Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (21 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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UN officials on the ground in Cambodia were largely powerless to break the cycle because resources for development had to come from governments. Vieira de Mello embraced what were called Quick Impact Projects (QIPs), which were executed by private aid organizations but paid for by UNHCR. The first was a two-week project employing Cambodians to repair a bridge in Siem Reap province. Other QIPs improved access to clean water and set up mobile health units, or distributed rice seeds and fertilizer, along with fishery equipment, water jars, and mosquito nets. A few offered start-up loans for farmers or gave assistance to vulnerable elderly persons, orphans, or amputees. Projects would eventually be undertaken in all of Cambodia’s twenty-one provinces. At a time when instability deterred investors, he hoped the QIPs would serve as an essential bridge between emergency relief and longer-term development. Unfortunately, by the end of 1993, UNHCR had spent only $3.5 million on QIPs, a pittance of what was needed.
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For all the country’s divisions—between rich and poor, urban and rural, capitalist and Communist—Cambodians seemed virtually united in their conviction that the Paris agreement was unraveling. Vieira de Mello had succeeded in maintaining humanitarian ties to the Khmer Rouge, but this approach had not yielded the political dividend he had anticipated. UN peacekeepers were not seen as providing security, and they were increasingly despised. Between July and November 1992 UNTAC repatriated eighty-one military personnel for disciplinary reasons, including fifty-six Bulgarians. Some blue helmets were involved in smuggling, sexual harassment, and reckless driving that resulted in the deaths of Cambodians. General Sanderson could investigate incidents, but only a soldier’s own national military superiors could ship a transgressor home or garnish his wages.
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Just as Vieira de Mello had seen in Lebanon, Sanderson saw that the price of operating under a UN flag was that you lacked unified command and control of your troops.
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Just as Vieira de Mello had seen in Lebanon, Sanderson saw that the price of operating under a UN flag was that you lacked unified command and control of your troops.
HIV/AIDS, which had not been discussed much in Cambodia before the arrival of the peacekeepers, was raging, and Cambodians blamed the UN soldiers for their frequent dalliances with prostitutes.
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The acronym UNTAC became ridiculed as “UN Transmission of AIDS to Cambodians.”
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The mission’s reputation for sexual predation became so pronounced that even the Khmer Rouge, in their isolation, used radio broadcasts to accuse French troops of being “too busy with prostitutes to check on the presence of Vietnamese soldiers.”
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Instead of publicly condemning prostitution, Akashi, the head of the mission, astonished civil society leaders when he told them, “I am not a puritan. Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.”
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Akashi’s comments unleashed a public firestorm, and French paratroopers felt compelled to dismantle the rickety brothels that had sprung up beside their base. UN doctors ordered 800,000 condoms for distribution among soldiers, and UN officers allegedly told their soldiers not to park their vehicles in front of brothels where they could be spotted.
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The acronym UNTAC became ridiculed as “UN Transmission of AIDS to Cambodians.”
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The mission’s reputation for sexual predation became so pronounced that even the Khmer Rouge, in their isolation, used radio broadcasts to accuse French troops of being “too busy with prostitutes to check on the presence of Vietnamese soldiers.”
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Instead of publicly condemning prostitution, Akashi, the head of the mission, astonished civil society leaders when he told them, “I am not a puritan. Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.”
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Akashi’s comments unleashed a public firestorm, and French paratroopers felt compelled to dismantle the rickety brothels that had sprung up beside their base. UN doctors ordered 800,000 condoms for distribution among soldiers, and UN officers allegedly told their soldiers not to park their vehicles in front of brothels where they could be spotted.
It was not just UN soldiers who were raising eyebrows. Some UN civilian officials developed relationships with Cambodian women who did not speak English.The power differential made it hard to gauge how consensual the relationships were. With his “boys will be boys” comments, Akashi had disqualified himself from speaking out on gender-related matters, and other senior managers said that they did not have the right to interfere in the aid workers’ relationships with autonomous adults.Vieira de Mello steered clear of the issue. “Because Sergio played fast and loose in his own relationships with women,” recalls a female UN employee, “it would have been very hard for him to take the moral high ground, so he just kept his mouth shut.”
Since the Khmer Rouge had refused to disarm, and since Akashi’s UN administration had opted not to assert meaningful “direct control” over the key ministries, the only parts of the Paris agreement that seemed salvageable were the repatriation operation, which had picked up pace, and the elections, which had been scheduled for May 1993. Hun Sen saw that Prince Sihanouk’s son Ranariddh was his main opposition and began physically assaulting candidates in his party. UN police continued to trickle into Cambodia, but they were spread too thin to investigate human rights complaints, protect voter registration sites, or guard political party offices.
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Lacking the power to make arrests, they could not stop Hun Sen’s hit squads from assaulting political opponents or Khmer Rouge forces from attacking ethnic Vietnamese with impunity.
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Lacking the power to make arrests, they could not stop Hun Sen’s hit squads from assaulting political opponents or Khmer Rouge forces from attacking ethnic Vietnamese with impunity.
Prince Sihanouk denounced UNTAC’s failure to punish Hun Sen’s attacks. He said that while he and the Cambodian people had initially welcomed the UN, they had come to realize that “UNTAC is a terrible cocktail of races who do not even understand each other.” Sihanouk said that thanks to the arrival of thousands of Vietnamese prostitutes, and the tremendous spike in prices caused by the peacekeepers’ arrival, “UNTAC is detested, hated.”
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He criticized the UN’s decision to proceed with the elections. “In order to be able to tell the UN and the world that they have succeeded in their mission, UNTAC is going to have an election despite the fact none of the conditions for the election have been met. None. It is a hideous comedy.”
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He criticized the UN’s decision to proceed with the elections. “In order to be able to tell the UN and the world that they have succeeded in their mission, UNTAC is going to have an election despite the fact none of the conditions for the election have been met. None. It is a hideous comedy.”
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In January 1993 Akashi reacted to the criticism—which had initially come only from the Khmer Rouge but was now emanating from all sides—by creating, for the first time in the history of the UN, a UN special prosecutor’s office with the power to arrest and punish those suspected of committing political crimes and human rights violations. The very first UN arrest was made on January 11, when a Cambodian government official was apprehended while he was destroying an opposition party office with an ax. However, because the UN did not itself have the facilities or the personnel to prosecute suspects, it handed the man over to the Cambodian police, who promptly released him.
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With Cambodia increasingly resembling the Wild West, the Khmer Rouge too grew yet more brazen. In December 1992 they took some sixty-seven UNTAC peacekeepers hostage, charging them with spying on behalf of Hun Sen and the Vietnamese.
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On December 27, 1992, they massacred thirteen ethnic Vietnamese, including four children, in a river village.The killers scattered leaflets that demanded that Akashi rid the country of Vietnamese. A month later the Khmer Rouge killed eight people, including three local policemen and an eight-year-old girl.
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On December 27, 1992, they massacred thirteen ethnic Vietnamese, including four children, in a river village.The killers scattered leaflets that demanded that Akashi rid the country of Vietnamese. A month later the Khmer Rouge killed eight people, including three local policemen and an eight-year-old girl.
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In his correspondence with UN Headquarters, Vieira de Mello noted a “clear trend” in the Khmer Rouge ranks toward “isolationism, introversion and pathological suspiciousness.” But while his boss Akashi favored sanctions, he continued to believe that further punitive measures would only cause the Khmer Rouge to opt out of the political process altogether.
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On March 10, 1993, in another fishing village in Siem Reap province, the Khmer Rouge killed thirty-three ethnic Vietnamese and wounded another twenty-nine. Among those killed were eight children and a baby.
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It was the worst massacre of the postwar period. On March 27, 1993, a Bangladeshi soldier was killed in the first deliberate murder of UNTAC personnel. By May, the month of the vote, eleven UNTAC civilians and soldiers had been killed.
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On March 10, 1993, in another fishing village in Siem Reap province, the Khmer Rouge killed thirty-three ethnic Vietnamese and wounded another twenty-nine. Among those killed were eight children and a baby.
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It was the worst massacre of the postwar period. On March 27, 1993, a Bangladeshi soldier was killed in the first deliberate murder of UNTAC personnel. By May, the month of the vote, eleven UNTAC civilians and soldiers had been killed.
Remarkably, amid all the massacres and military skirmishes,Vieira de Mello’s repatriation effort proceeded smoothly. The operation that filled him with the most pride involved a weary and malaria-infected group of displaced Montagnards (French for “mountain people”) whom UNTAC soldiers had encountered on patrol in the dense forests of northeastern Cambodia. The Montagnards had lived in the central highlands of Vietnam and teamed up with U.S. Special Forces to fight the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In 1979, facing persecution for their pro-American allegiances, they had fled from Vietnam to Cambodia, where they were also shunned by Cambodians hostile to anybody associated with Vietnam.
Throughout long bouts of fighting and hardship, the Montagnards had relied on shortwave radio sermons and a few worn Bibles translated into their dialect in order to maintain their Christian faith.
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The Montagnards had attracted some interest in the United States in 1985, when Lutheran missionaries in Raleigh, North Carolina, helped resettle some two hundred there. But until Vieira de Mello and UNHCR took interest in them, the rest of their group had languished in the Cambodian bush.
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The Montagnards had attracted some interest in the United States in 1985, when Lutheran missionaries in Raleigh, North Carolina, helped resettle some two hundred there. But until Vieira de Mello and UNHCR took interest in them, the rest of their group had languished in the Cambodian bush.
The Security Council had tasked UNTAC with demobilizing and disarming all military elements, but when the Montagnards were discovered, their commander, Colonel Y-Pen Ayun, was reluctant to comply for fear his people would be forced back to Vietnam. He said his men could turn over their arms only if they got instructions to do so from their leader, a general whom they had been waiting to hear from since 1975. UN officials had the unfortunate task of breaking the bad news to Ayun that their leader had been executed by the Khmer Rouge almost as soon as he had traveled to Phnom Penh nearly two decades before. When Ayun was told the news, he and his men protested, asking the UN for proof of the general’s murder, but eventually their eyes filled with tears and they realized that their long journey in the wilderness was over. Ayun’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Y-Hinnie, told Nate Thayer of the
Far Eastern Economic Review,
“I am not angry, but very sad that the Americans forgot us. The Americans are like our elder brother, so it is very sad when your brother forgets you.”
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Ayun told UN officials that since his people were unwelcome in both Vietnam and Cambodia, they wanted to join their kin in North Carolina.
Far Eastern Economic Review,
“I am not angry, but very sad that the Americans forgot us. The Americans are like our elder brother, so it is very sad when your brother forgets you.”
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Ayun told UN officials that since his people were unwelcome in both Vietnam and Cambodia, they wanted to join their kin in North Carolina.
Vieira de Mello knew that responding to the plight of the Montagnards would consume sizable staff resources and would have scant bearing on Cambodia’s future. But he saw an opportunity to close one of the many doors the cold war had left ajar, to personally guarantee the safety of a forgotten ethnic minority, and, not incidentally, to cater to a useful and vocal Christian constituency in the United States. On September 28, 1992, he paid the Montagnards an incognito visit and, in a meeting with Colonel Ayun, produced a pen and a notebook and declared, “Put your disarmament in writing!” After more than thirty years as a fighting force, Ayun wrote in cursive handwriting, “We the Montagnard people . . . have today put down our arms and have agreed to dismantle our military and political movement and stop and never start again any hostile activities of any kinds. We agreed to do all this so that we can become refugees and be resettled in the U.S. where we want to live in peace.”
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Vieira de Mello presided over a brief ceremony in the middle of the jungle, where Ayun’s men solemnly handed over 144 old but well-maintained AK-47 assault rifles and 2,557 rounds of ammunition. The Montagnards lowered their flag and handed it to Vieira de Mello, who later hung it in his UN office in Geneva.
On October 10, 1992, he faxed a note to Lionel Rosenblatt, one of the group’s long-standing advocates in the United States:
Dear Lionel,
Operation concluded!
They were disarmed between last night and this morning (144 weapons), dissolved as a political/military organization and were relocated
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. . .
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. . .
The ball is in your court.
Please help with expedited processing.
All the best and thanks,
Sergio
Pushed by Rosenblatt and other refugee advocates, President George H. W. Bush’s administration sent immigration officers to Cambodia in record speed. Within six weeks all the Montagnards had been resettled in North Carolina, the home state of Republican senator Jesse Helms, who had taken a personal interest in this persecuted Christian group.
Early on in his career Vieira de Mello had observed military commanders routinely take note of the achievements of their soldiers in written letters of thanks and commendation. He brought this practice to the world of UN civilian performance and became famous among UN staff for his thank-you letters. After this operation he quickly wrote to General Sanderson, expressing his personal thanks to the Uruguayan colonel, the Ghanaian major, the Malian captain, the Australian private, and the American navy major who provided invaluable assistance in the repatriation operation. In a memo back to UNHCR headquarters,Vieira de Mello also handwrote a note crediting Giuseppe de Vincentis, the young UNHCR field officer, for his leadership on the issue. “Peppe can be proud of what he did,” Vieira de Mello wrote. “One of the last pages of [the] IndoChinese tragedy was resolved peacefully. Only one in many unknown stories in the careers of HCR staff and small humanitarian achievements that give us pride in serving UNHCR.”
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