Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (12 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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In the fall of 1989 a group of disgruntled UNHCR staff members (not including Vieira de Mello) sent a dossier on Hocké to donor governments and to a Swiss television crew. They charged, accurately, that Hocké had dipped into a special Danish fund for his personal use, spending some $300,000 to fly himself and his wife on the Concorde and regularly upgrading his business-class flights to first class, which, at a time of U.S.-driven fiscal belt-tightening, only the UN secretary-general was permitted to do.
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Although Washington had backed Hocké’s candidacy, U.S. support dried up.
4
Although Washington had backed Hocké’s candidacy, U.S. support dried up.
In late October 1989 Dennis McNamara, a New Zealander who was one of Vieira de Mello’s closest friends at UNHCR, jubilantly told his friend, “Sergio, he’s resigned.” “Who?” Vieira de Mello asked. “Who?! Hocké, you ass,” said McNamara. “That’s bullshit,” Vieira de Mello said. The two men scrambled around agency headquarters to confirm the high commissioner’s departure. The headline in
Le Monde
the next day summed up his aborted tenure: RESIGNATION OF MR. J-P HOCKÉ: GOOD MANAGER BUT TOO AUTHORITARIAN.
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Although Hocké had given him the biggest promotion of his career, Vieira de Mello did not stop by his office as he boxed up his belongings. Nor did he send Hocké a farewell note. “Other people I didn’t give a damn about,” Hocké recalls, “but from Sergio, a friend, I expected more.”
Le Monde
the next day summed up his aborted tenure: RESIGNATION OF MR. J-P HOCKÉ: GOOD MANAGER BUT TOO AUTHORITARIAN.
5
Although Hocké had given him the biggest promotion of his career, Vieira de Mello did not stop by his office as he boxed up his belongings. Nor did he send Hocké a farewell note. “Other people I didn’t give a damn about,” Hocké recalls, “but from Sergio, a friend, I expected more.”
A year later Vieira de Mello arranged a meeting with the fallen high commissioner, who was working in downtown Geneva. “Jean-Pierre, you look so well,” Vieira de Mello said, cheerily inquiring after his family and new line of work but making no mention of what had happened and offering no apology for his silence. “He seemed to want to clear the air without clearing the air,” says Hocké. “He wanted to be admired by everyone, to be on good terms with everyone. He was basically a seducer. He tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but I wasn’t prepared to go along with that.” When Hocké heard that Vieira de Mello had returned to UNHCR headquarters and told colleagues that they had resolved their differences, he wrote his former chief of staff a bitter letter in which he informed him that he would not forget his disloyalty. Vieira de Mello made no further attempts at rapprochement.
Thorvald Stoltenberg, who had been Norway’s foreign minister, succeeded Hocké but quit after ten months to reclaim his old job in Oslo. “Politicians come here to build their careers but not to serve refugees,” Vieira de Mello fumed, making a mental note that former elected officials who were appointed to senior UN posts would bring Rolodexes and fund-raising savvy but would usually lack fealty to the UN itself.
Vieira de Mello’s own loyalty to the UN deepened by the day, even as the organization’s flaws continued to reveal themselves. One of his main annoyances was that no matter how fast he found himself rising in the UN system, his nationality would ultimately matter as much as, if not more than, his performance. He saw this on countless occasions, but in 1990, after Stoltenberg’s exit, he witnessed a rare occasion where a friend of his,Virendra Dayal, fought back. Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar asked Dayal, his chief of staff, to become the high commissioner. Dayal, a fifty-five-year-old Oxford-educated Indian national, had worked at UNHCR from 1965 to 1972, serving under Jamieson during the Bangladesh emergency. He understood that the agency was struggling and was eager to bail it out. But no sooner had Pérez de Cuéllar publicly revealed his intention to appoint Dayal than an unnamed U.S. official—suspected to be John Bolton, who was then President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for international organizations and would later become George W. Bush’s controversial ambassador to the UN—was quoted in the
NewYork Times
slamming the secretary-general’s choice and saying that the United States wanted to see a prominent politician from a rich country in the job rather than a UN bureaucrat from the developing world.
NewYork Times
slamming the secretary-general’s choice and saying that the United States wanted to see a prominent politician from a rich country in the job rather than a UN bureaucrat from the developing world.
Dayal was livid. He gathered the press in the secretary-general’s conference room on the thirty-eighth floor of UN Headquarters and let loose. He said he felt “great pain” that certain people were “more comfortable with second-level politicians from the first world rather than with first-rate international civil servants from the third world.”
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He’d had enough. “To hell with this,” he said. “I’m going back to India to tend to my garden.” With Dayal’s exit, Bolton triumphantly hailed the fact that donor countries could now “get control of this process.” A nominee’s experience working on refugee issues was a plus, he stressed, but should not be “a determining factor.”
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He’d had enough. “To hell with this,” he said. “I’m going back to India to tend to my garden.” With Dayal’s exit, Bolton triumphantly hailed the fact that donor countries could now “get control of this process.” A nominee’s experience working on refugee issues was a plus, he stressed, but should not be “a determining factor.”
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Vieira de Mello, who had been unhappy about the turmoil at UNHCR, delightedly passed photocopies of Dayal’s angry press briefing around UNHCR headquarters. “Thank god somebody has spoken about the ridiculous tradition of reserving certain posts for certain nationalities,” he told Dayal. He revered the UN’s commitment to multinationality but hated being reminded, as he was on a near-daily basis, that “some nations were more equal than others.”
In December 1990 Pérez de Cuéllar nominated Sadako Ogata, a sixty-three-year-old Japanese political science professor, to become high commissioner. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of California-Berkeley, she was the first woman and the first academic to fill the post. In lobbying on Ogata’s behalf, the Japanese government had promised to increase its contribution to the refugee agency were she selected. And so it did, doubling its contribution from $52 million in 1990 to $113 million the following year.
What Vieira de Mello found most frustrating about UNHCR’s leadership setbacks was that they coincided with heady times at the United Nations as a whole. In the late 1980s, with the waning of U.S.-Soviet tensions, the entire organization had a prominence and a sense of possibility that it had not had since its founding in 1945. The president of the UN General Assembly, Dante Caputo of Argentina, reflected the spirit of the moment when he noted, “This, more than any earlier time, is the hour of the United Nations.”
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The UN’s “hour,” as far as Vieira de Mello was concerned, was long overdue. In a world of conflict, repression, and extreme poverty, he had come to see the UN as the only body that could serve both as a humanitarian actor in its own right and as a platform for governments to identify common interests and pool their resources to meet global challenges. The end of the cold war meant that more countries could use the UN as the forum in which to debate their differences. He thought it would also mean that the powerful countries with permanent seats on the UN Security Council would be more prone to act collectively to defuse threats to international peace and security.
Hopes that once had sounded impossibly naïve suddenly became mainstream. And in 1988 and 1989, as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, responsible for overseeing agency policy throughout the region, Vieira de Mello saw firsthand how salutary the new climate could be, as he worked to help resolve one of the messiest chapters of the cold war: the displacement of the Vietnamese “boat people.” It was his role in these negotiations that would begin to give him a name outside the UN.
Remarkably, more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese were still washing up on the shores of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand. Indeed, in Hong Kong, for instance, where 3,395 boat people had arrived in 1987, a whopping 8,900 arrived in May 1989 alone.
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Most of them were likely fleeing not political persecution but economic hardship.
10
Compounding the challenge, Western countries that had once been generous in resettling the Vietnamese had stiffened their entry criteria.
11
This meant that Vietnam’s neighbors were stuck sheltering boat people whom the United States refused to resettle but whom Washington also insisted not be sent back to Vietnam. The countries bordering Vietnam were fed up and started denying the Vietnamese access to their shores—deputizing fishermen to ram the boat people so they would not be able to land and herding those who arrived into squalid, overcrowded camps.
12
9
Most of them were likely fleeing not political persecution but economic hardship.
10
Compounding the challenge, Western countries that had once been generous in resettling the Vietnamese had stiffened their entry criteria.
11
This meant that Vietnam’s neighbors were stuck sheltering boat people whom the United States refused to resettle but whom Washington also insisted not be sent back to Vietnam. The countries bordering Vietnam were fed up and started denying the Vietnamese access to their shores—deputizing fishermen to ram the boat people so they would not be able to land and herding those who arrived into squalid, overcrowded camps.
12
Vieira de Mello inherited a multiyear effort by UNHCR staff and by Western diplomats to resolve the matter. Each person who fled Vietnam had a different story. Neighboring countries could not treat all of them as economic migrants. Some individuals would in fact face violent reprisals if they were sent back to Vietnam. As the guardian of refugee law, UNHCR had to help find a way to ensure that Vietnamese civilians who faced genuine political threats would continue to be admitted. Vieira de Mello had to try to persuade key governments to allow case-by-case screenings.
He spent thirteen months shuttling between the major Western capitals and the East Asian countries where the refugees were being crammed into camps. He stroked the egos of ambassadors and tried to convince them that a multifaceted compromise was in their long-term interest. He developed a habit that would never leave him. On the road constantly, he would scribble notes from his meetings onto hotel stationery pads. On these tiny slips of paper—probably no larger than the library request slips his father had amassed—he would spell out the key talking points for everything from meetings with minor consular officials to major plenary addresses. His colleagues marveled at how one so fastidious could end up delivering pivotal remarks while reading from a Hilton Hotel note pad. “Is that the best you can do?”Assadi ribbed him. “Look, I’m always moving so these pads are convenient,” Vieira de Mello replied. “But I’ve also learned over the years that if I can’t fit my argument on a hotel note pad, I probably don’t know what I’m trying to say!” Just as his mother, Gilda, had helped organize his father’s library scraps, Vieira de Mello’s secretary at UNHCR grew accustomed to unusual piles turning up in her in-box. “Would you mind typing this up for the files?” he would ask, handing her palm-sized shards of paper covered in his miniature handwriting in felt-tip pen, held together by a paper clip or stuffed into a hotel stationery envelope.
The key concessions had been made in the months before he got involved: Vietnam had shown a desire to improve its regional and international ties at a time of diminished Soviet support, and Washington had finally begun to rethink its long-standing policy that every fleeing Vietnamese should be considered an automatic legal refugee. With Vieira de Mello’s coaxing, and themselves already ripe to reach an agreement, Western countries agreed to open up additional resettlement slots for Vietnamese who had been languishing in neighboring countries.These countries in turn agreed to grant asylum to those whom UNHCR’s new screening policies determined to be genuine refugees.
13
Border officials would be trained to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which Vietnamese were actually fleeing for their lives and which could be fairly sent back to Vietnam. After a preliminary meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March 1989, some seventy governments gathered in Geneva that June and signed this compromise package, known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action—the first-ever three-way agreement among countries of origin, asylum, and resettlement.
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A
NewYork Times
editorial hailed the compromise as “A Cure for Compassion Fatigue.”
15
13
Border officials would be trained to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which Vietnamese were actually fleeing for their lives and which could be fairly sent back to Vietnam. After a preliminary meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March 1989, some seventy governments gathered in Geneva that June and signed this compromise package, known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action—the first-ever three-way agreement among countries of origin, asylum, and resettlement.
14
A
NewYork Times
editorial hailed the compromise as “A Cure for Compassion Fatigue.”
15
The plan was controversial. Arthur Helton, the refugee advocate who fourteen years later would be killed in Iraq in the attack on the UN, was perhaps the most vocal American critic. He documented the flaws in the screening process. The screeners and immigration officials who classified whether or not a person was a refugee were often ignorant of conditions in Vietnam, vulnerable to bribes, and hasty in their review of the cases before them. The average interview lasted twenty minutes.
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In addition, too few UNHCR staff were in place to monitor the sessions. In Hong Kong many of theVietnamese felt physically manhandled or emotionally browbeaten into declaring themselves “economic migrants.” Helton quoted one Vietnamese boat person as saying, “The major aim of this policy is not to select the real refugee but to stop the flow of refugees.”
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In addition, too few UNHCR staff were in place to monitor the sessions. In Hong Kong many of theVietnamese felt physically manhandled or emotionally browbeaten into declaring themselves “economic migrants.” Helton quoted one Vietnamese boat person as saying, “The major aim of this policy is not to select the real refugee but to stop the flow of refugees.”
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But Vieira de Mello did not see a viable alternative. “If we don’t find a compromise,” he told his critics, “we will permanently kill asylum.” The status quo was simply not an option. Although Vietnam might be an inhospitable place to return to, he agreed with Thomas Jamieson’s old adage: “If there is a way to close a camp, take it.” The only hope for deterring the outflow of economic migrants and saving those fleeing political oppression was to develop a mechanism for sending nonrefugees back.
Securing the agreement proved easy compared with implementing it. Vieira de Mello instructed UNHCR staff to suspend medical and counseling services and scale back education and employment programs for screened-out boat people in the camps in neighboring countries.
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More controversially, he defied the spirit of a key UNHCR principle, which was that the agency would only assist in
voluntarily
returning refugees to their countries of origin. Technically, those being sent back were not “refugees,” but UNHCR would still have to help return terrified Vietnamese to their homeland against their will. Vieira de Mello traveled to Hong Kong, and accompanied by Casella, he spoke with Vietnamese community leaders who had been denied refugee status in the screening process but were refusing to return to Vietnam. One man told Vieira de Mello that he intended to commit suicide if the UN tried to force him home.Vieira de Mello’s face grew dark and solemn. “How could you say such a thing?” he asked.“Your wife and your children rely upon you. You cannot abandon them when you have survived all you have together.” When the man insisted he would prefer to die than face the Communists in Vietnam,Vieira de Mello grew even more emotional and delivered a sweeping oration on the value of life and the importance of returning to one’s own soil and providing for one’s family. Casella could take his colleague’s melodrama no longer.“Listen, if you are going to kill yourself,” he said, “make sure you use a knife and sever the vein properly because we’d hate for you to have to try twice. And since this will make an enormous mess, we’d appreciate it if you did it outside, so that we don’t have to clean up after you.” Vieira de Mello was astonished, but he later conceded that Casella’s bluntness may have been more effective.The Comprehensive Plan of Action would fail unless nonrefugees left the camps and went back to Vietnam.
18
More controversially, he defied the spirit of a key UNHCR principle, which was that the agency would only assist in
voluntarily
returning refugees to their countries of origin. Technically, those being sent back were not “refugees,” but UNHCR would still have to help return terrified Vietnamese to their homeland against their will. Vieira de Mello traveled to Hong Kong, and accompanied by Casella, he spoke with Vietnamese community leaders who had been denied refugee status in the screening process but were refusing to return to Vietnam. One man told Vieira de Mello that he intended to commit suicide if the UN tried to force him home.Vieira de Mello’s face grew dark and solemn. “How could you say such a thing?” he asked.“Your wife and your children rely upon you. You cannot abandon them when you have survived all you have together.” When the man insisted he would prefer to die than face the Communists in Vietnam,Vieira de Mello grew even more emotional and delivered a sweeping oration on the value of life and the importance of returning to one’s own soil and providing for one’s family. Casella could take his colleague’s melodrama no longer.“Listen, if you are going to kill yourself,” he said, “make sure you use a knife and sever the vein properly because we’d hate for you to have to try twice. And since this will make an enormous mess, we’d appreciate it if you did it outside, so that we don’t have to clean up after you.” Vieira de Mello was astonished, but he later conceded that Casella’s bluntness may have been more effective.The Comprehensive Plan of Action would fail unless nonrefugees left the camps and went back to Vietnam.
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