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

by Samantha Power

  Many UN staffers shared Vieira de Mello’s belief (instilled in him by Thomas Jamieson) that almost any life in one’s home is preferable to life in a refugee camp. Although the feeding times in the camps were predictable and the water was reliably clean, most refugees found the life of dependence intolerable. Norah Niland, the Irish UNHCR official, was responsible for looking out for extremely vulnerable refugees—the elderly, the sick, and the very young. At the staff summit, when Vieira de Mello raised the cash option, she felt as though her peers were speaking unwittingly condescendingly toward poor people. “Underlying all the arguments against cash was ‘Poor people can’t manage money,’ ” she recalls. But she, who had grown up poor in County Mayo, argued that poor people were just as likely to save their money—and to waste it—as rich people. Her boss took her side. “If you place your trust in people, they tend to act responsibly,” Vieira de Mello said, echoing her view. “And they have a far better sense of what they need money for than we ever will.”

  UNHCR staff admired Vieira de Mello’s decisiveness, but some criticized his haste. Normally, refugees returned to their homes after elections and the establishment of more stable governing bodies; but in Cambodia repatriation was preceding the vote. Dennis McNamara, who ran the UN human rights branch of the mission, believed his friend was neglecting the safety of refugees, who would be returning to districts where UN troops and police were not yet present to provide security. Whenever Vieira de Mello saw McNamara approaching in the hallway of UN headquarters in Phnom Penh, he groaned audibly, “Uh-oh, here comes McNamara, the pope of principle!”

  Vieira de Mello believed UNHCR had reason to rush. He was deeply affected by the tongue-lashing he received when he visited one of the Khmer Rouge-controlled camps along the Thai border.The refugees he spoke with were adamant that Cambodia was where they belonged. Sensing their impatience in the camps, he feared that, in their eagerness to get home, the refugees might flood across the border without UNHCR assistance, endangering themselves and increasing the likelihood of mine amputations, violent clashes, and dashed expectations. With the elections a year away, he did not feel UNHCR could afford to wait until more UN peacekeepers were in place to begin moving the refugees home. “If you have any objections, raise them now,” he told staff. “If you have alternatives, suggest them now.” However imperfect the cash option was, nobody offered a better idea as to how to bring the refugees home and launch them on their new lives, and he decided to press on. “I will take full responsibility if something goes wrong,” he assured uneasy colleagues.

  A few UN officials speculated that Vieira de Mello’s obsessive punctuality in his personal life was dictating his thinking. It was as if he could not conceive of arriving late for a political appointment. “Sergio had made a commitment to the UN, to Cambodia, and to the refugees,” recalls Nici Dahrendorf, a British UNHCR official with the mission.“He wouldn’t turn up late for repatriation any more than he would arrive late for dinner.”

  Having made the decision, Vieira de Mello hung the expensive aerial photos, commissioned before his time, on the walls of the UNHCR office in Phnom Penh. These monuments to useless planning resembled abstract paintings. Whenever he ushered visitors into the office, he drew attention to the UN artwork.“I prefer the UN satellite artists to Jackson Pollock myself,” he would say.

  While the original plan had put the onus on UNHCR to track down tracts of land to resettle refugees, the introduction of the cash option put Cambodians in charge of their own destinies. All returnees would get a domestic kit that included utensils, tools, a large water bucket, reinforced plastic sheeting, chemically impregnated mosquito nets to protect against malaria, and coupons for four hundred days’ worth of food rations (two hundred days for those who moved to the Phnom Penh area). A refugee family could still decide to wait for the UN to find them a small plot of land. Or they could choose the cash option (Option C), which critics nicknamed “Option Catastrophe.” Refugee families who chose this option would receive a modest cash grant of $50 per adult and $25 per child. The cash would pay for the returnees to plant seeds in a small garden or to pay relatives in exchange for accommodation.21 Vieira de Mello believed it was essential for UNHCR to stop micromanaging the repatriation. “We can’t dictate the return,” he told his colleagues. “We have to follow the people.”

  Because he encouraged debate at UNHCR, the staff often unearthed ideas that might otherwise have remained buried in the bureaucracy. As UNHCR officials in Battambang attempted to map a schedule for refugee returns, they wondered what they would do during monsoon season (May-August), when the roads from the camps at the border into Cambodia would be too flooded to traverse. “What about the train that Cambodians used before the war?” Vieira de Mello asked. Others had proposed this same idea of repairing the wagons and tracks, but UNHCR staff had written it off as too expensive.This time he asked, “Has anybody talked to the former railway managers to see what it would take to repair?” Nobody had. And after a short investigation, it emerged that the rickety train and tracks could be restored for $100,000. Remarkably, the antiquated train with its blue UN flag, dubbed the Sisophon Express, would reduce the duration of the 210-mile trip from Sisophon, the town where refugees would be dropped off just inside Cambodia, all the way to Phnom Penh, from three days to twelve hours.22

  FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE

  On March 21, 1992, five days after Akashi, the UN head of mission, finally moved to Cambodia, he gaveVieira de Mello the green light to start repatriation. Vieira de Mello sent a fax to Ogata on Hotel Cambodiana stationery, apologizing for contacting her at home but jubilant. “Yet another week-end interference!” he wrote. “You’ll end up calling me Special Pain rather than Envoy.” He told Ogata that the first batch of refugees would return to their country on March 30 and that the dignitaries who would greet them in Cambodia would likely constitute a “crowd larger than the number of actual returnees! ”23

  As he counted down the days, he saw that tensions in the camps were building. On March 25 in the Site 8 camp, gunmen presumed to belong to the Khmer Rouge asked for two refugees by name and executed them. On March 29, the eve of the scheduled repatriation launch, Khmer Rouge forces seized part of a key roadway in Cambodia between Kompong Thom and the northern province of Preah Vihear, and then Hun Sen retaliated by attacking them.24 It felt as though all-out war could resume at any time.

  Although the UNTAC political and military mission had only technically come into existence on March 15, and only 2,000 of the anticipated 16,000 peacekeepers had yet deployed, Cambodians looked to the UN blue helmets to quell the fighting. But General Sanderson, who had taken over the military side of the mission (while Akashi ran the political), stressed that he had no intention of forcing the parties to comply with the terms of the Paris agreement. UN peacekeepers would in fact steer clear of violent areas. “We are in Cambodia as peacekeepers, not peace enforcers,” Sanderson said. “I will not put UN forces in the middle of a confused environment and no cease-fire, where the roads are mined.”25

  Vieira de Mello knew that every UN political and military mission got one chance to make a formidable first impression, and he worried that the blue helmets were missing this opportunity. As he had seen in Lebanon, the troops that made up UN forces varied in quality and attitude. The well-equipped Dutch units that General Sanderson sent to northwestern Cambodia fired back decisively in defense of civilians and their soldiers. The Malaysian forces in western Cambodia learned Khmer and attempted to secure the cooperation of the Khmer Rouge. By contrast, some of the African units, in Sanderson’s words, “came with their backsides hanging out of their trousers.” The Tunisians and the Cameroonians were participating simply because in the Security Council, France had been so intent on offsetting Anglo influence in the region that it had insisted that a large number of French-speaking troops be sent. Cambodians developed a saying about how a typical UNTAC soldier filled his days. Set to rhyme in Khmer, it translated as “In the morning he jogs, in
the afternoon he drives, in the evening he drinks.”26 Sanderson worked with what he was given but recalls, “I wouldn’t have taken many of the troops if I had a choice.”

  Perhaps owing to his own youthful run-in with the Paris police in 1968, Vieira de Mello had never warmed to law enforcement officials as he had to soldiers. But in Cambodia he understood that, in order for refugees to feel secure once they returned to Cambodia, policing would have to be a vital component of the UN mission. But he also knew that in its forty-seven-year history the UN had never really done policing. Unsurprisingly, almost none of the expected 3,600 police arrived in time for the first refugee returns on March 30, and only 800 would arrive before May. Many lacked driver’s licenses and spoke neither English nor French, UNTAC’s two official languages.27

  As hard as it was to quickly rally soldiers to participate in peacekeeping missions, soldiers were at least always on standby in their countries and rarely engaged in actual combat. Police officers, by contrast, tended to be busy doing police work at home and thus could rarely be spared. Police work also relied upon the officers’ links with the local population, and it would be hard to find trained police who had the necessary language skills, the knowledge of local law, and the confidence of the population. The “policing gap” would undermine this and every one of Vieira de Mello’s subsequent UN missions.

  Nonetheless, despite the mounting violence and the thinness of UN security forces, he stuck to his plan to go ahead and begin helping refugees return on March 30. He understood the gamble he was taking: If a returning refugee was murdered or stepped on a mine, it would send a chill through the refugee camps in Thailand and possibly torpedo the repatriation operation. This, in turn, could ruin the chances of holding elections the following year. Still, he opposed delaying the launch because he thought it would send a signal to both the spoilers and the refugees that the UN could be cowed. His deputy Fouinat asked Thomson, the public health specialist, “Doc, can you assure us that there will be no deaths in the first convoys?” Thomson was incredulous. “Listen, François, I’m not Jesus Christ,” he said. “People die no matter where they live. People die in Paris.They aren’t going to start not dying just because they are put on UNHCR convoys.”

  On March 30 Vieira de Mello traveled to Site 2, the largest camp on the Thai border, and spoke to the 527 refugees who had volunteered to be part of the first returning group. Looking out at men and women who were clinging to their blue departure passes and green nylon UN travel bags containing noodles, sugar, soap, and a toothbrush, he said that the UN had no intention of telling Cambodians—“an independent and proud people”—what to do. The organization would try to create conditions that would enable them “to regain control of their fate and to shape their own future.” “Today, we are, at long last, gathered to make a dream come true: that of breaking the spiral of violence in Cambodia and of witnessing the emergence of a reunited, reconciled and pacified society,” he said. “We are betting on peace. We will, as from this morning and with deep emotion, escort you home.”28

  A small contingent of Malaysian peacekeepers would escort the first seventy families who bravely volunteered to return to Cambodia. Beneath signs that read GRATITUDE TO THAILAND in Khmer, Thai, and English, some of the departing refugees wept with fear or anticipation, others smiled and waved, and most filed stoically onto the buses. None had any idea what lay in store for them in their homeland or whether the shaky peace would last.

  In his send-off speech Vieira de Mello had sounded more confident than he felt. He had many outstanding questions that only time would answer: Would those who had survived the war inside Cambodia welcome the exiles back? Would Hun Sen’s government treat the refugees as traitors? If they moved in with their extended families, how long would the generosity of their relatives last? Would the returnees’ desperation to return to land they owned before the war lead them to ignore land-mine warnings? Would they give up on rural areas altogether and pour into the cities?

  Before the convoy departed Site 2, Vieira de Mello briefly dropped out of sight. He made a short pilgrimage to a shrine in front of the Hotel Sarin, where in front of a three-foot-high statue of the Buddha he burned incense and lit candles, issuing a prayer to the gods—again born more of superstition than faith—that nothing would go wrong.

  A firm asphalt road dotted with houses and well-groomed gardens ran from the Thai refugee camp to the border. But once the UN convoy crossed the narrow bridge that marked the crossing into Cambodia, the terrain changed. Sturdy houses gave way to bamboo and leaf shacks, and water wells and pipes were replaced by shallow pools of stagnant water. Abandoned military posts offered reminders of the fighting that had recently raged in the area. In the weeks leading up to the return, some 428 mines had been removed from the road between the border and the UNHCR reception center in Sisophon. The refugees had been warned that just six feet on either side of the road had been cleared, but beyond that mines were omnipresent. In March alone thirteen Cambodian villagers had been killed or maimed by mines in the nearby fields.29

  Vieira de Mello traveled in the second vehicle in a refugee convoy of several dozen buses. He maintained radio contact with Dahrendorf of UNHCR, who drove in the lead vehicle. He was so tense that she could hardly recognize his voice. The convoy had left later than he had planned, and he was afraid of being tardy to the welcoming reception in Sisophon, which he had scripted minute by minute.“Nici, can you please tell your driver to go faster,” he thundered over the radio. Dahrendorf explained that if they sped up, they would lose the busloads of refugees behind them. He was insistent. “I said, ‘Drive faster,’ ” he snapped. When she again refused, he ordered her to stop the car and leaped out of the passenger seat. “This is ridiculous,” he blared. “My car will drive in front.” He succeeded in spurring on his driver, but as Dahrendorf had warned, his vehicle outpaced the convoy and ended up having to stop to wait for the buses filled with refugees to catch up.

  As the buses wended their way into Sisophon, schoolchildren lined the road waving Cambodian flags, pop music blared, and Cambodian musicians performed traditional song. After a two-hour drive, the refugees disembarked, looking dazed. Some had never set foot outside a refugee camp. In conversations with journalists, they explained their fears. “I’m worried about the Khmer Rouge because they haven’t settled down yet,” said So Koemsan, twenty-eight, whose parents and four siblings had died of starvation during the Maoists’ bloody reign. “If they fail in their objectives, they might take it out on people like us . . . but I hope the UN will protect us.”30 Eng Peo, thirty-seven, had raised two children in the camp. “I have not been a farmer for many years, and my children have never seen a farm,” he said. “How do I start again?”31

  Vieira de Mello had a keen eye for symbolism. He had invited UN blue helmets to intersperse themselves in the convoy so that the peacekeepers would begin to feel ownership over the repatriation operation. But just before he left Thailand—a country that had often treated the Cambodian refugees brutally—the head of the Thai army had told him that he intended to travel to Cambodia to be a part of the welcoming delegation. Throughout the drive Vieira de Mello complained that the general’s very presence would send a paternalistic message from Thailand and would possibly upstage Prince Sihanouk. As his UN car approached the Sisophon reception center, he saw the Thai general standing smugly on the podium with his arms folded. “What the hell does that bastard think he’s doing?” Vieira de Mello fumed to Assadi. “This is not the message we want to send.This is Sihanouk’s show.”

  Prince Sihanouk quickly made that clear. He swooped down dramatically in a Russian-made helicopter, along with his wife, Monique, to give the homecoming his blessing, and the Thai general disappeared. As Cambodian officials presented the refugees with orchids onstage,Vieira de Mello spoke into a megaphone, his comments translated into Khmer. “Welcome home,” he said. “We were there for you in Thailand and, I promise you, we will be here to help you resettle in your homeland.”
32

  Iain Guest, the UNHCR spokesman, watched his boss standing at the dais in the hot sun. Vieira de Mello’s pale blue Asian suit was soaked through with perspiration, and the look on his face was grim, resolute, and triumphant. “For Sergio, that was a moment of fierce vindication,” Guest remembers. “It was a look that said, ‘I told you this would work and by god it did, and I’m going to stand in the sun longer than any of you sons of bitches.’ ”

  When asked by a journalist about the recent upsurge in fighting,Vieira de Mello said, “Don’t expect peace to be instantaneous after 20 years of war.The refugees’ return is a strong message to those who are tempted to violate the ceasefire.”33 But whether the return of refugees would deter the violent—or incite them—remained an open question. And nearly 360,000 Cambodians remained on the Thai-Cambodian border, awaiting UN help.