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

by Samantha Power

  Vieira de Mello inherited a multiyear effort by UNHCR staff and by Western diplomats to resolve the matter. Each person who fled Vietnam had a different story. Neighboring countries could not treat all of them as economic migrants. Some individuals would in fact face violent reprisals if they were sent back to Vietnam. As the guardian of refugee law, UNHCR had to help find a way to ensure that Vietnamese civilians who faced genuine political threats would continue to be admitted. Vieira de Mello had to try to persuade key governments to allow case-by-case screenings.

  He spent thirteen months shuttling between the major Western capitals and the East Asian countries where the refugees were being crammed into camps. He stroked the egos of ambassadors and tried to convince them that a multifaceted compromise was in their long-term interest. He developed a habit that would never leave him. On the road constantly, he would scribble notes from his meetings onto hotel stationery pads. On these tiny slips of paper—probably no larger than the library request slips his father had amassed—he would spell out the key talking points for everything from meetings with minor consular officials to major plenary addresses. His colleagues marveled at how one so fastidious could end up delivering pivotal remarks while reading from a Hilton Hotel note pad. “Is that the best you can do?”Assadi ribbed him. “Look, I’m always moving so these pads are convenient,” Vieira de Mello replied. “But I’ve also learned over the years that if I can’t fit my argument on a hotel note pad, I probably don’t know what I’m trying to say!” Just as his mother, Gilda, had helped organize his father’s library scraps, Vieira de Mello’s secretary at UNHCR grew accustomed to unusual piles turning up in her in-box. “Would you mind typing this up for the files?” he would ask, handing her palm-sized shards of paper covered in his miniature handwriting in felt-tip pen, held together by a paper clip or stuffed into a hotel stationery envelope.

  The key concessions had been made in the months before he got involved: Vietnam had shown a desire to improve its regional and international ties at a time of diminished Soviet support, and Washington had finally begun to rethink its long-standing policy that every fleeing Vietnamese should be considered an automatic legal refugee. With Vieira de Mello’s coaxing, and themselves already ripe to reach an agreement, Western countries agreed to open up additional resettlement slots for Vietnamese who had been languishing in neighboring countries.These countries in turn agreed to grant asylum to those whom UNHCR’s new screening policies determined to be genuine refugees.13 Border officials would be trained to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which Vietnamese were actually fleeing for their lives and which could be fairly sent back to Vietnam. After a preliminary meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March 1989, some seventy governments gathered in Geneva that June and signed this compromise package, known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action—the first-ever three-way agreement among countries of origin, asylum, and resettlement.14 A NewYork Times editorial hailed the compromise as “A Cure for Compassion Fatigue.”15

  The plan was controversial. Arthur Helton, the refugee advocate who fourteen years later would be killed in Iraq in the attack on the UN, was perhaps the most vocal American critic. He documented the flaws in the screening process. The screeners and immigration officials who classified whether or not a person was a refugee were often ignorant of conditions in Vietnam, vulnerable to bribes, and hasty in their review of the cases before them. The average interview lasted twenty minutes.16 In addition, too few UNHCR staff were in place to monitor the sessions. In Hong Kong many of theVietnamese felt physically manhandled or emotionally browbeaten into declaring themselves “economic migrants.” Helton quoted one Vietnamese boat person as saying, “The major aim of this policy is not to select the real refugee but to stop the flow of refugees.”17

  But Vieira de Mello did not see a viable alternative. “If we don’t find a compromise,” he told his critics, “we will permanently kill asylum.” The status quo was simply not an option. Although Vietnam might be an inhospitable place to return to, he agreed with Thomas Jamieson’s old adage: “If there is a way to close a camp, take it.” The only hope for deterring the outflow of economic migrants and saving those fleeing political oppression was to develop a mechanism for sending nonrefugees back.

  Securing the agreement proved easy compared with implementing it. Vieira de Mello instructed UNHCR staff to suspend medical and counseling services and scale back education and employment programs for screened-out boat people in the camps in neighboring countries.18 More controversially, he defied the spirit of a key UNHCR principle, which was that the agency would only assist in voluntarily returning refugees to their countries of origin. Technically, those being sent back were not “refugees,” but UNHCR would still have to help return terrified Vietnamese to their homeland against their will. Vieira de Mello traveled to Hong Kong, and accompanied by Casella, he spoke with Vietnamese community leaders who had been denied refugee status in the screening process but were refusing to return to Vietnam. One man told Vieira de Mello that he intended to commit suicide if the UN tried to force him home.Vieira de Mello’s face grew dark and solemn. “How could you say such a thing?” he asked.“Your wife and your children rely upon you. You cannot abandon them when you have survived all you have together.” When the man insisted he would prefer to die than face the Communists in Vietnam,Vieira de Mello grew even more emotional and delivered a sweeping oration on the value of life and the importance of returning to one’s own soil and providing for one’s family. Casella could take his colleague’s melodrama no longer.“Listen, if you are going to kill yourself,” he said, “make sure you use a knife and sever the vein properly because we’d hate for you to have to try twice. And since this will make an enormous mess, we’d appreciate it if you did it outside, so that we don’t have to clean up after you.” Vieira de Mello was astonished, but he later conceded that Casella’s bluntness may have been more effective.The Comprehensive Plan of Action would fail unless nonrefugees left the camps and went back to Vietnam.

  Although Vieira de Mello believed UNHCR would have to compel some refugees to return, he knew that many of the UNHCR staff who worked under him in the region would object to doing anything that hinted of forced return, even to those who had not qualified as refugees. In December 1989, on the occasion of the first return operation, he planned the transport of those classed as illegal migrants with the Hong Kong authorities, deliberately bypassing his own staff. Hong Kong police and prison guards in riot gear arrived at 3 a.m., roughly shepherded fifty-one Vietnamese onto buses, and then flew them to Hanoi. In later repatriations the Hong Kong guards even went so far as to inject refugees with sedatives in order to get them to board the transport planes.19

  As word of the new screening process made its way back to Vietnam, refugee flows declined considerably. In 1989 some 70,000Vietnamese had sought asylum in Southeast Asia. In 1992, by contrast, only forty-one Vietnamese landed in neighboring countries.20 Although other factors, such as the start of Vietnam’s economic boom, played a role in the reduced flows, the agreement proved pivotal. Some 70,000 illegal migrants were sent back to Vietnam from the camps, and although UNHCR did not have the staff to monitor them on return, they were generally not mistreated by the Vietnamese authorities. All the boat people had been cleared out of camps by 1996, with the United States resettling some 40 percent of the refugees.21

  For a person who recited UN ideals with near-romantic reverence, Vieira de Mello had proven himself remarkably willing to compromise those principles. He argued that such pragmatic concessions served the long-term interests of both the refugees and the UN. In this case he may have been correct that he had extracted the most humane outcome he could from the governments involved. But he could have gone to greater lengths to use his pulpit at UNHCR to try to ensure that the Vietnamese were more fairly screened in the camps and were better treated en route back to Vietnam. This was the first of several prominent instances in his career in which he would downplay his and the UN’s obligation to tr
y to shape the preferences of governments. By the 1980s he had come to see himself as a UN man, but since the organization was both a body of self-interested governments and a body of ideals, he did not seem sure yet whether serving the UN meant doing what states demanded or pressing for what refugees needed.

  The demands on the United Nations were multiplying. In 1991 the UN Security Council authorized the Persian Gulf War, and the U.S.-led coalition swiftly removed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Sadako Ogata, the newly crowned UN High Commissioner for Refugees, was immediately thrust into UNHCR’s most complex mission to date—working with Western armies to care for and repatriate some 1.5 million Kurds displaced inside and outside Iraq.22

  On April 5, 1991, in a radical break with the Security Council’s traditional deference to state sovereignty, the Council demanded that international humanitarian organizations like UNHCR be granted immediate access to Iraq. In Operation Provide Comfort, U.S., French, and British planes began dropping food packages to the Kurds from the air and then expanded the operation by sending ground troops inside northern Iraq to set up and protect temporary UNHCR camps.23 It was the first military intervention in history carried out in the name of displaced persons. And it marked the beginning of an era in which borders seemed less sacred and the traditional line separating humanitarian matters from political and military affairs became blurred.

  Just before the Gulf War, Vieira de Mello had been promoted to UNHCR director of external relations, responsible for managing the agency’s ties with governments and fund-raising.With the UN breaking new legal and geopolitical ground each day, he found himself desk-bound in Geneva. But while he played little role in the Gulf crisis, the UN was being handed two other challenges that would soon pull him in: the end of war in Cambodia and the start of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

  In September 1991 Vietnam announced that, after a twelve-year occupation of Cambodia, it was withdrawing its soldiers. And on October 23,1991, after twenty-two years of continuous conflict and more than a decade of tortured negotiations, Cambodia’s four factions signed the momentous Paris peace agreement. The same country that for decades had been at the epicenter of decolonization struggles and U.S. and Soviet proxy wars now seemed destined to become a laboratory for post-cold war transition.The newfound unity among the five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, the Soviet Union, the U.K., and the United States—was almost unprecedented in the history of the Council, and it had produced results. The belligerents promised to lay down their guns, to submit to a UN transitional authority, and to participate in the country’s first free elections. The Council informed UN officials in New York in the small Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which had just been set up because of heightened demand, that they would need to field 16,000 troops and 3,600 police to serve in the new mission. And they told Ogata’s UNHCR that it would be responsible for facilitating the return of 360,000 Cambodian refugees from border camps into a volatile “postwar” environment.

  Just when UN agencies were reeling under the strain of managing a huge refugee operation in northern Iraq and launching one in Cambodia, war broke out in the Balkans. In 1991 Ogata dispatched dozens of aid workers to Croatia to try to feed and shelter those on the run, and in December the Security Council called for some 14,000 peacekeepers to be sent to Croatia to patrol a shaky cease-fire there. UN staff in New York could not keep up. An office that had fielded a total of 11,000 peacekeepers the previous year was being called upon to find five times that many, and the phone would keep ringing. In addition, unarmed humanitarian aid workers were suddenly being called upon to operate in the midst of live and deadly conflict, assuming risks traditionally taken only by soldiers.

  Initially removed from “the action” as it unfolded,Vieira de Mello used his spare time to theorize about the geopolitical and humanitarian implications of the end of the cold war. After Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait and his monstrous attacks on the Shiites and the Kurds, the decision by the most powerful governments in the UN to bypass a sovereign government in order to assist civilians in need impressedVieira de Mello. Like many, he understood this to be the harbinger of a “new world order” in which citizens might be rescued from their abusive governments. He did not yet appreciate how unprepared the UN system was to tackle these complex new challenges.

  INVENTING THE FUTURE

  Cheered on by Robert Misrahi,Vieira de Mello had completed the French system’s most demanding and competitive “state doctorate” (doctorat d’état) back in 1985. At night, after eating dinner with Annie and the boys at their home, he had disappeared into his large study lined with wall-to-wall book-cases. Typed again by Annie, the thesis was entitled Civitas Maxima: Origins, Foundations, and Philosophical and Practical Significance of the Supranationality Concept.24 His colleagues marveled at his productivity. Omar Bakhet recalls, “I was shocked when he told me one day, ‘I’m going to go and defend my thesis.” I said, “Thesis? What thesis?”

  In his 1974 doctorate Vieira de Mello had credited Marxism with defining a social utopia by which civilization could measure its progress. In Civitas Maxima, a more mature six-hundred-page conceptual work of philosophy, he defined his own version of a utopian egalitarian society. He no longer vented against philosophy’s irrelevance but instead tried to introduce an affirmative theory of universalism rooted in reciprocal respect. Clearly influenced by the cold war détente, he had begun to see such universality as possible, but he asked, “Does universality carry within itself the germs of its own annihilation?” Although what would later be called “globalization” was already tearing down barriers among peoples, states were also acquiring ever greater powers of destruction, and man’s inhumanity to man seemed not to be abating. He tried to define a social order that would curb those tendencies, and he moved away from the historical determinism of Marxism, toward the aspirational philosophy of Misrahi and of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose main work, The Principle of Hope, argued that individuals had to first define and wish into being the utopia that they sought to create. Only man would pull history toward a more just future.

  Vieira de Mello took immense satisfaction in seeing through the grueling doctorate process, and he hoped that his thesis might find a wider audience. He sent a copy of it to Sonia, his multilingual sister in Brazil, in the hopes that she might help him translate it into Portuguese for possible publication in Brazil. “Sergio, this is not French. It is some language other than French,” she teased her brother. “How can I translate what I can’t understand?”

  In December 1991 Vieira de Mello drew upon his dissertation in order to deliver a lecture at the Geneva International Peace Research Institute entitled “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times.” He used his remarks to respond to American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the end of the cold war signified the triumph of political and economic liberalism and the “end of history.” He criticized Fukuyama and others for “a combination of naïve optimism and supreme arrogance.” “No,” Vieira de Mello declared, “history is not finished.”25 But it was, he argued, changing course.

  His lecture offered an ambitious and vivid—if dense—articulation of his worldview. Writing around the time of the French Revolution, Vieira de Mello noted, Immanuel Kant had been conscious that he was living through a turning point both in philosophical history and in real-world history. In the aftermath of Communism’s demise, he now argued, the world had reached an analogous juncture. International law, which was being fortified by the day, offered evidence of humanity’s “long march” toward reason. But “history’s schizophrenia” was on full display, as he was struck by the enormous “distance separating institutional progress from ethical progress, law from morals.” Whatever laws had been placed on the books, one could not rely upon governments to respect, promote, or enforce those strictures. With a “fascinating persistence,” sovereign states showed that they
would be overtaken by the “impulse to not reason,” he argued. The same “childlike madness, vanity, meanness, and thirst for destruction” that Kant observed among political leaders in his day still ensured that, in the coming century, “history” would stubbornly live on.

  But this did not deter Vieira de Mello from urging individuals and governments to strive toward a new Ideal. He argued that generating constructive change required a “synthesis of utopia and realism.”“The persistent tendency to fail represents equally persistent encouragement to shape such a system,” he insisted. What would the ideal system entail? Governments needed to accept that their interests would be best advanced if they united in a community based on laws. Kant’s proposals for a federation of states, which had been taken up by Simón Bolívar in 1826 and by European statesmen with renewed vigor in the 1990s, needed to be resurrected globally. Kant was calling not for a supranational federal state,Vieira de Mello stressed, but for a “federation of peoples” that did not require individuals, groups, or countries to abandon their identities.