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

by Samantha Power

  walked to the lead vehicle in the convoy, where Vieira de Mello was seated with his French bodyguard, and tapped on the glass of the armored personnel carrier. The French soldier opened the door and raised his machine gun as a barrier to keep Banbury away. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Vieira de Mello said, smiling broadly at the young American, whom he had not seen since Cambodia. “Tony, what are you doing here?!” Although he had been impatient to depart, he stepped out of his vehicle and inquired about Banbury’s recent posting in Haiti and his plans with UNPROFOR. “There we were in the dark, at the Sarajevo airport with gunfire going off in the background, the UN mission crumbling, and the NATO threat of air strikes hanging over us,” recalls Banbury. “And Sergio calmly emerged from the armored personnel carrier and made me feel, for those few minutes, like nothing in the world was more important than me.” Vieira de Mello instructed the French soldier to make room for Banbury in one of the vehicles, and the convoy set off in the dark.

  They arrived on the outskirts of Gorazde just after midnight. Vieira de Mello saw houses still burning, dead animals on the roadside, and crowds of refugees crammed into the roofless hulks of charred houses. He drove into town and headed to the central bank, where he found Stogran and the other UN observers looking exhausted and unshaven. “The only food left here is what is left of UNHCR rations,” the Canadian told him.

  The next morning, Vieira de Mello gathered his small political team for a morning meeting. Groggy UN officials found their boss looking meticulously groomed.“What did you do?” Banbury asked. “Pack a shower in your suitcase?” “If we look our best,” he replied, “we will remind people here of the dignity they used to have. And we will show them that the siege has been broken.” When Mark Baskin, a forty-one-year-old American, asked, “What should we do?” Vieira de Mello answered, “Walk around.” “Walk around for what?” Baskin asked. “Show the flag,” Vieira de Mello said. “Then the people will know that the UN has come to town.”

  Although the shooting had largely stopped, team members saw bullet casings, shrapnel, pockmarks, and bloodstains on the buildings. Vieira de Mello was determined to make the UN as visible as possible, and he was intrepid in that pursuit. Surrounded by UNPROFOR soldiers decked out in helmets and Kevlar, he strode around town in slacks and a winter parka, crossing the downtown bridge that had been the scene of fierce battles. The sound of gunfire and the presence of Serb militiamen hardly seemed to register with him. “We were completely surrounded,” recalls Nick Costello, a Serbian-speaking British UN officer. “We were vulnerable from all the high ground, and as we drove around in our shiny white vehicles, we made ripe targets.” Vieira de Mello’s nonchalance was strategic. “Normalcy is returning to Gorazde,” he told his aides. “If we show the people that we are not afraid, we can ease their own fears. If we act as though life is normal, life will become more normal.”

  Stogran, who had felt ignored by his UN superiors when it mattered, was suddenly overwhelmed by UN officials who had not suffered through the siege and yet who now overran his team’s meager resources. He had used diesel containers to store water from the local river in case of emergencies, but he found the newcomers unthinkingly pouring the river water into the generator, believing it was fuel. “This is classic UN,” Vieira de Mello said to Stogran, acknowledging the strain he must have felt. “So many chefs, we can’t even find the kitchen!”

  Stogran found the self-styled “UN saviors” uncurious about the past and sanctimonious about how the Serbs and Bosnians could be brought into line in the future. Though they had never set foot in Gorazde before, they had their maps and their preexisting assumptions and asked few questions. But Vieira de Mello was different. “You were the voice of this place,” he told Stogran. “You made it far harder for the politicians to look away.” The beleaguered major was touched. “After every conversation with Sergio,” he recalls, “I walked away feeling a deep and totally novel sense of calm.”

  At around 5 p.m. on Vieira de Mello’s first full day in Gorazde, the Serbs began to leave the town in accordance with the ultimatum. But as they retreated, they adopted a scorched-earth policy, blowing up houses and the sole water-pumping station in the area.Vieira de Mello was incensed. “This was the most outraged I had ever seen him,” recalls Costello.“He was full of passion, his voice was trembling, but at the same time he was trying to maintain his charm with the Serbs.”

  At midnight he and Costello drove in their Land Rover to a village called Kopaci on the outskirts of town. The Serbs were blocking the entry of a second UN supply convoy, and he hoped to negotiate its release. A line of UNHCR relief trucks stood stalled roadside, while the surrounding hills blazed with fire. Suddenly, in the headlights, he spotted the burly figure of General Mladić, who was yelling about the desecration of the town’s old Serbian Orthodox church. When Mladić saw him, he seemed pleased and beckoned him. Mladić used Costello’s flashlight to steer them to the grave-yard behind the church, where he directed Vieira de Mello’s attention to the smashed headstones and to the freshly dug graves of Serb soldiers who had died in recent fighting. Vieira de Mello, who was not entirely comfortable being led into the pitch black by this suspected war criminal, noticed that Mladić was weeping. “Don’t ever forget what you have seen here,” Mladić said. He shook Vieira de Mello’s hand and said he would at last allow the stalled UN relief convoy to proceed into Gorazde. It was 2 a.m.27

  Vieira de Mello did not have a big enough team or enough time to thoroughly certify whether the Serbs had withdrawn all their heavy weapons from the twelve-mile exclusion zone. As he told the press, “In these hills and forests, we don’t have the means to tell you they are clear.”28 But this was somewhat disingenuous. He knew that he did not want to see NATO air strikes, and as the person who would determine whether the Serbs were in violation of NATO’s terms, he had the power to prevent them. Costello remembers the exchange that preceded Vieira de Mello’s final communication with Akashi before he announced his verdict: “Sergio asked us, nudge nudge, wink wink, ‘Have you verified the weapons are out of the exclusion zone?’ and we said, ‘Yes, we have.’ We lied to NATO,” recalls Costello. “We knew NATO was itching to do air strikes and we knew it would have been the wrong thing to do. We physically couldn’t check all the sites—we had run out of time—but we also knew that confirming Serb compliance was what was best for everyone.”

  Vieira de Mello even compromised on the two-mile area in the center of town that was meant to be free of soldiers. As early as April 25 Serb militia were found there. The Serbs said these police had remained so as to protect Serb civilians, but the “policemen” were obviously soldiers who had just changed from green army to blue police uniforms.Vieira de Mello opted to let the matter rest.

  On April 27 Akashi declared publicly that the Serbs were in “effective compliance” with the ultimatum. Thus, for a second time in two months, he announced that he would not call for NATO air power.29

  The Bosnians were crushed, as they knew that their only lasting reprieve would come if NATO stopped the Serbs militarily, and UNPROFOR seemed intent on preventing that from happening. But Vieira de Mello made the implausible claim that he had acted in accordance with the will of the Bosnian people.“I was in Gorazde. I spoke with the inhabitants,” he told a Croatian journalist. “The majority of them agreed with me, because if we had struck from the air, they would have been worse off.”30

  MUDDLING ALONG

  Although Vieira de Mello had spent only four days in Gorazde, he returned to Zagreb with a new mystique. Izumi Nakamitsu, Akashi’s special assistant, saw him back at headquarters and inquired, “Weren’t you frightened about being bombed?” He smiled. “Izumi, please, you know they would never bomb while I was there.” Most people recalled his grace under pressure.The tales of his brushing his teeth with Italian mineral water fed his increasingly hallowed persona.

  Akashi contentedly took credit for the apparent calming of tensions. He responded to a congratulatory message from
Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali with a letter of his own:

  Mr. Secretary-General,

  I am touched by your kind message. I am proud that UNPROFOR has again proved its ability to control a dangerous situation. Under your wise guidance I will continue to serve the cause of our Organization by combining firmness with flexibility and by harnessing power with diplomacy.

  Kindest regards,

  Yasushi Akashi31

  But flush with confidence, Akashi then sparked a minidrama at UN Headquarters in New York, causing already substantial fissures between the United States and the UN to widen. Washington, the UN’s largest funder, had always been hard on the organization for its financial laxity. But as the isolationist wing of the Republican Party gained strength in the post-cold war world, some members of Congress had started calling for outright withdrawal from the UN, and both Republicans and Democrats had begun invoking UN peacekeeping failures in Somalia and Bosnia as grounds for cutting off vital U.S. funds. The normally reserved Akashi gave an interview to the New York Times in which he suggested that since Somalia, the United States had lost its nerve, becoming “somewhat reticent, somewhat afraid, timid and tentative,” avoiding putting its own troops where they were needed to help in “situations like Gorazde.”32 Akashi, who was himself extremely timid, wanted U.S. troops on the ground because he felt U.S. officials would then share his opposition to using air power. But Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, lit into Akashi, calling it “totally counterproductive for an international civil servant to be criticizing any government” and adding that UN officials “should remember where their salaries are paid.” Appearing before the UN Security Council, Albright warned, “Statements such as these cannot help but call into question the utility of further U.S. contributions, financial or otherwise, to UN peacekeeping. It is no secret that at present UN peacekeeping is not popular among either the American people or the U.S. Congress.”33

  While Akashi’s statement had been manifestly accurate, Albright’s rebuttal made it clear who buttered Akashi’s bread. There was simply no way, structurally, that a senior official in the UN could get away with publicly criticizing the wealthiest and most powerful country in the organization.

  And the hole Akashi was digging for himself grew deeper. In early May he crossed a line that stunned even his harshest critics: He instructed UNPROFOR peacekeepers to escort Serb tanks through the heavy weapons exclusion zone ringing Sarajevo, effectively using blue helmets to shield offensive weapons that were being transferred for use at another battlefront. Vieira de Mello could not believe his ears when he received news of Akashi’s blunder. “Here was Sergio, who spent hours every day cultivating these relationships, and finessing these incredibly intricate deals, and suddenly Akashi offers to help the Serbs move their weapons,” recalls Simon Shadbolt, Rose’s military assistant. “He was horrified.” So was Prime Minister Silajdžić, who declared, “Whatever credibility the UN and the international community had has been ruined . . . by the behavior of UN representatives here.”34 U.S. Senate minority leader Bob Dole called for Akashi’s resignation. “Akashi’s approach is one of appeasement,” Dole said in a statement:

  He meets with war criminals and calls them friends. And when the United States refuses to send soldiers under UN command, he calls us timid. Akashi should be sent packing to a post far away where his weakness and indecisive-ness will not cost lives . . . UN officials speak of the need for neutrality as though they are referees in a sports match. The problem is that this game is aggression.35

  When I saw Vieira de Mello in Zagreb and asked him what he thought of what became known as “tank-gate,” he was unwilling as ever to break ranks. He went as far as he could, answering, “Not ideal.”

  With Akashi discredited,Vieira de Mello became the only senior UN official whom the Bosnian government would see. Although he had supported the approach taken by Akashi and Rose, he somehow escaped criticism. “He was a man first, a UN official second,” explains Silajdžić. “He always made us feel he understood our point of view and was brainstorming constantly to help us get what we needed. He didn’t hide behind the usual UN excuses.” Although Gorazde was no longer being shelled, the enclave was still racked by violence. UN troops were being shot at by both sides, and Serb troops returned inside the two-mile zone. “It is tense,” Mark Baskin, the UN political officer, wrote from Gorazde. “We seek direction.”36

  Vieira de Mello felt as though he had little to offer. UN peacekeepers were back in a situation much like that in southern Lebanon, where they had been bossed about by Israeli troops and their Christian proxies. Just as he had done then for General Callaghan, he drafted letters of protest on his boss’s behalf. As then, he could only warn Karadžić that if he didn’t remove Serb gunmen from Gorazde, “I shall have no alternative but to report to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and, through him, to the Security Council.”37 The Serbs knew that they could do as they pleased. A Karadžić aide wrote back mischievously that the armed Serbs in the Gorazde exclusion zone were not in fact soldiers—they just could not find “anything to wear” other than uniforms.38 Vieira de Mello knew that the UN could not keep traveling to the brink and back. “We must get away from this succession of exclusion zones, violations, cease-fires which go nowhere,” he told reporters at a press conference. “We need a political solution.”39

  He wondered if a Cyprus-like stalemate was the best that the former Yugoslavia could hope for. At a May 10 meeting with a delegation of potential donors, he exclaimed dogmatically that in the Balkans “hatred is the bottom line!”40 He saw that the UN brand could end up permanently soiled if it remained implicated in a mission that was no more achievable than Somalia had been. The countries on the Security Council that had sent the peacekeepers to Bosnia with an ambiguous mandate and insufficient means were the ones letting the Bosnians down. But it was the “UN,” and not the responsible individual governments, that would take the blame. “Americans are justifiably wary about putting troops at the United Nations’ disposal,” said a New York Times editorial. “UN troops in Bosnia are empowered to do little more than flash their blue berets and count the Serb shells obliterating Gorazde.” The editorial hailed a new U.S. presidential directive that placed strict limits on U.S. funding and participation in UN peacekeeping missions.41

  When Rose first arrived in Bosnia, he had been eager to push the boundaries of the UN mandate. But he had grown similarly resigned. “The guns could be heading for their next offensive,” he said. “If somebody wants to fight a war here, a peacekeeping force cannot stop it.”42 Under his command UNPROFOR would not call in NATO air strikes to protect civilians. “We took peacekeeping as far as it could go,” Rose said. “We took it right to the line.”43 The Serbs, who carefully tracked all international statements, took heed. With no threat of NATO air power hanging overhead, the Serbs treated UNPROFOR as a nuisance that they could manipulate or ignore.

  While Vieira de Mello had hoped to use humanitarian achievements to bring about political change, by the late summer of 1994 it was clear that international heavyweights like the United States, Russia, and Europe would have to step up their commitments if they were to negotiate a peace to save civilians. UNPROFOR was increasingly unable even to deliver food to hungry civilians. In July the Serbs suspended UN aid convoys into Sarajevo. On July 20, after several UN planes were hit by Serb gunfire, the UN stopped sending in relief by air. And on July 27 Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić sent a letter to UN authorities announcing the closure of Vieira de Mello’s precious Blue Routes, which had done so much to restore life in the Bosnian capital. Some 160,000 civilians and 32,000 vehicles had made use of the open roads.44 But after a four-month reprieve, the Serbs were strangling Sarajevo once again. What Vieira de Mello did not seem to recognize was that by covering up Serb violations rather than appealing to Western countries for sustained help, UNPROFOR was actually reducing the odds of a stronger Western stand. He, Akashi, and Rose were making it easier for powe
rful governments to look away.

  He plodded ahead, attempting to negotiate a large prisoner exchange. Bosnian vice president Ejup Ganic asked how Vieira de Mello could trust the Serbs to free prisoners when in the previous two months they had deported some two thousand elderly Bosnians from the town of Bjeljina. “I appreciate Mr. Vieira de Mello’s optimism,” Ganic said at a press conference. “But for God’s sake, they are expelling thousands of people from their homes, putting them into labour and concentration camps.”45 Vieira de Mello relayed the statements made by Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić as if they were reliable. “[Karadžić] assured us this was not his policy, that this was obviously contrary to the interests and the reputation of the Bosnian Serbs and that he was taking every possible measure, including the replacement of the police chief of Bjeljina, so as to bring these practices to an end,” he said credulously.46 The longer he remained a part of the flawed UNPROFOR mission, the more he sounded as though he had stopped seeing the facts as they were. For the first time in his career, he seemed to be valuing the UN’s interest in looking good over civilians’ interest in being safe.