Annan closed with a line that Vieira de Mello triple-underlined on his copy of the speech:
For at the end of the twentieth century, one thing is clear: A United Nations that will not stand up for human rights is a United Nations that cannot stand up for itself.34
After a few days of NATO bombing, pundits shifted away from debating whether the war was legal to discussing whether its ghastly consequences could be contained. In September 1995, when NATO had finally intervened forcefully in Bosnia, it brought the Bosnian Serbs to heel with remarkable speed.This precedent, as well as NATO’s colossal 300-1 superiority in military expenditures, had left U.S. and U.K. planners bullish about the odds of a swift air campaign in Kosovo.35 On the first day of the war, President Clinton had said that the United States had no intention of deploying ground troops. He expected the Serbs to surrender after just a few days.
But Milošević had other ideas. Within hours of NATO’s first attack on March 24, he launched Operation Horseshoe, using prepositioned Serbian police and paramilitary forces to systematically empty Kosovo of ethnic Albanians. Masked gunmen in uniforms turned up in villages and threatened to kill any individual who refused to leave. By March 29, some 4,000 ethnic Albanians were pouring out of Kosovo per hour. In the first week more than 100,000 Kosovars streamed into Albania and 28,000 entered Macedonia, while another 35,000 fled to Montenegro. And in the days ahead they kept coming, by foot, by car, by train, and on tractors.
UNHCR had expected a maximum of 100,000 refugees to spill into neighboring countries, so they were overwhelmed when ten times that number crossed.36 Sadako Ogata rushed staff to the border who hurried to fly in extra food stocks, set up tents, and negotiate with neighboring Macedonia, which tried to deny entry to the refugees. But in the early days, when the petrified Kosovars crossed the border into Macedonia and Albania, they found almost nobody to welcome them. Indeed, in Macedonia five times more international journalists awaited the refugees than UNHCR staff.37
Based in New York, Vieira de Mello could do little to help the refugees, beyond hoping that his former colleagues at UNHCR caught up with the flow. Telegenic and articulate, he took to the airwaves to shift attention from the UN’s lack of preparation to the ongoing suffering of Kosovar Albanians. “Reports of masked men in uniforms knocking on doors and telling people to leave or be killed are countless,” Vieira de Mello told reporters. “We are witnessing the emptying of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.”38 Most of the refugees reaching Macedonia and Albania were women, children, and the elderly, he said, which raised “the disturbing question as to the fate of a large proportion of Kosovar Albanian males within Kosovo.”39 No international aid workers were present inside Kosovo, and less than four years after the massacre in Srebrenica, he feared that the absence of men could well mean the massacre of men.
Although UNHCR’s reputation was severely bruised by the early chaos, its fieldworkers quickly got their footing, amassing enough food and tempo-raryThe MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, April 28, 1999.
shelter to defuse the emergency. Families in Albania displayed remarkable generosity toward their Kosovar kin, and very few refugees died of disease, exposure, or starvation. The emergency abated. Some 800,000 Kosovar Albanians settled into refugee camps.
Initially, they had reason to fear their exile would be permanent. Clinton’s renunciation of ground troops had convinced Milošević that, although his forces were hopelessly outgunned, they could wait out the air attacks until domestic public opinion in NATO countries turned against the war. Events on the battlefield augured well for the Serbs. Serb antiaircraft gunners shot down a U.S. F-117 stealth bomber on March 28. Four days later Serb forces captured three U.S. soldiers near the Macedonia-Yugoslav border. On April 12, NATO struck a passenger train south of Belgrade, killing thirty civilians and forcing Clinton to issue a public apology. Two days later NATO hit a convoy of families in flight, leaving sixty-four dead. On April 23, NATO destroyed the Serbian state television building, killing ten.
The heads of state of the nineteen NATO countries had expected to gather in triumph on April 23-25 in Washington to celebrate NATO’s fiftieth birthday. But the alliance’s first-ever war cast a pall on the occasion. And the bad news kept coming. On May 2 a U.S. F-16 fighter jet crashed inside Serbia (though its pilot was rescued). Three days later NATO suffered its first fatalities, as two U.S. Army pilots on a training mission in Albania died when their Apache helicopter crashed. On May 7 a NATO cluster bomb aimed at a military airport in Niš went astray and hit a hospital and a fruit and vegetable market, killing fifteen Serbs and wounding seventy.
NATO’s lowest point came at 9:46 p.m. on May 7. Relying on an out-of-date map, American pilots fired three cruise missiles at what they thought was a Serbian government building but that proved to be the Chinese embassy. As firemen descended on the scene, a blood-soaked, frantic Chinese cultural affairs adviser appeared on Serbian television, saying, “We haven’t found some of my colleagues.” More than twenty people in the embassy were wounded, and three were killed. Chinese ambassador Pan Zhanlien stood before the ruins and said, “The People’s Republic has been attacked.” In Beijing a mob gathered at the U.S. embassy, trapping the ambassador inside. Protesters in the NATO countries of Greece, Italy, and Germany decried the civilian toll of the war.40 A spokesman for Annan said the secretary-general was “shocked and distressed” at the growing number of deadly NATO mistakes.41
BEHIND SERB LINES
NATO’s struggles on the battlefield caused the UN’s star to shine brighter.The Western allies started to recognize that, while they had the military prowess to inflict severe harm, they would not necessarily succeed in extracting a surrender from Belgrade. For that they would need Serbia’s historic backer, Russia, to press for peace. The Russians, who were not quick to forgive NATO for launching the war, attached a condition to their cooperation: The UN (where Moscow had great clout) rather than NATO (from which Moscow was excluded) would play the dominant role in any postwar transition.
Vieira de Mello had his own ideas about how to make the UN relevant again, and they did not entail waiting for the Russians to broker a deal. In a senior staff meeting in early May, as Annan described the criticisms he was getting for not condemning NATO, Vieira de Mello spoke up: “Well, there’s one area we can take a stand,” he said, “the humanitarian area.” “Yes,” said Annan,“but what can we do that we are not already doing?” Vieira de Mello answered, “We can get inside Kosovo.”
It was a stroke of political genius. He would lead the first international team into Kosovo since NATO bombing had begun forty days before. The UN would place unarmed officials behind the front lines in a province from which Kosovars were fleeing and that NATO ground forces were avoiding. By entering Kosovo, Vieira de Mello thought he could ascertain the fate of the displaced civilians who had not made their way to safety and assess the extent of NATO’s collateral damage. The trip would instantly elevate the UN’s profile and might even do some good. Annan leaped at the idea, proposing it to the Security Council the following day.
The Russians were elated. Believing Vieira de Mello’s mission would aid his Serbian allies, Ambassador Sergei Lavrov told Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott,“It is no accident that Sergio and I have the same name!” Lavrov urged Vieira de Mello to document the severe economic and environmental devastation caused by NATO. U.S. and U.K. officials had the opposite reaction. With new reports of NATO collateral damage surfacing each day, and with no sure victory in sight, NATO planners did not want to have to go out of their way to avoid hitting UN personnel and thus reduce their already-thin list of targets. Because Yugoslav officials on the ground would block the UN’s movement, the allies were also concerned that Vieira de Mello would emerge with more horror stories about stray NATO missiles than about Serb brutality. Nancy Soderberg, the acting U.S. ambassador to the UN, called him on May 5 to complain about the mission. “Sergio, this is a stupid idea,” she said. “You are playing right into Serb hand
s.” Firmly but gently he pushed back. “Nancy, my dear, I’m afraid this is nonnegotiable,” he said. “We are the United Nations, and no country, not even one as powerful as yours, can tell us where we can and cannot go.” U.S. officials nixed a planned Council statement welcoming the initiative.42 The following day the divided Council instead issued a noncommittal statement saying it “took note” of the mission “with interest.”43
One of the first people Vieira de Mello telephoned after he got approval to assemble a team was his friend Bakhet. They had spent countless hours debating whether there could ever be any such thing as “humanitarian” war. “Omar,” he said, “do you want to go to Kosovo so we can study the merits and demerits of humanitarian intervention up close?” Bakhet accepted eagerly.“In a simple sense the activist Sergio preferred to be in the field, to find out what people needed,” says Bakhet. “But the activist Sergio also knew that being in the field gave him more credibility in political discussions when he returned to capitals.”
Vieira de Mello was exhilarated by the prospect of returning to the center of “the action” and, in so doing, inserting the UN back in the game. At the press briefing where he laid out plans for the trip, he downplayed the dangers. “There is an element of risk in any such mission, and, although we are not irresponsible, I would say that we are used to working in that kind of environment. Unfortunately this is not new to the kind of job that we do.”44 He also waved off U.S. concerns that his team would be duped by the Serbs, saying testily that he would not be the “prisoner of a pre-arranged itinerary.” He had not amassed twenty-nine years’ experience for nothing, he said: The UN would not be manipulated.45
Vieira de Mello pulled together a team of experts on nutrition, health care, child care, sanitation, shelter, and reconstruction, even though he knew that the humanitarians would not be able to conduct detailed assessments on such a short trip under fire. The battle among agencies for a spot on the team was fierce. Louise Arbour, the UN prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, had been trying to send investigators into Kosovo since the massacre in Racak in January. She was enraged that Annan had thrown his weight behind Vieira de Mello’s mission but had not made any effort to press for access for tribunal investigators, even though reports were swirling that the Serbs were destroying evidence of their crimes. Arbour telephoned Vieira de Mello and demanded that a member of her staff be permitted to join his delegation. “I can’t do that, Louise,” he said. “The Serbs would never allow it.” “Have you asked them?” she asked. “Have you even tried?” He admitted that he had not. She then called Secretary-General Annan and persuaded him to insist.
Vieira de Mello entrusted Nils Kastberg, a forty-four-year-old Swede who headed UNICEF’s emergency programs, to lead an advance mission to the region to lay the groundwork for the trip. Kastberg’s first stop was Geneva, where he met two NATO officers from Brussels. They insisted that the UN drive in clearly marked white vehicles, travel only by day, notify Brussels of their precise route forty-eight hours in advance, and never deviate from the preordained plan.
Kastberg spent May 10-12 in Belgrade conducting delicate negotiations with the Serb authorities.The Serbs insisted that the UN travel at all times with a Serb escort and that before visiting Kosovo they first tour Serbian cities that had been bombed by NATO. Each day of negotiations Kastberg kept one eye trained on the clock, as he needed to ensure that he and his colleagues reached their hotel rooms by nightfall, which was when NATO commenced bombing each day. On May 11, as the afternoon negotiations wore on, Kastberg received a call from Arbour. She said that Annan had given her his word that a war crimes investigator would have a spot on the team.
Kastberg dreaded raising the issue with the Serbs, but when an order came from the secretary-general, he had no choice. He asked Serbia’s lead negotiator to join him for a walk in the garden, away from the listening devices. “I have something to ask you, and it is going to make you very angry, but after you express your anger I would like to ask you if we can put our heads together and find a solution.” The official nodded.When Kastberg explained the new wrinkle, the Serb negotiator erupted in rage. “You know how we feel about this so-called court,” he said, referring to the Serb belief that the tribunal was anti-Serb. “Are you trying to humiliate us?!” Kastberg waited him out. “I warned you that it would make you angry,” he said. The official paced back and forth around the garden. It was 4:30 p.m., and Kastberg needed to resolve the matter. A rumor was circulating that NATO was going to bomb one of Belgrade’s main bridges that day, so the UN team was in a special hurry to get back to their hotels. Finally the Serb gathered himself and said quietly, “You know, if anybody heard that there was someone from The Hague on the mission, not only is that person likely to be attacked, but so is the entire UN delegation.” Kastberg nodded, knowing that the Serb also saw an opportunity to present the tribunal with evidence of NATO war crimes. “The only way this will work,” Belgrade’s negotiator said, “is if the person assumes a different identity.” It was agreed that whoever Arbour nominated for the team would travel undercover.
Arbour tapped Frank Dutton, a fifty-year-old South African who had spent a decade investigating apartheid hit squads before joining the UN court. Dutton flew from The Hague to Geneva, where the UN drew up a temporary contract making him a “human rights officer” and giving him an entirely new UN passport, which no longer listed him as an employee of the tribunal. “We thought we had masterfully disguised his identity,” recalls Kastberg, “until he showed up to leave for the trip with all kinds of cameras and film and asked me to negotiate the filming of mass graves.”
While Dutton joined the UN assessment team eagerly, others felt as though they had no choice. Kirsten Young was based at UNHCR in Geneva as executive assistant to Dennis McNamara. A thirty-four-year-old Australian, Young had been subjected to relentless shelling when she worked in Bosnia in 1993. In the intervening years she had gotten married, undergone intensive post-traumatic stress counseling, and finally made her peace with the ghosts of the Balkans.Yet suddenly McNamara, her mentor, was asking her to return to the region. As she drove home from her office at UNHCR in Geneva, Young telephoned her husband, the head of an international NGO. As she broke the news of her forthcoming trip, she began sobbing so violently that she had to pull over to the side of the road. The prospect of aerial bombardment terrified her. “Kirsten, you don’t have to go,” her husband said. “No, I do, I do,” she said. “I have to go. How do I say no to this kind of mission?” Young remembers the pressure she felt. “The whole humanitarian world is such a macho cowboy environment,” she says. “They all talk about ‘having balls.’ You’re terrified to say no because then you would be showing you don’t ‘have any balls.’ Even feminists get sucked into that trap.” Young remained jittery until she met up with Vieira de Mello in Geneva a few days later, and her fears abated. “Sergio had this aura of nonchalance and invincibility,” she says. “I just resolved not to leave his side.”
Annan too was energized by the imminent trip. In a lengthy Q and A moderated by Judy Woodruff on CNN, he said he was tired of hearing criticisms of the UN.“This morning,” he said, “when people started talking about the incompetence of UNHCR and others, I did not hear a single person mention the sacrifice these people make and the risks they take.”46 Annan spoke suddenly as if from a position of strength. “I don’t think we are going to see NATO setting itself up as a policeman of the world, replacing the United Nations. My own sense, and I may be wrong here, is that after what NATO has gone through in the Balkans, it is going to reassess its own approach. And I think it should.”47 He said countries should not avoid the Security Council.“It’s like saying, ‘I’m not going to this or that court because I know that things will not go my way. So I’m going to do something else,’ ” he said. “We cannot lecture everybody about the need for the rule of law and ignore it when it’s convenient.”48 At a subsequent press conference Annan said that any apparent loss of relevance fo
r the UN was “a short-term phenomenon because we live in a global and an interdependent world and today we need the UN even more than we did yesterday and the day before that.” In words that prophesied the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Annan warned, “Any nation or group of nations that decides to ignore this is setting a precedent and creating a situation that is likely to haunt all of us.”49
Twelve
INDEPENDENCE IN ACTION
Vieira de Mello believed that the potential political and humanitarian benefits of inserting himself and his hastily assembled UN team into a live war zone vastly outweighed the physical risks. But even as he made his way to the region, the Clinton administration stepped up its criticism of his trip. On May 16, 1999, Secretary-General Annan, who was staying at the home of Queen Beatrix in the Netherlands, received a furious phone call from Thomas Pickering, the under secretary of state for political affairs, who was calling from the United States, where it was 4 a.m. Pickering told Annan that he had just seen Vieira de Mello’s itinerary and it was unacceptable. The UN delegation would be in the region for eleven days, but in Kosovo for less than three of those, from Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning. Washington officials remained concerned that the UN team would see the power plants and bridges NATO had hit in Serbia, but that they would not get an accurate picture of the destruction and bloodshed the Serbs had caused in Kosovo. “Milošević is going to get huge propaganda mileage out of this,” Pickering said. He advised Annan to cancel the mission unless the Serbs allowed at least three-quarters of it to be spent in Kosovo. Annan refused.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 31
