The death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic Brazilian chief of the U.N. Mission to Iraq, with 21 others in a Baghdad terrorist bombing in August 2003 presaged the failure of U.S. policy in Iraq. He suffered for several hours under tons of rubble because heroic yet poorly equipped rescuers from the most powerful military in history lacked the training and equipment to free him.
Vieira de Mello left a legacy of decades of inspiring and unconventional efforts to bring peace and sanity to the most brutal war zones in recent history, including Lebanon, Cambodia, the Congo, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq.
Foreign policy expert Samantha Power unearths the legacy of her friend in a sweeping new biography, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008) -- her monumental effort to understand the dashing UN diplomat's original, "transformational" responses to the modern challenges of poverty, genocide, racism, terrorism, and civil war. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called Chasing the Flame a "majestic, profoundly important book... the defining work for our generation."
Power, 37, is the Anna Lindh Professor of Global Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her groundbreaking book A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer Prize and wide acclaim in 2003. From 1993 to 1996, Power covered wars in the former Yugoslavia, and she remains a working journalist. She is also advising on two forthcoming films about Vieira de Mello: a documentary by Greg Barker (Ghosts of Rwanda) and a feature film by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda).
Power made headlines in early March when she resigned as a senior foreign policy advisor to Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign after an unguarded, off-the-record remark to a British reporter in which she referred to Obama rival Sen. Hillary Clinton as a "monster." Power began working with Obama in 2005 after he met with her to discuss her genocide study, A Problem from Hell. Obama was the sole lawmaker to contact Power about the book.
Samantha Power recently sat down in Seattle for a lengthy conversation about her human rights work, her new book, her remorse for the Clinton "blunder," and more.
More than anyone now, you're the face of the human rights movement. Were you obsessed with peace and justice as a little girl?
Not at all. I was a little brat. I played sports, and threw myself into them. I wanted to be a sports reporter or sportscaster. Perhaps, having family in Ireland, I had a more international orientation, but never with the idea I could do anything to change or even tweak the world. At no point in college at Yale did I self-identify as a human rights person or take human rights classes. I was mainly interested in my sports radio talk show and being a sports reporter.
But the [1993] images of the concentration camps in Bosnia 50 years after the Holocaust shook me out of my navel-gazing, and I said, "God, what am I doing with my life?" I'd been a journalist, and ended up being a reporter in Bosnia, where these [human rights] commitments were entrenched without me knowing it. In law school, people said you're a human rights person because you cared about genocide in Bosnia. And I said, "I am? What does that mean?" My lowest grade in law school was in my human rights class.
How did you leap from journalism to law?
I was in Bosnia for two and a half years [1993-1996] and I did a lot of writing, but I was doing daily or weekly journalism where I wasn't sinking my teeth into anything. I felt that I wasn't achieving much. Srebrenica was seized just before I left [Bosnia], and men and boys in that safe area had been massacred en masse, so I didn't have a sense of my journalism being able to make a difference.
I romanticized law [as] a more concrete tool. Yet, in law school, I started doing a deeper kind of journalism. I began [the genocide book], and did longer [magazine] pieces. I was better at journalism part time. I did one article every six months, so I could put a lot of energy and thought into the article.
You put yourself in harm's way to get stories. For a 2004 New Yorker story, you met a janjaweed leader who committed atrocities in Darfur.
Yes. A real monster. That's what I hate most about my [monster] comment. I know real monsters, and it's important to choose your words carefully.
I'm more careful now. I ask myself for every story is the possible finding worth the risk. In the case of Darfur, nobody had spent time with the head of the janjaweed, and a comprehensive article on the genocide had not been written. While there were risks, it wasn't like going to Iraq, where journalists are targeted [and] the ability to make a difference in our consciousness is very small.
You've helped bring the mass killings in Darfur to the consciousness of the country and now there's a growing anti-genocide network.
There really is. It's a huge source of pride, and a club I want to be member of.
What's going on in Darfur now, and what should be done?
It's bad. There's a 26,000 troop peacekeeping force authorized, and only 9,000 troops have shown up. The key is to get those extra troops who will come from countries other than the United States.
In the wake of Iraq, it'll be a long time before the United States will be doing genocide prevention or suppression. If we're going to deal with global challenges, we'll need global standing, and that requires first adhering to the Constitution, and then reintegrating with the Geneva Conventions and the other international instruments that we've repudiated.
What sparked your massive biography on UN Diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello?
It began as an article. My editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Cullen Murphy, proposed this story.
Sergio was a friend, and instinctively I wouldn't have thought of him as a great man. As I got into Sergio's life, I realized he'd been in many more war zones than I'd understood, and that he had negotiated with more killers than anybody in history. I thought, my God, this is the guy for now. We're just starting to tackle these questions. It would be incredible if we could short-circuit our learning by walking in his shoes to capture that legacy. And if our young people get exposed to people and movements that cross borders, they'll be more sophisticated at knowing how to talk across divides.
You explore Vieira de Mello's unconventional approach to conflict as he served the UN in the most brutal war zones.
Sergio always went to the worst places first. In the '70s, he deals with refugee flows and wars of independence, and he's in the thick of war. In the early '80s, he's in Lebanon dealing with the PLO use of the UN base as a staging ground, the Israeli invasion, the birth of Hezbollah, and the attacks on U.S. installations. Then, in Cambodia, he's dealing with the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge and returning Cambodians to their homes. In Bosnia, he's in the middle of a war. In Congo, just after the [Rwandan] genocide, he's deciding what to do with the [Hutu] genocidaires. In 1999, he deals with both Kosovo and East Timor as a nation builder, a governor -- much like Paul Bremer in Iraq.
He went into harm's way at all stages of conflict, and never rested easily once a place degenerated into genocide or into a failing state. He knew there weren't any quick fixes. We in the States tend to focus on war-torn countries only at the moment they become threats to us, and only for as long as they are threats. Sergio saw the world as more connected, and was ahead of his time. As he put it, "There's no such thing as a distant crisis." We're locked into this globe, whether it's dealing with melting icecaps, or terrorists across borders, or refugee flows that know no boundaries.
And you stress his empathy for individuals.
I think my favorite scene is where he treats an old Azerbaijani woman like a head of state. He asks, "What do you wish for yourself?" And she says, "I wish that I could go up into the sky, turn into a cloud, and that the cloud could travel across the sky until it's over my land, and then that I could turn into rain and root myself in the soil of the land that I love." Sergio talked to this woman as though she held the key to world peace. Sergio was very special in that way.
He's not a perfect hero by any means. He made mistakes about how to advance human dignity and collective security. Also, he wasn't so good with his own family. It's sad he never got a chance to balance the personal and the professional.
Could you talk about Vieira de Mello's final UN assignment in Iraq in 2003?
He didn't want to go to Iraq because he didn't think the Americans were ready to take the advice of a UN troubleshooter. Then he thought, if I care about Iraq, and I care about the UN, this is the most important place in the world. So he went. He spent that summer trying to prevail upon [Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul] Bremer to give up power quickly, and to reconstitute the Iraqi army and deal with Iraqi military grievances. He failed in those efforts.
He constructed the UN headquarters [in Baghdad] as an anti-Green Zone -- a place where Iraqis could file grievances and check e-mail. That made it quite porous. Al Qaeda in Iraq had a young jihadi pull a truck up right outside Sergio's office, and a bomb went off. There were amazing individual heroic efforts [by U.S. soldiers and Marines], but they didn't have the equipment or the training to do an industrial rescue effort, which is what Sergio needed. The Americans were left, despite the $500 billion Pentagon budget, trying to rescue Sergio with a lady's basket handbag and a curtain rope from a UN office that they turned into a pulley system with their bare hands, but he was pinned under thousands of pounds of rubble.
He was alive for three and a half hours. The most powerful military in the history of mankind was woefully unprepared to deal with large-scale terrorist attacks against civilian targets, even though that was part of Bush's logic for the war. That haunts me more than the non-rescue.
He died like a refugee, like the stateless people he had spent his life trying to help.
How did your relationship with Sergio affect the writing of the biography?
I spent nine months excavating the last three and a half hours of his life. I found that brutal. I felt like I was in the hole with him, in the shaft. Nowhere else in the book do you get 40 pages on three hours, but in it you saw so much of Sergio's character. He didn't lord his authority over anybody. He asked about the rest of the staff. He kept his sense of humor. He kept his will.
Knowing Sergio made me more relentless to get at things that were hard to find. While he bears some resemblance to the person I knew, he's a much richer, more self-critical, a more adaptive giant of a man, I now realize.
If he had survived, do you think he could have addressed problems the U.S. has run into since the bombing?
We know from history that the United States was not ready to take UN advice for a long time. Sergio had managed to charm Bremer and President Bush, but the United States needed to acknowledge it needed help for Sergio to be of real value. Sergio was maybe the most capable international civil servant ever, but he couldn't undo history. I don't think he could have saved Iraq from the place this series of blunders led it to.
And you have compared Sergio Vieira de Mello and Sen. Barack Obama.
Sergio and Barack have an unusual combination of empirical and pragmatic rigor, and a deep and abiding compassion for people who are voiceless and invisible and not as empowered in their societies as they should be. And both have a modern sense of the connectedness of all of us. It's a complex world with a set of problems that we haven't faced before, and that doesn't scare Obama, and Sergio gravitated to it like a moth to the flame.
Although your "monster" description made big news, the press hasn't featured your oft-expressed admiration for Sen. Hillary Clinton.
I've said it hundreds of times over the past 15 months. She's a pioneer, brilliant, obviously incredibly capable, and if I weren't working for Barack Obama, I'm sure I'd have put my foot in my mouth on her behalf.
You were courageous to appear on Stephen Colbert's political satire show only days after your resignation from the Obama campaign.
My basic rule is that I'll do any media lined up prior to my blunder, and Colbert was lined up. I care so much about the ideas that Sergio embodied; canceling it would have been bad for the things I care about. And maybe it was good to put myself in a situation where someone else made light of [the blunder] because I find it very serious and quite terrible, and to be with somebody who turned it into the Cookie Monster, maybe that wasn't the worse thing in the world.
What do you hope for in post-Bush/Cheney foreign policy?
First and foremost, the United States has to get its own house in order and recover its regard for the principles that have made it a beacon for the world. The regard for human rights makes America singular. If we're just a country that pursues our national interest as defined in the short term, that won't be good for our national interest in the long term. We have to begin integrating a concern for human consequences at every stage of policy and be curious about what the effects of our policies are.