Vieira de Mello claimed a huge amount of freedom in his marriage. Early on Annie complained about the phone calls from women and his late-night arrivals, but eventually she grew resigned. “Nothing I said was going to change him,” she remembers, “and when I complained, it just made him angry.” He would tell his friends, “Everybody has a cross to bear in life, and I am Annie’s cross.”
Over the years he would have several significant relationships with women, but he was unwilling to give up his home life, which anchored him. In the mid-1980s he told a UN friend, Fabienne Morisset, “I will never get divorced—neither from my marriage nor from the UN.” When his sons were young, he brought his family back to Brazil every two years on UN home leave. He also took them on a skiing holiday every winter, and in periods when he was based in Geneva, he drove the boys to school every morning on his way to work. Even though he often worked late during the week, he and Annie were known for hosting barbecues and dinner parties on the weekends. When guests came to the house, he wandered around in his bedroom slippers, boasting about his one culinary specialty, feijoada, the Brazilian national stew that is a potpourri of pork, ham, sausage, spices, and carefully soaked beans.
He likely would not have been able to work in the places he did—or rise at the pace he did—if his chief priority had been raising his sons. As his career progressed, he never stopped accepting the most challenging assignments, no matter how dangerous or remote they were. His willingness to go wherever he was needed—whenever—was unique. Many of his peers who embraced jobs in Geneva and New York did not like desk jobs, but they understood that being in the office would enable them to stay close to home while their children grew up.Vieira de Mello lived a daily zero-sum game: The more he traveled, the more skilled a UN troubleshooter he became, and the less he met the daily needs of his family.
He maintained close ties with a few of his childhood Brazilian friends, including Flavio da Silveira, who still lived in Geneva. But he spent most of his after-hours time with his colleagues from work. Curiously, he often sought out the company of the more cynical UN staffers. Alexander “Sacha” Casella, an Italian-Czech who was twenty-two years his senior, was one UN official who believed life was nasty, brutish, and short and could hardly contain his skepticism about the motives of UN member states, senior officials, and human beings in general. To any colleague bordering on earnest, Casella would offer one of his maxims. “Living is a prelude to death,” he would say. “Marriage is a prelude to divorce.” Exhibiting ethical behavior within an unethical system was unwise. “You should never tell the truth,” Casella said. “People will take you for granted. Even if you see someone in the hall and you’re going to a meeting, tell them you are going to the bathroom.” And he liked to recite a parable that he believed summed up humanitarianism:
A bird gets stuck in the mud. The bird makes noises to try to get the attention of those who might come to his rescue. A farmer hears the noises, arrives at the scene, chops the head off the bird, and eats it for dinner.The moral of this story is, “If you get stuck, don’t make noises; if you make noises, it will not necessarily be your friend who comes to help; and in the end whoever saves you will likely eat you.”
Vieira de Mello frequently asked Casella to accompany him on his missions overseas. “You are so cynical that having you around helps me understand the mind-set of the killers and crooks,” he told his friend. Casella urged him to stop taking UN life so seriously and once handed him an envelope: “Sergio, the only thing that should anger you is when this doesn’t come.” Vieira de Mello opened the envelope, and inside the envelope he found another envelope. Inside that was a third. And finally in a tiny envelope, he found Casella’s intended pick-me-up device: a UNHCR pay stub.
But while the UN offered its professional employees good salaries and generous benefits,Vieira de Mello did not stay with the UN for the money. He saw it as the place a person of his nationality and background could best make a difference in the world. While European academia had no place for him, the UN valued what he had to offer. He imagined himself soaring to great heights within the organization. “When I die, I will have a state funeral,” he told Heidi Cervantes, a Swiss girlfriend. “I would like every one of my girlfriends to come to my funeral and walk behind my coffin. You’ll come, right?”
Cervantes could not tell if he was serious. “How do you know you will be so important as to deserve a state funeral?” she asked.
“I will be an important man,” he said. “You will see.”
“Do you want to become an ambassador?” she asked.
He was aghast. “No way,” he said.“Any Swiss jerk can become an ambassador. I want to become the UN secretary-general.”
Cervantes laughed. “At your funeral, Sergio, they will say your only fault was your modesty.”
RULES OF THE GAME
Vieira de Mello had come to understand that devotion to the UN meant serving at the whim of his supervisors and being prepared to pack up and move to a new region on a moment’s notice. In 1986, at thirty-eight, he eagerly took up a position as UNHCR regional representative for South America with responsibility for a dozen countries. He rented a home in Buenos Aires, where he expected Annie and their two sons, seven and five, to join him. He was elated, as the assignment would enable him to visit his mother more often than he had been able to do since he left Rio in 1966. It would also allow him to leave his desk job. “The restless part of Sergio would come to you and say, ‘I need another challenge.’ Then you would know he was bored,” Annan remembers. “He felt there was nothing more he could bring to a job or he didn’t have the space to do what he wanted to do. Being in the field gave him room for creativity. He knew himself and the environment in which he did best.”
No sooner had he arrived in Buenos Aires than UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar announced that Jean-Pierre Hocké, a forty-seven-year-old Swiss national, would take over as the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees.2 Having pledged to reinvigorate the agency by drawing on its youth, Hocké summoned Vieira de Mello back to Geneva to serve as his chief of staff.8 Annie, who had just boxed up their life in Massongy, was forced to adjust to yet another life-changing promotion. “Let’s just say I had stopped cracking open the bottles of champagne,” she says. Though Vieira de Mello was returning to Geneva to take up a senior position, he was uncharacteristically melancholy. “I have broken my promise to my mother yet again,” he told an Argentinian friend. “She will be devastated.” The demands of the UN had come to take precedence over all others.
The United States had aggressively pushed for Hocké’s appointment. In UNHCR’s early decades Washington had prized the agency as a vehicle for resettling refugees fleeing Communism. But by the 1980s U.S. impatience with wastefulness in the UN system was spilling over into its dealings even with UNHCR. In 1985 the U.S. Congress passed a law for the first time requiring that America’s annual dues to the UN be reduced pending major UN reform.The Reagan administration expected Hocké to run a lean shop.
Vieira de Mello was excited by the little he knew about his new boss. Hocké came from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a well-regarded humanitarian organization that tried to ensure that in wartime the rights of civilians and prisoners were respected. He had managed all of ICRC’s field operations and had personally headed missions in Nigeria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Vietnam.When Hocké learned that the Somalian government had claimed double the number of refugees in its camps, so as to feed its army with the extra aid, the high commissioner temporarily suspended relief. He vowed to tackle the chronic refugee crises, or the “Palestinization” of refugee populations like the Afghans in Pakistan. He reminded UN staff and donor countries that the long-term care the UN offered refugees was nothing to boast about: It simply showed that conditions in the refugees’ home countries were not improving. And he took the radical step of arguing that it wasn’t enough to press neighboring countries to grant asylum to those fleeing persecution; UNHCR had to work
with the other UN bodies to end poverty and persecution in their countries of origin. Vieira de Mello, who admired his new boss’s energy and ideas, supplied the scotch for early-evening gossip and brainstorming sessions in Hocké’s office. He kept the Black Label hidden in the hard-file folder marked “Organization of American States” and the Red Label disguised in the “Organization of African Unity” folder.
But Hocké’s relations with other staff members quickly deteriorated, as he was seen to micromanage field operations from afar and to dismiss alternative viewpoints. He also raised less money than UNHCR was spending, and the agency fell into debt for the first time in its history.3 Détente had set in between the Soviet Union and the United States, and Washington stopped treating refugees as pawns in the larger ideological struggle and reduced its contribution to UNHCR accordingly. After a year serving as chief of staff and another year as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, Vieira de Mello started to believe that the discontent among staff and the decisions by donor countries to cut back their contributions were harming his home agency. He came to the conclusion that his colleagues had reached months before: for the good of the UN, Hocké had to go. “He has lost the plot,” Vieira de Mello told Morisset.
In the fall of 1989 a group of disgruntled UNHCR staff members (not including Vieira de Mello) sent a dossier on Hocké to donor governments and to a Swiss television crew. They charged, accurately, that Hocké had dipped into a special Danish fund for his personal use, spending some $300,000 to fly himself and his wife on the Concorde and regularly upgrading his business-class flights to first class, which, at a time of U.S.-driven fiscal belt-tightening, only the UN secretary-general was permitted to do.4 Although Washington had backed Hocké’s candidacy, U.S. support dried up.
In late October 1989 Dennis McNamara, a New Zealander who was one of Vieira de Mello’s closest friends at UNHCR, jubilantly told his friend, “Sergio, he’s resigned.” “Who?” Vieira de Mello asked. “Who?! Hocké, you ass,” said McNamara. “That’s bullshit,” Vieira de Mello said. The two men scrambled around agency headquarters to confirm the high commissioner’s departure. The headline in Le Monde the next day summed up his aborted tenure: RESIGNATION OF MR. J-P HOCKÉ: GOOD MANAGER BUT TOO AUTHORITARIAN.5 Although Hocké had given him the biggest promotion of his career, Vieira de Mello did not stop by his office as he boxed up his belongings. Nor did he send Hocké a farewell note. “Other people I didn’t give a damn about,” Hocké recalls, “but from Sergio, a friend, I expected more.”
A year later Vieira de Mello arranged a meeting with the fallen high commissioner, who was working in downtown Geneva. “Jean-Pierre, you look so well,” Vieira de Mello said, cheerily inquiring after his family and new line of work but making no mention of what had happened and offering no apology for his silence. “He seemed to want to clear the air without clearing the air,” says Hocké. “He wanted to be admired by everyone, to be on good terms with everyone. He was basically a seducer. He tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but I wasn’t prepared to go along with that.” When Hocké heard that Vieira de Mello had returned to UNHCR headquarters and told colleagues that they had resolved their differences, he wrote his former chief of staff a bitter letter in which he informed him that he would not forget his disloyalty. Vieira de Mello made no further attempts at rapprochement.
Thorvald Stoltenberg, who had been Norway’s foreign minister, succeeded Hocké but quit after ten months to reclaim his old job in Oslo. “Politicians come here to build their careers but not to serve refugees,” Vieira de Mello fumed, making a mental note that former elected officials who were appointed to senior UN posts would bring Rolodexes and fund-raising savvy but would usually lack fealty to the UN itself.
Vieira de Mello’s own loyalty to the UN deepened by the day, even as the organization’s flaws continued to reveal themselves. One of his main annoyances was that no matter how fast he found himself rising in the UN system, his nationality would ultimately matter as much as, if not more than, his performance. He saw this on countless occasions, but in 1990, after Stoltenberg’s exit, he witnessed a rare occasion where a friend of his,Virendra Dayal, fought back. Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar asked Dayal, his chief of staff, to become the high commissioner. Dayal, a fifty-five-year-old Oxford-educated Indian national, had worked at UNHCR from 1965 to 1972, serving under Jamieson during the Bangladesh emergency. He understood that the agency was struggling and was eager to bail it out. But no sooner had Pérez de Cuéllar publicly revealed his intention to appoint Dayal than an unnamed U.S. official—suspected to be John Bolton, who was then President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for international organizations and would later become George W. Bush’s controversial ambassador to the UN—was quoted in the NewYork Times slamming the secretary-general’s choice and saying that the United States wanted to see a prominent politician from a rich country in the job rather than a UN bureaucrat from the developing world.
Dayal was livid. He gathered the press in the secretary-general’s conference room on the thirty-eighth floor of UN Headquarters and let loose. He said he felt “great pain” that certain people were “more comfortable with second-level politicians from the first world rather than with first-rate international civil servants from the third world.”6 He’d had enough. “To hell with this,” he said. “I’m going back to India to tend to my garden.” With Dayal’s exit, Bolton triumphantly hailed the fact that donor countries could now “get control of this process.” A nominee’s experience working on refugee issues was a plus, he stressed, but should not be “a determining factor.”7
Vieira de Mello, who had been unhappy about the turmoil at UNHCR, delightedly passed photocopies of Dayal’s angry press briefing around UNHCR headquarters. “Thank god somebody has spoken about the ridiculous tradition of reserving certain posts for certain nationalities,” he told Dayal. He revered the UN’s commitment to multinationality but hated being reminded, as he was on a near-daily basis, that “some nations were more equal than others.”
In December 1990 Pérez de Cuéllar nominated Sadako Ogata, a sixty-three-year-old Japanese political science professor, to become high commissioner. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of California-Berkeley, she was the first woman and the first academic to fill the post. In lobbying on Ogata’s behalf, the Japanese government had promised to increase its contribution to the refugee agency were she selected. And so it did, doubling its contribution from $52 million in 1990 to $113 million the following year.
THE HOUR OF THE UNITED NATIONS:
THE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN OF ACTION
What Vieira de Mello found most frustrating about UNHCR’s leadership setbacks was that they coincided with heady times at the United Nations as a whole. In the late 1980s, with the waning of U.S.-Soviet tensions, the entire organization had a prominence and a sense of possibility that it had not had since its founding in 1945. The president of the UN General Assembly, Dante Caputo of Argentina, reflected the spirit of the moment when he noted, “This, more than any earlier time, is the hour of the United Nations.”8
The UN’s “hour,” as far as Vieira de Mello was concerned, was long overdue. In a world of conflict, repression, and extreme poverty, he had come to see the UN as the only body that could serve both as a humanitarian actor in its own right and as a platform for governments to identify common interests and pool their resources to meet global challenges. The end of the cold war meant that more countries could use the UN as the forum in which to debate their differences. He thought it would also mean that the powerful countries with permanent seats on the UN Security Council would be more prone to act collectively to defuse threats to international peace and security.
Hopes that once had sounded impossibly naïve suddenly became mainstream. And in 1988 and 1989, as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, responsible for overseeing agency policy throughout the region, Vieira de Mello saw firsthand how salutary the new climate could be, as he worked to help resolve one of the
messiest chapters of the cold war: the displacement of the Vietnamese “boat people.” It was his role in these negotiations that would begin to give him a name outside the UN.
Remarkably, more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese were still washing up on the shores of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand. Indeed, in Hong Kong, for instance, where 3,395 boat people had arrived in 1987, a whopping 8,900 arrived in May 1989 alone.9 Most of them were likely fleeing not political persecution but economic hardship.10 Compounding the challenge, Western countries that had once been generous in resettling the Vietnamese had stiffened their entry criteria.11 This meant that Vietnam’s neighbors were stuck sheltering boat people whom the United States refused to resettle but whom Washington also insisted not be sent back to Vietnam. The countries bordering Vietnam were fed up and started denying the Vietnamese access to their shores—deputizing fishermen to ram the boat people so they would not be able to land and herding those who arrived into squalid, overcrowded camps.12
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 8
