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

by Samantha Power

  Vieira de Mello saw that frustrated countries were increasingly working around UN gridlock and assembling in smaller bodies according to geography or shared interests. Believing there were more than enough deadly challenges to go around, he generally treated security and development initiatives outside the UN not as competitors, but as partners. But he was irritated by what he saw as a tendency to romanticize such initiatives, whose success would turn on some of the very same member states that had proven unreliable in the UN. Whatever the precise shape or composition of an international grouping, he argued, if the countries inside these bodies didn’t change, many of the UN’s weaknesses—diplomatic gridlock, bureaucratic red tape, or insufficient political will—would undermine their performance. In his view, there was no silver bullet or reform “fix” on the horizon. There was only the messy, thankless work of trying to change states’ perceptions of their interests. When countries like the United States began speaking of bypassing the UN—and building a new, more amicable “community of democracies”—he understood the appeal. After all, the UN itself was initially founded as a club for like-minded countries. But in the long run he did not see how global threats could be tackled without engaging undemocratic states or rogue nations. Since all of the looming challenges crossed borders, states would have to cooperate and burden-share, and the United Nations remained the only international institution that gathered representatives from all countries in one place.

  Vieira de Mello knew from his own journey that when the countries on the Security Council were united and determined to enforce peace and security, his peacemaking or state-building missions stood far higher odds of bringing results. If powerful countries were divided or, as often happened, if their attention wandered, the belligerents and spoilers took heed. “The UN is an instrument, a frame, an engine,” he noted. It would be “as dynamic, as conciliatory, as innovative, as successful” as governments “wish it, allow it, make it be.”4 But just how dynamic or successful did they wish it to be?

  The UN did not create global divisions among rich and poor, secular and religious, urban and rural, modern and traditional. But because the UN is the only global meeting place, those tensions play themselves out in its decision-making chambers. Today, almost five years after Vieira de Mello’s death, just when consensus is most needed, the Security Council is more divided than it has been since the end of the cold war. China, which rarely asserted itself at the UN during most of Vieira de Mello’s career, is “coming out” economically and geopolitically.While many Western leaders hail the erosion of sovereignty in a globalized world, China clings to it, contending that others have no business meddling in its or anybody else’s domestic affairs.

  China is not alone. The so-called petro-authoritarian countries, led by Russia, have rolled back their democratic domestic gains and begun leveraging their natural resources to bully their neighbors. European powers still seem confused about how to make use of their newfound collective weight. And the United States, because of its war in Iraq, its disavowal of international legal constraints, and the abuses carried out in its counterterrorism efforts, commands little respect around the world and has increasing difficulty summoning support in international settings. The erosion of U.S. influence, combined with the new assertiveness of countries that do not see their own interests as advanced by improving the living conditions of others, means that UN negotiations on security and human rights issues are commonly yielding even greater theatrics and stalemates than in Vieira de Mello’s day.

  Vieira de Mello was exasperated by the fact that the UN’s loudest critics were politicians from the very countries that had assigned the UN impossible tasks and then starved it of resources or refused to loan it topflight personnel. “I’d like to see them try it!” he would exclaim, when some simpleminded jab reached him in a remote outpost. In the last few years of his life he pushed back, trying to draw the attention of the media and the public to their own governments. Early in his career, working in Sudan, Cyprus, and Mozambique, he had taken satisfaction from the fact that his agency could put up tents, feed refugees, and remind governments of their humanitarian obligations. Later, in Bosnia and Rwanda too, he acted on the UN’s humanitarian imperative, helping ensure that hundreds of thousands of victims received food and shelter. But after the massacres in those countries he began speaking out against governments that were using humanitarian aid to avoid dealing with the deeper political and economic causes of violence and death. He likened aid workers to ambulance drivers and complained that they were being treated as though they alone should prevent road deaths. “Little is done to ensure the proper state of the roads, control drunken driving, introduce speed limits, and enforce safety standards,” he argued.5 The aid groups and UN actors who stepped in to offer succor, he noted, “distract attention and divert responsibility from those who are in a position to bring about change: political actors.”6

  Again and again for Vieira de Mello, political actors were the key. He saw that the UN’s inadequacies, which were many, were those of the world. Instead of relying on “the UN” to change the countries of the world, he believed, the countries of the world would have to change in order to transform the UN. But at the time of his death, global insecurity was causing those countries to dig in and finger-point rather than to compromise and pool their resources to tackle common problems. He wondered what it would take for a truly United Nations to emerge. “Given the intransigence of human stupidity,” he said, “maybe we have to wait for an extra-planetary threat, like in the science fiction films, for the United Nations to finally realize their mission.” He hoped that it would not take an external threat to concentrate the minds of citizens and their leaders, but he found it alarming that contemporary dangers were not “rational imperatives” sufficient to galvanize unity or real commitments.7

  FIXING THE SYSTEM

  In Western countries today transnational threats could serve as the uniting forces that Vieira de Mello thought were necessary. But while these mortal concerns have begun to reorient governments toward international institutions, thus far they have mostly raised alarms without prompting changes in individual or state behavior.

  He once said, “The future is to be invented.” With the seeming rise in irrationality and rage in an increasingly interconnected world, a better future might be invented if citizens and governments took heed of the key lessons of Vieira de Mello’s long career: • Legitimacy matters, and it comes both from legal authority or consent and from competent performance.

  • Spoilers, rogue states, and nonstate militants must be engaged, if only so they can be sized up and neutralized.

  • Fearful people must be made more secure.

  • Dignity is the cornerstone of order.

  • We outsiders must bring humility and patience to our dealings in foreign lands.

  Legitimacy

  Vieira de Mello knew that maintaining legitimacy was essential. When countries intervened abroad without the UN’s blessing, they were usually greeted with suspicion and outright hostility, whereas a UN mission was more often perceived as being sent by the world, which gave it a longer grace period. But he saw that many other factors shaped perceptions of legitimacy. Did an operation do more good than harm? Did the foreigners play by international rules? Did they observe cultural norms? Were they there to live well or do good? Were they accountable for their performance? Did the local people welcome what was being done? Were they even asked?

  Vieira de Mello learned that competence was essential. Legitimacy was performance-based. And neither the UN nor individual governments had nearly enough in-house expertise to perform reliably and earn local respect. When he launched his governing missions in Kosovo and East Timor, he cried out to New York to create a standby roster of technocrats who were experts on customs, agriculture, immigration, communications, banking, health, roads and ports, drugs and crime, and fiscal policy. The generalists whom the UN system dispatched might have been sound political analysts, but few
of them had any actual governing expertise, which undermined the UN’s standing in the eyes of both the Kosovars and the Timorese. “Until we can get the right people on board quickly, and if necessary, throw them overboard just as quickly,” he argued, “then we will continue to founder.”8 Nothing killed legitimacy like a failure to deliver results. “The UN cannot presume that it will be seen as legitimate by the local population in question just because in some distant Security Council chamber a piece of paper was produced,” he wrote. “We need to show why we are beneficial to the people on the ground and we need to show that quickly.”9 The same was true of governments, NGOs, and individuals acting outside the UN. Legitimacy would turn on being seen to play by the rules and by bringing concrete improvements, which would require acute cultural sensitivity and tangible skills.

  Engage All Kinds

  Early on in his career Vieira de Mello was stridently outspoken about his principles.When he joined the UN in 1969, he was fond of reciting Marxist political tracts and bashing the “imperialists” who he thought were running roughshod across the planet. When he saw American cars driving down the streets of Geneva, he made the motion of hurling stones at them. When he heard American accents, he mimicked them. Even as a thirty-four-year-old political officer in southern Lebanon, he was so outspoken in his criticism of the Israeli invasion that one of his superiors thought him a “prima donna and crybaby.” But it was in Lebanon that he learned that using words like “unacceptable” or denouncing injustice brought few returns. He resolved instead to find ways to appeal to the interests of diverse stakeholders.

  In the years ahead he would never view the United States as a trusted friend, but he would come to see it as a necessary partner. American policies were too often carried out arrogantly, he believed, and with an eye to domestic political audiences. Still, when it came to humanitarian affairs, peace-keeping, and diplomacy, he knew that he and the UN needed U.S. money, leverage, and leadership. And as he amassed experience in the UN, he realized that however unreliable Washington was, it also shouldered substantial global financial, humanitarian, and security responsibilities that other countries would not. So he became masterful at appealing to U.S. government officials in their language. Even when his objectives were purely idealistic, his means could be ruthlessly pragmatic, which made him an unusual breed.

  Vieira de Mello’s pragmatism also entailed a willingness to engage with "evil.” As a lifelong student of philosophy, he had long pored over the classic texts on the nature of evil. As he began to encounter perpetrators of atrocity and warmongers in the world, the theoretical categories struck him as incomplete.They didn’t seem to leave space for slippage, for the family man who (usually gradually) rationalizes becoming a butcher. It was that descent that preoccupied him. Where had the Khmer Rouge gone wrong? Was there a moment, one moment, when they stood at a fork in the road and chose their apocalyptic path? If he or somebody could diagnose how and why individuals and groups became militant, he seemed to believe, peacemakers would have better odds of putting the genie back in the bottle. If outsiders were to return refugees home or negotiate peace deals, they would have to understand the wrongdoers. He saw Washington’s habit of lumping diverse nonstate groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah together with countries such as Iran and Syria as not simply intellectually unsophisticated, but strategically counterproductive and even deadly.

  His highly practical mantra of “talking to everyone” caused him lapses in judgment. Sharing French wine with Ieng Sary may have kept the Khmer Rouge engaged in Cambodia’s peace process longer than they were otherwise inclined, but it also led him to pay too little attention to the atrocities they had committed. In Bosnia his sometimes obsequious deference to Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević brought few concessions at all. As he brought Karadžić the latest edition of The New York Review of Books or scoured the shops of Belgrade for the perfect gift for Milošević, he lost sight of the fact that he had grown silent on matters of principle and oblivious to the ways extremists were exploiting his determined neutrality to advance their own ends.

  But he grew on the job.The massacre in Srebrenica and the genocide in Rwanda seemed to jar him out of an earlier credulousness. For the rest of his career, although he still engaged with thugs and killers, he was less prone to appease his interlocutors. He did not always raise their past sins, but he never forgot them. After his 1999 trip through the ethnically cleansed villages of Kosovo,Vieira de Mello refused to speak Portuguese with the Serbian foreign minister and firmly condemned Serb arson and deportation, while also remaining in dialogue long enough to argue that Serbia had to halt its offensive. If his ever-evolving approach could be summed up, then, it would be:Talk to rogues, attempt to understand what makes them tick, extract concessions from them whenever possible, but remain clear about who they are and what they have done, as well as what you stand for. Past sins mattered not just intrinsically but because they were predictive of future behavior.“Think of how hard it is for any of us to change,” he told me once. “Why do we expect it to be easier for a war criminal?”

  Law and Security First

  In the aftermath of September 11, Vieira de Mello heard Western leaders talk a great deal about the importance of promoting universal values. In 2002, when he read Bush’s National Security Strategy doctrine, he noted eleven references to liberty and forty-five mentions of freedom. Vieira de Mello naturally favored the promotion of liberty and freedom, but he believed that fixing the international system would entail advancing one freedom above others: freedom from fear. “Security is the first priority,” he liked to say, “and the second priority, and the third priority, and the fourth priority.” He could have gone on. The best-laid plans for weak states—returning refugees, promoting human rights, restoring infrastructure, fortifying health and educational facilities, or holding elections—would amount to little if citizens did not feel safe in their own homes and on their own streets. Indeed, he saw elections in the developing world often bring hard-liners to power precisely because fearful citizens voted not for who would govern best but for extremists who stoked fears and then promised to offer safety. And again and again he watched as promising postwar transitions collapsed because of a failure to fill the security void.

  In December 1991 he deployed to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and found a war-ravaged city filled with giddy Cambodians who expected that the imminent arrival of a sizable UN peacekeeping force would enforce the recent peace agreements. Instead, he watched in horror as the weeks slipped by. By the time the blue helmets turned up, political assaults were already rampant and much of the momentum of the peace negotiations had been lost.

  Nothing frustrated him more than people’s tendency to repeat their mistakes. “I sometimes wonder if those of us engaged in peacekeeping are the human equivalents of goldfish,” he once said. “These animals are said to have memories that last in the region of two seconds. Now, for them that means life swimming around and around in a bowl will not be interminably dull. When it applies to us the impact is greater and far more serious.”10 He liked to quote the old adage “Experience is what allows us to repeat our mistakes, only with more finesse.”11 What may have been a forgivable security gap in Cambodia, then, was far less forgivable a full decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In June 1999, the same day he shared the jubilation of returning Kosovar Albanian refugees who lined the streets to cheer their NATO liberators, he saw a man who had just been murdered in broad daylight.Within a week Kosovar Albanian gangs had chased away tens of thousands of Serbs. And although fifty thousand victorious NATO troops patrolled the province, they were soldiers trained to fight wars, not to police tight-knit communities. By the time of Vieira de Mello’s departure a short five weeks after NATO’s entry, the sense of triumph had been spoiled by the tit-for-tat attacks carried out by ethnic Albanian vigilantes. By the time international police had deployed in any sizable numbers, more than a third of Kosovo’s Serb population had fled or b
een ethnically cleansed. Any hope of coexistence had evaporated.

  In circumstances where the major powers sent in UN peacekeepers and staff, Vieira de Mello had grown used to halfheartedness from the major powers. After all, no single country’s national interests were sufficiently at stake for it to take responsibility for filling the law-and-order void. But since the United States had argued that U.S. interests were mortally at stake in the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, he expected the most powerful military in the world to bring careful planning and hefty resources to bear. He didn’t support the war, but he never imagined that U.S. planners would think so little about the peace. Surely, he thought, they had watched as UN peacekeepers foundered in their “morning after” efforts to maintain order in the 1990s. Surely the Coalition would take precautions to stave off the kind of chaos that could be far deadlier than anything a regular army could unleash. Surely they would understand that establishing human security was a prerequisite to achieving other aims. Surely . . .

  Vieira de Mello did not live to see Iraq descend into the bloody sectarian nightmare it has become. Nor did he live to see the disastrous effect the war in Iraq would have on other regions of the world or on the enforcement of UN principles. Vieira de Mello had once been a vocal opponent of using force for humanitarian purposes, but he had reluctantly come to believe that international military or police action, while undesirable, was sometimes required. He worried that granting this exception would benefit opportunistic countries motivated by other interests who would invoke the cause of civilian protection as a way to justify their ulterior designs. But he also believed that idealists like himself, who had relied faithfully on the power of reason alone, had let victims down. UN peacekeepers should not themselves wage war, but they needed to be prepared to draw distinctions between victims and aggressors. Moreover, in order for UN diplomacy to be effective or UN rules to be respected, they needed to be able to “project credible force” to protect themselves and to prevent large-scale attacks on civilians.