Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (99 page)

2
In October 2001 Mary Robinson had called for a suspension of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan so that aid workers could reach starving civilians. Later, noting correctly that the Pentagon seemed uncurious about the extent and source of civilian casualties, she said, “I can’t accept that one causes ‘collateral damage’ in villages and doesn’t even ask about the number and names of the dead.” She added later, “In my view, people are not collateral damage.They are people.” Sameer Ahmed, “An Interview with Mary Robinson: U.S. Policy and UN Ethics,”
Stanford Daily News,
February 14, 2003. See also “UN Critical of U.S. Action in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, March 6, 2002.

3
Mary Robinson, "Protecting Human Rights: The United States, the United Nations, and the World,” John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation: Responding to Terrorism Series, January 6, 2002.

4
“The Global Politics of Human Rights,” interview with Mary Robinson,
Politic
[Yale University], December 7, 2002.

5
Colum Lynch, “UN Human Rights Commissioner Named,”
Washington Post,
July 23, 2002, p. A12.

6
SVDM to Carolina Larriera, September 10, 2002.

7
SVDM to Larriera, September 13, 2002.

8
SVDM to Marcia Luar Ibrahim, September 13, 2002.

9
SVDM to Larriera, October 12, 2002.

10
SVDM to Adrien and Laurent Vieira de Mello, November 5, 2002.

11
François d’Alançon, “Rencontre avec Sergio Vieira de Mello, Pompier de l’ONU” (Conversation with Sergio Vieira de Mello, Firefighter of the United Nations),
La Croix,
June 21, 2003.

12
SVDM to guide at the British Museum, November 15, 2002.

13
SVDM, Statement by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, September 20, 2002.

14
Christopher Pratner,“UN’s Vieira de Mello Sees U.S. Constitution as Human Rights Model,” BBC Monitoring International Reports (from Vienna’s
Der Standard
online), May 11, 2003.

15
Harold Hongju Koh, “A Job Description for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,”
Columbia Human Rights Law Review
(Summer 2004), p. 493. The article was based on the paper Koh delivered at a conference at Columbia in February 2003.

16
SVDM, “Five Questions for the Human Rights Field,”
Sur: International Journal on Human Rights
, 2004, p. 170.

17
SVDM, Statement to the Informal Meeting of the Commission on Human Rights, September 24, 2002.

18
SVDM, Human Rights “Manifesto,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, undated.

19
Some 270 people held permanent contracts in Geneva, while another 190 staffers were based in twenty countries around the world.

20
SVDM, interview with Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

21
SVDM to Catherine Bertini, November 15, 2002.

22
The United States had been assured of forty-three votes of support, but only twenty-nine nations ended up backing its membership. France, Austria, and Sweden were elected from the U.S. regional grouping. They joined Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria—five of the ten countries rated “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties.

23
SVDM, Press Conference on “The New HCHR,” Geneva, September 20, 2002.

24
“Commission on Human Rights Takes Up Debate on Situation in Occupied Arab Territories, Including Palestine,” UN Press Release, March 27, 2003.

25
SVDM, Closing Statement to UN Commission on Human Rights, April 25, 2003.

26
Ibid.

27
D’Alançon, “Recontre avec Sergio Vieira de Mello.”

28
SVDM, “World Civilization: Barking Up the Wrong Tree?” Third Annual BP World Civilization Lecture, British Museum, November 11, 2002.

29
SVDM, “Holistic Democracy: The Human Rights Content of Legitimate Governance,” Seminar on the Interdependence between Democracy and Human Rights, Geneva, November 25, 2002.

30
Ibid. He offered a variety of models for democratic consultation “from the village council to the
diwaniya
, from the
loya jirga
to the circle of elders.”

31
Human Rights Features
no. 6 (April 22-25, 2003), p. 60.

32
SVDM, Q and A, September-October 2002, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

33
SVDM, Statement to the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, March 21, 2003.

34
SVDM, interview on
BBC Talking Point,
December 8, 2002.

35
James P. Lucier, “Just What Is a War Criminal?,”
Insight,
August 2, 1999, p. 13.

36
John R. Bolton, “Why an International Criminal Court Won’t Work,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 30, 1998, p. A19.

37
“Wite-Out” quote is from John R. Bolton, Address to the Federalist Society’s 2003 National Lawyers Convention, November 13, 2003, online at . The “happiest moment” quote is from Glenn Kessler and Colum Lynch, “Critic of U.N. Named Envoy; Bush’s Choice of Bolton Is a Surprise; Democrats Plan to Contest Nomination,”
Washington Post,
March 8, 2005, p. A1. Bolton’s most memorable summation of his exasperation with international institutions came in 2005 in a speech at Yale University, in which he declared, “Why shouldn’t we pay for what we want, instead of paying a bill for what we get?” Richard Low, “Bolton’s Undiplomatic Unilateralism,”
Yale Daily News,
October 6, 2005.

38
SVDM, Statement to the Opening of the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, March 17, 2003.

39
Ibid.

40
“Bin Laden’s message,” broadcast by al-Jazeera, November 12, 2002, online at http:// .

41
“Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN,” November 3, 2001, online at http:// .

42
Ben Russell, “Straw Joins Row Over ‘Torture Pictures,’”
Independent
, January 21, 2002, p. 1.

43
Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Finn, "U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects,”
Washington Post,
March 11, 2002, p. A1.

44
Donald Rumsfeld, “Stakeout at the Pentagon,” April 12, 2003, online at ..

45
Committee on Select Intelligence,“Statement of Cofer Black, Former Chief, Counterterrorism Center,” Investigation of September 11 Intelligence Failures, Hearing, September 26, 2002.

46
Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, "U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations: ‘Stress and Duress’ Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities,”
Washington Post
, December 26, 2002, p. A1. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration also rendered suspects to third countries. The CIA has defended rendition by claiming that access to American due process would force intelligence agents, or enable suspected terrorists, to disclose CIA sources and methods. Initially, Egypt (the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind Israel) was the principal destination of rendered suspects. But after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration began sending suspects to other countries as well. Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,”
New Yorker
, February 14, 2005, p. 106.

47
Priest and Gellman, "U.S. Decries Abuse.”

48
SVDM, Statement to Informal Meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights, September 24, 2002.

49
Human Rights Watch, “Indefinite Detention Without Trial in the United Kingdom Under Part 4 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001,” June 24, 2004, online at . Even in times of emergency, human rights law did not permit governments to opt out of the fundamental right to life or right to be free of cruel or degrading punishment.

50
SVDM, Statement of the Eleventh Workshop on Regional Cooperation for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region, Islamabad, February 25-27, 2003. He urged the countries in the UN General Assembly to add a new instrument to the books, the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which would have instituted a system of regular independent inspections of detention facilities in order to guard against torture. SVDM, Address to the Third Committee of the General Assembly, November 4, 2002.

51
SVDM, Q and A, September-October 2002; SVDM, Address to the Third Committee of the General Assembly, November 4, 2002.

52
SVDM, Statement to the Opening of the 59th Session of the Commission on Human Rights, March 17, 2003.

53
SVDM to Annick Stevenson, May 21, 2003.

54
Kofi Annan, “When Force Is Considered, There Is No Substitute for Legitimacy Provided by United Nations,” Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002, online at .

55
Ibid.

56
George W. Bush, Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002, online at .

57
For Annan’s reflections on this sequence, see Philip Gourevitch, “The Optimist,”
New Yorker
, March 3, 2003, p. 55.

58
SVDM, interview on
BBC Talking Points,
December 8, 2002.

59
SVDM, “Equipe da ONU fará avaliaçâo da segurança em Bagdád” (Making the UN Function in Baghdad),
O Estado de Sáo Paulo
, June 1, 2003.

60
Strobe Talbott,
The Great Experiment: From Tribes to Global Nation
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 364.

61
George Packer,
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 95.

62
Colin Powell, Address to UN Security Council, February 5, 2003, online at www ..

63
The only UN official, apart from the secretary-general, who had met with Bush was the head of the World Food Program, James Morris, but he was a Republican-backed U.S. political appointee, while Vieira de Mello was a lifelong UN civil servant from Brazil.

64
Notes on the Armitage-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

65
Ibid.

66
Notes on the Bush-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

67
James Risen et al., “Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations,”
New York Times,
May 13, 2004, p. A1.

68
Notes on the Bush-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

69
Ibid.Vieira de Mello also raised the plight of the Palestinians. Bush said that he was the only president to have said there should be two states. (In fact, President Clinton was the first to endorse a two-state solution, which he did in January 2001, shortly before Bush took office.) Bush said that the Palestinians needed a better deal.“Blame Israel last not first for the condition of the Palestinian people,” he said.

70
“President Bush: Monday ‘Moment of Truth’ for World in Iraq,” White House press release, March 16, 2003.

71
SVDM, "Making the UN Function.”

72
President Bush, Address to the Nation, March 19, 2003, news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html. The initial invasion was carried out by 250,000 troops from the United States; 45,000 from the U.K.; and 2,000 from Australia. Poland (200), Albania (70), and Romania (278) all provided troops in noncombat roles. Just before the invasion, Colin Powell announced that the Coalition of the Willing consisted of 30 countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. An additional 15 anonymous countries provided assistance but did not want to declare support. See http://news .. On March 27, 2003, the White House announced a list of forty-nine members. Among these were six that were unarmed (or without formal armies): Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands. See Dana Milbank, “Many Willing, but Only a Few Are Able,”
Washington Post,
March 25, 2003, p. A7.

73
SVDM, interview by Tim Sebastian,
HARDtalk,
BBC, April 14, 2003.

2
YouGov Survey Results, "Iraq War Track Part 9, prepared for the
Daily Telegraph
and ITV News,” April 6, 2003, online at .

3
Colum Lynch, “Britain Offers Plan for U.N.’s Postwar Role,”
Washington Post,
April 5, 2003, p. A28.

4
James Blitz, “Blair Faces Challenge of Getting Consensus on UN Role,”
Financial Times,
March 21, 2003, p. 9.

5
Ibid.

6
U.S. officials were satisfied with the UN’s performance in Afghanistan, where in December 2001 Lakhdar Brahimi had chaired the Bonn conference, which resulted in the appointment of Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Secretary Rumsfeld applauded General Tommy Franks for keeping “the coalition footprint modest” and for allowing local leaders to arrive at local solutions. “Over time,” Rumsfeld said, Afghans would be able to “take full responsibility for their security and stability rather than having to depend on foreign forces.” Donald Rumsfeld, “Beyond Nation Building,” Speech at Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, New York City, February 14, 2003.

7
Ibid.

8
Ibid.

9
Don Melvin, “Bush, Blair Weigh Next Steps; U.N. Role in Iraq May Divide Allies,”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
April 8, 2003, p. A3.

10
George W. Bush and Tony Blair, “Joint Statement on Iraq’s Future,” April 8, 2003.

11
“President Bush Meets with Prime Minister Blair in Northern Ireland,” White House Press Release, April 8, 2003.

12
Eric Schmitt and Steven R. Weisman, “US to Recruit Iraqi Civilians to Interim Posts,”
New York Times,
April 11, 2003, p. A1.

13
Office of the Spokesperson of the Secretary-General, “UN Secretary-General’s Press Encounter Upon Arrival at UNHQ,” April 7, 2003.

14
SVDM to Peter Galbraith, December 21, 2002.

15
SVDM, interview by Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

16
SVDM to Carolina Larreira, April 1, 2003. The original article, the first to mention Vieira de Mello in the context of Iraq, was Philip Webster, James Bone, Rosemary Bennett, and Greg Hurst, “Coalition to Stay in Charge for Task of Rebuilding,”
Times
(London), March 27, 2003, p. 10.

17
SVDM to Larriera, April 3, 2003.

18
“President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” White House Press Release, May 1, 2003.

19
Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, Remarks at a Town Hall Meeting with Troops, Doha, Qatar, April 28, 2003.

20
Anthony Zinni, Remarks to the Marine Corps Association and U.S. Naval Institute Forum 2003, Arlington, Virginia, September 4, 2003.

21
Steven R. Weisman and Felicity Barringer, “Against France and Russia, Washington Tries to Curb U.N. Role in Postwar Iraq,”
New York Times,
March 27, 2003, p. B10.

22
“President Bush Meets with Prime Minister Blair.”

23
Notes on the Rice-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

24
Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Remarks on President Bush-PM Blair Meeting, April 8, 2003.

25
“US Will Ask UN to Back Control by Allies in Iraq,”
New York Times,
May 9, 2003, p. A1.

26
Pool Report of Garner’s Trip to Baghdad, April 21, 2003, online at .

27
George Packer,
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 130.

28
UNESCO estimates that some 150,000 objects were lost or stolen.

29
Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, U.S. Department of Defense News Briefing, April 11, 2003.

30
The Coalition Provisional Authority would eventually estimate that the looting damage was worth $12 billion. The exiles (the biggest backer of the Coalition’s invasion) later blamed the looting on the State Department’s refusal to train an army of Iraqi exiles to make up the inaugural security forces (seventy-two Iraqis received training). Packer,
Assassins’ Gate,
p. 139.

31
In the weeks prior to the announcement, the Pentagon had been proceeding with plans to deploy a senior civilian administrator, and Rumsfeld had been winnowing a list of names. But Garner expected the person to deploy sometime in August. Bremer’s deployment was rushed forward because of chaos on the ground and Garner’s inability to manage it. Powell seems to have welcomed the appointment of Bremer, who had been a career State Department official, but Bremer reported directly to Rumsfeld.

32
John Negroponte and Jeremy Greenstock, “Letter from the Permanent Representation of the UK and the US to the UN addressed to the President of the Security Council,” May 8, 2003, online at .

33
Anthony Shadid, “Shiites Denounce Occupation,”
Washington Post,
May 19, 2003, p. A1.

34
CPA Order no. 1 de-Ba’athified in two ways: (1) “Senior party members” (the top four levels) were removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector. They were also evaluated for criminal conduct. (2) In the top three rungs of the public sector, those determined to be full members of the Ba’ath party (including two junior ranks) were removed from their jobs. This included all individuals who held jobs “in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions (e.g., universities and hospitals).” In January 2004, in an effort to systematize the process, a de-Ba’athification commission was established under Ahmed Chalabi. Some thirty thousand Ba’athists had already lost their jobs. The fourth-highest leadership echelons would be allowed to contest their dismissals if they did not commit crimes and if they had advanced up the ranks of the party by dint of their professional achievements. When Chalabi was asked whether the new body would facilitate reconciliation, however, he dismissed the idea, saying that “reconciliation is an inappropriate term.”“Who will reconcile with whom?” he asked. “Will those buried in mass graves reconcile with those who killed them?” Sam Dagher,“Iraq Governing Council Details Plan to Root Out Ba’ath Members,” Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2004.

35
Dan Senor, speaking for Bremer in August 2004, said, “The Shia could have been an enormous stumbling block to the Coalition if they had been uncooperative. If we had held back on de-Ba’athification, some have argued that the Sunni insurgency would not have been as bad, but, in the complete picture, the fact that this meant so much to the Shia was crucial.” John Lee Anderson, “Out on the Street,”
New Yorker,
November 15, 2004, pp. 73, 78.

36
Paul Hughes, Garner’s chief of staff, who had promised the Iraqi soldiers jobs and salaries, later told
The New Yorker
’s George Packer: “From the Iraqi viewpoint, that simple action took away the one symbol of sovereignty the Iraqi people still had.” Packer,
Assassins’ Gate,
p. 192.

37
It was hard to reconcile the Coalition’s commitment to rebuild and reform Iraq with the terms of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which assumes that any occupation will be purely temporary and that the occupier will not impose any particular form of government, or change the status of public officials/judges or penal laws. The 1907 Hague Convention also notes that the laws in force in the country must be respected. So Council Resolution 1483, by encouraging the occupying powers to help create “conditions in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future,” seemed to contradict these provisions of humanitarian law.

38
Felicity Barringer, “UN Vote on Iraq Authorization Is Due Next Week, US Says,”
New York Times,
May 15, 2003, p. A24.

39
UN source, “Note to Mr. Riza: Special Coordinator for Iraq,” May 9, 2003.

40
SVDM to Galbraith, May 16, 2003.

41
Steven Erlanger, “I Should Always Believe Journalists,”
New York Times,
August 24, 2004.

42
In 2007 multiple letters were exchanged in the
London Review of Books
over whether Vieira de Mello met with Bush a second time. Tariq Ali wrote that Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor had told him of a second meeting, a comment Tharoor denied making. In fact Tharoor made the same claim to me, but he was repeating hearsay and had no knowledge of Vieira de Mello’s movements. Only one meeting between the two men took place: on March 5, 2003, two and a half months before Vieira de Mello would be appointed as UN special representative in Iraq.

43
Felicity Barringer,“Security Council Almost Unanimously Approves Broad Mandate for Allies in Iraq,”
New York Times,
May 23, 2003, p. A12.

44
Ibid. Several months after the August 19, 2003 attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad, when the UN was being pressed to return to Baghdad, Annan would say, “Bad resolutions kill people.”

45
Ibid.

46
Colum Lynch, “France, Russia Back Lifting of Iraq Sanctions,”
Washington Post,
May 22, 2003, p. A1; Felicity Barringer, “US Wins Support to End Sanctions Imposed on Iraq,”
New York Times,
May 22, 2003, p. A1.

47
Barringer, “Security Council Almost Unanimously Approves.”

48
Marcelo Musa Cavalleri, “Um brasileiro em busca, du paz” (A Brazilian in Search of Peace),
Época,
August 2003.

49
Liana Melo and Rita Moraes, “Com a mesma intensidade que trabalhava, o diplomata reconstruía a vida afetiva” (With the Same Intensity with Which He Worked, the Diplomat Reconstructed His Personal Life),
Istoe,
August 27, 2003.

50
Colum Lynch, “Diplomat Will Oversee UN’s Iraq Operations,”
Washington Post,
May 24, 2003, p. A18.

51
SVDM to Jane Holl Lute, July 8, 2003.

52
SVDM, interview by Spindle.

53
SVDM to Machado et al., May 29, 2003.

54
SVDM, interview by Spindle.

55
Ibid.