WE HAD BEEN KEEPING a low profile with the press. The fact that the war was taking place in Europe rather than Central Africa made it easier for the major media outlets to cover it. The fact that, once again, Milosevic and Ambassador Holbrooke seemed to be facing off, made it more interesting. But our team was instructed not to give interviews or to encourage the press to follow us as we did our work.
For the most part this was fine. The reporters generally had better things to do, but occasionally, they would come around asking for a quote or an interview. A real USAID officer had arrived, and I turned over the humanitarian portfolio to him. But I picked up the role of press attaché for our team. The Embassy had a full-time press officer in Pristina, but we were beginning to operate as a bit of an independent organization finally, so I took on the role.
Mostly, what this meant was saying “no” to people. No, you can’t have an interview. No I can’t give you a quote. No, please don’t follow us around. But one evening the team chief, Shaun, came to me and asked me to organize a press briefing and tour. I was to gather up as many of the international reporters as I could and get them to follow me around for the day.
I made some phone calls and let people know they could come by the office in the morning and that they would have full, on-the-record, access, cameras invited to follow, whatever they wanted to see or film was OK. But it was only for the day and it was only with me.
The next morning there were probably a dozen media vehicles out front. CBS had sent a film crew and a reporter. The New York Times sent a photographer. The AP, and several European services were present. I walked out and explained that for the day we were “on-the-record,” and then pointed out on my map where we were going. They could film, photograph, record, write whatever they needed. We rolled out of the gate a few minutes later, and our caravan was off.
Our first stop was Kishna Reka, an IDP camp up in the Berisha Mountains. There were probably around 3,000 IDPs up there, many of whom I knew by sight because we had made a habit of stopping in every few days when we could to check on them.
The road up was rocky and treacherous, but passable. Nonetheless we often parked about halfway up and walked the last kilometer into the area. When we reached the top, Allen Pizzey from CBS News was waiting.
“I wanted to get a shot of your vehicle winding up this hill,” he said.
How the hell did you beat us up here, I wondered. “Oh, well…” I didn’t know what to say. My partner, Rob, who was notoriously pressaverse, volunteered to walk back down the hill and drive up to give the cameraman a chance to get what would actually be some B-Roll footage.
We wandered through the camp with Allen, Anne Thompson from the AP, and a handful of others. Throughout, I would have some sort of interaction with the IDPs and the reporters and photographers would crowd around. For me it was a pretty normal day in the camp.
It took a couple of hours to wander through the camp so that most of the reporters got enough for a story. Still, about half of them followed us to another village near Suva Reka where we were checking to see if some books had been delivered to a school, as we had arranged. An hour’s drive, another hour wandering around the town to find out that, no, they had not been delivered.
By that time it was early afternoon and the press had lost interest. No worries, I thought, we had done our job. We had served as a distraction.
A few days earlier, eighteen women, children, and elderly members of a single family had been killed by Serbian police in a small village called Gornje Obrinje. The same day an MUP officer had murdered thirteen men in the village of Golubovac. But one young man had survived the Golubovac massacre. Selman Morina, witness, survivor of a war crime, was badly wounded in the leg and arm. We needed to get him out of the province.
Someone up the line, Holbrooke maybe, but I really don’t know, had made a deal with the Serbs that would allow us to take him out to Skopje, Macedonia for medical treatment. I was the distraction that kept the press busy so Morina could be quietly ferried to Skopje.
Once they learned what had happened, what I had done, many of the reporters were pissed. But we kept Morina alive and got him in front of the war crimes tribunal investigators, and they got stories. CBS had a nice four or five-minute piece about an American diplomat trying to save lives in the mountains of Kosovo. The similar AP story, accompanied by a photograph, ran in newspapers around the world. My aunt in North Carolina sent a copy of the story from her local paper to my mom. A friend at an NGO sent me a copy of the story from Denmark. It ran in “Stars and Stripes.”
But despite small successes, things weren’t going very well. The negotiations between Holbrooke and Milosevic were failing because Milosevic thought the U.S. was bluffing about using force. NATO was authorized to strike targets in Serbia, but Milosevic still refused to halt his operations against civilians in Kosovo.
Washington asked us to put together a survey of damaged housing. Apparently someone wanted to be able to point to a number and say that the Serbian forces had damaged X percent of houses and destroyed Y percent. I was tasked to put this together. In fact, it would have been a daunting task for a cartographer, but I developed a relatively simple plan with an easy matrix that worked.
“Drive down the main roads of Kosovo,” I told our teams. “Whichever villages you can see from the roads, estimate how many houses fall into each of these categories: level one, no damage or lightly damaged, the structure would be habitable with window or door replacement; level two, major damage, a large hole in a wall or part of a roof missing; level three, roof off, burned.”
This admittedly amateurish methodology allowed us to survey an estimated 20,000 homes. Of course, the damage varied widely with some villages suffering 10% level one damage and some with 90% level three. We sent the information to the embassy in Belgrade. The North Atlantic Council agreed on an Activation Order, one step closer to beginning combat operations against Serbia.
Our boss and his deputy developed an evacuation strategy that would send a team or two to Skopje each day until we were gradually all out of the country in the last hours before the NATO deadline. Some people on the team welcomed the opportunity to go for a couple days’ rest in Skopje, while others wanted to be in the last truck to cross the border. I was in the latter camp.
But a few days after we had run our diversion on the reporters, I came back to the office after a mission to report that my truck was acting up. These big Suburbans had been collected from embassies all over the world and flown to Belgrade, then driven to Kosovo. They were behemoths, weighted down with steel plating and inches-thick polycarbonate windows. Mine had starting running poorly on the road back to Pristina.
I told our deputy, and he glanced at the boss. They said more or less in tandem, “Take it down to the motor pool in Skopje and drop it off for repair.”
I asked if I would be allowed to come back that evening. Our deputy said, “Absolutely.” I took off. When I arrived in Skopje, I learned that I had been assigned a room in the Hotel Aleksandar Palace and wouldn’t be going back after all.
I was pissed at myself for being so gullible. I should have let someone else drive the truck down, someone who wanted to leave. I was afraid my war was over.
We spent a few days in Skopje, eating at new and different restaurants, drinking a lot, and staring at the news on TV, watching for any sign. Just a day or two before I had been tricked into leaving Kosovo, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Belgrade called to tell me I had been promoted within the Foreign Service. This was a surprise since none of the work I was doing in Kosovo could have appeared in my file that went before the promotion panel. Nonetheless, I decided to throw a small party.
I invited all of my colleagues and a few of the reporters and NGO staff that had come out with us to join me at a restaurant. I threw a couple hundred dollars at the owner and told him to keep the food and wine coming. It lasted an hour or two but by then everyone else’s wallets had come out, too.
I was pretty drunk and so were many of the others. NGO workers, reporters, soldiers, diplomats, are all similar in some ways—adventure seekers, highly competent, borderline intellectuals, drinkers. We drank until late in the evening; somehow we made it back to the hotel. The next morning we learned that Milosevic had blinked. We were going back in, but it was to be a vastly different mission.
Our little team would be replaced by a large international mission, to be run by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. That mission would be called the Kosovo Verification Mission, KVM. Their job would be to verify the withdrawal of the VJ (the Serbian Army) from Kosovo, and of the other elements of the agreement between Milosevic and Holbrooke.