ON 19 AUGUST, 2003, A TRUCK pulled into the alley behind the Canal Hotel in Baghdad and a bomb detonated, crumpling a corner of the United Nations' mission in Iraq. Inside the building was Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian-born UN official who had
previously served in Vietnam, Lebanon, Cyprus, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor. More than anyone else at the UN, he embodied the organisation's idealism, as well as its limitations. Vieira de Mello was pinned under the rubble and hung on for several hours before dying. The ineffectual efforts of American forces to save him were a harbinger of the larger American failure in Iraq.
Samantha Power, who until her outspoken comments about Hillary Clinton in an interview with The Scotsman earlier this month was Barak Obama's top foreign affairs adviser, has written a comprehensive biography of Vieira de Mello that explains how his contradictions and failures were rooted in those of the institution he so loyally served.
Vieira de Mello was born in 1948. The son of a Brazilian diplomat, he was a prototypical global cosmopolitan who grew up in Europe and, as a student, manned the barricades during the événements of 1968 in Paris while studying Marxist philosophy. The young Vieira de Mello was instinctively anti-US and cringed whenever he heard an American accent.
After earning his degree, he worked with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, travelling to southern Sudan, Mozambique and Vietnam, and passionately embracing the UN and international law as the embodiments of global justice.
But the UN's limitations were rudely exposed in the genocidal crises of the mid-1990s. Before then its peacekeeping operations involved interspersing lightly armed international troops to separate combatants who had signed peace deals. This worked in places like Namibia, El Salvador and Mozambique, where security conditions were not terribly demanding.
After 1991, however, the number of peacekeeping initiatives exploded, and its ethic of strict political neutrality between warring parties ended up favouring aggressors like the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. Moreover, the peacekeepers' restrictive rules of engagement prohibited them from firing their weapons, even in self-defence. This led to disgraceful episodes like the one in Rwanda in 1994 when Belgian peacekeepers abandoned the Tutsis to rampaging Hutu militias.
The hard fact is that some conflicts simply cannot be solved without resort to power. The Bosnian war ended only when the Croatian army and Nato air power attacked Serbian forces, while ethnic cleansing against the Albanians in Kosovo was stopped only through Nato bombing of Serbia itself.
But the UN – and Vieira de Mello as its representative – was so fixated on its traditional role as neutral arbiter that it actively sought to prevent the use of air power by Nato. Without being able to deploy force to fix the underlying cause of conflict, even the best-intentioned humanitarian interventions often had the perverse effect of prolonging conflict.
Power argues that Vieira de Mello underwent a personal evolution that tracked the UN experiences. In his early days he carried the UN habit of being non-judgmental to an extreme: he dined with the Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary and cultivated a friendship with Slobodan Milosevic.
Power is critical of the way Vieira de Mello helped to organise forced returns of refugees to Vietnam and Rwanda, but she is not entirely convincing in her claim that by the end of the 1990s, he had concluded that the UN needed to shift away from peacekeeping and towards peace enforcement. If he really believed such a thing, he never articulated the view or disavowed the earlier UN posture as fundamentally broken, which Kofi Annan was eventually to do.
When the Bush administration came into office in 2001, it took what it regarded as the lessons of the 1990s too much to heart. No longer would the United States be tied down by the political correctness of multilateral organisations; instead, it would act first and seek international legitimation later. The Iraq war was the direct result.
Vieira de Mello's ill-fated mission to Baghdad was a particularly bitter pill for the UN to swallow. It was no secret that the organisation opposed the invasion, and yet Kofi Annan insisted on sending a large team to Baghdad to prove that the UN was still relevant. Once in Iraq, Vieira de Mello found his mission distrusted and marginalised by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, a fact that did not prevent al-Qaeda in Iraq from making the UN base one of its first civilian targets. Sadly, the US could have greatly profited from the nation-building expertise of a man like Vieira de Mello.
In the wake of the Iraq debacle, the idea that strong countries like the US should use their power to defend human rights or promote democracy around the world has become widely discredited. From an overmilitarised foreign policy, there is a danger of going to the opposite extreme, forgetting the lessons of the 1990s that hard power is sometimes needed to resolve political conflicts, and that there is not yet an adequate set of international institutions to deploy it legitimately and effectively.
Chasing the Flame argues, as Vieira de Mello himself once did, that the UN is often unfairly blamed for failures to protect the vulnerable or deter aggression, when the real failure is that of the great powers standing behind it. Those powers are seldom willing to give it sufficient resources, attention and boots on the ground to accomplish the ambitious mandates they set for it. At present, the UN is involved in eight separate peacekeeping operations in Africa alone; failure in a high-profile case like Darfur (which seems likely) will once again discredit it. Power makes the case for powerful countries like the US putting much greater effort into making the UN work.
In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the UN will ever be able to evolve into an organisation that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes.
Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the US and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers, or trust it with large sums of money.
But surely the life and death of Sérgio Vieira de Mello is a good place to begin a serious debate about the proper way to manage world order in the future.
The full article contains 1106 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
