On April 9, 2003, when a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, many officials at the headquarters of the United Nations, in New York, averted their eyes from the celebratory images unfolding on CNN. A few days later, when a wide-shot photograph revealed that relatively few Iraqis had participated in the statue demolition, U.N. employees rapidly disseminated the image through e-mail. “We didn’t wish bad things for the Iraqis,” a U.N. official recalls. “But we were terrified that if the Bush Administration got away with walking all over international law it would jeopardize everything we stood for.”
The Security Council had withheld support for the invasion, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. diplomats had warned of the human suffering that it would cause; they were chastened by the ease with which the American-led Coalition had reached Baghdad, and by the relative bloodlessness of the battle. A swift victory, U.N. officials worried, would establish a dangerous precedent, emboldening member states to go to war even in the face of firm international opposition. Annan, speaking with colleagues, lamented the possibly irreparable loss of U.N. relevance.
French, German, and Russian diplomats cared less about the U.N. charter than about their own national interests. Having opposed the war, these countries had severely strained relations with Washington, and the diplomats feared the economic and political consequences. On May 22nd, the same countries on the Security Council which had refused to condone the invasion ahead of time joined the United States in voting for a resolution giving retroactive legitimacy to the occupation. These countries were eager to signal their support for a stable, democratic Iraq; to insure that they were not shut out of economic opportunities there; and to force the Americans to acknowledge that, under international law, they were formal occupiers, not “liberators.” They also wanted to try to give the U.N.—which they trusted more than the Americans—a significant role in shaping the new Iraq.
Whatever the Europeans’ aims, U.S. diplomats, who were still basking in their apparent victory, largely dictated the terms of Security Council Resolution 1483, offering other countries no say in how Iraq was governed, providing no timetable for departure, and handing the U.N. an ill-defined, subservient role. Although the U.N. resolution technically obliged the occupiers to abide by the Geneva Conventions—which prohibit occupying authorities from exploiting a country’s resources or making fundamental changes to its government—the international norms of occupation were superseded. Resolution 1483 effectively granted the Americans and the British the legal authority to choose Iraq’s political leaders, to spend its oil revenue, and to transform its legal, political, and economic structures. It also called on other U.N. member states to contribute personnel, equipment, and other resources to the Coalition’s effort. For the first time in history, the Security Council was upholding the occupation of one U.N. member state by another. Mona Khalil, a lawyer at headquarters, set up a screen saver on her computer that read “The U.N. Charter has left the building.”
Many Iraqis were aghast when they learned of Resolution 1483. A month earlier, Moqtada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric, had been asked, by the Washington Post, whether the Americans were occupiers or liberators. “I don’t know their intentions,” he said. “Only God does.” Sadr and millions of other Iraqis now had their answer: the U.N. resolution confirmed that it was indeed an occupation.
Annan, though aware of Resolution 1483’s problems, told colleagues that he was pleased to be “back in the game.” Mark Malloch Brown, then the head of the U.N. Development Program, told the Times that the measure was a “very good resolution” because it gave the U.N. a foot in the door. Annan and Malloch Brown knew the challenges of managing postwar transitions—a daunting task even in small countries like East Timor, which the U.N. oversaw between 1999 and 2002—and they were quietly relieved that the Security Council had not asked the U.N. to run Iraq.
Instead, the council had asked for a U.N. Special Representative for Iraq, who would help set up an Iraqi “interim administration.” Even this envoy was subservient to the Coalition. He would have a fraction of the powers of Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy appointed to Afghanistan in 2001, who had helped select that country’s first post-Taliban leader. Annan’s advisers disagreed about who should fill the Iraq post. Several of them believed that it should be a junior official whose rank would be commensurate with his almost laughably insignificant role. Kieran Prendergast, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, asked Annan, “Are the Americans actually going to create a space for us to play a political role, or are they intent on doing everything themselves and just appropriating the U.N. decal?” The British, who still hoped that the U.N. could play a vital role in Iraq, urged Annan to appoint an envoy strong enough to stand up to the Americans. Jeremy Greenstock, the British Ambassador to the U.N., told Annan that the choice was simple: “We are really talking about Sergio.”
Sergio Vieira de Mello, a fifty-five-year-old Brazilian diplomat, had worked his entire adult life for the U.N. In thirty-four years of service, he had held posts in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo, and East Timor. Besides Portuguese, he spoke fluent English, French, Italian, and Spanish. In 2002, he had been promoted to High Commissioner for Human Rights. A reporter whom I met in the Balkans, where Vieira de Mello had served as a senior U.N. diplomat, aptly described him as a “cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy”; a strikingly handsome man, he was an idealist who pursued his goals with fierce pragmatism. When it served his agenda, he even made overtures to thugs. His colleague Carina Perelli, an Uruguayan who was head of the U.N. election division, called him an encantador de serpientes—a snake charmer. In the Balkans, he tried to win over the hard-line Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, by presenting him with a copy of The New York Review of Books featuring the headline “WAR OVER PSYCHOANALYSIS.” He joked that his autobiography would be called “My Friends the War Criminals.”
Vieira de Mello was suited to the role of the U.N.’s Iraq envoy not because he knew the country—he did not—but because, as a humanitarian and a diplomat, he had amassed so much experience working in violent places with heads of state, dictators, rebel leaders, and refugees. In recent years, he had run the U.N. administrations in Kosovo and East Timor, where he had been invested with virtually the same overarching powers that L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had been given in Iraq. Vieira de Mello had long ago stopped believing that he brought solutions to a troubled place, but he knew how to ask the questions that helped expose constructive ideas. Vieira de Mello could perhaps show the Americans what to do and what not to do. As Fred Eckhard, a former U.N. spokesman, told me, “Sergio was one of us. And he wasn’t a turncoat. He stood for what we stood for.”
The Americans were surprisingly enthusiastic about Vieira de Mello. A few weeks before the invasion, he had pulled off an unusual feat for a U.N. official: he had charmed President George W. Bush. On March 5th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President, impressed by Vieira de Mello’s lean physique, greeted him by grasping his shoulder and saying admiringly, “You must work out.” Vieira de Mello had criticized the rough handling of terrorist suspects at the American-run detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he described as a “legal black hole,” and he had pressed the President to renounce torture. Yet Vieira de Mello had been careful not to rail against the President, and Bush had not responded defensively. Bush said that Guantánamo could not become a “country club,” and insisted that fighting terrorism demanded a forceful approach. Vieira de Mello nodded. “I know,” he said. “In East Timor I gave U.N. peacekeepers shoot-to-kill authority to go after the militia.” Later, Jonathan Prentice, Vieira de Mello’s special assistant, who attended the meeting, said to a colleague, “I can’t fucking believe this—the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is showing off about his shoot-to-kill policy!” But Prentice knew that Vieira de Mello’s words were strategic: “Sergio knew that Bush probably presumed him to be a tree hugger, and that this was a quick way to show him otherwise. That would give his subsequent criticisms more force.”
Vieira de Mello had never turned down an assignment before, but not long after his meeting with Bush he asked Iqbal Riza, Annan’s chief of staff, to remove his name from consideration for the Iraq post. He had spent two and a half years on a remote, sweltering island, governing East Timor, and he still felt depleted. He had served as human-rights commissioner for only eight months. Most important, after three decades of living in war zones, he had decided to consider his personal life. His two sons were grown, and in East Timor he had fallen in love with a twenty-nine-year-old Argentine-Italian U.N. official, Carolina Larriera; he had decided to end his marriage and start anew.
Still, Vieira de Mello took seriously the line in his contract stipulating that he serve wherever the Secretary-General sent him. He also relished being at the center of global events. As High Commissioner, he spent his days at a desk in Geneva. He felt removed from Iraq, one of the most wrenching geopolitical crises of our time. Although it had been years since he had acknowledged an aspiration to become Secretary-General, he must have known that the odds of his candidacy would rise significantly if he could help stabilize Iraq. He also knew that he was the best man for a bad mission and that he had more experience managing post-conflict transitions than any other person in the U.N. system. He could tap these skills to serve the Iraqi people.
In late May, Annan called Vieira de Mello to New York. When he arrived, he phoned Larriera, who was working as a public-information officer at the U.N. Together, they rehearsed the arguments for not going to Iraq. “Repeat after me, Sergio: ‘I can say no. I am the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I’ve just started,’ ” Larriera said. “They probably just want to brainstorm about the other candidates,” he reassured her. But he knew better.
The meeting took place at Annan’s apartment, on the Upper East Side. Annan told Vieira de Mello that the Iraq envoy “will have to serve as a bridge to the Coalition, but he will also have to distance himself from the Coalition.” He would have to get out into the countryside and listen to ordinary Iraqis. And he would have to push the Coalition to develop a firmer timetable for holding elections, drafting a constitution, and transferring sovereignty. The overthrow of Saddam’s dictatorial regime had created a collapsed state and a security void, and the occupiers had worsened the situation by making critical mistakes: in May, the Coalition had demobilized Saddam’s Army, which had turned legions of armed Iraqis into enemies of the occupation. The C.P.A. had also begun purging Baath Party officials from Iraq’s key ministries, which vitiated the police force and impeded the delivery of services. Annan and Vieira de Mello did not discuss the physical risk of going to Iraq, because, although looting was rampant, it looked as though Saddam’s forces had been roundly defeated. In Baghdad, Iraqis, foreign journalists, and aid workers walked the streets in relative safety. Annan never asked him directly whether he would go to Iraq, but, after almost an hour of discussion, he said, “So when are we going to announce your appointment?”
Vieira de Mello accepted the job, on two conditions. First, he would choose his own team—allowing him to bring Larriera to Baghdad as an economic official. Second, unlike his stewardship of East Timor, which had dragged on a year longer than he thought it would, he would serve in Iraq for only four months. He would then hand the operation over to another Special Representative and return to Geneva.
“Sergio was the best man for the job,” says Kamel Morjane, then the United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees, who was the runner-up for the position. “He was the one U.N. person who might be able to influence the U.S. and the U.K.” Another U.N. official recalls, “Everyone was hoping that 1483, with all of its absurdities, would be salvaged by Sergio himself. That was the whole plan: Sergio will fix it.”
Even if Vieira de Mello was torn about going to Iraq, he was pleased that the U.N. had been summoned. As he told a Wall Street Journal reporter, “After cursing the U.N. or calling it irrelevant or comparing it to the League of Nations . . . the United States very quickly came back, as it were, even though they will never admit it, in search for international legitimacy.” He continued, “My guess is that the U.S. and the U.K. and those that have joined will realize . . . that this is too big, that building a democratic Iraq is not simple. . . . And as a result they have every interest in encouraging others who are seen to be more impartial, independent, more palatable to join in and help create these new institutions. . . . We will then look back at the war as an interlude that will have lasted two or three months, that was indeed shocking and did shake us a great deal, but nothing more than that, an accident rather than a new pattern . . . and I touch wood when I say that.”
On June 2, 2003, Vieira de Mello was on a plane bound for Baghdad. He wore a gray tailored suit with an emerald Ferragamo tie—“the color of Islam,” he said. It was a birthday present from Larriera, who would join him on June 15th.
Despite Vieira de Mello’s relative ignorance about Iraq, he knew a lot about helping societies emerging from tyranny and conflict. In the eighties, he had helped lead the negotiations giving rise to the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees, which led to the return and resettlement of eighty thousand Vietnamese boat people. In 1992 and 1993, he had orchestrated the repatriation of some three hundred and fifty thousand Cambodian refugees. And in Kosovo and East Timor he had done everything from appointing judges to choosing new forms of currency and arranging for garbage collection.
He understood that he needed to establish momentum immediately. “I want Arabic speakers,” he told Prentice, his special assistant. Among the half-dozen Arabic speakers appointed for the mission was Ghassan Salamé, a former Lebanese cultural minister and a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques_,_ in Paris. Salamé had studied Iraqi history and knew leading Iraqi opposition officials and intellectuals, as well as members of the Baath regime. Salamé had warned Vieira de Mello that the influence of Iraq’s neighbors would increase in the coming months, and he said that the Americans had committed hara-kiri by demobilizing Saddam’s Army. Salamé had opposed the war, but he wanted to help the U.N. end the occupation. He agreed to become Vieira de Mello’s chief political adviser.
On the plane to Baghdad, Vieira de Mello studied Resolution 1483, focussing on a provision “stressing the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future.” The resolution did not say precisely what the U.N. should do to make this happen. According to the resolution, the U.N. Special Representative would “encourage” and “promote” measures to improve Iraqi welfare. “I think I could just as easily ‘encourage’ progress from Geneva,” he joked to Prentice.
Before landing, Vieira de Mello edited a statement that he would deliver on the tarmac upon landing. “For a three-minute speech, it seemed excessive to scrutinize and rescrutinize every clause,” said Ahmad Fawzi, a U.N. spokesman. “But for Sergio it had to be just so.” Vieira de Mello had come to understand what American planners had not adequately grasped before invading Iraq: outsiders almost never get the chance to revise a first impression.
When the flight landed in Baghdad, about a dozen journalists were at the airport. The return of the U.N. to Iraq had been widely hailed in the region and beyond, and Vieira de Mello had expected a large turnout. But many journalists were across town, where Paul Bremer had held a press conference that same afternoon. “It felt like a bust,” a U.N. official recalls. Nevertheless, Vieira de Mello presented himself meticulously, tucking his prepared text into his breast pocket. “The day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly,” he declared. “In the coming days, I intend to listen intensively to what the Iraqi people have to say.”
Soon after arriving, Vieira de Mello met with the U.N. humanitarian coördinator in Iraq, Ramiro Lopes da Silva, a Portuguese official who had held the post since the previous year. In 1999, Lopes da Silva had been a member of a daring ten-day assessment mission that Vieira de Mello had led into Kosovo, under the cover of NATO bombing, and, as native Portuguese speakers, they shared a cultural bond. The U.N. had so much work to do in Iraq that the two men could divide their labor. Lopes da Silva would coördinate the work of the humanitarian and reconstruction agencies. Vieira de Mello, who preferred high politics to what he had once called “grocery delivery,” would undertake the more controversial task of trying to persuade the Americans to present to the Iraqi public a scheme for ending the occupation. He knew that his two goals—earning the trust of the Iraqis and developing a strong working relationship with the Coalition—might be seen as contradictory by Iraqis hostile to American rule.
When Vieira de Mello first arrived in East Timor, in 1999, the Timorese had been deeply grateful to the U.N. for having staged a referendum that had led to its independence from Indonesia. But in Iraq U.N. civil servants like Vieira de Mello were tarred by their association with the weapons inspectors whom the U.N. had sent into the country during Saddam’s regime; they were equally resented for the sanctions that the U.N. member states had imposed on Saddam’s regime, crippling the economy. Some Iraqis even saw officials working for the humanitarian Oil-for-Food program as agents of punishment. There were advantages, however, to having a history in Iraq. Whereas the Coalition relied disproportionately on Iraqi exiles for intelligence, the U.N. had three thousand Iraqi staff members who had remained in the country, even during the invasion. Vieira de Mello thought that it would be easier for him to get a read on the Iraqi street than it was for Bremer.
Vieira de Mello and his team moved into offices in the Canal Hotel, a three-story building in the eastern suburbs of Baghdad, which had been converted from a hotel-management school into U.N. headquarters in the nineteen-eighties. Trimmed with the U.N.’s trademark light blue, the building was well known to Iraqis. Vieira de Mello was given a spacious corner office on the third floor.
On June 3rd, he travelled to the Green Zone, the four-and-a-half-square-mile fortified district along the Tigris where the Americans had set up the Coalition Provisional Authority, to meet Bremer. Concrete blast walls and concertina wire surrounded it, and sandbagged U.S. machine-gun posts warded off intruders. As U.S. soldiers inspected the badges of officials in the U.N. convoy, Vieira de Mello observed a long line of Iraqis looking for work or attempting to register complaints. Seeing the rough inspections that Iraqis were subjected to, Vieira de Mello shook his head and muttered to Prentice, “There go the hearts and minds.”
He was appalled by the willful isolation of the Americans. Vieira de Mello, in a later phone conversation with Bernard Kouchner, the French diplomat who had succeeded him in administering Kosovo, said, “It is just like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. They have created their own wooden town. They stay in their barracks. They leave in armored cars. They wear flak jackets. They barely go out, and when they do they return as quickly as possible.”
When Vieira de Mello and his U.N. team entered the former palace where Bremer had chosen to work, they saw Americans emerging from offices identified as various Iraqi ministries. Resolution 1483 had envisaged the Coalition as a temporary authority in Iraq; Vieira de Mello now realized that the Coalition considered itself an actual government. At the meeting, Bremer explained that he saw Phase One of the transition as the uprooting of the Baathist regime and the establishment of law, order, and basic services. Vieira de Mello worried that these goals were at cross-purposes: uprooting the old regime would undermine the state’s power to provide the services and stability that Bremer recognized were essential. Yet Bremer seemed unconcerned. “We expect to turn the corner in the next month or so,” he said. Phase Two, Bremer went on, included economic reconstruction, job creation, and the formation of democratic bodies. He intended to appoint a group of Iraqis that would select the drafters of a new constitution. Vieira de Mello winced at the idea that a constitution would be drafted before general elections were held, as it would seem like an illegitimate American charter. But he held back his views, characteristically reluctant to alienate somebody before he had first had the chance to win him over. (Douglas Stafford, the former Deputy U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, once described Vieira de Mello as “a man who doesn’t know how to make an enemy.”)
Vieira de Mello returned to the Canal Hotel, where he had a heated discussion with his top staff. Jamal Benomar, one of his Arab-speaking advisers, insisted that the U.S., by taking over the governing functions of Iraq and acting as a full sovereign, had already violated Resolution 1483. He urged Vieira de Mello to press for the immediate creation of an Iraqi government. Otherwise, the U.N. would appear complicit in an occupation despised by Iraqis. Vieira de Mello countered that Bremer would respond badly to criticism. He believed that the U.N. had to work with the Americans in order to change their approach. “We can’t just sit at the Canal Hotel and do nothing,” he told his team. “You can’t help people from a distance.”
In his meetings with American and British officials, Vieira de Mello never focussed on whether the Coalition should be in Iraq in the first place. “The war was a fact,” Prentice says. “The occupation was a fact. You’ve got two choices when you have those facts: either you can try to help the Iraqi people out of the mess and urge a swift end to the occupation. Or you can take the moral high ground and turn your back.” Vieira de Mello had often spoken of the importance of “black-boxing” intentions. “By taking the Americans at their word, and then making them abide by those words, you create leverage,” he told colleagues. In 1991, Khmer Rouge leaders had signed a peace agreement, and Vieira de Mello treated it with respect, even after Khmer Rouge guerrillas continued to engage in violence. Senior Khmer Rouge officials grew to trust him, which helped him complete his ambitious refugee-return plan. Over the years, Vieira de Mello’s approach made him unpopular with his more doctrinaire U.N. colleagues, who saw him as accommodationist and amoral. (In the Balkans, several of his critics had nicknamed him Serbio.)
On his third night in Baghdad, Vieira de Mello had dinner with John Sawers, the British diplomat who served as Bremer’s deputy. Vieira de Mello described what he took to be the lesson of East Timor. “The Timorese were O.K. with the U.N. in charge for a certain, brief period of time, but at a certain point, we had to switch to a support role,” he told Sawers. “You’ll have to do the same.” After the dinner, he began forwarding suggestions to Sawers. “If Bremer thinks these are British ideas rather than U.N. ideas, they are far more likely to be accepted,” he said.
At the first meeting between mid-level U.N. and C.P.A. officials in the Green Zone, copies of Resolution 1483 were passed out, and the group went over the text line by line. The Americans looked flummoxed. “What does ‘encourage’ mean?” one asked. “We don’t know,” Nadia Younes, the U.N. chief of staff, said. “You wrote the thing!” Jamal Benomar recalls, “The C.P.A. made clear that what it expected of the U.N. was for us to issue a press release from time to time, applauding the Coalition’s efforts. They would do everything and we would clap.” (Bremer told me that he liked the resolution, because it left no doubt who governed Iraq: “We were the sovereign. Under international law, you are either sovereign or you are not. It’s like being pregnant. Under 1483, the role that Sergio and the U.N. could play was limited. They were there to help us.”)
Vieira de Mello’s team members were disheartened by their dealings with the Coalition. Nearly all the U.N. staff had privately opposed the U.S.-led invasion. They found Coalition officials absurdly young and inexperienced. Many were politically conservative, and they dreamed aloud of turning Iraq into a laboratory for free-market democracy. Almost none of them spoke Arabic.
The suspicion was mutual. U.S. officials had not forgotten the U.N. Security Council’s refusal to support the war. In late June, Vieira de Mello was stopped at a Coalition checkpoint on the airport road. Alain Chergui, his bodyguard, told an Army lieutenant that U.N. vehicles, under international rules, were not to be checked. The lieutenant refused to let the U.N. convoy pass. “Do you know who is in the car?” Chergui said, frustrated. “No, and I don’t care,” the lieutenant replied. Chergui called Bremer’s chief of staff, who tried to intervene. But the lieutenant was still unmoved. Vieira de Mello, humiliated, finally stepped out of the car and placed a call to Bremer, who got an officer on the staff of the U.S. commander General Ricardo Sanchez to order the convoy through.
In the summer of 2003, Baghdad was not nearly as dangerous as Sarajevo had been when Vieira de Mello had lived there under siege in 1993. The Iraqis whom Vieira de Mello met talked about theft, unemployment, lack of electricity, and the indignity of a foreign occupation, but they were not yet worried about suicide bombers or civil war. An insurgency had begun, but Coalition forces were its targets, and in June and July it seemed plausible that the attacks were the last gasp of the Baathist regime.
Nevertheless, Vieira de Mello was careful. He was initially housed on one of the top floors of the Sheraton Hotel in central Baghdad, but the elevators rarely worked. “How would I make it down all these stairs if the hotel were hit?” he asked his bodyguard. In late June, he moved his residence to the nearby Cedar Hotel, which was smaller and less trafficked.
In previous U.N. missions, Vieira de Mello had helped boost staff morale by making himself available after hours for drinks. But in Baghdad he rarely socialized. When Larriera arrived, she brought items he had requested—chocolate, CDs of Brazilian music, photographs from East Timor, and, for good luck, two small iron Buddhas that they had bought together in Thailand. He held a few wine-and-cheese parties in his office at the Canal, but he typically hurried home to his drab oasis at the Cedar Hotel. “I’ll cook,” he would say when he and Larriera reached the hotel; most days, they picked up leftovers at the Canal’s cafeteria, and he heated them up on a tiny electric burner. The staff grumbled that he was reclusive. Salamé pushed him to go out for at least Friday lunches. On one occasion, when he thought he was having lunch alone with Salamé, he arrived at the restaurant and found a table filled with U.N. staff. After waiting out the meal stiffly, he told Salamé, “Next time, tell me who’s coming to lunch.”
Though Vieira de Mello withheld himself from his colleagues, he insisted that the U.N. promote its accessibility. Only thirty American soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the U.N. headquarters, and Vieira de Mello did not request reinforcements, believing that a more visible U.S. presence would, perversely, invite attack. The more isolated Bremer and the Americans became, the more welcoming Vieira de Mello and his colleagues made the U.N.: Iraqis regularly met with U.N. staff in the cafeteria for tea or coffee, and made use of the U.N.’s computers to check e-mail. The security officers were concerned that if a bomb went off nearby it might shatter some of the Canal’s many windows. A U.N. security team decided to put a blast-resistant film over the windows. But, because it was not clear which administrative budget should cover the expense, only Vieira de Mello’s office and the cafeteria were treated; the rest of the project was deferred.
Day by day, Baghdad was growing more violent. The Bush Administration had sent in too few U.S. troops to fill the security vacuum or to control Iraq’s borders, allowing foreign insurgents to pass easily into Iraq. And other U.N. member states, having opposed the invasion, were reluctant to offer stability forces or civilian police, as they had done for the peacekeeping missions in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Bremer’s demobilization and de-Baathification decrees had alienated the very Iraqis who might have maintained security. And many still had their guns.
Vieira de Mello urged Bremer to scale back the de-Baathification edict by targeting only top-tier party officials rather than mid-level technocrats. He also pleaded with the Coalition to cater to the needs of the Iraqi Army veterans. He reminded Bremer that U.N. officials had experience setting up programs to reintegrate demobilized soldiers into civilian life or into professional police forces; they had facilitated this process in East Timor and Bosnia, for example. And he told Bremer that Javier Solana, the Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union, had raised the possibility that the E.U. would contribute police forces through the U.N. Bremer responded that the Europeans would have to put their police at the disposal of the Coalition.
Each time that Vieira de Mello visited Bremer in the Green Zone, more sandbags were piled up around the entrance, and the lines of Iraqis outside seemed longer. On June 18th, some two thousand former Iraqi officers gathered outside the Green Zone to protest the disbanding of the Army. During the demonstration, a small group of officers went to the Canal Hotel to try to persuade Vieira de Mello to help them get reinstated. He promised the men that he would approach Bremer. But Bremer said that the order had expressed Washington’s wishes.
Vieira de Mello gave his first major press conference on June 24th. “You may have noticed that over the past three weeks I have been rather quiet,” he said. “That is because I have been listening, travelling, and learning.” His team had divided Iraqi society into categories—political parties, professional associations, nongovernmental organizations, human-rights groups, lawyers, judges, women’s groups, and religious groups. “O.K., who am I meeting today?” he had asked his staff each morning. After making his way through an initial list of Baghdad contacts, he announced, “Now I’m heading out to the regions!” Influential Iraqis were identified in Basra, Mosul, Erbil, Sulaimaniya, Hilla, and Najaf. “Bremer didn’t have time to talk to people,” Ghassan Salamé recalls. “Because Resolution 1483 gave the U.N. no real tasks, we had all the time in the world to listen.”
At the time, the Americans had little contact with Iraq’s religious leaders. Vieira de Mello believed that the U.N. could make a contribution if it could enlist the support of powerful clerics. On June 28th, he travelled south to Najaf, to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the prominent Shiite cleric, who had refused to meet with the occupiers. In a whispery voice, Sistani complained about the Coalition’s rush to privatize state-owned enterprises, as well as its use of excessive force. He also said that he was planning to issue a fatwa declaring that only Iraqis could write the Iraqi constitution.
“Samahat al-Sayyid,” Vieira de Mello began, using the Arabic expression for “your eminence,” which he had rehearsed along the road from Baghdad. “I understand you want the constitution written by Iraqis—”
“I didn’t say the constitution should be written by Iraqis,” Sistani said sharply. “I said it should be written by elected Iraqis.”
Vieira de Mello nodded. “I learned the same lesson in East Timor,” he said. With these words, Vieira de Mello, perhaps unintentionally, set himself up in direct opposition to the Coalition, which still planned to appoint a committee to select drafters for a constitution. Bremer was insensitive to the importance of introducing a constitution that was not tainted by its association with the occupiers. But Vieira de Mello, by failing to tell Sistani that fair elections would take at least a year to prepare, had raised expectations that could not be met.
After the meeting, Vieira de Mello was driven to the sacred shrine where Imam Ali, a cousin of Muhammad, was buried. “I want to go into the mausoleum,” he whispered to Salamé, who shook his head, saying that a bloody confrontation had occurred there a few weeks before. “No, Ghassan, we must,” Vieira de Mello said. “I may not get back here again.”
A large group of Iraqis had gathered around them, some murmuring, “What are the foreigners doing here?”
“Out now, Sergio,” Salamé said, firmly.
“Why?” he asked.
“Out now,” Salamé said. Vieira de Mello reluctantly left the shrine. A U.N. official who was present recalls, “Sergio was discovering the world of Iraq. From an intellectual point of view, he wanted to see everything, and sometimes he was oblivious to the political sensitivities.”
On the drive back to Baghdad, Salamé congratulated Vieira de Mello. “You know you made a big statement there,” he said, referring to his endorsement of Sistani’s electoral ground rules, which Bremer opposed. Vieira de Mello punched Salamé playfully and resorted to what was becoming his favorite quip: “Ghassan, I don’t want to become a Bremello!”
Two days after the meeting, Sistani issued the fatwa saying that he would not recognize the legitimacy of a constitution that was not written by an elected Iraqi assembly. He also said that the U.N. agreed with him. Bremer asked Vieira de Mello to refute the cleric’s claim as a misrepresentation of the U.N. position, but Vieira de Mello refused. Bremer was incensed. “It took us months to undo the damage that Sergio did in that one meeting,” Bremer told me. **{: .small}
Though Vieira de Mello was horrified by the Coalition’s blunders, he felt that they created an opening for the U.N. In a note to a colleague, he was upbeat: “I feel confident that the U.N. will truly, as opposed to rhetorically, be able to play its ‘vital role’ in Iraq.” His team was eager to offer assistance on developing a power-sharing plan for Iraq’s many factions. “Iraqis need to know that they will get tangible, executive authority,” Vieira de Mello told Bremer.
The U.N. had considerable experience with constitutions and elections. Vieira de Mello had dealt with such issues in Cambodia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Some of Bremer’s plans reminded him of his own past mistakes; in East Timor, he had been roundly criticized for initially failing to offer a clear timetable for a transition to full sovereignty. The U.N. had kept the Timorese in the dark in much the same way that the Americans were failing to enlighten Iraqis. Vieira de Mello urged Bremer to begin to develop and publicize a plan for elections.
At one meeting, Bremer said that he was going to appoint a “consultative committee” of Iraqi leaders. Vieira de Mello suggested that he rename the group the Iraqi “provisional government.” Bremer refused, but came around to Vieira de Mello’s idea that “council” carried a more authoritative air than “committee.” But that was not enough. “We need to signal executive powers,” Vieira de Mello said. Salamé, who attended the meeting, said, “We should put hukm in the name.” In Arabic hukuuma means “government.” Bremer agreed, and the matter was settled: the new body would be called majlis al-hukm—the Governing Council.
The functions of the Governing Council remained undefined. Vieira de Mello urged Bremer to give it the power to manage foreign affairs, finance, security, and constitutional process. And he pushed for allowing the Iraqis on the council to designate ministers and be given the power to approve the national budget. Bremer, for his part, had to decide who belonged on the twenty-five-member council. Vieira de Mello, who had spent the previous six weeks meeting Iraqi leaders, volunteered names. He persuaded Bremer to include the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, Hamid Majeed Mousa. And Aqila al-Hashimi, an experienced Shiite diplomat who had helped to arrange Vieira de Mello’s meetings in Najaf, became one of just three women on the council.
Vieira de Mello was proud of his contributions to the Governing Council. In a cable to U.N. headquarters in early July, he wrote that “Bremer was at pains to state that our thinking had been influential.” He noted that the C.P.A. demonstrated a “growing understanding” that the “aspirations and frustrations of Iraqis need to be dealt with by greater empathy and accommodation and that the U.N. has a useful role to play in this regard.” Vieira de Mello’s pride was perhaps excessive. He saw it as a victory that only nine of the twenty-five Iraqi members of the body were exiles. Yet, as many Iraqis noted, six of the thirteen Shiite representatives and three of the five Sunnis were exiles. Vieira de Mello hailed the Governing Council’s power to propose policies and appoint interim diplomats and ministers. But Bremer could veto any of these decisions.
The council was inaugurated on July 13, 2003, and Vieira de Mello was the only non-Iraqi who spoke at the ceremony. He wore a light-blue tie, in honor of the U.N. “We are here, in whatever form you wish, for as long as you want us,” he told the Iraqis who had just been sworn in as council members. Back at the Canal Hotel, the U.N. staff was again divided. Marwan Ali, a political aide, warned him, “Sergio, don’t you see, you’re not changing the Americans. You are helping the Americans.” Vieira de Mello argued that the Governing Council was the “only game in town.” At last, the U.N. would be able to negotiate with Iraqi leaders rather than with the occupiers. “This is only a start,” he told Prentice. “But it is a necessary start.”
Vieira de Mello and Bremer were establishing a fragile rapport. Although Bremer had close ties to some of the neoconservatives in Washington, who viewed the U.N. with contempt, Vieira de Mello believed that Bremer was more cosmopolitan, because he spoke French, Dutch, and Norwegian. “I’ve been giving advice to Bremer on how to manage the Iraqis’ hurt pride,” he told Jonathan Steele, a reporter for the Guardian. “There’s been a gradual change in him. Everything I’m telling you, he buys.” While having a beer with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, of the Washington Post, Vieira de Mello told him, “Bremer will succeed if he makes himself Iraq’s man in Washington rather than Washington’s man in Iraq.” Vieira de Mello relished being involved in such a high-profile challenge. In an e-mail to Peter Galbraith, the former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, who intended to visit Iraq, he wrote, “Why only one day in Baghdad? Here’s where things are happening . . . good and bad.”
Vieira de Mello took pride in what the U.N. had achieved. “Can you believe we stretched our marginal mandate as far as we did?” he asked Salamé in late July. He believed that the U.N. would help organize landmark elections in 2004. “Iraq is a test for both the United States and for the U.N.” he told the French newspaper La Croix. “The world has become too complex for only one country, whatever its might, to determine the future or the destiny of humanity. The United States will realize that it is in its interest to exert its power through this multilateral filter that gives it credibility, acceptability, and legitimacy. The era of empire is finished.”
After helping Bremer to form the Governing Council, Vieira de Mello found his influence abruptly diminished. The Iraqis who had previously used Vieira de Mello to convey their views to Bremer could now negotiate directly with the Americans. Vieira de Mello had inadvertently made himself dispensable. Kieran Prendergast, the U.N.’s Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, says, “He was like a Victorian parlormaid—seduced and discarded.”
The Governing Council ended up spending more time squabbling than exercising its limited authority. Vieira de Mello suggested that the council would gain credibility if it were funded by the U.N. and if it received counsel from U.N. advisers. But Iraqi council members were not interested. He wrote to U.N. headquarters that their behavior did “not indicate a particular willingness for compromise.” The council members seemed out of touch with ordinary Iraqis, he said, and were operating “in a kind of cocoon.”
Nevertheless, if the choice was between absolute U.S. rule and flawed Iraqi rule, Vieira de Mello preferred the Governing Council. In July, he toured the Middle East to persuade Iraq’s neighbors to give the council “the benefit of the doubt.” He visited Crown Prince Abdullah, in Saudi Arabia. He flew to Damascus to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and to Tehran to meet with President Mohammad Khatami—representatives of regimes that the Bush Administration had labelled as state sponsors of terrorism. He also met with the foreign minister of Egypt and with Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League. He responded to criticisms of the Iraq occupation by reminding these leaders that their own regimes were far from democratic. Several Arab governments said that they were prepared to support the council if the Coalition really let it govern.
Numerous Arab journalists suggested that Vieira de Mello was being used. When he was asked, on August 9th, if the U.N. was there as “just a cover for the American invasion,” his temper flared: “Kofi Annan and myself are independent from anyone.” He rejected the charge that the Governing Council had been handpicked by the Americans. In fact, he later wrote, the council was “as representative an institution of governance as one could imagine in the Iraq of today.”
Vieira de Mello’s tour upset some members of his staff in Baghdad. Ramiro Lopes da Silva, his deputy, recalls, “Here you had Sergio in public saying, ‘I helped create this Governing Council. I support this Governing Council.’ Yet the Governing Council did not really attempt to represent the concerns of the Iraqi population. How did that make the U.N. look?” Vieira de Mello’s friend Timur Goksel, the spokesman for the U.N. in Lebanon, was shocked by his appearances on Arab television. “Sergio dressed like an administrator. He talked like an administrator. He looked like one of them.” Goksel remembers the e-mail he sent to his friend: “I told him, ‘Go to the coffee shops, Sergio. Reach out to the men with the guns.’ ”
Iraqis, too, were skeptical of Vieira de Mello’s claims about the council. An August, 2003, Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Iraqis thought that the policies of the Governing Council were “mostly determined” by the Coalition. While Vieira de Mello was promoting the council abroad, Moqtada al-Sadr was demanding its dissolution. Sadr said that the Hawza_—_the Shiite religious authority—should run Iraq, and on July 25th he gathered tens of thousands of followers outside Najaf, to show his strength. “The Iraqi Governing Council was set up by the Americans and it must be disbanded,” Sadr declared. He and other militants were gaining clout, in part because they were delivering social services and physical security that the Coalition was not.
Vieira de Mello liked to repeat what he had learned after years of frustration: “Soldiers make bad policemen.” After the looting and chaos that followed the fall of Saddam’s regime, the Justice Department had drawn up plans to deploy to Iraq more than six thousand police trainers. But only fifty trainers had arrived so far. Electricity, water, and other utilities operated intermittently at best. Vieira de Mello reminded Bremer that much of Kosovo and all of East Timor had been burned to the ground when the U.N. arrived but that the U.N. administrators had managed to mobilize international resources for recovery. Yet Bremer seemed unwilling to give the U.N. a substantive role; around this time, Vieira de Mello told George Packer, a reporter for this magazine, that the “neocon side of Bremer’s personality” was emerging.
In meetings with Bremer and General Sanchez, Vieira de Mello asked about the thousands of prisoners being held at a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport who had been crammed into facilities without air-conditioning or sufficient oversight of guards. He argued that human rights were the cornerstone of all that had been wrong with Saddam’s reign. He stressed the importance of creating a database for Iraqis in detention, and he asked that family members and lawyers be granted access to the detainees. He urged that the preventive-detention period be reduced from twenty-one days to seventy-two hours, that status review be instituted, and that something like a public-defender system be created. “I’m not accusing your soldiers of abuse,” he told Sanchez. “I’m saying, ‘You don’t have the checks and balances in place to guard against abuse.’ ”
Vieira de Mello was careful to convey these complaints in private and without shrillness. When he pushed for a visit to the prison at Abu Ghraib, which the Coalition began operating on August 4th, Bremer accompanied him. The morning of the visit, he presented Bremer with a “Wizard of Id” cartoon depicting the King inspecting conditions in a dungeon. The King is shown the various meals the prisoners can choose from—“swill,” “fat-free swill,” “vegetarian swill,” and “kosher swill”—and the prison guard explains, “The human-rights people are coming in the morning.”
He tried to convince himself that his private pressure was having an effect. He told reporters that showers had been built for four hundred Iraqis detained in sweltering tents, that proper buildings would soon replace the tents, and that the number of juvenile detainees in Baghdad had dropped from a hundred and seventy-two to thirty. Nevertheless, he could not get Bremer to take seriously detainee issues, which Bremer believed were the responsibility of the U.S. military, not the C.P.A. At one meeting, Vieira de Mello showed Bremer a photo from a local newspaper showing Iraqis in U.S. detention who had been hooded. “This is incredible,” Vieira de Mello said. Bremer responded, “What’s wrong with hooding?” Eight months later, the scandal at Abu Ghraib broke. (Bremer points out that he was unaware of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and says that hooding suspects is “standard security procedure.”)
The one area in which the Coalition remained amenable to U.N. help was elections. In July, Vieira de Mello invited Carina Perelli, the Uruguayan who ran the U.N.’s election division in New York, to Baghdad to conduct a feasibility study, which she and a team of advisers began on August 1st.
Perelli, a brash, chain-smoking heavyset rebel, and Vieira de Mello, an immaculate, health-obsessed company man, were an unlikely pair. But they had become close friends when they had worked together planning East Timor’s first free elections. In Baghdad, they often completed each other’s sentences, and bantered to ease the tension. “I need a quickie with you,” Vieira de Mello said, grabbing Perelli in the hallway to discuss the election lists. “At my age, I don’t do quickies anymore,” she answered.
Perelli and her team spent almost three weeks touring Iraq. In mid-August, she drove with Vieira de Mello to the Green Zone for a meeting with Bremer. On the drive there, Vieira de Mello said of Bremer, “He still sees elections as a technical matter, and not a wholly political one. You have to educate him like you educated me.” He joked, “The problem with you election people is that you are an acquired taste.”
At the meeting, Bremer presented his plan to have a group of appointed Iraqis draft a constitution, which would then be ratified in a referendum. Perelli disagreed vehemently. “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.”
After the meeting, she expressed worry that Vieira de Mello, her chief ally in the U.N., would be leaving Baghdad in only six weeks. “If you abandon me, I’ll have to deal not only with Bremer but also with whatever jerk the U.N. replaces you with,” she said. “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.”
Vieira de Mello’s dealings with U.N. headquarters were making him especially tense. He had always been exasperated by the organization’s delayed responses, the administrative hassles, the obliviousness to a field staff’s daily trials. But in Iraq these problems were magnified. As devoted as he was to the U.N., he exploded in frustration. “The U.N. is unable to attract the best,” Vieira de Mello complained to Salamé. “And on the rare occasion that the U.N. happens to find the best it doesn’t have the slightest idea how to keep them. If the U.N. ever succeeds, it is by accident.”
Soon after Vieira de Mello arrived in Iraq, the insurgents began experimenting with improvised explosive devices. Initially, they left the bombs on the road at night. But, as the weeks passed, the bombs were better disguised and more powerful. Attacks on Coalition forces increased daily. A hundred and seventeen attacks occurred in May; there were four hundred and fifty-one in July.
At the Canal, Vieira de Mello’s office looked out on a seven-foot-wide gravel road. A hospital and a catering school shared the road. The U.S. military had initially used an armored vehicle to seal off the road, because it ran so close to the back of U.N. headquarters, but senior U.N. officials rejected the practice; if access to the hospital or the school was cut off, the U.N would alienate Iraqis the way the Americans did when they diverted traffic from the Green Zone. On seeing Vieira de Mello’s corner office, whose several windows overlooked the road, Alain Chergui, the bodyguard, thought about snipers, and suggested switching offices. But Vieira de Mello said that he did not want to ask his staff to bear risks that he would not.
Security at the Canal was clearly inadequate. A concrete barrier had been installed five years earlier, during Saddam’s regime, but it had since been propped up next to the perimeter fence, unused. Members of Vieira de Mello’s nine-member “close protection team” were given only 9-mm. pistols. Seven weeks after Chergui pleaded with New York for submachine guns, they arrived—hand-me-downs that had been used by U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. Three of the seven guns were useless, lacking the pins required in order to fire. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s internal threat assessments grew darker. A June 29th report noted, “To date there have been no direct assaults on U.N. staff or facilities, but it is the consensus of the U.N.-Iraq Security Team that it is only a matter of time.”
Whereas in other missions, the U.N. was able to rely on its own peacekeepers—or on local authorities—for intelligence and protection, in Iraq it was wholly dependent on the Coalition. Yet Vieira de Mello’s military adviser, an Australian colonel named Jeff Davie, was not allowed even to enter the Coalition’s operations room or to review its intelligence assessments. Vieira de Mello pushed General Sanchez for greater coöperation. He offered to send over Prentice, his British assistant. “Intelligence will not go beyond these four eyes,” Vieira de Mello said. “And Jonathan is a Brit. He’s one of you!” Sanchez rejected the offer.
By August, the U.N. was torn between needing the Coalition for security at the Canal and believing that the presence of U.S. forces might provoke attack. Insurgents were beginning to target perceived allies of the Coalition. On August 7th, a bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing seventeen people. It was the deadliest attack in Baghdad since the start of the occupation. Although a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the Jordanian terrorist who became the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq—was later found to be responsible, at the time most Coalition officials still thought that the insurgency was led by Iraqi criminals and aggrieved former Baathists. U.N. officials shared that view. Indeed, the fact that Bush had drawn a dubious link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11th attacks made them particularly skeptical that groups linked to Al Qaeda were in Iraq.
On August 12th, an internal U.N. memo noted an unusual Coalition report stating that “hundreds of Islamic militants who fled the country during the war have returned and are planning to conduct major terrorist attacks.” The next day, a Lebanese journalist brought Ghassan Salamé blue slips of paper that he had found at the scene of an explosion in the commercial Karada district. “Al Qaeda” was printed on them, in Arabic. After the explosion, someone had thrown the slips out a car window, like confetti. Salamé went to Vieira de Mello and said, “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this.”
Vieira de Mello had come to believe that the U.N.’s troubled history in Iraq, and its close association with the Coalition, had given it an image problem. “There exists in the minds of many Iraqis mixed feelings about the record of the United Nations here,” he told a reporter. Nevertheless, Vieira de Mello believed that Iraqis saw the U.N. as preferable to the Coalition. The Iraqis he met told him that they hoped for a stronger, not weaker, U.N. role. Iraqis, he told visitors, “see clearly in the United Nations an independent and impartial player that is the only source of international legitimacy.” But Vieira de Mello did not seem to recognize that the Iraqi people could no longer be spoken of collectively—sectarian and ethnic resentments were dividing them into factions. And the Islamist radicals who had infiltrated the country had their own agenda.
Throughout Baghdad, as the violence picked up, Coalition forces got jumpier. On August 8th, U.S. troops at a checkpoint fatally shot five Iraqis, including an eight-year-old girl; the following day, Coalition soldiers killed two Iraqi policemen whom they mistook for criminals. On August 17th, American soldiers killed Mazen Dana, a veteran Reuters cameraman from Palestine; they claimed to have mistaken his video camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
In an e-mail to senior staff, Vieira de Mello wrote, “In previous positions, I always condemned attacks on journalists. Should I not do it here as well?” His aides agreed that the attack should be condemned, but they worried about the implications of condemning an “accidental” attack on a journalist when Vieira de Mello had not publicly criticized the Coalition for killing Iraqi civilians. Nadia Younes, the 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.” But, she noted, “we have to weigh the effect your statements, if you start reacting to all violence, will have on Bremer.” Vieira de Mello, having concluded that his access to the Coalition had shrivelled up, authorized his press officer to issue statements condemning both the attack on Dana and a recent Coalition attack in the Sunni triangle, in which an eight-year-old boy and his mother had been killed. As long as New York didn’t overrule him, it would be the first public U.N. statement on a human-rights violation by the Coalition. “I’ve done all I can do to influence the Americans behind the scenes,” Vieira de Mello told Marwan Ali. “I have to start speaking out.”
Vieira de Mello began to see the growing insurgency as the consequence of an increasingly malignant occupation. Hemmed in by Resolution 1483, however, he concluded that the only way to improve security in Baghdad was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. Coalition troops, he told a Brazilian journalist, had to “have greater sensitivity and respect for the customs of the people.” They had to focus on the dignity of Iraqis, which was being trampled daily: Iraqis had lived under a barbarous regime; the war with Iran had killed hundreds of thousands; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in “one of the most humiliating periods in the history of this people,” they had almost no say on how they were being ruled.
Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed article. An occupation, he wrote, can be “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 Americans and the British to “aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance.”
Vieira de Mello desperately wanted a break. In mid-August, he asked Larriera if she could join him the following weekend for a trip to Jordan. “I just need one day off,” he told her. But she said she could not skip an upcoming human-rights workshop.
On August 18th, Vieira de Mello received two airline tickets by diplomatic pouch. On September 30, 2003, he and Larriera would fly to Brazil for a month’s holiday; they would then begin their life together in Geneva. In his hotel room, Vieira de Mello presented the tickets to Larriera. “I need to think about the future so I don’t lose my mind in the present,” he said.
The next morning, a Tuesday, he took the stairs up to his third-floor office, greeting colleagues along the way. He read the latest dispatches from the U.N. headquarters in New York, and answered e-mails. In the late morning, his security guards prepared a convoy to take him to the Green Zone. He was scheduled to meet with Bremer and a delegation of U.S. senators. By noon, his armored sedan was ready to go, but Bremer’s office called: the flight carrying the U.S. delegation had been delayed. Vieira de Mello telephoned Larriera and told her that he was counting the days—forty-two—before they would fly to Brazil.
At 3 P.M., he met with a pair of senior officials from the International Monetary Fund, along with Larriera. When the meeting ended, at four o’clock, Larriera left with the visitors.
Around 4:20 P.M., he warmly greeted Gil Loescher and Arthur Helton, two American researchers who had arrived in Iraq that morning to examine the humanitarian costs of the war. He ushered them into his office, and they took seats near his office window. Two members of his team—Nadia Younes and Fiona Watson, a Scottish political-affairs officer—joined the discussion.
As they sat down to talk, a brown-and-orange Kamash flatbed truck was approaching the gravel road that ran behind the Canal Hotel. Kamash trucks were Russian and had been purchased in bulk in 2002 by Saddam Hussein’s government for use in mining, agriculture, and irrigation. They looked like the commercial trucks that were being widely used for reconstruction projects. At 4:27 P.M, the driver turned onto the gravel road. All that was visible on its bed was a metal casing resembling the shell of an air-conditioning unit. Underneath the casing was a cone-shaped bomb that had been bundled up in artillery shells, mortars, and hand grenades. The truck driver, who had received his instructions from Zarqawi, sped down the road so quickly that gravel sprayed the ground-floor windows, startling U.N. staffers. After pulling up directly beneath Vieira de Mello’s office, the driver detonated the bomb. The last words uttered in the room, a split second later, belonged to Vieira de Mello. “Oh, shit,” he said, sounding more resigned than surprised.
Loescher later compared the explosion to “one million flashbulbs going off all at once.” Because U.N. administrators had failed to coat most of the Canal’s windows with blast-resistant film, the windows shattered and sent thousands of glass spears flying. Larriera was in her office on the third floor, which had a steel grate over the window; the grate flew the length of the room, and the steel door was ripped from its hinges. Miraculously unharmed, she began navigating her way along the hallway, which was pitch black—the power had gone out—toward Vieira de Mello’s office. Although she couldn’t see, she half expected to bump into him in the hall. She called out his name softly: “Sergio. I’m here, Sergio. Are you there?” The building was still shaking from the force of the blast, and she could smell something burning.
When she got to Vieira de Mello’s office, it wasn’t there anymore. The roof, the walls, and the floor had caved in, and then crashed down, pancake style, onto the floors below. Larriera made her way out of the building.
Jeff Davie, Vieira de Mello’s military adviser, tried to reach his boss by prying at the rubble from a spot in the rear of the Canal where the collapsed office might be. After he pulled some of the lighter concrete away and created a slight gap, he heard a voice. Davie shouted out to the person who had made the noise. “Jeff, my legs,” Vieira de Mello answered.
Vieira de Mello, whom Davie still couldn’t see, was lucid. Trapped in a shaft and pinned beneath rubble, he could neither see nor feel his legs. “Sergio is alive!” Davie called out. “But he’s trapped between the floors.”
A rescue worker asked Vieira de Mello whether he could move his toes. He said yes. “How about your fingers?” He could. “What day of the week is it?” “Tuesday,” he answered. “Is Carolina O.K.?”
Larriera, who had heard that Vieira de Mello was still alive, climbed the rubble and poked her head inside a gap. “Sergio, are you there? It’s me,” she said, in Spanish. “Carolina, I am so happy . . . you are O.K.,” he answered. “My legs, they are hurting. Carolina, please help me.” She replied, “Be still, my love. I am going to get you out of here.” Realizing that a more industrial rescue effort was needed, she told him that she had to leave to get help. “I am coming back very soon,” she said. However, after she left the Canal, U.S. soldiers established a cordon around the crime scene, and she was prevented from returning to his side.
Ninety minutes after the blast, two Iraqi fire engines pulled into the Canal complex. But critical rescue implements—sledgehammers, ladders, Sheetrock pullers, crowbars, rappelling rope, and backboards to transport the injured—were missing. “Where the hell is everything?” a U.S. captain raged. The Iraqi driver shrugged. “Ali Baba,” he said, using the Iraqi slang for thief. Looters had taken the fire department’s equipment.
A dozen bodies of U.N. officials had already been removed from the rubble, most crushed by falling beams or impaled by flying glass. Salim Lone, the U.N. press officer in Baghdad, spoke to reporters outside the ravaged complex. “It is quite unspeakable to attack those who are unarmed,” he said to CNN. “We are easy targets. We knew that from the beginning, but we came nevertheless, knowing there was a risk, but every one of us wanted to come and help the people of Iraq, who have suffered for so long. And what a way to pay us back.”
Although Bush had justified the war, in part, on a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism, the U.S. military had not been equipped to respond to a large-scale terrorist attack on civilians. A U.S. Army paramedic, André Valentine, and a fireman, William von Zehle, prepared to descend into the shaft where several people appeared to be buried along with Vieira de Mello. They needed tools that could slice through rebar and I-beams. This equipment is standard for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. fire departments, but the U.S. Army had not brought any to Iraq. Ralf Embro, an emergency worker on the scene, surveyed the shaft helplessly. Vieira de Mello was lodged under an enormous pile of rubble. But Embro had no pulleys and no container with which to remove debris. He scrambled around the darkness of the third floor and returned to the top of the shaft carrying a large straw handbag and a cord that had been used to draw curtains. “This is all we got,” he said. He tied the cord onto the handbag and lowered it down to Valentine, who had descended thirty feet to the bottom of the shaft and was working to stabilize Vieira de Mello and Loescher, who had landed near him and somehow survived. Valentine and von Zehle methodically deposited bricks and mud into the handbag, and Embro hauled it up.
Down in the shaft, Valentine was struggling. He had to amputate Loescher’s legs, using a saw. Vieira de Mello, who could not be moved until Loescher had been extracted, grew less responsive. “I need you to work with me, Sergio,” Valentine said, nudging him back to consciousness. “I need you to stay awake.” Vieira de Mello asked, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Valentine didn’t answer.
After nearly three hours, Vieira de Mello was still in the same position. By 7:30 P.M., he responded only to painful stimuli. Half an hour later, he was dead.
Heavy equipment arrived after nightfall. Recovering Vieira de Mello’s body remained a risky task, as the rubble continued to shift. Rescuers attached a rope to his lacerated body, and U.S. soldiers pulled it up. Improbably, he had been lying on the U.N. flag that used to hang in his office. At 9 P.M., his body was placed on a stretcher and removed from the building.
Fifteen U.N. officials and seven civilians died in the blast of August 19th; of the people who had been in Vieira de Mello’s office, only Loescher survived. In a speech the next day, Kofi Annan declared, “We will persevere. It’s essential work. We are not going to be intimidated.”
But the insurgents were not done. On September 22nd, another bomber attacked the U.N. base, killing a U.N. security guard and two Iraqi policemen and injuring nineteen. Kieran Prendergast called the U.N. effort in Baghdad a “suicide mission,” and the staff demanded withdrawal. U.N. “relevance” had to take a back seat to safety. On October 30th, the U.N. pulled out of Baghdad, and the United States was left to contend with Iraq on its own. ♦
