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Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN Photo
| "If words could bring them back", a colleague said sadly the other day, "22 people would be alive today." She was referring to the outpouring of emotional support that flooded the United Nations in the wake of the horrific truck bombing at the UN Baghdad headquarters building on 19 August. To those of us who had lost friends and co-workers amidst the devastation, the words of sympathy were a welcome acknowledgment of our grief, and a richly deserved tribute to the selfless courage of those who had gone half a world away from their homes to die in the service of their fellow human beings. But ultimately, they were just words. They could never replace the lives that had been taken away. And they could never bring them back.
I lost many friends and colleagues amidst the rubble that tragic Tuesday. But one loss has continued to haunt my waking days and restless nights, and that is of a friend I had cherished throughout the 25 years of my United Nations career—the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The tributes that have appeared in the world press in the wake of Sergio's death have portrayed him well, as the most brilliant and most widely experienced of the remarkable officials who have served the United Nations in trouble spot after trouble spot. But even the television footage of him could not fully capture the extent to which Sergio, killed in his prime at 55, was full of life, and of all the qualities that make life glow. His charisma was of the kind that lit up a room as soon as he entered it. He was often described as charming, but there was neither arrogance nor superficiality about his charm. His manner was open and friendly; he spoke with sincerity and directness, yet knew how not to offend; he laughed easily, inveigling those around him into the shared complicity of his humour. He was an outstanding listener, establishing a close rapport with strangers in a matter of minutes. His warmth was genuine: he embraced his fellow human beings whole, whether individually or collectively, and his gregariousness came infused with a tangible affection. He was generous to a fault: invite him to dinner and he would come proffering a box of chocolates the size of the coffee table. Many of us he called his brothers, and there is no doubt at all that he meant it, sweeping us into a fraternity of shared commitment to the ideals of the Organization to which he devoted his entire adult life.
Sergio joined the United Nations in 1969 at 21, on the staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (where I joined him nine years later). From very early on he was marked as a man of exceptional ability in an organization full of high achievers. He had all the skills of the international diplomat—grace and elegance, self-confidence in unfamiliar situations, a talent for communicating easily across cultural barriers, an instinctive respect for other points of view, and a remarkable fluency in several languages.
But he was above all what the French call un homme de terrain—a man of the field, a man of action.
The first major refugee crisis on which he cut his teeth was the influx of 10 million East Bengali refugees into India in 1971—the largest refugee exodus known to humanity. Sergio went on to serve the refugee cause in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. But though refugee work was a passion, he was too restless a spirit to be confined by any single endeavour. He had stints in peacekeeping, in Lebanon and later in the former Yugoslavia (at a time when I worked on the same issue at UN Headquarters in New York)—both situations in which he amply demonstrated both his courage and his excellent political judgement. To get him back to UNHCR headquarters, the United Nations invented a job for him that had not existed before: Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees. But soon thereafter, he was promoted by Kofi Annan to Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs in New York.
Coordinating humanitarian action was never going to be, for Sergio, a long-term alternative to conducting humanitarian action. When the United Nations was asked, at 72 hours' notice, to take over the civil administration of Kosovo, Sergio it was who was sent down there to set up the operation. He had no sooner returned to the tranquillity of New York than a bigger challenge loomed—running the newly-liberated land of East Timor during the troubled period after the departure of the Indonesians. He was an outstanding success: no territory could have had a more capable, more compassionate viceroy to guide it to independence. Sergio's accomplishments were crowned with his appointment as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had done the job for only seven months when the emergency summons came again, to Iraq. This time he took it on reluctantly. He was looking forward to the more settled life he was simply not destined to have.
When he left for Iraq, we had an e-mail exchange that will remain forever seared in my memory. During the war he had made some statements in a television interview that rankled some Muslim friends of mine. Knowing Sergio as I did, I sent him one friend's e-mail, even though it was harshly critical of him. Sergio replied to my friend with such extraordinary receptivity and honesty that the critic (an Iranian) was instantly disarmed. He wrote to Sergio saying, "May the God of Abraham protect you in Iraq." I added, only half-jocularly, "In addition to the God of Abraham, may the 333,000 Hindu gods watch over you, my friend". Sergio's reply was typical. "Thank you, my brother", he wrote. "I will need every one of the 333,000 to keep me safe." Sadly, not one of them, it seems, was listening.
—Shashi Tharoor is United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
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