Slate
Feb. 25, 2008

Dangerous Places
What Sergio Vieira de Mello learned at the U.N.

By Paul Berman
Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 4:13 PM ET

Samantha Power has now written two fat and valuable tomes on a single
theme, which is the effort launched by various lonely and heroic
individuals over the last hundred years to identify and name acts of
mass slaughter and other grand-scale crimes, to arouse the
indignation of the world, and to rescue the victims. Her topic ought
to be fairly simple, in principle?a story of people who, like the
fire wardens in national parks, keep an eye out for smoke on the
horizon, sound the alarm, and join the fire brigade when it belatedly
arrives.

Yet genocides, unlike forest fires, tend to be invisible at first
(except to the victims), which is weird to consider. The potential
rescuers in faraway countries tend not to regard themselves as
potential rescuers, and the entire process of trying to identify,
denounce, and resolve the hugest of human calamities turns out to be
filled, start to finish, with baffling and unexpected difficulties.
Six years ago, in the first of her books, A Problem From Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide, Power described a series of mass
slaughters, from the Turkish massacre of Armenians in the 1910s to
the Serbian massacre of Balkan Muslims in the 1990s. She described
the frustrated efforts of various high-minded American diplomats and
other people to prod Washington, D.C., to respond. And she described
Washington’s ever-reliable impulse to remain lost in slumber for as
long as possible?even if, under Bill Clinton, Washington did
ultimately bestir itself, a few years too late and with insufficient
vigor, to take not quite enough action in the Balkans.

Power was angry at what she described. She concluded her chapter on
Saddam Hussein’s massacre of the Iraqi Kurds by banging the table
with a one-sentence indignant paragraph: "To this day, however, no
Iraqi soldier or political leader has been punished for atrocities
committed against the Kurds." And there you see, in Proudhon’s
phrase, the fecundity of the unpredictable. Power published that
sentence in 2002. George W. Bush’s error, a year later, was anything
but a wishy-washy lack of resolve, and the whole conundrum has turned
out to be knottier even than you would have surmised from the already
knotty picture in the aptly titled A Problem From Hell.

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Power’s new book, Chasing the Flame, tells a roughly similar
story?and at the same length, too, as if 600 pages were her natural
stride?except that instead of writing about frustrated American
diplomats trying to prod a sluggish American government, this time
she describes one of the key personalities at the United Nations
during the last few decades, until his death in 2003. This was Sergio
Vieira de Mello, a dashing Brazilian with a French education and,
therefore, with excellent left-wing credentials from the Paris
student uprising of 1968. Vieira de Mello was too handsome for his
own good and keenly ambitious in his professional life, which led to
years of bureaucratic maneuvering and political chit-collecting at
U.N. headquarters in Geneva and New York?biographical details on
which Power lavishes a sometimes annoying degree of attention.

He was also, however, an impeccably serious man, authentically
dedicated to the U.N. and especially to the goal of rescuing the
utterly oppressed. He served in any number of hair-raising U.N.
missions in Lebanon, Cambodia, Central Africa, the Balkans, and other
places, always with courage, sometimes improvising in a spirit of
buccaneer do-goodism; and, on these matters, the details are
fascinating to read. The U.N. intervened in East Timor in 1999,
courtesy of the Australian armed forces, and Vieira de Mello spent
two-and-a-half years there as viceroy, administering as best he
could. And then, after the invasion of Iraq, he was dispatched to
Baghdad, where he was killed, together with 21 other people, in a
suicide bombing?an attack by al-Qaida, as Power informs us (in the
course of a painfully grisly and extended account of the man’s last
moments), intended partly to punish him for having performed his
viceregal duties back in East Timor.

Vieira de Mello brought a lot of talent and wisdom to Iraq, which
raises the question of whether?if only he had lived, and if only the
haughty American pooh-bahs had deigned to heed the advice of a man
with superior experience?he might have helped to bring about a better
outcome there. But too many if onlys clutter that sentence. Anyway,
he did leave behind a record of achievement?and the record, as Power
lays it out, merely brings us face to face one more time with those
quandaries that dominate her earlier book. How much success, after
all, has the U.N. actually enjoyed over the years? Power describes
one U.N. enterprise after another that proved to be fatally feeble or
exacerbated an already bad situation or racked up humanitarian
triumphs (Vieira de Mello did help bring 360,000 Cambodian refugees
back to their homes) without providing for a long-term solution. What
can explain this wobbly and dispiriting record? Vieira de Mello
committed his share of blunders. Often the failures were owed to the
same kind of obstacles that frustrated so many of the American
diplomats in Power’s earlier book?bureaucratic inanity, wavering
will, a poverty of resources.

But the biggest difficulty, or so my reading of Chasing the Flame
leads me to suppose, is a problem of the imagination. A philosophical
issue. It’s the same problem that keeps popping up in Power’s earlier
book as well: an inability to imagine why some people might set out
to destroy whole populations. Vieira de Mello participated in U.N.
missions that followed any of several logics?the logic of
peacekeeping, or of establishing safe havens for the persecuted, or
of providing humanitarian aid. But each of those logics presumes that
if horrific conflicts have broken out, it is because otherwise
reasonable people have fallen into misunderstandings and a neutral
broker like the U.N. might usefully intercede. Yet conflicts
sometimes break out because one or another popular political movement
has arrived at a sincere belief in the virtue of exterminating its
enemies, and horrific ideologies lie at the origin. Neutral
mediations in a case like that are bound only to obscure the
reality?which has happened several times over, as Power usefully
demonstrates.

The repeated failures and frustrations ultimately led Vieira de Mello
to contemplate something more vigorous?a policy of enforcing human
rights, drawing on the strength of powerful countries, and sometimes
choosing to violate openly the sovereign borders of some benighted
nation. NATO did this by bombing Serbia in 1999 (which Vieira de
Mello opposed at first, later changing his mind), and Australia did
the same thing with U.N. blessings in East Timor (which Vieira de
Mello regarded from the start as the right thing to do under the
circumstances). But he never seems to have entirely disentangled the
several strands of those militant new ideas from the ancient U.N.
instinct for strict neutrality, which, to my eyes, leaves his new
ideas less than clear. What should we conclude, then? The right way
to defend the extremely oppressed, if any such way exists?what could
it be? President Bush’s alternative to the U.N., his "Bush
doctrine"?which I take to be a benignly intended but knuckleheaded
American nationalism, militarily oriented, joined to a wan
libertarian faith in creative chaos and free markets?has already
assumed its own distinctive place in the history of disastrous
attempts to resist catastrophic disasters. One more negative lesson,
on top of all the others. Which leaves us where?

Vieira de Mello did acquire a set of fingertip practical precepts,
and Power is at pains to pass these along. He believed that in any
disaster zone, civilian security must first of all be guaranteed. He
believed that whenever foreign forces intervene, local people ought
to be accorded their dignity. He believed in studying the local
language. He also believed in the usefulness of talking to the bad
guys, whoever they might be?though Power shows that more than once
(in Cambodia, talking to the Khmer Rouge, and in Serbia, talking to
the worst of the Serbian nationalists), this final precept, with its
residual odor of U.N. neutrality, led him astray.

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I wish that she had devoted a few of those 600 pages to Bernard
Kouchner, who is today the foreign minister of France but who, in the
past, pursued a parallel and rival career to Vieira de Mello’s,
working for humanitarian organizations and sometimes even for the
U.N. Kouchner has paid repeated homage to Vieira de Mello’s bravery
and idealism, and has done so not just in print but in person,
traveling to Baghdad last August, on the anniversary of the al-Qaida
attack?the first high French official to set foot in post-Saddam
Iraq, a historic gesture. Yet Kouchner has also proposed a more
radical criticism of the old neutralist ethic than anything Vieira de
Mello ever entertained?an argument for something much more forceful,
perhaps a step toward building a world government in the distant
future on a foundation of human rights and at least minimal social
services. Something visionary. It was Kouchner, more than anyone
else, who laid out the political theory known at the U.N. as "the
responsibility to protect"?the doctrine that ultimately came into
play in the Kosovo war and in East Timor and that, in Kouchner’s
thinking, ought to have led to similar U.N. action against Saddam.
But this kind of theorizing goes beyond the scope of Power’s
biography.

Samantha Power has lately been offering foreign policy advice to
Barack Obama, which gives her book something of the dramatic quality
of a leaked memo, compiling do’s and don’ts for any new American
administration. I suppose that, among her do’s and don’ts, Power
herself would emphasize the fingertip wisdom that Vieira de Mello
laboriously accumulated. But I see a larger observation lurking in
her new book as well, humble and grave at the same time. Humble,
because nearly a century after the Turkish massacre of Armenians, we
had better recognize that, even now, nobody has come up with a
reliable method of preventing anything similar from taking place in
the days ahead. And grave, because by now we ought to have learned
that mass slaughters and extreme oppression are perennial facts of
modern life, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, with his flaws and heroism,
represents us at our best and at our most helpless.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress