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Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

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Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil (simply "Sergio" to many) was the personification of what the United Nations could and should be. As Paul Bremer's adviser Ryan Cocker once said, "Sergio is as good as it gets not only for the UN, but for international diplomacy." Sergio was the UN Secretary General's "ultimate go-to guy", a nation builder in the world's toughest spots like East Timor, Cambodia, Kosovo. No one who met him - from George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War, to the Khmer Rouge, to Slobodan Milosevic - came away untouched by his intelligence, physical bearing, charisma and integrity. It was a major blow to the world when he and 14 other UN staff were killed on August 19th 2003 by an al-Qeada suicide bomber at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, an event that has become known as the UN's "9/11". He was often spoken of as candidate for the position of UN Secretary General, but his career was cut short before he had a chance to become the world-renowned elder statesman he was destined to be. This biography by Pulitzer Prize winning Samantha Power is a monument to his legacy and should connect with a wide audience. Not only an enthralling story of adventure (Sergio was almost always in the field in dangerous situations and places), but equally a revelation of what was happening behind the headlines in major crisis around the world over the past 30 years - and it is the story of the UN itself, as mirrored in the ups and downs of Sergio's life and character, its faults, weaknesses and strengths.

Power has managed to convey Sergio's persona with utmost sympathy, seductively drawing the reader into Sergio's world. His younger staff members were often likened to puppy dogs who followed him around, at one point even into the bushes to take a leak - I often felt this way reading his biography, like a puppy dog I didn't want him to leave or for the book to end, for the inevitable to happen. I dreaded the last chapter titled "August 19 2003" - it is the most thrilling chapter in the book, a masterpiece of journalistic writing - it can bring the reader to tears in a way no fiction could achieve. Samantha Power is an adviser to Barak Obama "the person whose rigor and compassion bear the closest resemblance to Sergio's that I have ever seen," she says in the credits. Power also knows Terry George, director of Hotel Rwanda, who advised her on this book and who expressed an interest in making a movie version, we can only hope.

Samantha Power has done it again -- just as compelling, just as timely and just as important as The Problem From Hell. The story of Sergio Vieira de Mello would be compelling stuff in its own right. But the way Power sets Vieira de Mello's story against the most immediate and consequential questions about how to best deal with the current challenges in the world is absolutely brilliant. Read it for the story, read it for the questions, read it for the answers, just make sure you read it soon.

This is an excellent book with some flaws. While there are plenty of good quotes that take jabs at the field work done by the UN including by Sergio Vieira de Mello himself none of them are adequately examined, but then you could say that wasn't the point of the book. I have comments on three of the countries de Mello (the name most people called him that I knew) worked.

1. Jarat Chopra resigned over deep disagreements with de Mello about governing East Timor but Ms Power never says what they are. Two essays by Chopra found online provide a view from the other side. In the book one of them is a mere footnote. They are worth reading.

2. While the book makes de Mello look like almost a one man show in Rwanda I recommend Sadako Ogata's book The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s on her time as the head of UNHCR to get a another perspective of how the upper echelon of the UN works. Her chapter on Rwanda gives a much more detailed and compelling story of this very difficult situation where UNHCR was left on its own. The chapters on Bosnia also provide a wider view.

3. Then there is Iraq and the riveting final chapter in the book. It's an excellent narrative on the declining security situation in Baghdad in June-September 2003 and how institutions like the UN reacted to it.

I was dismayed with the Epilogue. It was so boring I considered not finishing the book after reading more than 500 pages. It read like a UN document, that's how bad it is.

As an observation, no matter how good de Mello was and no matter how good and loyal his staff was at the field level most aid workers are not aware of these efforts or even know who these people are. The UN is there monitoring and more often than not, interpreting rules on why something cannot be done and being criticized for its lack of competence. Programs run by the UN are sometimes successful despite the unintentional efforts of the UN to ruin them. Even with de Mello, the UN had a long way to go and it still does.

My favorite quote in the book - and there are many good ones - is the response he gave to a young UNHCR staffer at his farewell in Geneva. When asked what advice he had to give to a young staff member, he said, "Be in the field. That's what I built my career on. That's what relevant. Nothing else matters."

Overall, an excellent book. Well written. Re-building a country is not easy. I highly recommend this book.

About half-way through Chasing the Flame, Sergio Vieira de Mello advises a younger UNHCR official to "be very graphic because that is how you grab people's attention. And our success at UNHCR depends on our ability to get and hold people's attention."

It's a piece of advice that the book's author, Samantha Power, brings to life throughout the book. From the Khmer Rouge shooting at a UN helicopter that was lowering a housing container into the jungle, "not aggressively...but trying to alert the strangers that they were on the verge of making house in a minefield," to convincing Serbian smugglers to sneak 80,000 blankets into Bosnian territory by handing them certificates saying "UN Consultant," to Laurent Kabila's high-heeled lizard-skin disco dancing shoes (worn together with his starched uniform), Power has an amazing ability to pull out complex details that both grab/hold the reader's attention and act as metaphors for the bigger picture.

These are not the affect-oriented visuals that one associates with UNICEF commercials - the exceptions, like a scene of a Rwandan man committing suicide by drowning himself in a shallow puddle, are so powerful they could never fit into a cliché - rather, these moments are effortlessly telling precisely because they are complex and many sided. Power's writerly decisions turn the book into a page-turner as gripping as any novel, but their cumulative effect creates a picture of layers of our world that we don't normally see. The details accumulate and become more than themselves.

Other reviewers call Sergio a "hero." I don't know about that. I'm not even sure I came out of the book liking the guy. What did come through to me was a well-rounded picture of a very interesting man who kept learning as he shuttled from one tragic focal point of the world to another. Through Sergio, Power paints a real-life picture of the ultimately unsolvable tensions between pragmatism and idealism, and, more generally, of the way power and people interact in some of the most difficult conditions on our planet. If each detail is an expert brush stroke, then the painting, in the end, is not merely a portrait of Sergio. It is a complex portrait of a complex world, with Sergio simultaneously a fully fleshed out, conflicted, real person, and an archetype - the human being that, in the end, is the fulcrum of all tensions and decisions. What makes this book so important, besides its art, is that these are the real life tensions and decisions that have defined the world we live in.

To be honest, I only picked up Chasing the Flame out of respect for its Pulitzer-prize-winning author. A biography of a bureaucrat is not a subject that I would normally find interesting. But Power chose her subject well. For all his faults, Sergio was an extraordinary man whose willingness to keep learning from the awful historical moments in the centre of which he continually found himself -- which he, in fact, chased throughout his life -- makes him a powerful lens through which Power clears away layers of murk to show us a side of our world that is normally obscured. Chasing the Flame doesn't give easy answers, but it does give a graphic picture of the man who would have been the next UN Secretary General, and of the world behind the headlines in the international section. It's an extraordinary book.

Samantha Power has rendered a great service to students of international affairs, and indeed to the international community at large, with this splendid biography of a gifted actor on that great stage.

Vieira de Mello personified the United Nations in both its strengths and its weaknesses, and Power makes very clear just what those are.

He embodied the spirit of the internationalist: neutrality, impartiality and unfailing courage to go where the member states were too often reluctant to go - but not reluctant at all to send people like him, who never, until the end, hesitated to answer the call of duty. At the same time, his zeal for impartiality too often led him into a moral relativism which eventually became distorted into complicity with evil. He was quicker than many to realize that trap that the world body had fallen into, especially in reflecting on the U.N.'s experiences in Rwanda and in Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990's.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was a renaissance man: philosopher, linguist, historian, scholar of many fields. He was a charming and handsome man, a highly sociable man who was nevertheless capable of brutally hard work, often under conditions as uncomfortable as they were dangerous. He was concerned about all the peoples with and for whom he worked, and cared - and showed he cared - for individual refugees and displaced persons as for the most junior of his co-workers. He was intensely ambitious, but never hesitated to dispute the views, policies and directions of his desk-bound "superiors" in New York and in the capitols of the member states. In the most striking example of this, he completely revised the intent of the mission in East Timor, devolving a degree of autonomy on the East Timorese quite other than that in his mandate, and on a timetable of his own devising. New York was appalled at this, but Vieira de Mello left the Secretariat little alternative but to accept his re-writing his own orders. It was just this early devolution and restoration of sovereignty that he urged on the Coalition Authority in Iraq, but to no avail - L.Paul Bremer had his mind made up, and his mistakes are becoming history, but a very different history than the one Vieira de Mello made in East Timor.

The only time in his long career that Vieira de Mello expressed reluctance to accept a posting was his last - to Iraq as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General. He arrived in Baghdad on June 2, 2003. When he died there six weeks later it was, as Power writes in the last line of the book, as though he had been "buried beneath the weight of the United Nations itself."

Samantha Power is to be congratulated on this fine book. It will be read by those concerned with the history Vieira de Mello lived, but will also be enjoyed by and will reward those less informed of the events described. It may be read as a huge adventure story - for that was what Vieira de Mello's life was, and Power has captured that spirit of adventure with a novelist's skill. Sergio Vieira de Mello was the United Nations' Kennedy,and we who hardly knew him can only express our thanks for her contribution to our knowledge and understanding of these interesting times.

It only remains to wait for the movie - and trust that Tom Cruise will not be the star.

I finished this book over a month ago. It it is unusual for me to take thirty days to review a book. However, this book continues to ricochet through my being.

Admittedly, Samantha's last book, The Pulitzer Prize winning "A Problem From Hell - America in an Age of Genocide" occupies a prominent place in my personal library. Chasing The Flame - Sergio Vieira De Mello And The Fight To Save The World" has earned the space next to her former book.

Once I began, I couldn't put Chasing The Flame down. Power has a literary and researcher's skill that that is unequivocally unique. The documentation and sheer magnitude of the effort are mind-boggling. Why? Why, one may ask would someone take the 4 years it took to write this story?

For me, versus many other reviewers, the lessons of Vieira de Mello's life and the most poignant aspects of the book are NOT the failures and demise of the U.N.

Contradictions - the human experience is one inhabited by contradictions. Some of those contradictions are self-initiated and self-imposed. Others are systemic and emanate from socio-economic, social structural inequities that evidence themselves throughout human history. Our response to these contradictions (as individuals, groups, organizations and government entities of all types) is particularly poignant. Vieira de Mello's life and career are evidence of that. This book is not an end to the discussion of issues it covers...it's a chronicle of a whole host of issues we can and must begin to discuss and act upon.

The human capacity for evil - Once again, Power chronicles this truth. I remain distressed at the ongoing capacity we as a species have for ignoring human atrocity and our penchant for "standing by" and/or failing to respond immediately and adequately to these situations as they arise --- as well as our penchant to ignore the conditions that continue to spawn them.

The United Nations - I am unequivocally convinced that the charter of the U.N. has been bastardized into a current state that has diluted the essential capabilities that the world currently requires from it. It's not the UN's fault. Frankly, it's ours and the member governments that comprise it. I am also hopeful that a restoration/re-engineering of the U.N. (long overdue) newly empowered and FULLY funded has the unrealized potential to prevent and address vastly more effectively the human suffering that is thriving all around our planet.(with prognostications of it's ever increasing frequency and depth of seriousness).

The face and being of anger seems to have a myriad of revitalized and new expressions of both form and substance here on Earth today. As stated by Jean-Salim Kanaan, a French-Egyptian political officer stationed in Iraq: " And God knows how much harm angry people can do."(p.436). We seem to have a tendency that has evolved with NGO's where we avoid the angry people (particularly the one's who are armed and inflicting death and destruction on innocent people). Vieira de Mello's life is evidence of an approach to the contrary. He sought out these people and spoke directly to them --- unarmed. Power's work has substantive implications for the urgent genesis of a new approach by the U.S. and others to foreign policy and international diplomacy.

Another incredibly poignant truth that we must revisit that emanated from the life of Vieria de Mello is captured in the following: "Although Vieira de Mello became an explicit advocate for human rights late in his career, he had lobbied on behalf of human beings for decades.After his death, the quality of his that was most often admired was his regard for individuals. His colleagues took note of how surprisingly rare it was, even in the world of humanitarianism, to find and official who actually looked out for human beings, one by one, as he or she encountered them." (p.530). This attribute of Vieira de Mello's life is pregnant with meaning for the individual citizen of planet Earth today. Imagine what might be possible if people began to act upon the quote above and actively begin to seek out the rescue of orphaned children, refugees etc. who require a new chance at life via removal from the hell of their current life conditions? --- 1@aTime. Perhaps we're being encouraged by Vieira de Mello's life to consider new ways of living --- I'm speaking to those who have a home, resources, seats at the kitchen table and a refrigerator with food in it. In a world where the delta between the haves and have-nots is becoming increasingly wider, the individual with resources continues to be ensconced comfortably with increasing social distance from the suffering that inhabits this planet. Vieira de Mello's life story begs the questions: "What can (must) I do? How can I help? Can I become a part of the solution?"

Vieira de Mello's statement that, "We live in fearful times and fear is a bad advisor" (p. 364) is a clarion call to a reawakening from the darkness of the nightmare that has cast it's pall over all of us, particularly during the past eight years. Hope and dreaming of new possibilities always sheds the light that destroys fear. However, it must be accompanied by new, risky, courageous forms of action that Vieria de Mello's life demonstrates for us all.

"Humanitarian crises are always political crises" (p. 219) is a truth revealed throughout the life of Vieira de Mello. Again, a wholesale readjustment in the thought processes and actions of governments and our approach to human rights atrocities (and their prevention) continues to be a tremendous challenge, yet an opportunity, during this, the 21st century.

For all those who are trumpeting their excitement over the possibility of a forthcoming movie about this book --- I remain reluctant. There is simply no substitute for reading this superbly crafted literary art form. Samantha Power has dedicated her life to bringing us Pulitzer Prize caliber insights into the plight of human rights atrocities that continue to decimate this planet....now chronicling the amazing life of one of the foremost participants in the amelioration of this devastating reality - Vieira de Mello's Chasing The Flame deserves the same serious Pulitzer consideration as well.

I was changed by this book. You will be too. Buy it, Savor it. Ponder it. Get involved. Speak out. We can change this world. Together.

Bill Dahl

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Power's book is her failure to present a methodical comparison of the disagreements over the role of the local population during the UN's administration of East Timor and during the US occupation of Iraq. Both were tectonic struggles with historical implications affecting state-building efforts generally, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan specifically. Power's treatment of de Mello in East Timor and Iraq is only half the story.

Power's oversight is all the more surprising given the detailed nature of the book, which is replete with microscopic anecdotal information. It is odd, therefore, to have missed out the critical aspects of pivotal world events that the struggle for local participation in both East Timor and Iraq represent. Both instances became public knowledge and considerable material is available in the public domain.

Power describes step-by-step how de Mello tried to influence Paul Bremer when, as `governor' of Iraq, he was excluding a meaningful role for the Iraqis during the occupation. She casts de Mello as a champion of Iraqi participation. What Power does not describe is the eerie parallel of arguments made to de Mello when he was the Transitional Administrator in East Timor by the UN's Head of District Administration and the original inventor of the transitional administration model, Jarat Chopra. Just as Bremer resisted de Mello in Iraq, de Mello had previously resisted Chopra in East Timor--both with disastrous consequences.

Throughout the 1990s, Chopra had pioneered the means of exercising political authority in transitions, also called "peace-maintenance". At the time, East Timor would prove to be the most extreme case of international administration, with the UN assuming sovereign as well as executive, legislative and judicial powers. Chopra, a planner of the mission in East Timor, recognized that he had not built in safeguards for local participation or checks and balances on an absolutist form of power that his peace-maintenance work had produced. Consequently, according to his account, he began to take corrective action in the field.

The UN mission as the government of the country had completely excluded any Timorese role. Yet, power-sharing was unacceptable to de Mello and rejected by him and his inner circle--who are one-sidedly interviewed by Power. Chopra's arguments mirror those made by de Mello to Bremer in Iraq. It would have been fascinating for Power to compare in both instances the back-and-forth debates over such issues as early elections, consultative bodies, timetables for transfers of power, and space for peaceful opposition to avoid future violence.

De Mello's reversal of roles, from resisting power-sharing in East Timor to arguing for it in Iraq, is to his credit, for it reflects that he learnt his lesson. It would have been compelling for Power to explain the evolution of this story.

Similarly, in many ways, de Mello was undermined in Iraq by the very image of success in East Timor that he had been instrumental in crafting. Bremer, in his own account (My Year in Iraq), explains that he did not have available to him luxuries of local participation that de Mello had in East Timor. This view is a misunderstanding of events in East Timor, where local participation was not a luxury but had to be forced on de Mello by Chopra, the World Bank and Timorese pressure. Bremer's view rests on an image of success that obscured the underlying failures of the UN in East Timor, failures that would explode into violence in 2006. One can only wonder if Bremer might have been less dismissive of de Mello had the parallels been made more apparent much earlier.

Chopra's press interviews and subsequent writings presciently predicted how events would unfold in East Timor. He was also self-critical of the mechanisms for international administration that he had designed and identified the shortcomings of external governorship--even in East Timor, which had unparalleled conditions for success. It would have been interesting for Power to investigate what impact a more honest appraisal by de Mello of the East Timor mission might have had at the time. If the US Administration had absorbed, not an image of success, but a more sober assessment of the East Timor experience, would political/military occupation still have been seen as the way to go in Afghanistan and Iraq, places which entirely lacked conditions for success?

The fallout from the Chopra-de Mello and de-Mello-Bremer dynamics regarding how to deal with local populations in transitions is playing out, not only in the reorientation of state-building, but also at the frontlines through the Pentagon's controversial Human Terrain System that embeds social scientists with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Tragically and coincidentally, the first casualty of the program was one of Chopra's own protégés, Michael Bhatia.) The debate over the program between anthropologists and the military add a degree of urgency to the missing part of Power's book, since the high politics of local participation were the antecedents to the current disagreements.

Samantha Powers portrayal of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a outstanding biography of a modern hero. It reads like a thriller and should win her another Pullitzer prize. Sergio was a man with passion for his convictions always ready to accept new challenges in dangerous areas of the world. Thanks to her book we have the depiction of a true hero that gave his life so that a bit of peace and justice could emerge from that part of the world.
Samantha should be congratulated and I hope she will be part of Obama foreign advise team.
Daniel Sette Camara, MD

The ingredients that make for a great biography are the same as those that make for a great work of fiction: A strong cast of well-developed characters, a rich setting of details and complexity that draws the reader in, a gripping narrative that keeps the reader turning the pages... Witness, for example, Walter Isaacson's biography of Kissinger, a tour-de-force recreation of the world of 1970's international diplomatic intrigues. Mr. Isaacson, of course, may have an easier task, as Henry Kissinger is not a martyred humanitarian hero and in many ways much easier to poke fun at. But Ms. Power's subject, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was also a fascinating character in his own right. Like Kissinger he was a man of striking contradictions - a prodigious workaholic who could live for months on end on a spartan diet of rice and chocolate bars in the field, yet at the same time a bon vivant of such vanity that he carried around packets of fabric wipes so his starched khakis would always remain spotless after a day through the mud.

Vieira de Mello had led a fascinating life, and Ms Power's book did paint a well-rounded portrait of the man. However, the book could have benefited from much better developed supporting characters, not to mention more insightful expositions of the complex events that revolved around them. It was also too long, and plodding at times. Over all the book would have been a much better read if the author had focused on fewer episodes of VdM's life with more depth. This is the sort of book that the reader may wish to read selectively. Personally I found the chapters on the Balkans, Cambodia and Iraq to be the best reads.

Nonetheless, the book gets 4 stars for the unique perspective it provides into the workings of the UN. Its many fly-on-the-wall accounts of high level UN decision-making provides not only insights into substantive policy debates but also the clash of personalities. Calling this a "fawning hagiography" is unfair, although the author does tend to be overly reverential and a bit too ready to take people's words at face value. The Vieira de Mello that emerges, for all his strengths and foibles, is an apt embodiment of the UN. High-minded and sometimes truly heroic, he was generally at his best working on projects of relative moral clarity, over which there was broad consensus, such as the successful return of over 350,000 Cambodian refugees to their homes. When he ventured into more murky political waters, the qualities that served him well at the UNHCR became liabilities. A knack for charming powerful people is useful when negotiating food shipments. The same eagerness to be liked turns into a tendency to side with power in tough political negotiations. In Bosnia he was so ready to cave in to the Serbs that people started calling him "Serbio". And it wasn't simply a matter of pragmatism - at the end of his tenure he was so determined to remain on good terms with all sides, that he spent an entire afternoon shopping for a going-away present for Milosevic, even as other branches of the UN were investigating Milosevic fo war crimes.

De Mello never mastered the art of saying no. When it counted, such as during the debates leading up to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, his instinct was to stay on the fence rather than risk courting unpopularity. He did not speak out when the US began building pressure for war in the fall of 2002. He declined to take part when Rund Lubbers, the UNHCR commissioner, attempted to rally senior UN officials to jointly oppose the war on the eve of its outbreak. Even in the face of mounting evidence of Coalition mis-steps in Iraq, de Mello, then serving as the UN High Commissionerr on Human Rights, was so evasive that one British TV interviewer lost patience and asked outright, "Is the human rights commissioner too scared to speak out against the United States?"

Cynics claimed that he was angling to succeed Annan as Secretary General down the line. He might or might not have been, but he was certainly loath to antagonize powerful people in the Bush administration. His reward was to become the administration's preferred choice to head the UN mission in Iraq. De Mello often insisted that even if he had spoken out, it would not have made one whit of difference in US policy. Perhaps. But his own life might have been saved.

In the last chapter of the book the author drew a number of lessons from de Mello's many achievements. All very worthy, but perhaps an additional lesson can be drawn from his failings: For a statesman, popularity is the least achievement of all.

An extraordinary book about the life-work of an extraordinary man. Those who rated this book poorly simply because they want something more exciting (and not too intellectual) will have to stick with fiction.