Carolina Larriera is the only person who both survived the bomb and lost a loved one. Afflicted by a severe case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, she left the United Nations and moved to Rio de Janeiro. There she and Vieira de Mello’s mother, Gilda, attempted to raise his profile in Brazil, a country that has become acquainted with him only in death. They also pushed the UN to investigate the attack and the failed rescue effort. Larriera spoke with the FBI, tracked down William von Zehle, and along with Timorese foreign minister José Ramos-Horta, visited Gil Loescher in the U.K., but she made little headway.
In early 2004, after she and Gilda collected a bagful of sand from Vieira de Mello’s favorite spot on Ipanema beach in Rio, she flew to Geneva, where she visited the cemetery they had discovered together, and she sprinkled the Brazilian sand upon his grave. Later that year she reenrolled in the master’s degree program at the Fletcher School, which she had been slated to start the month of the attack. In 2006, after graduating from Fletcher, she began teaching international relations at Pontificia Universidade Cátolica in Rio, and the following year she took a job running the Latin American office of an organization that lobbies for access to medicines for the poor.
Gilda Vieira de Mello, who was eighty-five at the time of the attack, remains mentally alert, physically fit, and feisty. She had long declared herself too old to fly, but in 2004 she made an exception, taking one last foreign trip to Geneva to attend the ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Canal Hotel attack. She remains in deep mourning, her apartment a virtual shrine to her deceased son. She and Larriera see each other almost every day. They blame George W. Bush for the Iraq war, and blame Kofi Annan for sending Vieira de Mello to Iraq. On New Year’s Eve 2006 they drank a bottle of champagne to toast the end of Annan’s term as secretary-general.
The Canal Hotel stands vacant in Baghdad. The building is distinguished by the fading blue and white paint on the arches and the gaping three-story black hole in its side. Under significant pressure from the Bush administration, Annan reestablished a UN presence in Iraq a year after the attack. In July 2004 Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a Pakistani diplomat, was named special representative. Since the desire to maintain the appearance of independence had long been trumped by security concerns, Qazi lived and worked holed up in the Green Zone, protected now by a small contingent of UN soldiers from Fiji.32 He and his team offered political and humanitarian advice to the Iraqi government when they could, but their role was marginal.Where once Iraqis who worked for the UN eschewed any connection with the Coalition, today they avoid association with the UN as well, working undercover. In November 2007 Vieira de Mello’s friend Staffan de Mistura replaced Qazi in the thankless job. “I agreed for one reason, for one man,” de Mistura says. “I don’t know anybody who can walk in the shadow of Sergio. But maybe we can all surprise ourselves and achieve something by trying.”
Most of the survivors of the attack and the family members of the deceased went several years without learning the identity of the perpetrators. Only in 2006 did some happen to learn from the media that in January 2005 one Awraz Abd Al Aziz Mahmoud Sa’eed, known as al-Kurdi, had confessed to helping plan the attack for Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq. In July 2006 a small UN delegation made its way from Baghdad’s Green Zone to the U.S. detention facility at Camp Cropper, where al-Kurdi was detained. He had been arrested for involvement in another attack and then confessed to his role in the UN bombing.
In a three-hour interview the UN officials were persuaded that al-Kurdi, thirty-four years old at the time of the attack, was not lying. The father of two, he had been imprisoned for joining the rebellion against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991. He had been released in 1995 in one of Saddam’s amnesties. He had joined al-Zarqawi’s group in 2002 and served as a driver to al-Zarqawi, who had also lived at his home for four months. Later promoted to become “General Prince for Martyrs,” al-Kurdi said that in August 2003 al-Zarqawi had instructed him to plan attacks on both the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad. At that time al-Zarqawi’s network was so poorly understood by U.S. intelligence operatives that he and al-Kurdi had no trouble meeting daily. Later, for security reasons, their meetings would have to be scaled back to once a month.
Al-Kurdi had personally surveyed the premises in advance of the bomb. He had tried several times to enter the UN complex, using a false ID and posing as a UN job seeker, but he had been blocked. He had gotten inside the neighboring spinal hospital with a false identification and surveyed the short distance between the unfinished brick wall and the Canal building. He said that he told al-Zarqawi that there was “only one place where we can get through.” It was via the narrow access road that ran beneath Vieira de Mello’s office.
Al-Kurdi did not personally know that the UN envoy kept his office in the most vulnerable part of the building, above the unfinished wall, but he knew that the UN boss was the target. He had placed the odds of success at only 50 percent “because the truck, going toward the building, could be noticed and even one bullet could have killed the driver.” He said his group had moral concerns. “We realized that this could of course cause damages to the hospital itself and this would damage the reputation of our organization and would backfire on us,” al-Kurdi said. “We were even hesitant to do it.”
On August 18, at al-Kurdi’s house in Ramadi, al-Zarqawi had explained to the designated bomber, Abu Farid al-Massri, the reasons for targeting the UN. Al-Zarqawi told him that al-Qaeda’s decision-making council had ordered the strike because a UN senior official was housed there who, in al-Kurdi’s words, was “the person behind the separation of East Timor from Indonesia and who was also the reason for the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Al-Zarqawi spent the entire night with the bomber, while al-Kurdi and his children slept in the next room. Al-Zarqawi personally helped load the bomb onto the truck. Disappointed by the force of the Jordanian attack, he had been the one to decide to attach mortars and the plastic explosive C4 to the TNT.
Originally al-Kurdi was scheduled to leave Ramadi at 6 a.m. for a 9 a.m. attack, but he received a telephone call before departing, delaying the strike until the afternoon. He drove the truck to the neighborhood of the Canal Hotel and arrived around noon.The bomber was driven separately and met up with al-Kurdi at the Canal at 3:30 p.m. Al-Massri had chosen to set off the detonation device manually instead of having it detonated remotely. Al-Kurdi reminded him of how to use it and pointed out the access road and the target.
After parting ways with al-Massri, al-Kurdi waited across the street for ten minutes, and then, after seeing the truck explode, he melted into the crowd and returned to his home in Ramadi. He had been instructed not to leave the area until he heard the sound of the explosion. When he arrived at his house, however, his coconspirators were angry with him for not staying long enough to be able to report the results. But they later learned from the media that Vieira de Mello had in fact been killed.The UN questioners asked al-Kurdi if he and al-Zarqawi considered the operation a success.“The purpose of the attack was to send the message and [it was] not like a military operation that is a victorious or failing operation,” he said. “But with the death of Sergio, we believed that the message has been fully sent and if Sergio had not died then half of the message would have been sent.”33
When al-Kurdi elaborated on the motives behind the attack, he said that he had his own view as to why the UN in general and Vieira de Mello in particular were appropriate targets:
For me personally as an Iraqi, I believe that the resolutions of the UN were not just and a lot of harm has been caused to the Iraqi people for thirteen years, like hunger and diseases. Actually, the [UN] sanctions were on the Iraqi people and not on the government . . . Secondly, a lot of Islamic countries have been through injustices and various occupations and foreign troops using the UN resolutions . . . against Muslim people under the name of the UN. Maybe the UN is not the one issuing these resolutions, but there are super powers us
ing the UN. Crimes are committed in Islamic countries and so we wanted to send the message to this organization . . . The compromise can be before the fight, but not after the fight, and if the UN wanted to rescue the people, it should have intervened before the catastrophe [took] place . . . A lot of families and children have been killed.
Al-Kurdi pleaded not guilty in the Iraqi court. He explained his reasoning: “Maybe during some of the operations innocent civilians were killed, but we didn’t intend or mean to kill any child, and if it happened by mistake we asked God for mercy and forgiveness.” The insurgency was fully justified, he said:
My country is occupied, and I didn’t go [to] any other country to fight ... My country has been occupied by foreign troops without any international legitimacy, and the people have been killed, and my religion says that I should fight. Even the Christians and the Seculars say that when your country is occupied you have to fight the occupier, and that’s not only in the Muslim countries but also in the Christian areas like Vietnam, Somalia, and Haiti. Where the countries are occupied, it is legitimate to resist the occupier.There is no religion or international norms or traditions whether Eastern or Western or anybody who is supporting the occupation of my country from either a religious or an intellectual point of view. The ones who cooperate with the occupier should receive the same treatment that the occupier receives . . . As far as I’m concerned, I’m innocent. I didn’t kill any people from the street. I didn’t steal money from any house . . . There are thousands of Iraqis who are in Abu Ghraib jail or other jails of the occupation without charge for two or three years and nobody can help, and you are telling me that you don’t want them to attack the UN or the Red Cross or others . . . When the Americans came, they stepped on our heads with their shoes so what do you expect us to do? Death is more honorable than life . . .You can ask the regular people about this, and now even the people they are wishing that the days of Saddam would come back.34
On July 3, 2007, as U.S. troops in Iraq prepared to take time away from the bloody civil war in order to mark American Independence Day, the Iraqi government hanged al-Kurdi. In the few wire stories that covered his execution, journalists referred to several of the high-profile attacks he had helped to orchestrate. None saw fit to mention his involvement in the attack on the United Nations.
EPILOGUE
By the time Sergio Vieira de Mello went to Iraq, he knew too much. He knew that governments were prone to define their national interests in the short term and to neglect the common good. He knew that dangerous armed groups were feeding off of individual and collective humiliation and growing in strength and number. He knew that they were often more nimble and more adaptive than the states that opposed them. And 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.
Vieira de Mello made mistakes and delivered few unvarnished successes that could be guaranteed to last (the world being too complex for guarantees). Nonetheless, as long as he was around—treating the most intractable conflicts as if peace were one phone call away, eschewing diplomatic hierarchy in the frantic pursuit of solutions, and remaining unflappable, impeccable, and seemingly untouchable while the shells rained down around him—a flame continued to flicker somewhere.
He is now gone. But what are we to take from what he saw, what he learned, what we lost? Where, in other words, do we go from here?
While many have responded to today’s divisions and insecurities with ideology, Vieira de Mello’s life steers us away from one-size-fits-all doctrine to a principled, flexible pragmatism that can adapt to meet diffuse and unpredictable challenges.
A BROKEN SYSTEM
In the aftermath of the bomb at the Canal Hotel, Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to convey just how irreplaceable Vieira de Mello had become and just how severe the loss would be for the world. “I had only one Sergio,” he said simply.1 He knew nobody who had Vieira de Mello’s linguistic skills, cultural breadth, critical mind, political savvy, humanitarian commitments, and world-weary wisdom. “Sergio,” as he was known to heads of state and refugees around the world, had long ago surpassed the legend of his mentor Thomas Jamieson. Confronted by crises, he had often asked, “What would Jamie do?” And henceforth generations of diplomats and humanitarians will likely ask, “What would Sergio do?”
Vieira de Mello began each mission by trying to “get real”: to see the world as it was rather than as he might have liked it to be. Today getting real means recognizing that the most pressing threats on the horizon are transnational and thus cannot be tackled by a single country. But getting real also requires acknowledging that the international system is polarized and slow, just when we need cooperation and urgent action. Vieira de Mello was a UN man to his core, determined to “show the UN flag” whenever he arrived in a war-torn area. Throughout his career UN successes—in spurring decolonization, helping refugees return to their homes, persuading militants to engage in political processes, sponsoring elections, and ushering in independence—filled him with a seemingly guileless pride. The UN remained the embodiment of the “world’s conscience” for him because it was the place where governments assembled to enshrine their legal and moral commitments. It was the home of the international rules that, if followed, would breed greater peace and security. But 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. “I am the first person to recognize that the UN leaves a lot to be desired,” he acknowledged.2 He conceded that the “transition from the ideal to the real is often extremely long, hard, costly, and cruel.”3
He knew that the organization he cherished was at once an actor in its own right and simply a building, no better or worse than the collective will of the countries that constituted it. The UN-the-actor needed to be reformed. Twentieth-century rules were no match for twenty-first-century crises. Mediocrity and corruption among UN personnel had to be weeded out, but accountability could not simply mean additional paperwork or micromanaging from Headquarters, as it usually did. UN civil servants had to become more self-critical and introspective, accepting what had taken Vieira de Mello years to learn: that they are agents of change themselves and not simply the servants of powerful governments.
His clashes with Dennis McNamara arose because, in his friend’s view, “Sergio sided with power.” He had sided with governments in helping organize the forced return of the Vietnamese and Rwandan refugees, and he had been so mute about Serbian atrocities that he had earned the nickname “Serbio.” Once he moved to UN Headquarters in New York, however, while he was always careful to gauge the prevailing winds, he was less prone to simply defer to them. He stood up more frequently for the rights and needs of civilians, defying the wishes of the United States to lead an assessment mission into Kosovo under the cover of NATO bombing and arguing forcefully, when the pro-Indonesian militia began burning down East Timor, that UN officials in the country could not abandon the desperate Timorese, no matter what UN member states were saying. “For once,” he argued to his senior colleagues, “let’s allow the states on the [Security] Council to make the wrong decisions instead of saving them the trouble by making the wrong decisions for them.”When he himself governed East Timor, he played by UN rules at the start. But governments had written those rules for an era of peacekeeping when UN troops interpositioned themselves as a “thin blue line” between two sides that had agreed to a cease-fire. The regulations were woefully ill suited for multifaceted missions in countries still racked by internal violence or where the UN had to rebuild whole institutions from scratch. When he realized that he was losing the support of the Timorese, he changed course, taking the revolutionary step of appointing Timorese to s
upervise their UN underlings. He chose his battles. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of how to bend UN rules to their breaking point without gaining a reputation for insubordination.
But there was only so much one UN civil servant could do. Whether the UN could help “humanize history,” as he put it, would not turn on whether UN bureaucrats became more self-critical or how loudly they howled about an injustice. If the UN was to become a truly constructive, stabilizing twenty-first-century player, as it had to be, the governments in the building would have to change their preferences and their behavior. This would mean throwing their weight behind tasks the UN performed well—by supporting the work of the specialized humanitarian field agencies such as UNHCR, vastly improving the logistic and strategic support for UN peacekeeping missions, and making use of the UN’s convening powers to deepen and broaden the rules governing international and internal state practices on such vital concerns as climate change and terrorism. But it would also mean being selective, and not asking the UN to do too much, or to perform tasks that could better be performed by regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, or new quasi-governmental operational entities like the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria or the International Criminal Court (ICC) (both of which governments deliberately set up outside the UN system).
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 65
