Vieira de Mello’s Lessons

Exactly ten years ago, on August 19 2003, a terrorist attack in Baghdad killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, then chief of the UN mission in Iraq. 21 UN colleagues and local staff from 11 countries died in the rubble of the Canal Hotel where the UN had set up shop after the US invasion. The attack sent shockwaves through the humanitarian community. In 2008, UN members designated August 19 ​“World Humanitarian Day” to honor ​“those who have lost their lives in humanitarian service and those who continue to bring assistance and relief to millions”. The 10^th anniversary of Vieira de Mello’s death coincides with his biographer Samantha Power — a journalist, academic and human rights activist turned Obama administration official — assuming the role of US ambassador to the United Nations. ​“Chasing the Flame”, Power’s book on the Brazilian-born UN official, probed the lessons from his career in the trenches of peacekeeping, humanitarian action and diplomacy.

Now Power herself has the chance to apply these lessons.

As the face of US diplomacy at the UN with close personal ties to the President, Power has the unique opportunity to shape political initiatives that improve the lives of those in conflict zones and the conditions of humanitarians and peacekeepers sent to support the world’s most vulnerable. This is more urgent than ever. Events over the past months confirm Power’s dictum that ​“neither the blue flag nor the red cross is enough to protect humanitarians in an age of terror.” 

Somalia is a case in point. Last week, Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) closed all its programs there after 22 years of continuous presence. MSF described the decision as ​“the result of extreme attacks on its staff in an environment where armed groups and civilian leaders increasingly support, tolerate, or condone the killing, assaulting, and abducting of humanitarian aid workers”.

In June, the UN compound in Mogadishu was attacked, killing one UN staff member, three contractors, four Somali guards and innocent civilians. In May, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson revealed that around 3000 African Union peacekeepers had been killed in Somalia since 2007 — more than the combined casualties of coalition forces in Afghanistan during the same period.

In Mali peacekeepers and humanitarians risk becoming victims of attacks as insurgents seek retaliation for the actions of the French counter-terrorism forces. And in Congo, the UN’s new aggressive stance with the unprecedented deployment of a UN ​“intervention brigade” raises the stakes for its peacekeeping and humanitarian presence — and for the most powerful UN members in the Security Council.

As Samantha Power argued in 2008: ​“When United Nations-mandated international security forces are sent, the world’s governments must contribute the troops, equipment and intelligence they need to deliver professional service.” All too often, however, UN member states fall short of these responsibilities.

At a time when the US deploys the most advanced military and intelligence equipment in history, UN missions are often forced to rely on technology from early last century. This year’s Congo mission is the first to have access to surveillance drones — a technology that should have been made available to UN missions long ago. To advance that effort, developing countries should abandon their skepticism against UN surveillance drones being exploited by Western powers. Washington in particular does not have to go through UN peacekeeping missions to eavesdrop on other countries.

In addition, as Power pointed out while still a journalist, ​“the United Nations must be able to recruit soldiers from the major powers, which have coughed up only a few hundred troops in recent years”. The US and also Germany still rarely entrust their own soldiers to UN command leaving the dangerous jobs to troops mostly from Asia and Africa.

What’s more, at a time of increasing geopolitical confrontation between Western powers and Russia and China over outside intervention, Power would be well advised to try to broaden the consensus on contested norms such as ​“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) which Vieira de Mello supported early on. The recent debates over interventions in Libya and Syria have led to an increasing polarization over R2P.

Vieira de Mello’s native Brazil has introduced a compromise initiative under the name of ​“Responsibility While Protecting”. Rather than referring to the need to build on this type of bridge-building activities, Power, in her Senate confirmation hearings argued that the R2P norm is ​“less important, I think, than US practice and US policy.” And in a move to placate her right-wing critics, she added that the US ​“is the greatest country on earth. We have nothing to apologize for.”

That kind of language does not bode well for reaching across the aisle in the Security Council and beyond. Instead, the ​“principled pragmatism” she admired Vieira de Mello for might serve her better in her new role.

Above all though, Power and other key players at the UN should follow Vieira de Mello’s emphasis on self-criticism. Less than a year before his death, he told a conference of 170 members of the peacekeeping community in New York: ​“Be humble. Admit your failures and mistakes as soon as you identify them, and try to learn from them.” This applies to the leadership in the UN bureaucracy that is battling scandals such as the Haiti cholera epidemic caused by peacekeepers. And it also applies to key UN member states.

Today, many in the US and Germany simply want to move the attention away from places like Afghanistan and Iraq where the West has spent billions and achieved little. And they are equally tired of engaging with the bloody Syrian civil war where all mediation efforts have gone up in flames. Neither the public nor many senior policy-makers have the appetite or patience for exploring the lessons from failure.

But we should resist the temptation to simply turn the page. We owe this to those who have given their lives in the line of duty — in particular to Sergio Vieira de Mello. Already back in 2000 he argued that the UN as well as national bureaucracies have ​“proven more adept at repeating mistakes, than at learning lessons. Time to change.”