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

by Samantha Power

  Vieira de Mello knew that some on his staff would have preferred for him to avoid any association with the Coalition. He continued to have heated exchanges with Marwan Ali, his political aide. “Sergio, don’t you see, you’re not changing the Americans.You are helping the Americans.” But Vieira de Mello believed he was making progress and that Bremer could still go either way. The two men were getting along well. They were both handsome, charismatic, hyperachieving workaholics who knew how to take charge. Although Bremer had close ties to the neoconservatives, who were known for their anti-UN fervor,Vieira de Mello believed that Bremer was cut from a different cloth because he spoke French, Dutch, and Norwegian. This gift for languages testified to a curiosity and a breadth of perspective that he did not often find among Americans. “I’ve been giving Bremer advice on how to manage the hurt pride of the Iraqis,” he told Jonathan Steele of the Guardian. “There’s been a gradual change in him. Everything I’m telling you, he buys.” Although Vieira de Mello had resisted his appointment to Iraq, he found the first two months of the mission exhilarating. He felt as though he was actually making inroads with the Coalition and with the Iraqis, and he naturally loved being at the center of what felt like the geopolitical universe. In an e-mail he asked Peter Galbraith why he intended to spend just a single day in Baghdad, noting that the Iraqi capital was where things were “happening . . . good and bad.”27

  Occasionally, though, he grew frustrated over Bremer’s mixed messages. He complained about the “5 p.m. syndrome,” where, he said, “I have my Bremer till 5 p.m. [or 9 a.m. D.C. time], and after 5 p.m. Washington has its Bremer.”28 But because of his own experience being micromanaged by UN Headquarters, he sympathized with the “long screwdriver” that Bremer fought off from his higher-ups in the United States. “Bremer will succeed if he makes himself Iraq’s man in Washington rather than Washington’s man in Iraq,” he told the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran over a drink. He had saved the UN mission in East Timor only by coming to that realization himself.

  In conversations with visitors at this time, he swung between two extremes. On the one hand he acknowledged that the UN was a “minor player” on the scene and confessed embarrassment at its “total lack of authority.” He frequently reminded visitors: “The UN is not in charge here. The Coalition is.” But he also stressed, perhaps to convince himself, that the United Nations would not be “a rubber-stamping organization for whatever the military occupiers decide,” and he insisted that many Iraqis saw the UN as the guardian and promoter of Iraqi sovereignty.29 He believed that the UN role would expand over time, and he expected it would be the United Nations that would help organize the country’s first free elections. He was convinced that no other body could meet twenty-first-century challenges.“Iraq is a test for both the United States and for the UN,” he said in an interview with a French journalist in Baghdad. “The world has become too complex for only one country, whatever its might, to determine the future or the destiny of humanity. The United States will realize that it is in its interest to exert its power through this multilateral filter that gives it credibility, acceptability and legitimacy. The era of empire is finished.”30 While he was correct that the United States would eventually need the UN in Iraq, he was wrong in thinking that Washington was close to recognizing this.

  On July 21, he flew to New York, where he briefed the Security Council the following day. Defending the Governing Council’s representativeness, he stressed,“What the Council needs at present is not expressions of doubt; it is not skepticism, it is not criticism, that is too easy. What it needs is Iraqi support [and] ... the support of neighboring countries.”31 Resolution 1483 had given the UN almost no formal authority, but he genuinely believed that his small political mission had made a tangible difference. “Can you believe we stretched our marginal mandate as far as we did?” he asked Salamé.

  Despite his optimism, one thing worried him: the deteriorating security climate. “The United Nations presence in Iraq remains vulnerable to any who would seek to target our organization,” he said in his remarks before the Security Council. “Our security continues to rely significantly on the reputation of the United Nations, our ability to demonstrate, meaningfully, that we are in Iraq to assist its people.” Two days before his testimony an Iraqi driver with the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) had died in Mosul when he swerved into a bus in an effort to evade the gunfire coming from a passing car. And on the very day Vieira de Mello testified, a Sri Lankan with the International Committee of the Red Cross had been killed south of Baghdad.Vieira de Mello mentioned both attacks in his testimony and stressed that the Coalition bore responsibility for security. As he wound down his remarks, a woman in the gallery shouted out her criticism of the Governing Council. “This is not a legitimate body,” she yelled, “and you know that!” In the press briefing afterward, a reporter asked Vieira de Mello to elaborate on his security concerns. He said that the Shiite south and mainly Kurdish north were peaceful. “What you have is a triangle, Baghdad, the north and the west, that are particularly dangerous and risky for Coalition forces. And more recently I’m afraid for internationals as well.”32 These were Vieira de Mello’s last words on the record before returning to Iraq.

  Twenty

  REBUFFED

  The first gathering of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad, July 13, 2003.

  “LIKE A VICTORIAN PARLOR MAID”

  After Vieira de Mello helped Bremer with the formation of the Governing Council, his influence diminished and his renowned political instincts let him down.The Coalition had relied on him in late June because he brought expertise on political transitions and because he had familiarity and credibility with a variety of Iraqi political and religious forces. But paradoxically, by serving as a talent spotter, he had made himself dispensable. Once Bremer was able to work directly with the Governing Council, he had less need for a UN intermediary. Similarly, prominent Iraqis who had previously used Vieira de Mello to convey their views to Bremer found it easier to negotiate directly with the Americans.

  Vieira de Mello was sad to see Ryan Crocker and British ambassador John Sawers leave Baghdad at the end of July. Bremer was surrounding himself with advisers who seemed more hostile to the UN. Vieira de Mello told one visitor that “the more neocon side of Jerry’s personality” was emerging.1

  While in New York, after briefing the Security Council, he had turned up in the office of his colleague Kieran Prendergast and plopped down on Prendergast’s couch. “My god,” he had said, “I need a drink.” He and Prendergast were not friends, but the two men had worked together more closely while he was in Iraq than they had before. Prendergast produced a bottle of Mongolian vodka with golden flecks inside that an aide had brought back from a recent trip. “That looks awful,” Vieira de Mello said, “but it will do.” After taking several swigs of the spirit, he said that the Americans and Iraqis were already showing signs of losing interest in UN help. Then sure enough, as soon as he got back to Baghdad, the Iraqis on the Governing Council began prevaricating and delaying when he tried to meet with them. They told him that he was welcome to join them after an upcoming lunch with Bremer, while coffee was being served.“He was like a Victorian parlor maid,” recalls Prendergast. “Seduced and discarded.”

  Vieira de Mello had hoped the Iraqis on the Governing Council would rise to the occasion and actually govern by exercising the limited authority they had been given. But they were doing the opposite, spending most of their time squabbling. He suggested the council would be better off if it were funded by the UN (rather than the United States and the U.K.) and if it received assistance from UN technical advisers. But Iraqi council members were not interested. He wrote to Headquarters that their behavior did “not indicate a particular willingness for compromise.”2 They seemed woefully out of touch with ordinary Iraqis and were operating, he complained, “in a kind of cocoon.”3

  But if the choice was between absolute U.S. rule and flaw
ed Iraqi rule, Vieira de Mello would take the Governing Council. To persuade Iraq’s neighbors to give the council “the benefit of the doubt,” he went on a whirlwind tour of the region. On a trip to Turkey, he met with the Turkish and Indian foreign ministers. He visited Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. More than three years before the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton) would urge the Bush administration to enlist Iraq’s neighbors, he tried to do so, flying to Damascus and Tehran to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and President Mohammad Khatami. In Amman he met with the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan. And in Egypt he met with Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League.

  Vieira de Mello knew he was a more palatable salesman than any American and than certain members of the Governing Council itself. Nonetheless he had to be careful not to come across as a handmaiden to the occupation. When Arab journalists quizzed him as to whether the UN was there as “just a cover to the American invasion,” his temper flared: “The UN, its secretary-general, and the SRSG [Special Representative of the Secretary-General] are no tool and no cover for anyone. We are an independent organization. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and myself are independent from anyone. So do not suggest for any second that we are there supporting the United States or the Coalition.”4 He rejected the charge that the Governing Council had been “handpicked” by the Americans. In fact, he insisted, the council was “as representative an institution of governance as one could imagine in the Iraq of today.” Those Arab governments that faulted the Governing Council because it had not been elected, he wrote in a draft op-ed he hoped to publish in the region, “should be prepared to promote the same principle in their domestic constituencies.”5 He convinced himself that he was making progress, as several Arab governments said that they were prepared to support the council if the occupiers really let it govern.

  His sales tour alarmed his staff in Baghdad and friends around the world who read about it. An August 2003 Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Iraqis thought that the policies of the Governing Council were “mostly determined” by the United States and the U.K., while only 16 percent deemed the body “fairly independent.”6 “Here you had Sergio in public saying, ‘I helped create this Governing Council. I support this Governing Council,’ ” recalls Ramiro Lopes da Silva, his deputy in Baghdad. “And then the Governing Council did not really attempt to represent the concerns of the Iraqi population, as the members were probably more concerned with themselves. How did that make the UN look?” Timur Goksel, who was still spokesman for the UN in Lebanon some two decades after he had worked with Vieira de Mello in Naqoura, was shocked to hear Vieira de Mello’s defense of the council on Arab television. “I thought maybe he felt a bit too secure in Iraq,” Goksel recalls. “I thought something was going wrong. He dressed like an administrator. He talked like an administrator. He looked like one of them.” Goksel sent an e-mail to his friend urging him to break away from the formal structures and do as they had done in Lebanon. “Go to the coffee shops, Sergio,” he recalls writing. “Reach out to the men with the guns.” Omar Bakhet got in touch with Vieira de Mello to deliver the same message. Bakhet appealed to him to “stop trying to carve out a political role for yourself. No one in the Middle East is innocent.”

  But Vieira de Mello had invested too much to give up on the nascent council. Despite the evidence he saw daily, he told himself it would eventually succeed. “I wouldn’t be touring countries in the region trying to sell the Governing Council if I didn’t believe what I’m saying,” he told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The last thing I need and the organization needs is to be marketing the interests of the United States.”7

  But the Iraqi political landscape was changing in ways that he did not appreciate. Moqtada al-Sadr and other militants were gaining clout because they were delivering social services and physical security that the Coalition was not. While Vieira de Mello was selling the council in July, al-Sadr had taken to demanding its dissolution. He said that the Hawza, or the Shiite religious authority, should run Iraq, and on July 25 he gathered tens of thousands of Shiites in Najaf to show his strength and urge an end of the occupation. “The Iraqi Governing Council was set up by the Americans, and it must be disbanded,” al-Sadr told his followers.8

  Vieira de Mello knew that in the three key areas where the Coalition was foundering—power sharing, policing, and economic development—the UN had made grave mistakes but had amassed unique expertise.Yet, to his amazement, the Coalition seemed uninterested in tapping it. On the law-and-order side, he liked to repeat what he had learned through years of frustration: “Soldiers make bad policemen.”Although the UN had trained local policemen in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the Coalition did not request its assistance. Instead, the CPA gave a $50 million contract to DynCorp International, which was originally supposed to send six thousand trainers, but which eventually set just five hundred. One police chief from North Carolina, Jon Villanova, was given a staff of forty to train twenty thousand Iraqi policemen.9 Electricity, water, and other utilities operated intermittently at best, lagging far behind public expectations. Vieira de Mello reminded Bremer that much of Kosovo and all of East Timor had been burned to the ground when the UN arrived, but the UN administrations had eventually managed to mobilize the resources needed for recovery. Still, Bremer seemed unreceptive to UN advice. “We could have helped,” Vieira de Mello told Packer in August. “We still can,” he said. “There’s still time.”10

  The one issue on which Vieira de Mello and Bremer clashed heatedly was the rights of detainees in U.S. custody. In Cambodia, Congo, and East Timor,Vieira de Mello had feuded with his friend Dennis McNamara over human rights issues. But in Iraq he behaved like the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that he had reluctantly become. He talked constantly of “bringing the high commissioner’s post to the field.” He behaved as though he had acquired a new pride in, and perhaps a new understanding of, his Geneva job, as he saw that violations of human rights were the cornerstone of all that had been wrong with Saddam Hussein’s reign and all that could go wrong under the Coalition. “The moment we landed in Iraq,” recalls Mona Rishmawi, a UN human rights adviser, “he was a different man.” “Some people think that human rights are the UN’s soft underbelly,” he told aides. “But Iraqis know that human rights conditions will make or break Iraq.”

  On July 15, 2003, he and Bremer were scheduled to discuss detainees. Sawers had counseled him to raise any concerns about excessive use of U.S. military force or prison conditions, not by criticizing but instead by asking Bremer, “How will you deal with criticisms?”11 It was the only meeting in the Green Zone from which Bremer insisted on barring Prentice and Salamé. Vieira de Mello inquired about the conditions of the thousands of prisoners at the Baghdad airport who were crammed into inhumane facilities. He stressed the importance of creating a database for Iraqis in detention, and just as he had done with President Bush in March, he asked that family members and lawyers be granted access to the detainees. He urged that the detention period be reduced from twenty-one days to seventy-two hours, that status review be instituted, and that something like a public defender system be created. “I’m not accusing your soldiers of abuse,” he told Bremer. “I’m saying you don’t have the checks and balances in place to guard against abuse.” Bremer said he undertood the UN position but felt that it was being unjustly biased by “the Palestinian on your staff.” He was referring to Rishmawi, who carried a Jordanian passport but was of Palestinian descent and at recent international gatherings had been critical of U.S. detention practices. Vieira de Mello defended Rishmawi, who accompanied him to the meeting and was waiting outside. He argued that the Coalition was harming its own cause with its reckless approach to detainee issues. Nearly a year passed before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, forcing Bremer to address Rishmawi’s criticisms on the merits. Vieira de Mello was the first international official to warn Bremer of the potential for grave abuse and national embarrassment.
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br />   At a subsequent meeting with Bremer he brought with him a local newspaper clipping that carried a photo of Iraqis who had been hooded in U.S. detention.“This is incredible,” he said, but Bremer looked confused.“What’s wrong with hooding?” he asked. Knowing that Coalition commander General Ricardo Sanchez and Bremer frequently clashed over their interlocking responsibilities,Vieira de Mello raised detainee practices with Sanchez as well, requesting that the UN be given the right to inspect U.S. prison facilities. Sanchez said he thought such external monitoring unnecessary. "My troops are among the best in the world,” he said.“I want to maintain these standards. I am proud of my troops, and I intend to remain proud of them.”

  Throughout his career Vieira de Mello had always liked to be liked. On the issue of detainees, he conveyed all of his complaints to the Americans in private, at no time speaking out publicly. When he pushed for a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison, which the Coalition had renovated and reopened on August 4, he asked Bremer to accompany him.The morning of the visit, he presented Bremer with a cartoon he had cut out of the International Herald Tribune.The cartoon, The Wizard of Id, depicted the king who lived in isolation from his people, inspecting conditions in the dungeon. Entering the dungeon, the king was escorted by a guard into the dining area, where he was shown the types of “swill” from which prisoners could choose: “swill,” “fat-free swill,” “vegetarian swill,” and “kosher swill.” The guard explained: “The human rights people are coming in the morning.” Vieira de Mello convinced himself that his private pressure was paying dividends. He told reporters that a central data bank for detainees was in the works, showers had been built for four hundred of the Iraqis detained in sweltering tents, proper prison buildings would soon replace the tents, and the number of juvenile detainees in Baghdad had dropped from 172 to 30. But however much he hoped for progress, he could not get either Bremer or Sanchez to prioritize the fate of detainees.