.
In May 2000, after the U.N. Security Council had decided to send thousands of troops to keep a band of psychotic killers known as the RUF from toppling the government of Sierra Leone, a delegation of 25 officials from the Clinton administration descended on his office, Hédi Annabi said:
- “And one of them just looked at me and said, ‘What are you going to do about this mess?'” “And I said, ‘Are you coming to tell me how I’m going to fix it with the troops you’re not giving me, or are you coming to help me figure out how to fix it? Because if it’s the first, this is going to be a short meeting.'”
Hedi Annabi, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General
and Head of UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti.
Annabi was no more known to the public than any other U.N. lifer, and could scarcely have borne less resemblance to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing and impossibly handsome U.N. envoy who was killed in a truck bombing in Baghdad in 2003. George Clooney would have played de Mello in the movie; Annabi, an extra-dry and sometimes cryptic Tunisian, was more the Peter Sellers of Being There.
Hédi Annabi: Country Has ‘Unique Moment of Opportunity’ to Break with Destructive Cycles of Past
BOSTON (Christian Science Monitor) — The United Nation’s is used to confronting disasters. Whether in the aftermath of civil wars or the wake of natural disasters, its employees and the military personnel seconded to the UN are frequently among the first to enter the hostile environments.
Danger comes with that territory, and UN workers have lost their lives in a dozen countries around the world as a consequence. But the Haiti earthquake that devastated the capital Port-au-Prince and killed tens of thousands of Haitians, is shaping up to be the deadliest for the UN’s own employees in the organization’s 65-year history.
The earthquake quickly demolished much of the Christopher Hotel, the UN’s Haiti headquarters, as it did to hundreds of buildings across the city. Speaking in New York on Thursday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that roughly 150 of his staff remained unaccounted for.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
