Albright’s Combative Personality May Hold Key to Mideast Peace

By Richard H. Curtiss

“Ross’s mission was regarded as an 11th-hour attempt to break the deadlock through quiet diplomacy, and his failure appeared to confront President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with two options: Either try to exert greater pressure on Netanyahu by making their proposals public, or abandon the role of mediator.”

—Correspondent Serge Schmemann, New York Times, March 31, 1998

It was in 1993 after a luncheon in United Nations headquarters in New York that I first became aware of Madeleine Albright’s individualistic role in U.S. foreign policymaking. After the lunch, the Saudi ambassador to the U.N. invited me to view and photograph two works of Arabic calligraphy the Saudi government had presented as permanent decorations for U.N. headquarters.

As we moved from one exhibit to the other we encountered Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian ambassador to the U.N., whose physician father I already had met in Washington. The Saudi delegate introduced me to the U.S.-raised son whom the newly independent Bosnian government had called upon to suspend a career as an American businessman to be come a Bosnian diplomat.

I expressed my regret to him that, faced with two crises in his last months as a lame-duck president, George Bush had chosen to deal with what seemed, wrongly, to be the easiest one, Somalia, leaving the genocide in Bosnia to be dealt with by his successor, Bill Clinton. Now after nearly a year in office, Clinton was displaying little interest in foreign affairs, and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher, seemed unwilling to lead the divided European countries in rescuing the Muslim-led multisectarian Sarajevo government from invasions by its Serb and Croat neighbors.

The American-turned-Bosnian official, however, seemed strangely optimistic. “At least the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, understands and she’ll do the right thing if she possibly can,” he assured me. As the months dragged on, with reports of atrocities against isolated Bosnian Muslim towns and villages seeping out, and cameras recording the horrors of Sarajevo’s besieged citizens being bombarded and starved simultaneously while pinned down in unheated homes during freezing winter weather, I watched Madeleine Albright carefully as she shuttled between New York and Washington for weekly meetings, along with Christopher and then-National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, with the president.

There were few “leaks” from Clinton cabinet sessions on foreign policy, however, and it finally took needling from Senator Bob Dole, President Clinton’s opponent in the forthcoming 1996 elections, to force Clinton to intervene. But then things went well and the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serb forces followed by U.S.-led NATO occupation and the U.S.-negotiated Dayton, Ohio agreement halted the bloodshed.

Albright has emerged as the strongest champion of the Kosovars.

Through it all, I later learned, Albright and Lake persevered in forcing Clinton to focus on action to halt the genocide, while his Pentagon advisers and European allies opposed it. So Albright, who seemed to come into office with little understanding of the Middle East but a great deal of knowledge about Central and Eastern Europe, where she was born, certainly exhibited none of the anti-Muslim or pro-Serb tendencies of her fellow French and Russian delegates to the U.N.

The Israel-Palestine problem was something else. Where some of her predecessors in New York merely went through the motions of protecting Israel from U.N. Security Council condemnations because U.S. presidents, driven by domestic political considerations, ordered them to, Madeleine Albright really seemed to believe the Palestinians were “terrorists” and to have forgotten, or never to have realized, upon whose land the nation of Israel was founded.

It almost certainly was this pro-Israel zeal, and not the fact that she had been right all along about Bosnia, that enabled Bill Clinton to steer her nomination through the Senate without serious opposition to replace Christopher as secretary of state for the second Clinton term.

Albright’s “discovery,” only weeks later in January 1997, that all four of her grandparents had been Jewish and that three of them had perished in the European Holocaust (one grandfather was already dead at the time Germany occupied her native Czechoslovakia) was, of course, ludicrous. In fact she had quietly alerted the Clinton administration, as it prepared for Senate hearings on her nomination, to be aware that the question of “Jewish origins” might arise.

In the Know

It didn’t then, but it had arisen earlier in the Israeli press and in U.S. Jewish community weekly newspapers when she was serving in the United Nations. The writer reminded readers of the Washington Report of that fact in December 1996, and it was that article that started the Washington Post’s two State Department correspondents on the research that led them to confront Albright with the evidence of her origins. Her comment that “I’ll have to look into that” was typically guarded and uninformative, neither confirming nor denying that she knew all along.

More recently, the spotlight has turned to the former Yugoslavia again. And again Madeleine Albright has emerged not merely as a champion but, in fact, the strongest champion of the Kosovars. They are the embattled Muslims of Albanian origin who make up 90 percent of the population of Kosovo, a province that enjoyed autonomy in Tito’s Yugoslavia. That autonomy was revoked by Slobodan Milosevic, the communist-turned-Serb-nationalist-extremist who now rules Serbia and Montenegro. And it was this revocation of autonomy that has led to a nearly open campaign for national independence by some leaders of the Albanian majority.

When black-uniformed “special police” from Serbia sought to put down the campaign by killing entire families of some supporters of armed action against the Serbs, Madeleine Albright put herself way out in front of the European leaders with her outspoken condemnation of any repetition of the bloody methods used by the Serbs in Bosnia. And, even though the Europeans are not yet ready to follow the U.S. all the way, she was successful in reinstating economic sanctions against Serbia that had been lifted because of recent, limited Serb cooperation in Bosnia.

So where does Madeleine Albright stand on issues important to Muslims? In Eastern Europe she’s been their champion. In Iraq she’s sounded like a relentless scold. And in Palestine, a domestic political minefield for U.S. politicians, she’s been uncommonly cautious since becoming secretary of state.

Now, however, that’s where the world’s attention has shifted, with the failure of U.S. peace talks director Dennis Ross to moderate Binyamin Netanyahu’s intransigence against carrying out significant Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank and against halting expansion of the Jewish settlements. Barring further outside distractions like Saddam Hussain or Monica Lewinsky, Clinton faces a decision on the matter which casts a dark shadow over U.S. relations with the entire Islamic world.

On March 30, Albright’s spokesman, James Rubin, said that “there are many options, and one option has always been to disengage.” He didn’t say, of course, what “disengagement” from brokering Israeli-Arab peace implies for U.S. military and economic aid to Israel, which receives more of both each year than all of the countries of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined.

Conservative U.S. columnist Robert Novak wrote, even before Ross’s latest failure, that Madeleine Albright already had lost faith in him and his fellow Israelists who have been running U.S. Middle East policy in recent years. She is looking for new ideas from veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering, former U.S. ambassador to both Jordan and Israel along with El Salvador and the former Soviet Union and her predecessor as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Novak said. Pickering already has retired once as a career diplomat, and now has been called back to be one of Albright’s top two deputies, he’s also in a position to give her frank counsel without fear of political or career consequences.

Novak predicted that she, in turn, will advise Clinton that it is time for the U.S. to pursue its own peace plan at the risk of a public break with Netanyahu. To head that off, Netanyahu has mobilized both U.S. Jewish community leaders against Clinton and also such extreme right-wing Clinton critics as militant Christian Zionist Jerry Falwell and equally outspoken friends of Israel in Congress.

It is Clinton’s nature to avoid all such confrontations. There is no doubt, also, that he considers himself highly vulnerable to media exploitation of the moral charges hanging over his head. But if Albright chooses to do it, she can accurately point out to the president that there is nothing more Israel’s friends in the U.S. media can do to him that they are not doing already in an attempt either to keep him from breaking openly with Netanyahu or to force him to resign in favor of Vice President Al Gore, Israel’s greatest American friend of all.

So what is Madeleine Albright, supporter of Balkan Muslims and critic of Middle Eastern Muslim leaders, advising Bill Clinton to do? Hopefully it’s the same thing she advised him to do in Bosnia—drop his detachment and fear of domestic political consequences and confront Netanyahu just as forthrightly as he confronted Milosevic.

If Clinton does, the peace process eventually could get back on track and the world-wide relief that would generate might even help Clinton at home. If he doesn’t, new forces will be set in motion whose unpredictable consequences will be felt long after both Clinton and Netanyahu are history.

Perhaps Albright could combine her talents—championing peace in the Middle East as she did in Eastern Europe, and scolding relentlessly anyone too timid to support it.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.