He defended the risks by citing Cambodian self-determination. “It is the choice of these people to come here, and we must respect that choice,” he told Philip Shenon of the New York Times. When Shenon mentioned the savagery of the Khmer Rouge, Vieira de Mello snapped, “I don’t need anybody to tell me about that history.The Cambodians who are returning here are Ph.D.s in that history.”23 But sometimes he did in fact make it sound as though he had lost sight of the bloodshed. After he left Cambodia, he would recall bringing journalists to Khmer Rouge lands so that “they could show to the world, to the international media that they were not the monsters that everybody believed they were.” Even though the monstrosity of the Khmer Rouge leadership had long been proven,Vieira de Mello simply did not keep it foremost in his mind.
He asked Lynch to base himself with the returnees in Yeah Ath so as to give UNHCR a pair of “eyes and ears” on the ground. Lynch agreed without hesitating. He made clear that Lynch should stay in Yeah Ath around the clock. “I don’t want to hear about you driving back to the Thai border to sleep,” Vieira de Mello said.
Initially Lynch had company, as Vieira de Mello had prevailed upon the Khmer Rouge authorities to allow an UNTAC civil police presence. But the American lawyer had watched in amusement as the UNTAC police attempted to set up shop in the inaccessible village. As a UN helicopter delivered a portable toilet, the wire snapped and the toilet tumbled into the Tonle Sap River. When the UN police tried to lower their housing containers into the area, the Khmer Rouge began shooting at them, and they fled in panic. Only later did they learn that the guerrillas had not been firing aggressively but had in fact been trying to alert the strangers that they were on the verge of making house in a minefield. Unsurprisingly, the UNTAC police did not last long in Yeah Ath. When Hun Sen’s forces attacked the village, the Fijian police voluntarily handed their vehicles to the Khmer Rouge, and soon packed up and left.
Even though reaching Yeah Ath posed enormous challenges, Vieira de Mello loved making the journey. He appreciated Lynch’s dedication. “I hear you’re living in a hammock,” he teased. “The returnees have already built houses for themselves, and look at the example you are setting!” Always one who prized languages, he urged Lynch, who already spoke Thai, to work on improving his Khmer. “All you do is sit under a tree,” he said playfully, “at least learn the damn language!” Lynch found it intensely annoying that, although Vieira de Mello knew only a few dozen words of Khmer, he pronounced them so flawlessly that Cambodians often mistook him for one of their own.
Vieira de Mello’s long-range radio call sign was TIN MINE, and he gave Lynch the moniker TIN MINE ONE. Months later Lynch inquired of his colleague Assadi about the origins of the strange moniker, and Assadi told him that it had nothing to do with Cambodia’s mining potential. Rather, it derived from Vieira de Mello’s favorite disco in Malaysia, which was called Tin Mine and which he remembered fondly from his days chairing the negotiations over the return of the Vietnamese boat people.
Vieira de Mello respected the risks that Lynch was taking by living on his own among the Khmer Rouge, but he did not cut the American any slack. Lynch had received two gifts from his Khmer Rouge hosts—the hammock and a pair of their light military boots. In presenting Lynch with the boots, the Khmer Rouge soldiers told him that if he stepped on a mine in the boots, he would lose a foot instead of an entire leg. Lynch, naturally, wore the boots everywhere. But Vieira de Mello spotted Lynch’s footwear on one of his visits. “What are you wearing?” he asked, enraged. “Take those off. You are here as an employee of the United Nations. Don’t you go native on me!” But his pique passed quickly. Several months later, when UNHCR rotated Lynch to Kenya, Vieira de Mello called Lynch’s boss in order to pay the highest compliment he could. “Put Jamie to good use,” he said. “He really knows how to work with thugs.”
Six
WHITE CAR SYNDROME
Vieira de Mello was bringing the refugees home, but he could not save the UN mission as a whole. Nor could he preserve the exuberance that he had felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw that while the UN system could manage humanitarian tasks like the one he had been handed, it could not yet deliver either economic or physical security, the two ingredients crucial for a country’s long-term stability. Irrespective of how many refugees the UN helped return, he knew the standing of the UNTAC mission would continue to plunge.
EXPECTATION GAPS
The major donor countries were willing to spend enormous sums on highly visible tasks like bringing refugees home and holding elections, but they were not willing to rebuild Cambodian infrastructure or spur economic development until they were sure that the country would not return to war. And since the Soviet Union, Cambodia’s former benefactor, had slashed its assistance, Cambodia’s health, education, and civil administration sectors were starved for funds.
In a phenomenon that would become known as the White Car Syndrome, prices in Cambodia had soared with the arrival of 30,000 foreigners. The UN spent some $300,000 per day for bed and board for mission staff.1 For living expenses UN staff received an extra allowance of $140 per day—equal to the average Cambodian’s yearly salary in 1991, and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian de-miner.2 Because of these high UN salaries, the price of gas and pork doubled. Cambodians had salivated at word that UNTAC would bring a whopping $2 billion budget to Cambodia. But in practice the bulk of UN funds were spent outside the country on the purchase of equipment and supplies, or on salary payments to foreign UNTAC peacekeepers and civilians. And indeed, while the UN boasted of the jobs it was creating, the $2 million spent on the salaries of Cambodian staff in 1992 was less than that spent on UN vehicle repair.3 Those jobs that the UN did create for Cambodians would not exist beyond UNTAC’s departure in 1993.
Vieira de Mello worried for Cambodia’s future but also for its present, as a “rejection syndrome” could take hold if Cambodians believed that returning refugees were being treated better than those who had remained in Cambodia during the civil war.4 By late 1992 a French businessman named Jean-Marie Bertron, who had opened the hugely successful Café No Problem in Phnom Penh, had packed his bags and returned to Europe.“The UN,” Bertron told the Washington Post, “has turned a princess into a hooker.”5
Some thirty donor countries had combined to pledge some $880 million to Cambodia, but a year into the UNTAC mission they had disbursed only $100 million.6 Roger Lawrence, the head of UNTAC’s rehabilitation pillar, described the caution of rich countries: “We are in a vicious circle here in which the peace process founders in part because the economic component isn’t working—and the economic part is not working because the peace process is perceived as foundering.Whole regions of Cambodia haven’t seen any tangible evidence of reconstruction.”7 Rural areas were especially slighted.
UN officials on the ground in Cambodia were largely powerless to break the cycle because resources for development had to come from governments. Vieira de Mello embraced what were called Quick Impact Projects (QIPs), which were executed by private aid organizations but paid for by UNHCR. The first was a two-week project employing Cambodians to repair a bridge in Siem Reap province. Other QIPs improved access to clean water and set up mobile health units, or distributed rice seeds and fertilizer, along with fishery equipment, water jars, and mosquito nets. A few offered start-up loans for farmers or gave assistance to vulnerable elderly persons, orphans, or amputees. Projects would eventually be undertaken in all of Cambodia’s twenty-one provinces. At a time when instability deterred investors, he hoped the QIPs would serve as an essential bridge between emergency relief and longer-term development. Unfortunately, by the end of 1993, UNHCR had spent only $3.5 million on QIPs, a pittance of what was needed.8
For all the country’s divisions—between rich and poor, urban and rural, capitalist and Communist—Cambodians seemed virtually united in their conviction that the Paris agreement was unraveling. Vieira de Mello had succeeded in maintaining humanitarian ties to the Khmer Rou
ge, but this approach had not yielded the political dividend he had anticipated. UN peacekeepers were not seen as providing security, and they were increasingly despised. Between July and November 1992 UNTAC repatriated eighty-one military personnel for disciplinary reasons, including fifty-six Bulgarians. Some blue helmets were involved in smuggling, sexual harassment, and reckless driving that resulted in the deaths of Cambodians. General Sanderson could investigate incidents, but only a soldier’s own national military superiors could ship a transgressor home or garnish his wages.9 Just as Vieira de Mello had seen in Lebanon, Sanderson saw that the price of operating under a UN flag was that you lacked unified command and control of your troops.
HIV/AIDS, which had not been discussed much in Cambodia before the arrival of the peacekeepers, was raging, and Cambodians blamed the UN soldiers for their frequent dalliances with prostitutes.10 The acronym UNTAC became ridiculed as “UN Transmission of AIDS to Cambodians.”11 The mission’s reputation for sexual predation became so pronounced that even the Khmer Rouge, in their isolation, used radio broadcasts to accuse French troops of being “too busy with prostitutes to check on the presence of Vietnamese soldiers.”12 Instead of publicly condemning prostitution, Akashi, the head of the mission, astonished civil society leaders when he told them, “I am not a puritan. Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.”13 Akashi’s comments unleashed a public firestorm, and French paratroopers felt compelled to dismantle the rickety brothels that had sprung up beside their base. UN doctors ordered 800,000 condoms for distribution among soldiers, and UN officers allegedly told their soldiers not to park their vehicles in front of brothels where they could be spotted.
It was not just UN soldiers who were raising eyebrows. Some UN civilian officials developed relationships with Cambodian women who did not speak English.The power differential made it hard to gauge how consensual the relationships were. With his “boys will be boys” comments, Akashi had disqualified himself from speaking out on gender-related matters, and other senior managers said that they did not have the right to interfere in the aid workers’ relationships with autonomous adults.Vieira de Mello steered clear of the issue. “Because Sergio played fast and loose in his own relationships with women,” recalls a female UN employee, “it would have been very hard for him to take the moral high ground, so he just kept his mouth shut.”
SECURITY MELTDOWN
Since the Khmer Rouge had refused to disarm, and since Akashi’s UN administration had opted not to assert meaningful “direct control” over the key ministries, the only parts of the Paris agreement that seemed salvageable were the repatriation operation, which had picked up pace, and the elections, which had been scheduled for May 1993. Hun Sen saw that Prince Sihanouk’s son Ranariddh was his main opposition and began physically assaulting candidates in his party. UN police continued to trickle into Cambodia, but they were spread too thin to investigate human rights complaints, protect voter registration sites, or guard political party offices.14 Lacking the power to make arrests, they could not stop Hun Sen’s hit squads from assaulting political opponents or Khmer Rouge forces from attacking ethnic Vietnamese with impunity.
Prince Sihanouk denounced UNTAC’s failure to punish Hun Sen’s attacks. He said that while he and the Cambodian people had initially welcomed the UN, they had come to realize that “UNTAC is a terrible cocktail of races who do not even understand each other.” Sihanouk said that thanks to the arrival of thousands of Vietnamese prostitutes, and the tremendous spike in prices caused by the peacekeepers’ arrival, “UNTAC is detested, hated.”15 He criticized the UN’s decision to proceed with the elections. “In order to be able to tell the UN and the world that they have succeeded in their mission, UNTAC is going to have an election despite the fact none of the conditions for the election have been met. None. It is a hideous comedy.”16
In January 1993 Akashi reacted to the criticism—which had initially come only from the Khmer Rouge but was now emanating from all sides—by creating, for the first time in the history of the UN, a UN special prosecutor’s office with the power to arrest and punish those suspected of committing political crimes and human rights violations. The very first UN arrest was made on January 11, when a Cambodian government official was apprehended while he was destroying an opposition party office with an ax. However, because the UN did not itself have the facilities or the personnel to prosecute suspects, it handed the man over to the Cambodian police, who promptly released him.17
With Cambodia increasingly resembling the Wild West, the Khmer Rouge too grew yet more brazen. In December 1992 they took some sixty-seven UNTAC peacekeepers hostage, charging them with spying on behalf of Hun Sen and the Vietnamese.18 On December 27, 1992, they massacred thirteen ethnic Vietnamese, including four children, in a river village.The killers scattered leaflets that demanded that Akashi rid the country of Vietnamese. A month later the Khmer Rouge killed eight people, including three local policemen and an eight-year-old girl.19
In his correspondence with UN Headquarters, Vieira de Mello noted a “clear trend” in the Khmer Rouge ranks toward “isolationism, introversion and pathological suspiciousness.” But while his boss Akashi favored sanctions, he continued to believe that further punitive measures would only cause the Khmer Rouge to opt out of the political process altogether.20 On March 10, 1993, in another fishing village in Siem Reap province, the Khmer Rouge killed thirty-three ethnic Vietnamese and wounded another twenty-nine. Among those killed were eight children and a baby.21 It was the worst massacre of the postwar period. On March 27, 1993, a Bangladeshi soldier was killed in the first deliberate murder of UNTAC personnel. By May, the month of the vote, eleven UNTAC civilians and soldiers had been killed.
“ONE IN MANY UNKNOWN STORIES”
Remarkably, amid all the massacres and military skirmishes,Vieira de Mello’s repatriation effort proceeded smoothly. The operation that filled him with the most pride involved a weary and malaria-infected group of displaced Montagnards (French for “mountain people”) whom UNTAC soldiers had encountered on patrol in the dense forests of northeastern Cambodia. The Montagnards had lived in the central highlands of Vietnam and teamed up with U.S. Special Forces to fight the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In 1979, facing persecution for their pro-American allegiances, they had fled from Vietnam to Cambodia, where they were also shunned by Cambodians hostile to anybody associated with Vietnam.
Throughout long bouts of fighting and hardship, the Montagnards had relied on shortwave radio sermons and a few worn Bibles translated into their dialect in order to maintain their Christian faith.22 The Montagnards had attracted some interest in the United States in 1985, when Lutheran missionaries in Raleigh, North Carolina, helped resettle some two hundred there. But until Vieira de Mello and UNHCR took interest in them, the rest of their group had languished in the Cambodian bush.
The Security Council had tasked UNTAC with demobilizing and disarming all military elements, but when the Montagnards were discovered, their commander, Colonel Y-Pen Ayun, was reluctant to comply for fear his people would be forced back to Vietnam. He said his men could turn over their arms only if they got instructions to do so from their leader, a general whom they had been waiting to hear from since 1975. UN officials had the unfortunate task of breaking the bad news to Ayun that their leader had been executed by the Khmer Rouge almost as soon as he had traveled to Phnom Penh nearly two decades before. When Ayun was told the news, he and his men protested, asking the UN for proof of the general’s murder, but eventually their eyes filled with tears and they realized that their long journey in the wilderness was over. Ayun’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Y-Hinnie, told Nate Thayer of the Far Eastern Economic Review, “I am not angry, but very sad that the Americans forgot us. The Americans are like our elder brother, so it is very sad when your brother forgets you.”23 Ayun told UN officials that since his people were unwelcome in both Vie
tnam and Cambodia, they wanted to join their kin in North Carolina.
Vieira de Mello knew that responding to the plight of the Montagnards would consume sizable staff resources and would have scant bearing on Cambodia’s future. But he saw an opportunity to close one of the many doors the cold war had left ajar, to personally guarantee the safety of a forgotten ethnic minority, and, not incidentally, to cater to a useful and vocal Christian constituency in the United States. On September 28, 1992, he paid the Montagnards an incognito visit and, in a meeting with Colonel Ayun, produced a pen and a notebook and declared, “Put your disarmament in writing!” After more than thirty years as a fighting force, Ayun wrote in cursive handwriting, “We the Montagnard people . . . have today put down our arms and have agreed to dismantle our military and political movement and stop and never start again any hostile activities of any kinds. We agreed to do all this so that we can become refugees and be resettled in the U.S. where we want to live in peace.”24
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 15