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

by Samantha Power

  Sixteen

  "A NEW SERGIO”

  If Vieira de Mello revealed an important quality in East Timor, it was not his wisdom so much as his adaptability. As early as the spring of 2000 he felt that his mission, which was seen outside of East Timor as a rare UN success, was on the brink of failure. Physical security was breaking down, the economy was in ruins, and the Timorese had begun to view the UN as a second “occupier.” Desperate to recover, he aggressively cracked down on security threats and attempted to give the Timorese a meaningful say in their own affairs. In order to regain momentum, he realized, he would have to pay more attention to Timorese dignity and welfare than to UN rules.

  PROVIDING SECURITY FIRST

  The greatest fear of the Timorese was that the Indonesian militias would return. While they resented the UN political footprint, they valued the UN military presence. When the peacekeeping troops took over from the Multinational Force, Vieira de Mello made clear there would be no letup in security. The UN force, he warned, would “maintain the highest deterrence and reaction capacity in East Timor, which I would not advise anyone [to] test.”1 Rumors still swirled that the pro-Indonesian militia planned to come back to massacre the population. On July 24, 2000, Private Leonard Manning, a twenty-four-year-old blue helmet from New Zealand, became the first battle casualty of the peacekeeping force when he was shot in the head while out on patrol near the town of Suai, on the border with West Timor. When his body was recovered several hours later, his throat had been slashed and his ears cut off.2

  The day of the attack Alain Chergui, one of Vieira de Mello’s bodyguards, drove to his boss’s house. When he arrived at the door, Vieira de Mello skipped his usual pleasantries and said simply, “We are going to Suai.” Chergui recalls the transformation. “His face was so serious, so heavy, dour,” the French protection officer remembers. “He was not like Sergio.” When they arrived in the town where the killing had occurred, Vieira de Mello grilled Manning’s colleagues in the Kiwi battalion. “He was obsessed,” says Chergui. “He wanted every detail of what Manning had done all day long.” He would use the information to argue with New York that the peacekeepers’ rules of engagement should be made more aggressive. But he would also use it to soften the blow suffered by Manning’s parents, who would be left with a precise picture of the good their son had been doing the day he died. He would make a point of visiting them when he passed through New Zealand on official business.

  Vieira de Mello had learned a vital lesson in Bosnia and Zaire. It was essential to signal to armed elements that the UN would not roll over. If the militants smelled weakness, he knew, they would exploit it. Therefore, in the wake of Manning’s death, he revised the peacekeepers’ rules of engagement to maximize peacekeepers’ flexibility to defend themselves and to protect civilians. Previously, peacekeepers had had to wait to be fired upon before they struck back, and they had to fire warning shots before directly targeting anybody. But henceforth the blue helmets would be able to initiate fire at suspected militia without waiting. UN soldiers and police would also be permitted to apprehend suspicious individuals on the basis of minimal evidence. Vieira de Mello authorized large police and military sweeps to drive out the militia and restore public confidence. He later reflected, “We chose not to opt for the usual and classical peacekeeping approach: taking abuse, taking bullets, taking casualties and not responding with enough force, not shooting to kill. The UN had done that before and we weren’t going to repeat it here.”3 At a speech in which he congratulated the troops on neutralizing the threat, he presented a bellicose face of the UN. “Let them try again, and they will get the same response,” he said.4

  His favorite part of the job, he made clear, involved managing military affairs. His staff teased him for his seeming delight at attending military parades in the scorching sun. A big believer in such parades ever since he had accompanied Brian Urquhart around southern Lebanon in 1982, he visited with each unit separately and often found occasions to present medals to the soldiers to boost their morale. “A parade may never have been the most important event in Sergio’s day,” recalls Jonathan Prentice, “but he knew it was likely to be the most important event in a soldier’s day.”

  Neither he nor the peacekeepers had jurisdiction over West Timor, which was part of Indonesia. Nonetheless, UN humanitarian agencies like UNHCR operated there in order to help repatriate some 90,000 East Timorese refugees who had not yet returned home. On September 5, 2000, militia leader Olivio Moruk, one of nineteen men named by the Indonesian attorney general as a key orchestrator of the 1999 massacres and a suspect in the murder of Leonard Manning, was killed in his home village in West Timor. Word of his death spread quickly. The following day a funeral procession of some three thousand people wound its way past the UNHCR compound in the town of Atambua, in Indonesian-controlled West Timor. UNHCR security staff considered evacuating the office, but the local police chief assured them that the demonstration would pass peacefully. Instead, an advance group of thirty to fifty militiamen on motorbikes, armed with a mix of stones, bottles, homemade guns, and semiautomatic weapons, broke off from the march and stormed the UN office. “White people have caused our loss in the referendum,” one gunman shouted, “and now they’re causing our suffering.”5 The men burned the UNHCR flag and raised the Indonesian flag. As the militia shouted insults nearby, Carlos Caceres, a Puerto Rican UNHCR worker inside the agency compound, responded to an e-mail from a colleague. Caceres wrote:

  My next post needs to be in a tropical island without jungle fever and mad warriors. At this very moment, we are barricaded in the office. A militia leader was murdered last night. He was decapitated and had his heart and penis cut out . . . Traffic disappeared and the streets are strangely and ominously quiet. I am glad that a couple of weeks ago we bought rolls and rolls of barbed wire . . .

  We sent most of the staff home, rushing to safety. I just heard someone on the radio saying that they are praying for us in the office.The militias are on the way, and I am sure they will do their best to demolish this office.The man killed was the head of one of the most notorious and criminal militia groups of East Timor.These guys act without thinking and can kill a human as easily (and painlessly) as I kill mosquitoes in my room.

  You should see this office. Plywood on the windows, staff peering out through openings in the curtains hastily installed a few minutes ago. We are waiting for this enemy, we sit here like bait, unarmed, waiting for a wave to hit. I am glad to be leaving this island for three weeks. I just hope I will be able to leave tomorrow.

  Carlos

  Minutes after hitting “send,” Caceres was brutally hacked to death, along with Samson Aregahegan, an Ethiopian supply officer, and Pero Simundza, a Croatian telecommunications officer.6 Their bodies were then set aflame in front of the office. Another UNHCR staffer suffered machete wounds to the head. The mob, which then ransacked and torched the UNHCR office, went around town on trucks and motorcycles inspecting private houses and hotels, saying they were looking to “finish” the “white people from UNHCR.”7 With Vieira de Mello’s strong support, Secretary-General Annan declared “security Phase V” for West Timor, ordering the withdrawal of all international staff and the suspension of UNHCR operations until security could be established and the guilty brought to justice.

  The Indonesian authorities proved uninterested in reining in the militia or rounding up the killers.8 Conditions in West Timor remained too volatile for the UN to return. While Vieira de Mello knew that a UNHCR presence in West Timor might speed refugee repatriation, he never recommended that the UN resume its operations there because he was never satisfied that it could do so safely. The humanitarian imperative no longer trumped all other concerns.

  In East Timor itself he focused on improving the performance of UN police. Although he was a committed multilateralist, he took what for him was the heretical step of deciding that on occasion geographic distribution should be sacrificed in the interest of unit cohesion. “What is
more important?” he asked. “That twenty countries each send six policemen, or that the UN police stop crime?” In March 2001 UNTAET began to experiment with new models for UN policing, assigning responsibility for the Bacau district to police from a single country, the Philippines.9 When UN officials in New York objected because they thought that the new single-nationality units were an affront to the UN ethos, Vieira de Mello successfully defended the move.

  In 2001 he persuaded his friend and foil Dennis McNamara to become his deputy. He had talked up the mission and the fun they would have conspiring together once again. But by the time McNamara arrived, Vieira de Mello was drained by the relentless job pressure. His sense of play seemed to have vanished, and even though the two men had clashed often over principle in the past, they had never feuded as they did in East Timor. “Sergio didn’t want a number two,” McNamara recalls. “He wanted special assistants who were loyal to him above all.”

  Vieira de Mello made McNamara responsible for cleaning up the UN Serious Crimes Unit, which was meant to pursue those responsible for crimes against humanity. Talk of an international tribunal modeled on those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia had quickly faded, as Western states rushed to normalize ties with Indonesia. The serious crimes panel, which consisted of two international judges and one Timorese, would investigate 1,339 murders and indict 391 suspects. Although 55 trials would be eventually held, 303 leading suspects, including the ex-governor of Timor and General Wiranto, the head of the army during the massacres, would live comfortably on the Indonesian mainland and in West Timor.10

  Vieira de Mello didn’t give McNamara support when he needed it. His deputy traveled to Indonesia to press Jakarta to arrest suspected war criminals, but Vieira de Mello backed his chief of staff, Nagalingam Parameswaran, a Malaysian who encouraged the militia leaders to return to East Timor and assured them that they would not be prosecuted. Vieira de Mello believed that if he could persuade the spoilers to reintegrate in East Timor, it would enhance East Timor’s prospects for peace. “Sergio, you’ve become like a bloody politician,” McNamara said. “How can you just let the killers go free?” Stability mattered more to Vieira de Mello than immediate justice. Although he personally supported war crimes tribunals, Gusmão and Ramos-Horta were eager to normalize ties with Indonesia, even if that required pardoning those with blood on their hands. In the role he was in, Vieira de Mello believed he should defer to their assessment that the peace of the present should be valued above reckoning for the crimes of the past. McNamara continued to press the prosecutor’s office to pursue indictments and arrests. And the clash with Parameswaran grew bitter, with the Malaysian publicly calling McNamara a “racist” and a UN oversight body accusing him of political interference in serious crimes. To McNamara’s shock his friend did not speak up for him. Instead Vieira de Mello focused on the overall mission, urging his critics in East Timor and beyond to take a long-term view and not despair. “Regularly,” he said, “we hear of aging war criminals from the Second World War being indicted.”11

  FILLING THE POWER-SHARING GAP: TIMORIZATION

  The UN Security Council had given Vieira de Mello a mandate to govern East Timor on his own for more than two years. During his first six months he did not challenge this assumption, even as he struggled to manage the colossal responsibilities associated with absolute powers. But in the spring of 2000, with Timorese unrest boiling over, he sent a half-dozen trusted members of his staff on a two-day retreat and asked them to return with proposals for overhauling the mission. He delivered a new set of options to the Timorese at the annual gathering of their resistance movement. “The most acute phase of the emergency is overcome,” he told the Timorese leaders. “We hear clearly your concerns that UNTAET fails to communicate or involve the East Timorese sufficiently.” He described the two alternative models. “Under the first model UNTAET and myself will continue to be the punching bag,” he told the audience, smiling. Under a second “political model” the UN would speed up the “Timorization” process and form a “co-government” in order to “share the punches with you.”12 He would create a mixed cabinet divided evenly between four Timorese and four internationals. “Faced as we were with our own difficulties in the establishment of this mission, we did not, we could not, involve the Timorese at large as much as they were entitled to,” Vieira de Mello said. “To the extent that this was due to our omissions or neglect, I assume responsibility and express my regret. It has taken time to understand one another.”13

  Gusmão recalls the sense of relief within his party. “This was the time we started to believe that Sergio was committed to the Timorese,” he says. “The Security Council had given him all of the power, but he said, ‘No, I need you.’” He approached Vieira de Mello after his speech and said, “I see this is not Cambodia after all.”

  Vieira de Mello’s ties with Timorese officials improved. Ramos-Horta, the unofficial foreign minister, began to tease him for his authoritarian tendencies, referring to him as the “Saddam Hussein of East Timor” or chiding, “Sergio, you have more powers than Suharto ever did. How can you live with yourself?” Vieira de Mello could give as good as he got. He referred to Ramos-Horta as “Gromyko,” the eternal Soviet foreign minister. “José, you’ve been foreign minister of East Timor for twenty-four years. You’ve never managed a career change or a promotion.”

  Officials in UN Headquarters had a different reaction: Vieira de Mello was breaking the rules. The Security Council had empowered the UN, and not the Timorese, to run the place before independence. Vieira de Mello scheduled a video conference with New York to defend his power-sharing plan. Without informing Headquarters, he invited the Timorese who were slated to become cabinet members to participate in the discussion. “Sergio knew that he was trying to do something revolutionary in the UN system,” recalls Prentice. “And his attitude was, ‘If you want to deny the Timorese power, then have the guts to fucking say it to them yourself.’” UN officials in New York muted their concerns, and on July 15, 2000, Vieira de Mello swore in a new mixed cabinet. UN officials would keep control of the police and emergency services, and the political affairs, justice, and finance portfolios. Timorese would take charge of the ministries for internal administration, infrastructure, economic affairs, and social affairs. A few months later Ramos-Horta, who had informally represented East Timor abroad for years, would become the official minister for foreign affairs. For the first time in the UN mission, high-paid foreigners would work under Timorese managers.

  Some UN staff in East Timor were even more uneasy with the new arrangement than those in New York. They had not come all the way to East Timor to answer to Timorese, they said. Their contracts said that they worked for the UN secretary-general.14 Vieira de Mello decided to confront the UN staff members who resisted the changes. He assembled the entire UN staff—some seven hundred people—along with the four new Timorese cabinet ministers, in the auditorium of the parliament building. He spoke from the dais and, pointing to the Timorese sitting in the front row, said, “These are your new bosses.” When one UN official objected that there was no provision in the UN Security Council resolution for what UNTAET was doing, he was defiant. “I assume full responsibility,” he said. “You either obey, or you can leave.”

  Vieira de Mello also set out to mend fences with FALINTIL soldiers, who were still holed up in their barracks. The UN supplied $35,000 worth of humanitarian assistance per month until February 2001, when the new army, the Timorese Defense Force, was officially christened. He had stopped viewing FALINTIL through the prism of the KLA and had come to see how central the fighters were—culturally, as well as practically—to Timorese identity and stability.

  Timorese leaders were only temporarily appeased by Vieira de Mello’s power-sharing initiative.They quickly grew dissatisfied with the pace of the transfer of power.15 Sure, they were part of a mixed cabinet, but they could not fire UN staff, and the UN senior staff continued to hold their regular executive meetings without them, pr
esenting them with regulations as if they were faits accomplis.

  Although he never attacked Vieira de Mello personally, Gusmão slammed UNTAET. The Timorese were supposedly being taught “democracy,” he said, but “many of those who teach us never practiced it in their own countries.” The UN were preaching reliance on nongovernmental organizations, but “numerous NGOs live off the aid ‘business’ to poor countries.”16

  Part of what was irking Gusmão was the absence of a “transition timetable.”17 As he remembers it:

  The people were asking, How long? How long? How long? It was important psychologically to get a timeframe. If you just say “transition,” without giving specifics, ordinary Timorese will say, “Twenty-four years—yes, that was a transition!” They were asking, we were all asking, quite simply, When will the malaes [foreigners] go?