Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (39 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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If ascent in the UN were strictly merit-based, by 1997 Vieira de Mello would have been vying for one of several prominent jobs at UN Headquarters. With all of his proven gifts negotiating with governments, he might have been named under-secretary-general for political affairs. Or with his extensive experience working with and within UN peacekeeping missions, he could have been chosen under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.
But the UN could never be confused with a meritocracy. The permanent five Security Council countries got to vet who would fill key positions in the UN Secretariat. In the 1990s, the Department of Political Affairs generally went to a Brit, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was slated for the French, both the Department of Management and the UN Development Program went to Americans, and the Secretariat’s satellite office in Geneva was run by a Russian.
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China, the only permanent member of the Security Council not looked after, did not yet complain about being underrepresented.
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China, the only permanent member of the Security Council not looked after, did not yet complain about being underrepresented.
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The one UN department in New York that had not been earmarked for a particular nationality was the small Department of Humanitarian Affairs, under which he had just served. DHA, which had been created after the Gulf War to coordinate the UN’s emergency-relief activities, had been run by a Swede, a Dane, and most recently by Akashi.
DHA had achieved little in its six years of existence. The heads of the agencies it was meant to coordinate—UNHCR, the World Food Program, and other UN relief organizations—had not warmed to a body that they saw as a nuisance. Ogata, who had dramatically expanded UNHCR’s budget and global reach, resisted any efforts to give up the turf she had acquired.
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But Vieira de Mello told Nakamitsu, who knew DHA well and advised him against taking the job, that he viewed the post as a “stepping stone” to a more political job in New York. “The main attraction is that I will be exposed to the Security Council,” he said.
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But Vieira de Mello told Nakamitsu, who knew DHA well and advised him against taking the job, that he viewed the post as a “stepping stone” to a more political job in New York. “The main attraction is that I will be exposed to the Security Council,” he said.
Normally, he was reluctant to campaign for himself.“I’m not like Shashi,” he told colleagues, referring to Shashi Tharoor, an Indian national who had a reputation for wining and dining powerful diplomats.Vieira de Mello marveled at how, in his tenure at the UN, Tharoor had also managed to publish four nonfiction books, three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.
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While India would name Tharoor as its candidate for secretary-general in 2006, Vieira de Mello took it as a point of pride that his home country would never pull strings for him. “I have never asked Brazil for favors,” he liked to say. But he had so impressed ambassadors from Western countries in recent years that he had their backing instead. In November 1997 Annan announced that Vieira de Mello would take over the department as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
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While India would name Tharoor as its candidate for secretary-general in 2006, Vieira de Mello took it as a point of pride that his home country would never pull strings for him. “I have never asked Brazil for favors,” he liked to say. But he had so impressed ambassadors from Western countries in recent years that he had their backing instead. In November 1997 Annan announced that Vieira de Mello would take over the department as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
People worked backward from Vieira de Mello’s rapid rise in the UN and assumed he had a Machiavellian lust for power.They had started to interpret his every move as proof of an elaborate plan to earn the top job, that of UN secretary-general. Vieira de Mello had held this ambition early on in his career, but other factors had since crept into his thinking. “People thought Sergio plotted his life like in a chess game,” recalls Fabrizio Hochschild, a Chilean Brit, then thirty-two, who succeeded Nakamitsu as his special assistant. “But he didn’t think long-term. What he thought was, ‘I’m bored now. It’s time to move on. Where can I go? What can I learn?’ ” When a colleague in Geneva offered him congratulations on his promotion to under-secretary-general, he replied, “Big deal. Big fucking deal.” But one aspect of the move was a big deal. Having worked at UNHCR for twenty-eight years, bowing out only twice to serve in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Bosnia, he was leaving his mother ship for good.
Several hundred people gathered for his farewell party in Geneva. He gave a very short speech in which he said, “I have gotten a lot from this place. I hope I have given something back. If I have any gift, it is that I am aware of my weaknesses.” With Ogata away on leave, her deputy Gerald Walzer presented him with a UN flak jacket in its singular baby blue. “You’ll need this to protect you against all the backstabbing in New York,” Walzer said. One junior UNHCR official asked Vieira de Mello whether he had any recommendations for young staff who aspired to follow in his footsteps. “Be in the field,” he replied. “That is it. That’s what I built my career on. That’s what’s relevant. Nothing else matters.”
He would keep the flak jacket hanging on a coatrack in his New York office.
Part II
Vieira de Mello with General Michael Jackson
(center)
in Kosovo.
(center)
in Kosovo.
Eleven
“GIVING WAR A CHANCE”
Working at UN Headquarters in New York for the first time in his career, Vieira de Mello sometimes felt as though he were suffering death by a thousand paper cuts. His first public appearance came on November 14, 1997. After Secretary-General Annan introduced him to the media as the new under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, responsible for coordinating all the humanitarian efforts in the UN system, he offered characteristically understated remarks. “I hope to contribute my modest field experience in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations to the strengthening of the office,” he said. “Since solutions to humanitarian problems cannot be humanitarian,” he continued, he intended to enlist the support of political, military, human rights, and economic development experts.
At the press conference he stood beside Annan in order to field journalists’ questions. But the media had more pressing issues on their minds. The Republican-controlled U.S. Congress had torpedoed a spending bill that would have turned over to the UN nearly $1 billion of the $1.4 billion that the United States owed in back dues.
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Annan warned that the UN could not keep borrowing from its peacekeeping budget in order to meet its obligations around the world.
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Annan warned that the UN could not keep borrowing from its peacekeeping budget in order to meet its obligations around the world.
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But the main topic of the day was the one that would define Annan’s tenure as secretary-general: Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, UN inspectors had been mandated to dismantle Iraq’s long-range ballistic missiles and its biological and chemical weapons programs. But two days before the press conference, Saddam Hussein had expelled the American weapons inspectors, and the Clinton administration had responded by threatening to bomb Iraq. Asked during the press conference whether he planned to evacuate UN staff there, Annan said he still hoped a diplomatic solution could be found. “We would definitely not put our staff in harm’s way,” he said. “And the moment we feel their lives are in danger, we will pull them out.”
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When Vieira de Mello was at UNHCR, his colleagues could be roughly divided between two camps. On one side were the rights “fundamentalists” like Dennis McNamara who believed refugee law permitted few compromises with governments. On the other were the “pragmatists” like himself who were prepared to make deals that appeased the powerful in the belief that such compromises served the long-term interest of civilians. Having generally failed to persuade the UNHCR fundamentalists of his views, he had taken a good deal of heat and was glad by 1997 to strike out in a new place.
But no sooner had he arrived at the intensely pragmatic Secretariat in New York than he grew nostalgic for what he had left behind. The countries in the UN General Assembly had established UNHCR in 1951 as an office distinct from the UN as a whole. Because it raised its own funds and answered to its own governing board, it had a high degree of autonomy. By contrast, senior officials at UN Headquarters knew that their salaries were paid by the annual dues of UN member states. While UNHCR officials thought of themselves as servants of the refugees, UN officials in the Secretariat saw themselves as servants of governments. “There is the UN that meets and the UN that does,” his UNHCR colleague Nicholas Morris told him. “Now you are joining the UN that meets.”
Kofi Annan had been elected secretary-general the previous year by promising sweeping UN reform and by pledging to meet the demands of Republican senators Jesse Helms and Bob Dole to cut the bloated UN down to size. In announcing his plans, Annan said that the changes he proposed were the “most extensive and far-reaching reforms in the fifty-two-year history of the Organization.”
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One of the first targets for Annan’s scalpel was the branch of the UN that Vieira de Mello had been tapped to run.
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One of the first targets for Annan’s scalpel was the branch of the UN that Vieira de Mello had been tapped to run.
Annan tasked Vieira de Mello with downgrading the Department of Humanitarian Affairs into a smaller Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Vieira de Mello did as asked, restructuring the office. Strongly partial to field experience over desk jobs, he filled vacancies by borrowing staff from the humanitarian field agencies. Joe Connor, the under-secretary-general for management who would have to approve any structural changes, raised no objections. But when Vieira de Mello sent a written version of his restructuring plan up to Annan’s office, Connor summoned his colleague to see him. Connor and his team lined up on one side of the table, while Vieira de Mello and his closest associates stacked the other. In what Vieira de Mello took to be a patronizing lecture, Connor told him that New York was not Geneva, UN Headquarters was not UNHCR, and he would spare himself and the UN great inconvenience if he would put plans in writing and receive formal clearance before sending anything to the secretary-general. Vieira de Mello was so angry that he could not even speak. His tapped his leg under the table, and he took no notes. As soon as he got back to his office, he exploded in rage, telling Fabrizio Hochschild, his special assistant, “Who do they think I am? Some unknowing little humanitarian child who doesn’t know the wise ways of the adults in New York!”
Since he hated being disliked, he was the wrong person to manage shrinking an office. As a field person accustomed to making do with very few people around him, he reviewed the posts within his department and wondered,“What the hell do all these people do every day?” He cut the staff size by half, which naturally demoralized officials who had predated him.
But the hostility of his immediate staff paled beside that of the powerful UN agencies that OCHA was supposed to coordinate.The heads of agencies more often came to meetings to protect their own interests than to develop common strategies. Hochschild remembers, “The attitude among the agencies toward Sergio then was, ‘You can pretend to coordinate us if you want, but we’re going to go right ahead with what we are doing, thank you.’” Vieira de Mello knew he lacked the one thing that might help him secure cooperation: money. Indeed, he had no operational budget at all.
He was miserable. For the first time in his long career, the wars he spent his days fighting were several thousand miles from any battlefield or refugee camp. He turned on his charm for number crunchers, not warlords. And while he had always found the paperwork at UNHCR tiresome, he had never had to fill out as many forms as he did at Headquarters. A man whose strongest asset was his charisma was reduced to making his appeals on paper—and in service not of action, but of mere coordination. “I’m not sure I believe in what we’re doing,” he confessed to an aide. “Do we really need this place?”
Once he had completed the restructuring of OCHA, he did what he had always done. Rather than bowing to fixed hierarchies, he identified and relied upon those who could get the job done and largely excluded those he considered deadweight. In his inner circle were those he trusted; in a more distant circle, those he respected; and in the outermost circle, those he deemed mediocre. The more junior staff flocked to him. “Young people at Headquarters trailed him around as if he were the Pied Piper,” recalls John Ruggie, an assistant secretary-general.
Annie had remained in Europe with Laurent and Adrien, now nineteen and seventeen. Laurent was studying in Lausanne, while Adrien would en-roll at the university in Lyon, France. Vieira de Mello bought an apartment for himself in the Manhattan Place complex on First Avenue between East Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh streets.
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