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

by Samantha Power

  Although Vieira de Mello had dealt with human suffering and humanitarian law for his entire career, he never saw himself as a “human rights type.” He saw human rights advocates as those who named and shamed governments. He saw his strength as working with governments behind the scenes to secure consensus. He did not feel temperamentally suited for a job that required more bluntness than any other in the UN system. But after Robinson, Annan felt that Vieira de Mello’s very unsuitability for the human rights commissioner’s job made him an ideal candidate to smooth out relations with the United States.

  Western diplomats hailed the choice, but human rights groups sounded displeased. Michael Posner, head of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, wondered whether the new commissioner would confront the Russians on Chechnya, or the United States on its post-9/11 detentions. “It requires a very strong backbone,” Posner said. “Mary Robinson had that.”5 “My concern,” recalls Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, “was that Sergio had no record of using public pressure.” Roth and others were willing to give him a chance, but they believed his personal ambition would make him reluctant to alienate governments. “Ideally, you’d get somebody who saw becoming high commissioner as the pinnacle of their career, not as a stepping-stone to higher ground, to becoming secretary-general,” says Roth.

  Naturally, the more senior Vieira de Mello became, the more people were convinced that he was angling for the top job. That summer Prince Zeid Raad Zeid al-Hussein, Jordan’s ambassador to the UN, told him that the other ambassadors had begun speaking of him as a serious contender to succeed Annan in 2006. Vieira de Mello waved him off, referring to the tradition by which the position of secretary-general rotated among regional blocs.“Latin America has had its turn,” he said. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a Peruvian, had given way to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, who had been replaced by Annan of Ghana. In 2006 it would be Asia’s turn in the queue. “But, Sergio,” Zeid said playfully, “after all you did for East Timor, don’t tell me they haven’t made you a citizen.You can be Asia’s candidate.”24

  The raw ambition of his youth seemed to have receded. Partly this was because after spending thirty-three years in the system, he knew too much about its flaws—flaws that would only loom larger if he were to hold the top job. Less than a week before he was to fly to Geneva to take up his new post, he met Larriera in the UN lobby, and the couple walked several blocks up First Avenue together. Suddenly a motorcade belonging to Annan came tearing out of the gates of UN Headquarters. “Do you want to become secretary-general?” she asked. He shrugged. “Carolina, if I were to become secretary-general, there’d be no more Sergio, and no more Sergio and Carolina.” He took her hand as they crossed East Forty-eighth Street. “There’d be only that,” he said, nodding in the direction of the UN gates as they closed behind the last vehicle in the convoy. As they walked uptown, he explained his ambivalence. “When the SG took office, he had a vision, an ambitious reform agenda,” he said. “And what became of it? The job of SG took over. The job will always take over. Now there is no more Kofi. No more vision. He is just the SG. And that’s what would happen to me.” Whatever the drawbacks of becoming secretary-general, though, he had never met a challenge he didn’t embrace, and if powerful governments had put his name forward, it seems inconceivable that he would have taken himself out of the running.

  He did not see becoming UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as a great career move. Although it was the most senior post he had ever held, it carried little prestige, relative to other jobs he had been eligible for, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had one of the smallest overall budgets of any UN agency ($66 million). It carried out few operations in the field, where he was in his element. Its commissioner would inevitably be attacked, either by governments (if he was critical of them) or by human rights groups (if he was not). And in its decade of existence, the OHCHR had managed to exert scant real-world influence. Powerful governments held it in low regard.

  His colleagues in the UN had told him that the ideal high commissioner would combine the skills of a politician, a bureaucrat, and a human rights expert. He was none of these things. He had no independent political base, no patience for bureaucracy, and little human rights background. After the press conference at which Annan announced his appointment,Vieira de Mello rode the elevator up to the twenty-second floor, where he was sharing a borrowed office with Prentice, closed the door behind him, and said, “Now what the hell do I do?” The first thing he did was walk with his aide to the Barnes & Noble near New York University and begin piling up books on the theory and practice of human rights. “Did he ever think he would be the high commissioner for human rights?” says Prentice. “No, not in a month of Sundays.”

  TIME TO GET SERIOUS

  Worn out from the long slog in East Timor, Vieira de Mello and Larriera spent the remainder of the summer in Larriera’s studio flat in New York. She worked on the weekends as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he picked her up after work. Because UN Headquarters was largely deserted in August, he felt little pressure to make appearances on the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

  Whatever headaches lay ahead, Vieira de Mello was relieved to be back in Western civilization after nearly three years in the most remote reaches of Southeast Asia. He was also determined not to let his new job get in the way of his personal life, which had become a priority. He told his friends that, although his divorce proceedings were taking time, he would soon put an end to what he called “l’hypocrisie du passé,” the hypocrisy of the past—of his past. Annan had been through a messy divorce two decades before and cautioned, “Be patient and do it right. Once you are living apart, there is no need to force it. For the sake of the children, do it on a civilized basis.” Vieira de Mello told Annan that he was glad to be moving back to Geneva so he could finally be near his sons. “It was sort of a guilty feeling,” Annan recalls.

  Vieira de Mello was boyishly proud of his relationship with Larriera. While in New York, he introduced her to his friend Omar Bakhet. When she got up to go to the restroom, he watched her walk away and said,“I’m totally in love.” Bakhet reacted with initial skepticism, as did other friends. “Do you have any idea how many times you’ve told me this?” he asked. But Vieira de Mello was insistent. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “I’ve had enough of breaking people’s hearts. It’s time to get serious about these matters.” His friend Fabienne Morisset remembers,“Sergio had tired of the contradictions in himself. In his professional life he was working around the clock to try to reduce suffering in the world. Yet in his personal life he knew he had caused pain. He was determined to reconcile both halves of his being.”

  On September 11, 2002, Vieira de Mello cleared passport control at JFK International Airport. He was on his way to Geneva, where he would finally start his new job. He stopped at an Internet kiosk to mark the dawn of the next stage of his life with Larriera—a life, he wrote to her, “with so many and such dangerous unknowns, where I await for you to accompany me.” He thanked her for her support at a time when “I myself know that I haven’t been easy to manage,” and he promised her reciprocal support in the days ahead.6

  Larriera was planning to move to Geneva in the spring, when she would take up a job with Martin Griffiths, who had left the UN to run a conflict resolution center in Geneva. She also gained admission to a distance-learning master’s degree program tailored for UN officials at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, which she was to begin the following August. Vieira de Mello found it hard to be separated from her. On September 13 he e-mailed her his home, cell, and work phone numbers and instructed her to keep them with her at all times, and even to “hide them in Central Park, in case you get an irrepressible urge to call me while you are running.”7 The same day he wrote to Marcia Luar Ibrahim, the wife of his former bodyguard in East Timor, that he was lonely because “Não sei mais viver sem a Carolina. ”8 He no longer knew how t
o live without Carolina.

  He rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the old town in Geneva, promising Larriera that once she moved to Europe they would splurge on a house somewhere around Lake Geneva. The first time she stuck her head out the window of their temporary quarters, she spotted a plaque on the building diagonal from theirs. It was the former home of Jorge Luis Borges, her favorite writer, who was also from Buenos Aires. On a run one day they then stumbled upon a small walled park tucked into downtown Geneva. It proved to be a cemetery for the town’s most prized citizens.The couple entered and found Borges’s understated grave, which was so elegant that they returned to take photos of it.

  The couple settled into a range of habits to keep them connected despite the four thousand miles that separated them during the week. They shopped online together at Ikea—he from Geneva, she from New York. They declined invitations to go out in the evenings. He told colleagues, “I am not a dinner person,” and asked them to accommodate him at lunchtime. Larriera gave him wake-up calls at 1 a.m. New York time, and he did the same, calling her at 1 p.m. Geneva time. They tried to see each other every weekend, with him flying to New York and she to Geneva twice a month. When her mother was diagnosed with kidney cancer, he flew twenty-one hours to Buenos Aires so he could spend the day of the surgery by Larriera’s side.The couple generally spoke Spanish together, as his was flawless and she was still mastering Portuguese. But whenever he talked about his feelings for her or about their future, he drifted unselfconsciously into Portuguese. As he had gotten older, he had grown more proudly Brazilian. He ostentatiously checked the manufacturers’ labels in shops to see if items were “made in Brazil”; he affixed a bumper sticker of the Brazilian flag to his car in Geneva; and he donned gold and green T-shirts with Brazilian football logos. When he recycled UN paper, he explained it by saying, “These are the trees from my Amazon we are printing on.” His relationship with Larriera caused these habits to grow more pronounced, as he told others she had reawakened his roots.

  When the couple reached the one-year anniversary of the launch of “history,” he marked it with another e-mail to thank her “for standing me for a year” and to express hope that “for the rest of my life it will be like this.”9 Ever since “history” had begun the previous October, he had referred to her in public as “my wife Carolina,” and over the summer they had begun wearing gold rings made at Tiffany’s. His had the name “Carolina” engraved on the inside, and her matching ring bore the name “Sergio.”

  But his romantic happiness came at a price. Annie was resisting his efforts to divorce her, failing to show up for court appointments. He was most stung by the criticism he was getting from his sons, who were protective of their mother and refused to meet Larriera. He could not convince them of his sincerity. “I should have done this ten years ago,” he told his friend Annick Stevenson. “Maybe it would have been easier on them if they were younger. But I can’t delay any longer. I have got to deal with my life.” When his sons refused to take his calls, he e-mailed them, proposing a “direct dialogue.” He wrote that he did not seek to undermine their loyalty toward their mother but wanted “a chance to explain to you many things so you could maybe understand my mistakes.”10

  In this time of profound personal change,Vieira de Mello became more spiritual. He had long been vehement about his atheism. Once, when he and Larriera attended a mass in East Timor performed by Bishop Felipe Ximenes Belo, everyone else made the sign of the cross, but despite his prominence he kept his hands by his sides, stubbornly staring down at the floor. Afterward she ribbed him about his defiance, but he shook his head. “You know I don’t believe in all the bullshit of the Catholic Church,” he said. “I can’t betray my principles.” In his twenties and thirties he had told religious colleagues, “We have to realize God in man.” He had shown no signs of moving toward organized religion, but had long observed the superstitions of his native Brazil. “If God is Brazilian,” he often said, knocking on wood twice, “I’ll be safe.”11

  But Buddhism, which he saw more as a philosophy than a religion, had always intrigued him. Ever since 1989 he had carried with him a silver Buddha given to him by Bakhet. When he felt he needed luck during the Cambodian refugee repatriation launch in 1992, he had lit incense in front of the Buddha statue near the Thai border. Bakhet traveled annually to India on a six-week meditation retreat, and while in the early years of their friendship Vieira de Mello had mocked his friend’s interest in “mystical nonsense,” his attitude had begun to change.“One of these days I need to sit down with you, Omar,” he said. In 1998 Bakhet had given him a large glossy picture book on Buddhism and assumed that he simply filed it away, unread. But when Bakhet visited him in East Timor, he spotted the book lying prominently on the coffee table. When Vieira de Mello disappeared into the shower, Bakhet opened the book and discovered his friend’s meticulous scribbles all over the margins.

  “When I retire,” Vieira de Mello announced one day to his friend Morisset, “I want to be a Buddhist.” In the meantime, although he did not have the time to seek formal instruction, he learned what he could. In November, shortly after he moved back to Geneva, he and Larriera visited the British Museum in London, and he e-mailed their guide afterward that he had “developed, jointly with my wife Carolina, a curiosity and eager taste for Buddhist philosophy, art and culture,” which he noted was “rather unusual for two Latin Americans.” He asked for further clarity on Luohan, whom he understood to be a guide to truth. He asked specifically about Luohan’s “effort to transcend mundane repetitiveness (did I get it right?) and attain unity with the world.”12 The guide responded that Luohan had managed to reach a personal nirvana without leaving the earthly world and had therefore reached a level of spirituality somewhere between ordinary man and Buddha. “Sergio’s level of consciousness was rising,” Morisset recalls, “and this meant he was more in touch with the world’s cruelty.”

  “WHAT WOULD VICTIMS EXPECT?”

  As he settled into his new life in Geneva,Vieira de Mello tried to get a quick handle on the high commissioner’s job. The office seemed mired in an impossible paradox. Without the direct support of governments, he would not get the funds or political cooperation he needed; but if he was seen to be too close to powerful governments, he would lack credibility. He answered his early critics. On September 20, 2002, he declared, “My job will require speaking out.... But it also requires tact and political acumen, as well as the ability to roll up one’s sleeves and get down to work to protect human rights away from the spotlights and the microphones.”13 He joked that his preparation for a job that entailed tiptoeing in political minefields came when he ran the Mine Action Center in Cambodia.14 He admitted to friends that publicly criticizing governments would require the biggest adjustment of his career. “Sergio was aware that his days of being loved by everyone were coming to an end,” recalls Prentice.

  He began to conceive of his role as that of emergency “first responder.” He could swoop into a place where abuses were being carried out and attract a burst of media coverage. At a brainstorming session in New York, Harold Koh, who had been assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Clinton administration and had subsequently become dean of Yale Law School, urged him to try to pass the “taxi driver test.” “When the driver of the average taxi cab that you hail—whether in Delhi, Rio, Nairobi, Cairo, Paris, Beijing, or New York—asks, ’Aren’t you Sergio, the high commissioner?’ (placing you on a first-name basis with Saddam, Madonna, and Pelé), you will finally be well on your way to having the independent political base that you will need.”15 The better known Vieira de Mello became, the less dependent he would be upon particular governments.

  He would never have found it easy to be office-bound again, but the high commissioner’s perch was worse than most offices. As he became acquainted with his new employees, he thought many of them were measuring their impact not by the lives they bettered but by the number of human rights conferences
they planned or the number of human rights treaties they invoked. “The place is just infested with fucking lawyers,” he told his close associates. He noted that the way to reach those desperate for the UN’s help was “certainly not workshops.”16 “If our rules, our debates, this commission and my office’s very existence, cannot protect the weak,” he declared, “then what value do they have?”17 His deputy Bertrand Ramcharan suggested the office acquire more space in order to manage the influx of new hires that the new commissioner hoped to make. Vieira de Mello was incredulous: “No, we’ll have every office doubled up. The little money we have should be spent on human rights.” In a note to Prentice in the margins of his draft human rights strategic plan, he scrawled, “What would victims expect from us, from me?”18