Four

By 1991 Vieira de Mello, at forty-three, had helped care for refugees in Bangladesh, Sudan, Mozambique, and South America. He had helped advise the commander of a UN military peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. And he had helped negotiate a political compromise among UN member states over the fate of refugees and migrants from Vietnam. But in Cambodia the Security Council was for the first time making the UN responsible for all three sets of tasks at once: humanitarian, military, and political. And Vieira de Mello was convinced that stability in the post-cold war era would turn on whether the UN system succeeded in managing such complex challenges.

After Cambodia’s four factions signed the Paris peace agreement in October 1991, the Security Council countries made clear their intention to authorize a large UN peacekeeping mission known as the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). ⁹ While UN peacekeepers in Lebanon had generally avoided involvement in regional politics and simply attempted to serve as a buffer along the border between Israel and Lebanon, UNTAC was given responsibility for seven pillars—one for each of the vital sectors that the country would need in order to move from dictatorship to democracy: human rights, elections, military (demobilization), civil administration, civilian police, refugee repatriation, and rehabilitation. The mission was oriented around elections, which were likely to be held in the spring of 1993. Vieira de Mello convinced Sadako Ogata, his boss, that he was the person best suited to manage the repatriation pillar—helping return some 360,000 Cambodian refugees who had long been marooned on the Thai border. ¹⁰

His team would have to ensure that Cambodians who had been living outside their country for more than a decade would return in time to vote. This would be no easy task. His friend Dennis McNamara was put in charge of the UN human rights pillar. “You got the better job,” Vieira de Mello told him. “What?” McNamara exclaimed. “You’ve got refugees to bring home. They would come home even without you, but you’ll be able to take the credit!”

Vieira de Mello would wear two hats in Cambodia. As Ogata’s special envoy, he would answer to UNHCR in Geneva and manage his own budget of $120 million to oversee the return of the refugees. But as the head of one pillar in the larger UNTAC peacekeeping mission, he would also answer to a Japanese diplomat named Yasushi Akashi, who had been named the head of the overall UNTAC operation. ¹ Akashi was a fairly typical UN bureaucrat who seemed unlikely to inspire; yet what he lacked in charisma, UN planners hoped he would bring in funds. And in fact the Japanese government would contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to Cambodia’s reconstruction in the coming years. It would also become the second-largest funder of peace-keeping in the world, behind only the United States.

On December 5, 1991, Vieira de Mello departed Geneva to take up his new post in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Because the countries on the UN Security Council were haggling over the terms of the new UNTAC mission, he was the only senior UN official present in Cambodia for several months. He liked the idea of arriving ahead of the peacekeepers and spoke, as he always did, of the need to “hit the ground running.” But after some seventeen new embassies and consulates had already opened shop, he grew impatient. “What the hell is taking the Council so long?” he asked, knowing that, even after the Council finally gave the UN peacekeeping mission the green light, it would need months to deploy some 22,000 UN peacekeepers and civilians. ¹¹ From the moment he set foot in Cambodia, he felt the clock ticking.

Cambodia was a small country of nine million, wedged between sixty million Thais to the west and seventy million Vietnamese to the east. Vieira de Mello was enraptured by the country’s mix of tradition and modernity. Peasants rowed their boats along the Mekong, carrying rice and chickens to market, while students rode their mopeds and bicycles, their mouths wrapped in kharma, the traditional Cambodian checkered scarf made notorious by the Khmer Rouge. The country’s infrastructure was shattered by war and neglect. Roads that would be essential for moving refugees had long ago been washed away by the rains. The rice paddy fields were sown with land mines. Some 80 percent of the bridges had been destroyed, replaced with rickety wooden planks or not at all. The wide boulevards in Phnom Penh were lined with crumbling relics of the ornate mansions that French colonizers had once occupied.

Cambodians still seemed shell-shocked by the violence that had engulfed them for almost a quarter of a century. As he delved into the country’s history, Vieira de Mello was struck by the remarkably diverse forms of terror and repression that Cambodia had suffered since it won its independence from France in 1953. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration had targeted the country in a secret bombing campaign. A five-year civil war then raged between the corrupt U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol and a band of notoriously brutal Maoist guerrillas known as the Khmer Rouge. And in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge victory ushered in a totalitarian terror that left more than two million Cambodians dead—a terror that was brought to an end only in 1978, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed the Vietnamese puppet regime that still held power.

Foreigners had not really been present in Cambodia in significant numbers since the Khmer Rouge had run them out of the country. Yet already by the time of Vieira de Mello’s early arrival, herds of Cambodian cyclos, or bicycle-powered sedan chairs, were being overwhelmed on the roads by gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to UN agencies or humanitarian aid groups. He knew that the trickiest part of any postconflict environment was managing local expectations, and he hoped that foreigners would bring real resources that could be used to deliver tangible change.

In his early months in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello did three things that would become hallmarks of his subsequent missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq: He assembled a trustworthy, “no bullshit” UN team around him; he cultivated ties with the country’s most influential players; and he contrasted the plans and resources he had been handed by UN Headquarters with the ground reality, attempting to adapt the plans to fit what he (like Jamieson before him) called “the real world.”

ASSEMBLING THE TEAM

UNHCR, Vieira de Mello’s home agency, was more limber than UN Headquarters, which managed peacekeeping missions. While the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN Headquarters in New York took months to screen job applicants, UNHCR was able to send staff to Cambodia almost immediately. Since he would have only a small team under him to manage the massive repatriation operation, he knew that the quality and commitment of the staff he assembled would be essential. Even the most coherent UN mandate could be bungled if he hired the wrong people.

Over the course of 1991, one of Vieira de Mello’s primary functions in Geneva had been to interact with UNHCR’s governing board, or executive committee. In that capacity he had encountered the Dutch government’s representative to the committee, a razor-sharp twenty-nine-year-old brunette named Mieke Bos. Vieira de Mello was quickly smitten, and the two became romantically involved before he was appointed UNHCR special envoy. Bos had joined the Dutch government in the hopes of working on human rights issues, but she had never worked in the field. “How can you sit behind a desk in an office when there is so much work to be done in the world?” he pressed her. “Come with me to Cambodia. I need a special assistant.” He was offering a path she had long considered but had never known how to pursue. Within weeks the Dutch government had agreed to loan Bos to the United Nations, and she joined Vieira de Mello in Phnom Penh in February 1992.

He had taken a room in the Hotel Cambodiana, a newly opened luxury hotel on the Mekong that was home to dozens of foreign embassies and residences. He rarely sat still, but when he did, he liked to retire to comfortable living quarters. In his hotel room he ended the day by dipping into an extensive classical music CD collection, as well as his trademark stash of Johnnie Walker Black Label imported from Thailand. On weekends when he and Bos were in Phnom Penh, they got their exercise in the hotel pool.

The couple worked day and night and traveled the country together. As their relationship deepened, she moved into his suite at the hotel. Although he remained in close telephone contact with Annie and his thirteen- and eleven-year-old sons back in France, he made no effort to hide his romance from his colleagues. It was the most open relationship he had had since he got married almost two decades before.“Annie and I have an understanding,” he told friends. He never talked with Bos about a future together, but he behaved as if he were unattached, accompanying her on a trip to Europe to meet her family. “Somehow, because Sergio was so open, it took the stigma away,” recalls one UN colleague.“We’d often have to remind ourselves,‘Wait, this guy has a wife back home. I wonder what she makes of this?’” On the rare occasions Vieira de Mello discussed his marriage, he spoke sympathetically and respectfully about Annie. “She is doing a wonderful job raising the boys,” he said. “Without her sacrifices, I would never be able to do what I do.” Only when Annie, Laurent, and Adrien traveled to Cambodia for a visit did Bos move out of their shared hotel room, temporarily taking up quarters elsewhere in the hotel.

In most professional hierarchies, a relationship between a senior manager and a special assistant would require the end of the romantic relationship or the dismissal of the supervisor. But for Vieira de Mello, who worked eighteen-hour days, special assistants made natural partners. Throughout his career he often became involved with colleagues with whom he could discuss the day’s challenges. “The UN then was still like a third-world country,” says one UN senior official. “Nobody thought twice when the boss slept with the assistant. Today not even a person as popular as Sergio would be able to get away with a relationship like that.”

Because of the routine he and Bos had established, he rarely socialized with his other colleagues after hours. One evening he had planned to have dinner with Sten Bronee, a friend from UNHCR who was passing through Phnom Penh. But at the last minute he sent Bronee an apologetic note saying he had to cancel owing to an “urgent, unexpected meeting.” Bronee decided to take up the recommendation of the hotel concierge to try a newly opened restaurant. When he entered the restaurant, he did a double-take. Vieira de Mello was sitting with Bos at a secluded table in the corner. When he spotted Bronee, he looked a bit embarrassed and waved sheepishly. Bronee smiled.“If I had the choice of having dinner with me or with her,” he recalls thinking, “I would have chosen her too.”

Jamshid Anvar, Vieira de Mello’s Iranian colleague who held a senior post in Geneva, advised Vieira de Mello not to bring Bos with him when he flew overseas to meet with donors. “Sergio, it doesn’t look right,” Anvar said. “You are at a wholly different level now.” Vieira de Mello was defensive.“I’m not bringing her to sleep with her,” he said. “I’m bringing her because she’s brilliant and I need her.” Anvar said he knew that, but others did not. “You are a man known for your integrity,” he continued. “You should bend over backward to protect your reputation.” Vieira de Mello told Anvar that he believed his reputation would rise or fall on whether he successfully brought home the refugees, and for that he needed Bos.

In assembling the rest of his team, Vieira de Mello generally relied upon staff with whom he had worked before. Newcomers found their way into his orbit in roundabout ways. Andrew Thomson, a doctor from New Zealand, ended up in Cambodia by happenstance. As a medical student in the mid-1980s, he had been dissecting frogs in his lab when he met a Cambodian refugee who was getting recertified as a surgeon. The man, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge horrors, told Thomson about the last operation he had performed in Phnom Penh before Pol Pot’s bloody takeover: He had removed the diamond from his wife’s engagement ring, sterilized it, and camouflaged it by sewing it into the flesh of her arm, beneath her vaccination scar. One of only sixty Cambodian doctors (out of six hundred) to survive the terror, the man eventually escaped to Thailand, then was resettled to Auckland, where he operated again on his wife to remove the diamond, which he sold in order to begin their new life. Thomson had been so mesmerized by the man’s descriptions of Cambodia that as soon as he finished medical school, he had made his way to the Thai-Cambodian border, where he worked for two years as a Red Cross medic.

In 1991, unsure where he would go after Thailand, Thomson, twenty-seven, had visited Geneva to attend a monthlong course on health emergencies. At lunchtime after the final class, he joined a group of his classmates for a beer in a café beside Lake Geneva. One of them mentioned that UNHCR would soon be managing the return of Cambodia’s refugees. Although he had never worked for the UN before, Thomson spoke Khmer and knew the medical hazards the returnees would face. “Does anybody know where UNHCR is?” he asked the other students. Nobody did, but somebody pulled out a small tourist map, which bore the agency’s tiny emblem. Slightly tipsy, Thomson marched over to UNHCR headquarters and wandered the halls until he found a door marked CAMBODIA. He knocked and began chatting with an official who was helping to plan the repatriation operation from afar and who seemed thoroughly overwhelmed. Thomson soon finagled a consultant’s contract to join Vieira de Mello’s team.

Once in Cambodia, UN officials were most likely to earn Vieira de Mello’s trust if they worked with him one-on-one. One day Giuseppe de Vincentis, a junior UNHCR official from Italy, ran into his boss in the lobby of the Hotel Cambodiana. Vieira de Mello told him to be prepared to attend a meeting with him that afternoon. De Vincentis, thirty-one, asked if he should wear a jacket and tie, and Vieira de Mello, who himself usually wore one of his “lucky suits”—unflattering pale blue and gray Asian matching tunics and trousers, similar to those donned by Cambodia’s politicians—said he should, elaborating no further. As an overdressed de Vincentis sat stiffly near the hotel’s front desk, his UN colleagues who wandered by teased him about his appearance. When Vieira de Mello finally arrived, he explained that he wanted de Vincentis to accompany him to a meeting with one of the opposition factions. He said that in Lebanon, General Callaghan had occasionally made the mistake of meeting on his own with the Israelis and Palestinians and thus had later lacked corroboration when the parties broke their promises. “Ever since then one of my rules is ‘never discuss sensitive issues without a witness,’ ” Vieira de Mello said. “You are my witness.” As they drove outside Phnom Penh and passed into opposition territory that UN officials had never visited before, he said, “Here’s where we make the sign of the cross, Peppe. I have no idea what lies ahead.” Vieira de Mello did not believe in God, but he remained superstitious and made a habit of appealing, usually playfully, for whatever help he could get.

Those like de Vincentis who gained entrée to his close inner circle felt privileged to be part of a lithe and dynamic team. Others felt the chill of their boss’s indifference. “If you weren’t charmed by him,” recalls Norah Niland, a thirty-nine-year-old Irish aid worker with UNHCR, “he loved you less.” But most UN officials who knew him were drawn to him. Even Sylvana Foa, a UNHCR spokesperson with whom he frequently sparred, recalls: “When you were with Sergio, he made you feel that you were more beautiful and more interesting than you had ever felt before. When he left you to go and talk to someone else, he’d make you feel that it was a terrible burden for him to have to leave.”

BEFRIENDING THE POWERFUL

Of all the Cambodian leaders, Vieira de Mello was most intent on befriending Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the most influential person in Cambodia and perhaps the most colorful character in all of Asia. He knew that the sixty-nine-year-old prince was the only person capable of fostering reconciliation among Cambodia’s warring factions. A gourmand, a womanizer, and a movie director, Sihanouk had been Cambodia’s king and, on ten separate occasions, its prime minister. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had put the royal leader under house arrest and killed three of Sihanouk’s daughters, two of his sons, and fifteen of his grandchildren. Although Sihanouk later maintained lavish palaces in China and North Korea, Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s terror felt that he too had suffered. Without Sihanouk’s mediation, the Paris negotiations would likely not have produced the October 1991 deal. ²

The agreement had also assigned the UN—not Prime Minister Hun Sen—the task of exercising “direct control” over ministries whose performance could have bearing on the outcome of the future elections: defense, foreign affairs, finance, public security, and information. Because Sihanouk was revered by Cambodians, the Paris agreement had named him the chairman of a new quasi-governing body called the Supreme National Council, which included representatives of all four of Cambodia’s main factions, including the Hun Sen government. ³ As chairman, it would be his job to prod the factions into sticking to the terms of the deal they had struck in Paris and settling their differences through dialogue. Vieira de Mello saw that the UN would not be able to exercise its ambitious mandate if it did not keep the old man on its side.

Instead of criticizing Sihanouk for his long absences from Cambodia, as some of his UN colleagues did, Vieira de Mello wrote him lengthy letters by hand and attempted to keep him in the loop even when the prince was at his home in Beijing. In January 1993 Sihanouk would write in French to Vieira de Mello from the Chinese capital in order to thank him for his letters, which, Sihanouk wrote,“reflect your understanding, your goodwill, your concern and, above all, your compassion for our most unfortunate grassroot people.” Sihanouk continued: “You who are so kind to always keep me well informed of your benevolent activities through your letters and documents which all reach me.” ⁴

Unfortunately, while the Hun Sen government and the Khmer Rouge had managed to come together to sign the Paris agreement, their underlying hatred for each other had not diminished. Indeed, each side had cooperated in the negotiations because it thought that the final agreement would destroy the other—the Khmer Rouge believed that a powerful UN administration would set up shop in Cambodia and run the country, stripping Prime Minister Hun Sen of his power; Hun Sen, for his part, believed that the UN would disarm the Khmer Rouge, thereby defanging his main opponent. Vieira de Mello worried about what might happen if Hun Sen refused to surrender power or if the Khmer Rouge refused to relinquish their weapons. UN planners in New York were so busy scrambling to round up 22,000 UN military and civilian staff that they had no time to undertake worst-case contingency planning. ⁵ In fact, UN Headquarters did not even have a strategic planning unit. Thus, in Cambodia and elsewhere, once the Security Council decided on the contours of a UN mission, UN personnel on the ground often felt they lacked the freedom—not to mention the wherewithal—to change course.

Vieira de Mello did not like what he saw of Hun Sen, whose regime was taking advantage of the security vacuum that existed in advance of the arrival of UN blue helmets. In the months preceding the official launch of the UNTAC mission, he received daily disturbing reports of government-backed thugs carrying out revenge killings and other violent acts. Officials in Hun Sen’s government who assumed that they would soon be replaced by UN officials sold off government office desks, chairs, and light fixtures and pocketed the money. Fearing the UN would soon take their guns away, many Cambodian soldiers took to armed banditry. ⁶ “Security cannot wait,” Vieira de Mello said. “If the peacekeepers don’t get here soon,” he told Bos, “they will have to make peace.”

In Cambodia Vieira de Mello saw that the twin UN values of peace and human rights clashed. From a human rights perspective, the Khmer Rouge deserved to be punished or, at the very least, shunned. Yet the letter of the Paris agreement required UN officials—and Cambodians—to treat the Khmer Rouge as one faction among many. He could understand why traumatized Cambodians might find this difficult, and he was surprised when the president of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, who had not set foot in Phnom Penh since his notorious regime had been overthrown in 1978, was able to slip quietly into town a few days after Sihanouk. Khieu moved into a downtown office, tried not to draw attention to himself, and seemed open to the idea of participating in the transitional Supreme National Council—an audaciously trusting approach for one so senior in one of the bloodiest regimes in modern memory. “I’m going to live here for a very long time,” Khieu declared. “I am very happy to be back.” ⁷ It was a scene that would have been unthinkable just a year before.

But the calm did not last. No sooner had Khieu and his Maoist associates taken up their new offices in Phnom Penh than they were greeted by thousands of angry demonstrators. As Khieu and Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge minister of defense, huddled inside, protesters charged the building with hatchets, rocks, and sticks, breaking the windows and chanting “Kill, kill, kill!” Lightly armed Cambodian troops who were loyal to Hun Sen stood by as the mob kicked in the front gate and barged into the house, stealing $200,000 of the Khmer Rouge’s money and setting much of the cash ablaze. Hun Sen arrived at the scene, but he did not order the mob to disperse. When the demonstrators finally reached Khieu, they beat him with their fists and sticks and attempted to choke him with electric wire. By the time government soldiers actually intervened—four hours into the ordeal—Khieu, who had put on a steel helmet, was badly bruised and cut, bleeding heavily from a gash to his head. ⁸ John Sanderson, the Australian general who would soon become the commander of the UNTAC peacekeeping force, happened to be in Phnom Penh on a UN planning mission. When Sanderson went to Hun Sen to complain about the attack, the Cambodian premier denied responsibility. “The people turned out to protest the Khmer Rouge,” Hun Sen said.“It would have been wrong of me in this new democracy to deny them their right of free expression.” Vieira de Mello trusted neither the genocidal Khmer Rouge nor the tyrannical Hun Sen. He thought only Sihanouk had Cambodia’s interests at heart, but the prince said he was powerless to stop the violence.“I am only a figurehead,” he admitted publicly. ⁹ This was a disturbing confession. If Sihanouk, the father of modern Cambodia, could not exert control over Hun Sen, Vieira de Mello wondered, how would the UN?

“GETTING REAL”

Vieira de Mello and his staff discussed the many things that could go wrong once they began returning refugees to Cambodia. Six of the seven Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand were effectively controlled by one of the three opposition factions, each of whom could rescind its support for repatriation at any time. The Khmer Rouge housed more than 77,000 Cambodians in their camps, and they had never before permitted camp inhabitants to move freely.

Even if the refugees were not coerced outright, Vieira de Mello knew that they might prove too terrified to budge. Those Cambodians who had been born and raised in border camps had been reared on a steady diet of propaganda, mostly about the bloodthirstiness of Hun Sen. Vieira de Mello also had concerns about the refugees’ self-sufficiency after years of receiving clean water, medical services, and food aid from relief groups. ¹⁰ The camps had become like small towns. The Site 2 camp, for instance, had a population of 216,000, the second-largest gathering of Cambodians in the world, after Phnom Penh. It contained hospitals, pharmacies, Buddhist temples, factories, a newspaper, courts, a prison, gambling dens, an alcohol treatment center, and a red-light district. ¹¹ “International generosity may have gone too far in terms of the care and maintenance, even the spoon-feeding, of Cambodians in exile in the Thai border camps,” Vieira de Mello told a reporter.“So we wonder if the refugees are now capable of reacquiring initiative and independence.” ¹² The mortality rate in the camps was three times lower than in Cambodia. The poverty-stricken country had the world’s lowest life expectancy of 49.7 years. And it was unclear how conditions would improve, as fewer than three thousand Cambodians had been educated beyond secondary school. ¹³

Vieira de Mello inherited a detailed plan for repatriation. The French government had spent $675,000 hiring a satellite company, Spot Image, to survey the country. ¹⁴ The satellite photographs showed some 571,000 acres of “potentially available arable land” in western Cambodia. On the basis of this finding, the Cambodia experts at UNHCR had prepared an elaborate, 242-page repatriation “Blue Book.” ¹⁵ UN officials had announced that each refugee family would receive five acres of this arable land, as well as agricultural implements to till it. UNHCR staff in the camps showed videos and distributed flyers showcasing the farmland. It seemed that all that remained for Vieira de Mello to do was to execute a well-mapped formula for return.

But as he and his staff began traveling to territory in Cambodia that had previously been off-limits, the scheme began to sit badly with them. By their very definition, the satellite photographs were not able to detect two features of the land that would necessarily topple the best-laid plans: land mines and malaria-ridden mosquitoes.

Vieira de Mello had been told that Cambodia possessed nearly one mine for every two Cambodians and that the country had the highest proportion of amputees in the world. ¹⁶ Still, it was not until he contracted HALO Trust, a British charity, to conduct on-the-ground surveys of possible resettlement areas that he understood how deadly the terrain was. Out of 173,000 acres it surveyed, HALO Trust found that only 76,000 were “probably clear of mines,” 69,000 were “probably mined,” and 28,000 were “heavily mined.” Desperate for land so as to be able to fulfill the promise UNHCR had made to refugees, he asked which UN peacekeeping units had been assigned to do the de-mining and learned that none of the countries sending troops to Cambodia were prepared to volunteer them for such a risky assignment. As another UNHCR official put it: “The only de-mining going on now is when people tread on them.” ¹⁷ Because the fate of refugees would depend in large measure on the removal of the country’s mines, Vieira de Mello was made head of the Cambodia Mine Action Center. By the time of his departure in the spring of 1993, however, the UN had helped clear only 15,000 out of an estimated eight million mines and other unexploded ordnance. ¹⁸

Andrew Thomson, who had more experience working in Cambodia than other UN personnel, was the bearer of bad news on malaria. Soon after arriving he got his hands on a recent malaria survey and superimposed the results on a land map of Cambodia, marking Xs through those districts that were too infested to responsibly resettle refugees. He brought the map to Vieira de Mello and told him UNHCR had to declare “no-go” areas. “If we send people back to these areas,” Thomson said, “we’ll be sending them into a death trap.” Vieira de Mello looked at the map and observed that most of the areas that Thomson had marked off-limits were areas that had traditionally been strongholds of the Khmer Rouge. If the Khmer Rouge leaders were told that Cambodian refugees in Thailand could go to territory Hun Sen controlled, but not to theirs, the guerrillas would likely abandon the peace process. The repatriation operation had not even begun, and already the immediate safety of the refugees was colliding with the long-term stability of the peace process. Vieira de Mello waved off Thomson. “We can’t wait for perfect conditions before we bring people back,” he said. “But these aren’t imperfect conditions,” Thomson countered. “These are deadly conditions. Do you want to be responsible for mass death?” Vieira de Mello conceded part of the point, saying that UNHCR would begin by resettling people to areas where malaria was less prevalent and decide later about the rest of the country. Every decision seemed to be one that carried with it necessary benefits and potentially catastrophic costs. ¹⁹

From his trips into the hinterland and his conversations with refugees and his own staff, Vieira de Mello had reluctantly concluded that UNHCR stood no chance of delivering the land that it had promised. He would have to throw out the detailed Blue Book that he had received on arrival. He lamented the stark “contradiction between allowing free choice and the impossibility of satisfying it” and set out to find an alternative to what he called the “silly, irresponsible offer of five acres of free land.” ²⁰

Vieira de Mello summoned a cross section of his field staff to Phnom Penh to discuss the way forward. On the day of the minisummit, the UN generators, which functioned only intermittently, were not working, and without air-conditioning UN staffers wilted in the heat. “I’m not allowing any of you to leave this room until we come up with a solution,” he said, only half joking, as sweat saturated his clothes.

Determined to extract ideas from his team, and sensitive to the need to secure staff buy-in, he had a habit of allowing discussions to descend into angry free-for-alls in which junior officials felt free to talk back to him. He was less concerned with the rank of a colleague than he was with laying the foundation for a smooth return operation. If a twenty-eight-year-old rookie aid worker had a useful suggestion to make, he was all ears. He saw no inconsistency in soliciting that person’s views alongside those of key ambassadors in Phnom Penh. To that end, he hosted a wine-and-cheese cocktail hour most Sundays in his room at the Hotel Cambodiana, with Charles Twining, the U.S. ambassador.

Vieira de Mello instinctively relied for feedback not only on international staff and diplomats but also on the Cambodians who worked with the UN—the drivers, translators, security guards, and messengers. He learned their names and their life stories and regularly inquired after their families. “He made the clerks and drivers feel like they were quite somebody, like they were indispensable to this grand mission,” recalls Jahanshah Assadi, the UNHCR field representative in Aranyaprathet, Thailand. Once, in rural Cambodia, Vieira de Mello’s own driver faltered as he attempted to drive across an irrigation canal on a narrow two-plank “bridge.” If the vehicle’s tires strayed an inch in either direction, the car would have tumbled ten feet down into the canal below. Seeing his driver sweat at the prospect of endangering UN officials’ lives, Vieira de Mello intervened. “Allow me,” he said, taking the wheel and adding a white lie so as not to undermine the driver’s authority. “This is my favorite part of the drive.”

In a meeting in Phnom Penh, a senior UNHCR official was laying into the local staff for their poor bookkeeping habits when Vieira de Mello cut him off midsentence.“Have you stopped for one second to think about what our local staff have gone through?” he asked. “Do you expect them to have developed perfect bookkeeping habits when their families were being slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge?” He grew angrier as he continued. “Instead of criticizing them, why don’t you take the time to show them how to keep proper financial records?” he asked. “After everything they have survived, I don’t think they’ll have trouble improving their accounting.”

His deputy François Fouinat suggested that UNHCR replace the offer of land with that of cash. In desperate need of a new plan, Vieira de Mello leaped at the idea, even though his bosses in New York and Geneva had already rejected it. For many in the refugee-advocacy community, the idea of providing each refugee with a lump sum of hard currency was sacrilege. Large amounts of money would suddenly be circulating in communities that had never seen such sums before. It could lead to theft, violent crime, and simple profligacy. It could also cause a wholesale demographic transformation—instead of moving back to rural areas, where they might farm, refugees might move en masse to Cambodia’s major cities. This would clog the towns with temporary big spenders who would have no means of supporting themselves after the money ran out.

Many UN staffers shared Vieira de Mello’s belief (instilled in him by Thomas Jamieson) that almost any life in one’s home is preferable to life in a refugee camp. Although the feeding times in the camps were predictable and the water was reliably clean, most refugees found the life of dependence intolerable. Norah Niland, the Irish UNHCR official, was responsible for looking out for extremely vulnerable refugees—the elderly, the sick, and the very young. At the staff summit, when Vieira de Mello raised the cash option, she felt as though her peers were speaking unwittingly condescendingly toward poor people. “Underlying all the arguments against cash was ‘Poor people can’t manage money,’ ” she recalls. But she, who had grown up poor in County Mayo, argued that poor people were just as likely to save their money—and to waste it—as rich people. Her boss took her side. “If you place your trust in people, they tend to act responsibly,” Vieira de Mello said, echoing her view. “And they have a far better sense of what they need money for than we ever will.”

UNHCR staff admired Vieira de Mello’s decisiveness, but some criticized his haste. Normally, refugees returned to their homes after elections and the establishment of more stable governing bodies; but in Cambodia repatriation was preceding the vote. Dennis McNamara, who ran the UN human rights branch of the mission, believed his friend was neglecting the safety of refugees, who would be returning to districts where UN troops and police were not yet present to provide security. Whenever Vieira de Mello saw McNamara approaching in the hallway of UN headquarters in Phnom Penh, he groaned audibly, “Uh-oh, here comes McNamara, the pope of principle!”

Vieira de Mello believed UNHCR had reason to rush. He was deeply affected by the tongue-lashing he received when he visited one of the Khmer Rouge-controlled camps along the Thai border. The refugees he spoke with were adamant that Cambodia was where they belonged. Sensing their impatience in the camps, he feared that, in their eagerness to get home, the refugees might flood across the border without UNHCR assistance, endangering themselves and increasing the likelihood of mine amputations, violent clashes, and dashed expectations. With the elections a year away, he did not feel UNHCR could afford to wait until more UN peacekeepers were in place to begin moving the refugees home. “If you have any objections, raise them now,” he told staff. “If you have alternatives, suggest them now.” However imperfect the cash option was, nobody offered a better idea as to how to bring the refugees home and launch them on their new lives, and he decided to press on. “I will take full responsibility if something goes wrong,” he assured uneasy colleagues.

A few UN officials speculated that Vieira de Mello’s obsessive punctuality in his personal life was dictating his thinking. It was as if he could not conceive of arriving late for a political appointment. “Sergio had made a commitment to the UN, to Cambodia, and to the refugees,” recalls Nici Dahrendorf, a British UNHCR official with the mission.“He wouldn’t turn up late for repatriation any more than he would arrive late for dinner.”

Having made the decision, Vieira de Mello hung the expensive aerial photos, commissioned before his time, on the walls of the UNHCR office in Phnom Penh. These monuments to useless planning resembled abstract paintings. Whenever he ushered visitors into the office, he drew attention to the UN artwork.“I prefer the UN satellite artists to Jackson Pollock myself,” he would say.

While the original plan had put the onus on UNHCR to track down tracts of land to resettle refugees, the introduction of the cash option put Cambodians in charge of their own destinies. All returnees would get a domestic kit that included utensils, tools, a large water bucket, reinforced plastic sheeting, chemically impregnated mosquito nets to protect against malaria, and coupons for four hundred days’ worth of food rations (two hundred days for those who moved to the Phnom Penh area). A refugee family could still decide to wait for the UN to find them a small plot of land. Or they could choose the cash option (Option C), which critics nicknamed “Option Catastrophe.” Refugee families who chose this option would receive a modest cash grant of $50 per adult and $25 per child. The cash would pay for the returnees to plant seeds in a small garden or to pay relatives in exchange for accommodation. ²¹ Vieira de Mello believed it was essential for UNHCR to stop micromanaging the repatriation. “We can’t dictate the return,” he told his colleagues. “We have to follow the people.”

Because he encouraged debate at UNHCR, the staff often unearthed ideas that might otherwise have remained buried in the bureaucracy. As UNHCR officials in Battambang attempted to map a schedule for refugee returns, they wondered what they would do during monsoon season (May-August), when the roads from the camps at the border into Cambodia would be too flooded to traverse. “What about the train that Cambodians used before the war?” Vieira de Mello asked. Others had proposed this same idea of repairing the wagons and tracks, but UNHCR staff had written it off as too expensive. This time he asked, “Has anybody talked to the former railway managers to see what it would take to repair?” Nobody had. And after a short investigation, it emerged that the rickety train and tracks could be restored for $100,000. Remarkably, the antiquated train with its blue UN flag, dubbed the Sisophon Express, would reduce the duration of the 210-mile trip from Sisophon, the town where refugees would be dropped off just inside Cambodia, all the way to Phnom Penh, from three days to twelve hours. ²²

FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE

On March 21, 1992, five days after Akashi, the UN head of mission, finally moved to Cambodia, he gave Vieira de Mello the green light to start repatriation. Vieira de Mello sent a fax to Ogata on Hotel Cambodiana stationery, apologizing for contacting her at home but jubilant. “Yet another week-end interference!” he wrote. “You’ll end up calling me Special Pain rather than Envoy.” He told Ogata that the first batch of refugees would return to their country on March 30 and that the dignitaries who would greet them in Cambodia would likely constitute a “crowd larger than the number of actual returnees! ” ²³

As he counted down the days, he saw that tensions in the camps were building. On March 25 in the Site 8 camp, gunmen presumed to belong to the Khmer Rouge asked for two refugees by name and executed them. On March 29, the eve of the scheduled repatriation launch, Khmer Rouge forces seized part of a key roadway in Cambodia between Kompong Thom and the northern province of Preah Vihear, and then Hun Sen retaliated by attacking them. ²⁴ It felt as though all-out war could resume at any time.

Although the UNTAC political and military mission had only technically come into existence on March 15, and only 2,000 of the anticipated 16,000 peacekeepers had yet deployed, Cambodians looked to the UN blue helmets to quell the fighting. But General Sanderson, who had taken over the military side of the mission (while Akashi ran the political), stressed that he had no intention of forcing the parties to comply with the terms of the Paris agreement. UN peacekeepers would in fact steer clear of violent areas. “We are in Cambodia as peacekeepers, not peace enforcers,” Sanderson said. “I will not put UN forces in the middle of a confused environment and no cease-fire, where the roads are mined.” ²⁵

Vieira de Mello knew that every UN political and military mission got one chance to make a formidable first impression, and he worried that the blue helmets were missing this opportunity. As he had seen in Lebanon, the troops that made up UN forces varied in quality and attitude. The well-equipped Dutch units that General Sanderson sent to northwestern Cambodia fired back decisively in defense of civilians and their soldiers. The Malaysian forces in western Cambodia learned Khmer and attempted to secure the cooperation of the Khmer Rouge. By contrast, some of the African units, in Sanderson’s words, “came with their backsides hanging out of their trousers.” The Tunisians and the Cameroonians were participating simply because in the Security Council, France had been so intent on offsetting Anglo influence in the region that it had insisted that a large number of French-speaking troops be sent. Cambodians developed a saying about how a typical UNTAC soldier filled his days. Set to rhyme in Khmer, it translated as “In the morning he jogs, in the afternoon he drives, in the evening he drinks.” ²⁶ Sanderson worked with what he was given but recalls, “I wouldn’t have taken many of the troops if I had a choice.”

Perhaps owing to his own youthful run-in with the Paris police in 1968, Vieira de Mello had never warmed to law enforcement officials as he had to soldiers. But in Cambodia he understood that, in order for refugees to feel secure once they returned to Cambodia, policing would have to be a vital component of the UN mission. But he also knew that in its forty-seven-year history the UN had never really done policing. Unsurprisingly, almost none of the expected 3,600 police arrived in time for the first refugee returns on March 30, and only 800 would arrive before May. Many lacked driver’s licenses and spoke neither English nor French, UNTAC’s two official languages. ²⁷

As hard as it was to quickly rally soldiers to participate in peacekeeping missions, soldiers were at least always on standby in their countries and rarely engaged in actual combat. Police officers, by contrast, tended to be busy doing police work at home and thus could rarely be spared. Police work also relied upon the officers’ links with the local population, and it would be hard to find trained police who had the necessary language skills, the knowledge of local law, and the confidence of the population. The “policing gap” would undermine this and every one of Vieira de Mello’s subsequent UN missions.

Nonetheless, despite the mounting violence and the thinness of UN security forces, he stuck to his plan to go ahead and begin helping refugees return on March 30. He understood the gamble he was taking: If a returning refugee was murdered or stepped on a mine, it would send a chill through the refugee camps in Thailand and possibly torpedo the repatriation operation. This, in turn, could ruin the chances of holding elections the following year. Still, he opposed delaying the launch because he thought it would send a signal to both the spoilers and the refugees that the UN could be cowed. His deputy Fouinat asked Thomson, the public health specialist, “Doc, can you assure us that there will be no deaths in the first convoys?” Thomson was incredulous. “Listen, François, I’m not Jesus Christ,” he said. “People die no matter where they live. People die in Paris. They aren’t going to start not dying just because they are put on UNHCR convoys.”

On March 30 Vieira de Mello traveled to Site 2, the largest camp on the Thai border, and spoke to the 527 refugees who had volunteered to be part of the first returning group. Looking out at men and women who were clinging to their blue departure passes and green nylon UN travel bags containing noodles, sugar, soap, and a toothbrush, he said that the UN had no intention of telling Cambodians—“an independent and proud people”—what to do. The organization would try to create conditions that would enable them “to regain control of their fate and to shape their own future.” “Today, we are, at long last, gathered to make a dream come true: that of breaking the spiral of violence in Cambodia and of witnessing the emergence of a reunited, reconciled and pacified society,” he said. “We are betting on peace. We will, as from this morning and with deep emotion, escort you home.” ²⁸

A small contingent of Malaysian peacekeepers would escort the first seventy families who bravely volunteered to return to Cambodia. Beneath signs that read GRATITUDE TO THAILAND in Khmer, Thai, and English, some of the departing refugees wept with fear or anticipation, others smiled and waved, and most filed stoically onto the buses. None had any idea what lay in store for them in their homeland or whether the shaky peace would last.

In his send-off speech Vieira de Mello had sounded more confident than he felt. He had many outstanding questions that only time would answer: Would those who had survived the war inside Cambodia welcome the exiles back? Would Hun Sen’s government treat the refugees as traitors? If they moved in with their extended families, how long would the generosity of their relatives last? Would the returnees’ desperation to return to land they owned before the war lead them to ignore land-mine warnings? Would they give up on rural areas altogether and pour into the cities?

Before the convoy departed Site 2, Vieira de Mello briefly dropped out of sight. He made a short pilgrimage to a shrine in front of the Hotel Sarin, where in front of a three-foot-high statue of the Buddha he burned incense and lit candles, issuing a prayer to the gods—again born more of superstition than faith—that nothing would go wrong.

A firm asphalt road dotted with houses and well-groomed gardens ran from the Thai refugee camp to the border. But once the UN convoy crossed the narrow bridge that marked the crossing into Cambodia, the terrain changed. Sturdy houses gave way to bamboo and leaf shacks, and water wells and pipes were replaced by shallow pools of stagnant water. Abandoned military posts offered reminders of the fighting that had recently raged in the area. In the weeks leading up to the return, some 428 mines had been removed from the road between the border and the UNHCR reception center in Sisophon. The refugees had been warned that just six feet on either side of the road had been cleared, but beyond that mines were omnipresent. In March alone thirteen Cambodian villagers had been killed or maimed by mines in the nearby fields. ²⁹

Vieira de Mello traveled in the second vehicle in a refugee convoy of several dozen buses. He maintained radio contact with Dahrendorf of UNHCR, who drove in the lead vehicle. He was so tense that she could hardly recognize his voice. The convoy had left later than he had planned, and he was afraid of being tardy to the welcoming reception in Sisophon, which he had scripted minute by minute.“Nici, can you please tell your driver to go faster,” he thundered over the radio. Dahrendorf explained that if they sped up, they would lose the busloads of refugees behind them. He was insistent. “I said, ‘Drive faster,’ ” he snapped. When she again refused, he ordered her to stop the car and leaped out of the passenger seat. “This is ridiculous,” he blared. “My car will drive in front.” He succeeded in spurring on his driver, but as Dahrendorf had warned, his vehicle outpaced the convoy and ended up having to stop to wait for the buses filled with refugees to catch up.

As the buses wended their way into Sisophon, schoolchildren lined the road waving Cambodian flags, pop music blared, and Cambodian musicians performed traditional song. After a two-hour drive, the refugees disembarked, looking dazed. Some had never set foot outside a refugee camp. In conversations with journalists, they explained their fears. “I’m worried about the Khmer Rouge because they haven’t settled down yet,” said So Koemsan, twenty-eight, whose parents and four siblings had died of starvation during the Maoists’ bloody reign. “If they fail in their objectives, they might take it out on people like us . . . but I hope the UN will protect us.” ³⁰ Eng Peo, thirty-seven, had raised two children in the camp. “I have not been a farmer for many years, and my children have never seen a farm,” he said. “How do I start again?” ³¹

Vieira de Mello had a keen eye for symbolism. He had invited UN blue helmets to intersperse themselves in the convoy so that the peacekeepers would begin to feel ownership over the repatriation operation. But just before he left Thailand—a country that had often treated the Cambodian refugees brutally—the head of the Thai army had told him that he intended to travel to Cambodia to be a part of the welcoming delegation. Throughout the drive Vieira de Mello complained that the general’s very presence would send a paternalistic message from Thailand and would possibly upstage Prince Sihanouk. As his UN car approached the Sisophon reception center, he saw the Thai general standing smugly on the podium with his arms folded. “What the hell does that bastard think he’s doing?” Vieira de Mello fumed to Assadi. “This is not the message we want to send. This is Sihanouk’s show.”

Prince Sihanouk quickly made that clear. He swooped down dramatically in a Russian-made helicopter, along with his wife, Monique, to give the homecoming his blessing, and the Thai general disappeared. As Cambodian officials presented the refugees with orchids onstage, Vieira de Mello spoke into a megaphone, his comments translated into Khmer. “Welcome home,” he said. “We were there for you in Thailand and, I promise you, we will be here to help you resettle in your homeland.” ³²

Iain Guest, the UNHCR spokesman, watched his boss standing at the dais in the hot sun. Vieira de Mello’s pale blue Asian suit was soaked through with perspiration, and the look on his face was grim, resolute, and triumphant. “For Sergio, that was a moment of fierce vindication,” Guest remembers. “It was a look that said, ‘I told you this would work and by god it did, and I’m going to stand in the sun longer than any of you sons of bitches.’ ”

When asked by a journalist about the recent upsurge in fighting, Vieira de Mello said, “Don’t expect peace to be instantaneous after 20 years of war. The refugees’ return is a strong message to those who are tempted to violate the ceasefire.” ³³ But whether the return of refugees would deter the violent—or incite them—remained an open question. And nearly 360,000 Cambodians remained on the Thai-Cambodian border, awaiting UN help.