Kindle Notes & Highlights
He had long ago stopped believing that he brought the solutions to a place’s woes, but he had grown masterful at asking the questions that helped reveal constructive ideas.
He thought about dignity, noting, “a wounded soul may hurt as much as a wounded body.”
When should killers be engaged, and when should they be shunned? Can peace be lasting without justice? Can humanitarian aid do more harm than good? Are the UN’s singular virtues—impartiality, independence, and integrity—viable in an age of terror? When is military force necessary? How can its inevitably harmful effects be mitigated?
His professional journey led him to believe the world’s leaders needed to do three big things. First, they had to invest far greater resources in trying to ensure that people enjoyed law and order. Second, they had to engage even the most unsavory militants. Even if they did not find common ground with rogue states or rebels, at least they might acquire a better sense of how to outmaneuver them. And third, they would be wise to orient their activities less around democracy than around individual dignity.
his first published writing, he commended the violence as “salutary,” noting that if the students had staged only peaceful rallies on the university campus, the French public would have looked the other way. Street fighting had been necessary in order to get the attention of an indifferent public.
“One can awaken the masses from their lethargy only with the sound of animal struggle,” he wrote.9 But unless the struggle became “global, irreversible, and permanent” and brought about the “demise of fossilized thought,” he argued, the students would go down in the French annals as “the organizers of a huge and laughable folkloric bazaar.”
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.
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.”
first and then talk about education second.”19 Vieira de Mello saw that while UNHCR had become skilled at feeding people in flight, governments were far less adept at preventing crises in the first place, or at rebuilding societies after emergencies so they could become self-sufficient.
He argued that the core philosophical principle that should drive human and interstate relations was “intersubjectivity,” or an ability to step into the shoes of others—even into the shoes of wrongdoers. If philosophers could help broaden each individual’s ability to adopt another’s perspective, he argued, they could help usher in what Misrahi called a “conversion.”22
Then they moved to Peru, where Vieira de Mello became UNHCR’s regional representative for northern South America and attempted to help asylum-seekers who were fleeing the Latin American military dictatorships.
But over the next eighteen months he would see for the first time how little the UN flag could mean to those consumed with their own grievances and fears.
Lebanon was the place where Vieira de Mello’s youthful absolutism began to give way to the pragmatism for which he would later be known.
Peacekeeping was then loosely defined as the interpositioning of neutral, lightly armed multinational forces between warring factions that had agreed to a truce or political settlement. It was a relatively new practice, initiated in 1956 by Lester Pearson, Canada’s foreign minister, who helped organize the deployment of international troops to supervise the withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli troops from the Suez region of Egypt.4 Soon
Vieira de Mello immediately won over the U.S. diplomat by telling him, “People say you know your way around. I could really use your help.” As Crocker remembers, “Nothing quite succeeds so well as carefully constructed flattery. He had me.”
He agreed with Urquhart that lightly armed UN peacekeepers could succeed only if
After witnessing Callaghan’s sputtering protests on the day of the invasion, Vieira de Mello told colleagues he was sure of one thing: “I will never use the word ‘unacceptable’ again.” There seemed little point in issuing shrill denunciations with nothing more than moral outrage behind them.
“Philosophical ideas must be applicable on the ground, and the field should be their only judge, their only criteria.”35 When Misrahi visited Israel on personal business, he met with his pupil and applauded his attempts to apply philosophy to his humanitarian and diplomatic work. But he thought Vieira de Mello could not expect mere reason and dialogue to yield conversion when little mutual understanding existed among the factions. “Just going and meeting with the enemy is not enough to establish reciprocal respect,” Misrahi insisted, urging him to take a longer view of human progress. “History
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killed fifty people, including seventeen Americans. It was the first-ever suicide bomb attack against a U.S. target, the opening salvo in an unconventional battle that would not command significant high-level attention until the al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001.
When the driver detonated his explosives, the blast blew bodies out of the building as far as fifty yards away and left a crater thirty feet deep and forty feet wide.49 A total of 241 American servicemen were killed in what was at that time the deadliest terrorist attack that had ever been carried out against Americans.
Vieira de Mello offset his seeming priggishness about UN principles by flamboyantly playing up his love of women. He
His reputation as a ladies’ man followed him throughout his career, and he seemed to relish the rumors of his exploits.
But while the UN offered its professional employees good salaries and generous benefits, Vieira de Mello did not stay with the UN for the money. He saw it as the place a person of his nationality and background could best make a difference in the world.
“I would like every one of my girlfriends to come to my funeral and walk behind my coffin.You’ll come, right?”
The UN’s “hour,” as far as Vieira de Mello was concerned, was long overdue. In a world of conflict, repression, and extreme poverty, he had come to see the UN as the only body that could serve both as a humanitarian actor in its own right and as a platform for governments to identify common interests and pool their resources to meet global challenges.
“Look, I’m always moving so these pads are convenient,” Vieira de Mello replied. “But I’ve also learned over the years that if I can’t fit my argument on a hotel note pad, I probably don’t know what I’m trying to say!”
By the 1980s he had come to see himself as a UN man, but since the organization was both a body of self-interested governments and a body of ideals, he did not seem sure yet whether serving the UN meant doing what states demanded or pressing for what refugees needed.
organizations like UNHCR be granted immediate access to Iraq. In Operation Provide Comfort, U.S., French, and British planes began dropping food packages to the Kurds from the air and then expanded the operation by sending ground troops inside northern Iraq to set up and protect temporary UNHCR camps.23 It was the first military intervention in history carried out in the name of displaced persons.
cases. Typed again by Annie, the thesis was entitled Civitas Maxima: Origins, Foundations, and Philosophical and Practical Significance of the Supranationality Concept.
“Does universality carry within itself the germs of its own annihilation?”
German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose main work, The Principle of Hope, argued that individuals had to first define and wish into being the utopia that they sought to create. Only man would pull history toward a more just future.
International law, which was being fortified by the day, offered evidence of humanity’s “long march” toward reason. But “history’s schizophrenia” was on full display, as he was struck by the enormous “distance separating institutional progress from ethical progress, law from morals.”
But this did not deter Vieira de Mello from urging individuals and governments to strive toward a new Ideal. He argued that generating constructive change required a “synthesis of utopia and realism.”
What would the ideal system entail? Governments needed to accept that their interests would be best advanced if they united in a community based on laws.
Kant was calling not for a supranational federal state,Vieira de Mello stressed, but for a “federation of peoples” that did not require individuals, groups, or countries to abandon their identities.
“How many wars could have been avoided,” he wrote, “if statesmen had not shown contempt for nations’ sense of self-esteem!”
Kant was adamant that a state should not interfere in the internal affairs of another. But he made an exception that Vieira de Mello endorsed: When a state fell into anarchy and threatened the stability of its neighbors, other countries had to step up.
Yet it seemed to him that democratic voters in the West had grown complacent because of their enhanced material well-being. And he worried that now, thanks to the cold war’s end, “messianic” ideas about the “end of history” were further seducing them.
“We must act as if perpetual peace is something real, though perhaps it is not,” Vieira de Mello said, quoting Kant. Then he added his own coda: “The future is to be invented.”
“I studied philosophy a long time, but I need to look for confirmation of philosophy and of values in the real world,” he once told an interviewer. “I’m restless. I like challenges, changes. I look for trouble, it’s true. Because in trouble I find truth and reality.”26
since it won its independence from France in 1953. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration had targeted the country in a secret bombing campaign. A five-year civil war then raged between the corrupt U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol and a band of notoriously brutal Maoist guerrillas known as the Khmer Rouge. And in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge victory ushered in a totalitarian terror that left more than two million Cambodians dead—a
missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq: He assembled a trustworthy, “no bullshit” UN team around him; he cultivated ties with the country’s most influential players; and he contrasted the plans and resources he had been handed by UN Headquarters with the ground reality, attempting to adapt the plans to fit what he (like Jamieson before him) called “the real world.”
In most professional hierarchies, a relationship between a senior manager and a special assistant would require the end of the romantic relationship or the dismissal of the supervisor. But for Vieira de Mello, who worked eighteen-hour days, special assistants made natural partners.
He was convinced that peace hinged upon whether the UN could secure the Khmer Rouge’s cooperation. For many humanitarians the prospect of working with the Khmer Rouge was loathsome.
But Vieira de Mello believed in what he called “black boxing.” “Sometimes you have to black box past behavior and black box future intentions,” he told colleagues. “You just have to take people at their word in the present.” He returned to Kant’s admonition, “We should act as if the thing that perhaps does not exist, does exist.”
want to look into Ieng Sary’s eyes,” he told Nici Dahrendorf. “I want to see if they are still burning with ideological fire.” At this stage in his career, mulling the roots of evil was more stimulating than managing the logistics of easing the suffering that resulted from that evil. Late
“You never know where you are going to end up,” he said. “One day you could be that person’s boss. The next day you could be working for them. Why make an enemy when you don’t have to?” Stafford commented to a colleague, “You know what Sergio’s biggest problem is? He refuses to make enemies.”
“The art of diplomacy is to avoid placing yourself in a position where you can be humiliated.”
The acronym UNTAC became ridiculed as “UN Transmission of AIDS to Cambodians.”11
was not just UN soldiers who were raising eyebrows. Some UN civilian officials developed relationships with Cambodian women who did not speak English. The power differential made it hard to gauge how consensual the relationships were.
