Fourteen
Vieira de Mello did not have long to stew over being big-footed as the UN administrator in Kosovo. At the opposite end of the earth, a humanitarian crisis of potentially catastrophic proportions was unfolding. East Timor, a tiny half-island in the Pacific, was attempting to rid itself of the Indonesian forces that had occupied it since 1975.1 And after a bloody conflict Vieira de Mello would be given a permanent chance to run his own long-term, complex mission. If he proved himself in Timor, he knew he would also demonstrate that the UN was in fact capable of stabilizing a broken country. If he failed, he also understood, the repercussions would be felt far from the Pacific.
INDEPENDENCE
During the occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, Indonesia’s armed forces killed some 200,000 Timorese. But in May 1999, while the world’s gaze was fixed upon NATO’s war with Serbia, the UN negotiated a deal by which the Indonesians agreed to give East Timor’s 800,000 people the chance to vote for independence. Just as Vieira de Mello was returning from Kosovo, six hundred UN officials in East Timor were staging election education seminars, preparing voter lists, and setting up polling stations. They were backed by 800 unarmed UN police and military liaison officers. Even though violence had been escalating all summer, the UN team hoped that the 26,000
Four days ahead of the UN vote, Indonesian police chasing, shooting, and killing pro-independence supporter Joaquim Bernardino Guterres. These were the first photographs of Indonesian police actually killing an East Timorese.
Indonesian army and police forces in East Timor would keep their pledge to guarantee security during the vote.
On August 30 the Timorese headed to the polls for the long-awaited vote on independence.2 UN election observers estimated that more than half the voters were already lined up when the polls opened at 6:30 a.m.3 Worried about Indonesia’s wrath, most went directly from the polling stations to hiding in the hills. Some 98.6 percent of registered Timorese cast ballots.
On September 4, 1999, anxious Timorese gathered around their television sets and radios to hear Ian Martin, the head of the UN election mission, read the results. Many wept joyously when the local radio and television reporters translated Martin’s announcement: 78.5 percent of Timorese had voted for independence. “This day will be eternally remembered as the day of national liberation,” declared Xanana Gusmão, the Timorese independence leader, who had been jailed in Indonesia since 1992. Domingos Sarmento, a former guerrilla who had also spent time in an Indonesian prison, listened to the news in his Dili home with his family. Upon hearing the results, he and his relatives went outside holding hands, and they kissed the land. “We were kissing something that finally belonged to us,” he recalls. “East Timor was a country.” But in fact the Indonesians had other plans in mind.
Within an hour of the announcement of the results, the sound of gunfire and screams abruptly halted Timorese celebrations. Black-uniformed pro-Indonesian militia, backed by the Indonesian army and police, embarked upon a savage looting, cleansing, and killing spree that left at least three-quarters of all property burned or destroyed, most of the population purged from their homes, and more than a thousand Timorese dead.4 The actions were calculated to destroy East Timor’s prospects for survival. Indeed, the gunmen went so far as to pour battery acid into the electrical generators. “We knew the Indonesians were going to do something dramatic,” recalls Taur Matan Ruak, then commander of the Timorese guerrilla resistance. “When you kill an animal, its last movement is like a spasm, and it is very strong.” In the next fortnight, the marauding militia also butchered sixteen Timorese employed by the UN as election workers.5 José Ramos-Horta, the longtime face of Timor’s movement for independence and corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, helplessly watched events unfold from New York, where he had flown to lobby the Security Council. “I saw on CNN that whole towns were being burned to a crisp, and my family in East Timor was hysterical with fear,” he recalls. “I thought that we were about to see the end of East Timor.”
Fearing a human cataclysm, Gusmão instructed Timorese rebels to turn the other cheek. “If we strike back,” Matan Ruak, the guerrilla commander, told his troops, on Gusmão’s instruction, “we will give the international community the excuse they want to call this a civil war, to equate us with the Indonesian militias.We have to stay clean.”
On September 5, after an American UN policeman was shot in the stomach, Martin ordered the withdrawal of UN election staff from rural areas. Timorese and international UN workers flocked to the capital, Dili, gathering at the UN base there. They saw that many terrified Timorese with no connection to the UN had taken shelter at a high school that abutted the UN compound. As night fell, a mob of militiamen hacked one man to death in the school yard and then began firing homemade guns—welded pipes packed with nails and gunpowder that were set off with cigarette lighters—at the Timorese, who fled toward the UN compound.
UN security officers guarding the base initially fended off the desperate Timorese. But fearing that the militia were closing in on them, mothers began hurling their children over the concrete wall separating the high school from the UN complex. Other Timorese cut themselves as they forced their way through holes they had sliced into the razor wire fence. As UN staff saw parents begin to follow their children over the wall, they formed an impromptu assembly line, passing the Timorese from one pair of hands to the next, until they were safely inside the UN building. The nighttime images of panic and rescue were broadcast globally. By the end of the evening more than fifteen hundred Timorese had joined foreign journalists and UN Timorese and international staff in the UN compound, where they slept on cardboard and shared dwindling rations. Ramos-Horta’s thirty-eight-year-old sister, Aida, and her six children, aged three, five, eight, ten, thirteen, and fourteen, were among those being sheltered. With corpses lining the streets, the sound of gunfire echoing through the night, and bare-chested militiamen brandishing large machetes outside the UN gate, UN staffers feared that the mob would storm the compound.
Vieira de Mello watched events unfold from New York, and still undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, he attempted to coordinate the UN’s humanitarian response. He herded the heads of the World Food Program, UNHCR, and the major aid groups together to ramp up their emergency aid deliveries. But while the militia were on the loose, he knew it would be very difficult to reach those in greatest need. He believed the crisis was so severe that military intervention, that rare and risky measure, was necessary.
Although the evidence indicated that Indonesian armed forces were committing and abetting the massacres, Western diplomats continued to point to the original referendum agreement in which Indonesia had accepted responsibility for maintaining East Timor’s security. When Sandy Berger, the national security adviser to President Clinton, was asked why the United States had not stepped up to try to stop the violence, Berger said,“You know, my daughter has a very messy apartment up in college; maybe I shouldn’t intervene to have that cleaned up. I don’t think anybody ever articulated a doctrine which said we ought to intervene wherever there’s a humanitarian problem.”6 None of the major powers seemed inclined to rescue the Timorese. “Nobody is going to fight their way in,” said Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary.7
But because it was UN staff who had staged the referendum, it was again the organization rather than the specific countries that constituted it that came under fire.The French newspaper L’Express ran a commentary by philosopher André Glucksmann, who called for the abolition of the UN, the “alibi of cynical powers”:
The UN lured the Timorese into an ambush: it offers them a free referendum, they vote under its guarantee, it delivers them to the militias’ knives . . . Is the ability to foresee and to reform inversely proportional to the size of its resources? 180 nations, a lot of money, a plethora of bureaucrats. . . . A warning to the brave people who are counting on it: the UN knows, the UN keeps quiet, the UN withdraws.8
Le Point, another French newspaper, published an editorial by the prominent philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who invoked Somalia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica as the “other theaters of the UN’s shame.” He slammed the “slow but sure League-of-Nations-ization of the UN.”And he closed the appeal by arguing, “The UN did its time. The time of the UN has passed. We have to finish off this macabre farce which the UN has become.”9
Vieira de Mello was so incensed by the attacks that he fired off an intemperate response, which Le Monde entitled “Retort to Two Intellectual Show-offs.” The under-secretary-general denounced the “two prosecutor-philosophers.” Although it was “so easy to caricature, to ridicule, to defame” the UN “from the comfort of their Parisian homes,” he wrote, their reasoning was an “insult to philosophy” and would do nothing to improve people’s lives. He defended the UN referendum, which he noted had the full support of the Timorese. And he wondered why he could not recall Glucksmann and Lévy denouncing Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor.10 Instead of “shooting us in the back” by urging that the UN “rampart against anarchy” be destroyed—“a nonsense philosophically, politically and practically”—Vieira de Mello wrote, the men could do some real good by pressing Western governments to rescue East Timor.11
Secretary-General Annan too was defensive, as the associations with Rwanda and Srebrenica were inescapable. He claimed that the Indonesian slaughter was unexpected: “If any of us had an inkling that it was going to be this chaotic, I don’t think anyone would have gone forward. We are no fools.”12 When journalists challenged him to account for why the UN had not deployed force to stop the atrocities, he explained that he did not have a protection force of his own. The countries that composed the UN were to blame.“We all talk of the United Nations and the international community,” Annan said. “The international community is governments—governments with the capacity and the will to act. The governments have made it clear that it will be too dangerous to go in.”13When a reporter asked if he was advocating a Kosovo-style intervention, he avoided making a forceful appeal, instead answering with characteristic tentativeness: “I do not think your analogy is completely irrelevant.”14
An unshaven and frazzled Ramos-Horta shuttled between New York and Washington, invoking Rwanda whenever he could. “It was clear that people in the office of the secretary-general and in the White House were traumatized by Rwanda,” he recalls. “So I kept repeating, ‘Do you want another Rwanda in Timor? That’s what you’re going to get if you don’t act now.’ ” Vieira de Mello, who spoke often about the Don Bosco school in Rwanda
The remains of East Timorese homes in the Ermera district, thirty-one miles south of Dili, September 27, 1999.
that the Belgians had abandoned, had the same concern. The Security Council had instructed UN election workers to carry out the referendum. Surely, he thought, the countries on the Council would not again abandon civilians who had trusted them.
When the violence began, the BBC chartered a plane to evacuate journalists, but a few remained and used UN satellite phones to plead for outside help. The pressure on Annan and the countries within the UN mounted. A vast network of religious groups and other grassroots organizations kicked into gear, demanding intervention. On September 7, Annan was informed that the UN had received 60,000 e-mails regarding East Timor, a deluge of concern so great that a separate computer server had to be set up to handle the influx.15
UN MUTINY
Martin was worried both about the bloodshed in the country and about the people gathered at the compound. In a reversal of its previous position, Australia agreed to admit Timorese UN staff on the condition that Australian citizens be evacuated from East Timor first and that any Timorese who landed in Darwin, Australia, would not be eligible to apply for longer-term visas.16
Martin’s bigger problem was the fifteen hundred Timorese civilians with no UN connection who had poured into the compound on September 5 and whom Australia would not take. The militiamen who prowled outside the blue-painted gates seemed poised to attack at any point. Piled into a large auditorium, the displaced Timorese sang songs that the UN had made up for the election, lit candles, and prayed before their small crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary.17 One Timorese woman gave birth to a baby boy inside the compound, and out of gratitude to the UN mission in East Timor, or UNAMET, the woman chose an unusual name for her new son: “Pedro UNAMET.”18
The UN had a policy of never evacuating civilians, but Martin urged New York to lobby member states to do something to protect all Timorese (UN and non-UN alike) at the compound. Hearing nothing, on the evening of September 8, Martin felt he had no choice but to follow the advice of Alan Mills, the head of UN civilian police, and his security advisers, and recommend to New York that the secretary-general declare a “Phase V” emergency.22 Annan reluctantly accepted the recommendation and ordered the withdrawal of all UN staff. Before Martin had shared the news with UN officials at the compound, most learned of the evacuation from CNN.
Patrick Burgess, a forty-four-year-old Australian who worked for OCHA, the branch of the UN that Vieira de Mello ran, was horrified by the news of their departure and protested. But Martin explained that the few reliable Indonesian army officers who had been protecting the UN compound had been spotted preparing to leave. This meant that they and the Timorese civilians would soon be left at the mercy of marauding killers. “We can’t think only about this mission. If there is a massacre here, it will doom UN missions like this all around the world,” Martin told Burgess. “What country is going to send its nationals into harm’s way if it can’t trust the UN officials in charge to look after them?” Since Burgess spoke Indonesian, Martin asked him to tell the Timorese of the UN decision.19
Burgess asked two Canadian colleagues, Geoffrey Robinson, forty-two, and Colin Stewart, thirty-eight, to help him assemble Timorese leaders. “We have been ordered to leave tomorrow morning,” Burgess told the Timorese. “It is better we tell you now. The men are obviously going to be a target, but we can cut a hole in the fence tonight and you can make a run for the mountains.” Burgess and Robinson wept openly as they stammered their way through an explanation of the logic behind the UN’s withdrawal. Sister Esmerelda, a Timorese community activist whom the UN staffers had known for several months, heard them out. “Whatever else may happen,” she said, “this referendum has removed any doubt that [the] East Timorese wish to be free. For conducting it, we will always be grateful to UNAMET.” As she wiped away tears, she continued: “We knew there would be violence after the vote and we hoped that you would stay. And yet, we are not surprised that you plan to leave us now.We are used to being abandoned in our times of greatest need.” The UN workers hung their heads in shame. “When you leave tomorrow,” Sister Esmeralda went on, “many of us will be massacred, but those of us who survive will continue the struggle to be free.” Saying she had to hurry, she shuffled away.20
Most Timorese made no attempt to hide their emotions. They grew so panicked that they wailed in agony. Some plotted their escape. A small group began scheming to take hostages. “We must stop the UN from leaving. The bald man cannot leave the compound,” said one Timorese man, referring to Martin.21 UN security staff began preparing to depart, burning UN documents and removing the hard drives from computers.
Throughout the compound groups of UN staff members clustered together to discuss their predicament. Many were sure a Rwanda-style massacre would commence if they withdrew. Some, like Carina Perelli, the head of the UN Electoral Assistance Division, suggested that the staff resign so that nobody would have the authority to order their evacuation. “We were trying not only to save the Timorese,” she recalls, “but to save the UN from itself.” Rosie Martinez, a Filipina personnel officer, spent the evening on her computer typing up faux UN contracts for Timorese civilians, so that they might pose as UN personnel in the hopes of being evacuated. She would ask each international staff member his or her rank and then proclaim, “Well, you are entitled to two interpreters, a driver, a secretary, and didn’t you have a cook in your house?”
Burgess, Robinson, and Stewart sat together.“I can’t believe we are doing this,” said Robinson. “We can’t do this,” said Stewart. Burgess was nominated to return upstairs and ask Martin to reconsider.“When we leave here tomorrow,” he pleaded, “all these people are going to be killed. I don’t want to live with that for the rest of my life.” Martin agreed but said he had an obligation to protect the UN staff. Burgess challenged him. “We are not in immediate danger, and a lot of staff want to stay.” Martin, who had been hearing mainly from his police and security advisers about imminent militia attacks and about staff panic, looked surprised. “How many people feel that way?” he asked. Burgess guessed fifty or sixty. Martin asked Mark Quarterman, a thirty-nine-year-old American aide, to survey the staff and take down the names of those who were willing to remain. Quarterman returned several hours later with a list of more than eighty volunteers. Martin was persuaded and told New York that he intended to remain with UN staff in Dili until the evacuation of non-UN Timorese civilians could be negotiated.“We had decided to serve the flag,” Perelli recalls, “instead of serving the bureaucracy. Sergio always said that serving the flag gave you the power to do what you should do, not just what you were ordered to do.”
With reports of hundreds of Timorese already murdered, Vieira de Mello had the feeling of “here we go again.” In Bosnia in 1993 and 1994 he, like other UN officials, had understood the major powers to be unwilling to act to stop atrocities and had not pushed the matter. But a central lesson of the calamities of Rwanda and Srebrenica was that UN officials should, at a minimum, be on the record advocating solutions and challenging political constraints instead of simply deferring to them.When large numbers of lives were at stake, the smooth pragmatist had to exercise moral leadership. Doing so, he saw, was its own form of pragmatism.
Although his responsibilities toward East Timor were technically only humanitarian, he took a strong political stand. Just as the UN should not have trusted the Serbs to guarantee the Bosnians’ safety in Srebrenica, he argued, the UN could not now trust the Indonesians. Since the UN had already rightly decided to evacuate Timorese UN staff, he endorsed a proposal that was gathering momentum at Headquarters: to send a small Australian contingent to the UN compound to protect the non-UN Timorese who had sought shelter there. “I appreciate there is a high likelihood that this will be unacceptable with the Security Council,” he argued in writing. “However, I feel if we wish to avoid being a scapegoat, we should put the onus of rejecting solutions on others.”22 He pressed the point. “If we learned anything in the last five years,” he said, “it is that we have to stop telling the Security Council what it wants to know, and instead tell it what it needs to know.” He added, “We can’t censor ourselves.”23
Powerful countries were still officially accepting Indonesia’s assurances that it would keep its pledge to secure East Timor. But he wrote, “Should we not be skeptical in this regard?”24 He and his senior colleagues in the UN Secretariat had an obligation to put forth their independent view, which meant pushing for Australian intervention. “For once,” he urged in a senior staff meeting, “let’s allow the states on the Council to make the wrong decisions instead of saving them the trouble by making the wrong decisions for them.”
The two parts of the UN—UN career staff and UN member states—were responding differently. While UN staff were refusing to leave Dili without the Timorese and UN senior staff in New York were pressing Western governments to act, the governments themselves were still resisting sending troops to rescue either the Timorese at the UN compound or the imperiled population as a whole.The Indonesians knew that, so long as the major powers remained uninvolved, control of East Timor would remain theirs. “Don’t hector and lecture us,” a defiant Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas said on CNN. “That doesn’t help.”25
But not all Western countries were alike. Portugal, East Timor’s former colonizer, joined the push for intervention. Portuguese prime minister António Guterres telephoned President Clinton and pleaded with him to bring the issue before the Security Council. In Australia, the first UN member state to have recognized the legality of Indonesia’s occupation, the political left pressed Prime Minister John Howard to make up for the country’s past sins, while conservatives argued that something had to be done to stave off the flood of Timorese refugees who would end up in Australia. In his boldest statement of the crisis, Secretary-General Annan warned that what he called “crimes against humanity” would be punished.26 On September 9, 1999, on his way out the door to New Zealand for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Clinton announced that the United States was suspending a $2.5 million military assistance program to Indonesia, as well as $40 million in commercial sales.27 The IMF suspended a $450 million installment of aid, and the World Bank announced a freeze on its annual $1 billion aid program. The Indonesians, Clinton said, “didn’t like the results of the referendum and they’re trying to undo it by running people out of the country or into the grave.” He continued, “We expect the authorities to live up to their word and their responsibilities. [They] must invite”—Clinton repeated himself for effect—“must invite the international community to assist in restoring security.”28 Hiding in the mountains, Sarmento, the former guerrilla who had celebrated the referendum results, heard Clinton’s statement on his shortwave radio and cheered the ultimatum. The Timorese who were gathered in the UN compound jumped up and down, rejoicing at what they hoped was a reprieve.
On September 12, the international economic and diplomatic pressure on Indonesia paid off. President B. J. Habibie announced in both Indonesian and English, “I have decided to invite the international peacekeeping force in order to assist us—together with the Indonesian military, in a cooperative manner—to restore stability to the troubled province.”29
An outside military intervention would at last occur in East Timor, and the Indonesians would not contest it. After a tense, all-night negotiating session, the Security Council gave its blessing to sending an international force. As had occurred in Kosovo in March, the rescuers would be war fighters, not peacekeepers. After the peacekeeping humiliations of the 1990s, so-called coalitions of the willing or Multinational Forces (MNF), operating totally distinct from the UN bureaucracy, were seen as preferable to UN-led missions. They deployed more quickly, brought more aggressive rules of engagement, and because they were usually led by a single country, operated in more straightforward and disciplined chains of command. In this instance Australia would command an 11,500-troop MNF known as the International Force for East Timor, or INTERFET. Thanks to the pressure of powerful governments and the courage of local UN officials who refused to strand Timorese civilians, East Timor would survive.
At midnight on Monday, September 13, Burgess woke up the Timorese community leaders, including Sister Esmerelda. “You are being evacuated to Darwin, Australia,” he said. “You need to be lined up, quiet and ready, in one hour.” Although the Australian force had not yet deployed, the Indonesians had clearly relented, and the island had calmed. Beginning as dawn broke, five Australian and one New Zealand Hercules C-130 aircraft undertook the unprecedented evacuation. By 4:30 p.m. on September 14, a total of 1,454 East Timorese (UN and non-UN alike), 74 UN employees, and a remaining British reporter had been pulled out.30 John Dauth, Australia’s deputy secretary of foreign affairs, helped negotiate the passage of the refugees. “Normally, the gut assumption of Australians is that refugees will find the country so fabulous that they will stay on,” says Dauth. “But none of us wanted to relive the fall of Saigon, where people who had entrusted their fates to the international community had been left behind.”31
AN INTERVENTION AND A TRANSITION
The Australian-led force landed on East Timor’s shores just five days after the Security Council authorized it. Vieira de Mello recalled that in Cambodia months had elapsed between the Council’s approval of the force and the peace-keepers’ actual deployment. He applauded the wholly different sense of urgency with which governments were now springing into action. Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the Philippines all contributed personnel, equipment, or intelligence to the Multinational Force. The Indonesian military and paramilitary leaders hightailed it out of East Timor, while the Timorese militia aligned with them fled across the border to Indonesian-run West Timor, where the international force was not permitted to follow them. Within two weeks of the intervention, almost the only signs of the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation of East Timor were the smoldering ashes, the unburied corpses, and the parting Indonesian messages, graffitied onto the walls of buildings: “SLOWLY BUT SURELY, THIS PLACE WILL FALL APART” and “A FREE EAST TIMOR WILL EAT STONES.”32 Vieira de Mello took the obvious lesson from the force’s swift success, which he shared in public remarks a few months later: “Whenever lives of civilians are at risk and a rapid international intervention is necessary, the only effective solution is the establishment of a multinational force.”33 Peacemaking was not a job for lightly armed blue helmets. But it was a job that had to be done, and one that UN officials could use their pulpits to urge be done.
The Timorese had been waiting to govern themselves for more than two decades—in the jungle; in exile in Portugal, Australia, and Mozambique; and under the boot of the Indonesians in Timor itself. Indonesia had released Gusmão, fifty-three, the former rebel leader and head of the independence movement, from its custody on September 7, 1999. Gusmão’s poetry and letters from prison, as well as South African president Nelson Mandela’s meeting with him in 1997, had made him a national hero and an international cult figure. With Indonesia’s abrupt departure from East Timor, the Timorese resistance leaders were in charge by default, but they knew that they would pass through some period of transition en route to full sovereignty—living under a UN administration or governing themselves with UN help.Whatever arrangement was made, all Timorese assumed that Gusmão, the undisputed national leader, would be recognized as the supreme authority in the newly liberated state.
In late September Gusmão, the future president, and Ramos-Horta, the future foreign minister, visited Washington and New York, where heads of state were gathering for the annual launch of the UN General Assembly. Although East Timor was not yet formally a free nation, this was the first time Gusmão could walk among the world’s leaders and imagine the Timorese flag flying alongside the flags of the other UN member states.The Timorese delegation was invited to attend a reception hosted by President Clinton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grateful for Clinton’s firm stand against Indonesia, Gusmão and Ramos-Horta joined a lengthy receiving line. When the line had hardly moved after half an hour, they made a motion to leave, but a White House staffer commandeered them back into line, assuring them that President Clinton would be very disappointed if he could not personally congratulate them on their hard-won freedom. Back in line, where they would end up waiting almost two hours, they made small talk with the person standing behind them, who just happened to be Hun Sen, the premier of Cambodia. Hun Sen had strong views on one aspect of East Timor’s future: UN involvement. He complained that the UN had sent thousands of peacekeepers and bureaucrats to Cambodia, had spent more than $2 billion, and had abruptly left the country after holding elections. He said that international donors now felt that, because they had funded the mammoth UN mission, they had already done their part for Cambodia. “The UN will come with their white cars and their high salaries, and they will run around busily for two or three years,” Hun Sen warned. “Then their mandate will expire, they will leave, and you will be left with almost nothing.” Gusmão and Ramos-Horta thanked him for his warning and said that they intended to avoid a similar fate.
Gusmão flew back to Dili on October 22, 1999, a free man in his homeland for the first time since his imprisonment in 1992. Thousands of Timorese flocked to the Dili seafront plaza to greet him. “All of us must try to let go of the bad things they have done to us,” Gusmão told them. “Tomorrow is ours.”34 With tears in his eyes, and every expectation that his people were only days or weeks away from playing important roles in a new government, he proclaimed, “We knew we would suffer, but we are still here.”35
But on October 25 the Security Council in New York took decision-making out of Timorese hands and announced, in Resolution 1272, the creation of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). The resolution gave “all legislative and executive authority” not to Gusmão but to a foreign UN administrator who would run East Timor for at least fifteen months.36 Gusmão, who had favored a central UN role but not outright UN rule, was livid.When he first learned of the UN plan several weeks before, he had shouted to his colleagues, “What are they doing? What do these people want?” When he saw the resolution, he was even more steamed. The other Timorese leaders tried to calm him down, but they sympathized. “Imagine a transition in South Africa, where Mandela wasn’t given the ultimate authority,” says Ramos-Horta. “Imagine if some UN official were given all the power and told it was up to him whether he felt like consulting Mandela or not.” Sarmento, the former guerrilla who was also a lawyer, was also taken aback by the UN resolution. He had studied constitutional law, legal theory, and comparative law. “It looked like no legal structure I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “I knew that in democracies the powers were supposed to be separated and not clumped together in one man.” However, knowing that East Timor lay in ruins and needed outside help, he resigned himself to a period of UN administration.
Secretary-General Annan’s top advisers scrambled to assemble the second enormous mission of the year. The UN officials who had helped arrange the referendum believed Annan’s planners were shunning them as if they were responsible for the carnage.37 Ian Martin, who had organized the vote and remained in East Timor afterward, was rarely canvassed for advice. He pleaded with officials in Headquarters to move their planning base to Darwin, Australia, so that Gusmão and other Timorese leaders could be consulted. But New York paid no heed and gave no guidance to Martin, who was told to bide his time until his successor showed up.
Lacking familiarity with Timor itself, UN officials in New York took the plans they had developed for the Kosovo administration and virtually transposed them onto East Timor. UN staff who felt sidelined joked that Security Council Resolution 1272 was a “delete Kosovo, insert East Timor” resolution. Annan asked Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria and UN negotiator in Afghanistan, to become the head of UNTAET. Brahimi declined on the grounds that an international administration was unnecessary now that the Indonesians had left. He also argued that it was wrong to assume that what suited Kosovo would fit East Timor.“I know nothing about either Kosovo or Timor,” Brahimi told Annan, “but the one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that they are not the same place.” Since most of the UN planners had never visited East Timor, they had no feel for Gusmão’s extraordinary popularity and no grasp of the difference between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Timorese guerrilla force known as FALINTIL.38
Even if the UN planning staff in New York had put the most knowledgeable senior people in place, they still would have been overwhelmed. In the wake of Rwanda and Srebrenica the Security Council had stopped turning to the UN for help in peacekeeping or conflict resolution, and the UN staff in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, never large, had been cut by more than a quarter. But suddenly in 1999 Annan found himself unable to keep up with the demands. At the same time that the peacekeeping planners were setting up the transitional administrations in East Timor and Kosovo, they were also fielding missions to Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as maintaining thirteen preexisting operations.39 The department was so thinly staffed that it could commit just one professional staff member per operation.40
After Brahimi turned down Annan, it was obvious who would become UN administrator. Vieira de Mello was the only UN official who brought fluent Portuguese, extensive experience in Asia, and, after his second stint in Kosovo, the spirited backing of the Clinton administration, which would foot a large portion of the UN bill. He was the UN official best suited to performing tasks as varied as overseeing the drafting of a constitution, planning elections, and facilitating the return of Timorese refugees. There was only one problem: Vieira de Mello already had a job as under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
Annan asked him again to take a leave from UN Headquarters and to become the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in East Timor. Vieira de Mello accepted eagerly. He had been bristling in his desk job in New York since returning from Kosovo in July. He lured those who had worked with him on previous missions to join him for a short stint. “It will only be for six months max,” he told them. “We’ll be back in New York in time for the summer.” In fact, he would stay in East Timor for two and a half years.
He packed up his apartment in New York and on November 8 flew to Geneva in order to see Annie and his sons. Since East Timor was the most inaccessible place imaginable, he knew that he would see his family even less than he had while he had been at Headquarters. Laurent and Adrien were still in university, and he would speak to them by telephone and e-mail them, but while they had liked passing through New York, East Timor was a harder sell.
Instead of resigning his position, which would have allowed a successor to take over, Vieira de Mello went on temporary leave, and his office, filled with his books and mementos, awaited his return. Fabrizio Hochschild was uneasy about his boss having abandoned the newly restructured office. “I tried to make him feel guilty about it,” he recalls. “To be honest, I failed.”41
On his many connecting flights en route to Dili, Vieira de Mello read and reread the all-encompassing Security Council Resolution 1272, which left nothing to the imagination. Even though the text included one vague line on the need for the UN to “consult and cooperate closely with the East Timorese people,” his control as administrator was absolute.42 Before he left, Brahimi ribbed him, “Sergio, instead of you being the dictator and Gusmão your adviser, why don’t you make Gusmão the dictator and you be the adviser?” But both men knew that UN civil servants could not reverse Security Council edicts. He had been appointed what he called a “benevolent despot” in a country he had never before even visited. Neither the Timorese nor other international organizations had been given a say in how the country was to be run—or in this case built. Nothing like this had been tried before. And although East Timor’s end state was clear—independence—Vieira de Mello would have to pave his own path to that goal. He would complain often that he lacked “an instruction manual.”43
Although Vieira de Mello knew the Security Council resolution by heart by the time he landed in Dili, it would take him months to grasp the significance of what was missing from the four-page text: a plan for sharing power with the Timorese and for providing them with day-to-day economic and physical security. These gaps would haunt the mission and very nearly cost him, and the UN, a rare success.