What infuriated him was that at just the time aid workers were assuming ever greater risks, they were taking ever more blame for their ineffectiveness. He defended the work of his colleagues in the field who were not in a position to defend themselves. In 1999 scholar Edward Luttwak published an influential article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Give War a Chance,” in which he suggested that aid workers and peace-brokers were prolonging wars that would only end permanently if they were “allowed to run their natural course.” “Policy elites,” Luttwak wrote, “should actively resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples’ wars—not because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because they care about it.”20
Vieira de Mello wrote a steaming letter to the editor slamming Luttwak’s “simplistic compilation of old arguments and wrong conclusions.”21 He faulted Luttwak for his “uniform picture of war.” Since few conflicts tidily confined themselves within national borders, Vieira de Mello argued, turning one’s back on violence would often result in wider, messier regional conflicts. In addition, since so many governments and rebel movements benefited from war, they had an incentive to prolong war on their own. They didn’t need any help from aid workers. While he acknowledged that humanitarian action could sometimes have perverse consequences, he wrote that “to deny aid altogether is not only unhelpful, it is unthinkable.”22 He noted that he generally valued critical commentary, but he found unhelpful such “oversimplified accounts far removed from the complexities of actual war and blanket statements that lead to quietism.”23
Of course, after his time in Bosnia and Zaire, Vieira de Mello had his own concerns about humanitarian action and its capacity to do inadvertent harm. But he thought the flawed tendency of aid workers to give aid uncritically and indefinitely was a lesser danger than the tendency of rich countries to turn their backs on humanitarian crises altogether. The biggest flaw in the UN system was that governments came to the UN and paid lip service to the tenets of the UN Charter but were unprepared to do what it took to patrol the global commons. “There are currently more international instruments and mechanisms to control the illicit production and trade of compact discs than there are for small arms,” he observed.24 For as long as countries calculated their self-interest within short time frames, the UN and other humanitarian bodies would be left to manage only the violent symptoms of inequality, rage, and terror.
In early January 1999, a year into his time at Headquarters, Vieira de Mello nearly quit the United Nations. The Washington Post and the Boston Globe broke a story alleging that several UN weapons inspectors in Iraq (the team included nine Americans, eight Brits, one Russian, and one Australian) had passed along eavesdropping intelligence to the Clinton administration. The intelligence had made it easier for Washington to bomb targets that it said were connected to Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction. The scandal underscored just how tangled the webs of intergovernmental and governmental allegiances could become. The inspectors had joined the UN only after working for their national intelligence services. “When we ask for nonproliferation people, where do they come from?” Charles Duelfer, a senior U.S. inspector on the team, was quoted as saying. “The Red Cross doesn’t have chemical weapons experts.”25 But the inspectors had been admitted to Iraq only because they operated under the UN—and not the U.S. or British—flag. Inspectors signed loyalty oaths when they joined the UN, promising never to share their findings with their governments or the public.26 In Iraq on a UN mission of peace, they seemed to have instead facilitated an American war.
Vieira de Mello telephoned Omar Bakhet after midnight on a Friday, two days after the story first broke. “Sergio, you sound drunk,” said Bakhet, who had been posted to New York after Rwanda.
“Something terrible has happened,” said Vieira de Mello. “Can you meet me in the morning?”
The two men met the next day at a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan. When Vieira de Mello arrived bleary-eyed and unshaven, Bakhet exclaimed, “Sergio, I never thought the day would come where I would be able to say this to you, but you look horrible.”
Vieira de Mello ignored his friend and thrust a copy of the Washington Post down before him. “This is unacceptable. It will taint the UN everywhere,” he said. “I think I have to resign.”
Bakhet glanced at the cover story and back at his friend. “You’re not actually surprised that the Americans are using the UN as cover, are you?” Bakhet asked.
“Omar, the United Nations is spying for the United States,” said Vieira de Mello. “Spying! We have completely surrendered our independence, our impartiality, and our neutrality. And without our principles, we have nothing. Nothing!”
Bakhet shook his head and said, “What amazes me, Sergio, is your naïveté.”
Vieira de Mello cut him off:“I am not speaking to you naïvely. The minute we become an instrument, the minute that we cover up for governments, we’ve lost all we’ve got to offer.”
“But, Sergio,” Bakhet said, “you of all people know the influence of the United States.”
Vieira de Mello interrupted again. “Influence, yes,” he said, “but outright servitude, no.”
Only after several espressos did he agree to let the weekend pass before drafting his letter of resignation. By the following day he had calmed down and begun debating tamer measures, such as visibly snubbing Richard Butler, the head of the UN inspections team, who was thought to be responsible for the leaks, when he next visited UN Headquarters. Hochschild, his assistant, agreed that some kind of public rebuke of Butler was called for, and was thus taken aback when he saw Vieira de Mello greet Butler on his next visit as if nothing had happened. No matter how great his outrage, Hochschild noted, Vieira de Mello remained as reluctant as ever to make an enemy.
KOSOVO: “NOT WAGING WAR”
When he lived in the Balkans in the early 1990s, Vieira de Mello had refused even to make an enemy of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who, like Saddam Hussein, had tormented his citizens for more than a decade. Milošević had been halted but not deposed by Western military force in Bosnia in 1995. Throughout 1998, Vieira de Mello’s first year in New York, Milošević’s police and paramilitaries had responded to an insurgency in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo by stepping up their attacks on ethnic Albanians, who made up 90 percent of the population of two million.18
By the fall of 1998 a guerrilla force known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had also stepped up its attacks on Serb policemen and other Serb authorities in the hopes of driving them out of the province. The Serbs had retaliated by forcing some 230,000 Kosovar Albanians out of their homes and killing some 700 civilians. In September the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that the Serbs cease their attacks on ethnic Albanians and withdraw their forces from Kosovo. The Council also authorized the dispatch of international monitors. But despite the resolution and the presence of the monitors, by December Serb gunmen had resumed burning homes and displacing civilians. On January 15, 1999, Serb paramilitary forces murdered some 45 Kosovar Albanians in the town of Racak. Because NATO had already put its reputation on the line in the region—some 33,000 NATO troops were still patrolling the peace in neighboring Bosnia—Western leaders believed that Serbia’s antics were making the alliance look weak, and they began to consider using military force against the Serbs.
In February 1999 diplomats from the United States, Europe, and Russia convened Kosovar and Serb leaders at the French château of Rambouillet and presented a take-it-or-leave-it plan that would have kept Kosovo within Serbia but granted it unprecedented powers of self-governance. It would also have provided for the deployment of a NATO force to deter violence and enforce the deal. After a delay the Kosovar Albanians accepted the plan, but the Serbs walked out of the talks. In the meantime, 40,000 Serbian soldiers, one-third of Serbia’s total armed forces, massed in and around Kosovo.
Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration’s envoy to the Balkans, traveled to Serbia�
�s capital, Belgrade, to inform Milošević that he could either accept the Rambouillet deal or face NATO bombing. When the Serbs made no concessions by March 23, he departed Belgrade. Kofi Annan withdrew UN aid workers from Kosovo the same day. The stage had been set for war—and for the biggest challenge to the UN Charter since the end of the cold war.
On March 24, 1999, NATO began bombing Serbia. NATO secretary-general Javier Solana was insistent that, despite all appearances to the contrary, NATO’s action was not especially aggressive. “Let me be clear,” he said implausibly as cruise missiles rained down on Serbia, “NATO is not waging war against Yugoslavia.”27
The UN Security Council had not authorized what NATO was doing. The United States and the U.K. had not introduced a resolution in the council because Russia and China, two of its five permanent members, had made plain their intention to veto it. And according to the UN Charter, the Security Council was the only body empowered to determine whether Milošević’s attacks on ethnic Albanians constituted a sufficiently grave “threat to international peace and security” to warrant collective military action. The Council had authorized the U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991, as well as the U.S. feeding-cum-nation-building exercise in Somalia. And it had established the UN “safe areas” in Bosnia and eventually called upon NATO to protect them. Vieira de Mello was a true believer in the Security Council’s primacy, which he said carried the “central and unique responsibility” for keeping peace.28 But suddenly his respect for the Charter had come into conflict with his determination to prevent atrocity.
No country likes to be seen as breaking the law—even law as fuzzy as international law—and U.S. and British officials argued that the Security Council had effectively already licensed the war with a resolution it had passed the previous September. Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, also invoked the consensus within NATO, saying, “We have 19 members of NATO, all democracies, having authorized this action.”29 But Western officials could not mask the reality that a major military operation was being undertaken without the blessing of the Security Council.30
Having gotten to know Milošević five years before, Vieira de Mello was no stranger to the Serbian strongman’s brutality. Nor was he opposed, in principle, to the use of force. He was a different man than the civil servant who in Bosnia had dutifully probed Council resolutions like a Talmudic scholar. After Rwanda and Srebrenica he had reluctantly come around to the view that military action on humanitarian grounds, while never desirable, was sometimes necessary. When the UN failed to act, it was not only the victims of massacres who suffered; it was the credibility of the UN as a whole.
Vieira de Mello understood that Russia and China would almost never support military action for humanitarian purposes. As countries that committed grave human rights abuses at home, they had too much to lose themselves. Throughout the 1990s the two countries had regularly invoked sovereignty as grounds for stymieing discussions of government misdeeds. Only when Western powers stood together unequivocally, flexing their collective diplomatic and financial muscles, did Russia and China come around, as in the Persian Gulf War or in the belated decision to act militarily in Bosnia. But Vieira de Mello knew that occasions would arise when all the Western unity and diplomacy in the world would not change their views. In those circumstances, he was prepared to admit, exceptional emergencies might require a “coalition of the willing” to bypass the paralyzed Council. Ever so rarely, the urgency and legitimacy of the cause could excuse the illegality of the procedures.
But he had not made up his mind whether the circumstances in the former Yugoslavia in March 1999 qualified. If NATO went to war without the Security Council’s blessing, he worried other countries would view the UN Charter’s provisions as optional. And he made his views known to Nancy Soderberg, the Clinton administration’s acting ambassador to the UN. “We have the international machinery to stop the Serbs’ abuses,” he said.“We just have to give the machinery time to work. Why the rush to bomb?” Soderberg, speaking for the Clinton administration and the Kosovars, countered, “Sergio, Milošević has been killing Albanians for more than a decade. If this is a rush, I’d hate to see what it would look like to take our time.”
UN officials at Headquarters were bitterly divided over the war, and many looked to Vieira de Mello, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, for guidance. But either because he was conflicted or because he did not want to alienate those he did not agree with, he did not give it. He never openly declared whether on balance he opposed or supported the NATO war. “Even with a small group of us over drinks he would make his views appear totally neutral,” recalls Rashid Khalikov, a Russian colleague in OCHA.
Vieira de Mello knew one thing: His personal view of NATO’s war was irrelevant. To the degree that citizens of the world looked to the UN for comment, they looked to Secretary-General Annan, who had a checkered past when it came to responding to crimes against humanity and genocide. He had been in charge of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations during the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre, and he had been justly criticized for failing to sound the alarm. Annan felt that the very countries that had turned their backs on the Rwandans and the Bosnians were the ones making him their scapegoat, but he knew that his name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century. Since becoming secretary-general in 1997, he had used his pulpit to publicly urge governments to embrace a new “norm of humanitarian intervention” to halt atrocities.
Nonetheless Annan was the primary guardian of the UN rulebook. Since NATO was acting in defiance of that rulebook, the war’s critics expected him to decry NATO’s military action. But in this, the Security Council’s first major crisis on his watch, Annan had two competing fears: Either the United States would come away believing it could do as it chose, or the Russians would be so disgusted with the UN’s failure to deter the United States that it would turn away from the institution.The first day of the war Annan thus issued a statement in which he tried to have it both ways. He lamented the use of force but added the following jarring sentence:“It is indeed tragic that diplomacy has failed, but there are times when the use of force may be legitimate in the pursuit of peace.”31
To the delight of the Clinton administration, the New York Times headline the day after the launch of the war read “THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OFFERS IMPLICIT ENDORSEMENT OF RAIDS.”32 Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, stormed into Annan’s office and denounced him for his complicity in the illegal NATO attack. Vieira de Mello too told Hochschild that Annan had gone too far to appease the United States.
As the war progressed, Annan continued to walk a fine line between making clear that the NATO war technically violated the Charter and stressing that atrocities demanded a response. “Unless the Security Council is restored to its preeminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a dangerous path to anarchy,” the secretary-general said in one speech. “But equally importantly, unless the Security Council can unite around the aim of confronting massive human rights violations and crimes against humanity on the scale of Kosovo, then we will betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations.” He continued, “The choice must not be between Council unity and inaction in the face of genocide, as in the case of Rwanda, on the one hand; or Council division, and regional action, as in the case of Kosovo, on the other.”33
Annan kept speaking out, both denouncing the horrors and asserting the indispensability of the UN. On April 7, two weeks into NATO’s war, he delivered a speech at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in which he said:
When civilians are attacked and massacred because of their ethnicity, as in Kosovo, the world looks to the United Nations to speak up for them. When men, women and children are assaulted and their limbs hacked off, as in Sierra Leone, here again the world looks to the United Nations.When women and girls are denied their right to equality, a
s in Afghanistan, the world looks to the United Nations to take a stand. . . . We will not, and we cannot accept a situation where people are brutalized behind national boundaries.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 30
