EPILOGUE, Sergio

In the aftermath of the bomb at the Canal Hotel, Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to convey just how irreplaceable Vieira de Mello had become and just how severe the loss would be for the world. “I had only one Sergio,” he said simply.¹ He knew nobody who had Vieira de Mello’s linguistic skills, cultural breadth, critical mind, political savvy, humanitarian commitments, and world-weary wisdom. “Sergio,” as he was known to heads of state and refugees around the world, had long ago surpassed the legend of his mentor Thomas Jamieson. Confronted by crises, he had often asked, “What would Jamie do?” And henceforth generations of diplomats and humanitarians will likely ask, “What would Sergio do?”

Vieira de Mello began each mission by trying to “get real”: to see the world as it was rather than as he might have liked it to be. Today getting real means recognizing that the most pressing threats on the horizon are transnational and thus cannot be tackled by a single country. But getting real also requires acknowledging that the international system is polarized and slow, just when we need cooperation and urgent action. Vieira de Mello was a UN man to his core, determined to “show the UN flag” whenever he arrived in a war-torn area. Throughout his career UN successes—in spurring decolonization, helping refugees return to their homes, persuading militants to engage in political processes, sponsoring elections, and ushering in independence—filled him with a seemingly guileless pride. The UN remained the embodiment of the “world’s conscience” for him because it was the place where governments assembled to enshrine their legal and moral commitments. It was the home of the international rules that, if followed, would breed greater peace and security. But by the time of his death he was deeply worried that the system he had joined thirty-four years before was not up to the task of dealing with the barbarism and lawlessness of the times. “I am the first person to recognize that the UN leaves a lot to be desired,” he acknowledged.² He conceded that the “transition from the ideal to the real is often extremely long, hard, costly, and cruel.”³

He knew that the organization he cherished was at once an actor in its own right and simply a building, no better or worse than the collective will of the countries that constituted it. The UN-the-actor needed to be reformed. Twentieth-century rules were no match for twenty-first-century crises. Mediocrity and corruption among UN personnel had to be weeded out, but accountability could not simply mean additional paperwork or micromanaging from Headquarters, as it usually did. UN civil servants had to become more self-critical and introspective, accepting what had taken Vieira de Mello years to learn: that they are agents of change themselves and not simply the servants of powerful governments.

His clashes with Dennis McNamara arose because, in his friend’s view, “Sergio sided with power.” He had sided with governments in helping organize the forced return of the Vietnamese and Rwandan refugees, and he had been so mute about Serbian atrocities that he had earned the nickname “Serbio.” Once he moved to UN Headquarters in New York, however, while he was always careful to gauge the prevailing winds, he was less prone to simply defer to them. He stood up more frequently for the rights and needs of civilians, defying the wishes of the United States to lead an assessment mission into Kosovo under the cover of NATO bombing and arguing forcefully, when the pro-Indonesian militia began burning down East Timor, that UN officials in the country could not abandon the desperate Timorese, no matter what UN member states were saying. “For once,” he argued to his senior colleagues, “let’s allow the states on the [Security] Council to make the wrong decisions instead of saving them the trouble by making the wrong decisions for them.” When he himself governed East Timor, he played by UN rules at the start. But governments had written those rules for an era of peacekeeping when UN troops interpositioned themselves as a “thin blue line” between two sides that had agreed to a cease-fire. The regulations were woefully ill suited for multifaceted missions in countries still racked by internal violence or where the UN had to rebuild whole institutions from scratch. When he realized that he was losing the support of the Timorese, he changed course, taking the revolutionary step of appointing Timorese to supervise their UN underlings. He chose his battles. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of how to bend UN rules to their breaking point without gaining a reputation for insubordination.

But there was only so much one UN civil servant could do. Whether the UN could help “humanize history,” as he put it, would not turn on whether UN bureaucrats became more self-critical or how loudly they howled about an injustice. If the UN was to become a truly constructive, stabilizing twenty-first-century player, as it had to be, the governments in the building would have to change their preferences and their behavior. This would mean throwing their weight behind tasks the UN performed well—by supporting the work of the specialized humanitarian field agencies such as UNHCR, vastly improving the logistic and strategic support for UN peacekeeping missions, and making use of the UN’s convening powers to deepen and broaden the rules governing international and internal state practices on such vital concerns as climate change and terrorism. But it would also mean being selective, and not asking the UN to do too much, or to perform tasks that could better be performed by regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, or new quasi-governmental operational entities like the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria or the International Criminal Court (ICC) (both of which governments deliberately set up outside the UN system).

Vieira de Mello saw that frustrated countries were increasingly working around UN gridlock and assembling in smaller bodies according to geography or shared interests. Believing there were more than enough deadly challenges to go around, he generally treated security and development initiatives outside the UN not as competitors, but as partners. But he was irritated by what he saw as a tendency to romanticize such initiatives, whose success would turn on some of the very same member states that had proven unreliable in the UN. Whatever the precise shape or composition of an international grouping, he argued, if the countries inside these bodies didn’t change, many of the UN’s weaknesses—diplomatic gridlock, bureaucratic red tape, or insufficient political will—would undermine their performance. In his view, there was no silver bullet or reform “fix” on the horizon. There was only the messy, thankless work of trying to change states’ perceptions of their interests. When countries like the United States began speaking of bypassing the UN—and building a new, more amicable “community of democracies”—he understood the appeal. After all, the UN itself was initially founded as a club for like-minded countries. But in the long run he did not see how global threats could be tackled without engaging undemocratic states or rogue nations. Since all of the looming challenges crossed borders, states would have to cooperate and burden-share, and the United Nations remained the only international institution that gathered representatives from all countries in one place.

Vieira de Mello knew from his own journey that when the countries on the Security Council were united and determined to enforce peace and security, his peacemaking or state-building missions stood far higher odds of bringing results. If powerful countries were divided or, as often happened, if their attention wandered, the belligerents and spoilers took heed. “The UN is an instrument, a frame, an engine,” he noted. It would be “as dynamic, as conciliatory, as innovative, as successful” as governments “wish it, allow it, make it be.”⁴ But just how dynamic or successful did they wish it to be?

The UN did not create global divisions among rich and poor, secular and religious, urban and rural, modern and traditional. But because the UN is the only global meeting place, those tensions play themselves out in its decision-making chambers. Today, almost five years after Vieira de Mello’s death, just when consensus is most needed, the Security Council is more divided than it has been since the end of the cold war. China, which rarely asserted itself at the UN during most of Vieira de Mello’s career, is “coming out” economically and geopolitically. While many Western leaders hail the erosion of sovereignty in a globalized world, China clings to it, contending that others have no business meddling in its or anybody else’s domestic affairs.

China is not alone. The so-called petro-authoritarian countries, led by Russia, have rolled back their democratic domestic gains and begun leveraging their natural resources to bully their neighbors. European powers still seem confused about how to make use of their newfound collective weight. And the United States, because of its war in Iraq, its disavowal of international legal constraints, and the abuses carried out in its counterterrorism efforts, commands little respect around the world and has increasing difficulty summoning support in international settings. The erosion of U.S. influence, combined with the new assertiveness of countries that do not see their own interests as advanced by improving the living conditions of others, means that UN negotiations on security and human rights issues are commonly yielding even greater theatrics and stalemates than in Vieira de Mello’s day.

Vieira de Mello was exasperated by the fact that the UN’s loudest critics were politicians from the very countries that had assigned the UN impossible tasks and then starved it of resources or refused to loan it topflight personnel. “I’d like to see them try it!” he would exclaim, when some simpleminded jab reached him in a remote outpost. In the last few years of his life he pushed back, trying to draw the attention of the media and the public to their own governments. Early in his career, working in Sudan, Cyprus, and Mozambique, he had taken satisfaction from the fact that his agency could put up tents, feed refugees, and remind governments of their humanitarian obligations. Later, in Bosnia and Rwanda too, he acted on the UN’s humanitarian imperative, helping ensure that hundreds of thousands of victims received food and shelter. But after the massacres in those countries he began speaking out against governments that were using humanitarian aid to avoid dealing with the deeper political and economic causes of violence and death. He likened aid workers to ambulance drivers and complained that they were being treated as though they alone should prevent road deaths. “Little is done to ensure the proper state of the roads, control drunken driving, introduce speed limits, and enforce safety standards,” he argued.⁵ The aid groups and UN actors who stepped in to offer succor, he noted, “distract attention and divert responsibility from those who are in a position to bring about change: political actors.”⁶

Again and again for Vieira de Mello, political actors were the key. He saw that the UN’s inadequacies, which were many, were those of the world. Instead of relying on “the UN” to change the countries of the world, he believed, the countries of the world would have to change in order to transform the UN. But at the time of his death, global insecurity was causing those countries to dig in and finger-point rather than to compromise and pool their resources to tackle common problems. He wondered what it would take for a truly United Nations to emerge. “Given the intransigence of human stupidity,” he said, “maybe we have to wait for an extra-planetary threat, like in the science fiction films, for the United Nations to finally realize their mission.” He hoped that it would not take an external threat to concentrate the minds of citizens and their leaders, but he found it alarming that contemporary dangers were not “rational imperatives” sufficient to galvanize unity or real commitments.⁷

FIXING THE SYSTEM

He once said, “The future is to be invented.” With the seeming rise in irrationality and rage in an increasingly interconnected world, a better future might be invented if citizens and governments took heed of the key lessons of Vieira de Mello’s long career:

• Legitimacy matters, and it comes both from legal authority or consent and from competent performance.

• Spoilers, rogue states, and nonstate militants must be engaged, if only so they can be sized up and neutralized.

• Fearful people must be made more secure.

• Dignity is the cornerstone of order.

• We outsiders must bring humility and patience to our dealings in foreign lands.

Legitimacy

Vieira de Mello knew that maintaining legitimacy was essential. When countries intervened abroad without the UN’s blessing, they were usually greeted with suspicion and outright hostility, whereas a UN mission was more often perceived as being sent by the world, which gave it a longer grace period. But he saw that many other factors shaped perceptions of legitimacy. Did an operation do more good than harm? Did the foreigners play by international rules? Did they observe cultural norms? Were they there to live well or do good? Were they accountable for their performance? Did the local people welcome what was being done? Were they even asked?

Vieira de Mello learned that competence was essential. Legitimacy was performance-based. And neither the UN nor individual governments had nearly enough in-house expertise to perform reliably and earn local respect. When he launched his governing missions in Kosovo and East Timor, he cried out to New York to create a standby roster of technocrats who were experts on customs, agriculture, immigration, communications, banking, health, roads and ports, drugs and crime, and fiscal policy. The generalists whom the UN system dispatched might have been sound political analysts, but few of them had any actual governing expertise, which undermined the UN’s standing in the eyes of both the Kosovars and the Timorese. “Until we can get the right people on board quickly, and if necessary, throw them overboard just as quickly,” he argued, “then we will continue to founder.”⁸ Nothing killed legitimacy like a failure to deliver results. “The UN cannot presume that it will be seen as legitimate by the local population in question just because in some distant Security Council chamber a piece of paper was produced,” he wrote. “We need to show why we are beneficial to the people on the ground and we need to show that quickly.”⁹ The same was true of governments, NGOs, and individuals acting outside the UN. Legitimacy would turn on being seen to play by the rules and by bringing concrete improvements, which would require acute cultural sensitivity and tangible skills.

Engage All Kinds

Early on in his career Vieira de Mello was stridently outspoken about his principles. When he joined the UN in 1969, he was fond of reciting Marxist political tracts and bashing the “imperialists” who he thought were running roughshod across the planet. When he saw American cars driving down the streets of Geneva, he made the motion of hurling stones at them. When he heard American accents, he mimicked them. Even as a thirty-four-year-old political officer in southern Lebanon, he was so outspoken in his criticism of the Israeli invasion that one of his superiors thought him a “prima donna and crybaby.” But it was in Lebanon that he learned that using words like “unacceptable” or denouncing injustice brought few returns. He resolved instead to find ways to appeal to the interests of diverse stakeholders.

In the years ahead he would never view the United States as a trusted friend, but he would come to see it as a necessary partner. American policies were too often carried out arrogantly, he believed, and with an eye to domestic political audiences. Still, when it came to humanitarian affairs, peace-keeping, and diplomacy, he knew that he and the UN needed U.S. money, leverage, and leadership. And as he amassed experience in the UN, he realized that however unreliable Washington was, it also shouldered substantial global financial, humanitarian, and security responsibilities that other countries would not. So he became masterful at appealing to U.S. government officials in their language. Even when his objectives were purely idealistic, his means could be ruthlessly pragmatic, which made him an unusual breed.

Vieira de Mello’s pragmatism also entailed a willingness to engage with “evil.” As a lifelong student of philosophy, he had long pored over the classic texts on the nature of evil. As he began to encounter perpetrators of atrocity and warmongers in the world, the theoretical categories struck him as incomplete. They didn’t seem to leave space for slippage, for the family man who (usually gradually) rationalizes becoming a butcher. It was that descent that preoccupied him. Where had the Khmer Rouge gone wrong? Was there a moment, one moment, when they stood at a fork in the road and chose their apocalyptic path? If he or somebody could diagnose how and why individuals and groups became militant, he seemed to believe, peacemakers would have better odds of putting the genie back in the bottle. If outsiders were to return refugees home or negotiate peace deals, they would have to understand the wrongdoers. He saw Washington’s habit of lumping diverse nonstate groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah together with countries such as Iran and Syria as not simply intellectually unsophisticated, but strategically counterproductive and even deadly.

His highly practical mantra of “talking to everyone” caused him lapses in judgment. Sharing French wine with Ieng Sary may have kept the Khmer Rouge engaged in Cambodia’s peace process longer than they were otherwise inclined, but it also led him to pay too little attention to the atrocities they had committed. In Bosnia his sometimes obsequious deference to Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević brought few concessions at all. As he brought Karadžić the latest edition of The New York Review of Books or scoured the shops of Belgrade for the perfect gift for Milošević, he lost sight of the fact that he had grown silent on matters of principle and oblivious to the ways extremists were exploiting his determined neutrality to advance their own ends.

But he grew on the job. The massacre in Srebrenica and the genocide in Rwanda seemed to jar him out of an earlier credulousness. For the rest of his career, although he still engaged with thugs and killers, he was less prone to appease his interlocutors. He did not always raise their past sins, but he never forgot them. After his 1999 trip through the ethnically cleansed villages of Kosovo,Vieira de Mello refused to speak Portuguese with the Serbian foreign minister and firmly condemned Serb arson and deportation, while also remaining in dialogue long enough to argue that Serbia had to halt its offensive. If his ever-evolving approach could be summed up, then, it would be: Talk to rogues, attempt to understand what makes them tick, extract concessions from them whenever possible, but remain clear about who they are and what they have done, as well as what you stand for. Past sins mattered not just intrinsically but because they were predictive of future behavior. “Think of how hard it is for any of us to change,” he told me once. “Why do we expect it to be easier for a war criminal?”

Law and Security First

In the aftermath of September 11, Vieira de Mello heard Western leaders talk a great deal about the importance of promoting universal values. In 2002, when he read Bush’s National Security Strategy doctrine, he noted eleven references to liberty and forty-five mentions of freedom. Vieira de Mello naturally favored the promotion of liberty and freedom, but he believed that fixing the international system would entail advancing one freedom above others: freedom from fear. “Security is the first priority,” he liked to say, “and the second priority, and the third priority, and the fourth priority.” He could have gone on. The best-laid plans for weak states—returning refugees, promoting human rights, restoring infrastructure, fortifying health and educational facilities, or holding elections—would amount to little if citizens did not feel safe in their own homes and on their own streets. Indeed, he saw elections in the developing world often bring hard-liners to power precisely because fearful citizens voted not for who would govern best but for extremists who stoked fears and then promised to offer safety. And again and again he watched as promising postwar transitions collapsed because of a failure to fill the security void.

In December 1991 he deployed to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and found a war-ravaged city filled with giddy Cambodians who expected that the imminent arrival of a sizable UN peacekeeping force would enforce the recent peace agreements. Instead, he watched in horror as the weeks slipped by. By the time the blue helmets turned up, political assaults were already rampant and much of the momentum of the peace negotiations had been lost.

Nothing frustrated him more than people’s tendency to repeat their mistakes. “I sometimes wonder if those of us engaged in peacekeeping are the human equivalents of goldfish,” he once said. “These animals are said to have memories that last in the region of two seconds. Now, for them that means life swimming around and around in a bowl will not be interminably dull. When it applies to us the impact is greater and far more serious.”¹⁰ He liked to quote the old adage “Experience is what allows us to repeat our mistakes, only with more finesse.”¹¹ What may have been a forgivable security gap in Cambodia, then, was far less forgivable a full decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In June 1999, the same day he shared the jubilation of returning Kosovar Albanian refugees who lined the streets to cheer their NATO liberators, he saw a man who had just been murdered in broad daylight. Within a week Kosovar Albanian gangs had chased away tens of thousands of Serbs. And although fifty thousand victorious NATO troops patrolled the province, they were soldiers trained to fight wars, not to police tight-knit communities. By the time of Vieira de Mello’s departure a short five weeks after NATO’s entry, the sense of triumph had been spoiled by the tit-for-tat attacks carried out by ethnic Albanian vigilantes. By the time international police had deployed in any sizable numbers, more than a third of Kosovo’s Serb population had fled or been ethnically cleansed. Any hope of coexistence had evaporated.

In circumstances where the major powers sent in UN peacekeepers and staff, Vieira de Mello had grown used to halfheartedness from the major powers. After all, no single country’s national interests were sufficiently at stake for it to take responsibility for filling the law-and-order void. But since the United States had argued that U.S. interests were mortally at stake in the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, he expected the most powerful military in the world to bring careful planning and hefty resources to bear. He didn’t support the war, but he never imagined that U.S. planners would think so little about the peace. Surely, he thought, they had watched as UN peacekeepers foundered in their “morning after” efforts to maintain order in the 1990s. Surely the Coalition would take precautions to stave off the kind of chaos that could be far deadlier than anything a regular army could unleash. Surely they would understand that establishing human security was a prerequisite to achieving other aims. Surely...

Vieira de Mello did not live to see Iraq descend into the bloody sectarian nightmare it has become. Nor did he live to see the disastrous effect the war in Iraq would have on other regions of the world or on the enforcement of UN principles. Vieira de Mello had once been a vocal opponent of using force for humanitarian purposes, but he had reluctantly come to believe that international military or police action, while undesirable, was sometimes required. He worried that granting this exception would benefit opportunistic countries motivated by other interests who would invoke the cause of civilian protection as a way to justify their ulterior designs. But he also believed that idealists like himself, who had relied faithfully on the power of reason alone, had let victims down. UN peacekeepers should not themselves wage war, but they needed to be prepared to draw distinctions between victims and aggressors. Moreover, in order for UN diplomacy to be effective or UN rules to be respected, they needed to be able to “project credible force” to protect themselves and to prevent large-scale attacks on civilians.

In 2000 he had embraced a new norm first put forth by an independent commission: the “responsibility to protect.” The first responsibility to protect individuals from violence fell to those individuals’ government, but when that government proved unable (in a failing state) or unwilling (in a repressive state) to offer such protection, then the responsibility vested upward to the international community, which had a duty to mobilize the means to stop mass murder. Getting governments to agree to the concept in the abstract, he knew, was the easy part. While every country in the UN would endorse the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” very few would actually prove willing to exercise the responsibility. They wanted civilians to be protected, but they weren’t prepared to put their own soldiers or police in harm’s way to do the protecting. Unarmed relief workers who worked for NGOs were more likely to enter violent areas than were national militaries. What was true while Vieira de Mello was alive is even more true today, as the specter of Iraq hangs over public discussions of foreign engagement, deterring peacekeeping and state-building elsewhere in the world. And for all the talk of globalized threats, very few countries seem prepared to act on Vieira de Mello’s warning that “there is no longer such a thing as distant crisis.”¹²

One way Vieira de Mello looked out for physical security was to support international tribunals aimed at ending impunity and removing from the streets those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. When he worked strictly as a humanitarian, he had questioned whether legal accountability didn’t simply make perpetrators more determined to fight on. But his view changed in the mid-1990s. The same Vieira de Mello who had tried to convince Washington Post correspondent John Pomfret that countries should just put their pasts behind them and “learn to forget” became a vocal advocate of remembering and punishing. He kept a poster of the most wanted UN war crimes suspects from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda on his office wall in Geneva and then New York. And after his May 1999 daredevil trip into Kosovo, he insisted on stuffing investigator Frank Dutton’s war crimes evidence in his suitcase in order to ensure that it made it back to The Hague. It was in the Balkans and in the refugee camps of Congo that he acquired his belief that pursuing justice would not lessen the odds of peace, but would, in the long term, advance them. Milošević, the man responsible for the Bosnian war, was treated like a dignitary in 1995 in order to bring the war to an end. But that same Milošević had not lost his taste for ethnic cleansing and massacres, and in 1999 he spearheaded another Serbian offensive in Kosovo. He would stop destabilizing the region only when he was incapacitated. In Africa, as Vieira de Mello walked through the camps where génocidaires were sharpening their knives for future battle, he saw that determined killers would continue to wreak havoc if they were left at large. “It’s a false dichotomy, this peace and justice thing,” he told his colleagues. “No peace is going to last if impunity reigns.” He was not an absolutist. He knew that indictments could sometimes be destabilizing and had to be carefully sequenced, but what mattered was that questions of accountability be addressed with the immediate and long-term interests of victims in mind. Although he was well aware of the Bush administration’s contempt for the International Criminal Court, the normally diplomatic Vieira de Melllo was so committed to the court that he made a point of defending it in his only meeting with President Bush.

Dignity Is the Point

Vieira de Mello’s relationship with human rights evolved in much the same way that his view of justice did, but it took longer. While to the naked eye human rights and humanitarianism seem like versions of a single theme, in disaster zones they were often seen to be rivals. Aid workers who denounced human rights abuses were often denied access to those in need, so they kept quiet in order to keep abusive governments and gunmen from expelling them. At UNHCR, when Vieira de Mello tried to advance the overall, long-term welfare of refugees as a class, he at times proved willing to cut corners on individual rights.

But when he took up his position as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, he started seeing human rights as the vehicle to calm interstate relations. Human rights and international law were under siege from all sides and he started to see that if order was to be preserved globally, international rules would have to become more binding on state and nonstate actors alike. His greatest appreciation of the relevance of human rights to high politics came in Iraq. During the occupation, he stressed repeatedly, the Coalition would have to go out of its way to respect and protect Iraqi human rights; that meant changing its detention policies and checkpoint rules of engagement and also respecting local customs. Whether Iraq transformed itself into a stable state would depend not on its oil resources but on whether Iraqis were able to live with dignity. “I could see him changing every day he was in Baghdad,” recalls Mona Rishmawi, UN human rights officer in Iraq. “Human rights were no longer abstract principles on a page; they were the indispensable bedrocks of a society’s survival.” Vieira de Mello wrestled with the trade-offs inherent in achieving respect for human rights. He saw Iraqis living the tension between liberty and equality, as rich Iraqi exiles used the new freedoms to line their pockets. He saw the dangers that self-determination posed to women’s and minorities’ rights. But whatever the trade-offs, human rights could not be treated as afterthoughts; they had to be central to Iraqi, Coalition, and regional planning. No realistic strategy for stabilizing Iraq or any traumatized country could exclude them.

Although Vieira de Mello became an explicit advocate for human rights late in his career, he had lobbied on behalf of human beings for decades. After his death the quality of his that was most often hailed was his regard for individuals. His colleagues took note of how surprisingly rare it was, even in the world of humanitarianism, to find an official who actually looked out for human beings, one by one, as he or she encountered them. In Lebanon Vieira de Mello paid frequent visits to the relatives of Lebanese wounded or killed by UN fire; in Cambodia he learned the country’s history from UN drivers and translators who had survived the slaughter, and he personally oversaw the resettlement of several hundred Christian Montagnards, unwanted by Vietnam and Cambodia, to North Carolina, where they live to this day; in Bosnia he refused to wear a flak jacket because Sarajevan civilians enjoyed no such luxury, and he helped organize the underground “train” to get civilians out of the besieged Bosnian capital; in Azerbaijan he circled back to find the elderly peasant woman who wished to become a cloud, listening to her as if she held the key to world peace; in Kosovo he insisted on tracking down the Albanian nephew of his cleaning lady, following up with incessant phone calls and faxes to UN staff in Macedonia; in East Timor he invited the parents of Leonard Manning, the first UN peacekeeper killed there, to attend the country’s independence ceremony; and even in Iraq he found time to wire money to the Timorese woman who had cleaned his house so that she might pay for her children’s education. In a thirty-four-year career, he made a trademark of “Sergio letters,” a virtual library of thousands of handwritten letters of greeting, thanks, or commendation, penned to friends and colleagues around the world. He treated junior staff, local staff, and local citizens with respect. He understood that he had the single-handed power to enhance their sense of dignity, and this was a power he used often.

He thought the international system would be far more effective and humane if it too focused on dignity—the dignity of individuals, of communities, and of whole nations. But to enhance dignity, he knew, outside actors had to do something they did not do naturally: probe deeply into the societies they were working in. He was acutely conscious of the fact that the future of the places he worked belonged to the individuals who lived there. Well-meaning foreigners could bring money, political leverage, or technical expertise, but they were there to support local leaders and processes and to build local capacity. He sometimes did this badly, overrelying on his close staff or on local favorites. But wherever he went, he tested his assumptions and sought diverse feedback. He insisted on walking around besieged Sarajevo in order to gain a read on the Bosnian “street.” In Congo he knew he would be a less persuasive advocate for a multinational military force if he hadn’t himself talked to the refugees there, so he slipped across the Rwandan border undercover. In East Timor he insisted that the UN director of administration take down the barbed wire around the Governor’s House so that the Timorese would be able to approach and share their complaints. When Timorese representatives told him that they were fed up with working for UN officials who had simply taken the place of Indonesians as their overlords, he listened and changed course, hemorrhaging power as quickly as the UN Security Council would allow him. In Iraq, to his ultimate peril, he opened up the Canal Hotel, dubbing it the “anti-Green Zone” and inviting Iraqis to come and register human rights abuses (past and present) and simply to check their e-mails. If UN officials were to isolate themselves as the Americans were doing, he argued, they would alienate the very citizens they were there to help. And if the Americans didn’t become more sensitive to the dignity they were trampling during their occupation, they would fail.

He offered advice to others who tried state-building: “Be humble,” he told a conference of diplomats and humanitarians in 2002. “Admit your mistakes and your failures as soon as you identify them, and try and learn from them obviously. Be frank and honest with the people you are there to help because only then will you stand a true chance of succeeding, and of your achievements being acknowledged by them, which is more important than the international community.”¹³ He valued learning languages because they enabled him to connect with people on their terms. It was a sign of respect for their traditions as well as a window into their psyches. He tried to learn Tetum in East Timor and was self-conscious that he did not know Arabic while in Iraq. He thought understanding a nation’s history, pride, and trauma was more important than knowing its literacy rates or trading prospects. He paid careful attention to symbolism. “How many wars could have been avoided by taking care not to create international treaties on the foundation of mistrust and of contempt for nations’ sense of self-esteem?” he asked.¹⁴ He came to believe that, whatever their inexperience, Kosovars, Timorese, and Iraqis would be better off governing themselves and learning on the job than getting talked down to by foreigners.

Complexity, Humility, and Patience

In their attempts to prevent conflict, spur economic development, or shore up failing states, Vieira de Mello saw, outsiders had their work cut out for them. Notwithstanding billions of dollars’ worth of investments, none of the places where he worked over the years are fully stable places today. Sudan and Iraq are still marred by savage violence, while Lebanon and Congo remain dysfunctional, fragmented states that suffer waves of deadly fighting. Cambodia is booming economically, but Hun Sen remains in power, intimidating his opposition. Bosnia has not seen fighting since NATO intervened militarily in 1995, but it has lost the spirit of multiethnicity that Vieira de Mello so prized, and its two most high-profile war criminals, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, remain at large. When it comes to Kosovo, the countries on the Security Council are still divided over whether it should attain full independence, and the interethnic tensions contained since 1999 seem likely to explode if a peaceful resolution is not soon found. East Timor has remained free of Indonesian control, but widespread unemployment and stalled development have resulted in violent riots, causing 150,000 people to flee their homes and requiring the Security Council to redeploy 1,600 international police. The turmoil caused the UN’s critics to point out that even a rare UN success story had faltered.

Vieira de Mello read UN situation reports and cables, as well as wire stories, from all over the world in order to keep up with events in the places he had once worked. He was crestfallen whenever he saw that hard-won progress had been reversed. But he consoled himself by recalling just how broken the places had been to begin with. The roads were not simply unpaved, and the electricity not simply sporadic. In many cases the entire fabric of society had been obliterated, creating indescribably complex problems that international actors would not ameliorate easily—or quickly. Thus the impatient philosopher-humanitarian became more sanguine later in his career, recognizing that anybody who entered a war-torn society had to do so with humility and patience. “We all tend to measure and judge history in the light of our own existence,” he said in one speech. “We have to adopt a more long-term perspective. History is not in a hurry.”¹⁵ There might not be early or visible returns on outside investments. Elections might produce ugly outcomes. Corrupt officials might impede reconstruction. Civil unrest might taint the advent of democracy. But whenever donor governments or his own UN staff were tempted to give up in exasperation, he would urge them to ask “Compared to what?” “We know how bad things are today,” he would say, “but we should remind ourselves how bad things have been in the past, and how much worse things can get.” Frustrations tended to boil over when the gap was too great between the expectations of locals and donor governments on the one hand, and the grim, slow-paced sputtering improvements in battered societies on the other. He saw half of his job as “expectation management.”

When Vieira de Mello landed in Iraq in June 2003, it was probably already too late to save the country from the savagery of its internal fissures and from the blunders made by its occupiers. But if there was any person who—drawing upon the wisdom amassed in a lifetime of trial and error—might have found a way to build common cause among foes, or at least to mitigate human suffering, it was he. But for him to have been helpful, the Americans in Iraq would have had to acknowledge that they needed help. They did not.

When he joined the UN back in 1969, similarly, it was probably already too late to save the organization from the interstate rivalries that, in different forms, had cursed the institution from the start. But if there was anyone who could have wrung from the UN whatever reform and promise it could muster, it was he. But if he was to have fixed the UN, the leading member states within it, and especially the United States, would have had to truly wish to see its transformation.

When President George W. Bush declared repeatedly in 2001 and 2002, “Either you are with us or you are against us,” he was wrong. Hundreds of millions of citizens of the world may not have been with the United States as such, but they were not against America either. Yet, like much of Bush’s rhetoric, this description of an imagined dichotomy quickly spawned policies that gave rise to a real one. Bush’s self-fulfilling doctrine ensured that those who were treated as enemies of the United States became enemies of the United States. And the terrorists too embraced this totalizing logic. In their summons to jihad, they said, in effect, “If you are not with us in our struggle against the United States, you are against us, and we will destroy you.”

Vieira de Mello was born in 1948, just as the post-World War II order was taking shape. He died in 2003, just as the battle lines in the twenty-f irst century’s first major struggle were being drawn. His end could not have been more tragic. Just when he was poised to be most useful—to the United States, to Iraq, to the world—he was killed. And on August 19, after the bomb went off, as he was pinned in the rubble, he found himself in the same impossibly vulnerable position as those whose fates he had championed during his career. When he realized he had miraculously survived the blast, he must have expected that professional soldiers from the most sophisticated military in history would find a way to extract him from the debris. But as his life seeped slowly out of him, there must have been a moment—hopefully not a long one—when he realized he was every bit as helpless in his time of need as millions of victims had been before him. He died under the Canal Hotel’s rubble—buried beneath the weight of the United Nations itself.

A BROKEN SYSTEM

FIXING THE SYSTEM

Legitimacy

Engage All Kinds

Law and Security First

Dignity Is the Point

Complexity, Humility, and Patience