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Authors: Samantha Power

Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (5 page)

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Word of his contribution to
Combat
quickly reached his family in Brazil. His sister, Sonia, spotted a news item in one of the Rio newspapers describing a Brazilian student involved in the Paris clashes who had returned home and been abducted and murdered, presumably by the military regime. She panicked and passed the article along to a friend who was traveling to Europe. When Arnaldo saw it, he told his son that he should not risk returning to Brazil anytime soon. The French government had granted amnesty to foreign students arrested in the riots, but it required them to check in with the authorities at the police station on a weekly basis. This seemed a small price to pay for continuing his education at the Sorbonne, and Sergio went back to class in the fall of 1968 in the hopes of combining his credits from Rio, Fribourg, and Paris to graduate in 1969.
 
 
Although he relished the educational rigors of the Sorbonne, he was lonely in Paris and nostalgic for Rio. “People don’t exist here,” he wrote to a girlfriend in Geneva in March 1969. “I spend my time with books.”
11
His letters grew increasingly mournful as he noted that “for two years nothing has changed except myself. Complaining of the crowds, cars, noise, and “an uninformed mass that I’m tired of, ” he wrote that he missed “the days where I could walk alone with my sea birds.”
12
 
 
But back in Brazil the military dictatorship was growing more repressive. Paramilitary forces roamed the country arresting and often torturing those suspected of subversive activity. Well-known Brazilian diplomats such as Vinicius de Moraes, who in his spare time had helped launch the bossa nova genre by writing the lyrics for such songs as “The Girl from Ipanema,” were dismissed from the foreign diplomatic corps. In the spring of 1969, five years after the initial coup, Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, who was neither well known nor openly critical of the military regime, was sitting at the breakfast table of his residence in Stuttgart, sipping his morning coffee, reading the morning papers, and flipping through Brazil’s diplomatic digest. As he scanned the list of civil servants whom the military regime had forced into retirement, his eyes fixed suddenly upon a name he had not expected to find: his own. He had been sacked by a government he had served for twenty-eight years.
 
 
Sergio was in Paris when he learned the news. He raged at the Brazilian government for hurting his family and complained that his father had been fired for his political views. But Arnaldo’s colleagues and relatives speculated that his worsening drinking habit may also have been a factor. The military regime offered no explanation.
 
 
As Arnaldo packed up his life in Europe, he told his son that he would not be able to pay for his graduate studies at the Sorbonne. In May, just two months before graduation, Sergio wrote again to the young woman he had dated when he was in Geneva. Sounding depressed and confused about his future, he informed her that his father had been fired. “The dictatorship is a reality,” he wrote.“I will be obliged to earn my bread starting in August.” He would try to find work but had “no idea” where. “My future is more than up in the air.”
13
 
 
In June he wrote to her that he expected to receive high marks in his philosophy exams. (He would in fact dazzle the Sorbonne faculty, finishing first out of 198 candidates in metaphysics.) “But for what?” he wrote sarcastically. If he had studied economics or marketing instead, “some American company would have assured me a ‘happy’ future strewn with dollars.” He would never sell out, he told her, and “just short of dying of hunger,” he would “never abandon philosophy.” The philosopher, he wrote, could become either “the most just man” or “the most radical bandit.” Either way, he insisted, “to do philosophy is to have it in your blood and to do what very few will do—to both be a man and to think everywhere and always.”
14
 
 
After trying briefly to find a philosophy teaching job, Sergio made his way to Geneva, where the da Silveira home had become his European base. He decided to try to find work with one of the many international organizations there. Knowing Sergio’s gift with languages (he already spoke flawless Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French), an acquaintance of his father’s put him in touch with Jean Halpérin, the forty-eight-year-old Swiss director of the language division at the United Nations. Halpérin had hesitated to take the meeting because he knew of no available jobs, but when they met, he was immediately taken in by the young man’s passion for philosophy. Halpérin offered to call the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which often needed ushers for large conferences on the preservation of cultural monuments. “Thank you very much,” Sergio said, smiling politely. “I know UNESCO, and it is not my cup of tea. My sense is that it is a lot of ‘blah, blah, blah.’” Surprised that someone unemployed would be so picky, Halpérin explained that his academic background would not leave him many options within the United Nations. “I’m very sorry, Sergio,” he said, “but the UN deals with everything under the sun except philosophy.”
 
 
A few days later Halpérin received a call from a colleague at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was looking for a French editor. UNHCR performed two main tasks—it gave people fleeing political persecution the material assistance they needed to survive in exile, and it tried to ensure that the displaced were not forced back to the countries that had driven them out. The United Nations required fluent English and two years of professional experience. Sergio spoke little English and had never held a full-time job, but he interviewed better than any of his fellow applicants and was given a temporary contract. He started his career at UNHCR in November 1969 and would spend the next thirty-four years working under the UN flag.
 
 
“WHAT WOULD JAMIE DO?”
 
 
Almost as soon as he took up his post at UNHCR, he began hearing tales of a man who was every bit his opposite.Vieira de Mello was a twenty-one-year-old Sorbonne-educated, multilingual Brazilian with a lean physique and a movie-star smile.Thomas Jamieson, UNHCR’s director of field operations, was a fifty-eight-year-old pale, balding, rotund, bespectacled Scotsman who had never graduated from secondary school. And although Jamieson had lived in and out of French-speaking countries since the Second World War, he prided himself on having never bothered to master French. Despite these cosmetic differences, Vieira de Mello quickly found a mentor in the man known as “Jamie.”
 
 
Jamieson had joined UNHCR in 1959 after working with UN and nongovernmental groups to resettle German, Korean, and Palestinian war refugees.Vieira de Mello actively sought him out, peppering him with questions about his experiences.Warm and instantly accessible to those he liked, Jamieson was not an intellectual likeVieira de Mello’s father, but he placed a similar emphasis on audacity, and he shared Arnaldo’s taste for scotch. First-time visitors to Jamieson’s home near Geneva knew they had reached their destination when they saw the trash cans outside overflowing with empty whiskey bottles. Whether he was in his office at UNHCR or roaming around some dusty outpost in Nigeria, Jamieson always invited colleagues to join him for his close-of-business drink of Johnnie Walker Red Label. More than five thousand miles from his family and discouraged from returning to Brazil, Vieira de Mello seemed to prize the new bond.
 
 
Jamieson explained that his overarching aim—and that of the UN—was simple: “Children should have a better and happier life than their parents.” He decried the refugee camps that had clogged the European continent after World War II.“If there is a way to avoid setting up a camp, find it,” he would say. “If there is a way to close a camp, take it.” His central message, conveyed to all who encountered him, was that “UNHCR ought to endeavor to eliminate itself.”
15
Over long lunches in Geneva he warned Vieira de Mello that charitable enterprises could quickly grow more concerned with their own self-perpetuation than with helping the needy. Jamieson urged him to be sure to distinguish the interests of the UN, his place of employment, from the interests of refugees, his reason for working.
 
 
Jamieson generally managed field operations from afar, spending most of his time at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva. But when he ventured overseas, he made the most of it, ostentatiously arriving back, in the words of one colleague, “with the red dust of the Sahara still on his safari suit.” He used slide shows and stirring oral accounts of the suffering of refugees to spice up the sterile and impersonal chambers of the Palais des Nations, where UN staff and ambassadors from donor countries gathered. Jamieson often sounded contemptuous of diplomats. “You’re all sitting here in comfort,” he would say after a trip.“I’ve come from the real world where the action is and where the answers are.” He was never shy about voicing his impatience with legal hair-splitting, UN red tape, or diplomatic pomposity, and he despised the incessant and interminable array of meetings his job required. It was not uncommon for him to stroll fifteen minutes late into a coordination session that he was supposed to chair. “Ohhhh so I see we are having a meeting. How charming,” he would say.“If there’s one thing in the world I like, it is meetings. Tell you what we are going to do: I’ll tell you what I have decided, then we can meet for as long as you wish!” Undemocratic in his approach, Jamieson got his way by relying upon his personal relationship with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the powerful and visionary high commissioner who ran UNHCR.
2
Although Sadruddin could find Jamieson taxing, he valued his ability, in the words of a colleague, to “kick bean-counters with such finesse.”While Vieira de Mello had none of Jamieson’s willingness to make enemies, he shared his mentor’s distaste for bureaucracy.
 
 
Vieira de Mello had joined UNHCR at an electrifying time. Under the leadership of Sadruddin, UNHCR shifted its emphasis from Europe, where refugees from World War II and the Soviet Union had commanded attention in the 1940s and 1950s, to Africa and Asia, where decolonization wars had created new refugee flows in the 1960s and 1970s. Of all the UN agencies, UNHCR had the best reputation among aid workers and donor governments. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry had neutered the Security Council, but UNHCR, which had its own governing board, or executive committee, had managed to thrive. It had already won one Nobel Prize—in 1954, for resettling European refugees after the Second World War—and was on its way to another in 1981, for managing the flight of refugees from Southeast Asia. As UNHCR expanded its work from Europe to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, staff members who spoke multiple languages or hailed from the developing world were put to use.Vieira de Mello, who had been UNHCR’s youngest professional staff member when he joined at twenty-one, rose more quickly than most of his peers.
 
 
His leftist ideals still brewed close to the surface. Although he did not romanticize Communism as it was being practiced in the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba, he slammed the United States for its war in Vietnam and its support for repressive right-wing regimes like Brazil’s. When he spotted an American-made car while walking down the streets of Geneva with friends, he would bend down as if picking up a stone and make the motion of hurling it at the passing vehicle. “Imperialists!” he would exclaim. In restaurants too when he heard an American accent, he occasionally made a show of getting up and moving out of earshot. “You can just hear the capitalism in their voices,” he would say with disdain.
 
 
Although he had stopped attending classes at the Sorbonne after receiving his basic degree in philosophy in 1969, he had continued to work toward his master’s from afar, reading and writing mainly at night and on the weekends. In 1970 he used up his UN vacation days studying for his oral exams and earned a master’s from the Sorbonne in moral philosophy. He still viewed the UN as a place of temporary employment. Although Jamieson had captured his imagination, the UN’s byzantine procedural requirements had not. He wrote to his former girlfriend in July 1970 that the UN had not changed: “From the sludge, I have only been able to learn one thing: the inanity of a life filled with forms of imaginary content.”
16
 
 
Jamieson never asked about his protégé’s philosophical pursuits, which he found excessively abstract, but Vieira de Mello did not mind. He laughed whenever Jamieson contrasted his own self-made path with that of his overcredentialed, privileged colleagues. “If I had a formal education,” Jamieson liked to say impishly, “I wouldn’t be working in this office. I’d be prime minister of England!”
 
 
A few of Vieira de Mello’s colleagues felt that he was too forgiving of Jamieson’s condescension.“Jamie was friendly,” recalls one, “but his friendliness was like that of a colonial sahib who treated his Indian valet nicely.” Jamieson sounded like many Western visitors to Africa when he spoke admiringly of its people, telling a UNHCR newsletter of “their great sense of humour; their happy spirit even in great difficulties.”
17
Vieira de Mello saw those colonial tendencies as forgivable by-products of Jamieson’s age and upbringing.
 
 
In 1971, two years into his time at UNHCR, Vieira de Mello was transformed by his first-ever field mission. The agency had taken on its largest challenge to date, managing the entire UN emergency response to the staggering influx into India of some ten million Bengalis. Pakistan had forced them out of their homes in the eastern part of the country, which would soon become Bangladesh. UNHCR’s global budget was then only $7 million, but High Commissioner Sadruddin raised nearly $200 million to contribute to an operation that would cost more than $430 million.
18
Operating under fierce pressure, Jamieson brought his favorite staff to the region—first to India to manage the refugee arrivals, and then to newly independent Bangladesh to help lay the ground for the massive return. He shuttled around as if he owned the region, even calling Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi “my dear girl.” Vieira de Mello, who was only twenty-three, was based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he helped organize the distribution of food aid and shelter to Bengalis as they returned home. When he disagreed with his boss, Jamieson would tell him, “My dear boy, you are completely and utterly wrong.”
BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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