Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...since he returned last March to the small Caucasian republic where he ruled as Communist Party boss before Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him to Moscow in 1985. At a time in life when other senior statesmen would be content to write their memoirs, the 64-year-old diplomat has embarked on the riskiest mission of his career: bringing peace and stability to his homeland. There he daily faces more violence than he did as a major player in the cold war, as Georgia is beset by ethnic rebellions in the independence-minded regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia...
...takes on the biggest job of his 30 years as a career diplomat, Eagleburger, 62, somehow makes all this work to his advantage. "There is charisma in that funny penguin of a figure," says a veteran congressional aide. His devil-may-care attitude about how he treats his body extends to how he handles his public image, and at least in that regard the result has been astonishingly healthy...
That image is built with simple materials: intelligence and a bluff honesty. "I do not dissemble well," he says, a startling admission for a diplomat. He not only gets away with being direct, but people like him for it. "Many people in the State Department are quietly subversive about policies they don't like but obsequious to their elders and betters," says a longtime colleague. But Eagleburger has swum against that stream: never talking out of school, but glad to raise his voice within...
...breakup of Yugoslavia has been painful for Eagleburger, and a test of his philosophy. Seven of his 11 years abroad as a diplomat, four of them as ambassador under Jimmy Carter, were spent in Yugoslavia, where he earned the nickname "Larry of Macedonia." Soon after becoming Deputy Secretary in the Bush Administration in 1989, he warned that the end of the cold war could unleash ethnic hatreds in Europe, especially in Yugoslavia. He was criticized for having cold war nostalgia, but his fears have been justified. The U.S. mostly kept out of the mounting Yugoslav crisis until Baker visited Belgrade...
...agreed to begin new talks next week in Geneva, some of those closest to the crisis are giving up hope. Britain's Lord Carrington, the European Community negotiator, resigned after a year of fruitless labor -- including more than 30 cease-fires, all broken. And George D. Kenney, a career diplomat who heads the State Department's Yugoslavia desk, resigned to protest America's failure to act decisively against Serbian "genocide." The London conference, he said, was "a charade...