Chasing the Flame

"Now this is a very interesting book. Samantha Power is now working in quite a senior position in the Obama administration. She is in charge of multilateral affairs in the White House, the National Security Council. She became famous last year when she was on a tour selling this book. At the time she was advising Obama and the struggle between him and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination was still going on. And she was interviewed by The Scotsman and said that “Hillary is a monster,” adding afterwards: “That’s off the record.” But the journalists at The Scotsman were a bit brutal and said that for it to be off the record she would have to have said it was off the record before she said it, not after. So it got published. And she had to resign, at least officially, from Obama’s campaign. But I think a number of people who knew her and knew him said: “Well that won’t last, and if he becomes president she’ll be back.” And sure enough she is back. And so that lends an extra interest to this book. The other thing is that her previous book was about the United States and genocide, and particularly she wrote about Rwanda, and why everybody in Washington didn’t want to intervene in Rwanda, and why they allowed the genocide there to happen. But in the course of her reporting and academic career, she had got to know this man, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was a Brazilian, brilliant UN official. He worked initially mainly on the humanitarian side, for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and he was particularly in Bosnia. She was following the Bosnian war and she got to know him then. And eventually Kofi Annan sent him as the UN representative to Baghdad, after the American invasion in 2003. And he was blown up there, along with his staff, in an attack on UN headquarters in August of 2003. So it’s a tragic story. But the interesting thing about it is that Sergio was a philosopher by training – someone who cared passionately about issues – but he was also tremendously practical and very good at getting things done. And, according to the precise role he was playing, his attitude to some issues changed. In some cases, especially in the earlier part of his career, he was functioning as a humanitarian and would basically say “I will negotiate even with the devil, in order to get supplies through and to relieve suffering.” And he sometimes was prepared to go along with governments, or very unpleasant armed factions, in order to be able to help people who were in their power. Perhaps an extreme case was when he was repatriating refugees to Rwanda after the genocide, from Tanzania, and he pretty much violated what’s supposed to be a sacred principle of UNHCR, that people are only ever sent back of their own free will. And there was not much question that most of these people would rather have stayed in Tanzania. But the government of Tanzania didn’t want them. And Sergio basically came to the conclusion that the best (or least bad) thing in the circumstances was to organize this in a humane and civilized way – and a lot of people felt he was going too far in sacrificing principle to realpolitik. But then I think, partly as a result of the different jobs he was given, and partly of his observation of what was wrong and why these terrible humanitarian problems arise, he came around more to thinking that human rights and the basic principles of the UN are very important and sometimes they trump the immediate, short-term humanitarian considerations. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So the book is very interesting because it’s about a very interesting man, who had a very interesting life, but also you feel that, in a way, it’s not only a book about Sergio Vieira de Mello, but also a book about Samantha Power; that she herself is wrestling with many of these dilemmas – about the relationship between power and idealism and how you get things right when you actually have responsibilities. I keep wondering what’s she thinking now about Sri Lanka, or other places in the world where terrible things are happening? And if she were writing the book about herself, now, what judgments would she make? And you can see that this is somebody who is quite honest and able to admit that problems are not simple and there often isn’t a straightforward black and white solution and you have to go for the lesser evil. And that’s pretty unpleasant when you’re dealing with a very unpleasant situation in which very large numbers of people are being killed or are in danger of being killed."