Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (16 page)

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On March 26, 1996, I was the State Department representative accompanying First Lady Hillary Clinton who was making her own visit to Bosnia. Her plane was filled with an assortment of White House aides for whom adventure travel to places like Bosnia was not something they did every day. She was also accompanied by well-known print and television journalists
including Andrea Mitchell, an abundance of U.S. military escorts, lots of security agents, her daughter, Chelsea, and entertainers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, who had donated their time to come along and entertain the troops at USO shows. The first lady’s primary agenda was to visit the troops, but she also was scheduled to meet with leaders of Bosnia’s emerging civil society, including some of Bosnia’s nascent women’s groups, among which were the widows of the Srebrenica massacre who barely nine months before had staggered across Serbian lines from that eastern enclave, their husbands having been rounded up and executed by Serb paramilitaries.

We overnighted at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and early the next day boarded a C-17 military transport for the final two-hour leg to Bosnia. Having visited there during the war, I didn’t think much about security now that the fighting was over. I was more curious about what the Tuzla base would look like after two months, the first U.S. military presence in Bosnia, and most importantly whether Ambassador John Menzies had been successful in bringing the Bosnian women’s groups onto the base for the meeting with the first lady.

As our descent began, I could feel the g’s associated with a corkscrew landing. Typical of a military flight, there was not the same level of discipline in fastening seat belts as there is in a commercial flight. Despite the turbulence of the landing pattern, people were standing around in the enormous cavern of the aircraft’s hold, excited at the prospect of soon landing in Bosnia. I ventured over to listen to a member of the security detail briefing the first lady and her team on the situation we would likely encounter on the ground. As she did for every briefing she received, she listened attentively, glancing at her reading materials as he talked and talked. I found myself almost rolling my eyes as the briefer went on and on about the possibility of snipers and what the plan of action would be (essentially, making a beeline to the armored vehicles parked nearby). As the briefing continued for what seemed like half an hour, one of the journalists, a little worried, asked me if it was going to be that dangerous. I explained I was not going to contradict the briefer, but, whispering, I told
him I seriously doubted we would encounter any such threat. For heaven’s sake, I explained, it was a U.S. military base with thousands of troops, where there had not been a single such incident in the three months they had set up camp. He was relieved, but those more attentively listening to the briefer were not, as they contemplated that soon they could be running for their lives across an open tarmac à la “sniper alley” in Sarajevo.

There of course were no snipers, and as the nervous passengers exited from the rear of the aircraft off an enormous steel ramp that could handle tanks and other tactical vehicles, we were greeted by a group of Bosnian children in colorful native dress. Hope none of them is a sniper, I thought. They presented Mrs. Clinton with bright bouquets of spring flowers that were quickly gathered up by aides while the first lady patted the children on the head. She wanted to spend more time with them, but was urged to keep moving by her security detail, which was bent on getting her to the safety of an armored SUV. The U.S. troops’ commander General Nash was there, as was Ambassador Menzies, and having delivered the women leaders to the community center, we soon began a packed schedule of meetings: first, the Bosnian women’s groups, then soldiers, then a helicopter ride to another base to see more soldiers, a demonstration of remotely guided robots that could inspect potential bombs and booby-traps, a visit to an empty but thoroughly prepared field hospital whose doctors briefed her on their capabilities for handling complex surgeries. Finally, under an enormous green tent, we were treated to a Sinbad comedy monologue and a Sheryl Crow concert that culminated in several of her top hits, including a rendition of “Strong Enough” that she serenaded to the senior enlisted NCO as the soldiers roared their approval. The visit seemed over before it began by the time we made our way back to the airstrip and boarded the C-17 for the flight to Germany. But the threat of snipers seemed to be all most people could remember.

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The U.S. Senate confirmed me as the first ambassador to Macedonia in June 1996. The procedure had gone smoothly even though the
Greek-American community had its continued reservations about sending an ambassador to Macedonia. As the Senate was about to clear the nomination, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) placed a hold to protest the administration’s decision to put U.S. troops in Macedonia under the command of the United Nations. It was, so I was told, “nothing personal,” and therefore something the administration could work to have lifted.

The problem with a “hold” is that no one can be sure when the senator will release it. Senator McConnell did not have a record for keeping holds indefinitely, but the reason for the hold took some time to decipher, starting with the fact that at the time Senate rules did not require that a senator acknowledge placing a hold. When it was finally revealed after a few days that McConnell, via one of his staff members, had done it, the State Department’s Congressional Office went into action, first by blaming the victim: me.

“Do you have some problem with Senator McConnell you have not revealed to us?” they asked me.

“Um, not that I am aware of,” I answered, racking my brain to recall whether I had ever met the senator on a congressional delegation and whether I could have done anything to offend him.

My father was in Massachusetts General Hospital with pancreatic cancer fighting for his life. He wanted to see his son become an ambassador and there was no way of knowing how long McConnell would continue to place his hold. My family and I remained in limbo. We had half the things in our house packed in anticipation of moving, but we had no idea of when or if we would move to Macedonia. Moving to a different country is bad enough in the best of circumstances, but not knowing was not easy on my kids. As one of my daughters said to me during the ordeal, “Dad, I’m very proud of you, but you have ruined my life.”

Three weeks after the nomination was supposed to clear, a deal was struck that involved Senator McConnell lifting his “principled hold” (meaning, nothing personal about me!) in return for the deputy floor
leader reading a bloodcurdling speech about the evils of United Nations peacekeeping, followed by a voice vote to approve my nomination. I was in Boston with my dad, now in intensive care with an elaborate oxygen mask and throat tube covering most of his face. He had barely survived an operation on his pancreas, a procedure in which he contracted a life-threatening infection. I leaned over and told him, not knowing if he could hear me. He lifted his right arm off the bed slowly with a clenched fist. Two weeks later his cancer was in remission for what turned out to be two more years.

I arrived in Embassy Skopje, housed in a former nursery school building to which very few ordinary security upgrades had been made. There was no security officer and no marines. It was one of the new embassies that had sprung up like mushrooms after the rains of change washed out both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia five years earlier. There were only a handful of staff members, including just one officer to manage all the political and economic and commercial relations with Macedonia. There were a couple of administrative officers to oversee the myriad tasks associated with transforming a nursery school into a U.S. embassy, and there were consular operations.

I selected a deputy chief of mission from a list given to me by the State Department’s human resources personnel. Paul Jones was in his mid-thirties and had already worked in Latin America, Moscow, and, most recently, Sarajevo. He had wisdom and instincts well beyond his years. I interviewed Paul for what was to be an hourlong meeting. But after hearing him out for a minute, using an old Holbrooke trick I told him, “You’re hired. When can you get out there?”

• • •

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.

I
n 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.