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

by Samantha Power

  LAW AND ORDER GAP

  In every sector there was a debate about how much to rely upon the Timorese and how much international expertise to enlist. “The natural reflex of an international organization is to dump lots of international people into a situation,” recalls Hansjörg Strohmeyer, Vieira de Mello’s legal adviser who accompanied him to East Timor as well as Kosovo. Strohmeyer instead canvassed the country for lawyers. The Australian-led force dropped leaflets from airplanes, calling for qualified Timorese to contact the UN. And the UN employed a pair of Timorese to drive around Dili on their mopeds to put out the word that lawyers would meet every Friday at 3 p.m. on the steps of the parliament building.

  Within a week the UN had identified an initial group of seventeen jurists, and lacking chairs or furniture to sit on, they sat with Strohmeyer on the ground.25 The educated Timorese generally had only bachelor’s degrees from Indonesian universities, but they had what Vieira de Mello called “une rage de bien faire, de vite faire”—a rage to do well, to do fast.26 In a moving ceremony on January 7, 2000, Vieira de Mello handed black robes to eight judges and two prosecutors in the burned-out shell of the courthouse in Dili.27 Domingos Sarmento, the former FALINTIL guerrilla fighter, was one of the hastily trained Timorese who was given a robe that day. “Mr. Sergio handed me the robe, and I felt like he was handing me the country,” he recalls. Sarmento and the other UN-appointed judges took up offices in smoke-blackened chambers in courthouses that the Indonesians had stripped of their doors, windows, and pipes.28

  With the departure of Indonesian security forces, East Timor desperately needed to deter violent crime. The well-equipped Australian-led Multinational Force had, in January 2000, handed off to a traditional UN peacekeeping force, composed of 8,500 lightly armed blue helmets. This time, unlike in Kosovo, the force commander would report to Vieira de Mello.The UN civilian police were as slow as ever to arrive. Resolution 1272 had authorized the dispatch of some 1,600 officers, but three months into the mission only 400 UN police had turned up.29 He tried to find a local solution by opening the country’s first police training college.The college enrolled fifty Timorese trainees, including eleven women, in a three-month crash course. But no matter how long he served in the UN system, or how many frustrated cables he wrote to New York, Vieira de Mello had made little progress in finding the means to fill the inevitable security void that followed the UN’s arrival in vulnerable places.

  Because the prisons had been torched and all the prison guards had fled to Indonesian territory, few arrests could be accommodated, and many criminals had to be released in order to make way for new arrivals. In April 2000 Vieira de Mello said, “We cannot fill jails that we don’t have.” He suggested that community service sentences be given to “people who have not done bodily harm, who do not have blood on their hands.”30 This meant that many lawbreakers were let loose.

  The untrained Timorese did their best to learn the law quickly, attending weeklong training courses in Australia. But they were too few and too new to manage the bustling docket. By early 2001 there was a backlog of more than seven hundred cases in the category of serious crimes alone.31 While Timorese in other parts of the government complained that they had not been given enough power, Timorese judges complained that UNTAET’s decision to throw them unprepared into the courtroom had compromised Timorese faith in the rule of law. “We had no idea what we were doing,” recalls Sarmento, who would become East Timor’s justice minister in 2003. “And it will take the people a long time to recover from seeing all the mistakes we made in the early days.”

  Vieira de Mello tried to keep the Governor’s House as accessible to Timorese as possible. Locals could simply ride their bikes up to the entrance if they wanted to make a complaint or apply for a job. In mid-2000, when the UN chief of administration attempted to fence in the compound with barbed wire, Vieira de Mello went ballistic.“What the hell kind of signal are you trying to send?” he shouted, insisting that the barbed wire and barricades be torn down.“A lot of people said Sergio wasn’t security conscious,” recalls Gamal Ibrahim, who would spend two years as his bodyguard in East Timor. “But I’m one of the few people who knows: He didn’t like to live in ways that other people couldn’t.” When he headed to the market after work to buy bananas, he teased his bodyguards about their wandering eyes. “Someday I’ll be shot by a sniper and you’ll be chatting up a girl,” he said. Gilda, his eighty-two-year-old mother in Brazil, was so worried about his catching malaria or being targeted by pro-Indonesian forces that he turned his former Geneva cell phone into her “direct line,” handing the phone to Ibrahim as he entered high-level meetings. “If my mother calls,” he would say, “tell her I’ll be out in an hour.” In the early months of the mission she called every other day to check on her son.

  The security threat posed by pro-Indonesian militia who lived in West Timor was still very real. For the first year of the UN mission, the Timorese were petrified that their killers would return. On one occasion Gusmão and Ramos-Horta told Vieira de Mello that Indonesian loyalists had infiltrated Dili from West Timor and were on the verge of seizing it. They urged him to authorize the police to detain anybody who appeared on their list of suspects. Chastened by his own reluctance to use force in Bosnia, Vieira de Mello was tempted. When Sidney Jones, his senior human rights adviser, raised objections, Ramos-Horta exclaimed, “Human rights? Human rights? That is Alice in Wonderland. We have to deal with reality here.” Hochschild sensed that Vieira de Mello was leaning toward authorizing unlawful detentions and argued that he was losing touch with his values. Vieira de Mello, who felt like he was under siege from all sides, snapped, “Maybe I should resign and go back to New York.” Many Timorese were starting to wish that the entire UN mission would do just that.

  STAYING PUT

  Vieira de Mello was no fonder of the diplomatic circuit in East Timor than he had been in New York. When informed of meetings with dignitaries, he would curse playfully in e-mail, expressing his distaste for them with mock expletives (“?#!%&X”). As had been true in all of his missions, his closest ties were to his special assistants (Hochschild and later Prentice) and his bodyguards (Ibrahim and Alain Chergui, a former French paratrooper). Ibrahim, who had arrived in East Timor in January 2000, had not been there long when Lyn Manuel, Vieira de Mello’s Filipina secretary, noticed on a flight manifest that it was Ibrahim’s birthday. Standing outside his boss’s office, Ibrahim was shocked to hear Vieira de Mello, whom he did not yet know well, shout out, “Well, Lyn, I hear it’s somebody’s birthday today!” Ibrahim was dragged inside, and Vieira de Mello produced a bottle of his trademark Johnnie Walker Black Label. Each member of his inner circle toasted Ibrahim with a different drinking device—a Dixie cup, a throwaway plastic coffee cup, and a plastic Coke bottle cut in half.

  Just before he had left the United States, Ibrahim had become engaged to Marcia Luar, an Angolan. As the weeks passed, Luar grew suspicious that Ibrahim might be straying with Timorese women. “What are the women there like?” she asked her fiancé. “What do you mean ‘women’?” Ibrahim answered. “There’s not even any food here!” Luar was unpersuaded. “Who are you working with there?” she asked. “Let me speak to him. He speaks Portuguese, right?” Ibrahim was horrified and told Luar that he worked for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and under no circumstances could she speak to him.

  One day when they were waiting for their helicopter to refuel, Vieira de Mello overheard Ibrahim arguing with Luar. “Give me the phone, Gamal. I’ll set her straight.” Ibrahim held the phone to his chest. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I gave her a ring before coming here.” Vieira de Mello grabbed the phone and assured Luar that her fiancé was behaving himself. From that point on, anytime he overheard the couple speaking, he insisted on intervening with what he called a “security briefing.”When he realized that their mission together was going to last far longer than six months, Vieira de Mello found a UN job for Luar in East Timor.

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bsp; Because of the toll his life in the field had taken on his own family, and because his closest friends were his UN colleagues, he always made a point of inquiring after the personal lives of his staff. In February 2000 Strohmeyer, the UNTAET legal adviser, slipped a note under his door at the Hotel Resende requesting that he be released to return to New York. He had gotten married in 1998 and did not think his marriage could survive another year’s separation. Vieira de Mello called Strohmeyer into his office and granted his request to return to UN Headquarters. “Look, if you want a marriage to work, you have to be present,” he said. “I should know.” Strohmeyer, who had expected to have to argue his case, was relieved that his boss was so understanding. But before he departed, Vieira de Mello stopped him. “Before you leave Timor,” he said, “there are three projects I’d like you to undertake.” Those “three projects,” which he ticked off with a straight face, were gargantuan: helping to normalize Timorese relations with Indonesia, negotiate a treaty on oil-revenue sharing, and establish a war crimes court. Strohmeyer did not make much of a dent in any of them, but he remained in East Timor until July 2000. He was divorced by the following year.

  Vieira de Mello never imagined that he would stay in East Timor as long as he did. Most of his colleagues assumed he would be appointed to the job of UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a position that Sadako Ogata, his former boss, would vacate at the end of 2000 and one that was more prestigious and powerful than the coordinating job he had held in New York. Although he had tired of refugee work when he was at UNHCR, running an entire UN agency would present ample political and diplomatic challenges, and his two years in New York had made him nostalgic for the tangible assistance offered by UNHCR, which he had previously taken for granted. He knew that the plum jobs in the UN system generally did not go to those who had toiled in the UN ranks. Annan had been a significant exception. But Vieria de Mello had drafted more repatriation agreements, negotiated with more government officials, and led more field missions than any other candidate. Most UN staff in Geneva, New York, and East Timor were sure that the job of UN High Commissioner for Refugees was his for the taking. Popular consensus was that he would serve his time in East Timor and then return to Geneva to assume the refugee crown—a crown many people believed was the penultimate post he would hold before becoming secretary-general.

  But two things got in the way of this plan. First, Annan, like his predecessors, looked to fill senior appointments with individuals from countries that would donate significant funds. And second, the very qualities that made Vieira de Mello a shoo-in for the high commissioner’s job made governments reluctant to let him leave East Timor. Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, believed that UN peacekeeping, which was coming off the “triple failure” of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, had been bent to its breaking point. The East Timor mission had given the UN a rare chance to resurrect itself. In the fall of 2000, as Vieira de Mello’s name began circulating for the job of high commissioner, Holbrooke telephoned Annan and urged him to keep “the ultimate go-to guy” in East Timor. “I didn’t need any persuading,” Annan recalls. “I knew Sergio was too valuable to bring home early.” Holbrooke telephoned Vieira de Mello in Dili and said, “I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’m asking Kofi to keep you there. This mission will define the UN for decades. It will show the UN can actually do things right.” Vieira de Mello did not betray his disappointment. “I will do what my brother tells me to do,” he said, referring to Annan. In October 2000 Annan asked Ruud Lubbers, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, the third-largest source of UNHCR funding, to become high commissioner for refugees.

  Vieira de Mello was less stung by the news of Lubbers’s appointment than by the way it was imparted. He learned about it from the news media and then received a formulaic typed letter with Annan’s machine-produced signature stamped on the bottom. “Given Sergio’s long history in the UN,” his special assistant Hochschild recalls,“he obviously thought he merited at least a phone call.” Hochschild persuaded his demoralized boss to host a dinner for his closest staff, then told the staff to surprise him by wearing pajamas to the occasion. This amused Vieira de Mello, as did an “Ode” prepared by his British secretary Carole Ray, which read in part:

  Dear Boss, this special evening is designed to make you happy

  ’Cos the news in from New York, of late, has all been rather crappy.

  Though things in the past weeks have not gone quite the way you planned,

  You must admit your office here is beautifully manned.

  We know that living in this place is getting really tough,

  And if you had been asked, you would have said you’d had enough.

  So whilst we all acknowledge the S-G’s massive cock-up

  Your loyal team is here to do our best to cheer you up . . .

  You’re the only one who knows the dates, the names, the times, the places.

  You recall the dignitaries and, of course, the pretty faces . . .

  Where your team all work their buns off and rarely do get cross,

  But only because Sergio Vieira de Mello is their boss.

  We are glad you are not going, that you’re staying here with us.

  So try to make the best of it and stop making a fuss!

  In an effort to fend off claustrophobia on the small island, he tried to persuade his friends in Europe and Asia to visit him. “But, Sergio,” the American soprano Barbara Hendricks said, “Timor is just not on the way to anywhere!” Ever since the mid-1980s, whenever he had been away on a mission, his friend Fabienne Morisset had sent him a diplomatic pouch at the end of each week filled with all five days’ hard-copy editions of Le Monde. When he reached Dili, he had discouraged her from sending the papers, saying, “It will take six months!” His mother sent him Veja, Brazil’s equivalent of Time magazine, which he read faithfully, no matter how outdated it was when it arrived.

  He wrote to his old friend Annick Stevenson (formerly Roulet),23 urging her to come to East Timor and to write a story for the French regional daily Le Progrès on the elections and the formation of a new government. “I well know that Indonesia and Timor are not the principal preoccupations of readers from Lyon,” he wrote, “but you could try to broaden their horizons.”32 Stevenson regretfully relayed her editor’s response: “Taking into account the density of news in the world at this time (Middle East, Macedonia, Northern Ireland), it seems difficult to justify sending you there.”33 Vieira de Mello masked his disappointment, exclaiming cheerily, “The answer is not surprising! ”34

  The climate within the UN mission was almost as tense as on the Timorese street.The heat (90 degrees daily, with humidity between 60 and 90 percent) was withering. Most of the UN staffers lived off rice and Indonesian noodles.Those UN staff who worked in the districts, far from Dili, felt particularly cut off, unable to procure desks, computers, or even pens and paper. Following their boss’s lead, UN staff worked nineteen-hour days and on weekends. East Timor offered no diversions. The UN was taking the blame for all that was going wrong, and those in Vieira de Mello’s inner circle felt they were on the brink of a major failure or at the very least a major outbreak of social unrest. “Normal people reacted in strange ways,” recalls Hochschild, “but strange people reacted in outlandish ways.”

  Vieira de Mello knew the flaws of the UN system intimately. While working in New York, he had kept a cartoon pinned to the wall from the mid-1990s, at the time that Euro Disney was suffering its financial crisis. The cartoon showed Mickey saying to his companion Goofy: “It looks as if the UN is taking over—now it really can’t get worse.”35 But understanding those flaws was different from living them. The people of East Timor had high hopes for self-governance and improved living conditions, but Vieira de Mello felt as though he and UNTAET were dashing them daily. “Our vision was we’d administer the place and we’d consult with the Timorese. Then, after elections we’d hand over the keys to the Timorese and be on our way,” recalls Pren
tice. “The Timorese, who had been waiting centuries to govern themselves, understandably had different ideas.” And eventually so did Vieira de Mello, who came to see that he would need to bend the UN rules in order to save the mission. The most effective way for him to exercise power in East Timor would be to surrender it.