused on Albania as a place to build up equipment in the event of a decision to invade with ground troops.

  Macedonia continued to fill up with Albanian Kosovo refugees, at first those simply sitting out the conflict in the Albanian communities in western Macedonia and later, starting in April 1999, those forced out of Kosovo by Serb paramilitaries. As the numbers grew, the Macedonian government began to panic. Macedonia’s total population was barely 2 million and there was already a population of some 450,000 Albanian citizens of Macedonia. With the prospect of another half million Albanians from Kosovo’s 1.7 million population, and potentially even more, the specter of Albanians actually outnumbering ethnic Macedonians loomed in the minds of the latter.

  The Macedonian government began what was in effect a slowdown at the border, thereby reducing the flow of Albanians southward to a trickle as thousands of frightened refugees, without food, water, or sanitary facilities, and without any place to go, stacked up north of the border.

  The international community’s response was by and large to accuse the Macedonian government of not living up to its international obligations to take in refugees. Soon, tiny and frightened Macedonia became in the eyes of the international community an accomplice to Serb ethnic cleansing policies, a kind of little brother to Milosevic’s reign of terror.

  The embassy went to work. I met often with Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski to urge him simply to open the border and not to try to process individual refugee cases there. These demarches usually worked for a day, but were then followed by more delays.

  Charlie Stonecipher and Mitko came up with a plan. On the way back from the border station where they were checking the flow of refugees, they identified an underused sport plane airstrip halfway between Skopje and the border, ten miles away. What if we proposed to the Macedonians that it become a refugee camp, with tents and food provided by the UN? Charlie and Mitko suggested in my office. I asked how many refugees could be housed there. “A lot,” answered Charlie. “Maybe upwards of fifteen thousand.” Probably not enough, I thought, but it would make a good start.

  It was definitely worth a try, but the prime minister was growing tired of my daily call, and responses from his office were coming as slowly as the refugees were getting through the border. I kept seeing the prime minister because it was essential to keep his door open to us. No one else in Washington was doing that. Keeping communication with the local government is probably the most important duty of an ambassador. It is far more important than making tough pronouncements and criticisms that impress people back in Washington but complicate communication.

  That afternoon, Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott called. I told him the Macedonians were not keeping the border open and that we needed to do something quick. He asked what could be done, and I told him about the idea for a large refugee camp near the border that would be fenced and where refugees could be sheltered. He told me he was in Italy and would check with me in the morning about a possible visit.

  The next morning, as Strobe got ready to head for a day trip from Italy to neighboring Albania, he called to ask whether I still wanted him to stop in Macedonia. I had just heard that the border was again closed overnight and told him by all means to come, that I would arrange for a meeting with the prime minister.

  That afternoon, Talbott and his interagency delegation arrived in a C-130 at Skopje Airport, the aircraft having popped chaff and flares to thwart antiaircraft missiles. The C-130’s sensors had detected being “painted” by fire-control radar from nearby Serbia on its final descent into Skopje, a fact that made Strobe and the group especially happy to greet me on the ground.

  We arranged for the fifteen-member group to stay at my house and some nearby government villas, not wanting to use downtown hotels. Prime Minister Georgievski, whose villa was close to mine, agreed to come over to the residence, together with Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Trajkovski making sure he actually showed up.

  At the end of a one-hour meeting we had a deal with the prime minister. Macedonia would allow for the creation of a large “transit” camp in which refugees could catch their breath before being evacuated temporarily to third countries, where they would sit out the war. I recommended we get this out as soon as possible, preferably to the journalists waiting outside the house.

  Strobe Talbott accepted a pair of underwear and socks and got some well-deserved rest that night. In the morning, en route to the airport, he stopped at the embassy to address the Macedonian and U.S. staff who had worked so hard, with such dedication, through the crisis.

  “I have never felt so close to Emba
ssy Skopje,” he began. “Because having arrived here last night without a suitcase, I am this morning wearing Ambassador Hill’s underwear.”

  That afternoon, the trickle at the border became a flood. Under the expert supervision of British Brigadier General Tim Cross, widely known as a logistics genius, NATO troops, principally Italian and British with some U.S. help at the airport, immediately started erecting large six- and twelve-person tents, building sanitary facilities, and organizing food operations. By Monday afternoon there were twenty thousand refugees, and by Thursday the number had grown to sixty thousand. They were weary, frightened people who had been driven from their homes in Kosovo, sometimes at gunpoint, and had just spent days stacked up at the closed border. Now they were safe.

  For more than two months, my family and I heard the rumble of fighter-bombers overhead as they completed their runs over Serbia and Kosovo and made their turns back to NATO bases in Italy. At one point, an A-10 Warthog jet landed at Skopje International Airport, having been hit by a Serb missile, its tail section looking like Swiss cheese and its pilots feeling lucky to be alive. For those passengers landing at the airport on Austrian Air and other airlines that continued service through the war, the sight of a U.S. ground attack jet was a reminder that all was not well in Macedonia.

  The Kosovo bombing campaign continued through the spring. It is often cited in the fullness of time as a brilliant effort that created the independent and peaceful Kosovo of today, a model for the future. In fact, once it was clear that those who had predicted Milosevic would immediately capitulate were completely wrong, the bombing campaign became increasingly unpopular, especially when, inevitably, targeting errors mounted. I woke up one morning to learn that a train in central Serbia was hit, killing many civilian passengers. On another day I arrived at the embassy to discover that we had inadvertently targeted Kosovo-Albanian refugees on the road between Jakove and Prizren, killing many of them, mistakes that caused some of the international nongovernmental organizations to start offering advice through the media to NATO war planners as to the altitude at which they should bomb their targets.

  The most notorious targeting mistake took place on May 7, 1999, when U.S. precision guided bombs struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade from three sides, killing several Chinese inside. The night before I had spoken with General Clark, who told me that we had a “big package” going down that night. I turned on CNN in the morning and learned the news. I sat on the end of the bed clutching the sides of my head between the palms of my hands. “Oh my God, is this what he meant?” Of course, the targeting of the Chinese embassy was a total mistake, though the Chinese never seemed to believe that. It had been misidentified as an Interior Ministry facility. The bombing continued, but no one was feeling very optimistic.

  There was, however, an important diplomatic track at work. Strobe Talbott, in addition to bucking up the morale at my embassy, was also making his way between European capitals, especially Moscow, to keep the pressure on Milosevic and make him understand that there would be no respite until he agreed to open Kosovo to NATO troops and to what in effect was to become an international protectorate. Without the diplomatic work of Talbott and his team, the bombing would not have been effective. “Diplomacy without force,” as Frederick the Great of Prussia is reported to have said, is “music without instruments.” He could have gone on to say that bombing without diplomacy is just systematized violence.

  Per our agreement with Prime Minister Georgievski in April, some of the refugees were indeed being transferred to other countries, including the United States, but most were still there seventy days later, still without hot meals due to concerns about fire in the hot and dry environs of the camp, which consisted of thousands of green and brown tents. They still had no idea what the future held for them. Rumors substituted for news.

  June 4, 1999, the day Serb military commanders agreed to allow NATO’s entry into Kosovo, was a happy one, not only for the refugees, but also for the Macedonian people, who had seen their economy collapse due to a war on its border that seemed to have no end. Our embassy had done all we could for the Macedonians. When an official realized that our transit camp did not have a fence around it, I offered to finance it provided he could find a Macedonian contractor to build it. He found one very quickly. Our economic officer, Anton Smith, organized a trade fair for Macedonian suppliers of goods needed for the camps to substitute for imports. I toured the trade fair with British General Sir Michael Jackson as NATO purchasing officers trailed behind us, exchanging their contact information with Macedonian producers of such items as bottled water, cheese, bread, and camping equipment. A few business transactions were completed, though most were not. Nonetheless, we had helped transform Macedonian public opinion, which had been so implacably hostile to NATO, the UN, and the international community in general for bringing “their war” to Macedonia. Deputy Foreign Minister Trajkovski (who would later become president of Macedonia, only to die a few years later in a plane crash) became the embassy’s closest interlocutor. Trajkovski and I hosted what were at first daily meetings in the Macedonian Foreign Ministry to address the mountain of mistrust between Macedonian agencies on the one hand, and the international nongovernment organizations, UN organizations, and NATO on the other. Seated at a long table with some thirty people gathered around it, we dealt with practical problems. When the Macedonian electrical agency representative complained that the UN had failed to pay its bill, I asked, “Is there a representative here from the UN who can answer that?” A person from the other end of the table said, “Of course we will pay, but they never sent us the bill!” I turned to the Macedonian and asked, “Have you sent a bill?” Before he could answer I directed him and the UN rep to meet in the corner of the room, work it out, and report back to the group. And so on.

  • • •

  Macedonia had endured its worst months as an independent state, though it learned much and developed some self-confidence in the process. Visitors from Washington, at first only Strobe but later planeloads of congressmen and senators, saw firsthand what war was doing to this tiny country whose only ambition was to stay out of it and survive.

  When the bombing stopped and the announcement was made about the first meetings between the Serbs and NATO commanders, I went out to Uranija Restaurant, located in a park in the center of Skopje. It was a clear, beautiful June night. With a group of Macedonian friends, including the Gruevskis and Peshevs, we celebrated the expected end of the war and the ordeal. “I never thought our little country could ever survive a war in Kosovo,” one said to me. “You mean ‘your beautiful little country,’  ” I joked as we toasted again.

  I returned to my home that night to turn on CNN and check for the latest developments. The relief I felt was overwhelming. For the first time in three long months I could watch the news without a sense of foreboding. Anyone who today suggests that the Kosovo War was an inexorable march toward an inevitable triumph, a model for resolving future such conflicts, simply was not there at the time.

  But just then my cell phone rang. It was our refugee coordinator, Ted Morse, who asked in a very agitated voice if I would tell the Macedonian interior minister not to use the riot police currently at the camp. I told Ted to slow down and explain why there were riot police at the camp in the first place. He explained what had happened. An Albanian had seen a young boy he believed to have helped the Serbs burn his home. He gave chase, and soon many of the camp residents were hunting down the Roma living in the vast camp. The Roma family took refuge in the offices of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), a prefabricated structure that sat on cinder blocks in the center of the main Stenkovac camp. The hostile crowd began to gather around the office compound, at which point CRS called the Macedonian police for help. With the situation momentarily stabilized, Ted called me to ask that I use my contacts in the Macedonian government to prevent the police from entering the camp. I then spoke by phone with the CRS official, who told me the situation remained fluid. The Albania
ns had not returned to their tents and were milling around to see what would happen next. I told her I would get there immediately.

  When I arrived I could see in the dim light the Macedonian riot police sitting outside the camp fence waiting for orders. Ed Joseph, the Catholic Relief official in charge of the camp, met me at the entrance and asked that I talk to a group of camp elders whom he had brought outside the gate. I agreed, though it was clear to me that the camp elders were hardly the problem, nor could they be much of a solution. I spoke about the need to restore order in the camp, and most important, to get the crowds of young men away from the CRS offices. One spoke up: “You need to enter the camp and speak directly to them.” I looked over into the camp through the crude fencing and saw the large crowd. I didn’t want to do it—it seemed a little risky, to put it mildly—but I certainly couldn’t see what talking to a pleasant group of septuagenarians outside the camp gates was accomplishing, either. I also thought a camp riot involving Macedonian police would undermine much of what we had accomplished in the past two and a half months. I asked Joseph what he thought. “Worth a try,” he responded.

  I could tell that Brad, a member of the two-person security detail who had accompanied me out from Skopje, was not very enthusiastic.

  “It’ll be okay, Brad. We’ll stay close to the gate in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

  Brad smiled wanly and agreed. I told him, “Let’s do it.”

  Charlie Stonecipher, DCM Paul Jones, Ed Joseph, Ted Morse, and Ed’s interpreter accompanied me. Brad and his colleague followed, carrying semiautomatic rifles. A couple of the younger of the camp elders led the way, calling out to the crowd with a battery-powered bullhorn to make way for us.