Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (14 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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Vieira de Mello was the rare UN official who had the background in philosophy to prepare such a lecture. Yet while he seemed to have infinite patience for ideas, his greatest ambition was to bring “the Ideal” to life in practice. And he did not feel that this was something he was achieving in Geneva. “I studied philosophy a long time, but I need to look for confirmation of philosophy and of values in the real world,” he once told an interviewer. “I’m restless. I like challenges, changes. I look for trouble, it’s true. Because in trouble I find truth and reality.”
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Ever since he had returned from Lebanon eight years before, he had kept his eye out for an opportunity to participate in another UN peacekeeping mission. “Sergio had caught the political bug,” Kofi Annan recalls.Vieira de Mello’s experience chairing talks aimed at resettling the Vietnamese boat people only whetted his appetite for political negotiations, which were likely to be rare at a humanitarian agency like UNHCR. He began phoning colleagues elsewhere in the UN system, inquiring as to whether they knew of any openings. He wanted a job in the field that would allow him to help refugees and sharpen his understanding of the political challenges likely to emerge in the new era.
An opportunity soon presented itself in Cambodia.
Four
HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING
By 1991 Vieira de Mello, at forty-three, had helped care for refugees in Bangladesh, Sudan, Mozambique, and South America. He had helped advise the commander of a UN military peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. And he had helped negotiate a political compromise among UN member states over the fate of refugees and migrants from Vietnam. But in Cambodia the Security Council was for the first time making the UN responsible for all three sets of tasks at once: humanitarian, military, and political. And Vieira de Mello was convinced that stability in the post-cold war era would turn on whether the UN system succeeded in managing such complex challenges.
After Cambodia’s four factions signed the Paris peace agreement in October 1991, the Security Council countries made clear their intention to authorize a large UN peacekeeping mission known as the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
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While UN peacekeepers in Lebanon had generally avoided involvement in regional politics and simply attempted to serve as a buffer along the border between Israel and Lebanon, UNTAC was given responsibility for seven pillars—one for each of the vital sectors that the country would need in order to move from dictatorship to democracy: human rights, elections, military (demobilization), civil administration, civilian police, refugee repatriation, and rehabilitation. The mission was oriented around elections, which were likely to be held in the spring of 1993. Vieira de Mello convinced Sadako Ogata, his boss, that he was the person best suited to manage the repatriation pillar—helping return some 360,000 Cambodian refugees who had long been marooned on the Thai border.
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While UN peacekeepers in Lebanon had generally avoided involvement in regional politics and simply attempted to serve as a buffer along the border between Israel and Lebanon, UNTAC was given responsibility for seven pillars—one for each of the vital sectors that the country would need in order to move from dictatorship to democracy: human rights, elections, military (demobilization), civil administration, civilian police, refugee repatriation, and rehabilitation. The mission was oriented around elections, which were likely to be held in the spring of 1993. Vieira de Mello convinced Sadako Ogata, his boss, that he was the person best suited to manage the repatriation pillar—helping return some 360,000 Cambodian refugees who had long been marooned on the Thai border.
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His team would have to ensure that Cambodians who had been living outside their country for more than a decade would return in time to vote. This would be no easy task. His friend Dennis McNamara was put in charge of the UN human rights pillar. “You got the better job,” Vieira de Mello told him. “What?” McNamara exclaimed. “You’ve got refugees to bring home. They would come home even without you, but you’ll be able to take the credit!”
Vieira de Mello would wear two hats in Cambodia. As Ogata’s special envoy, he would answer to UNHCR in Geneva and manage his own budget of $120 million to oversee the return of the refugees. But as the head of one pillar in the larger UNTAC peacekeeping mission, he would also answer to a Japanese diplomat named Yasushi Akashi, who had been named the head of the overall UNTAC operation.
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Akashi was a fairly typical UN bureaucrat who seemed unlikely to inspire; yet what he lacked in charisma, UN planners hoped he would bring in funds. And in fact the Japanese government would contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to Cambodia’s reconstruction in the coming years. It would also become the second-largest funder of peace-keeping in the world, behind only the United States.
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Akashi was a fairly typical UN bureaucrat who seemed unlikely to inspire; yet what he lacked in charisma, UN planners hoped he would bring in funds. And in fact the Japanese government would contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to Cambodia’s reconstruction in the coming years. It would also become the second-largest funder of peace-keeping in the world, behind only the United States.
On December 5, 1991,Vieira de Mello departed Geneva to take up his new post in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Because the countries on the UN Security Council were haggling over the terms of the new UNTAC mission, he was the only senior UN official present in Cambodia for several months. He liked the idea of arriving ahead of the peacekeepers and spoke, as he always did, of the need to “hit the ground running.” But after some seventeen new embassies and consulates had already opened shop, he grew impatient. “What the hell is taking the Council so long?” he asked, knowing that, even after the Council finally gave the UN peacekeeping mission the green light, it would need months to deploy some 22,000 UN peacekeepers and civilians.
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From the moment he set foot in Cambodia, he felt the clock ticking.
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From the moment he set foot in Cambodia, he felt the clock ticking.
Cambodia was a small country of nine million, wedged between sixty million Thais to the west and seventy million Vietnamese to the east. Vieira de Mello was enraptured by the country’s mix of tradition and modernity. Peasants rowed their boats along the Mekong, carrying rice and chickens to market, while students rode their mopeds and bicycles, their mouths wrapped in
kharma,
the traditional Cambodian checkered scarf made notorious by the Khmer Rouge. The country’s infrastructure was shattered by war and neglect. Roads that would be essential for moving refugees had long ago been washed away by the rains. The rice paddy fields were sown with land mines. Some 80 percent of the bridges had been destroyed, replaced with rickety wooden planks or not at all. The wide boulevards in Phnom Penh were lined with crumbling relics of the ornate mansions that French colonizers had once occupied.
kharma,
the traditional Cambodian checkered scarf made notorious by the Khmer Rouge. The country’s infrastructure was shattered by war and neglect. Roads that would be essential for moving refugees had long ago been washed away by the rains. The rice paddy fields were sown with land mines. Some 80 percent of the bridges had been destroyed, replaced with rickety wooden planks or not at all. The wide boulevards in Phnom Penh were lined with crumbling relics of the ornate mansions that French colonizers had once occupied.
Cambodians still seemed shell-shocked by the violence that had engulfed them for almost a quarter of a century. As he delved into the country’s history, Vieira de Mello was struck by the remarkably diverse forms of terror and repression that Cambodia had suffered since it won its independence from France in 1953. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration had targeted the country in a secret bombing campaign. A five-year civil war then raged between the corrupt U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol and a band of notoriously brutal Maoist guerrillas known as the Khmer Rouge. And in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge victory ushered in a totalitarian terror that left more than two million Cambodians dead—a terror that was brought to an end only in 1978, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed the Vietnamese puppet regime that still held power.
Foreigners had not really been present in Cambodia in significant numbers since the Khmer Rouge had run them out of the country. Yet already by the time of Vieira de Mello’s early arrival, herds of Cambodian
cyclos,
or bicycle-powered sedan chairs, were being overwhelmed on the roads by gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to UN agencies or humanitarian aid groups. He knew that the trickiest part of any postconflict environment was managing local expectations, and he hoped that foreigners would bring real resources that could be used to deliver tangible change.
cyclos,
or bicycle-powered sedan chairs, were being overwhelmed on the roads by gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to UN agencies or humanitarian aid groups. He knew that the trickiest part of any postconflict environment was managing local expectations, and he hoped that foreigners would bring real resources that could be used to deliver tangible change.
In his early months in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello did three things that would become hallmarks of his subsequent missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq: He assembled a trustworthy, “no bullshit” UN team around him; he cultivated ties with the country’s most influential players; and he contrasted the plans and resources he had been handed by UN Headquarters with the ground reality, attempting to adapt the plans to fit what he (like Jamieson before him) called “the real world.”
UNHCR,Vieira de Mello’s home agency, was more limber than UN Headquarters, which managed peacekeeping missions. While the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN Headquarters in New York took months to screen job applicants, UNHCR was able to send staff to Cambodia almost immediately. Since he would have only a small team under him to manage the massive repatriation operation, he knew that the quality and commitment of the staff he assembled would be essential. Even the most coherent UN mandate could be bungled if he hired the wrong people.
Over the course of 1991, one of Vieira de Mello’s primary functions in Geneva had been to interact with UNHCR’s governing board, or executive committee. In that capacity he had encountered the Dutch government’s representative to the committee, a razor-sharp twenty-nine-year-old brunette named Mieke Bos.Vieira de Mello was quickly smitten, and the two became romantically involved before he was appointed UNHCR special envoy. Bos had joined the Dutch government in the hopes of working on human rights issues, but she had never worked in the field. “How can you sit behind a desk in an office when there is so much work to be done in the world?” he pressed her. “Come with me to Cambodia. I need a special assistant.” He was offering a path she had long considered but had never known how to pursue. Within weeks the Dutch government had agreed to loan Bos to the United Nations, and she joined Vieira de Mello in Phnom Penh in February 1992.
He had taken a room in the Hotel Cambodiana, a newly opened luxury hotel on the Mekong that was home to dozens of foreign embassies and residences. He rarely sat still, but when he did, he liked to retire to comfortable living quarters. In his hotel room he ended the day by dipping into an extensive classical music CD collection, as well as his trademark stash of Johnnie Walker Black Label imported from Thailand. On weekends when he and Bos were in Phnom Penh, they got their exercise in the hotel pool.
The couple worked day and night and traveled the country together. As their relationship deepened, she moved into his suite at the hotel. Although he remained in close telephone contact with Annie and his thirteen- and eleven-year-old sons back in France, he made no effort to hide his romance from his colleagues. It was the most open relationship he had had since he got married almost two decades before.“Annie and I have an understanding,” he told friends. He never talked with Bos about a future together, but he behaved as if he were unattached, accompanying her on a trip to Europe to meet her family. “Somehow, because Sergio was so open, it took the stigma away,” recalls one UN colleague.“We’d often have to remind ourselves,‘Wait, this guy has a wife back home. I wonder what she makes of this?’” On the rare occasions Vieira de Mello discussed his marriage, he spoke sympathetically and respectfully about Annie. “She is doing a wonderful job raising the boys,” he said. “Without her sacrifices, I would never be able to do what I do.” Only when Annie, Laurent, and Adrien traveled to Cambodia for a visit did Bos move out of their shared hotel room, temporarily taking up quarters elsewhere in the hotel.
In most professional hierarchies, a relationship between a senior manager and a special assistant would require the end of the romantic relationship or the dismissal of the supervisor. But for Vieira de Mello, who worked eighteen-hour days, special assistants made natural partners. Throughout his career he often became involved with colleagues with whom he could discuss the day’s challenges. “The UN then was still like a third-world country,” says one UN senior official. “Nobody thought twice when the boss slept with the assistant. Today not even a person as popular as Sergio would be able to get away with a relationship like that.”
Because of the routine he and Bos had established, he rarely socialized with his other colleagues after hours. One evening he had planned to have dinner with Sten Bronee, a friend from UNHCR who was passing through Phnom Penh. But at the last minute he sent Bronee an apologetic note saying he had to cancel owing to an “urgent, unexpected meeting.” Bronee decided to take up the recommendation of the hotel concierge to try a newly opened restaurant. When he entered the restaurant, he did a double-take. Vieira de Mello was sitting with Bos at a secluded table in the corner.When he spotted Bronee, he looked a bit embarrassed and waved sheepishly. Bronee smiled.“If I had the choice of having dinner with me or with her,” he recalls thinking, “I would have chosen her too.”
Jamshid Anvar,Vieira de Mello’s Iranian colleague who held a senior post in Geneva, advised Vieira de Mello not to bring Bos with him when he flew overseas to meet with donors. “Sergio, it doesn’t look right,” Anvar said. “You are at a wholly different level now.” Vieira de Mello was defensive.“I’m not bringing her to sleep with her,” he said. “I’m bringing her because she’s brilliant and I need her.” Anvar said he knew that, but others did not. “You are a man known for your integrity,” he continued. “You should bend over backward to protect your reputation.” Vieira de Mello told Anvar that he believed his reputation would rise or fall on whether he successfully brought home the refugees, and for that he needed Bos.
In assembling the rest of his team,Vieira de Mello generally relied upon staff with whom he had worked before. Newcomers found their way into his orbit in roundabout ways. Andrew Thomson, a doctor from New Zealand, ended up in Cambodia by happenstance. As a medical student in the mid-1980s, he had been dissecting frogs in his lab when he met a Cambodian refugee who was getting recertified as a surgeon.The man, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge horrors, told Thomson about the last operation he had performed in Phnom Penh before Pol Pot’s bloody takeover: He had removed the diamond from his wife’s engagement ring, sterilized it, and camouflaged it by sewing it into the flesh of her arm, beneath her vaccination scar. One of only sixty Cambodian doctors (out of six hundred) to survive the terror, the man eventually escaped to Thailand, then was resettled to Auckland, where he operated again on his wife to remove the diamond, which he sold in order to begin their new life. Thomson had been so mesmerized by the man’s descriptions of Cambodia that as soon as he finished medical school, he had made his way to the Thai-Cambodian border, where he worked for two years as a Red Cross medic.
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