Draft:Jolyon Naegele

Jolyon Naegele (born April 19,1955 in New York, NY) is a former journalist and political analyst based in the Czech Republic. He was Voice of America’s correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe (1984-1994) covering the final years of Communist state rule, the revolution of 1989 and the break-up of Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He subsequently worked as an editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) based in Prague (1996-2003). He was chief political affairs officer in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, UNMIK in Pristina (2003-2017), heading the mission’s Office of Political Affairs for ten years.

Career
Naegele joined Voice of America (VOA) in 1984, working as a correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe covering the region while being based as VOA bureau chief in Vienna (1984-89), Bonn (1989-90) and Prague (1990-94). Naegele’s interview for VOA with Alexander Dubček attracted considerable attention in Czechoslovakia and in foreign news media, including the New York Times.

Czech sociologist and former dissident Jiřina Šiklová in her laudatio in honor of Naegele upon his winning the annually awarded Pelikán Prize, named after Czech politician and journalist Jiří Pelikán, described Naegele as “a great journalist, correspondent, and indirectly the creator of the local culture. With your words, you connected us, who lived here behind the barbed wire borders, protected us, increased our self-confidence and,above all, conveyed the feeling that ‘the world knows what is happening here’. By writing and reporting about us, you helped form domestic and foreign public opinion about local conditions.”

While at RFE/RL between 1996 and 2003, Naegele focused primarily on the Western Balkans, reporting inter alia on post-war reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina, armed conflict and its aftermath in Kosovo and the insurgency in Macedonia, ethnic identity issues and corruption in Montenegro. He also covered the electoral defeat of Slovak populist Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar and political and ethnic minority issues in Turkey.

In the course of his 14 years at the UN mission in Kosovo, Naegele’s tasks included coordinating direct dialogue between the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government in Pristina and the Serbian authorities in Belgrade, serving as UNMIK’s representative on the Central Election Commission in Kosovo, a task which included monitoring elections. On behalf of UNMIK’s head, the Special Representative of the Secretary General, Naegele also facilitated Kosovo’s participation at annual gatherings of foreign ministers of the West Balkan states with their counterparts from the Visegrád-Four as well as of the South-East European Cooperation Process, where some member states, which did not recognize Kosovo in the first years after its declaration of independence would not otherwise have agreed to permit Kosovo’s participation. Naegele also participated in an OSCE-chaired committee in the drafting of the 2008 Constitution of Kosovo derived from the 2007 Ahtisaari Plan for resolving Kosovo’s status.