Israel’s fight, up until that point, had been with the Palestinians. But with their occupation of Lebanon, Israeli forces began to meet new resistance— that of Lebanese Shiites. In January 1983, with the UNIFIL mandate in southern Lebanon up for renewal again, Urquhart flew to Jerusalem and met with the Israelis, whose occupying forces were suffering a growing number of casualties. In his notes on the trip, he wrote that he observed “a genuine desire amongst intelligent Israelis to get out of Lebanon before it overwhelms them.They have certainly bitten off more than they can chew.”43 The Israelis would not withdraw from Lebanon for eighteen years. They would lose 675 soldiers there.
Urquhart’s visit to Lebanon gave Vieira de Mello his first chance to spend time with a legendary UN figure. For once he made a terrible impression. After they had dinner together in a Turkish restaurant, Urquhart wrote in his diary that Vieira de Mello had
a very severe case of localitis and constantly lecture[d] and boom[ed] at one about the iniquities of the Israelis, the humiliating position in which UNIFIL finds itself, etc., etc. I got rather annoyed at this and pointed out to de Mello that since he had been in UNIFIL nothing has happened to compare with all the things that had happened before, not to mention the experiences that some of us had had in other parts of the world, and that humiliation was in the eye of the observer.
Urquhart concluded his entry with a stinging verdict on his ambitious young colleague. “He has become a great prima donna and cry-baby, and I think he should be sent back to the High Commissioner for Refugees as soon as possible.”44
TAKING SIDES
For all of his frustrations as a UN official, Vieira de Mello knew that the Multinational Force in Beirut wasn’t faring much better. On his periodic trips to the capital, he continued to see Ryan Crocker at the U.S. embassy. Entering an American embassy in the 1980s was nowhere near as challenging as it would later become. Like any visitor, he could walk right past a Lebanese army checkpoint, up the driveway, and into the main lobby of the eight-story building. Only then would he present his ID card and make his business known to U.S. guards.
At 1:05 p.m. on April 18, 1983, when Vieira de Mello was back in southern Lebanon, a man in a leather jacket drove a black delivery van with five hundred pounds of explosives through the embassy’s front entrance.The blast, which destroyed the van and all traces of its driver, killed fifty people, including seventeen Americans. It was the first-ever suicide bomb attack against a U.S. target, the opening salvo in an unconventional battle that would not command significant high-level attention until the al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001.
When Vieira de Mello next saw Crocker, who had narrowly escaped the blast, the two men commiserated on the impossible task of putting Lebanon back together again. “This is a hopeless mess,” said Vieira de Mello. “I see no way out that is going to be good for anyone—not the UN, the Lebanese, the U.S., nor Israel. No way out whatsoever.” Crocker agreed. “There is a new player on the court out there,” the U.S. diplomat noted, “and this player is definitely changing the rules of the game.” They wondered aloud how this new breed of Islamic fighter willing to die for his cause would be suppressed.
Vieira de Mello’s tour in Lebanon was winding down, and in his last weeks he tried to ensure that a small incident would not ignite a far larger one. On March 30, 1983, a jumpy Fijian soldier manning a UN checkpoint had shot and killed a highly respected forty-year-old Lebanese doctor named Khalil Kaloush. Upon learning of the incident, Vieira de Mello, Goksel, and a small UN delegation proceeded to Kaloush’s hometown to meet with the village chiefs, who demanded compensation, or “blood money.”45
When the grieving family rejected Vieira de Mello’s request to attend the funeral, he had UNIFIL send a floral wreath, which the family also turned away. But he didn’t give up, visiting the Kaloush family multiple times and telling them that he understood that the UN had to pay up. Dr. Kaloush’s’s widow asked that the couple’s four children, who ranged in age from four to ten, be educated. Over a ten-year period this would cost around $150,000.
Vieira de Mello knew that the New York bureaucracy was no match for a tribal culture prone to exacting swift revenge. UN administrative staff initially told him that the hurdles would be insurmountable. But after weeks of badgering, he finally received permission to dispense the funds.46 In one of his few victories in eighteen months in Lebanon, on June 23, he delivered the payment to Mrs. Kaloush. A week later his Lebanon mission came to an end, and he returned to Geneva.
Back at a desk at UNHCR, Vieira de Mello watched, horrified, as the Western troops in the Multinational Force in Beirut ratcheted up their fire-power against the Lebanese armed groups. U.S. warships off the coast of Beirut and U.S. Marines in the city offered military backing for the beleaguered Lebanese army, which was at war with other Lebanese armed groups. In September and October six U.S. servicemen were killed in action and fifty were wounded. In a lengthy analysis in October 1983, NewYork Times Beirut correspondent Thomas Friedman described the shift: “Without anyone really noticing it at first, the Marines here have been transformed during the last month of fighting from a largely symbolic peacekeeping force—welcomed by all—to just one more faction in the internal Lebanese conflict.”47 Vieira de Mello disapproved of what was occurring. “They have taken sides,” he noted to a colleague. “They’ve lost any appearance of neutrality. And when you throw neutrality away, you better hope you’ve chosen the right side.”
On October 19, 1983, at a televised press conference in Washington, D.C., a Washington Times reporter and former U.S. Marine named Jeremiah O’Leary asked President Reagan why U.S. troops had set up their base at Beirut airport on flat terrain instead of finding high ground elsewhere in the city. Reagan said that since the Marines in Lebanon were not performing a traditional combat role, they observed different rules. U.S. forces were peacekeepers, he said, not war fighters.
Four days later, at around 6:20 a.m., a yellow Mercedes truck carrying 2,500 pounds of TNT entered an empty public airport parking lot, circled the parking lot twice so as to pick up speed, and plowed through a six-foot-high iron fence around the U.S. Marine barracks. By the time the U.S. sentry guarding the compound had installed a bullet clip into his previously unloaded gun, the truck had already barreled past. A fourteen-foot-long, foot-and-a-half-thick black barrier usually helped block the building entrance, but Marines had removed it the previous day for a Saturday-afternoon country-western concert and pizza party.48 Although one Marine fired on the oncoming vehicle and another threw himself in front of it, the truck easily plowed into the lobby of the four-story building. When the driver detonated his explosives, the blast blew bodies out of the building as far as fifty yards away and left a crater thirty feet deep and forty feet wide.49 A total of 241 American servicemen were killed in what was at that time the deadliest terrorist attack that had ever been carried out against Americans.50
Initially President Reagan was defiant. Appearing with his wife, Nancy, his voice trembling, the president decried the “bestial nature” of the attack and stressed that such people “cannot take over that vital and strategic area of the earth or for that matter any other part of the earth.”51 He quickly dispatched three hundred more U.S. troops. “Many Americans are wondering why we must keep our forces in Lebanon,” Reagan said.“We cannot pick and choose where we will support freedom.”52 Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger suggested that Moscow might be behind the suicide attack. “The Soviets love to fish in troubled waters,” he said.53 In a formal address to the nation Reagan described the good that U.S. forces were doing, staving off Soviet influence, stabilizing a “powder-keg” region, safeguarding energy resources, and protecting Israel. “Would the terrorists have launched their suicide attacks against the Multinational Force if it were not doing its job?” he asked.54 Reagan appointed a new Middle East envoy. He chose a man who had served as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford and who would again serve as secretary of defense under Ge
orge W. Bush: the fifty-one-year-old Donald Rumsfeld.
The U.S. public was angered by the death toll, the continued sniper and shelling attacks against Americans, and the confusion about what U.S. troops were doing in Lebanon.55 Although Reagan initially ignored the public unrest, by February 1984 he had announced that he was “re-concentrating” U.S. forces. The last of the Marines had left by the end of the month. With Congress crying, “Bring our men home,” Reagan complained, “All this can do is stimulate the terrorists and urge them on to further attacks.”56
In 2003, on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the Marine barracks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would say that his experience as Reagan’s envoy in Lebanon had shaped his approach to fighting twenty-first-century terrorism. When U.S. forces left Beirut in 1984, Rumsfeld said, the United States had mistakenly shown extremists that “terrorism works.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, by contrast,Washington would “take the war to them, to go after them where they are, where they live, where they plan, where they hide.”57 He noted,“We can’t simply defend. We can’t hunker down and hope they’ll go away.”58 That, for Rumsfeld, was the “lesson of Lebanon.”
Vieira de Mello drew a different lesson. Any doubts he had about whether UNIFIL should have fought back in the face of the Israeli invasion were dispelled. If UN peacekeepers were to surrender their neutrality, as the troops in the Multinational Force had done, they would be viewed as combatants. He had come to appreciate the tangible virtues of the UN’s commitment to impartiality. More than a decade would pass before—in a peacekeeping mission in the Balkans—he would realize that impartiality too carried grave risks.
Three
BLOOD RUNNING BLUE
COMMITMENTS FOR LIFE
Vieira de Mello had joined the UN in 1969 by happenstance, but he gradually came to see the UN not merely as his place of employment but as his family and the embodiment of his evolving political ideals. By the 1980s he had grown used to the red tape and had committed the UN Charter’s provisions to memory with the same zeal with which he had once memorized the teachings of Karl Marx. His colleagues saw that he had a fiercely pragmatic side, but they also began teasing him that his blood had begun to run, not red, but “UN blue.”
In August 1983, after returning from Lebanon,Vieira de Mello was named UNHCR deputy head of personnel services. He would work directly under Kofi Annan, who in 1996 would become the first UN official ever to work his way up the UN ranks to become secretary-general. Vieira de Mello helped Annan restructure the personnel office, which oversaw recruitment, hiring, promotions, and overseas postings. Annan made him the first head of training.“Sergio liked to explain, he liked to teach, he liked to talk about the organization, where he had been, what he had done, what he had learned,” Annan recalls. The two men became friends, but Annan, who was divorced, left the office every day at 5 p.m. to meet his son after school, so they rarely socialized.
The UNHCR of 1983 was very different from the agency Vieira de Mello had joined in 1969. Its regular budget had grown sixtyfold, from $6 million to $400 million, and its staff had exploded from 140 to more than 700 in some 80 offices around the globe. What had been a European organization had become truly international. He no longer knew the names of most of his colleagues.
Vieira de Mello adorned his new office with the plaques and ribbons given to him by the battalions that had served in Lebanon. “What is this, Sergio? You’ve started playing with guns?” Jamshid Anvar, his Iranian colleague, said playfully. “Well, well, Lebanon has turned our resident Marxist into a bourgeois militarist!” Vieira de Mello laughed good-naturedly and then said seriously that the soldiers who served the UN were not militarists.
Yet whatever his boyish pride at his newfound experience working with the military, he also confessed his sense of shame over the humiliations that the UN force had suffered in Lebanon. Even though the suicide attacks against the American and French units in Lebanon had convinced him that UN peacekeepers should not become combatants, he described the mission as a “black chapter” in his life. “The UN was powerless,” he told colleagues. “It was awful.”
Sometimes, when he spoke about the UN’s aspirations, he could sound credulous. He said he strove to observe the Hammarskjöld principles—“independence, integrity, impartiality”—a reference to the UN’s legendary Swedish secretary-general who was killed in a plane crash in Congo in 1961. Once when he and Jahanshah Assadi, a close colleague from Iran, were working all night to prepare a report in time for a meeting of UNHCR’s governing executive committee, Vieira de Mello burst into their shared office with tears in his eyes.The Tanzanian ambassador, who was chairing the executive committee, had read over his summary of the day’s events and accused him of giving a biased rendition of the discussion. “He thinks I’m being partial here, that I’m not being objective, that I’m playing favorites,” Vieira de Mello said almost desperately. Assadi tried to console him. “Aw, Sergio, every government has its own agenda, just forget about it, let it go.” But he couldn’t. “I am partial,” he said. “But I am partial to the mission of the United Nations.” Assadi, who was taken aback by his agitation, recalls, “For Sergio, the worst insult someone could hurl at you was that you were not behaving like a proper UN person.” He carried his UN passport proudly and treated it as though it constituted a nationality of its own. “I’m not Latin American,” he would tell non-UN people. “I’m not Brazilian.”1
Often after work, instead of driving immediately back to his home just across the French-Swiss border in Massongy, he would head out with Antonio Carlos Diegues Santana, a fellow Brazilian who ran UNHCR’s field support unit. They would speak in Portuguese about Brazilian politics, play pinball, and drink beer.Vieira de Mello prided himself on his ties to Brazil, and even his insistence that everyone call him “Sergio” was a relic from his country, where public figures go by familiar names (Pelé, Lula, etc.). Still, he was not nearly as politically active as his friend. His leftist rage had by then largely evaporated, and he saw no harm in stopping by the Brazilian mission in Geneva to pick up that week’s Brazilian newspapers and magazines. Diegues Santana refused to set foot inside the building because it represented the military regime. He told Vieira de Mello that the day the generals stepped down would be the day he returned to his homeland.
When that day finally came, in March 1985, and Diegues Santana announced that he intended to leave the UN and return to Brazil, Vieira de Mello initially didn’t believe him. “If I am still stuck here in Geneva in three months’ time,” Diegues Santana said to a small circle of friends gathered for a drink,“I will take a knife to my guts and commit suicide.” Vieira de Mello laughed and said dramatically, “No, no, if you are still here in three months, I promise, with all of our friends here as witnesses, I will take a knife to your guts!” Diegues Santana could tell that his friend had not understood that he was serious about leaving. When he submitted his resignation a few weeks later, he and Vieira de Mello ended up out on the bar’s terrace in an hour-long heated argument, both men gesturing wildly with their hands and swearing at each other in their native tongue. “Sergio didn’t believe I would leave,” Diegues Santana recalls. “It was not because of me. It was because of the organization. He thought it was the most important thing in the whole world.”
Vieira de Mello offset his seeming priggishness about UN principles by flamboyantly playing up his love of women. He would be known throughout his career for treating cafeteria workers, security guards, and maintenance staff with unusual respect, prompting Omar Bakhet, an Eritrean colleague,to compliment him on his egalitarianism.“But, Omar, I am not a true egalitarian,” he said. “I don’t see class, race, or religion, but I most definitely see gender!” Once, as he entered La Glycine, his favorite restaurant in Geneva, with his Italian colleague Salvatore Lombardo, he exclaimed in Italian, “Look around you. What has happened?” Lombardo wasn’t sure what he meant. “Come è possibile che ci non è una donna in questo ristorante?” Vieira de Me
llo asked, openmouthed. “How is it possible that there is not a single woman in this restaurant?” After the two men sat down and began to discuss refugee matters, the door to the restaurant opened, and he cut Lombardo off midsentence. “Finally!” he exclaimed, leaping out of his seat and beginning a slow, rhythmic clap. Initially the patrons in the restaurant did not know what he was applauding, but one by one, as they looked around, they realized the significance of the woman’s arrival and joined in. In under a minute the unsuspecting woman had roused a thunderous standing ovation from the male-only lunchtime crowd.
His reputation as a ladies’ man followed him throughout his career, and he seemed to relish the rumors of his exploits. In 1982 Mark Malloch Brown, a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried British aid worker who a quarter-century later would become deputy secretary-general of the UN under Annan, had spent several months pursuing an attractive British UNHCR official. After finally spending the night in her apartment, Malloch Brown awoke buoyantly the next morning, only to notice that beside her alarm clock was a framed photograph of the woman with her parents—and Vieira de Mello. “If it was just Sergio, that wouldn’t have been so bad,” Malloch Brown recalls. “But it was clear Sergio had already insinuated himself in the deepest quarters of this woman’s life. I didn’t stand a chance!”
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 7
