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

by Samantha Power

  At the press conference he was asked about the likelihood that ethnic Albanians would carry out revenge attacks against Serbs. Although McNamara had urged him to condemn displacements and revenge killings, Vieira de Mello sent an unfortunately passive signal to the inhabitants of the polarized province. Instead of denouncing the spate of attacks on Serbs, he said, “I believe it is unavoidable that there will be security incidents here and there.”6 It was late June before he brought Kosovo’s Albanian and Serb leaders together to issue a joint appeal for peace.

  After the press conference McNamara led his friend’s political team to a four-story house that was owned by a Kosovar acquaintance and had been used by UNHCR staff before the bombing. UNHCR had negotiated with the family, who agreed to move into the basement while the UN took over the main house. It would double as UN residence and UN headquarters until Vieira de Mello’s UN transitional administration appropriated a former Serbian government office building for its permanent operations.

  Every evening in the hallway outside his bedroom on the top floor, Vieira de Mello would gather his team, which by now included Martin Griffiths, McNamara, Kirsten Young (his assistant), Kent, Hochschild, Fraser, Strohmeyer, and Susan Manual, a spokesperson. Somebody would pull a small bridge table into the center of the landing, and he would plop down a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and several bars of Lindt and Ritter Sport chocolate. While the others dipped deep into the bottle, Vieira de Mello alternated between leading the discussion of the day’s events and disappearing into his bedroom to place his calls to New York.

  Fraser did not enjoy cohabiting in a virtually all-male house without running water.With their disagreeable stomachs, the smell could be unbearable. Her bedroom housed the highly secure UN code-cable machine, and because of the time difference with New York, the machine rang and churned out classified paper faxes all through the night. At one point Fraser grew so exasperated with the machine’s frequent interruptions of her sleep that she unplugged it. When she confessed her crime to Hochschild the following day, he said, “Don’t worry about it. When was the last time you saw something important in a classified UN code cable?”

  Despite the unhygienic conditions in the house, Vieira de Mello maintained his reputation for elegance with the disheveled members of his staff. One night after he headed out of the house for a meeting, McNamara, who had had a few drinks, broke into his friend’s room and raided his suitcases. “I’ve found him out,” he shouted out into the hallway. “Come quick!” The officials in Vieira de Mello’s team gathered guiltily beside his bed, where McNamara had laid out the evidence. “This is how he does it, the bastard,” McNamara exclaimed. Inside the case were a dozen identical, spotless, crisply starched and ironed blue button-down shirts.

  Most of Vieira de Mello’s staff were, like him, left-leaning progressives who had been attracted to the UN because of its support for decolonization.They thus found it ironic to be involved themselves in a quasi-colonial governing experiment. They joked about Vieira de Mello’s newfound imperial impulses and nicknamed him “Viceroy.” But they all felt the tensions inherent in the arrangement. Vieira de Mello himself did not naturally embrace the full range of powers granted to him. He struggled to wrap his mind around the idea that all of the buildings, finances, and companies that had been owned by the Serbian government were now, technically, his. Speeding down Kosovo’s main thoroughfare one day, he cautioned Griffiths to slow down, as it would not send the right signal to the Kosovars if the administrator were given a speeding ticket. Griffiths agreed and slowed down. But suddenly he remembered the Hobbesian setting they were in. “Sergio, there’s nobody here to arrest us, besides us,” he noted. “We’re the ones in charge.” Vieira de Mello grimaced. “What a truly terrifying thought,” he said.

  As the administrator, Vieira de Mello found that his responsibilities were enormous. The garbage had been piling up since NATO began bombing in March, and he would have to find some way to pay the collectors. He pleaded with the UN legal adviser’s office in New York for permission to spend revenues from state-owned enterprises, such as electric and water utilities, without checking with the authorities in Belgrade. Headquarters was frightfully slow in answering him.“Sergio got almost no guidance on the big issues, and major guidance on tiny issues,” recalls Fraser. “He couldn’t stand the combination of silence and tinkering.”

  If the UN rules and regulations had tormented him in his office in New York, they very nearly ruined his efforts to govern Kosovo. The one way he could have won the affection of the ethnic Albanians was to offer them tangible assistance by paying them the state salaries they were owed or by quickly finding funds for them to rebuild their destroyed property. Some 50,000 ethnic Albanian civil servants had not been paid in more than two months, but he could not simply do as he had done for one drunken Serb guard and reach into his tin of petty cash to supply their back pay. Although the Security Council had given the UN mission a $456 million budget, the money came from assessed contributions and thus, as had been true in Cambodia, could be used only to cover the needs of UN employees: staff salaries, vehicles, computers, and air conditioners. If he wanted to pay Kosovars for their labor as security guards, civil servants, road builders, teachers, or garbage collectors, he had to drum up a separate trust fund, to which countries in the UN had no obligation to contribute. The fund didn’t really get started until after he left, by which point local frustration with the UN was already high. In Cambodia a government had existed alongside the UN, whereas in Kosovo the UN was the government. This gave it the power to detain and release murderers, to appoint judges, and to fire mayors.Yet UN rules devised decades earlier for vastly less ambitious missions denied him the flexibility to hire and fire UN staff or to disburse funds as he saw fit.“It is like being asked to perform Olympic gymnastics and then being placed in a straitjacket,” he later wrote.7

  On June 16 he returned to one of the villages near Urosevac that he had visited on his assessment trip in May, and he tracked down a woman he had met there who had been forced from her home at gunpoint. “I told you I’d be back,” he said to the woman. “I told you I’d look after you.” She wept with gratitude but told him that her home had been destroyed and she had nothing to eat. When it came to meeting those vital needs, he had nothing to offer.

  Vieira de Mello went out of his way to convey to his staff, to NATO, and to ethnic Albanians and Serbs that everything was proceeding according to a clear and sophisticated plan. But privately he screamed to the heavens about “fucking New York.” “We were stragglers,” recalls Fabrizio Hochschild. “It was smoke and mirrors. Sergio always managed to look like he was in charge and credible whether he was standing on a tower of marble or a small lump of sand, which is what we were on in Kosovo.”

  THE POLICING GAP

  The biggest failing in the transition, and the one whose consequences would be felt for generations to come, was the absence of law, order, and justice. Vieira de Mello had two problems: an abundance of returning Kosovar Albanian refugees who bore grudges against Serbs who had first oppressed them and then expelled them, and the overnight disappearance of the institutions that had maintained order in the province.

  In Cambodia Vieira de Mello and UNHCR had organized most of the refugee returns. But in Kosovo civilians marched back on their own, with no regard for the condition of their homes or for the mines, booby traps, and unexploded NATO ordnance that was scattered throughout the province. Within two weeks of his arrival, some 300,000 Kosovars had spontaneously crossed back into Kosovo, and an additional 50,000 were returning every day. They came as they had left: on foot, by car, or by tractor. In formation they resembled the columns of Hutu refugees that had been forced back to Rwanda in 1996, but while those refugees returned only under the barrel of the gun, in Kosovo the UN would have needed guns to prevent the flood. By June 25 the number of returnees exceeded 650,000. In his first month there more than 130 returning Kosovars were injured by ordnance.8

 
; Any UN official who had worked in the aftermath of violence was familiar with the “policing gap” that often opened between the time when one government stepped down and another got its bearings. When an occupier departed, or when security forces were disbanded, criminal elements were usually the prime beneficiaries. Vieira de Mello had believed that NATO troops would be able to prevent most revenge attacks against Serbs. At the National Press Club in Washington in early June, he had said confidently, “Kosovo is a very small province, so 50,000 troops are . . . likely to stem any revenge rampage that might be in the making.”9 Here he proved dead wrong. The skills needed for war fighting varied greatly from those needed for crime prevention. And Kosovo didn’t have few police or corrupt police, as Cambodia did; after the Serbs left, it had no police. The Pentagon had suggested that the UN simply “recycle” the KLA as a police force, but this UN officials found laughable, as it was precisely the KLA that had taken to terrorizing Serb civilians. This left Vieira de Mello’s tiny UN mission to confront the most daunting postwar challenge: ending the vicious cycle of violence. It would take an eternity to recruit enough international police to secure the streets. Bernard Miyet, who ran the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, said he could not even recruit a UN police commissioner for Kosovo until he knew the nationality of Vieira de Mello’s replacement as special representative.The UN’s other hires had to ensure national balance.10

  The UN had begun recruiting police only on June 10, the day of the unexpected Security Council resolution creating the UN administration. Vieira de Mello pleaded for units with the foreign ministers of the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy who visited Kosovo on June 23. Four days later some thirty-five police arrived from the UN mission in Bosnia, hailing from Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Estonia, Pakistan, Portugal, Romania, and the United States.11 But they functioned only as advisers to NATO. Since few countries had spare police capacity at home, they had none to siphon off to Kosovo to do real police work. Vieira de Mello requested specialists to combat organized crime, which had flourished in Kosovo even before the war and was now booming. This appeal would not be satisfied until 2001, two years after it was made, by which time Kosovo’s crime networks were firmly entrenched.12

  Vieira de Mello controlled all the functions of Kosovo’s new interim government, except he had no say over NATO forces. He urged General Jackson to take initiative, but since NATO had just fought a war against the Serbs, NATO officers continued to view the Serb minority as the threat and not as potential victims. Vieira de Mello understood their view. Some ten thousand ethnic Albanians had been killed in recent months, more than six hundred villages had been razed to the ground, and fresh graves were being unearthed each day. Throughout the country NATO soldiers were discovering eyeglasses, watches, tobacco tins, IDs, and bits of clothing amid piles of bones. Vieira de Mello knew from his own helicopter tours of the province how moving it was to see the results of the Serbs’ scorched-earth campaign: acre upon acre of ashen neighborhoods. Still, he thought it was incumbent on NATO to stop the violence. But no matter how many appeals he made, Jackson did not give his troops standing orders to stop looting or arson. As typically happened in UN missions as well, some national contingents in NATO reflexively took civilian protection more seriously than others. While the British battalion intervened regularly to stop ethnic Albanians from assaulting Serbs, German and Italian soldiers tended to remain in their armored personnel carriers, reluctant to carry out foot patrols. An American captain was candid when he told one Serb, “It is better to leave, we can’t protect you.”13

  The most isolated forces in Kosovo were the Americans. While most of the other troop-contributing countries occupied factories, warehouses, or abandoned Yugoslav military complexes in urban areas, American planners built a garrison from scratch in an enormous wheat field four miles from the nearest town.The U.S. military hired the contractor Brown & Root to carry out the construction of facilities in the 750-acre complex known as Camp Bondsteel. Hemmed in by nine guard towers and forbidding wire fences, the soldiers slept in prefabricated huts with heating and air-conditioning. More than any other base, Bondsteel would be a preview of the Green Zone fortress that U.S. administrators would set up in Iraq in 2003.

  Vieira de Mello did not see how the Americans would possibly be able to protect the Serb minority or win Kosovar hearts and minds if they were holed up so far away from the local community. But he understood that, ever since the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration had become driven by “force protection.” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others who had pushed for the war in Kosovo were concerned that as soon as U.S. troops took casualties, Congress would press for an American exit. As a result, while Vieira de Mello viewed the posture of the U.S. forces as counterproductive, he shrugged it off, deeming it the price of the U.S. participation in, and perhaps even funding for, the Kosovo mission as a whole.

  He also made use of the U.S. base to house prisoners on the rare occasions on which NATO made arrests. With the Serbs gone, Kosovo had no justice system.14 Almost all of the prison staff had fled alongside the Serb military and police. With no place to put Kosovar Albanian looters or thugs, NATO soldiers tended to dump the suspects in tents inside the Western bases.15 Within two weeks of the start of Vieira de Mello’s mission, some two hundred detainees (charged with arson, violent assault, or murder) faced indefinite detention.The UN needed to put in place a body to try them.

  On June 30 he appointed nine judges and prosecutors, three of whom were Serbs, to act as a mobile unit to dispense justice throughout Kosovo. By mid-July they had heard the cases of 249 detainees and released 112 of them.16 The ethnic Albanians criticized the UN for overrepresenting Serbs on the bench.This didn’t last long. After just a few days in office, one of the three Serb judges was evicted from his apartment and threatened with death. He fled to Serbia.17

  The ethnic Albanians’ purge of Kosovo’s Serb minority, which NATO now estimated was taking fifty Serb lives each week, was not merely revenge. It was a deliberate attempt to affect future negotiations on Kosovo’s status. By promising sovereignty to Serbia, autonomy to the Kosovar Albanians, and governing authority to the UN, the Security Council had handed Vieira de Mello and his staff a mandate predicated on fundamental contradictions. The Serbs resented the UN for stripping them of their power and giving the Kosovars rights and privileges they had never had before. The Kosovars resented the UN for taking the place of Serbs in running the place and denying them their independence. It was, Vieira de Mello liked to quip, “an effort to combine motherhood with virginity.”18 And success in Kosovo, like a virgin giving birth, would have required a divine intervention. The Kosovars had chosen not to wait. They had opted instead to alter Kosovo’s demographics so as to make it impossible for international mediators to later hand the province back to Serbia. If Kosovar independence required ethnic purity, they appeared prepared to achieve it.

  COMBINING MOTHERHOOD AND VIRGINITY

  Vieira de Mello could not give Kosovars a timetable for independence because it was not up to him: The countries on the Security Council would decide. But because the UN mission was the face of international ambivalence about Kosovo’s statehood, it would be UN officials who would take the blame.The acronym for the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo, UNMIK, sounded like anmik, which in Albanian means “enemy.”19 Strohmeyer recalls the progression of Albanian sentiment: “Just before the UN moved in, the Albanians were forced to give the three-finger Serb salute.When the UN arrived, they gave us the peace sign. And then after we’d been there a week, they gave us the middle finger.”

  Vieira de Mello divided his time battling New York for personnel and office supplies, urging donor countries to contribute funds to Kosovo’s economic development, and defusing ethnic Albanian frustration. His most important act as administrator was the creation of a transitional council comprising representatives from the major political, ethnic, and social groups: six Kosov
ar Albanians, two Serbs, one Bosnian Muslim, and one Turk. The council was to advise the UN on how to govern.

  Having fought for independence, KLA soldiers had expected to run the province themselves. Since the KLA had people and money in place all over Kosovo, they were able to commandeer municipal buildings that had been vacated by the Serbs and even issue political regulations and legal edicts. In a direct snub to Vieira de Mello’s nascent transitional council, Hashim Thaci, the leader of the KLA, named a twenty-one-member all-Albanian cabinet in early July. Thaci also appointed mayors in twenty-five of the province’s twenty-nine municipalities. On July 15 Ibrahim Rugova, the more pacifistic founder of the Kosovo independence movement, returned to the province from exile and declared, “I am the president.”20 Vieira de Mello declared that neither man had any official status until democratic elections could be held.21 The UN, he insisted, was “the only source of authority in Kosovo.”22

  As frustrated as he was by local intransigence, he was also exhilarated. It stung to know that he would not be the permanent international administrator. The European Union was planning to put up more than half of the annual $1.5 billion needed to run and reconstruct Kosovo, and he awaited word of which European Annan would select for the top job.