Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (38 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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The operation grew increasingly violent.The refugees described systematic beatings, demands for bribes, theft of their Tanzanian currency (under the ruse that the refugees were not permitted to take currency out of the country), strip searches, and the looting of personal property such as bicycles, blankets,jerry cans, and even UNHCR plastic sheeting. A few refugees were found raped or beaten to death.
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The Tanzanians were so determined to rid their country of the Rwandan Hutu exiles that they fired guns into the air, used tear gas, and beat the refugees with sticks in order to keep them moving. Several refugees attempted suicide. One man used a blunt knife to cut his neck but survived, while another drowned himself in a shallow puddle of water.
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In less than two weeks more than 450,000 refugees returned to Rwanda from Tanzania.
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And these on the heels of the 700,000 who had arrived back after fleeing the camps in Zaire.
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The Tanzanians were so determined to rid their country of the Rwandan Hutu exiles that they fired guns into the air, used tear gas, and beat the refugees with sticks in order to keep them moving. Several refugees attempted suicide. One man used a blunt knife to cut his neck but survived, while another drowned himself in a shallow puddle of water.
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In less than two weeks more than 450,000 refugees returned to Rwanda from Tanzania.
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And these on the heels of the 700,000 who had arrived back after fleeing the camps in Zaire.
Ogata and UNHCR were so afraid of jeopardizing their relationship with the Tanzanian government that they said little in response to the forceful push-back. On January 10, 1997, Ogata finally signed a relatively tame letter of protest over the “reported use of force.” But when Vieira de Mello telephoned Elly Mtango, a leading official in the Tanzanian foreign ministry, to inform him that the protest would be sent to the president the following day, Mtango warned him that UNHCR would have to “live with the consequences” of such a hostile act.
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Knowing that UNHCR needed Tanzania to keep its borders open to refugees from other countries, Vieira de Mello agreed not to send the letter.
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Knowing that UNHCR needed Tanzania to keep its borders open to refugees from other countries, Vieira de Mello agreed not to send the letter.
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UNHCR had been complicit in this forced repatriation, and both the agency and Vieira de Mello came under attack. Human rights groups speculated that the agency had simply bowed before the whims of its largest donors, who had made no secret of their desire to see the camps closed. Since the end of the cold war, UNHCR had seemed to internalize the impatience of host countries and donors who wanted to rush repatriation. “UNHCR may not have been able to stop the repatriation from Tanzania,” says Gil Loescher, a refugee expert who in 2003 would be meeting with Vieira de Mello in Iraq on the day of the attack on the UN base. “But it should have made clear it opposed it, and it should have publicized what Tanzania was planning. It should have used its leverage with donor governments. And at the very least it should not have sanctioned forced repatriation.” Human Rights Watch accused the agency of having “shamefully abandoned its responsibility to protect refugees.”
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Ogata had been every bit as eager as Vieira de Mello to rid UNHCR of the albatross of the Rwandan refugee problem. But seeing the price UNHCR was paying for the bungled Tanzania repatriation, she distanced herself from the operation and pointed the finger at Vieira de Mello. “The return of refugees from Tanzania cost UNHCR a lot,” she says.“Sergio knew Tanzania well. But in choosing the lesser evil you can make a mistake. And it is not just Sergio who suffers the consequences. It is me as well.”
In Zaire, Kabila had effectively broken off all contact with the UN after a UN human rights rapporteur had accused his rebels of committing massacres. By the spring of 1997, with Kabila’s army closing in on Kinshasa, it was essential that UNHCR restore its relations with the man who was now seemingly destined to become president of Zaire. Ogata asked Vieira de Mello to head back to the region in order to try to charm the warlord.
By the time he was able to meet with Kabila personally for the first time, Kabila’s rebel forces were perched just sixty miles east of Kinshasa, and Mobutu was on the verge of surrendering. On May 12, 1997, upon arriving at Kabila’s temporary base, Vieira de Mello was told he would have to wait. Grandi, the Italian UNHCR official who had arranged the visit and who knew that his boss had a packed schedule, was crestfallen. He apologized for the mix-up. “No problem,” Vieira de Mello said. “You live out in the jungle the whole time. We bourgeois diplomats from Geneva can rough it occasionally.We will wait here until we are summoned.”
He took advantage of the delay by holding meetings with individual members of Kabila’s entourage and by plotting strategy. “I will use my usual tactics,” he told Grandi. “I will build a bond up front by telling Kabila, ‘I am not an American. I am not a Frenchman. I am a Brazilian, from the third world just like you.’ ” When the rebel leader finally turned up for the meeting the following day, Vieira de Mello did as he forecast, capitalizing on their shared third-world pedigree.“Sergio could mingle in all possible worlds. With Kabila he was a man from a poor former colony in the developing world,” recalls Grandi. “And with European diplomats he was a Sorbonne-educated dignitary.”
Vieira de Mello told Kabila that he hoped that he and UNHCR could “abandon polemic” and make a “fresh start” in repatriating all Hutu refugees remaining in Zaire to Rwanda.True to form, he said that while he was concerned about Kabila’s alleged massacres, he saw no point in embarrassing the rebels by denouncing them publicly. Kabila was delighted. He told Vieira de Mello that he had been “beginning to despair” about working with UNHCR but found himself “encouraged” by their discussion. As the two men parted,Vieira de Mello wished him luck in his negotiations with Mobutu, which were scheduled for the following day. "This is going to be rapid,” said Kabila.
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Indeed, Kabila brought his seven-month rebellion to a triumphant end just five days later. On May 17, 1997, he marched his forces into Kinshasa, declared the end of Mobutu’s reign of nearly thirty-two years, and announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Kinshasa’s residents poured into the streets to greet the rebels. They sang, chanted, and waved anything they could find that was white in order to signal peace: flags, paper, shirts, socks, and even plastic chairs. Mobutu flew that night to Morocco, while his ministers hightailed it by speedboat across the Congo River to Brazzaville, Congo, carrying their designer luggage.
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Kinshasa’s residents poured into the streets to greet the rebels. They sang, chanted, and waved anything they could find that was white in order to signal peace: flags, paper, shirts, socks, and even plastic chairs. Mobutu flew that night to Morocco, while his ministers hightailed it by speedboat across the Congo River to Brazzaville, Congo, carrying their designer luggage.
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By July 1997 some 834,000 Hutu refugees who had once lived in the UNHCR camps had returned to Rwanda. Some 52,000 were known to still be living in Zaire and neighboring countries. This meant that 213,000 refugees who had at one point resided in the camps remained unaccounted for. Most were presumed to have been killed in battle or massacres, or to have died of disease, dehydration, or starvation in flight.
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It was impossible to know how many of the deceased were killers and how many were civilians who had played no role in the 1994 genocide.
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It was impossible to know how many of the deceased were killers and how many were civilians who had played no role in the 1994 genocide.
Rwandan vice president Paul Kagame said he had no remorse about the deaths of Hutu civilians. “It is my strong belief that the United Nations people are trying to deflect the blame for failures of their own making onto us,” he said. “Their failure to act in eastern Zaire directly caused these problems, and when things blew up in their faces they blamed us. These are people who want to be judges and nobody can judge them.”
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The Rwandan government had been brutal, yes; it had been deceitful, yes; but by joining forces with Kabila, it had also managed to destroy the hostile Hutuland at its border when nobody else would.
Back in Geneva, Vieira de Mello found himself attacked by colleagues and close friends for the decisions he had made in the field. He brushed off his critics, telling them, “You can’t be involved in an operation this messy and expect to come out clean.” He and McNamara picked up their argument where it had left off. “Sergio wanted to be friends with everyone,” McNamara recalls. “But in this case he could not be friends both with Tanzania and the U.S. government, which wanted to force return, and with human rights advocates, who wanted any return to be voluntary.” He had to choose a side, and, his friend remembers, “he sided with power.” The heated battles took their toll.“It’s hard enough to fight with friends professionally,” McNamara says, “but when you fight with friends about principle, it is especially rough.”
Vieira de Mello used the occasion of a gathering of the agency’s governing board to strike back at those who were attacking him. The philosopher in him emerged in his defense of UNHCR. “Voluntariness is based on the execution of free will—freedom is the basis of will—and that is precisely what these [refugee] populations had been deprived of since the genocide.” He closed his remarks defiantly:
I request, therefore, those who so impulsively criticize us, including friends and institutions we deeply respect, those who have the privilege of distance and responsibility, to place events in their chronology and in their overall context, and not to use their memory in a selective manner. . . . To my knowledge, our critics had no better formula to offer. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! That, Mr. Chairman, is the frustration many of us felt.
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He was worn out. Having once believed that UNHCR should remain apolitical, he had grown exasperated by UNHCR’s dependence on governments that themselves avoided exercising political leadership. He had never seen the UN’s reputation so tattered by its performance, or relief to refugees carry such perverse side effects. “Would Rwanda, Zaire, and the UN all be better off if we had never set foot in those camps?” he wrote in an article for a book on peacekeeping. In instances in which proper security conditions did not exist, he asked provocatively, “Should humanitarian agencies refuse to intervene?”
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As a young man in UNHCR,Vieira de Mello had believed in a pure humanitarian ideal. He had believed that aid agencies could and should perform apolitical lifesaving tasks, and that peacekeepers could and should remain impartial and avoid the use of force. But Bosnia and Rwanda had taught him that sometimes when UN humanitarians tried to be neutral, they abetted criminal acts. If Bosnia had exposed for Vieira de Mello the shortcomings of UN peacekeeping, the Great Lakes crises exposed the limits of offering humanitarian care. He was now convinced that UN officials would better serve the powerless if they could find a way to enlist the power of the world’s largest countries. His transformation from student revolutionary was complete.
What UN aid agencies had been missing in Bosnia had not been plastic sheeting to replace windows in wintertime but a determination by Western governments to halt aggression. What they had been missing in the Zaire crisis were not tents or high-protein biscuits but a willingness among the major powers to send police to Zaire to arrest the
génocidaires
. In his public remarks Vieira de Mello began exhorting his colleagues to stop hiding behind their allegedly apolitical, humanitarian roles. The Great Lakes ordeal showed that the innocent victim was “often a fictitious concept.” He urged UN officials to accept “that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real.” Since everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, “we can hardly afford to be apolitical.”
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génocidaires
. In his public remarks Vieira de Mello began exhorting his colleagues to stop hiding behind their allegedly apolitical, humanitarian roles. The Great Lakes ordeal showed that the innocent victim was “often a fictitious concept.” He urged UN officials to accept “that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real.” Since everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, “we can hardly afford to be apolitical.”
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Vieira de Mello needed to find a political job in a hurry. Ever since Lebanon, he had been keeping his eye on UN Headquarters in New York. In November the United States had vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s nomination for a second term in office. The vote was 14-1, and U.S. officials had quickly tried to appease disgruntled African countries by choosing another African as the UN’s seventh secretary-general: Kofi Annan, Vieira de Mello’s friend and former colleague.
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Vieira de Mello was thrilled. “I think Kofi will be able to bring me to New York at some point,” he told Nakamitsu. “I am ready to make a move.”
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Vieira de Mello was thrilled. “I think Kofi will be able to bring me to New York at some point,” he told Nakamitsu. “I am ready to make a move.”
His ties with Ogata had stiffened. The year that had just passed was the darkest and most challenging in UNHCR’s history. The plight of refugees and the trade-offs inherent in negotiating on their behalf no longer engaged him as they once had. The problems were too familiar, and the solutions to those problems resided not in Geneva and not in the field but in Washington, Paris, London, Moscow, and Beijing.“We are so remarkably ill informed,” he told Griffiths. “We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don’t understand the politics, and we can’t identify the points of leverage. I don’t know why we are surprised that right now we are failing at almost everything. We can’t protect refugees, and we can’t protect the UN reputation.”
His personal life too was changing. Laurent, his eighteen-year-old son, had entered university in Lausanne, Switzerland. And when Vieira de Mello returned from his posting in the Great Lakes, he took a step he had not taken before, renting his own apartment in Geneva. Although he did not consider filing for a legal separation, he lived more like a bachelor than he had since his early twenties.
But he was biding his time. His ambitions were professional, and he felt he was being wasted where he was. Maybe, he thought, if Annan brought him to New York, where global leaders converged, he might be able to lobby the major powers. But there were only so many political jobs suitable for a person of his rank. It was obvious that his next move would be to the prestigious rank of under-secretary-general, the hierarchical equivalent of earning his second star. The UN system had only twenty-one such slots.
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