Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

  Once in Cambodia, UN officials were most likely to earn Vieira de Mello’s trust if they worked with him one-on-one. One day Giuseppe de Vincentis, a junior UNHCR official from Italy, ran into his boss in the lobby of the Hotel Cambodiana. Vieira de Mello told him to be prepared to attend a meeting with him that afternoon. De Vincentis, thirty-one, asked if he should wear a jacket and tie, and Vieira de Mello, who himself usually wore one of his “lucky suits”—unflattering pale blue and gray Asian matching tunics and trousers, similar to those donned by Cambodia’s politicians—said he should, elaborating no further. As an overdressed de Vincentis sat stiffly near the hotel’s front desk, his UN colleagues who wandered by teased him about his appearance. When Vieira de Mello finally arrived, he explained that he wanted de Vincentis to accompany him to a meeting with one of the opposition factions. He said that in Lebanon, General Callaghan had occasionally made the mistake of meeting on his own with the Israelis and Palestinians and thus had later lacked corroboration when the parties broke their promises. “Ever since then one of my rules is ‘never discuss sensitive issues without a witness,’ ” Vieira de Mello said. “You are my witness.” As they drove outside Phnom Penh and passed into opposition territory that UN officials had never visited before, he said, “Here’s where we make the sign of the cross, Peppe. I have no idea what lies ahead.” Vieira de Mello did not believe in God, but he remained superstitious and made a habit of appealing, usually playfully, for whatever help he could get.

  Those like de Vincentis who gained entrée to his close inner circle felt privileged to be part of a lithe and dynamic team. Others felt the chill of their boss’s indifference. “If you weren’t charmed by him,” recalls Norah Niland, a thirty-nine-year-old Irish aid worker with UNHCR, “he loved you less.” But most UN officials who knew him were drawn to him. Even Sylvana Foa, a UNHCR spokesperson with whom he frequently sparred, recalls: “When you were with Sergio, he made you feel that you were more beautiful and more interesting than you had ever felt before. When he left you to go and talk to someone else, he’d make you feel that it was a terrible burden for him to have to leave.”

  BEFRIENDING THE POWERFUL

  Of all the Cambodian leaders, Vieira de Mello was most intent on befriending Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the most influential person in Cambodia and perhaps the most colorful character in all of Asia. He knew that the sixty-nine-year-old prince was the only person capable of fostering reconciliation among Cambodia’s warring factions. A gourmand, a womanizer, and a movie director, Sihanouk had been Cambodia’s king and, on ten separate occasions, its prime minister. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had put the royal leader under house arrest and killed three of Sihanouk’s daughters, two of his sons, and fifteen of his grandchildren. Although Sihanouk later maintained lavish palaces in China and North Korea, Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s terror felt that he too had suffered. Without Sihanouk’s mediation, the Paris negotiations would likely not have produced the October 1991 deal.2

  The agreement had also assigned the UN—not Prime Minister Hun Sen—the task of exercising “direct control” over ministries whose performance could have bearing on the outcome of the future elections: defense, foreign affairs, finance, public security, and information. Because Sihanouk was revered by Cambodians, the Paris agreement had named him the chairman of a new quasi-governing body called the Supreme National Council, which included representatives of all four of Cambodia’s main factions, including the Hun Sen government.3 As chairman, it would be his job to prod the factions into sticking to the terms of the deal they had struck in Paris and settling their differences through dialogue.Vieira de Mello saw that the UN would not be able to exercise its ambitious mandate if it did not keep the old man on its side.

  Instead of criticizing Sihanouk for his long absences from Cambodia, as some of his UN colleagues did, Vieira de Mello wrote him lengthy letters by hand and attempted to keep him in the loop even when the prince was at his home in Beijing. In January 1993 Sihanouk would write in French to Vieira de Mello from the Chinese capital in order to thank him for his letters, which, Sihanouk wrote,“reflect your understanding, your goodwill, your concern and, above all, your compassion for our most unfortunate grassroot people.” Sihanouk continued: “You who are so kind to always keep me well informed of your benevolent activities through your letters and documents which all reach me.”4

  Unfortunately, while the Hun Sen government and the Khmer Rouge had managed to come together to sign the Paris agreement, their underlying hatred for each other had not diminished. Indeed, each side had cooperated in the negotiations because it thought that the final agreement would destroy the other—the Khmer Rouge believed that a powerful UN administration would set up shop in Cambodia and run the country, stripping Prime Minister Hun Sen of his power; Hun Sen, for his part, believed that the UN would disarm the Khmer Rouge, thereby defanging his main opponent. Vieira de Mello worried about what might happen if Hun Sen refused to surrender power or if the Khmer Rouge refused to relinquish their weapons. UN planners in New York were so busy scrambling to round up 22,000 UN military and civilian staff that they had no time to undertake worst-case contingency planning.5 In fact, UN Headquarters did not even have a strategic planning unit. Thus, in Cambodia and elsewhere, once the Security Council decided on the contours of a UN mission, UN personnel on the ground often felt they lacked the freedom—not to mention the wherewithal—to change course.

  Vieira de Mello did not like what he saw of Hun Sen, whose regime was taking advantage of the security vacuum that existed in advance of the arrival of UN blue helmets. In the months preceding the official launch of the UNTAC mission, he received daily disturbing reports of government-backed thugs carrying out revenge killings and other violent acts. Officials in Hun Sen’s government who assumed that they would soon be replaced by UN officials sold off government office desks, chairs, and light fixtures and pocketed the money. Fearing the UN would soon take their guns away, many Cambodian soldiers took to armed banditry.6 “Security cannot wait,” Vieira de Mello said. “If the peacekeepers don’t get here soon,” he told Bos, “they will have to make peace.”

  In Cambodia Vieira de Mello saw that the twin UN values of peace and human rights clashed. From a human rights perspective, the Khmer Rouge deserved to be punished or, at the very least, shunned.Yet the letter of the Paris agreement required UN officials—and Cambodians—to treat the Khmer Rouge as one faction among many. He could understand why traumatized Cambodians might find this difficult, and he was surprised when the president of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, who had not set foot in Phnom Penh since his notorious regime had been overthrown in 1978, was able to slip quietly into town a few days after Sihanouk. Khieu moved into a downtown office, tried not to draw attention to himself, and seemed open to the idea of participating in the transitional Supreme National Council—an audaciously trusting approach for one so senior in one of the bloodiest regimes in modern memory. “I’m going to live here for a very long time,” Khieu declared. “I am very happy to be back.”7 It was a scene that would have been unthinkable just a year before.

  But the calm did not last. No sooner had Khieu and his Maoist associates taken up their new offices in Phnom Penh than they were greeted by thousands of angry demonstrators. As Khieu and Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge minister of defense, huddled inside, protesters charged the building with hatchets, rocks, and sticks, breaking the windows and chanting “Kill, kill, kill!” Lightly armed Cambodian troops who were loyal to Hun Sen stood by as the mob kicked in the front gate and barged into the house, stealing $200,000 of the Khmer Rouge’s money and setting much of the cash ablaze. Hun Sen arrived at the scene, but he did not order the mob to disperse.When the demonstrators finally reached Khieu, they beat him with their fists and sticks and attempted to choke him with electric wire. By the time government soldiers actually intervened—four hours into the ordeal—Khieu, who had put on a steel helmet, was badly bruised and cut, bleeding heavily from a gash to his head.8
John Sanderson, the Australian general who would soon become the commander of the UNTAC peacekeeping force, happened to be in Phnom Penh on a UN planning mission. When Sanderson went to Hun Sen to complain about the attack, the Cambodian premier denied responsibility. “The people turned out to protest the Khmer Rouge,” Hun Sen said.“It would have been wrong of me in this new democracy to deny them their right of free expression.” Vieira de Mello trusted neither the genocidal Khmer Rouge nor the tyrannical Hun Sen. He thought only Sihanouk had Cambodia’s interests at heart, but the prince said he was powerless to stop the violence.“I am only a figurehead,” he admitted publicly.9 This was a disturbing confession. If Sihanouk, the father of modern Cambodia, could not exert control over Hun Sen, Vieira de Mello wondered, how would the UN?

  “GETTING REAL”

  Vieira de Mello and his staff discussed the many things that could go wrong once they began returning refugees to Cambodia. Six of the seven Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand were effectively controlled by one of the three opposition factions, each of whom could rescind its support for repatriation at any time. The Khmer Rouge housed more than 77,000 Cambodians in their camps, and they had never before permitted camp inhabitants to move freely.

  Even if the refugees were not coerced outright, Vieira de Mello knew that they might prove too terrified to budge. Those Cambodians who had been born and raised in border camps had been reared on a steady diet of propaganda, mostly about the bloodthirstiness of Hun Sen.Vieira de Mello also had concerns about the refugees’ self-sufficiency after years of receiving clean water, medical services, and food aid from relief groups.10 The camps had become like small towns. The Site 2 camp, for instance, had a population of 216,000, the second-largest gathering of Cambodians in the world, after Phnom Penh. It contained hospitals, pharmacies, Buddhist temples, factories, a newspaper, courts, a prison, gambling dens, an alcohol treatment center, and a red-light district.11 “International generosity may have gone too far in terms of the care and maintenance, even the spoon-feeding, of Cambodians in exile in the Thai border camps,” Vieira de Mello told a reporter.“So we wonder if the refugees are now capable of reacquiring initiative and independence.”12 The mortality rate in the camps was three times lower than in Cambodia. The poverty-stricken country had the world’s lowest life expectancy of 49.7 years. And it was unclear how conditions would improve, as fewer than three thousand Cambodians had been educated beyond secondary school.13

  Vieira de Mello inherited a detailed plan for repatriation. The French government had spent $675,000 hiring a satellite company, Spot Image, to survey the country.14 The satellite photographs showed some 571,000 acres of “potentially available arable land” in western Cambodia. On the basis of this finding, the Cambodia experts at UNHCR had prepared an elaborate, 242-page repatriation “Blue Book.”15 UN officials had announced that each refugee family would receive five acres of this arable land, as well as agricultural implements to till it. UNHCR staff in the camps showed videos and distributed flyers showcasing the farmland. It seemed that all that remained for Vieira de Mello to do was to execute a well-mapped formula for return.

  But as he and his staff began traveling to territory in Cambodia that had previously been off-limits, the scheme began to sit badly with them. By their very definition, the satellite photographs were not able to detect two features of the land that would necessarily topple the best-laid plans: land mines and malaria-ridden mosquitoes.

  Vieira de Mello had been told that Cambodia possessed nearly one mine for every two Cambodians and that the country had the highest proportion of amputees in the world.16 Still, it was not until he contracted HALO Trust, a British charity, to conduct on-the-ground surveys of possible resettlement areas that he understood how deadly the terrain was. Out of 173,000 acres it surveyed, HALO Trust found that only 76,000 were “probably clear of mines,” 69,000 were “probably mined,” and 28,000 were “heavily mined.” Desperate for land so as to be able to fulfill the promise UNHCR had made to refugees, he asked which UN peacekeeping units had been assigned to do the de-mining and learned that none of the countries sending troops to Cambodia were prepared to volunteer them for such a risky assignment. As another UNHCR official put it: “The only de-mining going on now is when people tread on them.”17 Because the fate of refugees would depend in large measure on the removal of the country’s mines, Vieira de Mello was made head of the Cambodia Mine Action Center. By the time of his departure in the spring of 1993, however, the UN had helped clear only 15,000 out of an estimated eight million mines and other unexploded ordnance.18

  Andrew Thomson, who had more experience working in Cambodia than other UN personnel, was the bearer of bad news on malaria. Soon after arriving he got his hands on a recent malaria survey and superimposed the results on a land map of Cambodia, marking Xs through those districts that were too infested to responsibly resettle refugees. He brought the map to Vieira de Mello and told him UNHCR had to declare “no-go” areas. “If we send people back to these areas,” Thomson said, “we’ll be sending them into a death trap.” Vieira de Mello looked at the map and observed that most of the areas that Thomson had marked off-limits were areas that had traditionally been strongholds of the Khmer Rouge. If the Khmer Rouge leaders were told that Cambodian refugees in Thailand could go to territory Hun Sen controlled, but not to theirs, the guerrillas would likely abandon the peace process.The repatriation operation had not even begun, and already the immediate safety of the refugees was colliding with the long-term stability of the peace process. Vieira de Mello waved off Thomson. “We can’t wait for perfect conditions before we bring people back,” he said. “But these aren’t imperfect conditions,” Thomson countered. “These are deadly conditions. Do you want to be responsible for mass death?” Vieira de Mello conceded part of the point, saying that UNHCR would begin by resettling people to areas where malaria was less prevalent and decide later about the rest of the country. Every decision seemed to be one that carried with it necessary benefits and potentially catastrophic costs.19

  From his trips into the hinterland and his conversations with refugees and his own staff, Vieira de Mello had reluctantly concluded that UNHCR stood no chance of delivering the land that it had promised. He would have to throw out the detailed Blue Book that he had received on arrival. He lamented the stark “contradiction between allowing free choice and the impossibility of satisfying it” and set out to find an alternative to what he called the “silly, irresponsible offer of five acres of free land.”20

  Vieira de Mello summoned a cross section of his field staff to Phnom Penh to discuss the way forward. On the day of the minisummit, the UN generators, which functioned only intermittently, were not working, and without air-conditioning UN staffers wilted in the heat. “I’m not allowing any of you to leave this room until we come up with a solution,” he said, only half joking, as sweat saturated his clothes.

  Determined to extract ideas from his team, and sensitive to the need to secure staff buy-in, he had a habit of allowing discussions to descend into angry free-for-alls in which junior officials felt free to talk back to him. He was less concerned with the rank of a colleague than he was with laying the foundation for a smooth return operation. If a twenty-eight-year-old rookie aid worker had a useful suggestion to make, he was all ears. He saw no inconsistency in soliciting that person’s views alongside those of key ambassadors in Phnom Penh. To that end, he hosted a wine-and-cheese cocktail hour most Sundays in his room at the Hotel Cambodiana, with Charles Twining, the U.S. ambassador.

  Vieira de Mello instinctively relied for feedback not only on international staff and diplomats but also on the Cambodians who worked with the UN—the drivers, translators, security guards, and messengers. He learned their names and their life stories and regularly inquired after their families. “He made the clerks and drivers feel like they were quite somebody, like they were indispensable to this grand mission,” recalls Jahanshah Assadi, the UNHCR field representative in Aranyaprathet, Thailan
d. Once, in rural Cambodia, Vieira de Mello’s own driver faltered as he attempted to drive across an irrigation canal on a narrow two-plank “bridge.” If the vehicle’s tires strayed an inch in either direction, the car would have tumbled ten feet down into the canal below. Seeing his driver sweat at the prospect of endangering UN officials’ lives,Vieira de Mello intervened. “Allow me,” he said, taking the wheel and adding a white lie so as not to undermine the driver’s authority. “This is my favorite part of the drive.”

  In a meeting in Phnom Penh, a senior UNHCR official was laying into the local staff for their poor bookkeeping habits when Vieira de Mello cut him off midsentence.“Have you stopped for one second to think about what our local staff have gone through?” he asked. “Do you expect them to have developed perfect bookkeeping habits when their families were being slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge?” He grew angrier as he continued. “Instead of criticizing them, why don’t you take the time to show them how to keep proper financial records?” he asked. “After everything they have survived, I don’t think they’ll have trouble improving their accounting.”

  His deputy François Fouinat suggested that UNHCR replace the offer of land with that of cash. In desperate need of a new plan,Vieira de Mello leaped at the idea, even though his bosses in New York and Geneva had already rejected it. For many in the refugee-advocacy community, the idea of providing each refugee with a lump sum of hard currency was sacrilege. Large amounts of money would suddenly be circulating in communities that had never seen such sums before. It could lead to theft, violent crime, and simple profligacy. It could also cause a wholesale demographic transformation—instead of moving back to rural areas, where they might farm, refugees might move en masse to Cambodia’s major cities. This would clog the towns with temporary big spenders who would have no means of supporting themselves after the money ran out.