Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (17 page)

Yugoslavia’s longtime leader Tito, to square the circle of Kosovo’s inhabitants having their own rights, had created autonomous provinces. Kosovo would have all the rights and responsibilities of the six republics of Yugoslavia, but those rights and responsibilities would be expressed from within a province belonging to Serbia. As if not to make Kosovo the only such province in Yugoslavia, Tito also gave Vojvodina a similar status. Vojvodina is the part of Serbia north of the Danube and is historically linked to neighboring Hungary, with a substantial Hungarian population. With the departure of German landowners after World War II and the influx of Serbs looking for better agricultural land, Vojvodina had become more Serbianized. The solution: Vojvodina would also enjoy autonomous province status and would, like Kosovo, become one of the eight constituent parts of Yugoslavia.

But Kosovo was having none of it, and pressure for a separate republic intensified as the Dayton Peace Accords, taking up Bosnia, reduced Yugoslavia to a kind of Serbo-Slavia. When Milosevic abolished the Yugoslav constitution and began to centralize powers that had previously been given to the republics and provinces, Kosovo began to stir again.

Albanians were also upset that their issues had not been raised during the Dayton talks, an expectation that had no basis for being met as the Bosnian peace process had never envisioned including the Kosovo situation. I was more aware of Kosovo than some others because I had served in neighboring Albania, but as concerned as I was from several trips there in 1994
and in 1995, I realized that compared to the brutal ongoing war in Bosnia, the issue of Kosovo could not be included in already complex talks. When Albanian-American demonstrators came to the gates of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to protest that Kosovo was not on the agenda and demanding to meet with the U.S. negotiating team, Milosevic asked Holbrooke to keep me from meeting with them. Not to my surprise, because he was so focused on Bosnia, Holbrooke agreed to Milosevic’s request and sent instead the chargé of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Rudy Perina.

By the spring of 1998 it was clear that Kosovo’s time in the Balkan Wars had come. As a Kosovo Albanian leader said to me, “It is where it began and where it will end.” The proximate cause was the growth of a Kosovar armed resistance movement that was fast looking to remove the Gandhi-like presence of Ibrahim Rugova as the leader of Kosovo’s independence aspirations. Holbrooke’s first successor in the Balkans was John Kornblum, but by the start of Kosovo’s crisis the reins had been handed to Bob Gelbard. Gelbard was a smart Foreign Service officer whose professional experience was primarily in Latin America, dealing with leaderships tied to the narcotics trade. Gelbard had a passion about his work, but in dealing with Balkan leaders, he fell back on his experience in Latin America and treated many as drug lords.

Gelbard’s approach to his interlocutors was straightforward and brutally honest, excessively so. In the United States, honesty and clarity are often considered virtues, especially on the public speaking circuit. But to people on the rest of the planet, it can be a mixed blessing at best. And in diplomacy, especially involving mediation, a stray comment can become deadly.

In February 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a fast-growing force in the countryside. It had a historical grievance to be sure, but it also had been armed to the teeth with military weaponry looted the previous year during Albania’s “pyramid scheme” meltdown. In Albania’s case, financial institutions took money from the public and at first paid out enormous dividends. Soon those dividends began to shrink, and within months they had disappeared. When the United Nations
imposed trade sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992, the Italian mafia moved in and the oil companies, complying with sanction resolutions, moved out.

Enormous quantities of gasoline were shipped up the Albanian coast, arriving in the port of Vlora and departing Albania through Lake Shkodra, en route to Yugoslavia. The mafia-controlled oil shipments created other business opportunities, and soon Albania, no stranger to organized crime, was in the clutches of the international mafia. They were not so much Ponzi schemes, which was what the international press had concluded, as they were money-laundering facilities, a fraud committed against naïve Albanians experiencing their first taste of capitalism.

After the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, normal international trade was reestablished with Yugoslavia, and the underpinning of those money-laundering facilities in Albania, principally from gasoline smuggling, began to decline through 1996 and 1997 as the big money moved elsewhere. When the larger investment schemes completely collapsed in early 1997, civil unrest broke out in several of Albania’s cities. By March, Albania was in complete chaos, as cities began to fall into the hands of well-financed gangs. Government armories were looted and Western embassies began to evacuate their citizens. The U.S. ambassador in Tirana delayed ordering the evacuation in the hopes the situation would improve. Ultimately, the delay resulted in an eventual helicopter evacuation of nine hundred U.S. citizens on what turned out to be one of the most violent days of the disturbances.

From neighboring Macedonia I could see that Albanian government stood on the brink of collapse. By the time order was restored with the help of Italian troops, an estimated three million weapons had been looted, many of them sold to gangs in Kosovo, many of which in turn would soon reemerge as elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The KLA operated sporadically in Kosovo in 1996, but in 1997 attacks on Serb security forces grew more numerous and more deadly. Serb forces responded, and soon Kosovo was engulfed in war. In Macedonia,
the public watched with increasing alarm as Kosovo began to descend into chaos.

The KLA, whose ranks of Kosovo patriots also included former smugglers and armed gangs, was careful to keep the identity of its leaders a secret and its politics tightly controlled. Such a level of secrecy helped frame myths that the KLA fighters were Islamic terrorists, Marxist guerrillas, or, in the fertile imagination of Albania haters, both. One fact was clear: Ibrahim Rugova’s leadership did not impress the KLA. In part, that was based on Kosovo’s clan structures. There were also regional issues at play, but more fundamentally it reflected a growing popular feeling that Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) had become corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the public, a reputation that also started catching on with Western nongovernmental organizations, which were now done with Bosnia and facing a steep learning curve in Kosovo.

The United States had long considered Rugova the leader of Kosovo’s political aspirations. I first met him at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Belgrade in July 1989, just days after Milosevic’s infamous visit to Kosovo for the six hundredth anniversary of the great battle, an event that helped drive the Serbs to war. A quiet academic who would not be easily identified as a politician, he spoke in measured tones about the step-by-step process the Kosovars were on, explaining the underground school system his movement had started and funded. Rugova saw little hope in Milosevic but was prepared to meet with him if it could lead to a better outcome.

There are no secrets in the Balkans—it’s too small a place—but it was clear that Rugova’s aim was complete independence, nothing less. He was nonetheless strategically patient about how and when he could achieve his goal. More fundamentally, he shared with most Albanians in Kosovo a deep trust and abiding faith in the United States.

In February 1998, Special Envoy Gelbard, in a misplaced effort at evenhandedness, condemned Serbian police activities in Kosovo but went on to say that the KLA was a terrorist group, remarking after meeting
two members of the KLA, “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.”

Gelbard’s remarks about terrorism spiked tensions within Kosovo and caused huge concern that the Serbs would view them as a green light to attack the KLA wherever they could find them. In fact, Serb authorities had long viewed the KLA as a terrorist organization, and whether Gelbard’s comments had any bearing on the situation is doubtful. But within weeks, the Serbs moved aggressively into the Drenica Valley, the heart of the KLA, and attacked the compound of a known KLA commander, Adem Jashari, where they killed him and his entire family of sixteen, including children.

The Serb action was universally condemned, but Gelbard’s own vigorous denunciation of the Serb action, perhaps influenced by his frustration at being blamed for contributing to the Serb rampage, was particularly hard-edged against Milosevic.

An envoy, for which access to all parties is essential, does not always have the luxury of speaking out publicly. That task can be left to all sorts of people in Washington, many of whom rarely travel, let alone have exclusive access to Balkan dictators. I was told that Gelbard compounded his problem during a meeting with Milosevic, his last, when he pounded his fist on the table. He was praised in Washington for his directness, but in Belgrade was shown to the door and never granted another meeting on his own.

With the situation on the ground now deteriorating fast, the Clinton administration had no one who could meet with Milosevic. For many in both the “liberal hawk” and the growing neoconservative movements, lack of access to a dictator was hardly a disadvantage. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had replaced Warren Christopher in 1997, knew all too well from her days as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations what her European colleagues thought of intervention on behalf of the Kosovars, whose case they viewed as straightforward separatism, with all that implied in many such situations on the continent, whether in Spain or Northern Ireland. Albright, who personally found Milosevic
repulsive, knew that like it or not, we needed an envoy who could talk to him and vigorously follow the negotiating track until it was obvious, or could be made obvious to our allies and partners in the process, that no progress was possible.

In early May, Secretary Albright called me in Skopje and asked if in addition to my duties as ambassador to Macedonia I could take on the full-time job of Kosovo envoy. I was not surprised by the call, having been tipped off that it was coming. I knew it would mean that in splitting my duties I would be spending more time in Kosovo than in Macedonia. I worried whether being a peace envoy between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians held much prospect for success. Diplomacy is a little like hitting in baseball. If you succeed one out of three times you are probably doing well. Nonetheless I told the secretary I would do it. Besides, her request didn’t seem like an offer I could refuse.

After explaining the impossible situation Gelbard had put himself in with Milosevic (Holbrooke had already done so in great detail and with great zeal), Albright told me she had asked Gelbard to focus full-time on the upcoming Bosnian elections. She requested that I go to London to meet with Holbrooke, who, although now in the private sector, was acting as a consultant with the administration (and would within the next year become the UN ambassador, replacing Bill Richardson). After meeting in London, we would fly to Belgrade, and Holbrooke would reintroduce me to Milosevic.

Dick had been out of the game for two years. He had made lots more money in the private sector, “client skiing,” as he explained his duties to me. It was clear that he relished being back and was looking forward to the meeting with Milosevic.

Milosevic greeted Dick and me as if we were long-lost friends. As we walked into the White Palace in Belgrade, he offered a stiff handshake to our highly capable chargé d’affaires, Richard Miles. Milosevic always blamed the local diplomat if he had a problem with another country, and he knew he had a problem with us.

Milosevic gestured to chairs we were familiar with and began to recall all the great times we had had together in Dayton; meanwhile, Dick and I wondered how Richard Miles was taking all this in. We practically fell out of those chairs when Milosevic tried out a joke in his article- and preposition-deprived English: “You know what was most important accomplishment of Dayton?” He was recalling the difficulties we had had with Izetbegovic during the last hectic hours. “Americans,” he said, “finally learned what is like to live with Muslims!” The Serb leader then chuckled at his own line.

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.