Seven
If the UN’s Cambodia mission had put a dent in Vieira de Mello’s hopes for a “new world order,” his time in Bosnia would temporarily extinguish them. On October 7, 1993, unaware of just how dark a pall Somalia would cast over UN operations around the world, he said good-bye to his wife and sons, fifteen and thirteen, and made his way to the familiar Geneva airport to embark upon yet another journey into the unknown.
Although UN Headquarters in New York had kept him waiting for months before offering him the Bosnia posting, his bosses now wanted him in place immediately. Amid the craze of his departure, Annick Roulet, his friend and former press officer in Cambodia, had been unable to steal time to discuss how she might support him from Geneva. They had agreed to meet at the airport for a cup of coffee before his flight.
Roulet was on time, but he burst through the doors of the airport just forty-five minutes before his plane was to depart. “I’m sorry, Annick,” he said, breathlessly. “I think we’ll only manage a quick hello.” She proceeded to the nearest ticket desk and purchased a business-class ticket to London. “What have you done?” he asked when she rejoined him in the security line. “Working for you,” she said, “one learns to innovate.” He glanced at the ticket she was holding. “Why London?” he asked. “Why not London?” she answered. After clearing security, the two shared a relaxed cup of coffee in the business-class lounge in the departures area. When it was time for him to board, Roulet walked him to his gate and then retraced her steps, exiting the terminal and apologetically informing the Swissair agent that her boss had just called canceling her London meeting. She received a full refund.
Vieira de Mello knew the basics of the crisis. Slovenia and Croatia had seceded from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in 1991, and a bloody war had ensued. At just the time he had been complaining about the slow deployment of UN peacekeepers to Cambodia in 1992, the UN’s tiny Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York had been attempting to find an additional 14,000 peacekeepers to send to Croatia to patrol a shaky cease-fire there. Then in April 1992, with the peacekeeping office stretched to its breaking point, Bosnia too had declared independence from Yugoslavia, and Serb nationalists had declared war. Bosnia’s population (43 percent Bosnian, 35 percent Serb, and 18 percent Croat) lived so intermingled that the violence instantly turned savage.13Serb paramilitary forces herded Bosnian and Croat men into concentration camps, burned down non-Serb villages, and besieged a number of heavily populated towns that the UN Security Council eventually declared “safe areas.”
With the murder of European civilians captured on television, the pressure mounted on President Bush to intervene in the Balkans as he had done over Kuwait in 1991. But the circumstances in the Gulf had been very different from those in the former Yugoslavia. Saddam Hussein had invaded a neighbor and threatened U.S. oil supplies. Bosnia was home to a messy civil war that the Bush administration did not feel threatened “vital U.S. interests.”
But because the Western media covered the Bosnian conflict incessantly, the major powers could not afford to look away entirely. The United States joined European countries in funding UN humanitarian agencies that fed the war’s victims. The Security Council voted to send UN peacekeepers to the war-torn country in order to escort the aid workers who were delivering relief, and a number of European countries contributed soldiers to the dangerous mission. By the time of Vieira de Mello’s posting, the French had put more than 3,000 troops in Bosnia, the British nearly 2,300, and the Spanish over 1,200.1 But Western governments told their soldiers with the UN to avoid risk, and the blue helmets rarely fought back against marauding militia. Each country on the Security Council framed the crisis differently: the Bush and later Clinton administrations, which refused to put boots on the ground, blamed the Serbs for their “war of aggression”; Britain and France, which had troops in harm’s way, wanted to stay neutral in the conflict and played up a “tragic civil war”; and the Russians, out of solidarity with their fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs, sided with the Serbs. These divisions among the UN’s most powerful countries would paralyze the mission Vieira de Mello was joining.
For all of the shortcomings of the UN mission in Cambodia, its two concrete achievements—the return of 360,000 refugees and the elections—had earned it a fairly glowing reputation outside Asia. By contrast, UNPROFOR was already seen as a “loser.” Few Bosnians read the fine print of UN mandates and inevitably saw the peacekeepers in their flak jackets, blue helmets, and armored personnel carriers as protectors. They were thus crushed to realize that most peacekeepers saw themselves as mere monitors.
FORcE PROTECTION
Vieira de Mello spent October 7 in Zagreb, the peaceful capital of Croatia where UNPROFOR kept its headquarters, then flew to Sarajevo. One of the UN’s most significant achievements in the region had been the establishment of a humanitarian airlift into the Bosnian capital, which was encircled by Bosnian Serb gunners. The UN relied on the airport, which it controlled, to transport its peacekeepers and supplies, to fly in journalists who were essential for maintaining public support and funding for the mission, and to deliver humanitarian relief to trapped civilians.The cargo planes were flown by American, French, British, German, and Canadian pilots, who operated what they called “Maybe Airlines.”2
By the time of Vieira de Mello’s arrival, the daredevil pilots had grown quite practiced at evading Serb attacks, but it meant a roller coaster of a ride. He had been warned that Serb gunfire could pierce the base of the plane and penetrate his seat from below, so he sat atop his flak jacket and braced for what he knew would be a rapid and unwieldy descent. Starting at 18,000 feet, the plane took a steep and unforgiving dive, leveled for a short stretch, and then plunged again, this time twisting to and fro in order to prevent Serb ground missile sites from locking on. At the last minute the nose of the plane jerked upward, and the wheels crashed into the runway, jolting him and the other passengers forward. After the plane had skidded to a halt, he disembarked carrying a light suitcase and a briefcase.
The journey from the airport offered him his first in-person glimpse of the Bosnian war. Sarajevo had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and he was told that the identical rectangular gray concrete apartment buildings around the airport had housed the athletes.The complex was so gutted by shell and sniper fire that he assumed it had been deserted. But a closer inspection revealed flowerpots on the window ledges, laundry hanging between telephone poles outside, and children kicking soccer balls against entranceways. Plastic sheeting affixed with the UNHCR logo had replaced glass in almost all the windows. Rusted hulks of cars had been propped on their sides along the road in a largely futile effort to shield pedestrians.
Vieira de Mello’s UN driver brought him to the bunkered compound where he would work and live for the next several months. The “UN residency” was located in the former Delegates’ Club of the Yugoslav Communist Party, and it was a frequent target of Serb sniper and shell fire. He was shown a tiny office next to the briefing room, which would double as his sleeping quarters. Because he could speak with nearly all of the UNPROFOR officers in their native tongues, he quickly became a popular presence. But the soldiers teased him for his primness. The Belgian who commanded UN forces in Bosnia, Francis Briquemont, marveled at the number of times during the day that he spotted Vieira de Mello shuttling to and from the bathroom with his toothbrush and toothpaste.3
Vieira de Mello and his UN colleagues kept attuned to events in Somalia. Initially, in the wake of the October 4 firefight, the Clinton administration did just what the Reagan administration had done after the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983—it pledged it would remain until the job was done. “We came to Somalia to rescue innocent people in a burning house,” President Clinton said in an address from the Oval Office, the day of Vieira de Mello’s arrival in Sarajevo. By remaining, Clinton said, “we’ve got a reasonable chance of cooling off the embers and getting other firefighters to take our place. So now we face a choice. Do we leave when the job gets tough, or when the job is well done?” Clinton announced that he was sending some 1,700 reinforcements, 104 additional armored vehicles, an aircraft carrier, and 3,600 offshore Marines.4
But as Vieira de Mello adjusted to life under siege in Sarajevo, Clinton changed his mind. On October 19 the president backtracked—again as the Reagan administration had done almost exactly a decade before—announcing that U.S. forces in Somalia would “stand down.”5 The United States would not attempt to apprehend General Aideed. Indeed, the man whom Clinton officials had so recently branded a “thug” was now described by a Clinton spokesperson as “a clan leader with a substantial constituency in Somalia.”6
Vieira de Mello and his UN colleagues in Bosnia saw that the fates of the two missions were intertwined. In Somalia U.S. troops henceforth rarely ventured out of their compounds. “Force protection” became the American mantra. One U.S. officer was quoted in the Washington Post on the eve of his departure. “We’re not cops and we’re having to adopt war-fighting technology for a fugitive hunt in a city of about a million,” he said.7
Bosnia was similar to Somalia,Vieira de Mello understood, in that non-combatants in both places were the prime victims of the violence and the prime pawns of political leaders. Once-bustling cities were held under siege by Serb gunners, and snipers fired upon civilians carrying water or UN rations. The Bosnian army, which was much weaker than its Serb opponent, often positioned its weapons in civilian neighborhoods, despite knowing that the Serbs would retaliate disproportionately. They did so in part because the front lines ran close to the center of town and also in order to camouflage the few heavy weapons they had in their possession. The UN estimated that more than 90 percent of the 100,000 people eventually killed in the conflict were civilians. These “unconventional wars” would be the wars of the future.
CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT
Vieira de Mello loved being back with the military. He settled into a routine in Sarajevo, offering his political advice to Stoltenberg in Zagreb and counseling General Briquemont in Sarajevo, while building close ties with the key
Vieira de Mello (right) and UN Bosnia Force Commander Francis Briquemont (center) scouring the Bosnian hills.
Serb and Bosnian personalities. He was told his time in Bosnia would entail negotiating prisoner exchange agreements, cease-fires, and access for UN aid convoys. Prominent Western diplomats would be the ones to try to craft a lasting political settlement.
Stoltenberg was a career Norwegian politician, not a UN veteran. This led him to make choices that his new aide did not like.Vieira de Mello believed that the UN drew legitimacy and strength from the geographical diversity of its field staff. He was thus aghast when Stoltenberg decided to hire one Norwegian as his adviser and another as his deputy chief of mission. “He can’t do what he’s doing,” Vieira de Mello fumed to colleagues. “He’s not establishing a Norwegian foreign ministry in exile. He’s working now for the United Nations.” Stoltenberg, for his part, valued efficiency above what he saw as the UN’s overly romantic commitment to multinationality. He also did not think that his staffing choices were unusual. “It is common to have thirty French or fifty Americans in a mission,” he says, “but when you have three Norwegians, people start to talk.” Vieira de Mello, who rarely picked losing battles, avoided raising the matter with Stoltenberg directly.
Since the Serbs frequently obstructed the movement of UN relief deliveries, he purposefully cultivated a warm relationship with Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, who before the war had worked as a psychiatrist in Sarajevo and fancied himself a poet. Vieira de Mello was repulsed by the Bosnian Serb leader’s anti-Muslim fervor and unimpressed by his poetry, but he was determined—just as he had been with the Khmer Rouge’s Ieng Sary—to do what it took to butter up the Bosnian Serbs’ most influential politician. On one occasion, when he visited Bosnian Serb headquarters in the town of Pale, he brought a copy of The New York Review of Books as a gift to Karadžić, because it featured a cover story on psychiatry.8 Whenever the Serb leader saw fit to go on long rants about how Serbs were saving Christian civilization from a Muslim jihad, Vieira de Mello gave Karadžić his full attention. The only hint of his impatience with the Serb was the incessant jittering of his leg beneath the table. Alone with friends or colleagues, he complained about Karadžić’s bloviating and his incessant references to Serb grievances dating back to the fourteenth century. He said that he was tempted to open every meeting in the Balkans with the proviso “Today we are going to begin this meeting in 1945.” But in practice he never dared to alienate his interlocutors.
His closest friend in the Balkans was Haris Silajdžić, the dashing forty-eight-year-old prime minister of Bosnia.The two men talked about philosophy, music, and women. WhileVieira de Mello’s graciousness toward Karadžić was contrived, his affection toward Silajdžić was genuine. Each man delighted in being known as a lady-killer. On one occasion Silajdžić was half an hour late for one of their meetings. As the minutes ticked by, a Bosnian official suggested that since the prime minister had proven unreachable at his home and office, somebody might telephone a woman in the Bosnian government with whom he was said to be involved. When Vieira de Mello heard the name of the woman in question, he reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled upon it. “Perhaps I can help,” he said, smiling.
Silajdžić and Vieira de Mello both functioned on little sleep, so they frequently met for drinks or dinner in generator-powered restaurants, and they spoke by telephone at all hours. “Sergio came to breakfast with new ideas,” Silajdžić recalls. “That meant he had been thinking through the night.”
Not content to remain cooped up inside the secure but stuffy UN compound, Vieira de Mello tried to establish a connection with the “Bosnian street.” He explored the majestic, battered capital city with Lola Urošević, his twenty-eight-year-old translator, accompanying her on walks through the town, visiting her home, and getting to know her family. Urošević felt calmed by her boss’s presence. As sniper and shell fire crackled in the winter afternoons, he seemed unflustered and rarely wore his UN-issued flak jacket. “How could I wear that thing,” he asked her, “when you, your family, and neighbors walk around with nothing?” Back in the UN bunker with international staff, he explained his disavowal of the flak jacket in a more self-parodying way. “Do you have any idea how fat those things make you look?” he said.
Before the war Urošević had been a full-time medical student at the University of Sarajevo. But when the violence erupted, because she spoke French and English, she had gone to work for the UN, where she earned ten times the pay that she would have received had she practiced medicine. Vieira de Mello made a point of inquiring about Urošević’s studies, which she continued at night. One day when she hurried back to UN headquarters after a low-key ceremony celebrating her graduation, she found him smiling ear-to-ear in her office, along with several other colleagues. “Congratulations, Dr. Urošević ” he said. Reaching beneath his desk, he produced a bottle of champagne, an exotic commodity in the besieged capital. “I managed to track down a little something for the occasion!”
The suffering of Sarajevans made a deep impression on him.The city was filled with men and women of high culture and learning. As the temperature dropped and the frigid winter set in, proud Europeans who had run out of firewood began burning their books in order to cook UN humanitarian aid. And when the cemeteries quickly filled up, he watched Sarajevan families use once-placid city parks to bury their dead. He worked with General Briquemont to help smuggle gasoline for generators to a resistance organization called the Sarajevo Group of Authors, a gathering of Sarajevo’s leading filmmakers, artists, and students who composed eye-catching graphic art and films and exported them to Western capitals in the hopes of mobilizing a Western rescue operation.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
On December 24, 1993, while most UN officials around the world celebrated Christmas with their families, Vieira de Mello’s sympathy for the Bosnians prompted him to undertake one of his boldest schemes as a UN official. He summoned his new forty-four-year-old military aide, a Canadian major named John Russell, to his office. “John,” he said, “we’re going to break the siege of Sarajevo.” Russell was flummoxed. The Serbs had the city surrounded, and unless Russell had failed to notice a radical change of heart in Western capitals, the outside world had no intention of forcibly removing Serb forces from the deadly hills ringing the city. “I want you to find a way to get people out,” Vieira de Mello explained. “People who don’t fit within the UN rules, but who need to get out—because they can’t get the medical care they need here, because they are separated from a loved one, or because they can do more good on the outside than they are doing inside.” Russell nodded but, afraid he might not be up to the task, cautioned, “Okay, sir, but keep in mind that it was just two days ago that I learned where Sarajevo airport was.”
Vieira de Mello spent the next three days shuttling Russell around the city, introducing him to Bosnian officials as well as key international actors, such as the head of the French battalion in Sarajevo and the logistics and customs officials who ran the airlift at the airport.The pair also traveled to Pale, where they met with the Bosnian Serb authorities. Vieira de Mello’s introduction was the same in each instance. “This is John Russell. He is my new military aide. In my absence he speaks for me and for the United Nations.” Russell was taken aback by the gravity of his new responsibilities. “I was thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” he recalls. “Overnight I found myself operating at the highest level.”
Russell would manage what Vieira de Mello dubbed “the train,” a UN convoy that transported Bosnian civilians out of the city. The Canadian began timing trial runs to the airport. He clocked his trips down Sarajevo’s main boulevard, which had become known as “Sniper’s Alley.” In order to smuggle civilians out of the city, he would have to first pass through a checkpoint at the airport manned by armed Bosnians, then get by a Serb checkpoint, and finally get UN authorization.
Russell led the convoy in one of two cars—either Vieira de Mello’s personal car, a bullet-proof American Chevrolet, which the Bosnian and UN guards already recognized, or a standard-issue UN Nissan Pathfinder. Often the shell and sniper fire on Sniper’s Alley forced him to drive at a hundred miles per hour. The most perilous part of the journey came when the “train” reached the airport itself. In January 1993 the forty-seven-year-old Bosnian vice president Hakija Turajlic had been riding in the back of a French UN armored personnel carrier when Serb soldiers outside the airport stopped the vehicle, yanked Turajlic out, and killed him by firing seven bullets over the shoulder of his UN escort.9 In order to ensure that Vieira de Mello’s human cargo did not meet the same fate, Russell made sure that the door of each APC harboring Bosnian civilians was shuttered and locked from the inside.
In allowing the UN humanitarian airlift, the Serbs had granted a one-hour block of time to UN Hercules or Ilyushin cargo planes to fly in the morning and a second slot in the afternoon. Russell tried to ensure that every flight that left the city carried Bosnian civilians. Once the Bosnians under his charge had cleared the military checkpoints, he waited with them at the airport in the VIP lounge, away from aid workers, journalists, and diplomats. UN airport officials were under instructions to load Russell’s passengers onto the airplane before the others.
Vieira de Mello would cheerily check in every now and then (“Is the train running on time today, John?”) or would pass his aide a list of names of people to be evacuated (“Take care of this family, will you, John?”). He told Russell to select the most “deserving” cases but did not stipulate precise criteria. Deciding who was eligible to leave the city was by far the worst part of Russell’s job, and Vieira de Mello was glad it was a task he could delegate. “It’s a balancing act,” he said, instructing Russell to maximize the good they were doing but to be sure the train was not publicized. The more individuals the UN helped, the more likely it was that somebody would blurt out the details of the operation to the media, and either the Bosnian Serb authorities or the Bosnian government would shut it down. Russell usually took no more than a half-dozen civilians at a time.
The roster of those evacuated included a delegation of Bosnian athletes who Vieira de Mello thought would ably publicize the country’s suffering at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sarajevo, who had been granted an audience with the pope; a Bosnian doctor who enrolled in a specialized course in treating bullet wounds; and a man whose wife was dying of cancer in France.
As word began to spread across the capital that Russell was the man playing God at the UN, the Canadian grew edgy. One woman asked if she could bring her dog on the flight. He exploded.“I’m not going to waste my resources moving a fucking poodle around.” Another tried to bring a huge suitcase filled with books. “The UN is not Lufthansa,” Russell snapped. One woman had terminal cancer and wanted to seek treatment in Western Europe. Russell made a cold calculation in turning down her request. “There are only so many seats,” he said to himself, “and she’s going to die anyway. It’s sad, but I have to spend my time focusing on the living.” The only persons he automatically rejected were those who attempted to bribe him with sex or money, or Bosnian men of fighting age who he believed might be deserting. “I had people who kissed my hand like I was royalty,” Russell recalls. “But I also saw people I turned down, lying dead on the street. They died at my hands, indirectly.” All told, in the 110 days that he ran the train for Vieira de Mello, Russell rescued 298 people. Pat Dray, the Canadian captain who replaced him, evacuated several hundred more. Vieira de Mello did not discuss the operation, or his role in launching it, with his friends, colleagues, or critics.
In addition to getting certain Bosnians out of Sarajevo, he also worked on bringing important visitors in. The same week he initiated “the train,” he helped arrange for the American soprano Barbara Hendricks, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, to perform a New Year’s concert in Sarajevo. At midnight on December 31, 1993, in one of the few glimmers of hope the city had enjoyed in nearly two years, Hendricks sang with a much-shrunken Bosnian Symphony Orchestra. Many of its members had fled, been conscripted, or been killed, including a trombone player who had been shot the week before. Yet Vieira de Mello and some two hundred local and foreign dignitaries savored the sounds of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, and Schubert’s Ave Maria. The concert was broadcast live on local television, but because the city lacked electricity, few Bosnians could watch. The concert’s main effect was to make Sarajevans who heard about the performance feel slightly less alone. In the forty-five minutes in which Hendricks sang and Vieira de Mello listened, half a dozen shells landed within a hundred yards of the TV studio that had been converted into a concert hall for the occasion. Over the course of New Year’s Day, five people were killed and forty-six wounded in the capital.10
General Briquemont had been away from Sarajevo visiting his troops while Hendricks delivered her midnight performance. The next day, at a formal lunch in her honor in the officers’ mess, Briquemont asked whether she would mind singing something a cappella. No sooner had the soprano cleared her throat and begun to sing than a shell crashed down beside the building, causing the lights to flicker and the silverware to clatter. Hendricks kept on singing through the din. When Vieira de Mello asked her afterward how she had managed to remain so calm, she said,“If I die, I know I want to go out singing.” He had always been skeptical about goodwill ambassadors, believing that the logistics of arranging celebrity visits brought more headaches than benefits. But after the incident, Hendricks recalls, “I could tell I went up several notches in his estimation.” The following evening Vieira de Mello played a CD of Brazilian music and attempted to teach her and the French officers to dance the samba. Hendricks told him that no matter how many ravaged cities she had visited for the UN, nothing had prepared her to see a European city in such a state. “I feel like I have walked into a Kafka novel,” she said. “If I see giant cockroaches on the wall, I won’t be surprised.” He agreed, saying, “This kind of savagery probably lies buried within us all.”
They discussed their respective personal lives. He reflected on how much he missed his sons during the holidays. He and Annie were together so rarely that Hendricks asked why they had not formalized their separation. “Don’t wait too long,” she advised. “You need to give Annie a chance to start another life of her own. She should get to live without waiting for you. The longer you postpone dealing with this, the harder it will be.” He deflected the question. “We’ve grown apart,” he said, “but that’s no reason to end a marriage.”
“WE MUST NOT BE PARTIAL”
Vieira de Mello was an expert compartmentalizer and concentrated on the work at hand. The singular dilemma that he and his colleagues faced was that the very UN humanitarian airlift that had loosened the Serb noose around the necks of Bosnian civilians had evolved into something of a noose around UNPROFOR itself. He was of the view that if UN peacekeepers fought back against Serbs who were targeting civilians, Serb gunners would retaliate by firing several well-placed, shoulder-launched missiles at a UN cargo plane, closing down the whole feeding operation and endangering several million lives. The countries that had sent soldiers to serve in the peacekeeping mission cared enough about Bosnia to try to prevent mass starvation, but he did not believe that they cared enough to fight the Serbs in a war. The blue helmets were thus in a bind.11 They were passing out food, but not preventing those fed from being felled by sniper or shell fire, causing critics to accuse the UN of “passing out sandwiches at the gates of Auschwitz.”12
Vieira de Mello defended UNPROFOR’s approach. He argued that the blue helmets played a vital humanitarian role and cautioned against using force. “There are 95% fewer casualties in Bosnia now than there were a year ago,” he argued. “We are buying time for the Bosnians until a peace agreement can be signed.” For that to happen the major powers—not the UN peacekeepers—would have to ratchet up their diplomatic involvement. “Expecting UNPROFOR to bring about a political solution,” he told an interviewer, “is, at the very least, absurd. It’s a conceptual mistake.”13 UN officials had to resist the impulse to be trigger-happy. “If we opt for force,” he insisted, “we have chosen war.”14
Impartiality was so central to his understanding of the essence of UN peacekeeping that he refused journalists’ requests to state which party bore the greatest responsibility for the carnage. “We must not be partial,” he explained. “I understand it is hard for you to understand, but it is the only way for us to help stop the war in Bosnia.”15 He hailed the virtues of what he called “affirmative action”—humanitarian work that made life a little more bearable for civilians in war. “We may not be able to change the world here,” he told his demoralized staff, “but we can change individual worlds, one at a time.” If UN peacekeepers could simply freeze the battle lines in place, and UN aid agencies could keep civilians alive, the UN mission was doing its part. From his perspective, Western negotiators would have to be the ones to use their considerable resources to negotiate a permanent peace.
But many UN officials saw the situation differently. Some argued that the peacekeepers should challenge the Serbs militarily. More junior UN officials—often on their first field missions—were outraged just as he had been on his first peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. They believed that the blue helmets were too timid, and that UN officials who had been in the system too long were so interested in protecting their own reputations that they were downplaying carnage that they should have been denouncing. They were treating a stopgap feeding operation as an end in itself.They had made themselves complicit by not vocally urging Western governments to rescue civilians. “The system is broken,” David Harland, a thirty-two-year-old political officer from New Zealand, argued. “We are being used. We aren’t going to get a peace agreement by simply hanging around.”
Bosnia was one of the few missions Vieira de Mello undertook in the absence of Dennis McNamara, who was back in Geneva as UNHCR’s director of external relations. Still, McNamara kept up his role jabbing at his friend’s conscience, teasing over the telephone,“That’s not peacekeeping you are doing, Sergio. It’s war monitoring.” The Economist chided the UN as “an armour-plated meals-on-wheels service.”16 More stinging to him, the Bosnians themselves jeered the blue helmets as either the UN Self-Protection Force or “SERBPROFOR.” He kept some of the hate mail he received while on mission. One letter, entitled “War Criminals and Their Supporters,” included cut-out photographs of Slobodan Milošević and Karadžić alongside Boutros-Ghali and Stoltenberg.
In late January 1994, however, Bosnian civilians began to believe that UNPROFOR might at last defend them. Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose, a fifty-three-year-old former British SAS officer who had served in Northern Ireland and fought in the Falklands War, took over as commander of UN forces in Bosnia, replacing General Briquemont. Rose, the general whom Vieira de Mello spoke with the night of our first meeting, arrived in Sarajevo citing the SAS motto: “Who dares, wins.” Peace had to be pushed; Serb harassment of civilians and peacekeepers had to stop. “If they shoot at us, we’ll shoot back,” Rose said, “and I have no hesitation about that whatsoever.”17 In some places the Serbs were blocking or siphoning 80 percent of humanitarian supplies. “We’ve got to lean on the door harder, and if we keep leaning in a very, very concerted way,” the general said, “then that door is going to open further, and more aid will go through.”18 This spirit was infectious, as UN civil servants and peacekeepers who had grown fatalistic were inspired by their new commander.
Just as Rose arrived, UN Headquarters in New York informed Vieira de Mello that he was being promoted. He would no longer be based in Sarajevo as a roaming adviser to Stoltenberg and the generals. Instead he would be relocated to UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb and would run the Department of Civil Affairs, managing a team of fifty international political analysts spread out throughout the former Yugoslavia and retaining the function of top political adviser to the head of the mission. He groaned when he heard the rest of the news—instead of answering to Stoltenberg, whom he at least saw as a political heavyweight, he would serve under the new UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General: his former boss in Cambodia,Yasushi Akashi.
Vieira de Mello joked privately that in order for him to earn the title of “adviser,” he needed to work for somebody who was interested in taking advice. Akashi was not that person. Boutros-Ghali later admitted that he had peevishly chosen a Japanese (rather than a European) diplomat “as a rebuke to the Europeans for their failure to deal with this conflict on their own continent.”19 Undoubtedly, Japan’s heavy share of the UN peacekeeping budget was again a factor. Even though he had known his new boss for more than two years,Vieira de Mello continued to call him “Mr. Akashi” and “sir.” “For somebody who cut such a dashing figure,” recalls Michael Williams, who worked with Vieira de Mello in Cambodia and again in UNPROFOR, “Sergio was remarkablyprotocolaire.”
Vieira de Mello overlapped with General Rose in Sarajevo for just thirteen days. But the two men took an instant liking to each other. Rose had been educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne and spoke fluent French, which endeared him to Vieira de Mello and to the French soldiers in Sarajevo who might otherwise have been suspicious of a British commander. Rose respected the relationships Vieira de Mello had already managed to build with Balkan leaders and his vast experience living and working in conflict areas. Rose later noted that he admired Vieira de Mello “above anyone else I worked with in Bosnia.”20
One of their first encounters was telling. Rose, who was readying himself for his first trip to meet Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, was donning a flak jacket and helmet and preparing to board an armored UN convoy. He saw Vieira de Mello exiting the residency for the same meeting. “How are you getting down there?” Rose asked.Vieira de Mello said he was walking because the people of Sarajevo resented UN peacekeepers who zoomed past them in armored vehicles. Ignoring the UN security protocol, Rose ripped off his protective layers and ambled down the dangerous street with his colleague, stopping to talk to Sarajevans along the way. When the men arrived at the pockmarked Austro-Hungarian-era building that served as the Presidency, they entered a dark and subfreezing tomb where Bosnian waiters in white gloves served orange juice and UN aid biscuits off silver trays.When a shell struck nearby, the ceiling sent a shower of light dust down upon them. The men struggled to suppress their giggles at what Rose remembered as “a mad hatter’s tea party.”21
For a person who had just arrived in the Balkans, Rose was remarkably sure of himself, which impressed Vieira de Mello and thrilled Bosnian civilians who were desperate to see a more aggressive UN. But in private meetings Rose’s self-assuredness began to take a turn that some of his UN colleagues found disturbing. As a professional officer, he seemed to look down upon the ragtag Bosnian army, which was disorganized and poorly equipped, and to respect Serb forces who made use of officers and heavy weapons they inherited from the Yugoslav National Army. Rose was also suspicious of the Western media, whose sympathies lay with the Bosnians, the war’s main victims. He later called the Sarajevo press corps “a pair of jackals circling the decaying corpse of Bosnia.”22
In late January 1994 Aryeh Neier, the head of Helsinki Watch (the precursor to Human Rights Watch), visited Sarajevo and met with both men. Neier urged Rose to have his peacekeepers take a tougher stand with the Serbs. Rose counseled against doing what Washington had pressed peacekeepers to do in Somalia—cross what he called the “Mogadishu line,” which for him meant surrendering their neutrality and “making war out of white-painted vehicles.” While Vieira de Mello looked on silently, Rose argued that Sarajevo was not technically under siege, since UN aid deliveries were reaching civilians. “A lot of the shooting,” Rose said, “is done to create the impression of major battles when there is no real fighting. They are trying to look good on CNN.” Neier, who believed that Rose was downplaying the Serbs’ culpability in order to justify UN neutrality, angrily relayed Rose’s claim to the Sarajevo media.23
Vieira de Mello knew that Sarajevo was very much under siege. Indeed, with some twelve hundred shells falling per day, the Bosnian capital was then probably the most dangerous city on earth. He sent a cable to UN Headquarters three days after Rose’s arrival, in which he wrote: “Sarajevo is definitely not a town where civil—or, for that matter, military—personnel of UNPROFOR should be allowed to expose themselves to undue risk, in particular by driving in soft-skin vehicles. [My] own cars have been repeatedly shot at. A simple ballistic analysis would show that the only reason both of us are able to respond to your fax is that such vehicles were armoured.”24
He had survived two close calls in Bosnia. In December 1993, when on his way to the airport, he saw that the car driving in front of his, which was marked PRESS, had been hit by two Serb snipers firing from a nearby building. “Stop the car!” he shouted, instructing his driver to move his armored car into a position that would allow it to shield the journalist, who had been shot in the arm, and the driver, who had been hit in the leg. Felix Faix, a former French paratrooper who was his bodyguard, shoved Vieira de Mello into the backseat of the car, pulled out his gun, and fired at the two snipers, who were apparently hit and collapsed out of view. On a second occasion, when driving along Sniper’s Alley, Vieira de Mello’s own armored car was hit three times by a sniper but managed to limp back to headquarters, as Faix again kept his boss pinned down in the backseat. But while Vieira de Mello clearly appreciated the dangers posed by Serb gunners, he never stood up to Rose or challenged his public portrayal of Sarajevo as a city that was not in fact besieged. Rose remembers no disagreement of any kind. “We were absolutely hand and glove,” he recalls. “Instinctively we felt the same way about things.”
MARKET MASSACRE
Saturday, February 5, 1994, was scheduled to be Vieira de Mello’s last day in Sarajevo. But at 12:10 p.m. a shell landed in a crowded downtown Sarajevo market on the busiest shopping day of the week, blowing sixty-eight Bosnian shoppers and vendors to bits. It took him time to reach Akashi by phone because the special representative had chosen that weekend to take his closest advisers to his favorite Japanese restaurant in Graz, Austria. When he finally got through, Akashi told him to remain in Sarajevo and offer his political judgment on what seemed to be a shrinking number of options for preventing the war’s escalation.
The scene at the market was ghastly. The green awnings and corrugated tin roofs that covered the market stalls had been converted into stretchers to carry the injured, or tarps on which to lay out the dead. Somebody had drawn a chalk ring around the spot where the deadly mortar shell had landed. The crater formed the base of a paw mark, with the toes offering evidence of the spray of hot metal, which had done most of the damage. Severed body parts were intermingled with cigarettes, daily newspapers, Coca-Cola cans, clothing, household goods, and homegrown vegetables.
Many of the dead were transported to the local morgue in a dump truck. Eight of the victims were so badly mangled that hospital staff could not determine whether they were men or women.25 More than 150 people had been wounded, and the hospitals, short-staffed and underresourced on the best of days, could not keep up with the deluge. Doctors in the emergency room, their white coats stained with blood, yelled instructions to one another as they rushed to grab gauze, medicines, and bandages delivered by international relief groups. Family members waited outside to get word of the fate of their loved ones, and they let out shrieks of agony when doctors emerged with bad news. The wounded simply lay in the halls moaning for attention. The following day the main Sarajevo daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, ran six full pages of black-bordered death notices.26 Virtually every person Vieira de Mello knew in the city had a relative, neighbor, or friend affected by the massacre.
Even though powerful governments had dictated the international response to Serb aggression, Sarajevans directed their anger at UNPROFOR, which was present in a way that the United States and Europe were not. “Boutros-Ghali just watches all this and he does nothing,” said one woman interviewed near the market.“He’s worse than Milošević and Karadžić. He’s their accomplice.”27 It was not a good weekend to be seen driving in a white UN vehicle. Vieira de Mello was sickened by the incident. “Bastards!” he exclaimed, referring to those who had fired the shell. “How do they call themselves soldiers?” But after what he later called “the worst day of my life, where I cried with anger,” he buried his emotions.28 He believed that Bosnia’s most tragic day could also be its most transformative. The world’s major powers might now focus their attention and their resources long enough on Bosnia to bring peace.
The Serbs had made a habit of trying to cover their tracks by accusing the Bosnians of attacking themselves. Just a month earlier Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić had told Vieira de Mello and Rose, “The Muslims would kill Allah himself in order to discredit the Serbs!”29 The Bosnian war was the first twentieth-century conflict in which the parties used CNN to argue their cases.The day of the attack Karadžić told the network, “This is a cold-blooded murder and I would demand the strongest sentence against those who are responsible for this.”30 He threatened to block all air and land relief deliveries to Sarajevo if the UN did not exonerate them. A visibly shattered Bosnian prime minister Silajdžić was interviewed as well. “This is defacing the international community and our civilization,” he countered. “Please, let’s forget about my being the prime minister for a minute. I’m talking as a man, now. Please remember these scenes; if we don’t stop it, it is going to come to your doorstep.”31
In the past, when the Serbs refused UN demands, UNPROFOR officials had lacked leverage and simply scaled back their requests. This time, though, the public outcry in capitals over the market massacre gave Western leaders little choice but to throw the weight of NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history, behind UN diplomacy. The German government, which just two weeks before had said it opposed military action, reversed its position, saying it now supported NATO air strikes against the Serbs. The French demanded an emergency NATO summit to discuss an immediate military response. Only the British remained reluctant to use force against the Serbs. “The rest of the world cannot send armies into what is a cruel and vicious civil war,” British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said.32
On February 9, four days after the market attack, NATO’s sixteen foreign ministers haggled for more than twelve hours to produce an unprecedented ultimatum: The Serbs had until midnight GMT on February 20 to withdraw their heavy weapons from a twelve-mile “exclusion zone” around Sarajevo. Any weapons that remained after that time would be placed in the custody of UN peacekeepers or bombed by NATO. The alliance had never before made such an explicit threat. And Sarajevo civilians had never felt so close to being rescued. “Nobody should doubt NATO’s resolve,” President Clinton warned from Washington. “NATO is now ready to act.”33 But after so many false promises in the past, skeptics abounded. One cartoon summed up the Western track record. A survivor peered out from behind the ruins of Sarajevo, shouting, “The rhetoric is coming! The rhetoric is coming!”34
NATO and the UN had much in common. The most influential countries in NATO—the United States, Britain, and France—held permanent seats and vetoes on the UN Security Council. But many in Russia, which also held a UN Security Council seat, continued to see NATO as the enemy it had been during the cold war.35 In addition, as the Serbs’ benefactor, Russia staunchly opposed the idea of air strikes.
UN officials like Vieira de Mello and Rose favored only what was called NATO “close air support”—the limited, surgical use of air power against the Serbs on the rare occasions when blue helmets came under serious attack. In aiding the peacekeepers’ self-defense, NATO pilots were allowed to hit only the offending weapon.Vieira de Mello opposed the kind of strikes that the Clinton administration favored, NATO offensive “air strikes,” which he saw as incompatible with impartial peacekeeping. If NATO wanted to make war, he reasoned, the major powers should withdraw the UN peacekeepers and the United States should ensure success by putting its own troops on the ground and joining a NATO ground force. Short of that unlikely turn of events, he argued, the Clinton administration should stop pushing the lightly armed blue helmets to absorb the physical risks that would flow from NATO bombing from the air.
Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali held the same view. He liked to quote Elliot Cohen, the U.S. military analyst, who said, “Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”36 Vieira de Mello and Rose agreed: A NATO air campaign that was not backed by a larger plan to protect Bosnian civilians would do more harm than good. Defenseless citizens would be better off if NATO did not bomb. UNPROFOR would be able to continue to deliver relief and buy time for negotiators to hatch a political settlement. “You don’t stand on the moral high ground with other nations’ soldiers,” Rose said, echoing Vieira de Mello’s view. “The logic of war is not the logic of peacekeeping. Do one or the other, but don’t try to conflate the two.” Their UN team set out to use the threat of NATO air strikes against Serb positions to persuade the Serbs to remove their heavy weapons from the hills around Sarajevo. No matter how much carnage he had seen in Bosnia or elsewhere,Vieira de Mello could not shake his belief that patient dialogue could eventually bring about the kind of “conversion” that his philosophy mentor, Robert Misrahi, had advocated.
Because Western leaders were fearful that bombing might lead the Serbs to take UN hostages, and because French and British soldiers might be the first to be rounded up, the NATO ultimatum left it to UN officials in the field to decide whether to call for NATO bombing. Akashi, the same man who had been turned back by a few scrawny Khmer Rouge soldiers at a bamboo pole two years before, would decide whether air power would be employed. And Akashi had already made up his mind. “If Serb guns are silent and a significant number of them have been placed under UNPROFOR control,” he wrote in an internal note to Headquarters days before the ultimatum was to expire, “I have no intention of agreeing to NATO air strikes.”37
Sensing the reluctance of UNPROFOR officials and the British government to bomb, and knowing the disdain Russians felt toward NATO, the Serbs were initially defiant. The Bosnian Serb deputy force commander, Major General Manojlo Milovanovic, wrote to Rose: “I would like you to understand that the Serbs have never and will never accept anybody’s ultimatum, even at the price of being wiped off the planet.”38
But Vieira de Mello spent hours driving back and forth to the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale and on the phone with Bosnian Serb leaders in an effort to persuade them to pull back their forces. “Since there were large elements in NATO that wanted to bomb,” recalls Simon Shadbolt, Rose’s military assistant, “Sergio was able to portray NATO as the bad cop and the UN as good cop. He urged the Serbs to move to do the minimum of what NATO would accept.”39
With the February 20 deadline for Serb cooperation fast approaching, the Serbs still had not removed many of their heavy weapons. Bosnians were in great suspense over the expiration of the NATO deadline, but Vieira de Mello was not. He knew that Akashi, the man with his finger on the trigger, had never viewed NATO air strikes as a real option. He traveled with Akashi to Pale on the eve of the NATO deadline, and when they attempted to return to Sarajevo, the narrow mountain road back to the capital was so clogged with Serb tanks and heavy weapons attempting to scurry out of range that they had to spend a cold and snowy night together in their vehicle.40 Akashi was elated, as some progress was better than none. Vieira de Mello told the press, “If in the coming hours things continue as they have been for the past 48 hours, then there is no reason for concern.”41 When a journalist asked Rose where he would be when the deadline passed, the general said, “Asleep, in bed.”42
As the deadline expired, Akashi admitted to UN Headquarters that the exclusion zone was not entirely clear of heavy weapons. Nonetheless, he declared the Serbs in “substantial compliance” with the terms of the ultimatum.43 He told CNN, “There’s no need to resort to air strikes.”44 As soon as the announcement was made, a relieved Vieira de Mello joined a group of military officers for a late-night whiskey toast at the residency. “Živeli,” he exclaimed in Serbo-Croatian, amid the sound of clinking glasses. “To life!”
“THE PATH TO A NORMAL LIFE”
Bosnian officials and civilians had hoped that a NATO intervention would eliminate the Serb heavy weapons that had taken some ten thousand lives in the city. They worried that when Western attention drifted elsewhere, the Serbs would simply reclaim guns that they had placed under UN supervision and reimpose the siege.Vieira de Mello, the UN official whom the Bosnians trusted most, attempted to allay their fears.The day after the deadline passed, he met with President Izetbegović, explaining that he had personally toured by Puma helicopter the most remote places where Serb heavy weapons were being gathered under UN watch. While he said there was naturally “room for improvement” in the UN’s control system, which consisted of thirty-six land inspection and helicopter patrols, he appealed to the Bosnians “to appreciate that snow, ice, mud and mountainous terrain were making UNPROFOR’s task unenviable.” The Serb weapons that remained in range, he insisted, were “unimpressive.”45 He urged President Izetbegović to publicly praise developments, which Izetbegović agreed to do on Bosnian television. “I believe this is a great victory for us although it might not be quite clear, and not without shortcomings,” Izetbegović said. “You can let your children out to play and not be afraid for their lives; you can go to the market place without being afraid and wondering whether you will come back or not. After twenty-three months of killing this is something important indeed.”46
But most Bosnians were conflicted. Sarajevans still could not leave the city, and Serbs were still attacking Bosnians in the rest of the country—sometimes using the very heavy weapons that they had relocated from the hills surrounding the capital. Gordana Knežević, the editor of Oslobodjenje in Sarajevo, remarked: “It is as though our death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment.”47
The lessons of the Sarajevo experience seemed obvious. Tasked to deliver food aid but not to fight ethnic cleansing, UNPROFOR had lost both the trust of the Bosnians and the respect of the Serbs. But when the United States brought the weight of NATO to bear on the crisis, it conveyed a resolve that had been absent before.The ghastly carnage of February 5, 1994, had caused the Clinton administration to invest its clout in ending civilian suffering. Diplomacy backed by the threat of force had yielded concessions. As a result, starting on February 21, the people of Sarajevo savored the first quiet days they had enjoyed in nearly two years. Vieira de Mello telephoned Annick Roulet in Geneva: “Annick, the trams are running again in Sarajevo!!”
He knew from Lebanon and Cambodia how quickly Western leaders would again forget Bosnia. In the brief window they had, UNPROFOR officials had to try to turn the cease-fire around Sarajevo into a countrywide peace.48 Vieira de Mello swiftly set out to do what he had done in Cambodia: use humanitarian progress to try to forge common ground among the bitter foes. If people in the region could become reacquainted with the creature comforts of peace—electricity, running water, and markets brimming with commercial goods—they might be less willing to return to violence. If in Cambodia Vieira de Mello had persuaded the Khmer Rouge to cooperate with the UN repatriation operation because they too wanted refugees to return to lands under their control, in Bosnia he hoped that the taste of normalcy might prompt citizens to press their leaders to concede territory in political negotiations.
From the beginning of the war in 1992, the Serbs had cut off utilities and food supplies to Sarajevo. Most of the old roads into the city were mined or booby-trapped, and the only link that Bosnian civilians had to the outside world was a tunnel under the airport runway. But by maintaining this stranglehold, the Serb authorities were also besieging their own kin, as the Serb suburbs around Sarajevo got their electricity and water from sources inside the Bosnian capital. In addition, in order for Serbs to move between two of the suburbs, they had to circumnavigate the entire city, which took almost a full day.
On Thursday, March 17, 1994, after an all-night negotiation session, Vieira de Mello sealed a landmark deal. Four so-called Blue Routes would be opened. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, the Bosnians would open the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge connecting Sarajevo with one of the Serb suburbs. The roads linking the two main Serb suburbs would also be opened for two hours in the morning and the afternoon. In return the Serbs would open the road linking two Bosnian suburbs and the road between Sarajevo and central Bosnia, enabling humanitarian relief and civilian bus traffic to pass into the capital. Thanks to Vieira de Mello’s Blue Routes accord, civilians in Sarajevo would be able to travel openly to the outside world for the first time since the outbreak of war in 1992. It started to look as though their sentence of life imprisonment too would be lifted.
Vieira de Mello’s beaming visage appeared in news broadcasts around the world. Even though he was flushed with excitement, he also tried to manage the expectations of the local population. “Much to our regret this country is still technically at war,” he reminded people. “So don’t expect the opening of the city overnight.”49 In announcing the terms of the accord, he nudged the Serb and Bosnian negotiators into a handshake, which was the first public handshake between senior officials from the two sides since the war began. Almost a decade later, notwithstanding all his other achievements, he would tell a Brazilian journalist that this 1994 agreement constituted the proudest act in his career as a UN official.50
On the day that the bridge into Sarajevo actually opened for the first time, Bosnians and Serbs who had not seen their family members for more than two years crossed into lands held by their battlefield rivals. Hundreds of people gathered to see if their relatives or friends would appear.51 One sixty-seven-year-old Bosnian man, Hasan Begic, whom the Serbs had evicted from his Sarajevo apartment with ten minutes’ notice back in September 1992, made the trek across the bridge to the Serb neighborhood so as to find his disabled son Edhem. An hour after he crossed the bridge, he returned, horrified.“They told me my son was killed by a sniper on January 11 in front of the house,” Begic told a reporter. “I have nothing more to do over there.”52
Despite the trauma and loss that Bosnian civilians continued to endure, a tidal wave of optimism swept through the country and through the UN mission. A cease-fire was holding for a fifth straight week. Cafés in Sarajevo were reopening. With commercial traffic entering the city at last, prices tumbled. On March 20 some 20,000 Sarajevans signaled their trust in the new calm by pouring into Sarajevo’s open-air Olympic stadium to cheer the city football team in its 4-0 victory over a UN squad composed of one Egyptian, five British, three French, and two Ukrainian soldiers.
On March 22 a UN Ilyushin 76 landed at the airport in the besieged Bosnian city of Tuzla, providing the first food airlift of the war to more than a million people living there. Akashi said, “This is a very happy day for all of us. There’s a new positive momentum for a cease-fire, disengagement, the establishment of a durable peace and the improvement of the life of the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think the dark days are almost over.”53