The child of a United Nations official, getting her first look at the UN’s
Turtle Bay headquarters in New York, asks her mother how many people work
there. “About one in four” is the dyspeptic reply. That old UN chestnut
still makes the rounds because it sums up a paper-pushing, jobs-for-the-boys
institutional culture that successive “management reforms” have stirred but
never really shaken. But among those one in four, the UN every so often
attracts, and more surprisingly retains, the loyalty of individuals who
would stand out in a crowd of thousands.
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brilliant and charismatic Brazilian troubleshooter
whose life is charted in exhaustive, indeed excessive, detail in Chasing the
Flame by the almost equally brilliant and charismatic American political
academic Samantha Power, was the most flamboyantly unforgettable of that
select breed. A soixante-huitard who got his first taste of violence as a
student revolutionary manning the Paris barricades, he came to the UN pretty
much by chance in 1969 when his immersion in Marxist philosophy – a lifelong
fascination which later resulted in an impenetrable doctorat d’État on “the
significance of supranationality” – was interrupted by the sordidly
bourgeois necessity of earning his keep. His diplomat father had been sacked
by the Brazilian junta, for reasons which possibly included a fondness, soon
acquired by his son, for Johnny Walker whisky.
Hired by the UN High Commission for Refugees because of his impressive command
of several languages, young Sergio’s energy, physical bravery and capacity
to improvise in impossible situations rapidly propelled him up the
hierarchy. “Chasing the flame” (of idealism, or of conflagration?) was less
a manifestation of his idealism than a psychological necessity. He was never
merrier, or cooler, or more captivating than when strolling within range of
snipers, often deliberately dispensing with a flak jacket so as to share the
risks run by the civilians he was there to assist. “I look for trouble, it’s
true”, he admitted. “Because in trouble I find truth and reality.” He had
gaiety, a lightly worn cosmopolitan charm, chiselled good looks and a
Clinton-like knack of making even someone he barely noticed feel as though
they had his undivided attention. He used those assets to cut compromises,
by no means always to his credit or that of the UN, with such hideous
characters as the Khmer Rouge’s Ieng Sary and the Serbian President,
Slobodan Milosevic.
In August 2003, at the age of fifty-five, Vieira de Mello met a slow,
agonizing and possibly avoidable death in Baghdad, trapped in the bombed-out
wreckage of the UN offices from which the US military lacked the equipment
to cut survivors free. Obituaries and tributes spoke of him as the best
Secretary General the UN never had. Professor Power, it is pretty plain,
shares that evaluation. The evidence she so meticulously piles up cannot
quite take the strain. This was a man with political savvy and an
extraordinary capacity for leadership, but on too many critical occasions,
he did not exercise these well.
Sergio, as he was universally known, was vain enough to relish adulation – one
of his innumerable lovers joked that “At your funeral, Sergio, they will say
your only fault was your modesty” – but he would have been embarrassed by
his biographer’s cloying subtitle, “the fight to save the world”. There is
no better antidote to star-struck idealism than a life spent in the world’s
nastier hellholes, when the choices available too often lie between two
evils, and the need to get something done can warp judgement and compromise
moral integrity. As it did his – most damningly in Bosnia during the siege
of Sarajevo, but also in Afghanistan, where in 1999 he cut aid deals with
the Taliban. A man of restless intelligence who, Power writes, “never
stopped questioning his own decisions or those of governments”, Sergio knew
all about the “humanitarian trap”, the leverage foul regimes have over
outsiders attempting to alleviate the suffering such regimes inflict. In the
guise of pragmatism, he was capable of walking right in, eyes open.
This is a book that declares itself to be a “dual biography” of “a brave and
enigmatic man”, and, no less, of “a dangerous world whose ills are too big
to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply”. Its distinctively
American subtext is “how to engage” – what politicians can learn from Vieira
de Mello’s life.
Because of that subtext, and because the writing of this book coincided with
Power’s recruitment to the Barack Obama campaign – first as a campaign
worker and then as a high-profile foreign policy adviser, until a couple of
bad gaffes while on her book tour took her out of his team – this book is
doomed to be scanned mainly for clues to Senator Obama’s approach to foreign
policy. Power herself encourages us to make the link, writing in her
acknowledgements that Obama is “the person whose rigour and compassion bear
the closest resemblance to Sergio’s that I have ever seen”. And some clues
are easy to spot: Obama’s professed willingness to “engage” with Iran and
Syria may have its genesis in one of the “key lessons” for governments Power
draws from Sergio’s career: “Spoilers, rogue states, and nonstate militants
must be engaged, if only so they can be sized up and neutralized”.
As a mid-ranking UN civil servant, Vieira de Mello was in no position to
“neutralize” anyone, of course, and his efforts at sweet-talking thugs were
nowhere near as successful, or as edifying, as this implies. There is a
jarring disjunction between Power’s concluding assessment, and her ungilded
earlier observation that her hero’s “popularity with wrongdoers stemmed in
part from his moral relativism”, and that he often “seemed more interested
in being liked and in maintaining access than in standing up for those who
were suffering”.
It is perilous to try to use a biography as a political pamphlet. Readers who
resist the temptation to treat her book as “The Obama Code” will get more
out of this slow-moving but ultimately compelling tale of a singularly
intelligent, articulate individualist’s career at the interface between a
lumbering UN bureaucracy and humankind at its most vulnerable. He helped to
cope with refugee crises in Southern Sudan and at the violent birth of
Bangladesh, witnessed the 1982 war in Lebanon, and wrestled with complex
humanitarian emergencies in Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Africa’s Great
Lakes area, Afghanistan and East Timor before leading the UN team returning
to post-Saddam Iraq.
In broken societies at Matthew Arnold’s “dark edges drear and naked shingles
of the world”, people’s expectations of the “international community” almost
always exceed what outsiders can hope to achieve. Vieira de Mello was
complicit in some of the UN’s greatest bungles, the peacekeeping operations
of the 1990s that tested its limited capacities almost to destruction; but
to follow his trajectory is to understand better what went wrong, and,
mostly, to admire his growing grasp of the intractable politics of
humanitarian assistance.
Among the things he learnt was to husband his idealism – stuffing it in a back
pocket, some of his colleagues charged. As a young man seconded to UNIFIL as
a political adviser, arriving just as Israel swept past UNIFIL peacekeepers
in 1982 to hound the PLO out of Lebanon, he had railed so wildly at the
“humiliation” of the UN that Brian Urquhart, the UN’s peacekeeping supremo,
sourly dismissed him as “a great prima donna and cry-baby”, who should be
packed off as soon as possible back to the UNHCR in Geneva. Yet it was
Vieira de Mello who instantly grasped the damage to the UN that one incident
could do – the fatal shooting by a nervous Fijian sentry of a highly respected
Lebanese doctor – and who successfully pestered the UN bureaucracy to break
all its rules and come up with “blood money” for the dead man’s family.
Vieira de Mello’s forte was thinking on his feet.
The neophyte got Urquhart’s point: the UN would get nowhere by wringing its
hands at the “unacceptable” – a word he swore that, after Lebanon, he would
never use again. His pragmatism could verge on cynicism, though he was not a
cynic. He was sent to Cambodia in 1991, in charge of the
refugee-repatriation element of the ambitious, big-budget,
peace-and-reconstruction mission assigned to the UN in the wake of the Paris
peace conference. That mission was largely botched, mainly because the UN
failed to assert its authority. Yasushi Akashi, the UN jobsworth in overall
charge, declined to court the trouble involved in enforcing the UN’s mandate
to assume administrative authority over the Vietnam-backed Hun Sen
government in the run-up to elections. The UN’s half-measures and too hasty
pull-out denied Cambodians their best chance of becoming a “reconciled and
pacified society”, the hopeful message Vieira de Mello took to the Thai
border camps. Even so, his was the closest the UN came to a Cambodian
success story – the return home of 362,209 refugees. Distasteful as was
Vieira de Mello’s hobnobbing with Khmer Rouge leaders to get them to
cooperate, Akashi’s fumbling and complacency may have left him little choice
but repugnant compromise.
If Cambodia was the frying pan, Bosnia was the fire that burnt irreperable
holes in the reputation of UN peacekeeping. As political adviser to the UN
Secretary General’s special representative – Boutros Boutros Ghali’s
disastrous choice was, again, Yasushi Akashi – Vieira de Mello proved
ingenious at negotiating humanitarian relief, and, at best, ingenuous in his
dealings with Belgrade and the Bosnian Serbs. By the time he arrived in
1993, UNPROFOR’s passivity towards Serb forces strangling Sarajevo had
already, as Power writes, lost it “the trust of the Bosnians and the respect
of the Serbs”. Yet Vieira de Mello repeatedly connived with Akashi and with
Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose to lie about Serb flouting of NATO
ultimatums – first to lift the siege of Sarajevo, then to halt their assault
on the UN-declared “safe area” of Gorazde.
In February 1994, a Serb shell hit a Sarajevo marketplace, killing sixty-eight
Bosnians. It should have been a turning point. NATO placed itself at the
disposal of the UN. But under a cumbrous and unworkable “dual key”
agreement, NATO airpower could be used only if Rose requested it and Akashi
approved. They, and Vieira de Mello, “clung to the belief that full-on NATO
airstrikes were not compatible with UN neutrality, and that UN neutrality
was the cornerstone of the UN system”. For that belief, Bosnians paid
heavily.
Power recounts how Vieira de Mello volunteered to head a UN team into Gorazde
to “verify” Serb compliance with NATO’s ultimatum to withdraw its troops and
weapons or be bombed – and how, determined from the outset to forestall a
NATO strike regardless of Serb conduct, he told his team to lie outright
about the continuing Serb presence. Power’s blow-by-blow account of conduct
that earned Vieira de Mello the nickname “Serbio” concludes that he came to
value “the UN’s interest in looking good over civilians’ interest in being
safe”. But two sickening passages make this sound too charitable. In
burnt-out Gorazde, she writes with seeming admiration, “Most people recalled
his grace under pressure. The tales of his brushing his teeth with Italian
mineral water fed his increasingly hallowed persona”. Hallowed? In Gorazde,
he had shaken hands with the notorious Bosnian Serb General, Ratko Mladic,
who in 1995 was to shoulder aside Dutch UN forces, seize the safe haven of
Srebrenica and order the massacre in cold blood of 8,000 Bosnian men and
boys. When the mass graves were discovered, she writes, “Vieira de Mello was
stunned. ‘I never thought Mladic was this stupid,’ he said. ‘The massacre
was totally unnecessary’”. As the report on UN peacekeeping delivered in
2000 by Lakhdar Brahimi bitingly observed, when one party repeatedly attacks
civilians, UN “equal treatment” of all sides “can in the best case result in
ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil”.
Power notes that Vieira de Mello had moved on, and up, before Srebrenica and
thus largely escaped public blame; but that hardly justifies her subsequent
observation that, until he became “personally tarred” by his decision to go
ahead with the forced repatriation of Rwandan refugees in 1996, he had led
an “unblemished career”.
Conversely, she judges too harshly his attempts to cope with the hideous
aftermath of the Rwanda massacres. The refugee camps in Congo and Tanzania
were hellholes in the grip of murderous Hutu militias, and emptying them was
a defensible decision in impossible circumstances. He had, at the least,
learnt by then that since everyone played politics with humanitarian aid,
the UN “can hardly afford to be apolitical”.
It is at about this point that Power’s hero finally becomes, if not exactly
lovable, a convincingly effective international operator. The UN trusteeship
of East Timor would have been an unmitigated failure, not a patchy success,
had it not been for his intelligent reworking of the script to accelerate
the transfer of power to the Timorese leadership. Power writes with most
passion about the Balkans and Rwanda, the regions she knows best. Yet, from
the public policy standpoint, the Timor chapters are perhaps the most
instructive.
Power conducted 400 interviews and ploughed through 10,000 pages of UN
documents for this book; the lack of editorial winnowing shows. Other
people’s office politics are as interesting as their holiday videos, and the
book’s important themes have a tendency to get buried in office badinage and
the detailed chronicling of Vieira de Mello’s bedhopping. Despite this
display of meticulousness, there are minor and major inaccuracies. George
Bush senior made his “new world order” speech at the UN months after, not
before, Iraq was ousted from Kuwait. It is seriously misleading to depict
Cambodia as a country that “for decades had been at the epicentre of
decolonisation struggles and US and Soviet proxy wars”; China and Vietnam
were, surely, the elephants in that particular room.
Writing about the UN stalemate on Iraq in 2003, she accuses the US and UK of
“ploughing ahead despite the resistance of every country on the Security
Council except Spain”. This is wide of the mark; Bulgaria was openly in
support, the three African members were undecided. Had a vote on the aborted
Iraq resolution been taken, Pakistan would, albeit reluctantly, have sided
with the US. In the end thirty countries publicly signed up in support of
the US-led coalition; only Britain, Australia and Denmark committed combat
troops, but many more sent non-combat contingents, provided access to bases
or air space or promised assistance with post-war construction.
At its best, Chasing the Flame is a compelling work, culminating in a
brilliant and moving reconstruction of Vieira de Mello’s doomed last mission
in Iraq, and the frantic, disorganized rescue efforts to pull survivors from
the bombed-out Canal Hotel as his life seeped away in the rubble. The banal
epilogue, with its musings on how “we outsiders must bring humility and
patience to our dealings in foreign lands”, is an anticlimax that would have
been better left unwritten. Nothing, the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello
convincingly demonstrates, is ever as simple as that.
Samantha Power
CHASING THE FLAME
Sergio Vieira de Mello and the fight to save the world
622pp. Allen Lane the Penguin Press. £25 (US $32.95).
978 0 7139 9841 2
Rosemary Righter is an Associate Editor of The Times.
