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

by Samantha Power

  When Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, asked him to join in rallying the heads of UN agencies to jointly oppose the war, Vieira de Mello declined. He had come to see the war as inevitable. “When I sat down with Bush, I saw a very relaxed man,” he told Lubbers. “This was not a man pondering other options.”

  Indeed, without an authorizing Security Council resolution, President Bush charged ahead. On March 17, 2003, he issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, demanding that he and his sons leave Iraq. The ultimatum expired on March 19 at 8 p.m. EST, and roughly ninety minutes later U.S. and British forces invaded. “My fellow citizens,” President Bush declared from the Oval Office, “at this hour, American and Coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”72

  In mid-April, by which time Baghdad had already fallen,Vieira de Mello telephoned UN Headquarters and pleaded for guidance. “What is the UN position on the war in Iraq?” he asked. He was scheduled to appear on the notoriously confrontational BBC talk show HARDtalk the following day, and he needed the secretary-general and his top advisers to develop a strategy in a hurry. "What message does the UN want to give the public on Iraq?” he asked. “If we don’t figure out where we stand, I’m going to get massacred.” Even though he received no instructions from New York, he felt he had to go ahead with the interview because the UN couldn’t be silent at such a vital time. As he headed into the studio in Geneva, he told Prentice, "Watch this little lamb go to slaughter.”

  He was smooth but evasive and thus came across as apologetic on behalf of the American invaders.When the interviewer,Tim Sebastian, asked about collateral damage,Vieira de Mello said it was “difficult to avoid civilian casualties.” When Sebastian asked him about the looting that had broken out in Baghdad, he said, “It is probably unavoidable after you’ve kept the lid on those people for so many years.” When Sebastian asked him about reports that U.S. Marines were firing on unarmed civilians, he explained, “The problem is that there has also been a lot of deceit on the other side using fighters disguised as civilians.” When Sebastian asked him about the Coalition’s poor planning, he said, “I’m not sure it was badly planned. I think the planning was to topple that regime and to neutralize its armed forces. . . . I’m sure sooner or later they’ll get a grip on that.” When Sebastian asked him whether he worried that the rights of detainees in Iraq would be trampled as they had been in Guantánamo, he answered, “I have no reason to presume that they will subject them to the same treatment.” And when Sebastian pushed him to answer whether the Iraqis were paying too high a price for freedom, he urged people to recall the twenty-four years of suffering under the prior regime. Sebastian eventually lost patience. “Is the human rights commissioner too scared to speak out against the United States?” he asked.73

  When Vieira de Mello and Prentice left the studio, they did not discuss the interview.“You could tell from his body language afterward that he knew how terrible it was,” Prentice recalls. “I didn’t see the point of telling him after the fact that he sucked.” At UN Headquarters in New York, the transcript of his appearance on HARDtalk was e-mailed from one outraged UN official to another. “With that interview,” one UN official remembers,“anyone who had suspicions about what Sergio was after or whether he was sucking up to the Americans got all the proof they needed.”

  Eighteen

  "DON’T ASK WHO STARTED THE FIRE”

  A VITAL ROLE?

  Once the Coalition invasion began, two questions consumed UN officials: Would Saddam Hussein put up a fight? And would the UN play a postwar political role in Iraq? While the U.S. and British embassies in Baghdad had been closed since 1991, the UN had maintained a continuous base of operations in Iraq since the Gulf War. Before the U.S.-led war more than a thousand expatriates worked in the country, partnering with some three thousand Iraqi staff.26

  At Headquarters in New York, UN senior staff had spent months debating whether and how they should be involved in the postwar “peace.”Annan feared that Washington’s marginalization of the UN over Iraq would detract from the organization’s overall global relevance, and this made him eager to find a way to get UN international staff back to Iraq as soon as possible. With his senior advisers he repeatedly stressed, “We have to prove we can do something useful.” Mark Malloch Brown, Vieira de Mello’s friend from their days together at UNHCR and now the head of the UN Development Program, agreed, arguing, “For Iraq’s sake, for the world’s sake, and for the UN’s sake, we can’t sit this out.” As Malloch Brown remembers,“There were lots of tactical conversations about how much of our virginity to lose, but the overwhelming majority of us felt that, if you’re the fire brigade, you don’t ask who started the fire and whether it is a moral fire before you get involved.”

  The under-secretaries-general for peacekeeping and political affairs, Jean-Marie Guéhenno and Kieran Prendergast, were more cautious.“It isn’t written anywhere in stone that the UN has to be deployed to every crisis,” said Guéhenno. Prendergast, who was strongly influenced by his American special assistant, forty-year-old Rick Hooper, argued that it was a mistake to chase “a role for role’s sake.” Hooper, who had attended the University of Damascus and spoke flawless Arabic, was known in UN circles for his strong views on Middle Eastern politics and for combining operational and strategic thinking. “We should look for the UN’s comparative advantage,” Hooper urged, “and not simply pick up whatever crumbs are thrown at us.”

  It seemed likely that Washington would eventually need to involve the UN, because the U.S. welcome would wear thin in Iraq, because a U.S. occupation would harm U.S. standing internationally, or because the United States would not want to foot the bill for Iraq’s reconstruction on its own.Vieira de Mello participated in these high-level UN discussions by speakerphone from Geneva. He believed that the Bush administration would turn back to the UN as soon as it achieved its military objectives. He knew better than anybody just how hard it was to manage postwar transitions, and he knew that the United States did not have the in-house expertise necessary to reintegrate the Iraqi military, facilitate the return of refugees, or plan elections. Whenever he was asked whether the Iraq war signaled the end of the UN, he would say of the Americans, “They will come back.”1

  Since late 2002 the British had been pressing the Americans to give the UN a prominent political role after the war. British prime minister Tony Blair, President Bush’s most trusted Coalition partner, knew that British voters were unenthusiastic about U.S. plans to run Iraq unilaterally. Polls in the Daily Telegraph showed that while British support for the war had risen to a high of 66 percent, only 2 percent of those polled supported the establishment of an American-controlled administration afterward.2 On April 3, two weeks into the war, British foreign secretary Jack Straw presented Secretary of State Colin Powell with a detailed “day after” occupation plan that envisaged the appointment of a powerful UN special envoy.3 If the UN ran the show, the plan showed, instead of paying for the occupation, the United States would be charged just 20 percent of the cost (its share of the UN peacekeeping budget).4 France and Germany naturally favored the British plan because, having opposed the war, they were dead set against the idea of leaving the Americans in charge of Iraq. France had proposed an arrangement like that after the 1999 Kosovo war, in which NATO had run the military operation and the UN, initially under Vieira de Mello, had overseen the political administration.5

  But the Bush administration rejected the British approach. The U.S. attitude was “We aren’t going to expend blood and treasure to have you decide who runs Iraq.” Bush’s top advisers did not think highly of the UN, both because of the Security Council’s refusal to endorse the war and because they looked down upon the UN’s past performances in the Balkans, Rwanda, Kosovo, and even East Timor, which elsewhere was seen as a success.6 In a speech in February 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld had said that the United States intende
d to avoid the kind of “nation-building” that the UN did. He faulted the UN performance in Kosovo.“They issue postage stamps, passports, driver’s licenses, and the like,” he said, “and decisions made by the local parliament are invalid without the signatures of the UN administrators.”7 In poverty-stricken East Timor, he continued, the UN had caused the capital city of Dili to become “one of the most expensive cities in Asia.” Restaurants there “cater to international workers who have salaries that are some two hundred times the average local wage,” he said.“In the city’s main supermarkets prices are reportedly on a par with London and New York.”8 Rumsfeld seemed to believe that the United States would simply be able to dislodge Saddam Hussein and walk away without itself getting involved in Iraqi affairs.

  In thinking about the war’s aftermath, other U.S. officials believed that they faced a trade-off between legitimacy and control, and they expressed a clear preference for control. Even Secretary Powell was insistent. “The Coalition, having taken the political risk and having paid the cost in lives, must have a leading role,” he said.9 Three weeks into the war, after their third summit in as many weeks, Bush and Blair could only agree that “the United Nations has a vital role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq.”10 Neither man specified what “vital role” meant. When journalists pressed Bush to clarify the meaning of the phrase, he grew irritated. “Evidently there’s some skepticism here in Europe about whether or not I mean what I say,” Bush said. “Saddam Hussein clearly knows I mean what I say. And a vital role for the United Nations means a vital role for the United Nations.”11 Paul Wolfowitz was more concrete, saying that the UN would perform humanitarian tasks. “The UN can be an important partner,” the deputy secretary of defense said. “But it can’t be the managing partner. It can’t be in charge.”12

  For all of their differences with Washington, Annan, Vieira de Mello, and other senior UN officials were actually in full agreement with the Bush administration that the UN should not run Iraq. In a March 21 memo, Annan’s top advisers argued that the UN should “resist and discourage” notions of a UN transitional administration, which would vastly exceed the UN’s capacity. In 2000 Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister, had released a highly touted report in which he culled the lessons of UN political and peacekeeping operations of the previous decade and concluded that the UN Secretariat needed to learn to “say no” to unachievable mandates. As Vieira de Mello had experienced firsthand in Bosnia and Kosovo, the UN too often took the fall for the wrongheaded decisions of the countries on the Security Council. When asked by a reporter whether the UN would be willing to run an Iraqi administration similar to those in East Timor and Kosovo, Annan replied, “Iraq is not East Timor and Iraq is not Kosovo. There are trained personnel, there is a reasonably effective civil service, there are engineers and others who can play a role in their own country.... Iraqis have to be responsible for their political future, and to control their own natural resources.”13

  As the speculation about the postwar phase began to heat up, Vieira de Mello began to wonder whether he might get pulled into the fray. His job in Geneva was frustrating him. In an e-mail to Peter Galbraith, he noted that he was still struggling to define his role, which was “not easy after three decades of operational, high-adrenaline stuff.”14 He complained to a journalist that a “succession of appointments, of meetings, of trips, deprive me of my freedom.”15 When Fabrizio Hochschild, his special assistant in Kosovo and East Timor, visited him in his plush new office, several times the size of his prior quarters, Hochschild brought his two-year-old son, Adam, who began playing in Vieira de Mello’s swirling desk chair. As the two friends got caught up, Adam suddenly began wailing at the top of his lungs. Hochschild did all he could to console him, but the boy cried on as if in agony. The high commissioner quipped, “At least someone knows how I feel.”

  In March 2003, shortly after he met with Bush, Vieira de Mello traveled to Brussels, where his friend Omar Bakhet was working. Bakhet set up a meeting with Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, but in the middle of their discussion, Prodi drifted to sleep. Leaving the meeting, Vieira de Mello erupted. “Fuck, Omar, this is what we are doing with our lives, putting up with this kind of garbage. He wouldn’t dare do that if I represented a Western country.” Bakhet tried to make light of the incident. “How do you think I feel, Sergio? This is my life here. Normally I bring blankets to meetings.” But his friend did not laugh. Bakhet recalls,“I felt like the flame in Sergio was dying slowly inside him.”

  Still, although office life had never suited him and he felt removed from the “action” on Iraq, Vieira de Mello was committed to finishing what he had started. He was planning a politically delicate trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories for the fall, and he was ready to use the political capital he had amassed in capitals throughout his career to elevate the profile of his office and of human rights. He was also determined to complete his divorce. When his name began to appear in the press as a possible candidate to be UN envoy in Iraq, he played it down. The April 1 edition of Development News, a World Bank publication, quoted a London Times article saying that the Americans saw him as their candidate. He forwarded the link to Larriera. “Here starts the speculation,” he wrote. “I must have serious enemies in the UK for someone to say this of me!”16 Since he had only just arrived in Geneva to take up the post of human rights commissioner, he did not think Annan would even consider removing him. A few days later he e-mailed Larriera an invitation that had been sent to him from the mayor of Geneva, who on June 7 would be hosting a reception in order to open five hundred bottles of wine. “Some good news,” he wrote her. “Let’s go!”17

  On April 9, a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad.The mood on the thirty-eighth floor at UN Headquarters, where most people had opposed the war, was not celebratory. One of the few UN officials who had backed the invasion was sickened. “They couldn’t step back, even for one day, to rejoice in the end of Saddam’s tyranny,” the official recalls. The Americans were triumphant. On May 1, 2003, President Bush made his infamous proclamation in front of a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”18 At a town hall meeting at a U.S. base in Qatar, an army officer asked Rumsfeld whether he had been “bombarded with apologetic phone calls” from his “doom and gloom” critics. Amid much laughter and applause, Rumsfeld responded: “There were a lot of hand-wringers around, weren’t there? You know, during World War II, I think Winston Churchill was talking about the Battle of Britain, and he said, ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’ A humorist in Washington the other day sent me a note paraphrasing that, and he said, ‘Never have so many been so wrong about so much.’ But I would never say that.”19

  Vieira de Mello hoped that the smugness of American decision-makers would be matched by competence on the ground. Battlefield success did not automatically translate into long-term stability, as the United States was already learning in Afghanistan. He was all too aware of how quickly progress could be reversed. As retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, said later, referring to the swift U.S. success in the initial conventional war in Iraq: “Ohio State beat Slippery Rock sixty-two to nothing. No shit.”20 Whether the American and British invasion would prove a lasting success would turn on whether the Americans could provide physical and economic security for Iraqis. And in this regard Vieira de Mello took note of the fact that nobody he had talked to at the UN, in Europe, or in the Bush administration seemed to be able to answer an essential question: After Saddam was defeated, who would run Iraq?

  AMERICAN RULE

  Administration officials had initially suggested that an Iraqi interim authority (split between Iraqi exiles and those who had stayed in Iraq and suffered under Saddam) would be chosen as soon as Coalition troops secured the country.21 After a summit meeting
with Prime Minister Blair in April, President Bush said, “I hear a lot of talk here about how we’re going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it. From day one, we have said the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country . . . It is a cynical world that says it’s impossible for the Iraqis to run themselves.”22 After his meeting with Bush in March, Vieira de Mello had met with National Security Adviser Rice, who told him that Washington hoped “very soon to identify technocrats who can help run the country.” She had insisted that people who claimed that President Bush intended to appoint a military governor “do not know what they are taking about,” adding, “We have no desire to be in Iraq longer than necessary.”23 Publicly, she said, “If Afghanistan is any guide, the people themselves will tell you, well, that person has been a leader.”24 As late as mid-May the Bush administration still imagined having a transitional Iraqi government composed of Iraqi exiles and internals in place by the end of the month.25