Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (75 page)

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Authors: Samantha Power

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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By the end of July at least four hundred UN international staffers were in Baghdad alone, and their safety was looked out for by some twenty professional security staff, who were responsible for the entire country.
24
Very few incoming UN officials attended the mandatory security briefings, and almost none of the heads of agencies insisted they do so. The UN security team’s threat assessment, written July 25, said: “Direct assaults on clearly identified UN staff and facilities are all but a certainty.”
25
 
 
By August Vieira de Mello had grown unusually irritable. Whenever he left the country and traveled along the airport road, American security contractors stopped his UN car and attempted to search it. He continued to refuse to grant the Coalition this right.“The bastards need to learn to respect the UN flag,” he said. He staged acts of civil disobedience reminiscent of the actions he had taken as a thirty-four-year-old political officer in Lebanon. With the 120-degree summer heat blaring down on his convoy, he often sat, arms folded and fuming, for more than an hour until the contractors agreed to allow his UN vehicle to pass.
 
 
When he ducked out of Iraq to attend a World Economic Forum meeting in Amman, Jordan, prominent foreign ministers besieged him with requests for meetings, but as he scanned the roster of renowned attendees, the only name that caused him to light up was that of Brazilian novelist Paulo Coehlo. “Look!” he exclaimed to his aide Salman Ahmed. “Do you think there’s any chance I could get a meeting with him?” When he returned to Baghdad, he told colleagues that his private meeting with Coehlo had been the highlight of his trip. When the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa passed through Baghdad, Vieira de Mello cleared out his schedule to spend time with him. After Vargas Llosa had left,Vieira de Mello immediately wrote to André Simões, his nephew and godson in Brazil, and asked him to send the Portuguese translation of
The Way to Paradise
by mail as soon as he could.
26
He wanted to read about anything except Iraq. The reading care packages from his mother and friends came as they had throughout his career, and he devoured them.
 
 
But with his UN staff, he tried to keep up appearances. His staff watched him carefully. "Whenever his face would change,” Marwan Ali recalls, “we would wonder what was happening.” His reports back to New York concentrated on what had been achieved, not on what was being denied. He worried about his team. The hotels lacked electricity and running water, and the heat was unbearable. He signed off his e-mails “with warmest (literally and figuratively) personal regards.” When Larriera told him that one member of his team had picked up a cold in the scorching heat, he corrected her: “No, Carolina, she doesn’t have a cold. She’s breaking down because the stress is too high.” He insisted that Prentice take a week off to join his wife for a celebration of their first wedding anniversary. Rick Hooper, the Arabic-speaking political officer who worked on Iraq in New York as Under-Secretary-General Prendergast’s special assistant, flew to Baghdad to replace him. Hooper had long argued that Annan should have declared the Coalition invasion illegal (which the secretary-general would not do until an interview with the BBC in September 2004).
 
 
Jean-Sélim Kanaan, the French-Egyptian political officer, left Iraq in July so that he could be with his wife, Laura Dolci-Kanaan, in Geneva when she gave birth to their first child. In his last letter before departing Baghdad, he wrote that the Coalition had taken the UN colors and “trailed them in mud.”
 
 
I have to say that I am secretly awaiting the moment when the United Nations finally finds a role that is our own . . . What an extraordinary moment that will be—one where we will be able to give the order to a [U.S.] soldier to lower his weapon and to keep silent. And no longer having to undergo this public humiliation of the body searches in the streets, despite our UN badges, despite our diplomatic status . . . It appears to me more and more evident that the United States is going to come begging for the aid of the rest of the world to face this titanic task. The quagmire becomes stickier each day . . . But we must be careful in this game, as there are twenty-eight million players who no longer find this funny at all. And God knows how much harm angry people can do.
27
 
 
 
 
As the security concerns of UN staff multiplied, each team member expressed different fears. Carole Ray, Vieira de Mello’s secretary, hated traffic jams because she feared an angry mob. Shawbo Taher, an Iraqi Kurd who worked as Salamé’s assistant, felt most frightened in her hotel at night. The hotel was not guarded, and the rooms had large glass windows that looters or assailants could easily break through. A sense of doom pervaded. In late July Bob Turner, a UN humanitarian official, remarked to Kevin Kennedy, “It isn’t a question of if we get hit. It is a question of how we get hit and where we get hit.”
 
 
Although Vieira de Mello urged others to take breaks, he did not feel he could do the same. “Sergio was very conscious of his role as the leader of the mission, setting the tone for everyone else,” recalls Larriera. “He knew he couldn’t be seen to be breaking down in front of his staff.” In all the time he was in Iraq, he took only one day off, stealing twenty-four hours with Larriera in Jordan. Desperate for a break, he arrived in Amman at 2 a.m. on July 18, and they drove to Petra at 8 a.m. the following morning. In other postings he had been able to exercise freely, but in Baghdad he was restricted to jogging fifteen laps in a stadium that was heavily guarded by the Americans. “You know, Sergio, I will not die by bullet here in Iraq,” Ibrahim, his bodyguard, said, running in the Baghdad heat with Larriera, Prentice, and Vieira de Mello. “But I will definitely die of heat exhaustion.” Vieira de Mello also attempted nightly workouts inside the hotel, jogging up and down the stairs. But the security deterioration increasingly confined his movements to the route between the Cedar Hotel and the Canal Hotel.
 
 
In previous missions his frustrations with UN Headquarters—the delayed responses, the administrative hassles, the seeming obliviousness of bean counters and ambassadors alike to the field staff’s daily trials—had exasperated him. But in Iraq they infuriated him. Salamé wondered aloud how Vieira de Mello could have remained in the system. “The UN is a residual institution,” Salamé said. “When nobody wants to deal with an issue, it is left to the UN.” Vieira de Mello was initially defensive. “No, it is not residual,” he said. “In terms of productivity,” Salamé persisted, “it is not a zero, it is less than a zero.” Vieira de Mello snapped, “Listen, Ghassan, the UN is unable to attract the best. None of the member states will give the UN their best. And on the rare occasion that the UN happens to find the best, it doesn’t have the slightest idea how to keep them. If the UN ever succeeds, it is by accident.” He gave Salamé some advice: “If you ever join the UN, I have just one rule for you: Spend as little time as possible in New York.”
 
 
Increasingly claustrophobic in Iraq, he tried to focus on the personal life that awaited him once he left. He received word from the tribunal in France that his divorce would be completed in October. His relations with his sons had improved. Laurent had received his engineering degree in Lausanne, and they had celebrated together before he left Geneva. His relationship with Adrien had taken longer to heal, but they had begun to correspond again. By good fortune Adrien happened to be in New York with his girlfriend and her parents when Vieira de Mello briefed the Security Council in July, so they had gone out for dinner at a steak house. Still, he hoped to build closer ties to them. He e-mailed them that it was “very hot and very difficult” in Baghdad and urged, “Please keep writing to me.”
 
 
Vieira de Mello knew from Bosnia how difficult it was to persuade Western countries to share intelligence with the UN. But in other missions the UN was at least able to rely on its own peacekeepers and police, or on local authorities, for assistance; in Iraq the Coalition was the only available source of intelligence, early warning, and security. Vieira de Mello’s Australian military adviser, Jeff Davie, found the Americans’ tight-lipped posture exasperating. “If I hadn’t been wearing a blue beret,” Davie says, “my access would have been entirely different.” Davie was not allowed to enter the Coalition’s operations room or review its intelligence assessments.Vieira de Mello pushed General Sanchez for more cooperation. He even offered to send over Prentice. “Intelligence will not go beyond these four eyes,” Vieira de Mello said, “and Jonathan is a Brit. He’s one of you!” Sanchez demurred. On July 14 Lopes da Silva sent the CPA a letter requesting that the UN formally post a security liaison officer with the Coalition, but the appeal was ignored.
28
In Vieira de Mello’s meetings with General Sanchez, he pleaded for more access to information. “I’m security blind,” he told the U.S. commander. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on.” On July 24, when he met with several senior Coalition military officers, the group discussed improving U.S. knowledge of UN locations, establishing a “9-1-1 number” for incidents, and streamlining a process for assessing and circulating threats to the UN.
29
But security cooperation between the UN and the Coalition remained ad hoc and inadequate.
 
 
Many within the UN would have been upset if the relationship had grown closer. In August Vieira de Mello prepared for a trip to northern Iraq. In testimony to his increased concern about security, he asked Davie to review his itinerary. “I already have the approval of my security team,” he said, “but have a look at this and let me know what you think.” Davie brought the schedule to the Green Zone and ran the locations by an accessible U.S. intelligence officer.When Nadia Younes,Vieira de Mello’s chief of staff, learned that Davie had done so, she was very upset. “How could you have told the Coalition where Sergio was going?” she said. “We don’t want to run our plans by them.”
 
 
The platoon of U.S. soldiers who offered light perimeter security for the Canal complex had been given UN radios so they could communicate with UN security officers, but they were not authorized to search incoming vehicles or personnel. They could use the UN cafeteria and the Internet facilities, but they were forbidden to bring their weapons inside.
30
But most U. S. soldiers simply shielded their pistols as they entered, putting them in the back of their waistbands.The U.S. platoon that milled around the perimeter manned a pair of 50-caliber-machine-gun posts on the roof of the hotel. They were wedged in between the large water tanks and not visible from the ground. But on July 23, when Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by U.S. troops, gunfire erupted throughout the capital and several shots hit the building.The soldiers from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment on the roof fired back, and a mini-firefight ensued.
 
 
By August the UN was torn between needing the Americans for security and believing that the American presence, which was increasingly despised by Iraqis, undermined its security.“The Coalition and the UN were like two tango dancers, locked in an embrace, but determined to stay at arm’s length from one another,” Davie recalls. Baghdad was far more dangerous than it had been in June, but the number of U.S. troops offering light security outside the Canal did not increase.
 
 
Lopes da Silva, who chaired the UN security meetings, was overwhelmed by his manifold humanitarian tasks. He did not convene the meetings regularly or keep careful records. The security staff never did contingency planning for a bomb attack. And Tun Myat, who ran UN security in New York, did not press Lopes da Silva to comply with regulations.
 
 
In late July and early August UN security officials invited several private security firms to the Canal to pitch their services. But the process of hiring them would be torturously slow. Even the security improvements to the Canal Hotel facilities ordered back in May had not yet been undertaken. On June 15 the windows in Vieira de Mello’s office had been treated with sun-resistant ultraviolet sheeting but not with professional blast-resistant film. The solution was understood to be temporary. In late June, after a shooting incident near the Canal resurrected concern over the Canal’s windows, an official from the World Food Program offered to fund the procurement and installation of the film, but inexplicably the chief administrative officer, Paul Aghadjanian, turned the offer down, claiming that he had already started the tendering process.
31
Aghadjanian had his hands full wrapping up the Oil for Food Program, and security follow-through was never his priority. Because he opted to finance the film installation using petty cash, he instructed the engineer who began coating the windows in mid-July not to exceed the $200 petty cash ceiling.
32
Nearly three months after the need for blast-proofing the windows had been identified, only Vieira de Mello’s office and the cafeteria had been fitted with shoddy film. The rest of the UN’s office windows remained exposed.
 
 
Meanwhile the new wall that was being erected to separate the Canal from its neighbors was being built right up alongside the UN building itself, leaving no real buffer between the UN complex and the outside world. The wall would be thirteen feet high around much of the compound, but beneath Vieira de Mello’s office and several of those next to his, it would reach just seven feet. The builders said they would try to finish the wall by September.

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