Not all ambassadors have the same influence on the politics of the country they come from. For some, the service in a certain country simply ends up in the cyclical replacement of ambassadors, some have progressed and lead an embassy for the first time, some have already been rewarded for some merits and sent to serve as ambassadors for four years. Some go to the position of ambassador as punishment, when they want to remove them from domestic politics.
Some ambassadors send their reports through established diplomatic channels to certain services in the ministries of foreign affairs who assess their importance, and then send them or not to higher authorities who forward them or do not forward them to their competent authorities, in order to finally reach the minister of foreign affairs, heads of state or the government, or ended up in the wastebasket. There is a hierarchy in diplomacy as in the army, a career diplomat does not jump over colleagues with a higher rank to reach the general.
And there are different ambassadors. Those who are sent by their government with some special task, those who enjoy the special trust of their bosses, who can skip the usual diplomatic hierarchy and directly report and express their opinion to the presidents of governments or states.
Such ambassadors include the future ambassador of the United States of America to Serbia, Christopher Hill. An experienced diplomat, who proved himself to the State Department as ambassador to Macedonia in the final phase of the war breakup of Yugoslavia, in Poland, which was very important for NATO immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in South Korea and Iraq, was brought out of retirement by US President Joseph Biden and convinced him to accept another ambassador's mandate - in Belgrade.
For service in Serbia, which is the central country of the so-called In the Western Balkans, which is considered a crisis region primarily due to unresolved ethnic conflicts, Christopher Hill qualified as the head of the American delegation in negotiations with representatives of North Korea on nuclear disarmament in 2003 and as an American negotiator during the formation of the all-Iraqi government in Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq.
At the time when NATO bombed FR Yugoslavia, he was a special envoy for Kosovo (1998-1999) and a member of the American delegation in the negotiations between the representatives of the Kosovo Albanians and Serbia in Rambouillet. He was part of the team of the American "bulldozer" Richard Holbrooke, and could observe from close range how Holbrooke twisted Slobodan Milosevic's hands.
There is no doubt that Christopher Hill will be entrusted with putting pressure on Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić on all the issues that bother the Americans. Therefore, the members of the President's team in charge of such affairs should seriously understand and analyze what Hill said on December 14 during the hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Right at the beginning of his presentation, he warned the Serbian authorities to "take seriously" the American efforts in the Western Balkans and highlighted Bosnia and Herzegovina as the primary problem.
"We will be watching very carefully who is helping to move things in the right direction and who is not." BiH is a key issue for our cooperation with Serbia in the future," said Hill before the Senate. He practically said that he will ask Vučić to put pressure on the leadership of Republika Srpska to withdraw the steps it took to separate the judiciary and the army from Bosnian institutions and transfer them to the jurisdiction of the Serbian entity.
This means that the USA will no longer watch Milorad Dodik stand idly by as the second man in the politics of the "Serbian world", right after Aleksandar Vučić.
Elsewhere, he highlighted the "frustrating lack of progress in the negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina" and said very clearly how the US sees a solution: "Mutual recognition is the best way to progress, as President Joseph Biden said." Hill was present when Holbrooke convinced Milosevic that the then Kosovo crisis should be resolved as Washington wanted.
Hill went on to talk about the "malignant" influence of Russia and China on Serbia and that the US will "try to help" Serbia to "build resilience against them." In other words, pressure will be exerted so that Serbia does not buy Russian weapons, does not borrow from the Chinese and does not give them key infrastructural jobs.
He also emphasized that he will insist on a full investigation into the murder of American citizens, the Bitići brothers, in 1999.
Somewhere along the way, he also mentioned the importance of media freedom, fair elections and civil society.
Christopher Hill speaks Serbian, no one has to translate for him the constant anti-Western, anti-American and xenophobic intonations of Pink television's news program, which fuel ethnic tensions. The same applies to state-run tabloids.
The appointment of Hill as ambassador in Belgrade could be interpreted as a sign that this administration believes that the time has come for Serbia to fulfill what Biden expects: the abolition of Dodik in Bosnia, recognition of Kosovo's independence, distancing from Russia and China. In the future, America will do what America is already doing, when it cares about something, and someone stands in its way.
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