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Alumnus helps Macedonia find economic stability

Philip Reeker, 1991 Thunderbird graduate, the new U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, zips his jacket and pulls a knit cap onto his head. Members of a mountaineering club have assembled for a Sunday morning hike, and Reeker has joined the group outside Skopje, the capital of the small Eastern European country on the Balkan peninsula.

The foreign service professional says the fresh air will be a cure for too much time behind a desk.

An excited dog runs forward and back along the line of hikers as they ascend past a 14th century convent still in use. After three days of steady winter rain, the path is slick with mud and wet leaves. But the hikers press forward until they arrive at the ruins of an even older structure.

A remote Christian church built in the fourth century clings to the mountainside, and the group pauses to light beeswax candles near an image of the Virgin Mary. Someone has placed an orange, now shriveled, on a rusted altar. Others leave Macedonian denari notes.

Reeker, who joined the U.S. State Department in 1992 after graduating from Thunderbird School of Global Management, sips bottled water and surveys the site.

“Macedonia is a young country in an ancient land,” he says. “You’re still dealing with the transformation from a Communist system. Macedonia has been independent and dealing with its own economy, its own foreign policy and its own security needs for only 17 years.”

The history of the Balkan peninsula goes back much further, extending to the Neolithic era and to the days of Alexander the Great, the king of Macedonia who conquered the Persian empire in the fourth century BC. More recently, the country known today as Macedonia was part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia.

As the hikers wind their way back down the mountain toward their cars, a midday call to prayer echoes from Muslim mosques in the ethnic Albanian villages below. More than one-quarter of the population in Macedonia is ethnic Albanian, which adds complexity to the country’s landscape.

“It’s very important to know the country where you’re serving and to understand the people,” Reeker says. “I struggle every day to understand more of the context in which the citizens of Macedonia interpret events — and the ethnic Albanian community may interpret something very differently than the ethnic Macedonian community.”

Despite the multiethnic challenges, Reeker sees progress in the small country fighting for its place in the European Union and NATO. A giant billboard at the airport near Skopje advertises Macedonia as a “new business heaven in Europe,” and Reeker says the claim is reachable.

“It’s a small corner of Europe that remains largely undiscovered by a lot of people,” he says. “But they’re moving forward, sometimes with stops and starts. I think the 21st century will be good for Macedonia.”

Return to Macedonia

Local media greeted Reeker at the airport when he arrived in Macedonia as a new ambassador on Sept. 25, 2008. Michelle Osmanli, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Macedonia, missed the television coverage but quickly heard about it.

“Your ambassador is showing you up,” one friend called to say. “He speaks better Macedonian than you do.”

Osmanli is married to a Macedonian and has studied the language for several years. “I’m always complimented on how fluent I am,” she says.

But Reeker has a gift for languages. He learned German before enrolling at Thunderbird, and then picked up Hungarian on his first foreign service tour. When he went to Macedonia on his second tour from 1997 to 1999, he added a fourth language to the list.

He also added many friends.

Živko Gruevski, an early entrepreneur in Eastern Europe who launched Macedonian Airlines in 1994, counts himself among these friends. He says Reeker’s ability to speak Macedonian opens the hearts of the people, but his professionalism on the job is what makes the popularity endure.

“He manages to be at every significant event,” Gruevski says. “He has a knack for saying the right thing at the right time. He never says any word more or any word less than he should.”

The assignment in Macedonia requires all of these skills.

The country, which is smaller in land mass than Belgium with about 2 million residents, has applied for NATO membership and has been a candidate to join the European Union since 2005.

But other issues have drawn attention away from these goals. These include high unemployment rates and an ongoing name dispute with Greece, which refers to the country as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

“I’m dealing with political issues, security issues, military, NATO, economics, finance, investment and cultural diplomacy,” says Reeker, who maintains regular contact with the highest Macedonian officials.

He says the Balkans represent the last piece of Europe that the United States has sought to make “whole, free and at peace.”

“That’s why we’re very engaged here,” he says. “We’ve done a lot in terms of our assistance program to help Macedonia in most spheres. In the end, it will benefit all of us by providing stability, security and sustainable prosperity.”

Duty to country

Reeker says an appreciation for cross-cultural communication came early in his life. His father was a computer scientist who became an academic, and this career required frequent moves.

Reeker took his first trip to Europe at age 7 and attended high school in Australia, where he picked up an accent that he took with him to Yale University. He says he thought briefly about staying in Australia, but he valued his U.S. citizenship and wanted to maintain ties to his home country.

“I love being an American,” he says. “That gives you great blessings, to be born in America. But I lived overseas and got an appreciation for that also.”

After graduating from Yale, he enrolled at Thunderbird, a school he first heard about while his dad taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He says this strengthened his passion for diversity.

“Being at Thunderbird only reinforced that,” he says, “because you realize that everybody else has the same global mindset.”

One day at Thunderbird, Reeker saw a sign advertising the Foreign Service Exam, and he decided on a whim to take the test. “It was one exam in my life that I didn’t really care how I did,” he says. “I took it as a lark. But I did
really well.”

He traveled to Los Angeles for oral exams, and suddenly what started as a lark became a viable career option. Reeker says the idea of serving his country appealed to him, so he accepted an assignment in Hungary.

Even then, he says, he figured he would complete only one three-year tour and then return to the private sector. Instead, he became hooked.

“Once you get into foreign service, it’s contagious,” he says. “It gets into your blood.”

Friends told him he would marry a nice Hungarian woman, but instead he met another foreign service worker from Minnesota named Solveig Johnson. Her next assignment took her to Iceland, and Reeker moved on to Macedonia.

The couple continued their courtship long distance and eventually married. Reeker finished his tour in Macedonia and then stayed five years in Washington, first as director of press relations and then as deputy spokesman for the U.S. State Department.

He was serving in Iraq when the opportunity came to return to Macedonia.

Reaching critical mass

Dinner guests filter into Reeker’s home on a chilly winter evening the night before the hike into the mountains. The ambassador has lived in the spacious house for less than three months and still is settling into the new environment.

This includes adjusting to the security officers standing at a guardhouse by the curb. The uniformed men shadow Reeker everywhere he goes, which he says can be awkward when he tries to go jogging in the mornings.

But Reeker understands the need for caution. During his first tour in Macedonia, when he handled media relations for a previous ambassador, a mob of more than 2,000 people stormed the U.S. Embassy one day after NATO forces bombed Kosovo in 1999. Reeker found himself locked in a cramped “panic room” with the ambassador and a chain-smoking Macedonian reporter who wanted to light up.

The climate in Macedonia is much calmer now, as the guests take their assigned seats in Reeker’s dining room. Original paintings on loan from the U.S. State Department arrived two days earlier in a large green crate, and Reeker and his wife are eager to show off the artwork that now adorns their walls.

As the food arrives, chatter at one table moves toward mild political debate. Jordan Trajkov ’01, who owns and operates a Macedonian winery, engages a high-ranking government official in a conversation on the urgent need to send more Macedonian students to foreign universities for graduate degrees.

“Do you really think graduate degrees will make the most difference?” the official asks.

“Thunderbird changed my life,” Trajkov responds. “If we could help 2 percent of our population earn graduate degrees, we would reach critical mass. Macedonia would be changed forever.”

Wooing foreign investors

Just about everyone in Macedonia has ideas about the best way to attract foreign investment and create sustainable prosperity in the emerging market.

“Government structures, ministries and the institutions of a free market economy that we often take for granted are still an ongoing process here,” Reeker says. “The government is putting a lot of resources into development and training programs.”

One Macedonian official with particular influence is Zoran Stavrevski, the deputy prime minister for economic development. Shortly after Reeker arrived as ambassador, the pair traveled with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski to the United States to meet business leaders and spread awareness about investment opportunities in Macedonia.

The journey came in the early months of a global recession — when few companies were thinking about new investments — but Stavrevski says the timing could not have been better.

“Attracting investors is a long-term process,” he says. “The crisis will end, and people will remember that Macedonia was present there.”

Stavrevski says Macedonia also is working at home to make reforms. He says keeping infrastructure up to date has been a challenge, but the country has made other gains. These include lowering tax rates, securing private property rights and reducing bureaucracy.

Macedonia also offers cheap labor compared with other European countries, but that’s not a selling point Stavrevski wants to advertise. “We want people to invest in Macedonia as a knowledge-based society,” he says.

Knowledge-based society

Macedonian engineer Atanas Kocov, Ph.D., dean of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, shares this vision.

As president of the Macedonian-American Alumni Association and a former Fulbright scholar, he has helped develop a virtual network that shares technical information with engineers in Slovakia. The network allows global companies to submit projects simultaneously to hundreds of local engineers, who then make bids and compete for business.

“We’re seeing Macedonia as a tiger in the region,” Kocov says. “We’re part of Europe and should be well-developed.”

Osmanli says the U.S. private-sector presence in the country is relatively small, but already includes several big names such as Johnson Controls, AllianceOne and Microsoft. The American Chamber of Commerce in Macedonia brings together more than 100 leading foreign and local companies to promote positive change in the business environment.

She says foreign investors enjoy low taxes in Macedonia and easy access to high-ranking government officials. “Big names will answer a cell phone,” she says.

A low cost of living in Macedonia also allows many foreign professionals to enjoy a modern and comfortable lifestyle, and Osmanli said this often comes with perks such as nannies for the children.

But not everything is rosy. Osmanli agrees with Stavrevski that transportation, utilities and other infrastructure systems need improvements. She also says the government needs to streamline its bureaucracy, add transparency to public programs and take a more aggressive stance on corruption.

She says the supply of skilled workers also remains limited, and many in Macedonia do not look for work. She says this contributes to the high unemployment rates, but overall the country is moving in the right direction.

“Macedonia cannot remain a black hole economically in Europe,” Osmanli says.

Ideal regional hub

Reeker, of course, has his own views. He says the country’s biggest strength is its diverse population, which makes Macedonia ideal as a regional hub.

“This is a small market,” he says. “But if you add in neighbors such as Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and EU countries such as Bulgaria and Greece to the south — with Turkey just an easy transport away — you have a much larger market.”

He says Macedonia can respond to this market, providing a base for companies looking to expand their European operations with manufacturing and assembly plants, call centers and high-tech support.

But he cautions investors to come with their eyes open. “Those who want to invest and do business here need to be prepared — like so many Thunderbird graduates are — for navigating this cross-cultural environment,” he says.

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