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

by Samantha Power

  In the car ride back to Kigali,Vieira de Mello stared out the window, lost in his own thoughts. When the car reached the Hotel Mille Collines, he disembarked quietly and retired to his room. By the next day he had returned to his garrulous self, but he was focused on the future. “I just feel this thing is about to blow open,” he told Bakhet.The tension in the air was similar to that he had felt in Lebanon before the Israeli invasion in 1982.

  WAR IN ZAIRE: “THE WEST MEANS DEATH!”

  A month later, Kagame’s forces invaded Zaire in order to close the camps and eliminate the Hutu threat once and for all. “People who want to continue exterminating others have got to be resisted,” the Rwandan vice president said.28 His soldiers teamed up with an unheralded fifty-six-year-old former Marxist warlord named Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his newly formed Zairean rebel movement, which aspired to overthrow Zairean president Mobutu. Kabila’s rebels and Kagame’s regular Rwandan army forces launched a combined assault on the southernmost Hutu refugee camps along Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Some 220,000 refugees from the camps, along with some 30,000 local Zaireans, took flight. Under fire, Ogata’s contingent of Zairean soldiers proved a mixed bag. Some helped to evacuate UNHCR’s international staff, but many simply joined Mobutu’s defense against the joint Zairean rebel-Rwandan attack. Some of these units were even reported to have used UNHCR planes to transport war matériel into battle against Kabila’s rebels.29

  At the sight of the Kabila-Rwandan attackers, most of the frantic Hutu refugees fled northward away from Rwanda, toward the UN camps in Bukavu. But Bukavu was next on the attackers’ target list. On October 25 the UNHCR representative there telephoned Ogata in Geneva and passed the telephone to the local archbishop, Monsignor Christophe Munzihirwa, who begged Ogata to secure international military intervention to save the people in the camp from the joint rebel-Rwandan assault. Four days later Bukavu fell and UNHCR and other aid organizations suspended operations. Amid the slaughter that ensued, the attacking forces murdered Archbishop Munzihirwa.30

  Many of the 1994 génocidaires were undoubtedly killed in the offensive. But testimonies of survivors revealed that thousands of Hutu civilians also likely died. One Hutu refugee told Amnesty International that when five Zairean rebels entered a church compound where Hutu were hiding, one of the foreign priests in charge went to speak to the gunmen. The Hutu survivor remembered:

  [The priest] then called one of us, Pascal Murwirano, a 22-year-old Rwandese, to help, as he did not speak Kinyarwanda.The conversation went like this:

  “Are you from Rwanda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you Hutu?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you leave Rwanda?”

  “1994.”

  “Take off your clothes.”

  Pascal crossed himself. I remember it so well. He unbuttoned the first button of his shirt and before he could unbutton the second one, he was shot. He took one bullet in the heart, four in the stomach and one in the head.31

  The battle lines were drawn. On one side were Mobutu’s Zairean government forces and armed Rwandan Hutu refugees, mostly génocidaires, while on the other were the Kabila-led Zairean rebels and the mainly Tutsi Rwandan army forces. A UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe of greater dimensions than the one in 1994.”32

  With tens of thousands of Hutu refugees now fleeing westward into the Zairean jungle, Ogata and Vieira de Mello no longer had any ambivalence about where the refugees belonged. Civilians would undoubtedly be safer in Rwanda than trapped between warring armies in Zaire. He telephoned Lionel Rosenblatt, with whom he had helped organize the resettlement of the Montagnards from Cambodia. He now begged Rosenblatt, who ran Refugees International, a leading advocacy group in Washington, to alert the Clinton administration to the fact that the Hutu were moving away from food and shelter. “The west means death!” Vieira de Mello exclaimed. If Hutu families headed west into the deep jungle with the militants, they would be pursued and killed, or they would die of starvation or disease. Aid workers and diplomats had to find a way to persuade the refugees at long last to head back to their former homes in Rwanda.

  On October 30, as another bloody crisis engulfed the region and the Western media descended again on Rwanda and Zaire, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali appointed as his special political envoy to the region Raymond Chrétien, Canada’s ambassador to the United States.33 A week later, in another boon to Vieira de Mello’s résumé, Boutros-Ghali named him humanitarian coordinator, answering not to Ogata but to the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA), a newly created division at UN Headquarters in New York. Improbably, he would once again answer to Yasushi Akashi, who, despite his mediocre performances in Cambodia and Bosnia, had been promoted to run DHA, once again out of deference to Japan, the UN’s second-largest donor. Chrétien and Vieira de Mello were meant to coordinate their efforts, with Chrétien managing the political negotiations and Vieira de Mello relegated to the humanitarian.

  Vieira de Mello immediately made his way to Kinshasa, Zaire. On November 7 he was told that Chrétien, his political counterpart, was already en route to the region. Chrétien would arrive in Kigali the following morning for his first meetings with the Rwandan authorities. Vieira de Mello knew that political envoys tended to view humanitarians as expendable “grocery deliverers” who would play no important role in high-stakes political talks. Already Chrétien had stopped to see Mobutu in France, where the Zairean president was receiving cancer treatment. Vieira de Mello did not want Chrétien to hold any further high-level meetings without him. But when he telephoned the UNHCR office in Kinshasa, he was told that no commercial or UN flight would be able to fly him a thousand miles from Kinshasa to Kigali in time to greet Chrétien. If he was to make it, he would have to charter a private jet to fly him to an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, where he could then catch a regular UN flight to Kigali. He reflexively accepted, and when he and his UNHCR colleague Chefike Desalegn arrived at the Kinshasa airport, he gasped at the sight of the jet on the runway. “Chefike,” he exclaimed, delighted, “it’s Mobutu’s personal Learjet!” Seated on the plane, he shouted up to his colleague: “Tell them to take their time getting to Entebbe. If they make a few laps, we can get a full night’s sleep!” The two men reached Kigali several hours ahead of Chrétien.

  Months later, when Vieira de Mello returned to Geneva, he was informed that the three-hour charter leg had cost UNHCR $50,000. In 1998 the Financial Times would publish an exposé on UN corruption, making Vieira de Mello’s extravagance a prime example of the organization’s excesses.34 This would be the first such charge ever lodged against him, but while he worried that the UN’s critics would use it to tarnish his entire career, the scandal did not stick.

  Having managed to insinuate himself into Chrétien’s small negotiating team, Vieira de Mello got to hear the Rwandans again lambaste the UN. “They just vomited all over the organization,” recalls Chrétien. “I mean it was savage. I didn’t take the hatred personally. I was the UN special envoy for a month or two, but for Sergio it was his lifelong employer. They looked right at him when they attacked the organization. He seemed very uncomfortable.”

  Events in Zaire made him even more uncomfortable. International aid workers had been largely evacuated from refugee camps in eastern Zaire, so he had no idea how many Hutu refugees were in pain or dying out of view. The rare eyewitness reports indicated that the newly displaced were sleeping in the forests without food or blankets and were sucking on tree roots to quench their thirst. As the coordinator of all humanitarian activities in the region, Vieira de Mello had to find a way to enable aid workers to go behind the front lines to reach the refugees. He knew from his past missions that although the UN system frowned upon contact with nonstate actors (like Shiite militia in Lebanon or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), somebody in the UN had to reach out to Kabila, the Zairean rebel leader. Without Kabila’s authorization, it would be too dangerous for aid workers to reenter Zaire in o
rder to feed and clothe Hutu refugees on the run.

  On the evening of November 8, Omar Bakhet saw a face outside the window of his home in Kigali. It was a Rwandan government official who asked Bakhet if he would like to meet Kabila at the rebel leader’s new headquarters in Zaire. The Rwandans were adamant that Bakhet not bring anybody from UNHCR, which they blamed for feeding the génocidaires in the refugee camps. Bakhet suggested Daniel Toole, a forty-year-old American colleague from UNICEF. The Rwandan official agreed, saying, “He is the right nationality.”

  The following morning Bakhet and Toole drove to the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi and seated themselves in the lobby of a local hotel, as they had been instructed to do. The place was teeming with journalists, who were themselves hoping to get the Rwandan government’s permission to cross into Zaire so they could cover the war there. By the late afternoon, after hours of idle waiting and far too many cups of coffee, Bakhet and Toole were poised to give up. But just as they were preparing to pay their bill, a Rwandan officer approached and told them to follow him. They did so, exiting through the back of the hotel, then driving a circuitous route to the border so as to elude the press.

  As the sun was setting, the officer led Bakhet and Toole into rebel-held Zaire. Both men knew that what they were doing was risky, physically and professionally. UN peacekeepers and UN civilians were supposed to respect national boundaries. Aware that UN Headquarters in New York would not have granted him permission to cross from Rwanda into Zaire, Bakhet had not asked his superiors for clearance, which Toole did not know. Their Rwandan driver seemed terrified.

  When the men reached one of Mobutu’s darkened old villas, they found Laurent Kabila sitting at a coffee table in a heavily starched tan officer’s uniform. Over the course of several hours of discussion, the men succeeded in negotiating an informal humanitarian agreement, whereby the rebel leader promised to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid to civilians. It was only when Kabila excused himself to go to the restroom that Bakhet and Toole simultaneously noticed, to their amazement, that along with his crisp new uniform, the rebel leader was wearing white socks and high-heeled, lizard-skin disco dancing shoes.

  When Toole himself headed to the bathroom a short while later, Kabila leaned over to Bakhet and confessed that he had one need above all others: a satellite telephone. Bakhet promised that if Kabila allowed vital relief to pass into Goma, he would place his personal phone in the first truck of the first UN convoy of relief. The two men shook hands, and six trucks filled with hospital supplies, along with Bakhet’s satellite phone, soon rumbled across the border into Zaire.

  As Bakhet and Toole drove back to Rwanda after the meeting, they felt triumphant. They had taken a significant risk, and in so doing they had managed to open up a discreet channel of UN communication with the rebels. However, Bakhet’s satisfaction at having scored a diplomatic coup faded almost as soon as he was back in cell phone range.Vieira de Mello telephoned him and raged,“Omar, where the hell have you been? Christiane Amanpour has been on CNN claiming that the UN is holding secret talks with Kabila in Zaire. Mobutu is furious, and in New York, Headquarters is going out of its mind!”

  Bakhet started to explain, but his friend interrupted, asking, “So you met with Kabila in no-man’s-land, right?” Bakhet answered, “No, I—” But Vieira de Mello cut him off again. “Listen, Omar,” he said, “I told New York you met Kabila on the Rwandan side of no-man’s-land. Now where did you meet Kabila?” Bakhet understood.Vieira de Mello knew how to work the system in a way he knew he never would.

  Benon Sevan, who ran the UN security department in New York and a decade later would be indicted for his involvement in the UN’s oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, reprimanded Bakhet for violating UN rules. But Vieira de Mello stuck to his contrived story, lying outright in a cable to Sevan: “It is my understanding that Mr. Bakhet did not cross the border into Zaire.The meeting he held was at the border, i.e., in the no-man’s-land separating the two border posts. The mission was authorized by me on that basis. Mr. Bakhet, therefore, did not violate standing instructions. Warm regards, Sergio.”35

  “MULTINATIONAL FARCE”

  Vieira de Mello believed neither the aid workers nor the refugees would be safe unless international forces were sent to create and protect safe routes through rebel-held territory. The safe corridors would simultaneously allow the delivery of relief in one direction, and the secure passage of refugees back to Rwanda in the other.17

  Although he knew what was required, he was highly skeptical that Western countries would agree to put their troops in harm’s way to protect civilians.The UN Security Council had not only done nothing to stop the 1994 genocide, but had left UNHCR alone to manage the camps in the Great Lakes region for more than two years. Whenever U.S. officials had pressed Mobutu’s Zaire to do more to persuade the refugees to go home, France had interfered on Mobutu’s and the Hutu’s behalf.Whenever France had turned up the heat on the Rwandan government, Washington had taken Kagame’s side. Vieira de Mello also knew from the tragic failure to defend the safe areas in Bosnia how easy it was to declare land “safe,” yet how difficult it was to persuade the major powers in fact to secure civilians. As the violence in Zaire escalated, UN member states began debating sending troops. The negotiations proceeded so slowly that Emma Bonino, the feisty European commissioner for humanitarian aid, slammed the ambassadors in New York, saying,“UN Security Council representatives should keep in mind that the thousands of refugees dying every day in [Zaire] cannot spend the weekend in Long Island, as they do.”36

  However, on November 11,Vieira de Mello got the shocking and welcome news that Canada had agreed to head a large UN-authorized force to secure the humanitarian corridors that UNHCR had proposed. During the 1994 genocide the commander of UN forces in Rwanda had been Canadian lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, and because of Dallaire’s awareness-raising, many Canadians felt they had a debt to repay the region. General Maurice Baril, the head of Canada’s armed forces who had previously worked as a senior UN military adviser to Boutros-Ghali, would command the Multinational Force (MNF), which was expected to consist of 10,000 to 12,000 troops.

  Because of the bloodshed,Western governments finally seemed willing to offer the armed assistance UNHCR had been seeking since 1994. Even U.S. officials pledged a thousand troops, though U.S. defense secretary William Perry cautioned that the forces would not “be used to disarm militants.”37 With the countries on the Security Council at last serious about intervening in the region, Søren Jessen-Petersen, a mild-mannered Danish bureaucrat who ran UNHCR’s office in New York, sent a jubilant cable that reached Vieira de Mello in Zaire. “We are on board and the train is moving fast,” he wrote. "FINALLY!!”38

  But Kabila’s rebels and the Rwandan government wanted the train to head back to the station. They were convinced that any international force would foil their offensive and benefit the Hutu militants. They decided to strike a knockout blow before the international troops had time to assemble. On November 14 the Kabila-Rwandan forces fired artillery and rockets into the Mugunga camp, the last stronghold for Rwandan Hutu in Zaire. Mugunga had been home to 200,000 Rwandan refugees, and that number had reached 500,000 after the attacks on the other camps.This time the joint forces attacked the camp from the west, and the only place that refugees could run was toward Rwanda. Some 12,000 Hutu refugees fled across the border per hour, and by nightfall on November 15, UNHCR estimated that 200,000 had returned to Rwanda in the previous two days. Another 300,000 were on the road.That same day, after days of haggling, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the deployment of the Multinational Force to Zaire.

  No matter how removed he was from the capitals in which decisions were being made,Vieira de Mello stayed plugged in. In the 1980s, before the era of phone cards and cell phones, he was known for carrying plastic bags filled with coins from all over the world, which he used in public pay phones. By the mid-1990s he had less cumbersome ways of staying in touch with h
eadquarters. Martin Griffiths, a forty-five-year-old from Wales whom New York had assigned to be his deputy, found his new senior colleague businesslike to the point of being brusque. “After a long day of meetings, we would come back to our hotels exhausted, and the general rule on missions is that the team will convene for dinner to drink and remember—or try to forget—the day,” recalls Griffiths.“But not Sergio. He would go straight back to his hotel room, order room service, read the faxes from Geneva and New York, and make dozens and dozens of phone calls.”

  Vieira de Mello was attempting to follow the progress of the international force. Initially, Western countries acted as though the joint rebel-Rwandan offensive would not affect their plans. The countries that had offered troops went through the motions of preparing to deploy, and a Canadian reconnaissance team under General Baril flew to the region. But the first sign of wavering enthusiasm for the Multinational Force came when the U.S. aerial search teams said they had spotted only 165,000 Hutu refugees in the forest—far fewer than the 700,000 or so UNHCR thought were still on the run. If most refugees had returned safely to Rwanda, as the Americans were suggesting, countries that had promised to send troops to Zaire would have the excuse they needed to back out.