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

by Samantha Power

  At the time Vieira de Mello launched his learning tour, the Americans had little contact with Iraq’s religious leaders. His political officers believed that the UN could valuably contribute to stability if they could enlist the support of the powerful clerics, especially Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Salamé sent out feelers through Dr. Aquila al-Hashimi, a powerful Shiite Muslim in Baghdad who spoke fluent French and English and seemed likely to be named Iraq’s first ambassador to the UN. When she confirmed that her uncle, an influential cleric in Najaf, was willing to help arrange a meeting with al-Sistani,Vieira de Mello knew he had scored a coup. “Ya’llah!” he exclaimed.

  The politics of the June 28 trip were complex. “There are three forces in Najaf,” Salamé said, “the pope, Sistani; the black sheep, Moqtada al-Sadr; and the politician, Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. Ideally we would make three trips to Najaf.” Even Vieira de Mello had his limits, and he couldn’t imagine driving the two and a half hours there and back on three separate occasions. “Okay, we’ll meet with all three,” he said,“but we’ll have lunch with none of them.” They dined with al-Hashimi’s uncle, Sheikh Mohammed al-Faridhi, who had organized the visit.

  After meeting briefly with al-Faridhi at his home in Najaf, the delegation headed into a meeting that Vieira de Mello knew would be the most important of his time in Iraq. Al-Sistani brought a political agenda to the meeting that surprised his UN visitors. In a soft voice hardly more audible than a whisper, al-Sistani said the Americans had no business privatizing state-owned enterprises, as that was the job of a sovereign government. And he wanted the UN to act more autonomously from the Coalition. He said the organization should condemn a recent U.S. helicopter attack at the Syrian-Iraqi border.Vieira de Mello promised to look into the incident.

  The most important part of the discussion concerned the future Iraqi constitution. Al-Sistani said that he was planning to issue a fatwa that said that only Iraqis could write the founding charter. This was directed at Noah Feldman, the Arabic-speaking professor of constitutional and Islamic law at New York University who was said to be drafting Iraq’s constitution for the Coalition. “Samahet al Sayyid,” Vieira de Mello said, using the Arabic expression for “your eminence,” which he had rehearsed on the drive from Baghdad, “I understand you want the constitution written by Iraqis—” Al-Sistani cut him off. “I didn’t say the constitution should be written by Iraqis,” the cleric said sharply, clutching the hand of Marwan Ali, who was translating. “I said it should be written by elected Iraqis.” Vieira de Mello nodded and said that he had learned the same lesson in East Timor.

  Without realizing the significance of what he had said, Vieira de Mello had set himself up in direct opposition to the Coalition, which planned to appoint a committee of its own to draft the constitution. In one respect, his instinct to stand up to Bremer was the right one, as the Coalition was paying too little heed to just how discredited any U.S.-picked drafters of the constitution would be. But with his casual statement, the UN special representative had also implicitly raised expectations that elections could be held quickly, which was technically impossible. Al-Sistani would frequently refer to his meeting with Vieira de Mello when he insisted that only the decisions of elected Iraqis should be recognized as law. Bremer would be incensed. “It would take us months to undo the damage that Sergio did in that one meeting,” he recalls.

  After meeting with Sistani,Vieira de Mello was shown the sacred shrine where Imam Ali was buried. “I want to go into the mausoleum,” he said to Salamé, who shook his head, explaining that a bloody confrontation had occurred there a few weeks before. With the same enthusiasm with which he had snapped photos of the Khmer Rouge,Vieira de Mello pleaded, “No, Ghassan, we must. I may not get back here again.” Salamé asked al-Faridhi whether they might enter the mosque’s outer mausoleum, but Vieira de Mello pressed, “I want to go inside.” Salamé recalls al-Faridhi turning white with panic and begging them to leave quietly. A large group of Iraqis was gathering around the mysterious assemblage of foreigners. Some had begun murmuring to one another,“What are the foreigners doing here?” “Out now, Sergio,” Salamé said, firmly.“Why?” he asked. “Out now,” Salamé said. “Sergio was discovering the world of Iraq,” recalls a member of his UN team.“From an intellectual point of view, he wanted to see everything, and sometimes he was oblivious to the political sensitivities.”

  The UN team enjoyed a relatively relaxed lunch with al-Fahridi, then proceeded to their meeting with Moqtada al-Sadr, the twenty-something radical who was amassing a large and violent following and whom Bremer was shunning. When Vieira de Mello entered, al-Sadr sat on the ground chain-smoking, along with two of his religious aides.Vieira de Mello offered his usual introduction, describing the UN’s impartiality and expressing hope that the organization could help end the occupation that he knew al-Sadr opposed. Al-Sadr looked at him listlessly, refusing to respond. When the Iraqi finally spoke, he made plain that he knew nothing about the UN.“Can Muslim countries be members of the UN?” he asked. When Salamé said yes, he asked for examples, and Salamé told him his own country had been a founding member of the UN. Again al-Sadr lapsed into silence. After several more unsatisfying and awkward exchanges, the UN delegation got up to leave.

  In their final meeting in Najaf, the UN officials met with Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. In the 1960s al-Hakim and Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, the father-in-law of Moqtada, had founded the modern Shiite Islamic political movement in Iraq. When Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr was executed in 1980, al-Hakim fled to Iran and formed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He returned to Iraq in May 2003 and was denounced by Moqtada, who did not believe that he had a claim to Shiite political leadership.15 This meeting went far better, as al-Hakim was warm and personable. He explained Iraqi impatience with the Coalition by analogizing Iraq’s occupation to a cat that a man acquired in order to free his house of mice. “He got a cat, which got rid of the mouse,” al-Hakim said. But then, unfortunately, “the cat wouldn’t leave.”16

  On their drive back to Baghdad, Salamé congratulated Vieira de Mello on an impressive day establishing the UN’s distinct credentials, and he told him that their meeting with al-Sistani could prove important. “You know you made a big statement there,” he said, referring to his endorsement of al-Sistani’s electoral ground rule. Vieira de Mello punched Salamé playfully and resorted to what was becoming his favorite quip: “You know, Ghassan, I don’t want to become a Bremello!”

  Three days after the meeting al-Sistani issued his fatwa saying he would not recognize the legitimacy of any constitution that was not written by an elected Iraqi assembly. He also said that the UN had agreed with him. Bremer asked Vieira de Mello to refute the cleric’s claim as a misrepresentation of the UN position, but he refused, hoping that perhaps the Coalition would at least speed its election planning. In a note to a UN colleague soon thereafter, he sounded upbeat: “I feel confident that the UN will truly, as opposed to rhetorically, be able to play its ‘vital role’ in Iraq.”17

  POWER SHARING AND LEGITIMACY

  Over the years he had found that Americans tended not to appreciate the importance of legitimacy. He saw the toll the U.S. occupation was taking on Iraqi morale. “You need to be sure to accommodate Iraqi pride and Iraqi trauma,” he told Sawers.18 Iraqi patience would last longer, he stressed, if people received tangible, material dividends from the Coalition. But the Americans and British were not offering impressive returns. Jean-Sélim Kanaan, one of Vieira de Mello’s political aides, wrote letters to his wife, Laura Dolci-Kanaan, a UN official in Geneva, in which he reflected on the Americans he was encountering in the Green Zone:

  To see young fresh Americans sent from their virgin suburbs playing the sorcerer’s apprentices on questions as significant as the systems of pension, the national distribution networks of wages or the ministerial reorganization . . . is somewhat surreal . . .

  We pass from the doors on which panels were quickly posted that anno
unce triumphantly: “Minister of Health,” “Minister of Transportation.” Behind the door, one often finds seated a good American . . . He is the minister. It doesn’t matter that within five meters from there the revolt thunders and that he has practically no contact with the men and women in his ministry of supervision.

  But how could he? As soon as he wants to take three steps, he must be escorted by two overflowing vehicles of soldiers armed up to their teeth and often very nervous. He crosses the city without really seeing it . . . Iraq today is an occupied country, and poorly occupied.19

  Kanaan, whose father was Egyptian and mother was French, had been able to read and write Arabic since he was a child, but he had never mastered spoken Arabic. He had been thrilled to earn a spot on the A team, but in his phone calls home he described his mounting horror at American unpreparedness. “In the UN we’ve screwed up a lot of times,” Kanaan told his wife. “But for all of our mistakes in Bosnia and Kosovo, we were never this bad. The Americans had no plan. Absolutely no plan!”

  Vieira de Mello shared Kanaan’s horror at the Coalition’s blunders, but he also saw that the Americans’ lack of experience and competence created an opening for the UN. His team had genuine insight to offer on how to develop a power-sharing plan. “Iraqis need to know that they will get tangible, executive authority at the end of this first phase,” Vieira de Mello told Coalition officials.20

  The UN had a wealth of experience with elections, constitutions, and timetables for transitions. In their weekly meetings Vieira de Mello urged Bremer to begin planning for elections, which would take close to a year to organize. He appealed to him to present the Iraqi people with a transparent timeline that spelled out the process by which they would come to control their destinies. In East Timor he had come to regret his original failure to offer such a road map. He e-mailed Carina Perelli of the UN Electoral Assistance Division in New York and told her that he was pushing Bremer to launch a voter-registration drive, which would be “a tangible demonstration of intent by the CPA that its rhetoric about handing over sovereignty to a representative Iraqi government as soon as possible actually has substance.”21

  Seeing elections as a wedge into larger political influence for the UN, he asked Perelli to come to Baghdad to conduct a feasibility study. Most of the e-mail, which was copied to a variety of UN officials, was written in formal English, but knowing Perelli was in South America awaiting the birth of her niece,Vieira de Mello signed off in Spanish: “No me vengas con el cuento de que tenías vacaciones programadas en Montevideo: yo tenía planeado pasar tres semanas en Rio . . . !” (Don’t come to me with the story of how you had time off planned in Montevideo: I had planned to spend three weeks in Rio . . . !) As was his wont, he followed up often to be sure Perelli would come quickly. “It will be a breezy 50 degrees (Celsius!) [122 Fahrenheit] or higher in Baghdad by the time you come,” he wrote, “so you will need to wrap up warm.”22

  Bremer’s political plans raised a wide assortment of red flags with Vieira de Mello. He remembered the hostility that his creation of a nonexecutive, consultative body had engendered in East Timor, which was a relatively homogeneous society in comparison to Iraq. If Bremer gave the Iraqis on his new advisory council titles without responsibilities, they would be seen as American puppets. If Bremer handpicked the members of the new body, the same could be true. Decisions of whom to include and exclude would have unforeseen consequences, and foreigners were never well placed to anticipate them. On the other hand,Vieira de Mello appreciated Bremer’s predicament. Since it would take at least a year for Iraq to prepare for an election, and since the Security Council had put the Americans (and not the UN) in charge, Bremer saw it as his job to appoint some kind of Iraqi body quickly.

  Vieira de Mello offered a range of suggestions. He urged Bremer to rename his “consultative committee” the Iraqi “provisional government.” Bremer refused, but he eventually came around to the idea that Iraqis should not be relegated to the role of mere “advisers.” Vieira de Mello convinced Bremer that “council” carried a more authoritative air than “committee.” But that was not enough. “We need to signal executive powers,” the UN special representative said. Salamé, the only native Arabic speaker in the room, leaped in. “We should put hukm in the name,” Salamé said. In Arabic hukuma meant “government,” which would give the impression that the body would have power of its own. “As soon as I heard it,” Crocker recalls, “I thought, ‘How come we didn’t think of it ourselves?’” It was settled: The new body would be called majlis al-hukm, which was translated into English as “Governing Council.”

  Bremer sometimes changed his mind after consulting with Washington, and UN officials were not sure that the new name would stick. But at their next meeting with the CPA, Bremer began by asking, “When are we going to inaugurate the”—he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and continued—“the majlis al-hukm?” Salamé winked at Vieira de Mello.

  The functions of the Governing Council remained undefined.Vieira de Mello knew that the more independent governing responsibilities the new body exercised, the more the Iraqis would respect it. He urged Bremer to give it the power to manage foreign affairs, finance, security, and the constitutional process. He insisted that the Iraqis on the council be allowed to designate “ministers” and, crucially, that the council be given the power to approve the budget. But he knew he had to be careful about overreaching. “Resolution 1483 gave the UN almost no scope for maneuver,” recalls Salamé. “At any time the CPA could have told us, ‘You are trespassing,’ and they would have been right.”

  Deciding just who belonged on the twenty-five-member council was no easy task. Vieira de Mello, who had spent the previous six weeks building his Rolodex, served as an intermediary between Bremer and Iraqi political, religious, and civic leaders. He pushed Bremer to allow the secretary-general of the Communist Party, Hamid Majeed Mousa, to be included. He urged that Bremer take special care to maximize Sunni membership. Aquila al-Hashimi, who had helped to arrange Vieira de Mello’s meetings in Najaf, made the cut, becoming one of just three women on the council. And he was pleased by Bremer’s appointment of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of SCIRI, despite al-Hakim’s links to Iran. Only high-level Ba’athists were excluded.

  Vieira de Mello felt proud of his contributions to the Governing Council. In a cable back to UN Headquarters in early July, he wrote that “Bremer was at pains to state that our thinking had been influential on his recalibrations.” He noted that the CPA demonstrated a “growing understanding” that the “aspirations and frustrations of Iraqis need to be dealt with by greater empathy and accommodation and that the UN has a useful role to play in this regard.”23 Vieira de Mello saw it as a victory that only nine of the twenty-five Iraqi members of the body were exiles. But from the Iraqi perspective, six of the thirteen Shiite representatives and three of the five Sunnis were exiles, and neither the inclusion of five Kurdish representatives who had lived in northern Iraq under Saddam nor the addition of Turkmen or Christian representatives appeased the Sunni population.24 Vieira de Mello hailed the fact that the Governing Council had the power to appoint interim ministers and propose policies, but Iraqis saw that Bremer was left with the authority to veto any of the new body’s decisions.

  The UN staff were split again, this time on whether to embrace this new body. Vieira de Mello argued that, despite its manifest imperfections, the Governing Council was the “only game in town.”25 “We have to take the leap of faith,” he said. At last Iraq would have a recognized body, and the UN would be able to offer its services to it rather than to the Americans. “This is only a start,” he insisted. “But it is a necessary start in the same way the first mixed cabinet in East Timor was a start.”

  He attended the inauguration of the council on July 13, 2003.The members of the Governing Council acted as though they had not been appointed by the Coalition but had simply congealed into a body on their own. In a carefully staged visual the council summoned Bremer, Sawers, Crocker, a
nd Vieira de Mello and “self-proclaimed themselves.” Vieira de Mello was the only non-Iraqi asked to speak at the ceremony. Wearing a pale blue tie to remind the audience of the organization he represented, he began and closed his remarks in Arabic: “Usharifuni, an akouna ma’akum al-yaom. Wa urahhib bitashkeel majlis al-hokum.” Although he knew few words, he pronounced them effortlessly: “It is an honor to be with you today. And I welcome the formation of the Governing Council.” He hailed the gathering as the first major step toward the return of Iraqi sovereignty, and he pledged ongoing UN support. “We are here, in whatever form you wish, for as long as you want us,” he told the beaming council members.26 Crocker watched him admiringly. "He was wrapping the blue flag around what we were trying to do politically. I thought it was an act of real political courage. It was also an act of unbelievable physical courage, although we didn’t see it at the time.”