Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (32 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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For all of her downplaying of Vieira de Mello’s assets, Ogata was very fond of him. When she was invited to meet the queen of England, she told her aides that she was tempted to invite him rather than her own husband. Ogata also understood that she would not be able to keep him by her side at UNHCR if she did not reward his manifest talents. The repatriation of 360,000 refugees to Cambodia, followed so swiftly by his high-profile trip into Gorazde, had earned him praise far beyond the humanitarian community. She valued his Rolodex and his pragmatic and creative approach to crises, as well as the fact that he did not get bogged down in ideology. “Sergio was a problem-solver,” she recalls. “I got the impression he agreed with my way of doing things.” Ogata told him that she would create a new post of director of policy planning and operations just for him. This made him the number three official at UNHCR, an agency that then employed five thousand staff. The position of director of operations had not been refilled at UNHCR since Thomas Jamieson had left it to retire in 1972, so history had come full circle. Ogata also promised him that she would work to get his new position bumped up to assistant secretary-general, which was the third-highest rank in the UN system. This would happen in January 1996.
 
 
Ogata asked him to organize what she hoped would be a pathbreaking intergovernmental summit to address the problems of displacement and migration in the former Soviet Union. Russia wanted to use the conference to earn international sympathy and money to support the twenty-five million ethnic Russians who were being discriminated against in and sometimes even expelled from Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and the other former Soviet republics.
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UNHCR hoped to gather leaders to get them to agree to broader legislation that would protect minorities and guarantee freedom of movement across boundaries.
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He enlisted a twenty-seven-year-old Italian named Claire Messina, who had written her Ph.D. on Russian migration, to help manage the process. “Most senior people pretend they know things,” Messina recalls. “Sergio saw no shame in saying, ‘I don’t know anything about the region. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ ” He also persuaded Viktor Andreev, the Russian with whom he had worked closely in Bosnia, to move to Geneva to join his team. Although Andreev was notoriously lazy and Messina did most of the work herself, Vieira de Mello did not seem to mind. He explained the hire by saying, “First, we need a Russian in this process. And second,Viktor is very loyal. He never played games with me in Bosnia. He was straight. And for a Russian in the Balkans that was very rare.” In fact, hiring a Russian national for such a politically sensitive conference was more likely to alienate non-Russians. But for Vieira de Mello, loyalty and personal history more than compensated.
 
 
The conference, which would be held in May 1996, would prove something of a bust, as the governments that attended would largely limit themselves to reciting old complaints rather than devising new guidelines to meet the challenges of discrimination and migration. Nonetheless Vieira de Mello enjoyed the groundwork. In 1995 he traveled to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, where he briefed senior officials and heard their concerns. The combination of his new UN rank, the contacts he had amassed over the years, and the public profile he had established for himself in Bosnia meant that, on his visits to the former Soviet Union, he gained entrée at an entirely new level: with heads of state and foreign ministers. “Are you not impressed that prime ministers drop everything to see me?” he asked his new special assistant Izumi Nakamitsu, who had been Akashi’s aide in the Balkans. “Don’t get carried away,” she reminded him. “These are prime ministers from very small countries.” He stuck his tongue out at her in pretend offense.
 
 
His steady climb through the ranks of the UN had not stripped him of his unusual regard for the individuals in whose name UN programs were run. On one trip in September 1996 to Azerbaijan, a country that had been at war with Armenia over the province of Nagorno Karabakh, the deputy foreign minister escorted him around a sprawling refugee camp. The country was teeming with refugees, as one in eight Azerbaijanis had been displaced by the conflict. The fetid camp was starting to acquire the air of permanence that Jamieson had so despised. Individual refugees approached him to share their grievances. He told them he was meeting with the president of the country later in the day and asked, “Is there a message that I can deliver on your behalf?” At the start of his tour of the camp, he chatted at length with an elderly woman, probably in her late seventies, who described the melancholy she felt at being unable to return to her rural home. He continued speaking with other camp residents, with Azerbaijani officials, and with UN field workers. After an hour the deputy foreign minister steered him toward the camp exit, where his official limousine waited. Suddenly, just as he was about to enter the vehicle, he stopped. “I need to find that old lady again,” he said.
 
 
The delegation made its way back to the woman’s battered tent, where she remained standing outside. “What do you miss the most?” Vieira de Mello asked the woman. “I am a proud person,” she said through a translator. “My whole life I have lived alone, and I have worked the land myself. I have never depended on anybody for anything. And now here I am for three years dependent on handouts from the UN. It is very hard.” She looked down at the ground.“And what do you want for yourself?” he asked. She looked straight at him and said simply: “I want to go up into the sky and become a cloud. And then as a cloud, I want to travel through the sky many miles to where my home is, and when I see my land, I want to turn into rain, and fall from the sky, landing in the soil so I can remain forever in the place that I belong.” He shook his head in wonder. He knew how unlikely it was that the crisis in Nagorno Karabakh would be resolved in her lifetime, but he promised he would do what he could.“A wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body,” he often told colleagues.
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He moved naturally between refugee camps and the capital cities where he made his appeals for diplomatic interventions or financial resources. He was increasingly popular in Washington. Many of those he had encountered over the years at U.S. embassies or in the refugee world had amassed power in the Clinton administration. Still, when he visited town, he would feign irritation with Dawn Calabia, the UNHCR official who managed his schedule. “These people are too low level. Why can’t you get me a meeting with the secretary of state, the vice president, or the president?” he said. “Just wait,” Calabia replied. “When the president actually needs you for something, then you’ll get that meeting.”
 
 
He did not like the ritual of paying homage to midlevel officialdom. “These people should come to me,” he would say, pointing to the schedule, sometimes with genuine indignation and sometimes with contrived pomposity: “That way, I can wear my jeans, and you can supply the cold beer.” There were only two categories of people he really wanted to meet with: old friends and people who could be useful to him in tackling the crises of the day. “Why do I have to meet him?” he would groan. “Why does it have to be me? I only have eight hours in this town and no time to breathe and you want me to waste my time with him?”
 
 
He was most comfortable in Southeast Asia. Six years after helping to negotiate the plan to resettle Vietnamese boat people, he was able to personally oversee the closure of the refugee camps in the region. Although he took pride in his role, his mind was drifting to the political sphere. On the plane ride to Hanoi, where once he would have consumed situation reports on refugee housing and education needs, he instead read Robert McNamara’s
In Retrospect,
the former U.S. secretary of defense’s reckoning with the Vietnam War. When Nakamitsu asked him his view of the book, he shook his head. “Some people can’t say ‘in retrospect,’ ” he said. “It’s too late.”
 
 
Whenever he was in Geneva for more than a month, he grew restless. On the wall of his office, he had hung his framed photograph of the Sarajevo tram, alongside the bronze plaques given to him by UN peacekeeping units in Lebanon and Bosnia, and the flag of the Montagnards whom he had helped resettle from Cambodia to North Carolina. On his desk he kept the framed photograph of Jamieson. Beside his computer he kept a shoebox. One day Nakamitsu inquired about the contents of the box. “That is the box of possibilities,” he told her. “Inside are the names of people who have impressed me over the years. Someday when I run my own mission, I will call upon those people, and we will put together a dream team.” He opened up the box, and she peered inside to see Vieira de Mello’s professional confetti: hundreds of business cards and handwritten names and numbers scribbled onto napkins, hotel stationery, and fragments of bar coasters. She marveled at the variety of names he had gathered—government officials, unheralded UN field officers, soldiers, journalists, bodyguards, even the salesperson who had sold him his home air conditioner.
 
 
He retained the names of others as well—those who he felt had let him down. As sensitive to impingements on his own dignity as he was to those on others’, he was not one to forget even imagined slights. A small piece of paper with the name “Tim Wirth” remained pinned beneath his stapler on his desk for more than a year. Once, when he had traveled to Washington for meetings, Wirth, who was undersecretary of state for global affairs in the Clinton administration, had been unable to receive him. “One day Tim Wirth will ask me for a meeting,” he told Nakamitsu, “and I will turn it down.” It wasn’t just the lack of access that got to him. As she recalls, “Sergio took the snub as one more sign that the United States didn’t take the UN seriously.” Even though Wirth was perhaps the biggest backer of the UN in the Clinton administration—so big that after he left office he would take over the UN Foundation, funded by Ted Turner, and would lead the effort to improve the UN’s standing in the eyes of Americans—Vieira de Mello carried the grudge.
 
 
Since he and Nakamitsu had worked in the Balkans at the same time, they spent a lot of time discussing UNPROFOR, the Balkan mission that continued to founder in their absence. He always defended the mission, believing the peacekeepers were doing more good than harm for civilians. He also refrained from publicly jabbing the major powers on the UN Security Council, who continued to bring great bombast but insufficient resolve to the conflict. In Geneva, where UNHCR civilian relief workers were seen to be outperforming the UNPROFOR peacekeepers, he insisted that the blue helmets were getting a bad rap: UNHCR food convoys would not be able to reach civilians amid such violence were they not escorted by UN soldiers. In addition, he said, the peacekeepers were guarding heavy-weapons collection points around Sarajevo, and they had helped end the siege of Gorazde.
 
 
But as the months wore on and he acquired the distance to reflect on UNPROFOR’s performance, he changed his mind. He suddenly became plagued by memories of the UN’s timidity and, he feared, its complicity. He reflected critically on the way he and other UNPROFOR officials had downplayed Serb brutality in order to stop NATO from using air power. UNPROFOR was the first peacekeeping force to be given a humanitarian mandate in the context of “an all-out and merciless war,” he wrote. “A greater contradiction in terms and, indeed, on the ground, would have been difficult to achieve.”
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He wrote of the “senselessness of providing relief where there was no security, where shelling and sniper fire took their daily toll on those recently ’assisted.’ ”
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Absent political remedies, the humanitarian aid deliveries were a “frustrating palliative.” He worried privately that he had become what critic David Rieff called a “cultist of the small victory”—so consumed by small humanitarian tasks that he had lost sight of how best to make a meaningful difference.
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He finally stopped treating the UN Security Council’s Resolution 836, which had established Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Srebrenica as “safe areas,” as worth probing for guidance, later referring to it simply as a “museum piece of irresponsible political and military behavior.” He confessed to one reporter that “you would get up in Sarajevo during that fucking winter and look at yourself in the mirror and wonder whether we were not the wardens of a huge concentration camp.”
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By failing to protect the “safe areas” and effectively forcing civilians to remain in their squalor, he said, Western countries and international institutions had exposed “the limits of our own moral conscience.” He finally even felt comfortable joking about Akashi. “Akashi is amoral and inhumane,” he told colleagues. “But apart from that he is a good guy!”
 
 
No longer weighted down by the day-to-day crisis management of the Balkans, and at a safe remove from the fighting, the philosopher who had argued for melding utopia and realism began to reemerge.The same man who had insisted to John Pomfret that the parties in the Balkans negotiate peace and give up on legal prosecutions now tacked a Hague MOST WANTED poster of the war’s prime suspects on his office wall.The poster bore the names and faces of many he had wined and dined, almost all of whom remained at large. If the UN had failed to protect civilians in need, the organization now had a duty to punish the guilty. As he had argued back in 1991 in his lecture on Kant, fair judicial processes were needed to halt cycles of violence.

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