Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2 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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INTRODUCTION
 
At 8:45 a.m., on Tuesday, August 19, 2003, five months after the American-led invasion of Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello arrived by car at the headquarters of the United Nations in Baghdad. He had been unusually quiet on the drive over, and his bodyguards thought that he was showing signs of the strain of an ever less relevant UN presence and a collapsing security situation.
 
 
Having worked his entire adult life for the UN, Vieira de Mello, a fifty-five-year-old Brazilian, had plenty of experience with frustration. In his thirty-four years of service, he had moved with the headlines, working in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, and East Timor. He spoke Portuguese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish fluently and dabbled in several other languages. He had been rewarded for his talents with the toughest assignment of his career: UN envoy to Iraq.
 
 
He was suited for the job not because he knew Iraq—he didn’t—but because he had amassed so much experience working in violent places. He could perhaps show the Americans what to do—and what not to do. He had long ago stopped believing that he brought the solutions to a place’s woes, but he had grown masterful at asking the questions that helped reveal constructive ideas.
 
 
Work had always been a place of refuge, and when he entered the UN’s Baghdad base at the Canal Hotel he took the stairs up to his third-floor office, greeting staff members along the way. He spent the morning reading the latest cable traffic from UN Headquarters in New York and responding to e-mails.
 
 
In the late morning his security guards prepared a convoy to take him to the Green Zone, the fortified district where the American and British Coalition administrators had set up their base in Saddam Hussein’s abandoned palaces. He was scheduled to meet with L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, and a delegation of U.S. lawmakers from Washington.
 
 
By noon his armored sedan was ready to go, but just then Bremer’s office called. The flight bringing the U.S. congressional delegation to Baghdad from Kuwait had been delayed, and the lunch meeting would have to be canceled. He telephoned Carolina Larriera, his fiancée, who was an economic officer in the mission. “I’ve been spared,” he said. “Do you want to grab a sandwich?” Larriera said she couldn’t because she had to send out invitations for an upcoming conference by 5 p.m. He told her he was counting the days—fortytwo remaining—before they would fly to Brazil for a month’s holiday.
 
 
UN officials had not expected to play a significant political role in Iraq. In the run-up to the war, the White House had scorned the UN, likening it to the ineffectual League of Nations.Vice President Dick Cheney had said that the UN had proven itself “incapable of dealing with the threat that Saddam Hussein represents, incapable of enforcing its own resolutions, incapable of meeting the challenge we face in the twenty-first century.”
1
 
 
But in the weeks following the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, it had become clear that U.S. soldiers were going to need help. Suicide bombings had not yet begun, but widespread looting had, and those who had so easily dislodged the Iraqi dictator seemed increasingly lost when it came to managing the turbulent aftermath of his reign. European leaders who felt they had been snubbed back in March, when the United States and Britain had chosen to go to war, now agreed with Washington on one issue: Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, should deploy a team of specialists to help speed the day that Iraqis regained control of their country.
 
 
Vieira de Mello was chosen to head that team because of his vast experience, but also because a few weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he had done something few UN officials before him had managed: He charmed George W. Bush. In a meeting in the Oval Office, Vieira de Mello had criticized U.S. detention policies in Guantánamo and Afghanistan and pressed the president to renounce torture; yet Bush had warmed to him as a man.When the day came to choose an envoy, Annan appointed Vieira de Mello, believing he was the one man whose advice the Bush administration might heed. Annan also knew that his charismatic colleague was the rare troubleshooter who could secure the simultaneous backing of the American, European, and Arab governments.
 
 
During the eleven weeks he had spent in Iraq,Vieira de Mello had tried to find and expand the space where the UN could make a difference. Under Saddam Hussein, Sunnis had been the favored sect, but Vieira de Mello saw the danger of a new Shiite tyranny of the majority. He attempted to forestall it by pressing for the inclusion of Sunni leaders in the transition process and by enlisting the support of the leading Shiite clerics who were refusing to meet with Bremer. And he pressed Coalition officials to end their dependence on Ahmad Chalabi and other exiles who had a greater following in Washington than in Iraq.
 
 
But Bremer resisted implementing the UN’s most important suggestions. Vieira de Mello had tried and failed to gain greater UN and Red Cross access to Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody. He had tried and failed to persuade Bremer to devise concrete timelines for a constitution, for elections, and for the exit of U.S. troops. And he had tried and failed to get the Coalition to rescind or scale back its two most destabilizing decrees—the wholesale de-Ba’athification of Iraqi institutions and the disbanding of the Iraqi army. By late July he had grown depressed. He told colleagues that Bremer and the Iraqis had stopped returning his phone calls.
 
 
Now, with two hours unexpectedly freed up, he returned to his cluttered to-do list. Up to then he had never publicly criticized the Coalition’s excessive use of force, but he decided to change course, instructing an aide to draft a press release criticizing the Coalition’s recent shooting of civilians. The more obstruction he met in Baghdad, the more his mind drifted forward to September 30, the day he would return to his full-time job in Geneva as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. His time in Iraq had filled him with ideas about how to make a UN backwater—a sponsor of costly reports and seminars—matter in the lives of real people.
 
 
At 3 p.m. he met with two officials from the International Monetary Fund to discuss the Coalition’s rush to privatize Iraqi state enterprises. Around 4:25 p.m. he started his last meeting of the day, warmly greeting Gil Loescher and Arthur Helton, two American researchers who were in Iraq to examine the humanitarian costs of the war. He ushered them to a coffee table in an alcove near his office window. Two members of his UN team—Fiona Watson, a Scottish political affairs officer, and Nadia Younes, his wisecracking Egyptian chief of staff, rounded out the circle.
 
 
Just after the group had taken their seats, a deafening explosion sounded, and the sky flashed white. One person present likened the light to “one million flashbulbs going off all at once.” The windows shattered, sending thousands of glass spears flying across the office. The roof, the walls, and the floor beneath the office caved in, then crashed down, pancake style, onto the floors below. The last words uttered, a split-second after the explosion, belonged to Vieira de Mello. “Oh shit,” he said, seemingly more in resignation than in surprise.
 
 
“ HE ’S LIKE A cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” This was how a journalist colleague described Sergio Vieira de Mello to me on the eve of my first meeting with him. It was April 1994, I was a novice reporter in the former Yugoslavia, and he was reputed to be the most dynamic and politically savvy figure in the UN mission there. We had friends in common, and he agreed to brief me on the conflict over a meal on April 15 in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.
 
 
The UN peacekeeping mission in neighboring Bosnia, which had been in a state of steady crisis for two years, was on the brink of collapse. On April 10, NATO had staged the first bombing raid in its entire forty-five-year history, attacking Serbs who were besieging the UN “safe area” of Gorazde. Yet in the face of what proved a tame show of Western force, the Serbs defiantly continued their assault. I had been told that Vieira de Mello was a true believer in the UN. I did not expect him to keep our appointment for dinner.
 
 
But when I telephoned to give him the opportunity to cancel, he was remarkably calm. “The sky is falling here,” he said, “but a man has got to eat, hasn’t he? If World War Three starts while we’re at dinner, we won’t order a second bottle of wine.”
 
 
The UN had been established in 1945—in the words of its founding Charter—to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The Security Council, the UN’s most powerful organ, was responsible for maintaining international peace and security. Because each of its five permanent members—Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—could veto the resolutions of the others, the Council had been paralyzed by U.S.-Soviet tensions during the cold war. But for a brief period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the major powers at last seemed prepared to work together through the UN to keep peace. In 1991, in keeping with his promise of promoting a “new world order,” President George H. W. Bush had obtained UN support to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait.
 
 
Within a year of the U.S.-led coalition’s triumph in Kuwait, however, it had become clear that many governments did not believe their national interests were imperiled by the carnage in the Balkans. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid, which prevented Bosnians from starving, but they did not stop the slaughter. They sent peacekeepers into a live war zone, causing critics to chide UN officials like Vieira de Mello for simply “passing out sandwiches at the gates of Auschwitz.”
2
 
 
We met at 8 p.m. at a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of town. He carried a cell phone, then still a fairly exotic device. While living in Cambodia in 1992, he told me, he had one of the earliest available models. The size of a quart of milk, it had lengthy antennae and could work only outdoors. By the time of his posting to the Balkans, the phones had slimmed down to the size of walkie-talkies.
 
 
No sooner had we been seated than the phone rang. Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose, the UN commander, was telephoning from Sarajevo to brief him on the evening’s tumultuous events. I made a motion to move away in order to give him his privacy. He insistently waved me back to my seat and pointed to the wine that the waiter had just brought to the table. He did not seem to be the type of international diplomat who spent his time scheming about how to plant self-serving stories in the press. But if he happened to have an audience for his high-stakes activities, he also wouldn’t shoo it away.
 
 
He winced throughout Rose’s update, which lasted around five minutes. When he hung up, he told me what he had learned: Bosnian defenses around Gorazde had collapsed, exposing British soldiers to attack. One of Rose’s men had been shot and badly injured.The UN was attempting to manage a medical evacuation, and NATO bombers were standing by in case they were needed again. Gorazde, which was home to 65,000 Bosnians, looked poised to fall. “It’s going to be a long night,” Vieira de Mello said wearily, though no part of him seemed to mind. I could see how he had gained a reputation for workaholism, unflappability, and a commitment to enjoying life despite the despair around him.
 
 
In the breaks between calls, I asked him how he had ended up at the United Nations. “Nobody else would take me,” he said, implausibly. “I was a child of 1968,” he explained, proudly recounting how, when he was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968, he had joined his fellow students in revolt. He was beaten so badly by the police that he had required hospitalization. He pointed to the scar above his right eye—a monument to his rebellious youth.
 
 
I asked if he had been tempted to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had worked for the Brazilian foreign service. He shook his head violently. “The Brazilian government ruined my father’s life,” he said. A few years after the military regime seized power in 1964, the generals had forced his father into early retirement. “I would never work for Brazil,” he said.
 
 
As he rattled off the various war zones he had worked in, I wondered how a man of his adventurous tastes was managing to endure the staid pace of life in peaceful Zagreb.When I asked him if he missed Sarajevo, where he had lived for five months, he groaned. “You have no idea,” he said. “I would take life under siege any day over endless staff meetings and paperwork. I was born to be in the field.”
 
 
Again his phone rang, transforming this man of hearty laughter and animated tales into a sober diplomat, deliberate and exceedingly self-conscious about his choice of words and even his grave facial expressions. His eyes narrowed in concentration as General Rose told him that Serb shelling had abated long enough for the UN to evacuate the wounded British officer to Sarajevo. But soon after the young soldier arrived, he died. “I’m so sorry, Mike,” Vieira de Mello said. When he ended the call, I asked him what the UN would do. He said he was certain of only one thing. “In the UN, we cannot surrender our impartiality. It is perhaps our greatest asset.”

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