Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (40 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 building lobby was marbled and manned by a doorman with white gloves. The apartment itself was a drab, 1970s-style two-bedroom, lined with mirrors, but it had a stunning 180-degree view of the New York skyline, spanning from the East River to the World Trade Center towers at the southern tip of Manhattan. He loved the view and cherished finally having his own permanent base.
He had long appreciated wine, fine food, music, and the arts. But in New York, the world’s cultural capital, he remained in “mission mode.” With the exception of the runs he took several times each week in Central Park, his routine was indistinguishable from that in remote southern Lebanon. He remained in the office later than almost anybody on his staff, and he seemed perfectly content at night being one of the only officials in the entire UN system who read all the code cables from the field. On the occasions he took advantage of New York’s culinary or cultural assets, he did so with friends from the UN, rarely reaching beyond his work circle. “For Sergio there was never a clear division between his personal life and his professional life,” recalls Hochschild. “There was no such thing as ‘after hours.’ ”
Each day he was in New York, his appetite for management shrank further. By late 1998 he had delegated much of the bookkeeping and coordination to Martin Griffiths, his deputy whom he had come to nickname “the one-and-only Martin Griffiths.” The bureaucratic battles were dull, degrading, and time-consuming. “Sergio had endless patience for everything else,” says Hochschild, “but no patience for administration.”
But parts of the job did suit Vieira de Mello: diplomacy, big-picture reflection, and speaking up on behalf of endangered civilians. In the multiple calls he paid to ambassadors with seats on the Security Council, he framed issues in language they would understand—both by speaking their languages and by relating the natural disasters, refugee flows, and civil wars to crises that their countries had endured. He knew that the more they trusted him, the more funds he would be able to extract from them during emergencies. Yet there were certain lines he would not cross: he despised diplomatic receptions and avoided them with vehemence.
One of the few people that Vieira de Mello failed to woo was the undersecretary-general for political affairs, Kieran Prendergast, a knighted former British ambassador.
5
Prendergast found Vieira de Mello’s charm “studied” and his overall persona “obsequious.” And Vieira de Mello could not stand Prendergast’s prefacing his own name with “Sir” in his UN correspondence, as he thought it sent a message of class division ill suited to the UN’s egalitarian ideal. The two men often sparred over minutiae. On one occasion Vieira de Mello argued that the term “hegemon” should be used in a public speech to describe the United States. Prendergast told him in his posh English accent that the word had pejorative overtones. Vieira de Mello believed that the term neutrally described U.S. predominance and telephoned Prendergast later in the day to happily inform him that the Oxford English Dictionary indeed defined “hegemon” neutrally as “leadership, predominance, preponderance.” Prendergast dismissed him again. “I’m a native English speaker,” he said coolly. “You’ll have to trust me.”
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Prendergast found Vieira de Mello’s charm “studied” and his overall persona “obsequious.” And Vieira de Mello could not stand Prendergast’s prefacing his own name with “Sir” in his UN correspondence, as he thought it sent a message of class division ill suited to the UN’s egalitarian ideal. The two men often sparred over minutiae. On one occasion Vieira de Mello argued that the term “hegemon” should be used in a public speech to describe the United States. Prendergast told him in his posh English accent that the word had pejorative overtones. Vieira de Mello believed that the term neutrally described U.S. predominance and telephoned Prendergast later in the day to happily inform him that the Oxford English Dictionary indeed defined “hegemon” neutrally as “leadership, predominance, preponderance.” Prendergast dismissed him again. “I’m a native English speaker,” he said coolly. “You’ll have to trust me.”
Vieira de Mello had hoped that being based in New York would afford him the time to branch out intellectually. He blocked out two or three hours each morning so that he could get reading done. But these reading slots were usually eaten up by unavoidable meetings or by the unexpected arrival of an old acquaintance from places as far-flung as Mozambique or Mongolia, for whom Vieira de Mello would always make time. Still, he did manage to offer philosophical guidance on nettlesome intellectual and moral challenges to UN officials who did not themselves have the luxury of time to reflect. To nonexperts, humanitarian action and human rights sounded like synonyms or, at the very least, complements. But he knew that, in the real world, feeding people was often incompatible with speaking out. “How do we reconcile the need for humanitarian access and thus discretion, with the need, sometimes the obligation, for human rights?” he asked a gathering of diplomats from donor countries in Geneva, undoubtedly with the events of Zaire and Tanzania on his mind. “In the face of overwhelming human rights abuses, when do humanitarian agencies withdraw? Does the so-called humanitarian imperative have its limits?” Aid workers were generally so reactive that they could seem unprofessional. “In each situation we have to invent a new set of ground rules,” he argued. “This in turn has led to accusations that we are inconsistent and promote different standards in different situations.”
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When he laid out these fundamental questions, he sounded almost embarrassed for having introduced theory into practice. “I have grown a bit abstract,” he told diplomats at the gathering,“a symptom that the remoteness of New York is beginning to have an effect on me!”
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But if he didn’t devise principles to guide humanitarian action, he worried that the aid organizations his office coordinated would continue to drift haphazardly from one crisis to the next.
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When he laid out these fundamental questions, he sounded almost embarrassed for having introduced theory into practice. “I have grown a bit abstract,” he told diplomats at the gathering,“a symptom that the remoteness of New York is beginning to have an effect on me!”
7
But if he didn’t devise principles to guide humanitarian action, he worried that the aid organizations his office coordinated would continue to drift haphazardly from one crisis to the next.
He excelled at serving as an emissary in New York for afflicted peoples and regions. Nobody in the UN system was more persuasive about why a place or a cause mattered morally or strategically. In November 1998 he visited the Central American countries (El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala) that had been devastated by Hurricane Mitch. In December 1998 he traveled to North Korea and returned to launch an appeal for $260 million in UN food aid. The UN officials who accompanied him on his various trips gaped at the ease with which he rattled off the names of officials from a rural Chinese province or from the obscure Russian republic of Ingushetia, pronouncing each name as if he were a local. His recall was photographic.Yet no matter how compelling his presentations, donors were often uninterested in contributing. After visiting Ukraine, for instance, he tried to draw attention to the needs of the survivors of Chernobyl, but his office raised just $1.5 million out of the $100 million it requested.
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Afghanistan was his hardest sell. He visited the country soon after he started in New York. An earthquake had killed 4,500 and displaced another 30,000, which only compounded the poverty and cruelty in a country that had suffered nineteen years of war. “In my 28 years with the UN, I have seen few places that gather as many nightmarish conditions as Afghanistan,” he told the press. “Kabul looked to me like an immense Sarajevo. There is every reason to feel outraged.”
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Since the Taliban took over in September 1996, the country had become what he called “the most difficult place to work on earth.”
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Taliban leaders said that they would not accept UN aid if the organization delivered relief directly to women. As the nominal coordinator of aid agencies, Vieira de Mello had to decide whether the UN agencies should accept the Taliban’s discriminatory dispersal of aid, when he was sure that suspending aid on principled grounds would, in his words, “sentence civilian populations to death or greater suffering.”
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Asked by a reporter whether women still had access to humanitarian aid, he answered: “Yes. But if you ask me if they have access to a number of more important things than immediate food aid for survival, such as education, work, sanitary services, and medical professions, where women were previously in the majority, the answer is no. Or rather, they have access that is extremely limited to an unacceptable and revolting degree.”
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Taliban leaders said that they would not accept UN aid if the organization delivered relief directly to women. As the nominal coordinator of aid agencies, Vieira de Mello had to decide whether the UN agencies should accept the Taliban’s discriminatory dispersal of aid, when he was sure that suspending aid on principled grounds would, in his words, “sentence civilian populations to death or greater suffering.”
11
Asked by a reporter whether women still had access to humanitarian aid, he answered: “Yes. But if you ask me if they have access to a number of more important things than immediate food aid for survival, such as education, work, sanitary services, and medical professions, where women were previously in the majority, the answer is no. Or rather, they have access that is extremely limited to an unacceptable and revolting degree.”
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As he usually did, he chose the path of negotiation. He treated the Taliban as rational actors, meeting with them in Kabul and creating what he called “a test of sincerity.” In order to receive UN aid, they had to allow five schools for girls to be built along with five for boys.
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But when he returned to New York, he received a letter from the Taliban informing him that they had no intention of educating girls and that foreign female UN employees would no longer be permitted to work in the country unless they were accompanied by their male relatives. Unsurprisingly, the Taliban had flunked his sincerity test.
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But when he returned to New York, he received a letter from the Taliban informing him that they had no intention of educating girls and that foreign female UN employees would no longer be permitted to work in the country unless they were accompanied by their male relatives. Unsurprisingly, the Taliban had flunked his sincerity test.
Vieira de Mello protested the new regulations, but he also urged the UN agencies to send Muslim women to replace non-Muslims in the hopes of smoothing ties.The Taliban just grew more brazen. On March 23, 1998, the Taliban governor of Kandahar slapped the locally hired head of one UN agency in the face. The governor previously had struck an official from the International Committee of the Red Cross and thrown a thermos at a UN regional coordinator. Vieira de Mello felt he had no choice but to recommend that the UN pull its international staff out of Kandahar and that it suspend its aid programs in southern Afghanistan.
Yet still he bowed to the humanitarian imperative. Not long after the face-slap, he appealed to UN agencies to return to the region. Before long, most evacuated staff had in fact resumed aid deliveries. No matter how many lines the Taliban crossed, relief groups brought the same attitude to bear that they had with the Serbs and the Rwandan Hutu: They believed their primary duty was to provide food, medicine, and educational services to civilians. They were willing to swallow an awful lot if it meant continuing to deliver aid. Vieira de Mello had taken to calling this the “humanitarian trap.” In May 1998, when Griffiths helped negotiate a twenty-three-point memorandum of understanding between the UN and the Taliban, human rights groups denounced the UN for accepting the Taliban’s rules. “The UN endorsement of Taliban restrictions on women’s basic rights to education and health care,” Physicians for Human Rights said in a press release,“is a betrayal of international human rights standards and of the female population of Afghanistan.”
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And with a regime as brutal and erratic as the Taliban, any “understanding” was bound to be temporary. The following month the Taliban ordered all private aid groups to gather their workers into a dilapidated building in Kabul, where henceforth they could be more easily controlled. More than two hundred foreigners from thirty-eight aid organizations left Afghanistan in protest, forcing the suspension of three-quarters of international aid to the country.
With Vieira de Mello’s backing, large UN agencies such as the World Food Program and the UN Development Program hung on. But security kept deteriorating. On July 13 two local UN staff were abducted in eastern Afghanistan and found hanged a week later. And on August 20 tensions increased when the United States retaliated for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by firing cruise missiles on a terrorist training camp in eastern Afghanistan allegedly housing Osama bin Laden.
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The following day a French UN employee was shot in the face and an Italian UN military official was fatally shot in the stomach while driving in a UN vehicle in Kabul.
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The following day a French UN employee was shot in the face and an Italian UN military official was fatally shot in the stomach while driving in a UN vehicle in Kabul.
For the next seven months UN agencies remained outside Afghanistan, but Vieira de Mello maintained contact with Taliban leaders. Initially he told them that the UN would not return unless the deaths of UN staff were investigated and punished. But in March 1999, under pressure from donor countries and the aid groups themselves, he said that the Taliban had made a “satisfactory and concerted effort” to investigate the murders, and he claimed that security conditions in the country permitted the UN’s gradual return.
Neither he nor powerful governments seemed to appreciate the extremity of the crisis brewing in Afghanistan. He told the Taliban of his fears that bin Laden would stage attacks on UN personnel, but Taliban leaders persuaded him that they had al-Qaeda under control. “We have raised the Osama bin Laden problem with the Taliban leadership,” Vieira de Mello told reporters on the day he announced the UN return. He said unconvincingly that they had given him “assurances” that bin Laden was “not above the law” and would “not be allowed to put the lives of international staff of humanitarian agencies in danger.”
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In but one testament to his ability to hear what he wanted to hear, he took them at their word.
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In but one testament to his ability to hear what he wanted to hear, he took them at their word.
Vieira de Mello understood better than most the risks faced by aid workers in the field. Some fifty humanitarians had been killed in 1998, while sixty-four would die in 1999.
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In almost all of his public appearances, he tried to sound the alarm about the increasing danger to humanitarian personnel. In the new era of warfare, where irregular armed forces were proliferating, aid workers were seen increasingly as bonus targets. “The providers of food are automatically perceived as taking sides,” he said. “Anyone helping the victims on one side is bound to be accused by the other side of supporting the enemy.” He noted that “for the first time in our history it is more dangerous to be an unarmed humanitarian worker than an armed soldier on peacekeeping duties.”
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Believing the best he could do was to press for laws that might deter attacks, he argued that the new International Criminal Court should punish the targeting of humanitarian personnel as a war crime.
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17
In almost all of his public appearances, he tried to sound the alarm about the increasing danger to humanitarian personnel. In the new era of warfare, where irregular armed forces were proliferating, aid workers were seen increasingly as bonus targets. “The providers of food are automatically perceived as taking sides,” he said. “Anyone helping the victims on one side is bound to be accused by the other side of supporting the enemy.” He noted that “for the first time in our history it is more dangerous to be an unarmed humanitarian worker than an armed soldier on peacekeeping duties.”
18
Believing the best he could do was to press for laws that might deter attacks, he argued that the new International Criminal Court should punish the targeting of humanitarian personnel as a war crime.
19
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