Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (69 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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When Vieira de Mello arrived in East Timor in 1999, the Timorese had been hugely grateful to the UN for having staged the referendum on independence. But when he landed in Iraq, he knew that Saddam Hussein had demonized the UN weapons inspectors and the Oil for Food Program.The inspectors were cast as meddling agents of Washington. And the Oil for Food officials, although technically offering humanitarian succor to needy citizens, were symbols of the UN sanctions that had crippled the Iraqi economy. He was aware that he was inheriting the sins of his predecessors. For all of the disadvantages of having a past in Iraq, however, there were also advantages. While the Coalition continued to rely disproportionately on Iraqi exiles for intelligence, the UN had three thousand Iraqi staff members who had remained enmeshed in the country even during the invasion. He thought he would have an easier time than Bremer in getting a read on the Iraqi street. Unlike in East Timor, he did not have to scrounge up offices, computers, vehicles, or translators. He and his team moved into offices in the Canal Hotel, a white, three-story former hotel training college that had been converted into UN headquarters in the 1980s. Trimmed with the UN’s trademark light blue paint, and located in the eastern suburbs of Baghdad, the site was well known to Iraqis.
He set out to make the Canal familiar to the Americans as well. On June 3, his first full day in Baghdad, he ventured to the four-and-a-half-square-mile fortified district along the Tigris that had already become known as the Green Zone. When the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division fought its way into downtown Baghdad, it had chosen Saddam Hussein’s seat of power as the Coalition’s own and converted the modern Ba’ath party headquarters, the National Assembly, and the 258-room Republican Palace into the Coalition’s offices.
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Concrete blast walls and rolls of concertina razor wire were erected around the eight-mile perimeter, and sandbagged U.S. machine-gun posts warded off intruders.
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Concrete blast walls and rolls of concertina razor wire were erected around the eight-mile perimeter, and sandbagged U.S. machine-gun posts warded off intruders.
As U.S. soldiers inspected the badges of officials in the UN convoy, Vieira de Mello observed the long, wending line of Iraqis queuing up outside the American barricades to apply for work and to register complaints. Before they were allowed to enter, they were patted down, some roughly. He shook his head. “There go the hearts and minds,” he muttered to Prentice.
There was much that was off-putting about the Green Zone. During the evening Americans danced in the disco of the Rashid Hotel, where Hussein’s son Uday had once held vicious court, and gift shops would soon sell T-shirts depicting Uncle Sam daring insurgents to BRING IT ON!
5
Several thousand internationals (mainly Americans but including some British, Australians, Dutch, Japanese, Poles, and Spanish who were part of the Coalition) shuttled among former Iraqi government buildings adorned with murals of Babylonian glory. They strolled along boulevards lined with eucalyptus and palm trees, wearing safari vests, combat boots, and cargo pants. And they slept in prefabricated housing containers. Their phones carried New York (914) area codes, meaning that when the Iraqi phone system was restored, reaching an Iraqi would carry the price of an overseas call.
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The manicured lawns and sparse traffic inside the Green Zone presented a study in contrasts with the congested chaos of the unpoliced urban gridlock outside the walls. Even Coalition staff had begun to refer to their island of residence and work as “The Bubble.”
7
In a phone conversation with Bernard Kouchner, his successor in administering Kosovo,Vieira de Mello would marvel at the Americans’ insulation in the Green Zone. “You know the way they are,” he told Kouchner. “It is just like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo.They have created their own wooden town.They stay in their barracks.They leave in armored cars. They wear flak jackets. They barely go out and when they do they return as quickly as possible.”
5
Several thousand internationals (mainly Americans but including some British, Australians, Dutch, Japanese, Poles, and Spanish who were part of the Coalition) shuttled among former Iraqi government buildings adorned with murals of Babylonian glory. They strolled along boulevards lined with eucalyptus and palm trees, wearing safari vests, combat boots, and cargo pants. And they slept in prefabricated housing containers. Their phones carried New York (914) area codes, meaning that when the Iraqi phone system was restored, reaching an Iraqi would carry the price of an overseas call.
6
The manicured lawns and sparse traffic inside the Green Zone presented a study in contrasts with the congested chaos of the unpoliced urban gridlock outside the walls. Even Coalition staff had begun to refer to their island of residence and work as “The Bubble.”
7
In a phone conversation with Bernard Kouchner, his successor in administering Kosovo,Vieira de Mello would marvel at the Americans’ insulation in the Green Zone. “You know the way they are,” he told Kouchner. “It is just like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo.They have created their own wooden town.They stay in their barracks.They leave in armored cars. They wear flak jackets. They barely go out and when they do they return as quickly as possible.”
When Vieira de Mello and his UN team entered the palace where Bremer had set up shop, they saw clean-scrubbed Americans emerging from offices marked for various ministries. This was the first time he really comprehended that the Coalition considered itself the actual government of Iraq. Not wanting to alienate Bremer from the start, he mainly listened, holding back his own views. He had expected to hear the details of Bremer’s plan for devolving power, but he quickly realized that Coalition officials had no such plan. They were improvising.
Bremer’s top American adviser was Ryan Crocker, the Arabist whom Vieira de Mello had befriended in Beirut in 1982. “Sergio is as good as it gets not only in the UN, but in international diplomacy,” Crocker had told Bremer before their first meeting. “He is the personification of what the UN could be and should be but rarely is.” Bremer would make up his own mind. “He didn’t take my word for it,” Crocker recalls. “He had to see for himself.”
Bremer explained that he saw phase one of the transition as the uprooting of the old regime and the establishment of law and order and basic services. “We expect to turn the corner in the next month or so,” he said, seemingly unaware that the wholesale evisceration of the old regime that he had undertaken was at odds with the establishment of law and order.They would then proceed to phase two, which included economic reconstruction, job creation, and the formation of democratic bodies. On the all-important political side, Bremer said, he intended to appoint a group of Iraqis to a constitutional conference, where they would draft a new constitution that would be submitted to Iraqis for a referendum. Vieira de Mello winced at the idea that the constitution would be drafted before general elections were held, as it would thus seem like an illegitimate American charter. Bremer said that he would also appoint a “consultative committee” composed of representatives from all religious, political, and social backgrounds. This committee in turn would appoint Iraqi technocrats to the different ministries to work with the American and British ministers in charge.
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Bremer was impressed with what he saw of Vieira de Mello.“The Iraqis were concerned, and we were concerned, about whether the UN would play a helpful role or not,” the American remembers. “The thing that pleased me is that Sergio said he wouldn’t work against us and he wouldn’t stand off. He wanted to work with us.”
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Bremer was impressed with what he saw of Vieira de Mello.“The Iraqis were concerned, and we were concerned, about whether the UN would play a helpful role or not,” the American remembers. “The thing that pleased me is that Sergio said he wouldn’t work against us and he wouldn’t stand off. He wanted to work with us.”
This didn’t sit well with some of Vieira de Mello’s own staff. After the meeting in the Green Zone, he returned to the Canal Hotel to discuss the UN’s options with his staff. Benomar, one of his political advisers, urged him to declare publicly that the UN special representative believed the Coalition was in violation of Resolution 1483 because it had taken over the governing functions of Iraq. “We’ve got to take a stand,” the Moroccan argued. Marwan Ali, a Palestinian UN political aide who had attended university in Iraq, complained about the vagueness of the Security Council resolution, which offered no guidance on how the UN should interact with either the Americans or the Iraqis. “It’s constructive vagueness,” Vieira de Mello attempted. “There’s no such thing as constructive vagueness in Iraq,” Ali countered. “It’s just vague vagueness.” Most members of the team recognized that the CPA had established facts on the ground that the UN would not be able to alter. The majority felt that the only way the UN could make a meaningful difference in Iraq would be not to denounce the Coalition but to persuade it to alter its approach. Vieira de Mello sided with the pragmatists. “We can’t just sit at the Canal Hotel and do nothing,” he said. “You can’t help people from a distance.”
In his meetings with American and British officials, he never focused on whether the Coalition should have been in Iraq in the first place. “Sergio didn’t bother himself with whether the war was right or wrong,” says Prentice. “The war was a fact.The occupation was a fact. You’ve got two choices when you have those facts: Either you can try to help the Iraqi people out of the mess and urge a swift end to the occupation. Or you can take the moral high ground and turn your back on it.” Throughout his career Vieira de Mello had often spoken of the importance of “black boxing” intentions. "By taking the Americans at their word, and then making them abide by those words,” he told colleagues, “you can create leverage.” This was what he had done with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and with the Serbs in Bosnia. It was also what the UN had done with Indonesia when Jakarta had agreed to a referendum in East Timor and then been forced to stand by the results.
On his third night in Baghdad, Vieira de Mello had dinner with John Sawers, the British diplomat who served as Bremer’s deputy. Since it was still a relatively calm time, the two men sat out on the terrace in the open air, eating steaks and drinking Iraqi beer late into the evening. Vieira de Mello’s adult experience in the Islamic world had been confined to his tours of Sudan in 1973-74 and Lebanon in 1981-83. He spoke fluent English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish and mediocre Tetum (the Timorese dialect), but he spoke hardly a word of Arabic. Sawers noted Vieira de Mello’s self-consciousness about his linguistic handicap. “Here was one of the greatest linguists in the history of the UN system,” recalls Sawers, “and he could barely say hello and good-bye in Arabic. He was not pleased.”
Vieira de Mello knew that most UN officials who had amassed Middle East experience had also acquired baggage. He consoled himself that as an outsider he might bring fresh eyes to the country’s challenges. His main asset wasn’t his Iraq-specific knowledge, but his problem-solving experience and his war-tested ability to charm thugs. Carina Perelli, the head of the UN Electoral Assistance Division, called him an
“encantador de serpientes,”
a mesmerizing charmer of even the most poisonous snakes. While dining with Sawers, Vieira de Mello offered a comparative perspective, speaking at length about what he took to be the lesson of East Timor. “The Timorese were okay with the UN in charge for a certain, brief period of time, but at a certain point we had to switch to a support role,” he said. “You’ll have to do the same.” In the early weeks of his time in Iraq, when Vieira de Mello had a suggestion to make, he would forward it to Sawers. “If Bremer thinks these are British ideas rather than UN ideas,” he liked to say, “they are far more likely to be accepted!” Sawers suggested that the UN co-locate with the Americans and the British in the Green Zone. But Vieira de Mello dismissed the idea, saying, “My instincts are to keep a degree of distance from the Coalition. And that will require some physical distance.”
“encantador de serpientes,”
a mesmerizing charmer of even the most poisonous snakes. While dining with Sawers, Vieira de Mello offered a comparative perspective, speaking at length about what he took to be the lesson of East Timor. “The Timorese were okay with the UN in charge for a certain, brief period of time, but at a certain point we had to switch to a support role,” he said. “You’ll have to do the same.” In the early weeks of his time in Iraq, when Vieira de Mello had a suggestion to make, he would forward it to Sawers. “If Bremer thinks these are British ideas rather than UN ideas,” he liked to say, “they are far more likely to be accepted!” Sawers suggested that the UN co-locate with the Americans and the British in the Green Zone. But Vieira de Mello dismissed the idea, saying, “My instincts are to keep a degree of distance from the Coalition. And that will require some physical distance.”
Nadia Younes, his chief of staff, managed the UN’s day-to-day ties with the Coalition. At the first large meeting between midlevel U.S. and UN officials in the Green Zone, Younes passed around copies of UN Resolution 1483, and the group went over the text line by line. The Americans looked flummoxed. “What does ‘encourage’ mean?” a U.S. official asked. “We don’t know,” Younes replied. “You wrote the thing!” Another U.S. official chimed in: “Well, it probably means that Sergio should issue a statement once a month praising the CPA.” It would take many more meetings for Coalition officials to see the UN role as anything more than either cosmetic or confrontational. For Bremer the resolution was useful because it made clear that there was only one ruler of Iraq: “We were the occupying authority.We were the sovereign. Under international law you are either sovereign or you are not. It’s like being pregnant. Under 1483 the role that Sergio and the UN could play was limited. They were there to help us.”
While Vieira de Mello soon managed to win Bremer’s respect (if never his full trust), other U.S. officials remained suspicious of the UN. In late June Vieira de Mello was stopped at a Coalition checkpoint on the airport road. Alain Chergui, who was part of his team of bodyguards, told a U.S. soldier that under international rules UN vehicles were not to be checked. The young soldier refused to let the UN convoy pass. “Do you know who is in the car?” Chergui said, frustrated. “No, and I don’t care,” the soldier replied. Chergui called Patrick Kennedy, Bremer’s chief of staff, who agreed to intervene. But Chergui got nowhere when he told the soldier who was on the line. “Is he civilian?” the soldier asked. Chergui nodded. “Then I don’t give a shit.” When Ibrahim,Vieira de Mello’s more hot-tempered bodyguard, began to pick a fight with another one of the Coalition soldiers, the special representative finally stepped out of the car and placed a call to Bremer, who reached somebody in the military chain of command, who eventually ordered the convoy through. On subsequent occasions when the UN bodyguards (several of whom were French and thus believed the Americans were deliberately hostile) ended up in quarrels, Chergui told his colleagues to muzzle their fury. “You have to stay cool, or we will impair Sergio’s job for silly reasons,” he said. “The Americans don’t want us here to begin with. We are playing in their garden.”
The mistrust was mutual. Almost all UN staff had opposed the U.S.-led invasion. They thought that the Coalition staff, who were vetted by Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon, were frighteningly young and inexperienced. Most were Republicans, and many dreamed aloud of turning Iraq into a free market laboratory. A growing number had adopted Bremer’s dress code, trudging around in khakis, blue blazers, and desert combat boots. While two-thirds of Vieira de Mello’s closest advisers spoke Arabic, very few in Bremer’s senior circle did.
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