Tina S. Kaidanow, a career diplomat who was the first U.S. ambassador to Kosovo following its independence in 2008, died on Oct. 14 in Washington. She was 59.
Her death, at Georgetown University Hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest, her brother, Eric Kaidanow, said. She had been hospitalized for three weeks while doctors there were trying to find the source of internal bleeding, he said.
Over three decades, Ms. Kaidanow held a number of foreign service and foreign policy jobs, including running the State Department’s counterterrorism and political-affairs bureaus and serving as deputy ambassador in Kabul, Afghanistan.
At her death, she was the State Department’s special representative for Guantánamo Affairs, overseeing and negotiating for the transfer of detainees from the prison at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to third countries.
In that capacity, she traveled to Belize in 2023 to personally thank the government there for taking in the prisoner Majid Khan, a former Pakistani courier for Al Qaeda who had turned government cooperator, as well as his wife and daughter.
Ms. Kaidanow joined Belize’s foreign minister at a news conference in Belize City that sought to reassure the public there that their new resident presented no threat. “If you encounter Mr. Khan anywhere, I hope you will say hello,” she told local reporters. “He is so happy to be here. He is very grateful.”
Holding the Guantánamo post since August 2022, she had, at her death, reached several other resettlement deals that have yet to be completed.
A major focus of Ms. Kaidanow’s work had been in the Balkans, addressing the conflicts and complications stirred by the breakup of Yugoslavia.
She began her career as a consular officer in Belgrade in 1995, worked in Sarajevo from 1997 and then moved to Skopje, Macedonia, in 1998 as special assistant to the envoy to the crisis in Kosovo, Ambassador Christopher R. Hill.
From 2006 until 2008, she served as the senior ranking diplomat, known as the chief of mission, in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and forged ties with Kosovars planning their independence. Once Kosovo broke away from Serbia, President George W. Bush appointed her ambassador to that newly independent country.
“I have witnessed the trauma of war and the power of U.S. involvement in bringing peace to the region and sustaining that peace,” she said at her Senate confirmation hearing in June 2008.
President Biden mourned her death in a letter of condolence to her brother on Monday. “Her work to establish our official embassy presence in Pristina helped nurture a robust, stable, and successful democracy and broader peace in the region,” he said, adding that as vice president he had been briefed by Ms. Kaidanow in Kosovo.
In a statement on the social media site X, President Vjosa Osmani of Kosovo called her “a bold and courageous leader who played a profound role in many critical and historic events before and after Kosovo’s declaration of independence.”
Rabbi Dana Saroken, who officiated at Ms. Kaidanow’s funeral near Baltimore on Monday, described Ms. Kaidanow as a devoted daughter of Holocaust survivors who both died less than a year before she did. Early in her foreign service career, Ms. Saroken said, she brought joy to her mother, who was born in Split, Croatia, by learning Serbo Croatian at the State Department’s foreign language school so proficiently that they could speak in her mother’s native tongue.
Tina Susan Kaidanow was born on June 3, 1965, in Philadelphia to Esther and Howard Kaidanow and grew up in Baltimore County, Md.
She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and another master’s in political science from Columbia University, where she also obtained a certificate in Russian studies from the Harriman Institute.
Early in government career Ms. Kaidanow served at the National Security Council as director for Southeast European affairs and later in two advisory roles at the Defense Department.
Her brother is her only immediate survivor. Her mother died in July; her father in November 2023.
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