In New York, Jessen-Petersen of UNHCR pleaded with Western ambassadors to appreciate the “chicken and egg” bind in which UNHCR found itself. Governments wanted information on the number, whereabouts, and conditions of the Hutu refugees in the Zairean jungle before sending forces. But a few dozen UNHCR aid workers would by themselves be unable to obtain that information. Only national militaries could supply the mobility, security, and intelligence to stage such a hunt.39
If Jessen-Petersen was exasperated in New York, Vieira de Mello was practically numb from the deception and obstruction he was encountering in his official meetings in the region. On one occasion an army colonel known to be responsible for waging a scorched-earth policy rattled off a string of denials and then asked credulously,“Why would the army deliberately attack civilian populations?”40 After the meeting, as Vieira de Mello and Griffiths walked to their car, Griffiths remarked:“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Every time we go into meetings with these war criminals, I come out—and I’m sure it’s the same for you—absolutely convinced of the plausibility of their arguments. What is it? Why does this happen?” Vieira de Mello stopped, turned to look at Griffiths, and said, “It’s because you’re extraordinarily stupid.”41 The two men burst into laughter, struck by the absurdity of their seemingly fruitless negotiations. They would become close friends in the months and years ahead.
Oppressed by officialdom, Vieira de Mello tried to find ways to remain connected to the human drama under way, relying upon Filippo Grandi, a thirty-six-year-old Italian who was UNHCR’s Goma representative. In 1994, when Grandi had returned to Geneva from Congo after the cholera outbreak, he had prepared to deliver remarks to a group of outside dignitaries and had run his remarks by Vieira de Mello, who was a legend to young staff. “No, Filippo, when you speak with important people, you have to convey a visceral sense of the dramatic experiences you have been through,” Vieira de Mello had said. “I’m not asking you to say anything wrong or fake, but you have to be very graphic because that is how you grab people’s attention. And our success at UNHCR depends on our ability to get and hold people’s attention.”When Grandi replied that he doubted he had comparable powers of persuasion,Vieira de Mello had exclaimed,“Nonsense! We are Latin, both of us. It is in the blood.”
In late November, now in the region together, Vieira de Mello told Grandi that he would like to visit rebel territory so that he could get an up-close feel for the displacement. He knew that he would be a more effective advocate if he had witnessed firsthand the terror and squalor of the refugees’ new circumstances, but he also knew that carrying out such a visit would be frowned upon by New York. He could get caught up in the crossfire of the joint rebel-Rwandan offensive, or, given anti-UN feeling among the Rwandans, he might even be targeted. But the bigger risks were political. It had been one thing for his friend Bakhet to slip into eastern Zaire, but it would be quite another thing for a UN official of his stature to make the trek. He would be seen to be legitimating Kabila’s rule, and Mobutu’s government would be incensed. “The Zaireans are only willing to endure me here because I’m junior,” Grandi told his senior colleague. “They will erupt if you come.” But Vieira de Mello had made up his mind.“We will be discreet,” he said, “and we will not meet with the rebels. I will just look around.” In the end Grandi prepared a travel manifest that listed the assistant secretary-general as a lowly field officer, and on November 25 Vieira de Mello slipped anonymously across the border to spend a few hours in the Goma, Mugunga, and Lake Vert camps, where he could meet with shell-shocked refugees who had survived the attacks. What he saw in Zaire only deepened his conviction that the Multinational Force was urgently needed.“The people we can see are by definition the lucky ones,” he said to Grandi. “Where the hell are the rest?”
On November 27 Vieira de Mello traveled to Entebbe, where General Baril was setting up MNF advance headquarters. He eagerly told Baril that the MNF could do everything from airlifting groups of refugees out of the forest to arresting the génocidaires and turning them over to the UN war crimes tribunal. Baril nodded politely, but on his way to Entebbe he had stopped in Stuttgart, Germany, to consult with troop contributors, and he knew that Western enthusiasm for the mission was evaporating. He explained that the troop contributors had discussed four levels of MNF engagement: • Level A: ascertaining the location and condition of the refugees;
• Level B: establishing airlift capacity for delivering humanitarian aid;
• Level C: helping return the refugees to Rwanda in a permissive environment; and
• Level D: helping return the refugees to Rwanda in a dangerous environment.
Baril told Vieira de Mello that the MNF would go no further than Level A. Under no circumstances would it separate out the génocidaires or protect aid workers.42 Vieira de Mello, who was crestfallen, battled, in Baril’s words, “like a bulldog.” “If we can save a hundred refugees,” he pleaded, “let’s save a hundred!” But Baril shook his head. “Sergio, the machinery I have isn’t meant to save a hundred. Militaries are big, cumbersome, slow, and expensive.” He suggested that UNHCR charter its own commercial planes to retrieve the refugees from the jungle. When Vieira de Mello said that was a military’s job, Baril put his foot down. “Look, Sergio, your plan is limited only by your imagination. Mine is limited by the countries who have sent troops to serve under me.” Vieira de Mello never ceased to wonder how political and military leaders saw nothing unseemly about asking unarmed aid workers to enter areas into which they would not dare send their soldiers.
Having hoped fleetingly that UN member states were prepared to step in to help the desperate refugees, he saw now that the plans had collapsed. His own mission had come to feel like a failure on every front. In his entire career he could not recall a field job where he spent so much time in motion and achieved so little. “In Bosnia, we humanitarians may have been fig leaves for Western powers,” he told a colleague later, “but in Zaire we were invisible and irrelevant. I’m not sure which was more pathetic.”
On December 23 the UN Security Council decided to disband the nascent MNF. The United States called off the search for refugees, claiming that UNHCR had exaggerated the number of missing refugees and blaming the agency for failing to separate out the “intimidators.” Vieira de Mello was furious. “They think it would have been so easy to say, ‘Génocidaires to the left, civilians to the right,’ ” he fumed.“Well, if it was so easy, why didn’t they come and help when we asked them?” Henceforth he would borrow European humanitarian commissioner Bonino’s description of the Multinational Force: “Multinational Farce.”
REPATRIATION FROM TANZANIA: SIDING WITH POWER
Having felt powerless to address the humanitarian debacle in Zaire,Vieira de Mello decided to take charge of the less threatening but equally untenable situation in the refugee camps in neighboring Tanzania. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide,Tanzania had absorbed 535,000 Rwandan exiles, and now, after more than two years of playing host, the Tanzanian government wanted to expel the Hutu refugees in the camps whom they blamed for deforestation, theft, and violence.43 Tanzania had the backing of the United States and the U.K., which were urging Ogata to scale back food aid in the camps as a precursor to closing them.44 UNHCR was dependent on voluntary contributions and took such demands from donor governments seriously.
Vieira de Mello had last visited the Tanzanian refugee camps in September. They were not nearly as militarized as those he had seen in Zaire because the Tanzanian authorities had been more effective in keeping heavy armaments out of the camps and even in arresting a few high-profile génocidaires. But these actions had the unintended effect of making the camps more comfortable for the Rwandan exiles. Tanzania’s largest camp, Benaco, which was home to 160,000 refugees, bore street signs named for such people as Nelson Mandela and even Sadako Ogata. Beside row upon row of small mud-brick huts, the Rwandan Hutu grew maize and vegetables in their well-groomed gardens.45 Having witnessed the violence in Zair
e and fearful it would spread next to Tanzania,Vieira de Mello was prepared to urge Ogata to pull the plug on assistance.
But on November 27, 1996, the Tanzanian authorities beat him to it, officially informing UNHCR that they intended to close the camps and send the refugees home.The Tanzanians asked Vieira de Mello if UNHCR would help fund the $1.7 million operation. If UNHCR was squeamish about cooperating, they said, they would proceed on their own and would not hesitate to employ their “own methods.”46 Vieira de Mello agreed to team up.
His decision put him on a collision course with his old friend Dennis McNamara, who had become UNHCR’s director of protection .47 McNamara adamantly opposed UNHCR’s complicity in any plan that would force refugees to return to Rwanda, where many had genuine reasons to fear persecution. The two friends engaged in tense, pitched battles by phone and in person.48 “We don’t have a choice,” Vieira de Mello argued.“The Tanzanians are going to send them back anyway.” McNamara thought the Tanzanians might be bluffing, but regardless he did not believe that their threats should dictate UNHCR’s stance. “Let them do it anyway,” he said. “Just don’t let UNHCR be a part of pushing people back.” Vieira de Mello said he was committed to a voluntary and orderly return, but he could not afford to be a purist. In camps controlled by génocidaires, the whole notion of voluntariness, a cornerstone of UNHCR’s existence, had been thrown on its head. Could anybody really claim that the refugees were voluntarily remaining in the border camps of Tanzania or voluntarily serving as human shields for Hutu gunmen fleeing deeper into the jungles in Zaire? In addition, Tanzania was receiving a flood of new refugees from Burundi, and he worried that a testy Tanzania might seal its borders, keeping out people who were fleeing for their lives.49 “Get real, Dennis,” he said. “You can’t just come riding in on that great white horse of moral principle; you have to solve the problem.”
On Friday, November 29,Vieira de Mello flew to the Tanzanian capital, Dar-es-Salaam, where he held a three-hour meeting that would decide the fates of the refugees. He appealed to the Tanzanians “as far as possible” to carry out the repatriation “consistent with established principles.”50 At the start of the meeting he said that force should not be used to move the refugees. But since he doubted that the refugees would budge without some form of coercion, he did not object when the Tanzanians said they would send police and security forces to the camps. In a testament to his desire to solve the refugee problem once and for all, he even offered UNHCR funds to transport and pay the forces. Griffiths, his deputy, was struck by the speed and ease with which he accepted the Tanzanian arguments. “Sergio had been briefed before the meeting about all the arguments on each side, but when we got into the meeting, he seemed to have made up his mind,” Griffiths recalls. “He effectively said, ‘Do it, do it quickly, and if you have to use the police to do it, do your best to keep them out of sight.’ ” The Tanzanians said they wanted the matter resolved by December 31.51 This gave Vieira de Mello and UNHCR almost no time to try to ensure that the operation would be carried out humanely. Nonetheless, he insisted that an imperfect refugee return operation was preferable to the status quo.“We have to choose the least bad option here,” he told his critics.
Repatriating more than half a million Hutu from Tanzania was bound to be messy. In Cambodia he had managed the return of 360,000 Cambodians over thirteen months, making use of huge financial resources and a large peacekeeping presence. In Tanzania, UNHCR would have just three weeks, and once the Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda, they would not receive international protection. The most crucial difference was one of mind-set: The refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border had been impatient to go home, while the refugees in Tanzania were so frightened of returning to Rwanda that some would likely take up arms to stay where they were.
On December 5, 1996,Vieira de Mello signed off on a joint UNHCR-TANZANIAN “Message to all Rwandese Refugees in Tanzania.” Remarkably, even though he had growing concerns about human rights conditions in Rwanda and could by no means guarantee the refugees’ safety, he put UNHCR’s stamp on the assurance that “all Rwandese refugees can now return to their country in safety.”52 UNHCR arranged for leaflets to be printed and distributed in the camps and for loudspeakers to broadcast the joint communiqué in Kinyarwanda. The statement did not inform the refugees that, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, any person who feared persecution had the legal right to remain in Tanzania and apply for asylum.
By the evening of December 11, rumors began circulating among aid workers that some refugees had begun to leave the Tanzanian camps voluntarily. The refugees had harvested crops from their small gardens, waited to receive their biweekly ration of red beans, corn, and cooking oil, and taken off on foot.53 At first the aid workers were hopeful that the commotion signaled the end of the spell the génocidaires had cast over the refugees. But by the morning of December 12, UNHCR officials were aghast to learn that the refugees were in fact trudging toward Kenya and Zambia, away from the border and thus away from their former homes in Rwanda. Camps that just twenty-four hours before had teemed with life were being completely vacated.
Rwandan Hutu militiamen had gone hut-to-hut ordering the refugees to move east across the plains of northwestern Tanzania. Some headed into the hills of the Burigi Game Reserve, the home of lions, zebras, elephants, and giraffes. Many of the women carried children strapped to their backs. Refugees told the few aid workers and journalists they encountered that Kagame’s Rwandan troops were waiting to arrest or kill them if they returned to Rwanda. The horror stories were vivid: Babies would be snatched from their mothers, and the hands and feet of returning Hutu would be chopped off.54 “Is it true that they will castrate all the men and boys at the border?” one refugee asked a reporter.55
Vieira de Mello had already left Tanzania for Rwanda when all hell broke loose. Ogata consulted with him by phone and issued instructions from Geneva: UNHCR should support the Tanzanian government’s attempt to redirect the refugees toward Rwanda. Ten thousand Tanzanian soldiers carrying clubs and AK-47s had already set up roadblocks and begun forcing the refugees to do an about-face.The “orderly and humane” return promised by UNHCR had turned into a military push-back, as McNamara had feared.
By December 16 the rate of return was staggering. More than 10,000 people crossed per hour, 51,000 by midday, and more than 100,000 by the time the border crossing was closed for the night.56 The refugees, who were herded over a narrow concrete bridge over the Kagera River into Rusumo, Rwanda, were exhausted and terrified. The farther they had walked, the more swollen were their feet. Draped in rags and plastic bags, they had braved heavy rains. The wealthier ones carried their belongings piled high on bicycles or in wheelbarrows. An estimated twenty-five babies were born each day along the way.57 So many children were getting separated from their parents—134 children had gotten lost on December 15 alone—that Red Cross workers began tying children to their mothers with yellow string.58
The operation grew increasingly violent.The refugees described systematic beatings, demands for bribes, theft of their Tanzanian currency (under the ruse that the refugees were not permitted to take currency out of the country), strip searches, and the looting of personal property such as bicycles, blankets,jerry cans, and even UNHCR plastic sheeting. A few refugees were found raped or beaten to death.59 The Tanzanians were so determined to rid their country of the Rwandan Hutu exiles that they fired guns into the air, used tear gas, and beat the refugees with sticks in order to keep them moving. Several refugees attempted suicide. One man used a blunt knife to cut his neck but survived, while another drowned himself in a shallow puddle of water.60 In less than two weeks more than 450,000 refugees returned to Rwanda from Tanzania.61 And these on the heels of the 700,000 who had arrived back after fleeing the camps in Zaire.
Ogata and UNHCR were so afraid of jeopardizing their relationship with the Tanzanian government that they said little in response to the forceful push-back. On January 10, 1997, Ogata finally signed a relatively
tame letter of protest over the “reported use of force.” But when Vieira de Mello telephoned Elly Mtango, a leading official in the Tanzanian foreign ministry, to inform him that the protest would be sent to the president the following day, Mtango warned him that UNHCR would have to “live with the consequences” of such a hostile act.62 Knowing that UNHCR needed Tanzania to keep its borders open to refugees from other countries, Vieira de Mello agreed not to send the letter.63
UNHCR had been complicit in this forced repatriation, and both the agency and Vieira de Mello came under attack. Human rights groups speculated that the agency had simply bowed before the whims of its largest donors, who had made no secret of their desire to see the camps closed. Since the end of the cold war, UNHCR had seemed to internalize the impatience of host countries and donors who wanted to rush repatriation. “UNHCR may not have been able to stop the repatriation from Tanzania,” says Gil Loescher, a refugee expert who in 2003 would be meeting with Vieira de Mello in Iraq on the day of the attack on the UN base. “But it should have made clear it opposed it, and it should have publicized what Tanzania was planning. It should have used its leverage with donor governments. And at the very least it should not have sanctioned forced repatriation.” Human Rights Watch accused the agency of having “shamefully abandoned its responsibility to protect refugees.”64
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 27
