What a disgrace!
The massacre of our colleagues in Baghdad has been felt by many of us as a terrible shock. It has given rise to a number of emotions.
Sadness came first. Sadness to see the sacrifice of all these innocent lives by barbarians who respect nothing and nobody. Sadness to see all these women and men of good will who came to help people in distress being killed for no reason.
Then came anger. Anger to see how poorly protected our colleagues were. While dozens of heavily armed soldiers are killed every week, our colleagues seemed strangely fragile amid such chaos.
My anger continued to grow when the Security Council adopted its resolution on the protection of humanitarian staff. While in the draft of this resolution it said that all killers of humanitarian staff should be considered war criminals and judged by The Hague court, one country succeeded in having this sentence excluded from the final version. Furthermore, its representative had the cheek to be delighted that this resolution would in no way change the obligations of member states towards international staff. In the present context it meant that he was happy that international civil servants would not be better protected than they currently are. What a disgrace !
One last emotion was pride. While being told about the lives of our colleagues, I could not help admiring them, their devotion and their simplicity. And so I felt proud to be a member of the same family.
Irony of life
Last February, Sergio Vieira de Mello was the only chief of department to attend the meetings organized for the construction of a monument to international civil servants who lost their lives for peace. Thanks to your generosity, to the generosity of the UN Secretary General and of other agencies of the UN System, this monument will be inaugurated on 24 October.
Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz