Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (67 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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On Thursday, May 22, Vieira de Mello flew first class on the daytime flight from Geneva to New York. Before he departed, he and Prentice made calls to the Chinese ambassador to the UN in New York and to Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, asking them, in the event that he was named UN envoy to Iraq, to issue statements praising his appointment. He hoped that this would counter any notion that he was an American puppet by making it clear that he had broad support in the international community.
 
 
Prentice, who normally flew economy class, received an unexpected upgrade. He and Vieira de Mello spent the flight together in first class drinking champagne, feasting on lobster and fine cheeses, and poking fun at the draft Security Council resolution, which (in a long career of working with lousy mandates) was by far the worst Vieira de Mello had ever seen. “What the fuck does this mean?” he asked, pointing to the clause outlining the special representative’s functions. “I have no idea,” said Prentice.
 
 
While Vieira de Mello was flying, the countries with seats on the Security Council were meeting to vote on the final draft of the resolution. At 9:30 a.m. in New York, diplomats chatted amicably in the Council chamber and stared expectantly at the door, where they hoped the Syrian ambassador would appear. After a forty-minute delay and frequent cell phone calls, the ambassador never showed, and the fourteen other ambassadors voted unanimously in favor of Resolution 1483.
43
Most midlevel UN staff were demoralized by the rush to endorse the U.S. and British occupation. One UN lawyer, Mona Khalil, put a screen saver up on her computer that read: “The UN Charter has left the building.” But Annan was personally pleased that the UN was “back in the game” and also relieved the Council had not asked the UN to administer the country. "I have always held that the unity of the Council is the indispensable foundation for effective action to maintain international peace and security,” he told reporters after the session. “We should all be gratified that the Council has come together.”
44
Calling it a “foot-in-the-door resolution,” Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the UN Development Program, seconded Annan’s satisfaction. “It’s a very good resolution,” he said.
45
 
 
The Europeans had swallowed giving the United States and Great Britain virtual control over Iraq’s oil revenues, and giving the UN vague and subservient tasks, but they put a positive spin on this occasion. They pointed to some ninety changes made to the original draft resolution as evidence of their influence.
46
"The war that we did not want, and the majority of the Council did not want, has taken place,” German ambassador Gunter Pleuger said. “We cannot undo history. We are now in a situation where we have to take action for the sake of the Iraqi people.”
47
The French did not think they had the option of opposing it. “We could have abstained from the resolution,” recalls one official at the French mission. “But we asked ourselves, what do we get by abstaining? We’ll be blamed for being anti-Iraqi and obstructing efforts at reconstruction. And if things go wrong, the United States will scapegoat us and say we obstructed what was necessary. We couldn’t give them another opportunity to blame us.”
 
 
The Bush administration was riding high. It had infuriated its allies, gone to war, dislodged Saddam Hussein, and now gotten the Security Council to bless its occupation. As one U.S. official recalls, “We had staved off divorce or murder, and we had moved back into the house together.”
 
 
When Iraqis got wind of the contents of the UN resolution, they were crushed. A month before the resolution Shiite militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had granted one of his first-ever interviews, to Anthony Shadid of the
Washington Post.
When Shadid had asked al-Sadr whether Americans were occupiers or liberators, al-Sadr had been circumspect: “This is not a question to ask me,” he said. “It is a question to ask them. I don’t know their intentions. Only God does.” But with the passage of Resolution 1483, al-Sadr and millions of other Iraqis had their answer: It was an “occupation”; the UN resolution said so. The Arabic word for occupation,
ihtilal,
carried several damning resonances: the British occupation of Iraq (1915-1932), the Israeli occupation of Lebanon (1978-2000), and the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
 
 
With the passage of the resolution, all that was left to announce was who would be named the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq. When Vieira de Mello landed in New York, he phoned Larriera, who had been awaiting his arrival in her office at the UN. Together they rehearsed the arguments for not going to Iraq. “Repeat after me, Sergio: ‘I can say no. I am the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I’ve just started,’” Larriera said. He assured her, “I already told Riza to take me off the list. They probably just want to brainstorm about the other candidates.” He knew better.
 
 
He took a cab directly from Kennedy airport to Larriera’s tiny studio apartment on East Sixty-second Street, between First and Second avenues. He showered and then walked the five short blocks to Annan’s home.When the meeting began, they discussed the generic functions that the UN envoy in Iraq would have to perform. “He will have to serve as a bridge to the Coalition, but he will also have to distance himself from the Coalition,” Annan said. He would have to get out into the countryside and listen to what Iraqis were saying. And he would have to push the Coalition to develop a more transparent timetable for holding elections, drafting a constitution, and handing over full sovereignty to the Iraqis.The two men did not discuss the physical dangers in Iraq because, although looting was occurring, it looked as though Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard forces had been roundly defeated. Iraq seemed more peaceful than Bosnia and Kosovo had been when Vieira de Mello had risked his life as a UN envoy. Annan never asked him directly whether he would go, but after almost an hour of general discussion about the tasks that lay ahead, the secretary-general said, “So when are we going to announce your appointment?”
 
 
Gamal Ibrahim, Vieira de Mello’s former bodyguard, had not seen him since he became human rights commissioner the previous September. Ibrahim was leaving the UN to get a bite to eat when he spotted Vieira de Mello on the street coming from Annan’s home.“Stop the car,” Ibrahim told the person he was driving with. “Sergio? What are you doing here?” Vieira de Mello’s face brightened. “Gamal!” Ibrahim offered him a lift uptown to Larriera’s apartment. “The SG just told me I’m going to Baghdad,”Vieira de Mello said. Ibrahim was impressed. “That’s good for you, Mr. Sergio, good for your career,” he said. “What do you mean, Gamal? I’ve worked for the UN for thirty-four years. I’m going to retire in two or three years. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve done everything. I’m the High Commissioner for Human Rights. What career am I working for? What do I have left to prove?” Ibrahim was taken aback and asked, “So why are you going?” “Can you say no to your boss?” Vieira de Mello said. “I cannot say no to mine.” They arrived at Larriera’s apartment building.“We’ll talk later,” he said as he got out of the car. Ibrahim feared he knew what that meant and figured that he would be equally bad at refusing a job he didn’t want.
 
 
Larriera knew something had gone wrong when Vieira de Mello hadn’t called.When she telephoned her apartment from work, he answered. “They put it in such a way that I couldn’t say what we had planned I was going to say,” he blurted out. “But would you come with me?” She was stunned. “What do you mean?” she said. “They asked you to go to Iraq?”
 
 
He had accepted the job on two conditions. First, unlike his posting to East Timor, the Iraq assignment would not be prolonged. Annan had asked Vieira de Mello to serve for six months. Vieira de Mello had said three. And the two men had settled on a four-month term. Vieira de Mello would preside over a UN start-up mission, just as he had done in 1999 in Kosovo, and then he would hand the operation over to a more permanent special representative and return to Geneva to his full-time job as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He would not stay a day past his assigned tenure, he told Annan, “no matter what.” His second condition was nonnegotiable: Larriera would be part of his team.
 
 
The couple passed the evening in gloomy resignation. They had spent months plotting the next phase of their life together in Geneva, and suddenly their plans had been turned upside down. He had persuaded Annan to postpone the formal announcement so that they could enjoy a weekend of relative peace. Resolved to make the best of the time they had together in New York, she suggested that they leave her cramped apartment for a few hours and get dinner at one of their favorite restaurants.When they entered L’Absinthe, a brasserie on East Sixty-seventh Street, however, they spotted a crowd of UN colleagues inside. “No more UN tonight,” he said, spiriting her back outside.
 
 
Knowing he would be in high demand, he avoided Headquarters the next day for fear of being buttonholed. In Tunis his friend Kamel Morjane was meeting with President Ben Ali, who agreed to support his candidacy. “I have only one condition,” Ben Ali said. “If the secretary-general chooses you, I will give you a team from my own personal security detail. I will not let you go alone.” Morjane accepted the offer of additional security and telephoned Riza, who informed him that Annan had already chosen Vieira de Mello. Morjane’s pride was wounded, but he telephoned his friend to congratulate him. “Prepare yourself,” Vieira de Mello said. “I will not stay one day longer than four months, and you will replace me.” Morjane was disappointed. “The only person happy in my house was my wife,” he recalls. “But rationally I thought Sergio was the best man for the job, not only because of his skills, which were obvious, but also because he was the one UN person who might be able to influence the United States and the U.K. He’d be able to find the best space for the UN. There was nobody better than Sergio at finding that space.” Annan had come to the same conclusion. “At the end of the day everyone was hoping that 1483, with all of its absurdities, would be salvaged by Sergio himself,” recalls one UN official. “That was the whole plan: Sergio will fix it.”
 
 
Vieira de Mello telephoned his mother to ensure she did not read about his latest assignment in the Brazilian press. When she got the news, she was devastated. “Sergio, stop taking care of the world, and start taking care of yourself,” she said. She had always worried about her son’s physical security. “What if they mistake you for an American?” she asked.
48
He assured her that they would not and promised that he would fly straight to Rio at the end of his four-month appointment. She wrote his name on a piece of paper and placed it inside a Bible.
49
 
 
On Saturday, after stopping into the UN for a few hours of briefings, he met up with Larriera and toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit
Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus
. The couple paid particular attention to the architecture, sculpture, jewelry, carvings, and tablets from Iraq.They then went shopping at the Gap for light cotton shirts and khaki slacks.
 
 
In the end, Vieira de Mello went to Iraq not primarily because he was auditioning for the position of secretary-general or because he needed an adrenaline hit. He went to Iraq for a far more prosaic reason:The secretary-general of the United Nations had asked him. “People forget this about Sergio,” Prentice says. “For a man who had huge vanity, he respected the UN structure. He was remarkably quaint.”
 
 
On Tuesday, May 27, Vieira de Mello attended a meeting of the Iraq Steering Group, Annan’s brain trust on Iraq. He continued to scrutinize Resolution 1483, pleading with his colleagues for clarification. Since they had been in New York during the three-week drafting process, they could better gauge the Council’s “original intent.” “Can anyone explain this to me?” he asked. Edward Mortimer, Annan’s director of communications, recalls, "Each time they tried to explain, I thought to myself, ‘If he wasn’t confused before, he certainly will be now.’”
 
 
Events were moving so quickly that Vieira de Mello had to absorb an enormous amount of new information overnight. He had read about the Coalition’s decision to demobilize the Iraqi army, but at the Steering Group meeting he began hearing about the violent consequences of the U.S. edict. Ramiro Lopes da Silva, a fifty-two-year-old Portuguese official who had been the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq before the war, had returned to Baghdad with a small team in early May to resume operations and await word of the UN’s forthcoming role. On speakerphone he reported that the UN had offered humanitarian assistance to Iraqi soldiers, who were no longer being paid. Louise Fréchette, the deputy secretary-general and chair of the Steering Group, argued that payments to the army were the responsibility of the United States, and the UN should not divert aid from elsewhere in the world to bail out the Americans. In the end UN officials decided the soldiers should be eligible for aid like other Iraqis.
 
 
UN staff members were split about Annan’s decision to appoint Vieira de Mello. Many were upset that so soon after being steamrollered by the Coalition, the secretary-general would scamper to service U.S. needs by sending his best.They were also disturbed that Vieira de Mello was “America’s pick” and speculated that this was little more than a brown-nosing dress rehearsal for his secretary-generalship. “Sergio has been contaminated by the fact that the Americans consecrated him,” Prendergast argued to the secretary-general. Others reacted differently. “We were flattered that Bush wanted him,” recalls Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman. “Sergio was one of us. And he wasn’t a turncoat. He stood for what we stood for.”

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