Most of the human rights staffers he encountered in Geneva were UN lifers who had rarely ventured into the field.19 He vowed to make the office more operational. “The majority of people who work at human rights have been here forever. Forever! Ask them whether they have seen one violation of human rights in their professional careers. Most of them will tell you they haven’t,” he told Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker. "This is a crazy system that kills motivation and that kills the flame.”20 He e-mailed a colleague that bureaucratic life in the UN “demotivated young and capable staff, rewarded dinosaurs who have made their entire careers behind their HQs desks, punished those who believed in mobility, rotation and dared volunteer for field missions and undermined the goals of the UN as a result.”21 He planned to begin systematic rotation of staff from Geneva to the field so that the violations they were trying to curb became more real to them.
As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, he struggled to distance himself from the UN Commission on Human Rights, which he saw as an embarrassment to the UN and to human rights. The UN Commission on Human Rights, which met for six weeks every March and April in Geneva, was made up of fifty-three states that were elected after being nominated by countries in their regions. Often those elected were themselves flagrant human rights abusers. The year before he arrived, the United States, which had occupied a seat on the commission continuously since 1947, had been denied a seat in a secret vote.22 The snub was seen as payback for the U.S. failure to pay some $580 million in back dues to the UN, its rejection of the Kyoto environmental pact, its frontal assault on the International Criminal Court, and its decision to expedite the building of a nuclear missile shield. Each year the commission directed several resolutions at Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but it had never in its history passed resolutions against China, Syria, or Saudi Arabia. In 2002 the UN Commission on Human Rights had failed to censure Iran, Zimbabwe, and Russia. And in 2003 Gadaffi’s Libya was elected to serve as the chair of the upcoming commission.
Vieira de Mello was irked by the natural association people made between him and the commission, the most widely criticized part of the UN. People seemed to expect him as commissioner to be able to influence the body’s composition and habits, which he was powerless to do. He tried to be patient with the journalists who constantly grilled him about the human rights abusers who populated the commission. “The UN High Commissioner’s office is what I control,” he said. “The UN High Commission is an intergovernmental organ comprised of states.” He understood why people might be unhappy with the chair of the upcoming commission, but he told critics to “address that question” to the governments that had elected Libya.23
Sitting through his first six-week session of the UN Commission on Human Rights proved excruciating. The members defeated a resolution criticizing Zimbabwe and eliminated the position of human rights rapporteur for Sudan.The Palestinian representative charged Israel with “Zionist Nazism.”24 Seeking to preserve his office’s integrity and speak his mind, Vieria de Mello ridiculed the ritual “insulting language” that made the commission seem “stuck in an earlier time.”25 “I would suggest to you,” he said, “that when a denunciation has become traditional it should perhaps be abandoned or revised.” The commission’s problem was not that it was “too political,” which was to be expected of a body made up of governments. “For some people in this room to accuse others of being political,” he said, “is a bit like fish criticizing one another for being wet.”26 The trouble was not politics. The trouble was simply that many countries on the commission had little regard for human rights.
The part of the job that he liked most was philosophical: He was returning to his roots. His speeches before international organizations, human rights groups, and gatherings of dignitaries were sprinkled with references to Arendt, Kant, and Hegel. “What are the fundamental human rights?” he asked. “Are they not the basis for philosophy?”27 In East Timor he had been responsible for making sure that school textbooks were printed and water pipes were repaired. As high commissioner, he parsed definitions of democracy. He frequently noted democracy’s shortcomings: “Democratic rule does not automatically correlate with respect for human rights, nor does its presence necessarily lead to economic and social development.”28 He delighted in promoting his concept of “holistic democracy,” which encompassed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” He faulted those who equated democracy with the casting of ballots, and argued, “Democracy is as much about what happens between elections as it is about what happens during them.”29 He liked to paraphrase Nelson Mandela, saying that people should never be “forced to choose between ballots and bread.”30 Holistic democracy would provide physical and economic security as well as voting rights.
He argued that human rights were the foundation for interstate stability. He wanted human rights to matter to geopolitics (as he always wanted to be where “the action was”), but he also did not understand why disarmament was a key item on the Security Council checklist while human rights were not. “A regime that can grossly violate the rights of its own people is ipso facto a threat to its neighbors and to regional and international peace and security,” he insisted.31 He had viewed some human rights advocates he had clashed with in his career as shrill and absolutist. When they urged him to delay refugee returns to Cambodia, or to avoid negotiating with the Khmer Rouge, Serb nationalists, or the Taliban, he thought they were being unrealistic and often unhelpful. But now he appreciated that even if international humanitarian law, refugee law, and human rights law were politically inconvenient, they were also essential mechanisms for regulating state behavior.32 He told skeptics that “human rights” was another phrase for rule of law, which they found less controversial. “He was impressed and surprised,” recalls Prentice. “It was an education for him that his core values—all of his basic instincts and beliefs—were out there in this body of human rights law.” “I’ve been dealing all my life with the effect of human rights violations,” he told Edward Mortimer, a senior adviser to Annan in New York. “At last I have a job which deals with the source of the problem.” He was fond of quoting the former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations Abdul Rahman Pazhwak, who in 1966 had presided over the General Assembly and said: “If the United Nations could be said to have any ideology, it must be that of human rights.”33
He had always supported the UN war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but he now had a pulpit from which to lobby on behalf of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He met the objections of those, like senior Bush administration officials, who believed the court would never get off the ground by citing recent historical advances: “Many people said the ad hoc tribunal on the former Yugoslavia and the ad hoc tribunal on Rwanda were jokes. Well, they were not jokes. An international criminal court . . . will come into being ... and you will see that that will not be a joke . . . The ICC will exist and will operate whether one or the other country joins it or not.”34
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
The one country on everybody’s mind was the United States. On the ICC and countless other issues, the world’s most powerful country had a view different from his own.The high commissioner and his staff occupied the Palais Wilson, a peach-colored manor on a slope overlooking Lake Geneva. The first headquarters of the League of Nations, the building had been named after former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Vieira de Mello was unshy about referring to his own “Wilsonian” leanings and reminded visitors of America’s founding role in crafting international institutions as a way of convincing them that President Bush’s unilateralism was not likely permanent. The Bush administration’s disdain for international law was perhaps best reflected in the statements of John Bolton, then under secretary of state for arms control and international security. “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so because, over the long term, the goal of those who think t
hat international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States,” he said.35 It was Bolton who delighted in being the one to inform Secretary-General Annan that the United States would be “un-signing” the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, which Bolton branded “a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism that is not just naïve but dangerous.”36 “Taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute, Bolton later boasted, was “the happiest moment in my government service.”37 In 2004 President Bush would name Bolton U.S. ambassador to the UN.
Vieira de Mello knew he would have to figure out a way to work with, through, and around the United States. In his speeches he chipped away at notions of American exceptionalism, arguing that the tendency to violate rights was as universal as the rights themselves. “There does not exist on this earth a paradise for human rights,” he said. “It is too tempting to divide the world into zones of light and zones of shadow, but the truth is that we all sail between the two.”38
He sought to balance respect for a country’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks with efforts to make sure that it respected international rules in the process. He thought human rights organizations that condemned Bush at times sounded as though they were defending terrorism. In his public remarks he stressed that it was important to delve into “root causes” but asked, “Are there not justifications for every crime and every atrocity?” He continued,“The sadist has his reasons just like he who is pushed by madness. There were economic motivations for slavery,” he said. “We have the right to live without this fear of dying, no matter where, at any moment.”39 He urged his staff to remember to denounce terrorist acts with every bit the fervor with which they criticized human rights violations by states. He did not want to alienate the United States before he had a chance to influence it behind the scenes.
Because he had been in Asia on 9/11, he had not personally experienced the jolt that the attacks delivered to the American psyche. More palpable for him was the terrorist attack that occurred one month into his tenure as high commissioner. On October 12, 2002, several bombs exploded in and near a popular nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, where he and Larriera had taken many long weekends. More than two hundred people were killed, many of them Australian youths. After the attack the al-Jazeera network broadcast a statement from Osama bin Laden in which he said he had warned Australia not to send its troops to join in the UN’s “despicable effort to separate East Timor” from Indonesia. “It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosion in Bali,” bin Laden said. He asked why the killing of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Palestine did not outrage Western audiences. “Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning, and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness are your lot?” bin Laden said.“This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb.”40
This was the second speech in which bin Laden had used East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia as a rallying cry. The previous year, in November 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had delivered a lengthy diatribe against the United Nations, blaming a UN resolution for partitioning Palestine in 1947, attacking UN peacekeepers for standing by when Muslims were murdered in UN safe areas in Bosnia, and accusing “the criminal Kofi Annan” of dividing Indonesia, “the most populous country in the Islamic world.” Bin Laden had lumped the UN with U.S. and Israeli interests and said, “Under no circumstances should any Muslim or sane person resort to the United Nations.The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime.”41
The Bali bombing sickened Vieira de Mello. He and Larriera were together in Geneva when they heard the news. They spent the afternoon scouring the Internet for a map of Bali that would help them ascertain which nightclub, among the many they had strolled by, had been struck. They were horrified that a place of such tranquillity could have been so brutalized. Two UN soldiers on mission in East Timor (one of whom was Brazilian) were among those killed. One month after the attack, when the Balinese held a ceremony at the scorched site, the couple performed their own private ritual in Geneva, lighting a candle to honor the dead.
His disgust over al-Qaeda’s strikes at civilian targets made Vieira de Mello argue even more strenuously that Western countries must obey international law. Even before he took up his post, disturbing evidence of American involvement in torture had been mounting. In January 2002 photographs had been leaked of shackled prisoners in Guantánamo, kneeling and wearing heavy gloves, face masks, and earmuffs, stirring international outrage but little outcry in the United States.42 In March 2002 U.S. diplomats had been quoted in the Washington Post describing the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” or sending terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, where intelligence agents routinely engaged in torture.43 And in April the press ran “souvenir photos” taken by U.S. soldiers, of their peers posing beside the blindfolded, shackled, and naked body of John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old California native who had joined the Taliban. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed what he said were only rumors of mistreatment. “I guess if you ask me when I got up in the morning and we’ve got people getting killed in the Middle East, and we’ve got a war going on in Afghanistan, if I’m going to change my schedule and go chasing after the rumors on things like that, it’s unlikely.”44
The evidence of U.S. abuse mounted throughout Vieira de Mello’s time in Geneva. In September, just after he left his post as head of the CIA counterterrorism center, Cofer Black testified in a joint House and Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing: “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is there was a ‘before 9/11,’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11 the gloves come off.”45 And in December Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman published a devastating account of the Bush administration’s “brass-knuckled quest for information” and their harsh dealings with terror suspects.The lengthy cover story quoted one U.S. official responsible for capturing and transferring suspected terrorists as saying,“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”46 Priest and Gellman quoted another American involved in rendition candidly explaining the virtues of the practice.“We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them,” the official said. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”47 Despite these highly public revelations and the harm they could do to America’s standing in the Islamic world and elsewhere, senior officials in the Bush administration did not seek to distance themselves from these practices and did not even condemn them until May 2004, when American soldiers, CIA agents, and contractors were found to have systematically tortured Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
In light of the Bush administration’s stated hostility to the UN in general and to human rights treaties specifically, Vieira de Mello knew he would hardly be pushing on an open door when he urged Washington to adhere to international rules. He tried to be politic, using speeches to stress the gravity of the threat posed by terrorist networks.“A brutal attack and an exceptional threat may require an extraordinary and unequivocal response,” he said. But, he continued:
these measures must be taken in transparency, they must be in short duration, and they must take place within the framework of the law. Without that, the terrorists will ultimately win and we will ultimately lose as we would have allowed them to destroy the very foundation of our modern human civilization. I am convinced that it is possible to fight this menace at no cost to our human rights. Protecting your citizens and upholding rights are not incompatible: on the contrary, they must go firmly together lest we lose our bearing.48
He believed that international human rights law already gave governments the flexibility they needed to meet exceptional threats. They were free to extend the length of detentions in times of emergency, but if t
hey did so, they had to notify the secretary-general, as Great Britain had done in December 2001.49
Although he generally preferred raising his concerns about state practices behind closed doors, torture was an exception. “I have been appalled at the resurgence of debate in certain parts of the world as to whether resort to torture may be justified to tackle terrorism,” he said at a regional conference in Islamabad. “It may not.The right to be free from torture was recognized a long time ago by all states.There can be no going back, no matter—I repeat, no matter—how grave the provocation.”50
Washington had just invented its own legal rules and begun acting as though international law did not exist at all. He urged that the prisoners in Guantánamo be tried or released, and he argued that the denial of rights was “one of the very goals of the terrorists.”51 “We live in fearful times, and fear is a bad adviser,” he argued in one of his more memorable lines before the UN Commission on Human Rights. “For when security is defined too narrowly—for example, as nothing more than a state’s duty to protect its citizens—then the pursuit of security can lead to the violation of the human rights of those who are outside the circle of the protected.”52
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 45
