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

by Samantha Power

  25 John Ruggie,“Press Briefing on Kosovo,” July 21, 1999, online at briefings/docs/1999/19990721.RUGGIE.html.

  26 SVDM, “Resist the Apartheid Temptation in the Balkans,” International Herald Tribune, August 25, 1999, p. 26.

  27 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 23.

  28 Bill Clinton, Remarks to the 54th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 1999.

  29 Hochschild, “‘It Is Better to Leave, We Can’t Protect You,’ ” p. 295.

  30 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

  CHAPTER 14. BENEVOLENT DICTATOR 1 The day before the Indonesian invasion U.S. president Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met in Jakarta with President Suharto. The notes on the Ford-Kissinger-Suharto discussion (online at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf ) reveal that the United States openly approved of the plan to invade. Suharto said, “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.” And Ford consented, saying, “We will understand and will not press you on the issue.” Kissinger expressed some misgivings about the possible U.S. public reaction and cautioned: “We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned [to the United States].”

  2 The Timorese were asked to vote yes to one of the two following statements: “Do you ACCEPT the proposed special autonomy for East Timor within the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia?” or “Do you REJECT the proposed special autonomy for East Timor, leading to East Timor’s separation from Indonesia?”

  3 Ian Martin, “The Popular Consultation and the United Nations Mission in East Timor—First Reflections,” in James J. Fox and Dionisio Babo Soares, eds., Out of the Ashes: Destruction and Reconstruction of East Timor (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2003), p. 133.

  4 Some 230,000 fled or were deported to refugee camps in Indonesia-controlled West Timor, and several hundred thousand more were internally displaced.

  5 Ian Martin, “Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor,” Public Hearing, March 15-17, 2004.

  6 Sandy Berger, “Special White House Briefing, Subject: President Clinton’s Trip to APEC Meeting in New Zealand,” September 8, 1999.

  7 Rupert Cornwell, “East Timor in Turmoil,” Independent (London), September 6, 1999, p. 3.

  8 André Glucksmann, “Impardonnable ONU” (Unpardonable UN), L’Express, September 23, 1999.

  9 “Le bloc-notes de Bernard-Henri Lévy” (Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Note Pad), Le Point, September 24, 1999.

  10 SVDM, “Réplique a deux intellectuals cabotins” (Retort to Two Intellectual Show-offs), Le Monde, October 17, 1999.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Kofi Annan, Press Conference, New York, September 10, 1999.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Geoffrey Robinson, “‘If You Leave Us, We Will Die,’” Dissent, Winter 2002, p. 97.

  16 On September 9, the Australian government announced that individuals fleeing East Timor would be able to apply for special humanitarian visas upon arrival in Australia (rather than before entry). The humanitarian stay visas were for those who had “been, or will likely be, displaced from their place of residence” and were a more general version of a special visa category that the Australian government had established for Kosovar refugees the previous April. The visas were expected to last no longer than three months, and the Australian immigration minister told ABC radio: “It’s not intended to be used in a large number of cases.”“Government Change to Humanitarian Visa Arrangements,” Australian Associated Press, September 1999.

  17 Seth Mydans, “Cry from Besieged City: Don’t Forget East Timor,” New York Times, September 12, 1999, p. A14.

  18 Manfred Becker (director), The Siege, Telefilm, Canada, 2004.

  19 Officially, the language is known as Bahasa Indonesia. East Timor itself is known in Tetum as Timor Lorosa’e, in Portuguese as Timor-Leste, and in Indonesian as Timor Timur.

  20 Robinson, “‘If You Leave Us,’” p. 94.

  21 Becker, The Siege.

  22 SVDM, “Note for Mr. Prendergast: Re: IDPs in UN Compound,” September 9, 1999.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Michael Carey, "UNAMET’s Final Humiliation,” ABC Australia, September 9, 1999.

  26 Kofi Annan, Press Conference, New York, September 10, 1999.

  27 Keith Richburg, “Indonesia Softening on Peacekeepers,” Washington Post, September 12, 1999, p. A1.

  28 Bill Clinton, Press Conference on East Timor,Washington, D.C., September 9, 1999.

  29 Seth Mydans, “Indonesia Invites a UN Force to Timor,” New York Times, September 13, 1999, p. A1.

  30 Doug Struck, “‘The Militias Will Eat Your Crying Babies’; Terrified Refugees Describe Harrowing Escape from Dili,” Washington Post, September 16, 1999, p. A17.

  31 On April 30, 1975, as the United States withdrew from captured Saigon, desperate Vietnamese gathered at the U.S. embassy and other points across the city. Over the previous two weeks, 50,000 South Vietnamese who had supported the United States in the war had been evacuated along with 6,000 Americans. Upon learning that the North Vietnamese would overtake Saigon at daybreak, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford ordered U.S. helicopters to evacuate the embassy in the middle of the night. After discovering that 129 U.S. Marines had been left behind, they sent another helicopter back, now in daylight. As the helicopter ascended, around 400 Vietnamese who had been promised evacuation were abandoned below. Marines tossed tear gas grenades down among the Vietnamese.

  32 Seth Mydans, “Refugees Are Joyful in a Dili of Ashes,” NewYork Times, September 21, 1999, p. A10.

  33 SVDM, Speaking Notes, “Handing Over Ceremony with General Cosgrove,” February 23, 2000. He continued, “Had a force like INTERFET been deployed in the spring of 1994 to Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.”

  34 Laura King, “Thousands Cheer East Timor Leader,” Associated Press, October 22, 1999.

  35 Terry McCarthy and Jason Tedjasukmana, “The Cult of Gusmão,” Time Europe, March 20, 2000, p. 30.

  36 UN Security Council Resolution 1272, October 25, 1999.

  37 Francesc Vendrell, the senior UN envoy who had miraculously persuaded the Indonesians to allow the referendum and had been working on East Timor since 1976, was told not to meddle and was treated at UN Headquarters, in the words of one UN official, “like a common criminal.”

  38 FALINTIL is the Forças Armadas da Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste (the Armed Forces for the National Liberation of Timor-Leste).

  39 Conflict Security and Development Group, King’s College, London, “A Review of Peace Operations: A Case for Change, East Timor,” March 10, 2003, pp. 18-21.

  40 The ratio of professional staff members to operation has since risen to two or three per operation. But the ratio of professional staff in Headquarters to UN personnel in the field remains around 1:149. UN General Assembly, Administrative and Budgetary Committee, “Introductory Remarks by the Under-Secretary-General for the Department of Management,” Comprehensive Report on Strengthening the Capacity of the Organization to Manage and Sustain Peace Operations, June 5, 2007.

  41 Only in December 2000, thirteen months after Vieira de Mello departed, did a near-mutiny in the office convince Annan to formally replace Vieira de Mello with Kenzo Oshima, a career Japanese diplomat.

  42 UN Security Council Resolution 1272. Jarat Chopra has helpfully described four categories of transitional authority: assistance, where the state was still intact and functioning, and the UN gave technical advice but exerted no direct authority over a government; control, as in Cambodia, where the UN sent transitional personnel to exercise “direct control” over certain governing functions; partnership, as in Namibia, where the UN and South Africa initially collaborated; and outrigh
t governorship, as in East Timor, where the UN exercised direct governmental authority. Jarat Chopra, “Introducing Peace Maintenance,” Global Governance 4 ( January-March 1998), p. 7.

  43 SVDM, Address to National Council, June 28, 2001.

  CHAPTER 15. HOARDING POWER, HOARDING BLAME 1 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Saved from Ruin: The Reincarnation of East Timor; U.N. Handing Over Sovereignty After Nation-Building Effort,” Washington Post, May 19, 2002, p. A1.

  2 SVDM, “The Future of UN State-Building,” International Peace Academy conference, October 18-19, 2002, .

  3 Ibid.

  4 World Bank, “Report of the Joint Assessment Mission to East Timor,” December 8, 1999, online at .

  5 SVDM, Speech at the University of Sydney, June 13, 2001.

  6 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country: Lessons for the UN from Kosovo and East Timor,” 2000, unpublished.

  7 Indeed, the flag of Gusmão’s resistance party, which would become the flag of East Timor, had appeared on referendum ballots as the symbol of the vote for independence.

  8 The seven seats corresponded to the seven pro-independence parties within the National Congress for the Reconstruction of East Timor (CNRT), the coalition of resistance parties led by Gusmão.

  9 James Traub,“Inventing East Timor,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 79, no. 4 ( July-August 2000), p. 82.

  10 Abilio Araujo, "To Be or Not to Be a X(B)anana Republic,” Jakarta Post, January 26, 2001.

  11 SVDM, “Notes from November 27 Brainstorming Session with Hedi Annabi,” December 2, 1999.

  12 Although most Timorese political leaders spoke Portuguese, ordinary Timorese rarely did. The prevalent language was Tetum, but the Timorese leaders deemed Portuguese a more versatile language for Timorese youths and successfully urged Vieira de Mello to make it the country’s official language.

  13 Millennium Report of the Secretary-General of the UN, April 3, 2000, p. 224.

  14 Chandrasekaran, “Saved from Ruin,” p. A1.

  15 Mark Riley, “Time for the UN to Go,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 24, 2000.

  16 SVDM to Paul Grossrieder (director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross), February 18, 2002, in response to a harshly critical essay by Jarat Chopra, who had resigned from UNTAET.

  17 Some of the Timorese leaders, like Ramos-Horta, had favored disbanding the armed forces altogether.They cited the model of Costa Rica, which had ushered in a new era by eliminating the army after a 1948 peace agreement ended the country’s civil war.

  18 Carmel Egan and Paul Toohey, “Timor Riviera Meets Hell’s Kitchen,” Weekend Australian,January 15, 2000, p. 11.

  19 “East Timor Out of the Woods? Not Quite,” Straits Times (Singapore), February 12, 2000.

  20 Ibid.

  21 SVDM, “The Situation in East Timor,” presentation to the Security Council, June 27, 2000.

  22 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

  23 Ibid.

  24 The Trust Fund for East Timor (TFET) was established at the December 1999 Tokyo Donors Meeting. By June 15, 2000, a total of about $165 million had been pledged to the TFET: by Portugal ($50 million), the European Commission ($48.7 million), Japan ($28 million), and the United States ($0.5 million). Of this sum only $41.4 million had been received and a mere $2.6 million distributed. TFET, Update no. 1, August 2000, online at .

  25 Hansjörg Strohmeyer, “Collapse and Reconstruction of a Judicial System: The UN Missions in Kosovo and East Timor,” American Journal of International Law 95, no. 1 ( January 2000).

  26 SVDM, interview by Fabien Curto Millet, "East Timor: The Building of a Nation,” November 2001, on Millet’s Web site at Oxford University, users.ox.ac.uk/~ball1024/sergioVDM_interview.pdf.

  27 Hansjörg Strohmeyer, “Making Multilateral Interventions Work: The U.N. and the Creation of Transitional Justice Systems in Kosovo and East Timor,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs Journal (Summer 2001), pp. 107-24.

  28 Strohmeyer, “Collapse and Reconstruction.”

  29 Two years later, in February 2002, the UN police had only 299 vehicles for more than 1,400 officers. Conflict Security and Development group, King’s College, London, “A Review of Peace Operations: A Case for Change, East Timor,” March 10, 2003, p. 75.

  30 SVDM, Press Conference, April 5, 2000. This proved an ongoing problem, as rich countries proved characteristically reluctant to fund prisons.

  31 UNTAET Human Rights Report, March 2001, cited in Joel C. Beauvais, “Benevolent Despotism: A Critique of U.N. State-Building in East Timor,” International Law and Politics 33 (2001), p. 1155.

  32 SVDM to Annick Stevenson, August 12, 2001.

  33 Stevenson to SVDM, August 13, 2001.

  34 SVDM to Stevenson, August 17, 2001.

  35 Fabrizio Hochschild, “‘It Is Better to Leave, We Can’t Protect You’: Flight in the First Months of United Nations Transitional Administrations in Kosovo and East Timor,” Journal of Refugee Studies 17, no. 3 (September 2004), pp. 286-300.

  CHAPTER 16. “A NEW SERGIO” 1 SVDM, Speaking Notes, Handing Over Ceremony with General Cosgrove, February 23, 2000.

  2 Manning was New Zealand’s first battle casualty since 1971. On August 10, 2001, Private Devi Ram Jaishi, twenty-six, of Nepal, was shot in the same area when militiamen attacked his unit. Jaishi died from his injuries while being evacuated to Dili for treatment. Four others (three soldiers and one civilian) were injured. Eugene Bingham, “Ambush on a Timor Jungle Trail,” New Zealand Herald, September 7, 2002.

  3 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Saved from Ruin: The Reincarnation of East Timor; U.N. Handing Over Sovereignty After Nation-Building Effort,” Washington Post, May 19, 2002, p. A1.

  4 “UN Confident: East Timor Border Secure,” Deutsche Presse Agentur, May 18, 2002.

  5 Lakhan Mehrotra to SVDM, January 11, 2001.

  6 “Three UNHCR Staff Killed in West Timor,” UN News Service, September 6, 2000; Tom McCawley,“Four UN Staff Killed in East Timor Riots,” Financial Times, September 7, 2000, p. 6. The UNHCR inspector general’s report after the murders found that the militia “saw UNHCR not as an impartial humanitarian organization but as indistinguishable from the UN and the international military force (INTERFET) perceived as having stolen East Timor from Indonesia.” The report found that the head of office and field security officer in Atambua made a “serious error of judgment in not insisting on evacuation.” Inspector General’s Office, UNHCR, “Report of the Inquiry into the Deaths of Three UNCHR Staff Members in Atambua, Indonesia, on 6 September 2000,” December 8, 2000, para. 10.

  7 Inspector general’s report, para. 67.

  8 In May 2001, after an Indonesian prosecutor charged six gunmen with the mild charge of “assault,” the suspects received sentences of between ten and twenty months. Before the murders, some 170,000 East Timorese refugees had left West Timor and returned home, with UNHCR’s assistance, but after the attack and the UN evacuation, only 29,000 did so. Conflict Security and Development Group, King’s College, London, “A Review of Peace Operations: A Case for Change, East Timor,” March 10, 2003, note 157.

  9 King’s College, “Review of Peace Operations,” p. 78.

  10 “Report of the Secretary-General on Justice and Reconciliation for Timor-Leste,” July 26, 2006.

  11 SVDM, Address to National Council, June 28, 2001.

  12 “UN Mission in East Timor Suggests Power Sharing Arrangements,” UNTAET News, May 30, 2000. SVDM briefed the Security Council on June 27, 2000.

  13 SVDM, “Remarks at First Session of the National Congress for the Reconstruction of East Timor,” transcript, August 21, 2000.

  14 Some objected on the opposite grounds. The thirteen UN district administrators unanimously objected, complaining that the Timorese were not actually being brought into the process, and that the half-measure smacked of “tokenism.” Mark Dodd, “UN Peace Mission at War with Itself,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 13, 2000, p. 19.

  15 In December 2000 the Timorese held less than 10 percent of all manage
ment positions, only three out of thirteen district administrator positions, and six deputy district administrator positions. Joel C. Beuvais, “Benevolent Despotism, a Critique of UN State-Building in East Timor,” International Law and Politics 33, no. 101 (December 12, 2001), p. 1144.

  16 Simon Chesterman, “East Timor in Transition,” International Peacekeeping (Spring 2002), p. 70.

  17 “East Timor: Transition Calendar Is Priority—Xanana Gusmão,” Lusa News, August 23, 2000.

  18 SVDM to Jean-Marie Guéhenno, “Taxation of Profits from UN Contracts,” March 26, 2001.

  19 SVDM to Guéhenno, “Transfer of UN Assets,” November 25, 2000.

  20 The UN financial regulations generally require equipment in good condition to be sent to other UN missions, to be placed on reserve for future UN missions, or to be sold to other UN agencies, NGOs, or governments. As UNTAET wrapped up in 2002, the total inventory value of its assets was $72.4 million. In accordance with UN mission liquidation procedures, 79 percent of these assets were redeployed to other peacekeeping missions (including the East Timor follow-on mission) or to the UN Logistics Base in Brindisi, Italy, for temporary storage. But $8.1 million in assets were unusually donated (in the words of the secretary-general’s report) because, in light of East Timor’s wholesale destruction, "removal or withdrawal of all UNTAET assets from the country will have a catastrophic effect on the functioning of the Government after independence.” “Report of the Secretary-General: Financing of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor,” March 27, 2002. When the small follow-on UN mission in East Timor departed in May 2005, it donated a whopping 41 percent of its assets (worth $23 million) to the Timorese government.

  21 “Dollars Flowing from Passports,” Tempo magazine, October 30-November 5, 2001.

  22 Frei Betto, “Intervenção branca no Timor Leste” (White Intervention in East Timor), O Globo, February 16, 2001.

  23 SVDM, “Difamacao e crime” (Defamation Is a Crime), O Globo, April 9, 2001.

  24 SVDM to Bernard Miyet, “Local Staff Members Who Died While Serving UNAMET,” September 20, 2000.