In Sergio Vieira de Mello, the senior UN official who died after one of the two massive bomb attacks (AFP) that dominate today's headlines, the world body has lost one of its finest men and the whole planet a noble soul in the quest for peace and human rights.
"C'était vraiment un chic type!" journalist Sonia B., who knew the man in Bosnia, told me this morning; a really fine guy who "spent less time with his UN colleagues than out on the streets with the people" who bore the brunt of the siege of Sarajevo.
"De Mello was a pragmatist, not a man for the institutions," my colleague and friend added. "He didn't bullshit we journalists and it was people he cared about, the ordinary people. He saved lives in a Christian way. A truly Christian way, I mean, discreetly, without the least fuss about it.
"When [late French former president François] Mitterrand came to Sarajevo [in June 1992], there was applause. When De Mello left Sarajevo, many people were weeping."
Yesterday's lunch at "the canteen" was rich when it came to people in this small world. I found Sam, currently running the pizzeria, deep in local geography and tales of childhood with a pretty young woman he'd long taken for a Moroccan but who turned out to come from almost next door to his own village in Algeria's Kabylie.
I struck up a friendship with Philippe, who knew many parts of Africa, India and Afghanistan that I've been to, and more besides, after a long civil service career under successive French governments in fields ranging from defence and intelligence to humanitarian cooperation.
It was a pleasure to be able to talk to an open-minded and humanitarian man about both the successes and foul misdeeds of this country's various rulers, as well as those of "obscure" places like the Central African Republic, without a host of preliminaries and explanations.
Philippe has been on mission to some of these countries alongside staff from a range of UN organisations, developing considerable respect for the people who keep the United Nations going despite its flaws, the more idle appointees and the weight of a bureaucracy which comes with the juggling of a myriad members and opposing policies.
Neither of us mentioned the late UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, because we didn't know that he was pinioned under rubble after the Baghdad blast that was to claim his life, along with at least (update) 23 others, while more than 100 people were injured.
"He asked for a glass of water before he died," Sonia said. "It was atrocious."
She can be a tough nut when she needs to, Sonia. Not only has she covered the Balkan conflicts, she comes from that region. But De Mello's death still shook her to tears.
The appalling news I got from the wildcat, who was tapped into AFP's wires and is among another friend to have met De Mello. Like her, the Brazilian was a "doer", efficient in an office but often happier out of one. His predecessor in one of the toughest jobs in the UN, Mary Robinson, said on the radio this morning that he was a field man to the core, ideally suited to the task of UN special representative in Iraq.
The BBC will no doubt be updating its brief background piece on the UN's work behind the scenes in Iraq.
In Africa, De Mello won respect -- though often with one hand tied behind his back for lack of funds, international commitment and the bloody-mindedness of the "local players" -- as a coordinator in the tormented Great Lakes region, seeking to restore a semblance of order and keep humanitarian assistance functioning after the Rwandan genocide and with the war in Democratic Republic of Congo.
He went on to play a key role in helping steer East Timor to independence and -- ah! buzzphrase of the new century, "good governance" -- by former "terrorists" four years ago.
That BBC story says
"there was no obvious participation on [De Mello's] part in the formation of the new governing council for Iraq, which was billed as one of the key steps in the country's move away from an autocratic regime to a democracy."
But every journalist who knew or has written about the gifted diplomat will read that "no obvious participation" for the semi diplo-speak it is. Moreover, the United Nations -- its senior staff, not the Security Council -- has done its best to keep a distance, particularly "on the record", from any plans drawn up by those who engaged in what a large part of the world still considers an illegal, unjustified war, whether it ended Saddam's barbaric regime or not.
Realpolitik is complex. De Mello, a thoroughly good and immensely patient man, will have had strong opinions about who is rightfully and indeed legally entitled to run Iraq. There's no doubt he will have made those views known, through channels whose tortuous workings he mastered, to its current overlords, particularly the United States.
In my corner, another civil servant -- and also, I would say on the strength of a first 90-minute conversation in some depth, another good man -- knew perfectly well that when you talk to a journalist nothing is off the record for ever as we "swapped notes" on the differences between the Americans' behaviour in Baghdad and that of the Brits in Basra.
Philippe, with his defence and satellite expertise, also filled me in on a question I've long wanted a better answer to than "jungle", but frequently forgotten to ask: how it was that scores of thousands of Hutus could "vanish" in eastern Zaïre, as then it was, after the Rwandan butchery. That's for some other time...
I am not suggesting there that De Mello's death and those of other UN personnel among the victims was a direct result of the policies of the occupation forces in Iraq. On the "why?", the BBC's Paul Reynolds has already made an interesting first stab at an analysis.
Most of the analysis will come later, just as some of the "facts" will eventually out. Doing their best at "the factory", my own immediate colleagues are still quite properly wrapped up with the shocking event, its immediate aftermath, the quest for survivors and the fallout.
The same goes for yesterday's other brutal bombing of a central Jerusalem bus, with its similar toll. But that equally appalling crime is sadly of another order, part of a fearful but long-standing "pattern of death", with likely consequences which are only too predictable.
In the often frightening "New World Order", what happens in Israel and what journalists are not allowed to call Palestine makes some kind of shocking, tragic and historic sense. Unacceptable but understandable.
The savage murder of De Mello and almost a score of others is a far less immediately comprehensible consequence of the gross injustices and the resulting fanaticism which constitute the wicked side of that so-called order. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it "senseless".
Certainly it is one of the most brutal blows the United Nations has sustained since one of the Ghanaian's predecessors died in the Congo when his plane blew up in the air and crashed in September 1961.
There are those who contend that Dag Hammersköld, who supported the electoral process then in hand in that benighted country, was also assassinated. Film-maker Hans Rudiger Minow made an intriguing documentary about this, shown last April on Planète television (Historia article; French). He pinned it on a mining company and the Belgians.
When a teenager, I read Hammersköld's 'Markings'. The man said very many wise things.
"Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only a soldier can do it," was among them. Especially soldiers who work alongside people of the calibre of De Mello, whose brain and looks were enough to "melt the hearts of women in Sarajevo", Sonia also remarked.
In the blogosphere, Dave recalled another Hammersköld comment in February, when he said that "forgiveness breaks the chains of causality" (Joyce's Paradiso).
Yesterday's atrocity in the wake of barbarism by so many parties in the Middle and Near East could make forgiveness an even rarer quality than ever.
12:51:50 PM link 
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