Sergio by Samantha Power

Author:Samantha Power [Power, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

In an effort to fend off claustrophobia on the small island, he tried to persuade his friends in Europe and Asia to visit him. “But, Sergio,” the American soprano Barbara Hendricks said, “Timor is just not on the way to anywhere!” Ever since the mid-1980s, whenever he had been away on a mission, his friend Fabienne Morisset had sent him a diplomatic pouch at the end of each week filled with all five days’ hard-copy editions of Le Monde. When he reached Dili, he had discouraged her from sending the papers, saying, “It will take six months!” His mother sent him Veja, Brazil’s equivalent of Time magazine, which he read faithfully, no matter how outdated it was when it arrived.

He wrote to his old friend Annick Stevenson (formerly Roulet),v urging her to come to East Timor and to write a story for the French regional daily Le Progrès on the elections and the formation of a new government. “I well know that Indonesia and Timor are not the principal preoccupations of readers from Lyon,” he wrote, “but you could try to broaden their horizons.” 32 Stevenson regretfully relayed her editor’s response: “Taking into account the density of news in the world at this time (Middle East, Macedonia, Northern Ireland), it seems difficult to justify sending you there.”33 Vieira de Mello masked his disappointment, exclaiming cheerily, “The answer is not surprising!”34

The climate within the UN mission was almost as tense as on the Timorese street. The heat (90 degrees daily, with humidity between 60 and 90 percent) was withering. Most of the UN staffers lived off rice and Indonesian noodles. Those UN staff who worked in the districts, far from Dili, felt particularly cut off, unable to procure desks, computers, or even pens and paper. Following their boss’s lead, UN staff worked nineteen-hour days and on weekends. East Timor offered no diversions. The UN was taking the blame for all that was going wrong, and those in Vieira de Mello’s inner circle felt they were on the brink of a major failure or at the very least a major outbreak of social unrest. “Normal people reacted in strange ways,” recalls Hochschild, “but strange people reacted in outlandish ways.”

Vieira de Mello knew the flaws of the UN system intimately. While working in New York, he had kept a cartoon pinned to the wall from the mid-1990s, at the time that Euro Disney was suffering its financial crisis. The cartoon showed Mickey saying to his companion Goofy: “It looks as if the UN is taking over—now it really can’t get worse.”35 But understanding those flaws was different from living them. The people of East Timor had high hopes for self-governance and improved living conditions, but Vieira de Mello felt as though he and UNTAET were dashing them daily. “Our vision was we’d administer the place and we’d consult with the Timorese. Then, after elections we’d hand over the keys to the Timorese and be on our way,” recalls Prentice. “The Timorese, who had been waiting centuries to govern themselves, understandably had different ideas.

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