Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (62 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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He had always supported the UN war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but he now had a pulpit from which to lobby on behalf of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He met the objections of those, like senior Bush administration officials, who believed the court would never get off the ground by citing recent historical advances: “Many people said the ad hoc tribunal on the former Yugoslavia and the ad hoc tribunal on Rwanda were jokes. Well, they were not jokes. An international criminal court . . . will come into being ... and you will see that that will not be a joke . . . The ICC will exist and will operate whether one or the other country joins it or not.”
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The one country on everybody’s mind was the United States. On the ICC and countless other issues, the world’s most powerful country had a view different from his own.The high commissioner and his staff occupied the Palais Wilson, a peach-colored manor on a slope overlooking Lake Geneva. The first headquarters of the League of Nations, the building had been named after former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Vieira de Mello was unshy about referring to his own “Wilsonian” leanings and reminded visitors of America’s founding role in crafting international institutions as a way of convincing them that President Bush’s unilateralism was not likely permanent. The Bush administration’s disdain for international law was perhaps best reflected in the statements of John Bolton, then under secretary of state for arms control and international security. “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States,” he said.
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It was Bolton who delighted in being the one to inform Secretary-General Annan that the United States would be “un-signing” the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, which Bolton branded “a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism that is not just naïve but dangerous.”
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“Taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute, Bolton later boasted, was “the happiest moment in my government service.”
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In 2004 President Bush would name Bolton U.S. ambassador to the UN.
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It was Bolton who delighted in being the one to inform Secretary-General Annan that the United States would be “un-signing” the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, which Bolton branded “a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism that is not just naïve but dangerous.”
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“Taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute, Bolton later boasted, was “the happiest moment in my government service.”
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In 2004 President Bush would name Bolton U.S. ambassador to the UN.
Vieira de Mello knew he would have to figure out a way to work with, through, and around the United States. In his speeches he chipped away at notions of American exceptionalism, arguing that the tendency to violate rights was as universal as the rights themselves. “There does not exist on this earth a paradise for human rights,” he said. “It is too tempting to divide the world into zones of light and zones of shadow, but the truth is that we all sail between the two.”
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He sought to balance respect for a country’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks with efforts to make sure that it respected international rules in the process. He thought human rights organizations that condemned Bush at times sounded as though they were defending terrorism. In his public remarks he stressed that it was important to delve into “root causes” but asked, “Are there not justifications for every crime and every atrocity?” He continued,“The sadist has his reasons just like he who is pushed by madness. There were economic motivations for slavery,” he said. “We have the right to live without this fear of dying, no matter where, at any moment.”
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He urged his staff to remember to denounce terrorist acts with every bit the fervor with which they criticized human rights violations by states. He did not want to alienate the United States before he had a chance to influence it behind the scenes.
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He urged his staff to remember to denounce terrorist acts with every bit the fervor with which they criticized human rights violations by states. He did not want to alienate the United States before he had a chance to influence it behind the scenes.
Because he had been in Asia on 9/11, he had not personally experienced the jolt that the attacks delivered to the American psyche. More palpable for him was the terrorist attack that occurred one month into his tenure as high commissioner. On October 12, 2002, several bombs exploded in and near a popular nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, where he and Larriera had taken many long weekends. More than two hundred people were killed, many of them Australian youths. After the attack the al-Jazeera network broadcast a statement from Osama bin Laden in which he said he had warned Australia not to send its troops to join in the UN’s “despicable effort to separate East Timor” from Indonesia. “It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosion in Bali,” bin Laden said. He asked why the killing of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Palestine did not outrage Western audiences. “Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning, and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness are your lot?” bin Laden said.“This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb.”
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This was the second speech in which bin Laden had used East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia as a rallying cry. The previous year, in November 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had delivered a lengthy diatribe against the United Nations, blaming a UN resolution for partitioning Palestine in 1947, attacking UN peacekeepers for standing by when Muslims were murdered in UN safe areas in Bosnia, and accusing “the criminal Kofi Annan” of dividing Indonesia, “the most populous country in the Islamic world.” Bin Laden had lumped the UN with U.S. and Israeli interests and said, “Under no circumstances should any Muslim or sane person resort to the United Nations.The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime.”
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The Bali bombing sickened Vieira de Mello. He and Larriera were together in Geneva when they heard the news. They spent the afternoon scouring the Internet for a map of Bali that would help them ascertain which nightclub, among the many they had strolled by, had been struck. They were horrified that a place of such tranquillity could have been so brutalized. Two UN soldiers on mission in East Timor (one of whom was Brazilian) were among those killed. One month after the attack, when the Balinese held a ceremony at the scorched site, the couple performed their own private ritual in Geneva, lighting a candle to honor the dead.
His disgust over al-Qaeda’s strikes at civilian targets made Vieira de Mello argue even more strenuously that Western countries must obey international law. Even before he took up his post, disturbing evidence of American involvement in torture had been mounting. In January 2002 photographs had been leaked of shackled prisoners in Guantánamo, kneeling and wearing heavy gloves, face masks, and earmuffs, stirring international outrage but little outcry in the United States.
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In March 2002 U.S. diplomats had been quoted in the
Washington Post
describing the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” or sending terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, where intelligence agents routinely engaged in torture.
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And in April the press ran “souvenir photos” taken by U.S. soldiers, of their peers posing beside the blindfolded, shackled, and naked body of John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old California native who had joined the Taliban. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed what he said were only rumors of mistreatment. “I guess if you ask me when I got up in the morning and we’ve got people getting killed in the Middle East, and we’ve got a war going on in Afghanistan, if I’m going to change my schedule and go chasing after the rumors on things like that, it’s unlikely.”
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In March 2002 U.S. diplomats had been quoted in the
Washington Post
describing the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” or sending terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, where intelligence agents routinely engaged in torture.
43
And in April the press ran “souvenir photos” taken by U.S. soldiers, of their peers posing beside the blindfolded, shackled, and naked body of John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old California native who had joined the Taliban. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed what he said were only rumors of mistreatment. “I guess if you ask me when I got up in the morning and we’ve got people getting killed in the Middle East, and we’ve got a war going on in Afghanistan, if I’m going to change my schedule and go chasing after the rumors on things like that, it’s unlikely.”
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The evidence of U.S. abuse mounted throughout Vieira de Mello’s time in Geneva. In September, just after he left his post as head of the CIA counterterrorism center, Cofer Black testified in a joint House and Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing: “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is there was a ‘before 9/11,’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11 the gloves come off.”
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And in December
Washington Post
reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman published a devastating account of the Bush administration’s “brass-knuckled quest for information” and their harsh dealings with terror suspects.The lengthy cover story quoted one U.S. official responsible for capturing and transferring suspected terrorists as saying,“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”
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Priest and Gellman quoted another American involved in rendition candidly explaining the virtues of the practice.“We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them,” the official said. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”
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Despite these highly public revelations and the harm they could do to America’s standing in the Islamic world and elsewhere, senior officials in the Bush administration did not seek to distance themselves from these practices and did not even condemn them until May 2004, when American soldiers, CIA agents, and contractors were found to have systematically tortured Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
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And in December
Washington Post
reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman published a devastating account of the Bush administration’s “brass-knuckled quest for information” and their harsh dealings with terror suspects.The lengthy cover story quoted one U.S. official responsible for capturing and transferring suspected terrorists as saying,“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”
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Priest and Gellman quoted another American involved in rendition candidly explaining the virtues of the practice.“We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them,” the official said. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”
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Despite these highly public revelations and the harm they could do to America’s standing in the Islamic world and elsewhere, senior officials in the Bush administration did not seek to distance themselves from these practices and did not even condemn them until May 2004, when American soldiers, CIA agents, and contractors were found to have systematically tortured Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
In light of the Bush administration’s stated hostility to the UN in general and to human rights treaties specifically, Vieira de Mello knew he would hardly be pushing on an open door when he urged Washington to adhere to international rules. He tried to be politic, using speeches to stress the gravity of the threat posed by terrorist networks.“A brutal attack and an exceptional threat may require an extraordinary and unequivocal response,” he said. But, he continued:
these measures must be taken in transparency, they must be in short duration, and they must take place within the framework of the law. Without that, the terrorists will ultimately win and we will ultimately lose as we would have allowed them to destroy the very foundation of our modern human civilization. I am convinced that it is possible to fight this menace at no cost to our human rights. Protecting your citizens and upholding rights are not incompatible: on the contrary, they must go firmly together lest we lose our bearing.
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He believed that international human rights law already gave governments the flexibility they needed to meet exceptional threats. They were free to extend the length of detentions in times of emergency, but if they did so, they had to notify the secretary-general, as Great Britain had done in December 2001.
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Although he generally preferred raising his concerns about state practices behind closed doors, torture was an exception. “I have been appalled at the resurgence of debate in certain parts of the world as to whether resort to torture may be justified to tackle terrorism,” he said at a regional conference in Islamabad. “It may not.The right to be free from torture was recognized a long time ago by all states.There can be no going back, no matter—I repeat, no matter—how grave the provocation.”
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Washington had just invented its own legal rules and begun acting as though international law did not exist at all. He urged that the prisoners in Guantánamo be tried or released, and he argued that the denial of rights was “one of the very goals of the terrorists.”
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“We live in fearful times, and fear is a bad adviser,” he argued in one of his more memorable lines before the UN Commission on Human Rights. “For when security is defined too narrowly—for example, as nothing more than a state’s duty to protect its citizens—then the pursuit of security can lead to the violation of the human rights of those who are outside the circle of the protected.”
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“We live in fearful times, and fear is a bad adviser,” he argued in one of his more memorable lines before the UN Commission on Human Rights. “For when security is defined too narrowly—for example, as nothing more than a state’s duty to protect its citizens—then the pursuit of security can lead to the violation of the human rights of those who are outside the circle of the protected.”
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Vieira de Mello’s every public move was scrutinized. In May 2003 Annick Stevenson, who had become a press officer in the office, forwarded him an e-mail from an Arab journalist who complained that he had denounced a Palestinian suicide attack but had not done the same after a recent violent Israeli response. He could not win, and he knew it. He wrote to Stevenson:
Nonsense of course. I didn’t issue a statement on the bombing in Chechnya either . . . so I’m anti-Russian and pro-Chechen terrorists (Muslims by the way). The problem is: either we issue one after every attack or we continue exposing ourselves to this kind of biased interpretation. One thing is sure: as long as Arab (or Jewish) journalists continue to think in this unidimensional way, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
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The threat of war elsewhere in the Middle East cast a shadow over Vieira de Mello’s tenure as human rights commissioner. On September 12, 2002, his first official day on the job, Secretary-General Annan and President George W. Bush had duked it out in the UN General Assembly Chamber before the world’s heads of state. The subject was Iraq. Pointing to the UN-mandated Gulf War that Bush’s father had orchestrated, Annan argued, “There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.”
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He staked out a middle ground on the war path, calling for the resumption of weapons inspections but also for Iraq to finally meet its obligations. “If Iraq’s defiance continues,” Annan warned, “the Security Council must face its responsibilities.”
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Annan wanted peace, but he desperately wanted the Security Council to take a united position. For that to happen, he knew, Saddam Hussein would have to make visible new concessions.
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He staked out a middle ground on the war path, calling for the resumption of weapons inspections but also for Iraq to finally meet its obligations. “If Iraq’s defiance continues,” Annan warned, “the Security Council must face its responsibilities.”
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Annan wanted peace, but he desperately wanted the Security Council to take a united position. For that to happen, he knew, Saddam Hussein would have to make visible new concessions.
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