When the day of the vote finally arrived, we were not sure where we stood because a number of ambassadors had not yet received official guidance from their capitals. Sitting in the US chair in the nerve-racking final moments before I would press the button to vote, I watched the ambassadors from Panama and Haiti on their cell phones, animatedly lobbying to secure a change in their instructions. The Panamanian ambassador spotted me watching her in tense anticipation. When she put down her phone, she flashed me a grin and a thumbs-up, mouthing the word “No!” The Haitian ambassador followed suit.
Kelly, holding a clipboard with her latest spreadsheet, went in search of one of the supportive African representatives she realized was missing from the hall. She waited outside the men’s room until he emerged and then beseeched him to run in order to vote on time (which he just managed to do).
In the end, thanks to the widespread, relentless lobbying of US diplomats and spirited leadership from the Netherlands and Latin American countries like Argentina and Chile, the resolution to rescind benefits to LGBT couples failed. In fact, it failed by a margin of almost two to one.*
Close to every swing country in Africa and Asia went our way. The bravest votes came from Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the Seychelles, who all voted NO. Many other ambassadors from African countries—twenty-eight in total—either abstained or made the intensely personal choice not to show up to the vote because they didn’t like the instructions they received from their capitals. Sri Lanka, which was liberalizing after a period of repressive rule, boldly stood with democratic countries in rejecting Russia’s measure.
That evening, those of us involved in the effort gathered with some of the other staff at the US Mission. We went around the room and each reflected on what had happened. David, who had helped me push LGBT policies at the White House, shared what the day and the entire campaign had meant to him. He reminded us that not so long ago, being gay and serving in the State Department had been a terrifying experience. In the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuality was classified as a national security risk, and more than 1,000 people were fired or forced out due to suspicions of being gay. It was not until President Clinton’s first term that Secretary of State Christopher finally put an end to the practice of vetting employees as potential threats solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. David had come to work at the State Department around when Clinton nominated James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, the first time an openly gay person had been put forward for an ambassadorship. Key Republican senators had blocked Hormel’s confirmation because of his sexuality. David asked us to imagine how he now felt seeing US diplomats all around the world working tirelessly to advance the cause of LGBT equality.
When it was my turn to speak, I gave voice to something I had learned in government: sometimes, preventing a bad outcome is what passes for victory.
“We won,” I told the team, “because we cared more and we worked harder. Never forget how much that can matter.”
THE MORE THE US AND RUSSIAN GOVERNMENTS were at loggerheads, the more I had to compartmentalize in order to work productively with Vitaly. We were continuing to authorize peacekeeping missions in Africa together. Along with those of four other governments, diplomats from the United States and Russia were close to finalizing a nuclear deal with Iran. And yet in countless Security Council sessions, Vitaly was defending the indefensible, repeating lines sent by Moscow that he was too intelligent to believe and speaking in binary terms that belied his nuanced grasp of what was actually happening.
Then, to my surprise, at the height of the Ukraine crisis, I began receiving text messages from him, asking to meet “not at my mission or yours.”
We settled on a booth in an empty, darkened restaurant in the basement of the Millennium Hilton across from the UN. The hotel, which I found creepy even when it was bustling, reminded me of the kinds of places I had frequented decades before in the desolate heartland of the Bosnian Serbs’ ethnically-cleansed, breakaway state.
Vitaly, it turned out, was making contact without Moscow’s blessing. He said he wanted to brainstorm about how our countries could find a way out of the Ukraine crisis. In our first private meeting he told me—wrongly it would turn out—that Putin did not intend to occupy eastern Ukraine.
“If we did that, it would only spoil his Crimea victory,” he said. “You can’t do better than 80 percent approval ratings . . . it would be all downhill.”
I reminded him that at the start of the crisis he had initially told me that Putin would not seize Crimea, either. “You have a habit of conflating your hopes with your forecast,” I said.
He shrugged: “I choose to be an optimist.”
I said I understood why, and quoted my favorite line from the late psychologist Amos Tversky, who had said he preferred optimism because “as a pessimist, you suffer twice.”
At a later one-on-one meeting in the same basement restaurant, Vitaly gave me a list of individuals in the United States and abroad whom Putin was “inclined to listen to.” He thought the people on his list might be able to convince Putin to pull back from eastern Ukraine. I passed the names to the White House, which explored those and other back channels in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, none bore fruit. Around this time, I wrote in my journal: “It seems massively likely that this will be war, a real war, a big war, a war whose consequences will be felt well beyond Ukraine.”
Vitaly and I continued to meet discreetly, and he tried to give me insight into Putin’s mind-set. Invariably, though, the ideas he offered for “big bang” constitutional reform proposals to guarantee the rights of Russians in eastern Ukraine proved to be ones that the Ukrainian government had already floated. Every time Ukraine made a proposal that Vitaly thought might be sufficient, the next time we met I would hand him a news article detailing the fact that Russian separatists had already rejected it. Putin was deft at pocketing the concessions from Ukraine and then moving the goalposts on his demands. He was not serious about making peace, and ultimately Vitaly’s ideas went nowhere.
President Obama directed the US government to invest in stabilizing the Ukrainian government. We provided more than $1 billion in foreign assistance over the next two years in an effort to strengthen the country’s military and economy and to reform corrupt political institutions. These steps would bring Ukraine closer to the US and Europe, as the majority of its citizens desired. To impose costs on Russia, President Obama also levied targeted sanctions on wealthy individuals close to Putin and on state-connected entities in the energy, financial, and defense sectors. In order for sanctions to be effective, we needed to convince the countries of the EU to mirror them, which, given the financial blowback many of them faced, required relentless diplomacy.37
But the conflict in eastern Ukraine continued. And in turn the US relationship with Russia further deteriorated. It became increasingly difficult to hive off the acrimony from Ukraine and Syria and to keep finding common ground responding to matters in other regions of the world. Vitaly and I tried to keep working together, but Putin began personally involving himself in a growing number of issues—including, to my shock, the twenty-year commemoration of the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
The United Kingdom had been negotiating a fairly bland Security Council resolution that condemned the Srebrenica genocide and stressed the importance of accountability. But as the vote drew near, my team sounded the alarm: Russia was striking references to “genocide” from the draft text.
The objective facts about Srebrenica had long been established. In 2007, the International Court of Justice had found that Bosnian Serb soldiers had perpetrated genocide there, and Serbia itself had extradited Slobodan Milošević to stand trial for genocide at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. However, a few days before the 2015 anniversary, Russia’s diplomats made clear that they would not allow a resolution to pass if it mentioned “genocide.” Incredulous, I called Vitaly.
“What are you doing on the Srebr
enica text?” I demanded. “You were there then. You can’t deny this history.”
He paused. Then, choosing his words carefully, he said coldly, “I take it you will not accept our text, and we cannot accept yours.”
“What is going on?” I asked, worry setting in. I imagined how the mothers of Srebrenica would react to hearing that the UN rejected the full truth of what had happened to their sons. “Come on, talk to me. You’ve met those families.”
He began to soften. “I have my instructions, and they are not flexible,” he said.
“Are you kidding me? You really can’t call the genocide ‘genocide’?” I asked.
“You know me well enough to know when I am kidding,” he said.
“Shit,” I replied. “Can we try to be creative? Those people will be devastated if we can’t figure this out.”
Over the next forty-eight hours, Vitaly and I ducked out of Security Council meetings and huddled in different corners of the UN, in search of compromise language that would make clear that the Security Council recognized the genocide while allowing Putin to agree to abstain.
We stripped “genocide” references throughout the text, replacing them with euphemisms that reminded me of the annual White House statements on the Armenian genocide that I despised. To compensate, we inserted a reference recalling the “judgment of the International Court of Justice of 26 February 2007,” and we attached the court’s written finding of genocide as an appendix.
I did not feel good about what I had negotiated. But our draft met two important standards: it made clear that the Security Council saw the events of 1995 as “genocide,” and it had a chance of being acceptable to Putin, who Vitaly had indicated was carefully reviewing our drafts.
In the end, my own misgivings about the language Vitaly and I had agreed upon proved moot. The morning of the vote, he sent me a one-line email verdict on our compromise text: “It didn’t fly.”
Knowing Russia was going to veto even the watered-down text, we reverted back to the draft that properly and frontally recognized genocide. I felt for Vitaly as he raised his hand to veto a resolution he knew his country should have supported.
I began my remarks after the vote by drawing on my personal history. I recalled being a twenty-four-year-old reporter in Sarajevo when a colleague first told me about reports of mass executions. Not wanting to believe what I was hearing, I told the Council, my reaction at the time had simply been “No”—it was not possible.
When I had learned earlier that day that Russia was planning to veto the Srebrenica resolution, I recalled to the Council, my incredulity and disappointment had prompted the same reaction: “No.”
I had invited David Rohde, who had uncovered the massacre, to the session, along with Laura Pitter, who had chronicled it for Human Rights Watch and encouraged me to move to the Balkans in the first place. I looked in their direction as I spoke.
I described the mother I met in 2010 who was burying the fourth of her murdered sons. “She was still searching for the remains of the fifth,” I said. “It is that mother’s truth and pain that was vetoed by Russia today . . . This is a veto of a well-established fact documented by hundreds of thousands of pages of witness testimony, photographic evidence, and physical forensic evidence.”
Because Vitaly knew exactly what had happened in Srebrenica, he had not denied the facts in his statement defending Russia’s vote. Instead, he had said that dwelling on the past would impede reconciliation between Bosnians and Serbs. I tore into this rationale, arguing, “Imagine being the mother of those five sons killed in the Srebrenica genocide, and being told that a denial of the genocide will advance reconciliation. It is madness . . . There is no stability in genocide denial.”
In the end, I knew—and Vitaly must have known as well—that Putin saw the world in us-versus-them terms.
If Ukraine was with the West, then Russia would punish Ukraine.
If Western countries embraced LGBT rights, then Russia would try to deny them.
If the West was critical of the Bosnian Serbs, then Russia would side with even those responsible for genocide.
And no matter what, Vitaly would try to sell what Russia was doing to the world.
A WHILE LATER, ON THE MORNING we were set to elect new members of the UN’s forty-seven-nation Human Rights Council, I opened a red folder on my office desk and began reading from the cable inside. What I saw was not unexpected, but it still caused me to shake my head. “What on earth will it take?” I wondered.
I hated my voting instructions from Washington.
Being on the Human Rights Council gave the United States important influence over the direction of international human rights investigations, but the elections themselves were an unseemly exercise. Nominated by their respective regions, infamous human rights abusers always appeared on the ballot (and thus on the Council). In this election, three countries—Russia, Hungary, and Croatia—were competing with each other for the two Eastern European seats.
Russia had invaded Ukraine. It was backing the Assad regime in Syria at all costs, contributing to some of the worst carnage the world had seen in a half century. Putin had shuttered independent media, banned various nongovernmental organizations, and imprisoned dissidents. Yet the instructions I received from the State Department about how to vote were timeless and impervious to these developments. In the General Assembly later that morning, I was directed to vote for Russia.
Russia and the United States were permanent members of the Security Council, and for as long as anyone could remember, it was our practice to vote for one another in UN elections as a “courtesy.” This was a self-interested, reciprocal deal we had with each of the four other permanent members, meant to assure the United States of four reliable votes in every election we ourselves entered.
As I walked across 1st Avenue to the United Nations, I asked my elections officer, a young US diplomat, if he expected a close race for the Eastern European seats. “Russia has it locked,” he explained. “The last time they ran, they won 176 votes, even more than France and the UK.”
I made my way into the US box in the General Assembly hall and ruminated. One of the immensely gratifying aspects of being a senior official in President Obama’s administration was that I almost never received direction from Washington that I did not have a chance to shape or challenge. Looking around the chamber at the other ambassadors, I knew that I was likely the only person in the hall who enjoyed such independence.
I understood the logic of the US government’s long-standing deal. But this day felt different. Too much had happened since I arrived at the UN not to vote my conscience. After the secret paper ballots had been passed around, I wrote the names of Croatia and Hungary in the Eastern European section, folded the paper over three times, and placed it through the slit in the brown wooden box that a UN official carried down the aisle.*
Occasions when the majority of UN ambassadors milled around in one place at the same time were rare. As the votes were tabulated by hand, I crisscrossed the chamber, trying to gin up commitments from my colleagues on issues that ranged from releasing a political prisoner their government had locked up to voting to condemn Iran’s human rights record in the General Assembly.
Election winners were normally announced in less than half an hour, and, as the clock ticked well beyond that, the chatter in the room began to fade.
“What is taking so long?” my Uruguayan colleague murmured.
My elections expert hustled down to the front of the chamber and returned to explain that one region’s vote was too close to call, so UN officials were doing a recount. “Probably Hungary and Croatia battling for the last slot,” he said.
Finally, around two hours after we had handed in our ballots, the president of the General Assembly took the microphone and read the names of the fourteen countries that had won seats on the Human Rights Council. Russia was not among them.
In the Eastern European region, Hungary, which had more money to invest in its lo
bbying campaign than Croatia, had received 144 votes. Croatia snagged the second seat with 114 votes. Russia had received only 112 votes. A collective gasp of shock rippled through the hall. Had there been one more vote for Russia and one fewer for Croatia, the two countries would have tied. If this had occurred, Russia would have bullied and bribed during the run-off, and walked away with the seat. As it stood, Russia had lost—the first time in history that its government had been defeated in a major UN election.
I looked over at the Ukrainian ambassador. His face was cupped in his hands. I wasn’t sure if he was weeping with relief or smiling.
On one level, of course, the outcome was not a big deal. Russia’s loss in this election would not bring about the removal of its troops from Ukraine. But it was a rare repudiation of Putin on the global stage and a tiny measure of accountability for a country that had enjoyed impunity for its actions.
— 34 —
Freedom from Fear
In July of 2014, a doctor named Kent Brantly became the first American diagnosed with Ebola. Brantly had contracted the virus treating patients in Liberia, and when he returned to the US for medical care, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all broadcast live footage of a police-escorted ambulance transporting him from an Air Force base to Atlanta’s Emory Hospital. As news choppers filmed his arrival from above, he exited the ambulance in a large white biohazard suit and walked into the hospital, where highly trained Ebola specialists would treat him in a special isolation unit.
Three days later, another American named Nancy Writebol also arrived at Emory for treatment. Writebol had worked alongside Brantly in Liberia, where she too had been exposed to the disease. The arrival of a second Ebola-infected person in the US generated more breathless news coverage. Although infectious disease experts emphasized that the broader public was not at risk, fear and misinformation about the potential for a domestic Ebola outbreak ricocheted around the internet.
The Education of an Idealist Page 46