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

by Christopher R. Hill

  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.

  With little or no progress to report in the first week, I met with Secretary Albright and her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, who was emerging as a substantive advisor on Kosovo. Madeleine asked what I thought of possibly making a trip to Belgrade to tell Milosevic that he’d better get serious on the negotiations.

  It was the first I had heard of the idea, though I didn’t think it was a bad one and wished I had thought of
it myself. It would have the advantage of showing that we were prepared to go the extra mile to warn Milosevic, and would have the added benefit of making clear to him what we thought of his delegation’s behavior. I had always found that Milosevic was at his worst when he hadn’t seen us recently and received a dose of reality. I told the secretary I would think about it, but thought it was a good idea.

  Just thirty minutes later, I, along with Wolfgang Petritsch and the Russian envoy, the affable, intelligent, but somewhat irrelevant Boris Majorsky, were seated in front of the press for our weekly press conference. The venue was a large indoor gymnasium, a basketball and volleyball facility in the village of Rambouillet. The reporters numbered into the hundreds. Phil Reeker, who had become the spokesman at Rambouillet (or, as I never tired of calling him, “the grim Reeker”), introduced us and called on the rock star of correspondents, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who also happened to be the wife of Jamie Rubin, to ask the first question.

  “This question is for Ambassador Hill. Ambassador, have you given any thought to making a trip to Belgrade to meet with Milosevic?” I realized that this idea was gaining currency.

  On February 16, I flew to Belgrade in a U.S. military aircraft with Petritsch. Milosevic had long since lost any confidence that the process could lead to an outcome acceptable to the Serbs, but his inability to think strategically meant that he was going to make the job easier for us. He loudly rejected any role whatsoever for NATO, a sine qua non for any conceivable solution. He had never quite gotten over the inclusion of the word interim. To Milosevic, it felt like the eastern Slovenian agreement during the first week of Dayton, which had led to the imposition of Croatian sovereignty in that region. Interim was simply a means to give the Serbs in Kosovo “time to run away.”

  To the extent I ever had any ability to reach Milosevic, it was fast depleting that winter. For the first time he tried to insist that I also see his new foreign minister, a clear sign that the Milosevic channel was coming to an end. I objected to seeing Foreign Minister Vladislav Jovanovic at all, pointing out to Milosevic that he did not seem to me in the loop, and, without being too tough on the foreign minister, questioned whether he was intellectually up to such issues. For a second, Milosevic showed a sign of his old self.

  “You know, Serbian people are very proud that their foreign minister is a genuine Serbian peasant.”

  But as uncooperative as the Serbs were being—and conveniently so as the goal increasingly became an effort to convince doubting Europeans and Russians that there was no other alternative—the Albanians were not much better.

  Jamie Rubin was of the view that the real leader of the Kosovo delegation was Hashim Thaci and that Albright should focus her efforts on him. Jamie had begun to pay attention exclusively to Thaci, even going so far as to recommend combinations of suits and ties for him to wear. For all the time I have met and worked with foreigners, it would never have occurred to me to tell one of them how to match a shirt and a tie, such was Jamie’s attention to detail. But Jamie had a definite point about focusing on Thaci as an eventual leader, a point that would be validated some years later when Thaci was elected prime minister.

  I had no problem with a focus on Thaci, especially the need to get him on board, but given our reluctant European allies, on whose continent this war was raging, I believed we should play it straight with the others as well, and not put ourselves into domestic Kosovo politics, favoring those who engaged in violent resistance over those who for decades had not. I knew Rugova had enormous popularity (he would eventually be elected president in a free Kosovo) and that a tilt toward the KLA leadership might not serve us well, especially as we knew very little about Thaci at the time, whether he was a leader or a front for someone else. American foreign policy is replete with stories of supporting the more aggressive player in a civil war, only to find that that aggressive player was not at all our player. Since the Peace Corps I knew how fraught the process of picking someone else’s leadership could be.

  Getting tough with the Albanians to get them to yes was not made any easier by their use of cell phones, a device that had not been as prevalent at Dayton in 1995. Tough talk with them would often result in someone calling one of their many supporters in Washington, who in turn would call the State Department and complain. Life in the big city, I explained to Phil and Tina.

  The Kosovo Albanians allegedly did not really believe that NATO would come to Kosovo; instead they suspected the entire negotiation was a ruse of some kind to induce them to accept autonomy rather than independence; then, for whatever reason, NATO would not come to be part of the implementation. Wes Clark called to tell me he understood that this lack of trust was an enormous problem within the Kosovo delegation, but that he was willing to help by coming to Rambouillet whenever I needed him. “Just say the word and I’ll be there,” he told me. Other acquaintances of mine in Washington sent emails and suggested the same. “Bring Clark to Rambouillet,” I told Tina and Phil. “There is something fishy in Brussels.”

  American generals do not get four stars on their shoulders by accepting no for an answer (something I was to learn again when I was assigned to Iraq), but the French, who wanted no part of it, were resisting mightily Clark’s “send me in, coach” campaign. I said to Clark that, given that U.S. forces in Europe had well over one hundred thousand troops, surely someone, say a colonel doing planning for the Kosovo mission, could meet with the doubting Thomases of the Albanian delegation? No, the answer kept coming back from Clark. “I’m the only one who can put their concerns to rest.”

  Finally, the French agreed that Clark would meet the Kosovars at a nearby French air base, which he did on February 22. That was as close as Clark was going to get to Rambouillet.

  Just before the recess that was set to be called two weeks into the process, Thaci, to our great concern, left the conference on February 18, returning two days later with even tougher demands. He never said where he had gone, though the suspicion was that he went to see Adem Demaci, the firebrand self-appointed political leader of the KLA, who had refused to take part in Rambouillet. For months, Demaci had made outlandish and outlying pronouncements to the press in Pristina, so much so that the Serbs never interfered with him, such was his contribution to their argument that the KLA was simply a group of crazed radicals.

  “Why can’t you agree to this?” I asked Thaci, truly not understanding whether he comprehended the near-fatal consequences for the Kosovars of a “no” answer.

  “It is you who doesn’t understand,” he replied. “If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me.”

  The Rambouillet conference was extended for three days at the request of the Contact Group ministers, who were spending more and more time at the meetings, between their duties managing their countries’ affairs in every other part of the world. I marveled at the amount of time busy senior officials had for the problems of Kosovo, whose total population could fit into a small section of Beijing, Seoul, or Tokyo.

  On the last day of the extended session, the Contact Group ministers met with the Serb head of delegation, Milutinovic. Tuna danced around as best he could but finally had to admit his country could not accept the presence of foreign troops on its soil and therefore could not accept the agreement.

  The Kosovo Albanian delegation was completely split as the hour drew near. Thaci had become incommunicado; nor was Rugova prepared to take the lead. With hours to go, we were in a situation where both sides were saying no, an excuse for some of the assembled Contact Group ministers to wash their hands of the entire affair. Wolfgang and I went into the Albanian delegation room, an ornate, refurbished lower-floor room made of granite and wood paneling, richly appointed with tapestries. As I began my plea a cell phone started ringing, and an embarrassed Kosovar struggled to find the mute button.

  “Turn that thing off,” I said, “because whoever is calling you cannot possibly have something more important to tell you than what I am about to say.”

 
; My interpreter, Bix Aliu, an Albanian-American who had been living in Skopje and had accompanied me through many experiences in Kosovo, delivered my lines with great precision. Although an American through and through (he would soon go on to become a Foreign Service officer), Bix could not help but feel a sense that Kosovo’s moment had arrived, but that its leadership, all assembled in that room, was failing it.

  “We have come a long way together, but this is the end of the road. If you do not accept this agreement, there is nothing I or anyone else can do for you. So now it is your choice.”

  Wolfgang made a similar plea and we left the room. I slumped down on a stair step outside the room and accepted a cigarette from Jamie Rubin, as if taking up Jamie’s smoking habit would help. We waited.

  After a half hour, Veton Surroi emerged. Veton was one of the nonaligned group members, neither KLA nor LDK, whom I had never found all that enjoyable to deal with over the past nine months, and who hadn’t seemed to have much support among the others in the delegation. I was aware of that when he was banned from my meetings with the KLA leadership in Likove a few months before. He told Wolfgang and me that he had been asked to speak for the Albanian delegation to the Contact Group foreign ministers. His word was good enough for me, since there didn’t appear to be any other approach on the table.

  I escorted him into the room where the Contact Group foreign ministers were meeting and told them that Surroi had an announcement for them. He said that the delegation accepted the plan but would need time to return to Kosovo to build support among the people there, since some aspects of it, namely autonomy rather than independence, would be problematic for them. That the delegation had to return to Kosovo did not please all the foreign ministers, but Secretary Albright made sure they understood that Veton’s message was a yes.