Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (43 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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One of the first people Vieira de Mello telephoned after he got approval to assemble a team was his friend Bakhet. They had spent countless hours debating whether there could ever be any such thing as “humanitarian” war. “Omar,” he said, “do you want to go to Kosovo so we can study the merits and demerits of humanitarian intervention up close?” Bakhet accepted eagerly.“In a simple sense the activist Sergio preferred to be in the field, to find out what people needed,” says Bakhet. “But the activist Sergio also knew that being in the field gave him more credibility in political discussions when he returned to capitals.”
Vieira de Mello was exhilarated by the prospect of returning to the center of “the action” and, in so doing, inserting the UN back in the game. At the press briefing where he laid out plans for the trip, he downplayed the dangers. “There is an element of risk in any such mission, and, although we are not irresponsible, I would say that we are used to working in that kind of environment. Unfortunately this is not new to the kind of job that we do.”
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He also waved off U.S. concerns that his team would be duped by the Serbs, saying testily that he would not be the “prisoner of a pre-arranged itinerary.” He had not amassed twenty-nine years’ experience for nothing, he said: The UN would not be manipulated.
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He also waved off U.S. concerns that his team would be duped by the Serbs, saying testily that he would not be the “prisoner of a pre-arranged itinerary.” He had not amassed twenty-nine years’ experience for nothing, he said: The UN would not be manipulated.
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Vieira de Mello pulled together a team of experts on nutrition, health care, child care, sanitation, shelter, and reconstruction, even though he knew that the humanitarians would not be able to conduct detailed assessments on such a short trip under fire. The battle among agencies for a spot on the team was fierce. Louise Arbour, the UN prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, had been trying to send investigators into Kosovo since the massacre in Racak in January. She was enraged that Annan had thrown his weight behind Vieira de Mello’s mission but had not made any effort to press for access for tribunal investigators, even though reports were swirling that the Serbs were destroying evidence of their crimes. Arbour telephoned Vieira de Mello and demanded that a member of her staff be permitted to join his delegation. “I can’t do that, Louise,” he said. “The Serbs would never allow it.” “Have you asked them?” she asked. “Have you even tried?” He admitted that he had not. She then called Secretary-General Annan and persuaded him to insist.
Vieira de Mello entrusted Nils Kastberg, a forty-four-year-old Swede who headed UNICEF’s emergency programs, to lead an advance mission to the region to lay the groundwork for the trip. Kastberg’s first stop was Geneva, where he met two NATO officers from Brussels. They insisted that the UN drive in clearly marked white vehicles, travel only by day, notify Brussels of their precise route forty-eight hours in advance, and never deviate from the preordained plan.
Kastberg spent May 10-12 in Belgrade conducting delicate negotiations with the Serb authorities.The Serbs insisted that the UN travel at all times with a Serb escort and that before visiting Kosovo they first tour Serbian cities that had been bombed by NATO. Each day of negotiations Kastberg kept one eye trained on the clock, as he needed to ensure that he and his colleagues reached their hotel rooms by nightfall, which was when NATO commenced bombing each day. On May 11, as the afternoon negotiations wore on, Kastberg received a call from Arbour. She said that Annan had given her his word that a war crimes investigator would have a spot on the team.
Kastberg dreaded raising the issue with the Serbs, but when an order came from the secretary-general, he had no choice. He asked Serbia’s lead negotiator to join him for a walk in the garden, away from the listening devices. “I have something to ask you, and it is going to make you very angry, but after you express your anger I would like to ask you if we can put our heads together and find a solution.” The official nodded.When Kastberg explained the new wrinkle, the Serb negotiator erupted in rage. “You know how we feel about this so-called court,” he said, referring to the Serb belief that the tribunal was anti-Serb. “Are you trying to humiliate us?!” Kastberg waited him out. “I warned you that it would make you angry,” he said. The official paced back and forth around the garden. It was 4:30 p.m., and Kastberg needed to resolve the matter. A rumor was circulating that NATO was going to bomb one of Belgrade’s main bridges that day, so the UN team was in a special hurry to get back to their hotels. Finally the Serb gathered himself and said quietly, “You know, if anybody heard that there was someone from The Hague on the mission, not only is that person likely to be attacked, but so is the entire UN delegation.” Kastberg nodded, knowing that the Serb also saw an opportunity to present the tribunal with evidence of NATO war crimes. “The only way this will work,” Belgrade’s negotiator said, “is if the person assumes a different identity.” It was agreed that whoever Arbour nominated for the team would travel undercover.
Arbour tapped Frank Dutton, a fifty-year-old South African who had spent a decade investigating apartheid hit squads before joining the UN court. Dutton flew from The Hague to Geneva, where the UN drew up a temporary contract making him a “human rights officer” and giving him an entirely new UN passport, which no longer listed him as an employee of the tribunal. “We thought we had masterfully disguised his identity,” recalls Kastberg, “until he showed up to leave for the trip with all kinds of cameras and film and asked me to negotiate the filming of mass graves.”
While Dutton joined the UN assessment team eagerly, others felt as though they had no choice. Kirsten Young was based at UNHCR in Geneva as executive assistant to Dennis McNamara. A thirty-four-year-old Australian, Young had been subjected to relentless shelling when she worked in Bosnia in 1993. In the intervening years she had gotten married, undergone intensive post-traumatic stress counseling, and finally made her peace with the ghosts of the Balkans.Yet suddenly McNamara, her mentor, was asking her to return to the region. As she drove home from her office at UNHCR in Geneva, Young telephoned her husband, the head of an international NGO. As she broke the news of her forthcoming trip, she began sobbing so violently that she had to pull over to the side of the road. The prospect of aerial bombardment terrified her. “Kirsten, you don’t have to go,” her husband said. “No, I do, I do,” she said. “I have to go. How do I say no to this kind of mission?” Young remembers the pressure she felt. “The whole humanitarian world is such a macho cowboy environment,” she says. “They all talk about ‘having balls.’ You’re terrified to say no because then you would be showing you don’t ‘have any balls.’ Even feminists get sucked into that trap.” Young remained jittery until she met up with Vieira de Mello in Geneva a few days later, and her fears abated. “Sergio had this aura of nonchalance and invincibility,” she says. “I just resolved not to leave his side.”
Annan too was energized by the imminent trip. In a lengthy Q and A moderated by Judy Woodruff on CNN, he said he was tired of hearing criticisms of the UN.“This morning,” he said, “when people started talking about the incompetence of UNHCR and others, I did not hear a single person mention the sacrifice these people make and the risks they take.”
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Annan spoke suddenly as if from a position of strength. “I don’t think we are going to see NATO setting itself up as a policeman of the world, replacing the United Nations. My own sense, and I may be wrong here, is that after what NATO has gone through in the Balkans, it is going to reassess its own approach. And I think it should.”
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He said countries should not avoid the Security Council.“It’s like saying, ‘I’m not going to this or that court because I know that things will not go my way. So I’m going to do something else,’ ” he said. “We cannot lecture everybody about the need for the rule of law and ignore it when it’s convenient.”
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At a subsequent press conference Annan said that any apparent loss of relevance for the UN was “a short-term phenomenon because we live in a global and an interdependent world and today we need the UN even more than we did yesterday and the day before that.” In words that prophesied the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Annan warned, “Any nation or group of nations that decides to ignore this is setting a precedent and creating a situation that is likely to haunt all of us.”
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Annan spoke suddenly as if from a position of strength. “I don’t think we are going to see NATO setting itself up as a policeman of the world, replacing the United Nations. My own sense, and I may be wrong here, is that after what NATO has gone through in the Balkans, it is going to reassess its own approach. And I think it should.”
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He said countries should not avoid the Security Council.“It’s like saying, ‘I’m not going to this or that court because I know that things will not go my way. So I’m going to do something else,’ ” he said. “We cannot lecture everybody about the need for the rule of law and ignore it when it’s convenient.”
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At a subsequent press conference Annan said that any apparent loss of relevance for the UN was “a short-term phenomenon because we live in a global and an interdependent world and today we need the UN even more than we did yesterday and the day before that.” In words that prophesied the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Annan warned, “Any nation or group of nations that decides to ignore this is setting a precedent and creating a situation that is likely to haunt all of us.”
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Twelve
INDEPENDENCE IN ACTION
Vieira de Mello believed that the potential political and humanitarian benefits of inserting himself and his hastily assembled UN team into a live war zone vastly outweighed the physical risks. But even as he made his way to the region, the Clinton administration stepped up its criticism of his trip. On May 16, 1999, Secretary-General Annan, who was staying at the home of Queen Beatrix in the Netherlands, received a furious phone call from Thomas Pickering, the under secretary of state for political affairs, who was calling from the United States, where it was 4 a.m. Pickering told Annan that he had just seen Vieira de Mello’s itinerary and it was unacceptable. The UN delegation would be in the region for eleven days, but in Kosovo for less than three of those, from Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning. Washington officials remained concerned that the UN team would see the power plants and bridges NATO had hit in Serbia, but that they would not get an accurate picture of the destruction and bloodshed the Serbs had caused in Kosovo. “Milošević is going to get huge propaganda mileage out of this,” Pickering said. He advised Annan to cancel the mission unless the Serbs allowed at least three-quarters of it to be spent in Kosovo. Annan refused.
When Annan’s special assistant Nader Mousavizadeh tracked down the UN envoy in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Zagreb, Vieira de Mello said he was fed up with American bullying. He had already heard twice from the U.S. mission in New York, once from the U.S. representative in Geneva, and the night before from Pickering himself. He was aware of the danger that, on such a short, restricted trip, he would hand the Serbs a public relations victory, but he expected to bring back useful information. “Enough is enough,” he told Mousavizadeh. “I am on a needs-assessment mission. I will do what I have to do to assess needs!”
When he rejoined his assembled team in the hotel lobby, he said, “The Americans are livid. They are refusing to offer us security assurances. Each of you should decide for yourself whether you still want to be a part of this mission. I am going to go ahead, but that should not influence your decision.” The very fact that Washington was so hostile to the trip only strengthened the team’s sense that they were right to attempt to conduct an independent investigation. Almost all of those gathered had experienced war before, and many thought the risk of being struck by one of NATO’s precision-guided munitions was low in comparison to the dangers they had faced in other war zones. None of the team members dropped out.
While Western officials had reasons to be anxious, the Serb authorities should have been concerned as well. Milošević was trying to pretend as though Kosovar Albanians were leaving voluntarily or fleeing NATO air strikes. “Everyone runs away because of the bombing,” Milošević told CBS News. “Birds run away, wild animals run away.”
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He urged the public not to believe the deceitful Western media. “I personally saw on CNN at the beginning of this war poor Albanian refugees walking through snow and suffering a lot. You know, it was springtime at the time in Kosovo,” he said.“There was no snow. . . . They are paid to lie.”
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He noted that while the Serbs may have occasionally burned “individual houses,” their misdeeds did not compare to Vietnam, where “American forces torched villages suspected of hiding Viet Cong.”
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He urged the public not to believe the deceitful Western media. “I personally saw on CNN at the beginning of this war poor Albanian refugees walking through snow and suffering a lot. You know, it was springtime at the time in Kosovo,” he said.“There was no snow. . . . They are paid to lie.”
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He noted that while the Serbs may have occasionally burned “individual houses,” their misdeeds did not compare to Vietnam, where “American forces torched villages suspected of hiding Viet Cong.”
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The reports of the number of Kosovar Albanian men who had gone missing ranged from 10,000 to 100,000.
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Vieira de Mello believed his team could improve the clarity of the picture. “It’s the first time we are able to embark in this kind of way and right in the middle of a war,” he told journalists after driving from Zagreb to Belgrade.
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He said that he hoped to talk to those Kosovar Albanians in hiding who had been unable to escape to a neighboring country. “Many say this mission is madness,” he said, but only officials with the UN could reach “those who are in desperate need inside Kosovo.”
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Vieira de Mello believed his team could improve the clarity of the picture. “It’s the first time we are able to embark in this kind of way and right in the middle of a war,” he told journalists after driving from Zagreb to Belgrade.
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He said that he hoped to talk to those Kosovar Albanians in hiding who had been unable to escape to a neighboring country. “Many say this mission is madness,” he said, but only officials with the UN could reach “those who are in desperate need inside Kosovo.”
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After driving from Croatia to Serbia, he held meetings with Serb officialdom that were tense and interminable.The Serbs directed their rants against NATO at him personally. “I don’t know how he put up with all he heard,” says Sarah Uppard, then a forty-three-year-old aid worker with Save the Children. “I would have lost it several dozen times over. But he managed to be firm, patient, and charming at once. He made everybody feel listened to without making even the slightest concession. Even the most aggressive officials found themselves taken in by him.” The minister of refugees, Bratislava Morina, was a close friend of Mira Marković, Milošević’s wife, and was used to getting her way. She denounced NATO for its “genocide” against Serbs and slammed the UN for failing to prevent the war. Yet by the end of the meeting, she was a different woman.“Sergio had her eating out of his palm,” recalls Kirsten Young of UNHCR.
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