Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (53 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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UN officials who had been in East Timor during the bloody referendum felt that Vieira de Mello was going out of his way to distance himself from his predecessors. Tamrat Samuel, a forty-seven-year-old Eritrean who had helped plan the referendum, flew into Dili with him and remained for a month. He warned his boss that the UN officials who had lived through the election trauma were suspicious of the new arrivals. “You have to be concerned about perceptions,” Samuel said. “People think ‘Sergio’s boys’ from Kosovo are coming to show them who knows best.” Vieira de Mello laughed. “That’s silly,” he said. “We are here to do this together. There is no such thing as ‘my crowd.’ ” But Samuel stressed that many UN staff believed his team thought, “We are the saviors who have come to fix this mess made by the UN before us.”
Vieira de Mello claimed he did not share the view of UN officials in New York who acted as though the bloodshed were somehow the fault of the UN election workers. In fact, he so admired the stand that UN officials in Dili had taken on behalf of the Timorese at the UN compound that he made Carina Perelli, who ran the election division, promise to take him on a tour of the scene. “I want to know every detail of the siege, of who did what and when,” he told her. And indeed, when he got to East Timor, the Timorese told him how much they respected the prior UN mission for having carried out the referendum amid the violence and for having refused to abandon the Timorese at the compound. But he did not make a sufficient effort to communicate his respect to those UN election officials he overlapped with in Timor. He was far more concerned about the impression he made on the Timorese than about the one he made on his UN colleagues.
His first priority was building governing structures. When he worked in Cambodia, he had understood the hallowed local status of Prince Sihanouk and spent months cultivating ties with him. In East Timor he knew his success would hinge on his relationship with Gusmão, who was both the former rebel commander and unquestioned political leader.
The day after Vieira de Mello landed in Dili after traveling for more than twenty-four hours, he made an unusual, and essential, courtesy call. Instead of waiting for Gusmão to pay his respects to him, he made the two-hour trek to the town of Aileu, where the Timorese leader was encamped. The stifling journey along steep, largely unpaved mountain roads gave him his first glimpse of the country he now ruled. Gusmão thought it a welcome gesture. “I had expected to go down to Dili to see him,” he recalls. “So I took note when Sergio went out of his way to come find me.”
Gusmão told Vieira de Mello that he was pleased the UN had appointed a Brazilian, so that they would be able to communicate with each other in Portuguese, the language of those Timorese who had been educated by Portuguese colonizers before the Indonesian annexation. But he complained that thus far the UN had been doling out humanitarian aid without much local consultation. And he conveyed the concern that had been irking him since his conversation with Hun Sen in New York: East Timor did not want to suffer the “Cambodia trauma.” “I know the UN means well,” he told the new UN administrator, “but in Cambodia the UN came in, spent millions, and then left a vacuum behind them, which was filled with chaos. How are we to suppose that the same thing won’t be done here?” Vieira de Mello smiled graciously. "Well, I served in Cambodia, so I know a few things about that mission,” he said. “The UN certainly made mistakes, but there was more than enough blame to go around.” Gusmão was not interested in the specifics. “Just promise me you’re not going to run Timor like you ran Cambodia,” he said. “We don’t want you to come and go and for us to be left shaking our heads and saying,‘Was that a storm that just passed through here?’ ” Vieira de Mello agreed. “I promise we will not repeat Cambodia here.” Not repeating Cambodia meant aggressively establishing functioning governing structures that made a concrete and lasting difference to citizens.
He struggled to decide how much preferred status to give to Gusmão. UN officials in New York urged him not to play favorites and to treat Gusmão as the head of one party among many. But it did not take Gallup pollsters or a formal election to confirm Gusmão’s hallowed local status.
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Vieira de Mello appreciated New York’s concerns. If he relied on Gusmão to gauge “the will of the people,” he would alienate anybody who did not follow Gusmão. Plus, even if doing so meshed with overall Timorese sentiment, it would send the wrong signal to the Timorese about how leaders would be chosen in the new democratic East Timor. In advance of presidential elections, he would try to walk a fine line, respecting Gusmão’s de facto authority without formally enshrining it.
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Vieira de Mello appreciated New York’s concerns. If he relied on Gusmão to gauge “the will of the people,” he would alienate anybody who did not follow Gusmão. Plus, even if doing so meshed with overall Timorese sentiment, it would send the wrong signal to the Timorese about how leaders would be chosen in the new democratic East Timor. In advance of presidential elections, he would try to walk a fine line, respecting Gusmão’s de facto authority without formally enshrining it.
In Cambodia Yasushi Akashi’s administration had supervised certain ministries, but in East Timor Vieira de Mello and his UN team were asked to run them all themselves. On December 2, 1999, in his most important early ruling, he set up the National Consultative Council (NCC), an advisory body that he hoped would make Timorese feel as though they had a voice in their futures. On its face the council looked reasonable enough. In addition to Vieira de Mello, the NCC included three other UN officials, seven representatives from Gusmão’s party, three members of other political groups, and one representative of the Timorese Catholic Church.
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But since the Security Council had authorized only the UN administrator to make law, the NCC was merely a sounding board. Vieira de Mello could have passed any measure he wanted, irrespective of Timorese wishes. In practice he issued only regulations that the entire advisory body was willing to support. In the early months of the mission, he issued regulations establishing a banking system, a civil service, and a currency: U.S. dollars.
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José Ramos-Horta, East Timor’s eventual foreign minister, laughed off the UN’s invitation to join the NCC.“I was powerless outside of East Timor for long enough,” he told Vieira de Mello. “The last thing I need is to be powerless inside Timor.” Gusmão accepted the invitation to serve, but after several meetings, he recalls, “We felt we were being used. We realized we weren’t there to help the UN make decisions or to prepare ourselves to run the administration. We were there to put our rubber stamp on Sergio’s regulations, to allow the UN to claim to be consulting.” Ironically, others felt Vieira de Mello was too deferential to Gusmão, that the country was becoming a “Xanana Republic.”
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As administrator, he had to find a way simultaneously to offer short-term solutions and to nurture the Timorese capacity to govern themselves in the long term. He repeatedly stressed that the UN was there not to rule, but to prepare the Timorese to do so. But in the meantime UNTAET would have to ensure that tax revenue was collected, the garbage was picked up, and schools were refurbished and run. The UN mission would recruit and train a local Timorese civil service, but in the meantime the UN itself would supply basic services. Jobless Timorese (some 80 percent of the working-age population) thus saw foreigners staffing their civil service, while they went hungry.
Vieira de Mello knew that the Timorese would not suffer UN rule for long. In a November 27 brainstorming session with staff, he argued, “The current goodwill of the East Timorese toward the mission is an expendable asset. The longer UNTAET stays, the greater the chances that it will be perceived as a competing power.” But even though he was sensitive to the danger of stoking Timorese resentment, he was so convinced of the UN’s impartiality that he found it impossible to view the UN as a colonial power. He blanched whenever somebody used the word “protectorate” to describe what he and his colleagues were attempting. He saw a UN administration as totally different from a colonial mission run by a single country, and he pointed out that the Security Council had explicitly tasked UNTAET to work itself out of existence. Yet while he was eager to hold elections, the recent referendum had been so traumatic that he suggested delaying the vote by a year or two.
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In most sectors international UN staff members were put in charge so as to mentor and train the Timorese and to restore services. Unfortunately for Vieira de Mello, UN staff performed neither task well. Most UN officials did not speak any of the relevant languages (Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, or Tetum) and thus had difficulty transferring skills.
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However, as bloated as the UN bureaucracy in New York was in certain departments, it was sorely lacking staff with actual technical expertise. Because he was unable to recruit from any pre-vetted list of experts, crucial posts remained vacant for months.“Our system for launching operations has sometimes been compared to a volunteer fire department,” Secretary-General Annan later wrote.“But that description is far too generous. Every time there is a fire, we must first find fire engines and the funds to run them before we can start dousing the flames.”
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Vieira de Mello complained that he could hire political officers, logisticians, and administrators but could not summon the road engineers, waste managers, tax policy experts, and electrical engineers he needed to make East Timor run. Ian Martin, who watched Vieira de Mello’s struggles from afar, recalls, “Suddenly the UN became formally responsible for everything, and yet it had zero capacity for anything.” Jonathan Prentice, a political officer in the mission who later replaced Hochschild as Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, noted,“We’re not a great rent-a-government. In the first few months, we had all these people sent in from New York who could write diplomatic cables, but nobody who could lay electrical cable.”
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However, as bloated as the UN bureaucracy in New York was in certain departments, it was sorely lacking staff with actual technical expertise. Because he was unable to recruit from any pre-vetted list of experts, crucial posts remained vacant for months.“Our system for launching operations has sometimes been compared to a volunteer fire department,” Secretary-General Annan later wrote.“But that description is far too generous. Every time there is a fire, we must first find fire engines and the funds to run them before we can start dousing the flames.”
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Vieira de Mello complained that he could hire political officers, logisticians, and administrators but could not summon the road engineers, waste managers, tax policy experts, and electrical engineers he needed to make East Timor run. Ian Martin, who watched Vieira de Mello’s struggles from afar, recalls, “Suddenly the UN became formally responsible for everything, and yet it had zero capacity for anything.” Jonathan Prentice, a political officer in the mission who later replaced Hochschild as Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, noted,“We’re not a great rent-a-government. In the first few months, we had all these people sent in from New York who could write diplomatic cables, but nobody who could lay electrical cable.”
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The Timorese, who were already frustrated to have so little governing authority, pounced on the early signs of weakness. “I know many of them have no experience, no expertise, no academic qualifications at all,” Ramos-Horta said of the UN staff. “I asked one of them—an American lady—what her qualifications were, and she said only that she had worked in Yosemite National Park.”
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Most hiring decisions were made in New York. And once the internationals had been contracted, Vieira de Mello was largely stuck with them. Although he was running a mission of his own, he did not have the hiring authority to make use of the “box of possibilities” that he had kept in his office for nearly a decade. And even if he enjoyed full say, he would have been hard pressed to persuade the few specialists he knew to move overnight to a malaria-ridden island in the Pacific. He was unsure how he would manage to deliver tangible goods and services to the Timorese.
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Most hiring decisions were made in New York. And once the internationals had been contracted, Vieira de Mello was largely stuck with them. Although he was running a mission of his own, he did not have the hiring authority to make use of the “box of possibilities” that he had kept in his office for nearly a decade. And even if he enjoyed full say, he would have been hard pressed to persuade the few specialists he knew to move overnight to a malaria-ridden island in the Pacific. He was unsure how he would manage to deliver tangible goods and services to the Timorese.
While some UN officials had difficulty viewing their less-educated Timorese counterparts as partners, others were self-conscious about the mismatch between the UN’s huge responsibilities and its staff’s inapt experience. Hochschild remembers: “I would get into arguments on what the salary scale for teachers should be, and I’d suddenly hear myself and think, ‘What the hell am I talking about? Is this fair to East Timor to let people like me contribute to this debate?’” But Vieira de Mello did his best to remind himself and his staff that “only the Security Council, not I, can divest myself of this ultimate authority.”
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Vieira de Mello had always been acutely sensitive to symbolism and to what he had long called “national self-esteem.” In the early months of the mission he tried not to act like a governor. “Just call me Sergio,” he had said to so many Timorese that when his secretaries attempted to set up appointments for their boss, they usually got nowhere when they said they were calling on behalf of “Mr. Vieira de Mello.” On several occasions, when his vehicle was stuck in traffic, his Egyptian bodyguard Gamal Ibrahim affixed a siren to the roof of the car. “Gamal, Gamal, what are you doing?!” Vieira de Mello would shout. “Take that thing down. I’d rather be late than act like a king.”
Initially he slept in the Hotel Resende, which had neither locks on the doors nor hot water but did have an abundance of cockroaches. On one occasion, fed up with the grief he was getting from Gusmão and Ramos-Horta about the luxuriant lifestyles enjoyed by UN staff, he invited them to his hotel room for drinks. He proudly welcomed them into his suite, escorting them the length of his small bedroom and into his minuscule bathroom. “I want you to see this opulent palace you’re all talking about,” he told his guests. After four months he was told that a villa along the Savu Sea had been restored for him. But when he saw the eight-bedroom house, he was aghast. “I can’t stay here,” he said on his first tour of the capacious quarters. He had the house partitioned, keeping two rooms for himself and designating the rest as a guesthouse for international visitors.
He studied the local language,Tetum, scheduling several lessons a week with Domingos Amaral, his translator, and squeezing in practice sessions whenever his schedule offered a window. When Amaral worked as a translator in the UN election mission, he had traveled in the car behind his boss’s. But Vieira de Mello surprised him by frequently summoning him to sit beside him. “Domingos, where are you going?” he would protest. “Let’s use the journey to practice my Tetum.” Dipping into his large collection of hotel note pads, Vieira de Mello used them to jot words and pronunciation keys for himself. Before he gave a speech, he would have Amaral phonetically mark the key words or lines in Tetum, so that he would know where to place the stress. He referred to Amaral as “Professor.” “Professor, how do you win the sympathy of the people?” he asked rhetorically. “First, you have to learn the language. Language is the key to a people’s culture, and culture is the key to a people’s heart. If you force them to speak your language, you will never win their sympathy.” As Amaral helped him rehearse whole paragraphs of Tetum, he would whisper, “Don’t tell Ramos-Horta or Xanana. It will be our secret.”
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