Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (46 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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As Vieira de Mello drove with Bakhet into Zagreb, he complained that officials from the Croatian foreign ministry were likely waiting for him at the hotel. “I’ve had enough of meetings,” he said suddenly.“Let’s forget the Croats and go get a proper meal.” The two men ducked into a restaurant Vieira de Mello knew from his days working for UNPROFOR five years before.They talked about all topics under the sun except Kosovo. When they arrived at the airport to catch their flight to Switzerland, they found a panicked UN staff and irritated Croatian officials. Vieira de Mello beckoned Dutton over to his suitcase, where the war crimes investigator retrieved his evidence.
 
 
Team members flew from Zagreb to Zurich, where they stayed at an airport hotel. There Vieira de Mello found a fax awaiting him from his assistant, Fabrizio Hochschild, who had read a wire story describing the UN press conference in Montenegro. Hochschild, who was loyal to Vieira de Mello but also often sharply critical, wrote that his boss’s rebuttals of Serbian falsehoods “were courageous and made us all feel proud.”
12
UN Headquarters in New York had had a funereal feeling in March, when NATO went to war unilaterally, but Vieira de Mello’s mission had lifted spirits. The Security Council may have been bypassed, but by offering the first independent eyewitness proof of the ethnic cleansing, UN officials felt they had proven the organization mattered.
 
 
The exhausted UN team members gathered in the hotel garden for drinks and dinner, but their leader retired to his hotel room. As his colleagues released the tension of the previous two weeks with alcohol and laughter, Vieira de Mello stood at his hotel window looking down at the courtyard, clutching a phone to his ear and waving occasionally.
 
 
When he returned to Headquarters in New York, he became the first humanitarian official ever to be called to testify before the UN Security Council. On June 2, all eyes were on him, as he had gone where even NATO generals had not dared to go. He began his remarks by commending the Yugoslav health authorities for caring for Kastberg and Khalikov, but then he delved quickly into a detailed discussion of Serb ethnic cleansing. His team, he said, had enjoyed access that “was more than expected, but less than requested.”
13
The Serbian authorities had limited the team’s movement by citing security concerns that were “often neither understandable, nor convincing.” Nonetheless he had seen enough of the province to know that it was a “panorama of empty villages, burned houses, looted shops, wandering livestock, and unattended farms.”
14
 
 
Since the bulk of the mission’s time had been spent in Serbia, he had plenty to add about the destruction caused by NATO bombing as well. He reported that civilians would be suffering for many years the effects of the environmental damage, psychological trauma, and destruction of essential services, such as electricity, health, communications, and heating. Although his presentation was evenhanded, he had led with a discussion of Serb violence, and it was these comments that captured global news headlines, as he knew they would.
 
 
His daredevil mission had not brought radically new information to light, but he had highlighted civilian suffering and reasserted the UN’s independent voice. He had shown as much to himself as to anyone that the UN was prepared to stand up for the victims of ethnic cleansing, while also standing up for itself.
 
 
Thirteen
 
 
VICEROY
 
 
In three decades of responding to war and displacement, Vieira de Mello had made a specialty out of understanding governments. Although he never entirely got his way, he had learned to negotiate with them, to extract resources from them, and to manipulate them. His senior colleagues in New York, who themselves were generally veterans of national government service, were usually surprised to learn that he had never himself worked for Brazil.The UN was not a place one could go to get experience running a country. But all that changed, unexpectedly, with the crisis in Kosovo.
 
 
ENDING A WAR
 
 
When he and his team returned to the United States after their risky assessment mission, NATO’s war was still going poorly. Nonetheless, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister, and Martti Ahtisaari, the Finnish president, were spearheading peace talks supported by the Clinton administration, and those talks were managing to gather steam. The mothers and wives of Serbian soldiers had begun protesting the casualties the army was suffering, and NATO had begun bombing businesses belonging to Milošević’s closest associates. The Serbian leader, who had expected to be able to play Russia off against NATO, found himself boxed in when the UN, NATO, and Russia suddenly began presenting a united front. On Thursday, June 3, 1999, after seventy-eight days and 12,500 NATO bombing raids, Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari handed Milošević a “take it or leave it” deal, and he surrendered. That evening NATO officers began negotiating the withdrawal of Serbian police and military forces from Kosovo.
 
 
One major question had been left unresolved: After Serb forces departed, who would run Kosovo? Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, which had operated its own informal, underground governing structures since the province was stripped of its autonomy in 1989, was eager to take over, but the Russians would not allow it. Serbian officials would have been happy to remain in charge, but that was precisely what the NATO air campaign had been designed to undo.
 
 
Vieira de Mello gave numerous media interviews following his return to New York in which he argued that, as an interim measure, the UN (and not NATO) was the organization best suited to running the province. “If the UN were to play that role,” he told a large audience at the National Press Club in Washington four days after Milošević’s surrender, “I can assure you that it is ready to move, and move fast.”
1
But neither he nor Secretary-General Annan expected the UN to be handed such a role. Even though the Russians were lobbying for it, UN officials assumed that the organization would be cut out of the peace much as it had been cut out of the war. Indeed, Vieira de Mello was so confident that others would be given the task of managing Kosovo’s fate that, having neglected the rest of the world since March, he made plans to fly to Beijing on June 9, then on to Islamabad, Pakistan, on June 13, to assess regional humanitarian conditions.
 
 
But Moscow quickly forced him to change his travel plans. The Clinton administration had bypassed the UN Security Council in the run-up to the war because Russia would have vetoed any U.S. resolution authorizing NATO bombing. Now that the Russians were insisting the UN lead the transition, Washington was prepared to return to the Security Council and invite it to help shape Kosovo’s future. On June 10, the Security Council passed Resolution 1244, which amounted to a lowest-common-denominator fudge among powerful countries. It granted Kosovo “substantial autonomy” but not independence, and “meaningful self-administration” but not self-government. Serb police and military units would have to leave Kosovo. But the Security Council countries reiterated their respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” At an unspecified date down the road (a date that had not yet arrived in late 2007), the province would move out of this halfway house and either legally remain part of Serbia or, more likely, achieve full international recognition as an independent country. Kosovo still needed a government, so the UN would function as an “interim international administration” until the province’s final status could be resolved.
 
 
Resolution 1244 called on Annan to appoint a Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) as transitional administrator.This person would oversee civil administration, humanitarian affairs (via UNHCR), reconstruction (via the EU), and institution-building (via the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). This administrator would work in tandem with—but would have no say over—NATO, which would send in 50,000 ground troops in a peacekeeping role to stabilize the province.
 
 
UN staff had done no advance planning to lead what, by the look of things, would be both the most ambitious political mission in the organization’s history and its highest-profile assignment since the Bosnia and Rwanda debacles. Even though it was unclear whether the UN had the in-house expertise to actually govern anything, Annan embraced the assignment. In the words of one UN staffer, “When the Security Council calls, the Secretariat doesn’t bark. It bows its head, puts its tail between its legs, and starts walking.”
 
 
Annan knew that the UN couldn’t afford to fail, and the choice of his special representative was essential. Because the countries on the Security Council had given him no warning, he had not lined up a candidate. On Friday, June 11, he summoned Vieira de Mello to his office on the thirty-eighth floor. “Sergio,” he said, “I need you to go back.” Although Vieira de Mello was exhausted, he was also delighted. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi had nixed his appointment as SRSG in 1993; this would mark the first time in his career that he would run his own UN mission. The only catch was that the assignment was temporary. Since Europe would supply the bulk of the funding for Kosovo’s rebuilding, Annan felt he needed to find a European to succeed Vieira de Mello as soon as possible.
 
 
ASSEMBLING A TEAM
 
 
When Vieira de Mello led his eleven-day humanitarian mission into Serbia the previous month, he had been handed a diverse interagency team. But for this vital political mission, he was given the freedom to choose his own staff. He picked a half-dozen trustworthy colleagues who were prepared to leave their lives and families on twenty-four hours’ notice. Dozens more UN staff would soon follow, but the nucleus would be key. Helena Fraser, a twenty-seven-year-old British national, had been the Kosovo desk officer in New York. “Can you be ready to leave tomorrow?” Fabrizio Hochschild asked her. “I’m getting married in a month,” she said, but then added, “I did go for my last dress fitting earlier today.”
 
 
Hansjörg Strohmeyer, a thirty-seven-year-old former German judge who had only recently joined Vieira de Mello’s office, had worked in Bosnia for three years and knew the Yugoslav legal codes.“I need a lawyer down there,” Vieira de Mello told him. Strohmeyer’s mother had just flown in from Dortmund that day, and unable to speak English, she would be lost in New York without him. But he eagerly accepted. When he delivered the news to his mother that evening, she burst into tears.
 
 
The next day, Saturday, June 12, Fraser, Strohmeyer, and the other young team members raced around New York preparing for the trip. Fraser went to Bloomingdale’s with her fiancé to buy light cotton clothing for the mission. As the couple hurriedly piled up purchases, the saleslady asked what the occasion was. “I’m going to Kosovo,” Fraser said. The woman looked puzzled. “Where’s that?” she asked. “It’s in the former Yugoslavia,” Fraser answered. “Where’s that?” the saleslady followed up.“It’s in the Balkans,” Fraser said. “Hmmm,” the lady said. “Where’s that?” “It’s in Europe,” Fraser replied. The woman’s face brightened. “Oh, congratulations,” she said.“Have a wonderful trip!”
 
 
Strohmeyer had been told that Vieira de Mello’s team would likely depart on Sunday. On Saturday morning he dropped off his laundry and swung by the UN to pick up a few relevant books. “Have you picked up your ticket already?” Vieira de Mello’s secretary asked. Strohmeyer said he had not. She told him that he could get it from Hochschild at the airport later. “What do you mean ‘later’?” he asked. “The flight leaves this afternoon,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you?” They had not. Strohmeyer, who had his passport with him, ran back to the Laundromat, stuffed his wet laundry into a bag with his books, and hailed a cab to the airport. His mother would have to fend for herself.
 
 
Vieira de Mello barely made the flight himself. Like the others, he had spent the day organizing his life for the trip. But he had also been getting hourly updates from the Balkans, where a new exodus was under way. Thousands of Serbian civilians had suddenly taken to the road, heading for Serbia proper. They had voluntarily piled their belongings atop their cars and wagons in much the same way Kosovar Albanians had recently been forced to do at gunpoint. The Serbs scoffed at Western assurances that NATO forces would protect the Serbs. “How can we believe NATO when they bombed us?” a young Serb student was quoted by the
Washington Post
as asking.
2
Yet while Vieira de Mello was aware of the fears of the Serb minority, he underestimated the longing that some ethnic Albanians felt for revenge.
 
 
By the time he reached New York’s Kennedy airport, cleared security, and sprinted to his gate, the flight attendants were just about to close the airplane door. Team members who had nervously awaited their boss’s arrival, cheered his entrance but groaned at his attire. He was wearing a khaki safari suit that made him look twenty years older and significantly more colonial than he intended.

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