In late September Gusmão, the future president, and Ramos-Horta, the future foreign minister, visited Washington and New York, where heads of state were gathering for the annual launch of the UN General Assembly. Although East Timor was not yet formally a free nation, this was the first time Gusmão could walk among the world’s leaders and imagine the Timorese flag flying alongside the flags of the other UN member states.The Timorese delegation was invited to attend a reception hosted by President Clinton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grateful for Clinton’s firm stand against Indonesia, Gusmão and Ramos-Horta joined a lengthy receiving line. When the line had hardly moved after half an hour, they made a motion to leave, but a White House staffer commandeered them back into line, assuring them that President Clinton would be very disappointed if he could not personally congratulate them on their hard-won freedom. Back in line, where they would end up waiting almost two hours, they made small talk with the person standing behind them, who just happened to be Hun Sen, the premier of Cambodia. Hun Sen had strong views on one aspect of East Timor’s future: UN involvement. He complained that the UN had sent thousands of peacekeepers and bureaucrats to Cambodia, had spent more than $2 billion, and had abruptly left the country after holding elections. He said that international donors now felt that, because they had funded the mammoth UN mission, they had already done their part for Cambodia. “The UN will come with their white cars and their high salaries, and they will run around busily for two or three years,” Hun Sen warned. “Then their mandate will expire, they will leave, and you will be left with almost nothing.” Gusmão and Ramos-Horta thanked him for his warning and said that they intended to avoid a similar fate.
Gusmão flew back to Dili on October 22, 1999, a free man in his homeland for the first time since his imprisonment in 1992. Thousands of Timorese flocked to the Dili seafront plaza to greet him. “All of us must try to let go of the bad things they have done to us,” Gusmão told them. “Tomorrow is ours.”34 With tears in his eyes, and every expectation that his people were only days or weeks away from playing important roles in a new government, he proclaimed, “We knew we would suffer, but we are still here.”35
But on October 25 the Security Council in New York took decision-making out of Timorese hands and announced, in Resolution 1272, the creation of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). The resolution gave “all legislative and executive authority” not to Gusmão but to a foreign UN administrator who would run East Timor for at least fifteen months.36 Gusmão, who had favored a central UN role but not outright UN rule, was livid.When he first learned of the UN plan several weeks before, he had shouted to his colleagues, “What are they doing? What do these people want?” When he saw the resolution, he was even more steamed. The other Timorese leaders tried to calm him down, but they sympathized. “Imagine a transition in South Africa, where Mandela wasn’t given the ultimate authority,” says Ramos-Horta. “Imagine if some UN official were given all the power and told it was up to him whether he felt like consulting Mandela or not.” Sarmento, the former guerrilla who was also a lawyer, was also taken aback by the UN resolution. He had studied constitutional law, legal theory, and comparative law. “It looked like no legal structure I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “I knew that in democracies the powers were supposed to be separated and not clumped together in one man.” However, knowing that East Timor lay in ruins and needed outside help, he resigned himself to a period of UN administration.
Secretary-General Annan’s top advisers scrambled to assemble the second enormous mission of the year. The UN officials who had helped arrange the referendum believed Annan’s planners were shunning them as if they were responsible for the carnage.37 Ian Martin, who had organized the vote and remained in East Timor afterward, was rarely canvassed for advice. He pleaded with officials in Headquarters to move their planning base to Darwin, Australia, so that Gusmão and other Timorese leaders could be consulted. But New York paid no heed and gave no guidance to Martin, who was told to bide his time until his successor showed up.
Lacking familiarity with Timor itself, UN officials in New York took the plans they had developed for the Kosovo administration and virtually transposed them onto East Timor. UN staff who felt sidelined joked that Security Council Resolution 1272 was a “delete Kosovo, insert East Timor” resolution. Annan asked Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria and UN negotiator in Afghanistan, to become the head of UNTAET. Brahimi declined on the grounds that an international administration was unnecessary now that the Indonesians had left. He also argued that it was wrong to assume that what suited Kosovo would fit East Timor.“I know nothing about either Kosovo or Timor,” Brahimi told Annan, “but the one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that they are not the same place.” Since most of the UN planners had never visited East Timor, they had no feel for Gusmão’s extraordinary popularity and no grasp of the difference between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Timorese guerrilla force known as FALINTIL.38
Even if the UN planning staff in New York had put the most knowledgeable senior people in place, they still would have been overwhelmed. In the wake of Rwanda and Srebrenica the Security Council had stopped turning to the UN for help in peacekeeping or conflict resolution, and the UN staff in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, never large, had been cut by more than a quarter. But suddenly in 1999 Annan found himself unable to keep up with the demands. At the same time that the peacekeeping planners were setting up the transitional administrations in East Timor and Kosovo, they were also fielding missions to Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as maintaining thirteen preexisting operations.39 The department was so thinly staffed that it could commit just one professional staff member per operation.40
After Brahimi turned down Annan, it was obvious who would become UN administrator. Vieira de Mello was the only UN official who brought fluent Portuguese, extensive experience in Asia, and, after his second stint in Kosovo, the spirited backing of the Clinton administration, which would foot a large portion of the UN bill. He was the UN official best suited to performing tasks as varied as overseeing the drafting of a constitution, planning elections, and facilitating the return of Timorese refugees. There was only one problem: Vieira de Mello already had a job as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
Annan asked him again to take a leave from UN Headquarters and to become the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in East Timor. Vieira de Mello accepted eagerly. He had been bristling in his desk job in New York since returning from Kosovo in July. He lured those who had worked with him on previous missions to join him for a short stint. “It will only be for six months max,” he told them. “We’ll be back in New York in time for the summer.” In fact, he would stay in East Timor for two and a half years.
He packed up his apartment in New York and on November 8 flew to Geneva in order to see Annie and his sons. Since East Timor was the most inaccessible place imaginable, he knew that he would see his family even less than he had while he had been at Headquarters. Laurent and Adrien were still in university, and he would speak to them by telephone and e-mail them, but while they had liked passing through New York, East Timor was a harder sell.
Instead of resigning his position, which would have allowed a successor to take over, Vieira de Mello went on temporary leave, and his office, filled with his books and mementos, awaited his return. Fabrizio Hochschild was uneasy about his boss having abandoned the newly restructured office. “I tried to make him feel guilty about it,” he recalls. “To be honest, I failed.”41
On his many connecting flights en route to Dili, Vieira de Mello read and reread the all-encompassing Security Council Resolution 1272, which left nothing to the imagination. Even though the text included one vague line on the need for the UN to “consult and cooperate closely with the East Timorese people,” his control as administrator was absolute.42 Before he left, Brahimi ribbed him, “Sergio, instead of you being the dictator an
d Gusmão your adviser, why don’t you make Gusmão the dictator and you be the adviser?” But both men knew that UN civil servants could not reverse Security Council edicts. He had been appointed what he called a “benevolent despot” in a country he had never before even visited. Neither the Timorese nor other international organizations had been given a say in how the country was to be run—or in this case built. Nothing like this had been tried before. And although East Timor’s end state was clear—independence—Vieira de Mello would have to pave his own path to that goal. He would complain often that he lacked “an instruction manual.”43
Although Vieira de Mello knew the Security Council resolution by heart by the time he landed in Dili, it would take him months to grasp the significance of what was missing from the four-page text: a plan for sharing power with the Timorese and for providing them with day-to-day economic and physical security. These gaps would haunt the mission and very nearly cost him, and the UN, a rare success.
Fifteen
HOARDING POWER, HOARDING BLAME
“YEAR ZERO”
As his Red Cross plane landed in the Dili darkness on November 16, 1999, Vieira de Mello had two thoughts. The first was “This time you’ve got to do it right.” He, like all senior UN staff, knew that the UN’s reputation for competence had plummeted in the 1990s. His second thought was “How do we do this? We’ve never done anything this big before.”1 The single-runway airport bore a sign that said, WELCOME TO THE MOST RECENT COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
He knew that the UN mission had a number of things going for it. In a country that was ethnically homogeneous and 90 percent Catholic, he did not have to worry about curtailing ethnic or sectarian strife of the kind that raged between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. Also, the people were united in their goal of achieving independence. Most of the militiamen and voters who had favored remaining part of Indonesia had fled to West Timor. And Xanana Gusmão, East Timor’s de facto leader, himself preached reconciliation and patience. Vieira de Mello noted the absence of the “mortal hatred” he had observed in the Balkans.2
An additional factor that distinguished East Timor from Kosovo making the place what he later called “a pretty perfect petri-dish,” was that all of the countries on the Security Council were united behind the aims of the UN mission. Russia and China joined Western democracies in welcoming East Timor’s march to independence. And rich countries seemed prepared to give generously to assist in the birth and teething of this new country.
But as he drove from the airport into town and saw the shocking scale of destruction, he could tell that he would need all the help he could get. He peered out at row upon row of houses that had been turned to cinders. Although in New York he had tracked the Indonesian burning and killing campaign and had even argued for a military intervention, the thoroughness and freshness of the onslaught were jarring.“It is shocking to think that all of this just happened,” he said to his special assistant Fabrizio Hochschild. “Three months ago all these buildings were standing, and now they’re gone.” In Kosovo schools and hospitals and post offices had been left intact.“It was just a question of figuring out where the hell the key was,” he remembered, while in East Timor. “Nothing, literally nothing, was left intact on the ground, except the will of the Timorese.”3
East Timor had never enjoyed the autonomy that Kosovo had prior to 1989. Under the Indonesians the Timorese had filled primarily low-level jobs. The middle and senior ranks of the civil service would have to be recruited and trained almost from scratch, from a population that was 60 percent illiterate.4 In Kosovo the UN mission had struggled to reestablish the rule of law in the wake of the Serbs’ departure, but the province did not lack for lawyers. In East Timor Vieira de Mello was quickly told that the island was home to only sixty lawyers. Even though he had anticipated that Indonesia’s rules and records would need to be thoroughly amended, he had not expected to discover that the Indonesians had systematically burned every record they laid their hands on, including property deeds, tax records, and marriage licenses. The holistic campaign of destruction and the obliteration of the state records reminded him of “Year Zero,” the Khmer Rouge’s launch of a new society back in 1975.5
As UN administrator, he knew that he would have to make a wide range of decisions in a hurry. Airports and ports had to be opened, clean water procured, health care provided, schools resuscitated, a currency created, relations with Indonesia normalized, a constitution drafted, an official language chosen, and tax, customs, and banking systems devised. Policies that normally evolved over hundreds of years would all have to be decided within months of arrival—by him and his team. For decades, he observed, UN advisers had “lectured Governments on how to best go about their business,” and the organization now found itself “in the awkward position of being called upon to practice what it has been preaching.”6
UN officials who had been in East Timor during the bloody referendum felt that Vieira de Mello was going out of his way to distance himself from his predecessors. Tamrat Samuel, a forty-seven-year-old Eritrean who had helped plan the referendum, flew into Dili with him and remained for a month. He warned his boss that the UN officials who had lived through the election trauma were suspicious of the new arrivals. “You have to be concerned about perceptions,” Samuel said. “People think ‘Sergio’s boys’ from Kosovo are coming to show them who knows best.” Vieira de Mello laughed. “That’s silly,” he said. “We are here to do this together. There is no such thing as ‘my crowd.’ ” But Samuel stressed that many UN staff believed his team thought, “We are the saviors who have come to fix this mess made by the UN before us.”
Vieira de Mello claimed he did not share the view of UN officials in New York who acted as though the bloodshed were somehow the fault of the UN election workers. In fact, he so admired the stand that UN officials in Dili had taken on behalf of the Timorese at the UN compound that he made Carina Perelli, who ran the election division, promise to take him on a tour of the scene. “I want to know every detail of the siege, of who did what and when,” he told her. And indeed, when he got to East Timor, the Timorese told him how much they respected the prior UN mission for having carried out the referendum amid the violence and for having refused to abandon the Timorese at the compound. But he did not make a sufficient effort to communicate his respect to those UN election officials he overlapped with in Timor. He was far more concerned about the impression he made on the Timorese than about the one he made on his UN colleagues.
EXPECTATION GAP: POWER SHARING
His first priority was building governing structures. When he worked in Cambodia, he had understood the hallowed local status of Prince Sihanouk and spent months cultivating ties with him. In East Timor he knew his success would hinge on his relationship with Gusmão, who was both the former rebel commander and unquestioned political leader.
The day after Vieira de Mello landed in Dili after traveling for more than twenty-four hours, he made an unusual, and essential, courtesy call. Instead of waiting for Gusmão to pay his respects to him, he made the two-hour trek to the town of Aileu, where the Timorese leader was encamped. The stifling journey along steep, largely unpaved mountain roads gave him his first glimpse of the country he now ruled. Gusmão thought it a welcome gesture. “I had expected to go down to Dili to see him,” he recalls. “So I took note when Sergio went out of his way to come find me.”
Gusmão told Vieira de Mello that he was pleased the UN had appointed a Brazilian, so that they would be able to communicate with each other in Portuguese, the language of those Timorese who had been educated by Portuguese colonizers before the Indonesian annexation. But he complained that thus far the UN had been doling out humanitarian aid without much local consultation. And he conveyed the concern that had been irking him since his conversation with Hun Sen in New York: East Timor did not want to suffer the “Cambodia trauma.” “I know the UN means well,” he told the new UN administrator, “but in Cambodia the UN came in, spent millions, an
d then left a vacuum behind them, which was filled with chaos. How are we to suppose that the same thing won’t be done here?” Vieira de Mello smiled graciously. "Well, I served in Cambodia, so I know a few things about that mission,” he said. “The UN certainly made mistakes, but there was more than enough blame to go around.” Gusmão was not interested in the specifics. “Just promise me you’re not going to run Timor like you ran Cambodia,” he said. “We don’t want you to come and go and for us to be left shaking our heads and saying,‘Was that a storm that just passed through here?’ ” Vieira de Mello agreed. “I promise we will not repeat Cambodia here.” Not repeating Cambodia meant aggressively establishing functioning governing structures that made a concrete and lasting difference to citizens.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 38