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

by Samantha Power

  Ogata had been every bit as eager as Vieira de Mello to rid UNHCR of the albatross of the Rwandan refugee problem. But seeing the price UNHCR was paying for the bungled Tanzania repatriation, she distanced herself from the operation and pointed the finger at Vieira de Mello. “The return of refugees from Tanzania cost UNHCR a lot,” she says.“Sergio knew Tanzania well. But in choosing the lesser evil you can make a mistake. And it is not just Sergio who suffers the consequences. It is me as well.”

  END GAME

  In Zaire, Kabila had effectively broken off all contact with the UN after a UN human rights rapporteur had accused his rebels of committing massacres. By the spring of 1997, with Kabila’s army closing in on Kinshasa, it was essential that UNHCR restore its relations with the man who was now seemingly destined to become president of Zaire. Ogata asked Vieira de Mello to head back to the region in order to try to charm the warlord.

  By the time he was able to meet with Kabila personally for the first time, Kabila’s rebel forces were perched just sixty miles east of Kinshasa, and Mobutu was on the verge of surrendering. On May 12, 1997, upon arriving at Kabila’s temporary base, Vieira de Mello was told he would have to wait. Grandi, the Italian UNHCR official who had arranged the visit and who knew that his boss had a packed schedule, was crestfallen. He apologized for the mix-up. “No problem,” Vieira de Mello said. “You live out in the jungle the whole time. We bourgeois diplomats from Geneva can rough it occasionally.We will wait here until we are summoned.”

  He took advantage of the delay by holding meetings with individual members of Kabila’s entourage and by plotting strategy. “I will use my usual tactics,” he told Grandi. “I will build a bond up front by telling Kabila, ‘I am not an American. I am not a Frenchman. I am a Brazilian, from the third world just like you.’ ” When the rebel leader finally turned up for the meeting the following day, Vieira de Mello did as he forecast, capitalizing on their shared third-world pedigree.“Sergio could mingle in all possible worlds. With Kabila he was a man from a poor former colony in the developing world,” recalls Grandi. “And with European diplomats he was a Sorbonne-educated dignitary.”

  Vieira de Mello told Kabila that he hoped that he and UNHCR could “abandon polemic” and make a “fresh start” in repatriating all Hutu refugees remaining in Zaire to Rwanda.True to form, he said that while he was concerned about Kabila’s alleged massacres, he saw no point in embarrassing the rebels by denouncing them publicly. Kabila was delighted. He told Vieira de Mello that he had been “beginning to despair” about working with UNHCR but found himself “encouraged” by their discussion. As the two men parted,Vieira de Mello wished him luck in his negotiations with Mobutu, which were scheduled for the following day. "This is going to be rapid,” said Kabila.65

  Indeed, Kabila brought his seven-month rebellion to a triumphant end just five days later. On May 17, 1997, he marched his forces into Kinshasa, declared the end of Mobutu’s reign of nearly thirty-two years, and announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Congo.66 Kinshasa’s residents poured into the streets to greet the rebels. They sang, chanted, and waved anything they could find that was white in order to signal peace: flags, paper, shirts, socks, and even plastic chairs. Mobutu flew that night to Morocco, while his ministers hightailed it by speedboat across the Congo River to Brazzaville, Congo, carrying their designer luggage.67

  By July 1997 some 834,000 Hutu refugees who had once lived in the UNHCR camps had returned to Rwanda. Some 52,000 were known to still be living in Zaire and neighboring countries. This meant that 213,000 refugees who had at one point resided in the camps remained unaccounted for. Most were presumed to have been killed in battle or massacres, or to have died of disease, dehydration, or starvation in flight.68 It was impossible to know how many of the deceased were killers and how many were civilians who had played no role in the 1994 genocide.

  Rwandan vice president Paul Kagame said he had no remorse about the deaths of Hutu civilians. “It is my strong belief that the United Nations people are trying to deflect the blame for failures of their own making onto us,” he said. “Their failure to act in eastern Zaire directly caused these problems, and when things blew up in their faces they blamed us. These are people who want to be judges and nobody can judge them.”69

  The Rwandan government had been brutal, yes; it had been deceitful, yes; but by joining forces with Kabila, it had also managed to destroy the hostile Hutuland at its border when nobody else would.

  Back in Geneva, Vieira de Mello found himself attacked by colleagues and close friends for the decisions he had made in the field. He brushed off his critics, telling them, “You can’t be involved in an operation this messy and expect to come out clean.” He and McNamara picked up their argument where it had left off. “Sergio wanted to be friends with everyone,” McNamara recalls. “But in this case he could not be friends both with Tanzania and the U.S. government, which wanted to force return, and with human rights advocates, who wanted any return to be voluntary.” He had to choose a side, and, his friend remembers, “he sided with power.” The heated battles took their toll.“It’s hard enough to fight with friends professionally,” McNamara says, “but when you fight with friends about principle, it is especially rough.”

  Vieira de Mello used the occasion of a gathering of the agency’s governing board to strike back at those who were attacking him. The philosopher in him emerged in his defense of UNHCR. “Voluntariness is based on the execution of free will—freedom is the basis of will—and that is precisely what these [refugee] populations had been deprived of since the genocide.” He closed his remarks defiantly:

  I request, therefore, those who so impulsively criticize us, including friends and institutions we deeply respect, those who have the privilege of distance and responsibility, to place events in their chronology and in their overall context, and not to use their memory in a selective manner. . . . To my knowledge, our critics had no better formula to offer. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! That, Mr. Chairman, is the frustration many of us felt.70

  He was worn out. Having once believed that UNHCR should remain apolitical, he had grown exasperated by UNHCR’s dependence on governments that themselves avoided exercising political leadership. He had never seen the UN’s reputation so tattered by its performance, or relief to refugees carry such perverse side effects. “Would Rwanda, Zaire, and the UN all be better off if we had never set foot in those camps?” he wrote in an article for a book on peacekeeping. In instances in which proper security conditions did not exist, he asked provocatively, “Should humanitarian agencies refuse to intervene?”71

  As a young man in UNHCR,Vieira de Mello had believed in a pure humanitarian ideal. He had believed that aid agencies could and should perform apolitical lifesaving tasks, and that peacekeepers could and should remain impartial and avoid the use of force. But Bosnia and Rwanda had taught him that sometimes when UN humanitarians tried to be neutral, they abetted criminal acts. If Bosnia had exposed for Vieira de Mello the shortcomings of UN peacekeeping, the Great Lakes crises exposed the limits of offering humanitarian care. He was now convinced that UN officials would better serve the powerless if they could find a way to enlist the power of the world’s largest countries. His transformation from student revolutionary was complete.

  What UN aid agencies had been missing in Bosnia had not been plastic sheeting to replace windows in wintertime but a determination by Western governments to halt aggression. What they had been missing in the Zaire crisis were not tents or high-protein biscuits but a willingness among the major powers to send police to Zaire to arrest the génocidaires. In his public remarks Vieira de Mello began exhorting his colleagues to stop hiding behind their allegedly apolitical, humanitarian roles. The Great Lakes ordeal showed that the innocent victim was “often a fictitious concept.” He urged UN officials to accept “that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real.” Sin
ce everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, “we can hardly afford to be apolitical.”72

  Vieira de Mello needed to find a political job in a hurry. Ever since Lebanon, he had been keeping his eye on UN Headquarters in New York. In November the United States had vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s nomination for a second term in office. The vote was 14-1, and U.S. officials had quickly tried to appease disgruntled African countries by choosing another African as the UN’s seventh secretary-general: Kofi Annan, Vieira de Mello’s friend and former colleague.73 Vieira de Mello was thrilled. “I think Kofi will be able to bring me to New York at some point,” he told Nakamitsu. “I am ready to make a move.”

  His ties with Ogata had stiffened. The year that had just passed was the darkest and most challenging in UNHCR’s history. The plight of refugees and the trade-offs inherent in negotiating on their behalf no longer engaged him as they once had. The problems were too familiar, and the solutions to those problems resided not in Geneva and not in the field but in Washington, Paris, London, Moscow, and Beijing.“We are so remarkably ill informed,” he told Griffiths. “We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don’t understand the politics, and we can’t identify the points of leverage. I don’t know why we are surprised that right now we are failing at almost everything. We can’t protect refugees, and we can’t protect the UN reputation.”

  His personal life too was changing. Laurent, his eighteen-year-old son, had entered university in Lausanne, Switzerland. And when Vieira de Mello returned from his posting in the Great Lakes, he took a step he had not taken before, renting his own apartment in Geneva. Although he did not consider filing for a legal separation, he lived more like a bachelor than he had since his early twenties.

  But he was biding his time. His ambitions were professional, and he felt he was being wasted where he was. Maybe, he thought, if Annan brought him to New York, where global leaders converged, he might be able to lobby the major powers. But there were only so many political jobs suitable for a person of his rank. It was obvious that his next move would be to the prestigious rank of under-secretary-general, the hierarchical equivalent of earning his second star. The UN system had only twenty-one such slots.

  If ascent in the UN were strictly merit-based, by 1997 Vieira de Mello would have been vying for one of several prominent jobs at UN Headquarters. With all of his proven gifts negotiating with governments, he might have been named under-secretary-general for political affairs. Or with his extensive experience working with and within UN peacekeeping missions, he could have been chosen under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

  But the UN could never be confused with a meritocracy. The permanent five Security Council countries got to vet who would fill key positions in the UN Secretariat. In the 1990s, the Department of Political Affairs generally went to a Brit, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was slated for the French, both the Department of Management and the UN Development Program went to Americans, and the Secretariat’s satellite office in Geneva was run by a Russian.74 China, the only permanent member of the Security Council not looked after, did not yet complain about being underrepresented.75

  The one UN department in New York that had not been earmarked for a particular nationality was the small Department of Humanitarian Affairs, under which he had just served. DHA, which had been created after the Gulf War to coordinate the UN’s emergency-relief activities, had been run by a Swede, a Dane, and most recently by Akashi.

  DHA had achieved little in its six years of existence. The heads of the agencies it was meant to coordinate—UNHCR, the World Food Program, and other UN relief organizations—had not warmed to a body that they saw as a nuisance. Ogata, who had dramatically expanded UNHCR’s budget and global reach, resisted any efforts to give up the turf she had acquired.76 But Vieira de Mello told Nakamitsu, who knew DHA well and advised him against taking the job, that he viewed the post as a “stepping stone” to a more political job in New York. “The main attraction is that I will be exposed to the Security Council,” he said.

  Normally, he was reluctant to campaign for himself.“I’m not like Shashi,” he told colleagues, referring to Shashi Tharoor, an Indian national who had a reputation for wining and dining powerful diplomats.Vieira de Mello marveled at how, in his tenure at the UN, Tharoor had also managed to publish four nonfiction books, three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.77 While India would name Tharoor as its candidate for secretary-general in 2006, Vieira de Mello took it as a point of pride that his home country would never pull strings for him. “I have never asked Brazil for favors,” he liked to say. But he had so impressed ambassadors from Western countries in recent years that he had their backing instead. In November 1997 Annan announced that Vieira de Mello would take over the department as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

  People worked backward from Vieira de Mello’s rapid rise in the UN and assumed he had a Machiavellian lust for power.They had started to interpret his every move as proof of an elaborate plan to earn the top job, that of UN secretary-general. Vieira de Mello had held this ambition early on in his career, but other factors had since crept into his thinking. “People thought Sergio plotted his life like in a chess game,” recalls Fabrizio Hochschild, a Chilean Brit, then thirty-two, who succeeded Nakamitsu as his special assistant. “But he didn’t think long-term. What he thought was, ‘I’m bored now. It’s time to move on. Where can I go? What can I learn?’ ” When a colleague in Geneva offered him congratulations on his promotion to under-secretary-general, he replied, “Big deal. Big fucking deal.” But one aspect of the move was a big deal. Having worked at UNHCR for twenty-eight years, bowing out only twice to serve in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Bosnia, he was leaving his mother ship for good.

  Several hundred people gathered for his farewell party in Geneva. He gave a very short speech in which he said, “I have gotten a lot from this place. I hope I have given something back. If I have any gift, it is that I am aware of my weaknesses.” With Ogata away on leave, her deputy Gerald Walzer presented him with a UN flak jacket in its singular baby blue. “You’ll need this to protect you against all the backstabbing in New York,” Walzer said. One junior UNHCR official asked Vieira de Mello whether he had any recommendations for young staff who aspired to follow in his footsteps. “Be in the field,” he replied. “That is it. That’s what I built my career on. That’s what’s relevant. Nothing else matters.”

  He would keep the flak jacket hanging on a coatrack in his New York office.

  Part II

  Vieira de Mello with General Michael Jackson (center) in Kosovo.

  Eleven

  “GIVING WAR A CHANCE”

  BEcOMING A BUREAUCRAT

  Working at UN Headquarters in New York for the first time in his career, Vieira de Mello sometimes felt as though he were suffering death by a thousand paper cuts. His first public appearance came on November 14, 1997. After Secretary-General Annan introduced him to the media as the new under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, responsible for coordinating all the humanitarian efforts in the UN system, he offered characteristically understated remarks. “I hope to contribute my modest field experience in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations to the strengthening of the office,” he said. “Since solutions to humanitarian problems cannot be humanitarian,” he continued, he intended to enlist the support of political, military, human rights, and economic development experts.

  At the press conference he stood beside Annan in order to field journalists’ questions. But the media had more pressing issues on their minds. The Republican-controlled U.S. Congress had torpedoed a spending bill that would have turned over to the UN nearly $1 billion of the $1.4 billion that the United States owed in back dues.1 Annan warned that the UN could not keep borrowing from its peacekeeping budget in order to meet its obligations around the world.2

  But the main topic of the day was the one that would define Annan’s t
enure as secretary-general: Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, UN inspectors had been mandated to dismantle Iraq’s long-range ballistic missiles and its biological and chemical weapons programs. But two days before the press conference, Saddam Hussein had expelled the American weapons inspectors, and the Clinton administration had responded by threatening to bomb Iraq. Asked during the press conference whether he planned to evacuate UN staff there, Annan said he still hoped a diplomatic solution could be found. “We would definitely not put our staff in harm’s way,” he said. “And the moment we feel their lives are in danger, we will pull them out.”3