NOTES

I conducted more than four hundred interviews with Sergio Vieira de Mello’s colleagues, friends, and family members, many of whom shared their letters and e-mails. To protect confidentiality, I have not listed my own interviews in the endnotes but have cited any material I received from others. I owe a special thanks to UNHCR in Geneva and the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, which generously granted me access to internal files that had not previously been reviewed by scholars or journalists. In the end I was able to peruse more than ten thousand pages of classified cables and internal memos, along with Vieira de Mello’s own handwritten notes from his missions.

INTRODUCTION

1 Dick Cheney, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.

2 Bernard-Henri Lévy quoted in Roger Cohen, “A Balkan Gyre of War, Spinning Onto Film,” New York Times, March 12, 1995 sec. 2, p.1.

3 Paolo Lembo, “Lest We Forget: The UN in Iraq—Sergio Vieira de Mello (1948- 2003),” Azerbaijan International 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).

CHAPTER 1. DISPLACED

1 Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, Top Secret Cable, March 29, 1964, U.S. State Department, .

2 “Brazil: The Military Republic, 1964-85,” in Rex A. Hudson, ed., Brazil: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1998), p. 80.

3 “The Post-Vargas Republic, 1954-64,” ibid., p. 78.

4 Bahia would later be home to such Brazilian cultural icons as singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and the novelist Jorge Amado. It had the most racially diverse population and some of the most fertile soil in Brazil.

5 Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Bolivar, o Brasil e os nossos vizinhos do Prata (Bolivar, Brazil, and Our Neighbors in the Southern Cone) (Rio de Janeiro, 1963).

6 Far fewer died in Brazil than in Argentina, where more than thirty thousand people were “disappeared.”

7 When Tarcilo left parliament, the daily Jornal do Brasil called him “the greatest Brazilian parliamentarian since 1930.” Perfis parlamentares 29, pp. 55-58, Camara dos Deputados, Centro de Documentação e Informação, Coordenação de Publicacões, Brasilia, 1985.

8 Sergio Vieira de Mello (hereinafter SVDM), “Sentido da Palavra Fraternidade” (Sense of the Word Fraternity) in Pensamiento e Memória (Thought and Memory) (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2004), pp. 231-32.

9 SVDM, "Un Chaos salutaire” (A Healthy Chaos), Combat, May 18-19, 1968.

10 Ibid.

11 SVDM to a girlfriend who prefers to remain anonymous, March 2, 1969.

12 SVDM to anonymous, March 12, 1969.

13 SVDM to anonymous, May 19, 1969.

14 SVDM to anonymous, June 23, 1969.

15 “‘Jamie’: A Man of Action,” UNHCR no. 1, March 1974.

16 SVDM to anonymous, July 11, 1970.

17 “‘Jamie’: A Man of Action.”

18 Ibid. Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 157. Bangladesh’s independence was declared in March 1971 and was recognized by Pakistan in December.

19 “Quotes from the Press Conference,” UNHCR no. 1, July 1972. The press conference took place on July 6, 1972, at the Palais des Nations.

20 Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Os Corsários na guerras do Brasil e o dramático batismo de fogo de Garibaldi (The Privateers in the Wars of Brazil and the Dramatic Baptism of Fire of Garibaldi) (Sialul, 1992).

21 Robert Misrahi, interview by Michel Thieren, June 7, 2007.

22 SVDM, “La rôle de la philosophie dans la société contemporaine” (The Role of Philosophy in Contemporary Society) (Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1974).

CHAPTER 2. “I WILL NEVER USE THE WORD ‘UNACCEPTABLE’ AGAIN”

1 Sources differ on the number of fatalities brought about by the Israeli invasion. A Newsweek account estimated that 1,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed, along with 18 Israeli soldiers and some 250 PLO guerrillas. Raymond Carroll et al., “Operation Cease-fire,” Newsweek, April 3, 1978, p. 39.

2 The first round of the Lebanese civil war, which ran from April 1975 to October 1976, left the central government without control of southern Lebanon. When Syrian troops making up an Arab Deterrent Force tried to deploy there, Israel objected. After the Israeli invasion in 1978, Lebanese government officials complained that Israel’s obstructionism had denied Lebanon the means to neutralize Palestinian forces in the south.

3 “A Mission for the U.N.,” Washington Post, March 19, 1978, p. C6.

4 The first UN military missions were observer missions rather than what would become known as peacekeeping deployments. In 1948, after Israel went to war with Palestinian fighters and Arab armies, the Security Council voted to send twenty-one monitors to supervise the truce. In 2007 the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) still kept 152 observers in the Sinai. Similarly, after fighting broke out in 1947 between India and Pakistan over the disputed province of Kashmir, the Security Council established a commission to monitor the India-Pakistan cease-fire, a role that the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) performs to this day. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was established in 1956 in the Suez region of Egypt, when the General Assembly held its first-ever Emergency Special Session after the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, which had been precipitated by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Under UNEF’s supervision, the U.K. and France withdrew from the region within two months and Israeli forces withdrew within five months. The cease-fire held for ten years until 1967, when UNEF was withdrawn at the request of the Egyptian government.

5 Five missions began after that in the Congo in the 1960s. In West New Guinea (1962-63) peacekeepers monitored the cease-fire during the transition of West Irian from Dutch rule to Indonesian rule; in Yemen (1963-64) they supervised Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s disengagement from Yemen’s civil war; in Cyprus (1964-present) they helped prevent further conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; in the Dominican Republic (1965-66) they monitored the situation following the outbreak of civil war; in India/Pakistan (1965-66) they supervised the India/Pakistan cease-fire outside of Kashmir.

6 In 1978 some 1,200 blue helmets were stationed on the Golan Heights, and 2,300 remained deployed in Cyprus.

7 James Mackinlay, The Peacekeepers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 56, 66.

8 H. McCoubrey and N. D. White, The Blue Helmets (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1996), p. 94.

9 David B. Ottaway, "Lebanon Is Alarmed by Increasing Israeli Activity in Its South,” Washington Post, October 26, 1980, p. A25.

10 In 1981 a Washington Post reporter recounted an exchange in which an Israeli liaison officer complained that Nigerian soldiers guarding checkpoints did not speak Arabic, Hebrew, or English. As a result, the Israelis claimed, when PLO guerrillas approached the checkpoints, the Nigerians did not conduct thorough inspections. “All they ask is, ‘You have boom-boom?’ If the answer is no, they let them go,” an Israeli soldier said. The Post reporter followed up by asking the Nigerian soldier on duty if he spoke English. “We’re from a former British colony,” the Nigerian said in a British accent. “Of course we speak English.” William Claiborne, “Israeli Army Warns of Clashes Between UNIFIL, Haddad Militia,” Washington Post, April 2, 1981, p. A16.

11 Woerlee Naq to Erskine/Aimé, Most Immediate Code Cable, February 12, 1982, no. FILTSO 351 NAQ 503.

12 When he visited Beirut in February 1982, Urquhart listened to the British ambassador to Lebanon insist (with what Urquhart later described as “the air of complete authority which only simpletons and autocrats enjoy”) that the only solution to the Lebanon problem was for UNIFIL to “fight its way to the border.” Urquhart noted drily that it was a shame that the British themselves had not seen fit to contribute troops to UNIFIL. Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 336.

13 Mackinlay, Peacekeepers, p. 61.

14 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 293.

15 Ibid.

16 Woerlee to Urquhart, Code Cable, February 17, 1982, no. NAQ 542.

17 Woerlee to Urquhart, Code Cable, February 18, 1982, no. NAQ 561.

18 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, April 10, 1982, no. NYQ 1009 UNTSO 680.

19 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 373.

20 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 8, 1982, no. NAQ 2045.

21 Andersen to Husa, March 10, 1982, “Medical Facilities,” no. NAQ 807.

22 Arafat in fact despised Abu Nidal, who is reported to have staged the assassination to cause maximum damage to the PLO. Argov, who was shot in the head, survived but was left partially blind and paralyzed for the rest of his life. He died in 2003, having spent the final twenty-one years of his life in a Jerusalem hospital.

23 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 6, 1982, no. NAQ 2016 FILTSO 1261.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 “Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon,” June 11, 1982.

27 From June to September some 17,825 were estimated to have been killed in Lebanon as a whole, with 5,515 killed in Beirut and its suburbs. Jay Ross, “War Casualties Put at 48,000 in Lebanon,” Washington Post, September 3, 1982, p. A22.

28 David Ottaway,“Arafat Charges UN Force Failed to Resist Israelis,” Washington Post, June 9, 1982, p. A18.

29 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, June 7, 1982, no. NAQ 1600.

30 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 8, 1982, no. NAQ 2045.

31 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, June 14, 1982, no. NAQ 2141.

32 Timour Goksel, interview by Jean Krasno,Yale-UN Oral History, March 17, 1998.

33 The Lebanese naturally opposed the Israeli invasion, but they supported the continuation of UNIFIL. If the UN remained, it at least signaled the world’s intention to bring about an Israeli withdrawal and a return of Lebanese sovereignty. Indeed, when the UNIFIL mandate came up for renewal before the Security Council, Lebanese mukhtars (village mayors) wrote to the secretary-general to request an extension. McCoubrey and White, Blue Helmets, p. 103.

34 Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, July 29, 1982, no. NAQ 2564.

35 Robert Misrahi, interview by Michel Thieren, June 7, 2007.

36 Ibid.

37 Many Palestinians who lived in Lebanon resided in camps like Sabra and Shatila, dating back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

38 Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, p. 346.

39 Henry Kamm,“Arafat Demands Three Nations Return Peace Force to Beirut,” New York Times, September 17, 1982, p. A6.

40 In response to public outcry over the massacre in Israel and abroad, Prime Minister Menachem Begin established an investigative commission in late September. Headed by Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, the commission issued its findings in February 1983, blaming the massacre on the Christian Phalangist forces that carried it out but faulting Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan for approving the Phalangists’ entry into the camps, for not preventing the massacre, and for not stopping it once it was under way. Prime Minister Begin dismissed Sharon, who the Kahan commission found bore “personal responsibility,” but Eitan remained in his job.

41 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation Announcing the Formation of a New Multinational Force in Lebanon,” September 20, 1982.

42 Troop contributors to UNIFIL saw the decision by the major powers not to send a beefed-up UNIFIL to Beirut as a snub and a further blow to the UN’s reputation in the region. Callaghan wrote to UN Headquarters in New York that Nigeria had decided to withdraw its troops from UNIFIL because it did not want to be seen as assisting the Israeli occupation and also because the creation of the non-UN Multinational Force was “an outright blow to UN peace-keeping concept and can only be construed as humiliating for the UNIFIL contributors.” Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, December 28, 1982, no. NAQ 4123.

43 Brian Urquhart, “A Brief Trip to the Middle East 5-11 January 1983,” confidential UNIFIL files.

44 Ibid. Urquhart was scathing of others as well. He wrote that U.S. forces in Beirut “have never been seen to go out on patrol except once on a heavily publicized patrol through east Beirut, which is much safer than New York City . . . What a posture for the marines, and how humiliating for them it must be. I did not see a single American military sailor, airman, marine or soldier in or around Beirut the whole time I was there. They stay in camp.”

45 A clan spokesman denounced UNIFIL, saying that the UN had come to bring peace but had taken to killing Lebanese. He insisted that all “colored UNIFIL personnel” be relieved of their checkpoint duties. UNIFIL was in such a vulnerable position that Callaghan felt he had no choice but to comply and quickly replaced the Fijians at volatile checkpoints with members of the largely Caucasian Dutch, Irish, and French platoons. Callaghan to Urquhart, Code Cable, March 31, 1983, no. NAQ 915 FILTSO 763.

46 Urquhart to Callaghan, Code Cable, June 3, 1983, no. NYQ 1219.

47 Thomas L. Friedman, “Peacekeepers Become Another Warring Faction,” New York Times, October 23, 1983, sec. 4, p. 1.

48 Thomas L. Friedman, “Marines Release Diagram on Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1983, p. A1.

49 Thomas L. Friedman, “Beirut Death Toll at 161 Americans; French Casualties Rise in Bombings; Reagan Insists Marines Will Remain; Buildings Blasted,” New York Times, October 24, 1983, p. A1; Friedman, “Marines Release Diagram.”

50 Less than two minutes after the attack on the Marine compound, as French soldiers gathered at the windows of their compound to see what had caused the ruckus, a second car bomber smashed into their eight-story building, killing fifty-eight French paratroopers.Ten days later in southern Lebanon a young man in a green Chevrolet truck laden with some eight hundred pounds of explosives crashed through the main gates of the Israeli military intelligence headquarters just south of Tyre. The suicide bomb killed twenty-eight Israeli soldiers and security personnel, as well as thirty-two Arabs, most of whom were being held in detention cells. Terence Smith, “At Least 29 Die as Truck Bomb Rips Israeli Post in Lebanon,” New York Times, November 5, 1983, sec. 1, p. 1; Herbert H. Denton, “Bomb in Tyre Kills 39; Israeli Planes Retaliate, Strike PLO Near Beirut,” Washington Post, November 5, 1993, p. A1.

51 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Reporters on the Death of American and French Military Personnel in Beirut, Lebanon,” October 23, 1983.

52 Ronald Reagan,“Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Regional Editors and Broadcasters on the Situation in Lebanon,” October 24, 1983.

53 Steven Strasser et al., “The Marine Massacre,” Newsweek, October 31, 1983, p. 20.

54 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Events in Lebanon and Grenada,” October 27, 1983.

55 Even before the attack on the Marine barracks, a New York Times-CBS poll found that three-quarters of respondents supported a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Lebanon if they remained unable to stabilize the country, while more Americans (47 percent) disapproved of Reagan’s handling of foreign policy than approved (38 percent). David Shribman, “Foreign Policy Costing Reagan Public Support,” New York Times, September 30, 1983, p. A1.

56 Ronald Reagan, President’s News Conference, April 4, 1984.

57 Donald Rumsfeld, “Take the Fight to the Terrorists,” Washington Post, October 26, 2003, p. B7; “Donald H. Rumsfeld Holds Defense Department News Briefing,” October 23, 2003, online at .

58 “Donald Rumsfeld Delivers Remarks at the National Conference of State Legislatures,” December 12, 2003 online at

CHAPTER 3. BLOOD RUNNING BLUE

1 SVDM, interview by Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

2 Jean-Pierre Hocké succeeded the previous high commissioner, Poul Hartling, a seventy-two-year-old Dane who had served for seven years.

3 UNHCR racked up a deficit of $7 million in 1988 and $40 million by 1989.

4 “Hocké Says Resignation Was His Decision,” Associated Press, October 27, 1989.

5 “Démission de M J-P Hocké: Bon organisateur mais trop autoritaire,” Le Monde, October 28, 1989.

6 Anthony Goodman, “UN Aide Says He Was ‘Stabbed’ Over Refugee Job,” Reuters, November 14, 1990.

7 Paul Lewis, “2 Camps in the Search for U.N. Refugee Chief,” New York Times, November 18, 1990, sec. 1, p. 6.

8 “General Assembly President’s Remarks at Conclusion of General Debate,” press release, October 14, 1988.

9 Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Inhumane Deterrence: The Treatment of VietnameseBoat People in Hong Kong (1989), p. 8.

10 In the immediate wake of the war, those who fled Vietnam had generally been people implicated by their ties to the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. Others had fled Communist “re-education” or military conscription.

11 President Carter had agreed to take in an astonishing 168,000 Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians per year. France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and others followed suit. But these numbers had dropped precipitously.

12 Malaysia had already adopted a policy of “redirection”—giving the Vietnamese boats, life jackets, a compass, and maps and urging them to make their way to Indonesia. Arthur Helton, “The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees: An Experiment in Refugee Protection and Control,” New York Law School Journal of Human Rights 8, part 1 (1990-1991).

13 Pierre Jambor, the UNHCR representative to Thailand, first raised the screening idea back in 1986, but the human rights lawyers at UNHCR were slow to embrace it.

14 See Sten Bronee, “The History of the Comprehensive Plan of Action,” International Journal of Refugee Law 5, no. 4 (1993), pp. 534-43.

15 New York Times, June 14, 1989, p. A26.

16 W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response (London: Zed Books, 1998), p. 208.

17 Helton, "The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees.”

18 W. Courtland Robinson, “The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, 1989-1997: Sharing the Burden and Passing the Buck,” Journal of Refugee Studies 17, no. 3 (2004), p. 323.

19 Robinson, Terms of Refuge, p. 217.

20 Overall, about 28 percent of Vietnamese asylum-seekers were successful in gaining refugee status. Robinson, “Comprehensive Plan of Action,” pp. 323, 328. Hong Kong officials were the most reluctant to grant asylum, finding only 20 percent of Vietnamese applicants to have a well-founded fear of persecution. Alexander Betts, Comprehensive Plans of Action (Geneva: Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, Working Paper No. 120, 2006), p. 37.

21 Betts, Comprehensive Plans of Action, p. 40.

22 More than a million Kurds and other Iraqis had fled to Iran. Another 450,000 headed toward Turkey, which refused to admit them. Stranded in the inhospitable, freezing mountain ranges south of the Turkish border, between 500 and 2,000 Kurds were thought to be dying daily.

23 The United States, the U.K., France, and Turkey were the big players, but in the end, thirteen nations participated directly in the Combined Task Force and the material support came from a total of thirty countries. The Security Council also declared a no-fly zone to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his bombers to strafe civilians huddled in the mountains.

24 SVDM, Civitas Maxima: Origines, fondements et portée philosophique et pratique du concept de supranationalité, thèse pour le Doctorat d’État ès Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Paris, April 1985.

25 This and all subsequent quotes from the speech are from SVDM, “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times,” Geneva International Peace Research Institute, December 4, 1991.

26 SVDM, interview by De Frente Com Gabi, Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT), 2002.

CHAPTER 4. HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING

1 Vieira de Mello knew Yasushi Akashi only by his CV. Akashi had begun his career in the Japanese foreign service and in 1979 had left to join the staff of the UN Secretariat, where he spent thirteen years. Prior to being named Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Cambodia, Akashi had run the UN Department of Public Information and the more obscure UN Department of Disarmament Affairs.

2 Philip Shenon, “Norodom Sihanouk: The Prince of Survivors,” New York Times, October 25, 1991, p. 6.

3 The Paris agreement left the power of the Supreme National Council (SNC) ambiguous. It was established as “the unique legitimate body and source of authority in Cambodia in which, throughout the transitional period, national sovereignty and unity are enshrined.” But in Paris the SNC also agreed to delegate to the UN “all powers necessary to ensure the implementation of this Agreement.” When it came to the UN relationship with the named ministries of defense, foreign affairs, finance, public security, and information, the agreement assigned UNTAC only the task of exercising “such control as is necessary to ensure [their] strict neutrality,” leaving Akashi and the local actors great discretion in deciding the extent of UN interference, supervision, and executive action. See

4 Sihanouk to SVDM, January 23, 1993.

5 Planning was so chaotic that General John Sanderson, the commander of the UN force, was shown a UN Security Council statement that listed him as commander of the UN force that was then deploying to Bosnia.

6 Nate Thayer, “Plunder of the State,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 9, 1992, p. 11.

7 Rodney Tasker and Nate Thayer, “Tactics of Silence,” Far Eastern Economic Review, December 12, 1991, p. 10.

8 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

9 Nate Thayer, “Murderous Instincts,” Far Eastern Economic Review, February 6, 1992, p. 13.

10 UN reports warned that returnees would have likely “lost part of their ‘peasants memory’” and would not be able to fend for themselves. UNHCR Absorption Capacity Survey, January 1990, p. 15, quoted in W. Courtland Robinson, “Something Like Home Again”: The Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1994), p. 13.

11 William Branigin, "U.N. Starts Cambodian Repatriation,” Washington Post, March 31, 1992, p. A1.

12 Ron Moreau, “The Perilous Road Home,” Newsweek, April 13, 1992, p. 37.

13 Jarat Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” Watson Institute for International Studies Occasional Paper no. 15, 1994, p. 57.

14 UNHCR, “Cambodia: Land Identification for Settlement of Returnees, November 4-December 17, 1991,” PTSS Mission Report 91/33, p. 12, quoted in Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 19.

15 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 13.

16 In 1991 there were 30,000 Cambodian amputees within the country and an additional 5,000 to 6,000 residing in Thai border camps.“Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward’s War,” Asia Watch, September 1991.

17 Mats Berdal and Michael Liefer, “Cambodia,” in James Mayall, ed., The New Interventionism1991-1994: United Nations Experience in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 48.

18 Clearing one mine cost between $300 and $1,000, including the cost of training de-miners. John Ryle, “The Invisible Enemy,” New Yorker, November 29, 1993, p. 126.

19 Cambodia’s local politics had also been invisible from the skies. As UNHCR representatives traveled the countryside, they realized that while Hun Sen had boasted of the abundance of land his government would cede to the refugees, autonomous provincial and district officials had their own ideas. Many had begun privatizing the land in their districts in order to make a financial killing before the UN attempted to give it away for free.

20 Nicholas Cumming-Bruce, “UN Struggles to Meet Pledge to Refugees,” Guardian, May 6, 1992, p. 11.

21 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 66.

22 Cumming-Bruce, “UN Struggles.”

23 SVDM to Sadako Ogata, March 21, 1992.

24 William Branigin, “Cambodians Launching Offensive; Khmer Rouge Cited as Endangering U.N. Peace Operation,” Washington Post, March 30, 1992, p. A1.

25 Nate Thayer, “Phnom Penh Launches Offensive as Cease-Fire Efforts Stall,” Associated Press, March 29, 1992. The UN Charter authorizes two forms of military intervention. In the first, which falls under Chapter 6, a host government invites UN blue helmets to perform a consensual set of tasks. In such a mission the troops are supposed to use force only in self-defense. The other type of UN intervention force, which falls under Chapter 7 of the Charter, can be deployed even without the parties’ consent; it permits blue helmets to “make” peace and not simply keep it. Cambodia was a Chapter 6 deployment.

26 Bruce Wallace, “Death Returns to the Killing Fields,” Maclean’s, March 1, 1993, p. 32.

27 Prior to UNTAC, the UN’s most ambitious peacekeeping mission had been the UN Transitional Assistance Group in Namibia. There the UN policing component was seen as a success. But Namibia had begun with a much stronger, more professional indigenous police corps, and English was spoken throughout the country, making it easier for English-speaking police to help local forces carry out police work.

28 SVDM, Statement at Site 2, March 30, 1992.

29 Teresa Poole, “Cambodians Take Road Back to the Future,” Independent, March 28, 1992, p. 14.

30 Yuli Ismartono, “Refugees Head Home to Uncertainty and Strife,” Inter Press Service, March 31, 1992; Branigin, "U.N. Starts Cambodian Repatriation.”

31 Philip Shenon,“Peppered with Mines, Awash in Civil War, It Still Is Home for Cambodians,” New York Times, March 30, 1992, p. A3.

32 SVDM, Statement at the Sisophon reception center, March 30, 1992.

33 Teresa Poole, “Cambodians Begin New Life,” Independent, March 31, 1992, p. 16.

CHAPTER 5. “BLACK BOXING”

1 SVDM, “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times,” Geneva International Peace Research Institute, December 4, 1991.

2 UN Security Council, second progress report of the secretary-general on UNTAC, September 21, 1992, para. 29, p. 7.

3 SVDM to Sadako Ogata, “Visit to Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) Zone—6 to 8 April 1992,” April 12, 1992.

4 SVDM to Ogata and Jamshid Anvar, “Report on Visit to Area Controlled by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK), 6-8 April 1992,” April 10, 1992.

5 Tiziano Terzani, “An Indecent Peace,” Far Eastern Economic Review, June 25, 1992, p. 21.

6 Bruce Wallace, “Death Returns to the Killing Fields,” Maclean’s, March 1, 1993, p. 32.

7 Yasushi Akashi to Tetsuo Miyabara, U.S. General Accounting Office, I-32, August 5, 1993, pp. 1-2, cited in Janet E. Heininger, Peacekeeping in Transition: The United Nations in Cambodia (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994), p. 72.

8 Mats Berdal and Michael Liefer, "Cambodia,” in James Mayall, ed., The New Interventionism1991-1994: United Nations Experience in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia(New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 42; John Sanderson, “UNTAC: Successes and Failures,” in Hugh Smith, ed., International Peacekeeping: Building on the Cambodian Experience (Canberra: Australian Defence Studies Centre, 1994), p. 132.

9 Nayan Chanda, “UN Divisions,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 23, 1992, p. 9.

10 SVDM, Reginald Austin, and Dennis McNamara to Akashi, strictly confidential memo, June 15, 1992.

11 SVDM, strictly confidential draft discussion paper on Contingency Repatriation Strategy, July 28, 1992.

12 Jean-Claude Pomonti, “Selon un expert français les capacités militaires des Khmers rouges sont surestimées” (According to a French Expert, the Military Capabilities of the Khmer Rouge Are Overestimated), Le Monde, August 22, 1992.

13 SVDM to Christophe Peschoux and Jahanshah Assadi, handwritten note on clipping, September 13, 1992.

14 SVDM to Son Sen, September 3, 1992.

15 SVDM to Ogata and Warren Blatter, “Visit to DK Zone, 30 Sept-1 Oct.”

16 Ibid.

17 SVDM, interview by James S. Sutterlin, May 5, 1998, Yale-UN Oral History, p. 26.

18 W. Courtland Robinson, “Something Like Home Again”: The Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1994), p. 34.

19 Ibid., p. 37. Robinson, a critic of UNHCR’s failure to disclose all the facts to the returnees, notes: “Good information is both touchstone and cornerstone of safe and voluntary repatriation.”

20 Philip Shenon, “Call of Land Lures Refugees to Khmer Rouge Zone,” New York Times, January 31, 1993.

21 Vieira de Mello also bucked the will of the Security Council. In July 1992, when the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm, the Security Council passed a resolution requesting that the secretary-general ensure that “international assistance to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Cambodia from now on only benefits the parties which are fulfilling their obligations under the Paris agreement and cooperating fully with UNTAC.” UN Security Council Resolution 766, quoted in Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 33.

22 Ibid., p. 35.

23 Shenon, “Call of Land.”

CHAPTER 6. WHITE CAR SYNDROME

1 Nate Thayer and Susumu Awanohara, “Cambodia Takes a Bath,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 15, 1992, p. 56.

2 E.V.K. Fitzgerald, "The Economic Dimension of the Peace Process in Cambodia,” in Peter Utting, ed., Between Hope and Insecurity:The Social Consequences of the Cambodian Peace Process (Geneva: UNRISD Report, 1994), p. 44.

3 Ibid., p. 55.

4 In 1992 and 1993, 65 percent of all UN food aid in Cambodia went to returnees, though they made up just 4 percent of the population. W. Courtland Robinson, “Something Like Home Again”: The Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1994), p. 59.

5 William Branigin, “Missteps on the Path to Peace; Problems Mount and Budgets Soar,” Washington Post, September 22, 1992, p. A1.

6 The United States, which had made the largest commitment in Tokyo, had only delivered $14 million of its pledged $135 million. Japan, the second-largest donor, had coughed up just $9 million. Report of the Secretary-General on the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 722 (1992), February 13, 1993, para. 31, p. 8.

7 Philip Shenon, “Most Cambodians See Nothing of Aid,” New York Times, February 21, 1993, sec. 1, p. 10.

8 Jarat Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” Watson Institute for International Studies Occasional Paper no. 15, 1994, p. 65.

9 When a UN spokesman was asked whether the entire Bulgarian force could be withdrawn, he acknowledged that they “behave in a manner that makes all of us blush,” but said they could not be repatriated because “it would be a terrible insult” to Bulgaria. William Branigin,“Tarnishing the U.N.’s Image in Cambodia; Bulgarians Chided for Monkey Business,” Washington Post, October 29, 1993, p. A33.

10 A health ministry study found that 77 percent of Cambodians did not know what a condom was. William Branigin, “Key Phases of UN Peace Operation in Cambodia Seen Breaking Down,” Washington Post, October 4, 1992, p. A33.

11 Report on Public Perceptions of UNTAC in the City of Phnom Penh, Information/Education Division Analysis Report, September 18, 1992, p. 102.

12 “French U.N. Army Commander Orders Brothels Removed,”Agence France-Presse, November 1, 1992.

13 Terry McCarthy, “Hot Tempers Rise on the Seamier Side,” Independent, October 19, 1992, p. 12.

14 As on the military side, the quality of UN police varied. Singapore, for instance, sent a designated unit of seventy-five police who had been prescreened for the mission.They had ten years’ police experience and arrived on the heels of a special eight-week training course, where they were taught intercultural communication and lectured in Cambodian history. Janet E. Heininger, Peacekeeping in Transition:The United Nations in Cambodia (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994), p. 80.

15 Nayan Chanda, “Cambodia: I Want to Retake Power,” Far Eastern Economic Review, February 4, 1993, p. 20.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., p. 28.

18 Nate Thayer, “Cambodia: Legal Weapon,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 21, 1993; “Khmer Rouge Release 21, but Take 46 More Peacekeepers Captive,” Agence France-Presse, December 17, 1992.

19 Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” p. 27.

20 SVDM to Marrack Goulding, “Our Recent Conversations,” February 12, 1993.

21 Indochina Digest, March 12, 1993, quoted in Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” p. 42.

22 William Branigin, "Montagnards End Fight Against Hanoi,” Washington Post, October 11, 1992, p. A46.

23 Nate Thayer, "The Forgotten Army,” Far Eastern Economic Review, September 10, 1992, p. 18.

24 Colonel Y-Pen Ayun to SVDM, handwritten “DECLARATION, September 28, 1992.”

25 SVDM to Lionel Rosenblatt, October 10, 1992.

26 SVDM to UNHCR headquarters, “Chronology of Events,” October 1992.

27 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 63.

28 Ron Moreau, “Cambodia: ‘This Is My Home,’” Newsweek, February 22, 1993, p. 38.

29 SVDM, interview by James S. Sutterlin, May 5, 1998, Yale-UN Oral History, p. 15.

30 Robinson, “Something Like Home Again,” p. 46.

31 SVDM, “Refugee Repatriation and Reintegration in Cambodia,” The UNTAC: Debriefingand Lessons, Report and Recommendations of the International Conference, Singapore, August 1994 (London: Kluwer Law International, 1995), p. 151.

32 SVDM to Ogata, “On visit of secretary-general to Cambodia, April 18-20, 1992,” May 6, 1992.

33 Nicholas Cumming-Bruce,“Sixth UNVictim Shot Dead in Cambodia,” Guardian, April 9, 1993, p. 11. The fallout from the incident underscored the fragility of many UN member states’ relationship with UN peacekeeping. In Japan the murder kicked off a debate that had been intensifying throughout the month. The constitution of Japan, the second-largest donor to the United Nations, “renounced war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” In 1992 the Japanese parliament passed an international peacekeeping law that allowed six hundred Japanese soldiers and police to join UNTAC. But these troops served as engineers, road builders, and police, and according to law, they would have to be withdrawn if full-fledged war erupted. Some members of Parliament suggested that day had come.

34 “Angola: UN Secretary-General’s Envoy Margaret Antsee Reportedly to Be Replaced,” BBC News, May 11, 1993.

35 “Angola: UN to Appoint New Special Envoy Soon,” Inter Press Service.

36 “Angola Peace Parley Resumes,” Agence France-Presse, May 14, 1993.

37 “Angola: UN to Appoint New Special Envoy Soon,” Inter Press Service. The person chosen in Vieira de Mello’s stead was former Malian foreign minister Alioune Blondin Beye, who arrived in June. Beye died in a plane crash in 1998 as he shuttled between African capitals in pursuit of a settlement.

38 Chopra, “United Nations Authority in Cambodia,” p. 49.

39 “Akashi Declares Campaign a Success Despite Violence,” Agence France-Presse, May 20, 1992.

40 The official budget was $1.6 billion. But if one adds the pledged rehabilitation and repatriation assistance and off-budget costs, the amount came to $2.5-$2.8 billion. Michael W. Doyle, UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1995), p. 29.

41 SVDM, interview by Sutterlin, p. 25.

42 SVDM to Courtland Robinson, August 9, 1993.

43 SVDM, draft proposal, “Deceit and Estrangement: The Aborted Relationship Between the KR and the Cambodian Peace Process (1989-1993).”

44 SVDM to Ogata, “Clearance to Engage in a Research Project Related to My Cambodia Experience,” September 20, 1993.

45 Christine Dodson to A. Henning, “Mr. Vieira de Mello: Request for Clearance to Engage in a Research Project,” October 29, 1993.

46 Lisa Coulombe to SVDM, June 23, 1992.

47 John Burns, “Sarajevans Jeer as U.N. Leader Urges Restraint,” New York Times, January 1, 1993, p. A1.

48 George Gordon-Lennox and Annick Stevenson, Sergio Vieira de Mello: An Exceptional Man (Geneva: Éditions du Tricorne, 2004), p. 67.

49 In December 1992 the first Bush administration sent 28,000 troops to Somalia to participate in a feeding mission. In May 1993 the Americans departed, handing off peacekeeping tasks to a smaller UN force. The largely non-American successor force was authorized at 28,000 troops, but only 16,000 troops deployed. The larger U.S. mission had deployed only in southern and central Somalia, while the smaller UN force was mandated to secure the whole country. After the June 1993 massacre of twenty-five Pakistani blue helmets, Clinton sent 400 Army Rangers and 130 Delta Forces to Somalia and offered a $25,000 reward for the capture of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed.

50 Bill Clinton, news conference, October 14, 1993.

CHAPTER 7. “SANDWICHES AT THE GATES”

1 In addition to France’s 3,096 troops, the U.K.’s 2,281, and Spain’s 1,219, other troop contributors on June 1, 1993, included Canada (1,043), Belgium (100), Denmark (186), and Norway (35). The United States fielded 290 troops at a field hospital in Croatia. The main contributors to the UNPROFOR force in Croatia were Argentina (895), Belgium (702), Canada (1,222), Czech Republic (503), Denmark (975), Finland (296), France (2,239), Jordan (918), Kenya (935), Nepal (897), Netherlands (925), Poland (973), Russia (842), Slovakia (404), and the U.K. (250).

2 Five nations flew regularly: the United States, 4,597 flights; France, 2,133; the U.K., 1,902; Canada, 1,860; and Germany, 1,279. Tom Squitieri, “History’s Longest Airlift Ends with Food Delivery to Sarajevo,” USA Today, January 10, 1996, p. 4A. While many UN planes had been hit, a Serb surface-to-air missile had only once brought down a lumbering C-130 and its crew. A small piece of the wreckage from that plane, which crashed in September 1992, killing four Italian crew members, lay in High Commissioner Ogata’s office in Geneva. It sat atop a torn piece of one of the blankets that the plane had been carrying. Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade (New York : Norton, 2005), p. 62.

3 George Gordon-Lennox and Annick Stevenson, Sergio Vieira de Mello: An Exceptional Man (Geneva: Éditions du Tricorne, 2004), p. 70.

4 Bill Clinton, Address to the Nation, October 7, 1993.

5 Bill Clinton, Remarks and an Exchange with Reporters Prior to a Meeting with Members of Congress, October 19, 1993.

6 Ruth Marcus and John Lancaster, "U.S. Pulls Rangers Out of Somalia; Officials Send Conciliatory Signals to Aideed,” Washington Post, October 20, 1993, p. A1.

7 John Lancaster, "Mission Incomplete, Rangers Pack Up; Missteps, Heavy Casualties Marked Futile Hunt in Mogadishu,” Washington Post, October 21, 1993, p. A1.

8 William Shawcross, “The UN Murderers Must Never Be Allowed to Achieve Their Aim,” Daily Telegraph, August 22, 2003, p. 18.

9 Steven A. Holmes, “Word of Bosnian’s Killing Cuts Clinton Briefing Short,” New York Times, January 9, 1993, sec. 1, p. 1.

10 Paul Alexander,“Renowned Soprano Headlines Concert of Peace,” Associated Press, December 31, 1993.

11 Boutros-Ghali liked to quote the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass,arguing that the Security Council had asked UN forces to do “six impossible things before breakfast.” He wrote, “By helping to evacuate populations threatened by terror or death by advancing forces, the United Nations could be said to be helping ethnic cleansing. And by trying to negotiate cease-fires, the United Nations could be helping to seal the results of the acquisition of territory by force.” Boutros Boutros-Ghali,Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 86-87.

12 Bernard Henri-Lévy, quoted in Roger Cohen “A Balkan Gyre of War, Spinning Onto Film,” New York Times, March 12, 1995, sec. 2, p. 1.

13 Milan Jelovac,“Hrvatska ne može biti cipar” (Croatia Cannot Be Like Cyprus), Danas, June 21, 1994, pp. 7-9.

14 Ibid.

15 “Oproštajna posjeta Serda di mela kód Dr. Harisa Silajdažić” (A Farewell Visit of SVDM with Dr. Haris Silajdžić), Oslobodjenje, February 3, 1994.

16 “In Bosnia’s Bog,” Economist, April 23, 1994, p. 16.

17 Tony Smith, “New British Commander of UN Troops Pledges New, Tougher Aid Approach,” Associated Press Worldstream, February 2, 1994.

18 Ibid.

19 Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, p. 141.

20 Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia (New York: Warner Books, 1998), p. 35.

21 Ibid., p. 37.

22 Ibid., p. 241.

23 Rose told Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdžić that he had been misquoted and that he had actually said that he did not want to develop a “siege mentality” in Sarajevo. As Rose later noted, Silajdžić “had chosen to sign up to the lie, probably on the grounds that he did not yet know if I would turn out to be helpful to the Bosnians or not.” Ibid., p. 42.

24 SVDM and Viktor Andreev to Akashi, “Security of Civil Affairs Staff in BH,” January 26, 1994, no. D-SRSG-SAR-0061.

25 “Civil War Between Good and Evil, Say Bosnian Officials,” CNN News, February 5, 1994.

26 John Kifner, “Mourners Fear Gunners Even at Burials,” New York Times, February 8, 1994, p. A15.

27 Paul Adams,“Mortar Attack in Sarajevo Kills at Least 60,” All Things Considered, February 5, 1994.

28 SVDM, interview by De Frente Com Gabi, Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT), 2002.

29 Rose, Fighting for Peace, p. 47.

30 “Serb Leader Claims No Responsibility in Shelling,” CNN News, February 5, 1994.

31 “Reciprocal Blame in Mortar Attack on Sarajevo Market,” CNN News, February 6, 1994.

32 Mark Heinrich and Robert Block,“Sarajevo Atrocity Turns Market into Bloodbath,” Independent, February 6, 1994, p. 1.

33 Roger Cohen, “NATO Gives Serbs a 10-Day Deadline to Withdraw Guns,” New York Times, February 10, 1994, p. A1.

34 Irish Times, February 8, 1994, p. A1.

35 In 1997 NATO and Russia would create the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, giving Russia a formal tie with the alliance. The agreement that produced the joint council acknowledged the shared security goals of Russia and NATO and, with the tensions over Bosnia very much in mind, described the new body as “the principal venue of consultation between NATO and Russia in times of crisis or for any other situation affecting peace and stability.”

36 Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, p. 142.

37 Akashi to Annan, “Use of Air Power,” February 15, 1994, no. CCZ 229. Vieira de Mello was tasked with talking “wobbling” countries out of bombing the Serbs. He coauthored a paper for the British government that U.K. officials later said helped persuade Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind to continue to stand up to the Americans and resist the temptation to bomb. “It always amused me,” Rose later wrote, “that some of the most compelling arguments in the ‘UK Eyes Only’ paper had been drafted by a Brazilian diplomat.” Rose, Fighting for Peace, p. 64.

38 Rose, Fighting for Peace, p. 62.

39 A key turning point came on February 17 when, on British urging, Russia presented the Serbs with an option for retreating without losing face: The Serbs would withdraw as NATO had demanded, but four hundred Russian troops stationed in Croatia would take their place around Sarajevo. On February 20, with Karadžić among them, Serb crowds flooded the streets to shake hands with their arriving Slavic Russian “brothers,” who gave the three-fingered Serb salute. Rose later admitted that “our common determination not to allow air strikes placed me in some kind of unholy alliance with the Russians against NATO.” Ibid., p. 88.

40 Ibid., p. 89.

41 Trevor Huggins, “Weather Could Prevent Full Control of Some Weapons,” Agence France-Presse, February 20, 1994.

42 Nightline, ABC News, February 21, 1994.

43 Akashi to Secretary-General, “Situation in Sarajevo,” February 20, 1994, no. CCZ 263.

44 “Tenuous Peace Reigns in Sarajevo after Deadline Passage,” CNN News, February 20, 1994.

45 SVDM to Akashi, “Meetings with President Izetbegović, Ministers Ljubijankic and Muratović,” February 21, 1994.

46 Alija Izetbegović, Summary of Statement for Bosnia and Herzégovina Television, February 21, 1994.

47 Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York : Penguin Books, 1997), p. 318.

48 In the immediate aftermath of the NATO ultimatum, Washington brokered a landmark deal between Bosnian and Croat forces, bringing an end to some of the most vicious fighting and ethnic cleansing of the war. And on February 28, when four Serb Galeb jets bombed a Bosnian factory, violating a UN no-fly zone, two U.S. F-16s acting for NATO shot them down. Peace enforcement, rather than merely peacekeeping, appeared to be the wave of the future.

49 David B. Ottaway, "Sarajevo Exit Route to Open; Muslims, Serbs Sign Access Pact,” Washington Post, March 18, 1994, p. A1.

50 SVDM, interview by De Frente Com Gabi, 2002.

51 All told, on the first day, forty-one people crossed the bridge, nine people traveled by bus into central Bosnia, fifteen Bosnians crossed the airport, and ninety Serbs ventured between their two suburbs. Chuck Sudetic, “Siege of Sarajevo Lifts Briefly as 83 Leave the City,” New York Times, March 24, 1994, p. A5.

52 David B. Ottaway, “Routes out of Sarajevo Are Opened; A Few Risk Dangers to Reunite with Kin,” Washington Post, March 24, 1994, p. A21.

53 Emma Daly, "’I Think the Dark Days Are Almost Over,’” Independent, March 23, 1994, p. 1.

CHAPTER 8. "SERBIO”

1 UN Joint Commission Officers Reporting, on Gorazde Pocket, April 6-7, 1994.

2 Chuck Sudetic, “Serbs Propose Bosnia Cease-Fire as They Pound Enclave,” New York Times, April 7, 1994, p. A3.

3 Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia (New York: Warner Books, 1998), p. 156.

4 Vladislav Guerassev to SVDM, “Reactions to Gorazde Events: View from Belgrade,” Most Immediate Code Cable, April 11, 1994.

5 Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 233.

6 Jonathan Randal, “Bosnian Serbs Seize, Harass UN Troops,” Washington Post, April 15, 1994, p. A1.

7 Michael R. Gordon, “Conflict in the Balkans: The Bluff That Failed; Serbs Around Gorazde Are Undeterred by NATO’s Policy of Limited Air Strikes,” New York Times, April 19, 1994.

8 Douglas Jehl, “Clinton Is Telling Serbs That NATO and UN Are Neutral,” New York Times, April 15, 1994, p. A8.

9 Roger Cohen, “Conflict in the Balkans: United Nations; U.N.’s Bosnia Dilemma: Press Serbs or Pull Out?” New York Times, April 17, 1994, p. A12; Viktor Andreev to SVDM (drafted by Harland), “Weekly BH Political Assessment (#62),” Restricted Cable, April 16, 1994.

10 Christopher Bellamy,“Rose Fears ‘Tragedy’ as Serbs Take Gorazde,” Independent, April 19, 1994, p. 9.

11 Ruth Marcus, “NATO Powers Consider Expanding Bosnia Role,” Washington Post, April 19, 1994, p. A1.

12 Muhamed Sacirbey, Security Council Open Debate, April 21, 1994.

13 UN official (anonymous), handwritten notes on the meeting, May 18, 1994.

14 Guerassev to SVDM, “Aftermath of Gorazde: View from Belgrade,” Most Immediate Code Cable, April 18, 1994.

15 Chuck Sudetic,“Serbian Soldiers Seize Guns Held by UN, Then Return Most,” New York Times, April 20, 1994, p. A13.

16 Laura Silber and Bruce Clark, “City Where the Dead Are Lucky: UN Aid Group Describes the ‘Living Hell’ of Gorazde,” Financial Times, April 23, 1994, p. 2; Peter Jennings (reporter) and David Gelber (producer), No Peace to Keep, ABC News, 1995.

17 Jonathan Randal, “Serb Forces Rain Fire on Gorazde,” Washington Post, April 19, 1994, p. A10.

18 Srecko Latal, "U.N. Says Little Left to Do, ’Catastrophe’ Awaits Gorazde,” Associated Press Worldstream, April 18, 1994.

19 Michael Specter,“Yeltsin Warns Bosnian Serbs to Stop Assault on Gorazde,” New York Times, April 20, 1994, p. A12.

20 Michael Specter, “Moscow Withdraws Its Objections to NATO Strikes Near Gorazde,” New York Times, April 24, 1994, p. A13.

21 Rick Atkinson, “NATO Has Plan for Massive Air Strikes Against Bosnian Serb Forces,” Washington Post, April 25, 1994, p. A14.

22 Shitakha to Akashi, “Meeting in Belgrade with Bosnian Serb Civil and Military Authorities, 22 April 94,” April 23, 1994, no. Z630.

23 Rose, Fighting for Peace, p. 176.

24 Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 234.

25 UN Military Observer, Gorazde to UNMO HQ, Situation Report, April 23, 1994.

26 Ian Traynor, “The Inscrutable Face of a Man Who Said No to NATO,” Guardian, April 25, 1994, p. 9.

27 Rose, Fighting for Peace, p. 179.

28 Roger Cohen, "U.N. and Bosnians at Odds on Serb Pullout,” New York Times, April 28, 1994, p. A10.

29 Jonathan Randal, “Bosnian Serbs Meet Weapons Deadline,” Washington Post, April 27, 1994, p. A25.

30 Milan Jelovac, “Hrvatska ne može biti cipar” (Croatia Cannot Be Like Cyprus),” Danas, June 21, 1994, pp. 7-9.

31 Akashi to Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, April 27, 1994, no. Z646.

32 Roger Cohen, “Man in the Middle Calls on Confucius,” New York Times, April 26, 1994, p. A6.

33 Paul Lewis, “Serbs Complying with NATO Demand on Arms Pullouts; U.N. Mediator Rebuked,” New York Times, April 27, 1994, p. A6. Albright said: “The position of my government on the deployment of U.S. ground troops to Bosnia is well known. We believe that this position is correct and consistent with our national interest. If Mr. Akashi believed that we should become involved on the ground, he should have made that view known to U.S. officials. He should not, however, have publicly insulted my president.”

34 Jonathan Randal, "U.N., in Double Reverse, Again Blocks Serb Tanks; Muslims Call Akashi Partner in Aggression,” Washington Post, May 7, 1994, p. A12.

35 Robert Dole, “Lift Bosnia Arms Embargo,” press release, May 10, 1994.

36 Akashi to Annan,“HCA’s Meetings with PM Silajdžić and Dr. Karadžić on 7 May in Vienna and Pale Respectively, and with President Izetbegović on 8 May in Sarajevo,” Immediate Code Cable, May 8, 1994.

37 Akashi to Karadžić, May 10, 1994.

38 Dr. Jovan Zametica to Akashi, May 10, 1994.

39 John Pomfret, “Serbs Move Guns from Gorazde—Possibly for a New Offensive,” Washington Post, April 28, 1994, p. A20.

40 UN official (anonymous), handwritten notes, May 10, 1994.

41 "U.S. Troops in UN Peacekeeping,” New York Times, April 25, 1994, p. A14.

42 Roger Cohen, "U.N. and Bosnians at Odds on Serb Pullout,” New York Times, April 28, 1994, p. A10.

43 Chris Stephen, “A Sheriff Being Driven Out of Town,” Guardian, April 30, 1994, p. 24.

44 Boutros-Ghali, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to Resolution 908, United Nations Security Council, September 17, 1994.

45 “UN Official Predicts Progress on Sarajevo Demilitarization,” Agence France-Presse, September 8, 1994.

46 Ibid.

47 Akashi to Annan, “Bosnia and Herzegovina—HCA Meetings with Authorities in Pale and Sarajevo,” September 26, 1994, no. Z-1473.

48 Milan Jelovac, "O planu za hrvatsku znam koliko i Globus” (I Know as Much as Globus About a Plan for Croatia), Danas, November 1, 1994, pp. 8, 9, 11.

CHAPTER 9. IN RETROSPECT 1 Sadako Ogata to Kofi Annan, August 23, 1994.

1 Sadako Ogata to Kofi Annan, August 23, 1994.

2 Claire Messina and Oleg Shamshur,“Conference Reports: Regional Conference to Address the Problems of Refugees, Displaced Persons, Other Forms of Involuntary Displacement, and Returnees in the Countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and Relevant Neighboring Countries,” International Migration Review 31, no. 2 (1997), p. 464. Holly Cartner of Human Rights Watch said the draft program of action had “no teeth, no mechanisms for accountability,” and she described the meeting as “a serious abdication of responsibility and the squandering of a valuable opportunity.” See “Human Rights Group Faults U.N. Conference on CIS Refugees,” Deutsche Presse Agentur, May 30, 1996.

3 Paolo Lembo, “Lest We Forget: The UN in Iraq—Sergio Vieira de Mello (1948- 2003)” Azerbaijan International 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).

4 SVDM, “Humanitarian Aspects of Peacekeeping,” in Daniel Warner, ed., New Dimensionsof Peacekeeping (New York: Springer, 1995), p. 142.

5 SVDM, “The Evolution of UN Humanitarian Operations,” in Stuarte Gordon, ed., Aspects of Peacekeeping (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 124.

6 David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone 1996), p. 203.

7 SVDM, interview with Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

8 Adrian Brown, “Serbs Expel 3,000 Civilians from Fallen Srebrenica,”Agence France-Presse, July 12, 1995.

9 Report of the UN Panel on Peace Operations (Brahimi Report), August 21, 2000, p. ix. The report continues: “In some cases, local parties consist not of moral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims, and peacekeepers may not only be operationally justified in using force but morally compelled to do so ... Impartiality is not the same as neutrality or equal treatment of all parties in all cases for all time, which can amount to a policy of appeasement” (part II, E, 50).

10 Tom Squitieri, “History’s Longest Airlift Ends with Food Delivery to Sarajevo,” USA Today, January 10, 1996, p. A4.

11 The Berlin airlift ran from June 26, 1948, through September 30, 1949. Its 277,000 flights delivered 2.3 million tons of cargo, and sixty-five pilots were killed.

12 UNHCR also delivered some 950,000 tons of food via land convoys, which reached some 2.7 million beneficiaries. Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 330.

CHAPTER 10. DAMNED IF YOU DO

1 The Goma area was home to six impromptu “camps” containing 850,000 refugees; the Bukavu area contained twenty-eight camps with 290,000 refugees; and the Uvira area housed twenty-five camps with 250,000 refugees.

2 Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 8-10.

3 Keith B. Richburg, "U.N. Report Urges Foreign Forces to Protect Rwandans,” WashingtonPost, November 18, 1994, p. A1. The refugee leaders urged patience, pointing to their RPF (mainly Tutsi) foes who had been in exile for thirty years but had eventually reclaimed power in Rwanda by force of arms.

4 The Goma camps were about 1 mile from the border; Kibumba was 1.5 miles away; Bukavu was along the border; Mugunga was about 16 miles away; Camp Benaco in Tanzania was around 6 miles away.

5 Vieira de Mello was in fact interested in Mozambique and Sudan, the two countries where he had worked as a young UNHCR field officer.

6 Some 5,800 UN peacekeepers were present in Rwanda, but the Security Council expressly prohibited the blue helmets from helping out in Zaire. UN rules prohibited them from crossing an international border. Kofi Annan, the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, suggested hiring a private security firm called DSL, but Ogata did not think she could persuade the United States, Japan, or other rich countries to pay the fee of $250 million for two years. Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade (New York: Norton, 2005), pp. 203-4.

7 John Pomfret, “Aid Dilemma: Keeping It from the Oppressors; U.N., Charities Find Crises Make Them Tools of War,” Washington Post, September 23, 1997, p. A1.

8 SVDM to Ogata, “My Mission to Eastern Zaire: 29 to 31 July 1996,” August 6, 1996, no. AHC/96/0231.

9 Sadako Ogata,“End of Year Statement to Staff,” December 14, 1994, online at www. .

10 Ray Wilkinson, “The Heart of Darkness,” Refugees 110 (December 1, 1997), p. 9.

11 Back in December 1935, the League of Nations high commissioner for German refugees, James G. McDonald, resigned to protest international inaction to aid the flight of Jewish refugees. McDonald, who had been appointed in 1933, stepped down after Hitler’s Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws. Gil Loescher, Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 42-44.

12 Reuters, “Zairean Security Force Enters Rwandan Refugee Camps,”Agence France-Presse, February 12, 1995; "Zairians Begin a U.N. Mission for Rwandans,” New York Times, February 13, 1995, p. A6.

13 CZSC, the acronym for the Zairean force, comes from the French Contingent Zairois pour la Sécurité des Camps.

14 Reuters, “Zairians Begin a U.N. Mission for Rwandans.”

15 "U.N. Official Praises Refugee Action Plan,” Deutsche Presse Agentur, February 19, 1995.

16 One U.S. government source estimated that in a single camp the Hutu authorities’ appropriation and resale of humanitarian aid generated an additional $6 million a year for arms purchases. Pomfret, “Aid Dilemma.” A month before Vieira de Mello’s arrival, UNHCR had attempted to register the inhabitants of the camps, but the Hutu militants had spread the rumor that the ink used for registration would cause sterility or death. The propaganda worked: at least 700,000 refugees boycotted the registration, which then made it easy for camp leaders to continue to inflate the numbers so as to divert excess rations to their gunmen. See “UN Locates Missing Hutus,” Financial Times, November 22, 1996, p. 4.

17 Joel Boutroue, Missed Opportunities: The Role of the International Community in the Returnof the Rwandan Refugees from Eastern Zaire, July 1994-December 1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, June 1998), p. 70.

18 SVDM to Ogata, “My Mission to Eastern Zaire: 29 to 31 July 1996.”

19 Kurt Mills, “Refugee Return from Zaire to Rwanda: The Role of UNHCR,” in Howard Adelman and Govind C. Rao, eds., War and Peace in Zaire-Congo: Analyzing and Evaluating Intervention, 1996-1997 (Africa World Press, 2004).

20 Boutroue, Missed Opportunities, p. 75.

21 UNHCR, Refugee Camp Security in the Great Lakes Region, April 1997, no. EVAL/01/97, pp. 12-13, 25.

22 Buchizya Mseteka, “Rwanda Says It Seeks Orderly Return of Refugees,” Reuters, August 23, 1996.

23 Xinhua News Agency, "62 Dead in Sweep Against Rwandan Rebels,” July 14, 1996.

24 SVDM to Ogata, “My Mission to Eastern Zaire: 29 to 31 July 1996.”

25 Elif Kaban, “Rwanda Strongman Blasts Zaire,Wants Refugees Home,” Reuters, April 6, 1996.

26 Mahmoud Mamdani, “Why Rwanda Admitted to Its Role in Zaire,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), August 8, 1997.

27 SVDM to Ogata, “My Mission to Eastern Zaire: 29 to 31 July 1996.”

28 Chris McGreal, “Rwanda Warns of Looming War; Kigali’s Forces Cross into Zaire in Retaliation for Border Shelling,” Guardian, October 31, 1996. Kagame defended Rwanda’s raid across the border and said there was “no question” that his army would press on. “If you slap me in the face,” he said, “when I hit back I may not hit in the face. I may hit somewhere else.”

29 “Another Congo Crisis,” Africa Confidential 39, no. 16 (August 7, 1998).

30 Stephen Buckley, “Rwandans Strike Town Inside Zaire; Officer Tells of Raid ‘To Destabilize Them,’ ” Washington Post, October 31, 1996, p. A26.

31 Amnesty International, "Hidden from Scrutiny: Human Rights Abuses in Eastern Zaire,” December 19, 1996.

32 “Une Situation humanitaire désespérées s’installe dans l’est du Zaire” (Eastern Zaire Faces Desperate Humanitarian Situation), Le Monde, October 30, 1996.

33 From 1978 to 1981 Chrétien had served as Canada’s ambassador to the Great Lakes countries, jointly accredited to Zaire, Rwanda, and the Congo Republic.

34 Jimmy Burns and Frances Williams, “Refugees’ Agency Lost in Wilderness of Bungling and Waste,” Financial Times, July 29, 1998, p. 7.

35 SVDM to Benon Sevan, November 12, 1996, no. AHC/GL/006.

36 Tony Smith, “Rwandan Hutu Refugees Dare to Go Home; World Cannot Decide How to Help,” Associated Press, November 9, 1996.

37 Jim Wolf, "Africa-Bound U.S.Troops Will Not Disarm Factions,” Reuters, November 14, 1996.

38 Jessen-Petersen to Ogata, “Situation in Eastern Zaire,” November 14, 1996.

39 Luis Arreaga to A. Mahiga, “Redefining the Role of a Multinational Force,” November 21, 1996.

40 SVDM to Akashi, Ogata, and Chrétien, “Situation in Burundi—Visit to Bujumbura, 6-7 December 1996,” December 9, 1996. Vieira de Mello met with Colonel Firmin Siuzoyiheba, who was expelling Burundians, who were pouring into Tanzania.

41 George Gordon-Lennox and Annick Stevenson, Sergio Vieira de Mello: An Exceptional Man (Geneva: Editions du Tricorne, 2004), p. 85.

42 SVDM to Akashi, Ogata, and Chrétien, “Meeting with General M. Baril—Entebbe, 27 November 1996,” November 27, 1996.

43 In the two years since the genocide, very little repatriation had occurred. Only 6,427 Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda from Tanzania in 1995, and half that number went home in 1996. UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 265.

44 Raymond Bonner, "U.N. Shift on Rwandans a Bow to ‘New Realities,’ ” New York Times, December 21, 1996, sec. 1, p. 7.

45 Annie Thomas, “Abandoned Refugee Camp Is Ghost Town,” Agence France-Presse, December 18, 1996.

46 Sokiri to SVDM, “Return of Refugees from Tanzania,” November 27, 1996.

47 SVDM, “The Humanitarian Situation in the Great Lakes,” speaking notes for statement to standing committee of executive committee, January 30, 1997, EXCOM 1 August 1994-December 1997; cited in UNHCR, State of the World’s Refugees 2000, p. 265.

48 Earlier in the year McNamara had unveiled a new agency doctrine of “imposed return” by which UNHCR would approve sending refugees back against their will “to less than optimal conditions in their home country,” provided that UNHCR could monitor conditions. He said UNHCR was forced to approve such returns because host countries no longer wanted the refugees and donors no longer wanted to pay for them. Ben Barber, “Refugees May Be Sent Home,” Washington Times, April 22, 1996, p. A14.

49 Beginning in the 1960s refugees from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe flocked to Tanzania to benefit from its generous asylum policy. The government offered refugees land for settlement, integration into local communities, and occasionally extended citizenship. In 1983 Tanzania’s president Julius Nyerere received UNHCR’s Nansen Medal for his country’s excellent refugee record. Hania Zlotnik, “International Migration 1965-96: An Overview,” Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (September 1998), pp. 429-68.

50 SVDM to Ogata and Akashi, “Meetings in Dar, 29-30 November 1996,” December 1, 1996, no. AHC/GL//026.

51 Ibid.

52 “Message to all Rwandese Refugees in Tanzania from the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,” International Journal of Refugee Law 9 (1997), pp. 328-29.Vieira de Mello said publicly, “We believe that the conditions in Rwanda have evolved in a positive and encouraging manner, so that the refugees can return in safety and dignity.” Raymond Bonner, "U.N. Shift on Rwandans Bow to ‘New Realities,’ ” New York Times,December 21, 1996.

53 Chris Tomlinson, “400,000 Rwandans Leave Refugee Camps to Hide in Game Park,” Associated Press, December 13, 1996.

54 Karin Davies, “Confronted by Tanzanian Soldiers, Rwandan Refugees Head Back,” Associated Press, December 14, 1996.

55 Ibid.

56 Christian Parayre, “Rwandan Refugees Crossing from Tanzania at 10,000 an Hour,” Agence France-Presse, December 16, 1996.

57 Matti Huuhtanen, “Tanzania Sends More Refugees Home to Rwanda,” Associated Press, December 16, 1996.

58 Karin Davies, “Tanzania Sends Rwandan Refugees Home,”Associated Press, December 16, 1996.

59 Sokiri to Chefike and Mahiga, “Preliminary Report on the Role of the Army and Police in the Repatriation of Rwandese Refugees from Karagwe and Ngara Districts,” December 30, 1996.

60 Karin Davies, “Tanzania Police and Soldiers Herd Reluctant Refugees and Hutu Extremists Toward the Border with Rwanda,” Associated Press Worldstream, December 19, 1996.

61 Christian Parayre, “Rwandan Hutus Press Homewards Despite Fears Over Unfair Trials,” Agence France-Presse, December 28, 1996. With the returns the Rwandan population was thought to have increased by 20 percent.

62 UNHCR, note for the file, January 10, 1997 (author unknown).

63 Ibid.; Arthur C. Helton, "The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action,” International Journal of Refugee Law 13, no. 1/2, p. 273.

64 Bonner, "U.N. Shift on Rwandans”; “Africa: Human Rights Developments,” Human Rights Watch World Report, 1998.

65 SVDM to Jessen-Petersen, “Meetings with Kabila and Senior AFDL Officials, Lubumbashi, 13 May 97,” May 13, 1997.

66 Mobutu had changed the name from Congo to Zaire in 1971, as a way of stamping out Western influence.

67 Judith Matloff, "Taking Zaire Easier Than Ruling the New ’Congo,’” Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 1997, p. 1.

68 UNHCR, State of the World’s Refugees 1997: A Humanitarian Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 23.

69 John Pomfret, “Rwandans Led Revolt in Congo; Defense Minister Says Arms, Troops Supplied for Anti-Mobutu Drive,” Washington Post, July 9, 1997, p. A1.

70 SVDM, speaking notes, EXCOM Standing Committee, January 30, 1997, “The Humanitarian Situation in the Great Lakes Region.”

71 SVDM, “The Evolution of UN Humanitarian Operations,” in Stuarte Gordon, ed., Aspects of Peacekeeping (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 121.

72 SVDM, “The Impact of the External Environment and Responsibilities of External Actors,” ICRC Conference, March 28, 1998.

73 U.S. opposition to Boutros-Ghali stemmed largely from the fact that, in a presidential election year, the Republicans had so criticized him that Clinton, who had never had an easy time with him, came out against him. Secretary of State Warren Christopher notified Boutros-Ghali in May of the U.S. intention to veto his reelection. When Boutros-Ghali asked for the reasons, Christopher refused to tell him, saying he did not want to harm their friendship. Boutros-Ghali reportedly said, “You are a lawyer. Won’t you represent my case to the president?” But Christopher answered, “I am the president’s lawyer.” Global Policy, “Secretary-General Elections 1996,” Chronology, . In mid-September 1996 Boutros-Ghali had arrived at a lunch at the UN after a vacation and declared, "It is great to be back from vacation. Frankly, I get bored on vacation. It’s much more fun to be at work here blocking reform, flying my black helicopters, imposing global taxes, demoralizing my staff.” Barbara Crossette, “With Little Fanfare and Facing Crisis, U.N. Starts a New Year,” NewYork Times, September 18, 1996, p. A9.

74 In 1999 Mark Malloch Brown, a Brit, would become the first non-American appointed to run the UN Development Program.

75 In November 2006 Margaret Chan would be appointed the head of the World Health Organization, the first Chinese to head a UN agency.

76 Thomas G.Weiss,“Civilian-Military Interactions and Ongoing UN Reforms: DHA’s Past and OCHA’s Remaining Challenges,” in Jim Whitman, ed., Peacekeeping and the UN Agencies (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 56.

77 See .

CHAPTER 11. “GIVING WAR A CHANCE”

1 Since 1994 the United States had made only token payments to the UN. When House Republicans blocked repayment, they foiled the effort that Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the UN, was making at the UN to get U.S. dues reduced from 25 to 22 percent of the overall total. “The Congress has sent me into a battle to lower our dues scales without even a slingshot,” Richardson said. John Goshko, "U.S. Refusal to Pay Debt Alarms UN,” Washington Post, November 15, 1997, p. A1.

2 Kofi Annan, press conference at United Nations Headquarters, November 14, 1997, online at .

3 Ibid. The United States called off the planned missile strikes when the government of Iraq offered unconditional cooperation.

4 Kofi Annan, Statement to the Special Meeting of the General Assembly on Reform, July 16, 1997.

5 Prior to joining the UN, Kieran Prendergast had served as British ambassador in Turkey, British high commissioner to Kenya, and British high commissioner to Zimbabwe.

6 SVDM, “OCHA: Visions, Priorities and Needs,” Geneva, Palais des Nations, June 8, 1998.

7 Ibid.

8 UN Department of Public Information, “Episode 708,” UN World Chronicle, April 21, 1998.

9 Geir Moulson, "U.N. Official: Afghan Rivals’‘War Games’ Endanger Aid,” Associated Press Worldstream, February 26, 1998.

10 Thalif Deen, "U.N. Restricts Aid to Saving Lives,” Inter Press Service, July 22, 1998. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

11 “Taliban Places Restrictions on Foreign Muslim Women Working for UN,” Associated Press Worldstream, March 13, 1998.

12 Luisa Ballin, “Nous posons des conditions à p’aide aux talibans” (We Are Setting Conditions for Aid to the Taliban), La Croix, March 2, 1998, p. 7.

13 Ibid.

14 Physicians for Human Rights, “Medical Group Condemns UN Agreement with Taliban,” June 1998.

15 The Clinton administration carried out the attack on Afghanistan the same day as its infamous cruise missile strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

16 Farhan Haq, "U.N. Staff to Return to Afghanistan,” Inter Press Service, March 12, 1999; “No U.S., British Nationals Among UN Staff in Afghanistan,” Agence France-Presse, March 18, 1999.

17 Dennis King, “Paying the Ultimate Price: Analysis of the Death of Humanitarian Aid Workers (1997-2001),” January 2002, .There are no statistics on the number of humanitarian workers worldwide and no common reporting procedures on injuries or deaths.

18 Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Conference Report on Humanitarian Challenges in the New Millennium:Where Are We Headed?, September 29, 1998, p. 14.

19 “UN Official Condemns Attacking of Humanitarian Vehicles in Angola,” Xinhua News Agency, May 22, 1998.

20 Edward Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (July-August 1999).

21 SVDM, “Enough Is Enough,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January-February 2000).

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 SVDM, “War and Politics: The Humanitarian Deceit,” 1998, unpublished.

25 Barbara Crossette,“Reports of Spying Dim Outlook for Inspections,” NewYork Times, January 8, 1999, p. A8.

26 Colum Lynch, "U.S. Used UN to Spy on Iraq, Aides Say,” Boston Globe, January 6, 1999, p. A1.

27 Javier Solana, press statement, March 23, 1999, online at .

28 SVDM, “Promoting Peace and Security: Humanitarian Activities Relevant to the Security Council,” Address to an Open Session of the Security Council, January 21, 1999.

29 Sandy Berger, Special White House Briefing on Kosovo and NATO Air Operations, March 25, 1999. Berger said: “We always prefer to operate pursuant to a UN resolution. But we’ve also always taken the position that NATO has the authority, in situations it considers to be threats to the stability and security of its area, to act by consensus, without explicit UN authority. And that is the case here as well.”

30 The Security Council authorized the Korean War in June 1950, while the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council. Later that summer, when the Soviets returned and began vetoing U.S.-sponsored resolutions on Korea, the United States introduced the Uniting for Peace resolution in the General Assembly (also known as the Acheson Plan, after then-secretary of state Dean Acheson), which held that if the Security Council permanent members could not reach consensus and failed to exercise their “primary responsibility” for maintaining international peace and security, the responsibility would pass to the General Assembly, where two-thirds of the members present would need to authorize action. Since Korea, the Uniting for Peace resolution has been used to call the General Assembly into special session ten times, not always to bypass the Soviet veto. Following the British-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, Security Council resolutions calling for cease-fires were vetoed by France and the U.K.; an emergency session held under the Uniting for Peace resolution passed a U.S. resolution, leading to the withdrawal of France and the U.K. less than a week later. See Michael Ratner and Jules Lobel, “A UN Alternative to War: ‘Uniting for Peace,’” Jurist, February 10, 2003.

31 Kofi Annan, “Statement Regarding NATO Airstrikes of Serbian Military Targets,” March 24, 1999.

32 Judith Miller, “The Secretary-General Offers Implicit Endorsement of Raids,” New York Times, March 25, 1999, p. A13.

33 Kofi Annan, “The Effectiveness of the International Rule of Law in Maintaining International Peace and Security,” May 18, 1999, .

34 Kofi Annan, “A United Nations That Will Not Stand Up for Human Rights Is a United Nations That Cannot Stand Up for Itself,” Address to the Commission on Human Rights, April 7, 1999.

35 Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001), p. 140.

36 UNHCR, “Comments to British House of Commons Report on the Kosovo Humanitarian Crisis,” undated.

37 Peter Capella, “UN Agency Failed to Meet Refugee Crisis, Says Report,” Guardian, February 12, 2000, p. 17. See also David Rieff, “The Agency That Has Had a Bad War,” Guardian, June 10, 1999, p. 19.

38 Farhan Haq, "U.N. Pushes for Access to Refugees,” Inter Press Service, April 5, 1999.

39 Edith M. Lederer, “Divided Council Manages to Express Concern Over Kosovo Refugees,” Associated Press Worldstream, April 5, 1999.

40 Blaine Harden, "A Long Struggle That Led Serb Leader to Back Down,” New York Times, June 6, 1999, p. 1.

41 “Secretary General Shocked and Distressed by Bombing of Civilian Buildings in Yugoslavia, Including Chinese Embassy,” press release, May 10, 1999.

42 Nicole Winfield, "Annan Asks Yugoslavia to Accept UN Humanitarian Team,”Associated Press Worldstream, May 4, 1999.

43 “NATO Raids Go On as Hopes Rise for Negotiated End to Kosovo Conflict,” Agence France-Presse, May 7, 1999.

44 SVDM, Press Briefing, May 7, 1999.

45 Ibid.

46 CNN World Report Forum, Morning Q&A Session, May 7, 1999.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Kofi Annan, Press Conference, May 14, 1999.

CHAPTER 12. INDEPENDENCE IN ACTION

1 Slobodan Milošević, interview by CBS News, April 22, 1999, online at .

2 Ibid.

3 Slobodan Milošević, interview by Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI, April 30, 1999.

4 William Cohen and Henry Hugh Shelton, appearing on Face the Nation, May 16, 1999.

5 Candice Hughes, “NATO Pounds Kosovo; Serbs Complain Troop Withdrawal Obstructed,” Associated Press, May 16, 1999.

6 “UN Team Arrives to Study Kosovars’ Plight,” New York Times, May 18, 1999, p. A10; “UN Team to Spend 2-3 Days in Kosovo,” Associated Press Worldstream, May 17, 1999.

7 Candice Hughes, “UN Team Tries to Steer Neutral Course in Question of Who Is Suffering More,” Associated Press Worldstream, May 20, 1999.

8 “UN Aid Team in Kosovo,” Guardian, May 21, 1999.

9 Candice Hughes, “Silent Kosovo Bears Witness to the Ethnic Conflict,” Associated Press, May 21, 1999.

10 Although the two republics were then jointly part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Montenegro did not share Serbia’s war aims. Blessed by a scenic coastline and superior economic prospects, some 55.5 percent of Montenegrins voted for independence in 2006, clearing the European Union threshold, and the country became the 192nd member of the UN on June 28, 2006.

11 “ ‘Enough Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing’ in Kosovo,” Agence France-Presse, May 24, 1999.

12 Fabrizio Hochschild to SVDM, May 26, 1999.

13 SVDM, Briefing to the Security Council on the UN Inter-Agency Needs Assessment Mission to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, June 2, 1999.

14 Ibid.

CHAPTER 13. VICEROY

1 SVDM, “Humanitarian Needs in Kosovo and Yugoslavia,” National Press Club, June 7, 1999.

2 Michael Dobbs, “NATO Occupies Tense Kosovo Capital; British Troops Confront Russians at Pristina Airport,” Washington Post, June 13, 1999, p. A1.

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

4 Donna Bryson, “Aid Workers Follow Troops to Kosovo,” Associated Press, June 13, 1999.

5 “UN Civilian Administrator Arrives in Pristina,” Agence France-Presse, June 13, 1999.

6 Ibid.

7 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

8 UN Interim Administration in Kosovo, "Chronology,” online at .

9 SVDM, “Humanitarian Needs.”

10 Ian Johnstone, “Note on the Kosovo Mission Planning Meeting at United Nations Headquarters, New York, on 9 June 1999 at 5:15 p.m.,” June 12, 1999.

11 “UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Fact Sheet, June 12, 1999, online at .

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

13 Ibid.

14 Before the NATO war, ethnic Albanians constituted just 30 of the 756 judges and prosecutors in Kosovo. Report of the Secretary-General on the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, July 12, 1999, p. 14.

15 Only on July 4 did Vieira de Mello use his governing authority to issue a legal order retroactively authorizing NATO troops to detain suspects.

16 Hansjörg Strohmeyer, “Collapse and Reconstruction of a Judicial System: The United Nations Missions in Kosovo and East Timor,” American Journal of International Law 95, no.1 (January 2001), p. 53.

17 Ibid., p. 52.

18 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

19 Simon Chesterman, You, the People:The United Nations,Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 11.

20 Colleen Barry, “Rugova Returns to Kosovo from Wartime Exile,”Associated Press, July 15, 1999.

21 Kosovo has held four elections since 1999: municipal elections in 2000 and 2003, and national assembly elections in 2001 and 2004. These elections were conducted under international supervision. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other observing groups found the elections generally fair and free.

22 Niko Price, “Competing Governments in Kosovo Raise Questions about Future,” Associated Press, July 4, 1999.

23 In a nod to Washington, Annan also announced that James “Jock” Covey, a former U.S. diplomat who had served in the White House, would serve as Kouchner’s principal deputy.

24 “UN Kosovo Mission Appeals for End to Attacks on Minorities,” July 14, 1999.

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

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

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

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

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

30 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

CHAPTER 14. BENEVOLENT DICTATOR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 Ibid.

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

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

21 Becker, The Siege.

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

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 15. HOARDING POWER, HOARDING BLAME

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

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

3 Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 Ibid.

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

22 SVDM, “How Not to Run a Country.”

23 Ibid.

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

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

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

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

28 Strohmeyer, “Collapse and Reconstruction.”

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

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

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

32 SVDM to Annick Stevenson, August 12, 2001.

33 Stevenson to SVDM, August 13, 2001.

34 SVDM to Stevenson, August 17, 2001.

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

CHAPTER 16. “A NEW SERGIO”

1 SVDM, Speaking Notes, Handing Over Ceremony with General Cosgrove, February 23, 2000.

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

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

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

5 Lakhan Mehrotra to SVDM, January 11, 2001.

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

7 Inspector general’s report, para. 67.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 SVDM to Guéhenno,“Payment of Compensation to Next of Kin of UNAMET Staff Killed in 99,” July 6, 2001.

26 Guéhenno to SVDM, “Payment of Compensation in Respect of UNAMET SSA Contractors Killed in 99,” July 18, 2001.

27 SVDM to Guéhenno, Kieran Prendergast, “Timor Sea,” April 2, 2002.

28 An even larger field, Greater Sunrise, which was thought to hold $10 billion in revenue, was only partially in the joint area, and negotiations on it were deferred until 2003. Galbraith’s team (which was by then working directly for the new East Timorese government) secured a 50-50 split of revenues in an area that would have originally gone 91 percent to the Australians.

29 Joanne Collins, “Former Guerrilla Hero Set for Landslide Win in East Timor Presidential Election,” Scotsman, April 15, 2002, p. 11.

30 SVDM to Carolina Larriera, October 22, 2001.

31 SVDM to Antonio Carlos Machado, November 19, 2001.

32 SVDM, Press Conference, April 13, 2002, online at .

33 “UN Official: Timor Prospects Good,” Associated Press Online, May 18, 2002.

34 SVDM, “The Future of UN State-building,” International Peace Academy Conference, October 18-19, 2002, .

35 Bronwyn Curran, “We Will Not Abandon Our Baby, UN East Timor Envoy Promises,” Agence France-Presse, May 17, 2002.

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

CHAPTER 17. "FEAR IS A BAD ADVISER ”

1 Carola Hoyos, “UN Appoints Human Rights Chief,” Financial Times, July 23, 2002.

2 In October 2001 Mary Robinson had called for a suspension of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan so that aid workers could reach starving civilians. Later, noting correctly that the Pentagon seemed uncurious about the extent and source of civilian casualties, she said, “I can’t accept that one causes ‘collateral damage’ in villages and doesn’t even ask about the number and names of the dead.” She added later, “In my view, people are not collateral damage.They are people.” Sameer Ahmed, “An Interview with Mary Robinson: U.S. Policy and UN Ethics,” Stanford Daily News, February 14, 2003. See also “UN Critical of U.S. Action in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, March 6, 2002.

3 Mary Robinson, "Protecting Human Rights: The United States, the United Nations, and the World,” John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation: Responding to Terrorism Series, January 6, 2002.

4 “The Global Politics of Human Rights,” interview with Mary Robinson, Politic [Yale University], December 7, 2002.

5 Colum Lynch, “UN Human Rights Commissioner Named,” Washington Post, July 23, 2002, p. A12.

6 SVDM to Carolina Larriera, September 10, 2002.

7 SVDM to Larriera, September 13, 2002.

8 SVDM to Marcia Luar Ibrahim, September 13, 2002.

9 SVDM to Larriera, October 12, 2002.

10 SVDM to Adrien and Laurent Vieira de Mello, November 5, 2002.

11 François d’Alançon, “Rencontre avec Sergio Vieira de Mello, Pompier de l’ONU” (Conversation with Sergio Vieira de Mello, Firefighter of the United Nations), La Croix, June 21, 2003.

12 SVDM to guide at the British Museum, November 15, 2002.

13 SVDM, Statement by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, September 20, 2002.

14 Christopher Pratner,“UN’s Vieira de Mello Sees U.S. Constitution as Human Rights Model,” BBC Monitoring International Reports (from Vienna’s Der Standard online), May 11, 2003.

15 Harold Hongju Koh, “A Job Description for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review (Summer 2004), p. 493. The article was based on the paper Koh delivered at a conference at Columbia in February 2003.

16 SVDM, “Five Questions for the Human Rights Field,” Sur: International Journal on Human Rights, 2004, p. 170.

17 SVDM, Statement to the Informal Meeting of the Commission on Human Rights, September 24, 2002.

18 SVDM, Human Rights “Manifesto,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, undated.

19 Some 270 people held permanent contracts in Geneva, while another 190 staffers were based in twenty countries around the world.

20 SVDM, interview with Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

21 SVDM to Catherine Bertini, November 15, 2002.

22 The United States had been assured of forty-three votes of support, but only twenty-nine nations ended up backing its membership. France, Austria, and Sweden were elected from the U.S. regional grouping. They joined Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria—five of the ten countries rated “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties.

23 SVDM, Press Conference on “The New HCHR,” Geneva, September 20, 2002.

24 “Commission on Human Rights Takes Up Debate on Situation in Occupied Arab Territories, Including Palestine,” UN Press Release, March 27, 2003.

25 SVDM, Closing Statement to UN Commission on Human Rights, April 25, 2003.

26 Ibid.

27 D’Alançon, “Recontre avec Sergio Vieira de Mello.”

28 SVDM, “World Civilization: Barking Up the Wrong Tree?” Third Annual BP World Civilization Lecture, British Museum, November 11, 2002.

29 SVDM, “Holistic Democracy: The Human Rights Content of Legitimate Governance,” Seminar on the Interdependence between Democracy and Human Rights, Geneva, November 25, 2002.

30 Ibid. He offered a variety of models for democratic consultation “from the village council to the diwaniya, from the loya jirga to the circle of elders.”

31 Human Rights Features no. 6 (April 22-25, 2003), p. 60.

32 SVDM, Q and A, September-October 2002, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

33 SVDM, Statement to the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, March 21, 2003.

34 SVDM, interview on BBC Talking Point, December 8, 2002.

35 James P. Lucier, “Just What Is a War Criminal?,” Insight, August 2, 1999, p. 13.

36 John R. Bolton, “Why an International Criminal Court Won’t Work,” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1998, p. A19.

37 “Wite-Out” quote is from John R. Bolton, Address to the Federalist Society’s 2003 National Lawyers Convention, November 13, 2003, online at . The “happiest moment” quote is from Glenn Kessler and Colum Lynch, “Critic of U.N. Named Envoy; Bush’s Choice of Bolton Is a Surprise; Democrats Plan to Contest Nomination,” Washington Post, March 8, 2005, p. A1. Bolton’s most memorable summation of his exasperation with international institutions came in 2005 in a speech at Yale University, in which he declared, “Why shouldn’t we pay for what we want, instead of paying a bill for what we get?” Richard Low, “Bolton’s Undiplomatic Unilateralism,” Yale Daily News, October 6, 2005.

38 SVDM, Statement to the Opening of the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, March 17, 2003.

39 Ibid.

40 “Bin Laden’s message,” broadcast by al-Jazeera, November 12, 2002, online at http:// .

41 “Bin Laden Rails against Crusaders and UN,” November 3, 2001, online at http:// .

42 Ben Russell, “Straw Joins Row Over ‘Torture Pictures,’” Independent, January 21, 2002, p. 1.

43 Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Finn, "U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects,” Washington Post, March 11, 2002, p. A1.

44 Donald Rumsfeld, “Stakeout at the Pentagon,” April 12, 2003, online at ..

45 Committee on Select Intelligence,“Statement of Cofer Black, Former Chief, Counterterrorism Center,” Investigation of September 11 Intelligence Failures, Hearing, September 26, 2002.

46 Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, "U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations: ‘Stress and Duress’ Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities,” Washington Post, December 26, 2002, p. A1. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration also rendered suspects to third countries. The CIA has defended rendition by claiming that access to American due process would force intelligence agents, or enable suspected terrorists, to disclose CIA sources and methods. Initially, Egypt (the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind Israel) was the principal destination of rendered suspects. But after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration began sending suspects to other countries as well. Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” New Yorker, February 14, 2005, p. 106.

47 Priest and Gellman, "U.S. Decries Abuse.”

48 SVDM, Statement to Informal Meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights, September 24, 2002.

49 Human Rights Watch, “Indefinite Detention Without Trial in the United Kingdom Under Part 4 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001,” June 24, 2004, online at . Even in times of emergency, human rights law did not permit governments to opt out of the fundamental right to life or right to be free of cruel or degrading punishment.

50 SVDM, Statement of the Eleventh Workshop on Regional Cooperation for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region, Islamabad, February 25-27, 2003. He urged the countries in the UN General Assembly to add a new instrument to the books, the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which would have instituted a system of regular independent inspections of detention facilities in order to guard against torture. SVDM, Address to the Third Committee of the General Assembly, November 4, 2002.

51 SVDM, Q and A, September-October 2002; SVDM, Address to the Third Committee of the General Assembly, November 4, 2002.

52 SVDM, Statement to the Opening of the 59th Session of the Commission on Human Rights, March 17, 2003.

53 SVDM to Annick Stevenson, May 21, 2003.

54 Kofi Annan, “When Force Is Considered, There Is No Substitute for Legitimacy Provided by United Nations,” Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002, online at .

55 Ibid.

56 George W. Bush, Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002, online at .

57 For Annan’s reflections on this sequence, see Philip Gourevitch, “The Optimist,” New Yorker, March 3, 2003, p. 55.

58 SVDM, interview on BBC Talking Points, December 8, 2002.

59 SVDM, “Equipe da ONU fará avaliaçâo da segurança em Bagdád” (Making the UN Function in Baghdad), O Estado de Sáo Paulo, June 1, 2003.

60 Strobe Talbott, The Great Experiment: From Tribes to Global Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 364.

61 George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 95.

62 Colin Powell, Address to UN Security Council, February 5, 2003, online at www ..

63 The only UN official, apart from the secretary-general, who had met with Bush was the head of the World Food Program, James Morris, but he was a Republican-backed U.S. political appointee, while Vieira de Mello was a lifelong UN civil servant from Brazil.

64 Notes on the Armitage-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

65 Ibid.

66 Notes on the Bush-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

67 James Risen et al., “Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations,” New York Times, May 13, 2004, p. A1.

68 Notes on the Bush-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

69 Ibid.Vieira de Mello also raised the plight of the Palestinians. Bush said that he was the only president to have said there should be two states. (In fact, President Clinton was the first to endorse a two-state solution, which he did in January 2001, shortly before Bush took office.) Bush said that the Palestinians needed a better deal.“Blame Israel last not first for the condition of the Palestinian people,” he said.

70 “President Bush: Monday ‘Moment of Truth’ for World in Iraq,” White House press release, March 16, 2003.

71 SVDM, "Making the UN Function.”

72 President Bush, Address to the Nation, March 19, 2003, news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html. The initial invasion was carried out by 250,000 troops from the United States; 45,000 from the U.K.; and 2,000 from Australia. Poland (200), Albania (70), and Romania (278) all provided troops in noncombat roles. Just before the invasion, Colin Powell announced that the Coalition of the Willing consisted of 30 countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. An additional 15 anonymous countries provided assistance but did not want to declare support. See http://news .. On March 27, 2003, the White House announced a list of forty-nine members. Among these were six that were unarmed (or without formal armies): Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands. See Dana Milbank, “Many Willing, but Only a Few Are Able,” Washington Post, March 25, 2003, p. A7.

73 SVDM, interview by Tim Sebastian, HARDtalk, BBC, April 14, 2003.

CHAPTER 18. "DON’T ASK WHO STARTED THE FIRE" 1. SVDM, unpublished interview by Bill Spindle, Wall Street Journal, posted online at

1 SVDM, unpublished interview by Bill Spindle, Wall Street Journal, posted online at .

2 YouGov Survey Results, "Iraq War Track Part 9, prepared for the Daily Telegraph and ITV News,” April 6, 2003, online at .

3 Colum Lynch, “Britain Offers Plan for U.N.’s Postwar Role,” Washington Post, April 5, 2003, p. A28.

4 James Blitz, “Blair Faces Challenge of Getting Consensus on UN Role,” Financial Times, March 21, 2003, p. 9.

5 Ibid.

6 U.S. officials were satisfied with the UN’s performance in Afghanistan, where in December 2001 Lakhdar Brahimi had chaired the Bonn conference, which resulted in the appointment of Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Secretary Rumsfeld applauded General Tommy Franks for keeping “the coalition footprint modest” and for allowing local leaders to arrive at local solutions. “Over time,” Rumsfeld said, Afghans would be able to “take full responsibility for their security and stability rather than having to depend on foreign forces.” Donald Rumsfeld, “Beyond Nation Building,” Speech at Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, New York City, February 14, 2003.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Don Melvin, “Bush, Blair Weigh Next Steps; U.N. Role in Iraq May Divide Allies,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 8, 2003, p. A3.

10 George W. Bush and Tony Blair, “Joint Statement on Iraq’s Future,” April 8, 2003.

11 “President Bush Meets with Prime Minister Blair in Northern Ireland,” White House Press Release, April 8, 2003.

12 Eric Schmitt and Steven R. Weisman, “US to Recruit Iraqi Civilians to Interim Posts,” New York Times, April 11, 2003, p. A1.

13 Office of the Spokesperson of the Secretary-General, “UN Secretary-General’s Press Encounter Upon Arrival at UNHQ,” April 7, 2003.

14 SVDM to Peter Galbraith, December 21, 2002.

15 SVDM, interview by Philip Gourevitch, November 22, 2002.

16 SVDM to Carolina Larreira, April 1, 2003. The original article, the first to mention Vieira de Mello in the context of Iraq, was Philip Webster, James Bone, Rosemary Bennett, and Greg Hurst, “Coalition to Stay in Charge for Task of Rebuilding,”Times(London), March 27, 2003, p. 10.

17 SVDM to Larriera, April 3, 2003.

18 “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” White House Press Release, May 1, 2003.

19 Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, Remarks at a Town Hall Meeting with Troops, Doha, Qatar, April 28, 2003.

20 Anthony Zinni, Remarks to the Marine Corps Association and U.S. Naval Institute Forum 2003, Arlington, Virginia, September 4, 2003.

21 Steven R. Weisman and Felicity Barringer, “Against France and Russia, Washington Tries to Curb U.N. Role in Postwar Iraq,” New York Times, March 27, 2003, p. B10.

22 “President Bush Meets with Prime Minister Blair.”

23 Notes on the Rice-SVDM meeting, March 5, 2003.

24 Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Remarks on President Bush-PM Blair Meeting, April 8, 2003.

25 “US Will Ask UN to Back Control by Allies in Iraq,” New York Times, May 9, 2003, p. A1.

26 Pool Report of Garner’s Trip to Baghdad, April 21, 2003, online at .

27 George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 130.

28 UNESCO estimates that some 150,000 objects were lost or stolen.

29 Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, U.S. Department of Defense News Briefing, April 11, 2003.

30 The Coalition Provisional Authority would eventually estimate that the looting damage was worth $12 billion. The exiles (the biggest backer of the Coalition’s invasion) later blamed the looting on the State Department’s refusal to train an army of Iraqi exiles to make up the inaugural security forces (seventy-two Iraqis received training). Packer, Assassins’ Gate, p. 139.

31 In the weeks prior to the announcement, the Pentagon had been proceeding with plans to deploy a senior civilian administrator, and Rumsfeld had been winnowing a list of names. But Garner expected the person to deploy sometime in August. Bremer’s deployment was rushed forward because of chaos on the ground and Garner’s inability to manage it. Powell seems to have welcomed the appointment of Bremer, who had been a career State Department official, but Bremer reported directly to Rumsfeld.

32 John Negroponte and Jeremy Greenstock, “Letter from the Permanent Representation of the UK and the US to the UN addressed to the President of the Security Council,” May 8, 2003, online at .

33 Anthony Shadid, “Shiites Denounce Occupation,” Washington Post, May 19, 2003, p. A1.

34 CPA Order no. 1 de-Ba’athified in two ways: (1) “Senior party members” (the top four levels) were removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector. They were also evaluated for criminal conduct. (2) In the top three rungs of the public sector, those determined to be full members of the Ba’ath party (including two junior ranks) were removed from their jobs. This included all individuals who held jobs “in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions (e.g., universities and hospitals).” In January 2004, in an effort to systematize the process, a de-Ba’athification commission was established under Ahmed Chalabi. Some thirty thousand Ba’athists had already lost their jobs. The fourth-highest leadership echelons would be allowed to contest their dismissals if they did not commit crimes and if they had advanced up the ranks of the party by dint of their professional achievements. When Chalabi was asked whether the new body would facilitate reconciliation, however, he dismissed the idea, saying that “reconciliation is an inappropriate term.”“Who will reconcile with whom?” he asked. “Will those buried in mass graves reconcile with those who killed them?” Sam Dagher,“Iraq Governing Council Details Plan to Root Out Ba’ath Members,” Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2004.

35 Dan Senor, speaking for Bremer in August 2004, said, “The Shia could have been an enormous stumbling block to the Coalition if they had been uncooperative. If we had held back on de-Ba’athification, some have argued that the Sunni insurgency would not have been as bad, but, in the complete picture, the fact that this meant so much to the Shia was crucial.” John Lee Anderson, “Out on the Street,” New Yorker, November 15, 2004, pp. 73, 78.

36 Paul Hughes, Garner’s chief of staff, who had promised the Iraqi soldiers jobs and salaries, later told The New Yorker’s George Packer: “From the Iraqi viewpoint, that simple action took away the one symbol of sovereignty the Iraqi people still had.” Packer,Assassins’ Gate, p. 192.

37 It was hard to reconcile the Coalition’s commitment to rebuild and reform Iraq with the terms of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which assumes that any occupation will be purely temporary and that the occupier will not impose any particular form of government, or change the status of public officials/judges or penal laws. The 1907 Hague Convention also notes that the laws in force in the country must be respected. So Council Resolution 1483, by encouraging the occupying powers to help create “conditions in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future,” seemed to contradict these provisions of humanitarian law.

38 Felicity Barringer, “UN Vote on Iraq Authorization Is Due Next Week, US Says,” New York Times, May 15, 2003, p. A24.

39 UN source, “Note to Mr. Riza: Special Coordinator for Iraq,” May 9, 2003.

40 SVDM to Galbraith, May 16, 2003.

41 Steven Erlanger, “I Should Always Believe Journalists,” New York Times, August 24, 2004.

42 In 2007 multiple letters were exchanged in the London Review of Books over whether Vieira de Mello met with Bush a second time. Tariq Ali wrote that Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor had told him of a second meeting, a comment Tharoor denied making. In fact Tharoor made the same claim to me, but he was repeating hearsay and had no knowledge of Vieira de Mello’s movements. Only one meeting between the two men took place: on March 5, 2003, two and a half months before Vieira de Mello would be appointed as UN special representative in Iraq.

43 Felicity Barringer,“Security Council Almost Unanimously Approves Broad Mandate for Allies in Iraq,” New York Times, May 23, 2003, p. A12.

44 Ibid. Several months after the August 19, 2003 attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad, when the UN was being pressed to return to Baghdad, Annan would say, “Bad resolutions kill people.”

45 Ibid.

46 Colum Lynch, “France, Russia Back Lifting of Iraq Sanctions,” Washington Post, May 22, 2003, p. A1; Felicity Barringer, “US Wins Support to End Sanctions Imposed on Iraq,” New York Times, May 22, 2003, p. A1.

47 Barringer, “Security Council Almost Unanimously Approves.”

48 Marcelo Musa Cavalleri, “Um brasileiro em busca, du paz” (A Brazilian in Search of Peace), Época, August 2003.

49 Liana Melo and Rita Moraes, “Com a mesma intensidade que trabalhava, o diplomata reconstruía a vida afetiva” (With the Same Intensity with Which He Worked, the Diplomat Reconstructed His Personal Life), Istoe, August 27, 2003.

50 Colum Lynch, “Diplomat Will Oversee UN’s Iraq Operations,” Washington Post, May 24, 2003, p. A18.

51 SVDM to Jane Holl Lute, July 8, 2003.

52 SVDM, interview by Spindle.

53 SVDM to Machado et al., May 29, 2003.

54 SVDM, interview by Spindle.

55 Ibid.

CHAPTER 19. “YOU CAN’T HELP PEOPLE FROM A DISTANCE”

1 Notes on the meeting, June 1, 2003.

2 SVDM, airport statement, June 2, 2003.

3 The same Security Council resolution that had authorized the Coalition occupation and created the post of UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq had also provided for the end of civilian sanctions and the resumption of oil exports (the revenue from which would be deposited directly into a Development Fund for Iraq). It also mandated the termination of the Oil for Food Program within six months. (The program was officially closed November 21, 2003.) In January 2004 an Iraqi newspaper published a list of 270 people from 40 countries who had profited from the illicit sale of Iraqi oil during the Oil for Food Program, and in April the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that “the former Iraqi regime attained $10.1 billion in illegal revenue” from the program. The UN, the U.S. Senate, and the Iraqi government launched inquiries, which led to the resignation and ultimate indictment of Benon Sevan, the former head of the program. The report by independent investigator Paul Volcker, released in September 2005, faulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan for a conflict of interest involving his son Kojo (who was employed by a beneficiary of the program) and for the UN’s mismanagement of the Oil for Food Program. Annan would later call the whole affair “deeply embarrassing.”

4 William Langeweische, “Welcome to the Green Zone,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2004, p. 64.

5 Ibid., p. 88. The T-shirts were a takeoff on President Bush’s July 2003 taunts to those who might attack U.S. forces in Iraq. “My answer is, bring them on,” Bush said. “We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” Press Q&A, July 2, 2003.

6 Langeweische, “Green Zone,” p. 64.

7 Ibid., p. 62.

8 Iraq Steering Group meeting minutes, June 3, 2003.

9 See Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (New York : Knopf, 2006).

10 A May 28, 2003, memo from the UN security staff in Iraq described the security situation as “post war” with “looting, car-jacking, street robbery, shootings and other crimes . . . widespread and common in cities and along main routes.” Report of the Security in Iraq Accountability Panel, March 3, 2004, online at (hereafter Walzer report), p. 22.

11 Because visitors could pass freely in and out of the Cedar as well, the security staff began looking for a private house that would offer Vieira de Mello both the communications facilities and the enhanced security he needed. The going rate for the one house they found was $12,000 per month, which he deemed too steep.

12 Walzer report, p. 17.

13 Procurement in peacekeeping and political missions was no easy matter. Each field mission was required to establish a local committee on contracts to review and recommend contract awards. This committee had to be composed of four staffers from the mission: a legal adviser, the chief of finance section, the chief of general services, and the chief of transport services. Field missions were not permitted to award contracts worth more than $75,000 without approval by the chief administrative officer and the local committee on contracts. Field missions could not award contracts worth more than $200,000 without their approval, plus that of the Headquarters committee on contracts.

14 SVDM to Kieran Prendergast, “Meeting with Ambassadors Bremer and Sawers,” June 5, 2003, CZX 03.

15 Al-Hakim would be assassinated on August 29, 2003, in a wave of violence against Shia clerics in Najaf that was thought to have been carried out by al-Qaeda’s Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Al-Hakim’s brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who was already a member of the Governing Council, would then assume the leadership of SCIRI, which was the largest party in the United Iraqi Alliance coalition and won the most seats in the Iraqi parliament in the December 2005 elections.

16 Bill Spindle, “Identity Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2003.

17 SVDM to Joseph Vernon Reed, July 5, 2003.

18 Notes on the meeting with John Sawers, June 5, 2003.

19 Letters dated early June and June 25, 2003, published in Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriersde la paix: du Kosovo à l’Irak (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2004), p. 423.

20 Notes on the Sawers meeting, June 5, 2003.

21 SVDM to Carina Perelli, June 26, 2003.

22 SVDM to Perelli, July 1, 2003.

23 SVDM to Prendergast, “Meetings with Ambassadors Bremer and Sawers: Comprehensive Update on Political Process,” July 1, 2003.

24 Among those polled, 92 percent welcomed lawyers and judges and 75 percent welcomed Iraqi clerics, but only 36 percent welcomed formerly exiled politicians. Office of Research, Opinion Analysis, U.S. State Department, October 21, 2003.

25 SVDM, internal UN draft, August 17, 2003.

26 SVDM, remarks, July 13, 2003.

27 SVDM to Peter Galbraith, July 4, 2003.

28 SVDM, interview by George Packer, August 13, 2003.

29 SVDM, interview by Tim Sebastian, HARDtalk, BBC, April 14, 2003.

30 François d’Alançon, “Recontre avec Sergio Vieira de Mello, Le Pompier de l’ONU,” (Conversation with Sergio Vieira de Mello, Firefighter of the United Nations), La Croix, June 21, 2003.

31 SVDM, remarks to the press at presentation of secretary-general’s report, July 22, 2003.

32 Ibid.

CHAPTER 20. REBUFFED

1 SVDM, interview by George Packer, August 13, 2003.

2 SVDM, UN draft, August 17, 2003.

3 SVDM, interview by Packer.

4 UN News Center,“Transcript of Press Conference by Sergio Vieria de Mello, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq in Cairo,” August 9, 2003.

5 SVDM, draft op-ed, August 2003.

6 Office of Research, Opinion Analysis, U.S. State Department, October 21, 2003.

7 SVDM, interview with Packer.

8 Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), pp. 258-59.

9 DynCorp was given the contract for field training sometime in June 2003. In a 2006 interview with David Rohde, Bremer blamed the contractors for the CPA’s failure to ensure that the country was policed: "DynCorp was not producing anybody. We were doing the best we could.” Michael Moss and David Rohde, “Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police,” New York Times, May 21, 2006.

10 SVDM, interview with Packer.

11 Notes on the meeting with John Sawers, June 18, 2003.

12 Report of the Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of UN Personnel in Iraq, online at , p.13 (hereinafter Ahtisaari report).

13 Robert Adolph to Ramiro Lopes da Silva, June 18, 2003.

14 Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, U.S. Defense Department News Briefing, June 30, 2003.

15 “Donald H. Rumsfeld Holds Defense Department News Briefing with Jay Garner,” U.S. Department of Defense, June 18, 2003.

16 Jon Lee Anderson, “Out on the Street,” New Yorker, November 15, 2004, p. 74.

17 Brookings Institution, “Iraq Index: Number of Attacks by Insurgents and Militias,” updated July 20, 2007.

18 Adolph to Lopes da Silva, Security Management Team, and UNSECOORD, Threat Assessment, June 29, 2003.

19 Kevin Kennedy to UN Headquarters September 4, 2003.

20 SVDM to Bremer and Sawers, July 6, 2003.

21 Robert Adolph, Chronology of Events (in possession of author).

22 Fred Eckhard to Shashi Tharoor, “Iraq Briefings,” July 25, 2003.

23 Salim Lone to Eckhard, August 12, 2003.

24 Ahtisaari report, p. 10.

25 Adolph, Chronology.

26 SVDM to André Simões, July 1, 2003

27 Jean-Sélim Kanaan, July 1, 2003, published in Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la paix: du Kosovo à l’Irak (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2004), pp. 436-38.

28 Ahtisaari report, p. 17.

29 SVDM to Kieran Prendergast, July 24, 2003.

30 Report of the Security in Iraq Accountability Panel, March 3, 2004, online at .www.un.org/news/dh/iraq/SIAP-report.pdf, p.13.

31 Ibid., p. 18.

32 Ibid.

33 Robert F. Worth and John Tierney, "FBI Teams Sent to Investigate Bomb Attack on Embassy,” New York Times, August 9, 2003, p. A6.

34 Vivienne Walt, “Jordanians Ask: Why Us?; Analysts Disagree on Reasons Behind Embassy Bombing,” Houston Chronicle, August 8, 2003, p. A21.

35 Justin Huggler, “A Mercedes Was on a Roof, Blown by the Force of the Blast,” Independent, August 8, 2003, p. 2.

36 Office of the SRSG, weekly press briefing, August 7, 2003.

37 Helen Kennedy,“Daughters Talk of a ‘Loving Dad,’” Daily News, August 2, 2003, p. 3.

38 Initially Jordan denied that U.S. forces were planning on going to Iraq. They were “not participating in this war,” Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s foreign minister, said. They were there only to train Jordanian soldiers and defend Jordan against Iraqi missile attack. Ian Cobain and Stephen Farrell, “Israeli Special Forces Join ‘Secret Front’ in Jordan,” Times (London), March 17, 2003, p. 13.

39 Anthony Shadid, “Attacks Intensify in Western Iraq; Foreigners Suspected in Eight Assaults,” Washington Post, August 2, 2003, p. A12.

40 Tamara Chalabi, “Jordan Slandered My Father at Saddam’s Behest,” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2003, p. A10.

41 Dexter Filkins and Robert F. Worth, “11 Die in Baghdad as Car Bomb Hits Jordanian Embassy,” New York Times, August 9, 2003, p. A1.

42 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Car Bomb Kills 11 in Baghdad,” Washington Post, August 8, 2003, p. A1.

43 Filkins and Worth, “11 Die in Baghdad.”

44 Thom Shanker, “Iraqis to Keep Responsibility for Guarding Embassies,” Washington Post, August 9, 2003, p. A7.

45 Adolph, Chronology.

46 Salim Lone to SVDM, August 13, 2003.

47 SVDM to Martine Chergui, August 7, 2003.

48 SVDM, interview by IRIN news service July 14, 2003.

49 Office of the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq (UNOCHI) Centre Region, “Draft Paper on the UN Outreach Campaign in Mosul,” circulated August 17, 2003.

50 SVDM, interview by IRIN.

51 SVDM, remarks to Security Council before presentation of secretary-general’s report, July 22, 2003.

52 The Committee to Protect Journalists found the shelling to be unintentional but avoidable. It faulted senior U.S. officers who knew journalists stayed at the hotel but did not properly convey this knowledge to the tank commander who fired. Eventually the U.S. military investigation into journalist Mazen Dana’s death would reach the same conclusion.The death was "regrettable,” but the soldier who had shot Dana had “acted within the rules of engagement.” Committee to Protect Journalists, “Iraq: CPJ Dismayed by US Investigation into Killing of Reuters Cameraman,” September 22, 2003.

53 Anthony Shadid, “US Military Probes Cameraman’s Death,” Washington Post, August 19, 2003, p. A15.

54 Ibid.

55 Younes to SVDM, August 18, 2003.

56 Jamil Chade, “Ocupação e humilihante, diz Vieria de Mello” (Occupation and Humiliation, Says Vieira de Mello), O Estado de São Paulo, August 18, 2003.

57 SVDM, remarks to Security Council before presentation of secretary-general’s report, July 22, 2003.

58 SVDM, interview with Packer.

59 Chade, “Ocupação e humilihante.”

60 SVDM, draft op-ed, August 2003.

61 Chade, “Ocupação e humilihante.”

62 Joshua Hammer, “I Saw Many Dying,” Newsweek Web exclusive, August 19, 2003.

CHAPTER 21. AUGUST 19, 2003

1 Khaled Mansour to UN officials, August 19, 2003, 8:01 a.m.

2 Mansour to Veronique Taveau, August 19, 2003, 8:14 a.m.

3 The congressional delegation was composed of Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), and John Sununu (R-NH).

4 Report of the Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of UN Personnel in Iraq, online at , p. 14.

5 Ibid.

6 “Blast at UN Headquarters in Baghdad,” CNN Breaking News, August 19, 2003, 9:01 a.m. ET.

7 Ibid.

8 Jeff Davie, “Search for the SRSG,” internal written account, September 11, 2003.

9 Ibid.

10 Salim Lone, “Discussion with UN Baghdad Spokesman,” CNN, August 19, 2003, 11:45 a.m. ET.

11 Salim Lone, “Interview with Spokesman for UN Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello,” CNN, August 19, 2003, 1:00 p.m. ET.

12 “Baghdad UN Blast:What Future for the UN,” BBC News, last updated August 25, 2003, online at .

13 “Huge Explosion at U.N. Headquarters in Baghdad,” CNN Breaking News, August 19, 2003, 12:01 p.m. ET.

14 Fred Eckhard, “United Nations Briefing Re: Bombing on U.N. Compound in Baghdad, Iraq,” UN Headquarters, August 19, 2003.

15 “Huge Explosion at UN Headquarters in Baghdad,” CNN Breaking News, August 19, 2003, 12:03 p.m. ET.

16 Ibid.

17 Jimmy Breslin, “Dying over Something That Never Was,” Newsday, August 22, 2003.

18 “Huge Explosion at UN Headquarters in Baghdad,” CNN Breaking News, August 19, 2003, 12:03 p.m. ET.

19 Larry Kaplow, “At a Soft Target, UN and Iraqis United by Shock,” Cox News Service, August 19, 2003.

20 Jamie Wilson, “Baghdad Bombing: They Came to Bring Relief from War. Now They Are Asking: Why Us?” Guardian, August 20, 2003, p. 3.

21 Several of Vieira de Mello’s friends and family members dispute whether the UN envoy would have lashed out in this way. Although he was an atheist, they say, he was also superstitious. In addition, he was in a highly vulnerable position, dependent on the efforts of his devout rescuer. I have relied upon Valentine, the only witness to the scene, who is adamant that the exchange proceeded as I have described. Assuming Valentine’s memory serves him, the outburst can best be ascribed to the pain Vieira de Mello was in, as well as his anger over what he likely saw as unacceptable proselytizing.

22 Davie, “Search for the SRSG.”

CHAPTER 22. POSTMORTEM

1 Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Press Conference at Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, August 20, 2003, online at .

2 “UN Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello Begins Final Journey Home,” August 22, 2003, &Cr=xxxx&Cr1=#.

3 Kofi Annan, “Secretary-General Mourns Loss of ‘Dear Friend’ Sergio Vieira de Mello, Memorial Service in Rio de Janeiro,” August 23, 2003, online at Press/docs/2003/sgsm8829.doc.htm.Vieira de Mello’s “dying wish,” which quickly entered popular lore, was not mentioned in the press before Sevan’s tarmac speech on August 22. The following day the Washington Post published an article with the headline: “ ‘Don’t Let Them Pull the U.N. Out of Iraq’; Envoy’s Final Words Related by Army Sergeant Who Tried to Free Him.”

4 Kofi Annan, “Secretary-General’s Press Encounter with the Ambassadors of Malaysia, Cuba and South Africa Regarding the Attack on the United Nations in Baghdad,” August 22, 2003.

5 Liana Melo and Rita Moraes, “Energia e paixão Com a mesma intensidade que trabalhava, o diplomata reconstruía a vida afetiva” (Energy and Passion:With the Same Intensity with Which He Worked, the Diplomat Reconstructed His Personal Life), Istoe,August 27, 2003.

6 On August 21 the FBI also got a confession of sorts. A previously unknown group, the Armed Vanguards of the Second Mohammed Army, claimed responsibility. "We say it proudly that we did not hesitate for one moment to kill crusader blood,” said the group. In a typewritten statement in Arabic sent to the Dubai-based satellite TV channel al-Arabiya, they pledged “to continue fighting every foreigner [in Iraq] and to carry out similar operations.” Brian Whitaker, “Mystery Group Says It Planted Baghdad Bomb,”Guardian, August 22, 2003. Suspicion also fell upon Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, who on August 11 had told the Arab media that the “enemies of Islam” were not only the United States, the U.K., and Jews, but also “the UN and other international organizations.” Lopes da Silva to UN Headquarters, August 28, 2003. The Associated Press reported on the contents of the two-page message from Mullah Omar, written in Pashtu, which said: “Oh Muslims, know the enemies of your religion—the Jews and Christians. America, Britain, the UN and all Western aid groups are the greatest enemies of Islam and humanity.” Kathy Gannon, “Reclusive Taliban Leader Calls International Aid Groups ‘Enemy of Islam,’” Associated Press, August 12, 2003.

7 Iraq Steering Group meeting, August 22, 2003.

8 Ramiro Lopes da Silva to UN Headquarters, August 27, 2003. Among the 4,233 Iraqi staff, 2,830 worked in the northern governorates, 157 in central Iraq, 935 in Baghdad, and 311 in southern Iraq. Kevin Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 23, 2003.

9 Iraq Steering Group meeting, August 25, 2003.

10 Ibid.

11 Iraq Steering Group meeting, August 28, 2003.

12 Iraq Steering Group meeting, September 11, 2003.

13 Lopes da Silva to UN Headquarters, August 25, 2003. On August 24 UN security reviewed the ten hotels being used by UN staff and required staff to leave five of them. Iraq Steering Group meeting, August 25, 2003.

14 Lopes da Silva to UN Headquarters, September 1, 2003.

15 Lopes da Silva to UN Headquarters, September 2, 2003.

16 Kevin Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 10, 2003.

17 Iraq Steering Group meeting, September 8, 2003.

18 Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 3, 5, and 11, 2003.

19 Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 5, 2003.

20 Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 7 and 8, 2003.

21 Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 16, 2003.

22 Report of the Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of UN Personnel in Iraq, online at (hereinafter Ahtisaari report).

23 Kevin Kennedy was the rare UN official who agreed with Annan. Afraid of stranding Iraqi staff, he wrote to New York: “The UN should only leave if a direct, sustained threat, indicative of an organized campaign against United Nations personnel, premises or programmes, was established.” Kennedy to UN Headquarters, September 11, 2003.

24 “Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Remarks to the Memorial Ceremony in Honour of Colleagues Killed in the Bombing of the United Nations Mission in Baghdad,” September 19, 2003.

25 Internal UN Discussion Draft, Planning Assumptions, September 19, 2003.

26 Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid, “Gunmen Injure U.S. Appointed Iraqi Official,” Washington Post, September 21, 2003, p. A1.

27 David Filipov, “Rebuilding Iraq: New Strains after Iraq Blast; UN to Reconsider Staffing Levels,” Boston Globe, September 23, 2003, p. A1.

28 Kevin Kennedy,“Baghdad Update #3: SMT Recommendations,” September 22, 2003. On the suggestion of Kevin Kennedy, the SMT included a caveat that if the secretary-general deemed it necessary, a small voluntary presence of international staff could be maintained in Baghdad to provide leadership to national staff, to liaise with the CPA and the Governing Council, and to continue beefing up security at the Canal Hotel. SMT,“For Consideration of the Steering Group on Iraq, Concept of Operations for a Core Presence in Baghdad, 22 September 2003.” In a follow-up memo on September 24, Kennedy elaborated on the functions of this core presence. “A UN international presence, regardless of size, is more than mere symbolism; it indicates visible commitment and involvement. Ongoing discussions of a future role for the organization will be affected if the UN withdraws all international staff from Iraq and even a small presence can perform a critical role.” The abandonment of national staff weighed on him: “National Officers, regardless of experience and rank, will not get the same access or reaction from the Coalition, should assistance be required on an urgent basis.” In addition “a complete departure of international staff may have a direct impact on the continued deliverance of NGO programmes.” Kennedy also noted the UN’s experience with reconstruction and the assistance UN officials were giving civilian contractors and Coalition engineers. “If all internationals leave, that work, for the most part, will cease, making a larger re-entry more difficult.” The proposed core team included nineteen UN officials. “Concept of Operations for Core International Presence in Iraq,” September 25, 2003.

29 Kennedy, "Baghdad Update #3.”

30 In April 2004 Lopes da Silva was named country director of the World Food Program operation in Sudan.

31 Gil Loescher, online diary, .

32 Annan’s report to the Security Council in August 2004 said that the security of UN staff would be the “overarching guiding principle” for all UN activities in Iraq. In December 2004 Annan announced the creation at Headquarters of the UN Department of Safety and Security, for which the General Assembly added $53.6 million to the UN’s regular budget. The Department of Safety and Security would have 383 posts, 134 of them temporary. See .

33 Al-Kurdi said he had also been involved in the September 22 attack, dropping off the car used by the bomber. He was involved in a November 12, 2003, attack on the Italian police headquarters in Nasiriyah, killing nineteen Italians, the first Italian casualties in the Iraq war and the worst single loss of life for Italy since World War II. Twenty Italians were wounded. At least eight Iraqis were killed, and more than fifty wounded. He also owned up to the assassination of Izziden Salim, the former president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Al-Kurdi was arrested on January 15, 2005, and testified on March 30 before the Iraqi Central Criminal Court.

34 All quotes in the confession taken from Ashraf Jehengir Qazi to Ibrahim Gambari, “Meeting with Awraz Abd Al Aziz Mahmoud Sa’eed, aka Al Kurdi,” Code Cable CZX-251, July 3, 2006.

EPILOGUE

1 Felicity Barringer,“UN Chief Says New Force in Iraq Can Be Led by U.S.,” NewYork Times, August 23, 2003, p. A2. “We have played a vital role,” Annan said. “But we did because of that personality. Because of Sergio being who he is. The next time around, the mandates have to be very clear and well-defined. I cannot rely on personalities. I had only one Sergio.”

2 SVDM, “The World’s Conscience: The UN Facing the Irrational in History,” inaugural lecture at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, November 2, 2000, p. 11.

3 Ibid., p. 6.

4 SVDM, “Global Governance and the UN,” address to annual meeting of Trilateral Commission,Tokyo, 2000.

5 SVDM, “War and Politics: The Humanitarian Deceit,” written 1998, unpublished, p. 2.

6 Ibid., p. 4.

7 SVDM, “The World’s Conscience,” p. 11.

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

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 SVDM, “War and Politics,” p. 10.

13 SVDM, “Challenges in Peacekeeping: Past, Present and Future,” New York, October 29, 2002.

14 SVDM, “Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times,” Geneva International Peace Research Institute, December 4, 1991.

15 SVDM, “The World’s Conscience,” p. 11.