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The UN pays in blood
By Alexander Casella
As the dust settles on
the assassination, by a car-bomb on August 19, of Sergio
Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special
representative in Iraq, there are still more questions
than answers as regards the circumstances of the murder.
What a number of governments, as well as some UN
staff members have confirmed, speaking on condition of
anonymity, is that a previous attempt might have been
made on the life of Vieira de Mello. Some two weeks
before his assassination, tracer bullets were seen
coming close to his aircraft as it was landing in
Baghdad on a return journey from Kuwait.
The
incident went unreported as the UN chose to believe that
it was a freak occurrence not specifically directed at
the UN envoy and thus no additional security measures
were taken to protect him. This negligence was very much
in line with the corporate culture of the UN
headquarters, which viewed its staff in the field as
benefiting from an undefined mantel of universal
protection.
While the approach suited the mood
of benign neglect with which the organization's
headquarters approached field security, it was, as such,
not totally unfounded. During the Bosnian crises, all
the parties refrained from overt actions of aggression
against UN staff members.
Conversely, in March
2000, three staff members from the UN refugee agency
were hacked to death by pro-Indonesian militias in
Attambue in West Timor after their local guards had
deserted them. The killings raised many questions, the
main one being why was the UN staff in Attambue in the
first place. On paper they were there to promote the
repatriation to East Timor of refugees who had been
forcefully herded out of the territory by the militias.
For all practical purposes, however, repatriation from
Attambue was a non-starter as the militias were dead set
against it and tightly controlled the district.
Not a few within the UN suspected that their
colleagues in Attambue should never have been there in
the first place, were it only because there was nothing
for them to do and they were sacrificed to the
organization's yen to show the flag. A subsequent
inquiry into the murder came to no conclusion. Attambue
notwithstanding, the UN as such considers to view itself
as above any fray and its staff members as endowed with
the gift of inviolability.
Iraq was to disprove
the UN bureaucracy of this illusion.
The wisdom
of hindsight notwithstanding, it is difficult to imagine
what the UN could have done to do no wrong on its return
to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Clearly,
the upper echelons of the UN secretariat were completely
unaware of how unpopular, not to say hated, the UN was
in Iraq.
Among the population, the organization
was associated with two crippling measure imposed on the
country; the embargo and the food for oil program. The
former was an everyday burden to the average Iraqi. The
latter, which provided that 25 percent of the oil
revenue would go as reparation to Kuwait, 13 percent to
northern Iraq and only 57 percent to the rest of the
country, was perceived as a major injustice.
That Saddam was responsible for the embargo and
that he and his associates were siphoning off a good
part of the food for oil revenue was either overlooked
or obscured by Saddam's propaganda machine. Ultimately,
it was Saddam's security that ensured that a resentful
but cowed population would not expose the weapons
inspectors to hostile acts.
When the UN returned
to Baghdad after Saddam's fall it chose at its
headquarters the Canal hotel. Both cosmetically and in
terms of security it proved a disastrous choice. The
hotel had been the previous headquarters of the weapons
inspectors and thus stood for everything the Iraqis
detested in the UN.
In terms of security, it was
a nightmare, standing in an open area next to a major
highway. While New York had delegated on the spot some
15 security offices, these were reported as spending
most of their time allocating helmets and flak vests to
the staff rather than addressing the issue of the
security of the building as such.
UN staff
monitoring was another neglected issue. Initially the UN
had set a ceiling of 75 staff members for Baghdad. With
every UN agency rushing in staff to show the flag, there
could have been some 350 officers. The organization then
back paddled and increased the ceiling of its staff to
250, albeit without keeping a close track of those who
were arriving and leaving.
While car bombs are
among the most lethal tools of terrorists, they are also
among the easiest to counter when there is space
available to erect a barrier between the bomb and its
target. This simple truth obviously escaped the UN
security "experts". Thus, while the front and back of
the Canal hotel were reasonably monitored, the sides
were unprotected, and the truck bomb that killed Vieira
de Mello encountered no obstacle in parking below his
office windows 10 meters away from his building.
While the question as to who should have ensured
the security of the hotel will probably never be
clarified - the UN claiming, albeit weekly, that it was
a US responsibility, and the Americans claiming that
they were never formally asked - there is only one word
that qualifies the situation, and it is negligence.
There were indeed some American units covering
the front of the hotel and the nearby access roads, but
in small numbers. What some UN staff suspect is that the
organization was agreeable to some degree of
American-provided security, but did not want to give the
impression that it was operating from an
American-secured fortress. Ultimately, what it sought
was the best of both worlds, that is to say, security
without the stigma of having Americans ensuring it. This
was a commodity that did not exist in Baghdad.
Ultimately, it got the worst of both worlds.
The
choice of Vieira de Mello as special UN representative
for Iraq also raised questions. That he was the best of
the best is unquestioned. However, at the time of his
assignment he was also UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights, a full time job to say the least. With the US
pushing for the nomination of Vieira de Mello to Iraq
and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who wanted to give
the job to a more conventional political personality,
vacillating, it was finally agreed that Vieira de Mello,
who did not want the job in the first place, would go
for four months, a compromise between the requirements
of his post at Human Rights and the demands of
Washington. The compromise left unanswered the question
as to why, among the dozens of glitterati who roam the
corridors of power at the UN in New York, it was not
possible to find a single full time candidate for the
job.
One week after the assassination the Quds
press agency distributed a statement by the al-Masri
brigade, which is known to be close to al-Qaeda, in
which it claimed responsibility for the attack. While
the origin and veracity of the statement could not be
verified, it sent shudders through the UN system. A
ceremony to honor Vieira de Mello in Kabul was postponed
by one week and the UN guards at the European office of
the organization in Geneva took to wearing side arms.
The al-Masri statement was both a justification
of the attack and a call to arms against the
organization. The UN was accused of being a "stick used
by the US" and of "giving legitimacy" to Washington. As
for Vieira de Mello, he was accused by name of
"polishing the image of the US" in Kosovo, Lebanon and
Iraq and of "carving up East Timor". Last but not least,
the location of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in the
Canal hotel was underlined for its symbolic meaning,
real or imagined.
Though past resentment of the
UN in Iraq might have facilitated the organizing of the
attack, it was clear from the statement that the killing
of Vieira de Mello carried a political message, and
benefited from international complicities, a belief
shared by many in the UN.
While Vieira de Mello
had never disguised the fact that he was opposed to the
US invasion of Iraq, he was neither a doctrinaire nor,
two PhDs notwithstanding, an abstract intellectual.
Thus, once saddled with a mission, he sought to make the
best of what he viewed as a disaster and spent all his
energy trying to coax the American occupation
authorities into shifting power to local Iraqis and thus
pave the way for a return to Iraqi sovereignty.
The creation of the Provisional Council was very
much of his doing and his efforts to convince the
countries of the region to give some recognition to the
council gave him a degree of visibility, which proved to
be fatal. Thus, assassinating him fulfilled three
objectives. It demonstrated that the Americans could not
ensure security in Baghdad, it sought to derail the
beginning of a normalization process. and it proved a
major setback to an international presence in Iraq.
Better security might not have saved Vieira de Mello,
but UN negligence regarding the security of its field
staff certainly made the endeavor easier to carry out.
Following the assassination, the UN has set up
an internal inquiry into the overall issue of the
security of its staff in Baghdad. Many UN field staff
offers believe that the inquiry will be a bureaucratic
whitewash and that, unless an independent commission of
experts is set up which can not only identify
deficiencies but also impose retribution for those
responsible for negligence at all levels, business as
usual will prevail.
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