The photos are only the most visible reminder of the United Nations’ trauma since a truck bomb destroyed its offices in Baghdad last month. To U.N. officials, the pictures of their fallen colleagues are a daily reminder of the deep sense of dismay and discomfort they feel about rebuilding Iraq.
For Kofi Annan, the United Nations’ mild-mannered secretary-general, Iraq has become the biggest personal and professional crisis of his career. Annan was already taking the heat from world leaders–especially in South Africa, Brazil and the gulf states–to condemn President George W. Bush’s war and his roughing up of the Security Council earlier this year. Many poorer countries accused Annan of being far too pro-American.
But the Baghdad bombing–considered by many at the United Nations to be their own 9/11–turned the policy dispute into a personal disaster for Annan. With the death of his protege Sergio Vieira de Mello, Annan lost a close friend and found his leadership under fire. Faced with a bitter staff and a divided world, Annan emerged last week with a sharp rebuke not just to Bush but to the rest of the Security Council. In a speech to the General Assembly in Manhattan, Annan cast Bush’s policy of pre-emptive strikes as a threat to “world peace and stability.” Yet he also warned Bush’s critics that the Security Council needed to confront America’s worst fears by fighting against terrorists and the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. “He was emotionally affected because Sergio was probably the best he had,” says one former State Department official who is close to Annan. “He wants to galvanize opinion and point out that the United Nations can’t work without authority in these very dangerous places.”
Annan has a far bigger dream than rebuilding Iraq: he wants to push through a sweeping set of reforms before he leaves office in 2006. At the heart of those reforms is the monumental task of making the Security Council more decisive, more representative and more effective–whether against terrorism, illegal weapons or genocide. That means tackling the emotional question of which country should join, or be bumped from, the exclusive club of permanent members wielding vetoes–a club limited, at present, to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain. Annan also wants to reform the sprawling U.N. system, reining in its many independent agencies to bring them under stricter control at head-quarters in New York.
President Bush may have urged the world’s leaders to “move forward” last week. But Annan showed that the United Nations is deeply uneasy about going anywhere in Iraq, and has yet to recover from the war itself. Two days after Bush appealed for international help, Annan ordered the temporary withdrawal of most of the United Nations’ foreign staff after another suicide bombing of the U.N. building in Baghdad. “Frankly, there is something not far off panic among U.N. staff,” says one senior aide to Annan. For the moment, the Security Council is playing its old game of setting high goals with little means of reaching them. “They keep dumping the United Nations in difficult situations without giving sufficiently clear instructions of what we’re supposed to do, or adequate resources to do it, either financial or military,” says Annan’s aide.
Many distraught U.N. staff members blame that woolly, underfunded mandate for the deaths of their friends last month. That distress only complicates Annan’s historic ambition to overhaul the Security Council. It’s hard enough to corral the world’s headstrong rulers while they’re still fighting over the future of Iraq. It’s harder still when your own staff feels their lives may depend on the outcome.
