Posted by Donald Officer (Moderator) on April 15, 2008, 12:13 pm, in reply to "Ottawa XPress cover story on Samantha Power"
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Is Justice Indivisible?
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power. The Penguin Press; New York, New York, 2008. (622 pages) and The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America by Erna Paris. Knopf Canada; Toronto, Ontario, 2008. (375 pages). Reviewed by Donald R. Officer.
These two extraordinary books tackle what is ultimately the same enormously important issue from different but equally valid directions. The subject of Samantha Power’s political biography is Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian humanitarian and (genuine) nation builder whose entire career was spent in the employee of the United Nations. This route was unusual. In the organization’s senior ranks, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan might be the only other notable UN “lifer” that comes to mind. Furthermore, his story speaks for itself, for it is not as a veteran international bureaucrat that “Sergio” will be remembered. Distinguished Canadian author Erna Paris has also written a profile in The Sun Climbs Slow, but hers is of an organization, a group portrait, the fledgling International Criminal Court. There are heroes in her book too, likewise challenges, achievements and tragedies.
Let me begin by saying that as a reviewer, reading these two books made for a rich educational week. After putting these titles down, I was overwhelmed with a sense of the fragility of our world as well as the incredible challenges it presents as its peoples everywhere are forced to adapt to stupefying shifts. For those inclined to assume we live in an era of bean counters and technocrats with little room for heroism or high-minded assaults on the impossible – think again. Likewise, do not for a minute believe that shows of unfathomable cruelty are disappearing from mankind’s repertoire. Of course, between those two ends of the character spectrum stand vast numbers of victims and bystanders. I expect you have already met a few of them.
After a childhood that included a temporary exile in Argentina occasioned by Brazil’s own repressive politics, Vieira de Mello’s real political awakening came rudely in the form of a Paris police truncheon. As a doctoral student in philosophy at the Sorbonne he found himself caught up in the student and popular rebellion of 1968. Beaten by the riot squad, he nevertheless recovered to graduate the following year, the same year his father was forced out of the Brazilian Foreign Service by the generals in charge. Vowing never to serve in Brazil, Vieira de Mello joined the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Office in Geneva later in 1969.
The next thirty-four years that ended with his needless and heartbreaking death under the rubble of the United Nations building in American occupied Baghdad furnish an unbelievable overview of the conflict bedeviled “postwar” period. Sergio strongly preferred the active zones although he learned to tolerate serious frustration as he coped with reams of paperwork and international low level one-upmanship. He served on most continents most actively in Asia (far and Middle Eastern), Africa (mostly sub-Saharan), and Europe (the Balkans). His assignments in Sudan, Peru and Switzerland were quieter of course, but he often faced conflict of a different variety at UN Headquarters in New York or sometimes in the High Commissioner’s Geneva office.
Perhaps the biggest challenge the author faced was to sum up the meaning of Sergio de Mello’s career. Death as a consequence of the first truly substantial suicide bombing of post Saddam Iraq forces some form of assessment in itself, but Sergio’s philosophy of engagement evolved continuously as he acquired new wisdom and skills over the years. Samantha Power is a very astute reporter detecting the nuances of these changes in the man even as she tries to gauge their impact on his performance as an administrator and negotiator. She is likewise always aware of the complex maneuvers that alternatively ruthless or cautious actors indulge in the big game of state. We have the historical record to help us see that process in hindsight. Vieira de Mello’s academic work was aimed at finding application for the lessons of philosophy in the Real Politik of the world we’ve inherited. It would appear that was his career goal as well.
How does Power or should the reader summarize this man’s achievements? The author keeps her reporter’s objectivity to the extent that is possible. Fairly enough she sees him as a hero. He has a Byronic or Ulysses like dimension in the hands on way he threw himself into the causes of the downtrodden or the tenacious if wily ferocity with which he followed his own curiosity and built problem solving capacity. When I began the book I kept wondering whether or not Sergio could teach us all a way forward in turbulent times. As I finished it I began to appreciate that a life is not a balance sheet and the world must continue to find its own way as the pages keep turning.
If anything, the questions in The Sun Climbs Slowly are even bigger and thornier. Erna Paris, after all, is trying to shed light on the evolution of an institution. The implications are naturally more far reaching in that sense than those of the life of a single person. Therefore this author goes back much further to Thucydides and the Peloponnesian wars to medieval Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia and the appallingly bellicose stretches the congresses and treaty makers tried to minimize. She frames the big moral problem of accountability to humanity in a very scholarly yet immediately accessible way by balancing the ethical dilemma of power and justice against the mountain of monstrous evidence.
I began and will repeat that these two books are both significant works of non fiction prose. Awards are in order. That assessment, which will be shared by many readers, does not imply that either book ties up all the ends. In Chasing the Flame we are witness to a life very few of us could or would want to aspire to. Sergio was enormously talented, charismatic, energetic, informed and yes, lucky. Even for him of course, the luck ran out.
The big issue I refer to in the first paragraph – the elephant in the kitchen – for both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court is the ongoing impact of such international bodies on the jealously guarded sovereignty of nation states. Both organizations appeared when conditions were right for their approval or at least tolerance. The United States in its status as sole remaining superpower (for now) has regarded the United Nations which it continues to host and underwrite alternately with disdain and grudging sufferance. Erna Paris tells us the ICC found a lucky window as the disgraceful Abu Ghraib pictures were released and the situation in Darfur began to gain headlines. Strategically, the American diplomatic snipers who opposed the formation of that body so vigorously, pulled back from their forward position. How could they openly oppose the prosecution of war criminals in the light of what was happening in Iraq? Doubtless the heroism of Vieira de Mello was enhanced but his accomplishments diminished by the continuous wheel spinning that big powers and small players alike force on UN operations.
The classic view of power and its limits is that eventually a basic, if necessary international, moral outrage balances the otherwise self-evident rights of the powerful. The italics are mine. Sergio and the ICC advocates have apparently been forced to live by an ancient atavistic code after millenniums of philosophizing and legal embellishment. Only Europe shows serious signs of moving past the stultifying limitations of nation state sovereignty. The doctrine of American Exceptionalism has proven to be a particularly troublesome roadblock, for historical and geographical reasons especially galling to Canadians. If world bodies remain weak and restrained in the face of genocide, global poverty and the plight of millions of refugees, it is because world powers are keeping those bodies weak directly or indirectly. Surely it is time for the peoples of the world to question the antiquated authority that oppresses them. In the wired world do we need to defer to primitive aggression so reflexively still? Erna Paris notes that the internet moved the ICC agenda forward at critical junctures – grounds for hope. Sergio asked in his doctoral thesis how philosophy might achieve relevance in today’s politics. Must we ask our best and brightest to keep martyring themselves on the cross of passive indifference?
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