Six

WHITE CAR SYNDROME

Vieira de Mello was bringing the refugees home, but he could not save the UN mission as a whole. Nor could he preserve the exuberance that he had felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw that while the UN system could manage humanitarian tasks like the one he had been handed, it could not yet deliver either economic or physical security, the two ingredients crucial for a country’s long-term stability. Irrespective of how many refugees the UN helped return, he knew the standing of the UNTAC mission would continue to plunge.

EXPECTATION GAPS

The major donor countries were willing to spend enormous sums on highly visible tasks like bringing refugees home and holding elections, but they were not willing to rebuild Cambodian infrastructure or spur economic development until they were sure that the country would not return to war. And since the Soviet Union, Cambodia’s former benefactor, had slashed its assistance, Cambodia’s health, education, and civil administration sectors were starved for funds.

In a phenomenon that would become known as the White Car Syndrome, prices in Cambodia had soared with the arrival of 30,000 foreigners. The UN spent some $300,000 per day for bed and board for mission staff.¹ For living expenses UN staff received an extra allowance of $140 per day—equal to the average Cambodian’s yearly salary in 1991, and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian de-miner.² Because of these high UN salaries, the price of gas and pork doubled. Cambodians had salivated at word that UNTAC would bring a whopping $2 billion budget to Cambodia. But in practice the bulk of UN funds were spent outside the country on the purchase of equipment and supplies, or on salary payments to foreign UNTAC peacekeepers and civilians. And indeed, while the UN boasted of the jobs it was creating, the $2 million spent on the salaries of Cambodian staff in 1992 was less than that spent on UN vehicle repair.³ Those jobs that the UN did create for Cambodians would not exist beyond UNTAC’s departure in 1993.

Vieira de Mello worried for Cambodia’s future but also for its present, as a “rejection syndrome” could take hold if Cambodians believed that returning refugees were being treated better than those who had remained in Cambodia during the civil war.⁴ By late 1992 a French businessman named Jean-Marie Bertron, who had opened the hugely successful Café No Problem in Phnom Penh, had packed his bags and returned to Europe.“The UN,” Bertron told the Washington Post, “has turned a princess into a hooker.”⁵

Some thirty donor countries had combined to pledge some $880 million to Cambodia, but a year into the UNTAC mission they had disbursed only $100 million.⁶ Roger Lawrence, the head of UNTAC’s rehabilitation pillar, described the caution of rich countries: “We are in a vicious circle here in which the peace process founders in part because the economic component isn’t working—and the economic part is not working because the peace process is perceived as foundering.Whole regions of Cambodia haven’t seen any tangible evidence of reconstruction.”⁷ Rural areas were especially slighted.

UN officials on the ground in Cambodia were largely powerless to break the cycle because resources for development had to come from governments. Vieira de Mello embraced what were called Quick Impact Projects (QIPs), which were executed by private aid organizations but paid for by UNHCR. The first was a two-week project employing Cambodians to repair a bridge in Siem Reap province. Other QIPs improved access to clean water and set up mobile health units, or distributed rice seeds and fertilizer, along with fishery equipment, water jars, and mosquito nets. A few offered start-up loans for farmers or gave assistance to vulnerable elderly persons, orphans, or amputees. Projects would eventually be undertaken in all of Cambodia’s twenty-one provinces. At a time when instability deterred investors, he hoped the QIPs would serve as an essential bridge between emergency relief and longer-term development. Unfortunately, by the end of 1993, UNHCR had spent only $3.5 million on QIPs, a pittance of what was needed.⁸

For all the country’s divisions—between rich and poor, urban and rural, capitalist and Communist—Cambodians seemed virtually united in their conviction that the Paris agreement was unraveling. Vieira de Mello had succeeded in maintaining humanitarian ties to the Khmer Rouge, but this approach had not yielded the political dividend he had anticipated. UN peacekeepers were not seen as providing security, and they were increasingly despised. Between July and November 1992 UNTAC repatriated eighty-one military personnel for disciplinary reasons, including fifty-six Bulgarians. Some blue helmets were involved in smuggling, sexual harassment, and reckless driving that resulted in the deaths of Cambodians. General Sanderson could investigate incidents, but only a soldier’s own national military superiors could ship a transgressor home or garnish his wages.⁹ Just as Vieira de Mello had seen in Lebanon, Sanderson saw that the price of operating under a UN flag was that you lacked unified command and control of your troops.

HIV/AIDS, which had not been discussed much in Cambodia before the arrival of the peacekeepers, was raging, and Cambodians blamed the UN soldiers for their frequent dalliances with prostitutes.¹⁰ The acronym UNTAC became ridiculed as “UN Transmission of AIDS to Cambodians.”¹¹ The mission’s reputation for sexual predation became so pronounced that even the Khmer Rouge, in their isolation, used radio broadcasts to accuse French troops of being “too busy with prostitutes to check on the presence of Vietnamese soldiers.”¹² Instead of publicly condemning prostitution, Akashi, the head of the mission, astonished civil society leaders when he told them, “I am not a puritan. Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.”¹³ Akashi’s comments unleashed a public firestorm, and French paratroopers felt compelled to dismantle the rickety brothels that had sprung up beside their base. UN doctors ordered 800,000 condoms for distribution among soldiers, and UN officers allegedly told their soldiers not to park their vehicles in front of brothels where they could be spotted.

It was not just UN soldiers who were raising eyebrows. Some UN civilian officials developed relationships with Cambodian women who did not speak English.The power differential made it hard to gauge how consensual the relationships were. With his “boys will be boys” comments, Akashi had disqualified himself from speaking out on gender-related matters, and other senior managers said that they did not have the right to interfere in the aid workers’ relationships with autonomous adults.Vieira de Mello steered clear of the issue. “Because Sergio played fast and loose in his own relationships with women,” recalls a female UN employee, “it would have been very hard for him to take the moral high ground, so he just kept his mouth shut.”

SECURITY MELTDOWN

Since the Khmer Rouge had refused to disarm, and since Akashi’s UN administration had opted not to assert meaningful “direct control” over the key ministries, the only parts of the Paris agreement that seemed salvageable were the repatriation operation, which had picked up pace, and the elections, which had been scheduled for May 1993. Hun Sen saw that Prince Sihanouk’s son Ranariddh was his main opposition and began physically assaulting candidates in his party. UN police continued to trickle into Cambodia, but they were spread too thin to investigate human rights complaints, protect voter registration sites, or guard political party offices.¹⁴ Lacking the power to make arrests, they could not stop Hun Sen’s hit squads from assaulting political opponents or Khmer Rouge forces from attacking ethnic Vietnamese with impunity.

Prince Sihanouk denounced UNTAC’s failure to punish Hun Sen’s attacks. He said that while he and the Cambodian people had initially welcomed the UN, they had come to realize that “UNTAC is a terrible cocktail of races who do not even understand each other.” Sihanouk said that thanks to the arrival of thousands of Vietnamese prostitutes, and the tremendous spike in prices caused by the peacekeepers’ arrival, “UNTAC is detested, hated.”¹⁵ He criticized the UN’s decision to proceed with the elections. “In order to be able to tell the UN and the world that they have succeeded in their mission, UNTAC is going to have an election despite the fact none of the conditions for the election have been met. None. It is a hideous comedy.”¹⁶

In January 1993 Akashi reacted to the criticism—which had initially come only from the Khmer Rouge but was now emanating from all sides—by creating, for the first time in the history of the UN, a UN special prosecutor’s office with the power to arrest and punish those suspected of committing political crimes and human rights violations. The very first UN arrest was made on January 11, when a Cambodian government official was apprehended while he was destroying an opposition party office with an ax. However, because the UN did not itself have the facilities or the personnel to prosecute suspects, it handed the man over to the Cambodian police, who promptly released him.¹⁷

With Cambodia increasingly resembling the Wild West, the Khmer Rouge too grew yet more brazen. In December 1992 they took some sixty-seven UNTAC peacekeepers hostage, charging them with spying on behalf of Hun Sen and the Vietnamese.¹⁸ On December 27, 1992, they massacred thirteen ethnic Vietnamese, including four children, in a river village.The killers scattered leaflets that demanded that Akashi rid the country of Vietnamese. A month later the Khmer Rouge killed eight people, including three local policemen and an eight-year-old girl.¹⁹

In his correspondence with UN Headquarters, Vieira de Mello noted a “clear trend” in the Khmer Rouge ranks toward “isolationism, introversion and pathological suspiciousness.” But while his boss Akashi favored sanctions, he continued to believe that further punitive measures would only cause the Khmer Rouge to opt out of the political process altogether.²⁰ On March 10, 1993, in another fishing village in Siem Reap province, the Khmer Rouge killed thirty-three ethnic Vietnamese and wounded another twenty-nine. Among those killed were eight children and a baby.²¹ It was the worst massacre of the postwar period. On March 27, 1993, a Bangladeshi soldier was killed in the first deliberate murder of UNTAC personnel. By May, the month of the vote, eleven UNTAC civilians and soldiers had been killed.

“ONE IN MANY UNKNOWN STORIES”

Remarkably, amid all the massacres and military skirmishes,Vieira de Mello’s repatriation effort proceeded smoothly. The operation that filled him with the most pride involved a weary and malaria-infected group of displaced Montagnards (French for “mountain people”) whom UNTAC soldiers had encountered on patrol in the dense forests of northeastern Cambodia. The Montagnards had lived in the central highlands of Vietnam and teamed up with U.S. Special Forces to fight the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In 1979, facing persecution for their pro-American allegiances, they had fled from Vietnam to Cambodia, where they were also shunned by Cambodians hostile to anybody associated with Vietnam.

Throughout long bouts of fighting and hardship, the Montagnards had relied on shortwave radio sermons and a few worn Bibles translated into their dialect in order to maintain their Christian faith.²² The Montagnards had attracted some interest in the United States in 1985, when Lutheran missionaries in Raleigh, North Carolina, helped resettle some two hundred there. But until Vieira de Mello and UNHCR took interest in them, the rest of their group had languished in the Cambodian bush.

The Security Council had tasked UNTAC with demobilizing and disarming all military elements, but when the Montagnards were discovered, their commander, Colonel Y-Pen Ayun, was reluctant to comply for fear his people would be forced back to Vietnam. He said his men could turn over their arms only if they got instructions to do so from their leader, a general whom they had been waiting to hear from since 1975. UN officials had the unfortunate task of breaking the bad news to Ayun that their leader had been executed by the Khmer Rouge almost as soon as he had traveled to Phnom Penh nearly two decades before. When Ayun was told the news, he and his men protested, asking the UN for proof of the general’s murder, but eventually their eyes filled with tears and they realized that their long journey in the wilderness was over. Ayun’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Y-Hinnie, told Nate Thayer of the Far Eastern Economic Review, “I am not angry, but very sad that the Americans forgot us. The Americans are like our elder brother, so it is very sad when your brother forgets you.”²³ Ayun told UN officials that since his people were unwelcome in both Vietnam and Cambodia, they wanted to join their kin in North Carolina.

Vieira de Mello knew that responding to the plight of the Montagnards would consume sizable staff resources and would have scant bearing on Cambodia’s future. But he saw an opportunity to close one of the many doors the cold war had left ajar, to personally guarantee the safety of a forgotten ethnic minority, and, not incidentally, to cater to a useful and vocal Christian constituency in the United States. On September 28, 1992, he paid the Montagnards an incognito visit and, in a meeting with Colonel Ayun, produced a pen and a notebook and declared, “Put your disarmament in writing!” After more than thirty years as a fighting force, Ayun wrote in cursive handwriting, “We the Montagnard people . . . have today put down our arms and have agreed to dismantle our military and political movement and stop and never start again any hostile activities of any kinds. We agreed to do all this so that we can become refugees and be resettled in the U.S. where we want to live in peace.”²⁴

Vieira de Mello presided over a brief ceremony in the middle of the jungle, where Ayun’s men solemnly handed over 144 old but well-maintained AK-47 assault rifles and 2,557 rounds of ammunition. The Montagnards lowered their flag and handed it to Vieira de Mello, who later hung it in his UN office in Geneva.

On October 10, 1992, he faxed a note to Lionel Rosenblatt, one of the group’s long-standing advocates in the United States:

Dear Lionel,

Operation concluded!

They were disarmed between last night and this morning (144 weapons), dissolved as a political/military organization and were relocated¹² . . .

The ball is in your court.

Please help with expedited processing.

All the best and thanks,

Sergio

Pushed by Rosenblatt and other refugee advocates, President George H. W. Bush’s administration sent immigration officers to Cambodia in record speed. Within six weeks all the Montagnards had been resettled in North Carolina, the home state of Republican senator Jesse Helms, who had taken a personal interest in this persecuted Christian group.

Early on in his career Vieira de Mello had observed military commanders routinely take note of the achievements of their soldiers in written letters of thanks and commendation. He brought this practice to the world of UN civilian performance and became famous among UN staff for his thank-you letters. After this operation he quickly wrote to General Sanderson, expressing his personal thanks to the Uruguayan colonel, the Ghanaian major, the Malian captain, the Australian private, and the American navy major who provided invaluable assistance in the repatriation operation. In a memo back to UNHCR headquarters,Vieira de Mello also handwrote a note crediting Giuseppe de Vincentis, the young UNHCR field officer, for his leadership on the issue. “Peppe can be proud of what he did,” Vieira de Mello wrote. “One of the last pages of [the] IndoChinese tragedy was resolved peacefully. Only one in many unknown stories in the careers of HCR staff and small humanitarian achievements that give us pride in serving UNHCR.”²⁶

While the return of the Montagnards earned Vieira de Mello friends in the United States, his reputation was solidified globally because the larger repatriation operation never suffered the calamities that Cambodians or international experts had predicted. Although the returns had started slowly, as the election approached UNHCR was meeting its target of sending home some 40,000 Cambodians each month. Refugees relied upon the UN for bus and train transit, for protection against banditry and extortion en route, for assistance in tracking down family members, and of course for food, land, building materials, and cash. By the time of the elections in May 1993 a total of 362,209 Cambodians had returned, 90,000 of whom took the refurbished train from Sisophon to Phnom Penh. Most of them rushed back to the places where they had grown up. And to the surprise of outside experts, those refugees who had lived in a camp controlled by one of the three opposition factions showed great independence in their choices, often choosing to return to land that was under the grip of Hun Sen. Only one returnee died en route—in a bus accident in Thailand.²⁷

“Our mistake was being too paternalistic,” Vieira de Mello told a journalist, decrying the “imbecilic notion” of “telling people where to go.”²⁸ He observed that he had been wrong to assume that the refugees in the camps “had lost any initiative, any freedom of judgment, any freedom of thought; had become totally dependent and might follow the instructions of their leaders like sheep.” He had found the opposite. “The moment you removed the lid,” he recalled, “they were quite capable of deciding for themselves.”²⁹Like Thomas Jamieson, he would henceforth be a fierce advocate of relying on refugees for planning guidance.

In March 1993 the last convoy of 199 returnees left Khao-I-Dang, the oldest of the refugee camps and the backdrop for the final scene in the film The Killing Fields. In his remarks at the closing ceremony, Vieira de Mello reported that since 1979 nearly 235,000 Cambodian refugees had been resettled from camps in Thailand to the United States and elsewhere overseas. But the international community should not treat this as a source of pride, he said. “I cannot but share the misgivings of a former colleague,” he declared, “when he said many years ago that he could never quite see how we were contributing to the solution of Cambodia’s problem by flying its few remaining qualified people to new homes thousands of miles away.”³⁰ Having managed the repatriation and stuck to deadlines that others had faulted,Vieira de Mello was proud of having “proved wrong all the prophecies of doom.”³¹

EXIT

The previous April, when Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had visited Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had personally escorted him around. Having laid out the risks of renewed civil war, he explained to the secretary-general how each challenge could be overcome.“I am optimistic like you,” Boutros-Ghali had said.³² Vieira de Mello had never before had the opportunity to perform before a UN secretary-general, and he made a memorable impression. Jean-Claude Aimé, whom Vieira de Mello had worked with in Bangladesh and Lebanon, and who was Boutros-Ghali’s chief of staff, told him that the secretary-general had big plans for him.

Boutros-Ghali returned to Phnom Penh in April 1993, a year after his first visit, to usher in Cambodia’s election season. Some twenty political parties had registered, and they faced serious risks. He got a taste of the violence on his second day in the country when four Cambodian gunmen shot dead a twenty-five-year-old Japanese volunteer election supervisor, the sixth UN worker killed in two weeks. In the wake of the murder, UN security officials held emergency meetings aimed at enhancing security for staff. Armed UN troops and barbed-wire barricades blocked the roads around UNTAC headquarters. But Boutros-Ghali took a tough line, declaring in a speech: “The UN will not be intimidated by violence. The election will take place.”³³ In mid-April, however, Khieu Samphan cast further doubt on this proclamation when he announced that he and other Khmer Rouge leaders were leaving

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and his special representative Yasushi Akashi being briefed by Vieira de Mello on his repatriation plan, April 19, 1992.

Phnom Penh and formally withdrawing from the Paris peace process. They would not participate in the elections.

With violence flaring and UNTAC foundering, many UN officials had assumed that Vieira de Mello would find a way to remain in Cambodia through the landmark elections. But to his delight Boutros-Ghali asked him to serve as his envoy to Angola. Although he had been separated from his family for a year and a half, he did not hesitate before accepting the promotion. While Akashi had pointedly excluded him from strategic decision making in Cambodia, in Angola he would be the boss. He would answer only to the secretary-general and to the countries on the Security Council. He would no longer have to use humanitarian successes to pursue political ends. He could tackle political and diplomatic challenges head-on, while leaving the delivery of the “groceries” to others.

Angola had been at war almost nonstop since its Portuguese colonizers had departed in 1975. It had held its first free elections in September 1992, but Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the rebel movement, had lost the vote and again taken up arms. It would be up to Vieira de Mello to try to end the civil war for good. Although the challenge was enormous, after nearly a quarter century in the UN, he believed he was up to it. He would be returning to a neighborhood he knew well from his time in Mozambique in the 1970s, he would be able to speak his native Portuguese, and he would draw on the negotiation skills he had honed with the Khmer Rouge and others.

He informed his UN colleagues that he would be leaving Cambodia before the elections. “I would stay if I could,” he said, “but the secretary-general has asked me to go.”When he invoked the UN’s highest authority, he could sound alternately pompous and self-parodying. His colleagues were disappointed. “Things felt like they were going to hell,” recalls Michael Williams, who worked as Dennis McNamara’s deputy in UNTAC’s Human Rights Division.“Sergio was this dynamic and commanding figure in UNTAC, and UNTAC didn’t have commanding figures.We were worried that Cambodia would descend into civil war, and the best we had was leaving. We were stunned.”

At Vieira de Mello’s going-away party Andrew Thomson made the mistake of asking Mieke Bos if she, too, was moving to Angola. “No,” she said tersely, “I’m staying here.” Vieira de Mello flew from Phnom Penh to Brazil, where he took his family on a ten-day vacation. He left knowing that his job had been well done but that the UN mission as a whole still hung in the balance.

Once he got back to Geneva, he busily assembled his Angola team. Squatting in a temporary office in an annex building near the main UNHCR headquarters, he began telephoning colleagues to try to persuade them to join him. Many turned him down because it was a hardship post to which they could not bring their families, or because they spoke only French and English and not Portuguese. When Annick Roulet, Vieira de Mello’s communications officer in Cambodia, refused on linguistic grounds, he waved off her worries. “Come on,” he said. “You have a month to learn, and Portuguese is a very easy language.” Roulet shook her head. “Sergio,” she said, “you have no credibility: Every language is easy for you.” But he prevailed, and Roulet again agreed to accompany him.

Vieira de Mello’s giddy scheming proved short-lived. On May 11, 1993, the UN leaked unofficial word that he was to be named the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Angola.³⁴ Several days later he received a call from Boutros-Ghali’s office in New York informing him that his candidacy had been nixed. UN officials had cleared his appointment with the Angolan government, but they had somehow failed to consult with Savimbi, and the rebels were furious. They had “nothing against” Vieira de Mello personally, a rebel spokesman said, but under no circumstances would they work with a Brazilian national.³⁵ Savimbi had never forgiven Brazil for having been the first Western nation to recognize Angolan independence under his rival Agostinho Neto in 1975. And he even accused Brazil of helping rig the country’s recent elections in favor of the ruling party.³⁶ “How can a Brazilian citizen claim to be neutral when they actively helped President dos Santos to be elected?” a rebel official asked.³⁷

Vieira de Mello was crushed. His paychecks at UNHCR had already been suspended—his salary was to be paid by the UN Secretariat in New York—and he had practically booked his flight to Angola. “Ogata has already given me farewell presents,” he complained to friends, referring to the high commissioner for refugees. “Now what?” He was furious with Boutros-Ghali and his staff for mishandling the appointment. Also, although he was a proud Brazilian, he had not lived in Brazil since he was a teenager and had no connection with the government there. Yet he was being held responsible for Brazil’s policies. He had grown so devoted to the transnational ideals of the United Nations that it infuriated him when others pigeonholed him on the basis of nationality.“How could they saddle me with the sins of a government I can’t control?” he asked sympathetic colleagues, though he knew full well that such lumping was commonplace in the UN.

He kept busy in Geneva by reading press reports and UN cables from Cambodia. But the news from the country he had left was grim. Between March 1 and May 14 more than a hundred violent incidents had been recorded, causing 200 deaths, 338 injuries, and 114 abductions.³⁸ UN Headquarters had ordered the families of UN officials to evacuate Cambodia. Some three hundred polling sites had been closed because of the violence. UNTAC’s goal, when it arrived fourteen months before, had been to preside over “free and fair” elections. By the time of the vote, though, UNTAC’s electoral director Reginald Austin was saying that the UN would content itself with establishing whatever “neutral political acreages” it could.The main goal was to stage a vote without igniting another civil war. On the eve of the vote Akashi, who had consistently attempted to claim the peace process was on track, could only muster: “I can say with every confidence that this election will be the freest and fairest in Cambodia’s recent history.”³⁹ This was not saying much, as each of Cambodia’s previous elections had been marred by coercion and terror.

Miraculously, the elections proved a calm and inspiring success. On May 23, the first day of voting, Vieira de Mello read reports of jubilant and defiant Cambodians queuing up for hours to vote. By the end of the six-day process, nearly 90 percent of Cambodia’s 4.7 million registered voters had cast ballots. One of the great mysteries of the vote was why the Khmer Rouge, who had pulled out of the Paris agreement, did not sabotage it. “All they had to do was kill a bunch of foreigners,” recalls Austin, “and that would have shut the whole thing down.” Every UN official had a theory as to why the Khmer Rouge did not act up. Clearly, the revolutionaries were divided among themselves, and their organizational structure had broken down. But, Austin speculates, “partly it was because Sergio had softened them up somewhat. He ensured that ‘foreigners’ or ‘UN officials’ were no longer abstractions to the senior Khmer Rouge command.”

Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son, won a near majority in the vote, taking 58 seats out of the 120 in the constituent assembly. Hun Sen’s ruling party came in second, scoring 51 seats. Initially Hun Sen contested the results, persuading seven provinces to announce they would secede from Cambodia. But the elder Sihanouk soon persuaded him to join the new government. As the UNTAC mandate expired, Prince Sihanouk was crowned Cambodia’s king, Ranariddh became first prime minister, and Hun Sen became second prime minister.

The negotiations on the shape of Cambodia’s coalition government proved far more important than the voting itself. Yet at precisely the time international attention was needed, UN officials were declaring successful elections and preparing to head home. “The distinct message from the Security Council and from Boutros-Ghali was ‘hold the elections and get the hell out,’ ” McNamara remembers.

By the end of 1993 all UNTAC staff had vanished from the country. The mission had cost $2.5 billion, by far the most expensive in UN history, but it left little tangible behind it—besides a fragile, divided government .⁴⁰

The following year Vieira de Mello got word that the Cambodian army had attacked and completely destroyed the Khmer Rouge’s “model village” settlement of Yeah Ath, sending several thousand people fleeing yet again. He later described the event as “one of the saddest moments in my career, in my life, to realize that something that we had been working on so carefully, so prudently, and that we had hoped would be like a crack in the wall, in the impenetrable wall that surrounded the Khmer Rouge areas, and that we hoped would also serve as a model inside, it went literally down the drain.”⁴¹ He sent a note to James Lynch in Kenya, in which he confessed he had been “naïve” to think that Hun Sen would allow a utopian Khmer Rouge farming village to flourish right under his nose.” The news from Cambodia would only get worse. In July 1997 Hun Sen deposed Ranariddh in a coup, disavowing the results of the UN election.

STALLED

Vieira de Mello was out of a job. Ogata was grateful for his services, but she had filled all of her senior positions assuming that he was heading to Angola. He tried to make a virtue out of necessity. “I’ve always said I wanted time to reflect and write,” he told colleagues. “Well, now I have all the time in the world. Be careful what you wish for.”

Cooped up at a borrowed desk in the UNHCR annex—Dennis McNamara teased his friend that he was being housed in a “cupboard”—Vieira de Mello read and commented on a lengthy manuscript by researcher Courtland Robinson on the repatriation operation. He had opened up UNHCR’s files to Robinson and felt a little stung by the critique. He wrote to Robinson, “Never forget that what may be obvious after the fact requires a great deal of soul-searching and debate and involves a lot of anxiety and uncertainty before the fact, especially when a decision affecting the lives of people is about to be taken.” Robinson criticized UNHCR’s decision to return refugees to unsafe areas. Here Vieira de Mello accepted the charge but wrote, “It is difficult to imagine how one could spell out conditions under which return may be deemed safe. Should, for instance, returnees require higher standards than those enjoyed by the majority that never left?” He urged Robinson to take on UNTAC’s most serious weakness: the absence of a meaningful economic rehabilitation strategy, which undermined Cambodia’s long-term prospects.⁴²

He spent the summer of 1993 in Geneva on the telephone to UN Headquarters in New York attempting to scrounge up a useful job, contemplating his future, and drafting a book proposal, which he tentatively titled “Deceit and Estrangement: The Aborted Relationship Between the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Peace Process (1989-1993).” At the heart of his proposal, which would examine whether the Khmer Rouge could have been kept engaged, was an implicit question: Which approach was more fruitful—his or Akashi’s? In terms of outcomes, he knew that he had the edge, as 360,000 Cambodian refugees had returned safely, including 77,000-plus who had been trapped in Khmer Rouge-controlled camps. But he also knew that lessons from the humanitarian sphere could not always be applied to the political realm. Still, he believed Akashi had been wrong to push the already-mistrustful Maoist guerrillas into an even darker and more suspicious vortex of isolation than the one they had inhabited when the UN first arrived. What was required, there and elsewhere, Vieira de Mello wrote, was “a dynamic even-handed diplomacy open to all the parties to the conflict.”⁴³

His pitch to Ogata was endearing. It was that of a man determined to remain a student all of his life. “As you know,” he wrote to her, “I have followed Cambodian affairs since University.” He did not request a study leave but said he intended to use his spare time and annual leave to conduct the research. He did not seem to mind much that any project tacked on to his normal seventy- or eighty-hour workweek would further reduce the time he spent with his family. He argued that his study would help strengthen the UN capacity “to resolve internal conflicts in the turbulent times ahead.”

A UN man to his core, he knew that the organization frowned upon those officials who drew upon their field and diplomatic experiences to produce public manifestos. He wrote to Ogata, “I trust that my nearly twenty-four years of service with the Organization and my academic record will suffice as a guarantee of my ability to use the information at my disposal in the interest and not the detriment of the United Nations.”⁴⁴

But his credentials did not suffice. Christine Dodson, director of personnel at UN Headquarters in New York, responded to his request. “Mr. Vieira de Mello is of course at liberty to engage in personal research in his own time on any topic. However he should bear in mind that any manuscript that emerges would have to be submitted to the Secretary-General for approval. . . . Such approval seems unlikely to be granted.”⁴⁵

Vieira de Mello spent the summer of 1993 overcome by the most severe wave of professional self-doubt he had ever experienced. “I’m not going anywhere in the UN,” he told Irene Khan, a UNHCR colleague who would later become secretary-general of Amnesty International. “What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re not even forty-five!” “Yes,” he said, “but at fifty I could be dead.” Because of his father’s death at fifty-nine, he carried with him a persistent fear of heart attack. Famously fond of his whiskey, he had cut back significantly in his thirties. He told friends,“I don’t want to end up like my father.” He exercised obsessively and kept vigilant tabs on his cholesterol and blood pressure. After one doctor’s appointment in Geneva, he returned to the office, and his assistant inquired after his results. “Everything is fine except there is a little fluctuation in my cardia,” he said. “Just like my father.” While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had received a letter from a Canadian researcher requesting an interview. He had jotted a note at the bottom of her letter in black pen, “Ok for mid-Dec if still around or alive.”⁴⁶

His colleagues in UNHCR saw that he had outgrown the humanitarian agency that had been his home for twenty-four years. They were stunned that Boutros-Ghali had not found a place for him. “Sergio, they have no idea what they are missing,” Jahanshah Assadi said to his friend. “You are this diamond in the rough, and they will find you.” Vieira de Mello shook his head. “You know how it is, Jahanshah,” he said. “We are the lowly humanitarians.We’re the guys who pass out food and fix roads. They look down on us elsewhere in the UN.They don’t see us as capable of handling high politics.” Assadi agreed. “That’s all true, Sergio, but once they get their hands on you, they will not let you go.” Many UN officials were already speculating that he would be the first person to scale the rungs of UNHCR to succeed Ogata as the high commissioner, or even move beyond to do what no lifelong UN civil servant to that point had ever done—become secretary-general of the whole United Nations. Alluding to the top floor of UN Headquarters where the secretary-general kept his office, Omar Bakhet reassured his friend that the pause was only temporary, saying, “Sergio, you will ride the escalator from Cambodia all the way up to the thirty-eighth floor.”

While in Cambodia, Vieira de Mello had read the bloody news from the former Yugoslavia. An Italian UN colleague of his, Staffan de Mistura, had even called him in Phnom Penh from a guesthouse in Serb territory for advice on how to get a convoy of 80,000 blankets past an angry throng of Serb women who were blocking the only roads to Bosnian territory. Vieira de Mello urged him to think laterally. “When there is a wall in front of you,” he said by phone,“you either break it, you jump over it if you are tall enough, or you bypass it.” When de Mistura said he couldn’t bypass five hundred women,Vieira de Mello asked why he didn’t hire Serb smugglers.“The trick will be the carrot,” he said. “Money may not be enough. Give them something morally different from what they get in their lives. Give them a sense of dignity.” Vieira de Mello suggested de Mistura match the pay the black marketeers got for smuggling cigarettes but also provide a certificate that said “UN consultant.” The “Sergio solution” worked, as the smugglers got the blankets through, and when de Mistura visited one of them in his home months later, he saw the UN certificate hanging above his fireplace.

But while Vieira de Mello was always willing to don his thinking cap for a colleague, he had no particular attachment to the former Yugoslavia and generally found himself resenting the amount of staff and press attention it consumed relative to Cambodia. Bosnia’s war was unfortunate, of course, but Cambodia, which received far less political attention, had seemed to have a genuine chance at peace. Yet donor countries spent twenty-four times more per capita in Bosnia than they did in Cambodia. He had quietly applauded when in July 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had outraged sensibilities in the Western world by defiantly dubbing the Bosnia conflict “a rich man’s war” and later saying on a visit to Bosnia,“You have a situation that is better than ten other places in the world. I can give you a list.”⁴⁷

Perhaps because he felt his personal clock ticking, Vieira de Mello seemed to be in a great hurry to register his professional achievements. On the few occasions when he felt his career was stalled—and this was one—he fell into a fearsome funk. But even in such a low period, his wide smile and humor shielded most of his colleagues from his insecurities. “It’s ok,” he said, “as long as they don’t send me to the former Yugoslavia!”⁴⁸ Having expressed misgivings about working in the Balkans, however, he promptly turned his attention to securing the most high-level job there that he could find.

After six months of limbo in Geneva, Vieira de Mello was named the Bosnia-based political adviser to Thorvald Stoltenberg, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the former Yugoslavia. Stoltenberg was the same man whom Vieira de Mello blamed for hastily jumping ship as high commissioner three years before.

In one sense the Bosnia job compounded Vieira de Mello’s sense of professional stagnation. Despite all of his feats—serving as High Commissioner Hocké’s chief of staff, negotiating the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Vietnamese boat people, and overseeing the massive repatriation operation in Cambodia—he was returning to a job similar to the one he had held a decade before when he advised General Callaghan in Lebanon. In order to serve Stoltenberg, he would again work at the right hand of the generals who commanded the peacekeepers. He would assess the political climate in Bosnia and identify humanitarian and diplomatic targets of opportunity for what was known as the UN Protection Force, or UNPROFOR.

While in Lebanon, Vieira de Mello had signed up for a relatively peaceful mission that had turned violent with the Israeli invasion in 1982, in the Balkans he knew from the outset that he was entering a raging war zone. U.S. and European statesmen would continue to try to broker a political settlement, and he and the UN peacekeepers would try to build local confidence by easing civilian suffering on the ground. “I’m heading into Dante’s inferno,” he told friends.

The optimism that had followed the fall of the Berlin Wall had faded. Indeed, by the time of his posting to Sarajevo, the eruption of ethnic violence across the globe had begun to stir a nostalgia among pundits for the stability of the mutually assured destruction of the cold war. The democracies that had triumphed against Communism seemed outmatched by a new generation of brazen ethnic and religious nationalists and warlords. And whatever hopes existed for a UN renaissance seemed to die the very week of his departure for the Balkans.

On October 4, 1993, three days before he would fly to the former Yugoslavia, he watched chilling television footage from Mogadishu, Somalia.⁴⁹ Over the course of the street battle, Somali fighters loyal to Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. soldiers. More than a thousand Somalis were also thought to have died. The evening news depicted jubilant Somalis dragging the mutilated corpse of a naked U.S. soldier along the streets of Mogadishu. The Somalia fiasco would prove to be one of the pivotal events of the 1990s. Because U.S. soldiers had gone to Somalia to assist a beleaguered UN mission, the incident solidified the anti-UN prejudice of many in the U.S. Congress and deepened the Pentagon’s distrust of the Clinton administration, which it blamed for sending U.S. troops into harm’s way without a proper plan.

At a news conference after the firefight, President Clinton said,“I still believe that UN peacekeeping is important. And I still believe that America can play a role in that.” But he urged the UN to learn from its recent struggles. “The UN went into Cambodia first of all with this theory about what they had to do to or with the Khmer Rouge, and then moved away from any kind of military approach . . . in effect, creating a process in which the local people had to take responsibility for their own future. If we are going to do that kind of work, we ought to take the Cambodian model in Somalia and everyplace else.”⁵⁰Vieira de Mello was proud of his achievements in Cambodia, but he knew the flaws of the UNTAC mission, and he knew that the key predictor of any UN mission’s success was its clarity of purpose and the backing it got from the major powers. He initially thought that what the Balkan mission lacked in clarity, it gained in support from the major powers. But he did not realize how divided those powers were over what should be done, and he did not foresee how he, the UN he cherished, and Bosnia itself would suffer the consequences.