Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (27 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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The Serbs had made a habit of trying to cover their tracks by accusing the Bosnians of attacking themselves. Just a month earlier Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić had told Vieira de Mello and Rose, “The Muslims would kill Allah himself in order to discredit the Serbs!”
29
The Bosnian war was the first twentieth-century conflict in which the parties used CNN to argue their cases.The day of the attack Karadžić told the network, “This is a cold-blooded murder and I would demand the strongest sentence against those who are responsible for this.”
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He threatened to block all air and land relief deliveries to Sarajevo if the UN did not exonerate them. A visibly shattered Bosnian prime minister Silajdžić was interviewed as well. “This is defacing the international community and our civilization,” he countered. “Please, let’s forget about my being the prime minister for a minute. I’m talking as a man, now. Please remember these scenes; if we don’t stop it, it is going to come to your doorstep.”
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In the past, when the Serbs refused UN demands, UNPROFOR officials had lacked leverage and simply scaled back their requests. This time, though, the public outcry in capitals over the market massacre gave Western leaders little choice but to throw the weight of NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history, behind UN diplomacy. The German government, which just two weeks before had said it opposed military action, reversed its position, saying it now supported NATO air strikes against the Serbs. The French demanded an emergency NATO summit to discuss an immediate military response. Only the British remained reluctant to use force against the Serbs. “The rest of the world cannot send armies into what is a cruel and vicious civil war,” British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said.
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On February 9, four days after the market attack, NATO’s sixteen foreign ministers haggled for more than twelve hours to produce an unprecedented ultimatum: The Serbs had until midnight GMT on February 20 to withdraw their heavy weapons from a twelve-mile “exclusion zone” around Sarajevo. Any weapons that remained after that time would be placed in the custody of UN peacekeepers or bombed by NATO. The alliance had never before made such an explicit threat. And Sarajevo civilians had never felt so close to being rescued. “Nobody should doubt NATO’s resolve,” President Clinton warned from Washington. “NATO is now ready to act.”
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But after so many false promises in the past, skeptics abounded. One cartoon summed up the Western track record. A survivor peered out from behind the ruins of Sarajevo, shouting, “The rhetoric is coming! The rhetoric is coming!”
34
 
 
NATO and the UN had much in common. The most influential countries in NATO—the United States, Britain, and France—held permanent seats and vetoes on the UN Security Council. But many in Russia, which also held a UN Security Council seat, continued to see NATO as the enemy it had been during the cold war.
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In addition, as the Serbs’ benefactor, Russia staunchly opposed the idea of air strikes.
 
 
UN officials like Vieira de Mello and Rose favored only what was called NATO “close air support”—the limited, surgical use of air power against the Serbs on the rare occasions when blue helmets came under serious attack. In aiding the peacekeepers’ self-defense, NATO pilots were allowed to hit only the offending weapon.Vieira de Mello opposed the kind of strikes that the Clinton administration favored, NATO offensive “air strikes,” which he saw as incompatible with impartial peacekeeping. If NATO wanted to make war, he reasoned, the major powers should withdraw the UN peacekeepers and the United States should ensure success by putting its own troops on the ground and joining a NATO ground force. Short of that unlikely turn of events, he argued, the Clinton administration should stop pushing the lightly armed blue helmets to absorb the physical risks that would flow from NATO bombing from the air.
 
 
Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali held the same view. He liked to quote Elliot Cohen, the U.S. military analyst, who said, “Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”
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Vieira de Mello and Rose agreed: A NATO air campaign that was not backed by a larger plan to protect Bosnian civilians would do more harm than good. Defenseless citizens would be better off if NATO did not bomb. UNPROFOR would be able to continue to deliver relief and buy time for negotiators to hatch a political settlement. “You don’t stand on the moral high ground with other nations’ soldiers,” Rose said, echoing Vieira de Mello’s view. “The logic of war is not the logic of peacekeeping. Do one or the other, but don’t try to conflate the two.” Their UN team set out to use the threat of NATO air strikes against Serb positions to persuade the Serbs to remove their heavy weapons from the hills around Sarajevo. No matter how much carnage he had seen in Bosnia or elsewhere,Vieira de Mello could not shake his belief that patient dialogue could eventually bring about the kind of “conversion” that his philosophy mentor, Robert Misrahi, had advocated.
 
 
Because Western leaders were fearful that bombing might lead the Serbs to take UN hostages, and because French and British soldiers might be the first to be rounded up, the NATO ultimatum left it to UN officials in the field to decide whether to call for NATO bombing. Akashi, the same man who had been turned back by a few scrawny Khmer Rouge soldiers at a bamboo pole two years before, would decide whether air power would be employed. And Akashi had already made up his mind. “If Serb guns are silent and a significant number of them have been placed under UNPROFOR control,” he wrote in an internal note to Headquarters days before the ultimatum was to expire, “I have no intention of agreeing to NATO air strikes.”
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Sensing the reluctance of UNPROFOR officials and the British government to bomb, and knowing the disdain Russians felt toward NATO, the Serbs were initially defiant. The Bosnian Serb deputy force commander, Major General Manojlo Milovanovic, wrote to Rose: “I would like you to understand that the Serbs have never and will never accept anybody’s ultimatum, even at the price of being wiped off the planet.”
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But Vieira de Mello spent hours driving back and forth to the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale and on the phone with Bosnian Serb leaders in an effort to persuade them to pull back their forces. “Since there were large elements in NATO that wanted to bomb,” recalls Simon Shadbolt, Rose’s military assistant, “Sergio was able to portray NATO as the bad cop and the UN as good cop. He urged the Serbs to move to do the minimum of what NATO would accept.”
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With the February 20 deadline for Serb cooperation fast approaching, the Serbs still had not removed many of their heavy weapons. Bosnians were in great suspense over the expiration of the NATO deadline, but Vieira de Mello was not. He knew that Akashi, the man with his finger on the trigger, had never viewed NATO air strikes as a real option. He traveled with Akashi to Pale on the eve of the NATO deadline, and when they attempted to return to Sarajevo, the narrow mountain road back to the capital was so clogged with Serb tanks and heavy weapons attempting to scurry out of range that they had to spend a cold and snowy night together in their vehicle.
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Akashi was elated, as some progress was better than none. Vieira de Mello told the press, “If in the coming hours things continue as they have been for the past 48 hours, then there is no reason for concern.”
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When a journalist asked Rose where he would be when the deadline passed, the general said, “Asleep, in bed.”
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As the deadline expired, Akashi admitted to UN Headquarters that the exclusion zone was not entirely clear of heavy weapons. Nonetheless, he declared the Serbs in “substantial compliance” with the terms of the ultimatum.
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He told CNN, “There’s no need to resort to air strikes.”
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As soon as the announcement was made, a relieved Vieira de Mello joined a group of military officers for a late-night whiskey toast at the residency.
“Živeli,”
he exclaimed in Serbo-Croatian, amid the sound of clinking glasses. “To life!”
 
 
“THE PATH TO A NORMAL LIFE”
 
 
Bosnian officials and civilians had hoped that a NATO intervention would eliminate the Serb heavy weapons that had taken some ten thousand lives in the city. They worried that when Western attention drifted elsewhere, the Serbs would simply reclaim guns that they had placed under UN supervision and reimpose the siege.Vieira de Mello, the UN official whom the Bosnians trusted most, attempted to allay their fears.The day after the deadline passed, he met with President Izetbegović, explaining that he had personally toured by Puma helicopter the most remote places where Serb heavy weapons were being gathered under UN watch. While he said there was naturally “room for improvement” in the UN’s control system, which consisted of thirty-six land inspection and helicopter patrols, he appealed to the Bosnians “to appreciate that snow, ice, mud and mountainous terrain were making UNPROFOR’s task unenviable.” The Serb weapons that remained in range, he insisted, were “unimpressive.”
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He urged President Izetbegović to publicly praise developments, which Izetbegović agreed to do on Bosnian television. “I believe this is a great victory for us although it might not be quite clear, and not without shortcomings,” Izetbegović said. “You can let your children out to play and not be afraid for their lives; you can go to the market place without being afraid and wondering whether you will come back or not. After twenty-three months of killing this is something important indeed.”
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But most Bosnians were conflicted. Sarajevans still could not leave the city, and Serbs were still attacking Bosnians in the rest of the country—sometimes using the very heavy weapons that they had relocated from the hills surrounding the capital. Gordana Knežević, the editor of
Oslobodjenje
in Sarajevo, remarked: “It is as though our death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment.”
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The lessons of the Sarajevo experience seemed obvious. Tasked to deliver food aid but not to fight ethnic cleansing, UNPROFOR had lost both the trust of the Bosnians and the respect of the Serbs. But when the United States brought the weight of NATO to bear on the crisis, it conveyed a resolve that had been absent before.The ghastly carnage of February 5, 1994, had caused the Clinton administration to invest its clout in ending civilian suffering. Diplomacy backed by the threat of force had yielded concessions. As a result, starting on February 21, the people of Sarajevo savored the first quiet days they had enjoyed in nearly two years. Vieira de Mello telephoned Annick Roulet in Geneva: “Annick, the trams are running again in Sarajevo!!”
 
 
He knew from Lebanon and Cambodia how quickly Western leaders would again forget Bosnia. In the brief window they had, UNPROFOR officials had to try to turn the cease-fire around Sarajevo into a countrywide peace.
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Vieira de Mello swiftly set out to do what he had done in Cambodia: use humanitarian progress to try to forge common ground among the bitter foes. If people in the region could become reacquainted with the creature comforts of peace—electricity, running water, and markets brimming with commercial goods—they might be less willing to return to violence. If in Cambodia Vieira de Mello had persuaded the Khmer Rouge to cooperate with the UN repatriation operation because they too wanted refugees to return to lands under their control, in Bosnia he hoped that the taste of normalcy might prompt citizens to press their leaders to concede territory in political negotiations.
 
 
From the beginning of the war in 1992, the Serbs had cut off utilities and food supplies to Sarajevo. Most of the old roads into the city were mined or booby-trapped, and the only link that Bosnian civilians had to the outside world was a tunnel under the airport runway. But by maintaining this stranglehold, the Serb authorities were also besieging their own kin, as the Serb suburbs around Sarajevo got their electricity and water from sources inside the Bosnian capital. In addition, in order for Serbs to move between two of the suburbs, they had to circumnavigate the entire city, which took almost a full day.
 
 
On Thursday, March 17, 1994, after an all-night negotiation session, Vieira de Mello sealed a landmark deal. Four so-called Blue Routes would be opened. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, the Bosnians would open the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge connecting Sarajevo with one of the Serb suburbs. The roads linking the two main Serb suburbs would also be opened for two hours in the morning and the afternoon. In return the Serbs would open the road linking two Bosnian suburbs and the road between Sarajevo and central Bosnia, enabling humanitarian relief and civilian bus traffic to pass into the capital. Thanks to Vieira de Mello’s Blue Routes accord, civilians in Sarajevo would be able to travel openly to the outside world for the first time since the outbreak of war in 1992. It started to look as though their sentence of life imprisonment too would be lifted.
 

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