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

by Samantha Power

  In one town in Kosovo a group of children who had been orphaned by a Serb attack ran toward the UN officials, who realized they had almost nothing to offer. “We could pass out chocolate,” Vandam recalls. “But we knew we would then be abandoning them. I don’t think any of us had ever felt so helpless.” As Sarah Uppard entered her vehicle, one of the children grabbed her hand and refused to let it go. “The kids had no idea what would happen after we left,” remembers Uppard, “and neither did we. It was heartbreaking.”

  Vieira de Mello’s unexpected stops and his endless follow-up questions in conversation with Kosovar Albanian civilians caused the convoy to fall behind schedule every day. In one instance, when a group of displaced ethnic Albanians emerged from the trees to speak with him, Chikvaidze contacted a NATO liaison officer to inform him of the delay. Speaking through an interpreter, Vieira de Mello asked the refugees when they had fled, how long they had been hiding, where they were finding food, and whether there were Serb or KLA forces in the vicinity. The discussions dragged on, and Chikvaidze received a telephone call from a UN official at Headquarters who himself had just been telephoned by the office of an enraged secretary-general of NATO. “Oh my god, Mr. Chikvaidze,” the official exclaimed, “NATO is so pissed off that you’re interfering with their work.” Chikvaidze, already conscious of the clock, approached Vieira de Mello, who was in his element conversing with the Kosovars. “They’re terrified in the operations center, Sergio. The secretary-general of NATO is raging mad—” Vieira de Mello, whose back was to Chikvaidze, wheeled around 180 degrees and burst out: “Fuck the secretary-general of NATO. I’m working here.” Chikvaidze was taken aback, as Vieira de Mello rarely let his temper show. “Do you want me to call NATO and pass along that message?” Chikvaidze asked. Vieira de Mello smiled and returned to his task. Every evening at dinner Terry Burke, the team’s chief security officer, would plead with him to do a better job sticking to the schedule. “But, Terry, think of what we’re achieving!” Vieira de Mello would say, adding, “Sit this man down, he needs another glass of wine.”

  He was tense on the trip, not so much because of the physical danger but because he knew he needed to bring home fresh evidence of Serbian aggression. If he returned to New York empty-handed, he would miss both an opportunity to raise additional resources to meet humanitarian needs and a chance to remind governments and publics of the UN’s unique value. Between the propaganda he had been fed by Serbian officials before he got to Kosovo and the restrictions the Serbs had imposed on his movements while inside the province, he was not sure he was getting what he needed. Yet despite the pressure and the grimness of the surroundings, he remained playful with his colleagues, treating them to multiple bottles of wine each night. Team members marveled at how he would hold forth at the table tipsily but then, at a designated hour, head upstairs to his room to make his ritual satellite phone calls to New York until the early hours of the morning.

  He felt most at ease with his friend Bakhet.The two men did what they had done for more than two decades: They talked about the fate of the UN and bantered about women. Vieira de Mello made repeated references to the beauty of one of the interpreters assigned to him by the Yugoslav foreign ministry. Once when the convoy stopped to interview Kosovo refugees, he summoned Bakhet to him under the guise of discussing highly classified business. When Bakhet asked what was so pressing, he said, “That goddamn minder from the ministry of foreign affairs won’t leave me alone with the translator for one minute! Create a decoy, will you?”

  The Serbs had their fun as well. Before the mission began, Kastberg had advised team members that, in light of the food shortages in Kosovo, each team member should bring his or her own supplies. Many members of the delegation brought huge suitcases stocked with bread, dried fruit, chocolate, chamomile tea, and toilet paper. At hotels and guesthouses the Serbian authorities made a point of housing the UN delegates on the top floor. Since NATO attacks had disabled the province’s electricity grid, the elevators did not work, and the Serbs delighted in watching UN team members hauling their heavy stashes of food up successive flights of stairs. Once the UN staff panted their way to their rooms, the Serb officials typically invited them to the local municipal offices where large feasts had been prepared.

  On Saturday, May 22, the team’s last full scheduled day in Kosovo, Vieira de Mello was not satisfied with his ability to document life and death behind Serb lines. He instructed Bakhet to take most of the team across the border into Montenegro,19 while he and a small group would spend an unplanned extra night in Kosovo, making their way to Montenegro a day later than originally scheduled. Young opted for what she called the “cowards’ convoy.” Uppard initially made the same decision but changed her mind the following morning, as she felt she could trust Vieira de Mello to lead what became known as the “cowboy convoy.” Vieira de Mello informed NATO of the split, but it nonetheless very nearly brought disaster. NATO officials had been instructed to look out for a convoy of ten white vehicles, which would be clearly visible from the air. Officials in Brussels did not tell NATO pilots of the change of plan. As a result, he later learned, when the bombers spotted one of the two smaller convoys, they made preparations to strike what they initially assumed was a Serbian military convoy.

  On May 24, after gathering additional evidence and testimony during the extra half day in Kosovo, Vieira de Mello’s smaller team crossed out of Kosovo into Montenegro.10 Bakhet’s group, which had arrived the previous evening in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, erupted into cheers when their colleagues reached the hotel. Vieira de Mello knew how to make an entrance, and he had instructed Bakhet to arrange a press conference to coincide with his arrival. Although he had not seen all he had hoped to see, he expected his findings would have broad media appeal.“Just by being here, we don’t have to say, ‘There are reports of . . .’ We will be able to say, ‘We have seen . . .”’ he told Bakhet.

  Although he had watched his friend in action for close to two decades, Bakhet was impressed. “The usual UN bureaucrat would have waited to have his press conference in Belgrade, or once he was safe and sound in Geneva or New York,” he recalls.“But Sergio knew that the impact on the world would be so much greater if he delivered his findings breathlessly just when he had ‘escaped’ Kosovo.” At the media event, Vieira de Mello described the “ghost towns” that his team had encountered. He said the evidence was overwhelming and irrefutable.“Everything indicates that there is an attempt to displace, ethnically cleanse, Kosovo,” he said. “In a word, it is pretty revolting.”11

  He was saying nothing new.The mere fact that 800,000 ethnic Albanians had already flooded out of Kosovo was ample proof of Serbian paramilitaries’ ethnic cleansing. Yet his presentation of “eyewitness” findings received prominent play in the press. It stripped those who remained skeptical about Serb brutality of the excuse of “hearsay” or “insufficient information.” Kastberg and Khalikov, lying in their hospital beds in Belgrade, heard snippets of their boss’s press conference on the BBC. Kastberg asked his colleague, “What do you think the Serbs will do to Sergio when he gets back to Belgrade?”

  Vieira de Mello knew the risks of returning to the Serbian capital. When his team arrived back on May 26, his first stop was Belgrade Central Hospital, where he checked on his injured colleagues. “Here I was feeling sorry for you, risking kidnapping and NATO bombing for the sake of the UN and the principles of humanitarianism,” Vieira de Mello teased. “But look at these nurses! I clearly chose the wrong car to drive in.” He then made his way to what he knew would be a difficult meeting with the Serbian authorities. Told he would be meeting with Milošević, Vieira de Mello said to Bakhet in the car ride over, “I don’t want to shake hands with that man.” Milošević, in fact, did not show. And when the Yugoslav minister of foreign affairs, Zivadin Jovanovic, the country’s former ambassador in Angola, greeted him in Portuguese, Vieira de Mello interrupted him in English. “Your Excellency, I would prefer not to tell you what I am go
ing to tell you in Portuguese,” he said melodramatically. “It would be an insult to my mother tongue.” He proceeded to launch into the most impassioned and rigorous defense of the core UN right to human security and dignity that Bakhet had ever heard. “Sergio was so outspoken and so undiplomatic, and yet so professional,” Bakhet recalls. “It was as if the UN Charter was speaking through a person.” As the men drove back to their hotel, Bakhet could only shake his head. “You must have a death wish, Sergio,” he said.

  When the two men walked into the lobby of the Belgrade Hyatt, they saw Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic, Serbia’s most notorious warlord, who gave them the finger. Deciding it best to remain out of view, they proceeded directly to the elevators. Arkan sat down in the Hyatt bar with his wife, popular Serbian folksinger Ceca, and their two children, who were dressed primly as if for church. Relieved to be out of Kosovo, Kirsten Young was having a drink with several UN team members, and she shuddered when she saw Arkan at the adjacent table.

  When Vieira de Mello reached his hotel room, he ordered room service and turned on CNN. There he saw Christiane Amanpour deliver a shocking leaked exclusive: Louise Arbour, the UN war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, had indicted Milošević for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the first time a sitting head of state had ever been indicted by an international tribunal. Vieira de Mello was taken aback by the timing of the indictment. Frank Dutton, Arbour’s war crimes investigator who had accompanied the mission under cover, had assured him that no indictment would be issued while they were in the region.“Why did they do this now?” Vieira de Mello shouted at Bakhet. “Why not at any other time within the last five or six years? Why not tomorrow? What if we are held hostage here?” Vieira de Mello, the same man who kept a poster of Bosnia’s MOST WANTED war crimes suspects on the wall in his office in New York, wanted to see Milošević behind bars. Yet he felt that the security of his mission had been jeopardized, and the UN had revealed itself to be disorganized and dysfunctional. Few of the UN team members slept soundly that night. Vandam of the WHO opted to sleep in his clothes.“I decided that if they were going to kidnap me in the middle of the night, I would prefer not to be taken naked,” he recalls.

  The UN team was scheduled to drive back to Croatia the following day, but Vieira de Mello pushed forward the time of the UN departure, opting to leave at the crack of dawn. Before leaving, he went to Belgrade Central Hospital and escorted Kastberg and Khalikov to the airport, where they were put on a plane back to NewYork. He also pulled Dutton aside and asked him for the notes, film, and videotapes he had collected.“The Serbs will be much less likely to search me than you,” Vieira de Mello said. The same man who had once befriended war criminals like Ieng Sary and Radovan Karadžić and agreed that his biography might best be entitled My Friends, the War Criminals was now doing his part to ensure that Balkan war criminals faced justice. After burying a bounty of evidence beneath his socks and T-shirts, he crossed the border from Serbia into peaceful Croatia and breathed an audible sigh of relief.“You don’t think NATO can miss this badly, do you?” he asked Bakhet. Later that day Arbour formally announced Milošević’s indictment. The Serbian dictator would be arrested and transferred to The Hague two years later.The leak had proven harmless.

  As Vieira de Mello drove with Bakhet into Zagreb, he complained that officials from the Croatian foreign ministry were likely waiting for him at the hotel. “I’ve had enough of meetings,” he said suddenly.“Let’s forget the Croats and go get a proper meal.” The two men ducked into a restaurant Vieira de Mello knew from his days working for UNPROFOR five years before.They talked about all topics under the sun except Kosovo. When they arrived at the airport to catch their flight to Switzerland, they found a panicked UN staff and irritated Croatian officials. Vieira de Mello beckoned Dutton over to his suitcase, where the war crimes investigator retrieved his evidence.

  Team members flew from Zagreb to Zurich, where they stayed at an airport hotel. There Vieira de Mello found a fax awaiting him from his assistant, Fabrizio Hochschild, who had read a wire story describing the UN press conference in Montenegro. Hochschild, who was loyal to Vieira de Mello but also often sharply critical, wrote that his boss’s rebuttals of Serbian falsehoods “were courageous and made us all feel proud.”12 UN Headquarters in New York had had a funereal feeling in March, when NATO went to war unilaterally, but Vieira de Mello’s mission had lifted spirits. The Security Council may have been bypassed, but by offering the first independent eyewitness proof of the ethnic cleansing, UN officials felt they had proven the organization mattered.

  The exhausted UN team members gathered in the hotel garden for drinks and dinner, but their leader retired to his hotel room. As his colleagues released the tension of the previous two weeks with alcohol and laughter, Vieira de Mello stood at his hotel window looking down at the courtyard, clutching a phone to his ear and waving occasionally.

  When he returned to Headquarters in New York, he became the first humanitarian official ever to be called to testify before the UN Security Council. On June 2, all eyes were on him, as he had gone where even NATO generals had not dared to go. He began his remarks by commending the Yugoslav health authorities for caring for Kastberg and Khalikov, but then he delved quickly into a detailed discussion of Serb ethnic cleansing. His team, he said, had enjoyed access that “was more than expected, but less than requested.”13 The Serbian authorities had limited the team’s movement by citing security concerns that were “often neither understandable, nor convincing.” Nonetheless he had seen enough of the province to know that it was a “panorama of empty villages, burned houses, looted shops, wandering livestock, and unattended farms.”14

  Since the bulk of the mission’s time had been spent in Serbia, he had plenty to add about the destruction caused by NATO bombing as well. He reported that civilians would be suffering for many years the effects of the environmental damage, psychological trauma, and destruction of essential services, such as electricity, health, communications, and heating. Although his presentation was evenhanded, he had led with a discussion of Serb violence, and it was these comments that captured global news headlines, as he knew they would.

  His daredevil mission had not brought radically new information to light, but he had highlighted civilian suffering and reasserted the UN’s independent voice. He had shown as much to himself as to anyone that the UN was prepared to stand up for the victims of ethnic cleansing, while also standing up for itself.

  Thirteen

  VICEROY

  In three decades of responding to war and displacement, Vieira de Mello had made a specialty out of understanding governments. Although he never entirely got his way, he had learned to negotiate with them, to extract resources from them, and to manipulate them. His senior colleagues in New York, who themselves were generally veterans of national government service, were usually surprised to learn that he had never himself worked for Brazil.The UN was not a place one could go to get experience running a country. But all that changed, unexpectedly, with the crisis in Kosovo.

  ENDING A WAR

  When he and his team returned to the United States after their risky assessment mission, NATO’s war was still going poorly. Nonetheless, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister, and Martti Ahtisaari, the Finnish president, were spearheading peace talks supported by the Clinton administration, and those talks were managing to gather steam. The mothers and wives of Serbian soldiers had begun protesting the casualties the army was suffering, and NATO had begun bombing businesses belonging to Milošević’s closest associates. The Serbian leader, who had expected to be able to play Russia off against NATO, found himself boxed in when the UN, NATO, and Russia suddenly began presenting a united front. On Thursday, June 3, 1999, after seventy-eight days and 12,500 NATO bombing raids, Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari handed Milošević a “take it or leave it” deal, and he surrendered. That evening NATO officers began negotiating the withdrawal of Serbian police and military forces from Kosovo.<
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  One major question had been left unresolved: After Serb forces departed, who would run Kosovo? Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, which had operated its own informal, underground governing structures since the province was stripped of its autonomy in 1989, was eager to take over, but the Russians would not allow it. Serbian officials would have been happy to remain in charge, but that was precisely what the NATO air campaign had been designed to undo.

  Vieira de Mello gave numerous media interviews following his return to New York in which he argued that, as an interim measure, the UN (and not NATO) was the organization best suited to running the province. “If the UN were to play that role,” he told a large audience at the National Press Club in Washington four days after Milošević’s surrender, “I can assure you that it is ready to move, and move fast.”1 But neither he nor Secretary-General Annan expected the UN to be handed such a role. Even though the Russians were lobbying for it, UN officials assumed that the organization would be cut out of the peace much as it had been cut out of the war. Indeed, Vieira de Mello was so confident that others would be given the task of managing Kosovo’s fate that, having neglected the rest of the world since March, he made plans to fly to Beijing on June 9, then on to Islamabad, Pakistan, on June 13, to assess regional humanitarian conditions.