BIOGRAPHY: Chasing the Flame: Sérgio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, By Samantha Power, Penguin, 600pp. £25An admiring, balanced but overwhelmingly detailed biography of a long-serving UN humanitarian who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq in 2003, writes Adam Lebor.
THE BUREAUCRATS working for the United Nations Secretariat, its body of permanent officials, love to claim they are impartial civil servants.
Secretariat officials maintain they do not make policy, but merely wait for their instructions from the Security Council, where the decisions are taken. Like many founding legends of large institutions this is nonsense. From the crises of the 1990s to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, UN officials have repeatedly intervened in policy-making, often with catastrophic results.
Kofi Annan, the former secretary general, was head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and in Srebrenica, in Bosnia. In January 1994, Annan's office twice directed General Roméo Dallaire, head of UN peacekeepers, not to raid the Hutu arms caches where weapons were being stored in preparation for the mass slaughter of Tutsis. Annan then sat on General Dallaire's cable warning of mass slaughter to come and did not circulate it to the Security Council.
In May 1995, Yasushi Akashi, the highest civilian UN official in the former Yugoslavia, refused a request by General Rupert Smith, commander of UN troops in Bosnia, for an air strike against the Bosnian Serbs. His reason, recorded in his cable to Annan, was that an air strike would "weaken" Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, whom he believed was needed for a peace deal. At the start of the crisis in Darfur, the UN's humanitarian chief in Sudan, Dr Mukesh Kapila, sent repeated reports of the atrocities carried out by Sudanese forces to UN headquarters in New York. These were ignored by officials in the more powerful Department of Political Affairs, because they were judged politically inconvenient. When Kapila asked for guidance on the political aspects of Darfur, he was told there was none, as Darfur was purely a humanitarian issue.
All of these failures, of both vision and simple moral courage, are rooted in the contradiction at the heart of the United Nations: how to respect national sovereignty and stop human rights abuses when the abusers are also members of the United Nations. In this panoramic, thoughtful and important book, Samantha Power recounts Vieira de Mello's attempts to grapple with that contradiction throughout the 35 years he worked at the United Nations. Vieira de Mello was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. He studied at the Sorbonne, where he took part in the student unrest of 1968 and was clubbed across the face by the Paris police. Like many idealists in the developing world, he joined the United Nations in 1969 with an almost cult-like enthusiasm, seeing it as a counterweight to the superpowers, especially the United States. As Power records: "he gradually came to see the UN not merely as his place of employment but as his family and the embodiment of his evolving political ideals". So much so that Vieira de Mello even memorised the UN's charter, just as he had once done with Karl Marx's writings.
VIEIRA DE MELLO served in Lebanon in the 1980s and it was there he first witnessed the impotence of the United Nations in a war zone, when Israel invaded. He then worked for the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, dealing with humanitarian crises across the world before he was despatched to Cambodia where he helped steer the country to democracy. Power includes a fascinating account of Vieira de Mello's trip deep into the jungle to meet with the murderous leadership of the Khmer Rouge, several of whom, like, Vieira de Mello, had been educated at the Sorbonne. Vieira de Mello strongly believed that no matter how evil the Khmer Rouge were, they had to be engaged with to make the peace process work. But when does treating mass-murders as equal partners in diplomacy become complicity in their crimes? Vieira de Mello's boss in Cambodia was Yasushi Akashi. Akashi famously refused to demand passage through an ad-hoc roadblock in his UN vehicle - thus sending a signal that the United Nations would remain passive when confronted, a pattern that continued during the Yugoslav wars. Even Vieira de Mello would search the streets of Belgrade to find a suitable present to bring to Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic before each meeting.
Samantha Power is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Problem from Hell: a Study of the United States Response to Genocide during the Twentieth Century and was a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama. But she recently resigned after describing Hillary Clinton as a "monster" who would "do anything to win" in an interview with the Scotsman. One hopes that this minor slip of the tongue will not prevent her from taking up a post in a future Obama administration, when the fuss has faded away. For Chasing the Flame is more than a biography of a charismatic UN official who could have made a dynamic and effective secretary general. It is a vivid account of recent history and its numerous humanitarian catastrophes.
Nor is it a hagiography. Power's affection, even love, for Vieira de Mello is clear, but she also details the moral compromises he made, his love of wine and women, and the destruction of his marriage.
POWER IS ESPECIALLY good on Iraq, giving a lively UN insider's account of the doubts about the mission.
However, at 600 pages, the book is too long. Power falls into the classic biographer's trap of chasing every lead, and including too much information. At times the non-specialist reader will likely be overwhelmed by detail, which slows down the narrative.
Perhaps Vieira de Mello's - and the United Nations' - greatest success was in East Timor, where he managed the political transition to independence in 2002. By then Vieira de Mello understood that the Akashi approach - of obsessive neutrality - did not work. The UN, he believed, had to engage with the world and could achieve results. Vieira de Mello devoted his life to the United Nations but in the end it failed him. His Baghdad office was barely protected. Requests for blast-proof windows and a perimeter wall around the UN compound in Baghdad fell into the bureaucratic void. He died, crushed by rubble on August 19th, 2003, an early victim of the suicide bombs that still claim so many lives in Baghdad.
After Nato bombed the Serbs in 1999, Vieira de Mello briefly served as Annan's Special Representative in Kosovo, where he helped set up the UN's civil administration. In the frenzied excitement of Kosovo's independence last month, few Kosovars knew or remembered the dapper Brazilian civil servant. But Kosovo's independence was his achievement, too, one of many in a life tragically cut short. Sérgio Vieira de Mello chased the flame for his entire career at the UN. In the end it consumed him. We, and the world, are the poorer for his loss.
Adam LeBor is an author and journalist based in Budapest, Hungary. He covered the Yugoslav wars for the Times and the Independent. His book Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide is published in paperback by Yale University Press