Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (88 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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Loescher divides his existence into his “first life” and his “second life.” He says that on occasions when he is tempted to feel sorry for himself, he thinks about all that was lost on August 19, including his close friend Arthur Helton. He also thinks about refugees.“My whole career I have been visiting refugee camps, and without realizing it, I was getting tutorials about resilience. If they can bounce back, I certainly can.” He says he has his blue periods, but he does not ascribe those to his injuries. “There is plenty to feel blue about in the world,” he says.
While Loescher lives with the visible scars of the attack, Vieira de Mello’s bodyguards endure the ghosts of August 19. Gaby Pichon, the French close protection officer who was just twenty feet away from his boss when the bomber struck, says his dreams are haunted by his failure to save the man entrusted to him. “Why him and not me?” he says. “I have flashbacks. It is not like a TV that you can turn off. I don’t have a remote control.” Gamal Ibrahim, the Egyptian who guarded Vieira de Mello in East Timor and for the first two months in Iraq, removed himself from the UN’s close protection roster after the bomb and transferred to the canine unit.“I never want to get close to anybody I’m protecting again,” he says. “Working with a dog is fine for me.” Alain Chergui, who on Vieira de Mello’s insistence had taken leave five days before the bomb, is convinced he would have found a way to save his boss. He cannot forgive himself for being absent when it mattered most, for Vieira de Mello, for the UN, and for the world. “If I weren’t married,” he says, “I would probably be dead now. I would have shot myself maybe. Protecting Sergio was what I was there to do; it was all I was there to do.”
Lyn Manuel, fifty-eight, is back living in Queens and working at UN Headquarters. She has undergone four plastic surgeries on her face and five on her injured left eye, and her recovery is nothing short of miraculous. But, because she has lost vision in the left eye, and her good eye has begun to falter, she plans to retire in 2008. She knows that, for many UN officials, she is a walking reminder of the dead.
Jonathan Prentice and Carole Ray, Vieira de Mello’s special assistant and secretary, who had gone on leave with Chergui just days before the bomb, live with the knowledge that their replacements, Rick Hooper and Ranillo Buenaventura, died at desks that they normally occupied. After their boss’s death, they remained at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva partly as a way of staying close to his memory. “I’m not sailing quite so close to the sun as I did when I rode Sergio’s coat tails,” Prentice says. “But maybe that’s not as important as I once thought it was, or as Sergio thought it was.”
Two of Vieira de Mello’s closest friends in the UN, Omar Bakhet and Dennis McNamara, had been outspoken, unconventional staff members throughout their tenures with the organization. On many occasions when they got into trouble with their higher-ups, Vieira de Mello had intervened on their behalf. The year after the Canal attack, Bakhet left the UN, and today he advises the African Union on how to restructure itself. McNamara, who had achieved the rank of assistant secretary-general, retired in 2007 and currently works as a consultant on how to protect civilians in African conflict areas. Although they had sparred constantly, McNamara and Vieira de Mello had worked together in Geneva, Cambodia, Congo, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq. “Had things gone differently,” he says, “Sergio and I would surely have ended up in some other godforsaken place together.” Fabrizio Hochschild, Vieira de Mello’s special assistant in Geneva, New York, Kosovo, and East Timor, shared his mentor’s taste for working in the field, but he also tried to do what his boss and friend had never managed: put family first. The father of three children, Hochschild returned to Geneva from Tanzania after the Baghdad bomb and became director of operations for Louise Arbour, Vieira de Mello’s successor as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He took periodic trips to the world’s hot spots but tried to remain close to home, even learning how to become a manager.
Martin Griffiths, who became Vieira de Mello’s friend late in life, had left the UN in 2000 to run the Henry Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, where he serves as a mediator among war combatants. Glad to be free of the shackles of UN red tape and politicking, he believes Vieira de Mello was himself on a path toward reconciling his personal and professional ambitions. “Sergio had devoted his life to the ideals and organization of the UN. And the countries in it had failed and disappointed him just as much as they had enriched and glorified him,” Griffiths observes. “The thing about Sergio was his youth. He still wanted what youth wants. He was getting more and more impatient about the half-measures he had. His tragedy was not his death—that was our tragedy. His tragedy was that he never finally arrived at that state of equilibrium that adults call happiness.”
Annie Vieira de Mello, who still lives in Massongy, remains very close to her sons, Laurent and Adrien. Both in their late twenties, the two men have deliberately eschewed the public spotlight. Laurent works as an engineer in Zurich, while Adrien, who graduated with a degree in geography, works in construction and building design in Geneva. With all that has been written and broadcast about their father, they have gained a deeper understanding of why he was so often absent during their childhoods.
Carolina Larriera is the only person who both survived the bomb and lost a loved one. Afflicted by a severe case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, she left the United Nations and moved to Rio de Janeiro. There she and Vieira de Mello’s mother, Gilda, attempted to raise his profile in Brazil, a country that has become acquainted with him only in death. They also pushed the UN to investigate the attack and the failed rescue effort. Larriera spoke with the FBI, tracked down William von Zehle, and along with Timorese foreign minister José Ramos-Horta, visited Gil Loescher in the U.K., but she made little headway.
In early 2004, after she and Gilda collected a bagful of sand from Vieira de Mello’s favorite spot on Ipanema beach in Rio, she flew to Geneva, where she visited the cemetery they had discovered together, and she sprinkled the Brazilian sand upon his grave. Later that year she reenrolled in the master’s degree program at the Fletcher School, which she had been slated to start the month of the attack. In 2006, after graduating from Fletcher, she began teaching international relations at Pontificia Universidade Cátolica in Rio, and the following year she took a job running the Latin American office of an organization that lobbies for access to medicines for the poor.
Gilda Vieira de Mello, who was eighty-five at the time of the attack, remains mentally alert, physically fit, and feisty. She had long declared herself too old to fly, but in 2004 she made an exception, taking one last foreign trip to Geneva to attend the ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Canal Hotel attack. She remains in deep mourning, her apartment a virtual shrine to her deceased son. She and Larriera see each other almost every day. They blame George W. Bush for the Iraq war, and blame Kofi Annan for sending Vieira de Mello to Iraq. On New Year’s Eve 2006 they drank a bottle of champagne to toast the end of Annan’s term as secretary-general.
The Canal Hotel stands vacant in Baghdad. The building is distinguished by the fading blue and white paint on the arches and the gaping three-story black hole in its side. Under significant pressure from the Bush administration, Annan reestablished a UN presence in Iraq a year after the attack. In July 2004 Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a Pakistani diplomat, was named special representative. Since the desire to maintain the appearance of independence had long been trumped by security concerns, Qazi lived and worked holed up in the Green Zone, protected now by a small contingent of UN soldiers from Fiji.
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He and his team offered political and humanitarian advice to the Iraqi government when they could, but their role was marginal.Where once Iraqis who worked for the UN eschewed any connection with the Coalition, today they avoid association with the UN as well, working undercover. In November 2007 Vieira de Mello’s friend Staffan de Mistura replaced Qazi in the thankless job. “I agreed for one reason, for one man,” de Mistura says. “I don’t know anybody who can walk in the shadow of Sergio. But maybe we can all surprise ourselves and achieve something by trying.”
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He and his team offered political and humanitarian advice to the Iraqi government when they could, but their role was marginal.Where once Iraqis who worked for the UN eschewed any connection with the Coalition, today they avoid association with the UN as well, working undercover. In November 2007 Vieira de Mello’s friend Staffan de Mistura replaced Qazi in the thankless job. “I agreed for one reason, for one man,” de Mistura says. “I don’t know anybody who can walk in the shadow of Sergio. But maybe we can all surprise ourselves and achieve something by trying.”
Most of the survivors of the attack and the family members of the deceased went several years without learning the identity of the perpetrators. Only in 2006 did some happen to learn from the media that in January 2005 one Awraz Abd Al Aziz Mahmoud Sa’eed, known as al-Kurdi, had confessed to helping plan the attack for Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq. In July 2006 a small UN delegation made its way from Baghdad’s Green Zone to the U.S. detention facility at Camp Cropper, where al-Kurdi was detained. He had been arrested for involvement in another attack and then confessed to his role in the UN bombing.
In a three-hour interview the UN officials were persuaded that al-Kurdi, thirty-four years old at the time of the attack, was not lying. The father of two, he had been imprisoned for joining the rebellion against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991. He had been released in 1995 in one of Saddam’s amnesties. He had joined al-Zarqawi’s group in 2002 and served as a driver to al-Zarqawi, who had also lived at his home for four months. Later promoted to become “General Prince for Martyrs,” al-Kurdi said that in August 2003 al-Zarqawi had instructed him to plan attacks on both the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad. At that time al-Zarqawi’s network was so poorly understood by U.S. intelligence operatives that he and al-Kurdi had no trouble meeting daily. Later, for security reasons, their meetings would have to be scaled back to once a month.
Al-Kurdi had personally surveyed the premises in advance of the bomb. He had tried several times to enter the UN complex, using a false ID and posing as a UN job seeker, but he had been blocked. He had gotten inside the neighboring spinal hospital with a false identification and surveyed the short distance between the unfinished brick wall and the Canal building. He said that he told al-Zarqawi that there was “only one place where we can get through.” It was via the narrow access road that ran beneath Vieira de Mello’s office.
Al-Kurdi did not personally know that the UN envoy kept his office in the most vulnerable part of the building, above the unfinished wall, but he knew that the UN boss was the target. He had placed the odds of success at only 50 percent “because the truck, going toward the building, could be noticed and even one bullet could have killed the driver.” He said his group had moral concerns. “We realized that this could of course cause damages to the hospital itself and this would damage the reputation of our organization and would backfire on us,” al-Kurdi said. “We were even hesitant to do it.”
On August 18, at al-Kurdi’s house in Ramadi, al-Zarqawi had explained to the designated bomber, Abu Farid al-Massri, the reasons for targeting the UN. Al-Zarqawi told him that al-Qaeda’s decision-making council had ordered the strike because a UN senior official was housed there who, in al-Kurdi’s words, was “the person behind the separation of East Timor from Indonesia and who was also the reason for the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Al-Zarqawi spent the entire night with the bomber, while al-Kurdi and his children slept in the next room. Al-Zarqawi personally helped load the bomb onto the truck. Disappointed by the force of the Jordanian attack, he had been the one to decide to attach mortars and the plastic explosive C4 to the TNT.
Originally al-Kurdi was scheduled to leave Ramadi at 6 a.m. for a 9 a.m. attack, but he received a telephone call before departing, delaying the strike until the afternoon. He drove the truck to the neighborhood of the Canal Hotel and arrived around noon.The bomber was driven separately and met up with al-Kurdi at the Canal at 3:30 p.m. Al-Massri had chosen to set off the detonation device manually instead of having it detonated remotely. Al-Kurdi reminded him of how to use it and pointed out the access road and the target.
After parting ways with al-Massri, al-Kurdi waited across the street for ten minutes, and then, after seeing the truck explode, he melted into the crowd and returned to his home in Ramadi. He had been instructed not to leave the area until he heard the sound of the explosion. When he arrived at his house, however, his coconspirators were angry with him for not staying long enough to be able to report the results. But they later learned from the media that Vieira de Mello had in fact been killed.The UN questioners asked al-Kurdi if he and al-Zarqawi considered the operation a success.“The purpose of the attack was to send the message and [it was] not like a military operation that is a victorious or failing operation,” he said. “But with the death of Sergio, we believed that the message has been fully sent and if Sergio had not died then half of the message would have been sent.”
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When al-Kurdi elaborated on the motives behind the attack, he said that he had his own view as to why the UN in general and Vieira de Mello in particular were appropriate targets:
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