Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (16 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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Andrew Thomson, who had more experience working in Cambodia than other UN personnel, was the bearer of bad news on malaria. Soon after arriving he got his hands on a recent malaria survey and superimposed the results on a land map of Cambodia, marking Xs through those districts that were too infested to responsibly resettle refugees. He brought the map to Vieira de Mello and told him UNHCR had to declare “no-go” areas. “If we send people back to these areas,” Thomson said, “we’ll be sending them into a death trap.” Vieira de Mello looked at the map and observed that most of the areas that Thomson had marked off-limits were areas that had traditionally been strongholds of the Khmer Rouge. If the Khmer Rouge leaders were told that Cambodian refugees in Thailand could go to territory Hun Sen controlled, but not to theirs, the guerrillas would likely abandon the peace process.The repatriation operation had not even begun, and already the immediate safety of the refugees was colliding with the long-term stability of the peace process. Vieira de Mello waved off Thomson. “We can’t wait for perfect conditions before we bring people back,” he said. “But these aren’t imperfect conditions,” Thomson countered. “These are
deadly
conditions. Do you want to be responsible for mass death?” Vieira de Mello conceded part of the point, saying that UNHCR would begin by resettling people to areas where malaria was less prevalent and decide later about the rest of the country. Every decision seemed to be one that carried with it necessary benefits and potentially catastrophic costs.
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deadly
conditions. Do you want to be responsible for mass death?” Vieira de Mello conceded part of the point, saying that UNHCR would begin by resettling people to areas where malaria was less prevalent and decide later about the rest of the country. Every decision seemed to be one that carried with it necessary benefits and potentially catastrophic costs.
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From his trips into the hinterland and his conversations with refugees and his own staff, Vieira de Mello had reluctantly concluded that UNHCR stood no chance of delivering the land that it had promised. He would have to throw out the detailed Blue Book that he had received on arrival. He lamented the stark “contradiction between allowing free choice and the impossibility of satisfying it” and set out to find an alternative to what he called the “silly, irresponsible offer of five acres of free land.”
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Vieira de Mello summoned a cross section of his field staff to Phnom Penh to discuss the way forward. On the day of the minisummit, the UN generators, which functioned only intermittently, were not working, and without air-conditioning UN staffers wilted in the heat. “I’m not allowing any of you to leave this room until we come up with a solution,” he said, only half joking, as sweat saturated his clothes.
Determined to extract ideas from his team, and sensitive to the need to secure staff buy-in, he had a habit of allowing discussions to descend into angry free-for-alls in which junior officials felt free to talk back to him. He was less concerned with the rank of a colleague than he was with laying the foundation for a smooth return operation. If a twenty-eight-year-old rookie aid worker had a useful suggestion to make, he was all ears. He saw no inconsistency in soliciting that person’s views alongside those of key ambassadors in Phnom Penh. To that end, he hosted a wine-and-cheese cocktail hour most Sundays in his room at the Hotel Cambodiana, with Charles Twining, the U.S. ambassador.
Vieira de Mello instinctively relied for feedback not only on international staff and diplomats but also on the Cambodians who worked with the UN—the drivers, translators, security guards, and messengers. He learned their names and their life stories and regularly inquired after their families. “He made the clerks and drivers feel like they were quite somebody, like they were indispensable to this grand mission,” recalls Jahanshah Assadi, the UNHCR field representative in Aranyaprathet, Thailand. Once, in rural Cambodia, Vieira de Mello’s own driver faltered as he attempted to drive across an irrigation canal on a narrow two-plank “bridge.” If the vehicle’s tires strayed an inch in either direction, the car would have tumbled ten feet down into the canal below. Seeing his driver sweat at the prospect of endangering UN officials’ lives,Vieira de Mello intervened. “Allow me,” he said, taking the wheel and adding a white lie so as not to undermine the driver’s authority. “This is my favorite part of the drive.”
In a meeting in Phnom Penh, a senior UNHCR official was laying into the local staff for their poor bookkeeping habits when Vieira de Mello cut him off midsentence.“Have you stopped for one second to think about what our local staff have gone through?” he asked. “Do you expect them to have developed perfect bookkeeping habits when their families were being slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge?” He grew angrier as he continued. “Instead of criticizing them, why don’t you take the time to show them how to keep proper financial records?” he asked. “After everything they have survived, I don’t think they’ll have trouble improving their accounting.”
His deputy François Fouinat suggested that UNHCR replace the offer of land with that of cash. In desperate need of a new plan,Vieira de Mello leaped at the idea, even though his bosses in New York and Geneva had already rejected it. For many in the refugee-advocacy community, the idea of providing each refugee with a lump sum of hard currency was sacrilege. Large amounts of money would suddenly be circulating in communities that had never seen such sums before. It could lead to theft, violent crime, and simple profligacy. It could also cause a wholesale demographic transformation—instead of moving back to rural areas, where they might farm, refugees might move en masse to Cambodia’s major cities. This would clog the towns with temporary big spenders who would have no means of supporting themselves after the money ran out.
Many UN staffers shared Vieira de Mello’s belief (instilled in him by Thomas Jamieson) that almost any life in one’s home is preferable to life in a refugee camp. Although the feeding times in the camps were predictable and the water was reliably clean, most refugees found the life of dependence intolerable. Norah Niland, the Irish UNHCR official, was responsible for looking out for extremely vulnerable refugees—the elderly, the sick, and the very young. At the staff summit, when Vieira de Mello raised the cash option, she felt as though her peers were speaking unwittingly condescendingly toward poor people. “Underlying all the arguments against cash was ‘Poor people can’t manage money,’ ” she recalls. But she, who had grown up poor in County Mayo, argued that poor people were just as likely to save their money—and to waste it—as rich people. Her boss took her side. “If you place your trust in people, they tend to act responsibly,” Vieira de Mello said, echoing her view. “And they have a far better sense of what they need money for than we ever will.”
UNHCR staff admired Vieira de Mello’s decisiveness, but some criticized his haste. Normally, refugees returned to their homes after elections and the establishment of more stable governing bodies; but in Cambodia repatriation was preceding the vote. Dennis McNamara, who ran the UN human rights branch of the mission, believed his friend was neglecting the safety of refugees, who would be returning to districts where UN troops and police were not yet present to provide security. Whenever Vieira de Mello saw McNamara approaching in the hallway of UN headquarters in Phnom Penh, he groaned audibly, “Uh-oh, here comes McNamara, the pope of principle!”
Vieira de Mello believed UNHCR had reason to rush. He was deeply affected by the tongue-lashing he received when he visited one of the Khmer Rouge-controlled camps along the Thai border.The refugees he spoke with were adamant that Cambodia was where they belonged. Sensing their impatience in the camps, he feared that, in their eagerness to get home, the refugees might flood across the border without UNHCR assistance, endangering themselves and increasing the likelihood of mine amputations, violent clashes, and dashed expectations. With the elections a year away, he did not feel UNHCR could afford to wait until more UN peacekeepers were in place to begin moving the refugees home. “If you have any objections, raise them now,” he told staff. “If you have alternatives, suggest them now.” However imperfect the cash option was, nobody offered a better idea as to how to bring the refugees home and launch them on their new lives, and he decided to press on. “I will take full responsibility if something goes wrong,” he assured uneasy colleagues.
A few UN officials speculated that Vieira de Mello’s obsessive punctuality in his personal life was dictating his thinking. It was as if he could not conceive of arriving late for a political appointment. “Sergio had made a commitment to the UN, to Cambodia, and to the refugees,” recalls Nici Dahrendorf, a British UNHCR official with the mission.“He wouldn’t turn up late for repatriation any more than he would arrive late for dinner.”
Having made the decision, Vieira de Mello hung the expensive aerial photos, commissioned before his time, on the walls of the UNHCR office in Phnom Penh. These monuments to useless planning resembled abstract paintings. Whenever he ushered visitors into the office, he drew attention to the UN artwork.“I prefer the UN satellite artists to Jackson Pollock myself,” he would say.
While the original plan had put the onus on UNHCR to track down tracts of land to resettle refugees, the introduction of the cash option put Cambodians in charge of their own destinies. All returnees would get a domestic kit that included utensils, tools, a large water bucket, reinforced plastic sheeting, chemically impregnated mosquito nets to protect against malaria, and coupons for four hundred days’ worth of food rations (two hundred days for those who moved to the Phnom Penh area). A refugee family could still decide to wait for the UN to find them a small plot of land. Or they could choose the cash option (Option C), which critics nicknamed “Option Catastrophe.” Refugee families who chose this option would receive a modest cash grant of $50 per adult and $25 per child. The cash would pay for the returnees to plant seeds in a small garden or to pay relatives in exchange for accommodation.
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Vieira de Mello believed it was essential for UNHCR to stop micromanaging the repatriation. “We can’t dictate the return,” he told his colleagues. “We have to follow the people.”
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Vieira de Mello believed it was essential for UNHCR to stop micromanaging the repatriation. “We can’t dictate the return,” he told his colleagues. “We have to follow the people.”
Because he encouraged debate at UNHCR, the staff often unearthed ideas that might otherwise have remained buried in the bureaucracy. As UNHCR officials in Battambang attempted to map a schedule for refugee returns, they wondered what they would do during monsoon season (May-August), when the roads from the camps at the border into Cambodia would be too flooded to traverse. “What about the train that Cambodians used before the war?” Vieira de Mello asked. Others had proposed this same idea of repairing the wagons and tracks, but UNHCR staff had written it off as too expensive.This time he asked, “Has anybody talked to the former railway managers to see what it would take to repair?” Nobody had. And after a short investigation, it emerged that the rickety train and tracks could be restored for $100,000. Remarkably, the antiquated train with its blue UN flag, dubbed the Sisophon Express, would reduce the duration of the 210-mile trip from Sisophon, the town where refugees would be dropped off just inside Cambodia, all the way to Phnom Penh, from three days to twelve hours.
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On March 21, 1992, five days after Akashi, the UN head of mission, finally moved to Cambodia, he gaveVieira de Mello the green light to start repatriation. Vieira de Mello sent a fax to Ogata on Hotel Cambodiana stationery, apologizing for contacting her at home but jubilant. “Yet another week-end interference!” he wrote. “You’ll end up calling me Special Pain rather than Envoy.” He told Ogata that the first batch of refugees would return to their country on March 30 and that the dignitaries who would greet them in Cambodia would likely constitute a “crowd larger than the number of actual returnees! ”
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As he counted down the days, he saw that tensions in the camps were building. On March 25 in the Site 8 camp, gunmen presumed to belong to the Khmer Rouge asked for two refugees by name and executed them. On March 29, the eve of the scheduled repatriation launch, Khmer Rouge forces seized part of a key roadway in Cambodia between Kompong Thom and the northern province of Preah Vihear, and then Hun Sen retaliated by attacking them.
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It felt as though all-out war could resume at any time.
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It felt as though all-out war could resume at any time.
Although the UNTAC political and military mission had only technically come into existence on March 15, and only 2,000 of the anticipated 16,000 peacekeepers had yet deployed, Cambodians looked to the UN blue helmets to quell the fighting. But General Sanderson, who had taken over the military side of the mission (while Akashi ran the political), stressed that he had no intention of forcing the parties to comply with the terms of the Paris agreement. UN peacekeepers would in fact steer clear of violent areas. “We are in Cambodia as peacekeepers, not peace enforcers,” Sanderson said. “I will not put UN forces in the middle of a confused environment and no cease-fire, where the roads are mined.”
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Vieira de Mello knew that every UN political and military mission got one chance to make a formidable first impression, and he worried that the blue helmets were missing this opportunity. As he had seen in Lebanon, the troops that made up UN forces varied in quality and attitude. The well-equipped Dutch units that General Sanderson sent to northwestern Cambodia fired back decisively in defense of civilians and their soldiers. The Malaysian forces in western Cambodia learned Khmer and attempted to secure the cooperation of the Khmer Rouge. By contrast, some of the African units, in Sanderson’s words, “came with their backsides hanging out of their trousers.” The Tunisians and the Cameroonians were participating simply because in the Security Council, France had been so intent on offsetting Anglo influence in the region that it had insisted that a large number of French-speaking troops be sent. Cambodians developed a saying about how a typical UNTAC soldier filled his days. Set to rhyme in Khmer, it translated as “In the morning he jogs, in the afternoon he drives, in the evening he drinks.”
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Sanderson worked with what he was given but recalls, “I wouldn’t have taken many of the troops if I had a choice.”
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Sanderson worked with what he was given but recalls, “I wouldn’t have taken many of the troops if I had a choice.”
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