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

by Samantha Power

  When Annan’s special assistant Nader Mousavizadeh tracked down the UN envoy in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Zagreb, Vieira de Mello said he was fed up with American bullying. He had already heard twice from the U.S. mission in New York, once from the U.S. representative in Geneva, and the night before from Pickering himself. He was aware of the danger that, on such a short, restricted trip, he would hand the Serbs a public relations victory, but he expected to bring back useful information. “Enough is enough,” he told Mousavizadeh. “I am on a needs-assessment mission. I will do what I have to do to assess needs!”

  When he rejoined his assembled team in the hotel lobby, he said, “The Americans are livid. They are refusing to offer us security assurances. Each of you should decide for yourself whether you still want to be a part of this mission. I am going to go ahead, but that should not influence your decision.” The very fact that Washington was so hostile to the trip only strengthened the team’s sense that they were right to attempt to conduct an independent investigation. Almost all of those gathered had experienced war before, and many thought the risk of being struck by one of NATO’s precision-guided munitions was low in comparison to the dangers they had faced in other war zones. None of the team members dropped out.

  While Western officials had reasons to be anxious, the Serb authorities should have been concerned as well. Milošević was trying to pretend as though Kosovar Albanians were leaving voluntarily or fleeing NATO air strikes. “Everyone runs away because of the bombing,” Milošević told CBS News. “Birds run away, wild animals run away.”1 He urged the public not to believe the deceitful Western media. “I personally saw on CNN at the beginning of this war poor Albanian refugees walking through snow and suffering a lot. You know, it was springtime at the time in Kosovo,” he said.“There was no snow. . . . They are paid to lie.”2 He noted that while the Serbs may have occasionally burned “individual houses,” their misdeeds did not compare to Vietnam, where “American forces torched villages suspected of hiding Viet Cong.”3

  The reports of the number of Kosovar Albanian men who had gone missing ranged from 10,000 to 100,000.4 Vieira de Mello believed his team could improve the clarity of the picture. “It’s the first time we are able to embark in this kind of way and right in the middle of a war,” he told journalists after driving from Zagreb to Belgrade.5 He said that he hoped to talk to those Kosovar Albanians in hiding who had been unable to escape to a neighboring country. “Many say this mission is madness,” he said, but only officials with the UN could reach “those who are in desperate need inside Kosovo.”6

  After driving from Croatia to Serbia, he held meetings with Serb officialdom that were tense and interminable.The Serbs directed their rants against NATO at him personally. “I don’t know how he put up with all he heard,” says Sarah Uppard, then a forty-three-year-old aid worker with Save the Children. “I would have lost it several dozen times over. But he managed to be firm, patient, and charming at once. He made everybody feel listened to without making even the slightest concession. Even the most aggressive officials found themselves taken in by him.” The minister of refugees, Bratislava Morina, was a close friend of Mira Marković, Milošević’s wife, and was used to getting her way. She denounced NATO for its “genocide” against Serbs and slammed the UN for failing to prevent the war. Yet by the end of the meeting, she was a different woman.“Sergio had her eating out of his palm,” recalls Kirsten Young of UNHCR.

  On May 18 his UN team left Belgrade and embarked upon an investigation that would take them almost nineteen hundred miles in eleven days. They traveled in a fleet of ten white Toyota 4Runners, each marked with a large black “UN” logo. Terry Burke, the UN head of security for the mission, brought a separate stack of large black UN decals and plastered one to the roof of each of the cars. “I don’t want to get blasted for an error,” Burke Vieira de Mello and Yugoslav minister of refugees Bratislava Morina, May 1999.

  told Vieira de Mello. “If we get hit, I want everyone to know that whoever hit us did so because we are the UN.” The UN convoy was led and trailed by a Serbian police car. Burke had attempted to draft a getaway contingency plan, but he had just ended up with question marks. “Getaway where? With what?” he had asked himself. “If you run away from the Serb paramilitaries on the main roads, then you end up on the side roads vulnerable to NATO bombers.”

  The first stop on the UN tour was the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which had been struck eleven days before. When the UN team reached the ruins of the building, Vieira de Mello shook his head in disbelief at the sight before him: The attack had blown a six-foot-deep crater out of one side of the building and a pair of gaping holes out of the other side. One of the walls seemed to have been peeled off, revealing, like the exposed interior of a dollhouse, the desks, bookshelves, couches, and artwork of the embassy, which, though covered in a thin layer of dust, remained intact. “NATO is precise all right,” Vieira de Mello muttered to a colleague. “They just hit precisely the wrong target.”

  It had not been easy to find drivers willing to transport a UN delegation into a three-way battlefield. UN policemen who worked in neighboring Bosnia had lent themselves to the mission, but this meant that the drivers of the vehicles were not professional drivers and were not from the region. (The full-time drivers in Bosnia were natives of the area and thus could have become targets.) Already two of the UN cars in what had originally been a twelve-vehicle fleet had failed to show after getting lost on the drive up from Sarajevo.

  After leaving the Chinese embassy, the driver of Vieira de Mello’s lead vehicle suddenly noticed that the rest of the convoy was no longer visible in the rearview mirror. Once their car turned around and drove a mile back up the road, Vieira de Mello saw an overturned UN 4Runner on the horizon. Horrified, he pieced together what had occurred. The route was heavily trafficked because NATO had bombed several of the major roads. A Serb driver had become so transfixed by the sight of ten white UN vehicles speeding toward him on the other side of the road that he did not notice until the last minute that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Instead of ramming the car in front of him, he had swerved into the oncoming traffic, where a Ghanaian UN policeman was zooming toward him recklessly at close to eighty miles per hour. In order to avoid a head-on collision, the Ghanaian had jerked his car toward the side of the road. As he did, he lost control of the vehicle, which flipped in the air, hit a tree, and landed upside down in a ditch.

  Bakhet, who was traveling in the car directly behind the vehicle that crashed, had only looked up in time to see a large white vehicle flying through the air, for seemingly no good reason. Although he had given up smoking, he was so shaken that he asked for a cigarette, then nervously joined in the team’s effort to remove the injured UN officials from the wreckage. His cigarette hung precariously out of his mouth as diesel trickled slowly out of the car’s tank and out of jerry cans in the trunk.

  The men pulled out of the vehicle were Nils Kastberg and Rashid Khalikov, who had led the advance mission to Belgrade the week before. Trembling and pale on the side of the road, Khalikov had multiple fractures in his upper left arm and lower back. He shouted, “My mobile, give me my mobile.” He wanted to call his wife. Kastberg was also disabled with multiple fractures to his right foot.

  Vieira de Mello rushed between Kastberg and Khalikov. He instructed the Yugoslav security services to call an ambulance and turned to David Chikvaidze, an aide whose job it was to maintain contact with NATO headquarters. “Tell them that we have two men down,” he said, “and to go easy on the bombing around Belgrade hospitals.”

  Nothing seemed to be going according to plan. NATO had refused to guarantee the security of the mission. The Serbs had routed the delegation away from the terra incognita of Kosovo to towns in Serbia proper, where Western journalists were already present in droves. And finally, no sooner had the UN convoy left Belgrade and begun the journey into the countryside than it had been felled by a serious road accident. “I can see the
Serbian papers tomorrow,” Vieira de Mello quipped. “A photo of one of our cars in the Vieira de Mello comforts an injured Nils Kastberg of UNICEF.

  ditch, and the caption, ‘Beware, the UN has arrived!’ ” Most team members had the same reaction as they took in the scene, saying to themselves, out loud or in their heads, “Classic UN!”

  Once Kastberg and Khalikov had been bundled off to the hospital, Vieira de Mello set about comforting the other team members. Kirsten Young, who had been ambivalent about joining the UN team to begin with, was asking herself, “What the hell am I doing here? We have no idea what we’re doing!” As Young remembers, “You fear you are going to get bombed, but instead of getting bombed, you have a car crash completely of your own making.” Dr. Stéphane Vandam, the WHO representative on the team, had helped organize the medical evacuation. He too began to wonder whether they were in over their heads. “We were standing up for humanitarian values, putting them back in the hands of Kofi Annan, and taking them away from the politicians,” he remembers. “It was a brave mission, but it began then to feel like a very stupid mission.” After the accident Vieira de Mello went out of his way to give off an almost exaggerated air of confidence.Young recalls,“I was terribly frightened. I didn’t trust our drivers, I didn’t trust our security guys, and I didn’t trust the Serbs or NATO. Yet every time I looked up and saw Sergio smiling, I thought to myself, ‘If Sergio is here, it’ll be okay.’ He was a Teflon guy in the sense that nothing bad seemed to touch him.”

  The delegation continued onward to the town of Novi Sad, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. There they saw the Sloboda (Freedom) bridge collapsed in the Danube River. It was the second of Novi Sad’s three bridges hit in the early days of the NATO air campaign. Confronted with the hysteria and rage of Yugoslav authorities and Serb civilians, Vieira de Mello tried to argue that the UN had not authorized the war and that it and NATO were distinct entities. His hosts were unpersuaded. After the UN delegation had concluded a meeting with one Serbian town mayor, Chikvaidze spotted a poster on the door to the city hall with an image of a skull capped by a UN helmet, and he asked a burly Serb guard in the lobby of the building whether he could take the poster with him.The guard shrugged a grudging acceptance, as if to say, “Everything is now possible in my country.” Vieira de Mello shook his head when he saw the poster. “That is the predicament the UN is in,” he said.“What the Serbs are saying with that poster is, ‘The UN is no better than NATO. Because you didn’t stop NATO from doing this, you are all the same.’ ” When Vieira de Mello would go to Iraq in 2003, many would similarly blame the UN for failing to stop the U.S.-led invasion.

  Vieira de Mello was alternately impressed and horrified by NATO’s aim. While he talked to villagers in one southern Serbian city, he heard a whistling sound and looked up to see a cruise missile flying through the sky. “Wow,” he exclaimed with boyish wonderment as the missile crashed in the distance. “Thank you, General Electric, for not screwing that one up.” Ten miles down the road, the mission encountered the burning ruins of a Serb police station that the missile had struck.

  Just before the UN team sat down to a dinner hosted by officials in Niš, Yugoslavia’s third-largest city, the Serbian government host presented Vieira de Mello with photographs of the cadaver of a pregnant woman who he claimed had been killed by a NATO strike.The Serb official ended his presentation by circulating pictures of a destroyed fetus. Vieira de Mello was disgusted by the images, but he was just as outraged by the Serbs’ willful exploitation of the carnage. A Serbian reporter asked him about the photographs he had seen. “They’re deplorable,” he said sternly. But he added, “I’ve told you what I think you need to do to stop that.”7 He knew that once he reached Kosovo, he was likely to find many such gruesome scenes—the victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing.

  Throughout the trip he remained concerned about the fates of Kastberg and Khalikov, who were sharing a room in the intensive care unit of Belgrade Central Hospital. In solidarity with the mission, the men had refused to be evacuated back to Geneva and had undergone surgery in Belgrade. Vieira de Mello thus had to worry not only about the safety of the personnel in his convoy but also about them. Nonetheless, he was personally moved by their courage and loyalty, and knowing that they were crestfallen to have been sidelined after planning the trip, he telephoned them nightly in order to keep them in the loop. “He would tell us exactly what the mission had done that day,” Khalikov remembers. “He wanted to show us we were still part of the team.” Each night when Vieira de Mello checked in with the men, he could hear the crash and thud of bombs landing nearby. “We both knew that if something went wrong, we wouldn’t be able to run,” recalls Khalikov. “I was lying flat. I couldn’t get up. Nils couldn’t walk.” The men had also been warned upon arrival that a likely NATO target, the ministry of the interior, was located nearby. Although NATO had been given the coordinates of the hospital, the men had seen the wreckage of the Chinese embassy and knew that deadly mistakes were possible. Kastberg assured Vieira de Mello that the morale of the two patients was high. “Between us, we have three legs and three hands,” he said, “but we are in the hands of gorgeous nurses!”

  INSIDE KOSOVO: “PRETTY REVOLTING”

  On May 20 Vieira de Mello’s UN convoy finally entered the province of Kosovo, which appeared to have been emptied of ethnic Albanians. He was relieved finally to be on the most important leg of the trip. “I want to be able to move freely,” he told a reporter. “I don’t want any more speeches.”8 As the UN vehicles trundled into the province, men at the roadside shouted “Serbia! Serbia!” and offered the three-fingered Serbian salute.The UN team was now vulnerable to attack from three sides; armed Serbs, NATO, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were all engaged in fighting.

  The three UN security officials on the trip were not carrying guns, so the team had no choice but to rely on their police escorts for protection. These Serb “minders” were not about to let UN officials move around as they wished. Several times when Vieira de Mello tried to visit villages off the main roads, they refused, claiming the areas were unsafe. As the convoy progressed, the UN team encountered columns of ethnic Albanians fleeing on tractors or on foot. They saw houses, apartments, and shops that had been systematically burned or looted. Anti-Albanian and pro-Serb slogans had been painted on newly vacated buildings. In some areas 80 percent of the homes had been torched. On two occasions the team members themselves witnessed houses being set ablaze.

  As his precious few days in Kosovo raced by, Vieira de Mello grew claustrophobic and started to make unscheduled stops. The Serbs, who were anxious to hide the extent of the ethnic cleansing, tried to stop him. After parking the cars at the edge of one village near Urosevac, he broke away from his posse and strode toward what appeared to be abandoned homes and barns. “Sergio, no!” shouted Young. “They could be booby-trapped!” Others chimed in with similar admonitions. But he plowed ahead, knowing that the more he witnessed with his own eyes, the greater his impact would be when he returned to New York. He found homes littered with clothes, bedding, and household goods. Whoever had left the village had fled hastily, leaving behind livestock, family pets, household electronics, photograph albums, and personal legal effects. In one apartment he saw a full pot of tea on the kitchen table, ready to be consumed. “Silent confirmation,” he said.9

  Young had known Vieira de Mello for more than a decade at UNHCR, and she was aware of his reputation for compromising with governments at the expense of refugee rights. Her boss was Dennis McNamara, Vieira de Mello’s frequent foe on policy questions. But the man who was storming into ethnic Albanian homes for proof of war crimes bore little resemblance to the man known as a master diplomat with insufficient regard for human rights.“I had been a protection officer my whole career,” she says,“but there I was saying, ‘Aw, why is he pushing so hard?’ He was far more vigilant about protection than I was.”

  He seemed to have come full circle. It was as if his regrets over his
own neutrality in Bosnia, combined with his self-consciousness over having forced Hutu refugees back to Rwanda, and his disgust over the way NATO governments had paid no heed to the UN Charter, had resurrected in him the uncompromising righteousness that he had not displayed since his days in Lebanon. If he had once believed that his job was to carry out the aggregate will of powerful governments, he now acted as though he believed that promoting UN principles and protecting the UN flag entailed standing firmly for the advancement of human dignity, even if that required acting in defiance of those governments.

  Some members of the UN team felt so unsafe that they began trailing him as if he were ensconced in kryptonite. On one occasion when he stopped the convoy and again charged out of his vehicle, a half dozen members of the team hopped out of their cars and followed him. “People were like, ‘Where is the champ going?’ ‘Where is God going?’ ” recalls Eduardo Arboleda of UNHCR. “They were trailing him like puppy dogs. Until they got halfway down the road and realized he had stopped to take a leak.” The embarrassed UN officials returned to their vehicles with their heads down.