Ten
Rwandan refugees in the Ngara camp in Tanzania, 1994.
Vieira de Mello had never been one to expend his energy on hopeless places. Thus, although he was earning a deserved reputation as one of the UN system’s elite troubleshooters, he wanted nothing to do with the part of the world that in 1996 presented the most trouble of all: the Great Lakes region of Africa, which included Rwanda, Zaire, and Tanzania.
In April 1994, at the very time he was leading a UN convoy into the Bosnian safe area of Gorazde, Hutu extremists in Rwanda were in the process of butchering 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. After one hundred days of slaughter, the génocidaires were finally driven out of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), headed by Paul Kagame, the country’s future president.15 The killers fled into neighboring Tanzania and Zaire, hidden amid a fifteen-mile-long river of humanity. Some two million Hutu civilians, who had been led to believe by their leaders that they would be harmed if they stayed in Rwanda, were on the move.
In the first month of the exodus, cholera and dysentery epidemics killed at least 50,000 of the Hutu refugees who crossed into Zaire, and UNHCR, along with a wide variety of international aid groups, quickly sprang into action in the enormous (Zaire’s landmass is as large as Western Europe’s) and inhospitable country. Once the relief groups had helped control the disease epidemics, they remained in order to maintain the camps, which lay in Zaire and Tanzania not far from the Rwandan border.1 At these sprawling camps, which contained a mix of Hutu gunmen and legitimate Hutu refugees, international aid agencies doled out between 6,000 and 7,000 tons of food a week, at a cost of approximately $1 million per day, paid for by Western governments.
QUAGMIRE
In the quarter century since Vieira de Mello first joined UNHCR, humanitarian agencies had developed speedy and sophisticated mechanisms to deliver medicine, food, sanitation, and shelter to refugees in crisis. But aid workers knew that the care they offered often had the adverse consequence of leaving men in the camps free to concentrate on their military pursuits.2 Indeed, the international relief community had become so reliable that by the mid-1990s armed groups around the world had started factoring in the presence of donated relief as they plotted their military strategies.The Hutu génocidaires in Zaire had already proven themselves master planners.
Unsurprisingly, the same Hutu government officials who had orchestrated the fastest killing spree in recorded history quickly asserted control in their new environment. A UN team estimated that some 21 former ministers, 54 former members of parliament, and 126 ex-mayors resided in the camps.3 These former regime officials retained their weapons and access to their well-stocked foreign bank accounts. In many camps they quickly reconstituted the structures they had used to govern Rwanda, dividing the camps among prefectures and communes or, in some, establishing formal “ministries” for security, social welfare, finance, and communications. Camp leaders beat, or in some cases murdered, Hutu whom they suspected of wanting to head back to Rwanda. UNHCR aid workers regularly discovered fresh corpses in the camps, but they felt they had no choice but to work with the suspected killers.“The UNHCR emergency field manual said, ‘Find the natural leaders and get them to help you distribute relief,’ ” recalls Caroll Faubert, UNHCR’s special envoy to the Great Lakes region. “We didn’t think this through, but it meant: Give the genocidal leaders more power.” The Hutu militia in the Zairean camps soon began attacking Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Tutsi-led Rwandan government started staging small retaliatory strikes into Zaire. The location of several of the UNHCR camps within two miles of Rwanda made it easier for the génocidaires to stage their attacks and for the Rwandan army to strike back.4
As UNHCR’s director of policy planning and operations in Geneva, Vieira de Mello should have been heavily involved in the agency’s pivotal decision making concerning this controversial aid operation. But while others in Ogata’s inner circle had been involved in Rwanda since the genocide itself, he had been in the former Yugoslavia when the 1994 slaughter occurred, and he was initially content to stay largely removed from managing its messy aftermath. “Sergio didn’t want to get deeply involved in a problem that he knew had no solution,” recalls Izumi Nakamitsu, his special assistant at the time. Kamel Morjane, the director of UNHCR’s Africa Division, had a difficult time getting his colleague to focus on the region. Vieira de Mello stuck to his comfort areas: Asia, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. “Sergio,” Morjane said, “if you’re not interested in Africa, that’s okay. But at least give me a time and I can come and brief you!” Morjane managed to impose one fixed meeting each week.5
Vieira de Mello had still been in the Balkans when Ogata made her most important choices. She had considered closing the camps in the hopes that the Hutu exiles would go back to Rwanda, but she decided not to because she did not believe conditions there were safe. If the camps were to remain in place, she knew, they would have to be demilitarized. But UNHCR, a civilian agency, did not by itself have either the mandate or the security forces needed to neutralize the Hutu militants. The agency’s field officers and logisticians were unarmed and intended to stay that way. On Ogata’s pleading, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had tried to persuade powerful countries in the UN to send troops or police to the camps in Zaire to arrest the génocidaires and ship them off to the newly established UN war crimes tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. But when Boutros-Ghali attempted to round up international troops for the task, he had struck out. On January 10, 1995, he telephoned Ogata with the bad news: He had asked thirty-nine countries to send troops, and only one country, Bangladesh, had agreed. The world had turned its back on Rwanda during the genocide, so it was not surprising that, in its aftermath, countries were not leaping to deploy troops to arrest the génocidaires who were still armed and dangerous.6 The shadow of Somalia loomed large in many countries, and few were sympathetic to Rwandan Hutu, who as a collective were blamed for the genocide. Ogata and UNHCR had been told they would have to find a way to manage the genocidal gunmen on their own.
Vieira de Mello naturally got dragged into tortured in-house discussions about how to proceed. Several aid agencies, including Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-France and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest U.S. aid agency, decided to pull out of the camps. In the IRC’s sixty-four-year history, this marked the first time that it had terminated its feeding programs out of repugnance for its clientele. “It was a terrible decision to have to make,” IRC vice president Roy Williams said later, but “sometimes we just shouldn’t show up for a disaster.”7 Vieira de Mello did not consider recommending that Ogata end UN aid to the Hutu camps as a sign of protest against the génocidaires. “There is no justification for the suspension of UNHCR assistance,” he wrote in one report.8 He often argued that UNHCR had a special responsibility because it was the last frontier for refugees. Nongovernmental organizations could leave knowing UNHCR would be there to back them up.“We could have made ourselves feel good by saying, ‘We’re leaving,’ ” Ogata recalls. “But while principles are important, real life is more important.” In a statement to her staff Ogata cautioned against confusing a human rights mandate and a humanitarian mandate. “Unlike human rights actors,” she said, “UNHCR’s role is not judgmental but humanitarian. UNHCR is there not to expose the perpetrators but to help the victims.”9 She would not think of pulling out. “There were also innocent refugees in the camps; more than half were women and children,” she said later.“Should we have said: you are related to murderers, so you are guilty too?”16 10 Although she felt UNHCR had been abandoned by the world’s governments, she also never considered stepping down as high commissioner.11
Fresh out of options and desperate for help, Ogata took the hugely controversial step of using UN funds to rent out part of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s notoriously abusive Zairean army to do what no other country would do: provide security in the camps. On February 12, 1995, in a surreal scene, she traveled to Goma and presided over a ceremony in which the Zairean deputy prime minister, Admiral Mavua Mudima, turned over 150 soldiers from the Zairean presidential guard to UNHCR, the first installment of what others would call “Ogata’s troops.” UNHCR issued mustard-colored uniforms to the Zairean soldiers to distinguish them from the multitude of armed groups in the region, and the agency paid each of the soldiers three dollars per day, giving them vehicles, radios, and office equipment.12 At the cost of $10 million per year, some 1,500 of these subcontracted Zairean soldiers would offer security for UNHCR staff and for refugees at the camps in Zaire.13 “The troops are not going to divide the perpetrators from the innocent, only maintain law and order,” she said. “That is as far as my office can go.”14 She was already going further than any UN civilian official had dared go before. When reporters railed against UNHCR for continuing to feed the génocidaires, she pressed back. “Who would separate them?” she asked. “Who would pay for all this? The international community never came up with an answer.”15
Vieira de Mello did not personally visit the camps until July 1996, when he traveled to the Zairean border with Nakamitsu. If he had been skeptical that UNHCR could help resolve the mess in the Great Lakes region before his trip, he was downright despondent afterward. Militant camp leaders anointed by UNHCR lorded it over their fellow citizens. They sat beside stacks of UN flour and blankets with fists full of bills. They kept their guns visible and strutted around in new track suits, ordering each household to pay a monthly tax and press-ganging men into joining the genocidal militia that patrolled the camps and plotted for a future war in Rwanda. Instead of dispersing the free UN humanitarian aid, they often sold it. The profits allowed them to amass huge stashes of firearms and grenades.16
As he toured the camps with Nakamitsu, Vieira de Mello described Zaire as the “armpit of the world” and predicted that the country’s weak governing structures would soon crumble, causing the sprawling multiethnic nation to disintegrate. He found the experience of navigating the camps a chilling one.“There’s one,” he said to Nakamitsu, singling out a man he thought was a génocidaire crouching beside the blue UNHCR tents or bossing villagers around.“And there, there’s another one.”“How can you tell?” she asked him. “Look in their eyes,” he said. “There is nothing left in them.” He was disgusted by the scene. “The people here are being controlled by sheer terror, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
He had been told ahead of his trip that in just two years the camps had come to seem permanent, but he was unprepared for what he saw: a structured, seemingly permanent city life very similar to that in the Cambodian camps in Thailand before he had helped empty them. Indeed, a late-1995 survey of the four main camps in Goma, which housed 650,000 refugees, found 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 shops, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butchers, 5 ironsmiths, 4 photographic studios, 3 cinemas, 2 hotels, and 1 animal slaughterhouse.17
In both Cambodia and Zaire the major powers were willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars feeding the refugees, but they were not willing to insert their forces into the camps to ensure that the perpetrators of genocide were punished or removed. The crucial difference between the two circumstances, he saw, was that in the 1980s Western governments had spent millions aiding the Cambodian refugees as a way of destabilizing the Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh. But in the Great Lakes area, a region of marginal strategic value, Western governments were not using aid as a tool for promoting their national interests. Rather, they were using aid as a substitute for meaningful foreign policy engagement of any kind.
Upon his return to Geneva, Vieira de Mello warned in his trip report, “Our camps serve as transit, rest [and] recruitment bases in support of incursions into Rwanda.”18 He made three sets of recommendations for how UNHCR might disentangle itself from the moral and logistic quagmire. He recommended that UNHCR move its camps back from the Zairean-Rwandan border. To avoid border clashes, the agency’s rules required camps to be erected a “reasonable distance” from any international border, which was usually interpreted to mean at least thirty miles. But once the camps had been established near the border in 1994, Ogata had not pursued relocating them farther into Zaire because the move would have cost between $90 million and $125 million, and she would still have likely needed military force to move recalcitrant Hutu.19 She had also worried that moving the camps deeper into Zaire would signal to the refugees that the UN intended to offer them permanent care, and it would give the génocidaires in the camps a more spacious sanctuary in which to arm and train for future battle.20 Vieira de Mello now weighed in, arguing that even by just starting to plan to move the camps, UNHCR would at least show Hutu civilians and soldiers that they could not remain in limbo indefinitely.
Unsurprisingly, the Zairean troops who had been hired by Ogata were not proving reliable. They did not protect the refugees, and in many camps they constituted a threat in their own right.They took bribes from the Hutu militants, and some were reported to be involved in sexually exploiting young female refugees.21 Yet despite their worrying track record,Vieira de Mello’s second recommendation was to increase the force size of what he called “Mrs. Ogata’s contingent” from 1,500 to 2,500. Boxed in by impossible circumstances, he was desperate enough to tell himself that the Zairean forces could change. Since the morale of the Zairean contingent had sunk, he even drew on his memories of UN peacekeepers’ pride in Lebanon and Bosnia and urged UNHCR to host medal ceremonies for the Zairean soldiers.
After speaking to some of the Hutu refugees in Zaire, Vieira de Mello realized that they were staying for more complicated reasons than he had understood before visiting. Yes, he wrote, there was intimidation in the camps, but many of the refugees were also being deterred by the signals emanating from Rwanda. The Rwandan authorities denounced the UNHCR camps in Zaire and Tanzania, but they also made clear that they did not want all Hutu in the camps to return. As Emmanuel Ndahiro, Vice President Paul Kagame’s closest adviser, declared publicly, “Not even powerful America can afford to take in one million people at once.”22 Rwandan officials did not visit the camps or use media to encourage the Hutu to return. Nor did they release a list of “wanted” war crime suspects, which might have soothed the concerns of Hutu refugees who had not murdered their Tutsi neighbors but who worried that they would nonetheless be caught up in a dragnet. On July 13, just two weeks before Vieira de Mello’s trip to Zaire, Rwandan government troops in the northwestern province of Gisenyi, Rwanda, retaliated for the death of a Tutsi soldier at the hands of Hutu infiltrators by massacring sixty-two local Hutu residents, including women with infants strapped to their backs.23 Tit-for-tat ethnic massacres were occurring regularly in the border areas. Therefore, Vieira de Mello’s third recommendation was that UNHCR officials stop “distracting ourselves in a futile search for ‘intimidators’”—the camps were stuck with them—and instead concentrate on pressing the Rwandan authorities to do more than they had yet done to assure the Hutu that they would be safe on return.24
Rwandan government officials were contemptuous of his viewpoint. They were trying to manage the social and economic consequences of the extermination of 800,000 people and were tired of hearing about the plight of Hutu refugees in Zaire. “What is this nonsense about refugees?” Kagame said on the two-year anniversary of the genocide. “This is their home and they should return. I was a refugee myself for over 30 years and nobody made a fuss about it. Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees. . . . If the refugees say ‘we’re not returning,’ that stops being my problem. It is their problem.”25
But Kagame knew the refugees were in fact his problem because the Hutu génocidaires in the camps in Zaire were still determined to exterminate Tutsi and retake power in Rwanda. In a visit to Washington, Kagame informed Clinton administration officials that if UNHCR did not dismantle its camps in Zaire, his forces would do so. He later recalled, “I delivered a veiled warning: The failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action.” Kagame, who had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was pleased by the U.S. reaction.“Their response was really no response,” he said.26
In offering his recommendations to Ogata,Vieira de Mello knew all the options were bad. He was acutely conscious of the damage the crisis was doing to the standing of the United Nations locally and internationally.“UNHCR’s passivity,” he wrote in his trip report, “is untenable and is exposing the office to criticism and cheap accusations.” UNHCR could take the small steps he proposed, but what was really needed to resolve the situation were large steps by the governments of Rwanda and Zaire and concerted involvement by the major powers, who were claiming credit for generously supplying humanitarian aid but who were allowing the crisis to fester and deteriorate. “The prevailing status quo is not tenable without potentially disastrous consequences for the Office,” he concluded. “Unless UNHCR displays vision and sustained action, it is likely to become increasingly part of the problem and unable to preempt or effectively respond to looming ominous threats, over which it is losing any control.”27
Ogata was pleased that Vieira de Mello’s trip to the region had finally caused him to apply himself to finding a way out for UNHCR. It had only been when he toured the camps that the costs of the catastrophe—to the refugees and to the UN—fully registered with him. He paid his second visit to Zaire later in the summer and found UNHCR staff even more frustrated and helpless. On this trip he stopped in Rwanda. A few hours after arriving in Kigali he told Nakamitsu, “People don’t know how to smile here.” Only two and a half years after the slaughter of 1994, it was the gloomiest place he had ever visited. His formal meetings were unpleasant. The Rwandan chairman for refugee return, Ephraim Kabaija, railed against the UN for first doing nothing about the genocide and then for feeding war criminals in the camps across the border. The Rwandan president delivered a two-hour harangue on Belgium’s responsibility for the genocide. Leaving the meeting, Vieira de Mello muttered to Nakamitsu, “That’s the problem with Africans: They blame everything on colonialism.” Every official he met with echoed Kagame’s warning that Rwanda would not tolerate the existence of the camps for much longer. Vieira de Mello warned Ogata that the Rwandans were on the verge of invading Zaire.
He blocked out half a day to spend with his old friend Omar Bakhet, who had left UNHCR and was running the UN Development Program office in Rwanda, helping build a new legal system. Bakhet brought him to a church in Nyamata, where ten thousand Rwandans had been butchered on April 8, 1994. The Hutu génocidaires had sprayed the inside of the church with machine-gun fire, lobbed in grenades, and then used machetes to finish off any survivors.Vieira de Mello wandered around the church interior, which contained row upon row of shelves lined with skulls, and examined its bullet holes and shrapnel marks. He looked up at a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. Her serene visage smiled down upon him, but the wall beside her was still stained in blood.
Bakhet next brought him to the Don Bosco school, which UN peacekeepers from Belgium had used as a base in 1994. Some two thousand desperate Rwandan Tutsi had huddled with the blue helmets until April 11, 1994, when the Belgian UN commander at the school had been ordered to withdraw his forces.With the génocidaires outside the school drinking banana beer, brandishing their machetes, and chanting “Hutu power,” the Rwandan Tutsi inside had thrown themselves at the feet of the Belgians, begging them not to abandon the school. But the UN soldiers had shooed the helpless Tutsi away, even firing over their heads so as to ensure that they did not block the passage of UN vehicles. As soon as the Belgian peacekeepers departed, the militia had entered, butchering all those Rwandans who had made the mistake of seeking shelter beneath the UN flag.Vieira de Mello had already thought a great deal about the UN failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica, but henceforth he described the Rwanda massacre as the gravest single act of betrayal ever committed by the United Nations.
In the car ride back to Kigali,Vieira de Mello stared out the window, lost in his own thoughts. When the car reached the Hotel Mille Collines, he disembarked quietly and retired to his room. By the next day he had returned to his garrulous self, but he was focused on the future. “I just feel this thing is about to blow open,” he told Bakhet.The tension in the air was similar to that he had felt in Lebanon before the Israeli invasion in 1982.
WAR IN ZAIRE: “THE WEST MEANS DEATH!”
A month later, Kagame’s forces invaded Zaire in order to close the camps and eliminate the Hutu threat once and for all. “People who want to continue exterminating others have got to be resisted,” the Rwandan vice president said.28 His soldiers teamed up with an unheralded fifty-six-year-old former Marxist warlord named Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his newly formed Zairean rebel movement, which aspired to overthrow Zairean president Mobutu. Kabila’s rebels and Kagame’s regular Rwandan army forces launched a combined assault on the southernmost Hutu refugee camps along Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Some 220,000 refugees from the camps, along with some 30,000 local Zaireans, took flight. Under fire, Ogata’s contingent of Zairean soldiers proved a mixed bag. Some helped to evacuate UNHCR’s international staff, but many simply joined Mobutu’s defense against the joint Zairean rebel-Rwandan attack. Some of these units were even reported to have used UNHCR planes to transport war matériel into battle against Kabila’s rebels.29
At the sight of the Kabila-Rwandan attackers, most of the frantic Hutu refugees fled northward away from Rwanda, toward the UN camps in Bukavu. But Bukavu was next on the attackers’ target list. On October 25 the UNHCR representative there telephoned Ogata in Geneva and passed the telephone to the local archbishop, Monsignor Christophe Munzihirwa, who begged Ogata to secure international military intervention to save the people in the camp from the joint rebel-Rwandan assault. Four days later Bukavu fell and UNHCR and other aid organizations suspended operations. Amid the slaughter that ensued, the attacking forces murdered Archbishop Munzihirwa.30
Many of the 1994 génocidaires were undoubtedly killed in the offensive. But testimonies of survivors revealed that thousands of Hutu civilians also likely died. One Hutu refugee told Amnesty International that when five Zairean rebels entered a church compound where Hutu were hiding, one of the foreign priests in charge went to speak to the gunmen. The Hutu survivor remembered:
[The priest] then called one of us, Pascal Murwirano, a 22-year-old Rwandese, to help, as he did not speak Kinyarwanda.The conversation went like this:
“Are you from Rwanda?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Hutu?”
“Yes.”
“When did you leave Rwanda?”
“1994.”
“Take off your clothes.”
Pascal crossed himself. I remember it so well. He unbuttoned the first button of his shirt and before he could unbutton the second one, he was shot. He took one bullet in the heart, four in the stomach and one in the head.31
The battle lines were drawn. On one side were Mobutu’s Zairean government forces and armed Rwandan Hutu refugees, mostly génocidaires, while on the other were the Kabila-led Zairean rebels and the mainly Tutsi Rwandan army forces. A UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe of greater dimensions than the one in 1994.”32
With tens of thousands of Hutu refugees now fleeing westward into the Zairean jungle, Ogata and Vieira de Mello no longer had any ambivalence about where the refugees belonged. Civilians would undoubtedly be safer in Rwanda than trapped between warring armies in Zaire. He telephoned Lionel Rosenblatt, with whom he had helped organize the resettlement of the Montagnards from Cambodia. He now begged Rosenblatt, who ran Refugees International, a leading advocacy group in Washington, to alert the Clinton administration to the fact that the Hutu were moving away from food and shelter. “The west means death!” Vieira de Mello exclaimed. If Hutu families headed west into the deep jungle with the militants, they would be pursued and killed, or they would die of starvation or disease. Aid workers and diplomats had to find a way to persuade the refugees at long last to head back to their former homes in Rwanda.
On October 30, as another bloody crisis engulfed the region and the Western media descended again on Rwanda and Zaire, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali appointed as his special political envoy to the region Raymond Chrétien, Canada’s ambassador to the United States.33 A week later, in another boon to Vieira de Mello’s résumé, Boutros-Ghali named him humanitarian coordinator, answering not to Ogata but to the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA), a newly created division at UN Headquarters in New York. Improbably, he would once again answer to Yasushi Akashi, who, despite his mediocre performances in Cambodia and Bosnia, had been promoted to run DHA, once again out of deference to Japan, the UN’s second-largest donor. Chrétien and Vieira de Mello were meant to coordinate their efforts, with Chrétien managing the political negotiations and Vieira de Mello relegated to the humanitarian.
Vieira de Mello immediately made his way to Kinshasa, Zaire. On November 7 he was told that Chrétien, his political counterpart, was already en route to the region. Chrétien would arrive in Kigali the following morning for his first meetings with the Rwandan authorities. Vieira de Mello knew that political envoys tended to view humanitarians as expendable “grocery deliverers” who would play no important role in high-stakes political talks. Already Chrétien had stopped to see Mobutu in France, where the Zairean president was receiving cancer treatment. Vieira de Mello did not want Chrétien to hold any further high-level meetings without him. But when he telephoned the UNHCR office in Kinshasa, he was told that no commercial or UN flight would be able to fly him a thousand miles from Kinshasa to Kigali in time to greet Chrétien. If he was to make it, he would have to charter a private jet to fly him to an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, where he could then catch a regular UN flight to Kigali. He reflexively accepted, and when he and his UNHCR colleague Chefike Desalegn arrived at the Kinshasa airport, he gasped at the sight of the jet on the runway. “Chefike,” he exclaimed, delighted, “it’s Mobutu’s personal Learjet!” Seated on the plane, he shouted up to his colleague: “Tell them to take their time getting to Entebbe. If they make a few laps, we can get a full night’s sleep!” The two men reached Kigali several hours ahead of Chrétien.
Months later, when Vieira de Mello returned to Geneva, he was informed that the three-hour charter leg had cost UNHCR $50,000. In 1998 the Financial Times would publish an exposé on UN corruption, making Vieira de Mello’s extravagance a prime example of the organization’s excesses.34 This would be the first such charge ever lodged against him, but while he worried that the UN’s critics would use it to tarnish his entire career, the scandal did not stick.
Having managed to insinuate himself into Chrétien’s small negotiating team, Vieira de Mello got to hear the Rwandans again lambaste the UN. “They just vomited all over the organization,” recalls Chrétien. “I mean it was savage. I didn’t take the hatred personally. I was the UN special envoy for a month or two, but for Sergio it was his lifelong employer. They looked right at him when they attacked the organization. He seemed very uncomfortable.”
Events in Zaire made him even more uncomfortable. International aid workers had been largely evacuated from refugee camps in eastern Zaire, so he had no idea how many Hutu refugees were in pain or dying out of view. The rare eyewitness reports indicated that the newly displaced were sleeping in the forests without food or blankets and were sucking on tree roots to quench their thirst. As the coordinator of all humanitarian activities in the region, Vieira de Mello had to find a way to enable aid workers to go behind the front lines to reach the refugees. He knew from his past missions that although the UN system frowned upon contact with nonstate actors (like Shiite militia in Lebanon or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), somebody in the UN had to reach out to Kabila, the Zairean rebel leader. Without Kabila’s authorization, it would be too dangerous for aid workers to reenter Zaire in order to feed and clothe Hutu refugees on the run.
On the evening of November 8, Omar Bakhet saw a face outside the window of his home in Kigali. It was a Rwandan government official who asked Bakhet if he would like to meet Kabila at the rebel leader’s new headquarters in Zaire. The Rwandans were adamant that Bakhet not bring anybody from UNHCR, which they blamed for feeding the génocidaires in the refugee camps. Bakhet suggested Daniel Toole, a forty-year-old American colleague from UNICEF. The Rwandan official agreed, saying, “He is the right nationality.”
The following morning Bakhet and Toole drove to the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi and seated themselves in the lobby of a local hotel, as they had been instructed to do. The place was teeming with journalists, who were themselves hoping to get the Rwandan government’s permission to cross into Zaire so they could cover the war there. By the late afternoon, after hours of idle waiting and far too many cups of coffee, Bakhet and Toole were poised to give up. But just as they were preparing to pay their bill, a Rwandan officer approached and told them to follow him. They did so, exiting through the back of the hotel, then driving a circuitous route to the border so as to elude the press.
As the sun was setting, the officer led Bakhet and Toole into rebel-held Zaire. Both men knew that what they were doing was risky, physically and professionally. UN peacekeepers and UN civilians were supposed to respect national boundaries. Aware that UN Headquarters in New York would not have granted him permission to cross from Rwanda into Zaire, Bakhet had not asked his superiors for clearance, which Toole did not know. Their Rwandan driver seemed terrified.
When the men reached one of Mobutu’s darkened old villas, they found Laurent Kabila sitting at a coffee table in a heavily starched tan officer’s uniform. Over the course of several hours of discussion, the men succeeded in negotiating an informal humanitarian agreement, whereby the rebel leader promised to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid to civilians. It was only when Kabila excused himself to go to the restroom that Bakhet and Toole simultaneously noticed, to their amazement, that along with his crisp new uniform, the rebel leader was wearing white socks and high-heeled, lizard-skin disco dancing shoes.
When Toole himself headed to the bathroom a short while later, Kabila leaned over to Bakhet and confessed that he had one need above all others: a satellite telephone. Bakhet promised that if Kabila allowed vital relief to pass into Goma, he would place his personal phone in the first truck of the first UN convoy of relief. The two men shook hands, and six trucks filled with hospital supplies, along with Bakhet’s satellite phone, soon rumbled across the border into Zaire.
As Bakhet and Toole drove back to Rwanda after the meeting, they felt triumphant. They had taken a significant risk, and in so doing they had managed to open up a discreet channel of UN communication with the rebels. However, Bakhet’s satisfaction at having scored a diplomatic coup faded almost as soon as he was back in cell phone range.Vieira de Mello telephoned him and raged,“Omar, where the hell have you been? Christiane Amanpour has been on CNN claiming that the UN is holding secret talks with Kabila in Zaire. Mobutu is furious, and in New York, Headquarters is going out of its mind!”
Bakhet started to explain, but his friend interrupted, asking, “So you met with Kabila in no-man’s-land, right?” Bakhet answered, “No, I—” But Vieira de Mello cut him off again. “Listen, Omar,” he said, “I told New York you met Kabila on the Rwandan side of no-man’s-land. Now where did you meet Kabila?” Bakhet understood.Vieira de Mello knew how to work the system in a way he knew he never would.
Benon Sevan, who ran the UN security department in New York and a decade later would be indicted for his involvement in the UN’s oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, reprimanded Bakhet for violating UN rules. But Vieira de Mello stuck to his contrived story, lying outright in a cable to Sevan: “It is my understanding that Mr. Bakhet did not cross the border into Zaire.The meeting he held was at the border, i.e., in the no-man’s-land separating the two border posts. The mission was authorized by me on that basis. Mr. Bakhet, therefore, did not violate standing instructions. Warm regards, Sergio.”35
“MULTINATIONAL FARCE”
Vieira de Mello believed neither the aid workers nor the refugees would be safe unless international forces were sent to create and protect safe routes through rebel-held territory. The safe corridors would simultaneously allow the delivery of relief in one direction, and the secure passage of refugees back to Rwanda in the other.17
Although he knew what was required, he was highly skeptical that Western countries would agree to put their troops in harm’s way to protect civilians.The UN Security Council had not only done nothing to stop the 1994 genocide, but had left UNHCR alone to manage the camps in the Great Lakes region for more than two years. Whenever U.S. officials had pressed Mobutu’s Zaire to do more to persuade the refugees to go home, France had interfered on Mobutu’s and the Hutu’s behalf.Whenever France had turned up the heat on the Rwandan government, Washington had taken Kagame’s side. Vieira de Mello also knew from the tragic failure to defend the safe areas in Bosnia how easy it was to declare land “safe,” yet how difficult it was to persuade the major powers in fact to secure civilians. As the violence in Zaire escalated, UN member states began debating sending troops. The negotiations proceeded so slowly that Emma Bonino, the feisty European commissioner for humanitarian aid, slammed the ambassadors in New York, saying,“UN Security Council representatives should keep in mind that the thousands of refugees dying every day in [Zaire] cannot spend the weekend in Long Island, as they do.”36
However, on November 11,Vieira de Mello got the shocking and welcome news that Canada had agreed to head a large UN-authorized force to secure the humanitarian corridors that UNHCR had proposed. During the 1994 genocide the commander of UN forces in Rwanda had been Canadian lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, and because of Dallaire’s awareness-raising, many Canadians felt they had a debt to repay the region. General Maurice Baril, the head of Canada’s armed forces who had previously worked as a senior UN military adviser to Boutros-Ghali, would command the Multinational Force (MNF), which was expected to consist of 10,000 to 12,000 troops.
Because of the bloodshed,Western governments finally seemed willing to offer the armed assistance UNHCR had been seeking since 1994. Even U.S. officials pledged a thousand troops, though U.S. defense secretary William Perry cautioned that the forces would not “be used to disarm militants.”37 With the countries on the Security Council at last serious about intervening in the region, Søren Jessen-Petersen, a mild-mannered Danish bureaucrat who ran UNHCR’s office in New York, sent a jubilant cable that reached Vieira de Mello in Zaire. “We are on board and the train is moving fast,” he wrote. "FINALLY!!”38
But Kabila’s rebels and the Rwandan government wanted the train to head back to the station. They were convinced that any international force would foil their offensive and benefit the Hutu militants. They decided to strike a knockout blow before the international troops had time to assemble. On November 14 the Kabila-Rwandan forces fired artillery and rockets into the Mugunga camp, the last stronghold for Rwandan Hutu in Zaire. Mugunga had been home to 200,000 Rwandan refugees, and that number had reached 500,000 after the attacks on the other camps.This time the joint forces attacked the camp from the west, and the only place that refugees could run was toward Rwanda. Some 12,000 Hutu refugees fled across the border per hour, and by nightfall on November 15, UNHCR estimated that 200,000 had returned to Rwanda in the previous two days. Another 300,000 were on the road.That same day, after days of haggling, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the deployment of the Multinational Force to Zaire.
No matter how removed he was from the capitals in which decisions were being made,Vieira de Mello stayed plugged in. In the 1980s, before the era of phone cards and cell phones, he was known for carrying plastic bags filled with coins from all over the world, which he used in public pay phones. By the mid-1990s he had less cumbersome ways of staying in touch with headquarters. Martin Griffiths, a forty-five-year-old from Wales whom New York had assigned to be his deputy, found his new senior colleague businesslike to the point of being brusque. “After a long day of meetings, we would come back to our hotels exhausted, and the general rule on missions is that the team will convene for dinner to drink and remember—or try to forget—the day,” recalls Griffiths.“But not Sergio. He would go straight back to his hotel room, order room service, read the faxes from Geneva and New York, and make dozens and dozens of phone calls.”
Vieira de Mello was attempting to follow the progress of the international force. Initially, Western countries acted as though the joint rebel-Rwandan offensive would not affect their plans. The countries that had offered troops went through the motions of preparing to deploy, and a Canadian reconnaissance team under General Baril flew to the region. But the first sign of wavering enthusiasm for the Multinational Force came when the U.S. aerial search teams said they had spotted only 165,000 Hutu refugees in the forest—far fewer than the 700,000 or so UNHCR thought were still on the run. If most refugees had returned safely to Rwanda, as the Americans were suggesting, countries that had promised to send troops to Zaire would have the excuse they needed to back out.
In New York, Jessen-Petersen of UNHCR pleaded with Western ambassadors to appreciate the “chicken and egg” bind in which UNHCR found itself. Governments wanted information on the number, whereabouts, and conditions of the Hutu refugees in the Zairean jungle before sending forces. But a few dozen UNHCR aid workers would by themselves be unable to obtain that information. Only national militaries could supply the mobility, security, and intelligence to stage such a hunt.39
If Jessen-Petersen was exasperated in New York, Vieira de Mello was practically numb from the deception and obstruction he was encountering in his official meetings in the region. On one occasion an army colonel known to be responsible for waging a scorched-earth policy rattled off a string of denials and then asked credulously,“Why would the army deliberately attack civilian populations?”40 After the meeting, as Vieira de Mello and Griffiths walked to their car, Griffiths remarked:“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Every time we go into meetings with these war criminals, I come out—and I’m sure it’s the same for you—absolutely convinced of the plausibility of their arguments. What is it? Why does this happen?” Vieira de Mello stopped, turned to look at Griffiths, and said, “It’s because you’re extraordinarily stupid.”41 The two men burst into laughter, struck by the absurdity of their seemingly fruitless negotiations. They would become close friends in the months and years ahead.
Oppressed by officialdom, Vieira de Mello tried to find ways to remain connected to the human drama under way, relying upon Filippo Grandi, a thirty-six-year-old Italian who was UNHCR’s Goma representative. In 1994, when Grandi had returned to Geneva from Congo after the cholera outbreak, he had prepared to deliver remarks to a group of outside dignitaries and had run his remarks by Vieira de Mello, who was a legend to young staff. “No, Filippo, when you speak with important people, you have to convey a visceral sense of the dramatic experiences you have been through,” Vieira de Mello had said. “I’m not asking you to say anything wrong or fake, but you have to be very graphic because that is how you grab people’s attention. And our success at UNHCR depends on our ability to get and hold people’s attention.”When Grandi replied that he doubted he had comparable powers of persuasion,Vieira de Mello had exclaimed,“Nonsense! We are Latin, both of us. It is in the blood.”
In late November, now in the region together, Vieira de Mello told Grandi that he would like to visit rebel territory so that he could get an up-close feel for the displacement. He knew that he would be a more effective advocate if he had witnessed firsthand the terror and squalor of the refugees’ new circumstances, but he also knew that carrying out such a visit would be frowned upon by New York. He could get caught up in the crossfire of the joint rebel-Rwandan offensive, or, given anti-UN feeling among the Rwandans, he might even be targeted. But the bigger risks were political. It had been one thing for his friend Bakhet to slip into eastern Zaire, but it would be quite another thing for a UN official of his stature to make the trek. He would be seen to be legitimating Kabila’s rule, and Mobutu’s government would be incensed. “The Zaireans are only willing to endure me here because I’m junior,” Grandi told his senior colleague. “They will erupt if you come.” But Vieira de Mello had made up his mind.“We will be discreet,” he said, “and we will not meet with the rebels. I will just look around.” In the end Grandi prepared a travel manifest that listed the assistant secretary-general as a lowly field officer, and on November 25 Vieira de Mello slipped anonymously across the border to spend a few hours in the Goma, Mugunga, and Lake Vert camps, where he could meet with shell-shocked refugees who had survived the attacks. What he saw in Zaire only deepened his conviction that the Multinational Force was urgently needed.“The people we can see are by definition the lucky ones,” he said to Grandi. “Where the hell are the rest?”
On November 27 Vieira de Mello traveled to Entebbe, where General Baril was setting up MNF advance headquarters. He eagerly told Baril that the MNF could do everything from airlifting groups of refugees out of the forest to arresting the génocidaires and turning them over to the UN war crimes tribunal. Baril nodded politely, but on his way to Entebbe he had stopped in Stuttgart, Germany, to consult with troop contributors, and he knew that Western enthusiasm for the mission was evaporating. He explained that the troop contributors had discussed four levels of MNF engagement:
• Level A: ascertaining the location and condition of the refugees;
• Level B: establishing airlift capacity for delivering humanitarian aid;
• Level C: helping return the refugees to Rwanda in a permissive environment; and
• Level D: helping return the refugees to Rwanda in a dangerous environment.
Baril told Vieira de Mello that the MNF would go no further than Level A. Under no circumstances would it separate out the génocidaires or protect aid workers.42 Vieira de Mello, who was crestfallen, battled, in Baril’s words, “like a bulldog.” “If we can save a hundred refugees,” he pleaded, “let’s save a hundred!” But Baril shook his head. “Sergio, the machinery I have isn’t meant to save a hundred. Militaries are big, cumbersome, slow, and expensive.” He suggested that UNHCR charter its own commercial planes to retrieve the refugees from the jungle. When Vieira de Mello said that was a military’s job, Baril put his foot down. “Look, Sergio, your plan is limited only by your imagination. Mine is limited by the countries who have sent troops to serve under me.” Vieira de Mello never ceased to wonder how political and military leaders saw nothing unseemly about asking unarmed aid workers to enter areas into which they would not dare send their soldiers.
Having hoped fleetingly that UN member states were prepared to step in to help the desperate refugees, he saw now that the plans had collapsed. His own mission had come to feel like a failure on every front. In his entire career he could not recall a field job where he spent so much time in motion and achieved so little. “In Bosnia, we humanitarians may have been fig leaves for Western powers,” he told a colleague later, “but in Zaire we were invisible and irrelevant. I’m not sure which was more pathetic.”
On December 23 the UN Security Council decided to disband the nascent MNF. The United States called off the search for refugees, claiming that UNHCR had exaggerated the number of missing refugees and blaming the agency for failing to separate out the “intimidators.” Vieira de Mello was furious. “They think it would have been so easy to say, ‘Génocidaires to the left, civilians to the right,’ ” he fumed.“Well, if it was so easy, why didn’t they come and help when we asked them?” Henceforth he would borrow European humanitarian commissioner Bonino’s description of the Multinational Force: “Multinational Farce.”
REPATRIATION FROM TANZANIA: SIDING WITH POWER
Having felt powerless to address the humanitarian debacle in Zaire,Vieira de Mello decided to take charge of the less threatening but equally untenable situation in the refugee camps in neighboring Tanzania. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide,Tanzania had absorbed 535,000 Rwandan exiles, and now, after more than two years of playing host, the Tanzanian government wanted to expel the Hutu refugees in the camps whom they blamed for deforestation, theft, and violence.43 Tanzania had the backing of the United States and the U.K., which were urging Ogata to scale back food aid in the camps as a precursor to closing them.44 UNHCR was dependent on voluntary contributions and took such demands from donor governments seriously.
Vieira de Mello had last visited the Tanzanian refugee camps in September. They were not nearly as militarized as those he had seen in Zaire because the Tanzanian authorities had been more effective in keeping heavy armaments out of the camps and even in arresting a few high-profile génocidaires. But these actions had the unintended effect of making the camps more comfortable for the Rwandan exiles. Tanzania’s largest camp, Benaco, which was home to 160,000 refugees, bore street signs named for such people as Nelson Mandela and even Sadako Ogata. Beside row upon row of small mud-brick huts, the Rwandan Hutu grew maize and vegetables in their well-groomed gardens.45 Having witnessed the violence in Zaire and fearful it would spread next to Tanzania,Vieira de Mello was prepared to urge Ogata to pull the plug on assistance.
But on November 27, 1996, the Tanzanian authorities beat him to it, officially informing UNHCR that they intended to close the camps and send the refugees home.The Tanzanians asked Vieira de Mello if UNHCR would help fund the $1.7 million operation. If UNHCR was squeamish about cooperating, they said, they would proceed on their own and would not hesitate to employ their “own methods.”46 Vieira de Mello agreed to team up.
His decision put him on a collision course with his old friend Dennis McNamara, who had become UNHCR’s director of protection .47 McNamara adamantly opposed UNHCR’s complicity in any plan that would force refugees to return to Rwanda, where many had genuine reasons to fear persecution. The two friends engaged in tense, pitched battles by phone and in person.48 “We don’t have a choice,” Vieira de Mello argued.“The Tanzanians are going to send them back anyway.” McNamara thought the Tanzanians might be bluffing, but regardless he did not believe that their threats should dictate UNHCR’s stance. “Let them do it anyway,” he said. “Just don’t let UNHCR be a part of pushing people back.” Vieira de Mello said he was committed to a voluntary and orderly return, but he could not afford to be a purist. In camps controlled by génocidaires, the whole notion of voluntariness, a cornerstone of UNHCR’s existence, had been thrown on its head. Could anybody really claim that the refugees were voluntarily remaining in the border camps of Tanzania or voluntarily serving as human shields for Hutu gunmen fleeing deeper into the jungles in Zaire? In addition, Tanzania was receiving a flood of new refugees from Burundi, and he worried that a testy Tanzania might seal its borders, keeping out people who were fleeing for their lives.49 “Get real, Dennis,” he said. “You can’t just come riding in on that great white horse of moral principle; you have to solve the problem.”
On Friday, November 29,Vieira de Mello flew to the Tanzanian capital, Dar-es-Salaam, where he held a three-hour meeting that would decide the fates of the refugees. He appealed to the Tanzanians “as far as possible” to carry out the repatriation “consistent with established principles.”50 At the start of the meeting he said that force should not be used to move the refugees. But since he doubted that the refugees would budge without some form of coercion, he did not object when the Tanzanians said they would send police and security forces to the camps. In a testament to his desire to solve the refugee problem once and for all, he even offered UNHCR funds to transport and pay the forces. Griffiths, his deputy, was struck by the speed and ease with which he accepted the Tanzanian arguments. “Sergio had been briefed before the meeting about all the arguments on each side, but when we got into the meeting, he seemed to have made up his mind,” Griffiths recalls. “He effectively said, ‘Do it, do it quickly, and if you have to use the police to do it, do your best to keep them out of sight.’ ” The Tanzanians said they wanted the matter resolved by December 31.51 This gave Vieira de Mello and UNHCR almost no time to try to ensure that the operation would be carried out humanely. Nonetheless, he insisted that an imperfect refugee return operation was preferable to the status quo.“We have to choose the least bad option here,” he told his critics.
Repatriating more than half a million Hutu from Tanzania was bound to be messy. In Cambodia he had managed the return of 360,000 Cambodians over thirteen months, making use of huge financial resources and a large peacekeeping presence. In Tanzania, UNHCR would have just three weeks, and once the Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda, they would not receive international protection. The most crucial difference was one of mind-set: The refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border had been impatient to go home, while the refugees in Tanzania were so frightened of returning to Rwanda that some would likely take up arms to stay where they were.
On December 5, 1996,Vieira de Mello signed off on a joint UNHCR-TANZANIAN “Message to all Rwandese Refugees in Tanzania.” Remarkably, even though he had growing concerns about human rights conditions in Rwanda and could by no means guarantee the refugees’ safety, he put UNHCR’s stamp on the assurance that “all Rwandese refugees can now return to their country in safety.”52 UNHCR arranged for leaflets to be printed and distributed in the camps and for loudspeakers to broadcast the joint communiqué in Kinyarwanda. The statement did not inform the refugees that, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, any person who feared persecution had the legal right to remain in Tanzania and apply for asylum.
By the evening of December 11, rumors began circulating among aid workers that some refugees had begun to leave the Tanzanian camps voluntarily. The refugees had harvested crops from their small gardens, waited to receive their biweekly ration of red beans, corn, and cooking oil, and taken off on foot.53 At first the aid workers were hopeful that the commotion signaled the end of the spell the génocidaires had cast over the refugees. But by the morning of December 12, UNHCR officials were aghast to learn that the refugees were in fact trudging toward Kenya and Zambia, away from the border and thus away from their former homes in Rwanda. Camps that just twenty-four hours before had teemed with life were being completely vacated.
Rwandan Hutu militiamen had gone hut-to-hut ordering the refugees to move east across the plains of northwestern Tanzania. Some headed into the hills of the Burigi Game Reserve, the home of lions, zebras, elephants, and giraffes. Many of the women carried children strapped to their backs. Refugees told the few aid workers and journalists they encountered that Kagame’s Rwandan troops were waiting to arrest or kill them if they returned to Rwanda. The horror stories were vivid: Babies would be snatched from their mothers, and the hands and feet of returning Hutu would be chopped off.54 “Is it true that they will castrate all the men and boys at the border?” one refugee asked a reporter.55
Vieira de Mello had already left Tanzania for Rwanda when all hell broke loose. Ogata consulted with him by phone and issued instructions from Geneva: UNHCR should support the Tanzanian government’s attempt to redirect the refugees toward Rwanda. Ten thousand Tanzanian soldiers carrying clubs and AK-47s had already set up roadblocks and begun forcing the refugees to do an about-face.The “orderly and humane” return promised by UNHCR had turned into a military push-back, as McNamara had feared.
By December 16 the rate of return was staggering. More than 10,000 people crossed per hour, 51,000 by midday, and more than 100,000 by the time the border crossing was closed for the night.56 The refugees, who were herded over a narrow concrete bridge over the Kagera River into Rusumo, Rwanda, were exhausted and terrified. The farther they had walked, the more swollen were their feet. Draped in rags and plastic bags, they had braved heavy rains. The wealthier ones carried their belongings piled high on bicycles or in wheelbarrows. An estimated twenty-five babies were born each day along the way.57 So many children were getting separated from their parents—134 children had gotten lost on December 15 alone—that Red Cross workers began tying children to their mothers with yellow string.58
The operation grew increasingly violent.The refugees described systematic beatings, demands for bribes, theft of their Tanzanian currency (under the ruse that the refugees were not permitted to take currency out of the country), strip searches, and the looting of personal property such as bicycles, blankets,jerry cans, and even UNHCR plastic sheeting. A few refugees were found raped or beaten to death.59 The Tanzanians were so determined to rid their country of the Rwandan Hutu exiles that they fired guns into the air, used tear gas, and beat the refugees with sticks in order to keep them moving. Several refugees attempted suicide. One man used a blunt knife to cut his neck but survived, while another drowned himself in a shallow puddle of water.60 In less than two weeks more than 450,000 refugees returned to Rwanda from Tanzania.61 And these on the heels of the 700,000 who had arrived back after fleeing the camps in Zaire.
Ogata and UNHCR were so afraid of jeopardizing their relationship with the Tanzanian government that they said little in response to the forceful push-back. On January 10, 1997, Ogata finally signed a relatively tame letter of protest over the “reported use of force.” But when Vieira de Mello telephoned Elly Mtango, a leading official in the Tanzanian foreign ministry, to inform him that the protest would be sent to the president the following day, Mtango warned him that UNHCR would have to “live with the consequences” of such a hostile act.62 Knowing that UNHCR needed Tanzania to keep its borders open to refugees from other countries, Vieira de Mello agreed not to send the letter.63
UNHCR had been complicit in this forced repatriation, and both the agency and Vieira de Mello came under attack. Human rights groups speculated that the agency had simply bowed before the whims of its largest donors, who had made no secret of their desire to see the camps closed. Since the end of the cold war, UNHCR had seemed to internalize the impatience of host countries and donors who wanted to rush repatriation. “UNHCR may not have been able to stop the repatriation from Tanzania,” says Gil Loescher, a refugee expert who in 2003 would be meeting with Vieira de Mello in Iraq on the day of the attack on the UN base. “But it should have made clear it opposed it, and it should have publicized what Tanzania was planning. It should have used its leverage with donor governments. And at the very least it should not have sanctioned forced repatriation.” Human Rights Watch accused the agency of having “shamefully abandoned its responsibility to protect refugees.”64
Ogata had been every bit as eager as Vieira de Mello to rid UNHCR of the albatross of the Rwandan refugee problem. But seeing the price UNHCR was paying for the bungled Tanzania repatriation, she distanced herself from the operation and pointed the finger at Vieira de Mello. “The return of refugees from Tanzania cost UNHCR a lot,” she says.“Sergio knew Tanzania well. But in choosing the lesser evil you can make a mistake. And it is not just Sergio who suffers the consequences. It is me as well.”
END GAME
In Zaire, Kabila had effectively broken off all contact with the UN after a UN human rights rapporteur had accused his rebels of committing massacres. By the spring of 1997, with Kabila’s army closing in on Kinshasa, it was essential that UNHCR restore its relations with the man who was now seemingly destined to become president of Zaire. Ogata asked Vieira de Mello to head back to the region in order to try to charm the warlord.
By the time he was able to meet with Kabila personally for the first time, Kabila’s rebel forces were perched just sixty miles east of Kinshasa, and Mobutu was on the verge of surrendering. On May 12, 1997, upon arriving at Kabila’s temporary base, Vieira de Mello was told he would have to wait. Grandi, the Italian UNHCR official who had arranged the visit and who knew that his boss had a packed schedule, was crestfallen. He apologized for the mix-up. “No problem,” Vieira de Mello said. “You live out in the jungle the whole time. We bourgeois diplomats from Geneva can rough it occasionally.We will wait here until we are summoned.”
He took advantage of the delay by holding meetings with individual members of Kabila’s entourage and by plotting strategy. “I will use my usual tactics,” he told Grandi. “I will build a bond up front by telling Kabila, ‘I am not an American. I am not a Frenchman. I am a Brazilian, from the third world just like you.’ ” When the rebel leader finally turned up for the meeting the following day, Vieira de Mello did as he forecast, capitalizing on their shared third-world pedigree.“Sergio could mingle in all possible worlds. With Kabila he was a man from a poor former colony in the developing world,” recalls Grandi. “And with European diplomats he was a Sorbonne-educated dignitary.”
Vieira de Mello told Kabila that he hoped that he and UNHCR could “abandon polemic” and make a “fresh start” in repatriating all Hutu refugees remaining in Zaire to Rwanda.True to form, he said that while he was concerned about Kabila’s alleged massacres, he saw no point in embarrassing the rebels by denouncing them publicly. Kabila was delighted. He told Vieira de Mello that he had been “beginning to despair” about working with UNHCR but found himself “encouraged” by their discussion. As the two men parted,Vieira de Mello wished him luck in his negotiations with Mobutu, which were scheduled for the following day. "This is going to be rapid,” said Kabila.65
Indeed, Kabila brought his seven-month rebellion to a triumphant end just five days later. On May 17, 1997, he marched his forces into Kinshasa, declared the end of Mobutu’s reign of nearly thirty-two years, and announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Congo.66 Kinshasa’s residents poured into the streets to greet the rebels. They sang, chanted, and waved anything they could find that was white in order to signal peace: flags, paper, shirts, socks, and even plastic chairs. Mobutu flew that night to Morocco, while his ministers hightailed it by speedboat across the Congo River to Brazzaville, Congo, carrying their designer luggage.67
By July 1997 some 834,000 Hutu refugees who had once lived in the UNHCR camps had returned to Rwanda. Some 52,000 were known to still be living in Zaire and neighboring countries. This meant that 213,000 refugees who had at one point resided in the camps remained unaccounted for. Most were presumed to have been killed in battle or massacres, or to have died of disease, dehydration, or starvation in flight.68 It was impossible to know how many of the deceased were killers and how many were civilians who had played no role in the 1994 genocide.
Rwandan vice president Paul Kagame said he had no remorse about the deaths of Hutu civilians. “It is my strong belief that the United Nations people are trying to deflect the blame for failures of their own making onto us,” he said. “Their failure to act in eastern Zaire directly caused these problems, and when things blew up in their faces they blamed us. These are people who want to be judges and nobody can judge them.”69
The Rwandan government had been brutal, yes; it had been deceitful, yes; but by joining forces with Kabila, it had also managed to destroy the hostile Hutuland at its border when nobody else would.
Back in Geneva, Vieira de Mello found himself attacked by colleagues and close friends for the decisions he had made in the field. He brushed off his critics, telling them, “You can’t be involved in an operation this messy and expect to come out clean.” He and McNamara picked up their argument where it had left off. “Sergio wanted to be friends with everyone,” McNamara recalls. “But in this case he could not be friends both with Tanzania and the U.S. government, which wanted to force return, and with human rights advocates, who wanted any return to be voluntary.” He had to choose a side, and, his friend remembers, “he sided with power.” The heated battles took their toll.“It’s hard enough to fight with friends professionally,” McNamara says, “but when you fight with friends about principle, it is especially rough.”
Vieira de Mello used the occasion of a gathering of the agency’s governing board to strike back at those who were attacking him. The philosopher in him emerged in his defense of UNHCR. “Voluntariness is based on the execution of free will—freedom is the basis of will—and that is precisely what these [refugee] populations had been deprived of since the genocide.” He closed his remarks defiantly:
I request, therefore, those who so impulsively criticize us, including friends and institutions we deeply respect, those who have the privilege of distance and responsibility, to place events in their chronology and in their overall context, and not to use their memory in a selective manner. . . . To my knowledge, our critics had no better formula to offer. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! That, Mr. Chairman, is the frustration many of us felt.70
He was worn out. Having once believed that UNHCR should remain apolitical, he had grown exasperated by UNHCR’s dependence on governments that themselves avoided exercising political leadership. He had never seen the UN’s reputation so tattered by its performance, or relief to refugees carry such perverse side effects. “Would Rwanda, Zaire, and the UN all be better off if we had never set foot in those camps?” he wrote in an article for a book on peacekeeping. In instances in which proper security conditions did not exist, he asked provocatively, “Should humanitarian agencies refuse to intervene?”71
As a young man in UNHCR,Vieira de Mello had believed in a pure humanitarian ideal. He had believed that aid agencies could and should perform apolitical lifesaving tasks, and that peacekeepers could and should remain impartial and avoid the use of force. But Bosnia and Rwanda had taught him that sometimes when UN humanitarians tried to be neutral, they abetted criminal acts. If Bosnia had exposed for Vieira de Mello the shortcomings of UN peacekeeping, the Great Lakes crises exposed the limits of offering humanitarian care. He was now convinced that UN officials would better serve the powerless if they could find a way to enlist the power of the world’s largest countries. His transformation from student revolutionary was complete.
What UN aid agencies had been missing in Bosnia had not been plastic sheeting to replace windows in wintertime but a determination by Western governments to halt aggression. What they had been missing in the Zaire crisis were not tents or high-protein biscuits but a willingness among the major powers to send police to Zaire to arrest the génocidaires. In his public remarks Vieira de Mello began exhorting his colleagues to stop hiding behind their allegedly apolitical, humanitarian roles. The Great Lakes ordeal showed that the innocent victim was “often a fictitious concept.” He urged UN officials to accept “that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real.” Since everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, “we can hardly afford to be apolitical.”72
Vieira de Mello needed to find a political job in a hurry. Ever since Lebanon, he had been keeping his eye on UN Headquarters in New York. In November the United States had vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s nomination for a second term in office. The vote was 14-1, and U.S. officials had quickly tried to appease disgruntled African countries by choosing another African as the UN’s seventh secretary-general: Kofi Annan, Vieira de Mello’s friend and former colleague.73 Vieira de Mello was thrilled. “I think Kofi will be able to bring me to New York at some point,” he told Nakamitsu. “I am ready to make a move.”
His ties with Ogata had stiffened. The year that had just passed was the darkest and most challenging in UNHCR’s history. The plight of refugees and the trade-offs inherent in negotiating on their behalf no longer engaged him as they once had. The problems were too familiar, and the solutions to those problems resided not in Geneva and not in the field but in Washington, Paris, London, Moscow, and Beijing.“We are so remarkably ill informed,” he told Griffiths. “We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don’t understand the politics, and we can’t identify the points of leverage. I don’t know why we are surprised that right now we are failing at almost everything. We can’t protect refugees, and we can’t protect the UN reputation.”
His personal life too was changing. Laurent, his eighteen-year-old son, had entered university in Lausanne, Switzerland. And when Vieira de Mello returned from his posting in the Great Lakes, he took a step he had not taken before, renting his own apartment in Geneva. Although he did not consider filing for a legal separation, he lived more like a bachelor than he had since his early twenties.
But he was biding his time. His ambitions were professional, and he felt he was being wasted where he was. Maybe, he thought, if Annan brought him to New York, where global leaders converged, he might be able to lobby the major powers. But there were only so many political jobs suitable for a person of his rank. It was obvious that his next move would be to the prestigious rank of under-secretary-general, the hierarchical equivalent of earning his second star. The UN system had only twenty-one such slots.
If ascent in the UN were strictly merit-based, by 1997 Vieira de Mello would have been vying for one of several prominent jobs at UN Headquarters. With all of his proven gifts negotiating with governments, he might have been named under-secretary-general for political affairs. Or with his extensive experience working with and within UN peacekeeping missions, he could have been chosen under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.
But the UN could never be confused with a meritocracy. The permanent five Security Council countries got to vet who would fill key positions in the UN Secretariat. In the 1990s, the Department of Political Affairs generally went to a Brit, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was slated for the French, both the Department of Management and the UN Development Program went to Americans, and the Secretariat’s satellite office in Geneva was run by a Russian.74 China, the only permanent member of the Security Council not looked after, did not yet complain about being underrepresented.75
The one UN department in New York that had not been earmarked for a particular nationality was the small Department of Humanitarian Affairs, under which he had just served. DHA, which had been created after the Gulf War to coordinate the UN’s emergency-relief activities, had been run by a Swede, a Dane, and most recently by Akashi.
DHA had achieved little in its six years of existence. The heads of the agencies it was meant to coordinate—UNHCR, the World Food Program, and other UN relief organizations—had not warmed to a body that they saw as a nuisance. Ogata, who had dramatically expanded UNHCR’s budget and global reach, resisted any efforts to give up the turf she had acquired.76 But Vieira de Mello told Nakamitsu, who knew DHA well and advised him against taking the job, that he viewed the post as a “stepping stone” to a more political job in New York. “The main attraction is that I will be exposed to the Security Council,” he said.
Normally, he was reluctant to campaign for himself.“I’m not like Shashi,” he told colleagues, referring to Shashi Tharoor, an Indian national who had a reputation for wining and dining powerful diplomats.Vieira de Mello marveled at how, in his tenure at the UN, Tharoor had also managed to publish four nonfiction books, three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.77 While India would name Tharoor as its candidate for secretary-general in 2006, Vieira de Mello took it as a point of pride that his home country would never pull strings for him. “I have never asked Brazil for favors,” he liked to say. But he had so impressed ambassadors from Western countries in recent years that he had their backing instead. In November 1997 Annan announced that Vieira de Mello would take over the department as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
People worked backward from Vieira de Mello’s rapid rise in the UN and assumed he had a Machiavellian lust for power.They had started to interpret his every move as proof of an elaborate plan to earn the top job, that of UN secretary-general. Vieira de Mello had held this ambition early on in his career, but other factors had since crept into his thinking. “People thought Sergio plotted his life like in a chess game,” recalls Fabrizio Hochschild, a Chilean Brit, then thirty-two, who succeeded Nakamitsu as his special assistant. “But he didn’t think long-term. What he thought was, ‘I’m bored now. It’s time to move on. Where can I go? What can I learn?’ ” When a colleague in Geneva offered him congratulations on his promotion to under-secretary-general, he replied, “Big deal. Big fucking deal.” But one aspect of the move was a big deal. Having worked at UNHCR for twenty-eight years, bowing out only twice to serve in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Bosnia, he was leaving his mother ship for good.
Several hundred people gathered for his farewell party in Geneva. He gave a very short speech in which he said, “I have gotten a lot from this place. I hope I have given something back. If I have any gift, it is that I am aware of my weaknesses.” With Ogata away on leave, her deputy Gerald Walzer presented him with a UN flak jacket in its singular baby blue. “You’ll need this to protect you against all the backstabbing in New York,” Walzer said. One junior UNHCR official asked Vieira de Mello whether he had any recommendations for young staff who aspired to follow in his footsteps. “Be in the field,” he replied. “That is it. That’s what I built my career on. That’s what’s relevant. Nothing else matters.”
He would keep the flak jacket hanging on a coatrack in his New York office.