In September 2001, frustrated by his refusal to prioritize the relationship, she broke it off and stopped taking his phone calls. “This isn’t worth it,” she told him.“You’re not with me, and I want more.” He asked her to reconsider, but she was firm. Unless he made a real commitment, she said, they were through.
On September 11, 2001, Vieira de Mello was in Jakarta, Indonesia, meeting with senior Indonesian officials. At the end of the day he said good night to his aides and headed upstairs to his room, where he ordered room service. His cell phone rang, and it was Larriera telling him to turn on the television. The regular CNN broadcast had been interrupted and was showing the flaming World Trade Center towers that he used to view from his apartment in New York. Ibrahim, his bodyguard, knocked loudly on the door. “Mr. Sergio,” he shouted, “have you seen what happened?” When Ibrahim entered, his boss was holding his shortwave radio tuned to a French broadcast, as the English CNN broadcast played behind him. He just shook his head, speechless. “There was nothing to say,” recalls Ibrahim. “What do you say?”
On October 14, 2001, a month after the terrorist attacks, Vieira de Mello called Larriera and invited her over, saying he needed to talk. When she arrived at his Dili home, the lights were out. She let herself in through the side door and found a row of candles leading her from the doorway to the living room. Sprinkled on the floor were paper hearts that he had cut out of colored construction paper. “From now on, it’s the new Sergio!” he said, emerging. Larriera was skeptical. “I have changed,” he said. “And I will change. Don’t believe me. Watch me.” From that point on, the couple referred to their relationship before his October turnaround as their “prehistory.” “History,” he said, “begins today.”
Vieira de Mello’s closest colleagues at that time were in serious relationships. Jonathan Prentice, his special assistant, had married his high school sweetheart, Antonia, and the pair were inseparable. Hochschild, his previous assistant, had been a determined bachelor, but he and his wife had given birth to a child soon after their wedding in East Timor. Martin Griffiths, his former deputy in New York, had gotten divorced and remarried in 1999, naming Vieira de Mello the godfather of his newborn daughter. Now Vieira de Mello seemed to want what they had. He wrote to Larriera a week after they got back together, sounding like a teenager. After sending her “un besito matinal,” or morning kiss, he wrote that he found himself thinking that what they had together was too good to be true, but he exclaimed, “Fortunately, it is true.”30
He filed for divorce in December 2001. Although he had lived a separate life from Annie since 1996, she took the news badly. However distant they had grown, she had never expected him to leave the marriage. But he was determined to go ahead. He wrote to Antonio Carlos Machado, his best friend in Brazil, that after “various gaffes of mine designed to duck reality,” he had decided that he was deeply in love. Noting that he had no idea how draining love could be, he wrote that it had nonetheless filled him “with a new and vital élan,” and he was determined “to make the most of what remains of my life instead of wasting the few years that are left.”
Vieira de Mello told Machado that he had what would be an exhausting six months remaining in East Timor. Afterward he planned to take three months off “so as to do many of the things I’ve dreamed of and delayed my whole life.”31 He crammed a few of those ambitions into his weekends with Larriera in Timor. He insisted the couple climb Ramelau, Timor’s highest peak. He said he wanted to learn to scuba dive, and they got PADI certified. He announced he wanted to do the deepest dive in the area, so they plunged 130 feet off the coast of Atauro island.
At Christmastime he did something with Larriera he had done with none of his other girlfriends: He invited her home to Brazil to meet his mother. She in turn brought him to Buenos Aires, where she guided him to 1853 Vincente López Street, the house where the Vieira de Mello family had lived from the time he was twenty days old until he was three.
As his relationship with Larriera intensified, he settled into a reclusive domestic routine. She moved into his home, and they got a dog, Manchinha (Portuguese for Spot). In the early evening after the temperature cooled, they went for long runs along the coast or hiked up a nearby hill to the eighty-eight-foot-tall statue of Christ, which was modeled after the Christ the Redeemer statue above Rio de Janeiro. On the weekends they shopped at the market or continued their scuba-diving adventures with bodyguard Alain Chergui and the Prentices. As the mission began to coast along toward Timorese independence, he and Larriera even took long weekends on the nearby resort island of Bali. He grew giddy as the handover date approached, blasting the Paul McCartney song “Freedom” in their home.
In the week before East Timor’s gala independence ceremony, the Timorese leaders held a dinner in honor of their departing governor. Vieira de Mello toasted them and their future as an independent country. But he toasted most dramatically Larriera. “East Timor is special to me for many reasons,” he said, “but none more than because this is where I met Carolina. For two years we worked together in the same building in New York and never met. We had to travel to this small island ten thousand miles away in order to find one another.”
Vieira de Mello’s close friends were stunned by his transformation and by his espousal of monogamy. Many speculated that his fidelity could not last. Others disagreed, suggesting that at the pinnacle of the UN system he had realized he could not carry on relationships outside his marriage. All seemed to agree that Larriera had brought out a relaxed side to him that they had not seen in such abundance before. Morisset recalls long talks with him while he was in East Timor:
Sergio couldn’t accept getting old, getting less handsome. He’d always been preoccupied with his looks, but in later years he became obsessive about his fitness. He wanted to stay a seductive young guy. This was his role. This was his identity. This was what made him famous. And Carolina awakened in him his youth.
As he focused on his future with Larriera, he hoped that Secretary-General Annan would compensate him for having stranded him in Timor for two and a half years. He told Larriera,“He has the obligation to send me to a civilized place, to a decent post.”
But as his mission approached its end, Annan did not tell him where he was heading next. When a journalist asked Vieira de Mello his plans, he answered testily: “Regarding my next mission, you will have to address that question to the Secretary-General. I do not know yet.”32 As he boxed up the life he had built in Timor, he exclaimed to McNamara, “Where am I supposed to send my fucking boxes?” He could not understand how senior officials in New York were not more empathetic toward those who slogged away in the field. “Some of those bastards in New York should try this sometime,” he said.
Vieira de Mello reflected publicly on where the mission had succeeded and failed. “When I arrived in 1999, I felt like an ambulance driver arriving at the site of a car crash and finding a dismembered body in a state of clinical death,” he told reporters in Dili. The UN administration had helped put the territory back on its feet, he said, but with the average Timorese still living on fifty-five cents per day, the transition would be a long one. “You don’t change the devastation of 1999 into a Garden of Eden in two and a half years,” he said, adding that “we have laid solid bases for the country to live in peace.”33
The UN had spent $2.2 billion. It had renovated 700 schools, restored 17 rural power stations, trained thousands of teachers, recruited more than 11,000 civil servants for 15,000 posts, established two army battalions, and suited up more than 1,500 police. And Vieira de Mello had learned a valuable lesson about legitimacy: It was performance-based. “The UN cannot presume that it will be seen as legitimate by the local population in question just because in some distant Security Council chamber a piece of paper was produced,” he said. “We need to show why we are beneficial to the people on the ground, and we need to show that quickly.”34
His biggest surprise, he said, was the Timorese “capacity to forgive.”
“I have never seen it elsewhere,” he told a journalist, “and I’ve seen conflicts.” He cited regrets over handing the judiciary to the Timorese too soon and over being hemmed in by rules “too elaborate and too complex for a country that was still coming out of intensive care.”35 “Local people have little time for rules,” he wrote later. “They want results.”36 His final verdict? “I felt Vieira de Mello presenting Gusmão with a symbolic key to the Governor’s House, May 16, 2002.
that we had done as much as an unprepared organization could have done.” When he tried to publish a self-critical report on the lessons the UN had learned, his superiors in New York forbade him from doing so.
On May 18, with President Clinton and other heads of state arriving the next day for a flag-raising ceremony, he welcomed to East Timor the parents of Leonard Manning, the New Zealand peacekeeper who had been the first UN soldier murdered by the militia. He had invited the Manning family to be his only personal guests at the independence ceremony, and Larriera accompanied them throughout their stay. He spent the eve of independence in his office, where he stayed up all night at his desk signing letters to the unheralded individuals who had helped him in East Timor. At the end of each letter he handwrote two or three sentences of personal thanks. He wrote to the UN staff, to peacekeepers (past and present), to diplomats, to the Timorese, and to Indonesians.
The next day, when Secretary-General Annan arrived, Vieira de Mello approached Annan’s assistant Nader Mousavizadeh and pleaded, “You’ve got to find me time to speak with him one-on-one. I have to find out where I’m going next. I don’t want to be left hung out to dry.” Later he and Annan sat on the terrace of his home, facing the beach, but Annan offered little clarity. The secretary-general had still not decided where to put him.
Vieira de Mello had written to U2 in the hopes that they would travel to Dili and belt out their song “Beautiful Day” on independence day, but the band’s representatives had not responded, and he ended up reaching out to his old friend Barbara Hendricks instead. At midnight on May 19, in a candlelight ceremony, the light blue UN flag was lowered in Dili as Hendricks sang “Oh, Freedom,” a Civil War-era slave spiritual. Once the UN flag had come down, the red, yellow, black, and white Timorese flag, long the flag of the Timorese resistance, was raised. Vieira de Mello had made it a point to walk a half-step behind Annan and Gusmão throughout the event, and in the moving ceremony it was Annan who officially handed over sovereignty from the United Nations to the Timorese.The longest posting of Vieira de Mello’s career had come to an end. The time he had spent at the edge of the earth, cut off from museums and concerts and friends, sweltering in the equatorial sun, ushering in the first new nation of the twenty-first century, had tested his endurance and his perennial cheeriness.
The following day, as the independence celebrations continued and the Timorese leaders mingled with Clinton and a dozen other heads of state, Vieira de Mello slipped away and went for a run with Larriera—his first without bodyguards in East Timor.
At noon on May 21 Taur Matan Ruak, the former guerrilla leader and head of the Timorese army, arrived at the airport with his colleague Paulo Martins, the head of police.They expected a crowded Timorese send-off for Vieira de Mello. But as Matan Ruak recalls, “We arrived and nobody was there. Then Sergio and Carolina arrived, and then the time started moving, and still nobody came.” Matan Ruak was furious at his governmental colleagues for not paying more respect.“Not to say good-bye to Sergio, after all he did for East Timor . . . was to betray him,” Matan Ruak says. “The only consolation was that we knew we’d have many more chances to thank him properly.”
Matan Ruak embraced Vieira de Mello before he boarded the plane. “Thank you,” he said. “You will have friends here forever.” Vieira de Mello ascended the steps onto a small jet with Jonathan and Antonia Prentice, and with Larriera.
He had been saying for months that he could hardly wait to toast the end of his mission, and Prentice had brought two bottles of champagne onto the plane. But as Vieira de Mello rested his head against the window, he was flooded with melancholy. He pressed his hand up to the glass, as if to say good-bye. And as the faces of the few Timorese on the tarmac faded into the distance, he turned away from the window, buried his head in Larriera’s lap, and sobbed.
Part III
Vieira de Mello at a UN news conference in Geneva, December 4, 2002.
Seventeen
“ FEAR IS A BAD ADVISER”
Vieira de Mello’s reward for having governed Kosovo and East Timor in close succession was to be appointed to a UN job in the crosshairs of what president George W. Bush was calling the "war on terrorism.” In his new incarnation, in a world increasingly polarized over how to manage twenty-first-century economic and security challenges, he would be asked to take sides, which had never been his strong suit.
“NOW WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?”
Before he was thrown into this thicket, and still unaware of his next job, Vieira de Mello spent several months in Southeast Asia with Carolina Larriera. In the past he had always relaxed well but never long; this was perhaps the first time in his adult life that he felt truly suspended in time and space. Drawing on thirty years of accumulated earned leave, he took Larriera on a trip that started in Bali and wound its way west to West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), then north to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Macau, and Hong Kong. Mostly they traveled incognito, but when they reached Thailand, a surprise official reception, complete with crowns of orchids and a motorcade, awaited them, arranged by his friend General Winai Phattiyakul, the Thai who had commanded UN peacekeepers in East Timor.
The pair spent no more than two nights in any single place, traveling by plane, bus, and rented motorcycle. They shopped for their future home, buying carved doors in Bali, spears and shields in Papua, antique puppets in Thailand, iron Buddhas in Cambodia, and textiles in Laos. Since they were as yet unaware whether they were headed to New York or Geneva, they sent their purchases to Vieira de Mello’s apartment in New York, which he had rented out while in East Timor. They scheduled stops along the way so as to be able to watch their home soccer teams play their matches in the 2002 World Cup. They generally remained out of telephone contact while on the road, but when Brazil eliminated the U.K. in the quarterfinals, he could not resist gloating by phone to Jonathan Prentice, his British special assistant. The highlight of the trip came on June 30, when King Sihanouk welcomed his old ally back to the royal palace in Phnom Penh. The two men spoke of Cambodia’s prospects and the planned war crimes trials of the Khmer Rouge (which would include Ieng Sary), and Vieira de Mello invited Sihanouk to their wedding. The couple then headed to the Foreign Correspondents Club, which had a wall-to-wall television on which they watched Brazil defeat Germany in the World Cup finals.
The only times Vieira de Mello tensed up on the trip were the rare occasions when he telephoned UN Headquarters to try to determine where he was headed next. “I’m going to call the boss next Monday,” he would tell Larriera on a Wednesday. Then on the Friday, he would wake up and say, “Remember, I’m calling the SG on Monday.” And when Monday rolled around, he would spend the day mentally preparing for his conversation with Annan. “I never saw Sergio nervous,” recalls Larriera, “except for when he was speaking with the SG, or thinking about speaking with him.” She would tease him,“Are you biting your fingernails?” “No,” he would reply.“I’m biting my cuticles.There’s a big difference!” Even though he had known Annan for two decades, he respected the office of the secretary-general so much that he spoke to Annan as formally as he might have to a stranger in the position, never calling him “Kofi” but only “SG.”
The couple returned to New York in late July. Larriera reclaimed the UN public information job she had held before East Timor and studied for the GRE so that she could apply to graduate programs in public policy. Vieira de Mello awaited word of his fortune, joking to friends that he was “unemployed” and intended to live off of Larriera. Annan final
ly decided to offer him the Geneva-based job of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Since he was not ready to go back to the field to run another mission so soon, and since there were few alternatives, he felt he had no choice but to accept. On July 22, 2002, the secretary-general announced his appointment. Vieira de Mello had won out over a long list of candidates that included Corazon Aquino, the former president of the Philippines; Surin Pitsuwan, the former Thai foreign minister; and Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish dissident.1
Vieira de Mello’s predecessor in the job was former Irish president Mary Robinson. Robinson had been outspoken in her criticisms of the Bush administration’s human rights abuses in the wake of 9/11. She had slammed President Bush’s decision to withhold prisoner-of-war status and Geneva Convention protections from al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees housed in Guantánamo and elsewhere.2 And she had called on the United States to increase the percentage of its GNP devoted to foreign aid, which had fallen from 0.21 percent in 1990 to 0.10 percent in 1999. Although the United States was the UN’s biggest single donor, she had alienated U.S. officials by observing that while each Dane was coughing up $331 per year on aid, each American was giving only $33.3 Unsurprisingly, the United States refused to support her bid for a second four-year term as high commissioner. Still, she was unrepentant. “Holding back criticism, for whatever political reasons,” she said, “takes away the legitimacy of the agenda and the cause.”4
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 43
