CHALLENGES FOR THE UN

3/24/08

PAGE 40

TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of John Shattuck, who is here with me on stage, and all of our Library colleagues, I thank you for coming to today’s forum. I want to first acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR, which rebroadcasts our forums on Sunday evenings.

Sergio Vieira de Meilo, a humanitarian, peacemaker and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights died in 2003 while representing the United Nations in Baghdad, the victim of the first suicide bombing of a civilian target in the Iraq War. His loss was reminiscent of the death in 1961 of then-UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, whose plane crashed during a trip to negotiate peace in the Congo. President Kennedy’s remarks in the aftermath of that tragedy and on the future of the United Nations could have also been delivered at the more recent memorials to Sergio Vieira de Meilo. As we watch a brief excerpt, you’ll note at one point the camera captures the Secretary General’s empty chair.

[BEGIN AUDIO CLIP]

PRESIDENT KENNEDY: We meet here in an hour of grief and challenge. Dag Hammarskjold is dead, but the United Nations lives. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the tasks for which he died are at the top of our agenda. A noble servant of peace is gone, but the quest for peace lies before us. The problem is not the death of one man. The problem is the life of this organization. It will either grow to meet the challenges of our age or it will be gone with the wind, without influence, without force, without respect.

Were we to let it die, to enfeeble its vigor, to cripple its powers, we would condemn our future. For in the development of this organization rests the only true alternative to war, and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative. Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike.

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war. This will require new strength and new roles for the United Nations. For disarmament without checks is but a shadow and a community without law is but a shell. Already the United Nations has become both the measure and the vehicle of man’s most generous impulses. Already it has provided in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa this year, in the Congo, a means of holding man’s violence within bounds. But the great question which confronted this body in 1945 is still before us: Whether man’s cherished hopes of progress and peace ought to be destroyed by terror and disruption; whether the foul winds of war can be tamed in time to free the cooling winds of reason; and, whether the pledges of our charter ought to be fulfilled or defied -- pledges to secure peace, progress, human rights and world law.

[END AUDIO CLIP]

TOM PUTNAM: Though she was born in Ireland and moved to the United States at age nine, Samantha Power once told an interviewer that she is a child of Bosnia. For a year after graduating from Yale, at the age of 23, she covered the unfolding war in the Balkans as a freelance journalist and, in her own words, “through that experience, came of age.” Her reporting from the former Yugoslavia launched Ms. Power’s towering career as a journalist and crusader for human rights, reporting from such troubled lands as Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan.

In 2003, she published her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, documenting why the United States, at the height of its power, failed to stop the major genocides of the 20th century. The founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, she took a year off from her teaching responsibilities during the 2005 academic year to work in the office of Senator Barack Obama, and she currently serves as the Anna Lind Professor at the Kennedy School of Government.

It was also in the Balkans that Samantha Power met the subject of her newest book, Chasing the Flames: Sergio Vieira de Meilo and the Fight to Save the World. On the eve of their first meeting, a friend described Sergio Vieira de Meilo as “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” The next day, NATO unleashed the first bombing raids in its 45-year history, targeting Serbian nationals who were besieging the UN safe areas. Ms. Power telephoned Sergio de Meilo to give him the opportunity to cancel their plans to meet over dinner. But with his characteristic and unflappable zest for life, he suggested that though the sky was falling all around him and even if World War III was to begin that evening, “a man needed to eat.”

This compelling new biography captures the energy and drive of Sergio de Meilo who, Ms. Power writes, “came to see the United Nations not merely as his place of employment, but as his family and the embodiment of his evolving political ideals.” In the 1980s, he committed to memory provisions of the UN charter with the same zeal that he had once memorized the teachings of Karl Marx during de Meilo’s student days in Paris in 1968. His blood, his colleagues teased him, had moved from running Marxist red to UN blue. Yet as the book paints a vibrant portrait of de Meilo, it also sheds insight on the increasingly dangerous world in which he lived and asks piercing questions about the role of the UN in our time. When should killers be engaged and when should they be shunned? Can humanitarian aid do more harm than good? When is military force necessary? Are the UN’s singular virtues impartiality, independence and integrity viable in an age of terror?

To engage in a conversation on these questions tonight is John Shattuck, former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic and US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. In the latter role, John worked to end the war in Bosnia, to establish the International Crime Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and to restore a democratically elected government to Haiti -- challenges that he recounts, among others, in his book, Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response. In 2001 he returned to Boston as Chief Executive Officer of the Kennedy Library Foundation and is responsible for the spotlight that this institution shines on issues related to advancing human rights both at home and around the globe.

Ms. Power’s new book is on sale in our museum store, and she will sign copies following tonight’s discussion. But let me conclude by sharing a comment as an appreciative reader of this biography and Samantha Power’s previous work. “Sergio Vieira de Meilo,” she writes, “spent his life chasing the flame of idealism that motivates some to strive to combat injustice and inspires the vulnerable to believe that help will soon come.” By telling this enthralling story so masterfully, Samantha Power kindles fire in the hearts of her readers, and a well-reasoned hope that the institutions that Sergio de Meilo put his faith in and gave his life for can meet the challenges of our times and our future. Please join me and John in welcoming back Samantha Power to the Kennedy Library. [applause]

JOHN SHATTUCK: Samantha, it’s great to have you back, and I say that on many levels. You’ve written a spectacular book, and we’ll get into this in a moment. You also paid me a wonderful compliment when I wrote a book several years ago by interviewing me on this stage, so now I get to return the favor, and indeed for me the favor is all mine. I think many people know about Samantha’s courage and her great intelligence and her ability to tell stories, which she’s told masterfully in this book.

And I have to say, I have never really encountered a book that has narrative on so many different levels as this one. And the other thing I would say about this is that reading a 576-page book all the way to the end and then wanting more is definitely an indication of what it is. This is a book about the most difficult problems in our world: genocide, crimes against humanity, the ways in which cynical leaders start conflicts and countries continue them, and efforts by some people and nations to try to stop those conflicts. I want to sort of start with your subtitle, because I think it’s important for you to introduce us to the world you’re talking about. The subtitle of this book, it sounds a little bit grandiose, but I think it’s appropriate: “The fight to save the world.” It’s Sergio Vieira de Meilo and The Fight to Save the World. So maybe you could just sort of start us off by describing this world from the point of view of the hero, who we’ll talk about in a moment -- what it looked like to him from within a UN bureaucracy, what it looked like to him as a citizen of the world?

SAMANTHA POWER: Sure. Well, first, let me say it’s great to be back. I’ve had a rough month. Self-inflicted rough month. Very rough month. And so, it’s like a warm bath to be back, and I just wish I could turn the clock back to the last time we were here, and then do everything else the same, and then just do one little thing a little bit differently. So I’m sorry for those of you who I disappointed with my big mouth and my Irish temper, and I think we have an embarrassment of riches as Democrats and as people loyal to the principles upheld in this building in this election race. Anyway, it’s great to be an American these days.

So let me just say one word about the subtitle. I almost cancelled my book tour and everything because I was so crestfallen about everything that had happened, and I was so embarrassed. But I decided, actually thanks to Senator Obama, who just said, “What are you doing? You can’t do that. You’ve got to get out there. You worked on this book for all that time. Come on!” So he was amazing through all this.

And so, originally, I was supposed to be on Stephen Colbert last week, but I had cancelled in the wake of my blunder, and Obama said, “No, you got to.” So I called back, and they took me back. And so, I was on, on Monday night, but I was very worried that I would be seen to be making light of Monster-gate. Which I, you know … But, anyway, they actually gave me a little hint of what the questions would be, just a couple of them; they ended up changing the questions and not using them, but one of the questions was going to be, “So you’ve written this book about this incredible guy” -- this wasn’t a question that he asked -- “this amazing guy and you think that there are all these lessons in this person’s life that we can learn from, and wouldn’t that be easier if he had a different name? Like, didn’t you think about just cutting off the last name and just calling him ‘Sergio.’” So, I thought that was … He didn’t ask the question.

But it is something that I grapple with, because one of my beliefs -- we talked about this briefly before -- is that we’re lacking for contemporary, realistic heroes, and I say “hero” kind of a little bit ambivalently because Sergio is so flawed like all of us, but we’re lacking. We talk a great game about transnational threats and saving the world, even saving the planet, saving the ice caps, saving each of us, countries from terrorism, nuclear proliferation; we talk a good game, but we don’t have very many models, you know, of people who have actually gone out and are operating in the real world where the saving needs doing.

So the world that needs saving that he addresses is sub-state threats in a way. It’s not all too successful states or big, you know, kind of you-sunk-my-battleship kind of states, or that kind of conflict. But it’s failing states, it’s crumbling infrastructure, it’s lawlessness, it’s undergoverned spaces -- to use the military’s new parlance. Sometimes it’s genocidal states or states who would see a minority in another country and say, you know, “Why should we be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in ours?,” which seems to be an impulse. But it’s this murky kind of gray zones, as Primo Levi liked to describe it, and transnational and sort of sub-state, and that we have a guy who inhabited that space for 34 years; it was just, you know, too important a space to inhabit and we were all, I felt, you know, you and I both, like coming, we were all coming and trying to catch up and trying to learn. Because I live as a citizen of a state, you were serving the country in a range of different ways, and you were trying to orient the state toward the challenges, sub-state and transnational -- but here’s a guy who tried to extract from the US government, extract from the South African government, extract from the Jordanian and the Japanese, et cetera, to just get just enough national interest from each of the countries within the UN to deal with these kinds of challenges without so triggering their national interests that they came to engage with these kinds of challenges simply for their own sake. I mean, it’s that fine, incredibly fine line.

So my feeling, it’s a little tongue in cheek, “The fight to save the world,” in that, I think, Sergio would have said that quite ironically. But, on the other hand, I don’t think he would have done what he did if he didn’t feel like the mortal stakes were the ones that were worth putting his own life on the line. I mean, he was in 14 war zones over the course of a 34-year career.