A few passages from Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World...Sergio was a flawed hero, whose pragmatism came, perhaps, too late to make the critical changes that he saw his lifetime companion, the UN, needed, to ensure its survival in a changing world.
"...he knew that the UN, the multinational organization that he believed had to step up to meet transnational security, socioeconomic, environmental, and health concerns, had a knack for "killing the flame"-the flame of idealism that motivated some to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come...by the time of his death he was deeply worried that the system he had joined thirty-four years before was not up to the task of dealing with the barbarism and lawlessness of the times...
...When President George W. Bush declared repeatedly in 2001 and 2002, 'Either you are with us or against us,' he was wrong. Hundreds of millions of citizens for the world may not have been with the United States as such, but they were not against America either. Yet, like much of Bush's rhetoric, this description of an imagined dichotomy quickly ensured that those who were treated as enemies of the United States became enemies of the United States...
...as his life seeped slowly out of him, there must have been a moment-hopefully not a long one-when he realized that he was every bit as helpless in his time of need as millions of victims have been before him. He died under the Canal Hotel's rubble-buried beneath the weight of the United Nations itself."
"In the blurry world between humanitarian aid and international law he was as good as it gets, wielding a mixture of ambiguity and decisiveness with the personal and institutional authority to make it all, sometimes, work.
-The Economist on Sergio Vieira de Mello
