Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.
| Author | Neophytou, Maria |
| Position | Book review |
Samantha Power
ALLEN LANE, 2007
As an intern at the United Nations (UN) in New York in 2001, I remember well the current that seemed to run through the building as people breathlessly relayed the news that 'Sergio' would be arriving for a fleeting visit from the field. The High Commissioner was well known within diplomatic circles: it was said that he brushed his teeth with Italian mineral water, and was always immaculately groomed and meticulously prepared--whether trekking for days through the Cambodian jungle to meet with rebel leaders, or guiding a team through a three way battle zone in Kosovo.
Samantha Power describes this 'hallowed persona' as 'a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy', one of the few charismatic stars of the UN, whose young staffers 'trailed around him around as if he were the Pied Piper'. Her engaging biography brings his dramatic story to a wider audience, giving his life, work and ideas the chance to gain the recognition and profile they would surely have achieved had he survived the terrorist attack on the UN mission in Iraq in 2003.
In Power's own words, it is a 'dual biography', of a fascinating man and the extraordinary times he lived through. Sergio Vieira de Mello 'moved with the headlines', somehow finding himself at the centre of the action of many of the defining global events of the post-war period. Clubbed by police when as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne in 1968 he took to the streets infused with 'the flame' of the book's title, he carried the scars and spirit of '68 with him: first as the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) took him to the frontlines of Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda; and then through his subsequent postings as Head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) in Kosovo, East Timor and Iraq. This is truly a biography whereby the times made the man and the man in turn made the times.
And yet, even to portray the book as a dual biography is to do Power's five-hundred-page opus an injustice. The book essentially does five things. First and foremost, of course, it documents a life--a unique life story rich in experience and insight, which was so tragically cut short.
But secondly, it underlines the importance, for all its faults, of the UN. This is as much the UN's life story as it is...
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