Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (25 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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His closest friend in the Balkans was Haris Silajdžić, the dashing forty-eight-year-old prime minister of Bosnia.The two men talked about philosophy, music, and women. WhileVieira de Mello’s graciousness toward Karadžić was contrived, his affection toward Silajdžić was genuine. Each man delighted in being known as a lady-killer. On one occasion Silajdžić was half an hour late for one of their meetings. As the minutes ticked by, a Bosnian official suggested that since the prime minister had proven unreachable at his home and office, somebody might telephone a woman in the Bosnian government with whom he was said to be involved. When Vieira de Mello heard the name of the woman in question, he reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled upon it. “Perhaps I can help,” he said, smiling.
Silajdžić and Vieira de Mello both functioned on little sleep, so they frequently met for drinks or dinner in generator-powered restaurants, and they spoke by telephone at all hours. “Sergio came to breakfast with new ideas,” Silajdžić recalls. “That meant he had been thinking through the night.”
Not content to remain cooped up inside the secure but stuffy UN compound, Vieira de Mello tried to establish a connection with the “Bosnian street.” He explored the majestic, battered capital city with Lola Urošević, his twenty-eight-year-old translator, accompanying her on walks through the town, visiting her home, and getting to know her family. Urošević felt calmed by her boss’s presence. As sniper and shell fire crackled in the winter afternoons, he seemed unflustered and rarely wore his UN-issued flak jacket. “How could I wear that thing,” he asked her, “when you, your family, and neighbors walk around with nothing?” Back in the UN bunker with international staff, he explained his disavowal of the flak jacket in a more self-parodying way. “Do you have any idea how fat those things make you look?” he said.
Before the war Urošević had been a full-time medical student at the University of Sarajevo. But when the violence erupted, because she spoke French and English, she had gone to work for the UN, where she earned ten times the pay that she would have received had she practiced medicine. Vieira de Mello made a point of inquiring about Urošević’s studies, which she continued at night. One day when she hurried back to UN headquarters after a low-key ceremony celebrating her graduation, she found him smiling ear-to-ear in her office, along with several other colleagues. “Congratulations, Dr. Urošević ” he said. Reaching beneath his desk, he produced a bottle of champagne, an exotic commodity in the besieged capital. “I managed to track down a little something for the occasion!”
The suffering of Sarajevans made a deep impression on him.The city was filled with men and women of high culture and learning. As the temperature dropped and the frigid winter set in, proud Europeans who had run out of firewood began burning their books in order to cook UN humanitarian aid. And when the cemeteries quickly filled up, he watched Sarajevan families use once-placid city parks to bury their dead. He worked with General Briquemont to help smuggle gasoline for generators to a resistance organization called the Sarajevo Group of Authors, a gathering of Sarajevo’s leading filmmakers, artists, and students who composed eye-catching graphic art and films and exported them to Western capitals in the hopes of mobilizing a Western rescue operation.
On December 24, 1993, while most UN officials around the world celebrated Christmas with their families, Vieira de Mello’s sympathy for the Bosnians prompted him to undertake one of his boldest schemes as a UN official. He summoned his new forty-four-year-old military aide, a Canadian major named John Russell, to his office. “John,” he said, “we’re going to break the siege of Sarajevo.” Russell was flummoxed. The Serbs had the city surrounded, and unless Russell had failed to notice a radical change of heart in Western capitals, the outside world had no intention of forcibly removing Serb forces from the deadly hills ringing the city. “I want you to find a way to get people out,” Vieira de Mello explained. “People who don’t fit within the UN rules, but who need to get out—because they can’t get the medical care they need here, because they are separated from a loved one, or because they can do more good on the outside than they are doing inside.” Russell nodded but, afraid he might not be up to the task, cautioned, “Okay, sir, but keep in mind that it was just two days ago that I learned where Sarajevo airport was.”
Vieira de Mello spent the next three days shuttling Russell around the city, introducing him to Bosnian officials as well as key international actors, such as the head of the French battalion in Sarajevo and the logistics and customs officials who ran the airlift at the airport.The pair also traveled to Pale, where they met with the Bosnian Serb authorities. Vieira de Mello’s introduction was the same in each instance. “This is John Russell. He is my new military aide. In my absence he speaks for me and for the United Nations.” Russell was taken aback by the gravity of his new responsibilities. “I was thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” he recalls. “Overnight I found myself operating at the highest level.”
Russell would manage what Vieira de Mello dubbed “the train,” a UN convoy that transported Bosnian civilians out of the city. The Canadian began timing trial runs to the airport. He clocked his trips down Sarajevo’s main boulevard, which had become known as “Sniper’s Alley.” In order to smuggle civilians out of the city, he would have to first pass through a checkpoint at the airport manned by armed Bosnians, then get by a Serb checkpoint, and finally get UN authorization.
Russell led the convoy in one of two cars—either Vieira de Mello’s personal car, a bullet-proof American Chevrolet, which the Bosnian and UN guards already recognized, or a standard-issue UN Nissan Pathfinder. Often the shell and sniper fire on Sniper’s Alley forced him to drive at a hundred miles per hour. The most perilous part of the journey came when the “train” reached the airport itself. In January 1993 the forty-seven-year-old Bosnian vice president Hakija Turajlic had been riding in the back of a French UN armored personnel carrier when Serb soldiers outside the airport stopped the vehicle, yanked Turajlic out, and killed him by firing seven bullets over the shoulder of his UN escort.
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In order to ensure that Vieira de Mello’s human cargo did not meet the same fate, Russell made sure that the door of each APC harboring Bosnian civilians was shuttered and locked from the inside.
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In order to ensure that Vieira de Mello’s human cargo did not meet the same fate, Russell made sure that the door of each APC harboring Bosnian civilians was shuttered and locked from the inside.
In allowing the UN humanitarian airlift, the Serbs had granted a one-hour block of time to UN Hercules or Ilyushin cargo planes to fly in the morning and a second slot in the afternoon. Russell tried to ensure that every flight that left the city carried Bosnian civilians. Once the Bosnians under his charge had cleared the military checkpoints, he waited with them at the airport in the VIP lounge, away from aid workers, journalists, and diplomats. UN airport officials were under instructions to load Russell’s passengers onto the airplane before the others.
Vieira de Mello would cheerily check in every now and then (“Is the train running on time today, John?”) or would pass his aide a list of names of people to be evacuated (“Take care of this family, will you, John?”). He told Russell to select the most “deserving” cases but did not stipulate precise criteria. Deciding who was eligible to leave the city was by far the worst part of Russell’s job, and Vieira de Mello was glad it was a task he could delegate. “It’s a balancing act,” he said, instructing Russell to maximize the good they were doing but to be sure the train was not publicized. The more individuals the UN helped, the more likely it was that somebody would blurt out the details of the operation to the media, and either the Bosnian Serb authorities or the Bosnian government would shut it down. Russell usually took no more than a half-dozen civilians at a time.
The roster of those evacuated included a delegation of Bosnian athletes who Vieira de Mello thought would ably publicize the country’s suffering at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sarajevo, who had been granted an audience with the pope; a Bosnian doctor who enrolled in a specialized course in treating bullet wounds; and a man whose wife was dying of cancer in France.
As word began to spread across the capital that Russell was the man playing God at the UN, the Canadian grew edgy. One woman asked if she could bring her dog on the flight. He exploded.“I’m not going to waste my resources moving a fucking poodle around.” Another tried to bring a huge suitcase filled with books. “The UN is not Lufthansa,” Russell snapped. One woman had terminal cancer and wanted to seek treatment in Western Europe. Russell made a cold calculation in turning down her request. “There are only so many seats,” he said to himself, “and she’s going to die anyway. It’s sad, but I have to spend my time focusing on the living.” The only persons he automatically rejected were those who attempted to bribe him with sex or money, or Bosnian men of fighting age who he believed might be deserting. “I had people who kissed my hand like I was royalty,” Russell recalls. “But I also saw people I turned down, lying dead on the street. They died at my hands, indirectly.” All told, in the 110 days that he ran the train for Vieira de Mello, Russell rescued 298 people. Pat Dray, the Canadian captain who replaced him, evacuated several hundred more. Vieira de Mello did not discuss the operation, or his role in launching it, with his friends, colleagues, or critics.
In addition to getting certain Bosnians out of Sarajevo, he also worked on bringing important visitors in. The same week he initiated “the train,” he helped arrange for the American soprano Barbara Hendricks, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, to perform a New Year’s concert in Sarajevo. At midnight on December 31, 1993, in one of the few glimmers of hope the city had enjoyed in nearly two years, Hendricks sang with a much-shrunken Bosnian Symphony Orchestra. Many of its members had fled, been conscripted, or been killed, including a trombone player who had been shot the week before. Yet Vieira de Mello and some two hundred local and foreign dignitaries savored the sounds of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Gabriel Fauré’s
Requiem,
and Schubert’s
Ave Maria
. The concert was broadcast live on local television, but because the city lacked electricity, few Bosnians could watch. The concert’s main effect was to make Sarajevans who heard about the performance feel slightly less alone. In the forty-five minutes in which Hendricks sang and Vieira de Mello listened, half a dozen shells landed within a hundred yards of the TV studio that had been converted into a concert hall for the occasion. Over the course of New Year’s Day, five people were killed and forty-six wounded in the capital.
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Requiem,
and Schubert’s
Ave Maria
. The concert was broadcast live on local television, but because the city lacked electricity, few Bosnians could watch. The concert’s main effect was to make Sarajevans who heard about the performance feel slightly less alone. In the forty-five minutes in which Hendricks sang and Vieira de Mello listened, half a dozen shells landed within a hundred yards of the TV studio that had been converted into a concert hall for the occasion. Over the course of New Year’s Day, five people were killed and forty-six wounded in the capital.
10
General Briquemont had been away from Sarajevo visiting his troops while Hendricks delivered her midnight performance. The next day, at a formal lunch in her honor in the officers’ mess, Briquemont asked whether she would mind singing something a cappella. No sooner had the soprano cleared her throat and begun to sing than a shell crashed down beside the building, causing the lights to flicker and the silverware to clatter. Hendricks kept on singing through the din. When Vieira de Mello asked her afterward how she had managed to remain so calm, she said,“If I die, I know I want to go out singing.” He had always been skeptical about goodwill ambassadors, believing that the logistics of arranging celebrity visits brought more headaches than benefits. But after the incident, Hendricks recalls, “I could tell I went up several notches in his estimation.” The following evening Vieira de Mello played a CD of Brazilian music and attempted to teach her and the French officers to dance the samba. Hendricks told him that no matter how many ravaged cities she had visited for the UN, nothing had prepared her to see a European city in such a state. “I feel like I have walked into a Kafka novel,” she said. “If I see giant cockroaches on the wall, I won’t be surprised.” He agreed, saying, “This kind of savagery probably lies buried within us all.”
They discussed their respective personal lives. He reflected on how much he missed his sons during the holidays. He and Annie were together so rarely that Hendricks asked why they had not formalized their separation. “Don’t wait too long,” she advised. “You need to give Annie a chance to start another life of her own. She should get to live without waiting for you. The longer you postpone dealing with this, the harder it will be.” He deflected the question. “We’ve grown apart,” he said, “but that’s no reason to end a marriage.”
Vieira de Mello was an expert compartmentalizer and concentrated on the work at hand. The singular dilemma that he and his colleagues faced was that the very UN humanitarian airlift that had loosened the Serb noose around the necks of Bosnian civilians had evolved into something of a noose around UNPROFOR itself. He was of the view that if UN peacekeepers fought back against Serbs who were targeting civilians, Serb gunners would retaliate by firing several well-placed, shoulder-launched missiles at a UN cargo plane, closing down the whole feeding operation and endangering several million lives. The countries that had sent soldiers to serve in the peacekeeping mission cared enough about Bosnia to try to prevent mass starvation, but he did not believe that they cared enough to fight the Serbs in a war. The blue helmets were thus in a bind.
11
They were passing out food, but not preventing those fed from being felled by sniper or shell fire, causing critics to accuse the UN of “passing out sandwiches at the gates of Auschwitz.”
12
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They were passing out food, but not preventing those fed from being felled by sniper or shell fire, causing critics to accuse the UN of “passing out sandwiches at the gates of Auschwitz.”
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