Meredith attorney saluted by N.H. Bar as International Lawyer of the Year for work on behalf of Kosovo

MEREDITH — Robert McDaniel, who has spent the last three years in Europe working to help the fledgling nation of Kosovo attract foreign investment and establish trading relationships with the rest of the world, was recently honored as the 2012 International Lawyer of the Year by the N.H. Bar Association.

A 1969 graduate of Inter-Lakes High School, McDaniel says that the Latin that both he and his wife, Laurie, learned while in high school still comes in handy in his day-to-day work in Vienna, where he is head of the legal affairs for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where during the course of a day he will hear as many as eight different languages spoken.

He moved to Eastern Europe in 2010 to serve as an economic and legal advisor to the Kosovo Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just two years after Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, becoming the eighth nation which had once been a part of the former Yugoslavia to declare its independence.

''They've even coined a phrase for what's happened here, Balkanization, which means the breakup into smaller countries of what had once been a nation,'' says McDaniel, who said that the current situation in the area remains chaotic and that progress toward resolving the issues revolving around political, geographic, religious and ethnic differences is ''totally complex and confusing.''

He said that Kosovo, with about 11,000 square miles and some two million people, is located south of Serbia and is bordered on the west by Montenegro, in the south by Albania and to the southwest by Macedonia.

Since the late twentieth century, long-term severe ethnic tensions between Kosovo's Albanian and Serb populations have left Kosovo ethnically divided, resulting in inter-ethnic violence, including the Kosovo War of 1999, in which NATO air strikes forced Serbian forces to end a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the United Nations took over governorship.

McDaniel says that the largely Slavic state of Serbia, which has had historic ties with Russia which still continue to this day, doesn't recognize Kosovo's independence and that there are still many ethnic Slavs who are Eastern Orthodox Christians in the northern part of Kosovo,. The nation as a whole is 90 percent of Albanian descent and of those 97 percent are Muslim, a reflection of the country's long history in which it was part of the Turkey-based Ottoman empire for over 400 years.

He said that when Serbia held its recent elections there were polling places in northern Kosovo where votes were being cast in the Serbian election, which he said is something akin to having elections in New Hampshire in which residents of parts of Vermont are casting ballots.

He said that the Balkans have been a place of wild extremes and noted that during the Kosovo War some 12,000 people were killed by Serbians and buried in a mass grave in Kosovo and that allegations of similar war crimes committed against Serbs in Kosovo are also a part of the tensions which still simmer in that area.

''At one time people of many different faiths and ethnicities lived here together and tolerated each other. We hope to get to that point again,'' says McDaniel, who noted that Kosovo is the site of many of the religious shrines of what was the Ottoman era, which followed the historic defeat of the Serbs in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo in which the Ottomans defeated a coalition of Serbian forces.

He says that much of his work today is done from the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, where OSCE offices are located and he provides legal and strategic advice.

The OSCE is made up of 56 participating countries and serves as a forum for political negotiations and decision-making in the fields of early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.

''We're working with a dozen or more emergent democracies,'' says McDaniel, who adds that the OSCE works on the basis of consensus in reaching decisions and ''moves ahead on the basis of non objection by the many participants. Our job is to keep the dialogue open and avoid the kind of situations which saw 100,000 deaths in the 1999 war,'' says McDaniel.

After graduating from Inter-Lakes High School in 1969, McDaniel attended the United States Coast Guard Academy and became a commissioned officer in 1973. He served in various domestic and overseas assignments, graduated from Catholic University Law School in 1982, and became a federal prosecutor at the United States Attorney's Office in Washington, DC, a year later. He became an assistant attorney general in New Hampshire in 1987. His career then took him into private legal practice with the law firm of Devine, Millimet and Branch and on to top legal positions at international corporations such as Presstek Inc,. and IGI.

He said that following the 20001 terrorist attacks he and his wife, who is a paralegal and most recently director of the Music Clinic Theatre Company of Belmont, ran a law practice which had a strong international component.

Laurie says her husband's European work hasn't been without sacrifice, noting that they were only able to spend 20 days together last year.

That's going to change this winter, though, as the couple are planning a ''Yugoslav Winter'' in which Laurie will be spending a good deal of time in Europe.

''I would like to make a contribution to Kosovo and do something in the arts and theater there,'' she says.

McDaniel says that he thinks she'll like it there and says that one of the big advantages to working in Europe is the generous amount of vacation time workers have there. ''I get 58 days a year off, compared to the 14 you can expect here. It's a lot different lifestyle with a lot less stress,'' says McDaniel.

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Robert McDaniel. (Courtesy photo)