ABUJA, NIGERIA
JULY 7, 1998
To this day, many people in Nigeria think I killed him.
In early July 1998, I traveled to Nigeria with Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Pickering, who was then among the most senior career Foreign Service Officers. As assistant secretary of state for African affairs, I had gotten to know Pickering, my immediate boss, as a wise, fast-talking, and deeply knowledgeable diplomat. Having served as ambassador to six major countries and the United Nations, Pickering had seen and heard almost everything. The purpose of our trip to Nigeria was to encourage a responsible political transition. The nasty former dictator, Sani Abacha, had died a month earlier in the company of prostitutes. Viagra was reportedly involved. His interim successor was a moderate military leader, Abdulsalami Abubakar, who hoped to shepherd Nigeria through a democratic election to select its new leader.
A primary objective of our visit was to meet the wrongfully imprisoned opposition leader, Moshood Abiola. He was the presumed winner of Nigeria’s 1993 election, but the results were annulled, and he was later arrested. We hoped to negotiate his freedom so that he could participate in the upcoming election.
Along with Pickering and U.S. ambassador to Nigeria Bill Twaddell, I met Mr. Abiola in an austere government guesthouse on the vast presidential compound in the capital, Abuja. A large and imposing man, Abiola came with his minder shortly after we arrived. Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, knew Abiola from years past and greeted him warmly. Abiola, robust and happy to see us, sat on the couch and began to tell us how poorly he had been treated during his four years in prison. He was wearing sandals and multilayered, traditional Nigerian dress. I noted that his ankles were swollen.
About five minutes into the conversation, Abiola started to cough, at first mildly and intermittently, and then wrackingly with consistency. He said he was hot, so I asked his dutiful minder, “Please turn up the air-conditioning.” Noticing a tea service on the table between us, I offered Abiola, “Would you like some tea to help calm your cough?”
“Yes,” he said, with appreciation, and I poured him a cup. He sipped it, but continued coughing. Increasingly uncomfortable, Abiola removed his outer layer, leaving one layer on top. I shot Pickering a worried glance.
The coughing became dramatic. I told the assembled men, “I think we better call for a doctor.” No one argued. The minder immediately placed the call.
Abiola asked to be excused and went into the bathroom off our meeting room. When he emerged, he was bare-chested and sweating profusely, barely able to talk. He lay down on the couch writhing and then rolled facedown onto the floor. The doctor arrived promptly, took a quick look at him, and declared that Abiola was having a heart attack and must be transported to the hospital immediately. The men labored to lift the heavy Abiola into a small car, and we rushed to the nearby, rudimentary presidential hospital. I grabbed his eyeglasses off of a side table where he had left them, his only belonging, thinking of his daughter Hafsat in the U.S., whom I’d met before we left.
The doctors worked on him furiously, but within an hour they pronounced him dead.
We braced for violence. Abiola’s sudden and mysterious death would hit like a bombshell in Nigeria’s political tinderbox. Conspiracy theories would spread like metastatic cancer. Serious unrest throughout Nigeria was possible. Washington would hyperventilate, since it’s not every day that a major figure drops dead in a meeting with senior U.S. officials. His family would need to be told. And, urgently, Nigeria’s acting president would have to hear directly from us, even though his minister was present at the hospital and knew how it went down.
Ambassador Twaddell panicked and urged me and Pickering to rush to the airport and leave the country immediately. “Hell no,” we said. This delicate situation required deft management, not a hurried exit in a cloud of suspicion.
Right away, I called National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, my former boss, briefed him, and dictated a White House press release. Then we went to the Nigerian presidential palace to relay the entire drama to the acting president. We urged him to issue a careful statement and to announce the establishment of an independent autopsy by international experts, in order to quell rife speculation and limit the potential for violence. The acting president did both.
Next, Pickering, Twaddell, and I went with former Nigerian foreign minister Baba Kingibe to see Abiola’s wives and daughters. All of us walked in together, but soon I realized that I was effectively alone in the room with these distraught women. The men had hung far back and left the job to me—just like the pouring of the tea. I proceeded to explain that their husband/father was dead. He had died of an apparent heart attack that began in our meeting. The doctors did all they could to save him but could not. The ladies’ wailing was so intense, it haunts me to this day.
We briefed the press, and I returned to the U.S. embassy to write the official cable to report exactly what had happened. As a senior official, I almost never wrote up cables summarizing meetings, but in this case there was no more efficient way to ensure we got this very important history straight.
As I was typing, I heard in the distance on CNN a familiar voice of indignation. It was none other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson, then serving as President Clinton’s special envoy for the promotion of democracy in Africa. Reverend Jackson served capably in this role, and with good intentions; but on this occasion, I could have throttled him. He was riffing about how Abiola died under suspicious circumstances in a meeting with U.S. officials. I could not believe my ears—our own guy implying we were killers! Immediately, I placed a call to his longtime aide Yuri and asked him to shut the Reverend down. “Please, just get him off the set.” That happened, even as I was still watching the segment.
We stayed overnight in Nigeria to try to calm things, offer any needed assistance to the government, and make an orderly departure. Fortunately, despite deep public upset, no significant violence occurred. The autopsy eventually confirmed the cause of death as a heart attack. Nonetheless, it was Nigeria where conspiracy theories abound. The most popular, which still has currency over twenty years later, is that I killed Abiola by pouring him poisoned tea.
From that experience, I found that being a woman policymaker comes with unique hazards. The men would not have offered, much less thought, to pour the tea. They may not have swiftly called for a doctor. They may not have been able to break the bad news to the wives. Not for the last time, it was I, not they, who took the public fall for a crime nobody committed.
At the time of our ill-fated meeting with Abiola in Nigeria, I had been assistant secretary of state for African affairs for just under nine months. Even before settling into my spacious, wood-paneled sixth-floor office at the State Department, my first order of business had been to assemble a top-quality team of senior and experienced deputies, including Ambassadors Johnnie Carson and Vicki Huddleston, and Witney Schneidman, the only other political appointee. I had received invaluable advice from Ambassador Prudence “Pru” Bushnell, a smart, intuitive, straight-shooting career diplomat, whose toughness was belied by her slight stature and unassuming manner. Pru had served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Africa Bureau before being dispatched to Kenya as ambassador. She warned me unsparingly of the skepticism I would face as a young female political appointee in the pinstriped culture of the State Department. She counseled me to focus on policy outcomes and not to let the bureaucracy weigh me down.
Yet the best gift Pru gave me was the recommendation to hire Annette Bushelle as my personal assistant, a veteran of the office and Pru’s former secretary. Annette was a godsend, not only an extremely competent administrator, but an ever-attentive mother to me at work, who advised and protected me like my own mom, but without any of the attendant friction or frustration.
From the start, the AF Front Office, as it was known, was welcoming and supportive, but the rest of the bureau seemed to have been less certain what to expect.
The forty-three ambassadors and half dozen office directors who reported directly to me were mostly white, male, career Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) who ranged in age from roughly fifty to sixty-five. They were experienced Africa hands, mainly cautious, conservative in temperament and style, who viewed me as inexperienced, way too young for the job, and perhaps especially unsuited as a new mother. Some were silently dismissive. Many were passive-aggressive. A few were open-minded. Among the handful of female and African American ambassadors there was a slightly greater degree of acceptance, but they too were taking a wait-and-see approach.
My reputation from the NSC, as I was about to discover, had preceded me. From what I was eventually told by close colleagues, I was perceived as smart, dynamic, decisive, bureaucratically skilled, and tough, but also brash, demanding, impatient, hardheaded, and unafraid of confrontation. Some had also dubbed me imperious, autocratic, micromanaging, and intolerant of dissent. Though it was clear (and probably resented) that I had strong backing and top cover from the White House and the seventh floor (the secretary’s suite) at State, the open question was whether I could translate my access and relationships into policy success and increased respect and affection from the veterans of the Africa Bureau. At the outset, I estimated that about two-thirds of my direct reports were hostile or leaning negative toward me, and about one-third were open or leaning favorable. My aim was to flip that balance over the course of my tenure, fully recognizing that there were some who would never be fans.
Like many political appointees, I felt from the start that I was playing beat-the-clock. We had just over three more years in which to advance and entrench the president’s agenda, and I was not one to waste time. I came in with a clear vision of what I wanted to focus on. Within my first weeks on the job, I convened a conference of all the Chiefs of Mission serving in Africa. Each of our ambassadors returned from their posts to gather on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to discuss our priorities. In addition to the staples of conflict prevention and resolution, promotion of democracy, and human rights, I championed a “New Partnership with Africa for the 21st Century,” grounded in spurring economic growth and development through increased trade, aid, and investment.
Another theme I consistently stressed was that U.S. policymakers need to better understand and address the range of transnational security threats that incubate in and can emanate from Africa, including terrorism, international crime and drug flows, and infectious disease. To deepen our collective knowledge, I asked the Intelligence Community to provide two briefings to the ambassadors on international criminal flows and the terrorist threat in Africa; obliging, they noted it was the first time they had been asked to compile that information for senior policymakers. In 1997, I was surprised to discover that the terrorist threat in Africa was underappreciated by many; I made it a top priority to heighten awareness—especially among these ambassadors.
That first Chiefs of Mission conference was somewhat awkward. In substance, it went well enough, but I felt the weight of the ambassadors sizing me up. Not there to make friends or win a popularity contest, I refused to apologize for having my baby at the conference so I could breast-feed him. My direct style did not endear me to every one of those seasoned diplomats. What I cared about was that I was granted the respect and cooperation necessary to “get shit done.” And, if I did, I knew those many who cared foremost about outcomes might eventually accept me on the merits.
The other potentially tough audience I was mindful to try to tame was the African leaders—ambassadors, ministers, and heads of state—with whom I would work directly as their principal interlocutor. Secretary of State Albright talked to African leaders when the stakes were especially high, or she was visiting their country. The president would engage African leaders when he traveled, they visited the White House, or if the stakes were huge. But I was the official who, on a daily basis, needed to be able to pick up the phone and talk to President X or travel to meet with him. Most African leaders accepted that disparity in rank, understanding that dealing with the United States was unique and especially important. A few older, very long-serving and corrupt leaders, like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and José dos Santos of Angola, would sometimes play hard to get and occasionally make themselves unavailable at the last minute. Mostly, however, I was easily able to represent the U.S. at the highest levels of government in Africa and get the audiences I needed.
Interestingly, if the African leaders had reservations about my youth or gender, they hid them well. On occasion, I would encounter someone whose jaw dropped when they first met me. One civil society leader in Nigeria blurted out something like: “We thought you were sixty years old, two hundred and fifty pounds, and six feet tall,” based on media impressions. When the Sudanese ambassador to the U.N., Elfatih Erwa, with whom I had tussled remotely, first met me at the General Assembly, he exclaimed, “Oops, you’re beautiful, I always thought you were a monster.” By contrast, some journalists, especially a few retrograde, white South African writers, like Simon Barber, were fixated on the length of my skirts.
Still, I never had any African leader balk at dealing with me. Soon I realized that it was because they had no choice: I represented the USA whether they liked it or not, and they had to deal with the USA whether they liked it or not. Nonetheless, over time, I formed excellent working relationships with many leaders across the continent, including Meles of Ethiopia, Kagame of Rwanda, Museveni of Uganda, Obasanjo of Nigeria, Chissano of Mozambique, Mogae of Botswana, and Rawlings of Ghana, all of whom were unfailingly respectful and appropriate in their dealings with me.
Within six weeks of my arrival at State, in December 1997, I accompanied Secretary Albright on the first of her four trips to Africa as secretary of state. She visited Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Secretarial trips are grueling, complex enterprises that require careful design of the itinerary down to each meeting, and massive preparation of briefing memos, speeches, and press materials. The embassies and support staff in Washington handle the logistical feat of smoothly and safely transporting the secretary, staff, security detail, secure communications gear, and traveling press corps via a U.S. Air Force plane.
Albright’s first secretarial trip to Africa was largely successful, but for one unfortunate and unauthorized comment by a traveling staffer to the press. The staffer was quoted as saying, “We don’t do Mary Robinson,” a reference to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, which suggested we were disinclined to press the African leaders with whom we met on human rights. Understandably, Secretary Albright was furious and unloaded on a small group of us senior staff as we flew between stops on her plane, demanding to know, “Who on this plane, who among us could be so stupid and tone-deaf to say such a thing?”
We never did learn who the culprit was. Not only was this a damaging leak, but it played into an unwelcome critique that we were prepared to give the so-called “new African leaders” something of a pass on democracy and human rights, if they advanced our shared security agenda. Albright personally was offended, as she has always been an ardent defender of democracy. Plus, Mary Robinson was the respected former president of Ireland and an important interlocutor for the secretary.
Apart from this incident, for me the trip was most memorable as my first extended period away from Jake. He was barely five months old, and I was still breast-feeding. While traveling, I frequently became engorged, as I struggled to find time in the intense schedule to pump and dump my milk so that my supply could be sustained while I was away. In my absence, Jake drew down my stored reserves and drank formula as needed to supplement.
In Uganda, we traveled to the far north in Gulu to bear witness to the ravages of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the mystical, bizarre Sudanese-backed rebel group that terrorized the region, stealing children and torching villages. We visited a hospital where children camped at night, hoping that strength in numbers would shield them from being kidnapped in rebel raids, and a rehabilitation center run by the NGO World Vision for those who managed to escape their abductors. World Vision introduced us to a young, roughly three-year-old boy whose family had recently been slaughtered on the side of a dirt road by the LRA. The boy and his one-month-old baby sister had been shielded by their mother who lay on top of them in the ditch. The mother was killed but the boy managed to climb out from under her and realized that his sister was also alive. He carried her for a full day as he walked to Gulu to seek assistance.
Looking into that little boy’s eyes cut me to my core. I will never forget him or his sister, Charity, that beautiful baby girl who was younger even than Jake. As Secretary Albright cradled fragile Charity in her arms, I felt at once deeply grateful to be fortunate enough to raise a child in security, yet maddeningly powerless to help the orphaned child in front of me. As we left, my sense of guilt and betrayal was overwhelming.
Our last stop in Africa was Zimbabwe, a country I knew well from my doctoral dissertation. In the years since I studied there as a graduate student, Mugabe had become increasingly authoritarian and corrupt, wrecking the economy and allowing the country’s once excellent infrastructure to deteriorate. On our final day, as we prepared to leave the hotel, I plugged my breast pump into the socket, using my normal AC/DC converter. The apparatus first sparked and then fizzled. Dead.
I was mortified. We were forty-eight hours from returning to the U.S., with a final stop on the way back in Brussels. My milk supply was reduced already due to the infrequency with which I had been able to pump. I was far from ready to give up breast-feeding, which was my unique and most intimate connection to Jake, one that neither his father nor his nanny could replace. It made me feel vital to his existence, when I was wrestling with my own insecurities about whether I could (and should) be trying to succeed simultaneously at my demanding job and as a first-time mother. Feeling prematurely defeated in that struggle and just exhausted, I broke down and cried. (Note to mothers: always bring a manual pump overseas as a backup.)
Before leaving Zimbabwe, I called Ian and asked him to order a new pump. I consulted older women, seeking advice on what to do. Someone said, “I’ve heard that drinking lots of beer and hot chocolate is good for your milk supply.” It sounded like an old wives’ tale, but who doesn’t like beer or hot chocolate? In Belgium, I was blessed to be able to consume both in ample supply. Miraculously, it worked, and I was able to make it home in time to resume pumping and feeding before my supply totally evaporated.
I managed to continue breast-feeding Jake for another four months—until I had to join President Clinton on his first trip to Africa as president. Then I gave up, reluctantly conceding that if pumping on a secretarial trip had nearly done me in, the pace and unpredictability of a presidential tour with only a few hours of sleep every night would make pumping completely unsustainable.
Clinton’s first Africa trip was alternatively a buoyant, somber, and jubilant wild ride. With his easy charm, gently graying full head of hair, and long-fingered, almost regal hands warmly greeting all he encountered, President Clinton bounded energetically through the twelve-day, six-nation tour. The trip was an unprecedented multi-region, extended presidential visit to Africa. Clinton brought with him much of his cabinet (though as she often did, Secretary Albright stayed back, enabling me to take her place as the senior State Department official to join the president in every meeting and on every site visit). There were dozens of members of Congress, a huge traveling press corps, and ample staff support.
When the president of the United States travels abroad, the accompanying footprint is massive. When he travels to six countries in Africa, it becomes mind-boggling. First of all, six stops constitute an insanely long itinerary for any presidential trip. (When years later I was in a position to make such decisions, I would never have done that to Obama.) Then factor in the distances, security risks, and lack of adequate medical support in Africa, and it’s a whole different order of magnitude. Hospital ships with helicopters on stand-by loiter offshore. Secret Service detachments flood each country. Military transport planes leap-frog armored limousines from location to location. Experts install secure communications packages housed in soundproof containers at every stop. For each destination, there is an evacuation plan. The competency and complex orchestration are a wonder to behold.
We began in Ghana, where the most amazingly thick and raucous crowds lined the streets for miles from the airport to Accra’s Independence Square. There, a massive rally greeted President Clinton and his Ghanaian host, the frenetic, impulsive, but charming former military officer, President Jerry Rawlings. The greeting was the most extraordinary I have ever witnessed, befitting the first stop on the first-ever comprehensive presidential tour of Africa, in the first African country to achieve independence.
Next, in Uganda, the president visited a rural village and met with regional leaders in Entebbe. As I had urged, Clinton added a brief but moving stop in Kigali, Rwanda, where he met with survivors of the genocide, the president and vice president of Rwanda, and apologized on behalf of the U.S. and the international community for the failure to try to halt the genocide.
In South Africa, I joined Clinton as he visited Robben Island and toured Nelson Mandela’s cell with the former prisoner, now president, as his guide. I was deeply moved to witness firsthand the tall, aging, yet still powerful Mandela exhibit extraordinary dignity and a genuine lack of bitterness toward his captors, as he described dispassionately the harsh conditions of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment, eighteen of which he endured on Robben Island. Standing in the hot sun at the old prison quarry where he once labored, wearing a classic, colorful open-collared Madiba shirt, Mandela’s telling of his incredible story took me back to my days as an anti-apartheid activist, when I refused even to consider traveling to South Africa. Now, I was America’s senior diplomat for Africa joining my president in bilateral meetings with Nelson Mandela, president of a free South Africa.
The traveling press corps took full advantage of South Africa’s wineries and culinary treasures, enjoying the comparative luxury of Africa’s most developed country. The next stop was Botswana, where after quickly dispatching with official meetings, the Clintons decamped to the Okavango Delta in the north to enjoy some game watching. Then, in Senegal, the Clintons visited Goree Island, a last point of departure for many Africans during the slave trade.
The trip was a highly successful, fun, if exhausting journey, which sent the very clear signal that Africa was high among President Clinton’s priorities. He was confident in Africa’s potential and keen to reap the benefits of a U.S.-Africa partnership based on mutual interest and mutual respect. At the center of the agenda was his “Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity in Africa,” which aimed to catalyze Africa’s full integration into the global economy through increased trade, investment, debt relief, and development assistance. He championed passage of the landmark African Growth and Opportunity Act, which would open the U.S. market as never before to goods from Africa. And President Clinton sent the strong signal to his entire cabinet that each member was expected to invest his or her time and institutional resources in Africa, and he would be keeping track of their progress.
The high we all felt coming off that trip was intense and exhilarating, but it was short-lived.
Apart from President Clinton’s trip to Africa in late March, 1998 was a year from hell. Murphy’s Law prevailed. Everything went wrong.
Barely six weeks later, the shit hit the fan in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia and Eritrea came to sudden blows. Their leaders had once been close partners in the struggle to overthrow the repressive Derg regime in Ethiopia in 1991 and in achieving Eritrean independence in 1993. More recently, tensions had been building along their lengthy common border, which had never been demarcated after Eritrea’s independence. Economic frictions, exacerbated by Ethiopia’s negative reaction to Eritrea’s introduction of an independent currency in 1997, created a combustible environment. When Eritrean and Ethiopian border guards skirmished on May 6, 1998, it was clear that either the leaders would quickly defuse tensions, or things might spiral out of control.
In Washington, we were deeply concerned to see two friends of the U.S. fight each other, particularly after I and President Clinton had (prematurely) heralded them as “new African leaders.” Personally, I was sickened to see Isaias of Eritrea and Meles of Ethiopia morph from collaborators to combatants. They were also important U.S. partners in addressing regional hot spots from Somalia, to Sudan, to Congo. The situation worsened in mid-May when Eritrea rolled tanks into the Badme area, a rocky, barren, lightly populated stretch along the border, administered since independence by Ethiopia. Eritrea also seized land in two other places along the border, asserting its territorial claims through the unlawful use of force.
When the call came for help, I was in Paris meeting with my French counterparts on a range of African issues. A wider war seemed probable, and I flew directly to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, with a mandate from Secretary Albright and the White House to try to ease the tension. A strong team of experts on East Africa came from Washington to meet me. The team included Gayle Smith, then a senior USAID officer who in her previous life had been a war correspondent covering the Ethiopian and Eritrean rebel movements that now led the governments in each country. Gayle had known both leaders well for years and understood how to get into their heads. David Dunn, a jovial and capable career diplomat, ran the East Africa office at the State Department, and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bailey was an experienced Africa hand and U.N. peacekeeper from the Pentagon. Long-haired, intensely committed, and unaccustomed to the constraints of government, John Prendergast was an Africa director at the National Security Council, whom I had hired from the NGO world before I moved to State.
We arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to find a very agitated Prime Minister Meles Zenawi nearly bouncing off the walls of his dark, spartan, yet spacious formal office. Extremely intelligent, normally cool and calculating, Meles was seething, almost shaking, with anger at Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, whom he felt had betrayed him. Their last (and final) conversation had ended badly, and Meles was resigned to war. In our meetings, Gayle and I tried to calm him down and understand his position: he insisted that Eritrea withdraw from Badme immediately and unconditionally in order to restore “the status quo ante.” He repeated reflexively, “Not one rock!” in the soil of Badme could be altered; everything must be exactly like it was before the fighting began. I could hardly believe we were facing a major war over a virtually valueless piece of barren land.
We knew Isaias would be an even tougher customer in terms of his willingness to compromise, but armed with Meles’s bottom lines, we flew across the border to Asmara, the neat and orderly Eritrean capital, to explore Isaias’s position. In normal times, Isaias was hot-tempered and mercurial, unpretentious yet canny. He was, by turns, brash and charming, engaging and infuriating, but above all unpredictable. In this moment of stress and uncertainty, he was a roiling ball of rage, egged on by his perennial sidekicks and closest advisors, two men both named Yemane.
In our initial effort at shuttle diplomacy, we were joined by a senior Rwandan delegation led by Vice President Paul Kagame, who was respected by both leaders and well-known to us. As anticipated, Isaias proved even more recalcitrant than Meles; worse, he insulted and dismissed our efforts to defuse the conflict. Isaias maintained that the land he seized belonged to Eritrea, that Ethiopia had initiated several previous rounds of fighting along the border, and that it wished to topple his government. All Eritrea had done, according to Isaias, was to retake what was rightfully theirs. There was, in his view, no need for mediation.
Kagame, angered by the disrespectful attitude of Isaias and convinced of the futility of mediation, returned to Kigali but deputized his minister in the Office of the President, Patrick Mazimhaka, and other close aides to continue working with us. Undeterred by the intransigence of both Meles and Isaias—and determined not to give up on my first real attempt at personal diplomacy and conflict resolution—I continued shuttling between the two leaders, looking for a way forward. Even though my responsibilities spanned the whole African continent and this intensive sort of diplomacy could not be my full-time job for long, I was convinced that only the U.S. could possibly apply the sustained diplomatic resources and attention needed to resolve this conflict. If we quit, no one else could fill the void. Moreover, our particular team, given its composition and relationships with the players, was uniquely suited to try.
But the risks were palpable. All commercial flights between the two capitals had been halted, so we were compelled to fly the long distance back and forth between Addis and Asmara in a small U.S. military prop plane and later a little leased plane that seated four passengers. As tensions escalated, the airspace over the disputed area also became a war zone, and we were forced to fly way out over the Red Sea to avoid being shot down, adding hours and additional stress to our travels. These rides were terrifying, white-knuckle journeys buffeted by high winds over mountainous remote areas. As a new mother, I chastised myself silently for taking such risks, but I figured—what choice do I have? Still, I couldn’t help fearing that we might meet the same fate as revered former U.S. congressman Mickey Leland, who died in a 1989 plane crash over a remote part of Ethiopia as he tried to mitigate recurrent famine. Indeed, in 1999, Ethiopian forces downed a South African civilian private plane flying over the two countries.
With the help of the Rwandans, we drafted a framework of principles designed to end the conflict. Our proposal involved Eritrean withdrawal in accordance with international law, a cease-fire, monitors, and an internationally sanctioned process to delimit and demarcate the border.
Following one tense meeting in Asmara, Isaias demanded that he and I meet solo and kicked out my team. I protested but decided to stay in order to prove that I could take him one-on-one. Alone in his austere meeting room, decorated sparsely with the ugly, heavy wooden furniture typical of the ceremonial offices of some African heads of state, I heard him out. As usual, he was obnoxious, condescending, and offensive, arguing by turns that we were stupid, biased, and incompetent. Isaias insisted in effect that, “Eritrea had done no wrong. We are the victims. We are not moving an inch. Let there be war to teach the arrogant Ethiopians a lesson.”
In response, I was forceful and perhaps even profane, countering, “This is the dumbest war I can imagine. It can and must be resolved peacefully.” I told Isaias he needed to pull his forces back and work with us to address the underlying conflict. The meeting ended in an impasse, but I had demonstrated that neither I nor the USA would be cowed by him. Both buoyant and exhausted, I reported to my team that Isaias had challenged my “manhood,” but I stood my ground and gave it all back to him.
After two separate rounds of intensive diplomacy culminated in early June, Ethiopia accepted our proposal. We pressed hard in Asmara on Isaias to relent, but he stubbornly refused, insisting instead on demilitarizing the disputed areas and direct talks with Ethiopia—a nonstarter. My next move was to travel with our Rwandan partners in four hops on our rickety small plane to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where the leaders of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which years later became the African Union, would convene for their annual summit. Our goal was to seek the OAU’s endorsement of our framework proposal.
Shortly after we took off from Eritrea, Ethiopia launched a major air assault on the Asmara airport, sharply escalating the conflict. Eritrea responded by striking both military and civilian targets deep inside Ethiopia, including the densely populated historic city of Mekele, killing civilians on the street and hitting a school. The air war underscored the determination of the two countries to bloody each other badly and heralded the start of a sustained, deadly conflict. The U.S. drew down our embassy staff in Asmara to a bare minimum, while President Clinton personally interceded with the leaders to broker successfully an air strike moratorium after about ten days of intensive bombardment.
In parallel, we worked to mount diplomatic pressure on the parties to agree to a cease-fire and political resolution. In Ouagadougou, I became the first American ever allowed formally to address the OAU Council of Ministers. With Patrick Mazimhaka, I outlined the history of our efforts and the substance of our proposed framework, ending by asking for and receiving agreement from the OAU to endorse it and to commit to joining us in sustained diplomacy toward a resolution. We next set our sights on New York, where we obtained a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that both sides cease hostilities, welcoming the air moratorium, and supporting the U.S. and OAU mediation efforts. At this stage, Rwanda handed off its role as our African negotiating partner to the OAU. Algeria later stepped in, proving to be a very capable partner.
Fighting died down after the air moratorium went into effect and the rainy season intensified. The parties were hardly through with hostilities; instead, they used the monsoon months to mobilize, train, and deploy large forces to the border area, dig trenches in World War I fashion, and purchase massive quantities of sophisticated weapons and aircraft from Russian, Eastern European, and Chinese arms dealers.
In September 1998, at my suggestion, President Clinton appointed my good friend and former boss, his former national security advisor Anthony Lake, as special envoy for Ethiopia and Eritrea. Tony would take over the negotiating team, assuming day-to-day responsibility for the shuttle diplomacy and liaison with the OAU, reporting to Clinton through me and Gayle Smith, now the new NSC senior director for African affairs. Gayle and I remained deeply involved in all aspects of our strategy and diplomacy, but with wide responsibilities and an African continent blowing up in multiple places simultaneously, we could not devote the necessary sustained attention to this critical conflict. Ever wise, deeply respected, and collegial, Tony was the perfect envoy to drive forward our negotiations in partnership with Algerian prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia and his team, making numerous trips to the warring capitals.
Over two and a half years, the U.S. never relented in its diplomacy, as the deadly war raged on. Whenever possible, I joined Tony on his missions to the capitals and to Algiers, where we coordinated with the Algerians and co-hosted “proximity talks,” in which the parties spoke to the U.S.-Algerian mediating team, though never to each other, even as we all stayed in the same diplomatic compound. As we continued to try to narrow the differences between the parties, political pressure mounted in each country to finish the war.
One day in the spring of 2000—with economic costs soaring for two of the world’s most impoverished countries and the rainy season fast approaching when the ground would turn into impossible mud—my office phone rang. When I picked up, there were no voices. All I could make out in the far distance was B. B. King singing “The Thrill Is Gone.” After the song ended, a deeply frustrated Tony Lake, with John Prendergast, reported from Algiers that both sides remained as dug-in as ever. They were very near throwing in the towel. My job, easy by comparison, given their claustrophobic confinement in a bland Algerian diplomatic facility, was to talk them off the ceiling. I calmly implored them, “Take a break, find something to drink, then get some sleep. And remember the stakes.” We could not give up.
As the Algiers talks reached a critical moment in early May 2000, it was not the warring parties but an American who blindsided all of us. U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke, who was leading a Security Council delegation to Africa, unilaterally diverted the U.N. mission to Eritrea. Holbrooke was not only a talented veteran diplomat with an outsized ego but also a contemporary and rival of Tony Lake’s from the Vietnam era when they both served as young Foreign Service Officers. Over the objections of our negotiating team and without sanction from the White House, Holbrooke and seven U.N. diplomats dropped into Asmara with little knowledge of the leaders or the complex issues at play. Holbrooke, who bore a decades-long, personal animus toward Tony Lake and a strong, if more recent, disdain for me, decided to prove that he could do what we couldn’t and broker an end to the war. He fell prey to Isaias’s efforts to charm and mislead him about the history and balance of culpability in the conflict. Ignorant and emboldened, Holbrooke proceeded to Addis from Asmara, armed with Isaias’s talking points.
Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, Meles—desperate for a way to hold off his own hard-liners, who were pressing for a final offensive to vanquish Eritrea—urged the U.S. to offer him a diplomatic lifeline. Instead, Holbrooke, refusing to consult Tony or others on the U.S. negotiating team, presented Meles with an Isaias proposal that had already been considered and rejected by Ethiopia. When Meles asked if this was the best and final U.S. offer, Dick said yes, misrepresenting the American position. Furious at what he perceived to be an eleventh-hour American effort to try to dupe him, Meles angrily refused Holbrooke’s warmed-over scraps.
Holbrooke erupted, berating Meles as “the Milosevic of Africa.” By convincing Meles that the Americans were no longer willing to play a constructive role, Holbrooke virtually ensured that the war would resume with Ethiopia launching its planned offensive. When within forty-eight hours, it did, the joke throughout the State Department was that Holbrooke’s next book should be To Start a War, a sequel to his memoir entitled To End a War, which recounted his role in the Bosnia negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Peace Accords. Yet this last phase of the war was no joke. Of the up to 100,000 soldiers who died in the conflict, tens of thousands perished in this final offensive. Following his diplomatic failure, Holbrooke publicly lambasted the leaders, especially Meles, and surreptitiously spun up critical press stories and editorials blaming me and Tony for the failure of American diplomacy.
This time, Ethiopia routed Eritrea. The U.S. led the U.N. Security Council in imposing an arms embargo on both countries, a step many observers argued we should have taken earlier, but that until then, we assessed, would have made tough negotiations even more difficult. When the offensive ebbed, we were able to persuade the parties to return to Algiers for further proximity talks in early June. After a few weeks of additional negotiations, Tony and our team gained both sides’ agreement to a formal cessation of hostilities and complex arrangements for separating and monitoring the opposing forces with a U.N. peacekeeping force. The parties also agreed to conclude a final and binding peace agreement that would define and demarcate the border, resolve all claims and disputes, and eventually restore ties between the countries. The Algiers Agreement was signed by the parties on December 12, 2000, and by Secretary Albright on behalf of the U.S. as a co-guarantor.
The deadliest inter-state conflict in the world had ended. The U.S. partnership with the OAU and Algeria to accomplish this goal was indispensable as well as unprecedented. The Clinton administration was given considerable credit for the eventual success of our negotiation by some of the same press outlets that had criticized us six months earlier. On behalf of President Clinton, for our work to resolve this horrific conflict, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger awarded Tony, me, and Gayle the Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial Award. This prize was deeply meaningful, as it recognized the sacrifice of my late NSC colleague, an Air Force colonel, who died in 1995 along with two other dedicated public servants, Joe Kruzel and Robert Frasure, in a fiery accident on a mountainside in Bosnia, while working with Richard Holbrooke to bring peace to the Balkans. Their loss is emblematic of the risks our unsung Foreign Service Officers and civil servants as well as our uniformed military, incur every day to bring peace and hope to the most dangerous parts of the world.
For over two years, our Ethiopia-Eritrea negotiating team was relentless in their high-stakes, high-stress diplomacy with two sides that needed and resented us in equal measure. I honed my skills as a negotiator, diplomat, and team leader, experiencing firsthand the extreme difficulty of trying to reconcile warring parties. I learned the immeasurable value of patience and persistence in a complex negotiation, the difficulty of overcoming the intransigence of stubborn leaders facing their own domestic pressures, and the importance of negotiating outside the glare of the public spotlight where positions only harden.
In this, as in many conflicts, U.S. diplomatic engagement was essential to achieving an agreement. No other country could have applied the resources, prestige, tenacity, and weight to press for resolution; yet, as we were repeatedly reminded, U.S. influence has limits. America cannot compel recalcitrant warring parties to make peace, even when they are poor and substantially dependent on us for assistance. While tireless effort is best exerted at every stage to try to end a war, I found that the breakthrough often only comes when one or both sides is exhausted and ready to relent. Until then, the conflict likely will not prove “ripe” for resolution through mediation.
In January 2001, shortly before the administration ended, I visited Eritrea for the last time. Over the prior three years, it had been Isaias who was most difficult throughout the negotiation, yet he was the one who insisted on taking me dancing at a popular nightclub in Asmara and out on the Red Sea in a small Eritrean military boat from the port of Massawa. Awkward, ironic, and in some ways gratifying, that visit would give me the chance to see him finally relax and revert briefly to his former jovial, if caustic, self. It would be the last time we had any fun together.
After the war concluded in December 2000, a long, cold peace ensued; but progress toward demarcating the border and normalizing relations between the two adversaries would remain frozen until 2018, when a new Ethiopian leader finally agreed to fully implement our original agreement unconditionally.