Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

  I asked him what he would do if he were in charge. “In charge of the world?” he asked. “Or in charge of the UN mission?” The distinction was essential, he insisted. While the peacekeepers had become global symbols of cowardice, they were following instructions from powerful capitals. “The one thing you have to remember,” he said, “is that the major powers will kick the UN.They’ll scream at the UN. But at the end of the day they are getting the UN that they want and deserve. If the United States and Europe wanted a muscular peacekeeping operation here, they would insist on adding muscle. If they really wanted to stop the Serbs, they would have done so long ago.”

  As our meal wound down, he reached into the breast pocket of his elegantly tailored blazer and pulled out a battered piece of paper—a single page—that constituted the only formal instructions the Security Council had ever offered him or the peacekeepers there in the Balkans. It was the third page of UN Security Council Resolution 836, which had set up the six “safe areas,” including Gorazde. He had underlined and double-underlined the important passages and made notes to himself in the margins in blue pen, red pen, black pen, and pencil. He had refolded the resolution so many times that when he held it up to the table lamp, its creases made it virtually see-through.

  He pointed to the key paragraph, which said the UN peacekeepers were in Bosnia “to deter attacks against the safe areas.” “But what is required for ‘deterrence’?” he asked. “What constitutes an ‘attack’?” he continued. “And what in the hell—no, where in the hell—are the ‘safe areas’?” The countries on the Security Council had passed the resolution, he said, but they had never bothered to delineate the boundaries of the safe zones. “That’s not a coincidence,” he insisted. “If nobody knows what is officially protected, then nobody can be called upon to do the protecting.”

  He focused on a pivotal comma. “Look at this,” he said. “The resolution says we should ‘comma—acting in self-defense—comma—take the necessary measures—comma—including the use of force’ to respond to attacks against civilians!” No matter how many times he had studied the UN mandate, its vagueness continued to enrage him. “What are the commas supposed to mean?” he asked. “Does it mean the UN should only use force in self-defense? Or does it mean we should use force in self-defense and also to protect the Bosnians?” I was flabbergasted by his intimacy with the text. I had never even thought to read the text of UN resolutions, which seemed of little relevance to the tragedy unfolding.

  At the end of our dinner, he was driven back to the operations room at UN headquarters. As we parted, he told me somewhat melodramatically that Western countries were on the verge of deciding more than the future of a troubled region. They were defining their approach to the post-cold war global order and determining the future of the United Nations, which had been waiting almost a half century for its chance to civilize the world. He seemed to believe the UN was up to the task. Judging from what I had seen in Bosnia, I was skeptical.

  IN THE DECADE that separated the war in Bosnia from that in Iraq, Vieira de Mello became a global figure. In 1999 the UN got into the governing business for the first time, and he was the one tapped to run two small statelets— Kosovo, where he deployed on seventy-two hours’ notice, and then the tiny half-island nation of East Timor, which he administered for two and a half years. Suddenly a man who had practiced his leftism “loudly” back in 1968 was walking around in a safari suit and being teased by his staff for taking on the absolute powers of a colonial “viceroy.” After years of critiquing governments, he found himself struggling to balance fiscal discipline and social welfare, liberty and security, and peace and justice. In the eyes of powerful governments, he had become the “go-to guy”—handed one mission impossible after another. By the time he shepherded East Timor to independence in 2002, colleagues and international diplomats had begun placing wagers on when—not whether—he would become UN secretary-general.

  Vieira de Mello carried a leather-bound copy of the UN Charter with him when he traveled, and he suffered when the UN suffered. In his long career he saw religious extremists and militants take shelter in UN refugee camps, where they sold UN food for money to buy arms. He saw warlords transform themselves into used-car salesmen by selling stolen UN Land Cruisers (repainted but still bearing UN license plates). He saw proud French and British peacekeepers stripped of their weapons, handcuffed to lampposts, and turned into human shields. But he was more stung by the UN’s self-inflicted wounds. While the bad guys in war zones were predictably bad, he was sometimes more frustrated by the sins of the nominal “good guys” who carried UN passports or wore UN berets. Senior officials, including himself, were often so eager to tell the major powers what they wanted to hear that they had covered up deadly facts or exaggerated their own successes. In Rwanda and Srebrenica, another UN “safe area” in Bosnia, UN peacekeepers had turned their backs on civilians who had sought the protection of the UN flag, paving the way for some of the largest massacres since the Second World War.

  And yet. For all the indignities, he didn’t believe countries acting outside the UN would fare much better. He knew that there was no other forum where all countries gathered to try to stop the planet’s bleeding. Even while the debate over Iraq had shown that diplomacy would not always prevent war, many countries still tried to settle their differences through the UN.The organization had helped colonized peoples in the developing world achieve their independence, causing UN membership to nearly quadruple from 51 at the founding to 192. The UN had offered shelter, food, and medicine to civilians neglected or persecuted by their governments. For all of the UN’s high-profile peacekeeping failures in the 1990s, blue helmets had been found to be more reliable and less expensive preventers of conflict than states acting alone. Most of the war zones in which Vieira de Mello had worked over the years had stumbled toward shaky peace, and UN officials had played essential roles in demobilizing combatants, punishing war criminals, rebuilding schools and health clinics, organizing elections, and returning refugees to their homes.

  The organization had also paid him to see the world. In the UN he had made his closest friends—a multilingual and multicultural group of “ne’erdo-wells,” as he described them—some idealistic and some cynical, but all, in his words, “bloody fascinating.” The UN constituted his family.When he was asked how, with all of his intellectual and diplomatic gifts, he could tolerate the headaches that came with working for such a terrible bureaucracy, he would say, “Where else would I go?” But in unguarded, more freely sentimental moments, he confided, “Just look at everything the UN has given me.” He also believed—initially as a function of his idealism, but later in keeping with his ruthless pragmatism—that the only way to bring about lasting global stability was to press countries to play by international rules—by UN rules.

  Our paths intersected only occasionally after the Balkans, but whenever I ran into him, I was struck by his intellectual and cultural range. In conversation he would dart from the likely results of the next midterm election in the United States to the arrest of an opposition leader in Egypt to the favorites in the next World Cup soccer championship to his considered view of the latest R.E.M. album. In September 2002 I was surprised to learn that he had been named UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had always seemed more comfortable negotiating with wrongdoers than denouncing them from a distant platform. It didn’t surprise me when I heard that he was the first human rights commissioner to meet with a sitting U.S. president. “Typical Sergio timing,” I thought. “He becomes human rights czar at just the time George Bush decides to start talking about freedom and democracy.”

  I found the subsequent news of his appointment to Iraq both infuriating and encouraging. After deriding the UN in the run-up to war, Washington was now using it for its own purposes. But if Iraq had a prayer—and at that point it still seemed to—Vieira de Mello and his handpicked UN “A team” seemed to have the highest odds of answering it.

  In the course of explo
ring Vieira de Mello’s life, work, and ideas,1 I have caught glimpses of the person I met on April 15, 1994. The contradictions that I encountered at our first dinner remain evident. He was somehow both the worldly realist who understood the interests of states and the motives of politicians and the UN acolyte who clung to his mauled copy of the latest Security Council resolution. He was a bon vivant who could drink and socialize into the wee hours of the morning and a fiercely disciplined official who was at his most content holed up in his office at 11 p.m. making phone calls to his UN colleagues several time zones away.

  This is a dual biography. It is the life story of a brave and enigmatic man who saw the world very differently in 2003 than he had when he joined the UN in 1969. At the start of his career he advocated strict adherence to a binding set of principles. Like a good anti-imperialist, he was deeply mistrustful of state power and of military force. But as he moved from Sudan to Lebanon to Cambodia to Bosnia to Congo to Kosovo to East Timor to Iraq, he tailored his tactics to the troubles around him and tried to enlist the powerful. He brought a gritty pragmatism to negotiations, yet no amount of exposure to brutality seemed to dislodge his ideals. Unusually, he managed simultaneously to perform high-stakes peacemaking and nation-building tasks and to reflect critically on them. He thought a lot about legitimacy—about who had it and how they could keep it. He thought about competence and wondered, with all the ingenuity that fueled progress in the developed world, why so little of it was ever made available to assist what he called “convalescing states.” He thought about dignity, noting, “a wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body.”3 He thought, naturally, about how to work with a United States that was deeply ambivalent about—and often hostile to—international institutions and laws. And long before they became catchphrases in the White House, he thought about the nature of evil and the roots of terror. By 2003 he had begun to worry that powerful countries were pursuing their own security in ways that aggravated their peril.

  He had blind spots and made many mistakes, but he never stopped questioning his own decisions or those of the world’s governments. Thus, at the very time he was arranging food deliveries, organizing refugee returns, or negotiating with warlords, he was also pressing colleagues to join him in grappling with such questions as:When should killers be engaged, and when should they be shunned? Can peace be lasting without justice? Can humanitarian aid do more harm than good? Are the UN’s singular virtues— impartiality, independence, and integrity—viable in an age of terror? When is military force necessary? How can its inevitably harmful effects be mitigated? He did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions. He had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.

  The biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello is also the biography of a dangerous world whose ills are too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Although the types of conflict—and the loci of Western attention—have shifted over the last four decades, every generation has had to deal with broken lives and broken societies. Because of the terrible costs of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Americans today seem torn between two impulses. The first is to retreat from global engagement altogether.We do not feel sure that our government or we ourselves know what we are doing. The second is to go abroad to stamp out threats in the hopes of achieving full security. Vieira de Mello’s life reminds us of the impossibility of either course. The United States can no more pack up and turn away from today’s global threats than it can remake the world to its own liking. Vieira de Mello understood that just because he couldn’t cure all ills didn’t mean he should not do what he could to ameliorate some.

  The question, for him and us, is not whether to engage in the world but how to engage. Although he did not have time to formulate a guiding doctrine, he did have a thirty-four-year head start in thinking about the plagues that preoccupy us today: civil war, refugee flows, religious extremism, suppressed national and religious identity, genocide, and terrorism. He started out as a humanitarian, but by 2003 he had become a diplomat and politician, comfortable weighing lesser evils. His professional journey led him to believe the world’s leaders needed to do three big things. First, they had to invest far greater resources in trying to ensure that people enjoyed law and order. Second, they had to engage even the most unsavory militants. Even if they did not find common ground with rogue states or rebels, at least they might acquire a better sense of how to outmaneuver them. And third, they would be wise to orient their activities less around democracy than around individual dignity. And the best way for outsiders to make a dent in enhancing that dignity would be to improve their linguistic and cultural knowledge base, to remind themselves of their own fallibility, to empower those who know their societies best, and to be resilient and adaptable in the face of inevitable setbacks.

  Sergio Vieira de Mello spent more than three decades attempting to save and improve lives—lives that today continue to hang in the balance. As the war drums roll, and as cultural and religious fissures widen into canyons, there is no better time to turn for guidance to a man whose long journey under fire helps to reveal the roots of our current predicament—and perhaps the remedies.

  Part I

  Sergio Vieira de Mello in what would become Bangladesh, November 1971.

  One

  DISPLACED

  Sergio Vieira de Mello’s youth left him with the impression that politics disrupted lives more than it improved them. In March 1964, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, a group of military officers decided to unseat João Goulart, Brazil’s democratically elected president. Under Goulart the rural poor had begun seizing farmland, and the urban poor were staging food riots. The generals accused Goulart of allowing Communists to take over the country. Just five years after the Communist victory in Cuba, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson had similar concerns. The U.S. ambassador in Rio de Janeiro warned that if Washington did not act against Brazil’s “radical left revolutionaries,” the country could become “the China of the 1960s.”1 In an operation code-named “Brother Sam,” four U.S. Navy oil tankers and one U.S. aircraft carrier sailed toward the Brazilian coast in case the generals needed help.2

  They didn’t. President Goulart had some support in the countryside, but much of the public had tired of him. On March 29 the front-page headline of the Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã declared “ENOUGH!” The next day it proclaimed “OUT!”3 A force of ten thousand mutinous Brazilian troops marched from the state of Minas Gerais toward Rio. Goulart ordered his infantry to suppress the revolt, but they chose instead to join the coup, and Goulart fled with his wife and two children to Uruguay.

  Young Sergio was no more political than most teenagers. His focus was on keeping up with his studies (he would finish first in his high school class), following the Botafogo soccer team (which that year would share the prestigious Rio-São Paulo Championship), and chasing girls on the Ipanema beach, just two blocks from his home. But his relatives and schoolteachers had led him to believe that Communism would be bad for Brazil and the military could be trusted to restore order. Brazil’s generals had taken power in 1945, 1954, and 1961 and had ruled benignly and only briefly each time. Since the leaders of the coup promised to hold elections the following year, he joined his family and friends in initially cheering the military takeover.

  “THEIR TRANQUILLITY HAS DISINTEGRATED”

  Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Sergio’s father, had grown up in a farming family in the agricultural hinterland of Bahia, Brazil’s northeastern province.4 Arnaldo and his four siblings had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in Salvador, the province’s capital. After attending university in Rio, Arnaldo worked as an editor and war commentator at A Noite (“The Night”), a leading newspaper at the time. He was determined to pass the entrance exams for the Brazilian foreign ministry, which he did in 1941. So poor that he could afford neither books nor notebooks, Arnaldo did all of his reading at the Rio public library, squeezing his notes onto the palm-sized forms used to order library books. He
carried around plastic bags filled with stacks of such forms and arranged the bags by subject area.

  In 1935 Arnaldo met Gilda Dos Santos, a seventeen-year-old Rio beauty. He quickly befriended her mother, Isabelle Dacosta Santos, an accomplished painter, and her father, Miguel Antonio Dos Santos, a man of many talents who was well known in Rio as a writer of musical theater, a French and German translator, and a poet who ran a jewelry store with his brothers. “Arnaldo is getting engaged to my father,” Gilda joked to friends. The young couple married in 1940 in Rio, and Gilda gave birth to a daughter, Sonia, in 1943 and then to Sergio on March 15, 1948.

  The Vieira de Mellos lived a peripatetic existence typical of diplomatic families. In 1950 Arnaldo, then thirty-six, moved his wife and two children from Argentina, where young Sergio had spent his first two years, to Genoa, Italy. In 1952 Arnaldo was posted back to Brazil, where Sergio lived until he was nearly six. Arnaldo was next sent back to Italy to work at the consulate in Milan, where Sergio and Sonia were enrolled in the local French school. In 1956, the year of the Suez crisis, the family lived in Beirut, and in 1958 they finally settled in Rome, where they lived for four years, one of the longest consecutive stints Sergio would spend in a single city in his entire life.