Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (11 page)
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Authors: Samantha Power
BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Often after work, instead of driving immediately back to his home just across the French-Swiss border in Massongy, he would head out with Antonio Carlos Diegues Santana, a fellow Brazilian who ran UNHCR’s field support unit. They would speak in Portuguese about Brazilian politics, play pinball, and drink beer.Vieira de Mello prided himself on his ties to Brazil, and even his insistence that everyone call him “Sergio” was a relic from his country, where public figures go by familiar names (Pelé, Lula, etc.). Still, he was not nearly as politically active as his friend. His leftist rage had by then largely evaporated, and he saw no harm in stopping by the Brazilian mission in Geneva to pick up that week’s Brazilian newspapers and magazines. Diegues Santana refused to set foot inside the building because it represented the military regime. He told Vieira de Mello that the day the generals stepped down would be the day he returned to his homeland.
When that day finally came, in March 1985, and Diegues Santana announced that he intended to leave the UN and return to Brazil, Vieira de Mello initially didn’t believe him. “If I am still stuck here in Geneva in three months’ time,” Diegues Santana said to a small circle of friends gathered for a drink,“I will take a knife to my guts and commit suicide.” Vieira de Mello laughed and said dramatically, “No, no, if you are still here in three months, I promise, with all of our friends here as witnesses,
I
will take a knife to your guts!” Diegues Santana could tell that his friend had not understood that he was serious about leaving. When he submitted his resignation a few weeks later, he and Vieira de Mello ended up out on the bar’s terrace in an hour-long heated argument, both men gesturing wildly with their hands and swearing at each other in their native tongue. “Sergio didn’t believe I would leave,” Diegues Santana recalls. “It was not because of me. It was because of the organization. He thought it was the most important thing in the whole world.”
I
will take a knife to your guts!” Diegues Santana could tell that his friend had not understood that he was serious about leaving. When he submitted his resignation a few weeks later, he and Vieira de Mello ended up out on the bar’s terrace in an hour-long heated argument, both men gesturing wildly with their hands and swearing at each other in their native tongue. “Sergio didn’t believe I would leave,” Diegues Santana recalls. “It was not because of me. It was because of the organization. He thought it was the most important thing in the whole world.”
Vieira de Mello offset his seeming priggishness about UN principles by flamboyantly playing up his love of women. He would be known throughout his career for treating cafeteria workers, security guards, and maintenance staff with unusual respect, prompting Omar Bakhet, an Eritrean colleague,to compliment him on his egalitarianism.“But, Omar, I am not a true egalitarian,” he said. “I don’t see class, race, or religion, but I most definitely see gender!” Once, as he entered La Glycine, his favorite restaurant in Geneva, with his Italian colleague Salvatore Lombardo, he exclaimed in Italian, “Look around you. What has happened?” Lombardo wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Come è possibile che ci non è una donna in questo ristorante?”
Vieira de Mello asked, openmouthed. “How is it possible that there is not a single woman in this restaurant?” After the two men sat down and began to discuss refugee matters, the door to the restaurant opened, and he cut Lombardo off midsentence. “Finally!” he exclaimed, leaping out of his seat and beginning a slow, rhythmic clap. Initially the patrons in the restaurant did not know what he was applauding, but one by one, as they looked around, they realized the significance of the woman’s arrival and joined in. In under a minute the unsuspecting woman had roused a thunderous standing ovation from the male-only lunchtime crowd.
“Come è possibile che ci non è una donna in questo ristorante?”
Vieira de Mello asked, openmouthed. “How is it possible that there is not a single woman in this restaurant?” After the two men sat down and began to discuss refugee matters, the door to the restaurant opened, and he cut Lombardo off midsentence. “Finally!” he exclaimed, leaping out of his seat and beginning a slow, rhythmic clap. Initially the patrons in the restaurant did not know what he was applauding, but one by one, as they looked around, they realized the significance of the woman’s arrival and joined in. In under a minute the unsuspecting woman had roused a thunderous standing ovation from the male-only lunchtime crowd.
His reputation as a ladies’ man followed him throughout his career, and he seemed to relish the rumors of his exploits. In 1982 Mark Malloch Brown, a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried British aid worker who a quarter-century later would become deputy secretary-general of the UN under Annan, had spent several months pursuing an attractive British UNHCR official. After finally spending the night in her apartment, Malloch Brown awoke buoyantly the next morning, only to notice that beside her alarm clock was a framed photograph of the woman with her parents—and Vieira de Mello. “If it was just Sergio, that wouldn’t have been so bad,” Malloch Brown recalls. “But it was clear Sergio had already insinuated himself in the deepest quarters of this woman’s life. I didn’t stand a chance!”
Vieira de Mello claimed a huge amount of freedom in his marriage. Early on Annie complained about the phone calls from women and his late-night arrivals, but eventually she grew resigned. “Nothing I said was going to change him,” she remembers, “and when I complained, it just made him angry.” He would tell his friends, “Everybody has a cross to bear in life, and I am Annie’s cross.”
Over the years he would have several significant relationships with women, but he was unwilling to give up his home life, which anchored him. In the mid-1980s he told a UN friend, Fabienne Morisset, “I will never get divorced—neither from my marriage nor from the UN.” When his sons were young, he brought his family back to Brazil every two years on UN home leave. He also took them on a skiing holiday every winter, and in periods when he was based in Geneva, he drove the boys to school every morning on his way to work. Even though he often worked late during the week, he and Annie were known for hosting barbecues and dinner parties on the weekends. When guests came to the house, he wandered around in his bedroom slippers, boasting about his one culinary specialty,
feijoada
, the Brazilian national stew that is a potpourri of pork, ham, sausage, spices, and carefully soaked beans.
feijoada
, the Brazilian national stew that is a potpourri of pork, ham, sausage, spices, and carefully soaked beans.
He likely would not have been able to work in the places he did—or rise at the pace he did—if his chief priority had been raising his sons. As his career progressed, he never stopped accepting the most challenging assignments, no matter how dangerous or remote they were. His willingness to go wherever he was needed—whenever—was unique. Many of his peers who embraced jobs in Geneva and New York did not like desk jobs, but they understood that being in the office would enable them to stay close to home while their children grew up.Vieira de Mello lived a daily zero-sum game: The more he traveled, the more skilled a UN troubleshooter he became, and the less he met the daily needs of his family.
He maintained close ties with a few of his childhood Brazilian friends, including Flavio da Silveira, who still lived in Geneva. But he spent most of his after-hours time with his colleagues from work. Curiously, he often sought out the company of the more cynical UN staffers. Alexander “Sacha” Casella, an Italian-Czech who was twenty-two years his senior, was one UN official who believed life was nasty, brutish, and short and could hardly contain his skepticism about the motives of UN member states, senior officials, and human beings in general. To any colleague bordering on earnest, Casella would offer one of his maxims. “Living is a prelude to death,” he would say. “Marriage is a prelude to divorce.” Exhibiting ethical behavior within an unethical system was unwise. “You should never tell the truth,” Casella said. “People will take you for granted. Even if you see someone in the hall and you’re going to a meeting, tell them you are going to the bathroom.” And he liked to recite a parable that he believed summed up humanitarianism:
A bird gets stuck in the mud. The bird makes noises to try to get the attention of those who might come to his rescue. A farmer hears the noises, arrives at the scene, chops the head off the bird, and eats it for dinner.The moral of this story is, “If you get stuck, don’t make noises; if you make noises, it will not necessarily be your friend who comes to help; and in the end whoever saves you will likely eat you.”
Vieira de Mello frequently asked Casella to accompany him on his missions overseas. “You are so cynical that having you around helps me understand the mind-set of the killers and crooks,” he told his friend. Casella urged him to stop taking UN life so seriously and once handed him an envelope: “Sergio, the only thing that should anger you is when this doesn’t come.” Vieira de Mello opened the envelope, and inside the envelope he found another envelope. Inside that was a third. And finally in a tiny envelope, he found Casella’s intended pick-me-up device: a UNHCR pay stub.
But while the UN offered its professional employees good salaries and generous benefits,Vieira de Mello did not stay with the UN for the money. He saw it as the place a person of his nationality and background could best make a difference in the world. While European academia had no place for him, the UN valued what he had to offer. He imagined himself soaring to great heights within the organization. “When I die, I will have a state funeral,” he told Heidi Cervantes, a Swiss girlfriend. “I would like every one of my girlfriends to come to my funeral and walk behind my coffin. You’ll come, right?”
Cervantes could not tell if he was serious. “How do you know you will be so important as to deserve a state funeral?” she asked.
“I will be an important man,” he said. “You will see.”
“Do you want to become an ambassador?” she asked.
He was aghast. “No way,” he said.“Any Swiss jerk can become an ambassador. I want to become the UN secretary-general.”
Cervantes laughed. “At your funeral, Sergio, they will say your only fault was your modesty.”
Vieira de Mello had come to understand that devotion to the UN meant serving at the whim of his supervisors and being prepared to pack up and move to a new region on a moment’s notice. In 1986, at thirty-eight, he eagerly took up a position as UNHCR regional representative for South America with responsibility for a dozen countries. He rented a home in Buenos Aires, where he expected Annie and their two sons, seven and five, to join him. He was elated, as the assignment would enable him to visit his mother more often than he had been able to do since he left Rio in 1966. It would also allow him to leave his desk job. “The restless part of Sergio would come to you and say, ‘I need another challenge.’ Then you would know he was bored,” Annan remembers. “He felt there was nothing more he could bring to a job or he didn’t have the space to do what he wanted to do. Being in the field gave him room for creativity. He knew himself and the environment in which he did best.”
No sooner had he arrived in Buenos Aires than UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar announced that Jean-Pierre Hocké, a forty-seven-year-old Swiss national, would take over as the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
2
Having pledged to reinvigorate the agency by drawing on its youth, Hocké summoned Vieira de Mello back to Geneva to serve as his chief of staff.
8
Annie, who had just boxed up their life in Massongy, was forced to adjust to yet another life-changing promotion. “Let’s just say I had stopped cracking open the bottles of champagne,” she says. Though Vieira de Mello was returning to Geneva to take up a senior position, he was uncharacteristically melancholy. “I have broken my promise to my mother yet again,” he told an Argentinian friend. “She will be devastated.” The demands of the UN had come to take precedence over all others.
2
Having pledged to reinvigorate the agency by drawing on its youth, Hocké summoned Vieira de Mello back to Geneva to serve as his chief of staff.
8
Annie, who had just boxed up their life in Massongy, was forced to adjust to yet another life-changing promotion. “Let’s just say I had stopped cracking open the bottles of champagne,” she says. Though Vieira de Mello was returning to Geneva to take up a senior position, he was uncharacteristically melancholy. “I have broken my promise to my mother yet again,” he told an Argentinian friend. “She will be devastated.” The demands of the UN had come to take precedence over all others.
The United States had aggressively pushed for Hocké’s appointment. In UNHCR’s early decades Washington had prized the agency as a vehicle for resettling refugees fleeing Communism. But by the 1980s U.S. impatience with wastefulness in the UN system was spilling over into its dealings even with UNHCR. In 1985 the U.S. Congress passed a law for the first time requiring that America’s annual dues to the UN be reduced pending major UN reform.The Reagan administration expected Hocké to run a lean shop.
Vieira de Mello was excited by the little he knew about his new boss. Hocké came from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a well-regarded humanitarian organization that tried to ensure that in wartime the rights of civilians and prisoners were respected. He had managed all of ICRC’s field operations and had personally headed missions in Nigeria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Vietnam.When Hocké learned that the Somalian government had claimed double the number of refugees in its camps, so as to feed its army with the extra aid, the high commissioner temporarily suspended relief. He vowed to tackle the chronic refugee crises, or the “Palestinization” of refugee populations like the Afghans in Pakistan. He reminded UN staff and donor countries that the long-term care the UN offered refugees was nothing to boast about: It simply showed that conditions in the refugees’ home countries were not improving. And he took the radical step of arguing that it wasn’t enough to press neighboring countries to grant asylum to those fleeing persecution; UNHCR had to work with the other UN bodies to end poverty and persecution in their countries of origin. Vieira de Mello, who admired his new boss’s energy and ideas, supplied the scotch for early-evening gossip and brainstorming sessions in Hocké’s office. He kept the Black Label hidden in the hard-file folder marked “Organization of American States” and the Red Label disguised in the “Organization of African Unity” folder.
But Hocké’s relations with other staff members quickly deteriorated, as he was seen to micromanage field operations from afar and to dismiss alternative viewpoints. He also raised less money than UNHCR was spending, and the agency fell into debt for the first time in its history.
3
Détente had set in between the Soviet Union and the United States, and Washington stopped treating refugees as pawns in the larger ideological struggle and reduced its contribution to UNHCR accordingly. After a year serving as chief of staff and another year as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, Vieira de Mello started to believe that the discontent among staff and the decisions by donor countries to cut back their contributions were harming his home agency. He came to the conclusion that his colleagues had reached months before: for the good of the UN, Hocké had to go. “He has lost the plot,” Vieira de Mello told Morisset.
3
Détente had set in between the Soviet Union and the United States, and Washington stopped treating refugees as pawns in the larger ideological struggle and reduced its contribution to UNHCR accordingly. After a year serving as chief of staff and another year as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, Vieira de Mello started to believe that the discontent among staff and the decisions by donor countries to cut back their contributions were harming his home agency. He came to the conclusion that his colleagues had reached months before: for the good of the UN, Hocké had to go. “He has lost the plot,” Vieira de Mello told Morisset.
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