The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 71 A Flawed Hero Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Samantha Power, Penguin Press, 2008, $32.95, hardcover, 640 pages. R EVIEWED BY P ETER F. S PALDING Samantha Power, a former adviser to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, was nicknamed “the geno- cide chick” by some of her Harvard students after she won the Pulitzer Prize for her last book, The Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002). Her new work profiles the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing director of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Baghdad headquarters was bombed in August 2003. Killed at 55, he was found beneath the rubble, sprawled on the flag of the organization he had served his whole adult life. As Power explains, Vieira de Mello saw his temporary duty in Iraq as an opportunity to “listen to the voices” there. Toward that end, he made himself and his offices open to visitors. The much safer Green Zone was not a place he wanted to be. The Brazilian-born diplomat was aptly described as a “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy” by a journalist on the eve of Power’s first meeting with him in Zagreb in 1994, where she was a novice reporter cov- ering the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. He had a taste for Johnnie Walker Black Label and the ladies, but was also a serious student of moral philosophy who wrote a 600-page Ph.D. thesis for the Sorbonne pro- moting a theory of universalism root- ed in reciprocal respect. Married and the father of two sons, Vieira de Mello repeatedly left his family behind to seek the most dan- gerous, unaccompanied assignments — postings one could also describe as “the real Foreign Service”: East Paki- stan/Bangladesh (1971-1972); Sudan (1973-1974); Cyprus (1974-1975); Mozambique (1975-1977); Lebanon (1981-1983); Cambodia (1991-1993); Kosovo (1993-1994); East Timor (1999-2002); and Iraq (2002-2003). Sergio, as his staff fondly called him, declared that he was not assign- ed to manage politics, but to “deliver the groceries” to refugees displaced by war. He once told a UNHCR col- league: “We are the lowly humanitari- ans. We’re the guys who pass out food and fix the roads. They look down on us elsewhere in the U.N. They don’t see us as capable of handling high pol- itics.” Nevertheless, many in the United Nations hierarchy saw him as a future secretary general. Though she clearly admires her subject, Power acknowledges that he was obsequious to war criminals like Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic in hopes of gaining their cooperation. (Such unsuccessful fawning caused some U.N. colleagues to nickname him “Serbio.”) He be- haved with equal subservience toward the Khmer Rouge leadership, sharing fine French wine with Ieng Sary, the regime’s “brother number two,” with nary a mention of the genocide he had helped perpetrate. A friend once told Vieira de Mello that if he ever wrote an autobiogra- phy, he should call it My Friends the War Criminals. Power is less damn- ing, contenting herself with the obser- vation that “his highly practical mantra of ‘talking to everyone’ caused him lapses of judgment.” That is putting it mildly, to say the least. As Power titles one chapter in the book, “Fear Is a Bad Adviser.” So is ego. The massacre in Srebrenica and the Rwandan genocide would temper his willingness to make nice with mass murderers. But one suspects that the ambitious Vieira de Mello remained motivated by the desire to get results at any cost, thereby increasing his stature in the eyes of his superiors. Reading between the lines of this beautifully written and well-research- ed biography, one comes to under- stand why a pragmatic idealist seeking the presidency might reach out to the author — who, like the hero of her B OOKS This beautifully written and well-researched biography shows us why Vieira de Mello was such a compelling figure. u