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

by Christopher R. Hill

  The crowd opened for us as we made our way through the gate and toward the administrative area, surrounded by young men. The camp elder on the bullhorn was really doing his job, demanding room and calling on people to sit down to listen to me. Paul Jones had the presence of mind to grab a plastic Coca-Cola crate for me to stand on, and Charlie had somehow found an American flag, albeit a beach towel, but nonetheless a welcome sight to the crowd.

  Paul planted the crate on its end in the mud and said, “Good luck.” I climbed onto it, holding the bullhorn in my right hand while raising the other to signal for quiet and hoping the crate wasn’t going to tip over. I had no idea what I was going to say:

  “Mir mbrema. Une jam Hill. Une kam liame sot. Generale nga NATO sot keni takoj me Serbise.” (Good evening. I am Hill. I have news today. NATO generals have met today with the Serbs.)

  I looked down at the interpreter, who I suspect had listened to as much butchery of the Albanian language as he could take in a lifetime and so said to me, “Please let me help.” I started speaking in English, passing the bullhorn down to him for interpretation.

  “The NATO generals have not met with the Serbs to negotiate. They told the Serbs and the Serbs have agreed to allow NATO to enter Kosovo.”

  The crowd erupted into a loud roar. If my plan was to calm them down, it wasn’t working at all. The advantage of using the interpreter was that I could think of my next sentence while he was rendering the previous. I started to get on a roll.

  “This means that soon all of you and your families will return to Kosovo. And when you return you will find that much has been destroyed. But we will go back together, and together we will rebuild Kosovo brick by brick. The rule of law in Kosovo has also been destroyed, but that also must be rebuilt. But we will not wait until we have returned to Kosovo to rebuild the rule of law. We will start now!” I added in Albanian language, “tani” (now), “sot” (today)!

  By this time the crowd, seated on the ground and stretching as far as my eyes could see, lit up by one klieg light, coming from a Macedonian television station, had become an audience. The danger had passed, but my adrenaline was flowing and I was in a good rhythm with the interpreter:

  “I know there are people here who you believe have committed terrible crimes. Give them to me and I will see that justice is done to them. You know me! Give them to me! I will do right by you. We have been through too much together to shame ourselves by making a terrible mistake.” It was a little dramatic, but it seemed to be working.

  At that moment, two VW Microbus ambulances pulled up to the back of the offices and the two Roma families who had been falsely accused (it turned out) were put into the vehicles and taken out of the camp. A father and son had been beaten mercilessly. The fourteen-year-old had both arms dislocated in an effort to dismember him.

  “Now, please go back to your tents. Rest, and get ready for the next part of our journey together.” Again, a little melodramatic, I thought, but why not, given the circumstances?

  It had worked. One of the camp elders came to me as the crowd began to disperse and explained that some of them had not been able to hear and wanted me to repeat my message. I looked over at Charlie and ruefully shook my head to the effect that I simply couldn’t do it again. Always the Foreign Service officer, he said in mock seriousness, “Maybe just an executive summary.”

  After the encore performance, we got ready to drive back to town in a Chevy Suburban. Nobody said much about what we had just seen, nor did we want to talk about the risks we had all just run. I mentioned to Ed Joseph my concern about what the future of Kosovo would be like. “Maybe that was a taste of things to come,” Ed answered.

  Within weeks the camp was gone, and what had peaked as a city of more than sixty-five thousand people was now an empty space, as many had followed NATO convoys into Kosovo. President Clinton came to visit two weeks later. The day before, I was back out at the camp, this time pleading with people not to leave quite yet, so there would be enough refugees for him to meet there.

  13

  PATTERNS OF COOPERATION

  Macedonia survived, and as NATO troops and convoys, with helicopters overhead, poured up that familiar valley into Kosovo, trailed by cars and tractors carrying returning refugees, even that troubled land also calmed down. Leaders such as Veton Surroi, Hashim Thaci, and Jakup Krasniqi emerged from hiding. I accompanied Ibrahim Rugova, who had sat out the war in Rome as a guest of the Vatican, on his return to a hero’s welcome to contend with a new political landscape in a Kosovo unrecognizable from before. Many towns and neighborhoods had been burned to the ground by Serb paramilitaries taking reprisals on the Albanian community for the NATO bombs. None was worse than in the town of Jakove, where during a visit in July I saw row upon row of shops that had been torched by departing Serb troops.

  The Kosovars began to rebuild, an activity that never seemed to slow down to this day. I also visited the United Nations building in Pristina and met with the new special representative, Sergio de Mello (who almost a decade later would be killed in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq). He had experiences in many parts of the world, and together with the representative of Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, had already started the preparations for free elections. Kosovo may have a unique history, but its postconflict challenges of getting the economy moving, and of forging political consensus and legitimacy, were far from unique. De Mello’s experience elsewhere made him the right person to begin the tasks there. Meanwhile, Kosovo’s Serb community, already small, became smaller as many packed their own cars and tractors, and like the Serbs of Croatia, some dug up the graves of their ancestors and headed north into Serbia. Those who remained grouped themselves into a few enclaves, expecting the worst from their Albanian neighbors. Fortunately, despite some score settling, an age-old issue in the Balkans, the worst never came.

  In Macedonia, people picked up where they had left off before the war. Textile orders from international buyers abroad started trickling in again. First Lady Hillary Clinton had made two visits during the war. On the first visit, she heard about the problem facing the textile industry—their loss of contracts due to the conflict and to a flexible and globalized garment industry, which can switch suppliers on a moment’s notice. But when she returned a month later with her husband in June 1999, she brought with her several garment purchasers, including the CEO of the American apparel maker Liz Claiborne. She announced to a packed auditorium of mostly women textile workers who had previously been laid off that they would be working again.

  “She really cares about Macedonia. She is so sincere in trying to help us,” a Macedonian friend said to me. There was no question that she had followed up. I was deeply moved.

  On one of my final days in country, a businessman approached me on the street and put his arms around me and thanked me for my work. He was a milk producer from Bitola, in southern Macedonia, who had actually received a real contract from the U.S. military to supply our troops. “Thank you, thank you!” he continued. “I never knew Americans could drink so much milk!”

  “You’re welcome,” I responded, still in his embrace and somewhat overwhelmed by this emotional outburst of affection. I wasn’t sure what to say. “We also use it on our cereal.”

  I left Macedonia in August 1999, sadly, because I could not imagine my life without a daily life-and-death crisis, such is the addictive quality of adrenaline. I returned to Washington to begin a one-year assignment at the National Security Council staff as a senior director for the Balkans, responsible for advising the president on the Balkans and for making sure the interagency process of government stayed focused on the tasks ahead. Kosovo had been a traumatic experience for all, and there was a very real sense that we may have just been lucky at the end, when Milosevic gave up. “It was such a great experience, we should never repeat it,” a British diplomat commented to me.

  I wasn’t really in the mood for Washington’s trench warfare, nor for a climate of polar
ization and recrimination that seemed increasingly similar to what had caused the Balkans wars in the first place. Secretary Albright and President Clinton had selected me, at my request (sometimes it helps to ask), to become ambassador to Poland when that position opened up in the summer of 2000. Earlier in June I had arranged an academic year in Boston to organize and collect my thoughts, intellectually calm down, read a few of the books that had piled up unread throughout the crisis, and jot down some thoughts about what I had just experienced. But National Security Advisor Sandy Berger instead asked if I would take on the task of coordinating U.S. government agencies working on postconflict operations in the Balkans, especially Bosnia and Kosovo. Berger had asked me during President Clinton’s visit to Macedonia in June 1999, just a week after people had begun to return to their homes in Kosovo. We were visiting Stenkovac, where the refugees were busy packing up whatever belongings they had to begin another phase in their uncertain future. In every respect, it wasn’t really an offer I could refuse.

  The national security staff broadly consists of a national security advisor to the president, a deputy or two, and senior directors of “directorates” that roughly correspond to geographic and functional bureaus in the State Department. Working for each senior director are “directors,” a kind of entry-level position where much of the work of the NSC staff is done. These can be members of the career Foreign Service, career military or career CIA, and political appointees who are experts from academia. This last group will sometimes spend the rest of their professional lives talking to the media with the inflated role of “the director,” as opposed to one of several. When Berger asked me to take the job, he also asked if there was anything he could do. “I need Tina,” I told him. She became a director of the office and proved as adept a Washington player as she was in the field during the conflict in Kosovo. Foreign Service officers who are effective in Washington and in the field are not easy to find, and I didn’t want to let Tina go elsewhere.

  When the president hosts a foreign leader, the senior director joins the national security advisor as the briefer, note taker, and participant in the debrief meeting. It’s heady stuff, but only for the few minutes the president is actually focused on the issue before he turns his attention to something else. A foreign policy meeting may be sandwiched between events involving domestic issues, like greeting a winning baseball team or signing a bill. I always marveled at President Clinton’s ability, indeed at any president’s ability, to remember which meeting he was in and who he was talking with.

  Where the president does become especially focused is on overseas trips. I accompanied President Clinton to Bulgaria and Kosovo just before Thanksgiving 1999, and his capacity to absorb the briefing materials and then hold cogent discussions with his starstruck interlocutors was remarkable. His conversations with the Kosovo leadership in particular showed his sweep of the issues, and his advice was particularly on target: “You are in the world’s spotlight today, but it won’t last. Take advantage of it. Demonstrate progress in building your institutions, because at some point that spotlight will move elsewhere.” That was very good advice for a region that was already becoming yesterday’s news. As I took notes of the meeting, I saw the puzzled looks on the faces of the much-divided Kosovo leadership as they sat across from the president in a makeshift, austere meeting room at the Pristina airport. It was as if they could not understand that there might be issues in the world more compelling than their own and that could eventually divert the president’s attention.

  As relieved as the administration felt about the “victory” in Kosovo, the continued presence of a defiant Milosevic in Belgrade, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq almost a decade before, remained a bitter aftertaste of the war. Some European countries, such as Italy, seemed prepared to move on, though most did not. At the NSC I chaired numerous meetings aimed at finding stiffer, more personalized sanctions that would target family finances hidden in third countries or otherwise restrict Milosevic’s travel and that of his family, so-called smart sanctions. Despite the promise by sanction experts, the sanctioneers, to create financial havoc for Milosevic and his family, no evidence ever emerged to suggest they were anything more than a momentary nuisance, a fly at a picnic. Milosevic seemed to be fully recovered from the war and, if anything, more self-confident than ever.

  It would not be until the summer of 2000, just as I was preparing to leave for Poland, that Milosevic, one year after NATO’s entry into Kosovo, optimistically called for early presidential elections in September. He had every expectation of winning, just as he had in every other election. But this time, as I was settling into my new life in Poland, he overreached. By October 5, amid the “Bulldozer revolution” (all transfers of power during that era seemed to require a catchy name, this one deriving its own from a striking factory worker who plowed an industrial vehicle into one of Milosevic’s party buildings), he relinquished power. That night in Warsaw, I was hosting U.S. participants in the Chopin Piano Competition together with Polish guests for a large dinner at my home, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. I’d sneak away from the sixty or so guests seated at small round tables and go to the study to watch the latest CNN coverage, at last returning to announce to the guests that Milosevic was finally gone. They applauded politely and went back to their dinner. I was now living in a different country.

  I had arrived in Poland in July 2000 on a hot, sunny day, my family and I anxious to begin our new lives. The city of Warsaw was unrecognizable from the time I lived there fifteen years before. Construction was everywhere. Miraculously, it seemed, the dull grayness was gone, replaced by bright colors. What I remembered as grim, heavy buildings were now freshly sandblasted to reveal a textured brightness that had been covered by decades of communist grime and soot. Even the weather seemed better than under communism. Somehow out of Poland’s ashes had emerged a vibrant entrepreneurial class of young people whose collective memory of the communist years was fast fading and who seemed uninterested in looking back. They were focused on Poland’s future as a European Union country, a status that would complete the country’s journey of a thousand years, to be in every way a Western European country.

  Just a month before I arrived in Warsaw, the ruling coalition split when the junior partner to the government, the “Freedom Union” (UW, by its Polish acronym), walked out of the government. Freedom Union was the party that represented many of the Warsaw-based intellectuals who had in many cases borne the brunt of Jaruzelski’s martial law crackdown a few years before. Its leadership had been a who’s who of communist-era prison inmates. They were replaced by lesser-known Solidarity figures, who by the summer of 2000 were understood to be temporary, given the expectation of a victory in 2001 by the Left Alliance Party, the former communists. “You’re really unlucky to come to Poland when you did,” one Polish watcher told me. “No more fun!”

  Actually, I relished as any diplomat would the challenge of doing my part to keep Poland on track. Poland in 2000 seemed safely out of the communist woods in which it had struggled ten plus years before, but in the meantime, a new form of nationalism had begun to engulf the region. With its large rural and disaffected population Poland seemed to be a prime candidate to catch this new disease. Poland had succumbed to dictatorship in the 1930s after enjoying a democracy of about a decade. Of the new democracies in the northern tier of former Eastern Bloc states, Poland was the one deemed least likely to succeed.

  The embassy needed to be close to the opposition, the former communists now social democrats, which had high expectations that they would take over the government, as well as to the Solidarity government, now on its last breath. “Don’t lose track of anyone,” I told the political officers. “Today’s opposition will be tomorrow’s ruling party, and so on.” When Solidarity, as predicted, lost the election in 2001 and went into the wilderness as the opposition, they accepted their role but were back in government in 2005. Poland’s democracy continued to work.

  I did what U.S. ambassadors ha
ve done in Warsaw for decades, plunging into its complex social and political scene, turning my house into a salon of senior politicians and artists and writers. General Jaruzelski, still wearing his trademark dark glasses from the time he ran the country during martial law, returned my visit to his modest home in the neighborhood. Adam Michnik, a writer who had been imprisoned by the communists and later forgave them (earning considerable criticism from those who had never been near a prison cell or even paid a fraction of the price that he did for Poland’s democracy), became a frequent visitor. There were many others: Helena Luczywo, who brought Poland’s top underground newspaper into the open and made it Poland’s newspaper of record; Wanda Rapaczynski, a teenage refugee in 1968, who returned to help turn that newspaper into a media giant.

  Though the Poles had their own thriving democracy, they seemed just as interested in the U.S. elections in November 2000. As embassies do worldwide, we hosted an election party. The Marriott hotel ballroom was filled to capacity as the animated and boisterous crowd carefully watched the coverage, holding drinks in their hands, unworried by the outcome. Poles loved George H. W. Bush and had been equally fond of Bill Clinton, though less familiar with George W. Bush and Al Gore and had no reason to think that anything would change. As the voting returns began to come in at midnight, I stood on the stage and assured the audience that we would not close down until a winner had been declared.

  I didn’t keep that promise, and as the weeks rolled by Polish friends would ask: “Are things there going to be all right?”

  Joining Europe (the EU) and keeping the United States engaged in Europe were two pillars of Poland’s emerging foreign policy, positions that enjoyed consensus across Poland’s raucous political divide. That effort to keep close ties with the EU and the United States seemed to be getting a tad more difficult as the Bush administration began an unceremonious and relentless review of many U.S. commitments to multilateralism, including in arms control and climate change. The Poles shared some of the skepticism about agreements that also seemed to them to have dubious enforcement regimes, but they did not want to be put in the position of choosing between the United States and the Europeans. The Europeans, a Pole complained, sometimes define being a European as not being an American. Differences over such issues as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming helped them to do that. The Poles watched helplessly as the U.S.-European relationship worsened. They tried to play the role that Britain also tries to play, that of a transatlantic reconciler. But while the Europeans had long since grown used to the British playing that role, an EU aspirant trying to do the same was less tolerated.