Free Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power Page A

Callaghan. “And if that was his opinion he would have said so.”
     
     
    Irrespective of whether Vieira de Mello was testing out his ideas or simply telling both men what he thought they most wanted to hear, he knew that UNIFIL officers and civilian officials would have little say in what happened next. The powerful countries on the Security Council would decide whether the UN peacekeepers would pack up and go home.
     
     
    And decide they did. On June 18 the Security Council extended UNI-FIL’s mandate. 33 Four years after the blue helmets had been sent in to monitor Israel’s withdrawal, they were now being asked, temporarily, to submit to an Israeli occupation and restrict their role to delivering humanitarian aid. “The Security Council told us to stay,” recalls Goksel, “but they basically told us there was nothing for us to do. The signal we got was, ‘Do what you can to justify your salaries.’ We felt useless. We hid in Naqoura and tried to become invisible. After that, even Sergio didn’t want to go around saying, ‘I’m a UN guy.’”
     
     
    Vieira de Mello repeatedly telephoned UN Headquarters in New York in search of consolation. It was the first time in his life that he was part of something that was being publicly condemned and ridiculed. He insisted on replaying June 6, the day of the invasion, again and again.“Is there something else I could have done?” he askedVirendra Dayal, the UN secretary-general’s chief of staff with whom he had worked in Bangladesh. Dayal tried to soothe his colleague. “Sergio, what could you as a young man have done all by yourself in the face of a massive land, air, and naval invasion?” Dayal wanted him to pass through New York on his way to Brazil for home leave in July. He thought a debriefing might help. But when he reached New York,Vieira de Mello just kept up his second-guessing. “Stop lacerating yourself,” Dayal urged. But his junior colleague was adamant: “We should have made more of a show,” Vieira de Mello said.
     
     
    However degrading it had been to be part of the UNIFIL mission before the Israeli invasion, it felt far worse afterward. WhenVieira de Mello returned to Lebanon after his leave, he found that Israeli forces were keeping UN officials largely pinned down to the UN base in Naqoura.The Israelis seemed to hope that their invasion would cause the peacekeepers to leave.They closed the Lebanese-Israeli border to UN personnel and vehicles at will, blocking resupply and personnel rotation convoys, and they denied UN personnel flight permission except for rare medical emergencies. The Israeli press suggested that the UN was passing information to Palestinian terrorists about Israeli military positions. In a cable to Urquhart, Callaghan criticized Israel’s “official smear campaign” against UNIFIL and begged UN officials in New York to approach the Israeli delegation so as “to put a firm stop to this sorry state of affairs.” 34
     
     
    Vieira de Mello staged small acts of civil disobedience, refusing to submit requests for travel permits to the Israeli authorities, moving around without escorts, and often sitting in his vehicle at Israeli checkpoints in the hot sun for entire afternoons, refusing to allow the Israelis to search his car. “We are the United Nations,” he would fume, sometimes astonishing Goksel. “Can’t you see the flag? We will not submit to the will of an illegal occupying force.” When he briefed incoming units of peacekeepers, he gave them the same advice he himself would receive from friends before leaving for Iraq in 2003, urging them to avoid close association with the occupiers, so as to maintain the faith of the populace.
     
     
    After Vieira de Mello received his doctorate in 1974, Robert Misrahi, his adviser, had persuaded him to pursue a “state doctorate,” the highest and most competitive degree offered by the French university system.Vieira de Mello had done so, working intermittently