Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (109 page)
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Authors: Samantha Power
BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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as UNHCR policy planning and operations director
as UNHCR regional representative for South America
on UN impartiality
and Vietnamese boat people
views of
on “affirmative action,”
on danger to humanitarian personnel
on democracy
evolution of ideas of
on fear as bad adviser
on force for humanitarian purposes
on “getting real,”
on Great Lakes region of Africa
on Hammarskjöld principles
on humanitarian crises as political crises
on legitimacy
Luttwak’s “Give War a Chance” criticized by
on “new world order” after end of cold war
on no such thing as distant crisis
provision of law and order recommended by
on Security Council primacy
on state-building
UN war crimes tribunal supported by
on UN weapons inspectors spying for U.S.
youth of
birth of
on coup of
Lacerda supported by
as student revolutionary
Vieira de Mello, Sonia ,
Vieira de Mello,Tarcilo .
Vietnamese boat people
Villanova, Jon
Vincentis, Giuseppe de
Vollmer, Rand
von Zehle,William:
in Canal Hotel rescue operation
Larriera tracking down
on SVDM’s resistance to pulling mission out .
Walzer, Gerald
war crimes tribunals:
International Criminal Court (ICC)
for Khmer Rouge
SVDM as supporter of
for Yugoslavia
Watson, Fiona
Weinberger, Caspar
White Car Syndrome
Williams, Michael
Williams, Roy
Wilson,Woodrow
Wiranto, General
Wirth,Tim
Wolfowitz, Paul
Woodruff, Judy
Yeah Ath
Yeltsin, Boris
Younes, Nadia
Young, Kirsten Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia
aid workers and peacekeepers sent to
basics of crisis in
Dayton peace agreement
SVDM becoming Stoltenberg’s political adviser in
SVDM on forgetting history in
SVDM’s resentment of disproportionate international investment in
war crimes tribunal for
See also
Bosnia; Kosovo; Serbs
Bosnia; Kosovo; Serbs
al-Zarqawi, Abu Mussab
Zinni, Anthony
“Zionism equals racism” resolution
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is the author of
“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide
(Harper Collins, 2003), which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize Book Award for the best book on foreign policy, and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She remains an active journalist, reporting from Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and elswehere. She is a contributor to
The New Yorker
and a foreign policy columnist for
Time
magazine. She was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School (1998-2002), and from 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for
The Boston Globe
and
U.S. News & World Report.
She is the editor, with Graham Allison, of
Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact
(St. Martin’s, 2000). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Power moved to the United States from Ireland in 1979, at the age of nine.
“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide
(Harper Collins, 2003), which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize Book Award for the best book on foreign policy, and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She remains an active journalist, reporting from Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and elswehere. She is a contributor to
The New Yorker
and a foreign policy columnist for
Time
magazine. She was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School (1998-2002), and from 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for
The Boston Globe
and
U.S. News & World Report.
She is the editor, with Graham Allison, of
Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact
(St. Martin’s, 2000). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Power moved to the United States from Ireland in 1979, at the age of nine.
1
Quotations that are not sourced in the Notes are taken from my interviews, conducted between January 2004 and November 2007.
2
Prince Sadruddin was the second son of Sultan Mohamed Shah Aga Khan III, imam of the Ismaili Shiites. He spent much of his youth in India, but he had French, Iranian, and Swiss nationalities. Educated at Harvard, he became the publisher of the
Paris Review
in the early 1950s and then joined the UN as a civil servant. He was appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1965 at the age of thirty-two, a post he held until 1977.
Paris Review
in the early 1950s and then joined the UN as a civil servant. He was appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1965 at the age of thirty-two, a post he held until 1977.
3
U.S. officials were normally unwilling to criticize Israel, but in 1978 President Jimmy Carter was closing in on his landmark Camp David peace deal between Israel and Egypt, and he feared that an Israeli occupation of Lebanon could derail it. Carter decided that the best way to secure an Israeli withdrawal while also saving Israeli face was to authorize the dispatch of UN peacekeepers. The United States drove a resolution through the Council, taking Israel by surprise, and the Soviets abstained from the vote.
4
In 2006, after Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel prompted another Israeli invasion, the Security Council authorized a 12,000-person UN force for southern Lebanon. Israel criticized the resolution because again Hezbollah fighters were permitted to remain in the south.
5
In December 1991 the UN General Assembly voted to revoke the 1975 resolution.
6
Haddad’s army, which he called the South Lebanese Army, was made up largely of poor Shi’a from the border villages.
7
In 2007 President George W. Bush would name Crocker U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
8
Vieira de Mello was also named secretary of the executive committee.
9
The four Cambodian parties that signed the Paris agreement were FUNCINPEC, the anti-Communist royalist party of Prince Sihanouk, led by his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh; the somewhat marginal Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) of former prime minister Son Sann; the Khmer Rouge (KR), formally under Khieu Samphan (but with Pol Pot still in fact in charge); and the State of Cambodia (SOC), controlled by Prime Minister Hun Sen.
10
The KR controlled three camps—Site 8, O’Trao, and Site K.The KPNLF, Son Sann’s faction, controlled two—Sok Sann and Site 2. FUNCINPEC controlled one—Site B. And the final site, Khao-I-Dang, was controlled not by any faction but by UNHCR.
11
The UN Security Council authorized a core of 15,900 military troops, along with 3,600 police monitors and 2,400 civilian administrators.
13
I use the word “Bosnian” to describe those who remained in territory under Bosnian government control and who, for much of the war, clung to the ideal of a multiethnic, unitary state. At the outset the “Bosnians” were Muslim, Croat, and Serb, but by the end of the war “Bosnian” and “Muslim” had become almost synonymous. After the war the term “Bosniak” was introduced to describe this mainly Muslim population.
14
Between 1992 and 1996 some three million Russians had fled the other republics for Russia.
15
Between 1994 and 2000 Kagame was the country’s vice president and minister of defense. He became president in the spring of 2000.
16
Critics believed that Ogata created a false dichotomy between withdrawing and remaining, instead of creatively responding to the bind in which UNHCR found itself. They say UNHCR should have insisted on moving the camps deeper into Zaire to cut down on violent cross-border raids, or it should have cut off aid in certain camps to see whether this might prompt those who had committed no crimes during the genocide to return to their homes, leaving the guilty in Zaire to fend for themselves.
17
The corridors UNHCR proposed would run from Goma to Gisenyi, Rwanda; Bukavu to Cyangugu, Rwanda; and Uvira to Bujumbura, Burundi.
18
The 1974Yugoslav constitution had given the province of Kosovo self-governing powers comparable to those of Serbia and the country’s other five republics. In 1989, however, Milošević stripped the province of its autonomy and put it under Serbia’s jurisdiction. For clarity, I will refer to “Kosovo” and “Serbia” as if they were separate geographic entities, when in fact Kosovo was a province within Serbia.
19
Montenegro and Serbia were close allies, which then jointly made up the “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
20
UN officials present that day still dispute who actually arrived first and won the bet.
21
In 2007 French president Nicolas Sarkozy named Kouchner as his foreign minister.
22
The UN system uses five escalating security phases to describe the prevailing conditions in a country and the commensurate requirements for staff: Phase I, precautionary; Phase II, restricted movement; Phase III, relocation; Phase IV, program suspension; Phase V, which can be declared only by the secretary-general, evacuation.
23
Annick Roulet had gotten married in 1999, and her married name was Stevenson.
24
The question of whether Vieira de Mello could have become secretary-general ignites great debate even today. Since it was in fact Asia’s turn to nominate a secretary-general in 2006, those who believed Vieira de Mello would be appointed assumed that national rivalries in Asia would prevent them from reaching a consensus and that Vieira de Mello would be chosen to break the stalemate. Others thought that, having waited several decades for its turn, Asia would never forfeit the chance to appoint one of its own, and Vieira de Mello would be chosen a decade down the line.
25
The “Responsibility to Protect” or "R2P” was a concept introduced in December 2001 by the independent Commission on State Sovereignty and Intervention, cochaired by Gareth Evans and Mahmoud Sahoun, and composed of former diplomats, politicians, and public intellectuals. In September 2005, 150 countries in the General Assembly unanimously endorsed the new norm.
26
The organization’s largest program (which later became the most notorious) was the Oil for Food Program. In 1996 the Iraqi government, under severe sanctions, signed a deal with the UN Secretariat allowing Iraq to sell its oil to finance the purchase of food and medicine.All told, the program, which the UN monitored, was used to fund the delivery of some $31 billion worth of humanitarian supplies, while another $8.2 billion remained in the production and delivery pipeline.
27
Iraq’s elections were held in January 2005, and the constitutional drafting committee was appointed by the elected parliament. Their draft constitution entered into effect after it was approved by a majority in all but two of Iraq’s provinces.
28
By coincidence, the person in charge of all of UN security, a sixty-year-old Burmese named Tun Myat, was named to the post after serving as humanitarian coordinator in Iraq from 2000 to 2002. Because of his perceived special knowledge of Iraq, those on the Steering Group who had never visited the country or the region almost never challenged him.
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