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

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 thenput 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 thesechallenges. 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