Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (26 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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Vieira de Mello defended UNPROFOR’s approach. He argued that the blue helmets played a vital humanitarian role and cautioned against using force. “There are 95% fewer casualties in Bosnia now than there were a year ago,” he argued. “We are buying time for the Bosnians until a peace agreement can be signed.” For that to happen the major powers—not the UN peacekeepers—would have to ratchet up their diplomatic involvement. “Expecting UNPROFOR to bring about a political solution,” he told an interviewer, “is, at the very least, absurd. It’s a conceptual mistake.”
13
UN officials had to resist the impulse to be trigger-happy. “If we opt for force,” he insisted, “we have chosen war.”
14
 
 
Impartiality was so central to his understanding of the essence of UN peacekeeping that he refused journalists’ requests to state which party bore the greatest responsibility for the carnage. “We must not be partial,” he explained. “I understand it is hard for you to understand, but it is the only way for us to help stop the war in Bosnia.”
15
He hailed the virtues of what he called “affirmative action”—humanitarian work that made life a little more bearable for civilians in war. “We may not be able to change the world here,” he told his demoralized staff, “but we can change individual worlds, one at a time.” If UN peacekeepers could simply freeze the battle lines in place, and UN aid agencies could keep civilians alive, the UN mission was doing its part. From his perspective, Western negotiators would have to be the ones to use their considerable resources to negotiate a permanent peace.
 
 
But many UN officials saw the situation differently. Some argued that the peacekeepers should challenge the Serbs militarily. More junior UN officials—often on their first field missions—were outraged just as he had been on his first peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. They believed that the blue helmets were too timid, and that UN officials who had been in the system too long were so interested in protecting their own reputations that they were downplaying carnage that they should have been denouncing. They were treating a stopgap feeding operation as an end in itself.They had made themselves complicit by not vocally urging Western governments to rescue civilians. “The system is broken,” David Harland, a thirty-two-year-old political officer from New Zealand, argued. “We are being used. We aren’t going to get a peace agreement by simply hanging around.”
 
 
Bosnia was one of the few missions Vieira de Mello undertook in the absence of Dennis McNamara, who was back in Geneva as UNHCR’s director of external relations. Still, McNamara kept up his role jabbing at his friend’s conscience, teasing over the telephone,“That’s not peacekeeping you are doing, Sergio. It’s war monitoring.”
The Economist
chided the UN as “an armour-plated meals-on-wheels service.”
16
More stinging to him, the Bosnians themselves jeered the blue helmets as either the UN
Self
-Protection Force or “SERBPROFOR.” He kept some of the hate mail he received while on mission. One letter, entitled “War Criminals and Their Supporters,” included cut-out photographs of Slobodan Milošević and Karadžić alongside Boutros-Ghali and Stoltenberg.
 
 
In late January 1994, however, Bosnian civilians began to believe that UNPROFOR might at last defend them. Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose, a fifty-three-year-old former British SAS officer who had served in Northern Ireland and fought in the Falklands War, took over as commander of UN forces in Bosnia, replacing General Briquemont. Rose, the general whom Vieira de Mello spoke with the night of our first meeting, arrived in Sarajevo citing the SAS motto: “Who dares, wins.” Peace had to be pushed; Serb harassment of civilians and peacekeepers had to stop. “If they shoot at us, we’ll shoot back,” Rose said, “and I have no hesitation about that whatsoever.”
17
In some places the Serbs were blocking or siphoning 80 percent of humanitarian supplies. “We’ve got to lean on the door harder, and if we keep leaning in a very, very concerted way,” the general said, “then that door is going to open further, and more aid will go through.”
18
This spirit was infectious, as UN civil servants and peacekeepers who had grown fatalistic were inspired by their new commander.
 
 
Just as Rose arrived, UN Headquarters in New York informed Vieira de Mello that he was being promoted. He would no longer be based in Sarajevo as a roaming adviser to Stoltenberg and the generals. Instead he would be relocated to UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb and would run the Department of Civil Affairs, managing a team of fifty international political analysts spread out throughout the former Yugoslavia and retaining the function of top political adviser to the head of the mission. He groaned when he heard the rest of the news—instead of answering to Stoltenberg, whom he at least saw as a political heavyweight, he would serve under the new UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General: his former boss in Cambodia,Yasushi Akashi.
 
 
Vieira de Mello joked privately that in order for him to earn the title of “adviser,” he needed to work for somebody who was interested in taking advice. Akashi was not that person. Boutros-Ghali later admitted that he had peevishly chosen a Japanese (rather than a European) diplomat “as a rebuke to the Europeans for their failure to deal with this conflict on their own continent.”
19
Undoubtedly, Japan’s heavy share of the UN peacekeeping budget was again a factor. Even though he had known his new boss for more than two years,Vieira de Mello continued to call him “Mr. Akashi” and “sir.” “For somebody who cut such a dashing figure,” recalls Michael Williams, who worked with Vieira de Mello in Cambodia and again in UNPROFOR, “Sergio was remarkably
protocolaire
.”
 
 
Vieira de Mello overlapped with General Rose in Sarajevo for just thirteen days. But the two men took an instant liking to each other. Rose had been educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne and spoke fluent French, which endeared him to Vieira de Mello and to the French soldiers in Sarajevo who might otherwise have been suspicious of a British commander. Rose respected the relationships Vieira de Mello had already managed to build with Balkan leaders and his vast experience living and working in conflict areas. Rose later noted that he admired Vieira de Mello “above anyone else I worked with in Bosnia.”
20
 
 
One of their first encounters was telling. Rose, who was readying himself for his first trip to meet Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, was donning a flak jacket and helmet and preparing to board an armored UN convoy. He saw Vieira de Mello exiting the residency for the same meeting. “How are you getting down there?” Rose asked.Vieira de Mello said he was walking because the people of Sarajevo resented UN peacekeepers who zoomed past them in armored vehicles. Ignoring the UN security protocol, Rose ripped off his protective layers and ambled down the dangerous street with his colleague, stopping to talk to Sarajevans along the way. When the men arrived at the pockmarked Austro-Hungarian-era building that served as the Presidency, they entered a dark and subfreezing tomb where Bosnian waiters in white gloves served orange juice and UN aid biscuits off silver trays.When a shell struck nearby, the ceiling sent a shower of light dust down upon them. The men struggled to suppress their giggles at what Rose remembered as “a mad hatter’s tea party.”
21
 
 
For a person who had just arrived in the Balkans, Rose was remarkably sure of himself, which impressed Vieira de Mello and thrilled Bosnian civilians who were desperate to see a more aggressive UN. But in private meetings Rose’s self-assuredness began to take a turn that some of his UN colleagues found disturbing. As a professional officer, he seemed to look down upon the ragtag Bosnian army, which was disorganized and poorly equipped, and to respect Serb forces who made use of officers and heavy weapons they inherited from the Yugoslav National Army. Rose was also suspicious of the Western media, whose sympathies lay with the Bosnians, the war’s main victims. He later called the Sarajevo press corps “a pair of jackals circling the decaying corpse of Bosnia.”
22
 
 
In late January 1994 Aryeh Neier, the head of Helsinki Watch (the precursor to Human Rights Watch), visited Sarajevo and met with both men. Neier urged Rose to have his peacekeepers take a tougher stand with the Serbs. Rose counseled against doing what Washington had pressed peacekeepers to do in Somalia—cross what he called the “Mogadishu line,” which for him meant surrendering their neutrality and “making war out of white-painted vehicles.” While Vieira de Mello looked on silently, Rose argued that Sarajevo was not technically under siege, since UN aid deliveries were reaching civilians. “A lot of the shooting,” Rose said, “is done to create the impression of major battles when there is no real fighting. They are trying to look good on CNN.” Neier, who believed that Rose was downplaying the Serbs’ culpability in order to justify UN neutrality, angrily relayed Rose’s claim to the Sarajevo media.
23
 
 
Vieira de Mello knew that Sarajevo was very much under siege. Indeed, with some twelve hundred shells falling per day, the Bosnian capital was then probably the most dangerous city on earth. He sent a cable to UN Headquarters three days after Rose’s arrival, in which he wrote: “Sarajevo is definitely not a town where civil—or, for that matter, military—personnel of UNPROFOR should be allowed to expose themselves to undue risk, in particular by driving in soft-skin vehicles. [My] own cars have been repeatedly shot at. A simple ballistic analysis would show that the only reason both of us are able to respond to your fax is that such vehicles were armoured.”
24
 
 
He had survived two close calls in Bosnia. In December 1993, when on his way to the airport, he saw that the car driving in front of his, which was marked PRESS, had been hit by two Serb snipers firing from a nearby building. “Stop the car!” he shouted, instructing his driver to move his armored car into a position that would allow it to shield the journalist, who had been shot in the arm, and the driver, who had been hit in the leg. Felix Faix, a former French paratrooper who was his bodyguard, shoved Vieira de Mello into the backseat of the car, pulled out his gun, and fired at the two snipers, who were apparently hit and collapsed out of view. On a second occasion, when driving along Sniper’s Alley, Vieira de Mello’s own armored car was hit three times by a sniper but managed to limp back to headquarters, as Faix again kept his boss pinned down in the backseat. But while Vieira de Mello clearly appreciated the dangers posed by Serb gunners, he never stood up to Rose or challenged his public portrayal of Sarajevo as a city that was not in fact besieged. Rose remembers no disagreement of any kind. “We were absolutely hand and glove,” he recalls. “Instinctively we felt the same way about things.”
 
 
MARKET MASSACRE
 
 
Saturday, February 5, 1994, was scheduled to be Vieira de Mello’s last day in Sarajevo. But at 12:10 p.m. a shell landed in a crowded downtown Sarajevo market on the busiest shopping day of the week, blowing sixty-eight Bosnian shoppers and vendors to bits. It took him time to reach Akashi by phone because the special representative had chosen that weekend to take his closest advisers to his favorite Japanese restaurant in Graz, Austria. When he finally got through, Akashi told him to remain in Sarajevo and offer his political judgment on what seemed to be a shrinking number of options for preventing the war’s escalation.
 
 
The scene at the market was ghastly. The green awnings and corrugated tin roofs that covered the market stalls had been converted into stretchers to carry the injured, or tarps on which to lay out the dead. Somebody had drawn a chalk ring around the spot where the deadly mortar shell had landed. The crater formed the base of a paw mark, with the toes offering evidence of the spray of hot metal, which had done most of the damage. Severed body parts were intermingled with cigarettes, daily newspapers, Coca-Cola cans, clothing, household goods, and homegrown vegetables.
 
 
Many of the dead were transported to the local morgue in a dump truck. Eight of the victims were so badly mangled that hospital staff could not determine whether they were men or women.
25
More than 150 people had been wounded, and the hospitals, short-staffed and underresourced on the best of days, could not keep up with the deluge. Doctors in the emergency room, their white coats stained with blood, yelled instructions to one another as they rushed to grab gauze, medicines, and bandages delivered by international relief groups. Family members waited outside to get word of the fate of their loved ones, and they let out shrieks of agony when doctors emerged with bad news. The wounded simply lay in the halls moaning for attention. The following day the main Sarajevo daily newspaper,
Oslobodjenje,
ran six full pages of black-bordered death notices.
26
Virtually every person Vieira de Mello knew in the city had a relative, neighbor, or friend affected by the massacre.
 
 
Even though powerful governments had dictated the international response to Serb aggression, Sarajevans directed their anger at UNPROFOR, which was present in a way that the United States and Europe were not. “Boutros-Ghali just watches all this and he does nothing,” said one woman interviewed near the market.“He’s worse than Milošević and Karadžić. He’s their accomplice.”
27
It was not a good weekend to be seen driving in a white UN vehicle. Vieira de Mello was sickened by the incident. “Bastards!” he exclaimed, referring to those who had fired the shell. “How do they call themselves soldiers?” But after what he later called “the worst day of my life, where I cried with anger,” he buried his emotions.
28
He believed that Bosnia’s most tragic day could also be its most transformative. The world’s major powers might now focus their attention and their resources long enough on Bosnia to bring peace.

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