Tough operator who was no stranger to danger

SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO, the top UN envoy on Iraq who was killed in a bomb blast yesterday, was a tough but debonair Brazilian who had been dispatched on some of the world body's most difficult missions.

Mr Vieira de Mello, 55, replaced former President Mary Robinson as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last September. He was the immediate choice of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to take on the Iraqi job in May after the controversial US-British invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. He was also the US choice and had been summoned to Washington in March, weeks before the start of the US-led invasion, to be sounded out by President George W Bush.

After arriving in Baghdad, he had quickly established his presence and won the respect of US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer despite tension between Washington and the UN Secretariat over the Iraq war.

"The relationship has been businesslike, it has been constructive, and it has been frank," Mr Vieira de Mello said last week. But he agreed he had landed in "a delicate.....and even bizarre situation" in post-war Iraq.

In an address to the UN Security Council in July, he made what was to be a prescient remark, saying: "The United Nations presence in Iraq remains vulnerable to any who would seek to target our organisation."

Mr Vieira de Mello, born in Rio de Janeiro, had worked for the UN for 35 years, starting as a junior publications editor with the UNHCR refugee agency in Geneva in 1969. He was no stranger to danger or to the problems of rebuilding countries shattered by war.

For over two decades with the UNHCR and on secondment, he served as a field officer in a devastated Bangladesh after its war of separation from Pakistan, and in civil war zones in Sudan, Mozambique and Lebanon. In 1993, he was dispatched to Bosnia as war raged, and took charge of civil affairs for the UN Protection Force, and in 1996 became Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees. Two years later, he became Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and was sent to the Serbian province of Kosovo before being given his biggest task building the new Asian nation of East Timor. Mr Vieira de Mello played a vital role in bringing it to full independence by 2002.