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

by Christopher R. Hill

  Holbrooke introduced each member of the delegation: Jim Pardew from the Pentagon, Wes Clark from the Joint Chiefs, General Don Kerrick from the NSC, Bob Owen, and me, whom he described to Milosevic as someone close to Bob Frasure. Milosevic looked us all over carefully. I’m sure he recalled my previous meeting in the fall, when in response to his point that the United States could not maintain sanctions against Yugoslavia because of lost business opportunities, I responded somewhat curtly that the United States could keep up the sanctions against Serbia for decades if need be. Look at Cuba, I said, thinking perhaps that finally we had discovered a purpose in the Cuban embargo. That comment had not been well received, but, on the other hand, Milosevic seemed to have a pretty thick skin.

  Milosevic, as Bob had long believed and I was now convinced, was ready to settle. He had not lifted a finger for the Bosnian Serb forces during their defeat in the spring and summer months, and now he wanted to get on with the challenge of implementing the Contact Group plan that essentially split Bosnia into two entities, giving the Serbs living there much of what they had wanted. Our concern about Milosevic all along was not whether he could coerce the Bosnian Serbs, but whether he could actually be accepted as their representative when the endgame came. The relationships between the Serb nationalists in Bosnia and former communist power structure types like Milosevic was far more complex than anyone in the West could understand. Milosevic was no one’s favorite among the Serbs. For the nationalists, he was a former communist, and for the former communists, he was a nationalist. In fact, Milosevic’s loyalties stayed very close to home, but he wanted respect from us, and was clearly prepared to pay to get it in the form of a Bosnian settlement.

  Though NATO bombing of Serb positions was front-page news throughout the world, Milosevic never mentioned it in our initial discussions. He turned the subject to the negotiations:

  “I have been busy,” he said, reaching inside his blue blazer to pull out a piece of paper. Its contents were astounding. Milosevic had reached an agreement with the Bosnian Serb leadership, witnessed by the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, to make him, Milosevic, their sole representative for the purpose of the negotiations. I was shocked at the sweep of what had just happened. Milosevic gave the Serbian-language documents to Holbrooke; I was sitting next to him and took it from his hand to see what was actually in it. The one-page paper was extraordinary and I knew immediately it meant that our negotiation would succeed where others had failed because Milosevic had finally acknowledged or at least created via the patriarch the linkage to the Bosnian Serbs that was necessary for negotiation.

  A sustainable peace process, which had eluded us for years, was now at hand, and in fact in my hand. A war that had claimed so many lives, and was claiming more lives that very night, could really be brought to an end. As I made my way slowly through the brief Cyrillic text and studied the scrawled signatures to try to decipher whose was whose, I thought about Bob. Holbrooke listened as I read out a translation (with Milosevic trying to help me) and finally said to me: “I wish Bob were here to see this.” I knew I would choke up if I tried to say something. I just nodded. After years of this war, we were going to be the ones to end it.

  The meeting continued for hours, until well after midnight. Conversations with Milosevic never followed a linear course. They flowed into historical discussions about the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, World War II, then New York City, where he spent his youth as a Yugoslav banker. Milosevic would then describe his (always grandiose) plans for the Yugoslav economy, drift back to New York, and so forth. Side conversations began to ensue and I got to know Bojan, the son of a diplomat, as we talked about attending international schools around the world.

  Dick ducked out for the occasional phone call, which he would invariably describe as coming from the White House, though most of us suspected they were from his wife, Kati, in New York. Milosevic was at pains to differentiate himself from the Bosnian Serbs, at one point to our amusement calling them “shit.” That was a reminder for me that no matter how well one learns a foreign language (and Milosevic’s English was pretty good), swearing in it can never be mastered.

  When the meeting finally adjourned, we left for the Hyatt hotel on the other side of the Drina River and were met by the first of many gaggles of reporters that would follow us through the entire shuttle. The press was always curious about the marathon meetings with Milosevic and what was really being discussed. Were we giving away Bosnian towns to the Serbs? I watched Holbrooke deliver his lines and marveled at his capacity to speak in complete paragraphs without pause, while saying so little about the talks that had lasted eight entire hours with Milosevic. He would also give the press some memorable lines that would drown out everything else, such as “We come on a mission of peace at a moment of war.” It was a line he had not rehearsed nor to my knowledge used in any of the meetings with anyone. In a stroke, it captured the essence of our endeavors and of our mission. When someone has a line like that, who cares if he reveals nothing else?

  What Holbrooke did not tell the press that day was the plan hatched with Milosevic to have the three foreign ministers go to Geneva and announce an agreement of some kind. To Holbrooke the exact kind of agreement was secondary. He would figure out that detail later. “Remember, Chris, logistics are always more important than substance. That will come later.” Milosevic had pressed Holbrooke for a conference to decide the entire issue of Bosnia, but Holbrooke, having just met with Izetbegovic in Paris, knew that the Bosnians were not ready for a high-wire act of that kind.

  After Belgrade we dashed off to Zagreb, Croatia, where we met President Franjo Tudjman to brief him on the discussions in Belgrade and to convince him of the value of holding a foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva. Unlike Milosevic, who would be accompanied by a maximum of two or three people in his meetings with us, Tudjman would assemble his entire cabinet, including a formal arrival ceremony at the presidential palace. The ceremony never came off the way Tudjman’s protocol staff planned. Each time we arrived at the front entrance, manned by guards in uniforms that resembled something from an overbudgeted version of The Wizard of Oz, Holbrooke would step into the entryway, Tudjman and his retinue visible far ahead in the palatial greeting area, and immediately turn left to use the men’s room while the president and the entourage stood waiting. After Holbrooke answered nature’s call three visits in a row, the protocol chief implored me to suggest that he use the facilities at the airport, even though our cars pulled up to the plane on the tarmac, thus requiring another stop in the terminal building. It wasn’t going to happen. I gave it a shot with Holbrooke, but he wasn’t interested. “Chris, I appreciate your attention to detail. But this is too much.”

  Airplane flights always allowed for the best staff meetings even though there was no table and people had to perch on seats facing the wrong way or sit on the floor of the aircraft to hear. As we departed Zagreb that first visit, Holbrooke discussed how we had secured agreement from all parties to hold a foreign ministers’ meeting, but there was no agreement on what was to be done at it. Holbrooke turned to Bob Owen and said, “Let’s do up a document. We’ll call it Agreed Principles, and it will list the elements of the Contact Group plan, that is, things that have really already been agreed.” Thinking about the agonizing Washington clearance process, I asked how we could get that cleared in just a couple of days, moreover while we were on the road. “Don’t be a typical Foreign Service officer,” he said. This was a favorite epithet of Holbrooke’s. “You know the only thing worse than not having guidance from Washington is having guidance from Washington. Draw it up, Bob,” he said. With a glance at me he added, “I’ll take care of Chris’s concerns about Washington clearances.”

  7

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  Since arriving in Paris on August 28, the team had already visited Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo as well as Geneva, Berlin, Paris, and Brussels in a frenetic effort to gain support for the “Agreed Principles” t
hat we intended to announce in Geneva on September 8. But on Labor Day, September 4, 1995, with only three days until Geneva, I convinced Holbrooke to add two more stops en route to Ankara, Turkey. Based on a visit that the DOD representative Jim Pardew and I had made to Skopje on Friday, September 1, we were also going to stop in Athens and then Skopje to try to close the “interim accord,” a set of mutual obligations to be agreed to between Greece and Macedonia that would result in an end to the Greek economic embargo on Macedonia, which was strangling that small and troubled country in the south Balkans.

  The problem between the two countries might seem like a joke in the heads of a late-night comedian, but in the Balkans there was nothing funny about it. Greece objected to Macedonia’s use of a name that first appeared in Greek antiquity and had since served as a place-name for an area that included northern Greece and southernmost Yugoslavia. Macedonia was the name of Alexander the Great’s home kingdom, the Macedonians his tribe. When Tito fashioned Yugoslavia, he recognized that the Slavic people living in that southernmost part since around A.D. 700 (a thousand years after Alexander the Great) were not Serbs, as the Serbs were inclined to insist; however, neither were they Bulgarians, as the Bulgarians insisted. They were Macedonians, that is, people living in a region known as Macedonia.

  The Greeks accepted the creation of a “Republic of Macedonia” as long as it was a part of Yugoslavia. But when Yugoslavia broke up and the Macedonians like other republics created their own state via a referendum, the Greeks objected that an independent Republic of Macedonia was in effect a heist of intellectual property rights from ancient Greece and might imply a territorial claim on northern Greece, also a part of geographical Macedonia.

  The Macedonians were having their own bout with nationalism and did not help matters by the adopting of a flag that was based on a symbol from ancient Macedonia unearthed some years before in an archaeological dig near the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki. They were stirring up bitter memories among Greek-Americans, many of whom had been driven from their homes during the Greek Civil War in 1947. It was a war that had engaged a (largely) Slavic minority in northern Greece, in line with Tito’s ambitions to stretch his communist Yugoslav state all the way to the Aegean Sea. Whether it was a fight that dated from Alexander or represented a modern territorial dispute, the problem was not going away on its own. Meanwhile, Greece had imposed a blockade aimed at forcing the Republic of Macedonia to change its name and constitution and to abandon the symbols from the time of ancient Greece.

  By 1995, the issue had been mediated for some two years by both former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance, representing the United Nations, and Matthew Nimetz, a New York–based lawyer representing the United States. The two distinguished negotiators had worked tirelessly to get Athens and Skopje to negotiate an interim accord, one whose purpose was not the final resolution of the “name issue” but to put to rest other issues that made the narrower question of the name so intractable.

  The United States had a special interest because Macedonia was the one country in the Balkans in which the United States had agreed, primarily as a gesture of solidarity with beleaguered Europeans who were already deployed in Bosnia and Croatia, to station forces under UN command. Progress in Macedonia’s relationship with its southern neighbor would strengthen Macedonia’s stability and viability, and help it overcome its status as the most fragile new state in the Balkans.

  Vance and Nimetz had taken the talks as far as they could, but they now required an endgame. However, there was a serious problem. Macedonia would not sit down with the Greeks to negotiate the final points of the plan unless the Greek embargo was lifted. The Greeks would not sit down with the Macedonians unless the embargo remained in effect. For some two months, little progress was achieved.

  Just before we were to head to Paris and on to the Balkans, I had gone to see Holbrooke late at night, knocking perfunctorily on his door and walking in. It was the usual dark and forbidding office, with the table lights on and the overheads off. I told him I had an idea for how to break the Greek-Macedonian impasse. He was reading a memo on Bosnia.

  “Chris, I don’t have time for Macedonia now.” He was tired of listening to me about Macedonia. Admittedly, I had become a little obsessed with the idea that Macedonia-Greece was the low-hanging fruit of the Balkans, a place where most pickings seemed to require an extension ladder, but Dick didn’t mind people taking another run at him. He did it all the time to them.

  “Dick, we could solve this. Can you imagine what it will look like if our delegation swept into Skopje and Athens and came away with an agreement, a breakthrough that would really give us momentum for Bosnia?”

  He looked up from what he was reading. I think I had him on the words momentum and Bosnia.

  “Go on,” he said cautiously.

  “Here’s the idea: During our trip to the Balkans Jim and I will break off from the delegation to go to Skopje and offer the Macedonians to arbitrate the last few issues, based on consultations with them and the Greeks. The Macedonians and Greeks would then meet in New York for what would essentially be a one-day signing ceremony. No one, given the time zone differences, would remember whether the embargo was lifted in the morning or the afternoon. The sticking point is [Macedonian president] Kiro Gligorov. If he agrees, I would propose you head to Athens and Skopje and seal the deal.”

  “How will Matt and Cy react?” said Holbrooke, his wheels turning.

  “I’ve talked to Matt. He told me we are down to a few issues in the text, none of them deal breakers, really small items.”

  “Chris, if there is one thing I thought I had taught you, it is that there is no such thing as a small issue in the Balkans. Okay, what are they?”

  In seconds Holbrooke’s laser focus took him from barely knowing where Macedonia was on the map, to being a full-fledged expert on the minutiae of the Vance-Nimetz interim accord.

  “The problem is that every time Matt and Secretary Vance”—I could not refer to the former secretary of state, one of the most distinguished Americans alive, by his first name—“receive a proposed solution from the Greeks, the Macedonians object, and vice versa.”

  “So you would arbitrate it?”

  I leaned over from my chair and put both my hands on his desk: “No, not me. You! Based on conversations with the parties that you would have on the next trip. They would know what the ideas are, where we were heading with them, and accept them when presented with them at the negotiation-signing ceremony.”

  “Marshall okay with this?” Holbrooke asked, referring to Marshall Adair, head of the Greek office in the State Department. I told him he was (which he was, sort of). I asked Holbrooke whether I should brief Matt Nimetz. He thought for a second, tilting back on his chair behind his desk, his hands behind his head, and his elbows spread from what seemed like one end of the room to the other.

  “No, I’ll handle that.”

  On September 1, 1995, I went to Skopje to meet with Macedonian foreign minister Stevo Crvenkovski and President Gligorov. Jim Pardew from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, who was also a bit of a Macedonian enthusiast, accompanied me on the two-hour flight.

  I always enjoyed going to Skopje. I had visited it on several occasions since becoming the office director for the Balkans a year before. It was a quiet town, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire whose downtown was dominated by a hill and a Turkish fortress, much as it had been for four centuries. A stone bridge connected the older part of the town with the newer section, built after an earthquake had devastated the city in 1963. The bridge had survived for centuries, a testimony to Turkish engineering. Grainy old photographs on display in the ethnographic museum revealed its multiple uses. During late-nineteenth-century uprisings the Turks hanged insurgents off the sides, a warning to potential recruits to the cause.

  Macedonia was truly off the beaten track for journalists and officials alike. Under the steady leadership of its octogenarian president, Kiro Gligorov, it had managed
to gain its independence without a shot being fired. But its serious issues included an unhappy ethnic Albanian community in its western regions, bordering Albania and Kosovo; an unmarked border with Serbia proper on the north; Bulgarian neighbors to the east who maintained that Macedonians were Tito-ized Bulgarians and spoke a language which was a slightly Serbianized Bulgarian; and, of course, the issue with its southern neighbor, Greece.

  Jim and I arrived at Gligorov’s downtown office, part of the parliament building. It was a large, musty structure with red carpets that slid with every footstep over the marble floor. I went over the remaining points in the text with Foreign Minister Crvenkovski and President Gligorov, explaining how I would propose to resolve them, one in favor of them, the other in the Greeks’ favor, and so forth. Gligorov said very little, but both men agreed to the approach—provided, of course, that the Greeks would, too. I assured them that we had worked with the Greeks and would have them fully on board. President Gligorov explained the risk for his government, which had made it clear it would never sit down with the Greeks and negotiate under the pressure of an economic embargo. To do so, even for a day, would be politically risky. I assured him that the Greeks wanted to get through this as much as he did. “How can I trust them?” he countered. “You don’t have to,” I explained. “That is our problem, not yours. Your problem is whether you trust us.” I was rather proud of that line, and thought I might file it away for future use. So far, so good, I thought, as we headed back out to Skopje Airport.

  Jim and I flew on to Belgrade, where a U.S. Embassy car was waiting to drive us to Milosevic’s office to catch up to Holbrooke. We walked into the middle of a session and Holbrooke asked how it had gone. “We got it,” I answered. Milosevic was left to wonder what I was talking about.