Part III

Vieira de Mello at a UN news conference in Geneva, December 4, 2002.

Seventeen

“ FEAR IS A BAD ADVISER”

Vieira de Mello’s reward for having governed Kosovo and East Timor in close succession was to be appointed to a UN job in the crosshairs of what president George W. Bush was calling the "war on terrorism.” In his new incarnation, in a world increasingly polarized over how to manage twenty-first-century economic and security challenges, he would be asked to take sides, which had never been his strong suit.

“NOW WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?”

Before he was thrown into this thicket, and still unaware of his next job, Vieira de Mello spent several months in Southeast Asia with Carolina Larriera. In the past he had always relaxed well but never long; this was perhaps the first time in his adult life that he felt truly suspended in time and space. Drawing on thirty years of accumulated earned leave, he took Larriera on a trip that started in Bali and wound its way west to West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), then north to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Macau, and Hong Kong. Mostly they traveled incognito, but when they reached Thailand, a surprise official reception, complete with crowns of orchids and a motorcade, awaited them, arranged by his friend General Winai Phattiyakul, the Thai who had commanded UN peacekeepers in East Timor.

The pair spent no more than two nights in any single place, traveling by plane, bus, and rented motorcycle. They shopped for their future home, buying carved doors in Bali, spears and shields in Papua, antique puppets in Thailand, iron Buddhas in Cambodia, and textiles in Laos. Since they were as yet unaware whether they were headed to New York or Geneva, they sent their purchases to Vieira de Mello’s apartment in New York, which he had rented out while in East Timor. They scheduled stops along the way so as to be able to watch their home soccer teams play their matches in the 2002 World Cup. They generally remained out of telephone contact while on the road, but when Brazil eliminated the U.K. in the quarterfinals, he could not resist gloating by phone to Jonathan Prentice, his British special assistant. The highlight of the trip came on June 30, when King Sihanouk welcomed his old ally back to the royal palace in Phnom Penh. The two men spoke of Cambodia’s prospects and the planned war crimes trials of the Khmer Rouge (which would include Ieng Sary), and Vieira de Mello invited Sihanouk to their wedding. The couple then headed to the Foreign Correspondents Club, which had a wall-to-wall television on which they watched Brazil defeat Germany in the World Cup finals.

The only times Vieira de Mello tensed up on the trip were the rare occasions when he telephoned UN Headquarters to try to determine where he was headed next. “I’m going to call the boss next Monday,” he would tell Larriera on a Wednesday. Then on the Friday, he would wake up and say, “Remember, I’m calling the SG on Monday.” And when Monday rolled around, he would spend the day mentally preparing for his conversation with Annan. “I never saw Sergio nervous,” recalls Larriera, “except for when he was speaking with the SG, or thinking about speaking with him.” She would tease him,“Are you biting your fingernails?” “No,” he would reply.“I’m biting my cuticles.There’s a big difference!” Even though he had known Annan for two decades, he respected the office of the secretary-general so much that he spoke to Annan as formally as he might have to a stranger in the position, never calling him “Kofi” but only “SG.”

The couple returned to New York in late July. Larriera reclaimed the UN public information job she had held before East Timor and studied for the GRE so that she could apply to graduate programs in public policy. Vieira de Mello awaited word of his fortune, joking to friends that he was “unemployed” and intended to live off of Larriera. Annan finally decided to offer him the Geneva-based job of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Since he was not ready to go back to the field to run another mission so soon, and since there were few alternatives, he felt he had no choice but to accept. On July 22, 2002, the secretary-general announced his appointment. Vieira de Mello had won out over a long list of candidates that included Corazon Aquino, the former president of the Philippines; Surin Pitsuwan, the former Thai foreign minister; and Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish dissident.¹

Vieira de Mello’s predecessor in the job was former Irish president Mary Robinson. Robinson had been outspoken in her criticisms of the Bush administration’s human rights abuses in the wake of 9/11. She had slammed President Bush’s decision to withhold prisoner-of-war status and Geneva Convention protections from al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees housed in Guantánamo and elsewhere.² And she had called on the United States to increase the percentage of its GNP devoted to foreign aid, which had fallen from 0.21 percent in 1990 to 0.10 percent in 1999. Although the United States was the UN’s biggest single donor, she had alienated U.S. officials by observing that while each Dane was coughing up $331 per year on aid, each American was giving only $33.³Unsurprisingly, the United States refused to support her bid for a second four-year term as high commissioner. Still, she was unrepentant. “Holding back criticism, for whatever political reasons,” she said, “takes away the legitimacy of the agenda and the cause.”⁴

Although Vieira de Mello had dealt with human suffering and humanitarian law for his entire career, he never saw himself as a “human rights type.” He saw human rights advocates as those who named and shamed governments. He saw his strength as working with governments behind the scenes to secure consensus. He did not feel temperamentally suited for a job that required more bluntness than any other in the UN system. But after Robinson, Annan felt that Vieira de Mello’s very unsuitability for the human rights commissioner’s job made him an ideal candidate to smooth out relations with the United States.

Western diplomats hailed the choice, but human rights groups sounded displeased. Michael Posner, head of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, wondered whether the new commissioner would confront the Russians on Chechnya, or the United States on its post-9/11 detentions. “It requires a very strong backbone,” Posner said. “Mary Robinson had that.”⁵ “My concern,” recalls Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, “was that Sergio had no record of using public pressure.” Roth and others were willing to give him a chance, but they believed his personal ambition would make him reluctant to alienate governments. “Ideally, you’d get somebody who saw becoming high commissioner as the pinnacle of their career, not as a stepping-stone to higher ground, to becoming secretary-general,” says Roth.

Naturally, the more senior Vieira de Mello became, the more people were convinced that he was angling for the top job. That summer Prince Zeid Raad Zeid al-Hussein, Jordan’s ambassador to the UN, told him that the other ambassadors had begun speaking of him as a serious contender to succeed Annan in 2006. Vieira de Mello waved him off, referring to the tradition by which the position of secretary-general rotated among regional blocs.“Latin America has had its turn,” he said. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a Peruvian, had given way to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, who had been replaced by Annan of Ghana. In 2006 it would be Asia’s turn in the queue. “But, Sergio,” Zeid said playfully, “after all you did for East Timor, don’t tell me they haven’t made you a citizen.You can be Asia’s candidate.”²⁴

The raw ambition of his youth seemed to have receded. Partly this was because after spending thirty-three years in the system, he knew too much about its flaws—flaws that would only loom larger if he were to hold the top job. Less than a week before he was to fly to Geneva to take up his new post, he met Larriera in the UN lobby, and the couple walked several blocks up First Avenue together. Suddenly a motorcade belonging to Annan came tearing out of the gates of UN Headquarters. “Do you want to become secretary-general?” she asked. He shrugged. “Carolina, if I were to become secretary-general, there’d be no more Sergio, and no more Sergio and Carolina.” He took her hand as they crossed East Forty-eighth Street. “There’d be only that,” he said, nodding in the direction of the UN gates as they closed behind the last vehicle in the convoy. As they walked uptown, he explained his ambivalence. “When the SG took office, he had a vision, an ambitious reform agenda,” he said. “And what became of it? The job of SG took over. The job will always take over. Now there is no more Kofi. No more vision. He is just the SG. And that’s what would happen to me.” Whatever the drawbacks of becoming secretary-general, though, he had never met a challenge he didn’t embrace, and if powerful governments had put his name forward, it seems inconceivable that he would have taken himself out of the running.

He did not see becoming UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as a great career move. Although it was the most senior post he had ever held, it carried little prestige, relative to other jobs he had been eligible for, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had one of the smallest overall budgets of any UN agency ($66 million). It carried out few operations in the field, where he was in his element. Its commissioner would inevitably be attacked, either by governments (if he was critical of them) or by human rights groups (if he was not). And in its decade of existence, the OHCHR had managed to exert scant real-world influence. Powerful governments held it in low regard.

His colleagues in the UN had told him that the ideal high commissioner would combine the skills of a politician, a bureaucrat, and a human rights expert. He was none of these things. He had no independent political base, no patience for bureaucracy, and little human rights background. After the press conference at which Annan announced his appointment,Vieira de Mello rode the elevator up to the twenty-second floor, where he was sharing a borrowed office with Prentice, closed the door behind him, and said, “Now what the hell do I do?” The first thing he did was walk with his aide to the Barnes & Noble near New York University and begin piling up books on the theory and practice of human rights. “Did he ever think he would be the high commissioner for human rights?” says Prentice. “No, not in a month of Sundays.”

TIME TO GET SERIOUS

Worn out from the long slog in East Timor, Vieira de Mello and Larriera spent the remainder of the summer in Larriera’s studio flat in New York. She worked on the weekends as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he picked her up after work. Because UN Headquarters was largely deserted in August, he felt little pressure to make appearances on the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

Whatever headaches lay ahead, Vieira de Mello was relieved to be back in Western civilization after nearly three years in the most remote reaches of Southeast Asia. He was also determined not to let his new job get in the way of his personal life, which had become a priority. He told his friends that, although his divorce proceedings were taking time, he would soon put an end to what he called “l’hypocrisie du passé,” the hypocrisy of the past—of his past. Annan had been through a messy divorce two decades before and cautioned, “Be patient and do it right. Once you are living apart, there is no need to force it. For the sake of the children, do it on a civilized basis.” Vieira de Mello told Annan that he was glad to be moving back to Geneva so he could finally be near his sons. “It was sort of a guilty feeling,” Annan recalls.

Vieira de Mello was boyishly proud of his relationship with Larriera. While in New York, he introduced her to his friend Omar Bakhet. When she got up to go to the restroom, he watched her walk away and said,“I’m totally in love.” Bakhet reacted with initial skepticism, as did other friends. “Do you have any idea how many times you’ve told me this?” he asked. But Vieira de Mello was insistent. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “I’ve had enough of breaking people’s hearts. It’s time to get serious about these matters.” His friend Fabienne Morisset remembers,“Sergio had tired of the contradictions in himself. In his professional life he was working around the clock to try to reduce suffering in the world. Yet in his personal life he knew he had caused pain. He was determined to reconcile both halves of his being.”

On September 11, 2002, Vieira de Mello cleared passport control at JFK International Airport. He was on his way to Geneva, where he would finally start his new job. He stopped at an Internet kiosk to mark the dawn of the next stage of his life with Larriera—a life, he wrote to her, “with so many and such dangerous unknowns, where I await for you to accompany me.” He thanked her for her support at a time when “I myself know that I haven’t been easy to manage,” and he promised her reciprocal support in the days ahead.⁶

Larriera was planning to move to Geneva in the spring, when she would take up a job with Martin Griffiths, who had left the UN to run a conflict resolution center in Geneva. She also gained admission to a distance-learning master’s degree program tailored for UN officials at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, which she was to begin the following August. Vieira de Mello found it hard to be separated from her. On September 13 he e-mailed her his home, cell, and work phone numbers and instructed her to keep them with her at all times, and even to “hide them in Central Park, in case you get an irrepressible urge to call me while you are running.”⁷ The same day he wrote to Marcia Luar Ibrahim, the wife of his former bodyguard in East Timor, that he was lonely because “Não sei mais viver sem a Carolina. ”⁸ He no longer knew how to live without Carolina.

He rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the old town in Geneva, promising Larriera that once she moved to Europe they would splurge on a house somewhere around Lake Geneva. The first time she stuck her head out the window of their temporary quarters, she spotted a plaque on the building diagonal from theirs. It was the former home of Jorge Luis Borges, her favorite writer, who was also from Buenos Aires. On a run one day they then stumbled upon a small walled park tucked into downtown Geneva. It proved to be a cemetery for the town’s most prized citizens.The couple entered and found Borges’s understated grave, which was so elegant that they returned to take photos of it.

The couple settled into a range of habits to keep them connected despite the four thousand miles that separated them during the week. They shopped online together at Ikea—he from Geneva, she from New York. They declined invitations to go out in the evenings. He told colleagues, “I am not a dinner person,” and asked them to accommodate him at lunchtime. Larriera gave him wake-up calls at 1 a.m. New York time, and he did the same, calling her at 1 p.m. Geneva time. They tried to see each other every weekend, with him flying to New York and she to Geneva twice a month. When her mother was diagnosed with kidney cancer, he flew twenty-one hours to Buenos Aires so he could spend the day of the surgery by Larriera’s side.The couple generally spoke Spanish together, as his was flawless and she was still mastering Portuguese. But whenever he talked about his feelings for her or about their future, he drifted unselfconsciously into Portuguese. As he had gotten older, he had grown more proudly Brazilian. He ostentatiously checked the manufacturers’ labels in shops to see if items were “made in Brazil”; he affixed a bumper sticker of the Brazilian flag to his car in Geneva; and he donned gold and green T-shirts with Brazilian football logos. When he recycled UN paper, he explained it by saying, “These are the trees from my Amazon we are printing on.” His relationship with Larriera caused these habits to grow more pronounced, as he told others she had reawakened his roots.

When the couple reached the one-year anniversary of the launch of “history,” he marked it with another e-mail to thank her “for standing me for a year” and to express hope that “for the rest of my life it will be like this.”⁹ Ever since “history” had begun the previous October, he had referred to her in public as “my wife Carolina,” and over the summer they had begun wearing gold rings made at Tiffany’s. His had the name “Carolina” engraved on the inside, and her matching ring bore the name “Sergio.”

But his romantic happiness came at a price. Annie was resisting his efforts to divorce her, failing to show up for court appointments. He was most stung by the criticism he was getting from his sons, who were protective of their mother and refused to meet Larriera. He could not convince them of his sincerity. “I should have done this ten years ago,” he told his friend Annick Stevenson. “Maybe it would have been easier on them if they were younger. But I can’t delay any longer. I have got to deal with my life.” When his sons refused to take his calls, he e-mailed them, proposing a “direct dialogue.” He wrote that he did not seek to undermine their loyalty toward their mother but wanted “a chance to explain to you many things so you could maybe understand my mistakes.”¹⁰

In this time of profound personal change,Vieira de Mello became more spiritual. He had long been vehement about his atheism. Once, when he and Larriera attended a mass in East Timor performed by Bishop Felipe Ximenes Belo, everyone else made the sign of the cross, but despite his prominence he kept his hands by his sides, stubbornly staring down at the floor. Afterward she ribbed him about his defiance, but he shook his head. “You know I don’t believe in all the bullshit of the Catholic Church,” he said. “I can’t betray my principles.” In his twenties and thirties he had told religious colleagues, “We have to realize God in man.” He had shown no signs of moving toward organized religion, but had long observed the superstitions of his native Brazil. “If God is Brazilian,” he often said, knocking on wood twice, “I’ll be safe.”¹¹

But Buddhism, which he saw more as a philosophy than a religion, had always intrigued him. Ever since 1989 he had carried with him a silver Buddha given to him by Bakhet. When he felt he needed luck during the Cambodian refugee repatriation launch in 1992, he had lit incense in front of the Buddha statue near the Thai border. Bakhet traveled annually to India on a six-week meditation retreat, and while in the early years of their friendship Vieira de Mello had mocked his friend’s interest in “mystical nonsense,” his attitude had begun to change.“One of these days I need to sit down with you, Omar,” he said. In 1998 Bakhet had given him a large glossy picture book on Buddhism and assumed that he simply filed it away, unread. But when Bakhet visited him in East Timor, he spotted the book lying prominently on the coffee table. When Vieira de Mello disappeared into the shower, Bakhet opened the book and discovered his friend’s meticulous scribbles all over the margins.

“When I retire,” Vieira de Mello announced one day to his friend Morisset, “I want to be a Buddhist.” In the meantime, although he did not have the time to seek formal instruction, he learned what he could. In November, shortly after he moved back to Geneva, he and Larriera visited the British Museum in London, and he e-mailed their guide afterward that he had “developed, jointly with my wife Carolina, a curiosity and eager taste for Buddhist philosophy, art and culture,” which he noted was “rather unusual for two Latin Americans.” He asked for further clarity on Luohan, whom he understood to be a guide to truth. He asked specifically about Luohan’s “effort to transcend mundane repetitiveness (did I get it right?) and attain unity with the world.”¹² The guide responded that Luohan had managed to reach a personal nirvana without leaving the earthly world and had therefore reached a level of spirituality somewhere between ordinary man and Buddha. “Sergio’s level of consciousness was rising,” Morisset recalls, “and this meant he was more in touch with the world’s cruelty.”

“WHAT WOULD VICTIMS EXPECT?”

As he settled into his new life in Geneva,Vieira de Mello tried to get a quick handle on the high commissioner’s job. The office seemed mired in an impossible paradox. Without the direct support of governments, he would not get the funds or political cooperation he needed; but if he was seen to be too close to powerful governments, he would lack credibility. He answered his early critics. On September 20, 2002, he declared, “My job will require speaking out.... But it also requires tact and political acumen, as well as the ability to roll up one’s sleeves and get down to work to protect human rights away from the spotlights and the microphones.”¹³ He joked that his preparation for a job that entailed tiptoeing in political minefields came when he ran the Mine Action Center in Cambodia.¹⁴ He admitted to friends that publicly criticizing governments would require the biggest adjustment of his career. “Sergio was aware that his days of being loved by everyone were coming to an end,” recalls Prentice.

He began to conceive of his role as that of emergency “first responder.” He could swoop into a place where abuses were being carried out and attract a burst of media coverage. At a brainstorming session in New York, Harold Koh, who had been assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Clinton administration and had subsequently become dean of Yale Law School, urged him to try to pass the “taxi driver test.” “When the driver of the average taxi cab that you hail—whether in Delhi, Rio, Nairobi, Cairo, Paris, Beijing, or New York—asks, ’Aren’t you Sergio, the high commissioner?’ (placing you on a first-name basis with Saddam, Madonna, and Pelé), you will finally be well on your way to having the independent political base that you will need.”¹⁵ The better known Vieira de Mello became, the less dependent he would be upon particular governments.

He would never have found it easy to be office-bound again, but the high commissioner’s perch was worse than most offices. As he became acquainted with his new employees, he thought many of them were measuring their impact not by the lives they bettered but by the number of human rights conferences they planned or the number of human rights treaties they invoked. “The place is just infested with fucking lawyers,” he told his close associates. He noted that the way to reach those desperate for the UN’s help was “certainly not workshops.”¹⁶ “If our rules, our debates, this commission and my office’s very existence, cannot protect the weak,” he declared, “then what value do they have?”¹⁷ His deputy Bertrand Ramcharan suggested the office acquire more space in order to manage the influx of new hires that the new commissioner hoped to make. Vieira de Mello was incredulous: “No, we’ll have every office doubled up. The little money we have should be spent on human rights.” In a note to Prentice in the margins of his draft human rights strategic plan, he scrawled, “What would victims expect from us, from me?”¹⁸

Most of the human rights staffers he encountered in Geneva were UN lifers who had rarely ventured into the field.¹⁹ He vowed to make the office more operational. “The majority of people who work at human rights have been here forever. Forever! Ask them whether they have seen one violation of human rights in their professional careers. Most of them will tell you they haven’t,” he told Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker. "This is a crazy system that kills motivation and that kills the flame.”²⁰ He e-mailed a colleague that bureaucratic life in the UN “demotivated young and capable staff, rewarded dinosaurs who have made their entire careers behind their HQs desks, punished those who believed in mobility, rotation and dared volunteer for field missions and undermined the goals of the UN as a result.”²¹ He planned to begin systematic rotation of staff from Geneva to the field so that the violations they were trying to curb became more real to them.

As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, he struggled to distance himself from the UN Commission on Human Rights, which he saw as an embarrassment to the UN and to human rights. The UN Commission on Human Rights, which met for six weeks every March and April in Geneva, was made up of fifty-three states that were elected after being nominated by countries in their regions. Often those elected were themselves flagrant human rights abusers. The year before he arrived, the United States, which had occupied a seat on the commission continuously since 1947, had been denied a seat in a secret vote.²² The snub was seen as payback for the U.S. failure to pay some $580 million in back dues to the UN, its rejection of the Kyoto environmental pact, its frontal assault on the International Criminal Court, and its decision to expedite the building of a nuclear missile shield. Each year the commission directed several resolutions at Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but it had never in its history passed resolutions against China, Syria, or Saudi Arabia. In 2002 the UN Commission on Human Rights had failed to censure Iran, Zimbabwe, and Russia. And in 2003 Gadaffi’s Libya was elected to serve as the chair of the upcoming commission.

Vieira de Mello was irked by the natural association people made between him and the commission, the most widely criticized part of the UN. People seemed to expect him as commissioner to be able to influence the body’s composition and habits, which he was powerless to do. He tried to be patient with the journalists who constantly grilled him about the human rights abusers who populated the commission. “The UN High Commissioner’s office is what I control,” he said. “The UN High Commission is an intergovernmental organ comprised of states.” He understood why people might be unhappy with the chair of the upcoming commission, but he told critics to “address that question” to the governments that had elected Libya.²³

Sitting through his first six-week session of the UN Commission on Human Rights proved excruciating. The members defeated a resolution criticizing Zimbabwe and eliminated the position of human rights rapporteur for Sudan.The Palestinian representative charged Israel with “Zionist Nazism.”²⁴ Seeking to preserve his office’s integrity and speak his mind, Vieria de Mello ridiculed the ritual “insulting language” that made the commission seem “stuck in an earlier time.”²⁵ “I would suggest to you,” he said, “that when a denunciation has become traditional it should perhaps be abandoned or revised.” The commission’s problem was not that it was “too political,” which was to be expected of a body made up of governments. “For some people in this room to accuse others of being political,” he said, “is a bit like fish criticizing one another for being wet.”²⁶ The trouble was not politics. The trouble was simply that many countries on the commission had little regard for human rights.

The part of the job that he liked most was philosophical: He was returning to his roots. His speeches before international organizations, human rights groups, and gatherings of dignitaries were sprinkled with references to Arendt, Kant, and Hegel. “What are the fundamental human rights?” he asked. “Are they not the basis for philosophy?”²⁷ In East Timor he had been responsible for making sure that school textbooks were printed and water pipes were repaired. As high commissioner, he parsed definitions of democracy. He frequently noted democracy’s shortcomings: “Democratic rule does not automatically correlate with respect for human rights, nor does its presence necessarily lead to economic and social development.”²⁸ He delighted in promoting his concept of “holistic democracy,” which encompassed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” He faulted those who equated democracy with the casting of ballots, and argued, “Democracy is as much about what happens between elections as it is about what happens during them.”²⁹ He liked to paraphrase Nelson Mandela, saying that people should never be “forced to choose between ballots and bread.”³⁰ Holistic democracy would provide physical and economic security as well as voting rights.

He argued that human rights were the foundation for interstate stability. He wanted human rights to matter to geopolitics (as he always wanted to be where “the action was”), but he also did not understand why disarmament was a key item on the Security Council checklist while human rights were not. “A regime that can grossly violate the rights of its own people is ipso facto a threat to its neighbors and to regional and international peace and security,” he insisted.³¹ He had viewed some human rights advocates he had clashed with in his career as shrill and absolutist. When they urged him to delay refugee returns to Cambodia, or to avoid negotiating with the Khmer Rouge, Serb nationalists, or the Taliban, he thought they were being unrealistic and often unhelpful. But now he appreciated that even if international humanitarian law, refugee law, and human rights law were politically inconvenient, they were also essential mechanisms for regulating state behavior.³² He told skeptics that “human rights” was another phrase for rule of law, which they found less controversial. “He was impressed and surprised,” recalls Prentice. “It was an education for him that his core values—all of his basic instincts and beliefs—were out there in this body of human rights law.” “I’ve been dealing all my life with the effect of human rights violations,” he told Edward Mortimer, a senior adviser to Annan in New York. “At last I have a job which deals with the source of the problem.” He was fond of quoting the former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations Abdul Rahman Pazhwak, who in 1966 had presided over the General Assembly and said: “If the United Nations could be said to have any ideology, it must be that of human rights.”³³

He had always supported the UN war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but he now had a pulpit from which to lobby on behalf of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He met the objections of those, like senior Bush administration officials, who believed the court would never get off the ground by citing recent historical advances: “Many people said the ad hoc tribunal on the former Yugoslavia and the ad hoc tribunal on Rwanda were jokes. Well, they were not jokes. An international criminal court . . . will come into being ... and you will see that that will not be a joke . . . The ICC will exist and will operate whether one or the other country joins it or not.”³⁴

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

The one country on everybody’s mind was the United States. On the ICC and countless other issues, the world’s most powerful country had a view different from his own.The high commissioner and his staff occupied the Palais Wilson, a peach-colored manor on a slope overlooking Lake Geneva. The first headquarters of the League of Nations, the building had been named after former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Vieira de Mello was unshy about referring to his own “Wilsonian” leanings and reminded visitors of America’s founding role in crafting international institutions as a way of convincing them that President Bush’s unilateralism was not likely permanent. The Bush administration’s disdain for international law was perhaps best reflected in the statements of John Bolton, then under secretary of state for arms control and international security. “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States,” he said.³⁵ It was Bolton who delighted in being the one to inform Secretary-General Annan that the United States would be “un-signing” the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, which Bolton branded “a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism that is not just naïve but dangerous.”³⁶ “Taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute, Bolton later boasted, was “the happiest moment in my government service.”³⁷ In 2004 President Bush would name Bolton U.S. ambassador to the UN.

Vieira de Mello knew he would have to figure out a way to work with, through, and around the United States. In his speeches he chipped away at notions of American exceptionalism, arguing that the tendency to violate rights was as universal as the rights themselves. “There does not exist on this earth a paradise for human rights,” he said. “It is too tempting to divide the world into zones of light and zones of shadow, but the truth is that we all sail between the two.”³⁸

He sought to balance respect for a country’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks with efforts to make sure that it respected international rules in the process. He thought human rights organizations that condemned Bush at times sounded as though they were defending terrorism. In his public remarks he stressed that it was important to delve into “root causes” but asked, “Are there not justifications for every crime and every atrocity?” He continued,“The sadist has his reasons just like he who is pushed by madness. There were economic motivations for slavery,” he said. “We have the right to live without this fear of dying, no matter where, at any moment.”³⁹ He urged his staff to remember to denounce terrorist acts with every bit the fervor with which they criticized human rights violations by states. He did not want to alienate the United States before he had a chance to influence it behind the scenes.

Because he had been in Asia on 9/11, he had not personally experienced the jolt that the attacks delivered to the American psyche. More palpable for him was the terrorist attack that occurred one month into his tenure as high commissioner. On October 12, 2002, several bombs exploded in and near a popular nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, where he and Larriera had taken many long weekends. More than two hundred people were killed, many of them Australian youths. After the attack the al-Jazeera network broadcast a statement from Osama bin Laden in which he said he had warned Australia not to send its troops to join in the UN’s “despicable effort to separate East Timor” from Indonesia. “It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosion in Bali,” bin Laden said. He asked why the killing of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Palestine did not outrage Western audiences. “Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning, and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness are your lot?” bin Laden said.“This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb.”⁴⁰

This was the second speech in which bin Laden had used East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia as a rallying cry. The previous year, in November 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had delivered a lengthy diatribe against the United Nations, blaming a UN resolution for partitioning Palestine in 1947, attacking UN peacekeepers for standing by when Muslims were murdered in UN safe areas in Bosnia, and accusing “the criminal Kofi Annan” of dividing Indonesia, “the most populous country in the Islamic world.” Bin Laden had lumped the UN with U.S. and Israeli interests and said, “Under no circumstances should any Muslim or sane person resort to the United Nations.The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime.”⁴¹

The Bali bombing sickened Vieira de Mello. He and Larriera were together in Geneva when they heard the news. They spent the afternoon scouring the Internet for a map of Bali that would help them ascertain which nightclub, among the many they had strolled by, had been struck. They were horrified that a place of such tranquillity could have been so brutalized. Two UN soldiers on mission in East Timor (one of whom was Brazilian) were among those killed. One month after the attack, when the Balinese held a ceremony at the scorched site, the couple performed their own private ritual in Geneva, lighting a candle to honor the dead.

His disgust over al-Qaeda’s strikes at civilian targets made Vieira de Mello argue even more strenuously that Western countries must obey international law. Even before he took up his post, disturbing evidence of American involvement in torture had been mounting. In January 2002 photographs had been leaked of shackled prisoners in Guantánamo, kneeling and wearing heavy gloves, face masks, and earmuffs, stirring international outrage but little outcry in the United States.⁴² In March 2002 U.S. diplomats had been quoted in the Washington Post describing the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” or sending terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, where intelligence agents routinely engaged in torture.⁴³ And in April the press ran “souvenir photos” taken by U.S. soldiers, of their peers posing beside the blindfolded, shackled, and naked body of John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old California native who had joined the Taliban. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed what he said were only rumors of mistreatment. “I guess if you ask me when I got up in the morning and we’ve got people getting killed in the Middle East, and we’ve got a war going on in Afghanistan, if I’m going to change my schedule and go chasing after the rumors on things like that, it’s unlikely.”⁴⁴

The evidence of U.S. abuse mounted throughout Vieira de Mello’s time in Geneva. In September, just after he left his post as head of the CIA counterterrorism center, Cofer Black testified in a joint House and Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing: “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is there was a ‘before 9/11,’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11 the gloves come off.”⁴⁵ And in December Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman published a devastating account of the Bush administration’s “brass-knuckled quest for information” and their harsh dealings with terror suspects.The lengthy cover story quoted one U.S. official responsible for capturing and transferring suspected terrorists as saying,“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”⁴⁶ Priest and Gellman quoted another American involved in rendition candidly explaining the virtues of the practice.“We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them,” the official said. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”⁴⁷ Despite these highly public revelations and the harm they could do to America’s standing in the Islamic world and elsewhere, senior officials in the Bush administration did not seek to distance themselves from these practices and did not even condemn them until May 2004, when American soldiers, CIA agents, and contractors were found to have systematically tortured Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

In light of the Bush administration’s stated hostility to the UN in general and to human rights treaties specifically, Vieira de Mello knew he would hardly be pushing on an open door when he urged Washington to adhere to international rules. He tried to be politic, using speeches to stress the gravity of the threat posed by terrorist networks.“A brutal attack and an exceptional threat may require an extraordinary and unequivocal response,” he said. But, he continued:

these measures must be taken in transparency, they must be in short duration, and they must take place within the framework of the law. Without that, the terrorists will ultimately win and we will ultimately lose as we would have allowed them to destroy the very foundation of our modern human civilization. I am convinced that it is possible to fight this menace at no cost to our human rights. Protecting your citizens and upholding rights are not incompatible: on the contrary, they must go firmly together lest we lose our bearing.⁴⁸

He believed that international human rights law already gave governments the flexibility they needed to meet exceptional threats. They were free to extend the length of detentions in times of emergency, but if they did so, they had to notify the secretary-general, as Great Britain had done in December 2001.⁴⁹

Although he generally preferred raising his concerns about state practices behind closed doors, torture was an exception. “I have been appalled at the resurgence of debate in certain parts of the world as to whether resort to torture may be justified to tackle terrorism,” he said at a regional conference in Islamabad. “It may not.The right to be free from torture was recognized a long time ago by all states.There can be no going back, no matter—I repeat, no matter—how grave the provocation.”⁵⁰

Washington had just invented its own legal rules and begun acting as though international law did not exist at all. He urged that the prisoners in Guantánamo be tried or released, and he argued that the denial of rights was “one of the very goals of the terrorists.”⁵¹“We live in fearful times, and fear is a bad adviser,” he argued in one of his more memorable lines before the UN Commission on Human Rights. “For when security is defined too narrowly—for example, as nothing more than a state’s duty to protect its citizens—then the pursuit of security can lead to the violation of the human rights of those who are outside the circle of the protected.”⁵²

Vieira de Mello’s every public move was scrutinized. In May 2003 Annick Stevenson, who had become a press officer in the office, forwarded him an e-mail from an Arab journalist who complained that he had denounced a Palestinian suicide attack but had not done the same after a recent violent Israeli response. He could not win, and he knew it. He wrote to Stevenson:

Nonsense of course. I didn’t issue a statement on the bombing in Chechnya either . . . so I’m anti-Russian and pro-Chechen terrorists (Muslims by the way). The problem is: either we issue one after every attack or we continue exposing ourselves to this kind of biased interpretation. One thing is sure: as long as Arab (or Jewish) journalists continue to think in this unidimensional way, there will be no peace in the Middle East.⁵³

IRAQ

The threat of war elsewhere in the Middle East cast a shadow over Vieira de Mello’s tenure as human rights commissioner. On September 12, 2002, his first official day on the job, Secretary-General Annan and President George W. Bush had duked it out in the UN General Assembly Chamber before the world’s heads of state. The subject was Iraq. Pointing to the UN-mandated Gulf War that Bush’s father had orchestrated, Annan argued, “There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.”⁵⁴ He staked out a middle ground on the war path, calling for the resumption of weapons inspections but also for Iraq to finally meet its obligations. “If Iraq’s defiance continues,” Annan warned, “the Security Council must face its responsibilities.”⁵⁵Annan wanted peace, but he desperately wanted the Security Council to take a united position. For that to happen, he knew, Saddam Hussein would have to make visible new concessions.

President Bush had brought his trademark swagger to the podium. As Annan looked on from nearby, Bush dangled the prospect of UN irrelevance before the packed house. “We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, and our resolutions would be more than wishes,” Bush said. “Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”⁵⁶ Bush offered his own definition of adherence with UN principles: It meant siding with the United States against Saddam Hussein.⁵⁷

Part of Vieira de Mello was tempted to support the war in Iraq. He had openly supported the Australian-led intervention in East Timor, and he had eventually come to see NATO’s war in Kosovo as justified. He publicly echoed the secretary-general’s recognition that states had a right, even a duty, to intervene to end gross violations of human rights. He often invoked the UN member states’ “responsibility to protect” citizens who were being murdered or allowed to be murdered by their own governments.²⁵ Vieira de Mello was eager to see Saddam Hussein’s genocidal regime replaced. He had not joined those UN colleagues who had decried the decade-long American sanctions regime in Iraq. When he was asked in December 2002 what the UN would do to alleviate the toll of the sanctions, he stressed, “Let’s not forget that it also takes two to tango,” and blamed the Iraqi dictator for failing to get food and medicine to his people.⁵⁸ In an op-ed he questioned how the Security Council could be debating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without considering Saddam Hussein’s mass destruction of civilians. What was missing in geopolitics, Vieira de Mello wrote, was “the recognition that flagrant and systematic violations of human rights are frequently the principal cause of global insecurity.”⁵⁹States had to move away from “dysfunctional definitions of security” and start recognizing the nexus of security and human rights.

But however much the UN human rights commissioner might have welcomed the removal of Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration was justifying its invasion by arguing that Hussein posed an “imminent threat”—an argument Vieira de Mello found unpersuasive. He also knew how challenging it was to reassemble a country once a regime had been toppled. Even in tiny Kosovo and East Timor this task had proven difficult, and Iraq was an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous country of 27 million people.

Above all, Vieira de Mello was concerned about the precedent an American and British war would set. His loyalty to UN procedures made him deeply uncomfortable with the Bush administration’s flouting of the UN Security Council.The divisions over Iraq, he feared, might actually dismantle or render obsolete the UN architecture. He saw similarities between the circumstances in 2003 and those that had existed around the time of NATO’s war in Kosovo four years before. But while in 1999 NATO had gone ahead and attacked Serbia over the opposition of China and Russia, on this occasion the United States and the United Kingdom were plowing ahead despite the resistance of every country on the Council except Spain. In the year leading up to the 1999 NATO air strikes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević had killed some 3,000 Kosovo Albanians and displaced 300,000 others; Saddam Hussein had committed genocide against the Kurds back in 1987-88, but even a tyranny as brutal as his did not seem adequate grounds to undertake something as risky as regime change. Also Vieira de Mello knew that the Clinton administration’s foreign policy team had done all it could to try to get the countries on the Security Council to back the NATO war in Kosovo. Then, once the Russians had made plain they would block an authorizing resolution,Washington had launched the bombing campaign while simultaneously maintaining close contact with Kofi Annan.The Bush team, by contrast, seemed to relish thumbing its nose at the UN. Indeed, one senior Bush administration planner told Strobe Talbott, who had been Clinton’s deputy secretary of state: “That’s the difference between you people and us, Strobe. Your type agonizes, ours seizes opportunities. You see our interests in Iraq and in the UN as in tension with each other; we see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”⁶⁰ With a war in Iraq, many senior U.S. officials saw a chance both to bring down Saddam Hussein and to weaken the UN. Vieira de Mello was understandably concerned that such an action constituted a far greater repudiation of international rules and of the Security Council’s primacy than had Kosovo. In the end, then, though he had become a supporter of humanitarian intervention, he believed that Bush’s top advisers were not motivated by a regard for the Iraqis and that an American-British invasion would endanger both the Iraqi people and the United Nations.

Despite his personal view, he again did not speak out. “Why should I?” he told those closest to him. “Nobody is going to listen to me anyway, and it will only interfere with my ability to help the Iraqis down the road.” But trying to stop the war and trying to be sure the UN developed a coherent strategy to deal with the war were two different things. He believed that the UN was being altogether too reactive on Iraq. He sent a letter to Annan, also signed by Dennis McNamara (with whom Vieira de Mello was back on good terms) and several other colleagues, in which he offered to gather a group of senior UN officials to formulate a UN strategy regarding the invasion. “It was clear we were going to get hit by a tsunami,” recalls one UN official, “and we weren’t ready.” Annan never responded.

While UN staffers agonized over the consequences of the imminent conflict, President Bush seemed to be utterly convinced of the strategic and moral benefits of dislodging Saddam Hussein. His advisers had arranged meetings for him with Iraqi exiles who favored the war and generally downplayed the potential costs. On January 10, 2003, Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and distinguished Iraqi exile, told Bush that the invasion would transform the image of the United States in the Middle East. “People will greet the troops with sweets and flowers,” Makiya said. Hatem Mukhlis, a Sunni doctor also present at the meeting, generally agreed with Makiya but urged Bush to be sure to keep the Iraqi army intact and stressed the importance of making a strong and humane first impression: “If you don’t win their hearts at the start, if they don’t get benefits,” Mukhlis said, “after two months you could see Mogadishu in Baghdad.”⁶¹

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell gave his infamous presentation before the UN Security Council, making many worrying claims that would later prove false about Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs.⁶² The corridors of UN Headquarters in New York were abuzz with debate and anticipation. UN staff who had never met before because they worked on disparate geographic or substantive issues were suddenly embroiled in heated discussions about Iraq. The discussions touched upon the latest testimony from Hans Blix, the head of the UN weapons-inspection team; the question of whether the UN team in Iraq running the Oil for Food Program should pull out; the rules in the UN Charter and their suitability to meet twenty-first-century threats (when weapons of mass destruction could be used without warning); and the worry that the Security Council or the secretary-general would not survive a steamrolling by two of the UN’s founding member states. Secretary-General Annan seemed convinced that if the United States and Great Britain went to war without the approval of the Security Council, the UN would seem irrelevant. But working-level UN officials had never felt more relevant. “The entire world—the weapons inspectors from Iraq, the foreign ministers from the major powers, the top correspondents from the major media—they had all descended upon the United Nations,” recalls Oliver Ulich, a midlevel official. “We were the center of the universe. Besides, the only way to become more ‘relevant’ was to become an accomplice in the war.”

Annan chose not to denounce the Iraq invasion.“Do we really think that this war can be avoided or delayed if I speak out?” he asked his colleagues. His special assistant, Nader Mousavizadeh, remembers, “It was like choosing between the plague and cholera. Do you implicitly sign on to the war, or do you set the UN on a collision course with its most influential member?”

A BIG INTERVIEW?

In March 2003, in a meeting that would alter the course of his life, Vieira de Mello had the opportunity to voice his human rights concerns with President Bush directly. Anthony Banbury, with whom he had worked in Cambodia and Bosnia, had served on the staff of the National Security Council under President Clinton and stayed on after Bush’s election. Before leaving his job, Banbury wanted to ensure that the Bush administration saw the most appealing face of the United Nations: that of Vieira de Mello.

Getting on the calendar of the president was next to impossible, especially on the eve of a major U.S.-led war in Iraq. But Banbury prepared a memo for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in which he made the case for Bush to meet Vieira de Mello. “There are some very good people in the UN,” Banbury noted. “Sergio is the very best of the best.” Banbury also contended that it was in the interest of the White House to be seen engaging with the human rights commissioner.“The United States is taking some hits on human rights lately,” he argued.“The U.S. is the leader in the field of human rights. This will give the president a chance to address the criticisms and get our story out.” As he recalls,“This was a stretch. The president of the United States doesn’t meet with human rights people from the UN. This was the secretary of state’s job or his staff’s job.”⁶³

Yet to his and Vieira de Mello’s surprise, Rice embraced the idea and placed the meeting on the president’s schedule (over the objections of Bush’s schedulers). Vieira de Mello, a true believer in the UN, and President Bush, a lifelong UN skeptic, would meet on the afternoon of March 5, 2003.

Vieira de Mello spent the morning meeting with senior officials at the State Department, discussing the role his office could play in the wake of any U.S. invasion, sharing the insights he had gained on war crimes and policing in the Balkans and East Timor. Having feared that the Bush administration would sideline the UN, he was relieved to hear Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, say that he expected the UN to play a prominent role as soon as Saddam Hussein was overthrown. “The sooner that activities can be turned over to respected international actors, the better,” Armitage said. “Expect to be hearing from us a lot.”⁶⁴ When Vieira de Mello noted that sixteen prisoners in Guantánamo had recently attempted suicide,Armitage conceded that the delicate balance between security and liberty had been skewed. “The ends do not justify the means,” Armitage said. “The pendulum has swung too far.”⁶⁵ In other State Department meetings Vieira de Mello was told of the Future of Iraq Project, the elaborate $5 million, eighteen-month-long process by which Iraqi exiles and American experts drafted blueprint laws and institutions to replace Saddam Hussein’s after his fall. Vieira de Mello would learn later that Defense Department officials Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith would decide the Iraqis’ course. The Future of Iraq Project reports would go unread by the U.S. administrators who followed U.S. troops into Baghdad.

Perhaps because Rice had given Bush a favorable briefing on Vieira de Mello, the president greeted him warmly, shaking his hand vigorously and commenting on how fit he seemed. “You must work out,” Bush said. As soon as the two men sat down and began discussing U.S. treatment of detainees, Bush stressed that in wartime exceptional measures were required. “Guantánamo is not a country club, but it should not be,” Bush said, insisting that fighting terrorism demanded forcefulness.Vieira de Mello nodded.“I know,” he said. “In East Timor I gave UN peacekeepers shoot-to-kill authority to go after the militia.” His aide Prentice,was so taken aback that he commented to a UN colleague, “I can’t fucking believe this: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is showing off about his shoot-to-kill policy!” Prentice understood that his boss’s seemingly spontaneous outburst had in fact been deliberate. “Sergio knew exactly what he was doing,” he remembers. “He knew that Bush probably presumed him to be a tree-hugger and that this was a quick way to show him otherwise.”

Vieira de Mello, who had seemed relaxed even with the Khmer Rouge, sat at the edge of his chair, and his easy smile seemed frozen and forced. But his reflexive charm paid off. He managed not to make the president defensive when he described Guantánamo as a “legal black hole” and warned of possible torture being carried out by Americans in Afghanistan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, had just been arrested in Pakistan, and he urged Bush to ensure that U.S. interrogators played by legal rules. “He is a killer,” Bush said, “but he will be treated humanely.”⁶⁶ A year later the New York Times reported that the high-level detainee had been in fact systematically subjected to water-boarding and other harsh treatment prohibited by international law.⁶⁷

Vieira de Mello had visited Pakistan in late February. There he had met a man who believed his sons were in Guantánamo but was not sure. Vieira de Mello told Bush of the father’s desperation and appealed to him as a parent to alert families to the whereabouts of their relatives. Bush turned to Rice and said,“We need to look into this. It would be terrible not to know where your children are.” Nonetheless, the Bush administration would not in fact disclose the identities of the Guantánamo detainees until March 2006. On the issue of torture, Bush was adamant. “Americans won’t torture anybody,” he said. “I won’t allow it.” Bush justified the war that the United States would soon launch in Iraq on human rights grounds. “I cannot say how strongly I feel about what Saddam Hussein has done to his own people,” Bush said. “Deep in my bosom is a real desire for the freedom of people. The human condition matters to me.”⁶⁸ Bush also said that in going to war to disarm Iraq, he would be defending the United Nations. “UN words must mean something,” he said.⁶⁹

Although Vieira de Mello brought up the thorniest human rights issues of the day, Bush took a visible liking to him. The president was so engaged in the discussion that he doubled the length of the meeting, which had been scheduled to last fifteen minutes. When Bush’s secretary came in to tell him it was time for his scheduled call, he waved her away. "Tell Tony I’ll call him back,” Bush said, referring to the British prime minister. “Sergio was Sergio,” recalls Banbury. "The president was so used to people bowing to him that he appreciated Sergio’s directness.”Another observer recalled,“The courtiers took note that the king was happy.” Banbury remembers that U.S. officials came away from the meeting thinking, “This is a reasonable guy we can do business with. He’s not going to give us everything we want, but he’s a smart guy we can talk to.”

In early 2003 the world was so polarized and the debate over the war in Iraq was growing so vitriolic that any inroads Vieira de Mello made with Washington inevitably cost him elsewhere in the UN. Some of his critics began whispering that President Bush had agreed to the meeting only because Vieira de Mello was having an affair with Rice (he was not). At UN Headquarters in New York others speculated that Vieira de Mello had offered Bush a friendly UN face so as to earn himself a job in Iraq after the war—and the top job of UN secretary-general after Annan. “Guys like Sergio don’t meet with George Bush,” recalls UN spokesman Fred Eckhard.“I could only see it as a big interview.” Vieira de Mello laughed off these comments and got back to work, relaying word to the families he had met with in Pakistan that he had passed on their concerns to the president of the United States.

OFF TO WAR

President Bush had insisted that he would return to the UN Security Council for a resolution to authorize an invasion of Iraq. But as the weeks passed, even seemingly reliable allies like Vicente Fox of Mexico and Ricardo Lagos of Chile rejected the president’s war plans. Bush did not take these rebuffs as grounds to reexamine his thinking, but rather as proof that the UN was not up to the task of combating rogue regimes. “The UN must mean something,” he said. “Remember Rwanda or Kosovo. The UN didn’t do its job. And we hope tomorrow the UN will do its job. If not, all of us need to step back and try to figure out how to make the UN work better as we head into the twenty-first century.”⁷⁰ Vieira de Mello drafted an op-ed in response to these taunts, stressing that the UN’s “major crisis” was the fault of the countries in it, not of the organization itself. “When member states make a mess of their own rules or disrupt their own collective political architecture,” he wrote, “it is wrong to blame the UN or its Secretary-General.”⁷¹

When Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, asked him to join in rallying the heads of UN agencies to jointly oppose the war, Vieira de Mello declined. He had come to see the war as inevitable. “When I sat down with Bush, I saw a very relaxed man,” he told Lubbers. “This was not a man pondering other options.”

Indeed, without an authorizing Security Council resolution, President Bush charged ahead. On March 17, 2003, he issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, demanding that he and his sons leave Iraq. The ultimatum expired on March 19 at 8 p.m. EST, and roughly ninety minutes later U.S. and British forces invaded. “My fellow citizens,” President Bush declared from the Oval Office, “at this hour, American and Coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”⁷²

In mid-April, by which time Baghdad had already fallen,Vieira de Mello telephoned UN Headquarters and pleaded for guidance. “What is the UN position on the war in Iraq?” he asked. He was scheduled to appear on the notoriously confrontational BBC talk show HARDtalk the following day, and he needed the secretary-general and his top advisers to develop a strategy in a hurry. "What message does the UN want to give the public on Iraq?” he asked. “If we don’t figure out where we stand, I’m going to get massacred.” Even though he received no instructions from New York, he felt he had to go ahead with the interview because the UN couldn’t be silent at such a vital time. As he headed into the studio in Geneva, he told Prentice, "Watch this little lamb go to slaughter.”

He was smooth but evasive and thus came across as apologetic on behalf of the American invaders.When the interviewer,Tim Sebastian, asked about collateral damage,Vieira de Mello said it was “difficult to avoid civilian casualties.” When Sebastian asked him about the looting that had broken out in Baghdad, he said, “It is probably unavoidable after you’ve kept the lid on those people for so many years.” When Sebastian asked him about reports that U.S. Marines were firing on unarmed civilians, he explained, “The problem is that there has also been a lot of deceit on the other side using fighters disguised as civilians.” When Sebastian asked him about the Coalition’s poor planning, he said, “I’m not sure it was badly planned. I think the planning was to topple that regime and to neutralize its armed forces. . . . I’m sure sooner or later they’ll get a grip on that.” When Sebastian asked him whether he worried that the rights of detainees in Iraq would be trampled as they had been in Guantánamo, he answered, “I have no reason to presume that they will subject them to the same treatment.” And when Sebastian pushed him to answer whether the Iraqis were paying too high a price for freedom, he urged people to recall the twenty-four years of suffering under the prior regime. Sebastian eventually lost patience. “Is the human rights commissioner too scared to speak out against the United States?” he asked.⁷³

When Vieira de Mello and Prentice left the studio, they did not discuss the interview.“You could tell from his body language afterward that he knew how terrible it was,” Prentice recalls. “I didn’t see the point of telling him after the fact that he sucked.” At UN Headquarters in New York, the transcript of his appearance on HARDtalk was e-mailed from one outraged UN official to another. “With that interview,” one UN official remembers,“anyone who had suspicions about what Sergio was after or whether he was sucking up to the Americans got all the proof they needed.”