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

by Samantha Power

  Secretary-General Annan too was defensive, as the associations with Rwanda and Srebrenica were inescapable. He claimed that the Indonesian slaughter was unexpected: “If any of us had an inkling that it was going to be this chaotic, I don’t think anyone would have gone forward. We are no fools.”12 When journalists challenged him to account for why the UN had not deployed force to stop the atrocities, he explained that he did not have a protection force of his own. The countries that composed the UN were to blame.“We all talk of the United Nations and the international community,” Annan said. “The international community is governments—governments with the capacity and the will to act. The governments have made it clear that it will be too dangerous to go in.”13 When a reporter asked if he was advocating a Kosovo-style intervention, he avoided making a forceful appeal, instead answering with characteristic tentativeness: “I do not think your analogy is completely irrelevant.”14

  An unshaven and frazzled Ramos-Horta shuttled between New York and Washington, invoking Rwanda whenever he could. “It was clear that people in the office of the secretary-general and in the White House were traumatized by Rwanda,” he recalls. “So I kept repeating, ‘Do you want another Rwanda in Timor? That’s what you’re going to get if you don’t act now.’ ” Vieira de Mello, who spoke often about the Don Bosco school in Rwanda The remains of East Timorese homes in the Ermera district, thirty-one miles south of Dili, September 27, 1999.

  that the Belgians had abandoned, had the same concern. The Security Council had instructed UN election workers to carry out the referendum. Surely, he thought, the countries on the Council would not again abandon civilians who had trusted them.

  When the violence began, the BBC chartered a plane to evacuate journalists, but a few remained and used UN satellite phones to plead for outside help. The pressure on Annan and the countries within the UN mounted. A vast network of religious groups and other grassroots organizations kicked into gear, demanding intervention. On September 7, Annan was informed that the UN had received 60,000 e-mails regarding East Timor, a deluge of concern so great that a separate computer server had to be set up to handle the influx.15

  UN MUTINY

  Martin was worried both about the bloodshed in the country and about the people gathered at the compound. In a reversal of its previous position, Australia agreed to admit Timorese UN staff on the condition that Australian citizens be evacuated from East Timor first and that any Timorese who landed in Darwin, Australia, would not be eligible to apply for longer-term visas.16

  Martin’s bigger problem was the fifteen hundred Timorese civilians with no UN connection who had poured into the compound on September 5 and whom Australia would not take. The militiamen who prowled outside the blue-painted gates seemed poised to attack at any point. Piled into a large auditorium, the displaced Timorese sang songs that the UN had made up for the election, lit candles, and prayed before their small crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary.17 One Timorese woman gave birth to a baby boy inside the compound, and out of gratitude to the UN mission in East Timor, or UNAMET, the woman chose an unusual name for her new son: “Pedro UNAMET.”18

  The UN had a policy of never evacuating civilians, but Martin urged New York to lobby member states to do something to protect all Timorese (UN and non-UN alike) at the compound. Hearing nothing, on the evening of September 8, Martin felt he had no choice but to follow the advice of Alan Mills, the head of UN civilian police, and his security advisers, and recommend to New York that the secretary-general declare a “Phase V” emergency.22 Annan reluctantly accepted the recommendation and ordered the withdrawal of all UN staff. Before Martin had shared the news with UN officials at the compound, most learned of the evacuation from CNN.

  Patrick Burgess, a forty-four-year-old Australian who worked for OCHA, the branch of the UN that Vieira de Mello ran, was horrified by the news of their departure and protested. But Martin explained that the few reliable Indonesian army officers who had been protecting the UN compound had been spotted preparing to leave. This meant that they and the Timorese civilians would soon be left at the mercy of marauding killers. “We can’t think only about this mission. If there is a massacre here, it will doom UN missions like this all around the world,” Martin told Burgess. “What country is going to send its nationals into harm’s way if it can’t trust the UN officials in charge to look after them?” Since Burgess spoke Indonesian, Martin asked him to tell the Timorese of the UN decision.19

  Burgess asked two Canadian colleagues, Geoffrey Robinson, forty-two, and Colin Stewart, thirty-eight, to help him assemble Timorese leaders. “We have been ordered to leave tomorrow morning,” Burgess told the Timorese. “It is better we tell you now. The men are obviously going to be a target, but we can cut a hole in the fence tonight and you can make a run for the mountains.” Burgess and Robinson wept openly as they stammered their way through an explanation of the logic behind the UN’s withdrawal. Sister Esmerelda, a Timorese community activist whom the UN staffers had known for several months, heard them out. “Whatever else may happen,” she said, “this referendum has removed any doubt that [the] East Timorese wish to be free. For conducting it, we will always be grateful to UNAMET.” As she wiped away tears, she continued: “We knew there would be violence after the vote and we hoped that you would stay. And yet, we are not surprised that you plan to leave us now.We are used to being abandoned in our times of greatest need.” The UN workers hung their heads in shame. “When you leave tomorrow,” Sister Esmeralda went on, “many of us will be massacred, but those of us who survive will continue the struggle to be free.” Saying she had to hurry, she shuffled away.20

  Most Timorese made no attempt to hide their emotions. They grew so panicked that they wailed in agony. Some plotted their escape. A small group began scheming to take hostages. “We must stop the UN from leaving. The bald man cannot leave the compound,” said one Timorese man, referring to Martin.21 UN security staff began preparing to depart, burning UN documents and removing the hard drives from computers.

  Throughout the compound groups of UN staff members clustered together to discuss their predicament. Many were sure a Rwanda-style massacre would commence if they withdrew. Some, like Carina Perelli, the head of the UN Electoral Assistance Division, suggested that the staff resign so that nobody would have the authority to order their evacuation. “We were trying not only to save the Timorese,” she recalls, “but to save the UN from itself.” Rosie Martinez, a Filipina personnel officer, spent the evening on her computer typing up faux UN contracts for Timorese civilians, so that they might pose as UN personnel in the hopes of being evacuated. She would ask each international staff member his or her rank and then proclaim, “Well, you are entitled to two interpreters, a driver, a secretary, and didn’t you have a cook in your house?”

  Burgess, Robinson, and Stewart sat together.“I can’t believe we are doing this,” said Robinson. “We can’t do this,” said Stewart. Burgess was nominated to return upstairs and ask Martin to reconsider.“When we leave here tomorrow,” he pleaded, “all these people are going to be killed. I don’t want to live with that for the rest of my life.” Martin agreed but said he had an obligation to protect the UN staff. Burgess challenged him. “We are not in immediate danger, and a lot of staff want to stay.” Martin, who had been hearing mainly from his police and security advisers about imminent militia attacks and about staff panic, looked surprised. “How many people feel that way?” he asked. Burgess guessed fifty or sixty. Martin asked Mark Quarterman, a thirty-nine-year-old American aide, to survey the staff and take down the names of those who were willing to remain. Quarterman returned several hours later with a list of more than eighty volunteers. Martin was persuaded and told New York that he intended to remain with UN staff in Dili until the evacuation of non-UN Timorese civilians could be negotiated.“We had decided to serve the flag,” Perelli recalls, “instead of serving the bureaucracy. Sergio always said that serving the flag gave you the power to do what you should do, n
ot just what you were ordered to do.”

  With reports of hundreds of Timorese already murdered, Vieira de Mello had the feeling of “here we go again.” In Bosnia in 1993 and 1994 he, like other UN officials, had understood the major powers to be unwilling to act to stop atrocities and had not pushed the matter. But a central lesson of the calamities of Rwanda and Srebrenica was that UN officials should, at a minimum, be on the record advocating solutions and challenging political constraints instead of simply deferring to them.When large numbers of lives were at stake, the smooth pragmatist had to exercise moral leadership. Doing so, he saw, was its own form of pragmatism.

  Although his responsibilities toward East Timor were technically only humanitarian, he took a strong political stand. Just as the UN should not have trusted the Serbs to guarantee the Bosnians’ safety in Srebrenica, he argued, the UN could not now trust the Indonesians. Since the UN had already rightly decided to evacuate Timorese UN staff, he endorsed a proposal that was gathering momentum at Headquarters: to send a small Australian contingent to the UN compound to protect the non-UN Timorese who had sought shelter there. “I appreciate there is a high likelihood that this will be unacceptable with the Security Council,” he argued in writing. “However, I feel if we wish to avoid being a scapegoat, we should put the onus of rejecting solutions on others.”22 He pressed the point. “If we learned anything in the last five years,” he said, “it is that we have to stop telling the Security Council what it wants to know, and instead tell it what it needs to know.” He added, “We can’t censor ourselves.”23

  Powerful countries were still officially accepting Indonesia’s assurances that it would keep its pledge to secure East Timor. But he wrote, “Should we not be skeptical in this regard?”24 He and his senior colleagues in the UN Secretariat had an obligation to put forth their independent view, which meant pushing for Australian intervention. “For once,” he urged in a senior staff meeting, “let’s allow the states on the Council to make the wrong decisions instead of saving them the trouble by making the wrong decisions for them.”

  The two parts of the UN—UN career staff and UN member states—were responding differently. While UN staff were refusing to leave Dili without the Timorese and UN senior staff in New York were pressing Western governments to act, the governments themselves were still resisting sending troops to rescue either the Timorese at the UN compound or the imperiled population as a whole.The Indonesians knew that, so long as the major powers remained uninvolved, control of East Timor would remain theirs. “Don’t hector and lecture us,” a defiant Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas said on CNN. “That doesn’t help.”25

  But not all Western countries were alike. Portugal, East Timor’s former colonizer, joined the push for intervention. Portuguese prime minister António Guterres telephoned President Clinton and pleaded with him to bring the issue before the Security Council. In Australia, the first UN member state to have recognized the legality of Indonesia’s occupation, the political left pressed Prime Minister John Howard to make up for the country’s past sins, while conservatives argued that something had to be done to stave off the flood of Timorese refugees who would end up in Australia. In his boldest statement of the crisis, Secretary-General Annan warned that what he called “crimes against humanity” would be punished.26 On September 9, 1999, on his way out the door to New Zealand for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Clinton announced that the United States was suspending a $2.5 million military assistance program to Indonesia, as well as $40 million in commercial sales.27 The IMF suspended a $450 million installment of aid, and the World Bank announced a freeze on its annual $1 billion aid program. The Indonesians, Clinton said, “didn’t like the results of the referendum and they’re trying to undo it by running people out of the country or into the grave.” He continued, “We expect the authorities to live up to their word and their responsibilities. [They] must invite”—Clinton repeated himself for effect—“must invite the international community to assist in restoring security.”28 Hiding in the mountains, Sarmento, the former guerrilla who had celebrated the referendum results, heard Clinton’s statement on his shortwave radio and cheered the ultimatum. The Timorese who were gathered in the UN compound jumped up and down, rejoicing at what they hoped was a reprieve.

  On September 12, the international economic and diplomatic pressure on Indonesia paid off. President B. J. Habibie announced in both Indonesian and English, “I have decided to invite the international peacekeeping force in order to assist us—together with the Indonesian military, in a cooperative manner—to restore stability to the troubled province.”29

  An outside military intervention would at last occur in East Timor, and the Indonesians would not contest it. After a tense, all-night negotiating session, the Security Council gave its blessing to sending an international force. As had occurred in Kosovo in March, the rescuers would be war fighters, not peacekeepers. After the peacekeeping humiliations of the 1990s, so-called coalitions of the willing or Multinational Forces (MNF), operating totally distinct from the UN bureaucracy, were seen as preferable to UN-led missions. They deployed more quickly, brought more aggressive rules of engagement, and because they were usually led by a single country, operated in more straightforward and disciplined chains of command. In this instance Australia would command an 11,500-troop MNF known as the International Force for East Timor, or INTERFET. Thanks to the pressure of powerful governments and the courage of local UN officials who refused to strand Timorese civilians, East Timor would survive.

  At midnight on Monday, September 13, Burgess woke up the Timorese community leaders, including Sister Esmerelda. “You are being evacuated to Darwin, Australia,” he said. “You need to be lined up, quiet and ready, in one hour.” Although the Australian force had not yet deployed, the Indonesians had clearly relented, and the island had calmed. Beginning as dawn broke, five Australian and one New Zealand Hercules C-130 aircraft undertook the unprecedented evacuation. By 4:30 p.m. on September 14, a total of 1,454 East Timorese (UN and non-UN alike), 74 UN employees, and a remaining British reporter had been pulled out.30 John Dauth, Australia’s deputy secretary of foreign affairs, helped negotiate the passage of the refugees. “Normally, the gut assumption of Australians is that refugees will find the country so fabulous that they will stay on,” says Dauth. “But none of us wanted to relive the fall of Saigon, where people who had entrusted their fates to the international community had been left behind.”31

  AN INTERVENTION AND A TRANSITION

  The Australian-led force landed on East Timor’s shores just five days after the Security Council authorized it. Vieira de Mello recalled that in Cambodia months had elapsed between the Council’s approval of the force and the peace-keepers’ actual deployment. He applauded the wholly different sense of urgency with which governments were now springing into action. Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the Philippines all contributed personnel, equipment, or intelligence to the Multinational Force. The Indonesian military and paramilitary leaders hightailed it out of East Timor, while the Timorese militia aligned with them fled across the border to Indonesian-run West Timor, where the international force was not permitted to follow them. Within two weeks of the intervention, almost the only signs of the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation of East Timor were the smoldering ashes, the unburied corpses, and the parting Indonesian messages, graffitied onto the walls of buildings: “SLOWLY BUT SURELY, THIS PLACE WILL FALL APART” and “A FREE EAST TIMOR WILL EAT STONES.”32 Vieira de Mello took the obvious lesson from the force’s swift success, which he shared in public remarks a few months later: “Whenever lives of civilians are at risk and a rapid international intervention is necessary, the only effective solution is the establishment of a multinational force.”33 Peacemaking was not a job for lightly armed blue helmets. But it was a job that had to be done, and one that UN officials could use their pulpits to urge be done.

  The Timorese had been waiting to govern themselves for more than t
wo decades—in the jungle; in exile in Portugal, Australia, and Mozambique; and under the boot of the Indonesians in Timor itself. Indonesia had released Gusmão, fifty-three, the former rebel leader and head of the independence movement, from its custody on September 7, 1999. Gusmão’s poetry and letters from prison, as well as South African president Nelson Mandela’s meeting with him in 1997, had made him a national hero and an international cult figure. With Indonesia’s abrupt departure from East Timor, the Timorese resistance leaders were in charge by default, but they knew that they would pass through some period of transition en route to full sovereignty—living under a UN administration or governing themselves with UN help.Whatever arrangement was made, all Timorese assumed that Gusmão, the undisputed national leader, would be recognized as the supreme authority in the newly liberated state.