Wonderful news from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences: "Sergio" is one of 15 semi-finalists selected for the prize of Best Documentary Feature. Directed by Greg Barker ("Ghosts of Rwanda") and produced by John Battsek ("One Day in September") and Julie Goldman (Devil's Playground"), the film tells Sergio's inspirational story.
Congratulations to Greg, John, Julie and their entire team as well as all the other semi-finalists.
Samantha Power wrote in Chasing the Flame that Sergio believed “the best way for outsiders to make a dent in enhancing [individual 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.” It’s sometimes easier said than done, however. Living in the United States often makes it difficult to get truly nuanced perspectives of different cultural realities, and the kind of humility that Sergio sought can easily be forgotten.
For that very reason, anyone interested in foreign aid would do well to listen to Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet’s recent discussion with Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, African’s most prestigious literary award; founding editor and executive director of Africa’s most well-respected literary journal, Kwani?; contributor to South Africa’s largest newspaper and director of Bard College’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Languages and Literature. It’s a strong reminder of the often unforeseen counterproductive effects of charity and the need to question easy assumptions. How else can we try to do better?
Today marks the inauguration of World Humanitarian Day and the sixth anniversary of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad which killed 22 people – including Sergio. Though that bombing marked the first time that the U.N. was the direct target of a violent attack, the loss of aid workers is sadly not a rare occurrence – according to Michael Bear at Change.org, 81 have been killed this year alone.
In the Huffington Post, Navi Pillay, head of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, used the anniversary to make a strong argument for supporting human rights in the midst of humanitarian crises, stating, “It is very often abuse of human rights that causes humanitarian crises in the first place…Similarly, if human rights are ignored during a humanitarian crisis, the crisis will often deepen.” And Mark Leon Goldberg of the UN Dispatch posted a moving PSA as well as a link to an op-ed by Samantha Power from a year ago today.
Tragically, today will also be marked by one of the worst days of violence in Baghdad since June, with multiple explosions across the city, and the U.N. is reporting that two civilian employees of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan were among those killed in the attack on Kabul yesterday. This occurs just a little over a week after the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to renew their mission in Iraq for another year. We previously reported that Staffan de Mistura was stepping down as chief of that mission, and we wish his successor, Ad Melkert of the Netherlands, previously an associate administrator of the U.N. Development Program, the very best in moving forward. As CARE asks in their World Humanitarian Day Post, we all must take a serious look at why aid workers are being targeted more frequently and what we can do to ensure their safety.
The UN Dispatch reports that Sergio’s successor as top diplomat in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, will be stepping down to become deputy executive director of the World Food Program. A close friend and colleague of Sergio, de Mistura helped facilitate the difficult political progress that made the surge the success it was. We await the next appointment with interest.
By Joshua Weissburg
Samantha Power, in her recent post, described Sergio Vieira de Mello as a leader whose greatest accomplishments came in navigating the "grey zones of the global system" to make progress on complex problems that transcend borders and national identities. Americans, wrote Power, don't quite know what to make of a man like this. Sergio was not the sort of hero that we Americans grew up reading about. Sure, our history books have their great humanitarians--many of them from other countries--but even Ghandi and Mandela focused on righting the particular political injustices and wrongs in their own countries. We lack even the appropriate vocabulary to describe someone like Sergio. Was he a politician? A diplomat? A great statesman? None of these terms capture the identity of a leader whose efforts had little to do with the pursuit of any national interest. In many respects Sergio broke the mold. Those who examine his life will help shape a new one.
My program at The Aspen Institute works to engage Americans as voices and contributors in the effort to shape the foreign policy leaders of the 21st century. We believe that foreign policy is better--more legitimate, representative, principled, cooperative and generous--when the American public has a better understanding of the issues at play and a bigger role in setting foreign policy. We didn't come up with this idea; it has a long and storied tradition, from Andrew Jackson through the present day. Former U.S. Senator Gary Hart summed up the Global Interdependence Initiative's (GII) premise that foreign policy is too important to be left to politicians or ideologues: "The veil separating the foreign policy priesthood from the people must be removed. We, the people, must insist that our nation’s finest principles characterize our dealings with our global neighbors."
I often find myself writing on the GII's Switchblog about the power of narrative as a way to engage people on issues that seem too big, too complicated to warrant thinking through or taking action. Chasing the Flame, and Sergio's legacy as a whole, provides a powerful narrative lens through which to tell a story about what determined, principled engagement with the world's problems can accomplish. In the coming weeks and months I look forward to exploring how Sergio's principles and legacy can inform specific solutions to global challenges that often appear insoluble.
By Samantha Power
We launched this site on the five year anniversary of Sergio’s death because it didn’t seem adequate to light yet another candle, to reminisce about his successes and failures in the field, or to celebrate the remarkable A Team that was killed or wounded with him in Baghdad. This year, five years after the attack, with Russian troops having invaded Georgia, humanitarian workers being targeted in Afghanistan, and so few of the lessons of Sergio’s life heeded in geopolitical circles, it seemed a good moment to try to generate a debate on how dignity and security could best be promoted in foreign policy today.
While alive, Sergio was known as the “go to guy,” and these days the absence of such a go-to person is felt daily. The United States and Europe are speaking with multiple voices on the Russian invasion. Rivalry and differences among China, Russia and the United States have greatly undermined the Security Council and its capacity to meet this and other threats to international peace and security.
Here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there are few events commemorating the murder of Sergio, a Brazilian, on August 19, 2003. This was a suicide bomb that not only took 22 lives, but that shattered the old school faith of humanitarians that their good intentions would shield them from being targeted in the field. Born in Brazil, Sergio Vieira de Mello was the son of a diplomat, so travelled a great deal as a child. Then he became a peripatetic trouble-shooter himself, working in the UN for 34 years in relief, refugee protection, peacekeeping and what became known as nation-building. As a result, most Brazilians got to know Sergio in death rather than in life, and they still know him largely in silhouette. That said, university and graduate students in particular seem hungry to reclaim Sergio as one of Brazil’s own. In addition, as Brazil asserts itself on the international stage, Sergio’s life seems one that more Brazilian diplomats are intent on accessing for wisdom in settling regional and international disputes, and also for an understanding of the sources of violence and extremism, ills that plague this country’s own cities as well as danger zones abroad.
Americans have themselves found it hard to “place” Sergio. Although world leaders and citizens have talked at length the last decade about globalization, global terrorism, global warming, global poverty, etc., we still read history books that introduce us to statist figures. We rarely get to walk in the footsteps of a person who moved with the world’s challenges – across borders. His achievements aren’t those we are used to celebrating (or even noticing) – orchestrating the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees, negotiating demobilization agreements, helping draft constitutions or plan elections, and even shepherding a tiny country (East Timor) to independence. People also have trouble placing Sergio because his life is one of trade-offs and moral incommensurables in negotiations; he offers no black and white formulas for peace or even coexistence; he inhabited the grey zones of the global system.
Hopefully this site will be a space where people from all walks can come to debate how the United States and other countries can better navigate those grey zones in the years ahead. In the meantime, we join in remembrance of the 22 innocent lives that were taken five years ago today in Baghdad.
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