Russia, the Near Abroad and the West, William H. Hill
A Federalist in Moldova Russia, the Near Abroad and the West: Lessons from the MoldovaTransnistria Conflict. By: William H. Hill. Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press: Washington, DC, 2012. One measure of the credibility of a modern diplomat’s memoir, in our post-Wikileak world, may well be the length of its production delays. Departments and agencies hire full-time, professional secret-combers, whose job it is to cleanse classified information from any document meant for public consumption. By this standard, Russia, the Near Abroad and the West: Lessons from the Moldova-Transnistria Conflict, William Hill’s account of the five years he served as head of the OSCE’s Mission to Moldova, should be hotly anticipated. Originally scheduled to debut in August 2012, its release date has been pushed back to October. However, it wasn’t the security clearance process that was entirely to blame: Hill had to submit the manuscript to his current employer, the National Defense University, and as a professional courtesy, he also checked with many of his former colleagues before printing personal correspondence. Surprisingly, the OSCE has no formal publishing hurdles. This allowed Hill to quote extensively from his own reports and memorandums, essentially private emails written in the style of State Department cables. The final result is
Books and Reviews 159 as complete a picture of ongoing international negotiations. The closest comparison is the work of Ron Asmus, whose books on the diplomacy surrounding NATO expansion and the GeorgianRussian War in 2008 also offered readers the same kind of fly-on-the-wall access. In fact, another reason for the book’s delay was the untimely passing of Asmus, who was in the process of reading the manuscript when his health sharply declined. Hill’s central thesis also follows in the tradition of Asmus: a conflict in Russia’s so-called “Near Abroad” goes unheeded by the United States, but later proves to have a crucial, and detrimental, impact on the bilateral relationship between the two powers. Between 1999 and 2006, William Hill was charged with brokering a solution to the Transnistrian conflict, one of the so-called “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union. The Pridnestrovian Moldovian Republic, or Transnistria as it is commonly called, is an industrial and largely Russian-speaking enclave that broke away from Moldova in the early 1990s, following a brief civil war. Moldova was unable to heel the breakaway republic, but the Transnistrian government was unable to gain international recognition, resulting in a political stalemate. Hill’s narrative focuses on what is widely considered to be the closest point the two sides have ever come to a resolution: a 2003 plan that Russian negotiator Dmitry Kozak, then deputy head of the presidential administration, attempted to broker through a secretive blitz campaign of shuttle diplomacy. Hill vividly describes how things fell apart, up to the last possible moment, even as Vladimir Putin was
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Books and Reviews boarding an aircraft to attend the signing of the peace accord. In many ways, the book is arriving at the best possible time for Moldova. As the Transnistrian conflict passes its 20th anniversary, experts are once again finding reasons for optimism. A new generation of leaders is appearing around the negotiation table. Moldova replaced its long-ruling Communist Party with a Europeanfocused coalition government, which, after three years of trying, finally succeeded in appointing a president. Most surprisingly, the long-time authoritarian Transnistrian leader, Igor Smirnov, was replaced through democratic mechanisms by a young and pragmatic leader named Yevgeny Shevchuk. Back in March of 2003, Hill wrote a memo that could have been drafted last week: “This year may be our best chance in a generation of reaching a political settlement of the Transnistrian conflict ... Recurrent Moldovan dreams that international pressure will finally reward them with a unitary state must be regularly doused with doses of realpolitik. Pressure must be maintained on the Transnistrians for real actions, no matter how much they beg for relief ... Despite their status as mediators, Russia and Ukraine are involved in the conflict ... The possibility cannot be excluded that one or both of our mediator colleagues will backslide and provide de facto support for one or another of the parties.” In fact, reading Hill’s story gives the impression that history is repeating itself before it is even published, nevermind forgotten. In the early days of his mission, Hill made considerable progress in eliminating Russian munitions dumps that, while largely non-functional, were still very much hazardous materials that provided Russian troops with a pretext for staying on
Russia, the Near Abroad and the West, William H. Hill
Moldovan soil. Later, a parallel attempt to solve the conflict outside of official channels brought everyone back to square one. Today, the OSCE has developed a successful programme for securing radioactive waste in both Moldova and Transnistria. Official negotiations have led to agreements on resuming train services across the country and providing all citizens with basic medical care. This progress has instigated chatter about a different creature entirely – a political solution to the 20-year conflict. Some experts have even started using the Moldovan F-word: Federalism. As William Hill documents, it was Kozak’s experiment in 2003 which transformed Federalism into the dirtiest word in Moldovan politics. As Kozak attempted to railroad a solution between elites in Transnistria and Chisinau, both sides failed to properly communicate with their domestic audiences. Suffice to say that in rapid succession, William Hill was hung and burned in effigy by Transnistrians, publicly berated by Moldovan intellectuals for betraying them to the Russians, and finally, sources say, the subject of an angry phone call from Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush. The decline and fall of the peace treaty provides a breakneck narrative, often accompanied by rich characterisation. Some of the most memorable scenes involve the former Transnistrian leader Smirnov, whose tactics prove in the retelling to be deliciously vindictive. Once, Smirnov spontaneously piled Hill, an OSCE colleague, and both of their wives into the official Transnistrian Volga sedan (“that Smirnov drove, himself, without escort, at high speed through the weekend Tiraspol traffic”) in order to conduct an inch-by-inch tour of the new Sheriff football complex (“two
Russia, the Near Abroad and the West, William H. Hill
outdoor stadiums, one indoor stadium, two hotels, and eleven practice fields”), followed by a leisurely lunch. It’s all very baffling, until Hill returned to discover that a fuming Dmitry Kozak had been kept waiting all the while in the government building. Future memoirists might have a happier ending than Hill’s, but they certainly won’t have more colourful anecdotes. Yevgeny Shevchuk, Transnistria’s new leader, also makes a cameo appearance. Although the book was sent to the printer before Shevchuk’s election as president of the quasi-state, Hill portrays him favourably as a rational and constructive negotiator. In a recent interview, Hill said Shevchuk will make a pragmatic partner on issues dealing with socioeconomic welfare and communications, but when it comes to the larger question of conflict resolution, Hill suspects Shevchuk’s experience in the negotiations may have taught him not to trust his Moldovan counterparts. Hill does not begrudge Kozak, and frequently repeats that he considers him a man of much talent. Perhaps if greater efforts had been made to coordinate with the official negotiators, and if any effort at all had been made to explain the plan to the general public, it would have succeeded. Or, at the least, the image of Federalism would not have been so thoroughly tarnished. Among the most vocal critics of a federal solution in general, and William Hill in particular, is Vladimir Socor, an ardent proMoldovan and analyst with the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC. Socor led a camp of Moldovans who were worried that the Kozak plan would give Russia a Trojan horse inside Moldova capable of destabilising its already fragile government.
Books and Reviews 161 The venom continued to flow throughout Hill’s tenure. Socor accused Hill of pushing the Kozak plan in disguised forms, a charge which Hill strongly refuted. The debate is catalogued in a depressing corner of the internet, next to a YouTube video of a dejected and angry Dmitry Kozak giving one last press conference in the Chisinau airport on his way out the door. Incidentally, it was Kozak’s last appearance in the international arena until he was placed in charge of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The story ends with a heartbreaking line. By Hill’s estimation at the time of writing, the Kozak experience “should not have precluded the idea of federalisation in Moldova as a possible resolution of the Transnistrian conflict,” but in reality, it does. When asked whether recent events have changed his mind, Hill responds with cautious optimism. He admits that the relationship between Yevgeny Shevchuk and the Moldovan prime minister, Vlad Filat, is many times more promising than the platform of mistrust and deceit which served as standard operating procedure for their predecessors. “They have a chance today, like we had a chance. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have seen it coming, but now ... it’s possible.” Russia, the Near Abroad and the West should be required reading for all Transnistrian settlement optimists, especially for those Europeans with ambitious plans for a quick resolution outside of official channels. William Schreiber