But Moscow quickly forced him to change his travel plans. The Clinton administration had bypassed the UN Security Council in the run-up to the war because Russia would have vetoed any U.S. resolution authorizing NATO bombing. Now that the Russians were insisting the UN lead the transition, Washington was prepared to return to the Security Council and invite it to help shape Kosovo’s future. On June 10, the Security Council passed Resolution 1244, which amounted to a lowest-common-denominator fudge among powerful countries. It granted Kosovo “substantial autonomy” but not independence, and “meaningful self-administration” but not self-government. Serb police and military units would have to leave Kosovo. But the Security Council countries reiterated their respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” At an unspecified date down the road (a date that had not yet arrived in late 2007), the province would move out of this halfway house and either legally remain part of Serbia or, more likely, achieve full international recognition as an independent country. Kosovo still needed a government, so the UN would function as an “interim international administration” until the province’s final status could be resolved.
Resolution 1244 called on Annan to appoint a Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) as transitional administrator.This person would oversee civil administration, humanitarian affairs (via UNHCR), reconstruction (via the EU), and institution-building (via the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). This administrator would work in tandem with—but would have no say over—NATO, which would send in 50,000 ground troops in a peacekeeping role to stabilize the province.
UN staff had done no advance planning to lead what, by the look of things, would be both the most ambitious political mission in the organization’s history and its highest-profile assignment since the Bosnia and Rwanda debacles. Even though it was unclear whether the UN had the in-house expertise to actually govern anything, Annan embraced the assignment. In the words of one UN staffer, “When the Security Council calls, the Secretariat doesn’t bark. It bows its head, puts its tail between its legs, and starts walking.”
Annan knew that the UN couldn’t afford to fail, and the choice of his special representative was essential. Because the countries on the Security Council had given him no warning, he had not lined up a candidate. On Friday, June 11, he summoned Vieira de Mello to his office on the thirty-eighth floor. “Sergio,” he said, “I need you to go back.” Although Vieira de Mello was exhausted, he was also delighted. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi had nixed his appointment as SRSG in 1993; this would mark the first time in his career that he would run his own UN mission. The only catch was that the assignment was temporary. Since Europe would supply the bulk of the funding for Kosovo’s rebuilding, Annan felt he needed to find a European to succeed Vieira de Mello as soon as possible.
ASSEMBLING A TEAM
When Vieira de Mello led his eleven-day humanitarian mission into Serbia the previous month, he had been handed a diverse interagency team. But for this vital political mission, he was given the freedom to choose his own staff. He picked a half-dozen trustworthy colleagues who were prepared to leave their lives and families on twenty-four hours’ notice. Dozens more UN staff would soon follow, but the nucleus would be key. Helena Fraser, a twenty-seven-year-old British national, had been the Kosovo desk officer in New York. “Can you be ready to leave tomorrow?” Fabrizio Hochschild asked her. “I’m getting married in a month,” she said, but then added, “I did go for my last dress fitting earlier today.”
Hansjörg Strohmeyer, a thirty-seven-year-old former German judge who had only recently joined Vieira de Mello’s office, had worked in Bosnia for three years and knew the Yugoslav legal codes.“I need a lawyer down there,” Vieira de Mello told him. Strohmeyer’s mother had just flown in from Dortmund that day, and unable to speak English, she would be lost in New York without him. But he eagerly accepted. When he delivered the news to his mother that evening, she burst into tears.
The next day, Saturday, June 12, Fraser, Strohmeyer, and the other young team members raced around New York preparing for the trip. Fraser went to Bloomingdale’s with her fiancé to buy light cotton clothing for the mission. As the couple hurriedly piled up purchases, the saleslady asked what the occasion was. “I’m going to Kosovo,” Fraser said. The woman looked puzzled. “Where’s that?” she asked. “It’s in the former Yugoslavia,” Fraser answered. “Where’s that?” the saleslady followed up.“It’s in the Balkans,” Fraser said. “Hmmm,” the lady said. “Where’s that?” “It’s in Europe,” Fraser replied. The woman’s face brightened. “Oh, congratulations,” she said.“Have a wonderful trip!”
Strohmeyer had been told that Vieira de Mello’s team would likely depart on Sunday. On Saturday morning he dropped off his laundry and swung by the UN to pick up a few relevant books. “Have you picked up your ticket already?” Vieira de Mello’s secretary asked. Strohmeyer said he had not. She told him that he could get it from Hochschild at the airport later. “What do you mean ‘later’?” he asked. “The flight leaves this afternoon,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you?” They had not. Strohmeyer, who had his passport with him, ran back to the Laundromat, stuffed his wet laundry into a bag with his books, and hailed a cab to the airport. His mother would have to fend for herself.
Vieira de Mello barely made the flight himself. Like the others, he had spent the day organizing his life for the trip. But he had also been getting hourly updates from the Balkans, where a new exodus was under way. Thousands of Serbian civilians had suddenly taken to the road, heading for Serbia proper. They had voluntarily piled their belongings atop their cars and wagons in much the same way Kosovar Albanians had recently been forced to do at gunpoint. The Serbs scoffed at Western assurances that NATO forces would protect the Serbs. “How can we believe NATO when they bombed us?” a young Serb student was quoted by the Washington Post as asking.2 Yet while Vieira de Mello was aware of the fears of the Serb minority, he underestimated the longing that some ethnic Albanians felt for revenge.
By the time he reached New York’s Kennedy airport, cleared security, and sprinted to his gate, the flight attendants were just about to close the airplane door. Team members who had nervously awaited their boss’s arrival, cheered his entrance but groaned at his attire. He was wearing a khaki safari suit that made him look twenty years older and significantly more colonial than he intended.
IN CHARGE AT LAST
He used the overnight flight to Rome to study Security Council Resolution 1244, which left Kosovo’s final status undefined but gave him far more power than Yasushi Akashi had been given in Cambodia. Akashi had supervised Cambodian ministries; in Kosovo Vieira de Mello would have to build and run them. Somehow, with no money, no valid precedents, and no institutions to draw upon, he would have to determine what law should apply in the province and decide how to collect customs and taxes, what kind of passports should be issued, how to kick-start the economy, whether Yugoslav currency should remain in effect, and what on earth to do with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the ethnic Albanian guerrillas who would be an uncontested armed presence as soon as Serbian police and soldiers had fully withdrawn. Vieira de Mello was the interim administrator. He did not know how long “interim” would last, but he set out to establish a framework for governing the place. His greatest challenge, he knew, would be rapidly mobilizing police, UN staff, and money from New York.
His small UN governing team flew from Rome on to Skopje, Macedonia. When they landed, they proceeded straight to NATO’s temporary headquarters, where the force commander, British lieutenant-general Michael Jackson, was garrisoned. Vieira de Mello told Jackson that his team intended to drive north to Kosovo that very day. Jackson advised against it. “The province has not been secured,” he said. “We haven’t even set up our headquarters yet.”
Vieira de Mello told General Jackson that he was aware of the risks of premature entry. But having traveled around Kosovo while NATO was
bombing and Serb paramilitary forces were on the loose, he was not about to be deterred now that a peace deal had been struck. Although the UN Security Council had put the UN in charge of the province, he knew that if he did not quickly establish a UN ground presence, NATO and KLA soldiers would fill the vacuum. Jackson wished him luck, and the two men agreed to hold daily meetings in Kosovo so as to coordinate their separate civilian and military chains of command.
Because the mission had been jerry-rigged in a hurry, Vieira de Mello’s team needed to beg and borrow supplies from aid groups, governments, and other branches of the UN that were already present in the region. They borrowed two vehicles from a Swedish relief organization, communications equipment from the British government’s aid agency, water and fuel from UNHCR, and military rations from NATO. Vieira de Mello felt he was on what he later called “an under-budgeted high school outing.”3
The trip from the Macedonian border to Pristina, the Kosovo capital, was straightforward; the two vehicles simply had to drive forty miles northward. But the scenes around them were anything but normal. Less than three weeks before, when he had driven a portion of the same road, it had been deserted. Now the streets were lined with cheering Kosovar Albanians who had never quite believed that they would be free of Serb tyranny. Most Kosovars were still outside the country in refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. Those who flocked to greet the UN convoy were mainly those who had hidden inside the province during the NATO bombing campaign. They made the peace sign, threw flowers into the street, and cheered the British prime minister and U.S. president, chanting, “TO-NY, TO-NY” and “CLIN-TON, CLIN-TON.” “This must have been what it felt like for American troops at the end of the Second World War,” Fraser said to a colleague.
Vieira de Mello eyed families walking along the side of the road. They were carrying bundles and appeared to be heading back to their homes. He saw scattered cars piled high with suitcases and appliances. “Once these people start heading home,” he noted, “there’ll be no stopping them.” Yet having toured Kosovo’s charred villages, he knew many would return to find only the ashen remains of their past lives.
After around three hours on the road, as the UN convoy ascended the crest of a hill, he instructed his driver to stop the vehicle. He disembarked with the others and eyed the capital city of Pristina below. As he did, he turned back and looked at the cars that his team had appropriated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to show people that it is the United Nations, and not Sweden, that is arriving. Who’s got a UN flag?” Somebody produced a royal blue UN flag, around the size of a pillowcase, and tied it to the antenna of Vieira de Mello’s lead vehicle. He looked satisfied, even though the enormous decals of the Swedish flag emblazoned on the side of the cars were far more visible to onlookers.
He had been in a hurry to get to Pristina for another, more juvenile reason. Dennis McNamara, who was managing UNHCR’s operations in the region, was bringing the first UN relief into Kosovo in nearly three months. McNamara had told Vieira de Mello that he intended to be the first UN official to reach the newly liberated capital. Over their radios the two friends had ribbed and taunted each other constantly throughout the afternoon, but McNamara had gone silent, and Vieira de Mello worried that his friend had won the bet.
McNamara had enjoyed a lengthy head start, having departed Skopje in the morning. But he was traveling in a twenty-three-truck convoy that carried 250 tons of supplies, including bottled water, wheat flour, hygienic kits, blankets, plastic sheeting, and 48,000 Meals Ready to Eat.4 It took most of the day for his unwieldy convoy to snake its way to the UN warehouse on the outskirts of Pristina. Staffan de Mistura, the Italian who on Vieira de Mello’s advice had hired smugglers as “UN consultants” in Bosnia seven years before, was part of McNamara’s convoy. He was unaware that they were part of a race, and it never dawned on him that Vieira de Mello, who had been appointed interim administrator only two days before, could have already reached Kosovo.Yet no sooner had de Mistura disembarked from his truck at the UN warehouse than he heard a familiar voice. “Benvenuto, Staffan!” Vieira de Mello said.
As Vieira de Mello, McNamara, and de Mistura embraced warmly,20 an elderly Serb who was guarding the gate of the UN warehouse began screaming obscenities and raising his machine gun as if to shoot them if they approached. The man was visibly drunk and so incoherent that he seemed at once harmless and dangerous. Vieira de Mello had been informed that the Serbs had burned down the other large UN warehouse in Kosovo, so he knew the UN needed to hang on to this one.
“Staffan, I need a drink,” he said suddenly to de Mistura.
“What you mean, you need a drink?” the Italian asked. It was broad daylight, and there was work to be done.
“Do you have any slivovitz here?” Vieira de Mello pressed.
De Mistura asked the UN interpreters to see what they could find. A few minutes later one of the locals approached with a small bottle of the Balkan spirit. Vieira de Mello approached the angry Serb cautiously and pointed to the bottle. “I would like to drink some slivovitz with you and talk things out,” he said.
The Serb guard looked skeptical, but the Balkan rules of hospitality required him to accept.The men raised their glasses. “Živeli,” Vieira de Mello toasted to the baffled Serb in his language. De Mistura was not sure whether he or the Serb guard was in a greater state of shock. But when he saw the guard rest his gun beside his chair and return the toast, he knew who would soon win the battle of wills.
Speaking through a UN interpreter, the Serb began explaining the source of his rage. He had guarded the UN warehouse for almost a year, and the Serbian government had yet to pay him. His friends and relatives had already fled Kosovo, but he had remained in order to collect what was owed to him. Vieira de Mello finished his drink, returned to his vehicle, and dipped into a tin box that he used to store petty cash.When he handed the Serb the several hundred dollars he was owed, the guard pocketed the money, picked up his gun, and walked away. The warehouse belonged to the UN.
Having secured a home for the UN’s humanitarian supplies, Vieira de Mello and the others made their way into town. Pristina was even more deserted than it had been during the war. Most of the Serbs had left, and few ethnic Albanians had yet made it back. As the UN group reached town, they saw that Serb forces were still setting houses aflame.The circumstances reminded him of his arrival in Gorazde five years before. But while in Gorazde the arson had been a sign of the Serbs’ invulnerability, this time it was clearly a last gasp by the departing Serbs—a sign of their relative weakness.
In advance of arriving, they had not lined up a place to stay. Randolph Kent, who was part of the group, remembers the chaos and uncertainty that they felt as they drove aimlessly around Pristina.“Have you ever been on the holiday where you arrive and you say,‘Why the hell didn’t we book a hotel?’ Well, that’s what it was like,” Kent recalls.
As the team stopped at the side of the road to discuss their plans for the rest of the day, they saw another drunken Serb soldier in a militia uniform staggering up the road. They thought little of it, as the sight was becoming familiar. A few minutes later as they drove up the road, however, they saw the same soldier’s body lying facedown. He had been shot—one of four Serbs who were reported killed by the KLA that day.5 Because it was the Serbs who had maintained order, even if brutal order, their departure was leaving a dangerous vacuum.
Although he had hardly slept on the transatlantic flight, Vieira de Mello was in a familiar hurry to establish the UN presence. He held a press conference downtown at the Grand Hotel. When he was shown the room where the event was to be held, he eyed the podium. “There’s a NATO flag there,” he told Eduardo Arboleda of UNHCR. “I can’t appear before a NATO flag.” “But, Sergio, people will concentrate on what you are saying,” Arboleda said. “No, I’ll offend the Serbs,” he replied. “They were just bombed by NATO.” Since a UN flag could not be found as a backdrop, Vieira de Mello demanded someone find a light b
lue sheet, which was procured from housekeeping and hung instead. “For this forlorn group without food, cars, sleeping bags, or a place to stay, to say, ‘We’re here, and we’re the new UN administration!’ seemed preposterous,” recalls Strohmeyer. “There were ten of us and fifty thousand NATO troops.” Yet Vieira de Mello’s self-respect, personal and institutional, made him and the other team members believe that they had an essential role to play.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 34
