Conversation
A First-hand Account of 19 August 2003
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A suicide car bomber destroyed the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August, killing 22 people, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The attack, which occurred at 4:45 p.m. Baghdad time, injured over 100 in what Mr. Annan denounced as an inexcusable "act of unprovoked and murderous violence".
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Salim Lone, spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq, being interviewed by CNN. Photo courtesy of CNN television
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The explosion took place beneath the windows of Mr. Vieira de Mello's office and, according to Salim Lone, who at the time was serving as the spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq, that office and those surrounding it were completely demolished. Rescuers from the United States forces worked unsuccessfully to extricate Mr. Vieira de Mello from the ruined building, which served as a base for some 300 UN personnel out of the more than 600 in Iraq.
Mr. Lone, who was injured in the attack and is due to retire from the United Nations at the end of September 2003, spoke in New York with Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle.
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"Everything sort of shattered"
On 19 August, at Sergio's request, I had drafted a statement on the killing of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana by American soldiers outside the Abu Ghraib prison. Sergio wanted me, by day's end, to expand the statement to include the high level of human insecurity in Iraq at the time, which, in effect, saved my life, since I would otherwise have attended the meeting he was chairing when the bomb struck.
For the revised statement, since Internet access was very slow in Baghdad, I had called Nejib Friji, director of the UN Information Centre in Beirut, and asked him if he could please help with a quick search on the Internet for some data on the kind of human insecurity that plagued Iraq. I also asked Reham [Al-Farra] to do some quick research on this subject. I cannot be sure about it, but I believe Reham might have gone to get some information from the Humanitarian Coordinator's office, where the blast hit hard. Which is why she died. It was her first working day there; she had arrived from the UN in New York the previous afternoon.
The bomb blast was terrifying. It seemed to encompass the whole world; it felt like the end of the world. I was sure the bomb was somewhere right behind me, but it was actually at the opposite end of the floor by Sergio's office. Everything sort of shattered in my room, and I just do not know how I escaped the huge shards of glass that flew into the room from the window behind me. Anyway, I could hardly see anything amid the soot that was everywhere, and I stumbled into the corridor. I remember thinking that a second bomb might go off soon, or that the building might collapse as happened to the World Trade Center.
So there was a high level of panic everywhere. And when we got out of the building, there were grievously wounded friends and colleagues lying on the lawn, being tended to by others not so badly hurt. Indeed, a Palestinian colleague, Marwan Ali, against every rule and every instruction went back into the building to see if anyone needed help, and found Lynn Manuel, Sergio's secretary, staggering about outside Sergio's office, and he carried her downstairs.
I myself immediately called my parents, my wife, one of our sons and my New York office to let them know that there had been this terrible bomb, but that I was okay, and then I went to Sergio's side of the building. It was cordoned off, but I was let through because I was his Spokesman, and I discovered to my horror that that was where the bomb had struck. The office, that whole part of the building, didn't exist any more, and I saw that Ghassan Salama, Sergio's senior political adviser, and Gaby Pichon, from Sergio's security detail, had climbed up the rubble and were trying to communicate with Sergio, who was very deep under the rubble. Everyone there knew they had to be prepared to hear the worst; there seemed little that anybody could do without the kind of equipment that was needed. The most awful part was when the first bodies were brought out. It was terrible.
One of those I was closest to who died was Rick [Hooper], one of our geniuses at the UN and only 41. He was just a remarkable person, totally committed to justice. He spoke fluent Arabic and was a strong opponent of occupations. He had worked for many years in Palestine and had come out to help end the current occupation. But apart from his brilliance and passion for justice, what set him apart was his ability to identify the kinds of positions the UN could adopt in the trickiest of Middle East situations. He was just an amazing man. And I had been so happy, in the period before I myself left for Iraq, that he was considering going as well. I told him, "You just have to come, we need you there, we really need you there". So he did come out, and he was killed.
"Security was terrible for everyone"
It was clear from the day I arrived that things in Iraq were much worse than I had thought-in every way, particularly security-wise. I had no worries about going even though I knew the situation was bad. When you know there is an important mission to perform, you go.
Ours was the first civilian plane to land in Baghdad at the newly reopened airport. And from there to the UN headquarters, for most of the way you saw literally no Iraqis anywhere, but lots of tanks and Humvees. I subsequently discovered that that road is a particularly dangerous one, but it was like a ghost town. You know, just two days earlier, two staff in UN cars had been targeted and killed, and another one with the ICRC. Two were badly wounded. So it became clear that that the UN was being targeted. But of course the security situation was terrible for everyone, for the Iraqis in particular. Plus, there were rapes, criminal murders, apart from the political murders, kidnappings, limited electricity for air conditioners in 125o F temperatures, limited clean water-it was a bad scene. And it kept getting worse from the day we arrived-more violence, more attacks on US and British troops, more dead. And the young coalition soldiers in Baghdad were under severe stress.
"Message was not getting across"
As the Director of Communications for Sergio, I had called a meeting of the other information officers of UN agencies. They had talked to as many Iraqis and Arabs as they could to get a feeling for what the situation was, and I discovered right away that for most ordinary Iraqis the UN and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were seen as one. They didn't distinguish between the two.
It is not that they hated the UN: they were saying the UN should be helping them, that it should not be working with the Coalition. Those of us who were able to respond to this would say that we were only there because of the need to try to end the military control as soon as possible, as Kofi Annan and Sergio had repeatedly said.
But on the whole, that message was not getting across very well, in significant part because the communications environment is a very confounding one in Iraq. First, Iraqis are not used to a free media, and basically the media just reported what the Government was saying and doing. There is no level of trust, of credibility, as far as the media is concerned. And in the absence of that, and given the very terrible history that Iraqis have lived, especially since the invasion of Kuwait and after, they are inclined to believe the worst. They live by the rumour mill, and in their experience they feel the worst rumours are usually the correct ones.
So there is no easy way to communicate with the Iraqis. There is the Iraqi media network that the CPA runs. There is a real passion for the free press, in the sense that there are lots of new newspapers-most of them very strongly pushing a particular line. Therefore, they don't have credibility except among those who follow that particular line. So how to communicate in that environment was a very tough task.
But certainly, Sergio began doing more and more interviews and appearances on the Arab networks-Al-Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Abu Dhabi TV, LBC (the Lebanese TV), Al-Alam. But we were making a lot of headway that way, and so Sergio was going to begin a whole series of direct outreach meetings and gatherings with Iraqi organizations-not just the political leaderships but groups interested in human rights, groups working for women and youth, groups engaged in art, groups like that. We thought if we could convince the ordinary Iraqis of the UN commitment to Iraq, this would deter the extremists who were targeting the UN and other innocent civilians. In hindsight, I can say that we were grasping at straws.
Given the viciousness of the attack, I don't see what could have deterred it. It was a difficult role for the UN and, you know, what the UN was being asked to do in this phase was not easy to implement. It was a very, very tough assignment for Sergio. And, as I said, he had made headway to begin with, but it was getting harder and harder because the UN could not point beyond the Iraqi Governing Council to concrete events and steps that showed that military control was going to end soon, that jobs and security and services were being restored. The other problem was that most UN staff, feeling the tension in the city and the resentments of even ordinary Iraqis, leave alone the extremist threats, felt that there were too many international professionals in Baghdad. They were really worried that there would be a big attack.
"Beginning a new career"
Even before Iraq, I felt that the great challenge facing the world is this so-called "clash of civilizations". The feeling on both sides, the West as well as Muslims, is that there is a clash. So I had wanted, after my UN career, to begin a new one in which I would try to make my small contribution to help improve relations between Islam and the West, primarily by trying to present a more accurate picture of Muslims and Islam in the West. That was what I was I planning to do long before I went to Iraq. But now, after this terrible atrocity against the United Nations, I feel doubly or triply or quadruply committed to doing something in that area. How I'll do it I'm not sure yet.
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