Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (23 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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By the end of 1993 all UNTAC staff had vanished from the country. The mission had cost $2.5 billion, by far the most expensive in UN history, but it left little tangible behind it—besides a fragile, divided government .
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The following year Vieira de Mello got word that the Cambodian army had attacked and completely destroyed the Khmer Rouge’s “model village” settlement of Yeah Ath, sending several thousand people fleeing yet again. He later described the event as “one of the saddest moments in my career, in my life, to realize that something that we had been working on so carefully, so prudently, and that we had hoped would be like a crack in the wall, in the impenetrable wall that surrounded the Khmer Rouge areas, and that we hoped would also serve as a model inside, it went literally down the drain.”
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He sent a note to James Lynch in Kenya, in which he confessed he had been “naïve” to think that Hun Sen would allow a utopian Khmer Rouge farming village to flourish right under his nose.” The news from Cambodia would only get worse. In July 1997 Hun Sen deposed Ranariddh in a coup, disavowing the results of the UN election.
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He sent a note to James Lynch in Kenya, in which he confessed he had been “naïve” to think that Hun Sen would allow a utopian Khmer Rouge farming village to flourish right under his nose.” The news from Cambodia would only get worse. In July 1997 Hun Sen deposed Ranariddh in a coup, disavowing the results of the UN election.
Vieira de Mello was out of a job. Ogata was grateful for his services, but she had filled all of her senior positions assuming that he was heading to Angola. He tried to make a virtue out of necessity. “I’ve always said I wanted time to reflect and write,” he told colleagues. “Well, now I have all the time in the world. Be careful what you wish for.”
Cooped up at a borrowed desk in the UNHCR annex—Dennis McNamara teased his friend that he was being housed in a “cupboard”—Vieira de Mello read and commented on a lengthy manuscript by researcher Courtland Robinson on the repatriation operation. He had opened up UNHCR’s files to Robinson and felt a little stung by the critique. He wrote to Robinson, “Never forget that what may be obvious
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the fact requires a great deal of soul-searching and debate and involves a lot of anxiety and uncertainty before the fact, especially when a decision affecting the lives of people is about to be taken.” Robinson criticized UNHCR’s decision to return refugees to unsafe areas. Here Vieira de Mello accepted the charge but wrote, “It is difficult to imagine how one could spell out conditions under which return may be deemed safe. Should, for instance, returnees require higher standards than those enjoyed by the majority that never left?” He urged Robinson to take on UNTAC’s most serious weakness: the absence of a meaningful economic rehabilitation strategy, which undermined Cambodia’s long-term prospects.
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after
the fact requires a great deal of soul-searching and debate and involves a lot of anxiety and uncertainty before the fact, especially when a decision affecting the lives of people is about to be taken.” Robinson criticized UNHCR’s decision to return refugees to unsafe areas. Here Vieira de Mello accepted the charge but wrote, “It is difficult to imagine how one could spell out conditions under which return may be deemed safe. Should, for instance, returnees require higher standards than those enjoyed by the majority that never left?” He urged Robinson to take on UNTAC’s most serious weakness: the absence of a meaningful economic rehabilitation strategy, which undermined Cambodia’s long-term prospects.
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He spent the summer of 1993 in Geneva on the telephone to UN Headquarters in New York attempting to scrounge up a useful job, contemplating his future, and drafting a book proposal, which he tentatively titled “Deceit and Estrangement: The Aborted Relationship Between the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Peace Process (1989-1993).” At the heart of his proposal, which would examine whether the Khmer Rouge could have been kept engaged, was an implicit question: Which approach was more fruitful—his or Akashi’s? In terms of outcomes, he knew that he had the edge, as 360,000 Cambodian refugees had returned safely, including 77,000-plus who had been trapped in Khmer Rouge-controlled camps. But he also knew that lessons from the humanitarian sphere could not always be applied to the political realm. Still, he believed Akashi had been wrong to push the already-mistrustful Maoist guerrillas into an even darker and more suspicious vortex of isolation than the one they had inhabited when the UN first arrived. What was required, there and elsewhere, Vieira de Mello wrote, was “a dynamic even-handed diplomacy open to all the parties to the conflict.”
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His pitch to Ogata was endearing. It was that of a man determined to remain a student all of his life. “As you know,” he wrote to her, “I have followed Cambodian affairs since University.” He did not request a study leave but said he intended to use his spare time and annual leave to conduct the research. He did not seem to mind much that any project tacked on to his normal seventy- or eighty-hour workweek would further reduce the time he spent with his family. He argued that his study would help strengthen the UN capacity “to resolve internal conflicts in the turbulent times ahead.”
A UN man to his core, he knew that the organization frowned upon those officials who drew upon their field and diplomatic experiences to produce public manifestos. He wrote to Ogata, “I trust that my nearly twenty-four years of service with the Organization and my academic record will suffice as a guarantee of my ability to use the information at my disposal in the interest and not the detriment of the United Nations.”
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But his credentials did not suffice. Christine Dodson, director of personnel at UN Headquarters in New York, responded to his request. “Mr. Vieira de Mello is of course at liberty to engage in personal research in his own time on any topic. However he should bear in mind that any manuscript that emerges would have to be submitted to the Secretary-General for approval. . . . Such approval seems unlikely to be granted.”
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Vieira de Mello spent the summer of 1993 overcome by the most severe wave of professional self-doubt he had ever experienced. “I’m not going anywhere in the UN,” he told Irene Khan, a UNHCR colleague who would later become secretary-general of Amnesty International. “What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re not even forty-five!” “Yes,” he said, “but at fifty I could be dead.” Because of his father’s death at fifty-nine, he carried with him a persistent fear of heart attack. Famously fond of his whiskey, he had cut back significantly in his thirties. He told friends,“I don’t want to end up like my father.” He exercised obsessively and kept vigilant tabs on his cholesterol and blood pressure. After one doctor’s appointment in Geneva, he returned to the office, and his assistant inquired after his results. “Everything is fine except there is a little fluctuation in my cardia,” he said. “Just like my father.” While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had received a letter from a Canadian researcher requesting an interview. He had jotted a note at the bottom of her letter in black pen, “Ok for mid-Dec if still around or alive.”
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His colleagues in UNHCR saw that he had outgrown the humanitarian agency that had been his home for twenty-four years. They were stunned that Boutros-Ghali had not found a place for him. “Sergio, they have no idea what they are missing,” Jahanshah Assadi said to his friend. “You are this diamond in the rough, and they will find you.” Vieira de Mello shook his head. “You know how it is, Jahanshah,” he said. “We are the lowly humanitarians.We’re the guys who pass out food and fix roads. They look down on us elsewhere in the UN.They don’t see us as capable of handling high politics.” Assadi agreed. “That’s all true, Sergio, but once they get their hands on you, they will not let you go.” Many UN officials were already speculating that he would be the first person to scale the rungs of UNHCR to succeed Ogata as the high commissioner, or even move beyond to do what no lifelong UN civil servant to that point had ever done—become secretary-general of the whole United Nations. Alluding to the top floor of UN Headquarters where the secretary-general kept his office, Omar Bakhet reassured his friend that the pause was only temporary, saying, “Sergio, you will ride the escalator from Cambodia all the way up to the thirty-eighth floor.”
While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had read the bloody news from the former Yugoslavia. An Italian UN colleague of his, Staffan de Mistura, had even called him in Phnom Penh from a guesthouse in Serb territory for advice on how to get a convoy of 80,000 blankets past an angry throng of Serb women who were blocking the only roads to Bosnian territory. Vieira de Mello urged him to think laterally. “When there is a wall in front of you,” he said by phone,“you either break it, you jump over it if you are tall enough, or you bypass it.” When de Mistura said he couldn’t bypass five hundred women,Vieira de Mello asked why he didn’t hire Serb smugglers.“The trick will be the carrot,” he said. “Money may not be enough. Give them something morally different from what they get in their lives. Give them a sense of dignity.” Vieira de Mello suggested de Mistura match the pay the black marketeers got for smuggling cigarettes but also provide a certificate that said “UN consultant.” The “Sergio solution” worked, as the smugglers got the blankets through, and when de Mistura visited one of them in his home months later, he saw the UN certificate hanging above his fireplace.
But while Vieira de Mello was always willing to don his thinking cap for a colleague, he had no particular attachment to the former Yugoslavia and generally found himself resenting the amount of staff and press attention it consumed relative to Cambodia. Bosnia’s war was unfortunate, of course, but Cambodia, which received far less political attention, had seemed to have a genuine chance at peace. Yet donor countries spent twenty-four times more per capita in Bosnia than they did in Cambodia. He had quietly applauded when in July 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had outraged sensibilities in the Western world by defiantly dubbing the Bosnia conflict “a rich man’s war” and later saying on a visit to Bosnia,“You have a situation that is better than ten other places in the world. I can give you a list.”
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Perhaps because he felt his personal clock ticking, Vieira de Mello seemed to be in a great hurry to register his professional achievements. On the few occasions when he felt his career was stalled—and this was one—he fell into a fearsome funk. But even in such a low period, his wide smile and humor shielded most of his colleagues from his insecurities. “It’s ok,” he said, “as long as they don’t send me to the former Yugoslavia!”
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Having expressed misgivings about working in the Balkans, however, he promptly turned his attention to securing the most high-level job there that he could find.
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Having expressed misgivings about working in the Balkans, however, he promptly turned his attention to securing the most high-level job there that he could find.
After six months of limbo in Geneva, Vieira de Mello was named the Bosnia-based political adviser to Thorvald Stoltenberg, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the former Yugoslavia. Stoltenberg was the same man whom Vieira de Mello blamed for hastily jumping ship as high commissioner three years before.
In one sense the Bosnia job compounded Vieira de Mello’s sense of professional stagnation. Despite all of his feats—serving as High Commissioner Hocké’s chief of staff, negotiating the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Vietnamese boat people, and overseeing the massive repatriation operation in Cambodia—he was returning to a job similar to the one he had held a decade before when he advised General Callaghan in Lebanon. In order to serve Stoltenberg, he would again work at the right hand of the generals who commanded the peacekeepers. He would assess the political climate in Bosnia and identify humanitarian and diplomatic targets of opportunity for what was known as the UN Protection Force, or UNPROFOR.
While in Lebanon, Vieira de Mello had signed up for a relatively peaceful mission that had turned violent with the Israeli invasion in 1982, in the Balkans he knew from the outset that he was entering a raging war zone. U.S. and European statesmen would continue to try to broker a political settlement, and he and the UN peacekeepers would try to build local confidence by easing civilian suffering on the ground. “I’m heading into Dante’s inferno,” he told friends.
The optimism that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall had faded. Indeed, by the time of his posting to Sarajevo, the eruption of ethnic violence across the globe had begun to stir a nostalgia among pundits for the stability of the mutually assured destruction of the cold war. The democracies that had triumphed against Communism seemed outmatched by a new generation of brazen ethnic and religious nationalists and warlords. And whatever hopes existed for a UN renaissance seemed to die the very week of his departure for the Balkans.
On October 4, 1993, three days before he would fly to the former Yugoslavia, he watched chilling television footage from Mogadishu, Somalia.
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Over the course of the street battle, Somali fighters loyal to Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. soldiers. More than a thousand Somalis were also thought to have died. The evening news depicted jubilant Somalis dragging the mutilated corpse of a naked U.S. soldier along the streets of Mogadishu. The Somalia fiasco would prove to be one of the pivotal events of the 1990s. Because U.S. soldiers had gone to Somalia to assist a beleaguered UN mission, the incident solidified the anti-UN prejudice of many in the U.S. Congress and deepened the Pentagon’s distrust of the Clinton administration, which it blamed for sending U.S. troops into harm’s way without a proper plan.
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Over the course of the street battle, Somali fighters loyal to Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. soldiers. More than a thousand Somalis were also thought to have died. The evening news depicted jubilant Somalis dragging the mutilated corpse of a naked U.S. soldier along the streets of Mogadishu. The Somalia fiasco would prove to be one of the pivotal events of the 1990s. Because U.S. soldiers had gone to Somalia to assist a beleaguered UN mission, the incident solidified the anti-UN prejudice of many in the U.S. Congress and deepened the Pentagon’s distrust of the Clinton administration, which it blamed for sending U.S. troops into harm’s way without a proper plan.
At a news conference after the firefight, President Clinton said,“I still believe that UN peacekeeping is important. And I still believe that America can play a role in that.” But he urged the UN to learn from its recent struggles. “The UN went into Cambodia first of all with this theory about what they had to do to or with the Khmer Rouge, and then moved away from any kind of military approach . . . in effect, creating a process in which the local people had to take responsibility for their own future. If we are going to do that kind of work, we ought to take the Cambodian model in Somalia and everyplace else.”
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Vieira de Mello was proud of his achievements in Cambodia, but he knew the flaws of the UNTAC mission, and he knew that the key predictor of any UN mission’s success was its clarity of purpose and the backing it got from the major powers. He initially thought that what the Balkan mission lacked in clarity, it gained in support from the major powers. But he did not realize how divided those powers were over what should be done, and he did not foresee how he, the UN he cherished, and Bosnia itself would suffer the consequences.
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Vieira de Mello was proud of his achievements in Cambodia, but he knew the flaws of the UNTAC mission, and he knew that the key predictor of any UN mission’s success was its clarity of purpose and the backing it got from the major powers. He initially thought that what the Balkan mission lacked in clarity, it gained in support from the major powers. But he did not realize how divided those powers were over what should be done, and he did not foresee how he, the UN he cherished, and Bosnia itself would suffer the consequences.
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