Can Richard Holbrooke Really Say That?

Recalling the Bulldog Diplomat's Ex Abrupto Intervention in a Meeting with Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas in September 1999

After the traditional first two foreign service postings abroad, I showed up for my customary third tour job at the Main State department building in Washington DC in the summer of 1998, only to discover that the position to which I had been assigned no longer existed.  Even the position number was nowhere to be found, and I spent a week or so wandering from office to office in search of it.  

Lucky for me, the Indonesia desk needed surge support; Indonesia was in crisis.  So I was summoned out of my bureaucratic limbo and pitched into the diplomatic trenches.  Thank god. 

This explains how, one year later, I came to be the note-taker in a meeting between then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and then Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas that took place in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly in 1999.  And it was in that meeting that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke—the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations at the time—made an ex abrupto intervention that I myself will never forget but which never made it into the historical record.  

But first, some context about Indonesia and about the late Ambassador Holbrooke to help set the scene.

Indonesia as Geo-Political Presence, Then and Now

Not as widely appreciated as it should be, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world (after China, India, and the United States), with a population of 270 million.  It is also the most populous Muslim-majority nation (followed by Pakistan), and the third largest democracy—with its diverse, multi-ethnic population spread across 17 thousand islands and 3 time zones.  A multiverse world unto itself, Indonesia possesses its own center of geopolitical gravity and anchors the 10-nation strong Association of Southeastern Nations (ASEAN).  As a diplomat who served in both East Asia and Latin America, to me Indonesia occupies a space akin to that of Brazil in South America.  Both are “continent countries” with a major strategic presence in their respective regions while remaining somehow separate and distinct from their geographic surroundings.  Whatever the significant cultural overlap, Brazil is a world apart from Spanish-speaking South America; Indonesia sits betwixt and between India and China while blending a bit of both (the contemporary strategic heart of the bygone colonial “Indo-China” grouping of which it was never part). 

In the summer of 1998 Indonesia remained mired in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.  With the economy in a tailspin and amid widespread social unrest, political instability deepened.  After three decades of strongman rule, President Suharto had been forced to resign earlier that year, leaving a fragile caretaker government to negotiate a tenuous political transition.  Separatist movements from Aceh in the west to Irian Jaya (now West Papua) in the east threatened to tear the country apart.  In an August 1999 referendum, East Timor chose to secede from its 25 year forced union with Indonesia.  In response, outraged nationalist elements of the Indonesian military organized and armed informal militias to intimidate and attack the East Timorese population.  Approximately 1,500 people were killed and over 200,000 displaced in the ensuing violence.  

At the same time, Indonesia’s first ever truly democratic presidential elections were scheduled to take place in October, a few short weeks after the meeting. 

Richard Holbrooke - Bulldog Diplomat

For diplomats of my (late baby boomer) generation, Ambassador Holbrooke is a figure who needs no introduction.  For others, let’s just say the man was a legend.  A two-time Assistant Secretary and veteran foreign policy advisor for Democratic presidents, he seemed perpetually in the running to be Secretary of State.  He was known (and feared) in equal measure for his strategic sense, intellectual brilliance, and boundless, unbridled ambition.  His blunt diplomatic manner, too, and that’s a euphemism.  If you’re one of those people who thought that being a diplomat meant being nice, being endlessly accommodating, and always letting others have their way, you had another thing coming with Holbrooke.  He perfected this bulldog style of diplomacy while working to end the contemporaneous wars of ethnic cleansing amid the implosion of the former Yugoslavia (which partly explains the content and form of his interjection).  I never worked directly with him, but heard stories from those who did, and watched him in action once or twice, including during the meeting in question.  (For those interested in more details, George Packard’s book Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century is one good place to begin).

Can He Say That? Well, He Just Did.

We had two broad goals for the meeting between the Secretary and her Indonesian counterpart back then.  The first was to express strong support for Indonesia’s democratic transition.  The second was to urge the Indonesian government to halt the militia-led violence in East Timor and allow the tiny half-island to transition freely to independence.  Foreign Minister Ali Alatas was a seasoned, suave, and sophisticated career Indonesian diplomat who was widely rumored to be a favored candidate as the next UN Secretary General¹.  Holbrooke, as American Ambassador to the UN, was the second-ranking member of the US delegation and sat immediately to the right of the Secretary. 

For her part, Secretary Albright was a veteran foreign policy expert who knew the Eastern Europe portfolio cold.  But she understandably required more intensive support from the bureaucracy on issues farther afield from her core area of expertise.  Such as, say, Indonesia.  This support came in the form of 3-5 inch flash cards that State Department desk officers prepared with talking points for her use in meetings with foreign officials.  During the exchange with Foreign Minister Alatas, the flash cards and talking points prepared by my colleagues on the Indonesia desk seemed to serve Secretary Albright well—until about half way through.  

Then something happened.  I don’t recall exactly what.  It may have been the tone of Foreign Minister Alatas’s complaint, or the outraged look on his face, or the incongruous comparison with a part of the world Albright knew all too well.  But when the talk turned to East Timor and militia-led violence, I remember him saying something along the lines of, “I feel it is unfair of you to put us in the same category as Milosevic.”²  Apparently stunned into silence by the comparison, Secretary Albright didn’t know how to respond.  Her flash cards had not prepared her for this unexpected tangent, and the gift for improvisation had momentarily abandoned her.  So she froze, said nothing, and for a long moment of silence the meeting felt like it might go off the rails.  Until Holbrooke stepped in:

“We would never compare you with a fucking son of a bitch like Milosevic!”  

Just as quickly, order was restored.  The diplomatic point was made.  Indonesia, for all its real problems, was an emerging democracy, not a collapsing state.  It was navigating a tenuous political transition—with a powerful military fearful of losing its privileges, the worry of spreading social unrest, and separatist tensions threatening its current fragile stability and uncertain future path.  The violence in East Timor was troubling and real.  But it was not on a scale or of a kind comparable to that taking place in the former Yugoslavia.  Nor was the urbane Foreign Minister Alatas—or Indonesia’s unlikely caretaker leader, President Habibe, for that matter—anything like the psychopathic Serbian ethnic-cleanser-in-chief, Slobodan Milsosevic.

I remember Foreign Minister Alatas appearing visibly relieved after Holbrooke’s unexpected outburst, perhaps encouraged that US assessments had not fallen into the familiar trap of false equivalencies.  Back on track, the meeting proceeded, concluding on a positive note of strong US support for Indonesia’s democratic consolidation.  Meanwhile, I dutifully wrote down Holbrooke’s colorful words verbatim on my notepad and included them in the draft memorandum of conversation submitted to the executive secretariat.  But (for some reason) those words never found their way into the published version for the record. 

Let this short addendum serve as an asterisk, if not an actual correction.  As for the potential utility of blunt speech in the supposedly indirect and beating-about-the-bush profession of diplomacy, I’d say that’s a judgment call. But you’d better know what you’re doing.

1. According to some reports, the violence in East Timor was partly responsible for derailing Alatas’s candidacy.

2. Then Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic, who led the savage ethnic cleansing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia.