Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (20 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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Ever since his meeting with Ieng Sary in May, he had been lobbying Khmer Rouge officials in Phnom Penh to grant him a return visit to their rural territory. Finally, in August he got his opening after a Cambodian refugee couple, whom UNHCR had just brought back from Thailand, were killed by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers.
14
Although the Khmer Rouge leadership denied involvement in the murders, they tried to counteract the public relations blow by inviting Vieira de Mello back for a visit.
 
 
On September 30, 1992, he and Bos retraced the journey they had taken in April. The transformation since their last visit was staggering. An entire town had sprung up, as the Khmer Rouge had made good on their promise to give returning refugees land for rice cultivation and gardening. UNHCR had not yet assisted in the returns, but refugees had started finding their way to the area on their own.
 
 
In a meeting with General Ny Korn’s civilian representative, Vieira de Mello spelled out the contents of a “pragmatic package” he hoped the guerrillas could accept. “It has been six months since we were last here,” he told the official. “Many more refugees in the camps would like to come back, but we can’t give them assurances that they should do so unless you open up your territory.” Even if the Khmer Rouge continued to refuse to deal with Akashi at a political level, Vieira de Mello urged that the general allow unhindered access for UNHCR staff, for UNTAC de-miners, and for UN civilian police who would help ensure the safety of returnees. “Time is running out,” Vieira de Mello said.
15
 
 
The Khmer Rouge official nodded. “The door is open,” he said, adding, “if you come in, start doing something.” He asked for food, medical assistance, and diesel for bulldozers to improve the access road, but he said UN police were unnecessary because the Khmer Rouge would keep returnees safe. UNTAC de-miners would be allowed, but only those “of the right nationality.” Vieira de Mello understood this to mean the Thais, who were the longtime backers of the Khmer Rouge. He had an imperfect deal, but a deal at last.
16
“I know that they were using us,” he said later, “but we were using them too.”
17
 
 
The UN investigated the murder of the two returnees. In October 1992 Son Sen, the commander of the Khmer Rouge forces, wrote to Vieira de Mello denying responsibility. Instead of responding by presenting the UN’s evidence of Khmer Rouge guilt, Vieira de Mello wrote:
 
 
Excellency,
 
 
 
 
I have the honour to acknowledge receipt of your telegram dated 11 October in which you informed me that, according to your investigation, the [Khmer Rouge] was not involved in the alleged murders of two returnees that are said to have occurred in Siem Reap Province on 22 and 23 August. It proves that caution in the handling of and publicity on alleged incidents such as the one mentioned above, without a proper investigation having been conducted, is the correct approach.
 
 
 
 
Conversely, your message reinforces the request I made in my letter to you of 3 September, as repeated in my message of 16 September, that UNHCR/ UNTAC Repatriation Component, in particular, be granted access to the village in order to allow the investigation.
 
 
 
 
Yours sincerely,
 
 
 
 
Sergio Vieira de Mello
 
 
 
 
His unfailing politeness with the Khmer Rouge had earned him their respect—and at times it seemed even their affection. In 1992 Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan sent Vieira de Mello identical New Year’s cards, each bearing a grainy photo of the remains of a majestic twelfth-century temple in Angkor Wat.
 
 
McNamara thought his friend was going too far. He believed it would be madness to place civilians back in the custody of mass murderers. At a minimum he believed the UN had a duty to advertise to the refugees the fact that they would be entrusting their fates to the same men who were responsible for two million deaths when they governed Cambodia from 1975 to 1978.
 
 
But Vieira de Mello plowed ahead. A November 1992 UNHCR leaflet distributed in Site 8 said nonchalantly: “UNHCR is about to start movements to some new areas where previously UNHCR had no access. Before deciding that it was safe to send you, UNHCR visited these areas a number of times.” The leaflet did not mention that the sites in question would be governed by the Khmer Rouge.
18
Reporters who journeyed to Khmer Rouge lands and spoke to returnees found widespread ignorance about the bloody past of local officials.
19
“We do not believe the stories about the Khmer Rouge genocide,” Eum Suem, a forty-three-year-old teacher who had spent seven years in a refugee camp, told the
New York Times
.
20
Many, like Eum, had fled the Vietnamese invasion in 1978 and found it more chilling to entertain the idea of settling in land controlled by Hun Sen, whom they still saw as a Vietnamese puppet.
 
 
In January 1993 Vieira de Mello bucked the complaints of his peers, whom he wrote off as purists, and for the first time involved UNHCR in returning refugees to a Khmer Rouge-controlled area, known asYeah Ath, or “Grandmother Ath.” On January 13, 1993, UNHCR helped 252 Cambodians in the Site 8 camp move to Yeah Ath, which he considered a pilot return village .
21
The Khmer Rouge managed to deliver unmined, fertile land, and the returnees used the UNHCR household kits to build houses, a pagoda, and a small school. UNHCR built a new access road, bridges, and seven wells. In the coming weeks some 2,714 Cambodians came directly from the border camps, while another 3,729 people made their way to Yeah Ath from other locations. “I do believe,” Vieira de Mello told an interviewer, “that Yeah Ath may be recognized in a few years as having been what I always had in mind: that is, a bridge—a very experimental, social bridge between the [Khmer Rouge] and the rest of the world.”
22
 
 
He defended the risks by citing Cambodian self-determination. “It is the choice of these people to come here, and we must respect that choice,” he told Philip Shenon of the
New York Times
. When Shenon mentioned the savagery of the Khmer Rouge, Vieira de Mello snapped, “I don’t need anybody to tell me about that history.The Cambodians who are returning here are Ph.D.s in that history.”
23
But sometimes he did in fact make it sound as though he had lost sight of the bloodshed. After he left Cambodia, he would recall bringing journalists to Khmer Rouge lands so that “they could show to the world, to the international media that they were not the monsters that everybody believed they were.” Even though the monstrosity of the Khmer Rouge leadership had long been proven,Vieira de Mello simply did not keep it foremost in his mind.
 
 
He asked Lynch to base himself with the returnees in Yeah Ath so as to give UNHCR a pair of “eyes and ears” on the ground. Lynch agreed without hesitating. He made clear that Lynch should stay in Yeah Ath around the clock. “I don’t want to hear about you driving back to the Thai border to sleep,” Vieira de Mello said.
 
 
Initially Lynch had company, as Vieira de Mello had prevailed upon the Khmer Rouge authorities to allow an UNTAC civil police presence. But the American lawyer had watched in amusement as the UNTAC police attempted to set up shop in the inaccessible village. As a UN helicopter delivered a portable toilet, the wire snapped and the toilet tumbled into the Tonle Sap River. When the UN police tried to lower their housing containers into the area, the Khmer Rouge began shooting at them, and they fled in panic. Only later did they learn that the guerrillas had not been firing aggressively but had in fact been trying to alert the strangers that they were on the verge of making house in a minefield. Unsurprisingly, the UNTAC police did not last long in Yeah Ath. When Hun Sen’s forces attacked the village, the Fijian police voluntarily handed their vehicles to the Khmer Rouge, and soon packed up and left.
 
 
Even though reaching Yeah Ath posed enormous challenges, Vieira de Mello loved making the journey. He appreciated Lynch’s dedication. “I hear you’re living in a hammock,” he teased. “The returnees have already built houses for themselves, and look at the example you are setting!” Always one who prized languages, he urged Lynch, who already spoke Thai, to work on improving his Khmer. “All you do is sit under a tree,” he said playfully, “at least learn the damn language!” Lynch found it intensely annoying that, although Vieira de Mello knew only a few dozen words of Khmer, he pronounced them so flawlessly that Cambodians often mistook him for one of their own.
 
 
Vieira de Mello’s long-range radio call sign was TIN MINE, and he gave Lynch the moniker TIN MINE ONE. Months later Lynch inquired of his colleague Assadi about the origins of the strange moniker, and Assadi told him that it had nothing to do with Cambodia’s mining potential. Rather, it derived from Vieira de Mello’s favorite disco in Malaysia, which was called Tin Mine and which he remembered fondly from his days chairing the negotiations over the return of the Vietnamese boat people.
 
 
Vieira de Mello respected the risks that Lynch was taking by living on his own among the Khmer Rouge, but he did not cut the American any slack. Lynch had received two gifts from his Khmer Rouge hosts—the hammock and a pair of their light military boots. In presenting Lynch with the boots, the Khmer Rouge soldiers told him that if he stepped on a mine in the boots, he would lose a foot instead of an entire leg. Lynch, naturally, wore the boots everywhere. But Vieira de Mello spotted Lynch’s footwear on one of his visits. “What are you wearing?” he asked, enraged. “Take those off. You are here as an employee of the United Nations. Don’t you go native on me!” But his pique passed quickly. Several months later, when UNHCR rotated Lynch to Kenya, Vieira de Mello called Lynch’s boss in order to pay the highest compliment he could. “Put Jamie to good use,” he said. “He really knows how to work with thugs.”
 
 
Six
 
 
WHITE CAR SYNDROME
 
 
Vieira de Mello was bringing the refugees home, but he could not save the UN mission as a whole. Nor could he preserve the exuberance that he had felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw that while the UN system could manage humanitarian tasks like the one he had been handed, it could not yet deliver either economic or physical security, the two ingredients crucial for a country’s long-term stability. Irrespective of how many refugees the UN helped return, he knew the standing of the UNTAC mission would continue to plunge.
 
 
EXPECTATION GAPS
 
 
The major donor countries were willing to spend enormous sums on highly visible tasks like bringing refugees home and holding elections, but they were not willing to rebuild Cambodian infrastructure or spur economic development until they were sure that the country would not return to war. And since the Soviet Union, Cambodia’s former benefactor, had slashed its assistance, Cambodia’s health, education, and civil administration sectors were starved for funds.
 
 
In a phenomenon that would become known as the White Car Syndrome, prices in Cambodia had soared with the arrival of 30,000 foreigners. The UN spent some $300,000 per day for bed and board for mission staff.
1
For living expenses UN staff received an extra allowance of $140 per day—equal to the average Cambodian’s yearly salary in 1991, and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian de-miner.
2
Because of these high UN salaries, the price of gas and pork doubled. Cambodians had salivated at word that UNTAC would bring a whopping $2 billion budget to Cambodia. But in practice the bulk of UN funds were spent outside the country on the purchase of equipment and supplies, or on salary payments to foreign UNTAC peacekeepers and civilians. And indeed, while the UN boasted of the jobs it was creating, the $2 million spent on the salaries of Cambodian staff in 1992 was less than that spent on UN vehicle repair.
3
Those jobs that the UN did create for Cambodians would not exist beyond UNTAC’s departure in 1993.
 
 
Vieira de Mello worried for Cambodia’s future but also for its present, as a “rejection syndrome” could take hold if Cambodians believed that returning refugees were being treated better than those who had remained in Cambodia during the civil war.
4
By late 1992 a French businessman named Jean-Marie Bertron, who had opened the hugely successful Café No Problem in Phnom Penh, had packed his bags and returned to Europe.“The UN,” Bertron told the
Washington Post,
“has turned a princess into a hooker.”
5
 
 
Some thirty donor countries had combined to pledge some $880 million to Cambodia, but a year into the UNTAC mission they had disbursed only $100 million.
6
Roger Lawrence, the head of UNTAC’s rehabilitation pillar, described the caution of rich countries: “We are in a vicious circle here in which the peace process founders in part because the economic component isn’t working—and the economic part is not working because the peace process is perceived as foundering.Whole regions of Cambodia haven’t seen any tangible evidence of reconstruction.”
7
Rural areas were especially slighted.

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