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

by Samantha Power

  Five

  “BLACK BOXING”

  Cambodian refugees returning to their country on the UN-renovated Sisophon Express.

  As a student of philosophy Vieira de Mello had often pondered the nature of evil. But in Cambodia he actually got to know some of the world’s most feared mass murderers. Soon after arriving in Phnom Penh, he had visited the Tuol Sleng torture and execution center, where the Khmer Rouge had murdered as many as 20,000 alleged opponents and which Hun Sen’s government kept open as a museum. Although he was thoroughly revolted by the photos of executed men and women of all ages, he was absolutely convinced that he and other UN officials had to engage potential spoilers. He was convinced that peace hinged upon whether the UN could secure the Khmer Rouge’s cooperation. For many humanitarians the prospect of working with the Khmer Rouge was loathsome. Human rights advocates had criticized international mediators for glossing over Khmer Rouge crimes—deliberately avoiding the word “genocide” in the Paris agreement, for instance, and stipulating euphemistically that the signatories wished to avoid a return to “past practices.” But Vieira de Mello believed in what he called “black boxing.” “Sometimes you have to black box past behavior and black box future intentions,” he told colleagues. “You just have to take people at their word in the present.” He returned to Kant’s admonition, “We should act as if the thing that perhaps does not exist, does exist.”1

  The Khmer Rouge were bitterly disappointed by UNTAC’s performance. They had expected Akashi and the UN Transitional Authority to take charge of Cambodia and end Vietnamese influence in the country. But while the Paris agreement had authorized the UN to take direct control of the key ministries, a mere 218 UN professionals—95 in Phnom Penh and 123 in the provinces—had been tasked to supervise the activities of some 140,000 Cambodian civil servants in Hun Sen’s government, and almost none of the UN officials spoke Khmer.2 UNTAC’s role was thus inevitably more advisory than supervisory.

  Akashi had also proven reluctant to exercise the authority and capacity that he had actually been given by the Paris agreement. Although he was supposed to take “appropriate corrective steps” when Cambodian officials misbehaved, he rarely reassigned Cambodian personnel. He told colleagues that because the Japanese constitution had been imposed by Douglas MacArthur and the American occupiers after World War II, it had lacked legitimacy with many Japanese. He believed that the UN would alienate Cambodians if it tried to impose its vision. When the Khmer Rouge saw that Akashi intended to take a minimalist approach to his job, they began to renege on the commitments they had made in Paris. If Hun Sen would not relinquish control of the key ministries or purge the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge would in turn deny UNTAC access to its territory. None of the factions that had been at war since the early 1970s agreed to disarm.

  CHARMING THE KHMER ROUGE

  Vieira de Mello set out to get to know the Khmer Rouge leadership. While UN officials who worked in the camps at the Thai border had met with mid-level Khmer Rouge officials over the years, no international official had yet met with senior Khmer Rouge leaders on their turf. He was determined to become the first. “Part of him thought, ‘What kind of feat would it be if I could be the one to bring the Khmer Rouge to heel?’ ” recalls Courtland Robinson, a longtime analyst of Cambodian affairs.

  But Vieira de Mello had other motives. He had always been intrigued by the question of how Khmer Rouge revolutionaries like Ieng Sary, Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan could have studied in Paris, even reading the same philosophy tracts as he had at university. “I want to look into Ieng Sary’s eyes,” he told Nici Dahrendorf. “I want to see if they are still burning with ideological fire.”At this stage in his career, mulling the roots of evil was more stimulating than managing the logistics of easing the suffering that resulted from that evil. Late at night, as he sat in his hotel suite with McNamara, Bos, and a bottle of Black Label, he could debate the Khmer Rouge’s history into the early-morning hours. “How did they go astray?” he asked. “Was there a moment where they turned down the wrong path, or was the ideology destined to be carried to its extreme? And if it was going to be carried to the extreme, was the extreme destined to be murderous?” McNamara did not believe the Khmer Rouge could change their ways. He was known around the mission for declaring, “Let’s give ’em hell.” By contrast, Vieira de Mello rarely pushed the parties to go much beyond where they had proven themselves inclined to go. “Will you for once think of the morning after we give them hell, Dennis?” he asked. “I give them hell, but what happens then? They won’t return my calls ever again.” William Shawcross, the British journalist, teased Vieira de Mello that his eventual autobiography would be aptly titled My Friends, the War Criminals.

  One day Salvatore Lombardo, the Italian UNHCR official, entered the dusty UN office in Battambang to find his boss Vieira de Mello sprawled out on the couch reading Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason in French. “Sergio, what the hell are you doing?” Lombardo asked. Vieira de Mello replied without raising his eyes from the text:“This is the only kind of reading I can do that enables me to actually escape this place.” Kant was fresh in his mind because he had recently delivered his lecture at the Geneva International Peace Research Institute. He brought the paper to Cambodia and excitedly shared it with Bos, who made a valiant effort to navigate his prose but could never follow the argument.“No matter how I tried, I would either fall asleep after two pages, or put it down in frustration at my inability to understand it,” she recalls. He pretended as though it didn’t matter, but she noticed that he kept leaving it lying around their hotel room in the not-so-subtle hope that she might get a second wind.

  In some sense, Vieira de Mello’s desire to charm the Khmer Rouge was rooted in his general desire to keep everyone on his side. A few years before, when he had been UNHCR’s director of the Asia Bureau in Geneva, he had asked Douglas Stafford, the deputy high commissioner, to replace a country director in Indonesia who was terrorizing the staff, and one in Hong Kong who was drinking too much. But when Stafford reviewed the personnel files, he saw that Vieira de Mello had given both employees “outstanding” reviews. “Without a paper record of incompetence or abusiveness, how am I supposed to help you get rid of these people?” Stafford asked. “Why did you mark them ‘outstanding’?” Vieira de Mello was unapologetic. “You never know where you are going to end up,” he said. “One day you could be that person’s boss. The next day you could be working for them. Why make an enemy when you don’t have to?” Stafford commented to a colleague, “You know what Sergio’s biggest problem is? He refuses to make enemies.”

  While ambition, intellectual curiosity, and this refusal to make enemies certainly played a role in steering Vieira de Mello toward the Khmer Rouge, he also knew that the Paris agreement was hanging in the balance. If the Khmer Rouge stopped cooperating with the UN altogether, war could restart. Since the Maoist guerrillas controlled several refugee camps on the Thai border, they could refuse to allow “their” 77,000-plus refugees to return to Cambodia. Or they could sabotage the UN-sponsored elections less than a year away by shooting at Cambodians who headed out to vote.

  It was never clear exactly who was in charge of the Khmer Rouge. Neither Brother Number One (Pol Pot) nor Brother Number Three (Ieng Sary), the group’s best-known leaders, showed their faces in Phnom Penh. Khieu Samphan, the public face of the Khmer Rouge, tape-recorded his meetings with UN officials, giving rise to speculation that he was sending the tapes to Pol Pot. For insight on the Khmer Rouge, Vieira de Mello relied most closely upon a thirty-four-year-old American named James Lynch. A former corporate lawyer from Connecticut, Lynch had helped Cambodian refugees resettle in the United States as a pro bono service for his law firm and then moved to Thailand in order to take up a job processing refugee asylum requests. Lynch had spent half a decade negotiating with Khmer Rouge officials at the Thai border, and Vieira de Mello asked him to arrange for him to travel deep into the bush to meet them.

  On April 6,
1992,Vieira de Mello, Bos, and Andrew Thomson headed out with a de-mining expert, an agricultural engineer, and Udo Janz, the head of the UNHCR office in Battambang, Cambodia’s second-largest town. Lynch and Jahanshah Assadi were to drive from Thai territory and join Vieira de Mello and the others at the Khmer Rouge base camp. Heading into dangerous territory, the UN team did not spell out their plans to their Cambodian army escorts. But as they approached the Mongkol Borei River, one of the escorts Hun Sen’s government had provided exclaimed, “We aren’t going any further. This is suicide!” They had never before skirted Khmer Rouge territory, and they hurriedly abandoned the UN group.

  The bridge that the UN team had been instructed to cross had been blown out. Perched atop a riverbank at the edge of Khmer Rouge territory, the staff looked to Vieira de Mello for guidance. His plan began to look simultaneously wildly ambitious and shockingly amateurish. But suddenly he pointed across the river. “Look!” he proclaimed gleefully. “They’re here!” Standing atop the opposite riverbank were three Khmer Rouge soldiers, carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing Mao caps, khakis, and their trademark kerchiefs. “Go talk to them, Doc,” he instructed Thomson, the group’s only Khmer speaker. “See if they are our guides.”

  Thomson stared at Vieira de Mello in disbelief. Ever since he had moved to Cambodia in 1989, the New Zealander had experienced a recurrent nightmare, influenced by the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields. In the dream, while he slept in his tent in an Australian Red Cross hospital, a Khmer Rouge cadre in black pajamas waded through a field of rice paddies, entered the back of the tent, dragged Thomson outside, and executed him. In the two years he had spent in Cambodia before joining the UN, he had never met a Khmer Rouge soldier and had sworn to himself that he never would. Although the Paris agreement stipulated that UN officials were to work with the Maoists, Thomson had lived among Cambodians too long to be able to overlook the guerrillas’ bloody past. “We were supposed to treat the Khmer Rouge like the other parties,” he recalls, “but they weren’t like the others. They were mass murderers.” Nonetheless,Vieira de Mello’s enthusiasm for the adventure had been so infectious and the case he made to Thomson about his indispensability had been so persuasive that the young doctor suddenly found himself being summoned to begin chatting with a member of a militia known to shoot without asking questions.

  Thomson made his way down a twenty-foot-high sloping mud riverbank toward the shallow river below. He walked halfway across the river and changed his mind, freezing in his tracks. “Shit,” he said to himself. “I can keep going and get a bullet in the chest, or I can turn around now and get shot in the back.” The soldier on the opposite bank peered down at him, but because the sun was behind his head,Thomson could only make out the soldier’s silhouette and not his facial expression.

  “Hi,” Thomson said in Khmer, quaking with fear. “Are you the Khmer Rouge?”

  The soldier nodded.

  “Where’s the bridge?” Thomson asked.

  The soldier gazed down and answered listlessly, “There’s no bridge. You must walk across.” The UN officials would have to trust that there were no mines on the river floor if they wanted to continue their journey.

  If the UN team members were to leave their vehicles behind, they would be entirely dependent on the Khmer Rouge. Without the Land Cruisers’ long-range antennas, they would not be able to maintain radio contact with the UN base. A few of the officials carried handheld radios, but the radios had neither the range nor the battery life to be of use for long. Vieira de Mello shrugged, rolled up his trousers, and headed down to where Thomson was standing. The others followed, knowing that once they crossed the river, they would be heading into the unknown.

  As the single-file line of UN officials walked through the water, carrying their day packs of mosquito nets, notebooks, and bottled water, the tension and the absurdity of the encounter were such that somebody in the group Vieira de Mello and Mieke Bos crossing the Mongkol Borei River en route to Khmer Rouge territory, April 6, 1992.

  began giggling, and within seconds the others had joined in. By the time they had crossed the narrow river, the entire crew was howling with laughter. The expression on the faces of their dour Khmer Rouge guides did not change.

  The soldiers led the UN team into the forest on a two-mile walk, warning them not to step off the trail because the woods were smothered with mines. Alongside the path the UN officials saw rocket launchers, piles of ammunition, and bunkers.“So much for UN disarmament!” Vieira de Mello exclaimed. He produced a camera and began snapping photos of the soldiers beside their weaponry.Thomson, who remained rattled, said, “Sergio, I just know you don’t want to be taking photos. They are, after all, the Khmer Rouge!” Vieira de Mello was amused. “You bet I do, Doc. I may not get the chance again.”

  The group came upon a Chinese flatbed truck, which they were told to board. As the truck traveled through ever-denser brush, Vieira de Mello used sanitary wipes to keep himself clean. After around two hours of driving amid bamboo that was three stories high, the truck entered a field where two hundred Khmer Rouge soldiers were lined up as if for inspection. The UN team had reached the Khmer Rouge camp.

  Lynch and Assadi had arrived several hours earlier from Thailand and had grown alarmed when they were unable to reach their colleagues on the radio. When their boss arrived all smiles, however, the two men feigned coolness. “What took you so long?” Assadi asked. Lynch was the person who had mapped out the itinerary. “How exactly did you expect us to cross that river in our car?” Vieira de Mello ribbed him.

  The Khmer Rouge treated the visiting UN delegation like royalty. General Ny Korn, the Khmer Rouge military commander for the region, ushered them into a small hut, offering beer, Coca-Cola, and the most precious commodity of all—ice cubes, which had been driven in that afternoon from Thailand. Vieira de Mello had behaved much like a giddy boy on a school field trip on the journey into the jungle, but as soon as the negotiations began, he was all business. Instead of ignoring or marginalizing the Khmer Rouge, as Akashi and Sanderson were doing, he tried to convince them that in order to remain a significant political force, they would need to entice refugees to return to land under their control in Cambodia. If nobody returned to their former strongholds, they would not score well in the 1993 vote.

  He told General Ny Korn that as long as the returns were genuinely voluntary, UNHCR would help Cambodians move to Khmer Rouge-held lands. And the general made it easy, quickly agreeing with the UN principle that every Cambodian refugee had the right to return to whichever area he or she chose. This meant that refugees in the Khmer Rouge-controlled camps would have the freedom to choose to leave the cultish Maoist organization and settle anywhere in Cambodia. But it also meant that those refugees who chose to move to Cambodian lands under Khmer Rouge control would get UNHCR assistance. Yet for Vieira de Mello to offer this, he told the general, the reclusive Khmer Rouge would have to grant the UN unfettered access to the area, so that experts could conduct full health, water, and mine assessments. The Khmer Rouge took the UN officials around the area and pointed to the lush vegetation and the fertile land.“The best farming land in the country,” said one. “You must tell the people in the camps.”

  As the afternoon wore on, mosquitoes began to take aim at the UN visitors. Udo Janz applied roll-on mosquito repellent, and the Khmer Rouge officials at the table pointed to his device with openmouthed wonder. Janz told them that the repellent would keep mosquitoes and malaria away. One of the bolder soldiers grabbed the stick, took a whiff, and exclaimed in Khmer, “Lemon, lemon!” He then did as Janz had done, dispensing the repellent the length of his arm. On his map Thomson had placed an enormous X through the territory they were sitting in because it was known to be laden with malaria-infested mosquitoes. But when he raised the matter, a Khmer Rouge public health official said, “We don’t have malaria here. We cut down all the forests, and the malaria went away.” Thomson did a double take. “You’re trying to tell me that none of
you has malaria?” he asked. “Don’t insult me by lying to me.” The Khmer Rouge official grew angry. “What do you know about my country?” he asked. Suddenly Vieira de Mello, the diplomat, broke from his conversation with General Ny Korn and placed himself between the two sparring health professionals.“I think we can all agree that malaria is a serious problem,” he said. “And of course it warrants careful consideration. You two can follow up at a later date.”

  Aid workers and diplomats in war-torn areas often have to weigh offers of hospitality against potentially life-threatening consequences. In the late afternoon a Khmer Rouge soldier suggested that the UN team ward off the heat by taking a swim in the river. “We’re fine,” said Vieira de Mello, on behalf of the others. But the soldiers were insistent. “We don’t have bathing suits,” Vieira de Mello tried. General Ny Korn delivered a stern order in Khmer. Within minutes a Khmer Rouge cadre had returned with sarongs for the UN officials to wear. With trepidation, Vieira de Mello and the others eased themselves into the water, which proved immensely refreshing. The Khmer Rouge soldiers stood beaming on the banks of the river. “You see how clean the river is now,” one shouted. “When the Vietnamese ruled Cambodia, the rivers were filled with body parts and corpses.” The UN swimmers cringed at the thought of what lay beneath them. The young Khmer Rouge soldiers, most of them still teenagers, took special delight in gawking at Bos, the lone woman in the group, as she swam. “She’s torturing these poor lads,” Assadi said to Lynch. “It just isn’t fair.”