Exiled envoy
Vygaudas Ušackas, the new EU special representative to Afghanistan, is the latest diplomat to be exiled abroad by
Lithuania’s president.
The joke in Vilnius is that if you are in Lithuania’s diplomatic corps and get under President Dalia Grybauskaite’s skin, then nothing less than exile to Afghanistan awaits you.
Last October, Valteris Baliukonis, who had been a foreign affairs adviser to Valdas Adamkus, the previous president, was on course to become Lithuania’s ambassador to Spain, having been approved by the governments in Vilnius and Madrid. But when his authorisation papers reached Grybauskaite, she put them in the bin. Baliukonis had apparently rubbed her up the wrong way while she was the European commissioner for financial programming and the budget, so the posting in Madrid was forfeited, and Baliukonis was dispatched to Kabul to head Lithuania’s mission.
Next came Vygaudas Usackas, who in December, after Lithuania became embroiled in bad publicity about the existence of CIA prisons not far from Vilnius, played down the damning revelation. Usackas issued a soundbite to the effect that the detention centres, though erected, had not held prisoners.
This was not what Grybauskaite wanted to hear. An inquiry was unable to establish whether any prisoners had been held at the CIA facilities, a caveat that Usackas craftily tried to spin. Grybauskaite had wanted Lithuania to ‘confess and repent’ for the clandestine jailhouses and was irked by Usackas’s ‘fudge and forget’ approach. She soon expressed a lack of confidence in him, and Usackas, a non-party cabinet member, had no choice but to resign in January. Within a week, he became a candidate for the post of EU special representative to Afghanistan (EUSR), and by the end of February was chosen for the job. Exile number two.
A career diplomat since 1991, when Lithuania gained its independence from the Soviet Union, Usackas worked tirelessly over two decades to nurture the Lithuania’s image and shield it from unwarranted broadsides and its own follies. When Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, suggested last June that Polish forces did not occupy Vilnius after the First World War, Us?ackas did not hesitate in reacting to the ‘big brother’. When David Cameron, leader of the UK’s main opposition party, cracked a joke about his country’s main cultural organisation, the Arts Council, favouring “one-legged Lithuanian lesbians”, Usackas, then ambassador to the UK, reminded him that there were 100,000 Lithuanian residents in the UK. After Lithuania impeached Rolandas Paksas, the then president, in 2004, Usackas, in Washington, DC at the time, worked tirelessly to mend the damage.
So it was only natural that, when criticism rained down on Lithuania for playing Washington’s lackey and permitting a group of CIA spooks to build torture chambers, Usackas should use his considerable public relations skills to contain the fall-out. If anything, the incident underscores the art of Baltic diplomacy: Washington must be satisfied, directives issued in Brussels must be followed, Moscow must be kept at bay and, in the newest dimension, countries such as Ukraine and Georgia shepherded toward democracy.
To his credit, Usackas, who is 45 and married with two children, has learned all these skills. He was ambassador to the US for five years and to the UK for two. He worked as Lithuania’s first negotiator with the EU on membership and in the 1990s was the country’s liaison to NATO. He speaks Russian (as well as English and French) and travels to former Soviet republics regularly, doing whatever he can to advance Western integration. Last year he advocated offering clear prospects of EU membership to Ukraine at a time when most European diplomats wanted to forget Kiev and its debacles. As Usackas argued: “If Ukraine one day succeeds in its democratic transformation and integration to the West, the Russian people will also start asking, ‘Why are we different’?”
In itself, Usackas’s stance toward Russia is praiseworthy. Even though his father, grandfather and grandmother were imprisoned in Siberian gulags – and his mother was shot by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1947 for assisting partisans – he appears to bear no grudges. In the 1990s he was instrumental in facilitating border crossings with Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, and, while foreign minister, tried softening Vilnius’s perennially prickly stance toward Moscow. Last November, when conservatives in Lithuania’s government wanted to raise the issue of compensation for Soviet occupation damages, Usackas struck the item from the agenda. Pragmatism took precedence over emotion.
Fact File
Curriculum Vitae
1964: Born, Skuodas1990: Law degree, Vilnius University
1991: Joins foreign ministry
1992-96: Lithuanian mission to EU, NATO
1996-99: Political director, foreign ministry
2000-01: Chief negotiator on EU accession
2001-06: Ambassador to the US and Mexico
2006-08: Ambassador to the UK
2008-10: Minister of foreign affairs
2010-: EU special representative to Afghanistan
But mollifying the Russian bear is one thing, taming Afghanistan is quite another. It will put Usackas’s skills to the test. As the EU’s envoy, he will have to co-ordinate policy with other big players – the US, NATO – while keeping hope alive among tribal Afghans despite the incessant violence, and ushering them toward law-abiding governance.
Usackas will not be starting from scratch. He inherits an action plan. “My view is that over the next three to five years we should aim for a security situation in Afghanistan that has calmed down enough to allow for long-term development, and that means, for example, a diversification of the economy away from drugs,” Usackas tells European Voice. He stresses that it will be important for him to manage expectations – both in the EU and with the Afghan people. “You have to be very careful with the benchmarks you establish in an area like Afghanistan – and you have to have patience,” he says.
His first priority upon arriving in Kabul in April will be to merge the office of the EUSR, with its staff of 23, which he nominally heads, with the 83 staff working for the European Commission. Usackas, who preaches the virtues of ‘teamwork spirit’, should have no problem pulling this off. As one Lithuanian colleague said, he is a master at networking – a diplomat’s diplomat. Šarunas Marciulionis, a former NBA basketball star who is friends with Usackas, says: “He’s very active, he’s a great communicator, and he can use his skills to work with people from different backgrounds and religions.”
Usackas loves using sport to forge informal ties. While in Vilnius, he organised golf and tennis tournaments for the diplomatic community, and says he hopes to do something similar in Afghanistan. True to form, he played basketball with a group of Afghans in Chaghcharan last year. If Grybauskaite continues in her ways, then a basketball team of exiled Lithuanian diplomats should be easy to put together.