In the spring of 2000, Kofi Annan entrusted Lakhdar Brahimi, his current special envoy in Iraq, with conducting a wide report into improving UN peacekeeping operations. Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, pulled no punches. In his report he outlined three main issues. First, the UN should not accept unclear mandates. Second, the UN was not functioning as a meritocracy: staff were hired, assigned and promoted on the basis of personal and political contacts rather than on ability. Third, as a result of the above, a small number of outstanding officers were given "unreasonable workloads" to cover the shortcomings of the others. Brahimi concluded that these issues, if not addressed, would make any "lasting reform of the UN impossible."
The Brahimi report was lavishly praised and then forgotten. Three years later, the Baghdad bomb - which killed 23 staff, including UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello - and the inquiry into the bombing that followed confirmed most of the deficiencies Brahimi had identified.
After the fall of Saddam, most of the relevant political actors concluded that some sort of UN presence in Iraq was desirable. The UN was desperate to reaffirm its relevance. For the US, a UN presence, albeit not one with a dominant role, was seen as providing a veneer of legitimacy for the occupation. And several countries which had been instrumental in denying UN endorsement for the US invasion did not wish to aggravate further their already strained relations with the US and thus did not raise objections to a UN role post-invasion.
As a result, the UN security council adopted resolution 1483 on 22nd May 2003. This was an exercise in obfuscation. It required Kofi Annan to appoint a special representative for Iraq who would be given three tasks: co-ord-inating UN activities within the UN system (the activities were not defined); directing separate UN humanitarian activities "in co-ordination with the Authority" [the occupying powers]; and working "intensively" with "the Authority" and "others concerned" to establish "national institutions" and help to create an Iraqi interim administration. What working "intensively" meant was undefined.
As long as the UN had only a humanitarian role in Iraq, it was reasonable to assume that it would not become a target. But once it became involved in political issues, it came into conflict with those forces opposed to any stabilisation after the US invasion.
On 2nd June, following the adoption of resolution 1483, Kofi Annan acted with uncommon speed and dispatched his special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, to Baghdad. In the weeks that followed, every UN agency started pouring staff into Iraq. Initially the UN had set a ceiling of 75 staff in Iraq at any one time, but by last summer the number reportedly exceeded 350.
Vieira de Mello was aware that, having stepped into the political arena, both he and the UN were now a target. However, neither Kofi Annan nor the UN steering committee on Iraq - headed by Annan's deputy, Louise Fréchette, the former deputy defence minister of Canada - appeared to be aware of the UN's predicament.
On 19th August 2003, disaster struck. In mid-afternoon a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with several hundred kilos of explosives up to the section of the UN building in Baghdad where Vieira de Mello and his staff had their offices, and detonated it. Pandemonium followed. Rescue efforts were haphazard and the UN did not even know the identity of all of its people in Baghdad.
As the UN pulled out from Iraq, questions were raised. Should the UN have been in Baghdad at all? Had an attack been foreseen and had contingency plans been laid? Had security precautions been taken? Who in the UN was responsible for what?
To address the concerns raised by the single most devastating attack against the UN since it was created in 1945, Kofi Annan appointed Martti Ahtisaari, the plain-speaking former president of Finland, to head a panel of inquiry.
On 20th October 2003, Ahtisaari released his report. It was a damning indictment not only of the UN security system but also of the way that Kofi Annan ran his shop. Among the deficiencies Ahtisaari identified were: lack of proper threat assessment "in the field and at headquarters," lack of "qualified personnel," and lack of "attention by the UN management to security issues."
The organisation is used to criticism from so-called "UN haters," but it has seldom met such a reprimand from a figure with the stature of Ahtisaari, a man well disposed towards the UN.
To draw some more specific lessons from the tragedy, Kofi Annan could have used the UN office of internal oversight. Why he chose to disregard this unit and announce the creation of yet another panel of inquiry - the Iraq accountability panel - was never explained. The man he handpicked to head this panel was a retired Austrian UN staff member, Gerald Walzer. The nomination of Walzer to head the panel was greeted with disbelief by many UN staff. Unlike such figures as Brahimi and Ahtisaari, Walzer was a UN machine man.
By an odd coincidence, Walzer and Vieira de Mello came from the same UN burrow. Both had their base in the UN refugee agency, which both had joined young. Both were hard-working, but otherwise were chalk and cheese.
Walzer joined the UNHCR at the age of 19 as a finance clerk. Soft-spoken and meticulous, his world was one of figures and regulations, financial rules and balance sheets. Slowly but steadily he worked his way up the ladder as the reliable administrator on whom his superiors could count.
The Brazilian Vieira de Mello joined UNHCR at the age of 21 with an MA in philosophy from the University of Paris. He subsequently achieved the top French academic distinction - the "state doctorate" - for a thesis on Spinoza.
Walzer was a headquarters man. Vieira de Mello, however, had served in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Lebanon, Sarajevo under siege, Cambodia and East Timor. Though cautious, he knew when to take risks; in Cambodia, as head of the repatriation operation in 1992, he would drive himself into the Khmer Rouge areas to negotiate the safe passage of the returnees. Elegant, articulate, fluent in five languages, a superb athlete, his charm belied his deep commitment to the UN and his conviction that whatever the problem there was always a solution.
Walzer was the cog that no bureaucracy can do without. Vieira de Mello was the innovator without whom no bureaucracy is ever inspired to reach out beyond the confines of convention.
The careers of the two men came to a head in 1993. Sadaka Ogata, then the UN high commissioner for refugees, was looking for a new deputy. On the advice of a working party, Vieira de Mello was approached about the position in November 1993, and was given indications that he would have the post. But on 2nd December, Ogata appointed Walzer, who at the time was financial controller. While no official reason was given, Walzer had the advantage of not challenging her intelligence. In practice, Walzer remained financial controller while Ogata continued to take all the political decisions.
However, Ogata soon realised that she had deprived herself of the talents of her most brilliant staff member, and created a new post of assistant high commissioner with the rank of assistant secretary general, to which she appointed Vieira de Mello in 1996. As deputy high commissioner, it was Walzer's job to process Vieira de Mello's promotion to a rank equivalent to his own. He did his utmost to delay the procedure, and while outwardly the relationship between the two men remained professional, the underlying tension was clear enough.
"Given their past relations," commented a UN staff member, "the least that one can say is that it was insensitive of Annan to choose Walzer to investigate the responsibilities surrounding the death of Vieira de Mello."
Vieira de Mello was, of course, one of the few "better performers" who were constantly on call to make up for the non-performance of others. In 1999, while emergency relief co-ordinator in New York, Kofi Annan sent him on a three-month mission to East Timor. He did so well that his stay was prolonged to two and a half years, during which he steered the country to independence. When Kofi Annan said he wanted to send him to Iraq, Vieira de Mello was high commissioner for human rights, and initially refused to leave his post. Finally he accepted, on the understanding that it would be a four-month mission and no more. That Vieira de Mello was ultimately Washington's choice was clear, though he had his doubts about the wisdom of the invasion and harboured serious reservations about Paul Bremer's style of government in Iraq. However, as he confided to his staff, his job was not to moralise about the invasion but to contribute to a solution.
On 3rd March 2004, Walzer submitted his report to Annan. It was initially designated as an "internal document," but eventually a summary was released, the gist of which was that negligence and lack of security awareness occurred at all levels of the bureaucracy, from New York to UN staff in Baghdad. All shared responsibility for failing to anticipate the likelihood of the attack - except Kofi Annan. Later, the UN announced that Annan had taken action (albeit rather gentle) against four middle and lower level UN staff responsible for Iraq.
Based on Walzer's description, the management of the security situation in Baghdad was one long tale of incompetence, amateurism and neglect. Yet the same could be said of any big UN operation. Even in East Timor, one of the UN's greatest successes, Vieira de Mello used to complain constantly to his intimates about the slow reaction time of the UN system.
Who was to blame? Walzer argued that all staff in Baghdad, including Vieira de Mello, had a "false sense of security." Yet according to witnesses, Vieira de Mello was intensely aware of the risks he was exposed to. And Walzer makes no reference to the fact that when Vieira de Mello arrived in Baghdad, his six bodyguards were armed only with 9mm handguns, mere peashooters by local standards. Requests for better equipment were ignored, until the UN finally shipped in six submachine guns from Bosnia, three of which did not work.
Whatever security shortcomings occurred in Baghdad, the real failure occurred at the top, in the UN secretariat in New York. It was up to New York to determine the threat level in Iraq and to communicate it to Baghdad. Following the Walzer report, Louise Fréchette did offer to resign but was refused, "given the collective nature of the failings." So why, if responsibility was "collective," were sanctions applied only at the lower end of the hierarchy? It is notable that none of those sanctioned - a Burmese, a Portuguese, a Gambian and a Jordanian - were nationals of a government with enough weight to intervene on their behalf.
The mayhem that occurred in Baghdad on 19th August was a tragedy - and one that greater security might not have prevented. But it was followed by a parody of an inquiry and a politically inspired white wash. It was the UN secretariat at its worst.
