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

by Samantha Power

  He retained the names of others as well—those who he felt had let him down. As sensitive to impingements on his own dignity as he was to those on others’, he was not one to forget even imagined slights. A small piece of paper with the name “Tim Wirth” remained pinned beneath his stapler on his desk for more than a year. Once, when he had traveled to Washington for meetings, Wirth, who was undersecretary of state for global affairs in the Clinton administration, had been unable to receive him. “One day Tim Wirth will ask me for a meeting,” he told Nakamitsu, “and I will turn it down.” It wasn’t just the lack of access that got to him. As she recalls, “Sergio took the snub as one more sign that the United States didn’t take the UN seriously.” Even though Wirth was perhaps the biggest backer of the UN in the Clinton administration—so big that after he left office he would take over the UN Foundation, funded by Ted Turner, and would lead the effort to improve the UN’s standing in the eyes of Americans—Vieira de Mello carried the grudge.

  Since he and Nakamitsu had worked in the Balkans at the same time, they spent a lot of time discussing UNPROFOR, the Balkan mission that continued to founder in their absence. He always defended the mission, believing the peacekeepers were doing more good than harm for civilians. He also refrained from publicly jabbing the major powers on the UN Security Council, who continued to bring great bombast but insufficient resolve to the conflict. In Geneva, where UNHCR civilian relief workers were seen to be outperforming the UNPROFOR peacekeepers, he insisted that the blue helmets were getting a bad rap: UNHCR food convoys would not be able to reach civilians amid such violence were they not escorted by UN soldiers. In addition, he said, the peacekeepers were guarding heavy-weapons collection points around Sarajevo, and they had helped end the siege of Gorazde.

  But as the months wore on and he acquired the distance to reflect on UNPROFOR’s performance, he changed his mind. He suddenly became plagued by memories of the UN’s timidity and, he feared, its complicity. He reflected critically on the way he and other UNPROFOR officials had downplayed Serb brutality in order to stop NATO from using air power. UNPROFOR was the first peacekeeping force to be given a humanitarian mandate in the context of “an all-out and merciless war,” he wrote. “A greater contradiction in terms and, indeed, on the ground, would have been difficult to achieve.”4 He wrote of the “senselessness of providing relief where there was no security, where shelling and sniper fire took their daily toll on those recently ’assisted.’ ”5 Absent political remedies, the humanitarian aid deliveries were a “frustrating palliative.” He worried privately that he had become what critic David Rieff called a “cultist of the small victory”—so consumed by small humanitarian tasks that he had lost sight of how best to make a meaningful difference.6

  He finally stopped treating the UN Security Council’s Resolution 836, which had established Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Srebrenica as “safe areas,” as worth probing for guidance, later referring to it simply as a “museum piece of irresponsible political and military behavior.” He confessed to one reporter that “you would get up in Sarajevo during that fucking winter and look at yourself in the mirror and wonder whether we were not the wardens of a huge concentration camp.”7 By failing to protect the “safe areas” and effectively forcing civilians to remain in their squalor, he said, Western countries and international institutions had exposed “the limits of our own moral conscience.” He finally even felt comfortable joking about Akashi. “Akashi is amoral and inhumane,” he told colleagues. “But apart from that he is a good guy!”

  No longer weighted down by the day-to-day crisis management of the Balkans, and at a safe remove from the fighting, the philosopher who had argued for melding utopia and realism began to reemerge.The same man who had insisted to John Pomfret that the parties in the Balkans negotiate peace and give up on legal prosecutions now tacked a Hague MOST WANTED poster of the war’s prime suspects on his office wall.The poster bore the names and faces of many he had wined and dined, almost all of whom remained at large. If the UN had failed to protect civilians in need, the organization now had a duty to punish the guilty. As he had argued back in 1991 in his lecture on Kant, fair judicial processes were needed to halt cycles of violence.

  He saw that the progress he had made in easing the siege of Sarajevo had been fully reversed. In the spring of 1995 the Bosnian Serbs sealed the roads into the city, recommenced sniper and shelling attacks on the capital, and began shutting down the airport and the trams at whim. “The Serbs have seen what NATO air power looks like,” he told Nakamitsu, “and they aren’t terribly impressed.” Serb forces brazenly fired upon the safe areas, blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid to trapped civilians in them, and with little to fear from UN peacekeepers, even obstructed the passage of supplies to the blue helmets, who by the summer of 1995 had so little fuel that they were forced to conduct patrols on mules.

  He did not see a way out. But he also did not foresee the catastrophic events of July 1995. On July 11 he was in Tbilisi, Georgia, preparing for the UNHCR conference on migration in the former Soviet Union. He turned on CNN in his hotel room and saw that the safe area of Srebrenica, which was just sixty-two miles northeast of the enclave of Gorazde, was being pounded by the Bosnian Serb army. Television images depicted tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees fleeing along the main road in the enclave and gathering at the Dutch UN base. He did not believe that the major powers were prepared to employ serious NATO military force in order to protect the fleeing civilians. Some 400 Dutch troops were in the enclave, tasked with protecting some 40,000 Bosnian civilians.

  He grew even more pessimistic when CNN showed the broad, ruddy face of General Mladić, the Serb general who fifteen months before had taken him on the morbid tour of the desecrated Serb cemetery outside Gorazde. If Mladić viewed NATO as a “paper tiger” in 1994,Vieira de Mello could only imagine how emboldened he had become after marching uncontested into Srebrenica. By the middle of the day the UN announced that the Srebrenica safe area had officially fallen. Mladić was shown passing out candy to small, terrified Bosnian children and telling the men and women gathered at the UNPROFOR base that they had nothing to fear. “No one will do you any harm,” the general said. “First women and children are to be taken. . . . Don’t be afraid.”8 All males over sixteen, he said nonchalantly, would be “screened for war crimes.” Even though the footage of Mladić rounding up Bosnian men aired on CNN and the BBC,Western leaders did not publicly demand that the male detainees be released.

  That night at dinner Vieira de Mello and Nakamitsu discussed the capture of the safe area. “This is the biggest blow to the UN yet,” he said. “I’m not sure we will recover. It is one thing for the UN to fail to protect civilians. But it is another thing for the UN to promise to protect people and then to open its gates to those intent on harming them.” Bosnian civilians had flocked to the Dutch UN base in Srebrenica, trusting that there they would be safe, but the Dutch had turned them away. With a dark sense of foreboding, the two former UNPROFOR officials drank a bad bottle of Georgian red wine and resumed the familiar debate as to whether Akashi should have called for the bombing of the Serbs outside Sarajevo after the market massacre of February 1994 or whether Vieira de Mello himself should have requested all-out air strikes when the Serbs had not complied properly with the Gorazde ultimatum. For the first time he suggested aloud that the choices he and others had made in Bosnia may have cost lives.“I’m glad I’m not there now,” he confessed. “I’m not sure what I would have done.” It was an admission that seemed to reflect both moral insecurity and professional relief.

  He understood that night that the fall of a UN safe area had damaged the UN’s standing and that civilians would forever be traumatized by the ordeal. But over the next several weeks he would learn that the Serb seizure of the territory of Srebrenica was only part of the catastrophe. The real tragedy involved the fate of the Bosnian men and boys whom Mladić had hauled away to undisclosed locations. Over the next five days, while Vieira de Mell
o and Nakamitsu continued their tour of the former Soviet Union, Mladić presided over the systematic slaughter of every Bosnian man and boy in his custody, some eight thousand in all. When the Serb mass graves were discovered six weeks later, Vieira de Mello was stunned. “I never thought Mladić was this stupid,” he said, projecting his own reverence for reason onto one who clearly observed different norms. “The massacre was totally unnecessary.” The safe-area concept that Vieira de Mello had himself helped to preserve had brought ruin and death to those who mistakenly believed that the UN flag represented an international promise of protection.

  When Vieira de Mello lived in the Balkans, he had deduced that NATO countries were not willing to make war to protect civilians. And he had believed that NATO air power would have caused Serbs to retaliate against UN peacekeepers and UNHCR aid workers. But with revelations about the Srebrenica massacre, public pressure on Western governments suddenly rose to an unprecedented pitch. UNPROFOR peacekeepers had been exposed as unable or unwilling to protect civilians who relied upon them. And cries for the withdrawal of the blue helmets—by those who cared about saving lives in Bosnia and by those who cared about the future of the UN—were heard around the world.

  Finally, in late August 1995 the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. On August 28 a second massacre occurred around the corner from the infamous bloodied market that Vieira de Mello had visited eighteen months before. This shell killed thirty-seven people.This time UN peacekeepers were withdrawn from Serb territory so that NATO could strike from the air without worrying about the safety of the blue helmets. Acting through NATO, the United States and Europe began a two-week heavy bombing campaign. NATO replaced the “pin-prick” air strikes seen around Gorazde with systematic attacks on Serb bunkers, ammunitions depots, and airstrips.

  Vieira de Mello welcomed the NATO onslaught he had once opposed. He saw the air attacks as the only way to break a deadly stalemate. And indeed with their intervention Western governments finally altered the balance of power on the ground, reversed Serb gains, and enabled negotiators to press all three sides into signing the Dayton Peace Agreement, which divided Bosnia into two roughly equal halves, one controlled by the Serbs, the other by an uneasy alliance of Bosnians and Croats. Some 198 peacekeepers and aid workers had been killed in the war in Bosnia, along with more than 100,000 Bosnian civilians. The approach favored by General Rose, which Vieira de Mello had strongly favored, was judged harshly by history. A UN report, issued in 2000, noted that when one party to a conflict repeatedly attacked civilians, the UN’s “continued equal treatment” of all sides “can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil.”9

  The Bosnia peacekeeping failure, combined with the experience of UN blue helmets who were bystanders to genocide in Rwanda in 1994, dealt devastating blows to the reputation of the United Nations. Released from the cold war stalemate, the Security Council of the 1990s had been liberated to enforce international peace and security. But the back-to-back calamities had made it clear that, if civilians were not pawns in a larger ideological struggle, as they had been in the cold war, their welfare would command hardly any attention at all. Instead of using the Security Council to establish and enforce a new global order, the major powers sent lightly armed peacekeepers into harm’s way simply to monitor the carnage. The results were devastating in two regards. First, civilians were murdered en masse. And second, the UN peacekeepers took far more of the blame than the politicians who had handed them an assignment that was, Vieira de Mello liked to say, “mission impossible.”

  He returned to Bosnia only once. On January 9, 1996, as 60,000 NATO troops were arriving to enforce the new Dayton peace, Ogata sent him to mark the end of the Sarajevo humanitarian airlift. With the war over, the checkpoints were gone and the roads that Vieira de Mello had worked so hard to open were now cluttered with traffic. At the airport ceremony he smashed a champagne bottle against a large food crate and declared, “Our efforts helped keep the city alive, but now we are no longer needed.”10 He credited Sarajevo civilians for their “resilience, courage and pride,” acknowledging, “We know we only partially mitigated their suffering.” The airlift, Operation Provide Promise, which had run from July 2, 1992, to January 4, 1996, had outlasted the fifteen-month Berlin airlift.11 Twenty-one countries had flown nearly 13,000 missions and delivered 160,677 metric tons of food, medicines, and other supplies.12 Vieira de Mello let the occasion pass without mentioning the hundreds of Bosnians whom he had helped smuggle out of Sarajevo on the UN “train” that he had run from his office. Never one to pause long in a sentimental moment, he smiled to the assembled dignitaries and muttered under his breath to Nakamitsu, “I can’t believe we just wasted a good bottle of Dom Pérignon!”

  Even though UNHCR had been criticized in the former Yugoslavia for overextending itself, unlike the peacekeepers’, its presumptive virtue had not been challenged. In fact, it was the rare UN agency that (with the exception of the crisis over deposed high commissioner Jean-Pierre Hocké) had escaped serious scandal during its forty-five-year history. Because he had departed the Balkans long before Srebrenica’s fall,Vieira de Mello too managed to avoid being blamed by the media or by critics of the UN. But all of that changed as a result of the humanitarian crisis brought about by the genocide in Rwanda. UNHCR would be attacked with vitriol, and for the first time in Vieira de Mello’s unblemished career, he would find himself personally tarred by an international moral and humanitarian calamity.

  Ten

  DAMNED IF YOU DO

  Rwandan refugees in the Ngara camp in Tanzania, 1994.

  Vieira de Mello had never been one to expend his energy on hopeless places. Thus, although he was earning a deserved reputation as one of the UN system’s elite troubleshooters, he wanted nothing to do with the part of the world that in 1996 presented the most trouble of all: the Great Lakes region of Africa, which included Rwanda, Zaire, and Tanzania.

  In April 1994, at the very time he was leading a UN convoy into the Bosnian safe area of Gorazde, Hutu extremists in Rwanda were in the process of butchering 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. After one hundred days of slaughter, the génocidaires were finally driven out of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), headed by Paul Kagame, the country’s future president.15 The killers fled into neighboring Tanzania and Zaire, hidden amid a fifteen-mile-long river of humanity. Some two million Hutu civilians, who had been led to believe by their leaders that they would be harmed if they stayed in Rwanda, were on the move.

  In the first month of the exodus, cholera and dysentery epidemics killed at least 50,000 of the Hutu refugees who crossed into Zaire, and UNHCR, along with a wide variety of international aid groups, quickly sprang into action in the enormous (Zaire’s landmass is as large as Western Europe’s) and inhospitable country. Once the relief groups had helped control the disease epidemics, they remained in order to maintain the camps, which lay in Zaire and Tanzania not far from the Rwandan border.1 At these sprawling camps, which contained a mix of Hutu gunmen and legitimate Hutu refugees, international aid agencies doled out between 6,000 and 7,000 tons of food a week, at a cost of approximately $1 million per day, paid for by Western governments.

  QUAGMIRE

  In the quarter century since Vieira de Mello first joined UNHCR, humanitarian agencies had developed speedy and sophisticated mechanisms to deliver medicine, food, sanitation, and shelter to refugees in crisis. But aid workers knew that the care they offered often had the adverse consequence of leaving men in the camps free to concentrate on their military pursuits.2 Indeed, the international relief community had become so reliable that by the mid-1990s armed groups around the world had started factoring in the presence of donated relief as they plotted their military strategies.The Hutu génocidaires in Zaire had already proven themselves master planners.

  Unsurprisingly, the same Hutu government officials who had orchestrated the fastest killing spree i
n recorded history quickly asserted control in their new environment. A UN team estimated that some 21 former ministers, 54 former members of parliament, and 126 ex-mayors resided in the camps.3 These former regime officials retained their weapons and access to their well-stocked foreign bank accounts. In many camps they quickly reconstituted the structures they had used to govern Rwanda, dividing the camps among prefectures and communes or, in some, establishing formal “ministries” for security, social welfare, finance, and communications. Camp leaders beat, or in some cases murdered, Hutu whom they suspected of wanting to head back to Rwanda. UNHCR aid workers regularly discovered fresh corpses in the camps, but they felt they had no choice but to work with the suspected killers.“The UNHCR emergency field manual said, ‘Find the natural leaders and get them to help you distribute relief,’ ” recalls Caroll Faubert, UNHCR’s special envoy to the Great Lakes region. “We didn’t think this through, but it meant: Give the genocidal leaders more power.” The Hutu militia in the Zairean camps soon began attacking Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Tutsi-led Rwandan government started staging small retaliatory strikes into Zaire. The location of several of the UNHCR camps within two miles of Rwanda made it easier for the génocidaires to stage their attacks and for the Rwandan army to strike back.4