Fifteen
HOARDING POWER, HOARDING BLAME

“YEAR ZERO”

As his Red Cross plane landed in the Dili darkness on November 16, 1999, Vieira de Mello had two thoughts. The first was “This time you’ve got to do it right.” He, like all senior UN staff, knew that the UN’s reputation for competence had plummeted in the 1990s. His second thought was “How do we do this? We’ve never done anything this big before.”1 The single-runway airport bore a sign that said, WELCOME TO THE MOST RECENT COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
He knew that the UN mission had a number of things going for it. In a country that was ethnically homogeneous and 90 percent Catholic, he did not have to worry about curtailing ethnic or sectarian strife of the kind that raged between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. Also, the people were united in their goal of achieving independence. Most of the militiamen and voters who had favored remaining part of Indonesia had fled to West Timor. And Xanana Gusmão, East Timor’s de facto leader, himself preached reconciliation and patience. Vieira de Mello noted the absence of the “mortal hatred” he had observed in the Balkans.2
An additional factor that distinguished East Timor from Kosovo making the place what he later called “a pretty perfect petri-dish,” was that all of the countries on the Security Council were united behind the aims of the UN mission. Russia and China joined Western democracies in welcoming East Timor’s march to independence. And rich countries seemed prepared to give generously to assist in the birth and teething of this new country.
But as he drove from the airport into town and saw the shocking scale of destruction, he could tell that he would need all the help he could get. He peered out at row upon row of houses that had been turned to cinders. Although in New York he had tracked the Indonesian burning and killing campaign and had even argued for a military intervention, the thoroughness and freshness of the onslaught were jarring. “It is shocking to think that all of this just happened,” he said to his special assistant Fabrizio Hochschild. “Three months ago all these buildings were standing, and now they’re gone.” In Kosovo schools and hospitals and post offices had been left intact. “It was just a question of figuring out where the hell the key was,” he remembered, while in East Timor. “Nothing, literally nothing, was left intact on the ground, except the will of the Timorese.”3
East Timor had never enjoyed the autonomy that Kosovo had prior to 1989. Under the Indonesians the Timorese had filled primarily low-level jobs. The middle and senior ranks of the civil service would have to be recruited and trained almost from scratch, from a population that was 60 percent illiterate. 4 In Kosovo the UN mission had struggled to reestablish the rule of law in the wake of the Serbs’ departure, but the province did not lack for lawyers. In East Timor Vieira de Mello was quickly told that the island was home to only sixty lawyers. Even though he had anticipated that Indonesia’s rules and records would need to be thoroughly amended, he had not expected to discover that the Indonesians had systematically burned every record they laid their hands on, including property deeds, tax records, and marriage licenses. The holistic campaign of destruction and the obliteration of the state records reminded him of “Year Zero,” the Khmer Rouge’s launch of a new society back in 1975.5
As UN administrator, he knew that he would have to make a wide range of decisions in a hurry. Airports and ports had to be opened, clean water procured, health care provided, schools resuscitated, a currency created, relations with Indonesia normalized, a constitution drafted, an official language chosen, and tax, customs, and banking systems devised. Policies that normally evolved over hundreds of years would all have to be decided within months of arrival—by him and his team. For decades, he observed, UN advisers had “lectured Governments on how to best go about their business,” and the organization now found itself “in the awkward position of being called upon to practice what it has been preaching.”6
UN officials who had been in East Timor during the bloody referendum felt that Vieira de Mello was going out of his way to distance himself from his predecessors. Tamrat Samuel, a f orty-seven-year-old Eritrean who had helped plan the referendum, flew into Dili with him and remained for a month. He warned his boss that the UN officials who had lived through the election trauma were suspicious of the new arrivals. “You have to be concerned about perceptions,” Samuel said. “People think ‘Sergio’s boys’ from Kosovo are coming to show them who knows best.” Vieira de Mello laughed. “That’s silly,” he said. “We are here to do this together. There is no such thing as ‘my crowd.’ ” But Samuel stressed that many UN staff believed his team thought, “We are the saviors who have come to fix this mess made by the UN before us.”
Vieira de Mello claimed he did not share the view of UN officials in New York who acted as though the bloodshed were somehow the fault of the UN election workers. In fact, he so admired the stand that UN officials in Dili had taken on behalf of the Timorese at the UN compound that he made Carina Perelli, who ran the election division, promise to take him on a tour of the scene. “I want to know every detail of the siege, of who did what and when,” he told her. And indeed, when he got to East Timor, the Timorese told him how much they respected the prior UN mission for having carried out the referendum amid the violence and for having refused to abandon the Timorese at the compound. But he did not make a sufficient effort to communicate his respect to those UN election officials he overlapped with in Timor. He was far more concerned about the impression he made on the Timorese than about the one he made on his UN colleagues.

EXPECTATION GAP: POWER SHARING

His first priority was building governing structures. When he worked in Cambodia, he had understood the hallowed local status of Prince Sihanouk and spent months cultivating ties with him. In East Timor he knew his success would hinge on his relationship with Gusmão, who was both the former rebel commander and unquestioned political leader.
The day after Vieira de Mello landed in Dili after traveling for more than twenty-four hours, he made an unusual, and essential, courtesy call. Instead of waiting for Gusmão to pay his respects to him, he made the two-hour trek to the town of Aileu, where the Timorese leader was encamped. The stifling journey along steep, largely unpaved mountain roads gave him his first glimpse of the country he now ruled. Gusmão thought it a welcome gesture. “I had expected to go down to Dili to see him,” he recalls. “So I took note when Sergio went out of his way to come find me.”
Gusmão told Vieira de Mello that he was pleased the UN had appointed a Brazilian, so that they would be able to communicate with each other in Portuguese, the language of those Timorese who had been educated by Portuguese colonizers before the Indonesian annexation. But he complained that thus far the UN had been doling out humanitarian aid without much local consultation. And he conveyed the concern that had been irking him since his conversation with Hun Sen in New York: East Timor did not want to suffer the “Cambodia trauma.” “I know the UN means well,” he told the new UN administrator, “but in Cambodia the UN came in, spent millions, and then left a vacuum behind them, which was filled with chaos. How are we to suppose that the same thing won’t be done here?” Vieira de Mello smiled graciously. “Well, I served in Cambodia, so I know a few things about that mission,” he said. “The UN certainly made mistakes, but there was more than enough blame to go around.” Gusmão was not interested in the specifics. “Just promise me you’re not going to run Timor like you ran Cambodia,” he said. “We don’t want you to come and go and for us to be left shaking our heads and saying, ‘Was that a storm that just passed through here?’ ” Vieira de Mello agreed. “I promise we will not repeat Cambodia here.” Not repeating Cambodia meant aggressively establishing functioning governing structures that made a concrete and lasting difference to citizens.
He struggled to decide how much preferred status to give to Gusmão. UN officials in New York urged him not to play favorites and to treat Gusmão as the head of one party among many. But it did not take Gallup pollsters or a formal election to confirm Gusmão’s hallowed local status.7 Vieira de Mello appreciated New York’s concerns. If he relied on Gusmão to gauge “the will of the people,” he would alienate anybody who did not follow Gusmão. Plus, even if doing so meshed with overall Timorese sentiment, it would send the wrong signal to the Timorese about how leaders would be chosen in the new democratic East Timor. In advance of presidential elections, he would try to walk a fine line, respecting Gusmão’s de facto authority without formally enshrining it.
In Cambodia Yasushi Akashi’s administration had supervised certain ministries, but in East Timor Vieira de Mello and his UN team were asked to run them all themselves. On December 2, 1999, in his most important early ruling, he set up the National Consultative Council (NCC), an advisory body that he hoped would make Timorese feel as though they had a voice in their futures. On its face the council looked reasonable enough. In addition to Vieira de Mello, the NCC included three other UN officials, seven representatives from Gusmão’s party, three members of other political groups, and one representative of the Timorese Catholic Church.8
But since the Security Council had authorized only the UN administrator to make law, the NCC was merely a sounding board. Vieira de Mello could have passed any measure he wanted, irrespective of Timorese wishes. In practice he issued only regulations that the entire advisory body was willing to support. In the early months of the mission, he issued regulations establishing a banking system, a civil service, and a currency: U.S. dollars.9
José Ramos-Horta, East Timor’s eventual foreign minister, laughed off the UN’s invitation to join the NCC. “I was powerless outside of East Timor for long enough,” he told Vieira de Mello. “The last thing I need is to be powerless inside Timor.” Gusmão accepted the invitation to serve, but after several meetings, he recalls, “We felt we were being used. We realized we weren’t there to help the UN make decisions or to prepare ourselves to run the administration.We were there to put our rubber stamp on Sergio’s regulations, to allow the UN to claim to be consulting.” Ironically, others felt Vieira de Mello was too deferential to Gusmão, that the country was becoming a “Xanana Republic.”10
As administrator, he had to find a way simultaneously to offer short-term solutions and to nurture the Timorese capacity to govern themselves in the long term. He repeatedly stressed that the UN was there not to rule, but to prepare the Timorese to do so. But in the meantime UNTAET would have to ensure that tax revenue was collected, the garbage was picked up, and schools were refurbished and run. The UN mission would recruit and train a local Timorese civil service, but in the meantime the UN itself would supply basic services. Jobless Timorese (some 80 percent of the working-age population) thus saw foreigners staffing their civil service, while they went hungry.
Vieira de Mello knew that the Timorese would not suffer UN rule for long. In a November 27 brainstorming session with staff, he argued, “The current goodwill of the East Timorese toward the mission is an expendable asset. The longer UNTAET stays, the greater the chances that it will be perceived as a competing power.” But even though he was sensitive to the danger of stoking Timorese resentment, he was so convinced of the UN’s impartiality that he found it impossible to view the UN as a colonial power. He blanched whenever somebody used the word “protectorate” to describe what he and his colleagues were attempting. He saw a UN administration as totally different from a colonial mission run by a single country, and he pointed out that the Security Council had explicitly tasked UNTAET to work itself out of existence. Yet while he was eager to hold elections, the recent referendum had been so traumatic that he suggested delaying the vote by a year or two.11
In most sectors international UN staff members were put in charge so as to mentor and train the Timorese and to restore services. Unfortunately for Vieira de Mello, UN staff performed neither task well. Most UN officials did not speak any of the relevant languages (Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, or Tetum) and thus had difficulty transferring skills.12 However, as bloated as the UN bureaucracy in New York was in certain departments, it was sorely lacking staff with actual technical expertise. Because he was unable to recruit from any pre-vetted list of experts, crucial posts remained vacant for months. “Our system for launching operations has sometimes been compared to a volunteer fire department,” Secretary-General Annan later wrote. “But that description is far too generous. Every time there is a fire, we must first find fire engines and the funds to run them before we can start dousing the flames.”13 Vieira de Mello complained that he could hire political officers, logisticians, and administrators but could not summon the road engineers, waste managers, tax policy experts, and electrical engineers he needed to make East Timor run. Ian Martin, who watched Vieira de Mello’s struggles from afar, recalls, “Suddenly the UN became formally responsible for everything, and yet it had zero capacity for anything.” Jonathan Prentice, a political officer in the mission who later replaced Hochschild as Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, noted,“We’re not a great rent-a-government. In the first few months, we had all these people sent in from New York who could write diplomatic cables, but nobody who could lay electrical cable.”14
The Timorese, who were already frustrated to have so little governing authority, pounced on the early signs of weakness. “I know many of them have no experience, no expertise, no academic qualifications at all,” Ramos-Horta said of the UN staff. “I asked one of them—an American lady—what her qualifications were, and she said only that she had worked in Yosemite National Park.”15 Most hiring decisions were made in New York. And once the internationals had been contracted, Vieira de Mello was largely stuck with them. Although he was running a mission of his own, he did not have the hiring authority to make use of the “box of possibilities” that he had kept in his office for nearly a decade. And even if he enjoyed full say, he would have been hard pressed to persuade the few specialists he knew to move overnight to a malaria-ridden island in the Pacific. He was unsure how he would manage to deliver tangible goods and services to the Timorese.
While some UN officials had difficulty viewing their less-educated Timorese counterparts as partners, others were self-conscious about the mismatch between the UN’s huge responsibilities and its staff ’s inapt experience. Hochschild remembers: “I would get into arguments on what the salary scale for teachers should be, and I’d suddenly hear myself and think, ‘What the hell am I talking about? Is this fair to East Timor to let people like me contribute to this debate?’” But Vieira de Mello did his best to remind himself and his staff that “only the Security Council, not I, can divest myself of this ultimate authority.”16

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

Vieira de Mello had always been acutely sensitive to symbolism and to what he had long called “national self-esteem.” In the early months of the mission he tried not to act like a governor. “Just call me Sergio,” he had said to so many Timorese that when his secretaries attempted to set up appointments for their boss, they usually got nowhere when they said they were calling on behalf of “Mr. Vieira de Mello.” On several occasions, when his vehicle was stuck in traffic, his Egyptian bodyguard Gamal Ibrahim affixed a siren to the roof of the car. “Gamal, Gamal, what are you doing?!” Vieira de Mello would shout. “Take that thing down. I’d rather be late than act like a king.”
Initially he slept in the Hotel Resende, which had neither locks on the doors nor hot water but did have an abundance of cockroaches. On one occasion, fed up with the grief he was getting from Gusmão and Ramos-Horta about the luxuriant lifestyles enjoyed by UN staff, he invited them to his hotel room for drinks. He proudly welcomed them into his suite, escorting them the length of his small bedroom and into his minuscule bathroom. “I want you to see this opulent palace you’re all talking about,” he told his guests. After four months he was told that a villa along the Savu Sea had been restored for him. But when he saw the eight-bedroom house, he was aghast. “I can’t stay here,” he said on his first tour of the capacious quarters. He had the house partitioned, keeping two rooms for himself and designating the rest as a guesthouse for international visitors.
He studied the local language,Tetum, scheduling several lessons a week with Domingos Amaral, his translator, and squeezing in practice sessions whenever his schedule offered a window. When Amaral worked as a translator in the UN election mission, he had traveled in the car behind his boss’s. But Vieira de Mello surprised him by frequently summoning him to sit beside him. “Domingos, where are you going?” he would protest. “Let’s use the journey to practice my Tetum.” Dipping into his large collection of hotel note pads, Vieira de Mello used them to jot words and pronunciation keys for himself. Before he gave a speech, he would have Amaral phonetically mark the key words or lines in Tetum, so that he would know where to place the stress. He referred to Amaral as “Professor.” “Professor, how do you win the sympathy of the people?” he asked rhetorically. “First, you have to learn the language. Language is the key to a people’s culture, and culture is the key to a people’s heart. If you force them to speak your language, you will never win their sympathy.” As Amaral helped him rehearse whole paragraphs of Tetum, he would whisper, “Don’t tell Ramos-Horta or Xanana. It will be our secret.”
Local staff members were unaccustomed to being treated with such respect by foreigners. When Vieira de Mello held a barbecue at his house, he made sure Amaral’s whole family attended. And as he had done with Lola Urošević, his translator in Sarajevo, he never stopped asking the Timorese how they judged their economic prospects or the UN’s performance.
But for all of his sensitivity to symbols, some of his decisions sent the wrong signal to the Timorese.With the havoc wreaked by the Kosovo Liberation Army foremost in his mind, he initially urged the Timorese to disband FALINTIL, the guerrilla army that had been fighting for independence for a quarter of a century. Much as NATO had been tasked with stabilizing Kosovo, he thought that it should be the job of the Australian-led Multinational Force to keep the Timorese secure. He thought that the presence of the FALINTIL guerrillas might intimidate those Timorese who had voted in the referendum to remain a part of Indonesia and who would eventually return to their homes in East Timor. But his early idea met with an uproar, as the rebels were beloved as both the symbol of and the vehicle for the end of Indonesia’s occupation. He quickly reversed his decision, instructing the fighters to remain in their barracks, off the streets. Gusmão was angry about this edict as well, complaining that independence fighters should not be “encaged like chickens.”17
On November 18, tensions over FALINTIL came to a head. The Australian force commander, General Peter Cosgrove, instructed the guerrillas to consolidate some seventeen hundred fighters in a single barracks in Aileu. The soldiers did so in a relatively orderly fashion, but one truck filled with soldiers had a flat tire on its way and decided to stop in Dili for the night. The Australian military got word of their unauthorized presence and confronted them, seizing their knives and guns. When Gusmão was roused from his bed and informed, he was outraged. “The Australians are treating my men like common criminals,” he exclaimed. “They came to Timor, they didn’t fight a single battle, the militias fled, and now they are walking around with big chests like conquerors. We fought for twenty-four years, and yet they actually think they are superior.”
Gusmão’s first task was soothing his men. “We played by Indonesian rules for all these years,” he said, as much to himself as to his fighters. “We can follow UN rules for a few more months.” But then he made a public stand. He drove to Dili with a platoon with weapons and was intercepted by General Cosgrove personally. “I don’t speak in the streets,” said Gusmão. “I’m on my way to Dili. If you want, feel free to come along.” When Cosgrove blocked the road with an Australian armored personnel carrier, Gusmão disembarked. “We are used to walking,” he said. He and his men walked the remaining several miles into town, and Cosgrove trailed on foot. Vieira de Mello was scheduled to meet with Gusmão that very morning. When he arrived amid a loud commotion, he exclaimed, “Xanana, what have you done? I thought we were going to meet to discuss our strategic plan!”
UNTAET’s symbolic mistakes kept coming. Since the hotels and guesthouses had been burned down along with everything else in East Timor, most arriving UN officials had no place to stay. At the start election officials who had stayed on slept beneath their desks at the UN compound, hanging washing lines between their offices. Unwisely, UN administrative staff arranged for two ships, known as the Hotel Olympia and the Amos W, to sail to Dili and serve as hotels for those waiting for housing. The $160-per-night rooms in the floating hotels were not grand—the ships were really nothing more than barges topped with four layers of stacked containers—but from the vantage point of the Timorese onshore, the ships looked like luxury liners, especially after a rooftop disco opened on one, blaring music into the night. Timorese nationals were initially barred from dining or sleeping on the ships, which stirred further unrest. Unemployed Timorese milled around the esplanade near the gangplanks, hoping to be hired for the going wage paid by the UN and other international employers: three dollars for a twelve-hour day.18 The ships would become such a headache for Vieira de Mello that in July 2000 he ordered the nightclub on the ship to be closed at midnight. But by then the damage had long been done.
The Timorese were jobless, homeless, and hungry. They saw few signs that their country was being rebuilt. They did not control their own destinies. And they grew angry. In December 1999 some 7,000 Timorese who were waiting in the scorching heat to be interviewed for 2,000 UN jobs learned that the jobs would go first to those who spoke English. The crowd began throwing rocks, hitting an Australian soldier in the mouth. Then they turned on Timorese who worked for the UN, beating up several and stabbing one. Only when Ramos-Horta arrived on the scene were tempers calmed.19 The following month, at the first major demonstration against the UN, one of the protesters held up a sign that read, “EAST TIMORESE NEED FOOD AND MEDICINE, NOT HOTELS AND DISCOTHEQUES.”20
In 2000 the UN moved from its election headquarters at the teacher training compound into the Governor’s House, a two-story colonnaded Mediterranean mansion that overlooked the ocean, which had first housed the Portuguese and then the Indonesian colonial powers. Since no other facility that was still standing could accommodate the large UN mission, Vieira de Mello moved into the same second-floor office that months before had housed the unpopular Indonesian governor.
Instead of simply departing their prior headquarters, the UN staff stripped the premises bare. In a highly literal reading of the UN rules laid down by the member states, they removed all “UN property”: not only the tables, chairs, and bulbs but also the air conditioners, cables, and wires. “Anything they couldn’t take, they broke,” recalls Padre Filomeno Jacob, who would later become Timorese education minister. “It was like vandalism.” Upon learning of the incident, Vieira de Mello personally delivered certain items back to the Timorese. But it was too late. “That’s when we realized we had to look out for ourselves,” Jacob says. “We entered the confrontation phase.” Gusmão began to refer to the UN presence as the “second occupation.”
The protests picked up steam. In February 2000 angry medical students marched in the streets demanding the right to go back to school. One fish merchant came and dumped his raw fish at the doorstep of the UN mission, protesting the lack of electricity, which had deprived him of refrigeration. The Timorese gathered regularly to protest price hikes, and the UN’s fourteen hundred local staff staged their own strikes over pay.
028
Vieira de Mello and Xanana Gusmão.
The arrival of the UN had raised expectations that, thanks to familiar UN funding strictures, the mission could not deliver. The Security Council had handed UNTAET an ambitious mandate and a generous budget of more than $600 million. But the UN rules still forbade peacekeeping funds from being spent on rebuilding Timorese electricity grids or on paying the salaries of Timorese civil servants. Just as had been true in Cambodia and Kosovo, the UN budget could be spent only on UN facilities and UN salaries. “Something is clearly not right if UNTAET can cost $692 million, whereas the entire budget of East Timor comes to a bit over $59 million,” Vieira de Mello declared before the Security Council. “Can it therefore come as a surprise that there is so much criticism of United Nations extravagances, while the Timorese continue to suffer?”21
An even more remarkable UN rule held that UN assets could be used only by mission staff. This meant that, although the UN was there to assist in “state-building,” owing to liability concerns, the Timorese technically could not be transported on UN helicopters or in UN vehicles. UN staff eventually had more than five hundred vehicles, but Vieira de Mello had to break the rules in order to get a dozen of them released for the top Timorese leaders who would one day be running the country themselves.22 “This is ridiculous,” he exclaimed during one of many arguments with the UN official in charge of administration. “I have the authority to order troops to open fire on militia leaders, but I don’t have the authority to give a computer to Xanana Gusmão!” Since New York was thirteen hours behind East Timor, he could rarely get the authorization he needed in a timely fashion. Prentice explains, “There will always be that tension, with headquarters thinking we are all a bunch of Colonel Kurtzes, and the field people thinking, ‘These guys who just sit behind their nice desks don’t understand anything.’ ” The rules, Vieira de Mello wrote in a “lessons learned” paper, “make the UN appear arrogant and egotistical in the eyes of those whom we are meant to help.”23 The World Bank administered a $165 million trust fund for East Timor, which was meant to be used for vital reconstruction, but Vieira de Mello had no say on how the budget was disbursed.24 “We are very focused on the risk of corruption. We don’t always recognize that there’s a similar risk in delay,” recalls Sarah Cliffe, who ran the World Bank program there. “Something is probably not right if we have the same rules for a $500,000 grant as we do for a $400 million loan.”

LAW AND ORDER GAP

In every sector there was a debate about how much to rely upon the Timorese and how much international expertise to enlist. “The natural reflex of an international organization is to dump lots of international people into a situation,” recalls Hansjörg Strohmeyer, Vieira de Mello’s legal adviser who accompanied him to East Timor as well as Kosovo. Strohmeyer instead canvassed the country for lawyers. The Australian-led force dropped leaflets from airplanes, calling for qualified Timorese to contact the UN. And the UN employed a pair of Timorese to drive around Dili on their mopeds to put out the word that lawyers would meet every Friday at 3 p.m. on the steps of the parliament building.
Within a week the UN had identified an initial group of seventeen jurists, and lacking chairs or furniture to sit on, they sat with Strohmeyer on the ground.25 The educated Timorese generally had only bachelor’s degrees from Indonesian universities, but they had what Vieira de Mello called “une rage de bien faire, de vite faire”—a rage to do well, to do fast.26 In a moving ceremony on January 7, 2000, Vieira de Mello handed black robes to eight judges and two prosecutors in the burned-out shell of the courthouse in Dili.27 Domingos Sarmento, the former FALINTIL guerrilla fighter, was one of the hastily trained Timorese who was given a robe that day. “Mr. Sergio handed me the robe, and I felt like he was handing me the country,” he recalls. Sarmento and the other UN-appointed judges took up offices in smoke-blackened chambers in courthouses that the Indonesians had stripped of their doors, windows, and pipes.28
With the departure of Indonesian security forces, East Timor desperately needed to deter violent crime. The well-equipped Australian-led Multinational Force had, in January 2000, handed off to a traditional UN peacekeeping force, composed of 8,500 lightly armed blue helmets. This time, unlike in Kosovo, the force commander would report to Vieira de Mello. The UN civilian police were as slow as ever to arrive. Resolution 1272 had authorized the dispatch of some 1,600 officers, but three months into the mission only 400 UN police had turned up.29 He tried to find a local solution by opening the country’s first police training college. The college enrolled fifty Timorese trainees, including eleven women, in a three-month crash course. But no matter how long he served in the UN system, or how many frustrated cables he wrote to New York, Vieira de Mello had made little progress in finding the means to fill the inevitable security void that followed the UN’s arrival in vulnerable places.
Because the prisons had been torched and all the prison guards had fled to Indonesian territory, few arrests could be accommodated, and many criminals had to be released in order to make way for new arrivals. In April 2000 Vieira de Mello said, “We cannot fill jails that we don’t have.” He suggested that community service sentences be given to “people who have not done bodily harm, who do not have blood on their hands.”30 This meant that many lawbreakers were let loose.
The untrained Timorese did their best to learn the law quickly, attending weeklong training courses in Australia. But they were too few and too new to manage the bustling docket. By early 2001 there was a backlog of more than seven hundred cases in the category of serious crimes alone.31 While Timorese in other parts of the government complained that they had not been given enough power, Timorese judges complained that UNTAET’s decision to throw them unprepared into the courtroom had compromised Timorese faith in the rule of law. “We had no idea what we were doing,” recalls Sarmento, who would become East Timor’s justice minister in 2003. “And it will take the people a long time to recover from seeing all the mistakes we made in the early days.”
Vieira de Mello tried to keep the Governor’s House as accessible to Timorese as possible. Locals could simply ride their bikes up to the entrance if they wanted to make a complaint or apply for a job. In mid-2000, when the UN chief of administration attempted to fence in the compound with barbed wire, Vieira de Mello went ballistic. “What the hell kind of signal are you trying to send?” he shouted, insisting that the barbed wire and barricades be torn down. “A lot of people said Sergio wasn’t security conscious,” recalls Gamal Ibrahim, who would spend two years as his bodyguard in East Timor. “But I’m one of the few people who knows: He didn’t like to live in ways that other people couldn’t.” When he headed to the market after work to buy bananas, he teased his bodyguards about their wandering eyes. “Someday I’ll be shot by a sniper and you’ll be chatting up a girl,” he said. Gilda, his eighty-two-year-old mother in Brazil, was so worried about his catching malaria or being targeted by pro-Indonesian forces that he turned his former Geneva cell phone into her “direct line,” handing the phone to Ibrahim as he entered high-level meetings. “If my mother calls,” he would say, “tell her I’ll be out in an hour.” In the early months of the mission she called every other day to check on her son.
The security threat posed by pro-Indonesian militia who lived in West Timor was still very real. For the first year of the UN mission, the Timorese were petrified that their killers would return. On one occasion Gusmão and Ramos-Horta told Vieira de Mello that Indonesian loyalists had infiltrated Dili from West Timor and were on the verge of seizing it. They urged him to authorize the police to detain anybody who appeared on their list of suspects. Chastened by his own reluctance to use force in Bosnia, Vieira de Mello was tempted. When Sidney Jones, his senior human rights adviser, raised objections, Ramos-Horta exclaimed, “Human rights? Human rights? That is Alice in Wonderland. We have to deal with reality here.” Hochschild sensed that Vieira de Mello was leaning toward authorizing unlawful detentions and argued that he was losing touch with his values. Vieira de Mello, who felt like he was under siege from all sides, snapped, “Maybe I should resign and go back to New York.” Many Timorese were starting to wish that the entire UN mission would do just that.

STAYING PUT

Vieira de Mello was no fonder of the diplomatic circuit in East Timor than he had been in New York. When informed of meetings with dignitaries, he would curse playfully in e-mail, expressing his distaste for them with mock expletives (“?#!%&X”). As had been true in all of his missions, his closest ties were to his special assistants (Hochschild and later Prentice) and his bodyguards (Ibrahim and Alain Chergui, a former French paratrooper). Ibrahim, who had arrived in East Timor in January 2000, had not been there long when Lyn Manuel, Vieira de Mello’s Filipina secretary, noticed on a flight manifest that it was Ibrahim’s birthday. Standing outside his boss’s office, Ibrahim was shocked to hear Vieira de Mello, whom he did not yet know well, shout out, “Well, Lyn, I hear it’s somebody’s birthday today!” Ibrahim was dragged inside, and Vieira de Mello produced a bottle of his trademark Johnnie Walker Black Label. Each member of his inner circle toasted Ibrahim with a different drinking device—a Dixie cup, a throwaway plastic coffee cup, and a plastic Coke bottle cut in half.
Just before he had left the United States, Ibrahim had become engaged to Marcia Luar, an Angolan. As the weeks passed, Luar grew suspicious that Ibrahim might be straying with Timorese women. “What are the women there like?” she asked her fiancé. “What do you mean ‘women’?” Ibrahim answered. “There’s not even any food here!” Luar was unpersuaded. “Who are you working with there?” she asked. “Let me speak to him. He speaks Portuguese, right?” Ibrahim was horrified and told Luar that he worked for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and under no circumstances could she speak to him.
One day when they were waiting for their helicopter to refuel, Vieira de Mello overheard Ibrahim arguing with Luar. “Give me the phone, Gamal. I’ll set her straight.” Ibrahim held the phone to his chest. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I gave her a ring before coming here.” Vieira de Mello grabbed the phone and assured Luar that her fiancé was behaving himself. From that point on, anytime he overheard the couple speaking, he insisted on intervening with what he called a “security briefing.” When he realized that their mission together was going to last far longer than six months, Vieira de Mello found a UN job for Luar in East Timor.
Because of the toll his life in the field had taken on his own family, and because his closest friends were his UN colleagues, he always made a point of inquiring after the personal lives of his staff. In February 2000 Strohmeyer, the UNTAET legal adviser, slipped a note under his door at the Hotel Resende requesting that he be released to return to New York. He had gotten married in 1998 and did not think his marriage could survive another year’s separation. Vieira de Mello called Strohmeyer into his office and granted his request to return to UN Headquarters. “Look, if you want a marriage to work, you have to be present,” he said. “I should know.” Strohmeyer, who had expected to have to argue his case, was relieved that his boss was so understanding. But before he departed, Vieira de Mello stopped him. “Before you leave Timor,” he said, “there are three projects I’d like you to undertake.” Those “three projects,” which he ticked off with a straight face, were gargantuan: helping to normalize Timorese relations with Indonesia, negotiate a treaty on oil-revenue sharing, and establish a war crimes court. Strohmeyer did not make much of a dent in any of them, but he remained in East Timor until July 2000. He was divorced by the following year.
Vieira de Mello never imagined that he would stay in East Timor as long as he did. Most of his colleagues assumed he would be appointed to the job of UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a position that Sadako Ogata, his former boss, would vacate at the end of 2000 and one that was more prestigious and powerful than the coordinating job he had held in New York. Although he had tired of refugee work when he was at UNHCR, running an entire UN agency would present ample political and diplomatic challenges, and his two years in New York had made him nostalgic for the tangible assistance offered by UNHCR, which he had previously taken for granted. He knew that the plum jobs in the UN system generally did not go to those who had toiled in the UN ranks. Annan had been a significant exception. But Vieria de Mello had drafted more repatriation agreements, negotiated with more government officials, and led more field missions than any other candidate. Most UN staff in Geneva, New York, and East Timor were sure that the job of UN High Commissioner for Refugees was his for the taking. Popular consensus was that he would serve his time in East Timor and then return to Geneva to assume the refugee crown—a crown many people believed was the penultimate post he would hold before becoming secretary-general.
But two things got in the way of this plan. First, Annan, like his predecessors, looked to fill senior appointments with individuals from countries that would donate significant funds. And second, the very qualities that made Vieira de Mello a shoo-in for the high commissioner’s job made governments reluctant to let him leave East Timor. Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, believed that UN peacekeeping, which was coming off the “triple failure” of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, had been bent to its breaking point. The East Timor mission had given the UN a rare chance to resurrect itself. In the fall of 2000, as Vieira de Mello’s name began circulating for the job of high commissioner, Holbrooke telephoned Annan and urged him to keep “the ultimate go-to guy” in East Timor. “I didn’t need any persuading,” Annan recalls. “I knew Sergio was too valuable to bring home early.” Holbrooke telephoned Vieira de Mello in Dili and said, “I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’m asking Kofi to keep you there. This mission will define the UN for decades. It will show the UN can actually do things right.” Vieira de Mello did not betray his disappointment. “I will do what my brother tells me to do,” he said, referring to Annan. In October 2000 Annan asked Ruud Lubbers, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, the third-largest source of UNHCR funding, to become high commissioner for refugees.
Vieira de Mello was less stung by the news of Lubbers’s appointment than by the way it was imparted. He learned about it from the news media and then received a formulaic typed letter with Annan’s machine-produced signature stamped on the bottom. “Given Sergio’s long history in the UN,” his special assistant Hochschild recalls, “he obviously thought he merited at least a phone call.” Hochschild persuaded his demoralized boss to host a dinner for his closest staff, then told the staff to surprise him by wearing pajamas to the occasion. This amused Vieira de Mello, as did an “Ode” prepared by his British secretary Carole Ray, which read in part:
Dear Boss, this special evening is designed to make you happy
’Cos the news in from New York, of late, has all been rather crappy.
Though things in the past weeks have not gone quite the way you
planned,
You must admit your office here is beautifully manned.
We know that living in this place is getting really tough,
And if you had been asked, you would have said you’d had enough.
So whilst we all acknowledge the S-G’s massive cock-up
Your loyal team is here to do our best to cheer you up . . .
You’re the only one who knows the dates, the names, the times, the
places.
You recall the dignitaries and, of course, the pretty faces . . .
Where your team all work their buns off and rarely do get cross,
But only because Sergio Vieira de Mello is their boss.
We are glad you are not going, that you’re staying here with us.
So try to make the best of it and stop making a fuss!
In an effort to fend off claustrophobia on the small island, he tried to persuade his friends in Europe and Asia to visit him. “But, Sergio,” the American soprano Barbara Hendricks said, “Timor is just not on the way to anywhere!” Ever since the mid-1980s, whenever he had been away on a mission, his friend Fabienne Morisset had sent him a diplomatic pouch at the end of each week filled with all five days’ hard-copy editions of Le Monde. When he reached Dili, he had discouraged her from sending the papers, saying, “It will take six months!” His mother sent him Veja, Brazil’s equivalent of Time magazine, which he read faithfully, no matter how outdated it was when it arrived.
He wrote to his old friend Annick Stevenson (formerly Roulet),v urging her to come to East Timor and to write a story for the French regional daily Le Progrès on the elections and the formation of a new government. “I well know that Indonesia and Timor are not the principal preoccupations of readers from Lyon,” he wrote, “but you could try to broaden their horizons.” 32 Stevenson regretfully relayed her editor’s response: “Taking into account the density of news in the world at this time (Middle East, Macedonia, Northern Ireland), it seems difficult to justify sending you there.”33 Vieira de Mello masked his disappointment, exclaiming cheerily, “The answer is not surprising!”34
The climate within the UN mission was almost as tense as on the Timorese street. The heat (90 degrees daily, with humidity between 60 and 90 percent) was withering. Most of the UN staffers lived off rice and Indonesian noodles. Those UN staff who worked in the districts, far from Dili, felt particularly cut off, unable to procure desks, computers, or even pens and paper. Following their boss’s lead, UN staff worked nineteen-hour days and on weekends. East Timor offered no diversions. The UN was taking the blame for all that was going wrong, and those in Vieira de Mello’s inner circle felt they were on the brink of a major failure or at the very least a major outbreak of social unrest. “Normal people reacted in strange ways,” recalls Hochschild, “but strange people reacted in outlandish ways.”
Vieira de Mello knew the flaws of the UN system intimately. While working in New York, he had kept a cartoon pinned to the wall from the mid-1990s, at the time that Euro Disney was suffering its financial crisis. The cartoon showed Mickey saying to his companion Goofy: “It looks as if the UN is taking over—now it really can’t get worse.”35 But understanding those flaws was different from living them. The people of East Timor had high hopes for self-governance and improved living conditions, but Vieira de Mello felt as though he and UNTAET were dashing them daily. “Our vision was we’d administer the place and we’d consult with the Timorese. Then, after elections we’d hand over the keys to the Timorese and be on our way,” recalls Prentice. “The Timorese, who had been waiting centuries to govern themselves, understandably had different ideas.” And eventually so did Vieira de Mello, who came to see that he would need to bend the UN rules in order to save the mission. The most effective way for him to exercise power in East Timor would be to surrender it.