Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (28 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’s beaming visage appeared in news broadcasts around the world. Even though he was flushed with excitement, he also tried to manage the expectations of the local population. “Much to our regret this country is still technically at war,” he reminded people. “So don’t expect the opening of the city overnight.”
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In announcing the terms of the accord, he nudged the Serb and Bosnian negotiators into a handshake, which was the first public handshake between senior officials from the two sides since the war began. Almost a decade later, notwithstanding all his other achievements, he would tell a Brazilian journalist that this 1994 agreement constituted the proudest act in his career as a UN official.
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In announcing the terms of the accord, he nudged the Serb and Bosnian negotiators into a handshake, which was the first public handshake between senior officials from the two sides since the war began. Almost a decade later, notwithstanding all his other achievements, he would tell a Brazilian journalist that this 1994 agreement constituted the proudest act in his career as a UN official.
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On the day that the bridge into Sarajevo actually opened for the first time, Bosnians and Serbs who had not seen their family members for more than two years crossed into lands held by their battlefield rivals. Hundreds of people gathered to see if their relatives or friends would appear.
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One sixty-seven-year-old Bosnian man, Hasan Begic, whom the Serbs had evicted from his Sarajevo apartment with ten minutes’ notice back in September 1992, made the trek across the bridge to the Serb neighborhood so as to find his disabled son Edhem. An hour after he crossed the bridge, he returned, horrified.“They told me my son was killed by a sniper on January 11 in front of the house,” Begic told a reporter. “I have nothing more to do over there.”
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One sixty-seven-year-old Bosnian man, Hasan Begic, whom the Serbs had evicted from his Sarajevo apartment with ten minutes’ notice back in September 1992, made the trek across the bridge to the Serb neighborhood so as to find his disabled son Edhem. An hour after he crossed the bridge, he returned, horrified.“They told me my son was killed by a sniper on January 11 in front of the house,” Begic told a reporter. “I have nothing more to do over there.”
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Despite the trauma and loss that Bosnian civilians continued to endure, a tidal wave of optimism swept through the country and through the UN mission. A cease-fire was holding for a fifth straight week. Cafés in Sarajevo were reopening. With commercial traffic entering the city at last, prices tumbled. On March 20 some 20,000 Sarajevans signaled their trust in the new calm by pouring into Sarajevo’s open-air Olympic stadium to cheer the city football team in its 4-0 victory over a UN squad composed of one Egyptian, five British, three French, and two Ukrainian soldiers.
On March 22 a UN Ilyushin 76 landed at the airport in the besieged Bosnian city of Tuzla, providing the first food airlift of the war to more than a million people living there. Akashi said, “This is a very happy day for all of us. There’s a new positive momentum for a cease-fire, disengagement, the establishment of a durable peace and the improvement of the life of the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think the dark days are almost over.”
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Eight
"SERBIO”
The dark days in Bosnia were in fact far from over. Even though the NATO ultimatum had halted fighting around Sarajevo, the rest of the country remained at war. And the more determined Vieira de Mello became to defend the impotent UN mission, the more morally compromised he became.
He did not warm to his new post in Zagreb, Croatia. Although the Bosnian capital had been deadly dangerous, it had brimmed with life; Zagreb, with its large luxury hotels and visible sector of war profiteers, was hard to get used to.The tensions inherent in helping run a peacekeeping mission in a country not at peace had not abated. But what made matters worse was that he now had a “field job” away from the field. In a meeting with his new team on February 25, 1994, he told them that he looked forward to once-a-week staff meetings. A Canadian military lawyer raised her hand and said she would prefer it if the staff met three times per week. This was only a hint of the office atmosphere that would smother him in the coming months.
As the head of UNPROFOR’s civil affairs department, he inherited a slew of personnel who had been hired before his time and whom he couldn’t unload. He was quickly overwhelmed by the paperwork, the phone calls, the meetings, and the staff-management issues, and he asked Elisabeth Naucler, a Finnish lawyer, to become his chief of staff so that he could spend more time troubleshooting back in Bosnia. “The most difficult thing in a peacekeeping mission is the internal peacekeeping,” he told her. “His mind and heart were in Bosnia while his body was stuck in Zagreb dealing with staff infighting,” Naucler remembers. “It must have been torture.”
But he soon got a reprieve from his desk job. Having escaped NATO bombing in the wake of the gruesome market massacre, Serb forces began attacking Bosnia’s eastern enclave of Gorazde in late March. Another of the six UNDECLARED “safe areas,” Gorazde was perched strategically on the main thruway connecting Belgrade and the Serb-held regions of Bosnia. Although the Gorazde enclave was quite large—it ran twelve miles from north to south and nineteen miles from west to east—only a handful of unarmed UN military observers and four UN aid workers were based there, which left its 65,000 inhabitants especially vulnerable. On April 6, the UN observers reported that the Serb offensive had left 67 people dead, including 10 children and 19 women and elderly men. Some 325 Bosnians had been injured. The food in the area would not last longer than two weeks.
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That same day Vieira de Mello, who was visiting Sarajevo, set off with General Rose on a fact-finding trip to Gorazde. As the men entered Serb territory, they passed Serb trenches along the front line, and they saw an Orthodox priest in black robes giving communion to the soldiers. They got only as far as the Serb stronghold of Pale and were turned back. Vieira de Mello tried to convince the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić that if the Serbs blocked passage, it would only prove their hostile designs. Mladić knew that the one thing few UN officials could resist was the promise of a cease-fire. He told the UN duo that if they returned to Sarajevo, he would negotiate a halt in fighting with the Bosnian army. True to form, the UN delegation agreed to return to the Bosnian capital. “If the Serbs say the situation is such that they don’t want us to go there now, we have to accept that,” Rose told the press.
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Nonetheless, before returning to Sarajevo, Rose did persuade Mladić to allow a dozen mainly British elite officers to proceed to Gorazde to have a look around.
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Nonetheless, before returning to Sarajevo, Rose did persuade Mladić to allow a dozen mainly British elite officers to proceed to Gorazde to have a look around.
After his failed effort to reach Gorazde, Vieira de Mello took a preplanned trip back to Geneva and France.While he was away, the Serbs pressed ahead with their offensive, seizing a crucial 3,400-foot-high ridge overlooking Gorazde and setting fire to neighboring villages. U.S. intelligence, which had been monitoring the situation, intercepted a message from Mladić to one of his field commanders in which he said he did not want “a single lavatory left standing in the town.”
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Just two months after NATO had threatened to bomb the Bosnian Serbs around Sarajevo, the lives of Bosnians hung in the balance yet again.While in February the mere threat of force had caused the Serbs to pull back most of their weapons from around Sarajevo, in Gorazde it looked as though threats would not suffice; NATO would actually have to use air power if the Serbs were to be stopped. If Rose and Akashi did not call for help from NATO pilots, Gorazde and its large civilian populace looked certain to fall into Serb hands.
On April 10 General Rose did something few expected him to do: He summoned NATO bombers to give the peacekeepers he had sent into Gorazde “close air support.” Rose and Akashi had long said they were more comfortable with limited close air support (a defensive measure) than with air strikes (which they considered an act of war). And they believed a surgical defensive strike against Serbs firing on UN troops would deter the Serbs without squandering the momentum toward peace. Since the founding of NATO in 1949, the alliance had never before placed itself at the disposal of UN blue helmets. And it would not soon do so again. First Rose had to sign off on air request forms; then Akashi (who was in Paris) had to give political clearance; and finally NATO had to agree. By the time all three approvals had been received, more than an hour had passed.The cloud cover and rain were so thick that two NATO A-10 aircraft had to fly low through Bosnia’s valleys, which made them vulnerable to Serb ground fire.They were initially unable to find the offending Serb tanks and ran out of fuel. Two U.S. Air Force F-16C Fighting Falcons picked up where they left off, and at 6:26 p.m., two hours after Rose initiated the request, NATO struck, eliminating a Serb artillery command post four miles from town and reportedly killing nine Serb officers. This was the alliance’s first attack on a ground target in its history.
UN and NATO officials understood that a threshold had been crossed— for the UN, for NATO, and for Bosnia.The people of Gorazde were elated. They gathered in the streets and gave thumbs-up signs to the members of the small UN team encamped in the central bank building. Serbian president Slobodan Milošević predictably denounced the attack, which he said “heavily harms the reputation of the UN in its role as mediator of the peace process.”
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By calling on NATO to bomb one faction, he said, UNPROFOR had taken sides. The following day, when the Serbs kept up their shelling, NATO struck again, destroying two Serb APCs and damaging one tank.
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By calling on NATO to bomb one faction, he said, UNPROFOR had taken sides. The following day, when the Serbs kept up their shelling, NATO struck again, destroying two Serb APCs and damaging one tank.
At his home in Massongy, France, Vieira de Mello was not where he wanted to be. After twenty-four years of service to the United Nations, he had happened to leave his mission area during one of the most important crises in UN history. Indeed, while NATO’s first-ever air operation was under way on April 10, he had the surreal experience of receiving a phone call from Charles Kirudja, Akashi’s chief of staff, who complained about personnel infighting in the office. Vieira de Mello rushed back to Zagreb on April 11, the day of the second strike, and found that the Serb offensive had not abated.
NATO’s sparing use of air power—critics quickly branded the two attacks “pin-pricks”—revealed just how constrained NATO was by UN concerns about retaliation against peacekeepers. It also showed the limits, in mountain areas, of the gleaming laser-guided technology that had seemed invincible in the Persian Gulf War. Western commentators noted that, with its tepid uses of force, NATO resembled the proverbial elephant that had given birth to a mouse.
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On April 12 the Serbs raided three of seven weapons-collection points that had been established outside Sarajevo in February, taking back heavy weapons from a cantonment as a result of NATO’s ultimatum. By April 14, sensing that the UN and NATO were paralyzed, the Serbs had detained, placed under house arrest, or blocked the movement of 150 UN soldiers across Bosnia.
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A
New York Times
headline summed up the letdown: “THE BLUFF THAT FAILED; SERBS AROUND GORAZDE ARE UNDETERRED BY NATO’S POLICY OF LIMITED AIR STRIKES.”
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5
On April 12 the Serbs raided three of seven weapons-collection points that had been established outside Sarajevo in February, taking back heavy weapons from a cantonment as a result of NATO’s ultimatum. By April 14, sensing that the UN and NATO were paralyzed, the Serbs had detained, placed under house arrest, or blocked the movement of 150 UN soldiers across Bosnia.
6
A
New York Times
headline summed up the letdown: “THE BLUFF THAT FAILED; SERBS AROUND GORAZDE ARE UNDETERRED BY NATO’S POLICY OF LIMITED AIR STRIKES.”
7
Having pushed for air power to be used, President Clinton tried to claim that international forces remained neutral. “I would remind the Serbs that we have taken no action, none, through NATO and with the support of the UN, to try to win a military victory for their adversaries,” he said.
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But Vieira de Mello saw that Clinton was trying to have it both ways: feeling good by standing up for the Bosnians but feeling safe by placating the Serbs. “This is Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ moment,” he told me at our first dinner meeting. “He wants to please everyone at once.”
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But Vieira de Mello saw that Clinton was trying to have it both ways: feeling good by standing up for the Bosnians but feeling safe by placating the Serbs. “This is Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ moment,” he told me at our first dinner meeting. “He wants to please everyone at once.”
At around 3 p.m. on April 15, the Bosnian defenses to the north and southeast of the town collapsed. The Serbs overran a UN observation post, pummeling a UN Land Rover north of Gorazde with machine-gun fire and seriously wounding two members of the elite squad of British officers that Rose had sent into Gorazde the previous week.
At just the time NATO might have struck back in retaliation for the attack on the British soldiers, Akashi was in the midst of a seven-hour meeting with Karadžić in his Pale headquarters.
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John Almstrom, Akashi’s Canadian military adviser, set up the secure satellite phone to NATO in the parking lot and carried the military maps of potential targets in his briefcase. “This was a bad dream,” recalls Almstrom. “You are in Karadžić’s office and you know you are probably going to bomb Karadžić.” But unsurprisingly Akashi chose not to do so, opting instead to work with the Serbs to evacuate the wounded British soldiers.
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John Almstrom, Akashi’s Canadian military adviser, set up the secure satellite phone to NATO in the parking lot and carried the military maps of potential targets in his briefcase. “This was a bad dream,” recalls Almstrom. “You are in Karadžić’s office and you know you are probably going to bomb Karadžić.” But unsurprisingly Akashi chose not to do so, opting instead to work with the Serbs to evacuate the wounded British soldiers.
Vieira de Mello had seen UN resolutions and observation posts trampled in Lebanon, but this time around he was the second-highest-ranking political official in the mission, beneath only Akashi. He could try to use his clout to alter UNPROFOR’s course. But as he confessed to me that evening, he did not see a way out.
The following day, with the Serbs continuing their stampede toward Gorazde, Rose called for NATO air power for a third time, but on this occasion, in order to avoid inflaming Serb tempers, he informed Mladić that he had done so. At the sight of NATO planes, the forewarned Serb tanks shot down a British Sea Harrier with a shoulder-fired missile. Even though the pilot safely ejected and reunited with Rose’s men in Gorazde, this was the first time in NATO history that it had ever lost a plane in a combat operation, and Admiral Leighton Smith, the American who commanded NATO forces, was furious. Smith said he was fed up with the restrictive rules of engagement insisted upon by Akashi and Rose.The tactical constraints and the UN’s advance warnings to the Serbs were endangering his pilots.
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