In the spring of 1998, the Balkans was set for another convulsion, this time in Kosovo, the Serbian province whose majority population of Albanians chafed at being ruled by Belgrade. Serbs often describe the Battle of Kosovo in June 1389 as the crucible of the Serb nation. They lost to a superior force from the Ottoman Empire, but in the retelling of the story, complete with a martyred Prince Lazar, Serb identity was supposedly born. The actual history of the battle is, of course, more complex. For starters, it is not clear who fought on whose side, though most historians agree that what are now called Albanians almost certainly fought alongside the Serbs and others resisting the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans, not the other way around, as is often explained by the Serbs. Indeed, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Albanians, under the leadership of George Skanderbeg, fought battle after battle against the Ottoman occupation. Every Balkan nationality had its stories of struggle against the Ottoman Empire, but for the Serbs, their struggles seem in their mind’s eye to eclipse all others. Outside the town of Nis, four hours southeast of Belgrade, there sits atop a grassy knoll a round tower some twenty feet high, built by the Turks entirely out of porous concrete—and thousands of skulls belonging to the victims of a Serb uprising in 1805.
The Dayton Peace Accords of November 1995 had reconfigured what was left of Yugoslavia to a rump state consisting of two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. Within Serbia were the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. As the centerpiece of Serbia’s historical narrative, the Serbs would not allow Kosovo to be its own republic, so that it would stay within the Serbian republic.
Yugoslavia’s longtime leader Tito, to square the circle of Kosovo’s inhabitants having their own rights, had created autonomous provinces. Kosovo would have all the rights and responsibilities of the six republics of Yugoslavia, but those rights and responsibilities would be expressed from within a province belonging to Serbia. As if not to make Kosovo the only such province in Yugoslavia, Tito also gave Vojvodina a similar status. Vojvodina is the part of Serbia north of the Danube and is historically linked to neighboring Hungary, with a substantial Hungarian population. With the departure of German landowners after World War II and the influx of Serbs looking for better agricultural land, Vojvodina had become more Serbianized. The solution: Vojvodina would also enjoy autonomous province status and would, like Kosovo, become one of the eight constituent parts of Yugoslavia.
But Kosovo was having none of it, and pressure for a separate republic intensified as the Dayton Peace Accords, taking up Bosnia, reduced Yugoslavia to a kind of Serbo-Slavia. When Milosevic abolished the Yugoslav constitution and began to centralize powers that had previously been given to the republics and provinces, Kosovo began to stir again.
Albanians were also upset that their issues had not been raised during the Dayton talks, an expectation that had no basis for being met as the Bosnian peace process had never envisioned including the Kosovo situation. I was more aware of Kosovo than some others because I had served in neighboring Albania, but as concerned as I was from several trips there in 1994 and in 1995, I realized that compared to the brutal ongoing war in Bosnia, the issue of Kosovo could not be included in already complex talks. When Albanian-American demonstrators came to the gates of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to protest that Kosovo was not on the agenda and demanding to meet with the U.S. negotiating team, Milosevic asked Holbrooke to keep me from meeting with them. Not to my surprise, because he was so focused on Bosnia, Holbrooke agreed to Milosevic’s request and sent instead the chargé of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Rudy Perina.
By the spring of 1998 it was clear that Kosovo’s time in the Balkan Wars had come. As a Kosovo Albanian leader said to me, “It is where it began and where it will end.” The proximate cause was the growth of a Kosovar armed resistance movement that was fast looking to remove the Gandhi-like presence of Ibrahim Rugova as the leader of Kosovo’s independence aspirations. Holbrooke’s first successor in the Balkans was John Kornblum, but by the start of Kosovo’s crisis the reins had been handed to Bob Gelbard. Gelbard was a smart Foreign Service officer whose professional experience was primarily in Latin America, dealing with leaderships tied to the narcotics trade. Gelbard had a passion about his work, but in dealing with Balkan leaders, he fell back on his experience in Latin America and treated many as drug lords.
Gelbard’s approach to his interlocutors was straightforward and brutally honest, excessively so. In the United States, honesty and clarity are often considered virtues, especially on the public speaking circuit. But to people on the rest of the planet, it can be a mixed blessing at best. And in diplomacy, especially involving mediation, a stray comment can become deadly.
In February 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a fast-growing force in the countryside. It had a historical grievance to be sure, but it also had been armed to the teeth with military weaponry looted the previous year during Albania’s “pyramid scheme” meltdown. In Albania’s case, financial institutions took money from the public and at first paid out enormous dividends. Soon those dividends began to shrink, and within months they had disappeared. When the United Nations imposed trade sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992, the Italian mafia moved in and the oil companies, complying with sanction resolutions, moved out.
Enormous quantities of gasoline were shipped up the Albanian coast, arriving in the port of Vlora and departing Albania through Lake Shkodra, en route to Yugoslavia. The mafia-controlled oil shipments created other business opportunities, and soon Albania, no stranger to organized crime, was in the clutches of the international mafia. They were not so much Ponzi schemes, which was what the international press had concluded, as they were money-laundering facilities, a fraud committed against naïve Albanians experiencing their first taste of capitalism.
After the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, normal international trade was reestablished with Yugoslavia, and the underpinning of those money-laundering facilities in Albania, principally from gasoline smuggling, began to decline through 1996 and 1997 as the big money moved elsewhere. When the larger investment schemes completely collapsed in early 1997, civil unrest broke out in several of Albania’s cities. By March, Albania was in complete chaos, as cities began to fall into the hands of well-financed gangs. Government armories were looted and Western embassies began to evacuate their citizens. The U.S. ambassador in Tirana delayed ordering the evacuation in the hopes the situation would improve. Ultimately, the delay resulted in an eventual helicopter evacuation of nine hundred U.S. citizens on what turned out to be one of the most violent days of the disturbances.
From neighboring Macedonia I could see that Albanian government stood on the brink of collapse. By the time order was restored with the help of Italian troops, an estimated three million weapons had been looted, many of them sold to gangs in Kosovo, many of which in turn would soon reemerge as elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The KLA operated sporadically in Kosovo in 1996, but in 1997 attacks on Serb security forces grew more numerous and more deadly. Serb forces responded, and soon Kosovo was engulfed in war. In Macedonia, the public watched with increasing alarm as Kosovo began to descend into chaos.
The KLA, whose ranks of Kosovo patriots also included former smugglers and armed gangs, was careful to keep the identity of its leaders a secret and its politics tightly controlled. Such a level of secrecy helped frame myths that the KLA fighters were Islamic terrorists, Marxist guerrillas, or, in the fertile imagination of Albania haters, both. One fact was clear: Ibrahim Rugova’s leadership did not impress the KLA. In part, that was based on Kosovo’s clan structures. There were also regional issues at play, but more fundamentally it reflected a growing popular feeling that Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) had become corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the public, a reputation that also started catching on with Western nongovernmental organizations, which were now done with Bosnia and facing a steep learning curve in Kosovo.
The United States had long considered Rugova the leader of Kosovo’s political aspirations. I first met him at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Belgrade in July 1989, just days after Milosevic’s infamous visit to Kosovo for the six hundredth anniversary of the great battle, an event that helped drive the Serbs to war. A quiet academic who would not be easily identified as a politician, he spoke in measured tones about the step-by-step process the Kosovars were on, explaining the underground school system his movement had started and funded. Rugova saw little hope in Milosevic but was prepared to meet with him if it could lead to a better outcome.
There are no secrets in the Balkans—it’s too small a place—but it was clear that Rugova’s aim was complete independence, nothing less. He was nonetheless strategically patient about how and when he could achieve his goal. More fundamentally, he shared with most Albanians in Kosovo a deep trust and abiding faith in the United States.
In February 1998, Special Envoy Gelbard, in a misplaced effort at evenhandedness, condemned Serbian police activities in Kosovo but went on to say that the KLA was a terrorist group, remarking after meeting two members of the KLA, “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.”
Gelbard’s remarks about terrorism spiked tensions within Kosovo and caused huge concern that the Serbs would view them as a green light to attack the KLA wherever they could find them. In fact, Serb authorities had long viewed the KLA as a terrorist organization, and whether Gelbard’s comments had any bearing on the situation is doubtful. But within weeks, the Serbs moved aggressively into the Drenica Valley, the heart of the KLA, and attacked the compound of a known KLA commander, Adem Jashari, where they killed him and his entire family of sixteen, including children.
The Serb action was universally condemned, but Gelbard’s own vigorous denunciation of the Serb action, perhaps influenced by his frustration at being blamed for contributing to the Serb rampage, was particularly hard-edged against Milosevic.
An envoy, for which access to all parties is essential, does not always have the luxury of speaking out publicly. That task can be left to all sorts of people in Washington, many of whom rarely travel, let alone have exclusive access to Balkan dictators. I was told that Gelbard compounded his problem during a meeting with Milosevic, his last, when he pounded his fist on the table. He was praised in Washington for his directness, but in Belgrade was shown to the door and never granted another meeting on his own.
With the situation on the ground now deteriorating fast, the Clinton administration had no one who could meet with Milosevic. For many in both the “liberal hawk” and the growing neoconservative movements, lack of access to a dictator was hardly a disadvantage. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had replaced Warren Christopher in 1997, knew all too well from her days as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations what her European colleagues thought of intervention on behalf of the Kosovars, whose case they viewed as straightforward separatism, with all that implied in many such situations on the continent, whether in Spain or Northern Ireland. Albright, who personally found Milosevic repulsive, knew that like it or not, we needed an envoy who could talk to him and vigorously follow the negotiating track until it was obvious, or could be made obvious to our allies and partners in the process, that no progress was possible.
In early May, Secretary Albright called me in Skopje and asked if in addition to my duties as ambassador to Macedonia I could take on the full-time job of Kosovo envoy. I was not surprised by the call, having been tipped off that it was coming. I knew it would mean that in splitting my duties I would be spending more time in Kosovo than in Macedonia. I worried whether being a peace envoy between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians held much prospect for success. Diplomacy is a little like hitting in baseball. If you succeed one out of three times you are probably doing well. Nonetheless I told the secretary I would do it. Besides, her request didn’t seem like an offer I could refuse.
After explaining the impossible situation Gelbard had put himself in with Milosevic (Holbrooke had already done so in great detail and with great zeal), Albright told me she had asked Gelbard to focus full-time on the upcoming Bosnian elections. She requested that I go to London to meet with Holbrooke, who, although now in the private sector, was acting as a consultant with the administration (and would within the next year become the UN ambassador, replacing Bill Richardson). After meeting in London, we would fly to Belgrade, and Holbrooke would reintroduce me to Milosevic.
Dick had been out of the game for two years. He had made lots more money in the private sector, “client skiing,” as he explained his duties to me. It was clear that he relished being back and was looking forward to the meeting with Milosevic.
Milosevic greeted Dick and me as if we were long-lost friends. As we walked into the White Palace in Belgrade, he offered a stiff handshake to our highly capable chargé d’affaires, Richard Miles. Milosevic always blamed the local diplomat if he had a problem with another country, and he knew he had a problem with us.
Milosevic gestured to chairs we were familiar with and began to recall all the great times we had had together in Dayton; meanwhile, Dick and I wondered how Richard Miles was taking all this in. We practically fell out of those chairs when Milosevic tried out a joke in his article- and preposition-deprived English: “You know what was most important accomplishment of Dayton?” He was recalling the difficulties we had had with Izetbegovic during the last hectic hours. “Americans,” he said, “finally learned what is like to live with Muslims!” The Serb leader then chuckled at his own line.
Holbrooke and I ignored it, and Dick got going: “Mr. President, President Clinton, Secretary Albright, and I”—huh?—“have decided to name Ambassador Hill”—I didn’t have that title when I last had met Milosevic, and he looked over at me, nodding approvingly at my new status—“as our new envoy to assist in finding a solution to the Kosovo crisis.” I glanced at Milosevic.
Leaning forward, his right hand on his knee, Milosevic responded, “Mr. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke”—Milosevic enjoyed being one of the only people on earth to know Holbrooke’s full name—“there is no crisis. There are just a few Albanian separatists that the American media is fond of talking to, and our security services are dealing with. Do not concern yourself with a crisis.”
“Nonetheless,” Dick continued, “we believe the situation is becoming more serious, and needs to be addressed, and I hope we can—”
“Mr. Holbrooke, I do not need an envoy. Kosovo is a part of Serbia. It is a domestic problem. Serbian people could never accept a foreigner dealing with their own internal problems. Did you not notice that on April twenty-third there was a national referendum and ninety-five percent of Serbs completely rejected any foreign mediation to solve the Kosovo crisis? But I can say to you that Ambassador Chris”—he paused to look at me, and smiled as I cringed—“is welcome anytime to see me, and can go anywhere he wants in Kosovo.”
I was on as the mediator despite Milosevic’s disclaimer that no mediator was necessary, but I had no great sense of accomplishment. I took over the conversation from there, believing it was not in my interest or anyone else’s that Holbrooke be perceived as the envoy, especially as he was not even working for the government at that time.
Our next stop was Kosovo itself. Holbrooke did not know the players there, so it fell to me to introduce him. We visited Rugova in his ramshackle LDK offices, along with other LDK leaders, including Fehmi Agani, the vice president, as well as Rugova’s interpreter. Rugova visibly lit up at the prospect of an American envoy based in nearby Skopje and devoted entirely to Kosovo, not Bosnia. We met with Rugova again that afternoon in his home. Rugova always had his television on while he received people in his home. At first I thought it was a precaution against Serb wiretaps, but I later concluded he just liked having the TV on all the time.
Holbrooke proposed an idea we had pursued with Milosevic the previous day: “Would you be willing to come to Belgrade and meet with President Milosevic?” Rugova clearly was not interested and started to express his reluctance, but before I could make the case for the meeting, Holbrooke blurted out another idea: “And after visiting Belgrade, I know that President Clinton would be very interested in meeting you at the White House.”
It was the old negotiator trick, to package an unpleasant element with something much more palatable. But, of course, nobody in Washington knew that Holbrooke was going to offer a presidential meeting. Those meetings are the coin of the realm and are not offered lightly. Presidential schedulers—people for whom saying no comes very naturally—are almost as powerful as the person whose schedule they control. But Holbrooke was riding high in the years following Dayton and had no doubt that he could pull it off.
On May 15, I went to Belgrade to be nearby when Rugova met Milosevic for an inconclusive meeting. On May 28 Rugova met with President Clinton in the Oval Office (for another inconclusive meeting). Meeting people, as I tried to explain to Holbrooke, was really not the issue here. The problem remained that Rugova was fast losing influence on the ground to the KLA. His meeting with President Clinton, taken together with his meeting with Milosevic, was not going to change that situation.
In June I began to shuttle between Kosovo and Belgrade in an effort to find common ground between the Albanians and the Serbs in the form of a joint statement that would restore (and then some) Kosovo’s autonomy, and establish the basis of a negotiation. The State Department sent me Tina Kaidanow, an extremely capable officer, fluent in Serbian from her recent assignment in Belgrade. I also included in the team Embassy Skopje’s skillful press attaché, Phil Reeker. Tina and Phil came with me on almost all trips, while Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones ran the embassy in Skopje.
The European Union also appointed a negotiator, a knowledgeable, intelligent, and all-around good diplomat, the Austrian ambassador in Belgrade, Wolfgang Petritsch. Whether it was because he was from neighboring Austria or that his descendants were originally from Slovenia, Wolfgang knew the Balkans well. He was also a pleasure to work with. He understood the complex history, the effects of the Ottoman Empire and of the national churches on national identity, the mythologizing of the Serbs about Kosovo, but at the same time the importance of Kosovo to the Serbs. He was bright, dedicated, moderate, and worked well with everyone. I was delighted to have him as a colleague and to have the Europeans as partners in the entire process. If the endgame was to join the Balkans to Europe, a project that had been somewhat delayed by four hundred years of Ottoman occupation, it was obvious that the European Union needed to be a partner throughout.
The negotiations Wolfgang and I were conducting (usually with different daily itineraries, but always coordinated with frequent meetings and telephone contact) took place against the backdrop of a seriously deteriorating situation on the ground. Within days of the meeting with Clinton, up to twenty Kosovo Albanians were killed in apparent retaliation for the killing of a Serb policeman in Glogovac. Despite the fact that it had been the Dayton peace process that brought the war in Bosnia to an end, many people believed it was the NATO air attacks and could not understand what diplomacy we were waiting for in Kosovo when air strikes would do the trick.
Our diplomacy was viewed as just an extension of our raw power. In Washington the unholy alliance of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives demanded action. In one meeting I found myself in front of Paul Wolfowitz, who rarely encountered a problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by dropping a few bombs, and Mort Abramowitz, a former head of the Carnegie Foundation who rarely encountered a village in the Balkans he didn’t want to see turned into an independent state. They were combining forces to pressure the U.S. government, even though philosophically they came from very different perspectives.
The triumphalist mood in the United States in the 1990s was palpable. No problem, no matter how gritty and entrenched in decades or centuries of miserable and sordid history, was outside our capacity to solve, usually by force. Those who did not subscribe to this worldview were supposedly trapped in the past, unable to understand the new paradigm of the “new American century.”
Thus the Balkans with its historical legacy would be the crucible of this instrument of might and right. Rwanda would be, according to this view, the last chapter of the previous era, where old concepts of sovereignty and national interests had yielded to disastrous consequences. Rwanda would live on as a brutal reminder to those who could not embrace the future.
The trouble, of course, was that not every country embraced this future of Pax Americana. The French, for starters, had concerns, especially with a country (a “hyperpower,” as then foreign minister Hubert Vedrine was calling the United States) that eschewed UN Security Council imprimaturs on armed interventions. The free ride we had had in the early 1990s with the new Russian government had come to an end, especially when the Russians came to understand that our respect for their interests did not include keeping former Warsaw Pact countries from joining NATO.
Americans on the left and right increasingly asserted an American exceptionalism that seemed to many across the globe to put us above the law. Our tendency to reduce enormously complex historical issues into Manichean morality plays did not sit well with Europeans. There was no question the Dayton peace process had been a success, thanks to American leadership. But as much as we had tried to share the success with all the Contact Group members from Europe, we paid a price there, too, for solving a European problem for them and then—as we did in the postconflict reconstruction—sticking Europe with the bill while we looked for another war.
We were not going to be successful in ending the Kosovo violence unless we first worked with the Europeans. And if it came again to war, we needed the Europeans at our side.
As the dusty Balkan summer of 1998 wore on, I realized that bringing the Serbs and Albanians around a table to end the violence was looking more and more remote. The Albanians had one thing on their minds: get NATO, that is, the United States, to intervene militarily. What was low-intensity conflict in one way became low-IQ warfare in another when Serbs time and time again retaliated for often minor provocations with brutal and excessive force, which would be thoroughly documented and increase worldwide sympathy for the Kosovar cause.
To help protect the civilian population from Serb attacks I began an effort with Milosevic to convince him to accept an international observation mission. He refused.
“But you allow diplomats accredited to your country to visit Kosovo,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but they are diplomats accredited to our country. They are not international monitors.”
“But aren’t they allowed to report what they see when they are in Kosovo?”
“Can they go in a group?”
“Yes, of course. That is up to them.”
“Well, then can we call them the ‘Kosovo Diplomatic Monitoring Mission’?”
“That is your business what you call them.”
Thus the monitoring mission, KDOM, which would eventually number some two thousand diplomats, was born. I was one of the first to visit Kosovo in this capacity. And as I walked down a street south of Peje, a large town in the west of Kosovo, I sensed that much had been accomplished in the creation of KDOM. But as I continued on past a row of abandoned Albanian homes, whose inhabitants had fled to the mountains, I heard a small explosion in the back of a house some twenty feet away. I jumped back and saw the house go up in flames. It was as if the Serbs were saying, “Hey, KDOM member, monitor this!”
Rugova had been the de facto leader of the Kosovo Albanians for more than a decade and, certainly in my view, deserved to be treated with respect. But he was increasing being dismissed in Washington as ineffectual, and more tellingly, as not in charge of the men with guns.
In late May, Gelbard stole a march on this issue by meeting with a KLA group in Geneva at the time that Holbrooke and I were meeting with Rugova. The implication was that Holbrooke and I were with yesterday’s news, while Gelbard was with the people who counted. But as Dick and I journeyed out into the Kosovo hinterland before he returned to the United States, we came to a small town in the southwestern part of the province called Junik, which had been the site of violence. Village elders invited us to a farmhouse where we sat on the floor with glasses of strong, sugared Turkish tea to listen to what twenty villagers sitting with us had to say. A few minutes into the meeting a KLA fighter looking like Che Guevara joined us, in a full store-bought camouflage uniform, and sat down next to Holbrooke. There was very little room, and to anyone looking at the wire service photo that was shown around the world the next day he seemed to be sitting in Holbrooke’s lap.
Holbrooke realized that even though this more than evened the score with Gelbard, it could cause him the same problems with Milosevic that Gelbard had incurred a few weeks before. Holbrooke asked me to go back to Belgrade the next day to meet with Milosevic and assure him that Che’s entry into the room was entirely unexpected.
The next day Milosevic rose grudgingly to greet me and, as we sat down, threw the newspaper picture at my lap and said, “Do you know the problem this is for me? I want to work with you and Deek,” as he called Dick, “but the Serbian people are very angry now. Very angry.”
I explained to him that notwithstanding the photo of the KLA guerrilla sitting in Holbrooke’s lap, we had no part in it. I pointed out that mediators should talk to all sides. He interrupted to point out something we already knew, which was that this wasn’t going to help Rugova, either.
But he finally seemed ready to let it go. He had seen the report of Gelbard’s meeting as well, and figured (correctly) that there was some level of competition going on between Gelbard and Holbrooke. His last comment on the issue: “I like Deek. But for the sake of career he would eat small children for breakfast.”