Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (20 page)

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 Kosovo 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.

In Likove, we sat across the table from the “KLA spokesman,” a position I suspect had been created the moment our vehicle pulled into the driveway. In any case, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour had interviewed Jakup Krasniqi a few weeks before.

Krasniqi took a hard-line position on the ten-day delay, insisting that the swap be in perfect symmetry, with strict and complete reciprocity, a concept and condition that was the refuge of all Balkan officials, high and low. Bill Walker, seated on my left, said “enough of this” and stood up as if to leave. I grabbed his right sleeve and pulled him back down to his seat while I continued looking Krasniqi in the eye across the narrow wooden table.

“Mr. Krasniqi, why won’t you accept this proposal? Ten days is not very long.”

“How could I ever trust Milosevic?” he replied.

I was working through an interpreter, and wanting Krasniqi to understand everything, I spoke in short sentences to allow the interpreter to render each statement literally while I thought of the next line.

“Trust Milosevic? Mr. Krasniqi, that is not your problem. That is my
problem. Your problem is not whether you trust him, but rather whether you trust me. But before you answer whether you trust me, you need to understand something. If you don’t trust me, it means you don’t trust the American government. If you don’t trust the American government, you don’t trust the American people. And if you don’t trust the American people, you do not trust America. And Mr. Krasniqi”—this was the most fun I had had in months—“if you don’t trust America you are in very big trouble. So, Mr. Krasniqi, let me ask you. Do you trust America?”

The Serbs were released the following day, and the Albanians nine days after that.

That proved to be the last piece of good news we were to have. A few days later forty-five inhabitants of the small village of Racak were massacred, their bodies left in a drainage ditch. The massacre, the worst in months, was likened to the one carried out in Srebrenica, Bosnia, which had been the proximate cause of NATO action. The killings at Srebrenica, which totaled some seven thousand, were far greater in number, but the effect was similar. The Racak murders were denounced throughout the world and helped put military intervention on an inexorable path. Bill Walker, as head of the monitoring mission, went to the site and pronounced the Serbs guilty. Some criticized him for preempting the findings of the forensic team, but one doesn’t always need a forensic team to know the gist of what has happened, and Walker did the right thing, even though his candor earned Milosevic’s denunciation and expulsion (an order the sometimes-practical Milosevic later rescinded as NATO planes began to fuel up on their runways).

While Washington had long been ready to commit NATO airpower, other partners in the process and near to it, the Italians, wanted to give negotiation one last chance. Secretary Albright called me and asked what I thought of a face-to-face negotiation somewhere in Western Europe, one last try at it. I was no more enthusiastic about the idea than she was. Most concerning was the fact that while the Serbs were prepared to inch toward more autonomy, the Kosovo Albanian side would have no part of
the A-word. That had been the reason I had added the word
interim
to the plan I had been working to sell. Milosevic had not reacted well to the idea that the agreement should be a five-year plan, but I pressed for it as the only feasible approach given that Albanians were not prepared to give up on the historic mission to gain a Kosovo homeland.

Meanwhile, the Serbs made clear that they could negotiate many aspects of a new quality of autonomy for Kosovo but were not going to agree to a “republic” status for Kosovo, which would in effect take it completely out of Serbia. Nor were they prepared to accept “foreign troops” in any kind of implementing role.

• • •

Secretary Albright and her close advisors, especially her spokesperson Jamie Rubin, had long come to the conclusion that NATO would be involved, but she knew far better than others in Washington, including Rubin, that getting the Europeans on board was going to be difficult. Refusing to hold a negotiation on the basis that it would not work was not an option.

On January 29, the Contact Group foreign ministers summoned representatives of Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to attend peace negotiations at Rambouillet, France, a chateau just outside Paris, and to appear by February 6. The Contact Group set the time parameter at seven days, with an option to extend for another week. “Where did that [the time frame] come from?” I asked Phil Reeker, recalling that at Dayton we never set a time frame. “They have to know how much food to order,” he responded.

The parties arrived in Rambouillet on February 6. Whereas the Dayton talks took place at a large military base, surrounded by barbed wire, Rambouillet is a fourteenth-century château complete with turrets; from a distance it looks like a large Lego project. Not every room had its own bathroom, and many that did had been modernized some time around 1890. The French ambassador in Macedonia, my colleague Jacques Huntzinger, who also knew a thing or two about the Balkans and had been a key conduit to understanding French thinking on the Kosovo
crisis, was tasked by his government to assemble the Kosovo Albanian delegation and deliver them to the talks. Given the degree of antipathy that existed among the three-headed delegation—Rugova, the KLA, and the “independent intellectuals” from Pristina—I did not envy Jacques’s duties that day, herding them onto a plane and enduring the three-hour trip to Paris.

The morning the negotiations were to get under way, a front-page story in the
International Herald Tribune
reported that Holbrooke was giving the talks a fifty-fifty chance of success, odds I would have been pleased to have. I called him:

“Dick, I understand the fifty percent you have on failure, but I would be very interested in what your basis was for the other fifty percent.”

“Chris, you may have a point.”

No kidding. As we got under way, I saw little chance it could work, and decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter.

The Albanians, fractious as they were, nonetheless understood the need to negotiate, and the need to get to yes. The Serbs, in the absence of Milosevic, did not engage and seemed all ready to go into a fatalistic stall. The chief of the delegation was Milosevic’s former foreign minister, now prime minister, Milan Milutinovic, or as members of the U.S. delegation, especially those not speaking Serbian, called him, “Tuna.” Nikola Sainovic, Milosevic’s representative in Kosovo, was the deputy of the delegation.

I had spent considerable time in Kosovo with Sainovic, seeking to clear roads of Serb security forces and ensuring a flow of displaced persons back to their homes, as well as humanitarian access. He was intelligent, straightforward, and highly capable. But at Rambouillet he was a broken man. Just two weeks before, intercepts of his cell phone calls, leaked to the
Washington Post,
appeared to implicate him in ordering security forces to commit the Racak massacre. Sainovic understood what
those intercepts, now public knowledge, meant. Sooner or later he would be arrested for war crimes. (He was arrested on May 2, 2003, and was subsequently found guilty in 2008.)

The Yugoslav delegation did not negotiate, instead maintaining their fixation that there could be no foreign implementation of the agreement. “If the agreement is good and fair . . . no foreign force is necessary to make them implement it.” It was an internally logical statement, a classic Milosevic high school debater’s point, except that it made no sense at all. For their part, the Kosovo Albanians engaged but demanded that the document provide a path to independence.