Whatever the motives of my adversaries, it became clear, on those solitary nights in my upstairs office, that if I wanted compassion from others, I needed to show it, even to those who didn’t respond in kind. Besides, what did I have to complain about? I would never be a perfect person, but Hillary was laughing again, Chelsea was still doing well at Stanford, I was still doing a job I loved, and spring was on the way.
FIFTY-TWO
On February 19, a week after the Senate vote, I gave the first posthumous pardon ever granted by a President, to Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, who, because of his race, had been wrongfully convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer 117 years earlier. Such actions by a President may seem unimportant compared with the power of current events, but correcting historical mistakes matters, not only to the descendants of those who were wronged but to us all. In the last week of the month, Paul Begala announced his departure from the White House. I had relished having Paul there, because he had been with me since New Hampshire and he was smart, funny, combative, and effective. He also had small children who deserved more time with their father. Paul had stuck with me through the impeachment battle; now he needed to leave. The only news out of Whitewater World was the lopsided vote of the American Bar Association, 384–49, on a resolution calling for the repeal of the independent counsel law, and a news report saying the Justice Department was investigating whether Kenneth Starr had deceived Janet Reno about his office’s involvement with the Jones case and about the reasons he gave her for adding the Lewinsky matter to his jurisdiction.
March began with the announcement that after months of complex negotiations, the administration had succeeded in preserving the largest unprotected stand of old-growth redwoods in the world, the Headwaters Forest in northern California. The next week I took a four-day trip to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to highlight a new era of democratic cooperation in a region in which, not long before, America had supported repressive regimes with horrible human rights records as long as they were anti-Communist. Viewing the aftermath of natural disasters that American troops were helping with, speaking to the parliament in El Salvador, where recent adversaries in a bloody civil war now sat together in peace, apologizing for America’s past actions in Guatemala—all these seemed to me to be signs of a new era of democratic progress I was committed to support. By the time I returned, we were moving toward another Balkan war, this time in Kosovo. The Serbs had launched an offensive against rebellious Kosovar Albanians a year earlier, killing many innocent people; some women and children were burned in their own homes. The last round of Serb aggression had sparked another exodus of refugees and had increased the desire of Kosovar Albanians for independence. The killings were all too reminiscent of the early days of Bosnia, which, like Kosovo, bridged the divide between European Muslims and Serb Orthodox Christians, a dividing line along which there had been conflict from time to time for six hundred years. In 1974, Tito had given Kosovo autonomy, allowing it self-government and control over its schools. In 1989, Milosevic had taken autonomy away. The tensions had been rising ever since, and had exploded after the independence of Bosnia was secured in 1995. I was determined not to allow Kosovo to become another Bosnia. So was Madeleine Albright.
By April 1998, the United Nations had imposed an arms embargo, and the United States and its allies had imposed economic sanctions on Serbia for its failure to end the hostilities and begin a dialogue with the Kosovar Albanians. By the middle of June, NATO had begun to plan for a range of military options to end the violence. As summer came, Dick Holbrooke was back in the region to try to find a diplomatic solution for the standoff.
In mid-July, Serb forces again attacked armed and unarmed Kosovars, beginning a summer of aggression that would force 300,000 more Kosovar Albanians to leave their homes. In late September, the UN Security Council had passed another resolution demanding an end to hostilities, and at month’s end we sent Holbrooke on yet another mission to Belgrade to try to reason with Milosevic. On October 13, NATO had threatened to attack Serbia within four days unless the UN resolutions were observed. The air strikes were delayed when four thousand Yugoslav special police officers were withdrawn from Kosovo. Things got better for a while, but in January 1999 the Serbs were killing innocents in Kosovo again, and NATO air strikes seemed inevitable. We decided to try diplomacy one more time, but I wasn’t optimistic. The parties’ objectives were far apart. The United States and NATO wanted Kosovo to have the political autonomy it had enjoyed under the Yugoslav constitution between 1974 and 1989, until Milosevic took it away, and we wanted a NATO-led peacekeeping force to guarantee the peace and the safety of Kosovo’s civilians, including the Serb minority. Milosevic wanted to keep control of Kosovo, and was opposed to any foreign troop deployments there. The Kosovar Albanians wanted independence. They were also divided among themselves. Ibrahim Rugova, the head of the shadow government, was a soft-spoken man with a penchant for wearing a scarf around his neck. I was convinced we could make a peace agreement with him, but not so sure about the other main Kosovar faction, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by a young man named Hacim Thaci. The KLA wanted independence and believed it could actually go toe-to-toe with the Serbian army. The parties met at Rambouillet, France, on February 6, to work out the details of an agreement that would restore autonomy, protect the Kosovars from oppression with a NATO-led operation, disarm the KLA, and allow the Serb army to continue to patrol the border. Madeleine Albright and her British counterpart, Robin Cook, pursued this policy aggressively. After a week of negotiations coordinated by U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill and his counterparts from the European Union and Russia, Madeleine found that our position was opposed by both sides: the Serbs didn’t want to agree to a NATO peacekeeping force, and the Kosovars didn’t want to agree to accept autonomy unless they were also guaranteed a referendum on independence. And the KLA weren’t happy about having to disarm, partly because they weren’t sure they could rely on the NATO forces to protect them. Our team decided to write the agreement in a way that would delay the referendum but not deny it forever. On February 23, the Kosovar Albanians, including Thaci, accepted the agreement in principle, returned home to sell it to their people, and in mid-March traveled to Paris to sign the finished document. The Serbs boycotted the ceremony, as forty thousand Serbian troops massed in and around Kosovo and Milosevic said again that he would never agree to foreign troops on Yugoslavian soil. I sent Dick Holbrooke back to see him one last time, but even Dick couldn’t budge him. On March 23, after Holbrooke left Belgrade, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, with my full support, directed General Wes Clark to begin air strikes. On the same day, by a bipartisan majority of 58–41, the Senate voted to support the action. Earlier in the month, the House had voted 219–191 to support sending U.S. troops to Kosovo if there was a peace agreement. Among the prominent Republicans voting for the proposal were the new Speaker, Dennis Hastert, and Henry Hyde. When Congressman Hyde said America should stand up against Milosevic and ethnic cleansing, I smiled and thought to myself that maybe Dr. Jekyll was in there somewhere after all. While a majority of Congress and all our NATO allies favored the air strikes, Russia did not. Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was on his way to the United States to meet with Al Gore. When Al notified him that a NATO attack on Yugoslavia was imminent, Primakov ordered his plane to turn around and take him back to Moscow.