The theory that got the least traction was the one that would prove most likely. August 7 was the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.The CPA floated the possibility that behind the Jordanian embassy strike was Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), a Kurdish terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda, which was reported to have had a small presence in northern Iraq before the war. General Sanchez said publicly that an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq was “clearly a possibility,” but the Americans then had minimal evidence of their infiltration. The al-Qaeda theory got minimal play.41 Vieira de Mello told the secretary-general he was not yet sure the attack was a turning point. “It just depends on who did it and why,” he told Annan. “This incident alone doesn’t give us enough to go on.” The Bush administration downplayed the event. Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said the attack was part of an inevitable “ebb and flow” in violence.42 General Sanchez said the 37,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad would not assume responsibility for guarding embassies. “This is the Iraqi police’s responsibility,” he said.43 Secretary of State Powell said, “Maybe what you want to do is stand back a little bit more and let Iraqis” take over more protection tasks.44 But in Iraq Thomas Fuentes, the American who headed the FBI team, cabled headquarters and requested they send him experienced bomb-blast experts. He expected more attacks on civilian targets.
As Mona Rishmawi was leaving her hotel on the morning of August 12, she saw a stash of leaflets scattered on the ground before her. On inspection she saw that the leaflets bore Osama bin Laden’s picture. Rishmawi thought, “Baghdad and al-Qaeda—these two things don’t match. What a bizarre joke. What are these people doing?” Since President Bush had partly predicated the war on a link between Saddam Hussein and September 11, she wondered whether the Americans had planted the leaflets to justify the invasion. The same day the UN daily security incident summary noted, “The [Coalition Forces] received intelligence reports that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled the country during the war have returned and are planning to conduct major terrorist attacks.”45
On August 12, 2003, Salim Lone, the UN public affairs officer, sent an e-mail to Vieira de Mello describing the mounting fear in the mission after the Jordanian embassy attack. The following day he provided his boss with a list of questions that he might be asked at that day’s press conference, the first he would give in more than six weeks. Among them was: “Is the UN worried it is one of the soft targets?”46 Lone urged security team members to tell the U.S. soldiers to leave. Chergui, who felt the violence escalating, thought Lone’s idea irresponsible. “Don’t come here and say they should go,” he said. “We don’t have anyone else, and if something happens, we will immediately blame the U.S. for not being there.”
Salamé moved freely around Baghdad without concern for the security protocols. But on August 13 a Lebanese journalist brought him small slips of paper that he had found at the scene of an explosion in the commercial Karada district. The papers were colored sky blue, and each was the size of a business card.They had been thrown from a car like confetti after the explosion. “Al-Qaeda” was written on them in Arabic. Salamé was as puzzled as Rishmawi. He went straight to Vieira de Mello. “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” he said.“It could be fake, but it looks serious.” Vieira de Mello showed the papers to his trusted bodyguard Chergui. “Where were these found?” Chergui asked. The three men discussed the papers for a few minutes but didn’t know what to conclude, beyond that they should keep an eye out for further signs of foreign infiltration. It was their first serious conversation about a possible al-Qaeda presence in Iraq. Up to that point the insurgency was widely assumed to be fueled by Iraqis who had been close to Saddam Hussein or who were contesting the American occupation. Chergui was supposed to go on leave the next day, but he told his boss that he would prefer to postpone his departure. The two men were so close that Vieira de Mello maintained an e-mail correspondence with Chergui’s wife, Martine. On August 7 he had e-mailed her asking whether she felt lonely without her husband. Claiming sole responsibility for Chergui’s absence,Vieira de Mello noted that, while Chergui was doing an excellent job, “You have an equal right to him.”47 He insisted that Chergui take leave as he had planned.
The UN staff was split between those who expected an attack on the UN and those who could not imagine it. All agreed that security was spinning out of control. “I come from the most violent part of the world,” Marwan Ali recalls, “and I, even I, couldn’t believe that in two or three months things could deteriorate as badly as they had, even though the whole time I was saying things would deteriorate badly.” Most UN staff also agreed that the UN had an image problem throughout the country. Vieira de Mello had come to realize that Resolution 1483, which legitimated the occupation, had been one more factor eroding the UN’s shaky standing.“I think we must be honest to ourselves and recognize there exists, in the minds of many Iraqis, mixed feelings about the record of the United Nations here,” Vieira de Mello told a reporter. “And you can’t expect them to make these fine distinctions between mandates given to the Secretary-General by the Security Council and the role of the Secretariat per se. They lump this all together as any public opinion would do.”48
Bob Turner began chairing a UN advocacy group aimed at improving the UN reputation. “We thought that the negative impression of the UN was going to have a security impact,” he recalls. “We’d be safer if we could improve the standing of the UN.”A few days later a UN staffer in Mosul prepared a paper proposing a UN outreach campaign.“In view of the increased incidents targeting certain UN agencies and NGOs,” the paper said, it was time for the UN to use print, radio, and TV and to network with prominent Iraqi figures to publicize the UN’s humanitarian services and to gain citizens’ “trust.” In attempting to “feed” images to the media, the staffer warned against the “static image of the UN shot in studio” and recommended images that show “we are out there dirtying our hands to serve the population.”49
But Vieira de Mello was sure that, whatever the UN’s sins, Iraqis still saw the organization as preferable to the Coalition. Iraqis he met told him that they hoped for a stronger, not a weaker, UN role. “They see the UN as an independent, reliable, good faith partner,” he assured visitors. “They know the UN has no hidden agenda.” He added, “They see clearly in the United Nations an independent and impartial player that is the only source of international legitimacy.”50 When he had briefed the Security Council in New York, he said that the Iraqi people “unanimously call—including those who are critical, even resentful, over what they perceive to be the United Nations’ past record in their country—for an energetic, center-stage role for the organization.”51 But the trouble with this attitude was that he never disaggregated the "they.” And the Iraqi people were increasingly at odds with one another. More important, the Islamic radicals, who he did not yet know had infiltrated the country, had an agenda all their own.
Unusual for him,Vieira de Mello was beginning to feel personally vulnerable. He discussed moving offices with Chergui but feared it would panic staff. “I’d better leave that to my successor,” he said. Chergui decided to look for another space in the building where he could bring his boss in the event of an attack. After rummaging through the Canal, he identified a small storage space filled with folding chairs and tables just off the conference room on the lower level. He resolved to bring Vieira de Mello there in an emergency.
Throughout Baghdad, Coalition forces were getting ever jumpier. On August 12 the Pentagon released its official report effectively exonerating the U.S. military for the April shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which had killed two journalists and injured three others.52 This followed an incident on July 27 when U.S. troops had killed at least three Iraqis who crossed a military cordon; another on August 8 in which they fatally shot five more Iraqis, including an eight-year-old girl, at a newly erected checkpoint; and a third on Aug
ust 9, when Coalition soldiers killed two Iraqi policemen whom they mistook for criminals.53 On August 17 Mazen Dana, a forty-three-year-old veteran Palestinian cameraman with Reuters, had received U.S. permission to film the Abu Ghraib prison, which the day before had been the scene of a mortar attack that killed six Iraqis and wounded fifty-nine. U.S. troops outside the prison, perhaps mistaking his television camera with its white microphone for a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, fired several shots at close range. Dana’s camera recorded a tank heading toward him, the crack of six shots in quick succession, and the tumult of his camera falling to the ground.54 Dana was killed on the spot. Vieira de Mello knew that the time for quiet diplomacy with the Americans had passed; he would have to speak out.
Although Dana was the twelfth journalist killed since the start of the war, this shooting had struck a particular nerve at the UN because it seemed to reflect a larger trend.Wearing the hat of human rights commissioner,Vieira de Mello knew that as attacks on U.S. soldiers increased, the Americans would become increasingly jittery and prone to shoot civilians.“In previous positions, I always condemned attacks on journalists,” he wrote in an e-mail to senior staff.“Should I not do it here as well?” His aides responded quickly, agreeing that the attack should be denounced, but expressing concern about the implications of condemning an “accidental” attack on a journalist when the UN had not publicly faulted the Coalition when it had killed Iraqi civilians.
Younes, his Egyptian chief of staff, urged her boss to couch the condemnation of Dana’s killing in a statement that “deplored in general the increasing number of civilian deaths and injuries occurring in the past few weeks,” but she noted, “We have to weigh the effect your statements, if you start reacting to all violence, will have on Bremer and Co.”55 But having concluded that his private admonitions to Bremer were falling on deaf ears and that his access to the Coalition had already shriveled up, Vieira de Mello authorized his press officer to draft a press release condemning the incident.
Younes was one of the most outspoken members of Vieira de Mello’s team. As an Arabic speaker, she had a better sense of the swelling anger toward the Coalition than most of her international colleagues, whose primary exposure to Iraqis came in shuttling to and from their hotels. The previous week she had received a phone call from UN Headquarters in New York. Lamin Sise, Annan’s Gambian legal adviser, told her that she had been promoted to assistant secretary-general. She had been elated, not least because the job would get her out of Baghdad. But she quickly realized that as the chief of staff she was expected to facilitate the handover between Vieira de Mello and his as-yet-unnamed successor. This wouldn’t do. On Friday, August 15, she called Sise in a panic. She could not wait two months to leave. “Lamin,” she said, “I need to get out. The history of this country is very bloody. This place is on fire.” She telephoned twice more in order to press the point. Sise promised to try to expedite the hiring of her replacement.
Vieira de Mello did not have that option and focused on salvaging the mission. Unable to control security, he reflected on the source of the insurgency, which was an increasingly malignant occupation. He assumed that the way to improve security was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. “Who would like to see his country occupied?” he asked a Brazilian journalist. “I would not like to see foreign tanks in Copacabana.” Coalition troops had to have “more sensitivity and respect for the culture of the population,” he said.56 The dignity of Iraqis was being trampled. Their “pride,” he told visitors, was “today deeply hurt.” He rattled off the catalog of harms that would have wounded anybody:They had lived under a barbarous regime; they had been killed by the hundreds of thousands in the war with Iran; their army had invaded Kuwait and then been swiftly dislodged, at the cost of thousands of lives; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions and isolation; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in “one of the most humiliating periods in the history of these people,” they had almost no say on how they were being ruled, and nobody had presented them with a road map to their liberation. Even in his remarks before the Security Council in late July, Vieira de Mello had urged diplomats to stop speaking of Iraq as the sum of its past afflictions. “Iraq is something other than a past repressive regime, it is something other than a pariah state,” he said.“It is not simply the scene of conflict, deprivation and abuse.”57
The Americans had to stop talking about “nation-building,” he said, as “Iraq has five thousand years of history.” The Iraqis had “more to teach us about building nations,” he told a British interviewer, than the United States or UN had to teach them. Iraqis were fed up with being treated like a failed state. He told another visitor that the Iraqis complained to him that the Americans “keep referring to Rwanda.” “Why the hell do they refer to Rwanda?” they asked him. “This is not Rwanda!”58 Vieira de Mello believed that additional Coalition troops should have been sent in the immediate aftermath of their ground victory in April. But now he argued that “saturating Iraq with foreign troops” would only exacerbate the humiliation and rage experienced by Iraqis. Instead, applying a lesson from East Timor, he pressed for a transparent timetable, “a calendar with dates.”59 Just as Gusmão had taught him in East Timor, people had to be given a concrete road map so they could see how and when they would gain control of their own destinies.
Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed on the occupation.“In the short time I have been in Iraq, and witnessed the reality of occupation,” he wrote, “I have come to question whether such a state of affairs can ever truly be legitimate. Certainly, occupation can be legally supported. Occupation can also certainly be carried out benignly, grounded in nothing but good intentions. But morally and practically, I doubt it can ever be legitimate: its time, if it ever had one, has passed.” He urged the Coalition to “aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance.”60
On Sunday, August 17, he gave a long interview with the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade of O Estado de São Paulo. Asked if he feared the UN might be targeted by terrorists, he said, “I don’t think so.” Although in-house he had urged the launching of a national advocacy campaign to improve the UN’s reputation, he knew his mother, Gilda, would read the interview in Rio de Janeiro, and he said, “The local population respects the United Nations, which is not what they feel toward the occupation forces.They view us as an independent and friendly organization and know we are here to help them.” He said he had few personal concerns for his safety. “I don’t know exactly why, but I believe I have been in more risky situations. Here in Baghdad, I don’t feel in danger as in other places where I worked for the UN.”61
Yet for all his attempts to maintain a brave face, he had soured on the mission so much that he was biding his time. The Iraqis on the Governing Council had initially told him that a UN representative would be housed with them, but they reversed this decision. His ties with Bremer were growing more tense. A few days after he had shared a relatively uneventful lunch with Ayatollah Hussein Ismail al-Sadr, a moderate cousin of the young Shiite militant, an enraged Bremer had telephoned him and accused him of “inciting the Iraqis to ask for democracy.” Bristling at the reprimand,Vieira de Mello asked his aide Marwan Ali, who had attended the lunch, whether he could remember what he had said. “Nothing inflammatory,” Ali said. “It was just the usual blah blah blah about democracy.”Vieira de Mello understood Bremer’s concerns about the time it would take to organize an election, but he thought that if Bremer started to find democracy inconvenient, the U.S.-led mission was doomed.
The Coalition was straying further from the rapid handover of power that Vieira de Mello had proposed. At the same time Moqtada al-Sadr was gaining power, and the more the Coalition tried to crush him, the stronger he became. “The last thing we should do is ostracize him,” Vieira de Mello told Jonathan Steele of the Guardian. “It’s always useful to have an enfant terribleif you can control him.” If Bremer had a timeline in mind for ending the oc
cupation, he was keeping it to himself. Vieira de Mello told journalists what he had told Bremer from the start: “Iraqis are completely in the dark. They’ve got to know when this will come to an end.”
With the staff he had brought from Geneva, he began discussing the restructuring of the high commissioner’s office. He also began doing things he had never done in other, supposedly more dangerous missions, such as signing off his e-mails by urging friends to “please pray for us.” Coming from an avowed atheist, these e-mails struck people as strange. The day before he spoke with the Brazilian journalist, he had accompanied his bodyguards to a shooting range, where he received training in how to fire a gun and how to maneuver his vehicle in a hazardous situation.
The weekend of August 16 and 17 was not a good one. Insurgents blew up the pipeline transporting oil to Turkey and destroyed a water main in northern Baghdad, cutting off water to nearly half a million people.62 The only boost to the morale of Vieira de Mello and his team was the return of Jean-Sélim Kanaan, who arrived at the Canal Hotel the afternoon of Monday, August 18, toting cigars, champagne, and photos of his newborn son, then three and a half weeks old.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 56
