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

by Samantha Power

  He struggled to decide how much preferred status to give to Gusmão. UN officials in New York urged him not to play favorites and to treat Gusmão as the head of one party among many. But it did not take Gallup pollsters or a formal election to confirm Gusmão’s hallowed local status.7 Vieira de Mello appreciated New York’s concerns. If he relied on Gusmão to gauge “the will of the people,” he would alienate anybody who did not follow Gusmão. Plus, even if doing so meshed with overall Timorese sentiment, it would send the wrong signal to the Timorese about how leaders would be chosen in the new democratic East Timor. In advance of presidential elections, he would try to walk a fine line, respecting Gusmão’s de facto authority without formally enshrining it.

  In Cambodia Yasushi Akashi’s administration had supervised certain ministries, but in East Timor Vieira de Mello and his UN team were asked to run them all themselves. On December 2, 1999, in his most important early ruling, he set up the National Consultative Council (NCC), an advisory body that he hoped would make Timorese feel as though they had a voice in their futures. On its face the council looked reasonable enough. In addition to Vieira de Mello, the NCC included three other UN officials, seven representatives from Gusmão’s party, three members of other political groups, and one representative of the Timorese Catholic Church.8

  But since the Security Council had authorized only the UN administrator to make law, the NCC was merely a sounding board. Vieira de Mello could have passed any measure he wanted, irrespective of Timorese wishes. In practice he issued only regulations that the entire advisory body was willing to support. In the early months of the mission, he issued regulations establishing a banking system, a civil service, and a currency: U.S. dollars.9

  José Ramos-Horta, East Timor’s eventual foreign minister, laughed off the UN’s invitation to join the NCC.“I was powerless outside of East Timor for long enough,” he told Vieira de Mello. “The last thing I need is to be powerless inside Timor.” Gusmão accepted the invitation to serve, but after several meetings, he recalls, “We felt we were being used. We realized we weren’t there to help the UN make decisions or to prepare ourselves to run the administration. We were there to put our rubber stamp on Sergio’s regulations, to allow the UN to claim to be consulting.” Ironically, others felt Vieira de Mello was too deferential to Gusmão, that the country was becoming a “Xanana Republic.”10

  As administrator, he had to find a way simultaneously to offer short-term solutions and to nurture the Timorese capacity to govern themselves in the long term. He repeatedly stressed that the UN was there not to rule, but to prepare the Timorese to do so. But in the meantime UNTAET would have to ensure that tax revenue was collected, the garbage was picked up, and schools were refurbished and run. The UN mission would recruit and train a local Timorese civil service, but in the meantime the UN itself would supply basic services. Jobless Timorese (some 80 percent of the working-age population) thus saw foreigners staffing their civil service, while they went hungry.

  Vieira de Mello knew that the Timorese would not suffer UN rule for long. In a November 27 brainstorming session with staff, he argued, “The current goodwill of the East Timorese toward the mission is an expendable asset. The longer UNTAET stays, the greater the chances that it will be perceived as a competing power.” But even though he was sensitive to the danger of stoking Timorese resentment, he was so convinced of the UN’s impartiality that he found it impossible to view the UN as a colonial power. He blanched whenever somebody used the word “protectorate” to describe what he and his colleagues were attempting. He saw a UN administration as totally different from a colonial mission run by a single country, and he pointed out that the Security Council had explicitly tasked UNTAET to work itself out of existence. Yet while he was eager to hold elections, the recent referendum had been so traumatic that he suggested delaying the vote by a year or two.11

  In most sectors international UN staff members were put in charge so as to mentor and train the Timorese and to restore services. Unfortunately for Vieira de Mello, UN staff performed neither task well. Most UN officials did not speak any of the relevant languages (Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, or Tetum) and thus had difficulty transferring skills.12 However, as bloated as the UN bureaucracy in New York was in certain departments, it was sorely lacking staff with actual technical expertise. Because he was unable to recruit from any pre-vetted list of experts, crucial posts remained vacant for months.“Our system for launching operations has sometimes been compared to a volunteer fire department,” Secretary-General Annan later wrote.“But that description is far too generous. Every time there is a fire, we must first find fire engines and the funds to run them before we can start dousing the flames.”13 Vieira de Mello complained that he could hire political officers, logisticians, and administrators but could not summon the road engineers, waste managers, tax policy experts, and electrical engineers he needed to make East Timor run. Ian Martin, who watched Vieira de Mello’s struggles from afar, recalls, “Suddenly the UN became formally responsible for everything, and yet it had zero capacity for anything.” Jonathan Prentice, a political officer in the mission who later replaced Hochschild as Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, noted,“We’re not a great rent-a-government. In the first few months, we had all these people sent in from New York who could write diplomatic cables, but nobody who could lay electrical cable.”14

  The Timorese, who were already frustrated to have so little governing authority, pounced on the early signs of weakness. “I know many of them have no experience, no expertise, no academic qualifications at all,” Ramos-Horta said of the UN staff. “I asked one of them—an American lady—what her qualifications were, and she said only that she had worked in Yosemite National Park.”15 Most hiring decisions were made in New York. And once the internationals had been contracted, Vieira de Mello was largely stuck with them. Although he was running a mission of his own, he did not have the hiring authority to make use of the “box of possibilities” that he had kept in his office for nearly a decade. And even if he enjoyed full say, he would have been hard pressed to persuade the few specialists he knew to move overnight to a malaria-ridden island in the Pacific. He was unsure how he would manage to deliver tangible goods and services to the Timorese.

  While some UN officials had difficulty viewing their less-educated Timorese counterparts as partners, others were self-conscious about the mismatch between the UN’s huge responsibilities and its staff’s inapt experience. Hochschild remembers: “I would get into arguments on what the salary scale for teachers should be, and I’d suddenly hear myself and think, ‘What the hell am I talking about? Is this fair to East Timor to let people like me contribute to this debate?’” But Vieira de Mello did his best to remind himself and his staff that “only the Security Council, not I, can divest myself of this ultimate authority.”16

  ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

  Vieira de Mello had always been acutely sensitive to symbolism and to what he had long called “national self-esteem.” In the early months of the mission he tried not to act like a governor. “Just call me Sergio,” he had said to so many Timorese that when his secretaries attempted to set up appointments for their boss, they usually got nowhere when they said they were calling on behalf of “Mr. Vieira de Mello.” On several occasions, when his vehicle was stuck in traffic, his Egyptian bodyguard Gamal Ibrahim affixed a siren to the roof of the car. “Gamal, Gamal, what are you doing?!” Vieira de Mello would shout. “Take that thing down. I’d rather be late than act like a king.”

  Initially he slept in the Hotel Resende, which had neither locks on the doors nor hot water but did have an abundance of cockroaches. On one occasion, fed up with the grief he was getting from Gusmão and Ramos-Horta about the luxuriant lifestyles enjoyed by UN staff, he invited them to his hotel room for drinks. He proudly welcomed them into his suite, escorting them the length of his small bedroom and into his minuscule bathroom. “I want you to see this opulent palace you’re all talking about,” he to
ld his guests. After four months he was told that a villa along the Savu Sea had been restored for him. But when he saw the eight-bedroom house, he was aghast. “I can’t stay here,” he said on his first tour of the capacious quarters. He had the house partitioned, keeping two rooms for himself and designating the rest as a guesthouse for international visitors.

  He studied the local language,Tetum, scheduling several lessons a week with Domingos Amaral, his translator, and squeezing in practice sessions whenever his schedule offered a window. When Amaral worked as a translator in the UN election mission, he had traveled in the car behind his boss’s. But Vieira de Mello surprised him by frequently summoning him to sit beside him. “Domingos, where are you going?” he would protest. “Let’s use the journey to practice my Tetum.” Dipping into his large collection of hotel note pads, Vieira de Mello used them to jot words and pronunciation keys for himself. Before he gave a speech, he would have Amaral phonetically mark the key words or lines in Tetum, so that he would know where to place the stress. He referred to Amaral as “Professor.” “Professor, how do you win the sympathy of the people?” he asked rhetorically. “First, you have to learn the language. Language is the key to a people’s culture, and culture is the key to a people’s heart. If you force them to speak your language, you will never win their sympathy.” As Amaral helped him rehearse whole paragraphs of Tetum, he would whisper, “Don’t tell Ramos-Horta or Xanana. It will be our secret.”

  Local staff members were unaccustomed to being treated with such respect by foreigners. When Vieira de Mello held a barbecue at his house, he made sure Amaral’s whole family attended. And as he had done with Lola Urošević, his translator in Sarajevo, he never stopped asking the Timorese how they judged their economic prospects or the UN’s performance.

  But for all of his sensitivity to symbols, some of his decisions sent the wrong signal to the Timorese.With the havoc wreaked by the Kosovo Liberation Army foremost in his mind, he initially urged the Timorese to disband FALINTIL, the guerrilla army that had been fighting for independence for a quarter of a century. Much as NATO had been tasked with stabilizing Kosovo, he thought that it should be the job of the Australian-led Multinational Force to keep the Timorese secure. He thought that the presence of the FALINTIL guerrillas might intimidate those Timorese who had voted in the referendum to remain a part of Indonesia and who would eventually return to their homes in East Timor. But his early idea met with an uproar, as the rebels were beloved as both the symbol of and the vehicle for the end of Indonesia’s occupation. He quickly reversed his decision, instructing the fighters to remain in their barracks, off the streets. Gusmão was angry about this edict as well, complaining that independence fighters should not be “encaged like chickens.”17

  On November 18, tensions over FALINTIL came to a head. The Australian force commander, General Peter Cosgrove, instructed the guerrillas to consolidate some seventeen hundred fighters in a single barracks in Aileu. The soldiers did so in a relatively orderly fashion, but one truck filled with soldiers had a flat tire on its way and decided to stop in Dili for the night. The Australian military got word of their unauthorized presence and confronted them, seizing their knives and guns.When Gusmão was roused from his bed and informed, he was outraged. “The Australians are treating my men like common criminals,” he exclaimed. “They came to Timor, they didn’t fight a single battle, the militias fled, and now they are walking around with big chests like conquerors.We fought for twenty-four years, and yet they actually think they are superior.”

  Gusmão’s first task was soothing his men. “We played by Indonesian rules for all these years,” he said, as much to himself as to his fighters.“We can follow UN rules for a few more months.” But then he made a public stand. He drove to Dili with a platoon with weapons and was intercepted by General Cosgrove personally. “I don’t speak in the streets,” said Gusmão. “I’m on my way to Dili. If you want, feel free to come along.” When Cosgrove blocked the road with an Australian armored personnel carrier, Gusmão disembarked. “We are used to walking,” he said. He and his men walked the remaining several miles into town, and Cosgrove trailed on foot. Vieira de Mello was scheduled to meet with Gusmão that very morning. When he arrived amid a loud commotion, he exclaimed, “Xanana, what have you done? I thought we were going to meet to discuss our strategic plan!”

  UNTAET’s symbolic mistakes kept coming. Since the hotels and guesthouses had been burned down along with everything else in East Timor, most arriving UN officials had no place to stay. At the start election officials who had stayed on slept beneath their desks at the UN compound, hanging washing lines between their offices. Unwisely, UN administrative staff arranged for two ships, known as the Hotel Olympia and the Amos W, to sail to Dili and serve as hotels for those waiting for housing. The $160-per-night rooms in the floating hotels were not grand—the ships were really nothing more than barges topped with four layers of stacked containers—but from the vantage point of the Timorese onshore, the ships looked like luxury liners, especially after a rooftop disco opened on one, blaring music into the night. Timorese nationals were initially barred from dining or sleeping on the ships, which stirred further unrest. Unemployed Timorese milled around the esplanade near the gangplanks, hoping to be hired for the going wage paid by the UN and other international employers: three dollars for a twelve-hour day.18 The ships would become such a headache for Vieira de Mello that in July 2000 he ordered the nightclub on the ship to be closed at midnight. But by then the damage had long been done.

  The Timorese were jobless, homeless, and hungry. They saw few signs that their country was being rebuilt. They did not control their own destinies. And they grew angry. In December 1999 some 7,000 Timorese who were waiting in the scorching heat to be interviewed for 2,000 UN jobs learned that the jobs would go first to those who spoke English. The crowd began throwing rocks, hitting an Australian soldier in the mouth.Then they turned on Timorese who worked for the UN, beating up several and stabbing one. Only when Ramos-Horta arrived on the scene were tempers calmed.19 The following month, at the first major demonstration against the UN, one of the protesters held up a sign that read, “EAST TIMORESE NEED FOOD AND MEDICINE, NOT HOTELS AND DISCOTHEQUES.”20

  In 2000 the UN moved from its election headquarters at the teacher training compound into the Governor’s House, a two-story colonnaded Mediterranean mansion that overlooked the ocean, which had first housed the Portuguese and then the Indonesian colonial powers. Since no other facility that was still standing could accommodate the large UN mission, Vieira de Mello moved into the same second-floor office that months before had housed the unpopular Indonesian governor.

  Instead of simply departing their prior headquarters, the UN staff stripped the premises bare. In a highly literal reading of the UN rules laid down by the member states, they removed all “UN property”: not only the tables, chairs, and bulbs but also the air conditioners, cables, and wires. “Anything they couldn’t take, they broke,” recalls Padre Filomeno Jacob, who would later become Timorese education minister.“It was like vandalism.” Upon learning of the incident, Vieira de Mello personally delivered certain items back to the Timorese. But it was too late. “That’s when we realized we had to look out for ourselves,” Jacob says. “We entered the confrontation phase.” Gusmão began to refer to the UN presence as the “second occupation.”

  The protests picked up steam. In February 2000 angry medical students marched in the streets demanding the right to go back to school. One fish merchant came and dumped his raw fish at the doorstep of the UN mission, protesting the lack of electricity, which had deprived him of refrigeration. Vieira de Mello and Xanana Gusmão.

  The Timorese gathered regularly to protest price hikes, and the UN’s fourteen hundred local staff staged their own strikes over pay.

  The arrival of the UN had raised expectations that, thanks to familiar UN funding strictures, the mission could not deliver. The Security Council had handed UNTAET an ambitious mandat
e and a generous budget of more than $600 million. But the UN rules still forbade peacekeeping funds from being spent on rebuilding Timorese electricity grids or on paying the salaries of Timorese civil servants. Just as had been true in Cambodia and Kosovo, the UN budget could be spent only on UN facilities and UN salaries. “Something is clearly not right if UNTAET can cost $692 million, whereas the entire budget of East Timor comes to a bit over $59 million,” Vieira de Mello declared before the Security Council. “Can it therefore come as a surprise that there is so much criticism of United Nations extravagances, while the Timorese continue to suffer?”21

  An even more remarkable UN rule held that UN assets could be used only by mission staff. This meant that, although the UN was there to assist in “state-building,” owing to liability concerns, the Timorese technically could not be transported on UN helicopters or in UN vehicles. UN staff eventually had more than five hundred vehicles, but Vieira de Mello had to break the rules in order to get a dozen of them released for the top Timorese leaders who would one day be running the country themselves.22 “This is ridiculous,” he exclaimed during one of many arguments with the UN official in charge of administration. “I have the authority to order troops to open fire on militia leaders, but I don’t have the authority to give a computer to Xanana Gusmão!” Since New York was thirteen hours behind East Timor, he could rarely get the authorization he needed in a timely fashion. Prentice explains, “There will always be that tension, with headquarters thinking we are all a bunch of Colonel Kurtzes, and the field people thinking, ‘These guys who just sit behind their nice desks don’t understand anything.’” The rules, Vieira de Mello wrote in a “lessons learned” paper, “make the UN appear arrogant and egotistical in the eyes of those whom we are meant to help.”23 The World Bank administered a $165 million trust fund for East Timor, which was meant to be used for vital reconstruction, but Vieira de Mello had no say on how the budget was disbursed.24 “We are very focused on the risk of corruption. We don’t always recognize that there’s a similar risk in delay,” recalls Sarah Cliffe, who ran the World Bank program there. “Something is probably not right if we have the same rules for a $500,000 grant as we do for a $400 million loan.”