First, I must thank those who aided the creation of this book. There would be no book at all if not for Cullen Murphy, who, while still the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, proposed that I write a magazine profile of Sergio. Every book’s quality turns on the inventiveness or significance of the question behind it, and Cullen is the person who chose a question I would not have come up with on my own. My friends Philip Gourevitch and George Packer launched me by donating the transcripts of lengthy interviews they conducted with Sergio shortly before he died. A remarkable number of people offered to read drafts, perhaps unaware that I would take them up on their offers and inflict a messy manuscript on them. Those who suffered most were the early readers, who pretended to overlook the grave flaws in substance and style, engaging critically with every paragraph as if I were just a few snappier transitions away from completion: Jamshid Anvar; Omar Bakhet; Nader Mousavizadeh; Carina Perelli; Carole Ray; Strobe Talbott; Oliver Ulich; my stalwart life policy advisers Richard Holbrooke and Jonathan Moore (who, along with his wife, Katie, introduced me to Sergio back in 1994); novelist Nick Papandreaou, who stages an essential return for every painful book cycle; Chuck Cohen, who never leaves; and my wild and brilliant aunt and uncle in Waterville, Ireland: Patricia and Derry Gibson. Salman Ahmed, Jeff Davie, Helena Fraser, Peter Galbraith, James Lynch, Jon Randal, and Ghassan Salamé reviewed parts of the book for accuracy. Others commented critically on more developed but still ugly full drafts: John Gomperts, Richard Goodwin, Michael Ignatieff, Georgeanne Macguire, Fabienne Morisset, Cullen Murphy, Izumi Nakamitsu-Lennartsson, Laura Pitter, John Schumann, and Diederik Vanhoogstraten. Jonathan Prentice and Fabrizio Hochschild were transatlantic partners in this endeavor, offering intense feedback as well as vital friendship. I tried to take to heart every comment, but any remaining mistakes or oversights are my own. In Brazil Antonio Vieira de Mello, André Simões, Sonia Vieira de Mello, and the epic Gilda Vieira de Mello took a generous leap of faith in inviting me into their close-knit family, sharing memories, letters, and photos. Despite the rawness of the loss and the pain of recalling Iraq, Carolina Larriera did the same, contributing invaluably to my understanding of the man and his mission. Leon Wieseltier stepped in, as he always does, to provide advice when it mattered most. My colleague Sarah Sewall at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered constant moral support and creative push-back. She then salvaged the book’s final months, loaning me the indefatigable Meghan Frederico to join me in the all-nighters needed to fact-check an unwieldy tome. Robin Trangsrud arranged my travel and provided support for my courses. Daniel Camos-i-Duarella drew on his French, Spanish, and Portuguese to help me get to the bottom of mysteries that had persisted into the book’s final days. And Sarah Stanlick and Nahreen Ghazarian (thanks to Swanee Hunt) arrived at the center in time to help shepherd the book through publication.
Michel Thieren, a medical doctor with the World Health Organization, deserves singular thanks. After he read “A Problem from Hell,” he e-mailed me, a stranger, and announced that he intended to find the book a French publisher. After he spent two years unsuccessfully hawking the book door-to-door in France, he asked to see Chasing the Flame in its roughest state and delivered sixty pages of intensive micro and macro comments. Moreover, he tracked down Sergio’s professors at the Sorbonne, sneaked me into the UN antechambers so that I could photocopy documents leaked to me by others, and delivered cheering phone calls and e-mails, tracking every deadline as if it were his own.
Six months after starting the book I met Terry George, the director of Hotel Rwanda. When I tried to persuade Terry to make a movie about Raphael Lem-kin, the coiner of the word “genocide,” his eyes glazed over. But as soon as I mentioned this project, he lit up. I have no doubt that Terry will make a superb film out of Sergio’s life, but in the meantime I have been blessed to have him as a collaborator. Moviemakers are notorious for ruining books, but my long conversations with Terry have improved this one.Whenever I found myself heading down some East Timorese garden path, it was Terry who would pull me back. “But what is the universal story here, the tale that does not depend on time or place?” he would ask. “Think about it this way: ‘Once upon a time, there was a kingdom. And in that kingdom, there was a good, flawed knight named Sergio. He had a sword, and he had a shield ...’” I also benefitted from talking with Greg Barker, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, who is making a documentary about the Canal Hotel attack on August 19, 2003. Meredith Blake, who did so much to make An Inconvenient Truth inconveniently relevant for so many, has taken on the difficult task of determining how to maximize the social impact of these endeavors (see ). She is backed by Randy Newcomb and the incomparable Pam Omidyar, who is doing more than anybody else I know—in Sergio’s words—to “invent the future.”
Team Obama’s John Favreau, Mark Lippert, Dennis McDonough, and Ben Rhodes offered daily infusions of conviction and banter while Obama himself always found a way to supply impeccably timed moral support despite having a few other things on his plate.
I am blessed to have close friends whom I see and talk to less than I would like, but whose voices roam about in my head regardless: Amy Bach, Steven Bourke, Allan Buchman, Holly Burkhalter, Gillian Caldwell, Greg Carr, Chuck Cohen, Lenor Cohen, Emma Daly, Joy DeMenil, Sharon Dolovich, Mano Felciano, Debbie Fine, Jody Freeman, Danna Harman, Oren Harman, Michele Horgan, George Timothy Horry, Anna Husarska, Peter Jukes, Kate Lowenstein, Martha Minow, Jonathan Moore, Charlotte Morgan, Julian Mulvey, Azar Nafisi, Luis Moreno Ocampo, David Pressman, Lee Siegel, Alexis Sinduhije, Stacy Sullivan, Jim Tipton, Zain Verjee, and Miro Weinberger. Curt Wood, my neighbor and friend, kept my house from falling down while I was away and occasionally when I was working obliviously inside. Cass Sunstein stepped in to offer improbable care, delivering what amounted to the clutch ninth-inning, game-seven RBI. One baritone voice will stay with me forever: that of the late, great David Halberstam, who ordered me to banish lunch and to remember that we have the greatest job on earth.
They say it’s a bad idea to mix friendship and business, but I don’t know what I would do if my editor,Vanessa Mobley, and my agent, Sarah Chalfant, were not also dear friends. They are the best in their respective businesses and they make my work better, while also enduring one impossibly demanding writer. In the final stretch Lindsay Whalen and Bruce Giffords at The Penguin Press demonstrated infinite patience as they worked overtime to get every precious detail correct.Thanks also to David Remnick and Daniel Zalewski at The New Yorker, who launched Sergio by showcasing his Iraq experience.
At the heart of my A team is my former assistant Hillary Schrenell. Hillary was a recent college graduate when she joined the Carr Center as an intern in 2003. Over the following four years she morphed into a scrupulous administrator, a relentless researcher, a photo finder, a merciless editor, and a true friend. I have never known anyone else who cares more than I do about finding the unfindable source, who agonizes over word choices as if the future of the planet depended on linguistic precision, and whose ruthless perfectionism forced me to get my game up on these pages in order to withstand her gleaming scalpel and satisfy her loving eye. I’m not sure I know anybody else who combines such exceptional intellect with such unrelenting conscientiousness. The world needs more Hillarys.
And then there are the friends who kept me daily company: Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Goodwin, standard-setting historians and beloved confidantes; David Rohde and Elizabeth Rubin, brave and indefatigable reporters who care enough about their friendships to nurture them from Kandahar; Sayres Rudy, who understands everything, always; Michal Safdie and Moshe Safdie, who have altogether changed what my eyes see in the world; and Elliot Thomson, the wonder twin who has taught me to savor the trajectory of even the pitches we throw straight into the dirt.
Back in 1993 in the Balkans, Laura Pitter patiently introduced this novice reporter to the concept of the “nut graph,” and she has offered me a most uncomplicated friendship since. A public defender in the Bronx,
she infuses those who know her with calmness and goodness. And John Prendergast, a friend whom I can hardly believe I’ve only known since 2004, lived and breathed this book with me, calling every single day at midnight, insisting on speaking when all I wanted to do was turn off the phones, and making me feel unequivocally accompanied throughout. As the telephone bills from Darfur, the Philippines, Uganda, and countless other places attest, geography was no barrier for long wending discussions on the Royals’ “resurgent” farm system, the aims of the latest janjaweed offensive, or, inevitably, the most deeply personal subjects of life and love. It is no exaggeration to say that every time I might have been daunted by a reportorial, geopolitical, or personal minefield before me, John shrugged, picked me up on his shoulders, and carried me through to the other side.
The book is dedicated to three people: Mort Abramowitz, Frederick Zollo, and Stephen Power. Mort and Fred are two people who, despite all they have seen, retain a capacity for incredulity over hackneyed thinking and unjust acts. Both thought this book a lousy idea—“Samantha, Sergio worked for the United Nations,” Fred would say. "What did he achieve exactly?” Mort, who never saw Sergio at his best, was simply puzzled by all my fuss. But their skepticism was rooted in such high standards, and such unyielding support for me, that they helped move me eventually, belatedly, to understand the point of the book and, in many ways, the point of my career. And Stephen Power, my brother, has done what many of us pledge to do and few of us manage: change his life. Indeed, the depth of his self-scrutiny and transformation is staggering.
Of course, as anybody who knows me is aware, every word I write is implicitly dedicated to my parents, Edmund Bourke and Vera Delaney. Just as they did on my first book, they again read every word of every draft, managing to act as though each read were a revelation. I believe it was printing out the sixth draft of what was then an eight-hundred-page book that finished off the third of their “Sergio printers.” Their commitment to the project was so thorough that they actually hid chapters from each other—behind cereal boxes, under couch cushions, and in sock drawers—so as to be the first to give feedback. Eddie called most mornings to refer me to books he thought might offer insight. And when I didn’t leap, he’d buy and read the books so as to sharpen the point. His openness to new ideas and personal growth are a wonder. As for my mother, she might as well have written this book for all the emotion she invested in the last four years. It can’t be easy on her to internalize my struggles as if they are her own, but her verbatim renditions of Jon Stewart monologues, exuberant Off-Broadway theater discoveries, obligatory anti-A-Rod updates, and simple cheer made every hard day seem a whole lot softer. Eddie and Mum continue to present a model of how to aspire to be in the world—insatiably curious, unfailingly sincere, and constantly on the lookout for the chance to fall over laughing. I’m so very lucky.
NOTES
I conducted more than four hundred interviews with Sergio Vieira de Mello’s colleagues, friends, and family members, many of whom shared their letters and e-mails. To protect confidentiality, I have not listed my own interviews in the endnotes but have cited any material I received from others. I owe a special thanks to UNHCR in Geneva and the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, which generously granted me access to internal files that had not previously been reviewed by scholars or journalists. In the end I was able to peruse more than ten thousand pages of classified cables and internal memos, along with Vieira de Mello’s own handwritten notes from his missions.
INTRODUCTION 1 Dick Cheney, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.
2 Bernard-Henri Lévy quoted in Roger Cohen, “A Balkan Gyre of War, Spinning Onto Film,” New York Times, March 12, 1995 sec. 2, p.1.
3 Paolo Lembo, “Lest We Forget: The UN in Iraq—Sergio Vieira de Mello (1948- 2003),” Azerbaijan International 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).
CHAPTER 1. DISPLACED 1 Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, Top Secret Cable, March 29, 1964, U.S. State Department, .
2 “Brazil: The Military Republic, 1964-85,” in Rex A. Hudson, ed., Brazil: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1998), p. 80.
3 “The Post-Vargas Republic, 1954-64,” ibid., p. 78.
4 Bahia would later be home to such Brazilian cultural icons as singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and the novelist Jorge Amado. It had the most racially diverse population and some of the most fertile soil in Brazil.
5 Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Bolivar, o Brasil e os nossos vizinhos do Prata (Bolivar, Brazil, and Our Neighbors in the Southern Cone) (Rio de Janeiro, 1963).
6 Far fewer died in Brazil than in Argentina, where more than thirty thousand people were “disappeared.”
7 When Tarcilo left parliament, the daily Jornal do Brasil called him “the greatest Brazilian parliamentarian since 1930.” Perfis parlamentares 29, pp. 55-58, Camara dos Deputados, Centro de Documentação e Informação, Coordenação de Publicacões, Brasilia, 1985.
8 Sergio Vieira de Mello (hereinafter SVDM), “Sentido da Palavra Fraternidade” (Sense of the Word Fraternity) in Pensamiento e Memória (Thought and Memory) (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2004), pp. 231-32.
9 SVDM, "Un Chaos salutaire” (A Healthy Chaos), Combat, May 18-19, 1968.
10 Ibid.
11 SVDM to a girlfriend who prefers to remain anonymous, March 2, 1969.
12 SVDM to anonymous, March 12, 1969.
13 SVDM to anonymous, May 19, 1969.
14 SVDM to anonymous, June 23, 1969.
15 “‘Jamie’: A Man of Action,” UNHCR no. 1, March 1974.
16 SVDM to anonymous, July 11, 1970.
17 “‘Jamie’: A Man of Action.”
18 Ibid. Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 157. Bangladesh’s independence was declared in March 1971 and was recognized by Pakistan in December.
19 “Quotes from the Press Conference,” UNHCR no. 1, July 1972. The press conference took place on July 6, 1972, at the Palais des Nations.
20 Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Os Corsários na guerras do Brasil e o dramático batismo de fogo de Garibaldi (The Privateers in the Wars of Brazil and the Dramatic Baptism of Fire of Garibaldi) (Sialul, 1992).
21 Robert Misrahi, interview by Michel Thieren, June 7, 2007.
22 SVDM, “La rôle de la philosophie dans la société contemporaine” (The Role of Philosophy in Contemporary Society) (Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1974).
CHAPTER 2. “I WILL NEVER USE THE WORD ‘UNACCEPTABLE’ AGAIN” 1 Sources differ on the number of fatalities brought about by the Israeli invasion. A Newsweek account estimated that 1,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed, along with 18 Israeli soldiers and some 250 PLO guerrillas. Raymond Carroll et al., “Operation Cease-fire,” Newsweek, April 3, 1978, p. 39.
2 The first round of the Lebanese civil war, which ran from April 1975 to October 1976, left the central government without control of southern Lebanon. When Syrian troops making up an Arab Deterrent Force tried to deploy there, Israel objected. After the Israeli invasion in 1978, Lebanese government officials complained that Israel’s obstructionism had denied Lebanon the means to neutralize Palestinian forces in the south.
3 “A Mission for the U.N.,” Washington Post, March 19, 1978, p. C6.
4 The first UN military missions were observer missions rather than what would become known as peacekeeping deployments. In 1948, after Israel went to war with Palestinian fighters and Arab armies, the Security Council voted to send twenty-one monitors to supervise the truce. In 2007 the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) still kept 152 observers in the Sinai. Similarly, after fighting broke out in 1947 between India and Pakistan over the disputed province of Kashmir, the Security Council established a commission to monitor the India-Pakistan cease-fire, a role that the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) performs to this day. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was estab
lished in 1956 in the Suez region of Egypt, when the General Assembly held its first-ever Emergency Special Session after the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, which had been precipitated by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Under UNEF’s supervision, the U.K. and France withdrew from the region within two months and Israeli forces withdrew within five months. The cease-fire held for ten years until 1967, when UNEF was withdrawn at the request of the Egyptian government.
5 Five missions began after that in the Congo in the 1960s. In West New Guinea (1962-63) peacekeepers monitored the cease-fire during the transition of West Irian from Dutch rule to Indonesian rule; in Yemen (1963-64) they supervised Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s disengagement from Yemen’s civil war; in Cyprus (1964-present) they helped prevent further conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; in the Dominican Republic (1965-66) they monitored the situation following the outbreak of civil war; in India/Pakistan (1965-66) they supervised the India/Pakistan cease-fire outside of Kashmir.
6 In 1978 some 1,200 blue helmets were stationed on the Golan Heights, and 2,300 remained deployed in Cyprus.
7 James Mackinlay, The Peacekeepers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 56, 66.
8 H. McCoubrey and N. D. White, The Blue Helmets (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1996), p. 94.
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