Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

  The one area on which the Coalition proved amenable to UN help was elections. Vieira de Mello persuaded Carina Perelli, one of his favorite people from UN Headquarters in New York, to lead a delegation to Iraq on August 1. Perelli (a brash, chain-smoking, heavyset ex-revolutionary) and Vieira de Mello (an immaculate, health-obsessed company man) were an unlikely pair. But they had come to respect and even adore each other while managing East Timor’s elections. In Baghdad they completed each other’s sentences in the office and bantered to ease the tension. “I need a quickie with you,” Vieira de Mello would say if he saw Perelli in the hallway when he wanted to discuss the election lists.“At my age, I don’t do quickies anymore,” she would answer.

  Perelli and her team spent almost three weeks touring Iraq so as to be able to assess whether the UN Electoral Assistance Division could reasonably contribute. Just before leaving Baghdad in mid-August, she drove with Vieira de Mello to the Green Zone for a meeting with Bremer. On the drive there her friend urged her to be straight. “Bremer still sees elections as a technical matter and not a wholly political one,” Vieira de Mello said. “You have to educate him like you educated me . . .The problem with you election people,” he continued, smiling, “is that you are an acquired taste.”

  In the meeting Bremer presented his plan: The unelected Governing Council would draft an electoral law, and the Iraqis would ratify the law in a referendum. Perelli disagreed vehemently with the sequencing the Coalition had in mind. “You have to be very careful with referendums in transitions,” she said.“They become public opinion polls, which, on the basis of my conversations with Iraqis, is not in your interest.”27

  She left the meeting optimistic that the Coalition would request UN assistance.Vieira de Mello liked to quote Yassir Arafat saying,“Give me a square kilometer, and I’ll control the country.” As Perelli recalls, “We saw we had a window. We knew it was not the front door.” The challenge for the UN would be to figure out how to open the window. Vieira de Mello assured her that he would pull the plug on UN electoral assistance if she came to believe the Americans were sacrificing core principles. Perelli had a different worry: Vieira de Mello, her chief ally in the UN, would be leaving Baghdad in six weeks’ time, and she would be stuck on her own. “If you abandon me,” she said, “I’ll have to deal not only with Bremer but also with whatever jerk they replace you with. I can handle the Americans, but I can’t handle both.” He assured her that he would stand up for her from Geneva. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “This place is getting to me, and I want to start my life with Carolina.”

  In previous missions he had helped offset flagging staff morale by making himself available after hours for drinks with close staff. But in Baghdad he socialized only rarely. Larriera had arrived in mid-June, toting the items he had asked her to bring: large stashes of chocolate, his Sony portable stereo, a Discman for his runs, a Brazilian music CD collection, a James Bond Gold DVD collection that she had given him for Christmas, photographs from East Timor, and, for good luck, two small iron Buddha statues that they had bought together in Thailand. He held two wine and cheese parties in his office at the Canal, but he typically hurried home to the drab oasis that he and Larriera had established in their suite at the Cedar Hotel. She was working as an economics officer with the mission, but also preparing to start a master’s program in August. “You study,” he would say when they reached the hotel. “I’ll cook!” And so he did. Before leaving the Canal, the couple would pick up aluminum trays of leftover lunchtime food at the cafeteria, and he would heat them up on a tiny electric burner. Or he would prepare breaded veal, steaks, and potato omelets of his own. The staff grumbled that he was reclusive. Salamé pushed him at least to go out for Friday lunches. But on one occasion when he thought he was having lunch with Salamé alone, he arrived at the restaurant and found a table filled with UN staff. He waited out the meal stiffly and later instructed Salamé, “Next time tell me who’s coming to lunch.” Once Salamé phoned to tell him that he had tracked down an Iraqi book of photographs for him and was leaving it at the hotel reception desk. “No,” Vieira de Mello said, “come up and have a scotch.” Salamé’s room abutted Vieira de Mello’s, yet this was the only occasion that he was invited inside.

  NOW A WAR ZONE

  The violence was getting worse, and it was wearing everybody out. Soon after Vieira de Mello arrived in June, the insurgents began experimenting with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Initially they left IEDs on the road at night so as to trap U.S. convoys on patrol. But as the weeks had passed, the attacks grew more sophisticated. The bombs were better disguised and more powerful, and were often followed by gunmen shooting from hideouts nearby. The attacks on Coalition forces increased daily. Some 117 attacks occurred in May, 307 in June, and 451 in July.12 FBI agents had originally come to Iraq to interrogate senior Iraqi detainees at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport. But in the second week of July, FBI agents in Iraq put in a request to headquarters for post-blast bomb gear, such as gloves and swabbing material. None of this equipment had been sent before because the Bush administration had not anticipated the kind of resistance the Coalition was encountering.

  Vieira de Mello occupied a spacious third-floor corner office at the back of the Canal Hotel that combined a relaxed living room alcove, a desk area, and a boardroom table to accommodate larger meetings. The windows on one wall looked out onto a seven-foot-wide gravel access road that turned off Canal Road, a main thoroughfare. Across the access road he could see a hospital for patients with spinal injuries. Farther down the road, diagonal from Vieira de Mello’s office, was an Iraqi catering school and the newly established Coalition Civil-Military Operations Center, occupied by two dozen American civil affairs officers attached to the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. The Americans had erected huge sandbags and a ten-foot-high steel gate laced with barbed wire around their quarters. They had also posted guards on the roof of the Canal itself to man a twenty-four-hour, 360-degree observation post.

  The access road that ran behind the Canal Hotel was open to public traffic. UN security officials and U.S. military officers with the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment worked to close off the road, which ran very close to the back of the hotel, but senior UN staff were concerned that if the UN began disrupting traffic or blocking the road to the catering school or the spinal hospital, they would alienate Iraqis as the Americans had done when they sealed off the Green Zone.

  Rishmawi, the human rights officer, occupied an office on the back side of the building near Vieira de Mello’s. Her desk was positioned such that she had her back up against the window. She found herself worrying that a gunman would position himself atop the neighboring spinal hospital and fire at the back of her head. In late June, when another office opened up down the hall, she leaped for it.Vieira de Mello pretended that he was hurt. “How could you strand me here?” he said. “Aren’t you going to miss the view?” “You see a view,” she answered. “All I see is snipers.” Yet she felt foolish for moving.

  The security team based at the Canal was small, never exceeding a half-dozen UN officials. So many UN agencies were jockeying to send staff to Iraq that the team spent more time processing travel requests from New York and Geneva than they did securing UN staff who were already in Iraq. On June 18 Robert Adolph sent Ramiro Lopes da Silva an e-mail complaining of the deluge. “The overwhelming majority of UN staff that are in Iraq should not be here,” Adolph wrote disapprovingly. “The volume of security clearance requests has been staggering. . . . Tired people tend to make more mistakes. Given the current security context, we dare not permit those mistakes to be made.”13

  The person who was the most vigilant about Vieira de Mello’s personal security was Alain Chergui, the fifty-year-old former French special forces officer who had guarded him in East Timor. In early June Chergui had joined Vieira de Mello in Cyprus and asked Paul Aghadjanian, the UN mission’s chief administrative officer, where he could find the container of
security equipment and instructions sent from New York. Aghadjanian had said he knew of no such container. “I was expecting weaponry, ammunition, ballistic vests, night-vision goggles, helmets, trauma kits, GPS, all the equipment mandatory for such a mission,” Chergui remembers. “Plus a map and some notes and and and and . . .” Their first day in Iraq, Adolph had delivered a security briefing to Vieira de Mello and his team that Chergui found condescending. “He said things like ‘Don’t fuck with a guy with a gun,’” he remembers. “I thought, ‘What do they think you should do when there’s a guy with a gun?’ ”

  Chergui had worked for the UN in Iraq back in 1998. Even in a Baghdad that was then tyrannical but orderly, he had labored for six months to get waist-high cement barriers erected outside the Canal so that arriving vehicles would be funneled through a chute to a checkpoint. When he had arrived back at the Canal with Vieira de Mello on June 2, he had been stunned to discover that, in a much more deadly environment, only forty-three Iraqi national staff and thirty-eight U.S. soldiers were manning the gates of the premises. “Of the American soldiers, some have to eat, some have to rest, some have to do paperwork,” he said to himself. “How many are actually offering perimeter security?” Then he spotted the concrete barriers he had installed five years before. They were propped up parallel to the perimeter fence, unused.

  Chergui was part of Vieira de Mello’s nine-member close protection team. Each member was given only a 9mm pistol. These guns were appropriate for manning the entrance to the UN compound in Geneva but were totally unsuited to a war zone. Chergui pleaded with New York for submachine guns. Seven weeks into his time in Baghdad, the guns finally arrived: hand-me-downs from the UN civilian police in Bosnia. He was relieved, but when he opened the box, he was stunned to see that three of the seven guns lacked the pins required to fire. “It’s like giving somebody the present of a pen without ink,” he says.

  When Chergui saw Vieira de Mello’s corner office, he was aghast. Looking out the office window, he could peer into the nearby spinal hospital and see a mosque in the distance. Concerned mainly about snipers, he asked the head of the close protection team to look into moving the office. But when he presented the idea to Vieira de Mello, his boss vetoed the move.The Canal was overcrowded with staff, and he said he did not want to ask his staff to bear risks that he would not.

  Later in the month two of Vieira de Mello’s other French bodyguards took security matters into their own hands, borrowing several AK-47s from the French embassy. Since the UN in New York would never have approved these weapons, Vieira de Mello had personally given the go-ahead. In the morning as they left the hotel, he would often ask whether “Santa Claus” (his nickname for the guns) was joining them. One day while Perelli was in the car, Gaby Pichon, a French bodyguard, confessed to his boss, “We need training.”Vieira de Mello teased, “Just hand the gun to Carina—she’ll show you how to use it.”

  While UN security officials grew alarmed about the escalating violence, U.S. officials sounded oddly unworried. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was asked why he was reluctant to characterize the Iraqi rebellion as a “guerrilla war.” “I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war,’ ” he said, “is because there isn’t one.”14 The resistance was coming from “deadenders” who would be quashed.15 In Baghdad, U.S. officials all sang from the same hymnbook. Paul Bremer told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson on August 7, “More people get killed in New York every night than get killed in Baghdad.”16

  Though fewer than a dozen attacks occurred each day—a relatively small number when compared to 2007, when there would be 163 daily attacks by insurgents and militia—UN officials understood that circumstances had changed.17 The UN’s June Threat Assessment, dated June 29 and written by Adolph, noted: “To date there have been no direct assaults on UN staff or facilities, but it is the consensus of the UN-Iraq Security Team that it is only a matter of time.”18 In a June 30 meeting of UN officials with security responsibilities, Kevin Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine who worked on logistics and humanitarian affairs, told staff, “The situation has changed. This is now a war zone.” Kennedy ordered three bomb shelters to be built for some two hundred people.19 When a World Food Program warehouse and IOM office in Mosul were hit with grenades, Vieira de Mello sent a note to Bremer on July 6 that attached a rough translation of a leaflet “against religious enemies” that had been distributed around a nearby mosque prior to the attack .20

  Kennedy and Vieira de Mello discussed the deluge of staff that UN agencies were irresponsibly sending to Iraq. Whatever the political pressures and funding opportunities, they needed to stay away until the risks abated. “People are coming to Baghdad and treating it like they’re making a trip to Geneva,” Kennedy said. A few days later, as the two men waited together at Baghdad airport for a flight out, they watched a motley crew of foreigners working for the UN and other humanitarian agencies emerge from a plane. “What the hell are all these people doing here?” Vieira de Mello asked. He dubbed the inessential personnel who flocked to the city “the tourists.”

  At a meeting of the UN Security Management Team in Baghdad on July 12, UN security staff updated attendees on the status of previous security recommendations. Adolph’s notes on the meeting read as follows:

  Cease the influx of incoming staff . . . NOT ACHIEVED

  Reduce the numbers of staff . . . NOT ACHIEVED21

  As the attacks on the Coalition continued, UN security officers tried to curtail the mobility of UN staff. Curfews were imposed, and travel without a two-vehicle escort was forbidden.

  At a UN press briefing in Baghdad on July 24, Salim Lone, a spokesman at the mission, took note of the string of four recent attacks against international staff. “Certainly we can no longer call these isolated incidents, not at all,” he told the press. UN staff were “easy, soft targets,” and it was “so easy to pick on us.” His comments were picked up in the international media, and Fred Eckhard, the chief UN spokesman in New York, sent a note to Shashi Tharoor, the head of public information, recommending that Lone be barred from speaking to the press in the future. Eckhard wrote that Lone had “contradicted [the official] position that attacks on UN workers were isolated incidents.”22 When Lone received his dressing-down, he responded with fury and demanded an apology. He described as “laughable” Eckhard’s notion that attacks were isolated:

  I guess you will want us to hold on to that line even when we are bunkered down in [the] Canal Hotel or hightailing it out of Iraq to implement our rapid reaction plan. Which could happen any day. MANY think this should be implemented automatically if there is one more fatal attack on a UN staff/vehicle. Some actually say we should be evacuated. Do you know what the security situation here is like and the conditions we now work under are, especially after the two attacks and the two UN deaths and a third near fatality that occurred two days before the briefing? Do you know how many UN missions are being conducted in an active combat zone undergoing guerrilla warfare?23

  Vieira de Mello with Shiite clerics in Hillah.

  But Lone was inexperienced in conflict settings. More seasoned UN staff in Iraq saw the recent flurry of incidents differently.28 Because several of the attacks had occurred in the vicinity of IOM offices or personnel, many UN staff believed the IOM was being targeted because it had effectively made itself part of the Coalition. The IOM was not a UN agency, but it used UN vehicles, and it had gotten involved (despite having assured Vieira de Mello that it would not) in two highly sensitive initiatives sponsored by the Coalition: resolving property disputes in Kurdish areas, and helping reintegrate demobilized Iraqi soldiers. Vieira de Mello was enraged by the IOM’s double-dealing, but he resisted his colleagues’ calls to sever UN links to the organization. Lopes da Silva remembers, “It was part of Sergio’s personality to work things out. That was Sergio—he would keep trying, keep trying, rather than cut them loose.”