ChasingtheFlame

But since Annan was closer to Boutros-Ghali, the boss, he had gotten Vieira de Mello’s leave from UNHCR extended three times. “For Ogata if you work at Toyota, you stay at Toyota until the end,” recalls Kamel Morjane, then director of the Africa Division at UNHCR. “Sergio decided to leave Toyota and work at Honda. When he returned, he had to be subjected to a new test. He had to prove his loyalty.” Ogata now denies that she was testing him and claims she had no objection to his lengthy leave. “What Sergio was doing in Bosnia was rather limited compared to what we in UNHCR were doing,” she says. “There were many brilliant officials in UNHCR that I could call upon in his absence.” She could often sound as though his emerging public profile was a threat to her own.

For all of her downplaying of Vieira de Mello’s assets, Ogata was very fond of him. When she was invited to meet the queen of England, she told her aides that she was tempted to invite him rather than her own husband. Ogata also understood that she would not be able to keep him by her side at UNHCR if she did not reward his manifest talents. The repatriation of 360,000 refugees to Cambodia, followed so swiftly by his high-profile trip into Gorazde, had earned him praise far beyond the humanitarian community. She valued his Rolodex and his pragmatic and creative approach to crises, as well as the fact that he did not get bogged down in ideology. “Sergio was a problem-solver,” she recalls. “I got the impression he agreed with my way of doing things.” Ogata told him that she would create a new post of director of policy planning and operations just for him. This made him the number three official at UNHCR, an agency that then employed five thousand staff. The position of director of operations had not been refilled at UNHCR since Thomas Jamieson had left it to retire in 1972, so history had come full circle. Ogata also promised him that she would work to get his new position bumped up to assistant secretary-general, which was the third-highest rank in the UN system. This would happen in January 1996.

Ogata asked him to organize what she hoped would be a pathbreaking intergovernmental summit to address the problems of displacement and migration in the former Soviet Union. Russia wanted to use the conference to earn international sympathy and money to support the twenty-five million ethnic Russians who were being discriminated against in and sometimes even expelled from Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and the other former Soviet republics. ¹⁴ UNHCR hoped to gather leaders to get them to agree to broader legislation that would protect minorities and guarantee freedom of movement across boundaries. ²

He enlisted a twenty-seven-year-old Italian named Claire Messina, who had written her Ph.D. on Russian migration, to help manage the process. “Most senior people pretend they know things,” Messina recalls. “Sergio saw no shame in saying, ‘I don’t know anything about the region. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ ” He also persuaded Viktor Andreev, the Russian with whom he had worked closely in Bosnia, to move to Geneva to join his team. Although Andreev was notoriously lazy and Messina did most of the work herself, Vieira de Mello did not seem to mind. He explained the hire by saying, “First, we need a Russian in this process. And second,Viktor is very loyal. He never played games with me in Bosnia. He was straight. And for a Russian in the Balkans that was very rare.” In fact, hiring a Russian national for such a politically sensitive conference was more likely to alienate non-Russians. But for Vieira de Mello, loyalty and personal history more than compensated.

The conference, which would be held in May 1996, would prove something of a bust, as the governments that attended would largely limit themselves to reciting old complaints rather than devising new guidelines to meet the challenges of discrimination and migration. Nonetheless Vieira de Mello enjoyed the groundwork. In 1995 he traveled to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, where he briefed senior officials and heard their concerns. The combination of his new UN rank, the contacts he had amassed over the years, and the public profile he had established for himself in Bosnia meant that, on his visits to the former Soviet Union, he gained entrée at an entirely new level: with heads of state and foreign ministers. “Are you not impressed that prime ministers drop everything to see me?” he asked his new special assistant Izumi Nakamitsu, who had been Akashi’s aide in the Balkans. “Don’t get carried away,” she reminded him. “These are prime ministers from very small countries.” He stuck his tongue out at her in pretend offense.

His steady climb through the ranks of the UN had not stripped him of his unusual regard for the individuals in whose name UN programs were run. On one trip in September 1996 to Azerbaijan, a country that had been at war with Armenia over the province of Nagorno Karabakh, the deputy foreign minister escorted him around a sprawling refugee camp. The country was teeming with refugees, as one in eight Azerbaijanis had been displaced by the conflict. The fetid camp was starting to acquire the air of permanence that Jamieson had so despised. Individual refugees approached him to share their grievances. He told them he was meeting with the president of the country later in the day and asked, “Is there a message that I can deliver on your behalf?” At the start of his tour of the camp, he chatted at length with an elderly woman, probably in her late seventies, who described the melancholy she felt at being unable to return to her rural home. He continued speaking with other camp residents, with Azerbaijani officials, and with UN field workers. After an hour the deputy foreign minister steered him toward the camp exit, where his official limousine waited. Suddenly, just as he was about to enter the vehicle, he stopped. “I need to find that old lady again,” he said.

The delegation made its way back to the woman’s battered tent, where she remained standing outside. “What do you miss the most?” Vieira de Mello asked the woman. “I am a proud person,” she said through a translator. “My whole life I have lived alone, and I have worked the land myself. I have never depended on anybody for anything. And now here I am for three years dependent on handouts from the UN. It is very hard.” She looked down at the ground.“And what do you want for yourself?” he asked. She looked straight at him and said simply: “I want to go up into the sky and become a cloud. And then as a cloud, I want to travel through the sky many miles to where my home is, and when I see my land, I want to turn into rain, and fall from the sky, landing in the soil so I can remain forever in the place that I belong.” He shook his head in wonder. He knew how unlikely it was that the crisis in Nagorno Karabakh would be resolved in her lifetime, but he promised he would do what he could.“A wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body,” he often told colleagues. ³

He moved naturally between refugee camps and the capital cities where he made his appeals for diplomatic interventions or financial resources. He was increasingly popular in Washington. Many of those he had encountered over the years at U.S. embassies or in the refugee world had amassed power in the Clinton administration. Still, when he visited town, he would feign irritation with Dawn Calabia, the UNHCR official who managed his schedule. “These people are too low level. Why can’t you get me a meeting with the secretary of state, the vice president, or the president?” he said. “Just wait,” Calabia replied. “When the president actually needs you for something, then you’ll get that meeting.”

He did not like the ritual of paying homage to midlevel officialdom. “These people should come to me,” he would say, pointing to the schedule, sometimes with genuine indignation and sometimes with contrived pomposity: “That way, I can wear my jeans, and you can supply the cold beer.” There were only two categories of people he really wanted to meet with: old friends and people who could be useful to him in tackling the crises of the day. “Why do I have to meet him?” he would groan. “Why does it have to be me? I only have eight hours in this town and no time to breathe and you want me to waste my time with him?”

He was most comfortable in Southeast Asia. Six years after helping to negotiate the plan to resettle Vietnamese boat people, he was able to personally oversee the closure of the refugee camps in the region. Although he took pride in his role, his mind was drifting to the political sphere. On the plane ride to Hanoi, where once he would have consumed situation reports on refugee housing and education needs, he instead read Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, the former U.S. secretary of defense’s reckoning with the Vietnam War. When Nakamitsu asked him his view of the book, he shook his head. “Some people can’t say ‘in retrospect,’ ” he said. “It’s too late.”

Whenever he was in Geneva for more than a month, he grew restless. On the wall of his office, he had hung his framed photograph of the Sarajevo tram, alongside the bronze plaques given to him by UN peacekeeping units in Lebanon and Bosnia, and the flag of the Montagnards whom he had helped resettle from Cambodia to North Carolina. On his desk he kept the framed photograph of Jamieson. Beside his computer he kept a shoebox. One day Nakamitsu inquired about the contents of the box. “That is the box of possibilities,” he told her. “Inside are the names of people who have impressed me over the years. Someday when I run my own mission, I will call upon those people, and we will put together a dream team.” He opened up the box, and she peered inside to see Vieira de Mello’s professional confetti: hundreds of business cards and handwritten names and numbers scribbled onto napkins, hotel stationery, and fragments of bar coasters. She marveled at the variety of names he had gathered—government officials, unheralded UN field officers, soldiers, journalists, bodyguards, even the salesperson who had sold him his home air conditioner.

He retained the names of others as well—those who he felt had let him down. As sensitive to impingements on his own dignity as he was to those on others’, he was not one to forget even imagined slights. A small piece of paper with the name “Tim Wirth” remained pinned beneath his stapler on his desk for more than a year. Once, when he had traveled to Washington for meetings, Wirth, who was undersecretary of state for global affairs in the Clinton administration, had been unable to receive him. “One day Tim Wirth will ask me for a meeting,” he told Nakamitsu, “and I will turn it down.” It wasn’t just the lack of access that got to him. As she recalls, “Sergio took the snub as one more sign that the United States didn’t take the UN seriously.” Even though Wirth was perhaps the biggest backer of the UN in the Clinton administration—so big that after he left office he would take over the UN Foundation, funded by Ted Turner, and would lead the effort to improve the UN’s standing in the eyes of Americans—Vieira de Mello carried the grudge.

Since he and Nakamitsu had worked in the Balkans at the same time, they spent a lot of time discussing UNPROFOR, the Balkan mission that continued to founder in their absence. He always defended the mission, believing the peacekeepers were doing more good than harm for civilians. He also refrained from publicly jabbing the major powers on the UN Security Council, who continued to bring great bombast but insufficient resolve to the conflict. In Geneva, where UNHCR civilian relief workers were seen to be outperforming the UNPROFOR peacekeepers, he insisted that the blue helmets were getting a bad rap: UNHCR food convoys would not be able to reach civilians amid such violence were they not escorted by UN soldiers. In addition, he said, the peacekeepers were guarding heavy-weapons collection points around Sarajevo, and they had helped end the siege of Gorazde.

But as the months wore on and he acquired the distance to reflect on UNPROFOR’s performance, he changed his mind. He suddenly became plagued by memories of the UN’s timidity and, he feared, its complicity. He reflected critically on the way he and other UNPROFOR officials had downplayed Serb brutality in order to stop NATO from using air power. UNPROFOR was the first peacekeeping force to be given a humanitarian mandate in the context of “an all-out and merciless war,” he wrote. “A greater contradiction in terms and, indeed, on the ground, would have been difficult to achieve.” ⁴ He wrote of the “senselessness of providing relief where there was no security, where shelling and sniper fire took their daily toll on those recently ’assisted.’ ” ⁵ Absent political remedies, the humanitarian aid deliveries were a “frustrating palliative.” He worried privately that he had become what critic David Rieff called a “cultist of the small victory”—so consumed by small humanitarian tasks that he had lost sight of how best to make a meaningful difference. ⁶

He finally stopped treating the UN Security Council’s Resolution 836, which had established Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Srebrenica as “safe areas,” as worth probing for guidance, later referring to it simply as a “museum piece of irresponsible political and military behavior.” He confessed to one reporter that “you would get up in Sarajevo during that fucking winter and look at yourself in the mirror and wonder whether we were not the wardens of a huge concentration camp.” ⁷ By failing to protect the “safe areas” and effectively forcing civilians to remain in their squalor, he said, Western countries and international institutions had exposed “the limits of our own moral conscience.” He finally even felt comfortable joking about Akashi. “Akashi is amoral and inhumane,” he told colleagues. “But apart from that he is a good guy!”

No longer weighted down by the day-to-day crisis management of the Balkans, and at a safe remove from the fighting, the philosopher who had argued for melding utopia and realism began to reemerge. The same man who had insisted to John Pomfret that the parties in the Balkans negotiate peace and give up on legal prosecutions now tacked a Hague MOST WANTED poster of the war’s prime suspects on his office wall. The poster bore the names and faces of many he had wined and dined, almost all of whom remained at large. If the UN had failed to protect civilians in need, the organization now had a duty to punish the guilty. As he had argued back in 1991 in his lecture on Kant, fair judicial processes were needed to halt cycles of violence.

He saw that the progress he had made in easing the siege of Sarajevo had been fully reversed. In the spring of 1995 the Bosnian Serbs sealed the roads into the city, recommenced sniper and shelling attacks on the capital, and began shutting down the airport and the trams at whim. “The Serbs have seen what NATO air power looks like,” he told Nakamitsu, “and they aren’t terribly impressed.” Serb forces brazenly fired upon the safe areas, blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid to trapped civilians in them, and with little to fear from UN peacekeepers, even obstructed the passage of supplies to the blue helmets, who by the summer of 1995 had so little fuel that they were forced to conduct patrols on mules.

He did not see a way out. But he also did not foresee the catastrophic events of July 1995. On July 11 he was in Tbilisi, Georgia, preparing for the UNHCR conference on migration in the former Soviet Union. He turned on CNN in his hotel room and saw that the safe area of Srebrenica, which was just sixty-two miles northeast of the enclave of Gorazde, was being pounded by the Bosnian Serb army. Television images depicted tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees fleeing along the main road in the enclave and gathering at the Dutch UN base. He did not believe that the major powers were prepared to employ serious NATO military force in order to protect the fleeing civilians. Some 400 Dutch troops were in the enclave, tasked with protecting some 40,000 Bosnian civilians.

He grew even more pessimistic when CNN showed the broad, ruddy face of General Mladić, the Serb general who fifteen months before had taken him on the morbid tour of the desecrated Serb cemetery outside Gorazde. If Mladić viewed NATO as a “paper tiger” in 1994, Vieira de Mello could only imagine how emboldened he had become after marching uncontested into Srebrenica. By the middle of the day the UN announced that the Srebrenica safe area had officially fallen. Mladić was shown passing out candy to small, terrified Bosnian children and telling the men and women gathered at the UNPROFOR base that they had nothing to fear. “No one will do you any harm,” the general said. “First women and children are to be taken. . . . Don’t be afraid.” ⁸ All males over sixteen, he said nonchalantly, would be “screened for war crimes.” Even though the footage of Mladić rounding up Bosnian men aired on CNN and the BBC,Western leaders did not publicly demand that the male detainees be released.

That night at dinner Vieira de Mello and Nakamitsu discussed the capture of the safe area. “This is the biggest blow to the UN yet,” he said. “I’m not sure we will recover. It is one thing for the UN to fail to protect civilians. But it is another thing for the UN to promise to protect people and then to open its gates to those intent on harming them.” Bosnian civilians had flocked to the Dutch UN base in Srebrenica, trusting that there they would be safe, but the Dutch had turned them away. With a dark sense of foreboding, the two former UNPROFOR officials drank a bad bottle of Georgian red wine and resumed the familiar debate as to whether Akashi should have called for the bombing of the Serbs outside Sarajevo after the market massacre of February 1994 or whether Vieira de Mello himself should have requested all-out air strikes when the Serbs had not complied properly with the Gorazde ultimatum. For the first time he suggested aloud that the choices he and others had made in Bosnia may have cost lives.“I’m glad I’m not there now,” he confessed. “I’m not sure what I would have done.” It was an admission that seemed to reflect both moral insecurity and professional relief.

He understood that night that the fall of a UN safe area had damaged the UN’s standing and that civilians would forever be traumatized by the ordeal. But over the next several weeks he would learn that the Serb seizure of the territory of Srebrenica was only part of the catastrophe. The real tragedy involved the fate of the Bosnian men and boys whom Mladić had hauled away to undisclosed locations. Over the next five days, while Vieira de Mello and Nakamitsu continued their tour of the former Soviet Union, Mladić presided over the systematic slaughter of every Bosnian man and boy in his custody, some eight thousand in all. When the Serb mass graves were discovered six weeks later, Vieira de Mello was stunned. “I never thought Mladić was this stupid,” he said, projecting his own reverence for reason onto one who clearly observed different norms. “The massacre was totally unnecessary.” The safe-area concept that Vieira de Mello had himself helped to preserve had brought ruin and death to those who mistakenly believed that the UN flag represented an international promise of protection.

When Vieira de Mello lived in the Balkans, he had deduced that NATO countries were not willing to make war to protect civilians. And he had believed that NATO air power would have caused Serbs to retaliate against UN peacekeepers and UNHCR aid workers. But with revelations about the Srebrenica massacre, public pressure on Western governments suddenly rose to an unprecedented pitch. UNPROFOR peacekeepers had been exposed as unable or unwilling to protect civilians who relied upon them. And cries for the withdrawal of the blue helmets—by those who cared about saving lives in Bosnia and by those who cared about the future of the UN—were heard around the world.

Finally, in late August 1995 the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. On August 28 a second massacre occurred around the corner from the infamous bloodied market that Vieira de Mello had visited eighteen months before. This shell killed thirty-seven people. This time UN peacekeepers were withdrawn from Serb territory so that NATO could strike from the air without worrying about the safety of the blue helmets. Acting through NATO, the United States and Europe began a two-week heavy bombing campaign. NATO replaced the “pin-prick” air strikes seen around Gorazde with systematic attacks on Serb bunkers, ammunitions depots, and airstrips.

Vieira de Mello welcomed the NATO onslaught he had once opposed. He saw the air attacks as the only way to break a deadly stalemate. And indeed with their intervention Western governments finally altered the balance of power on the ground, reversed Serb gains, and enabled negotiators to press all three sides into signing the Dayton Peace Agreement, which divided Bosnia into two roughly equal halves, one controlled by the Serbs, the other by an uneasy alliance of Bosnians and Croats. Some 198 peacekeepers and aid workers had been killed in the war in Bosnia, along with more than 100,000 Bosnian civilians. The approach favored by General Rose, which Vieira de Mello had strongly favored, was judged harshly by history. A UN report, issued in 2000, noted that when one party to a conflict repeatedly attacked civilians, the UN’s “continued equal treatment” of all sides “can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil.” ⁹

The Bosnia peacekeeping failure, combined with the experience of UN blue helmets who were bystanders to genocide in Rwanda in 1994, dealt devastating blows to the reputation of the United Nations. Released from the cold war stalemate, the Security Council of the 1990s had been liberated to enforce international peace and security. But the back-to-back calamities had made it clear that, if civilians were not pawns in a larger ideological struggle, as they had been in the cold war, their welfare would command hardly any attention at all. Instead of using the Security Council to establish and enforce a new global order, the major powers sent lightly armed peacekeepers into harm’s way simply to monitor the carnage. The results were devastating in two regards. First, civilians were murdered en masse. And second, the UN peacekeepers took far more of the blame than the politicians who had handed them an assignment that was, Vieira de Mello liked to say, “mission impossible.”

He returned to Bosnia only once. On January 9, 1996, as 60,000 NATO troops were arriving to enforce the new Dayton peace, Ogata sent him to mark the end of the Sarajevo humanitarian airlift. With the war over, the checkpoints were gone and the roads that Vieira de Mello had worked so hard to open were now cluttered with traffic. At the airport ceremony he smashed a champagne bottle against a large food crate and declared, “Our efforts helped keep the city alive, but now we are no longer needed.” ¹⁰ He credited Sarajevo civilians for their “resilience, courage and pride,” acknowledging, “We know we only partially mitigated their suffering.” The airlift, Operation Provide Promise, which had run from July 2, 1992, to January 4, 1996, had outlasted the fifteen-month Berlin airlift. ¹¹ Twenty-one countries had flown nearly 13,000 missions and delivered 160,677 metric tons of food, medicines, and other supplies. ¹² Vieira de Mello let the occasion pass without mentioning the hundreds of Bosnians whom he had helped smuggle out of Sarajevo on the UN “train” that he had run from his office. Never one to pause long in a sentimental moment, he smiled to the assembled dignitaries and muttered under his breath to Nakamitsu, “I can’t believe we just wasted a good bottle of Dom Pérignon!”

Even though UNHCR had been criticized in the former Yugoslavia for overextending itself, unlike the peacekeepers’, its presumptive virtue had not been challenged. In fact, it was the rare UN agency that (with the exception of the crisis over deposed high commissioner Jean-Pierre Hocké) had escaped serious scandal during its forty-five-year history. Because he had departed the Balkans long before Srebrenica’s fall, Vieira de Mello too managed to avoid being blamed by the media or by critics of the UN. But all of that changed as a result of the humanitarian crisis brought about by the genocide in Rwanda. UNHCR would be attacked with vitriol, and for the first time in Vieira de Mello’s unblemished career, he would find himself personally tarred by an international moral and humanitarian calamity.