French president Jacques Chirac lobbied for France’s own Bernard Kouchner, a former French health minister and the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, one of the most influential humanitarian aid and advocacy organizations.21 On July 2 Annan announced Kouchner’s appointment.23
Vieira de Mello went to the airport to greet Kouchner when he arrived in Kosovo on July 15. He had no doubt about Kouchner’s commitment to the former Yugoslavia. The French advocate had helped organize the Barbara Hendricks visit to Sarajevo in 1994 and had been a longtime ally of the Kosovars. The two men were friends, but they had very different styles. Vieira de Mello had often cringed over the years at Kouchner’s efforts to promote himself as well as his causes. In 1992 he had groaned audibly when he heard that, in Somalia, Kouchner had posed for the television cameras wading toward the shore carrying a bag of rice on his back. Now, seven years later, upon seeing Kouchner disembark from his airplane in Pristina, accompanied by a television crew, Vieira de Mello decided to get out of town as quickly as possible.
He had loved serving as interim administrator, as it was his most senior political appointment and it combined so many of the challenges that he had seen tackled in isolation during his career: repatriation of refugees, governance, reconstruction, and law and order. He was truly sorry to leave. But he was proud of what he had achieved in a short time. In addition to setting up the Kosovo Transitional Council and engaging restive Kosovars in a UN-led political process, he had established a warm and cooperative personal relationship with NATO (even if staff within the organizations did not mesh easily), and most remarkably, with scant guidance, he had put in place the basic laws that Kosovo would need to govern itself. “He established the law of the land with no rules and zero advice,” Helena Fraser remembers. “And this was 1999, when you couldn’t yet Google some recently decolonized nation and find out how they wrote their first laws. He was totally improvising.”
He masked his frustration at being big-footed with humor and deference. He brought Kouchner to the former ministry of defense building, where he had set up UN headquarters. While Kouchner’s media entourage filmed, Vieira de Mello wore a big smile and pulled out the chair from behind what had been his desk. “Welcome to your office,” he said. “You are the boss!” Kouchner planted himself at his new desk, as Vieira de Mello shuffled over to the wall, out of camera range. He teased Kouchner, “Like the Soviet system, you can tell the importance of a man by the number of phones he has.” The French diplomat eyed the four phones cluttering the desk before him and fell for the bait, picking up the receiver on one of them. “Do any of them work?” he asked. “No, of course not,” Vieira de Mello answered, smiling. “This is Kosovo.”
The following day, in his last act, he opened the first meeting of the multiethnic Kosovo Transitional Council, then handed over the chairmanship to his successor. “He couldn’t bear playing second fiddle to Kouchner,” recalls Strohmeyer. After saying a few quiet good-byes, he slipped off to the airport.
Vieira de Mello’s last public statement as administrator was: “Killings, kidnapping, forced expulsions, house burnings, and looting are a daily occurrence. These are criminal acts. They cannot be excused by the suffering that has been inflicted in the past. Kosovo’s future must be built on justice, not vengeance.”24 By the time of his departure, only 156 of the 3,100 police requested by the UN had arrived, and some 150,000 Serbs had already fled.25
NO QUICK FIX
Back in New York, where his staff ribbed him as the “proconsul,” Vieira de Mello was not in a playful mood. After his two high-profile trips into Kosovo and almost two months in the field, his spirits slumped in the office environment. “How long am I now going to be stuck behind this desk?” he asked Hochschild. An earthquake in Turkey struck within four weeks of his return, requiring him to busy himself raising funds for emergency relief, but his mind drifted to the province he had left.
Before heading to Kosovo, he had promised the cleaning lady in his office at UN Headquarters that he would track down a nephew of hers in the province who was wheelchair-bound. While he had been in the region in June and July, he had made no progress. But back in New York he now pressed McNamara and Young to find the young man. He wrote multiple letters, offering leads on the boy, who was thought to be living as a refugee in Macedonia. “We were trying to do our jobs as systematically and fairly as we could,” recalls Young. “But every couple of weeks we would get a note from Sergio asking us to drop everything and help somebody new. For a while it was the nephew of his cleaning lady, but then, once we had helped him, it was somebody else. There was always somebody. It got to the point that we dreaded his phone calls. It was very kind of him, but not very efficient for us.”
Vieira de Mello monitored events in Kosovo with the vigilance of a parent who has left his child in a neighbor’s care. He devoured reams of cable traffic from the Balkans, and he defended the UN’s nation-building experiment and urged skeptics to give the Kosovars and the UN a little more time before they wrote off the possibility of peace. He angrily penned an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune, faulting the UN’s shortsighted critics who thought it “naïve” to work for coexistence. The violence in Bosnia and Kosovo, he wrote, “pales beside the mutual slaughter that characterized until relatively recently relations between many West European nations.” He argued that Kosovo was no more marked by revenge killings than South Africa had been after white rule ended. But observers there had not given up on reconciliation. “No serious commentator suggested, even in private, that blacks and whites were doomed to separation in South Africa, or that partition was inevitable,” he wrote. “Why should we apply different criteria to the Balkans? Why should its peoples not be given the time to heal their wounds? Why do we look for quick fixes there?”26
He understood where all the pressure was coming from. Rich countries had given $207 per person in response to the 1999 UN Kosovo appeal, as distinct from the $16 per person raised for Sierra Leone.27 This was a problem in its own right. “Just because these people look like us and are white,” he had long complained to staff, “doesn’t mean they are more deserving.” But the disproportionate spending mattered for another reason: If, with all the resources expended, Kosovo could not be stabilized, donor nations would be reluctant to give money to shore up other trouble spots.
He still hadn’t made up his mind as to whether NATO was right to have sidelined the UN Security Council and intervened in Serbia. He believed a precedent had been set. If a powerful country wanted to act and could not get the support of Security Council countries, he knew the country would be just a little more tempted to go it alone. President Clinton spoke before the General Assembly on September 21, 1999, and argued convincingly that when NATO bombed Serbia, it had in fact been defending the interests and values of the UN as well as those of the Kosovars.“NATO’s actions followed a clear consensus, expressed in several Security Council resolutions that the atrocities committed by Serb forces were unacceptable,” Clinton said. “Had we chosen to do nothing in the face of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened the United Nations. Instead, we would have risked discrediting everything it stands for. By acting as we did, we helped to vindicate the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, to give the UN the opportunity it now has to play the central role in shaping Kosovo’s future.”28 Vieira de Mello ended up largely persuaded, as allowing Serbia’s atrocities so soon after Rwanda and Srebrenica would have indeed cost the UN. He adopted a formulation common among those who supported NATO’s action but were nervous about its implications: The war was illegal (under the procedural rules of the UN Charter) but legitimate (according to the substantive ideals the UN was trying to advance).
Vieira de Mello tried to share the lessons he had learned in Kosovo, most of which related to law and order, with governments and senior UN officials at Headquarters. He proposed the establishment of a roster of pretrained, multinational police, along with judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, who would
place themselves on call and who could head into the field on short notice.29 The success of a mission could be decided in its first month. Providing civilians with security needed not only to be the top priority; it also had to be “the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth priority,” he argued. “Unlike other nation-building tasks,” he wrote, “law and order cannot wait.”30
Fourteen
BENEVOLENT DICTATOR
Vieira de Mello did not have long to stew over being big-footed as the UN administrator in Kosovo. At the opposite end of the earth, a humanitarian crisis of potentially catastrophic proportions was unfolding. East Timor, a tiny half-island in the Pacific, was attempting to rid itself of the Indonesian forces that had occupied it since 1975.1 And after a bloody conflict Vieira de Mello would be given a permanent chance to run his own long-term, complex mission. If he proved himself in Timor, he knew he would also demonstrate that the UN was in fact capable of stabilizing a broken country. If he failed, he also understood, the repercussions would be felt far from the Pacific.
INDEPENDENCE
During the occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, Indonesia’s armed forces killed some 200,000 Timorese. But in May 1999, while the world’s gaze was fixed upon NATO’s war with Serbia, the UN negotiated a deal by which the Indonesians agreed to give East Timor’s 800,000 people the chance to vote for independence. Just as Vieira de Mello was returning from Kosovo, six hundred UN officials in East Timor were staging election education seminars, preparing voter lists, and setting up polling stations. They were backed by 800 unarmed UN police and military liaison officers. Even though violence had been escalating all summer, the UN team hoped that the 26,000 Four days ahead of the UN vote, Indonesian police chasing, shooting, and killing pro-independence supporter Joaquim Bernardino Guterres. These were the first photographs of Indonesian police actually killing an East Timorese.
Indonesian army and police forces in East Timor would keep their pledge to guarantee security during the vote.
On August 30 the Timorese headed to the polls for the long-awaited vote on independence.2 UN election observers estimated that more than half the voters were already lined up when the polls opened at 6:30 a.m.3 Worried about Indonesia’s wrath, most went directly from the polling stations to hiding in the hills. Some 98.6 percent of registered Timorese cast ballots.
On September 4, 1999, anxious Timorese gathered around their television sets and radios to hear Ian Martin, the head of the UN election mission, read the results. Many wept joyously when the local radio and television reporters translated Martin’s announcement: 78.5 percent of Timorese had voted for independence. “This day will be eternally remembered as the day of national liberation,” declared Xanana Gusmão, the Timorese independence leader, who had been jailed in Indonesia since 1992. Domingos Sarmento, a former guerrilla who had also spent time in an Indonesian prison, listened to the news in his Dili home with his family. Upon hearing the results, he and his relatives went outside holding hands, and they kissed the land. “We were kissing something that finally belonged to us,” he recalls. “East Timor was a country.” But in fact the Indonesians had other plans in mind.
Within an hour of the announcement of the results, the sound of gunfire and screams abruptly halted Timorese celebrations. Black-uniformed pro-Indonesian militia, backed by the Indonesian army and police, embarked upon a savage looting, cleansing, and killing spree that left at least three-quarters of all property burned or destroyed, most of the population purged from their homes, and more than a thousand Timorese dead.4 The actions were calculated to destroy East Timor’s prospects for survival. Indeed, the gunmen went so far as to pour battery acid into the electrical generators. “We knew the Indonesians were going to do something dramatic,” recalls Taur Matan Ruak, then commander of the Timorese guerrilla resistance. “When you kill an animal, its last movement is like a spasm, and it is very strong.” In the next fortnight, the marauding militia also butchered sixteen Timorese employed by the UN as election workers.5 José Ramos-Horta, the longtime face of Timor’s movement for independence and corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, helplessly watched events unfold from New York, where he had flown to lobby the Security Council. “I saw on CNN that whole towns were being burned to a crisp, and my family in East Timor was hysterical with fear,” he recalls. “I thought that we were about to see the end of East Timor.”
Fearing a human cataclysm, Gusmão instructed Timorese rebels to turn the other cheek. “If we strike back,” Matan Ruak, the guerrilla commander, told his troops, on Gusmão’s instruction, “we will give the international community the excuse they want to call this a civil war, to equate us with the Indonesian militias.We have to stay clean.”
On September 5, after an American UN policeman was shot in the stomach, Martin ordered the withdrawal of UN election staff from rural areas. Timorese and international UN workers flocked to the capital, Dili, gathering at the UN base there. They saw that many terrified Timorese with no connection to the UN had taken shelter at a high school that abutted the UN compound. As night fell, a mob of militiamen hacked one man to death in the school yard and then began firing homemade guns—welded pipes packed with nails and gunpowder that were set off with cigarette lighters—at the Timorese, who fled toward the UN compound.
UN security officers guarding the base initially fended off the desperate Timorese. But fearing that the militia were closing in on them, mothers began hurling their children over the concrete wall separating the high school from the UN complex. Other Timorese cut themselves as they forced their way through holes they had sliced into the razor wire fence. As UN staff saw parents begin to follow their children over the wall, they formed an impromptu assembly line, passing the Timorese from one pair of hands to the next, until they were safely inside the UN building. The nighttime images of panic and rescue were broadcast globally. By the end of the evening more than fifteen hundred Timorese had joined foreign journalists and UN Timorese and international staff in the UN compound, where they slept on cardboard and shared dwindling rations. Ramos-Horta’s thirty-eight-year-old sister, Aida, and her six children, aged three, five, eight, ten, thirteen, and fourteen, were among those being sheltered. With corpses lining the streets, the sound of gunfire echoing through the night, and bare-chested militiamen brandishing large machetes outside the UN gate, UN staffers feared that the mob would storm the compound.
Vieira de Mello watched events unfold from New York, and still undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, he attempted to coordinate the UN’s humanitarian response. He herded the heads of the World Food Program, UNHCR, and the major aid groups together to ramp up their emergency aid deliveries. But while the militia were on the loose, he knew it would be very difficult to reach those in greatest need. He believed the crisis was so severe that military intervention, that rare and risky measure, was necessary.
Although the evidence indicated that Indonesian armed forces were committing and abetting the massacres, Western diplomats continued to point to the original referendum agreement in which Indonesia had accepted responsibility for maintaining East Timor’s security. When Sandy Berger, the national security adviser to President Clinton, was asked why the United States had not stepped up to try to stop the violence, Berger said,“You know, my daughter has a very messy apartment up in college; maybe I shouldn’t intervene to have that cleaned up. I don’t think anybody ever articulated a doctrine which said we ought to intervene wherever there’s a humanitarian problem.”6 None of the major powers seemed inclined to rescue the Timorese. “Nobody is going to fight their way in,” said Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary.7
But because it was UN staff who had staged the referendum, it was again the organization rather than the specific countries that constituted it that came under fire.The French newspaper L’Express ran a commentary by philosopher André Glucksmann, who called for the abolition of the UN, the “alibi of cynical powers”:
The UN lured the Timorese into an ambu
sh: it offers them a free referendum, they vote under its guarantee, it delivers them to the militias’ knives . . . Is the ability to foresee and to reform inversely proportional to the size of its resources? 180 nations, a lot of money, a plethora of bureaucrats. . . . A warning to the brave people who are counting on it: the UN knows, the UN keeps quiet, the UN withdraws.8
Le Point, another French newspaper, published an editorial by the prominent philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who invoked Somalia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica as the “other theaters of the UN’s shame.” He slammed the “slow but sure League-of-Nations-ization of the UN.”And he closed the appeal by arguing, “The UN did its time. The time of the UN has passed. We have to finish off this macabre farce which the UN has become.”9
Vieira de Mello was so incensed by the attacks that he fired off an intemperate response, which Le Monde entitled “Retort to Two Intellectual Show-offs.” The under-secretary-general denounced the “two prosecutor-philosophers.” Although it was “so easy to caricature, to ridicule, to defame” the UN “from the comfort of their Parisian homes,” he wrote, their reasoning was an “insult to philosophy” and would do nothing to improve people’s lives. He defended the UN referendum, which he noted had the full support of the Timorese. And he wondered why he could not recall Glucksmann and Lévy denouncing Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor.10 Instead of “shooting us in the back” by urging that the UN “rampart against anarchy” be destroyed—“a nonsense philosophically, politically and practically”—Vieira de Mello wrote, the men could do some real good by pressing Western governments to rescue East Timor.11
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 36