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Last Updated:Wednesday, August 20, 2003. 9:48am (AEST)
'No-one we could less spare' - Sergio Vieira de MelloSergio Vieira de Mello, the top United Nations envoy to Iraq who was killed by a bomb blast last night, was a tough but debonair Brazilian who had been dispatched on some of the UN's most difficult missions. Mr Vieira de Mello, 55, was trapped under rubble and died after a suspected suicide bomb blast in Baghdad. He was no stranger during his 33-year UN career to situations where his life and those of colleagues with him on peace missions around the globe was at best at risk and at worst in extreme peril. "The United Nations presence in Iraq remains vulnerable to any who would seek to target our organisation," he had told the Security Council in July in a report on the first two months of the challenging mission. While heading the widely-hailed operation that took East Timor to free elections and full independence in 2002, he kept a notice in his office in Dili, the capital, reading: "Please leave your guns outside." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since September, Mr Vieira de Mello was the immediate choice of secretary-general Kofi Annan to take on the Iraqi job in May after the controversial US-British invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. The choice was also approved by Washington, despite clear disapproval among top UN officials of the attack on Iraq. Bitter blowMr Annan called Mr Vieira de Mello's death "a bitter blow for the United Nations and for me personally". "The death of any colleague is hard to bear but I could think of no-one we could less spare," Mr Annan said in a statement. The chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, worked with Mr Viera De Mello in East Timor and says he is deeply saddened. "I think I speak on behalf of thousands of young men and women in the Australian Defence Force who know Sergio Viera de Mello from his tremendous mission of peace in East Timor," General Cosgrove said. "I know the East Timorese people today too, man and woman, will be in mourning." Salim Lone, the UN spokesman in Baghdad, said: "There is no other person in the UN who is handed such tough crises. Sergio Vieira de Mello was one great person who was here to try to bring an end to the tragedy of Iraq forever." Mr Vieira de Mello was one of the UN's most widely recognised officials. He had insisted his Iraq assignment be for just four months so he could hold on to the human rights post in Geneva. RespectAfter arriving in Baghdad, he had quickly established an authoritative presence and won the respect of the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, despite tension between Washington and the UN secretariat over the Iraq war. Nancy Soderberg, a former US ambassador to the UN, said: "He could deal with kings and diplomats and ordinary refugees with the same enthusiasm and sense of respect." Mr Vieira de Mello's deputy as human rights commissioner, Bertrand Ramcharand, said his boss "was one of the finest performers in the UN". Diplomats say he was among front-runners to succeed the secretary-general. Mr Vieira de Mello, born in Rio de Janeiro, started work in the UN system in 1969 as a junior publications editor with the UNHCR refugee agency in Geneva. But he soon came to grips with the problems of countries shattered by war. Over more than two decades with the UNHCR and on secondment, he served as a field officer in a devastated Bangladesh after its war of separation from Pakistan and in civil war zones in Sudan, Mozambique and Lebanon. Moving up through the ranks of the UNHCR, he was consigned to desk jobs running relief operations from Geneva during much of the 1980s - including crises in the Great Lakes region of central Africa and the exodus of Albanians from the country after the collapse of communism in 1991. In 1993, he was dispatched to Bosnia as a war raged between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, and took charge of civil affairs for the UN Protection Force. In 1996, he became assistant high commissioner for refugees. Two years later, Mr Annan moved him to New York to become under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and then sent him briefly to the Serbian province of Kosovo before giving him his biggest task - building the new Asian nation of East Timor. The tennis-loving Mr Vieira de Mello played a vital role in bringing the territory, which had been left an economic and social wreck after the violence that accompanied Indonesian withdrawal, to full independence by 2002. Mr Vieira de Mello was married but separated from his wife, and is survived by two sons. -- Reuters
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