Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (24 page)

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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 Albanians 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.

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.

M
acedonia 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 polarization 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.