Three - BLOOD RUNNING BLUE, Sergio

Often after work, instead of driving immediately back to his home just across the French-Swiss border in Massongy, he would head out with Antonio Carlos Diegues Santana, a fellow Brazilian who ran UNHCR’s field support unit. They would speak in Portuguese about Brazilian politics, play pinball, and drink beer. Vieira de Mello prided himself on his ties to Brazil, and even his insistence that everyone call him “Sergio” was a relic from his country, where public figures go by familiar names (Pelé, Lula, etc.). Still, he was not nearly as politically active as his friend. His leftist rage had by then largely evaporated, and he saw no harm in stopping by the Brazilian mission in Geneva to pick up that week’s Brazilian newspapers and magazines. Diegues Santana refused to set foot inside the building because it represented the military regime. He told Vieira de Mello that the day the generals stepped down would be the day he returned to his homeland.

When that day finally came, in March 1985, and Diegues Santana announced that he intended to leave the UN and return to Brazil, Vieira de Mello initially didn’t believe him. “If I am still stuck here in Geneva in three months’ time,” Diegues Santana said to a small circle of friends gathered for a drink, “I will take a knife to my guts and commit suicide.” Vieira de Mello laughed and said dramatically, “No, no, if you are still here in three months, I promise, with all of our friends here as witnesses, I will take a knife to your guts!” Diegues Santana could tell that his friend had not understood that he was serious about leaving. When he submitted his resignation a few weeks later, he and Vieira de Mello ended up out on the bar’s terrace in an hour-long heated argument, both men gesturing wildly with their hands and swearing at each other in their native tongue. “Sergio didn’t believe I would leave,” Diegues Santana recalls. “It was not because of me. It was because of the organization. He thought it was the most important thing in the whole world.”

Vieira de Mello offset his seeming priggishness about UN principles by flamboyantly playing up his love of women. He would be known throughout his career for treating cafeteria workers, security guards, and maintenance staff with unusual respect, prompting Omar Bakhet, an Eritrean colleague, to compliment him on his egalitarianism.“But, Omar, I am not a true egalitarian,” he said. “I don’t see class, race, or religion, but I most definitely see gender!” Once, as he entered La Glycine, his favorite restaurant in Geneva, with his Italian colleague Salvatore Lombardo, he exclaimed in Italian, “Look around you. What has happened?” Lombardo wasn’t sure what he meant. “Come è possibile che ci non è una donna in questo ristorante?” Vieira de Mello asked, openmouthed. “How is it possible that there is not a single woman in this restaurant?” After the two men sat down and began to discuss refugee matters, the door to the restaurant opened, and he cut Lombardo off midsentence. “Finally!” he exclaimed, leaping out of his seat and beginning a slow, rhythmic clap. Initially the patrons in the restaurant did not know what he was applauding, but one by one, as they looked around, they realized the significance of the woman’s arrival and joined in. In under a minute the unsuspecting woman had roused a thunderous standing ovation from the male-only lunchtime crowd.

His reputation as a ladies’ man followed him throughout his career, and he seemed to relish the rumors of his exploits. In 1982 Mark Malloch Brown, a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried British aid worker who a quarter-century later would become deputy secretary-general of the UN under Annan, had spent several months pursuing an attractive British UNHCR official. After finally spending the night in her apartment, Malloch Brown awoke buoyantly the next morning, only to notice that beside her alarm clock was a framed photograph of the woman with her parents—and Vieira de Mello. “If it was just Sergio, that wouldn’t have been so bad,” Malloch Brown recalls. “But it was clear Sergio had already insinuated himself in the deepest quarters of this woman’s life. I didn’t stand a chance!”

Vieira de Mello claimed a huge amount of freedom in his marriage. Early on Annie complained about the phone calls from women and his late-night arrivals, but eventually she grew resigned. “Nothing I said was going to change him,” she remembers, “and when I complained, it just made him angry.” He would tell his friends, “Everybody has a cross to bear in life, and I am Annie’s cross.”

Over the years he would have several significant relationships with women, but he was unwilling to give up his home life, which anchored him. In the mid-1980s he told a UN friend, Fabienne Morisset, “I will never get divorced—neither from my marriage nor from the UN.” When his sons were young, he brought his family back to Brazil every two years on UN home leave. He also took them on a skiing holiday every winter, and in periods when he was based in Geneva, he drove the boys to school every morning on his way to work. Even though he often worked late during the week, he and Annie were known for hosting barbecues and dinner parties on the weekends. When guests came to the house, he wandered around in his bedroom slippers, boasting about his one culinary specialty, feijoada, the Brazilian national stew that is a potpourri of pork, ham, sausage, spices, and carefully soaked beans.

He likely would not have been able to work in the places he did—or rise at the pace he did—if his chief priority had been raising his sons. As his career progressed, he never stopped accepting the most challenging assignments, no matter how dangerous or remote they were. His willingness to go wherever he was needed—whenever—was unique. Many of his peers who embraced jobs in Geneva and New York did not like desk jobs, but they understood that being in the office would enable them to stay close to home while their children grew up. Vieira de Mello lived a daily zero-sum game: The more he traveled, the more skilled a UN troubleshooter he became, and the less he met the daily needs of his family.

He maintained close ties with a few of his childhood Brazilian friends, including Flavio da Silveira, who still lived in Geneva. But he spent most of his after-hours time with his colleagues from work. Curiously, he often sought out the company of the more cynical UN staffers. Alexander “Sacha” Casella, an Italian-Czech who was twenty-two years his senior, was one UN official who believed life was nasty, brutish, and short and could hardly contain his skepticism about the motives of UN member states, senior officials, and human beings in general. To any colleague bordering on earnest, Casella would offer one of his maxims. “Living is a prelude to death,” he would say. “Marriage is a prelude to divorce.” Exhibiting ethical behavior within an unethical system was unwise. “You should never tell the truth,” Casella said. “People will take you for granted. Even if you see someone in the hall and you’re going to a meeting, tell them you are going to the bathroom.” And he liked to recite a parable that he believed summed up humanitarianism:

A bird gets stuck in the mud. The bird makes noises to try to get the attention of those who might come to his rescue. A farmer hears the noises, arrives at the scene, chops the head off the bird, and eats it for dinner. The moral of this story is, “If you get stuck, don’t make noises; if you make noises, it will not necessarily be your friend who comes to help; and in the end whoever saves you will likely eat you.”

Vieira de Mello frequently asked Casella to accompany him on his missions overseas. “You are so cynical that having you around helps me understand the mind-set of the killers and crooks,” he told his friend. Casella urged him to stop taking UN life so seriously and once handed him an envelope: “Sergio, the only thing that should anger you is when this doesn’t come.” Vieira de Mello opened the envelope, and inside the envelope he found another envelope. Inside that was a third. And finally in a tiny envelope, he found Casella’s intended pick-me-up device: a UNHCR pay stub.

But while the UN offered its professional employees good salaries and generous benefits, Vieira de Mello did not stay with the UN for the money. He saw it as the place a person of his nationality and background could best make a difference in the world. While European academia had no place for him, the UN valued what he had to offer. He imagined himself soaring to great heights within the organization. “When I die, I will have a state funeral,” he told Heidi Cervantes, a Swiss girlfriend. “I would like every one of my girlfriends to come to my funeral and walk behind my coffin.You’ll come, right?”

No sooner had he arrived in Buenos Aires than UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar announced that Jean-Pierre Hocké, a forty-seven-year-old Swiss national, would take over as the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees.² Having pledged to reinvigorate the agency by drawing on its youth, Hocké summoned Vieira de Mello back to Geneva to serve as his chief of staff.^h Annie, who had just boxed up their life in Massongy, was forced to adjust to yet another life-changing promotion. “Let’s just say I had stopped cracking open the bottles of champagne,” she says. Though Vieira de Mello was returning to Geneva to take up a senior position, he was uncharacteristically melancholy. “I have broken my promise to my mother yet again,” he told an Argentinian friend. “She will be devastated.” The demands of the UN had come to take precedence over all others.

The United States had aggressively pushed for Hocké’s appointment. In UNHCR’s early decades Washington had prized the agency as a vehicle for resettling refugees fleeing Communism. But by the 1980s U.S. impatience with wastefulness in the UN system was spilling over into its dealings even with UNHCR. In 1985 the U.S. Congress passed a law for the first time requiring that America’s annual dues to the UN be reduced pending major UN reform. The Reagan administration expected Hocké to run a lean shop.

Vieira de Mello was excited by the little he knew about his new boss. Hocké came from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a well-regarded humanitarian organization that tried to ensure that in wartime the rights of civilians and prisoners were respected. He had managed all of ICRC’s field operations and had personally headed missions in Nigeria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Vietnam. When Hocké learned that the Somalian government had claimed double the number of refugees in its camps, so as to feed its army with the extra aid, the high commissioner temporarily suspended relief. He vowed to tackle the chronic refugee crises, or the “Palestinization” of refugee populations like the Afghans in Pakistan. He reminded UN staff and donor countries that the long-term care the UN offered refugees was nothing to boast about: It simply showed that conditions in the refugees’ home countries were not improving. And he took the radical step of arguing that it wasn’t enough to press neighboring countries to grant asylum to those fleeing persecution; UNHCR had to work with the other UN bodies to end poverty and persecution in their countries of origin. Vieira de Mello, who admired his new boss’s energy and ideas, supplied the scotch for early-evening gossip and brainstorming sessions in Hocké’s office. He kept the Black Label hidden in the hard-file folder marked “Organization of American States” and the Red Label disguised in the “Organization of African Unity” folder.

But Hocké’s relations with other staff members quickly deteriorated, as he was seen to micromanage field operations from afar and to dismiss alternative viewpoints. He also raised less money than UNHCR was spending, and the agency fell into debt for the first time in its history.³ Détente had set in between the Soviet Union and the United States, and Washington stopped treating refugees as pawns in the larger ideological struggle and reduced its contribution to UNHCR accordingly. After a year serving as chief of staff and another year as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, Vieira de Mello started to believe that the discontent among staff and the decisions by donor countries to cut back their contributions were harming his home agency. He came to the conclusion that his colleagues had reached months before: for the good of the UN, Hocké had to go. “He has lost the plot,” Vieira de Mello told Morisset.

In the fall of 1989 a group of disgruntled UNHCR staff members (not including Vieira de Mello) sent a dossier on Hocké to donor governments and to a Swiss television crew. They charged, accurately, that Hocké had dipped into a special Danish fund for his personal use, spending some $300,000 to fly himself and his wife on the Concorde and regularly upgrading his business-class flights to first class, which, at a time of U.S.-driven fiscal belt-tightening, only the UN secretary-general was permitted to do.⁴ Although Washington had backed Hocké’s candidacy, U.S. support dried up.

In late October 1989 Dennis McNamara, a New Zealander who was one of Vieira de Mello’s closest friends at UNHCR, jubilantly told his friend, “Sergio, he’s resigned.” “Who?” Vieira de Mello asked. “Who?! Hocké, you ass,” said McNamara. “That’s bullshit,” Vieira de Mello said. The two men scrambled around agency headquarters to confirm the high commissioner’s departure. The headline in Le Monde the next day summed up his aborted tenure: RESIGNATION OF MR. J-P HOCKÉ: GOOD MANAGER BUT TOO AUTHORITARIAN. ⁵ Although Hocké had given him the biggest promotion of his career, Vieira de Mello did not stop by his office as he boxed up his belongings. Nor did he send Hocké a farewell note. “Other people I didn’t give a damn about,” Hocké recalls, “but from Sergio, a friend, I expected more.”

A year later Vieira de Mello arranged a meeting with the fallen high commissioner, who was working in downtown Geneva. “Jean-Pierre, you look so well,” Vieira de Mello said, cheerily inquiring after his family and new line of work but making no mention of what had happened and offering no apology for his silence. “He seemed to want to clear the air without clearing the air,” says Hocké. “He wanted to be admired by everyone, to be on good terms with everyone. He was basically a seducer. He tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but I wasn’t prepared to go along with that.” When Hocké heard that Vieira de Mello had returned to UNHCR headquarters and told colleagues that they had resolved their differences, he wrote his former chief of staff a bitter letter in which he informed him that he would not forget his disloyalty. Vieira de Mello made no further attempts at rapprochement.

Thorvald Stoltenberg, who had been Norway’s foreign minister, succeeded Hocké but quit after ten months to reclaim his old job in Oslo. “Politicians come here to build their careers but not to serve refugees,” Vieira de Mello fumed, making a mental note that former elected officials who were appointed to senior UN posts would bring Rolodexes and fund-raising savvy but would usually lack fealty to the UN itself.

Vieira de Mello’s own loyalty to the UN deepened by the day, even as the organization’s flaws continued to reveal themselves. One of his main annoyances was that no matter how fast he found himself rising in the UN system, his nationality would ultimately matter as much as, if not more than, his performance. He saw this on countless occasions, but in 1990, after Stoltenberg’s exit, he witnessed a rare occasion where a friend of his,Virendra Dayal, fought back. Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar asked Dayal, his chief of staff, to become the high commissioner. Dayal, a fifty-five-year-old Oxford-educated Indian national, had worked at UNHCR from 1965 to 1972, serving under Jamieson during the Bangladesh emergency. He understood that the agency was struggling and was eager to bail it out. But no sooner had Pérez de Cuéllar publicly revealed his intention to appoint Dayal than an unnamed U.S. official—suspected to be John Bolton, who was then President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for international organizations and would later become George W. Bush’s controversial ambassador to the UN—was quoted in the New York Times slamming the secretary-general’s choice and saying that the United States wanted to see a prominent politician from a rich country in the job rather than a UN bureaucrat from the developing world.

Dayal was livid. He gathered the press in the secretary-general’s conference room on the thirty-eighth floor of UN Headquarters and let loose. He said he felt “great pain” that certain people were “more comfortable with second-level politicians from the first world rather than with first-rate international civil servants from the third world.”⁶ He’d had enough. “To hell with this,” he said. “I’m going back to India to tend to my garden.” With Dayal’s exit, Bolton triumphantly hailed the fact that donor countries could now “get control of this process.” A nominee’s experience working on refugee issues was a plus, he stressed, but should not be “a determining factor.”⁷

Vieira de Mello, who had been unhappy about the turmoil at UNHCR, delightedly passed photocopies of Dayal’s angry press briefing around UNHCR headquarters. “Thank god somebody has spoken about the ridiculous tradition of reserving certain posts for certain nationalities,” he told Dayal. He revered the UN’s commitment to multinationality but hated being reminded, as he was on a near-daily basis, that “some nations were more equal than others.”

In December 1990 Pérez de Cuéllar nominated Sadako Ogata, a sixty-three-year-old Japanese political science professor, to become high commissioner. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of California-Berkeley, she was the first woman and the first academic to fill the post. In lobbying on Ogata’s behalf, the Japanese government had promised to increase its contribution to the refugee agency were she selected. And so it did, doubling its contribution from $52 million in 1990 to $113 million the following year.

The UN’s “hour,” as far as Vieira de Mello was concerned, was long overdue. In a world of conflict, repression, and extreme poverty, he had come to see the UN as the only body that could serve both as a humanitarian actor in its own right and as a platform for governments to identify common interests and pool their resources to meet global challenges. The end of the cold war meant that more countries could use the UN as the forum in which to debate their differences. He thought it would also mean that the powerful countries with permanent seats on the UN Security Council would be more prone to act collectively to defuse threats to international peace and security.

Hopes that once had sounded impossibly naïve suddenly became mainstream. And in 1988 and 1989, as director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau, responsible for overseeing agency policy throughout the region, Vieira de Mello saw firsthand how salutary the new climate could be, as he worked to help resolve one of the messiest chapters of the cold war: the displacement of the Vietnamese “boat people.” It was his role in these negotiations that would begin to give him a name outside the UN.

Remarkably, more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese were still washing up on the shores of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand. Indeed, in Hong Kong, for instance, where 3,395 boat people had arrived in 1987, a whopping 8,900 arrived in May 1989 alone.⁹ Most of them were likely fleeing not political persecution but economic hardship.¹⁰ Compounding the challenge, Western countries that had once been generous in resettling the Vietnamese had stiffened their entry criteria.¹¹ This meant that Vietnam’s neighbors were stuck sheltering boat people whom the United States refused to resettle but whom Washington also insisted not be sent back to Vietnam. The countries bordering Vietnam were fed up and started denying the Vietnamese access to their shores—deputizing fishermen to ram the boat people so they would not be able to land and herding those who arrived into squalid, overcrowded camps.¹²

Vieira de Mello inherited a multiyear effort by UNHCR staff and by Western diplomats to resolve the matter. Each person who fled Vietnam had a different story. Neighboring countries could not treat all of them as economic migrants. Some individuals would in fact face violent reprisals if they were sent back to Vietnam. As the guardian of refugee law, UNHCR had to help find a way to ensure that Vietnamese civilians who faced genuine political threats would continue to be admitted. Vieira de Mello had to try to persuade key governments to allow case-by-case screenings.

He spent thirteen months shuttling between the major Western capitals and the East Asian countries where the refugees were being crammed into camps. He stroked the egos of ambassadors and tried to convince them that a multifaceted compromise was in their long-term interest. He developed a habit that would never leave him. On the road constantly, he would scribble notes from his meetings onto hotel stationery pads. On these tiny slips of paper—probably no larger than the library request slips his father had amassed—he would spell out the key talking points for everything from meetings with minor consular officials to major plenary addresses. His colleagues marveled at how one so fastidious could end up delivering pivotal remarks while reading from a Hilton Hotel note pad. “Is that the best you can do?” Assadi ribbed him. “Look, I’m always moving so these pads are convenient,” Vieira de Mello replied. “But I’ve also learned over the years that if I can’t fit my argument on a hotel note pad, I probably don’t know what I’m trying to say!” Just as his mother, Gilda, had helped organize his father’s library scraps, Vieira de Mello’s secretary at UNHCR grew accustomed to unusual piles turning up in her in-box. “Would you mind typing this up for the files?” he would ask, handing her palm-sized shards of paper covered in his miniature handwriting in felt-tip pen, held together by a paper clip or stuffed into a hotel stationery envelope.

The key concessions had been made in the months before he got involved: Vietnam had shown a desire to improve its regional and international ties at a time of diminished Soviet support, and Washington had finally begun to rethink its long-standing policy that every fleeing Vietnamese should be considered an automatic legal refugee. With Vieira de Mello’s coaxing, and themselves already ripe to reach an agreement, Western countries agreed to open up additional resettlement slots for Vietnamese who had been languishing in neighboring countries. These countries in turn agreed to grant asylum to those whom UNHCR’s new screening policies determined to be genuine refugees.¹³ Border officials would be trained to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which Vietnamese were actually fleeing for their lives and which could be fairly sent back to Vietnam. After a preliminary meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March 1989, some seventy governments gathered in Geneva that June and signed this compromise package, known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action—the first-ever three-way agreement among countries of origin, asylum, and resettlement.¹⁴ A New York Times editorial hailed the compromise as “A Cure for Compassion Fatigue.”¹⁵

The plan was controversial. Arthur Helton, the refugee advocate who fourteen years later would be killed in Iraq in the attack on the UN, was perhaps the most vocal American critic. He documented the flaws in the screening process. The screeners and immigration officials who classified whether or not a person was a refugee were often ignorant of conditions in Vietnam, vulnerable to bribes, and hasty in their review of the cases before them. The average interview lasted twenty minutes.¹⁶ In addition, too few UNHCR staff were in place to monitor the sessions. In Hong Kong many of the Vietnamese felt physically manhandled or emotionally browbeaten into declaring themselves “economic migrants.” Helton quoted one Vietnamese boat person as saying, “The major aim of this policy is not to select the real refugee but to stop the flow of refugees.”¹⁷

But Vieira de Mello did not see a viable alternative. “If we don’t find a compromise,” he told his critics, “we will permanently kill asylum.” The status quo was simply not an option. Although Vietnam might be an inhospitable place to return to, he agreed with Thomas Jamieson’s old adage: “If there is a way to close a camp, take it.” The only hope for deterring the outflow of economic migrants and saving those fleeing political oppression was to develop a mechanism for sending nonrefugees back.

Securing the agreement proved easy compared with implementing it. Vieira de Mello instructed UNHCR staff to suspend medical and counseling services and scale back education and employment programs for screened-out boat people in the camps in neighboring countries.¹⁸ More controversially, he defied the spirit of a key UNHCR principle, which was that the agency would only assist in voluntarily returning refugees to their countries of origin. Technically, those being sent back were not “refugees,” but UNHCR would still have to help return terrified Vietnamese to their homeland against their will. Vieira de Mello traveled to Hong Kong, and accompanied by Casella, he spoke with Vietnamese community leaders who had been denied refugee status in the screening process but were refusing to return to Vietnam. One man told Vieira de Mello that he intended to commit suicide if the UN tried to force him home.Vieira de Mello’s face grew dark and solemn. “How could you say such a thing?” he asked. “Your wife and your children rely upon you. You cannot abandon them when you have survived all you have together.” When the man insisted he would prefer to die than face the Communists in Vietnam,Vieira de Mello grew even more emotional and delivered a sweeping oration on the value of life and the importance of returning to one’s own soil and providing for one’s family. Casella could take his colleague’s melodrama no longer. “Listen, if you are going to kill yourself,” he said, “make sure you use a knife and sever the vein properly because we’d hate for you to have to try twice. And since this will make an enormous mess, we’d appreciate it if you did it outside, so that we don’t have to clean up after you.” Vieira de Mello was astonished, but he later conceded that Casella’s bluntness may have been more effective. The Comprehensive Plan of Action would fail unless nonrefugees left the camps and went back to Vietnam.

Although Vieira de Mello believed UNHCR would have to compel some refugees to return, he knew that many of the UNHCR staff who worked under him in the region would object to doing anything that hinted of forced return, even to those who had not qualified as refugees. In December 1989, on the occasion of the first return operation, he planned the transport of those classed as illegal migrants with the Hong Kong authorities, deliberately bypassing his own staff. Hong Kong police and prison guards in riot gear arrived at 3 a.m., roughly shepherded fifty-one Vietnamese onto buses, and then flew them to Hanoi. In later repatriations the Hong Kong guards even went so far as to inject refugees with sedatives in order to get them to board the transport planes.¹⁹

As word of the new screening process made its way back to Vietnam, refugee flows declined considerably. In 1989 some 70,000 Vietnamese had sought asylum in Southeast Asia. In 1992, by contrast, only forty-one Vietnamese landed in neighboring countries.²⁰ Although other factors, such as the start of Vietnam’s economic boom, played a role in the reduced flows, the agreement proved pivotal. Some 70,000 illegal migrants were sent back to Vietnam from the camps, and although UNHCR did not have the staff to monitor them on return, they were generally not mistreated by the Vietnamese authorities. All the boat people had been cleared out of camps by 1996, with the United States resettling some 40 percent of the refugees.²¹

For a person who recited UN ideals with near-romantic reverence, Vieira de Mello had proven himself remarkably willing to compromise those principles. He argued that such pragmatic concessions served the long-term interests of both the refugees and the UN. In this case he may have been correct that he had extracted the most humane outcome he could from the governments involved. But he could have gone to greater lengths to use his pulpit at UNHCR to try to ensure that the Vietnamese were more fairly screened in the camps and were better treated en route back to Vietnam. This was the first of several prominent instances in his career in which he would downplay his and the UN’s obligation to try to shape the preferences of governments. By the 1980s he had come to see himself as a UN man, but since the organization was both a body of self-interested governments and a body of ideals, he did not seem sure yet whether serving the UN meant doing what states demanded or pressing for what refugees needed.

The demands on the United Nations were multiplying. In 1991 the UN Security Council authorized the Persian Gulf War, and the U.S.-led coalition swiftly removed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Sadako Ogata, the newly crowned UN High Commissioner for Refugees, was immediately thrust into UNHCR’s most complex mission to date—working with Western armies to care for and repatriate some 1.5 million Kurds displaced inside and outside Iraq.²²

On April 5, 1991, in a radical break with the Security Council’s traditional deference to state sovereignty, the Council demanded that international humanitarian organizations like UNHCR be granted immediate access to Iraq. In Operation Provide Comfort, U.S., French, and British planes began dropping food packages to the Kurds from the air and then expanded the operation by sending ground troops inside northern Iraq to set up and protect temporary UNHCR camps.²³ It was the first military intervention in history carried out in the name of displaced persons. And it marked the beginning of an era in which borders seemed less sacred and the traditional line separating humanitarian matters from political and military affairs became blurred.

Just before the Gulf War, Vieira de Mello had been promoted to UNHCR director of external relations, responsible for managing the agency’s ties with governments and fund-raising. With the UN breaking new legal and geopolitical ground each day, he found himself desk-bound in Geneva. But while he played little role in the Gulf crisis, the UN was being handed two other challenges that would soon pull him in: the end of war in Cambodia and the start of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

In September 1991 Vietnam announced that, after a twelve-year occupation of Cambodia, it was withdrawing its soldiers. And on October 23, 1991, after twenty-two years of continuous conflict and more than a decade of tortured negotiations, Cambodia’s four factions signed the momentous Paris peace agreement. The same country that for decades had been at the epicenter of decolonization struggles and U.S. and Soviet proxy wars now seemed destined to become a laboratory for post-cold war transition. The newfound unity among the five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, the Soviet Union, the U.K., and the United States—was almost unprecedented in the history of the Council, and it had produced results. The belligerents promised to lay down their guns, to submit to a UN transitional authority, and to participate in the country’s first free elections. The Council informed UN officials in New York in the small Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which had just been set up because of heightened demand, that they would need to field 16,000 troops and 3,600 police to serve in the new mission. And they told Ogata’s UNHCR that it would be responsible for facilitating the return of 360,000 Cambodian refugees from border camps into a volatile “postwar” environment.

Just when UN agencies were reeling under the strain of managing a huge refugee operation in northern Iraq and launching one in Cambodia, war broke out in the Balkans. In 1991 Ogata dispatched dozens of aid workers to Croatia to try to feed and shelter those on the run, and in December the Security Council called for some 14,000 peacekeepers to be sent to Croatia to patrol a shaky cease-fire there. UN staff in New York could not keep up. An office that had fielded a total of 11,000 peacekeepers the previous year was being called upon to find five times that many, and the phone would keep ringing. In addition, unarmed humanitarian aid workers were suddenly being called upon to operate in the midst of live and deadly conflict, assuming risks traditionally taken only by soldiers.

Initially removed from “the action” as it unfolded,Vieira de Mello used his spare time to theorize about the geopolitical and humanitarian implications of the end of the cold war. After Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait and his monstrous attacks on the Shiites and the Kurds, the decision by the most powerful governments in the UN to bypass a sovereign government in order to assist civilians in need impressed Vieira de Mello. Like many, he understood this to be the harbinger of a “new world order” in which citizens might be rescued from their abusive governments. He did not yet appreciate how unprepared the UN system was to tackle these complex new challenges.

In his 1974 doctorate Vieira de Mello had credited Marxism with defining a social utopia by which civilization could measure its progress. In Civitas Maxima, a more mature six-hundred-page conceptual work of philosophy, he defined his own version of a utopian egalitarian society. He no longer vented against philosophy’s irrelevance but instead tried to introduce an affirmative theory of universalism rooted in reciprocal respect. Clearly influenced by the cold war détente, he had begun to see such universality as possible, but he asked, “Does universality carry within itself the germs of its own annihilation?” Although what would later be called “globalization” was already tearing down barriers among peoples, states were also acquiring ever greater powers of destruction, and man’s inhumanity to man seemed not to be abating. He tried to define a social order that would curb those tendencies, and he moved away from the historical determinism of Marxism, toward the aspirational philosophy of Misrahi and of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose main work, The Principle of Hope, argued that individuals had to first define and wish into being the utopia that they sought to create. Only man would pull history toward a more just future.

Vieira de Mello took immense satisfaction in seeing through the grueling doctorate process, and he hoped that his thesis might find a wider audience. He sent a copy of it to Sonia, his multilingual sister in Brazil, in the hopes that she might help him translate it into Portuguese for possible publication in Brazil. “Sergio, this is not French. It is some language other than French,” she teased her brother. “How can I translate what I can’t understand?”

In December 1991 Vieira de Mello drew upon his dissertation in order to deliver a lecture at the Geneva International Peace Research Institute entitled “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times.” He used his remarks to respond to American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the end of the cold war signified the triumph of political and economic liberalism and the “end of history.” He criticized Fukuyama and others for “a combination of naïve optimism and supreme arrogance.” “No,” Vieira de Mello declared, “history is not finished.”²⁵ But it was, he argued, changing course.

His lecture offered an ambitious and vivid—if dense—articulation of his worldview. Writing around the time of the French Revolution, Vieira de Mello noted, Immanuel Kant had been conscious that he was living through a turning point both in philosophical history and in real-world history. In the aftermath of Communism’s demise, he now argued, the world had reached an analogous juncture. International law, which was being fortified by the day, offered evidence of humanity’s “long march” toward reason. But “history’s schizophrenia” was on full display, as he was struck by the enormous “distance separating institutional progress from ethical progress, law from morals.” Whatever laws had been placed on the books, one could not rely upon governments to respect, promote, or enforce those strictures. With a “fascinating persistence,” sovereign states showed that they would be overtaken by the “impulse to not reason,” he argued. The same “childlike madness, vanity, meanness, and thirst for destruction” that Kant observed among political leaders in his day still ensured that, in the coming century, “history” would stubbornly live on.

But this did not deter Vieira de Mello from urging individuals and governments to strive toward a new Ideal. He argued that generating constructive change required a “synthesis of utopia and realism.” “The persistent tendency to fail represents equally persistent encouragement to shape such a system,” he insisted. What would the ideal system entail? Governments needed to accept that their interests would be best advanced if they united in a community based on laws. Kant’s proposals for a federation of states, which had been taken up by Simón Bolívar in 1826 and by European statesmen with renewed vigor in the 1990s, needed to be resurrected globally. Kant was calling not for a supranational federal state,Vieira de Mello stressed, but for a “federation of peoples” that did not require individuals, groups, or countries to abandon their identities.

Vieira de Mello did not believe a federation of peoples or a corresponding “perpetual peace” was close at hand, but other Kantian ideas could be embraced in the present. If countries insisted on resorting to violence, for instance, they needed to play by certain rules. “War,” he argued, “must not stain the state of peace with infamy.” If atrocities committed in battle went unpunished, the warring factions would find it impossible to trust one another after they had stopped fighting. Peace deals simultaneously had to provide for accountability and somehow show empathy for a war’s losers. He returned to a theme he had emphasized in his high school essay in Brazil. “How many wars could have been avoided,” he wrote, “if statesmen had not shown contempt for nations’ sense of self-esteem!”

For Vieira de Mello, the most challenging and timely aspect of Kant’s political thought centered on the right of intervention—a debate that the UN-sponsored incursion on behalf of the Kurds in northern Iraq had revived. Kant was adamant that a state should not interfere in the internal affairs of another. But he made an exception that Vieira de Mello endorsed: When a state fell into anarchy and threatened the stability of its neighbors, other countries had to step up. Since the circumstances in northern Iraq met these criteria, he believed Kant “would have applauded” the UN-authorized operation there.

Vieira de Mello did not believe that it was enough for philosophers, or even statesmen, to declare the Ideal; the world’s citizenry had to make it real. Yet it seemed to him that democratic voters in the West had grown complacent because of their enhanced material well-being. And he worried that now, thanks to the cold war’s end, “messianic” ideas about the “end of history” were further seducing them. Vieira de Mello argued that citizens could not afford to “wash our hands of the construction of a real peace” and leave the important decisions to statesmen. Regular people simply had to participate. “Are we to abdicate this responsibility?” he asked. “We are all—you and me, affluent and destitute peoples—jointly responsible for the opportunity, which is a right, to fully participate in the formation of progress.” He closed out his lecture with words that would foreshadow his approach to negotiating in conflict zones. “We must act as if perpetual peace is something real, though perhaps it is not,” Vieira de Mello said, quoting Kant. Then he added his own coda: “The future is to be invented.”

Vieira de Mello was the rare UN official who had the background in philosophy to prepare such a lecture. Yet while he seemed to have infinite patience for ideas, his greatest ambition was to bring “the Ideal” to life in practice. And he did not feel that this was something he was achieving in Geneva. “I studied philosophy a long time, but I need to look for confirmation of philosophy and of values in the real world,” he once told an interviewer. “I’m restless. I like challenges, changes. I look for trouble, it’s true. Because in trouble I find truth and reality.”²⁶

Ever since he had returned from Lebanon eight years before, he had kept his eye out for an opportunity to participate in another UN peacekeeping mission. “Sergio had caught the political bug,” Kofi Annan recalls. Vieira de Mello’s experience chairing talks aimed at resettling the Vietnamese boat people only whetted his appetite for political negotiations, which were likely to be rare at a humanitarian agency like UNHCR. He began phoning colleagues elsewhere in the UN system, inquiring as to whether they knew of any openings. He wanted a job in the field that would allow him to help refugees and sharpen his understanding of the political challenges likely to emerge in the new era.

COMMITMENTS FOR LIFE

RULES OF THE GAME

THE HOUR OF THE UNITED NATIONS: THE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN OF ACTION

INVENTING THE FUTURE