Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (7 page)

I arrived at the airport carrying two suitcases that included MREs (Meals, Ready [or not] to Eat) and a sleeping bag. Officials from the Albanian Foreign Ministry met me at planeside as a rusted tractor-drawn cart collected the luggage from the plane, and drove me to our “embassy,” located in room 215 of the Dajti Hotel. I checked into room 216. “The residence.” I was on my own that night, as I was many subsequent nights. I got to know my new post, learned how to communicate with Washington with unreliable phones and faxes, hired Albanians to help us get networked and established, and began to put together an embassy. We had an embassy building and compound, built in 1931, that we had handed over to the French in 1946 and later the Italians for safekeeping, and had given notice to our Italian tenants that we were to move in on October 1, 1991.

Within a week of my arrival, I received a telephone call from Mother Teresa, who, unbeknownst to many, was an ethnic Albanian, and who was spending her summer establishing orphanages and a medical facility in Tirana. She asked if I would meet her at her office. I cupped the phone and asked our assistants whether it could be that I was really talking to Mother Teresa or was there someone else by that name and title in Tirana. I had learned not to be surprised by anything there.

I met her in a sitting room of the villa she was using for her clinic with her New York–based assistant. Mother Teresa spoke softly but directly. She thanked me for the food assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that was to be given to the orphanages. She apologized for not having filled out all the forms, explaining that her main oversight indeed came from above, as she humorously pointed her
finger up in the air. She asked if when we took back our embassy from the Italians, would we continue to store her medications for her clinic. I wasn’t going to be the first person in the world to say no to Mother Teresa, and so I promptly agreed. Her assistant interrupted to ask if we would build a new gate in the back of the compound. “We can talk about that,” I responded. I then asked Mother Teresa if she could do me the favor of meeting one of our transport planes bringing in food for Albanians and personally accept a pallet of canned products for her orphanage. She agreed.

The next morning I went out to the airport and met the C-141, a large, four-engine jet, whose cargo was being unloaded. I explained to the crew chief, based in McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, to expect a VIP. A few minutes later, a small white jeep pulled up to the plane. The aircraft crew stopped their activities and stared in disbelief as Mother Teresa, riding shotgun, slowly descended from the vehicle and approached the aircraft. All the crew members dropped to one knee in her presence. She went among them, giving small Virgin Mary medallions to each of them.

The pilot, a diminutive woman in a flight suit, her red hair pulled back in a tight bun, invited her on board. Mother Teresa slowly climbed the three or four steps of the ladder, and on entering the aircraft looked at the enormous cargo bay, telling the pilot, “This plane is too big to fly.” The pilot assured her that was not the case, whereupon Mother Teresa said, “All the same, I will say a prayer.” She stood in the hatchway, clasped her hands together, and prayed silently. The rest of us, though somewhat less anxious about the plane’s capabilities, did the same. Never having seen anything quite like this in my life, and concerned whether anyone would ever believe me that this extraordinary moment which had many of us near tears had actually happened, I slowly backed out of the hatchway and took a picture from outside. The photo of Mother Teresa silhouetted in the hatchway of a MAC aircraft would later make its way from me to the USAID assistant administrator, Carol Adelman, to the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and on to many offices and
public areas of the Military Airlift Command. It symbolized, in 1991, a more gentle and optimistic moment for the United States, when there seemed to be no end to the capacity of our country to rise to the occasion.

What I was doing in Tirana, Albania, many of my colleagues were doing over the vast regions of the former Soviet Union, now being divided into newly independent states. From 1990 until 1992 more than a dozen new embassies had been established in places where there was virtually no infrastructure; even getting to these newly created countries, with their newly created national airlines, could be a lifetime adventure. Using a tired cliché from more recent times, it would be called a “civilian surge.”

But the Foreign Service pulled it off. We found people who were prepared to go to these places, more often than not without their families and without any other creature comforts. Tirana had two restaurants plus one on the back balcony of the Dajti Hotel. Dining out in Albania was a culinary adventure then, the dimensions of which were sometimes not known until the middle of the night.

A few colleagues were to join us as the weeks rolled by, but the real company was in knowing that what may have been unique for me was typical for the Foreign Service. We got to know the Albanians, one by one, the way a good diplomat does. It is always about relationships, not transactions. My first visit with Deputy Prime Minister Gramoz Pashko was followed quickly by an invitation to his small home. He and his wife, Mimoza, welcomed me with everything they had, including a bottle of whiskey. Mimoza’s brother, the new finance minister in the transitional government, Genc Ruli, stopped by. They asked about America, but mainly told me about Albania and made me feel comfortable so far from my own home.

At one point Gramoz took a music cassette from a shelf and before putting it in the tinny-sounding boom box asked, “Do you like Dire Straits?”

“My favorite,” I replied.

We had interpreters, Kestrina Budina and Andi Dervishi, who had been hired a couple of months before by temporary summer personnel we had in Tirana, and a consular officer FSO named Bill Ryerson. Bill set the U.S. standard for deeply and passionately caring about Albania, even learning the language in his spare time. Appropriately, because there was no one remotely as qualified, he went on to become our first ambassador. I became his number two, that is, deputy chief of mission, in charge of running the inside of the embassy while the ambassador performed the outreach. I found a language teacher, Professor Ukë Buchpapai, to start teaching me survival Albanian. Meanwhile, I signed on many day laborers to help repair the embassy, Albanians who had somehow managed to learn some English from some source and could be useful as we moved into what was pretty much the skeletal remains of our embassy, built in 1931 and abandoned in 1946. One was Tony Muco, who showed up at the gate on the day we moved into our old embassy and said to me: “I need job. I will do anything. Work very hard. I good friend of Chris Hill.”

“Funny,” I told him, “he never mentioned you to me.” I liked him instantly, invited him in, and put him to work. (Tony later rose to be the head of our local guard force.)

Small teams of U.S. government experts in economic assistance, humanitarian aid workers, and other contractors came through the embassy. They provided enormous help to this fledgling little democracy, though unlike Iraq later, here the contractors never dominated embassy life. We helped the Albanians privatize the agriculture sector. We had people working in their ministries of finance, foreign trade, energy, and food distribution. The U.S. Department of Commerce sent out a team led by a seasoned commercial expert, Jay Burgess, with whom I had worked earlier. The International Republican Institute, led by a dynamic North Carolinian named M. C. Andrews, and Tom Melia from the National Democratic Institute provided technical assistance to political parties. Also, a distinguished but thoroughly down-to-earth senior judge from the federal bench in Manhattan, Judge Robert Sweet, assisted the Albanian court system. He helped introduce a
totally new concept of a “procedures code.” The Albanian courts had heretofore been meting out death sentences and lengthy terms for the catch-all “agitation and propaganda,” but the new code would be the centerpiece of a new country based on the rule of law. Judge Sweet’s statuesque wife, Adele, a former newspaper publisher with a keen political sense, accompanied him, and we put her to work as well, advising Albania’s nascent media outlets.

We were not experimenting, or using Albanians as a laboratory, because almost everything we were doing in Albania was being done elsewhere in the newly independent states of the post–Cold War period. In Albania, USAID funded still one more project. The Albanian dictatorship had created a gulag of prison camps located in some of the most remote places in this remote country. People sent to prison spent decades in these prison farms, as did their families, who had been evicted from their apartments for having had a “bad biography” (Albania’s contribution to the lexicon of twentieth-century communist dictatorships). They lived in these rural barracks without schooling or any other amenities that would equip them for life in a modern state.

It was difficult to explain such systemic cruelty to American visitors. When Deputy Treasury Secretary John Robson visited, I asked our Albanian assistant to pull together a group of ex-political prisoners who had suffered internal exile in the gulag system. “We need at least fifteen of them,” I told Kestrina. “No problem,” she answered. “And I’d like that each has been in prison for twenty years to show the extent of the issue.” “No problem,” she answered, shrugging her shoulders at the simplicity of fulfilling the request.

Kestrina’s group of twenty ex-political prisoners who had served twenty years apiece met with Robson in a small room in the embassy. The most senior was Osman Kazazi, who had been in internal exile for forty-six years and was now eighty-seven years old. Robson listened to all of them telling stories of their horrific lives. “We all need to think about the future,” Robson concluded, while Kazazi nodded in agreement, albeit somewhat confused. USAID Deputy Administrator Carol Adelman then
put together a training program for the victims and especially their families, teaching them to manage hotels that we believed were sure to come. With Robson serving as bureaucratic top cover, Adelman made clear to the cumbersome USAID bureaucracy (and perhaps with the aging Kazazi in mind) that we didn’t have a lot of time. We needed to get this done now. Over the months and years, a country whose system had been based on terror was, thanks in part to U.S. assistance, being transformed into a country that could begin to live and breathe.

In a part of Europe where war clouds were gathering fast, despite the forecast of a sunny and warm post–Cold War era, Albania managed to stay out of trouble. It stayed on the right track with a modicum of foreign aid but with a great deal of support from the United States. Albania would later send troops to Iraq and by 2007 would be invited to join NATO. It wasn’t the number one issue in Europe, but I had learned a lot about how to manage these situations.

After completing my tour in Albania, I returned to work in the State Department’s European Bureau, with responsibility for all the countries of northern Central Europe, including the newly independent Baltic states and Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, and of course Poland.

• • •

In September 1994, the new assistant secretary for Europe, Richard Holbrooke, asked to meet me. I had never met him, nor had anyone explained to me why he had asked to see me. But given that we were in the first chaotic days of his tenure as the assistant secretary of the bureau (EUR), which oversees the primary implementation of U.S. policy in Europe, I thought it might be in connection with a reassignment, perhaps something to do with the Balkans. I was right.

Ambassador Holbrooke had taken over EUR two weeks before with a mandate to improve it in any way he could, to make it responsive to the problems now coming fast and furious in the post–Cold War world. He began to put together a strong leadership team to deal with these
challenges. For his principal deputy he selected John Kornblum, an officer known throughout European policy circles for his work in helping to create that continent’s post–Cold War multilateral architecture. For the newly liberated states of Eastern Europe, renamed Central Europe, he selected Bob Frasure, who had served as the first U.S. ambassador to Estonia. Bob, a negotiator at heart, had played a crucial role in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from that fledgling state.

The most urgent of these changes was to find a team that could work with Bob Frasure to help devise a policy to address the violence in the Balkans, which was making a mockery of international standards of human rights—the slogan of a Europe “whole, free and at peace.” The ongoing fighting in the Balkans was also contributing mightily to the fraying of the transatlantic relations. The breakup of Yugoslavia was fast shaping up as a major post–Cold War crisis gripping the young Clinton administration.

But the complexity of it exceeded people’s patience in trying to understand it. On the one hand, there was the interest of the northern republics, Slovenia and Croatia, to exit a state consisting of poorer regions and republics that they felt were holding them back. To want to leave seemed fair enough, especially when these aspirations were consistent with long-standing U.S. sympathy for self-determination. But changing of international borders was not something lightly regarded in Europe, or in the United States or anywhere for that matter. Croatian and Slovene nationalists regarded Yugoslavia as a conspiracy to enshrine the hegemony of Serbia. Yet the origins of the Yugoslav state were far more complex, and in fact in the early twentieth century those two republics wanted to join forces with Serbia to resist the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

From the Serb nationalist point of view, another narrative flowed, that of Yugoslavia being a conspiracy to make the great nation of the Serbs a one-eighth player among five other republics and two autonomous regions, in effect denying the Serbs their sovereign place in Europe. This latter narrative in Serbia, so cynically and shamelessly exploited by
its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, ultimately worked with Croatian and Slovene nationalism to break up Yugoslavia.