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

by Samantha Power

  This didn’t sit well with some of Vieira de Mello’s own staff. After the meeting in the Green Zone, he returned to the Canal Hotel to discuss the UN’s options with his staff. Benomar, one of his political advisers, urged him to declare publicly that the UN special representative believed the Coalition was in violation of Resolution 1483 because it had taken over the governing functions of Iraq. “We’ve got to take a stand,” the Moroccan argued. Marwan Ali, a Palestinian UN political aide who had attended university in Iraq, complained about the vagueness of the Security Council resolution, which offered no guidance on how the UN should interact with either the Americans or the Iraqis. “It’s constructive vagueness,” Vieira de Mello attempted. “There’s no such thing as constructive vagueness in Iraq,” Ali countered. “It’s just vague vagueness.” Most members of the team recognized that the CPA had established facts on the ground that the UN would not be able to alter. The majority felt that the only way the UN could make a meaningful difference in Iraq would be not to denounce the Coalition but to persuade it to alter its approach. Vieira de Mello sided with the pragmatists. “We can’t just sit at the Canal Hotel and do nothing,” he said. “You can’t help people from a distance.”

  In his meetings with American and British officials, he never focused on whether the Coalition should have been in Iraq in the first place. “Sergio didn’t bother himself with whether the war was right or wrong,” says Prentice. “The war was a fact.The occupation was a fact. You’ve got two choices when you have those facts: Either you can try to help the Iraqi people out of the mess and urge a swift end to the occupation. Or you can take the moral high ground and turn your back on it.” Throughout his career Vieira de Mello had often spoken of the importance of “black boxing” intentions. "By taking the Americans at their word, and then making them abide by those words,” he told colleagues, “you can create leverage.” This was what he had done with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and with the Serbs in Bosnia. It was also what the UN had done with Indonesia when Jakarta had agreed to a referendum in East Timor and then been forced to stand by the results.

  On his third night in Baghdad, Vieira de Mello had dinner with John Sawers, the British diplomat who served as Bremer’s deputy. Since it was still a relatively calm time, the two men sat out on the terrace in the open air, eating steaks and drinking Iraqi beer late into the evening. Vieira de Mello’s adult experience in the Islamic world had been confined to his tours of Sudan in 1973-74 and Lebanon in 1981-83. He spoke fluent English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish and mediocre Tetum (the Timorese dialect), but he spoke hardly a word of Arabic. Sawers noted Vieira de Mello’s self-consciousness about his linguistic handicap. “Here was one of the greatest linguists in the history of the UN system,” recalls Sawers, “and he could barely say hello and good-bye in Arabic. He was not pleased.”

  Vieira de Mello knew that most UN officials who had amassed Middle East experience had also acquired baggage. He consoled himself that as an outsider he might bring fresh eyes to the country’s challenges. His main asset wasn’t his Iraq-specific knowledge, but his problem-solving experience and his war-tested ability to charm thugs. Carina Perelli, the head of the UN Electoral Assistance Division, called him an “encantador de serpientes,” a mesmerizing charmer of even the most poisonous snakes. While dining with Sawers, Vieira de Mello offered a comparative perspective, speaking at length about what he took to be the lesson of East Timor. “The Timorese were okay with the UN in charge for a certain, brief period of time, but at a certain point we had to switch to a support role,” he said. “You’ll have to do the same.” In the early weeks of his time in Iraq, when Vieira de Mello had a suggestion to make, he would forward it to Sawers. “If Bremer thinks these are British ideas rather than UN ideas,” he liked to say, “they are far more likely to be accepted!” Sawers suggested that the UN co-locate with the Americans and the British in the Green Zone. But Vieira de Mello dismissed the idea, saying, “My instincts are to keep a degree of distance from the Coalition. And that will require some physical distance.”

  Nadia Younes, his chief of staff, managed the UN’s day-to-day ties with the Coalition. At the first large meeting between midlevel U.S. and UN officials in the Green Zone, Younes passed around copies of UN Resolution 1483, and the group went over the text line by line. The Americans looked flummoxed. “What does ‘encourage’ mean?” a U.S. official asked. “We don’t know,” Younes replied. “You wrote the thing!” Another U.S. official chimed in: “Well, it probably means that Sergio should issue a statement once a month praising the CPA.” It would take many more meetings for Coalition officials to see the UN role as anything more than either cosmetic or confrontational. For Bremer the resolution was useful because it made clear that there was only one ruler of Iraq: “We were the occupying authority.We were the sovereign. Under international law you are either sovereign or you are not. It’s like being pregnant. Under 1483 the role that Sergio and the UN could play was limited. They were there to help us.”

  While Vieira de Mello soon managed to win Bremer’s respect (if never his full trust), other U.S. officials remained suspicious of the UN. In late June Vieira de Mello was stopped at a Coalition checkpoint on the airport road. Alain Chergui, who was part of his team of bodyguards, told a U.S. soldier that under international rules UN vehicles were not to be checked. The young soldier refused to let the UN convoy pass. “Do you know who is in the car?” Chergui said, frustrated. “No, and I don’t care,” the soldier replied. Chergui called Patrick Kennedy, Bremer’s chief of staff, who agreed to intervene. But Chergui got nowhere when he told the soldier who was on the line. “Is he civilian?” the soldier asked. Chergui nodded. “Then I don’t give a shit.” When Ibrahim,Vieira de Mello’s more hot-tempered bodyguard, began to pick a fight with another one of the Coalition soldiers, the special representative finally stepped out of the car and placed a call to Bremer, who reached somebody in the military chain of command, who eventually ordered the convoy through. On subsequent occasions when the UN bodyguards (several of whom were French and thus believed the Americans were deliberately hostile) ended up in quarrels, Chergui told his colleagues to muzzle their fury. “You have to stay cool, or we will impair Sergio’s job for silly reasons,” he said. “The Americans don’t want us here to begin with. We are playing in their garden.”

  The mistrust was mutual. Almost all UN staff had opposed the U.S.-led invasion. They thought that the Coalition staff, who were vetted by Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon, were frighteningly young and inexperienced. Most were Republicans, and many dreamed aloud of turning Iraq into a free market laboratory. A growing number had adopted Bremer’s dress code, trudging around in khakis, blue blazers, and desert combat boots. While two-thirds of Vieira de Mello’s closest advisers spoke Arabic, very few in Bremer’s senior circle did.9

  Jeff Davie, a colonel in the Australian Defense Forces who served as Vieira de Mello’s military adviser, experienced this mutual suspicion firsthand. When Davie first reached Baghdad, his suitcases carrying his regular Australian military uniform lagged behind, and he wore civilian clothes. UN officials embraced him, as he provided invaluable insight into the Coalition, of which Australia was a member. But ten days into his posting, his Australian khakis arrived, and he began wearing them to work, along with his blue beret. UN staff were horrified. “Suddenly they saw a Coalition soldier emerging out of the office next to Sergio’s. I looked like a fifth columnist,” he recalls. “They couldn’t believe Sergio would hire somebody like me.” The reception was no warmer over in the Green Zone. He remembers, “The Coalition said, ‘You’re wearing a blue beret; we can’t trust you,’ and the UN staff said, ‘You’re wearing a Coalition uniform; we can’t trust you.’ ”

  LAW AND ORDER GAP

  Looking back, it is almost impossible to recall the brief period, between early April and late June 2003, when Iraq was a relatively peaceful place. The two months after Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled to the ground by Am
erican soldiers brought some joyous scenes of Iraqis celebrating the toppling of the tyrant and some traumatic scenes in which families located the remains of missing relatives. But mainly those two months brought creeping uncertainty and shock that the Coalition wasn’t more organized.

  The Baghdad that Vieira de Mello and his team entered was nowhere near as dangerous as Khmer Rouge territory in 1992, besieged Sarajevo in 1993, or war-torn Kosovo in May 1999. The Iraqis that Vieira de Mello met were worried about theft, unemployment, lack of electricity, and the indignity of a foreign occupation, but they were not worried about an imminent civil war or suicide bomb attacks. A nascent insurgency was afoot, but it was Coalition forces who were being targeted, and it initially seemed as though the attacks were a last gasp by the prior regime. In a few short months the attacks on “soft targets” in Baghdad would grow so frequent that the city outside the small Green Zone would become known as the Red Zone. But that was not the Iraq of June 2003.

  Typically the head of a UN mission (here, Vieira de Mello) automatically assumed the role of “designated security official” and bore the ultimate responsibility for staff safety. But since Lopes da Silva already carried the title from having run the UN humanitarian mission before the war, and since Vieira de Mello would be on the road constantly and was to remain in Iraq only until September 30, Lopes da Silva retained the security reins. “I’m here for four months,” Vieira de Mello told his colleague. “Don’t try to get me involved in that!”

  The biggest concern preoccupying Iraqis and internationals alike was crime, which was not unusual after the fall of a regime.10 Vieira de Mello and Lopes da Silva were worried that UN staff would be robbed or accidentally caught near Coalition personnel who came under fire.“Our biggest fear was ‘wrong place, wrong time’ incidents,” Lopes da Silva remembers.

  While Lopes da Silva offered the last word on security within the mission, Robert Adolph, an ex-U.S. Marine, was day-to-day security coordinator. One of Adolph’s first tasks was to find secure accommodation for UN staff in Baghdad, which proved difficult. Most hotels seemed infiltrated with shady characters from the past regime or woefully exposed.The first batch of UN arrivals had slept under their desks at the Canal and then moved out into a “tent city” in the field adjoining UN headquarters. On May 28 Adolph had announced that UN staff were permitted to leave the Canal premises and take up rooms in one of a dozen hotels that his team had cleared. It was assumed that UN staff would live in hotels only temporarily. Once security improved and crime subsided, the staff would likely rent their own private apartments or houses as they had in other UN missions.

  Vieira de Mello was given a suite on one of the top floors of the Sheraton Hotel, where the elevators rarely worked, and he felt vulnerable.“How would I make it down all these stairs if the hotel were hit?” he asked Chergui, his bodyguard. “It is insecure and insecurable,” Chergui said. Vieira de Mello insisted that he be moved to the less trafficked Cedar Hotel, which he was in late June.11

  In Saddam Hussein’s day Iraq had been virtually crime free, and the UN base at the Canal Hotel, guarded by Iraqi diplomatic police, had been safe. When Lopes da Silva returned to his old office on May 1, he had found the Iraqi guards gone and U.S. troops from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment using the Canal as their command headquarters. He was told that back in April, in the wake of the U.S. takeover, local looters had pounced on the then-deserted Canal and begun ransacking it, stealing cars, desks, computers, air conditioners, and all else they could pilfer. U.S. soldiers had ended up taking over the hotel because a group of Iraqi UN staff had emerged from hiding and hailed them to come and stop the rampage. With the return of the UN’s humanitarian and Oil for Food Program staff in May and the arrival of Vieira de Mello’s small political team in June, the American presence had been reduced to a light shield around the perimeter of the compound. Unarmed Iraqis manned the front gates. Iraqis entered and exited all day, meeting UN staff in the cafeteria for tea and coffee. It was as easy to enter as the U.S. embassy in Beirut had been two decades before. As was the case with most halfhearted security measures, the UN guards inconvenienced without deterring or impeding.

  Veteran security officers were concerned that if a bomb aimed at Coalition forces went off nearby, it might shatter some of the Canal Hotel’s many glass windows. Indeed, five days before Vieira de Mello’s arrival, Coalition forces near the Canal had exploded ordnance that broke several. When a building survey revealed that some 1,260 square meters of the Canal’s outer glass was exposed, the UN Security Management Team (SMT) resolved to cover up the windows with blast-resistant film. But because it was not clear which administrative budget should cover the expense, the matter was deferred.12 Lopes da Silva and Adolph also found that the perimeter fencing around the complex had numerous breaches and ordered the construction of a wall to enclose the Canal. The wall would be thirteen feet high with spiking on top. But because elaborate UN rules required an open bidding process, it would take six weeks to award the construction contract.13

  Iraq’s law-and-order problem grew more severe by the day. Because of his de-Ba’athification and demobilization decrees, Bremer had alienated the very Iraqi forces that might have maintained security. Because Secretary Rumsfeld had sent in too few U.S. troops to control Iraq’s borders and blanket the country, foreign insurgents passed easily in and out of Iraq from Iran and Syria. And because of the absence of support in the UN Security Council for the war, other UN member states did not chip in postwar stability forces or civilian police in the way they had done for the peacekeeping missions in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor.The ministries that kept Iraqi garbage collected, buses running, and electricity intact were now run by American and British citizens who neither spoke Arabic nor had ever managed such tasks in the United States or the U.K. And the unemployed Iraqi ex-army officers, who had been assured by Jay Garner that they would retain their jobs, felt betrayed by the Coalition. Since the Coalition had no Iraqi security partner, it had to build a brand-new security force from scratch. And now it had a new concern: The soldiers in the old army had kept their guns.

  Vieira de Mello urged Bremer to scale back the de-Ba’athification edict and to meet the needs of the Iraqi army veterans. He reminded the U.S. administrator that all over the world UN officials had amassed experience setting up programs to reintegrate demobilized soldiers. Most promisingly, in one meeting he told Bremer that the top adviser to Javier Solana, the secretary-general of the European Union, had written to the UN to make an as-yet-informal offer of Spanish civil guards, Italian carabinieri, and French gendarmerie. Instead of eagerly seizing the opportunity, which might have lightened the U.S. load, Bremer said that if the Europeans wanted to contribute police, they would have to place them at the disposal of the Coalition.14

  Each time Vieira de Mello visited Bremer in the Green Zone, it had grown more fortified. Sandbags piled up around the outer entrance, and the lines of Iraqis attempting to get inside twisted farther into the distance. At the Canal Hotel, by contrast, Iraqis could just walk up to the guard booth and request entry. If somebody inside vouched for the visitor, he or she was ushered inside and steered to the appropriate UN staffer, who would hear his or her complaint or request. Iraq was a country riddled by grievances, past and present. Once it became known that the UN (unlike the CPA) would not A former Iraqi soldier outside the Green Zone, June 18, 2003. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed that U.S. soldiers killed two Iraqis during the demonstration.

  turn Iraqi petitioners away, ousted Ba’ath party members, demobilized officers, and relatives of those detained by Coalition forces began gathering at the Canal gate in the hopes of securing redress.

  On June 18 some two thousand former Iraqi officers gathered outside the Green Zone to protest the disbanding of the army. While the protest raged, a small group of officers peeled off and made their way to the Canal Hotel in the hopes of convincing Vieira de Mello to help them get reinstated. He promised he would serve as an int
ermediary with Bremer. But Bremer rejected Vieira de Mello’s appeals, and when Salamé relayed the news to the officers, they turned and walked away from the Canal. “There go the future insurgents,” Benomar said to Salamé, who nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see bullets in their eyes.”

  LEARNING TOUR

  In order to be of actual use to Bremer and to Iraq,Vieira de Mello felt he needed to learn a lot in a hurry. In his early weeks he deliberately refrained from speaking to the media. When he finally gave his first major press conference on June 24, 2003, he explained, “You may have noticed that over the past three weeks I have been rather quiet. That is because I have been listening, traveling, and learning.” Mortified that Bremer had ordered de-Ba’athification and demobilization after spending so little time in Iraq, Vieira de Mello was determined to look before he leaped. When he set out to learn, he did not learn on the fly. He developed a game plan that would enable him to glean the needs and interests of the Iraqis systematically. “Okay, who am I meeting today?” he would ask his staff in the morning. They had divided Iraqi society into categories: political parties, professional associations, nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups, lawyers, judges, women’s groups, and religious groups. Once he had made his way through the list of Baghdad contacts, he announced, “Okay, now I’m heading out to the regions.” Influential Iraqis were identified in Basra, Mosul, Erbil, Sulaimaniya, Hilla, and Najaf. “Bremer didn’t have time to talk to people,” Salamé recalls. “Because Resolution 1483 gave the UN no real tasks, we had all the time in the world to listen.”