humanitarian aid do more harm than good? Are the UN’s singular virtues— impartiality, independence, and integrity—viable in an age of terror? When is military force necessary? How can its inevitably harmful effects be mitigated? He did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions. He had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.
The biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello is also the biography of a dangerous world whose ills are too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Although the types of conflict—and the loci of Western attention—have shifted over the last four decades, every generation has had to deal with broken lives and broken societies. Because of the terrible costs of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Americans today seem torn between two impulses. The first is to retreat from global engagement altogether.We do not feel sure that our government or we ourselves know what we are doing. The second is to go abroad to stamp out threats in the hopes of achieving full security. Vieira de Mello’s life reminds us of the impossibility of either course. The United States can no more pack up and turn away from today’s global threats than it can remake the world to its own liking. Vieira de Mello understood that just because he couldn’t cure all ills didn’t mean he should not do what he could to ameliorate some.
The question, for him and us, is not whether to engage in the world but how to engage. Although he did not have time to formulate a guiding doctrine, he did have a thirty-four-year head start in thinking about the plagues that preoccupy us today: civil war, refugee flows, religious extremism, suppressed national and religious identity, genocide, and terrorism. He started out as a humanitarian, but by 2003 he had become a diplomat and politician, comfortable weighing lesser evils. His professional journey led him to believe the world’s leaders needed to do three big things. First, they had to invest far greater resources in trying to ensure that people enjoyed law and order. Second, they had to engage even the most unsavory militants. Even if they did not find common ground with rogue states or rebels, at least they might acquire a better sense of how to outmaneuver them. And third, they would be wise to orient their activities less around democracy than around individual dignity. And the best way for outsiders to make a dent in enhancing that dignity would be to improve their linguistic and cultural knowledge base, to remind themselves of their own fallibility, to empower those who know their societies best, and to be resilient and adaptable in the face of inevitable setbacks.
Sergio Vieira de Mello spent more than three decades attempting to save and improve lives—lives that today continue to hang in the balance. As the war drums roll, and as cultural and religious fissures widen into canyons, there is no better time to turn for guidance to a man whose long journey under fire helps to reveal the roots of our current predicament—and perhaps the remedies.
Part I
Sergio Vieira de Mello in what would become Bangladesh, November 1971.
One
DISPLACED
Sergio Vieira de Mello’s youth left him with the impression that politics disrupted lives more than it improved them. In March 1964, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, a group of military officers decided to unseat João Goulart, Brazil’s democratically elected president. Under Goulart the rural poor had begun seizing farmland, and the urban poor were staging food riots. The generals accused Goulart of allowing Communists to take over the country. Just five years after the Communist victory in Cuba, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson had similar concerns. The U.S. ambassador in Rio de Janeiro warned that if Washington did not act against Brazil’s “radical left revolutionaries,” the country could become “the China of the 1960s.” 1 In an