Global Policy Forum

By Steven Erlanger

One, a Brazilian, looked like Hollywood's notion of a diplomat — slender, graying, elegant, with a touch of an accent in the many languages he spoke. One, an Egyptian, was a hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-thinking specialist in managing chaos.

Both died on Tuesday in Baghdad, crushed under the rubble of the Canal Hotel, the makeshift headquarters of the United Nations in Iraq. Over the years, both had been transformed, in that strange and careful dance of journalists and sources, into cherished friends of mine. The Brazilian, Sergio Vieira de Mello, 55, and the Egyptian, Nadia Younes, 57, were career employees of that United Nations bureaucracy cheerfully despised by so many Americans. Yet they were in Baghdad, very reluctantly, in the service of a war the United Nations Security Council refused to sanction, trying to organize the post-war mess and help the Americans and the British create a new, democratic life for Iraqis. They were, along with two dozen other United Nations workers and international aid specialists, victims of an organized effort to drive the Americans and the other "infidels" out of Iraq.

I knew both for a long time. They served in some of the world's least salubrious places, where local need and geopolitics intersected. They worked to bring a modicum of peace and comfort to the afflicted, a measure of sense to the overlords, a dose of justice to the victims. But only a measure — they were realists, even cynics, about what could be done in the deep, dusty fissures of national struggle and ethnic conflict.

They were critics of governments and of their own politicized bureaucracy, amusing about the obsessions of the Security Council and the reluctance of member countries to pay for the adventures they so blithely undertook.

Sergio and Nadia took life as it found them, and tried to improve it for others. In that sense, they did believe in something: international law, a form of slow amelioration, a sense that a post-cold war world could have a less violent and rapacious future. I met Sergio in Southeast Asia, soon after I became Bangkok bureau chief for this newspaper in 1988. He was working for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, as he had done since 1969, and was deeply engaged in both the problem of the Vietnamese boat people, who were fleeing the oppression and poverty of their homeland for a dream of America, and the enormous emotional and social scars of the Pol Pot years in Cambodia.

It was in Southeast Asia then that I began to perceive the increasing influence of the United Nations and its cousins, the nongovernmental organizations — human-rights advocates, church groups, foundations and professional aid workers — filling the gaps in ravaged places where shrinking foreign-aid budgets did not reach. Southeast Asia created its own network of obsessives and fanatics and friends, like the Balkans, where Sergio also served.

When Slobodan Milosevic finally capitulated to NATO's bombing campaign in 1999 and pulled Serbian army and police out of the province of Kosovo, Sergio was sent in by Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, to run the place.

I was already in Pristina, Kosovo's dreary capital, before NATO troops arrived, having secured myself a "suite" in the Grand Hotel, which we regarded as a five-star establishment — four of them dead, the last blinking. The place was full of angry Serbs, some guilty, many drunk, most of them armed. I gave Sergio his first bed in "liberated" Kosovo, on a cheap couch covered with pink nylon upholstery, when he arrived as the world's plenipotentiary.

The United Nations hadn't a plan: the Americans and British had wanted the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to run Kosovo, only hadn't won the war decisively enough to achieve that, and Mr. Milosevic was able to throw the future of Kosovo into the hands of the United Nations Security Council, where Serbia had allies. So Sergio was himself thrown into Pristina, into the confusion, to try to create the semblance of an administration.

But he knew he would never get to keep the job, which he would have done wonderfully. He was a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian. Kosovo is, after a fashion, Europe. He knew the politics of the United Nations and the Security Council. He was sure the job would go to a Frenchman. And so it did, to Bernard Kouchner, the foreign aid activist and former health minister of France, and Sergio was later given another dusty, broken hellhole to run — East Timor, once colonized by the Portuguese and then the Indonesians.

With Mr. Kouchner came Nadia Younes, the French-speaking, American-educated, Puccini-loving Egyptian, whom Kofi Annan trusted to keep the emotional Mr. Kouchner on line and on course. A former chief of protocol for the United Nations, she was anything but prim.

In long conversations over neat whiskey, marked by scores of cigarettes, sometimes in a cold, blacked-out Kosovo, even in the United Nations headquarters that was once the seat of Belgrade's administration in Pristina, Nadia was, above all, honest about what was possible and what was not.

Blunt, refreshingly cynical, she spoke openly about the realities of Kosovo: the criminality of the Kosovo Liberation Army; the fraud of its "transformation" into a supposedly disarmed civilian conservation corps; the hapless optimism of the Clinton administration; the endless reluctance of the Security Council to finance its responsibilities in Kosovo; the wounded, malign nationalism of the local Serbs; the reverse ethnic cleansing of the province, with most Serbs and Roma and even Muslim, non-Albanian minorities, like the Gorani, pushed out by the ethnic Albanians; the lawlessness of the province, with 80-year-old women murdered in their apartments and no one arrested; the fecklessness of much of the United Nations' own initial efforts.

So why did she persist? Because she thought it mattered. Because she was horrified by what had come before, under Mr. Milosevic. Because it was vital to her that the United Nations not be seen to fail. Nadia would often have dinner with Mr. Kouchner and French-speaking staff and visitors; Mr. Kouchner is a deft hand at spaghetti. The conversation was extremely funny, especially about the habits and proclivities of the American, British, German and Italian soldiers and diplomats who made up KFOR, the NATO-led army that patrolled the province and generally worked to avoid confrontation with anyone. Later, after I published a long, frank interview with the head of the Kosovo office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Dennis McNamara, the reaction from United Nations headquarters was appalled. Nadia was asked to refute the article. She couldn't, she told her bosses; all the criticisms were true.

Sergio did such a good job in East Timor that in September of last year, Mr. Annan made him the high commissioner for human rights in Geneva. But the Bush administration, impressed by his professionalism and his acuity, wanted him for post-war Iraq, as Mr. Annan's special representative. Some saw him as Mr. Annan's successor.

Sergio did not want to go to Baghdad. He didn't support the unsanctioned war; he was anxious about the post-war climate; he had personal commitments. We exchanged a number of e-mails about the possibility of his taking the job, and nearly until the day it was announced, and despite my warning to him that he would find himself forced to take the job, he refused to believe he would have to do it. "I can't seriously drop my current (eight-month-old) job and go off on another adventure," he wrote me. "Moreover, the mandate, as far as I can tell, does not look right to me."

But he finally did agree to go, understanding the importance of the task, the need to help the Anglo-Saxons finish what they started in Iraq. He brought Nadia to Baghdad to be his chief of staff. The day he was named, on May 27, he e-mailed me. "I should always believe journalists!" he said, remembering my warning. "But it's only for four months." He looked forward to a drink in my new apartment, but he was very troubled.

He ended: "All the very best, my friend, and please pray for me." Sergio and Nadia lived lives of sacrifice and substance. Their deaths both shame and mock the armchair warriors, the television talk-show mudwrestlers, the pontificators, the manipulators and the simplifiers. Their deaths are a reminder that imperium, no matter how benign its intent, is never altruistic, and calls forth its own responses. And their lives are a reminder that it is just possible to do some small good in this rank, sorry, blood-drenched world.

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