Vieira de Mello’s every public move was scrutinized. In May 2003 Annick Stevenson, who had become a press officer in the office, forwarded him an e-mail from an Arab journalist who complained that he had denounced a Palestinian suicide attack but had not done the same after a recent violent Israeli response. He could not win, and he knew it. He wrote to Stevenson:
Nonsense of course. I didn’t issue a statement on the bombing in Chechnya either . . . so I’m anti-Russian and pro-Chechen terrorists (Muslims by the way). The problem is: either we issue one after every attack or we continue exposing ourselves to this kind of biased interpretation. One thing is sure: as long as Arab (or Jewish) journalists continue to think in this unidimensional way, there will be no peace in the Middle East.53
IRAQ
The threat of war elsewhere in the Middle East cast a shadow over Vieira de Mello’s tenure as human rights commissioner. On September 12, 2002, his first official day on the job, Secretary-General Annan and President George W. Bush had duked it out in the UN General Assembly Chamber before the world’s heads of state. The subject was Iraq. Pointing to the UN-mandated Gulf War that Bush’s father had orchestrated, Annan argued, “There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.”54 He staked out a middle ground on the war path, calling for the resumption of weapons inspections but also for Iraq to finally meet its obligations. “If Iraq’s defiance continues,” Annan warned, “the Security Council must face its responsibilities.”55 Annan wanted peace, but he desperately wanted the Security Council to take a united position. For that to happen, he knew, Saddam Hussein would have to make visible new concessions.
President Bush had brought his trademark swagger to the podium. As Annan looked on from nearby, Bush dangled the prospect of UN irrelevance before the packed house. “We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, and our resolutions would be more than wishes,” Bush said. “Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”56 Bush offered his own definition of adherence with UN principles: It meant siding with the United States against Saddam Hussein.57
Part of Vieira de Mello was tempted to support the war in Iraq. He had openly supported the Australian-led intervention in East Timor, and he had eventually come to see NATO’s war in Kosovo as justified. He publicly echoed the secretary-general’s recognition that states had a right, even a duty, to intervene to end gross violations of human rights. He often invoked the UN member states’ “responsibility to protect” citizens who were being murdered or allowed to be murdered by their own governments.25 Vieira de Mello was eager to see Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime replaced. He had not joined those UN colleagues who had decried the decade-long American sanctions regime in Iraq. When he was asked in December 2002 what the UN would do to alleviate the toll of the sanctions, he stressed, “Let’s not forget that it also takes two to tango,” and blamed the Iraqi dictator for failing to get food and medicine to his people.58 In an op-ed he questioned how the Security Council could be debating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without considering Saddam Hussein’s mass destruction of civilians. What was missing in geopolitics, Vieira de Mello wrote, was “the recognition that flagrant and systematic violations of human rights are frequently the principal cause of global insecurity.”59 States had to move away from “dysfunctional definitions of security” and start recognizing the nexus of security and human rights.
But however much the UN human rights commissioner might have welcomed the removal of Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration was justifying its invasion by arguing that Hussein posed an “imminent threat”—an argument Vieira de Mello found unpersuasive. He also knew how challenging it was to reassemble a country once a regime had been toppled. Even in tiny Kosovo and East Timor this task had proven difficult, and Iraq was an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous country of 27 million people.
Above all, Vieira de Mello was concerned about the precedent an American and British war would set. His loyalty to UN procedures made him deeply uncomfortable with the Bush administration’s flouting of the UN Security Council.The divisions over Iraq, he feared, might actually dismantle or render obsolete the UN architecture. He saw similarities between the circumstances in 2003 and those that had existed around the time of NATO’s war in Kosovo four years before. But while in 1999 NATO had gone ahead and attacked Serbia over the opposition of China and Russia, on this occasion the United States and the United Kingdom were plowing ahead despite the resistance of every country on the Council except Spain. In the year leading up to the 1999 NATO air strikes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević had killed some 3,000 Kosovo Albanians and displaced 300,000 others; Saddam Hussein had committed genocide against the Kurds back in 1987-88, but even a tyranny as brutal as his did not seem adequate grounds to undertake something as risky as regime change. Also Vieira de Mello knew that the Clinton administration’s foreign policy team had done all it could to try to get the countries on the Security Council to back the NATO war in Kosovo. Then, once the Russians had made plain they would block an authorizing resolution,Washington had launched the bombing campaign while simultaneously maintaining close contact with Kofi Annan.The Bush team, by contrast, seemed to relish thumbing its nose at the UN. Indeed, one senior Bush administration planner told Strobe Talbott, who had been Clinton’s deputy secretary of state: “That’s the difference between you people and us, Strobe. Your type agonizes, ours seizes opportunities. You see our interests in Iraq and in the UN as in tension with each other; we see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”60 With a war in Iraq, many senior U.S. officials saw a chance both to bring down Saddam Hussein and to weaken the UN. Vieira de Mello was understandably concerned that such an action constituted a far greater repudiation of international rules and of the Security Council’s primacy than had Kosovo. In the end, then, though he had become a supporter of humanitarian intervention, he believed that Bush’s top advisers were not motivated by a regard for the Iraqis and that an American-British invasion would endanger both the Iraqi people and the United Nations.
Despite his personal view, he again did not speak out. “Why should I?” he told those closest to him. “Nobody is going to listen to me anyway, and it will only interfere with my ability to help the Iraqis down the road.” But trying to stop the war and trying to be sure the UN developed a coherent strategy to deal with the war were two different things. He believed that the UN was being altogether too reactive on Iraq. He sent a letter to Annan, also signed by Dennis McNamara (with whom Vieira de Mello was back on good terms) and several other colleagues, in which he offered to gather a group of senior UN officials to formulate a UN strategy regarding the invasion. “It was clear we were going to get hit by a tsunami,” recalls one UN official, “and we weren’t ready.” Annan never responded.
While UN staffers agonized over the consequences of the imminent conflict, President Bush seemed to be utterly convinced of the strategic and moral benefits of dislodging Saddam Hussein. His advisers had arranged meetings for him with Iraqi exiles who favored the war and generally downplayed the potential costs. On January 10, 2003, Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and distinguished Iraqi exile, told Bush that the invasion would transform the image of the United States in the Middle East. “People will greet the troops with sweets and flowers,” Makiya said. Hatem Mukhlis, a Sunni doctor also present at the meeting, generally agreed with Makiya but urged Bush to be sure to keep the Iraqi army intact and stressed the importance of making a strong and humane first impression: “If you don’t win their hearts at the start, if they don’t get benefits,” Mukhlis said, “after two months you could see Mogadishu in Baghdad.”61
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell gave his infamous presentation before the UN Security Council, making many worry
ing claims that would later prove false about Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs.62 The corridors of UN Headquarters in New York were abuzz with debate and anticipation. UN staff who had never met before because they worked on disparate geographic or substantive issues were suddenly embroiled in heated discussions about Iraq. The discussions touched upon the latest testimony from Hans Blix, the head of the UN weapons-inspection team; the question of whether the UN team in Iraq running the Oil for Food Program should pull out; the rules in the UN Charter and their suitability to meet twenty-first-century threats (when weapons of mass destruction could be used without warning); and the worry that the Security Council or the secretary-general would not survive a steamrolling by two of the UN’s founding member states. Secretary-General Annan seemed convinced that if the United States and Great Britain went to war without the approval of the Security Council, the UN would seem irrelevant. But working-level UN officials had never felt more relevant. “The entire world—the weapons inspectors from Iraq, the foreign ministers from the major powers, the top correspondents from the major media—they had all descended upon the United Nations,” recalls Oliver Ulich, a midlevel official. “We were the center of the universe. Besides, the only way to become more ‘relevant’ was to become an accomplice in the war.”
Annan chose not to denounce the Iraq invasion.“Do we really think that this war can be avoided or delayed if I speak out?” he asked his colleagues. His special assistant, Nader Mousavizadeh, remembers, “It was like choosing between the plague and cholera. Do you implicitly sign on to the war, or do you set the UN on a collision course with its most influential member?”
A BIG INTERVIEW?
In March 2003, in a meeting that would alter the course of his life, Vieira de Mello had the opportunity to voice his human rights concerns with President Bush directly. Anthony Banbury, with whom he had worked in Cambodia and Bosnia, had served on the staff of the National Security Council under President Clinton and stayed on after Bush’s election. Before leaving his job, Banbury wanted to ensure that the Bush administration saw the most appealing face of the United Nations: that of Vieira de Mello.
Getting on the calendar of the president was next to impossible, especially on the eve of a major U.S.-led war in Iraq. But Banbury prepared a memo for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in which he made the case for Bush to meet Vieira de Mello. “There are some very good people in the UN,” Banbury noted. “Sergio is the very best of the best.” Banbury also contended that it was in the interest of the White House to be seen engaging with the human rights commissioner.“The United States is taking some hits on human rights lately,” he argued.“The U.S. is the leader in the field of human rights. This will give the president a chance to address the criticisms and get our story out.” As he recalls,“This was a stretch. The president of the United States doesn’t meet with human rights people from the UN. This was the secretary of state’s job or his staff’s job.”63
Yet to his and Vieira de Mello’s surprise, Rice embraced the idea and placed the meeting on the president’s schedule (over the objections of Bush’s schedulers). Vieira de Mello, a true believer in the UN, and President Bush, a lifelong UN skeptic, would meet on the afternoon of March 5, 2003.
Vieira de Mello spent the morning meeting with senior officials at the State Department, discussing the role his office could play in the wake of any U.S. invasion, sharing the insights he had gained on war crimes and policing in the Balkans and East Timor. Having feared that the Bush administration would sideline the UN, he was relieved to hear Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, say that he expected the UN to play a prominent role as soon as Saddam Hussein was overthrown. “The sooner that activities can be turned over to respected international actors, the better,” Armitage said. “Expect to be hearing from us a lot.”64 When Vieira de Mello noted that sixteen prisoners in Guantánamo had recently attempted suicide,Armitage conceded that the delicate balance between security and liberty had been skewed. “The ends do not justify the means,” Armitage said. “The pendulum has swung too far.”65 In other State Department meetings Vieira de Mello was told of the Future of Iraq Project, the elaborate $5 million, eighteen-month-long process by which Iraqi exiles and American experts drafted blueprint laws and institutions to replace Saddam Hussein’s after his fall. Vieira de Mello would learn later that Defense Department officials Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith would decide the Iraqis’ course. The Future of Iraq Project reports would go unread by the U.S. administrators who followed U.S. troops into Baghdad.
Perhaps because Rice had given Bush a favorable briefing on Vieira de Mello, the president greeted him warmly, shaking his hand vigorously and commenting on how fit he seemed. “You must work out,” Bush said. As soon as the two men sat down and began discussing U.S. treatment of detainees, Bush stressed that in wartime exceptional measures were required. “Guantánamo is not a country club, but it should not be,” Bush said, insisting that fighting terrorism demanded forcefulness.Vieira de Mello nodded.“I know,” he said. “In East Timor I gave UN peacekeepers shoot-to-kill authority to go after the militia.” His aide Prentice,was so taken aback that he commented to a UN colleague, “I can’t fucking believe this: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is showing off about his shoot-to-kill policy!” Prentice understood that his boss’s seemingly spontaneous outburst had in fact been deliberate. “Sergio knew exactly what he was doing,” he remembers. “He knew that Bush probably presumed him to be a tree-hugger and that this was a quick way to show him otherwise.”
Vieira de Mello, who had seemed relaxed even with the Khmer Rouge, sat at the edge of his chair, and his easy smile seemed frozen and forced. But his reflexive charm paid off. He managed not to make the president defensive when he described Guantánamo as a “legal black hole” and warned of possible torture being carried out by Americans in Afghanistan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, had just been arrested in Pakistan, and he urged Bush to ensure that U.S. interrogators played by legal rules. “He is a killer,” Bush said, “but he will be treated humanely.”66 A year later the New York Times reported that the high-level detainee had been in fact systematically subjected to water-boarding and other harsh treatment prohibited by international law.67
Vieira de Mello had visited Pakistan in late February. There he had met a man who believed his sons were in Guantánamo but was not sure. Vieira de Mello told Bush of the father’s desperation and appealed to him as a parent to alert families to the whereabouts of their relatives. Bush turned to Rice and said,“We need to look into this. It would be terrible not to know where your children are.” Nonetheless, the Bush administration would not in fact disclose the identities of the Guantánamo detainees until March 2006. On the issue of torture, Bush was adamant. “Americans won’t torture anybody,” he said. “I won’t allow it.” Bush justified the war that the United States would soon launch in Iraq on human rights grounds. “I cannot say how strongly I feel about what Saddam Hussein has done to his own people,” Bush said. “Deep in my bosom is a real desire for the freedom of people. The human condition matters to me.”68 Bush also said that in going to war to disarm Iraq, he would be defending the United Nations. “UN words must mean something,” he said.69
Although Vieira de Mello brought up the thorniest human rights issues of the day, Bush took a visible liking to him. The president was so engaged in the discussion that he doubled the length of the meeting, which had been scheduled to last fifteen minutes. When Bush’s secretary came in to tell him it was time for his scheduled call, he waved her away. "Tell Tony I’ll call him back,” Bush said, referring to the British prime minister. “Sergio was Sergio,” recalls Banbury. "The president was so used to people bowing to him that he appreciated Sergio’s directness.”Another observer recalled,“The courtiers took note that the king was happy.” Banbury remembers that U.S. officials came away from the meeting thinking, “This is a rea
sonable guy we can do business with. He’s not going to give us everything we want, but he’s a smart guy we can talk to.”
In early 2003 the world was so polarized and the debate over the war in Iraq was growing so vitriolic that any inroads Vieira de Mello made with Washington inevitably cost him elsewhere in the UN. Some of his critics began whispering that President Bush had agreed to the meeting only because Vieira de Mello was having an affair with Rice (he was not). At UN Headquarters in New York others speculated that Vieira de Mello had offered Bush a friendly UN face so as to earn himself a job in Iraq after the war—and the top job of UN secretary-general after Annan. “Guys like Sergio don’t meet with George Bush,” recalls UN spokesman Fred Eckhard.“I could only see it as a big interview.” Vieira de Mello laughed off these comments and got back to work, relaying word to the families he had met with in Pakistan that he had passed on their concerns to the president of the United States.
OFF TO WAR
President Bush had insisted that he would return to the UN Security Council for a resolution to authorize an invasion of Iraq. But as the weeks passed, even seemingly reliable allies like Vicente Fox of Mexico and Ricardo Lagos of Chile rejected the president’s war plans. Bush did not take these rebuffs as grounds to reexamine his thinking, but rather as proof that the UN was not up to the task of combating rogue regimes. “The UN must mean something,” he said. “Remember Rwanda or Kosovo. The UN didn’t do its job. And we hope tomorrow the UN will do its job. If not, all of us need to step back and try to figure out how to make the UN work better as we head into the twenty-first century.”70 Vieira de Mello drafted an op-ed in response to these taunts, stressing that the UN’s “major crisis” was the fault of the countries in it, not of the organization itself. “When member states make a mess of their own rules or disrupt their own collective political architecture,” he wrote, “it is wrong to blame the UN or its Secretary-General.”71
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 46
