TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of John Shattuck, who is here with me on stage, and all of our Library colleagues, I thank you for coming to today’s forum. I want to first acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR, which rebroadcasts our forums on Sunday evenings.
Sergio Vieira de Meilo, a humanitarian, peacemaker and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights died in 2003 while representing the United Nations in Baghdad, the victim of the first suicide bombing of a civilian target in the Iraq War. His loss was reminiscent of the death in 1961 of then-UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, whose plane crashed during a trip to negotiate peace in the Congo. President Kennedy’s remarks in the aftermath of that tragedy and on the future of the United Nations could have also been delivered at the more recent memorials to Sergio Vieira de Meilo. As we watch a brief excerpt, you’ll note at one point the camera captures the Secretary General’s empty chair.
[BEGIN AUDIO CLIP]
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: We meet here in an hour of grief and challenge. Dag Hammarskjold is dead, but the United Nations lives. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the tasks for which he died are at the top of our agenda. A noble servant of peace is gone, but the quest for peace lies before us. The problem is not the death of one man. The problem is the life of this organization. It will either grow to meet the challenges of our age or it will be gone with the wind, without influence, without force, without respect.
Were we to let it die, to enfeeble its vigor, to cripple its powers, we would condemn our future. For in the development of this organization rests the only true alternative to war, and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative. Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike.
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war. This will require new strength and new roles for the United Nations. For disarmament without checks is but a shadow and a community without law is but a shell. Already the United Nations has become both the measure and the vehicle of man’s most generous impulses. Already it has provided in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa this year, in the Congo, a means of holding man’s violence within bounds. But the great question which confronted this body in 1945 is still before us: Whether man’s cherished hopes of progress and peace ought to be destroyed by terror and disruption; whether the foul winds of war can be tamed in time to free the cooling winds of reason; and, whether the pledges of our charter ought to be fulfilled or defied -- pledges to secure peace, progress, human rights and world law.
[END AUDIO CLIP]
TOM PUTNAM: Though she was born in Ireland and moved to the United States at age nine, Samantha Power once told an interviewer that she is a child of Bosnia. For a year after graduating from Yale, at the age of 23, she covered the unfolding war in the Balkans as a freelance journalist and, in her own words, “through that experience, came of age.” Her reporting from the former Yugoslavia launched Ms. Power’s towering career as a journalist and crusader for human rights, reporting from such troubled lands as Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan.
In 2003, she published her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, documenting why the United States, at the height of its power, failed to stop the major genocides of the 20th century. The founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, she took a year off from her teaching responsibilities during the 2005 academic year to work in the office of Senator Barack Obama, and she currently serves as the Anna Lind Professor at the Kennedy School of Government.
It was also in the Balkans that Samantha Power met the subject of her newest book, Chasing the Flames: Sergio Vieira de Meilo and the Fight to Save the World. On the eve of their first meeting, a friend described Sergio Vieira de Meilo as “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” The next day, NATO unleashed the first bombing raids in its 45-year history, targeting Serbian nationals who were besieging the UN safe areas. Ms. Power telephoned Sergio de Meilo to give him the opportunity to cancel their plans to meet over dinner. But with his characteristic and unflappable zest for life, he suggested that though the sky was falling all around him and even if World War III was to begin that evening, “a man needed to eat.”
This compelling new biography captures the energy and drive of Sergio de Meilo who, Ms. Power writes, “came to see the United Nations not merely as his place of employment, but as his family and the embodiment of his evolving political ideals.” In the 1980s, he committed to memory provisions of the UN charter with the same zeal that he had once memorized the teachings of Karl Marx during de Meilo’s student days in Paris in 1968. His blood, his colleagues teased him, had moved from running Marxist red to UN blue. Yet as the book paints a vibrant portrait of de Meilo, it also sheds insight on the increasingly dangerous world in which he lived and asks piercing questions about the role of the UN in our time. When should killers be engaged and when should they be shunned? Can humanitarian aid do more harm than good? When is military force necessary? Are the UN’s singular virtues impartiality, independence and integrity viable in an age of terror?
To engage in a conversation on these questions tonight is John Shattuck, former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic and US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. In the latter role, John worked to end the war in Bosnia, to establish the International Crime Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and to restore a democratically elected government to Haiti -- challenges that he recounts, among others, in his book, Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response. In 2001 he returned to Boston as Chief Executive Officer of the Kennedy Library Foundation and is responsible for the spotlight that this institution shines on issues related to advancing human rights both at home and around the globe.
Ms. Power’s new book is on sale in our museum store, and she will sign copies following tonight’s discussion. But let me conclude by sharing a comment as an appreciative reader of this biography and Samantha Power’s previous work. “Sergio Vieira de Meilo,” she writes, “spent his life chasing the flame of idealism that motivates some to strive to combat injustice and inspires the vulnerable to believe that help will soon come.” By telling this enthralling story so masterfully, Samantha Power kindles fire in the hearts of her readers, and a well-reasoned hope that the institutions that Sergio de Meilo put his faith in and gave his life for can meet the challenges of our times and our future. Please join me and John in welcoming back Samantha Power to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
JOHN SHATTUCK: Samantha, it’s great to have you back, and I say that on many levels. You’ve written a spectacular book, and we’ll get into this in a moment. You also paid me a wonderful compliment when I wrote a book several years ago by interviewing me on this stage, so now I get to return the favor, and indeed for me the favor is all mine. I think many people know about Samantha’s courage and her great intelligence and her ability to tell stories, which she’s told masterfully in this book.
And I have to say, I have never really encountered a book that has narrative on so many different levels as this one. And the other thing I would say about this is that reading a 576-page book all the way to the end and then wanting more is definitely an indication of what it is. This is a book about the most difficult problems in our world: genocide, crimes against humanity, the ways in which cynical leaders start conflicts and countries continue them, and efforts by some people and nations to try to stop those conflicts. I want to sort of start with your subtitle, because I think it’s important for you to introduce us to the world you’re talking about. The subtitle of this book, it sounds a little bit grandiose, but I think it’s appropriate: “The fight to save the world.” It’s Sergio Vieira de Meilo and The Fight to Save the World. So maybe you could just sort of start us off by describing this world from the point of view of the hero, who we’ll talk about in a moment -- what it looked like to him from within a UN bureaucracy, what it looked like to him as a citizen of the world?
SAMANTHA POWER: Sure. Well, first, let me say it’s great to be back. I’ve had a rough month. Self-inflicted rough month. Very rough month. And so, it’s like a warm bath to be back, and I just wish I could turn the clock back to the last time we were here, and then do everything else the same, and then just do one little thing a little bit differently. So I’m sorry for those of you who I disappointed with my big mouth and my Irish temper, and I think we have an embarrassment of riches as Democrats and as people loyal to the principles upheld in this building in this election race. Anyway, it’s great to be an American these days.
So let me just say one word about the subtitle. I almost cancelled my book tour and everything because I was so crestfallen about everything that had happened, and I was so embarrassed. But I decided, actually thanks to Senator Obama, who just said, “What are you doing? You can’t do that. You’ve got to get out there. You worked on this book for all that time. Come on!” So he was amazing through all this.
And so, originally, I was supposed to be on Stephen Colbert last week, but I had cancelled in the wake of my blunder, and Obama said, “No, you got to.” So I called back, and they took me back. And so, I was on, on Monday night, but I was very worried that I would be seen to be making light of Monster-gate. Which I, you know … But, anyway, they actually gave me a little hint of what the questions would be, just a couple of them; they ended up changing the questions and not using them, but one of the questions was going to be, “So you’ve written this book about this incredible guy” -- this wasn’t a question that he asked -- “this amazing guy and you think that there are all these lessons in this person’s life that we can learn from, and wouldn’t that be easier if he had a different name? Like, didn’t you think about just cutting off the last name and just calling him ‘Sergio.’” So, I thought that was … He didn’t ask the question.
But it is something that I grapple with, because one of my beliefs -- we talked about this briefly before -- is that we’re lacking for contemporary, realistic heroes, and I say “hero” kind of a little bit ambivalently because Sergio is so flawed like all of us, but we’re lacking. We talk a great game about transnational threats and saving the world, even saving the planet, saving the ice caps, saving each of us, countries from terrorism, nuclear proliferation; we talk a good game, but we don’t have very many models, you know, of people who have actually gone out and are operating in the real world where the saving needs doing.
So the world that needs saving that he addresses is sub-state threats in a way. It’s not all too successful states or big, you know, kind of you-sunk-my-battleship kind of states, or that kind of conflict. But it’s failing states, it’s crumbling infrastructure, it’s lawlessness, it’s undergoverned spaces -- to use the military’s new parlance. Sometimes it’s genocidal states or states who would see a minority in another country and say, you know, “Why should we be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in ours?,” which seems to be an impulse. But it’s this murky kind of gray zones, as Primo Levi liked to describe it, and transnational and sort of sub-state, and that we have a guy who inhabited that space for 34 years; it was just, you know, too important a space to inhabit and we were all, I felt, you know, you and I both, like coming, we were all coming and trying to catch up and trying to learn. Because I live as a citizen of a state, you were serving the country in a range of different ways, and you were trying to orient the state toward the challenges, sub-state and transnational -- but here’s a guy who tried to extract from the US government, extract from the South African government, extract from the Jordanian and the Japanese, et cetera, to just get just enough national interest from each of the countries within the UN to deal with these kinds of challenges without so triggering their national interests that they came to engage with these kinds of challenges simply for their own sake. I mean, it’s that fine, incredibly fine line.
So my feeling, it’s a little tongue in cheek, “The fight to save the world,” in that, I think, Sergio would have said that quite ironically. But, on the other hand, I don’t think he would have done what he did if he didn’t feel like the mortal stakes were the ones that were worth putting his own life on the line. I mean, he was in 14 war zones over the course of a 34-year career.
The main thing about him is he had a head start thinking about something that we are coming to, as citizens and as leaders, I think, too late -- not too late, but late, later than would have been good and judicious -- and so, wouldn’t it be better if, given the mistakes he made, if we could somehow maybe preempt those mistakes or short-circuit them, sort of lower the gradient of the learning curve by walking in his footsteps. Maybe he strays in that direction, we could stray virtually on an airplane rather than having to stray and lose 4,000 lives or stray and appease or stray and, you know, think that actors can be trusted who can’t be trusted, or think that because someone can’t be trusted, they can’t be engaged. There are so many things that he’s done over the course of that life that if we go ahead as a super power and make those same mistakes, the costs will be greater than we can afford, it seems to me right now.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, let’s look at the hero. Let’s look at Sergio. And I have to say, you brought out his middle name in a way that I’d never seen it before – Vieira -- and I finally learned how to pronounce it. Sergio was always who he was from my point of view. And, you know, your book is on three levels at least -- and many others, probably, as well -- it’s certainly a very wonderful biography, a political biography, of an international hero. And we’ll get to him. It’s also a story about the United Nations and what it goes through during this long period of three decades. I mean, it’s not that long, really, but it’s an enormously long period when you think that the Cold War ended in the middle of it, and then so many lessons need to be learned from what the failed safe states that you describe are.
And then it’s a broader, I would say, a truly global biography. What did the world look like during this period? At any event, looking at Sergio, you mentioned the sort of gray areas and the moral complexity that comes out of this book, I think -- we’ll get to that in a minute -- but one of the things that always impressed me about him -- and I did meet him, I had several meetings with him when he was in Geneva -- was that he was the opposite from the gray bureaucrat, the typical UN bureaucrat, who always seemed rather distant and a little difficult to -- and I see my friend, Phil Budden, the Consul General from the United Kingdom here; I don’t think he had service in the UN, so I’m not insulting you, Phil, but …
SAMANTHA POWER: You’re not gray, either.
JOHN SHATTUCK: But this gray phenomenon. And then there’s Sergio, who’s in the middle of it, who’s got this great intelligence and sort of sparkling capacity to get to both the ironies and the realities of life. And a great sense of humor. And I’ll just tell one tiny story, and then I want you to talk about him. I came to Geneva at one point without any clothing. I had clothing that I was wearing … [laughter] I was wearing, of course …
SAMANTHA POWER: The inner life of John Shattuck.
JOHN SHATTUCK: The airlines had managed to -- the emperor has no clothes -- had managed to lose my luggage, and I was on my way to Rwanda, which is not a particularly good place to go without any luggage at all, although I wasn’t going to take very much. And Sergio very kindly offered to lend me some of his shirts. And I’ll never forget the comment that he made, he said, “It might actually be useful for a US bureaucrat to have a little of the UN rub off on him.” So I thought that was rather nice. So over to you. Tell us about this remarkable man.
SAMANTHA POWER: He did light up a room. I mean, he had that quality that I guess politicians are known for, which is to make everyone feel, in one on one encounters or in one on 1,000 encounters, but that that person that they’re speaking to is the most important person in the room, and that it pains Sergio, it pains whoever the politician or Sergio is, to leave -- it’s that the worst thing in the world is to have to actually leave this particular encounter to go and have to do something else. And, I mean, people talked about him making them feel like the Queen of England, making them feel like the center of the universe. And in Sergio’s case I think what was distinct was that he actually was a true egalitarian in that he didn’t treat a head of state all that differently than he would’ve treated a refugee.
One of my favorite scenes in the book, you may remember -- and for those of you who are going to read the book, I’ll set it up, because I won’t spoil it because I won’t be able to do justice to the encounter that he had -- but he meets this Azerbajani refugee in one of these refugee camps, and she’s a 75-year-old peasant farmer. They speak briefly. He goes around to the rest of the refugee camp. He’s at that point Under Secretary General, I think, for humanitarian affairs. He’s already a really big deal in the UN system, just a couple of promotions away from the top. And he talks to this woman and asks her about how she’s doing, and then walks away and makes more ritual stops, and then has to go meet with the prime minister and is with the deputy foreign minister, who’s trying to get him to the limo so they can get to the meeting with the prime minister. And he’s just about to get in the car -- and he talked to the woman like an hour before -- and he said, “I’ve got to get back; I want to talk to that woman again.” So he went and he tracked her down, and just -- you should read it because her language is so much better than mine will be -- but basically he said, you know, “What do you wish for yourself?” And she said, “What I really wish is that I could become a cloud and that I could go up into the sky and that I, as a cloud, could move hundreds of miles southward in the direction of my home, and that as a cloud I could just somehow turn into rain and as rain I could fall into the soil, and I could rest there in the soil of my land.” This woman was never going to go back to her home.
And Sergio was capable, after all of these years in these broken places, to get choked up by that, to think that he had heard something that was -- it was as if it was a key to world peace. He would keep the prime minister waiting in order to continue to engage with this woman and to give her some hope. And he was rare also in circling back -- this is something that I hope to be able to take from spending time with him, since his death; I mean, this is one of the take-aways for me, because I’m not good at this -- but he would, when he went into Kosovo under the cover of NATO bombing, NATO, of course, started bombing in 1999, the Serbs, in order to secure autonomy for the ethnic Albanians.
And Sergio on the one hand was sympathetic to the use of force, but, on the other hand, really pissed off that the UN Security Council had been bypassed. He recognized that it was just a stalemate, that Russia was never going to go along with any kind of aggressive enforcement of, you know, peacekeeping and human rights principles, so there was no way that force would have been used and the Albanians would have been so-called liberated if not for the use of force, but he also felt it was very important to re-assert the UN's independence.
So what he did is he led a team under the cover of -- I say under the cover of, while NATO was bombing, while Serb paramilitaries were at large, and while the Albanian guerillas were also in part of a war -- and he said, “We’re going in, and we’re going to try to ascertain the fates of displaced people.” So he leads this convoy in. NATO is furious, and the US government, absolutely furious. Jamie Rubin and others denounced Sergio for standing up to the United States. Again, he was quite sympathetic to what they were trying to do for the Albanians, but he still felt there was a space to go and see collateral damage by NATO, but also Serb massacres against civilians. He clung to this idea that you could somehow be an independent applier of the rules, whereas most people say, “Well, you apply the rules against the United States, then you’re by definition not applying them on behalf of the Albanians or vice versa.” But, anyway, he goes in and he meets somebody whose house has been torched, whose son has been massacred, an ethnic Albanian who was hiding and only came out of the woods because they saw a UN vehicle and reported on the situation, and had an exchange where the trip itself was more symbolic and that it showed that the UN could still be an independent voice. They did ascertain the welfare, vaguely, of the displaced people, but it wasn’t a hugely … It was more symbolic than a hugely constructive trip. And he risked a lot in order to do that.
But anyway, he comes out, NATO ends up, the Serbs ends up surrendering, the Albanians end up getting autonomy, Sergio ends up being the guy put in charge of governing the Kosovo province, and the first thing he does in his first week while in Kosovo, he says, “I’ve got to go find that guy. I promised him we’d be back, and I want to go find that guy.” And he went and he tracked down the person. And just in general this ability to disaggregate the human in human rights or the human in humanitarian, to see individuals kind of mano y mano, you know, one by one.
And, again, you could say that about a politician, that they look and they shine their spotlight on you and you feel like you’re … But it didn’t feel forced. And the exception, of course, though, was his own. This is, again, the contradictions in so many people -- but probably the people who he was the least attentive to were the people who were closest to him. So his wife and kids, he didn’t elevate them in quite the same way, and probably did put the welfare of the world above at least the short-term welfare of the people closest to him. He was absent. In order to be in 14 war zones, he never got off the train.
Most UN officials, most diplomats in their 30s or their 40s duck out for a while in order to raise families and be with their kids as they go to school, and he never made those compromises. He had two sons and a wife, but he continued to put, again, the fate of women like the Azerbajani refugee, again, arguably above those closest to him. So that would have been his one big blindspot, I think, and it was one later in life, as he got closer to the pinnacle of being Secretary General, he began to revisit that balance and fell in love with somebody else, was getting a divorce, wanted to start a second family I think in part to do it right and get the balance more right. The contradiction got too great for him, you know, that he was trying to ease suffering for others and then was causing suffering in his personal life. It became, like, too, too much.
JOHN SHATTUCK: So he’s very human. He puts human into human rights and he’s very human himself. You say a figure in the middle of the UN. Now, I want to move to the UN, because this is really the narrative that is sort of broader in scope, but nonetheless brings Sergio’s perspective into this. And one of the things that struck me about the way in which you treated his attitude toward the UN in the early days, during at least half of his career and on, really, I guess it finally ended a little bit in Bosnia and Rwanda -- we’ll get to that -- was the principle of neutrality, that the UN is this neutral body that needs to make sure that it talks to everyone and really doesn’t sort of take a moral stance vis a vis any of the particular actors.
And, of course, he gets brought in and begins to talk to a number of the bad guys in the world, I mean, particularly when he gets to Bosnia he’s talking with the Serbs, et cetera. He acquires this nickname from some of the Western forces that, particularly in the US, he’s known as Serbio, because he’s talking to the bad guys in the interest of neutrality. Tell us about this, and how did his position change on this over time, because I think it’s a very central question of what the UN really is and now should be. Where is the issue of neutrality?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, let me first say that, as you described at the beginning, that there’s this biography of the man, there’s a biography of the UN system such as it is, and then it’s a biography of the world -- these three layers. You know, I did 400 interviews or something for this book, and was so busy trying to reconstruct what the guy did and then what the missions he was on -- because most of them hadn’t been written about in any great detail -- but there was a point, probably about a year before I finished the book, where I went to Charettes and I got one of these big, you know, charts or whatever and with my crayons -- it was so primitive -- but I was, like, “Oh, there are three biographies at work here.” So I very self-consciously then came to understand it as these three layers. And in some ways, maybe, even that metaphor of, I mean, I did it horizontally because it was timelines that would help me orient, like, when did the wall fall, when did the UN Security Council get to then become something, again without the Russian and American vetoes, what did that mean for Sergio? It helped place it.
But in some ways, to your question, I could think about each of these three grids or lines in the time line actually more like arcs, because I often thought of this book, as I was writing it, focusing on Sergio, that it was like The Education of Henry Adams, like the education of Sergio Vieira de Meilo, the education of an idealist in practice, you know, in the real dirty world.
And so, on that question, and it’s not always the case that the UN and the UN’s learning maps his learning. He’s usually a little bit out in front. Sometimes he’s a little behind. But nonetheless, with regard to neutrality, he enters the UN because, I think, in large measure politics kind of gross him out. He was the son of a Brazilian diplomat, and his father was forced into early retirement when the Brazilian military took over in a coup in the mid-‘60s. And so Sergio kind of said, “Eww, politics; eww, military; eww, state power,” you know? And he would have been very skeptical about governments. Paris ’68, which Tom mentioned, was the manifestation of that -- throwing rocks at the Parisian police, spewing all kinds of rants about the imperial Americans, Vietnam War, and capitalism in general.
But the place that he then gravitated toward was the UN, which of course was a gathering of states. I mean, today, 192 states -- back then, 175 governments. So the very thing that he was trying to run away from, he, without really being so, I mean, like many of us have some confusion about the many UNs there are within the UN, right? There’s the humanitarian piece, which he joined, but then the bulk of what gets done out of the UN is done when governments come in and decide to pool their resources. The UN is, for the most part, the sum of the world’s governments’ clumsiness or conscience, polarization or promise. It’s all there, but it’s usually the manifestation of lots of countries’ politics that turn up within the building.
So on neutrality, he goes, because he thinks, “Well, states are biased, governments are political, but I’m going to go to the UN where impartiality, integrity, independence” -- these things, again, the Hammarskjold principles, these were the things that he, as an independent civil servant of this organization carrying a blue UN passport, somehow he could be for those principles and the governments would be on the other side of the building and he wouldn’t really have to talk to them, you know?
And, of course, for the first ten years within the UN he worked for the High Commissioner for Refugees: he was feeding people, he was supplying shelter, and he could avoid a lot of the politics. He could just go and say, “Could I have some more, please?” and he could beg for money to buy shelter, to buy vaccines, to buy food for people who had been displaced in conflict, and usually there were enough takers within, and that was it. He’d interact with governments only that far.
Where it all came to a head for him, though, was in Lebanon, where his belief was initially that the UN force in southern Lebanon, which exists in greater numbers even today, after 2006, but that that force could be neutral and that it could be a buffer, and that the PLO, on the one hand, which were, you know, had their bases in southern Lebanon at that time, and the Israelis on the other, would respect that buffer, that the UN flag was enough, that we were neutral and that mattered.
And what ended up happening is the PLO used, you know, sort of hid behind the UN, and then would duck out and then go into northern Israel and kill Israelis. Israel then invaded in ’82, June of ’82, mowed right over the UN checkpoints, the UN bases. Sergio goes marching up to an Israeli tank commander, again believing that principle: “What you’ve just done is unacceptable. You can’t cross an international border.” And the tank commander just goes, “Unacceptable?” And Sergio says, “Unacceptable.” And the guy goes, “You think this is unacceptable? I’ve got 50 tanks behind me. Now, that’s unacceptable.” And Sergio said from that point forward he never used the word “unacceptable” again. So that was a key moment in this neutrality dance, because it’s him recognizing that if the principles are to be enforced you have to somehow play into; you’ve got to get dirty; you’ve got to be in the room with governments; you’ve got to be negotiating with them; you’ve got to make them see their interests as advanced. You know, as later, Israel, it stayed in Lebanon until the year 2000, in the end left Lebanon on the belief that it was doing more harm than good, Palestinians, et cetera.
I mean, it has to be from within. You have to get within the framework of cost and benefits. And to be outside the room simply pointing to the principles or denouncing wasn’t going to put you in a very educated state of mind to be able to help identify areas of overlap, even just tiny, you know, slivers of overlap. So that’s step one, I think. That makes him be prepared to play politics, be prepared to be in the room.
But what the UN flag can be, he still, you know, fundamentally, that he can’t quite shake. I mean, partly because what does shaking faith in neutrality and impartiality mean? It means you end up having to choose sides and you get very nervous about that, right? Because how do you know -- every government isn’t perfect, and by taking the side of one entity’s behavior, somehow you’re turning your back on another. So, I mean, because there’s no magic formula for who’s right, there’s only the principles, it made him more prepared to be Machiavellian here or there, or be in the room, but he was still responding very, very tactically.
And you mentioned the Balkans, where he was known as Serbio. There was an instance I think -- and he would have said this himself and he did say it himself -- that later he looked back on that mission and believed that he was just handing sandwiches out at the gate of Auschwitz. That, in effect, aid was prolonging the conflict, that it was giving the major powers, again, the governments, an alibi that they didn’t have to grapple with the sources of the violence. They could just feed, put band-aids on the wound, and hope that it went away.
And the true turning point, then, in the wake of that, I think there’s Lebanon and then the second turning point in his life in his relationship with these seemingly noble principles -- and who can be against neutrality or impartiality, I mean, they sound great -- was to recognize that civilians gravitated toward the promise of UN protection without themselves understanding what he had come to understand in Lebanon, which is that the UN is ultimately a gathering of governments. And unless you can get governments to change, principles are going to lie fallow. They’re not going to be necessarily enforced.
So what he realized after Srebrenica, after the massacre in Rwanda, the genocide in Rwanda, was that civilians didn’t know that. They just saw UN and they thought, “Oh, that means the world is serious,” so they gravitated, as many of you know, in both Rwanda and in Srebrenica, to UN bases and then the peacekeepers there, of course, had been sent by governments that weren’t serious about making war to help civilians or risking the lives of their soldiers or their police. So in two back to back cases, the peacekeepers just -- when the killers came, they just opened their doors. The killers came in and the civilians were surrendered. And Sergio saw this; they were more vulnerable than they would have been had there been no UN, maybe, because then they would have just taken to the hills, they would have run, tried to get to neighboring countries. But they had really trusted in the sort of principled side of the UN.
So with that, he then said, “Okay, now I’ve moved to a whole new place. Now I know we, as peacekeepers, we’ve got to push back. We as people who worked on the UN side of things can’t allow governments to go in unless they’re serious about civilian protection. And I, as a UN guy who occasionally am in a position to instruct the peacekeepers as to what to do, I have to order them to use force, I have to order them to make arrests.” He instituted a shoot to kill policy, Sergio did, in East Timor, in order to prevent the Indonesian militia from coming into East Timor and killing Timorese civilians.
That was so different from the rules of engagement in Bosnia and in Rwanda. I mean, it was very controversial. He decided to ask for forgiveness and not permission, which was a very assertive way. I mean, because most UN civil servants say, “Oh, I’ve got to wait to hear what the Security Council tells me to do.” And he said, “No, I know from history that if we don’t assert ourselves … We have to be impartial, but impartial to these principles, not just a pseudo mediator between two unequal sides or civilians will pay the price. And my loyalty” -- my, Sergio’s -- “loyalty is to civilians and is to the enforcement of those principles. And if the member states are mad at me for being too aggressive, then they can take it up with me later. But I’m going to do it my way, having learned from Rwanda and Srebrenica.”
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, one of the areas of moral complexity of your book is Sergio’s relationship to two major tools of the international community, which really are tools that come out of governments. As you say, the UN is ultimately nothing more, nothing less, than governments, and particularly the governments on the Security Council. The two tools are the use of force, which I think we ought to explore a little bit here, and the use of justice as an instrument of trying to bring about peace.
There’s an enormous amount of controversy about both fields, both aspects of what Sergio, as you rightly say and as you point out in your book, becomes more sophisticated in the use of both of these tools. But the tools that we later will learn, particularly when we move to Iraq and we’ll do that in a moment, you know, become very complex. How would you say he changed -- you mentioned what he ended up doing in East Timor with respect to getting the rules of engagement for the UN forces to be much more, you know, heavy. But to move further on to the use of force, this whole concept of humanitarian intervention was, after all, Bosnia, then Kosovo, East Timor to some extent, and then the way it gets twisted in Iraq. And then, separately, the issue of justice, which many would still dispute the equation, in my own work, but justice can also be seen to get in the way of trying to bring the bad guys to the table. So how does he look at those two big issues, which are kind of central to everything he does?
SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah, I mean, he looks at them with a lot of, I mean, a lot of ambivalence and a lot of confusion, I mean, in the sense that if there are golden rules that he puts forth, one of them is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. There’s no template of circumstance that you can think up ahead of time, as, “Okay, in that circumstance, if you check that box, that box, that box, then military force is required.”
I think the greatest tension for him, once he got over the Srebrenica-Rwanda threshold, was how do you deal with -- and this is the world we’re in now even more than when he was with us -- but how do you deal with the fact that, on the one hand, we recognized with Rwanda, with Srebrenica, with Darfur, whatever, that there are occasions when forms of coercion are going to have to be used in order to deter the perpetrators of mass atrocity. He got it, for sure.
JOHN SHATTUCK: And used by whom, though?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, that’s what I was going to get to. So the first is you’re okay with force, and if you’re throwing stones at the Parisian police and hating anything to do with state power, that’s a big threshold to overcome. So he overcomes that, and then he understands that, you know, in a sense, governments, in the case of Rwanda, Darfur, they’re not interested in putting their troops in harm’s way and really putting much on the line. So that leaves the UN. So single countries aren’t going to get involved in Darfur, because they care just that much about the people of Darfur. Maybe what you could do is you can peel a little bit of enough countries’ self interest away that that’ll get you enough residual interest to send a peacekeeping force. Then the danger is that that peacekeeping force is, because it’s like a default option or lowest common denominator option, that the people who are actually in the field aren’t ready to do the tough work.
And that’s where, as we talked about, you know, he was pushing more and more for the troops on the ground to see that their self interests were at stake, the capitals were invested once they’d sent their troops and their police into dangerous places, their pride was on the line. You know, Holland will never be the same having gone through Srebrenica. Even though being at Srebrenica wasn’t in the Netherlands’ national interest, being humiliated after Srebrenica turns out, you know, was.
And so, he would make arguments like that. But he bumped up against two challenges that we live with, again, even more today. One is this question of authorization. How do you get through the UN Security Council -- which is for Sergio the be all and end all of international legal enforcement -- a resolution authorizing coercion or the use of force? And while that was an issue with the US and Russia squaring off in the ‘90s, much more an issue today with US, Russia and China now in an effective stalemate within that institution.
And the second issue is how do you affect politics? He was comfortable with the use of force, but how do you affect the politics in enough countries that those countries, now in Afghanistan, for NATO, those countries feel like it’s in their domestic self interest to be a part of a NATO peacekeeping force or to be a part, today, of a UN Darfur peacekeeping force?
And what he recognized was that the conversation is not constructively had at the United Nations, where each of you come as an ambassador from your country into this building, bringing your country’s national interest. What he recognized and started to do much more in the later years of his life and his career was to go into the capitals and try to affect perceptions of national interest, security interest, domestic political interest. So, for now, for NATO in Afghanistan, that would mean going to Canada -- not just him, but urging people who cared about the Taliban not coming back or cared about the security threat and trying to play into Canada’s domestic conversation. Going to Germany and trying to get German troops to deploy in dangerous areas in Afghanistan, which they’re now refusing to do. Going to the Netherlands and try to … But not acting as if there’s going to be some institutional fix, you know, that somehow fixing or kind of even declaring a norm against genocide within the UN, within the General Assembly, is going to make any of you ambassadors go back to your capital and say, “Oh, but there’s a norm in the General Assembly. Now we’ve got to.”
So he was comfortable with the use of force. The Security Council challenge, I think, was not one he had an answer for, because he was such a UN guy that the idea of sort of contracting out the authorization of the use of force, because, as you know, the permanent members each have a veto now, so if China doesn’t want to stand up to Sudan, that’s enough, that’s a deal-breaker. If Russia didn’t want to bring independence to Kosovo, that was a deal-breaker, and it leads you into these unilateral acts or multilateral acts, but not universally multilateral acts.
And so, I think he’d have a really hard time now. And I think what we have to think about are what are alternative sources of legitimacy until we get to the place where Russia, China and the United States are not at loggerheads, so that the Security Council can return to some semblance of a functional body, which it hasn't been for very many years of its long life. I mean, of 60 years, how long has the Security Council been free to be that kind of engine?
Anyway, so there’s an institutional problem. Really, the issue is the domestic political of making people care enough about failing states or about genocide or about refugees that they’re willing to put something on the line beyond rhetoric.
On the justice front, briefly, I think, as you know, again, in the education of Sergio Vieira de Meilo, he started very skeptical as a guy who wanted to be in the room with the killers, and who traipsed around Belgrade, as you know, looking for the perfect painting for Slobodan Milocevic in advance of his farewell meeting. And when he went to meet with Radovan Karadzic, the head of the Bosnian Serbs, trying, you know … Would he bring a former psychiatrist who’s now a psychotic -- what do you do? What’s the perfect gift?
And he found this somehow in besieged Sarajevo, tracked down this copy of the New York Review of Books, which had as its cover story a story on new theories of psychoanalysis. And he was so proud; he goes to the Bosnian Serb little mini capital where these nationalist extremist militant jerks are there, and he presents this thing. But he would have thought that anybody, if he had to negotiate the justice question, that that would have interfered with his ability to get access for humanitarian convoys, to bring about a political settlement, that you can’t mix apples and oranges.
What he started to realize, that is, if you’re going there for the apples, namely the deal, you can’t then bring in these questions of accountability. What he then began to believe strongly, though, as he started to see these nationalists, these extremists, him doing the deals, thinking it was durable, and then these guys who don’t change, they’re still jerks, they’re still killers. They aren’t interested, right, because the costs of them doing the wrong thing haven’t been raised high enough. So he starts to see that and he starts to say, “They’re getting in the way of my peace. My peace isn’t lasting.”
And then that coincides with your efforts and other people’s efforts within the Clinton Administration to build these international tribunals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and so forth. And then Sergio starts to see himself on a continuum where he doesn’t view his role any differently -- his job is to get the deal -- but he starts to see that there are these stages of this and that any peace that he achieves will not be a lasting peace unless these guys are -- and he didn’t care so much about whether they go to the Hague -- but they have to be incapacitated.
And I think that was the shift for him. Because it was a sense of, do we punish them or do we give them a golden parachute? And he’s saying, “Well, golden parachutes aren’t that viable. It turns out they parachute right back in, like Charles Taylor, to continue to do the harm. So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to somehow neutralize them and often that means incarceration, but there have got to be other forms of incapacitation that we can work with.” And at that point, then, he starts to see himself as one player among many in a system where the negotiator can’t mix, but where someone else has to be pulling up the rear, or the harm-doers’ cost-benefit calculus doesn't change sufficiently to really make lasting commitments. They have to believe that incapacitation is out there.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, let’s go to the great tragedy which is Iraq, and it really is, in many ways, a tragedy in the book and it’s a tragedy in the world, and I want you all to be thinking of your questions for Samantha, because in about five to ten minutes I’m going to turn to you. But, you know, here we are on the 5th anniversary of Iraq this week, so this is a very momentous time, in a way, to be discussing this issue. And Sergio, of course, goes to Iraq as the UN representative.
He’s done so much around the world. He’s gone to all these places and he’s been really the kind of principal in East Timor and Kosovo, so he’s got an incredible track record. He’s the only person that Kofi Annan would think of sending there. What was his mission there? What do you think he could have accomplished? And, of course, the tragedy, we know, is that he lost his life there in the first suicide truck bombing of the insurgency, and in many ways I think that’s a metaphor for the end of the UN in Iraq, at least at that moment. So tell us your perspective of that tragic last chapter.
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, in some ways, him being deployed to Iraq is the final tragic sort of outgrowth of his charm, because it was, in fact, his meeting with George Bush in early March, two to three weeks ahead of the invasion five years ago, in which Sergio made such a favorable impression on our President, that it was Bush, in fact, more than Annan and Blair, it has to be said, less on the base of charm and more on the base of performance, but they both, both Blair and Bush, believed that Sergio was, which he was, the go-to guy. And Bush had never met a UN official with whom he had any chemistry. Sergio came into this meeting, had a whole list of things he wanted to talk to the President about: Guantanamo, torture, the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court. And, yet, instinctively, just as he brought whatever, the New York Review of Books to Karadzic, he knew that that was going to be a difficult conversation -- Guantanamo, torture, et cetera. So he starts the meeting -- well, Bush grabs his shoulder and Sergio is a buff guy and Bush says, “Wow, you must work out.” They have this long conversation about their workout regimens. And then they sit down, and then Sergio boasts about the policy I mentioned earlier, which is the UN’s shoot to kill policy in East Timor that they put in place in order to prevent these incursions. And Bush is like, “Wow. This is a High Commissioner for Human Rights? I love this guy.” And then Sergio pivots effortlessly to Guantanamo, to torture, to the International Criminal Court. But the whole vibe was from the position of, “Sir, Mr. President, this is not in your interest. You know, terrorist recruitment is increasing as a result of your deviations from international norms. The International Criminal Court can be a place where people who will not be extradited to the United States will eventually be extraditable. It’s in the United States’ interest for there to be enforceable rules of the road with regard to war criminals and people who commit crimes against humanity in a systematic way.”
I mean, Bush, he’s having these conversations and he’s not on his heels. And he comments to everybody around him how impressed he was. And then what happens is, people forget this, and I certainly did in the wake of the US invasion, we now joke about “mission accomplished,” but there was a sense that the war part of the war had gone well, better than expected. There was a sense among diplomats at the United Nations in New York who had opposed the war -- French, German, Spanish, Chilean, Mexican -- of being chastened, of having gotten it wrong, of having predicted all these doomsday scenarios, and you had of course American officials gloating about how well everything had gone.
And I mention this to answer your question because it’s a moment to freeze. Americans feeling very confident, continental Europeans who had opposed the war feeling chastened, and even the Bush administration, but especially the Europeans really wanting to kiss and make up. Not wanting this degree of polarization within the Western alliance to persist, the British playing a kind of intermediary role of trying to make that happen.
And the form that that set of political desires took was a UN Security Council resolution that, in a sense, authorized the occupation. Do you remember when it used to be politically, you’re making a political statement if you called it an occupation? Well, that all changed at the end of May when the United States and the other European countries and Russia and China came together and put in place a resolution saying, “This is a legal occupation that carries with it certain benefits” -- in that you get to be Paul Bremer -- “but it carries with it certain obligations as well and that you don’t get to do a whole set of things.”
Part of that -- and this was very much on British urging -- part of the fine print of it was to say, “And we will send a UN envoy to Iraq in order to, in a way, be the representative of the world that cares about Iraq, to be the middle man between the Iraqi people, who are understandably skeptical and confused as to what’s happening, and the Administration that doesn’t have a whole lot of experience, also, doing nation-building of this kind.”
Now, Bremer and others write in their books about how everyone on the planes, on the American side going in -- this isn’t true of the British at all -- but on the American side going into Iraq, they’re all reading books on post-World War II German and Japanese, US or Allied occupation of Germany and Japan. And that’s the data set. “Well, we did this in Germany and now we’re going to do this in Iraq.”
And it was clear that the UN, leaving Sergio aside, but that the UN as a whole, the UN system on the humanitarian side, on the nation-building side, had been a receptacle of learning in a lot of different …
JOHN SHATTUCK: In all these issues that we’ve talked about, yeah.
SAMANTHA POWER: Exactly. So if you could bring some of that to bear -- and the same would have been true of the State Department, of course, and USAID or British expertise, for that matter -- but had more of that been brought to bear, then, conceivably, the second phase, which it was in everyone’s interest to go well, right, no one was wishing -- there probably were people who were wishing harm upon Iraq -- but most people of good faith said, “Well, okay, this was terrible and this invasion was a bad idea, but surely we want this to go better.”
So continental Europeans, too, everyone said: “Well, we need UN expertise there.” So that’s a long-winded preamble to Sergio disagreeing and saying for the first time in his entire career, “I don’t want to go,” and calling Kofi Annan’s chief of staff and saying, “I’m on the short list. I don’t want to be on the short list. The Americans are not ready to take my advice; they’re not ready to take the UN’s advice. We will elevate their whole experiment here by sending somebody of my stature. And, by the way, I’m going to get a personal life one of these days. I’m getting a divorce, and I want to deal with that. For the first time in my life, I want to put my personal life at least somewhere up there in the equation.” And he said, “I want to be off the list.” And, in the end, Annan -- sensing the UN’s perceptions, much like Kennedy was saying, perceptions of mounting irrelevance with President Bush taunting the UN General Assembly chamber that, “You’re going to be like the League of Nations. You’re becoming irrelevant. Your Security Council resolutions aren’t being enforced. What are you in the 21st century?” -- Annan, I think, has a moment of panic and says, “We’ve got to get in the game.”
So when you ask why did he go? He went for one simple reason, and that’s because Kofi Annan asked. He would never have said no to either his friend or to his boss. He viewed himself like a soldier who’s being called up for duty to a certain place. He’d already done the one thing he’d never done, which is to ask that he not be asked. And then over the course of that heartbreaking summer, he tried to bring to bear the lessons of this, again, particular sensibility he had about dignity and a sense that the occupation, the longer it lasted, the more restive people were becoming. This all seems, again, very obvious now, but at the time he was well ahead of the curve in urging Bremer, and basically saying, “Look, even in little East Timor, where I was the governor, I was representing the UN. I had all the legitimacy in the world on paper, but people got really sick of me in about five minutes. They’re going to get even more sick of you, I promise you.” But Bremer had a hard time hearing that, didn’t triangulate, was holed up in the Green Zone, wasn’t in touch with the Iraqi street. Sergio urged him to scale back the de-Baathification decree, having, again, made similar mistakes 15 years before himself, and of course he urged him to reconstitute the army in some form and as quickly as possible, because he’d seen the effects of demobilized militants in other post-conflict circumstances.
So then, of course, on August 19th, it’s actually Sergio’s -- I’m not sure if you remember this from the book -- but he’d never denounced the excessive use of force by the coalition forces. His feeling was you’ve got to be in the room. As soon as you denounce, you move the UN to one side of the country and the Americans will be on the other side. “I’m a middle man.” And the day before the bomb goes off, he says, “Okay, now it’s about these principles.” Again, it’s always a dance, right, to figure out, is it better to be in the room, is it better to be holding the principles up? He said, “If I’m here, I’ve got to be the spokesperson for these principles,” and he authorizes the only two press releases criticizing the coalition -- he’d done a lot of criticism behind the scenes -- but public criticisms of Bremer: one on the killing of a Reuters journalist and the other on a killing, a checkpoint, you know, excessive use of force, or whatever. And both those press releases were to be issued August 19th. Suicide bomber pulls up outside Sergio’s window. Like you mentioned, it was the first evidence, really, that Al Qaeda was, in fact, in Iraq, that it had come to Iraq largely in the wake of the invasion …
JOHN SHATTUCK: Entirely in the wake of the invasion as has now been demonstrated.
SAMANTHA POWER: Absolutely. And pulls up outside Sergio’s office, which is woefully exposed, partly because he wants the UN headquarters to be the anti-Green Zone, he wants it to be the place that Iraqis can come and file their grievances against Saddam Hussein or against the occupation or the coalition or whatever, or just check their email. It was a very porous space, and the suicide bomb goes off. Twenty-one people are killed within an hour, really, of the attack. Sergio lives for three and a half hours.
And as you’ve read, and have heard me say, just the final sort of dagger in the heart of this whole story is not just the loss of all of Sergio’s expertise and the loss of the man and the persona and all the good that he tried to do, but it’s that, in the end, he died in a sense like a refugee. He died under the rubble.
Although the United States had predicated the war in Iraq on a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, predicated it in part on a link between Saddam Hussein and large-scale terrorist attacks on civilian targets, amazingly, ridiculously, appallingly, we had done no planning to respond to large-scale terrorist attacks against civilian targets. So when the bomb went off, although individual Americans behaved heroically, as I described, they had no search and rescue capacity embedded within the force structure. They had none of the kind of equipment you would have needed, like cutting equipment for the concrete or for the rebar. So one of them found one of these, an EMT and an amazing reservist, found a lady’s handbag, a woman’s basket handbag, and then someone else found a curtain rope from one of the offices, and MacGyver-style they tied the curtain rope to the handbag, lowered it down -- Sergio was in a 30-foot sort of shaft, and they, with their bare hands, tried to move the rubble, using their hands and their helmets, put it into the basket. This is what the largest, most powerful superpower in the history of mankind brought to bear to rescue, again, I think a person with a unique set of skills and an awful lot to teach, and he died after three and a half hours.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, as I invite people to go to the microphone for questions to Samantha, I’ll ask a last question, which I’m sure is on everyone’s mind as we get to the end of this incredible drama and story, which is, on some levels, as Samantha’s been telling it, what becomes of the UN after Sergio, not so much that Sergio is at the center of it, but what happened to the UN in Iraq is in many ways a metaphor for what has happened to the UN in these last eight years, or perhaps before, but I think particularly in that time with a heavy emphasis on US unilateralism. You know, in looking to our presidential choices we have to make, what happens in the next presidency with respect to the UN? What should the next president do? And then please come to the microphone if you have any questions for Samantha.
SAMANTHA POWER: I definitely will answer the question. But in some ways the answer to the question depends less on that second layer of this story about the UN and more on that third layer, yeah, the third layer in our relationship to it, that is, the biography of the world. What becomes of the UN will depend on whether a critical mass, a critical number of leaders or countries, decide to take seriously violent extremism, violence, broken-ness, dignity, whether we live, you know, as John F. Kennedy said, you know, whether we negotiate in fear or whether we continue to fear to negotiate.
I mean, freeing our politics from fear in this country seems really important, understanding how we, the United States and other countries who are having similar debates about their role in the 21st century in dealing with global challenges, how they relate, how all of us relate to the fear that others are living in abroad. I really do think that if we came back to the Rooseveltian principle of freedom from fear and made a collective commitment to dealing with lawlessness, which is what’s causing extremism, I think, to flourish as much as anything -- I mean, there are other factors, as well, of course -- and simply dealing with law and not dealing with Al Qaeda is obviously not an option, but not dealing with law and just dealing with Al Qaeda is also not an option. That’s the approach we’ve been taking.
So I think the question of what becomes of the UN depends on whether enough countries become serious about moving beyond the cliche of “21st century challenges and global threats” and to the resource-sharing, the kinds of sort of incursions, short-term sacrifices, that are going to be required, very difficult domestic conversations that have to be had, and then that will get amplified. When each of you, again, as ambassador, you have that conversation, and part of that conversation, in your capital, you then come into the UN with a different mindset.
So, for instance, on the Security Council: if China believes it can militarily quash aspirations to dignity within its own borders, if it believes truly that over time there won’t be any kind of backlash toward the extraction of national resources in the developing world within those countries in the way that it was against traditional colonialism, if they believe that, if they continue to go forward in that, well then China will be that country at the UN advancing those objectives. If somehow -- and we’re not the most credible country to be pushing them in this direction -- but if somehow they start to see that with global power comes global responsibility, or start to feel the push-back and start to see that you have to ingrain a regard for labor standards or environmental standards or human rights standards as we came late to the party and are still not quite at the party in understanding, then you’ll start to see China as more constructive in the UN and liberated somewhat, anyway, from that gridlock.
I think in our country there is an appetite for … I think the cliche has kind of sunk in, right? Global challenges, there are very few challenges that we can handle alone as a single country. Now the next step is some combination of bottom-up push by those of us who believe that, just as we’ve done on genocide, and put that on the map.
Certainly, we’re capable as citizens of creating more of a space as we have on global warming, to create more of a space for what’s possible in our politics, met by 21st century leadership, which is why, I mean, the leadership question, you know, alone, in a bottom up way, it’s not enough, but with being met and actually having … One of the reasons I like Senator Obama so much is also to imagine his ability -- and Senator Clinton has this I’m sure, as well, but Obama I know has it in spades -- to talk directly to the people of China, to talk directly to the people of Jordan. I mean, to actually, already, this primary season and the success of both Clinton and Obama have done wonders for America’s standing in the world in that, in 2004 … Remember people used to make that distinction between the American people and the President, and then 2004 they blurred the distinction and they said, “Well, okay, if we reelected this, then somehow we’re endorsing these policies.” Well, what the success of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have done, I think, is reawakened that power of discernment in people. And as we go forward, though, to have a president who can bypass governments that aren’t themselves ready to be injecting resources into the UN or leave aside the institutional manifestation just tackling these problems, to have a president who says to Canada or Germany about Afghanistan: “You really don’t want to be a part of keeping the Taliban from assassinating women in stadiums? You don’t want to be a part of that.” To have that conversation, to go down and then hope that something else can go up, I think that could be amazing.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, there’s a big agenda, clearly, and I know our questioners are eager to get at you so they can continue the dialogue. Please?
Q: Thanks for the segue to my question.
JOHN SHATTUCK: If you could just identify yourself?
Q: Jack Ellis. I’m wondering if you could comment on the effect of domestic political pandering, and I’m not just talking about America, although we’ve got Ireland, Israel, Cuba, it seems to me Putin’s doing it, he’s pandering to his domestic political concerns with Serbia and stuff like that. Isn’t that a problem, not just for us, but for other countries?
SAMANTHA POWER: Let me broaden it a little bit. I think you’re onto a deep and important problem. A) Yes, of course, there’s a problem; B) Though I think the problem in the 21st century is that basically there are now two audiences for every message. I say two. I mean there are a million audiences for every message. But specifically, the pandering, or there’s the domestic, there’s the play to the gallery, play to the peanut gallery at home, and then there’s the fact that that peanut gallery isn’t the only recipient of that message. So the message is broadcast directly -- to use your Putin example -- to Belgrade and people who burn down embassies on that basis of that pandering message, they will soon be burning down people and have in fact burned down, burned people in the course of … So I think that, again, it’s an adjustment that our leaders in this country haven’t made, and that, I mean, a lot of people are reckless; they just don’t care about anything other than the sources of their own power. But when one thinks, for instance, about what would be really useful in the restoration of American standing in the world or useful in signaling a real rupture with some of the policies that have gone so badly wrong these last seven years would be some kind of gesture of humility. That would go a long way internationally, right, some kind of reckoning, public reckoning, apology. I don’t know what it is, and there are a lot of different models one can use.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Although one should take note that all three presidential candidates, including John McCain, have called for the closing of Guantanamo.
SAMANTHA POWER: Right. So there’s that, and, you know, there are things that you can do to un-do what has been done. But I guess I would just say, if you didn’t have any domestic constituency to worry about, wouldn’t there be something else you would do? Wouldn’t you go further? Wouldn’t you actually go back and just say, “Do-over, please.”
JOHN SHATTUCK: Truth commissions are sometimes useful.
SAMANTHA POWER: But the reason I mention this is even the fact that we go immediately toward what will actually happen -- we’ll close Guantanamo, somehow deal with the detainees, which is its own incredible legal and logistic and moral challenge, we will hopefully, the next president, any one of them, will renounce torture. We’ll stop having debates about whether waterboarding is or isn’t -- a no-brainer. And all of that will be great. That will be deeds that people around the world will look to.
But there’s a domestic check on very grand global gestures or seem to be. And I think in this globalized world where everything that the American President said is broadcast instantly on Al-Jazeera, and obviously is going to be heard in a very different way, and, of course, in our case, we’re not tuning in to quite the same extent to other people’s statements and other people’s statements and other people’s broadcasts. So one interesting question will be in the 21st century as the world grows a little more multi-polar, where there are other sources of economic power and so forth, will we become also more plugged in to other people’s pandering, as you put it, or other people’s politics and react accordingly? But I think that there’s the fact of pandering and then there’s the effect, you know, on real lives and the kind of stoking and the emboldening that mere words can have on other people’s behavior that, again, I don’t think we’ve recalibrated. We’re used to just being able to do what we need for our own power.
I mean, I’m speaking as if you’re a leader, you know, that you do what you do for yourself, and then, now, it just goes right to other people. I mean, he could have stoked Russian nationalism without also making the Serbs feel that they had a legitimate case. But in an era where the messages go right to the Serbian people, that's just not the case. The effect is linear.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Let’s go to our next questioner. And we want to get through the other three beyond you, so, Samantha, take note of their questions and answer them briefly.
SAMANTHA POWER: Where were you when I needed you.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Everything else has been perfect until now, but we want to get through these questions. Thank you.
Q: My name is Peter Smith. I’m co-chair of the Coalition for a Strong United Nations. And I want to thank you for bringing the insight that you did in seeing the growth of Sergio through these various crises and the way he shifted his perception. My question to you is there’s been a lot of discussion over the last two decades about how peacekeepers are formed and how they’re used. There’s a decision made in the Security Council and then months later maybe the peacekeepers will show up. You know, there’s a crisis but then there’re months that go by, the violence still being perpetrated. And there have been discussions of having a permanent peacekeeping force that’s multinational. And I wonder if you found anything that Sergio said about those other alternative ideas that might save lives and really have a much better effect?
SAMANTHA POWER: Great. Do you want me to hear a bunch of them?
JOHN SHATTUCK: No, go ahead and answer that one. We have about 10, 12 minutes left.
Q: Just briefly, though.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, it’s not exactly an easy question. None of these issues are easy.
SAMANTHA POWER: Have I been really longwinded?
JOHN SHATTUCK: No. I just want to make sure our wonderful questioners get to hear your answers.
SAMANTHA POWER: So I think that much like John’s question at the end about the UN -- what is the future of the UN -- I think this question of what is the future of rapid response, let’s put it that way, rapid military policing response -- I hate to be a broken record on this, but it comes back to whether a number of countries can be convinced to expedite their deployment. I mean, basically -- to start it a different way -- whether a number of countries can be convinced to care about policing or to care about reconstruction in a particular country or in a particular region, or care about peacekeeping and want to be the backbone?
In other words, the reason the delays occur is not, contrary to some of the spin on the part of people who, unlike yourself, would prefer to see the UN disappear, their spin is that the UN is the problem. All these delays and they put in the red tape and it’s this and it’s that. And there’s a lot of red tape, but believe me when countries want to get their troops into a place in order to be helpful, they cut through the red tape. And much of the red tape is not put into place by Ban Ki-moon now or by Sergio or Kofi Annan or whoever, by people in the UN civil service. The red tape is, believe it or not -- this is the dirty secret I learned writing this book -- but it’s one of the General Assembly committees, and it’s countries that, one of the reasons things are slow in terms of procurement of equipment, literally it’s that countries want to be able to get access to bidding.
Q: So did he ever talk about having a permanent force?
SAMANTHA POWER: I’m just going to come to that. I’m getting that.
Q: That was in place before the decision was made to send them anywhere?
SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah, but this is precisely, again, the frustration with the question a little bit, which is this idea that there can be a permanent force. This is what I’m trying to get at is countries have to decide that they -- what I was just starting to say was -- they want to be able to bid on contracts, and thus that’s why it takes forever to get equipment in, okay? So what has to happen is countries have to decide that they want to allocate in advance their helicopters, their helmets, their fuel. They have to decide, and that’s not about, can there be a permanent force? Is there some God out there who will decide there’s a permanent force, until George Soros controls his own permanent army or permanent police force, or Bill Gates or whoever, fundamentally, again, states control a monopoly on violence? So what I’m trying to get at in your question is that enough countries have to come to believe that what they give up in committing ahead of time is worth doing because of the gain to people who are dying in forgotten places. And right now we can't even get them to want to go to the places where people are dying even without having to make a preventive allocation of resources or preemptive, prospective allocation.
So what I’m saying is instead of talking about permanent armies or the future of the UN, what we need to do is get people to care about the people dying in these places or care about failing states or care about the security gap, and then what you will see, eventually, hopefully, and I think, again, a President Clinton or a President Obama or even a President McCain would be more aggressive in having this conversation internationally. But then there has to be a leader that goes door to door and says, “Okay, you say you care. Now let’s put your money where your mouth is.”
And what Sergio experimented with, which I think was really helpful, was actually getting units who spoke the same language from different countries. Believe it or not, this was a radical idea in the UN system, that you could get Mozambiquan troops, Portugese troops, Angolan troops and Timorese troops, and then create some kind of pride around them actually being a kind of all-Portugese unit to go to some place where Portugese was spoken. Leave Timor out of it and Timor would be a perfect place where they would go, where you get the advantage of the UN in that you’re not a single country coming looking like an invader, but you don’t deal with the disadvantages of the fact that peacekeepers in whatever permanent or temporary force can’t even speak to each other, never mind with the locals. So being more creative. But, again, that requires people in governments making the commitment to do something that would render these peacekeeping forces and policing forces and so forth more efficient.
Q: Thank you.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Please?
Q: I’m Louise. I’m at Suffolk University teaching a course on UN and co-chair of the UN Studies Program. But I’m speaking here also in the name of the colleagues from UNHCR, and I’d like to pay tribute to Samantha just recounting, and I have a colleague and friend with me here, and I’d like to recount some of the personal moments we have had with Sergio.
I go back with Sergio Vieira de Meilo to January, ’78, when he was in Mozambique. I had my second year in Geneva and he was defending his turf in Mozambique, and he was doing it in Portugese and Spanish, in French, in English, and in a moment I’m sure he would have spoken French. And all along, I mean, he was very responsive as a young UNHCR officer. The next I wanted to recount was he was Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees and we had global representatives meeting in Geneva in April ’96. Three days are over -- we had really discussed the whole world -- and the High Commissioner, Sagato Ogata, was sitting there -- Sergio Vieira de Meilo, and the deputy High Commissioner. And we were about to go out of the room and then one of our colleagues said, “Mrs. High Commissioner, couldn’t you just give us the strategy where you want to go in the next five years for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees?” She looked at Sergio Vieira de Meilo and said, “Sergio, you can do that.” So that’s to give you the idea, Sergio was our strategist, he was our philosopher, and we all looked up to him but we all stayed friends with him. In the meanwhile, I was a representative in Chile and I was on a visit in Rio and I was in his home in Rio and met his family there. That was before that in ’85.
But I think I wanted to say these few words to say thank you to Samantha, to give us an insight into the United Nations’ challenges, but also opportunities which one person has crystallized and has been able to really inspire so many within the system -- UNHCR, the humanitarian, the political, security, but also within the governmental. And I hope at the end of today and many other days, that you will have been able to turn your audience into pro-UN supporters, because if we didn’t have the UN there would be even more wars. Even though there’s Darfur and there’s so much going on in the world, but we have, and that would be Sergio also, we have no reason to give up. And the refugees are the first ones. I have served for 30 years in the UNHCR. The refugees are the first to teach us where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor. Thank you.
JOHN SHATTUCK: I’m sorry; we have just a few minutes left. We have a couple of other questions. [applause] Thank you very much for that statement. Yes, please?
Q: Yeah, so I am Andrew Ostman. I am a high school student at the Francis (inaudible) Charter School in Devins. And I was just sort of wondering, you mentioned that there’s sort of this deadlock going on in the UN Security Council right now, which sort of prevents a lot of authorization or a lot of the peacekeeping stuff and use of force in some places where it really might be beneficial. In your opinion, what’s sort of the best path to sort of either get an alternate source of legitimacy? Because we’re not necessarily going to be able to get concessions out of Russia or China, who might not necessarily want to go into whatever country it is, whether it’s Sudan or maybe Myanmar, or wherever they have trading relations, or to put pressure on these countries to be maybe more agreeable to …
JOHN SHATTUCK: You’re really asking Samantha to talk about legitimacy, how is it that these can be made legitimate? And maybe just a couple of, just a few sentences on that, so we can get to our final questioner. Thank you very much for your question.
SAMANTHA POWER: Great. Well, I don’t think we need to give up on the Security Council just yet. One cannot overstate the damage to the US influence in that body caused by very discrete foreign policy mistakes over the last seven years -- whether that’s detention policies, whether it’s embracing torture or versions of torture, whatever, whether it’s the invasion of Iraq. So our ability to make the Security Council, to actually convince people -- “our” meaning the United States’ ability -- is lower now than it has been in a very long time. So part of what one needs to do is actually put ourselves in a stronger position to be able to be heard in good faith on Darfur or Burma. Second, to be clear, military force is something that one is talking about in very, very rare circumstances. So the bigger issue when it comes to enforcing peace and security is often a range of other tools in the toolbox -- whether justice, which John mentioned, or what we’re talking about in Darfur is not an invasion of Sudan -- and, actually, even at this time of gridlock the Security Council has authorized a force of 26,000 peacekeepers who, because of diplomatic pressure, the Sudanese government has acquiesced and allowed that force to be deployed. That’s diplomacy working on behalf of security, which is, in fact, a form of military force, but it’s not like getting China and Russia to agree on an invasion of Sudan. Nor would it be like convincing any country to be part of that invasion of Sudan, which would be very hard to do. So I think broadening the range of tools in the toolbox, restoring US credibility, and then, in a much more systematic way, bringing middle powers and the more like-minded countries to the side, not of the United States, but of these principles of these arguments.
If it were not simply the US making these arguments within the council, but the US and some of the countries I mentioned earlier -- South Africa, Japan, European countries en masse, or maybe with a couple of defectors -- but if the United States was in much more cluttered company and China felt itself to be isolated among powerful countries, then the odds of it coming along, I think, are higher.
Final sentence-ish is that if all of that fails -- because right now it is hard to do not only on humanitarian issues, but also even on proliferation on Iran, by which you could actually get a meaningful consensus in the council, then perhaps the time will come if the Security Council doesn’t rise to 21st century challenges, then the time will come where I think you’re going to start to see a decentralization of legitimacy. So you’ll start to see NATO with one kind of decision-making body and its stamp of legitimacy on an Afghanistan, let’s say. You’ll start to see the African Union, more and more African countries and people turning to it to be the arbiter of when peacekeepers should be deployed or police and so forth. I don’t think that’s ideal because you’re going to get a clash of regions and a clash of legitimacies, but I think if there’s a market failure, and that’s what it will amount to, like any market you're going to see diversification, I think, in the face of that failure, because there is a need for people to exercise legitimacy and for each of us to turn to some body, and if that body of the council fails to produce dividends, you’re going to start to see people looking elsewhere.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Samantha Power does not take on small issues. And she does it with great courage. [applause] And along the way, she tells a great story. So I welcome Samantha back to the Kennedy Library. We welcome all of you out here where Samantha will be signing her book. It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it. Thank you all for coming and for your questions. [applause]
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