Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (82 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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Kuhner had already sent a group of military police into town to commandeer Iraqi fire brigades. And to his delight, at around 6 p.m., ninety minutes after the blast, two gleaming red fire engines pulled into the Canal complex. Kuhner and a sergeant raced toward them.When they tugged at the hatches, however, they realized that the storage cabins were bolted shut. And the vehicles had arrived with drivers but without firemen. When Kuhner asked the driver of one of the fire engines where the keys were, the driver shrugged. “Somebody find me bolt-cutters,” Kuhner ordered. When the bolt-cutters arrived, he and the sergeant hustled to opposite sides of the fire truck and sliced through the iron locks. The hatches swung open. But when Kuhner looked inside, all he saw were the legs of his colleague on the other side.The equipment—sledgehammers, ladders of various lengths, Sheetrock pullers, crowbars, rappelling rope, and backboards to transport the injured—was missing. “Where the hell is everything?” he raged at the Iraqi driver. The driver shrugged.
“Ali baba,”
he said, using the derogatory Iraqi phrase for “thief.” In yet another consequence of the Iraqi looting spree, the
ali baba
had run away with the fire department’s gear.
 
 
Back in Geneva, Jonathan Prentice, fresh off the celebration of his wedding anniversary in Beirut, had gone for a run in the morning and stopped in town for a haircut. As he walked home, he dropped by the security hut at his regular place of employment, the Palais Wilson, home of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.The security guards looked at him like they were seeing a ghost. “What are you doing here?” one asked. “I’m on holiday,” he said cheerily. “Haven’t you heard?” a guard said.“There’s been a bomb at the Canal.” Prentice’s stomach dropped, but he quickly assured himself that this was an incident like other incidents. He scrambled inside the palais and joined his colleagues who were crowded around a television in Vieira de Mello’s office on the top floor. When CNN showed the size of the rubble pile that used to be Vieira de Mello’s office, Prentice gasped. He telephoned a friend at UN Headquarters in New York every half hour for what was left of the day.
 
 
Alain Chergui, Vieira de Mello’s trusted bodyguard who had left Iraq on August 14 with Prentice and Ray, was in Bali. The Iraqi dry cleaners had stained some of his clothes, so he spent the afternoon shopping. He returned to his hotel and turned on the television, where he saw news of the attack and glimpsed the back of his colleague Pichon’s bald head. He desperately telephoned the close protection team members in Baghdad. He reached a Swedish bodyguard and attempted to take charge from Bali. “We’re going to need blood,” Chergui said. “He’ll need a transfusion.” The Swede sounded as though he had lost hope. “We can’t get blood here,” he said. “It’ll be too late.”
 
 
With the bomb Salim Lone suddenly became the television face of the UN mission. In his multiple appearances on CNN, Lone, whose head was bandaged, delivered unpolished, flustered comments. He often seemed to be talking more to himself than to his interlocutors. “It is quite unspeakable to attack those who are unarmed.You know, we are not protected.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.”
10
 
 
An hour later Lone appeared on CNN again:“There are also some wonderful Iraqis who died here today, so it just wasn’t us,” he said, noting that the UN death count had already reached thirteen.“It is such a devastating experience to be so hated, when all you’re trying to do is help. I mean, every one of them who died was here as a humanitarian.” The only note of optimism he sounded concerned the efforts being made to rescue Vieira de Mello.“It’s just been agonizing. We’re just making every effort to pull him out, and we have not been able to do it so far. But we think we have made some very good progress, and he might soon be removed from the rubble.”
11
Rumors were flying among survivors, U.S. soldiers were offering speculative words of reassurance, and Lone was repeating the hopeful words on CNN.
 
 
A frustrated Captain Kuhner had nothing to show for his attempt to requisition Iraqi fire rescue equipment. He moved back to the rear of the building and made himself the primary barrier between Larriera and the pile. She thought that if Kuhner understood who was under the rubble, he might get U.S. soldiers to do more. “Sergio Vieira de Mello, the SRSG, is buried right under there,” she said. Kuhner stared back blankly. “The Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN is buried there,” she tried. Again Kuhner was unmoved. “The UN boss is buried there,” she said “Kofi Annan’s envoy, the equivalent of General Sanchez.” Kuhner urged Larriera to go to Tent City with the other survivors. “You are only going to make it more difficult for us,” he told her. Larriera would not be dissuaded. “No, I’m not going,” she said.“You can’t make me.” The more patronizing the soldiers were with her, the more she had to struggle to maintain her calm.
 
 
Over Kuhner’s shoulder Larriera saw that Davie, Pichon, and Salamé seemed to have found a way to communicate with Vieira de Mello from a hole on top of one pile of rubble. She feigned an intention go back to Tent City, which caused Kuhner to relax his grip, and then she broke free and managed to tear past him. He pursued her but was weighted down by his heavy armor.
 
 
At the rear of the building Vieira de Mello seemed to be able to hear people through two separate crevices between the concrete slabs. The first was fifteen feet up the rubble, where Davie had held Loescher’s hand. The second point of entry was about fifteen feet to the right and slightly lower, near the right rear corner of the building. It was there that Larriera saw Davie, Pichon, and Salamé apparently speaking to Vieira de Mello. They could not reach him, but when Davie squeezed into the crevice up to his waist, he could see one of his boss’s arms.Vieira de Mello’s voice was able to carry through the crevice to where they were. He could hear and be heard. In Davie’s judgment, if the UN and U.S. officials could just lift the outside collapsed slab a few inches or pull rubble away from this gap, they could reach him.
 
 
In order to speak with Vieira de Mello, which Larriera was determined to do, she needed to scale the rubble. Once she escaped Kuhner’s grip, she still met resistance from her UN colleagues. Pichon, who was lower down in the rubble than Salamé and Davie, tried to wave her away, but she persisted. “What would you do if it was your wife under there?” she asked. Salamé, above, said, “Carolina, you’ll cause the rubble to collapse on top of Sergio.” But she would not be deterred. “You’re much heavier than I am, Ghassan,” she shouted. She climbed the rubble quickly, terrified that the U.S. soldiers would try to pull her down from behind. In so doing, her sandals got stuck in the mud, and she felt her skirt get caught on a piece of steel rebar. She kept moving up the rubble and grimaced as the back of her skirt tore off, leaving her underwear exposed from behind.
 
 
She stared up at one final steep flat block of concrete between her and Salamé. She cried up for help, and he extended his hand, pulling her up to where he was crouched on the pile. For the next five minutes she squatted down atop the rubble and poked her head inside the gap. “Sergio, are you there? It’s me,” she said in Spanish. "Carolina, I am so happy . . . you are okay,” he answered, relieved by his first confirmation that she had survived. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “My legs, they are hurting. Carolina, help me,” he answered. “Be still, my love,” she replied. “I am going to get you out of there.” But realizing that a far more industrial rescue effort was needed and feeling as though she was the only one possessed with frantic urgency, she told him that she had to leave temporarily to get proper help. “I am coming back very soon,” she said.
“Volve rápido, te amo,”
he replied. “Come back quickly, I love you.”
 
 
Soon after news of the blast hit London, the BBC posted a discussion page, “Baghdad UN Blast: What Future for the UN?” A diverse range of comments went up, slamming the U.S. occupation, lamenting the silence of moderate Muslims, and deploring the attack. The tenth comment on the site came from Argentina:
 
 
My sister was in the building, she works for the UN, her name is CAROLINA LARRIERA. PLEASE, any notice you have about her, send a mail. Someone notice me that she appears in the BBC TV broadcast.THANK YOU.
 
 
 
 
Pablo Larriera, Argentina
 
 
A UN staffer in Kosovo quickly posted a message, informing Larriera’s thirty-two-year-old brother that she was safe. “Apparently,” the UN official wrote, “she was seen on television trying to enter the site after the bomb had exploded.”
12
 
 
With Kofi Annan and his deputy Louise Fréchette on vacation and absent from New York, Iqbal Riza, the secretary-general’s chief of staff, was the most senior UN official at Headquarters. He did not make calls to Secretary Powell, National Security Adviser Rice, or any other senior U.S. official to expedite the rescue because, from CNN, it looked, in his words,“as if all that could be done was being done.” But it was left to UN spokesman Fred Eckhard to interface with the press. At 12:01 p.m. in New York he read Annan’s first statement on the attack, from Finland.The secretary-general denounced the “act of unprovoked and murderous violence against men and women who went to Iraq for one purpose only—to help the Iraqi people.” Pressed by reporters to say what implication the attack would have for the UN, Eckhard said he had few doubts that “we’re going to stay the course.”
13
Responding to charges that the UN had been lax with its security, he said, “The security is the responsibility of the Coalition partners. We depend on the host country for our security wherever we work in the world.”
14
 
 
The chaos at the Canal Hotel on August 19 stemmed in part from the novelty of the occasion. Only one large attack on a civilian target had occurred before in Iraq, and that was just twelve days before, the August 7 attack on the Jordanian embassy. But the bulk of the confusion was the result of multiple, dueling command structures and improper planning that gave rise to insufficient capacity. Wherever the United Nations set up operations around the world, it depended on local authorities for emergency services. If the UN Headquarters in New York City were hit, New York firemen and police would rush to the scene and FBI officers would investigate. In Baghdad, just as the UN had relied upon U.S. and Iraqi forces for protection, so too the UN now relied upon both for rescue.
 
 
But when it came to rescue in Iraq, it was unclear just who constituted the “local authorities.”Were they American or Iraqi? The Coalition had become the “provisional authority,” and it was an American civilian, not an Iraqi fireman, who actually ran the Iraqi fire department. U.S. soldiers at the Canal did not know what equipment the Iraqi fire department had, where the equipment was located, or who had the authority to summon it. If Americans were in charge, should U.S. civilians or military officers command the scene? Again, had the attack occurred in the United States, the division between civilian and military responders would have been clear. Even when the Pentagon was struck on September 11, 2001, it was the Arlington,Virginia, fire chief who served as the on-site commander for ten days. Even the most senior Defense Department officials technically answered to him. But in Iraq, while it was civil affairs officers who had rescue experience, they didn’t have the rank to issue instructions to their superior officers. “There was no one evidently in charge,” recalls Patrick Kennedy, Bremer’s chief of staff, who himself lacked any line authority over the U.S. military.
 
 
So the UN wasn’t in charge, the Iraqi fire department wasn’t in charge, and the U.S. Army tried to be in charge, but, in Valentine’s words, “they hadn’t dealt with a blown-up building before. They didn’t know what to do.” For Valentine and von Zehle, two of the few men on the scene who had experience undertaking rescue missions, descending into the shaft was something of a relief. At least they would henceforth be masters of their own destinies.
 
 
Desperate to do anything she could to help her fiancé and stunned by the lack of urgency and the primitive state of the rescue, Larriera left the rubble and went to Tent City to beg for help. She tried to get the UN’s most senior officials involved. The highest-ranking UN official at the Canal that day, apart from Vieira de Mello, was under-secretary-general Benon Sevan, who was visiting from New York. But Sevan did not return to the Canal once he reached Tent City. As Larriera prodded him to take charge, he refused even to make eye contact with her. Lopes da Silva,Vieira de Mello’s deputy, seemed to be constantly on the phone to New York. He had paid just one visit to the rear of the building. Bob Adolph, the head of security, also was in Tent City. “Who is in charge?” Larriera pleaded, begging one of the men responsible for security to go to the back of the hotel. “The soldiers there have no idea who is under the rubble! Sergio is dying!” Both men attempted to assure Larriera that the maximum was being done. “We’re trying to get him out, Carolina,” Lopes da Silva said. “You have to calm down.” As she chased after him, he turned his back, saying, “The Americans are in charge.”

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