The UN's Go to Guy Survives

This is a TL on what would happen if the U.N.'s “go to guy”, the one man that the Secretary Generals depended on for in crisis situations, the only U.N. man who was trusted by all five nations in the Security Council, the man that U.N staffers placed bets on not if, but when he would be chosen Secretary General, Sergio Vierra de Mello, known to the U.N. Staffers as just “Sergio”, was was not killed in a truck bomb in the Canal Hotel Bombing,

August 29, 2003
16:25-


Security officers at the U.N. headquarters in the Baghdad Canal Hotel detect a suspicious person i a vehicle near the hotel. The driver, Fahdal Nassim, an Algerian national, was taken out of the vehicle and placed into custody. Meanwhile, officers detect explosives in the vehicle, prompting an evacuation of the hotel.

16:26

Interrupted in the middle of the meeting, U.S. soldiers who were happening to be in the area told Sergio Vierra De Mello, Special Representative of the Secretary General to the United Nations Mission in Iraq, that there was a truck bomb in the area and that the whole building was being evacuated. He, rather famously, said to the U.S. soldier, 1st Sgt William Von Zhele, “Oh shit.” [1]

16:28

The entire staff of the building was evacuated to a safe location 2,000 meters away.

16:45

The truck bomb was defused via U.S. Army EOD technicians which, although was not needed as the suicide bomber who had the controls was arrested, it was primarily done as a safety precaution.

Sergio commented, “... this underscores the reason that we need more security in the Baghdad headquarters. We got a lucky break, but in this field, in this location, in this business, lucky breaks do not cut it. You cannot just run aid operations hoping that you just get lucky. The events of today should not at all make our work on the reconstruction of Iraq end. We need to get back to work, but I do think that this serves as a caution that there needs to be greater security in the area, We cannot survive only on luck again.”

[1]
According to Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame, these were Sergio's last words.
 
September, 2003

Due to the Canal Hotel events, there was actually a well acknowledged need at the United Nations that any operations in Iraq needed to be more secure. One of the drawbacks of making a more secure U.N. headquarters is that the building will be less accessible to the Iraqi people. What one of the things that Sergio did was that he tried to make the Canal Hotel into whatever Paul Bremer was not doing. The building was the “anti-Green Zone”. When it took two hours for an Iraqi just to be allowed to get inside of the Green Zone – let alone raise a complaint or actually try to get a job – in the Canal Hotel, one could just walk in and buy oneself some food or try to get a job. The hotel was a good place where journalists could come in and check the Internet. Sergio did not want that to change much.

One of the first things that the United Nations did was that they gave the Iraq mission a rather large – for the U.N. that is – discretionary budget. This was used to secure the location. The streets both in front and in the back of the hotel, extending for 5,000 meters out in both directions were blocked off to vehicular traffic by Jersey barriers. Secondly, the Canal Hotel itself was given enhanced security measures. Ordinary glass windows were made bullet and blast resistant. Regular doors were taken down and new ones were put up that were blast, bullet, and forced entry resistant. The front door, to give an air of openness, was chosen to be a bomb resistant, blast resistant, revolving door. All of this was - completed by the end of November, 2003 - done directly by the United Nations, with Iraqi workers being paid and the work was done up to many of the world's highest standards.

Security, however, is not just fancy doors or walls, it involves actual guards as well. One of the problems was that there as a dearth – at least for the time being – of nations who were willing to support donating their troops to the cause of making an American caused mess be less of one. Especially as the ones being selected were intended to be of Islamic nations that were not of the Coalition of the Willing. There were some nations donating, though. Trinidad and Tobago gave 45 troops and the Bahamas donated 71. However, as there was a pressure to make a secure headquarters. As a result, there was – with massive reluctance and resistance – a one year contract bid on guarding the Canal Hotel, and keeping Sergio and other top staff secure. The chosen corporation, Blackwater USA. This resulted in around 2,000 contractors securing the Canal Hotel starting October 1, 2003.

Sergio was supposed to leave around late September. If one were to speak to him before, he would have told you that he did not want this job. He hated the concept of going to do work in Iraq, especially after formerly being High Commissioner for Human Rights. However, it has been said that it was not an emotional epiphany that led to a desire to do so, it was simply that several people close to him, namely Kofi Annan, Condoleeza Rice, and Tony Blair pressured him to continue this work for one more year.
 
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