Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (77 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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Although Dana was the twelfth journalist killed since the start of the war, this shooting had struck a particular nerve at the UN because it seemed to reflect a larger trend.Wearing the hat of human rights commissioner,Vieira de Mello knew that as attacks on U.S. soldiers increased, the Americans would become increasingly jittery and prone to shoot civilians.“In previous positions, I always condemned attacks on journalists,” he wrote in an e-mail to senior staff.“Should I not do it here as well?” His aides responded quickly, agreeing that the attack should be denounced, but expressing concern about the implications of condemning an “accidental” attack on a journalist when the UN had not publicly faulted the Coalition when it had killed Iraqi civilians.
Younes, his Egyptian chief of staff, urged her boss to couch the condemnation of Dana’s killing in a statement that “deplored in general the increasing number of civilian deaths and injuries occurring in the past few weeks,” but she noted, “We have to weigh the effect your statements, if you start reacting to all violence, will have on Bremer and Co.”
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But having concluded that his private admonitions to Bremer were falling on deaf ears and that his access to the Coalition had already shriveled up, Vieira de Mello authorized his press officer to draft a press release condemning the incident.
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But having concluded that his private admonitions to Bremer were falling on deaf ears and that his access to the Coalition had already shriveled up, Vieira de Mello authorized his press officer to draft a press release condemning the incident.
Younes was one of the most outspoken members of Vieira de Mello’s team. As an Arabic speaker, she had a better sense of the swelling anger toward the Coalition than most of her international colleagues, whose primary exposure to Iraqis came in shuttling to and from their hotels. The previous week she had received a phone call from UN Headquarters in New York. Lamin Sise, Annan’s Gambian legal adviser, told her that she had been promoted to assistant secretary-general. She had been elated, not least because the job would get her out of Baghdad. But she quickly realized that as the chief of staff she was expected to facilitate the handover between Vieira de Mello and his as-yet-unnamed successor. This wouldn’t do. On Friday, August 15, she called Sise in a panic. She could not wait two months to leave. “Lamin,” she said, “I need to get out. The history of this country is very bloody. This place is on fire.” She telephoned twice more in order to press the point. Sise promised to try to expedite the hiring of her replacement.
Vieira de Mello did not have that option and focused on salvaging the mission. Unable to control security, he reflected on the source of the insurgency, which was an increasingly malignant occupation. He assumed that the way to improve security was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. “Who would like to see his country occupied?” he asked a Brazilian journalist. “I would not like to see foreign tanks in Copacabana.” Coalition troops had to have “more sensitivity and respect for the culture of the population,” he said.
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The dignity of Iraqis was being trampled. Their “pride,” he told visitors, was “today deeply hurt.” He rattled off the catalog of harms that would have wounded anybody:They had lived under a barbarous regime; they had been killed by the hundreds of thousands in the war with Iran; their army had invaded Kuwait and then been swiftly dislodged, at the cost of thousands of lives; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions and isolation; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in “one of the most humiliating periods in the history of these people,” they had almost no say on how they were being ruled, and nobody had presented them with a road map to their liberation. Even in his remarks before the Security Council in late July, Vieira de Mello had urged diplomats to stop speaking of Iraq as the sum of its past afflictions. “Iraq is something other than a past repressive regime, it is something other than a pariah state,” he said.“It is not simply the scene of conflict, deprivation and abuse.”
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The dignity of Iraqis was being trampled. Their “pride,” he told visitors, was “today deeply hurt.” He rattled off the catalog of harms that would have wounded anybody:They had lived under a barbarous regime; they had been killed by the hundreds of thousands in the war with Iran; their army had invaded Kuwait and then been swiftly dislodged, at the cost of thousands of lives; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions and isolation; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in “one of the most humiliating periods in the history of these people,” they had almost no say on how they were being ruled, and nobody had presented them with a road map to their liberation. Even in his remarks before the Security Council in late July, Vieira de Mello had urged diplomats to stop speaking of Iraq as the sum of its past afflictions. “Iraq is something other than a past repressive regime, it is something other than a pariah state,” he said.“It is not simply the scene of conflict, deprivation and abuse.”
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The Americans had to stop talking about “nation-building,” he said, as “Iraq has five thousand years of history.” The Iraqis had “more to teach us about building nations,” he told a British interviewer, than the United States or UN had to teach them. Iraqis were fed up with being treated like a failed state. He told another visitor that the Iraqis complained to him that the Americans “keep referring to Rwanda.” “Why the hell do they refer to Rwanda?” they asked him. “This is not Rwanda!”
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Vieira de Mello believed that additional Coalition troops should have been sent in the immediate aftermath of their ground victory in April. But now he argued that “saturating Iraq with foreign troops” would only exacerbate the humiliation and rage experienced by Iraqis. Instead, applying a lesson from East Timor, he pressed for a transparent timetable, “a calendar with dates.”
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Just as Gusmão had taught him in East Timor, people had to be given a concrete road map so they could see how and when they would gain control of their own destinies.
58
Vieira de Mello believed that additional Coalition troops should have been sent in the immediate aftermath of their ground victory in April. But now he argued that “saturating Iraq with foreign troops” would only exacerbate the humiliation and rage experienced by Iraqis. Instead, applying a lesson from East Timor, he pressed for a transparent timetable, “a calendar with dates.”
59
Just as Gusmão had taught him in East Timor, people had to be given a concrete road map so they could see how and when they would gain control of their own destinies.
Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed on the occupation.“In the short time I have been in Iraq, and witnessed the reality of occupation,” he wrote, “I have come to question whether such a state of affairs can ever truly be legitimate. Certainly, occupation can be legally supported. Occupation can also certainly be carried out benignly, grounded in nothing but good intentions. But morally and practically, I doubt it can ever be legitimate: its time, if it ever had one, has passed.” He urged the Coalition to “aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance.”
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On Sunday, August 17, he gave a long interview with the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade of
O Estado de São Paulo.
Asked if he feared the UN might be targeted by terrorists, he said, “I don’t think so.” Although in-house he had urged the launching of a national advocacy campaign to improve the UN’s reputation, he knew his mother, Gilda, would read the interview in Rio de Janeiro, and he said, “The local population respects the United Nations, which is not what they feel toward the occupation forces.They view us as an independent and friendly organization and know we are here to help them.” He said he had few personal concerns for his safety. “I don’t know exactly why, but I believe I have been in more risky situations. Here in Baghdad, I don’t feel in danger as in other places where I worked for the UN.”
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O Estado de São Paulo.
Asked if he feared the UN might be targeted by terrorists, he said, “I don’t think so.” Although in-house he had urged the launching of a national advocacy campaign to improve the UN’s reputation, he knew his mother, Gilda, would read the interview in Rio de Janeiro, and he said, “The local population respects the United Nations, which is not what they feel toward the occupation forces.They view us as an independent and friendly organization and know we are here to help them.” He said he had few personal concerns for his safety. “I don’t know exactly why, but I believe I have been in more risky situations. Here in Baghdad, I don’t feel in danger as in other places where I worked for the UN.”
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Yet for all his attempts to maintain a brave face, he had soured on the mission so much that he was biding his time. The Iraqis on the Governing Council had initially told him that a UN representative would be housed with them, but they reversed this decision. His ties with Bremer were growing more tense. A few days after he had shared a relatively uneventful lunch with Ayatollah Hussein Ismail al-Sadr, a moderate cousin of the young Shiite militant, an enraged Bremer had telephoned him and accused him of “inciting the Iraqis to ask for democracy.” Bristling at the reprimand,Vieira de Mello asked his aide Marwan Ali, who had attended the lunch, whether he could remember what he had said. “Nothing inflammatory,” Ali said. “It was just the usual blah blah blah about democracy.”Vieira de Mello understood Bremer’s concerns about the time it would take to organize an election, but he thought that if Bremer started to find democracy inconvenient, the U.S.-led mission was doomed.
The Coalition was straying further from the rapid handover of power that Vieira de Mello had proposed. At the same time Moqtada al-Sadr was gaining power, and the more the Coalition tried to crush him, the stronger he became. “The last thing we should do is ostracize him,” Vieira de Mello told Jonathan Steele of the
Guardian.
“It’s always useful to have an
enfant terrible
if you can control him.” If Bremer had a timeline in mind for ending the occupation, he was keeping it to himself. Vieira de Mello told journalists what he had told Bremer from the start: “Iraqis are completely in the dark. They’ve got to know when this will come to an end.”
Guardian.
“It’s always useful to have an
enfant terrible
if you can control him.” If Bremer had a timeline in mind for ending the occupation, he was keeping it to himself. Vieira de Mello told journalists what he had told Bremer from the start: “Iraqis are completely in the dark. They’ve got to know when this will come to an end.”
With the staff he had brought from Geneva, he began discussing the restructuring of the high commissioner’s office. He also began doing things he had never done in other, supposedly more dangerous missions, such as signing off his e-mails by urging friends to “please pray for us.” Coming from an avowed atheist, these e-mails struck people as strange. The day before he spoke with the Brazilian journalist, he had accompanied his bodyguards to a shooting range, where he received training in how to fire a gun and how to maneuver his vehicle in a hazardous situation.
The weekend of August 16 and 17 was not a good one. Insurgents blew up the pipeline transporting oil to Turkey and destroyed a water main in northern Baghdad, cutting off water to nearly half a million people.
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The only boost to the morale of Vieira de Mello and his team was the return of Jean-Sélim Kanaan, who arrived at the Canal Hotel the afternoon of Monday, August 18, toting cigars, champagne, and photos of his newborn son, then three and a half weeks old.
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The only boost to the morale of Vieira de Mello and his team was the return of Jean-Sélim Kanaan, who arrived at the Canal Hotel the afternoon of Monday, August 18, toting cigars, champagne, and photos of his newborn son, then three and a half weeks old.
Vieira de Mello knew he needed to do what Kanaan had done: get out of Iraq. He asked Larriera if she could join him the following weekend for a break. But she told him that she could not skip an upcoming human rights workshop. She said his presence too was essential. “I just need one day off,” he told her. But she could not very well duck out of the workshop at his request.
Desperate for an exit strategy, he asked his secretary back in Geneva to book his and Larriera’s flights to Brazil, where he would see his mother and have surgery on his right eye, which had started to droop downward a full quarter-century after the Paris police had hit him with their truncheons in May 1968. On the afternoon of Monday, August 18, his airline tickets arrived from Geneva, dated September 30, 2003, his last day in Iraq. Vieira de Mello brought the tickets back to the Cedar Hotel and held them up before Larriera. “I need to think about the future, so I don’t lose my mind in the present,” he said. The tickets were proof that he and Larriera would actually escape Baghdad. When he bumped into Salamé in the hotel, he said he needed to sit down with him to discuss the tour of the Middle East he and Larriera were planning for later in the fall. He wanted to return to Alexandria, which he had visited with his father, and Lebanon, where he had lived as a boy and as a young UN official.
Annan telephoned the same day, asking him to meet him in Europe to update him on his recent consultations with Iraq’s Arab neighbors. “Don’t forget,” Vieira de Mello said, “you promised me. I’m going to spend a month with my mother in Brazil after I’m done here.” Annan replied, “Don’t worry, you’ve more than earned it.Take the month.”
Twenty-one
AUGUST 19, 2003
n Tuesday, August 19, Vieira de Mello and Larriera had breakfast at their hotel. When Mona Rishmawi, Vieira de Mello’s human rights adviser, joined them, they discussed the UN’s future in Iraq. In his first two months in Baghdad he had spoken of bringing the job of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to Iraq. Beginning in August, though, he had grown anxious to get back to Geneva to bring field wisdom back to the high commissioner’s job. “In his mind he had already traveled,” recalls Rishmawi. When he returned to his post, he planned to expand a team of human rights monitors that had set up a foothold in Iraq but were having marginal impact. Over breakfast he gave the green light for Rishmawi and Larriera to go ahead with a human rights workshop the following Saturday, where the UN would help train Iraqis in human rights fact-finding and humanitarian and human rights law. He thought the workshop might be one more way for the UN to differentiate itself from the Coalition.
Most days it took twenty minutes to travel from their hotel to UN headquarters. But the traffic on the roads that day was far lighter than usual, and they reached the Canal Hotel in ten minutes. The unarmed Iraqi security guards checked the badges of those in the UN convoy, scanned the bottom of the vehicle with metal detectors, and waved the familiar faces inside the gate.
Gil Loescher and Arthur Helton, American refugee experts studying the humanitarian effect of the war for the e-magazine
,
were just landing in Baghdad. Loescher, a fifty-eight-year-old Oxford University researcher, had flown to Amman, Jordan, from London. Helton, a fifty-four-year-old St. Louis-born lawyer based at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, had met up with him there. And the pair had taken an uneventful flight from Amman to Baghdad.
,
were just landing in Baghdad. Loescher, a fifty-eight-year-old Oxford University researcher, had flown to Amman, Jordan, from London. Helton, a fifty-four-year-old St. Louis-born lawyer based at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, had met up with him there. And the pair had taken an uneventful flight from Amman to Baghdad.
Loescher and Helton had known Vieira de Mello a long time. Back in the 1980s they had criticized the UN’s Comprehensive Plan of Action, which he had helped negotiate and which had helped stop the hemorrhaging of Vietnamese boat people but had also given rise to human rights abuses. Loescher had argued that Vieira de Mello had deferred to the interests of states instead of upholding the rights of refugees. Helton had felt that the screening procedures designed to keep Vietnamese boat people out of neighboring countries had been unduly harsh. But they had not come to Iraq to rehash old disagreements.They were there to carry out a two-week field assessment.
Vieira de Mello had welcomed news of their visit. He wasn’t normally much for “assessments.” Too often, he thought, they were carried out by inexperienced individuals who took only cursory sweeps of a place and then boasted about the hardships they had endured “in the field” at ensuing dinner parties. Most studies offered generic or grandiose prescriptions without offering any concrete proposals for mobilizing political will among indifferent or unwilling implementing actors. Such recommendations generally went unread or unheeded. In this case, though, he welcomed an independent review of the Coalition’s performance. He had plenty of ideas as to how things ought to be done differently, and he knew that if the recommendations came from two Americans, they would gain more traction in Washington than anything that came from the UN.
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