ChasingtheFlame

But in the weeks following the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, it had become clear that U.S. soldiers were going to need help. Suicide bombings had not yet begun, but widespread looting had, and those who had so easily dislodged the Iraqi dictator seemed increasingly lost when it came to managing the turbulent aftermath of his reign. European leaders who felt they had been snubbed back in March, when the United States and Britain had chosen to go to war, now agreed with Washington on one issue: Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, should deploy a team of specialists to help speed the day that Iraqis regained control of their country.

Vieira de Mello was chosen to head that team because of his vast experience, but also because a few weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he had done something few UN officials before him had managed: He charmed George W. Bush. In a meeting in the Oval Office, Vieira de Mello had criticized U.S. detention policies in Guantánamo and Afghanistan and pressed the president to renounce torture; yet Bush had warmed to him as a man. When the day came to choose an envoy, Annan appointed Vieira de Mello, believing he was the one man whose advice the Bush administration might heed. Annan also knew that his charismatic colleague was the rare troubleshooter who could secure the simultaneous backing of the American, European, and Arab governments.

During the eleven weeks he had spent in Iraq, Vieira de Mello had tried to find and expand the space where the UN could make a difference. Under Saddam Hussein, Sunnis had been the favored sect, but Vieira de Mello saw the danger of a new Shiite tyranny of the majority. He attempted to forestall it by pressing for the inclusion of Sunni leaders in the transition process and by enlisting the support of the leading Shiite clerics who were refusing to meet with Bremer. And he pressed Coalition officials to end their dependence on Ahmad Chalabi and other exiles who had a greater following in Washington than in Iraq.

But Bremer resisted implementing the UN’s most important suggestions. Vieira de Mello had tried and failed to gain greater UN and Red Cross access to Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody. He had tried and failed to persuade Bremer to devise concrete timelines for a constitution, for elections, and for the exit of U.S. troops. And he had tried and failed to get the Coalition to rescind or scale back its two most destabilizing decrees—the wholesale de-Ba’athification of Iraqi institutions and the disbanding of the Iraqi army. By late July he had grown depressed. He told colleagues that Bremer and the Iraqis had stopped returning his phone calls.

Now, with two hours unexpectedly freed up, he returned to his cluttered to-do list. Up to then he had never publicly criticized the Coalition’s excessive use of force, but he decided to change course, instructing an aide to draft a press release criticizing the Coalition’s recent shooting of civilians. The more obstruction he met in Baghdad, the more his mind drifted forward to September 30, the day he would return to his full-time job in Geneva as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. His time in Iraq had filled him with ideas about how to make a UN backwater—a sponsor of costly reports and seminars—matter in the lives of real people.

At 3 p.m. he met with two officials from the International Monetary Fund to discuss the Coalition’s rush to privatize Iraqi state enterprises. Around 4:25 p.m. he started his last meeting of the day, warmly greeting Gil Loescher and Arthur Helton, two American researchers who were in Iraq to examine the humanitarian costs of the war. He ushered them to a coffee table in an alcove near his office window. Two members of his UN team—Fiona Watson, a Scottish political affairs officer, and Nadia Younes, his wisecracking Egyptian chief of staff, rounded out the circle.

Just after the group had taken their seats, a deafening explosion sounded, and the sky flashed white. One person present likened the light to “one million flashbulbs going off all at once.” The windows shattered, sending thousands of glass spears flying across the office. The roof, the walls, and the floor beneath the office caved in, then crashed down, pancake style, onto the floors below. The last words uttered, a split-second after the explosion, belonged to Vieira de Mello. “Oh shit,” he said, seemingly more in resignation than in surprise.

“ HE ’S LIKE A cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” This was how a journalist colleague described Sergio Vieira de Mello to me on the eve of my first meeting with him. It was April 1994, I was a novice reporter in the former Yugoslavia, and he was reputed to be the most dynamic and politically savvy figure in the UN mission there. We had friends in common, and he agreed to brief me on the conflict over a meal on April 15 in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.

The UN peacekeeping mission in neighboring Bosnia, which had been in a state of steady crisis for two years, was on the brink of collapse. On April 10, NATO had staged the first bombing raid in its entire forty-five-year history, attacking Serbs who were besieging the UN “safe area” of Gorazde. Yet in the face of what proved a tame show of Western force, the Serbs defiantly continued their assault. I had been told that Vieira de Mello was a true believer in the UN. I did not expect him to keep our appointment for dinner.

But when I telephoned to give him the opportunity to cancel, he was remarkably calm. “The sky is falling here,” he said, “but a man has got to eat, hasn’t he? If World War Three starts while we’re at dinner, we won’t order a second bottle of wine.”

The UN had been established in 1945—in the words of its founding Charter—to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The Security Council, the UN’s most powerful organ, was responsible for maintaining international peace and security. Because each of its five permanent members—Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—could veto the resolutions of the others, the Council had been paralyzed by U.S.-Soviet tensions during the cold war. But for a brief period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the major powers at last seemed prepared to work together through the UN to keep peace. In 1991, in keeping with his promise of promoting a “new world order,” President George H. W. Bush had obtained UN support to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait.

Within a year of the U.S.-led coalition’s triumph in Kuwait, however, it had become clear that many governments did not believe their national interests were imperiled by the carnage in the Balkans. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid, which prevented Bosnians from starving, but they did not stop the slaughter. They sent peacekeepers into a live war zone, causing critics to chide UN officials like Vieira de Mello for simply “passing out sandwiches at the gates of Auschwitz.” ²

We met at 8 p.m. at a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of town. He carried a cell phone, then still a fairly exotic device. While living in Cambodia in 1992, he told me, he had one of the earliest available models. The size of a quart of milk, it had lengthy antennae and could work only outdoors. By the time of his posting to the Balkans, the phones had slimmed down to the size of walkie-talkies.

No sooner had we been seated than the phone rang. Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose, the UN commander, was telephoning from Sarajevo to brief him on the evening’s tumultuous events. I made a motion to move away in order to give him his privacy. He insistently waved me back to my seat and pointed to the wine that the waiter had just brought to the table. He did not seem to be the type of international diplomat who spent his time scheming about how to plant self-serving stories in the press. But if he happened to have an audience for his high-stakes activities, he also wouldn’t shoo it away.

He winced throughout Rose’s update, which lasted around five minutes. When he hung up, he told me what he had learned: Bosnian defenses around Gorazde had collapsed, exposing British soldiers to attack. One of Rose’s men had been shot and badly injured. The UN was attempting to manage a medical evacuation, and NATO bombers were standing by in case they were needed again. Gorazde, which was home to 65,000 Bosnians, looked poised to fall. “It’s going to be a long night,” Vieira de Mello said wearily, though no part of him seemed to mind. I could see how he had gained a reputation for workaholism, unflappability, and a commitment to enjoying life despite the despair around him.

In the breaks between calls, I asked him how he had ended up at the United Nations. “Nobody else would take me,” he said, implausibly. “I was a child of 1968,” he explained, proudly recounting how, when he was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968, he had joined his fellow students in revolt. He was beaten so badly by the police that he had required hospitalization. He pointed to the scar above his right eye—a monument to his rebellious youth.

I asked if he had been tempted to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had worked for the Brazilian foreign service. He shook his head violently. “The Brazilian government ruined my father’s life,” he said. A few years after the military regime seized power in 1964, the generals had forced his father into early retirement. “I would never work for Brazil,” he said.

As he rattled off the various war zones he had worked in, I wondered how a man of his adventurous tastes was managing to endure the staid pace of life in peaceful Zagreb. When I asked him if he missed Sarajevo, where he had lived for five months, he groaned. “You have no idea,” he said. “I would take life under siege any day over endless staff meetings and paperwork. I was born to be in the field.”

Again his phone rang, transforming this man of hearty laughter and animated tales into a sober diplomat, deliberate and exceedingly self-conscious about his choice of words and even his grave facial expressions. His eyes narrowed in concentration as General Rose told him that Serb shelling had abated long enough for the UN to evacuate the wounded British officer to Sarajevo. But soon after the young soldier arrived, he died. “I’m so sorry, Mike,” Vieira de Mello said. When he ended the call, I asked him what the UN would do. He said he was certain of only one thing. “In the UN, we cannot surrender our impartiality. It is perhaps our greatest asset.”

I asked him what he would do if he were in charge. “In charge of the world?” he asked. “Or in charge of the UN mission?” The distinction was essential, he insisted. While the peacekeepers had become global symbols of cowardice, they were following instructions from powerful capitals. “The one thing you have to remember,” he said, “is that the major powers will kick the UN. They’ll scream at the UN. But at the end of the day they are getting the UN that they want and deserve. If the United States and Europe wanted a muscular peacekeeping operation here, they would insist on adding muscle. If they really wanted to stop the Serbs, they would have done so long ago.”

As our meal wound down, he reached into the breast pocket of his elegantly tailored blazer and pulled out a battered piece of paper—a single page—that constituted the only formal instructions the Security Council had ever offered him or the peacekeepers there in the Balkans. It was the third page of UN Security Council Resolution 836, which had set up the six “safe areas,” including Gorazde. He had underlined and double-underlined the important passages and made notes to himself in the margins in blue pen, red pen, black pen, and pencil. He had refolded the resolution so many times that when he held it up to the table lamp, its creases made it virtually see-through.

He pointed to the key paragraph, which said the UN peacekeepers were in Bosnia “to deter attacks against the safe areas.” “But what is required for ‘deterrence’?” he asked. “What constitutes an ‘attack’?” he continued. “And what in the hell—no, where in the hell—are the ‘safe areas’?” The countries on the Security Council had passed the resolution, he said, but they had never bothered to delineate the boundaries of the safe zones. “That’s not a coincidence,” he insisted. “If nobody knows what is officially protected, then nobody can be called upon to do the protecting.”

He focused on a pivotal comma. “Look at this,” he said. “The resolution says we should ‘comma—acting in self-defense—comma—take the necessary measures—comma—including the use of force’ to respond to attacks against civilians!” No matter how many times he had studied the UN mandate, its vagueness continued to enrage him. “What are the commas supposed to mean?” he asked. “Does it mean the UN should only use force in self-defense? Or does it mean we should use force in self-defense and also to protect the Bosnians?” I was flabbergasted by his intimacy with the text. I had never even thought to read the text of UN resolutions, which seemed of little relevance to the tragedy unfolding.

At the end of our dinner, he was driven back to the operations room at UN headquarters. As we parted, he told me somewhat melodramatically that Western countries were on the verge of deciding more than the future of a troubled region. They were defining their approach to the post-cold war global order and determining the future of the United Nations, which had been waiting almost a half century for its chance to civilize the world. He seemed to believe the UN was up to the task. Judging from what I had seen in Bosnia, I was skeptical.

IN THE DECADE that separated the war in Bosnia from that in Iraq, Vieira de Mello became a global figure. In 1999 the UN got into the governing business for the first time, and he was the one tapped to run two small statelets— Kosovo, where he deployed on seventy-two hours’ notice, and then the tiny half-island nation of East Timor, which he administered for two and a half years. Suddenly a man who had practiced his leftism “loudly” back in 1968 was walking around in a safari suit and being teased by his staff for taking on the absolute powers of a colonial “viceroy.” After years of critiquing governments, he found himself struggling to balance fiscal discipline and social welfare, liberty and security, and peace and justice. In the eyes of powerful governments, he had become the “go-to guy”—handed one mission impossible after another. By the time he shepherded East Timor to independence in 2002, colleagues and international diplomats had begun placing wagers on when—not whether—he would become UN secretary-general.

Vieira de Mello carried a leather-bound copy of the UN Charter with him when he traveled, and he suffered when the UN suffered. In his long career he saw religious extremists and militants take shelter in UN refugee camps, where they sold UN food for money to buy arms. He saw warlords transform themselves into used-car salesmen by selling stolen UN Land Cruisers (repainted but still bearing UN license plates). He saw proud French and British peacekeepers stripped of their weapons, handcuffed to lampposts, and turned into human shields. But he was more stung by the UN’s self-inflicted wounds. While the bad guys in war zones were predictably bad, he was sometimes more frustrated by the sins of the nominal “good guys” who carried UN passports or wore UN berets. Senior officials, including himself, were often so eager to tell the major powers what they wanted to hear that they had covered up deadly facts or exaggerated their own successes. In Rwanda and Srebrenica, another UN “safe area” in Bosnia, UN peacekeepers had turned their backs on civilians who had sought the protection of the UN flag, paving the way for some of the largest massacres since the Second World War.

And yet. For all the indignities, he didn’t believe countries acting outside the UN would fare much better. He knew that there was no other forum where all countries gathered to try to stop the planet’s bleeding. Even while the debate over Iraq had shown that diplomacy would not always prevent war, many countries still tried to settle their differences through the UN. The organization had helped colonized peoples in the developing world achieve their independence, causing UN membership to nearly quadruple from 51 at the founding to 192. The UN had offered shelter, food, and medicine to civilians neglected or persecuted by their governments. For all of the UN’s high-profile peacekeeping failures in the 1990s, blue helmets had been found to be more reliable and less expensive preventers of conflict than states acting alone. Most of the war zones in which Vieira de Mello had worked over the years had stumbled toward shaky peace, and UN officials had played essential roles in demobilizing combatants, punishing war criminals, rebuilding schools and health clinics, organizing elections, and returning refugees to their homes.

The organization had also paid him to see the world. In the UN he had made his closest friends—a multilingual and multicultural group of “ne’erdo-wells,” as he described them—some idealistic and some cynical, but all, in his words, “bloody fascinating.” The UN constituted his family. When he was asked how, with all of his intellectual and diplomatic gifts, he could tolerate the headaches that came with working for such a terrible bureaucracy, he would say, “Where else would I go?” But in unguarded, more freely sentimental moments, he confided, “Just look at everything the UN has given me.” He also believed—initially as a function of his idealism, but later in keeping with his ruthless pragmatism—that the only way to bring about lasting global stability was to press countries to play by international rules—by UN rules.

Our paths intersected only occasionally after the Balkans, but whenever I ran into him, I was struck by his intellectual and cultural range. In conversation he would dart from the likely results of the next midterm election in the United States to the arrest of an opposition leader in Egypt to the favorites in the next World Cup soccer championship to his considered view of the latest R.E.M. album. In September 2002 I was surprised to learn that he had been named UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had always seemed more comfortable negotiating with wrongdoers than denouncing them from a distant platform. It didn’t surprise me when I heard that he was the first human rights commissioner to meet with a sitting U.S. president. “Typical Sergio timing,” I thought. “He becomes human rights czar at just the time George Bush decides to start talking about freedom and democracy.”

I found the subsequent news of his appointment to Iraq both infuriating and encouraging. After deriding the UN in the run-up to war, Washington was now using it for its own purposes. But if Iraq had a prayer—and at that point it still seemed to—Vieira de Mello and his handpicked UN “A team” seemed to have the highest odds of answering it.

In the course of exploring Vieira de Mello’s life, work, and ideas, ¹ I have caught glimpses of the person I met on April 15, 1994. The contradictions that I encountered at our first dinner remain evident. He was somehow both the worldly realist who understood the interests of states and the motives of politicians and the UN acolyte who clung to his mauled copy of the latest Security Council resolution. He was a bon vivant who could drink and socialize into the wee hours of the morning and a fiercely disciplined official who was at his most content holed up in his office at 11 p.m. making phone calls to his UN colleagues several time zones away.

This is a dual biography. It is the life story of a brave and enigmatic man who saw the world very differently in 2003 than he had when he joined the UN in 1969. At the start of his career he advocated strict adherence to a binding set of principles. Like a good anti-imperialist, he was deeply mistrustful of state power and of military force. But as he moved from Sudan to Lebanon to Cambodia to Bosnia to Congo to Kosovo to East Timor to Iraq, he tailored his tactics to the troubles around him and tried to enlist the powerful. He brought a gritty pragmatism to negotiations, yet no amount of exposure to brutality seemed to dislodge his ideals. Unusually, he managed simultaneously to perform high-stakes peacemaking and nation-building tasks and to reflect critically on them. He thought a lot about legitimacy—about who had it and how they could keep it. He thought about competence and wondered, with all the ingenuity that fueled progress in the developed world, why so little of it was ever made available to assist what he called “convalescing states.” He thought about dignity, noting, “a wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body.” ³ He thought, naturally, about how to work with a United States that was deeply ambivalent about—and often hostile to—international institutions and laws. And long before they became catchphrases in the White House, he thought about the nature of evil and the roots of terror. By 2003 he had begun to worry that powerful countries were pursuing their own security in ways that aggravated their peril.

He had blind spots and made many mistakes, but he never stopped questioning his own decisions or those of the world’s governments. Thus, at the very time he was arranging food deliveries, organizing refugee returns, or negotiating with warlords, he was also pressing colleagues to join him in grappling with such questions as:When should killers be engaged, and when should they be shunned? Can peace be lasting without justice? Can humanitarian aid do more harm than good? Are the UN’s singular virtues— impartiality, independence, and integrity—viable in an age of terror? When is military force necessary? How can its inevitably harmful effects be mitigated? He did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions. He had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.

The biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello is also the biography of a dangerous world whose ills are too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Although the types of conflict—and the loci of Western attention—have shifted over the last four decades, every generation has had to deal with broken lives and broken societies. Because of the terrible costs of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Americans today seem torn between two impulses. The first is to retreat from global engagement altogether. We do not feel sure that our government or we ourselves know what we are doing. The second is to go abroad to stamp out threats in the hopes of achieving full security. Vieira de Mello’s life reminds us of the impossibility of either course. The United States can no more pack up and turn away from today’s global threats than it can remake the world to its own liking. Vieira de Mello understood that just because he couldn’t cure all ills didn’t mean he should not do what he could to ameliorate some.

The question, for him and us, is not whether to engage in the world but how to engage. Although he did not have time to formulate a guiding doctrine, he did have a thirty-four-year head start in thinking about the plagues that preoccupy us today: civil war, refugee flows, religious extremism, suppressed national and religious identity, genocide, and terrorism. He started out as a humanitarian, but by 2003 he had become a diplomat and politician, comfortable weighing lesser evils. His professional journey led him to believe the world’s leaders needed to do three big things. First, they had to invest far greater resources in trying to ensure that people enjoyed law and order. Second, they had to engage even the most unsavory militants. Even if they did not find common ground with rogue states or rebels, at least they might acquire a better sense of how to outmaneuver them. And third, they would be wise to orient their activities less around democracy than around individual dignity. And the best way for outsiders to make a dent in enhancing that dignity would be to improve their linguistic and cultural knowledge base, to remind themselves of their own fallibility, to empower those who know their societies best, and to be resilient and adaptable in the face of inevitable setbacks.

Sergio Vieira de Mello spent more than three decades attempting to save and improve lives—lives that today continue to hang in the balance. As the war drums roll, and as cultural and religious fissures widen into canyons, there is no better time to turn for guidance to a man whose long journey under fire helps to reveal the roots of our current predicament—and perhaps the remedies.