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

by Samantha Power

  FALLING OFF THE EDGE

  In February 1982, sensing mounting Israeli hostility toward the PLO,Vieira de Mello met with Yassir Arafat in Beirut and warned him that if he did not remove PLO fighters from the UN area, the Israelis would likely take matters into their own hands.16 Abu Walid, Arafat’s chief of staff, gave his “word of honor” that “not one single violation” of the cease-fire was the fault of the PLO.17 Met with such lies,Vieira de Mello knew the UN’s efforts at mediation were hopeless.

  UN officials and Western governments began to fear a second, all-out Israeli invasion. In April 1982 Urquhart, in New York, wrote to General Callaghan in Lebanon: “There is great concern in virtually all quarters here tonight about immediate future Israeli intentions. We have no firm facts to go on but I felt you should be aware of mood here.”18 The two men drew up contingency plans. They agreed that since the Security Council had neither equipped nor mandated the peacekeepers to make war, the blue helmets would stand aside in the event of an Israeli attack. Urquhart was so firm a believer that peacekeepers should avoid using force that when asked once why UN soldiers did not fight back, he said: “Jesus Christ is universally remembered after 2,000 years, but the same cannot be said about his contemporaries who did not turn the other cheek.”19 All UN units in southern Lebanon were informed that the Israelis might soon launch “an airborne, airmobile, amphibious or ground operation, or a combination of these.” In the event of an invasion, Callaghan cabled his troops, the UN radio code signal would be “RUBICON.”20

  The tenuous cease-fire was falling apart and the propaganda war was escalating. On April 21 Israel launched massive air raids against PLO targets in southern Lebanon. It did the same on May 9, and PLO fighters in Tyre fired rockets into northern Israel for the first time in nearly a year. UNIFIL’s chief medical officer in Naqoura began to investigate hospital facilities in Israel, Lebanon, and Cyprus in the event that the UN took mass casualties in a new war.21

  On June 3, 1982, a gunman with the Abu Nidal organization, which the Israelis accused of being linked to the PLO, shot Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, outside the Dorchester Hotel in London.22 On the morning of June 6, General Rafael Eitan, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, summoned Callaghan to Zefat in Israel, some twenty miles from UNIFIL headquarters.Vieira de Mello accompanied his boss and took notes. As soon as the UN team sat down, Eitan told Callaghan that the Israeli army was about to “initiate an operation” to ensure that PLO artillery would no longer reach Israel. Eitan said he “expected” that UN troops would not interfere with the Israeli advance.23

  Callaghan was enraged both by the invasion and by Eitan’s ploy to pull him away from the UN base just as the attack was being staged. “Israel’s behavior is totally unacceptable!” the Irish general exclaimed. Eitan was unmoved. “Our sole targets are the terrorists,” he said. “We shall accomplish our mission as assigned to us by our government.” He told Callaghan that UN resolutions were “a political matter for politicians to deal with,” and that twenty-eight minutes hence Israel would embark on its military operation.24 Callaghan knew that he had to alert his troops immediately. Out of radio range, he had no choice but to deliver the coded message—RUBICON—on an Israeli army phone.25 And remarkably the real humiliation had not yet begun.

  At 11:00 a.m. Israel launched Operation Peace in Galilee and reinvaded Lebanon. It attacked with some 90,000 troops in 1,200 tanks and 4,000 armored vehicles, backed by aircraft and offshore naval units. Israeli troops poured into the country across a flimsy wire fence at the border, and they cut through UN lines—“like a warm knife through butter,” as Urquhart later described it.

  The invasion did not come as a shock. In recent days all UN personnel had heard the sonic boom of Israeli war planes overhead and had seen the Israeli fleet line up in hostile formation off the coast.Vieira de Mello’s mind raced to Annie and their two sons, who were nearby. When he got back to Naqoura and reached her on the telephone, she was frantic with worry. “Sergio, I have never seen so many tanks in my life. The street is packed with them. What is going on?” He said, “They’re coming here.” He assured her that the Israelis would not dare to target the UN itself, but he told her to take the boys to the nearby shelter, where they would be safe in the event that the Palestinians fired their rockets from Tyre. He told her that as soon as Israeli troops allowed UN officials to cross into northern Israel, he would evacuate them back to France, which he did within several days.

  UNIFIL peacekeepers were armed only with light defensive weapons, and one Norwegian soldier was killed by shrapnel the day of the invasion. Most got out of the way of the Israeli assault.26 However, a few mounted resistance. On the coastal road leading north to Tyre, Dutch soldiers planted iron beams in front of an Israeli tank column, ruining the tracks of two oncoming tanks. Elsewhere a French sergeant armed only with a pistol stopped an Israeli tank as it rounded a curve.Thinking the tank was traveling alone, the peacekeeper told the Israeli driver that he had no business entering the UN zone. The tank driver pointed to the curve behind him and said, “Well, you might stop me, but there are 149 tanks just like this one behind me. What are you going to do about them?”

  The Israelis had initially invaded to push the PLO out of rocket range, but once deep inside Lebanon, they kept going. On June 10 they reached the outskirts of Beirut, from where they encircled the city and cut off PLO exit routes. A week later they laid siege to West Beirut, where some 6,000 PLO fighters were cloistered, causing heavy damage to the town and killing more than 5,000 Lebanese .27

  Though he knew he was living through one of the lowest moments in UN history, Vieira de Mello was initially exhilarated. He had never before found himself at the center of such high-stakes political drama. Overnight UN statements made in the sleepy town of Naqoura were suddenly capturing global headlines. Once Annie and the boys had flown back to Europe, he based himself at UNIFIL headquarters full-time.

  Vieira de Mello’s main diplomatic task in the weeks after the invasion was convincing the PLO that the UN was not in cahoots with Israel. Leading Palestinian officials pointed to Callaghan’s meeting with Eitan the day of the invasion as evidence of collusion. Arafat accused UNIFIL of helping the Israelis “stab the Palestinians in the back.”28 The Palestinian deputy representative at the UN in New York denounced the entire institution and said, “We feel this action by the United Nations and by the Israeli invading force has dealt a serious blow to the whole concept of peace-keeping and credibility of the UN.”29

  Vieira de Mello defended the UN’s honor. He drafted a cable to PLO leaders on Callaghan’s behalf, angrily pointing the finger back at the Palestinians for provoking the Israeli invasion. In light of their “unwarranted accusations of collaboration,” he reminded them that the Palestinians had infiltrated the UN area, hijacked UN vehicles, and attacked UN personnel. Since the Palestinians had ignored UN warnings and egged on the Israelis, they should “accept full responsibility” for the invasion.30 Although both Callaghan and Vieira de Mello were even angrier with the Israelis, they knew the invaders controlled the area. Callaghan requested that UN officials in NewYork “avoid any open criticism of the Israelis as this will surely be counterproductive.”31

  As soon as the whirlwind of the initial invasion had passed, the morale of UN peacekeepers—Vieira de Mello included—plummeted. Israel had thumbed its nose at the Security Council resolutions that demanded that Israel stay out of Lebanon, and in the course of invading a neighbor, its forces had trampled on the UN peacekeepers in their way. “We were never going to stop a determined Israeli offensive,” Vieira de Mello wistfully told Goksel, “but do you think we could have made it just a little harder for these bastards? The UN looks pathetic.” The troops serving the UN had been humiliated, but they would return home to their national armed services.Vieira de Mello had come to cherish the UN flag almost as much as he did Brazil’s, and the sting of the invasion would linger.

  Callaghan was adamant that,
however humiliating it might have felt, peacekeepers had been right not to contest the Israelis. “Soldiers don’t like to be marched through, no matter where they come from,” Callaghan said. “But I am the man answerable for these soldiers’ lives. What if I launch an operation against this invasion and twenty of my soldiers are killed? I do not have a mandate to risk the lives of soldiers equipped for self-defense.” He agreed with Urquhart that lightly armed UN peacekeepers could succeed only if the heavily armed warring parties kept their promises.

  After witnessing Callaghan’s sputtering protests on the day of the invasion,Vieira de Mello told colleagues he was sure of one thing: “I will never use the word ‘unacceptable’ again.” There seemed little point in issuing shrill denunciations with nothing more than moral outrage behind them.

  “SORRY STATE OF AFFAIRS”

  UNIFIL had been sent to Lebanon to monitor Israeli troop withdrawals and restore Lebanese sovereignty in the south. Now that Israel had reinvaded and occupied Lebanon outright, Vieira de Mello did not see how UNIFIL could continue. If the blue helmets attempted to remain during a full-scale Israeli occupation, he believed the neutrality of the peacekeepers would end up compromised. “We know that the Americans aren’t going to force Israel out of Lebanon this time,” he told Jean-Claude Aimé, a Haitian UN political officer who worked for the UN in Jerusalem. “Are we to watch Israeli troops mop up?” Aimé favored a UN withdrawal, and Vieira de Mello said he agreed.“If we stay and pretend nothing has happened,” he said, “it’s as if we are condoning their invasion.” He expected the Security Council to shut down the mission, and he began planning his return to Geneva.

  Callaghan pointed to the good that the UN mission was doing in humanitarian terms. “Pulling out would mean conceding totally,” he argued. “The local people depend on us. We can’t leave them on their own.” Since UNIFIL had set up base in southern Lebanon in 1978, some 250,000 civilians had returned to the area. The UN peacekeepers supplied water and electricity, maintained a hospital in Naqoura (run by the Swedes), repaired public buildings and roads, and cleared the area of explosive devices. Instead of throwing out used typewriters, photocopiers, desks, or chairs, the UN donated them to local schools. The peacekeepers also staged what became known as “harvest patrols,” escorting Lebanese civilians whose farms or olive plantations were located along the front lines.32 When he was with Callaghan, Vieira de Mello acted as though he agreed with the general. “Sergio never said, ‘I think UNIFIL should withdraw.’ Never,” recalls Callaghan. “And if that was his opinion he would have said so.”

  Irrespective of whether Vieira de Mello was testing out his ideas or simply telling both men what he thought they most wanted to hear, he knew that UNIFIL officers and civilian officials would have little say in what happened next. The powerful countries on the Security Council would decide whether the UN peacekeepers would pack up and go home.

  And decide they did. On June 18 the Security Council extended UNI-FIL’s mandate.33 Four years after the blue helmets had been sent in to monitor Israel’s withdrawal, they were now being asked, temporarily, to submit to an Israeli occupation and restrict their role to delivering humanitarian aid. “The Security Council told us to stay,” recalls Goksel, “but they basically told us there was nothing for us to do. The signal we got was, ‘Do what you can to justify your salaries.’ We felt useless. We hid in Naqoura and tried to become invisible. After that, even Sergio didn’t want to go around saying, ‘I’m a UN guy.’”

  Vieira de Mello repeatedly telephoned UN Headquarters in New York in search of consolation. It was the first time in his life that he was part of something that was being publicly condemned and ridiculed. He insisted on replaying June 6, the day of the invasion, again and again.“Is there something else I could have done?” he askedVirendra Dayal, the UN secretary-general’s chief of staff with whom he had worked in Bangladesh. Dayal tried to soothe his colleague. “Sergio, what could you as a young man have done all by yourself in the face of a massive land, air, and naval invasion?” Dayal wanted him to pass through New York on his way to Brazil for home leave in July. He thought a debriefing might help. But when he reached New York,Vieira de Mello just kept up his second-guessing. “Stop lacerating yourself,” Dayal urged. But his junior colleague was adamant: “We should have made more of a show,” Vieira de Mello said.

  However degrading it had been to be part of the UNIFIL mission before the Israeli invasion, it felt far worse afterward. WhenVieira de Mello returned to Lebanon after his leave, he found that Israeli forces were keeping UN officials largely pinned down to the UN base in Naqoura.The Israelis seemed to hope that their invasion would cause the peacekeepers to leave.They closed the Lebanese-Israeli border to UN personnel and vehicles at will, blocking resupply and personnel rotation convoys, and they denied UN personnel flight permission except for rare medical emergencies. The Israeli press suggested that the UN was passing information to Palestinian terrorists about Israeli military positions. In a cable to Urquhart, Callaghan criticized Israel’s “official smear campaign” against UNIFIL and begged UN officials in New York to approach the Israeli delegation so as “to put a firm stop to this sorry state of affairs.”34

  Vieira de Mello staged small acts of civil disobedience, refusing to submit requests for travel permits to the Israeli authorities, moving around without escorts, and often sitting in his vehicle at Israeli checkpoints in the hot sun for entire afternoons, refusing to allow the Israelis to search his car. “We are the United Nations,” he would fume, sometimes astonishing Goksel. “Can’t you see the flag? We will not submit to the will of an illegal occupying force.” When he briefed incoming units of peacekeepers, he gave them the same advice he himself would receive from friends before leaving for Iraq in 2003, urging them to avoid close association with the occupiers, so as to maintain the faith of the populace.

  After Vieira de Mello received his doctorate in 1974, Robert Misrahi, his adviser, had persuaded him to pursue a “state doctorate,” the highest and most competitive degree offered by the French university system.Vieira de Mello had done so, working intermittently but intensely on what he considered to be his most ambitious philosophical work. The only bright side to the paralysis of the UN mission in Lebanon was that he had time to dive more deeply into his thesis in a region where many of his ideas were being tested. When he corresponded with Misrahi, he lamented the inadequacy of philosophical tools.“Things are much more complicated in practice,” he told his professor. “Philosophical ideas must be applicable on the ground, and the field should be their only judge, their only criteria.”35 When Misrahi visited Israel on personal business, he met with his pupil and applauded his attempts to apply philosophy to his humanitarian and diplomatic work. But he thought Vieira de Mello could not expect mere reason and dialogue to yield conversion when little mutual understanding existed among the factions. “Just going and meeting with the enemy is not enough to establish reciprocal respect,” Misrahi insisted, urging him to take a longer view of human progress. “History is slow,” Misrahi says. “Vieira de Mello thought it could be quick.”36

  The Israeli invasion had chased the PLO and Yassir Arafat north to Beirut. The Palestinians were encircled. Fearing a massacre and hoping to end the siege peacefully, the United States, France, and Italy decided to deploy a Multinational Force, totally separate from the UN peacekeeping mission that was based in the southern part of the country. In August 1982, 800 U.S. troops, 800 French, and 400 Italians assisted with the evacuation of besieged Palestinian fighters and fanned out to the outskirts of Beirut to protect the sprawling settlements filled with Palestinian refugees.37 After some 15,000 Palestinians and Syrians left West Beirut, Arafat himself made his way to Greece, and then went on to Tunisia.

  The Western forces departed almost as quickly as they had arrived, retreating from Beirut on September 10, 1982, under banners of MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.38 With their exit the responsibility for ensuring the safety of the remaining half-million Palestinian
civilians in Lebanon passed to the Lebanese government, which was weak and divided.When Bashir Gemayel, the newly elected Christian president of Lebanon, was assassinated on September 14, Israeli-backed Christian militia intent on exacting revenge closed in on the Palestinian camps. Speaking from Rome,Yassir Arafat pleaded for the Multinational Force to return: “I ask Italy, France and the United States: What of your promise to protect the inhabitants of Beirut?”39 On September 16, as Israeli soldiers looked on, the militia forces entered the undefended Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. In the two days that followed, in the name of flushing out Palestinian terrorists, the militia murdered more than seven hundred men, women, and children.40

  On September 20, 1982, largely in response to the massacres, President Ronald Reagan announced his intention to redeploy U.S. Marines to Beirut. “Millions of us have seen pictures of the Palestinian victims of this tragedy,” Reagan said. “There is little that words can add, but there are actions we can and must take.”41 The Western countries that had sent armed contingents in August now offered larger forces: 1,400 American soldiers, 1,400 Italians, and 1,500 French (including 500 who were reassigned from UNIFIL) returned to Lebanon, accompanied by armored vehicles, mortars, and heavy artillery.42 Initially, their presence seemed to calm tensions.