Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top UN envoy to Iraq who was killed on Tuesday in a Baghdad bomb blast, was a tough but debonair Brazilian who handled some of the world body’s most difficult missions.Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since September, 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 insisted the Iraq appointment be for just four months so he could hold on to his UNHCHR post. Treading a diplomatic and political minefield, UN officials say, he quickly established his presence and won the respect of US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer despite tension between Washington and the UN Secretariat over the war. ‘‘The relationship has been businesslike, it has been constructive, and it has been frank,’’ Vieira de Mello, 55, told reporters in Cairo last week. In an address to the UN Security Council in July, he made what now appears a prescient remark, saying: ‘‘The United Nations presence in Iraq remains vulnerable to any who would seek to target our organisation.’’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. Moving up through the ranks of the UNHCR, he was consigned to desk jobs running relief operations from Geneva during much of the 1980s — including crises in the Great Lakes region of central Africa and the exodus of Albanians from the country after the collapse of Communism in 1991.In 1993, he was dispatched to Bosnia and in 1996 became Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees.Two years later, Annan took him to New York to become Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and then sent him briefly to the Serbian province of Kosovo before giving him his biggest task — building the new Asian nation of East Timor.Vieira de Mello played a vital role in bringing it to full independence by 2002. —Reuters
