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

by Samantha Power

  He had been a consistent supporter of the nascent UN war crimes tribunal that had been set up in The Hague in 1993 to punish crimes carried out in the former Yugoslavia. Even if he was willing to “black box” the brutal deeds of suspected war criminals in his negotiations, he believed it was important that the UN system as a whole find a way to punish the perpetrators of atrocity. He had argued this position over Akashi’s objections. Yet by the fall of 1994 he was so dispirited that he started contradicting his own beliefs. He sat down with the Washington Post’s John Pomfret and discussed the role that grievances from the Second World War were playing in fueling the Balkan crisis.“These people should just forget,” he said sharply. He compared the military rule in Argentina with that in Brazil and argued that the reason Brazil had managed to move on, while Argentina still seemed mired in recriminations over its past, was that Brazilians had decided to let go of their pain. Pomfret challenged him, arguing that it was precisely the failure to reckon with previous crimes that had made it easier for Serb extremists to rally their people to pursue long-sought revenge.This time around, when the wars ended, some form of accountability for the atrocities and some attempt at closure were essential.Vieira de Mello said he disagreed, calling the idea “very American.” When Pomfret, a China expert, said that in fact he had learned these lessons in China, where the crimes of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had been covered up at considerable cost, Vieira de Mello shook his head. “China is on the right track,” he argued.“Remembering history will only slow them down.”

  In September he traveled to Pale to attempt to defuse tensions between UNPROFOR and the Serbs. When Karadžić lectured him about the UN’s “intolerable” pro-Muslim bias, he said he understood the Serbs’ bitterness but rejected their allegations. “The UN is impartial,” he said.“Our efforts to seek peace in the Balkans are benefiting all sides equally.” And then to underscore the point he admitted, “NATO intervention might have been far more serious if not for UNPROFOR’s restraint.” Karadžić knew this to be true, but he countered that “UNPROFOR’s presence had prevented the total defeat of the Muslims.”47 Here Karadžić too was correct.

  Despite the mounting indications that he and UNPROFOR were addressing symptoms and not causes,Vieira de Mello kept his focus on tactical humanitarian gains. He began his final negotiations on prisoner exchanges on September 30, 1994. The talks began in the morning, and the parties spent the entire day feuding. As the discussions dragged on past midnight, French UN officials began serving whiskey and plum brandy. Several people drank so much that they passed out in their chairs. Vieira de Mello, who was returning to UNHCR in Geneva the following week, would not be denied. As dawn broke, after twenty hours of negotiation, the Bosnians and the Serbs settled on the terms of the lengthy agreement, which would allow for the release of more than three hundred prisoners. All that was left was for him to add his official signature.

  However, when Darko Mocibob, a Bosnian UN official, began translating the annexes to the agreement,Vieira de Mello realized that, during the bathroom breaks, the parties had struck a number of side deals benefiting their friends and families. As Mocibob translated the handwritten side texts, he watched a frown come over his boss’s face. “I could hardly suppress my laughter as I read him the additional terms, which none of us had expected,” Mocibob recalls. “It was ‘when Mehmed is released to the other side, he can carry 400 deutsch marks and 5 kilos of tobacco. Milos will be allowed to bring his pistol. And all the returnees will all be able to carry shoe glue.’” Vieira de Mello was desperate to close the deal, but not at the expense of the UN’s prestige. He refused to affix his signature to the private bargains. “I’m very happy for you that you have reached this agreement,” he said, too tired to be amused. “But you’ll have to find somebody else to be a witness. I am a senior official with the United Nations.” Only when the parties removed their side annexes did he agree to sign.

  The UNPROFOR mission was neither effective nor respected. Vieira de Mello had been away from UNHCR for a year and was due back. In one of his final interviews, he said he was leaving the region with a “bitter taste in my mouth.”48 Yet while he would not miss the humiliations, he would miss the people, the drama, and the global stakes. At a farewell reception at UN headquarters in Zagreb, his colleagues presented him with a parting gift of a framed photograph of the trams running along Sniper’s Alley in Sarajevo, with children running nearby. One UN official joked, “Just think, Sergio, one of those children might be yours.” Vieira de Mello smiled politely, but as Elisabeth Naucler, his Finnish aide, recalls, “He could have done without it.”

  He conducted a mini-farewell tour of the former Yugoslavia. In Zagreb he bade a stiff farewell to Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, whom he had never liked. In Belgrade he pounded the pavement of the old city, looking for a gift for Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. In the end he settled on a painting, which he presented at a warm final meeting in the Presidential Palace in downtown Belgrade. In Sarajevo, the city that had stolen his heart, he said good-bye to President Izetbegović, and Prime Minister Silajdžić, whom he now considered a close friend.

  What was most remarkable about his departure was that each of the feuding factions had come to believe he was their ally. “How many UN officials do you think would be sent off like that by all sides?” asks Vladislav Guerassev, who headed the UN office in Belgrade. “It shows you what a remarkable diplomat he was.” But during a bloody and morally fraught conflict in which the Serb side committed the bulk of the atrocities, his popularity with wrongdoers stemmed in part from his moral relativism. Even though he was unfailingly kind to Bosnian individuals, he had lost sight of the big picture. He seemed more interested in being liked and in maintaining access than in standing up for those who were suffering. He had brought a traditional approach to peacekeeping to a radically novel set of circumstances. And uncharacteristically, he had failed to adapt. Although Vieira de Mello was unaware of it, his seeming eagerness to side with strength had caused some of his critical UN colleagues to nickname him “Serbio.” It would take a massacre in another of the UN’s “safe areas” to jolt him into the belated recognition that impartial peacekeeping between two unequal sides was its own form of side-taking.

  Nine

  IN RETROSPECT

  Vieira de Mello was demoralized by his time in the Balkans, but he was not yet ashamed. Impartiality was such a bedrock UN principle and his daily activities had so consumed him that he had not yet questioned his or the UN’s performance.

  When he returned to Geneva in October 1994 he also had more prosaic matters on his mind. For starters, he was not sure whether High Commissioner Ogata would welcome him back. Ogata had qualities that Vieira de Mello admired. New to the UN, she disdained organizational habits that had been reflexively passed from one generation of UN officials and aid workers to the next. She was unafraid to speak her mind. UN staff in Geneva joked that in the male-dominated UN, Ogata kept a box outside her office, accompanied by a sign that read: PLEASE BE SURE TO DEPOSIT YOUR BALLS IN THE BOX BEFORE ENTERING. Vieira de Mello referred to Ogata as “La Vieille” (the Old Lady) and the “Diminutive Giant,” terms of both endearment and respect.

  But no matter how long he interacted with her, he never felt as though he knew her. She did not have the personal warmth that he most valued in people. Her eagerness to “put UNHCR on the map” had caused UNHCR to compete with agencies with which it had once collaborated. He still ventured into their one-on-one lunches with apprehension, sometimes dramatically grabbing his stomach and feigning physical cramps to show his amused colleagues the physical toll of his anxiety. Before entering her office, he would sigh, shake his head, and mockingly offer one of his favorite expressions: “Ahhh, the things I must do in service of humanity!”

  Having been away from UNHCR headquarters in Geneva for three years while in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, Vieira de Mello expected to undergo an uncomfortable period of hazing, and it duly
followed. He saw the UN holistically, as a system with many complementary parts, but Ogata saw other branches of the UN—such as the Department of Peacekeeping Operations for which he had worked in Bosnia—as competition. Toward the end of his time in the Balkans, she had grudgingly written to Kofi Annan, who was running the peacekeeping department in New York, that UNHCR was “under extreme strain” and that she wished Vieira de Mello “could have been around to help me tackle these crises.” The absence of staff of his caliber, she had written, “was jeopardizing the capacity of my Office to answer adequately to emergencies.”1

  But since Annan was closer to Boutros-Ghali, the boss, he had gotten Vieira de Mello’s leave from UNHCR extended three times. “For Ogata if you work at Toyota, you stay at Toyota until the end,” recalls Kamel Morjane, then director of the Africa Division at UNHCR. “Sergio decided to leave Toyota and work at Honda. When he returned, he had to be subjected to a new test. He had to prove his loyalty.” Ogata now denies that she was testing him and claims she had no objection to his lengthy leave. “What Sergio was doing in Bosnia was rather limited compared to what we in UNHCR were doing,” she says. “There were many brilliant officials in UNHCR that I could call upon in his absence.” She could often sound as though his emerging public profile was a threat to her own.

  For all of her downplaying of Vieira de Mello’s assets, Ogata was very fond of him. When she was invited to meet the queen of England, she told her aides that she was tempted to invite him rather than her own husband. Ogata also understood that she would not be able to keep him by her side at UNHCR if she did not reward his manifest talents. The repatriation of 360,000 refugees to Cambodia, followed so swiftly by his high-profile trip into Gorazde, had earned him praise far beyond the humanitarian community. She valued his Rolodex and his pragmatic and creative approach to crises, as well as the fact that he did not get bogged down in ideology. “Sergio was a problem-solver,” she recalls. “I got the impression he agreed with my way of doing things.” Ogata told him that she would create a new post of director of policy planning and operations just for him. This made him the number three official at UNHCR, an agency that then employed five thousand staff. The position of director of operations had not been refilled at UNHCR since Thomas Jamieson had left it to retire in 1972, so history had come full circle. Ogata also promised him that she would work to get his new position bumped up to assistant secretary-general, which was the third-highest rank in the UN system. This would happen in January 1996.

  Ogata asked him to organize what she hoped would be a pathbreaking intergovernmental summit to address the problems of displacement and migration in the former Soviet Union. Russia wanted to use the conference to earn international sympathy and money to support the twenty-five million ethnic Russians who were being discriminated against in and sometimes even expelled from Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and the other former Soviet republics.14 UNHCR hoped to gather leaders to get them to agree to broader legislation that would protect minorities and guarantee freedom of movement across boundaries.2

  He enlisted a twenty-seven-year-old Italian named Claire Messina, who had written her Ph.D. on Russian migration, to help manage the process. “Most senior people pretend they know things,” Messina recalls. “Sergio saw no shame in saying, ‘I don’t know anything about the region. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ ” He also persuaded Viktor Andreev, the Russian with whom he had worked closely in Bosnia, to move to Geneva to join his team. Although Andreev was notoriously lazy and Messina did most of the work herself, Vieira de Mello did not seem to mind. He explained the hire by saying, “First, we need a Russian in this process. And second,Viktor is very loyal. He never played games with me in Bosnia. He was straight. And for a Russian in the Balkans that was very rare.” In fact, hiring a Russian national for such a politically sensitive conference was more likely to alienate non-Russians. But for Vieira de Mello, loyalty and personal history more than compensated.

  The conference, which would be held in May 1996, would prove something of a bust, as the governments that attended would largely limit themselves to reciting old complaints rather than devising new guidelines to meet the challenges of discrimination and migration. Nonetheless Vieira de Mello enjoyed the groundwork. In 1995 he traveled to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, where he briefed senior officials and heard their concerns. The combination of his new UN rank, the contacts he had amassed over the years, and the public profile he had established for himself in Bosnia meant that, on his visits to the former Soviet Union, he gained entrée at an entirely new level: with heads of state and foreign ministers. “Are you not impressed that prime ministers drop everything to see me?” he asked his new special assistant Izumi Nakamitsu, who had been Akashi’s aide in the Balkans. “Don’t get carried away,” she reminded him. “These are prime ministers from very small countries.” He stuck his tongue out at her in pretend offense.

  His steady climb through the ranks of the UN had not stripped him of his unusual regard for the individuals in whose name UN programs were run. On one trip in September 1996 to Azerbaijan, a country that had been at war with Armenia over the province of Nagorno Karabakh, the deputy foreign minister escorted him around a sprawling refugee camp. The country was teeming with refugees, as one in eight Azerbaijanis had been displaced by the conflict. The fetid camp was starting to acquire the air of permanence that Jamieson had so despised. Individual refugees approached him to share their grievances. He told them he was meeting with the president of the country later in the day and asked, “Is there a message that I can deliver on your behalf?” At the start of his tour of the camp, he chatted at length with an elderly woman, probably in her late seventies, who described the melancholy she felt at being unable to return to her rural home. He continued speaking with other camp residents, with Azerbaijani officials, and with UN field workers. After an hour the deputy foreign minister steered him toward the camp exit, where his official limousine waited. Suddenly, just as he was about to enter the vehicle, he stopped. “I need to find that old lady again,” he said.

  The delegation made its way back to the woman’s battered tent, where she remained standing outside. “What do you miss the most?” Vieira de Mello asked the woman. “I am a proud person,” she said through a translator. “My whole life I have lived alone, and I have worked the land myself. I have never depended on anybody for anything. And now here I am for three years dependent on handouts from the UN. It is very hard.” She looked down at the ground.“And what do you want for yourself?” he asked. She looked straight at him and said simply: “I want to go up into the sky and become a cloud. And then as a cloud, I want to travel through the sky many miles to where my home is, and when I see my land, I want to turn into rain, and fall from the sky, landing in the soil so I can remain forever in the place that I belong.” He shook his head in wonder. He knew how unlikely it was that the crisis in Nagorno Karabakh would be resolved in her lifetime, but he promised he would do what he could.“A wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body,” he often told colleagues.3

  He moved naturally between refugee camps and the capital cities where he made his appeals for diplomatic interventions or financial resources. He was increasingly popular in Washington. Many of those he had encountered over the years at U.S. embassies or in the refugee world had amassed power in the Clinton administration. Still, when he visited town, he would feign irritation with Dawn Calabia, the UNHCR official who managed his schedule. “These people are too low level. Why can’t you get me a meeting with the secretary of state, the vice president, or the president?” he said. “Just wait,” Calabia replied. “When the president actually needs you for something, then you’ll get that meeting.”

  He did not like the ritual of paying homage to midlevel officialdom. “These people should come to me,” he would say, pointing to the schedule, sometimes with genuine indignation and sometimes with contrived po
mposity: “That way, I can wear my jeans, and you can supply the cold beer.” There were only two categories of people he really wanted to meet with: old friends and people who could be useful to him in tackling the crises of the day. “Why do I have to meet him?” he would groan. “Why does it have to be me? I only have eight hours in this town and no time to breathe and you want me to waste my time with him?”

  He was most comfortable in Southeast Asia. Six years after helping to negotiate the plan to resettle Vietnamese boat people, he was able to personally oversee the closure of the refugee camps in the region. Although he took pride in his role, his mind was drifting to the political sphere. On the plane ride to Hanoi, where once he would have consumed situation reports on refugee housing and education needs, he instead read Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, the former U.S. secretary of defense’s reckoning with the Vietnam War. When Nakamitsu asked him his view of the book, he shook his head. “Some people can’t say ‘in retrospect,’ ” he said. “It’s too late.”

  Whenever he was in Geneva for more than a month, he grew restless. On the wall of his office, he had hung his framed photograph of the Sarajevo tram, alongside the bronze plaques given to him by UN peacekeeping units in Lebanon and Bosnia, and the flag of the Montagnards whom he had helped resettle from Cambodia to North Carolina. On his desk he kept the framed photograph of Jamieson. Beside his computer he kept a shoebox. One day Nakamitsu inquired about the contents of the box. “That is the box of possibilities,” he told her. “Inside are the names of people who have impressed me over the years. Someday when I run my own mission, I will call upon those people, and we will put together a dream team.” He opened up the box, and she peered inside to see Vieira de Mello’s professional confetti: hundreds of business cards and handwritten names and numbers scribbled onto napkins, hotel stationery, and fragments of bar coasters. She marveled at the variety of names he had gathered—government officials, unheralded UN field officers, soldiers, journalists, bodyguards, even the salesperson who had sold him his home air conditioner.