The book jacket for "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World" by Samantha Power is pictured in this undated handout image. Source: Penguin Press via Bloomberg News
Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World," poses in this undated handout photo. Photographer: Walter Chin/Penguin Press via Bloomberg News Review by Craig Seligman
Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- United Nations officials are often derided for putting Band-Aids on the gaping wounds of the world's trouble spots.
In ``Chasing the Flame,'' Samantha Power recounts the all- too-brief life of one of those diplomats: Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who died in 2003 in an al-Qaeda bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad. He was 55.
Vieira de Mello, the son of a Brazilian diplomat, more or less drifted into UN work because he was good with languages. At first he was idealistic and eager to shake a finger at the world's butchers. Over the years he developed what Power calls a ``principled, flexible pragmatism'' -- sometimes too flexible.
He spent most of his career in hellholes, among them Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor and, fatally, Iraq. Again and again Power points up the UN's failures in those places, though ``failure'' is a relative term for an organization that sends its personnel into infernos the powerful nations of the world are eager to ignore.
Underfunded and underarmed, UN forces are often inadequate to the task before them. Then they're lambasted for doing too little by the very nations that have done less.
Yet somehow the UN has repeatedly managed to relieve suffering. Vieira de Mello could point proudly to the repatriation of refugees in Cambodia and Kosovo. In two and a half years in East Timor, he helped that fledgling nation, which had been almost destroyed by pro-Indonesian militias, onto its feet. (That was how he became a marked man: Osama bin Laden regarded the tiny Roman Catholic country as property that had been stolen from the Muslim world.)
`Serbio'
His ongoing moral dilemma was how far to engage the butchers in order to prevent more killing. Power doesn't hesitate to fault him for cozying up to the Khmer Rouge, and for becoming so friendly with Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic that his detractors started calling him ``Serbio.''
In what seems like an even crueler joke, this deftness at placating thugs was what made the Bush administration decide he was a man it could do business with. And that was his bad luck. He'd fallen in love and was ready to settle down in Geneva when the Americans pressured Secretary-General Kofi Annan into naming him head of the UN mission in Iraq.
Vieira de Mello had learned from his many mistakes, and he knew his experience could be valuable in stabilizing the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He cultivated L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in the hope of being able to help. The Americans didn't want his advice.
Glutton for Research
Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for ``A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,'' is a glutton for research. She conducted hundreds of interviews and pored over thousands of pages of documents to produce ``Chasing the Flame.'' And even though her writing is just serviceable and her text runs well over 600 pages, the result is riveting.
She doesn't grandstand. She respects the UN even as she chronicles its dysfunctionality. Her book is a clear-eyed biography of a man who probably would have made the UN run better if he had, as was expected, eventually become secretary- general. And in doing so he could have helped a lot of people.
``Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World'' is from Penguin Press (622 pages, $32.95).
(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
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