My first meeting with the Iranian ambassador began in broad daylight one afternoon in New York City but was meant to achieve maximum discretion. Rather than find a quiet corner at the U.N., which would raise eyebrows, or host him at the U.S. Mission, which was frequented by journalists, it was agreed I would visit him at his residence.
Diplomatic Security dropped off me and Puneet Talwar, the top Persian Gulf expert on the NSC staff, just around the corner from the Iranian residence, an elegant old town house on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. We walked casually up to the door and rang the bell—as normal as can be. The ambassador’s assistant answered, and the ambassador greeted us in plain sight at the bottom of the stairs. I stuck my hand out to shake his, as I did scores of times a day at the U.N., but he demurred, awkwardly placing his hand on his chest. Then I recalled, religious Iranian men won’t shake a woman’s hand. The same custom prevails with ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.
The Iranian ambassador was Mohammed Khazaie, a U.S.-educated former member of the Iranian parliament and representative at the World Bank. In public, he was a firebrand and perfectly apt representative of his neanderthal president; in private, the ambassador was soft-spoken, urbane, and respectful. To establish contact between us and open up the channel, Puneet, who had prior experience with Khazaie, joined me in our initial encounters.
In the numerous meetings that followed over the years, Khazaie and I met upstairs in his front parlor. Dates, pistachios, and fruit were proffered in abundance. Coffee and tea as well. It was always civil, if formal. After the first few encounters, Puneet stopped coming to New York, and I met Khazaie alone, following up by providing back-briefings to a tight circle of White House and State Department colleagues. Conscious that I would be vulnerable should he attempt anything untoward, I was a bit wary of visiting his house solo, as were the DS agents, though they never interfered. Yet my instincts, which were validated, told me that he would not cross any lines.
While I came to trust my physical safety in Khazaie’s presence, I was surprised to learn that the FBI did not trust me. Soon after I started meeting with Khazaie, the FBI came to the U.S. Mission to meet with my chief of security and with my deputy, Alex Wolff. They never asked to see me. In virtual whispers, the FBI told Alex that they had seen me go in and out of the Iranian ambassador’s residence and were suspicious of what I was doing. While it is the FBI’s job to conduct counterintelligence operations on U.S. soil and to be concerned about Americans who may be compromised, I was dismayed that they would think I might be among them. Alex told them to buzz off, assuring them that what I was doing was fully authorized. Fortunately, Alex was one of the very few people on my team who was read into this private channel. “Thank you for handling this as skillfully as you did,” I later commended Alex, who laughed when I said something to the effect of, “Otherwise, I would have had the FBI all up in my grill for years to come.”
Most of my visits and occasional phone calls with the Iranian ambassador were to deliver or receive a message between our capitals or to discuss issues of concern. I pressed for the release of three captured American hikers, who were eventually freed, and for the return of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007 and is still missing, believed to have been kidnapped by Iranian officials. I demanded an end to attacks committed by Iranian forces against U.S. military personnel in Iraq and conveyed the U.S. determination to retaliate. On behalf of the Department of Defense, I proposed the establishment of a U.S.-Iran military-to-military hotline to avoid unintended conflict in the Gulf, but Iran did not agree. At times, I was compelled to endure Khazaie’s complaints about FBI surveillance of him and his personnel in New York. Frequently, we discussed Iran’s nuclear program, and I warned that the U.S. was committed to halting it—by whatever means necessary.
On rare occasions when we passed each other in the U.N. corridors, Khazaie and I acted as if we did not know each other. Once, we exchanged hot words at a distance in a large U.N. committee meeting over an issue related to the U.S. role as host nation of the U.N. But apart from my work to sanction Iran harshly, we rarely had occasion to cross paths publicly. Remarkably, for years our private channel remained unknown to most, save the FBI and, I imagine, the Israelis.
Even as the U.S. government moved to increase pressure on Iran, we needed a way to communicate with the hostile regime. The Swiss embassy in Tehran, which we used for consular matters after we closed our own embassy in Tehran in 1979, was not suitable for sensitive political messages. Just as we have long had a discreet “New York channel” with the North Koreans, a backdoor way of exchanging messages utilizing their U.N. Mission in New York, we needed a confidential and reliable channel to Iran. Early in my tenure, due to my trusted role in the administration and my proximity to the Iranian ambassador in the relative discretion New York afforded, I was tapped by the White House to open an invisible line of communication with Iran.
Yet, even as we established a dialogue, relations between our two countries, long fraught, were about to become more strained. In addition to North Korea, the Obama administration had inherited the challenge of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Unlike North Korea, Iran did not yet have any nuclear weapons, but it had the facilities to make fissile material and was stockpiling that material swiftly so that it could make a bomb within two to three months, if it so decided. From the outset, the Obama administration was committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would threaten U.S. forces in the region, Israel, our Gulf partners, and even Europe.
Our strong preference was to accomplish this objective through a combination of increased economic pressure and diplomacy, but President Obama remained ready to use force if other options failed. At the same time, Obama wanted to demonstrate respect for the Iranian people who suffered under an odious, repressive regime. To this end, President Obama began the practice of delivering an annual Nowruz (New Year’s) message to the Iranian people. Out of pragmatism, we also signaled our willingness to engage in dialogue—sometimes blunt—with the Iranian government on its nuclear program, Iran’s support for terrorism, and other matters of grave concern to the U.S.
Two developments in 2009, however, underscored the need for fresh sanctions on Iran. First, after declaring victory in Iran’s presidential election, which was deeply marred by irregularities, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s noxious incumbent president, ordered a vicious crackdown on civil society, beating and killing scores of peaceful protesters in the streets of Iran’s major cities. Next, in September, the U.S. revealed the existence of a secret, undeclared, underground Iranian nuclear facility, which lent new impetus to our efforts to pressure Iran to come to the negotiating table.
Caught red-handed, Iran tried to get ahead of international pressure by agreeing to meet with the five permanent members of the UNSC plus Germany and the European Union (known as the P5+1) in Geneva to discuss its nuclear program. In October, Iran allowed international inspectors to visit the previously secret facility at Fordow and declared itself willing to ship most of its enriched uranium abroad to be converted into a scarce fuel for making medical isotopes, in order to buy time for real negotiations on its nuclear program. Iran, however, soon reneged on that bargain. The IAEA reported that Iran had enriched some uranium to 20 percent (close to bomb-grade quality) and continued working on warhead designs far longer than previously suspected. Iran’s recalcitrance in the face of unprecedented U.S. willingness to negotiate on the nuclear program galvanized the Obama administration’s push for much tougher sanctions.
Again, the ball was in my court: I had to deliver strong new sanctions, but this time there was less pressure to get it done fast. I was given time to maximize the impact of the outcome. In January 2010, I began negotiations with the P5 and Germany on a new sanctions resolution.
During my time as ambassador, I came to know my fellow P5 counterparts extremely well—their skills, weaknesses, temperaments, and idiosyncrasies. In this period, I spent far more time with each of these men than with my husband, and at times I felt that we were almost as familiar. I enjoyed each of my counterparts to varying degrees and more so over time, but we all sometimes fought one another with a vehemence and a vengeance that only married couples could muster.
My British colleague, Sir Mark Lyall Grant, was likable and highly capable but the most fastidious of my colleagues. While Mark and I agreed on the substance of most matters, we sometimes differed on the means of achieving our goals. For instance, I grew impatient with Mark over Syria when he would allow negotiations with the Russians to drag on for months, make last-minute concessions, and then become indignant when, predictably, Moscow ordered Churkin to veto. We could have put forward tougher texts that fully reflected the frustration of the Council with the Assad regime and garnered the same result in far less time, but Mark kept hoping that he could potentially bring the Russians along.
French ambassador Gérard Araud eventually became one of my favorite colleagues, but only after we frequently butted heads, and he and his staff trashed me repeatedly to the press. Gérard is extremely smart, hilarious, acerbic, and was one of the few openly gay ambassadors in New York. He has zero patience for Yankee sophistry. He loves New York City, is a well-read scholar of history and literature, and views much of the world as beneath him.
In December 2010, I hosted Gérard and the entire U.N. Security Council for two days of meetings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department, and with President Obama. Ian and I kicked the occasion off with a reception for ambassadors and their spouses at our home in Washington. Thirteen-year-old Jake was already known to many of my colleagues (not just Vitaly) because of his passion for foreign policy, which had only intensified through many visits to the U.N. and conversations with U.N. representatives from around the world. Jake was a knowledgeable and poised interlocutor, but back then his views often diverged from official U.S. policy. For instance, the Arab ambassadors at the U.N. found charming Jake’s strong sympathies for the Palestinian cause, which compelled me to limit his unsupervised conversations with them. (In the years since, Jake’s views have migrated toward the opposite extreme of uncritical support for the Netanyahu government.) During this rare party in Washington, Jake engaged the ambassadors in erudite conversation. He opined to the Indian representative (against U.S. policy) that India ought to be a permanent member of the Security Council and later asked the Chinese ambassador’s wife, “Why does China manipulate its currency?” eliciting a flummoxed response.
At eight, Maris was more reserved and committed no diplomatic faux pas. Attired in a fancy dress, she nicely greeted guests with a warm smile and friendly banter. When she came up to join me as I conversed with Gérard, she offered a cheerful hello. Gérard looked down contemptuously at her and sneered, “I don’t like children.” Maris was both shocked and unimpressed. I should have been outraged but was more amused. Gérard can be condescending; but as I learned, he is also a great ally in battle and can be charmingly self-effacing. I also came to like his partner Pascal very much, and when Gérard moved to Washington as French ambassador to the U.S., a posting he initially dreaded but came to like, we remained on good terms.
My second Chinese counterpart, Li Baodong, who once served as a low-level U.S. embassy Beijing employee and later China’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, replaced my friend Zhang Yesui as China’s permanent representative in 2010. At first, Baodong didn’t appear to have the heft, grace, or measured temperament of Yesui. Initially, he also seemed unsure of himself, or at least uncomfortable in English. With time, I got to know him better. He is, in fact, plenty canny and smart, and grew increasingly effective over time. By 2013, after a number of revealing one-on-one discussions about North Korea and our respective policies, I came to respect his skills and directness as well as to enjoy him as a colleague.
The P5 ambassadors worked intimately together for months as we negotiated on Iran sanctions. Employing the same tactic as on North Korea, I initially proposed a long list of powerful sanctions, aiming to drive the negotiation to its maximal outcome. Unlike North Korea, however, Iran was not an issue on which my European colleagues were prepared to defer to the U.S. For years, under President Bush, the U.S. had refused even to sit at the negotiating table with Iran, leaving the diplomacy as well as previous rounds of sanctions in Europe’s hands. The Europeans—France, Germany, and the U.K. (EU-3)—expected to drive the push for strong new sanctions in New York. Ambassador Araud, who had previously been France’s chief negotiator on Iran, especially resented my determination to play a leadership role in the negotiation. Yet I was under clear instructions from Washington to ensure we got what we needed and thus to keep control of the negotiations. President Obama’s policy and prestige were on the line, and we could not afford to outsource this effort. Thus, I had to balance Washington’s anxiety with the Europeans’ pride and deeper experience on this issue. To do so, I tried to ensure that the Iran negotiation was a truly collaborative effort with the EU-3, where we agreed initially on what we sought to achieve and worked together to maximize our success. Our comparative advantage was the U.S.’s superior ability to obtain agreement from the highly reluctant Chinese and Russians on a strong resolution.
President Obama met with Chinese president Hu Jintao in Washington in April 2010, on the margins of the first Nuclear Security Summit. Obama seized that opportunity to press Hu on tough new sanctions on Iran. China was a major trading partner of Iran, relied on Iranian oil, and had refused thus far to engage seriously in any concrete discussion of additional sanctions. But Obama’s personal intervention opened the door to increased Chinese flexibility such that, following the meeting, Obama dispatched me to meet with my Chinese counterparts that same afternoon in Washington. The talks that followed over the subsequent weeks yielded considerable progress with the Chinese, which demonstrated to the Europeans the critical value of U.S. leadership, even if they didn’t like to admit it.
Russia was the next target, and here Secretary Clinton played an important role in preparing the battlefield with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Even more critically, President Obama had forged a collaborative relationship with Russia’s young new president, Dmitri Medvedev, and used their tie to encourage Russia to accept more expansive penalties on Iran. With these openings, I was able to move the negotiation forward in New York so that, by May, we had a strong text that was broadly agreed upon among the P5 and Germany. We achieved that in part by providing Russia and China with Washington’s assurances that the U.S. would not penalize their economic interests beyond what they had agreed to in the sanctions, a pledge that was honored more in the breach once Congress enacted intensified U.S. national sanctions.
Prior to the U.N. vote, we also needed to manage Congress carefully, which was chomping at the bit to impose unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran and frustrated at the slow pace of the negotiations in New York. I had numerous discussions with senior Democratic members of the House and Senate. These exchanges generally followed the same line as with Howard Berman of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, whom I repeatedly urged, “Please, please, give us more time. I’m confident that we’ll get a good resolution out of the Security Council. But not if Congress acts first. If Russia and China see Congress go ahead and act unilaterally, including with penalties that hit them indirectly, I promise you we will lose them in New York. Russia and China will pocket congressional action as an excuse to avoid passing U.N. sanctions and turn around and argue that we acted in bad faith by targeting their economic interests.” Berman understood that while the U.S. could always impose national sanctions, we needed a U.N. resolution for the European Union to act as well as to compel other countries to impose far more powerful multilateral sanctions. Getting the New York–Washington sequence right was critical and, ultimately, we managed to keep Congress onside.
Just when we were close to finalizing a P5 agreement and taking the text to the full Council, we encountered an unexpected obstacle. Brazil and Turkey—both rotating members of the UNSC with major business interests in Iran and egotistical leaders, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, respectively—tried to derail the sanctions. They proposed that Iran commit to a lesser version of an aborted prior agreement, in which it would ship out of the country its low-enriched uranium in exchange for receiving a higher-grade uranium of the type that could only be used to make medical isotopes, not a bomb. Desperate to avoid sanctions, Iran suddenly embraced this gambit after the Brazilian and Turkish leaders made a last-ditch trip to Tehran. Suddenly, it seemed Russia might be swayed by the Turkish-Brazilian Hail Mary. So, I was relieved that Secretary Clinton intervened successfully with Foreign Minister Lavrov to keep Russia on board. Consequently, the day after Turkey and Brazil triumphantly announced their flimsy deal, the P5 jointly introduced our sanctions resolution for consideration by the whole Council. This move clearly signaled that the key powers were united in dismissing the Lula-Erdog˘an bid as too little too late to halt new sanctions.
UNSC Resolution 1929 was adopted on June 9, 2010, with twelve countries, including all the permanent members, voting in favor, Turkey and Brazil opposed, and Lebanon abstaining. After six months of slogging, I felt gratified and relieved to achieve a considerable success—an exceptionally strong sanctions resolution that laid the predicate for even tougher U.S. and E.U. penalties to follow. The resolution’s provisions included measures that authorized broad financial and banking sanctions and froze the assets of scores of Iranian entities involved in their nuclear program, including affiliates of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a particularly notorious arm of the Iranian military. In addition, the Security Council authorized intrusive inspections of suspect Iranian cargo, banned the sale to Iran of eight categories of heavy weapons and all related military training, prohibited Iran from launching any ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and banned Iranian foreign investment in nuclear-related projects.
While many experts at the time doubted that this resolution would push Iran to enter into real negotiations, it ultimately had exactly that effect. Resolution 1929 paved the way to the Iran nuclear deal. After Hassan Rouhani defeated Ahmadinejad to win the presidency in 2013, having run on a platform of engagement with the West to achieve sanctions relief, it was obvious that stringent economic pressure had indeed compelled Iran to come to the negotiating table.
Notwithstanding the high-visibility nuclear challenges posed by Iran and North Korea, the bulk of the U.N. Security Council’s agenda pertained to Sub-Saharan Africa, where conflicts persist, and the U.N. has deployed its largest and most complex peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. In my four and a half years at the U.N., I made eight official trips to Africa, most with multiple stops. Sometimes I traveled independently as an American cabinet official, but often as part of a formal UNSC delegation. The Council spent countless hours working to stabilize hot spots spanning from Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Congo in Central Africa, to Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia in the west.
Council members were mostly unified on how to approach these conflicts, with two notable exceptions: Côte d’Ivoire, where Russia maintained a curious commitment to the discredited former leader Laurent Gbagbo; and Sudan and southern Sudan, where Russia and China reliably protected Khartoum from Western countries that strenuously opposed the genocidal regime and supported southern Sudan’s right to self-determination.
Sudan, for me, was a familiar challenge, going back to the Clinton administration when we opposed Khartoum’s support for terrorism and its violent repression of the people in southern Sudan during decades of civil conflict. The people of southern Sudan were black, Christian, and animist, with major cultural and historic differences from their predominantly Arab and Muslim rulers in the north. Southern Sudanese had sought independence for decades; in response, Khartoum employed starvation, aerial bombardment, including of hospitals and schools, and militia raids to terrorize and enslave the southern population and deny them self-determination. The conflict in the south cost an estimated two million lives and was among the deadliest in the world. On a bipartisan basis, the U.S. was united in support of the people of southern Sudan, and Christian groups were especially active on their behalf.
Late in my tenure as assistant secretary for African affairs, I took up a defiant challenge from Sudan’s foreign minister to “Go see for yourself” whether there is slavery in southern Sudan, which Khartoum always vehemently denied. In November 2000, I flew unannounced on a small U.N. World Food Program aircraft from its hub in Lokichoggio, Kenya, to a barely visible dirt strip in southern Sudan. I met with women in the southwestern village of Marial Bai who had escaped slavery and rape at the hands of northern militia and visited an American missionary hospital in Lui that suffered regular bombing by Sudanese aircraft, including just hours after I left. Additionally, I spent the night in the town of Rumbek, a small hub of economic activity and base for U.N. agencies.
When I returned to Nairobi to report to the press the horrific personal stories of abuse I had documented, the Sudanese government protested vehemently that I had violated their sovereignty. I didn’t care. The truth of their ongoing atrocities had to be told, and I was not going to be intimidated into silence. On the record, I sharply condemned Khartoum’s rampant bombings of civilian targets and expressed my outrage after hearing firsthand accounts from women and children who were abducted, beaten, raped, tortured, enslaved—atrocities committed by militia at the direction or with the support of Sudan’s government.
That trip in 2000 reinforced my abhorrence of the Khartoum regime and underscored the desperation, poverty, and oppression suffered by the people of southern Sudan. The region was the place that time forgot. It was almost biblical. No roads, no communications, no functioning economy beyond small-scale subsistence agriculture, no schools, no nothing. Southern Sudan’s leader, John Garang, viewed by some as the George Washington of South Sudan, was an American-educated smooth talker. But his people suffered like none other on earth and his undisciplined, marauding Sudan People’s Liberation Army were among those who most brutally victimized them.
The Bush administration properly sustained a focus on Sudan, investing significant effort in brokering the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, by which Sudan agreed to allow the south to conduct a referendum on independence in January 2011. This landmark agreement faced innumerable obstacles in implementation but laid the foundation for the eventual establishment of South Sudan. However, on another front, Khartoum turned its killing machine west to the Darfur region of Sudan, where dissident ethnic groups challenged central government authority. The ensuing genocide, directed by then-president Omar al-Bashir and conducted by the Sudanese army, took over 300,000 lives at its peak between 2003 and 2005. While Secretary of State Colin Powell rightly insisted that the U.S. call the killings “genocide,” I argued as an outside policy expert that the Bush administration’s response amounted mainly to hand-wringing. Instead, I urged that the U.S. consider an air campaign and a naval blockade to halt Khartoum’s killing. In sum, my opposition to the cruelties of the Sudanese regime had continued unabated prior to taking up my post at the U.N.
Khartoum did not look forward to the arrival of the Obama administration. In addition to my own stance, as senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as Hillary Clinton, had all taken tough lines against Sudan—especially on Darfur. Soon after I arrived in New York, the International Criminal Court indicted Bashir for war crimes and genocide in Darfur and issued arrest warrants, making him the first sitting head of state to face such charges. The Bashir regime responded by expelling thirteen international aid organizations that delivered well over half of the critical humanitarian assistance to the desperate millions of internally displaced persons in Darfur. The Security Council was paralyzed, unable to condemn Khartoum, because Russia, China, and Libya shielded Sudan from censure. It was an early low point that foreshadowed the divisions that would only deepen in the Council on Sudan.
In March 2009, President Obama appointed retired Major General Scott Gration as his special envoy for Sudan. I had come to know Scott during the campaign when he was an early Obama supporter and frequent campaign surrogate. An affable former Air Force general and the son of missionaries, Scott and I got along fine personally. Nonetheless it soon emerged that we had stark policy differences over Sudan. Scott favored a more accommodating approach to Khartoum, cast public doubt over whether genocide persisted in Darfur, and recommended in testimony before Congress that the U.S. preemptively ease sanctions and lift the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation. Referring to how to engage Khartoum, he said, “We have got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” Gration’s approach alarmed me as well as many in Congress and the NGO community.
As the administration conducted its first review of Sudan policy, I argued strenuously at the Principals’ table that we should not give rewards to Sudan without concrete, irreversible changes in their policies and actions. Unfortunately, my differences with Scott were reported widely in the press, I trust through no fault of his and I know through none of mine. We were both loyal members of the Obama administration; neither of us had an interest in our dispute being aired publicly, which only heightened the difficulty for the president, who had to make the final decision. As the review progressed, I sensed that Secretary Clinton might be sliding into a more accommodationist camp, leaving me increasingly isolated as a proponent of maintaining a conditional, action-for-action approach. Unusually, I perceived that some in the White House may have been mischaracterizing my views on Sudan to the president. Thus, I took what was for me the rare step of invoking my privilege as a principal and member of the cabinet to write a memo directly to the president outlining my concerns about the direction of the policy review and explaining my recommended approach.
When the policy review concluded in October, and the president decided, I was satisfied with the outcome. No significant benefits would accrue to Khartoum unless their behavior on southern Sudan and Darfur changed substantially and irreversibly; moreover, we agreed to a significant list of penalties that would be imposed if Sudan’s behavior persisted or backslid.
Gration continued to pursue a rhetorical approach that worried me, but he deserves credit for gradually improving humanitarian access into Darfur in the wake of the NGO expulsions, helping to end the conflict between Chad and Sudan, and then turning his focus in 2010 to the upcoming referendum on an independent South Sudan scheduled for January 9, 2011.
As the referendum approached, there were many reasons for concern. Six years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, none of the difficult issues between north and south had been resolved. Electoral arrangements were way behind schedule, and fears mounted that Khartoum would renege on its promise to allow the referendum to proceed. When U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proposed a foreign-minister-level meeting on the margins of the annual gathering of heads of state at the opening of the General Assembly in late September 2010, I recommended that President Obama attend and elevate the meeting to an important summit just about one hundred days before the scheduled referendum.
Obama’s presence attracted many key leaders from Africa and Europe and lent impetus to implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the crucial January referendum. In his remarks, Obama warned of “more pressure and deeper isolation” for those who violate their commitments. But he also offered improved relations between the U.S. and Sudan, enhanced trade and investment ties, and the exchange of ambassadors—if Sudan fully and faithfully adhered to its commitments, ended the violence and the humanitarian crisis, and ensured accountability for war crimes in Darfur. Obama’s intervention and the potential for improved relations with the U.S. most likely positively influenced Sudan’s decision to allow the referendum to proceed.
Two weeks later, I led a Security Council delegation to southern Sudan, Darfur, and Khartoum. The trip highlighted the continued suffering of the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in Darfur, who were trapped in dusty, barren camps with insufficient food and water. Their makeshift villages were constantly threatened by Khartoum-backed militia who raided on horseback and burned the grass huts to the ground, killing as many as they could. In southern Sudan, we pressed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement leaders to prepare to govern in service of their people rather than in the insular, corrupt fashion to which they had already grown accustomed. Finally, our meetings in Khartoum enabled us to reinforce the necessity of allowing the referendum to be conducted unimpeded.
Almost miraculously, three months later, on January 9, 2011, millions of southern Sudanese came peacefully and joyfully to the polls to express their long-suppressed desire for independence, voting 98.6 percent in favor of establishing their own country, South Sudan.
The postelection euphoria was short lived.
In the six months after the vote leading up to official independence, the many issues that remained unresolved between north and south again came to the fore. In May, I led a second UNSC delegation to Sudan and South Sudan to try and defuse tensions and smooth the path to independence now just two months away. The challenge was exacerbated by the fact that Sudan remained a bone of contention between the U.S. and Russia. Most, if not all of the time, Russia vigorously protected the brutal Khartoum regime against economic and other pressures, while it readily dismissed southern Sudanese aspirations for independence and was studiously indifferent to the suffering of its people.
During one private argument on South Sudan, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin taunted me: “You think this new state will become independent, and all will be great. But I tell you, it will be stillborn and a mess for many years to come.” Certain he was wrong, I strenuously objected.
While Vitaly was always reluctant to travel overseas with the Security Council, preferring to send a deputy, he especially hated going to Africa, which I think he felt was uncomfortable and beneath him. Churkin, French ambassador Araud, and other colleagues complained more intensely when I led UNSC trips to the field, because I insisted that we get out of stifling meeting rooms in the capital and visit real people facing real challenges—in rural health clinics, desolate refugee camps, and remote villages that had seen recent conflict.
This time, since I was leading a particularly consequential and timely mission to Sudan, Vitaly made a point of coming along, I believe to try to check me. I knew Africa far better than he, so check me he could not, but bother me he did. One of my most vivid and not-so-cherished memories is of Vitaly walking barefoot past me down a long hotel corridor in Khartoum without speaking. He was wearing only a white hotel bathrobe that didn’t close properly at the belly, exposing too much of his pale chest. Apparently, something had happened to his suit. An image once seen, it is impossible to forget.
In the midst of our visit to Khartoum, fighting broke out along the soon-to-be north-south border, with Sudanese forces seizing the disputed Abyei area and moving troops into the Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan regions—southern areas of Sudan that border what would soon be South Sudan and have populations that resist Khartoum’s authority. Khartoum’s aggressive actions enraged me and most other members of our delegation, prompting us to deliver very tough messages to our Sudanese interlocutors. Sudan’s sustained bombing of these areas also led the U.N. to ramp up its efforts to defuse tensions and the U.S. to warn that improved relations were at risk if Sudan persisted. In the weeks just before South Sudan’s independence, we successfully pressed the two countries to pull back their forces and accede to an Ethiopian-led U.N. border force to demilitarize and monitor Abyei.
Tensions subsided sufficiently for South Sudan’s Independence Day, July 9, 2011, to be a raucous celebration. I was honored to be asked by President Obama to lead the U.S. delegation to the independence ceremonies. It was a distinguished group that included General Colin Powell—who as secretary of state had played an important role in paving the way for self-determination for the South Sudanese—along with Congressman Donald Payne, a fierce, longtime champion of the South Sudanese people, and General Carter Ham, the four-star general in charge of U.S. Africa Command. As head of delegation, I could bring one guest. I chose soon-to-be-fourteen-year-old Jake. My son has long been passionate about Africa—and not just the birds and the wildlife. We had visited Southern Africa previously, and he knew a lot about Sudan through me and his own study. He was thrilled to meet Colin Powell, ride on a U.S. Air Force jet, visit the U.S. military base in Djibouti, and talk Libya war strategy with General Ham.
In Juba, the South Sudanese capital, the U.S. delegation had a prime location in the shade near the stage, where I would speak along with several visiting heads of state and South Sudan’s new president, Salva Kiir. At some point during the hours-long, scorching ceremony, as I would later learn, Jake wandered around to stretch his legs and get some water, carrying his trusty long-lens digital camera and tripod (essentials for the avid birder he had become). He was some distance removed from our delegation’s seats when suddenly he was confronted by an angry security official who, as Jake would report, demanded, “You need to leave. No journalists allowed in the VIP section.”
Jake explained, “I am not a journalist. I’m here as a guest, and my mother is the American U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice.” But that explanation failed to satisfy the increasingly belligerent guard. Jake continued to protest politely to no avail. As the situation escalated into a near shouting match, with the guard preparing to take Jake into custody, a U.S. protocol officer arrived to plead Jake’s case, again without success. Finally, Ezekiel Gatkuoth, a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound South Sudanese official, who served as head of South Sudan’s mission in Washington, saw what was happening. Recognizing Jake as my son, he intervened to validate his story and spare him a trip to Juba’s finest jail.
The celebration in Juba was a wonder to behold—jubilant dancers, musicians, military parades, ululating women, back-slapping African leaders, and champagne and canapés for VIPs under air-conditioned tents—an extravagance that foretold problems to come. I returned to New York in time for the flag of South Sudan to be raised at U.N. Headquarters on July 14, as the world’s newest country was admitted to the international body that helped birth it. The joy at the U.N. was almost as irrepressible as in Juba. That night, I hosted a loud, super-sweaty dance party on the twenty-second floor of the new U.S. Mission building where Americans, South Sudanese, African delegates, and many others boogied long into the evening. In that miraculous moment, it seemed like the dreams of millions might in fact come true.
Alas, for the long-suffering people of South Sudan, who have been betrayed at every turn, lasting peace proved too much to hope for. Soon after independence, Sudan and South Sudan turned on each other. Fighting erupted along the border over disputed oil-rich areas. South Sudan, which owned 75 percent of the oil of the original undivided nation, still depended on pipelines, refineries, and ports in the north. The economy of each nation was linked directly to the other; yet, after fighting resumed, South Sudan took the self-defeating step of stopping oil production, sending both countries into an economic tailspin. Within South Sudan, ethnic-based political factions contested for power, while brutally abusing their people and robbing them blind through corruption. South Sudan’s army raped, tortured, and killed many thousands of its own citizens, reflecting the example set by Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s hard-drinking, do-nothing, demi-dictator president, who has little regard for the welfare of his people and later came to blows with his vicious, self-aggrandizing vice president, Riek Machar.
By December 2013, it was clear: South Sudan was, in fact, stillborn. One of my most bitter regrets is having to admit that Vitaly was right.
For the duration of the administration, I along with top U.S. officials, including President Obama, continued to try to help the people of South Sudan achieve the promise of their independence. Yet, so long as the population of South Sudan suffers under such leadership, there will be little the U.S., U.N., or others can do to enable them measurably to improve their lives.
When it comes to South Sudan’s morally bankrupt leaders, I am reminded of the depressing adage, “You can’t help those who refuse to help themselves.”