Read Online Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir by Christopher R. Hill - Free Book Online Page A

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 atotally 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