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

by Samantha Power

  As UNHCR’s director of policy planning and operations in Geneva, Vieira de Mello should have been heavily involved in the agency’s pivotal decision making concerning this controversial aid operation. But while others in Ogata’s inner circle had been involved in Rwanda since the genocide itself, he had been in the former Yugoslavia when the 1994 slaughter occurred, and he was initially content to stay largely removed from managing its messy aftermath. “Sergio didn’t want to get deeply involved in a problem that he knew had no solution,” recalls Izumi Nakamitsu, his special assistant at the time. Kamel Morjane, the director of UNHCR’s Africa Division, had a difficult time getting his colleague to focus on the region. Vieira de Mello stuck to his comfort areas: Asia, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. “Sergio,” Morjane said, “if you’re not interested in Africa, that’s okay. But at least give me a time and I can come and brief you!” Morjane managed to impose one fixed meeting each week.5

  Vieira de Mello had still been in the Balkans when Ogata made her most important choices. She had considered closing the camps in the hopes that the Hutu exiles would go back to Rwanda, but she decided not to because she did not believe conditions there were safe. If the camps were to remain in place, she knew, they would have to be demilitarized. But UNHCR, a civilian agency, did not by itself have either the mandate or the security forces needed to neutralize the Hutu militants. The agency’s field officers and logisticians were unarmed and intended to stay that way. On Ogata’s pleading, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had tried to persuade powerful countries in the UN to send troops or police to the camps in Zaire to arrest the génocidaires and ship them off to the newly established UN war crimes tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. But when Boutros-Ghali attempted to round up international troops for the task, he had struck out. On January 10, 1995, he telephoned Ogata with the bad news: He had asked thirty-nine countries to send troops, and only one country, Bangladesh, had agreed. The world had turned its back on Rwanda during the genocide, so it was not surprising that, in its aftermath, countries were not leaping to deploy troops to arrest the génocidaires who were still armed and dangerous.6 The shadow of Somalia loomed large in many countries, and few were sympathetic to Rwandan Hutu, who as a collective were blamed for the genocide. Ogata and UNHCR had been told they would have to find a way to manage the genocidal gunmen on their own.

  Vieira de Mello naturally got dragged into tortured in-house discussions about how to proceed. Several aid agencies, including Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-France and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest U.S. aid agency, decided to pull out of the camps. In the IRC’s sixty-four-year history, this marked the first time that it had terminated its feeding programs out of repugnance for its clientele. “It was a terrible decision to have to make,” IRC vice president Roy Williams said later, but “sometimes we just shouldn’t show up for a disaster.”7 Vieira de Mello did not consider recommending that Ogata end UN aid to the Hutu camps as a sign of protest against the génocidaires. “There is no justification for the suspension of UNHCR assistance,” he wrote in one report.8 He often argued that UNHCR had a special responsibility because it was the last frontier for refugees. Nongovernmental organizations could leave knowing UNHCR would be there to back them up.“We could have made ourselves feel good by saying, ‘We’re leaving,’ ” Ogata recalls. “But while principles are important, real life is more important.” In a statement to her staff Ogata cautioned against confusing a human rights mandate and a humanitarian mandate. “Unlike human rights actors,” she said, “UNHCR’s role is not judgmental but humanitarian. UNHCR is there not to expose the perpetrators but to help the victims.”9 She would not think of pulling out. “There were also innocent refugees in the camps; more than half were women and children,” she said later.“Should we have said: you are related to murderers, so you are guilty too?”16 10 Although she felt UNHCR had been abandoned by the world’s governments, she also never considered stepping down as high commissioner.11

  Fresh out of options and desperate for help, Ogata took the hugely controversial step of using UN funds to rent out part of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s notoriously abusive Zairean army to do what no other country would do: provide security in the camps. On February 12, 1995, in a surreal scene, she traveled to Goma and presided over a ceremony in which the Zairean deputy prime minister, Admiral Mavua Mudima, turned over 150 soldiers from the Zairean presidential guard to UNHCR, the first installment of what others would call “Ogata’s troops.” UNHCR issued mustard-colored uniforms to the Zairean soldiers to distinguish them from the multitude of armed groups in the region, and the agency paid each of the soldiers three dollars per day, giving them vehicles, radios, and office equipment.12 At the cost of $10 million per year, some 1,500 of these subcontracted Zairean soldiers would offer security for UNHCR staff and for refugees at the camps in Zaire.13 “The troops are not going to divide the perpetrators from the innocent, only maintain law and order,” she said. “That is as far as my office can go.”14 She was already going further than any UN civilian official had dared go before. When reporters railed against UNHCR for continuing to feed the génocidaires, she pressed back. “Who would separate them?” she asked. “Who would pay for all this? The international community never came up with an answer.”15

  Vieira de Mello did not personally visit the camps until July 1996, when he traveled to the Zairean border with Nakamitsu. If he had been skeptical that UNHCR could help resolve the mess in the Great Lakes region before his trip, he was downright despondent afterward. Militant camp leaders anointed by UNHCR lorded it over their fellow citizens. They sat beside stacks of UN flour and blankets with fists full of bills. They kept their guns visible and strutted around in new track suits, ordering each household to pay a monthly tax and press-ganging men into joining the genocidal militia that patrolled the camps and plotted for a future war in Rwanda. Instead of dispersing the free UN humanitarian aid, they often sold it. The profits allowed them to amass huge stashes of firearms and grenades.16

  As he toured the camps with Nakamitsu, Vieira de Mello described Zaire as the “armpit of the world” and predicted that the country’s weak governing structures would soon crumble, causing the sprawling multiethnic nation to disintegrate. He found the experience of navigating the camps a chilling one.“There’s one,” he said to Nakamitsu, singling out a man he thought was a génocidaire crouching beside the blue UNHCR tents or bossing villagers around.“And there, there’s another one.”“How can you tell?” she asked him. “Look in their eyes,” he said. “There is nothing left in them.” He was disgusted by the scene. “The people here are being controlled by sheer terror, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  He had been told ahead of his trip that in just two years the camps had come to seem permanent, but he was unprepared for what he saw: a structured, seemingly permanent city life very similar to that in the Cambodian camps in Thailand before he had helped empty them. Indeed, a late-1995 survey of the four main camps in Goma, which housed 650,000 refugees, found 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 shops, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butchers, 5 ironsmiths, 4 photographic studios, 3 cinemas, 2 hotels, and 1 animal slaughterhouse.17

  In both Cambodia and Zaire the major powers were willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars feeding the refugees, but they were not willing to insert their forces into the camps to ensure that the perpetrators of genocide were punished or removed. The crucial difference between the two circumstances, he saw, was that in the 1980s Western governments had spent millions aiding the Cambodian refugees as a way of destabilizing the Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh. But in the Great Lakes area, a region of marginal strategic value, Western governments were not using aid as a tool for promoting their national interests. Rather, they were using aid as a substitute for meaningful foreign policy engagement of any kind.

  Upon his return to Geneva, Vieira de Mello warned in his trip report, “Our camps serve as transit,
rest [and] recruitment bases in support of incursions into Rwanda.”18 He made three sets of recommendations for how UNHCR might disentangle itself from the moral and logistic quagmire. He recommended that UNHCR move its camps back from the Zairean-Rwandan border. To avoid border clashes, the agency’s rules required camps to be erected a “reasonable distance” from any international border, which was usually interpreted to mean at least thirty miles. But once the camps had been established near the border in 1994, Ogata had not pursued relocating them farther into Zaire because the move would have cost between $90 million and $125 million, and she would still have likely needed military force to move recalcitrant Hutu.19 She had also worried that moving the camps deeper into Zaire would signal to the refugees that the UN intended to offer them permanent care, and it would give the génocidaires in the camps a more spacious sanctuary in which to arm and train for future battle.20 Vieira de Mello now weighed in, arguing that even by just starting to plan to move the camps, UNHCR would at least show Hutu civilians and soldiers that they could not remain in limbo indefinitely.

  Unsurprisingly, the Zairean troops who had been hired by Ogata were not proving reliable. They did not protect the refugees, and in many camps they constituted a threat in their own right.They took bribes from the Hutu militants, and some were reported to be involved in sexually exploiting young female refugees.21 Yet despite their worrying track record,Vieira de Mello’s second recommendation was to increase the force size of what he called “Mrs. Ogata’s contingent” from 1,500 to 2,500. Boxed in by impossible circumstances, he was desperate enough to tell himself that the Zairean forces could change. Since the morale of the Zairean contingent had sunk, he even drew on his memories of UN peacekeepers’ pride in Lebanon and Bosnia and urged UNHCR to host medal ceremonies for the Zairean soldiers.

  After speaking to some of the Hutu refugees in Zaire, Vieira de Mello realized that they were staying for more complicated reasons than he had understood before visiting. Yes, he wrote, there was intimidation in the camps, but many of the refugees were also being deterred by the signals emanating from Rwanda. The Rwandan authorities denounced the UNHCR camps in Zaire and Tanzania, but they also made clear that they did not want all Hutu in the camps to return. As Emmanuel Ndahiro, Vice President Paul Kagame’s closest adviser, declared publicly, “Not even powerful America can afford to take in one million people at once.”22 Rwandan officials did not visit the camps or use media to encourage the Hutu to return. Nor did they release a list of “wanted” war crime suspects, which might have soothed the concerns of Hutu refugees who had not murdered their Tutsi neighbors but who worried that they would nonetheless be caught up in a dragnet. On July 13, just two weeks before Vieira de Mello’s trip to Zaire, Rwandan government troops in the northwestern province of Gisenyi, Rwanda, retaliated for the death of a Tutsi soldier at the hands of Hutu infiltrators by massacring sixty-two local Hutu residents, including women with infants strapped to their backs.23 Tit-for-tat ethnic massacres were occurring regularly in the border areas. Therefore, Vieira de Mello’s third recommendation was that UNHCR officials stop “distracting ourselves in a futile search for ‘intimidators’”—the camps were stuck with them—and instead concentrate on pressing the Rwandan authorities to do more than they had yet done to assure the Hutu that they would be safe on return.24

  Rwandan government officials were contemptuous of his viewpoint. They were trying to manage the social and economic consequences of the extermination of 800,000 people and were tired of hearing about the plight of Hutu refugees in Zaire. “What is this nonsense about refugees?” Kagame said on the two-year anniversary of the genocide. “This is their home and they should return. I was a refugee myself for over 30 years and nobody made a fuss about it. Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees. . . . If the refugees say ‘we’re not returning,’ that stops being my problem. It is their problem.”25

  But Kagame knew the refugees were in fact his problem because the Hutu génocidaires in the camps in Zaire were still determined to exterminate Tutsi and retake power in Rwanda. In a visit to Washington, Kagame informed Clinton administration officials that if UNHCR did not dismantle its camps in Zaire, his forces would do so. He later recalled, “I delivered a veiled warning: The failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action.” Kagame, who had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was pleased by the U.S. reaction.“Their response was really no response,” he said.26

  In offering his recommendations to Ogata,Vieira de Mello knew all the options were bad. He was acutely conscious of the damage the crisis was doing to the standing of the United Nations locally and internationally.“UNHCR’s passivity,” he wrote in his trip report, “is untenable and is exposing the office to criticism and cheap accusations.” UNHCR could take the small steps he proposed, but what was really needed to resolve the situation were large steps by the governments of Rwanda and Zaire and concerted involvement by the major powers, who were claiming credit for generously supplying humanitarian aid but who were allowing the crisis to fester and deteriorate. “The prevailing status quo is not tenable without potentially disastrous consequences for the Office,” he concluded. “Unless UNHCR displays vision and sustained action, it is likely to become increasingly part of the problem and unable to preempt or effectively respond to looming ominous threats, over which it is losing any control.”27

  Ogata was pleased that Vieira de Mello’s trip to the region had finally caused him to apply himself to finding a way out for UNHCR. It had only been when he toured the camps that the costs of the catastrophe—to the refugees and to the UN—fully registered with him. He paid his second visit to Zaire later in the summer and found UNHCR staff even more frustrated and helpless. On this trip he stopped in Rwanda. A few hours after arriving in Kigali he told Nakamitsu, “People don’t know how to smile here.” Only two and a half years after the slaughter of 1994, it was the gloomiest place he had ever visited. His formal meetings were unpleasant. The Rwandan chairman for refugee return, Ephraim Kabaija, railed against the UN for first doing nothing about the genocide and then for feeding war criminals in the camps across the border. The Rwandan president delivered a two-hour harangue on Belgium’s responsibility for the genocide. Leaving the meeting, Vieira de Mello muttered to Nakamitsu, “That’s the problem with Africans: They blame everything on colonialism.” Every official he met with echoed Kagame’s warning that Rwanda would not tolerate the existence of the camps for much longer. Vieira de Mello warned Ogata that the Rwandans were on the verge of invading Zaire.

  He blocked out half a day to spend with his old friend Omar Bakhet, who had left UNHCR and was running the UN Development Program office in Rwanda, helping build a new legal system. Bakhet brought him to a church in Nyamata, where ten thousand Rwandans had been butchered on April 8, 1994. The Hutu génocidaires had sprayed the inside of the church with machine-gun fire, lobbed in grenades, and then used machetes to finish off any survivors.Vieira de Mello wandered around the church interior, which contained row upon row of shelves lined with skulls, and examined its bullet holes and shrapnel marks. He looked up at a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. Her serene visage smiled down upon him, but the wall beside her was still stained in blood.

  Bakhet next brought him to the Don Bosco school, which UN peacekeepers from Belgium had used as a base in 1994. Some two thousand desperate Rwandan Tutsi had huddled with the blue helmets until April 11, 1994, when the Belgian UN commander at the school had been ordered to withdraw his forces.With the génocidaires outside the school drinking banana beer, brandishing their machetes, and chanting “Hutu power,” the Rwandan Tutsi inside had thrown themselves at the feet of the Belgians, begging them not to abandon the school. But the UN soldiers had shooed the helpless Tutsi away, even firing over their h
eads so as to ensure that they did not block the passage of UN vehicles. As soon as the Belgian peacekeepers departed, the militia had entered, butchering all those Rwandans who had made the mistake of seeking shelter beneath the UN flag.Vieira de Mello had already thought a great deal about the UN failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica, but henceforth he described the Rwanda massacre as the gravest single act of betrayal ever committed by the United Nations.