Alumni Gazette
DIPLOMAT: The first U.S. ambassador to Libya since the 1970s, Cretz has served in diplomatic posts in Syria, Israel, China, Pakistan, India, and Egypt. (Photo: Corbis)In September, as the Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi made a 96-minute address before the United Nations that grabbed headlines worldwide, U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz ’72 was back in Libya, hosting an “Iftar,” a celebration of the Holy Month of Ramadan, with over 250 guests at his residence in Tripoli.
Sworn in last December as the first American ambassador to the North African nation in 36 years, Cretz has adopted a below-the-radar approach to re-engaging Libya, describing his assignment as “a chance to reintroduce America to Libya and a chance to reintroduce Libya to America.”
That reintroduction comes 30 years after the U.S. severed diplomatic ties following a siege of the embassy in Tripoli in December 1979. Throughout the 1980s, acts of terrorism were attributed to Libya, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that claimed the lives of 270 people, including Rochester undergraduates Eric Coker ’90 and Katharine Hollister ’90, in December 1988.
In December 2003, Qadhafi surprised the international community by renouncing his past sponsorship of terrorism, declaring his intention to dismantle Libya’s weapons programs, and agreeing to pay reparations to the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103.
As Qadhafi moved to fulfill those promises, both the United States and the European Union normalized relations with Libya. President George W. Bush nominated Cretz to serve as ambassador in July 2007, and after a lengthy delay in the Senate, Cretz was confirmed and sworn in by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in December 2008.
During his confirmation hearings before the Senate, Cretz reported that commercial ties between the two nations were growing and developing outside Libya’s substantial oil industry, which has been the nation’s sole source of wealth for the past half-century.
Cretz says that prior to Libya’s decades of isolation, over 4,000 Libyans were attending American universities. Today, he adds, many of those same Libyans play senior roles in government, business, and the military, and maintain interest and excitement about renewed relations with the U.S.
He is concerned that younger Libyans have no such history to draw on. “We’ve lost a generation,” Cretz says. And to recover that lost ground, he has stressed the importance of initiatives that bring young Libyans to the U.S.—initiatives like a NASA space camp exchange program that sent 24 Libyan high school students, two teachers, and three filmmakers, to Huntsville, Ala., this past summer to join American students at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.
A career officer in the State Department’s Foreign Service since 1981, Cretz has served in Syria, Israel, China, Pakistan, India, and Egypt. An English major at Rochester, he entered the State University College of New York at Buffalo following graduation to take advantage of a program that combined a master’s degree in linguistics with a Peace Corps assignment.
His assignment, which lasted from 1975 to 1977, was in Kabul, Afghanistan. “Very few Westerners traveled there,” he recalls of those days; but it was “a magical country populated by people who were very rugged, proud, and welcoming.” It was something of a golden age for Afghanistan, a period before the Soviet invasion in 1979, the brutal Taliban dictatorship, and the U.S.-led military effort that ousted the Taliban in late 2001, and that has aimed to foster a democratic and stable Afghanistan ever since.
Cretz is optimistic that Libya is on a durable path to progress, but stresses that “it will be an evolutionary process.” And as for his role as the American ambassador, it’s one that he relishes, because “opportunities for diplomats of my generation to be there right at the beginning of a new relationship between the United States and a foreign country are extremely rare.”
