In three decades of responding to war and displacement, Vieira de Mello had made a specialty out of understanding governments. Although he never entirely got his way, he had learned to negotiate with them, to extract resources from them, and to manipulate them. His senior colleagues in New York, who themselves were generally veterans of national government service, were usually surprised to learn that he had never himself worked for Brazil. The UN was not a place one could go to get experience running a country. But all that changed, unexpectedly, with the crisis in Kosovo.

ENDING A WAR

When he and his team returned to the United States after their risky assessment mission, NATO’s war was still going poorly. Nonetheless, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister, and Martti Ahtisaari, the Finnish president, were spearheading peace talks supported by the Clinton administration, and those talks were managing to gather steam. The mothers and wives of Serbian soldiers had begun protesting the casualties the army was suffering, and NATO had begun bombing businesses belonging to Milošević’s closest associates. The Serbian leader, who had expected to be able to play Russia off against NATO, found himself boxed in when the UN, NATO, and Russia suddenly began presenting a united front. On Thursday, June 3, 1999, after seventy-eight days and 12,500 NATO bombing raids, Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari handed Milošević a “take it or leave it” deal, and he surrendered. That evening NATO officers began negotiating the withdrawal of Serbian police and military forces from Kosovo.

One major question had been left unresolved: After Serb forces departed, who would run Kosovo? Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, which had operated its own informal, underground governing structures since the province was stripped of its autonomy in 1989, was eager to take over, but the Russians would not allow it. Serbian officials would have been happy to remain in charge, but that was precisely what the NATO air campaign had been designed to undo.

Vieira de Mello gave numerous media interviews following his return to New York in which he argued that, as an interim measure, the UN (and not NATO) was the organization best suited to running the province. “If the UN were to play that role,” he told a large audience at the National Press Club in Washington four days after Milošević’s surrender, “I can assure you that it is ready to move, and move fast.” ¹ But neither he nor Secretary-General Annan expected the UN to be handed such a role. Even though the Russians were lobbying for it, UN officials assumed that the organization would be cut out of the peace much as it had been cut out of the war. Indeed, Vieira de Mello was so confident that others would be given the task of managing Kosovo’s fate that, having neglected the rest of the world since March, he made plans to fly to Beijing on June 9, then on to Islamabad, Pakistan, on June 13, to assess regional humanitarian conditions.

But Moscow quickly forced him to change his travel plans. The Clinton administration had bypassed the UN Security Council in the run-up to the war because Russia would have vetoed any U.S. resolution authorizing NATO bombing. Now that the Russians were insisting the UN lead the transition, Washington was prepared to return to the Security Council and invite it to help shape Kosovo’s future. On June 10, the Security Council passed Resolution 1244, which amounted to a lowest-common-denominator fudge among powerful countries. It granted Kosovo “substantial autonomy” but not independence, and “meaningful self-administration” but not self-government. Serb police and military units would have to leave Kosovo. But the Security Council countries reiterated their respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” At an unspecified date down the road (a date that had not yet arrived in late 2007), the province would move out of this halfway house and either legally remain part of Serbia or, more likely, achieve full international recognition as an independent country. Kosovo still needed a government, so the UN would function as an “interim international administration” until the province’s final status could be resolved.

Resolution 1244 called on Annan to appoint a Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) as transitional administrator. This person would oversee civil administration, humanitarian affairs (via UNHCR), reconstruction (via the EU), and institution-building (via the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). This administrator would work in tandem with—but would have no say over—NATO, which would send in 50,000 ground troops in a peacekeeping role to stabilize the province.

UN staff had done no advance planning to lead what, by the look of things, would be both the most ambitious political mission in the organization’s history and its highest-profile assignment since the Bosnia and Rwanda debacles. Even though it was unclear whether the UN had the in-house expertise to actually govern anything, Annan embraced the assignment. In the words of one UN staffer, “When the Security Council calls, the Secretariat doesn’t bark. It bows its head, puts its tail between its legs, and starts walking.”

Annan knew that the UN couldn’t afford to fail, and the choice of his special representative was essential. Because the countries on the Security Council had given him no warning, he had not lined up a candidate. On Friday, June 11, he summoned Vieira de Mello to his office on the thirty-eighth floor. “Sergio,” he said, “I need you to go back.” Although Vieira de Mello was exhausted, he was also delighted. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi had nixed his appointment as SRSG in 1993; this would mark the first time in his career that he would run his own UN mission. The only catch was that the assignment was temporary. Since Europe would supply the bulk of the funding for Kosovo’s rebuilding, Annan felt he needed to find a European to succeed Vieira de Mello as soon as possible.

ASSEMBLING A TEAM

When Vieira de Mello led his eleven-day humanitarian mission into Serbia the previous month, he had been handed a diverse interagency team. But for this vital political mission, he was given the freedom to choose his own staff. He picked a half-dozen trustworthy colleagues who were prepared to leave their lives and families on twenty-four hours’ notice. Dozens more UN staff would soon follow, but the nucleus would be key. Helena Fraser, a twenty-seven-year-old British national, had been the Kosovo desk officer in New York. “Can you be ready to leave tomorrow?” Fabrizio Hochschild asked her. “I’m getting married in a month,” she said, but then added, “I did go for my last dress fitting earlier today.”

Hansjörg Strohmeyer, a thirty-seven-year-old former German judge who had only recently joined Vieira de Mello’s office, had worked in Bosnia for three years and knew the Yugoslav legal codes.“I need a lawyer down there,” Vieira de Mello told him. Strohmeyer’s mother had just flown in from Dortmund that day, and unable to speak English, she would be lost in New York without him. But he eagerly accepted. When he delivered the news to his mother that evening, she burst into tears.

The next day, Saturday, June 12, Fraser, Strohmeyer, and the other young team members raced around New York preparing for the trip. Fraser went to Bloomingdale’s with her fiancé to buy light cotton clothing for the mission. As the couple hurriedly piled up purchases, the saleslady asked what the occasion was. “I’m going to Kosovo,” Fraser said. The woman looked puzzled. “Where’s that?” she asked. “It’s in the former Yugoslavia,” Fraser answered. “Where’s that?” the saleslady followed up.“It’s in the Balkans,” Fraser said. “Hmmm,” the lady said. “Where’s that?” “It’s in Europe,” Fraser replied. The woman’s face brightened. “Oh, congratulations,” she said.“Have a wonderful trip!”

Strohmeyer had been told that Vieira de Mello’s team would likely depart on Sunday. On Saturday morning he dropped off his laundry and swung by the UN to pick up a few relevant books. “Have you picked up your ticket already?” Vieira de Mello’s secretary asked. Strohmeyer said he had not. She told him that he could get it from Hochschild at the airport later. “What do you mean ‘later’?” he asked. “The flight leaves this afternoon,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you?” They had not. Strohmeyer, who had his passport with him, ran back to the Laundromat, stuffed his wet laundry into a bag with his books, and hailed a cab to the airport. His mother would have to fend for herself.

Vieira de Mello barely made the flight himself. Like the others, he had spent the day organizing his life for the trip. But he had also been getting hourly updates from the Balkans, where a new exodus was under way. Thousands of Serbian civilians had suddenly taken to the road, heading for Serbia proper. They had voluntarily piled their belongings atop their cars and wagons in much the same way Kosovar Albanians had recently been forced to do at gunpoint. The Serbs scoffed at Western assurances that NATO forces would protect the Serbs. “How can we believe NATO when they bombed us?” a young Serb student was quoted by the Washington Post as asking. ² Yet while Vieira de Mello was aware of the fears of the Serb minority, he underestimated the longing that some ethnic Albanians felt for revenge.

By the time he reached New York’s Kennedy airport, cleared security, and sprinted to his gate, the flight attendants were just about to close the airplane door. Team members who had nervously awaited their boss’s arrival, cheered his entrance but groaned at his attire. He was wearing a khaki safari suit that made him look twenty years older and significantly more colonial than he intended.

IN CHARGE AT LAST

He used the overnight flight to Rome to study Security Council Resolution 1244, which left Kosovo’s final status undefined but gave him far more power than Yasushi Akashi had been given in Cambodia. Akashi had supervised Cambodian ministries; in Kosovo Vieira de Mello would have to build and run them. Somehow, with no money, no valid precedents, and no institutions to draw upon, he would have to determine what law should apply in the province and decide how to collect customs and taxes, what kind of passports should be issued, how to kick-start the economy, whether Yugoslav currency should remain in effect, and what on earth to do with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the ethnic Albanian guerrillas who would be an uncontested armed presence as soon as Serbian police and soldiers had fully withdrawn. Vieira de Mello was the interim administrator. He did not know how long “interim” would last, but he set out to establish a framework for governing the place. His greatest challenge, he knew, would be rapidly mobilizing police, UN staff, and money from New York.

His small UN governing team flew from Rome on to Skopje, Macedonia. When they landed, they proceeded straight to NATO’s temporary headquarters, where the force commander, British lieutenant-general Michael Jackson, was garrisoned. Vieira de Mello told Jackson that his team intended to drive north to Kosovo that very day. Jackson advised against it. “The province has not been secured,” he said. “We haven’t even set up our headquarters yet.”

Vieira de Mello told General Jackson that he was aware of the risks of premature entry. But having traveled around Kosovo while NATO was bombing and Serb paramilitary forces were on the loose, he was not about to be deterred now that a peace deal had been struck. Although the UN Security Council had put the UN in charge of the province, he knew that if he did not quickly establish a UN ground presence, NATO and KLA soldiers would fill the vacuum. Jackson wished him luck, and the two men agreed to hold daily meetings in Kosovo so as to coordinate their separate civilian and military chains of command.

Because the mission had been jerry-rigged in a hurry, Vieira de Mello’s team needed to beg and borrow supplies from aid groups, governments, and other branches of the UN that were already present in the region. They borrowed two vehicles from a Swedish relief organization, communications equipment from the British government’s aid agency, water and fuel from UNHCR, and military rations from NATO. Vieira de Mello felt he was on what he later called “an under-budgeted high school outing.” ³

The trip from the Macedonian border to Pristina, the Kosovo capital, was straightforward; the two vehicles simply had to drive forty miles northward. But the scenes around them were anything but normal. Less than three weeks before, when he had driven a portion of the same road, it had been deserted. Now the streets were lined with cheering Kosovar Albanians who had never quite believed that they would be free of Serb tyranny. Most Kosovars were still outside the country in refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. Those who flocked to greet the UN convoy were mainly those who had hidden inside the province during the NATO bombing campaign. They made the peace sign, threw flowers into the street, and cheered the British prime minister and U.S. president, chanting, “TO-NY, TO-NY” and “CLIN-TON, CLIN-TON.” “This must have been what it felt like for American troops at the end of the Second World War,” Fraser said to a colleague.

Vieira de Mello eyed families walking along the side of the road. They were carrying bundles and appeared to be heading back to their homes. He saw scattered cars piled high with suitcases and appliances. “Once these people start heading home,” he noted, “there’ll be no stopping them.” Yet having toured Kosovo’s charred villages, he knew many would return to find only the ashen remains of their past lives.

After around three hours on the road, as the UN convoy ascended the crest of a hill, he instructed his driver to stop the vehicle. He disembarked with the others and eyed the capital city of Pristina below. As he did, he turned back and looked at the cars that his team had appropriated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to show people that it is the United Nations, and not Sweden, that is arriving. Who’s got a UN flag?” Somebody produced a royal blue UN flag, around the size of a pillowcase, and tied it to the antenna of Vieira de Mello’s lead vehicle. He looked satisfied, even though the enormous decals of the Swedish flag emblazoned on the side of the cars were far more visible to onlookers.

He had been in a hurry to get to Pristina for another, more juvenile reason. Dennis McNamara, who was managing UNHCR’s operations in the region, was bringing the first UN relief into Kosovo in nearly three months. McNamara had told Vieira de Mello that he intended to be the first UN official to reach the newly liberated capital. Over their radios the two friends had ribbed and taunted each other constantly throughout the afternoon, but McNamara had gone silent, and Vieira de Mello worried that his friend had won the bet.

McNamara had enjoyed a lengthy head start, having departed Skopje in the morning. But he was traveling in a twenty-three-truck convoy that carried 250 tons of supplies, including bottled water, wheat flour, hygienic kits, blankets, plastic sheeting, and 48,000 Meals Ready to Eat. ⁴ It took most of the day for his unwieldy convoy to snake its way to the UN warehouse on the outskirts of Pristina. Staffan de Mistura, the Italian who on Vieira de Mello’s advice had hired smugglers as “UN consultants” in Bosnia seven years before, was part of McNamara’s convoy. He was unaware that they were part of a race, and it never dawned on him that Vieira de Mello, who had been appointed interim administrator only two days before, could have already reached Kosovo. Yet no sooner had de Mistura disembarked from his truck at the UN warehouse than he heard a familiar voice. “Benvenuto, Staffan!” Vieira de Mello said.

As Vieira de Mello, McNamara, and de Mistura embraced warmly, ²⁰ an elderly Serb who was guarding the gate of the UN warehouse began screaming obscenities and raising his machine gun as if to shoot them if they approached. The man was visibly drunk and so incoherent that he seemed at once harmless and dangerous. Vieira de Mello had been informed that the Serbs had burned down the other large UN warehouse in Kosovo, so he knew the UN needed to hang on to this one.

“Staffan, I need a drink,” he said suddenly to de Mistura.

“What you mean, you need a drink?” the Italian asked. It was broad daylight, and there was work to be done.

“Do you have any slivovitz here?” Vieira de Mello pressed.

De Mistura asked the UN interpreters to see what they could find. A few minutes later one of the locals approached with a small bottle of the Balkan spirit. Vieira de Mello approached the angry Serb cautiously and pointed to the bottle. “I would like to drink some slivovitz with you and talk things out,” he said.

The Serb guard looked skeptical, but the Balkan rules of hospitality required him to accept. The men raised their glasses. “Živeli,” Vieira de Mello toasted to the baffled Serb in his language. De Mistura was not sure whether he or the Serb guard was in a greater state of shock. But when he saw the guard rest his gun beside his chair and return the toast, he knew who would soon win the battle of wills.

Speaking through a UN interpreter, the Serb began explaining the source of his rage. He had guarded the UN warehouse for almost a year, and the Serbian government had yet to pay him. His friends and relatives had already fled Kosovo, but he had remained in order to collect what was owed to him. Vieira de Mello finished his drink, returned to his vehicle, and dipped into a tin box that he used to store petty cash. When he handed the Serb the several hundred dollars he was owed, the guard pocketed the money, picked up his gun, and walked away. The warehouse belonged to the UN.

Having secured a home for the UN’s humanitarian supplies, Vieira de Mello and the others made their way into town. Pristina was even more deserted than it had been during the war. Most of the Serbs had left, and few ethnic Albanians had yet made it back. As the UN group reached town, they saw that Serb forces were still setting houses aflame. The circumstances reminded him of his arrival in Gorazde five years before. But while in Gorazde the arson had been a sign of the Serbs’ invulnerability, this time it was clearly a last gasp by the departing Serbs—a sign of their relative weakness.

In advance of arriving, they had not lined up a place to stay. Randolph Kent, who was part of the group, remembers the chaos and uncertainty that they felt as they drove aimlessly around Pristina.“Have you ever been on the holiday where you arrive and you say,‘Why the hell didn’t we book a hotel?’ Well, that’s what it was like,” Kent recalls.

As the team stopped at the side of the road to discuss their plans for the rest of the day, they saw another drunken Serb soldier in a militia uniform staggering up the road. They thought little of it, as the sight was becoming familiar. A few minutes later as they drove up the road, however, they saw the same soldier’s body lying facedown. He had been shot—one of four Serbs who were reported killed by the KLA that day. ⁵ Because it was the Serbs who had maintained order, even if brutal order, their departure was leaving a dangerous vacuum.

Although he had hardly slept on the transatlantic flight, Vieira de Mello was in a familiar hurry to establish the UN presence. He held a press conference downtown at the Grand Hotel. When he was shown the room where the event was to be held, he eyed the podium. “There’s a NATO flag there,” he told Eduardo Arboleda of UNHCR. “I can’t appear before a NATO flag.” “But, Sergio, people will concentrate on what you are saying,” Arboleda said. “No, I’ll offend the Serbs,” he replied. “They were just bombed by NATO.” Since a UN flag could not be found as a backdrop, Vieira de Mello demanded someone find a light blue sheet, which was procured from housekeeping and hung instead. “For this forlorn group without food, cars, sleeping bags, or a place to stay, to say, ‘We’re here, and we’re the new UN administration!’ seemed preposterous,” recalls Strohmeyer. “There were ten of us and fifty thousand NATO troops.” Yet Vieira de Mello’s self-respect, personal and institutional, made him and the other team members believe that they had an essential role to play.

At the press conference he was asked about the likelihood that ethnic Albanians would carry out revenge attacks against Serbs. Although McNamara had urged him to condemn displacements and revenge killings, Vieira de Mello sent an unfortunately passive signal to the inhabitants of the polarized province. Instead of denouncing the spate of attacks on Serbs, he said, “I believe it is unavoidable that there will be security incidents here and there.” ⁶ It was late June before he brought Kosovo’s Albanian and Serb leaders together to issue a joint appeal for peace.

After the press conference McNamara led his friend’s political team to a four-story house that was owned by a Kosovar acquaintance and had been used by UNHCR staff before the bombing. UNHCR had negotiated with the family, who agreed to move into the basement while the UN took over the main house. It would double as UN residence and UN headquarters until Vieira de Mello’s UN transitional administration appropriated a former Serbian government office building for its permanent operations.

Every evening in the hallway outside his bedroom on the top floor, Vieira de Mello would gather his team, which by now included Martin Griffiths, McNamara, Kirsten Young (his assistant), Kent, Hochschild, Fraser, Strohmeyer, and Susan Manual, a spokesperson. Somebody would pull a small bridge table into the center of the landing, and he would plop down a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and several bars of Lindt and Ritter Sport chocolate. While the others dipped deep into the bottle, Vieira de Mello alternated between leading the discussion of the day’s events and disappearing into his bedroom to place his calls to New York.

Fraser did not enjoy cohabiting in a virtually all-male house without running water. With their disagreeable stomachs, the smell could be unbearable. Her bedroom housed the highly secure UN code-cable machine, and because of the time difference with New York, the machine rang and churned out classified paper faxes all through the night. At one point Fraser grew so exasperated with the machine’s frequent interruptions of her sleep that she unplugged it. When she confessed her crime to Hochschild the following day, he said, “Don’t worry about it. When was the last time you saw something important in a classified UN code cable?”

Despite the unhygienic conditions in the house, Vieira de Mello maintained his reputation for elegance with the disheveled members of his staff. One night after he headed out of the house for a meeting, McNamara, who had had a few drinks, broke into his friend’s room and raided his suitcases. “I’ve found him out,” he shouted out into the hallway. “Come quick!” The officials in Vieira de Mello’s team gathered guiltily beside his bed, where McNamara had laid out the evidence. “This is how he does it, the bastard,” McNamara exclaimed. Inside the case were a dozen identical, spotless, crisply starched and ironed blue button-down shirts.

Most of Vieira de Mello’s staff were, like him, left-leaning progressives who had been attracted to the UN because of its support for decolonization. They thus found it ironic to be involved themselves in a quasi-colonial governing experiment. They joked about Vieira de Mello’s newfound imperial impulses and nicknamed him “Viceroy.” But they all felt the tensions inherent in the arrangement. Vieira de Mello himself did not naturally embrace the full range of powers granted to him. He struggled to wrap his mind around the idea that all of the buildings, finances, and companies that had been owned by the Serbian government were now, technically, his. Speeding down Kosovo’s main thoroughfare one day, he cautioned Griffiths to slow down, as it would not send the right signal to the Kosovars if the administrator were given a speeding ticket. Griffiths agreed and slowed down. But suddenly he remembered the Hobbesian setting they were in. “Sergio, there’s nobody here to arrest us, besides us,” he noted. “We’re the ones in charge.” Vieira de Mello grimaced. “What a truly terrifying thought,” he said.

As the administrator, Vieira de Mello found that his responsibilities were enormous. The garbage had been piling up since NATO began bombing in March, and he would have to find some way to pay the collectors. He pleaded with the UN legal adviser’s office in New York for permission to spend revenues from state-owned enterprises, such as electric and water utilities, without checking with the authorities in Belgrade. Headquarters was frightfully slow in answering him.“Sergio got almost no guidance on the big issues, and major guidance on tiny issues,” recalls Fraser. “He couldn’t stand the combination of silence and tinkering.”

If the UN rules and regulations had tormented him in his office in New York, they very nearly ruined his efforts to govern Kosovo. The one way he could have won the affection of the ethnic Albanians was to offer them tangible assistance by paying them the state salaries they were owed or by quickly finding funds for them to rebuild their destroyed property. Some 50,000 ethnic Albanian civil servants had not been paid in more than two months, but he could not simply do as he had done for one drunken Serb guard and reach into his tin of petty cash to supply their back pay. Although the Security Council had given the UN mission a $456 million budget, the money came from assessed contributions and thus, as had been true in Cambodia, could be used only to cover the needs of UN employees: staff salaries, vehicles, computers, and air conditioners. If he wanted to pay Kosovars for their labor as security guards, civil servants, road builders, teachers, or garbage collectors, he had to drum up a separate trust fund, to which countries in the UN had no obligation to contribute. The fund didn’t really get started until after he left, by which point local frustration with the UN was already high. In Cambodia a government had existed alongside the UN, whereas in Kosovo the UN was the government. This gave it the power to detain and release murderers, to appoint judges, and to fire mayors. Yet UN rules devised decades earlier for vastly less ambitious missions denied him the flexibility to hire and fire UN staff or to disburse funds as he saw fit.“It is like being asked to perform Olympic gymnastics and then being placed in a straitjacket,” he later wrote. ⁷

On June 16 he returned to one of the villages near Urosevac that he had visited on his assessment trip in May, and he tracked down a woman he had met there who had been forced from her home at gunpoint. “I told you I’d be back,” he said to the woman. “I told you I’d look after you.” She wept with gratitude but told him that her home had been destroyed and she had nothing to eat. When it came to meeting those vital needs, he had nothing to offer.

Vieira de Mello went out of his way to convey to his staff, to NATO, and to ethnic Albanians and Serbs that everything was proceeding according to a clear and sophisticated plan. But privately he screamed to the heavens about “fucking New York.” “We were stragglers,” recalls Fabrizio Hochschild. “It was smoke and mirrors. Sergio always managed to look like he was in charge and credible whether he was standing on a tower of marble or a small lump of sand, which is what we were on in Kosovo.”

THE POLICING GAP

The biggest failing in the transition, and the one whose consequences would be felt for generations to come, was the absence of law, order, and justice. Vieira de Mello had two problems: an abundance of returning Kosovar Albanian refugees who bore grudges against Serbs who had first oppressed them and then expelled them, and the overnight disappearance of the institutions that had maintained order in the province.

In Cambodia Vieira de Mello and UNHCR had organized most of the refugee returns. But in Kosovo civilians marched back on their own, with no regard for the condition of their homes or for the mines, booby traps, and unexploded NATO ordnance that was scattered throughout the province. Within two weeks of his arrival, some 300,000 Kosovars had spontaneously crossed back into Kosovo, and an additional 50,000 were returning every day. They came as they had left: on foot, by car, or by tractor. In formation they resembled the columns of Hutu refugees that had been forced back to Rwanda in 1996, but while those refugees returned only under the barrel of the gun, in Kosovo the UN would have needed guns to prevent the flood. By June 25 the number of returnees exceeded 650,000. In his first month there more than 130 returning Kosovars were injured by ordnance. ⁸

Any UN official who had worked in the aftermath of violence was familiar with the “policing gap” that often opened between the time when one government stepped down and another got its bearings. When an occupier departed, or when security forces were disbanded, criminal elements were usually the prime beneficiaries. Vieira de Mello had believed that NATO troops would be able to prevent most revenge attacks against Serbs. At the National Press Club in Washington in early June, he had said confidently, “Kosovo is a very small province, so 50,000 troops are . . . likely to stem any revenge rampage that might be in the making.” ⁹ Here he proved dead wrong. The skills needed for war fighting varied greatly from those needed for crime prevention. And Kosovo didn’t have few police or corrupt police, as Cambodia did; after the Serbs left, it had no police. The Pentagon had suggested that the UN simply “recycle” the KLA as a police force, but this UN officials found laughable, as it was precisely the KLA that had taken to terrorizing Serb civilians. This left Vieira de Mello’s tiny UN mission to confront the most daunting postwar challenge: ending the vicious cycle of violence. It would take an eternity to recruit enough international police to secure the streets. Bernard Miyet, who ran the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, said he could not even recruit a UN police commissioner for Kosovo until he knew the nationality of Vieira de Mello’s replacement as special representative. The UN’s other hires had to ensure national balance. ¹⁰

The UN had begun recruiting police only on June 10, the day of the unexpected Security Council resolution creating the UN administration. Vieira de Mello pleaded for units with the foreign ministers of the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy who visited Kosovo on June 23. Four days later some thirty-five police arrived from the UN mission in Bosnia, hailing from Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Estonia, Pakistan, Portugal, Romania, and the United States. ¹¹ But they functioned only as advisers to NATO. Since few countries had spare police capacity at home, they had none to siphon off to Kosovo to do real police work. Vieira de Mello requested specialists to combat organized crime, which had flourished in Kosovo even before the war and was now booming. This appeal would not be satisfied until 2001, two years after it was made, by which time Kosovo’s crime networks were firmly entrenched. ¹²

Vieira de Mello controlled all the functions of Kosovo’s new interim government, except he had no say over NATO forces. He urged General Jackson to take initiative, but since NATO had just fought a war against the Serbs, NATO officers continued to view the Serb minority as the threat and not as potential victims. Vieira de Mello understood their view. Some ten thousand ethnic Albanians had been killed in recent months, more than six hundred villages had been razed to the ground, and fresh graves were being unearthed each day. Throughout the country NATO soldiers were discovering eyeglasses, watches, tobacco tins, IDs, and bits of clothing amid piles of bones. Vieira de Mello knew from his own helicopter tours of the province how moving it was to see the results of the Serbs’ scorched-earth campaign: acre upon acre of ashen neighborhoods. Still, he thought it was incumbent on NATO to stop the violence. But no matter how many appeals he made, Jackson did not give his troops standing orders to stop looting or arson. As typically happened in UN missions as well, some national contingents in NATO reflexively took civilian protection more seriously than others. While the British battalion intervened regularly to stop ethnic Albanians from assaulting Serbs, German and Italian soldiers tended to remain in their armored personnel carriers, reluctant to carry out foot patrols. An American captain was candid when he told one Serb, “It is better to leave, we can’t protect you.” ¹³

The most isolated forces in Kosovo were the Americans. While most of the other troop-contributing countries occupied factories, warehouses, or abandoned Yugoslav military complexes in urban areas, American planners built a garrison from scratch in an enormous wheat field four miles from the nearest town. The U.S. military hired the contractor Brown & Root to carry out the construction of facilities in the 750-acre complex known as Camp Bondsteel. Hemmed in by nine guard towers and forbidding wire fences, the soldiers slept in prefabricated huts with heating and air-conditioning. More than any other base, Bondsteel would be a preview of the Green Zone fortress that U.S. administrators would set up in Iraq in 2003.

Vieira de Mello did not see how the Americans would possibly be able to protect the Serb minority or win Kosovar hearts and minds if they were holed up so far away from the local community. But he understood that, ever since the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration had become driven by “force protection.” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others who had pushed for the war in Kosovo were concerned that as soon as U.S. troops took casualties, Congress would press for an American exit. As a result, while Vieira de Mello viewed the posture of the U.S. forces as counterproductive, he shrugged it off, deeming it the price of the U.S. participation in, and perhaps even funding for, the Kosovo mission as a whole.

He also made use of the U.S. base to house prisoners on the rare occasions on which NATO made arrests. With the Serbs gone, Kosovo had no justice system. ¹⁴ Almost all of the prison staff had fled alongside the Serb military and police. With no place to put Kosovar Albanian looters or thugs, NATO soldiers tended to dump the suspects in tents inside the Western bases. ¹⁵ Within two weeks of the start of Vieira de Mello’s mission, some two hundred detainees (charged with arson, violent assault, or murder) faced indefinite detention. The UN needed to put in place a body to try them.

On June 30 he appointed nine judges and prosecutors, three of whom were Serbs, to act as a mobile unit to dispense justice throughout Kosovo. By mid-July they had heard the cases of 249 detainees and released 112 of them. ¹⁶ The ethnic Albanians criticized the UN for overrepresenting Serbs on the bench. This didn’t last long. After just a few days in office, one of the three Serb judges was evicted from his apartment and threatened with death. He fled to Serbia. ¹⁷

The ethnic Albanians’ purge of Kosovo’s Serb minority, which NATO now estimated was taking fifty Serb lives each week, was not merely revenge. It was a deliberate attempt to affect future negotiations on Kosovo’s status. By promising sovereignty to Serbia, autonomy to the Kosovar Albanians, and governing authority to the UN, the Security Council had handed Vieira de Mello and his staff a mandate predicated on fundamental contradictions. The Serbs resented the UN for stripping them of their power and giving the Kosovars rights and privileges they had never had before. The Kosovars resented the UN for taking the place of Serbs in running the place and denying them their independence. It was, Vieira de Mello liked to quip, “an effort to combine motherhood with virginity.” ¹⁸ And success in Kosovo, like a virgin giving birth, would have required a divine intervention. The Kosovars had chosen not to wait. They had opted instead to alter Kosovo’s demographics so as to make it impossible for international mediators to later hand the province back to Serbia. If Kosovar independence required ethnic purity, they appeared prepared to achieve it.

COMBINING MOTHERHOOD AND VIRGINITY

Vieira de Mello could not give Kosovars a timetable for independence because it was not up to him: The countries on the Security Council would decide. But because the UN mission was the face of international ambivalence about Kosovo’s statehood, it would be UN officials who would take the blame. The acronym for the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo, UNMIK, sounded like anmik, which in Albanian means “enemy.” ¹⁹ Strohmeyer recalls the progression of Albanian sentiment: “Just before the UN moved in, the Albanians were forced to give the three-finger Serb salute. When the UN arrived, they gave us the peace sign. And then after we’d been there a week, they gave us the middle finger.”

Vieira de Mello divided his time battling New York for personnel and office supplies, urging donor countries to contribute funds to Kosovo’s economic development, and defusing ethnic Albanian frustration. His most important act as administrator was the creation of a transitional council comprising representatives from the major political, ethnic, and social groups: six Kosovar Albanians, two Serbs, one Bosnian Muslim, and one Turk. The council was to advise the UN on how to govern.

Having fought for independence, KLA soldiers had expected to run the province themselves. Since the KLA had people and money in place all over Kosovo, they were able to commandeer municipal buildings that had been vacated by the Serbs and even issue political regulations and legal edicts. In a direct snub to Vieira de Mello’s nascent transitional council, Hashim Thaci, the leader of the KLA, named a twenty-one-member all-Albanian cabinet in early July. Thaci also appointed mayors in twenty-five of the province’s twenty-nine municipalities. On July 15 Ibrahim Rugova, the more pacifistic founder of the Kosovo independence movement, returned to the province from exile and declared, “I am the president.” ²⁰ Vieira de Mello declared that neither man had any official status until democratic elections could be held. ²¹ The UN, he insisted, was “the only source of authority in Kosovo.” ²²

As frustrated as he was by local intransigence, he was also exhilarated. It stung to know that he would not be the permanent international administrator. The European Union was planning to put up more than half of the annual $1.5 billion needed to run and reconstruct Kosovo, and he awaited word of which European Annan would select for the top job.

French president Jacques Chirac lobbied for France’s own Bernard Kouchner, a former French health minister and the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, one of the most influential humanitarian aid and advocacy organizations. ²¹ On July 2 Annan announced Kouchner’s appointment. ²³

Vieira de Mello went to the airport to greet Kouchner when he arrived in Kosovo on July 15. He had no doubt about Kouchner’s commitment to the former Yugoslavia. The French advocate had helped organize the Barbara Hendricks visit to Sarajevo in 1994 and had been a longtime ally of the Kosovars. The two men were friends, but they had very different styles. Vieira de Mello had often cringed over the years at Kouchner’s efforts to promote himself as well as his causes. In 1992 he had groaned audibly when he heard that, in Somalia, Kouchner had posed for the television cameras wading toward the shore carrying a bag of rice on his back. Now, seven years later, upon seeing Kouchner disembark from his airplane in Pristina, accompanied by a television crew, Vieira de Mello decided to get out of town as quickly as possible.

He had loved serving as interim administrator, as it was his most senior political appointment and it combined so many of the challenges that he had seen tackled in isolation during his career: repatriation of refugees, governance, reconstruction, and law and order. He was truly sorry to leave. But he was proud of what he had achieved in a short time. In addition to setting up the Kosovo Transitional Council and engaging restive Kosovars in a UN-led political process, he had established a warm and cooperative personal relationship with NATO (even if staff within the organizations did not mesh easily), and most remarkably, with scant guidance, he had put in place the basic laws that Kosovo would need to govern itself. “He established the law of the land with no rules and zero advice,” Helena Fraser remembers. “And this was 1999, when you couldn’t yet Google some recently decolonized nation and find out how they wrote their first laws. He was totally improvising.”

He masked his frustration at being big-footed with humor and deference. He brought Kouchner to the former ministry of defense building, where he had set up UN headquarters. While Kouchner’s media entourage filmed, Vieira de Mello wore a big smile and pulled out the chair from behind what had been his desk. “Welcome to your office,” he said. “You are the boss!” Kouchner planted himself at his new desk, as Vieira de Mello shuffled over to the wall, out of camera range. He teased Kouchner, “Like the Soviet system, you can tell the importance of a man by the number of phones he has.” The French diplomat eyed the four phones cluttering the desk before him and fell for the bait, picking up the receiver on one of them. “Do any of them work?” he asked. “No, of course not,” Vieira de Mello answered, smiling. “This is Kosovo.”

The following day, in his last act, he opened the first meeting of the multiethnic Kosovo Transitional Council, then handed over the chairmanship to his successor. “He couldn’t bear playing second fiddle to Kouchner,” recalls Strohmeyer. After saying a few quiet good-byes, he slipped off to the airport.

Vieira de Mello’s last public statement as administrator was: “Killings, kidnapping, forced expulsions, house burnings, and looting are a daily occurrence. These are criminal acts. They cannot be excused by the suffering that has been inflicted in the past. Kosovo’s future must be built on justice, not vengeance.” ²⁴ By the time of his departure, only 156 of the 3,100 police requested by the UN had arrived, and some 150,000 Serbs had already fled. ²⁵

NO QUICK FIX

Back in New York, where his staff ribbed him as the “proconsul,” Vieira de Mello was not in a playful mood. After his two high-profile trips into Kosovo and almost two months in the field, his spirits slumped in the office environment. “How long am I now going to be stuck behind this desk?” he asked Hochschild. An earthquake in Turkey struck within four weeks of his return, requiring him to busy himself raising funds for emergency relief, but his mind drifted to the province he had left.

Before heading to Kosovo, he had promised the cleaning lady in his office at UN Headquarters that he would track down a nephew of hers in the province who was wheelchair-bound. While he had been in the region in June and July, he had made no progress. But back in New York he now pressed McNamara and Young to find the young man. He wrote multiple letters, offering leads on the boy, who was thought to be living as a refugee in Macedonia. “We were trying to do our jobs as systematically and fairly as we could,” recalls Young. “But every couple of weeks we would get a note from Sergio asking us to drop everything and help somebody new. For a while it was the nephew of his cleaning lady, but then, once we had helped him, it was somebody else. There was always somebody. It got to the point that we dreaded his phone calls. It was very kind of him, but not very efficient for us.”

Vieira de Mello monitored events in Kosovo with the vigilance of a parent who has left his child in a neighbor’s care. He devoured reams of cable traffic from the Balkans, and he defended the UN’s nation-building experiment and urged skeptics to give the Kosovars and the UN a little more time before they wrote off the possibility of peace. He angrily penned an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune, faulting the UN’s shortsighted critics who thought it “naïve” to work for coexistence. The violence in Bosnia and Kosovo, he wrote, “pales beside the mutual slaughter that characterized until relatively recently relations between many West European nations.” He argued that Kosovo was no more marked by revenge killings than South Africa had been after white rule ended. But observers there had not given up on reconciliation. “No serious commentator suggested, even in private, that blacks and whites were doomed to separation in South Africa, or that partition was inevitable,” he wrote. “Why should we apply different criteria to the Balkans? Why should its peoples not be given the time to heal their wounds? Why do we look for quick fixes there?” ²⁶

He understood where all the pressure was coming from. Rich countries had given $207 per person in response to the 1999 UN Kosovo appeal, as distinct from the $16 per person raised for Sierra Leone. ²⁷ This was a problem in its own right. “Just because these people look like us and are white,” he had long complained to staff, “doesn’t mean they are more deserving.” But the disproportionate spending mattered for another reason: If, with all the resources expended, Kosovo could not be stabilized, donor nations would be reluctant to give money to shore up other trouble spots.

He still hadn’t made up his mind as to whether NATO was right to have sidelined the UN Security Council and intervened in Serbia. He believed a precedent had been set. If a powerful country wanted to act and could not get the support of Security Council countries, he knew the country would be just a little more tempted to go it alone. President Clinton spoke before the General Assembly on September 21, 1999, and argued convincingly that when NATO bombed Serbia, it had in fact been defending the interests and values of the UN as well as those of the Kosovars.“NATO’s actions followed a clear consensus, expressed in several Security Council resolutions that the atrocities committed by Serb forces were unacceptable,” Clinton said. “Had we chosen to do nothing in the face of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened the United Nations. Instead, we would have risked discrediting everything it stands for. By acting as we did, we helped to vindicate the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, to give the UN the opportunity it now has to play the central role in shaping Kosovo’s future.” ²⁸ Vieira de Mello ended up largely persuaded, as allowing Serbia’s atrocities so soon after Rwanda and Srebrenica would have indeed cost the UN. He adopted a formulation common among those who supported NATO’s action but were nervous about its implications: The war was illegal (under the procedural rules of the UN Charter) but legitimate (according to the substantive ideals the UN was trying to advance).

Vieira de Mello tried to share the lessons he had learned in Kosovo, most of which related to law and order, with governments and senior UN officials at Headquarters. He proposed the establishment of a roster of pretrained, multinational police, along with judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, who would place themselves on call and who could head into the field on short notice. ²⁹ The success of a mission could be decided in its first month. Providing civilians with security needed not only to be the top priority; it also had to be “the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth priority,” he argued. “Unlike other nation-building tasks,” he wrote, “law and order cannot wait.” ³⁰