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

by Samantha Power

  9 David B. Ottaway, "Lebanon Is Alarmed by Increasing Israeli Activity in Its South,” Washington Post, October 26, 1980, p. A25.

  10 In 1981 a Washington Post reporter recounted an exchange in which an Israeli liaison officer complained that Nigerian soldiers guarding checkpoints did not speak Arabic, Hebrew, or English. As a result, the Israelis claimed, when PLO guerrillas approached the checkpoints, the Nigerians did not conduct thorough inspections. “All they ask is, ‘You have boom-boom?’ If the answer is no, they let them go,” an Israeli soldier said. The Post reporter followed up by asking the Nigerian soldier on duty if he spoke English. “We’re from a former British colony,” the Nigerian said in a British accent. “Of course we speak English.” William Claiborne, “Israeli Army Warns of Clashes Between UNIFIL, Haddad Militia,” Washington Post, April 2, 1981, p. A16.

  11 Woerlee Naq to Erskine/Aimé, Most Immediate Code Cable, February 12, 1982, no. FILTSO 351 NAQ 503.

  12 When he visited Beirut in February 1982, Urquhart listened to the British ambassador to Lebanon insist (with what Urquhart later described as “the air of complete authority which only simpletons and autocrats enjoy”) that the only solution to the Lebanon problem was for UNIFIL to “fight its way to the border.” Urquhart noted drily that it was a shame that the British themselves had not seen fit to contribute troops to UNIFIL. Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 336.

  13 Mackinlay, Peacekeepers, p. 61.

  14 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 293.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Woerlee to Urquhart, Code Cable, February 17, 1982, no. NAQ 542.

  17 Woerlee to Urquhart, Code Cable, February 18, 1982, no. NAQ 561.

  18 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, April 10, 1982, no. NYQ 1009 UNTSO 680.

  19 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 373.

  20 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 8, 1982, no. NAQ 2045.

  21 Andersen to Husa, March 10, 1982, “Medical Facilities,” no. NAQ 807.

  22 Arafat in fact despised Abu Nidal, who is reported to have staged the assassination to cause maximum damage to the PLO. Argov, who was shot in the head, survived but was left partially blind and paralyzed for the rest of his life. He died in 2003, having spent the final twenty-one years of his life in a Jerusalem hospital.

  23 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 6, 1982, no. NAQ 2016 FILTSO 1261.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Ibid.

  26 “Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon,” June 11, 1982.

  27 From June to September some 17,825 were estimated to have been killed in Lebanon as a whole, with 5,515 killed in Beirut and its suburbs. Jay Ross, “War Casualties Put at 48,000 in Lebanon,” Washington Post, September 3, 1982, p. A22.

  28 David Ottaway,“Arafat Charges UN Force Failed to Resist Israelis,” Washington Post, June 9, 1982, p. A18.

  29 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, June 7, 1982, no. NAQ 1600.

  30 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 8, 1982, no. NAQ 2045.

  31 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 14, 1982, no. NAQ 2141.

  32 Timour Goksel, interview by Jean Krasno,Yale-UN Oral History, March 17, 1998.

  33 The Lebanese naturally opposed the Israeli invasion, but they supported the continuation of UNIFIL. If the UN remained, it at least signaled the world’s intention to bring about an Israeli withdrawal and a return of Lebanese sovereignty. Indeed, when the UNIFIL mandate came up for renewal before the Security Council, Lebanese mukhtars (village mayors) wrote to the secretary-general to request an extension. McCoubrey and White, Blue Helmets, p. 103.

  34 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, July 29, 1982, no. NAQ 2564.

  35 Robert Misrahi, interview by Michel Thieren, June 7, 2007.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Many Palestinians who lived in Lebanon resided in camps like Sabra and Shatila, dating back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

  38 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 346.

  39 Henry Kamm,“Arafat Demands Three Nations Return Peace Force to Beirut,” New York Times, September 17, 1982, p. A6.

  40 In response to public outcry over the massacre in Israel and abroad, Prime Minister Menachem Begin established an investigative commission in late September. Headed by Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, the commission issued its findings in February 1983, blaming the massacre on the Christian Phalangist forces that carried it out but faulting Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan for approving the Phalangists’ entry into the camps, for not preventing the massacre, and for not stopping it once it was under way. Prime Minister Begin dismissed Sharon, who the Kahan commission found bore “personal responsibility,” but Eitan remained in his job.

  41 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation Announcing the Formation of a New Multinational Force in Lebanon,” September 20, 1982.

  42 Troop contributors to UNIFIL saw the decision by the major powers not to send a beefed-up UNIFIL to Beirut as a snub and a further blow to the UN’s reputation in the region. Callaghan wrote to UN Headquarters in New York that Nigeria had decided to withdraw its troops from UNIFIL because it did not want to be seen as assisting the Israeli occupation and also because the creation of the non-UN Multinational Force was “an outright blow to UN peace-keeping concept and can only be construed as humiliating for the UNIFIL contributors.” Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, December 28, 1982, no. NAQ 4123.

  43 Brian Urquhart, “A Brief Trip to the Middle East 5-11 January 1983,” confidential UNIFIL files.

  44 Ibid. Urquhart was scathing of others as well. He wrote that U.S. forces in Beirut “have never been seen to go out on patrol except once on a heavily publicized patrol through east Beirut, which is much safer than New York City . . . What a posture for the marines, and how humiliating for them it must be. I did not see a single American military sailor, airman, marine or soldier in or around Beirut the whole time I was there. They stay in camp.”

  45 A clan spokesman denounced UNIFIL, saying that the UN had come to bring peace but had taken to killing Lebanese. He insisted that all “colored UNIFIL personnel” be relieved of their checkpoint duties. UNIFIL was in such a vulnerable position that Callaghan felt he had no choice but to comply and quickly replaced the Fijians at volatile checkpoints with members of the largely Caucasian Dutch, Irish, and French platoons. Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, March 31, 1983, no. NAQ 915 FILTSO 763.

  46 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, June 3, 1983, no. NYQ 1219.

  47 Thomas L. Friedman, “Peacekeepers Become Another Warring Faction,” New York Times, October 23, 1983, sec. 4, p. 1.

  48 Thomas L. Friedman, “Marines Release Diagram on Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1983, p. A1.

  49 Thomas L. Friedman, “Beirut Death Toll at 161 Americans; French Casualties Rise in Bombings; Reagan Insists Marines Will Remain; Buildings Blasted,” New York Times, October 24, 1983, p. A1; Friedman, “Marines Release Diagram.”

  50 Less than two minutes after the attack on the Marine compound, as French soldiers gathered at the windows of their compound to see what had caused the ruckus, a second car bomber smashed into their eight-story building, killing fifty-eight French paratroopers.Ten days later in southern Lebanon a young man in a green Chevrolet truck laden with some eight hundred pounds of explosives crashed through the main gates of the Israeli military intelligence headquarters just south of Tyre. The suicide bomb killed twenty-eight Israeli soldiers and security personnel, as well as thirty-two Arabs, most of whom were being held in detention cells. Terence Smith, “At Least 29 Die as Truck Bomb Rips Israeli Post in Lebanon,” New York Times, November 5, 1983, sec. 1, p. 1; Herbert H. Denton, “Bomb in Tyre Kills 39; Israeli Planes Retaliate, Strike PLO Near Beirut,” Washington Post, November 5, 1993, p. A1.

  51 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Reporters on the Death of American and French Military Personnel in Beirut, Lebanon,” October 23, 1983.

 
52 Ronald Reagan,“Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Regional Editors and Broadcasters on the Situation in Lebanon,” October 24, 1983.

  53 Steven Strasser et al., “The Marine Massacre,” Newsweek, October 31, 1983, p. 20.

  54 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Events in Lebanon and Grenada,” October 27, 1983.

  55 Even before the attack on the Marine barracks, a New York Times-CBS poll found that three-quarters of respondents supported a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Lebanon if they remained unable to stabilize the country, while more Americans (47 percent) disapproved of Reagan’s handling of foreign policy than approved (38 percent). David Shribman, “Foreign Policy Costing Reagan Public Support,” New York Times, September 30, 1983, p. A1.

  56 Ronald Reagan, President’s News Conference, April 4, 1984.

  57 Donald Rumsfeld, “Take the Fight to the Terrorists,” Washington Post, October 26, 2003, p. B7; “Donald H. Rumsfeld Holds Defense Department News Briefing,” October 23, 2003, online at .

  58 “Donald Rumsfeld Delivers Remarks at the National Conference of State Legislatures,” December 12, 2003 online at

  CHAPTER 3. BLOOD RUNNING BLUE 1 SVDM, interview by Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

  2 Jean-Pierre Hocké succeeded the previous high commissioner, Poul Hartling, a seventy-two-year-old Dane who had served for seven years.

  3 UNHCR racked up a deficit of $7 million in 1988 and $40 million by 1989.

  4 “Hocké Says Resignation Was His Decision,” Associated Press, October 27, 1989.

  5 “Démission de M J-P Hocké: Bon organisateur mais trop autoritaire,” Le Monde, October 28, 1989.

  6 Anthony Goodman, “UN Aide Says He Was ‘Stabbed’ Over Refugee Job,” Reuters, November 14, 1990.

  7 Paul Lewis, “2 Camps in the Search for U.N. Refugee Chief,” New York Times, November 18, 1990, sec. 1, p. 6.

  8 “General Assembly President’s Remarks at Conclusion of General Debate,” press release, October 14, 1988.

  9 Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Inhumane Deterrence: The Treatment of VietnameseBoat People in Hong Kong (1989), p. 8.

  10 In the immediate wake of the war, those who fled Vietnam had generally been people implicated by their ties to the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. Others had fled Communist “re-education” or military conscription.

  11 President Carter had agreed to take in an astonishing 168,000 Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians per year. France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and others followed suit. But these numbers had dropped precipitously.

  12 Malaysia had already adopted a policy of “redirection”—giving the Vietnamese boats, life jackets, a compass, and maps and urging them to make their way to Indonesia. Arthur Helton, “The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees: An Experiment in Refugee Protection and Control,” New York Law School Journal of Human Rights 8, part 1 (1990-1991).

  13 Pierre Jambor, the UNHCR representative to Thailand, first raised the screening idea back in 1986, but the human rights lawyers at UNHCR were slow to embrace it.

  14 See Sten Bronee, “The History of the Comprehensive Plan of Action,” International Journal of Refugee Law 5, no. 4 (1993), pp. 534-43.

  15 New York Times, June 14, 1989, p. A26.

  16 W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response (London: Zed Books, 1998), p. 208.

  17 Helton, "The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees.”

  18 W. Courtland Robinson, “The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, 1989-1997: Sharing the Burden and Passing the Buck,” Journal of Refugee Studies 17, no. 3 (2004), p. 323.

  19 Robinson, Terms of Refuge, p. 217.

  20 Overall, about 28 percent of Vietnamese asylum-seekers were successful in gaining refugee status. Robinson, “Comprehensive Plan of Action,” pp. 323, 328. Hong Kong officials were the most reluctant to grant asylum, finding only 20 percent of Vietnamese applicants to have a well-founded fear of persecution. Alexander Betts, Comprehensive Plans of Action (Geneva: Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, Working Paper No. 120, 2006), p. 37.

  21 Betts, Comprehensive Plans of Action, p. 40.

  22 More than a million Kurds and other Iraqis had fled to Iran. Another 450,000 headed toward Turkey, which refused to admit them. Stranded in the inhospitable, freezing mountain ranges south of the Turkish border, between 500 and 2,000 Kurds were thought to be dying daily.

  23 The United States, the U.K., France, and Turkey were the big players, but in the end, thirteen nations participated directly in the Combined Task Force and the material support came from a total of thirty countries. The Security Council also declared a no-fly zone to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his bombers to strafe civilians huddled in the mountains.

  24 SVDM, Civitas Maxima: Origines, fondements et portée philosophique et pratique du concept de supranationalité, thèse pour le Doctorat d’État ès Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Paris, April 1985.

  25 This and all subsequent quotes from the speech are from SVDM, “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times,” Geneva International Peace Research Institute, December 4, 1991.

  26 SVDM, interview by De Frente Com Gabi, Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT), 2002.

  CHAPTER 4. HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING 1 Vieira de Mello knew Yasushi Akashi only by his CV. Akashi had begun his career in the Japanese foreign service and in 1979 had left to join the staff of the UN Secretariat, where he spent thirteen years. Prior to being named Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Cambodia, Akashi had run the UN Department of Public Information and the more obscure UN Department of Disarmament Affairs.

  2 Philip Shenon, “Norodom Sihanouk: The Prince of Survivors,” New York Times, October 25, 1991, p. 6.

  3 The Paris agreement left the power of the Supreme National Council (SNC) ambiguous. It was established as “the unique legitimate body and source of authority in Cambodia in which, throughout the transitional period, national sovereignty and unity are enshrined.” But in Paris the SNC also agreed to delegate to the UN “all powers necessary to ensure the implementation of this Agreement.” When it came to the UN relationship with the named ministries of defense, foreign affairs, finance, public security, and information, the agreement assigned UNTAC only the task of exercising “such control as is necessary to ensure [their] strict neutrality,” leaving Akashi and the local actors great discretion in deciding the extent of UN interference, supervision, and executive action. See

  4 Sihanouk to SVDM, January 23, 1993.

  5 Planning was so chaotic that General John Sanderson, the commander of the UN force, was shown a UN Security Council statement that listed him as commander of the UN force that was then deploying to Bosnia.

  6 Nate Thayer, “Plunder of the State,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 9, 1992, p. 11.

  7 Rodney Tasker and Nate Thayer, “Tactics of Silence,” Far Eastern Economic Review, December 12, 1991, p. 10.

  8 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

  9 Nate Thayer, “Murderous Instincts,” Far Eastern Economic Review, February 6, 1992, p. 13.

  10 UN reports warned that returnees would have likely “lost part of their ‘peasants memory’” and would not be able to fend for themselves. UNHCR Absorption Capacity Survey, January 1990, p. 15, quoted in W. Courtland Robinson, “Something Like Home Again”: The Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1994), p. 13.

  11 William Branigin, "U.N. Starts Cambodian Repatriation,” Washington Post, March 31, 1992, p. A1.

  12 Ron Moreau, “The Perilous Road Home,” Newsweek, April 13, 1992, p. 37.

  13 Jarat Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” Watson Institute for International Studies Occasional Paper no. 15, 1994, p. 57.

  14 UNHCR, “Cambodia: Land Identification for Settlement of Returnees, Nove
mber 4-December 17, 1991,” PTSS Mission Report 91/33, p. 12, quoted in Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 19.

  15 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 13.

  16 In 1991 there were 30,000 Cambodian amputees within the country and an additional 5,000 to 6,000 residing in Thai border camps.“Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward’s War,” Asia Watch, September 1991.

  17 Mats Berdal and Michael Liefer, “Cambodia,” in James Mayall, ed., The New Interventionism1991-1994: United Nations Experience in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 48.

  18 Clearing one mine cost between $300 and $1,000, including the cost of training de-miners. John Ryle, “The Invisible Enemy,” New Yorker, November 29, 1993, p. 126.

  19 Cambodia’s local politics had also been invisible from the skies. As UNHCR representatives traveled the countryside, they realized that while Hun Sen had boasted of the abundance of land his government would cede to the refugees, autonomous provincial and district officials had their own ideas. Many had begun privatizing the land in their districts in order to make a financial killing before the UN attempted to give it away for free.

  20 Nicholas Cumming-Bruce, “UN Struggles to Meet Pledge to Refugees,” Guardian, May 6, 1992, p. 11.

  21 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 66.

  22 Cumming-Bruce, “UN Struggles.”

  23 SVDM to Sadako Ogata, March 21, 1992.

  24 William Branigin, “Cambodians Launching Offensive; Khmer Rouge Cited as Endangering U.N. Peace Operation,” Washington Post, March 30, 1992, p. A1.

  25 Nate Thayer, “Phnom Penh Launches Offensive as Cease-Fire Efforts Stall,” Associated Press, March 29, 1992. The UN Charter authorizes two forms of military intervention. In the first, which falls under Chapter 6, a host government invites UN blue helmets to perform a consensual set of tasks. In such a mission the troops are supposed to use force only in self-defense. The other type of UN intervention force, which falls under Chapter 7 of the Charter, can be deployed even without the parties’ consent; it permits blue helmets to “make” peace and not simply keep it. Cambodia was a Chapter 6 deployment.