And tell you another story about someone who was in a sense an idealist in action, an idealist in the world. Sergio was student in Paris in the 1960s somebody who would have been quoting Marx with great zeal; and at that time would see an American car or hear an American accent in Paris and say ‘Ah, imperialists!” Very prone to sort of write off powerful countries. And this country in particular.

Now at age 21, he graduated with a degree in philosophy. The Brazilian military had taken over his country’s government in a coup so he couldn’t go home and do what his father had done and he had a decision to make.  “I’m an idealist. I’m a believer in political change. Where do I go, What do I do?” And he went where many of his generation would have liked to go and that was the United Nations. He went to Geneva. Went door to door to a number of different agencies and said “I want to help people, where do I go; what do I do?” And he ended up at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees which cares for people fleeing persecution across international borders and supplies them with relief and keeps them alive in neighboring countries and then tries to secure protection for them when they go home.

It may seem odd that an idealist who’s skeptical about American power would go to the United Nations but that’s only because he was really only thinking about one side of the UN which is the UN that is the place that we park our principles. The UN is the place we put all the human rights treaties, the genocide type conventions. Commitment on climate change will be parked there (on reducing emissions and so forth). That’s where the principles go. But what took several years at the UN for Sergio to notice is the UN is also the sum of governments, the sum of state power. Today it’s 192 governments, all of which have militaries (most of which have militaries I don’t think Costa Rica has a military and I’m sure there are some island nations that don’t have militaries). All of which are actually coming into the United Nations to pursue their national interests.

They don’t change just because they enter the building, no more than you change because you enter this facility. If each of you – just about the same number as UN ambassadors -- enter this building, you may get to hear from one another. You may get to hear about another country or national interest; but just the mere act of being in this building when the principles are parked in the next room doesn’t make you necessarily change your country’s policies or politics. Sergio would learn this the hard way over many years. And part of his evolution, I think, was understanding that instead of standing on the other side of the room from powerful countries and saying, “You’re not in compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” or “You’re not doing this, that you should be,” his whole career track is about learning how to be in the room. Learning how to see what makes powerful countries and individuals tick and then how to think about employing sticks and carrots in order to appeal to their self-interest, in order to get them to care about the global commons. To care about the environment, to care about the refugees, to care about genocide and ultimately to do the things that in the long term will be beneficial to their own peace and security, but in the short term might not seem so appealing. He was a little like Zelig or Forrest Gump – he was kind of everywhere the world was over the course of three decades. So in the Seventies it was wars of de-colonization that were kind of ripping lives apart, the planet apart. He was in the Sudan for two years. In Cyprus after the Turkish invasion, for a year, in 74-75. In Mozambique seeing fighters and civilians fleeing into Mozambique from Rhodesia. Then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – some things never change, though the parties of course were very different back then.

In the early 1980’s he went to Lebanon and was actually in Beirut when the United States suffered the first-ever suicide attack  -- which wasn’t the Marine barracks, that would come in 1983 -- an attack on the US Embassy. Sergio was right there, in Beirut, when that happened.  And saw, in a sense, the birth of terrorism. There are many who date that, for us, to 9/11, but I think you could go back to the attack on the US Embassy in Beirut and certainly that on the Marine barracks and say that’s when this modern era began and we probably could have taken it more seriously sooner. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the UN was empowered to be involved in much more political environments and political roles and Sergio at that time had become already the ‘go to’ guy in the international system. He was the person sent in 1991 to be the first person to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge who were responsible for the deaths of two million people. Sergio was sent into the jungle to figure out how to bring them into a peace process.

I met him in Bosnia in 1994  where he spent a year and there he was known not as ‘Sergio’ which was his name but as ‘Serbio’ because he was seen as having gone too far in this progression from being seen as the sort of holder of the principles and the keeper of the norms to being the person who always wanted to be in the room, always wanted to be doing the negotiations  It was seen by many of us, including myself,  that he was not standing up, publicly enough, on behalf of the civilians who were being herded into concentration camps and so forth.

What I would learn over the course of writing the book was that at the very time he was insisting on being in the room, negotiating with the Serbs, he was also actually running a quasi Underground Railroad out of the back seat of his car, from Sarajevo; and single-handedly rescued more than 500 civilians, smuggling them out of the besieged capital so they could get medical care or publicize the plight of Sarajevo elsewhere in Europe. So he was never what he seemed on the surface. 

But at that time he made the judgment that it wasn’t the UN peacekeepers, of whom he was one, that didn’t want to stand up to the Serbs. It was the governments of Britain, France, the United States and Russia. And given that he felt-- and again, I think reasonable people could differ about what the right thing to do at that time was -- he felt, Better to keep people alive, and behind the scenes try to push the Great Powers to change their point of view, in terms of whether they were actually willing to protect civilians. Eventually that approach, I suppose you could say, proved the right one, except many lives were lost in the meantime.

He went from Bosnia to Rwanda to Congo – I’m not going to get into the details of any of these missions – East Timor, which he ran – he was like the Viceroy of East Timor for two and a half years, shepherding the country in the wake of systematic massacres by Indonesia, back in 1999. He was put in charge. The guy who had been throwing rocks at the Colonial Powers in the Parisian streets back in 1968, was suddenly deciding tax policy, what went into textbooks, in someone else’s country, because the UN had sent him there -- the United States had pushed to have him sent there --in order to bring a little island nation to independence after the Indonesian occupation.

Fatefully, in 2003, he met with President Bush. He was then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and amazingly, Sergio – and this is kind of a testament to the kind of charm or diplomatic skill, I suppose, he brought to any negotiation – in meeting with President Bush, just in advance of the Iraq War. President Bush, it has to be said, was very skeptical about the United Nations after going before the Security Council and then taunted, saying, “Look the UN is about to become a League of Nations. It’s irrelevant.”

Sergio met with Bush and somehow managed to bring up the importance of signing on to the International Criminal Court, which Bush opposed. Guantanamo, which Bush supported, and the practice of extraordinary rendition and torture. He brought all those issues up and President Bush came out of the meeting thinking “This is a man I can work with.”

That’s diplomacy!

One of the ways he did it, when they met -- Bush is apparently very warm in personal meetings -- he shook Sergio’s hand and sort of put his hand on his shoulder and Sergio was a good athlete and took care of his fitness and Bush said ‘Wow, you must work out’ and so they had like a six minute conversation about their work out regimen right at the start. And then Sergio went from that to talking about -- he was the Human Rights Commissioner at the time he held this meeting -- the ‘shoot to kill’ policy that he, Sergio, had put in place in East Timor in order to protect Timorese civilians from Indonesian gangs and militia. And Bush was like, “Wow! This is a Human Rights Commissioner I can work with.”  Based on that sort of relationship he had built,  Sergio was able to bring up the sort of range of issues that he was really there to discuss.

Now I said this meeting was fateful because Bush’s respect for Sergio was so great that he then went to learn much more about him, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. Bush and others, other senior US officials, decided that Sergio was the one guy in the UN system that the United States could work with. And the European countries that had opposed the war very much wanted to make up with the United States. Remember, there were some of the greatest rifts people said since the Second World War, even earlier since the founding of the alliance at least, of the NATO Alliance. So these kinds of divisions were really frustrating to many, many people who said, “Let’s make up in the wake of the Iraq War. Let’s try. And let’s do so also for the people of Iraq.  Even if we, France, Germany, Russia opposed this War, thought it was a bad idea, we all owe it to the people of Iraq to try to make the best of a bad situation.” So they sent Sergio, the go-to guy, the Zelig to run the UN mission in Iraq and specifically to go and help speed the end of the US occupation.  And hand over, speed the handover to the Iraqi people.