Relief operations in Somalia in 1997–1998 took priority over the security of those hired to carry out those operations. To my surprise, I discovered that this policy had not changed five years later. The bombing of the UN compound and loss of life in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, was the direct result of this negligent attitude.
Field workers today are briefed and trained to protect themselves and survive the unexpected. This is an improvement. However, it means little if at the top the policy on security of staff is guided by geopolitical pressures, outside interests, and a woeful lack of proper assessment of the conditions on the ground. In the summer of 2003, there were few in the United Nations and in the Coalition of the Willing who did not know that the UN compound and its staff were targets. Indeed, despite warnings of suicide attacks, security at the compound was considered by those who worked there to be a joke and, in one case, an invitation to catastrophe.
Backed by U.S.-led Coalition forces and secure with the shield of neutrality of the United Nations, one could be forgiven for feeling that Iraq was not much more dangerous than any other assignment. However, in spite of the presence of the military, these relief workers were as unprotected, as alone, and as isolated as we were in Somalia. After the Just-in-Time training in Basra, I had felt safer, not because of what I learned but because I was told that it was now official UN policy that the safety of its personnel was paramount, and in some cases even more important than the operation itself. However, that policy became subverted to Coalition interests; despite the repeated warnings, threats, and intelligence that an attack was likely, the UN, under pressure from its main donor, continued to place its staff unnecessarily at risk.
Baghdad was a war zone, yet the city was classified as Phase Four, which enabled the UN security boss in New York to permit international staff “directly concerned with emergency or humanitarian operations or security matters” to remain. A pretty wide brush, since most of the internationals serving in Iraq were directly concerned with humanitarian operations. The next category, Phase Five, on the other hand, required all internationals to leave and had to be approved by the secretary-general.
(Somalia was also, curiously, classified as Phase Four. Had it been Phase Five, they would not have created the flood-relief program. Kismayo was incontrovertibly Phase Five, and it was finally evacuated two months later during the buildup of militia forces prior to the final battle for the city.)
Had the UN secretary-general declared Baghdad as Phase Five, the international staff would have been evacuated out of country and operations would have been maintained by local employees of the UN. However, to evacuate would have been an admission that Iraq was more dangerous after the liberation by Coalition forces than before—a further embarrassment in light of the failure of Washington and London to find weapons of mass destruction or bona fide al Qaeda connections to the Saddam regime. Such lumpen acquiescence was so set in stone that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan refused to close down UN operations even after the bombing and the death of many of his staff. It was not until after a second bombing and further loss of life that he decided finally that it was too dangerous for internationals to remain in Iraq, no matter what the Coalition claimed in the daily Pentagon briefings.
It was not difficult to imagine history repeating itself: Baghdad reminded many of the conditions in Mogadishu in 1993 when the bodies of American soldiers were dragged through the streets by young militia and frenzied locals. (Indeed, in March 2004, four civilian American contractors were killed in Fallujah near Baghdad, their charred and mutilated bodies dragged through the streets and strung up on a bridge.) So concerned was Mick Lorentzen, chief of security at WFP headquarters in Rome, that immediately upon his return from Iraq, he fired off an e-mail to UN security officers worldwide that warned Iraq “is deteriorating and has all the hallmarks of another Somalia.” The urgency of the warning was prescient. The same explosive ingredients found in Somalia were creating a cocktail for anarchy in Iraq: Pockets of lawlessness were spreading across the country; foreigners filtered across the Iranian and Syrian borders intent on bagging an American or British soldier; unchecked looting was widespread, and trucks delivering humanitarian supplies were routinely looted and hijacked. Jobs were scarce; electricity, water, and sewage disposal were less available than during the war itself.
Many Iraqis who earlier had welcomed the Coalition forces were beginning to admit—at first reluctantly, then louder in demonstration—that they were better off under the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein than they were in the hands of the bungling and ineffective Coalition Provisional Authority, the interim administration created by Washington. One young father in Basra had told me it was better to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night from a Baathist henchman than a future of no electricity, no water, no jobs, and, above all, no security from gangs of looters that swept through the darkened neighborhoods. This reminded me of Yusuf’s claim that a dictator was better than anarchy. Iraq, once a modern secular country, looked like it would join Somalia back in the Stone Age.
* * *
The WFP headquarters in Baghdad were located in the UN compound, the former Canal Hotel; during Saddam’s reign, this sprawling complex had housed UN weapons inspectors and the WFP offices that administered the Oil-for-Food Program. As invading American forces gathered on the outskirts of the city, looters gutted the place. After remodeling and repainting the building in UN colors, the WFP, WHO, Unicef, mine-clearance teams, and other agencies returned.
When I first arrived, the UN compound was not a Kismayo fortress, but it would not be long before it was to become one—at least to all outside appearances. The entire property was ringed with a wall of shipping containers, which we were told was protection of a sort against car bombs. Following increasing guerrilla attacks against the Coalition forces, a cement-block wall, topped by rolled concertina wire, was hastily erected on the highway side.
The relief workers slept in large air-conditioned refugee tents laid out in rows in the hotel parking lot, a tent city created by the Swedish Rescue Service Agency with Ikea efficiency and precision. You checked in with the Swedes like at any hotel and were handed a plan of the area. Showers, portable toilets, and a tent with weights and a cycling machine had been set up in the back near a barbecue grill. A makeshift men’s room, with urinal crafted from an inverted water jug (a target large enough for several beery long shots), opened out onto the field that led to Sadr City, a center of anti-Coalition opposition. Between a hostile Iraq and us was a thin chain-link fence. One morning at daybreak, I went to relieve myself, and rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I looked up at an Iraqi youth with a Kalashnikov passing by. He was as startled as I was and we stood facing each other, a weapon in his hand, a weapon in mine. He looked down, grinned, then walked on. It was not lost on us that despite the impressive fortifications at the front, anyone with a mind to take down a few UN staffers, or to check out the size of non-Arab penises, could casually walk across the field and pop us off one by one through the wire fence. Or slip an RPG through the fence and lay waste to our tent city. (Indeed, so lax was security that an NGO staffer entered the UN compound by merely showing the guards her New York driver’s license.)
Under the stars of a gritty Baghdad night, humanitarian workers gathered around the barbecue grill and a cooler of beer at the far end of the tents. Most never left the compound; no staff was allowed outside the gates on foot. A few beers and some hamburgers on the grill after their ten-hour day was all the recreation they could expect in this war.
It had been a depressing twenty-four hours. I had just returned from a briefing of security officers—all ex-combat veterans—assigned to various UN agencies and NGOs. Each reported information they had about the security situation nationwide and in Baghdad. It was a gruesome picture, which as the days passed only got worse: There were an average of ten attacks a day against Coalition forces in the city; a convoy of six vehicles of a British news crew was attacked that morning by a gang driving pickup trucks and a silver Mercedes; a Red Cross helicopter was fired at near Hella. More macabre was the latest intel that the Fedayeen were capturing cats and dogs, disemboweling them, and stuffing them with explosive devices. The animals, placed along the street as roadkill, were detonated remotely when convoys passed. There was some talk that resistance forces soon would increase their attacks on the softest targets: humanitarian agencies and their staffs. It was one thing to be well-armed soldiers on an ill-defined mission, cleaning up the chaos that they themselves had created by invasion and occupation. It was quite another to be an unarmed relief worker caught in the crossfire.
The previous night, over the whir of air conditioners, the tent city had been rocked by the sound of an explosion. An American convoy was being ambushed at the underpass down the road; one soldier was killed and three wounded. We could sleep around the shooting, the helicopter gunships chasing the attackers back into Sadr City, but it didn’t improve our disposition to awaken to a blue-black sky that morning; sandstorms had been predicted, but there was something else in the air. A mysterious black pall covered us like a shroud; there was a taste of sulfur in the air. During the night, two hundred fifty kilometers to the northwest, saboteurs had blown up the crude-oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Baghdad’s Doura Refinery.
I found myself wondering once again, as I had done so often in Kismayo, what it would take to shut down the UN humanitarian operations. How dangerous does it have to get before relief workers are told that it is too dangerous and they should prepare to withdraw? The decision to terminate any humanitarian mission before its time, while refugees are being relocated, the starving fed, the injured and sick healed, is not one that is reached without careful consideration. In many remote and lonely outposts—Somalia, Burundi, Afghanistan—wherever aid workers are stationed, the decision to evacuate must be made at a moment’s notice, on the spot, when and where the bullets fly, not eventually through the chain of command that lands at a desk thousands of miles away. In 1998, a year of unprecedented killing of World Food Program field staff, someone somewhere finally realized that there was not much guidance in the manuals about when and how to evacuate. Security for the WFP had come a long way. There was, after all, the Just-in-Time training.
At our tent-city barbecue, a laptop connected to external speakers fed us sounds of ancient Madonna, and a French couple danced nearby. None at the beer cooler was a stranger to combat areas. Most had served in places like Kosovo, Afghanistan, Liberia, Angola, and Sudan. From nations as unconnected as Ecuador, Greece, Ghana, Croatia, Mozambique, the Netherlands, the U.S., and the UK, the lingua franca was English, but inevitably the French spoke mostly to the French, the Swedes to the Swedes and the Americans, the British and the Australians to anybody with a beer in his hand. Elizabeth once worked for a New York literary agency, Jane from Melbourne had been a schoolteacher, Pierre, a Belgian, was a Unicef security officer recently returned from Afghanistan, Anders, from the Swedish Coast Guard, had just come in from Sierra Leone, Jim, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, had been in charge of security for Unicef in Sudan.
This evening the laughter came a little too easily and we made jokes about things that were not so funny. It reminded me of that night in Nairobi. Then we laughed from fear, from the unknown. In Baghdad, it could be said, we laughed more just to be heard over the rattle of the gunfire. But there was a baleful desperation to that laughter as well.
The talk was of shutting down the UN operations in Baghdad and getting the hell out before the Saddam Fedayeen, foreign terrorists, or simply an angry mob of locals laid siege to the compound or blocked the roads leading out of the city. Barring a catastrophic event, however, abandoning the fort would come only in stages. Noncritical and clerical staff would be the first to leave, then those involved in organizing distribution of relief supplies, and then, finally, those needed to close down and lock up.
The lamps under a large umbrella and table provided the only light. At the beer cooler and over the grill, we were little more than shadows.
There was a short burst of gunfire.
“That keeps the juices flowing,” I said, watching a lone figure, towel around his waist, drift past us toward the showers.
“The adrenaline never stops in this place.” The speaker was Jane, a pert thirty-something Australian. Her job was in programming, but that was a misnomer, for she, together with the security officers, was the first in and last out of a country, setting up the operations in complex emergencies. She had been to all of them. “I do the paperwork, I sit behind a desk, most of the time,” she said modestly. Her last assignment was in North Korea.
“Do you get out to the field?”
“Quite a bit, actually. But this posting is a cushy city job. Oh. That’s closer,” she said to the sound of new gunfire.
“Would you rather be back in Melbourne?”
She threw her head back. “Are you kidding? There is no rush in Melbourne.”
“Rush? You’re here for the adrenaline rush?”
“That has something to do with it. Why are you here?”
“You could be a housewife,” came a deep voice from behind.
She turned and playfully kicked the voice in the leg.
Charles Forbes, chief of WFP security for Iraq, an ex–Royal Marine, emerged from the shadows. “Not much different from anywhere else. You were in Somalia?”
“During the floods in ’97 and ’98.”
“I heard that was where people were being eaten by crocodiles and bitten by poisonous snakes,” Jane said.
“Interesting times. In Kismayo, we spent much of the time trying to figure out how best to evacuate.”
“We call it relocating these days,” Charles said. “Going to another place in-country. ‘Evacuation’ means leaving the country. Things have moved on in the last few years.”
“Change in policy?”
“Probably not. Maybe just definition. No, check that. Security is taken very seriously today. We know we are all easy targets and you don’t mess around with staff safety. The head of the office can now make the decision, or the security officer can if there is one. Doesn’t take that much. Rioting, demonstrations that might get out of hand, attacks on the office—you don’t need the permission of the country director anymore or someone in New York. At least this is how it is on the books. They are already relocating the office in al Amara where One Para was attacked today—being sent to Basra.”
I thought about Kismayo: Had not the shooting of a woman and a child, the shooting of cargo planes, and the ambush of relief boats warranted evacuation—or at least relocation?
“What about Baghdad? There still is a war going on outside.”
“But your President announced that the war was over,” Jane said.
“That was for domestic consumption only.”
“Evacuation won’t happen here,” Charles said, a veteran of humanitarian postings in Afghanistan and Kosovo. “Evacuation is a political statement.”
Jim, security officer with Unicef, a tall square-shouldered ex-SEAL from South Carolina, rubbed down a thick mustache and merely snorted: “Politics.”
There was a muttered agreement. Politics and the aid trade go hand in hand. The major donors make the policy, not the Security Council. This is the way it has always been. In Iraq, the United States contributed $395 million to the controversial Oil-for-Food Program, more than the total of all other donor nations. This helped feed twenty-seven million people, just about the entire population of Iraq. Thus it was never questioned that the U.S. would have solid control of the agency that distributed its generosity. While the subject of evacuation was one that we could discuss, it was never going to be an issue as long as the Coalition forces were in town.
“What will it take?” I asked. “Soldiers are getting killed every day. One of us gets killed? That do it?”
“I don’t think so. It will take a lot more than that,” Charles had said with prophetic clarity. “Too much at stake here.”
Evacuation is generally based on risk. This night, Baghdad was not dangerous enough to consider evacuating. Nevertheless, we all knew that was rubbish. There was no question in our minds that with the war still being fought just outside the compound walls, we could soon be a target.
As Charles spoke, a sudden storm of gunfire, heavier than the usual Kalashnikovs, indicated that the Americans had brought in more firepower. That meant we could soon expect to be blessed with silence.
“What about the front gate, Charles?” asked a voice out of the dark.
“I might as well do it now,” Charles said.
The heavy steel door that opened onto the street had finally fallen off its hinges and the entrance to the compound had become an open thoroughfare. This was the security of the day at the compound.
“Maybe we should just keep it open. If we have to escape,” Jane said, “we won’t have to wrestle with it. Much faster that way.”
“Or someone with a car bomb could drive right in,” another said.
Charles returned a few minutes later with fresh beers and announced that he had parked a UN vehicle across the entrance.
Five weeks after this evening, a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with a ton of explosives alongside the outer north wall of the UN compound and blew up the headquarters. Twenty-two humanitarian workers were killed, more than a hundred others injured. Among the dead was career diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special representative in Iraq. His last words to a rescuer uttered from under the wreckage of the building were:
“Don’t let them pull the mission out.”
The dead were listed as:
Rick Hooper, 40, U.S.
Jean-Selim Kanaan, 33, Egypt
Chris Klein-Beekman, 32, Canada
Fiona Watson, 35, Britain
Naval Captain Manuel Martin Oar, Spain
Arthur Helton, 54, U.S.
Gillian Clark, 47, Canada
Alya Sousa, Iraq
Renam Al-Farra, Jordan
Saad Hermiz Abona, Iraq
Martha Teas, United States
Leen Asaad Al-Qadhi, Iraq
Ranillo Buenaventura, Philippines
Alyawi Bassem, Iraq
Reza Hosseini, Iran
Ihsan Taha Husein, Iraq
Sergio Vieira de Mello, 55, Brazil
Raid Shaker Al-Mahdawi, Iraq
Emaad Ahmed Salman, Iraq
Omar Kahtan Al-Orfali, Iraq
Khidir Saleem Sahir, Iraq
Nadia Younes, Egypt
They died serving humanity.
Two investigations into the Baghdad bombing sought to determine how the United Nations compound could be so vulnerable, especially in light of the warnings. An outside commission reported that humanitarian and political pressures caused staff security to be “compromised without an appropriate assessment as to the possible consequences.” Further, it added that despite the war that raged outside the compound, there was a quixotic belief that “the UN was protected by its neutrality and its humanitarian mandate and that the staff and its installations would not be directly targeted.”
An in-house panel was far more critical, and its conclusions showed that not a hell of a lot had changed since Somalia 1998. The panel, headed by Martti Ahtisaari, former Finnish president, concluded that the UN security system was “dysfunctional” and “sloppy,” and that the UN flouted security guidelines, ignored warnings, and provided “little guarantee of security to UN staff ” in high-risk areas.
It surprised none who served in the field that the investigation also found that UN management had not adequately prepared its employees—“who felt ‘extremely vulnerable’—for deployment in combat areas.”