If you only read one book about the United Nations, make sure that it is Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flame biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello. The excellent reviews that it has received actually do not do it sufficient justice. Whatever you think about the UN, the invasion of Iraq or the various humanitarian crises that took place in the 1990s you will learn something from it.
While many people have extremely strong opinions about “humanitarian interventions”, the subject is surrounded by myths and misconceptions. It is a new, and comparatively understudied, area of work and, although its influence on international relations is clearly growing, it has been subject to very little serious scrutiny.
Power uses Vieira de Mello’s career to tell a much wider story about how the UN has grappled with the humanitarian crises of the last few decades. Vieira de Mello served in the middle of some of the world’s worst conflict zones and he was responsible for making decisions during some of the UN’s most controversial and difficult missions. He defended the concept of humanitarian neutrality during the siege of Sarajevo, when many argued for a tougher line against the Serbs. He also helped to oversee the forcible closure of the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania, which remains one of UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ most criticized actions in its history.
Vieira de Mello became the youngest staff member of the office of the UNHCR at the age of 21 and rose quickly through its ranks. He showed considerable personal courage in many of the missions that he undertook, but was also a calculating pragmatist who went out of his way to cultivate friendships with everyone from George Bush to Slobodan Milosevic and the leadership of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. In that sense the Brazilian diplomat could be said to epitomize both the best and the worst of the UN system.
Vieira de Mello led the UN mission in Kosovo before handing over to Bernard Kouchner (whom he regarded as an insufferable self-publicist). He headed to East Timor, of which he was effectively Viceroy in the transition to independence. He then accepted the post as UN envoy to Iraq in 2003, a decision which was to cost him his life in the Baghdad bombing that August.
He combined his job in Iraq, which was only intended to be a temporary assignment, with heading up the office for the UN office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. I turned down a job as a human rights officer with the UN mission in Iraq and would probably have been with him in the building when it was bombed if I had accepted it. This gives the dramatic climax of Power’s book a particular personal piquancy.
One small criticism, though, is that it would have been nice to have got more of an insight into the discussions that took place within the UN in the run-up to the invasion itself. Almost all of the UN’s staff privately opposed Bush’s war plans. The invasion was plainly an illegal act of aggression which violated both articles one and two of the UN Charter. Yet both Kofi Annan and Vieira De Mello rebuffed the attempts of their senior colleagues to mobilize opinion against it.
I was living in Brazil at the time, and remember how strongly political opinion in Latin America was opposed to the invasion. I was shocked when the votes for war came in Britain and the US about how such a large section of the liberal-left rolled over to supporting it. In his final days Vieira de Mello became increasingly prepared to speak out against human rights violations carried out by the occupying forces in Iraq. He also became more vocal about the arrogant stupidity of the US appointed high Pro-Consul Paul Bremer and his disastrously ham-fisted administration.
Power provides a portrait of Vieira de Mello as trapped between his idealistic faith in humanitarianism and his pragmatic realization that to get anything done he would need to accommodate with the powers that be. This tendency to “side with power” undoubtedly advanced his own career and he was talked about as a possible successor to Annan as UN secretary-general. But it was ultimately to compromise him and the UN system into “wrapping the blue flag” around one of the most disastrous acts of US foreign policy in living memory. Vieira de Mello’s life story epitomizes a wider tragedy of our times.
