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

by Samantha Power

  His pitch to Ogata was endearing. It was that of a man determined to remain a student all of his life. “As you know,” he wrote to her, “I have followed Cambodian affairs since University.” He did not request a study leave but said he intended to use his spare time and annual leave to conduct the research. He did not seem to mind much that any project tacked on to his normal seventy- or eighty-hour workweek would further reduce the time he spent with his family. He argued that his study would help strengthen the UN capacity “to resolve internal conflicts in the turbulent times ahead.”

  A UN man to his core, he knew that the organization frowned upon those officials who drew upon their field and diplomatic experiences to produce public manifestos. He wrote to Ogata, “I trust that my nearly twenty-four years of service with the Organization and my academic record will suffice as a guarantee of my ability to use the information at my disposal in the interest and not the detriment of the United Nations.”44

  But his credentials did not suffice. Christine Dodson, director of personnel at UN Headquarters in New York, responded to his request. “Mr. Vieira de Mello is of course at liberty to engage in personal research in his own time on any topic. However he should bear in mind that any manuscript that emerges would have to be submitted to the Secretary-General for approval. . . . Such approval seems unlikely to be granted.”45

  Vieira de Mello spent the summer of 1993 overcome by the most severe wave of professional self-doubt he had ever experienced. “I’m not going anywhere in the UN,” he told Irene Khan, a UNHCR colleague who would later become secretary-general of Amnesty International. “What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re not even forty-five!” “Yes,” he said, “but at fifty I could be dead.” Because of his father’s death at fifty-nine, he carried with him a persistent fear of heart attack. Famously fond of his whiskey, he had cut back significantly in his thirties. He told friends,“I don’t want to end up like my father.” He exercised obsessively and kept vigilant tabs on his cholesterol and blood pressure. After one doctor’s appointment in Geneva, he returned to the office, and his assistant inquired after his results. “Everything is fine except there is a little fluctuation in my cardia,” he said. “Just like my father.” While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had received a letter from a Canadian researcher requesting an interview. He had jotted a note at the bottom of her letter in black pen, “Ok for mid-Dec if still around or alive.”46

  His colleagues in UNHCR saw that he had outgrown the humanitarian agency that had been his home for twenty-four years. They were stunned that Boutros-Ghali had not found a place for him. “Sergio, they have no idea what they are missing,” Jahanshah Assadi said to his friend. “You are this diamond in the rough, and they will find you.” Vieira de Mello shook his head. “You know how it is, Jahanshah,” he said. “We are the lowly humanitarians.We’re the guys who pass out food and fix roads. They look down on us elsewhere in the UN.They don’t see us as capable of handling high politics.” Assadi agreed. “That’s all true, Sergio, but once they get their hands on you, they will not let you go.” Many UN officials were already speculating that he would be the first person to scale the rungs of UNHCR to succeed Ogata as the high commissioner, or even move beyond to do what no lifelong UN civil servant to that point had ever done—become secretary-general of the whole United Nations. Alluding to the top floor of UN Headquarters where the secretary-general kept his office, Omar Bakhet reassured his friend that the pause was only temporary, saying, “Sergio, you will ride the escalator from Cambodia all the way up to the thirty-eighth floor.”

  While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had read the bloody news from the former Yugoslavia. An Italian UN colleague of his, Staffan de Mistura, had even called him in Phnom Penh from a guesthouse in Serb territory for advice on how to get a convoy of 80,000 blankets past an angry throng of Serb women who were blocking the only roads to Bosnian territory. Vieira de Mello urged him to think laterally. “When there is a wall in front of you,” he said by phone,“you either break it, you jump over it if you are tall enough, or you bypass it.” When de Mistura said he couldn’t bypass five hundred women,Vieira de Mello asked why he didn’t hire Serb smugglers.“The trick will be the carrot,” he said. “Money may not be enough. Give them something morally different from what they get in their lives. Give them a sense of dignity.” Vieira de Mello suggested de Mistura match the pay the black marketeers got for smuggling cigarettes but also provide a certificate that said “UN consultant.” The “Sergio solution” worked, as the smugglers got the blankets through, and when de Mistura visited one of them in his home months later, he saw the UN certificate hanging above his fireplace.

  But while Vieira de Mello was always willing to don his thinking cap for a colleague, he had no particular attachment to the former Yugoslavia and generally found himself resenting the amount of staff and press attention it consumed relative to Cambodia. Bosnia’s war was unfortunate, of course, but Cambodia, which received far less political attention, had seemed to have a genuine chance at peace. Yet donor countries spent twenty-four times more per capita in Bosnia than they did in Cambodia. He had quietly applauded when in July 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had outraged sensibilities in the Western world by defiantly dubbing the Bosnia conflict “a rich man’s war” and later saying on a visit to Bosnia,“You have a situation that is better than ten other places in the world. I can give you a list.”47

  Perhaps because he felt his personal clock ticking, Vieira de Mello seemed to be in a great hurry to register his professional achievements. On the few occasions when he felt his career was stalled—and this was one—he fell into a fearsome funk. But even in such a low period, his wide smile and humor shielded most of his colleagues from his insecurities. “It’s ok,” he said, “as long as they don’t send me to the former Yugoslavia!”48 Having expressed misgivings about working in the Balkans, however, he promptly turned his attention to securing the most high-level job there that he could find.

  After six months of limbo in Geneva, Vieira de Mello was named the Bosnia-based political adviser to Thorvald Stoltenberg, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the former Yugoslavia. Stoltenberg was the same man whom Vieira de Mello blamed for hastily jumping ship as high commissioner three years before.

  In one sense the Bosnia job compounded Vieira de Mello’s sense of professional stagnation. Despite all of his feats—serving as High Commissioner Hocké’s chief of staff, negotiating the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Vietnamese boat people, and overseeing the massive repatriation operation in Cambodia—he was returning to a job similar to the one he had held a decade before when he advised General Callaghan in Lebanon. In order to serve Stoltenberg, he would again work at the right hand of the generals who commanded the peacekeepers. He would assess the political climate in Bosnia and identify humanitarian and diplomatic targets of opportunity for what was known as the UN Protection Force, or UNPROFOR.

  While in Lebanon, Vieira de Mello had signed up for a relatively peaceful mission that had turned violent with the Israeli invasion in 1982, in the Balkans he knew from the outset that he was entering a raging war zone. U.S. and European statesmen would continue to try to broker a political settlement, and he and the UN peacekeepers would try to build local confidence by easing civilian suffering on the ground. “I’m heading into Dante’s inferno,” he told friends.

  The optimism that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall had faded. Indeed, by the time of his posting to Sarajevo, the eruption of ethnic violence across the globe had begun to stir a nostalgia among pundits for the stability of the mutually assured destruction of the cold war. The democracies that had triumphed against Communism seemed outmatched by a new generation of brazen ethnic and religious nationalists and warlords. And whatever hopes existed for a UN renaissance seemed to die the very week of his departure for the Balkans.

  On October 4, 1993, three days before he would fly to the former Yugoslavia
, he watched chilling television footage from Mogadishu, Somalia.49 Over the course of the street battle, Somali fighters loyal to Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. soldiers. More than a thousand Somalis were also thought to have died. The evening news depicted jubilant Somalis dragging the mutilated corpse of a naked U.S. soldier along the streets of Mogadishu. The Somalia fiasco would prove to be one of the pivotal events of the 1990s. Because U.S. soldiers had gone to Somalia to assist a beleaguered UN mission, the incident solidified the anti-UN prejudice of many in the U.S. Congress and deepened the Pentagon’s distrust of the Clinton administration, which it blamed for sending U.S. troops into harm’s way without a proper plan.

  At a news conference after the firefight, President Clinton said,“I still believe that UN peacekeeping is important. And I still believe that America can play a role in that.” But he urged the UN to learn from its recent struggles. “The UN went into Cambodia first of all with this theory about what they had to do to or with the Khmer Rouge, and then moved away from any kind of military approach . . . in effect, creating a process in which the local people had to take responsibility for their own future. If we are going to do that kind of work, we ought to take the Cambodian model in Somalia and everyplace else.”50Vieira de Mello was proud of his achievements in Cambodia, but he knew the flaws of the UNTAC mission, and he knew that the key predictor of any UN mission’s success was its clarity of purpose and the backing it got from the major powers. He initially thought that what the Balkan mission lacked in clarity, it gained in support from the major powers. But he did not realize how divided those powers were over what should be done, and he did not foresee how he, the UN he cherished, and Bosnia itself would suffer the consequences.

  Seven

  “SANDWICHES AT THE GATES”

  If the UN’s Cambodia mission had put a dent in Vieira de Mello’s hopes for a “new world order,” his time in Bosnia would temporarily extinguish them. On October 7, 1993, unaware of just how dark a pall Somalia would cast over UN operations around the world, he said good-bye to his wife and sons, fifteen and thirteen, and made his way to the familiar Geneva airport to embark upon yet another journey into the unknown.

  Although UN Headquarters in New York had kept him waiting for months before offering him the Bosnia posting, his bosses now wanted him in place immediately. Amid the craze of his departure, Annick Roulet, his friend and former press officer in Cambodia, had been unable to steal time to discuss how she might support him from Geneva. They had agreed to meet at the airport for a cup of coffee before his flight.

  Roulet was on time, but he burst through the doors of the airport just forty-five minutes before his plane was to depart. “I’m sorry, Annick,” he said, breathlessly. “I think we’ll only manage a quick hello.” She proceeded to the nearest ticket desk and purchased a business-class ticket to London. “What have you done?” he asked when she rejoined him in the security line. “Working for you,” she said, “one learns to innovate.” He glanced at the ticket she was holding. “Why London?” he asked. “Why not London?” she answered. After clearing security, the two shared a relaxed cup of coffee in the business-class lounge in the departures area. When it was time for him to board, Roulet walked him to his gate and then retraced her steps, exiting the terminal and apologetically informing the Swissair agent that her boss had just called canceling her London meeting. She received a full refund.

  Vieira de Mello knew the basics of the crisis. Slovenia and Croatia had seceded from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in 1991, and a bloody war had ensued. At just the time he had been complaining about the slow deployment of UN peacekeepers to Cambodia in 1992, the UN’s tiny Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York had been attempting to find an additional 14,000 peacekeepers to send to Croatia to patrol a shaky cease-fire there. Then in April 1992, with the peacekeeping office stretched to its breaking point, Bosnia too had declared independence from Yugoslavia, and Serb nationalists had declared war. Bosnia’s population (43 percent Bosnian, 35 percent Serb, and 18 percent Croat) lived so intermingled that the violence instantly turned savage.13 Serb paramilitary forces herded Bosnian and Croat men into concentration camps, burned down non-Serb villages, and besieged a number of heavily populated towns that the UN Security Council eventually declared “safe areas.”

  With the murder of European civilians captured on television, the pressure mounted on President Bush to intervene in the Balkans as he had done over Kuwait in 1991. But the circumstances in the Gulf had been very different from those in the former Yugoslavia. Saddam Hussein had invaded a neighbor and threatened U.S. oil supplies. Bosnia was home to a messy civil war that the Bush administration did not feel threatened “vital U.S. interests.”

  But because the Western media covered the Bosnian conflict incessantly, the major powers could not afford to look away entirely. The United States joined European countries in funding UN humanitarian agencies that fed the war’s victims. The Security Council voted to send UN peacekeepers to the war-torn country in order to escort the aid workers who were delivering relief, and a number of European countries contributed soldiers to the dangerous mission. By the time of Vieira de Mello’s posting, the French had put more than 3,000 troops in Bosnia, the British nearly 2,300, and the Spanish over 1,200.1 But Western governments told their soldiers with the UN to avoid risk, and the blue helmets rarely fought back against marauding militia. Each country on the Security Council framed the crisis differently: the Bush and later Clinton administrations, which refused to put boots on the ground, blamed the Serbs for their “war of aggression”; Britain and France, which had troops in harm’s way, wanted to stay neutral in the conflict and played up a “tragic civil war”; and the Russians, out of solidarity with their fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs, sided with the Serbs. These divisions among the UN’s most powerful countries would paralyze the mission Vieira de Mello was joining.

  For all of the shortcomings of the UN mission in Cambodia, its two concrete achievements—the return of 360,000 refugees and the elections—had earned it a fairly glowing reputation outside Asia. By contrast, UNPROFOR was already seen as a “loser.” Few Bosnians read the fine print of UN mandates and inevitably saw the peacekeepers in their flak jackets, blue helmets, and armored personnel carriers as protectors. They were thus crushed to realize that most peacekeepers saw themselves as mere monitors.

  FORcE PROTECTION

  Vieira de Mello spent October 7 in Zagreb, the peaceful capital of Croatia where UNPROFOR kept its headquarters, then flew to Sarajevo. One of the UN’s most significant achievements in the region had been the establishment of a humanitarian airlift into the Bosnian capital, which was encircled by Bosnian Serb gunners. The UN relied on the airport, which it controlled, to transport its peacekeepers and supplies, to fly in journalists who were essential for maintaining public support and funding for the mission, and to deliver humanitarian relief to trapped civilians.The cargo planes were flown by American, French, British, German, and Canadian pilots, who operated what they called “Maybe Airlines.”2

  By the time of Vieira de Mello’s arrival, the daredevil pilots had grown quite practiced at evading Serb attacks, but it meant a roller coaster of a ride. He had been warned that Serb gunfire could pierce the base of the plane and penetrate his seat from below, so he sat atop his flak jacket and braced for what he knew would be a rapid and unwieldy descent. Starting at 18,000 feet, the plane took a steep and unforgiving dive, leveled for a short stretch, and then plunged again, this time twisting to and fro in order to prevent Serb ground missile sites from locking on. At the last minute the nose of the plane jerked upward, and the wheels crashed into the runway, jolting him and the other passengers forward. After the plane had skidded to a halt, he disembarked carrying a light suitcase and a briefcase.

  The journey from the airport offered him his first in-person glimpse of the Bosnian war. Sarajevo had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and he was told that the ide
ntical rectangular gray concrete apartment buildings around the airport had housed the athletes.The complex was so gutted by shell and sniper fire that he assumed it had been deserted. But a closer inspection revealed flowerpots on the window ledges, laundry hanging between telephone poles outside, and children kicking soccer balls against entranceways. Plastic sheeting affixed with the UNHCR logo had replaced glass in almost all the windows. Rusted hulks of cars had been propped on their sides along the road in a largely futile effort to shield pedestrians.

  Vieira de Mello’s UN driver brought him to the bunkered compound where he would work and live for the next several months. The “UN residency” was located in the former Delegates’ Club of the Yugoslav Communist Party, and it was a frequent target of Serb sniper and shell fire. He was shown a tiny office next to the briefing room, which would double as his sleeping quarters. Because he could speak with nearly all of the UNPROFOR officers in their native tongues, he quickly became a popular presence. But the soldiers teased him for his primness. The Belgian who commanded UN forces in Bosnia, Francis Briquemont, marveled at the number of times during the day that he spotted Vieira de Mello shuttling to and from the bathroom with his toothbrush and toothpaste.3